Technically, I can't think of a better material than polycarbonate for a phone body. But many people are ready to pay more when the material looks expensive. The usual comment is "I don't pay $800 for a plastic phone".
The only self aware entity that I know of is myself. Because other humans look and behave a lot like me, I assume they are self-aware too. With animals, the line starts to blur, large mammals have a similar body structure and have reaction that, from my own experience, appear to be the result of self awareness, but when we get down to worms that can be computer-simulated, I am not so sure.
So how will we be able to know if something as alien as an AI is self-aware? Maybe it already is. I mean, isn't it painful for a program when you throw an exception? Obviously, we don't interpret as pain, because we know it is just a flow control instruction. But from a functional point of view, it signals your code to stop doing what it is doing and deal with the problem in order to prevent further damage, maybe with a mechanism to prevent the error from occurring again. It is just like pain for us.
I live in France. From a colleague who worked in the US and came back to France doing the same job, he earned about 3 times more in the US. However, he spend about half of it for the various insurances needed to get to the same level of health and social care that we get "for free" in France. So when it comes to work and money, he is 50% better off in the US. He is a competent developer.
It is anecdotal evidence but I think it reflects reality. In the US, you need to pay for your safety net, but earnings are, on average, high enough for you to afford it and keep some extra. What I find interesting however, is that even if we get better (and mandatory) protection from the state, we seem to be more into savings and less into debt. The "normal" way of thinking is save to buy, rather than buy first and pay back later. For instance, US-style credit cards are almost nonexistant (what we call credit cards are closer to what you call debit).
India and China have more than enough ability to make their own powerpacks for much less than Tesla is going to sell them. Most batteries are produced in China and they have no intention to stop here. Which means that even with the gigafactory, China is still expected to be the biggest battery producer.
The only way Tesla is going to sell stuff to the Chinese is if they do their manufacturing in China, and forget about their trade secrets too.
When normal people talk about "reading your email" this isn't what comes to mind.
So what comes to mind? For most people "reading your email" means that some human being is looking at your conversation. Google doesn't do that, they never did, only computers read your email. But if we include computers in the mix, than "reading your email" is inevitable.
And about "deserving a free pass", that's for you to decide. Do you want to give Google the free pass and use their convenient service or do you prefer not to and go to the competition. ProtonMail is just an example of a good privacy-oriented service.
Of course Google read your mail, they have to do it in order to provide the service they offer.
There are services that don't read your mail, like ProtonMail, by all means use them if you really want privacy. However, as a trade off, you don't get full text search, advanced spam filtering, and all the little things GMail offers. It is just technically impossible.
Now, if you judge that GMail features are worth letting Google access your email (the usual convinience/security tradeoff) then you are trusting Google. And if you are trusting Google, what does it do to you if they use your data to fine tune their own algorithms? No human is actually reading your email, it is all robots and anonymized data, or so they say. And if you think they lie, then why would you believe anything that's written in their privacy policy anyways?
Of all then data collecting companies, Google is the most obvious. They constantly remind you that they are watching you, I mean, when they tell you things like "you have a plane at 11am, based on your current location, you need to go by 9am" even then you didn't do anything, then you don't need a privacy policy to tell you that they collect data.
Technically speaking, you are right. Also, if you believe that terrorists caused 9/11, by that definition, you are a conspiracy theorist. In fact the only way not to be a conspiracy theorist about 9/11 is either not having an opinion at all or believing that everything is a giant mistake.
The number of female CS graduates has been dropping since the 80s when I graduated. Why? Are the women of today genetically less capable of grasping code than the women of 30 years ago? Nonsense.
Is it? While women haven't changed in 30 years, tech did. And on average, men and women score better on some cognitive tasks. For example, it seems that men are better at mental rotation while women tend to be better at calculations. And early computers were actually people, usually women, doing calculations by hand. Today, coding is much more abstract, it is more about managing large, complex structure than fiddling with instructions and addresses.
I am not saying that genetics is the reason why there are so few women coders but it shouldn't be dismissed as nonsense without proper study.
