At my company, "Lead Software Engineer" is a title. I'm not sure exactly where in the pay grade it is, but I'm above it at "Senior Software Engineer", one level below "Principal Software Engineer" (the highest engineering level at the company).
Hmm. I think you've identified a third classification of people that it's not worth arguing with -- people who respond to an argument with abuse and ad-hominem attacks.:-)
For myself, I generally judge based on either the tone of the original post, or the way they respond if I answer. I don't think I've ever seen someone I thought was a shill either. I only call someone a troll if I'm taking the time to argue against their point (i.e, "OK, I'll feed the troll. [argument]").
But I admire that you've checked into it, and are trying to use your sig to influence Slashdot culture for the good.
If you can't defend your opinions, on its merits, against a shill, then it probably means the shill has a valid point.
I think the "shill" accusation is akin to the "troll" accusation -- it questions your interlocutor's motivations. In a normal conversation, you assume that both people are making arguments for their positions because they truly hold their belief, and want to convince the other person, and (at least at some level) are willing to be convinced.
But a troll argues for something just to make people angry (or provoke some other response), not because he believes it. Similarly, a shill, although he may at some level believe it, argues something because it's his job (or for some other reason). You're not going to convince them to believe your way, nor are you going to get them to see that you have a reasonable point of view (i.e., "I still disagree with you, but I can see why you think that way.") On the contrary, arguing often ends up giving them exactly what they want: to see you wasting time / getting angry in the case of a troll, or raising the visibility of their argument, in the case of a shill.
Therefore, arguing with a troll or a shill is not only a waste of time, but often counter-productive.
Once upon a time, you could play a Blizzard game over a LAN.
This annoyed me at first too. But the fact is, you can still get together for LAN parties. We played SC2 at our office last weekend, and it was a blast.
Once upon a time, you could install a "spawn" copy to play against a friend, allowing the two of you to play multiplayer off one install disc and CD key.
This is a bit more of an annoyance. In the past we had a couple of more hard-core people who would buy the game, and some less hard-core people who would play "socially", but not buy it. However, two things. First, we can still play big games of SC1 at our office -- it's still an extremely fun game. Second, though annoying, it will probably have the overall effect of boosting SC2 sales. The game is harder to pirate, and there's incentive for people to buy the game who otherwise wouldn't. I know it's likely that at least one of my friends, who wouldn't have bought it before, will probably buy it just so he can play with the rest of us.
Once upon a time, you didn't need the internet to play single player.
AIUI, If you can't connect to Battle.net, it will still allow you to play the single-player mode (assuming that you've connected at least once to validate the key).
I'd say the poster above is wrong about #3, but is right about #4.
Because we don't pay taxes on assets, but on income. Paying taxes on held assets would be completely broken.
Do you own a mortgage? Have a pension plan? Own stock? How far do you think you'd get paying off your mortgage if every year you had to pay 30% of the equity in taxes? How well do you think you'd be able to save for retirement if you had to pay 30% of your portfolio in taxes every year?
Although I guess one might argue, the total value of all assets owned by people in the US far outweighs not only their income, but even the money in the system; so that if we abolished taxes on income and only taxed assets, the tax rate might be a lot lower, like 2%.
But then you might run into other problems, like people would avoid owning things to avoid paying taxes; and how do you valuate all of the assets you own?
You can call me a socialist, you can call me a communist. That's fine because I know I'm neither of those. I'm just someone that wants a fair playing field when it comes to aggregating X amount of resources so that our government and public services continue to function properly.
I recently read about a very interesting theory of how to define a just society.
Imagine there are a bunch of souls before birth, and they're asked to evaluate and decide on the rules of the social, cultural, economic, and legal conditions of the society they will be born in. However, none of them know what place they will hold in that society. They may be born in the top 1%, the bottom 1%, or somewhere in the middle. They may be healthy or sickly, talented or not, &c. They know the different positions in society, but they don't know the distribution -- whether it's 99% lords and 1% downtrodden peasants, or 1% lords and 99% downtrodden peasants (so that they can't do probability calculations). If that group of people can agree on a set of rules for society, not knowing which place they will hold in it, will be just.
