The irony is that AC here may well be the Russian operative in the room.
Always remember that Russia is not truly sided with or against any American party, political idea, or institution. What they are against is American and Western strength, and what they are for is anything which sabotages that strength and ability to act. Their goal is to be able to muscle in like they did in Ukraine and Syria and fill the vacuum that results from weakening global contenders.
To that end, they are more than happy to be "caught" manipulating American elections. That makes them seem strong and America seem weak. And I doubt they care much at all whether Candidate A or Candidate B wins except they want whichever does win to be weakened by the infighting and the accusations of collaboration. They are also happy to have accusations bandied about who they support and who supports them. In all likelihood, they are the ones sponsoring them. Anything that points out a group of fellow Americans or Westerners as the "true enemy" is in Russia's interest to promote. If not, then it's just Americans doing their work for them.
The best defense to Russia is to take it very seriously abroad and find ways to make Putin's grip on power the more difficult and tenuous. When it comes to domestic affairs, Russia can't mind control large groups of Americans, but it can spark existing tensions and promote paranoia, even of itself. The best recourse of the average citizen is to find common ground, build bridges with your political opponents, and call your congressperson to tell them you support follow though on the Magnitsky Act (which makes Putin's dictatorship far less palatable to the Russian elites) and ones like it and taking a hardline on Russia.
About 20 million artifacts were destroyed just this past September when the National Museum of Brazil went up in flames. I expect even more have been decimated in the museums and historical displays targeted by ISIS. Unless it's a nuclear bunker, collecting everything you want to save in a single spot is not necessarily a great idea for preserving it all. Not to mention that, in general, museums have to deal with a lot of theft and vandalism. Many hugely significant artifacts have simply disappeared. Maybe just because of bad bookkeeping, maybe something more nefarious.
Packing artifacts in creates might be better than handing them out as souvenirs to passing tourists, but I don't think it's better than letting people who can afford state-of-the-art security and fire suppressant systems make them their prized possessions. The real risk to these artifacts is being insufficiently valued by society in general. That's when they will be disposed, put in insufficiently safe storage (government funded or not), or even ground up to make "medicine." Historical artifacts selling for millions may not match with the socially enlightened future imagined by Star Trek, but it's an awful lot better than many more likely alternatives.
Since ancient times we have had to deal with the problem of markets preferring one type of payment but having an influx of other kinds. Meant there was money to be made offering the service of converting to the preferred currency. Malls, airports, or anywhere with concentrated shops will have had ATMs available exactly so people can get their electronic holdings into a spendable format. Seems like we will start installing machines to accept deposits and put them on temporary credit cards, or something similar.
But I do wonder if refusing cash is an actually business savvy phenomenon which will endure. Spend untold amounts on advertising for the one in a thousand chance someone who sees the ad will come to your shop, and then turn away guaranteed customers with payment in hand? When a competing shop shows up accepting cash, I will bet their mistake becomes evident.
^This is exactly what we have discussed at faculty meetings about recruitment. As for why students are willing to pay, because they aren't the ones financing it -- it's banks, scholarships, and their parents. There is some good news about the high fees, which is that partly they are there to subsidize poorer students (a campus of only wealthy students is uninteresting and makes for poor recruiting) and it's not expected that an average would actually pay them. Of course, some people (e.g. with wealthy parents who have no intent of offering financial assistance) neither have the funds nor qualify for assistance.
My recommendation is this: go to a community college for the first couple years, then transfer to a small public school. While there are great teachers out there, for the most part Calculus I is taught the same way from the same book no matter where you go, and that's true for almost all core classes. So go to community college to get that education at a tenth the cost (or probably free) and then transfer to finish a four year program. A small school will give you the most options for getting help from your pofessors, buffering your credentials with TA and research opportunities etc. and be cheaper (esp. if you don't play sports and it doesn't have sponsored sports teams).
If you stick around for grad school, then that's where you should look at bigger schools. At that level you'll have a small group that you're working with and direct mentorship anyway no matter where you go. If you're STEM you will probably earn a stipend instead of incurring more debt even at the expensive schools, and when you're doing research is when you actually care about having multimillion dollar NMR machines on campus.
What is missing from your comment is a single defined negative outcome. When millions of people die each year from mosquito born diseases, vague insinuations that something bad you can't articulate could happen is not a sufficient rebuttal to saving them. What are you proposing could happen that would make us long for the days when we only had malaria and dengue to worry about?
