The 'primary' system should be replaced with a run-off election; so the final vote is between 2.
If you're unhappy that we have a mostly two-party system, then you need to realize that what you just suggested would often result in a one-party system. Any district that has a super-majority of one party will wind up with two candidates from the same party. In the final election you get a choice between, e.g., a Democrat or a Democrat. You want to support a Green Party guy -- to bad, he's not even on the ballot.
FWIW I would also get rid of primaries. I can see people being horrified by the idea that local parties would pick their own candidates,
Primaries are how the parties pick their candidates. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Why are you so horrified of parties picking their own candidates that you'd eliminate the method they use to do that?
Now, of course, the system isn't perfect. We have people in this area who are quite proud of the fact that they lie when they register to vote and claim to be Republican, just so they can vote in the Republican primaries and "help" them pick "better candidates". I'm not surprised that Democrats would lie to try to torpedo the election. No, I've never heard a Republican say he's going to mis-register to do that, but lots of Dems do. This is not a "both sides do it" thing.
Sad thing is there's a portion of Americans who really believe we should stop the "wrong" people from voting. I get the racists and why they feel that way,
Oh, knock this silly shit off. It is NOT racist to want only those people who are citizens to be able to vote. "Not a citizen" is "wrong people", and "not a citizen" has nothing at all to do with race. Another "wrong people" is "people who don't care enough to vote". People who don't care enough to vote should not vote. You keep misrepresenting people you don't understand, and it only makes you look foolish.
For my money I want to see voting made mandatory,
You keep saying this silly thing, too. Forcing people to vote will not improve the results, it will only add noise to the signal. People who do not care enough to vote will not care enough to be informed voters. They will either vote for random people (first on the list, e.g.) or the names they hear the most on the radio ads.
If you want to make money even MORE important in elections, then make voting mandatory. When "name recognition" becomes the selection method for the majority of voters who have nothing else to base their decision on, then politicians will just buy more ads to keep their name in front of the public.
I am quite happy if the turnout for an election is only 40% or 50% of the potential voters. That means that 40% or 50% of the potential voters cared enough to have an opinion and express it. The rest don't matter at all -- if you have no opinion or you don't care, then don't pretend that your voice must be heard, and don't pretend on their behalf that their voice must be heard. You are trying to speak for people who just don't care. If they don't care, why do you?
Seems like the only thing something like this would do is deter voters. Hackers know better.
Apparently not. I get tons of hacking attempts direct out of Chinese IP space (for those I've looked up), and probably other IP spaces that I haven't looked up. Blocking non-US IP addresses would be much more than just "deter voters", it would block a lot of hacking.
This is not something that is highly real-time dependent. You don't have to register "right this second". If you've waited so long that it truly is the end of registration time and you need to do it "right this second" using some web site, that's your own fault for waiting. There are almost certainly email-based methods of registering if there is a web version, and that won' t be blocked.
And, of course, this has nothing to do with voting or blocking actual voters, unless it's the stupid app-based voting intended for out-of-country people. If you can point to an example of an online voting system where out-of-US IPs are blocked, THAT would be deterring voters.
More absolute nonsense, as prices are set to maximize revenue.
When your costs go up, they come out of that "profit", and to keep the profit the prices have to go up. A company that has a 2% margin like many grocery stores do cannot accept a 10% increase in costs and keep the prices the same.
Let's say you're middle management and you come into the CEO's office, to tell him that you've raised prices in response to the latest increase in the minimum wage. He asks if the price increase has cost the company more in lost customers than it has gained in creased revenue,
The number of lost customers is completely irrelevant if your prices no longer cover the costs of doing business. Any exec who tells the CEO that "we've kept 100% of our customers but every sale is now costing us money because Uberbah says we don't have to raise prices to cover that" isn't going to keep his job.
"All other things being the same" is a crucial clause that is implicit in any argument that deals with one factor. Costs go up, all other things being the same the prices have to go up, too. You can only cut into the profits so much. You can only cut quality so much. You can only automate so much. But all three of those are things that aren't staying the same.
Yeah, its been steadily going up for decades.
But not because people are being paid more. Being paid more does NOT balance out the costs by improving productivity. You ignored that tiny detail I explained last time.
Which means you have even less of an excuse to deny an increase in the minimum wage,
You are either not reading what I wrote, or you can't understand it. I said nothing about denying an increase in minimum wage. Go argue with someone who actually said that.
Also before everyone piles in with the old "if you raise wages prices go up" nonsense, if that were true humanity could never progress as a species.
It is obviously true, because you are forgetting the implicit "all other things being the same" condition. All other things being the same, doubling the cost of labor will absolutely cause the prices to go up. It cannot do otherwise. If you have a shift of ten people at McDs and the wages (and associated taxes, etc) double, then the prices will have to go up.
Now, the reason we "progress as a species" (which is itself a stupid way to refer to this) is because all other things are not the same. You have a shift of ten but realize you can automate the jobs of four of them. You realize you can cut the quality of the product and save on the ingredients. You vertically integrate so the costs of the ingredients go down. You find savings in other areas so the prices don't have to go up as much.
Prices go up slower than wages when productivity goes up faster than wages.
What was that? "Productivity goes up"? So that's something that didn't stay the same. It's not a result of doubling the minimum wage, however. If someone can do 10 operations an hour (retrieve order from pallet, whatever) they aren't suddenly able to do 20 per hour just because you paid them double. Productivity increases require other actions. It's dishonest to shove all the good things onto a pay increase and ignore all the other changes that reduce costs so prices don't go up as fast. That's what you're doing when you argue that "doubling wages doesn't mean prices go up".
This just shows the problem with creating a really high minimum wage. Everyone who was already making that amount will want a raise, too. If half your employees already make $15/hr, and half make the actual minimum ($7 something), then giving half your employees a raise to $15/hr will only make the other half unhappy.
"I had to work here 10 years to get up to $15/hr. Now they're paying newbs who walk in the door on day 1 the same amount I'm making after ten years... how unfair is that?"