In essence, this theory allows for inequality of income, status, &c, but only to the degree that allowing some people to have more raises the bottom "rung" of the ladder.
Or to put it another way: if you were a soul before being born, and you had a choice of which country you were going to live in, but not what place you held in the society of that country or the kind of body / brain you would be born with, where would you rather live?
And a legal framework where contracts are upheld? And a public education system so that Google didn't have to teach their engineers how to read first? And a regulatory framework for the stock market, so that people actually have some modicum of trust that they're not going to be totally hoodwinked, making it possible for Google stock to sell, and thus valuable to investors, allowing them to raise money by issuing shares?
(Sorry, that's a long train of logic, but it's a really important one.)
There's another mechanism, the foreign earned income exclusion, which (for approved countries) allows you to exclude income before you even calculate the tax. If you live in one such country, even though your tax rate in that country is lower than the US, you'd pay the lower tax rate rather than the higher one.
Doesn't do me much good, as I live in the UK, where the tax rate is definitely higher.:-)
I'm pretty sure countries with 2.5% income tax wouldn't be on the list of approved countries anyway, so it's not really a loophole.
owned [ucsc.edu] 73% of total assets and 83% of financial wealth in the US.
There's a difference between property and income. What you want is the percentage of total income in the top 10%, not percentage of total assets. (Oh, and I suppose you should throw in appreciation on those assets as well -- capital gains, &c.)
The price of the US version is currently USD$59.99 [blizzard.com]. The australian version, AUD$89.95 (USD$87.38) a 45% markup.
I've found that a a lot of times the difference between the UK and US list price is that the UK price includes VAT, and the US price doesn't include sales tax. But I'm guessing that Australian VAT isn't 45%, so there's obviously something else here...
Dude, I left the US three years ago, before Fox News was that big of a thing (and didn't have a TV for three years before that). So I saw it completely fresh when visiting some friends a couple of months ago. I even agree with many of the principles they claim to espouse -- small government, free market, &c. But it's is over-the-top bad. I was pretty amazed that my friends, who seem pretty normal reasonable people, could even stand to watch it.
Another problem with self publishing is that most authors are not the best editors of their own work. In fact, very few writers can both write and edit - they're different enough skillsets that there is that little overlap. But even when a writer can, they tend to be workmanlike at best. This is because if a writer writes paragraph X, that is supposed to say Y, that writer will always know that Y is the message. Unfortunately, paragraph X might not have actually said Y, and because the writer automatically reads Y into the paragraph, s/he doesn't catch the error. In short, the author is just too close to their own work to be the best editor of that work.
What do you think about his claim that the four authors of the book edited one anothers' work? At least that takes away the "it was supposed to say Y but doesn't" problem.
Editing would be hard to crowd-source, but might be able to be paid for. Filtering should be able to be crowd-sourced somehow. But I can't see how promotion and marketing can be crowd-sourced without a pre-existing fan base (as the author of the article clearly has).
The thing I didn't like about this is that you have to be on a computer with pwdhash in order for this to work.
What I did instead was generate 52 random passwords, and put them in a matrix on a business-card sized piece of paper. Then I invented a simple "hash" to map the website name onto the matrix. Same effect: instant, secure, mostly unique passwords with no memory required.
Not quite as secure as pwdhash, because (1) there are collisions, so occasionally two sites end up with the same password, and (2) if someone took my little card, it's possible for a clever person to figure out my "hash" algorithm. But it's 95% of the way there, and has the additional property that I don't need to have pwdhash, or even a computer around. I just pull the card out of my wallet.
Actually, I was surprised at how good the numbers were. Only 40% use the same password for more than one site? You mean 60% of people actually have a different password for all 150 sites that want you to make an account and give them login information? That's amazingly good -- so good that I find it hard to believe. I don't know anyone that has a completely different password for every site.
A lot of his advice is just plain unreasonable. "Use one password per site, don't write it down, change them a lot." I'll tell you what this means: forgetting passwords every three months. That means conditioning users and operators to reset passwords frequently. And since "password" (i.e., the private information required) for resetting passwords is often much weaker than the password itself, this makes the whole system less secure. Anyone who honestly recommends this is an idiot. For the vast majority of users this is not going to work. Coming up with an actually usable system is better.
