The government (which is making these rules) belongs to us. Do we chose to have intrusive searches using mostly-unproven technology? What our choice in the matter of giving away our privacy in the battle between fear and freedom?
As polls have consistently shown, the answer is yes. We, as a country, are quite okay with giving away our freedom and privacy to alleviate our fear.
At base, there are limited natural resources, and limited human resources, and when the market starts to run out of ways to efficiently exploit them, or the resources themselves start running out (peak oil, peak rainforest, peak population), it's hard to imagine how there will ever be a rebound.
Only if you assume technology growth is limited. The basis behind unlimited stock growth is unlimited technological growth. As long as we continue to discover new ways to convert non-resources into resources more efficiently, we can continue to grow. Theoretically, yes, this will end, someday, when we've essentially maxed out our knowledge about the universe. But not in our lifetimes.
Trial by corporate peers would be an intriguing (if corruption-ridden) idea! I suppose it could work as long as both sides have ample ability to disqualify obviously-biased "jurors" (as they do already, but maybe more-so). So, I think more likely jurors would be large corporations that had no skin in this particular game (maybe a clothes retailer, or a news company, or large appliance maker, etc.). It'd be pretty hard to get a truly un-biased (and un-corrupted) jury pool, but maybe no worse than currently.
The computer you're using to type on would either have to be locally sourced...
If we assume the patent started when wheels became exponentially more critical for society (let's just say around the time the automobile was invented, for argument's sake), the cost by now would be far more than 100k per wheel... Automobiles came into mass production roughly in 1914, let's round up to 1920. Let's just say it started at $1 back then (about $10 in 2010 dollars). In 1930, it'd cost $1k to renew. By 1940, it'd cost $1 million to renew. By 1960, it'd cost 1 trillion dollars to renew (per year).... that's double the entire GDP of the US at that time. So, I'm pretty sure the patent would be long-gone by then. So, I think my computer and my city would be just fine.
Probably starting at $1 is a bit too generous, so let's say $1k. Then you'd have 20-30 years, at best, and only that if you were making serious (Apple-esque) money off of it. Not to mention, a single patent is not usually enough, so the costs would be a multiple of this. Maybe it'd need some tweaking, but overall, exponential costs is a good way to limit patent time and yet give enough flexibility to encourage innovation of truly successful ideas.
Of course, this all sort of misses the point. We shouldn't be patenting "pinch-to-zoom" any more than we can patent "point-and-click" or "holding something over your head to avoid getting rained on".
Problem is, if you're the sole witness, there are still things that you can do no matter how wide-spread the knowledge is. You can a) debunk it, or b) stand witness to it in a trial. Sure, if you happened to record it in action, then the video stands on its own. But if you didn't, all you can distribute is your own testimony, which ultimately is only as verifiable as you are. The govt would still have a vested interest in pursuing you to either force a retraction, or prevent official testimony.
Your best bet is probably to give the information to a lawyer with instructions to release if you can't be contacted in some period of time. Then you just have to convince whomever is interrogating you that you're not bluffing about that arrangement. Of course, you have to find a way to get the info to said lawyer without them seeing, otherwise they'll just take him/her too. If you're good enough with computers that you think you can outmaneuver the govt, you could do the equivalent with some self-releasing mechanism, but you need to be sure they couldn't track and stop it. Though of course, they can threaten you/your family if you don't shut it down, at which point it's a matter of will (insert encryption-xkcd).
Ultimately, you're screwed. Glad I don't live in conspiracy theory land.
We don't need to separate everyone into male or female. We just need to have one top tier that *anyone* can enter: male, female, xxy, androgen-whatever, etc. And and any other tier can be very specific (eg. xx-females with no abnormalities). No one's left out, you can still see women compete, and if every once in a while, some woman competes successfully in the "men's" (really "top tier") events, that's okay!
Chances of being able to get compatible voltage out of the wall in 25 years are reasonable (although they've been playing with that too).
