people who say that there is no possibility that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer are wrong.
Similarly, people who say there is no possibility that asparagus causes cancer are wrong. The fact that no one has ever found evidence that links asparagus consumption to increased risk of cancer is irrelevant.
Of course only if you follow their definition of "bogus". That is "using names, addresses and other personal information that isn't quite in sync with that of the person registering the account".
Cite? Where did you get the definition of bogus you "quoted"? It's not in TFA, and it's not the definition I'd expect any email service provider to use. The only valid definition is "account name and password gain entry into a non-suspended account".
theyre no better than the intellectual property patents and frivolous design patents that their targets such as Google or Microsoft endorse and employ.
Do you have a citation of Google's use of such patents?
Don't sue them, insist on legal charges of theft being placed against them
By "legal charges", I assume you mean "criminal charges". A couple of points.
1. You can't make a prosecutor file. Prosecutors are generally fairly receptive to citizen requests for prosecutions, but it's ultimately their decision and there's nothing you can do to either stop them from filing or make them file.
2. If your allegation is actually "theft", not copyright infringement, you're going probably going to run into the problem that for ripped music you can't allege theft since you should still have a copy, and for personally-created music you may have a problem substantiating enough value to raise it above petty theft. Also, if you can still download the music from the cloud, that may also prevent you from alleging theft, because you still have access to it.
3. If your allegation is copyright infringement, you need to be able to show that the infringement fits the requirements of the criminal copyright statutes. I don't think you could do that in this case, because it doesn't.
Agree to settle if they cancel the terms of their contract.
If you manage to get a prosecutor to file criminal charges, you can't "settle". Criminal actions are between the government and the perpetrator. The victim is at most allowed to express an opinion.
All in all, I think you'd have more luck with a civil suit for copyright infringement on the files to which you own the copyright. The EULA may try to limit your options, but it may not be successful. To be successful it would have to either (a) indicate that you agree to transfer copyright of your music to Apple, (b) indicate that you agree to grant Apple a license to your music or (c) indicate that you agree not to sue in the event Apple infringes your copyrights. I'd be flabbergasted if the EULA contained anything like (a) or (b), and even (c) is unlikely, and may not be enforceable even if present.
Keep in mind, I'm a computer programmer who likes legal stuff, not a lawyer. Everything above could be completely wrong.
Make that 15 for Hillary and 181 for Trump. Three of the "guaranteed red" states -- Utah, Idaho and Wyoming -- look likely to vote for a Democrat for the first time in many, many elections because Mormons really hate Trump.
Trump is going to score well in conservative White districts
Interestingly, arguably the whitest of white and reddest of red states, Utah, which hasn't given its electoral votes to a Democrat since 1964, is set to pick Clinton over Trump, according to head-to-head polling. Utah would pick *any* of the other candidates, from either party, over Trump. If the pollsters had thought to include Mickey Mouse in their notional contests, I'll bet he'd have beat Trump, too.
It seems to me that surge pricing isn't a market failure at all. It's how the market gets more drivers on the road when they're needed. I suppose that with good predictive capabilities Uber might be able to get the drivers out slightly before the surge hits, rather than immediately after, and that in turn could reduce the level of far increases needed. But I think it will always be necessary to surge pricing during periods of high demand in order to ensure that enough drivers are on the road.
Otherwise you end up with the taxi problem, that there are never any taxis available when you (and many other people) need one the most.
What is a deficiency in the system, IMO, is that Uber has to set the surge prices. I'd prefer a real-time auction setup, where each driver indicates the rate they need and the max distance they'll travel for a fare, and phone app shows the rider a ranked listing of rides they could get, with an estimated arrival time and cost for each. Then rider and driver effectively negotiate the pricing and Uber just provides the connection between them.
Fingerprints are usernames you don't need to memorize; not passwords.
Completely wrong. Fingerprints are neither.
Fingerprints make terrible usernames; the birthday problem ensures that as soon as the database gets at all large, false matches will abound. A crucial characteristic of usernames is uniqueness, and fingerprints, and the fuzzy matching systems used to compare them, do not provide that.
Fingerprints make terrible passwords, because they're public information. You leave them everywhere.
Fingerprints can be useful authenticators, though, with security equal to the level of difficulty of getting the device to accept faked data as a valid measurement. See my other post in this thread.
