"The job of the IRS is to collect taxes, not prepare them."
except that how is the IRS supposed to know if you filed and paid the correct amount?
that's right, the IRS has to also compute its version of what you owe to see that it matches, i.e. it has to "PREPARE" your taxes ANYWAYS. And they have to already have almost all info needed. Its all duplicate effort -- a waste of your time.
I thought such contracts were illegal or invalid. NIH had similar requirements that if your education or training was paid thru an NIH fellowship, you had to "payback" by working in the field of training for several years. That arrangement was later ruled to be illegal indenturing.
I do this also (Unknown number? pick up and say NOTHING) (Real caller? always eventually says Hello) (Fake caller, hangs up)
Another variant is: Unknown number? pick up then hang up immediately. Real caller/important call? invariably will call you back quickly, Fake? doesn't call back...
My primary email address and mailbox is maintained daily, deleting all spam and junk. At the end of every month, all large attachments are saved (if valuable) and otherwise deleted. Then the mailbox for that month is archived and a new mailbox for the new month starts with zero. Archived mailboxes are accessible via the IMAP server.
Each month amounts to about 30MB of archived emails. I have emails dating back to the early 1980's. All searchable with grep or imap.
All incoming emails to this primary email address are also copied to another mailbox. This other mailbox is the one that my cell phone accesses. This mailbox is aged out at about 10 days (i.e. nothing is older than 10 days). So the cell phone doesn't have to keep infinity emails and its set to delete emails after about 7-10 days also.
I have multiple other email addresses, on gmail, hotmail/outlook, and yahoo. I used to try to maintain these also, but now I just let them do the infinite thing... Only one of these addresses keeps really important stuff. Most are use for non-critical Internet nonsense and handles for various Internet accounts.
that "plenty of evidence study" is totally ridiculous... didn't even include tax and tip (nevermind gas, driving costs). they list $3 for broccoli, that is way way off... around here (NY) $2 buys you 5X the broccoli included in one of those meals. Nearly every price listed is bogus.
The only time eating out is going to be cheaper is for fast food, low quality mass produced meals, which pretty much means high-carbs and not healthy.
And as far as saving time, other than fast food options, delivery would usually be faster, otherwise home cooking will be faster than most any decent quality restaurant. The high end, of course, requires skill and time that most cannot match at home.
so you're going to go to a "good restaurant" and READ while you wait? How gauche... Read while driving to the restaurant? read while waiting for your table?
Ok, so when you're cooking, you can listen to music OF YOUR CHOICE (or even TV if you must).... not possible at a restaurant (unless I suppose you're going to do the earbud thing and continue to be gauche...)
"I eat exactly *0* homecooked meals a week. My time is worth more to me than the $$ is costs to get a (good) restaurant meal. "
Unless you live in NYC and go around the corner to your fave restaurant (and even if this is true), I don't believe you actually save much time given your "good restaurant meal". It is fairly simple to prepare a very high quality meal with a wide variety of foods in well under an hour, in many cases under 30minutes. No "good restaurant" experience that I know of is less than 60mins, usually at least 90mins. And if it is truly "good" and in NYC, you are going to be waiting for a table for at least 30mins.
So no, even if time > $$$ (which I might agree in many scenerios), I don't believe you are actually saving time. The caveat would be decent take out/delivery where you still eat at home, but you can work while a restaurant cooks and delivers.
"At what point do we finally decide that C just wasn't the best choice for large scale long lived systems?"
So what choice should have been made... in 1972? (early days of Unix).
Seems like it was an excellent choice for 1972 and survive nearly 50 years (i.e. your "long lived" criterion). Was there another choice in 1972 that was a better choice in 1972 that has shown itself to be a popular (i.e. grown in usage by leaps and bounds since 1972 or earlier) and solid choice in 2018?
This legal conundrum is exactly why common carrier status was created. The previous FCC tried to classify ISPs as common carriers, which would absolve them from policing the content that they carry. But ISPs don't want to be hamstrung by this status... so this is the result. ISPs then *can* be sued and held accountable for what it carries...
Forgot to add the third factor: File formats. If the hardware and OS/API changes won't get you, the file format changes will. Most people have to SHARE files with the rest of the world. The shift from.DOC and.XLS to.DOCX and.XLSX forced a lot of MS Office upgrades on people even if they were perfectly happy with older copies of Office. As long as the file formats are also controlled by these same entities that want constant upgrades, most of the market will be forced to upgrades anyways. Hence the importance of not letting proprietary image formats overtake.JPG and.TIF.
