Honestly it's all a bit strange, the various attacks on the US / UK/ France / Germany were all over the media in Australia, and the general sentiment was that they are an attack on us, despite them happening literally on the other side of the planet, and the conflict in Syria is closer. When the Australian media talk about who North Korea might decide to fire nuclear weapons at, of course the topic comes up of "where in Australia is in range".
People in my home state worry about what the US, China, Russia, North Korea, and ISIS are all up to despite being arguably on the safest bit of land on Earth, its just bizarre and I didn't see it until I spent a number of years in the UK.
How about Australians? I know there have been 1-2 incidents with Muslims, but is it that big a fear thing there? Or is a secret cabal of Chinese? Some kind of panic over a wave of Indonesians? Some kind of organized crime thing?
Pretty much all of the above, the Australian public has been whipped up into a xenophobic frenzy just like people in the good ol' USA, Europe,and elsewhere, and much of it is overblown nonsense.
We Aussies like to think of our country as a lot more important than it really is on an international stage, when the rest of the world views us as a nice holiday destination and we spend all our time having barbecues or at the beach. So *of course* the terrorrists, chinese, asylum seekers, and everyone else, want to attack us and destroy our way of life.
Octopuses sounds terrible, as does Octopi and Octopodes. I've never understood why the plural isn't simply Octopus, like Sheep, or Squid.
Octopus tend to be solitary anyway, so its rare you really need to make the distinction between one and many Octopus, and more often you are talking vaguely about the species as a whole.
Withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea would require some sort of ironclad guarantee that North Korea would not invade again, or a guarantee of immediate UN authorization for the U.S. to intervene again, or South Korea unilaterally deciding to give up the deterrence of having U.S. troops present.
I think this is the gambit that Xi and Kim are angling for.
Under the Trump administration the US has been erratic at best, with suddenly withdrawing from the TPP and imposing trade restrictions on China without thinking about how it might affect their allies, as well as all of the rhetoric and sabre rattling over North Korea. From the perspective of South Korea, is their ongoing alliance with the US worth it? Or has it become something of a liability?
So Xi tells Kim to stop the nuclear programme in return for demanding the withdrawal of US troops, and the South might just be considering it.
Unfortunately the planet doesn't care for per-capita emissions, only global total emissions.
Per-capita Australia is one of the worst emitters around, but because we only have 26 million people we are only a drop in the bucket of total global emissions
I agree, but it could also be a sign of a highly unequal society that companies no longer have to go to the broad public to raise funds as they can get all they need from a handful of private investors.
Sorry, are you claiming Trump was responsible for the rainfall in California, the Hollywood scandal and global temperature? That would be impressive for any world leader!
Interesting enough the Trump Presidency may have had a postivive effect on the whole Hollywood sexism thing; Remember that 'womens march' that happened just after his inaugeration? Where thousands of men and women marched in response to sexual allegations against Trump. I'd say that would embolden anyone else to speak out about other high profile attackers and pave the way for things like #metoo.
If all of the resold toys are bought at the outrageous markup, then that's what they should have been priced in the first place.
Which makes you wonder, why *aren't* they being priced that way? Surely these toy makers want to make the most money right?
I wonder if people are willing pay more to the online scalper than they would otherwise be prepared to pay in a Big Box Store for some reason. Is it because thrifty families have a chance to buy the toy earlier and rich families can't bare the thought of some poor kids having something that their kids don't? Is it simply that a toy becomes more desirable the more unavailable it is? Certainly it seems like there's more to it than simple supply and demand, because otherwise makers would see the presence of scalpers as a signal that they can increase prices without altering demand.
Neural networks can work really well on specific problem domains. The problem is: You have no idea what they are actually learning. The features that a network identifies within its layers are not really accessible to us. The problem lies, imho, in the total lack of domain knowledge. Since the network doesn't understand what the objects in those pictures are, they are doing a purely mechanical analysis of some (and who knows which) aspects of the pictures. They can learn some really weird things.
