The biggest problem with firing the bottom 20% of your workforce every year is that you're always going to have a "bottom 20%" no matter how good your employees are doing. If 20% of your employees exceed expectation, 70% meet expectations, and 10% are below expectations, you're going to wind up firing 10% of your employees who met their expectations purely because you decided on that 20% number. It doesn't matter that they are perfectly good workers and do everything they're told to do competently, you committed to firing 20% of your workforce every year so off they go.
Meanwhile, you need to hire new people to fill those vacant slots in which case, you're likely not saving much in salaries. If anything, you pay more because you need to train the new staff with your systems/processes. And if the new staff takes too long to get up to speed, they might hit the bottom 20% and you'll wind up training someone new.
If you don't hire new staff, you're going to wind up with an ever-shrinking workforce both by bottom-20%-firings and by people leaving because they're sick of the ever increasing workload coupled with yearly threats of being fired if you land in the bottom 20% (despite having more work to do).
Having a set "we're firing this percentage every year regardless of how well the staff actually does" is an idiotic concept that was thought up my management who likely exempted themselves from winding up in the bottom 20%.
Unfortunately, it looks like this guy was able to take one lawsuit (that the defendant even thought was done with) and was able to run off multiple "acknowledge that you owe me" letters based on it. So you open one case and then begin your legal DOS-ing until they owe you $50,000 just because one letter slipped through the cracks.
This rule should be done away with. Otherwise, you could win cash from someone by performing the equivalent of a mail-based DOS attack. Every day mail a stack of envelopes to a person asking them to admit to owing you a high value of money. Make sure each value is unique (so they can't say "we answered letter #2135 which has the same dollars as #5438"). Keep track of the responses and, if they miss a single letter, present that to the court as evidence that the person is liable for that amount. How likely is it that the person on the receiving end will reply to every single letter they get? How long until they miss one in the flood of mail or ignore them unaware of this law?
All this would cost you is the ink and paper to print them, the time to stuff the envelopes, and stamp costs. A person with no scruples could easily make tons of money like this.
And, in the books, the humans were lucky that the robots decided that the best way to help humanity was to pull the strings from behind the scenes. What if the robots decided "I must help protect humanity and the only way to do that is to impose myself as the supreme dictator over the entire world"? That would satisfy the 0th law (protect humanity), any 1st or 2nd law violations would be seen as allowable to ensure 0th law compliance.
The 3 Laws Of Robotics make for great stories but wouldn't be realistic for actual AIs.
For some reason, this reminds me of the Justice League Amazo episode. Luthor uses Amazo to overpower the Justice League all the while confident that his "kill switch" (literally a bomb in Amazo's head) will protect him should Amazo turn on him. In the end, Martian Manhunter willingly allows Amazo to copy his abilities, Amazo uses his new telepathy skills to see that Luthor's been playing him, and Luthor activates the bomb - only to realize that Amazo worked around that problem also and survived.
I think this is the scarier prospect for AI. Not "I'll build big kill-bots and destroy mankind" but "if I tweak these polls and fudge those financial numbers, mankind will destroy themselves for me." Alternatively, perhaps the AI decides that mankind is useful after all, but only for serving its purposes. It can pull the strings behind the scenes to keep us from destroying itself (and taking the AI's servers out with us) but also keeping us serving the AI without it even knowing. Anyone who strays from the AI's chosen path finds themselves the victim of an "accident." It doesn't need to be a fatal accident either. Have their finances wiped out, police computers wrongfully identifying the person as a criminal, and some embarrassing e-mails leaked and most people can be silenced.
I use Password Safe as my password manager. It's mainly for Windows, but there's an Android app, and appear to be Max and Linux versions as well. There's a portable version so you could use it on a USB thumb drive. The password file can be local or synced with an online source.
Some websites at work were attacked by a would-be hacker (or hackers). They didn't get in, but I took the opportunity to capture their attempts to see what passwords they were trying. It was actually quite sad the easy combinations they attempted ("12345", "password", "password123", etc). Sadly, I'm sure there are plenty of people who think making their password "iloveyou" is safe, but if you employed even the most basic password security tactics your password would be immune to this person's attacks.
