How come when companies break the law they get to "agree" on the punishment?
This is like asking "How come cows can fly?" They can't so the question is meaningless. In your case companies do not do anything, people within those companies do things. Because there are many people within a company many things can be done at the same time. Some times even at cross purposes.
In this case one person did the price fixing. Then later another person agreed to pay the fine. Almost certainly this was not the same person.
Not "Brainless research" but "brainless reporting of research".
Or maybe brainless readers. Yes the problem is with people who get there science education by reading web Blogs and CNN headlines. The people who write forthose outlets are really trying to sell ad space. Don't blame the researchers because to ideot blogger jumped on the story and bend it around to snag a few more click-thoughs on his web site ads.
"I don't know" might be a frequent response) which (by my definition, at least) 'understands' the question."
Actually if the machine is being truthful "I don't know" is a very sophisticated answer. It means the machine has searched its store of information and deduced that the answer can not be derived from that store.
The trouble is that as a software engineer, I know that the designers will simply design the system to say "I don't know" whenever the system fails to find the answer.
Failing to find is MUCH different than knowing for certain something is not there.
The problem is the "disappearing AI". You figure that X requires "thinking" but then when they build a machine to do X you can take it aparts and understand how it works and then you say "That is not thinking it is just a mechanical process". The trouble is that the above applies for any X.
We can even make "X" be "Free Will". A simple way to do that is to use random numbers. The machine "thinks" of hundreds of random actions, evaluates each and then does one of them. Of course this action changes the state of the machine's world and in the next iteration the machine evaluates potential action in light of this changed world. After thousands of iterations we have unpredictable but rational actions. But still we can take apart the machine and see that it is only "mechanical". YES it is non-derterministic but still mechanical.
You can never get past the "disappearing AI" problem as long as the machine can be taken apart and understood.
OK. so there is the solution. Buid things we can't understand. Don't worry. This will happen soon after AIs start building AI and we let this pprocess so go for some time
Yes. I'll believe they are "trying". But they have a LONG ways to go and need to try harder. Last week I ordered some sheet music. It was two thin 12x9 inch booklets. Less than 100 pages total. UPS delivered the package in a 24x12x18 inch cardboard box. The box contained the books and quite a bit of packing material. I was expecting a padded envelope.
"try" is not enough. What Amazon should do is let the shippers keep 5% of what they save over a year ago average. They get the saving as year end bonuses.
To all of those who don't think they want to see "executable code" in a PDF document....
How else would you implement a typesetting language? There is a big problem with simple bitmapped fonts, they don't scale, no sharp edges unless the scale of the bitmap exactly matches the screen resolution. So we need __instructions__ on how to draw the characters. Also those instructions change if the characters is large or small relative to the screen resolution. You can't make goos looking documents without some kind of interpreter. All good typesetters are interpreter.
That said you COULD make a safe interpreter by limiting what it has access to.
No the moon really is a bad place to build stuff. Yes there are no storms or wind. But moon dust, unlike dust on Earth or even mars looks and cats like ground glass. The stuff gets into everything and is very abrasive. Anything that moves will not last long unless you figure a way to keep the dust away.
Here on Earth crushed rock (sand) becomes rounded quickly. But not on the moon.
These are CONTRACTORS not employees. The whole reason a company uses contract labor is so they can adjust the number of bodies to the workload without having to later layoff their own employees. In other works these a TEMPORARY jobs. Everyone understood they were temporary and would not last. I don't even count not renewing a contract with a layoff
I was a contractor once too. And sure enough we were the first to go. With all of about 20 minutes notice at that. Cutting your pay is just a very nice way to say "Find another job, soon." The more normal way to say that to a contractors is "Find another job."
Read the story "Volt" is a "temp agency". Our company uses Volt too. For thing like when a normal emplyee is on extended sick leave, they might hire someone on a 6 month contract.
I'm a software developer. I've had a few periods where I was unemployed. I think that is when I wrote the most open source software. I had time. What else does a software guy do when he has plenty of spare time?
Yes a destruct password would be usful but even better how about a "Clean Password" when you enter that you get real data but not the same data as if you had entered yur real password. Then when they ask you to decrypt the hiddel files you can enter the clean password and the cops get to see yoy "secret business plans" and some customer lists and other boring stuff. They would thing nothig of it because that is what everyone encrypts.
