"Scientist" is nonsensically vague here. I have a PhD in Computer Science. I've had jobs where my title was "Sr. Research Scientist". I worked with an atmospheric science research group in graduate school, so I feel like I'm probably above average in terms of climate knowledge for computer scientists, but you absolutely shouldn't care what I think about climate change. I don't have the expertise to provide reliably correct information there.
What matters is that an overwhelming majority of *climate* scientists agree that climate change is caused by man. Those are the people with the relevant expertise. But similarly, they have no special claim to authority when it comes to the dangers of ML. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, etc., are not people who automatically deserve consideration of their opinions on areas outside their expertise. Today, there aren't a large number of scientists with expertise in AI or ML who are worried about these existential threats. We're almost universally much more concerned about things like the economic impact of continued growth in automation.
What litigation? No one is being prosecuted or sued here. The government isn't stepping in and telling anyone what they can or cannot say or do. Users have the right to criticize Tumblr for what they perceive Tumblr to be falling down at. Tumblr has the right to control how its property is used and how its brand is presented.
You sound really fired up about free speech, right up to the part where you'd prefer no one else have any of it.
Great. Here's what actually happened. Third parties did some basic research and found the existence of this material on Tumblr's site. Other people then pressure Tumblr to remove that content. Tumblr will presumably then remove this content. If you find this series of events objectionable, what's your preferred alternative? Should Tumblr be compelled by law to host them? Should third parties be prevented from pointing them out? Are you just saying you'd prefer Tumblr ignore them?
I have a hard time seeing any censorship here. This appears to be a bunch of people using their freedom to speak their mind, and (presumably) a company agreeing with them. It's not really censorship for me to paint over your graffiti on my wall. It's my wall. I get to decide what I want it to say. You can go paint your own wall. You may wish Tumblr would do otherwise, but it's their wall. They aren't obligated, legally or ethically, to display anything they don't want on that wall.
"Everyone is equally free to die of exposure on a park bench."
Protected classes aren't something anyone came up with to elevate one group over another. They were literally the last ditch hope at getting people who were, through accidents of birth and history, already above others to stop ruthlessly exploiting that advantage to stay above those "protected groups".
You don't like people having legal protections from you fucking them over? Just stop fucking them over for a few decades and the laws will catch up.
I'm not aware of any product or company that's ever successfully made a pitch based on "yes we cost more or don't work as well, but look at our sweet privacy policy".
I'm not saying they're right or wrong from an ethical standpoint. I don't even think such a global binary classification exists. The "right" amount of privacy depends on who you're asking. But regardless of what you determine the "right amount" to be, I'm pretty well convinced you can't sell much of a product by appealing to it.
In theory, they have. In practice, as far as I can tell, you get around it by just not describing your patent as "X on a computer". Couch it in enough jargon, and it appears that you can make "X" look novel to the patent office, for pretty much any value of "X".
Sure, but the point is that court cases are inherently uncertain. You can be right and lose. If suing Exxon meant that I thought there was a 1% chance I'd lose and owe them $400,000,000 in legal fees, I'm not suing Exxon.
Sure, if you live and work in a culture that expects slavish dedication to "work" and doesn't recognize that employees aren't spreadsheets that just output stuff according to a formula.
I worked during graduate school for a company that couldn't have cared less about my research or eventual PhD. I took time away from work -- above and beyond my allowed vacation time -- to do things like present at conferences. I left for five years to go be a professor before coming back. My career is fine, because my company, for whatever flaws it has, realizes that people are complicated fuzzy messes that you can sometimes work with to get a better long term result, even if it comes at what appears to be a short term expense.
What if I told you that anyone can choose to do things that way?
Hilary Clinton will be like 73 years old for the next election, and she just lost this one to a guy that couldn't have beaten *me* in a general election, and I'm an atheist who doesn't like people and who has the TV presence of Moe Syzlak. You think she might not be a viable candidate for the nomination in four years? Wow...what an amazing prediction there, Karnak.
