Of course, it does all hinge on the game code implementing such security properly. I have no idea whether this particular game would do so.
Of course, all of those other problems are caused by the game code not implementing security properly, so I don't think you need precognition to figure out how well it will work in this case...
. . . on the other side of the solar system. Obviously, he is right in the very short term, nobody is moving there today and, likely, not in the next decade or three. Will there be a base on mars in the next century? Maybe. Will we go there to live once we have mastered genetic engineering to adapt to any environment? Duh? We may live on Jupiter. Of course, that might be centuries away, so who gives a fuck?
"May" != "Will". A lot of these things are "Wouldn't it be cool?!?" type discussions, but the practical matters will make it really really hard. Yes, you _could_ genetically engineer people to live on Mars without as much need for terraforming, but... keep in mind we are only now starting to address genetic engineering for very very slight changes to single genes.
This is a huge project. How many kids are you willing to have to get ones that work? How many stillbirths are you willing to tolerate? How many kids with gross deformities or brain damage or other maladaptive traits are you willing to tolerate, and to provide housing and care for for the rest of their lives? Or would you prefer to euthanize them? How will you feel about raising a kid who is uncomfortable in your environment, and who's environment you are uncomfortable in? Who's doesn't just _feel_ different, but is different in ways you can hardly comprehend.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm just saying that a regular nuclear family type situation is not going to accomplish it, because doing so would be so incredibly painful. People have troubles raising their kids right now, and that's LOADS easier than if their kids were significantly different and were effectively designed to be sent into battle with an extreme environment. People aren't even willing to tolerate driving less to save their current planet, why would they be willing to tolerate decades of emotional pain to colonize a new planet?
I've thought about getting one myself for a while now, in the case of a Carrington event or EMP, just to keep spare phones in I would have around anyway.
"Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a cellphone when you are unable to contact a tower?"
I loved how he always did a cameo in every Marvel movie. I've been saying for a long time that he should just film a bunch of scenes that could be used in future movies, but now it's too late.
Reading through the abstract something that struck me was the statement "with no degradation in magnetic properties after >2,000 cycles".
With the increase in speed of SSD's all the time, and advances like this that don't suffer degradation, it made me wonder if at some point there would be no need for separation of RAM and SSD, if storage were fast enough you could just use as much of it as you liked for system memory.
Looking around at some specs it seems like at this point RAM may be just 10x faster than the best SSD's around, probably less now. I'm sure there will always be even faster L1/L2 cache memory chips to speed things up, but just thinking of the system RAM we all have today - there has to be a point where the primary storage is fast enough to take on that role and gain greatly improved system memory as a result.
For a long time, the time it takes the transfer data from RAM to the CPU has been the bottleneck in performance. That is a large part of why so much of a CPU's die is devoted to cache - putting a ton of computational elements on the die is pointless if you can't keep them busy, and cache is also more straightforward to design. Switching out RAM for flash would cause a HUGE performance hit.
Beyond that, RAM can cycle continuously with no upper limit. Due to caches, most DRAM isn't going to cycle as frequently as SRAM in the cache will, but 2000 cycles is a trivial number when you're talking about RAM, you can pass that in fractions of a second. Many people are uncomfortable using SSDs for swap, which is a primitive way of using it as RAM.
I would be very surprised if we ever reach a point where there's some sort of unified storage and memory hardware, unless we freeze the target. Basically, anytime someone invents new technology, we generally use it to expand the parameters of the space to address new problems, rather than only using it to simplify the existing space.
I suppose it's barely possible that my vote isn't being counted, but I would be VERY surprised if that were the case, other than trivial clerical errors. The problems we need to solve are things like "People are not database records", and "People don't listen" and "People who listen screw up all the time" and "Infrastructure is selected by committees of people, and people are terrible at their jobs". Basically we're way past the point where mere technical issues dominate the problem space, the big problems are social and political issues which aren't reasonable to blockchain your way out of.
Also, believe me, if you take someone who suspects that the system is rigged against them, introducing a digital voter ID and an explanation involving crypto math is NOT going to make them comfortable. I would have thought that would be self-evident from a few minutes paying attention to Facebook.
Once I started a new job which had a few nice things like getting reimbursed for decent home Internet service (because I was on call). But the system used to request reimbursement was clearly designed for the people cutting the checks, not for the people entering the requests, so after three months I just gave up and paid for my home Internet service the old fashioned way, out of my own damn pocket.