Now you can put sensors under any and all glass surface where random passers-by will put their fingers and safely and securely read their fingerprints, whether they like^Wknow it or not. Didn't we predict that fingerprints are the safest and securest passwords ever? I think this pretty well clinches it, don't you?
Like many (most?) you deeply misunderstand biometric security.
Password authentication security is based on password secrecy. Revealing the password means that the attacker can enter it and authenticate as you, because anyone can enter a password.
Biometric authentication security is based on measurement integrity. Revealing the biometric accomplishes nothing unless the attacker can arrange for the measuring device to receive the value and accept it as a real measurement. Secrecy of the biometric data is irrelevant to the security analysis.
This, by the way, is why all those complaints about "you can't rotate/revoke your fingerprint more than 10 times!" are pointless. Rotating passwords is useful because it switches from a value that may no longer be secret to a new value which presumably is secret, restoring security. But biometric data is assumed to be known, so rotating it would have no purpose; you'd just substitute one known value for another.
This means that the security (or lack thereof) of biometrics lies entirely in how hard it is to convince the system to accept fake data. If you can bypass the sensor and just feed it the image you want, then the security level can be no stronger than the difficulty of doing that bypass. If you can make a fake fingerprint and get the scanner to accept it as real, then the security level can be no stronger than the difficulty of making that fake fingerprint.
How hard are those things? That depends on the details of the system. On consumer devices, the answer is "not all that hard if the attacker is willing to do some work". However, that doesn't make it useless, because most of the attackers who'd like to get into your phone aren't willing to work for it. The thief who stole your phone could probably lift a print from the surface of the phone, make a mask, create a gelatin finger and unlock it, but most people willing to work that hard will find it easier to get a job. Or at least go steal another phone that isn't locked. Your kids/spouse/etc. are also unlikely to be willing to go to that much trouble (on average; you know your own family and can judge your case).
I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't necessarily have any ethical qualms with killing and eating animals, but if I could eat meat without killing an animal most of the time and save energy in the process, I'm good with that.
+1
I actually find it very satisfying (perhaps in some primitive part of my brain) to eat meat that I killed myself, so I obviously don't have any ethical issues. But if cultured meat is as good as the natural stuff and has a smaller environmental footprint, I'm all for it. I may still raise a pig or a chicken for myself, and I'll still hunt, but such self-provided meat is a miniscule portion of the meat I eat, and I'd consider it great to replace the rest with something that doesn't require huge factory farms of animals kept in insufferable conditions and generating huge quantities of various pollutants... because I respect animals and I do have ethical qualms with some of the things we do in the name of efficient meat production.
The reason is because "expert warns" isn't attention-grabbing. It's not just the headlines, all of journalism is rife with terrible fucking grammar and sentence construction.
Then clearly the sentence should have been written as: "Sex In Moving Cars Could Be Increased by Self-Driving Features, Expert Warns".
...and what Google needs is a particular constellation of cognitive abilities which no one can really clearly define.
When we say we're looking for a candidate that has the intangibles, "what we really mean is that we don't know what we're looking for, but we just know it when we see it." ~B.Billick
Sort of:-)
The basic abilities can't really be described or measured. The result of applying those abilities through years of study and effort can be both described and measured. So Google can articulate what it looks for in a candidate. It can't articulate what it would look for in that candidate before he or she has taken some years of CS courses.
Bell Labs did some great work, sure. But there's no reason to expect that any other organization with tons of excess cash wouldn't do as well, or that any other monopoly-supported organization would have, or for that matter some directly government-funded research lab (because that's exactly what Bell Labs was, in effect, a research lab funded by "tax" revenues).
Bell Labs was one confluence of circumstances which happened to work out fairly well. We think. It's not evidence of anything except that sometimes when you throw lots of money at smart people you get good stuff out.
The real Satoshi could trivially and indisputably prove his identity: Sign some message generated today with the key used to sign the genesis block.
You know what would be awesome? To have an anonymous message show up on some online forum that says "Craight Wright is not Satoshi, and the May 2, 2016 opening prices of AAPL, INTC, GOOG and MSFT were $93.96, $30.45, $697.63 and $50.00, respectively", signed with the Bitcoin block 0 key.
Microsoft, and, to be fair, the other tech giants, would like highly trained and competent employees at a cheaper price.
