While I am sure you're right, and he certainly deserves some sort of punishment, does up to 10 years in prison (with up to three years of supervision after release) and a fine totaling up to $250,000 sound like proportional punishment to you?...
Honestly, prison seems excessive for most any property crime.
You did read that the penalty is "up to" ten years in prison. News stories always mention the maximum sentence for a crime, but first-time offenders with no aggravating factors never get sentenced to the maximum, and defendants that cooperate (by pleading guilty) always get a reduced sentence.
My bet is that he gets sentenced to time served and a fine... and deportation.
While buildings certainly imply human habitation, there are so many exceptions (farming/retail/industrial/utility buildings, abandoned homes, seasonal homes, homeless people, nomads, migrants, refuges, homes with more or less occupants than average [and how do you determine average])
And that's why they use AI, of course. You don't just count buildings, you count and classify types of building, and then use the results of the type of building to estimate the number of people, based on the knowledge gained from other areas where you can correlate the type of building with the number of people.
Your AI is going to have to know ok, this building is for farming, here are the homes for the farmers, that one over there is a utility building, that other one a barn; we see five tractors and three harvesters parked next to a Jeep and two trucks. These other twenty-two objects look like buildings in the orbital images but are actually bales of hay. A hectares are being cultivated. Together on the average this would mean X people associated with these buildings; over here are five houses, which probably house Y people, so given the data, we estimate Z people in this area.
that the results would be next to useless.
The results will be as good as the training of the AI.
Interesting, and it will be quite valuable to actually have this map-- we all pretty much can guess where the population lives, but guessing isn't the same as data.
But... Facebook? Why facebook?
I'm guessing that this is part of their initiative to take over the world by making Facebook the default internet connection for people who aren't currently internet connected.
This argument will never go anywhere, since different people use the word "socialism" to mean different things.
I blame the libertarians, actually. They started accusing any action where a government does something with the intent to benefit its citizens as being "socialism!", and the word has now almost completely lost the original meaning, "worker ownership and control of the means of production."
If two people don't even have the same idea what the word means, however, it's impossible for them to come to any consensus on the trade-offs of benefits, if any, and costs.
No one has suffered any harm here (except the people who made annotations, THAT really sucks).
NO.
If it took zero time and zero effort to find a book, purchase it, and load it on your machine, that might be true.
But, no. For nobody to "suffer any harm", they would need to replace the books on your machine with a copy that you can read that is downloaded from some different service.
If they're making you do the work of finding a copy somwhere else and buying it, that is free labor that they are not paying for. You already did that labor once, now they are telling you to do it again.
There ought to be some workaround to prevent MS from remotely deleting material that you have them already downloaded. I don't know the mechanism they are using for DRM (never used the Microsoft books thing), but most DRMs have a workaround of one kind or another.
(I'm not even sure how this is even legal, but I guess if you're as big as Microsoft, you do what you want and pay lawyers to make it legal. Did the original "purchase" have small print saying "warning! You're not actually buying this product, you're just buying the rights to read it as long as we choose to make it available."?)
Their login database, for software reasons, has to be one of three methods. It has to be a) store 100% of the passwords as plain-text, b) store 100% of the passwords as hashed, or c) be a hybrid system that allows either a plain-text or a hashed password with a marker for each entry specifying whether that entry is hashed or plain.
Or, d) none of the above.
According to the article, there is an interface called "Facebook Lite" that is used for accessing facebook on low-bandwidth connections; it was primarily the Facebook Lite users that had their passwords stored in plain text.
The point is, passwords should never have been available in plaintext in the first place.
What the heck is wrong with them? The techniques for keeping passwords encrypted (or not holding them at all, just the hash) are well known in the business, and have been well known for decades.
They should turn it into a source or revenue for the phone companies. When a phone call completes, have an option for the recipient to charge them $1.00. The phone company keeps half.
Even if it was a penny it would probably work...
^^^^
This is it.
The reason that there are a billion robocalls a day is that there is no cost to making a call. They don't pay for the resources they use.