I think its premature to be calling these things 'Artificial Intelligence', because as you say there doesn't really seem to be a whole lot of intelligence in these systems at all. The way I explain it is by calling them 'Artificial Instinct' machines instead, because that's closer to how these things actually function. The networks build up a set of kneejerk reactions to stimuli which is why they seem to work well for things that humans can do without really thinking about it, like driving cars.
The market demand in the US and Europe is not terribly high for such a beast, but I could easily see, say, China or Korea deciding that having a new platform was of strategic value. Samsung has even tried it already.
In China, for example, if it were announced today that Android and iOS were going to be forbidden starting in 2021, you would have a pretty complete alternative ecosystem by then.
The Chinese and the Russians are developing Sailfish OS for use in domestic markets, presumably because they aren't happy with US developed systems owning their markets.
It's no surprise when a new target-for-compatiblity becomes concerned, as history has demonstrated that by introducing compatibility, Microsoft will break that compatibility when it feels the time is right to get customers to migrate to Microsoft off of whatever previous software they used, and the cycle repeats.
This isn't unique to Microsoft though, and is seen throughout the industry not as 'nefariousness' just what makes good business strategy at any point in time.
When you're the underdog, you want people to switch to your offering, and as such software compatibility makes that easy. If you're successful and become top dog, you want to stop people leaving which you can do by ensuring your software compatibility is as hard as possible to replicate elsewhere.
Microsoft is certainly guilty of this, but imo its just the way business is. You don't give your competitors a level playing field unless someone makes you.
Nonsense. Retail jobs are unproductive and create no additional goods or services. The elimination of these jobs is good for the economy, since it frees up labor for productive work.
The problem is the education critical mass for productive work is increasing, you simply need to know a lot more stuff to be able to contribute to society.
Take away retail jobs (unproductive), and the now unemployed people (still unproductive) are going to need further education (also unproductive) and probably some kind of welfare so they can continue to live whilst retraining to do something useful.
In the long term this will probably be a good thing, but we need to stump up on education now and be prepared to pay for a large amount of displaced workers whose livelihoods have been made redundant. The idea that you can learn a simple trade, and spend your entire life doing it I believe is coming to an end, and the era of life long learning is beginning.
IKEA furniture isn't that difficult to put together. You just need to take your time, follow the directions and try not to misplace any of the small parts.
For us millennials its appears that assembling IKEA furniture has become some kind of rite of passage, and a true sign of 'adulting'.
And would you believe it, most of us completely suck at it. I've helped so many friends construct some basic things because the whole idea of screwing a few bits of chip board together completely terrifies them. Millennials by and large are just not practical people.
So the fact that there exists a service where you can summon someone from the internet to assemble your IKEA furniture for you doesn't really surprise me at all.
And all for what? For ads. Let that sink in for a moment.
All that money and effort. The abuse of our trust and violation of our privacy. The tricks and hacks played on our systems - some borderline illegal - in order to track us. All that just to help others sell us more crap. By “better understanding our customers” and “delivering an experience tailored to appeal to each customer”.
Not always, I *still* can't really believe people gave away a treasure trove of biometric facial data in exchange for cutesy pictures of their face as a cat or dog. I would be really surprised if Snap.inc doesn't have a deal with Palantir or other such government contractor.
So if some site decided to toss all them "pinko commis" off their site for expressing left wing views, you'd be ok with that? It's possible your view is at least consistent on this, but I doubt it.
Indeed they could ban anyone they choose, except for perhaps protected classes under discrimination laws but that's not the point. This is the problem with privately owned websites masquerading as public spaces. With real public spaces we've legislated what the owner of the space (read: government) is allowed to do to people there, and a different set of rules for private spaces.
Spoiled children are usually demanding that big mommy/daddy step in to solve their conflicts for them. That sounds more like the reddit/pro socjus crowd than the pro free speech people. I'm sure you'd say the same thing to the online SJWs getting flamed for their illogical arguments? Oh, right, when they're criticized, it's 'trolling'...
