And they aren't exactly what I'd call positive examples.
It used to be said that "A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far". . So it is a sign of progress that incompetent women are able to rise to the same level as incompetent men. If Jerry Yang can be CEO of Yahoo, then why not Melissa Mayer?
This is not just limited to tech. In politics, we had Condoleezza Rice, who was both female and black, rising to the highest levels of government, despite blundering from failure to fiasco in every job she had.
Also, it is silly to say this is a "tech" issue, since tech is actually doing much better than other industries. Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Melissa Mayers, were all CEOs of major tech firms. Even those led by men have women in high levels, such as Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. 45% of top executives at Google are female.
What other industry does as well?
Journalists just like to pick on techies because we make more money, and we are changing the world and they aren't.
The 225 low rent places will be for the "contractors" at FB (janitors, kitchen staff, thought police, etc).
Wouldn't it make more sense to just pay them more, rather than subsidizing their rent?
Rent subsidies for poor people to live in the heart of Silicon Valley makes about as much sense as subsidizing the BMW dealerships so they can sell Z4s to poor people at lower prices.
The key to making housing affordable is to increase the total supply. These 1.5K new houses will help, but the SF Bay Area really needs 1.5M.
Can a self driving car tell if 2 people on the side of the road are drunk and wobbling all over the place, or if its 2 friends horsing around.
Sure. In either case, the pattern of movement would be different from 2 sober people purposely walking parallel to traffic, and the prudent thing to do is slow down. An ANN should have little problem learning those patterns. Most likely, this is already a solved problem, or considering the millions of miles driven, there would be more than zero avoidable pedestrian deaths by now.
Or as another poster said a stray dor or a dog on a leash.
That also seems like a relatively easy pattern for an ANN to learn.
Do you think the engineers designing these systems are stupid? They have libraries of millions of scenarios, both simulated and real recorded events, which they use for training and testing. It is unlikely that you are going to think of anything new that isn't already handled.
You'd almost think that the people behind for-profit prisons want to bring back slavery in this country.
There is plenty of evidence that for-profit prisons are a bad idea, but phone price-gouging happens in state run prisons as well. In California, a major obstacle to prison reform is the prison guard union, which has an unholy alliance with conservative politicians. Liberal legislators are afraid to stand up to them, because they have other priorities, and don't want to be smeared as "soft on crime" for advocating sensible policies.
True, but this is a product of socialist medicine in the UK so that's what, communism?
Per capita, America spends more than twice as much on medical research as the UK. In fact, America spends nearly as much as the rest of the world combined.
But even then they shouldn't be storing that stuff by default, but rather because the customer flies that often and has insisted they keep it or has enrolled in some kind of subscription model (like Netflix).
This is partly because of the stupidity and apathy of the banks. Immediately after the first transaction, they could give the merchant (Orbitz in this case) a token for repeated transactions, that could only be used by that merchant. Then the merchant would only need the last 4 digits (to confirm the CC # with the customer), and would have no need to store the other digits.
People that suffer from CC fraud: 1. End users 2. Merchants
People that have the power to fix the problem: 1. Banks
Please note that these are disjoint sets. Banks actually profit from fraud because they can charge $30 for every chargeback, which costs them $0 to process. They have no incentive to fix the system.
To be fair though, credit cards themselves are a joke. Here is my 16 digit secret key. Please don't take more than you need.
Indeed. The root problem here is we base financial security on information that is both secret and widely known. Thousands of people have access to my SSN, and even more have access to my CC #s.
We should have 2FA for small transactions (debit cards already do this, as does ApplePay, Walmart-Pay, and WeChat), and 3FA for large transactions.
Only 10-15% of AMD are "wet". Also wet AMD often only affects one eye. Dry AMD usually affects both.
This is still great news, and hopefully there will be new breakthroughs on the dry side soon. AMD affects more than 10 million people just in America, roughly 3% of the population, and that is expected to grow with demographic changes, doubling by 2050 without new treatments. An effective treatment will make a huge difference to the quality of life of many people.
Those who grow up today will never have seen a working phone booth.
Obsolete tech can often have a long tail. The world's last telegraph service just recently shut down. Fax machines are still around (mostly used by lawyers, doctors, and governments). Typewriters are still being manufactured. You can even buy brand new floppy drives.
I saw "Red Sparrow" last week. It seemed incongruous that the spies have smartphones, but still exchanged secrets on a big stack of floppy disks instead of a single thumb drive... or maybe Dropbox. Spoiler alert: That is not the only implausible scene in the movie.
Exactly. There's enough of a risk of being raped while behind bars. Financial raping should be criminalized.
The revenue from the phone calls is only one benefit. The other benefit is that by jacking up the cost, we can reduce communications and break down family and community bonds, which is known to increase recidivism. This means repeat business for the prison, lucrative overtime pay for the guards, and even more profit for the phone contractor.
Prison should be more like a five-star resort, right?
Yes. Better and more human prisons are correlated with lower recidivism. Norway has the best prisons and one of the world's lowest rates of re-offense by ex-inmates.
