Sorry, but the term "virtual desktop" already has a meaning: it refers to having a logical screen larger than the physical screen. Microsoft is offering remote desktop functionality, not a virtual desktop.
One of the points of a properly constituted "basic income" scheme is that the income is supposed to be unconditional, exactly to remove such perverse incentives.
That you receive a rotten deal doesn't mean others should also
Indeed, the program imposed a 50% income tax on working participants: for any $1.00 they made working, the "basic income" was reduced $0.50. That defeats the point of the whole programme.
Cryptographically signing applications to ensure integrity and authenticity may be a good idea (as long as phone owners retain the option, existing today, of installing apps from other sources if they wish).
This scheme has nothing to do with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), which is a name for methods intended to prevent users from copying works which are protected by copyright. DRM is technology that's supposed to prevent users from copying content (movies, e-books, etc), or more generally enforce whatever restrictions the supplier would like to enforce. Since DRM generally prevents users from doing things they would otherwise be able to legally do (make fair use of portions of the works; make backup copies; copy works in the public domain etc) it is justifiably considered a bad thing.
I suspect that putting the DRM moniker on this possibly beneficial technology is motivated by encouraging users to think of DRM as something that protects their rights instead of something that violates them.
This is ridiculous. The claim is not that the shifts went away (that less waiting staff was needed) but that higher-rated waiters got the shifts at the expense of lower-rated waiters. In other words, this helps waiters who are liked by the customers and hurts waiters who aren't liked by the customers.
From the point of view of the customers this is a positive development -- they are getting the service they want. This is also good for waiters that do what customers like -- this fact is now recognized and leading to an increase in their pay. Naturally, from the point of view of waiters that customers don't like, this is a negative development, but why should we think it a problem? It is telling the authors of the article neglected to interview the waiters who got the extra shifts or the extra tables that were taken away from the badly performing waiters.
It is true that the reasons the customers like the waiters may have nothing to do with the table service as such -- for example, customers may prefer better-looking waiters, or waiters of the same race as themselves, or whatever. But regardless of the reason what happened here is that the restaurant now offers service which more conforms to what cusomters like.
There is no rule in English grammar about splitting infinitives. There is such a "rule" in Latin (where infinitives are single words and can't be split).
Why am I not surprised to discover that both the container for format (HEIF) Anna the codec (HVEC) are extensively covered by patents?
This is the GIF story again, except this time done deliberately by Apple and Microsoft.
The headline is misleading -- it was Congress that wrote the law, where the term "whistleblower" is specifically defined to only include those who report misconduct to the SEC. The Supreme Court simply confirmed that we are governed by the law as written.
Note that elsewhere in Dodd–Frank (in the part dealing with reporting to the CFPB) and in Sorbanes–Oxley whistleblowers are defined differently, so that even those that only report misconduct internally are protected.
In fact, this is Microsoft trying to support a dangerous undercurrent in the Linux world of walled gardens and insecure vendor-controlled installations.
If something is wrong in libc, libm, or libgtk Microsoft should get it fixed upstream, not ship their own incompatible version. Do you really trust them to backport every future bugfix after their fork?
[Microsoft] has actually transformed into an open source champion
Really? So shere is the source code for this "snap"? In fact:
Compiling your software for GNU/Linux doesn't make you a "champion of open source" just because GNU (and Linux) are open-source (and, more importantly, also Free Software). Releasing your source code makes you open-source.
"Snaps" are the opposite of the Unix philosophy of dynmically linking against system libraries – they are basically statically linked binaries (except that the binary comes in pieces). Instead of the "open-source" philosophy of clean interfaces and interoperability, they embrace a philosophy of tailored interfaces and closed gardens.
In fact, to the extent Microsoft champions "open source", this open-source is about taking advantage of source code released by others without Microsoft releasing any of its own. When I see Microsoft releasing source code under a free license (say BSD) for a significant program originally created by Microsoft (Skype, their web browser) I will believe them.
