>There are so many actual issues that black or native North Americans face
When I was a kid, dark-skinned people didn't show up well in photos... primarily because white people chose the film chemistry to make the faces they were familiar with (pale ones!) look good in pictures.
I think THAT was probably deserving of some indignant complaining. THIS is a quick laugh and a "Well, let's try and figure out how to make the algorithm better". Anything more tells you a lot more about the person complaining than it does about the coders.
If you want to play that game... it should never have happened in the first place. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is a pretty universal bit of wisdom humans routinely ignore if it interferes with their tribal instincts.
I went with 'grandparents' because as a middle-aged white guy I had racist grandparents who are no longer living. And mostly because I wasn't raised in a racist environment and the idea of one is (to me) foreign to my generation.
>I think you should avoid eye contact with gorillas as they may view it as a form of aggression.
Absolutely. And because I'm smarter than a gorilla (I hope!) it's on me to bend to its instincts. They're already locked up in a smallish habitat with a bunch of hairless apes constantly walking through their territory, they don't need us entering an eye-contact dominance contest with them to stress them out.
My local zoo has extremely thick Plexiglas (or equivalent) on the gorilla enclosure. I've seen the big male get pissed and attack the window and I STILL didn't trust he wasn't going to break it down and rip a few visitor's arms off.
If it thought the pedestrian was a gorilla... brake and avoid followed by 'accelerate away quickly'.
An adult silverback can run 400lbs of angry muscle, so it's going to wreck your car if you hit it... and if you scare it, it's going to wreck your car anyway.
It's like that recent H&M ad scandal with the little kid wearing a "Coolest monkey in the jungle" shirt. Kids get called monkeys all the time... when they're playing (especially climbing trees!) there's not a hell of a lot of difference between them and other young primates playing.
Because of (primarily) American racism issues, everyone assumes if you're calling a dark-skinned kid a 'monkey' you're trying to chain him and put him to work picking cotton. Same thing here - it's an understandable situation that gets people all bent out of shape because of shit that SHOULD be nothing but embarrassing history that died with our grandparents' generation.
Have you ever gone to the zoo and looked at the larger primates? They're fascinating because they're so much like us; I defy you to look a silverback in the eyes and not see a near-human intelligence looking back at you.
To a human, they're obviously not human... but to an algorithm checking out just the facial features? I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.
It was not uncommon when I was applying to universities in Canada to expect them to do their own testing of prospective students, since they generally didn't trust high schools not to inflate marks, and didn't have faith in the relevance of what standard testing was available (not a lot - IIRC, standard testing did not continue through high school).
In my opinion, if an educational institution cares about its reputation it should have its own entrance tests.
And here I am on 10M ADSL. Honestly, while I suppose it'd be nice to have more speed, I have yet to find the need for it. I can download 720p video faster than I can watch it, and that's my biggest bandwidth requirement.
On the other hand, the faster the standard, the less I'll get charged for my 'slow' connection, so I'm all for that.
I agree, but as this board is mostly American, arguing that here will get you ignored or derided as a communist.
I was only speaking to how a company will behave in the existing environment. It is indeed up to society to decide what they want that environment to look like.
> or take advantage of their experience and get them working/self-training on better stuff.
That's mostly a pipe-dream. If you're replacing 9 of 10 employees per location with an automation system, are you going to add 900% more locations to take advantage of the freed-up labour? Chances are if you had the money to expand like that, you'd already have done it.
>The true fool is the CEO who thinks replace-and-fire is the whole of the strategy and a magical solution.
If your company doesn't have massive market growth potential, there's little point in keeping around a human made redundant by a machine. Especially the low-skilled labour, which can be picked up in any market whenever you may decide you need it.
I did it for a while with a microwave and a hot plate. OK, technically the hot plate was probably against fire code, but I did it.
A small microwave isn't that expensive compared to the savings from avoiding a year's worth of fast food, and a hot plate is even less. I can easily cook something for myself at 1/10th the cost of a McD's meal that is also (much) better for me.
It takes a bit of effort to grocery shop and a bit of effort to cook, but by all means, if you enjoy staying poor and somewhat malnourished, keep blowing your money at restaurants.
Absolutely. But the economic version of natural selection still applies... if he doesn't do it, his company will tank and another will take over. So the choice is, "Do we push this problem onto the taxpayer or do we go bankrupt while someone else pushes it onto the taxpayer?"