Those are valid ethical questions that have to be answered by the AI and the programmers. If a car is forced to make a choice between killing a squirrel or killing a child, will it treat them the same?
This is not a "valid ethical question". It is just silly.
How will it choose if it has to decide between killing 4 people or 1?
But these rare corner cases are not that interesting, because they are... rare. Far more common are accidents where the correct course of action is obvious: hit the brakes. And SDCs are FAR better at that. A typical human takes about 1.5 seconds to realize what is happening, move a foot to the brake, and start depressing it. An SDC can do it in less than 10 milliseconds. At 70mph, a car travels more than 150 feet in 1.5 seconds. The response time will be even worse if the human is not paying attention.
Every time I see someone hacking up a lung on a plane...
In China they use IR cameras at the security gate. If you are running a fever, or hacking and coughing, you can't board the plane. The rationale is to keep disease in one province from spreading to the rest of the country, but it should also reduce in-flight infections.
One of the big complaints about Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa is that the Chinese companies bring in Chinese workers, and employ very few locals.
And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
In America, unpaid internships are generally illegal. They are only allowed if purely educational, involving no economically useful work. If you work, you must be paid at least the minimum wage.
If you work an unpaid internship, and document your activities, you can likely sue for backpay.
I am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one.
It is hard to evaluate doctors. Kaiser (a big American health company) tried to evaluate their doctors by patient outcome. It didn't work because the best doctors tended to have the worst record of good outcomes. Why? Because, since they were the best, they were often assigned the worst-case patients.
People do this with proprietary software as well. They don't read the EULA and they copy from friends. Why should they only get impunity for copyright violations of the GPL? Why doesn't Microsoft support a "first time free" policy for their own software?
Slashdot Mirror
And they aren't exactly what I'd call positive examples.
It used to be said that "A woman has to be twice as good as a man to go half as far". . So it is a sign of progress that incompetent women are able to rise to the same level as incompetent men. If Jerry Yang can be CEO of Yahoo, then why not Melissa Mayer?
This is not just limited to tech. In politics, we had Condoleezza Rice, who was both female and black, rising to the highest levels of government, despite blundering from failure to fiasco in every job she had.
Also, it is silly to say this is a "tech" issue, since tech is actually doing much better than other industries. Meg Whitman, Carly Fiorina, Melissa Mayers, were all CEOs of major tech firms. Even those led by men have women in high levels, such as Sheryl Sandberg at Facebook. 45% of top executives at Google are female.
What other industry does as well?
Journalists just like to pick on techies because we make more money, and we are changing the world and they aren't.
It's not "racially motivated" to be against slavery.
Immigrant labor is not "slavery", and their jobs are superior to what they would be paid in Mexico, or otherwise they wouldn't come here.
The worst racists are those that justify it by saying it is "for their own good".
The 225 low rent places will be for the "contractors" at FB (janitors, kitchen staff, thought police, etc).
Wouldn't it make more sense to just pay them more, rather than subsidizing their rent?
Rent subsidies for poor people to live in the heart of Silicon Valley makes about as much sense as subsidizing the BMW dealerships so they can sell Z4s to poor people at lower prices.
The key to making housing affordable is to increase the total supply. These 1.5K new houses will help, but the SF Bay Area really needs 1.5M.
The rocket size exceeds typical road clearance, so shipping over land is not an option for most destinations.
They could do what they did with the shuttle boosters: Manufacture in sections, ship them by rail, and then connect the sections with O rings.
That worked well.
Can a self driving car tell if 2 people on the side of the road are drunk and wobbling all over the place, or if its 2 friends horsing around.
Sure. In either case, the pattern of movement would be different from 2 sober people purposely walking parallel to traffic, and the prudent thing to do is slow down. An ANN should have little problem learning those patterns. Most likely, this is already a solved problem, or considering the millions of miles driven, there would be more than zero avoidable pedestrian deaths by now.
Or as another poster said a stray dor or a dog on a leash.
That also seems like a relatively easy pattern for an ANN to learn.
Do you think the engineers designing these systems are stupid? They have libraries of millions of scenarios, both simulated and real recorded events, which they use for training and testing. It is unlikely that you are going to think of anything new that isn't already handled.
You'd almost think that the people behind for-profit prisons want to bring back slavery in this country.
There is plenty of evidence that for-profit prisons are a bad idea, but phone price-gouging happens in state run prisons as well. In California, a major obstacle to prison reform is the prison guard union, which has an unholy alliance with conservative politicians. Liberal legislators are afraid to stand up to them, because they have other priorities, and don't want to be smeared as "soft on crime" for advocating sensible policies.
True, but this is a product of socialist medicine in the UK so that's what, communism?
Per capita, America spends more than twice as much on medical research as the UK. In fact, America spends nearly as much as the rest of the world combined.
But even then they shouldn't be storing that stuff by default, but rather because the customer flies that often and has insisted they keep it or has enrolled in some kind of subscription model (like Netflix).
