To be precise, I think I'd need signs that I'm dealing with a being with an independent mind that seems to like me. I find the idea of a robot companion creepy at this stage of AI, and still don't like being told "Thank you" by a machine, but I'll happily use automated assistance for doing things.
I don't really believe in backups unless I've demonstrated I can restore from them. When I'm dealing with anything important, I figure that data that isn't backed up doesn't exist, and data isn't backed up until restoration has been tested.
I'm reminded of Knuth's comment that he hadn't tested certain code, but merely proved it to be correct.
For most of what I do, I type "ls whatever" and examine the output. If it's what I want to delete, I do a little command-line editing.
Also, I have a little ritual. When I'm typing something potentially dangerous, I type it, sit on my hands, and examine it carefully. This means concentrating and not paying attention to anything else.
I took an Oracle Certified Professional test once. The general idea seemed to be that they'd say what you were supposed to do, and then provide four ways to do it that you'd never write in real life, three of them with more or less subtle problems.
Bullshit rhetoric is useful for a trial lawyer, but there are a lot of other skills. One is being able to write a good contract that will make it clear what is expected under all circumstances. If you hire a lawyer to write a BSR contract, and it goes to court, you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
Nice, but these are in a form that requires human-type intelligence to comprehend, and Asimov's robots have basically human intelligence with restrictions like this. We can't do human-type intelligence or anything near it. As an example, First Law requires that a robot understand what is a human (in one of the Lucky Starr novels, an enemy attempted to convince robots that Lucky's sidekick was not a human), what harm is, and requires a sophisticated universe model to calculate whether a given action would cause harm, and some sort of scanning ability to determine if a human might come to harm and what can be done to avert that.
Okay, now try to program a cat, if you think they're examples of simple intelligence. Rodney Brooks thought that the cat part of AI was horrifyingly difficult and the human part on top would be relatively easy, and I think he was correct there. (His approach of using machines with discrete behaviors modeling housefly-like behavior turned out to be a dead end, though.) I really doubt a machine with current AI would work nearly as well for companionship and emotional support, which (at least to me) seem to depend on having what appears to be an independent mind that pays attention to me.
You might want to stick your nose out of your safe space sometime.
Trump is as authoritarian a President as we've had in my lifetime. Before Trump, the parties were roughly equally authoritarian. By "anti-constitutional amendments" do you mean laws that violate the Constitution? Plenty of those from all around. As far as safe spaces go, I don't see much of a difference. Trump wants the theater to be a safe space for neo-Nazis, and right-wing football fans apparently don't want anyone to spout off with a trigger gesture before a football game. I think I know what you're trying to say with the "plenty supporters" sentence, but you don't distinguish it from, say, Tea Partiers lashing out at moderate Republicans. As far as anti-free-speech goes, all sides want to use social pressure to condition people's speech. For every leftist saying that you shouldn't arbitrarily insult people, there's a right winger claiming that "Happy Holidays" is anti-American.
In every educational environment I've been in, we've been expected to know a few practical things related to our studies. Graduating with a CS degree and no knowledge of how to trouble-shoot the hardware would be reasonable. Not being able to use a computer wouldn't be.
I have seen CS students nonplussed that we expected them to graduate with some knowledge of the science. Personally, I figured that if you were just interested in learning to program for the money, the MIS program was just across the river in the business school.
He ran up deficits by putting pressure on Congress by convincing enough gullible people to write their Congressional representatives to pass his spending plans. Congress has to pay attention to the people, because a third of the Senate and the whole House are never more than two years from the end of their terms.
I sat through some of that crap. It was based on emotion, not reason.
I believe you're describing existing law. However, if the company makes a new classification, there is no equivalent salary to be required to exceed. If the company says "This job is worth $40K/year", and nobody applies because nobody able to do the job would accept that salary, then the company has established that the salary is $40K/year, and that there are no US workers available. (Yeah, this trick shouldn't work, but it can be hard to prove.)
I don't like any visa program where the visa is dependent on continued employment. It leads to another class of below-the-law workers who can't use their legal rights, such as illegal workers and sex workers.
I don't think Trump is doing this for good reasons, but there's a definite possibility that he'll do some good in this specific area.
