If you have months with a higher income due to "extra" paycheck that raises your average monthly income to higher than your normal monthly income, making every month below. A month with a tax return or money from any other source like a bonus does the same again. For those who get paid twice a month rather than bi-weekly there can huge dips because of five week months although this side is more income vs expenses.
But there are plenty of things. Now that everyone has $5000 deductibles for their poor insurance there is often an up front heavy loading period to top off an HSA.
Also, in tech most "employees" are no longer exempt unless they are programmers or actual managers with direct reports. Meaning salary is salary + overtime. Because of this most tech "employees" are now contractors who get paid hourly and get no paid time off. This cases huge dips in income when life events happen and vacation is taken.
A job with overtime can spike that much for a period of months and then dip when the busy time passes. Months also are not four weeks long. Being paid bi-weekly instead of twice a month can result in periodic changes in income. Getting paid twice a month in turn would mean getting paid only twice in a five week month.
Tax return season and bonus time can result in spikes. Selling an investment is another example.
Most people outside the top 0.1% spend most of what they make so a prolonged spike means feeling comfortable to trim margins which are no longer there when that spike goes away.
"More than almost any other country, America taxes income far more than consumption"
True, all state and federal taxes should only apply to wealth in excess of the per capita domestic median. Producing is good for the national economy, spending is good for the national economy, building and hoarding excess wealth is not and 60% of our national economic output goes into that bucket.
Taxing consumption alone is a big free pass for wealth hoarders. Show me anyone in the top 0.1% by wealth and I'll show you someone who costs more and contributes less than a homeless man who just doesn't want to work and exploits every welfare program we have with deliberate fraud.
That definition has some problems, it would include people who are just culture fans (a serious problem now that geek/nerd culture is mainstream and adopted by many muggles)
For Nerds:
1. An obsessive interest in a complex topic involving STEM or any topic through a STEM lens. 2. No GF 3. High intelligence 4. Lack of social skills relative to Geeks 5. Ability to memorize and apply complex information and procedures. 6. Thorough and analytical relative to geeks. 7. Tend to value formal education 8. Read and research the best instructions on everything they touch.
For Geeks the list becomes:
1. An obsessive interest in a narrow topic of the moment 2. High Intelligence 3. Highly Creative relative to geeks 4. Ability to look up, adapt, and apply or throw away complex information and procedures. 5. Like taking things apart. 6. Put not bias on education type but will have engaged in endless self study. 7. Figure out everything they can about something independent of what anyone else says or instructions.
Everyone else is some kind of muggle. The trickiest muggles are what I call decoys, because geek/nerd culture has become mainstream these people have obsessed over it and infiltrated geek and nerd culture. But they won't have lab gear for making jello shots, they won't have a standard rack loaded with gear in their home, they'll love microsoft/apple gear. The upside to all this is that this mainstream decoy culture is more accepting of geeks/nerds than previous incarnations of mainstream culture and gives them more superficial common interests with females which they consider important in early stages of assessing compatibility.
Sure but a browser isn't the competition or a common interface. Plex, the FireTV interface, Netflix/Hulu app interfaces, and set top boxes interfaces made to be controlled with standard remotes/touch are the relevant peers Kodi competes with. Especially when talking about a space where you want to implement DRM and convince everyone to use the kodi app for everything.
Back in the day when you had no choices for media streaming/playback with lots of formats XBMC was the winner mostly because it was the only serious player on a platform that was difficult to program/hack and most definitely not made for that purpose.
Fair enough. I have all sorts of DIY and hacked gear sitting around in finished/in progress/and never going to be finished projects for similar purposes.
For myself I've just found that anything my wife is going to have to use is a poor choice for that type of project because I can't tinker with it or she'll get unhappy about any downtime. A portion of my tech is essentially treated as a production environment as a consequence.
I guess I don't understand the appeal vs a nice polished FireTV box which you can load Kodi on. Yeah it's 30 bucks more but the hours saved will more than make up the difference.
