Unfortunately, creating fake news is also one of the steps that authoritarians take on their way to dictatorships.
The real problem isn't people calling out fake news as such, but the people in power incorrectly calling out real news as "fake news", and then using their power to push their own fake news.
Because really, there is actual fake news, and it needs to be identified. The government doesn't need to censor it, but we, as a people, need to resist against malicious propagandists.
I'm not going to respond to most of this because you're being a bit vague and rambling and it's not clear what you're talking about. So I'll just pick this one first thing, which seems to at least be a kind of response to my post.
As to logistical efficiency, that isn't supportable unless you kill all the other welfare programs and then restrict the UBI to costing no more than those programs
So the idea of UBI is to kill all the other welfare programs, and that if you take the cost of the actual benefits disbursed along with all the various costs of administrating those programs, then UBI ends up being cheaper than the various welfare programs that are needed to accomplish the same things.
So if you actually knew something about the topic we're talking about, you might see things differently. You still might not like the idea of UBI, and you still might not believe that it ends up being cheaper, but we'd be having a very different, and perhaps more productive discussion. And just to tie it back to where we started, if you understood Marxism, we'd probably be able to have a better discussion about it. I'd bet you'd still disagree with Marx, but you'd be able to have real objections to the real theory.
However, we don't require people to read the bible or the Quran before identifying something as Christian or Islamic.
I'd say that you could complain about the behavior of a Christian group just by observing their behavior, but you can't condemn Christianity itself without having read the Bible. If you're going to enter into a debate about whether a belief is in keeping with Christian thought without having read the Bible, I don't think you should make your statements with a lot of confidence and authority.
It's been a while since I read Marx, and but I don't think you're quite right that "It doesn't justify itself logistically but morally." By my recollection, some of his complaints about Capitalism amounted to, "it's morally wrong", but an awful lot of his criticisms were more about, "It's unsustainable and will eventually collapse." Not that I'm trying to support Marxism. It just seems that a lot of so-called "conservatives" will immediately rail against Marxism and talk about the wonders of Capitalism while having such a poor understanding of either theory.
And on a related note, a lot of the arguments in favor of UBI aren't about it being morally good, but about it being logistically efficient. The general idea seems to be that poverty actually ends up being a drag on the economy, and you pay for it one way or another. If you create a bunch of complex systems (e.g. social security, medicare, minimum wage, employer-based healthcare) then you have to spend a lot of money managing them. Plus, being more complex, there's more room for chicanery, fraud, and waste. If you just guarantee a basic level of income, you can cut all that waste-- or so the argument goes.
The point is, it's not true that proponents of UBI argue, "Oh, sure, it's logistically inferior, but we should do it anyway because it's morally good!" You can disagree with the argument that they put forward, but instead you're just mischaracterizing it.
As far as government metrics go, poverty line is on the less controversial side.
I'm under the impression that it's not very controversial in the sense that people don't care very much, but not in the sense that people generally agree. If all social welfare programs, including food stamps, medicare, and social security were suddenly swapped for UBI, and the basic income level was set at the poverty line, I'm sure the poverty line would become extremely controversial.
That seems to just clean the toilet seat. It may be possible to completely automate all cleaning, maintenance, and service jobs. However, we're not remotely close to that point yet.
Jesus, you spent a long time figuring out how to calculate the poverty line, which is something we already do
We already calculate the poverty line, but part of what I'm pointing out is that it's not clear or uncontroversial. It's one of those things where, because there's an official term for it, people assume it's all figured out and set in stone, but there are arguments about how to calculate the poverty line. Republicans often complain it's too high, evidenced by the fact that people in poverty can sometimes afford such "luxuries" as TVs and refrigerators.
Basically it ties in with their argument that people are never poor because of systemic problems, but it's always a problem with their personal choices. You know, when they get on a rant about how food stamps are a scam because someone committed fraud and used them to buy lobster, or whatever? They'll sometimes throw out arguments like, "These poor people don't need any kind of government assistance. If they really don't have money, then how could they afford a refrigerator?!"
So my point is, the way these things are calculated are dumb, and there are always people trying to push the numbers around for their own agendas.
Don't we need someone to do those "you want fries with that" jobs?
Maybe McDonalds will completely automate those specific jobs at some point, but there will always be some low-prestige jobs that need doing. We all can't be rockstars.
But who will evaluate the housing/care/food provided?
If everyone has a guaranteed room, you can be sure that the government will be quite happy to pay 10$ a month to Hovel Towers to provide them, although a much better room could be rended for 11$.
You'll probably have the same general problem with guaranteed income. At least in America and how we run things, you'd still have the problem of people being forced to use specific vendors/products instead of having a real choice.
