When *I* was in schools the known function of the cerebellum was shaping what would otherwise be ballistic movement. Say you reach out to touch a dot at arm's length; your finger traces a smooth, precise, efficient curve. Without the cerebellum you'd just fling your arm in the general direction of the dot. We were taught the crebellum was a like an enormous, high speed, nerve impulse shaping co-processor. The structure of the cerebellum is kind of like a co-processor, lots of similar looking, repeating modular units.
The motor-only view of the cerebellum has been obsolete for 20 years or more. In any case it always seemed curious to me that such a large brain structure would be dedicated to that movement shaping function; it's not as if human gross movements are any more complex than other animals.
Maybe the cerebellum originally evolved to shape physical movement, but evolution is the ultimate hacker; it doesn't care what things are for, it cares what can be done with them. It's a bit like building supercomputers from GPUs; it's not what GPUs used to be for, but it works.
It's having an algorithm grind out a solution to playing the game which meets an additional constraints, which they tweak.
If they'd actually taught the AI ethics, the AI would construct the play constraints for itself starting from ethical principles. At full human levels of ethical self awareness, the AI would be chasing ghosts down the hall and then -- unprompted -- stop and ask itself, "What am I doing?"
So you're theory is that Trump's intelligence goes up when he's on the phone.
Also you don't seem to know how political denial works. Sure, he did not disclose "military" operations. He exposed intelligence operations. You don't need to *name* intelligence assets to expose them. The Israelis were furious.
As for Trump's "winning", I appreciate your optimism but I don't see it. It seems mostly to be what Trump called in his book "truthful hyperbole" (i.e., hyperbole). He's got remarkably little of what he promised done. No Mexicans paying for the wall. No cheap Obamacare replacement. No term limit constitutional amendment. No special prosecutor for Hillary. Common Core is still here.
But if "winning" is keeping your base happy, I'll concede he's winning. But it's easy to keep your base happy if they don't hold you to getting anything done. And "winning" is a stupid way to frame what a President has to do. We "won" the Iraq War. That doesn't make it good policy.
Does Trump look like the kind of guy that goes into specifics ovethe phone?
So far as he knows them, sure. Practically the first thing he did was expose a bunch of Israeli intelligence assets to the Russian ambassador in an Oval Office meeting.
In fact what would be far more Trump-like is him knowing the Chinese were listening, and leading them on in some ways... you have to wonder what he's said about tariffs with others knowing the Chinese were listening in.
So you're theory is that Trump is a genius 11-dimensional chess player.
I'm not one of those people who think Trump is stupid. Penn Jilett, who actually knows the man, has an interesting take on Trump: Trump isn't stupid. He's stupid for a president. Take even George W. Bush, whose intelligence is often mocked, and put him in a room with a couple of dozen other random guys, and he's probably the smartest guy in the room.
Jilette, by the way, says he likes Donald Trump personally, because he likes people who don't have a filter. This fits my impression of the man, and what other expansive egotists I've known are like. They're domineering and crafty, yes, but they're also impulsive and needy. They tend to improvise, because making an impression on the person they're talking to right now takes precedence over the long term.
Obama deported three million people [source], and although changes in statistics gathering make it hard to compare precisely with prior presidents, that's a lot of people. He also proposed a bipartisan solution for Dreamers, which was torpedoed at the last minute by the Tea Party caucus. That's hardly Obama kicking the can down the road.
Obama's deportation policy focused on troublemakers and people who commit crimes -- the very people Trump campaigned for throwing out. When Trump came in he took more of a bottom-feeder approach, going for the vulnerable, low hanging fruit and making examples of them (asylum-seekers, parents with children). As a result deportations are down, because immigrant communities distrust law enforcement and minority communities don't want to cooperate with immigration.
As a result, deportations are down under Trump. So, yes. There comes a point where people look silly, unless instead they look depraved. And speaking of silly, are you still waiting for Mexico to pay for the wall? Isn't that silly?
Oh, and your caravan "army" is fake news. There are a group of mainly Honduran (about half of them women and children) making their way north, and most of the viral images being shared are of different groups of people altogether and from the past. Caravan members haven't been beating up Mexican police or burning American flags. And in point of fact if they do reach the United States they do, under treaties we wrote after WW2, have a right to have their cases heard. If their cases have merit, we don't necessarily have to grant them residency, but we do have to find something humane to do with them. Why? Because we gave our word to do that.
