A company who has refused to follow state and city laws for years is ignoring more laws.
Uber is 100% right on this one, though. They have a licensed driver in the front seat in command. So, whatever the car is doing autonomously, how does that differ from technology like cruise control, automatic braking, and parking assist? From a legal point of view, adding autonomous features to cars have not required special permission so long as a driver is in control for liability purposes.
Why the fuck would any Linux developer want to do this?
As far as I'm concerned, two reasons: First,because I'm developing cross-platform software, and if I don't have to reboot or go to a VM, bonus. Second, because Visual Studio is a fucking fantastic IDE compared to the IDEs available on Linux. KDevelop is alright.
If your application is linux-only, and you don't need it to also run on windows, then yeah, I'm with you. Work in the environment the app will be used in. However, their new ability to build for Linux from Windows, if it works well (and that's a big if), will definitely benefit me.
You know, I almost preferred the Gates-Ballmer Microsoft, because it was brilliantly maniacal. The new Microsoft is just a whining pathetic pack of halfwits who can't really even decide what direction their company should go. Sure, they may be more open source friendly, but so the fuck what?
So I get more tools and more options to work with? I mean, that's the entire benefit of open-source friendly. Why are you complaining about Microsoft doing better? You don't have to use their stuff if you don't like it, but why do you want them to be evil?
Switching over to a low/no CO2 economy doesnt just mean shutting down coal plants. It means shutting down coal plants and building solar/wind/nuclear plants. Surely this counts as "economic activity".
Although I absolutely think being environmentally conscious is economically beneficial, that is the wrong argument. You're invoking the broken window fallacy. If I continuously break your windows and you have to replace them every time I do, there's a lot of activity, labor, and money changing hands, but you're not actually adding a positive value to the economy.
The valid economic argument to being environmentally conscious is that CO2 emission has a monetary cost. More extreme weather, effects an agriculture, etc. So even though fossil fuels may *appear* to be cheaper, it's simply because the cost has been externalized and we're paying for it elsewhere, but when you take those costs into consideration, a transition to renewables is warranted.
VeraCrypt forces long iteration on shorter passphrases (>70 sec on my laptop, i.e. unusable), regardless of how secure that passphrase actually is. There is no way to switch this off. No response on a complaint. This and some other things lead me to not trust this person. I am back to the last TrueCrypt version that does not have this brain-dead and insulting limitation.
I agree with you completely, and it's the reason I'm still using TrueCrypt.
Secure high-entropy passwords aside, what the people responding to you don't get it is that the user should be allowed to have a more convenient, but more less secure encryption solution if he chooses. I have a short, low entropy password. I could write software that would crack it and it would complete the work in a day or two. I **know** that, and I don't care. I'm not protecting state secrets with it. I'm not worried the NSA will get hold of it. I just want the random person who finds my lost USB flash drive to not have immediate access to the data. Most people wouldn't care to crack it, from those that would most wouldn't know how to go about it. In the statistically unlikely case whoever finds it both wants to crack it and is able to, the data they'll find will be disappointing to them and not a big deal to me. Some of the things I encrypt are more for privacy than security.
Basically, any decent criminal can lock-pick my front door. I still lock it, and it protects against the opportunist criminal. That's the level of security I want, and it makes no sense to tell me I can't have it. They could just pop a big red and flashing warning when I first create the volume that says, "based on the password and number of iterations you've chosen the average desktop computer would be able to crack your encrypted volume in 32 hours. Are you sure you don't want to choose a more complex password?" At that point, they've done their due diligence.
Rename it to something like Copilot or Driver Assist. They can say what they want about how Autopilot should be used but the name suggests otherwise.
A variety of autopilot systems in airplanes differ in complexity, many of them not doing anything more than the Model S autopilot does. Hold this heading. Need to change heading now? Let me dial in the new heading...ok, now hold that heading. Exactly analogous to the Model S. Hold this lane and speed. Need to change lanes? Let me press and hold the turn signal button...ok, now hold this lane.
By contrast a copilot can actually take over for you. You transfer the pilot-in-command job, let them hold the yoke, and they go nuts.
I think the problem is that people don't really understand autopilots in airplanes. They think the pilot can just say, "take me to LaGuardia" and the thing will do it. Although the more advanced autopilots of the today in commercial airliners can land the plane for you, it still requires the pilot to go through the pattern, get on the final leg, dial in the ILS frequency for the runway in question, and THEN it can go through the motions of controlling speed, keeping the plane lined up, and flaring at the appropriate height. Autopilots are not replacements for pilots.
Remember when I said that? Remember when I got mocked for saying that? Are you going to remember I said that when it turns out I'm right? Of course you won't.