If you ran a subway, you'd need to get floors swept and toilets cleaned, and you'd have to pay at least the minimum wage to whoever did it. Your continued operation depends on some basic level of cleanliness (which in some places is pretty low), so the guy with the toilet brush is vital to your business. If you had to pay the guy $40/hour, you would. Your evaluation of his value is based on how much you'd have to pay to replace the guy if he quit, not on the value of the service the guy provides. You need to realize that prices of things can go up without it being personal.
There was an alternative, who was defeated by about negative three million votes after Wikileaks and the FBI director targeted her after a decades-long Republican smear campaign.
In the article I read, they cited a specific law, which I forget. I haven't read the law myself, and am not legally able to determine whether something is a violation, but the courts can settle that. It sure looks like the order was issued without any thorough check on its legality.
What relevance is that? It says that it's a concern, but it's unlikely to be resolvable through judicial means, but only political (the courts will have to have the final say on it, but I can come up with scenarios where I think someone might have standing to enforce the clauses in court). My claim was that Trump has probably committed impeachable offenses already, and impeachment is a political remedy. In impeachment, Congress doesn't go through the courts. The House votes that the President has committed a High Crime or Misdemeanor, and violating the Constitution presumably counts. The Senate then conducts the trial There's no concept of "standing" here.
By the way, there are two emoluments clauses that apply. The one the Post doesn't mention applies specifically to the President, and is in article two of the Constitution. The other one says the President can't accept emoluments from domestic governments, other than the legally prescribed salary, which cannot vary during a Presidential term.
Providing voter ID means that a person MUST be registered to vote and can only vote once (at least per voting station).
Assuming anyone at the voting station cares. If you vote twice at one station, you're taking a pretty big risk that someone will notice, with or without voter ID. If nobody's going to complain when you show up five times and vote, nobody's going to care about your ID. If you are registered in multiple places (and apparently lots of people are, with no intent to vote twice), then your ID is good in multiple places. If we don't have it, and somebody shows up at the polling place claiming to be me, I'll notice that someone else signed my name in the register, so while it will help prevent the problem (if it's at all likely) this is fraud that will be noticed. I'm not saying voter ID is useless, but in most situations I envision it doesn't help much if at all. If you've got one where it really matters, I'd like to hear of it.
Same could be said of Republicans living in a Democrat-run state. And if there are so many Democrats, how did Republican governors and mayors get elected there?
Um, huh? Who says "so many Democrats"? Voting tends to differ over geography (we have a few token Republicans in our neighborhood), and if the balance is at all close the Republicans will get in now and then. I'm completely failing to comprehend what you could mean here.
What should consumer protection laws cover? Is it necessary for every software vendor to have strict liability for problems? That wipes out the industry, or at least causes nearly insuperable barriers to entry. It's already perfectly legal for a vendor to supply a warranty, and there are already laws that a product has to be reasonably useful at the purpose it's sold for. What happens is that, with some exceptions, nobody demands a software warranty. Critical software, like that in avionics and medical equipment, is developed at a much higher price than most software, and people are almost never willing to pay five times as much for a product less likely to be buggy.
You do have the same rights as you get with a car. If you get a warranty, it's because the dealer extended one to make the sale more attractive. There's no requirement, and a lot of used cars as sold pretty much as-is. If the car isn't in condition to be driven, then you may have some recourse, as it's not fit for its intended purpose. If there's an actual safety issue, the manufacturer might have to do a recall, but not for anything less. Most software is not sold to be safety-critical. If you're running a Therac-25, then the manufacturer does have legal obligations to keep the software from killing people.
the correct thing to do is to make sure you have as stable a platform as possible (and a backup).
I entirely agree.
An unpatched system is not considered stable by any measure of the word.
All systems are unpatched, relative to the state when the next update comes out. A stable system doesn't automagically become unstable when the next patch comes out. Heck, if you don't know if a more recent update is out, then, by your criteria, you can't know if your system is stable.
If you are worried about upgrading a computer, you're doing something wrong or not covering your bases properly.
Or you may have had an update break something. It's happened before and it'll happen again. Lots of people have had problems after "upgrading" to W10, for example, and smaller updates aren't safe either. If using Microsoft Windows means you're doing something wrong, then you're correct, but not otherwise.
