The entire purpose of patents is to stop competition, yes, by granting a short term monopoly to an inventor. In exchange, society gets the invention. The current problem is not that patents grant the holder that short term monopoly. The first problem is that software is authored; not invented. And the second problem is that "inventors" break the social contract by failing even to attempt bringing the product to market. The third problem is that the people who review and grant patents can not do so competently because it requires too much expertise and there are too many patents to check against. So, society gets nothing except bullied over petty disputes because somebody gets the bright idea to claim a monopoly on concepts (not machines, as patents are intended to protect).
Patents and copyrights both serve a purpose, and that "do away with all intellectual property" baloney is the rhetorical stuff of angsty fourteen year old children. The world does not revolve around your desire for free stuff, and we don't repair problems in a government building by burning down the building. With that approach to solving problems applied in medicine, if you got a splinter or common cold, you'd be shot in the head.
I don't buy the conclusion in the article at all, period.
1. When you refactor, you look over your source.
Programming is like any other kind of writing. The more you proofread, the more error-free your resulting work will be. While refactoring if all you're doing is copying and pasting code around, then sure, it does no good. But if you're paying attention to the code you're working with then you're also proofreading.
2. Improved interface = improved code.
The end functionality is not all that matters. Whether other programmers can use your code also has an impact upon how its quality will be perceived. When you refactor to improve an interface, you make your code more readable and more easily reused. That is most certainly an improvement.
3. Things change.
It wasn't that long ago that in C++, an insane number of malloc calls lurked behind every return. One could see this with callgrind, easily. Copies were copied and copied again just to get a return out of its function scope. Now we have move semantics. While you're refactoring, take a look and see if you can improve your performance with new language features.
4. Errors are not always obvious.
While refactoring, proofreading, and implementing new paradigms and patterns enabled by new language features, never stop compiling and running your code in your head. Sometimes ugly bugs don't show up until weird corner cases come around, but if you can think of that corner case ahead of time then you can nip it in the bud.
5. Get reacquainted.
While you're there, you might as well get to know your code well, once again. It has been a while since you've seen it, and hey, people forget. This is an excellent time to cozy up with a cup of coffee or hot cocoa and get to know the code you were once one with long ago.
If the conclusions drawn from a single case are generalized and promoted as gospel, be suspicious. Your competitors have a vested interest in teaching you to do things the wrong way. Should they ever succeed, may they be struck down by the fury of a thousand days maintaining the crap code they helped create by being underhanded.
History is full of examples of situations where a few thought something could go wrong, others didn't see the potential, and the few were right. My inability to see the risk doesn't mean you're wrong. The intentions behind your principles seem honest.
The thing is, there's a growing industry for DNA analysis, genetic engineering, and even (soon) medical profiling by DNA sample. With law enforcement empowered to gather DNA evidence without a warrant, that industry will grow. If you consider the GMO lobby's influence, trying to oppose this decision would be like trying to stop the wind with a handheld fan.
So, considering the people who can't see the risk here, it would be a great thing for others to demonstrate scenarios where this can cause harm to more than pride in our principles. It's never too late to have Congress change the law, and all this decision really says is that it's not a violation of your privacy for law enforcement to sample your DNA.
It is really difficult to imagine a scenario where DNA is stealth sampled that would hold up in court. The very act of surreptitious sampling raises the possibility that DNA is sampled from the wrong person. I worry about those who can neither afford to get results independently verified nor persuade public defenders to have it done. But the dystopian state of criminal defense and legal services in this country is another topic.
I don't conflate the two. The decision regarding whether law enforcement can collect DNA without a warrant applied to all scenarios where they might do so.
If you're worried about surreptitious collection of DNA, consider that countering an incorrect sample taken off a toilet seat or something would require little more than spitting on a swab. Every way this decision might be abused can be trivially countered.
When you become a member of the military, you surrender certain rights. It has to be that way. We're talking about a line of work that can involve seeing you knowingly ordered to your death. I'm not condoning war, by the way. It's just that so long as we have the unfortunate reality of war, there are other unfortunate things that will come with it.
Regarding rape kits, I don't think it's a violation of the rapist's rights to have their DNA collected. The DNA they "donated" in that case might be thought of as a gift and not property. When you give physical matter to somebody, it becomes theirs to do with as they see fit. This holds even if the physical matter is not wanted by the recipient. In the case of rape kits, the physical matter is regifted.
After this decision, we still won't have law enforcement going door to door collecting blood samples and cheek swabs. We also will not see prisoners compelled to donate a DNA sample. By doing that, they're testifying and testimony can not be compelled (Fifth Amendment). If anything, the Supreme Court just did away with courts compelling such donations via warrants.
Well, at least you just showed me a way to take it as a compliment. Though I don't really know that I have any kind of influence on opinions. All I do is speak my mind, and most of the time I think a little first. Though, sometimes (to be honest) I remember old clips of teenage girls screaming fainting at Beatles concerts in the 1950's. The potential for Minecraft in Microsoft's hands makes me feel just like that, and I haven't even played it in more than a year (lmao).
The military has been doing this for a long time now. If the Supreme Court had ruled differently, they would have shuttered who-knows-how-many government programs. Some of the research being done is very useful. For example, a small portion of the population is immune to HIV, and the Army did some testing to further knowledge about who is included in that group and why, whether the are genetic markers, etc. Sometimes that work has perks for the people involved. For example, I found out that I'm not immune to HIV when they tested my blood and DNA.
I've only touched on what I've seen myself. This doesn't consider cases like the testing of rape kits where a different decision could have raised the question of whether they can collect DNA samples from rape victims without the consent of the rapist or a warrant requirement that could introduce evidence-spoiling delays.
