fixermark

Correct. Though if that's the point one is trying to make, one should probably make it via stories of those scenarios and not "This technology makes it easier for the justice system to find people trying to dodge the justice system."

It feels like that'd really boil down to whether identifying a fugitive's location based on signal from the location-broadcaster they're carrying voluntarily on their person, connected to a distributed service network shared by customers of a private company, could be considered "unreasonable search and seizure."

To a first approximation, my guess would be "probably not." No more so than, say, a train station dropping a dime on you if you try and buy a ticket on a train and your name comes up as wanted.

Can my torrenting app stream my video, or do I have to wait for a full assembly of the pieces from torrent hosts and enough downloaded to watch it?

If the latter, torrenting is plenty cumbersome enough that if the studios are pushing movie-viewing to "Pay us money or you have to torrent it," they're winning.

Yep. We optimized having Netflix over having another browser out there with a new feature-set.

For basically all the users, this works great; demand for a new browser is low, for streaming media pretty high.

Essentially. The money gated behind a closed DRM solution is so large that the w3c ran the risk of becoming an irrelevant standards body for this space if they didn't comply with what their members wanted to do.

It's sub-optimal, but I don't think an optimal solution actually existed. A standards board divorced from reality is no better than no standard at all.

That's down an axis of "strictly worse than the alternatives." With an open-source ecosystem, I have to set it up and maintain it myself, when it breaks I have to service it by myself (often without a useful community to assist, because my problems are often unique to my special-snowflake configuration), and if I get attacked I'm 100% responsible for digging out of the assault with no recourse or assistance.

None of these are concerns with either Google's online offerings or the offerings of most startups.

I believe the parent poster meant that the classifiers that train into the baked-in categories are trained like a spam filter and use cross-account global knowledge. In other words, it's a model that works if there's a small number of buckets and a huge dataset to train the bucket-targeting against and breaks down if every individual user has their own buckets with their own conflicting understanding of what those buckets should contain.

Google has killed some of its offerings, but the core products of search, ads, drive, and mail are still there.

(... Inbox being only a UI on top of the mailbox and not the mailbox itself, not unlike Microsoft Schedule+ went away but the underlying Outlook functionality remained).

From my point of view, if it's a choice between an ecosystem of tools that Google could kill at their whim and an ecosystem of tools floated and maintained by startup companies that could dry up and die at any time, it's a bit of an illusory choice.

I was going to make a comment about how Google's approach to service deprecation contrasts with Microsoft's, but then I spot-checked my assumptions and realized that MS has discontinued over 50% of the Office ecosystem of apps over the years.

So I think I need to instead ask a question: Is Google's deprecation strategy actually unusual for a company with a wide ecosystem of offerings?

Google also drops child pornography and copyright-infringing search results.

It's a quality you can dislike, but you'll be hard-pressed to find a search engine with anywhere near the same order of magnitude of quality that doesn't adhere to these rules also. DDG does. Yahoo does.

For a corporation, to refrain from working with the government is to be hounded by the government. That's semi-incompatible with providing services.

I imagine the same thing that happens when a person steps behind a forklift, and the forklift operator backs up without looking.

Static doesn't necessarily mean safer. But the article also notes these aren't intended to share space with humans yet.

It depends on the target tradeoffs.

4 wheels can be inherently statically stable but requires more space and requires more energy when running (counter-intuitive, but if your balance algorithm is efficient, you use less energy wheeling around on 2 than on 4 because you can basically play games with gravity to get some acceleration tradeoffs... And you have half the number of powered wheels, assuming you're 4-wheel drive).

If they solve the hard math, the end result may very well be a more performant machine (though as someone else in thread has noted, depending on the overall goals, a zero-wheels statically-mounted arm could be better still).

This is a microcosm of why the information age has been one crazy miracle after another.

ALL else being equal? I'd flip a coin. Because if all else is equal, the credit score (that indicates past interactions) isn't predictive of future outcomes.

If we're assuming conscientiousness and intelligence aren't equal across these workers, that's a different story. In which case, it depends on particulars; I might take the one with the lower credit score because they've demonstrated willingness to take risks.

But really, the issue is that credit score is a lousy predictor of work performance. I have no reason to believe it's actually correlated.

Agreed. I think what this may mean going forward is that the CAAs are going to have to consider demanding that the training specifications be designed around a scenario where some (as-yet-to-be-defined) subset of the smart systems are disabled, and if the airframe behaves differently in that configuration, it demands re-training.

I'm somewhat surprised acceptance criteria weren't already there. You don't plan for the common case when lives are on the line.

It's odd to call the airframe "faulty" when (a) it flies and (b) the FAA requirements for positive static stability in the airframe itself don't forbid the 737 MAX from being flown.

Does the author mean the FAA airframe acceptance criteria are faulty?

Wow, so Australian law allows them to basically impress any citizen into espionage?

That's buck-wild.

I've had to debug around a short-lived bug in the Firefox rendering engine that only showed up in the FF rendering engine before. The site itself? Standards-compliant; there was flexibility in the standard (ironically, for flexboxes ;) ) about performance constraints and our site just fell down Gecko's slowness tree and hit every branch on the way.

Given the engines are allowed to vary, this experience is inevitable from time to time. The user-agent is really valuable in helping us figure out when that's what we're seeing.

It does seem so obviously simple to sidestep that it makes me wonder if they pushed it because they had an active attack they believed it would mitigate. Were they concerned that the attack was already baked into some automated script in the wild and this could perhaps at least trip up the script long enough for them to engineer a real fix?

Scripted attacks can of course be modified too, but it still takes more than zero human effort to do it.

The islands might be worth it.

Nobody's stopping these "large numbers of people" from swapping URLs.

They may get stopped from having their message show up in the "recommended videos" column on YouTube, and that's fine. Nobody has a right to be in that column.

(When the man said "The revolution will not be televised?" This is what he was talking about. ;) )

"No" and "No," then. "Strangers don't find out about my podcast" is nothing like "nobody can hear me." "PayPal won't middle-man my transaction" is nothing like "I can't get paid" (mailing checks or cash is a thing).

Who's selling?

If white nationalists want support, they're going to have to find an example that doesn't have either (a) the fundamental human rights atrocity that is the Palestinian enclaves dogging its "success" story (I'd call Israel indicative of the problems with forming a new independent ethnocentric nation in this modern world) or (b) a nation that---for all its implementation flaws---still has "all men are created equal" baked into its philosophical DNA and "creation myth," if you will.

You can definitely political vlog by renting space on a CDN to host your own webm's. Or BitTorrenting them and sharing magnet links. Google can't stop you.

Correct, but the world is divided into nations already that use up 100% of the claimable useful territory. I can't imagine a non-violent process by which the United States carves up a chunk of Montana and goes "here you are separatists; have fun."

That'd be inconvenient for the Montanans that own that land.

... and the US has some historical precedent regarding how it responds to separatists in general that isn't very promising. ;)

Any white nationalism that advocates "a nation of their own" implicitly advocates such killing, because we're out of land.

... unless that philosophy explicitly states "... and we'll build that nation on the shores of Antarctica," there's a genocide implied.

For starters: you live in a company town, and your continued employment at the company is geographically and practically tied deeply to that relationship.

Competing digital empires are always a click away.

No doubt, but that doesn't imply the lessons gleaned from how law applied to company towns are immediately portable to social media.