Agree with most of what you say, but "reasonable" is pretty conservative in this case. I'd say there's a very very high probability that you'll still be able to easily use any current charger in 25 years. Even if we somehow migrate to another power technology (wireless power perhaps?) in that time (which seems unlikely given historical rates of power technology progress) there's a ton of stuff people have that they would still want to use in that time-frame, in particular, large appliances that tend to last 15+ years on average. Bottom line, is that even if we switched to a new power source this year (but more likely the transition itself would take around 25 years), we'd still have easily accessible converters around for decades. Not to mention, history indicates that any such switch would not be universal, so travel converters and such would exist probably even much longer.
I'd say you have a reasonable chance of still being able to use a power charger from today in 100 years. Anything less than 50, you're pretty much guaranteed to be okay. (Of course, making sure the devices themselves stay functional is a different problem.)
I file mine in my todo.txt, which also includes missing features. Since I don't do a release if there are *any* known outstanding bugs, "bugs" and "incomplete features" are essentially the same for me.
The fact that QWERTY was designed for a typewriter, ie with the most-used keys farthest apart, probably is a benefit for virtual keyboards (and I'm saying this as someone who exclusively uses dvorak for regular typing). If you have the vowels all in the same place (like this, or like dvorak), you're going to get a lot more typos that the OS can't fix for you (eg "in" vs "on", since they're both valid choices). Of course, "in" vs "on" is still an issue on qwerty, so we could definitely do better, but it's an entirely different optimization decision than with a physical 10-finger keyboard.
Of course, it doesn't seem like any typing optimizations at all went into this arbitrarily-touted keyboard, so no comment there.
You can't really value a shrinking company on the same scale as a growing company. There's no historical P/E that could convince me to buy a dying company. (There are other things that could, like price/book, or likelihood of a takeover, or a projected P/E of say 1, etc.)
Also, 15.44 proj P/E is only really slightly low. Quoting FB's absurdly high P/E (which is no longer 105) is just silly. Compare to Apple at 14.19 historical P/E, and still growing strongly. Or to Google at 17 historical P/E (and growing). 15.44 is low for a growing tech company, but not even that low, so it's hardly a reason to buy a shrinking company.
I absolutely love Monoprice's earbuds. I often lose or break mine, so I like cheap ones I can easily replace. I'm used to pretty crappy quality, but when I realized Monoprice sold some, I was pleasantly surprised at how nice they were. (Though, they're still $5 earbuds, don't go expecting some crazy sound quality.)
Look historically. Black voters are extremely likely to vote for democrats, regardless of race. Look at recent white democratic nominees for president who all got over 85% of the black vote share. Yes, Obama got an even larger share than usual, but the 98% (which I think is really more like 96%) number is deceptive. It's really only 5-10% more than usual. Furthermore, the majority of that is actually due to increased turnout among democratic black voters who were highly enthused about the possibility of a black president. It doesn't mean they ignored all other factors, just that they were more likely to vote (at all) because of this one, very important, factor.
My daughter is now almost four and has been homeschooling since about a year old, socializes great with all of her peers in her age group and above, to include adults.
Um. She's 4. That's not home schooling.... that's parenting.
To be fair, I didn't say home schooling was in-total and in-general a failure. I just pointed out one particular (and significant) failure in this case. Home schooling has failed this kid as evidenced by his lack of science education. Any (il)logical assumptions you make from my statement are your own.
Well, okay, my quotes around "schooling" do indicate my disdain for it, but that's meta- to my post, I didn't argue toward any generalizations.
This is an obvious failure of home "schooling". Send the kid to school. Let him learn to socialize for one, and get a well rounded education his parents apparently lack. The fact that he's had minimal science education for the first 4-5 grades of his life, is really a sad testament to this type of education.
And just because *you* hated your chemistry education doesn't mean it was bad. People tend to say things are "a waste of everyone's time" when they really mean "it's something I had no interest in / aptitude for".
If they're making a phone, it's not a business decision; it's simply because Zuck sees it as a "cool" thing to do/have. That's all he's interested in, he has stated it explicitly.
I'm more interesting in hearing the qualifications for this statement:
"I am also fairly certain that Hellfire missiles or some other ordinance likely to be equipped on said drones has enough destructive capacity to take out civilian aircraft, train bridges, or even make it inside the defensive perimeter of the White House."
