"X creates a hostile [work] environment for Y" is not a question of opinion. It is a question of law and facts
Wow. So, you can factually measure a "hostile working environment", no opinion necessary? Set up a meter to record hostility radiation, maybe? And laws are always, always, in full, unquestionable agreement with what is right? If something is legal it's OK, and vice-versa? 'cause, laws in different places (and times!) are different: if this had happened in somewhere else (and assuming you're right that this memo was legal while the firing was illegal, which I really, really think you're super wrong about... but I'll get to that) where the laws were against the ex-employee, you'd suddenly be shouting down anyone saying Google was the bad guy, would you? "The law on this side of the border says this is hostile, the guy should never work again! Wait, hang on, let me check that map again..."
So, yeah: I absolutely, 100%, disagree that this isn't a matter of opinion, (possibly alongside law and facts, but absolutely not in complete deference to the former, nor singular interpretation of the latter). Which is why the rest of what you said is pretty much irrelevant to me. But, for funsies, let's play on your yard for a bit.
That goes back to my original assertion, which you rejected, that Google did not have to choose between establishing two different kinds of hostile environment.
Well, buttercup, funny thing. You've linked... umm... jury instructions from one court about a subset of hostile work environment cases? OK. And they conclude that... let's see, what's that last sentence there... "An employer may be held liable for the actionable third-party harassment of its employees when it ratifies or condones the conduct by failing to investigate and remedy it after learning of it.... Title VII prohibits discrimination against any individual..." Well, gosh, that looks like it says, if Google hadn't investigated and "remedied" the situation this guy's memo caused, they could be held as ratifying or condoning those actions and could be held liable. Aaand... let me see here... absolutely nothing about what that remedy must or mustn't be. Congratulations: you've supplied one link that does nothing to support your stance, and in fact just confirms Google probably couldn't legally do nothing.
Now, if you'd clicked the little link at the bottom of that page, to "10.5 CIVIL RIGHTS—TITLE VII—HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT—HARASSMENT BECAUSE OF PROTECTED CHARACTERISTICS—ELEMENTS", you'd come to something at least slightly more relevant, and at least slightly more enlightening. (Hey, did you know that sex is one of Title Vii's protected characteristics? Learning is fun!) For one thing, it sets aside the circumstance in which a working environment can be described as hostile, and... hey, what do you know? They mostly boil down to "did the people involved feel it made the environment hostile" and "would a reasonable person feel if made the working environment hostile". (Protip: "reasonable person" is not necessarily synonymous with "person who agrees with you".) Sounds like a matter of opinion to me!
I do love this. In an argument about what constitutes sexual harassment, you were literally linked one click away from a page explaining how this applies. Sooooo close.
Now, you basically have two choices right now. First: find a parent, gives them the baby eyes until they lend you the cash to hire a lawyer because you want to win one over the bad man on the internet, and get them to write you up some cast-iron legal arguments proving that Google was in the wrong here. (And if they do, don't waste posting it time here: contact this guy and let him know you've found a bullshit artist good enough to get him some of that sweet lawsuit payout, if he gives you a cut.) Second: move on. When all it takes to rip your side apart is to read the single link that you supplied, y
I think my favourite bit about this, apart from you still failing your reading roll (learn the difference between a stated opinion and a claimed fact, cheers), is the use of the "sorry that offends you, snowflake" meme. Aww, bless, you think you're edgey.
By the way, I was serious about that "other tech site" thing, so if you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Not sure if you've noticed, but slashdot has started pulling some illiterate, hateful, faux-logical idiots recently.
Your argument is that Google had only two options.
Stop. Go back to my first comment. Find the first word; it's pretty small, two letters, you may have missed it. Think about that first word. Consider how it may impact on the meaning of the sentence that follows. Try imagining the sentence with and without that word, to see how it changes the meaning of the sentence as a whole. This may help you shed a false assumption you're working from, possibly with a few reading comprehension lessons; if you don't get it, come back and let me know, and I'll try to help you. No guarantees; I'm not a miracle worker.
As a side note, if, while you're doing this, your mind starts wandering to the question of whether the viewpoints you're investing your time in protecting are really worth it, embrace that. Ask yourself if it's really contributing, even in a small way, to making the world overall better for everyone. Take a walk. Look at trees. Talk to friends. Think about people facing struggles you aren't. Spend as much time as you like on it, as much as you can.
