DaFranker

Perhaps you'd like a rephrasing:

A EULA can never bind you into a legal contract that has consequences beyond those already provided for by a law or the ability of the copyright holder of the software to deny use of the license.

The EULA is itself purely informal, but informal speech can serve in the provisions of certain laws that look at it to determine the intentions of the two parties. If a law exists that considers whether a user agreed to something in the determination of whether that user must be held to that thing they agreed to, then accepting a EULA is obviously valid under that provision -- but so would an email stating as much.

EULAs are just a list of statements the copyright holder and the user are throwing at each other in bulk format in order to cover those provisions where laws take such statements into account, along with a conditional authorization to use the software. If a EULA does anything else, it will be ignored, as there is generally no law that says "You must do what it says in the EULA". Unless you have one where you live, in which case ouch.

I can say whatever I want in an EULA, but it's going to be worth nothing in court if the user stopped using the license unless I was saying something that directly ties into an existing law. And if they do continue to use the license after doing things I forbid in the EULA, they are committing the specific crime of unauthorized use, since I'm no longer authorizing them.

As much as some EULA writers might get a kick out of writing that you will be tried according to whichever court's law they want, and that you'll be held responsible for XYZ humongous damages if you breach even the tiniest provision even up to two years after you cease using the software... yeah, nope, you'll still get convicted for unauthorized use, not the rest of that crap they listed.

Mind you, I'm repeating what a canadian lawyer explained to me. YMMV and some places may indeed hold the EULA against you.

EULAs are never legally binding, and especially not for someone who is 1) not currently a consenting user, and 2) invoking a right.

So in the EU, if current legislation projects bear fruit, a case could probably be made for implementing this under the protection of the right to be forgotten, and there would be very little those services could do to prevent it.

read access

You're thinking on the level of decisional strategies across agents. Arguments earlier up the comment chain where thinking on the level of implementing decisions in a given context for one agent, where the context includes other agents with unmodifiable strategies.

There was a lot of that going around yesterday. For me the most amusing was Twitch.

Heh. Gotta love how the default filter already blocks ||sourceforge.net^

What we need is more pervasive control of discrimination, then, and of other things that could use biometric information.

Simply "hiding" your biometrics or banning biometric identification altogether would be moving backwards in the bigger picture, which I'd compare to forbidding evolution research because it's against religious teaching.

This brings up the point I'm most looking forward to if we can get this stuff widespread: massive carpooling.

Forget Uber. Get a Google-AV subscription, find the nearest "unoccupied" AV (or call for one to come pick you up, preferably scheduled in advance to it's just waiting for you when you get out), hop in, state destination, get off. Car continues on its merry way to its next duty. Repeat when you want to go back home. Much less massive waste of space involved in all those parking lots. Much less opportunity cost waste. Less total cars in existence for the same amount of travelers.

It's like a public transit pass, but the bus stops are exactly where you want them, and the bus passes exactly when you need it, and you don't have to deal with that insane, smelly old guy who dances in the middle of the bus and then shakes peoples' shoulders so they give him pocket change.

For Sourceforge specifically? Sure.

In general, the way the comment was worded? No, suspicion does not equal hard fact.

We were talking about the latter.

Er, okay.

Well, I don't agree¹ with your method of evaluating trustworthiness (which seems to me rather too quantized and "chastity"-minded), but at least you know exactly what you're doing and who you're trusting.

[1] Read as "I believe it's sub-optimal for a given cost-benefit formula, after some assumptions about certain variables and certain opportunity costs, and other methods would likely be more useful in context."

Whoa what. Are you suggesting that suspicion of possibly maybe having put a trojan in someone else's files somewhere is grounds to make all one's efforts useless and poisons everything else you do?

Geeze, I guess we should stop using Google. They've been accused and suspected of much worse by a lot of people. I hope that's not what you meant.

and who breaks into our offices to steal our tech?