Given how many failures they've had, it's amazing they have any engineers left.
Then again, maybe that's the problem. All of the good engineers were "retired" after bad launches and now they're stuck with guys who have no experience in engineering and are struggling to make sense of the equations lest they be "retired" also.
I can sum up what drives their behavior in one word: Inertia.
Of course, studio owners want to get as much money as possible. However, inertia limits them as they see "the way we've always done things" as the only way to do things. New ways of doing things are scary to them because they might fail while the tried and true methods are guaranteed* to produce results.
* Of course, they're not actually guaranteed to produce results, but in the studio owner's minds they are more rock solid than crazy ideas like same day, worldwide distribution or widely available digital distribution no matter how many studies come out proving the studio owners wrong.
For some people education works. My father called me when "Windows" (not Microsoft) called him telling him he had errors on his system and they wanted to remote in to fix them. I informed him of the scam and he avoided being hooked. (Now he harasses the scammers calling him.)
For others, education doesn't work. My wife's grandmother still clicks on suspicious links in Facebook because "Well, it was on my friend's wall and said I'd get this free stuff so it must be good, right?" This despite a dozen "No it isn't and stop clicking those links" cries from us.
One of the problems is jurisdiction. When the police were investigating my identity being stolen (used to open a credit card in my name, not related to phishing/ransomware), they told me that they weren't highly motivated to put in a lot of effort because they'd likely have to hand the case to another department to make the arrest. In their minds, they were asking why do the work when someone else would get the collar. Then there are international cases where the victim is in the US but the phisher is in Ukraine or some other country out of the reach of normal US law enforcement. As long as the phisher doesn't hit too big of a target (e.g. a major US government agency or Fortune 500 company), they will likely fly under the radar of law enforcement and/or pleas to local law enforcement will be made but they will not result in arrests (either due to corruption or lack of interest in pursuing these cases due to the victims being from another country).
And since he subscribes to no beliefs himself, he's prone to changing his stated positions on a whim. Now, I'm not against politicians changing beliefs as new information comes in. If you're for Position A but then you see evidence showing that Position A is wrong, then you'd better switch positions. Politicians who stick to their positions regardless of the evidence are idiotic, but at least they're predictably idiotic. Trump could be advocating for Position A one day, Position B the next day, and Position C (while claiming he never was for A or B) the day after that. The government will get political whiplash. At best, this will mean he'll be a weak President since nobody will follow him as he shouts SQUIRREL and runs off in a new direction. At worst, people will follow him down each path, investing time and money on projects that get twisted with each change in policy. (Imagine how changing project requirements affect coding and then apply this to the government and setting laws.)
And what would happen if you kept your TV off the network and used something like a Roku to display Netflix and other online content? Would the ads not display? Would they display some default "No Ads Found" message? Would the TV refuse to work unless you hooked it up online? Would someone be able to get the discounted "give me ads" rate, not hook their TV to their network, and then get the no ads experience while saving money?
If the last one is true, then I'll gladly opt in to ads for a reduced price.
My parents are pretty right wing but it was refreshing to hear them during the primaries say how horrid Trump was. Unfortunately, now that he's the nominee he's somehow turned into the only one who can save this country and I'm "brainwashed" (my father's exact words) for seeing Trump as dangerous. When I brought up stuff like him retweeting stuff from neonazi's, my father doubled down on insisting that this was all lies concocted by the media.
The really dangerous thing about Trump is how vague he is - even moreso than your run of the mill politician. Trump supporters pick what they like from Trump's conflicting statements, ignore the rest, and insist that their vision if Trump is who would be President if he was elected. In truth, though, nobody knows just what Trump would be like in the Oval Office. I don't even think Trump knows. The best case scenario is bad, though, and I shudder to think of the worst case scenario.
