Considering that modern Apple products (from the early iPods on up) have had horrific user interfaces that are extremely hard to use by comparison to their competition,
Sorry, but you're simply wrong about that. The UIs may not be to your liking, but they've been easier to use for most people, and generally considered better by experts. And even if "most people" can be wrong and "experts" are full of crap, I've been using Mac, Windows, and Linux for a few decades, and I know my judgement is solid. I'm not a weirdo or a fanboy. The original iPod was better than the MP3 players of the time in almost every way, OSX has been less frustrating than Windows in a million ways, and the iOS UI blew the doors off of anything else available in 2007.
But really, I wasn't even just talking about the UI. I was talking about the design. And in a sense, you're right, it's about marketing, but evidently you don't know what marketing is. The field of "marketing" includes making sure that you're building a product that there's a market for. It includes saying, "This iPod prototype is too big. People won't want to carry that in their pocket." And you're right, that was Steve Jobs' brilliance. He could look at a product as a whole and say, "This is a pretty good product, but this isn't a great product that people will love, so it's not good enough."
Yeah, supposedly that was one of the important roles that Jobs played. Someone would bring him a new product or design, and he'd say, "Nope, not good enough."
And importantly, his view of what was "good enough" was often based on how pleasant or annoying it would be to use the end product. It's something missing from a lot of technology companies. It's common for companies to focus on having the longest feature list, the best technical specs, or having some new cool trendy gimmick. Jobs seemed to really think about, "This feature is cool, but what happens when I actually try to use it? Will it work well, or will it be annoying? Even if it works well, will it make my life easier and better, or will it be useless?" If it's annoying or useless, it just doesn't go into the product.
I don't think that's exactly an Apple problem. It's more of a technology problem that Jobs used to keep Apple away from. Even without Jobs, Apple still isn't as bad as the rest of the tech industry.
Can't help but notice the dislike of the "single producer streaming source" essentially conflicts with the quite-recent desire for "ala carte" cable without enforced packages.
I think you might be misunderstanding the complaint about wanted "a la carte" cable. The precise problem isn't that they have too many channels available to them. The problem is that the price of cable packages are high and rising, and people are saying, "If I'm paying $120 for 500 channels with thousands of shows, but I only watch 20 shows on 4 of those channels. Why can't I save some money by only getting the shows and channels I want?"
So now the content owners are saying, "Oh, you want a la carte, do you? Ok. We'll take those 20 shows that you want, put them each on a different streaming service. We'll charge $10/month for each service, and then in order to justify that price, we'll pack the service with a bunch of other shows that you don't care about. That's what you want, right?"
But no, having a la carte cable wasn't the goal, it was the means. The goal was to save money without losing access to the shows they want to watch. The idea was that maybe they could save money by sacrificing access to the crap they don't want. It doesn't help to give them a new distribution model that finds a different way to bundle crap we don't want, that ends up costing even more when you add it all up.
A new born who isopneing its eyes imediatly, grabbing for the fingers of his mother and smiling, making noice and trying to communicate: most likely is fully consciousness. You might _believe_ otherwise, but you don't _know_.
To the extent I don't know, you also don't know. Neither of us will ever fully know, in the same sense that I can't know if you have any consciousness now, or whether you're some kind of automaton that gives the appearance of consciousness.
However, insofar as we can know, we know that a newborn opening its eyes and grabbing fingers is not consciousness. There are basic instincts and sentience, but not consciousness.
Yeah, I'm just saying that for that purpose, you could possibly have a single button that's not used for any other purpose except that one, and then design the OS to respond uniquely to that key so that no other application could intercept it. Since it's not going to immediately reset your computer, there's not really a need to make it hard to press.
By that logic, then certainly nobody should claim that their babies have consciousness. You also can't claim that anything doesn't have consciousness. A rock could have consciousness-- we have no tests that can determine that it doesn't.
But we can test a lot about how people are processing and understanding things by testing their reactions. From that, psychologists have a decent understanding of what babies can and cannot understand, and essentially, they don't have the tools to understand anything or think about much of anything. They don't have the ability to attach significant meaning to stimuli.