I still mock you. Because nobody arguing for self-driving cars every argued they wouldn't get into an accident. We simply argue they'll get into *less* accidents than human beings. Your irrational and fearful arguments display a profound lack of understanding of statistics and a blind trust in human ability.
Tesla's autopilot isn't there yet. It's not a self-driving system, people who are putting too much trust in the system are being careless. It is, however, an important step toward getting us there. We just had the first accident that was caused by a problem with the software (it was most definitely the fault of the autopilot. The camera didn't get a clear view of the truck because of the sunlight, and the radar signal from the truck was being purposefully ignored by the algorithm designed to ignore overhead signs. It's terrible someone lost their life as a result, but you know what? The engineers just learned of a flaw. This flaw will be fixed. No other car in the Tesla fleet will ever fail in this exact way again. Will other accidents happen? Of course. Will more drivers die? Of course. Will any other driver ever die because the autopilot mistook a radar signal from a truck for an overhead sign? Nope.
I don't know what kind of driver you are, but I'm willing to assume you're a great driver. Most people sharing the road with you are not. Statistically speaking, 3000 other people died on the roads on the same day this person using autopilot died. And yes, that's because there are many more cars on the road, because that statistic includes motorcycles and drunk drivers, etc.; not because autopilot is safer than a human as of yet. However, all the causes for those 3000 other accidents? They've happened before, the exact same mistakes. And they will happen again. You cannot eliminate an entire class of mistakes from the human species when one of us make a mistake. You can when it's a computer algorithm.
So yes, human beings will get more distracted behind the wheel when a computer is doing the driving for them. That's ok, because the goal is that eventually there shouldn't even be a steering wheel in the car. The windshield shouldn't even exist, instead it should be an lcd screen that will show you video of the outside traffic when you want, or a movie for you to watch so you can be entertained while your car takes you to work. In the meantime, while the system is still not designed for that, some of these distracted drivers will pay a heavy price. Some innocent people will also pay the price, when the autopiloted Tesla crashes into a manually driven car, or hits a pedestrian, or otherwise kills a person that wasn't the distracted driver. But that's no different than when a drunk driver hits an innocent. It's no different than when someone texting while driving hits an innocent. It's no different than when someone who didn't get enough sleep ends up shutting their eyes and hits an innocent. The difference is that every time the autopilot does it, it's the last time it will do it, while for as long as there are human drivers, there will always be tired drivers. There will always be alcohol or other drug-impaired drivers. There will always be careless drivers.
They'd try, but it's ok. Captain America wouldn't stand for that anymore than he stood for SHIELD's bullshit.
I mean, if we're going to talk about the fictional pop-culture portrayal of the NSA, Captain America is fair game, right?
Look, I don't like what they're doing anymore than you do. They're way exceeding their authority, they shouldn't be allowed to collect any data domestically. But they're not fucking assassinating political candidates or office holders. If we start using that type of hyperbole, we stop getting taken seriously when we complain about the shit they ARE doing.
If the wage continues to stagnate they will still buy the robots and dump those workers!
Of course, eventually, because as the technology improves, it also gets cheaper. But they're not going to do that for as long as human labor is cheaper, which is the entire point people don't get, you're accelerating the process toward automation. Wages are a result of competition. They're low because you're competing with other people who are willing to take the job for that wage. And the moment that technology improves to where automation can do your job, you're now competing with the cost of the machine.
Personally I think robots are the worst thing they'll ever do...
You might be right, and then those costs will be factored in when companies decide whether to automate or not. That said, all your examples are terrible, because they're solvable with replacing the jobs they're talking about and adding one human security guard. Still comes out cheaper.
I'll start by saying that I agree with your post about 100%. My only point of contention is that I actually don't doubt the sincerity of the plaintiff or the validity of the religion. Specifically:
"there must be a line beyond which a practice is not 'religious' simply because a plaintiff labels it as such. [...] The Court concludes that FSMism is on the far side of that line."
He is right — in this case.
I disagree that he is right. The judge correctly identifies Pastafarianism as satire designed to make a political point but then proceeds to make a ruling making that political point invalid. The issue members of the FSM church try to bring to light is that members of religious groups get special treatment all the time. You can't wear hats for your driver's license picture. Wait, your religion says you must wear one? Ok, then you can wear one. Everybody else has to follow this rule, but you can't. Or, in this case, people in jail who are religious get to wear clothing the others aren't allowed to, they get to congregate at special times when others aren't allowed, etc. All the FSM church members want is that whatever rules you create apply equally to everyone. It's not even to remove those privileges from the religious. If there's a reason why inmates shouldn't be allowed these things, that reason doesn't disappear if they're religious. If there's no reason why they shouldn't be allowed these things, then there's no reason it should be banned for anyone.