Well, I don't know about movement being an inalienable right, but the problem with US immigration is that it's geared to provide employers in certain industries with cheap labor that falls outside legal protections.
Seriously, though, I see a Catch-22 in the adoption of, if not the creation of, generalist AI. As a philosophical materialist, I think such an AI is certainly possible, it's just not what we really want. What we want are machines which complement human strengths in behavioral flexibility and context-awareness by being repeatable and consistent, albeit in increasingly dynamic situations.
But the world as a whole more than just a more challenging version of a simple problem; it is complex in qualitatively different way, full of contradictory information and more to the point contradictory priorities. A machine that fully reproduced human flexibility would very likely reproduce human inconsistency.
In other words, we want a self driving car that's better at handling whatever surprises the road may throw up at it, not one that contemplates whether the passenger's life is worth preserving.
I have no doubt that the steps you recommend will improve your chances, but that's dependent on the experience and expertise of the cop. You can get yourself shot for trying to comply with officer commands. For example the officer tells you to raise your hands, and then thinks your cell phone is a gun.
Following orders can also get you shot if you misunderstand police commands. There was a black guy recently who got tasered by a cop apparently for that reason. The cop told him to sit on the curb. Then he told him to put his legs straight out. Then a second cop told him to "cross his legs", so he pulls his legs back to sit cross-legged (instead of crossing them at the ankles as the cop intended). The first cop shot him, essentially for complying with the second cop's instructions.
...what has happened so fundamentally in our country (US) where people don't care about actual citizenship, and protecting our borders?
Let me give you a liberal perspective on this: you are raising a straw man. We have no problem with protecting the border, the problem we have is with using scapegoating and scare-mongering, and bullshit waste of resources like building a wall. If you want to see the source of our problems, it's rich guys buying politicians, not Mexicans sneaking across the border to pick crops.
If you are here in this country illegally, you have criminally trespassed. You should be deported.
No, "trespass" has a specific meaning in law, and an unauthorized crossing of the border does not match that, even if it feels like tresspassing. And even as it were, the law allows people to enter your land against your wishes under certain circumstances. If a neighbor goes on your posted land to hunt, that's trespass. If he goes onto your posted land to escape a home invader, it's not trespass.
Treaties the US imposed on other people after WW2 also bind us when it comes to handling asylum seekers. We don't have to help them get here, but we do have to give them due process and administrative help when they get here, even if they sneak across our borders. It's actually the government that is breaking the law by turning asylum seekers away at the border without a hearing, which of course means they sneak across, which makes policing the border that much harder.
But I just don't get these seemingly increasing number of folks in the US promoting full blown open borders, with no control of who gets in here.
That was how we did immigration up until 1927. You showed up at Ellis Island, were checked for disease, promised you weren't an anarchist and they'd ship you over to the docks at Battery Park and let you go anywhere you wanted. The 1927 quotas were proposed by eugenicists, who were worried that the influx of Jews was lowering America's collective IQ.
Now if you were Mexican, you weren't part of the quota system. You could still walk across the border until 1965. That was because business interests needed the cheap labor. What changed in 65 was the rise of the United Farm Workers. Now this *might* just be coincidence, but if you look at how the'65 restrictions were enforced, they did not stem the influx of immigrants, so much as put those immigrants outside the protection of the law and made it harder for them to organize. The government didn't go after farmers hiring Mexicans, they went after the Mexicans. And the Mexicans they deported would be immediately replaced by other Mexicans, because there was a job waiting for them.
Now restrictions on employers have become stricter, but we still have a system which is dependent upon immigrant labor, but puts those laborers outside the protection of the law. That's the problem with the tip line; it's a tool for payback against people with no rights of due process. This is the problem of immigration in the US: the hypocrisy of the whole system corrupts things that would otherwise be a good idea.
What good does building a wall do if you can just pay someone to wave you through? And yet the demand for immigration security theater has the agency relaxing screening standards that are supposed to catch cartel infiltrators, in an agency that already has a stunning 5% corruption rate. Immigration security theater undermines national security.
