The boundary between "friend" and "enemy" is fuzzy and can change. US sells weapons to a lot of dodgy nations, and the chance of regretting it later is pretty high.
I agree there's a problem: OTHER nations will make them whether we do or not; and therefore we are forced to pursue similar technology to compete and survive.
Such bots will probably need a relatively simple "kill-switch" mechanism that is independent of the rest of the brain. Thus, if the main brain gets hacked or goes berserk, the independent kill-switch can be contacted to disable the entire thing. Because the kill-switch is (hopefully) a relatively simple mechanism, it's easier to prevent it being hacked. There is a risk the enemy will steal the security codes for the kill-switch, but that's a risk we'll have to accept.
If you think about it, cars and key infrastructure will probably need the same safeguards regardless of whether war-bots are built, because they can face similar problems. It's part of a bigger problem: stopping highly-complex machines that are out of control.
[Copy] the Star Wars universe -- program personality disorders into the intelligent robots.
So Trump is an experimental android. Explains a lot.
C4PO: "I'm the best droid, believe me; I know 900 foxtillian languages and everyone knows I translate the best. And I can run the Death-Star better than Vader. I know death. That asthmatic toaster is a total loser! He wastes time yanking off with his light-saber; I'd use Yuuuge weapons to wipe out the enemy in mass, let me tell ya, not play with silly little sabers while a big war rages around me. Low-energy Vader thinks small, really small, and has fake hands, so sad. #MEGA!"
This will create support problems. For example, our intranet has MS-Paint instructions for cropping and resizing images for CMS's and Office documents. If Paint goes away, then users may have to install and figure out something else themselves. We are talking thousands of users at the org. Sure, we can rework our instructions and/or negotiate with the baselining crew, but it's more rework, retraining, and help-desk calls until things settle.
Why yank it? If ain't broke, don't fix it. Windows tools become de-facto infrastructure, for good or bad. If MS keeps jerking users around, they are more likely to switch to Google Docs or something else. Familiarity is MS's only real selling point. Nobody picks MS because they are "good", they pick it for staff familiarity and compatibility. If MS moves the cheese around, they ruin their advantage, shooting their own feet. They shouldn't get cocky and think they are good at new products & change.
I tried to install Paint.NET a couple of years ago and it crashed the OS. Granted, maybe I was a rare case. And GIMP requires too many steps for simple stuff. Often I use MS-Paint for larger-scale rough drafting, and then GIMP to fine-tune it.
Many steps are just quicker in Paint: fewer menu layers and key/mouse-strokes. For one, GIMP's default settings are for larger images; thus if you work with a lot of low-res images, you have to keep re-adjusting GIMP's resolution settings. Maybe there's a way to fudge the defaults?
I don't think they get it, and immediately want to commoditize it such that it becomes junk quickly after it gets adopted. Even the XBox, Microsoft's one good entry into Hardware has suffered from atrophy to the point where most people I know would prefer a ps3/4
Business-wise, it worked "good enough": MS got a foothold into the gaming market and is cruising with the Xbox. They just have to keep it "good enough" for it to be a cash cow in the oligopoly-land of game consoles. If they accidentally slip behind PS, they'll do something to catch up.
Don't confuse business success with "good product" or "logic". For good or bad, being slimy is often profitable.
Prior art. The new kids don't know about the Clippy era; arguably the first commercially-common annoying AI-like "assistant". MS pioneered agitation in many ways.
"Food food food!, Can I lick my balls now? Why can't I sniff human butts? Food food food! Can I lick my balls now? Why can't I sniff human butts? Do I smell a squirrel?"
But after the 2000 dot-com bust computer science enrollments fell dramatically and students soured on the degree. Could something like it happen again?
MS-Office UI's are an utter mess and a feature pack-rat. I have had enough WTF moments when encountering new/changed Office products to fill an encyclopedia (remember those?). The bizarre semi-new "File" menu still makes me cringe. However, over time you just learn how to use Office features out of sheer rote memory because you have to if you want a pay-check.
Further, because everyone is using it, it's easier to find a Googled solution: the Network Effect. You don't know why you have to say press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F4 every third Tuesday of the month in Admin mode if you have a Samsung monitor, but you just learn that you do. Asking "why" is like asking to have Mormon doctrine logically explained. LibreOffice cannot compete with Education-by-Google (yet). MS-Office is the Rube Goldberg machine we know and love...well, at least know.
(I have some ideas for how to organize/manage features and feature-finders for feature-rich products, but that's another topic for another day.)
