Ok, but the Oxford comma was invented to remove ambiguity where there was less-than-optimal sentence construction so by the same logic we should not have to add it.
Yes, you can always rewrite a sentence to avoid ambiguity but that is just as valid an argument if you do not use the Oxford comma too. Hence my original point: the Oxford comma just shifts ambiguity around and has zero net value to the language.
The English language is much clearer in that respect. Long live the Oxford comma!
No it isn't. The Oxford comma adds just as much ambiguity as it removes so it is a stupid invention. For example:
I emailed the instructor, Fred, and the dean
If you use the Oxford comma then it is ambiguous whether Fred is the instructor and I emailed two people or whether Fred is not the instructor and I emailed three people. If you do not use the Oxford comma it is clear that Fred is the instructor and I emailed two people. Adding something which creates as much ambiguity as it solves is daft which is probably why as a schoolkid in the UK I was consistently taught that you do not use the Oxford comma.
Contributory copyright infringement for commercial gain.
That only applies if there is copyright infringement. If you point people to, and I quote the summary, "an authorized site" where is the copyright infringement? If the site is authorized there is no copyright infringement involved. For example, if I set up a website to point people to Netflix I would not expect that to be illegal even if I made money out of it.
A man from Denmark has been handed a six-month conditional prison sentence for spreading information about Popcorn Time, an authorized on-demand movies and TV shows streaming service.
So either the summary is wrong and the site was illegal (which is what I suspect) or someone needs to explain why making money pointing people to a legal streaming site is illegal.
Killing them through the vulnerabilities in their current driver-based model before that transformation is successful is about the only way the cab companies can delay the inevitable.
I think it very unlikely that Uber will be leading the revolution of self-driving cabs. Their reputation is so low at the moment that it is very unlikely to be able to persuade many local governments that they can be trusted with the safe operation of a fleet of computer-controlled cars. They are the Ryan Air ground transport.
Agreed. However, that does not mean that there is not a considerable risk attached to this approach too. One serious failure and it could all come crashing down. This is a high risk, high reward strategy with the added benefit that Tesla is producing potentially revolutionary products so even if they fail it will likely have long lasting benefits for society...and today there are sadly very few companies you can say that about.
Nobody mentioned self-driving cars. This is about whether London cabbies should be replaced by anyone who can drive while operating a GPS. Come up with a working, usable self-driving car and yes, probably just about everyone who earns a living from driving will be out of a job. Until then we need human drivers.
You'd have to be delusional to think this is an advantage.
Not at all. I would much rather be driven by someone who is proud of the job they do, who is committed enough that they are willing to spend the time to understand the layout of a large complex city and who also has the mental capacity to do so. The benefit of this test is not purely restricted to navigational know-how.
Nobody is going to pay double the cost of a truck just for the privilege of changing the trucker's job while paying him just as much as he makes driving the cheaper truck.
They would if he can deliver almost twice as much with the new truck because he doesn't spend 10 hours a day parked at a motel while he sleeps but instead sleeps on the road while the computer drives.
It's just as easy to stop and loot a manned truck. You just point a gun at the driver, and they do whatever you say.
Really? I would have thought that pointing a gun at the driver of a large track heading at 120km/h down a motorway was anything but easy and, since this would presumably involve you driving alongside in a smaller vehicle likely to involve a serious risk of injury to the robber should the driver decide that the best option to to push the smaller vehicle off the road.
Even if the robber is willing to take the physical risk the prison risk is also much greater. Armed robbery is a far more serious offence than burglary and carries the risk of even more serious charges if it were to go wrong and the driver were injured.
So if someone doesn't do their job, when is it good and when is it bad?
If they do not do their job it is generally bad unless they give a reason for not doing their job. In this case it is particularly bad because there was no reason given and because failure to secure data like this is far more important than whether a company gets fined or not: it risks undermining a fundamental financial service on which many others rely. This is no doubt why other arms of the US government offered to help: they understand how important it is that there is some degree of confidence both from consumers and other financial companies in the credit check service.