If robots are available, less expensive, and acceptable to consumers... the CEO who DOESN'T replace their workers with them is a CEO presiding over a failing company. Because while they're not doing it, others are, and have greater profit margins to work with.
> AT&T and Comcast are refusing or otherwise massively delaying moving the "wires, cables, etc" so that Google can not complete their rollout.
IANALawyer, but I would think the correct solution would be in the terms of pole access. Say, a requirement to either perform within a reasonable period at a reasonable fee any requested maintenance relating to other tenants' use of the infrastructure, or be billed for the pole owner's chosen vendor to do it for you. With a penalty clause for failure to comply set as loss of use of the poles.
At the consumer level, the appeal is that it's a small box you plug in and forget unless you want to move it.
That's why I replaced mine with a USB enclosure - so I can take the entire library wherever I want without carrying a large computer case, keyboard, and monitor with me.
>the altimeter (actually a barometer) needs to know the outside air pressure in order to hold altitude.
If they're using pressure-based altitude measurements they're fools. That is insufficiently accurate for this purpose! A radio altimeter for a drone adds around 3.5W of power draw, 300 grams of weight, and around $500 to the cost. Such a device would also likely fade in ability after about 60m unless designed to use more power (and cost more money), but really 60m is more than needed for the purpose I proposed. They are, however, very accurate and easily encased in a waterproof housing.
Why does the ESC need to breathe? If it's heat dissipation, a radiator does not need to be porous!
I'd mostly be worried about the rotors themselves, since rotating seals (especially delicate and tiny ones) aren't easy. Then again, if you use a decent marine grease it's probably not a huge issue.
I would certainly not expect to see such a drone showing up at the local electronics shop for $20!
The 'right to repair' movement is using tractors as an example of manufacturers being evil - restricting the rights of people who have purchased tangible devices to repair them.
If they're not already full of computers (much like a car is these days), they soon will be. With wireless diagnostics and controls. And with that will come the 'option' for firmware updates, which will then become mandatory with a periodic phone-home requirement or they'll shut down the tractors.
So yes, tractors have managed without Internet (at all!) until fairly recently... but the people making the tractors don't want that to continue any longer than they can help.
I thought the FCC was in the process of relaxing the definition of broadband so the established players could pretend they were doing more than they are?
Your car IS crash-resistant. It has airbags and crumple zones, seatbelts and antilock brakes. There are plenty of things in car design to protect the most important parts in the event of a collision.
For a moderately lightweight drone intended to operate over water at low altitudes, 'crash-resistant' means able to fall a few dozen feet into water, and then bob on the surface without the electronics getting wet until it is recovered by the owner. Maybe even with battery-monitoring to have it auto-descend gently when it is nearing the end of its run time.
>How can it be possible that a big company like Western Digital constructs a backdoor to your personal data?
It's not unheard of for companies to do this on consumer devices, for technical support to assist people who lock themselves out of devices and don't want to lose data. Up until now I'd only ever seen it in rebranded modems bundled with DSL service, but for a while it was difficult to avoid.
I agree it was never a good idea, and nowadays it should be considered criminal.
>The true GoPro market is not about showing what it is like to do something, its showing YOU doing something to others.
Produce a drone that follows a beacon at a chosen distance and horizontal / vertical offset, and can handle obstacle avoidance. Make it crash-resistant, waterproof and buoyant, and able to keep up with a jet ski with a 15 minute flight time. If you want to get fancy, have it clever enough to be able to circle its target or occasionally pass overhead, or modify its relative position for best lighting.
If you can build that, you'll sell it to all sorts of people who want to get video of themselves out on the water, and you'll have a lot less in the way of issues with people getting offended by them for privacy or safety reasons.
Slashdot Mirror
>There are so many actual issues that black or native North Americans face
When I was a kid, dark-skinned people didn't show up well in photos... primarily because white people chose the film chemistry to make the faces they were familiar with (pale ones!) look good in pictures.
I think THAT was probably deserving of some indignant complaining. THIS is a quick laugh and a "Well, let's try and figure out how to make the algorithm better". Anything more tells you a lot more about the person complaining than it does about the coders.