Lots of people have subtly different meanings in mind when they use the word consciousness, but most of those meanings somehow include the to interpretation of stimulus to attach meaning, and development of some kind of understanding of themselves and the world. Very often, it includes some kind of abstraction that provides a generalized narrative or theory about one's own existence and place in the world. That is, it's not just being able to understand individual an stimulus, but to contextualize all of stimuli into a story about who you are, where you are, why you're here, and what you should be doing.
Babies absolutely cannot do that. We know enough about how babies brains work and what they're capable of understanding to know that 100% of human newborns do not have consciousness. Unless there's some weird mutant psychic genius baby that's been covered up by the Men in Black or something, absolutely zero newborns have consciousness. Now, if you just mean "conscious" as in "awake and responsive to stimuli", then sure, lots of babies are conscious for large periods every day.
Yup. Back in the days when Ctrl-Alt-Del did an immediate soft reboot of your computer, it was really smart to not have it be a single button. Not only was it not a single button, they chose keys that were all over the keyboard, making it very difficult to press them all accidentally. If you slipped and mashed your hand down on the keyboard, there's no chance you'd just happen to hit those keys.
Now, I don't know. What does it do? It opens the login screen if you're in a domain? It brings up a menu to bring up the task manager, I think? Those things could be a single button, but at the same time, I don't think we need to cram a new button onto keyboard designs just for that.
No, I was right the first time. We don't have examples of newborns who come into the world with anything approaching adult-like consciousness and awareness.
Some may be more aware than others. I'm sure that's true, to some limited extent. But no, there aren't babies popping out of the womb with a solid understanding of the world around them. It just doesn't happen because it's not possible.
What many call "consciousness" is probably mostly just the brain focusing attention.
I think that's sort of... I don't know... begging the question? Your explanation seems to be reductionist. "Oh, that consciousness thing? That's just signals int he brain." as though to dismiss an attempt at a more holistic explanation.
On the other hand, the way you're saying it is that it's "mostly just the brain focusing attention." First, it's mostly just the brain focusing attention? Whenever someone says anything is "mostly just" anything, I feel like they're probably trying to hide something. Like if you handed me a beverage and I asked, "What's in this?" and you responded, "Oh, it's probably mostly just juice," I wouldn't find that answer satisfying. What else is in it?
But back to why I said it was kind of begging the question: It's mostly just the brain focusing attention? What does that mean? What is the brain doing when it focuses attention? At least how I'm thinking about this at the moment, something would need some level of consciousness in order to have attention, let along focus it. Consciousness would be the precondition necessary for attention, and therefore consciousness can't be defined by being "probably mostly just focusing attention".
Does that make sense? So for example (and this isn't the best example, but I'm just making something up), you need some kind of computer to access the Internet, right? So let's say I'm a time traveler from the past and I didn't know what computers were, or anything about them. I ask you to define what a computer is, and you say, "Oh, well a computer is probably mostly just when you access the Internet." Yeah, it makes a certain kind of sense, but there are several problems with this explanation. First, if I don't know what computers are, then I don't know what the Internet is either, so your explanation didn't actually explain anything. But second (and maybe more importantly), it's wrong. That's not what a computer is. You need computers to exist for a while before the Internet was possible, which is already a big clue that computers involve a lot more than just accessing the Internet.
Like I said, it's not a great example, but I'm hoping it makes my point a little more clearly. In order to focus your attention, you first need sentience, awareness, the ability to direct your attention, and some kind of motive force to cause you to direct your attention. On top of that, you'd need the ability to focus, which implies not only directing your attention, but tuning out other things that would draw your attention away. Even then, it's not clear that having the ability to focus attention is sufficient for consciousness.
And then also, you're talking about the contrast between "consciousness" and "unconsciousness", which implies "awake" vs. "asleep". I don't think that's really what we're talking about here. I think the discussion is about when a baby becomes a conscious being, i.e. when its development reaches a point where it has a level of "consciousness" comparable to an adult person. That's a tricky question all by itself, because it's not even completely clear that adults generally all have the same level of consciousness. We've never really settled on an explanation of what we're talking about when we say "consciousness", let alone how we would go about measuring it.
However, it takes a while for kids to develop a coherent concept of reality. They don't even start with a sense of object permanence.