Of course the obvious thing to do is to 1) find free equivalents, 2) hang on to the non-ransomware versions as long as possible.
But particularly in regards to #2: It won't last forever.... e.g. I have a piece of software I really like using. However it does not work on Windows 10. MS at some point will change Windows sufficiently to break your old copies of Photoshop, or the market will move off of Intel CPUs (e.g. to ARM or OpenRISC or whatever), which will also break these old copies.
Hanging on to old non-ransomware/rental software won't work in the long run, or even medium run. I've still got machines running Win XP, 2000. etc because of similar issues, but I know it won't last. Both hardware and OS/API changes (and the demands of keeping things secure over the Internet, etc) will force constant updates.
So yea, I guess free software (i.e. open source) is really the best solution... But support small companies that refuse to rent their products.
I get all the comments about trusting self-driving cars to obey laws, watch out for peds, etc. However there is no question that the human visual system is still worlds better than any artificial visual system at 1) recognizing objects in the face of otherwise ambiguous cues, integrating many visual cues (brightness, color, motion, depth, occlusions, textures, surface reflectance, etc, etc, 2) low light sensitivity. Compare any inexpensive camera (e.g. in smartphones, etc) to what the human eye act see in moonlight, the cheap cameras are terrible. The human retina can detect single photon events. What can typical cameras in consumer devices (and cars) do? I'd love to see what a self-driving car can do on a twisty winding road on a moonless night with possible obstacles in its path. The human eye operates over a 12 log unit range of brightness. It takes very expensive cameras and optical systems to come close to that.
Don't know why this is being touted as a "decline in interest" when the real story is that there hasn't been a clean useable jailbreak available for a LONG time, nothing really useable for IOS10 and nothing for IOS11, despite reports of "demos". Apple has done a good job of shutting JB'ing down, whether by patching holes, or.... I wonder if Apple pays these hackers off not to release the JB after a demo is released.
Yes IOS has offered many of the features that JB'ing used to provide, but not all... I still would JB if I could. But I can't be forever stuck on IOS8 either.
Neural circuits are at the scale of 50um (neurons are about 5um). The best fMRI machines can do about 500um-1mm, about an order of magnitude off in spatial resolution. And those magnets (7T-14T) are so powerful that it makes humans dizzy just to slowly move your head in them. At 14T the fields begin to impede blood flow (from the iron content in hemoglobin), so yes they are probably dangerous in ways we don't fully appreciate yet. You probably need something like 50T or more to get the spatial resolution you need to really "see" the functioning of neural circuits.
And that's only to get the BOLD signal (blood oxygen level-dependent), which is a SLOW, SLOW (1-10sec) signal that tells you more about blood oxygen than actual neural activity.
The current state of fMRI as a prospect for "reading minds" is like knowing that the CIA is in Langley, the Pentagon is in Arlington, and the White House and Capitol are in DC, seeing that certain lights in each go on, and claiming that you know what the US government is thinking and planning to do...
Not NIRS or fmri... Too slow (blood flow) and poorly resolved. She just mentions fmri because people know what it is from movies and the papers she references used fmri to "reconstruct" visual "thoughts". But she actually wants to access action potential information, which is 100-1000x faster than fmri and much better resolved in space (cellular resolution). It is "possible" because light is scattered and polarized by neuronal membranes when action potentials are conducted.
BUT it's never been done outside of a dish, never resolved in 3D thickness of live brain tissue because there is too much light scattering in 3D tissue and you really must use trans illumination (past light from one side, pick it up the other, to preserve polarization). Definitely will not work through skull, for cm's and back. Not happening no matter how much light you inject (people already use IR lasers, she is talking about and LCD sheet, right...).
Just not going to read our thoughts... Even if she solves the fmri in a cap problem, which itself is unlikely... Because: 1) way too much light scatter to get back enough light and resolve even 1mm (the current limit of fmri using the best magnets 14T which themselves are dangerous as the fields impede blood flood in the brain), it is only 2D information, 2) blood flow BOLD is too slow to encode thoughts (rise times of 100's of Ms, needs to be 100x faster), 3) 1mm resolution is not enough, need 50um for a cortical column, nevermind 5um for neurons,... Even if she solves all of that, still all you get is a movie of images. She like many are banking on the idea that the cortex is totally organized by function (mapped) so that reading at the cortical map level gives you thoughts and entire brain states. But it simply isn't so. Early (primal) sensory and motor brain areas are well mapped and organized according to input (such as images from the retina) but it quickly devolved into a morass of interconnected networks, poorly understood and NOT mapped. So all she will get are low level maps of images which isn't thought. MAYBE an image of my house when I think of my house but not WHAT I'm thinking about my house (do I want to burn it down, fix the roof, etc). Maybe you'd get a movie of visual and auditory and etc in my brain but you'd still be guessing what it all means -- like a movie of me and what I am doing, does that tell you what I'm thinking?