True, sort of, but I think this overstates the concern about monetary cost and ignores other costs.
The challenge with hiring top-tier tech people is that no one knows how to identify raw talent. The only thing we know how to do is to identify well-developed talent, and even that is somewhat hit or miss. When you couple this with the facts that less capable people are hard to get rid of and that they can do a tremendous amount of damage to an organization, the result is that "hire them raw and train them up" is a really bad idea.
I've been a software engineer for 25 years now, and worked in lots of different business environments, and been involved in hiring in most of them. I now work for Google, and like all Google engineers, I spend part of my time on interviewing. All of the best tech interviewing and hiring processes I've seen are similar to Google's in that they don't give a damn about what you know (notwithstanding the silly "checkbox" approach of many HR organizations), because they assume that the right people will be able to learn whatever is needed. So what they're really focused on is figuring out whether or not you're the right kind of "smart".
Google's method for identifying the "right kind of smart" is to pose a series of technical problems to solve. The actual problems and solutions are irrelevant, and even the algorithms and data structures knowledge required to solve the problems are not inherently important. I say not "inherently" important because while they're crucial to solve the problems, they're necessary only because they are the language of the problems. If Google had a way to identify which people who lack that knowledge nevertheless have the native ability, interest and dedication to become good at the sort of problem-solving required, they'd have no problem hiring people and then training them.
Another way to say this is that the problem is fundamentally one of filtering not training, because most people aren't the right kind of smart to fill Google's technical positions. I want to be clear that I'm not saying Google only hires geniuses, because that would be a vacuous statement. Intelligence isn't a simple linear continuum, and what Google needs is a particular constellation of cognitive abilities which no one can really clearly define. And so far, at least, the only way anyone knows to find them is through an extensive filtering process that starts with exposure to CS concepts, continues with a lengthy self-selection process where people who are fascinated by the ideas and who have sufficient levels of dedication devote themselves to studying them, generally also includes the formal filtering process of a relevant university degree program or two, and finally arrives at the interview process which tests for the presence of the needed abilities by demanding that they be demonstrated on toy problems. It's a horribly inefficient process, but the best one presently available, and modulo some details of the last step it's the same process used by all of the top tier software companies.
So I think this is why Microsoft et al (AFAICT Google actually isn't directly involved with this petition, though it could be) would like to see the entire population of US students exposed to CS ideas and theory during their public education, to cast a broader net. Getting more students exposed means more chance for those who have the right set of cognitive abilities to see and get interested in the ideas, and start the long self-selection and education process, doing the filtering that Microsoft et al simply don't know how to do.
In the long run, businesses consolidate and stagnate, i.e. you end up with a cooperative environment anyway, except that the cooperation is for profit. The only place where competition appears effective is in an immature market, where most of the players haven't sold out yet.
You've made the same fundamental error here that Karl Marx did in his formulation of economic theory: that production systems do reach maturity, where change ceases and competition therefore no longer matters[1]. In fact, this theory of non-advancement actually does describe reality at times, but only when other forces have arranged to squash competition. As long as competition is present, markets do not stagnate because the competitors continue innovating, looking for an edge to make their products more valuable or their production costs lower -- resulting ultimately in better goods at lower prices as competition forces all participants to adopt each new improvement. I don't believe there is any good in the marketplace that has ever reached perfection in both design and production process, and I'm skeptical that any good ever could. (I'd be very interested in counterexamples if you can think of any.)
You also mentioned consolidation. Yes, over time there is a tendency towards consolidation due to economies of scale, but even very mature markets tend to consolidate down to two or three players, never only one. When you see a marketplace reduced to a single player, it's almost certain that there is some extra-market force involved, because without that extra-market force there's a powerful incentive for capital to create a competitor in order to exploit potential innovations that a monopoly doesn't have a reason to make.[2]
Yes, cooperation is a core human characteristic, but so is competition. All the way back to pre-historic tribalism, people banded together in cooperative groups, then competed with other groups. And even within tribes, there has always been competition for status, and that competition has always included the formation of smaller cooperative groups to improve their ability to compete. At root, human cooperation is nothing more than a (very effective) competitive strategy.
Further, looking beyond humanity and social structures competition is the fundamental mechanism by which all knowledge is created. More precisely, variation and selection is the basic mechanism of creation, whether you're looking at the evolution of organisms, the construction of social structures, even the development of ideas. Selection, of course, is inherently competitive.
