Didn't the Supreme Court just rule that you can refuse to do business with someone for any reason you want? In that particular case it was cake makers not wanting to make wedding cakes for gay people and conservatives were all in favor of the idea of not forcing companies to serve people they don't like, but now that it's a conservative group whose custom is being refused they suddenly think it's a problem?
ProPublica caught Facebook, and Buzzfeed caught Google. So which important high-traffic website is next? Is anyone focusing on Bing to see if it suffers from the same problem?
"or bodega, as they are known in New York and Los Angeles"
Really? We call them bodegas in LA? It's (very) possible that i'm just out of touch, but when news stories started popping up about the strike in New York i had zero idea what a "bodega" was and had to google it to figure out what everyone was talking about it.
I'm going to guess (but have no evidence to support) that entrepreneurs and executives in Silicon Valley are far more likely to have come from a middle class or poor family than the average Wall Street executive.
If you have that kind of background you tend to go one of two ways. To generalize, either you believe that all of your success is 100% due to your own brilliance and hard work, with almost none of it due to luck or any help you got from anyone else, in which case you end up on the Libertarian/Republican side of the chart. Or you believe that even though you worked hard you also got a lot of benefits from society and got some lucky breaks along the way (and probably know a lot of people you grew up with who weren't as lucky) and feel like you should pay it forward, in which case you end up on the Democratic/Socialist (or apparently Globalist) side of the spectrum.
I confess that i am not intimately familiar with how commissions and compensation works for sales people, but the sales people i work with seem quite excited when they make long term deals. I'm guessing they either get commission on the entire thing up front or get follow-on commissions each year that the company remains a customer.
They also seem quite interested in how our long term projects are doing. Either they have a professional interest in the projects they sold doing well (and commissions aside, the higher-ups would probably get pissed off at a sales person who got us committed to too many projects that went south) or they're counting on either ongoing commissions or new commissions when the company re-ups.
So in short (hah) if your sales people are more focused on short term profits than long term profits that means you've structured your incentives incorrectly, not that the idea of incentivizing them is wrong
#1 For people who are confused, i'm pretty sure this is referring to corporate sales where they're trying to convince another corporation to buy their company's product instead of a competing company's product, which is in fact an important job. Not the salespeople at retail stores trying to convince individuals to buy an appliance or get the extended warranty, who can suck it.
#2 I'm usually pretty lenient about such things, but why is this on slashdot? It doesn't seem to have any direct connection to tech and it doesn't really see like something that matters to anyone outside of boardrooms or sales rooms.
Personally i want to multitask between VR and internet, and VR and music, and VR and video, and VR and paying attention to my SO, and VR and the TV show my SO is watching, and VR and what my cat is doing, and VR and food, and VR and knowing that no one is watching me act like an idiot while i can't see them.
Being able to open a browser or a media player in VR will only address three of those eight concerns.
"Second, Google's tried the 3rd party vendor route and gotten shit products out of it and continues watching Apple reap 95% of the mobile profit. Pixel was an attempt by Google to create a realistic competitor that would actually help them. Now that the Pixel appears realistic, Google needs more control to keep up with Apple who is ahead in many areas."
The Moto X they made in "collaboration" with Motorola after buying them was great. Its only problem was that it didn't have the full force of the Google marketing engine behind it the way the Pixel has. And there's no reason to believe that Motorola couldn't have made the Pixel as well if that's what Google told them to do.
Buying one manufacturer, turning around and selling it, and then turning around and buying a different manufacturer is just a colossal waste of time, money, and other resources. It's possible that selling Motorola was the mistake and Google has no choice but to pay to correct that mistake now, but one way or the other a mistake was made somewhere in the chain.
"one alleged scammer used a novel approach to try making money through Amazon."
Novels seem like a pretty standard and accepted approach to making money through a book publisher, it's either that or non-fiction. (I don't think short stories really get that much traction, but i could be mistaken.)
I believe if you're going to take down religions you have to do so in order.
After you defeat Scientology you get to fight Mormonism. Then Protestant Christianity, then Islam, then Catholicism, then Confucianism, then Buddhism, then Judaism, then Hinduism. And then you get to the good part! You have to fight Bahamut, Gilgamesh, Ra, _and_ Tiamat. And only after you've beaten those four do you get to fight Cthulhu.