The Democrats ("It's our job to guarantee everyone a perfect life free of even the slightest tinge of discomfort.") and Republicans ("Fuck poor people. If they wanted a good life, then they should have decided to be rich instead.") would need to compromise somehow on the level of income that should be guaranteed. As a result, they'd decide the guaranteed income with a calculation like this:
Figure out the lowest amount of money that someone could possibly live off of. Like if you were to live in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere and gruel, and see a veterinarian for your medical needs instead of a doctor, then you can live off of $[X] per day. So that's the starting number. But because Republicans would want to make sure people were motivated to work, and actually being able to pay your bills would make you too comfortable, they'd slice off 10%, and give everyone $[X*(9/10)*365] per year (let's call that $[Y]). Better save up for leap years, because you don't get extra money when there's an extra day.
And then they'd spend the next 40 years with Democrats arguing that we should raise it to $[Y*2], with some of outspoken figures saying it should be $[Y*20] if you're any kind of a minority in terms of ethnicity or sexual identity, or if your feelings were hurt at some point in your life. Meanwhile, Republicans would spend the next 40 years arguing that the whole thing should be abolished because it's turning everyone into a gay terrorist.
And during those 40 years, there'd be inflation. So that $[Y] per year that used to just barely almost let you pay your bills, it now doesn't come close to paying your bills. Republicans will outright refuse to increase the income level a single cent, but an alternate compromise will emerge. Instead of increasing the income, they'll lower the price of gruel, veterinarians, and trailer parks so that someone with an income of $[Y] per year can afford them. They'll do this by paying $[Z] in subsidies to gruel manufacturers, veterinary clinics, and trailer park developers, and making those companies promise to lower prices. It turns out $[Z] is trillions of dollars, and $[Z] is greater than the total cost it would take to increase the minimum guaranteed income so that people could afford the gruel, vets, and trailer parks at market prices, but forget about that. When the government gives handouts to companies in order to control prices, that's "free market capitalism". When they give money to poor people to buy their gruel, that's "Communism", and Jesus said Communism was evil.
Ok, so the end result is that you end up with one brand of gruel, one veterinary clinic chain, and one trailer park development company that are making affordable options, and those are the only things that poor people can really buy. And there, you have the same basic problem that you mentioned before, where people have to use specific vendors and products.
But actually, it's even worse!
Because these gruel/vet/trailer subsidies go on for several years, and then those vendors get lazy and greedy. The head of the gruel manufacturer needs to $700 million bonus and their shareholders need their dividends paid. They cut back on the quality of the ingredients of the gruel. Now it's canned in outer Mongolia and it's mostly made of sawdust and asbestos. The guy running the veterinary clinics embezzled $500 million and therefore they can't afford to pay their workers anymore, so they start promoting their receptionists and janitors to act
I totally agree. Also, honestly, I don't see a good reason why the OS itself should be running machine learning. The OS provides the layer between the hardware/firmware and the software applications, that allows you to run the software applications. An OS doesn't need to do anything except allow access to the hardware, and enable apps to be run. Then applications should do the things that you want done. The OS should be trying to do as little as possible, and get out of the way as much as possible, so that the apps and hardware can do their thing.
We don't need some kind of advanced AI running on the OS figuring out how to most effectively push ads for Candy Crush. I wish Microsoft would cut that stuff out. For whatever resources they devoted to this project, they could have made a window that pops up and says, "Your computer needs to be rebooted. Reboot now?" Then they could have used the rest of those resources to make Windows less frustrating to deal with.
I mean, yes, reboots are annoying and it'd be good to improve that process somehow. However, my concern would be that using machine learning to control the process could have the effect of making it even less predictable. Frankly it was easier when I could tell users, "Your computer will reboot at 3am every Tuesday. Save your work Monday night." Then they changed it so Windows just sort of reboots your machine... whenever. A new patch comes out, and if Microsoft decides that you need that patch tonight, then it's going to install tonight... at some point. We don't know when. It should be outside of the set "Active hours", and there are rules for when it runs, but it's not super obvious. And no, I can't control it.
And now that last part is changing to "It should be outside of the set 'Active hours', but not even Microsoft knows the rules for when it runs. And no, I can't control it."
In this marvelous age where we have created the ability to have perfect preservation in terms of digital data, we do a lot to make it still unlikely to run old software.
This is where I see potential value in ReactOS. Let's say you have some old piece of software that you need to run, and Microsoft broke compatibility when they transitioned from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Unfortunately, the vendor isn't around anymore and doesn't offer an update, but you need that software to run.
