I don't think a chief diversity officer who was either personally responsible or at least culpable in those illegal actions would be in any hurry to divulge those activities, unless they're getting paid by Microsoft to do essentially the same and IBM is worried about MS stealing some of their pie.
I'm guessing it's just a worthless lawsuit as a show of force to keep other people who sign non-compete clauses in line.
I'm not really sure how a diversity policy helps anything unless you've got a bunch of racists in HR or upper management that are actively refusing to hire minorities and the company is missing out on talented hires because they're discriminating on some basis other than competence. Unless you believe those statistics about women or minorities only making some fractional amount as much as men and assuming they're less expensive to hire which results in this huge profit, I don't see where these huge profits supposedly come from. Perhaps you think consumers care about diversity and will go out of their way to award companies that have diversity policies, but I don't really see that happening either as consumers tend to go for what's cheaper. I suppose if you want to count off-shoring or using H1-B candidates as increasing diversity, then yes it works, but that's just a factor of cost.
Otherwise I'm not sure how someone's skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or any of the other characteristics that typically get lumped in with "diversity" allow a company to develop facial recognition algorithms that work better for darker skin colors. It sounds more like the testing or QA team didn't use a good sample of images when testing the product. Or they did and were aware of it but would rather get the product to market sooner.
Another huge annoyance is the kind of people who stake out ownership of an entire page and are completely unwilling to accept anyone else contributing to it. They'll gladly revert any change you make, even if it's only one that cleans up the wording or rephrases something in order to make it more clear.
I'm not really sure what makes them into such petty tyrants, but dealing with them is an exercise in frustration. It's as though they take their editing as some kid of sacred mission from god, and heaven forbid if you do try to correct a legitimate mistake, because no amount of facts or sources will convince them that they are wrong.
Why not just make them do community service instead? I don't think it's really in the interest of the taxpayers to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or Swedish Krona I suppose) to lock up non-violent individuals who are committing what would be best regarded as civil offenses.
I'm not in favor of it just as a matter of helping people as a result of job loss due to automation, but as a replacement for other forms of government welfare. Essentially, treat it as a replacement for social security, medicare, food stamps, etc. We're already spending that money and replacing it with a single system cuts out loads of bureaucracy and results in a system that's more flexible and adaptable to people's needs.
Ideally a UBI serves as a reasonable safety net for people and not a means for people to live without trying to contribute value to society in some way or at least not be a detriment to it. I think that it shouldn't be more than enough to subsist if they lose a job, whether as a result of automation or not. Increased automation makes a UBI more feasible because it reduces costs for labor or results in increased productivity.
Ideally, it would also reduce crime to some degree which would help it to pay for itself. Housing prisoners is expensive and if I have a choice between paying someone $6,000 a year to not cause problems and paying $30,000 or more to keep them in prison, I think the former choice is preferable in that it means people who need to serve as prison guards can do something more productive instead.
Obviously, I don't think we can just implement a form of UBI while leaving everything else in place. Other government systems would likely need to change as well, but I think that most people would agree that the current welfare system is a mess.
Be that as it may, it doesn't really help them as far as advertising and brand recognition goes. I don't see Microsoft running any Super Bowl ads about their ability to help find porn.
You're assuming that you can just take any particular person and turn them into a doctor, engineer, or other highly skilled profession. There are some people who lack the intelligence, aptitude, or desire to participate in any of those fields. Devoting resources towards getting blood out of a stone is wasting them when they could be better spent on those who are capable and willing.
I also think you're assuming that all degrees are capable of producing value which I don't believe is this case either and I don't believe that a degree is philosophy necessarily imbues skills in self study, self motivation, time management, or project management any more than any other degree. Subsidizing degrees in philosophy, art history, religious studies, etc. is not going to provide the taxpayer with a good return on their investment. Wanting those degrees to be useful doesn't make them so, and allowing the large number of individuals to who choose to major in them and end up in a cycle of perpetual debt due to lack of job prospects is pure folly on the part of society.