Right, and you saying it isn't so doesn't stop it being so either. Do you see? As for the courts, well, let's just say I have a suspicion it isn't quite so clear-cut as you make out.
If the choices are to make the environment hostile to people who question feminist "dogma", or to allow it to be a hostile environment for woman, Google made the right choice. Oh, and given discrimination laws and their own terms of employment are against the (former) employee's behaviour here, good luck on that "unlawful firing" thing. "5: Insightful" my ass.
As a tangent not directed specifically at (but definitely including) you, this article's comments have been a wakeup call to me on just how awful the wider slashdot community has become. Anyone know of any half-decent tech news sites out there that aren't filled with terrified little people who think 1) that you need a penis to write good code, and 2) you should get to say so, at work, without repercussions?
Old systems can be re-purposed for many things without major snaking and wall destruction to install new wiring.
I've read through about half the comments here (at -1), replies to a question specifically asking how these could be repurposed... and no-one's come up with anything. (Well, except "it could be a low-grade antenna", with no followup on what it could be an antenna for, and a bunch of replies saying it wouldn't work.)
Can you describe some of the "many things" this cable could be repurposed for? I suspect the OP would appreciate it.
having "unique" plug types for particular purposes is a *feature*, not a bug - simply by looking at the plug, we know what the cable and the port does.
Surely that's only important if the plug and cable are limited in what they can do? I mean, if my PC has separate ports for my PS/2 mouse and my PS/2 keyboard, it's important for me to know that the two are different and I shouldn't plug the latter into the socket for the former. It's far less important when they have identical ports and sockets and it doesn't matter which way round they go.
There are absolutely some scenarios where distinguishing them is useful, but they've become small and rare enough (over IT users as a whole, perhaps not for you personally) that, compared to the benefits of just having ports and cables be nigh-interchangeable across most or all or your devices (if it fits, it's good), it's a great trade off; most people don't care how much power their USB cable provides, just that it works. (And, OK, yeah, they probably should care, but that's another issue. And, come to think of it, so is the existence of crappily-made cables that don't fit the standard: that's not a problem with the standard).
I mean, I notice that the big complaint you mention (Displayport/Thunderbolt) is an issue is where there are two physically compatible, but only partially functionally incompatible, cables. That's not "one-plug-for-everything", that's "one plug for some things, and now a second identical plug that does those things but also some more things that the first doesn't"; it's closer to PS/2 than USB. If those two cables had stayed as one that did everything, there'd be no problem... which is exactly where the trend you're arguing against is leading, and has been for the past couple of decades. And damned if life isn't a lot easier than it used to be. For most of us, anyway.
The summary suggests that the desperately-needed answer to the issue of people being split between multiple communication platforms... is another platform. I probably don't need to go over why that doesn't make much sense but, to summarise: not everyone would go over to it, and then you've just introduced one more circle to the diagram.
Personally, my approach would be an umbrella app, linked to whatever existing platforms you use but abstracting out the particulars, and configurable based on the user's priorities (security, functionality, speed, cost etc). When you want to talk, you add the people (potentially setting some other parameters as well), and it intelligently decides what the best platform is to send your message/host your discussion. "Oh, you want to have a personal discussion with Roy and July? I'll use WhatsApp, they both use it and respond quick.Oh, you need a confidential business discussion with Paula, Derek and Sam? They all use email, but that's a low security channel: do you want to use it anyway, set up a Slack channel with P & D and invite S to join, or Slack with P & D and send a separate message to S by Yammer?"
While universal IM clients go some way towards this, the next steps are to group contacts across services for individuals, start including none-IM contact methods (email, SMS etc), and to pull the decision of how to contact people from the user to the client. That said, I'm out of date of UIMs, it may be that some already do some/all of this?
7) Failure of online services to make 2d and 3d the same digital product so you didn't have to
choose.
This is a big one for me, both online and off. Separating 2D and 3D versions into two products (or as a more expensive variant to 2D only) leads to a chicken/egg scenario: I don't yet have a 3D setup, so I'm not buying any 3D content, so I have nothing to warrant a 3D setup, and round and round we go. If it was standard that buying a film online or a boxed disc got you the 2D and 3D versions, I'd have days worth of 3D content by now, and plenty of reason to be pricing up the hardware to view it.