This is merely a preprint, not a published paper. In other words, this has not been referred – subjected to regular scientific scrutiny.
Preprints are of great interest to researchers in the field -- they give them quick access to recent results before the slower process of scientific verification takes place. But preprints are not published papers (even those are not all correct!) – they aren't really useful to the general public. Especially in the case of major open problems like P=NP, such extraordinary claims require extraordinary verification, and this has yet to take place.
The submission headline here is very misleading, as is the summary. Either this preprint is correct (extremely unlikely), and then it definitely shows that P!=NP, or the preprint if wrong (almost surely the case), at which point it's not clear that it contains enough correct and deep results to actually suggest anything about whether P=NP or not. A much better headline would have been "new arXiv preprint purports to prove that P!=NP", and a better summary would have been
A recent arXiv preprint by Norbert Blum of the University of Bonn claims to show that P!=NP. This work has not been vetted by the general community and (as with every other claim of this type) is generally assumed to be incorrect. Readers who are not experts in complexity theory are advised to ignore this preprint until experts have had time to examine this work and its implications.
Suppose for the moment the story is true: people buying ad space from Facebook can ask the automated algorithm to only show their ads to certain demographics. Those who posted the ads may very well have violated the law, but how does it make Facebook responsible? They aren't checking each and every ad for legal compliance, after all, and the ads don't represent Facebook itself.
This is a moral point (Facebook shouldn't be held responsible for discriminatory content posted by users) but it may have legal teeth, depending on the previous contours of the liability shield of 47 USC 230.
The goal of keeping mum on security vulnerability until the vendor fixes it is to prevent potential attackers from learning about the vulnerability. The discoverer decides that users of the software are better off not knowing about the problem because they'd rather attackers don't know either.
Here, according to TFA, there are already exploits in the wild. In that situation MS users are already at risk; Google keeping mum can only hurt them (by keeping them ignorant of the vulnerability) but won't help (because the attackers already know).
Prof. Orin Kerr, a noted expert on the 4th Amendment and on computer crime law posted his negative reaction to this ruling; he has a longer commentary on this issue here
According to Prof. Kerr this is the third court of appeals to rule that that reading the stripes is "not a search", and that this runs counter to Supreme Court precedent such as Arizona v. Hicks.
On the one hand, the story makes it clear that the camera is always on and viewable by authorities; the officer just has control on whether it is locally overwriting a 30-second buffer or keeping a complete record. So even if the officer "keeps it off" in the bathroom, his supervisors can still snoop on him (no sound is transmitted though).
On the other hand, I agree that there needs to be a rule requiring officers to turn the cameras on -- but I don't think that arrests without the camera on should be invalid. Police have been making valid arrests without cameras for a long time. Rather, when there is a dispute between the police and a member of the public about the interaction (say, did the officer use excessive force? did the suspect make a threatening motion?), if video is unavailble there should be a evidentialry presumption against the government (so by default their story is not believed if they can't produce the video). But this should be rebuttable -- if the camera really failed, for example (say it was damaged during the altercation) then we should be back in the pre-camera world of competing stories.
Read the story: the camera is actually continuously recording into a 30-second buffer. When the officer starts recording, the previous 30 seconds are uploaded as well as any ongoing video. This actually has serious privacy implications:
Authorities can remotely access the feed even if the officer hasn't "turned on recording". They can even remotely record the feed independently of the officer. So now whenever you see a police officer the police may be recording you even if the officer says otherwise.
The officer gets no privacy from his supervisors. He can't speak privately with his family members, or just talk to a shopkeeper.
That said, I agree that there should be an evidentiary presumption against the government whenever camera footage is claimed to be unavailable though it should be rebuttable (e.g. in the case of a true malfunction).
There is no doubt that man-made CO2 emissions contribute significantly to the warming seen since the 19th Century, so that most of the warming since 1901 may be due to man-made emissions. Please clarify where in my post I asserted otherwise.
