He found a valid loophole in the law, the combination of different unrelated government actions. Firstly they created a transparency law (good!) which applies to certain government institutions. Also, they centralized the exams - when I wrote my Abitur many years ago, questions were made locally, by the school you took it, mostly by the teacher who had given the course, so it was based on the material that had actually been taught. There are advantages and disadvantages to that. For whatever reasons, some time between my Abitur and now they centralized everything, which brought the exam questions into one of the government institutions covered by the transparency law. Whoops.
Yes, this is actually a good standard, mod the AC up.
If you can't re-write your policy change or other "equality" demand in a way that doesn't mention gender at all, then it's not actually an equality demand.
On the contrary, I'm working with OpenCV right now in a project, I've read up on a couple very recent papers regarding foreground/background segmentation, and the results are quite astonishing if you compare them to a decade ago. And in some edge cases (especially low visibility, low contrast, slow movement), the computer can beat the human eye.
But in the vast majority of cases, especially when the machine was not prepared for this precise task, there's still way too much crazy shit happening to entrust human lives to it, and machines still make many mistakes that humans look at for a split second and say wtf?
I always thought it made sense from the perspective of "What if the one pilot in the cockpit suddenly keels over"
Yes, but not having the door locked makes even more sense form that perspective. Plus there's been at least one case (that I know of) where a passenger (who was also a commercial pilot) landed a plane after something happened to the pilot/s.
If I put up a poster in my front yard (in the United States) defaming a Japanese doctor, a Japanese court has zero ability to make me take it down.
Because you can't see that poster from Japan. Both the writing and the reading happens in the USA, due to physical restrictions.
The Internet is not bound by these restrictions.
Here's the realistic options that Google has:
1.) file an appeal 2.) comply with the court decision 3.) stop doing business in Japan, effective immediately
For some rea$$$on, I'm pretty sure that contrary to the usual USA-supremecists big talk here, #3 will not even be seriously considered within the Google HQ.
The decision is based on a defamation suit [...] Google is currently considering it's options including an appeal.
including? What are the other options? Simply ignoring a court decision? Of course, they're a big american company with a big american attitude including the "our laws are the laws of the world" approach (we can sue everyone everywhere for everything that's illegal in the USA, but we don't accept other countries laws as valid to us, even when we're doing our business there).
I'm split on the court decision, adding more information to something is generally the better approach over removing information, but other than some fanatics I don't think free speech trumps absolutely every other right and consideration on the planet, and when someone knowingly spreads false factual information about you, the line has been crossed.
TFA (and many articles on the subject - disclaimer: I live in Germany and read local news sources, too) forgets to mention something important which is very likely the reason that he gets job offers:
He didn't just send a "here's my cute idea" letter. He actually studied the law in question, his letter is said to be full of legalese mentioning all the important paragraphs. The letter is so that the agency responsible for handling them is now looking if they can find an actual, valid reason to refuse his request, because they couldn't on purely formal reasons (which they usually use when refusing a request they don't like).
You see, that's the problem right there: Stereotypes.
Some people negotiate harder than other people. Maybe statistically speaking, men fall more often into group 1 and women more often into group 2. You're trying to tell me that's the only factor? I'm quite sure introverts fall more often into group 2 while extroverts fall more often into group 1. Maybe redheads fall more often into group 1, or people born in August. Maybe tall people. Probably younger people fall more often into group 2. People shortly after a divorce, people with pets, people growing up with older siblings...
It's so crazy that we focus on the sex thing when there are one thousand differences between person A and person B, most of which were not theirs choice, many of which are equally genetic.
Because an experienced human pilot can take two looks at a highway and see if it's possible to land there. He understands one hundred details in two seconds because the human brain is, despite all its failings and shortcomings, and incredible pattern-matching engine and really, really good at finding the important details in noisy input. We're still trying to make computers as good as the worst humans when it comes to things like vision and shape recognition.
USA style "always two people in the cockpit" rules..
That, actually, is a totally stupid crazy rule. You're basically telling your pilots that no matter how often they prove themselves to be innocent, you constantly suspect them of being potential terrorists / suicidal mass-murderers.