Rather than worry about this decision, what we actually need is legislation or a decision that ensures rapid DNA forensics so that false results don't arise from spoiled or damaged samples, and oversight to ensure that samples are never handled incorrectly to produce spoilage and damage to begin with. DNA is such conclusive evidence where the science is concerned that people have forgotten that it's possible for humans to mess up science. Having the most accurate tests allowable by nature means nothing if the people performing the tests are underfunded or incompetent.
They started it:D I just want to be able to speak freely when I criticize what is ultimately a great company. When I give Microsoft crap, it's not a case of, "My grandpappy said Microsoft is evil." It's a case of, "They're very nearly doing this thing correctly, and if only..." Let me give you an example.
Consider their half-hearted, slow implementation of the C++11 standard when it's already time to start work on C++14. If I point something out like that, I'm not saying that Microsoft's development tools aren't worth using. Visual Studio is the best of the best, no contest. It's the industry and academic standard for a reason. Yet that's one example of a perfectly fair, valid criticism that can't ever really be posted because those $8.00/hr PR hirelings don't actually know anything about half the topics they shill up all over the web.
So, I have two options. I can shut up and never talk to anybody about topics relevant to my profession, or I can through trial and error attempt to find a way to deal with uninformed Internet police mucking up topics they don't know anything about using only the most kindergarten of rule sets to distinguish shitposts from honest criticism.
I don't think any of them lose any sleep over my pointing out that they do us, the Internet at large, and the company who contracted with them a disservice.
Last time I encountered them, marketing had decided to stir up banter by getting people to criticize icons. The idea is that even if the topic is banal, we'd still be discussing an upcoming product. So, when I pointed out that changing icon sets is braindead-simple (as in, my eight year old daughter can do it and my two year old daughter almost has on her own before), the comment got marked down because it didn't play with their random mission of the day that we'd have to telepathically read their minds to even know ahead of time.
PR has its place. It's the future of marketing, politics, and who knows how much else? But in this early new PR industry state, it's often performed with such incompetence that it defeats the purpose. That's not actually the workers' faults. It's the half-assed performance of their bosses who just follow an outdated formula and roll in outsourcing money for it rather than ever use their brains.
^ I'm so excited about what they can do with this that I didn't even notice my many errors in the above post. I don't know if I feel like a kid in a candy store at the possibilities ahead or a dog who just got asked if it wants to go outside. My optimism is on that level.
Any time I ever common on anything having to do with Microsoft, I get pummeled by a PR firm. But this is a *positive* post, no criticism, so maybe the minimum wage public opinion manipulators will leave me along this time.
Microsoft's gaming pedigree is diverse. Each franchise has its own business model, suitable for that title alone. They didn't take, say, the Halo culture and try to force it on Fable fans. One thing Microsoft is exceedingly good at is identifying the relationship between games and the business related to them.
For me, each Halo title represents a couple hours of gameplay. Ratchet up the difficulty, beat it, done. But it also has an army of diehard fans who find its real value in PvP and turn what could be a good story in compact form into an epic adventure. Fable, for me, is one of those "get everything, do everything" franchises representing much more time in game. Where Halo has a pretty awesome miniseries, Fable will probably never see anything like that. Totally different game mechanics foster totally different cultures and business models to match. That's what I'm getting at.
If Microsoft can form a business model around the culture that already exists for Minecraft, then they will absolutely rock the entire voxel sandbox genre.
Imagine when they bring in features barely just pioneers in other games, like blueprints, and then let you have NPCs to build the blueprinted structures where directed, farmer NPCs, guards, etc to model cities. Indie devs in this genre are only looking ahead to that kind of thing but it's where the genre is heading.
Imagine when they expand combat mechanics to marry the PvP culture they're already good at fostering into a creative, open-ended gameworld. Imagine when they treat servers like planets, and we can travel between them with spaceships or magic portals.
Minecraft did not advance like it could have, due to lukewarm post-release development and a terrible modding framework. But nobody -- bar none *nobody* -- is in a better position than Microsoft to do great things for the genre. I've described a handful of systems that sound like pipe dreams but in the Minecraft boilerplate are dead simple. And then mods? Forget it. They can own this genre at that point.
I think the PR firms might leave me alone regarding this one because I am dead serious and completely honest when I say that Microsoft is totally capable of delivering something extraordinary. They would seriously have to either try hard to screw this up or do no work at all, and that's not their style.
That depends upon the method of transmission, and the folklore is based on real concepts about pathogens. The zombie scenario is the absolute worst case imaginable where an infectious disease is concerned, and nothing more really. Even a disease that causes its victims to instantly drop dead isn't as bad because the victims aren't mobile vectors.
As a case in point, chances are that nobody ever caught ebola from a fly.
The key thing about zombies is that they're made of meat. If we're talking undead zombies, maybe they won't just starve and fall but they'll rot, get eaten by animals, and generally become weaker with time. Sooner or later, it will be hard for them to transmit the infection even if they're little more than bone and infected marrow by that time. But let's wax realistic.
Suppose we get some terrible flu/rabies hybrid pandemic that essentially creates the zombie scenario with mindless, violent, highly contagious victims. Then just wait. They will die, rot, and what remains can be cleansed with chlorine, acids, and fire.
Writing code that is readable to humans is an art. Pragmatics standards are not enough. Anonymous Coward is right about this. When you begin to truly challenge yourself to make each line human-readable whether the reader understands the technical concepts in play or not, the challenge is an entirely different task than simply sticking to a set of guidelines. Sadly, there is often no time for the art of code in professional programming, but we can always sharpen our skills that way in our private projects.
When you see the online work of the "coding superstars," you also don't see the code they originally posted, the people who analyzed and criticized it, nor the cycle of discouragement and raw tenacity that led the author to improve their work over time. But you should see this in your own work.