So your theses are "Quit dehumanizing people" and "The homeless ought to have been destroyed when it was legally possible to do so so we wouldn't have to deal with them"?
Sounds like a Trump tweet: be horrible, blame everyone else, do a lot of mental gymnastics so your being horrible is actually good.
While the summary comes off as a clumsy hitjob and I somewhat resent siding with it, there is more to the concept of "owing" than what is laid out in legal contracts. Just because the state won't enforce the repayment of a debt doesn't mean the debt doesn't exist.
Once you've turned eighteen you don't legally owe your parents anything, but you owe them a lot personally if they've given you a good home, and you would be quite a crummy person if you didn't pay it back by taking care of them if they become decrepit and infirm. You certainly have the freedom to be a crummy person if you want, but society might pick up where the government leaves off. Your friend list may grow shorter and you may find the willingness of people to help you when you won't help others is severely diminished.
If Amazon has benefitted extensively from Wikipedia, then it owes Wikipedia a moral debt. If it subsequently acts miserly towards Wikipedia, then we as a society may wish to consider how much we want to be benefactors to Amazon. Certainly, if Amazon won't repay Wikipedia, we shouldn't have much hope that they will repay us for our support given in the form of tax incentives or custom.
I think if it was that easy then there would be no housing problem in San Francisco in the first place. It's a problem the city has created for itself, such as by limiting buildings to 40 ft in height. Where are these new dorms going to be put? At least renting out extra rooms (presuming there are some) can be done instantaneously in response to an unusually large incoming class. Erecting new dormitories, if that's even possible, not so much.
IMHO the university's best long term bet is to move entirely. There is plenty of cheap housing elsewhere. Students are incredibly mobile -- a good chunk are probably already there from out-of-state or out-of-country. Professors typically also tend to choose their location according to the work rather than the reverse. The school can certainly maintain a presence for any research tightly integrated with local businesses (perhaps leave their grad school there) but their ~16k undergraduates doubtless could learn Eng Lit 101 just as comfortably twenty miles away and still be able to pursue summer internships with the big tech firms, etc.
Someone who's house you live in is already in a position of considerable power. If they kick you out, you're homeless. It's better to provide laws protecting tenants than to not let anyone ever live at anyone else's property.
Most people perceive the value of open expression (certainly so much as it benefits them personally). A notion has slipped in that being curtailed by the government is bad and being curtailed in any other way (as long as your group is the one wielding the bludgeon) is fair and even good. The government certainly has the capacity to do the most harm, but as corporate entities begin to approach it in power and effect, their capacity to do harm by regulating expression becomes similar. To be fair, limiting Trump is probably among the least damaging things that could happen... but after you get done celebrating his getting knocked down a peg, it is worth dwelling on the ominousness that twitter wields enough power to be able to threaten disconnecting POTUS from his primary means of communication with his base. I would not suggest regulating Twitter's affairs -- because that has every risk of being worse -- but if we truly value the idea of free speech, we should wish to see it pursued at every level and respected by every entity in our society, not just the government.
I would say we are more in need of evidence that the media have somehow overcome millions of years of evolved tribalism and self-interest (which doubtless utilized communication as soon as it became available) in order to provide strictly objective truth.
Subtly promoting your favorite people/causes is an innate oratorical talent everyone has to some degree. A very mild inflection can indicate preference for one person over another. Listeners may interpret it consciously or unconsciously as a valuable clue to information they are not personally privy to.
Without ever lying journalists wield a lot of soft power in what stories they choose to cover and how they choose to cover them. This can have a swaying effect even with neutral or even counter-biased parties also present.
Was there a grand conspiracy to softball Obama on late night comedy shows and interviews? Not in the sense of shadowy figures planning it out. But there might as well have been for the concerted effect which was generated.
Add to that the fact that pointedly non-neutral parties such as politicians with privileged platforms/information or corporations wielding ownership can take the existing biases and manipulate them.
I agree that the simplest answer is often best. But self-interest is usually the simplest answer of all for explaining human actions, and there are lot of ways for people to use their self-interest to semi-conspiratorial effect.
Plenty of people the world over cannot access large parts of the web because their governments censor it. That's the status quo. Creating technology that is privacy focused is key to making a web that really is open. In addition to thwarting less capable actors, it puts state actors in the awkward place of either having to embrace the tech, or be left vulnerable and outdated as the free world moves ahead.