My bottom line: she was always conscious. It was not that her consciousness changed, but the physical architecture, in terms of muscle control, methods of communication, energy levels, and emotionally coming to terms with the end of the world she had formerly known that had been the changes.
You may have done a little bit of experimentation, but that's a tiny sample size, colored through the perceptions of you being her father, and (it sounds like) not having a background in psychology. There has been extensive scientific study on these topics, and it's pretty well established that your daughter's consciousness has changed. Being able to control her limbs and tongue does not constitute consciousness.
I don't mean that as an insult against you or your daughter, by the day. It's just that newborns have very limited awareness and understanding of what's going on around them.
To some degree, this just sounds like playing word games, and coming up with new terms to sound like you've discovered something. Traditionally, there has been a distinction between sentience and consciousness. If you just want to say that babies feel and experience things, that's sentience and not necessarily consciousness. We can redefine the word "consciousness" to mean "sentience" and invent the word "meta-consciousness" to mean "consciousness", but you haven't really accomplished anything.
The concept of consciousness has been explored and modified over the past few thousand years (at least, we have records of people writing about it that far back), and it's fair to want to modify it some more. However, I think there's been a general view for a while that newborns are sentient but don't have much consciousness, and then we develop consciousness as we grow up. There seem to be developmental periods where our brains become capable of understanding certain things, and debatably those constitute different levels of consciousness and awareness, but again, that debate will be as much about what terms you want to use as it will be about our actual understanding of human development.
Kids as young as age 3 appear to behave differently when told "You are so smart" vs. "You did very well this time"...
I've read that the current wisdom is that you should praise kids for their effort rather than success. That is, you shouldn't say, "I'm proud of you because you're smart," or "I'm proud of you because you did well this time," but instead "I'm proud of you because I know how hard you tried. You really worked hard on that."
I think it kind of makes sense. Someone might complain that this is more "participation trophy" nonsense, but the idea isn't to pretend kids won something when they didn't. The idea is to send the message that, if you worked hard to win and tried your best, you should be proud of that regardless of whether you won. You shouldn't be especially proud of mere participation if you weren't trying very hard. But also if you won a contest that was easy for you to win, and you didn't try very hard, that's not something to be particularly proud of either.
AI notices patterns that determines crime rates amongst certain population groups! Fuq no.
I don't think that the problem is necessarily detecting higher crime rates among a certain population group. The problem is using that correlation to draw the conclusion, "Therefore those people are naturally more likely to commit crime."
Even if that conclusion isn't explicitly spelled out, it's still a problem when raw statistics are interpreted to be support for bigotry. If a scientist is studying crime statistics among specific population groups, they should be careful in how they formulate the study, and how they report their findings, to make sure they don't give a false impression that would validate bigotry.
Salespeople have the best leverage, so they get the best deal.
It's not just that. As you mention, you can easily see how much money a salesperson is bringing in, which provides a simple metric of job performance. Providing incentives for job performance is generally difficult because there aren't good metrics.
If you were to pay a programmer based on the number of lines of code they write, then their incentive is to write a bloated program with a lot of lines of code. They can game that metric, which isn't good. If you waiter simply based on how many tables they serve, then their incentive is to serve a lot of tables, even if they don't do it well. That's why it makes sense to have a portion of their income tied to tips, which incentivizes them to focus on customer satisfaction.
But with sales, there's a great job performance metric for how well a salesperson is doing. It's not an easy metric to game. The amount of money they make in sales is generally going to be proportional to the benefit they provide to the company.
If other roles had such a direct metric that was equally hard to game, I think you'd see more economic incentives being tied to those metrics. For example, I might expect that factories have some kind of incentive based on the number of units a worker can produce that pass QA. It's a pretty good metric of performance that's hard to game.
It seems to me that these things, in that we could really use a display format that can't actively do anything. For example, it should be possible to develop a safe subset of HTML that allows some basic formatting, but doesn't provide features that can create security holes. Similarly with PDF, we should be able to create a safe PDF format, and then set PDF viewers to only allow that form of PDF.
But no, that's not good enough. We need PDFs can can run Javascript and embed movies. For some reason.
If you never borrow money, you don't have a history of paying off loans.
Right, but my post was pointing out that it's not just about whether you pay off your loans, but how much credit you have available. All things being equal, borrowing the same amount of money and paying it off on the same schedule, if I just took out a few more credit cards and never used them, my credit would improve.
