Nice how they slipped in the "Public-Private Partnerships" bit so nobody seems to be calling attention to it. Where I come from (UK), they're used to extract/extort tax-payer money out of the public and funnel it into private pockets. Sounds like Puerto Rico is rapidly turning into Puerto Pobre and Bancos Ricos.
...that so many Americans identify with and defend patriotically and decry anything else as Socialism/Communism/government overreach. This is the free market and minimal regulation at work, doing what it's supposed to do, regardless of anything except profits and share prices, and you vote for it like true patriots every few years.
"...we're good at judging people and detecting if someone is telling the truth."
No we're not. How do you think so many scammers, con-artists, and ponzy-schemes do so well? It's precisely because we're so bad at judging people and detecting if someone is telling the truth.
It probably won't work on iPhones either. I regularly get garbled SMS messages from friends who use iPhones because they didn't use an SMS app to send it. All I want is a messaging service that everyone on any cell, mobile, or smartphone, no matter which carrier, no matter which make of hardware, that just works. For the history of mobile phones, that's been SMS. I see SMS as like email: For all its issues, it's the least bad messaging system we all have.
A crude measure of whether a piece of text is easy to read is something like the Flesch-Kinkaid reading ease metric which does simple measurements of average sentence length and average word length, assuming that longer words in longer sentences are more difficult to read. It kind-a-sort-a works.
A better idea would be to require users to pass a reading test made from the EULA text itself. The two most accurate I know of are the Open Cloze test, where every 7th word is left blank and users have to write/type in the correct word, or the C-Test, which is a little more complicated to explain but more valid and reliable and more fun to do (students really enjoy doing this type of test!)
Requiring users to pass a reading comprehension test, using the EULA text, would ensure that whoever clicks on "Accept" understands what they're agreeing to.
Whistle-blowers are afforded protection under the law (at least in theory) as an exception.
Bradley Manning, for one, was not a "whistle blower". He just wanted to impress a boyfriend.
Are you arguing that publicly reporting war crimes, e.g. targeting civilians, shouldn't come under whistle-blower protections based on unsupported allegations from a magazine?
"good for you" is too broad a statement and can't be scientifically validated. Pasta tends to have a lower glycemic index (GI) than most bread and potatoes and some varieties of rice as they're typically eaten, meaning that it keeps your blood-glucose levels more even and puts less load on your pancreas (which produces insulin). But then pasta tends to be calorie dense and so easy to overeat, leading to weight-gain and perhaps obesity and all its accompanying health effects. Also, what do people typically have with their pasta? Fatty, calorie-dense, and/or high-GI sauces, toppings, and/or condiments?
Yes, pasta can be part of a healthy meal but it can also be part of a very unhealthy meal. We should be talking about healthy meals, not individual ingredients.
Whistle-blowers are afforded protection under the law (at least in theory) as an exception. The idea is that a whistle-blower has the public interest at heart and is acting, not out of self-interest, but for the common good.
Furthermore, doxing private citizens isn't whistle-blowing and neither is collecting surveillance profiles on 1.9 billion people. J Edgar Hoover collected surveillance profiles on his friends (if you can call them that) and adversaries alike. I think you'll have a pretty hard time convincing anyone that Hoover was acting in the public's best interests.
IQ obviously isn't meaningless, it measures how well you perform on an IQ test. It perhaps is not a great measure of intelligence, though I don't think we have anything better, but is certainly a correlate of intelligence.
You'l be pleased to find out that there is something better than IQ tests - Working memory capacity tests: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... They're accurate and reliable, i.e. predictive of performance on a range of tasks, and have greater validity than IQ tests.
This is the UK it’s talking about, not a third world country. Not only are a lot of companies in Europe required to give paid time off for various reasons, there is a lot more time off to begin with. Also, if you think the US has a lot of regulatory overhead, workers can join a union that isn’t tied to a job, doesn’t cost dues and actually has political power. I worked in IT and I had a union.
But Thatcher and successive governments since have gutted union legislation to leave unions essentially toothless. Governments can seize or freeze unions' bank accounts and have all kinds of ways of outlawing strikes.