And complaining that they get a $3000 bonus after working ten years, oh my, how unfair is that! Paying for knee replacements is a health insurance issue. Worker's comp in many places. Worker's Comp in Oregon is so much better than health insurance because there is no deductable and no "in network" for care. You get a bill for a service for a worker's comp claim you send it to SAIF and they pay it. You have to drive 60 miles to see a specialist? You submit a milage claim and they pay it.) When I got my last worker's comp claim approved, they sent me a stack of reimbursement forms preprinted with my info, all I have to do is fill in the amounts and mail them back.
I hope Amazon loves the results of their social experiment. It will only prove to them how over-employeed they are and push for even more automation, like the Japanese warehouse that cut its employees by 90% after automating.
I don't know how the USA system works. I've never been there. I'm just stating how systems work elsewhere.
No, you are not. You are telling the US that they should use "caller pays", which is a lot more than just saying how things work for you.
You don't know the system here, so don't tell us how the system should change to make it better.
There's pros and cons for both. You tell me what's better.
I've told you what's better. Not being able to know ahead of time if you are going to be paying for a call to a mobile makes the idea of "caller pays" a non-starter. It's as bad as the scam of getting lured into calling a number in the 809 area code and then being billed a ridiculous amount because 809 is Dominican Republic, not US. (While Snopes calls this "outdated", they do so because "not all 809 numbers are a scam" and "other area codes can be used the same way." Misleading at best.) People expect a call to what looks like a US area code to be billed at their regular long distance rates -- and if you have nationwide calling that would be $0. Surprise! You called a mobile and talked for an hour, that's $6 for your call. Oh, wait, that carrier charges $.50 a minute for calls to mobiles, so that's $30. And the charge doesn't show up for a month or two as it propagates from the destination carrier back to your phone provider.
I get it. You don't care if that happens because you hate scam calls, and anything that might stop scam calls is ok by you. Even if it means Grandma cannot afford to call her grandkids because they all have cell phones and their providers charge $.50/min for calls.
Personally, I prefer not having to pay for something I didn't initiate.
You pay for the ability of others to initiate calls to you. Any argument you make that relies on you not paying for your cell service is silly.
Yes, six (6!), in two years. Compared to over 5000 neighborhood number spam calls.
You keep using that term, even though the definition is meaningless today. Your central office simply cannot look at an incoming number and know that it is spoofed based on your definition of "neighborhood number". I already gave you examples of why it is technically impossible to know. I'll repeat one: I have a valid phone number in an area code and prefix that is 2000 miles away. If I call someone there it would look like I'm spoofing a "neighborhood number", but I am not.
I'm sorry you get so many scam calls.
and is being used as a basis to criminalize not just neighborhood number spoofing but any unwanted call spoofing,
There is a difference between criminalizing the act and being able to detect it automatically. Of course make it illegal. Of course NOT demand that telcos automatically block any call from someone that claims to have the same area code and prefix.
It's very nice to block 99.998% of your spam calls with a single toggle switch in software conveniently named "block neighborhood numbers"
Yes, it may feel very nice, until your child cannot call you from a friend's home to get you to come pick him up because the call is from a "neighborhood number". It's the same area code, the same prefix, but I don't know it. It has to be a scammer. After all, it's 5000:1 odds to be a scam. (By the way, the phone your child is using is a cell phone, so the call is coming in from outside your central office.)
I should say "tried to apply the breaks." It's easy:
I know how easy it is to comment out a line of code. But, if the line of code that applies the brakes is commented out, the software is not even trying, and will never try, to apply the brakes. It may "detect obstacle" but it, by design, will do nothing about that obstacle. Saying it "tried to apply the brakes" gives the software some anthropogenic qualities. It "wanted to" apply the brakes, it "thought about" applying them, it "tried to". "Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try." The executable code has no idea that there was the commented out snippet so it doesn't even know that "trying to apply the brakes" was an option.
As to my comment, yes, every accident is the fault of a human at some level. That's not to say AVs are perfect - you are inserting a red-herring there.
It's not a red herring, it is a direct result of saying that humans will always be responsible for AV accidents. If the AV is never the cause of the accident, then the AV is perfect. If you can always point to a human who caused the result, then the AV isn't the cause. Even in the most extreme cases, like a brake line snapped when the brakes were applied so the AV couldn't keep from killing the pedestrian, you can always find a human cause. The engineer who designed the brakes underdesigned them. The quality control human inspecting the output of the brake line machine missed a flaw. The mechanic who last serviced the AV missed the signs of metal fatigue. All kinds of human failures.
I would instead say that AVs are only as good or bad as the actions of the people who designed them.
This is just another way of saying the AV will never be at fault. The designers are. Thus there is no accident that can be attached to an AV.
I think you want to attack the concept of AVs themselves, in which case you should just go ahead and do that.
I haven't hesitated to do that before, but I'm not doing that now. What I am attacking now is the concept that a human will always be the fault of an accident. It's just more of the same "AV are perfect" claims that AV zealots produce when attacking human drivers.
This started when someone blamed the woman who crossed the road where she shouldn't have for her own "suicide by AV". (Scare quotes, not quote quotes.) Yes, if she hadn't done that she wouldn't be dead now, probably. But the car shouldn't have hit her anyway. That makes it the AVs fault for hitting her.
but if you don't have the insight to know when you need some chicken soup,
Alexa isn't telling you that you need chicken soup. It's offering to SELL you chicken soup if you don't have any on hand. You may "have the insight" to know you want chicken soup but also have the insight that you're way too sick to drive to the local grocery story for a $1.29 can of it. "Yes, Alexa, hack hack cough, please send me some chicken soup that will arrive in three to five business days, after I've already recovered from whatever it is I have, or I've died from it. Thanks so much. And yes, please, send me cough drops too."
Wake up people, you will always be smarter than the technology in your hand.
People don't use Alexa because it is smarter than they are, it's because it is more convenient to have Alexa do something than for them to do it themselves. "Alexa, who won the Manchester United soccer match today?" is much easier than pulling out the Telegraph tomorrow or going to Google to find out.