One option is to ditch that software, and hope that you can find something similar that runs on new versions of Windows. Maybe no such software exists. Or maybe you find something and now you have it running on Windows 7, and then that vendor goes under, and now you're being pushed to Windows 10 and the new package won't run on that.
Another option would be to stick with Windows XP. And then, Microsoft discontinues support, and it's not getting security patches, but you stick with it. And then, vendors stop producing hardware that will run Windows XP, but you stick with it. Then your hardware breaks, and you go on eBay and buy an old system, install Windows XP, and you stick with it. It's bad enough that you have to run this old junky unsupported software, but you have to run it on an old junky unsupported OS that runs on old junky unsupported hardware. Plus it's not necessarily easy to make sure you have valid licensing for an old OS that requires activation. It's only a matter of time before it becomes a problem.
If there were an open source OS that could run that app, it's much easier to keep things running. It can be modified to run on new hardware or hypervisors, and you don't need to worry about licensing.
The problem with implementing this (without enough backups) for personal is that if you ever lose all of your key info or code generator, you are absolutely fucked
They just really need to come up with a coherent standard and get everyone onboard. Because SMS kind of made sense, until you find out that SMS is totally insecure. Then Google Authenticator (and similar OTP) comes out, which... really isn't half as good as people make it out to be. It's really just a second password, but stored and transmitted in a different way. That is, as far as I understand, the difference is that instead of sending the password over the internet and then storing a hash on the website, you store the password on the website and transmit part of the hash.
But it kind of works, except sometimes you still need to share an account with someone, and it doesn't work for that. And if you lose the cell phone it's on, it's a huge pain. So companies get smart, and they start allowing you to sync the OTP token or include it in your password manager, which makes it much more convenient-- but then compromises the security benefits you were trying for in the first place.
And then they have these USB dongles, which are kind of neat, but as you mention, are a pain if you lose them. And if you have the USB-A model and you have a device that only has USB-C ports, that's annoying. Same thing if you get the USB-C model and only have a machine with USB-A ports. Or if you have a phone with no USB ports, I guess that they have those wireless ones. And then some sites support some of these things and not others. A lot of sites support none of these things. And in any case, you're still stuck managing a bunch of passwords.
It seems like we should be able to do something better than that. Why don't we do something where each user gets a password-protected private key, and websites all get a public key, and you verify your identity that way? You'd still have a password to protect things, but you'd just need one. If websites get hacked, there's no password to be compromised. We wouldn't need elaborate password managers or SSO, just methods of keeping the certificate safe, secure, and available.
Ok, I'm sure that's not the best solution, but I'm not a security genius. Let some security genius figure out how we can make this stuff work that's not absurdly stupid.
My immediate thought when I read this story was, "Why didn't they make a fast/stripped-down/lightweight version of Visual Studio Code instead?" Like... strip out the GIT support and in-app terminal and all that stuff, but keep things like syntax highlighting and comparing two files. I mean, they already have an open source text editor that's much more useful, so why not reuse some of that code?
I suppose there's some value in a text editor that literally just edits text without anything as fancy as syntax highlighting, but... there's not a lot of value in it. Oh well, at least they're finally support CR and LF line breaks.
The irony is that some people are comfortable with ambiguity, while others insist on ambiguity as an absolute, thereby making is less ambiguous. In insisting that art has no meaning other than what the audience brings to it, they're actually insisting on one particular interpretation of the art itself, as meaningless.
That idea gets thrown around a lot and taken for fact, and I'm sure some of the people saying it believe it. Your artist friend may believe that it doesn't matter what he thinks the painting is of.
However, that's not a universal view, and many artist very much have a view of what their art means. In fact, some artists will even refuse to talk about their work for the exact opposite reason. Although they had a particular message or idea they were trying to convey, they don't want to explain it further for fear of muddying the waters. They feel that their art a precise expression of what they want to express, and that further explanation would make it less clear.
Also, a lot of times, even if an artist says "it doesn't matter what I think it means", they'll still get upset if you interpret it to mean something they don't like.
It's not quite that simple. I forget what controls they give you, but I remember there being some level of notifications in Facebook that it would not let you turn off, and it included stuff I didn't want.
Also, Facebook has a history of changing their notification rules and privacy rules without telling you. So you turn off all notifications, and then they create new notification classifications, and all the new ones are turned on by default. I don't know if they've done that recently, but it happened to me once. Ever since, I just auto-delete anything that comes from their domain.
The problem with this method is, a lot of companies will sell your address to spammers. Or they'll alter their marketing messages to make them harder to filter (e.g. changing the address they come from, not keeping any common elements in the subject).