Myself, I took an idea from a post I saw here on Slashdot about a year ago:
Use a password-generating program to generate a large number of passwords. I made 52.
Print them on a credit-card sized piece of paper, in a matrix.
Invent a way of "mapping" a website name onto the matrix, known only to you (doesn't have to be complicated, just something you can remember)
Put the original with your other safe documents, and keep a photocopy in your wallet.
Now, when any website asks you to create a count with a password, simply pull out your password card, map the website name onto the matrix, and bam -- instantaneous, strong, almost unique password. I never have to remember it or put it into a password program, since the mapping is repeatable. I don't have to worry about losing it with a hard drive crash, or about not having it stored if I need to log in on my phone or someone else's computer.
The only annoying bit dealing with sites that have restrictions on the passwords. A lot of sites won't let you use punctuation !@#$%^&*();{}[] in your passwords (presumably to rule out SQL injection attacks); and some, even though the mapped password has two symbols and a number, complain that I don''t have both upper and lower case. *sigh*
Not saying this is a strategy for the masses either, but at least it's something.
If you'd do that with the Volt you'd end up losing far more than $5,737.
You're not factoring in the externality of damage to the environment via CO2 and other emissions, and consumption of a limited resource which is necessary for things like plastic. Not saying that it's not still cheaper, but just pointing it out.
I do agree with your main point however -- people always say things like, "I bought a new car because I just kept pouring money into the old one." Really? How much were you "pouring in"? A $400 repair job here, a $1000 repair job once a year? That's still way cheaper than the interest you'll pay on the loan for the new car during that year. (Although again, that fails to factor in the personal cost of being car-less while it gets repaired.)
Its usually a good indication that they are ignored or virtually ignored.
Not at all. I don't use Twitter, but the vast majority of Facebook posts I read I don't react to via Facebook. I still read them, and am glad that the person posted them. A smaller number I click "Like", but there's not much else to say. Only a handful do I ever comment on (which would be the "retweet" or "respond" option on twitter).
That said, I found the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter *much* lower... which is why I use FB instead.:-)
Without any logical explanation, you have already jumped to the conclusion that the computer cannot predict those changes in the environment, and make a more accurate prediction than a human.
Well, take my "children playing" example. The computer would need to:
Recognize the motion at the side of the road as several children
Recognize the kind of motion as a specific class of "playing"
Recognize that this kind of "playing" might end with one of the children being pushed into the road.
Human beings have a huge number of neurons dedicated to analyzing social aspects of things. I think I'm pretty justified in thinking that computers would have a way to go before being equal to a human in that area.
Consider how many things could be coming at your car from the periphery that the human eye would not be able to detect. Computer systems can have more sensors with longer range. Computers can track more objects coming from more directions than the human eye can track simultaneously.
True; but have you ever had the following experience: You're driving along, and for some reason you notice a car slightly in front of you in another lane, and you think, "I bet he's going to change lanes, and he doesn't see me." And then he does, and you're glad that you noticed and were ready to slow down. Or this experience: You see some children on the sidewalk, playing around, and one ends up getting pushed and stumbles onto the street. You were giving them a wide berth, however, and there was no oncoming traffic, so a quick swerve is enough to avoid hitting the child.
I recently took the driving test for my UK license, after having a US license for 16 years. And one thing I noticed, driving in the city at rush hour, is the incredible amount of judgment involved in driving, which happens at a sub-conscious level. What is this cyclist going to do? When can I pull around this car stopped in the road? I'd better watch and be ready to brake / swerve to avoid one of these pedestrians who aren't paying attention and look like they might just walk out into the road -- and so on.
Maybe having computer-like reaction time and a huge number of sensors will make up for it. Certainly never being angry, distracted, tired, or drunk will go a long way to having a higher average safety record. But AI will need to go an awful lot further before I'd say an automated car was safer than an alert, experienced human.