There are 4 possible combination : 1- both medicine and alternative medicine work 2- only medicine works 3- only alternative medicine works 4- nothing work
"3" is extremely rare, and in the case of "1", doing nothing at all and letting your body recover may be all that's needed. The reason it simple: when alternative medicine work, it is studied and soon enough, if the risks aren't too great, it becomes medicine. Medicine is just alternative medicine that work.
The advantage alternative medicine has is that quite often, the human care is much better than what we have in hospitals or at the doctors office. While a doctor will just treat your disease like he does with the dozen people waiting in line behind you, your "alternative doctor" will take the time to teach you a healthy lifestyle (sleep well, eat well, exercise,... the usual obvious stuff no one does). In fact the reason homeopathy was successful isn't because of the sugar pills, it is because Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy also imposed strict lifestyle rules to his patients, some of them like limiting smoking and drinking alcohol are scientifically tied to health improvement today.
What's the point for casinos to target people on low income? High income is much more profitable. Is it a "long tail" thing where they try to get a little bit of money from a large number of people instead of a lot of money from just the richest?
A very important part of the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment that is not always mentioned is the coincidence counter. And this is what prevents instant transmission of information.
The experiment is often described as "create a pair of entangled particles, do weird stuff and see where each particle go". But the truth is: most particles involved in the experiment aren't actually entangled, so if you just look at the detectors, the only thing you see is noise. You need the coincidence counter to tell you that two blips in the noise pattern are actually two entangled particles, but only after the two have arrived. That's the important part, you only know after the fact, you can't watch the thing happen.
You can't use a delayed choice quantum eraser to build a useful machine that allows you to transfer data faster than light. With the current understanding of physics, it is simply impossible, and no experiment disproved that. The "information traveled back in time" interpretation is just one of many.
Currently, science isn't settled on a correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. In fact, scientists have no fucking idea how all that stuff work. The maths work, experiments match predictions, engineers put it to good use, but we don't know how to interpret the results.
$10 is about how much it costs extra to get 2-day delivery without prime. If you order from Amazon once a month, then $10/month is too much, simple maths.
Now, for the other services (ex: video streaming), it is only worth it if you actually use them. If the shows you watch aren't on Amazon platform, even $0.01 is too much.
Going from $100 to $120 may just be the tipping point for some people. And my gut feeling is that it is not by chance. Like any company, Amazon seeks to maximize profit. The $99 price was already chosen with that in mind: make it cheaper means less profit, and more expensive means less subscriptions. With the new price, they know they are going to lose some subscriptions, but for them, the $100-$120 demographic they probably identified long ago isn't worth losing $20 per subscriber.
What does it have to do with net neutrality. If anything, it is a case of product tying, not a net neutrality violation.
Net neutrality is only about discriminating internet traffic, not including a service you may or may not want in their package. Furthermore, AFAIK, net neutrality says nothing about peering. Peering is the direct connection between your ISP and Netflix's (or whatever) ISP. This is very important for popular services because the global internet isn't fast enough to support them, making them almost unusable during peak hours. So if the "fast Netflix" just means better peering, again, no net neutrality violation.
AFAIK, age of consent doesn't matter. The age of consent is the age where people can legally consent to have sex, but it doesn't mean they can shoot porn. The minimum age for that is 18 is every country I know of where porn is legal.
Nuclear and coal are almost opposite when it comes to power generation Coal: Cheap upfront, expensive fuel, lots of CO2, widespread pollution, low potential for disaster Nuclear: Expensive upfront, cheap fuel, almost no CO2, highly localized pollution, possibility of disasters
AI trained on white men will be more accurate with white men, but it doesn't mean that they will favor white men. In fact, if the black women it was trained with were particularly suitable, it will be more likely to be biased towards them.
It is nothing more than free market. Want to play a game on day one, and get all the fancy stuff, then you have to pay for the privilege. If you don't want to, just wait a year or two for the sales, you can often get -75%, with the most popular DLC included. On the other side, if you are a die hard fan with money to spend, there are often "collector editions" with goodies and stuff for 2 or 3 times the price.