Oh c'mon, it's plain to see there's spoiled brats on both sides.
So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly? It is far from "basically nothing", especially in the aggregate. If you disagree, I challenge you to start and run your own high-quality publication for a decade in a financially responsible way. I have.
Most of what you're talking about seems to be a straight up service for the person(s) submitting the article, so I don't see any obvious reason why the onus isn't on them for the costs.
If you want to make sure your paper has been proofread and has a professional typesetting, then you pay. If you want people to peer review, then you pay. If you want your article featured in prestigious journal in your field, then you pay.
All of this is an up front cost, and only needs to be paid once. Afterwards you have a.pdf that literally anyone can host, or indeed can use something like DAT/IPFS/Bittorrent to help share the burden of keeping it on the web.
$2000 per article doesn't sound like a huge cost, I would expect the cost of doing the actual research to be much higher than that and in return the researchers would save on subscriptions and per-paper fees used to create it in the first place.
The benefit to Microsoft is mostly in their direction, and not Linux.
Exactly, this is about their Azure cloud platform and not really anything else. There's a whole bunch of features you need to write.Net services to use, and being able to run them on Azure+Linux fits in with their current strategy.
Why not just fork and develop Firefox OS? It actually works, is based on Linux, CSS and HTML5 and has actually been deployed by a handful of phone manufacturers, primarily in India. I don't even think it's truly dead, as a couple of small Indian firms appear to still be developing it.
Sure, it was a waste of time for Mozilla but no need to reinvent the wheel.
Why not just do something completely different? Well FXOS is based upon Android and these guys don't seem want anything to do with Android. I wish them the best of luck but getting decent mainline hardware support out of modern phones is a serious undertaking, there's a reason why all recent efforts (firefox os, ubuntu touch, sailifsh os) use various hacks to re-use the android based drivers.
I question whether doing it for basically 5+ years was the right thing.
The downside to QE is high inflation, which didn't happen. So I question why you question it. While America was doing QE, the Euro Zone was doing austerity. The recession there was deeper and longer, and they still have an unemployment rate nearly double America's.
This is what puzzles me, conventional wisdom states that printing money like that should result in skyrocketing inflation, which obviously didn't happen and many countries doing it are still fighting deflation.
So what gives? Are tax havens really sequestering that much supply from the market? Is the money printed not making it into the general supply and just padding bank profits?
This is what happens when you place private companies at the center of what we now consider to be public spaces. We have rules restricting what governments can do, but those same rules often don't apply to private companies who can and will do whatever they feel like.
Race is bullshit anyway. It's just an arbitrary division based on a fairly random selection of traits. That's one reason why the ratio of non-white people is increasing - people who were white are now considered something else as the definition of race shifts.
Indeed. The various races were created out of isolation and time, and as a species we are a whole lot less isolated from each other now than we used to be. Inevitably we will merge into a singular race unless you want to arbitrarily restrict peoples freedoms to preserve 'racial purity' whatever that means.
On the plus side, technology that can meaningfully decarbonise the atmosphere on earth would be great for terraforming the atmosphere on Mars. We would still need to get a large quantity of Nitrogen from somewhere, hopefully the ammonia on Phobos and Deimos can help there.
Of course not, they have mad visionary skills, they gots the gap performance evaluations and the stretch goals. You are all not l33t compared to them. You are too stupid to get it.
I have been wondering whether or not its actually due to their level of expertise being the optimal point on the Dunning-Kruger curve.
True expertise takes a long time to gain, and if you're on the downward slope you realise how much you don't know and delay making decisions. Executives need to be confident making decisions with incomplete information, and to do that effectively they need to be at the Dunning-Kruger peak.