If you removed government subsidization of student loans, banks would figure this out in a hurry and would largely stop loaning money to people who try to major in those fields. much like they're not going to provide a home loan to a crack addict with a history of arson. This naturally drives people towards the fields of study where there is a possibility of doing something economically viable and prevents people who are always going to end up working as a cashier, builder, or some other job that requires no college education from running up six figure loan debts that they have no real hope of paying off. Instead they can entire the workforce sooner, begin earning sooner, start acquiring job skills sooner, and likely be able to afford a house and build up capital that they would not otherwise be able to do if they're taking out expensive student loans.
I'm not proposing training subsidies, just some form of UBI. Some recipients will use that money to educate themselves or will seek out training for work because they want the additional money that comes in the form of finding a job. Some will probably spend more time producing art, which doesn't have much economic value in and of itself, but does give them something to do and an opportunity to gain income through selling their works or services and keeps them out of trouble due to having a base level of income that's not attached to anything. A UBI is beneficial because you'll never find a government jobs program that's aimed at training people to be a drummer or to increase the number of wood carvers.
They could be if the government would stop subsidizing them. Banks shouldn't be required to lend people money and I suspect if student loans didn't have government backing the banks would be far more picky about who they loan money to. Of course, everyone needs to go to college these days, even little Timmy who had a 2.3 GPA in high school and plans to major in philosophy. That's just as good of a financial risk as little Suzy who was the class valedictorian and wants to go into biomedical engineering.
There's two problems with this. First, we don't necessarily know what jobs to train them for, either because they don't exist yet or we're not anticipating demand for them. There's also a side issue that any job you train someone for may also become unavailable before long as well. The second is that it assumes that all people are equally competent and capable of any job, which isn't true either. Eventually you reach a point with any person where they're incapable of doing anything economically productive due any number of factors including age, mental capability, health, etc.
It's probably cheaper to just give them some money to live off of contingent on them not running around committing crimes. People seem to think that a basic income like this would be completely detrimental, but I think it's preferable to alternatives. First, if people are being replaced by machines, it means overall labor capacity has either increased or remained the same at a lower cost so it isn't going to economically ruin the economy. Second, I believe that people left to their own devices will do a better job of finding supplemental or new employment better than any government planning board that thinks it can predict or direct the economy. The only other policy you'd need would be similar to China's one child policy so you don't have unproductive individuals spawning large numbers of children they're probably not well equip to care for either and I don't see a problem with just subsidizing the existence of people who aren't capable of finding new jobs. Yes, some people will choose not to work ever again, but if they want to go read books in the park all day, it's better than them turning to crime in order to try to get by.
I don't think it's a problem as just because a smart phone has become "good enough" does not mean that there aren't plenty of other things that aren't "good enough" and worth improving upon or that we have invented everything that we need or would like to have. But even if we somehow manage to get to that magically point in time where any improvements to existing products have hit a wall of diminishing returns and can't imagine anything else we need, I don't think it's the end of the road.
Just as we've seen with music and art, the next generation is not satisfied with their parents' music and there's no reason to think that "not your father's smartphone" won't be a thing either. You can even argue that much like with music that today's fare is nowhere near as good as what proceeded it in the 60's, 70's, or whatever other magical time period you want to use, that we'll see the same with phones. There may be no objective improvements and subjectively some will find the changes worse, but the new generation will want something of their own that defines them. Never mind the power of branding as social status which we already see driving a lot of purchasing decisions and there's plenty of room for continuing on into the future.
The wheels of our economy don't depend on things getting demonstrably better in order to keep turning. They merely require that people keep wanting to buy things and engaging in economic exchange with one and other to obtain them. That those things may change over time is largely inconsequential, or we'd already be reeling from the losses seen the the horsewhip and buggy industries over 100 years ago, the utter destruction of the typewriter industry, and the massive number of jobs lost when we get rid of all of those telephone switch operators.
If there's any major economic upheaval it will come from automated robots that are capable of laboring for humans and can be set to any task such that there's no need for a person who owns one to buy shoes since the robot can do all of the necessary labor from raising the food for the animals to be used for their leather all the way to molding the rubber soles and stitching the whole thing together for you and then keeping it in good repair. I think that's sufficiently far off into the future that it's not worth worrying about right now.