It's convenience, not intelligence. If you don't have a can of chicken soup on hand, having Alexa send it to you is more convenient than calling a friend. It's more convenient but not timely, so it is ineffective and inefficient. Convenience and efficiency are often diametrically opposing concepts.
Then they changed their tactics to only spoof the last-4 digits
No, the first spoofing was using any number, any area code, any exchange, even invalid area codes and exchanges. That was to easy to catch.
when they added 1 they made the calls look like they were from Mexico.
I don't know why you think adding the 1 to the number would make it look like the call comes from Mexico. The 770 area code is still Georgia. The country code for Mexico is 52.
When I call a local number, I don't need to put an area code.
And in most places in the US, we do. In those places where 7 digit dialing is still in place (are there any?), reaching a cell phone within the same area code will not require dialing an area code.
You want US to pay the same way YOU do. That means there must be some way for US to know ahead of time that we will be billed extra for a call. "Needing an area code" isn't it. Try again.
If I want to call a national number, I put in an area code. They start with 0.
Again, not in the US. NO area code starts with 0. Area codes USED to have a requirement that they have 0 or 1 as the middle number, because that's what differentiated them from an exchange, but with a growing need for area codes, the NANP was changed so that any middle digit was valid and 10 digit dialing became mandatory. Again, you want the US to change to "caller pays", and I'm asking you how anyone could know whether the number he's dialing is "pay extra because it is mobile" or not.
Everyone here knows this. 2 digit area codes are national land line rates. 3 digit codes are mobiles.
Well, that's not how it works here. There are no 2 digit area codes in the NANP. Cell phones exist in the same area codes as landlines. Given how it works, please explain how ANYONE could know they're calling a mobile and will be billed extra. The only way I can think of is a recorded message like "you're calling a mobile and will be billed extra" for every call to a mobile.
I'm sure it's similar in other countries.
Once again, "other countries" are not relevant. You said the US should bill the caller for mobile calls. You have failed to answer the question about how callers are notified before the charges occur that they will be charged. I guess it's ok for people to start getting bills for outrageous amounts because their friend decided to move his landline number to his new cellular phone and didn't tell anyone they'd be billed for calling him. I know, you don't care because you won' t be surprised by a bill for what used to be free.
In essence it's no different from calling a 1900 number in USA, you know it's going to charge you before you call it.
US mobile numbers do not start with '1900'. (Well, maybe some do. I don't know if you can get a cell number in the 900 area code.) You don't know it's a mobile number unless someone has told you. I can port my landline number to a mobile this afternoon and if I don't tell anyone I did that they'll find out when they get a bill. How wonderful, huh? That's what you want the US to change to.
Before you tell the US how it should charge people for calls to mobiles, you should think about the system and whether "caller pays" would be reasonable given that the caller has no reasonable way of knowing if any arbitrary number is going to wind up on a mobile or otherwise. You do things differently, I know, so maybe the US doing things differently isn't such a bad thing, huh?
In 10 digit dialing, neighborhood number is one that shares the same first 3 digits, and area code.
Ummm, in 10 digit dialing, the first three digits ARE the area code.
I think my point was that "neighborhood number" is a meaningless concept in the current telecommunications market. It may have had a good definition in the 1950's when one central office handled an exchange (what you refer to as the "first three digits" for 7 digit dialing). That central office handled one or more exchanges and thus one or more "neighborhoods". That is so 1950's.
Today it's all computerized and any number in any exchange may appear in any place. I have a phone number from an area code 2000 miles away. I know people who have numbers from other area codes than where they get service. "Neighborhood number" is, today, a useless phrase. That's what makes a proposal to block "neighborhood numbers" as spam technically wrong. Every time I call my brother I am making a call into a central office into an exchange from a system outside that exchange. That central office cannot just assume my call is from a scammer who is spoofing a number, because it is a valid phone number -- mine -- and correctly indicates the caller id and number.
Which is what the remainder of what I wrote talked about. That makes it "founded" and "related" and relevant.
But thanks for the lecture on how the phone system worked when I was a teenager. Nostalgia is wonderful.
No it doesn't. This is trivial to fix. You just slap a softmax layer onto the output of your NN to correct the bias.
That's almost certainly creating a bias in an attempt to fix one.
The correct question to ask here is, WHY did Amazon's AI learn to pick men preferentially? You can claim it is bias against women in the AI, but that doesn't mean it is.
The AI had to be trained to begin with. It couldn't just start looking at resumes and guessing. It had to be given a large number of resumes AND information about the quality of the hires that came out of manual selection of the employees. E.g., what did the resumes of the GOOD employees look like compared to the resumes of the ones that turned out to be frogs?
Now, if the AI was allowed to look at terms like "male" or "man", which I don't believe resumes are allowed to contain anymore, then that's a problem. It's being TOLD to differentiate by gender. Assuming that it was not getting that input to start with, then it had to be working from other factors. It made correlations like "95% of the GOOD programmers we hired used the word 'python' in their resume skills section." Or, "95% of the resumes that listed 'Cisco CNA' as a qualification resulted in BAD employees."
If the AI was coming to conclusions based on non-gender things, and it still selected predominately men to hire, then there must be some qualification or skill that men predominately have that women do not.
This is not the kind of thing you can fix just by including "man" or "woman" in the qualification list and trying to "unbias" the output by manual changes.
Spoof your phone number. Since you can't Googleit yourself:
Neither link provides any way for ME to spoof my number. The closest you get is that I can pay for a service where someone else will spoof while forwarding my call through them. The claim was that anyone can spoof their number, and telling me how other people can do it for me isn't me doing it myself.
The legitimate PBX owner would need to be certified by the local phone company.
Define "legitimate PBX owner". I didn't steal the damn thing, I bought it for my own use and paid for it. Now I'm paying you, telco, for service. How is this illegitimate? Are you saying that I, a private citizen, should not be able to run my own PBX if I want to?
They could charge for this service. Probably wouldn't go over well with customers.