You can also google these news stories without ever having to visit Slashdot. The reason for coming here is for curated information which fosters discussion. The summary provides the minimum information to understand the nature of the discussion and links to resources containing the fuller details. I would have to agree that this summary has failed to do that. The fact it's possible to work around the summary's deficiencies with a little extra labor does not make those deficiencies non-existent.
What makes more sense -- a million readers having to look up what GDPR is, or one person defining it?
The CIA being the CIA, it's a good policy to let other countries think that they are dispensing with their human spies if, in fact, they aren't (so they receive less scrutiny). It's also an advantage to paralyze enemy's use of technology by making them paranoid. Or to cause them to give away the location of sensitive data by clumsily trying to protect it against a new threat. And if the enemy doesn't respond that way, then the CIA can continue development and reap the actual benefits of wielding AI against an unprepared enemy. I wouldn't take information they publicly disclose too literally.
"The bill of a puffin is forged by generations, hundreds and thousands of years, of sexual selection. There's a lot going on there. That's why it's so colorful and pretty." But the radiant color is almost certainly not being used as a headlight, he said. He said whatever's making the beak glow is reacting with the UV light waves, and those light waves aren't around in the dark.
Your laundry detergent, highlighters, even paint on coke cans all have UV dyes in them. The reason is not because humans can see in UV or because they need these objects to glow in the dark. The dyes make them appear artificially bright during the day by emitting the converted UV light in addition to the reflected visible light. In as much as brightly colored beaks are important for sexual selection, the fluorescent pigments are part of the trick.
It's not bearing down on the pedestrian at 7 mph, it's on an orthogonal path. Pedestrians cross crosswalks at about 3.1 mph (2.4 seconds) meaning the car would certain (and definitively) clear the pedestrian without the pedestrian having to stop their advance. I mean, at the point the only way to hit the pedestrian would be to slow down. Stopping distance at that speed is also just over 2 ft, so if the car had made its decision any time up to that point it had done so with enough clearance to respond to changes of circumstance.
That said, the present rules are generally built around the premise that human drivers cannot make those kind of determinations accurately are simply required to stop no matter what if someone is at the crosswalk. So it may not be unreasonable legally that a ticket was issued, but it wasn't exactly reckless of human life on the AI's part either.
But, one of the things I wonder about is the potential for reduced understanding and insight among the people using it, and where it might lead.
To give you an idea of the present state of chemistry, we only recently measured the energy of a transition state, imaged atoms and molecules, or directly observed hydrogen bonds. New insights into the behavior of water is common reading. As for syntheses, the reaction mechanisms drawn are at best guesses and many times syntheses reasonable in theory are found not to work in practice. Basically, we chemists do not have much fundamental understanding so much as a practical intuition for how chemical systems behave. But improved understanding and classification often go hand-in-hand in science, so I think it likely that the output of these algorithms will actually improve our human-level interpretations.
If you 1) Had no job 2) Received thousands of dollars in student loans 3) Spent thousands of dollars on cryptocurrency.
Then, yes, you bought cryptocurrency using your student loans. Or are you saying if the loans hadn't been approved the students would have dropped out of college but continued to pay for the cryptocurrency? Whether or not it's provable to a degree of legal certainly, it's pretty obvious that the function of the loan was to enable the purchase of the currency.
Unfortunately, game theory tells us that lying is dominate strategy. If others are honest, it makes sense to lie since you get the same benefit without any risk. And if others lie, you have nothing to gain and honesty comes with a risk. Therefore, everyone lies.
Therefore no one votes, because it costs relatively significant time with negligible personal impact.
Therefore everyone conveniently litters when no one is around to report it.
Therefore everyone walks out on the tab at restaurants where they are unknown.
Therefore no one plays the lottery.
I think you are mistaken in the assumption that people are unwilling to invest in some greater notion if they see a way to marginally improve their optimized position.
If you tell me your salary in the premise of helping me negotiate a higher one and seem sincere, I will tell you my salary as a friendly consideration. Some abnormal persons such as sociopaths may respond with lies, but well-adjusted humans manage cooperativity just fine. There is a reason it's the "prisoner's" dilemma -- you have to build in the assumption that the persons involved are without moral scruple before you can have confidence they will only make the most self-serving choice.
The cases you list are precisely those where government dictated licensing is unnecessary, and the reason it is unnecessary is for exactly the reasons you have invoked -- the need for qualified individuals in those positions is crucial and self-evident. You might as well pass a law that no one can be hired to be CEO of a multibillion dollar company without an MBA. Quite obviously, no multibillion dollar company is going to hire an unqualified person for that position and is more than capable of doing the necessary vetting. Most CEOs probably do have MBAs. Those that don't will be proven in other ways. A one-size-fits-all law would simply be needlessly discriminatory of the latter and limit the pool of qualified talent.