I mean why not just get an android tablet with keyboard case and call it a day. There are numerous sub $100 android tablets.
The problem isn't the cost or getting working laptops/tablets to people in developing countries, it's what benefits they're supposed to bring to those people at that price. $100 per child can buy a lot of books and help train a lot of teachers which is far more likely to result in higher literacy, numeracy, and general learning. Almost all of the edutech initiatives, pilot projects, etc. for developing countries have achieve mediocre results at best and very poor return on investment.
The best hope for poorer countries to provide better education is Creative Commons licensed open educational resources (OER = similar in concept to free and open source software). The cost of textbooks and learning and teaching materials is one of the main barriers. OER drastically reduce the cost of providing the resources that students and teachers need.
But then OER doesn't bring huge government grants and subsidies to giant tech companies.
Similar to the Sweden example given by AC, in the UK, we have PAYE. The vast majority of people have payroll jobs and HMRC (British IRS) do a pretty good job of calculating your taxes. Rebates (of overpaid taxes) at the end of the financial year tend to be small. If you have more complicated sources of taxable income, e.g. capital gains tax or dividends, you report those to HMRC and they do a good job of calculating the lowest amount of tax you have to pay.
A few decades ago, HMRC used to be aggressive and unhelpful about collecting taxes. It drove a lot of people away from declaring various sources of income, often for fear of getting into trouble for making mistakes. Then HMRC tried being helpful and simplifying how people report their sources of income. As if by magic, people started reporting more income and far more taxes got paid. -- It's smart not to make people scared about their taxes, like it's some kind of high-stakes test they have to take every year.
We also need a flat tax that's paid by employers, so "regular employees" don't ever have to file taxes on their wages.
Welcome to the rest of the developed world where we have pay-as-you-earn (PAYE). It's utterly stupid to make people do their own taxes if they're on wages/salary - It's one of the first things commercial computers were designed to do for us - payroll. Could you imagine utilities companies making customers calculate their bills themselves?
As long as the academic research system values quantity over quality (AKA "publish or perish"), researchers will be pressured to publish papers as frequently as possible regardless of their quality or that they make meaningful contributions to science. Yes, it's really difficult to reproduce incoherent trash. Give "good" researchers tenure and reward the quality of the science they do, then we might learn more interesting and useful stuff. Prioritising quantity over quality just creates more noise in which to look for the good science.
One simple example is Roomba vacuums. Based on their sensors/AI they vacuum your house... but they could mess up and bump into a table... knocking over a candle and burning the house down.
An insurance company is likely to find you liable for leaving a burning candle unattended. If anyone is harmed in the fire, you could be looking at a criminal prosecution. Nobody would care about the robot vacuum cleaner.
If you create situations that put people and/or property at risk, you'll be accountable under the law regardless of how you do it. Whether corporations or organisations get prosecuted for putting people and/or property at risk will more than likely follow the same patterns of power and politics as everything else.
That machines might one day be considered as having free will and therefore legal culpability is science fiction.
Straight away this proposal looks like it was designed to attract Silicon Valley VCs. What they're proposing to do is create automated farms with very little labour, more than likely at less than a 10:1 ratio. That's the sweet spot for startups: Disrupt an existing business model by reducing the number of workers needed by at least 90% then you can disrupt the market by having lower labour costs, i.e. put tens of thousands of people out of work.
Currently, no machine can pick crops like agricultural workers can: It's skilled labour.
Yep, here's an explanation from the USPS themselves and a nice analogy to illustrate just how unfair the current attack on the USPS is: https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/b...
...to supply the extra energy used for capture and conversion of CO2 from current coal plants. The problem has a solution if we can just narrow down the scope of it enough.
Isn't it a crime for a company to tell such blatant lies to the public? Can't customers sue the companies for endangering their sensitive data? Is the no regulatory oversight for this?
Slashdot Mirror
Nice how they slipped in the "Public-Private Partnerships" bit so nobody seems to be calling attention to it. Where I come from (UK), they're used to extract/extort tax-payer money out of the public and funnel it into private pockets. Sounds like Puerto Rico is rapidly turning into Puerto Pobre and Bancos Ricos.
