Because his goals and your interests are now aligned.
Broadly speaking, the Gates Foundation wants to improve the world. It doesn't care about making a profit, it just wants to get the most improvement for the money it has available to spend. It can choose freely what kind of energy production to promote, and it is clearly choosing based on a bang-for-the-buck basis.
When Gates was running Microsoft, his goal was to make Microsoft bigger. Microsoft's mission statement of "enabling people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential" was actually subordinate to the goal of growing Microsoft, which is why one-Windows-running-on-everything was promoted over, say, clear standards and interoperability for Office files.
Seriously, I personally know the difference between sponsored and unsponsored links. I use the short-cut links in the sponsored section when the same place shows up near the top of the unsponsored section. Otherwise, I take those links with a big block of salt.
Folks, Google is about as good as we can expect to get for a company that makes its money off of advertising-supported services. They need to be watched and called out when they do marginal things, but they aren't deliberately evil as corporate policy goes.
What is the average humidity on those 40/20 degree days?
Come visit my home in the Washington DC suburbs, in. say, August. After a week of 90/90 weather (90+ degrees F, 90%+ humidity) you'll be crying for AC too.
A lot of our problems today are the result of people in power fundamentally misunderstanding what Big Data is good for.
We used to assume it was impractical for the Government to keep records of everything we do in the public sphere. Those things have gone from possible to practical to inevitable, mostly due to Moore's Law.
Just because you have everything recorded, doesn't mean it's useful, though. Technologists who should know better talk about searching these records to find the "needle in the haystack", selling the vision of complete records + powerful search tools = Total Awareness.
What they conveniently skip over is:
* All records have inaccuracies * If the inaccuracy rate is higher than the occurrence rate of what you're searching for, the search is not useful
Consider medical screening tests. If you have a test with a false positive rate of 1 in 1000, it is useless to use such a test to search for a condition that happens to 1 in 1000000 - 999 times out of a thousand, the test will say you're sick when you're fine.
Now, consider:
* The error rate of address OCR
versus
* The rate of secrets being exchanged via US Mail
Anyone in the Government who can't produce an estimate of those two numbers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near those records - it would be like giving a child a loaded gun, or a politician a Twitter account.
The people who actually DO AI worry publicly about it.
People in the field are painfully aware of:
* The limitations of existing systems * The difficulty of extrapolating from existing systems to general-purpose AI - things that look like easy extensions often aren't.
I did AI academically and industrially in the 1980's; at the time we were all painfully aware of the overpromising and underdelivery in the field.
Apple.com is number 64, just under two years later. One of the benefits of getting in on the ground floor like that was big blocks of IPv4 addresses - apple.com still controls a/24 block, I think.
When did microsoft.com get created?
My personal intro to the internet was at the University of Maryland - I was there when the TAC to Ft. Meade was installed.
The fastest way to shut this stuff down would be a dump of the phone call logs for:
* All members of the House and Senate * The President, Vice President, and all Cabinet Secretaries * The Supreme Court Justices
It would take the media about one day to map phone numbers to names of lobbyists, and a little longer to show the patterns of calls followed by votes and other actions.
A few days after that, these programs would be defunded.
In the sequel to Jumper, the bad guys control people with an implanted device that incapacitates them by stimulating their vagus nerves to make them throw up.
Enough that it could kill them, since it doesn't have to stop, ever.
When a Pages document in iCloud storage is open across multiple iOS/OSX devices, Pages routinely declares it can see multiple versions and can't decide which one it should keep. One of the options it offers you is to keep both of them, leaving you to manually look at both and figure out which one is the best. This happens even without simultaneous access, and edits often get distributed randomly between versions, requiring manual cut-and-paste merging.
Apple should go to the Dropbox people, hat in hand, and say:
Yes, Steve was a dick when he talked with you years ago. We don't want to acquire you - we want to hire you to host iCloud file storage. We want a cloud back end that Just Works, and cross-platform sharing will be a plus.
Jean McKenzie has been Executive Vice President of Mattel since September 2012. She was named President of American Girl Jan. 1, 2013. Prior to re-joining Mattel in 2011 as Senior Vice President-Marketing, she was President and CEO of Gateway Learning Corporation and Senior Vice President for The Walt Disney Company. From 1989-1998, Ms. McKenzie served in various executive positions at Mattel working on the Barbie brand, most recently as Executive Vice President and GM of Worldwide Barbie for Mattel.
