I'd say the exact opposite is true. The majority of reasonable people interested in tech news stopped posting or left years ago - e.g. to various subreddits and hacker news, or no forum at all to save time - and the many newcomers from the past five years or so are messing up moderation and the submitters have turned Slashdot in some kind of political opinion and household gadget slashvertisement site. And a large army of AC trolls appeared. I used to come here to learn about things like kernel development, satellite communication, or grey hat hacking, and noways people on/. seriously discuss whether "Alexa" is an operating system.
What you are experiencing seems to be due to changes to the mod point algorithm after the last ownership change. I believe it was designed to keep the trolls at bay and it works to some extent.
(Disclaimer: I've lurked on Slashdot since its beginnings and posted very actively about ten years ago, under various accounts and user names that are long gone.)
You portray this as if it was a negative trend but it isn't. It boosts the economy of poorer countries and adjusts them slowly to the economy of richer countries, which is an overall positive trend. We're all living in one world.
That being said, this self-correcting feature of capitalism does not suffice in general. There is no way around monetary transfers from rich regions of the earth to poorer regions if you want to prevent mass migration movements (and the same will be true in future if we start to have colonies in space), because there will always be structurally weak or otherwise disadvantaged regions.
Anybody is entitled to their opinion, including Obama and Putin, let alone Trump who certainly doesn't hold back. Voicing your opinion as a head of state is not propaganda, it's your duty as a president. You're right that it's sometimes considered inappropriate insofar as foreign elections are concerned, but not for the reasons you suggest. It's sometimes considered unwise because it can create a diplomatic problem when the other party than the one you've supported is elected. Otherwise there is nothing wrong with voicing public opinions and endorsements and every government does that in one form or another. That's not the problem with Russia's attempts to influence the US election - these attempts where based on electronic attacks, botnets and sneaky, secret ad campaigns. There is a lot wrong with that.
The difference is whether the means are overt, clearly attributable to the respective government, or covert and stealthy.
Both sides are fairly retarded, so maybe this propaganda effort was successful. Are there no reasonable, halfway educated center-right or center-left people left in the US?
Not really, it started out well but the Klingon's are really old hat and the inner conflict of the first officer seems to be artificial and unimaginative. Maybe the story becomes more interesting later.
The good thing to do would be to collect intelligence on suspects, hand the information to the police who then arrest them, not to cause kids in the whole world to blow their hands off.
To be more precise, the train would likely be pulverized into very small fragments, just like when an airplane crashes directly onto some massive surface.
And it has been evolving at a steady pace since then. First, expert systems, then powerful defeasible reasoning systems and diagnosis, text-to-speech, rudimentary speech recognition, recommender systems. Now complex image recognition, music synthesis, intelligent search, working speech recognition and many more machine-learning based pattern recognition tasks.
Given how young A.I. research is as a discipline, it has really made tremendous advances. Your phone can solve AI tasks that would have been considered inconceivable in the 60s. It may not yet seem human-like enough for you to be classified as intelligent behavior, but there is a threshold that will be passed probably still during this century.
No, you're not the only one. This so-called "chain of trust" is ridiculous. People are forced to trust binary blobs of various nebulous business entities with a long history of nefarious business practices, bad security, and unnecessary collusion with sometimes shady government entities. That's pretty much the opposite of trustworthiness.
Stop with that conspiracy nonsense and US partisan bullshit, please! Nature doesn't give a shit about politics, facts can be checked regardless of anyone's political affiliation. There's one reality and it doesn't care for which party you vote.
In Germany, a EULA presented in this way is not enforceable and most of them are invalid and void anyway, because they contain clauses that are not compatible with consumer rights, contract law, or other regulations. Contract law in the EU is very different from US contract law. The corporations are just betting regularly that nobody will sue them or otherwise invalidate the contract, which sadly is the case.
My general advice is to read the EULA, print it out, and send the company any changes you would like to make to it. Change anything you disagree with to an alternative suggestion of mutual benefit. If only 5% of customers or even less would do that, this EULA nonsense would stop very quickly.