First, the difference between someone who succeeds and someone who fails is that the one who succeeds doesn't give up after each failure. I've known quite a lot of very successful people, but I've never met a single one who hasn't left a string of failures behind them on the way.
Have you considered that there might be plenty of people out there who fail, don't give up, try again, fail again, and just never hit the point of success? Maybe you don't know them, or maybe you attribute their failure to something else, but I don't think it's true that everyone who keeps trying will necessarily succeed eventually.
One thing that stands out to me about people who are "lucky" is that they have a skill that can be somewhat subtle.
I think that's somewhat true. To me, the real "luck" that makes a meaningful difference is basic/fundamental stuff. For example, I was lucky to be born into a upper-middle class white family. I didn't really have to deal with poverty or racism, and in that fact alone, I was set up to succeed more than a lot of people out there. I was lucky to have parents who instilled certain habits and values, and those things have served me well. I had less control over those things than someone has control over whether they win the lottery-- at least they made a decision to buy a ticket. I was just born into a bunch of advantages. Likewise, someone who was born without those advantages had no control over that. Those things are just an issue of luck.
There are other things that are, to a certain extent, luck. If you win the lottery, that's luck. You can't control that.
However, I think you're right when you say "what people call 'luck' isn't." I've come to the idea that a lot of "luck" really comes down to keeping yourself open to opportunities, and having good judgement on which opportunities to seize. A lot of people let opportunities pass them by, without even realizing it. A lot of people see opportunities where there are none. You're being given new opportunities every day, and it take skill and courage to make something of them. That's not really luck.
Still, some people get better opportunities than others, so... luck is still a part of it.
I'm not sure about your case, but at one point I investigated why my credit score wasn't higher. In my case, the issue was basically that I didn't have enough credit cards. Part of the calculation involves the total amount of credit you have available.
If you and I have the same income, same debt, and have made all the same payments, you might imagine that our credit scores would be the same. However, if I have 3 credit cards with a total credit line of $10k available to me, and you have 5 credit cards with a total amount of $20k available to you, you'll have better credit than I do. Apparently.
Ok, "it probably would have survived in court" is probably too strong. However, it may well have survived in court, at least in some form. DACA was put into place in 2012. Why do you think the people who oppose it are just now threatening to challenge it in court? They know the Trump Justice Department won't mount a defense.
But anyway, that's a relatively minor point in my post. On the theoretical side of the debate, the President can do a fair amount in terms of deciding how to enforce laws. On the practical side of the debate, this change isn't about constitutional law, it's about satisfying the portion of the population that doesn't like immigrants, especially when they're not white.
The company is legally responsible for vetting contractually and/or legally burdened data from leaving any internal compartmentalized or secured areas to outside networks such as the Internet.... In the end I very much worry laws like these will less protect an employees privacy and more simply force companies to block any and all such privileges in the first place
Yeah, it is a bit complicated. The need for security varies from industry to industry, and business to business. In many cases, the best option is just to treat employees as trusted adults. Or more to the point, to deal with the need to secure data on a different level, preventing employees from accessing it in the first place rather than trying to police what they do with it. That's generally a better approach, since once the data is available to people, they might find some way to share it.
There's also the question of what level, and to what extent, you want to monitor or control user access. For example, are you just monitoring that some HTTPS traffic went to some site, or are you introducing some kind of proxy that's performing a MITM attack so that you can see the content of the traffic? Are you trying to blacklist a few sites, or instead block everything and only whitelist a few sites?
I don't think there's a correct answer, but you have to tailor the security to your needs. There may be a middle ground, e.g. block all IM but the employer-approved IM, and then have that traffic monitored and archived. That way, you make it clear to the employees that this is a company-owned service, and communications are not private. I think setting up a MITM monitoring system is worse, since it gives people the illusion that their traffic might be private.
Slashdot Mirror
Considering that modern Apple products (from the early iPods on up) have had horrific user interfaces that are extremely hard to use by comparison to their competition,
Sorry, but you're simply wrong about that. The UIs may not be to your liking, but they've been easier to use for most people, and generally considered better by experts. And even if "most people" can be wrong and "experts" are full of crap, I've been using Mac, Windows, and Linux for a few decades, and I know my judgement is solid. I'm not a weirdo or a fanboy. The original iPod was better than the MP3 players of the time in almost every way, OSX has been less frustrating than Windows in a million ways, and the iOS UI blew the doors off of anything else available in 2007.