In other words, we both agree that "man-made CO2 emissions would warm things up". But the authors of the paper are relying on the assertion "all warming up is due to man-made CO2 emissions" and that is something else entirely.
The authors of the study claim they can separate the contribution to wildfire rates from "anthropogenic climate change" and "natural climate variability", but then it turns out that what they call "contribution from anthropogenic climate change" sensible people would call "the sum of contribution from anthropogenic climate change and natural variability" and what they call "contribution from natural variability" we would call "short-term fluctuations".
Please do me the courtesy of
1. Explaining why you think all warming since 1901 is due to man-made causes; or
2. Showing that I am misreading the paper's definition of "anthropogenic climate change"; or
3. Explaining why you think the authors are correct in their conclusions despite points 1 and 2.
As far as I can tell, the paper shows that temperature increases are correlated with more wildfires. Up to this point it's solid science. Then they then define "Anthropogenic climate change" to mean "temperature increases since 1901" and "climate variability" to mean "fluctuations about the trend since 1901" and conclude that the anthropogenic climate change has been the cause of wildfire. Here I call shenanigans.
When most people say "climate variability" (especially in contrast to "anthopogenic climate change") they don't simply refer to short-term fluctuations about the warming trend -- they refer to the part of the warming trend which represents long-term variability/change in the climate independent of human action. This paper doesn't try to separate warming due to human CO2 emissions from warming due to other causes, so it can't tell us which drives the trend in the wildfires.
Can you explain what would be wrong with McDonald's offering free lunches to some people? As long as no-one was coerced to accept these lunches, I'd say this would be a wonderful development.
It may be that these free lunches would be unhealthy, or that they would cause children to get used to eating a lot of McDonald's food. But the people who would be offered these lunches could decide for themselves whether they want the food. There are other ways of getting food too.
The situation here is the same: Facebook offering "free internet" which is primarily good for using Facebook is certainly good for Facebook. But since this offering doesn't prevent other ISPs from making competing offers (either free or for-pay), this offering simply provides people more choices which inherently cannot make them worse off. Are we really so much smarter than Facebook's potential customers that we know for sure that they would prefer no service to Facebook's crippled one?
Slashdot Mirror
While the study of these functions is called "trigonometry", the functions themselves are called trigonometric.
How could knowledge be erased from people's brains by a change to a code repository?
Sorry, but the term "virtual desktop" already has a meaning: it refers to having a logical screen larger than the physical screen. Microsoft is offering remote desktop functionality, not a virtual desktop.
One of the points of a properly constituted "basic income" scheme is that the income is supposed to be unconditional, exactly to remove such perverse incentives.
That you receive a rotten deal doesn't mean others should also
.
Indeed, the program imposed a 50% income tax on working participants: for any $1.00 they made working, the "basic income" was reduced $0.50. That defeats the point of the whole programme.
Cryptographically signing applications to ensure integrity and authenticity may be a good idea (as long as phone owners retain the option, existing today, of installing apps from other sources if they wish). This scheme has nothing to do with DRM (Digital Restrictions Management), which is a name for methods intended to prevent users from copying works which are protected by copyright. DRM is technology that's supposed to prevent users from copying content (movies, e-books, etc), or more generally enforce whatever restrictions the supplier would like to enforce. Since DRM generally prevents users from doing things they would otherwise be able to legally do (make fair use of portions of the works; make backup copies; copy works in the public domain etc) it is justifiably considered a bad thing. I suspect that putting the DRM moniker on this possibly beneficial technology is motivated by encouraging users to think of DRM as something that protects their rights instead of something that violates them.