With the notable exception of Amazon who wants to lock down their platform this is only a partially fair criticism. In order to get content from content producers streaming companies like Netflix and Hulu had to integrate DRM which limited their options.
Loading in a browser is kind of a fringe case now anyway. Almost all of these platforms support embedded linux in the form of Android which is the puzzling thing... the only thing this gets you is access to the content within the Kodi app... anyone running Kodi can already access this content on the device running Kodi with their own respective apps.
"Can someone dumb it down enough for me to understand why in the hell someone would go to the trouble of throwing together a plugin to offer up illegal streaming content?? How is the plugin creator making money?"
Some make money, though usually not much and often not enough to offset their own costs. Money is just one of many reasons people do things. For most people who are heavily money motivated you usually have to look no further than their car to find a great example of something they do that isn't money motivated. It might make them money but that Lexus, BMW, or what have you makes them no more money than keeping a five year old inexpensive version of whatever they drive for practical reasons would. Not only does that nicer car not make one any money, one actually spends a great deal of extra money to get it without much tangible benefit.
Some are legitimately protesting the broken models and the way the copyright cartels are at war with the world destroying massive swathes of innovation that have nothing to do with movies or music with the laws they buy to protect their interests. Some are seeking recognition from their own peer group that values such things more than fancy cars. Some are impressing themselves because they are simply less caught up in the opinions of others. Some enjoy the thrill and the challenge. Some find the kind of meticulous work that goes with collecting and maintaining this content to be meditative. Some are basically just digital hoarders and feel the need for an excuse to justify their massive hoard.
The open source communities and the piracy communities are the most dangerous opponent of capitalism there is. They are naturally evolved and true communism (something never seen with a government) with people who aren't profit motivated volunteering labor and collaborating in a way that isn't oppressive and is not only successful but so far unstoppable.
"However, some providers do place nicely. I was pleasantly surprised that having an Amazon Fire box and the Netflix app on it that recently searches via Amazon not only return results for both but make it fairly seamless, even where choosing Amazon for a film would mean paying and Netflix wouldn't. Netflix content appears on the Amazon home screen too, which is nice."
That is nice.
There is a room for improvement though.
Plex should be integrated. If you already have showtime/hbo/whatever it should at least unlock the amazon variant so that results come up properly too. They need to drop the censoring on the Amazon variants. If you have the free option in one of your channels or apps that do have integration it should provide that as the first choice. When you've watched one of the videos included in your channels and it shows other suggestions they are almost always content you don't have and would need to pay for... it should be all content you are already paying for.
The streamed content is also much too pricey, $20 is too much for a streamable movie, especially when it isn't 4k and doesn't include the DTS master audio stream. That is more than I pay the movie theater and they provide a surround system the blows away what any of us have at home. Pricing should look more like Kindle books if they aren't going to provide us the DRM free videofiles at full quality and with theater master audio.
Plex is the better path. I highly recommend following the naming guide for your content since it will make your life easier long term. If you have a lot of existing content that can be a pain but it is easy to maintain (especially if you use downloaders with automatic renaming).
Plex automatically builds a rich metadata database for your content so mom and you can enjoy posters, ratings, a summary of what the show is about, sort by directors, year of release, whether you've watched it before, etc. It also has a mobile app and app for most devices and will automatically transcode on the fly for mobile viewing.
Plus Plex, while not being open source is still free. There is a paid option that gets you early access to updates, higher priority support, and makes the clients free in the various app stores but the apps are less than $5 one off anyway. That said I have a lifetime VIP account mostly because I wanted to support the project.
Plex has issues too (which in no way vindicates Kodi, more a state of this application space).
Everyone I know running Plex is having audio stuttering issues and has been for months. Different clients, different servers, different underlying OS, different homes entirely, and different content all exhibiting the same audio (but not video) stuttering. In the past this would have likely been fixable by adjusting cache/buffering options but the interface has been crippled in the last year on most platforms removing these options. Shared content from others is also buried in a sub-section or a menu that requires switching. This breaks searching/sorting functionality across your available Plex servers.
