Tell me, who exactly are the ignorant fools on this planet who believe that
Google to date has lived up to any motto as they thrive very well in the
unethical and immoral world of capitalism?
Easy. All the google fanbois who read and comment on slashdot, of which there are a lot but not as many as a few years ago. You can identify them easily, they'll defend anything google does by claiming "it's free, if you don't like it don't use it". (*)
We need a name for these guys, googlebois? goobois? goobs? Something catchy, anyway.
(*) which misses the point, Google being a spying outfit (**), even if you refuse to have anything to do with them they'll hoover up direct and indirect information about you on their systems, and you'll be affected by their whims.
Interesting, but confusing. Why does the Amazon web page you link to
state "There is no HIPAA certification for a cloud provider such as AWS."
Whose responsibility is it to ensure the data is safe? Surely, a "clueless operator" should not be able to put data on a publicly accessible share
in the first place, if Amazon complies and is the entity hosting the data?
I'm curious how the legalities are interpreted to bypass the HIPAA protections in this case.
Suppose you by the GSK pills in bulk, importing them NOT for resale.
You import them as raw materials for another manufactured product. You stick them into a machine that turns them into powder, you mix the powder with distilled water, and you make new pills. Technically, you've manufactured pills in the USA from imported raw materials.
So can you sell the new pills? You'd have to prove they are equivalent to the originals, which would be expensive using human trials. But another way to prove equivalence would be to prove that the chemical composition of the manufactured pills is literally identical to the original pills. Which would be much cheaper, given the "complicated" manufacturing process.
Meh, behind the scenes changing a RAM stick with another is trivial to do at the factory. Given that Apple already know they're going to be selling a model with extra RAM, your argument is bollocks. The only reason the markup exists is the Apple tax.
In fact, it's well known for hardware manufacturers to design higher specs on their products, and sell a crippled version to consumers at a lower price point.
That way, theres no supply chain headaches, and it's easy to create market segmentation to maximize profits.
that's completely irrelevant, the point is to show the country that we should
cherish the experimenter spirit.
No, sorry, that's exactly the kind of politico nonsense that lead to the president getting a nobel peace prize before he had a chance to do anything worthy of such a prize.
Don't draft some random kid into your political machinations. He's in school, he shouldn't have to fight your social wars for you. And that goes for both you AND the president.
You're overstating Google's contribution IMHO. Here's another point of view.
Regarding older public domain books, Google's efforts aren't very good, they get about a D for quality. You can check out the Internet archive, it has digitized copies of many pre-1900 works that were digitized by several companies independently. You'll find the company name in the files. I'm not a fan of M$, but their scans are way nicer than Google's. And if you compare with the works of some libraries such as the one in Goettingen, it's night and day.
Part of the reason is that Google's priorities are warped. They wanted to race ahead, digitize everything before anyone else. So they chose low resolution scans because that's faster. They hid their technology from the librarians who gave them the books, because OMG competitors! and they did a 60% OCR job on the easiest and cleanest books while completely ignoring the hard cases [eg mathematics, multilingual, etc].
The other thing their urgency got us was a legal morass. Google evilly just went ahead to scan all books, and published them on the web, while more responsible competitors were slowed down by getting permission first from the rights holders. When Google was too far ahead, the competing projects folded, and Google got (rightly) sued by the authors guild. That in turn caused a chilling effect on the projects that were left.
Now nobody wants to revisit the problem of orphan and older works, we're stuck with shitty google scans that are barely readable and full of OCR mistakes, and there's no telling how long we'll be having even that available freely on the web.
We didn't need to have Google do the bang up job they did. The world was cruising along, slowly digitizing works with care. Many universities were researching the issues, solving them one at a time, properly.
Does anyone remember the Indian/US/Chinese million books project?
The best hope for the future now is the underground. At least the pirates care about producing quality releases - whether it's movies, music, or books. And they don't care about money, so the next generation will be able to download illegal books and educate themselves for free like many people do today.
I will never remove adblock. I consider ads to be theft of attentionspan. Who authorised some thirdparty ad peddler to divert the image recognition neurons in my brain on some silly profitseeking mission that doesn't benefit me and actually lowers the quality of the text recognition task they are supposed to be performing in the first place?