It's similar to what happened with Blu-Ray. Once it became relatively commonplace for Blu-Rays movies to include digital copies, I started buying them far more because I was no longer having to choose between a DVD I could watch pretty much anywhere, or a Blu-Ray which looked nicer.
Even the Daily Mail sometimes gets it right. Whether they did this time, I don't know, but it is in line with what I have read over the last year from more reliable sources.
That's kinda the point. Talking about a groundbreaking medical breakthrough and giving the Mail as a source is a bit like trying to convince someone that global warming is real by directing them to your weird drunken uncle who also supports the flat earth theory and thinks all muslims are terrorists; you may be right, but you've chosen an awful method of convincing anyone of it.
I'd genuinely love a few links to those reliable sources you mentioned; I can't trust a word the Mail publishes.
Roughly 99% of internet users. About 0.2% deliberately disable javascript.
That data is from 2013. A quick search didn't bring up anything more recent, but I doubt there's been a humongous sway in javascript use among the general populace. Keep in mind that Slashdot users such as us are, almost by definition, not representative of the average internet user; just because it's common amongst your circle to disable javascript by default, doesn't mean that's common for everyone else.
Plus, it'd be interesting to know exactly what metric is being measured here. What fatalities are we talking about: just the occupants of the car itself, or other fatalities (occupants of other vehicles, pedestrians etc)? Are fatalities related to "AI vehicles" being counted even when they're being driven by humans at the time? What about when they're being placed under AI control in circumstances where they shouldn't be (so driver error in choosing to use the tool incorrectly, rather than the tool itself being faulty)?
Basically: hey, geoskd, can we get a citation over here?
One of the biggest reasons for AllMyVideos (and a number of other similar sites) to exist is for hosting all the copyright-violating stuff that the big boys like YouTube and DailyMotion detect and block.
One of the other biggest reasons for for AllMyVideos (and a number of other similar sites) to exist is for hosting all the none copyright-violating stuff that the big boys like YouTube and DailyMotion misdetect and wrongly block.
[quote]When a human gets in an accident, most start driving a bit slower and more carefully, thus increasing their overall safety.[/quote]
People slow down to get a better look at the accident, and lose focus from their driving. From the wikipedia entry for "rubbernecking":
According to a 2003 study in the U.S., rubbernecking was the cause of 16% of distraction-related traffic accidents.
With Al, the accident will get fixed specifically on a left turn, but then happen on a right turn.
Assuming that's true (and I have no reason to accept it is, at least as an inherent flaw of the process; I could argue that, at least as often, fixing the root of the left hand crash could prevent the equivalent right hand crash and a whole set of unforeseen related situations from ever happening), that's still better than for humans, where people could collectively have 1,000 of the same type of crash turning left, 1,000 turning right, and then see absolutely no drop in the number of those types of crash.
It will take a long time to work through all the possibilities because even though they are called AI, there is no adaptation.
Not a problem. The claim here isn't "AI will start perfect and always be perfect", it's "AI will rapidly become, and then always be, better than the average driver". Once that happens, lives are already being saved, and it'll only get better (especially as more SDCs get on the road, planning optimal movements together, dealing with less unpredictable human drivers).
...Because when a fallible human makes a mistake driving a car, an accident can occur right there and then, while when a fallible human makes a mistake programming the AI for the car, it's followed by months, or years, or decades of testing and oversight during which someone can say "hey, there's a mistake here, let's fix that" before any real-world accidents are possible.
Plus, when a fallible human makes a mistake that gets someone killed, the best case scenario (from a future safety point of view) is that they individually learn from that mistake, and they individually avoid that issue in future. When a self-driving car makes a mistake that gets someone killed, the situation can be accurately recorded, examined, discussed, fixed, and rolled out in such a way that no self-driving car ever makes that same mistake again.
bureaucrats trying to slow progress because it isn't perfectly safe
Do we know that the test would force them to be "perfectly safe"?
I genuinely want to know, I've no idea what those 15 points are, or whether or not they're reasonable. The summary just makes it sound like Toyota is upset at the test being there at all, rather than the contents of the test; I could check TFA, but that isn't the Slashdot way. If Toyota are just objecting to the test on principle, I'm with ACs post; oversight isn't an inherently bad thing. On the other hand, if it is the contents of the test itself, or some limit of how that testing has to be done that's truly stifling, I'm interested to hear what those problems are.
