If they've automated such detection, they're already 'hacking' your site by violating your implied TOS. Virtual trespass, if you will.
And I can't imagine they haven't, since manually checking their indexed sites for such activity would probably require more man-hours than mankind currently has available.
Google used to add value - they let you find what you needed to find. Now they're scraping sites and taking work product without recompense... though Google's probably far better at doing the same work with an in-house algorithm anyway.
The response to this is (so long as Google 'plays nice') is to restrict what your site gives to Google to teasers and only deliver your full site to actual visitors.
If the program really was there to fill a labour pool deficit, it never would have allowed for visas for positions where the wage was below the current median wage (for those employed, not for empty positions waiting to be filled). You'd still get downward pressure on wages as labour supply increased, but it'd be slower.
If your goal is to outsource to cheaper countries, the existing program works very well... until companies that can decide to move as much of their operations abroad as required to cut costs, until the cost of products domestically rises enough to throw sand in the gears of the economy, etc.
Free trade isn't just for goods, it's for labour and standard of living. We're watching it all even out but the process is uneven due to social and political differences between nations.
Unfortunately, in a large and complex society it is unreasonable to expect everyone to question everything all the time - it's too easy for people to avoid the problem of a 'reputation' given a large enough population and you can't spend all your time doing background checks on everyone when there's no place keeping trustworthy records and adhering to record keeping standards.
That's where regulation comes in - everyone agrees on standards, which are enforced by a standards body, and violators deal with the legal system upon discovery.
Yes, this makes it more difficult for 'little guys' to enter the market, and yes this gets abused by the larger players to make it even more difficult... but if you throw out such regulation you do NOT get a libertarian paradise - you get the lowest common denominator and nobody setting a 'floor' for just how low that can go, and then when enough people have been screwed over you get the public screaming for regulations.
I think the guy/organization in China who effectively owns the Bitcoin network will upgrade just enough to ensure they remains in control, while not owning the network obviously and entirely to reduce the cultist's confidence in it to the point he can't keep extracting wealth from the US.
It's not about maximizing Bitcoin mining, it's about maximizing net profits and keeping the scam going for as long as possible.
Good. Now try again where you show Newton was right about God and I'm wrong, using reproducible experiments that support a logically consistent theory that isn't more easily explained by something simpler (that is also supported by reproducible experiments that support a logically consistent theory that isn't more easily explained by something simpler, etc.)
Lots of religious folk are smart and achieve great things. That doesn't mean God exists, it means they have blind spots when it comes to their faith. Since faith is, by definition, believing what you want without proof in support of it (and often despite proof against it)... it's not particularly surprising Newton was deluded on the subject.
> In any case, a doctor who is asked for a second opinion gets the luxury of having both the first doctor's records (hopefully), as well as a data point occurring later in time.
Thank you for posting, as this would not have occurred to me if you hadn't.
Without RTFA (because I'm lazy right now), I'd love to see them use the expert system in parallel to doctors, complete with initial and follow-up visits to see what the difference is when the same doctor gets that second data point.
I would still expect the program to win, simply because it's never going to miscalculate a probability or forget an option, but it would be interesting to see how much the gap closes, especially when compared to how rare the condition is and how obvious the symptoms. I'd expect there are lots of options for rare edge cases a human would dismiss if they even recollected them.
An annoyance of modern life in the free world - people who believe in God (without the slightest sliver of proof and with plenty of evidence to explain where such beliefs came from, evidence that they are not immutable but have in fact 'muted' quite a bit over the years, decades, centuries and millennia) still vastly outnumber people who don't believe in the fantasy.
And if you're too obvious with your disbelief, they'll assume you're fundamentally evil (or just misguided if they're not the nasty, incredibly hypocritical type) and will be prejudiced against you in ways that can severely affect your life.
Maybe you find your social options limited, maybe you find your employment options limited, and maybe rather than passively exclude you they also spread the word around their community to ensure everyone else does, too.
I'm lucky to live in a place where that's not true to any significant degree, but there are plenty of places left where it is.
An adult who earnestly believes in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny and will defend that belief against Occam's Razor and all the rational alternative explanations will either be mocked or checked for psychiatric issues. An adult who earnestly believes an invisible, intangible, omniscient, omnipresent father figure who was intimately involved in the world a few thousand years ago but now only 'works in mysterious ways', though... you have to respect their beliefs for for some reason.
Vital Technologies of Bolton, Ontario, Canada went out of business trying to market their educational model, which had pressure, temperature, EM, and colour sensors.