The story got a lot of traction and got repeated in the tech press and well known blogs, but after some tech journalists looked into it, it turned out to be bogus. However, it's one of those things that seems to have stuck around probably because it's both interesting as well as silly.
What can you get with Red that you can't get without it, other than a lack of ads though? YouTube is actually pretty good in that regard as you can skip adds after a few seconds and they typically only run their required ad prior to the start of the video. If there are dozens of ads, it's probably due to the person who made the video inserting them, which is on them, not YouTube.
Add in that a lot of popular video makers are moving away from YouTube's ads (either because of shit pay or because they've been demonetized for whatever reason) and just advertise something as part of the beginning of their video (as in "Today's video brought to you by Megacorp Inc." and maybe a specific product plug related to the video subject like a new motherboard in a tech video) instead of relying on ads built in to YouTube and Red becomes even more pointless since you get that regardless of whether you have Red or not.
Maybe they call it a music service because that's what people who have YouTube Red (or even just YouTube in general) are actually using it for. If you look at some of the play counts for popular songs on YouTube some are in the hundreds of millions. I think this has more to do with people just wanting to hear certain songs on demand rather than watching the actual videos though, and I suspect that's probably due to many streaming services not allowing that behavior in the free tiers which is what drove people to Google instead.
I think it just shows how much people just want to be able to pick arbitrary songs to listen to such that they're willing to waste bandwidth on a video that they don't even see because it's hidden away in a different tab. YouTube could probably significantly cut bandwidth costs if they could detect this and only send audio in those cases. YouTube gets used only because nothing else has all the music (and by this I mean a lot of nichestuff) and the ability to arbitrarily play it.
I don't really know why YouTube Red is necessary though since you get all of that without a subscription. Though to be fair I don't really get streaming services in general. Personally I just prefer to buy albums that I like and keep music on my phone. All of the big stores are DRM free and often times you can find good albums on sale for $5.
I think that they're completely wrong and that learning to program is so much easier today than at any point in history.
First of all, there are a wealth of online resources that anyone can access with a web browser than there are loads of them that are freely available. There are loads of websites, videos, etc. dedicated to learning programming languages. Some like Python or Java have such an abundance that it's almost difficult to be able to determine which to use. On top of that, there are plenty of websites like Stack Overflow that are dedicated to answering people's questions, so you can even get by with learning on your own outside of a classroom and still be able to get some feedback and mentoring from more experienced programmers.
Development environments are easy as hell to install. You can a one-click installer from Oracle that will install and configure the JDK and an IDE for you. Most languages don't even need an IDE at all and just require running a script you can bang together in any text editor. It can't get much easier than that. Similarly, most kids figure out how to use a GUI on their own through trial and error. Their parents certainly didn't teach them how to become proficient computer users. Cloud computing has made things like Scratch possible where children can learn programming concepts and share their programs with friends and others. I fail to see the merit in any of the points that they make.
If programming seems hard, it's because it has become so widespread that we're trying to teach it to everyone instead of as in previous generations where people mostly seemed to seek it out and dedicate their own time and efforts towards it. It looks like the past was more successful because we don't see the people who tried and failed in the past. The old generation that seems to understand it more intuitively or didn't struggle as hard are the survivors of far more niche group.
I think the act of marketing it as uncrackable just attracts the attention of the kind of people looking for a good challenge.
If I had to make and market my own DRM I'd brand it as "some weak shit that a five year old could probably break in under ten minutes and totally not worth anyone's actual time due to being so trivial and beneath your abilities." Who's going to try seeking out any glory from cracking that?
It's still hard to say if that's the case though. Conceivably Picasso could have chosen from several painted canvases to paint over instead of this particular one. Did he already have his idea in mind when selecting a canvas to paint over such that he chose one that would lend itself most naturally to that endeavor? Or did he choose this canvas at random, allowing what was already there to shape his own creation through some happenstance connection between rolling hills and a woman's hunched back? Perhaps it was some experiment where he selected a random canvas and rotated it to purposefully induce some creative thought, much like one might stare at clouds to imagine what else they might be.
