If a company like google is not hiring certain races of people, I suspect it is not because of discrimination at google. I am pretty sure the problem can be traced all the way back to the inequality in public schools. When you have affluent school districts with tons of money and high university acceptance and attendance and poor schools where all the minorities go with high drop out rates and low university acceptance and attendance, you can't just expect google to hire people of different races equally and fix everything.
If there is one thing companies care about, it is making profit. They will hire whoever they can to maximize profit. I don;t think Google and other companies like Google would be begging for more H1B visas to hire more minorities from other countries if they were racist.
They are trying to maximize the talent of their workforce for the least amount of money. Any unnecessary discrimination would be cutting into their bottom line.
By "standard EULA" I was referring to something which would have protections for both buyers and sellers. It would not be negotiated between each pair of buyers and sellers, but it would be negotiated legislators who are elected by the general public.
The difference with current laws protecting customers and sellers is that I could imagine a system where there are several standard EULA's which are customized for particular types of products and industries. The proponents of EULA's say that the flexibility is necessary. To me it makes sense to have a different sort of agreement when you buy a shovel from when you buy a playstation 4. I think we can find a way to have this flexibility without the confusion, exploitation, and wasted time.
In short, I envision a system with tens of different EULA's rather than millions. Few enough that people can become familiar with the ones they frequently use, and choose to agree to them with full knowledge of what they are agreeing to, without needing to expend a lot of energy. They would also be knowledgeable enough to vote for politicians who advocate specific changes they might want.
Or a recent example in the news of legislators trying to make laws against the "knockout game". We already have laws against assaulting people, I don't think specifically prohibiting assaulting people as part of a game serves any additional purpose besides scoring political points with frightened Fox News viewers.
For anyone who wants to explore this specific topic further, this is a really good video talking about the problems with X from former X developer and current Wayland developer David Stone.
I don't know if this is a feature unique to lawyers, but as a software engineer, I can honestly say that as a profession, we don't attempt to make software more complicated for the purpose of keeping ourselves employed. Even though it is true that software gets more complex over time, it is actually for the purpose of making more work for the computers, and less work for engineers. Software engineers are more productive now than at any point in the past. The amount of work that modern tools allow 1 engineer can do is staggering today, compared with decades past. The thing that keeps us employed is that more people want more software now that it is more cost effective. We keep trying to engineer our way out of a job, but we just keep getting more work.
Rather than allowing EULAs written by companies, we should just have standard EULAs, for common types of products, and declare all other EULAs nonbinding.
I understand the need to have contracts that are nuanced, but for the kinds of contracts that you "agree" to simply by opening a box, should be standardized and devoid of any nefarious language.
I should not be able to send a letter to someone that says "By opening the envelope this letter arrived in, you agree to write me a check for $10,000, and failure to do so within 30 days will result in litigation" (and have it be enforceable). For the same reason, companies should not be able to have custom EULAs that are implicitly agreed to by opening a box or envelope.
Sure we can put the responsibility on the consumer to read every EULA for everything he/she buys from an OS to a bluetooth headset, but this is just a waste of everyone's time. We already invalidate stupid EULAs for being stupid. Lets just go one step further and make an implied boilerplate EULA that everyone is aware of and doesn't include anything shady.
I am well aware of qualia and the "hard problem" of consciousness. I would suggest that you read up on people like Dan Dennett who explain why qualia and the "hard problem" of consciousness don't actually exist. He also does a very good at explaining why the idea of a philosophical zombie is incoherent.
There is absolutely no reason why meat computers made of carbon atoms should have qualia and electronic computers made of silicon atoms shouldn't.
If we consider one CPU cycle to take 1 second, then a sending a ping across the U.S. would take the equivalent of 4 years. A simple conversation could take the equivalent of thousands of years. Would any consciousness be able to deal with such a relative delay?
I am not sure why one clock cycle would be equivalent to 1 second. If we assume a clock cycle is equal to a nano second then all of a sudden computer and human time are pretty close again.
Computers are going to have to get a lot faster than they are now before they become conscious. The first AIs are probably going to be too slow for us to find entertaining to talk to. At some point they will probably catch up to and surpass natural human beings. Of course by then we may simply augment our own brains with technology to keep up with artificial intelligence.