The judge makes the point that members of other religions truly believe, while members of the FSM don't. But even that's not really true. Members of the FSM truly believe in the tenets of their religion: they truly believe that making special exceptions to the rules to accommodate someone's religion is unfair and unethical. Their practices are designed to bring this perceived injustice to light and are central to their moral code.
The right way to ask it is "Do you think Apple should help the FBI, even though it helps Russian hackers get into your phone?"
Except that's not true. This battle has been phrased as the encryption backdoor battle, but they're not at all the same. After all, adding an encryption back door now, wouldn't help the FBI with a phone encrypted before the backdoor was added.
What the court order has asked Apple to do is to create an OS version, to be installed on this one phone to which they have a warrant to, that will remove the feature to automatically delete the contents if the phone if more than ten incorrect password attempts are made, and to allow software to brute force it. Since by default only a 4 digit PIN serves as the key to the encryption, 10,000 combinations shouldn't be a problem.
The government isn't asking Apple to weaken its encryption. In fact, their current software allows you to disable "simple passcode", and you could have a long, complex password. If you do, Apple can provide everything the government is requesting, and they're still not going to get your data, because they're not going to be able to brute force it. It's up to you to decide whether you want your phone to be encrypted strongly enough to sustain such an attack, or you want the convenience of a short password with content erase policy which will be good enough protection against the average phone thief. For this court order, the government isn't trying to take that right away from you. If they were, I'd side with Apple. As it stands, I think they absolutely have the right to what they are asking.
I showed it to her, she agrees with me 100%.
Also, not just blackmail. Unwelcome physical contact, or anything that would make a woman *reasonably* feel unsafe, like stalking was also mentioned in that post.
Please explain fully just what you mean. Or are you one of them guys who thinks no really means yes? I ask a women for a date she says no thanks. I ask her the next day she no thanks and please don't ask me again. I would say sorry for having bothered you and move on..YOU...??
Personally, I wouldn't even have asked the second time. It's called respecting boundaries and it leads to less conflicts in the workspace. However, there's a huge (and there should be) gap between social and cultural norms and legally actionable harassment.
I think asking said woman out every single day she comes in to work is incredibly crass, annoying, and makes you look like a pathetic loser. It's not harassment until you imply she may face consequences if she continues to say no. That she'll be fired, looked over for promotion. Or until you physically touch her. Or you start stalking her instead of just taking opportunity of being at the same place at the same time because you both work at the same place at the same time.
I don't why so many in the Linux community are so hooked on ZFS. BTRFS has a feature set that is rapidly getting there, its becoming more a more mature in terms of code that is already in the upstream.
Why not just put your energy there?
As someone who uses both zfs (for file server storage) and btrfs (for the OS), my reason for using zfs is raidz. If btrfs implemented something similar, I'd drop zfs.
Well, as soon as someone invents the AC battery we can switch back...
Ok, like this one? Flywheels store energy mechanically instead of chemically, and you can get get ac electrical output about as easily as you get dc. Just depends on your generator / converter setup.
You fail to understand what scientists know versus what they speculate about.
Not really. They're very clear about that. It's a requirement of science that you enumerate all of your assumptions, and quantify uncertainties whenever possible.
Making the assumption that they are even somewhat accurate about the big bang (unlikely)
For example, that's not an assumption. The general idea behind the big bang, that the universe was once infinitely small and it expanded, can be used to make certain predictions regarding what you expect to see when you look out in all directions, what you expect to see in the CMB, etc. You can precisely measure how accurate those predictions match up with experiments, and it's really, REALLY accurate.. Check out the text that goes with that graph: "Graph of cosmic microwave background spectrum measured by the FIRAS instrument on the COBE, the most precisely measured black body spectrum in nature. The error bars are too small to be seen even in an enlarged image, and it is impossible to distinguish the observed data from the theoretical curve."
What that boils down to is that your statement about how unlikely it is that scientific theories are "even somewhat accurate about the big bang" is provably an incorrect statement, based on our best available measurements. If you want to make an argument for your case, you need to bring something more to the table than, "I personally feel like scientists are speculating and can't possibly have a high likelyhood of stumbling upon what actually happened." The people you're criticizing have data. You have a feeling. You need to bring in some data, at which point I and everybody else will be glad to accept that our previous theories were wrong. The Lumineferous Ether was accepted theory, but when Michelson and Morley couldn't detect it using their inteferometer, and Einstein showed up with special relativity as an alternative with supporting data gathered from the 1919 solar eclipse, the Ether theory was destroyed. Scientists do not fear being proven wrong. However, you do have to bring evidence with you.