Now change the immigration so it allows for the immigrant laborers we actually need and keeps the people who've been here for years peacefully
Which is what any high-end chef or experimental psychologist will tell you: a lot of taste comes from imagination -- or at least expectations. That's why fine cuisine restaurants put so much effort into arranging food on the plate; if they slapped it on any old way it would taste different.
Human sense perception has Bayesian inference baked in at the neurological level. The colors you see, for example, are the product of both the light impinging on the retina and also the brain's prior knowledge of the scene .
This is a fact that accounts, I believe, for at least some police shootings of unarmed suspects. The human visual system does not have the bandwidth or acuity to instantaneously take in a whole scene; instead it picks out a few details and constructs, entirely within the brain, an HD picture of the world. But it's more of an animation than it is a movie. Until you actually direct your fovea to the cellphone in the suspect's hands, it's just a dark blob on your retina. If you "know" there's a gun, your brain replaces that blob with a very clear picture of a gun.
So it's quite possible, likely even, that the mere knowledge a drink came from a glass bottle could actually alter the taste, even if there is no chemical difference. That doesn't prove there is no chemical difference, however. You need a blind test to see whether human sensory organs can actually pick up the difference.
I like Postgres too, but it's not even close to having the features of Oracle. The problem is that using those features ties you to Oracle, so it's something you don't want to do casually (although Oracle likes you to).
More features is not necessarily better, particularly when the features are non-standard, but some of the things Oracle does are actually quite useful. For example it's possible to fork and merge database versions, and the various versions of the database will share common database pages. This is useful when building large and complex datasets; I knew a geospatial company that used this to prepare updates to their high precision global geographic datasets. As soon as they released the next version of their data products they'd immediately fork a new version of the database and start applying updates to that.
It is really easy to screw up your Oracle database server. It's practically an operating system in itself, and there are multiple resource pools that, improperly managed, can starve various back end processes your DBA has barely even heard of. That said, properly managed it should handle heavy workloads for the iron you're running it on.
This is why Oracle *doesn't* make sense for a lot of installations. You need DBAs who either have a great deal of arcane Oracle server management knowledge, or who have the sense not to monkey with stuff they don't understand. Either way, you're talking about someone who can command a higher salary than many organizations are willing to pay for such an unglamorous position.
and very frequently has to go down for some sort of synchronization.
This sounds like a lame excuse to me. The one thing that justifies paying Oracle it's pound of flesh is having a database server that keeps processing transactions, come hell or high water. That's because Oracle does transaction isolation better than anyone else. You never have to worry about stale reads or read locks or any of that kind of rigmarole, nor do you have to give up data consistency to get there. You never have to bring the service off line to back it up or restore or even restore parts of it. You can even pick and choose individual transactions or groups of transactions to roll back all while the database chugs merrily along, accepting new updates.
Oracle exploited, very early on, "copy-on-write" technology . Although back in the day they were pretty tight lipped about how they isolated various data reading and writing processes from each other, with a more modern perspective it's clear they make extensive use of C-O-W snapshotting under the covers.
The thing is... if you understood what it entailed, you probably *wouldn't* want a pony. That may make it the perfect analogy. I imagine a scene playing out like this:
Military officer: What progress do you have to report?
Researcher 1: Er...
Researcher 2 [smoothly interjecting]: This AI has developed an understanding of the world at roughly equivalent to that of most human beings.
Officer: Excellent. I am off now to tell the Pentagon we can build it into all our weapon systems.
[Officer leaves]
Researcher 1: Shouldn't you have told him the AI hates America?
We shouldn't break them up no matter how big they get, but we shouldn't ask they do anything about misinformation that spreads through their vast information distribution monopolies.
Well, I can think of a way of fixing this: make them charge subscription fees.
Facebook has just over 2 billion users; it's important to realize users are not customers, they're the product being sold to advertisers. The net operating profit generated by selling those users is just under 16 billion. So conservatively, each subscribers is worth about $8/year in profit.
Suppose we say that social media companies have to charge users $1/month. Then each user is worth 50% more as a customer than he is as a product. Then, if you're not happy with the job Facebook does about keeping fake news down, even fake news delivered to your conspiracy nut uncle or SJW sister-in-law, you can vote with your pocketbook. This would require Facebook to figure out a way of managing information that was broadly acceptable to the majority of its users. No government monitoring of content would be required.