Competition is deeply ingrained in humanity, because it's fundamental to all creative activities and processes... including the processes that produced humanity.
[1] Marx didn't state this assumption explicitly, but it underlies all his analyses of economic relationships, which he viewed as static and based solely on allocation of labor with little notion of the value of knowledge, and no consideration for how applied or created knowledge could change the structure.
[2] I'm skeptical that government anti-trust efforts are either necessary or even useful. If you look at the history of government anti-trust efforts what you find is a repeated pattern of government stepping in with relatively ineffective measures, followed by the destruction of the monopoly by an innovation-driven market reorganization that which would have happened regardless. I'm not saying long-term self-sustaining monopolies (other than governments themselves) couldn't exist, but I don't think we've ever seen one.
I don't think your argument would work, for several reasons, even if it weren't factually incorrect.
The definition of the Java programming language is, "the set of all Java programs".
This is an infinite set.
Only if you allow infinitely-long programs. Any finite limit on program length -- no matter how large -- means the number of possible programs is finite. Unimaginably large, but finite.
Consider lending someone your car to drive 100 miles. They return the car with 10,000 miles on it. You complain, and they offer to pay you for another 100 miles. That's not what the agreement was, and they made an insulting offer to compensate for it.
... so obviously, the next logical step would be to demand $2M from the renter for the 10,000 miles driven.
No, the next logical step is to demand the maximum legal compensation. This may be a ludicrous amount, but it's the right place to start your negotiations, since they started from a ludicrous place. You can always agree when they make you a reasonable offer.
It sounds like a potentially amazingly cool idea but I'm scared that being done by Google automatically means that it would also be scraping every bit of your life for data and feeding you ads all in a very non-opt-out kinda way.
You fundamentally misunderstand Google as a company. Google isn't an advertising company, it's a technology company that has many products which happen to be most effectively monetized by advertising. Not all of Google's products are monetized by advertising, and Google neither advertises on nor collects user data from those that aren't monetized that way. In fact, Google is increasingly focused on moving away from the advertising-supported model, by focusing product development on products which can be licensed/sold directly.
You can look at it this way: if you're using a Google service which is free to you, it's very likely that from a revenue perspective you're the product, not the customer (though the teams developing the products don't really think of it that way), which means that Google is interested in delivering targeted ads to your eyeballs. On the other hand, if you're using a Google product/service that you pay money for, then you're the customer, and Google is interested in ensuring that you think highly enough of the stuff you bought to want to buy more and/or encourage your friends to buy.
Are they really at liberty to do so? Can the court or the law somehow guarantee that?
Absolutely. The court just grants immunity from prosecution for any crime related to copyrights, and does so in writing. If any prosecutor tries to later use copyright-related evidence from the drive, the defendant just produces the written immunity grant and the court excludes the evidence from consideration. Depending on how the deal is written, it can also preclude use of evidence to discover other evidence ("fruit of the poisoned tree"), or even prosecution for evidence discovered completely independently (parallel construction).
This sort of thing happens all the time. Most often it's used to convince a witness to give testimony that implicates the witness in a minor crime, but proves that someone else is guilty of a major crime. But there's no limit to the sort of dealing that can be done. The deals are a form of contract, where the person agrees to do something they aren't otherwise obligated to do in exchange for the court promising to do or not do something.
IANAL, but all it takes is paying attention and you'll see lots and lots of this sort of thing in real life, especially in high-profile cases.
All of the major symmetric key crypto algorithms are just variations on the Feistel Network [wikipedia.org] structure going back to the early 70s.
AES (Rijndael) does not use a Feistel network, and neither does Serpent, another of the five AES finalists (Twofish, RC6 and MARS are based on Feistel networks).
all smartphones will have the panic button linked to three short presses of the on-off button
Heh. My phone (and I think all phones with Android Marshmallow or later?) opens the camera app with a double-press of the on-off button. I guess Indian manufacturers will need to remove that shortcut.
Slashdot Mirror
people who say that there is no possibility that non-ionizing radiation causes cancer are wrong.
Similarly, people who say there is no possibility that asparagus causes cancer are wrong. The fact that no one has ever found evidence that links asparagus consumption to increased risk of cancer is irrelevant.