Better do away with that stupid reinforced door and lock. It was added to solve one problem, yes, but as we've seen it creates other problems that you then need more band-aids for to solve, which will create yet other problems...
Computers sometimes fail. So do humans. The best way to not be at the mercy of either is to have both. There's at least one incident on record where malfunctioning sensors told a plane computer that it was 4000 feet higher than it actually was, and it would've happily crashed into the ground during descent if the pilot hadn't looked out the window to say "wtf, that's the ground right there".
At HAL 2001, yes that was 14 years ago, there was a speech with the title "why my space ship will not run Linux" and that's as true today as it was back then: Our current software, from firmware and operating system to applications, is total crap, incredibly shoddy, and half of it is being held together by spit and duct tape. Fact is that while we make progress (and not a little, actually it's quite amazing), we still don't know how to write really good software. We know a bit about how to teach humans to write pretty good software, even though most companies use 10% of that knowledge in real production (mostly because next-quarter focussed managers don't understand the incredibly good ROI on high software quality). But a lot of that knowledge is about software development processes.
But do we know how to make a non-trivial computer program that is guaranteed to behave correctly? How much software with an EAL5, EAL6 or EAL7 certification do you know? Wait, you can check here. Not very many.
I see most here ranting about the law appear to be in the libertarian mode of the market will fix everything
Not me. Extreme capitalism is just as bad as any other extremism. I'm just here to say that suing someone because some but not all of their content has captions is overdoing it.
You could make the exact same argument about the whole ADA
And in fact I do.
the truth is that it wouldn't happen by itself.
True, but the solution for "too little" is not "too much". When I drive into the city, I see a lot of free parking spaces all the time - for disabled people. It seems there's half a million disabled car drivers in this city, except that they're never parking anywhere. I understand handicapped parking. But when you can mark the times you see these spots actually used in a calendar, then maybe the amount is not right?
And beating shop owners over the head with the law has been the best way to get results.
Again, to some degree, yes. As with everything in life, there's a balance. The rest of us take a little inconvenience or additional cost upon ourselves to help out the disabled. We shouldn't be punished for making an effort just because that effort is not 100% perfect.
I understand not being an asshole to disabled people. Not making their life intentionally more difficult than it is.
I understand helping others if possible. Adding captions when you're doing subtitles in other languages anyways, putting ramps next to stairs when you're rebuilding the entrance anyway, that kind of thing.
I understand you might want to add these things by themselves for a bigger market or because of customer loyalty, or just because you can and it's not a big expense.
What I don't understand is this extremist approach of having the entire world change for your specific need. Old buildings that need to be damaged and reworked to cater to wheelchair people. A lawsuit not because you refuse to do captions, but because you don't have 100% coverage of them. This kind of crap gives people less desire to be friendly to disabled people, and very soon they'll do it only because the law requires it and only to the extent that the law requires.
An interesting read even though I have to admit I understand but half of it. What I didn't get is if there's a treatment path without medicine, something like the proper food, excercise regime, etc. -- because I find it hard to believe that the proper conditions cannot be created by the proper lifestyle.
"one psychiatrist" is not a valid citation. Point me to a name, a study, and some literature to explain why this discovery hasn't taken the medical world by storm, I'm always happy to expand my knowledge.
If this guy was suffering from depression, no background checks or security measures would have filtered him out. Depression is a civilisation disease, caused by the fucked-up society we have created around ourselves, the non-stop pressure, the endless competition, the constant message that you're not good enough that everyone is sending to everyone else. The artificial fear for survival that our governments create to drive wages down and create the economic pressure that corporations than exploit to get people to work under conditions that our parents would've scoffed at.
The solution is not in more pressure, the solution is in making a society that is made for human beings, not for robots, stock markets, the goddess of economic growth or any of the other crazy things that we're sacrificing millions of lives to.
Because never in the history of the world has any such capability been abused.
In the case of Germanwings, ground control would have been able to see what's going on once they detected the loss of altitude.
And then do what about it? Collectively praying that FSM picks up the plane with his tentacles?
t stifles me that in 2015, a young troubled copilot can end 150 lives in a way that can easily be prevented with simple technology.
