vacri

But we can agree that it's not the nature of a corporation to pay more taxes than necessary?

Think Different.

Future generations will really appreciate that plugged shaft!

The first rule is that you don't break userspace, not that you don't make mistakes. Commits go through a process before being put into the kernel, and if yours is going to break userspace, it won't get in, so don't expect it to. You can make mistakes, but if they're found, you're expected not to say "well, commit it anyway". It's not the mistake that the violation of the rule, but the cavalier attitude.

You need to work in a wider variety of workplaces, if you genuinely believe that. Perhaps put another way: were Jobs or Ballmer ever escorted out for their obnoxious behaviours?

The connection has timed out

The server at www.haproxy.com is taking too long to respond.

Not the best advert for a high availability proxy...

Well, here you offer a prime example of the power of religion: you are being wilfully ignorant because you don't want something to be a certain way.

You won't be satisfied unless the actual word 'literal' appears? It appears in the first paragraph of the Stercoranism link, and again in the second paragraph.

"the 9th century Carolingian theologian Paschasius Radbertus... wrote an influential tract around 832 upholding the literal interpretation of Christ in the Eucharist". He supported the literal change, but said that the holy bits dissolved before becoming poo.

... the very first paragraph after the table of contents?

If you check out the Middle Ages section, it shows that the theological debate that it wasn't physical alteration started... at a date that is closer to us than the birth of jesus.

Check out Stercoranism [1] as well (which contributed to the above debate), whose whole basis is that the doctrine of physical change must lead towards normal digestive processes happening, and wondering if this turns the eucharist into, literally, holy shit.

At the end of that article is a bit of modern apologia stating that christ probably leaves as soon as the cracker hits your stomach ('but nobody knows precisely when'[2]). :)

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stercoranism

[2] god does, after all, move in mysterious ways...

No one has every believed that the eucharist literally turns to blood and flesh. Your taste buds would tell you otherwise.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transubstantiation

Plenty of people have believed it historically. Scroll down to the Catholic section and you'll see some of the mental gymnastics I talked about to claim it in modern times.

Protestants don't believe in literal transubstantiation; I'd say they probably trust their taste-buds more, but then again, compare Protestant/Anglo-German food against Catholic/Franco-Italo-Spanish food :)

"questions that have no answer". They have more perhaps retreated to "god of the gaps"

I don't personally see a difference between these terms - they both mean claiming to have an answer for something that is unanswerable. If you have an answer for which the only proof is basically "just trust me", then it's not much of an answer. Russell's Teapot is a pretty clear example of this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell%27s_teapot

What's always missing from these discussions is that that patronising mockery and outright dismissal is how atheists and agnostics have always been treated by the religious - it wasn't until atheists started really kicking and screaming about the injustice that people started to take note. One the one hand you have folks like this complaining of atheists merely being (gasp) rude!, and on the other hand you have things like some states in the US still not allowing atheists to hold office, by articles in their consitutions[1].

It's exactly the same with women's rights and minority civil rights: "Really, people would listen to them more if they just toned down and spoke politely". We already know that that doesn't work and just gets you ignored.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/govbeat/wp/2014/07/08/t...

Given that Catholicism (like other religions) has wholly retreated to and now lives only in the area of "questions that have no answer", yes, it has no basis in reality. Nothing in Catholic dogma is independently verifiable. For example, the justifications around the eucharist literally being the blood and body of christ require some truly incredible mental gymnastics, and this transubstantiation is a core element of the faith. Yet strangely, the bread and doesn't literally change into the flesh and blood for the Protestants...

So where does the 'useful dialogue' start? I think it starts well before we just give moral authority to a bunch of very old men arguing about rules that only they made up. They should give us a better chain of authority than "since time immemorial".

Well, disasters and foreign economic threats aren't due to a politician's policy, and the regulatory environment usually doesn't change straight away (that requires legislation, not just a policy manifesto). War is a rare event as well, and it doesn't necessarily affect the wider economy - the war in Iraq and Afghanistan hasn't affected the US economy much, which quite happily went through a boom time in the early years of the war, then crashed for reasons unrelated to the war. Of course, the economy of Iraq got soundly fucked by war, but that wasn't due to the economic policies of the politician in charge.

Email lives on.

The first year of someone's term is very rarely affected by their policies. My particular pet hate is when politicians start bragging about how their policies are responsible for good economic news when they're still in the first three months.