She isn't going to face a justice department investigation because she didn't do anything particularly wrong, and the scandal has now served its purpose. You don't want to spend the next four years as President Trump having the New York Times and Washington Post running daily articles about yet another day's worth of courtroom testimony about the ratfucking (that's a real term, ladies and gents) that took place to get you elected in the first place, even if it doesn't really matter because the voters are all reading the Breitbart expose about the lizard people using the UN to run a global conspiracy to replace Bud Light with Seize Soixante Quatre or whatever that communist bubble water is called.
I don't understand what you're saying (or alternately, it just doesn't make sense). If anything, this accomplishes the opposite. If the recovery key was a strict technical requirement to access the account information, and Apple doesn't possess that key, then Apple would have the ability to tell the government, "Sorry, there's nothing we can do". If they replace the requirement of a key with a human being employed by Apple, then certainly they lose that ability.
In general, 2-factor authentication doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not the company has access to your data. It's only affects how difficult it is for an unauthorized user to get access. Apple could happily make themselves an authorized user though by just making sure they have the encryption keys to everything and only using 2-factor on the client to gate access to the keys for a user.
But if this affects governments' ability to request data at all, they're *adding* a "back-door" method of access here, not removing one.
That's not entirely true. People are responsible for their devices under normal operating conditions. If you intentionally do something that breaks it, you're at least partially responsible, and very likely solely responsible.
If you cut my brake lines and I run over someone, you're the one who goes to jail. My car was perfectly safe before your actions, and I took all necessary precautions to keep it safe. If it's legal to fly a drone where you live, then you aren't going to be held responsible for flying one that was intentionally disabled by an unauthorized third party.
You seem to take the word to mean something like "unimportant".
From dictionary.com...
anecdotal: Based on casual observations or indications rather than rigorous or scientific analysis: "There are anecdotal reports of children poisoned by hot dogs roasted over a fire of the [oleander] stems" (C. Claiborne Ray).
By that definition, I'd say you have not refuted the point at all.
I just realized: without revelation, creationists are in the same place as the evolutionists would be if they stopped finding fossils long ago. All the creationists can do is reinterpret the data (scriptures) they already have.
The fossil record is a nice benefit for evolutionary biologists, but the molecular record is sufficient to infer evolution beyond the level of doubt considered scientifically insignificant. So even without fossils, the fact that the DNA of all living organisms appears to fit so beautifully into a tree structure provides powerful evidence for a common ancestor.
The irony of that though, is delicious, is that, in order for science to learn new things, one generally forms a mental of image of how they believe the universe is, and, then, seeks to prove it by producing repeatable results.
The one extremely important point you left out is that scientists are trained to be skeptical of their own theories. A good scientist formulates a theory of some phenomenon, then tries his hardest to destroy that theory. If experiments show that the world does not match the theory, it is the theory that's wrong, not the world. Compare this to the creationist argument that God put fossils on the earth to test our faith. This is a case where the world seems to be 4.5 billion years old, but the "theory" tells us it is 6000 years old. To a scientist, the theory must be wrong. To the fundamentalist Christian, the world must be wrong.
> And how is that different from the other side wanting to prevent people from believing, to force gay marrige on a community, to help assisted suicide?
That's more than a little disingenuous on your part, I think. How do you force someone into not believing in God? Believe what you want, but you don't have the right to mandate what anyone else believes, and I can't say that I've ever met a fundamentalist atheist. I don't want to watch two hairy men kiss either, but I'm not so confident in my own superiority to think that my tastes should be the law.
The evolution/intelligent design issue is a little different in that it isn't a matter of taste. We know that evolution is a reality, and anyone who claims that the Earth is 6000 years old and humans were created in their present form is simply ignorant. It would be like arguing that the moon is made of cheese. I don't care if you want to believe it, but I would object to that theory being presented as a viable alternative to what we know with absolute certainty to be the truth.