...that so many Americans identify with and defend patriotically and decry anything else as Socialism/Communism/government overreach. This is the free market and minimal regulation at work, doing what it's supposed to do, regardless of anything except profits and share prices, and you vote for it like true patriots every few years.
"...we're good at judging people and detecting if someone is telling the truth."
No we're not. How do you think so many scammers, con-artists, and ponzy-schemes do so well? It's precisely because we're so bad at judging people and detecting if someone is telling the truth.
It probably won't work on iPhones either. I regularly get garbled SMS messages from friends who use iPhones because they didn't use an SMS app to send it. All I want is a messaging service that everyone on any cell, mobile, or smartphone, no matter which carrier, no matter which make of hardware, that just works. For the history of mobile phones, that's been SMS. I see SMS as like email: For all its issues, it's the least bad messaging system we all have.
A crude measure of whether a piece of text is easy to read is something like the Flesch-Kinkaid reading ease metric which does simple measurements of average sentence length and average word length, assuming that longer words in longer sentences are more difficult to read. It kind-a-sort-a works.
A better idea would be to require users to pass a reading test made from the EULA text itself. The two most accurate I know of are the Open Cloze test, where every 7th word is left blank and users have to write/type in the correct word, or the C-Test, which is a little more complicated to explain but more valid and reliable and more fun to do (students really enjoy doing this type of test!)
Requiring users to pass a reading comprehension test, using the EULA text, would ensure that whoever clicks on "Accept" understands what they're agreeing to.
Bradley Manning, for one, was not a "whistle blower". He just wanted to impress a boyfriend.
Are you arguing that publicly reporting war crimes, e.g. targeting civilians, shouldn't come under whistle-blower protections based on unsupported allegations from a magazine?
"good for you" is too broad a statement and can't be scientifically validated. Pasta tends to have a lower glycemic index (GI) than most bread and potatoes and some varieties of rice as they're typically eaten, meaning that it keeps your blood-glucose levels more even and puts less load on your pancreas (which produces insulin). But then pasta tends to be calorie dense and so easy to overeat, leading to weight-gain and perhaps obesity and all its accompanying health effects. Also, what do people typically have with their pasta? Fatty, calorie-dense, and/or high-GI sauces, toppings, and/or condiments?
Yes, pasta can be part of a healthy meal but it can also be part of a very unhealthy meal. We should be talking about healthy meals, not individual ingredients.
Whistle-blowers are afforded protection under the law (at least in theory) as an exception. The idea is that a whistle-blower has the public interest at heart and is acting, not out of self-interest, but for the common good.
Furthermore, doxing private citizens isn't whistle-blowing and neither is collecting surveillance profiles on 1.9 billion people. J Edgar Hoover collected surveillance profiles on his friends (if you can call them that) and adversaries alike. I think you'll have a pretty hard time convincing anyone that Hoover was acting in the public's best interests.
Obligatory photo of Erlich Bachman riding a unicorn and throwing money around: https://www.dailydot.com/wp-co...
Has Erlich Bachman met his match?
Do you believe everything you are told?
IQ obviously isn't meaningless, it measures how well you perform on an IQ test. It perhaps is not a great measure of intelligence, though I don't think we have anything better, but is certainly a correlate of intelligence.
You'l be pleased to find out that there is something better than IQ tests - Working memory capacity tests: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/p... They're accurate and reliable, i.e. predictive of performance on a range of tasks, and have greater validity than IQ tests.
This is the UK it’s talking about, not a third world country. Not only are a lot of companies in Europe required to give paid time off for various reasons, there is a lot more time off to begin with. Also, if you think the US has a lot of regulatory overhead, workers can join a union that isn’t tied to a job, doesn’t cost dues and actually has political power. I worked in IT and I had a union.
But Thatcher and successive governments since have gutted union legislation to leave unions essentially toothless. Governments can seize or freeze unions' bank accounts and have all kinds of ways of outlawing strikes.
I mean why not just get an android tablet with keyboard case and call it a day. There are numerous sub $100 android tablets.