Truth is that economies change slowly, and politicians have much less control over it than we all like to believe.

How are we nearly a decade into the life of NodeJS and still suffering from problems with its package manager, which itself is up to version 5.x?

From working with a variety of ticketing systems, any veteran dev will be able to tell you just how painful it is to work with multiple fields. Entry is never zippy. The more fields you have, the more painful it is. Most devs, given the choice, will use a ticketing system that is basically free text + a ticket title. If devs, who live and breathe tech, can't comfortably handle the idea of splitting information over various fields (for superior tracking and analysis), why should doctors be any different?

My city has a large, world-class Children's Hospital, but the administration there is ridiculously political, and the doctors will change nothing to make things more efficient.

A colleague of mine had a son who needed to get seen there. They asked him to fax in the admissions forms. Who has a fax machine? He found somewhere and faxed them in, in a couple of jobs. Nope, can he fax them so they all come through in one continuous job. So he goes back and faxes them again. Nope, can he fax them so that the documents arrive in the right order? So he decides to go to a different children's hospital in the city.

I had a friend who worked in the QA dept of that hospital and tried to get processes improved. He said that any time you tried anything, the relevant head of department would say "If we make this change, children will die". Everyone around the table would know the lie for what it was, but the head of dept had the final say if it involved child health.

In short, faxes will still be going strong there for a while yet, and they're a big hospital. :)

Way back in the 90s when I was doing my neurophysiology degree, one lecturer who worked with schizophrenia said that it was such a difficult disease to work with because it wasn't one disease. Traditionally, if they didn't know what was wrong with you, they just threw you in the 'one-size-fits-all' schizophrenia bucket. One example of this was that the most frequent symptom (hearing voices) was present in only 69% of cases, and all other symptoms dropped off fairly quickly from there.

At the time, he thought that schizophrenia would break up into four basic groups, based on positive/negative affect (does an episode have the person doing extra activity or withdrawing) and, I think, whether or not the person has hallucinations.

I haven't really kept in touch with the literature to see how his 4-way prediction went, but I have never seen anything to counter the idea that schizophrenia is more than a single disease. And, of course, classification of disease is a key element of treating it, so if schizophrenia is not being properly classified...

I think it's more about the friction of engaging a payment method. For me at least, there is a bigger gap between free and $0-but-fish-out-a-credit-card than there is between $1 and $10.

True, I wouldn't pay either $1 or $10 to generate a meme, but I wouldn't 'pay' $0 either.

RedHat was bought and incorporated by a pre-existing business. It wasn't bootstrapped.

I'd also discourage a patreon- or kickstarter-style offering for a B2B product, because it signals very clearly that you're not playing with the big fish.

Wikipedia Zero isn't about making the internet exclusively for Wikipedia. It's about putting the site into the ISP's no data charge area. Yes, it does mean that you end up with a two-tier pricing scheme ('free' and 'not free'), but to classify it as 'subsidising an internet plan to make it exclusive for wikipedia' is a gross mischaracterisation.

My mother is in her mid-70s. She's not technical by any stretch, but she has built and runs a couple of websites.

This whole 'old people a dumb as rocks when it comes to tech' meme needs to die. Some old people have trouble with tech. Plenty of them don't.

"The AI can transfer semantic meaning directly"

What does this mean? An AI that reads text still has to decipher it. Show it a newspaper and it still has to analyse what it sees and convert it into something sensical; it doesn't have mystical powers that absorb the information.

Even if you're talking wire protocols, it still needs to decipher the incoming data. This series of 1s and 0s makes these ascii characters. This series of ascii characters makes this sentence. This sentence means 'foo'.

The AI can even share trained neural ensembles or any computation device to perform a specific task

It was a massive coup when they designed a robot that could fold laundry. Not do the laundry, just fold it. How many other AIs has that been shared to?

I can only read the first paragraph of the article due to paywall, but it's making the case that 'computers are faster than humans' and they are... for certain tasks. Particularly ones with clear-cut rules. Machine learning and neural networks can do a lot of 'fuzzy' thinking, but they also make a lot of errors that fans just gloss over, errors that a human would never make (see the google image of two black people that got AI-tagged as 'gorillas' for one that made the news). Google did machine learning with their sketch program and it could tell if you drew a bicycle or a car... if you drew them in the stereotyped cartoonish side-on way. It had no idea what was going on if you drew it from a non-stereotyped angle. Fancy pattern-matching just doesn't compare to human understanding on that task.