I remember when I initially began to study programming beyond the introductory console programs nearly all STEM majors learn to write. I sought out communities to participate in because I believed that learning alongside others would encourage me. Instead, what I found was a Reddit community where a couple of users were more than a little aggressive in providing verbal beatdowns for every little mistake I made. But they never told me wrong. Today, when I go back to those same communities, I'm the one teaching those people because they've been stuck in one standard for so long. I'm nicer about it.
Compete with yourself. You don't need to achieve another's genius. In fact, if it is actually genius and not just a matter of skills you haven't yet mastered, you won't achieve it. Instead, challenge yourself to an ever higher standard. More thoroughly test your code, improve its performance, make it more self-documenting, or give it a better, more intuitive interface than you normally would. If you can't improve it functionally, try to change it so that even beginners can understand it. If you do this with enough effort, then the next thing to learn will always present itself. You won't even realize it when others begin to think of you as one of the coding superstars.
In your opinion, is the enormous number of software patents and too-high number of software patent trolls (greater than zero) partly to blame for this?
You're not allowed to criticize Facebook or Microsoft. Before expressing any thoughts, please contact the appropriate public relations contractors to inquire about opinions that are permitted.
If non-trivial problems could be solved within a guaranteed time frame, then you'd have already have a doorstep delivery date for your starship. Good management can make sure that core features are delivered on a schedule and help ensure that the schedule is not actually impossible to meet. If the schedule is not lenient enough, then the best management in the world can not guarantee delivery while also providing a guarantee for stability, security, and performance. Were this a simple matter, then the service of software development would not be worth so much.
You have three choices. You can give me enough time to finish the project correctly and receive an awesome result, but you will pay for that extra development time. You can give me too little time to deliver a quality result, but you will pay me for patches. You can give me too little development time and opt out of paying for updates, but you will pay for it when there are problems. Choose well.
There's a very old, very over-used saying about technology that people must be forgetting. It comes with three possible qualities: good, fast, and cheap. You may choose two.
Faithful people out there, please don't take any of what follows to mean that I'm making arguments about anything spiritual. This isn't about whether a machine can have a soul or not; that's an entirely different topic. And if a machine can show us a specific neurological basis for each and every thing regarding faith, that does not invalidate your beliefs. It only teaches us about how you experience those beliefs. That distinction isn't only important so that we can show you respect, but also because failing to make that distinction would put us in the wrong rhetorical and analytic frame for this topic.
First, let's discuss this concept of emotions. We have to get this out of the way ahead of everything.
Robots can not have emotions in any sense that we are familiar with them. Period. It is impossible to create an artificial entity with human emotions because every possible artificial entity is patently not human.
Our emotions are produced by chemical processes that in turn elicit physical reactions. When your stomach turns from disgust, you get butterflies in your belly upon seeing a crush, your heart pounds when you are afraid, or any other emotion is experienced, a complicated chain of physical reactions is taking place. Our nervous systems then transmit information back to our brains about our bodies' reaction to a stimulus that originated in the brain to begin with. Every single emotion is basically a process of the brain saying, "Hey, body (or, hey brain-self), are you getting this?" and the body (or a different part of the brain) responds, "Yep!"
After that point, the brain reinterprets that feedback from the body once more and somehow incorporates that into your subjective, phenomenological perception. Only then do you actually feel the emotion. In this regard, there is very little (or no) difference between an emotion and an instinctual impulse other than where it begins in the brain or where it ends up -- and that same distinction is present in some way between everything we'd normally call an emotion. Thinking of emotions in this way is not natural to us, and can lead us to some weird but not necessarily untrue conclusions. For example, by this definition hunger is an emotion. By including interactions between parts of the brain in this definition, your sentience might even be considered an emotion. This really blurs some lines, but it's an important aspect of thinking about "machine emotion" that just might sometimes uncomfortably deviate from our intuitive expectations.
For robots to have actual emotions, they would need actual human bodies AND brains -- which they can't have because they're machines. The idea of slaving logical processes to an emotional state does not describe emotion (even if it might some day produce a convincing simulation of emotion). It describes a scoring of conditions. Within the program, each "emotional" state is just a numeric resultant dependent upon other states in the machine. No belly to get butterflies, no heart to pound, no nervous system to play its role in a conversation between brain and body. In every natural sense, no brain and no body! If a scoring of conditions is all that is required for us to say that a machine has emotion, then (surprise!) the device you're using to read this has "emotion". Clearly, your PC or smartphone doesn't experience or possess anything we'd call feelings, thus demonstrating that a slaving of logic to states is not the same thing as emotion.
In fact, we have a name for that. It's a state machine.
Having covered that, let's now consider faith. We might create a strong AI to test its perceptions in matters of faith two ways. The first is to simulate emotions, just as suggested, but until we can simulate the physiological processes in play with emotions right down to the molecular scale (at least as a summary abstraction), we can't actually call that simulation a truly accurate model of our subjective experiences. In other words, the machine would ul
And now confirmed for Slashdot, making this literally The Last Site. In social media (confirmed with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google+, Ello, StackExchange, Digg, Myspace, Twitch, and Slashdot), any discussion with the name "Microsoft" is a toxic public relations stunt where nobody is allowed to express anything not approved ahead of time of by the PR firm.
Slashdot now joins a long list of sites I will refuse to ever discuss or read of Microsoft on. If they keep this up, they may alienate enough of us that their marketers can only talk to themselves. If they are really so intent on having us discuss news about them, then they could just stop posting it. Now watch the negative mod points get spent by their robots, on this below-threshold, third layer comment that almost nobody will ever see.