Uhm, no. Plenty of things in life are free. The reason MS is being despicable here is that they are choosing to offer free windows in exchange for installing spyware.
It was wrong when people bundled spyware with freeware software installers, and it is wrong when people bundle spyware with an OS.
Just switch to Debian or another Free OS that doesn't spy on you.
It may be a little less convenient, but the inconvenience pays off in a bit more safety the next time you download something.
I had the same initial reaction, but realistically I spend so much time on
Android/Chrome/Google Docs/GMail/etc. already that avoiding OnHub will do
nothing to stop Google knowing far too much about me.
Sure, when some guy steals my wallet, then calls me later on the phone to ask for my bank account password, I too figure that he's already got my $100 from the wallet, so what's the point of not telling him? I'm already out *some* money, it makes no difference anymore if he gets it *all*.
No, they don't want to get shut down for having an almost zero success rate.
Kaggle should do a no-fly list crime prediction competition, at least we'd get some good data about the state of the art to discuss on slashdot. As it is, the pro government astroturfers here can claim 100% accuracy and half the readership will lap it up because $TERRORISM.
Programs that save settings/need re-installing it's all in the User\
%username%\AppData folder
As a former windows developer, I can tell you it's not even remotely like that.
There are at least 5 different historical standards for where user data should go. But I'm done with all that, so if you feel it works for you, go ahead and enjoy your system. Ultimately you're better off wrestlng with a system if you are confident about understanding it.
Personally I like the simplicity of more modular systems where data and apps don't mix, I've replaced OSes for years while keeping my personal/home intact.
The only speed bumps tend to be when apps I use deprecate old capabilities, and I have to figure out why an old setting I've always used now works a bit differently in that app.
I don't know what type of software you're using, but all my preferences are stored in my home directory, in something that's called a dotfile. They're hidden files in my user area, which don't ever get touched if the system is completely replaced by a brand new install. That's different from the way windows works, as different Windows programs can store user preferences anywhere they like, and then you have to reset your preferences each time you do a clean reinstall.
Then you're doing it wrong. With linux, all you have to do is stick the install cd into the drive and reboot, you'll get a brand new system. The beauty of Linux is that the system is designed to cleanly separate your files from the system files, and the system partitions can be completely overwritten with a brand new system to make it work again.
If you're an engineer, you should return your "degree", because you're clearly not numerate (don't worry if you don't understand that word).
If someone makes $1 and they get a 40% raise, they now make $1.40. If you make $5 and you get a 25% raise, you now make $6.25. Guess who's got a higher amount? Yup, you got an extra $1.25 against the other guy's 40c. Think of all the lollipops you could have with all that extra buying power!
Because there is no good way to lay blame when damage occurs.
With a non-autonomous weapon, the person who pulls the trigger is basically responsible. If you're strolling in the park with your wife, and some guy shoots her, well, he's criminally liable. If some random autonomous robot gets hit by a cosmic ray and shoots your wife, nobody's responsible.
This is a huge issue for our society, because the rule of law and criminal deterrence is based on personal responsibility. Machines aren't persons. The death penalty for a machine is stupid (watch out, robot, if you kill someone we'll take out your batteries!). The number of ways that things can go wrong without the owner of the machine having a reasonable amount of liability is huge.
What if the autonomous weapon malfunctions in the field? Is the owner responsible for having deployed in that particular location? Is the manufacturer responsible for the bugs that occur? What if the machine is operating outside of recommended parameters? What if the machine was hacked, and the bug occurs due to a faulty communication issue, ie the message was sent to authorize targeting your wife, but then a fraction of a second later another message was sent rescinding the order, but the message was garbled or never arrived due to a netwoking delay in transit on Amazon's cloud servers? What if the machine's owner deploys thousands of vermin killing robots around the city without incident every day, but it just happened to kill your wife because she was misidentified as a rodent?