The addons system for Plex is a kludge and broken. There seems to be a strong idea among the devs that supporting DTS/DTS-HD/DTS-MA/Passthrough is not important. For instance on the FireTV this is not supported. Supposedly because it is not possible on the device but somehow Kodi supports it. Even the option for an external player has been dropped which at least allowed a workaround.
It seems like Plex is focusing too much on a small segment of the userbase that has heavy interest in mobile streaming. While a neat feature every now and then when traveling on a long trip or stuck in the hospital in practice this is just a small side perk compared to the day-to-day heavy lifting on the local LAN where the big advantage vs streaming options is that you can have high quality native video and audio streams.
And the media companies then label the DRM crippled Kodi as "legitimate" and the forks as "piracy tools" so the "legitimate" Kodi will be in app stores and readily available on your devices while the piracy tools will be blocked if not directly attacked.
They tried blocking Kodi on systems like FireTV but the platform is too popular. This is a great way to divide and conquer the user base.
"Because Kodi has an infinitely better interface from the couch than any of the websites."
Kodi works from the couch but it isn't exactly a great interface. For viewing content it is simple enough (although I wouldn't call it better than most systems) but getting any deeper and Kodi is actually cluttered, filled with similarly named categories and features, non-intuitively named options, etc.
If you understand what add-on and repository mean then with a decent interface it would be obvious without any misclicks how to install the same without ever having seen the app before as well as how to setup and organize access to local media. There is a reason there are a million and one "guides" for how to do this.
Kodi is a great media player due to technical capabilities. The interface, particularly the bits for configuration, is horrible.
Then you are aware the current intelligence capabilities mean the unelected individuals in intelligence have more blackmail material than Hoover could have ever began to dream of on any given politician which means they are in charge, not the politicians.
No, there is an actual disconnect. The algorithms set up a pathway for a learning system but the algorithm does not define the discrete path of logic which determines what decisions and choices the AI will make. The design decisions have more to do with providing the right balances in scoring good results, statistical patterns of AI design that provide better results based on the complexity of the type of decisions being made, that sort of thing. Some pieces are more like figuring out the ideal depths of pipelines, instruction complexity, and cache sizes in a general purpose CPU. Having designed those aspects of the CPU can be helpful in diagnosing issues but because the internal state is so variable and dynamic I could teleport the intel lead designer to my office right now and he couldn't explain every decision my cpu is making. CPU's have dozens of variables in varying states at any given moment and relatively straightforward and strict rules for interaction between them... neural networks and AI systems incorporating them have thousands of variables and flexible rules of interaction.
Humans make these decisions now and you can't provide the complete logical flow which makes them. Additionally, programs that we know all the steps for contain flaws. Before someone chimes in that software can be proven to be bug free mathematically, this is a false sense of security because software can only proven to be free of the bugs you knew to check for. I remember an MIT professor drawing a pie chart once, they drew a tiny line and indicated "this is what we know", Then a somewhat thicker swath next to that, "this is what we know we don't know". The professor then shaded in the rest which was almost the entire pie, "This is what we don't know we don't know."
Using the argument in this story we should do absolutely nothing, paralyzed in fear because we don't absolutely know how anything in physical reality works either. We just look at the output and assign labels and build models based on what seemed to be the result when we looked yesterday. We do not need absolute understanding or control of something to make use of it, our trust should be based on observation and results. When deciding if a trust a file system to handle my companies data I don't make the call based on the on paper theory of how it should work or paper proofs... I ultimately make the call based on it having superior capabilities to what I use now and not corrupting other people's data in testing over a number of years. Sound design translates to reality about as well as a well laid battle plan.
The problem is people want to paint things in terms of black and white when the world is very very grey. There is no fixed amount of blame to be distributed between the involved parties, all are 100% responsible for what they've done wrong. This includes anyone responsible for supplying enough resources to secure the system and handle the call volumes as well as leadership over the team that secured the system.