If you make a separate alias per service, it has two benefits:
1) It provides an easier, clearer, and more definitive method of getting rid of crap. You don't even need to filter. If one of your aliases starts getting spam, you kill that alias.
2) You can be pretty certain who sold your email address, and know not to do business with them again.
It's practically impossible to prevent copyrighted things from being uploaded illegally.
One of the things that people seem to misunderstand is that, basically, you have to start with the assumption that all video has a copyright. Not only does the video itself have a copyright, but it may have elements within it that have their own copyright. If the video includes music, or a video clip from something else, or even just some words quoting another work, each of those things may have copyright issues.
So fundamentally you have to ask, at what level is Google responsible for vetting the content that people upload to ensure that all of the material is properly licensed. If I upload a short video of me talking, and I play an audio clip of music that I wrote and recorded, how should we expect Google to verify that all of that material has been properly licensed? How do they verify the identity of the uploader? How do they verify the identity of all the content (the video and the music included in it)? How do they determine whether the uploader has a license to post that content?
People who don't understand the issue only think about the case of clear piracy. Joe Schmoe uploads a music video that he has no right to, and the record label gets mad that they didn't check the video well enough before it was uploaded. "Why doesn't Google make sure that copyrighted videos are only uploaded by the copyright holder?!" But then you have to consider that there are (supposedly) hundreds of thousands of hours of video uploaded to Youtube every day, and all of it has potential copyright issues. How could you vet it all?
I could see there being automated systems to try to detect known content. For example, Google could try to detect whether videos are the same as videos they've already been asked to take down, but I'm pretty sure they already do that kind of thing. There's simply no way for Google to pay enough lawyers to sort out all the possible copyright licensing violations of all the videos that pass through their service.
So that leaves two options: figure out a way for them to be considered a "neutral hosting provider", or else shut down Youtube.
So, we might find that this experiment could tell us about the sex life of goats?
Well if it did, that would be quite a scientific discovery. Prove that ghosts exist, prove that they have sex, and tell us something about their sex lives, all with one experiment?
I mean, look, a lot of experiments turn out to be valuable not because of what they discover about the thing they're trying to measure, but because of some unexpected result that leads to some new hypothesis. There's some truth to that idea that the phrase that heralds new scientific discoveries isn't "eureka", but "that's odd." Sometimes it's worth developing a highly precise experiment to confirm the results you're pretty sure you should get.
First, I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm not objecting to this experiment being carried out. I'm mostly in favor of any ethical experiment being carried out because you never know what you're going to discover. But just to raise the question...
On a certain level, I question how valuable this confirmation is. They're amount of space that they're measuring is minuscule compared to the size of the universe. The amount of time they're measuring is tiny compared to the total span of possible time. I'm not sure how they would establish that their sample size is representative of the whole.
And even if it were larger, it's one of those things where it's impossible to prove a negative. The assertion is that the laws of physics don't vary at all in any time or any place. What if there was just one little corner of the universe where, for the briefest of moments, the laws of physics were different? How would this test rule that out? I'm not even sure how you could possible rule that out, since we don't really know what that would mean.
I'd say that they haven't contributed significantly to prove that physics holds in all places and in all times. Instead, they've created an experiment that simply failed to capture anything interesting. And that's fine! It makes sense to have experiments that try things out, and a lot of experiments won't come up with anything very interesting.
Anyway, I'd posit that the idea that "the laws of physics don't change" is more of a philosophic tautology that underlies the science of physics, rather than a property of time and space that is part of physics to be tested. Because, in a sense, the laws of physics *do* change depending on where you are. Things are weigh more in some places int he universe than others. Time passes more quickly in some places than others. It's just that, whenever we discover that the rules are different from one place to another, we find some new set of rules under which we can unify the rules.
And so I'd say that this test is probably worthwhile, but not because it provides any real proof that "the laws of physics don't change over space and time". Instead, it's worthwhile because if they had found some deviation, it might have lead to new discoveries in physics. Those discoveries would eventually be explained and incorporated into physics, and so the same laws of physics would still apply in all places and at all times.
In other words, the "laws of physics" are a set of mathematical rules that we developed to explain the behavior of physical objects. That the laws apply to all things, all the time and in all places, is not something we need to prove, it's an assumption that's required to develop physics. When we find an anomaly, whatever that anomaly is, the laws must change, not the assumption. If you change the assumption, then we basically need to toss physics and as we know it and start over.
Slashdot Mirror
Unfortunately, creating fake news is also one of the steps that authoritarians take on their way to dictatorships.