Anyways she'll never solve the technical problems and fmri-like imaging simply isn't good enough because it's blood/oxygen. And optical signals from action potentials never been done in the living 3d brain, only in a dish, nevermind through the skull.
Another question that I would have liked to see address: Prospects for much better cold weather (and hot weather) battery performance. If we are to replace IC vehicles with electric vehicles, we need batteries that be perform well at -20F or colder. Also 130F or hotter. What can be done to span a greater range of real-world operating temperatures?
no lithium is NOT a rare earth metal, not even close. Lithium is quite abundant. There is this huge deposit in Bolivia for example, that has all the lithium we'll need (lets shift our wars from the Middle East to SA, shall we?)
"What's truly frightening is how many religious nutjobs look forward to doomsday. And they vote. For populists who pander to them."
Perhaps as frightening is the notion, openly espoused by many, that, since the return of Christ and the Rapture are coming SOON, there really is no point in planning for the long term future, no point in saving the environment, invest in R&D and infrastructure, etc. And in fact, hastening the "end of days" would be a good thing...
Slashdot Mirror
"The job of the IRS is to collect taxes, not prepare them."
except that how is the IRS supposed to know if you filed and paid the correct amount?
that's right, the IRS has to also compute its version of what you owe to see that it matches, i.e. it has to "PREPARE" your taxes ANYWAYS. And they have to already have almost all info needed. Its all duplicate effort -- a waste of your time.
"Looks like large areas of land will turn from freezing to much more friendly temperatures, then. And more space for agriculture, too."
I'm sure the Russians will appreciate these features of the land as they invade from the now indefensible northern border...
I thought such contracts were illegal or invalid.
NIH had similar requirements that if your education or training was paid thru an NIH fellowship, you had to "payback" by working in the field of training for several years. That arrangement was later ruled to be illegal indenturing.
Should make it a form of loan.
I do this also (Unknown number? pick up and say NOTHING) (Real caller? always eventually says Hello) (Fake caller, hangs up)
Another variant is: Unknown number? pick up then hang up immediately. Real caller/important call? invariably will call you back quickly, Fake? doesn't call back...
My primary email address and mailbox is maintained daily, deleting all spam and junk. At the end of every month, all large attachments are saved (if valuable) and otherwise deleted. Then the mailbox for that month is archived and a new mailbox for the new month starts with zero. Archived mailboxes are accessible via the IMAP server.
Each month amounts to about 30MB of archived emails. I have emails dating back to the early 1980's. All searchable with grep or imap.
All incoming emails to this primary email address are also copied to another mailbox. This other mailbox is the one that my cell phone accesses. This mailbox is aged out at about 10 days (i.e. nothing is older than 10 days). So the cell phone doesn't have to keep infinity emails and its set to delete emails after about 7-10 days also.
I have multiple other email addresses, on gmail, hotmail/outlook, and yahoo. I used to try to maintain these also, but now I just let them do the infinite thing... Only one of these addresses keeps really important stuff. Most are use for non-critical Internet nonsense and handles for various Internet accounts.
that "plenty of evidence study" is totally ridiculous... didn't even include tax and tip (nevermind gas, driving costs).
they list $3 for broccoli, that is way way off... around here (NY) $2 buys you 5X the broccoli included in one of those meals. Nearly every price listed is bogus.
The only time eating out is going to be cheaper is for fast food, low quality mass produced meals, which pretty much means high-carbs and not healthy.
And as far as saving time, other than fast food options, delivery would usually be faster, otherwise home cooking will be faster than most any decent quality restaurant. The high end, of course, requires skill and time that most cannot match at home.
so you're going to go to a "good restaurant" and READ while you wait? How gauche... Read while driving to the restaurant? read while waiting for your table?
Ok, so when you're cooking, you can listen to music OF YOUR CHOICE (or even TV if you must).... not possible at a restaurant (unless I suppose you're going to do the earbud thing and continue to be gauche...)