Secondly, the president is responsible for what happens, but not at fault for what happens in the administration.
Correct, and if he reverses this decision explaining that it is vitally important that major breaches like this are fully investigated in order to maintain confidence in an essential financial service then he would be doing his job. However, if he lets this stand then he is at much at fault as those making the decision because he is agreeing with it.
you don't have to agree with everything the president stands for
Indeed you do not. However, you are allowed to demand that your political leaders clearly explain their aims and policies and competently carry them out. I see close to zero evidence of either from Mr Trump. Fortunately, he is not my president but even the few things he does where I might agree with his actions (his aims never seem to be clear and often appear to shift on a whim) are carried out in such a hamfisted, incompetent manner that almost seemed designed to antagonize as many people as possible. This is why he faces so much opposition and never seems to get things done where a more competent person with some degree of self-control would avoid the cheap shots and the unfiltered stream of thoughts so that the job actually gets done. It is not some bizarre conspiracy resisting his rule it is just all the people he managed to tick off unnecessarily.
Yes, but an equally valid response would be to not provide any answer because you think the question was a mistake. The amount of critical thinking involved is extremely minimal: just about everyone quickly recognises that the question is stupid. The problem is the myriad ways in which a student might try to deal with that realization in an exam mean that the responses of students who realize the question is stupid are probably very similar to those students who just think the question is really hard. Hence, as a question, it utterly fails to demonstrate the student's knowledge of anything!
Uber is, essentially, saying that nearly all of them can all become delivery drivers.
No, actually the article is saying that their jobs will change to involve less driving. As the article points out you need someone onboard the truck to make the occasional minor repair to keep things going. You do not want to have to send a tow truck hundreds of miles into the middle of nowhere for something really minor. The other thing which the article does not mention is security: thieves would probably find an automated truck very easy to stop and loot.
What the article suggests is that truckers jobs will change. Instead of driving the long distances they can just go to sleep in their cab and wake up near the destination for the fiddly driving in a city and the delivery/pickup. This could make things safer by avoiding truckers driving late when tired just to make a delivery on time. They will still need the same driving skills and will still spend time away from families and those are the reasons they get paid a decent wage.
Well, for what it is worth Facebook apparently has an AI suicide prevention program. Rescuing someone does not necessarily require a physical act: mental problems are something that an AI might be able to help with.
Now it is certainly true that AI's roles in these areas are somewhat limited at the moment and there are somethings which it is hard to image AI being able to do within the foreseeable future. However, AI does not need to "do everything" to replace many jobs. If AI working in conjunction with a doctor lets that doctor diagnose 200 patients a day by identifying and dealing with the simple cases that reduces the need for doctors. Similarly if AI TA's let a professor teach 1,000 students effectively that reduces the need for teaching staff etc.
This is the way technology works: jobs change to do the work that technology cannot do with the result that a single human can do far more. Robots on assembly lines have not completely replaced all human workers but the work that humans on assembly lines do has changed to cover jobs that robots are not good at and to oversee the robots to fix things when they go wrong. In this way a handful of humans can run an assembly line that used to require a small army. This is not a bad thing: it lets us be far more productive with our time. However, care does need to be taken to ensure that it is possible for people to adapt to the changing jobs market and that things do not change so fast that it causes too much disruption for society to cope with.
Handled correctly changes like this give us more leisure time and a higher standard of living. Handled badly they can lead to civil unrest and worse.
Asking questions for which there is insufficient data to determine the unique correct answer is confusing and a waste of time, because they will never see such questions in real life.
The difference is that in real life you usually have some data relevant to answering the question. If you don't then you go out and get something and infer the age of the captain from that. If you want to test critical thinking a better question would have included some details related to the age of the captain e.g. was s/he married, did s/he have kids and if so what were their ages, how big was the ship?, how many years had they been a captain etc. However then you would have need to provide data on the average age of ship captains, the average number of years captains have served, the average age people have children at etc.