The leaders should be on the chopping block and pointing a lower level resource and taking action against them shouldn't mitigate their blame at all.
I don't know the details of the hack but the security involved could be bad enough to amount to criminal negligence. On the flip side the flaws could have been present despite reasonable due diligence or due to a lack of resources.
The hacker(s) could have a mitigating factor if making a misguided attempt to expose flaws and problems with the 911 system, this method of exposure is misguided and may have risked lives but given that the flaws and problems with the 911 have cost lives already trying to get them resolved could still be a significant mitigating factor. In most states there is the concept of an affirmative defense wherein you've committed a crime but done so in order to prevent a greater crime. Grabbing a woman off the street against her will and throwing her in the car to drive away is kidnapping, doing so because you know there is an active shooter roaming the park targeting women and don't believe there is time to explain... that is arguably an affirmative defense to that crime.
The culpability of other parties does not in and of itself mitigate ones own culpability. This is a fallacy. Having poor security doesn't mitigate the culpability of the people who robbed you for their crime, the fact you are the victim in their crime doesn't mitigate your culpability for making yourself an easy target with lax security.
We say "don't blame the victim" but the right message is probably more like "blame the offender for creating a victim, the victim should blame themselves for being the easy meat" in the case of a public entity "themselves" includes both the entity and the public so everyone should do what they can stop their public entity from being the easy meat even if all they can do is bitch loudly while paying taxes so their representative has to take action.
There have been recent reports of problems with the Dallas 911 infrastructure causing hold times and delays which resulted in deaths. This may have been an attempt to further highlight the problems.
This is also a terrible test. No form of putting an extremely nervous interviewee on the spot gives ANY indication of their proficiency. Simple problems are the worst because you are looking for something challenging. Other than a basic screener like "what is the line terminator in perl" you just have ignore degrees, gauge by past experience and test in the early part of the job by giving real work and comparing to peers at the same time in seat.
"how a person approaches solving a problem, what steps they take, how they go about verifying if their solution is correct, what questions they ask about the problem, etc. then the problem itself really doesn't matter"
The bold assumption there is that the way YOU go about this or admire is the way that is superior. The problem should be typical of the work they are being asked to do minus in house stuff and the method they use doesn't matter as long as they achieve results.
IMHO a big part of the problem is trying to get someone who can "hit the ground running." Sorry contract runners a complex position takes 6mo-2yrs for a fully competent resource to become proficient at in your specific org. This thing where companies expect to know who is good or sucks before hiring is ridiculous and the industry practice of churning sub-ten year turnover is devastating to the industry. If you have to raise pay to get someone new, give everyone on staff a raise.
"honestly if you're going to claim only those who managed to be the first to arrive in an area can claim it as a homeland"
That is hardly the case I'm making. A people isn't a real thing, it's a purely invented concept with very little basis in a loose coupling with (mostly inaccurate) genealogical connections and in some cases a shared belief in an imaginary overlord. So there can literally be no correct answer for the criteria on which "a people" defines its homeland. A person on the other hand is indisputably a people of one and is entitled to call wherever they were born their homeland (or anywhere else they please). But having a homeland does not entitle you to anything but some personal feels regarding the space and no other rights and privileges, including the right to be there or to deny the right of others to claim a homeland. I'm just pointing out the best histories of the jews indicate the people most of them THINK they are descended from aren't from Israel so it is a little silly to go militant and aggressive on others who settled there.
Most of those Jews and Palestianians have more arabic decent than anything as well as ironically common ancestors just as most American Jews are more European than anything. Claiming to be a part of any ancient people is ridiculous as several thousand years of breeding will make you genetically part of almost of every people not just the one you have a card in your wallet for.
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In tech most people have to work on contract now. No paid time off and you don't really make more.