Someone else in this thread pointed out that people would be killing each other without any religious influence at all. This is, of course, absolutely correct. I never meant to imply that the only reason such things occur is differences in their respective religions. I don't think anyone would argue that religion plays a significant role in these conflicts, however.
I could have written that myself maybe five years ago. To some extent, I still feel that way today. My problem (and presumably that of many others) is not with the faithful person praying for their loved ones. It's with the growing proportion of the population who takes their faith to the next step and decides that faith is not just good for them, but good for everyone and should be mandated. Then we get intelligent design in science classes, laws against gay marriage, laws against assisted suicide, the Terry Schiavo debacle, and numerous other effects that *do* cause problems for quite a number of people -- and that's just in the US. Worldwide, we have protestants killing catholics, muslims killing christians, jews and muslims killing each other indiscriminantly...you get the idea.
Richard Dawkins claims that the biggest problem with religious faith is that it rewards the suspension of critical thought. I agree, and it is one of the major causes of the ills mentioned above. So on a personal level, religious faith doesn't bother me. I have no desire to confront my grandmother about it. However, I don't believe that it is harmless, either. Does the good outweight the bad? I don't know, but we do currently seem to be in the midst of a spell of the "bad".
It's not that simple. The rovers are full of fairly sophisticated sensor packages, most of which can't handle the extremely low temperatures on the Martian surface. They need the batteries to basically, well, run the heater.
The principle investigator for the missions has written a book, "Roving Mars", that really is worth the read.
> It is part of my value system that people must not murder other people. > Now, is it immoral to impose this value system, or this part of my value system, unto others?
Yes. Society may collectively decide that as a whole they agree with your morality in this instance and legislate it, but for you to impose your wishes upon others simply because they are yours is exactly what the parent post was referring to.
If, given a real debate on the issues, a consensus arose that DRM is "good", one wouldn't really be able to complain. *I* may not like it, but in a representative democracy, *I* don't have sufficient power to enforce my will. Or at least that's the theory. In practice, our representative democracy mostly represents the interests of the representatives. (Ahh...alliteration). A consensus need only arise amongst the few who can ensure eternal campaign revenues, and their interests predictably deviate from that of the general public in certain areas. Hence the Sonny Bono Practically Infinite Copyright Act, DMCA, and scores of other laws that are so popular around these parts.
This is an application De Morgan's Laws. The EULA states if NOT A or NOT B (i.e., if you do NOT have the CD or do NOT have the right to listen to the CD, then you must delete the copies. De Morgan tells us that NOT A || NOT B is equivalent to NOT(A && B) instead of NOT(A OR B).
...go ahead and follow the law and explain how evolution is flawed and intelligent design is a valid alternative. But don't stop there. When you explain to your high school chemistry class elements and compounds and covalent bonds and such, take about half the time period and explain how chemistry is flawed and there is a valid alternative where really small people live inside the atoms and build bridges so they can visit each other and the bridges bind the atoms together. Maybe the inert gases just have really ugly people and no one wants to visit them.
Gravity? Well there's this Einstein guy who talked about curved space-time, but clearly those of us more evolved (pun intended) know that the true explanation is that the earth is magnetic and everything on it is made of metal, some metals being softer than others.
You'd waste some class time, but at the high school level, I think teaching critical thinking is more important than any particular theory. If I had a high school class that couldn't explain exactly what carbon dating is, but could critically examine a theory and draw conclusions from evidence, I'd feel pretty good about things.
Slashdot Mirror
"Scientist" is nonsensically vague here. I have a PhD in Computer Science. I've had jobs where my title was "Sr. Research Scientist". I worked with an atmospheric science research group in graduate school, so I feel like I'm probably above average in terms of climate knowledge for computer scientists, but you absolutely shouldn't care what I think about climate change. I don't have the expertise to provide reliably correct information there.