You're kidding, right? People already pay for caller ID service, why wouldn't they pay for "block illegitimate PBX owner's calls" service, too? It's a win-win for the telcos, just like the original Caller ID service was.
In the days of yore, when the telco owned the given block of numbers (and customers couldn't port them away), they could simply reject inbound calls with their own numbers set as the originating phone number.
Almost. It was quite possible for a company to have a local number for people to call but actually be operating out of another area code. In fact, a lot of companies did that instead of paying for an 800 number because it gave them a local presence while still saving the customer money. The phone company sold that service (I forget what they called it, something about a "remote number" I think). Other companies could sell that, providing a local number and using call forwarding to send it to the destination.
Calls from that distant company into the local area should bear the local number that local callers are likely to recognize instead of an unknown number from three states away.
It's just like today, when you call an 800 number that winds up at an Indian call center. When someone from that call center calls you back the number displayed should correspond to a US number known to the customer and not the local number for the call center.
The caller pays for his telephone service. You pay for your telephone service. How do you know ahead of time that you are calling a mobile phone and you will be billed extra? Does the destination service office interrupt the start of each call with a notice "this is a mobile call, you will be billed $.10/minute. Press 1 to agree"? How does your local office know that a number in a remote office is mobile versus non-mobile? Do all of your friends know that you expect them to pay more for calling you?
Basically, anyone can spoof a number for their outbound calls.
Can you explain how I, a wireline end-user, can do that? There is no input method I know of that lets me send bogus caller ID data.
They could set up a system which verifies numbers and also certifies legitimate spoof uses (such as a central PBX)
Scammers can buy central PBX systems, too.
On the receiving end, phone companies could flag and reject calls coming from outside their area without a valid return number. This, again, would cost them money
Au contraire. They'd sell this service and make a huge profit, just like they already charge $10/month for caller ID name and number and don't give refunds when they don't actually provide all the data. (This is a direct analogy to touch tone dialing, which many telcos charged a monthly fee for long after they had installed the hardware so every line could do DTMF.)
Spoofing works like this: a company buys service from a telco provider as a bulk service. I.e., like it is a telco itself. Part of the signalling process includes sending along the caller name and number from the source so it can be sold to the destination user. (It should be a crime for telcos to SELL caller id services -- it should be the default. It should also be a crime to sell "caller id name and number" and then provide only the number and the name of the state the call comes from -- and I'm talking about YOU CenturyLink.)
The "second" telco involved has no way to verify the information from the first telco, so it can do nothing but pass it along. The first telco is the scammer.
Sometimes this transport crosses international borders. Some scammer in a foreign country buys service from his local telco, which then routes the call to the US telco. The US telco has even less ability to validate the information, and the foreign telco has no reason to follow US law.
That's not a highly technical description, but it's close enough.
Perhaps there should be a "block neighborhood numbers not on your contacts list" feature.
Define "neighborhood number". I can live next door to you and have a number from the other side of the county. I can live on the other side of the country and have a number that looks like it is next door to you. I can live next door to you and have a number that looks like it is next door to you but is actually routed into the system on the other side of the country.
This would at least limit the scammers to a tiny subset of possible numbers to work with.
Blocking neighborhood numbers, assuming you mean "same area code and exchange as mine", would remove a vanishingly small amount of the potential spoofing space. Blocking "503-443-xxxx except on my list" would cover, at most, 10,000 numbers (everything from 0000 through 9999). It does nothing for any other area code, and every area code has a potential of 10,000,000 numbers. The limit imposed on scammers by blocking "neighborhood numbers" is very very small.
Seems like the phone scammers are out in force today -- two calls from crappers in the last five minutes on my work phone. Which I wish had caller ID.
If only there was a way to recognize the numbers of people you know. Maybe even have their name appear on the screen.
I think you completely missed the point of this entire discussion. The issue is that robo and spam callers can send any number and name data that they want, even that of your friends or neighbors. You can recognize the name, pick up the phone, and find out that someone at your number has requested information about back braces.
And unfortunately, the state AGs have missed out on one bit of technology that everyone thought was a good thing at the time: number portability. If I move from A to B and change cell providers, I can take my old phone number with me! If I used to live in 202-land but moved to 503-land, for example, I can keep my 202 area code number. Suppose I try calling my friend who I lived next door to in 202-land. There will be an inbound call to the central office serving his phone showing a 202 area code but coming from outside the 202 area. Does the phone company block that call as spam? It's not.
A related problem is VoIP. I have Vonage and when I signed up they had NO local numbers available for me. I could get a number in a city far away but in the same area code, or in a different area code altogether. I got a number that was local to my parents and family so they could call me toll-free. So, when I call someone next door to my brother the caller ID will show a local number. Does the phone company block that call because it must be spam?
But none of the "pirate" stations that I could hear
You didn't claim you couldn't hear the interference they could be generating, you claimed:
... I can't recall any "pirate" radio station that could possibly interfere with emergency services or air traffic control.
"Could possibly" is a very strong statement. It implies you know something about the issue. You claim to be "very familiar" with spurious emissions and harmonics, and yet you cannot imagine any way that a pirate "could possibly" cause interference.
Whether you can detect harmonics of a station on the other side of the planet or not doesn't prove jack shit about whether they were interfering, and now you show a lack of understanding of the effects of distance on radio signals. Your radio station could be splattering so many harmonics that you are completely wiping out the law enforcement frequencies in your city, and yet nobody further away than 50 miles could hear you. That's how radio works.
Do you remember the words "inverse square law"? In short, that law means that you can be wiping out a repeater input 1 mile away with a 10 microvolt received signal, but at 50 miles your signal for the same system would be just 0.004 microvolt. As information for the casual reader (but not you, because you are an expert at this stuff) a very very good sensitivity for a receiver is 0.1 microvolt.
By the way, it isn't ad hominem to point out your ignorance. The fact that you can't figure out any way they "could possibly" interfere isn't proof they cannot, and blasting away at OfCom because of your own ignorance is foolish.