Slashdot Mirror
Honestly it's all a bit strange, the various attacks on the US / UK/ France / Germany were all over the media in Australia, and the general sentiment was that they are an attack on us, despite them happening literally on the other side of the planet, and the conflict in Syria is closer. When the Australian media talk about who North Korea might decide to fire nuclear weapons at, of course the topic comes up of "where in Australia is in range".
People in my home state worry about what the US, China, Russia, North Korea, and ISIS are all up to despite being arguably on the safest bit of land on Earth, its just bizarre and I didn't see it until I spent a number of years in the UK.
How about Australians? I know there have been 1-2 incidents with Muslims, but is it that big a fear thing there? Or is a secret cabal of Chinese? Some kind of panic over a wave of Indonesians? Some kind of organized crime thing?
Pretty much all of the above, the Australian public has been whipped up into a xenophobic frenzy just like people in the good ol' USA, Europe,and elsewhere, and much of it is overblown nonsense.
We Aussies like to think of our country as a lot more important than it really is on an international stage, when the rest of the world views us as a nice holiday destination and we spend all our time having barbecues or at the beach. So *of course* the terrorrists, chinese, asylum seekers, and everyone else, want to attack us and destroy our way of life.
Octopuses sounds terrible, as does Octopi and Octopodes. I've never understood why the plural isn't simply Octopus, like Sheep, or Squid.
Octopus tend to be solitary anyway, so its rare you really need to make the distinction between one and many Octopus, and more often you are talking vaguely about the species as a whole.
Withdrawing U.S. troops from South Korea would require some sort of ironclad guarantee that North Korea would not invade again, or a guarantee of immediate UN authorization for the U.S. to intervene again, or South Korea unilaterally deciding to give up the deterrence of having U.S. troops present.
I think this is the gambit that Xi and Kim are angling for.
Under the Trump administration the US has been erratic at best, with suddenly withdrawing from the TPP and imposing trade restrictions on China without thinking about how it might affect their allies, as well as all of the rhetoric and sabre rattling over North Korea. From the perspective of South Korea, is their ongoing alliance with the US worth it? Or has it become something of a liability?
So Xi tells Kim to stop the nuclear programme in return for demanding the withdrawal of US troops, and the South might just be considering it.
Unfortunately the planet doesn't care for per-capita emissions, only global total emissions.
Per-capita Australia is one of the worst emitters around, but because we only have 26 million people we are only a drop in the bucket of total global emissions
I agree, but it could also be a sign of a highly unequal society that companies no longer have to go to the broad public to raise funds as they can get all they need from a handful of private investors.
Mining Bitcoin in the LMA skunkworks office obviously
Sorry, are you claiming Trump was responsible for the rainfall in California, the Hollywood scandal and global temperature? That would be impressive for any world leader!
Interesting enough the Trump Presidency may have had a postivive effect on the whole Hollywood sexism thing; Remember that 'womens march' that happened just after his inaugeration? Where thousands of men and women marched in response to sexual allegations against Trump. I'd say that would embolden anyone else to speak out about other high profile attackers and pave the way for things like #metoo.
If all of the resold toys are bought at the outrageous markup, then that's what they should have been priced in the first place.
Which makes you wonder, why *aren't* they being priced that way? Surely these toy makers want to make the most money right?
I wonder if people are willing pay more to the online scalper than they would otherwise be prepared to pay in a Big Box Store for some reason. Is it because thrifty families have a chance to buy the toy earlier and rich families can't bare the thought of some poor kids having something that their kids don't? Is it simply that a toy becomes more desirable the more unavailable it is? Certainly it seems like there's more to it than simple supply and demand, because otherwise makers would see the presence of scalpers as a signal that they can increase prices without altering demand.
Neural networks can work really well on specific problem domains. The problem is: You have no idea what they are actually learning. The features that a network identifies within its layers are not really accessible to us. The problem lies, imho, in the total lack of domain knowledge. Since the network doesn't understand what the objects in those pictures are, they are doing a purely mechanical analysis of some (and who knows which) aspects of the pictures. They can learn some really weird things.