There is reason to believe that economic development leads to greater political freedom. It happened in South Korea, once the per capita income rose enough, and it happened in Taiwan.
I think it's time to pull out the "correlation is not causation" quote. South Korea was also heavily influenced by the US during the Korean war. Also, greater political freedom means lower corruption and chronyism, which means economy as a whole runs better, and also that money is less unequally distributed. So greater political freedom may have caused the economic development.
In any case, it seems to me that China is trying to learn from the mistakes of other totalitarian countries. In the '70s they tried extreme experimentation with communism, where they got rid of money entirely, and tried to completely control the rate of production for everyone. That worked terribly. Since the '90s, they've been trying a new experiment, rarely seen elsewhere: market economy, but totalitarian government. Seems to be working pretty well for them so far. I personally know probably almost a hundred people from China, and from everything I've seen, believing that the wealthier middle-class in China are going to rise up and demand a democratic Chinese seems about as far-fetched as believing that the working class in the US are going to rise up and demand a communist government. Neither are being oppressed nearly enough to make that worthwhile.
s that an ideal that's especially resonant with the Chinese culture for some reason?
If it's so Chinese, why did communist Russia and Iron Curtain countries, and why do communist Cuba, engage in restrictions on free speech, protest, &c?
The idea is actually really ancient. If you read Plato's Republic, he specifically says that one of the duties of the government is to lie to the people, and make them feel good and positive about the country they're living in. (Wish I could give you a good quote, but it's been ages since I read it.) Of course, in Plato's mind, this would be done by philosophers who actually didn't want to be in power at all, who would rather sit around all day thinking about the Truth, but who were begged to come to power by the people, who recognized that such people (like Plato, of course) would be the absolutely best rulers, if only they could be convinced to take it up*. Like that would ever happen. But Communism seems to have a more idealistic vision of humanity as well, and so took up the propaganda idea with a vengance.
I think the fact is that their efforts actually do contribute to a more stable society in a lot of ways. But it also makes it way too easy for corruption, incompetence, and evil to hide behind. That's a cost which the west has typically judged not worth the benefits.
* Sorry for the run-on sentence, but I think I'll defy my English teachers and say it fits here.
If you look further in the article, you can reconstruct a hypothetical scenario which, from the FBI's point of view, looks completely normal:
Young Arab American named Khaled writes a blog post hinting at something violent: (TFA: "When he later asked Khaled about the post, his friend recalled “writing something stupid,” but said he wasn’t involved in any wrongdoing.")
FBI gets warrants to track whereabouts of Khalid and his friends, one of whom is Afifi (TFA: "[A former FBI agent] said he was certain that agents who installed it would have obtained a 30-day warrant for its use.")
FBI plants device on Afifi's car.
Afifi finds the device during a routine check-up
FBI notices the thing isn't moving, and/or notice the photos online, and decide to show their cards; especially since they're convinced he's not important anyway.
It's of course a bit scary to have people tracking you when you didn't do anything wrong; and it sounds like there was some annoying bullying (TFA: "[The FBI agent] told Afifi, “We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate.”) But it sounds like there's an explanation of how this could have happened by-the-book, and the FBI is doing their job.
Because controlling your bank accounts doesn't give someone the power to decide where billions of pork-barrel dollars are spent, much less control of the most powerful military on earth.
I insinuated that gays might be able to serve in the military just as well as straights.
It's possible that they have a huge number of genuine trolls on that site who do the same thing. It's also possible that in the past they have had a large number of discussions go off-track into useless bickering because of the same kinds of topics being expressed. (i.e., not caused by intentional trolls, but having the same effect).
In the past I've had a number of experiences, when joining a new community (and unaware of its history or unwritten rules) of accidentally saying something or bringing up a topic which looks, to the moderators of that community, just like the stuff nasty trolls start. Same kind of thing -- just asking a question or making a comment which is genuine, not knowing that this is what all trolls do.
