Trump is completely against this outsourcing thing.
I'm curious. What do you think a POTUS can do about outsourcing, except be against it?
How do you stop a transnational corporation from moving jobs to other countries in an age of big-dollar corporate lobbying? You think Trump is gonna call for a boycott?
The president can stop bad laws from passing.
Additionally, Trump in particular is an expert at negotiations and making deals.
That last link was from the State Department's internal audit of our Japanese ambassador.
We have a long list of trade deals which supercede the constitution and make Americans miserable. We're currently working on the Trans Pacific Partnership, which extends copyright protections, jacks up the cost of medicine, magnifies income inequality, and threatens the climate. (See Wikipedia for more detail.)
A president who has the interests of the *people* as a goal, and who wants the country to become strong again, could veto this treaty and negotiate better terms.
The President...shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur... Constitution of the United States, Art. II, Sec. 2
There will be a vigorous discussion here on Thursday about what went on during the Republican debates (Wednesday, tomorrow).
Trump is completely against this outsourcing thing. He sees quite clearly the damage it does to our workforce, and how it's turning the country into a 3rd world nation.
Unlike the other candidates, he doesn't have to promise anything to super PACs just to get campaign donations. We're starting to see the fallout from this, as at least one supar-PAC has declared war on Donald Trump.
And for comparison, note that about 6 months before becoming president, [then] Senator Obama voted *for* telecom immunity. After he had promised to vote against it. And the measure didn't need his vote to pass - it already had enough support for that.
As a result several telecoms donated to his campaign and he ultimately won.
Keep this job-loss article in mind as you listen to the candidates on Wednesday. Most of them are career politicians, and we know how they actually voted on some of these issues.
If you want to compete with 30,000 new job hunters because your company outsourced to another country, feel free to vote for a politician.
Of course, your company will offer you 3 months of extra employment if you agree to train your replacement, so it's not all bad!
Assuming "back door" means "any security bug, including a but that nobody knows about yet," well, "good luck with that."
There's a move afoot to rebrand lawful intercept away from the term "back door". This is a transparent attempt to gain legitimacy by framing, making it seem more palatable to users.
Bruce Schneier even commented on the practice, after hearing Keith Alexander (quote copied below, from the linked article).
A backdoor is what it is: an engineered way to bypass security, supposedly only used for lawful means.
Don't drink the coolaid, and think about what people say instead of just repeating what they say.
A backdoor isn't a bug, and rebranding it to sound safe doesn't make it so.
[FBI Director Comey said] There is a misconception that building a lawful intercept solution into a system requires a so-called "back door," one that foreign adversaries and hackers may try to exploit.
But that isn't true. We aren't seeking a back-door approach. We want to use the front door, with clarity and transparency, and with clear guidance provided by law. We are completely comfortable with court orders and legal process--front doors that provide the evidence and information we need to investigate crime and prevent terrorist attacks.
If you're concerned with surveillance, you shouldn't be thinking in terms of "which country", you should be thinking in terms of "which software".
There's no guarantee that *any* data will be safe *anywhere*. Your best choice, and in fact the only choice with any chance of success, is with a technical solution.
Use strong encryption end-to-end, encrypt any data on the servers, give your clients/customers their keys, and make certain you don't have a back door.
That's the only way to avoid it. Hire some really capable security people to implement a strong system, and employ a security maintenance team to keep you current with known security issues.
For all the bad you can say about Julian Assange, he's an expert in this sort of thing and even *he* wasn't able to choose a good country.
Epson printers come with an "ink pad", which is a sort of sponge that sops up excess ink from clearing the print heads and such.
When the ink pads are filled with ink, the printer firmware simply refuses to print - there's nothing you can do, no way to fix it or reset it. Your only recourse is to get another printer.
The printer doesn't *sense* the amount of ink in the pads, it simply calculates the amount of ink it *thinks* is in the pad, and the firmware will lock you out if it thinks it's too much.
And this can happen in the middle of a print job: the system gives you no warning or notice. Half the pages you need for your presentation tomorrow are sitting in the output tray, and the printer is junk. There is no recourse.
I've personally disassembled over a dozen Epson printers, the ink pads are never even 10% full when this happens. It's a complete scam.