"I eat exactly *0* homecooked meals a week. My time is worth more to me than the $$ is costs to get a (good) restaurant meal. "
Unless you live in NYC and go around the corner to your fave restaurant (and even if this is true), I don't believe you actually save much time given your "good restaurant meal". It is fairly simple to prepare a very high quality meal with a wide variety of foods in well under an hour, in many cases under 30minutes. No "good restaurant" experience that I know of is less than 60mins, usually at least 90mins. And if it is truly "good" and in NYC, you are going to be waiting for a table for at least 30mins.
So no, even if time > $$$ (which I might agree in many scenerios), I don't believe you are actually saving time. The caveat would be decent take out/delivery where you still eat at home, but you can work while a restaurant cooks and delivers.
"At what point do we finally decide that C just wasn't the best choice for large scale long lived systems?"
So what choice should have been made... in 1972? (early days of Unix).
Seems like it was an excellent choice for 1972 and survive nearly 50 years (i.e. your "long lived" criterion).
Was there another choice in 1972 that was a better choice in 1972 that has shown itself to be a popular (i.e. grown in usage by leaps and bounds since 1972 or earlier) and solid choice in 2018?
To the extent that C was designed with the PDP-11 machine code in mind,
if (a = b)
compiles directly into
MOV B, A
BNE 101$
which is a perfectly reasonable machine language construct (or any of its variants since most instructions set the PDP-11 condition codes.
I think many C programmers (certainly most of the early ones) are always aware of the machine code being generated as they are writing C....
(perhaps you think P-code when you write Pascal, good for you!)
Story's a bit off...
I bought a TI SR-50 freshman year in college, 1974. I think they were introduced in 1973. Before that, the TI SR-10... 1972.
This legal conundrum is exactly why common carrier status was created. The previous FCC tried to classify ISPs as common carriers, which would absolve them from policing the content that they carry. But ISPs don't want to be hamstrung by this status... so this is the result. ISPs then *can* be sued and held accountable for what it carries...
Well except for the part where Saturn became Jupiter... (ie a major mismatch between the book and movie)...
So will Apple (or a suitable proxy/agent/front) for $30,000, buy this Greykey so it can plug the hole(s)?
Forgot to add the third factor: File formats. If the hardware and OS/API changes won't get you, the file format changes will. Most people have to SHARE files with the rest of the world. The shift from .DOC and .XLS to .DOCX and .XLSX forced a lot of MS Office upgrades on people even if they were perfectly happy with older copies of Office. As long as the file formats are also controlled by these same entities that want constant upgrades, most of the market will be forced to upgrades anyways. Hence the importance of not letting proprietary image formats overtake .JPG and .TIF.
Of course the obvious thing to do is to 1) find free equivalents, 2) hang on to the non-ransomware versions as long as possible.
But particularly in regards to #2: It won't last forever.... e.g. I have a piece of software I really like using. However it does not work on Windows 10. MS at some point will change Windows sufficiently to break your old copies of Photoshop, or the market will move off of Intel CPUs (e.g. to ARM or OpenRISC or whatever), which will also break these old copies.
Hanging on to old non-ransomware/rental software won't work in the long run, or even medium run. I've still got machines running Win XP, 2000. etc because of similar issues, but I know it won't last. Both hardware and OS/API changes (and the demands of keeping things secure over the Internet, etc) will force constant updates.
So yea, I guess free software (i.e. open source) is really the best solution... But support small companies that refuse to rent their products.
I get all the comments about trusting self-driving cars to obey laws, watch out for peds, etc. However there is no question that the human visual system is still worlds better than any artificial visual system at 1) recognizing objects in the face of otherwise ambiguous cues, integrating many visual cues (brightness, color, motion, depth, occlusions, textures, surface reflectance, etc, etc, 2) low light sensitivity. Compare any inexpensive camera (e.g. in smartphones, etc) to what the human eye act see in moonlight, the cheap cameras are terrible. The human retina can detect single photon events. What can typical cameras in consumer devices (and cars) do? I'd love to see what a self-driving car can do on a twisty winding road on a moonless night with possible obstacles in its path. The human eye operates over a 12 log unit range of brightness. It takes very expensive cameras and optical systems to come close to that.