Where licensing actually is necessary is where the consumer is directly exposed to risks they may not be qualified to investigate. E.g., a large hospital might vet its own staff, but if a private person is able to open up their own medical clinic, there would be frauds and the people walking in the door would likely not all have the ability to discern the difference.
That said, something looser than present setup might, for instance, not block thousands of qualified doctors from practicing (reducing wait times and medical costs). So it might be worth looking at letting different professional organizations, hospitals/health care providers, counties, etc. have some ability to decide what they would consider satisfactory in hiring qualified providers of care. Stating the status quo is problematic does not require swinging fully to the opposite extreme of no licensing at all.
Who is going to pay for any mitigation effort? As it happens, I imagine companies would quite happily lobby their governments to put up money rather than having to pay it themselves in terms of taxes and regulation. And the politicians will be only too happy to sign up for something which lets them take credit for solving a much touted problem without much risk of alienating constituents.
"No stable government" only makes it easier. When have the major powers ever had a problem getting their way in an area with "no stable government"? Sometimes Step 1 is to fix things up so that there is no stable government.
I would say the crux of the problem is developing a self-propagating technology. It's easy to have massive effects with something that self-propagates -- humans affecting the climate are just such an example. Such technology is presently not developed, but that will not be perpetually the case: we make strides in that direction all the time.
"Dubious"? Which is of the victims are you accusing of lying and on what evidence? The stories are very consistent. Allegations came from people he worked with, met on the campaign trail, staffers at his Democratic office.
Upon the opening allegation by Leeann Tweeden, Al Franken acknowledged the hard evidence (a creepy photo) and called her a dirty lying *****. Well, he's not Trump, so he phrased it much better and said, "I don't remember it the same way," but the comment is still "What she's saying isn't true." Personally, I consider it quite unlikely that someone who decides they are going to make up a story about being assaulted a decade ago also just so happens to have photographic evidence of exactly that type of behavior by the accused, so I was very inclined to believe Tweeden even before other accusers came forward.
If you are wondering why Franken called for an investigation against himself, I believe the last time congress censured one of its own was over a decade ago and the last time the expelled someone was over a century-and-a-half ago. Meanwhile, the public outcry has time to defuse. It's especially a good move if you're expecting the investigation to come anyway. Ask yourself, when did Franken say he expected the investigation to clear himself of all charges? He didn't. And if he's not innocent, why does someone else need to tell him that? He's just hoping to punt the question and commute the consequences to a reprobation. Nothing particularly noble about that. Conyers thought this was quite the clever trick and did exactly the same thing when he was found out next.
In the subsequent allegation, Franken also used the "I don't remember" line.
And again on the next one. (On this one he also said "I've met tens of thousands of people and taken thousands of photographs, often in crowded and chaotic situations. I'm a warm person; I hug people. I've learned from recent stories that in some of those encounters, I crossed a line for some women — and I know that any number is too many." Yes, "I can't remember all the people I've met and groped, but just in case the takeaway is I'm a warm bubbly hugger. Oh and sorry I guess.")
As the allegations continued and he became clearly to his party he was jeopardizing a safe seat while blunting their use of Moore and Trump, Franken eventually got forced out. In his resignation he complained that other predators got to stay while he had to leave. Obviously very contrite.
I suppose in the age of Trump people have forgotten that most politicians are downright artful in their weaseling. Sexual predators too for that matter -- being able to deflect, reframe, and appear contrite are all key tools for a serial offender trying to keep their pattern under the radar. Franken's statements were calculated and skillful. But he never actually displayed any integrity in owning up to what he was guilty of, so let's not fall for his maneuvering there.
As for "What about Moore" someone could easily construct a defense for him along the same line as yours for Franken. They could doubt the accusers (who Moore says are lying). They could say "It happened 30 years ago" (Can Franken?) They could say it was nothing against the law at the time (Can Franken?). But the fact is that both men are predators, neither deserve office, and their unethical behavior does not need to be interpreted in the framework of each other. You might as well tell the judge, "Hey, what about O.J. Simpson and that murder?" when she sentences you for not paying your taxes.
Slashdot Mirror
The irony is that AC here may well be the Russian operative in the room.