In a way it's like this. Lots of friends who are musicians and play large instruments which are awkward to transport (such as a cello, double-bass, &c) hear people say, when they're struggling to get their instrument through a tight corner, something like "I bet you wish you played the piccolo." To the guy who says it, it's clever because it's fresh and new. But what they don't realize is that everyone else says the exact same thing, and the person they're saying it to has already heard it hundreds of times. It wasn't very funny the first time, and it certainly isn't funny the 100th time.
I bet if you lurked on the Free Republic long enough, you'd see how you were perceived by the moderators, and understand why you were banned.
That, or you'd find out that the moderators are bigoted fascists who won't tolerate dissenting opinions.:-)
But that Intel is considering something like this is a pretty big warning sign that the free market isn't working as it should in this market.
What do you mean "as it should"? If the overall result is that resources are saved by Intel only making one set of chips, instead of having to go through all the design and manufacturing process for two, then I think that's a good result.
As long as someone has physical posession of the device there is no such thing as absolute security.
Yes, but they don't need absolute security. They just need it to be enough that the vast majority of their customers won't. If it's a choice between paying $50 and actually opening up the processor and doing some kind of surgery, the vast majority of people will just pay the $50. If a couple of hundred people get a free upgrade because they are willing to do it, who cares? You probably made more from them by just selling them the chip in the first place than you would have made otherwise.
It's similar to internet filtering in China. Sure, you can get around it if you know what you're doing. But China doesn't need to prevent every single person in the country from being able to read about some news story. Their goal isn't 1984-style "everyone will love Big Brother or else". Their goal is to generally keep social order. So as reading about riots in Urumqi or the massacre at Tienanmen Square are difficult enough to find that 98% of the population will never hear about them, that's good enough.
Slashdot Mirror
At my company, "Lead Software Engineer" is a title. I'm not sure exactly where in the pay grade it is, but I'm above it at "Senior Software Engineer", one level below "Principal Software Engineer" (the highest engineering level at the company).
Hmm. I think you've identified a third classification of people that it's not worth arguing with -- people who respond to an argument with abuse and ad-hominem attacks. :-)
For myself, I generally judge based on either the tone of the original post, or the way they respond if I answer. I don't think I've ever seen someone I thought was a shill either. I only call someone a troll if I'm taking the time to argue against their point (i.e, "OK, I'll feed the troll. [argument]").
But I admire that you've checked into it, and are trying to use your sig to influence Slashdot culture for the good.
I think the "shill" accusation is akin to the "troll" accusation -- it questions your interlocutor's motivations. In a normal conversation, you assume that both people are making arguments for their positions because they truly hold their belief, and want to convince the other person, and (at least at some level) are willing to be convinced.
But a troll argues for something just to make people angry (or provoke some other response), not because he believes it. Similarly, a shill, although he may at some level believe it, argues something because it's his job (or for some other reason). You're not going to convince them to believe your way, nor are you going to get them to see that you have a reasonable point of view (i.e., "I still disagree with you, but I can see why you think that way.") On the contrary, arguing often ends up giving them exactly what they want: to see you wasting time / getting angry in the case of a troll, or raising the visibility of their argument, in the case of a shill.
Therefore, arguing with a troll or a shill is not only a waste of time, but often counter-productive.
This annoyed me at first too. But the fact is, you can still get together for LAN parties. We played SC2 at our office last weekend, and it was a blast.
This is a bit more of an annoyance. In the past we had a couple of more hard-core people who would buy the game, and some less hard-core people who would play "socially", but not buy it. However, two things. First, we can still play big games of SC1 at our office -- it's still an extremely fun game. Second, though annoying, it will probably have the overall effect of boosting SC2 sales. The game is harder to pirate, and there's incentive for people to buy the game who otherwise wouldn't. I know it's likely that at least one of my friends, who wouldn't have bought it before, will probably buy it just so he can play with the rest of us.
AIUI, If you can't connect to Battle.net, it will still allow you to play the single-player mode (assuming that you've connected at least once to validate the key).
I'd say the poster above is wrong about #3, but is right about #4.
Because we don't pay taxes on assets, but on income. Paying taxes on held assets would be completely broken.
Do you own a mortgage? Have a pension plan? Own stock? How far do you think you'd get paying off your mortgage if every year you had to pay 30% of the equity in taxes? How well do you think you'd be able to save for retirement if you had to pay 30% of your portfolio in taxes every year?