Even a penny a call would stop the robocalls dead. Even a tenth of a cent would stop them dead.
Since electrical power usage tends to peak during the daytime, the solution is to use solar electricity during the day, and sell the excess to the grid, and then use grid electricity during the night. The grid benefits by not having to generate as much peak power, and you benefit from having the grid power during the night, when there tends to be excess power available.
It's funny how they point to aviation as nearly infallible when they talk about self-driving cars.
Well, it's a little less than one failure in four million flight hours, that's a pretty amazing safety record. If Tesla self-driving was one failure in four million driving hours, I'd call that very near infallible, compared to human drivers, anyway.
But when they do fail, it's spectacular, and makes news.
I assume they're talking about the sensor behind the pitot hole here. Making that the only sensor, and non-redundant, is particularly questionable.
I would assume you're correct here, but it still begs the question as to why this sensor was non-redundant, and how that SPOF design ultimately got approved.
I am baffled as to why, if the problem had been identified, the planes weren't grounded until the software fix was implemented.
Um, in a program about women in tech, spending a year interviewing women for the program but then deciding "we don't need to put any of the women we interviewed on screen, we are only going to feature men saying that women are underrepresented" is, in fact, a solid statement in favor of the point "women are being ignored".
If the program were about Catholic males, and they spent a year interviewing Catholic males but then only used footage of a Muslim woman explaining Catholic culture, you might object, too.
Woosh. I meant NYT and WaPo... NE is more likely to get a story correct than NYT or WaPo. I listed 3 examples of news stories so bad that you should only expect them to happen once every 5 years or so.
But the stories you list show the opposite story from what you implied.
Story 1. Buzzfeed is some internet site. Says nothing about real sources.
The way you can tell legitimate media from spin is that the legitimate media updates their stories when new information becomes available.
story 3. The journalists reported the police report; and when the police report changed the story, the media reported that. This is what you want from journalism. This is what you don't get from internet gossip.
It costs a lot of money to pay those "anonymous sources" that are 100% factually wrong, but hit the narrative the news outlet wants.
I do point out that legitimate news sources have a firm policy against paying sources, anonymous or otherwise. It's the National Enquirer that you're thinking of that pays for scandal, and if you read them, you do get what you pay for, but you don't get journalism.
From the point on where I wrote But you don't actually need to correct for age to compare the predictive power of push-ups vs. treadmill performance I was not talking about correcting for age. So we're talking about different things. Let's stop here.
Ah, I see.
Yes, if you're talking about the ability of a test to predict a person's age, their data says that push-ups predict age better than treadmill performance does.
The data doesn't give results allowing you to compare how well the two tests predict cardiac events, because you can't directly compare the rates of cardiac events between different age groups.
Do you mean that they didn't do both measurements, push-up and thread mill capability, for the same group of test subjects at the same time? Is that what "cohorts don't overlap" means?
No. I said you can't correct for age. "Cohorts don't overlap" means that the age cohorts don't overlap.
I repeat: the pushup data shows simply that number of pushups correlates (negatively) with age.
In other words, after correcting for age the remaining effect is negligible? Just before you told me that they couldn't have corrected for age before making any conclusions because that's too hard, and then you correct for age and draw your own conclusion??
I don't understand your question. I didn't say the effect was "negligible", I said that the data did not support the conclusion. The cohorts did not overlap; you can't compare them, and since you can't compare them you can't say whether there's an effect or not.
To judge the effect of number of push-ups, you would need to compare groups of the same age, which is something that they didn't do.
Age is very hard to correct for in cardiovascular studies
Okay, I'll take your word for it. But you don't actually need to correct for age to compare the predictive power of push-ups vs. treadmill performance. You have three data points for each person, the two fitness measurements and subsequent cardiovascular outcomes. Determining that two of the three correlate better than other two of the tree is purely a numbers game.
It sounds like you are just saying that there are too few test subjects to back the claim?
I repeat: the pushup data shows simply that number of pushups correlates (negatively) with age.