I've listened to Handel on the Law a lot. Isn't the truth an absolute defense when it comes to libel/slander suits?
It is in this country, but not in other countries.
Not to get stereotypical, but the CTO's name 'kinda implies that he's originally from India, or perhaps his family is from there.
He may feel justified in pursuing a libel case simply from his upbringing. This might just be a cultural difference.
(And I'm *still* wondering how these people find work after such a scandal. "CTO of Ashlet Madison" isn't something that would sell a resume, and the "so... what have you been doing for the past 4 years" has to be an awkward interview question.)
The real question, the question that will make or break the browser, is: does it give the people what they want?
Does it have video chat builtin? Do the tabs have artistically sculpted curves? Does the color scheme use soft, pleasing low-contrast colors? Does it have flat chicklet controls or old-fashioned 3-d buttons? Does have an integrated mail reader?
These are the things the public wants, these are what it takes to make a modern browser. People want user-friendly, something that can be run by young toddlers and does everything in one application, with a sky-high level of customization options and a powerful extension ecosystem. One with a high-level of artistic merit.
Not some stripped-down single-purpose display engine.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Wednesday. 'The DOD has to tap into all the streams of innovation and emerging technology and it has to do so much more quickly,'
The British seemed to take it more seriously, and be smarter about it. This is part of why their human intelligence generally seemed superior to ours. Today, the new British government seems keen on sacrificing the security of its people on the altar of the false religion of national security.
I think it's the movies.
British intelligence had a string of high-profile successes, culminating in dropping that evil guy into the smokestack.
At least, that's what the public was led to believe.
In the modern world, the internet has a way of making the reality of the situation more plain.
Users should only [reuse passwords] where the compromise of one password does not result in the compromise of more valuable data protected by the same password on a different system.
So if I have access to a highly sensitive system, it's OK to reuse that password on a system with lower value data.
The Ashley Madison system stored an MD5 hash of the lower-cased username and password on the user's computer, so that they could revisit the site without having to reenter their login info.
Computing MD5 hash values is much faster than computing bcrypt() values, the hackers already had the username, and both fields were lower-cased.
They just brute forced the MD5 hash until they got a match. About 90% of the MD5 passwords matched exactly (ie - the passwords were already in lower case), of the remaining 10% they tried uppercasing the individual letters of the password until it matched.
Security is hard. Basing the MD5 hash on a reduced-space plaintext password was the fundamental error.
Also there were some administrative lapses. They changed password hash algorithms, and then forced users to change passwords at next login. Many users hadn't logged in in several years, so this left a lot of old, insecurely hashed passwords around.
Generally poor security for such a sensitive site. Makes me wonder how good other popular sites are at security.
We really should figure out this security thing.
Perhaps an open-source fixed-function password keeper (as Mooltipass) in separate trustable hardware would work?
The maker movement desperately needs federal government support.
That's the only way women and minorities will get access to makerspaces and creative tools.
Why, women make up half of all people, and the fact that they're under-represented in hackerspace memberships is clear evidence of pervasive prejudice and the "rape culture".
Just as there are few women coders, there are also few women hackers.
We only need to consider scientific research to see how this would work: before federal involvement, scientific inquiry was haphazard, capricious, and discretionary. Nowadays we have an organized inquiry into the frontiers of science at every direction of inquiry - eliminating duplication of effort, guiding lines of inquiry for best results, and generally eliminating risk.
This same model could bring the maker movement into the 21st century, bestowing the benefits of government bureaucracy on hackers across the country!
google cardboard pretty much makes this tech obsolete. my cell phone plus $20 headset and I have the same thing.
Carmak has stated that the big problem in VR headsets is latency: when the image movement is delayed slightly from when your head moves, it gives you headaches and nausea.
Carmak is a pretty smart guy, and has been working on this problem for awhile, and thinks he's solved the problem and that it will make a sellable product. He's got a track record for making sellable products, and so does Zuckerberg.
This is, of course, the reverse of an ad-hominum attack.
I'm not saying that earbuds and a flap from a shipping box isn't an equivalent setup, but I have to wonder...
"Raises privacy concerns" is elliptical speech: it's made to be deliberately obscure. (It uses "causes concern" to convey the central point without giving any information about what the point is.)