Everything is just speculation from unimaginative scientists who think they know what happened 14 billion years ago at some random spot that they can't even point their finger in the general direction of.
See? You're criticizing a theory that you don't even understand. Scientists can point to you the spot the Big Bang happened, exactly. So can I. It happened where I'm standing right now. At the exact spot that I'm standing. It also happened at the exact same spot you're standing. And at the exact center of the Andromeda galaxy. And exactly at whatever spot you pick at the edges of the milky way. Or any spot at all in the universe: Every spot in the universe is the center of the universe. The Big Bang isn't matter spreading into existing space. The space in which matter exists is expanding. Check out that video, it explains it really well.
That does not mean that space was not infinitely large while at the same time infinitely small, its all a matter of perspective. Outside looking in, its infinitely small, inside looking out its infinitely large.
This right there is the difference between speculation and scientific hypothesis. "Something that looks small from one perspective can look big from another perspective, so whose to say what's infinitely small or infinitely large" is hand-waving. Scientists don't do that. They tell you what they mean by small, and when. At roughly 10^-43 s after the Big Bang, the universe was 10^-35 m. That's the end of the Planck Epock. During the Inflationary Epoch, the universe grew to about 10 cm by 10^-32 s. These numbers are, admittedly by eve
There's a pretty big difference between targetting locations strategically and torturing / killing a prisoner that has already been rendered unable of doing you harm.
If you want to have an apt analogy, I say our treatment of Guantanamo prisoners and other "enemy combatents" that we've so labeled for the sole purpose of not extending them the rights of prisoners of war is the valid one. I agree that behavior is despicable, and it doesn't get enough attention.
Dropping bombs on combatants is absolutely fair game. It's not pretty, I don't like that we have to, but war necessarily involves killing people. Anyone purposefully bombing civilians is not ok (collateral damage is often unavoidable, but we must aim to minimize it). Anyone torturing or killing prisoners, civilians or otherwise, is not ok on either side.
We probably could but it might take devoting the entire worlds GDP for a decade or so and there is noway that would happen. We need the technological advances so that it would approach affordability.
I agree with you that there's a lot we could accomplish if we were willing to spend the money, but I honestly think we're still at the stage where this is a technology problem, not a resources one. I don't think we can build electronics that could function for 1,000 years, so I definitely don't think we have a system that can keep life support active for humans in a generational ship for 1,000 years...right now we're seriously questioning our capability of shielding astronauts from radiation on a trip to Mars. Resource-wise, we have extremely efficient methods for recycling water and air on the ISS, but our best still requires resupply missions with both of those resources. We've tried experiments like Biosphere 2 to run a fully self-contained environment only to see CO2 levels fluctuate and oxygen levels drop dramatically to the point they had to start pumping oxygen in out of concern for the researchers inside. Many species sealed in started dying off outright, except for things like ants and cockroaches which actually thrived, because cockroaches thrive anywhere. This wasn't a case of not having enough money to do it right, they did everything they thought was necessary to keep the place completely sealed...we just learned during the research process about a lot of things that weren't accounted for.
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll eventually get there. But I think right now if we discovered this all life on this planet would die off in 100 years and the only hope for humanity was a 100% confirmed habitable planet 16 light-years away and put every single one of our resources for the next 100 years to try to get a generational colony ship built and launched 100 years from today...well, I think our species is done for. We'd launch something, but everyone aboard would die before they make it as far as Saturn.
Even with current technology we could theoretically make a 16 ly journey in somewhere around 1,000 years.
No, we couldn't. We don't have the technology right now to build a multi-generational ship. We don't even have the technology right now to send an unmanned probe that would still be powered by the time it got there. We don't even have the technology right now to build an unmanned probe that would shut itself down and bring itself back up after 1000 years. Hell, it's hard to find a motherboard from the 80's that doesn't need capacitors replaced before it can be booted up again.
Who knows what kind of technology we'll have in 300,000 years, though. And the closest the destination, the more likely something can actually get there.
Slashdot Mirror
A company who has refused to follow state and city laws for years is ignoring more laws.
Uber is 100% right on this one, though. They have a licensed driver in the front seat in command. So, whatever the car is doing autonomously, how does that differ from technology like cruise control, automatic braking, and parking assist? From a legal point of view, adding autonomous features to cars have not required special permission so long as a driver is in control for liability purposes.
Why the fuck would any Linux developer want to do this?
As far as I'm concerned, two reasons: First,because I'm developing cross-platform software, and if I don't have to reboot or go to a VM, bonus. Second, because Visual Studio is a fucking fantastic IDE compared to the IDEs available on Linux. KDevelop is alright.