But really, I wasn't even just talking about the UI. I was talking about the design. And in a sense, you're right, it's about marketing, but evidently you don't know what marketing is. The field of "marketing" includes making sure that you're building a product that there's a market for. It includes saying, "This iPod prototype is too big. People won't want to carry that in their pocket." And you're right, that was Steve Jobs' brilliance. He could look at a product as a whole and say, "This is a pretty good product, but this isn't a great product that people will love, so it's not good enough."
Yeah, supposedly that was one of the important roles that Jobs played. Someone would bring him a new product or design, and he'd say, "Nope, not good enough."
And importantly, his view of what was "good enough" was often based on how pleasant or annoying it would be to use the end product. It's something missing from a lot of technology companies. It's common for companies to focus on having the longest feature list, the best technical specs, or having some new cool trendy gimmick. Jobs seemed to really think about, "This feature is cool, but what happens when I actually try to use it? Will it work well, or will it be annoying? Even if it works well, will it make my life easier and better, or will it be useless?" If it's annoying or useless, it just doesn't go into the product.
I don't think that's exactly an Apple problem. It's more of a technology problem that Jobs used to keep Apple away from. Even without Jobs, Apple still isn't as bad as the rest of the tech industry.
Can't help but notice the dislike of the "single producer streaming source" essentially conflicts with the quite-recent desire for "ala carte" cable without enforced packages.
I think you might be misunderstanding the complaint about wanted "a la carte" cable. The precise problem isn't that they have too many channels available to them. The problem is that the price of cable packages are high and rising, and people are saying, "If I'm paying $120 for 500 channels with thousands of shows, but I only watch 20 shows on 4 of those channels. Why can't I save some money by only getting the shows and channels I want?"
So now the content owners are saying, "Oh, you want a la carte, do you? Ok. We'll take those 20 shows that you want, put them each on a different streaming service. We'll charge $10/month for each service, and then in order to justify that price, we'll pack the service with a bunch of other shows that you don't care about. That's what you want, right?"
But no, having a la carte cable wasn't the goal, it was the means. The goal was to save money without losing access to the shows they want to watch. The idea was that maybe they could save money by sacrificing access to the crap they don't want. It doesn't help to give them a new distribution model that finds a different way to bundle crap we don't want, that ends up costing even more when you add it all up.
A new born who isopneing its eyes imediatly, grabbing for the fingers of his mother and smiling, making noice and trying to communicate: most likely is fully consciousness. You might _believe_ otherwise, but you don't _know_.
To the extent I don't know, you also don't know. Neither of us will ever fully know, in the same sense that I can't know if you have any consciousness now, or whether you're some kind of automaton that gives the appearance of consciousness.
However, insofar as we can know, we know that a newborn opening its eyes and grabbing fingers is not consciousness. There are basic instincts and sentience, but not consciousness.
My abstract reasoning at the age of 6 was beyond what most adult programmers will ever peak at
Did your mom tell you that, or did you take an online IQ test?
Yeah, I'm just saying that for that purpose, you could possibly have a single button that's not used for any other purpose except that one, and then design the OS to respond uniquely to that key so that no other application could intercept it. Since it's not going to immediately reset your computer, there's not really a need to make it hard to press.
You can not test consciousness.
By that logic, then certainly nobody should claim that their babies have consciousness. You also can't claim that anything doesn't have consciousness. A rock could have consciousness-- we have no tests that can determine that it doesn't.
But we can test a lot about how people are processing and understanding things by testing their reactions. From that, psychologists have a decent understanding of what babies can and cannot understand, and essentially, they don't have the tools to understand anything or think about much of anything. They don't have the ability to attach significant meaning to stimuli.
Lots of people have subtly different meanings in mind when they use the word consciousness, but most of those meanings somehow include the to interpretation of stimulus to attach meaning, and development of some kind of understanding of themselves and the world. Very often, it includes some kind of abstraction that provides a generalized narrative or theory about one's own existence and place in the world. That is, it's not just being able to understand individual an stimulus, but to contextualize all of stimuli into a story about who you are, where you are, why you're here, and what you should be doing.