It's also passive voice, in that there's no person performing the action, the action is simply "caused" by something. (For comparison, consider "we wrote reports" versus "reports were written".) Hence, there's no person or group responsible, it's simply an aspect of situation.
And finally, the phrase uses framing to soften the effect. Your personal information isn't being harvested, the system simply "raises some concerns".
Taken as a whole the headline tries to get the reader emotionally involved by stating something we should be concerned about, without saying in concrete terms *that* there is anything to be concerned about, and that it's *other people* who are concerned.
Meh. This didn't work on me, I'm not actually concerned, I'm going to ignore it.
I've often wondered what happens to people like this after the fact.
For example, recall Aaron Barr, the guy running HB Gary and who claimed he could "out" the Anonymous members by dubious correlation of social media accounts.
Or that guy Paul Christoforo who threw down with Penny Arcade founder Mike Krahulik (and got fired, banned from PAX, and his marketing company's client dropped them).
Do these people find jobs somewhere on this planet? Does Kevin Mitnick's security firm have a lot of customers?
The Ashley Madison guy - that's 'gotta be an awkward interview, you know.
"Why did you leave your previous place of employment?"
This is one of those situations where a sense of humor could make an interesting story into a great story.
The Marine Biological Association in Plymouth should buy a 1904 shilling (on eBay around $13) and send it to the German couple.
It would be the perfect story ending, generate some good-natured publicity, and the bottle and note are probably antiques of historical value. (Imagine the bottle and note in the Salem maritime museum (Peabody Essex Museum), with the above-mentioned story ending in the description.)
Maybe the MIT crew could put up a video somewhere. Something on YouTube perhaps, because it would be nice to watch what people are doing instead of seeing fixed frames every few seconds.
(Or maybe if the Vimeo plugin would continue loading the video while paused you could stop the video, work for a bit, and come back and see what's going on. Nope - preload is apparently fixed at some insufficient amount ahead of the stopping point.)
We could do worse than Trump... But.... We could do a LOT better too. I sure hope Trump get's tired of spending his money on this side show pretty soon...
The summary nature of voting on legislature (yea, nay, abstain) puts an upper bound on the amount of damage a bad congressman can do.
Essentially, there are a finite number of times any congressman can vote on an issue. If they vote against the interests of the people every time, they've reached maximum damage.
The same can be said of presidents (pass, veto, pocket-veto, &c.).
Few issues are black-and-white: most laws are some percent good for the people and some percent bad. The two issues I can find that are closest to 100% bad for the people are H1B Visas and the Patriot and USA Freedom acts.
H1B visas take jobs away from Americans and allow corporations to impose misery on the imported workers, and the Patriot act and related violates our rights and makes us less safe (by diverting resources away from effective strategies like intelligence gathering).
The relevant votes are shown below. The government doesn't care about our rights, and it doesn't care whether we have jobs. It has reached maximum damage.
Trump might be the worst president we've ever had, but at this point in time, he's not *guaranteed* to be the worst.
USA Freedom Act (Senate)
YEAs: 67 (D = 43, R = 23, I = 1) NAYs: 32 (D = 1, R = 30, I = 1) Not voting: 1 (R)
Way back when Heidi Fleiss got arrested for running a prostitution ring, and her list of clients fell into the hands of the police, my first thought was: if it were *me*, I'd have:
a) had a backup copy, and
b) been regularly adding high-ranking authorities (for instance: the chief of police) to the list of clients. In a diary fashion, interspersed (in the records) with the appointments of real clients.
For b) especially, having dates and times when the high-ranking official is known to be away from home, such as noon times if they have a day job, or adding verifiable corroborating information such as "and he came in soaking wet" on rainy days and such, would have gone a long way towards giving Ms. Fleiss some leverage.
Ah well... people don't think ahead in these modern times.
Apropos of nothing, I saw this on a friend's twitter feed:
ME: Hunny, did you have an Ashley Madison account? HER: What?! No! ME: Damn. That would have made what I'm about to say, a lot easier.
As any AI researcher will tell you, we know how the brain works and Geoffrey Hinton's recent paper is nothing short of a breakthrough, and will lead to us having strong AI programs real soon.