Without explaining it, just rust me this can be done. It would not fool a good cryptographer. He's figure it out but very few cops would and you would still have the "destruct password" to be used as a last resort.
BUT,... the destruct password would have to simulate a hardware failure. It would have to write trash to the disk and then re-flash the drive's firmware with random bits
I don't see anything special about those guns. We Dutch had the same guns on our trade- and war ships in that time. They can shoot a cannonball to a distance of about a kilometer.
What WAS special was not the size or the range but the fact that the guns were all IDENTICAL and that the shot madefor one gun could be used for any other gun. Today we are used to interchangeable parts but in those days except in England guns are made one at a time by highly skilled craftsmen. These guns must have been made in a factory using standardized precision tooling.
What this implies is that the English economy could support a (for the time) huge arms factory and the research and redevelopment that standardized tooling implies. Other governments of the time simply payed for guns, not gun factories.
It's a unfair advantage that the OS vendors can see the source code of FF, however the reverse is not true. So if Safari has this great performance, how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
First off if people have to copy you then by definition you are in the lead.
I write Open Source code and don't see it as a disadvantage. The reason I make it open source is that I WANT others to use it. I have a day job to pay the bills.
You have to look at the motivation of the people working on the software. Some peo9ple just like to make things, some paint, some make photos some make software. All of this beats watching TV.
The rules change when you are a monopoly. Apple is far from a monopoly.
The reason for these laws is that it is easy for a monopoly to exploit it's position. Microsoft it in fact do this. There use to be real competition between browsers theat was before MS bundled IE with Windows.
Good idea. But someone already thought of this. As I write this I think NASA has about a dozen on-going missions right now and about a dozen more in the pipeline. They've been following you suggestion for about the last 50 years.
I work in the space launch business and we are bussy with one average of more then one launch per month. Many are military but there are a fair number of NASA and commercial launches too.
"I've got a picture of how I'd like this to work in my head, but I can't find any software out there that seems to go along with it. I'm a big fan of keeping things simple, so I'd like to start with high level overviews. Each step in the process would be a general statement like 'Look for valid traffic on the monitoring interface'. For those who already know what 'valid traffic' means, it's easy to follow. However, if there was someone who was unsure what it meant, there would be a link they could click on that would pop open a new window (or something similar) explaining in detail what we're looking for and how to find it.
What you do is start a local, specialized verion of Wikipeadia. So if you are hire to shoot squirrels you can read the general overview what it says "Aim your gun at a squirrel then shoot it" but if you click on "gun" to lland of the artical where it explains about a tube that shoots from one and and how to not point the shooting end at anything you don't want dead.
The nice thing about Wiki is that (1) The software is free and everyone knows how to use it and (2) your documents cn grow over time and stay up to date.
That said my bosses still like paper documents. They like a nice neat product that can be called "complete" and get approval signatures on it. But then I ask "have you ever seen anyone READ one of those documents?" It's a generational thing. But I really do thing a living hyper linked document is the only why to go. If you have control issue then you need some kind of revision control system hooked up to the Wiki. Those are available and not hard to use. You can have a working wiki and periodically turn over the "approved" version controlled Wiki to the public if you like to work that way.
"Nasa does not want to fix the Hubble as there budgets have been cut. They want to put the money for fixing the Hubble into something else."
By the time a typical mission launches you have already spend MOST of it's budget. Any time you see a mission cancelled, unless it is cancelled at a very early, pre-development stage then what you are seeing is 80% of the cost flushed down the toilet in an effort to save 20%.
As an engineer, I've seen this happen many, many times. One we were working on a system that was estimated to cost about $100M but turned out to be more like $115M. So after spending $100M of your tax dolars congress decided not to spend the extra $15 and told us the "trash it all". And they did.
Same here. the planning and hardware is complete. All the salary to the hundreds of people involved over several years is mostly already spent long ago. Cancelling the mission will save very little of the total mission budget.
It depends on the time scale. Yes we WILL be a dead end unless we leave the Earth but we have a billion years (more or less) before we are forced to leave. So if we explore space now or wait 10,000 years it makes little difference. On the cosmic scale 10,000 years is "nothing".