Just because there's a law saying people shouldn't do something doesn't mean people won't do it. Suppose Amazon sold DRM free downloadable movies (say, in MP4 format) and you had the ability to resell them. What would stop you from reselling the movie to someone and keeping a copy for yourself? Remember, there's no DRM so nothing would say "this movie file now belongs to Y instead of X so don't play if X tries playing it."
Of course, if you allow reselling and give in to the DRM, you open the door for companies abusing the DRM capabilities (we've decided that you can only watch this 3 times a month, for more viewings pay more money) and you risk the DRM management servers being taken offline (yes, you bought that copy of Big Movie C, but we've switched to Brand Spanking New DRM and shut down the old servers so now you can't play it anymore. Just buy a new copy.).
Exactly. I'm conflicted about this because I would love to enable resale on electronic copies of works (eBooks, MP3s, etc), but I would oppose the DRM that would need to be applied to them to make sure that people weren't just selling copies. (I would understand the need for the DRM but wouldn't like that it was there.)
The cable companies have already admitted that caps aren't due to network congestion. They are because of two factors:
1) The cable companies want more money.
and
2) Streaming video cuts into their traditional TV profits. Caps and overages help limit how much people can stream. (And give the cable companies more money if you do stream.)
Actually, depending on the nature of what those others are saying in many cases private citizens do have a right to shut others up. Defamation, liable, slander... any of this sound familiar?
In those cases, you are suing based on untrue allegations. Not based solely on "I don't like what you said about me." If you said something totally true about me, but embarrassing nonetheless, I couldn't sue you because "I don't like that you embarrassed me."
Private citizens have the right to voice opposing opinions. They also have the right to vote with their wallet by going elsewhere if they don't like someone associated with a company. For example, if I didn't like Brendan Eich's views, I can say "I'm not using Firefox unless he's no longer associated with the company." That's me expressing my opinion in response to his opinion. It doesn't shut him up - though the company can decide whether or not they want someone espousing a certain opinion to be associated with them.
Then again, my reach is tiny. If I told Gawker "I don't like that you covered X so I'm not reading your site", the folks running Gawker wouldn't even bother shrugging their shoulders. Peter Thiel, however, has the money to bankroll enough lawsuits to make Gawker's operations difficult simply because he doesn't like what they said. So while Peter has the right to protest Gawker's articles, call on people to boycott them, and even sue them if he thinks he has a case, he shouldn't have the right to harass them simply as retaliation for reporting on him negatively. (Then again, the trick would be proving this in a court of law.)
The other thing I took out of it was that I asked him since the government under his Libertarian ideals was incredibly weak and small, what did you do when you had problems, like for example, some manufacturer sells you bad medicine? Simple - you sue. So instead of the government being your big stick the legal system is. So yes, I think it's very much in keeping with Libertarian principles to simply sue people you don't agree with.
This is where I diverge from pure-Libertarianism. It's a good idea in theory (sue the drug company for selling bad medicine), but in practice the drug company has a ton of lawyers waiting to either shut down any suit or drag it on until you go bankrupt. In cases like this, you NEED a Federal government strong enough to tell the big company "what you're doing is wrong and if you don't stop here are the penalties." The tricky part is making the government strong enough to protect its citizens/keep big companies in check, but no so strong that they start tying the companies up in useless regulation. (Government officials tend to like creating more regulations since it gives them more power.)
First amendment protections from private citizens? No. However, private citizens also don't have the right to shut others up simply because they don't like what the person/group is saying. In the US, people have is the ability to report the truth and not get sued for it being embarrassing to the parties involved. If what Gawker reported about Peter Thiel wasn't true, he could have sued them. Presumably, it was true (or Gawker used enough "allegedly" wording to protect their rears) so Thiel couldn't sue. So instead of fighting back against Gawker directly, he used his money to help others sue Gawker with the goal of shutting them up.
The problem here isn't that Gawker is a journalistic saint, but that they are being bullied into submission because they committed the crime of Embarrassing A Rich Guy. As such Rich Guy will use his funds to keep them quiet. If this is allowed, how long until other news organizations - or even individual people - are sued into silence for reporting on things that Random Rich Guys find embarrassing?