The fundamental problem is that whoever is designing the system gets to choose where they can freeride. If an insurance company designs the system, they're going to push work off on medical facilities and doctors. If a hospital designs the system, they're going to push work off on doctors and nurses. If doctors design the system, they're going to push work off on medical facilities and insurance providers. The key problem is that patient representation is lost in the process. If you stepped back and said "What option would provide the best patient outcome?", you'd start to consider questions like "How do we ask this question to get the best data, but to prevent people from getting irritated and pushing random buttons to make progress?" So, often a required field goes from having one of two or three answers to including options like "I don't know" or "Not applicable". And just to be safe, there should be a "I don't want to answer", so that you know whether or not the doctor actually thought about the question, rather than just pressing "Not applicable" to get the question to go away. Then, of course, you need people designing backends to reflect this ambiguity.
Unfortunately, it's easier to just force a selection at the front end, even though it messes up your data. So you can say with 100% confidence that a particular question was answered "Yes" or "No", but you have no confidence as to whether the person answering the questions actually made any effort to have them correspond with reality.
a) That's sex, not gender. Sex is biological, gender is a social construct.
Again, as I mentioned, how you want to dress and who or what you want to fuck, is up to you, but has nothing to do with how you fill out the forms. If you have a dick, use the mens restroom, if a vagina, women restroom.
Easy peasy.....we're talking a VERY small minority of people in the world that have these issues.....why should the majority get all bent out of shape for this insignificant number of people outside the norm?
I really don't care what an adult does, or two consenting adults do....in private, but don't force the masses to cow-tow to them...there should not be special treatment for acting outside the norms. You shouldn't be persecuted for it, but you also shouldn't expect special and protected treatment in every day life either.
So, just to be clear, what you're saying is that restrooms should be provided as a service to _you_, but they shouldn't be provided to those other people who are different from you?
And, again, just to make things clear to me, you would prefer to have a person dressed as a woman come into the men's restroom to use the stall, versus having them go into a women's restroom to use the stall, or vice versa? When answering, keep in mind that they are dressed to look like a woman (or man), and like most cisgender people they would prefer not to have other people looking at their genitalia outside the privacy of their bedroom at home.
[Personally, it would make me more uncomfortable to have a man dressed as a woman come into the restroom to use a stall. Having a woman dressed as a man come in to use the stall wouldn't make me comfortable or uncomfortable, I simply wouldn't even notice, just like I react when a man dressed as a man does it.]
That slashdot has been overrun by Anonymous Coward Snowflakes who can't stand for something to happen without labelling it a conspiracy of the SJWs?
I mean, don't get me wrong, slashdot has not been a go-to place for intelligent discussion for a very long time, but now it's becoming #gamergate enough that I'm kind of thinking I should go elsewhere for news. I don't even care if they're trolls or if they really believe this, because it's like debating whether you'd rather swim in a pool of vomit or a pool of shit.
What I hear, here, is that the kids should have their screen time limited, but the parents have that shit under control.
Once I went on a trip with a boy-scout crew where we spent a week on an island with no services. When we got back, the kids spent the rest of that day playing pick-up games of soccer, some weird simon-says thing, etc. The parents/chaperones all set in ordered ranks with their heads in their phones.
I'm not saying that kids should be allowed free reign, but this is not a problem with our youth, this is a problem with our society. If you want your kids to spend less time on their screens, put your own damn screens away and spend time with your kids.
The technology is one bit, but is there any reason why there has to be a single unit which encompasses the front end around to the wheels, and integrates the lights and grill? As a result, you can't easily just replace a broken piece, you have to replace the entire assembly.
[One reason is fuel efficiency. The assembly has fewer gaps to catch the wind. Another reason is reliability, the assembly is constructed as a unit and doesn't rely on as many people being successful. But there are probably alternative approaches which could give similar results.]
Food became much more palatable. We got a lot more quick snack type foods
No we didn't. I grew up in the 1960s. We had Twinkies, DingDongs, HoHos, all sort of chips and dips, and Velveeta "cheese". Pringles were available in 1968. McDonalds was everywhere.