Always remember that Russia is not truly sided with or against any American party, political idea, or institution. What they are against is American and Western strength, and what they are for is anything which sabotages that strength and ability to act. Their goal is to be able to muscle in like they did in Ukraine and Syria and fill the vacuum that results from weakening global contenders.
To that end, they are more than happy to be "caught" manipulating American elections. That makes them seem strong and America seem weak. And I doubt they care much at all whether Candidate A or Candidate B wins except they want whichever does win to be weakened by the infighting and the accusations of collaboration. They are also happy to have accusations bandied about who they support and who supports them. In all likelihood, they are the ones sponsoring them. Anything that points out a group of fellow Americans or Westerners as the "true enemy" is in Russia's interest to promote. If not, then it's just Americans doing their work for them.
The best defense to Russia is to take it very seriously abroad and find ways to make Putin's grip on power the more difficult and tenuous. When it comes to domestic affairs, Russia can't mind control large groups of Americans, but it can spark existing tensions and promote paranoia, even of itself. The best recourse of the average citizen is to find common ground, build bridges with your political opponents, and call your congressperson to tell them you support follow though on the Magnitsky Act (which makes Putin's dictatorship far less palatable to the Russian elites) and ones like it and taking a hardline on Russia.
About 20 million artifacts were destroyed just this past September when the National Museum of Brazil went up in flames. I expect even more have been decimated in the museums and historical displays targeted by ISIS. Unless it's a nuclear bunker, collecting everything you want to save in a single spot is not necessarily a great idea for preserving it all. Not to mention that, in general, museums have to deal with a lot of theft and vandalism. Many hugely significant artifacts have simply disappeared. Maybe just because of bad bookkeeping, maybe something more nefarious.
Packing artifacts in creates might be better than handing them out as souvenirs to passing tourists, but I don't think it's better than letting people who can afford state-of-the-art security and fire suppressant systems make them their prized possessions. The real risk to these artifacts is being insufficiently valued by society in general. That's when they will be disposed, put in insufficiently safe storage (government funded or not), or even ground up to make "medicine." Historical artifacts selling for millions may not match with the socially enlightened future imagined by Star Trek, but it's an awful lot better than many more likely alternatives.
I guess you missed the previous slashdot story.
Since ancient times we have had to deal with the problem of markets preferring one type of payment but having an influx of other kinds. Meant there was money to be made offering the service of converting to the preferred currency. Malls, airports, or anywhere with concentrated shops will have had ATMs available exactly so people can get their electronic holdings into a spendable format. Seems like we will start installing machines to accept deposits and put them on temporary credit cards, or something similar.
But I do wonder if refusing cash is an actually business savvy phenomenon which will endure. Spend untold amounts on advertising for the one in a thousand chance someone who sees the ad will come to your shop, and then turn away guaranteed customers with payment in hand? When a competing shop shows up accepting cash, I will bet their mistake becomes evident.
^This is exactly what we have discussed at faculty meetings about recruitment. As for why students are willing to pay, because they aren't the ones financing it -- it's banks, scholarships, and their parents. There is some good news about the high fees, which is that partly they are there to subsidize poorer students (a campus of only wealthy students is uninteresting and makes for poor recruiting) and it's not expected that an average would actually pay them. Of course, some people (e.g. with wealthy parents who have no intent of offering financial assistance) neither have the funds nor qualify for assistance.
My recommendation is this: go to a community college for the first couple years, then transfer to a small public school. While there are great teachers out there, for the most part Calculus I is taught the same way from the same book no matter where you go, and that's true for almost all core classes. So go to community college to get that education at a tenth the cost (or probably free) and then transfer to finish a four year program. A small school will give you the most options for getting help from your pofessors, buffering your credentials with TA and research opportunities etc. and be cheaper (esp. if you don't play sports and it doesn't have sponsored sports teams).
If you stick around for grad school, then that's where you should look at bigger schools. At that level you'll have a small group that you're working with and direct mentorship anyway no matter where you go. If you're STEM you will probably earn a stipend instead of incurring more debt even at the expensive schools, and when you're doing research is when you actually care about having multimillion dollar NMR machines on campus.
What is missing from your comment is a single defined negative outcome. When millions of people die each year from mosquito born diseases, vague insinuations that something bad you can't articulate could happen is not a sufficient rebuttal to saving them. What are you proposing could happen that would make us long for the days when we only had malaria and dengue to worry about?
So your theses are "Quit dehumanizing people" and "The homeless ought to have been destroyed when it was legally possible to do so so we wouldn't have to deal with them"?