We have IBM's Watson, a program that actually understands the information it's processing and will be used to augment medical diagnosis, SIRI, a personal assistant application that actually learns, and MAKO, a program who can do anything on a PC!
Neural networks are simulations of how brain works.
Apropos of nothing, since you're familiar with both neural nets and how the brain works, can you answer a quick question for me?
Neural nets have a left-to-right topology, where the inputs go in one side and the outputs leave the other side.
The brain doesn't do that - there's no "loop" in the brain where input neurons are processed on one side and output neurons exit the other.
This has always confused me about neural nets. If they simulate how the brain works, then how exactly *does* the brain work with inputs and outputs both on the same side?
Slashdot Mirror
So let me get this straight, this kid is being arrested and Trump is leading the polls?
The endless abuse, stupidity, waste, and misery is why Trump is leading the polls.
We've got the Republican debates tonight. See if any of the politicians will take a clear stance on fixing anything.
Oh, and check the voting records - it's the only way to make sure.
USA Freedom Act (Senate) (source)
YEAs: 67 (D = 43, R = 23, I = 1)
NAYs: 32 (D = 1, R = 30, I = 1)
Not voting: 1 (R)
I'm curious. What do you think a POTUS can do about outsourcing, except be against it?
How do you stop a transnational corporation from moving jobs to other countries in an age of big-dollar corporate lobbying? You think Trump is gonna call for a boycott?
The president can stop bad laws from passing.
Additionally, Trump in particular is an expert at negotiations and making deals.
For comparison, note that our current ambassador to Japan is Caroline Kennedy, who is largely a poor choice.
That last link was from the State Department's internal audit of our Japanese ambassador.
We have a long list of trade deals which supercede the constitution and make Americans miserable. We're currently working on the Trans Pacific Partnership, which extends copyright protections, jacks up the cost of medicine, magnifies income inequality, and threatens the climate. (See Wikipedia for more detail.)
A president who has the interests of the *people* as a goal, and who wants the country to become strong again, could veto this treaty and negotiate better terms.
The President...shall have Power, by and with the Advice and Consent of the Senate, to make Treaties, provided two thirds of the Senators present concur... Constitution of the United States, Art. II, Sec. 2
There will be a vigorous discussion here on Thursday about what went on during the Republican debates (Wednesday, tomorrow).
Trump is completely against this outsourcing thing. He sees quite clearly the damage it does to our workforce, and how it's turning the country into a 3rd world nation.
Unlike the other candidates, he doesn't have to promise anything to super PACs just to get campaign donations. We're starting to see the fallout from this, as at least one supar-PAC has declared war on Donald Trump.
And for comparison, note that about 6 months before becoming president, [then] Senator Obama voted *for* telecom immunity. After he had promised to vote against it. And the measure didn't need his vote to pass - it already had enough support for that.
As a result several telecoms donated to his campaign and he ultimately won.
Keep this job-loss article in mind as you listen to the candidates on Wednesday. Most of them are career politicians, and we know how they actually voted on some of these issues.
If you want to compete with 30,000 new job hunters because your company outsourced to another country, feel free to vote for a politician.
Of course, your company will offer you 3 months of extra employment if you agree to train your replacement, so it's not all bad!
Increase H1B Visas (Senate) (source)
YEAs: 67 (D = 52, R = 14, I = 2)
NAYs: 32 (D = 0, R = 32, I = 0)
Assuming "back door" means "any security bug, including a but that nobody knows about yet," well, "good luck with that."
There's a move afoot to rebrand lawful intercept away from the term "back door". This is a transparent attempt to gain legitimacy by framing, making it seem more palatable to users.
Bruce Schneier even commented on the practice, after hearing Keith Alexander (quote copied below, from the linked article).
A backdoor is what it is: an engineered way to bypass security, supposedly only used for lawful means.
Don't drink the coolaid, and think about what people say instead of just repeating what they say.
A backdoor isn't a bug, and rebranding it to sound safe doesn't make it so.
[FBI Director Comey said] There is a misconception that building a lawful intercept solution into a system requires a so-called "back door," one that foreign adversaries and hackers may try to exploit.