Oh, the chops exist somewhere in the private sector, that is certain. Whether they'll bid on any contracts is less certain, and whether they'd win is even less certain than that.
hat failed, so the next iteration is to get that same work force by providing the carrot on a stick labeled, "patriotism."
People willing to work for patriotism rather than money already work for the government. The problem is that they report to politicians.
...compared to most government/civil-service workers? In that light, hell yes they're paragons of efficiency and virtue.:/
I'm curious how you know this. I worked in the private sector for decades, but at least half that work was for public sector agencies (well over a hundred in all) at all levels of government and in every part of the country except Alaska. I'd say on average public employees are about the same as private sector employees, but the variance is greater.
That's because on one hand you've got rules that makes it hard to get rid of underperformers. But the other hand, you get people who are genuinely dedicated to the mission of their agency in a way that would be downright bizarre in a private sector employee. These are the kind of people who are really bullish about promoting the state's agricultural products, or getting the next generation into hunting and fishing. I once had a trip to the CDC's Fort Collins office when news of a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Africa came through. It was like being in a suit-up scene in some cheesy action movie because those guys were going to war -- with a virus that made you bleed out of your eyeballs.
The work of those kinds of employees goes largely unnoticed. When we had the Boston Marathon bombing up here, two bombs went off in the middle of crowds and 267 people were hurt, 14 requiring amputations, but only 3 died. First responders justifiably got a lot of credit for that, but the low death rate was also the result of planners having a procedure in place which rapidly activated trauma teams at 27 hospitals, so that on average each hospital had to triage on average fewer than ten patients. Imagine if they'd all gone to the nearest hospital instead. As far as I know whoever prevented that from happening never got any media pats on the back.
The kind of government employees that make those kinds of things happen are found everywhere, and everywhere they're weighed down by deadwood coworkers and bosses. The problem is worse, however, in places where the public is fatalistic about bad government employees. Texas is the worst I've seen. One of the hardware vendors we sometimes worked with landed a bunch of contracts there by procuring prostitutes for public officials. But even in Texas there's a core of good people who make things work; they're just not the ones getting blow jobs.
The first rule of getting a non-trivial federal government is to hire a good lobbyist, even if you have to skimp on the people who will actually do the work.
After 9/11 and especially the anthrax scare, the small company I worked for was courted to be part of some responses to Homeland Security RFPs. I was uncomfortable about the misleading way our technology was presented as being just what was needed, but in fact the winning proposals had even less substance, just teams of dirt cheap contractors with a track record of absorbing large quantities of government money for very little in return. But they had simply amazingly good lobbyists.
Actually, according to Hannah Arendt, the real problem with fascists is that they don't have any real commitment to any belief or principle:
In an ever-changing, incomprehensible world the masses had reached the point where they would, at the same time, believe everything and nothing, think that everything was possible and nothing was true... The totalitarian mass leaders based their propaganda on the correct psychological assumption that, under such conditions, one could make people believe the most fantastic statements one day, and trust that if the next day they were given irrefutable proof of their falsehood, they would take refuge in cynicism; instead of deserting the leaders who had lied to them, they would protest that they had known all along that the statement was a lie and would admire the leaders for their superior tactical cleverness.
The myth that the private sector is made up of wonderfully efficient and capable people is easily disproved. Look at your private sector coworkers, and consider the private sector coworkers you've had in the past. Most likely they were not all paragons of efficiency and virtue.
Still, it's likely that they are able to adapt to change more readily than their government sector counterparts, but it's not because they're fundamentally better; they just operate under less restrictive rules and expectations.
Now it can be a good to bring in outside expertise, but the idea that bringing in private sector people will magically fix things is naive, because that expertise will operate under all the same constraints as their government employee counterparts except one: contributing to politicians who oversee the program. That's why privatization's track record of making government cheap and efficient is so un-magical.
It can be a good thing to bring in outside experts and contractors, or it can be a bad one, depending on your plan. If your plan is to shove money at them and sit back while they solve your problems, well that's a bad plan. All things equal a vendor would rather your problems be interminable and expensive, and if he has to give you a job after you retire from public office, that's a small price to pay.