There's not a whole lot of need or justification for equipping drones with weapons internally. The need for weaponized drones is in areas where there's a significant risk for loss of life from a human operator. Furthermore, there are, in fact, laws against using the military (which may or may not include weaponized drones in spirit or letter of the law) on US soil. I really don't see it very likely that we'll have this sort of problem any time soon.
I'd second the idea of looking into finance. It's good money, which is enjoyable. And it's highly misunderstood in terms of its "evil"-ness. The majority of the industry is doing good things that create efficiencies in the market and benefit everyone (to varying degrees...). Furthermore, it really doesn't have to be as intense as some people think. As a quant, ie financial researcher (which is what you'd want to do with a math degree), you are working with PhD's and other more nerd-type people who tend to be very reasonable. You can usually limit how much you have to interact with the "asshole" components of the business -- though that may limit your advancement to some extent.
It's sort of the opposite of education, of course (in terms of philosophy). But personally, I've found it's far more satisfying to be valued and respected for what you do by those you work with/for, than to work hard for little pay or recognition to do something that's theoretically more "valuable". But to each their own of course.
I think they just put extra emphasis on numbers, since they're limited in scope (only 10ish words, and relatively simple context) and more critical than other words in a VM transcription. I just checked a few VMs and it's perfect on phone numbers even when they're not the same as the caller ID.
I don't know, it's nearly perfect on phone numbers, in my experience (which is really helpful). And pretty useful on most stuff to get a good enough idea. Though it does stumble a lot. But yeah, prob doesn't do very well with these, was just a thought.
I realized there's an interesting aspect to this, in that gVoice transcription is actively trying to do basically the same thing these guys did* (albeit in a far more general way). Wonder how gVoice would do transcribing google's own recaptcha audio. Someone go try that. Either way though, it's an interesting dilemma if they ever got automatic transcription good enough to defeat these audio recaptchas.
* Well, after RTFA, I realize that a fair bit of what they did was actually more related to hashing (and the pseudo-random generator) vs actually trying to parse the audio, but still.
Slashdot Mirror
The government (which is making these rules) belongs to us. Do we chose to have intrusive searches using mostly-unproven technology? What our choice in the matter of giving away our privacy in the battle between fear and freedom?
As polls have consistently shown, the answer is yes. We, as a country, are quite okay with giving away our freedom and privacy to alleviate our fear.
Unfortunately.
At base, there are limited natural resources, and limited human resources, and when the market starts to run out of ways to efficiently exploit them, or the resources themselves start running out (peak oil, peak rainforest, peak population), it's hard to imagine how there will ever be a rebound.
Only if you assume technology growth is limited. The basis behind unlimited stock growth is unlimited technological growth. As long as we continue to discover new ways to convert non-resources into resources more efficiently, we can continue to grow. Theoretically, yes, this will end, someday, when we've essentially maxed out our knowledge about the universe. But not in our lifetimes.
Trial by corporate peers would be an intriguing (if corruption-ridden) idea! I suppose it could work as long as both sides have ample ability to disqualify obviously-biased "jurors" (as they do already, but maybe more-so). So, I think more likely jurors would be large corporations that had no skin in this particular game (maybe a clothes retailer, or a news company, or large appliance maker, etc.). It'd be pretty hard to get a truly un-biased (and un-corrupted) jury pool, but maybe no worse than currently.
The computer you're using to type on would either have to be locally sourced...
If we assume the patent started when wheels became exponentially more critical for society (let's just say around the time the automobile was invented, for argument's sake), the cost by now would be far more than 100k per wheel... Automobiles came into mass production roughly in 1914, let's round up to 1920. Let's just say it started at $1 back then (about $10 in 2010 dollars). In 1930, it'd cost $1k to renew. By 1940, it'd cost $1 million to renew. By 1960, it'd cost 1 trillion dollars to renew (per year).... that's double the entire GDP of the US at that time. So, I'm pretty sure the patent would be long-gone by then. So, I think my computer and my city would be just fine.
Probably starting at $1 is a bit too generous, so let's say $1k. Then you'd have 20-30 years, at best, and only that if you were making serious (Apple-esque) money off of it. Not to mention, a single patent is not usually enough, so the costs would be a multiple of this. Maybe it'd need some tweaking, but overall, exponential costs is a good way to limit patent time and yet give enough flexibility to encourage innovation of truly successful ideas.
