Because Russian hackers hacked an insecure email system and let the information be freed instead of say Chinese hackers it's the Cold War again? It's only the Cold War if the democrats want to restart one and it certainly seems that they do. Even if the Russians do want to influence our elections so what? Unless you can actually prove some kind of crime that's just SOP. We do the same. In fact we do much worse.
Don't try to hide the only strategic analysis of revealed Russian aggression. They must be fought directly and quickly or the losses will be even greater.
I see. So you want to go to war with Russia? Would that be a land war? That worked out so well for Hitler and his minions. I'll tell you what. How about YOU go to war with them. Go over there. Bring a gun. Declare war against them. Let us know how it works out for you, chicken hawk war monger. I have no problem with the Russians. I like them. I don't want to fight them.
I guess the problem with the new Millennium and Globalism or whatever you call it is the lack of villains. We don't have anyone to fight against. No real villains. I mean yeah we have North Korea I guess. Kim Jong-Un is a kind of Clown-Villain and he might be worth going to war with, but aside from the powder keg in the middle east I can't really think of anyone else at the moment. So if you have such an itchy trigger finger and are target seeking maybe try aiming your weapon at a real villain rather than an imaginary one.
Three different government agencies agreed on Russia attempting to interfere with the latest election.
I'd like to see some evidence of this. How exactly did they interfere? What did they do? Did they buy electors? Did they leave some kind of paper trail? Swiss bank accounts? WTF are you talking about?
There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever, Mr. Comey said. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active-measures campaign driven from the top of that government. There is no fuzz on that.
I call bullshit. How? Give an example of how the Russians 'interfered' in any real demonstrable way with the last US election. They changed the votes? If so how? I guess they could try to buy votes or even more effectively perhaps bribe the electors whose votes actually matter. Of course if our electors are buyable we really only have ourselves to blame for being so easily corruptible and by having a system that is so easy to influence with money. But is there any evidence the Russians or anyone actually did this? I'd like to see the evidence rather than vague and essentially meaningless anti-Russian propaganda. If they want to hack insecure email systems I say good for them. It has no direct connection to US elections and I am totally cool with it. Improve the security of email rather than whining about it like little bitches. Also for those of you who want to go back to the Cold War just because you don't like the current president, fuck you. Stop picking fights with the Russkies. If you want to saber rattle at them it had better be for a damned good reason and email hacking does not qualify. How the fuck has the American Democratic party become war mongers?
The premise behind SETI have never been detection of a signal specifically directed at us
Actually no. The premise, at least until quite recently, has always been a narrowband and ideally modulated continuous wave RF signal in the 'water hole' between 1.42 and 1.66 Mhz directed right at us. If not directly at our planet at least at our star. Radio leakage is so weak that it is generally indistinguishable from noise after a few light years and many frequencies are attenuated into near nonexistence before they even make it out of the atmosphere.
Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"?
Well you have to be smart enough to earn one or more PhDs. Someone who believes that is probably not going to be able to do that, but if he tries he will probably quickly learn what a stupid idea it was. Hopefully he will still decide to get his PhD though. We can always use more AI researchers. Although dumb ones are less valuable you never know who might get lucky and stumble upon some cool breakthrough.
The first point is that the only example we have of intelligence is intimately tied to life and can only really be viewed as an aspect of that and the idea that intelligence can be separated from life or at least some form of artificial life is speculative at best. As someone who was quite interested in a career in AI research back in the 80s and has been following the feeble creep of its progress since then I am convinced that wetware is going to be the real future and not so much neural net ASICs like Google's TPU or whatever Nvidia is working on to run neural network architecture which although useful is I think not going to be the foundation for real AI that can give a nice robot chassis like Boston Dynamic's Atlas some level of general intelligence or common sense.
Think of something more like putting a rat/pig/monkey brain into an Atlas Robot. That is figuring out how to digitally interface with a brain-in-jar and train it directly as if it were a complete living animal. Even a rat brain is a far more sophisticated neural network machine than anything we will probably build from scratch in the next few hundred years.