The real problem isn't people calling out fake news as such, but the people in power incorrectly calling out real news as "fake news", and then using their power to push their own fake news.
Because really, there is actual fake news, and it needs to be identified. The government doesn't need to censor it, but we, as a people, need to resist against malicious propagandists.
I'm not going to respond to most of this because you're being a bit vague and rambling and it's not clear what you're talking about. So I'll just pick this one first thing, which seems to at least be a kind of response to my post.
As to logistical efficiency, that isn't supportable unless you kill all the other welfare programs and then restrict the UBI to costing no more than those programs
So the idea of UBI is to kill all the other welfare programs, and that if you take the cost of the actual benefits disbursed along with all the various costs of administrating those programs, then UBI ends up being cheaper than the various welfare programs that are needed to accomplish the same things.
So if you actually knew something about the topic we're talking about, you might see things differently. You still might not like the idea of UBI, and you still might not believe that it ends up being cheaper, but we'd be having a very different, and perhaps more productive discussion. And just to tie it back to where we started, if you understood Marxism, we'd probably be able to have a better discussion about it. I'd bet you'd still disagree with Marx, but you'd be able to have real objections to the real theory.
However, we don't require people to read the bible or the Quran before identifying something as Christian or Islamic.
I'd say that you could complain about the behavior of a Christian group just by observing their behavior, but you can't condemn Christianity itself without having read the Bible. If you're going to enter into a debate about whether a belief is in keeping with Christian thought without having read the Bible, I don't think you should make your statements with a lot of confidence and authority.
It's been a while since I read Marx, and but I don't think you're quite right that "It doesn't justify itself logistically but morally." By my recollection, some of his complaints about Capitalism amounted to, "it's morally wrong", but an awful lot of his criticisms were more about, "It's unsustainable and will eventually collapse." Not that I'm trying to support Marxism. It just seems that a lot of so-called "conservatives" will immediately rail against Marxism and talk about the wonders of Capitalism while having such a poor understanding of either theory.
And on a related note, a lot of the arguments in favor of UBI aren't about it being morally good, but about it being logistically efficient. The general idea seems to be that poverty actually ends up being a drag on the economy, and you pay for it one way or another. If you create a bunch of complex systems (e.g. social security, medicare, minimum wage, employer-based healthcare) then you have to spend a lot of money managing them. Plus, being more complex, there's more room for chicanery, fraud, and waste. If you just guarantee a basic level of income, you can cut all that waste-- or so the argument goes.
The point is, it's not true that proponents of UBI argue, "Oh, sure, it's logistically inferior, but we should do it anyway because it's morally good!" You can disagree with the argument that they put forward, but instead you're just mischaracterizing it.
As far as government metrics go, poverty line is on the less controversial side.
I'm under the impression that it's not very controversial in the sense that people don't care very much, but not in the sense that people generally agree. If all social welfare programs, including food stamps, medicare, and social security were suddenly swapped for UBI, and the basic income level was set at the poverty line, I'm sure the poverty line would become extremely controversial.
That seems to just clean the toilet seat. It may be possible to completely automate all cleaning, maintenance, and service jobs. However, we're not remotely close to that point yet.
Jesus, you spent a long time figuring out how to calculate the poverty line, which is something we already do
We already calculate the poverty line, but part of what I'm pointing out is that it's not clear or uncontroversial. It's one of those things where, because there's an official term for it, people assume it's all figured out and set in stone, but there are arguments about how to calculate the poverty line. Republicans often complain it's too high, evidenced by the fact that people in poverty can sometimes afford such "luxuries" as TVs and refrigerators.
Basically it ties in with their argument that people are never poor because of systemic problems, but it's always a problem with their personal choices. You know, when they get on a rant about how food stamps are a scam because someone committed fraud and used them to buy lobster, or whatever? They'll sometimes throw out arguments like, "These poor people don't need any kind of government assistance. If they really don't have money, then how could they afford a refrigerator?!"
So my point is, the way these things are calculated are dumb, and there are always people trying to push the numbers around for their own agendas.
Most likely, people will still need to scrub toilets.
Don't we need someone to do those "you want fries with that" jobs?
Maybe McDonalds will completely automate those specific jobs at some point, but there will always be some low-prestige jobs that need doing. We all can't be rockstars.
That's a little like saying, "I know what Shakespeare is all about. 'To be or not to be', right?"
But who will evaluate the housing/care/food provided?
If everyone has a guaranteed room, you can be sure that the government will be quite happy to pay 10$ a month to Hovel Towers to provide them, although a much better room could be rended for 11$.
You'll probably have the same general problem with guaranteed income. At least in America and how we run things, you'd still have the problem of people being forced to use specific vendors/products instead of having a real choice.