We will eventually learn to live on Earth in a sustainable, stable way.
as to how they found the edges of the deposits - ground penetrating radar maybe?
Much of the area around there is just plain out dirt. The tar is in large pockets. They likely dug out the dirt. The tarpits are now surouned by a nice grass covered park. The tar is only in places where crude oil bubbles up through small cracks
The entire area at one time was an oil feild. It was such an obvious place to drill because the oil was visible at the surface. So it was drilled and pumped out in the eraly 20th century, mostly. There are a few operating wells around still.
They also have a collection a humans who were either trying to drink the water floating on the tar (for those non-locals, reading this, the tar pits look like a small lake.) and thought they were smarter then the animals who tried and got stuck.
BTW, a smart human who falls in should look at the ducks that are around. It is easy to swim to the edge because people will float on both water and tar. Lay flat on your back and you don't sink. But then I bet few of the native Americans living 10,000 years ago knew how to swim.
Airplanes have this same problem. If the pilot is stupid he can "run out of airspace" and impact the ground. He always has to remember to keep his altitude about the local elevation. Yes sometimes pilots fail to do this.
And with cars. Drivers always have to keep to the "corect" side of the painted line to avoid head-on cloosions
In all case it amounts to not going to the wrong place. This new device is no different.
That said. I bet there is a smal pressure "reserve" in the jet pack. Enough for one second of flight if the surface power fails so you don't fall if something goes wrong.
30 light years is very close. If you send information it would not be a "conversation". you would just start sending and leave the transmitters on 24x7 "forever" Both sides I asume would do the same.
As for travel. The best we can hope for realistically is maybe 1/2 the speed of light. trips would be measured in lifetimes
I wonder if they could include this profiling in an opt-in user service.
YES. They have already. It is Open Source. Anyone can build it themselves. It is not all that hard to download the code and compile on your own machine. Big advantage too in that you can build it for your exact CPU too.
Slashdot Mirror
How come when companies break the law they get to "agree" on the punishment?
This is like asking "How come cows can fly?" They can't so the question is meaningless. In your case companies do not do anything, people within those companies do things. Because there are many people within a company many things can be done at the same time. Some times even at cross purposes.
In this case one person did the price fixing. Then later another person agreed to pay the fine. Almost certainly this was not the same person.
OK so the battery car battery could be charged in 10 seconds but who has "kilo-amp" sized outlets. What are you going to plug your charger into?
Not "Brainless research" but "brainless reporting of research".
Or maybe brainless readers. Yes the problem is with people who get there science education by reading web Blogs and CNN headlines. The people who write forthose outlets are really trying to sell ad space. Don't blame the researchers because to ideot blogger jumped on the story and bend it around to snag a few more click-thoughs on his web site ads.
"I don't know" might be a frequent response) which (by my definition, at least) 'understands' the question."
Actually if the machine is being truthful "I don't know" is a very sophisticated answer. It means the machine has searched its store of information and deduced that the answer can not be derived from that store.
The trouble is that as a software engineer, I know that the designers will simply design the system to say "I don't know" whenever the system fails to find the answer.
Failing to find is MUCH different than knowing for certain something is not there.
The problem is the "disappearing AI". You figure that X requires "thinking" but then when they build a machine to do X you can take it aparts and understand how it works and then you say "That is not thinking it is just a mechanical process". The trouble is that the above applies for any X.
We can even make "X" be "Free Will". A simple way to do that is to use random numbers. The machine "thinks" of hundreds of random actions, evaluates each and then does one of them. Of course this action changes the state of the machine's world and in the next iteration the machine evaluates potential action in light of this changed world. After thousands of iterations we have unpredictable but rational actions. But still we can take apart the machine and see that it is only "mechanical". YES it is non-derterministic but still mechanical.
You can never get past the "disappearing AI" problem as long as the machine can be taken apart and understood.
OK. so there is the solution. Buid things we can't understand. Don't worry. This will happen soon after AIs start building AI and we let this pprocess so go for some time
The European amateurs don't have nuclear weapons and they don't make threats.
Kind of the same with guns. A responsible hunter keeping one locked in a gun safe is different than some gang member having one in his pocket.
"they're trying to get things right."