What matters is that an overwhelming majority of *climate* scientists agree that climate change is caused by man. Those are the people with the relevant expertise. But similarly, they have no special claim to authority when it comes to the dangers of ML. Stephen Hawking, Elon Musk, etc., are not people who automatically deserve consideration of their opinions on areas outside their expertise. Today, there aren't a large number of scientists with expertise in AI or ML who are worried about these existential threats. We're almost universally much more concerned about things like the economic impact of continued growth in automation.
What litigation? No one is being prosecuted or sued here. The government isn't stepping in and telling anyone what they can or cannot say or do. Users have the right to criticize Tumblr for what they perceive Tumblr to be falling down at. Tumblr has the right to control how its property is used and how its brand is presented.
You sound really fired up about free speech, right up to the part where you'd prefer no one else have any of it.
So you don't like "censorship".
Great. Here's what actually happened. Third parties did some basic research and found the existence of this material on Tumblr's site. Other people then pressure Tumblr to remove that content. Tumblr will presumably then remove this content. If you find this series of events objectionable, what's your preferred alternative? Should Tumblr be compelled by law to host them? Should third parties be prevented from pointing them out? Are you just saying you'd prefer Tumblr ignore them?
I have a hard time seeing any censorship here. This appears to be a bunch of people using their freedom to speak their mind, and (presumably) a company agreeing with them. It's not really censorship for me to paint over your graffiti on my wall. It's my wall. I get to decide what I want it to say. You can go paint your own wall. You may wish Tumblr would do otherwise, but it's their wall. They aren't obligated, legally or ethically, to display anything they don't want on that wall.
"Everyone is equally free to die of exposure on a park bench."
Protected classes aren't something anyone came up with to elevate one group over another. They were literally the last ditch hope at getting people who were, through accidents of birth and history, already above others to stop ruthlessly exploiting that advantage to stay above those "protected groups".
You don't like people having legal protections from you fucking them over? Just stop fucking them over for a few decades and the laws will catch up.
I'm not aware of any product or company that's ever successfully made a pitch based on "yes we cost more or don't work as well, but look at our sweet privacy policy".
I'm not saying they're right or wrong from an ethical standpoint. I don't even think such a global binary classification exists. The "right" amount of privacy depends on who you're asking. But regardless of what you determine the "right amount" to be, I'm pretty well convinced you can't sell much of a product by appealing to it.
In theory, they have. In practice, as far as I can tell, you get around it by just not describing your patent as "X on a computer". Couch it in enough jargon, and it appears that you can make "X" look novel to the patent office, for pretty much any value of "X".
Sure, but the point is that court cases are inherently uncertain. You can be right and lose. If suing Exxon meant that I thought there was a 1% chance I'd lose and owe them $400,000,000 in legal fees, I'm not suing Exxon.
Sure, if you live and work in a culture that expects slavish dedication to "work" and doesn't recognize that employees aren't spreadsheets that just output stuff according to a formula.
I worked during graduate school for a company that couldn't have cared less about my research or eventual PhD. I took time away from work -- above and beyond my allowed vacation time -- to do things like present at conferences. I left for five years to go be a professor before coming back. My career is fine, because my company, for whatever flaws it has, realizes that people are complicated fuzzy messes that you can sometimes work with to get a better long term result, even if it comes at what appears to be a short term expense.
What if I told you that anyone can choose to do things that way?
Hilary Clinton will be like 73 years old for the next election, and she just lost this one to a guy that couldn't have beaten *me* in a general election, and I'm an atheist who doesn't like people and who has the TV presence of Moe Syzlak. You think she might not be a viable candidate for the nomination in four years? Wow...what an amazing prediction there, Karnak.
She isn't going to face a justice department investigation because she didn't do anything particularly wrong, and the scandal has now served its purpose. You don't want to spend the next four years as President Trump having the New York Times and Washington Post running daily articles about yet another day's worth of courtroom testimony about the ratfucking (that's a real term, ladies and gents) that took place to get you elected in the first place, even if it doesn't really matter because the voters are all reading the Breitbart expose about the lizard people using the UN to run a global conspiracy to replace Bud Light with Seize Soixante Quatre or whatever that communist bubble water is called.
