Indeed. There are many better examples of post-war soft power projection through economic meddling that this case could be compared to.
Not the nazis. They are far on the other side of the economic meddling coin.
414 karma · joined May 10, 2012
Not the nazis. They are far on the other side of the economic meddling coin.
It sounds like the AP being on your network is what constitutes the security risk. I doubt the FCC would have a problem with a network administrator taking action like that. Unrelated APs are different.
This projection of supply-and-demand is uncalled for, I think. Maybe it would be valid if a) they were blocking wifi in all their hotels, which it seems that they aren't yet, and b) that consumers know it is the hotel that is blocking the wifi, and not just technology fucking up as usual.
It's not fair to characterize this as a "do nothing, the market has spoken" situation when it's clear that the scenario is not widely present and consumer information is low. The only people talking about this are tech people.
Why would you compare them? Apples and oranges, imho.
The implication is that analogues of these situations happen all the time, and your ability to apply rational thought is proportional to the likelihood of achieving desirable outcomes.
If we're looking at a situation where a vast, vast amount of the value created in the economy is pumped in by a handful of players who own large automated factories and most knowledge-work that we know today is done by specialized AI, then we might be in trouble on the jobs front.
So I think what a lot of people are looking at is a situation where for the average person, there is no job for them in the greater industry - the engineering and technically skilled folks required to build and maintain the machinery might be a fraction of what is required now.
So the marginal contribution of low-skilled Joe Blow is going to be very low or zero.
Now, getting to this situation without mitigating it would probably lead to violence, etc, so this line of reasoning has lead a lot of people into looking at BI.
While I think you have a very valid point, I think that setting up the right carrots and sticks inside a BI system to ensure that the right amount of development occurs is something that can be done.
One of the major effects of simply giving the poor a regular source money is reducing their cognitive load. In the past, it was seen that this stress would encourage the poor to keep working, as it was seen that poverty is caused by lack of motivation.
Today we know that this just screws them over worse. Stress inhibits brain development and constant lack of security decreases motivation to try and improve the situation. Opportunity costs make most prospects look impossible, and an awful lot of people simply don't have the time to stop and figure out what they should do.
So let's get rid of that yolk and see what happens when we give everybody a secure environment to develop themselves. I think it's worth going through the effort of figuring out how to arrange the carrots and sticks to make it work. Don't you?
Except for most conceptions of socialism/communism (talk of proto-communist hunter gatherer societies notwithstanding).
(Non-strawman) communists see communism as a future post-scarcity society, like Star Trek economics. To them, the path to get there must involve ownership models that (to them) are not exploitative.
From the very start the idea was to figure out how to arrange society in order that the incentives are maximized to bring about post-scarcity. (Let's not get into a discussion about how well anyone did in attempting to bring that about - that's a very complex topic by itself).
So I don't know what you're talking about when you say that socialists are looking to back to some golden past.
I read a lot of broad ideological writing as well, so when people make statements that go completely against what adherents of a particular ideology have been saying themselves for over 150 years, well, it's a little jarring.
Again, this isn't about any ideology being right or wrong, this is about accuraccy.
> There are no better ideas.
The biggest mistake you can make is thinking that history is over.
The "people", not being an individual or an AI or whatever, has a more complex preference vector than a ranked list. The real world is more complex than that.
So can we now agree that Arrow's Impossibility Theorem doesn't apply to all of democracy, that these things are nuanced and there is a long and deep conversation about this kind of topic that has been going on in the human race for centuries, and that frankly, pointing to technical flaws in established, stable enough systems that were set up by people with a hell of a lot less information about anything than us hundreds of years go is not going to do anything to prevent that system from operating in the way that it does or to convince people who have vested interests in it remaining stable?
But also, what in particular makes you think that experiencing human emotions are fundamentally required in order to optimize for human values?
A different mind might have different emotions, or it might have no emotions, since emotions are a kludge that came about by natural selection, and may not be optimal safeguards in ensuring that an intelligence acts to optimize for the values we want.
And yet, he was born, and he did contribute, and we remember him for that, and we remember what his peers did to him in response. And we learn a lesson from that.
Why is this controversial?
Only recently has attention been turned to video games, as the genre is so new. The reaction from a minority in the video games community seems to view this criticism as an extraordinary attack, even some kind of corruption or conspiracy if you listen to some people on reddit.
These recent controversies (#GamerGate included) look pretty transparent from people with no stakes in the game. A lot of really violent backlash against an industry that is growing up.
If a book is published, it is allowed for journalists or other writers to say that this book is abhorrent for x, y, and z. It is also allowed for them to criticize and chastise the author for writing such an abhorrent book. This is not the same as censorship.
When a large part of society condemns something for whatever reason, or if a certain segment wishes to use their arguments to try convince enough people that something should be condemned, this is a natural, largely unpredictable, and unrelenting process that happens all the time to reflect shifting social values and morals. It's folly to fight that, and the trick is predicting where it will go. In my opinion, that is how companies and institutions survive.
A few years ago it might have been in (any random abstract) company's best interest to fire a gay employee. Regardless of the views of the decision maker at that company, for the sake of PR, this is the way it goes. These days, that decision goes the other way, particularly on the national scale.