Mars is an easier place to build a base than the Moon. You send the people to Mars, they build the infrastructure and refuel the ship, then they send the ship back. Meanwhile, they start producing drinkable water, breathable air, and food, all things that can theoretically be done there. When the next people show up, the ground has been broken, and the second wave can get started helping out, while the first wave start pumping the fuel (from the system they built the first time round) into the ship to get it heading back as soon as the second wavers are unloaded. People can be, and will be, kept busy building, colonising and terraforming.
The Moon, on the other hand, is a rock. You can't produce air, you have to bring your own water etc. Production of the basic essentials for human survival is impractical, if not outright impossible; the best you can hope for is efficient recycling, which isn't helpful for a growing colony. Once you've built the shelter (entirely from things you brought with you) and plugged in your recycling systems (which you brought with you), you're done; wait for the next shipment of supplies to arrive. When the next wave arrive, they're going to be setting up their new base, but it's not like you're going to have made any supplies to help them out.
So the Moon is closer, sure, but without a way to easily produce the things you need (not forgetting refueling the ship to return it), the only advantages it has over Mars are a shorter travel time to Earth, and less gravity to fight as you leave. Basically, it seems a heck of a lot easier to build a base on Mars than the Moon... even if the commute is a pain.
As individuals? Sure, I'm sure that applies to some people. As a species? Well, apparently not, given we've considered the possibility reasonable enough to have groups dedicated to trying to find examples of it.
As soon as I heard that someone's avatar was described as being two giraffes, I knew it was going to be in black and white. As far as I can tell, their algorithm thinks that any greyscale image includes two giraffes. A rorschach test image, an art piece with a stylised tree, a black and white MS Paint picture of a stick-man Dumbledore, everything I could find got described as two giraffes (often in a "fenced-off area").
Slashdot Mirror
"X creates a hostile [work] environment for Y" is not a question of opinion. It is a question of law and facts
Wow. So, you can factually measure a "hostile working environment", no opinion necessary? Set up a meter to record hostility radiation, maybe? And laws are always, always, in full, unquestionable agreement with what is right? If something is legal it's OK, and vice-versa? 'cause, laws in different places (and times!) are different: if this had happened in somewhere else (and assuming you're right that this memo was legal while the firing was illegal, which I really, really think you're super wrong about... but I'll get to that) where the laws were against the ex-employee, you'd suddenly be shouting down anyone saying Google was the bad guy, would you? "The law on this side of the border says this is hostile, the guy should never work again! Wait, hang on, let me check that map again..."
So, yeah: I absolutely, 100%, disagree that this isn't a matter of opinion, (possibly alongside law and facts, but absolutely not in complete deference to the former, nor singular interpretation of the latter). Which is why the rest of what you said is pretty much irrelevant to me. But, for funsies, let's play on your yard for a bit.
That goes back to my original assertion, which you rejected, that Google did not have to choose between establishing two different kinds of hostile environment.
Well, buttercup, funny thing. You've linked... umm... jury instructions from one court about a subset of hostile work environment cases? OK. And they conclude that... let's see, what's that last sentence there... "An employer may be held liable for the actionable third-party harassment of its employees when it ratifies or condones the conduct by failing to investigate and remedy it after learning of it. ... Title VII prohibits discrimination against any individual..." Well, gosh, that looks like it says, if Google hadn't investigated and "remedied" the situation this guy's memo caused, they could be held as ratifying or condoning those actions and could be held liable. Aaand... let me see here... absolutely nothing about what that remedy must or mustn't be. Congratulations: you've supplied one link that does nothing to support your stance, and in fact just confirms Google probably couldn't legally do nothing.
Now, if you'd clicked the little link at the bottom of that page, to "10.5 CIVIL RIGHTS—TITLE VII—HOSTILE WORK ENVIRONMENT—HARASSMENT BECAUSE OF PROTECTED CHARACTERISTICS—ELEMENTS", you'd come to something at least slightly more relevant, and at least slightly more enlightening. (Hey, did you know that sex is one of Title Vii's protected characteristics? Learning is fun!) For one thing, it sets aside the circumstance in which a working environment can be described as hostile, and... hey, what do you know? They mostly boil down to "did the people involved feel it made the environment hostile" and "would a reasonable person feel if made the working environment hostile". (Protip: "reasonable person" is not necessarily synonymous with "person who agrees with you".) Sounds like a matter of opinion to me!