I think its premature to be calling these things 'Artificial Intelligence', because as you say there doesn't really seem to be a whole lot of intelligence in these systems at all. The way I explain it is by calling them 'Artificial Instinct' machines instead, because that's closer to how these things actually function. The networks build up a set of kneejerk reactions to stimuli which is why they seem to work well for things that humans can do without really thinking about it, like driving cars.
The market demand in the US and Europe is not terribly high for such a beast, but I could easily see, say, China or Korea deciding that having a new platform was of strategic value. Samsung has even tried it already.
In China, for example, if it were announced today that Android and iOS were going to be forbidden starting in 2021, you would have a pretty complete alternative ecosystem by then.
The Chinese and the Russians are developing Sailfish OS for use in domestic markets, presumably because they aren't happy with US developed systems owning their markets.
It's no surprise when a new target-for-compatiblity becomes concerned, as history has demonstrated that by introducing compatibility, Microsoft will break that compatibility when it feels the time is right to get customers to migrate to Microsoft off of whatever previous software they used, and the cycle repeats.
This isn't unique to Microsoft though, and is seen throughout the industry not as 'nefariousness' just what makes good business strategy at any point in time.
When you're the underdog, you want people to switch to your offering, and as such software compatibility makes that easy. If you're successful and become top dog, you want to stop people leaving which you can do by ensuring your software compatibility is as hard as possible to replicate elsewhere.
Microsoft is certainly guilty of this, but imo its just the way business is. You don't give your competitors a level playing field unless someone makes you.
Nonsense. Retail jobs are unproductive and create no additional goods or services. The elimination of these jobs is good for the economy, since it frees up labor for productive work.
The problem is the education critical mass for productive work is increasing, you simply need to know a lot more stuff to be able to contribute to society.
Take away retail jobs (unproductive), and the now unemployed people (still unproductive) are going to need further education (also unproductive) and probably some kind of welfare so they can continue to live whilst retraining to do something useful.
In the long term this will probably be a good thing, but we need to stump up on education now and be prepared to pay for a large amount of displaced workers whose livelihoods have been made redundant. The idea that you can learn a simple trade, and spend your entire life doing it I believe is coming to an end, and the era of life long learning is beginning.
IKEA furniture isn't that difficult to put together. You just need to take your time, follow the directions and try not to misplace any of the small parts.
For us millennials its appears that assembling IKEA furniture has become some kind of rite of passage, and a true sign of 'adulting'.
And would you believe it, most of us completely suck at it. I've helped so many friends construct some basic things because the whole idea of screwing a few bits of chip board together completely terrifies them. Millennials by and large are just not practical people.
So the fact that there exists a service where you can summon someone from the internet to assemble your IKEA furniture for you doesn't really surprise me at all.
And all for what? For ads. Let that sink in for a moment. All that money and effort. The abuse of our trust and violation of our privacy. The tricks and hacks played on our systems - some borderline illegal - in order to track us. All that just to help others sell us more crap. By “better understanding our customers” and “delivering an experience tailored to appeal to each customer”.
Not always, I *still* can't really believe people gave away a treasure trove of biometric facial data in exchange for cutesy pictures of their face as a cat or dog. I would be really surprised if Snap .inc doesn't have a deal with Palantir or other such government contractor.
So if some site decided to toss all them "pinko commis" off their site for expressing left wing views, you'd be ok with that? It's possible your view is at least consistent on this, but I doubt it.
Indeed they could ban anyone they choose, except for perhaps protected classes under discrimination laws but that's not the point. This is the problem with privately owned websites masquerading as public spaces. With real public spaces we've legislated what the owner of the space (read: government) is allowed to do to people there, and a different set of rules for private spaces.
Spoiled children are usually demanding that big mommy/daddy step in to solve their conflicts for them. That sounds more like the reddit/pro socjus crowd than the pro free speech people. I'm sure you'd say the same thing to the online SJWs getting flamed for their illogical arguments? Oh, right, when they're criticized, it's 'trolling'...