Technology is not a panacea. Add one thing to make flying more safe (locked cockpit doors), create another problem without which a catastrophy could have been prevented (locked cockpit door).
Something I learnt in my first leadership position: When someone has an idea, ask them about the downsides and potential issues. If they can't think of any, they haven't thought it through enough.
Follow the money. Who is asking for video cameras?
The last thing you would have seen would have been a smug face and a victory sign. Maybe not in this crash, but in the next. That, my friend, is headlines material. That's a breaking story right there. That picture is worth a hundred times its weight in gold, even if you print it on the most heavy paper you can find.
That's a meme, but also a lie. As IT people especially, we can take a big hint from IKEA in this regards. Their documentation is short, mostly visual, always step-by-step and gives the user exactly the information he needs, with none of the unimportant blabla that many blow up many other documentations from the necessary 3 pages to the actual 30.
If the instructions for Windows were made by IKEA, thousands of IT support people would be out of jobs because users could actually do simple tasks by themselves.
And don;t forget to put a price on convenience: instead of waiting 4-8 weeks for your new stuff, you get to take it home and use it right away
This.
When my girlfriend moved in, we needed some new furniture. The huge wardrobe took three weeks to be delivered, and then one more week to exchange an (important) part that was broken in transport.
We both dislike IKEA a lot, but we went there to buy some dressers. Half of what they have on offer is trash and the other half ugly, but we went home with two pieces of the one dresser that's not a shame to have in your bedroom. Because we didn't want to have her clothes in luggage and bags waiting for furniture to be delivered. It's not the 16th century anymore where people had to go into the forest to chop down trees every time they wanted to have a table.
Correct. Rational evaluation will lead you to this result.
We're not rational, because our genes (who drive our evolution and thus our minds) don't give a fuck if we survive or not, only if they survive. To them, your kid is more valuable then you are.
Slashdot Mirror
Which AFAIK they also can't do.
He found a valid loophole in the law, the combination of different unrelated government actions. Firstly they created a transparency law (good!) which applies to certain government institutions. Also, they centralized the exams - when I wrote my Abitur many years ago, questions were made locally, by the school you took it, mostly by the teacher who had given the course, so it was based on the material that had actually been taught. There are advantages and disadvantages to that. For whatever reasons, some time between my Abitur and now they centralized everything, which brought the exam questions into one of the government institutions covered by the transparency law. Whoops.
Yes, this is actually a good standard, mod the AC up.
If you can't re-write your policy change or other "equality" demand in a way that doesn't mention gender at all, then it's not actually an equality demand.
On the contrary, I'm working with OpenCV right now in a project, I've read up on a couple very recent papers regarding foreground/background segmentation, and the results are quite astonishing if you compare them to a decade ago. And in some edge cases (especially low visibility, low contrast, slow movement), the computer can beat the human eye.
But in the vast majority of cases, especially when the machine was not prepared for this precise task, there's still way too much crazy shit happening to entrust human lives to it, and machines still make many mistakes that humans look at for a split second and say wtf?
I always thought it made sense from the perspective of "What if the one pilot in the cockpit suddenly keels over"
Yes, but not having the door locked makes even more sense form that perspective. Plus there's been at least one case (that I know of) where a passenger (who was also a commercial pilot) landed a plane after something happened to the pilot/s.
If I put up a poster in my front yard (in the United States) defaming a Japanese doctor, a Japanese court has zero ability to make me take it down.
Because you can't see that poster from Japan. Both the writing and the reading happens in the USA, due to physical restrictions.
The Internet is not bound by these restrictions.
Here's the realistic options that Google has:
1.) file an appeal
2.) comply with the court decision
3.) stop doing business in Japan, effective immediately
For some rea$$$on, I'm pretty sure that contrary to the usual USA-supremecists big talk here, #3 will not even be seriously considered within the Google HQ.
No, if a poster is found to be libel in Japan, it is not taken down elsewhere.
Because of a bad analogy. A poster put up in California is not visible from Japan.
I've never heard them accused of supporting Free Speech.
When you pull your head out of your ass, you can see the rest of the world more clearly. Try it.
Thankfully, Google is not a 3 year old throwing a temper tantrum, like you'd like them to be.