Of course only if you follow their definition of "bogus". That is "using names, addresses and other personal information that isn't quite in sync with that of the person registering the account".
Cite? Where did you get the definition of bogus you "quoted"? It's not in TFA, and it's not the definition I'd expect any email service provider to use. The only valid definition is "account name and password gain entry into a non-suspended account".
theyre no better than the intellectual property patents and frivolous design patents that their targets such as Google or Microsoft endorse and employ.
Do you have a citation of Google's use of such patents?
Don't sue them, insist on legal charges of theft being placed against them
By "legal charges", I assume you mean "criminal charges". A couple of points.
1. You can't make a prosecutor file. Prosecutors are generally fairly receptive to citizen requests for prosecutions, but it's ultimately their decision and there's nothing you can do to either stop them from filing or make them file.
2. If your allegation is actually "theft", not copyright infringement, you're going probably going to run into the problem that for ripped music you can't allege theft since you should still have a copy, and for personally-created music you may have a problem substantiating enough value to raise it above petty theft. Also, if you can still download the music from the cloud, that may also prevent you from alleging theft, because you still have access to it.
3. If your allegation is copyright infringement, you need to be able to show that the infringement fits the requirements of the criminal copyright statutes. I don't think you could do that in this case, because it doesn't.
Agree to settle if they cancel the terms of their contract.
If you manage to get a prosecutor to file criminal charges, you can't "settle". Criminal actions are between the government and the perpetrator. The victim is at most allowed to express an opinion.
All in all, I think you'd have more luck with a civil suit for copyright infringement on the files to which you own the copyright. The EULA may try to limit your options, but it may not be successful. To be successful it would have to either (a) indicate that you agree to transfer copyright of your music to Apple, (b) indicate that you agree to grant Apple a license to your music or (c) indicate that you agree not to sue in the event Apple infringes your copyrights. I'd be flabbergasted if the EULA contained anything like (a) or (b), and even (c) is unlikely, and may not be enforceable even if present.
Keep in mind, I'm a computer programmer who likes legal stuff, not a lawyer. Everything above could be completely wrong.
Make that 15 for Hillary and 181 for Trump. Three of the "guaranteed red" states -- Utah, Idaho and Wyoming -- look likely to vote for a Democrat for the first time in many, many elections because Mormons really hate Trump.
Trump is going to score well in conservative White districts
Interestingly, arguably the whitest of white and reddest of red states, Utah, which hasn't given its electoral votes to a Democrat since 1964, is set to pick Clinton over Trump, according to head-to-head polling. Utah would pick *any* of the other candidates, from either party, over Trump. If the pollsters had thought to include Mickey Mouse in their notional contests, I'll bet he'd have beat Trump, too.
It seems to me that surge pricing isn't a market failure at all. It's how the market gets more drivers on the road when they're needed. I suppose that with good predictive capabilities Uber might be able to get the drivers out slightly before the surge hits, rather than immediately after, and that in turn could reduce the level of far increases needed. But I think it will always be necessary to surge pricing during periods of high demand in order to ensure that enough drivers are on the road.
Otherwise you end up with the taxi problem, that there are never any taxis available when you (and many other people) need one the most.
What is a deficiency in the system, IMO, is that Uber has to set the surge prices. I'd prefer a real-time auction setup, where each driver indicates the rate they need and the max distance they'll travel for a fare, and phone app shows the rider a ranked listing of rides they could get, with an estimated arrival time and cost for each. Then rider and driver effectively negotiate the pricing and Uber just provides the connection between them.
Fingerprints are usernames you don't need to memorize; not passwords.
Completely wrong. Fingerprints are neither.
Fingerprints make terrible usernames; the birthday problem ensures that as soon as the database gets at all large, false matches will abound. A crucial characteristic of usernames is uniqueness, and fingerprints, and the fuzzy matching systems used to compare them, do not provide that.
Fingerprints make terrible passwords, because they're public information. You leave them everywhere.
Fingerprints can be useful authenticators, though, with security equal to the level of difficulty of getting the device to accept faked data as a valid measurement. See my other post in this thread.
Now you can put sensors under any and all glass surface where random passers-by will put their fingers and safely and securely read their fingerprints, whether they like^Wknow it or not. Didn't we predict that fingerprints are the safest and securest passwords ever? I think this pretty well clinches it, don't you?