Slashdot Mirror
When *I* was in schools the known function of the cerebellum was shaping what would otherwise be ballistic movement. Say you reach out to touch a dot at arm's length; your finger traces a smooth, precise, efficient curve. Without the cerebellum you'd just fling your arm in the general direction of the dot. We were taught the crebellum was a like an enormous, high speed, nerve impulse shaping co-processor. The structure of the cerebellum is kind of like a co-processor, lots of similar looking, repeating modular units.
The motor-only view of the cerebellum has been obsolete for 20 years or more. In any case it always seemed curious to me that such a large brain structure would be dedicated to that movement shaping function; it's not as if human gross movements are any more complex than other animals.
Maybe the cerebellum originally evolved to shape physical movement, but evolution is the ultimate hacker; it doesn't care what things are for, it cares what can be done with them. It's a bit like building supercomputers from GPUs; it's not what GPUs used to be for, but it works.
It's having an algorithm grind out a solution to playing the game which meets an additional constraints, which they tweak.
If they'd actually taught the AI ethics, the AI would construct the play constraints for itself starting from ethical principles. At full human levels of ethical self awareness, the AI would be chasing ghosts down the hall and then -- unprompted -- stop and ask itself, "What am I doing?"
So you're theory is that Trump's intelligence goes up when he's on the phone.
Also you don't seem to know how political denial works. Sure, he did not disclose "military" operations. He exposed intelligence operations. You don't need to *name* intelligence assets to expose them. The Israelis were furious.
As for Trump's "winning", I appreciate your optimism but I don't see it. It seems mostly to be what Trump called in his book "truthful hyperbole" (i.e., hyperbole). He's got remarkably little of what he promised done. No Mexicans paying for the wall. No cheap Obamacare replacement. No term limit constitutional amendment. No special prosecutor for Hillary. Common Core is still here.
But if "winning" is keeping your base happy, I'll concede he's winning. But it's easy to keep your base happy if they don't hold you to getting anything done. And "winning" is a stupid way to frame what a President has to do. We "won" the Iraq War. That doesn't make it good policy.
A cure for nervous mice that won't produce dangerous or unpleasant side effects.
Does Trump look like the kind of guy that goes into specifics ovethe phone?
So far as he knows them, sure. Practically the first thing he did was expose a bunch of Israeli intelligence assets to the Russian ambassador in an Oval Office meeting.
In fact what would be far more Trump-like is him knowing the Chinese were listening, and leading them on in some ways... you have to wonder what he's said about tariffs with others knowing the Chinese were listening in.
So you're theory is that Trump is a genius 11-dimensional chess player.
I'm not one of those people who think Trump is stupid. Penn Jilett, who actually knows the man, has an interesting take on Trump: Trump isn't stupid. He's stupid for a president. Take even George W. Bush, whose intelligence is often mocked, and put him in a room with a couple of dozen other random guys, and he's probably the smartest guy in the room.
Jilette, by the way, says he likes Donald Trump personally, because he likes people who don't have a filter. This fits my impression of the man, and what other expansive egotists I've known are like. They're domineering and crafty, yes, but they're also impulsive and needy. They tend to improvise, because making an impression on the person they're talking to right now takes precedence over the long term.
Right. It' a good thing Russia and China are showing such restraint by not listening in on Trump's unsecured telephone calls.
They're just rutabagas.
Obama deported three million people [source], and although changes in statistics gathering make it hard to compare precisely with prior presidents, that's a lot of people. He also proposed a bipartisan solution for Dreamers, which was torpedoed at the last minute by the Tea Party caucus. That's hardly Obama kicking the can down the road.
Obama's deportation policy focused on troublemakers and people who commit crimes -- the very people Trump campaigned for throwing out. When Trump came in he took more of a bottom-feeder approach, going for the vulnerable, low hanging fruit and making examples of them (asylum-seekers, parents with children). As a result deportations are down, because immigrant communities distrust law enforcement and minority communities don't want to cooperate with immigration.
As a result, deportations are down under Trump. So, yes. There comes a point where people look silly, unless instead they look depraved. And speaking of silly, are you still waiting for Mexico to pay for the wall? Isn't that silly?