The Democrats ("It's our job to guarantee everyone a perfect life free of even the slightest tinge of discomfort.") and Republicans ("Fuck poor people. If they wanted a good life, then they should have decided to be rich instead.") would need to compromise somehow on the level of income that should be guaranteed. As a result, they'd decide the guaranteed income with a calculation like this:
Figure out the lowest amount of money that someone could possibly live off of. Like if you were to live in a trailer park in the middle of nowhere and gruel, and see a veterinarian for your medical needs instead of a doctor, then you can live off of $[X] per day. So that's the starting number. But because Republicans would want to make sure people were motivated to work, and actually being able to pay your bills would make you too comfortable, they'd slice off 10%, and give everyone $[X*(9/10)*365] per year (let's call that $[Y]). Better save up for leap years, because you don't get extra money when there's an extra day.
And then they'd spend the next 40 years with Democrats arguing that we should raise it to $[Y*2], with some of outspoken figures saying it should be $[Y*20] if you're any kind of a minority in terms of ethnicity or sexual identity, or if your feelings were hurt at some point in your life. Meanwhile, Republicans would spend the next 40 years arguing that the whole thing should be abolished because it's turning everyone into a gay terrorist.
And during those 40 years, there'd be inflation. So that $[Y] per year that used to just barely almost let you pay your bills, it now doesn't come close to paying your bills. Republicans will outright refuse to increase the income level a single cent, but an alternate compromise will emerge. Instead of increasing the income, they'll lower the price of gruel, veterinarians, and trailer parks so that someone with an income of $[Y] per year can afford them. They'll do this by paying $[Z] in subsidies to gruel manufacturers, veterinary clinics, and trailer park developers, and making those companies promise to lower prices. It turns out $[Z] is trillions of dollars, and $[Z] is greater than the total cost it would take to increase the minimum guaranteed income so that people could afford the gruel, vets, and trailer parks at market prices, but forget about that. When the government gives handouts to companies in order to control prices, that's "free market capitalism". When they give money to poor people to buy their gruel, that's "Communism", and Jesus said Communism was evil.
Ok, so the end result is that you end up with one brand of gruel, one veterinary clinic chain, and one trailer park development company that are making affordable options, and those are the only things that poor people can really buy. And there, you have the same basic problem that you mentioned before, where people have to use specific vendors and products.
But actually, it's even worse!
Because these gruel/vet/trailer subsidies go on for several years, and then those vendors get lazy and greedy. The head of the gruel manufacturer needs to $700 million bonus and their shareholders need their dividends paid. They cut back on the quality of the ingredients of the gruel. Now it's canned in outer Mongolia and it's mostly made of sawdust and asbestos. The guy running the veterinary clinics embezzled $500 million and therefore they can't afford to pay their workers anymore, so they start promoting their receptionists and janitors to act
I totally agree. Also, honestly, I don't see a good reason why the OS itself should be running machine learning. The OS provides the layer between the hardware/firmware and the software applications, that allows you to run the software applications. An OS doesn't need to do anything except allow access to the hardware, and enable apps to be run. Then applications should do the things that you want done. The OS should be trying to do as little as possible, and get out of the way as much as possible, so that the apps and hardware can do their thing.
We don't need some kind of advanced AI running on the OS figuring out how to most effectively push ads for Candy Crush. I wish Microsoft would cut that stuff out. For whatever resources they devoted to this project, they could have made a window that pops up and says, "Your computer needs to be rebooted. Reboot now?" Then they could have used the rest of those resources to make Windows less frustrating to deal with.
In my opinion, this is not good news.
I mean, yes, reboots are annoying and it'd be good to improve that process somehow. However, my concern would be that using machine learning to control the process could have the effect of making it even less predictable. Frankly it was easier when I could tell users, "Your computer will reboot at 3am every Tuesday. Save your work Monday night." Then they changed it so Windows just sort of reboots your machine... whenever. A new patch comes out, and if Microsoft decides that you need that patch tonight, then it's going to install tonight... at some point. We don't know when. It should be outside of the set "Active hours", and there are rules for when it runs, but it's not super obvious. And no, I can't control it.
And now that last part is changing to "It should be outside of the set 'Active hours', but not even Microsoft knows the rules for when it runs. And no, I can't control it."
So someone just needs to use social engineering to get you to provide one of those codes.
In this marvelous age where we have created the ability to have perfect preservation in terms of digital data, we do a lot to make it still unlikely to run old software.