AFAIK: Shadowrun characters, and that's about it.

I would say that 99% of all spam I receive is written in English, whereas about 80% of my personal emails are in German.

You're missing some important numbers here for this to be meaningful: Base rates.

If you're getting 10 spam emails per month, and 99% of them are in English, but you're receiving 1000 legitimate personal emails per month, and 20% of them are in English, that's a total of 210 English emails on average per month. In this case, while technically true that an email written in English is more likely to be spam than an email written in German, it's also such a very poor indicator that you'd be better off using another indicator entirely.

On top of that, you've only pinpointed two categories out of many more possible categories of emails. What if someone is getting 50 spam emails per month, 5 job offer emails per month, 10 updates relevant to their profession per month, 100 professional emails per month, and 50 personal emails per month, and the English:German ratios for those are all 99:1, 9:1, 4:1, 1:1 and 4:1 respectively? Suddenly just "this email is written in English" isn't all that important anymore.

Base rates are very, very, very, super important when discussing stats like these.

Possible? Sure.

Brute-force solution is to consider all possible arrangements of numbers 1-9 in a 9x9 grid, filter that down to those that match the conditions of a completed grid, then iterate over the list of possible completed grid, for each grid find all possible arrangements of missing numbers, filter over those arrangements for those that can be solved, which means calculating whether there exists a solution from the available information, etc.

I didn't say efficient.

Yes, but if you do so you become eligible for charges of Conspiracy for High Tech Fraud, and a Conspiracy charge opens up a whole other can of worms you really don't want to mess with.

Oh, then that's simple. The $30,000 USD corporation pays a fine of $374, reparations for the officer's time to the tune of $41.75, and then is severely reprimanded with a warning not to do it again on threat of further monetary retribution.

Even if the money were sentient and capable of arguing for itself and defending its own case better than a good lawyer, here's what would happen: You can only authorize a legal person to use computer equipment. It is impossible to authorize a pile of money to use computer equipment. Therefore any computer equipment that is used by the pile of money (including that of the owner of the money) is used without consent, and therefore runs afoul of anti-piracy / anti-hacking laws, and your money will be charged with High Tech Fraud.

Since the money is not a legal person, legal responsibility would probably fall to the owner at the time of the crime (just like it falls to the "owner" of a child, their parents) and you would get punished along with your money. On top of this the money is automatically guilty and must pay reparations and punitives, which means you need to pay more of it as legal guardian of the now-bankrupt money.

And on and on down the rabbit hole it goes...

How many calculations did I just do?

Probably not that many. Let's say you create a water-skipping robot with two different AI programs in it and a shaky, not very precise arm (but still as good as a human arm in terms of specs).

One is custom-made to the physics of the problem, and will calculate the angles and the forces and the pressures and the candy tasty physekz all over, and then decide on a particular motion of the robot arm, and the rock will skip. It'll take a lot of computing power, but it'll work.

The other just has a goal, to see the rock skip, and tries things at semi-random (though it has the general knowledge that it can be done and that it has to throw the rock towards the water in a particular way for it to happen and that it can control the outcome), and tries to figure out patterns between what it did and what happened as a result. Eventually, it has a particular tactic, a certain set of instructions, which could be "down down down the left thing and up up right down down the right thing and the up thing does down down up push push down push twist-force-2 at the same time", an entirely not at all complicated set of instructions with very little computation. This signal is sent through other nodes that might not have the perfect signal number, and eventually this outputs to the arm's motors... which nevertheless manage to make the rock skip, because the motion here is almost the same as the motion of the first AI, yet this one was obtained by eliminating the ones that didn't result in the rock skipping.

TL;DR: You don't do that many calculations on the spot. The "maths" in most situations like this is done by elimination throughout all the attempts you've made in your life to control a throw. Subsequent throws once you're already a practiced rock-skipper just involve firing "the same neurons as usual" which send "the same signals as usual" to your muscles, which result in the same skipping as usual, with very little math. If you already know that 2x^5 + 20 = 110 implies x = 45 from doing the same calculation twenty times in the past hour, your brain isn't performing "calculations" anymore, it's just repeating a pattern that's already there in your brain like a table lookup.