That's how real life works. If you don't have any data relevant to answering the question then you either work on getting some related data or you put the question aside until some relevant data is available.
Some of the airline reservation services display an "ontime" percentage next to the flight - EG This flight is ontime 75% of the time. You don't need machine learning for something that simple statistical analysis will do.
You do if you want to provide better information than this. For example, I would be fine taking a flight which is 75% on time and the remaining 25% of the time is only 20 minutes late. I would be less happy if 25% of the time the flight was 2 hours late. Also this statistic ignores patterns in the delays. For example, suppose the flight is on time 90% of the time from Mon-Thu but delayed by 2 hours 85% of the time on Friday? This would be completely consistent with the data provided if you average over the week but clearly, you would never want to take this flight on Friday!
While you might be able to do a simple analysis on a weekly pattern airline schedules are more complex and if the delay is caused by a complex interaction of the crew, plane and airport schedules it will be a lot harder to pick up manually whereas a machine learning algorithm should easily be able to cope with this level of complexity and spot that on the third tuesday and second wednesday of every month your flight is delayed. In fact, if the airlines do not do this already, this might be a useful tool for them to spot and identify problems so they can fix them.
I think that their problem is that they continually wanted to protest some action and kept pushing the clock closer, only now they've run out of room...
If they really are physicists then they have a huge amount of room left. 2 minutes is 120 billion nanoseconds and you can gain the same factor again by going to attoseconds. At that point though you are at the accuracy of the most accurate clocks ever made and things like the height of the clock will start to matter due to gravitational time dilation.
Does anyone honestly think removing the 3.5mm jack from the iPhone was about courage?
Yes, it was about having the courage to see if you could get your customers to give you more money by having to buy new earbuds from you. Apparently they will.
The next bit of courage was removing the function keys and all but one of the ports while raising the price significantly and using one year old GPUs and CPUs...and apparently customers still bought it.
At this point, Apple is just trolling its customers to see how bad it has to get before they refuse to buy things. If you have any doubts about that just look at the MacPro: it was released in 2013 and has not been updated since yet they are still asking full price for it!
Cheap PCs don't run OS X. Or need hours of work to get it running.
No they don't - I switched from Macs a year ago due to the failure of their pro lineup. Windows 10 was very easy to setup and configure and very mac-like, just not as polished and more irritating. I would still much prefer OS X but Windows is nowhere near as bad as it used to be and with the Linux subsystem you can have a bash shell with full filesystem access....all this with a better CPU and GPU for ~$1-2k less. The OSX advantage was not worth that much to me plus they have no viable Pro desktop at all.
Ports on Macs work just fine.
It's the lack of important ones like a USB-A to allow sharing memory sticks with others that's the problem. I am not willing to buy and carry around dongles simply because they could not put a single USB-A port on the machine.
No idea about your keyboard point, obviously I hate the function key replacement
It's not just the lack of function keys it's the lack of almost any key movement. When I tried it in the store it was like typing on an iPad.
I love OS X but Apple's current laptops and 4+ year old Mac Pro (which they still try to sell at full price!) have become so bad they are bad jokes. They have even taken out features like the mag-safe power cord and new features they have added like the touch bar, is less useful than the keys it replaced. I wish it were not true but Apple without Steve Jobs simply doesn't seem to function.
Apart from the 2015 MacBook Pro, it's the only laptop with a decent keyboard and enough ports for real-world use.
Exactly, so clearly it's about damn time they fixed that by removing the ports, knackering the keyboard and increasing the price by several hundred dollars. You can't have MacBook Air owners having a better machine than the even more expensive MacBook Pro! Sadly, the likely replacement for most people will be a PC laptop: they are cheaper, faster and have functioning keyboards and a variety of ports.
Slashdot Mirror
My point entire point was that the summary was inconsistent and made no sense. That's why I quoted it!
Ok, but the Oxford comma was invented to remove ambiguity where there was less-than-optimal sentence construction so by the same logic we should not have to add it.