This is where I see potential value in ReactOS. Let's say you have some old piece of software that you need to run, and Microsoft broke compatibility when they transitioned from Windows XP to Windows Vista. Unfortunately, the vendor isn't around anymore and doesn't offer an update, but you need that software to run.
One option is to ditch that software, and hope that you can find something similar that runs on new versions of Windows. Maybe no such software exists. Or maybe you find something and now you have it running on Windows 7, and then that vendor goes under, and now you're being pushed to Windows 10 and the new package won't run on that.
Another option would be to stick with Windows XP. And then, Microsoft discontinues support, and it's not getting security patches, but you stick with it. And then, vendors stop producing hardware that will run Windows XP, but you stick with it. Then your hardware breaks, and you go on eBay and buy an old system, install Windows XP, and you stick with it. It's bad enough that you have to run this old junky unsupported software, but you have to run it on an old junky unsupported OS that runs on old junky unsupported hardware. Plus it's not necessarily easy to make sure you have valid licensing for an old OS that requires activation. It's only a matter of time before it becomes a problem.
If there were an open source OS that could run that app, it's much easier to keep things running. It can be modified to run on new hardware or hypervisors, and you don't need to worry about licensing.
The problem with implementing this (without enough backups) for personal is that if you ever lose all of your key info or code generator, you are absolutely fucked
They just really need to come up with a coherent standard and get everyone onboard. Because SMS kind of made sense, until you find out that SMS is totally insecure. Then Google Authenticator (and similar OTP) comes out, which... really isn't half as good as people make it out to be. It's really just a second password, but stored and transmitted in a different way. That is, as far as I understand, the difference is that instead of sending the password over the internet and then storing a hash on the website, you store the password on the website and transmit part of the hash.
But it kind of works, except sometimes you still need to share an account with someone, and it doesn't work for that. And if you lose the cell phone it's on, it's a huge pain. So companies get smart, and they start allowing you to sync the OTP token or include it in your password manager, which makes it much more convenient-- but then compromises the security benefits you were trying for in the first place.
And then they have these USB dongles, which are kind of neat, but as you mention, are a pain if you lose them. And if you have the USB-A model and you have a device that only has USB-C ports, that's annoying. Same thing if you get the USB-C model and only have a machine with USB-A ports. Or if you have a phone with no USB ports, I guess that they have those wireless ones. And then some sites support some of these things and not others. A lot of sites support none of these things. And in any case, you're still stuck managing a bunch of passwords.
It seems like we should be able to do something better than that. Why don't we do something where each user gets a password-protected private key, and websites all get a public key, and you verify your identity that way? You'd still have a password to protect things, but you'd just need one. If websites get hacked, there's no password to be compromised. We wouldn't need elaborate password managers or SSO, just methods of keeping the certificate safe, secure, and available.
Ok, I'm sure that's not the best solution, but I'm not a security genius. Let some security genius figure out how we can make this stuff work that's not absurdly stupid.
My immediate thought when I read this story was, "Why didn't they make a fast/stripped-down/lightweight version of Visual Studio Code instead?" Like... strip out the GIT support and in-app terminal and all that stuff, but keep things like syntax highlighting and comparing two files. I mean, they already have an open source text editor that's much more useful, so why not reuse some of that code?
I suppose there's some value in a text editor that literally just edits text without anything as fancy as syntax highlighting, but... there's not a lot of value in it. Oh well, at least they're finally support CR and LF line breaks.
The irony is that some people are comfortable with ambiguity, while others insist on ambiguity as an absolute, thereby making is less ambiguous. In insisting that art has no meaning other than what the audience brings to it, they're actually insisting on one particular interpretation of the art itself, as meaningless.
That idea gets thrown around a lot and taken for fact, and I'm sure some of the people saying it believe it. Your artist friend may believe that it doesn't matter what he thinks the painting is of.
However, that's not a universal view, and many artist very much have a view of what their art means. In fact, some artists will even refuse to talk about their work for the exact opposite reason. Although they had a particular message or idea they were trying to convey, they don't want to explain it further for fear of muddying the waters. They feel that their art a precise expression of what they want to express, and that further explanation would make it less clear.
Also, a lot of times, even if an artist says "it doesn't matter what I think it means", they'll still get upset if you interpret it to mean something they don't like.
Also, if there's a defective unit, you're not allowed to destroy and recycle them.
And we don't have much choice. These days, you seem to have to choose between Apple, Microsoft, or Google, and none of them are innovative anymore.
It's not quite that simple. I forget what controls they give you, but I remember there being some level of notifications in Facebook that it would not let you turn off, and it included stuff I didn't want.