If you have months with a higher income due to "extra" paycheck that raises your average monthly income to higher than your normal monthly income, making every month below. A month with a tax return or money from any other source like a bonus does the same again. For those who get paid twice a month rather than bi-weekly there can huge dips because of five week months although this side is more income vs expenses.
But there are plenty of things. Now that everyone has $5000 deductibles for their poor insurance there is often an up front heavy loading period to top off an HSA.
Also, in tech most "employees" are no longer exempt unless they are programmers or actual managers with direct reports. Meaning salary is salary + overtime. Because of this most tech "employees" are now contractors who get paid hourly and get no paid time off. This cases huge dips in income when life events happen and vacation is taken.
A job with overtime can spike that much for a period of months and then dip when the busy time passes. Months also are not four weeks long. Being paid bi-weekly instead of twice a month can result in periodic changes in income. Getting paid twice a month in turn would mean getting paid only twice in a five week month.
Tax return season and bonus time can result in spikes. Selling an investment is another example.
Most people outside the top 0.1% spend most of what they make so a prolonged spike means feeling comfortable to trim margins which are no longer there when that spike goes away.
"More than almost any other country, America taxes income far more than consumption"
True, all state and federal taxes should only apply to wealth in excess of the per capita domestic median. Producing is good for the national economy, spending is good for the national economy, building and hoarding excess wealth is not and 60% of our national economic output goes into that bucket.
Taxing consumption alone is a big free pass for wealth hoarders. Show me anyone in the top 0.1% by wealth and I'll show you someone who costs more and contributes less than a homeless man who just doesn't want to work and exploits every welfare program we have with deliberate fraud.
"3. Highly Creative relative to geeks"
3. Relative to nerds. I know what drove you nerds crazy.
That definition has some problems, it would include people who are just culture fans (a serious problem now that geek/nerd culture is mainstream and adopted by many muggles)
For Nerds:
1. An obsessive interest in a complex topic involving STEM or any topic through a STEM lens.
2. No GF
3. High intelligence
4. Lack of social skills relative to Geeks
5. Ability to memorize and apply complex information and procedures.
6. Thorough and analytical relative to geeks.
7. Tend to value formal education
8. Read and research the best instructions on everything they touch.
For Geeks the list becomes:
1. An obsessive interest in a narrow topic of the moment
2. High Intelligence
3. Highly Creative relative to geeks
4. Ability to look up, adapt, and apply or throw away complex information and procedures.
5. Like taking things apart.
6. Put not bias on education type but will have engaged in endless self study.
7. Figure out everything they can about something independent of what anyone else says or instructions.
Everyone else is some kind of muggle. The trickiest muggles are what I call decoys, because geek/nerd culture has become mainstream these people have obsessed over it and infiltrated geek and nerd culture. But they won't have lab gear for making jello shots, they won't have a standard rack loaded with gear in their home, they'll love microsoft/apple gear. The upside to all this is that this mainstream decoy culture is more accepting of geeks/nerds than previous incarnations of mainstream culture and gives them more superficial common interests with females which they consider important in early stages of assessing compatibility.
Sure but a browser isn't the competition or a common interface. Plex, the FireTV interface, Netflix/Hulu app interfaces, and set top boxes interfaces made to be controlled with standard remotes/touch are the relevant peers Kodi competes with. Especially when talking about a space where you want to implement DRM and convince everyone to use the kodi app for everything.
Back in the day when you had no choices for media streaming/playback with lots of formats XBMC was the winner mostly because it was the only serious player on a platform that was difficult to program/hack and most definitely not made for that purpose.
Fair enough. I have all sorts of DIY and hacked gear sitting around in finished/in progress/and never going to be finished projects for similar purposes.
For myself I've just found that anything my wife is going to have to use is a poor choice for that type of project because I can't tinker with it or she'll get unhappy about any downtime. A portion of my tech is essentially treated as a production environment as a consequence.
I guess I don't understand the appeal vs a nice polished FireTV box which you can load Kodi on. Yeah it's 30 bucks more but the hours saved will more than make up the difference.