In thirty years we'll find out the real reason they're spying on everyone. Right now, I'm working on an AI, and within that AI it requires user names and passwords to access its own data at the memory level. Layer on traditional security and to break this system, hackers would have to hack their hacks and the hacks hacking hacks.
And I'm just some dude. I've studied what I'm doing for years, and some experts say that I sell my skills short, but come on. I'm just some dude. There are people out there who can do the same thing by drawing a picture and changing its extension to.exe.
Frankly, if I didn't know my own work and that it's absolutely harmless, I'd be afraid of me. Knowing that, and imagining what's out there being created by practically anybody with time and at least two fingers to peck a keyboard with, I know damn well the real reason we're all being watched. Hell, it takes Elon Musk being elevated to Tony Stark status and billions spent before people have finally pulled their heads from their rear ends to get serious about AI ethics.
The future of national security is written in ones and zeroes, and our government has finally learned that those clowns in the legislature and the spooks in the FBI are always a day late and a dollar short when it comes to tech and then still can't manage to come up with a workable solution to problems if they all pop adderall and discuss it with the help of Wikipedia and two universities. Somebody has to be able to assess and confront threats that these old men who still can't program their VCRs have utterly zero hope of ever comprehending.
Fifteen years ago, it was piracy that people innovated regarding, thus disrupting the most well-established, well-connected industries in the United States. The entire piracy saga began with a college kid in a dorm room trying to share booty music with his frat buddies. So, layer on top of all this the fact that the rich know they're not untouchable and a large part of our population feels alienated and pissed off, and what did you think would happen? That they'd turn over the keys to the kingdom to the first talented software engineer to brainfart up something disruptive enough?
Regarding the Cisco interceptions, I don't think we have accurate details. Just thinking this over at a cursory glance for mere seconds should lead anybody to realize that journalists aren't going to risk becoming the next Snowden. So, when a story breaks, details are fudged. Expect it. And speaking from common sense, I do not believe that they intercept all shipments of routers so they can teleport them away to some clandestine location all without so much as an online shipment checker noticing. It's not a tenable approach, and we'd be stupid to believe it.
Our generation has thumbed its nose at power, like a young man so full of piss and vinegar that he challenges his father. And just like in wolf packs when the alpha puts down some pup that thinks it's ready to take over, the government is showing us that we're not there yet and that they won't let us get there. What the hell did people think would happen?
Change the icons. If you can't figure out how to do that then you probably shouldn't be beta testing an operating system. I'll rail on Microsoft's really terrible attempt to freshen things up as much as the next guy because, frankly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this beholder hates their kindergarten construction paper and paste style.
But for crying out loud, if you're going to choose something as important as your operating system based on whether you like the appearance of some easily customized thing, then you could probably just use whatever random OS and it would suit you fine. Not to mention, who actually spends most of their time looking at icons, as the critic mentions? Most of the time, I'm looking at Visual Studio or a browser.
This is aside from the fact that the most important thing about the GUI for an OS is that it facilitates productivity by making it fast and simple to perform most tasks. While Microsoft's artistic style currently looks worse than Windows 3.1 on a monochrome CRT, it does facilitate productivity. They're going with function over form because analysis of their sales and customers' needs has shown that it's the smart bet.
Also, they want to make everything touch screen friendly. Give them ten years and we'll be going through this again when they're too late making everything VR friendly as an afterthought. Change is scary. Sometimes, change is ugly. But this is the pettiest criticism I've ever seen for an OS.
This is to rape what assault is to battery. I agree with the spirit of your thoughts, but really, if in some nightmarish hell of a reality you had to choose between having your nudes posted and actually being raped, I think we all know you (and we) would choose the nude post.
But speaking of fear and intimidation, Reddit has by far the worst trolls on the Internet. These people, if you encounter them, are so adept at their game that you can end up with a migraine -- thus signalling the possibility of actual neurological damage resulting from dealing with them. Unauthorized nude posts are a very terrible thing impacting a very small number of people. Nobody is immune to the gangrenous rot of the "shit ______ says" legions, the MRA hate groups, the sovereign citizens, and the faux conservatives on that site.
You're right that the censorship card is overplayed. Posting your ex girlfriend's fanny isn't in the domain of free expression. It's her cooter, so the expression of posting it is hers alone. it's not censorship to stop people from expressing things FOR other people. Free expression means that we get to speak for ourselves! Brainless repetition of, "But mah censorships!" missing that distinction because those doing it don't stop to think. Well, that and some are afraid they may see a little less cooter.
Come on, this is the Internet -- there will still be more cooter than you can ever see in one lifetime. It costs us nothing to have a little respect.
But this is not where Reddit needs to end its reforms. It is absolutely full of hate groups and the kind of people whose blatant advocacy for acts such as murdering police and public officials raises the question of how many are disgruntled people abusing anonymity to vent frustration and how many are actual genuine domestic terrorists. Considering Reddit's numerous problems, cracking down harder on unauthorized cooter pics is basically a stunt for publicity.
After all, it has always been against the terms of service to post nude pics without permission of the subject and they have always removed such content immediately upon request *and* banned the user who posted it. This is not a change. It's a reminder.
What can I say? When you are right, you are damn right. That is irresponsible. You make me want to thank China for bringing up the topic. We need to be cautious that overall we don't damage the extent to which China economically benefits from their relationship with us though because not staying on friendly terms with the sleeping dragon is somewhere in the realm of Nero level insane.
I wonder if it would be possible to offshore overall fewer jobs to China specifically but for the same net cost of the current jobs there. Let's give them some unemployed people to manage without hurting their GDP.