If you want to play that game... it should never have happened in the first place. "Do unto others as you would have others do unto you" is a pretty universal bit of wisdom humans routinely ignore if it interferes with their tribal instincts.
I went with 'grandparents' because as a middle-aged white guy I had racist grandparents who are no longer living. And mostly because I wasn't raised in a racist environment and the idea of one is (to me) foreign to my generation.
>I think you should avoid eye contact with gorillas as they may view it as a form of aggression.
Absolutely. And because I'm smarter than a gorilla (I hope!) it's on me to bend to its instincts. They're already locked up in a smallish habitat with a bunch of hairless apes constantly walking through their territory, they don't need us entering an eye-contact dominance contest with them to stress them out.
My local zoo has extremely thick Plexiglas (or equivalent) on the gorilla enclosure. I've seen the big male get pissed and attack the window and I STILL didn't trust he wasn't going to break it down and rip a few visitor's arms off.
If it thought the pedestrian was a gorilla... brake and avoid followed by 'accelerate away quickly'.
An adult silverback can run 400lbs of angry muscle, so it's going to wreck your car if you hit it... and if you scare it, it's going to wreck your car anyway.
It's like that recent H&M ad scandal with the little kid wearing a "Coolest monkey in the jungle" shirt. Kids get called monkeys all the time... when they're playing (especially climbing trees!) there's not a hell of a lot of difference between them and other young primates playing.
Because of (primarily) American racism issues, everyone assumes if you're calling a dark-skinned kid a 'monkey' you're trying to chain him and put him to work picking cotton. Same thing here - it's an understandable situation that gets people all bent out of shape because of shit that SHOULD be nothing but embarrassing history that died with our grandparents' generation.
Have you ever gone to the zoo and looked at the larger primates? They're fascinating because they're so much like us; I defy you to look a silverback in the eyes and not see a near-human intelligence looking back at you.
To a human, they're obviously not human... but to an algorithm checking out just the facial features? I'm surprised this didn't happen sooner.
It was not uncommon when I was applying to universities in Canada to expect them to do their own testing of prospective students, since they generally didn't trust high schools not to inflate marks, and didn't have faith in the relevance of what standard testing was available (not a lot - IIRC, standard testing did not continue through high school).
In my opinion, if an educational institution cares about its reputation it should have its own entrance tests.
And here I am on 10M ADSL. Honestly, while I suppose it'd be nice to have more speed, I have yet to find the need for it. I can download 720p video faster than I can watch it, and that's my biggest bandwidth requirement.
On the other hand, the faster the standard, the less I'll get charged for my 'slow' connection, so I'm all for that.
Because for large amount of data, sneakernet is still more convenient.
My solution included the term 'reasonable' because anything I choose - not being an industry expert - is likely to be laughable.
In a contract for pole use, I'd expect limits to be specified in days.
>some things you NEED to be regulated.
I agree, but as this board is mostly American, arguing that here will get you ignored or derided as a communist.
I was only speaking to how a company will behave in the existing environment. It is indeed up to society to decide what they want that environment to look like.
> or take advantage of their experience and get them working/self-training on better stuff.
That's mostly a pipe-dream. If you're replacing 9 of 10 employees per location with an automation system, are you going to add 900% more locations to take advantage of the freed-up labour? Chances are if you had the money to expand like that, you'd already have done it.
>The true fool is the CEO who thinks replace-and-fire is the whole of the strategy and a magical solution.
If your company doesn't have massive market growth potential, there's little point in keeping around a human made redundant by a machine. Especially the low-skilled labour, which can be picked up in any market whenever you may decide you need it.
I did it for a while with a microwave and a hot plate. OK, technically the hot plate was probably against fire code, but I did it.
A small microwave isn't that expensive compared to the savings from avoiding a year's worth of fast food, and a hot plate is even less. I can easily cook something for myself at 1/10th the cost of a McD's meal that is also (much) better for me.
It takes a bit of effort to grocery shop and a bit of effort to cook, but by all means, if you enjoy staying poor and somewhat malnourished, keep blowing your money at restaurants.
Absolutely. But the economic version of natural selection still applies... if he doesn't do it, his company will tank and another will take over. So the choice is, "Do we push this problem onto the taxpayer or do we go bankrupt while someone else pushes it onto the taxpayer?"
Seems like an easy choice.
