Using tech like this to improve voice recognition and speech synthesis is useful. Using it to verify identities is problematic and should be banned before it causes any serious problems, destroys lives and livelihoods, and wastes resources and time. This is quite possibly the worst, most easily abused application of technology I've ever heard of any government or institution being idiotic or corrupt enough to try.
Because signatures are such unique and uncopyable things...
What advantage can you think of that a $1000 bill has over 10 x $100 bills?
I can dream up a few, like if I want to bribe my congressman maybe I don't need as many envelopes, or on those days where I need to shift $20,000,000 in cash it's a few pounds lighter so the shipping is cheaper.
But none of these would make me "strongly favor" bringing it back.
Moving an account from one bank to another and wanting it to be credited the same day. Er... without paying for a wire transfer.
Shopping in Manhattan. The last time I was in the Williams-Sonoma store they had a $1500 bread knife.
It doesn't affect me so I don't really care--I can count the number of times I've walked around with more than $1,000 in cash on me on the fingers of one hand--but there are certainly people whom it affects.
Your ideas work well in theory, but suffer from problems in practice.
When commercial sex is legalized, demand increases and girls get trafficked in to increase supply. Yes, there are advantages--sex workers can more easily get access to appropriate medical attention or get help when they are attacked by customers, for example. But you also get kids being raped. Sometimes the benefit of an activity to society is substantially outweighed by its cost and you ban it.
Consumption-based tax makes a lot of sense (we have some form of it in sales tax), although it creates tracking and complexity problems, especially if you want to have a progressive tax or are a small business owner.
And then you have criminal usury, payday loans, and people who are gambling away money they don't have--people who get desperate enough or lack information or psychological ability in a way that means they can be easily taken advantage of. As much as I like libertarianism, there are just some places where the government should step in and say "it's really not okay to make money this way."
Yes--It was Latin for a thousand years, then it started to be okay to write poetry and the like in modern languages. (Petrarch, in Italian). And to use it for scholarship after that, and we had the industrial revolution. I guess German was winning for a while, and now English is.
It may be Chinese in seventy years or so, but maybe not--I've heard Mandarin is rather difficult to learn, which may slow it down.
But then, Latin wasn't exactly a walk in the park.
So, you're telling me that you're persuaded by the summary of an article, never actually released (only leaked), utilizing these admittedly nebulous "externalized costs", in the face of undisputed evidence over decades that the power companies have never found wind energy to be cheaper.
Wonna buy a bridge?
No, I'm telling you that the summary of the article directly contradicts your statement about the article's position.
Your initial comment was that power companies were looking at costs carefully and would switch to the cheaper alternative. That comment was invalid insofar as it failed to take into account externalized costs.
The summary also directly contradicts your claim about what it says. It notes that "The report (PDF) demonstrates that if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas, wind power would be the cheapest source of energy." It is explicitly talking about externalized costs.
If this author were correct, the power companies would already be rushing to build wind-driven turbines. They already have people carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each power-generation method. When I see wind-driven turbines appearing on the windy parts of my horizon, then I'll believe that wind is cheaper than coal.
You are forgetting the major factor of externalized costs. Processes have costs that are internal so they have to be paid for by the owner, and external so they get paid by someone else. Pollution is a major source of externalized cost in conventional power generation.
The power company doesn't have to pay for those costs, but society as a whole does, for example in asthma treatments and deaths, or likely in certain kinds of cancers. So the power company will do the thing which is cheaper for *them* but more expensive as a *whole*.
Copyright infringement has been criminal for a while now--they just very rarely treat it criminally because they have limited resources and it would usually be ridiculous to treat it criminally. Basically you have a felony for what should get a parking ticket.
True for definitions of 'not exact' that equal 'fantasy pulled from a dark stinky place'.
A $6000 solar system produces $10000 per year? In Canada? Fucking idiot AC! Don't post again.
Canada is paying ridiculously large subsidies to solar operations, something like $0.88/KWh/yr, if I remember correctly. Meanwhile their actual power rates are very high and, in Ontario at least, are incredibly poorly managed (e.g. not sending a bill for eight months because they can't run their own electronic billing systems properly, making all kinds of manual changes to all of the bills, and paying a fortune on the Utility's debt service from another instance of gross mismanagement years ago.)
