I do the same thing, although I'm registered. Most of the time, I make tiny edits to correct issues in technical articles. At one time, for example, there was a code example with a typo. It's awesome to be able to go in and fix little issues like this. So, I'm part of the vast 99% that makes very few edits.
Sorry if it makes me a bad person, but I have no interest in spending serious amounts of my time editing Wikipedia articles. Honestly, though, I'm glad there are such people. I don't understand the general contempt of Wikipedia around here. It's got its flaws, but it's an amazing concept, and generally produces really good results, as far as I've seen. And it's been worth enough to me to donate a few bucks each year. I consider it to be a wonder of the information age.
So, people complain about the turf wars by a few editors with power over their tiny pond? So what? Let me introduce you to the species we call "humans", where such things happen all the time, in every social environment you can imagine, from politics to mega-corporations to open-source development teams to your local homeowner's association board.
Early generation autonomous vehicles will undoubtedly still require some amount of human intervention for special cases or tricky navigation. How would your autonomous car, for instance, possibly be able to understand where you want to park inside a multi-story parking garage, especially if you have a ticket for a particular spot? Seriously, it's going to be decades before cars are that smart. Maybe not even then.
In the situation you describe, the car's autonomous systems would kick in during self-driving mode to avoid accidents, even if you're in self-driving mode.
That doesn't mean that drivers will necessarily have to use the car's autonomous driving mode in order to be safe, though. Even when the driver is in full control of the car, these systems will still run in the background, ready to take over the instant there's danger.
And yes, if your tires are worn, there's a good bet the cars will know about that. Everything will have sensors in them, including tires.
The people who like Snapchat already know how to use it. Kids don't WANT their parents to learn how to use it. And in general, people nearly always hate change in the short term, even if it's objectively an improvement. Of course, there's always the chance that the "improvements" will be anything but as well.
This has every potential to go very badly. I'll be impressed if Snapchat users don't raise holy hell about it, because that's almost the inevitable result of these big re-designs.
Exactly why do self-driving cars, especially first-generation cars, have to work under all conditions to be useful or viable products? You're going to need a drivers' license to operate these first-gen vehicles anyhow. Think of self-driving mode as an advanced cruise-control, and I think you'll be closer to the mark than a 100% hands-off vehicle.
My presumption is that the first-gen vehicles will not work well in snowstorms, extreme traffic conditions, or be able to operate in unusual situations, such as traversing through parking lots. The human will have to take over there, with the AI just providing safety measures and assistance. That doesn't make self-driving technology worthless.
But for many of us, a car that can still operate 95% of the time in autonomous mode would still be very handy - especially if we live in areas with more temperate weather. Eventually, the technology will inch closer to 100% autonomy, but that may take another decade or so of refinement.
I'm also totally OK with not being a billionaire and dating supermodels.
This gives the impression that AOO is all about being small, simple, and stable, but it appears they're having a tough time even getting critical bugfixes deployed.
One of the strengths of open source is the diversity of choice. But that diversity can also be considered a weakness when it spreads valuable developers too thin, to the detriment of the entire community.
When developing and testing complex new systems, you try to keep your unknowns and external variables to a minimum (i.e. bad weather, terrible roads and traffic). Once you've established your algorithms work in the simpler cases, you move on to tougher and tougher situations. This is normal, logical development progression. I'm not sure why you'd think it's somehow indicative that cars will *never* be able to handle anything but good weather and traffic.
Image hashes typically work in a way such that you can find an image even if minor alterations have been made, such as if you re-compress them, change formats, alter a single pixel, etc. From what I understand, it often involves analysis of the color histogram used in initial searches, plus a tiny thumbnail for direct comparison, which would generally be too small to recognize a specific person. This lets you do "fuzzy" matching, unlike a hash like CRC32 or SHA1 which only can find exact matches.
I agree that this has all sorts of psychological barriers. "Hey, I'm worried about revenge porn, so I'm going to upload all my nude pics I shared with my ex-boyfriend to Facebook for analysis. You know, Facebook, the company that scans all my personal data for profit."
Just to clarify, there are NO ads injected into the games themselves - at least, not by Microsoft.