I think there are too many possibilities to definitely try and treat any as definitive truth or even more than possibility.
I don't necessarily buy that argument. There are plenty of games that I could just go out and pirate, but websites like GOG (make it easy for me to buy those games instead. It's mostly a lot of older games that have run their course, but newer titles like those in the Witcher series or some of Obsidian's newer releases have been made available there on release without any DRM and those companies are managing to be financially successful.
At some point, you probably start spending more on DRM than you gain by through sales that are lost to piracy. I suspect that a lot of piracy of software is done because it's the most convenient way to consume or in some cases the only way to consume. If you're not providing a legal way for digital distribution to occur in some countries, it's little surprise that willing consumers will revert to pirate copies. The other side comes down to economics. You can't sell a $60 game or a $20 movie into a market where those values constitute a monthly wage. Piracy in those territories does not represent a lost sale because it could never have been on to begin with. If you want to sell into those markets, you need to drop prices to a few dollars and it's very likely that you'll get some paying customers.
If you spend $200,000 on developing, implementing, and supporting (you know, when it invariably fucks over a paying customer and they're calling tech support) DRM, but the inclusion only generates an extra $50,000 in revenue then it's a waste. Everyone wants to believe that they're potentially losing millions, but it's clearly not that much. If you use Hollywood's figures for piracy the amount comes out to something larger than the GDP of the entire planet, which should tell you how baseless the calculations are.
I wonder how much human effort is devoted to both construction and circumvention of DRM schemes. We've seen time and time again that it doesn't work and is ultimately defeated rendering the entire exercise ultimately futile, and yet so few seemingly try to do otherwise. If all of that effort were put to some other use, I'm curious about what could be accomplished. The individuals who work on this stuff on either side must be some incredibly intelligent people to do what they do, so I suspect their talents are utterly wasted on something as pointless as this.
I don't really see the problem with it when it comes to open source communities. If you don't like a community, you can always fork the project and start your own offshoot. If all of the social justice sycophants want to congregate into one group that drives everyone else off, that's their own prerogative. If it gives them all their own little area to congregate in and leaves everyone else outside of the group who wants to get work done alone, all the better. It's almost like a self-organizing B Ark.
I think you make the mistake of thinking that the people who read those tweets or follow this accounts were anywhere close to neutral to start with. I do not think you could find many people who had their minds changed.
Also, why do you assume posts made here are genuine and not also troll accounts, whether Russian or just asshats from wherever? If they would use Twitter, why not other popular sites as well?
I think the solution is automated vehicles. Humans engage in all kinds of stupid behavior behind the wheel of a vehicle whether it's looking at their phones or being immensely intoxicated.
The other alternative is to do nothing and hope that millions of years of natural selection and evolution will result in human populations that don't look at phones while driving.
I haven't been paying much attention to this whole story since it seems like general boondoggle and that nothing substantial will come out of this, but doesn't the above quote make it harder for the people who want to accuse Trump of collusion? The " unwitting individuals" part makes it seem like Trump is just stupid (well we already knew this) instead of guilty of collusion.
It's not really that simple, and completely ignores the recent Obama administration that saw some of the largest deficits in U.S. history. Neither party is terribly fiscally responsible when it comes down to it and arguing about it is pointless since there are countless examples of both Democrats and Republicans overspending across the years.
Maybe it's just a way to get people interested in an ethics class. Generally they tend to be the type of class that most of the students don't take very seriously, because who the hell really has the perspective to at 20 years old. It's a class that everyone will agree should be in the curriculum, but is probably utterly useless in whether it actually does anything. It's pretty easy to get everyone in class to nod their heads about what is or isn't ethical, but turn them loose in the real world and give them mortgage payments and everyone's morality becomes a bit more pliable. It's not very often that people are overtly asked to do something obviously evil or illegal and so we end up with plenty of unethical events that aren't a result of any one clear cut directive, but a matter of dozens or hundreds of small choices that led down that particular path.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't think a chief diversity officer who was either personally responsible or at least culpable in those illegal actions would be in any hurry to divulge those activities, unless they're getting paid by Microsoft to do essentially the same and IBM is worried about MS stealing some of their pie.
