Doesn't really matter, as in another several decades all the coasties will be living in float-over country. They'll need the practice of turning up their noses.
So the alternative is to let governments have ultimate power over people? Walmart is a shitty place to do business so I don't do business there, but I'm basically stuck with the DMV. If your argument is that big power structures are bad for people because they will seek to dominate individuals, then you'd want power to be as distributed as possible, and while the political right in the U.S. often tends to be just as statist as the left (merely over different things) at least there's some recognition that it's bad. Really though I think Republicans just run on the message and then typically proceed to do the opposite.
I'm not advocating anarchism, but I can't see how allowing more government interference in my life could possibly be a good thing. All it does is attract petty moral tyrants who want to impose rules on me that I neither need or want. The religious right wanted to tell me who I could or couldn't have sex with or marry, and that I couldn't make choices about what to put in my body. And just when I thought that those moral busy bodies had been overcome the regressive left reared its ugly head demanding I use made up pronouns and that one person's opinion can matter more than another's based on their race, sexual orientation, or gender.
Both of these groups of people are fucking terrifying and while you or I might consider ourselves wise enough to handle the reins of a government that holds ultimate power over people, I wouldn't care to live in such a government run by either of those psychotic groups. We can see how religious fundamentalism turns out by looking at Saudi Arabia or other Islamic states and I can't imagine anyone in a Western democracy wanting to live in those polices unless they have become divorced of their rational thought. I don't think the world has seen a government of the loony left yet, but that's probably because Marxism tends to fail too quickly or collapse into authoritarian dictatorships for that group to hold power for any longer than a sub-faction to take power and purge the former group as a part of consolidating power.
I think the problem is that they only tested from a single restaurant if memory serves correct. If you're seeing really strange results, you'd probably want to get samples from a few other restaurants to see if it's the chain or an isolated incident.
Hell, depending on the city and location, some Subways could just sell soy instead of chicken it would be even more popular.
I was somewhat skeptical of the numbers as well, and found a previous year's version of the same survey: 2016 Report (PDF)
It seems that part of the problem is that it looks at any type of engineer, whether computer, electrical, software, or mechanical. It also measures employability in fields such as civil engineering, chemical engineering, and other fields that have nothing to do with software development. The numbers for some of those fields are higher than the number quoted in the summary, which leads me to believe that a reasonably chunk of the engineers surveyed have no desire to program at all or pursue a career in it.
There are some other interesting figures in the report, but it's quite large. Seems like this is another case of a reporter not understanding a study and making a bad headline.
Who would want to use a search engine so petty as to censor the web and distort search results (their primary and only useful function as far as I'm concerned) over a mischievous TV commercial? How could you trust that any other results are accurate or aren't the result of tampering. If Google were willing to artificially modify their results over something as trivial as that, you can bet they'd do the same for money, political influence, etc.
Is it not possible to change the activation phrase for your digital device? It seems to me that leaving it at the default is about as intelligent as leaving the default administrator login and password for a router. Sure, no one should try to take advantage of you, and in an ideal world they wouldn't. However, this isn't an ideal world and hopefully this serves as a lesson to you with little actual harm done. Given that the harm done is essentially minimal, you should probably thank Burger King instead of admonishing them.
It just changes the white background black, presumably reducing the amount of light that your screen is throwing out which in a dark room or early in the morning when your eyes are just adjusting less pleasant to deal with. It's the same kind of mode a lot of readers have where it inverts the color scheme so you end up with white text on a black background which makes night reading easier.
That's really just people in general though. Sports fans have their excitement rise and fall with trade rumors, political groups adjust plans based on poll numbers and election forecasts, legal departments may adjust recommendations just on the prospects of a lawsuit. Reacting to new information is rational.
If you believe that Apple talking with a company increases the likelihood of a deal being made, and if you believe that deals being made increase the value of a company, then you have to assign more value to the company simply based on talks occurring or you don't really believe that those talks have any effect on the company at all. The same thing happens if legislation is being considered or talked about that could affect a group.
Waiting around until something definitive happens without at least doing some advanced planning or taking any mitigating actions is just poor risk management. There's a difference between the stock prices shifting a small amount due to new information and the prices swinging wildly in either direction which tends not to happen very often in cases like these.
But the truth of it is, there's really no better way discovered yet to model value except through a market system that prevents unfair trading based on privileged access to information or intentional distortion of information. Small adjustments based on hearsay and rumor work more effectively than deciding value based on official decree, or using some kind of oracle.