I'd also suggest maybe thinking in at least as much in terms of DNA programming as CPU or GPU programming via Synthetic Biology and follow a career more like Craig Venter who famously made his own artificial bacteria or rather wrote the DNA and inserted it into an empty host cell. That's just a small start of course but it may eventually lead to being able to build artificial life forms that we can make intelligent just by giving them a large enough brain or encephalization quotient. Ultimately even an Atlas Robot with something like an Nvidia P100 cluster running deep learning style neural nets is a kind of very primitive life form. Going fully wet and nano is just another way to attack the same problem in a more integrated fashion: the way I think a far more advanced civ tech would do it.
I guess you should really think in terms of which vision of AI you want to follow or place your bets on. Silicon based connectionism is in vogue at the moment and I think that is great because a lot of progress was lost back in the 80s when it was considered a dead end. It is certainly a more powerful and promising approach than trying to hand code intelligence into a piece of software, but I still think we are just nipping at the heels of an even better approach: biology. Ultimately we are copying the only machine in existence that can create intelligence and that is the
As a Libertarian myself I wish we could do exactly that. Was it from Heinlein that I read about the idea of a group of representatives whose sole job is to repeal the stupid laws that the law passing representatives manage to pass? Sort of an Anti Parliament or Anti House of Representatives. Except that the deck is stacked to make it much harder to pass laws than to repeal them. Like a 2/3 majority necessary to pass put only a 1/3 minority necessary to repeal. Something like that. Reminds me about that Louis CK joke about porn: that we have enough of it now and can stop. Same with laws. I think we have more than enough at this point thank you very much.
If it has value then you should pay for it in one way or an other.
It's information. It's bits. It's out there. I am not hurting anyone by transferring the bits to my hard drive. If they don't want free riders then they shouldn't release the content into the world. Just show it in cinemas and carefully watch for hidden video cameras at all viewing locations.
Once your release it as data you immediately lose control of that data and you are going to get a lot of free riders. No point whining about the reality of it. Accept it or go do something else.
Hopefully people with money who like your work will pay you if you give them a way to do that. Enough people usually do, but for marginal content creators maybe not. That's just a downside of our modern world. Nothing is perfect.
To be fair we do not really have an adequate explanation of abiogenesis. Nothing at least that makes sense to our limited brains. We have to assume randomness just because we cannot come up with anything better.
Obvioiusly positing a supernatural entity who does it with magic offers zero explanatory value, but the truth is we just have no idea how life came about. All we know is that once it started it was like a chain reaction that was self-perpetuating.
Basically all life forms truly are molecular scale machines which no doubt could be built from scratch by a sufficiently advanced civilization. We are only just beginning to be able to tinker with such thing in the field of synthetic biology. We have only just begun to build actual simplistic robots that can walk around like we do. Maybe in 10,000 years we also will be able to design and create our own life forms.
People get all mystical about life but really it's just a very advanced branch of robotics. So advanced that it is the equivalent to alien tech. It's as if an alien civilization left us something like a phaser or a spaceship with an FTL drive and we were left on our own to figure out how it works but we cannot even really begin to figure it out because it is so far beyond our current scientific understanding. Hence the mysticism.
Because the people who create great breakthroughs in science generally started out as 'losers' by the standards of the common people who use such terms. It usually just means they are ugly and intellectual and intelligent.
First of all if you are talking about true AI and not just basically the same sort of connectionist statistical learning algorithms that have been around for many years you are perhaps better off getting into electrical engineering rather than machine learning because we don't yet really have the hardware to properly run the software on.
AI is all about research and research is still at a very early stage. When it comes to AI we are cavemen with crude stone axes. We need some fundamental breakthroughs and they are more likely to come from new hardware than new software.
Actually I suspect we may find that the best approach is by cheating with a bit of biology. We may find it easier to grow our own biological neurons that map themselves than trying to figure out what a brain does and emulate it with electronic circuits. So you may be better off getting a degree in some sort of biological science and specializing in the brain.