Slashdot Mirror
The entire purpose of patents is to stop competition, yes, by granting a short term monopoly to an inventor. In exchange, society gets the invention. The current problem is not that patents grant the holder that short term monopoly. The first problem is that software is authored; not invented. And the second problem is that "inventors" break the social contract by failing even to attempt bringing the product to market. The third problem is that the people who review and grant patents can not do so competently because it requires too much expertise and there are too many patents to check against. So, society gets nothing except bullied over petty disputes because somebody gets the bright idea to claim a monopoly on concepts (not machines, as patents are intended to protect).
Patents and copyrights both serve a purpose, and that "do away with all intellectual property" baloney is the rhetorical stuff of angsty fourteen year old children. The world does not revolve around your desire for free stuff, and we don't repair problems in a government building by burning down the building. With that approach to solving problems applied in medicine, if you got a splinter or common cold, you'd be shot in the head.
I don't buy the conclusion in the article at all, period.
1. When you refactor, you look over your source.
Programming is like any other kind of writing. The more you proofread, the more error-free your resulting work will be. While refactoring if all you're doing is copying and pasting code around, then sure, it does no good. But if you're paying attention to the code you're working with then you're also proofreading.
2. Improved interface = improved code.
The end functionality is not all that matters. Whether other programmers can use your code also has an impact upon how its quality will be perceived. When you refactor to improve an interface, you make your code more readable and more easily reused. That is most certainly an improvement.
3. Things change.
It wasn't that long ago that in C++, an insane number of malloc calls lurked behind every return. One could see this with callgrind, easily. Copies were copied and copied again just to get a return out of its function scope. Now we have move semantics. While you're refactoring, take a look and see if you can improve your performance with new language features.
4. Errors are not always obvious.
While refactoring, proofreading, and implementing new paradigms and patterns enabled by new language features, never stop compiling and running your code in your head. Sometimes ugly bugs don't show up until weird corner cases come around, but if you can think of that corner case ahead of time then you can nip it in the bud.
5. Get reacquainted.
While you're there, you might as well get to know your code well, once again. It has been a while since you've seen it, and hey, people forget. This is an excellent time to cozy up with a cup of coffee or hot cocoa and get to know the code you were once one with long ago.
If the conclusions drawn from a single case are generalized and promoted as gospel, be suspicious. Your competitors have a vested interest in teaching you to do things the wrong way. Should they ever succeed, may they be struck down by the fury of a thousand days maintaining the crap code they helped create by being underhanded.
History is full of examples of situations where a few thought something could go wrong, others didn't see the potential, and the few were right. My inability to see the risk doesn't mean you're wrong. The intentions behind your principles seem honest.
The thing is, there's a growing industry for DNA analysis, genetic engineering, and even (soon) medical profiling by DNA sample. With law enforcement empowered to gather DNA evidence without a warrant, that industry will grow. If you consider the GMO lobby's influence, trying to oppose this decision would be like trying to stop the wind with a handheld fan.
So, considering the people who can't see the risk here, it would be a great thing for others to demonstrate scenarios where this can cause harm to more than pride in our principles. It's never too late to have Congress change the law, and all this decision really says is that it's not a violation of your privacy for law enforcement to sample your DNA.
It is really difficult to imagine a scenario where DNA is stealth sampled that would hold up in court. The very act of surreptitious sampling raises the possibility that DNA is sampled from the wrong person. I worry about those who can neither afford to get results independently verified nor persuade public defenders to have it done. But the dystopian state of criminal defense and legal services in this country is another topic.
I don't conflate the two. The decision regarding whether law enforcement can collect DNA without a warrant applied to all scenarios where they might do so.
If you're worried about surreptitious collection of DNA, consider that countering an incorrect sample taken off a toilet seat or something would require little more than spitting on a swab. Every way this decision might be abused can be trivially countered.
When you become a member of the military, you surrender certain rights. It has to be that way. We're talking about a line of work that can involve seeing you knowingly ordered to your death. I'm not condoning war, by the way. It's just that so long as we have the unfortunate reality of war, there are other unfortunate things that will come with it.
Regarding rape kits, I don't think it's a violation of the rapist's rights to have their DNA collected. The DNA they "donated" in that case might be thought of as a gift and not property. When you give physical matter to somebody, it becomes theirs to do with as they see fit. This holds even if the physical matter is not wanted by the recipient. In the case of rape kits, the physical matter is regifted.
After this decision, we still won't have law enforcement going door to door collecting blood samples and cheek swabs. We also will not see prisoners compelled to donate a DNA sample. By doing that, they're testifying and testimony can not be compelled (Fifth Amendment). If anything, the Supreme Court just did away with courts compelling such donations via warrants.
Well, at least you just showed me a way to take it as a compliment. Though I don't really know that I have any kind of influence on opinions. All I do is speak my mind, and most of the time I think a little first. Though, sometimes (to be honest) I remember old clips of teenage girls screaming fainting at Beatles concerts in the 1950's. The potential for Minecraft in Microsoft's hands makes me feel just like that, and I haven't even played it in more than a year (lmao).
The military has been doing this for a long time now. If the Supreme Court had ruled differently, they would have shuttered who-knows-how-many government programs. Some of the research being done is very useful. For example, a small portion of the population is immune to HIV, and the Army did some testing to further knowledge about who is included in that group and why, whether the are genetic markers, etc. Sometimes that work has perks for the people involved. For example, I found out that I'm not immune to HIV when they tested my blood and DNA.
I've only touched on what I've seen myself. This doesn't consider cases like the testing of rape kits where a different decision could have raised the question of whether they can collect DNA samples from rape victims without the consent of the rapist or a warrant requirement that could introduce evidence-spoiling delays.