People who hate updates are either running on hardware that have unresolved (or unknown if an incompetent user) issues
If a competent user is one who knows all issues his or her hardware has, then we're all incompetent. When was the last time you checked the capacitors in your system? Fully tested the hard drive? Validated the CPU?
Let's put some plausible out-of-my-ass figures out. Suppose serious asteroid impacts happen about once in fifty million years, which isn't off by an order of magnitude, and that one would cause ten trillion dollars of damage, which is probably reasonable. That means that the expected annual loss of serious asteroid impacts is about $200K, so it makes sense to build something of a warning and defense system, at least a capability that we can implement if we need it.
As long as large numbers of people continue to deny the science and facts, there's going to be a lot of talk about them.
because we are not going to stop catastrophic warming.
The last of the great denialist doctrines: it's too late so there's no point in doing anything. In fact, we can still affect how bad the effects will be, and any slowdown will help. The longer we can put off the worst of the effects, the more wiggle room we've got to try to come up with and test other ideas.
because climate change is what is known as a "superordinate goal"
Climate change is a physical phenomenon (or, if you prefer, a cluster of them). It isn't a goal. Where do you get this crap? Goals frequently relate to physical phenomena, but they're two different things. We know we have some bad stuff coming up, and it's worthwhile discussing what we're going to do about it, and different people will have different ideas, and will evaluate proposed solutions differently. What's going to happen is the scientific part, and what we're going to do about it is the political part. Except, according to you, it's too late to do anything, so we may as well take our assorted ideas on how to improve the world and say they're because of climate change.
I remember the environmentalist
Yes, because there's only one opinion on it, right? I can find all sorts of different opinions, which I consider to be silly or misguided or even evil, among all sorts of different populations. Moreover, reducing CO2 emissions will slow climate change, and is in general worth doing (whether specific measures are is a matter of politics and economics).
At least people like Gates seem to be using it to drive an agenda for more investment in new technologies
Actually, Gates is a pretty smart guy, and might indeed be concerned about global warming and what we can do about it. He's a new-tech guy, so that drives some of his approaches, but the goal is to stop or slow something bad. If somebody is shooting at you, and you throw a grenade at them, this will not be taken to mean that you have a pro-grenade agenda, after all.
This is Slashdot, where pseudonymous people not living in the applicable country give legal advice. Heck, I've gotten medical advice from here also. I haven't necessarily taken all this advice, mind you.
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To be precise, I think I'd need signs that I'm dealing with a being with an independent mind that seems to like me. I find the idea of a robot companion creepy at this stage of AI, and still don't like being told "Thank you" by a machine, but I'll happily use automated assistance for doing things.
I don't really believe in backups unless I've demonstrated I can restore from them. When I'm dealing with anything important, I figure that data that isn't backed up doesn't exist, and data isn't backed up until restoration has been tested.
I'm reminded of Knuth's comment that he hadn't tested certain code, but merely proved it to be correct.
For most of what I do, I type "ls whatever" and examine the output. If it's what I want to delete, I do a little command-line editing.
Also, I have a little ritual. When I'm typing something potentially dangerous, I type it, sit on my hands, and examine it carefully. This means concentrating and not paying attention to anything else.
I took an Oracle Certified Professional test once. The general idea seemed to be that they'd say what you were supposed to do, and then provide four ways to do it that you'd never write in real life, three of them with more or less subtle problems.
Bullshit rhetoric is useful for a trial lawyer, but there are a lot of other skills. One is being able to write a good contract that will make it clear what is expected under all circumstances. If you hire a lawyer to write a BSR contract, and it goes to court, you're in for an unpleasant surprise.
Nice, but these are in a form that requires human-type intelligence to comprehend, and Asimov's robots have basically human intelligence with restrictions like this. We can't do human-type intelligence or anything near it. As an example, First Law requires that a robot understand what is a human (in one of the Lucky Starr novels, an enemy attempted to convince robots that Lucky's sidekick was not a human), what harm is, and requires a sophisticated universe model to calculate whether a given action would cause harm, and some sort of scanning ability to determine if a human might come to harm and what can be done to avert that.
Okay, now try to program a cat, if you think they're examples of simple intelligence. Rodney Brooks thought that the cat part of AI was horrifyingly difficult and the human part on top would be relatively easy, and I think he was correct there. (His approach of using machines with discrete behaviors modeling housefly-like behavior turned out to be a dead end, though.) I really doubt a machine with current AI would work nearly as well for companionship and emotional support, which (at least to me) seem to depend on having what appears to be an independent mind that pays attention to me.