Yes. I'll believe they are "trying". But they have a LONG ways to go and need to try harder. Last week I ordered some sheet music. It was two thin 12x9 inch booklets. Less than 100 pages total. UPS delivered the package in a 24x12x18 inch cardboard box. The box contained the books and quite a bit of packing material. I was expecting a padded envelope.
"try" is not enough. What Amazon should do is let the shippers keep 5% of what they save over a year ago average. They get the saving as year end bonuses.
To all of those who don't think they want to see "executable code" in a PDF document....
How else would you implement a typesetting language? There is a big problem with simple bitmapped fonts, they don't scale, no sharp edges unless the scale of the bitmap exactly matches the screen resolution. So we need __instructions__ on how to draw the characters. Also those instructions change if the characters is large or small relative to the screen resolution. You can't make goos looking documents without some kind of interpreter. All good typesetters are interpreter.
That said you COULD make a safe interpreter by limiting what it has access to.
No the moon really is a bad place to build stuff. Yes there are no storms or wind. But moon dust, unlike dust on Earth or even mars looks and cats like ground glass. The stuff gets into everything and is very abrasive. Anything that moves will not last long unless you figure a way to keep the dust away.
Here on Earth crushed rock (sand) becomes rounded quickly. But not on the moon.
These are CONTRACTORS not employees. The whole reason a company uses contract labor is so they can adjust the number of bodies to the workload without having to later layoff their own employees. In other works these a TEMPORARY jobs. Everyone understood they were temporary and would not last. I don't even count not renewing a contract with a layoff
I was a contractor once too. And sure enough we were the first to go. With all of about 20 minutes notice at that. Cutting your pay is just a very nice way to say "Find another job, soon." The more normal way to say that to a contractors is "Find another job."
Read the story "Volt" is a "temp agency". Our company uses Volt too. For thing like when a normal emplyee is on extended sick leave, they might hire someone on a 6 month contract.
I'm a software developer. I've had a few periods where I was unemployed. I think that is when I wrote the most open source software. I had time. What else does a software guy do when he has plenty of spare time?
Yes a destruct password would be usful but even better how about a "Clean Password" when you enter that you get real data but not the same data as if you had entered yur real password. Then when they ask you to decrypt the hiddel files you can enter the clean password and the cops get to see yoy "secret business plans" and some customer lists and other boring stuff. They would thing nothig of it because that is what everyone encrypts.
Without explaining it, just rust me this can be done. It would not fool a good cryptographer. He's figure it out but very few cops would and you would still have the "destruct password" to be used as a last resort.
BUT,... the destruct password would have to simulate a hardware failure. It would have to write trash to the disk and then re-flash the drive's firmware with random bits
I don't see anything special about those guns. We Dutch had the same guns on our trade- and war ships in that time. They can shoot a cannonball to a distance of about a kilometer.
What WAS special was not the size or the range but the fact that the guns were all IDENTICAL and that the shot madefor one gun could be used for any other gun. Today we are used to interchangeable parts but in those days except in England guns are made one at a time by highly skilled craftsmen. These guns must have been made in a factory using standardized precision tooling.
What this implies is that the English economy could support a (for the time) huge arms factory and the research and redevelopment that standardized tooling implies. Other governments of the time simply payed for guns, not gun factories.
It's a unfair advantage that the OS vendors can see the source code of FF, however the reverse is not true. So if Safari has this great performance, how can the FF figure out how Safari does it?
First off if people have to copy you then by definition you are in the lead.
I write Open Source code and don't see it as a disadvantage. The reason I make it open source is that I WANT others to use it. I have a day job to pay the bills.
You have to look at the motivation of the people working on the software. Some peo9ple just like to make things, some paint, some make photos some make software. All of this beats watching TV.
where's the justice?
The rules change when you are a monopoly. Apple is far from a monopoly.
The reason for these laws is that it is easy for a monopoly to exploit it's position. Microsoft it in fact do this. There use to be real competition between browsers theat was before MS bundled IE with Windows.
Good idea. But someone already thought of this. As I write this I think NASA has about a dozen on-going missions right now and about a dozen more in the pipeline. They've been following you suggestion for about the last 50 years.
I work in the space launch business and we are bussy with one average of more then one launch per month. Many are military but there are a fair number of NASA and commercial launches too.