There are some passive ads in the system menus and home screen. Many of the ads are for games or things gamers might be interested in. The ads don't play unless you actually click on them. So, it's irritating, but certainly not immersion-breaking.
The Xbox One is a pretty good console, aside from Microsoft constantly futzing with the interface. And in my opinion, all that futzing has just made it different, not really better.
Three of the four add-ons I use are marked "legacy". Honestly, if I need to go track down updated add-ons anyhow, why shouldn't I just switch to Chrome anyhow?
Firefox should have added an automatic update mechanism for transitioning to new, compatible add-ons. Asking their users to track down new versions that are compatible is completely brain-dead. And they shouldn't switch over until they have near complete coverage.
I also agree that we may see a noticeable drop in Firefox usage numbers right after they pull the lever and break all the old add-ons. People don't like having things that are currently working suddenly stop working, no matter how the developers try to justify it.
I swear, it's like they're TRYING to drive away the last of their customers like me.
Yep, I don't mind such deals if they're up front about it. Many people will pay for a Kindle subsidized by such ads. I choose to pay $10 more for an ad-free experience, and appreciate that I have a clear choice in the matter.
What's I absolutely despise is when I pay a premium for hardware and/or software, and a company thinks it has the right to monetize my eyeballs regardless. Microsoft is particularly prone to this with its Xbox consoles. And TV manufactures apparently can't seem but to help themselves earning a little extra on the side through sneaky methods such as the Samsung auto-playing ads, or Visio when they got caught snooping on user viewing data.
Yep, did the exact same thing a few years back with my Visio. It's a dumb terminal that displays content from HDMI port 1, and *nothing more*. No WAY it gets my wifi password.
I think Civilization would be easier for an AI to win with a balanced strategy and then win on micro-management.
Were that the case, I don't think the game's built-in AI would have to cheat quite as much as it does. Granted, the in-game AI can only rely on the local machine's CPU power, but I still think you're underestimating how much strategic depth the game has. Micromanagement will only get you so far.
It's probably not just Starcraft. But since Starcraft is such a popular RTS, and is very mature as an esport, it makes a good metric for AI systems.
I'd bet the best computer bot would also get its ass kicked at Civilization by any competent player. And that's probably true of any other game with a complex enough ruleset which doesn't rely on sheer mechanical fitness (such as an FPS aimbot). Additionally, these are games with limited information about the state of the world. That is, your view is limited to your own units, and clouded by a fog-of-war system. In some sense, that's similar to poker, except that the world is too complex to take advantage of brute-force computational abilities in any way. So, you're left with the cleverness of your strategies, and computer AIs apparently aren't quite there yet.
Anyone who has ever played Civilization at higher than average difficulty settings knows the built-in AI cheats like crazy (or at least, as of a few versions ago - haven't played the newer versions). So, even the game developers apparently have a tough time programming an agent to play as competently as a human.
I don't even bother with firmware updates. My TV needs only display an HDMI signal, and *nothing more*. If it can't do that properly out of the box, then WTF. I'm more worried about updates breaking something that's currently working, or adding some crapware or spyware that I can't remove. It's kind of a sad state.
I have videogame consoles that work well as media players. I know they'll be kept up to date for a reasonable lifetime, at least, and they seem far less likely to have hidden spyware or security vulnerabilities.
I know a lot of people say "put them on a separate network", but that's not really practical if you want to allow them access to your media server, for instance. I'd have to end up buying a lot of duplicate hardware to make that work. So, for the moment, I'm simply very judicious about which devices I give my wifi password to. Thank goodness that's still a way to easily control my devices network access.
You seriously think TheRealDonaldTrump is "just another user"? Sorry, the fact that someone is POTUS is actually pretty significant. You'll note that while I can go in and edit most articles on Wikipedia, I cannot go and alter the article for Donald Trump or Barrack Obama, and for good reason. It has special protection against the inevitable vandalism that would occur otherwise from random idiots and zealots.
Why Twitter didn't think it necessary to put some special protections on high-profile accounts is beyond me. You can bet they'll be doing it now, though.