I'm guessing it's just a worthless lawsuit as a show of force to keep other people who sign non-compete clauses in line.
I'm not really sure how a diversity policy helps anything unless you've got a bunch of racists in HR or upper management that are actively refusing to hire minorities and the company is missing out on talented hires because they're discriminating on some basis other than competence. Unless you believe those statistics about women or minorities only making some fractional amount as much as men and assuming they're less expensive to hire which results in this huge profit, I don't see where these huge profits supposedly come from. Perhaps you think consumers care about diversity and will go out of their way to award companies that have diversity policies, but I don't really see that happening either as consumers tend to go for what's cheaper. I suppose if you want to count off-shoring or using H1-B candidates as increasing diversity, then yes it works, but that's just a factor of cost.
Otherwise I'm not sure how someone's skin color, gender, sexual orientation, or any of the other characteristics that typically get lumped in with "diversity" allow a company to develop facial recognition algorithms that work better for darker skin colors. It sounds more like the testing or QA team didn't use a good sample of images when testing the product. Or they did and were aware of it but would rather get the product to market sooner.
Another huge annoyance is the kind of people who stake out ownership of an entire page and are completely unwilling to accept anyone else contributing to it. They'll gladly revert any change you make, even if it's only one that cleans up the wording or rephrases something in order to make it more clear.
I'm not really sure what makes them into such petty tyrants, but dealing with them is an exercise in frustration. It's as though they take their editing as some kid of sacred mission from god, and heaven forbid if you do try to correct a legitimate mistake, because no amount of facts or sources will convince them that they are wrong.
Why not just make them do community service instead? I don't think it's really in the interest of the taxpayers to spend tens of thousands of dollars (or Swedish Krona I suppose) to lock up non-violent individuals who are committing what would be best regarded as civil offenses.
I'm not in favor of it just as a matter of helping people as a result of job loss due to automation, but as a replacement for other forms of government welfare. Essentially, treat it as a replacement for social security, medicare, food stamps, etc. We're already spending that money and replacing it with a single system cuts out loads of bureaucracy and results in a system that's more flexible and adaptable to people's needs.
Ideally a UBI serves as a reasonable safety net for people and not a means for people to live without trying to contribute value to society in some way or at least not be a detriment to it. I think that it shouldn't be more than enough to subsist if they lose a job, whether as a result of automation or not. Increased automation makes a UBI more feasible because it reduces costs for labor or results in increased productivity.
Ideally, it would also reduce crime to some degree which would help it to pay for itself. Housing prisoners is expensive and if I have a choice between paying someone $6,000 a year to not cause problems and paying $30,000 or more to keep them in prison, I think the former choice is preferable in that it means people who need to serve as prison guards can do something more productive instead.
Obviously, I don't think we can just implement a form of UBI while leaving everything else in place. Other government systems would likely need to change as well, but I think that most people would agree that the current welfare system is a mess.
Be that as it may, it doesn't really help them as far as advertising and brand recognition goes. I don't see Microsoft running any Super Bowl ads about their ability to help find porn.
You're assuming that you can just take any particular person and turn them into a doctor, engineer, or other highly skilled profession. There are some people who lack the intelligence, aptitude, or desire to participate in any of those fields. Devoting resources towards getting blood out of a stone is wasting them when they could be better spent on those who are capable and willing.
I also think you're assuming that all degrees are capable of producing value which I don't believe is this case either and I don't believe that a degree is philosophy necessarily imbues skills in self study, self motivation, time management, or project management any more than any other degree. Subsidizing degrees in philosophy, art history, religious studies, etc. is not going to provide the taxpayer with a good return on their investment. Wanting those degrees to be useful doesn't make them so, and allowing the large number of individuals to who choose to major in them and end up in a cycle of perpetual debt due to lack of job prospects is pure folly on the part of society.