Like many (most?) you deeply misunderstand biometric security.
Password authentication security is based on password secrecy. Revealing the password means that the attacker can enter it and authenticate as you, because anyone can enter a password.
Biometric authentication security is based on measurement integrity. Revealing the biometric accomplishes nothing unless the attacker can arrange for the measuring device to receive the value and accept it as a real measurement. Secrecy of the biometric data is irrelevant to the security analysis.
This, by the way, is why all those complaints about "you can't rotate/revoke your fingerprint more than 10 times!" are pointless. Rotating passwords is useful because it switches from a value that may no longer be secret to a new value which presumably is secret, restoring security. But biometric data is assumed to be known, so rotating it would have no purpose; you'd just substitute one known value for another.
This means that the security (or lack thereof) of biometrics lies entirely in how hard it is to convince the system to accept fake data. If you can bypass the sensor and just feed it the image you want, then the security level can be no stronger than the difficulty of doing that bypass. If you can make a fake fingerprint and get the scanner to accept it as real, then the security level can be no stronger than the difficulty of making that fake fingerprint.
How hard are those things? That depends on the details of the system. On consumer devices, the answer is "not all that hard if the attacker is willing to do some work". However, that doesn't make it useless, because most of the attackers who'd like to get into your phone aren't willing to work for it. The thief who stole your phone could probably lift a print from the surface of the phone, make a mask, create a gelatin finger and unlock it, but most people willing to work that hard will find it easier to get a job. Or at least go steal another phone that isn't locked. Your kids/spouse/etc. are also unlikely to be willing to go to that much trouble (on average; you know your own family and can judge your case).
I'm not a vegetarian, and I don't necessarily have any ethical qualms with killing and eating animals, but if I could eat meat without killing an animal most of the time and save energy in the process, I'm good with that.
+1
I actually find it very satisfying (perhaps in some primitive part of my brain) to eat meat that I killed myself, so I obviously don't have any ethical issues. But if cultured meat is as good as the natural stuff and has a smaller environmental footprint, I'm all for it. I may still raise a pig or a chicken for myself, and I'll still hunt, but such self-provided meat is a miniscule portion of the meat I eat, and I'd consider it great to replace the rest with something that doesn't require huge factory farms of animals kept in insufferable conditions and generating huge quantities of various pollutants... because I respect animals and I do have ethical qualms with some of the things we do in the name of efficient meat production.
The reason is because "expert warns" isn't attention-grabbing. It's not just the headlines, all of journalism is rife with terrible fucking grammar and sentence construction.
Then clearly the sentence should have been written as: "Sex In Moving Cars Could Be Increased by Self-Driving Features, Expert Warns".
Gotta get the attention-grabber right up front.
...and what Google needs is a particular constellation of cognitive abilities which no one can really clearly define.
When we say we're looking for a candidate that has the intangibles, "what we really mean is that we don't know what we're looking for, but we just know it when we see it." ~B.Billick
Sort of :-)
The basic abilities can't really be described or measured. The result of applying those abilities through years of study and effort can be both described and measured. So Google can articulate what it looks for in a candidate. It can't articulate what it would look for in that candidate before he or she has taken some years of CS courses.
Bell Labs did some great work, sure. But there's no reason to expect that any other organization with tons of excess cash wouldn't do as well, or that any other monopoly-supported organization would have, or for that matter some directly government-funded research lab (because that's exactly what Bell Labs was, in effect, a research lab funded by "tax" revenues).
Bell Labs was one confluence of circumstances which happened to work out fairly well. We think. It's not evidence of anything except that sometimes when you throw lots of money at smart people you get good stuff out.
The real Satoshi could trivially and indisputably prove his identity: Sign some message generated today with the key used to sign the genesis block.
You know what would be awesome? To have an anonymous message show up on some online forum that says "Craight Wright is not Satoshi, and the May 2, 2016 opening prices of AAPL, INTC, GOOG and MSFT were $93.96, $30.45, $697.63 and $50.00, respectively", signed with the Bitcoin block 0 key.
Microsoft, and, to be fair, the other tech giants, would like highly trained and competent employees at a cheaper price.
True, sort of, but I think this overstates the concern about monetary cost and ignores other costs.
