This is the most brilliant reply to the whole thing and deserves to be modded +10.
You spotted the fast one they are trying to pull. You are right, "content blocking" is a newspeak word. We are not talking about content, we are talking about the non-content bullshit that is getting in the way of the real content.
Good catch.
With that in mind, these "rules" are even more evil than I found them on first reading. In fact, they are a good sign that someone at Mozilla has his head on backwards, and I should really check out other browsers again. This is pure evil.
advertising are starting to see what customers really think: they don't like advertising
And that is putting it very friendly.
Yes, nobody except the advertisement industry likes advertisement. Consumers don't want to see them, and most companies see them as expensive bullshit they only do because they don't know how else to survive against their competitors, who do.
The main problem with advertising is that it is given to us when we're not looking to buy (or rent) something. If I'm watching Star Wars then I really don't want to hear about your latest car. If I'm reading slashdot, I don't want to see an ad for your latest cloud offering.
This.
I have a concept floating around in my head to fix this, to replace unwanted advertisement with wanted product information, but as I'm busy with one hundred other projects, I don't see an opportunity to make it happen.
But I strongly believe in some years we will look back at that time and go "what the fuck were we thinking?".
I strongly believe advertisement as we know it will go the way of the Dodo bird, or of horse carriages and sail boats - maybe we will keep a little in museums.
Content Neutrality: Content blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising).
Seriously?
Have you been on the Internet lately, like in the last five years? Have you been outside lately? Have you watched TV in the last 10 years?
Advertisement is not neutral content, so it doesn't deserve content neutrality. Advertisement is the heroin of communication. It is intentionally designed to attract, bind and consume as much of your attention as possible, and attention is a limited resource. Both in time and in total your attention is limited. If it is tied up by roadside advertisement, you cannot focus on driving as well. If it is busy processing the ad messages on the train, you cannot focus on the conversation with your lover as good. If by repetition it has entered your long-term memory, it impacts you whenever it is triggered, not just when it is present itself. And we all know that if you have to focus for a long time, you feel exhausted. That is your mental battery running low.
This shit does not come for free. Advertisement, by its very nature, burns user resources and violates user needs. Anyone who doesn't understand that has no place writing rules about content blocking. Go back and take at least the 101 class before you write a textbook on the subject matter.
Once one has transmitted the means to convey information and technology, plans can be transmitted (ala Contact, but with technology for biological creation, not communication). One could send to another world every last step needed to create and nurture a human being in-situ,
You are assuming that life as we know it is meaningful to advanced species, and I challenge that assumption.
Life on earth made a leap forward when cells began working together and specializing. The same process is already going on in human societies - many of us are so specialised that we would have a hard time surviving outside the city and the logistics systems that provide us with water, food, electricity (for heat) and build our houses and roads. Imagine this goes on for another thousand years, with humans becoming the equivalent of cells. Highly specialised, completely linked into a larger system that becomes the new entity.
Life of such scale does not have restrictions that we have, the same way we are not impacted by the death of some individual cells in our body. Such a lifeform could easily engage in interstellar travel, even with the hundreds and thousands of years it takes. Its individual "cells" would die and reproduce, but it as a whole would continue.
You can even see nation states or cultures as a primitive version of such life. An identity above and beyond the individual. A frightening prospect for us westerners, who live in a culture that celebrates individualism. For asians, such ideas are much less frightening.
We then need to create a signal that is clearly different than that which is produced by natural processes lacking intelligence.
This will give you attention, but not communication.
Transporting meaning, i.e. signal, is more than just making sure you get noticed. How to encode meaning is largely arbitrary and requires a common understanding between sender and receipient. See to the early days of the Cyc project for enlightenment on just how many assumptions are in even the most simple of our communications.
The problem is not generating a signal. Any infant can do that pretty much from the moment it's born. The problem is being understood, and that takes years, even if you are completely embedded in the structure that creates language.
Do you REALLY see many people like that around you? Cause those are only about 2% of population.
As are the 160 IQ people.
Those people can't be all below average. There are simply too many of them for that. And the curve is broken.