I do love this. In an argument about what constitutes sexual harassment, you were literally linked one click away from a page explaining how this applies. Sooooo close.
Now, you basically have two choices right now. First: find a parent, gives them the baby eyes until they lend you the cash to hire a lawyer because you want to win one over the bad man on the internet, and get them to write you up some cast-iron legal arguments proving that Google was in the wrong here. (And if they do, don't waste posting it time here: contact this guy and let him know you've found a bullshit artist good enough to get him some of that sweet lawsuit payout, if he gives you a cut.) Second: move on. When all it takes to rip your side apart is to read the single link that you supplied, y
I think my favourite bit about this, apart from you still failing your reading roll (learn the difference between a stated opinion and a claimed fact, cheers), is the use of the "sorry that offends you, snowflake" meme. Aww, bless, you think you're edgey.
By the way, I was serious about that "other tech site" thing, so if you have any suggestions, I'd love to hear them. Not sure if you've noticed, but slashdot has started pulling some illiterate, hateful, faux-logical idiots recently.
Your argument is that Google had only two options.
Stop. Go back to my first comment. Find the first word; it's pretty small, two letters, you may have missed it. Think about that first word. Consider how it may impact on the meaning of the sentence that follows. Try imagining the sentence with and without that word, to see how it changes the meaning of the sentence as a whole. This may help you shed a false assumption you're working from, possibly with a few reading comprehension lessons; if you don't get it, come back and let me know, and I'll try to help you. No guarantees; I'm not a miracle worker.
As a side note, if, while you're doing this, your mind starts wandering to the question of whether the viewpoints you're investing your time in protecting are really worth it, embrace that. Ask yourself if it's really contributing, even in a small way, to making the world overall better for everyone. Take a walk. Look at trees. Talk to friends. Think about people facing struggles you aren't. Spend as much time as you like on it, as much as you can.
Right, and you saying it isn't so doesn't stop it being so either. Do you see? As for the courts, well, let's just say I have a suspicion it isn't quite so clear-cut as you make out.
Isn't it? I suspect they'd say that memos like that do, in fact, create a hostile environment for the women who work there. I know I would.
If the choices are to make the environment hostile to people who question feminist "dogma", or to allow it to be a hostile environment for woman, Google made the right choice. Oh, and given discrimination laws and their own terms of employment are against the (former) employee's behaviour here, good luck on that "unlawful firing" thing. "5: Insightful" my ass.
As a tangent not directed specifically at (but definitely including) you, this article's comments have been a wakeup call to me on just how awful the wider slashdot community has become. Anyone know of any half-decent tech news sites out there that aren't filled with terrified little people who think 1) that you need a penis to write good code, and 2) you should get to say so, at work, without repercussions?
What, your smartphone isn't running Windows XP?!?
Without disagreeing with your larger point ...
Old systems can be re-purposed for many things without major snaking and wall destruction to install new wiring.
I've read through about half the comments here (at -1), replies to a question specifically asking how these could be repurposed... and no-one's come up with anything. (Well, except "it could be a low-grade antenna", with no followup on what it could be an antenna for, and a bunch of replies saying it wouldn't work.)
Can you describe some of the "many things" this cable could be repurposed for? I suspect the OP would appreciate it.
having "unique" plug types for particular purposes is a *feature*, not a bug - simply by looking at the plug, we know what the cable and the port does.
Surely that's only important if the plug and cable are limited in what they can do? I mean, if my PC has separate ports for my PS/2 mouse and my PS/2 keyboard, it's important for me to know that the two are different and I shouldn't plug the latter into the socket for the former. It's far less important when they have identical ports and sockets and it doesn't matter which way round they go.
There are absolutely some scenarios where distinguishing them is useful, but they've become small and rare enough (over IT users as a whole, perhaps not for you personally) that, compared to the benefits of just having ports and cables be nigh-interchangeable across most or all or your devices (if it fits, it's good), it's a great trade off; most people don't care how much power their USB cable provides, just that it works. (And, OK, yeah, they probably should care, but that's another issue. And, come to think of it, so is the existence of crappily-made cables that don't fit the standard: that's not a problem with the standard).