Yes, you can always rewrite a sentence to avoid ambiguity but that is just as valid an argument if you do not use the Oxford comma too. Hence my original point: the Oxford comma just shifts ambiguity around and has zero net value to the language.
The English language is much clearer in that respect. Long live the Oxford comma!
No it isn't. The Oxford comma adds just as much ambiguity as it removes so it is a stupid invention. For example:
I emailed the instructor, Fred, and the dean
If you use the Oxford comma then it is ambiguous whether Fred is the instructor and I emailed two people or whether Fred is not the instructor and I emailed three people. If you do not use the Oxford comma it is clear that Fred is the instructor and I emailed two people. Adding something which creates as much ambiguity as it solves is daft which is probably why as a schoolkid in the UK I was consistently taught that you do not use the Oxford comma.
Contributory copyright infringement for commercial gain.
That only applies if there is copyright infringement. If you point people to, and I quote the summary, "an authorized site" where is the copyright infringement? If the site is authorized there is no copyright infringement involved. For example, if I set up a website to point people to Netflix I would not expect that to be illegal even if I made money out of it.
A man from Denmark has been handed a six-month conditional prison sentence for spreading information about Popcorn Time, an authorized on-demand movies and TV shows streaming service.
So either the summary is wrong and the site was illegal (which is what I suspect) or someone needs to explain why making money pointing people to a legal streaming site is illegal.
Killing them through the vulnerabilities in their current driver-based model before that transformation is successful is about the only way the cab companies can delay the inevitable.
I think it very unlikely that Uber will be leading the revolution of self-driving cabs. Their reputation is so low at the moment that it is very unlikely to be able to persuade many local governments that they can be trusted with the safe operation of a fleet of computer-controlled cars. They are the Ryan Air ground transport.
Agreed. However, that does not mean that there is not a considerable risk attached to this approach too. One serious failure and it could all come crashing down. This is a high risk, high reward strategy with the added benefit that Tesla is producing potentially revolutionary products so even if they fail it will likely have long lasting benefits for society...and today there are sadly very few companies you can say that about.
Nobody mentioned self-driving cars. This is about whether London cabbies should be replaced by anyone who can drive while operating a GPS. Come up with a working, usable self-driving car and yes, probably just about everyone who earns a living from driving will be out of a job. Until then we need human drivers.
You'd have to be delusional to think this is an advantage.
Not at all. I would much rather be driven by someone who is proud of the job they do, who is committed enough that they are willing to spend the time to understand the layout of a large complex city and who also has the mental capacity to do so. The benefit of this test is not purely restricted to navigational know-how.
I've tried a few times now and since my success rate is improving I am apparently becoming less human with time...
Nobody is going to pay double the cost of a truck just for the privilege of changing the trucker's job while paying him just as much as he makes driving the cheaper truck.
They would if he can deliver almost twice as much with the new truck because he doesn't spend 10 hours a day parked at a motel while he sleeps but instead sleeps on the road while the computer drives.
It's just as easy to stop and loot a manned truck. You just point a gun at the driver, and they do whatever you say.
Really? I would have thought that pointing a gun at the driver of a large track heading at 120km/h down a motorway was anything but easy and, since this would presumably involve you driving alongside in a smaller vehicle likely to involve a serious risk of injury to the robber should the driver decide that the best option to to push the smaller vehicle off the road.
Even if the robber is willing to take the physical risk the prison risk is also much greater. Armed robbery is a far more serious offence than burglary and carries the risk of even more serious charges if it were to go wrong and the driver were injured.
So if someone doesn't do their job, when is it good and when is it bad?
If they do not do their job it is generally bad unless they give a reason for not doing their job. In this case it is particularly bad because there was no reason given and because failure to secure data like this is far more important than whether a company gets fined or not: it risks undermining a fundamental financial service on which many others rely. This is no doubt why other arms of the US government offered to help: they understand how important it is that there is some degree of confidence both from consumers and other financial companies in the credit check service.
Secondly, the president is responsible for what happens, but not at fault for what happens in the administration.