This looks like one of those cases when someone was not fully willing to 'cooperate' with certain people and then the FBI is 'tipped off' with some very bogus evidence. I'm speculating, of course, but anyway that's how it looks to me.
I've recently chatted about this topic a bit with a fairly well-established expert in AI. He claimed that if genuine AI is principally possible - which we both believe, although opinions about this vary - then a superintelligence will almost certainly arise within a rather short time frame after the first genuine AI has been created.
If that happens, the outcome would likely be bad for humans, just like humans have turned out to be a threat to every less intelligent species on earth. A superintelligence is by definition much more intelligent than us, which means that superintelligences could also manipulate human society much more easily than humans can. They might for example predict stock markets way more accurately than human experts, which would be an easy way for them to get very rich very fast. Another issue is that if genuine AI is possible, it will almost certainly not be human-like in all of its features. Even current self-learning AI is not at all human-like. This poses a big challenge, because you can never be sure whether the software has really learned the same as humans, and because you cannot predict how the software will modify itself in future on the basis of its learning algorithms. It may look only superficially as if it thinks and acts like a human, whereas under the hood its reasoning could be very alien.
The underlying problem is called the value alignment problem: How can we make sure that a genuine AI's values align with human values? I believe there is no solution to it.
I'm blocking all ads indiscriminately and have a very fine web experience. I'm not interested in ads and sincerely hope that all sites who make their money primarily from ads go out of business sooner than later. The web was much better before it was infested with ads and companies.
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the exact opposite is true. The majority of reasonable people interested in tech news stopped posting or left years ago - e.g. to various subreddits and hacker news, or no forum at all to save time - and the many newcomers from the past five years or so are messing up moderation and the submitters have turned Slashdot in some kind of political opinion and household gadget slashvertisement site. And a large army of AC trolls appeared. I used to come here to learn about things like kernel development, satellite communication, or grey hat hacking, and noways people on /. seriously discuss whether "Alexa" is an operating system.
What you are experiencing seems to be due to changes to the mod point algorithm after the last ownership change. I believe it was designed to keep the trolls at bay and it works to some extent.
(Disclaimer: I've lurked on Slashdot since its beginnings and posted very actively about ten years ago, under various accounts and user names that are long gone.)
You portray this as if it was a negative trend but it isn't. It boosts the economy of poorer countries and adjusts them slowly to the economy of richer countries, which is an overall positive trend. We're all living in one world. That being said, this self-correcting feature of capitalism does not suffice in general. There is no way around monetary transfers from rich regions of the earth to poorer regions if you want to prevent mass migration movements (and the same will be true in future if we start to have colonies in space), because there will always be structurally weak or otherwise disadvantaged regions.
Anybody is entitled to their opinion, including Obama and Putin, let alone Trump who certainly doesn't hold back. Voicing your opinion as a head of state is not propaganda, it's your duty as a president. You're right that it's sometimes considered inappropriate insofar as foreign elections are concerned, but not for the reasons you suggest. It's sometimes considered unwise because it can create a diplomatic problem when the other party than the one you've supported is elected. Otherwise there is nothing wrong with voicing public opinions and endorsements and every government does that in one form or another. That's not the problem with Russia's attempts to influence the US election - these attempts where based on electronic attacks, botnets and sneaky, secret ad campaigns. There is a lot wrong with that. The difference is whether the means are overt, clearly attributable to the respective government, or covert and stealthy.
Both sides are fairly retarded, so maybe this propaganda effort was successful. Are there no reasonable, halfway educated center-right or center-left people left in the US?
Not really, it started out well but the Klingon's are really old hat and the inner conflict of the first officer seems to be artificial and unimaginative. Maybe the story becomes more interesting later.
The good thing to do would be to collect intelligence on suspects, hand the information to the police who then arrest them, not to cause kids in the whole world to blow their hands off.