The question of "Will computers end up being smarter then us?" might not be answerable. It might be the case that human evolution incorporates artificial intelligence and the line between man and machine is blurred.
This is hopefully an engineering detail that can be worked out. A possible solution is creating hydrogen compounds that are easier to store, preferably compounds that are easy (but not too easy) to convert back to hydrogen, and maybe even reuse the additives. Another solution might be to just make better containers for liquid hydrogen that do not leak or degrade, possibly involving nanotechnology.
There is no objective way to decide that, but there is a subjective way, which we use in all sorts of aspects of life that do not have black/white answers: judgement calls, performed by employees with the apt title of Judge:)
Well we definitely don't want it to be a case of "I'll know it when I see it" (as with historic restrictions on the first amendment in regards to obscenity by the supreme court). The whole point of having laws is the make justice of not completely, as objective as possible, to the end of providing equal protection under the law. If we felt judges were capable of using their judgment in all cases, then we wouldn't even need laws. We could just have judges sentence people based on how bad their behavior was judged to be by judges.
Lots of law is like that currently. Laws often have phrases like "A reasonable person..." in them, recognizing that someone, a judge/jury, is going to have to decide if the person was reasonable or not for some specific action.
These sorts of characterizations really only work when there is consensus among reasonable people on the subject. I would say that in regards to partisan politics, either there is no consensus among reasonable people, or reasonable people are rare.
Not that alone. But transparency is a key aspect to drive any market or democratic force. At least people could see something.. and either get angry about it, or shrug and say "so what". Right now, most people have little to no idea how much of their worldview is shaped by news, media, think tanks, lobbyists, etc... most of whom are beholden to large money interests.
I agree that transparency is better than opacity, but I think it is pretty safe to assume that most, if not nearly all, politicians are bought off by corporations. Even if you knew that politician X was getting money from lobby Y, proving that vote Z was based on this relationship is pretty hard to do (which is presumably why they all do it).
If those Walmart employees wanted to vote against their own best interest (a permanent raise from 7 to 10 dollars an hour), and in exchange get 500 dollars, that is their decision to make. At least they were able apply their "vote" to the issue.
Well I suppose it is debatable whether it *should* be their decision in a "real" democracy. You'd have libertarians arguing on the one hand that it should absolutely be their decision, and taking this decision away from them is precisely the opposite of freedom and democracy. On the other side you'd have progressives arguing that true democracy can not thrive in an environment where people are allowed to be exploited in this way, and such exploitation is a perversion of democracy, and the only way to achieve a healthy democracy is to take some freedoms away from people in order to provide and environment that fosters good decisions (e.g. forbid people to sell themselves into slavery, or sell their organs, or sell their votes, etc).
Honestly I feel the best answer will probably lie somewhere in the middle rather than at an ideological extreme. But this is another problem that solves itself if people were just more intelligent and well informed and made better decisions for themselves.
I don't know how we get to a society where most people are smart enough to prevent these sorts of perversions of democracy by voting, but I am fairly certain that any and all substitutes will not be effective. Nearly any law or regulation that you can come up with, can be exploited via loopholes, bribery, etc in an environment of ignorance and apathy. An informed and engaged electorate would make spending unimaginable amounts of money on elections rather wasteful, because it takes a lot of money (i.e. way more than is spent now) to prevent intelligent and diligent people from discovering the truth. Right now you can find out the truth rather easily by just using google and a bit of time and effort, it's just that very few people actually care enough to do it.
The nice thing about using solar to split water (rather than directly powering things), is that it doesn't need to be sunny all the time. You can just keep storing more hydrogen. And you can use whatever the cheapest form of electricity available is in every area (e.g. wind, hydroelectric, solar, tidal, geothermal, nuclear, etc)
That seems like a pretty expensive proposition if electric is vastly superior. It only becomes a good idea when the technology is cheap enough in the long run to allow the company to profit. Granted there is a gray area where 2 technologies can be roughly equal in profitability, where it makes sense for a company to push the slightly worse technology it has a stake in, but it makes less sense to try to corner a new technology you know is inferior.