SCOTUS said it was legal because SCOTUS itself was put in place in part via corporate influence. It's recursive, and may get worse. Yes, a "slippery slope"; they do happen.
Does this mean all of my Periodic Tables are wrong?
Yip, they are no longer "periodic". You can throw it out with your old Solar System model that had Pluto as a planet. (It doesn't balance right if you just tear off one ex-planet.) When Planet 9 is discovered, you'll need a new one again.
Physics is becoming like web dev stacks: you have to replace them every 4 years to keep up with the Joneses.
Think of a long, stretchy, string and the photon is just a ripple on it. Does the ripple have mass? It's just a part of the string! But if you touch the string, you'll feel the ripple moving through because the momentum interacts with you and it feels like something is there.
Because they practically force MS-Cloud down your throat. They know you need MS-Office to be compatible with all your existing MS documents, yet you can't go to another vendor if you want reasonable desktop pricing.
I don't think you are correct. You may be confusing "liquid" with cash. Stocks are liquid but they are NOT considered the same as cash. An accounting expert want to weigh in?
I don't use my smartphone heavily enough to want that much customization. Customization is only justified if you use a given feature set a lot. Otherwise, you are spending more effort tinkering than actually using the device. Most of the customization I want from Android is to make certain apps work like the iPhone versions, which often "did it better" as is.
That could change with a life-style change, but like I said, Apple products tend to be easier/quicker to use out of the box. Phone tinkerer/hobbyists are not their target market.
Congress would probably have to authorize "printing". It creates too much risk/blame for the Federal Reserve (FR) to do it themselves. It's a political calculation beyond the usual role of the FR: they are not to make political decisions, but rather try to objectively balance specific factors.
Quantitative Easing was kind of indirect "printing" of cash, and FR has already taken a lot of heat for it. It's probably not justified heat, but it's still not an area they are comfortable with. They only did it because of the unusual depth of the recession worldwide. The Chairman had said many times during the slump that any "additional" stimulus would have to come from lawmakers.
Treasuries have the same "shrinkage" problem as cash, and REIT's are not considered "cash", but an investment, kind of like stock.
Although REIT's do bring up a bigger problem: too much investment in real-estate instead of growth and employees. Perhaps we could tax investments in REIT's above a certain amount to dissuade excess.
Time for "helicopter money". Inflation is under par and fat cats are hoarding cash. Sufficient inflation will make sitting on cash unpleasant because its actual value shrinks quicker. It may even get T closer to the 3% GDP growth he wants as the cash is spent.
Slashdot Mirror
The boundary between "friend" and "enemy" is fuzzy and can change. US sells weapons to a lot of dodgy nations, and the chance of regretting it later is pretty high.
I agree there's a problem: OTHER nations will make them whether we do or not; and therefore we are forced to pursue similar technology to compete and survive.
Such bots will probably need a relatively simple "kill-switch" mechanism that is independent of the rest of the brain. Thus, if the main brain gets hacked or goes berserk, the independent kill-switch can be contacted to disable the entire thing. Because the kill-switch is (hopefully) a relatively simple mechanism, it's easier to prevent it being hacked. There is a risk the enemy will steal the security codes for the kill-switch, but that's a risk we'll have to accept.
If you think about it, cars and key infrastructure will probably need the same safeguards regardless of whether war-bots are built, because they can face similar problems. It's part of a bigger problem: stopping highly-complex machines that are out of control.
So Trump is an experimental android. Explains a lot.
C4PO: "I'm the best droid, believe me; I know 900 foxtillian languages and everyone knows I translate the best. And I can run the Death-Star better than Vader. I know death. That asthmatic toaster is a total loser! He wastes time yanking off with his light-saber; I'd use Yuuuge weapons to wipe out the enemy in mass, let me tell ya, not play with silly little sabers while a big war rages around me. Low-energy Vader thinks small, really small, and has fake hands, so sad. #MEGA!"
This will create support problems. For example, our intranet has MS-Paint instructions for cropping and resizing images for CMS's and Office documents. If Paint goes away, then users may have to install and figure out something else themselves. We are talking thousands of users at the org. Sure, we can rework our instructions and/or negotiate with the baselining crew, but it's more rework, retraining, and help-desk calls until things settle.
Why yank it? If ain't broke, don't fix it. Windows tools become de-facto infrastructure, for good or bad. If MS keeps jerking users around, they are more likely to switch to Google Docs or something else. Familiarity is MS's only real selling point. Nobody picks MS because they are "good", they pick it for staff familiarity and compatibility. If MS moves the cheese around, they ruin their advantage, shooting their own feet. They shouldn't get cocky and think they are good at new products & change.