My suggestion is to get at least 3 PhDs. One on the software side related to machine learning / artificial neural networks, another on the electrical engineering side of things designing something like Google's TPU but even more optimized for the most effective neural network architecture of the day, and perhaps most importantly a degree in Synthetic Biology and/or Cognitive Science for the wetware aspects which I predict will be the most successful in the future.
Probably the most effective approach to creating intelligence will be with making other species smarter. Genetically engineering bonobos or parrots or corvids to give them a better cerebral cortex for instance or figuring out how to give them some of our human genetics that makes our brains so effective in general. Of course that won't really be artificial intelligence but is just as cool in some ways and will probably happen before we can figure out how to build a brain from scratch.
There is also the artificial life angle: looking at life itself as an engineering problem. Life forms are basically just electrochemical robots evolved with genetic algorithms designed at the molecular nanotech level. Figure out for instance how to make your own form of life that is not based on DNA or even carbon. Again however this would start to stretch the meaning of 'artificial'. Once you figure out this puzzle everything starts to look artificial.
I was thinking this as well. It will kill the market for expensive laptops too. After the third macbook pro gets stolen even relatively wealthy people will start buying cheaper laptops or just buy the stolen ones from ebay to be restolen and resold on ebay yet again.
Note that this is more than just an issue of not being able to actually use your laptop. You can't reliably fly with one at all. You have to expect it's going to get either damaged or stolen.
Actual security would be too hard and invasive to make happen
Well they could balance effective detection techniques for real threats vs cost. Something like explosive sniffing dogs and old fashioned metal detectors. Nothing else is really needed.
I mean you could strip search everyone or make everyone exchange their clothes for TSA robes or something or even fill the cabin with something like isoflurane to knock out the passengers for the length of the flight, but such extreme measures are totally out of proportion to the threat. I mean it's not like there are planes being blown up every day.
You could probably make flights cheaper by filling a cargo plane with capsules of unconscious passengers and that seems pretty safe but again is an extreme solution to a non-problem. Although I sort of like the idea of a kind of flying capsule hotel.
Presumably it will start with the classic laptop and then they will gradually close the edge case loopholes you mention so that everyone will be bored on flights just like before we had portable computing devices. The goal of the TSA is not only security theatrics but to increase human misery and suffering and discomfort in any and every way they can.
I spend less than $6000 per year for rent, utilities, and food. So for the cost of one year in prison I could live for 12 years without working. I wonder how many of those criminals would be in jail if we had some sort of minimum basic income in the US. Not that I am claiming such a system is viable, but it sounds like in the case of the prisoners it would be much cheaper.
Having a glass of wine with dinner is pretty standard in a lot of European cultures. I'd be honestly shocked if it was bad for you, as the Mediterranean countries that swear by it are famous for the long and healthy lives.
So are you now honestly shocked? I personally found those other studies that indicated a glass of wine a day was good for you shocking.
That alcohol is not good for our brains doesn't seem all that shocking though. Note that the study isn't claiming you will die younger. Just that you will probably be less intelligent as you get older and continue to use alcohol. I'd say this study should especially support the idea of people like scientists who use their brains for a living should really consider trying to give up using alcohol. There are probably safer drugs that achieve whatever effect they want from the alcohol.
I have not found that to be the case at all. Usually it just means they have a minority view and since the majority is often wrong that can be a good thing.
I find this statement disturbing on at least two levels. One that you don't think Morocco is an African country and two the "I would say" as if it is a matter of opinion or something.
Yeah I guess it's a Windows thing. The developers wanted to make some extra cash with bundled adware, but I think they left Linux and Mac users alone. The Windows version still has the bundled adware when you download it from the link you posted.
The only way to avoid the adware on Windows is to compile the binary yourself from the source code or maybe use the Chocolatey package. There used to be download links that avoided the malware infected versions but those were taken down a long time ago. Presumably because the devs wanted to maximize their adware revenue. Every time someone downloaded the adware free version they probably figured they were losing money.