I've been exposed to enough anime that I'm starting to learn spoken Japanese. I still think (T_T) looks more cynical than crying rivers, so I think that emoticon is just culturally distinct on its own merits. Most westerners are simply more familiar with the sideways emoticons, not the Japanese versions.:-):-|:-(:-P:-/ >-(
We sort of forget that we didn't intrinsically *know* these things. We actually had to learn them along with everything else we take for granted in these modern times. So, in the case of Japanese, with enough cultural conditioning, you would probably eventually learn to interpret those emoticons the same way. I'm not sure I'd ascribe any deeper meanings in the results, such as how "Japanese look for emotion in the eyes, Westerners in the mouth" as the paper apparently did.
What's strange is the line from the writeup "In other words, we don’t all see glee in this glyph : )" which wasn't at all supported by the study's conclusion (not that we can actually READ it). From what I understand, we all DO see glee in that glyph. It was the other two Japanese emoticons that confused non-Japanese, especially Africans.
That seems to be a common mantra here, but I haven't found this to be the case at all. There are certainly a wide range of quality among answers, but if you sift through them carefully (and read the comments!), you can nearly almost always find the best answer. You also need to pay attention to age, as old answers may not remain the best answers in light of new language features.
A lot of what I use Stack Overflow for falls into two categories: * Common idioms for a language I'm learning, and am still unfamiliar with * Performing some extremely obscure tasks with some library / API
I'm working solo a lot these days, and for me, Stack Overflow is an absolute godsend, because I don't have convenient colleagues I can turn to and ask. Sometimes the answer doesn't meet my own quality standards, but I guess that's the difference between someone who just needs a hint in the right direction versus someone who is just blindly copying and pasting answers.
The grey beards on Slashdot continually bring this up. I have this yet to be an actual problem, ever. Are you guys that inept at copy and pasting?
I think it's one of those theoretical arguments by people who don't like the language, and probably don't use it much. I've heard similar arguments made about how dangerous C++ operator overloading is (because apparently you could hide really insane code that way, or something). In practice, I've never run into problems from either of these issues.
State-run DOTs tend to love overly-complicated, expensive boondoggle project like this. It's much more exciting to talk about a hyperloop than boring solutions like "add more roads or railway lines". They spout nonsense like:
“We cannot build our way out of congestion, and that’s why we’re looking so widely at technology,” Ford said.
So, instead, they consider building a hyperloop? Nice. All you have to do is read a bit further down to see how they prioritize boondoggle projects versus practical solutions:
The Colorado Department of Transportation plans to widen the 70 miles of Interstate 25 from Wellington, Colo., to Denver, but that project is slated to be completed in increments with full completion not in sight until 2075.
Fine with me. I want my employers to think they might lose me to another company that offers better salary, benefits, and projects. Employers have always tried to persuade me from leaving when I found a better job. I need to learn what changes I need to make to my LinkedIn profile so it triggers warning bells, so I can hopefully get better salary increases without jumping to a new company. Well, assuming I actually worked for someone else. It doesn't matter for the self-employed.
I've never understood why people are concerned about using LinkedIn. I use it myself without any real concerns. To me, there are two primary reasons for its existence. First, it's a convenient way for me to keep my professional contacts up to date. Second, it's a way to keep my resume online in a place recruiters know where to find it.
Privacy doesn't really enter into this equation. Go ahead, corporations and head-hunters, data-mine the crap out of my information if you want to. I know that data is valuable to you, and I figure that's a fair trade for the benefits it gives me. That's why it's there in a public place, for all the world to find. LinkedIn, of course, gets their tights in a wad because others are slurping up the public data they're hosting, but it doesn't really affect me at all.
What you're describing are fully featured web-hosted apps. Obviously, such things would need scripting to work.
But why should I deign to allow a 3rd party ad to execute arbitrary script from an undisclosed and potentially malicious actor to run on my client machine, all without any oversight by the website I visit or permission from me?
Surely there's a more intelligent middle-ground, rather than the free-for-all permissive model that simply hopes no one finds their way out of the sandbox, or figures out how to abuse your system from within the sandbox (like crypto-currency mining, for example).
Slashdot Mirror
I do the same thing, although I'm registered. Most of the time, I make tiny edits to correct issues in technical articles. At one time, for example, there was a code example with a typo. It's awesome to be able to go in and fix little issues like this. So, I'm part of the vast 99% that makes very few edits.