Although I guess one might argue, the total value of all assets owned by people in the US far outweighs not only their income, but even the money in the system; so that if we abolished taxes on income and only taxed assets, the tax rate might be a lot lower, like 2%.
But then you might run into other problems, like people would avoid owning things to avoid paying taxes; and how do you valuate all of the assets you own?
But it's an interesting idea.
I recently read about a very interesting theory of how to define a just society.
Imagine there are a bunch of souls before birth, and they're asked to evaluate and decide on the rules of the social, cultural, economic, and legal conditions of the society they will be born in. However, none of them know what place they will hold in that society. They may be born in the top 1%, the bottom 1%, or somewhere in the middle. They may be healthy or sickly, talented or not, &c. They know the different positions in society, but they don't know the distribution -- whether it's 99% lords and 1% downtrodden peasants, or 1% lords and 99% downtrodden peasants (so that they can't do probability calculations). If that group of people can agree on a set of rules for society, not knowing which place they will hold in it, will be just.
In essence, this theory allows for inequality of income, status, &c, but only to the degree that allowing some people to have more raises the bottom "rung" of the ladder.
Or to put it another way: if you were a soul before being born, and you had a choice of which country you were going to live in, but not what place you held in the society of that country or the kind of body / brain you would be born with, where would you rather live?
And a legal framework where contracts are upheld? And a public education system so that Google didn't have to teach their engineers how to read first? And a regulatory framework for the stock market, so that people actually have some modicum of trust that they're not going to be totally hoodwinked, making it possible for Google stock to sell, and thus valuable to investors, allowing them to raise money by issuing shares?
(Sorry, that's a long train of logic, but it's a really important one.)
There's another mechanism, the foreign earned income exclusion, which (for approved countries) allows you to exclude income before you even calculate the tax. If you live in one such country, even though your tax rate in that country is lower than the US, you'd pay the lower tax rate rather than the higher one.
Doesn't do me much good, as I live in the UK, where the tax rate is definitely higher. :-)
I'm pretty sure countries with 2.5% income tax wouldn't be on the list of approved countries anyway, so it's not really a loophole.
There's a difference between property and income. What you want is the percentage of total income in the top 10%, not percentage of total assets. (Oh, and I suppose you should throw in appreciation on those assets as well -- capital gains, &c.)
I've found that a a lot of times the difference between the UK and US list price is that the UK price includes VAT, and the US price doesn't include sales tax. But I'm guessing that Australian VAT isn't 45%, so there's obviously something else here...
Dude, I left the US three years ago, before Fox News was that big of a thing (and didn't have a TV for three years before that). So I saw it completely fresh when visiting some friends a couple of months ago. I even agree with many of the principles they claim to espouse -- small government, free market, &c. But it's is over-the-top bad. I was pretty amazed that my friends, who seem pretty normal reasonable people, could even stand to watch it.
What do you think about his claim that the four authors of the book edited one anothers' work? At least that takes away the "it was supposed to say Y but doesn't" problem.
Editing would be hard to crowd-source, but might be able to be paid for. Filtering should be able to be crowd-sourced somehow. But I can't see how promotion and marketing can be crowd-sourced without a pre-existing fan base (as the author of the article clearly has).
The thing I didn't like about this is that you have to be on a computer with pwdhash in order for this to work.
What I did instead was generate 52 random passwords, and put them in a matrix on a business-card sized piece of paper. Then I invented a simple "hash" to map the website name onto the matrix. Same effect: instant, secure, mostly unique passwords with no memory required.
Not quite as secure as pwdhash, because (1) there are collisions, so occasionally two sites end up with the same password, and (2) if someone took my little card, it's possible for a clever person to figure out my "hash" algorithm. But it's 95% of the way there, and has the additional property that I don't need to have pwdhash, or even a computer around. I just pull the card out of my wallet.
Actually, I was surprised at how good the numbers were. Only 40% use the same password for more than one site? You mean 60% of people actually have a different password for all 150 sites that want you to make an account and give them login information? That's amazingly good -- so good that I find it hard to believe. I don't know anyone that has a completely different password for every site.