With the notable exception of Amazon who wants to lock down their platform this is only a partially fair criticism. In order to get content from content producers streaming companies like Netflix and Hulu had to integrate DRM which limited their options.
Loading in a browser is kind of a fringe case now anyway. Almost all of these platforms support embedded linux in the form of Android which is the puzzling thing... the only thing this gets you is access to the content within the Kodi app... anyone running Kodi can already access this content on the device running Kodi with their own respective apps.
"Can someone dumb it down enough for me to understand why in the hell someone would go to the trouble of throwing together a plugin to offer up illegal streaming content?? How is the plugin creator making money?"
Some make money, though usually not much and often not enough to offset their own costs. Money is just one of many reasons people do things. For most people who are heavily money motivated you usually have to look no further than their car to find a great example of something they do that isn't money motivated. It might make them money but that Lexus, BMW, or what have you makes them no more money than keeping a five year old inexpensive version of whatever they drive for practical reasons would. Not only does that nicer car not make one any money, one actually spends a great deal of extra money to get it without much tangible benefit.
Some are legitimately protesting the broken models and the way the copyright cartels are at war with the world destroying massive swathes of innovation that have nothing to do with movies or music with the laws they buy to protect their interests. Some are seeking recognition from their own peer group that values such things more than fancy cars. Some are impressing themselves because they are simply less caught up in the opinions of others. Some enjoy the thrill and the challenge. Some find the kind of meticulous work that goes with collecting and maintaining this content to be meditative. Some are basically just digital hoarders and feel the need for an excuse to justify their massive hoard.
The open source communities and the piracy communities are the most dangerous opponent of capitalism there is. They are naturally evolved and true communism (something never seen with a government) with people who aren't profit motivated volunteering labor and collaborating in a way that isn't oppressive and is not only successful but so far unstoppable.
"However, some providers do place nicely. I was pleasantly surprised that having an Amazon Fire box and the Netflix app on it that recently searches via Amazon not only return results for both but make it fairly seamless, even where choosing Amazon for a film would mean paying and Netflix wouldn't. Netflix content appears on the Amazon home screen too, which is nice."
That is nice.
There is a room for improvement though.
Plex should be integrated. If you already have showtime/hbo/whatever it should at least unlock the amazon variant so that results come up properly too. They need to drop the censoring on the Amazon variants. If you have the free option in one of your channels or apps that do have integration it should provide that as the first choice. When you've watched one of the videos included in your channels and it shows other suggestions they are almost always content you don't have and would need to pay for... it should be all content you are already paying for.
The streamed content is also much too pricey, $20 is too much for a streamable movie, especially when it isn't 4k and doesn't include the DTS master audio stream. That is more than I pay the movie theater and they provide a surround system the blows away what any of us have at home. Pricing should look more like Kindle books if they aren't going to provide us the DRM free videofiles at full quality and with theater master audio.
Plex is the better path. I highly recommend following the naming guide for your content since it will make your life easier long term. If you have a lot of existing content that can be a pain but it is easy to maintain (especially if you use downloaders with automatic renaming).
Plex automatically builds a rich metadata database for your content so mom and you can enjoy posters, ratings, a summary of what the show is about, sort by directors, year of release, whether you've watched it before, etc. It also has a mobile app and app for most devices and will automatically transcode on the fly for mobile viewing.
Plus Plex, while not being open source is still free. There is a paid option that gets you early access to updates, higher priority support, and makes the clients free in the various app stores but the apps are less than $5 one off anyway. That said I have a lifetime VIP account mostly because I wanted to support the project.
That makes no sense. That isn't paid Plex it is just part of the setup of Plex whether you are free or VIP.
Plex isn't crippleware, the paid version mostly lets you get the clients free from various app stores and early access to new features.
Plex has issues too (which in no way vindicates Kodi, more a state of this application space).