Also, Facebook has a history of changing their notification rules and privacy rules without telling you. So you turn off all notifications, and then they create new notification classifications, and all the new ones are turned on by default. I don't know if they've done that recently, but it happened to me once. Ever since, I just auto-delete anything that comes from their domain.
The problem with this method is, a lot of companies will sell your address to spammers. Or they'll alter their marketing messages to make them harder to filter (e.g. changing the address they come from, not keeping any common elements in the subject).
If you make a separate alias per service, it has two benefits:
It's practically impossible to prevent copyrighted things from being uploaded illegally.
One of the things that people seem to misunderstand is that, basically, you have to start with the assumption that all video has a copyright. Not only does the video itself have a copyright, but it may have elements within it that have their own copyright. If the video includes music, or a video clip from something else, or even just some words quoting another work, each of those things may have copyright issues.
So fundamentally you have to ask, at what level is Google responsible for vetting the content that people upload to ensure that all of the material is properly licensed. If I upload a short video of me talking, and I play an audio clip of music that I wrote and recorded, how should we expect Google to verify that all of that material has been properly licensed? How do they verify the identity of the uploader? How do they verify the identity of all the content (the video and the music included in it)? How do they determine whether the uploader has a license to post that content?
People who don't understand the issue only think about the case of clear piracy. Joe Schmoe uploads a music video that he has no right to, and the record label gets mad that they didn't check the video well enough before it was uploaded. "Why doesn't Google make sure that copyrighted videos are only uploaded by the copyright holder?!" But then you have to consider that there are (supposedly) hundreds of thousands of hours of video uploaded to Youtube every day, and all of it has potential copyright issues. How could you vet it all?
I could see there being automated systems to try to detect known content. For example, Google could try to detect whether videos are the same as videos they've already been asked to take down, but I'm pretty sure they already do that kind of thing. There's simply no way for Google to pay enough lawyers to sort out all the possible copyright licensing violations of all the videos that pass through their service.
So that leaves two options: figure out a way for them to be considered a "neutral hosting provider", or else shut down Youtube.
So, we might find that this experiment could tell us about the sex life of goats?
Well if it did, that would be quite a scientific discovery. Prove that ghosts exist, prove that they have sex, and tell us something about their sex lives, all with one experiment?
I mean, look, a lot of experiments turn out to be valuable not because of what they discover about the thing they're trying to measure, but because of some unexpected result that leads to some new hypothesis. There's some truth to that idea that the phrase that heralds new scientific discoveries isn't "eureka", but "that's odd." Sometimes it's worth developing a highly precise experiment to confirm the results you're pretty sure you should get.
First, I'm going to preface this by saying that I'm not objecting to this experiment being carried out. I'm mostly in favor of any ethical experiment being carried out because you never know what you're going to discover. But just to raise the question...
On a certain level, I question how valuable this confirmation is. They're amount of space that they're measuring is minuscule compared to the size of the universe. The amount of time they're measuring is tiny compared to the total span of possible time. I'm not sure how they would establish that their sample size is representative of the whole.
And even if it were larger, it's one of those things where it's impossible to prove a negative. The assertion is that the laws of physics don't vary at all in any time or any place. What if there was just one little corner of the universe where, for the briefest of moments, the laws of physics were different? How would this test rule that out? I'm not even sure how you could possible rule that out, since we don't really know what that would mean.
I'd say that they haven't contributed significantly to prove that physics holds in all places and in all times. Instead, they've created an experiment that simply failed to capture anything interesting. And that's fine! It makes sense to have experiments that try things out, and a lot of experiments won't come up with anything very interesting.
Anyway, I'd posit that the idea that "the laws of physics don't change" is more of a philosophic tautology that underlies the science of physics, rather than a property of time and space that is part of physics to be tested. Because, in a sense, the laws of physics *do* change depending on where you are. Things are weigh more in some places int he universe than others. Time passes more quickly in some places than others. It's just that, whenever we discover that the rules are different from one place to another, we find some new set of rules under which we can unify the rules.
And so I'd say that this test is probably worthwhile, but not because it provides any real proof that "the laws of physics don't change over space and time". Instead, it's worthwhile because if they had found some deviation, it might have lead to new discoveries in physics. Those discoveries would eventually be explained and incorporated into physics, and so the same laws of physics would still apply in all places and at all times.
In other words, the "laws of physics" are a set of mathematical rules that we developed to explain the behavior of physical objects. That the laws apply to all things, all the time and in all places, is not something we need to prove, it's an assumption that's required to develop physics. When we find an anomaly, whatever that anomaly is, the laws must change, not the assumption. If you change the assumption, then we basically need to toss physics and as we know it and start over.