The fact is that AIs and autonomous robots have no legally useful place in society (unlike nonautonomous robots). There is almost no deterrence value in threatening an owner with fines (how much is reasonable in the rodent example?) and there is no value in destroying the offending machine (an autonomous machine is not alive, and it may be the identical model from a manufactured run of 1 million products, so what's the point of scrapping that one unit?). There is no point is blaming a random customer who bought the machine and probably has no clue at all how it operates or how to detect malfunctions. And you can bet that the manufacturing chain is full of lieability disclaimers and insurance companies will pass the buck. So what hope is there for avenging your wife? And if it goes to trial (against whom?) how long and how much cost will be spent for an uncertain outcome?
The ethical issues surrounding blame are serious, and at the risk of going slightly off topic, they are similar to the issues of terrorism. If a suicide bomber blows himself up in a crowded place, you can't pick up his pieces and stick them in jail. Nothing you can do to him has any deterrent effect, and going after his family or friends is, at best, a legal nightmare and an ethical problem. The issues surrounding autonomous machines are a bit like that, because, well, the fact that it's an *autonomous* machine means that no human being was actually pulling the trigger or directly making the choice to shoot.
Dear AC, you seem to be a cheapskate. You want "free labor"? Fuck off. Free software gives *anyone* the ability to pay someone who knows what he's doing to look at, and modify, the code. What more could anyone want? (except for cheapskates like you, but those people's " complaints" aren't worth addressing anyway)
That's the beauty of Free: you don't *have* to trust any Google's, Microsoft's or Apples or anyone with your security, because you can choose who will do the work and what exactly the criteria will be for the investigation
Yep. Community is exactly the wrong word. These are customers, they will never be a community. In a community, there is shared ownership (hint: community has the same root as communal and communism).
The reason there are open source communities is because by making the source open, it belongs to everybody in the community. This is not so with "shared" source (aka Microsoft's "look but don't share" approach). Merely publishing source code doesn't make it open. Open means I can change it, and I can republish the full system with my changes included, and it will actually run as expected. If there are any legal impediments, or unreasonable technical gotchas, then it's not open source. And there's no community.
Fair is fair. His company getting attacked IS a small step towards a more secure world for all who wish to use the internet and digital tools lawfully.
What's he complaining about, again? He doesn't want to accept his fair share of the cost? That's just mean, though.
That depends. This may be an unpopular point of view to some here, but the value of people depends on supply and demand, just like the value of goods. To lower the value of people in a country, all it takes is a large increase in population way beyond the required workforce and the available resources. Below a certain value, people will become disposable entities just like the slaves in Roman times. In some of the poorest countries around the world, this is partially happening. In the richer countries around the globe, this could also happen, either because our mix of resources and work changes too radically for our population at some point, or because the poor from other countries flee their homes in extreme numbers at some point.
We can't assume that human life will always be valued in the future like it is now.
I think that being able to recover "trivially" is the issue here. If you fire all the employees one moment, arguing that once you've paid their entitlements the company will have zero operating capital left, then it's going to be difficult to "trivially" recover and start operating as before. Anyone who's hired people knows that the upfront cost of hiring is much higher than the incremental cost of paying an ongoing employee's salary. It's much more likely that the company would be sold off to new owners while the employees are still emplyed, as the owners can inject more operating capital, and the upfront costs of hiring everyone don't apply.
In any case, this has little to do with unions, whose purpose is rather different.
Slashdot Mirror
Easy. All the google fanbois who read and comment on slashdot, of which there are a lot but not as many as a few years ago. You can identify them easily, they'll defend anything google does by claiming "it's free, if you don't like it don't use it". (*)
We need a name for these guys, googlebois? goobois? goobs? Something catchy, anyway.
(*) which misses the point, Google being a spying outfit (**), even if you refuse to have anything to do with them they'll hoover up direct and indirect information about you on their systems, and you'll be affected by their whims.
(**) They spy on you, buddy, not on the Chinese
Whose responsibility is it to ensure the data is safe? Surely, a "clueless operator" should not be able to put data on a publicly accessible share in the first place, if Amazon complies and is the entity hosting the data?
I'm curious how the legalities are interpreted to bypass the HIPAA protections in this case.
Suppose you by the GSK pills in bulk, importing them NOT for resale. You import them as raw materials for another manufactured product. You stick them into a machine that turns them into powder, you mix the powder with distilled water, and you make new pills. Technically, you've manufactured pills in the USA from imported raw materials.