And a second by the way -- pirate radio is not a phenomenon limited to the UK, so you telling me to join RSGB's anything is just ass hattery.
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The 'primary' system should be replaced with a run-off election; so the final vote is between 2.
If you're unhappy that we have a mostly two-party system, then you need to realize that what you just suggested would often result in a one-party system. Any district that has a super-majority of one party will wind up with two candidates from the same party. In the final election you get a choice between, e.g., a Democrat or a Democrat. You want to support a Green Party guy -- to bad, he's not even on the ballot.
FWIW I would also get rid of primaries. I can see people being horrified by the idea that local parties would pick their own candidates,
Primaries are how the parties pick their candidates. At least, that's how it's supposed to work. Why are you so horrified of parties picking their own candidates that you'd eliminate the method they use to do that?
Now, of course, the system isn't perfect. We have people in this area who are quite proud of the fact that they lie when they register to vote and claim to be Republican, just so they can vote in the Republican primaries and "help" them pick "better candidates". I'm not surprised that Democrats would lie to try to torpedo the election. No, I've never heard a Republican say he's going to mis-register to do that, but lots of Dems do. This is not a "both sides do it" thing.
Sad thing is there's a portion of Americans who really believe we should stop the "wrong" people from voting. I get the racists and why they feel that way,
Oh, knock this silly shit off. It is NOT racist to want only those people who are citizens to be able to vote. "Not a citizen" is "wrong people", and "not a citizen" has nothing at all to do with race. Another "wrong people" is "people who don't care enough to vote". People who don't care enough to vote should not vote. You keep misrepresenting people you don't understand, and it only makes you look foolish.
For my money I want to see voting made mandatory,
You keep saying this silly thing, too. Forcing people to vote will not improve the results, it will only add noise to the signal. People who do not care enough to vote will not care enough to be informed voters. They will either vote for random people (first on the list, e.g.) or the names they hear the most on the radio ads.
If you want to make money even MORE important in elections, then make voting mandatory. When "name recognition" becomes the selection method for the majority of voters who have nothing else to base their decision on, then politicians will just buy more ads to keep their name in front of the public.
I am quite happy if the turnout for an election is only 40% or 50% of the potential voters. That means that 40% or 50% of the potential voters cared enough to have an opinion and express it. The rest don't matter at all -- if you have no opinion or you don't care, then don't pretend that your voice must be heard, and don't pretend on their behalf that their voice must be heard. You are trying to speak for people who just don't care. If they don't care, why do you?
Seems like the only thing something like this would do is deter voters. Hackers know better.
Apparently not. I get tons of hacking attempts direct out of Chinese IP space (for those I've looked up), and probably other IP spaces that I haven't looked up. Blocking non-US IP addresses would be much more than just "deter voters", it would block a lot of hacking.
This is not something that is highly real-time dependent. You don't have to register "right this second". If you've waited so long that it truly is the end of registration time and you need to do it "right this second" using some web site, that's your own fault for waiting. There are almost certainly email-based methods of registering if there is a web version, and that won' t be blocked.
And, of course, this has nothing to do with voting or blocking actual voters, unless it's the stupid app-based voting intended for out-of-country people. If you can point to an example of an online voting system where out-of-US IPs are blocked, THAT would be deterring voters.
More absolute nonsense, as prices are set to maximize revenue.
When your costs go up, they come out of that "profit", and to keep the profit the prices have to go up. A company that has a 2% margin like many grocery stores do cannot accept a 10% increase in costs and keep the prices the same.
Let's say you're middle management and you come into the CEO's office, to tell him that you've raised prices in response to the latest increase in the minimum wage. He asks if the price increase has cost the company more in lost customers than it has gained in creased revenue,
The number of lost customers is completely irrelevant if your prices no longer cover the costs of doing business. Any exec who tells the CEO that "we've kept 100% of our customers but every sale is now costing us money because Uberbah says we don't have to raise prices to cover that" isn't going to keep his job.
"All other things being the same" is a crucial clause that is implicit in any argument that deals with one factor. Costs go up, all other things being the same the prices have to go up, too. You can only cut into the profits so much. You can only cut quality so much. You can only automate so much. But all three of those are things that aren't staying the same.
Yeah, its been steadily going up for decades.
But not because people are being paid more. Being paid more does NOT balance out the costs by improving productivity. You ignored that tiny detail I explained last time.
Which means you have even less of an excuse to deny an increase in the minimum wage,
You are either not reading what I wrote, or you can't understand it. I said nothing about denying an increase in minimum wage. Go argue with someone who actually said that.
Also before everyone piles in with the old "if you raise wages prices go up" nonsense, if that were true humanity could never progress as a species.
It is obviously true, because you are forgetting the implicit "all other things being the same" condition. All other things being the same, doubling the cost of labor will absolutely cause the prices to go up. It cannot do otherwise. If you have a shift of ten people at McDs and the wages (and associated taxes, etc) double, then the prices will have to go up.
Now, the reason we "progress as a species" (which is itself a stupid way to refer to this) is because all other things are not the same. You have a shift of ten but realize you can automate the jobs of four of them. You realize you can cut the quality of the product and save on the ingredients. You vertically integrate so the costs of the ingredients go down. You find savings in other areas so the prices don't have to go up as much.
Prices go up slower than wages when productivity goes up faster than wages.
What was that? "Productivity goes up"? So that's something that didn't stay the same. It's not a result of doubling the minimum wage, however. If someone can do 10 operations an hour (retrieve order from pallet, whatever) they aren't suddenly able to do 20 per hour just because you paid them double. Productivity increases require other actions. It's dishonest to shove all the good things onto a pay increase and ignore all the other changes that reduce costs so prices don't go up as fast. That's what you're doing when you argue that "doubling wages doesn't mean prices go up".
"I had to work here 10 years to get up to $15/hr. Now they're paying newbs who walk in the door on day 1 the same amount I'm making after ten years ... how unfair is that?"