You wouldn't even go about training a machine learning algorithm that way as it would be pointless. The idea is to let it make better predictions, not train to to make the same predictions as an existing person. Rejected applications are pointless for training as you don't know whether they were a good or bad rejection, whereas if you just give it approved loans and the outcome (i.e., was the loan defaulted on) then the AI can try to develop a set of rules. Typically you feed some large percentage of your data to the algorithm as training data and then use the left over part to test accuracy to see how many times it predicts correctly.
If you truly wanted to avoid racial or gender bias you would just remove that information from what you feed into the algorithm, at which point it can't a priori be biased against anyone because it can't even evaluate them based on those criteria. But let's suppose you do that and then look at the results after the fact, add that data back in and come to the startling conclusion that your AI is disproportionately rejecting candidates from some group. It can't possibly be because it knows they're a member of that group, but because that group happens to have worse outcomes.
If you stop to think about this, its not too hard to come to a reasonable conclusion that if your AI that knows nothing about race is suggesting that black/white/latino borrowers are a higher risk, it's because they're a higher risk. Reality doesn't care about feelings or trying to make sure that outcomes are equal across groups, so we conclude that some group is a worse risk. It probably is the case that black borrowers are more likely to default, but it's not because they're black, but because blacks are typically less well off so of course they're going to default on loans more often. In reality they probably shouldn't (and maybe wouldn't have) received a loan, but some policy designed to make it easier for them to get approval caused it to happen, but that doesn't make them a safer risk, it just lets some people feel better about the world.
If you want to check if your AI is racist find a group of loan applications that are for all intents the same with the only difference being the race of the applicant see if you get a different results based on race for that input set. My guess is that you probably wouldn't. Because if you're stripped out racial data as a category to train on, the algorithm wouldn't suddenly decide to discriminate based on it. Also, for some machine learning algorithms (e.g., anything like a decision tree) you can look at precisely how it evaluates a case, so you could see pretty easily if the AI has a step where race==groupX ? reject : approve becomes pretty apparent. That's not true for all algorithms, but just because its an AI doesn't means its a black box that is beyond all human understanding.
I would say the Slashdot community leans more libertarian (note the small 'l' there) than anything else. You'll probably stumble across just about every political philosophy here at some point, but I'd say that a majority (or at least a plurality) fall into the classical liberal category more so than anything else. I mean look at all of the recent wage gap articles and tell me that the community is socialist based on the comments that are posted and upvoted there.
The site ownership may fall into a different camp, and really they're the ones controlling what stories are put up. I don't think the community really would have wanted this.
It's not hidden or an Easter egg if they fucking blab about doing it. Easter eggs are things programmers sneak in that no one finds or notices. This reeks of some inane committee decision on how to appear hip but comes off kitschy because it was a deliberate marketing stunt.
If you wanted a useful story why not ask users about fun Easter eggs or secrets they've stumbled across over the years. Instead we get this TMZ-esque shit.
The part that looks like a lizard head is (I think) the ash/cherry on a cigar, and the brown part is the cigar, not a part of a crevice. Once you start looking at it that way, it's funny how your brain starts adjusting the perspective because it knows that the cigar should be protruding from wall. Also, for all I know it might not even be a wall, but a road with the cigar sticking up out of the ground.
I can at least understand the argument for preventing unofficial home button (or parts of it) repairs as it contains the finger print reader and it could be a lot easier to attack the security of the device if you could replace the reader.
Or perhaps its just a conspiracy to get people to upgrade to the next iPhone about which we seem to get at least one monthly rumor around here related to it ditching the home button, or something else like that.
Are you really surprised? A lot of pushers will always give you the first hit for free.
Not to say that body camera's are necessarily a bad idea, but they can be implemented without relying on a third party service. There are those who would argue that the police can't be trusted to manage it themselves so a third party system may have some allure.
You're missing the backside that as productivity increases, so does supply which reduces costs. You could certainly have a government that gives everyone a job, whether they want it or not, but that typically means doing so by limiting productivity or creating jobs which do nothing productive. Work for the sake of work is pointless.
Also, we have to look at the rest of the world as globalization trends continue. China has seen massive growth of the middle class since moving to a mixed economy, but naturally that's going to come at our expense. The U.S. owes a lot of its success in the 50's to escaping from WWII with its infrastructure unscathed while other western nations had to rebuild along with the isolationist Communist bloc not competing against the American economy.
Europe has been able to fully rebuild and reduce barriers to doing business to become a major economic powerhouse and the former Communist states have either ditched it or moved towards mixed economies that have allowed them to become far more prosperous. When we have to compete with the rest of the world, it's little wonder that we don't look as strong relative to decades past.
and suddenly when they are in a position of actually enacting a repeal and replacement bill into law they came up with nothing.