Believe it or not, I think it is a fair system. They are milking people with money to spend, and others can still play the game for cheap (and legally) some time later, and maybe not with all the pretty skins. Even discounting the promotional budget, AAA games are ridiculously expensive to produce, and some people have to pay. Sometimes, I am one of these people, sometimes, I am not, and just wait for the sales and/or take the minimum package.
As for staying competitive, I am not too much into eSports but most of the really competitive games don't seem to require you to pay ridiculous amount of money in order to play at high level, with the possible exception of Hearthstone (which is closer to a TCG like Magic than a typical video game). Many people still do, because as they are sinking thousands of hours into their game, they don't mind spending a bit of cash just for appearance, but some never paid more than the initial price, which may be zero.
So rather than "don't spend $60+DLC on a game", it is more like "don't spend more than you think the game is worth to you". Some people bought multi-thousand dollar arcade cabinets just for the game they love. Others think $5 is too expensive for the exact same game. Both are right.
That thing will first verify that it is paired with approved explosives, which will never happen because it requires gigabit internet to do so, the authentication servers are down, and the explosives you bought need a firmware upgrade, which isn't available because you bought them last week and their long term support lasts 5 days. It can still show you ads though.
And why do you trust Windows in a VM on Linux? Sure, Linux, and most software within your distro is open source but are you sure that all your binary packages are compiled from these sources, and the sources haven been modified along the way, and that some contributor didn't add some backdoor (NSA is a contributor you know...). And what about all the closed source firmware, like the infamous Intel IME? There are also these "ring -1" rootkits that run on top of your "bare metal" OS, which, btw, are a thing secure boot is supposed to protect against. Furthermore, VMs are not completely airtight. There are sometimes "VM escape" exploits, plus all the things the VM may naturally have access to, like the internet, shared directories or the clipboard.
You are probably right to put more trust in Linux than in Windows, probably. In any case, it is definitely not a black and white situation, and VMs are not magic bullets.
More seriously, we are in a world where very few people can understand how reality works.
Anyone with a high school level of scientific background can understand Newtonian mechanics, most people have trouble with special relativity but with the right mindset, it is not that hard. General relativity and quantum mechanics pretty much require years of specialized studies, and these are what form the basis of reality as we know it today. Mastery in these fields are a requirement in order to go further. As for our understanding of nature, we know the physics of throwing rocks very well, no need to do more research about that. The unsolved problems involve crazy accurate measurements, scales that are well beyond human, or complicated interactions.
We should not have more than 10% of the population on any given social media platform.
It defeats the purpose of a social media platform, which is to connect people. I don't want a https://xkcd.com/1810/ situation where you need many accounts to get in touch. The alternative to platforms are decentralized protocols but only one gained traction: e-mail.
I don't know about the US law but warranty normally only covers manufacturing defects. If you botch the repair and break the product by doing so, it is not a defect, and I don't see why they should fix your mistakes.
From what I understand, here is the idea: you break your phone screen, and repair it. Now you notice the new screen causes problems, you can't get warranty because what the seller sold you isn't defective. However, if your screen works well and a memory chip is defective, warranty works, because the problem comes from the original product. That's unless they can prove that the new screen caused the problem.
Also, what happens if in the process of fixing the memory chip defect, the original manufacturer damage your new screen because it is more fragile? Can they send back the phone with the now fixed chip and damaged screen and you now have to ask for warranty support from the one who sold you the screen...
A VR headset has no business collecting any of this crap without explicit consent.
Ok for the "without explicit consent" part but, a lot of valuable can be collected from VR headsets in order to improve VR. Tracking movement patterns in order to know if you are sick could be very useful. Motion sickness is a major problem for VR. There are mitigations but they tend to impact gameplay. This is something that depends a lot on the individual and more data for research purposes is a good thing. And there are more technical aspects: people have different setups and positional tracking data may help improve quality. Things like head motion can help understand how people interact with the virtual world. VR is just becoming mainstream, and there are a lot of questions to answer and technical problems to solve, much more than web page design.
Slashdot Mirror
Plastic looks cheap. Because it is cheap.
Technically, I can't think of a better material than polycarbonate for a phone body. But many people are ready to pay more when the material looks expensive. The usual comment is "I don't pay $800 for a plastic phone".