I mean, I notice that the big complaint you mention (Displayport/Thunderbolt) is an issue is where there are two physically compatible, but only partially functionally incompatible, cables. That's not "one-plug-for-everything", that's "one plug for some things, and now a second identical plug that does those things but also some more things that the first doesn't"; it's closer to PS/2 than USB. If those two cables had stayed as one that did everything, there'd be no problem... which is exactly where the trend you're arguing against is leading, and has been for the past couple of decades. And damned if life isn't a lot easier than it used to be. For most of us, anyway.
That's the average for full-time workers; 31 hours is the average including part-time work.
Throughout April, NOA territories will receive the last shipments of Nintendo Entertainment System: NES Classic Edition systems for this year.
for this year
for this year
I would not be surprised if news of the NES Classic's demise is being greatly exaggerated.
The summary suggests that the desperately-needed answer to the issue of people being split between multiple communication platforms... is another platform. I probably don't need to go over why that doesn't make much sense but, to summarise: not everyone would go over to it, and then you've just introduced one more circle to the diagram.
Personally, my approach would be an umbrella app, linked to whatever existing platforms you use but abstracting out the particulars, and configurable based on the user's priorities (security, functionality, speed, cost etc). When you want to talk, you add the people (potentially setting some other parameters as well), and it intelligently decides what the best platform is to send your message/host your discussion. "Oh, you want to have a personal discussion with Roy and July? I'll use WhatsApp, they both use it and respond quick.Oh, you need a confidential business discussion with Paula, Derek and Sam? They all use email, but that's a low security channel: do you want to use it anyway, set up a Slack channel with P & D and invite S to join, or Slack with P & D and send a separate message to S by Yammer?"
While universal IM clients go some way towards this, the next steps are to group contacts across services for individuals, start including none-IM contact methods (email, SMS etc), and to pull the decision of how to contact people from the user to the client. That said, I'm out of date of UIMs, it may be that some already do some/all of this?
7) Failure of online services to make 2d and 3d the same digital product so you didn't have to choose.
This is a big one for me, both online and off. Separating 2D and 3D versions into two products (or as a more expensive variant to 2D only) leads to a chicken/egg scenario: I don't yet have a 3D setup, so I'm not buying any 3D content, so I have nothing to warrant a 3D setup, and round and round we go. If it was standard that buying a film online or a boxed disc got you the 2D and 3D versions, I'd have days worth of 3D content by now, and plenty of reason to be pricing up the hardware to view it.
It's similar to what happened with Blu-Ray. Once it became relatively commonplace for Blu-Rays movies to include digital copies, I started buying them far more because I was no longer having to choose between a DVD I could watch pretty much anywhere, or a Blu-Ray which looked nicer.
Even the Daily Mail sometimes gets it right. Whether they did this time, I don't know, but it is in line with what I have read over the last year from more reliable sources.
That's kinda the point. Talking about a groundbreaking medical breakthrough and giving the Mail as a source is a bit like trying to convince someone that global warming is real by directing them to your weird drunken uncle who also supports the flat earth theory and thinks all muslims are terrorists; you may be right, but you've chosen an awful method of convincing anyone of it.
I'd genuinely love a few links to those reliable sources you mentioned; I can't trust a word the Mail publishes.
who really runs javascript from unknown sites?
Roughly 99% of internet users. About 0.2% deliberately disable javascript. That data is from 2013. A quick search didn't bring up anything more recent, but I doubt there's been a humongous sway in javascript use among the general populace. Keep in mind that Slashdot users such as us are, almost by definition, not representative of the average internet user; just because it's common amongst your circle to disable javascript by default, doesn't mean that's common for everyone else.
Plus, it'd be interesting to know exactly what metric is being measured here. What fatalities are we talking about: just the occupants of the car itself, or other fatalities (occupants of other vehicles, pedestrians etc)? Are fatalities related to "AI vehicles" being counted even when they're being driven by humans at the time? What about when they're being placed under AI control in circumstances where they shouldn't be (so driver error in choosing to use the tool incorrectly, rather than the tool itself being faulty)?
Basically: hey, geoskd, can we get a citation over here?
One of the biggest reasons for AllMyVideos (and a number of other similar sites) to exist is for hosting all the copyright-violating stuff that the big boys like YouTube and DailyMotion detect and block.
