Just "this is Alexa" might be confusing, humans can be called Alexa.
Are new babies still being named "Alexa"? I can't believe anyone would name their kid that anymore. It should be off the baby name list, like Adolf and Judas.
I think people are already getting used to calls from chatbots. I have received several. I didn't realize they weren't human until I went "off script" and the bot said "Let me get someone to help you with that."
Google is doing something that may be iteratively better, with a deeper flowchart, but it is not really new.
In the near future, people will just presume that any call from a business is a chatbot. We will have our own chatbots to deal with them. Hopefully, they will be able to resolve most issues without involving a human on either end.
it is one of the few middle eastern countries with a democracy
... except for the millions of people in the occupied territories who have no vote. They should be offered either citizenship or independence. Israel offers them neither.
where freedom of religion is protected
... except that the force of law is used to impose Jewish religious practices on non-Jews, including laws on the observance of the sabbath.
and its people are free to practice the religion they choose.
... unless they choose the wrong religion. For instance a Jewish Israeli can marry a non-Israeli, and their spouse will be granted residency in Israel and a pathway to citizenship. Non-Jewish citizens have no such right.
If you have a nitrogen leak to other parts of the building...
Unless it is an extremely tiny building, the leak would have no harmful effect.
If the execution chamber was 500 cubic feet, and it leaked into an adjacent broom closet the same size, the oxygen concentration in the closet would drop from 20% to 10%, which is easily survivable for hours or even days.
If we hire Nepalese Sherpas to organize and maintain the broom closet supplies, the risk would be even lower.
It's unproven in the FDA sense of "not the subject of an FDA-approved trial". They claim absence of evidence all the time on this basis.
There is no absence of evidence. N2 has been used for animal euthanasia for decades. What is the physiological difference between oxygen deprivation of an animal and a human? Answer: Nothing*.
IMO the key is replacing the roof itself with solar panels
That is what Tesla Solar Roof is. It is a replacement for a normal roof. This is why it makes sense to put solar on new houses. The cost is lower because the "original" roof is never built, and contractors can negotiate lower prices with the panel suppliers.
It is also cheaper for homeowners because the cost of the solar panels is built into the purchase price of the house, and is financed as part of the regular mortgage. So if you have a 5% mortgage, and get a typical 8-12% ROI on your solar panels, then your monthly mortgage+utility payments will be LOWER than if there were no solar panels.
They should be. Trump's policies in Korea have been very successful. He has cooperated diplomatically with South Korea, brushed assigned the normal American intransigence, and agreed to engage direcly with North Korea, in opposition to the ossified American bureaucracy.
The lessons here are clear:
1. Cooperate with your allies. 2. Be willing to talk to your enemies.
The problem with Iran is that he is doing the exact opposite. No cooperation with the other signatories. No diplomatic alternatives on the table.
Israel is very happy with Trump.
Netanyahu is happy, but reneging on the Iran deal is not in Israel's long term interests. Nor is politicizing Israeli-American relations. American support for Israel is declining, especially with young people and Democratic voters.
You are saying that Trump undid what Obama did. This is wrong. The unwinding of the deal puts America in a far worse position than we started in.
When the Iranians seized the American embassy in 1979, the US seized Iranian financial assets in America. There was never any question that the money belonged to Iran, and would be returned someday when relations improved. By 2017, these assets were worth $50B, and the money was returned to Iran as part of the nuke deal. Getting that money back was a major incentive for Iran to sign the deal.
So, now that America has reneged, is Iran going to send the money back? Absolutely not.
Trump has FAR less leverage for negotiating than Obama did. In addition to the money issue, the other signatories (China, Russia, Germany, Britain, France) are not reneging, and will not reimpose sanctions. So trade deals that could have gone to America will go elsewhere. Iranian Airlines will buy from Airbus, not Boeing, etc.
So even if you think Obama's deal was terrible, reneging on it, and having NO AGREEMENT and NO LEVERAGE, just makes the situation even worse.
The "island" is often the result of a transplant in front of the current hairline, then a few years go by, and the hairline retreats, leaving a skin gap between the transplant and hairline.
Anyway, I think this new drug is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Instead they should develop a drug that causes women to be attracted to bald men.