If you removed government subsidization of student loans, banks would figure this out in a hurry and would largely stop loaning money to people who try to major in those fields. much like they're not going to provide a home loan to a crack addict with a history of arson. This naturally drives people towards the fields of study where there is a possibility of doing something economically viable and prevents people who are always going to end up working as a cashier, builder, or some other job that requires no college education from running up six figure loan debts that they have no real hope of paying off. Instead they can entire the workforce sooner, begin earning sooner, start acquiring job skills sooner, and likely be able to afford a house and build up capital that they would not otherwise be able to do if they're taking out expensive student loans.
I'm not proposing training subsidies, just some form of UBI. Some recipients will use that money to educate themselves or will seek out training for work because they want the additional money that comes in the form of finding a job. Some will probably spend more time producing art, which doesn't have much economic value in and of itself, but does give them something to do and an opportunity to gain income through selling their works or services and keeps them out of trouble due to having a base level of income that's not attached to anything. A UBI is beneficial because you'll never find a government jobs program that's aimed at training people to be a drummer or to increase the number of wood carvers.
They could be if the government would stop subsidizing them. Banks shouldn't be required to lend people money and I suspect if student loans didn't have government backing the banks would be far more picky about who they loan money to. Of course, everyone needs to go to college these days, even little Timmy who had a 2.3 GPA in high school and plans to major in philosophy. That's just as good of a financial risk as little Suzy who was the class valedictorian and wants to go into biomedical engineering.
There's two problems with this. First, we don't necessarily know what jobs to train them for, either because they don't exist yet or we're not anticipating demand for them. There's also a side issue that any job you train someone for may also become unavailable before long as well. The second is that it assumes that all people are equally competent and capable of any job, which isn't true either. Eventually you reach a point with any person where they're incapable of doing anything economically productive due any number of factors including age, mental capability, health, etc.
It's probably cheaper to just give them some money to live off of contingent on them not running around committing crimes. People seem to think that a basic income like this would be completely detrimental, but I think it's preferable to alternatives. First, if people are being replaced by machines, it means overall labor capacity has either increased or remained the same at a lower cost so it isn't going to economically ruin the economy. Second, I believe that people left to their own devices will do a better job of finding supplemental or new employment better than any government planning board that thinks it can predict or direct the economy. The only other policy you'd need would be similar to China's one child policy so you don't have unproductive individuals spawning large numbers of children they're probably not well equip to care for either and I don't see a problem with just subsidizing the existence of people who aren't capable of finding new jobs. Yes, some people will choose not to work ever again, but if they want to go read books in the park all day, it's better than them turning to crime in order to try to get by.
I don't think it's a problem as just because a smart phone has become "good enough" does not mean that there aren't plenty of other things that aren't "good enough" and worth improving upon or that we have invented everything that we need or would like to have. But even if we somehow manage to get to that magically point in time where any improvements to existing products have hit a wall of diminishing returns and can't imagine anything else we need, I don't think it's the end of the road.
Just as we've seen with music and art, the next generation is not satisfied with their parents' music and there's no reason to think that "not your father's smartphone" won't be a thing either. You can even argue that much like with music that today's fare is nowhere near as good as what proceeded it in the 60's, 70's, or whatever other magical time period you want to use, that we'll see the same with phones. There may be no objective improvements and subjectively some will find the changes worse, but the new generation will want something of their own that defines them. Never mind the power of branding as social status which we already see driving a lot of purchasing decisions and there's plenty of room for continuing on into the future.
The wheels of our economy don't depend on things getting demonstrably better in order to keep turning. They merely require that people keep wanting to buy things and engaging in economic exchange with one and other to obtain them. That those things may change over time is largely inconsequential, or we'd already be reeling from the losses seen the the horsewhip and buggy industries over 100 years ago, the utter destruction of the typewriter industry, and the massive number of jobs lost when we get rid of all of those telephone switch operators.
If there's any major economic upheaval it will come from automated robots that are capable of laboring for humans and can be set to any task such that there's no need for a person who owns one to buy shoes since the robot can do all of the necessary labor from raising the food for the animals to be used for their leather all the way to molding the rubber soles and stitching the whole thing together for you and then keeping it in good repair. I think that's sufficiently far off into the future that it's not worth worrying about right now.