It's not a perfect curve, that's for sure. But the point is not about numbers and math. The point is what you said here:
Your view is distorted by the fact that you are probably standing a bit low (indicating higher IQ) on the right side of the curve, looking up-curve at all those people below you and going "OMG! There are SO MANY of them." So you don't see that in actuality, most of those people are actually on your side of the curve. Closer to you, than to those below IQ 85.
Most of us here are on the above-average side, as a self-selected group of people interested in stuff that's not very simple. So from our perspective, things that seem incomprehensible stupid would seem less so from the average persons POV.
I personally can't wrap my head around the concept of religion at all and while I can write an article about the psychological needs and cultural circumstances that contribute to the formation of religious ideas, I cannot personally "feel" how it is to be religious. And I can feel myself into many other things.
But from statistics I see, being religious is still pretty much normal.
So in short: Never make a conclusion about what's normal from your own personal experience.
If you have good people, you don't need managers, good people can manage themselves. If you have good people as managers, other people won't mind working for them, because a good manager is a real contribution to the team. If you have good people at the top level, they will bring good ideas into the company, have the resources and power to see them done, and benefit everyone.
And the reverse for bad people. In the end, it comes down to how good your people are.
That is CMM level 1. You don't want to run your organisation on that level. It's idealistic, and if it works, it works great, but it depends too much on individuals. When your company is not 20 people, but 2000, it becomes almost impossible to ensure that they are all heroes. That is when you need processes and organisational structures that, if they are made by good people(*), will act as training wheels for the less-good.
In IT we know this concept as an "expert system". Someone who is a really good manager works with someone who knows about processes and modelling to turn what he does best into a guideline for others who are not so good. The implicit knowledge gets turned into explicit knowledge. With that, you can go to CMM level 3. The higher levels are for a different discussion.
The point is: Managers are needed, because many people work better under management. Maybe nobody in the team wants to bother with resource allocation and procurement, or skill development and HR processes. Maybe nobody wants to bother with organisational tasks, or (something other posters commented) wants to make the hard decisions. There are many reasons. In the end it boils down to division of labor, which is a proven productivity enhancer.
(*) yes, you can't get rid of this dependency entirely, but you can reduce the number of good people you need. It is fairly easy to find 5 or 50 good people that set up the structure for everyone else. It is near impossible to find 500 or 5000 good people. Not because they don't exist. Because they already have jobs.
If the average IQ is 100 (and it is, by definition), that means for everyone with a 160 IQ, there has to be someone with a 40 IQ, or two people with 70 IQ, or four with 80...
There is an incredible number of stupid, uneducated idiots in this world, right around you. You just don't notice them because our social circles tend to be made up largely so others in it are similar to ourselves.
As the saying goes: Being stupid is a lot like being dead. It's more difficult for people around you than for yourself.
The core point is to investigate the assumptions we make, and that's what makes this a philosophical challenge, not a linguistic or engineering one.
Our life is full of assumptions that we are not even aware of. Thinking about aliens lets us challenge these assumptions. Visual communication? Maybe, but in which part of the electromagnetic spectrum? Audio? Which frequencies and what patterns? Tacticle? Chemical? Something else entirely?
What are "basics" of the universe that we can use to construct a communication system with a species very different? These questions are asked for this, and the Voyager plates are great examples, but still they make too many assumptions, without which we as humans don't know how to communicate.
No, it's perfectly legal to use the left lane, as long as you occasionally pass people on the middle lane.
Now, as for people doing 280+, I have yet to see one.
You're looking at one. Not very often, but an M3 will get you to 290. There's the occasional supercar as well that I've seen pass me when I was doing 220 or 240.
It's not very often that you have to make way when you're doing over 200, but it happens.
In reality, on sections restricted to 120, you'll have trucks going 90 on the right lane, most people averaging 120-130 on the middle lane, and some doing 150 on the left lane.
True, it's not quite as simple as I made it, but in general, people drive speed limit +10.
Firstly, in Germany the driver will not pull a gun on you anyway, because we're not maniacs armed to the teeth, we have strict gun laws, and very few shooting sprees.