Rather than worry about this decision, what we actually need is legislation or a decision that ensures rapid DNA forensics so that false results don't arise from spoiled or damaged samples, and oversight to ensure that samples are never handled incorrectly to produce spoilage and damage to begin with. DNA is such conclusive evidence where the science is concerned that people have forgotten that it's possible for humans to mess up science. Having the most accurate tests allowable by nature means nothing if the people performing the tests are underfunded or incompetent.
Salt looks like exactly what you're describing.
They started it :D I just want to be able to speak freely when I criticize what is ultimately a great company. When I give Microsoft crap, it's not a case of, "My grandpappy said Microsoft is evil." It's a case of, "They're very nearly doing this thing correctly, and if only..." Let me give you an example.
Consider their half-hearted, slow implementation of the C++11 standard when it's already time to start work on C++14. If I point something out like that, I'm not saying that Microsoft's development tools aren't worth using. Visual Studio is the best of the best, no contest. It's the industry and academic standard for a reason. Yet that's one example of a perfectly fair, valid criticism that can't ever really be posted because those $8.00/hr PR hirelings don't actually know anything about half the topics they shill up all over the web.
So, I have two options. I can shut up and never talk to anybody about topics relevant to my profession, or I can through trial and error attempt to find a way to deal with uninformed Internet police mucking up topics they don't know anything about using only the most kindergarten of rule sets to distinguish shitposts from honest criticism.
I don't think any of them lose any sleep over my pointing out that they do us, the Internet at large, and the company who contracted with them a disservice.
Last time I encountered them, marketing had decided to stir up banter by getting people to criticize icons. The idea is that even if the topic is banal, we'd still be discussing an upcoming product. So, when I pointed out that changing icon sets is braindead-simple (as in, my eight year old daughter can do it and my two year old daughter almost has on her own before), the comment got marked down because it didn't play with their random mission of the day that we'd have to telepathically read their minds to even know ahead of time.
PR has its place. It's the future of marketing, politics, and who knows how much else? But in this early new PR industry state, it's often performed with such incompetence that it defeats the purpose. That's not actually the workers' faults. It's the half-assed performance of their bosses who just follow an outdated formula and roll in outsourcing money for it rather than ever use their brains.
^ I'm so excited about what they can do with this that I didn't even notice my many errors in the above post. I don't know if I feel like a kid in a candy store at the possibilities ahead or a dog who just got asked if it wants to go outside. My optimism is on that level.
Any time I ever common on anything having to do with Microsoft, I get pummeled by a PR firm. But this is a *positive* post, no criticism, so maybe the minimum wage public opinion manipulators will leave me along this time.
Microsoft's gaming pedigree is diverse. Each franchise has its own business model, suitable for that title alone. They didn't take, say, the Halo culture and try to force it on Fable fans. One thing Microsoft is exceedingly good at is identifying the relationship between games and the business related to them.
For me, each Halo title represents a couple hours of gameplay. Ratchet up the difficulty, beat it, done. But it also has an army of diehard fans who find its real value in PvP and turn what could be a good story in compact form into an epic adventure. Fable, for me, is one of those "get everything, do everything" franchises representing much more time in game. Where Halo has a pretty awesome miniseries, Fable will probably never see anything like that. Totally different game mechanics foster totally different cultures and business models to match. That's what I'm getting at.
If Microsoft can form a business model around the culture that already exists for Minecraft, then they will absolutely rock the entire voxel sandbox genre.
Imagine when they bring in features barely just pioneers in other games, like blueprints, and then let you have NPCs to build the blueprinted structures where directed, farmer NPCs, guards, etc to model cities. Indie devs in this genre are only looking ahead to that kind of thing but it's where the genre is heading.
Imagine when they expand combat mechanics to marry the PvP culture they're already good at fostering into a creative, open-ended gameworld. Imagine when they treat servers like planets, and we can travel between them with spaceships or magic portals.
Minecraft did not advance like it could have, due to lukewarm post-release development and a terrible modding framework. But nobody -- bar none *nobody* -- is in a better position than Microsoft to do great things for the genre. I've described a handful of systems that sound like pipe dreams but in the Minecraft boilerplate are dead simple. And then mods? Forget it. They can own this genre at that point.
I think the PR firms might leave me alone regarding this one because I am dead serious and completely honest when I say that Microsoft is totally capable of delivering something extraordinary. They would seriously have to either try hard to screw this up or do no work at all, and that's not their style.
That depends upon the method of transmission, and the folklore is based on real concepts about pathogens. The zombie scenario is the absolute worst case imaginable where an infectious disease is concerned, and nothing more really. Even a disease that causes its victims to instantly drop dead isn't as bad because the victims aren't mobile vectors.
As a case in point, chances are that nobody ever caught ebola from a fly.
The key thing about zombies is that they're made of meat. If we're talking undead zombies, maybe they won't just starve and fall but they'll rot, get eaten by animals, and generally become weaker with time. Sooner or later, it will be hard for them to transmit the infection even if they're little more than bone and infected marrow by that time. But let's wax realistic.
Suppose we get some terrible flu/rabies hybrid pandemic that essentially creates the zombie scenario with mindless, violent, highly contagious victims. Then just wait. They will die, rot, and what remains can be cleansed with chlorine, acids, and fire.
Hiding is exactly the right thing to do.
Writing code that is readable to humans is an art. Pragmatics standards are not enough. Anonymous Coward is right about this. When you begin to truly challenge yourself to make each line human-readable whether the reader understands the technical concepts in play or not, the challenge is an entirely different task than simply sticking to a set of guidelines. Sadly, there is often no time for the art of code in professional programming, but we can always sharpen our skills that way in our private projects.
When you see the online work of the "coding superstars," you also don't see the code they originally posted, the people who analyzed and criticized it, nor the cycle of discouragement and raw tenacity that led the author to improve their work over time. But you should see this in your own work.