So can you sell the new pills? You'd have to prove they are equivalent to the originals, which would be expensive using human trials. But another way to prove equivalence would be to prove that the chemical composition of the manufactured pills is literally identical to the original pills. Which would be much cheaper, given the "complicated" manufacturing process.
It's less of a gamble than buying a few pills for $50k . People who do the latter effectively gamble their house or at least their kids education.
In fact, it's well known for hardware manufacturers to design higher specs on their products, and sell a crippled version to consumers at a lower price point. That way, theres no supply chain headaches, and it's easy to create market segmentation to maximize profits.
1) Companies have to follow due diligence when handling private medical data.
2) Companies want to use a cheap cloud computing platform to mine medical data.
3) Story: Amazon cloud services are not suitable for 1)+2)
I don't know about you, but I've learned something, and I know what I'll ask my health care provider about how they handle my data.
No, sorry, that's exactly the kind of politico nonsense that lead to the president getting a nobel peace prize before he had a chance to do anything worthy of such a prize.
Don't draft some random kid into your political machinations. He's in school, he shouldn't have to fight your social wars for you. And that goes for both you AND the president.
Regarding older public domain books, Google's efforts aren't very good, they get about a D for quality. You can check out the Internet archive, it has digitized copies of many pre-1900 works that were digitized by several companies independently. You'll find the company name in the files. I'm not a fan of M$, but their scans are way nicer than Google's. And if you compare with the works of some libraries such as the one in Goettingen, it's night and day.
Part of the reason is that Google's priorities are warped. They wanted to race ahead, digitize everything before anyone else. So they chose low resolution scans because that's faster. They hid their technology from the librarians who gave them the books, because OMG competitors! and they did a 60% OCR job on the easiest and cleanest books while completely ignoring the hard cases [eg mathematics, multilingual, etc].
The other thing their urgency got us was a legal morass. Google evilly just went ahead to scan all books, and published them on the web, while more responsible competitors were slowed down by getting permission first from the rights holders. When Google was too far ahead, the competing projects folded, and Google got (rightly) sued by the authors guild. That in turn caused a chilling effect on the projects that were left.
Now nobody wants to revisit the problem of orphan and older works, we're stuck with shitty google scans that are barely readable and full of OCR mistakes, and there's no telling how long we'll be having even that available freely on the web.
We didn't need to have Google do the bang up job they did. The world was cruising along, slowly digitizing works with care. Many universities were researching the issues, solving them one at a time, properly. Does anyone remember the Indian/US/Chinese million books project?
The best hope for the future now is the underground. At least the pirates care about producing quality releases - whether it's movies, music, or books. And they don't care about money, so the next generation will be able to download illegal books and educate themselves for free like many people do today.
I will never remove adblock. I consider ads to be theft of attentionspan. Who authorised some thirdparty ad peddler to divert the image recognition neurons in my brain on some silly profitseeking mission that doesn't benefit me and actually lowers the quality of the text recognition task they are supposed to be performing in the first place?
Just switch to Debian or another Free OS that doesn't spy on you. It may be a little less convenient, but the inconvenience pays off in a bit more safety the next time you download something.
Sure, when some guy steals my wallet, then calls me later on the phone to ask for my bank account password, I too figure that he's already got my $100 from the wallet, so what's the point of not telling him? I'm already out *some* money, it makes no difference anymore if he gets it *all*.
Kaggle should do a no-fly list crime prediction competition, at least we'd get some good data about the state of the art to discuss on slashdot. As it is, the pro government astroturfers here can claim 100% accuracy and half the readership will lap it up because $TERRORISM.
As a former windows developer, I can tell you it's not even remotely like that. There are at least 5 different historical standards for where user data should go. But I'm done with all that, so if you feel it works for you, go ahead and enjoy your system. Ultimately you're better off wrestlng with a system if you are confident about understanding it.
Personally I like the simplicity of more modular systems where data and apps don't mix, I've replaced OSes for years while keeping my personal /home intact.
The only speed bumps tend to be when apps I use deprecate old capabilities, and I have to figure out why an old setting I've always used now works a bit differently in that app.
I don't know what type of software you're using, but all my preferences are stored in my home directory, in something that's called a dotfile. They're hidden files in my user area, which don't ever get touched if the system is completely replaced by a brand new install. That's different from the way windows works, as different Windows programs can store user preferences anywhere they like, and then you have to reset your preferences each time you do a clean reinstall.