Secondly, what makes you think the truck won't call the cops (or at least a control center) when you smash the cab window and hit some kind of emergency stop? Or when the freight doors are opened at an unauthorized location? What makes you think there won't be a camera or three, streaming pictures of your face to the control center?
Your scenario is not very specific to automated trucks. It's a standard robbery with some details adapted. I don't see this as a major point. Especially not in Germany which is a very safe and very densely populated country. These trucks are not likely to be on many completely empty roads.
No, I meant intersections. The Autobahn doesn't have them. Some highway systems in other countries do have traffic lights, intersections, crossings, roundabouts. The German Autobahn does not.
Which country has the best on-line personal privacy laws that would made it patently illegal for any actor, state, or otherwise, to access my information?
Depends which country you want to protect yourself from.
If you are mostly afraid of US companies and the US government, put your server into Russia. They laugh in the face of US companies that make any demands.
For strong privacy laws, many european countries have laws in place much stronger than the US, but beware that they usually have a "if you agree to it, anything goes" clause (which is why these small "I agree to..." checkboxes are so important there.
Yes, it's pretty much a national custom. Also, Germany has extensive driving school with compulsory minimum hours, and driving instructors teach you strongly to signal. You can actually fail the driving test if you don't signal.
However, I disagree on the velocity differences. That depends very much on where you are driving. Some parts of the Autobahn have a 120 km/h speed limit and there you basically have two speeds: 80 km/h for the right lane, mostly filled with trucks, and 120 km/h on the 2nd and 3rd lanes. On other parts, however, you have no speed limit. Which means you are driving 180 on the middle lane, passing a truck doing 80 on the right lane, and someone going 280 passes you on the left lane. That's two 100 km/h speed differences right there.
According to WP, there are a number of fully autonomous metro lines in the world, and a longer list where there's a human basically just to intervene in case of emergencies.
one environment guaranteed to put stress on any car: the German Autobahn
Uh, no?
Have you ever actually driven on the German Autobahn? It is probably the most simple environment for an autonomous car, because absolutely everything is very clearly defined and built to standards. You have very reliable road quality, width, signaling. No traffic lights, roundabouts or intersections. Very few traffic rules (basically speed limit and whether or not trucks are allowed to overtake on this stretch). Construction sites are about the only tricky spots you will ever encounter. Even incoming and exiting traffic is very simple to handle, because there is one and only one way in which it will ever happen.
If I were to write autonomous driving software, I would start with the Autobahn, and then go to more complicated road systems later.
For trucks, even speed is trivial. The general high speed of trucks is 80 km/h, so if you are a truck you stay on the right lane and stick to that speed and that's it.
Left-lane driving on the Autobahn is more interesting, especially for foreigners (you think you're going crazy fast in your rental car at 190 km/h (about 120 mph), and there's this BMW behind you signaling to get your slow ass out of the way). But we're talking about trucks here.
No, you just ignored the context. What I posted was in the context of tobacco smoke. If the topic would've been poison gas or chemical factory accidents, I wouldn't have posted like that.
There are many toxic gasses we can't smell, or only in very high concentrations, and many pungent smells that are not harmfull by themselves (but point to harmful sources, e.g. the smell of something rotting is just a pointer you might stay away and definitely not eat it).
But for a lot of substances, smell actually is a good indicator of whether or not you should take a deep breath.
Never said he's a good guy. But for the past 20 years, whenever the USA got involved anywhere in the Middle East, they replaced one bad guy with an even worse guy.
Someone ought to be tried as a war criminal for this.
Oh, wait. The US doesn't like the concept of war criminals if it could apply to them, and even made a law to invade another NATO country (the Netherlands) if it should happen.
Slashdot Mirror
This is the most brilliant reply to the whole thing and deserves to be modded +10.
You spotted the fast one they are trying to pull. You are right, "content blocking" is a newspeak word. We are not talking about content, we are talking about the non-content bullshit that is getting in the way of the real content.
Good catch.