I remember when I initially began to study programming beyond the introductory console programs nearly all STEM majors learn to write. I sought out communities to participate in because I believed that learning alongside others would encourage me. Instead, what I found was a Reddit community where a couple of users were more than a little aggressive in providing verbal beatdowns for every little mistake I made. But they never told me wrong. Today, when I go back to those same communities, I'm the one teaching those people because they've been stuck in one standard for so long. I'm nicer about it.
Compete with yourself. You don't need to achieve another's genius. In fact, if it is actually genius and not just a matter of skills you haven't yet mastered, you won't achieve it. Instead, challenge yourself to an ever higher standard. More thoroughly test your code, improve its performance, make it more self-documenting, or give it a better, more intuitive interface than you normally would. If you can't improve it functionally, try to change it so that even beginners can understand it. If you do this with enough effort, then the next thing to learn will always present itself. You won't even realize it when others begin to think of you as one of the coding superstars.
In your opinion, is the enormous number of software patents and too-high number of software patent trolls (greater than zero) partly to blame for this?
You're not allowed to criticize Facebook or Microsoft. Before expressing any thoughts, please contact the appropriate public relations contractors to inquire about opinions that are permitted.
If non-trivial problems could be solved within a guaranteed time frame, then you'd have already have a doorstep delivery date for your starship. Good management can make sure that core features are delivered on a schedule and help ensure that the schedule is not actually impossible to meet. If the schedule is not lenient enough, then the best management in the world can not guarantee delivery while also providing a guarantee for stability, security, and performance. Were this a simple matter, then the service of software development would not be worth so much.
You have three choices. You can give me enough time to finish the project correctly and receive an awesome result, but you will pay for that extra development time. You can give me too little time to deliver a quality result, but you will pay me for patches. You can give me too little development time and opt out of paying for updates, but you will pay for it when there are problems. Choose well.
There's a very old, very over-used saying about technology that people must be forgetting. It comes with three possible qualities: good, fast, and cheap. You may choose two.
Faithful people out there, please don't take any of what follows to mean that I'm making arguments about anything spiritual. This isn't about whether a machine can have a soul or not; that's an entirely different topic. And if a machine can show us a specific neurological basis for each and every thing regarding faith, that does not invalidate your beliefs. It only teaches us about how you experience those beliefs. That distinction isn't only important so that we can show you respect, but also because failing to make that distinction would put us in the wrong rhetorical and analytic frame for this topic.
First, let's discuss this concept of emotions. We have to get this out of the way ahead of everything.
Robots can not have emotions in any sense that we are familiar with them. Period. It is impossible to create an artificial entity with human emotions because every possible artificial entity is patently not human.
Our emotions are produced by chemical processes that in turn elicit physical reactions. When your stomach turns from disgust, you get butterflies in your belly upon seeing a crush, your heart pounds when you are afraid, or any other emotion is experienced, a complicated chain of physical reactions is taking place. Our nervous systems then transmit information back to our brains about our bodies' reaction to a stimulus that originated in the brain to begin with. Every single emotion is basically a process of the brain saying, "Hey, body (or, hey brain-self), are you getting this?" and the body (or a different part of the brain) responds, "Yep!"
After that point, the brain reinterprets that feedback from the body once more and somehow incorporates that into your subjective, phenomenological perception. Only then do you actually feel the emotion. In this regard, there is very little (or no) difference between an emotion and an instinctual impulse other than where it begins in the brain or where it ends up -- and that same distinction is present in some way between everything we'd normally call an emotion. Thinking of emotions in this way is not natural to us, and can lead us to some weird but not necessarily untrue conclusions. For example, by this definition hunger is an emotion. By including interactions between parts of the brain in this definition, your sentience might even be considered an emotion. This really blurs some lines, but it's an important aspect of thinking about "machine emotion" that just might sometimes uncomfortably deviate from our intuitive expectations.
For robots to have actual emotions, they would need actual human bodies AND brains -- which they can't have because they're machines. The idea of slaving logical processes to an emotional state does not describe emotion (even if it might some day produce a convincing simulation of emotion). It describes a scoring of conditions. Within the program, each "emotional" state is just a numeric resultant dependent upon other states in the machine. No belly to get butterflies, no heart to pound, no nervous system to play its role in a conversation between brain and body. In every natural sense, no brain and no body! If a scoring of conditions is all that is required for us to say that a machine has emotion, then (surprise!) the device you're using to read this has "emotion". Clearly, your PC or smartphone doesn't experience or possess anything we'd call feelings, thus demonstrating that a slaving of logic to states is not the same thing as emotion.
In fact, we have a name for that. It's a state machine.
Having covered that, let's now consider faith. We might create a strong AI to test its perceptions in matters of faith two ways. The first is to simulate emotions, just as suggested, but until we can simulate the physiological processes in play with emotions right down to the molecular scale (at least as a summary abstraction), we can't actually call that simulation a truly accurate model of our subjective experiences. In other words, the machine would ul
And now confirmed for Slashdot, making this literally The Last Site. In social media (confirmed with Twitter, Facebook, Reddit, Google+, Ello, StackExchange, Digg, Myspace, Twitch, and Slashdot), any discussion with the name "Microsoft" is a toxic public relations stunt where nobody is allowed to express anything not approved ahead of time of by the PR firm.
Slashdot now joins a long list of sites I will refuse to ever discuss or read of Microsoft on. If they keep this up, they may alienate enough of us that their marketers can only talk to themselves. If they are really so intent on having us discuss news about them, then they could just stop posting it. Now watch the negative mod points get spent by their robots, on this below-threshold, third layer comment that almost nobody will ever see.
Looks like clickbait is here to stay on Slashdot, and common sense is out.