But that isn't true. We aren't seeking a back-door approach. We want to use the front door, with clarity and transparency, and with clear guidance provided by law. We are completely comfortable with court orders and legal process--front doors that provide the evidence and information we need to investigate crime and prevent terrorist attacks.
Your thinking about this the wrong way around.
If you're concerned with surveillance, you shouldn't be thinking in terms of "which country", you should be thinking in terms of "which software".
There's no guarantee that *any* data will be safe *anywhere*. Your best choice, and in fact the only choice with any chance of success, is with a technical solution.
Use strong encryption end-to-end, encrypt any data on the servers, give your clients/customers their keys, and make certain you don't have a back door.
That's the only way to avoid it. Hire some really capable security people to implement a strong system, and employ a security maintenance team to keep you current with known security issues.
For all the bad you can say about Julian Assange, he's an expert in this sort of thing and even *he* wasn't able to choose a good country.
Security through technology, it's the only way.
Epson printers come with an "ink pad", which is a sort of sponge that sops up excess ink from clearing the print heads and such.
When the ink pads are filled with ink, the printer firmware simply refuses to print - there's nothing you can do, no way to fix it or reset it. Your only recourse is to get another printer.
The printer doesn't *sense* the amount of ink in the pads, it simply calculates the amount of ink it *thinks* is in the pad, and the firmware will lock you out if it thinks it's too much.
And this can happen in the middle of a print job: the system gives you no warning or notice. Half the pages you need for your presentation tomorrow are sitting in the output tray, and the printer is junk. There is no recourse.
I've personally disassembled over a dozen Epson printers, the ink pads are never even 10% full when this happens. It's a complete scam.
Epson printers are free on Craigslist.
I've listened to Handel on the Law a lot. Isn't the truth an absolute defense when it comes to libel/slander suits?
It is in this country, but not in other countries.
Not to get stereotypical, but the CTO's name 'kinda implies that he's originally from India, or perhaps his family is from there.
He may feel justified in pursuing a libel case simply from his upbringing. This might just be a cultural difference.
(And I'm *still* wondering how these people find work after such a scandal. "CTO of Ashlet Madison" isn't something that would sell a resume, and the "so... what have you been doing for the past 4 years" has to be an awkward interview question.)
Benchmarks are an uninteresting aspect.
The real question, the question that will make or break the browser, is: does it give the people what they want?
Does it have video chat builtin?
Do the tabs have artistically sculpted curves?
Does the color scheme use soft, pleasing low-contrast colors?
Does it have flat chicklet controls or old-fashioned 3-d buttons?
Does have an integrated mail reader?
These are the things the public wants, these are what it takes to make a modern browser. People want user-friendly, something that can be run by young toddlers and does everything in one application, with a sky-high level of customization options and a powerful extension ecosystem. One with a high-level of artistic merit.
Not some stripped-down single-purpose display engine.
Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter said Wednesday. 'The DOD has to tap into all the streams of innovation and emerging technology and it has to do so much more quickly,'
Question 1: Do we spend more on military than the rest of the world combined?(*)
Question 2: Is our military already 1,000 times stronger than the next strongest power?
Question 3: Is there an immediate threat to the US from... anyone?
We're killing our country with all this needless spending.
Can't we just sit back and relax for a couple of years?
(*) This doesn't count militarization of the police, or internal police forces such as Homeland security, DEA, TSA, National Guard, and others.
The British seemed to take it more seriously, and be smarter about it. This is part of why their human intelligence generally seemed superior to ours. Today, the new British government seems keen on sacrificing the security of its people on the altar of the false religion of national security.
I think it's the movies.
British intelligence had a string of high-profile successes, culminating in dropping that evil guy into the smokestack.
At least, that's what the public was led to believe.
In the modern world, the internet has a way of making the reality of the situation more plain.
Perceptions change.
Users should only [reuse passwords] where the compromise of one password does not result in the compromise of more valuable data protected by the same password on a different system.
So if I have access to a highly sensitive system, it's OK to reuse that password on a system with lower value data.
OK - got it.
The Ashley Madison system stored an MD5 hash of the lower-cased username and password on the user's computer, so that they could revisit the site without having to reenter their login info.
Computing MD5 hash values is much faster than computing bcrypt() values, the hackers already had the username, and both fields were lower-cased.