A man in the middle ages thinks of the future of a time with more castles, more knights, more kings.

A man in the middle ages also thought there were devils in the cemetery, that unicorns were a thing, and that alchemy was a way to get rich quick if you could just find out how... and all of these things turned out to be bupkis. He was never in danger from being abducted by devils if he took a shortcut through the church's side yard.

Given a human and a strong AI (human level intelligence AI), the AI would prevail.

Until the AI has full control of its supply chain, from the tantalum mines in Africa, to the chip fabs in China, and the power plants in <locale>, it will not prevail. Parts break; it needs to replace and repair them. It needs 'food' (power) to think. The only real future where we have to seriously worry about a strong AI is one where it is being controlled by (or working with) a hostile party - ie: it's humans vs humans + AI, not humans vs AI.

Or if you mean on a personal level, depends where we are. If it controls the environment (doors etc), then it can just imprison me, and the strength of the AI (or even if it is an AI at all) is irrelevant. But if it can't do that, well... I can just go and flip the breakers, and wait for the power backup to drain.

Or, if you want an android-shape AI, keep in mind that AlphaGo was run on 1200 CPUs and 200 GPUs, and all it could do was play Go (albeit rather well). That's the kind of computational power required to do things 'the computer way', and requiring commensurate power and cooling. Moore's Law has already buckled, and chips are already being designed down to the atomic scale; there isn't much more miniaturisation to be done. Trying to fit a 'super AI' capable of all the things fans want into a form-factor of a human just ain't going to happen (kinda like alchemy).

Communicating one word at a time, one picture at a time or one sound at a time is slow and has significant overhead.

We don't. We have massive parallelism in how we communicate. The aphorism "a picture is worth a thousand words" is based on that.

All in all, AIs beat humans on very specific problems, but they're worthless for most tasks - and an AI that's specialised to one task is very rarely suitable for another. You can get a human to do quite complex tasks and use initiative with only the simplest of instructions. Don't even need to be at expert-level. Where is the AI that can wash, dry, and fold the clothes, change the baby, make lunch and dinner, fix the leaky sink, and bring the dog in at night? Yet that's a very humdrum day for a human.

It's not the best title, but it fits. The initial symptom that kicked off the investigation was a slowdown talking to SQS.

Why should the top 10 change? We still secure our houses with locks, secure our neighbourhoods with police, secure our borders with armies. We drive safer cars these days yet we still secure our road edges with barriers at dangerous points. Why would the categories of risk change on a bi-annual basis?

wired is dedicated.

Cable internet is shared. Most of the NBN rollout (HFC) is on ageing cable internet puchased from another vendor.

Some people in metropolitan areas will get connected to the existing coaxial network, which is going to have huge contention problems as it's stretched far beyond what it was ever intended for.

s/some/most/. HFC is the predominant plan for most of the capital cities (I think not... hobart? or was it adelaide?).

So here's my tale of what happened:

Party A was in power, and having infighting problems. Party B was headed by an absolute arse of a man, who used the tactic "Say No! to EVERYTHING". Didn't matter how benign or banal, the opposition party would say no. A flagship policy like the NBN was particularly focused on - and if you look at interviews with the opposition communications minister at the time (now our prime minister), it was clear that he was toeing the party line and didn't think changing the policy was a good idea.

Fast-forward to the next exection, and Absolute Arse gets into power. Turns out he can't govern at all (despite 20 years on the front benches) and he definitely isn't going to backtrack on something he's attacked so routinely. He's kicked out by his own party. At this stage, the NBN has been gutted, and its doom is sealed.

In steps the comms minister as the new PM, but he is now beset by factionalism. He knows what a turkey the NBN is, but he doesn't have the political power to do an about-face on his party's policies.

In short, we're fucked. By the time any other party can get in, the NBN will be 'mostly complete'. The most annoying thing is that the folks who really need good internet is business, not residences (think graphic design, medical imagery, etc), and the party that fucked the NBN is the 'party of business'. Enterprises can already dictate their own network backbones, but small-to-medium businesses cannot.

It's not even a misnomer to our American friends. The Australian main conservative party is more liberal than the American main liberal party.

I frequently try to "isntall" things...