Just out of curiosity, how do you know if a person is a TSA screener in either of those situations? Presumably the only way to know for sure is if they're a friend of yours. My only question is if we should also shun the friends of TSA agents in a manner similar to that which you've prescribed above.
Was there continuing demand, or just left over inventory? I'm sure there's still a little bit of demand for a Plymouth Barracuda, but I doubt that Chrysler (or whoever owns that brand now) is going to devote a production line to making any more.
But if you showed someone from the 90's what a 3D scan of naked body of one of today's Americans looked like, they'd say you'd probably need harder drugs than weed just to be able to do that job all day.
Occasionally doing some good in the world doesn't justify all of the terrible things some one has done as well. I don't suspect you'd let off someone who mugged a bunch of people at knife point just because they used some of the ill gotten gains to feed some of the area homeless. The only tragedy in all of this is that a person apparently needs a wealthy person to bankroll their court case in order to have a chance of getting justice.
Gawker was a shitty place for shitty people. The muck was to make click bait money and anything approaching actual journalism was likely an accident. It's almost certain they only went after Thiel due to his political leanings, not because they care about shady business. The number of their former staffers that showed up on the Shitty Media Men list says a lot about them. You might have decided to give them a pass because they appeared to espouse your beliefs, but they were horrible people who realized that they could get away with being horrible people as long as they told people like you what you wanted to hear.
Comparing Gawker to Sinclair says a lot more about you than it does Gawker. Gain some perspective and I think you'll see that nothing was lost.
It used to be that if you wanted video porn you had to pay for that too, but eventually it became plentiful and cheap. My understanding is that the people who put it online charge for live shows or have crowd-funding setups, so it's not as though all of them are doing this for free. If that's your model, it makes sense to just give away the old stuff since anyone who stumbles on it might be swayed to become a paying customer. The individual odds are low, but if you can get 250,000 eyeballs, a.1% conversion rate is good enough if each of those people will spend $10 a month.
Even if VR porn is expensive now, market forces and technological advances will drive down the cost over time. Unless you're creating customized real-time experiences, you're creating a digital good that might be expensive to make, but is cheap to duplicate exact copies of after it has been made. Even the program that can create real-time experiences only needs to be written once, as difficult as it may be to actually do so.
I don't think it will be easy, but New Zealand has been making a lot of inroads into removing invasive species, rats being on of the primary examples. Granted, a lot of this has been through going after low-hanging fruit like small isolated islands first, but it is being done successfully. I suspect that as we advance our knowledge, we'll get better at doing it too. I know that one of the approaches that has been used with mosquitoes is to release some sterile or genetically modified males that result in non-viable offspring or none at all. You could probably do something similar with rats to greatly reduce the populations to the point where other interventions make a larger dent in the problem.
I wonder if it has to do with them constantly pushing for both thinner and lighter. The MagSafe connector wasn't massive, but they killed off the headphone jack in their phones so that they could go thinner and the MagSafe connector may have been the largest remaining constraint preventing that. Also, at some point they get the weight down far enough where the MagSafe connector's attraction isn't broken by gentle tugs/pulls and you can actually drag the notebook off a table with the cord because the magnetic attraction is too strong. If you make the magnetic attraction less strong, eventually you wind up defeating the point of it to begin with and it comes loose too easily.
I've never personally owned a Mac notebook (I have friends/relatives that have had various models over the years) so I don't know how true that is in reality, but I can't think of anything else (outside of some patent situation) that makes any sense. I suppose you could argue cost or some hippy crap like them not being able to get the components from a conflict free source or something like that that.
But if they weren't effective, companies (legitimate or not) wouldn't seek to court them. Influencers are nothing new, we just used to call them movie stars or rock stars without really thinking about them in terms of influence. The only thing that's really different with this new set on Twitter is that they don't necessarily have an celebrity (or they're famous merely for being famous) or skills that might even mislead people into trusting them in areas outside of that skill set.
At least with Twitter your average no talent schlub has as much chance of being an influencer as one of the Hollywood crowd. The internet is just a force for democratization, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those things which are being democratized are useful or good.