Then you're doing it wrong. With linux, all you have to do is stick the install cd into the drive and reboot, you'll get a brand new system. The beauty of Linux is that the system is designed to cleanly separate your files from the system files, and the system partitions can be completely overwritten with a brand new system to make it work again.
Sorry, I'm going to have to mark your comment as -1, "Send to evolutionary refuse bin #2".
If someone makes $1 and they get a 40% raise, they now make $1.40. If you make $5 and you get a 25% raise, you now make $6.25. Guess who's got a higher amount? Yup, you got an extra $1.25 against the other guy's 40c. Think of all the lollipops you could have with all that extra buying power!
Well, it's taken Evolution *billions* of years, and frankly we're not that smart...
With a non-autonomous weapon, the person who pulls the trigger is basically responsible. If you're strolling in the park with your wife, and some guy shoots her, well, he's criminally liable. If some random autonomous robot gets hit by a cosmic ray and shoots your wife, nobody's responsible.
This is a huge issue for our society, because the rule of law and criminal deterrence is based on personal responsibility. Machines aren't persons. The death penalty for a machine is stupid (watch out, robot, if you kill someone we'll take out your batteries!). The number of ways that things can go wrong without the owner of the machine having a reasonable amount of liability is huge.
What if the autonomous weapon malfunctions in the field? Is the owner responsible for having deployed in that particular location? Is the manufacturer responsible for the bugs that occur? What if the machine is operating outside of recommended parameters? What if the machine was hacked, and the bug occurs due to a faulty communication issue, ie the message was sent to authorize targeting your wife, but then a fraction of a second later another message was sent rescinding the order, but the message was garbled or never arrived due to a netwoking delay in transit on Amazon's cloud servers? What if the machine's owner deploys thousands of vermin killing robots around the city without incident every day, but it just happened to kill your wife because she was misidentified as a rodent?
The fact is that AIs and autonomous robots have no legally useful place in society (unlike nonautonomous robots). There is almost no deterrence value in threatening an owner with fines (how much is reasonable in the rodent example?) and there is no value in destroying the offending machine (an autonomous machine is not alive, and it may be the identical model from a manufactured run of 1 million products, so what's the point of scrapping that one unit?). There is no point is blaming a random customer who bought the machine and probably has no clue at all how it operates or how to detect malfunctions. And you can bet that the manufacturing chain is full of lieability disclaimers and insurance companies will pass the buck. So what hope is there for avenging your wife? And if it goes to trial (against whom?) how long and how much cost will be spent for an uncertain outcome?
The ethical issues surrounding blame are serious, and at the risk of going slightly off topic, they are similar to the issues of terrorism. If a suicide bomber blows himself up in a crowded place, you can't pick up his pieces and stick them in jail. Nothing you can do to him has any deterrent effect, and going after his family or friends is, at best, a legal nightmare and an ethical problem. The issues surrounding autonomous machines are a bit like that, because, well, the fact that it's an *autonomous* machine means that no human being was actually pulling the trigger or directly making the choice to shoot.
Dear AC, you seem to be a cheapskate. You want "free labor"? Fuck off. Free software gives *anyone* the ability to pay someone who knows what he's doing to look at, and modify, the code. What more could anyone want? (except for cheapskates like you, but those people's " complaints" aren't worth addressing anyway) That's the beauty of Free: you don't *have* to trust any Google's, Microsoft's or Apples or anyone with your security, because you can choose who will do the work and what exactly the criteria will be for the investigation
The reason there are open source communities is because by making the source open, it belongs to everybody in the community. This is not so with "shared" source (aka Microsoft's "look but don't share" approach). Merely publishing source code doesn't make it open. Open means I can change it, and I can republish the full system with my changes included, and it will actually run as expected. If there are any legal impediments, or unreasonable technical gotchas, then it's not open source. And there's no community.
What's he complaining about, again? He doesn't want to accept his fair share of the cost? That's just mean, though.
HTH.
We can't assume that human life will always be valued in the future like it is now.
In any case, this has little to do with unions, whose purpose is rather different.