I don't understand what you're saying (or alternately, it just doesn't make sense). If anything, this accomplishes the opposite. If the recovery key was a strict technical requirement to access the account information, and Apple doesn't possess that key, then Apple would have the ability to tell the government, "Sorry, there's nothing we can do". If they replace the requirement of a key with a human being employed by Apple, then certainly they lose that ability.
In general, 2-factor authentication doesn't really have anything to do with whether or not the company has access to your data. It's only affects how difficult it is for an unauthorized user to get access. Apple could happily make themselves an authorized user though by just making sure they have the encryption keys to everything and only using 2-factor on the client to gate access to the keys for a user.
But if this affects governments' ability to request data at all, they're *adding* a "back-door" method of access here, not removing one.
That's not entirely true. People are responsible for their devices under normal operating conditions. If you intentionally do something that breaks it, you're at least partially responsible, and very likely solely responsible.
If you cut my brake lines and I run over someone, you're the one who goes to jail. My car was perfectly safe before your actions, and I took all necessary precautions to keep it safe. If it's legal to fly a drone where you live, then you aren't going to be held responsible for flying one that was intentionally disabled by an unauthorized third party.
You seem to take the word to mean something like "unimportant".
From dictionary.com...
anecdotal: Based on casual observations or indications rather than rigorous or scientific analysis: "There are anecdotal reports of children poisoned by hot dogs roasted over a fire of the [oleander] stems" (C. Claiborne Ray).
By that definition, I'd say you have not refuted the point at all.
I just realized: without revelation, creationists are in the same place as the evolutionists would be if they stopped finding fossils long ago. All the creationists can do is reinterpret the data (scriptures) they already have.
The fossil record is a nice benefit for evolutionary biologists, but the molecular record is sufficient to infer evolution beyond the level of doubt considered scientifically insignificant. So even without fossils, the fact that the DNA of all living organisms appears to fit so beautifully into a tree structure provides powerful evidence for a common ancestor.
The irony of that though, is delicious, is that, in order for science to learn new things, one generally forms a mental of image of how they believe the universe is, and, then, seeks to prove it by producing repeatable results.
The one extremely important point you left out is that scientists are trained to be skeptical of their own theories. A good scientist formulates a theory of some phenomenon, then tries his hardest to destroy that theory. If experiments show that the world does not match the theory, it is the theory that's wrong, not the world. Compare this to the creationist argument that God put fossils on the earth to test our faith. This is a case where the world seems to be 4.5 billion years old, but the "theory" tells us it is 6000 years old. To a scientist, the theory must be wrong. To the fundamentalist Christian, the world must be wrong.
> And how is that different from the other side wanting to prevent people from believing, to force gay marrige on a community, to help assisted suicide?
That's more than a little disingenuous on your part, I think. How do you force someone into not believing in God? Believe what you want, but you don't have the right to mandate what anyone else believes, and I can't say that I've ever met a fundamentalist atheist. I don't want to watch two hairy men kiss either, but I'm not so confident in my own superiority to think that my tastes should be the law.
The evolution/intelligent design issue is a little different in that it isn't a matter of taste. We know that evolution is a reality, and anyone who claims that the Earth is 6000 years old and humans were created in their present form is simply ignorant. It would be like arguing that the moon is made of cheese. I don't care if you want to believe it, but I would object to that theory being presented as a viable alternative to what we know with absolute certainty to be the truth.
Someone else in this thread pointed out that people would be killing each other without any religious influence at all. This is, of course, absolutely correct. I never meant to imply that the only reason such things occur is differences in their respective religions. I don't think anyone would argue that religion plays a significant role in these conflicts, however.