Oh, and your caravan "army" is fake news. There are a group of mainly Honduran (about half of them women and children) making their way north, and most of the viral images being shared are of different groups of people altogether and from the past. Caravan members haven't been beating up Mexican police or burning American flags. And in point of fact if they do reach the United States they do, under treaties we wrote after WW2, have a right to have their cases heard. If their cases have merit, we don't necessarily have to grant them residency, but we do have to find something humane to do with them. Why? Because we gave our word to do that.
Well, I don't know about movement being an inalienable right, but the problem with US immigration is that it's geared to provide employers in certain industries with cheap labor that falls outside legal protections.
Seriously, though, I see a Catch-22 in the adoption of, if not the creation of, generalist AI. As a philosophical materialist, I think such an AI is certainly possible, it's just not what we really want. What we want are machines which complement human strengths in behavioral flexibility and context-awareness by being repeatable and consistent, albeit in increasingly dynamic situations.
But the world as a whole more than just a more challenging version of a simple problem; it is complex in qualitatively different way, full of contradictory information and more to the point contradictory priorities. A machine that fully reproduced human flexibility would very likely reproduce human inconsistency.
In other words, we want a self driving car that's better at handling whatever surprises the road may throw up at it, not one that contemplates whether the passenger's life is worth preserving.
I have no doubt that the steps you recommend will improve your chances, but that's dependent on the experience and expertise of the cop. You can get yourself shot for trying to comply with officer commands. For example the officer tells you to raise your hands, and then thinks your cell phone is a gun.
Following orders can also get you shot if you misunderstand police commands. There was a black guy recently who got tasered by a cop apparently for that reason. The cop told him to sit on the curb. Then he told him to put his legs straight out. Then a second cop told him to "cross his legs", so he pulls his legs back to sit cross-legged (instead of crossing them at the ankles as the cop intended). The first cop shot him, essentially for complying with the second cop's instructions.
...what has happened so fundamentally in our country (US) where people don't care about actual citizenship, and protecting our borders?
Let me give you a liberal perspective on this: you are raising a straw man. We have no problem with protecting the border, the problem we have is with using scapegoating and scare-mongering, and bullshit waste of resources like building a wall. If you want to see the source of our problems, it's rich guys buying politicians, not Mexicans sneaking across the border to pick crops.
If you are here in this country illegally, you have criminally trespassed. You should be deported.
No, "trespass" has a specific meaning in law, and an unauthorized crossing of the border does not match that, even if it feels like tresspassing. And even as it were, the law allows people to enter your land against your wishes under certain circumstances. If a neighbor goes on your posted land to hunt, that's trespass. If he goes onto your posted land to escape a home invader, it's not trespass.
Treaties the US imposed on other people after WW2 also bind us when it comes to handling asylum seekers. We don't have to help them get here, but we do have to give them due process and administrative help when they get here, even if they sneak across our borders. It's actually the government that is breaking the law by turning asylum seekers away at the border without a hearing, which of course means they sneak across, which makes policing the border that much harder.
But I just don't get these seemingly increasing number of folks in the US promoting full blown open borders, with no control of who gets in here.
That was how we did immigration up until 1927. You showed up at Ellis Island, were checked for disease, promised you weren't an anarchist and they'd ship you over to the docks at Battery Park and let you go anywhere you wanted. The 1927 quotas were proposed by eugenicists, who were worried that the influx of Jews was lowering America's collective IQ.
Now if you were Mexican, you weren't part of the quota system. You could still walk across the border until 1965. That was because business interests needed the cheap labor. What changed in 65 was the rise of the United Farm Workers. Now this *might* just be coincidence, but if you look at how the'65 restrictions were enforced, they did not stem the influx of immigrants, so much as put those immigrants outside the protection of the law and made it harder for them to organize. The government didn't go after farmers hiring Mexicans, they went after the Mexicans. And the Mexicans they deported would be immediately replaced by other Mexicans, because there was a job waiting for them.
Now restrictions on employers have become stricter, but we still have a system which is dependent upon immigrant labor, but puts those laborers outside the protection of the law. That's the problem with the tip line; it's a tool for payback against people with no rights of due process. This is the problem of immigration in the US: the hypocrisy of the whole system corrupts things that would otherwise be a good idea.