One of the other biggest reasons for for AllMyVideos (and a number of other similar sites) to exist is for hosting all the none copyright-violating stuff that the big boys like YouTube and DailyMotion misdetect and wrongly block.
(Also, shoutout to Slashdot's mobile interface for not having an option to preview before posting, awesome setup.)
According to a 2003 study in the U.S., rubbernecking was the cause of 16% of distraction-related traffic accidents.
With Al, the accident will get fixed specifically on a left turn, but then happen on a right turn.
Assuming that's true (and I have no reason to accept it is, at least as an inherent flaw of the process; I could argue that, at least as often, fixing the root of the left hand crash could prevent the equivalent right hand crash and a whole set of unforeseen related situations from ever happening), that's still better than for humans, where people could collectively have 1,000 of the same type of crash turning left, 1,000 turning right, and then see absolutely no drop in the number of those types of crash.
It will take a long time to work through all the possibilities because even though they are called AI, there is no adaptation.
Not a problem. The claim here isn't "AI will start perfect and always be perfect", it's "AI will rapidly become, and then always be, better than the average driver". Once that happens, lives are already being saved, and it'll only get better (especially as more SDCs get on the road, planning optimal movements together, dealing with less unpredictable human drivers).
...Because when a fallible human makes a mistake driving a car, an accident can occur right there and then, while when a fallible human makes a mistake programming the AI for the car, it's followed by months, or years, or decades of testing and oversight during which someone can say "hey, there's a mistake here, let's fix that" before any real-world accidents are possible.
Plus, when a fallible human makes a mistake that gets someone killed, the best case scenario (from a future safety point of view) is that they individually learn from that mistake, and they individually avoid that issue in future. When a self-driving car makes a mistake that gets someone killed, the situation can be accurately recorded, examined, discussed, fixed, and rolled out in such a way that no self-driving car ever makes that same mistake again.
bureaucrats trying to slow progress because it isn't perfectly safe
Do we know that the test would force them to be "perfectly safe"?
I genuinely want to know, I've no idea what those 15 points are, or whether or not they're reasonable. The summary just makes it sound like Toyota is upset at the test being there at all, rather than the contents of the test; I could check TFA, but that isn't the Slashdot way. If Toyota are just objecting to the test on principle, I'm with ACs post; oversight isn't an inherently bad thing. On the other hand, if it is the contents of the test itself, or some limit of how that testing has to be done that's truly stifling, I'm interested to hear what those problems are.
Mars is an easier place to build a base than the Moon. You send the people to Mars, they build the infrastructure and refuel the ship, then they send the ship back. Meanwhile, they start producing drinkable water, breathable air, and food, all things that can theoretically be done there. When the next people show up, the ground has been broken, and the second wave can get started helping out, while the first wave start pumping the fuel (from the system they built the first time round) into the ship to get it heading back as soon as the second wavers are unloaded. People can be, and will be, kept busy building, colonising and terraforming.
The Moon, on the other hand, is a rock. You can't produce air, you have to bring your own water etc. Production of the basic essentials for human survival is impractical, if not outright impossible; the best you can hope for is efficient recycling, which isn't helpful for a growing colony. Once you've built the shelter (entirely from things you brought with you) and plugged in your recycling systems (which you brought with you), you're done; wait for the next shipment of supplies to arrive. When the next wave arrive, they're going to be setting up their new base, but it's not like you're going to have made any supplies to help them out.
So the Moon is closer, sure, but without a way to easily produce the things you need (not forgetting refueling the ship to return it), the only advantages it has over Mars are a shorter travel time to Earth, and less gravity to fight as you leave. Basically, it seems a heck of a lot easier to build a base on Mars than the Moon... even if the commute is a pain.
As individuals? Sure, I'm sure that applies to some people. As a species? Well, apparently not, given we've considered the possibility reasonable enough to have groups dedicated to trying to find examples of it.
As soon as I heard that someone's avatar was described as being two giraffes, I knew it was going to be in black and white. As far as I can tell, their algorithm thinks that any greyscale image includes two giraffes. A rorschach test image, an art piece with a stylised tree, a black and white MS Paint picture of a stick-man Dumbledore, everything I could find got described as two giraffes (often in a "fenced-off area").
So, If I'm willing to pay more, I can get a more powerful device? What a scoop!