Oh c'mon, it's plain to see there's spoiled brats on both sides.
So, where should that $2000 per article funding come from, exactly? It is far from "basically nothing", especially in the aggregate. If you disagree, I challenge you to start and run your own high-quality publication for a decade in a financially responsible way. I have.
Most of what you're talking about seems to be a straight up service for the person(s) submitting the article, so I don't see any obvious reason why the onus isn't on them for the costs.
If you want to make sure your paper has been proofread and has a professional typesetting, then you pay. If you want people to peer review, then you pay. If you want your article featured in prestigious journal in your field, then you pay.
All of this is an up front cost, and only needs to be paid once. Afterwards you have a .pdf that literally anyone can host, or indeed can use something like DAT/IPFS/Bittorrent to help share the burden of keeping it on the web.
$2000 per article doesn't sound like a huge cost, I would expect the cost of doing the actual research to be much higher than that and in return the researchers would save on subscriptions and per-paper fees used to create it in the first place.
The benefit to Microsoft is mostly in their direction, and not Linux.
Exactly, this is about their Azure cloud platform and not really anything else. There's a whole bunch of features you need to write .Net services to use, and being able to run them on Azure+Linux fits in with their current strategy.
What would the bots even do? Medium is weighing where an individual subscribers fees go according to articles that individual subscriber 'clapped'.
Why not just fork and develop Firefox OS? It actually works, is based on Linux, CSS and HTML5 and has actually been deployed by a handful of phone manufacturers, primarily in India. I don't even think it's truly dead, as a couple of small Indian firms appear to still be developing it.
Sure, it was a waste of time for Mozilla but no need to reinvent the wheel.
Why not just do something completely different? Well FXOS is based upon Android and these guys don't seem want anything to do with Android. I wish them the best of luck but getting decent mainline hardware support out of modern phones is a serious undertaking, there's a reason why all recent efforts (firefox os, ubuntu touch, sailifsh os) use various hacks to re-use the android based drivers.
I question whether doing it for basically 5+ years was the right thing.
The downside to QE is high inflation, which didn't happen. So I question why you question it. While America was doing QE, the Euro Zone was doing austerity. The recession there was deeper and longer, and they still have an unemployment rate nearly double America's.
This is what puzzles me, conventional wisdom states that printing money like that should result in skyrocketing inflation, which obviously didn't happen and many countries doing it are still fighting deflation.
So what gives? Are tax havens really sequestering that much supply from the market? Is the money printed not making it into the general supply and just padding bank profits?
This is what happens when you place private companies at the center of what we now consider to be public spaces. We have rules restricting what governments can do, but those same rules often don't apply to private companies who can and will do whatever they feel like.
Race is bullshit anyway. It's just an arbitrary division based on a fairly random selection of traits. That's one reason why the ratio of non-white people is increasing - people who were white are now considered something else as the definition of race shifts.
Indeed. The various races were created out of isolation and time, and as a species we are a whole lot less isolated from each other now than we used to be. Inevitably we will merge into a singular race unless you want to arbitrarily restrict peoples freedoms to preserve 'racial purity' whatever that means.
On the plus side, technology that can meaningfully decarbonise the atmosphere on earth would be great for terraforming the atmosphere on Mars. We would still need to get a large quantity of Nitrogen from somewhere, hopefully the ammonia on Phobos and Deimos can help there.
That executive is an idiot.
Aren't they all?
Of course not, they have mad visionary skills, they gots the gap performance evaluations and the stretch goals. You are all not l33t compared to them. You are too stupid to get it.
I have been wondering whether or not its actually due to their level of expertise being the optimal point on the Dunning-Kruger curve.
True expertise takes a long time to gain, and if you're on the downward slope you realise how much you don't know and delay making decisions. Executives need to be confident making decisions with incomplete information, and to do that effectively they need to be at the Dunning-Kruger peak.