If Toyota knew batteries were going to be better than fuel cells even given possible future technological improvements, I would fully expect them to join the party. Toyota is good at making cars, including cars with electric motors. Surely they stand to profit as much as anyone if battery technology drastically improves.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. There are probably better ways of getting hydrogen, but one way is to use electricity to split water molecules to get hydrogen and oxygen gas. You actually lose energy in the process, but you can use freely available solar power from the sun to split water. This is analogous to how the sun powered all the plants and a animals that died to make the oil we use to make gasoline.
The sun pretty much powers everything on the planet (with the exception of radioactive decay and heat in the core of the planet). It created a nice stockpile of energy dense hydrocarbons that took billions of years to make, unfortunately this resource is not renewable (or rather it renews very slowly).
Except that electric batteries kind of suck. It might be simpler, but I don't like waiting 3 hours to "fill up".
The difference between electric cars and fuel cell cars are small. Both have electric motors. The only difference is that the "battery" in a fuel cell vehicle, rather than being lithium or Nimh is a fuel cell + a tank of hydrogen, which is faster to "charge" (you just refill it with hydrogen).
Maybe it won't matter if super-capacitors ever materialize, but until then, I think hydrogen fuel cells are a good solution until something better comes along.
I think being able to explain something to an ordinary person is an unreasonable requirement given the level of intelligence of an ordinary person. I don't think it's desirable to have an election system that does not involve any math.
What percentage of American citizens understand the electoral college?
The results of a proper electronic election are better able to be verified by intelligent people.
With electronic voting, you can store not only the vote totals, but also who voted for what in a way that is scrambled, and make the results public. This way each person can verify that their vote was counted without allowing others to see how they voted.
By your reasoning, mail in ballots are just as problematic as internet voting. People can offer to buy your mail in ballot. Your spouse or employer can intimidate you in to signing up for mail voting and vote for you. The mafia can pay you a visit and demand you sign up for mail voting and give the ballot to them.
Slashdot Mirror
Judging by your post history, you are the most prolific and also the dumbest person on Slashdot.
If a company like google is not hiring certain races of people, I suspect it is not because of discrimination at google. I am pretty sure the problem can be traced all the way back to the inequality in public schools. When you have affluent school districts with tons of money and high university acceptance and attendance and poor schools where all the minorities go with high drop out rates and low university acceptance and attendance, you can't just expect google to hire people of different races equally and fix everything.
If there is one thing companies care about, it is making profit. They will hire whoever they can to maximize profit. I don;t think Google and other companies like Google would be begging for more H1B visas to hire more minorities from other countries if they were racist.
They are trying to maximize the talent of their workforce for the least amount of money. Any unnecessary discrimination would be cutting into their bottom line.
Since the PS4 can't stream media from a PC...
Maybe Sony could allow users to stream media to their PS4 from a PS3... from a PC
Is there any degradation in video quality?
By "standard EULA" I was referring to something which would have protections for both buyers and sellers. It would not be negotiated between each pair of buyers and sellers, but it would be negotiated legislators who are elected by the general public.
The difference with current laws protecting customers and sellers is that I could imagine a system where there are several standard EULA's which are customized for particular types of products and industries. The proponents of EULA's say that the flexibility is necessary. To me it makes sense to have a different sort of agreement when you buy a shovel from when you buy a playstation 4. I think we can find a way to have this flexibility without the confusion, exploitation, and wasted time.
In short, I envision a system with tens of different EULA's rather than millions. Few enough that people can become familiar with the ones they frequently use, and choose to agree to them with full knowledge of what they are agreeing to, without needing to expend a lot of energy. They would also be knowledgeable enough to vote for politicians who advocate specific changes they might want.
Or a recent example in the news of legislators trying to make laws against the "knockout game". We already have laws against assaulting people, I don't think specifically prohibiting assaulting people as part of a game serves any additional purpose besides scoring political points with frightened Fox News viewers.
For anyone who wants to explore this specific topic further, this is a really good video talking about the problems with X from former X developer and current Wayland developer David Stone.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIctzAQOe44
You: Really long comment that is a waste of everyone's time. Me: Fuck you.