Sounds like a Trump tweet: be horrible, blame everyone else, do a lot of mental gymnastics so your being horrible is actually good.
While the summary comes off as a clumsy hitjob and I somewhat resent siding with it, there is more to the concept of "owing" than what is laid out in legal contracts. Just because the state won't enforce the repayment of a debt doesn't mean the debt doesn't exist.
Once you've turned eighteen you don't legally owe your parents anything, but you owe them a lot personally if they've given you a good home, and you would be quite a crummy person if you didn't pay it back by taking care of them if they become decrepit and infirm. You certainly have the freedom to be a crummy person if you want, but society might pick up where the government leaves off. Your friend list may grow shorter and you may find the willingness of people to help you when you won't help others is severely diminished.
If Amazon has benefitted extensively from Wikipedia, then it owes Wikipedia a moral debt. If it subsequently acts miserly towards Wikipedia, then we as a society may wish to consider how much we want to be benefactors to Amazon. Certainly, if Amazon won't repay Wikipedia, we shouldn't have much hope that they will repay us for our support given in the form of tax incentives or custom.
I think if it was that easy then there would be no housing problem in San Francisco in the first place. It's a problem the city has created for itself, such as by limiting buildings to 40 ft in height. Where are these new dorms going to be put? At least renting out extra rooms (presuming there are some) can be done instantaneously in response to an unusually large incoming class. Erecting new dormitories, if that's even possible, not so much.
IMHO the university's best long term bet is to move entirely. There is plenty of cheap housing elsewhere. Students are incredibly mobile -- a good chunk are probably already there from out-of-state or out-of-country. Professors typically also tend to choose their location according to the work rather than the reverse. The school can certainly maintain a presence for any research tightly integrated with local businesses (perhaps leave their grad school there) but their ~16k undergraduates doubtless could learn Eng Lit 101 just as comfortably twenty miles away and still be able to pursue summer internships with the big tech firms, etc.
Someone who's house you live in is already in a position of considerable power. If they kick you out, you're homeless. It's better to provide laws protecting tenants than to not let anyone ever live at anyone else's property.
Most people perceive the value of open expression (certainly so much as it benefits them personally). A notion has slipped in that being curtailed by the government is bad and being curtailed in any other way (as long as your group is the one wielding the bludgeon) is fair and even good. The government certainly has the capacity to do the most harm, but as corporate entities begin to approach it in power and effect, their capacity to do harm by regulating expression becomes similar. To be fair, limiting Trump is probably among the least damaging things that could happen... but after you get done celebrating his getting knocked down a peg, it is worth dwelling on the ominousness that twitter wields enough power to be able to threaten disconnecting POTUS from his primary means of communication with his base. I would not suggest regulating Twitter's affairs -- because that has every risk of being worse -- but if we truly value the idea of free speech, we should wish to see it pursued at every level and respected by every entity in our society, not just the government.
I would say we are more in need of evidence that the media have somehow overcome millions of years of evolved tribalism and self-interest (which doubtless utilized communication as soon as it became available) in order to provide strictly objective truth.
Subtly promoting your favorite people/causes is an innate oratorical talent everyone has to some degree. A very mild inflection can indicate preference for one person over another. Listeners may interpret it consciously or unconsciously as a valuable clue to information they are not personally privy to.
Without ever lying journalists wield a lot of soft power in what stories they choose to cover and how they choose to cover them. This can have a swaying effect even with neutral or even counter-biased parties also present.
Was there a grand conspiracy to softball Obama on late night comedy shows and interviews? Not in the sense of shadowy figures planning it out. But there might as well have been for the concerted effect which was generated.
Add to that the fact that pointedly non-neutral parties such as politicians with privileged platforms/information or corporations wielding ownership can take the existing biases and manipulate them.
I agree that the simplest answer is often best. But self-interest is usually the simplest answer of all for explaining human actions, and there are lot of ways for people to use their self-interest to semi-conspiratorial effect.
Plenty of people the world over cannot access large parts of the web because their governments censor it. That's the status quo. Creating technology that is privacy focused is key to making a web that really is open. In addition to thwarting less capable actors, it puts state actors in the awkward place of either having to embrace the tech, or be left vulnerable and outdated as the free world moves ahead.
Because carbonation is part of the taste: https://www.hhmi.org/news/research-reveals-how-tongue-tastes-carbonation.