Babies absolutely cannot do that. We know enough about how babies brains work and what they're capable of understanding to know that 100% of human newborns do not have consciousness. Unless there's some weird mutant psychic genius baby that's been covered up by the Men in Black or something, absolutely zero newborns have consciousness. Now, if you just mean "conscious" as in "awake and responsive to stimuli", then sure, lots of babies are conscious for large periods every day.
What has that to do with: "consciousness and awareness" ?
WTF do you think we're talking about here?
Just because we can not ask them right away and no one is asking them later?
Because we've done extensive testing on babies and children and we know (roughly) how human brains develop.
What has that to do with: "consciousness and awareness" ?
WTF do you think we're talking about here?
Yup. Back in the days when Ctrl-Alt-Del did an immediate soft reboot of your computer, it was really smart to not have it be a single button. Not only was it not a single button, they chose keys that were all over the keyboard, making it very difficult to press them all accidentally. If you slipped and mashed your hand down on the keyboard, there's no chance you'd just happen to hit those keys.
Now, I don't know. What does it do? It opens the login screen if you're in a domain? It brings up a menu to bring up the task manager, I think? Those things could be a single button, but at the same time, I don't think we need to cram a new button onto keyboard designs just for that.
No, I was right the first time. We don't have examples of newborns who come into the world with anything approaching adult-like consciousness and awareness.
Some may be more aware than others. I'm sure that's true, to some limited extent. But no, there aren't babies popping out of the womb with a solid understanding of the world around them. It just doesn't happen because it's not possible.
What many call "consciousness" is probably mostly just the brain focusing attention.
I think that's sort of... I don't know... begging the question? Your explanation seems to be reductionist. "Oh, that consciousness thing? That's just signals int he brain." as though to dismiss an attempt at a more holistic explanation.
On the other hand, the way you're saying it is that it's "mostly just the brain focusing attention." First, it's mostly just the brain focusing attention? Whenever someone says anything is "mostly just" anything, I feel like they're probably trying to hide something. Like if you handed me a beverage and I asked, "What's in this?" and you responded, "Oh, it's probably mostly just juice," I wouldn't find that answer satisfying. What else is in it?
But back to why I said it was kind of begging the question: It's mostly just the brain focusing attention? What does that mean? What is the brain doing when it focuses attention? At least how I'm thinking about this at the moment, something would need some level of consciousness in order to have attention, let along focus it. Consciousness would be the precondition necessary for attention, and therefore consciousness can't be defined by being "probably mostly just focusing attention".
Does that make sense? So for example (and this isn't the best example, but I'm just making something up), you need some kind of computer to access the Internet, right? So let's say I'm a time traveler from the past and I didn't know what computers were, or anything about them. I ask you to define what a computer is, and you say, "Oh, well a computer is probably mostly just when you access the Internet." Yeah, it makes a certain kind of sense, but there are several problems with this explanation. First, if I don't know what computers are, then I don't know what the Internet is either, so your explanation didn't actually explain anything. But second (and maybe more importantly), it's wrong. That's not what a computer is. You need computers to exist for a while before the Internet was possible, which is already a big clue that computers involve a lot more than just accessing the Internet.
Like I said, it's not a great example, but I'm hoping it makes my point a little more clearly. In order to focus your attention, you first need sentience, awareness, the ability to direct your attention, and some kind of motive force to cause you to direct your attention. On top of that, you'd need the ability to focus, which implies not only directing your attention, but tuning out other things that would draw your attention away. Even then, it's not clear that having the ability to focus attention is sufficient for consciousness.
And then also, you're talking about the contrast between "consciousness" and "unconsciousness", which implies "awake" vs. "asleep". I don't think that's really what we're talking about here. I think the discussion is about when a baby becomes a conscious being, i.e. when its development reaches a point where it has a level of "consciousness" comparable to an adult person. That's a tricky question all by itself, because it's not even completely clear that adults generally all have the same level of consciousness. We've never really settled on an explanation of what we're talking about when we say "consciousness", let alone how we would go about measuring it.
However, it takes a while for kids to develop a coherent concept of reality. They don't even start with a sense of object permanence.