No, we wouldn't need this. How we could come to figure out and understand "the brain"[1] without understanding its smaller components is worth several science classes mostly involving maths, most of which I haven't mastered and thus won't arrogantly attempt to explain. We've managed to figure out other complex systems without understanding their components in detail. For one point of comparison, we'd already had a pretty good idea of how inertia and motion worked (Newton's laws) long before we understood in detail the atoms and forces acting upon/between them.

Then there's also the problem of your estimate. 500 years is a rather exaggerated timeframe. Twenty years ago I could've had the most prominent field experts tell me humans would never in the next three hundred years figure out biology even for the simplest of living organisms, because they were simply too irreducibly complex for that. And then a few years ago we simulated an entire worm's nervous system and gave it enough of a body for it to use, move around, and receive input from its entirely-fictional environment. Now we've got people working on doing the same thing with a cat brain. We're nearing breakthroughs in creating fully-synthetic, fully-functional animal organs that you can essentially real-life drag'n'drop to replace a failing natural organ without complications.

Knowing the above, are you really sure it's not 15 rather than 500 years?

[1]. (which is about as meaningful as saying we understand "weather", which is really a huge messy amalgam of many completely unrelated things ranging from fluidic motion and thermodynamics all the way to plate tectonics and even anthropology, after a fashion)

Arithmetic savants and trained arithmeticians can come a lot closer to the calculator, showing that the usual human brain layout and/or architecture is a really poor fit for performing this type of calculations.

There's also some evidence that the "efficiency" of the more powerful parts of animal brains (including humans) simply comes from a sort of n-dimensional conditional railroading, which would work like this if my understanding is correct: if you map (B/W) visual inputs to XY axes of a slice of neurons, then when a line is formed, this fires up a line of neurons, which allows a direct connection between the Z±1 neurons of the first and last neurons on the mapped line, so this connection becomes the line. These Z±1 neurons have pathways to various other nearby other potential Z±1 neurons; a connection lighting up between Z±1 neurons that don't have a straightline connection over the XY map could detect different shapes. Then the Z±1 layers and their connections could be creating highway maps between both Z±2 neurons and diagonally-offset neurons that don't "fit in the grid" we're imagining here (remember, we're in 3D and neurons don't form a homogeneous grid, so this is all abstraction anyway).

These second-level connections, arguably identifying something like shapes, have connections in such a way that the next level up detects something else, etc. (insert magic we don't understand), until the detection results in recognizing a specific object, while the side-channel connections we haven't mentioned yet but kept occurring at every level connect to a different side-channel ZY map for, say, the position of the object (with its own layers of processing that eventually connect to the object concept neuron so that the "position" is associated with the recognized object), and/or perhaps other side-channel maps or parallel XY mappings for various other things. And of course, a lot of these things connect to completely different parts that we ignore here, and a lot of the information indirectly makes its way to the conscious mind in this way; the brain doesn't compile a complete vision report and submit it to the conscious mind in one download, it's all using the same hardware.

Only if the architecture itself is unsafe and does not enforce timeline consistency.

It's relatively easy and simple (on the scale of programming a black-box automaton that runs our universe) to code a completely asymmetrical n-threaded system where some threads are millions of in-simulation years ahead of the others and yet the "final" timeline as would be output in a timestamp-sorted log would be identical to that produced by a single-threaded frame-synched system.

It's not even all that hard by our modern standards; some software scientists do it all the time.

So no, the analogy wasn't assuming a single-threaded implementation. It was merely assuming that the system was designed for a self-consistent (and probably loopless) timeline, which has strong evidence for being a property of the kind of spacetime we live in. One such piece of evidence is the ever-mounting empirical evidence reinforcing the c limit on information transfer.