Tenet most likely believed what he said. What often happens is that as intel moves up the chain, each level gives it a slight tweak to please the people one level above. When it finally reaches the top, the facts are badly twisted. This clearly happened with the Tonkin Gulf incident, and also with Iraq's WMD.
So when Colin Powell went in front of the UN and said that we had proof Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger, he had every reason to believe that was true. But there were people in the US government that knew that evidence had been discredited, and that Powell's claims were false.
Powell wasn't lying, because he wasn't being intentionally deceptive. But it was an intelligence failure, because the facts collected by people on the ground failed to bubble up through the bureaucracy to the people making decisions.
A compensation of $2,000 per person affected for a total of 292 billion dollars sounds like a good place to start.
Equifax doesn't even have 1% of that amount, and never will.
If they cannot pay, then all data held by Equifax should be seized in remission of the debt and permanently destroyed.
So thousands of employees, who had nothing to do with the breach, would lose their jobs, and the credit reporting industry would switch from a tri-opoloy to a duopoly, making the situation worse for consumers.
produce 100% of our transportation fuel from algae feedstocks with current technology.
No. Fuel from algae is no where near commercial viability. Current costs are about $35 per gallon, a factor of ten too high, and little progress is happening.
The people who were convinced were the Neocons running the country at that time. Turns out that was not an intel failure, but a lie.
The DCI during the run up to the war was George Tenet, a Clinton appointee. He told GWB that it was a "slam dunk" to prove that Iraq had WMDs, and GWB had no reason to doubt him. That was an intel failure.
Lets get the fuckin auto pilot working on de fuckin Telsa's b4 we start to worrin about dem take our jobs!
Auto-filling a PDF form is a lot easier than navigation in the physical world. Replacing many banking jobs wouldn't even require AI. A Perl script should be enough.
It's a good thing all those executives went to prison so corporations will start taking security seriously.
Sending people to prison for incompetence is silly. America already has far more people in prison than China, Russia or Iran, and four times the incarceration rate of the developed country average.
Non-violent offenders do not belong in prison. For instance, Equifax executives could wear tracking anklets and spend 60 hours a week changing bedpans in nursing homes for the next 10 years. The cost to the taxpayers would be negligible, they would be doing useful work, and they may be back below their level of incompetence.
Simple rule of thumb: Conservatives generally support law enforcement at the local level, but are often opposed to federal law enforcement agencies, such as the ATF, SEC, FTC, EEOC, etc. For liberals, it is the other way around.
They can still Google for a bondsman. They just won't see ads. It is a commodity service, and the only thing that matters is the fee. The ads just run up the costs.
Last time I was in jail there was a list of bail bond companies, in alphabetical order, posted on the wall next to the phone.
Rate of 8% successful, meaning almost 1 in 10 people are correctly identified. Not that bad.
Indeed. If you are looking for a suspect in a city of a million people, and this system flags 10 people, and upon double checking you find that one of the ten is the suspect, then that is pretty darn good.
The false positive rate, by itself, tells you nothing about the usefulness of a test.
if you win big, the rest of your life does not suck.
This is incorrect. For most lottery winners, their life temporarily sucks less, but they soon fall back below even their pre-win level of suckage. They usually squander their winnings, but often take on debt that they can't afford once the money is gone.
Just for fun? Throwing money away willfully, is fun? BS. They think that they may reasonably win. They have no clue that their chances are negligible.
You don't seem to know much about human nature. Most people buying lottery tickets are fully aware than their chance of winning is negligible. They don't do it to "win".
When there is an office lottery pool, I will chip in and participate just because it is the social thing to do.
Slashdot Mirror
Just "this is Alexa" might be confusing, humans can be called Alexa.
Are new babies still being named "Alexa"? I can't believe anyone would name their kid that anymore. It should be off the baby name list, like Adolf and Judas.
Expectations mean a lot.
I think people are already getting used to calls from chatbots. I have received several. I didn't realize they weren't human until I went "off script" and the bot said "Let me get someone to help you with that."
Google is doing something that may be iteratively better, with a deeper flowchart, but it is not really new.