Everyone I know running Plex is having audio stuttering issues and has been for months. Different clients, different servers, different underlying OS, different homes entirely, and different content all exhibiting the same audio (but not video) stuttering. In the past this would have likely been fixable by adjusting cache/buffering options but the interface has been crippled in the last year on most platforms removing these options. Shared content from others is also buried in a sub-section or a menu that requires switching. This breaks searching/sorting functionality across your available Plex servers.
The addons system for Plex is a kludge and broken. There seems to be a strong idea among the devs that supporting DTS/DTS-HD/DTS-MA/Passthrough is not important. For instance on the FireTV this is not supported. Supposedly because it is not possible on the device but somehow Kodi supports it. Even the option for an external player has been dropped which at least allowed a workaround.
It seems like Plex is focusing too much on a small segment of the userbase that has heavy interest in mobile streaming. While a neat feature every now and then when traveling on a long trip or stuck in the hospital in practice this is just a small side perk compared to the day-to-day heavy lifting on the local LAN where the big advantage vs streaming options is that you can have high quality native video and audio streams.
And the media companies then label the DRM crippled Kodi as "legitimate" and the forks as "piracy tools" so the "legitimate" Kodi will be in app stores and readily available on your devices while the piracy tools will be blocked if not directly attacked.
They tried blocking Kodi on systems like FireTV but the platform is too popular. This is a great way to divide and conquer the user base.
"Because Kodi has an infinitely better interface from the couch than any of the websites."
Kodi works from the couch but it isn't exactly a great interface. For viewing content it is simple enough (although I wouldn't call it better than most systems) but getting any deeper and Kodi is actually cluttered, filled with similarly named categories and features, non-intuitively named options, etc.
If you understand what add-on and repository mean then with a decent interface it would be obvious without any misclicks how to install the same without ever having seen the app before as well as how to setup and organize access to local media. There is a reason there are a million and one "guides" for how to do this.
Kodi is a great media player due to technical capabilities. The interface, particularly the bits for configuration, is horrible.
Then you are aware the current intelligence capabilities mean the unelected individuals in intelligence have more blackmail material than Hoover could have ever began to dream of on any given politician which means they are in charge, not the politicians.
No, there is an actual disconnect. The algorithms set up a pathway for a learning system but the algorithm does not define the discrete path of logic which determines what decisions and choices the AI will make. The design decisions have more to do with providing the right balances in scoring good results, statistical patterns of AI design that provide better results based on the complexity of the type of decisions being made, that sort of thing. Some pieces are more like figuring out the ideal depths of pipelines, instruction complexity, and cache sizes in a general purpose CPU. Having designed those aspects of the CPU can be helpful in diagnosing issues but because the internal state is so variable and dynamic I could teleport the intel lead designer to my office right now and he couldn't explain every decision my cpu is making. CPU's have dozens of variables in varying states at any given moment and relatively straightforward and strict rules for interaction between them... neural networks and AI systems incorporating them have thousands of variables and flexible rules of interaction.
Humans make these decisions now and you can't provide the complete logical flow which makes them. Additionally, programs that we know all the steps for contain flaws. Before someone chimes in that software can be proven to be bug free mathematically, this is a false sense of security because software can only proven to be free of the bugs you knew to check for. I remember an MIT professor drawing a pie chart once, they drew a tiny line and indicated "this is what we know", Then a somewhat thicker swath next to that, "this is what we know we don't know". The professor then shaded in the rest which was almost the entire pie, "This is what we don't know we don't know."
Using the argument in this story we should do absolutely nothing, paralyzed in fear because we don't absolutely know how anything in physical reality works either. We just look at the output and assign labels and build models based on what seemed to be the result when we looked yesterday. We do not need absolute understanding or control of something to make use of it, our trust should be based on observation and results. When deciding if a trust a file system to handle my companies data I don't make the call based on the on paper theory of how it should work or paper proofs... I ultimately make the call based on it having superior capabilities to what I use now and not corrupting other people's data in testing over a number of years. Sound design translates to reality about as well as a well laid battle plan.