In thirty years we'll find out the real reason they're spying on everyone. Right now, I'm working on an AI, and within that AI it requires user names and passwords to access its own data at the memory level. Layer on traditional security and to break this system, hackers would have to hack their hacks and the hacks hacking hacks.
.exe.
And I'm just some dude. I've studied what I'm doing for years, and some experts say that I sell my skills short, but come on. I'm just some dude. There are people out there who can do the same thing by drawing a picture and changing its extension to
Frankly, if I didn't know my own work and that it's absolutely harmless, I'd be afraid of me. Knowing that, and imagining what's out there being created by practically anybody with time and at least two fingers to peck a keyboard with, I know damn well the real reason we're all being watched. Hell, it takes Elon Musk being elevated to Tony Stark status and billions spent before people have finally pulled their heads from their rear ends to get serious about AI ethics.
The future of national security is written in ones and zeroes, and our government has finally learned that those clowns in the legislature and the spooks in the FBI are always a day late and a dollar short when it comes to tech and then still can't manage to come up with a workable solution to problems if they all pop adderall and discuss it with the help of Wikipedia and two universities. Somebody has to be able to assess and confront threats that these old men who still can't program their VCRs have utterly zero hope of ever comprehending.
Fifteen years ago, it was piracy that people innovated regarding, thus disrupting the most well-established, well-connected industries in the United States. The entire piracy saga began with a college kid in a dorm room trying to share booty music with his frat buddies. So, layer on top of all this the fact that the rich know they're not untouchable and a large part of our population feels alienated and pissed off, and what did you think would happen? That they'd turn over the keys to the kingdom to the first talented software engineer to brainfart up something disruptive enough?
Regarding the Cisco interceptions, I don't think we have accurate details. Just thinking this over at a cursory glance for mere seconds should lead anybody to realize that journalists aren't going to risk becoming the next Snowden. So, when a story breaks, details are fudged. Expect it. And speaking from common sense, I do not believe that they intercept all shipments of routers so they can teleport them away to some clandestine location all without so much as an online shipment checker noticing. It's not a tenable approach, and we'd be stupid to believe it.
Our generation has thumbed its nose at power, like a young man so full of piss and vinegar that he challenges his father. And just like in wolf packs when the alpha puts down some pup that thinks it's ready to take over, the government is showing us that we're not there yet and that they won't let us get there. What the hell did people think would happen?
Change the icons. If you can't figure out how to do that then you probably shouldn't be beta testing an operating system. I'll rail on Microsoft's really terrible attempt to freshen things up as much as the next guy because, frankly, beauty is in the eye of the beholder and this beholder hates their kindergarten construction paper and paste style.
But for crying out loud, if you're going to choose something as important as your operating system based on whether you like the appearance of some easily customized thing, then you could probably just use whatever random OS and it would suit you fine. Not to mention, who actually spends most of their time looking at icons, as the critic mentions? Most of the time, I'm looking at Visual Studio or a browser.
This is aside from the fact that the most important thing about the GUI for an OS is that it facilitates productivity by making it fast and simple to perform most tasks. While Microsoft's artistic style currently looks worse than Windows 3.1 on a monochrome CRT, it does facilitate productivity. They're going with function over form because analysis of their sales and customers' needs has shown that it's the smart bet.
Also, they want to make everything touch screen friendly. Give them ten years and we'll be going through this again when they're too late making everything VR friendly as an afterthought. Change is scary. Sometimes, change is ugly. But this is the pettiest criticism I've ever seen for an OS.
This is to rape what assault is to battery. I agree with the spirit of your thoughts, but really, if in some nightmarish hell of a reality you had to choose between having your nudes posted and actually being raped, I think we all know you (and we) would choose the nude post.
But speaking of fear and intimidation, Reddit has by far the worst trolls on the Internet. These people, if you encounter them, are so adept at their game that you can end up with a migraine -- thus signalling the possibility of actual neurological damage resulting from dealing with them. Unauthorized nude posts are a very terrible thing impacting a very small number of people. Nobody is immune to the gangrenous rot of the "shit ______ says" legions, the MRA hate groups, the sovereign citizens, and the faux conservatives on that site.
You're right that the censorship card is overplayed. Posting your ex girlfriend's fanny isn't in the domain of free expression. It's her cooter, so the expression of posting it is hers alone. it's not censorship to stop people from expressing things FOR other people. Free expression means that we get to speak for ourselves! Brainless repetition of, "But mah censorships!" missing that distinction because those doing it don't stop to think. Well, that and some are afraid they may see a little less cooter.
Come on, this is the Internet -- there will still be more cooter than you can ever see in one lifetime. It costs us nothing to have a little respect.
But this is not where Reddit needs to end its reforms. It is absolutely full of hate groups and the kind of people whose blatant advocacy for acts such as murdering police and public officials raises the question of how many are disgruntled people abusing anonymity to vent frustration and how many are actual genuine domestic terrorists. Considering Reddit's numerous problems, cracking down harder on unauthorized cooter pics is basically a stunt for publicity.
After all, it has always been against the terms of service to post nude pics without permission of the subject and they have always removed such content immediately upon request *and* banned the user who posted it. This is not a change. It's a reminder.
What can I say? When you are right, you are damn right. That is irresponsible. You make me want to thank China for bringing up the topic. We need to be cautious that overall we don't damage the extent to which China economically benefits from their relationship with us though because not staying on friendly terms with the sleeping dragon is somewhere in the realm of Nero level insane.
I wonder if it would be possible to offshore overall fewer jobs to China specifically but for the same net cost of the current jobs there. Let's give them some unemployed people to manage without hurting their GDP.
Also, Taiwan? Heh. Tibet. (No! Bad duck_rifted!)