The only self aware entity that I know of is myself. Because other humans look and behave a lot like me, I assume they are self-aware too. With animals, the line starts to blur, large mammals have a similar body structure and have reaction that, from my own experience, appear to be the result of self awareness, but when we get down to worms that can be computer-simulated, I am not so sure.
So how will we be able to know if something as alien as an AI is self-aware? Maybe it already is. I mean, isn't it painful for a program when you throw an exception? Obviously, we don't interpret as pain, because we know it is just a flow control instruction. But from a functional point of view, it signals your code to stop doing what it is doing and deal with the problem in order to prevent further damage, maybe with a mechanism to prevent the error from occurring again. It is just like pain for us.
Browsers already have an incognito mode. The app didn't.
I live in France. From a colleague who worked in the US and came back to France doing the same job, he earned about 3 times more in the US. However, he spend about half of it for the various insurances needed to get to the same level of health and social care that we get "for free" in France.
So when it comes to work and money, he is 50% better off in the US. He is a competent developer.
It is anecdotal evidence but I think it reflects reality. In the US, you need to pay for your safety net, but earnings are, on average, high enough for you to afford it and keep some extra. What I find interesting however, is that even if we get better (and mandatory) protection from the state, we seem to be more into savings and less into debt. The "normal" way of thinking is save to buy, rather than buy first and pay back later. For instance, US-style credit cards are almost nonexistant (what we call credit cards are closer to what you call debit).
India and China have more than enough ability to make their own powerpacks for much less than Tesla is going to sell them. Most batteries are produced in China and they have no intention to stop here. Which means that even with the gigafactory, China is still expected to be the biggest battery producer.
The only way Tesla is going to sell stuff to the Chinese is if they do their manufacturing in China, and forget about their trade secrets too.
When normal people talk about "reading your email" this isn't what comes to mind.
So what comes to mind? For most people "reading your email" means that some human being is looking at your conversation. Google doesn't do that, they never did, only computers read your email. But if we include computers in the mix, than "reading your email" is inevitable.
And about "deserving a free pass", that's for you to decide. Do you want to give Google the free pass and use their convenient service or do you prefer not to and go to the competition. ProtonMail is just an example of a good privacy-oriented service.
Of course Google read your mail, they have to do it in order to provide the service they offer.
There are services that don't read your mail, like ProtonMail, by all means use them if you really want privacy. However, as a trade off, you don't get full text search, advanced spam filtering, and all the little things GMail offers. It is just technically impossible.
Now, if you judge that GMail features are worth letting Google access your email (the usual convinience/security tradeoff) then you are trusting Google. And if you are trusting Google, what does it do to you if they use your data to fine tune their own algorithms? No human is actually reading your email, it is all robots and anonymized data, or so they say. And if you think they lie, then why would you believe anything that's written in their privacy policy anyways?
Of all then data collecting companies, Google is the most obvious. They constantly remind you that they are watching you, I mean, when they tell you things like "you have a plane at 11am, based on your current location, you need to go by 9am" even then you didn't do anything, then you don't need a privacy policy to tell you that they collect data.
Technically speaking, you are right.
Also, if you believe that terrorists caused 9/11, by that definition, you are a conspiracy theorist. In fact the only way not to be a conspiracy theorist about 9/11 is either not having an opinion at all or believing that everything is a giant mistake.
The number of female CS graduates has been dropping since the 80s when I graduated. Why? Are the women of today genetically less capable of grasping code than the women of 30 years ago? Nonsense.
Is it? While women haven't changed in 30 years, tech did. And on average, men and women score better on some cognitive tasks. For example, it seems that men are better at mental rotation while women tend to be better at calculations. And early computers were actually people, usually women, doing calculations by hand.
Today, coding is much more abstract, it is more about managing large, complex structure than fiddling with instructions and addresses.
I am not saying that genetics is the reason why there are so few women coders but it shouldn't be dismissed as nonsense without proper study.