So... I can't tell if it's aging that does it, or what, but not long ago I had a Twinkie, and I was like "WTF is this?" I remember Twinkies being decent and subtle when I was young, but now they're literally tasteless, like eating very clean dirt. Each individual part is so bland and basic, it tastes like the color. And HoHos/DingDongs/LittleDebbies are much the same. On the one hand, I think it's plausible that I've changed, but other things like Doritos and Pringles don't really seem different to me, so I'm also wondering if maybe the formulation they use has changed. Like they've made 100 "Consumers can't taste the difference" changes, and now you could taste the difference, but the frog has already been boiled.
You _can_ use better passwords, you _can_ be more careful with your social graph, these things are relatively simple to get right enough for most people. They are mostly geared towards protecting you from third-party activity which has not taken control of the infrastructure of the products you are using.
Yes, you could teach sixth graders about changing settings and using DuckDuckGo, but realistically the problem isn't the search engine or browser you use, it's the products you use. Yes, using Google for a search engine could expose various things to Google - but it's all the sites you go to that are strip-mining your information and selling it to each other, they don't need Google to do that. If you're using Facebook, then switching from Google to DuckDuckGo isn't helping you much. Likewise if you're using Amazon or YouTube or any other site. You're up against adversaries who control the horizontal and the vertical, there's not a lot you can do which isn't comparable to using crystals or magnets to address your arthritis. Hell, millions of people install malware-protection programs which turn out to be actual malware! THEY PAY FOR IT! We simply aren't equipped to effectively deal with this scale of issue at an individual level.
I think Google has good incentives to help teach you, the individual end-user, to avoid scams perpetrated by other individual end users (nigerian prince, identity theft), and also against organized and opportunistic data-collectors (black market trading in password databases types of things). And those are issues you actually can improve based on your actions. But protecting yourself from having Google or MasterCard or Target "steal" your privacy is a tough problem, individuals can only really solve it by opting out, or supporting regulatory changes.
Do you remember when you could buy a Mac Mini with non-soldered RAM, a quad core CPU, and a replaceable disk?
If you want non-soldered RAM and user replaceable disks you need to show Apple a business case where it makes sense for them. The number of people who upgrade RAM in their machines is a rounding error and I'm pretty sure Apple has the data to prove it.
How? I would buy one if I could get 32GB of RAM and a quad-core i7 (ie, match my Linux box which cost half as much as what they do sell). But I can't, so I don't buy one. A Mac Pro is way _more_ computer than I need, so I also don't buy one of those. So rather than upgrade, I just stick with docking an older macbook (before they decided to screw up their keyboards). I actually considered buying an iMac as an alternative, but I value being able to KVM between my various machines.
To be fair, I don't give a rat's ass about SODIMM or replaceable disks, except as a means to an end. But I also don't consider the small size to be of any value, the older minis were plenty small enough. IMHO Apple has backed themselves into a corner and burned their bridges, here, and I have no idea why.
Maybe they need to rename the current Mini to Micro, and inject a new Mini in between Micro and Pro, with mid-range iMac specs.
It is dumb that this is even legislation. I can see legislation for things like "You can't use people's work without their permission", but it's weird that we have legislation determining things like how you communicate and track things. If the industry can't work that out amongst themselves, then the industry shouldn't be able to operate.
This comes up frequently in high-tech companies: If only we could automate decision-making without involving people! Imagine!
This is literally the dumbest thing you could do, right up there with "B people hire C people." As an interviewer, I always looked at resumes to guide my interview approach, but in most cases it was impossible to make any decisions based on a resume. Even if you assume that the person didn't outright lie, you're looking at 4-line summary of 3-year work periods written by a writer who is very subjective, has little clue what is valuable about their work, and also is frankly a terrible writer. I often had candidates who were tough to call after we had spent an hour discussing multiple problems which I brought to the table - how could reducing your information content by many orders of magnitude possibly help?
And, let me be frank, resumes are full of lies and half-truths. I could believe machine-learning your way to a good evaluator given hundreds of pages of writing, especially if you have supporting evidence, but that's impossible with a resume. Hell, it's impossible to get supporting evidence in a resume unless someone is referring the candidate, and if it's a referral, you're usually better off just talking to the referrer rather than reading the resume at all!
Now, if you could feed the system a candidate's entire history of code reviews, email interactions with others, perf write-ups, things they say in meetings, etc, then I'll grant that you could plausibly machine-learn your way to identifying the top performers. I don't like how much of work it misses, though.