You can also google these news stories without ever having to visit Slashdot. The reason for coming here is for curated information which fosters discussion. The summary provides the minimum information to understand the nature of the discussion and links to resources containing the fuller details. I would have to agree that this summary has failed to do that. The fact it's possible to work around the summary's deficiencies with a little extra labor does not make those deficiencies non-existent.
What makes more sense -- a million readers having to look up what GDPR is, or one person defining it?
The CIA being the CIA, it's a good policy to let other countries think that they are dispensing with their human spies if, in fact, they aren't (so they receive less scrutiny). It's also an advantage to paralyze enemy's use of technology by making them paranoid. Or to cause them to give away the location of sensitive data by clumsily trying to protect it against a new threat. And if the enemy doesn't respond that way, then the CIA can continue development and reap the actual benefits of wielding AI against an unprepared enemy. I wouldn't take information they publicly disclose too literally.
They were less specialized, more direct, shorter, and far less formal.
It's funny having the Atlantic argue for concise articulation of an idea. Printing this article would take 17 pages.
"The bill of a puffin is forged by generations, hundreds and thousands of years, of sexual selection. There's a lot going on there. That's why it's so colorful and pretty." But the radiant color is almost certainly not being used as a headlight, he said. He said whatever's making the beak glow is reacting with the UV light waves, and those light waves aren't around in the dark.
Your laundry detergent, highlighters, even paint on coke cans all have UV dyes in them. The reason is not because humans can see in UV or because they need these objects to glow in the dark. The dyes make them appear artificially bright during the day by emitting the converted UV light in addition to the reflected visible light. In as much as brightly colored beaks are important for sexual selection, the fluorescent pigments are part of the trick.
It's not bearing down on the pedestrian at 7 mph, it's on an orthogonal path. Pedestrians cross crosswalks at about 3.1 mph (2.4 seconds) meaning the car would certain (and definitively) clear the pedestrian without the pedestrian having to stop their advance. I mean, at the point the only way to hit the pedestrian would be to slow down. Stopping distance at that speed is also just over 2 ft, so if the car had made its decision any time up to that point it had done so with enough clearance to respond to changes of circumstance.
That said, the present rules are generally built around the premise that human drivers cannot make those kind of determinations accurately are simply required to stop no matter what if someone is at the crosswalk. So it may not be unreasonable legally that a ticket was issued, but it wasn't exactly reckless of human life on the AI's part either.
But, one of the things I wonder about is the potential for reduced understanding and insight among the people using it, and where it might lead.
To give you an idea of the present state of chemistry, we only recently measured the energy of a transition state, imaged atoms and molecules, or directly observed hydrogen bonds. New insights into the behavior of water is common reading. As for syntheses, the reaction mechanisms drawn are at best guesses and many times syntheses reasonable in theory are found not to work in practice. Basically, we chemists do not have much fundamental understanding so much as a practical intuition for how chemical systems behave. But improved understanding and classification often go hand-in-hand in science, so I think it likely that the output of these algorithms will actually improve our human-level interpretations.
If you
1) Had no job
2) Received thousands of dollars in student loans
3) Spent thousands of dollars on cryptocurrency.
Then, yes, you bought cryptocurrency using your student loans. Or are you saying if the loans hadn't been approved the students would have dropped out of college but continued to pay for the cryptocurrency? Whether or not it's provable to a degree of legal certainly, it's pretty obvious that the function of the loan was to enable the purchase of the currency.
Unfortunately, game theory tells us that lying is dominate strategy. If others are honest, it makes sense to lie since you get the same benefit without any risk. And if others lie, you have nothing to gain and honesty comes with a risk. Therefore, everyone lies.
Therefore no one votes, because it costs relatively significant time with negligible personal impact.
Therefore everyone conveniently litters when no one is around to report it.
Therefore everyone walks out on the tab at restaurants where they are unknown.
Therefore no one plays the lottery.
I think you are mistaken in the assumption that people are unwilling to invest in some greater notion if they see a way to marginally improve their optimized position.
If you tell me your salary in the premise of helping me negotiate a higher one and seem sincere, I will tell you my salary as a friendly consideration. Some abnormal persons such as sociopaths may respond with lies, but well-adjusted humans manage cooperativity just fine. There is a reason it's the "prisoner's" dilemma -- you have to build in the assumption that the persons involved are without moral scruple before you can have confidence they will only make the most self-serving choice.