With that in mind, these "rules" are even more evil than I found them on first reading. In fact, they are a good sign that someone at Mozilla has his head on backwards, and I should really check out other browsers again. This is pure evil.
advertising are starting to see what customers really think: they don't like advertising
And that is putting it very friendly.
Yes, nobody except the advertisement industry likes advertisement. Consumers don't want to see them, and most companies see them as expensive bullshit they only do because they don't know how else to survive against their competitors, who do.
The main problem with advertising is that it is given to us when we're not looking to buy (or rent) something. If I'm watching Star Wars then I really don't want to hear about your latest car. If I'm reading slashdot, I don't want to see an ad for your latest cloud offering.
This.
I have a concept floating around in my head to fix this, to replace unwanted advertisement with wanted product information, but as I'm busy with one hundred other projects, I don't see an opportunity to make it happen.
But I strongly believe in some years we will look back at that time and go "what the fuck were we thinking?".
I strongly believe advertisement as we know it will go the way of the Dodo bird, or of horse carriages and sail boats - maybe we will keep a little in museums.
good sites who provide service having no better idea than ads to help pay the bills
there, fixed that for you.
In 2011 it was $5.80 a coin and today it is $245.00 a coin.
It was up to 600, 700 and more at the time of the hype. Wish I'd sold back then. Long-term trend seems downwards.
Content Neutrality: Content blocking software should focus on addressing potential user needs (such as on performance, security, and privacy) instead of blocking specific types of content (such as advertising).
Seriously?
Have you been on the Internet lately, like in the last five years? Have you been outside lately? Have you watched TV in the last 10 years?
Advertisement is not neutral content, so it doesn't deserve content neutrality. Advertisement is the heroin of communication. It is intentionally designed to attract, bind and consume as much of your attention as possible, and attention is a limited resource. Both in time and in total your attention is limited. If it is tied up by roadside advertisement, you cannot focus on driving as well. If it is busy processing the ad messages on the train, you cannot focus on the conversation with your lover as good. If by repetition it has entered your long-term memory, it impacts you whenever it is triggered, not just when it is present itself.
And we all know that if you have to focus for a long time, you feel exhausted. That is your mental battery running low.
This shit does not come for free. Advertisement, by its very nature, burns user resources and violates user needs. Anyone who doesn't understand that has no place writing rules about content blocking. Go back and take at least the 101 class before you write a textbook on the subject matter.
Once one has transmitted the means to convey information and technology, plans can be transmitted (ala Contact, but with technology for biological creation, not communication). One could send to another world every last step needed to create and nurture a human being in-situ,
You are assuming that life as we know it is meaningful to advanced species, and I challenge that assumption.
Life on earth made a leap forward when cells began working together and specializing. The same process is already going on in human societies - many of us are so specialised that we would have a hard time surviving outside the city and the logistics systems that provide us with water, food, electricity (for heat) and build our houses and roads. Imagine this goes on for another thousand years, with humans becoming the equivalent of cells. Highly specialised, completely linked into a larger system that becomes the new entity.
Life of such scale does not have restrictions that we have, the same way we are not impacted by the death of some individual cells in our body. Such a lifeform could easily engage in interstellar travel, even with the hundreds and thousands of years it takes. Its individual "cells" would die and reproduce, but it as a whole would continue.
You can even see nation states or cultures as a primitive version of such life. An identity above and beyond the individual. A frightening prospect for us westerners, who live in a culture that celebrates individualism. For asians, such ideas are much less frightening.
We then need to create a signal that is clearly different than that which is produced by natural processes lacking intelligence.
This will give you attention, but not communication.
Transporting meaning, i.e. signal, is more than just making sure you get noticed. How to encode meaning is largely arbitrary and requires a common understanding between sender and receipient. See to the early days of the Cyc project for enlightenment on just how many assumptions are in even the most simple of our communications.
The problem is not generating a signal. Any infant can do that pretty much from the moment it's born. The problem is being understood, and that takes years, even if you are completely embedded in the structure that creates language.
Do you REALLY see many people like that around you? Cause those are only about 2% of population.
As are the 160 IQ people.
Those people can't be all below average. There are simply too many of them for that. And the curve is broken.