If China come after American tech, especially from Silicon Valley, they'll end up with a lot more. They'll end up contaminating their society with capitalistic ideals as well as ideas. They'll import American consumerism, fashion, and a large part of culture as well. This could be a very risky proposition, even though they are trending towards Western values mixed with Communism already, this will increase the shift. I bet there are more than a few old hard-liners that see this as a bad thing.
Would they be sharing their concerns if Hillary Clinton was president right now?
No, but there would be a different group of people filing the law suits for much the same reason. A solid part of any electorate is more tribal than anything. To them, anything is permissible as long as their side is the one doing it. If it occurred to any of these people that eventually someone else might get to wield the power that they've created, we wouldn't have at least half of the mess we constantly find ourselves in.
Google employees absolutely would be complaining about working with the military if Clinton had been elected.
What's maybe different is whether anyone in the media would bother to cover it.
Just because someone is "not part of the political establishment" doesn't automatically make them better. That person she's accused of rigging her party's primary against backed her in the general election after the fact. That should tell you something.
Under further investigation it is discovered his business dealings are riddled with bankruptcies, lies, and ripping people off. And then he gets the job.
No, this wasn't under further investigation, his business background was known in advance, and IMHO many people voted for him BECAUSE of this, not in spite of it. I don't mean like they thought he was a crook and thought we needed a crook. I mean because they see people who get away with this kind of shit all the time, and mistake it for skill. Keeping your nose to the grindstone and getting shit done is, for the most part, not remarkable at all. So people notice the person who appears to be rising in spite of breaking all the rules, and doesn't notice the many people who get there by working hard and not tooting their own horns, and they assume that breaking all the rules is correlated with success.
It was on youtube interviewing him with his recent book. The context was he was talking about the 1% genetic difference between humans are apes(or whatever) and how even the most intelligent of apes are only as smart as a typical 3 year old human. He was saying that we think the laws of the Universe are "hard", but that's hubris because a species 1% different from us may have their 3 year old children being as smart as our smartest physicists, and what's difficult to us may be a simple logic problem to them.
A flaw in this argument is that those apes don't have the circuitry for thinking logically in the first place. They might be as smart as a typical 3-year-old human along some dimension, but which one do you expect will live longer abandoned in the forest?
Let me put it another way - naked humans fly about as well as a typical week-old bird, and no humans fly as well as a bird flies in the way a bird flies. But we have entirely different ways to fly where we greatly exceed birds. That doesn't imply that a bird at the controls of an airplane would fly better than a human, or that a 747 pilot given wings and reduced gravity would fly better than a bird.
Basically where I'm going with this is that there isn't much reason to assume some sort of magical open-ended scale for effortless intelligence. AI will probably exceed us by spending substantial effort and resources (super-human level intelligences will likely require greater-than-human resource commitments, with diminishing returns because coherent scaling is hard). Alien AI will suffer from the same basic constraints as human AI, because it will be made from the same basic stuff.
I propose that the issue isn't "humanity's inability", it's humanity's refusal to acknowledge those with talent by filtering them out by making them jump through hoops.
I think this oversimplifies things. "Making them jump through hoops" sometimes isn't some capricious filter thing - it's that they aren't functional in all the basic assumed human traits. So to access the area of their talent, you have to surround them with a system to accommodate their deficiencies. Sometimes that is reasonable, but sometimes it's a lot of work for little gain, and sometimes it's a lot of work for negative gain (just because someone makes amazing connections the rest of us can't make doesn't mean the results are useful or sometimes even understandable). You can't just segment cleanly into the 1% inspiration vs 99% perspiration pieces, because almost all of the hard work is in bridging those.
"I think it's perfectly fine to be an asshole when that is appropriate to the situation" is about as useless a statement as "I think it's perfectly fine to be a genocidal mass murderer when that is appropriate to the situation".
The question is *when* it is appropriate.
Hyperbole, much? Or do you literally think that being an asshole in a meeting is equivalent to genocide?
Just to be clear, the gist of my point is that if you're using "asshole" as a tool in your communications arsenal, good for you! That implies that you are almost never being an asshole, because in most situations it's a terrible response.
I don't know about everyone else's experience, but my experience is that VERY few people pull out "asshole" as a targeted tool, most assholes simply _are_ assholes, that's just how they interact with the world.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course, it does all hinge on the game code implementing such security properly. I have no idea whether this particular game would do so.