Correct, and if he reverses this decision explaining that it is vitally important that major breaches like this are fully investigated in order to maintain confidence in an essential financial service then he would be doing his job. However, if he lets this stand then he is at much at fault as those making the decision because he is agreeing with it.
you don't have to agree with everything the president stands for
Indeed you do not. However, you are allowed to demand that your political leaders clearly explain their aims and policies and competently carry them out. I see close to zero evidence of either from Mr Trump. Fortunately, he is not my president but even the few things he does where I might agree with his actions (his aims never seem to be clear and often appear to shift on a whim) are carried out in such a hamfisted, incompetent manner that almost seemed designed to antagonize as many people as possible. This is why he faces so much opposition and never seems to get things done where a more competent person with some degree of self-control would avoid the cheap shots and the unfiltered stream of thoughts so that the job actually gets done. It is not some bizarre conspiracy resisting his rule it is just all the people he managed to tick off unnecessarily.
Yes, but an equally valid response would be to not provide any answer because you think the question was a mistake. The amount of critical thinking involved is extremely minimal: just about everyone quickly recognises that the question is stupid. The problem is the myriad ways in which a student might try to deal with that realization in an exam mean that the responses of students who realize the question is stupid are probably very similar to those students who just think the question is really hard. Hence, as a question, it utterly fails to demonstrate the student's knowledge of anything!
Uber is, essentially, saying that nearly all of them can all become delivery drivers.
No, actually the article is saying that their jobs will change to involve less driving. As the article points out you need someone onboard the truck to make the occasional minor repair to keep things going. You do not want to have to send a tow truck hundreds of miles into the middle of nowhere for something really minor. The other thing which the article does not mention is security: thieves would probably find an automated truck very easy to stop and loot.
What the article suggests is that truckers jobs will change. Instead of driving the long distances they can just go to sleep in their cab and wake up near the destination for the fiddly driving in a city and the delivery/pickup. This could make things safer by avoiding truckers driving late when tired just to make a delivery on time. They will still need the same driving skills and will still spend time away from families and those are the reasons they get paid a decent wage.
4. Talk to me about my investments.
So-called robo-advisors are already doing that in a limited way.
5. Diagnose my illness (without a doctor as the interface)
Again this is already happening.
6. Teach my kids.
It's already happening.
9. Rescue someone.
Well, for what it is worth Facebook apparently has an AI suicide prevention program. Rescuing someone does not necessarily require a physical act: mental problems are something that an AI might be able to help with.
Now it is certainly true that AI's roles in these areas are somewhat limited at the moment and there are somethings which it is hard to image AI being able to do within the foreseeable future. However, AI does not need to "do everything" to replace many jobs. If AI working in conjunction with a doctor lets that doctor diagnose 200 patients a day by identifying and dealing with the simple cases that reduces the need for doctors. Similarly if AI TA's let a professor teach 1,000 students effectively that reduces the need for teaching staff etc.
This is the way technology works: jobs change to do the work that technology cannot do with the result that a single human can do far more. Robots on assembly lines have not completely replaced all human workers but the work that humans on assembly lines do has changed to cover jobs that robots are not good at and to oversee the robots to fix things when they go wrong. In this way a handful of humans can run an assembly line that used to require a small army. This is not a bad thing: it lets us be far more productive with our time. However, care does need to be taken to ensure that it is possible for people to adapt to the changing jobs market and that things do not change so fast that it causes too much disruption for society to cope with.
Handled correctly changes like this give us more leisure time and a higher standard of living. Handled badly they can lead to civil unrest and worse.
Asking questions for which there is insufficient data to determine the unique correct answer is confusing and a waste of time, because they will never see such questions in real life.
The difference is that in real life you usually have some data relevant to answering the question. If you don't then you go out and get something and infer the age of the captain from that. If you want to test critical thinking a better question would have included some details related to the age of the captain e.g. was s/he married, did s/he have kids and if so what were their ages, how big was the ship?, how many years had they been a captain etc. However then you would have need to provide data on the average age of ship captains, the average number of years captains have served, the average age people have children at etc.
