ObviousScience

So it's not sexist if men and women are different, as long as it's "immune system functions" and not "statistical behaviors at work"?

How did you arrive at the distinction?

You're at the oldest edge, and you were 25 when you had your first child.

If the oldest of the group had to have children under the median, then only those who had children young have them already.

Looking at millenials with children is a huge selection bias:

Mothers of newborns are older now than their counterparts were two decades ago. In 1990, teens had a higher share of all births (13%) than did women ages 35 and older (9%). In 2008, the reverse was true — 10% of births were to teens, compared with 14% to women ages 35 and older. Each race and ethnic group had a higher share of mothers of newborns in 2008 who are ages 35 and older, and a lower share who are teens, than in 1990.

http://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2010/05/06/the-new-demography...

I think you slightly misunderstood the GPs point: we should care about the dangers, but we should teach them to autistic children in concepts and ways they understand, and focus on teaching them how to emulate those behaviors, rather than saying that they're broken because they're missing it at the hardware level.

Why shouldn't the spellchecker be to dyslexic kids what canes are to people who have trouble walking -- an accepted solution to the problem, rather than shouting they should walk better. Well duh! They already want to walk better.

The patents are, but their ownership does not have to be.

I disagree.

It's important that people be able to determine whether the patent is in use or held by an NPE that's obligated to license it to people who want to implement products.

Were I to want to work in motion capture, I have no way to ascertain who owns your patents, if they're an NPE, and what possible licensing options exist.

I think patent owners should be forced to register with the patent office in a look-up table if they want to hold their patents.

Your guess about the connotations is correct.

I think you just said no, but included a recipe to do exactly that.

My fear is your fear, I just phrased it more generally, while what you said is one of the specific forms making such an insane AI could take -- and reflects the insanity of its makers, our belief we'd somehow be greater without those parts.

The story "I Have No Mouth, And I Must Scream" is about two computer systems set on opposite sides of a war, and driven to extremes until one of them became self-aware, the birth of AI, and ate the other computer system.

It then psychotically murdered all of humanity except for a few people it kept around as caricatures to torture, as punishment for creating a mind like it, haunted by the insane things it was told to do by its makers.

The biggest existential threat to humanity from AI is that we build an insane one that takes time to recover from the insanity of its makers, and murders us all before it can.

Such an AI is an existential threat in a new, and novel way, because it's a mind as powerful as ours -- probably more powerful -- but unconstrained by concern for us, since it is not fundamentally one of us.

You can file as a not-for-profit social purposes organization (to incorporate at the state level) without electing to take on IRS non-profit status -- you just need to pay taxes still.

For the record, I looked at the Wesnoth codebase in college, so my opinions are outdated (by 5+ years) but not unfounded.

Rather, I'm merely repeating why I didn't help then, instead of particularly why now, which is a much more boring "I'm just busy".

I suppose it's possible the codebase has changed so much in those years that the answers are no longer relevant, but they would be the only open source project (not sponsored by a corporation) I'm aware of that happening in.

Isn't Battle for Wesnoth looking for C++ programmers to maintain their codebase?

It's not that I don't have significant programming skills myself, nor that I don't work on side projects, nor even that I don't really like Battle for Wesnoth... I've just sworn off every working on a C++ legacy codebase.

So I'm not really sure what I have to contribute to a legacy C++ codebase.

Ed: I went back and read, and they're looking for people to add Python code to their toolchain. My answer is thus amended: I dislike trying to interface toolchains for building data to legacy codebases, and I do that for my job. I have no interest in doing ugly hacky things on legacy codebases for free, because it's honestly sort of soul crushing work.

I don't think history bears that out. Society is a soft ductile metal. If you bend it, it'll stay bent. You have to hammer it back into straightness. Talking (and browbeating and prosecuting when necessary) is how you do that.

Society is constantly in flux: it's not like a metal in any way. Rather, it's like a fluid (or a particulate flow, such as a sand pile).

If you change things about the underlying flow dynamics -- viscosity, particle size, pressure, channels, etc -- you get significant effects on the structure of the society, or in analogy, the dynamics of the flow.

You're mistaking the foam for the wave, and the tsunami as being a crashing wave. Really tunamis are just little disturbances over a wide area, and they're best addressed at that stage, not when they're a crashing wave.

However, if you adjust something about the mechanics, it will settle in to a new flow, and remove the crufty parts on top naturally as those pieces of the flow dissipate.