I tried to install Paint.NET a couple of years ago and it crashed the OS. Granted, maybe I was a rare case. And GIMP requires too many steps for simple stuff. Often I use MS-Paint for larger-scale rough drafting, and then GIMP to fine-tune it.
Many steps are just quicker in Paint: fewer menu layers and key/mouse-strokes. For one, GIMP's default settings are for larger images; thus if you work with a lot of low-res images, you have to keep re-adjusting GIMP's resolution settings. Maybe there's a way to fudge the defaults?
Business-wise, it worked "good enough": MS got a foothold into the gaming market and is cruising with the Xbox. They just have to keep it "good enough" for it to be a cash cow in the oligopoly-land of game consoles. If they accidentally slip behind PS, they'll do something to catch up.
Don't confuse business success with "good product" or "logic". For good or bad, being slimy is often profitable.
Prior art. The new kids don't know about the Clippy era; arguably the first commercially-common annoying AI-like "assistant". MS pioneered agitation in many ways.
"Cloudy Goggles", there's a sales-boosting name for ya.
Lick my balls
"Food food food!, Can I lick my balls now? Why can't I sniff human butts? Food food food! Can I lick my balls now? Why can't I sniff human butts? Do I smell a squirrel?"
YES
Now Spicer has time to spoof Melissa McCarthy
MS-Office UI's are an utter mess and a feature pack-rat. I have had enough WTF moments when encountering new/changed Office products to fill an encyclopedia (remember those?). The bizarre semi-new "File" menu still makes me cringe. However, over time you just learn how to use Office features out of sheer rote memory because you have to if you want a pay-check.
Further, because everyone is using it, it's easier to find a Googled solution: the Network Effect. You don't know why you have to say press Ctrl+Alt+Shift+F4 every third Tuesday of the month in Admin mode if you have a Samsung monitor, but you just learn that you do. Asking "why" is like asking to have Mormon doctrine logically explained. LibreOffice cannot compete with Education-by-Google (yet). MS-Office is the Rube Goldberg machine we know and love...well, at least know.
(I have some ideas for how to organize/manage features and feature-finders for feature-rich products, but that's another topic for another day.)
SCOTUS said it was legal because SCOTUS itself was put in place in part via corporate influence. It's recursive, and may get worse. Yes, a "slippery slope"; they do happen.
It took them 40 years to scrub out all the grays managing the projects.
Damn! Wish I saw this before I shot the dog.
Yip, they are no longer "periodic". You can throw it out with your old Solar System model that had Pluto as a planet. (It doesn't balance right if you just tear off one ex-planet.) When Planet 9 is discovered, you'll need a new one again.
Physics is becoming like web dev stacks: you have to replace them every 4 years to keep up with the Joneses.
"String theory" is already taken ;-)
Because they practically force MS-Cloud down your throat. They know you need MS-Office to be compatible with all your existing MS documents, yet you can't go to another vendor if you want reasonable desktop pricing.
I don't think you are correct. You may be confusing "liquid" with cash. Stocks are liquid but they are NOT considered the same as cash. An accounting expert want to weigh in?
Not necessarily.
I don't use my smartphone heavily enough to want that much customization. Customization is only justified if you use a given feature set a lot. Otherwise, you are spending more effort tinkering than actually using the device. Most of the customization I want from Android is to make certain apps work like the iPhone versions, which often "did it better" as is.
That could change with a life-style change, but like I said, Apple products tend to be easier/quicker to use out of the box. Phone tinkerer/hobbyists are not their target market.
Congress would probably have to authorize "printing". It creates too much risk/blame for the Federal Reserve (FR) to do it themselves. It's a political calculation beyond the usual role of the FR: they are not to make political decisions, but rather try to objectively balance specific factors.
Quantitative Easing was kind of indirect "printing" of cash, and FR has already taken a lot of heat for it. It's probably not justified heat, but it's still not an area they are comfortable with. They only did it because of the unusual depth of the recession worldwide. The Chairman had said many times during the slump that any "additional" stimulus would have to come from lawmakers.
Treasuries have the same "shrinkage" problem as cash, and REIT's are not considered "cash", but an investment, kind of like stock.
Although REIT's do bring up a bigger problem: too much investment in real-estate instead of growth and employees. Perhaps we could tax investments in REIT's above a certain amount to dissuade excess.
Time for "helicopter money". Inflation is under par and fat cats are hoarding cash. Sufficient inflation will make sitting on cash unpleasant because its actual value shrinks quicker. It may even get T closer to the 3% GDP growth he wants as the cash is spent.