In the lab, they were working on assembling one that could listen to your heartbeat and extract useful data from your body's electrical fields from a distance of a few feet.
> I assume the water it produces is akin to distilled water. Isn't that bad to drink?
Yes. A lot of the human digestive tract works by osmosis. Putting distilled water through it means it's going to reverse, and rather than your body absorbing a lot of important things, it's going to be dumping them - presumably into your stool.
I don't imagine hardening water to healthy levels will be all that difficult... the question is, can you make it inexpensive, robust, and foolproof enough for the type of applications this device (if it works and is practical) would see.
Continual consumption of distilled water is bad for your heart, nervous system, and immune system - but it takes fair while, and there are other ways to get minerals and other things you might normally get from water... mainly *eating* them. Still, it would be an additional concern that you otherwise wouldn't even have to think about.
Being able to blame Internet disconnection on external forces would just be icing on the cake.
What we really ought to do is declare free communication a human right (though I pity the person trying to figure out language allowing the suppression of dangerous misinformation, harassment, incitement to violence, etc.), then make damn sure the borders stay 'information porous'.
Just like beaming propaganda radio or television, we ought to be forcing free information flow on tyrannical regimes... at home and abroad. A government tries to lock things down, and the rest of the world should be working on whatever is practical for getting packets in and out of the 'no communication' zone.
I understand someone wanting to prevent people from benefiting without paying for their product.
I also understand the consumer fed up with being endlessly deceived and abused as the vendor tries to wring every last cent from them.
While piracy has given the appearance of the balance of power being with the latter group, it really never has been. Until our culture and laws change, it never will be.
I think he had the wrong perspective. The elderly tend to get 'cranky' for three reasons:
One, there's a portion of the brain governing impulse control that actually atrophies with age.
Two, their world has often shrunk drastically as their mobility is impaired, friends have died off, and younger family is busy and can't visit constantly. They're left with much less to think about, so little things become disproportionately important to them.
Three, they're often losing control and independence, and sometimes their faculties. You try remaining friendly when you're treated like a baby because your body and maybe a bit of your own mind are betraying you.
Nothing much can be done about the first (unless it's a symptom of the other two instead of another cause)... but there's a lot that can be done about items 2 & 3 that we don't do because it's easier to simply warehouse the elderly and give them minimal care while waiting for them to die so we can say we miss them.
I'd rather give the assistant a name and *mostly* have it answer only when my voice addresses it.
It would probably be useful to have security settings that would allow others to run some searches. We're working towards a 'Jarvis' interface, right? If it just talks to me, that's actually rather limiting.
Which bugs me no end. By population we're 1/10th the size of the USA. We have ports on both coasts, rail infrastructure between, and international airports.
There's no reason we can't process more of our own raw materials into final product and a larger share of the economic benefit here.
...that we celebrate the astronaut and hardly notice the rocket scientist and the engineers.
Yes, it takes impressive balls/ovaries to get into a small tin can mounted on top of a giant tube of explosives and ride that into space. (Though this could also be stupidity or insanity..)
Yes, it takes an impressive amount of composure, skill, and training to handle a trip into space, especially if anything goes off-plan. More than I'll ever have.
But NONE of that would be useful or necessary at all if someone hadn't conceived of and built the hardware, and there are a lot fewer people capable of designing an orbit (or beyond) capable rocket than there are people of capable of riding one. And that was even more true in the early days when a lot of the theory and best practice wasn't available with a Google search.
It's nice when you read about the astronauts acknowledging that. Outside of astronauts and space enthusiasts, you find a lot more people who know an astronaut's name than that of the engineer behind the equipment that made them an astronaut...
Mines around a perimeter to deter intrusion, for instance... there's nothing any more wrong with that than shooting someone trying to rush your position. Mines in a field to stop farming to cut off the enemy's food supply... that's war.
Morality comes from the person who decided where the mines should be deployed, the person who didn't keep records on that deployment, and from the military (all the way up their chain of command) that didn't remove them after the conflict ended.
You get the biggest, best-equipped military in the world. One (admittedly large by area and population) nation, effectively dominating a large portion of the planet and strongly influencing the rest. If you take off the gloves, you could take on the entire world and win.
You've done that at the expense of healthcare, education, and social programs. It's a choice you make every election cycle.
>There is now hope that the same techniques will be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make million-dollar trading decisions, and do countless other things to transform whole industries. But this won't happen -- or shouldn't happen -- unless we find ways of making techniques like deep learning more understandable to their creators and accountable to their users.