"I've got a picture of how I'd like this to work in my head, but I can't find any software out there that seems to go along with it. I'm a big fan of keeping things simple, so I'd like to start with high level overviews. Each step in the process would be a general statement like 'Look for valid traffic on the monitoring interface'. For those who already know what 'valid traffic' means, it's easy to follow. However, if there was someone who was unsure what it meant, there would be a link they could click on that would pop open a new window (or something similar) explaining in detail what we're looking for and how to find it.
What you do is start a local, specialized verion of Wikipeadia. So if you are hire to shoot squirrels you can read the general overview what it says "Aim your gun at a squirrel then shoot it" but if you click on "gun" to lland of the artical where it explains about a tube that shoots from one and and how to not point the shooting end at anything you don't want dead.
The nice thing about Wiki is that (1) The software is free and everyone knows how to use it and (2) your documents cn grow over time and stay up to date.
That said my bosses still like paper documents. They like a nice neat product that can be called "complete" and get approval signatures on it. But then I ask "have you ever seen anyone READ one of those documents?" It's a generational thing. But I really do thing a living hyper linked document is the only why to go. If you have control issue then you need some kind of revision control system hooked up to the Wiki. Those are available and not hard to use. You can have a working wiki and periodically turn over the "approved" version controlled Wiki to the public if you like to work that way.
"Nasa does not want to fix the Hubble as there budgets have been cut. They want to put the money for fixing the Hubble into something else."
By the time a typical mission launches you have already spend MOST of it's budget. Any time you see a mission cancelled, unless it is cancelled at a very early, pre-development stage then what you are seeing is 80% of the cost flushed down the toilet in an effort to save 20%.
As an engineer, I've seen this happen many, many times. One we were working on a system that was estimated to cost about $100M but turned out to be more like $115M. So after spending $100M of your tax dolars congress decided not to spend the extra $15 and told us the "trash it all". And they did.
Same here. the planning and hardware is complete. All the salary to the hundreds of people involved over several years is mostly already spent long ago. Cancelling the mission will save very little of the total mission budget.
It depends on the time scale. Yes we WILL be a dead end unless we leave the Earth but we have a billion years (more or less) before we are forced to leave. So if we explore space now or wait 10,000 years it makes little difference. On the cosmic scale 10,000 years is "nothing".
We will eventually learn to live on Earth in a sustainable, stable way.
as to how they found the edges of the deposits - ground penetrating radar maybe?
Much of the area around there is just plain out dirt. The tar is in large pockets. They likely dug out the dirt. The tarpits are now surouned by a nice grass covered park. The tar is only in places where crude oil bubbles up through small cracks
The entire area at one time was an oil feild. It was such an obvious place to drill because the oil was visible at the surface. So it was drilled and pumped out in the eraly 20th century, mostly. There are a few operating wells around still.
They also have a collection a humans who were either trying to drink the water floating on the tar (for those non-locals, reading this, the tar pits look like a small lake.) and thought they were smarter then the animals who tried and got stuck.
BTW, a smart human who falls in should look at the ducks that are around. It is easy to swim to the edge because people will float on both water and tar. Lay flat on your back and you don't sink. But then I bet few of the native Americans living 10,000 years ago knew how to swim.
Airplanes have this same problem. If the pilot is stupid he can "run out of airspace" and impact the ground. He always has to remember to keep his altitude about the local elevation. Yes sometimes pilots fail to do this.
And with cars. Drivers always have to keep to the "corect" side of the painted line to avoid head-on cloosions
In all case it amounts to not going to the wrong place. This new device is no different.
That said. I bet there is a smal pressure "reserve" in the jet pack. Enough for one second of flight if the surface power fails so you don't fall if something goes wrong.
30 light years is very close. If you send information it would not be a "conversation". you would just start sending and leave the transmitters on 24x7 "forever" Both sides I asume would do the same.
As for travel. The best we can hope for realistically is maybe 1/2 the speed of light. trips would be measured in lifetimes
I wonder if they could include this profiling in an opt-in user service.
YES. They have already. It is Open Source. Anyone can build it themselves. It is not all that hard to download the code and compile on your own machine. Big advantage too in that you can build it for your exact CPU too.
The biblical flood may be a story about a real flood that happened when the Black sea formed
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Black_Sea#Deluge_Hypothesis