If robots are available, less expensive, and acceptable to consumers... the CEO who DOESN'T replace their workers with them is a CEO presiding over a failing company. Because while they're not doing it, others are, and have greater profit margins to work with.
> AT&T and Comcast are refusing or otherwise massively delaying moving the "wires, cables, etc" so that Google can not complete their rollout.
IANALawyer, but I would think the correct solution would be in the terms of pole access. Say, a requirement to either perform within a reasonable period at a reasonable fee any requested maintenance relating to other tenants' use of the infrastructure, or be billed for the pole owner's chosen vendor to do it for you. With a penalty clause for failure to comply set as loss of use of the poles.
>what's the appeal to hardware NAS.
At the consumer level, the appeal is that it's a small box you plug in and forget unless you want to move it.
That's why I replaced mine with a USB enclosure - so I can take the entire library wherever I want without carrying a large computer case, keyboard, and monitor with me.
>the altimeter (actually a barometer) needs to know the outside air pressure in order to hold altitude.
If they're using pressure-based altitude measurements they're fools. That is insufficiently accurate for this purpose! A radio altimeter for a drone adds around 3.5W of power draw, 300 grams of weight, and around $500 to the cost. Such a device would also likely fade in ability after about 60m unless designed to use more power (and cost more money), but really 60m is more than needed for the purpose I proposed. They are, however, very accurate and easily encased in a waterproof housing.
Why does the ESC need to breathe? If it's heat dissipation, a radiator does not need to be porous!
I'd mostly be worried about the rotors themselves, since rotating seals (especially delicate and tiny ones) aren't easy. Then again, if you use a decent marine grease it's probably not a huge issue.
I would certainly not expect to see such a drone showing up at the local electronics shop for $20!
That's an excellent recitation of political talking points that doesn't actually address my post.
The 'right to repair' movement is using tractors as an example of manufacturers being evil - restricting the rights of people who have purchased tangible devices to repair them.
If they're not already full of computers (much like a car is these days), they soon will be. With wireless diagnostics and controls. And with that will come the 'option' for firmware updates, which will then become mandatory with a periodic phone-home requirement or they'll shut down the tractors.
So yes, tractors have managed without Internet (at all!) until fairly recently... but the people making the tractors don't want that to continue any longer than they can help.
I thought the FCC was in the process of relaxing the definition of broadband so the established players could pretend they were doing more than they are?
>I trust the Chinese government even less, and will avoid entrusting my data to a Chinese-made phone.
1) As a Canadian, I'm less likely to have trouble from the Chinese looking at my phone contents than the Americans (who share with Canada).
2) The phone I bought has been dissected by non-Chinese hackers who found nothing unusual or scary on it.
3) Unfortunately, countering point 1, it is an Android phone so in reality Google probably owns it. :(
4) I got a great (in my opinion) phone for a lot less than I'd pay if I'd bought a similarly-featured domestically available phone.
Another 'valuable' AC comment. /s
Your car IS crash-resistant. It has airbags and crumple zones, seatbelts and antilock brakes. There are plenty of things in car design to protect the most important parts in the event of a collision.
For a moderately lightweight drone intended to operate over water at low altitudes, 'crash-resistant' means able to fall a few dozen feet into water, and then bob on the surface without the electronics getting wet until it is recovered by the owner. Maybe even with battery-monitoring to have it auto-descend gently when it is nearing the end of its run time.
>How can it be possible that a big company like Western Digital constructs a backdoor to your personal data?
It's not unheard of for companies to do this on consumer devices, for technical support to assist people who lock themselves out of devices and don't want to lose data. Up until now I'd only ever seen it in rebranded modems bundled with DSL service, but for a while it was difficult to avoid.
I agree it was never a good idea, and nowadays it should be considered criminal.
>The true GoPro market is not about showing what it is like to do something, its showing YOU doing something to others.
Produce a drone that follows a beacon at a chosen distance and horizontal / vertical offset, and can handle obstacle avoidance. Make it crash-resistant, waterproof and buoyant, and able to keep up with a jet ski with a 15 minute flight time. If you want to get fancy, have it clever enough to be able to circle its target or occasionally pass overhead, or modify its relative position for best lighting.
If you can build that, you'll sell it to all sorts of people who want to get video of themselves out on the water, and you'll have a lot less in the way of issues with people getting offended by them for privacy or safety reasons.