It's not a perfect curve, that's for sure. But the point is not about numbers and math. The point is what you said here:
Your view is distorted by the fact that you are probably standing a bit low (indicating higher IQ) on the right side of the curve, looking up-curve at all those people below you and going "OMG! There are SO MANY of them."
So you don't see that in actuality, most of those people are actually on your side of the curve. Closer to you, than to those below IQ 85.
Most of us here are on the above-average side, as a self-selected group of people interested in stuff that's not very simple. So from our perspective, things that seem incomprehensible stupid would seem less so from the average persons POV.
I personally can't wrap my head around the concept of religion at all and while I can write an article about the psychological needs and cultural circumstances that contribute to the formation of religious ideas, I cannot personally "feel" how it is to be religious. And I can feel myself into many other things.
But from statistics I see, being religious is still pretty much normal.
So in short: Never make a conclusion about what's normal from your own personal experience.
That's what the "or"s outline, yes.
You are welcome to link to any actual research that shows the real distribution curve, of course. I'd be interested.
It's all the same, really.
If you have good people, you don't need managers, good people can manage themselves.
If you have good people as managers, other people won't mind working for them, because a good manager is a real contribution to the team.
If you have good people at the top level, they will bring good ideas into the company, have the resources and power to see them done, and benefit everyone.
And the reverse for bad people. In the end, it comes down to how good your people are.
That is CMM level 1. You don't want to run your organisation on that level. It's idealistic, and if it works, it works great, but it depends too much on individuals. When your company is not 20 people, but 2000, it becomes almost impossible to ensure that they are all heroes. That is when you need processes and organisational structures that, if they are made by good people(*), will act as training wheels for the less-good.
In IT we know this concept as an "expert system". Someone who is a really good manager works with someone who knows about processes and modelling to turn what he does best into a guideline for others who are not so good. The implicit knowledge gets turned into explicit knowledge. With that, you can go to CMM level 3. The higher levels are for a different discussion.
The point is: Managers are needed, because many people work better under management. Maybe nobody in the team wants to bother with resource allocation and procurement, or skill development and HR processes. Maybe nobody wants to bother with organisational tasks, or (something other posters commented) wants to make the hard decisions. There are many reasons. In the end it boils down to division of labor, which is a proven productivity enhancer.
(*) yes, you can't get rid of this dependency entirely, but you can reduce the number of good people you need. It is fairly easy to find 5 or 50 good people that set up the structure for everyone else. It is near impossible to find 500 or 5000 good people. Not because they don't exist. Because they already have jobs.
If the average IQ is 100 (and it is, by definition), that means for everyone with a 160 IQ, there has to be someone with a 40 IQ, or two people with 70 IQ, or four with 80...
There is an incredible number of stupid, uneducated idiots in this world, right around you. You just don't notice them because our social circles tend to be made up largely so others in it are similar to ourselves.
As the saying goes: Being stupid is a lot like being dead. It's more difficult for people around you than for yourself.
The core point is to investigate the assumptions we make, and that's what makes this a philosophical challenge, not a linguistic or engineering one.
Our life is full of assumptions that we are not even aware of. Thinking about aliens lets us challenge these assumptions. Visual communication? Maybe, but in which part of the electromagnetic spectrum? Audio? Which frequencies and what patterns? Tacticle? Chemical? Something else entirely?
What are "basics" of the universe that we can use to construct a communication system with a species very different? These questions are asked for this, and the Voyager plates are great examples, but still they make too many assumptions, without which we as humans don't know how to communicate.
No, it's perfectly legal to use the left lane, as long as you occasionally pass people on the middle lane.
Now, as for people doing 280+, I have yet to see one.
You're looking at one. Not very often, but an M3 will get you to 290. There's the occasional supercar as well that I've seen pass me when I was doing 220 or 240.
It's not very often that you have to make way when you're doing over 200, but it happens.
In reality, on sections restricted to 120, you'll have trucks going 90 on the right lane, most people averaging 120-130 on the middle lane, and some doing 150 on the left lane.
True, it's not quite as simple as I made it, but in general, people drive speed limit +10.