A lot of his advice is just plain unreasonable. "Use one password per site, don't write it down, change them a lot." I'll tell you what this means: forgetting passwords every three months. That means conditioning users and operators to reset passwords frequently. And since "password" (i.e., the private information required) for resetting passwords is often much weaker than the password itself, this makes the whole system less secure. Anyone who honestly recommends this is an idiot. For the vast majority of users this is not going to work. Coming up with an actually usable system is better.
Myself, I took an idea from a post I saw here on Slashdot about a year ago:
Now, when any website asks you to create a count with a password, simply pull out your password card, map the website name onto the matrix, and bam -- instantaneous, strong, almost unique password. I never have to remember it or put it into a password program, since the mapping is repeatable. I don't have to worry about losing it with a hard drive crash, or about not having it stored if I need to log in on my phone or someone else's computer.
The only annoying bit dealing with sites that have restrictions on the passwords. A lot of sites won't let you use punctuation !@#$%^&*();{}[] in your passwords (presumably to rule out SQL injection attacks); and some, even though the mapped password has two symbols and a number, complain that I don''t have both upper and lower case. *sigh*
Not saying this is a strategy for the masses either, but at least it's something.
You're not factoring in the externality of damage to the environment via CO2 and other emissions, and consumption of a limited resource which is necessary for things like plastic. Not saying that it's not still cheaper, but just pointing it out.
I do agree with your main point however -- people always say things like, "I bought a new car because I just kept pouring money into the old one." Really? How much were you "pouring in"? A $400 repair job here, a $1000 repair job once a year? That's still way cheaper than the interest you'll pay on the loan for the new car during that year. (Although again, that fails to factor in the personal cost of being car-less while it gets repaired.)
Not at all. I don't use Twitter, but the vast majority of Facebook posts I read I don't react to via Facebook. I still read them, and am glad that the person posted them. A smaller number I click "Like", but there's not much else to say. Only a handful do I ever comment on (which would be the "retweet" or "respond" option on twitter).
That said, I found the signal-to-noise ratio on Twitter *much* lower... which is why I use FB instead. :-)
Well, take my "children playing" example. The computer would need to:
Human beings have a huge number of neurons dedicated to analyzing social aspects of things. I think I'm pretty justified in thinking that computers would have a way to go before being equal to a human in that area.
True; but have you ever had the following experience: You're driving along, and for some reason you notice a car slightly in front of you in another lane, and you think, "I bet he's going to change lanes, and he doesn't see me." And then he does, and you're glad that you noticed and were ready to slow down. Or this experience: You see some children on the sidewalk, playing around, and one ends up getting pushed and stumbles onto the street. You were giving them a wide berth, however, and there was no oncoming traffic, so a quick swerve is enough to avoid hitting the child.
I recently took the driving test for my UK license, after having a US license for 16 years. And one thing I noticed, driving in the city at rush hour, is the incredible amount of judgment involved in driving, which happens at a sub-conscious level. What is this cyclist going to do? When can I pull around this car stopped in the road? I'd better watch and be ready to brake / swerve to avoid one of these pedestrians who aren't paying attention and look like they might just walk out into the road -- and so on.
Maybe having computer-like reaction time and a huge number of sensors will make up for it. Certainly never being angry, distracted, tired, or drunk will go a long way to having a higher average safety record. But AI will need to go an awful lot further before I'd say an automated car was safer than an alert, experienced human.
I think it's time to pull out the "correlation is not causation" quote. South Korea was also heavily influenced by the US during the Korean war. Also, greater political freedom means lower corruption and chronyism, which means economy as a whole runs better, and also that money is less unequally distributed. So greater political freedom may have caused the economic development.