Of course, all of those other problems are caused by the game code not implementing security properly, so I don't think you need precognition to figure out how well it will work in this case...
. . . on the other side of the solar system. Obviously, he is right in the very short term, nobody is moving there today and, likely, not in the next decade or three. Will there be a base on mars in the next century? Maybe. Will we go there to live once we have mastered genetic engineering to adapt to any environment? Duh? We may live on Jupiter. Of course, that might be centuries away, so who gives a fuck?
"May" != "Will". A lot of these things are "Wouldn't it be cool?!?" type discussions, but the practical matters will make it really really hard. Yes, you _could_ genetically engineer people to live on Mars without as much need for terraforming, but ... keep in mind we are only now starting to address genetic engineering for very very slight changes to single genes.
This is a huge project. How many kids are you willing to have to get ones that work? How many stillbirths are you willing to tolerate? How many kids with gross deformities or brain damage or other maladaptive traits are you willing to tolerate, and to provide housing and care for for the rest of their lives? Or would you prefer to euthanize them? How will you feel about raising a kid who is uncomfortable in your environment, and who's environment you are uncomfortable in? Who's doesn't just _feel_ different, but is different in ways you can hardly comprehend.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it's not possible. I'm just saying that a regular nuclear family type situation is not going to accomplish it, because doing so would be so incredibly painful. People have troubles raising their kids right now, and that's LOADS easier than if their kids were significantly different and were effectively designed to be sent into battle with an extreme environment. People aren't even willing to tolerate driving less to save their current planet, why would they be willing to tolerate decades of emotional pain to colonize a new planet?
I've thought about getting one myself for a while now, in the case of a Carrington event or EMP, just to keep spare phones in I would have around anyway.
"Tell me, Mr. Anderson, what good is a cellphone when you are unable to contact a tower?"
I loved how he always did a cameo in every Marvel movie. I've been saying for a long time that he should just film a bunch of scenes that could be used in future movies, but now it's too late.
Maybe they'll make a Marvel Zombies movie?
Reading through the abstract something that struck me was the statement "with no degradation in magnetic properties after >2,000 cycles".
With the increase in speed of SSD's all the time, and advances like this that don't suffer degradation, it made me wonder if at some point there would be no need for separation of RAM and SSD, if storage were fast enough you could just use as much of it as you liked for system memory.
Looking around at some specs it seems like at this point RAM may be just 10x faster than the best SSD's around, probably less now. I'm sure there will always be even faster L1/L2 cache memory chips to speed things up, but just thinking of the system RAM we all have today - there has to be a point where the primary storage is fast enough to take on that role and gain greatly improved system memory as a result.
For a long time, the time it takes the transfer data from RAM to the CPU has been the bottleneck in performance. That is a large part of why so much of a CPU's die is devoted to cache - putting a ton of computational elements on the die is pointless if you can't keep them busy, and cache is also more straightforward to design. Switching out RAM for flash would cause a HUGE performance hit.
Beyond that, RAM can cycle continuously with no upper limit. Due to caches, most DRAM isn't going to cycle as frequently as SRAM in the cache will, but 2000 cycles is a trivial number when you're talking about RAM, you can pass that in fractions of a second. Many people are uncomfortable using SSDs for swap, which is a primitive way of using it as RAM.
I would be very surprised if we ever reach a point where there's some sort of unified storage and memory hardware, unless we freeze the target. Basically, anytime someone invents new technology, we generally use it to expand the parameters of the space to address new problems, rather than only using it to simplify the existing space.
I suppose it's barely possible that my vote isn't being counted, but I would be VERY surprised if that were the case, other than trivial clerical errors. The problems we need to solve are things like "People are not database records", and "People don't listen" and "People who listen screw up all the time" and "Infrastructure is selected by committees of people, and people are terrible at their jobs". Basically we're way past the point where mere technical issues dominate the problem space, the big problems are social and political issues which aren't reasonable to blockchain your way out of.
Also, believe me, if you take someone who suspects that the system is rigged against them, introducing a digital voter ID and an explanation involving crypto math is NOT going to make them comfortable. I would have thought that would be self-evident from a few minutes paying attention to Facebook.
Once I started a new job which had a few nice things like getting reimbursed for decent home Internet service (because I was on call). But the system used to request reimbursement was clearly designed for the people cutting the checks, not for the people entering the requests, so after three months I just gave up and paid for my home Internet service the old fashioned way, out of my own damn pocket.