The bundled adware is not any sort of accident. The devs admitted as much a long time ago. They wanted to make money. I don't understand why people give the Filezilla devs a pass for going the adware/malware route. Maybe because they left Linux users alone or because they kept it open source. IMO though they are still dicks.
Well I guess it's free in the sense that all malware is free.
If you're still referring to it as adware, I'm assuming it's because of the partnership with SourceForge which bundled adware in certain versions of the software (of which you could easily still download a clean version if you knew what you were doing).
In all versions. There are no longer any binaries available that are not adware/malware. Yes what you are saying used to be true some years ago, but it is not true anymore. Also don't blame Sourceforge. Filezilla specifically chose to have Sourceforge bundle the adware because it makes money for them. They openly admitted it and had no plans to make any changes despite the complaints.
Yes if you are willing to go through the trouble of compiling the code yourself you can avoid the malware but not many people are going to go through the trouble.
That program ended quite a while ago.
Go find me a link to a Windows binary of the latest version of Filezilla that does not have the bundled adware. Good luck with that.
Also WinSCP is not Adware. Some people may prefer Filezilla for that reason. Filezilla is better if you like being served ads. WinSCP does not include Astromenda.
Yawn. Who cares. Filezilla is adware. It is *not* free software. Does anyone still use it? Why bother when there is truly free software that works just as well or better.
Actually it isn't that simple. Price competition exists in every market. That includes the labor market. There are many highly intelligent people all over the world who would happily work for far less than $93000. It really is an insane amount of money for a relatively easy (from an intellectual pov) job. American workers who make that much really are in a union like situation where for whatever reason the price of their labor is being kept artificially high. Obviously some (the ones with jobs) American programmers are happy with the situation, but the whole thing is completely inefficient and crazy. If a corporation were overcharging that much for a product or service they would not be looked at in a favorable light.
I am an American citizen and I would happily code for $20000 per year because I love it. It is fun. No one has to pay me 5 times that much. That is just insane. No I don't live in Silicon Valley. So I don't have to pay $5000/month in rent or whatever. No one is forcing anyone to live in such a ridiculously expensive place where I guess only very rich people can afford to be and if corporations are basing their work operations there then I have no sympathy for them. They are just being stupid. Another example of corporate inefficiency and irrationality. They may as well set up in Manhattan or something. How can they possibly compete with an operation located somewhere with a more sane cost of living? They can't but I guess they don't care. If you absolutely must have your offices in RichPersonVille where only the rich can afford to live then I guess you have to be willing to pay people enough so that they are rich as well. And yes $93000/year is 'rich' by any reasonable standard. What I am getting at is that foreigners are not the only enemy of such a high cost of labor. Other Americans are as well.
The problem is that technical users, like those found on Slashdot, tell home users that they should turn this stuff off because it causes all these problems, when it really doesn't when you're running a system with known hardware and under typical operating conditions.
Probably they only get told to turn it off after it causes some kind of problem. If I get a call from a friend about a computer problem that was caused by a MS update what the fuck do you think I'm going to tell him to do after that.?
I keep it turned off on my own computer because it caused me similar problems and is a total nightmare in almost every way. Microsoft thought that randomly taking over someone's computer for a few hours at a time without any warning was a good idea, but actually it's not. Even on Windows 7 I keep it off. Can't even imagine what it would be like to run Windows 10 with auto update on. Jesus. That must be a nightmare. I don't ever want to know what that is like. There is enough suffering in this world without that.
Slashdot Mirror
Because Russian hackers hacked an insecure email system and let the information be freed instead of say Chinese hackers it's the Cold War again? It's only the Cold War if the democrats want to restart one and it certainly seems that they do. Even if the Russians do want to influence our elections so what? Unless you can actually prove some kind of crime that's just SOP. We do the same. In fact we do much worse.
Don't try to hide the only strategic analysis of revealed Russian aggression. They must be fought directly and quickly or the losses will be even greater.