There are 4 possible combination :
1- both medicine and alternative medicine work
2- only medicine works
3- only alternative medicine works
4- nothing work
"3" is extremely rare, and in the case of "1", doing nothing at all and letting your body recover may be all that's needed. The reason it simple: when alternative medicine work, it is studied and soon enough, if the risks aren't too great, it becomes medicine. Medicine is just alternative medicine that work.
The advantage alternative medicine has is that quite often, the human care is much better than what we have in hospitals or at the doctors office. While a doctor will just treat your disease like he does with the dozen people waiting in line behind you, your "alternative doctor" will take the time to teach you a healthy lifestyle (sleep well, eat well, exercise, ... the usual obvious stuff no one does). In fact the reason homeopathy was successful isn't because of the sugar pills, it is because Samuel Hahnemann, the father of homeopathy also imposed strict lifestyle rules to his patients, some of them like limiting smoking and drinking alcohol are scientifically tied to health improvement today.
What's the point for casinos to target people on low income? High income is much more profitable.
Is it a "long tail" thing where they try to get a little bit of money from a large number of people instead of a lot of money from just the richest?
A very important part of the delayed choice quantum eraser experiment that is not always mentioned is the coincidence counter. And this is what prevents instant transmission of information.
The experiment is often described as "create a pair of entangled particles, do weird stuff and see where each particle go". But the truth is: most particles involved in the experiment aren't actually entangled, so if you just look at the detectors, the only thing you see is noise. You need the coincidence counter to tell you that two blips in the noise pattern are actually two entangled particles, but only after the two have arrived. That's the important part, you only know after the fact, you can't watch the thing happen.
You can't use a delayed choice quantum eraser to build a useful machine that allows you to transfer data faster than light. With the current understanding of physics, it is simply impossible, and no experiment disproved that. The "information traveled back in time" interpretation is just one of many.
Currently, science isn't settled on a correct interpretation of quantum mechanics. In fact, scientists have no fucking idea how all that stuff work. The maths work, experiments match predictions, engineers put it to good use, but we don't know how to interpret the results.
$10 is about how much it costs extra to get 2-day delivery without prime. If you order from Amazon once a month, then $10/month is too much, simple maths.
Now, for the other services (ex: video streaming), it is only worth it if you actually use them. If the shows you watch aren't on Amazon platform, even $0.01 is too much.
Going from $100 to $120 may just be the tipping point for some people. And my gut feeling is that it is not by chance. Like any company, Amazon seeks to maximize profit. The $99 price was already chosen with that in mind: make it cheaper means less profit, and more expensive means less subscriptions. With the new price, they know they are going to lose some subscriptions, but for them, the $100-$120 demographic they probably identified long ago isn't worth losing $20 per subscriber.
What does it have to do with net neutrality. If anything, it is a case of product tying, not a net neutrality violation.
Net neutrality is only about discriminating internet traffic, not including a service you may or may not want in their package.
Furthermore, AFAIK, net neutrality says nothing about peering. Peering is the direct connection between your ISP and Netflix's (or whatever) ISP. This is very important for popular services because the global internet isn't fast enough to support them, making them almost unusable during peak hours. So if the "fast Netflix" just means better peering, again, no net neutrality violation.
AFAIK, age of consent doesn't matter. The age of consent is the age where people can legally consent to have sex, but it doesn't mean they can shoot porn. The minimum age for that is 18 is every country I know of where porn is legal.
Nuclear and coal are almost opposite when it comes to power generation
Coal: Cheap upfront, expensive fuel, lots of CO2, widespread pollution, low potential for disaster
Nuclear: Expensive upfront, cheap fuel, almost no CO2, highly localized pollution, possibility of disasters
AI trained on white men will be more accurate with white men, but it doesn't mean that they will favor white men. In fact, if the black women it was trained with were particularly suitable, it will be more likely to be biased towards them.
It is nothing more than free market. Want to play a game on day one, and get all the fancy stuff, then you have to pay for the privilege. If you don't want to, just wait a year or two for the sales, you can often get -75%, with the most popular DLC included. On the other side, if you are a die hard fan with money to spend, there are often "collector editions" with goodies and stuff for 2 or 3 times the price.