The fundamental problem is that whoever is designing the system gets to choose where they can freeride. If an insurance company designs the system, they're going to push work off on medical facilities and doctors. If a hospital designs the system, they're going to push work off on doctors and nurses. If doctors design the system, they're going to push work off on medical facilities and insurance providers. The key problem is that patient representation is lost in the process. If you stepped back and said "What option would provide the best patient outcome?", you'd start to consider questions like "How do we ask this question to get the best data, but to prevent people from getting irritated and pushing random buttons to make progress?" So, often a required field goes from having one of two or three answers to including options like "I don't know" or "Not applicable". And just to be safe, there should be a "I don't want to answer", so that you know whether or not the doctor actually thought about the question, rather than just pressing "Not applicable" to get the question to go away. Then, of course, you need people designing backends to reflect this ambiguity.
Unfortunately, it's easier to just force a selection at the front end, even though it messes up your data. So you can say with 100% confidence that a particular question was answered "Yes" or "No", but you have no confidence as to whether the person answering the questions actually made any effort to have them correspond with reality.
Again, as I mentioned, how you want to dress and who or what you want to fuck, is up to you, but has nothing to do with how you fill out the forms. If you have a dick, use the mens restroom, if a vagina, women restroom.
Easy peasy.....we're talking a VERY small minority of people in the world that have these issues.....why should the majority get all bent out of shape for this insignificant number of people outside the norm?
I really don't care what an adult does, or two consenting adults do....in private, but don't force the masses to cow-tow to them...there should not be special treatment for acting outside the norms. You shouldn't be persecuted for it, but you also shouldn't expect special and protected treatment in every day life either.
So, just to be clear, what you're saying is that restrooms should be provided as a service to _you_, but they shouldn't be provided to those other people who are different from you?
And, again, just to make things clear to me, you would prefer to have a person dressed as a woman come into the men's restroom to use the stall, versus having them go into a women's restroom to use the stall, or vice versa? When answering, keep in mind that they are dressed to look like a woman (or man), and like most cisgender people they would prefer not to have other people looking at their genitalia outside the privacy of their bedroom at home.
[Personally, it would make me more uncomfortable to have a man dressed as a woman come into the restroom to use a stall. Having a woman dressed as a man come in to use the stall wouldn't make me comfortable or uncomfortable, I simply wouldn't even notice, just like I react when a man dressed as a man does it.]
See, adopting a code of conduct is already undermining the foundations of the kernel.
This is a classic hack to increase storage capacity.
Many comments here only prove one thing,
That slashdot has been overrun by Anonymous Coward Snowflakes who can't stand for something to happen without labelling it a conspiracy of the SJWs?
I mean, don't get me wrong, slashdot has not been a go-to place for intelligent discussion for a very long time, but now it's becoming #gamergate enough that I'm kind of thinking I should go elsewhere for news. I don't even care if they're trolls or if they really believe this, because it's like debating whether you'd rather swim in a pool of vomit or a pool of shit.
What I hear, here, is that the kids should have their screen time limited, but the parents have that shit under control.
Once I went on a trip with a boy-scout crew where we spent a week on an island with no services. When we got back, the kids spent the rest of that day playing pick-up games of soccer, some weird simon-says thing, etc. The parents/chaperones all set in ordered ranks with their heads in their phones.
I'm not saying that kids should be allowed free reign, but this is not a problem with our youth, this is a problem with our society. If you want your kids to spend less time on their screens, put your own damn screens away and spend time with your kids.
The technology is one bit, but is there any reason why there has to be a single unit which encompasses the front end around to the wheels, and integrates the lights and grill? As a result, you can't easily just replace a broken piece, you have to replace the entire assembly.
[One reason is fuel efficiency. The assembly has fewer gaps to catch the wind. Another reason is reliability, the assembly is constructed as a unit and doesn't rely on as many people being successful. But there are probably alternative approaches which could give similar results.]
Food became much more palatable. We got a lot more quick snack type foods
No we didn't. I grew up in the 1960s. We had Twinkies, DingDongs, HoHos, all sort of chips and dips, and Velveeta "cheese". Pringles were available in 1968. McDonalds was everywhere.