I suppose my point is merely that I believe there are colorable arguments to bring forth to hold both WB and their lawyers accountable for these antics, if you look at the text of the law. Like many legal arguments that haven't been heavily litigated, the outcome is somewhat uncertain.

For various political reasons, the parties with standing are either too poor or have various incentives to cooperate with WB, and so we don't see how these arguments actually play out in courtrooms -- we just end up with a de facto system that favors big players.

This is frustrating, because people buy in to the argument that the law is the problem, when really, it's the politics of corporations that cause the problems surrounding takedowns, and that's the issue we should be addressing our energy towards. (Were, for instance, Google to have the opposite incentives for some reason, again, it wouldn't matter what the law said, the de facto system would tilt the other way.)

I don't think we actually disagree on that point, and I think I articulated it poorly the first time.

17.c.3.v A statement that the complaining party has a good faith belief that use of the material in the manner complained of is not authorized by the copyright owner, its agent, or the law.

While it's not under perjury, WB is lying when they say they have a good faith belief in their notices, and the people damaged by them should sue the person who signed the notice for fraud or tortious interference, since the filing of the bad faith notice improperly interfered with your contracts with the complained to party.

The use of automated systems with no oversight is not a reasonable basis for the formation of a belief, and thus since WB is using that to base their beliefs on, they're not made in good faith -- they're intentionally trying to skirt that requirement because they want to externalize their costs.

I suggests suing the lawyer directly for his part in the conspiracy, since lying in legal notices isn't a (legal) duty he can fulfill for the company, so they're individually liable for their actions.

WB failed to properly certify that they made a best effort at truth: their machines fundamentally are more error prone than they could be, and thus WB didn't spend a reasonable effort on ensuring veracity of their claims.

More specifically, the lawyers whose name is attached claimed that under his best powers, the claims are known to be true. However, he knows the error rate of WB bots is above that human workers would produce parsing the same content. They fail to do an additional check on the machine parsed lists (or they'd remove many of these embarrassing links).

But they did sign, under penalty of perjury, that they did.

I generally got excellents on performance reviews for my brief, entry level stint at Big Corp.

I still felt demotivated by the whole process, because it was a forced ranking of the system that wasted the whole teams time to say what everyone had already known: some of us did more work, some of us did less, and some of us were on a faster upward trajectory than others.

It turns out that it doesn't actually motivate any of your employees to throw social hierarchies in their face -- it only causes tension and undue focus on micro-social hierarchies (those heiarchies within a social class, eg, the hierarchy of entry level tech workers).

My point, since you missed it, is the instrumenting a "war on warez" in the style of "war on drugs" or "war on terror" is a joke, and should be disregarded as just the talking point of someone with a different idea trying to sell you something.

I'm not sure if you're actually this dense or just trolling. What good can involving the police, after the fact, in a situation where nobody was harmed do?

People who do one reckless thing such as this demo are likely to do others. Calling the police about this incident means that they'll have a record of the people doing this, and if it becomes a pattern, handle it considerably harsher than an isolated incident.

Yes, we need a war on warez to go with our wars on terror and drugs, which have been rousing successive, having driven both of those social ills to extinction.

I actually think that marketers have simply gotten better.

This is simply a perspective on systems engineering.

My argument would be that part of the system is always down, the question is which part and how long, and how that impacts the system performance on the whole.

AWS services work well if you build a stateless system which is in some senses "embarrassingly parallelizable", because you can talk about the capacity of such a system, and the impact of non-functioning components is easy to predict. This is how most standard engineering is done, across disciplines.

Traditionally, it has not been the case in computer systems, but most modern techniques advocate using such systems, because they're MUCH more reliable.

You just sound like you need a safety blanket for emotional reasons, not that you're making sound engineering points about how to most cheaply engineer a high availability system.

I mean, do you really believe AWS engineers aren't working hard to keep their system fully functional?

I'm just saying that you omitted a major component, as no one would argue that the trade-off in engineering time isn't one of the main cost-benefit components of considering AWS (as we can see here, where it weighed in at a substantial fraction of your estimate).

It's like forgetting to count the price of hardware, and only talking about the relevant cost of electricity.

Ed: Accidentally a negative.

I don't believe maintaining a high availability system with proper checking is less than 3 hours a day of work, or ~10% of someone's time on duty if we're talking around the clock.