Sorry if it makes me a bad person, but I have no interest in spending serious amounts of my time editing Wikipedia articles. Honestly, though, I'm glad there are such people. I don't understand the general contempt of Wikipedia around here. It's got its flaws, but it's an amazing concept, and generally produces really good results, as far as I've seen. And it's been worth enough to me to donate a few bucks each year. I consider it to be a wonder of the information age.
So, people complain about the turf wars by a few editors with power over their tiny pond? So what? Let me introduce you to the species we call "humans", where such things happen all the time, in every social environment you can imagine, from politics to mega-corporations to open-source development teams to your local homeowner's association board.
Early generation autonomous vehicles will undoubtedly still require some amount of human intervention for special cases or tricky navigation. How would your autonomous car, for instance, possibly be able to understand where you want to park inside a multi-story parking garage, especially if you have a ticket for a particular spot? Seriously, it's going to be decades before cars are that smart. Maybe not even then.
In the situation you describe, the car's autonomous systems would kick in during self-driving mode to avoid accidents, even if you're in self-driving mode.
http://money.cnn.com/2016/01/2...
Relevant quote:
That doesn't mean that drivers will necessarily have to use the car's autonomous driving mode in order to be safe, though. Even when the driver is in full control of the car, these systems will still run in the background, ready to take over the instant there's danger.
And yes, if your tires are worn, there's a good bet the cars will know about that. Everything will have sensors in them, including tires.
The people who like Snapchat already know how to use it. Kids don't WANT their parents to learn how to use it. And in general, people nearly always hate change in the short term, even if it's objectively an improvement. Of course, there's always the chance that the "improvements" will be anything but as well.
This has every potential to go very badly. I'll be impressed if Snapchat users don't raise holy hell about it, because that's almost the inevitable result of these big re-designs.
I think you're misinterpreting my position.
Exactly why do self-driving cars, especially first-generation cars, have to work under all conditions to be useful or viable products? You're going to need a drivers' license to operate these first-gen vehicles anyhow. Think of self-driving mode as an advanced cruise-control, and I think you'll be closer to the mark than a 100% hands-off vehicle.
My presumption is that the first-gen vehicles will not work well in snowstorms, extreme traffic conditions, or be able to operate in unusual situations, such as traversing through parking lots. The human will have to take over there, with the AI just providing safety measures and assistance. That doesn't make self-driving technology worthless.
But for many of us, a car that can still operate 95% of the time in autonomous mode would still be very handy - especially if we live in areas with more temperate weather. Eventually, the technology will inch closer to 100% autonomy, but that may take another decade or so of refinement.
I'm also totally OK with not being a billionaire and dating supermodels.
This gives the impression that AOO is all about being small, simple, and stable, but it appears they're having a tough time even getting critical bugfixes deployed.
One of the strengths of open source is the diversity of choice. But that diversity can also be considered a weakness when it spreads valuable developers too thin, to the detriment of the entire community.
When developing and testing complex new systems, you try to keep your unknowns and external variables to a minimum (i.e. bad weather, terrible roads and traffic). Once you've established your algorithms work in the simpler cases, you move on to tougher and tougher situations. This is normal, logical development progression. I'm not sure why you'd think it's somehow indicative that cars will *never* be able to handle anything but good weather and traffic.
Good to know. Score one point for Firefox, at least.
Image hashes typically work in a way such that you can find an image even if minor alterations have been made, such as if you re-compress them, change formats, alter a single pixel, etc. From what I understand, it often involves analysis of the color histogram used in initial searches, plus a tiny thumbnail for direct comparison, which would generally be too small to recognize a specific person. This lets you do "fuzzy" matching, unlike a hash like CRC32 or SHA1 which only can find exact matches.
I agree that this has all sorts of psychological barriers. "Hey, I'm worried about revenge porn, so I'm going to upload all my nude pics I shared with my ex-boyfriend to Facebook for analysis. You know, Facebook, the company that scans all my personal data for profit."
Just to clarify, there are NO ads injected into the games themselves - at least, not by Microsoft.
There are some passive ads in the system menus and home screen. Many of the ads are for games or things gamers might be interested in. The ads don't play unless you actually click on them. So, it's irritating, but certainly not immersion-breaking.