I wouldn't say that. Companies like NVidia are doing a lot of work in designing cores that are made for deep learning and other types of specialty workflows where a general purpose CPU isn't as efficient or the amount of processing power needed is massive. Others like AMD have developed new interconnect technologies (they call it Infinity Fabric) that can be used to connect multiple small dies together on an interposer. This has massive ramifications as it means you can create massive dies in a much more cost-effective manner. We've also seen both Intel and AMD making moves towards APUs and with HBM (high bandwidth memory) it's eventually going to hit a point where x86 processors can become a SoC to that point that PCs become much more simplified. Maybe this doesn't have the wow-factor of some flashy new invention, but steady progress is often far more important than most of what people want to call "true" innovation.
RISC-V is also an ISA (instruction set architecture) which is not an actual chip implementation. It's very similar to ARM in that it allows for companies to develop their own implementations of the chip, much like how Apple, Samsung, NVidia, and Qualcomm all make their own cores. The only difference is that RISC-V doesn't cost anything to license. You'll still need to pay chip designers to create an implementation if you don't have an open implementation that's free to use and there's no guarantee that any free implementation fits the use case that you'd want to target. Even if it does, there's still no guarantee that someone's proprietary implementation doesn't have such significantly better performance that it's better just to pay the additional cost anyway.
It really depends on how the software is being used as part of a larger testing process and whether the errors tend to be type I or type II. If the software is only used to determine whether an animal testing stage should be used at all (i.e., why bother killing a bunch of animals needlessly if you're really sure what you have is already going to be toxic) and software is unlikely to classify something as toxic that is truly non-toxic, I don't think there's an issue at all. Instead you get better results as you can determine which chemicals should have priority for testing and can develop safe, useful chemicals more rapidly.
If on the other hand this software has become the only part of your testing process and it has the opposite problem (it's more likely to misidentify truly toxic chemicals as non-toxic) then we've got a problem. The financial liability for such mistakes is going to fall on the company that sold it, much like it does (at least in theory) currently. There are plenty of examples of drugs or other chemicals that went through proper testing procedures and were certified as safe, but were not. Sometimes it's a result of bad testing processes being followed, other times it's just a statistical fluke where we were 99% confident something was good, but were really just hitting that 1% case.
Once people get an idea stuck in their mind, they tend to look for evidence to reinforce it rather than the other way around. This is something that everyone is guilty of, even really smart people. What they believe is rather inconsequential, but trying to get them to change their mind by arguing with them is almost impossible. It doesn't matter how much expertise you have or how many other sources, they'll all be ignored.
From personal experience the only effective method I've ever discovered to get people to stop believing something idiotic is to bet money against them. Granted this only works if it's something that's easily testable so that it can be demonstrated to them (remember, an expert opinion or published journal paper is useless), but it seems that whatever part of the brain deals with thinking about money sends interrupt requests at a might higher priority level. Continued disbelief on their part is met with offers for additional bets. No one has ever bet more than twice.
If there are a lot of content regulations, that mean what little content that does slip through that fits a particular genre is going to be wildly popular since it may be the only one in that category. I've not played PUBG, but I know a lot of people who play games of that genre or style and it was my understanding that a newer game Fortnite was more popular now, but if that and others (all the similar games that came before and influenced PUBG) aren't available in China, then of course it will be a massive hit.
The same phenomenon also explains the popularity of video games. If they're one of the best mediums for finding creative expression because they aren't being clamped down on, then that's going to draw a lot of people, who might otherwise stick to books or films, to seek them out. If you completely managed to suck the creative soul out of other media forms, I wouldn't be surprised to find them abandoned altogether.
ARM is a bit old to be considered part of "these days" though you could argue that they're still making new designs and it's those to which you were referring. However, almost none of the big players use the standard design any longer and instead license the ISA and build their own custom cores. Even some of the Chinese phone companies are starting to get in on building their own SoCs and it probably won't be long before they start developing their own cores for those designs as well.
Considering how much better the custom cores turn out than the stock designs, I'm not sure ARM is doing anything too great at the moment. RISC-V could even supplant them in terms of ISA development, but I'm not putting as much stock into that as some others are.
The British public seems quite willing to put perceived safety above freedom, which is unfortunate because politicians are good at scaring people.
The British public is hardly unique in that regard. Countries outside of the U.S. are hardly immune to terrible leaders (and no good mainstream choice for replacing them) but at least the founders put enough safeguards in place to prevent those leaders and an idiotic electorate from doing the kind of harm that's being done to Britain at the moment.