So ... I can't tell if it's aging that does it, or what, but not long ago I had a Twinkie, and I was like "WTF is this?" I remember Twinkies being decent and subtle when I was young, but now they're literally tasteless, like eating very clean dirt. Each individual part is so bland and basic, it tastes like the color. And HoHos/DingDongs/LittleDebbies are much the same. On the one hand, I think it's plausible that I've changed, but other things like Doritos and Pringles don't really seem different to me, so I'm also wondering if maybe the formulation they use has changed. Like they've made 100 "Consumers can't taste the difference" changes, and now you could taste the difference, but the frog has already been boiled.
You _can_ use better passwords, you _can_ be more careful with your social graph, these things are relatively simple to get right enough for most people. They are mostly geared towards protecting you from third-party activity which has not taken control of the infrastructure of the products you are using.
Yes, you could teach sixth graders about changing settings and using DuckDuckGo, but realistically the problem isn't the search engine or browser you use, it's the products you use. Yes, using Google for a search engine could expose various things to Google - but it's all the sites you go to that are strip-mining your information and selling it to each other, they don't need Google to do that. If you're using Facebook, then switching from Google to DuckDuckGo isn't helping you much. Likewise if you're using Amazon or YouTube or any other site. You're up against adversaries who control the horizontal and the vertical, there's not a lot you can do which isn't comparable to using crystals or magnets to address your arthritis. Hell, millions of people install malware-protection programs which turn out to be actual malware! THEY PAY FOR IT! We simply aren't equipped to effectively deal with this scale of issue at an individual level.
I think Google has good incentives to help teach you, the individual end-user, to avoid scams perpetrated by other individual end users (nigerian prince, identity theft), and also against organized and opportunistic data-collectors (black market trading in password databases types of things). And those are issues you actually can improve based on your actions. But protecting yourself from having Google or MasterCard or Target "steal" your privacy is a tough problem, individuals can only really solve it by opting out, or supporting regulatory changes.
Do you remember when you could buy a Mac Mini with non-soldered RAM, a quad core CPU, and a replaceable disk?
If you want non-soldered RAM and user replaceable disks you need to show Apple a business case where it makes sense for them. The number of people who upgrade RAM in their machines is a rounding error and I'm pretty sure Apple has the data to prove it.
How? I would buy one if I could get 32GB of RAM and a quad-core i7 (ie, match my Linux box which cost half as much as what they do sell). But I can't, so I don't buy one. A Mac Pro is way _more_ computer than I need, so I also don't buy one of those. So rather than upgrade, I just stick with docking an older macbook (before they decided to screw up their keyboards). I actually considered buying an iMac as an alternative, but I value being able to KVM between my various machines.
To be fair, I don't give a rat's ass about SODIMM or replaceable disks, except as a means to an end. But I also don't consider the small size to be of any value, the older minis were plenty small enough. IMHO Apple has backed themselves into a corner and burned their bridges, here, and I have no idea why.
Maybe they need to rename the current Mini to Micro, and inject a new Mini in between Micro and Pro, with mid-range iMac specs.
Lots of software doesn't even try.
Think on that when you're installing your smart devices.
It is dumb that this is even legislation. I can see legislation for things like "You can't use people's work without their permission", but it's weird that we have legislation determining things like how you communicate and track things. If the industry can't work that out amongst themselves, then the industry shouldn't be able to operate.
This comes up frequently in high-tech companies: If only we could automate decision-making without involving people! Imagine!
This is literally the dumbest thing you could do, right up there with "B people hire C people." As an interviewer, I always looked at resumes to guide my interview approach, but in most cases it was impossible to make any decisions based on a resume. Even if you assume that the person didn't outright lie, you're looking at 4-line summary of 3-year work periods written by a writer who is very subjective, has little clue what is valuable about their work, and also is frankly a terrible writer. I often had candidates who were tough to call after we had spent an hour discussing multiple problems which I brought to the table - how could reducing your information content by many orders of magnitude possibly help?
And, let me be frank, resumes are full of lies and half-truths. I could believe machine-learning your way to a good evaluator given hundreds of pages of writing, especially if you have supporting evidence, but that's impossible with a resume. Hell, it's impossible to get supporting evidence in a resume unless someone is referring the candidate, and if it's a referral, you're usually better off just talking to the referrer rather than reading the resume at all!
Now, if you could feed the system a candidate's entire history of code reviews, email interactions with others, perf write-ups, things they say in meetings, etc, then I'll grant that you could plausibly machine-learn your way to identifying the top performers. I don't like how much of work it misses, though.