The Xbox One is a pretty good console, aside from Microsoft constantly futzing with the interface. And in my opinion, all that futzing has just made it different, not really better.
Three of the four add-ons I use are marked "legacy". Honestly, if I need to go track down updated add-ons anyhow, why shouldn't I just switch to Chrome anyhow?
Firefox should have added an automatic update mechanism for transitioning to new, compatible add-ons. Asking their users to track down new versions that are compatible is completely brain-dead. And they shouldn't switch over until they have near complete coverage.
I also agree that we may see a noticeable drop in Firefox usage numbers right after they pull the lever and break all the old add-ons. People don't like having things that are currently working suddenly stop working, no matter how the developers try to justify it.
I swear, it's like they're TRYING to drive away the last of their customers like me.
Just think of how much time it has to sit there and crack it tho....
Ahaha, true. Fortunately, the processors on those things are so under-powered, I'm probably good for the next hundred years or so.
Yep, I don't mind such deals if they're up front about it. Many people will pay for a Kindle subsidized by such ads. I choose to pay $10 more for an ad-free experience, and appreciate that I have a clear choice in the matter.
What's I absolutely despise is when I pay a premium for hardware and/or software, and a company thinks it has the right to monetize my eyeballs regardless. Microsoft is particularly prone to this with its Xbox consoles. And TV manufactures apparently can't seem but to help themselves earning a little extra on the side through sneaky methods such as the Samsung auto-playing ads, or Visio when they got caught snooping on user viewing data.
Yep, did the exact same thing a few years back with my Visio. It's a dumb terminal that displays content from HDMI port 1, and *nothing more*. No WAY it gets my wifi password.
Ahaha... seven episodes? Surely you jest. Goku vs Frieza lasted nineteen episodes.
I think Civilization would be easier for an AI to win with a balanced strategy and then win on micro-management.
Were that the case, I don't think the game's built-in AI would have to cheat quite as much as it does. Granted, the in-game AI can only rely on the local machine's CPU power, but I still think you're underestimating how much strategic depth the game has. Micromanagement will only get you so far.
It's probably not just Starcraft. But since Starcraft is such a popular RTS, and is very mature as an esport, it makes a good metric for AI systems.
I'd bet the best computer bot would also get its ass kicked at Civilization by any competent player. And that's probably true of any other game with a complex enough ruleset which doesn't rely on sheer mechanical fitness (such as an FPS aimbot). Additionally, these are games with limited information about the state of the world. That is, your view is limited to your own units, and clouded by a fog-of-war system. In some sense, that's similar to poker, except that the world is too complex to take advantage of brute-force computational abilities in any way. So, you're left with the cleverness of your strategies, and computer AIs apparently aren't quite there yet.
Anyone who has ever played Civilization at higher than average difficulty settings knows the built-in AI cheats like crazy (or at least, as of a few versions ago - haven't played the newer versions). So, even the game developers apparently have a tough time programming an agent to play as competently as a human.
I don't even bother with firmware updates. My TV needs only display an HDMI signal, and *nothing more*. If it can't do that properly out of the box, then WTF. I'm more worried about updates breaking something that's currently working, or adding some crapware or spyware that I can't remove. It's kind of a sad state.
I have videogame consoles that work well as media players. I know they'll be kept up to date for a reasonable lifetime, at least, and they seem far less likely to have hidden spyware or security vulnerabilities.
I know a lot of people say "put them on a separate network", but that's not really practical if you want to allow them access to your media server, for instance. I'd have to end up buying a lot of duplicate hardware to make that work. So, for the moment, I'm simply very judicious about which devices I give my wifi password to. Thank goodness that's still a way to easily control my devices network access.
You seriously think TheRealDonaldTrump is "just another user"? Sorry, the fact that someone is POTUS is actually pretty significant. You'll note that while I can go in and edit most articles on Wikipedia, I cannot go and alter the article for Donald Trump or Barrack Obama, and for good reason. It has special protection against the inevitable vandalism that would occur otherwise from random idiots and zealots.
Why Twitter didn't think it necessary to put some special protections on high-profile accounts is beyond me. You can bet they'll be doing it now, though.