It's even worse than that. They've had how many years now to sit down and think about a replacement plan, to go through the details, crunch the numbers, and get their party on board with a plan so that when they eventually could put it into action they could succeed. Instead they did nothing and tried to push out a cobbled together mess that they couldn't even get enough of their party behind to hold an actual vote on it.
Both of our major political parties are completely dysfunctional at this point. The Democrats spent all of their effort trying to push their anointed party insider candidate who needed significant party help to make it out of a primary against a fringe candidate no one was talking about seriously in the lead up to the election and the republicans had such a weak and unappealing array of candidate that a loud-mouthed bozo that was a complete outsider (he'd only changed to a Republican in 2011, but had bounced back and forth between the parties before) practically take over the party.
Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
The first is at least productive, but it isn't really a viable skill training program, especially if the only people who get to make license plates are in prison. The others are just pointless punishment that don't actually help anyone and just feed our vindictiveness.
One interesting approach that I read about a few years ago that seems to really help was a dog training program where inmates help to rehabilitate and train shelter dogs so that they can be adopted or for use as service animals. It's certainly not a huge job market outside of prison for this, but it is something and its believed that this also helps to rehabilitate inmates as well.
Gordon Ramsay also did a show about teaching prisoners to cook. This seemed like a pretty good idea since there's no shortage of jobs there and they can provide some stability in life. Someone even started a restaurant around the concept as well.
Also some European countries have large population groups that have different cultures and languages. Take a country like Belgium where there are several different groups all within the same country. The northern parts which are Dutch and Flemish culture largely speak Dutch and the southern part of the country in the Wallonian region speak French (or a dialect of it) and then there's a small region on the Eastern part of the country where German is spoken.
Slashdot Mirror
Reminds of one of George Carlin's bits: "The planet is fine. The people are fucked."
Doesn't really matter, as in another several decades all the coasties will be living in float-over country. They'll need the practice of turning up their noses.
So the alternative is to let governments have ultimate power over people? Walmart is a shitty place to do business so I don't do business there, but I'm basically stuck with the DMV. If your argument is that big power structures are bad for people because they will seek to dominate individuals, then you'd want power to be as distributed as possible, and while the political right in the U.S. often tends to be just as statist as the left (merely over different things) at least there's some recognition that it's bad. Really though I think Republicans just run on the message and then typically proceed to do the opposite.
I'm not advocating anarchism, but I can't see how allowing more government interference in my life could possibly be a good thing. All it does is attract petty moral tyrants who want to impose rules on me that I neither need or want. The religious right wanted to tell me who I could or couldn't have sex with or marry, and that I couldn't make choices about what to put in my body. And just when I thought that those moral busy bodies had been overcome the regressive left reared its ugly head demanding I use made up pronouns and that one person's opinion can matter more than another's based on their race, sexual orientation, or gender.
Both of these groups of people are fucking terrifying and while you or I might consider ourselves wise enough to handle the reins of a government that holds ultimate power over people, I wouldn't care to live in such a government run by either of those psychotic groups. We can see how religious fundamentalism turns out by looking at Saudi Arabia or other Islamic states and I can't imagine anyone in a Western democracy wanting to live in those polices unless they have become divorced of their rational thought. I don't think the world has seen a government of the loony left yet, but that's probably because Marxism tends to fail too quickly or collapse into authoritarian dictatorships for that group to hold power for any longer than a sub-faction to take power and purge the former group as a part of consolidating power.
I think the problem is that they only tested from a single restaurant if memory serves correct. If you're seeing really strange results, you'd probably want to get samples from a few other restaurants to see if it's the chain or an isolated incident.
Hell, depending on the city and location, some Subways could just sell soy instead of chicken it would be even more popular.
I was somewhat skeptical of the numbers as well, and found a previous year's version of the same survey: 2016 Report (PDF) It seems that part of the problem is that it looks at any type of engineer, whether computer, electrical, software, or mechanical. It also measures employability in fields such as civil engineering, chemical engineering, and other fields that have nothing to do with software development. The numbers for some of those fields are higher than the number quoted in the summary, which leads me to believe that a reasonably chunk of the engineers surveyed have no desire to program at all or pursue a career in it.
There are some other interesting figures in the report, but it's quite large. Seems like this is another case of a reporter not understanding a study and making a bad headline.