I could have written that myself maybe five years ago. To some extent, I still feel that way today. My problem (and presumably that of many others) is not with the faithful person praying for their loved ones. It's with the growing proportion of the population who takes their faith to the next step and decides that faith is not just good for them, but good for everyone and should be mandated. Then we get intelligent design in science classes, laws against gay marriage, laws against assisted suicide, the Terry Schiavo debacle, and numerous other effects that *do* cause problems for quite a number of people -- and that's just in the US. Worldwide, we have protestants killing catholics, muslims killing christians, jews and muslims killing each other indiscriminantly...you get the idea.
Richard Dawkins claims that the biggest problem with religious faith is that it rewards the suspension of critical thought. I agree, and it is one of the major causes of the ills mentioned above. So on a personal level, religious faith doesn't bother me. I have no desire to confront my grandmother about it. However, I don't believe that it is harmless, either. Does the good outweight the bad? I don't know, but we do currently seem to be in the midst of a spell of the "bad".
It's not that simple. The rovers are full of fairly sophisticated sensor packages, most of which can't handle the extremely low temperatures on the Martian surface. They need the batteries to basically, well, run the heater.
The principle investigator for the missions has written a book, "Roving Mars", that really is worth the read.
"And this is why Tom's and other tech review sites should always test it with, say, Linux in addition to Windows. They'd have known a lot sooner."
Funny. In my own independent testing, the Windows USB driver provides about a 30% gain in battery life using Linux as my baseline.
She was an invited guest of Congresswoman Lynn Woolsey. It isn't trespassing if you're invited inside.
> It is part of my value system that people must not murder other people.
> Now, is it immoral to impose this value system, or this part of my value system, unto others?
Yes. Society may collectively decide that as a whole they agree with your morality in this instance and legislate it, but for you to impose your wishes upon others simply because they are yours is exactly what the parent post was referring to.
If, given a real debate on the issues, a consensus arose that DRM is "good", one wouldn't really be able to complain. *I* may not like it, but in a representative democracy, *I* don't have sufficient power to enforce my will. Or at least that's the theory. In practice, our representative democracy mostly represents the interests of the representatives. (Ahh...alliteration). A consensus need only arise amongst the few who can ensure eternal campaign revenues, and their interests predictably deviate from that of the general public in certain areas. Hence the Sonny Bono Practically Infinite Copyright Act, DMCA, and scores of other laws that are so popular around these parts.
if (! (user.hasCD() || user.hasRightToMusic())
should be
if (!(user.hasCD() && user.hasRightToMusic()))
This is an application De Morgan's Laws. The EULA states if NOT A or NOT B (i.e., if you do NOT have the CD or do NOT have the right to listen to the CD, then you must delete the copies. De Morgan tells us that NOT A || NOT B is equivalent to NOT(A && B) instead of NOT(A OR B).
> As distributed, what can you do with it?
Nearly everything on your list is perfectly supported right out of the box...
> Word processing?
Wordpad
> Financial stuff?
Calc
> Photo & image manipulation (Paint prog?)
Paint
> Spreadsheets?
Calc
> Desktop publishing?
Wordpad
> Webpage authoring / editing?
Notepad
Come on, man. What more do you want?
...go ahead and follow the law and explain how evolution is flawed and intelligent design is a valid alternative. But don't stop there. When you explain to your high school chemistry class elements and compounds and covalent bonds and such, take about half the time period and explain how chemistry is flawed and there is a valid alternative where really small people live inside the atoms and build bridges so they can visit each other and the bridges bind the atoms together. Maybe the inert gases just have really ugly people and no one wants to visit them.
Gravity? Well there's this Einstein guy who talked about curved space-time, but clearly those of us more evolved (pun intended) know that the true explanation is that the earth is magnetic and everything on it is made of metal, some metals being softer than others.
You'd waste some class time, but at the high school level, I think teaching critical thinking is more important than any particular theory. If I had a high school class that couldn't explain exactly what carbon dating is, but could critically examine a theory and draw conclusions from evidence, I'd feel pretty good about things.
Funny, I didn't see a picture of a kernel. It looks like Gnome, an event deemed less shocking by the fact that it is Gnome.