Right. They should simply not make loans to people who don't have good credit.
Actually, they should not make loans for *new cars* to people who do not have good credit. Somebody whose credit is bad does not have the financial competence to buy a new car unless they can come up with the money up front or otherwise show that their credit score doesn't reflect their ability to handle money.
There is no reason for someone with bad credit to pay for a new car. You pay such a premium on a new car that you are basically throwing money away--or trading gabs of money for time spent looking for a decent used car, which doesn't usually take that long. You cannot afford to throw money away if you have bad credit.
Financing a new car for someone who has bad credit is taking advantage of their financial problem in a way which can make their children starve.
It's all a balancing act, and if the final goal isn't UX, then everything is going to come crashing down.
As fields mature, the dimension along which they compete changes. Once the major products are all adequate, they compete on things other than technical specs. Technical specs beyond a certain threshold for phones become largely irrelevant to consumers.
Competition is now occurring in other spaces: Branding, Network Advantages, even some on security post-Snowden.
Eventually the products will compete on price almost entirely, but we won't be there for a long time.
Ultimately it should depend on what you negotiated or are able to negotiate with your employer. If it is training you really need, make a good case for it.
Training gets *very* expensive if you're doing a lot of it. It may or may not be necessary to your job as opposed to good for networking. I have seen cases where someone's training budget gets absolutely out-of-hand, and they are going to a dozen conferences or more a year when realistically, they need less than half of that to do their job as well (i.e. their job is not networking) and it is mostly about them *enjoying* the conferences and maintaining a political status within the community.
We should never stop learning, but doing it *all* on an employer's dime isn't okay unless that was negotiated as part of the job.
The judge may have said it can be used in this one case, but unless struck down by another court, it sets up a precedent for other judges to do the same.
The precedent is already there. (Leaving aside issues of which precedent is binding v. persuasive v. nobody cares).
Service by publication--you just put ads in generally available newspapers--is allowed in some courts when you can't reach a person, a leftover from the days when people read newspapers.
A few years ago slashdot posted an article when a judge allowed service by *email*. The reasoning was that an email to the person was more likely to reach them than service by publication, which would have been allowed.
When service by publication would be permissible, most savvy judges are likely to allow service by email, if it is within their discretion to allow it.
Hey, remember the whole "War on Women" bit? That was all Darrell Issa's fault, the chairman of that committee. He's the richest member of the house, and he is interested in finger-pointing because he's operating as a political animal.
Why does slashdot listen to these blowhards? It's a web site, and it was done badly, and that's the tech discussion. Eight damning emails a politician uses to say that people care about the press coverage (in order to get those politicians their own press coverage) is not worth anyone's time.
Well yes, you are, guilty of deflecting criticism by claiming the definitions are too broad.
That's a common defensive reaction.
Problems should be well-defined. Someone can take that position whether they're doing it defensively or not and still be making a legitimate point. Calling it defensive, notably on a topic where there is moral stigma associated with being defensive about it, is just an ad hominem attack.
There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Parent's message--he appears to be dismissing out-of-hand an issue that affects hundreds of millions of people a year. He also failed to state what definitions he thinks are too broad to be useful. Responding with a question about one or more of those that might make people think about the issue is the difference between trolling and dialogue.
Slashdot Mirror
Using tech like this to improve voice recognition and speech synthesis is useful. Using it to verify identities is problematic and should be banned before it causes any serious problems, destroys lives and livelihoods, and wastes resources and time. This is quite possibly the worst, most easily abused application of technology I've ever heard of any government or institution being idiotic or corrupt enough to try.
Because signatures are such unique and uncopyable things...
"Tax evasion" is a crime. "Tax avoidance" is what is being done here.
"Tax evasion" has one legal meaning and another colloquial one. Colloquially speaking, "tax evasion" includes tax avoidance of this character.
Source: talking to people who aren't tax lawyers.
What advantage can you think of that a $1000 bill has over 10 x $100 bills?
I can dream up a few, like if I want to bribe my congressman maybe I don't need as many envelopes, or on those days where I need to shift $20,000,000 in cash it's a few pounds lighter so the shipping is cheaper.