If your application is linux-only, and you don't need it to also run on windows, then yeah, I'm with you. Work in the environment the app will be used in. However, their new ability to build for Linux from Windows, if it works well (and that's a big if), will definitely benefit me.
You know, I almost preferred the Gates-Ballmer Microsoft, because it was brilliantly maniacal. The new Microsoft is just a whining pathetic pack of halfwits who can't really even decide what direction their company should go. Sure, they may be more open source friendly, but so the fuck what?
So I get more tools and more options to work with? I mean, that's the entire benefit of open-source friendly. Why are you complaining about Microsoft doing better? You don't have to use their stuff if you don't like it, but why do you want them to be evil?
Switching over to a low/no CO2 economy doesnt just mean shutting down coal plants. It means shutting down coal plants and building solar/wind/nuclear plants. Surely this counts as "economic activity".
Although I absolutely think being environmentally conscious is economically beneficial, that is the wrong argument. You're invoking the broken window fallacy. If I continuously break your windows and you have to replace them every time I do, there's a lot of activity, labor, and money changing hands, but you're not actually adding a positive value to the economy.
The valid economic argument to being environmentally conscious is that CO2 emission has a monetary cost. More extreme weather, effects an agriculture, etc. So even though fossil fuels may *appear* to be cheaper, it's simply because the cost has been externalized and we're paying for it elsewhere, but when you take those costs into consideration, a transition to renewables is warranted.
VeraCrypt forces long iteration on shorter passphrases (>70 sec on my laptop, i.e. unusable), regardless of how secure that passphrase actually is. There is no way to switch this off. No response on a complaint. This and some other things lead me to not trust this person. I am back to the last TrueCrypt version that does not have this brain-dead and insulting limitation.
I agree with you completely, and it's the reason I'm still using TrueCrypt.
Secure high-entropy passwords aside, what the people responding to you don't get it is that the user should be allowed to have a more convenient, but more less secure encryption solution if he chooses. I have a short, low entropy password. I could write software that would crack it and it would complete the work in a day or two. I **know** that, and I don't care. I'm not protecting state secrets with it. I'm not worried the NSA will get hold of it. I just want the random person who finds my lost USB flash drive to not have immediate access to the data. Most people wouldn't care to crack it, from those that would most wouldn't know how to go about it. In the statistically unlikely case whoever finds it both wants to crack it and is able to, the data they'll find will be disappointing to them and not a big deal to me. Some of the things I encrypt are more for privacy than security.
Basically, any decent criminal can lock-pick my front door. I still lock it, and it protects against the opportunist criminal. That's the level of security I want, and it makes no sense to tell me I can't have it. They could just pop a big red and flashing warning when I first create the volume that says, "based on the password and number of iterations you've chosen the average desktop computer would be able to crack your encrypted volume in 32 hours. Are you sure you don't want to choose a more complex password?" At that point, they've done their due diligence.
Wait, wait, wait. You were trying to run from double bag companies and you went TO Verizon?
The only acceptable reason to be with verizon is the size of their network. In every single other way, they're inferior to all the other options.
Rename it to something like Copilot or Driver Assist. They can say what they want about how Autopilot should be used but the name suggests otherwise.
A variety of autopilot systems in airplanes differ in complexity, many of them not doing anything more than the Model S autopilot does. Hold this heading. Need to change heading now? Let me dial in the new heading...ok, now hold that heading. Exactly analogous to the Model S. Hold this lane and speed. Need to change lanes? Let me press and hold the turn signal button...ok, now hold this lane.
By contrast a copilot can actually take over for you. You transfer the pilot-in-command job, let them hold the yoke, and they go nuts.
I think the problem is that people don't really understand autopilots in airplanes. They think the pilot can just say, "take me to LaGuardia" and the thing will do it. Although the more advanced autopilots of the today in commercial airliners can land the plane for you, it still requires the pilot to go through the pattern, get on the final leg, dial in the ILS frequency for the runway in question, and THEN it can go through the motions of controlling speed, keeping the plane lined up, and flaring at the appropriate height. Autopilots are not replacements for pilots.
Remember when I said that? Remember when I got mocked for saying that? Are you going to remember I said that when it turns out I'm right? Of course you won't.
I still mock you. Because nobody arguing for self-driving cars every argued they wouldn't get into an accident. We simply argue they'll get into *less* accidents than human beings. Your irrational and fearful arguments display a profound lack of understanding of statistics and a blind trust in human ability.