And complaining that they get a $3000 bonus after working ten years, oh my, how unfair is that! Paying for knee replacements is a health insurance issue. Worker's comp in many places. Worker's Comp in Oregon is so much better than health insurance because there is no deductable and no "in network" for care. You get a bill for a service for a worker's comp claim you send it to SAIF and they pay it. You have to drive 60 miles to see a specialist? You submit a milage claim and they pay it.) When I got my last worker's comp claim approved, they sent me a stack of reimbursement forms preprinted with my info, all I have to do is fill in the amounts and mail them back.
I hope Amazon loves the results of their social experiment. It will only prove to them how over-employeed they are and push for even more automation, like the Japanese warehouse that cut its employees by 90% after automating.
I don't know how the USA system works. I've never been there. I'm just stating how systems work elsewhere.
No, you are not. You are telling the US that they should use "caller pays", which is a lot more than just saying how things work for you.
You don't know the system here, so don't tell us how the system should change to make it better.
There's pros and cons for both. You tell me what's better.
I've told you what's better. Not being able to know ahead of time if you are going to be paying for a call to a mobile makes the idea of "caller pays" a non-starter. It's as bad as the scam of getting lured into calling a number in the 809 area code and then being billed a ridiculous amount because 809 is Dominican Republic, not US. (While Snopes calls this "outdated", they do so because "not all 809 numbers are a scam" and "other area codes can be used the same way." Misleading at best.) People expect a call to what looks like a US area code to be billed at their regular long distance rates -- and if you have nationwide calling that would be $0. Surprise! You called a mobile and talked for an hour, that's $6 for your call. Oh, wait, that carrier charges $.50 a minute for calls to mobiles, so that's $30. And the charge doesn't show up for a month or two as it propagates from the destination carrier back to your phone provider.
I get it. You don't care if that happens because you hate scam calls, and anything that might stop scam calls is ok by you. Even if it means Grandma cannot afford to call her grandkids because they all have cell phones and their providers charge $.50/min for calls.
Personally, I prefer not having to pay for something I didn't initiate.
You pay for the ability of others to initiate calls to you. Any argument you make that relies on you not paying for your cell service is silly.
Yes, six (6!), in two years. Compared to over 5000 neighborhood number spam calls.
You keep using that term, even though the definition is meaningless today. Your central office simply cannot look at an incoming number and know that it is spoofed based on your definition of "neighborhood number". I already gave you examples of why it is technically impossible to know. I'll repeat one: I have a valid phone number in an area code and prefix that is 2000 miles away. If I call someone there it would look like I'm spoofing a "neighborhood number", but I am not.
I'm sorry you get so many scam calls.
and is being used as a basis to criminalize not just neighborhood number spoofing but any unwanted call spoofing,
There is a difference between criminalizing the act and being able to detect it automatically. Of course make it illegal. Of course NOT demand that telcos automatically block any call from someone that claims to have the same area code and prefix.
It's very nice to block 99.998% of your spam calls with a single toggle switch in software conveniently named "block neighborhood numbers"
Yes, it may feel very nice, until your child cannot call you from a friend's home to get you to come pick him up because the call is from a "neighborhood number". It's the same area code, the same prefix, but I don't know it. It has to be a scammer. After all, it's 5000:1 odds to be a scam. (By the way, the phone your child is using is a cell phone, so the call is coming in from outside your central office.)
Wheezing when you come in the door as a sign of a hart-attack to come?
This happens to me all the time. Open door, crawl in gasping for breath, "must watch My Drunk Kitchen, must (gasp) log in ... need to ...".
I should say "tried to apply the breaks." It's easy:
I know how easy it is to comment out a line of code. But, if the line of code that applies the brakes is commented out, the software is not even trying, and will never try, to apply the brakes. It may "detect obstacle" but it, by design, will do nothing about that obstacle. Saying it "tried to apply the brakes" gives the software some anthropogenic qualities. It "wanted to" apply the brakes, it "thought about" applying them, it "tried to". "Try not. Do. Or do not. There is no try." The executable code has no idea that there was the commented out snippet so it doesn't even know that "trying to apply the brakes" was an option.
As to my comment, yes, every accident is the fault of a human at some level. That's not to say AVs are perfect - you are inserting a red-herring there.
It's not a red herring, it is a direct result of saying that humans will always be responsible for AV accidents. If the AV is never the cause of the accident, then the AV is perfect. If you can always point to a human who caused the result, then the AV isn't the cause. Even in the most extreme cases, like a brake line snapped when the brakes were applied so the AV couldn't keep from killing the pedestrian, you can always find a human cause. The engineer who designed the brakes underdesigned them. The quality control human inspecting the output of the brake line machine missed a flaw. The mechanic who last serviced the AV missed the signs of metal fatigue. All kinds of human failures.
I would instead say that AVs are only as good or bad as the actions of the people who designed them.
This is just another way of saying the AV will never be at fault. The designers are. Thus there is no accident that can be attached to an AV.
I think you want to attack the concept of AVs themselves, in which case you should just go ahead and do that.
I haven't hesitated to do that before, but I'm not doing that now. What I am attacking now is the concept that a human will always be the fault of an accident. It's just more of the same "AV are perfect" claims that AV zealots produce when attacking human drivers.
This started when someone blamed the woman who crossed the road where she shouldn't have for her own "suicide by AV". (Scare quotes, not quote quotes.) Yes, if she hadn't done that she wouldn't be dead now, probably. But the car shouldn't have hit her anyway. That makes it the AVs fault for hitting her.
but if you don't have the insight to know when you need some chicken soup,
Alexa isn't telling you that you need chicken soup. It's offering to SELL you chicken soup if you don't have any on hand. You may "have the insight" to know you want chicken soup but also have the insight that you're way too sick to drive to the local grocery story for a $1.29 can of it. "Yes, Alexa, hack hack cough, please send me some chicken soup that will arrive in three to five business days, after I've already recovered from whatever it is I have, or I've died from it. Thanks so much. And yes, please, send me cough drops too."
Wake up people, you will always be smarter than the technology in your hand.