My bottom line: she was always conscious. It was not that her consciousness changed, but the physical architecture, in terms of muscle control, methods of communication, energy levels, and emotionally coming to terms with the end of the world she had formerly known that had been the changes.
You may have done a little bit of experimentation, but that's a tiny sample size, colored through the perceptions of you being her father, and (it sounds like) not having a background in psychology. There has been extensive scientific study on these topics, and it's pretty well established that your daughter's consciousness has changed. Being able to control her limbs and tongue does not constitute consciousness.
I don't mean that as an insult against you or your daughter, by the day. It's just that newborns have very limited awareness and understanding of what's going on around them.
To some degree, this just sounds like playing word games, and coming up with new terms to sound like you've discovered something. Traditionally, there has been a distinction between sentience and consciousness. If you just want to say that babies feel and experience things, that's sentience and not necessarily consciousness. We can redefine the word "consciousness" to mean "sentience" and invent the word "meta-consciousness" to mean "consciousness", but you haven't really accomplished anything.
The concept of consciousness has been explored and modified over the past few thousand years (at least, we have records of people writing about it that far back), and it's fair to want to modify it some more. However, I think there's been a general view for a while that newborns are sentient but don't have much consciousness, and then we develop consciousness as we grow up. There seem to be developmental periods where our brains become capable of understanding certain things, and debatably those constitute different levels of consciousness and awareness, but again, that debate will be as much about what terms you want to use as it will be about our actual understanding of human development.
Basically SMS isn't secure, and shouldn't be treated as a method of securely transmitting data.
Kids as young as age 3 appear to behave differently when told "You are so smart" vs. "You did very well this time"...
I've read that the current wisdom is that you should praise kids for their effort rather than success. That is, you shouldn't say, "I'm proud of you because you're smart," or "I'm proud of you because you did well this time," but instead "I'm proud of you because I know how hard you tried. You really worked hard on that."
I think it kind of makes sense. Someone might complain that this is more "participation trophy" nonsense, but the idea isn't to pretend kids won something when they didn't. The idea is to send the message that, if you worked hard to win and tried your best, you should be proud of that regardless of whether you won. You shouldn't be especially proud of mere participation if you weren't trying very hard. But also if you won a contest that was easy for you to win, and you didn't try very hard, that's not something to be particularly proud of either.
AI notices patterns that determines crime rates amongst certain population groups! Fuq no.
I don't think that the problem is necessarily detecting higher crime rates among a certain population group. The problem is using that correlation to draw the conclusion, "Therefore those people are naturally more likely to commit crime."
Even if that conclusion isn't explicitly spelled out, it's still a problem when raw statistics are interpreted to be support for bigotry. If a scientist is studying crime statistics among specific population groups, they should be careful in how they formulate the study, and how they report their findings, to make sure they don't give a false impression that would validate bigotry.
In this case, its about promising the impossible and giving away freebies on the backend to make up for it.
That only works if you give your salespeople the discretion to give away freebies.
Salespeople have the best leverage, so they get the best deal.
It's not just that. As you mention, you can easily see how much money a salesperson is bringing in, which provides a simple metric of job performance. Providing incentives for job performance is generally difficult because there aren't good metrics.
If you were to pay a programmer based on the number of lines of code they write, then their incentive is to write a bloated program with a lot of lines of code. They can game that metric, which isn't good. If you waiter simply based on how many tables they serve, then their incentive is to serve a lot of tables, even if they don't do it well. That's why it makes sense to have a portion of their income tied to tips, which incentivizes them to focus on customer satisfaction.
But with sales, there's a great job performance metric for how well a salesperson is doing. It's not an easy metric to game. The amount of money they make in sales is generally going to be proportional to the benefit they provide to the company.
If other roles had such a direct metric that was equally hard to game, I think you'd see more economic incentives being tied to those metrics. For example, I might expect that factories have some kind of incentive based on the number of units a worker can produce that pass QA. It's a pretty good metric of performance that's hard to game.
It seems to me that these things, in that we could really use a display format that can't actively do anything. For example, it should be possible to develop a safe subset of HTML that allows some basic formatting, but doesn't provide features that can create security holes. Similarly with PDF, we should be able to create a safe PDF format, and then set PDF viewers to only allow that form of PDF.