Tesla's autopilot isn't there yet. It's not a self-driving system, people who are putting too much trust in the system are being careless. It is, however, an important step toward getting us there. We just had the first accident that was caused by a problem with the software (it was most definitely the fault of the autopilot. The camera didn't get a clear view of the truck because of the sunlight, and the radar signal from the truck was being purposefully ignored by the algorithm designed to ignore overhead signs. It's terrible someone lost their life as a result, but you know what? The engineers just learned of a flaw. This flaw will be fixed. No other car in the Tesla fleet will ever fail in this exact way again. Will other accidents happen? Of course. Will more drivers die? Of course. Will any other driver ever die because the autopilot mistook a radar signal from a truck for an overhead sign? Nope.
I don't know what kind of driver you are, but I'm willing to assume you're a great driver. Most people sharing the road with you are not. Statistically speaking, 3000 other people died on the roads on the same day this person using autopilot died. And yes, that's because there are many more cars on the road, because that statistic includes motorcycles and drunk drivers, etc.; not because autopilot is safer than a human as of yet. However, all the causes for those 3000 other accidents? They've happened before, the exact same mistakes. And they will happen again. You cannot eliminate an entire class of mistakes from the human species when one of us make a mistake. You can when it's a computer algorithm.
So yes, human beings will get more distracted behind the wheel when a computer is doing the driving for them. That's ok, because the goal is that eventually there shouldn't even be a steering wheel in the car. The windshield shouldn't even exist, instead it should be an lcd screen that will show you video of the outside traffic when you want, or a movie for you to watch so you can be entertained while your car takes you to work. In the meantime, while the system is still not designed for that, some of these distracted drivers will pay a heavy price. Some innocent people will also pay the price, when the autopiloted Tesla crashes into a manually driven car, or hits a pedestrian, or otherwise kills a person that wasn't the distracted driver. But that's no different than when a drunk driver hits an innocent. It's no different than when someone texting while driving hits an innocent. It's no different than when someone who didn't get enough sleep ends up shutting their eyes and hits an innocent. The difference is that every time the autopilot does it, it's the last time it will do it, while for as long as there are human drivers, there will always be tired drivers. There will always be alcohol or other drug-impaired drivers. There will always be careless drivers.
Far more likely that the NSA would eliminate him.
They'd try, but it's ok. Captain America wouldn't stand for that anymore than he stood for SHIELD's bullshit.
I mean, if we're going to talk about the fictional pop-culture portrayal of the NSA, Captain America is fair game, right?
Look, I don't like what they're doing anymore than you do. They're way exceeding their authority, they shouldn't be allowed to collect any data domestically. But they're not fucking assassinating political candidates or office holders. If we start using that type of hyperbole, we stop getting taken seriously when we complain about the shit they ARE doing.
If the wage continues to stagnate they will still buy the robots and dump those workers!
Of course, eventually, because as the technology improves, it also gets cheaper. But they're not going to do that for as long as human labor is cheaper, which is the entire point people don't get, you're accelerating the process toward automation. Wages are a result of competition. They're low because you're competing with other people who are willing to take the job for that wage. And the moment that technology improves to where automation can do your job, you're now competing with the cost of the machine.
Personally I think robots are the worst thing they'll ever do...
You might be right, and then those costs will be factored in when companies decide whether to automate or not. That said, all your examples are terrible, because they're solvable with replacing the jobs they're talking about and adding one human security guard. Still comes out cheaper.
I'll start by saying that I agree with your post about 100%. My only point of contention is that I actually don't doubt the sincerity of the plaintiff or the validity of the religion. Specifically:
"there must be a line beyond which a practice is not 'religious' simply because a plaintiff labels it as such. [...] The Court concludes that FSMism is on the far side of that line."
He is right — in this case.
I disagree that he is right. The judge correctly identifies Pastafarianism as satire designed to make a political point but then proceeds to make a ruling making that political point invalid. The issue members of the FSM church try to bring to light is that members of religious groups get special treatment all the time. You can't wear hats for your driver's license picture. Wait, your religion says you must wear one? Ok, then you can wear one. Everybody else has to follow this rule, but you can't. Or, in this case, people in jail who are religious get to wear clothing the others aren't allowed to, they get to congregate at special times when others aren't allowed, etc. All the FSM church members want is that whatever rules you create apply equally to everyone. It's not even to remove those privileges from the religious. If there's a reason why inmates shouldn't be allowed these things, that reason doesn't disappear if they're religious. If there's no reason why they shouldn't be allowed these things, then there's no reason it should be banned for anyone.
The judge makes the point that members of other religions truly believe, while members of the FSM don't. But even that's not really true. Members of the FSM truly believe in the tenets of their religion: they truly believe that making special exceptions to the rules to accommodate someone's religion is unfair and unethical. Their practices are designed to bring this perceived injustice to light and are central to their moral code.