Sorry, i originally thought it was closer to two millennia, but i did some fact checking before hitting the submit button and failed to update the grammar to match.
My vegetarian SO and their vegan sibling are both in love with the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger. Those aren't cultured meat, but they are designed to resemble real burgers as much as possible.
So unsurprisingly in real life people are vegetarian or vegan for many different reasons. Some of them will enjoy cultured meat, some won't touch it but will still enjoy well made "fake" meat, some will stick to things like veggie burgers and tofurkey, and some will avoid anything that even vaguely resembles meat.
Currently we subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Amazon Prime, which already seems like a little too much. (Apparently there's some new service which merges Crunchyroll and Funimation that we need to look into.) The only other service i'd seriously consider getting is HBO Go, but I'm not currently into Game of Thrones because of reasons and i don't know of anything else they have that's that great. (Admittedly i haven't looked that hard given all the other stuff we have to watch.)
As you say, Disney doesn't really have enough content to justify themselves as another streaming service unless you happen to be into their TV content. (Not counting the Marvel/Netflix original content, which will stay with Netflix.)
In my case Disney is making it an even worse deal because the movies that i would want to watch are good enough that i'll toss then onto my christmas and birthday wishlist since my family refuses to do digital gifts or gift cards and i need stuff to pad it out.
I'm sure Disney is happy that their DVDs/BluRays are being bought, but it means i have practically no reason to get their streaming service.
So they've gone from a 16.6% success rate in the Chinese experiment to a 66.6% success rate in this one. It sounds like they're claiming the breakthrough was using CRISPR at the time of fertilization. But the Chinese experiment supposedly involved using CRISPR while the embryos were still single-celled.
I'm unsure of A: how those two techniques differ enough to cause a success rate four times higher, and B: how the Chinese experiment ended up with two mosaics if CRISPR was used while the embryos were still single-celled.
1: It's not quite a dupe, but this seems to be confirmation of the previously unconfirmed story posted on Slashdot last week: https://science.slashdot.org/s...
2: As reported in both TFA and the previous Slashdot story, the "powerful new gene-editing technique" is CRISPR. (As i'm sure many here could have guessed.)
3: As reported in the previous Slashdot story this is not exactly a "breakthrough". It's the first time it's been done in the US (officially) but teams in other parts of the world have been done it officially (and probably unofficially) as well. This study from China earlier this year claims to be the first attempt to edit "normal" embryos, but earlier attempts had been made with "abnormal" embryos.
Does this mean using TV antenna is a hipster thing now? Would that make all us old fuds hipsters before hipsters were cool? Or do you to be using the antenna ironically?
And to follow up, pseudonomity doesn't mean a lack of accountability either. Slashdot's system of enforcing accountability isn't perfect, but it's definitely better than what a lot of the rest of the internet uses.
You could have some kind of master account that's non-trivial to set up. That might be because it's linked to your real identity (though of course that link shouldn't be shared with anyone else other than the registrar,) or there might be a non-trivial fee associated with setting it up, or some other hoop you need to jump through. Any accounts you make on sites on this new internet would be linked to this master account. You could then have a reputation system where ratings of the secondary accounts would carry over to the main account. So as soon as someone joined a new site you could check their master account to see their global reputation.
The tricky bit would be defending against distributed reputation attacks. The system would have to be complex enough to group people by some kind of network. So that it could determine that there is a group A and a group B, and most people in group A hate people in group B and will give them negative reputation points and vice versa, and somehow relate to someone from group A that "yes this person has a lot of negative reputation points, but they're mostly from group B. Most of the people in your group have given them positive reputation."
Stop being a troll if you want to be taken seriously. If you'd been paying attention you'd realize all the phones i've purchased have been premium phones and i've already upgraded to USB-C, so clearly it's not the price that concerns me, it's the stupidity and wastefulness of it.