If management can't tell who's actually contributing work and who's screwing around and wasting everyone else's time, then it's management that needs to go. You can't expect to get good results if you don't have a useful way of measuring good results. Once most teams get large enough there's probably one person that's contributing several times the value of everyone else in the group. If management can't tell who that person is, they should be the one's being let go.
TFS links to a study (well, an article about a study at least) that suggests that researchers did show that those particular chemicals were harmful to coral reefs. Maybe you could argue that the amounts needed to be harmful exceed what a reef would ever be exposed to, but it seems it does cause problems.
Hawaii has several coral-lined bays where they don't permit boats. Their exposure to oil, fuel, etc. would be quite minimal relative to other reefs. However, they do see a large number of tourists, many of whom will be wearing sunscreen.
And before someone goes off about people getting skin cancer, there are several types of sunscreen that don't use either chemical and are available in high-SPF varieties. I'm not sure how easy it will be to enforce any of this. The last time I was in Hawaii there was plenty of litter on some of their beaches. If people can't even be expected to pick up after themselves, they won't be bothered to make sure they're not using the wrong kind of sunscreen.
Perhaps I didn't clarify what I meant. I meant to say that I was skeptical of the U.S. government doing this for reasons that are purely above board and that I do suspect there are ulterior motives in play.
Also, why would you believe Trump when he says that unless you mostly take him at face value? I wouldn't put much stock in anything he says as what he says seems to change every 10 minutes. I don't treat things which he says that confirm to my beliefs any different than anything else he says anymore.
There's a part of me that's always skeptical of things like this. For all we know, this was done as part of a favor for someone in the Chinese government in exchange for something else in return, like support for our position against North Korea.
I'd honestly be happy if new colors were about the extent of things and that they'd spent an entire year polishing features that already exist. As much as everyone harps on about innovation, new features for the sake of new features aren't useful, especially when half-baked in order to meet a yearly release schedule. Give me a solid implementation of a good idea over a weak attempt at a new one any day. New colors should be plenty to satisfy the idiots.
It probably doesn't even learn the objectives. Most of these AI bots that are created to play games, etc. have no conception of what they're doing. You need an actual human that understands that problem to be solved that establishes what the score is or how the bots are evaluated for fitness. Otherwise there's no selection mechanism and a bot that just stands there is every bit as good as one that plays perfectly.
But as you point out, these programs probably aren't that good at strategy, at least not on the level of human players. They're merely really, really good at identifying and shooting opponents. Compare this against human matches in Quake championships where both players not only needed to have good aim, but also had to memorize spawn timers and routes through the map and would blindly fire rockets around corners simply because that's where the opponent might be after seeing them five seconds ago as well as knowing not to run down some corridor because you know your opponent is thinking the same thing.
If you really wanted to improve the AI in terms of high-level decision making, it would be necessary to limit how quickly it can shoot. I would imagine that it would be trivial to measure how fast the best human players can acquire and shoot at a target and build in some limitations to the AI program. At that point it's going to need to find other avenues of evolution in order to beat human players.
If that were true they would have bended much sooner and let U.S. navel vessels carrying nuclear arms (or even just those powered by nuclear energy) dock, which they don't do. I suspect that if push really came to shove, or if there were a large scale global conflict, they would, but otherwise they haven't allowed it since the 80's.
It wouldn't surprise me if New Zealand has their own version of the MAFIAA who have no love for Mr. Dotcom either. Either that or there's no political capital that can be gained from refusing the U.S. on this matter. I suspect that there are more outraged greenies than there are those who are impassioned by extradition treaties. If no one in the electorate will vote you out for some particular political position, then there's no cost in holding it or perhaps something to be gained from the very few on the other side who are in favor of it.
Due to a combination of ads, trackers, auto-loading, self-playing video, and massive gobs of Javascript, the modern web page has become a bloated monstrosity that requires exceptionally powerful hardware to render. Also, as computers become more ubiquitous, the number of programming jobs increases without changes to the overall number of skilled programers. As such, we need more powerful CPUs to deal with all the poorly optimized code for those ads, trackers, etc.
Slashdot Mirror
They made them quieter because if they were squeaky then Apple would have to give them the grease.