In the near future, people will just presume that any call from a business is a chatbot. We will have our own chatbots to deal with them. Hopefully, they will be able to resolve most issues without involving a human on either end.
it is one of the few middle eastern countries with a democracy
... except for the millions of people in the occupied territories who have no vote. They should be offered either citizenship or independence. Israel offers them neither.
where freedom of religion is protected
... except that the force of law is used to impose Jewish religious practices on non-Jews, including laws on the observance of the sabbath.
and its people are free to practice the religion they choose.
... unless they choose the wrong religion. For instance a Jewish Israeli can marry a non-Israeli, and their spouse will be granted residency in Israel and a pathway to citizenship. Non-Jewish citizens have no such right.
If you have a nitrogen leak to other parts of the building ...
Unless it is an extremely tiny building, the leak would have no harmful effect.
If the execution chamber was 500 cubic feet, and it leaked into an adjacent broom closet the same size, the oxygen concentration in the closet would drop from 20% to 10%, which is easily survivable for hours or even days.
If we hire Nepalese Sherpas to organize and maintain the broom closet supplies, the risk would be even lower.
It's unproven in the FDA sense of "not the subject of an FDA-approved trial". They claim absence of evidence all the time on this basis.
There is no absence of evidence. N2 has been used for animal euthanasia for decades. What is the physiological difference between oxygen deprivation of an animal and a human? Answer: Nothing*.
* except for cetaceans and pinnipeds.
California already has a housing cost issue. Lets make new housing MORE expensive!
High housing prices in California have nothing to do with construction costs.
IMO the key is replacing the roof itself with solar panels
That is what Tesla Solar Roof is. It is a replacement for a normal roof. This is why it makes sense to put solar on new houses. The cost is lower because the "original" roof is never built, and contractors can negotiate lower prices with the panel suppliers.
It is also cheaper for homeowners because the cost of the solar panels is built into the purchase price of the house, and is financed as part of the regular mortgage. So if you have a 5% mortgage, and get a typical 8-12% ROI on your solar panels, then your monthly mortgage+utility payments will be LOWER than if there were no solar panels.
South Korea is tickled pink with him.
They should be. Trump's policies in Korea have been very successful. He has cooperated diplomatically with South Korea, brushed assigned the normal American intransigence, and agreed to engage direcly with North Korea, in opposition to the ossified American bureaucracy.
The lessons here are clear:
1. Cooperate with your allies.
2. Be willing to talk to your enemies.
The problem with Iran is that he is doing the exact opposite. No cooperation with the other signatories. No diplomatic alternatives on the table.
Israel is very happy with Trump.
Netanyahu is happy, but reneging on the Iran deal is not in Israel's long term interests. Nor is politicizing Israeli-American relations. American support for Israel is declining, especially with young people and Democratic voters.
You are saying that Trump undid what Obama did. This is wrong. The unwinding of the deal puts America in a far worse position than we started in.
When the Iranians seized the American embassy in 1979, the US seized Iranian financial assets in America. There was never any question that the money belonged to Iran, and would be returned someday when relations improved. By 2017, these assets were worth $50B, and the money was returned to Iran as part of the nuke deal. Getting that money back was a major incentive for Iran to sign the deal.
So, now that America has reneged, is Iran going to send the money back? Absolutely not.
Trump has FAR less leverage for negotiating than Obama did. In addition to the money issue, the other signatories (China, Russia, Germany, Britain, France) are not reneging, and will not reimpose sanctions. So trade deals that could have gone to America will go elsewhere. Iranian Airlines will buy from Airbus, not Boeing, etc.
So even if you think Obama's deal was terrible, reneging on it, and having NO AGREEMENT and NO LEVERAGE, just makes the situation even worse.
The "island" is often the result of a transplant in front of the current hairline, then a few years go by, and the hairline retreats, leaving a skin gap between the transplant and hairline.
Anyway, I think this new drug is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. Instead they should develop a drug that causes women to be attracted to bald men.
It was a manipulative lie.
Tenet most likely believed what he said. What often happens is that as intel moves up the chain, each level gives it a slight tweak to please the people one level above. When it finally reaches the top, the facts are badly twisted. This clearly happened with the Tonkin Gulf incident, and also with Iraq's WMD.
So when Colin Powell went in front of the UN and said that we had proof Iraq was trying to buy yellowcake from Niger, he had every reason to believe that was true. But there were people in the US government that knew that evidence had been discredited, and that Powell's claims were false.