The problem isn't the cost or getting working laptops/tablets to people in developing countries, it's what benefits they're supposed to bring to those people at that price. $100 per child can buy a lot of books and help train a lot of teachers which is far more likely to result in higher literacy, numeracy, and general learning. Almost all of the edutech initiatives, pilot projects, etc. for developing countries have achieve mediocre results at best and very poor return on investment.
The best hope for poorer countries to provide better education is Creative Commons licensed open educational resources (OER = similar in concept to free and open source software). The cost of textbooks and learning and teaching materials is one of the main barriers. OER drastically reduce the cost of providing the resources that students and teachers need.
But then OER doesn't bring huge government grants and subsidies to giant tech companies.
Similar to the Sweden example given by AC, in the UK, we have PAYE. The vast majority of people have payroll jobs and HMRC (British IRS) do a pretty good job of calculating your taxes. Rebates (of overpaid taxes) at the end of the financial year tend to be small. If you have more complicated sources of taxable income, e.g. capital gains tax or dividends, you report those to HMRC and they do a good job of calculating the lowest amount of tax you have to pay.
A few decades ago, HMRC used to be aggressive and unhelpful about collecting taxes. It drove a lot of people away from declaring various sources of income, often for fear of getting into trouble for making mistakes. Then HMRC tried being helpful and simplifying how people report their sources of income. As if by magic, people started reporting more income and far more taxes got paid. -- It's smart not to make people scared about their taxes, like it's some kind of high-stakes test they have to take every year.
We also need a flat tax that's paid by employers, so "regular employees" don't ever have to file taxes on their wages.
Welcome to the rest of the developed world where we have pay-as-you-earn (PAYE). It's utterly stupid to make people do their own taxes if they're on wages/salary - It's one of the first things commercial computers were designed to do for us - payroll. Could you imagine utilities companies making customers calculate their bills themselves?
As long as the academic research system values quantity over quality (AKA "publish or perish"), researchers will be pressured to publish papers as frequently as possible regardless of their quality or that they make meaningful contributions to science. Yes, it's really difficult to reproduce incoherent trash. Give "good" researchers tenure and reward the quality of the science they do, then we might learn more interesting and useful stuff. Prioritising quantity over quality just creates more noise in which to look for the good science.
One simple example is Roomba vacuums. Based on their sensors/AI they vacuum your house... but they could mess up and bump into a table... knocking over a candle and burning the house down.
An insurance company is likely to find you liable for leaving a burning candle unattended. If anyone is harmed in the fire, you could be looking at a criminal prosecution. Nobody would care about the robot vacuum cleaner.
If you create situations that put people and/or property at risk, you'll be accountable under the law regardless of how you do it. Whether corporations or organisations get prosecuted for putting people and/or property at risk will more than likely follow the same patterns of power and politics as everything else.
That machines might one day be considered as having free will and therefore legal culpability is science fiction.
Straight away this proposal looks like it was designed to attract Silicon Valley VCs. What they're proposing to do is create automated farms with very little labour, more than likely at less than a 10:1 ratio. That's the sweet spot for startups: Disrupt an existing business model by reducing the number of workers needed by at least 90% then you can disrupt the market by having lower labour costs, i.e. put tens of thousands of people out of work.
Currently, no machine can pick crops like agricultural workers can: It's skilled labour.
"As your attorney, I advise you to take a hit out of the little brown bottle in my shaving kit. You won't need much, just a tiny taste." -- Dr. Gonzo
Yep, here's an explanation from the USPS themselves and a nice analogy to illustrate just how unfair the current attack on the USPS is: https://www.uspsoig.gov/blog/b...
Yeah, but that's ~30% more Nickelback for you! Rock on, baby!!!
Actually, when you pull out from that close up shot, it looks like this: http://www.newmodellersshop.co... ;)
...to supply the extra energy used for capture and conversion of CO2 from current coal plants. The problem has a solution if we can just narrow down the scope of it enough.
Isn't it a crime for a company to tell such blatant lies to the public? Can't customers sue the companies for endangering their sensitive data? Is the no regulatory oversight for this?
Appropriate Banksy quote: "People who get up early in the morning cause war, death and famine."
What were the causes of death for people who stay up late?