You might want to stick your nose out of your safe space sometime.
Trump is as authoritarian a President as we've had in my lifetime. Before Trump, the parties were roughly equally authoritarian. By "anti-constitutional amendments" do you mean laws that violate the Constitution? Plenty of those from all around. As far as safe spaces go, I don't see much of a difference. Trump wants the theater to be a safe space for neo-Nazis, and right-wing football fans apparently don't want anyone to spout off with a trigger gesture before a football game. I think I know what you're trying to say with the "plenty supporters" sentence, but you don't distinguish it from, say, Tea Partiers lashing out at moderate Republicans. As far as anti-free-speech goes, all sides want to use social pressure to condition people's speech. For every leftist saying that you shouldn't arbitrarily insult people, there's a right winger claiming that "Happy Holidays" is anti-American.
In every educational environment I've been in, we've been expected to know a few practical things related to our studies. Graduating with a CS degree and no knowledge of how to trouble-shoot the hardware would be reasonable. Not being able to use a computer wouldn't be.
I have seen CS students nonplussed that we expected them to graduate with some knowledge of the science. Personally, I figured that if you were just interested in learning to program for the money, the MIS program was just across the river in the business school.
I was at the house of a college friend of mine. His mother said she was glad that he had laundry, because that's the only time she got to see him.
The countries were not designated by Obama. They were in a rider to an appropriations bill he signed.
He ran up deficits by putting pressure on Congress by convincing enough gullible people to write their Congressional representatives to pass his spending plans. Congress has to pay attention to the people, because a third of the Senate and the whole House are never more than two years from the end of their terms.
I sat through some of that crap. It was based on emotion, not reason.
I believe you're describing existing law. However, if the company makes a new classification, there is no equivalent salary to be required to exceed. If the company says "This job is worth $40K/year", and nobody applies because nobody able to do the job would accept that salary, then the company has established that the salary is $40K/year, and that there are no US workers available. (Yeah, this trick shouldn't work, but it can be hard to prove.)
I don't like any visa program where the visa is dependent on continued employment. It leads to another class of below-the-law workers who can't use their legal rights, such as illegal workers and sex workers.
I don't think Trump is doing this for good reasons, but there's a definite possibility that he'll do some good in this specific area.
If you ran a subway, you'd need to get floors swept and toilets cleaned, and you'd have to pay at least the minimum wage to whoever did it. Your continued operation depends on some basic level of cleanliness (which in some places is pretty low), so the guy with the toilet brush is vital to your business. If you had to pay the guy $40/hour, you would. Your evaluation of his value is based on how much you'd have to pay to replace the guy if he quit, not on the value of the service the guy provides. You need to realize that prices of things can go up without it being personal.
There was an alternative, who was defeated by about negative three million votes after Wikileaks and the FBI director targeted her after a decades-long Republican smear campaign.
In the article I read, they cited a specific law, which I forget. I haven't read the law myself, and am not legally able to determine whether something is a violation, but the courts can settle that. It sure looks like the order was issued without any thorough check on its legality.
What relevance is that? It says that it's a concern, but it's unlikely to be resolvable through judicial means, but only political (the courts will have to have the final say on it, but I can come up with scenarios where I think someone might have standing to enforce the clauses in court). My claim was that Trump has probably committed impeachable offenses already, and impeachment is a political remedy. In impeachment, Congress doesn't go through the courts. The House votes that the President has committed a High Crime or Misdemeanor, and violating the Constitution presumably counts. The Senate then conducts the trial There's no concept of "standing" here.
By the way, there are two emoluments clauses that apply. The one the Post doesn't mention applies specifically to the President, and is in article two of the Constitution. The other one says the President can't accept emoluments from domestic governments, other than the legally prescribed salary, which cannot vary during a Presidential term.