This is ridiculous. The claim is not that the shifts went away (that less waiting staff was needed) but that higher-rated waiters got the shifts at the expense of lower-rated waiters. In other words, this helps waiters who are liked by the customers and hurts waiters who aren't liked by the customers. From the point of view of the customers this is a positive development -- they are getting the service they want. This is also good for waiters that do what customers like -- this fact is now recognized and leading to an increase in their pay. Naturally, from the point of view of waiters that customers don't like, this is a negative development, but why should we think it a problem? It is telling the authors of the article neglected to interview the waiters who got the extra shifts or the extra tables that were taken away from the badly performing waiters. It is true that the reasons the customers like the waiters may have nothing to do with the table service as such -- for example, customers may prefer better-looking waiters, or waiters of the same race as themselves, or whatever. But regardless of the reason what happened here is that the restaurant now offers service which more conforms to what cusomters like.
There is no rule in English grammar about splitting infinitives. There is such a "rule" in Latin (where infinitives are single words and can't be split).
Why am I not surprised to discover that both the container for format (HEIF) Anna the codec (HVEC) are extensively covered by patents? This is the GIF story again, except this time done deliberately by Apple and Microsoft.
The headline is misleading -- it was Congress that wrote the law, where the term "whistleblower" is specifically defined to only include those who report misconduct to the SEC. The Supreme Court simply confirmed that we are governed by the law as written.
Note that elsewhere in Dodd–Frank (in the part dealing with reporting to the CFPB) and in Sorbanes–Oxley whistleblowers are defined differently, so that even those that only report misconduct internally are protected.
BSD has non-GPL version of libc and libm; in any case you only have to offer the source code, not to directly contribute it to the upstream project.
In fact, this is Microsoft trying to support a dangerous undercurrent in the Linux world of walled gardens and insecure vendor-controlled installations.
If something is wrong in libc, libm, or libgtk Microsoft should get it fixed upstream, not ship their own incompatible version. Do you really trust them to backport every future bugfix after their fork?
Really? So shere is the source code for this "snap"? In fact:
In fact, to the extent Microsoft champions "open source", this open-source is about taking advantage of source code released by others without Microsoft releasing any of its own. When I see Microsoft releasing source code under a free license (say BSD) for a significant program originally created by Microsoft (Skype, their web browser) I will believe them.
This is merely a preprint, not a published paper. In other words, this has not been referred – subjected to regular scientific scrutiny.
Preprints are of great interest to researchers in the field -- they give them quick access to recent results before the slower process of scientific verification takes place. But preprints are not published papers (even those are not all correct!) – they aren't really useful to the general public. Especially in the case of major open problems like P=NP, such extraordinary claims require extraordinary verification, and this has yet to take place.
The submission headline here is very misleading, as is the summary. Either this preprint is correct (extremely unlikely), and then it definitely shows that P!=NP, or the preprint if wrong (almost surely the case), at which point it's not clear that it contains enough correct and deep results to actually suggest anything about whether P=NP or not. A much better headline would have been "new arXiv preprint purports to prove that P!=NP", and a better summary would have been
Select your stream here.
Suppose for the moment the story is true: people buying ad space from Facebook can ask the automated algorithm to only show their ads to certain demographics. Those who posted the ads may very well have violated the law, but how does it make Facebook responsible? They aren't checking each and every ad for legal compliance, after all, and the ads don't represent Facebook itself.
This is a moral point (Facebook shouldn't be held responsible for discriminatory content posted by users) but it may have legal teeth, depending on the previous contours of the liability shield of 47 USC 230.
The goal of keeping mum on security vulnerability until the vendor fixes it is to prevent potential attackers from learning about the vulnerability. The discoverer decides that users of the software are better off not knowing about the problem because they'd rather attackers don't know either.
Here, according to TFA, there are already exploits in the wild. In that situation MS users are already at risk; Google keeping mum can only hurt them (by keeping them ignorant of the vulnerability) but won't help (because the attackers already know).
This is a bug in the Linux kernel, affecting most operating systems that use this kernel.