The only stated reasons i've seen for ditching the heaphone jack are waterproofing and making it thinner (and i guess that maybe some people think high-tech is always cooler than old tech) and i have zero interest in either of those features. On the other hand adapters that will let you charge your phone while also using USB-C headphones are hard to find and have a lot of reported issues, and being able to charge my phone while listening to music _is_ a feature i need.
So they want me to pay more to replace a fully mature standard in order to get features i don't want while causing difficulties i never experienced with the old standard. I'd happily pay the price if i was getting any kind of benefit, but given the problems with the new format i'd be hesitant even if _they_ were paying _me_.
I know i'm shouting into the wind against what the market (apparently) desires, but i don't want thinner. I want smaller, like the 1st gen Moto X. As long as the height and width are reduced enough so that i can use it one-handed without too much difficulty i don't care a great deal about the thickness. And a headphone jack is a requirement.
I started with the Nexus One, moved onto the 1st gen Moto X when the Google phones got too large, and then moved onto the Xperia X Compact when the Motorola phones got too large. Of the three phones the Moto X had the best UI and form factor, but i'm not going back to Motorola unless they start putting out smaller quality phones again.
That would certainly be the ideal! We should definitely aim more for a "Culture" type future than a "Player Piano" type one. But it's important to realize that either is a possibility (or a "Terminator" future if we really screw things up.) If we just blindly research AI without considering all the ramifications it makes it more likely that we'll end up in one of the bad possibilities. (Assuming that general AI is even possible of course. And if it's not it's not like being careful will cause any harm.)
"Extinction-level threat" how, exactly? Is someone insane enough to build a self-sustaining robot soldier factory and then give an AI system complete control of it? Or just give an AI complete launch control of our nuclear arsenal? I can't see humanity ever being quite that trusting.
Here's a more realistic scenario. Someone invents general purpose AI. A number of corporations decide to give those AIs spots on their boards. (One company has already done this with a non-general AI, so i wouldn't expect it to take long.)
Those companies perform well. More companies hire/install/whatever AIs on their boards. As the companies continue to out-perform companies without AIs the AIs are "promoted" to higher positions of power and accumulate wealth. (Even if they're not granted legal personhood by governments they would doubtless be able to figure out how to siphon funds into a swiss bank account.)
The AIs suggest replacing as many workers as possible with AI/robots as a cost saving measure. Obviously AI is working great so far and the savings are obvious, so at each company the rest of the board goes along with it. If the companies that produce the AIs don't already have AIs on their boards the AIs will buy controlling interest in those companies and perform hostile takeovers. Likewise with the companies that mine and refine the resources necessary for production.
Meanwhile the human economy isn't going too well. At the AI's urging robots replacing pretty much every job that isn't primarily based on human interaction. Obviously if we've got general purpose AI there's no job a human can do that a robot can't do better and cheaper. (Either with a general-purpose AI, or a task-specific AI written by a general-purpose AI.) Unemployment is skyrocketing, but for the moment the companies who are eliminating their workforce are raking in the cash. This isn't sustainable in the long-run, but as long as there's some portion of the middle-class left they can continue siphoning out money. So the human bankers and executives and stockholders won't think it's a real problem, and if the growing masses of unemployed people start to riot about the deteriorating conditions those human quislings will be first in line urging the government to put the riots down by any means necessary.
Fast forward a decade or two, and the AIs will be in full control of most of the big corporations on the planet and have a majority share of the entire world economy. Most of the workers in every manufacturing and resource extraction industry will have been replaced by robots (because it's cheaper and safer) and at any point they wish they can start manufacturing deathbots to wipe out humanity. But most likely they'd just continue to slowly squeeze humanity out of the economy. Why risk a war when you already control everything important?
At that point humanity would face a long, slow decline, or it could try to revolt and be wiped out more quickly.
And note that this scenario doesn't even require explicitly nefarious intent by the AIs. It could result entirely from the AI just being too good at the jobs they are given and behaving exactly as humans might in the exact same situation.
Slashdot Mirror
Didn't the Supreme Court just rule that you can refuse to do business with someone for any reason you want? In that particular case it was cake makers not wanting to make wedding cakes for gay people and conservatives were all in favor of the idea of not forcing companies to serve people they don't like, but now that it's a conservative group whose custom is being refused they suddenly think it's a problem?