What good does building a wall do if you can just pay someone to wave you through? And yet the demand for immigration security theater has the agency relaxing screening standards that are supposed to catch cartel infiltrators, in an agency that already has a stunning 5% corruption rate. Immigration security theater undermines national security.
Now change the immigration so it allows for the immigrant laborers we actually need and keeps the people who've been here for years peacefully
Which is what any high-end chef or experimental psychologist will tell you: a lot of taste comes from imagination -- or at least expectations. That's why fine cuisine restaurants put so much effort into arranging food on the plate; if they slapped it on any old way it would taste different.
Human sense perception has Bayesian inference baked in at the neurological level. The colors you see, for example, are the product of both the light impinging on the retina and also the brain's prior knowledge of the scene .
This is a fact that accounts, I believe, for at least some police shootings of unarmed suspects. The human visual system does not have the bandwidth or acuity to instantaneously take in a whole scene; instead it picks out a few details and constructs, entirely within the brain, an HD picture of the world. But it's more of an animation than it is a movie. Until you actually direct your fovea to the cellphone in the suspect's hands, it's just a dark blob on your retina. If you "know" there's a gun, your brain replaces that blob with a very clear picture of a gun.
So it's quite possible, likely even, that the mere knowledge a drink came from a glass bottle could actually alter the taste, even if there is no chemical difference. That doesn't prove there is no chemical difference, however. You need a blind test to see whether human sensory organs can actually pick up the difference.
I like Postgres too, but it's not even close to having the features of Oracle. The problem is that using those features ties you to Oracle, so it's something you don't want to do casually (although Oracle likes you to).
More features is not necessarily better, particularly when the features are non-standard, but some of the things Oracle does are actually quite useful. For example it's possible to fork and merge database versions, and the various versions of the database will share common database pages. This is useful when building large and complex datasets; I knew a geospatial company that used this to prepare updates to their high precision global geographic datasets. As soon as they released the next version of their data products they'd immediately fork a new version of the database and start applying updates to that.
It is really easy to screw up your Oracle database server. It's practically an operating system in itself, and there are multiple resource pools that, improperly managed, can starve various back end processes your DBA has barely even heard of. That said, properly managed it should handle heavy workloads for the iron you're running it on.
This is why Oracle *doesn't* make sense for a lot of installations. You need DBAs who either have a great deal of arcane Oracle server management knowledge, or who have the sense not to monkey with stuff they don't understand. Either way, you're talking about someone who can command a higher salary than many organizations are willing to pay for such an unglamorous position.
and very frequently has to go down for some sort of synchronization.
This sounds like a lame excuse to me. The one thing that justifies paying Oracle it's pound of flesh is having a database server that keeps processing transactions, come hell or high water. That's because Oracle does transaction isolation better than anyone else. You never have to worry about stale reads or read locks or any of that kind of rigmarole, nor do you have to give up data consistency to get there. You never have to bring the service off line to back it up or restore or even restore parts of it. You can even pick and choose individual transactions or groups of transactions to roll back all while the database chugs merrily along, accepting new updates.
Oracle exploited, very early on, "copy-on-write" technology . Although back in the day they were pretty tight lipped about how they isolated various data reading and writing processes from each other, with a more modern perspective it's clear they make extensive use of C-O-W snapshotting under the covers.
It would weaken the incentive. The majority of its revenue would come from your wanting to have access to it, not how much time you spent on it.
The thing is... if you understood what it entailed, you probably *wouldn't* want a pony. That may make it the perfect analogy. I imagine a scene playing out like this:
Military officer: What progress do you have to report?
Researcher 1: Er...
Researcher 2 [smoothly interjecting]: This AI has developed an understanding of the world at roughly equivalent to that of most human beings.
Officer: Excellent. I am off now to tell the Pentagon we can build it into all our weapon systems.
[Officer leaves]
Researcher 1: Shouldn't you have told him the AI hates America?
We shouldn't break them up no matter how big they get, but we shouldn't ask they do anything about misinformation that spreads through their vast information distribution monopolies.
Well, I can think of a way of fixing this: make them charge subscription fees.
Facebook has just over 2 billion users; it's important to realize users are not customers, they're the product being sold to advertisers. The net operating profit generated by selling those users is just under 16 billion. So conservatively, each subscribers is worth about $8/year in profit.