Prof. Orin Kerr, a noted expert on the 4th Amendment and on computer crime law posted his negative reaction to this ruling; he has a longer commentary on this issue here
According to Prof. Kerr this is the third court of appeals to rule that that reading the stripes is "not a search", and that this runs counter to Supreme Court precedent such as Arizona v. Hicks .
Plaese read the story: the camera records into an internal buffer and also streams in real time.
On the one hand, the story makes it clear that the camera is always on and viewable by authorities; the officer just has control on whether it is locally overwriting a 30-second buffer or keeping a complete record. So even if the officer "keeps it off" in the bathroom, his supervisors can still snoop on him (no sound is transmitted though).
On the other hand, I agree that there needs to be a rule requiring officers to turn the cameras on -- but I don't think that arrests without the camera on should be invalid. Police have been making valid arrests without cameras for a long time. Rather, when there is a dispute between the police and a member of the public about the interaction (say, did the officer use excessive force? did the suspect make a threatening motion?), if video is unavailble there should be a evidentialry presumption against the government (so by default their story is not believed if they can't produce the video). But this should be rebuttable -- if the camera really failed, for example (say it was damaged during the altercation) then we should be back in the pre-camera world of competing stories.
Read the story: the camera is actually continuously recording into a 30-second buffer. When the officer starts recording, the previous 30 seconds are uploaded as well as any ongoing video. This actually has serious privacy implications:
That said, I agree that there should be an evidentiary presumption against the government whenever camera footage is claimed to be unavailable though it should be rebuttable (e.g. in the case of a true malfunction).
There is no doubt that man-made CO2 emissions contribute significantly to the warming seen since the 19th Century, so that most of the warming since 1901 may be due to man-made emissions. Please clarify where in my post I asserted otherwise.
In other words, we both agree that "man-made CO2 emissions would warm things up". But the authors of the paper are relying on the assertion "all warming up is due to man-made CO2 emissions" and that is something else entirely.
The authors of the study claim they can separate the contribution to wildfire rates from "anthropogenic climate change" and "natural climate variability", but then it turns out that what they call "contribution from anthropogenic climate change" sensible people would call "the sum of contribution from anthropogenic climate change and natural variability" and what they call "contribution from natural variability" we would call "short-term fluctuations".
Please do me the courtesy of
1. Explaining why you think all warming since 1901 is due to man-made causes; or
2. Showing that I am misreading the paper's definition of "anthropogenic climate change"; or
3. Explaining why you think the authors are correct in their conclusions despite points 1 and 2.
As far as I can tell, the paper shows that temperature increases are correlated with more wildfires. Up to this point it's solid science. Then they then define "Anthropogenic climate change" to mean "temperature increases since 1901" and "climate variability" to mean "fluctuations about the trend since 1901" and conclude that the anthropogenic climate change has been the cause of wildfire. Here I call shenanigans.
When most people say "climate variability" (especially in contrast to "anthopogenic climate change") they don't simply refer to short-term fluctuations about the warming trend -- they refer to the part of the warming trend which represents long-term variability/change in the climate independent of human action. This paper doesn't try to separate warming due to human CO2 emissions from warming due to other causes, so it can't tell us which drives the trend in the wildfires.
Can you explain what would be wrong with McDonald's offering free lunches to some people? As long as no-one was coerced to accept these lunches, I'd say this would be a wonderful development.
It may be that these free lunches would be unhealthy, or that they would cause children to get used to eating a lot of McDonald's food. But the people who would be offered these lunches could decide for themselves whether they want the food. There are other ways of getting food too.
The situation here is the same: Facebook offering "free internet" which is primarily good for using Facebook is certainly good for Facebook. But since this offering doesn't prevent other ISPs from making competing offers (either free or for-pay), this offering simply provides people more choices which inherently cannot make them worse off. Are we really so much smarter than Facebook's potential customers that we know for sure that they would prefer no service to Facebook's crippled one?