While I care about understanding the system so it can be improved (hopefully before a problem occurs), ultimately all that matters is that it produces statistically better results than a human.
If a machine kills someone (and we don't even know why) 1% of the time, but a human doing the same job would mess up and kill 3% of people (but we'd understand why)... I'll take ignorance.
>Men are dumb enough to fall into the trap of the 60-hour work week with no life balance and women seem to not be.
As a middle-aged career man, I'm marginally qualified to respond to this with authority.
I WANTED to work those hours at the expense of outside life. I ENJOYED it. A young man is full of enthusiasm and competitiveness. The chance to succeed at something I was told couldn't be done, the challenge of proving I was the best... that was worth more than my paycheque to me.
Of course I slowed down a bit with time, and now I have a nice, strong dividing line between work and personal life, but I don't regret those early years at all. They were extremely satisfying.
Maybe that's testosterone, and maybe that's why women don't have that experience as a general rule, but so what? You couldn't have made me slow down and smell the roses and even if you had, it would have LOWERED my perceived quality of life at the time.
So from some people's point of view I gave up a decade of my personal life in return for a significant career advancement. I'm OK with that.
More importantly, *any woman can choose to do the same thing*. If they don't, *that is also their right*.
The solution is obvious... discriminate against women who want those low-hanging-fruit office jobs. There are lots of men who aren't typically aggressive or whatever stereotypical male traits you want to measure by. Hire them.
Attempt job equity at a job description level using a standard of "do you meet the qualifications and are you of the sex that is currently at under 50% representation for the job category?". A simple lack of qualified female applicants will have to suffice to explain the disparity at the top.
>It'll be shame to see it happen because Minecraft is great for kids
It's not that difficult to run your own server, even with a few server-side mods.
It's not quite as exciting as having a whole world of people playing so there's always a group to play with... but you know who is connecting (I run a whitelist) and you know who is ultimately controlling the content.
Slashdot Mirror
If they've automated such detection, they're already 'hacking' your site by violating your implied TOS. Virtual trespass, if you will.
And I can't imagine they haven't, since manually checking their indexed sites for such activity would probably require more man-hours than mankind currently has available.
Google used to add value - they let you find what you needed to find. Now they're scraping sites and taking work product without recompense... though Google's probably far better at doing the same work with an in-house algorithm anyway.
The response to this is (so long as Google 'plays nice') is to restrict what your site gives to Google to teasers and only deliver your full site to actual visitors.
If the program really was there to fill a labour pool deficit, it never would have allowed for visas for positions where the wage was below the current median wage (for those employed, not for empty positions waiting to be filled). You'd still get downward pressure on wages as labour supply increased, but it'd be slower.
If your goal is to outsource to cheaper countries, the existing program works very well... until companies that can decide to move as much of their operations abroad as required to cut costs, until the cost of products domestically rises enough to throw sand in the gears of the economy, etc.
Free trade isn't just for goods, it's for labour and standard of living. We're watching it all even out but the process is uneven due to social and political differences between nations.
That is a beautiful movie, nice choice. The remake failed to recreate what made it so.
Unfortunately, in a large and complex society it is unreasonable to expect everyone to question everything all the time - it's too easy for people to avoid the problem of a 'reputation' given a large enough population and you can't spend all your time doing background checks on everyone when there's no place keeping trustworthy records and adhering to record keeping standards.
That's where regulation comes in - everyone agrees on standards, which are enforced by a standards body, and violators deal with the legal system upon discovery.
Yes, this makes it more difficult for 'little guys' to enter the market, and yes this gets abused by the larger players to make it even more difficult... but if you throw out such regulation you do NOT get a libertarian paradise - you get the lowest common denominator and nobody setting a 'floor' for just how low that can go, and then when enough people have been screwed over you get the public screaming for regulations.
I think the guy/organization in China who effectively owns the Bitcoin network will upgrade just enough to ensure they remains in control, while not owning the network obviously and entirely to reduce the cultist's confidence in it to the point he can't keep extracting wealth from the US.
It's not about maximizing Bitcoin mining, it's about maximizing net profits and keeping the scam going for as long as possible.
Good. Now try again where you show Newton was right about God and I'm wrong, using reproducible experiments that support a logically consistent theory that isn't more easily explained by something simpler (that is also supported by reproducible experiments that support a logically consistent theory that isn't more easily explained by something simpler, etc.)