Age correlates with cardiovascular outcome, but that's not news.
Here's a graph of chance of heart attack versus age. https://heart.bmj.com/content/... The 41-pushup group averages 35 years old, which puts them on the very left edge of this graph, which is to all practical purposes "negligible chance of heart attack". Telling me that they have few heart attacks isn't news. Of course they don't, at 35 years, heart attacks are very uncommon.
The less-than-10 pushup group averages 48.4 years old, where the curve is rising... but the standard deviation of 10 means that a significant number of them are over 58 years old, where the curve is definitely non-negligible indeed.
So, the data tells me that the 58 year olds have more heart attacks than the 35 year olds. That's not news.
No, all it shows is that older people have more cardiovascular events than younger ones.
No, it shows that the ability to do push-ups was a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than their stamina on a treadmill test.
No. It shows that ability to do push-ups is a good predictor of... age.
That's what the article says, and the table you linked to does nothing to contradict it. Age is the easiest thing in the world to control for.
Age is very hard to correct for in cardiovascular studies, and when you "correct" two groups that are pretty much non overlapping (the difference in means is larger than the standard deviations), it is effectively impossible. Cardiovascular events are very highly nonlinear with age, and the age they happen to use here is one where the many-push-ups groups is of an age where cardiovascular events are very very rare. Most of the events you're going to find are going to be with the population that is a standard deviation older than the mean.
And in any case, since this "adjustment" of the data is critical to the results they give, they should have documented how they did that adjustment.
Slashdot Mirror
While I am sure you're right, and he certainly deserves some sort of punishment, does up to 10 years in prison (with up to three years of supervision after release) and a fine totaling up to $250,000 sound like proportional punishment to you?...
Honestly, prison seems excessive for most any property crime.
You did read that the penalty is "up to" ten years in prison. News stories always mention the maximum sentence for a crime, but first-time offenders with no aggravating factors never get sentenced to the maximum, and defendants that cooperate (by pleading guilty) always get a reduced sentence.
My bet is that he gets sentenced to time served and a fine... and deportation.
Nice to see that the old Oz classics live on, at least in India. Most people these days only know the movie, not the series of books.
Pleased to meet you.
But you don't have to guess my name, because Facebook has a policy that you have to have your account under your real name.
While buildings certainly imply human habitation, there are so many exceptions (farming/retail/industrial/utility buildings, abandoned homes, seasonal homes, homeless people, nomads, migrants, refuges, homes with more or less occupants than average [and how do you determine average])
And that's why they use AI, of course. You don't just count buildings, you count and classify types of building, and then use the results of the type of building to estimate the number of people, based on the knowledge gained from other areas where you can correlate the type of building with the number of people.
Your AI is going to have to know ok, this building is for farming, here are the homes for the farmers, that one over there is a utility building, that other one a barn; we see five tractors and three harvesters parked next to a Jeep and two trucks. These other twenty-two objects look like buildings in the orbital images but are actually bales of hay. A hectares are being cultivated. Together on the average this would mean X people associated with these buildings; over here are five houses, which probably house Y people, so given the data, we estimate Z people in this area.
that the results would be next to useless.
The results will be as good as the training of the AI.
Interesting, and it will be quite valuable to actually have this map-- we all pretty much can guess where the population lives, but guessing isn't the same as data.
But... Facebook? Why facebook?
I'm guessing that this is part of their initiative to take over the world by making Facebook the default internet connection for people who aren't currently internet connected.
Sigh.
This argument will never go anywhere, since different people use the word "socialism" to mean different things.
I blame the libertarians, actually. They started accusing any action where a government does something with the intent to benefit its citizens as being "socialism!", and the word has now almost completely lost the original meaning, "worker ownership and control of the means of production."
If two people don't even have the same idea what the word means, however, it's impossible for them to come to any consensus on the trade-offs of benefits, if any, and costs.
No one has suffered any harm here (except the people who made annotations, THAT really sucks).
NO.
If it took zero time and zero effort to find a book, purchase it, and load it on your machine, that might be true.