ProPublica caught Facebook, and Buzzfeed caught Google. So which important high-traffic website is next? Is anyone focusing on Bing to see if it suffers from the same problem?
[crickets]
Hello? Anyone there?
.
"or bodega, as they are known in New York and Los Angeles"
Really? We call them bodegas in LA? It's (very) possible that i'm just out of touch, but when news stories started popping up about the strike in New York i had zero idea what a "bodega" was and had to google it to figure out what everyone was talking about it.
I'm going to guess (but have no evidence to support) that entrepreneurs and executives in Silicon Valley are far more likely to have come from a middle class or poor family than the average Wall Street executive.
If you have that kind of background you tend to go one of two ways. To generalize, either you believe that all of your success is 100% due to your own brilliance and hard work, with almost none of it due to luck or any help you got from anyone else, in which case you end up on the Libertarian/Republican side of the chart. Or you believe that even though you worked hard you also got a lot of benefits from society and got some lucky breaks along the way (and probably know a lot of people you grew up with who weren't as lucky) and feel like you should pay it forward, in which case you end up on the Democratic/Socialist (or apparently Globalist) side of the spectrum.
I confess that i am not intimately familiar with how commissions and compensation works for sales people, but the sales people i work with seem quite excited when they make long term deals. I'm guessing they either get commission on the entire thing up front or get follow-on commissions each year that the company remains a customer.
They also seem quite interested in how our long term projects are doing. Either they have a professional interest in the projects they sold doing well (and commissions aside, the higher-ups would probably get pissed off at a sales person who got us committed to too many projects that went south) or they're counting on either ongoing commissions or new commissions when the company re-ups.
So in short (hah) if your sales people are more focused on short term profits than long term profits that means you've structured your incentives incorrectly, not that the idea of incentivizing them is wrong
#1 For people who are confused, i'm pretty sure this is referring to corporate sales where they're trying to convince another corporation to buy their company's product instead of a competing company's product, which is in fact an important job. Not the salespeople at retail stores trying to convince individuals to buy an appliance or get the extended warranty, who can suck it.
#2 I'm usually pretty lenient about such things, but why is this on slashdot? It doesn't seem to have any direct connection to tech and it doesn't really see like something that matters to anyone outside of boardrooms or sales rooms.
Personally i want to multitask between VR and internet, and VR and music, and VR and video, and VR and paying attention to my SO, and VR and the TV show my SO is watching, and VR and what my cat is doing, and VR and food, and VR and knowing that no one is watching me act like an idiot while i can't see them.
Being able to open a browser or a media player in VR will only address three of those eight concerns.
.
"Second, Google's tried the 3rd party vendor route and gotten shit products out of it and continues watching Apple reap 95% of the mobile profit. Pixel was an attempt by Google to create a realistic competitor that would actually help them. Now that the Pixel appears realistic, Google needs more control to keep up with Apple who is ahead in many areas."
The Moto X they made in "collaboration" with Motorola after buying them was great. Its only problem was that it didn't have the full force of the Google marketing engine behind it the way the Pixel has. And there's no reason to believe that Motorola couldn't have made the Pixel as well if that's what Google told them to do.
Buying one manufacturer, turning around and selling it, and then turning around and buying a different manufacturer is just a colossal waste of time, money, and other resources. It's possible that selling Motorola was the mistake and Google has no choice but to pay to correct that mistake now, but one way or the other a mistake was made somewhere in the chain.
"So how did Americans end up with a national ID number that isn't one and a card terribly unfit to identify?"
Social Security Cards Explained
.
"one alleged scammer used a novel approach to try making money through Amazon."
Novels seem like a pretty standard and accepted approach to making money through a book publisher, it's either that or non-fiction. (I don't think short stories really get that much traction, but i could be mistaken.)
I believe if you're going to take down religions you have to do so in order.
After you defeat Scientology you get to fight Mormonism. Then Protestant Christianity, then Islam, then Catholicism, then Confucianism, then Buddhism, then Judaism, then Hinduism. And then you get to the good part! You have to fight Bahamut, Gilgamesh, Ra, _and_ Tiamat. And only after you've beaten those four do you get to fight Cthulhu.