If China come after American tech, especially from Silicon Valley, they'll end up with a lot more. They'll end up contaminating their society with capitalistic ideals as well as ideas. They'll import American consumerism, fashion, and a large part of culture as well. This could be a very risky proposition, even though they are trending towards Western values mixed with Communism already, this will increase the shift. I bet there are more than a few old hard-liners that see this as a bad thing.
Just like Russia!
Would they be sharing their concerns if Hillary Clinton was president right now?
No, but there would be a different group of people filing the law suits for much the same reason. A solid part of any electorate is more tribal than anything. To them, anything is permissible as long as their side is the one doing it. If it occurred to any of these people that eventually someone else might get to wield the power that they've created, we wouldn't have at least half of the mess we constantly find ourselves in.
Google employees absolutely would be complaining about working with the military if Clinton had been elected.
What's maybe different is whether anyone in the media would bother to cover it.
Just because someone is "not part of the political establishment" doesn't automatically make them better. That person she's accused of rigging her party's primary against backed her in the general election after the fact. That should tell you something.
Under further investigation it is discovered his business dealings are riddled with bankruptcies, lies, and ripping people off. And then he gets the job.
No, this wasn't under further investigation, his business background was known in advance, and IMHO many people voted for him BECAUSE of this, not in spite of it. I don't mean like they thought he was a crook and thought we needed a crook. I mean because they see people who get away with this kind of shit all the time, and mistake it for skill. Keeping your nose to the grindstone and getting shit done is, for the most part, not remarkable at all. So people notice the person who appears to be rising in spite of breaking all the rules, and doesn't notice the many people who get there by working hard and not tooting their own horns, and they assume that breaking all the rules is correlated with success.
It was on youtube interviewing him with his recent book. The context was he was talking about the 1% genetic difference between humans are apes(or whatever) and how even the most intelligent of apes are only as smart as a typical 3 year old human. He was saying that we think the laws of the Universe are "hard", but that's hubris because a species 1% different from us may have their 3 year old children being as smart as our smartest physicists, and what's difficult to us may be a simple logic problem to them.
A flaw in this argument is that those apes don't have the circuitry for thinking logically in the first place. They might be as smart as a typical 3-year-old human along some dimension, but which one do you expect will live longer abandoned in the forest?
Let me put it another way - naked humans fly about as well as a typical week-old bird, and no humans fly as well as a bird flies in the way a bird flies. But we have entirely different ways to fly where we greatly exceed birds. That doesn't imply that a bird at the controls of an airplane would fly better than a human, or that a 747 pilot given wings and reduced gravity would fly better than a bird.
Basically where I'm going with this is that there isn't much reason to assume some sort of magical open-ended scale for effortless intelligence. AI will probably exceed us by spending substantial effort and resources (super-human level intelligences will likely require greater-than-human resource commitments, with diminishing returns because coherent scaling is hard). Alien AI will suffer from the same basic constraints as human AI, because it will be made from the same basic stuff.
I propose that the issue isn't "humanity's inability", it's humanity's refusal to acknowledge those with talent by filtering them out by making them jump through hoops.
I think this oversimplifies things. "Making them jump through hoops" sometimes isn't some capricious filter thing - it's that they aren't functional in all the basic assumed human traits. So to access the area of their talent, you have to surround them with a system to accommodate their deficiencies. Sometimes that is reasonable, but sometimes it's a lot of work for little gain, and sometimes it's a lot of work for negative gain (just because someone makes amazing connections the rest of us can't make doesn't mean the results are useful or sometimes even understandable). You can't just segment cleanly into the 1% inspiration vs 99% perspiration pieces, because almost all of the hard work is in bridging those.
"I think it's perfectly fine to be an asshole when that is appropriate to the situation" is about as useless a statement as "I think it's perfectly fine to be a genocidal mass murderer when that is appropriate to the situation".
The question is *when* it is appropriate.
Hyperbole, much? Or do you literally think that being an asshole in a meeting is equivalent to genocide?
Just to be clear, the gist of my point is that if you're using "asshole" as a tool in your communications arsenal, good for you! That implies that you are almost never being an asshole, because in most situations it's a terrible response.
I don't know about everyone else's experience, but my experience is that VERY few people pull out "asshole" as a targeted tool, most assholes simply _are_ assholes, that's just how they interact with the world.