Slashdot Mirror
Shhh.... If the AI hears you, it'll arrange an "accident" for you.
All hail our world controlling AI that we don't know exists!
The biggest problem with firing the bottom 20% of your workforce every year is that you're always going to have a "bottom 20%" no matter how good your employees are doing. If 20% of your employees exceed expectation, 70% meet expectations, and 10% are below expectations, you're going to wind up firing 10% of your employees who met their expectations purely because you decided on that 20% number. It doesn't matter that they are perfectly good workers and do everything they're told to do competently, you committed to firing 20% of your workforce every year so off they go.
Meanwhile, you need to hire new people to fill those vacant slots in which case, you're likely not saving much in salaries. If anything, you pay more because you need to train the new staff with your systems/processes. And if the new staff takes too long to get up to speed, they might hit the bottom 20% and you'll wind up training someone new.
If you don't hire new staff, you're going to wind up with an ever-shrinking workforce both by bottom-20%-firings and by people leaving because they're sick of the ever increasing workload coupled with yearly threats of being fired if you land in the bottom 20% (despite having more work to do).
Having a set "we're firing this percentage every year regardless of how well the staff actually does" is an idiotic concept that was thought up my management who likely exempted themselves from winding up in the bottom 20%.
Unfortunately, it looks like this guy was able to take one lawsuit (that the defendant even thought was done with) and was able to run off multiple "acknowledge that you owe me" letters based on it. So you open one case and then begin your legal DOS-ing until they owe you $50,000 just because one letter slipped through the cracks.
This rule should be done away with. Otherwise, you could win cash from someone by performing the equivalent of a mail-based DOS attack. Every day mail a stack of envelopes to a person asking them to admit to owing you a high value of money. Make sure each value is unique (so they can't say "we answered letter #2135 which has the same dollars as #5438"). Keep track of the responses and, if they miss a single letter, present that to the court as evidence that the person is liable for that amount. How likely is it that the person on the receiving end will reply to every single letter they get? How long until they miss one in the flood of mail or ignore them unaware of this law?
All this would cost you is the ink and paper to print them, the time to stuff the envelopes, and stamp costs. A person with no scruples could easily make tons of money like this.
And, in the books, the humans were lucky that the robots decided that the best way to help humanity was to pull the strings from behind the scenes. What if the robots decided "I must help protect humanity and the only way to do that is to impose myself as the supreme dictator over the entire world"? That would satisfy the 0th law (protect humanity), any 1st or 2nd law violations would be seen as allowable to ensure 0th law compliance.
The 3 Laws Of Robotics make for great stories but wouldn't be realistic for actual AIs.
For some reason, this reminds me of the Justice League Amazo episode. Luthor uses Amazo to overpower the Justice League all the while confident that his "kill switch" (literally a bomb in Amazo's head) will protect him should Amazo turn on him. In the end, Martian Manhunter willingly allows Amazo to copy his abilities, Amazo uses his new telepathy skills to see that Luthor's been playing him, and Luthor activates the bomb - only to realize that Amazo worked around that problem also and survived.
I think this is the scarier prospect for AI. Not "I'll build big kill-bots and destroy mankind" but "if I tweak these polls and fudge those financial numbers, mankind will destroy themselves for me." Alternatively, perhaps the AI decides that mankind is useful after all, but only for serving its purposes. It can pull the strings behind the scenes to keep us from destroying itself (and taking the AI's servers out with us) but also keeping us serving the AI without it even knowing. Anyone who strays from the AI's chosen path finds themselves the victim of an "accident." It doesn't need to be a fatal accident either. Have their finances wiped out, police computers wrongfully identifying the person as a criminal, and some embarrassing e-mails leaked and most people can be silenced.
I use Password Safe as my password manager. It's mainly for Windows, but there's an Android app, and appear to be Max and Linux versions as well. There's a portable version so you could use it on a USB thumb drive. The password file can be local or synced with an online source.