Of course, this all sort of misses the point. We shouldn't be patenting "pinch-to-zoom" any more than we can patent "point-and-click" or "holding something over your head to avoid getting rained on".
Problem is, if you're the sole witness, there are still things that you can do no matter how wide-spread the knowledge is. You can a) debunk it, or b) stand witness to it in a trial. Sure, if you happened to record it in action, then the video stands on its own. But if you didn't, all you can distribute is your own testimony, which ultimately is only as verifiable as you are. The govt would still have a vested interest in pursuing you to either force a retraction, or prevent official testimony.
Your best bet is probably to give the information to a lawyer with instructions to release if you can't be contacted in some period of time. Then you just have to convince whomever is interrogating you that you're not bluffing about that arrangement. Of course, you have to find a way to get the info to said lawyer without them seeing, otherwise they'll just take him/her too. If you're good enough with computers that you think you can outmaneuver the govt, you could do the equivalent with some self-releasing mechanism, but you need to be sure they couldn't track and stop it. Though of course, they can threaten you/your family if you don't shut it down, at which point it's a matter of will (insert encryption-xkcd).
Ultimately, you're screwed. Glad I don't live in conspiracy theory land.
We don't need to separate everyone into male or female. We just need to have one top tier that *anyone* can enter: male, female, xxy, androgen-whatever, etc. And and any other tier can be very specific (eg. xx-females with no abnormalities). No one's left out, you can still see women compete, and if every once in a while, some woman competes successfully in the "men's" (really "top tier") events, that's okay!
Chances of being able to get compatible voltage out of the wall in 25 years are reasonable (although they've been playing with that too).
Agree with most of what you say, but "reasonable" is pretty conservative in this case. I'd say there's a very very high probability that you'll still be able to easily use any current charger in 25 years. Even if we somehow migrate to another power technology (wireless power perhaps?) in that time (which seems unlikely given historical rates of power technology progress) there's a ton of stuff people have that they would still want to use in that time-frame, in particular, large appliances that tend to last 15+ years on average. Bottom line, is that even if we switched to a new power source this year (but more likely the transition itself would take around 25 years), we'd still have easily accessible converters around for decades. Not to mention, history indicates that any such switch would not be universal, so travel converters and such would exist probably even much longer.
I'd say you have a reasonable chance of still being able to use a power charger from today in 100 years. Anything less than 50, you're pretty much guaranteed to be okay. (Of course, making sure the devices themselves stay functional is a different problem.)
also why would "city" gas milage be lower (up to 10 MPH lower these days) if driving slow was better?
Starting and stopping. This has nothing to do with which constant speed is most efficient.
I file mine in my todo.txt, which also includes missing features. Since I don't do a release if there are *any* known outstanding bugs, "bugs" and "incomplete features" are essentially the same for me.
So you never release?
Or he's bad at finding bugs...
The fact that QWERTY was designed for a typewriter, ie with the most-used keys farthest apart, probably is a benefit for virtual keyboards (and I'm saying this as someone who exclusively uses dvorak for regular typing). If you have the vowels all in the same place (like this, or like dvorak), you're going to get a lot more typos that the OS can't fix for you (eg "in" vs "on", since they're both valid choices). Of course, "in" vs "on" is still an issue on qwerty, so we could definitely do better, but it's an entirely different optimization decision than with a physical 10-finger keyboard.
Of course, it doesn't seem like any typing optimizations at all went into this arbitrarily-touted keyboard, so no comment there.
Want to fuck?
Going to Microsoft for marketing assistance is like going to the president of Syria for advice on how to handle a disapproving populace.
Nokia can attest to this!
You can't really value a shrinking company on the same scale as a growing company. There's no historical P/E that could convince me to buy a dying company. (There are other things that could, like price/book, or likelihood of a takeover, or a projected P/E of say 1, etc.)
Also, 15.44 proj P/E is only really slightly low. Quoting FB's absurdly high P/E (which is no longer 105) is just silly. Compare to Apple at 14.19 historical P/E, and still growing strongly. Or to Google at 17 historical P/E (and growing). 15.44 is low for a growing tech company, but not even that low, so it's hardly a reason to buy a shrinking company.