The right way to ask it is "Do you think Apple should help the FBI, even though it helps Russian hackers get into your phone?"
Except that's not true. This battle has been phrased as the encryption backdoor battle, but they're not at all the same. After all, adding an encryption back door now, wouldn't help the FBI with a phone encrypted before the backdoor was added.
What the court order has asked Apple to do is to create an OS version, to be installed on this one phone to which they have a warrant to, that will remove the feature to automatically delete the contents if the phone if more than ten incorrect password attempts are made, and to allow software to brute force it. Since by default only a 4 digit PIN serves as the key to the encryption, 10,000 combinations shouldn't be a problem.
The government isn't asking Apple to weaken its encryption. In fact, their current software allows you to disable "simple passcode", and you could have a long, complex password. If you do, Apple can provide everything the government is requesting, and they're still not going to get your data, because they're not going to be able to brute force it. It's up to you to decide whether you want your phone to be encrypted strongly enough to sustain such an attack, or you want the convenience of a short password with content erase policy which will be good enough protection against the average phone thief. For this court order, the government isn't trying to take that right away from you. If they were, I'd side with Apple. As it stands, I think they absolutely have the right to what they are asking.
I showed it to her, she agrees with me 100%. Also, not just blackmail. Unwelcome physical contact, or anything that would make a woman *reasonably* feel unsafe, like stalking was also mentioned in that post.
Please explain fully just what you mean. Or are you one of them guys who thinks no really means yes? I ask a women for a date she says no thanks. I ask her the next day she no thanks and please don't ask me again. I would say sorry for having bothered you and move on..YOU...??
Personally, I wouldn't even have asked the second time. It's called respecting boundaries and it leads to less conflicts in the workspace. However, there's a huge (and there should be) gap between social and cultural norms and legally actionable harassment.
I think asking said woman out every single day she comes in to work is incredibly crass, annoying, and makes you look like a pathetic loser. It's not harassment until you imply she may face consequences if she continues to say no. That she'll be fired, looked over for promotion. Or until you physically touch her. Or you start stalking her instead of just taking opportunity of being at the same place at the same time because you both work at the same place at the same time.
The law isn't a way of enforcing etiquette.
What the hell? Why? Seems like the articles he posts are interesting and on topic for a nerdy site.
Maybe you should go away.
I don't why so many in the Linux community are so hooked on ZFS. BTRFS has a feature set that is rapidly getting there, its becoming more a more mature in terms of code that is already in the upstream.
Why not just put your energy there?
As someone who uses both zfs (for file server storage) and btrfs (for the OS), my reason for using zfs is raidz. If btrfs implemented something similar, I'd drop zfs.
Well, as soon as someone invents the AC battery we can switch back...
Ok, like this one? Flywheels store energy mechanically instead of chemically, and you can get get ac electrical output about as easily as you get dc. Just depends on your generator / converter setup.
You fail to understand what scientists know versus what they speculate about.
Not really. They're very clear about that. It's a requirement of science that you enumerate all of your assumptions, and quantify uncertainties whenever possible.
Making the assumption that they are even somewhat accurate about the big bang (unlikely)
For example, that's not an assumption. The general idea behind the big bang, that the universe was once infinitely small and it expanded, can be used to make certain predictions regarding what you expect to see when you look out in all directions, what you expect to see in the CMB, etc. You can precisely measure how accurate those predictions match up with experiments, and it's really, REALLY accurate.. Check out the text that goes with that graph: "Graph of cosmic microwave background spectrum measured by the FIRAS instrument on the COBE, the most precisely measured black body spectrum in nature. The error bars are too small to be seen even in an enlarged image, and it is impossible to distinguish the observed data from the theoretical curve."
What that boils down to is that your statement about how unlikely it is that scientific theories are "even somewhat accurate about the big bang" is provably an incorrect statement, based on our best available measurements. If you want to make an argument for your case, you need to bring something more to the table than, "I personally feel like scientists are speculating and can't possibly have a high likelyhood of stumbling upon what actually happened." The people you're criticizing have data. You have a feeling. You need to bring in some data, at which point I and everybody else will be glad to accept that our previous theories were wrong. The Lumineferous Ether was accepted theory, but when Michelson and Morley couldn't detect it using their inteferometer, and Einstein showed up with special relativity as an alternative with supporting data gathered from the 1919 solar eclipse, the Ether theory was destroyed. Scientists do not fear being proven wrong. However, you do have to bring evidence with you.
Everything is just speculation from unimaginative scientists who think they know what happened 14 billion years ago at some random spot that they can't even point their finger in the general direction of.