That's how real life works. If you don't have any data relevant to answering the question then you either work on getting some related data or you put the question aside until some relevant data is available.
Some of the airline reservation services display an "ontime" percentage next to the flight - EG This flight is ontime 75% of the time. You don't need machine learning for something that simple statistical analysis will do.
You do if you want to provide better information than this. For example, I would be fine taking a flight which is 75% on time and the remaining 25% of the time is only 20 minutes late. I would be less happy if 25% of the time the flight was 2 hours late. Also this statistic ignores patterns in the delays. For example, suppose the flight is on time 90% of the time from Mon-Thu but delayed by 2 hours 85% of the time on Friday? This would be completely consistent with the data provided if you average over the week but clearly, you would never want to take this flight on Friday!
While you might be able to do a simple analysis on a weekly pattern airline schedules are more complex and if the delay is caused by a complex interaction of the crew, plane and airport schedules it will be a lot harder to pick up manually whereas a machine learning algorithm should easily be able to cope with this level of complexity and spot that on the third tuesday and second wednesday of every month your flight is delayed. In fact, if the airlines do not do this already, this might be a useful tool for them to spot and identify problems so they can fix them.
I think that their problem is that they continually wanted to protest some action and kept pushing the clock closer, only now they've run out of room...
If they really are physicists then they have a huge amount of room left. 2 minutes is 120 billion nanoseconds and you can gain the same factor again by going to attoseconds. At that point though you are at the accuracy of the most accurate clocks ever made and things like the height of the clock will start to matter due to gravitational time dilation.
Well if it were parabolic smugness it would have a latus rectum.
Does anyone honestly think removing the 3.5mm jack from the iPhone was about courage?
Yes, it was about having the courage to see if you could get your customers to give you more money by having to buy new earbuds from you. Apparently they will.
The next bit of courage was removing the function keys and all but one of the ports while raising the price significantly and using one year old GPUs and CPUs...and apparently customers still bought it.
At this point, Apple is just trolling its customers to see how bad it has to get before they refuse to buy things. If you have any doubts about that just look at the MacPro: it was released in 2013 and has not been updated since yet they are still asking full price for it!
Cheap PCs don't run OS X. Or need hours of work to get it running.
No they don't - I switched from Macs a year ago due to the failure of their pro lineup. Windows 10 was very easy to setup and configure and very mac-like, just not as polished and more irritating. I would still much prefer OS X but Windows is nowhere near as bad as it used to be and with the Linux subsystem you can have a bash shell with full filesystem access....all this with a better CPU and GPU for ~$1-2k less. The OSX advantage was not worth that much to me plus they have no viable Pro desktop at all.
Ports on Macs work just fine.
It's the lack of important ones like a USB-A to allow sharing memory sticks with others that's the problem. I am not willing to buy and carry around dongles simply because they could not put a single USB-A port on the machine.
No idea about your keyboard point, obviously I hate the function key replacement
It's not just the lack of function keys it's the lack of almost any key movement. When I tried it in the store it was like typing on an iPad.
I love OS X but Apple's current laptops and 4+ year old Mac Pro (which they still try to sell at full price!) have become so bad they are bad jokes. They have even taken out features like the mag-safe power cord and new features they have added like the touch bar, is less useful than the keys it replaced. I wish it were not true but Apple without Steve Jobs simply doesn't seem to function.
Apart from the 2015 MacBook Pro, it's the only laptop with a decent keyboard and enough ports for real-world use.
Exactly, so clearly it's about damn time they fixed that by removing the ports, knackering the keyboard and increasing the price by several hundred dollars. You can't have MacBook Air owners having a better machine than the even more expensive MacBook Pro! Sadly, the likely replacement for most people will be a PC laptop: they are cheaper, faster and have functioning keyboards and a variety of ports.
Dropping the 'no' from it was not the change we had been hoping for.