Powell wasn't lying, because he wasn't being intentionally deceptive. But it was an intelligence failure, because the facts collected by people on the ground failed to bubble up through the bureaucracy to the people making decisions.
I can make a pizza that's about 250 calories a slice. When I go out to eat it's easy to forget that most pizzas are 600+ calories a slice.
Obvious solution: Take a pizza cutter with you to the restaurant, and cut each slice in half.
A compensation of $2,000 per person affected for a total of 292 billion dollars sounds like a good place to start.
Equifax doesn't even have 1% of that amount, and never will.
If they cannot pay, then all data held by Equifax should be seized in remission of the debt and permanently destroyed.
So thousands of employees, who had nothing to do with the breach, would lose their jobs, and the credit reporting industry would switch from a tri-opoloy to a duopoly, making the situation worse for consumers.
Perhaps you should think about this some more.
Yeah it'd be much better to do like China, Russia or Iran and just shoot them...
Russia has not used the death penalty in more than 20 years. The last judicial execution was in 1996.
produce 100% of our transportation fuel from algae feedstocks with current technology.
No. Fuel from algae is no where near commercial viability. Current costs are about $35 per gallon, a factor of ten too high, and little progress is happening.
The people who were convinced were the Neocons running the country at that time. Turns out that was not an intel failure, but a lie.
The DCI during the run up to the war was George Tenet, a Clinton appointee. He told GWB that it was a "slam dunk" to prove that Iraq had WMDs, and GWB had no reason to doubt him. That was an intel failure.
Lets get the fuckin auto pilot working on de fuckin Telsa's b4 we start to worrin about dem take our jobs!
Auto-filling a PDF form is a lot easier than navigation in the physical world. Replacing many banking jobs wouldn't even require AI. A Perl script should be enough.
Why do financial institutions seem to insist that Social Security numvers are a secret code? The government should just publish ALL of the SSNs
That is the way it works in many countries: Your citizenship number is public information.
Many have a separate changeable PIN for authentication.
The American system of making the same number both semi-public and secret is unique.
If 10% of the population went on record and disclosed their SSNs publicly it would shut down the SSN as a 'secret code.'
Equifax has already done this as a public service. Good for them.
It's a good thing all those executives went to prison so corporations will start taking security seriously.
Sending people to prison for incompetence is silly. America already has far more people in prison than China, Russia or Iran, and four times the incarceration rate of the developed country average.
Non-violent offenders do not belong in prison. For instance, Equifax executives could wear tracking anklets and spend 60 hours a week changing bedpans in nursing homes for the next 10 years. The cost to the taxpayers would be negligible, they would be doing useful work, and they may be back below their level of incompetence.
Simple rule of thumb: Conservatives generally support law enforcement at the local level, but are often opposed to federal law enforcement agencies, such as the ATF, SEC, FTC, EEOC, etc. For liberals, it is the other way around.
Exceptions to this rule: DEA, ICE.
The problem are American courts that set excessive bail and keep people in jail for relatively minor crimes
... and a big cause of that is elected judges. 38 states have elected judges.
Democracy is a good thing, but not in a courtroom.
They can still Google for a bondsman. They just won't see ads. It is a commodity service, and the only thing that matters is the fee. The ads just run up the costs.
Last time I was in jail there was a list of bail bond companies, in alphabetical order, posted on the wall next to the phone.
Rate of 8% successful, meaning almost 1 in 10 people are correctly identified. Not that bad.
Indeed. If you are looking for a suspect in a city of a million people, and this system flags 10 people, and upon double checking you find that one of the ten is the suspect, then that is pretty darn good.
The false positive rate, by itself, tells you nothing about the usefulness of a test.
if you win big, the rest of your life does not suck.
This is incorrect. For most lottery winners, their life temporarily sucks less, but they soon fall back below even their pre-win level of suckage. They usually squander their winnings, but often take on debt that they can't afford once the money is gone.
Just for fun? Throwing money away willfully, is fun? BS. They think that they may reasonably win. They have no clue that their chances are negligible.
You don't seem to know much about human nature. Most people buying lottery tickets are fully aware than their chance of winning is negligible. They don't do it to "win".
When there is an office lottery pool, I will chip in and participate just because it is the social thing to do.