Just out of curiosity, how do you know if a person is a TSA screener in either of those situations? Presumably the only way to know for sure is if they're a friend of yours. My only question is if we should also shun the friends of TSA agents in a manner similar to that which you've prescribed above.
Was there continuing demand, or just left over inventory? I'm sure there's still a little bit of demand for a Plymouth Barracuda, but I doubt that Chrysler (or whoever owns that brand now) is going to devote a production line to making any more.
But if you showed someone from the 90's what a 3D scan of naked body of one of today's Americans looked like, they'd say you'd probably need harder drugs than weed just to be able to do that job all day.
Then what is their function?
Security theater.
Occasionally doing some good in the world doesn't justify all of the terrible things some one has done as well. I don't suspect you'd let off someone who mugged a bunch of people at knife point just because they used some of the ill gotten gains to feed some of the area homeless. The only tragedy in all of this is that a person apparently needs a wealthy person to bankroll their court case in order to have a chance of getting justice.
Gawker was a shitty place for shitty people. The muck was to make click bait money and anything approaching actual journalism was likely an accident. It's almost certain they only went after Thiel due to his political leanings, not because they care about shady business. The number of their former staffers that showed up on the Shitty Media Men list says a lot about them. You might have decided to give them a pass because they appeared to espouse your beliefs, but they were horrible people who realized that they could get away with being horrible people as long as they told people like you what you wanted to hear.
Comparing Gawker to Sinclair says a lot more about you than it does Gawker. Gain some perspective and I think you'll see that nothing was lost.
It used to be that if you wanted video porn you had to pay for that too, but eventually it became plentiful and cheap. My understanding is that the people who put it online charge for live shows or have crowd-funding setups, so it's not as though all of them are doing this for free. If that's your model, it makes sense to just give away the old stuff since anyone who stumbles on it might be swayed to become a paying customer. The individual odds are low, but if you can get 250,000 eyeballs, a .1% conversion rate is good enough if each of those people will spend $10 a month.
Even if VR porn is expensive now, market forces and technological advances will drive down the cost over time. Unless you're creating customized real-time experiences, you're creating a digital good that might be expensive to make, but is cheap to duplicate exact copies of after it has been made. Even the program that can create real-time experiences only needs to be written once, as difficult as it may be to actually do so.
I don't think it will be easy, but New Zealand has been making a lot of inroads into removing invasive species, rats being on of the primary examples. Granted, a lot of this has been through going after low-hanging fruit like small isolated islands first, but it is being done successfully. I suspect that as we advance our knowledge, we'll get better at doing it too. I know that one of the approaches that has been used with mosquitoes is to release some sterile or genetically modified males that result in non-viable offspring or none at all. You could probably do something similar with rats to greatly reduce the populations to the point where other interventions make a larger dent in the problem.
I wonder if it has to do with them constantly pushing for both thinner and lighter. The MagSafe connector wasn't massive, but they killed off the headphone jack in their phones so that they could go thinner and the MagSafe connector may have been the largest remaining constraint preventing that. Also, at some point they get the weight down far enough where the MagSafe connector's attraction isn't broken by gentle tugs/pulls and you can actually drag the notebook off a table with the cord because the magnetic attraction is too strong. If you make the magnetic attraction less strong, eventually you wind up defeating the point of it to begin with and it comes loose too easily.
I've never personally owned a Mac notebook (I have friends/relatives that have had various models over the years) so I don't know how true that is in reality, but I can't think of anything else (outside of some patent situation) that makes any sense. I suppose you could argue cost or some hippy crap like them not being able to get the components from a conflict free source or something like that that.
But if they weren't effective, companies (legitimate or not) wouldn't seek to court them. Influencers are nothing new, we just used to call them movie stars or rock stars without really thinking about them in terms of influence. The only thing that's really different with this new set on Twitter is that they don't necessarily have an celebrity (or they're famous merely for being famous) or skills that might even mislead people into trusting them in areas outside of that skill set.
At least with Twitter your average no talent schlub has as much chance of being an influencer as one of the Hollywood crowd. The internet is just a force for democratization, but that doesn't necessarily mean that those things which are being democratized are useful or good.