The challenge with hiring top-tier tech people is that no one knows how to identify raw talent. The only thing we know how to do is to identify well-developed talent, and even that is somewhat hit or miss. When you couple this with the facts that less capable people are hard to get rid of and that they can do a tremendous amount of damage to an organization, the result is that "hire them raw and train them up" is a really bad idea.
I've been a software engineer for 25 years now, and worked in lots of different business environments, and been involved in hiring in most of them. I now work for Google, and like all Google engineers, I spend part of my time on interviewing. All of the best tech interviewing and hiring processes I've seen are similar to Google's in that they don't give a damn about what you know (notwithstanding the silly "checkbox" approach of many HR organizations), because they assume that the right people will be able to learn whatever is needed. So what they're really focused on is figuring out whether or not you're the right kind of "smart".
Google's method for identifying the "right kind of smart" is to pose a series of technical problems to solve. The actual problems and solutions are irrelevant, and even the algorithms and data structures knowledge required to solve the problems are not inherently important. I say not "inherently" important because while they're crucial to solve the problems, they're necessary only because they are the language of the problems. If Google had a way to identify which people who lack that knowledge nevertheless have the native ability, interest and dedication to become good at the sort of problem-solving required, they'd have no problem hiring people and then training them.
Another way to say this is that the problem is fundamentally one of filtering not training, because most people aren't the right kind of smart to fill Google's technical positions. I want to be clear that I'm not saying Google only hires geniuses, because that would be a vacuous statement. Intelligence isn't a simple linear continuum, and what Google needs is a particular constellation of cognitive abilities which no one can really clearly define. And so far, at least, the only way anyone knows to find them is through an extensive filtering process that starts with exposure to CS concepts, continues with a lengthy self-selection process where people who are fascinated by the ideas and who have sufficient levels of dedication devote themselves to studying them, generally also includes the formal filtering process of a relevant university degree program or two, and finally arrives at the interview process which tests for the presence of the needed abilities by demanding that they be demonstrated on toy problems. It's a horribly inefficient process, but the best one presently available, and modulo some details of the last step it's the same process used by all of the top tier software companies.
So I think this is why Microsoft et al (AFAICT Google actually isn't directly involved with this petition, though it could be) would like to see the entire population of US students exposed to CS ideas and theory during their public education, to cast a broader net. Getting more students exposed means more chance for those who have the right set of cognitive abilities to see and get interested in the ideas, and start the long self-selection and education process, doing the filtering that Microsoft et al simply don't know how to do.
In the long run, businesses consolidate and stagnate, i.e. you end up with a cooperative environment anyway, except that the cooperation is for profit. The only place where competition appears effective is in an immature market, where most of the players haven't sold out yet.
You've made the same fundamental error here that Karl Marx did in his formulation of economic theory: that production systems do reach maturity, where change ceases and competition therefore no longer matters[1]. In fact, this theory of non-advancement actually does describe reality at times, but only when other forces have arranged to squash competition. As long as competition is present, markets do not stagnate because the competitors continue innovating, looking for an edge to make their products more valuable or their production costs lower -- resulting ultimately in better goods at lower prices as competition forces all participants to adopt each new improvement. I don't believe there is any good in the marketplace that has ever reached perfection in both design and production process, and I'm skeptical that any good ever could. (I'd be very interested in counterexamples if you can think of any.)
You also mentioned consolidation. Yes, over time there is a tendency towards consolidation due to economies of scale, but even very mature markets tend to consolidate down to two or three players, never only one. When you see a marketplace reduced to a single player, it's almost certain that there is some extra-market force involved, because without that extra-market force there's a powerful incentive for capital to create a competitor in order to exploit potential innovations that a monopoly doesn't have a reason to make.[2]
Yes, cooperation is a core human characteristic, but so is competition. All the way back to pre-historic tribalism, people banded together in cooperative groups, then competed with other groups. And even within tribes, there has always been competition for status, and that competition has always included the formation of smaller cooperative groups to improve their ability to compete. At root, human cooperation is nothing more than a (very effective) competitive strategy.
Further, looking beyond humanity and social structures competition is the fundamental mechanism by which all knowledge is created. More precisely, variation and selection is the basic mechanism of creation, whether you're looking at the evolution of organisms, the construction of social structures, even the development of ideas. Selection, of course, is inherently competitive.
Competition is deeply ingrained in humanity, because it's fundamental to all creative activities and processes... including the processes that produced humanity.