I see. So you want to go to war with Russia? Would that be a land war? That worked out so well for Hitler and his minions. I'll tell you what. How about YOU go to war with them. Go over there. Bring a gun. Declare war against them. Let us know how it works out for you, chicken hawk war monger. I have no problem with the Russians. I like them. I don't want to fight them.
I guess the problem with the new Millennium and Globalism or whatever you call it is the lack of villains. We don't have anyone to fight against. No real villains. I mean yeah we have North Korea I guess. Kim Jong-Un is a kind of Clown-Villain and he might be worth going to war with, but aside from the powder keg in the middle east I can't really think of anyone else at the moment. So if you have such an itchy trigger finger and are target seeking maybe try aiming your weapon at a real villain rather than an imaginary one.
Three different government agencies agreed on Russia attempting to interfere with the latest election.
I'd like to see some evidence of this. How exactly did they interfere? What did they do? Did they buy electors? Did they leave some kind of paper trail? Swiss bank accounts? WTF are you talking about?
There should be no fuzz on this whatsoever, Mr. Comey said. The Russians interfered in our election during the 2016 cycle. They did it with purpose. They did it with sophistication. They did it with overwhelming technical efforts. And it was an active-measures campaign driven from the top of that government. There is no fuzz on that.
I call bullshit. How? Give an example of how the Russians 'interfered' in any real demonstrable way with the last US election. They changed the votes? If so how? I guess they could try to buy votes or even more effectively perhaps bribe the electors whose votes actually matter. Of course if our electors are buyable we really only have ourselves to blame for being so easily corruptible and by having a system that is so easy to influence with money. But is there any evidence the Russians or anyone actually did this? I'd like to see the evidence rather than vague and essentially meaningless anti-Russian propaganda. If they want to hack insecure email systems I say good for them. It has no direct connection to US elections and I am totally cool with it. Improve the security of email rather than whining about it like little bitches. Also for those of you who want to go back to the Cold War just because you don't like the current president, fuck you. Stop picking fights with the Russkies. If you want to saber rattle at them it had better be for a damned good reason and email hacking does not qualify. How the fuck has the American Democratic party become war mongers?
The premise behind SETI have never been detection of a signal specifically directed at us
Actually no. The premise, at least until quite recently, has always been a narrowband and ideally modulated continuous wave RF signal in the 'water hole' between 1.42 and 1.66 Mhz directed right at us. If not directly at our planet at least at our star. Radio leakage is so weak that it is generally indistinguishable from noise after a few light years and many frequencies are attenuated into near nonexistence before they even make it out of the atmosphere.
Is there a degree program, or other paths to skill and knowledge, for a programmer who's convinced that "AI is today what the web was in 1993"?
Well you have to be smart enough to earn one or more PhDs. Someone who believes that is probably not going to be able to do that, but if he tries he will probably quickly learn what a stupid idea it was. Hopefully he will still decide to get his PhD though. We can always use more AI researchers. Although dumb ones are less valuable you never know who might get lucky and stumble upon some cool breakthrough.
The first point is that the only example we have of intelligence is intimately tied to life and can only really be viewed as an aspect of that and the idea that intelligence can be separated from life or at least some form of artificial life is speculative at best. As someone who was quite interested in a career in AI research back in the 80s and has been following the feeble creep of its progress since then I am convinced that wetware is going to be the real future and not so much neural net ASICs like Google's TPU or whatever Nvidia is working on to run neural network architecture which although useful is I think not going to be the foundation for real AI that can give a nice robot chassis like Boston Dynamic's Atlas some level of general intelligence or common sense.
Think of something more like putting a rat/pig/monkey brain into an Atlas Robot. That is figuring out how to digitally interface with a brain-in-jar and train it directly as if it were a complete living animal. Even a rat brain is a far more sophisticated neural network machine than anything we will probably build from scratch in the next few hundred years.