I wouldn't say that. Companies like NVidia are doing a lot of work in designing cores that are made for deep learning and other types of specialty workflows where a general purpose CPU isn't as efficient or the amount of processing power needed is massive. Others like AMD have developed new interconnect technologies (they call it Infinity Fabric) that can be used to connect multiple small dies together on an interposer. This has massive ramifications as it means you can create massive dies in a much more cost-effective manner. We've also seen both Intel and AMD making moves towards APUs and with HBM (high bandwidth memory) it's eventually going to hit a point where x86 processors can become a SoC to that point that PCs become much more simplified. Maybe this doesn't have the wow-factor of some flashy new invention, but steady progress is often far more important than most of what people want to call "true" innovation.
RISC-V is also an ISA (instruction set architecture) which is not an actual chip implementation. It's very similar to ARM in that it allows for companies to develop their own implementations of the chip, much like how Apple, Samsung, NVidia, and Qualcomm all make their own cores. The only difference is that RISC-V doesn't cost anything to license. You'll still need to pay chip designers to create an implementation if you don't have an open implementation that's free to use and there's no guarantee that any free implementation fits the use case that you'd want to target. Even if it does, there's still no guarantee that someone's proprietary implementation doesn't have such significantly better performance that it's better just to pay the additional cost anyway.
It really depends on how the software is being used as part of a larger testing process and whether the errors tend to be type I or type II. If the software is only used to determine whether an animal testing stage should be used at all (i.e., why bother killing a bunch of animals needlessly if you're really sure what you have is already going to be toxic) and software is unlikely to classify something as toxic that is truly non-toxic, I don't think there's an issue at all. Instead you get better results as you can determine which chemicals should have priority for testing and can develop safe, useful chemicals more rapidly.
If on the other hand this software has become the only part of your testing process and it has the opposite problem (it's more likely to misidentify truly toxic chemicals as non-toxic) then we've got a problem. The financial liability for such mistakes is going to fall on the company that sold it, much like it does (at least in theory) currently. There are plenty of examples of drugs or other chemicals that went through proper testing procedures and were certified as safe, but were not. Sometimes it's a result of bad testing processes being followed, other times it's just a statistical fluke where we were 99% confident something was good, but were really just hitting that 1% case.
Once people get an idea stuck in their mind, they tend to look for evidence to reinforce it rather than the other way around. This is something that everyone is guilty of, even really smart people. What they believe is rather inconsequential, but trying to get them to change their mind by arguing with them is almost impossible. It doesn't matter how much expertise you have or how many other sources, they'll all be ignored.
From personal experience the only effective method I've ever discovered to get people to stop believing something idiotic is to bet money against them. Granted this only works if it's something that's easily testable so that it can be demonstrated to them (remember, an expert opinion or published journal paper is useless), but it seems that whatever part of the brain deals with thinking about money sends interrupt requests at a might higher priority level. Continued disbelief on their part is met with offers for additional bets. No one has ever bet more than twice.
If there are a lot of content regulations, that mean what little content that does slip through that fits a particular genre is going to be wildly popular since it may be the only one in that category. I've not played PUBG, but I know a lot of people who play games of that genre or style and it was my understanding that a newer game Fortnite was more popular now, but if that and others (all the similar games that came before and influenced PUBG) aren't available in China, then of course it will be a massive hit.
The same phenomenon also explains the popularity of video games. If they're one of the best mediums for finding creative expression because they aren't being clamped down on, then that's going to draw a lot of people, who might otherwise stick to books or films, to seek them out. If you completely managed to suck the creative soul out of other media forms, I wouldn't be surprised to find them abandoned altogether.
ARM... for now.
ARM is a bit old to be considered part of "these days" though you could argue that they're still making new designs and it's those to which you were referring. However, almost none of the big players use the standard design any longer and instead license the ISA and build their own custom cores. Even some of the Chinese phone companies are starting to get in on building their own SoCs and it probably won't be long before they start developing their own cores for those designs as well.
Considering how much better the custom cores turn out than the stock designs, I'm not sure ARM is doing anything too great at the moment. RISC-V could even supplant them in terms of ISA development, but I'm not putting as much stock into that as some others are.
The British public seems quite willing to put perceived safety above freedom, which is unfortunate because politicians are good at scaring people.
The British public is hardly unique in that regard. Countries outside of the U.S. are hardly immune to terrible leaders (and no good mainstream choice for replacing them) but at least the founders put enough safeguards in place to prevent those leaders and an idiotic electorate from doing the kind of harm that's being done to Britain at the moment.