I don't know if this is a feature unique to lawyers, but as a software engineer, I can honestly say that as a profession, we don't attempt to make software more complicated for the purpose of keeping ourselves employed. Even though it is true that software gets more complex over time, it is actually for the purpose of making more work for the computers, and less work for engineers. Software engineers are more productive now than at any point in the past. The amount of work that modern tools allow 1 engineer can do is staggering today, compared with decades past. The thing that keeps us employed is that more people want more software now that it is more cost effective. We keep trying to engineer our way out of a job, but we just keep getting more work.
Rather than allowing EULAs written by companies, we should just have standard EULAs, for common types of products, and declare all other EULAs nonbinding.
I understand the need to have contracts that are nuanced, but for the kinds of contracts that you "agree" to simply by opening a box, should be standardized and devoid of any nefarious language.
I should not be able to send a letter to someone that says "By opening the envelope this letter arrived in, you agree to write me a check for $10,000, and failure to do so within 30 days will result in litigation" (and have it be enforceable). For the same reason, companies should not be able to have custom EULAs that are implicitly agreed to by opening a box or envelope.
Sure we can put the responsibility on the consumer to read every EULA for everything he/she buys from an OS to a bluetooth headset, but this is just a waste of everyone's time. We already invalidate stupid EULAs for being stupid. Lets just go one step further and make an implied boilerplate EULA that everyone is aware of and doesn't include anything shady.
ok...
I am well aware of qualia and the "hard problem" of consciousness. I would suggest that you read up on people like Dan Dennett who explain why qualia and the "hard problem" of consciousness don't actually exist. He also does a very good at explaining why the idea of a philosophical zombie is incoherent.
There is absolutely no reason why meat computers made of carbon atoms should have qualia and electronic computers made of silicon atoms shouldn't.
Bernie Madoff is in prison. He *used* to be a millionaire.
This is like going to jail for burglary and then finding out that the warden in the prison you are in takes people's lunches from the fridge.
If we consider one CPU cycle to take 1 second, then a sending a ping across the U.S. would take the equivalent of 4 years. A simple conversation could take the equivalent of thousands of years. Would any consciousness be able to deal with such a relative delay?
I am not sure why one clock cycle would be equivalent to 1 second. If we assume a clock cycle is equal to a nano second then all of a sudden computer and human time are pretty close again.
Computers are going to have to get a lot faster than they are now before they become conscious. The first AIs are probably going to be too slow for us to find entertaining to talk to. At some point they will probably catch up to and surpass natural human beings. Of course by then we may simply augment our own brains with technology to keep up with artificial intelligence.
The question of "Will computers end up being smarter then us?" might not be answerable. It might be the case that human evolution incorporates artificial intelligence and the line between man and machine is blurred.
This is hopefully an engineering detail that can be worked out. A possible solution is creating hydrogen compounds that are easier to store, preferably compounds that are easy (but not too easy) to convert back to hydrogen, and maybe even reuse the additives. Another solution might be to just make better containers for liquid hydrogen that do not leak or degrade, possibly involving nanotechnology.
There is no objective way to decide that, but there is a subjective way, which we use in all sorts of aspects of life that do not have black/white answers: judgement calls, performed by employees with the apt title of Judge:)
Well we definitely don't want it to be a case of "I'll know it when I see it" (as with historic restrictions on the first amendment in regards to obscenity by the supreme court). The whole point of having laws is the make justice of not completely, as objective as possible, to the end of providing equal protection under the law. If we felt judges were capable of using their judgment in all cases, then we wouldn't even need laws. We could just have judges sentence people based on how bad their behavior was judged to be by judges.
Lots of law is like that currently. Laws often have phrases like "A reasonable person..." in them, recognizing that someone, a judge/jury, is going to have to decide if the person was reasonable or not for some specific action.
These sorts of characterizations really only work when there is consensus among reasonable people on the subject. I would say that in regards to partisan politics, either there is no consensus among reasonable people, or reasonable people are rare.
Not that alone. But transparency is a key aspect to drive any market or democratic force. At least people could see something.. and either get angry about it, or shrug and say "so what". Right now, most people have little to no idea how much of their worldview is shaped by news, media, think tanks, lobbyists, etc... most of whom are beholden to large money interests.