Maybe he was trying to go for a Funny mod based on a story that ran sometime back about Thiel being a customer of a company that does transfusions for people using blood from young people based on some supposed health benefits of doing so that were observed when doing this in mice.
The story got a lot of traction and got repeated in the tech press and well known blogs, but after some tech journalists looked into it, it turned out to be bogus. However, it's one of those things that seems to have stuck around probably because it's both interesting as well as silly.
What can you get with Red that you can't get without it, other than a lack of ads though? YouTube is actually pretty good in that regard as you can skip adds after a few seconds and they typically only run their required ad prior to the start of the video. If there are dozens of ads, it's probably due to the person who made the video inserting them, which is on them, not YouTube.
Add in that a lot of popular video makers are moving away from YouTube's ads (either because of shit pay or because they've been demonetized for whatever reason) and just advertise something as part of the beginning of their video (as in "Today's video brought to you by Megacorp Inc." and maybe a specific product plug related to the video subject like a new motherboard in a tech video) instead of relying on ads built in to YouTube and Red becomes even more pointless since you get that regardless of whether you have Red or not.
Maybe they call it a music service because that's what people who have YouTube Red (or even just YouTube in general) are actually using it for. If you look at some of the play counts for popular songs on YouTube some are in the hundreds of millions. I think this has more to do with people just wanting to hear certain songs on demand rather than watching the actual videos though, and I suspect that's probably due to many streaming services not allowing that behavior in the free tiers which is what drove people to Google instead.
I think it just shows how much people just want to be able to pick arbitrary songs to listen to such that they're willing to waste bandwidth on a video that they don't even see because it's hidden away in a different tab. YouTube could probably significantly cut bandwidth costs if they could detect this and only send audio in those cases. YouTube gets used only because nothing else has all the music (and by this I mean a lot of niche stuff) and the ability to arbitrarily play it.
I don't really know why YouTube Red is necessary though since you get all of that without a subscription. Though to be fair I don't really get streaming services in general. Personally I just prefer to buy albums that I like and keep music on my phone. All of the big stores are DRM free and often times you can find good albums on sale for $5.
I think that they're completely wrong and that learning to program is so much easier today than at any point in history.
First of all, there are a wealth of online resources that anyone can access with a web browser than there are loads of them that are freely available. There are loads of websites, videos, etc. dedicated to learning programming languages. Some like Python or Java have such an abundance that it's almost difficult to be able to determine which to use. On top of that, there are plenty of websites like Stack Overflow that are dedicated to answering people's questions, so you can even get by with learning on your own outside of a classroom and still be able to get some feedback and mentoring from more experienced programmers.
Development environments are easy as hell to install. You can a one-click installer from Oracle that will install and configure the JDK and an IDE for you. Most languages don't even need an IDE at all and just require running a script you can bang together in any text editor. It can't get much easier than that. Similarly, most kids figure out how to use a GUI on their own through trial and error. Their parents certainly didn't teach them how to become proficient computer users. Cloud computing has made things like Scratch possible where children can learn programming concepts and share their programs with friends and others. I fail to see the merit in any of the points that they make.
If programming seems hard, it's because it has become so widespread that we're trying to teach it to everyone instead of as in previous generations where people mostly seemed to seek it out and dedicate their own time and efforts towards it. It looks like the past was more successful because we don't see the people who tried and failed in the past. The old generation that seems to understand it more intuitively or didn't struggle as hard are the survivors of far more niche group.
I think the act of marketing it as uncrackable just attracts the attention of the kind of people looking for a good challenge.
If I had to make and market my own DRM I'd brand it as "some weak shit that a five year old could probably break in under ten minutes and totally not worth anyone's actual time due to being so trivial and beneath your abilities." Who's going to try seeking out any glory from cracking that?
It's still hard to say if that's the case though. Conceivably Picasso could have chosen from several painted canvases to paint over instead of this particular one. Did he already have his idea in mind when selecting a canvas to paint over such that he chose one that would lend itself most naturally to that endeavor? Or did he choose this canvas at random, allowing what was already there to shape his own creation through some happenstance connection between rolling hills and a woman's hunched back? Perhaps it was some experiment where he selected a random canvas and rotated it to purposefully induce some creative thought, much like one might stare at clouds to imagine what else they might be.