The problem is people want to paint things in terms of black and white when the world is very very grey. There is no fixed amount of blame to be distributed between the involved parties, all are 100% responsible for what they've done wrong. This includes anyone responsible for supplying enough resources to secure the system and handle the call volumes as well as leadership over the team that secured the system.
The leaders should be on the chopping block and pointing a lower level resource and taking action against them shouldn't mitigate their blame at all.
I don't know the details of the hack but the security involved could be bad enough to amount to criminal negligence. On the flip side the flaws could have been present despite reasonable due diligence or due to a lack of resources.
The hacker(s) could have a mitigating factor if making a misguided attempt to expose flaws and problems with the 911 system, this method of exposure is misguided and may have risked lives but given that the flaws and problems with the 911 have cost lives already trying to get them resolved could still be a significant mitigating factor. In most states there is the concept of an affirmative defense wherein you've committed a crime but done so in order to prevent a greater crime. Grabbing a woman off the street against her will and throwing her in the car to drive away is kidnapping, doing so because you know there is an active shooter roaming the park targeting women and don't believe there is time to explain... that is arguably an affirmative defense to that crime.
The culpability of other parties does not in and of itself mitigate ones own culpability. This is a fallacy. Having poor security doesn't mitigate the culpability of the people who robbed you for their crime, the fact you are the victim in their crime doesn't mitigate your culpability for making yourself an easy target with lax security.
We say "don't blame the victim" but the right message is probably more like "blame the offender for creating a victim, the victim should blame themselves for being the easy meat" in the case of a public entity "themselves" includes both the entity and the public so everyone should do what they can stop their public entity from being the easy meat even if all they can do is bitch loudly while paying taxes so their representative has to take action.
There have been recent reports of problems with the Dallas 911 infrastructure causing hold times and delays which resulted in deaths. This may have been an attempt to further highlight the problems.
This is also a terrible test. No form of putting an extremely nervous interviewee on the spot gives ANY indication of their proficiency. Simple problems are the worst because you are looking for something challenging. Other than a basic screener like "what is the line terminator in perl" you just have ignore degrees, gauge by past experience and test in the early part of the job by giving real work and comparing to peers at the same time in seat.
"how a person approaches solving a problem, what steps they take, how they go about verifying if their solution is correct, what questions they ask about the problem, etc. then the problem itself really doesn't matter"
The bold assumption there is that the way YOU go about this or admire is the way that is superior. The problem should be typical of the work they are being asked to do minus in house stuff and the method they use doesn't matter as long as they achieve results.
IMHO a big part of the problem is trying to get someone who can "hit the ground running." Sorry contract runners a complex position takes 6mo-2yrs for a fully competent resource to become proficient at in your specific org. This thing where companies expect to know who is good or sucks before hiring is ridiculous and the industry practice of churning sub-ten year turnover is devastating to the industry. If you have to raise pay to get someone new, give everyone on staff a raise.
"honestly if you're going to claim only those who managed to be the first to arrive in an area can claim it as a homeland"
That is hardly the case I'm making. A people isn't a real thing, it's a purely invented concept with very little basis in a loose coupling with (mostly inaccurate) genealogical connections and in some cases a shared belief in an imaginary overlord. So there can literally be no correct answer for the criteria on which "a people" defines its homeland. A person on the other hand is indisputably a people of one and is entitled to call wherever they were born their homeland (or anywhere else they please). But having a homeland does not entitle you to anything but some personal feels regarding the space and no other rights and privileges, including the right to be there or to deny the right of others to claim a homeland. I'm just pointing out the best histories of the jews indicate the people most of them THINK they are descended from aren't from Israel so it is a little silly to go militant and aggressive on others who settled there.
Most of those Jews and Palestianians have more arabic decent than anything as well as ironically common ancestors just as most American Jews are more European than anything. Claiming to be a part of any ancient people is ridiculous as several thousand years of breeding will make you genetically part of almost of every people not just the one you have a card in your wallet for.