Current neural network architectures are based on a highly simplified model of how real brains actually work. We still really don't know how real brains work. There are projects like The Allen Brain Atlas, The Human Connectome Project, The Brain Activity Map, or whatever Henry Markram is currently up to. There is an interesting Wired article about him that you should read. Maybe consider pursuing a career path like his.
I'd also suggest maybe thinking in at least as much in terms of DNA programming as CPU or GPU programming via Synthetic Biology and follow a career more like Craig Venter who famously made his own artificial bacteria or rather wrote the DNA and inserted it into an empty host cell. That's just a small start of course but it may eventually lead to being able to build artificial life forms that we can make intelligent just by giving them a large enough brain or encephalization quotient. Ultimately even an Atlas Robot with something like an Nvidia P100 cluster running deep learning style neural nets is a kind of very primitive life form. Going fully wet and nano is just another way to attack the same problem in a more integrated fashion: the way I think a far more advanced civ tech would do it.
I guess you should really think in terms of which vision of AI you want to follow or place your bets on. Silicon based connectionism is in vogue at the moment and I think that is great because a lot of progress was lost back in the 80s when it was considered a dead end. It is certainly a more powerful and promising approach than trying to hand code intelligence into a piece of software, but I still think we are just nipping at the heels of an even better approach: biology. Ultimately we are copying the only machine in existence that can create intelligence and that is the
Couldn't we just ban politicians from making laws
As a Libertarian myself I wish we could do exactly that. Was it from Heinlein that I read about the idea of a group of representatives whose sole job is to repeal the stupid laws that the law passing representatives manage to pass? Sort of an Anti Parliament or Anti House of Representatives. Except that the deck is stacked to make it much harder to pass laws than to repeal them. Like a 2/3 majority necessary to pass put only a 1/3 minority necessary to repeal. Something like that. Reminds me about that Louis CK joke about porn: that we have enough of it now and can stop. Same with laws. I think we have more than enough at this point thank you very much.
If it has value then you should pay for it in one way or an other.
It's information. It's bits. It's out there. I am not hurting anyone by transferring the bits to my hard drive. If they don't want free riders then they shouldn't release the content into the world. Just show it in cinemas and carefully watch for hidden video cameras at all viewing locations.
Once your release it as data you immediately lose control of that data and you are going to get a lot of free riders. No point whining about the reality of it. Accept it or go do something else.
Hopefully people with money who like your work will pay you if you give them a way to do that. Enough people usually do, but for marginal content creators maybe not. That's just a downside of our modern world. Nothing is perfect.
To be fair we do not really have an adequate explanation of abiogenesis. Nothing at least that makes sense to our limited brains. We have to assume randomness just because we cannot come up with anything better.
Obvioiusly positing a supernatural entity who does it with magic offers zero explanatory value, but the truth is we just have no idea how life came about. All we know is that once it started it was like a chain reaction that was self-perpetuating.
Basically all life forms truly are molecular scale machines which no doubt could be built from scratch by a sufficiently advanced civilization. We are only just beginning to be able to tinker with such thing in the field of synthetic biology. We have only just begun to build actual simplistic robots that can walk around like we do. Maybe in 10,000 years we also will be able to design and create our own life forms.
People get all mystical about life but really it's just a very advanced branch of robotics. So advanced that it is the equivalent to alien tech. It's as if an alien civilization left us something like a phaser or a spaceship with an FTL drive and we were left on our own to figure out how it works but we cannot even really begin to figure it out because it is so far beyond our current scientific understanding. Hence the mysticism.
Because the people who create great breakthroughs in science generally started out as 'losers' by the standards of the common people who use such terms. It usually just means they are ugly and intellectual and intelligent.
First of all if you are talking about true AI and not just basically the same sort of connectionist statistical learning algorithms that have been around for many years you are perhaps better off getting into electrical engineering rather than machine learning because we don't yet really have the hardware to properly run the software on.
AI is all about research and research is still at a very early stage. When it comes to AI we are cavemen with crude stone axes. We need some fundamental breakthroughs and they are more likely to come from new hardware than new software.