Believe it or not, I think it is a fair system. They are milking people with money to spend, and others can still play the game for cheap (and legally) some time later, and maybe not with all the pretty skins. Even discounting the promotional budget, AAA games are ridiculously expensive to produce, and some people have to pay. Sometimes, I am one of these people, sometimes, I am not, and just wait for the sales and/or take the minimum package.
As for staying competitive, I am not too much into eSports but most of the really competitive games don't seem to require you to pay ridiculous amount of money in order to play at high level, with the possible exception of Hearthstone (which is closer to a TCG like Magic than a typical video game).
Many people still do, because as they are sinking thousands of hours into their game, they don't mind spending a bit of cash just for appearance, but some never paid more than the initial price, which may be zero.
So rather than "don't spend $60+DLC on a game", it is more like "don't spend more than you think the game is worth to you". Some people bought multi-thousand dollar arcade cabinets just for the game they love. Others think $5 is too expensive for the exact same game. Both are right.
That thing will first verify that it is paired with approved explosives, which will never happen because it requires gigabit internet to do so, the authentication servers are down, and the explosives you bought need a firmware upgrade, which isn't available because you bought them last week and their long term support lasts 5 days.
It can still show you ads though.
And why do you trust Windows in a VM on Linux?
Sure, Linux, and most software within your distro is open source but are you sure that all your binary packages are compiled from these sources, and the sources haven been modified along the way, and that some contributor didn't add some backdoor (NSA is a contributor you know...). And what about all the closed source firmware, like the infamous Intel IME? There are also these "ring -1" rootkits that run on top of your "bare metal" OS, which, btw, are a thing secure boot is supposed to protect against.
Furthermore, VMs are not completely airtight. There are sometimes "VM escape" exploits, plus all the things the VM may naturally have access to, like the internet, shared directories or the clipboard.
You are probably right to put more trust in Linux than in Windows, probably. In any case, it is definitely not a black and white situation, and VMs are not magic bullets.
More seriously, we are in a world where very few people can understand how reality works.
Anyone with a high school level of scientific background can understand Newtonian mechanics, most people have trouble with special relativity but with the right mindset, it is not that hard. General relativity and quantum mechanics pretty much require years of specialized studies, and these are what form the basis of reality as we know it today. Mastery in these fields are a requirement in order to go further.
As for our understanding of nature, we know the physics of throwing rocks very well, no need to do more research about that. The unsolved problems involve crazy accurate measurements, scales that are well beyond human, or complicated interactions.
We should not have more than 10% of the population on any given social media platform.
It defeats the purpose of a social media platform, which is to connect people. I don't want a https://xkcd.com/1810/ situation where you need many accounts to get in touch. The alternative to platforms are decentralized protocols but only one gained traction: e-mail.
Amazon sells about 30-40 million books, the Library of Congress has about that many.
So an Amazon is roughly equal to a Library of Congress.
I don't know about the US law but warranty normally only covers manufacturing defects.
If you botch the repair and break the product by doing so, it is not a defect, and I don't see why they should fix your mistakes.
From what I understand, here is the idea: you break your phone screen, and repair it. Now you notice the new screen causes problems, you can't get warranty because what the seller sold you isn't defective. However, if your screen works well and a memory chip is defective, warranty works, because the problem comes from the original product. That's unless they can prove that the new screen caused the problem.
Also, what happens if in the process of fixing the memory chip defect, the original manufacturer damage your new screen because it is more fragile? Can they send back the phone with the now fixed chip and damaged screen and you now have to ask for warranty support from the one who sold you the screen...
A VR headset has no business collecting any of this crap without explicit consent.
Ok for the "without explicit consent" part but, a lot of valuable can be collected from VR headsets in order to improve VR.
Tracking movement patterns in order to know if you are sick could be very useful. Motion sickness is a major problem for VR. There are mitigations but they tend to impact gameplay. This is something that depends a lot on the individual and more data for research purposes is a good thing.
And there are more technical aspects: people have different setups and positional tracking data may help improve quality. Things like head motion can help understand how people interact with the virtual world.
VR is just becoming mainstream, and there are a lot of questions to answer and technical problems to solve, much more than web page design.