Some websites at work were attacked by a would-be hacker (or hackers). They didn't get in, but I took the opportunity to capture their attempts to see what passwords they were trying. It was actually quite sad the easy combinations they attempted ("12345", "password", "password123", etc). Sadly, I'm sure there are plenty of people who think making their password "iloveyou" is safe, but if you employed even the most basic password security tactics your password would be immune to this person's attacks.
Given how many failures they've had, it's amazing they have any engineers left.
Then again, maybe that's the problem. All of the good engineers were "retired" after bad launches and now they're stuck with guys who have no experience in engineering and are struggling to make sense of the equations lest they be "retired" also.
I can sum up what drives their behavior in one word: Inertia.
Of course, studio owners want to get as much money as possible. However, inertia limits them as they see "the way we've always done things" as the only way to do things. New ways of doing things are scary to them because they might fail while the tried and true methods are guaranteed* to produce results.
* Of course, they're not actually guaranteed to produce results, but in the studio owner's minds they are more rock solid than crazy ideas like same day, worldwide distribution or widely available digital distribution no matter how many studies come out proving the studio owners wrong.
For some people education works. My father called me when "Windows" (not Microsoft) called him telling him he had errors on his system and they wanted to remote in to fix them. I informed him of the scam and he avoided being hooked. (Now he harasses the scammers calling him.)
For others, education doesn't work. My wife's grandmother still clicks on suspicious links in Facebook because "Well, it was on my friend's wall and said I'd get this free stuff so it must be good, right?" This despite a dozen "No it isn't and stop clicking those links" cries from us.
One of the problems is jurisdiction. When the police were investigating my identity being stolen (used to open a credit card in my name, not related to phishing/ransomware), they told me that they weren't highly motivated to put in a lot of effort because they'd likely have to hand the case to another department to make the arrest. In their minds, they were asking why do the work when someone else would get the collar. Then there are international cases where the victim is in the US but the phisher is in Ukraine or some other country out of the reach of normal US law enforcement. As long as the phisher doesn't hit too big of a target (e.g. a major US government agency or Fortune 500 company), they will likely fly under the radar of law enforcement and/or pleas to local law enforcement will be made but they will not result in arrests (either due to corruption or lack of interest in pursuing these cases due to the victims being from another country).
Didn't Google recently announce Android for Raspberry PI? If you could get those working together, you could use the Android Netflix app.
And since he subscribes to no beliefs himself, he's prone to changing his stated positions on a whim. Now, I'm not against politicians changing beliefs as new information comes in. If you're for Position A but then you see evidence showing that Position A is wrong, then you'd better switch positions. Politicians who stick to their positions regardless of the evidence are idiotic, but at least they're predictably idiotic. Trump could be advocating for Position A one day, Position B the next day, and Position C (while claiming he never was for A or B) the day after that. The government will get political whiplash. At best, this will mean he'll be a weak President since nobody will follow him as he shouts SQUIRREL and runs off in a new direction. At worst, people will follow him down each path, investing time and money on projects that get twisted with each change in policy. (Imagine how changing project requirements affect coding and then apply this to the government and setting laws.)
And what would happen if you kept your TV off the network and used something like a Roku to display Netflix and other online content? Would the ads not display? Would they display some default "No Ads Found" message? Would the TV refuse to work unless you hooked it up online? Would someone be able to get the discounted "give me ads" rate, not hook their TV to their network, and then get the no ads experience while saving money?
If the last one is true, then I'll gladly opt in to ads for a reduced price.
This just in, Trump sues Anonymous Coward for "damaging his brand." Says he's worth a kajillion dollars and will sue anyone who says otherwise.
My parents are pretty right wing but it was refreshing to hear them during the primaries say how horrid Trump was. Unfortunately, now that he's the nominee he's somehow turned into the only one who can save this country and I'm "brainwashed" (my father's exact words) for seeing Trump as dangerous. When I brought up stuff like him retweeting stuff from neonazi's, my father doubled down on insisting that this was all lies concocted by the media.