The game studios are subject to these kinds of effects too, and that is what what will hurt the status quo of games in the long run (although there are arguments to be made that the desired status quo is already long gone, I dunno, it's been a while since I was attached to the games industry).
This is seen in OS X when an app window appears greyed out with a progress spinner in the center. The app may start out in this state if the machine was hibernated, or it may go into this state if it is open but it fits certain criteria, like all its windows being occluded by others. When this happens, the process is killed.
Every time first responders of any kind are deployed there is an inherent risk to their lives.
First responders have to drive fast to get to their destination quickly. SWAT teams are heavily armed and accidents do happen. Innocent bystanders could get shot, pets could get shot, other officers could get shot in a confusion. They might get called out on a prank call but end up finding a sovereign citizen freeman-on-the-land at home who hates the government and is willing to get into a firefight anyway.
All these things are potential liabilities on the department, not to mention the danger of having your entire SWAT force deployed to a prank call while there's a real incident on the far other side of town and not enough time to get there.
So yeah, we can argue about the cost as long as we want, but at the end of the day the primary cost on the minds of the police departments are these dangers, and the actual price tag quoted by them must take these into account.
There are other considerations too. Phone usage patterns are way different to computer usage patterns. The vast majority of phone usage occurs in small blips of activity during which execution can be optimized for the CPU to race to sleep state as soon as possible. Computers don't have the same usage patterns at all, and have a legacy of first and third party software (on all major platforms) that have not yet been optimized for performance.
No problems here.
i.e. Both sides of the equation have to be real companies doing real things who have a legitimate need to occasionally bring employees across. Neither of the companies can exist solely to funnel workers into the US.
I have an even easier to implement attack - a menu bar-less app that shows an iTunes password window after using system APIs to bring iTunes to the front. Make up some excuse in the text for why it needs your password. You don't even have to mess around with breakpoints, most users will probably type their password - and you don't even have to wait until they buy something from iTunes!
There have only been two instances of that: 68k to PPC and then Mac Toolbox to Cocoa. Carbon held the gap for a number of years by porting Mac Toolbox APIs to use modern things like protected memory. Both of those events were necessary and welcomed changes.
PPC to Intel was not a major rewrite for anyone except people who already knew what they were doing.
What's the problem here? Providing new APIs that reflect the advancements in software technology made in the last 45 years is a _good thing_.
If you were to write it in C then unless you tore out the ASM generated by the compiler manually you'd have calls to objc_msgSend in the call stack in between every method call, and even still you'd probably emit a bunch of register spills and argument handling.
The thing is, calls to objc_msgSend are _set up_ at the call site as if it were a call to the class's method's function pointer. objc_msgSend is a small trampoline that sits between the call site and the method call, it's not a proper function.
Besides, for something so small, getting a few good engineers (probably engineers who have a background in writing optimizing compilers) to hand-optimize the code and improve on it with new ideas every major release is probably the best option for everybody.
Consider also that objc_msgSend doesn't exist on its own. objc_msgSend_stret handles methods that return a struct, which is a pain in the butt most of the time, and there's also a bunch of hand-rolled variable-argument trampolines for dealing with ObjC blocks (IIRC the file is called a1a2_blocktramps.a, if you want to see something truly disturbing) that do things like calculating byte offsets and jumping to them based on how many arguments we have.
I'm going off on a tangent now but hopefully the point is made. These procedures are so far removed from normal function calls that writing them in C is not the best approach.
From the outside it looks like your comment could easily be translated as "women need to know their place", but with fancier words to make it look philosophical.
> "humans are all exactly identical, no questions asked"
No one asserts this, not even gender studies majors. What's problematic is asserting that gender differences should have any bearing on what a member of a particular gender is allowed to do.
Subscribing to stereotypes is what excludes a large number of extraordinarily talented women from either entering or finding work in the tech industry.
Studies like the one in the article give us data points, but nowhere to draw any conclusions from.
Conclusions in things like this are very often 'just-so' stories, of the kind you hear from the Evo Psych nonsense-heads.
Almost every study purporting to show innate differences between males and females has been shown to lack rigor, blindness, or has drawn conclusions from imaginary sources based on pre-conceived notions not found in the data.
You can see those preconceived notions in this thread. Many of the comments have a very strong stench of "of course, we've known this all along, men and women are different, and it's unfortunate that only men are good at the things that pay a lot of money, but that's life". The latter part may not be stated directly, but anyone who has paid any attention to this kind of argument on the internet knows that it's heavily implied under a very thin surface in the majority of comments like this.
It's this attitude that leads to the sexism in our industry. Seeing this kind of bollocks upvoted on a regular basis is extremely disheartening.
No, but they should be. No one is arguing that quality control isn't important. The problem is that the debate is being marred by FUD that would seek to remove access to these devices for people who need them to quit cigarettes.
> you in reality have no idea what ingredients the Chinese manufacturers are putting into their vapors
Aside from the gas station disposable ones, most e-liquid purchased in the US is made by small local businesses who want to do right by their customers. I certainly would never buy e-liquid from a non reputable vendor, and certainly not an anonymous company in China.