In an unsafe, approximation-riddled system where causality graphs are only searched for modifications up to a bounded depth or item count, yes, some discrepancies could be noticed. However, it's empirically evident that this bound, if it exists, is far greater than everything we've ever been able to calculate.

The Universe, whatever it runs on, routinely calculates graphs to perfect accuracy that would take us millenia of the sum total computing power on earth to solve accurately enough that we couldn't tell the difference in the result with our current instrumentation.

There are so many wrong assumptions in this OP, most of which the OP didn't state explicitly, that for once I don't even feel like breaking it down into chunks:

[quote of the whole thing]

No. When you run Dwarf Fortress on a slower computer, or do something in it that taxes your computer resources more, the dwarves don't suddenly sit up and take notice that something went faster in-game than it was supposed to. Everything just takes longer to calculate, at once, _including_ the dwarves' perceptions and any (in-simulation) tools they might use to measure this.

QED.

The White House responded to comments and inquiries with funny gifs. Now some random google employee can't put one measly harmless little easter egg somewhere in their product that says "Hah, take that, Competitor!"? We need to fire _all_ the videogame designers then. All of them. Across the entire industry.

180k$ USD, if I plan well, will last me ten years. By third-world standards, I live like a rich noble from Siliconvalleystan. If I didn't have a SO and knew where I could get a fake replacement identity quickly enough? Yep, the 180k sounds pretty good. Especially since going to "prison" for two years where I live is the worst punishment I'd get, and that's basically synonymous with "Big Continuous Frat Party with Free Room & Board, sports fields and exterior barbecue (with weekly beer party) included!".

I'd bet the missing creator just moved to Canada.

I'm glad you took the time to elaborate on this. It's impressive how quickly people came to conflate "AI" with either the general human-level form of intelligence or things they've seen in movies.

I think the idea was to use a DDoS-like farm of hacked machined to constantly send random messages and packets meant to trip their detection systems to random other IPs, thereby increasing the sheer amount of noise surveillance authorities have to deal with and false-positive "suspects" (the owners of all those hacked machines).

Naturally, that still doesn't solve any other problems...

Easy options for this are plentiful.

[1] http://www.sikuli.org/

By that metric, marketing and advertising must be cost centers! But they somehow always manage to take credit for revenue.

I'm puzzled by this. Compared to customer support, marketing's benefit is _very_ easy to measure. You just correlate a given marketing action or strategy (say, a particular ad) with the lead generation / customer acquisition / "new" customer base metrics over its duration + a certain margin afterwards calculated from your product's delay-to-purchase, comparing with your prior projected growth at the rate it was going before the marketing strategy.

Of course once you throw in larger entities and multiple concurrent strategies and other confounders it takes a bit more math chops to isolate specific edges, but usually it's easier for a manager to find information about measuring marketing output than for typical "cost centers". And when all else fails, that's what the "Where did you hear about us?" box on the questionnaire is there for.

And maybe a department only gets labeled a "cost center" in the first place if the manager running it is not influential or politically savvy enough to take credit for a piece of the revenue.

But yet, that's the kind of manager who gets put there! You want your best managers in the meaningful places that your company really relies on, and the lesser ones, well, there's an open spot down in Office Health & Safety right?

So it "earns" the label of a cost center because management put its worst person in charge of it. Okay. That's still... bad overall management, not just bad political savvy on the part of one manager.

An adept representation of a limited sample of the issues surrounding customer support and similar departments.

The problem is that it doesn't have to be like this. There are exceptional cases where customer support is not like this. Many of them have gained considerable benefit from investing in their customer support. One source of difficulty is that evaluation of those benefits requires very complicated (for an average middle manager) mathematics and causal modeling. There's no simple metric that measures the real benefits of good customer support, even tangentially.

Translation: "Tunnel Vision" and "Lack of diversity"