Actually I suspect we may find that the best approach is by cheating with a bit of biology. We may find it easier to grow our own biological neurons that map themselves than trying to figure out what a brain does and emulate it with electronic circuits. So you may be better off getting a degree in some sort of biological science and specializing in the brain.
My suggestion is to get at least 3 PhDs. One on the software side related to machine learning / artificial neural networks, another on the electrical engineering side of things designing something like Google's TPU but even more optimized for the most effective neural network architecture of the day, and perhaps most importantly a degree in Synthetic Biology and/or Cognitive Science for the wetware aspects which I predict will be the most successful in the future.
Probably the most effective approach to creating intelligence will be with making other species smarter. Genetically engineering bonobos or parrots or corvids to give them a better cerebral cortex for instance or figuring out how to give them some of our human genetics that makes our brains so effective in general. Of course that won't really be artificial intelligence but is just as cool in some ways and will probably happen before we can figure out how to build a brain from scratch.
There is also the artificial life angle: looking at life itself as an engineering problem. Life forms are basically just electrochemical robots evolved with genetic algorithms designed at the molecular nanotech level. Figure out for instance how to make your own form of life that is not based on DNA or even carbon. Again however this would start to stretch the meaning of 'artificial'. Once you figure out this puzzle everything starts to look artificial.
I was thinking this as well. It will kill the market for expensive laptops too. After the third macbook pro gets stolen even relatively wealthy people will start buying cheaper laptops or just buy the stolen ones from ebay to be restolen and resold on ebay yet again.
Note that this is more than just an issue of not being able to actually use your laptop. You can't reliably fly with one at all. You have to expect it's going to get either damaged or stolen.
Actual security would be too hard and invasive to make happen
Well they could balance effective detection techniques for real threats vs cost. Something like explosive sniffing dogs and old fashioned metal detectors. Nothing else is really needed.
I mean you could strip search everyone or make everyone exchange their clothes for TSA robes or something or even fill the cabin with something like isoflurane to knock out the passengers for the length of the flight, but such extreme measures are totally out of proportion to the threat. I mean it's not like there are planes being blown up every day.
You could probably make flights cheaper by filling a cargo plane with capsules of unconscious passengers and that seems pretty safe but again is an extreme solution to a non-problem. Although I sort of like the idea of a kind of flying capsule hotel.
Presumably it will start with the classic laptop and then they will gradually close the edge case loopholes you mention so that everyone will be bored on flights just like before we had portable computing devices. The goal of the TSA is not only security theatrics but to increase human misery and suffering and discomfort in any and every way they can.
I spend less than $6000 per year for rent, utilities, and food. So for the cost of one year in prison I could live for 12 years without working. I wonder how many of those criminals would be in jail if we had some sort of minimum basic income in the US. Not that I am claiming such a system is viable, but it sounds like in the case of the prisoners it would be much cheaper.
Having a glass of wine with dinner is pretty standard in a lot of European cultures. I'd be honestly shocked if it was bad for you, as the Mediterranean countries that swear by it are famous for the long and healthy lives.
So are you now honestly shocked? I personally found those other studies that indicated a glass of wine a day was good for you shocking.
That alcohol is not good for our brains doesn't seem all that shocking though. Note that the study isn't claiming you will die younger. Just that you will probably be less intelligent as you get older and continue to use alcohol. I'd say this study should especially support the idea of people like scientists who use their brains for a living should really consider trying to give up using alcohol. There are probably safer drugs that achieve whatever effect they want from the alcohol.
I have not found that to be the case at all. Usually it just means they have a minority view and since the majority is often wrong that can be a good thing.
I would say Morocco is pretty close to Africa
I find this statement disturbing on at least two levels. One that you don't think Morocco is an African country and two the "I would say" as if it is a matter of opinion or something.
Yeah I guess it's a Windows thing. The developers wanted to make some extra cash with bundled adware, but I think they left Linux and Mac users alone. The Windows version still has the bundled adware when you download it from the link you posted.