This is partly because of the stupidity and apathy of the banks. Immediately after the first transaction, they could give the merchant (Orbitz in this case) a token for repeated transactions, that could only be used by that merchant. Then the merchant would only need the last 4 digits (to confirm the CC # with the customer), and would have no need to store the other digits.
People that suffer from CC fraud:
1. End users
2. Merchants
People that have the power to fix the problem:
1. Banks
Please note that these are disjoint sets. Banks actually profit from fraud because they can charge $30 for every chargeback, which costs them $0 to process. They have no incentive to fix the system.
To be fair though, credit cards themselves are a joke. Here is my 16 digit secret key. Please don't take more than you need.
Indeed. The root problem here is we base financial security on information that is both secret and widely known. Thousands of people have access to my SSN, and even more have access to my CC #s.
We should have 2FA for small transactions (debit cards already do this, as does ApplePay, Walmart-Pay, and WeChat), and 3FA for large transactions.
The BBC article says both patients had wet AMD.
Only 10-15% of AMD are "wet". Also wet AMD often only affects one eye. Dry AMD usually affects both.
This is still great news, and hopefully there will be new breakthroughs on the dry side soon. AMD affects more than 10 million people just in America, roughly 3% of the population, and that is expected to grow with demographic changes, doubling by 2050 without new treatments. An effective treatment will make a huge difference to the quality of life of many people.
Those who grow up today will never have seen a working phone booth.
Obsolete tech can often have a long tail. The world's last telegraph service just recently shut down. Fax machines are still around (mostly used by lawyers, doctors, and governments). Typewriters are still being manufactured. You can even buy brand new floppy drives.
I saw "Red Sparrow" last week. It seemed incongruous that the spies have smartphones, but still exchanged secrets on a big stack of floppy disks instead of a single thumb drive ... or maybe Dropbox. Spoiler alert: That is not the only implausible scene in the movie.
Exactly. There's enough of a risk of being raped while behind bars. Financial raping should be criminalized.
The revenue from the phone calls is only one benefit. The other benefit is that by jacking up the cost, we can reduce communications and break down family and community bonds, which is known to increase recidivism. This means repeat business for the prison, lucrative overtime pay for the guards, and even more profit for the phone contractor.
Win-win for the PIC.
Prison should be more like a five-star resort, right?
Yes. Better and more human prisons are correlated with lower recidivism. Norway has the best prisons and one of the world's lowest rates of re-offense by ex-inmates.
An AI cant read that sort of thing.
Why not?
Those are valid ethical questions that have to be answered by the AI and the programmers. If a car is forced to make a choice between killing a squirrel or killing a child, will it treat them the same?
This is not a "valid ethical question". It is just silly.
How will it choose if it has to decide between killing 4 people or 1?
Unlike most humans, the SDC will do the right thing.
But these rare corner cases are not that interesting, because they are ... rare. Far more common are accidents where the correct course of action is obvious: hit the brakes. And SDCs are FAR better at that. A typical human takes about 1.5 seconds to realize what is happening, move a foot to the brake, and start depressing it. An SDC can do it in less than 10 milliseconds. At 70mph, a car travels more than 150 feet in 1.5 seconds. The response time will be even worse if the human is not paying attention.
Every time I see someone hacking up a lung on a plane ...
In China they use IR cameras at the security gate. If you are running a fever, or hacking and coughing, you can't board the plane. The rationale is to keep disease in one province from spreading to the rest of the country, but it should also reduce in-flight infections.
Africa is now the low cost labor pool for China.
One of the big complaints about Chinese infrastructure projects in Africa is that the Chinese companies bring in Chinese workers, and employ very few locals.
modern robots connected to modern computers, and it's obvious they can never build such a thing from scratch
Can you?
In other news 99% of the population unemployed because of tractors.
99% of the oxen and draft horse population: yes.
A single modern combine, operated by one driver, can do as much work as 100 horse pulled reapers driven by 100 men.
And while on the subject, please feel free to discuss non-paying Internships...
In America, unpaid internships are generally illegal. They are only allowed if purely educational, involving no economically useful work. If you work, you must be paid at least the minimum wage.
If you work an unpaid internship, and document your activities, you can likely sue for backpay.
Wasting energy to participate in a pyramid scheme is not a basic need.
Neither is watching porn or playing video games.
Just cut/cap their power supply.
Or maybe power companies should not be policing morality. As long as I pay my bill, what I do with the power is none of their concern.
I am very skeptical whether we have any idea who is a good pathologist and who is a bad one.
It is hard to evaluate doctors. Kaiser (a big American health company) tried to evaluate their doctors by patient outcome. It didn't work because the best doctors tended to have the worst record of good outcomes. Why? Because, since they were the best, they were often assigned the worst-case patients.
they just make random assumptions and move on.
People do this with proprietary software as well. They don't read the EULA and they copy from friends. Why should they only get impunity for copyright violations of the GPL? Why doesn't Microsoft support a "first time free" policy for their own software?
There is no battery technology existing or foreseen which is remotely capable of deployment at such scale
Sodium ion battery