If management can't tell who's actually contributing work and who's screwing around and wasting everyone else's time, then it's management that needs to go. You can't expect to get good results if you don't have a useful way of measuring good results. Once most teams get large enough there's probably one person that's contributing several times the value of everyone else in the group. If management can't tell who that person is, they should be the one's being let go.
It makes that sweet, sweet noise. It's the Stradivarius of keyboards.
TFS links to a study (well, an article about a study at least) that suggests that researchers did show that those particular chemicals were harmful to coral reefs. Maybe you could argue that the amounts needed to be harmful exceed what a reef would ever be exposed to, but it seems it does cause problems.
Hawaii has several coral-lined bays where they don't permit boats. Their exposure to oil, fuel, etc. would be quite minimal relative to other reefs. However, they do see a large number of tourists, many of whom will be wearing sunscreen.
And before someone goes off about people getting skin cancer, there are several types of sunscreen that don't use either chemical and are available in high-SPF varieties. I'm not sure how easy it will be to enforce any of this. The last time I was in Hawaii there was plenty of litter on some of their beaches. If people can't even be expected to pick up after themselves, they won't be bothered to make sure they're not using the wrong kind of sunscreen.
Perhaps I didn't clarify what I meant. I meant to say that I was skeptical of the U.S. government doing this for reasons that are purely above board and that I do suspect there are ulterior motives in play.
Also, why would you believe Trump when he says that unless you mostly take him at face value? I wouldn't put much stock in anything he says as what he says seems to change every 10 minutes. I don't treat things which he says that confirm to my beliefs any different than anything else he says anymore.
There's a part of me that's always skeptical of things like this. For all we know, this was done as part of a favor for someone in the Chinese government in exchange for something else in return, like support for our position against North Korea.
I'd honestly be happy if new colors were about the extent of things and that they'd spent an entire year polishing features that already exist. As much as everyone harps on about innovation, new features for the sake of new features aren't useful, especially when half-baked in order to meet a yearly release schedule. Give me a solid implementation of a good idea over a weak attempt at a new one any day. New colors should be plenty to satisfy the idiots.
It probably doesn't even learn the objectives. Most of these AI bots that are created to play games, etc. have no conception of what they're doing. You need an actual human that understands that problem to be solved that establishes what the score is or how the bots are evaluated for fitness. Otherwise there's no selection mechanism and a bot that just stands there is every bit as good as one that plays perfectly.
But as you point out, these programs probably aren't that good at strategy, at least not on the level of human players. They're merely really, really good at identifying and shooting opponents. Compare this against human matches in Quake championships where both players not only needed to have good aim, but also had to memorize spawn timers and routes through the map and would blindly fire rockets around corners simply because that's where the opponent might be after seeing them five seconds ago as well as knowing not to run down some corridor because you know your opponent is thinking the same thing.
If you really wanted to improve the AI in terms of high-level decision making, it would be necessary to limit how quickly it can shoot. I would imagine that it would be trivial to measure how fast the best human players can acquire and shoot at a target and build in some limitations to the AI program. At that point it's going to need to find other avenues of evolution in order to beat human players.
If that were true they would have bended much sooner and let U.S. navel vessels carrying nuclear arms (or even just those powered by nuclear energy) dock, which they don't do. I suspect that if push really came to shove, or if there were a large scale global conflict, they would, but otherwise they haven't allowed it since the 80's.
It wouldn't surprise me if New Zealand has their own version of the MAFIAA who have no love for Mr. Dotcom either. Either that or there's no political capital that can be gained from refusing the U.S. on this matter. I suspect that there are more outraged greenies than there are those who are impassioned by extradition treaties. If no one in the electorate will vote you out for some particular political position, then there's no cost in holding it or perhaps something to be gained from the very few on the other side who are in favor of it.
Due to a combination of ads, trackers, auto-loading, self-playing video, and massive gobs of Javascript, the modern web page has become a bloated monstrosity that requires exceptionally powerful hardware to render. Also, as computers become more ubiquitous, the number of programming jobs increases without changes to the overall number of skilled programers. As such, we need more powerful CPUs to deal with all the poorly optimized code for those ads, trackers, etc.
That sad part is, that's a fairly accurate description. The sadder part it that it's the best system that we've found in practice.