But, no. For nobody to "suffer any harm", they would need to replace the books on your machine with a copy that you can read that is downloaded from some different service.
If they're making you do the work of finding a copy somwhere else and buying it, that is free labor that they are not paying for. You already did that labor once, now they are telling you to do it again.
but your time costs microsoft nothing.
There ought to be some workaround to prevent MS from remotely deleting material that you have them already downloaded. I don't know the mechanism they are using for DRM (never used the Microsoft books thing), but most DRMs have a workaround of one kind or another.
(I'm not even sure how this is even legal, but I guess if you're as big as Microsoft, you do what you want and pay lawyers to make it legal. Did the original "purchase" have small print saying "warning! You're not actually buying this product, you're just buying the rights to read it as long as we choose to make it available."?)
https://www.ghacks.net/2019/04/02/microsoft-is-shutting-down-books-in-microsoft-store/
https://www.engadget.com/2019/04/02/microsoft-store-removes-e-books/
Their login database, for software reasons, has to be one of three methods. It has to be a) store 100% of the passwords as plain-text, b) store 100% of the passwords as hashed, or c) be a hybrid system that allows either a plain-text or a hashed password with a marker for each entry specifying whether that entry is hashed or plain.
Or, d) none of the above.
According to the article, there is an interface called "Facebook Lite" that is used for accessing facebook on low-bandwidth connections; it was primarily the Facebook Lite users that had their passwords stored in plain text.
The point is, passwords should never have been available in plaintext in the first place.
What the heck is wrong with them? The techniques for keeping passwords encrypted (or not holding them at all, just the hash) are well known in the business, and have been well known for decades.
Yes, I believe that would be covered by the phrase "license a library of already released content."
They should turn it into a source or revenue for the phone companies. When a phone call completes, have an option for the recipient to charge them $1.00. The phone company keeps half.
Even if it was a penny it would probably work...
^^^^
This is it.
The reason that there are a billion robocalls a day is that there is no cost to making a call. They don't pay for the resources they use.
Even a penny a call would stop the robocalls dead. Even a tenth of a cent would stop them dead.
The optimum mix of generation is a mix.
Since electrical power usage tends to peak during the daytime, the solution is to use solar electricity during the day, and sell the excess to the grid, and then use grid electricity during the night.
The grid benefits by not having to generate as much peak power, and you benefit from having the grid power during the night, when there tends to be excess power available.
It's funny how they point to aviation as nearly infallible when they talk about self-driving cars.
Well, it's a little less than one failure in four million flight hours, that's a pretty amazing safety record. If Tesla self-driving was one failure in four million driving hours, I'd call that very near infallible, compared to human drivers, anyway.
But when they do fail, it's spectacular, and makes news.
Source: http://planecrashinfo.com/caus...
Why the hell wasn't this the case before?
...
I assume they're talking about the sensor behind the pitot hole here. Making that the only sensor, and non-redundant, is particularly questionable.
I would assume you're correct here, but it still begs the question as to why this sensor was non-redundant, and how that SPOF design ultimately got approved.
I am baffled as to why, if the problem had been identified, the planes weren't grounded until the software fix was implemented.
Alternate source:
https://www.morningstar.com/ne...
Um, in a program about women in tech, spending a year interviewing women for the program but then deciding "we don't need to put any of the women we interviewed on screen, we are only going to feature men saying that women are underrepresented" is, in fact, a solid statement in favor of the point "women are being ignored".
If the program were about Catholic males, and they spent a year interviewing Catholic males but then only used footage of a Muslim woman explaining Catholic culture, you might object, too.
Woosh. I meant NYT and WaPo... NE is more likely to get a story correct than NYT or WaPo. I listed 3 examples of news stories so bad that you should only expect them to happen once every 5 years or so.
But the stories you list show the opposite story from what you implied.
Story 1. Buzzfeed is some internet site. Says nothing about real sources.
Story 2. I assume you didn't actually read the New York Times story of Covington. Here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... and follow-up here: https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
and editorials here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0... and here https://www.nytimes.com/2019/0...