Not sure if this makes the screw-up better or worse...
There shouldn't be just one organization with those two jobs. There should be an open, well-funded office in, say the National Institute for Standards and Technology that searches for vulnerabilities and has a responsible disclosure policy for everything it finds.
The Government has had this problem before - there used to be one body that handled both promotion and regulation of atomic energy in the US, the US Atomic Energy Commission. In 1974 it got broken up into two agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the regulator) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (the promoter).
Voice recognition is the most processor intensive thing most users commonly do, and today everybody does it remotely on big servers, primarily because you need a bunch of data in RAM to do it fast.
We probably won't see this on phones until we get really low-power RAM (memristor-based, maybe).
The "bad for wildlife" question basically comes down to:
* how much mass you have to move * how much land area you have to occupy
per watt generated.
Coal and hydro lose because they both require a lot of mass (water and coal) and a lot of area (dammed waterway, mines and transport).
Nuclear and geothermal win because they both require very little mass and very little area other than the plant itself - uranium ore has at least 1000 times the energy per gram as coal.
Any kind of solar is in the middle because of the large area needed to capture relatively dilute solar energy.
Slashdot Mirror
is a rack-mounted server, and getting an A/C balance that keeps the servers cool without freezing the humans is a problem.
Because his goals and your interests are now aligned.
Broadly speaking, the Gates Foundation wants to improve the world. It doesn't care about making a profit, it just wants to get the most improvement for the money it has available to spend. It can choose freely what kind of energy production to promote, and it is clearly choosing based on a bang-for-the-buck basis.
When Gates was running Microsoft, his goal was to make Microsoft bigger. Microsoft's mission statement of "enabling people and businesses throughout the world to realize their full potential" was actually subordinate to the goal of growing Microsoft, which is why one-Windows-running-on-everything was promoted over, say, clear standards and interoperability for Office files.
Who knew?
Seriously, I personally know the difference between sponsored and unsponsored links. I use the short-cut links in the sponsored section when the same place shows up near the top of the unsponsored section. Otherwise, I take those links with a big block of salt.
Folks, Google is about as good as we can expect to get for a company that makes its money off of advertising-supported services. They need to be watched and called out when they do marginal things, but they aren't deliberately evil as corporate policy goes.
Facebook, on the other hand...
I don't use an ad blocker. I could turn ads off here on Slashdot; I don't because by and large their ads aren't obnoxious.
I don't want to give Google permission to scan my email, so their index will be ready for the NSA to hoover up.
I don't have a gmail address, because Google admits up front they scan the contents of your email for advertising purposes.
No, thank you.
What is the average humidity on those 40/20 degree days?
Come visit my home in the Washington DC suburbs, in. say, August. After a week of 90/90 weather (90+ degrees F, 90%+ humidity) you'll be crying for AC too.
And rake off a little as it passes by.
A lot of our problems today are the result of people in power fundamentally misunderstanding what Big Data is good for.
We used to assume it was impractical for the Government to keep records of everything we do in the public sphere. Those things have gone from possible to practical to inevitable, mostly due to Moore's Law.
Just because you have everything recorded, doesn't mean it's useful, though. Technologists who should know better talk about searching these records to find the "needle in the haystack", selling the vision of complete records + powerful search tools = Total Awareness.
What they conveniently skip over is:
* All records have inaccuracies
* If the inaccuracy rate is higher than the occurrence rate of what you're searching for, the search is not useful
Consider medical screening tests. If you have a test with a false positive rate of 1 in 1000, it is useless to use such a test to search for a condition that happens to 1 in 1000000 - 999 times out of a thousand, the test will say you're sick when you're fine.
Now, consider:
* The error rate of address OCR
versus
* The rate of secrets being exchanged via US Mail
Anyone in the Government who can't produce an estimate of those two numbers shouldn't be allowed anywhere near those records - it would be like giving a child a loaded gun, or a politician a Twitter account.
At least when the science doesn't unambiguously support the position they've taken to make their constituents happy.
I don't have any presence on Facebook. If asked why not, I point out the similarities between Mark Zuckerberg and Satan's representative on earth.
However, my wife is on Facebook - she friends the children and handles any mass communications that must happen over there.
The people who actually DO AI worry publicly about it.