In any case, it seems to me that China is trying to learn from the mistakes of other totalitarian countries. In the '70s they tried extreme experimentation with communism, where they got rid of money entirely, and tried to completely control the rate of production for everyone. That worked terribly. Since the '90s, they've been trying a new experiment, rarely seen elsewhere: market economy, but totalitarian government. Seems to be working pretty well for them so far. I personally know probably almost a hundred people from China, and from everything I've seen, believing that the wealthier middle-class in China are going to rise up and demand a democratic Chinese seems about as far-fetched as believing that the working class in the US are going to rise up and demand a communist government. Neither are being oppressed nearly enough to make that worthwhile.
If it's so Chinese, why did communist Russia and Iron Curtain countries, and why do communist Cuba, engage in restrictions on free speech, protest, &c?
The idea is actually really ancient. If you read Plato's Republic, he specifically says that one of the duties of the government is to lie to the people, and make them feel good and positive about the country they're living in. (Wish I could give you a good quote, but it's been ages since I read it.) Of course, in Plato's mind, this would be done by philosophers who actually didn't want to be in power at all, who would rather sit around all day thinking about the Truth, but who were begged to come to power by the people, who recognized that such people (like Plato, of course) would be the absolutely best rulers, if only they could be convinced to take it up*. Like that would ever happen. But Communism seems to have a more idealistic vision of humanity as well, and so took up the propaganda idea with a vengance.
I think the fact is that their efforts actually do contribute to a more stable society in a lot of ways. But it also makes it way too easy for corruption, incompetence, and evil to hide behind. That's a cost which the west has typically judged not worth the benefits.
* Sorry for the run-on sentence, but I think I'll defy my English teachers and say it fits here.
If you look further in the article, you can reconstruct a hypothetical scenario which, from the FBI's point of view, looks completely normal:
It's of course a bit scary to have people tracking you when you didn't do anything wrong; and it sounds like there was some annoying bullying (TFA: "[The FBI agent] told Afifi, “We’re going to make this much more difficult for you if you don’t cooperate.”) But it sounds like there's an explanation of how this could have happened by-the-book, and the FBI is doing their job.
Because controlling your bank accounts doesn't give someone the power to decide where billions of pork-barrel dollars are spent, much less control of the most powerful military on earth.
It's possible that they have a huge number of genuine trolls on that site who do the same thing. It's also possible that in the past they have had a large number of discussions go off-track into useless bickering because of the same kinds of topics being expressed. (i.e., not caused by intentional trolls, but having the same effect).
In the past I've had a number of experiences, when joining a new community (and unaware of its history or unwritten rules) of accidentally saying something or bringing up a topic which looks, to the moderators of that community, just like the stuff nasty trolls start. Same kind of thing -- just asking a question or making a comment which is genuine, not knowing that this is what all trolls do.
In a way it's like this. Lots of friends who are musicians and play large instruments which are awkward to transport (such as a cello, double-bass, &c) hear people say, when they're struggling to get their instrument through a tight corner, something like "I bet you wish you played the piccolo." To the guy who says it, it's clever because it's fresh and new. But what they don't realize is that everyone else says the exact same thing, and the person they're saying it to has already heard it hundreds of times. It wasn't very funny the first time, and it certainly isn't funny the 100th time.
I bet if you lurked on the Free Republic long enough, you'd see how you were perceived by the moderators, and understand why you were banned.
That, or you'd find out that the moderators are bigoted fascists who won't tolerate dissenting opinions. :-)
What do you mean "as it should"? If the overall result is that resources are saved by Intel only making one set of chips, instead of having to go through all the design and manufacturing process for two, then I think that's a good result.
Yes, but they don't need absolute security. They just need it to be enough that the vast majority of their customers won't. If it's a choice between paying $50 and actually opening up the processor and doing some kind of surgery, the vast majority of people will just pay the $50. If a couple of hundred people get a free upgrade because they are willing to do it, who cares? You probably made more from them by just selling them the chip in the first place than you would have made otherwise.
It's similar to internet filtering in China. Sure, you can get around it if you know what you're doing. But China doesn't need to prevent every single person in the country from being able to read about some news story. Their goal isn't 1984-style "everyone will love Big Brother or else". Their goal is to generally keep social order. So as reading about riots in Urumqi or the massacre at Tienanmen Square are difficult enough to find that 98% of the population will never hear about them, that's good enough.