People don't use Alexa because it is smarter than they are, it's because it is more convenient to have Alexa do something than for them to do it themselves. "Alexa, who won the Manchester United soccer match today?" is much easier than pulling out the Telegraph tomorrow or going to Google to find out.
It's convenience, not intelligence. If you don't have a can of chicken soup on hand, having Alexa send it to you is more convenient than calling a friend. It's more convenient but not timely, so it is ineffective and inefficient. Convenience and efficiency are often diametrically opposing concepts.
Then they changed their tactics to only spoof the last-4 digits
No, the first spoofing was using any number, any area code, any exchange, even invalid area codes and exchanges. That was to easy to catch.
when they added 1 they made the calls look like they were from Mexico.
I don't know why you think adding the 1 to the number would make it look like the call comes from Mexico. The 770 area code is still Georgia. The country code for Mexico is 52.
When I call a local number, I don't need to put an area code.
And in most places in the US, we do. In those places where 7 digit dialing is still in place (are there any?), reaching a cell phone within the same area code will not require dialing an area code.
You want US to pay the same way YOU do. That means there must be some way for US to know ahead of time that we will be billed extra for a call. "Needing an area code" isn't it. Try again.
If I want to call a national number, I put in an area code. They start with 0.
Again, not in the US. NO area code starts with 0. Area codes USED to have a requirement that they have 0 or 1 as the middle number, because that's what differentiated them from an exchange, but with a growing need for area codes, the NANP was changed so that any middle digit was valid and 10 digit dialing became mandatory. Again, you want the US to change to "caller pays", and I'm asking you how anyone could know whether the number he's dialing is "pay extra because it is mobile" or not.
Everyone here knows this. 2 digit area codes are national land line rates. 3 digit codes are mobiles.
Well, that's not how it works here. There are no 2 digit area codes in the NANP. Cell phones exist in the same area codes as landlines. Given how it works, please explain how ANYONE could know they're calling a mobile and will be billed extra. The only way I can think of is a recorded message like "you're calling a mobile and will be billed extra" for every call to a mobile.
I'm sure it's similar in other countries.
Once again, "other countries" are not relevant. You said the US should bill the caller for mobile calls. You have failed to answer the question about how callers are notified before the charges occur that they will be charged. I guess it's ok for people to start getting bills for outrageous amounts because their friend decided to move his landline number to his new cellular phone and didn't tell anyone they'd be billed for calling him. I know, you don't care because you won' t be surprised by a bill for what used to be free.
In essence it's no different from calling a 1900 number in USA, you know it's going to charge you before you call it.
US mobile numbers do not start with '1900'. (Well, maybe some do. I don't know if you can get a cell number in the 900 area code.) You don't know it's a mobile number unless someone has told you. I can port my landline number to a mobile this afternoon and if I don't tell anyone I did that they'll find out when they get a bill. How wonderful, huh? That's what you want the US to change to.
Before you tell the US how it should charge people for calls to mobiles, you should think about the system and whether "caller pays" would be reasonable given that the caller has no reasonable way of knowing if any arbitrary number is going to wind up on a mobile or otherwise. You do things differently, I know, so maybe the US doing things differently isn't such a bad thing, huh?
In 10 digit dialing, neighborhood number is one that shares the same first 3 digits, and area code.
Ummm, in 10 digit dialing, the first three digits ARE the area code.
I think my point was that "neighborhood number" is a meaningless concept in the current telecommunications market. It may have had a good definition in the 1950's when one central office handled an exchange (what you refer to as the "first three digits" for 7 digit dialing). That central office handled one or more exchanges and thus one or more "neighborhoods". That is so 1950's.
Today it's all computerized and any number in any exchange may appear in any place. I have a phone number from an area code 2000 miles away. I know people who have numbers from other area codes than where they get service. "Neighborhood number" is, today, a useless phrase. That's what makes a proposal to block "neighborhood numbers" as spam technically wrong. Every time I call my brother I am making a call into a central office into an exchange from a system outside that exchange. That central office cannot just assume my call is from a scammer who is spoofing a number, because it is a valid phone number -- mine -- and correctly indicates the caller id and number.
Which is what the remainder of what I wrote talked about. That makes it "founded" and "related" and relevant.
But thanks for the lecture on how the phone system worked when I was a teenager. Nostalgia is wonderful.
No it doesn't. This is trivial to fix. You just slap a softmax layer onto the output of your NN to correct the bias.
That's almost certainly creating a bias in an attempt to fix one.
The correct question to ask here is, WHY did Amazon's AI learn to pick men preferentially? You can claim it is bias against women in the AI, but that doesn't mean it is.
The AI had to be trained to begin with. It couldn't just start looking at resumes and guessing. It had to be given a large number of resumes AND information about the quality of the hires that came out of manual selection of the employees. E.g., what did the resumes of the GOOD employees look like compared to the resumes of the ones that turned out to be frogs?
Now, if the AI was allowed to look at terms like "male" or "man", which I don't believe resumes are allowed to contain anymore, then that's a problem. It's being TOLD to differentiate by gender. Assuming that it was not getting that input to start with, then it had to be working from other factors. It made correlations like "95% of the GOOD programmers we hired used the word 'python' in their resume skills section." Or, "95% of the resumes that listed 'Cisco CNA' as a qualification resulted in BAD employees." If the AI was coming to conclusions based on non-gender things, and it still selected predominately men to hire, then there must be some qualification or skill that men predominately have that women do not.
This is not the kind of thing you can fix just by including "man" or "woman" in the qualification list and trying to "unbias" the output by manual changes.
Spoof your phone number. Since you can't Googleit yourself:
Neither link provides any way for ME to spoof my number. The closest you get is that I can pay for a service where someone else will spoof while forwarding my call through them. The claim was that anyone can spoof their number, and telling me how other people can do it for me isn't me doing it myself.
The legitimate PBX owner would need to be certified by the local phone company.
Define "legitimate PBX owner". I didn't steal the damn thing, I bought it for my own use and paid for it. Now I'm paying you, telco, for service. How is this illegitimate? Are you saying that I, a private citizen, should not be able to run my own PBX if I want to?