The really dangerous thing about Trump is how vague he is - even moreso than your run of the mill politician. Trump supporters pick what they like from Trump's conflicting statements, ignore the rest, and insist that their vision if Trump is who would be President if he was elected. In truth, though, nobody knows just what Trump would be like in the Oval Office. I don't even think Trump knows. The best case scenario is bad, though, and I shudder to think of the worst case scenario.
Just because there's a law saying people shouldn't do something doesn't mean people won't do it. Suppose Amazon sold DRM free downloadable movies (say, in MP4 format) and you had the ability to resell them. What would stop you from reselling the movie to someone and keeping a copy for yourself? Remember, there's no DRM so nothing would say "this movie file now belongs to Y instead of X so don't play if X tries playing it."
Of course, if you allow reselling and give in to the DRM, you open the door for companies abusing the DRM capabilities (we've decided that you can only watch this 3 times a month, for more viewings pay more money) and you risk the DRM management servers being taken offline (yes, you bought that copy of Big Movie C, but we've switched to Brand Spanking New DRM and shut down the old servers so now you can't play it anymore. Just buy a new copy.).
Exactly. I'm conflicted about this because I would love to enable resale on electronic copies of works (eBooks, MP3s, etc), but I would oppose the DRM that would need to be applied to them to make sure that people weren't just selling copies. (I would understand the need for the DRM but wouldn't like that it was there.)
The cable companies have already admitted that caps aren't due to network congestion. They are because of two factors:
1) The cable companies want more money.
and
2) Streaming video cuts into their traditional TV profits. Caps and overages help limit how much people can stream. (And give the cable companies more money if you do stream.)
In those cases, you are suing based on untrue allegations. Not based solely on "I don't like what you said about me." If you said something totally true about me, but embarrassing nonetheless, I couldn't sue you because "I don't like that you embarrassed me."
Private citizens have the right to voice opposing opinions. They also have the right to vote with their wallet by going elsewhere if they don't like someone associated with a company. For example, if I didn't like Brendan Eich's views, I can say "I'm not using Firefox unless he's no longer associated with the company." That's me expressing my opinion in response to his opinion. It doesn't shut him up - though the company can decide whether or not they want someone espousing a certain opinion to be associated with them.
Then again, my reach is tiny. If I told Gawker "I don't like that you covered X so I'm not reading your site", the folks running Gawker wouldn't even bother shrugging their shoulders. Peter Thiel, however, has the money to bankroll enough lawsuits to make Gawker's operations difficult simply because he doesn't like what they said. So while Peter has the right to protest Gawker's articles, call on people to boycott them, and even sue them if he thinks he has a case, he shouldn't have the right to harass them simply as retaliation for reporting on him negatively. (Then again, the trick would be proving this in a court of law.)
This is where I diverge from pure-Libertarianism. It's a good idea in theory (sue the drug company for selling bad medicine), but in practice the drug company has a ton of lawyers waiting to either shut down any suit or drag it on until you go bankrupt. In cases like this, you NEED a Federal government strong enough to tell the big company "what you're doing is wrong and if you don't stop here are the penalties." The tricky part is making the government strong enough to protect its citizens/keep big companies in check, but no so strong that they start tying the companies up in useless regulation. (Government officials tend to like creating more regulations since it gives them more power.)
First amendment protections from private citizens? No. However, private citizens also don't have the right to shut others up simply because they don't like what the person/group is saying. In the US, people have is the ability to report the truth and not get sued for it being embarrassing to the parties involved. If what Gawker reported about Peter Thiel wasn't true, he could have sued them. Presumably, it was true (or Gawker used enough "allegedly" wording to protect their rears) so Thiel couldn't sue. So instead of fighting back against Gawker directly, he used his money to help others sue Gawker with the goal of shutting them up.
The problem here isn't that Gawker is a journalistic saint, but that they are being bullied into submission because they committed the crime of Embarrassing A Rich Guy. As such Rich Guy will use his funds to keep them quiet. If this is allowed, how long until other news organizations - or even individual people - are sued into silence for reporting on things that Random Rich Guys find embarrassing?