I absolutely love Monoprice's earbuds. I often lose or break mine, so I like cheap ones I can easily replace. I'm used to pretty crappy quality, but when I realized Monoprice sold some, I was pleasantly surprised at how nice they were. (Though, they're still $5 earbuds, don't go expecting some crazy sound quality.)
Indeed AC.
Look historically. Black voters are extremely likely to vote for democrats, regardless of race. Look at recent white democratic nominees for president who all got over 85% of the black vote share. Yes, Obama got an even larger share than usual, but the 98% (which I think is really more like 96%) number is deceptive. It's really only 5-10% more than usual. Furthermore, the majority of that is actually due to increased turnout among democratic black voters who were highly enthused about the possibility of a black president. It doesn't mean they ignored all other factors, just that they were more likely to vote (at all) because of this one, very important, factor.
My daughter is now almost four and has been homeschooling since about a year old, socializes great with all of her peers in her age group and above, to include adults.
Um. She's 4. That's not home schooling.... that's parenting.
To be fair, I didn't say home schooling was in-total and in-general a failure. I just pointed out one particular (and significant) failure in this case. Home schooling has failed this kid as evidenced by his lack of science education. Any (il)logical assumptions you make from my statement are your own.
Well, okay, my quotes around "schooling" do indicate my disdain for it, but that's meta- to my post, I didn't argue toward any generalizations.
This is an obvious failure of home "schooling". Send the kid to school. Let him learn to socialize for one, and get a well rounded education his parents apparently lack. The fact that he's had minimal science education for the first 4-5 grades of his life, is really a sad testament to this type of education.
And just because *you* hated your chemistry education doesn't mean it was bad. People tend to say things are "a waste of everyone's time" when they really mean "it's something I had no interest in / aptitude for".
If they're making a phone, it's not a business decision; it's simply because Zuck sees it as a "cool" thing to do/have. That's all he's interested in, he has stated it explicitly.
I'm more interesting in hearing the qualifications for this statement:
"I am also fairly certain that Hellfire missiles or some other ordinance likely to be equipped on said drones has enough destructive capacity to take out civilian aircraft, train bridges, or even make it inside the defensive perimeter of the White House."
There's not a whole lot of need or justification for equipping drones with weapons internally. The need for weaponized drones is in areas where there's a significant risk for loss of life from a human operator. Furthermore, there are, in fact, laws against using the military (which may or may not include weaponized drones in spirit or letter of the law) on US soil. I really don't see it very likely that we'll have this sort of problem any time soon.
Insightful? More like conspiracy/doomsday theory.
I'd second the idea of looking into finance. It's good money, which is enjoyable. And it's highly misunderstood in terms of its "evil"-ness. The majority of the industry is doing good things that create efficiencies in the market and benefit everyone (to varying degrees...). Furthermore, it really doesn't have to be as intense as some people think. As a quant, ie financial researcher (which is what you'd want to do with a math degree), you are working with PhD's and other more nerd-type people who tend to be very reasonable. You can usually limit how much you have to interact with the "asshole" components of the business -- though that may limit your advancement to some extent.
It's sort of the opposite of education, of course (in terms of philosophy). But personally, I've found it's far more satisfying to be valued and respected for what you do by those you work with/for, than to work hard for little pay or recognition to do something that's theoretically more "valuable". But to each their own of course.
I think they just put extra emphasis on numbers, since they're limited in scope (only 10ish words, and relatively simple context) and more critical than other words in a VM transcription. I just checked a few VMs and it's perfect on phone numbers even when they're not the same as the caller ID.
I don't know, it's nearly perfect on phone numbers, in my experience (which is really helpful). And pretty useful on most stuff to get a good enough idea. Though it does stumble a lot. But yeah, prob doesn't do very well with these, was just a thought.
I realized there's an interesting aspect to this, in that gVoice transcription is actively trying to do basically the same thing these guys did* (albeit in a far more general way). Wonder how gVoice would do transcribing google's own recaptcha audio. Someone go try that. Either way though, it's an interesting dilemma if they ever got automatic transcription good enough to defeat these audio recaptchas.
* Well, after RTFA, I realize that a fair bit of what they did was actually more related to hashing (and the pseudo-random generator) vs actually trying to parse the audio, but still.