Lots of religious folk are smart and achieve great things. That doesn't mean God exists, it means they have blind spots when it comes to their faith. Since faith is, by definition, believing what you want without proof in support of it (and often despite proof against it)... it's not particularly surprising Newton was deluded on the subject.
> In any case, a doctor who is asked for a second opinion gets the luxury of having both the first doctor's records (hopefully), as well as a data point occurring later in time.
Thank you for posting, as this would not have occurred to me if you hadn't.
Without RTFA (because I'm lazy right now), I'd love to see them use the expert system in parallel to doctors, complete with initial and follow-up visits to see what the difference is when the same doctor gets that second data point.
I would still expect the program to win, simply because it's never going to miscalculate a probability or forget an option, but it would be interesting to see how much the gap closes, especially when compared to how rare the condition is and how obvious the symptoms. I'd expect there are lots of options for rare edge cases a human would dismiss if they even recollected them.
An annoyance of modern life in the free world - people who believe in God (without the slightest sliver of proof and with plenty of evidence to explain where such beliefs came from, evidence that they are not immutable but have in fact 'muted' quite a bit over the years, decades, centuries and millennia) still vastly outnumber people who don't believe in the fantasy.
And if you're too obvious with your disbelief, they'll assume you're fundamentally evil (or just misguided if they're not the nasty, incredibly hypocritical type) and will be prejudiced against you in ways that can severely affect your life.
Maybe you find your social options limited, maybe you find your employment options limited, and maybe rather than passively exclude you they also spread the word around their community to ensure everyone else does, too.
I'm lucky to live in a place where that's not true to any significant degree, but there are plenty of places left where it is.
An adult who earnestly believes in Santa, the Tooth Fairy, or the Easter Bunny and will defend that belief against Occam's Razor and all the rational alternative explanations will either be mocked or checked for psychiatric issues. An adult who earnestly believes an invisible, intangible, omniscient, omnipresent father figure who was intimately involved in the world a few thousand years ago but now only 'works in mysterious ways', though... you have to respect their beliefs for for some reason.
Vital Technologies of Bolton, Ontario, Canada went out of business trying to market their educational model, which had pressure, temperature, EM, and colour sensors.
In the lab, they were working on assembling one that could listen to your heartbeat and extract useful data from your body's electrical fields from a distance of a few feet.
> I assume the water it produces is akin to distilled water. Isn't that bad to drink?
Yes. A lot of the human digestive tract works by osmosis. Putting distilled water through it means it's going to reverse, and rather than your body absorbing a lot of important things, it's going to be dumping them - presumably into your stool.
I don't imagine hardening water to healthy levels will be all that difficult... the question is, can you make it inexpensive, robust, and foolproof enough for the type of applications this device (if it works and is practical) would see.
Continual consumption of distilled water is bad for your heart, nervous system, and immune system - but it takes fair while, and there are other ways to get minerals and other things you might normally get from water... mainly *eating* them. Still, it would be an additional concern that you otherwise wouldn't even have to think about.
Being able to blame Internet disconnection on external forces would just be icing on the cake.
What we really ought to do is declare free communication a human right (though I pity the person trying to figure out language allowing the suppression of dangerous misinformation, harassment, incitement to violence, etc.), then make damn sure the borders stay 'information porous'.
Just like beaming propaganda radio or television, we ought to be forcing free information flow on tyrannical regimes... at home and abroad. A government tries to lock things down, and the rest of the world should be working on whatever is practical for getting packets in and out of the 'no communication' zone.
Actually, they outsourced that to the airport cops, so that was government doing rotten things on behalf of a corporation.
I understand someone wanting to prevent people from benefiting without paying for their product.
I also understand the consumer fed up with being endlessly deceived and abused as the vendor tries to wring every last cent from them.
While piracy has given the appearance of the balance of power being with the latter group, it really never has been. Until our culture and laws change, it never will be.
I think he had the wrong perspective. The elderly tend to get 'cranky' for three reasons:
One, there's a portion of the brain governing impulse control that actually atrophies with age.
Two, their world has often shrunk drastically as their mobility is impaired, friends have died off, and younger family is busy and can't visit constantly. They're left with much less to think about, so little things become disproportionately important to them.
Three, they're often losing control and independence, and sometimes their faculties. You try remaining friendly when you're treated like a baby because your body and maybe a bit of your own mind are betraying you.