The decision is based on a defamation suit [...] Google is currently considering it's options including an appeal.
including? What are the other options? Simply ignoring a court decision? Of course, they're a big american company with a big american attitude including the "our laws are the laws of the world" approach (we can sue everyone everywhere for everything that's illegal in the USA, but we don't accept other countries laws as valid to us, even when we're doing our business there).
I'm split on the court decision, adding more information to something is generally the better approach over removing information, but other than some fanatics I don't think free speech trumps absolutely every other right and consideration on the planet, and when someone knowingly spreads false factual information about you, the line has been crossed.
TFA (and many articles on the subject - disclaimer: I live in Germany and read local news sources, too) forgets to mention something important which is very likely the reason that he gets job offers:
He didn't just send a "here's my cute idea" letter. He actually studied the law in question, his letter is said to be full of legalese mentioning all the important paragraphs. The letter is so that the agency responsible for handling them is now looking if they can find an actual, valid reason to refuse his request, because they couldn't on purely formal reasons (which they usually use when refusing a request they don't like).
That's a funny answer, but an illegal one. He took great care to make sure that the deadline set by law for their answer is ahead of the exam date.
Men negotiate harder than women do
You see, that's the problem right there: Stereotypes.
Some people negotiate harder than other people. Maybe statistically speaking, men fall more often into group 1 and women more often into group 2. You're trying to tell me that's the only factor? I'm quite sure introverts fall more often into group 2 while extroverts fall more often into group 1. Maybe redheads fall more often into group 1, or people born in August. Maybe tall people. Probably younger people fall more often into group 2. People shortly after a divorce, people with pets, people growing up with older siblings...
It's so crazy that we focus on the sex thing when there are one thousand differences between person A and person B, most of which were not theirs choice, many of which are equally genetic.
Because an experienced human pilot can take two looks at a highway and see if it's possible to land there. He understands one hundred details in two seconds because the human brain is, despite all its failings and shortcomings, and incredible pattern-matching engine and really, really good at finding the important details in noisy input. We're still trying to make computers as good as the worst humans when it comes to things like vision and shape recognition.
USA style "always two people in the cockpit" rules..
That, actually, is a totally stupid crazy rule. You're basically telling your pilots that no matter how often they prove themselves to be innocent, you constantly suspect them of being potential terrorists / suicidal mass-murderers.
Better do away with that stupid reinforced door and lock. It was added to solve one problem, yes, but as we've seen it creates other problems that you then need more band-aids for to solve, which will create yet other problems...
Computers sometimes fail. So do humans. The best way to not be at the mercy of either is to have both. There's at least one incident on record where malfunctioning sensors told a plane computer that it was 4000 feet higher than it actually was, and it would've happily crashed into the ground during descent if the pilot hadn't looked out the window to say "wtf, that's the ground right there".
At HAL 2001, yes that was 14 years ago, there was a speech with the title "why my space ship will not run Linux" and that's as true today as it was back then: Our current software, from firmware and operating system to applications, is total crap, incredibly shoddy, and half of it is being held together by spit and duct tape. Fact is that while we make progress (and not a little, actually it's quite amazing), we still don't know how to write really good software. We know a bit about how to teach humans to write pretty good software, even though most companies use 10% of that knowledge in real production (mostly because next-quarter focussed managers don't understand the incredibly good ROI on high software quality).
But a lot of that knowledge is about software development processes.
But do we know how to make a non-trivial computer program that is guaranteed to behave correctly? How much software with an EAL5, EAL6 or EAL7 certification do you know? Wait, you can check here. Not very many.
I see most here ranting about the law appear to be in the libertarian mode of the market will fix everything
Not me. Extreme capitalism is just as bad as any other extremism. I'm just here to say that suing someone because some but not all of their content has captions is overdoing it.
You could make the exact same argument about the whole ADA
And in fact I do.
the truth is that it wouldn't happen by itself.
True, but the solution for "too little" is not "too much". When I drive into the city, I see a lot of free parking spaces all the time - for disabled people. It seems there's half a million disabled car drivers in this city, except that they're never parking anywhere. I understand handicapped parking. But when you can mark the times you see these spots actually used in a calendar, then maybe the amount is not right?