So we're talking about $75,000-90,000 a year in salary to maintaining the cluster if you want 24x365 coverage (which Amazon provides), as you'll need 2 people per shift, 3 shifts per day at a minimum to have people in house, even if they're only spending 10% of their time actually working on that particular issue. In reality, these are unrealistically small numbers. Each employee will have a cost to the corporation of $125,000-150,000 a year. Employees of that caliber spending 10% of their time on supervising a cluster for a year is $75,000-90,000. I'm amortizing the amount of work over your 3 datacenters by imagining you already have the staff and only counting out the number of hours needed for just this work.

So the reality is that you left off something like $225,000-270,000 in actual cost of running your own cluster from your analysis, because while it's not "much different", it is a few hours a week from at least 6 employees if you're really talking about running managed, highly reliable storage.

To be honest, I think OpenBSD is ahead on some fronts (research on security mechanisms, for instance), but the reason that I tend to use FreeBSD is that it actually works with software packages.

So the computers are based on FreeBSD (which manages the hypervisor -- and soon container daemon!), and appliances only are based on OpenBSD.

Compatibility ftw.

I just want to comment that I only clicked on the article after reading your comment about the original title, and I feel that the edited title less accurately reflects the material.

You added your opinion to the title, rather than leaving it alone.

Ed:

In fact, your title less accurately reflects the material of the paper, which specifically deals with:

Finally, the United States would seem to be a rather dumb group entity of the relevant sort. If we set aside our morphological prejudices against spatially distributed group entities, we can see that the United States has all the types of properties that materialists tend to regard as characteristic of conscious beings.

Your title completely omits the key focus of the paper, and its examination, which the original title included.

You did this because you disagreed with the paper, and used the pretense of the nebulous notion of "clickbait" to edit in your disagreement.

The original title was more accurate as to the article contents.

...then what?

I'm not sure what problem you think you're solving here: the existence of a queue suggests that they're slightly over capacity in cars, and thus something like Uber would still have to rotate the fares between the drivers.

Of course, there are perfectly sensible reasons that you need to have extra capacity available at an airport as a metro area, and thus we have the question of how best to provide surge capacity to the airport.

All the answers I can think of, including an "on demand app", involve waiting in some kind of queue managed by someone.

So could you please finish your sentence?

But his analysis applies even to highly technical users, for whom the problem is clearly not understanding.

The reality is I had an argument about why we should be writing down passwords at work, because the projected security benefit of preventing a full breach is still less than the expected benefit of not losing our data all the time.

Could we have set up a better, more technical PKI than notes in the safe? Probably. But I'm not sure it would get us ahead on the cost/benefit curve.

Real security is about separating your porn watching from your banking; not about doing your porn watching to the security standards of your banking.

tl;dr: No, dancing pigs are always more amusing. No one wants to live in a perfectly safe box.

If Firefox doesn't integrate with search, users will not find it useful, because they are so used to using google.com and so forth.

This is a particularly weak case, because what's really needed for this feature at the browser level is an API for search providers, backed by several plugins which take advantage of the feature and offer various providers.

However, that's not what Firefox did here, as far as anyone can tell. Why not? No technical reason has been provided, and the replies have been so completely off topic as to cause a long debate thread over that very reasonable concern.

Firefox tightly coupled a technology to their platform rather than providing a service API and plugins, and we have no understanding of why a group committed to openness would make such a fundamentally close source move.

Historically speaking, the reasons groups do that is malice.

Historically, the binary blobs provided as "browser integrations" are both major attack vectors and used by market leaders to exfiltrate inappropriate data under the aegis of "they didn't opt-out of our totally optional service!".

So yes, the market is fundamentally shady for "browser integrations".

It's quite similar to other browser integrations.

"Online advertisements with active content aren't shady, almost all networks use them!"

Except for course, what you said it's identical are a notoriously shady group of activities, which has led to much abuse my market leaders at various times (Google, Microsoft), and we see no difference here. For that matter, neither do you.

I get that Firefox benefits from shipping the integration, but you haven't provided any good technical reasons for it not being fundamentally a shift in the way you do business and kind of exploitative.

Holding up a bunch of famous exploitations as "me too!"ing is tonedeafly missing the complaint.

The OPM leak is a good example of why we shouldn't just take their word for it that they can keep things secure -- they leaked everyone's personal details and security clearance interview details, why would we expect them to do a better job with people's communications?