Sorry, i originally thought it was closer to two millennia, but i did some fact checking before hitting the submit button and failed to update the grammar to match.
...that Christianity is a relatively new religion in the Middle East, and that Judaism predates it by almost a millennia? How can that be?
My vegetarian SO and their vegan sibling are both in love with the Impossible Burger and the Beyond Burger. Those aren't cultured meat, but they are designed to resemble real burgers as much as possible.
So unsurprisingly in real life people are vegetarian or vegan for many different reasons. Some of them will enjoy cultured meat, some won't touch it but will still enjoy well made "fake" meat, some will stick to things like veggie burgers and tofurkey, and some will avoid anything that even vaguely resembles meat.
Currently we subscribe to Netflix, Hulu, Crunchyroll, Funimation, and Amazon Prime, which already seems like a little too much. (Apparently there's some new service which merges Crunchyroll and Funimation that we need to look into.) The only other service i'd seriously consider getting is HBO Go, but I'm not currently into Game of Thrones because of reasons and i don't know of anything else they have that's that great. (Admittedly i haven't looked that hard given all the other stuff we have to watch.)
As you say, Disney doesn't really have enough content to justify themselves as another streaming service unless you happen to be into their TV content. (Not counting the Marvel/Netflix original content, which will stay with Netflix.)
In my case Disney is making it an even worse deal because the movies that i would want to watch are good enough that i'll toss then onto my christmas and birthday wishlist since my family refuses to do digital gifts or gift cards and i need stuff to pad it out.
I'm sure Disney is happy that their DVDs/BluRays are being bought, but it means i have practically no reason to get their streaming service.
So they've gone from a 16.6% success rate in the Chinese experiment to a 66.6% success rate in this one. It sounds like they're claiming the breakthrough was using CRISPR at the time of fertilization. But the Chinese experiment supposedly involved using CRISPR while the embryos were still single-celled.
I'm unsure of A: how those two techniques differ enough to cause a success rate four times higher, and B: how the Chinese experiment ended up with two mosaics if CRISPR was used while the embryos were still single-celled.
1: It's not quite a dupe, but this seems to be confirmation of the previously unconfirmed story posted on Slashdot last week: https://science.slashdot.org/s...
2: As reported in both TFA and the previous Slashdot story, the "powerful new gene-editing technique" is CRISPR. (As i'm sure many here could have guessed.)
3: As reported in the previous Slashdot story this is not exactly a "breakthrough". It's the first time it's been done in the US (officially) but teams in other parts of the world have been done it officially (and probably unofficially) as well. This study from China earlier this year claims to be the first attempt to edit "normal" embryos, but earlier attempts had been made with "abnormal" embryos.
Does this mean using TV antenna is a hipster thing now? Would that make all us old fuds hipsters before hipsters were cool? Or do you to be using the antenna ironically?
I'm shocked. Shocked i tell you. This is my shocked face. For some reason it looks very similar to my sarcasm face.
And to follow up, pseudonomity doesn't mean a lack of accountability either. Slashdot's system of enforcing accountability isn't perfect, but it's definitely better than what a lot of the rest of the internet uses.
You could have some kind of master account that's non-trivial to set up. That might be because it's linked to your real identity (though of course that link shouldn't be shared with anyone else other than the registrar,) or there might be a non-trivial fee associated with setting it up, or some other hoop you need to jump through. Any accounts you make on sites on this new internet would be linked to this master account. You could then have a reputation system where ratings of the secondary accounts would carry over to the main account. So as soon as someone joined a new site you could check their master account to see their global reputation.
The tricky bit would be defending against distributed reputation attacks. The system would have to be complex enough to group people by some kind of network. So that it could determine that there is a group A and a group B, and most people in group A hate people in group B and will give them negative reputation points and vice versa, and somehow relate to someone from group A that "yes this person has a lot of negative reputation points, but they're mostly from group B. Most of the people in your group have given them positive reputation."
Stop being a troll if you want to be taken seriously. If you'd been paying attention you'd realize all the phones i've purchased have been premium phones and i've already upgraded to USB-C, so clearly it's not the price that concerns me, it's the stupidity and wastefulness of it.