Firstly, in Germany the driver will not pull a gun on you anyway, because we're not maniacs armed to the teeth, we have strict gun laws, and very few shooting sprees.
Secondly, what makes you think the truck won't call the cops (or at least a control center) when you smash the cab window and hit some kind of emergency stop? Or when the freight doors are opened at an unauthorized location?
What makes you think there won't be a camera or three, streaming pictures of your face to the control center?
Your scenario is not very specific to automated trucks. It's a standard robbery with some details adapted. I don't see this as a major point. Especially not in Germany which is a very safe and very densely populated country. These trucks are not likely to be on many completely empty roads.
No, I meant intersections. The Autobahn doesn't have them. Some highway systems in other countries do have traffic lights, intersections, crossings, roundabouts. The German Autobahn does not.
Which country has the best on-line personal privacy laws that would made it patently illegal for any actor, state, or otherwise, to access my information?
Depends which country you want to protect yourself from.
If you are mostly afraid of US companies and the US government, put your server into Russia. They laugh in the face of US companies that make any demands.
For strong privacy laws, many european countries have laws in place much stronger than the US, but beware that they usually have a "if you agree to it, anything goes" clause (which is why these small "I agree to ..." checkboxes are so important there.
And you would hijack such a truck how, exactly? Get on board and threaten the computer with counting?
Yes, it's pretty much a national custom. Also, Germany has extensive driving school with compulsory minimum hours, and driving instructors teach you strongly to signal. You can actually fail the driving test if you don't signal.
However, I disagree on the velocity differences. That depends very much on where you are driving. Some parts of the Autobahn have a 120 km/h speed limit and there you basically have two speeds: 80 km/h for the right lane, mostly filled with trucks, and 120 km/h on the 2nd and 3rd lanes.
On other parts, however, you have no speed limit. Which means you are driving 180 on the middle lane, passing a truck doing 80 on the right lane, and someone going 280 passes you on the left lane. That's two 100 km/h speed differences right there.
According to WP, there are a number of fully autonomous metro lines in the world, and a longer list where there's a human basically just to intervene in case of emergencies.
one environment guaranteed to put stress on any car: the German Autobahn
Uh, no?
Have you ever actually driven on the German Autobahn? It is probably the most simple environment for an autonomous car, because absolutely everything is very clearly defined and built to standards. You have very reliable road quality, width, signaling. No traffic lights, roundabouts or intersections. Very few traffic rules (basically speed limit and whether or not trucks are allowed to overtake on this stretch). Construction sites are about the only tricky spots you will ever encounter. Even incoming and exiting traffic is very simple to handle, because there is one and only one way in which it will ever happen.
If I were to write autonomous driving software, I would start with the Autobahn, and then go to more complicated road systems later.
For trucks, even speed is trivial. The general high speed of trucks is 80 km/h, so if you are a truck you stay on the right lane and stick to that speed and that's it.
Left-lane driving on the Autobahn is more interesting, especially for foreigners (you think you're going crazy fast in your rental car at 190 km/h (about 120 mph), and there's this BMW behind you signaling to get your slow ass out of the way). But we're talking about trucks here.
No, you just ignored the context. What I posted was in the context of tobacco smoke. If the topic would've been poison gas or chemical factory accidents, I wouldn't have posted like that.
Nope, I didn't.
There are many toxic gasses we can't smell, or only in very high concentrations, and many pungent smells that are not harmfull by themselves (but point to harmful sources, e.g. the smell of something rotting is just a pointer you might stay away and definitely not eat it).
But for a lot of substances, smell actually is a good indicator of whether or not you should take a deep breath.
Never said he's a good guy. But for the past 20 years, whenever the USA got involved anywhere in the Middle East, they replaced one bad guy with an even worse guy.
Someone ought to be tried as a war criminal for this.
Oh, wait. The US doesn't like the concept of war criminals if it could apply to them, and even made a law to invade another NATO country (the Netherlands) if it should happen.
One of the reasons I do not for one second believe the "accidental" part in the story.
The hospital was a target, but for whatever reason will probably be buried in some top-secret archive forever.