[1] Marx didn't state this assumption explicitly, but it underlies all his analyses of economic relationships, which he viewed as static and based solely on allocation of labor with little notion of the value of knowledge, and no consideration for how applied or created knowledge could change the structure.
[2] I'm skeptical that government anti-trust efforts are either necessary or even useful. If you look at the history of government anti-trust efforts what you find is a repeated pattern of government stepping in with relatively ineffective measures, followed by the destruction of the monopoly by an innovation-driven market reorganization that which would have happened regardless. I'm not saying long-term self-sustaining monopolies (other than governments themselves) couldn't exist, but I don't think we've ever seen one.
I don't think your argument would work, for several reasons, even if it weren't factually incorrect.
The definition of the Java programming language is, "the set of all Java programs". This is an infinite set.
Only if you allow infinitely-long programs. Any finite limit on program length -- no matter how large -- means the number of possible programs is finite. Unimaginably large, but finite.
Consider lending someone your car to drive 100 miles. They return the car with 10,000 miles on it. You complain, and they offer to pay you for another 100 miles. That's not what the agreement was, and they made an insulting offer to compensate for it.
... so obviously, the next logical step would be to demand $2M from the renter for the 10,000 miles driven.
No, the next logical step is to demand the maximum legal compensation. This may be a ludicrous amount, but it's the right place to start your negotiations, since they started from a ludicrous place. You can always agree when they make you a reasonable offer.
It sounds like a potentially amazingly cool idea but I'm scared that being done by Google automatically means that it would also be scraping every bit of your life for data and feeding you ads all in a very non-opt-out kinda way.
You fundamentally misunderstand Google as a company. Google isn't an advertising company, it's a technology company that has many products which happen to be most effectively monetized by advertising. Not all of Google's products are monetized by advertising, and Google neither advertises on nor collects user data from those that aren't monetized that way. In fact, Google is increasingly focused on moving away from the advertising-supported model, by focusing product development on products which can be licensed/sold directly.
You can look at it this way: if you're using a Google service which is free to you, it's very likely that from a revenue perspective you're the product, not the customer (though the teams developing the products don't really think of it that way), which means that Google is interested in delivering targeted ads to your eyeballs. On the other hand, if you're using a Google product/service that you pay money for, then you're the customer, and Google is interested in ensuring that you think highly enough of the stuff you bought to want to buy more and/or encourage your friends to buy.
So put it at second priority and you'll get exactly that. The Chromecast bandwidth still won't be getting used if it's unplugged.
OnHub doesn't have ranked priorities.
automatically prioritize Wi-Fi to your Chromecast when it connects to your OnHub network after you plug it in
Or you could just leave it always-prioritized, and still have the same end result. Unplugged devices don't use much bandwidth.
Maybe you want to automatically prioritize a different device when the Chromecast isn't connected.
Assuming you are a millennial, apparently at least some of them also lack reading comprehension skills.
Are they really at liberty to do so? Can the court or the law somehow guarantee that?
Absolutely. The court just grants immunity from prosecution for any crime related to copyrights, and does so in writing. If any prosecutor tries to later use copyright-related evidence from the drive, the defendant just produces the written immunity grant and the court excludes the evidence from consideration. Depending on how the deal is written, it can also preclude use of evidence to discover other evidence ("fruit of the poisoned tree"), or even prosecution for evidence discovered completely independently (parallel construction).
This sort of thing happens all the time. Most often it's used to convince a witness to give testimony that implicates the witness in a minor crime, but proves that someone else is guilty of a major crime. But there's no limit to the sort of dealing that can be done. The deals are a form of contract, where the person agrees to do something they aren't otherwise obligated to do in exchange for the court promising to do or not do something.
IANAL, but all it takes is paying attention and you'll see lots and lots of this sort of thing in real life, especially in high-profile cases.
All of the major symmetric key crypto algorithms are just variations on the Feistel Network [wikipedia.org] structure going back to the early 70s.
AES (Rijndael) does not use a Feistel network, and neither does Serpent, another of the five AES finalists (Twofish, RC6 and MARS are based on Feistel networks).
all smartphones will have the panic button linked to three short presses of the on-off button
Heh. My phone (and I think all phones with Android Marshmallow or later?) opens the camera app with a double-press of the on-off button. I guess Indian manufacturers will need to remove that shortcut.