The way you can tell legitimate media from spin is that the legitimate media updates their stories when new information becomes available.
story 3. The journalists reported the police report; and when the police report changed the story, the media reported that. This is what you want from journalism. This is what you don't get from internet gossip.
It costs a lot of money to pay those "anonymous sources" that are 100% factually wrong, but hit the narrative the news outlet wants.
I do point out that legitimate news sources have a firm policy against paying sources, anonymous or otherwise. It's the National Enquirer that you're thinking of that pays for scandal, and if you read them, you do get what you pay for, but you don't get journalism.
Fine
You're not talking about the data, then.
Because age is central to the data. If you've stopped talking about age, you're stopped talking about the data.
From the point on where I wrote But you don't actually need to correct for age to compare the predictive power of push-ups vs. treadmill performance I was not talking about correcting for age. So we're talking about different things. Let's stop here.
Ah, I see.
Yes, if you're talking about the ability of a test to predict a person's age, their data says that push-ups predict age better than treadmill performance does.
The data doesn't give results allowing you to compare how well the two tests predict cardiac events, because you can't directly compare the rates of cardiac events between different age groups.
Do you mean that they didn't do both measurements, push-up and thread mill capability, for the same group of test subjects at the same time? Is that what "cohorts don't overlap" means?
No. I said you can't correct for age. "Cohorts don't overlap" means that the age cohorts don't overlap.
Because we are talking about correcting for age.
I repeat: the pushup data shows simply that number of pushups correlates (negatively) with age.
In other words, after correcting for age the remaining effect is negligible? Just before you told me that they couldn't have corrected for age before making any conclusions because that's too hard, and then you correct for age and draw your own conclusion??
I don't understand your question. I didn't say the effect was "negligible", I said that the data did not support the conclusion. The cohorts did not overlap; you can't compare them, and since you can't compare them you can't say whether there's an effect or not.
To judge the effect of number of push-ups, you would need to compare groups of the same age, which is something that they didn't do.
Age is very hard to correct for in cardiovascular studies
Okay, I'll take your word for it. But you don't actually need to correct for age to compare the predictive power of push-ups vs. treadmill performance. You have three data points for each person, the two fitness measurements and subsequent cardiovascular outcomes. Determining that two of the three correlate better than other two of the tree is purely a numbers game.
It sounds like you are just saying that there are too few test subjects to back the claim?
I repeat: the pushup data shows simply that number of pushups correlates (negatively) with age.
Age correlates with cardiovascular outcome, but that's not news.
Here's a graph of chance of heart attack versus age. https://heart.bmj.com/content/...
The 41-pushup group averages 35 years old, which puts them on the very left edge of this graph, which is to all practical purposes "negligible chance of heart attack". Telling me that they have few heart attacks isn't news. Of course they don't, at 35 years, heart attacks are very uncommon.
The less-than-10 pushup group averages 48.4 years old, where the curve is rising... but the standard deviation of 10 means that a significant number of them are over 58 years old, where the curve is definitely non-negligible indeed.
So, the data tells me that the 58 year olds have more heart attacks than the 35 year olds. That's not news.
No, all it shows is that older people have more cardiovascular events than younger ones.
No, it shows that the ability to do push-ups was a better predictor of cardiovascular disease than their stamina on a treadmill test.
No. It shows that ability to do push-ups is a good predictor of... age.
That's what the article says, and the table you linked to does nothing to contradict it. Age is the easiest thing in the world to control for.
Age is very hard to correct for in cardiovascular studies, and when you "correct" two groups that are pretty much non overlapping (the difference in means is larger than the standard deviations), it is effectively impossible. Cardiovascular events are very highly nonlinear with age, and the age they happen to use here is one where the many-push-ups groups is of an age where cardiovascular events are very very rare. Most of the events you're going to find are going to be with the population that is a standard deviation older than the mean.
And in any case, since this "adjustment" of the data is critical to the results they give, they should have documented how they did that adjustment.