Assuming anyone at the voting station cares. If you vote twice at one station, you're taking a pretty big risk that someone will notice, with or without voter ID. If nobody's going to complain when you show up five times and vote, nobody's going to care about your ID. If you are registered in multiple places (and apparently lots of people are, with no intent to vote twice), then your ID is good in multiple places. If we don't have it, and somebody shows up at the polling place claiming to be me, I'll notice that someone else signed my name in the register, so while it will help prevent the problem (if it's at all likely) this is fraud that will be noticed. I'm not saying voter ID is useless, but in most situations I envision it doesn't help much if at all. If you've got one where it really matters, I'd like to hear of it.
Um, huh? Who says "so many Democrats"? Voting tends to differ over geography (we have a few token Republicans in our neighborhood), and if the balance is at all close the Republicans will get in now and then. I'm completely failing to comprehend what you could mean here.
What should consumer protection laws cover? Is it necessary for every software vendor to have strict liability for problems? That wipes out the industry, or at least causes nearly insuperable barriers to entry. It's already perfectly legal for a vendor to supply a warranty, and there are already laws that a product has to be reasonably useful at the purpose it's sold for. What happens is that, with some exceptions, nobody demands a software warranty. Critical software, like that in avionics and medical equipment, is developed at a much higher price than most software, and people are almost never willing to pay five times as much for a product less likely to be buggy.
You do have the same rights as you get with a car. If you get a warranty, it's because the dealer extended one to make the sale more attractive. There's no requirement, and a lot of used cars as sold pretty much as-is. If the car isn't in condition to be driven, then you may have some recourse, as it's not fit for its intended purpose. If there's an actual safety issue, the manufacturer might have to do a recall, but not for anything less. Most software is not sold to be safety-critical. If you're running a Therac-25, then the manufacturer does have legal obligations to keep the software from killing people.
I entirely agree.
All systems are unpatched, relative to the state when the next update comes out. A stable system doesn't automagically become unstable when the next patch comes out. Heck, if you don't know if a more recent update is out, then, by your criteria, you can't know if your system is stable.
Or you may have had an update break something. It's happened before and it'll happen again. Lots of people have had problems after "upgrading" to W10, for example, and smaller updates aren't safe either. If using Microsoft Windows means you're doing something wrong, then you're correct, but not otherwise.
If a competent user is one who knows all issues his or her hardware has, then we're all incompetent. When was the last time you checked the capacitors in your system? Fully tested the hard drive? Validated the CPU?
Kelvin doesn't, Celsius does. Think 67 degrees Celsius above absolute zero, which is about -273.15 Celsius, so we've got about -206 degrees Celsius.
Let's put some plausible out-of-my-ass figures out. Suppose serious asteroid impacts happen about once in fifty million years, which isn't off by an order of magnitude, and that one would cause ten trillion dollars of damage, which is probably reasonable. That means that the expected annual loss of serious asteroid impacts is about $200K, so it makes sense to build something of a warning and defense system, at least a capability that we can implement if we need it.
As long as large numbers of people continue to deny the science and facts, there's going to be a lot of talk about them.
The last of the great denialist doctrines: it's too late so there's no point in doing anything. In fact, we can still affect how bad the effects will be, and any slowdown will help. The longer we can put off the worst of the effects, the more wiggle room we've got to try to come up with and test other ideas.
Climate change is a physical phenomenon (or, if you prefer, a cluster of them). It isn't a goal. Where do you get this crap? Goals frequently relate to physical phenomena, but they're two different things. We know we have some bad stuff coming up, and it's worthwhile discussing what we're going to do about it, and different people will have different ideas, and will evaluate proposed solutions differently. What's going to happen is the scientific part, and what we're going to do about it is the political part. Except, according to you, it's too late to do anything, so we may as well take our assorted ideas on how to improve the world and say they're because of climate change.
Yes, because there's only one opinion on it, right? I can find all sorts of different opinions, which I consider to be silly or misguided or even evil, among all sorts of different populations. Moreover, reducing CO2 emissions will slow climate change, and is in general worth doing (whether specific measures are is a matter of politics and economics).
Actually, Gates is a pretty smart guy, and might indeed be concerned about global warming and what we can do about it. He's a new-tech guy, so that drives some of his approaches, but the goal is to stop or slow something bad. If somebody is shooting at you, and you throw a grenade at them, this will not be taken to mean that you have a pro-grenade agenda, after all.
This is Slashdot, where pseudonymous people not living in the applicable country give legal advice. Heck, I've gotten medical advice from here also. I haven't necessarily taken all this advice, mind you.