I think there are too many possibilities to definitely try and treat any as definitive truth or even more than possibility.
I don't necessarily buy that argument. There are plenty of games that I could just go out and pirate, but websites like GOG (make it easy for me to buy those games instead. It's mostly a lot of older games that have run their course, but newer titles like those in the Witcher series or some of Obsidian's newer releases have been made available there on release without any DRM and those companies are managing to be financially successful.
At some point, you probably start spending more on DRM than you gain by through sales that are lost to piracy. I suspect that a lot of piracy of software is done because it's the most convenient way to consume or in some cases the only way to consume. If you're not providing a legal way for digital distribution to occur in some countries, it's little surprise that willing consumers will revert to pirate copies. The other side comes down to economics. You can't sell a $60 game or a $20 movie into a market where those values constitute a monthly wage. Piracy in those territories does not represent a lost sale because it could never have been on to begin with. If you want to sell into those markets, you need to drop prices to a few dollars and it's very likely that you'll get some paying customers.
If you spend $200,000 on developing, implementing, and supporting (you know, when it invariably fucks over a paying customer and they're calling tech support) DRM, but the inclusion only generates an extra $50,000 in revenue then it's a waste. Everyone wants to believe that they're potentially losing millions, but it's clearly not that much. If you use Hollywood's figures for piracy the amount comes out to something larger than the GDP of the entire planet, which should tell you how baseless the calculations are.
I wonder how much human effort is devoted to both construction and circumvention of DRM schemes. We've seen time and time again that it doesn't work and is ultimately defeated rendering the entire exercise ultimately futile, and yet so few seemingly try to do otherwise. If all of that effort were put to some other use, I'm curious about what could be accomplished. The individuals who work on this stuff on either side must be some incredibly intelligent people to do what they do, so I suspect their talents are utterly wasted on something as pointless as this.
I don't really see the problem with it when it comes to open source communities. If you don't like a community, you can always fork the project and start your own offshoot. If all of the social justice sycophants want to congregate into one group that drives everyone else off, that's their own prerogative. If it gives them all their own little area to congregate in and leaves everyone else outside of the group who wants to get work done alone, all the better. It's almost like a self-organizing B Ark.
I think you make the mistake of thinking that the people who read those tweets or follow this accounts were anywhere close to neutral to start with. I do not think you could find many people who had their minds changed.
Also, why do you assume posts made here are genuine and not also troll accounts, whether Russian or just asshats from wherever? If they would use Twitter, why not other popular sites as well?
I think the solution is automated vehicles. Humans engage in all kinds of stupid behavior behind the wheel of a vehicle whether it's looking at their phones or being immensely intoxicated.
The other alternative is to do nothing and hope that millions of years of natural selection and evolution will result in human populations that don't look at phones while driving.
I haven't been paying much attention to this whole story since it seems like general boondoggle and that nothing substantial will come out of this, but doesn't the above quote make it harder for the people who want to accuse Trump of collusion? The " unwitting individuals" part makes it seem like Trump is just stupid (well we already knew this) instead of guilty of collusion.
It's not really that simple, and completely ignores the recent Obama administration that saw some of the largest deficits in U.S. history. Neither party is terribly fiscally responsible when it comes down to it and arguing about it is pointless since there are countless examples of both Democrats and Republicans overspending across the years.
Maybe it's just a way to get people interested in an ethics class. Generally they tend to be the type of class that most of the students don't take very seriously, because who the hell really has the perspective to at 20 years old. It's a class that everyone will agree should be in the curriculum, but is probably utterly useless in whether it actually does anything. It's pretty easy to get everyone in class to nod their heads about what is or isn't ethical, but turn them loose in the real world and give them mortgage payments and everyone's morality becomes a bit more pliable. It's not very often that people are overtly asked to do something obviously evil or illegal and so we end up with plenty of unethical events that aren't a result of any one clear cut directive, but a matter of dozens or hundreds of small choices that led down that particular path.