See? You're criticizing a theory that you don't even understand. Scientists can point to you the spot the Big Bang happened, exactly. So can I. It happened where I'm standing right now. At the exact spot that I'm standing. It also happened at the exact same spot you're standing. And at the exact center of the Andromeda galaxy. And exactly at whatever spot you pick at the edges of the milky way. Or any spot at all in the universe: Every spot in the universe is the center of the universe. The Big Bang isn't matter spreading into existing space. The space in which matter exists is expanding. Check out that video, it explains it really well.
That does not mean that space was not infinitely large while at the same time infinitely small, its all a matter of perspective. Outside looking in, its infinitely small, inside looking out its infinitely large.
This right there is the difference between speculation and scientific hypothesis. "Something that looks small from one perspective can look big from another perspective, so whose to say what's infinitely small or infinitely large" is hand-waving. Scientists don't do that. They tell you what they mean by small, and when. At roughly 10^-43 s after the Big Bang, the universe was 10^-35 m. That's the end of the Planck Epock. During the Inflationary Epoch, the universe grew to about 10 cm by 10^-32 s. These numbers are, admittedly by eve
All systems produce waste heat, though. Even looking at the EV as a closed system, you don't see 100% efficiency.
No, but you do see >90% efficiency as compared to the ~40% at best from combustion engines.
Let me know when you figure out how to burn something without producing heat.
The amount of heat matters. Internal combustion engines are ~40% efficient at absolute best. Electric motors are ~98% efficient.
They're both producing waste heat, but one is producing *a lot* less per mile driven.
Waste it. But that's still better than wasting it all year round.
Who's wasting it year-round? Why would you turn on the electric car's heat in the summer?
OTOH gas cars use the engine waste heat for heating.
What do you do with that waste heat in the summer?
There's a pretty big difference between targetting locations strategically and torturing / killing a prisoner that has already been rendered unable of doing you harm.
If you want to have an apt analogy, I say our treatment of Guantanamo prisoners and other "enemy combatents" that we've so labeled for the sole purpose of not extending them the rights of prisoners of war is the valid one. I agree that behavior is despicable, and it doesn't get enough attention.
Dropping bombs on combatants is absolutely fair game. It's not pretty, I don't like that we have to, but war necessarily involves killing people. Anyone purposefully bombing civilians is not ok (collateral damage is often unavoidable, but we must aim to minimize it). Anyone torturing or killing prisoners, civilians or otherwise, is not ok on either side.
The USA founding fathers lived with the knowledge that they would be held accountable for what they said and wrote, and today it's no different.
You mean people like Madison and Hamilton, who wrote the Federalist Papers under a pseudonym to keep their authorship of them secret?
We probably could but it might take devoting the entire worlds GDP for a decade or so and there is noway that would happen. We need the technological advances so that it would approach affordability.
I agree with you that there's a lot we could accomplish if we were willing to spend the money, but I honestly think we're still at the stage where this is a technology problem, not a resources one. I don't think we can build electronics that could function for 1,000 years, so I definitely don't think we have a system that can keep life support active for humans in a generational ship for 1,000 years...right now we're seriously questioning our capability of shielding astronauts from radiation on a trip to Mars. Resource-wise, we have extremely efficient methods for recycling water and air on the ISS, but our best still requires resupply missions with both of those resources. We've tried experiments like Biosphere 2 to run a fully self-contained environment only to see CO2 levels fluctuate and oxygen levels drop dramatically to the point they had to start pumping oxygen in out of concern for the researchers inside. Many species sealed in started dying off outright, except for things like ants and cockroaches which actually thrived, because cockroaches thrive anywhere. This wasn't a case of not having enough money to do it right, they did everything they thought was necessary to keep the place completely sealed...we just learned during the research process about a lot of things that weren't accounted for.
Don't get me wrong, I think we'll eventually get there. But I think right now if we discovered this all life on this planet would die off in 100 years and the only hope for humanity was a 100% confirmed habitable planet 16 light-years away and put every single one of our resources for the next 100 years to try to get a generational colony ship built and launched 100 years from today...well, I think our species is done for. We'd launch something, but everyone aboard would die before they make it as far as Saturn.
Even with current technology we could theoretically make a 16 ly journey in somewhere around 1,000 years.
No, we couldn't. We don't have the technology right now to build a multi-generational ship. We don't even have the technology right now to send an unmanned probe that would still be powered by the time it got there. We don't even have the technology right now to build an unmanned probe that would shut itself down and bring itself back up after 1000 years. Hell, it's hard to find a motherboard from the 80's that doesn't need capacitors replaced before it can be booted up again.
Who knows what kind of technology we'll have in 300,000 years, though. And the closest the destination, the more likely something can actually get there.