They could charge for this service. Probably wouldn't go over well with customers.
You're kidding, right? People already pay for caller ID service, why wouldn't they pay for "block illegitimate PBX owner's calls" service, too? It's a win-win for the telcos, just like the original Caller ID service was.
In the days of yore, when the telco owned the given block of numbers (and customers couldn't port them away), they could simply reject inbound calls with their own numbers set as the originating phone number.
Almost. It was quite possible for a company to have a local number for people to call but actually be operating out of another area code. In fact, a lot of companies did that instead of paying for an 800 number because it gave them a local presence while still saving the customer money. The phone company sold that service (I forget what they called it, something about a "remote number" I think). Other companies could sell that, providing a local number and using call forwarding to send it to the destination.
Calls from that distant company into the local area should bear the local number that local callers are likely to recognize instead of an unknown number from three states away.
It's just like today, when you call an 800 number that winds up at an Indian call center. When someone from that call center calls you back the number displayed should correspond to a US number known to the customer and not the local number for the call center.
Make the caller pay, like the rest of the world.
The caller pays for his telephone service. You pay for your telephone service. How do you know ahead of time that you are calling a mobile phone and you will be billed extra? Does the destination service office interrupt the start of each call with a notice "this is a mobile call, you will be billed $.10/minute. Press 1 to agree"? How does your local office know that a number in a remote office is mobile versus non-mobile? Do all of your friends know that you expect them to pay more for calling you?
Basically, anyone can spoof a number for their outbound calls.
Can you explain how I, a wireline end-user, can do that? There is no input method I know of that lets me send bogus caller ID data.
They could set up a system which verifies numbers and also certifies legitimate spoof uses (such as a central PBX)
Scammers can buy central PBX systems, too.
On the receiving end, phone companies could flag and reject calls coming from outside their area without a valid return number. This, again, would cost them money
Au contraire. They'd sell this service and make a huge profit, just like they already charge $10/month for caller ID name and number and don't give refunds when they don't actually provide all the data. (This is a direct analogy to touch tone dialing, which many telcos charged a monthly fee for long after they had installed the hardware so every line could do DTMF.)
The "second" telco involved has no way to verify the information from the first telco, so it can do nothing but pass it along. The first telco is the scammer.
Sometimes this transport crosses international borders. Some scammer in a foreign country buys service from his local telco, which then routes the call to the US telco. The US telco has even less ability to validate the information, and the foreign telco has no reason to follow US law.
That's not a highly technical description, but it's close enough.
Perhaps there should be a "block neighborhood numbers not on your contacts list" feature.
Define "neighborhood number". I can live next door to you and have a number from the other side of the county. I can live on the other side of the country and have a number that looks like it is next door to you. I can live next door to you and have a number that looks like it is next door to you but is actually routed into the system on the other side of the country.
This would at least limit the scammers to a tiny subset of possible numbers to work with.
Blocking neighborhood numbers, assuming you mean "same area code and exchange as mine", would remove a vanishingly small amount of the potential spoofing space. Blocking "503-443-xxxx except on my list" would cover, at most, 10,000 numbers (everything from 0000 through 9999). It does nothing for any other area code, and every area code has a potential of 10,000,000 numbers. The limit imposed on scammers by blocking "neighborhood numbers" is very very small.
Seems like the phone scammers are out in force today -- two calls from crappers in the last five minutes on my work phone. Which I wish had caller ID.
The robocallers would have to know the name of someone you know.
If you are using an Android phone, Google has your contact list.
It'll be an arms race but one I think Google will stay comfortably ahead of.
Ok.
If only there was a way to recognize the numbers of people you know. Maybe even have their name appear on the screen.
I think you completely missed the point of this entire discussion. The issue is that robo and spam callers can send any number and name data that they want, even that of your friends or neighbors. You can recognize the name, pick up the phone, and find out that someone at your number has requested information about back braces.
And unfortunately, the state AGs have missed out on one bit of technology that everyone thought was a good thing at the time: number portability. If I move from A to B and change cell providers, I can take my old phone number with me! If I used to live in 202-land but moved to 503-land, for example, I can keep my 202 area code number. Suppose I try calling my friend who I lived next door to in 202-land. There will be an inbound call to the central office serving his phone showing a 202 area code but coming from outside the 202 area. Does the phone company block that call as spam? It's not.
A related problem is VoIP. I have Vonage and when I signed up they had NO local numbers available for me. I could get a number in a city far away but in the same area code, or in a different area code altogether. I got a number that was local to my parents and family so they could call me toll-free. So, when I call someone next door to my brother the caller ID will show a local number. Does the phone company block that call because it must be spam?
But none of the "pirate" stations that I could hear
You didn't claim you couldn't hear the interference they could be generating, you claimed:
"Could possibly" is a very strong statement. It implies you know something about the issue. You claim to be "very familiar" with spurious emissions and harmonics, and yet you cannot imagine any way that a pirate "could possibly" cause interference.
Whether you can detect harmonics of a station on the other side of the planet or not doesn't prove jack shit about whether they were interfering, and now you show a lack of understanding of the effects of distance on radio signals. Your radio station could be splattering so many harmonics that you are completely wiping out the law enforcement frequencies in your city, and yet nobody further away than 50 miles could hear you. That's how radio works.
Do you remember the words "inverse square law"? In short, that law means that you can be wiping out a repeater input 1 mile away with a 10 microvolt received signal, but at 50 miles your signal for the same system would be just 0.004 microvolt. As information for the casual reader (but not you, because you are an expert at this stuff) a very very good sensitivity for a receiver is 0.1 microvolt.
By the way, it isn't ad hominem to point out your ignorance. The fact that you can't figure out any way they "could possibly" interfere isn't proof they cannot, and blasting away at OfCom because of your own ignorance is foolish.
And a second by the way -- pirate radio is not a phenomenon limited to the UK, so you telling me to join RSGB's anything is just ass hattery.