Don't know why this is being touted as a "decline in interest" when the real story is that there hasn't been a clean useable jailbreak available for a LONG time, nothing really useable for IOS10 and nothing for IOS11, despite reports of "demos". Apple has done a good job of shutting JB'ing down, whether by patching holes, or.... I wonder if Apple pays these hackers off not to release the JB after a demo is released.
Yes IOS has offered many of the features that JB'ing used to provide, but not all... I still would JB if I could. But I can't be forever stuck on IOS8 either.
Neural circuits are at the scale of 50um (neurons are about 5um). The best fMRI machines can do about 500um-1mm, about an order of magnitude off in spatial resolution. And those magnets (7T-14T) are so powerful that it makes humans dizzy just to slowly move your head in them. At 14T the fields begin to impede blood flow (from the iron content in hemoglobin), so yes they are probably dangerous in ways we don't fully appreciate yet. You probably need something like 50T or more to get the spatial resolution you need to really "see" the functioning of neural circuits.
And that's only to get the BOLD signal (blood oxygen level-dependent), which is a SLOW, SLOW (1-10sec) signal that tells you more about blood oxygen than actual neural activity.
The current state of fMRI as a prospect for "reading minds" is like knowing that the CIA is in Langley, the Pentagon is in Arlington, and the White House and Capitol are in DC, seeing that certain lights in each go on, and claiming that you know what the US government is thinking and planning to do...
D. It might tell you if you were (constantly) think one of 50 pre-cataloged, pre-calibrated thought, but not if you had an "original" thought...
Not NIRS or fmri... Too slow (blood flow) and poorly resolved. She just mentions fmri because people know what it is from movies and the papers she references used fmri to "reconstruct" visual "thoughts". But she actually wants to access action potential information, which is 100-1000x faster than fmri and much better resolved in space (cellular resolution). It is "possible" because light is scattered and polarized by neuronal membranes when action potentials are conducted.
BUT it's never been done outside of a dish, never resolved in 3D thickness of live brain tissue because there is too much light scattering in 3D tissue and you really must use trans illumination (past light from one side, pick it up the other, to preserve polarization). Definitely will not work through skull, for cm's and back. Not happening no matter how much light you inject (people already use IR lasers, she is talking about and LCD sheet, right...).
Just not going to read our thoughts... ... Even if she solves all of that, still all you get is a movie of images. She like many are banking on the idea that the cortex is totally organized by function (mapped) so that reading at the cortical map level gives you thoughts and entire brain states. But it simply isn't so. Early (primal) sensory and motor brain areas are well mapped and organized according to input (such as images from the retina) but it quickly devolved into a morass of interconnected networks, poorly understood and NOT mapped. So all she will get are low level maps of images which isn't thought. MAYBE an image of my house when I think of my house but not WHAT I'm thinking about my house (do I want to burn it down, fix the roof, etc). Maybe you'd get a movie of visual and auditory and etc in my brain but you'd still be guessing what it all means -- like a movie of me and what I am doing, does that tell you what I'm thinking?
Even if she solves the fmri in a cap problem, which itself is unlikely... Because:
1) way too much light scatter to get back enough light and resolve even 1mm (the current limit of fmri using the best magnets 14T which themselves are dangerous as the fields impede blood flood in the brain), it is only 2D information,
2) blood flow BOLD is too slow to encode thoughts (rise times of 100's of Ms, needs to be 100x faster),
3) 1mm resolution is not enough, need 50um for a cortical column, nevermind 5um for neurons,
Anyways she'll never solve the technical problems and fmri-like imaging simply isn't good enough because it's blood/oxygen. And optical signals from action potentials never been done in the living 3d brain, only in a dish, nevermind through the skull.
Another question that I would have liked to see address: Prospects for much better cold weather (and hot weather) battery performance.
If we are to replace IC vehicles with electric vehicles, we need batteries that be perform well at -20F or colder. Also 130F or hotter. What can be done to span a greater range of real-world operating temperatures?
no lithium is NOT a rare earth metal, not even close.
Lithium is quite abundant. There is this huge deposit in Bolivia for example, that has all the lithium we'll need (lets shift our wars from the Middle East to SA, shall we?)
"What's truly frightening is how many religious nutjobs look forward to doomsday. And they vote. For populists who pander to them."
Perhaps as frightening is the notion, openly espoused by many, that, since the return of Christ and the Rapture are coming SOON, there really is no point in planning for the long term future, no point in saving the environment, invest in R&D and infrastructure, etc. And in fact, hastening the "end of days" would be a good thing...