People in the field are painfully aware of:
* The limitations of existing systems
* The difficulty of extrapolating from existing systems to general-purpose AI - things that look like easy extensions often aren't.
I did AI academically and industrially in the 1980's; at the time we were all painfully aware of the overpromising and underdelivery in the field.
Just say that fine revenue above police administrative costs goes somewhere else, so the people issuing the tickets don't directly benefit.
Since these are local/state offenses, the obvious place would be the state general fund.
There's potential for abuse, of course - states might have to specify maximum admin costs.
I bet the enthusiasm for local speed traps would drop way off under such a system. Sounds win/win to me.
Number 7 on the list of oldest registered domain names.
BBN is apparently owned by Raytheon.
Apple.com is number 64, just under two years later. One of the benefits of getting in on the ground floor like that was big blocks of IPv4 addresses - apple.com still controls a /24 block, I think.
When did microsoft.com get created?
My personal intro to the internet was at the University of Maryland - I was there when the TAC to Ft. Meade was installed.
The fastest way to shut this stuff down would be a dump of the phone call logs for:
* All members of the House and Senate
* The President, Vice President, and all Cabinet Secretaries
* The Supreme Court Justices
It would take the media about one day to map phone numbers to names of lobbyists, and a little longer to show the patterns of calls followed by votes and other actions.
A few days after that, these programs would be defunded.
In the sequel to Jumper, the bad guys control people with an implanted device that incapacitates them by stimulating their vagus nerves to make them throw up.
Enough that it could kill them, since it doesn't have to stop, ever.
No, thank you.
When a Pages document in iCloud storage is open across multiple iOS/OSX devices, Pages routinely declares it can see multiple versions and can't decide which one it should keep. One of the options it offers you is to keep both of them, leaving you to manually look at both and figure out which one is the best. This happens even without simultaneous access, and edits often get distributed randomly between versions, requiring manual cut-and-paste merging.
Apple should go to the Dropbox people, hat in hand, and say:
Yes, Steve was a dick when he talked with you years ago. We don't want to acquire you - we want to hire you to host iCloud file storage. We want a cloud back end that Just Works, and cross-platform sharing will be a plus.
I would pay for that service, in a heartbeat.
I can understand United doing legal crap like this.
Orbitz, however, is known for creative flight scheduling. I'm surprised skipping the last leg of a flight isn't an advanced option of Orbitz search.
The vast majority of newspaper ends up buried in landfills, where it essentially never breaks down.
With your current background, you could get a job in technical writing. Every firm that does engineering needs people like you who:
* Understand the subject matter
* Can write about it readably
Jean McKenzie has been Executive Vice President of Mattel since September 2012. She was named President of American Girl Jan. 1, 2013. Prior to re-joining Mattel in 2011 as Senior Vice President-Marketing, she was President and CEO of Gateway Learning Corporation and Senior Vice President for The Walt Disney Company. From 1989-1998, Ms. McKenzie served in various executive positions at Mattel working on the Barbie brand, most recently as Executive Vice President and GM of Worldwide Barbie for Mattel.
Not sure if this makes the screw-up better or worse...
There shouldn't be just one organization with those two jobs. There should be an open, well-funded office in, say the National Institute for Standards and Technology that searches for vulnerabilities and has a responsible disclosure policy for everything it finds.
The Government has had this problem before - there used to be one body that handled both promotion and regulation of atomic energy in the US, the US Atomic Energy Commission. In 1974 it got broken up into two agencies, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (the regulator) and the Energy Research and Development Administration (the promoter).
Automation will take us last.
Voice recognition is the most processor intensive thing most users commonly do, and today everybody does it remotely on big servers, primarily because you need a bunch of data in RAM to do it fast.
We probably won't see this on phones until we get really low-power RAM (memristor-based, maybe).
The "bad for wildlife" question basically comes down to:
* how much mass you have to move
* how much land area you have to occupy
per watt generated.
Coal and hydro lose because they both require a lot of mass (water and coal) and a lot of area (dammed waterway, mines and transport).
Nuclear and geothermal win because they both require very little mass and very little area other than the plant itself - uranium ore has at least 1000 times the energy per gram as coal.
Any kind of solar is in the middle because of the large area needed to capture relatively dilute solar energy.
Given his major influence on:
C
Java
Common Lisp
Scheme
And, as a throwaway on his Oracle bio page:
He designed the original EMACS command set and was the first person to port TeX.