They had too many high-level security failures, though.
To be more precise, the train would likely be pulverized into very small fragments, just like when an airplane crashes directly onto some massive surface.
And it has been evolving at a steady pace since then. First, expert systems, then powerful defeasible reasoning systems and diagnosis, text-to-speech, rudimentary speech recognition, recommender systems. Now complex image recognition, music synthesis, intelligent search, working speech recognition and many more machine-learning based pattern recognition tasks. Given how young A.I. research is as a discipline, it has really made tremendous advances. Your phone can solve AI tasks that would have been considered inconceivable in the 60s. It may not yet seem human-like enough for you to be classified as intelligent behavior, but there is a threshold that will be passed probably still during this century.
There is nothing to downplay, this will never get passed. You wanna bet?
No, you're not the only one. This so-called "chain of trust" is ridiculous. People are forced to trust binary blobs of various nebulous business entities with a long history of nefarious business practices, bad security, and unnecessary collusion with sometimes shady government entities. That's pretty much the opposite of trustworthiness.
Sorry, the 'web page layout' and orange text just kill it for me. That's a big No-No in typesetting, at least in the one to which I subscribe.
Stop with that conspiracy nonsense and US partisan bullshit, please! Nature doesn't give a shit about politics, facts can be checked regardless of anyone's political affiliation. There's one reality and it doesn't care for which party you vote.
The original story sounds very credible to me.
Yes.
In Germany, a EULA presented in this way is not enforceable and most of them are invalid and void anyway, because they contain clauses that are not compatible with consumer rights, contract law, or other regulations. Contract law in the EU is very different from US contract law. The corporations are just betting regularly that nobody will sue them or otherwise invalidate the contract, which sadly is the case.
My general advice is to read the EULA, print it out, and send the company any changes you would like to make to it. Change anything you disagree with to an alternative suggestion of mutual benefit. If only 5% of customers or even less would do that, this EULA nonsense would stop very quickly.
This looks like one of those cases when someone was not fully willing to 'cooperate' with certain people and then the FBI is 'tipped off' with some very bogus evidence. I'm speculating, of course, but anyway that's how it looks to me.
I've recently chatted about this topic a bit with a fairly well-established expert in AI. He claimed that if genuine AI is principally possible - which we both believe, although opinions about this vary - then a superintelligence will almost certainly arise within a rather short time frame after the first genuine AI has been created.
If that happens, the outcome would likely be bad for humans, just like humans have turned out to be a threat to every less intelligent species on earth. A superintelligence is by definition much more intelligent than us, which means that superintelligences could also manipulate human society much more easily than humans can. They might for example predict stock markets way more accurately than human experts, which would be an easy way for them to get very rich very fast. Another issue is that if genuine AI is possible, it will almost certainly not be human-like in all of its features. Even current self-learning AI is not at all human-like. This poses a big challenge, because you can never be sure whether the software has really learned the same as humans, and because you cannot predict how the software will modify itself in future on the basis of its learning algorithms. It may look only superficially as if it thinks and acts like a human, whereas under the hood its reasoning could be very alien.
The underlying problem is called the value alignment problem: How can we make sure that a genuine AI's values align with human values? I believe there is no solution to it.
No, it didn't.
In related news, 89% of all statistics are made up ad hoc. On Slashdot, it's 98.6% of all statistics, though.
This is possibly the most ignorant and narrow-minded comment I've ever read on Slashdot.
I'm blocking all ads indiscriminately and have a very fine web experience. I'm not interested in ads and sincerely hope that all sites who make their money primarily from ads go out of business sooner than later. The web was much better before it was infested with ads and companies.
Name me the country or region where you prefer to live so we can compare and have good laugh.
I'm well educated and bother to research things from a neutral perspective
Maybe just in your imagination. Besides, I'm also fairly well-educated and research things from a neutral perspective... I'm even being paid for it!
Well, I hate to say so, but it just looks as if the French people are smarter than you.