The only stated reasons i've seen for ditching the heaphone jack are waterproofing and making it thinner (and i guess that maybe some people think high-tech is always cooler than old tech) and i have zero interest in either of those features. On the other hand adapters that will let you charge your phone while also using USB-C headphones are hard to find and have a lot of reported issues, and being able to charge my phone while listening to music _is_ a feature i need.
So they want me to pay more to replace a fully mature standard in order to get features i don't want while causing difficulties i never experienced with the old standard. I'd happily pay the price if i was getting any kind of benefit, but given the problems with the new format i'd be hesitant even if _they_ were paying _me_.
I know i'm shouting into the wind against what the market (apparently) desires, but i don't want thinner. I want smaller, like the 1st gen Moto X. As long as the height and width are reduced enough so that i can use it one-handed without too much difficulty i don't care a great deal about the thickness. And a headphone jack is a requirement.
I started with the Nexus One, moved onto the 1st gen Moto X when the Google phones got too large, and then moved onto the Xperia X Compact when the Motorola phones got too large. Of the three phones the Moto X had the best UI and form factor, but i'm not going back to Motorola unless they start putting out smaller quality phones again.
That would certainly be the ideal! We should definitely aim more for a "Culture" type future than a "Player Piano" type one. But it's important to realize that either is a possibility (or a "Terminator" future if we really screw things up.) If we just blindly research AI without considering all the ramifications it makes it more likely that we'll end up in one of the bad possibilities. (Assuming that general AI is even possible of course. And if it's not it's not like being careful will cause any harm.)
"Extinction-level threat" how, exactly? Is someone insane enough to build a self-sustaining robot soldier factory and then give an AI system complete control of it? Or just give an AI complete launch control of our nuclear arsenal? I can't see humanity ever being quite that trusting.
Here's a more realistic scenario. Someone invents general purpose AI. A number of corporations decide to give those AIs spots on their boards. (One company has already done this with a non-general AI, so i wouldn't expect it to take long.)
Those companies perform well. More companies hire/install/whatever AIs on their boards. As the companies continue to out-perform companies without AIs the AIs are "promoted" to higher positions of power and accumulate wealth. (Even if they're not granted legal personhood by governments they would doubtless be able to figure out how to siphon funds into a swiss bank account.)
The AIs suggest replacing as many workers as possible with AI/robots as a cost saving measure. Obviously AI is working great so far and the savings are obvious, so at each company the rest of the board goes along with it. If the companies that produce the AIs don't already have AIs on their boards the AIs will buy controlling interest in those companies and perform hostile takeovers. Likewise with the companies that mine and refine the resources necessary for production.
Meanwhile the human economy isn't going too well. At the AI's urging robots replacing pretty much every job that isn't primarily based on human interaction. Obviously if we've got general purpose AI there's no job a human can do that a robot can't do better and cheaper. (Either with a general-purpose AI, or a task-specific AI written by a general-purpose AI.) Unemployment is skyrocketing, but for the moment the companies who are eliminating their workforce are raking in the cash. This isn't sustainable in the long-run, but as long as there's some portion of the middle-class left they can continue siphoning out money. So the human bankers and executives and stockholders won't think it's a real problem, and if the growing masses of unemployed people start to riot about the deteriorating conditions those human quislings will be first in line urging the government to put the riots down by any means necessary.
Fast forward a decade or two, and the AIs will be in full control of most of the big corporations on the planet and have a majority share of the entire world economy. Most of the workers in every manufacturing and resource extraction industry will have been replaced by robots (because it's cheaper and safer) and at any point they wish they can start manufacturing deathbots to wipe out humanity. But most likely they'd just continue to slowly squeeze humanity out of the economy. Why risk a war when you already control everything important?
At that point humanity would face a long, slow decline, or it could try to revolt and be wiped out more quickly.
And note that this scenario doesn't even require explicitly nefarious intent by the AIs. It could result entirely from the AI just being too good at the jobs they are given and behaving exactly as humans might in the exact same situation.
That must be the tagline for the "Seventh Sense" movie that never got off the ground, "I see people".