Suppose we say that social media companies have to charge users $1/month. Then each user is worth 50% more as a customer than he is as a product. Then, if you're not happy with the job Facebook does about keeping fake news down, even fake news delivered to your conspiracy nut uncle or SJW sister-in-law, you can vote with your pocketbook. This would require Facebook to figure out a way of managing information that was broadly acceptable to the majority of its users. No government monitoring of content would be required.
Oh, the chops exist somewhere in the private sector, that is certain. Whether they'll bid on any contracts is less certain, and whether they'd win is even less certain than that.
hat failed, so the next iteration is to get that same work force by providing the carrot on a stick labeled, "patriotism."
People willing to work for patriotism rather than money already work for the government. The problem is that they report to politicians.
...compared to most government/civil-service workers? In that light, hell yes they're paragons of efficiency and virtue. :/
I'm curious how you know this. I worked in the private sector for decades, but at least half that work was for public sector agencies (well over a hundred in all) at all levels of government and in every part of the country except Alaska. I'd say on average public employees are about the same as private sector employees, but the variance is greater.
That's because on one hand you've got rules that makes it hard to get rid of underperformers. But the other hand, you get people who are genuinely dedicated to the mission of their agency in a way that would be downright bizarre in a private sector employee. These are the kind of people who are really bullish about promoting the state's agricultural products, or getting the next generation into hunting and fishing. I once had a trip to the CDC's Fort Collins office when news of a hemorrhagic fever outbreak in Africa came through. It was like being in a suit-up scene in some cheesy action movie because those guys were going to war -- with a virus that made you bleed out of your eyeballs.
The work of those kinds of employees goes largely unnoticed. When we had the Boston Marathon bombing up here, two bombs went off in the middle of crowds and 267 people were hurt, 14 requiring amputations, but only 3 died. First responders justifiably got a lot of credit for that, but the low death rate was also the result of planners having a procedure in place which rapidly activated trauma teams at 27 hospitals, so that on average each hospital had to triage on average fewer than ten patients. Imagine if they'd all gone to the nearest hospital instead. As far as I know whoever prevented that from happening never got any media pats on the back.
The kind of government employees that make those kinds of things happen are found everywhere, and everywhere they're weighed down by deadwood coworkers and bosses. The problem is worse, however, in places where the public is fatalistic about bad government employees. Texas is the worst I've seen. One of the hardware vendors we sometimes worked with landed a bunch of contracts there by procuring prostitutes for public officials. But even in Texas there's a core of good people who make things work; they're just not the ones getting blow jobs.
The first rule of getting a non-trivial federal government is to hire a good lobbyist, even if you have to skimp on the people who will actually do the work.
After 9/11 and especially the anthrax scare, the small company I worked for was courted to be part of some responses to Homeland Security RFPs. I was uncomfortable about the misleading way our technology was presented as being just what was needed, but in fact the winning proposals had even less substance, just teams of dirt cheap contractors with a track record of absorbing large quantities of government money for very little in return. But they had simply amazingly good lobbyists.
Actually, according to Hannah Arendt, the real problem with fascists is that they don't have any real commitment to any belief or principle:
The myth that the private sector is made up of wonderfully efficient and capable people is easily disproved. Look at your private sector coworkers, and consider the private sector coworkers you've had in the past. Most likely they were not all paragons of efficiency and virtue.
Still, it's likely that they are able to adapt to change more readily than their government sector counterparts, but it's not because they're fundamentally better; they just operate under less restrictive rules and expectations.
Now it can be a good to bring in outside expertise, but the idea that bringing in private sector people will magically fix things is naive, because that expertise will operate under all the same constraints as their government employee counterparts except one: contributing to politicians who oversee the program. That's why privatization's track record of making government cheap and efficient is so un-magical.
It can be a good thing to bring in outside experts and contractors, or it can be a bad one, depending on your plan. If your plan is to shove money at them and sit back while they solve your problems, well that's a bad plan. All things equal a vendor would rather your problems be interminable and expensive, and if he has to give you a job after you retire from public office, that's a small price to pay.
If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him.
Well, it depends on the kind of laughter. People laugh for all kinds of reasons, some of them positive and healthy, but others quite nasty.