The cases you list are precisely those where government dictated licensing is unnecessary, and the reason it is unnecessary is for exactly the reasons you have invoked -- the need for qualified individuals in those positions is crucial and self-evident. You might as well pass a law that no one can be hired to be CEO of a multibillion dollar company without an MBA. Quite obviously, no multibillion dollar company is going to hire an unqualified person for that position and is more than capable of doing the necessary vetting. Most CEOs probably do have MBAs. Those that don't will be proven in other ways. A one-size-fits-all law would simply be needlessly discriminatory of the latter and limit the pool of qualified talent.
Where licensing actually is necessary is where the consumer is directly exposed to risks they may not be qualified to investigate. E.g., a large hospital might vet its own staff, but if a private person is able to open up their own medical clinic, there would be frauds and the people walking in the door would likely not all have the ability to discern the difference.
That said, something looser than present setup might, for instance, not block thousands of qualified doctors from practicing (reducing wait times and medical costs). So it might be worth looking at letting different professional organizations, hospitals/health care providers, counties, etc. have some ability to decide what they would consider satisfactory in hiring qualified providers of care. Stating the status quo is problematic does not require swinging fully to the opposite extreme of no licensing at all.
Who is going to pay for any mitigation effort? As it happens, I imagine companies would quite happily lobby their governments to put up money rather than having to pay it themselves in terms of taxes and regulation. And the politicians will be only too happy to sign up for something which lets them take credit for solving a much touted problem without much risk of alienating constituents.
"No stable government" only makes it easier. When have the major powers ever had a problem getting their way in an area with "no stable government"? Sometimes Step 1 is to fix things up so that there is no stable government.
I would say the crux of the problem is developing a self-propagating technology. It's easy to have massive effects with something that self-propagates -- humans affecting the climate are just such an example. Such technology is presently not developed, but that will not be perpetually the case: we make strides in that direction all the time.
"Dubious"? Which is of the victims are you accusing of lying and on what evidence? The stories are very consistent. Allegations came from people he worked with, met on the campaign trail, staffers at his Democratic office.
Upon the opening allegation by Leeann Tweeden, Al Franken acknowledged the hard evidence (a creepy photo) and called her a dirty lying *****. Well, he's not Trump, so he phrased it much better and said, "I don't remember it the same way," but the comment is still "What she's saying isn't true." Personally, I consider it quite unlikely that someone who decides they are going to make up a story about being assaulted a decade ago also just so happens to have photographic evidence of exactly that type of behavior by the accused, so I was very inclined to believe Tweeden even before other accusers came forward.
If you are wondering why Franken called for an investigation against himself, I believe the last time congress censured one of its own was over a decade ago and the last time the expelled someone was over a century-and-a-half ago. Meanwhile, the public outcry has time to defuse. It's especially a good move if you're expecting the investigation to come anyway. Ask yourself, when did Franken say he expected the investigation to clear himself of all charges? He didn't. And if he's not innocent, why does someone else need to tell him that? He's just hoping to punt the question and commute the consequences to a reprobation. Nothing particularly noble about that. Conyers thought this was quite the clever trick and did exactly the same thing when he was found out next.
In the subsequent allegation, Franken also used the "I don't remember" line.
And again on the next one. (On this one he also said "I've met tens of thousands of people and taken thousands of photographs, often in crowded and chaotic situations. I'm a warm person; I hug people. I've learned from recent stories that in some of those encounters, I crossed a line for some women — and I know that any number is too many." Yes, "I can't remember all the people I've met and groped, but just in case the takeaway is I'm a warm bubbly hugger. Oh and sorry I guess.")
As the allegations continued and he became clearly to his party he was jeopardizing a safe seat while blunting their use of Moore and Trump, Franken eventually got forced out. In his resignation he complained that other predators got to stay while he had to leave. Obviously very contrite.
I suppose in the age of Trump people have forgotten that most politicians are downright artful in their weaseling. Sexual predators too for that matter -- being able to deflect, reframe, and appear contrite are all key tools for a serial offender trying to keep their pattern under the radar. Franken's statements were calculated and skillful. But he never actually displayed any integrity in owning up to what he was guilty of, so let's not fall for his maneuvering there.
As for "What about Moore" someone could easily construct a defense for him along the same line as yours for Franken. They could doubt the accusers (who Moore says are lying). They could say "It happened 30 years ago" (Can Franken?) They could say it was nothing against the law at the time (Can Franken?). But the fact is that both men are predators, neither deserve office, and their unethical behavior does not need to be interpreted in the framework of each other. You might as well tell the judge, "Hey, what about O.J. Simpson and that murder?" when she sentences you for not paying your taxes.