They just brute forced the MD5 hash until they got a match. About 90% of the MD5 passwords matched exactly (ie - the passwords were already in lower case), of the remaining 10% they tried uppercasing the individual letters of the password until it matched.
Security is hard. Basing the MD5 hash on a reduced-space plaintext password was the fundamental error.
Also there were some administrative lapses. They changed password hash algorithms, and then forced users to change passwords at next login. Many users hadn't logged in in several years, so this left a lot of old, insecurely hashed passwords around.
Generally poor security for such a sensitive site. Makes me wonder how good other popular sites are at security.
We really should figure out this security thing.
Perhaps an open-source fixed-function password keeper (as Mooltipass) in separate trustable hardware would work?
OMGWTF!
Previously sitting at +4 Insightful.
Thank you, whoever gave the final +1 Funny to the article.
(Humor... it is a difficult concept!)
The maker movement desperately needs federal government support.
That's the only way women and minorities will get access to makerspaces and creative tools.
Why, women make up half of all people, and the fact that they're under-represented in hackerspace memberships is clear evidence of pervasive prejudice and the "rape culture".
Just as there are few women coders, there are also few women hackers.
We only need to consider scientific research to see how this would work: before federal involvement, scientific inquiry was haphazard, capricious, and discretionary. Nowadays we have an organized inquiry into the frontiers of science at every direction of inquiry - eliminating duplication of effort, guiding lines of inquiry for best results, and generally eliminating risk.
This same model could bring the maker movement into the 21st century, bestowing the benefits of government bureaucracy on hackers across the country!
google cardboard pretty much makes this tech obsolete. my cell phone plus $20 headset and I have the same thing.
Carmak has stated that the big problem in VR headsets is latency: when the image movement is delayed slightly from when your head moves, it gives you headaches and nausea.
Carmak is a pretty smart guy, and has been working on this problem for awhile, and thinks he's solved the problem and that it will make a sellable product. He's got a track record for making sellable products, and so does Zuckerberg.
This is, of course, the reverse of an ad-hominum attack.
I'm not saying that earbuds and a flap from a shipping box isn't an equivalent setup, but I have to wonder...
"Raises privacy concerns" is elliptical speech: it's made to be deliberately obscure. (It uses "causes concern" to convey the central point without giving any information about what the point is.)
It's also passive voice, in that there's no person performing the action, the action is simply "caused" by something. (For comparison, consider "we wrote reports" versus "reports were written".) Hence, there's no person or group responsible, it's simply an aspect of situation.
And finally, the phrase uses framing to soften the effect. Your personal information isn't being harvested, the system simply "raises some concerns".
Taken as a whole the headline tries to get the reader emotionally involved by stating something we should be concerned about, without saying in concrete terms *that* there is anything to be concerned about, and that it's *other people* who are concerned.
Meh. This didn't work on me, I'm not actually concerned, I'm going to ignore it.
(Propaganda success!)
This comes up now and again here on Slashdot. Maybe we should have a wiki or something "Frequently Asked Questions" or something
Fusion is always 20 years out, and there's a reason for it. this image sums it up nicely.
Essentially, we could have fusion power in about 20 years if we had the political will to think 20 years into the future and fund it.
Since fusion research won't yield results before the next election cycle, no congresscritters will vote for it.
I've often wondered what happens to people like this after the fact.
For example, recall Aaron Barr, the guy running HB Gary and who claimed he could "out" the Anonymous members by dubious correlation of social media accounts.
Or that guy Paul Christoforo who threw down with Penny Arcade founder Mike Krahulik (and got fired, banned from PAX, and his marketing company's client dropped them).
Do these people find jobs somewhere on this planet? Does Kevin Mitnick's security firm have a lot of customers?
The Ashley Madison guy - that's 'gotta be an awkward interview, you know.
"Why did you leave your previous place of employment?"
This is one of those situations where a sense of humor could make an interesting story into a great story.
The Marine Biological Association in Plymouth should buy a 1904 shilling (on eBay around $13) and send it to the German couple.
It would be the perfect story ending, generate some good-natured publicity, and the bottle and note are probably antiques of historical value. (Imagine the bottle and note in the Salem maritime museum (Peabody Essex Museum), with the above-mentioned story ending in the description.)