Who would want to use a search engine so petty as to censor the web and distort search results (their primary and only useful function as far as I'm concerned) over a mischievous TV commercial? How could you trust that any other results are accurate or aren't the result of tampering. If Google were willing to artificially modify their results over something as trivial as that, you can bet they'd do the same for money, political influence, etc.
Is it not possible to change the activation phrase for your digital device? It seems to me that leaving it at the default is about as intelligent as leaving the default administrator login and password for a router. Sure, no one should try to take advantage of you, and in an ideal world they wouldn't. However, this isn't an ideal world and hopefully this serves as a lesson to you with little actual harm done. Given that the harm done is essentially minimal, you should probably thank Burger King instead of admonishing them.
It just changes the white background black, presumably reducing the amount of light that your screen is throwing out which in a dark room or early in the morning when your eyes are just adjusting less pleasant to deal with. It's the same kind of mode a lot of readers have where it inverts the color scheme so you end up with white text on a black background which makes night reading easier.
That's really just people in general though. Sports fans have their excitement rise and fall with trade rumors, political groups adjust plans based on poll numbers and election forecasts, legal departments may adjust recommendations just on the prospects of a lawsuit. Reacting to new information is rational.
If you believe that Apple talking with a company increases the likelihood of a deal being made, and if you believe that deals being made increase the value of a company, then you have to assign more value to the company simply based on talks occurring or you don't really believe that those talks have any effect on the company at all. The same thing happens if legislation is being considered or talked about that could affect a group.
Waiting around until something definitive happens without at least doing some advanced planning or taking any mitigating actions is just poor risk management. There's a difference between the stock prices shifting a small amount due to new information and the prices swinging wildly in either direction which tends not to happen very often in cases like these.
But the truth of it is, there's really no better way discovered yet to model value except through a market system that prevents unfair trading based on privileged access to information or intentional distortion of information. Small adjustments based on hearsay and rumor work more effectively than deciding value based on official decree, or using some kind of oracle.
You wouldn't even go about training a machine learning algorithm that way as it would be pointless. The idea is to let it make better predictions, not train to to make the same predictions as an existing person. Rejected applications are pointless for training as you don't know whether they were a good or bad rejection, whereas if you just give it approved loans and the outcome (i.e., was the loan defaulted on) then the AI can try to develop a set of rules. Typically you feed some large percentage of your data to the algorithm as training data and then use the left over part to test accuracy to see how many times it predicts correctly.
If you truly wanted to avoid racial or gender bias you would just remove that information from what you feed into the algorithm, at which point it can't a priori be biased against anyone because it can't even evaluate them based on those criteria. But let's suppose you do that and then look at the results after the fact, add that data back in and come to the startling conclusion that your AI is disproportionately rejecting candidates from some group. It can't possibly be because it knows they're a member of that group, but because that group happens to have worse outcomes.
If you stop to think about this, its not too hard to come to a reasonable conclusion that if your AI that knows nothing about race is suggesting that black/white/latino borrowers are a higher risk, it's because they're a higher risk. Reality doesn't care about feelings or trying to make sure that outcomes are equal across groups, so we conclude that some group is a worse risk. It probably is the case that black borrowers are more likely to default, but it's not because they're black, but because blacks are typically less well off so of course they're going to default on loans more often. In reality they probably shouldn't (and maybe wouldn't have) received a loan, but some policy designed to make it easier for them to get approval caused it to happen, but that doesn't make them a safer risk, it just lets some people feel better about the world.
If you want to check if your AI is racist find a group of loan applications that are for all intents the same with the only difference being the race of the applicant see if you get a different results based on race for that input set. My guess is that you probably wouldn't. Because if you're stripped out racial data as a category to train on, the algorithm wouldn't suddenly decide to discriminate based on it. Also, for some machine learning algorithms (e.g., anything like a decision tree) you can look at precisely how it evaluates a case, so you could see pretty easily if the AI has a step where race==groupX ? reject : approve becomes pretty apparent. That's not true for all algorithms, but just because its an AI doesn't means its a black box that is beyond all human understanding.
I would say the Slashdot community leans more libertarian (note the small 'l' there) than anything else. You'll probably stumble across just about every political philosophy here at some point, but I'd say that a majority (or at least a plurality) fall into the classical liberal category more so than anything else. I mean look at all of the recent wage gap articles and tell me that the community is socialist based on the comments that are posted and upvoted there.
The site ownership may fall into a different camp, and really they're the ones controlling what stories are put up. I don't think the community really would have wanted this.
It's not hidden or an Easter egg if they fucking blab about doing it. Easter eggs are things programmers sneak in that no one finds or notices. This reeks of some inane committee decision on how to appear hip but comes off kitschy because it was a deliberate marketing stunt.