The only way to avoid the adware on Windows is to compile the binary yourself from the source code or maybe use the Chocolatey package. There used to be download links that avoided the malware infected versions but those were taken down a long time ago. Presumably because the devs wanted to maximize their adware revenue. Every time someone downloaded the adware free version they probably figured they were losing money.
The bundled adware is not any sort of accident. The devs admitted as much a long time ago. They wanted to make money. I don't understand why people give the Filezilla devs a pass for going the adware/malware route. Maybe because they left Linux users alone or because they kept it open source. IMO though they are still dicks.
How the fuck is it NOT free software?
Well I guess it's free in the sense that all malware is free.
If you're still referring to it as adware, I'm assuming it's because of the partnership with SourceForge which bundled adware in certain versions of the software (of which you could easily still download a clean version if you knew what you were doing).
In all versions. There are no longer any binaries available that are not adware/malware. Yes what you are saying used to be true some years ago, but it is not true anymore. Also don't blame Sourceforge. Filezilla specifically chose to have Sourceforge bundle the adware because it makes money for them. They openly admitted it and had no plans to make any changes despite the complaints.
Yes if you are willing to go through the trouble of compiling the code yourself you can avoid the malware but not many people are going to go through the trouble.
That program ended quite a while ago.
Go find me a link to a Windows binary of the latest version of Filezilla that does not have the bundled adware. Good luck with that.
Also WinSCP is not Adware. Some people may prefer Filezilla for that reason. Filezilla is better if you like being served ads. WinSCP does not include Astromenda.
Yawn. Who cares. Filezilla is adware. It is *not* free software. Does anyone still use it? Why bother when there is truly free software that works just as well or better.
The so called WMAP cold spot looks to just be some sort of data error and probably does not in fact exist
Too bad because the idea was seriously cool and would have been useful for science fiction.
Actually it isn't that simple. Price competition exists in every market. That includes the labor market. There are many highly intelligent people all over the world who would happily work for far less than $93000. It really is an insane amount of money for a relatively easy (from an intellectual pov) job. American workers who make that much really are in a union like situation where for whatever reason the price of their labor is being kept artificially high. Obviously some (the ones with jobs) American programmers are happy with the situation, but the whole thing is completely inefficient and crazy. If a corporation were overcharging that much for a product or service they would not be looked at in a favorable light.
I am an American citizen and I would happily code for $20000 per year because I love it. It is fun. No one has to pay me 5 times that much. That is just insane. No I don't live in Silicon Valley. So I don't have to pay $5000/month in rent or whatever. No one is forcing anyone to live in such a ridiculously expensive place where I guess only very rich people can afford to be and if corporations are basing their work operations there then I have no sympathy for them. They are just being stupid. Another example of corporate inefficiency and irrationality. They may as well set up in Manhattan or something. How can they possibly compete with an operation located somewhere with a more sane cost of living? They can't but I guess they don't care. If you absolutely must have your offices in RichPersonVille where only the rich can afford to live then I guess you have to be willing to pay people enough so that they are rich as well. And yes $93000/year is 'rich' by any reasonable standard. What I am getting at is that foreigners are not the only enemy of such a high cost of labor. Other Americans are as well.
The problem is that technical users, like those found on Slashdot, tell home users that they should turn this stuff off because it causes all these problems, when it really doesn't when you're running a system with known hardware and under typical operating conditions.
Probably they only get told to turn it off after it causes some kind of problem. If I get a call from a friend about a computer problem that was caused by a MS update what the fuck do you think I'm going to tell him to do after that.?
I keep it turned off on my own computer because it caused me similar problems and is a total nightmare in almost every way. Microsoft thought that randomly taking over someone's computer for a few hours at a time without any warning was a good idea, but actually it's not. Even on Windows 7 I keep it off. Can't even imagine what it would be like to run Windows 10 with auto update on. Jesus. That must be a nightmare. I don't ever want to know what that is like. There is enough suffering in this world without that.