But none of these would make me "strongly favor" bringing it back.
Moving an account from one bank to another and wanting it to be credited the same day. Er... without paying for a wire transfer.
Shopping in Manhattan. The last time I was in the Williams-Sonoma store they had a $1500 bread knife.
It doesn't affect me so I don't really care--I can count the number of times I've walked around with more than $1,000 in cash on me on the fingers of one hand--but there are certainly people whom it affects.
Your ideas work well in theory, but suffer from problems in practice.
When commercial sex is legalized, demand increases and girls get trafficked in to increase supply. Yes, there are advantages--sex workers can more easily get access to appropriate medical attention or get help when they are attacked by customers, for example. But you also get kids being raped. Sometimes the benefit of an activity to society is substantially outweighed by its cost and you ban it.
Consumption-based tax makes a lot of sense (we have some form of it in sales tax), although it creates tracking and complexity problems, especially if you want to have a progressive tax or are a small business owner.
And then you have criminal usury, payday loans, and people who are gambling away money they don't have--people who get desperate enough or lack information or psychological ability in a way that means they can be easily taken advantage of. As much as I like libertarianism, there are just some places where the government should step in and say "it's really not okay to make money this way."
Yes--It was Latin for a thousand years, then it started to be okay to write poetry and the like in modern languages. (Petrarch, in Italian). And to use it for scholarship after that, and we had the industrial revolution. I guess German was winning for a while, and now English is.
It may be Chinese in seventy years or so, but maybe not--I've heard Mandarin is rather difficult to learn, which may slow it down.
But then, Latin wasn't exactly a walk in the park.
So, you're telling me that you're persuaded by the summary of an article, never actually released (only leaked), utilizing these admittedly nebulous "externalized costs", in the face of undisputed evidence over decades that the power companies have never found wind energy to be cheaper.
Wonna buy a bridge?
No, I'm telling you that the summary of the article directly contradicts your statement about the article's position.
Your initial comment was that power companies were looking at costs carefully and would switch to the cheaper alternative. That comment was invalid insofar as it failed to take into account externalized costs.
The summary also directly contradicts your claim about what it says. It notes that "The report (PDF) demonstrates that if you were to take into account mining, pollution, and adverse health impacts of coal and gas, wind power would be the cheapest source of energy." It is explicitly talking about externalized costs.
If this author were correct, the power companies would already be rushing to build wind-driven turbines. They already have people carefully weighing the costs and benefits of each power-generation method. When I see wind-driven turbines appearing on the windy parts of my horizon, then I'll believe that wind is cheaper than coal.
You are forgetting the major factor of externalized costs. Processes have costs that are internal so they have to be paid for by the owner, and external so they get paid by someone else. Pollution is a major source of externalized cost in conventional power generation.
The power company doesn't have to pay for those costs, but society as a whole does, for example in asthma treatments and deaths, or likely in certain kinds of cancers. So the power company will do the thing which is cheaper for *them* but more expensive as a *whole*.
If they are serious they really need to get more big names, institutions, and ethicists on board. A lot more.
There has already been support for basically using time to create control groups, so this is much less of an issue than it could be.
Then they won't hire you.
They may hire you if you did something illegal and are honest about it. They will not hire you if you did something illegal and lied about it.
Copyright infringement has been criminal for a while now--they just very rarely treat it criminally because they have limited resources and it would usually be ridiculous to treat it criminally. Basically you have a felony for what should get a parking ticket.
True for definitions of 'not exact' that equal 'fantasy pulled from a dark stinky place'.
A $6000 solar system produces $10000 per year? In Canada? Fucking idiot AC! Don't post again.
Canada is paying ridiculously large subsidies to solar operations, something like $0.88/KWh/yr, if I remember correctly. Meanwhile their actual power rates are very high and, in Ontario at least, are incredibly poorly managed (e.g. not sending a bill for eight months because they can't run their own electronic billing systems properly, making all kinds of manual changes to all of the bills, and paying a fortune on the Utility's debt service from another instance of gross mismanagement years ago.)
I saw scans today starting just after noon Pacific Time.
Right. They should simply not make loans to people who don't have good credit.