I agree that transparency is better than opacity, but I think it is pretty safe to assume that most, if not nearly all, politicians are bought off by corporations. Even if you knew that politician X was getting money from lobby Y, proving that vote Z was based on this relationship is pretty hard to do (which is presumably why they all do it).
If those Walmart employees wanted to vote against their own best interest (a permanent raise from 7 to 10 dollars an hour), and in exchange get 500 dollars, that is their decision to make. At least they were able apply their "vote" to the issue.
Well I suppose it is debatable whether it *should* be their decision in a "real" democracy. You'd have libertarians arguing on the one hand that it should absolutely be their decision, and taking this decision away from them is precisely the opposite of freedom and democracy. On the other side you'd have progressives arguing that true democracy can not thrive in an environment where people are allowed to be exploited in this way, and such exploitation is a perversion of democracy, and the only way to achieve a healthy democracy is to take some freedoms away from people in order to provide and environment that fosters good decisions (e.g. forbid people to sell themselves into slavery, or sell their organs, or sell their votes, etc).
Honestly I feel the best answer will probably lie somewhere in the middle rather than at an ideological extreme. But this is another problem that solves itself if people were just more intelligent and well informed and made better decisions for themselves.
I don't know how we get to a society where most people are smart enough to prevent these sorts of perversions of democracy by voting, but I am fairly certain that any and all substitutes will not be effective. Nearly any law or regulation that you can come up with, can be exploited via loopholes, bribery, etc in an environment of ignorance and apathy. An informed and engaged electorate would make spending unimaginable amounts of money on elections rather wasteful, because it takes a lot of money (i.e. way more than is spent now) to prevent intelligent and diligent people from discovering the truth. Right now you can find out the truth rather easily by just using google and a bit of time and effort, it's just that very few people actually care enough to do it.
I really hope the my prospects of downloading future episodes of game of thrones via bittorrent are not threatened by the reliability of floppy disks.
The nice thing about using solar to split water (rather than directly powering things), is that it doesn't need to be sunny all the time. You can just keep storing more hydrogen. And you can use whatever the cheapest form of electricity available is in every area (e.g. wind, hydroelectric, solar, tidal, geothermal, nuclear, etc)
If Toyota knew batteries were going to be better than fuel cells even given possible future technological improvements, I would fully expect them to join the party. Toyota is good at making cars, including cars with electric motors. Surely they stand to profit as much as anyone if battery technology drastically improves.
I don't need 300 mile range. I just need a battery that can be charged in minutes rather than hours.
Hydrogen is the most common element in the universe. There are probably better ways of getting hydrogen, but one way is to use electricity to split water molecules to get hydrogen and oxygen gas. You actually lose energy in the process, but you can use freely available solar power from the sun to split water. This is analogous to how the sun powered all the plants and a animals that died to make the oil we use to make gasoline.
The sun pretty much powers everything on the planet (with the exception of radioactive decay and heat in the core of the planet). It created a nice stockpile of energy dense hydrocarbons that took billions of years to make, unfortunately this resource is not renewable (or rather it renews very slowly).
Except that electric batteries kind of suck. It might be simpler, but I don't like waiting 3 hours to "fill up".
The difference between electric cars and fuel cell cars are small. Both have electric motors. The only difference is that the "battery" in a fuel cell vehicle, rather than being lithium or Nimh is a fuel cell + a tank of hydrogen, which is faster to "charge" (you just refill it with hydrogen).
Maybe it won't matter if super-capacitors ever materialize, but until then, I think hydrogen fuel cells are a good solution until something better comes along.
I think being able to explain something to an ordinary person is an unreasonable requirement given the level of intelligence of an ordinary person. I don't think it's desirable to have an election system that does not involve any math.
What percentage of American citizens understand the electoral college?
The results of a proper electronic election are better able to be verified by intelligent people.
With electronic voting, you can store not only the vote totals, but also who voted for what in a way that is scrambled, and make the results public. This way each person can verify that their vote was counted without allowing others to see how they voted.
By your reasoning, mail in ballots are just as problematic as internet voting. People can offer to buy your mail in ballot. Your spouse or employer can intimidate you in to signing up for mail voting and vote for you. The mafia can pay you a visit and demand you sign up for mail voting and give the ballot to them.