But no, that's not good enough. We need PDFs can can run Javascript and embed movies. For some reason.
If you never borrow money, you don't have a history of paying off loans.
Right, but my post was pointing out that it's not just about whether you pay off your loans, but how much credit you have available. All things being equal, borrowing the same amount of money and paying it off on the same schedule, if I just took out a few more credit cards and never used them, my credit would improve.
First, the difference between someone who succeeds and someone who fails is that the one who succeeds doesn't give up after each failure. I've known quite a lot of very successful people, but I've never met a single one who hasn't left a string of failures behind them on the way.
Have you considered that there might be plenty of people out there who fail, don't give up, try again, fail again, and just never hit the point of success? Maybe you don't know them, or maybe you attribute their failure to something else, but I don't think it's true that everyone who keeps trying will necessarily succeed eventually.
One thing that stands out to me about people who are "lucky" is that they have a skill that can be somewhat subtle.
I think that's somewhat true. To me, the real "luck" that makes a meaningful difference is basic/fundamental stuff. For example, I was lucky to be born into a upper-middle class white family. I didn't really have to deal with poverty or racism, and in that fact alone, I was set up to succeed more than a lot of people out there. I was lucky to have parents who instilled certain habits and values, and those things have served me well. I had less control over those things than someone has control over whether they win the lottery-- at least they made a decision to buy a ticket. I was just born into a bunch of advantages. Likewise, someone who was born without those advantages had no control over that. Those things are just an issue of luck.
There are other things that are, to a certain extent, luck. If you win the lottery, that's luck. You can't control that.
However, I think you're right when you say "what people call 'luck' isn't." I've come to the idea that a lot of "luck" really comes down to keeping yourself open to opportunities, and having good judgement on which opportunities to seize. A lot of people let opportunities pass them by, without even realizing it. A lot of people see opportunities where there are none. You're being given new opportunities every day, and it take skill and courage to make something of them. That's not really luck.
Still, some people get better opportunities than others, so... luck is still a part of it.
I'm not sure about your case, but at one point I investigated why my credit score wasn't higher. In my case, the issue was basically that I didn't have enough credit cards. Part of the calculation involves the total amount of credit you have available.
If you and I have the same income, same debt, and have made all the same payments, you might imagine that our credit scores would be the same. However, if I have 3 credit cards with a total credit line of $10k available to me, and you have 5 credit cards with a total amount of $20k available to you, you'll have better credit than I do. Apparently.
Ok, "it probably would have survived in court" is probably too strong. However, it may well have survived in court, at least in some form. DACA was put into place in 2012. Why do you think the people who oppose it are just now threatening to challenge it in court? They know the Trump Justice Department won't mount a defense.
But anyway, that's a relatively minor point in my post. On the theoretical side of the debate, the President can do a fair amount in terms of deciding how to enforce laws. On the practical side of the debate, this change isn't about constitutional law, it's about satisfying the portion of the population that doesn't like immigrants, especially when they're not white.
The company is legally responsible for vetting contractually and/or legally burdened data from leaving any internal compartmentalized or secured areas to outside networks such as the Internet.... In the end I very much worry laws like these will less protect an employees privacy and more simply force companies to block any and all such privileges in the first place
Yeah, it is a bit complicated. The need for security varies from industry to industry, and business to business. In many cases, the best option is just to treat employees as trusted adults. Or more to the point, to deal with the need to secure data on a different level, preventing employees from accessing it in the first place rather than trying to police what they do with it. That's generally a better approach, since once the data is available to people, they might find some way to share it.
There's also the question of what level, and to what extent, you want to monitor or control user access. For example, are you just monitoring that some HTTPS traffic went to some site, or are you introducing some kind of proxy that's performing a MITM attack so that you can see the content of the traffic? Are you trying to blacklist a few sites, or instead block everything and only whitelist a few sites?
I don't think there's a correct answer, but you have to tailor the security to your needs. There may be a middle ground, e.g. block all IM but the employer-approved IM, and then have that traffic monitored and archived. That way, you make it clear to the employees that this is a company-owned service, and communications are not private. I think setting up a MITM monitoring system is worse, since it gives people the illusion that their traffic might be private.