Actually, they should not make loans for *new cars* to people who do not have good credit. Somebody whose credit is bad does not have the financial competence to buy a new car unless they can come up with the money up front or otherwise show that their credit score doesn't reflect their ability to handle money.
There is no reason for someone with bad credit to pay for a new car. You pay such a premium on a new car that you are basically throwing money away--or trading gabs of money for time spent looking for a decent used car, which doesn't usually take that long. You cannot afford to throw money away if you have bad credit.
Financing a new car for someone who has bad credit is taking advantage of their financial problem in a way which can make their children starve.
It's all a balancing act, and if the final goal isn't UX, then everything is going to come crashing down.
As fields mature, the dimension along which they compete changes. Once the major products are all adequate, they compete on things other than technical specs. Technical specs beyond a certain threshold for phones become largely irrelevant to consumers.
Competition is now occurring in other spaces: Branding, Network Advantages, even some on security post-Snowden.
Eventually the products will compete on price almost entirely, but we won't be there for a long time.
I hit the brick wall where the summary plunged into "thinking science has made God irrelevant."
Oh, silly summary. God remains a relevant fictional character. You know, like that girl from the Twilight books.
Ultimately it should depend on what you negotiated or are able to negotiate with your employer. If it is training you really need, make a good case for it.
Training gets *very* expensive if you're doing a lot of it. It may or may not be necessary to your job as opposed to good for networking. I have seen cases where someone's training budget gets absolutely out-of-hand, and they are going to a dozen conferences or more a year when realistically, they need less than half of that to do their job as well (i.e. their job is not networking) and it is mostly about them *enjoying* the conferences and maintaining a political status within the community.
We should never stop learning, but doing it *all* on an employer's dime isn't okay unless that was negotiated as part of the job.
The judge may have said it can be used in this one case, but unless struck down by another court, it sets up a precedent for other judges to do the same.
The precedent is already there. (Leaving aside issues of which precedent is binding v. persuasive v. nobody cares).
Service by publication--you just put ads in generally available newspapers--is allowed in some courts when you can't reach a person, a leftover from the days when people read newspapers.
A few years ago slashdot posted an article when a judge allowed service by *email*. The reasoning was that an email to the person was more likely to reach them than service by publication, which would have been allowed.
When service by publication would be permissible, most savvy judges are likely to allow service by email, if it is within their discretion to allow it.
"War on Women" is a Democrat campaign scam
Of course, but it happened because Issa was stupid enough to use an all-male panel (e.g. priests) to have a hearing on women's issues.
Hey, remember the whole "War on Women" bit? That was all Darrell Issa's fault, the chairman of that committee. He's the richest member of the house, and he is interested in finger-pointing because he's operating as a political animal.
Why does slashdot listen to these blowhards? It's a web site, and it was done badly, and that's the tech discussion. Eight damning emails a politician uses to say that people care about the press coverage (in order to get those politicians their own press coverage) is not worth anyone's time.
If on the other hand, one is looking for an avenue to influence company direction
But then, if one is looking for that any has a realistic chance of success, one is too busy to be reading this.
FTA: "(conversely, U.S. regulators can provide guarantees of confidentiality)"
WHY does ANYONE other than Netflix need to know who the subscribers are or what they watch?
Well yes, you are, guilty of deflecting criticism by claiming the definitions are too broad.
That's a common defensive reaction.
Problems should be well-defined. Someone can take that position whether they're doing it defensively or not and still be making a legitimate point. Calling it defensive, notably on a topic where there is moral stigma associated with being defensive about it, is just an ad hominem attack.
There are plenty of legitimate critiques of Parent's message--he appears to be dismissing out-of-hand an issue that affects hundreds of millions of people a year. He also failed to state what definitions he thinks are too broad to be useful. Responding with a question about one or more of those that might make people think about the issue is the difference between trolling and dialogue.
This is how things are supposed to be. The legal system was designed for individuals "to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects."
Like many countries, we inherited a strange and somewhat muddled legal system from England. That bit got added along the way.
The problem with punishing companies with bad security is that it discourages self-reporting. We *want* companies to report and rectify the problems.
What we should do is penalize it, but not if it is promptly reported.