And beating shop owners over the head with the law has been the best way to get results.
Again, to some degree, yes. As with everything in life, there's a balance. The rest of us take a little inconvenience or additional cost upon ourselves to help out the disabled. We shouldn't be punished for making an effort just because that effort is not 100% perfect.
I understand not being an asshole to disabled people. Not making their life intentionally more difficult than it is.
I understand helping others if possible. Adding captions when you're doing subtitles in other languages anyways, putting ramps next to stairs when you're rebuilding the entrance anyway, that kind of thing.
I understand you might want to add these things by themselves for a bigger market or because of customer loyalty, or just because you can and it's not a big expense.
What I don't understand is this extremist approach of having the entire world change for your specific need. Old buildings that need to be damaged and reworked to cater to wheelchair people. A lawsuit not because you refuse to do captions, but because you don't have 100% coverage of them. This kind of crap gives people less desire to be friendly to disabled people, and very soon they'll do it only because the law requires it and only to the extent that the law requires.
An interesting read even though I have to admit I understand but half of it. What I didn't get is if there's a treatment path without medicine, something like the proper food, excercise regime, etc. -- because I find it hard to believe that the proper conditions cannot be created by the proper lifestyle.
"one psychiatrist" is not a valid citation. Point me to a name, a study, and some literature to explain why this discovery hasn't taken the medical world by storm, I'm always happy to expand my knowledge.
If this guy was suffering from depression, no background checks or security measures would have filtered him out. Depression is a civilisation disease, caused by the fucked-up society we have created around ourselves, the non-stop pressure, the endless competition, the constant message that you're not good enough that everyone is sending to everyone else. The artificial fear for survival that our governments create to drive wages down and create the economic pressure that corporations than exploit to get people to work under conditions that our parents would've scoffed at.
The solution is not in more pressure, the solution is in making a society that is made for human beings, not for robots, stock markets, the goddess of economic growth or any of the other crazy things that we're sacrificing millions of lives to.
There could be streaming capability to the ground
Because never in the history of the world has any such capability been abused.
In the case of Germanwings, ground control would have been able to see what's going on once they detected the loss of altitude.
And then do what about it? Collectively praying that FSM picks up the plane with his tentacles?
t stifles me that in 2015, a young troubled copilot can end 150 lives in a way that can easily be prevented with simple technology.
Technology is not a panacea. Add one thing to make flying more safe (locked cockpit doors), create another problem without which a catastrophy could have been prevented (locked cockpit door).
Something I learnt in my first leadership position: When someone has an idea, ask them about the downsides and potential issues. If they can't think of any, they haven't thought it through enough.
Follow the money. Who is asking for video cameras?
The last thing you would have seen would have been a smug face and a victory sign. Maybe not in this crash, but in the next. That, my friend, is headlines material. That's a breaking story right there. That picture is worth a hundred times its weight in gold, even if you print it on the most heavy paper you can find.
That's a meme, but also a lie. As IT people especially, we can take a big hint from IKEA in this regards. Their documentation is short, mostly visual, always step-by-step and gives the user exactly the information he needs, with none of the unimportant blabla that many blow up many other documentations from the necessary 3 pages to the actual 30.
If the instructions for Windows were made by IKEA, thousands of IT support people would be out of jobs because users could actually do simple tasks by themselves.
And don;t forget to put a price on convenience: instead of waiting 4-8 weeks for your new stuff, you get to take it home and use it right away
This.
When my girlfriend moved in, we needed some new furniture. The huge wardrobe took three weeks to be delivered, and then one more week to exchange an (important) part that was broken in transport.
We both dislike IKEA a lot, but we went there to buy some dressers. Half of what they have on offer is trash and the other half ugly, but we went home with two pieces of the one dresser that's not a shame to have in your bedroom. Because we didn't want to have her clothes in luggage and bags waiting for furniture to be delivered. It's not the 16th century anymore where people had to go into the forest to chop down trees every time they wanted to have a table.
Correct. Rational evaluation will lead you to this result.
We're not rational, because our genes (who drive our evolution and thus our minds) don't give a fuck if we survive or not, only if they survive. To them, your kid is more valuable then you are.