If you wanted a useful story why not ask users about fun Easter eggs or secrets they've stumbled across over the years. Instead we get this TMZ-esque shit.
The part that looks like a lizard head is (I think) the ash/cherry on a cigar, and the brown part is the cigar, not a part of a crevice. Once you start looking at it that way, it's funny how your brain starts adjusting the perspective because it knows that the cigar should be protruding from wall. Also, for all I know it might not even be a wall, but a road with the cigar sticking up out of the ground.
Well I mean you don't *need* them.
This apparently also explains why my cat thinks he's some kind of damned royalty.
Wasn't this already covered almost a year ago? https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/16/06/11/1458246/apple-is-fighting-a-secret-war-to-keep-you-from-repairing-your-phone.
I can at least understand the argument for preventing unofficial home button (or parts of it) repairs as it contains the finger print reader and it could be a lot easier to attack the security of the device if you could replace the reader.
Or perhaps its just a conspiracy to get people to upgrade to the next iPhone about which we seem to get at least one monthly rumor around here related to it ditching the home button, or something else like that.
Are you really surprised? A lot of pushers will always give you the first hit for free.
Not to say that body camera's are necessarily a bad idea, but they can be implemented without relying on a third party service. There are those who would argue that the police can't be trusted to manage it themselves so a third party system may have some allure.
That's quite a staggering amount of money to lose. Are you implying that Twitter's got the egg on its face?
You're missing the backside that as productivity increases, so does supply which reduces costs. You could certainly have a government that gives everyone a job, whether they want it or not, but that typically means doing so by limiting productivity or creating jobs which do nothing productive. Work for the sake of work is pointless.
Also, we have to look at the rest of the world as globalization trends continue. China has seen massive growth of the middle class since moving to a mixed economy, but naturally that's going to come at our expense. The U.S. owes a lot of its success in the 50's to escaping from WWII with its infrastructure unscathed while other western nations had to rebuild along with the isolationist Communist bloc not competing against the American economy.
Europe has been able to fully rebuild and reduce barriers to doing business to become a major economic powerhouse and the former Communist states have either ditched it or moved towards mixed economies that have allowed them to become far more prosperous. When we have to compete with the rest of the world, it's little wonder that we don't look as strong relative to decades past.
and suddenly when they are in a position of actually enacting a repeal and replacement bill into law they came up with nothing.
It's even worse than that. They've had how many years now to sit down and think about a replacement plan, to go through the details, crunch the numbers, and get their party on board with a plan so that when they eventually could put it into action they could succeed. Instead they did nothing and tried to push out a cobbled together mess that they couldn't even get enough of their party behind to hold an actual vote on it.
Both of our major political parties are completely dysfunctional at this point. The Democrats spent all of their effort trying to push their anointed party insider candidate who needed significant party help to make it out of a primary against a fringe candidate no one was talking about seriously in the lead up to the election and the republicans had such a weak and unappealing array of candidate that a loud-mouthed bozo that was a complete outsider (he'd only changed to a Republican in 2011, but had bounced back and forth between the parties before) practically take over the party.
We have to create a narrative, just like he does.
Whoever fights with monsters should see to it that he does not become a monster in the process. And when you gaze long into an abyss the abyss also gazes into you.
The first is at least productive, but it isn't really a viable skill training program, especially if the only people who get to make license plates are in prison. The others are just pointless punishment that don't actually help anyone and just feed our vindictiveness.
One interesting approach that I read about a few years ago that seems to really help was a dog training program where inmates help to rehabilitate and train shelter dogs so that they can be adopted or for use as service animals. It's certainly not a huge job market outside of prison for this, but it is something and its believed that this also helps to rehabilitate inmates as well.
Gordon Ramsay also did a show about teaching prisoners to cook. This seemed like a pretty good idea since there's no shortage of jobs there and they can provide some stability in life. Someone even started a restaurant around the concept as well.
Wayne Tracker is such a boring alias. Carlos Danger was far, far better.
Also, if you're going to do something this scandalous, why bother to keep using the company's mail servers instead of something else.
There's an old saying about the VA: It gives America's veterans another chance to die for their country.
It's not something I would imagine them wanting whether they qualify for it or not.
Also some European countries have large population groups that have different cultures and languages. Take a country like Belgium where there are several different groups all within the same country. The northern parts which are Dutch and Flemish culture largely speak Dutch and the southern part of the country in the Wallonian region speak French (or a dialect of it) and then there's a small region on the Eastern part of the country where German is spoken.