Nothing much can be done about the first (unless it's a symptom of the other two instead of another cause)... but there's a lot that can be done about items 2 & 3 that we don't do because it's easier to simply warehouse the elderly and give them minimal care while waiting for them to die so we can say we miss them.
The problem with super-strength is that it doesn't come with (all that much) super-mass.
So, you think you can lift 1000kg now? Sure, but you're actually going to pull your face down unless that suit has flipper-like feet.
I'd rather give the assistant a name and *mostly* have it answer only when my voice addresses it.
It would probably be useful to have security settings that would allow others to run some searches. We're working towards a 'Jarvis' interface, right? If it just talks to me, that's actually rather limiting.
Which bugs me no end. By population we're 1/10th the size of the USA. We have ports on both coasts, rail infrastructure between, and international airports.
There's no reason we can't process more of our own raw materials into final product and a larger share of the economic benefit here.
...that we celebrate the astronaut and hardly notice the rocket scientist and the engineers.
Yes, it takes impressive balls/ovaries to get into a small tin can mounted on top of a giant tube of explosives and ride that into space. (Though this could also be stupidity or insanity..)
Yes, it takes an impressive amount of composure, skill, and training to handle a trip into space, especially if anything goes off-plan. More than I'll ever have.
But NONE of that would be useful or necessary at all if someone hadn't conceived of and built the hardware, and there are a lot fewer people capable of designing an orbit (or beyond) capable rocket than there are people of capable of riding one. And that was even more true in the early days when a lot of the theory and best practice wasn't available with a Google search.
It's nice when you read about the astronauts acknowledging that. Outside of astronauts and space enthusiasts, you find a lot more people who know an astronaut's name than that of the engineer behind the equipment that made them an astronaut...
>these immoral weapons.
Mines around a perimeter to deter intrusion, for instance... there's nothing any more wrong with that than shooting someone trying to rush your position. Mines in a field to stop farming to cut off the enemy's food supply... that's war.
Morality comes from the person who decided where the mines should be deployed, the person who didn't keep records on that deployment, and from the military (all the way up their chain of command) that didn't remove them after the conflict ended.
You get the biggest, best-equipped military in the world. One (admittedly large by area and population) nation, effectively dominating a large portion of the planet and strongly influencing the rest. If you take off the gloves, you could take on the entire world and win.
You've done that at the expense of healthcare, education, and social programs. It's a choice you make every election cycle.
>There is now hope that the same techniques will be able to diagnose deadly diseases, make million-dollar trading decisions, and do countless other things to transform whole industries. But this won't happen -- or shouldn't happen -- unless we find ways of making techniques like deep learning more understandable to their creators and accountable to their users.
While I care about understanding the system so it can be improved (hopefully before a problem occurs), ultimately all that matters is that it produces statistically better results than a human.
If a machine kills someone (and we don't even know why) 1% of the time, but a human doing the same job would mess up and kill 3% of people (but we'd understand why)... I'll take ignorance.
>Men are dumb enough to fall into the trap of the 60-hour work week with no life balance and women seem to not be.
As a middle-aged career man, I'm marginally qualified to respond to this with authority.
I WANTED to work those hours at the expense of outside life. I ENJOYED it. A young man is full of enthusiasm and competitiveness. The chance to succeed at something I was told couldn't be done, the challenge of proving I was the best... that was worth more than my paycheque to me.
Of course I slowed down a bit with time, and now I have a nice, strong dividing line between work and personal life, but I don't regret those early years at all. They were extremely satisfying.
Maybe that's testosterone, and maybe that's why women don't have that experience as a general rule, but so what? You couldn't have made me slow down and smell the roses and even if you had, it would have LOWERED my perceived quality of life at the time.
So from some people's point of view I gave up a decade of my personal life in return for a significant career advancement. I'm OK with that.
More importantly, *any woman can choose to do the same thing*. If they don't, *that is also their right*.
The solution is obvious... discriminate against women who want those low-hanging-fruit office jobs. There are lots of men who aren't typically aggressive or whatever stereotypical male traits you want to measure by. Hire them.
Attempt job equity at a job description level using a standard of "do you meet the qualifications and are you of the sex that is currently at under 50% representation for the job category?". A simple lack of qualified female applicants will have to suffice to explain the disparity at the top.
>It'll be shame to see it happen because Minecraft is great for kids
It's not that difficult to run your own server, even with a few server-side mods.
It's not quite as exciting as having a whole world of people playing so there's always a group to play with... but you know who is connecting (I run a whitelist) and you know who is ultimately controlling the content.