I've been exposed to enough anime that I'm starting to learn spoken Japanese. I still think (T_T) looks more cynical than crying rivers, so I think that emoticon is just culturally distinct on its own merits. Most westerners are simply more familiar with the sideways emoticons, not the Japanese versions. :-) :-| :-( :-P :-/ >-(
We sort of forget that we didn't intrinsically *know* these things. We actually had to learn them along with everything else we take for granted in these modern times. So, in the case of Japanese, with enough cultural conditioning, you would probably eventually learn to interpret those emoticons the same way. I'm not sure I'd ascribe any deeper meanings in the results, such as how "Japanese look for emotion in the eyes, Westerners in the mouth" as the paper apparently did.
What's strange is the line from the writeup "In other words, we don’t all see glee in this glyph : )" which wasn't at all supported by the study's conclusion (not that we can actually READ it). From what I understand, we all DO see glee in that glyph. It was the other two Japanese emoticons that confused non-Japanese, especially Africans.
In my last 15+ years on Slashdot I've found that commenter fall into one of two categories...
Has anyone ever told you that you seem to view the world in a binary fashion?
That seems to be a common mantra here, but I haven't found this to be the case at all. There are certainly a wide range of quality among answers, but if you sift through them carefully (and read the comments!), you can nearly almost always find the best answer. You also need to pay attention to age, as old answers may not remain the best answers in light of new language features.
A lot of what I use Stack Overflow for falls into two categories:
* Common idioms for a language I'm learning, and am still unfamiliar with
* Performing some extremely obscure tasks with some library / API
I'm working solo a lot these days, and for me, Stack Overflow is an absolute godsend, because I don't have convenient colleagues I can turn to and ask. Sometimes the answer doesn't meet my own quality standards, but I guess that's the difference between someone who just needs a hint in the right direction versus someone who is just blindly copying and pasting answers.
The grey beards on Slashdot continually bring this up. I have this yet to be an actual problem, ever. Are you guys that inept at copy and pasting?
I think it's one of those theoretical arguments by people who don't like the language, and probably don't use it much. I've heard similar arguments made about how dangerous C++ operator overloading is (because apparently you could hide really insane code that way, or something). In practice, I've never run into problems from either of these issues.
State-run DOTs tend to love overly-complicated, expensive boondoggle project like this. It's much more exciting to talk about a hyperloop than boring solutions like "add more roads or railway lines". They spout nonsense like:
“We cannot build our way out of congestion, and that’s why we’re looking so widely at technology,” Ford said.
So, instead, they consider building a hyperloop? Nice. All you have to do is read a bit further down to see how they prioritize boondoggle projects versus practical solutions:
The Colorado Department of Transportation plans to widen the 70 miles of Interstate 25 from Wellington, Colo., to Denver, but that project is slated to be completed in increments with full completion not in sight until 2075.
Fine with me. I want my employers to think they might lose me to another company that offers better salary, benefits, and projects. Employers have always tried to persuade me from leaving when I found a better job. I need to learn what changes I need to make to my LinkedIn profile so it triggers warning bells, so I can hopefully get better salary increases without jumping to a new company. Well, assuming I actually worked for someone else. It doesn't matter for the self-employed.
I've never understood why people are concerned about using LinkedIn. I use it myself without any real concerns. To me, there are two primary reasons for its existence. First, it's a convenient way for me to keep my professional contacts up to date. Second, it's a way to keep my resume online in a place recruiters know where to find it.
Privacy doesn't really enter into this equation. Go ahead, corporations and head-hunters, data-mine the crap out of my information if you want to. I know that data is valuable to you, and I figure that's a fair trade for the benefits it gives me. That's why it's there in a public place, for all the world to find. LinkedIn, of course, gets their tights in a wad because others are slurping up the public data they're hosting, but it doesn't really affect me at all.
What you're describing are fully featured web-hosted apps. Obviously, such things would need scripting to work.
But why should I deign to allow a 3rd party ad to execute arbitrary script from an undisclosed and potentially malicious actor to run on my client machine, all without any oversight by the website I visit or permission from me?
Surely there's a more intelligent middle-ground, rather than the free-for-all permissive model that simply hopes no one finds their way out of the sandbox, or figures out how to abuse your system from within the sandbox (like crypto-currency mining, for example).