I liked the Vimeo slideshow.
Maybe the MIT crew could put up a video somewhere. Something on YouTube perhaps, because it would be nice to watch what people are doing instead of seeing fixed frames every few seconds.
(Or maybe if the Vimeo plugin would continue loading the video while paused you could stop the video, work for a bit, and come back and see what's going on. Nope - preload is apparently fixed at some insufficient amount ahead of the stopping point.)
(Also, Adobe Flash FTW!)
We could do worse than Trump... But.... We could do a LOT better too. I sure hope Trump get's tired of spending his money on this side show pretty soon...
The summary nature of voting on legislature (yea, nay, abstain) puts an upper bound on the amount of damage a bad congressman can do.
Essentially, there are a finite number of times any congressman can vote on an issue. If they vote against the interests of the people every time, they've reached maximum damage.
The same can be said of presidents (pass, veto, pocket-veto, &c.).
Few issues are black-and-white: most laws are some percent good for the people and some percent bad. The two issues I can find that are closest to 100% bad for the people are H1B Visas and the Patriot and USA Freedom acts.
H1B visas take jobs away from Americans and allow corporations to impose misery on the imported workers, and the Patriot act and related violates our rights and makes us less safe (by diverting resources away from effective strategies like intelligence gathering).
The relevant votes are shown below. The government doesn't care about our rights, and it doesn't care whether we have jobs. It has reached maximum damage.
Trump might be the worst president we've ever had, but at this point in time, he's not *guaranteed* to be the worst.
USA Freedom Act (Senate)
YEAs: 67 (D = 43, R = 23, I = 1)
NAYs: 32 (D = 1, R = 30, I = 1)
Not voting: 1 (R)
USA Freedom Act (House)
https://www.govtrack.us/congre...
YEAs: 67 (D = 124, R = 179, I = 1)
NAYs: 32 (D = 70, R = 51, I = 1)
Not voting: 2 (R) 5(D)
Increase H1B Visas (Senate)
https://www.govtrack.us/congre...
YEAs: 67 (D = 52, R = 14, I = 2)
NAYs: 32 (D = 0, R = 32, I = 0)
Way back when Heidi Fleiss got arrested for running a prostitution ring, and her list of clients fell into the hands of the police, my first thought was: if it were *me*, I'd have:
a) had a backup copy, and
b) been regularly adding high-ranking authorities (for instance: the chief of police) to the list of clients. In a diary fashion, interspersed (in the records) with the appointments of real clients.
For b) especially, having dates and times when the high-ranking official is known to be away from home, such as noon times if they have a day job, or adding verifiable corroborating information such as "and he came in soaking wet" on rainy days and such, would have gone a long way towards giving Ms. Fleiss some leverage.
Ah well... people don't think ahead in these modern times.
Apropos of nothing, I saw this on a friend's twitter feed:
ME: Hunny, did you have an Ashley Madison account?
HER: What?! No!
ME: Damn. That would have made what I'm about to say, a lot easier.
Give it some time.
As any AI researcher will tell you, we know how the brain works and Geoffrey Hinton's recent paper is nothing short of a breakthrough, and will lead to us having strong AI programs real soon.
We have IBM's Watson, a program that actually understands the information it's processing and will be used to augment medical diagnosis, SIRI, a personal assistant application that actually learns, and MAKO, a program who can do anything on a PC!
IBM is already making neural network chips that implement the way the brain really works, a program the learns the same way that a child learns, and many, many more!
We have courses that teach you AI, and ... it's easy!
Give it some time! We need to let the AI mature like a fine wine, and filter down into consumer devices.
It's coming soon - it really is!
Neural networks are simulations of how brain works.
Apropos of nothing, since you're familiar with both neural nets and how the brain works, can you answer a quick question for me?
Neural nets have a left-to-right topology, where the inputs go in one side and the outputs leave the other side.
The brain doesn't do that - there's no "loop" in the brain where input neurons are processed on one side and output neurons exit the other.
This has always confused me about neural nets. If they simulate how the brain works, then how exactly *does* the brain work with inputs and outputs both on the same side?
Due to their ephemeral nature, sprites are hard to capture on camera.
For comparison, here's one that appeared over Paris this summer.