john_b

> "it makes perfect sense to be a bit wary about electric vehicles manufactured in California sunshine"

It makes no more sense than a Florida driver being wary of overheating a car made in Detroit. There may actually be some winter weather technical problems that Tesla has yet to resolve, I honestly don't know. But everything in your post is either speculation or a fallacy called argumentum ad populum [1].

If I were to speculate, I'd assume that an electric vehicle would be more reliable than a gas powered one in the winter, not less. Ignition is simpler, there are less moving parts, etc. But it's still speculation, and you can't make an argument from a point of ignorance.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Argumentum_ad_populum

> "In fact, post-affair surveillance seems to be an increasingly popular counseling prescription."

...

> "The psychotherapist and syndicated columnist Barton Goldsmith says he often advocates virtual monitoring in the aftermath of an affair. Even if a spouse never exercises the option of checking up, having it makes him or her feel more secure. “It’s like a digital leash.”"

One must really wonder at the unrealistic expectations that get placed on marriages (lifelong monogamy among them) when surveillance akin to that which is applied to sexual predators [1] and potential terrorists is seen as the most practical way of enforcing those expectations.

[1] http://www.omnilink.com/tracking-sex-offenders/

Generating random numbers in (0,1) is mathematically different than generating random numbers, even from the same type of distribution, in [0,1), (0,1], or [0,1]. Equating all of these, as the article points out, rarely causes problems in practice, but it is nonetheless a conceptual error.

If you'll pardon me pulling out my soapbox for a moment, this kind of bug would be less common if the "programmers don't need math" attitude was not a successful meme in our culture. The notion of "between zero and one" may seem straghtforward and obvious, but is actually ambiguous. Perhaps, given the number of distinct floating point values that can be represented in the interval (0,1), it would hardly seem to matter what interpretation of "between zero and one" is used. But in mathematics you will never see such terminology used without a qualifying statement that clarifies* the meaning.

*E.g. "between 0 and 1, inclusive", "on the closed interval bounded by 0 and 1", "[0,1]", etc.

Not that I disagree with you about the American love of driving, but that notion is part truth and partially a creation of automotive marketing. Frankly, many cars aren't that enjoyable to drive, and driving an enjoyable car in traffic is usually not very enjoyable either.

The 10th Amendment is largely a fiction today. Instead, the opposite is true: the federal government frequently claims and uses novel powers until a Supreme Court case says it can't. And sometimes those powers get minor modifications to enable their re-use afterwards.

The only fundamental force resisting these types of power grabs is a large body of citizens who both know and exercise their rights, and who look at government with suspicion instead of looking at it as a protector.

What Schmidt actually said, from the article:

> "The simplest outcome is we're going to end up breaking the Internet," said Google's Schmidt. Foreign governments, he said, are "eventually going to say, we want our own Internet in our country because we want it to work our way, and we don't want the NSA and these other people in it."

If you equate "slow" with "wasting time" you have very clearly missed the point.

"Move fast and break things" works only when the value of, and audience for, your work is highly uncertain. If you have any confidence whatsoever in the value or audience of what you're building, slow is usually better.

Going fast in the wrong direction is only a good use of time and resources when you quickly recognize the mistake and turn around. In my experience, most people who prioritize speed above all else are hellbent on a specific destination and won't change course until it's too late.

If you're going to make sweeping generalizations about a whole class of ideas and people, please provide something to back up your assertions. As is, your comment only offers an opinion.

I wouldn't go that far. Naritai offered a possible motive for this deal which might not be obvious without the context provided by his/her comment (the part about the recent technical collaboration is true, and not just an opinion). That's one of the useful functions of internet comments.

I am a mechanical engineer by training, and I think you are missing the point of this experiment.

This is the mechanical equivalent of a series of quick hacks. I don't think anyone expects these machines to last long or work without frequent maintenance. As I read it, the goal is only to enable a small community to be self sufficient; the machines should last long enough for them to accomplish their purpose. When they inevitably break down, the tools and materials will exist to repair or replace them, and the community will have the knowledge to do so.

The kind of up-front planning and precise design that you reference works when you have a large organization with a large pile of capital that is willing and able to spend the time and money to do something right the first time. This is optimal when that environment is present, but impossible for a small community of semi-skilled workers and farmers. The whole point is that the approach described in the article should work in the absence of professional skills.

On the other hand, simply providing this service enables anyone, malicious or not, to determine if a given mail server is vulnerable. Publishing a "shame list" doesn't reveal any new information, but may result in improvements to the vulnerable servers as a result.

This notion of supply works if the producer has an enforceable monopoly on production and distribution of the content. While the big studios do have a monopoly on the content they produce (i.e. movies and music are not commodities) the inherent ease of distribution and reproduction of that content means that attempts to monopolize its distribution will inevitably be circumvented.

For all practical purposes, once a work is pirated it is effectively supplied by a large number of individual actors within the market, and not the original distributor.

> "If you want to make a narrow page wider, you can open the Inspector and change the width."

The difference is that one is accessible to the average user. Outside of Developerland, most people don't even realize that the page they are viewing has a source which can be inspected or changed.

It seems like it's more of a feasibility demonstration at this point. Blinding would be hard as you say, but if they could incorporate variable pitch blades into the pack it should be doable.

It's a press release, not a post-mortem. Its only purpose is to inform the public of what they know with confidence.

Godel's incompleteness theorems only place restrictions on deductive systems. In mathematics, you can't perform "experiments" and measure what happens. As long as we can observe and measure physical quantities, even if those quantities are only indirect effects of what physicists are actually trying to measure, incompleteness is not a strong limitation of physics.

The parent didn't say they are some top level secret. Just that, as infants, they have no say in how they are portrayed to the outside world. Adopting a conservative rule here is reasonable; how many times have you heard people say "I wish my parents had shown my baby pictures to more people!"

Besides, the last thing the internet needs is more baby pictures. The baby picture is the human equivalent of the "what I ate for dinner" picture: everyone who comments will say how awesome it is, but nobody really cares about how cute your baby's bottle is or how spicy your curry was, and everyone realizes that it's just a form of attention seeking by the poster.

Have you considered that other leakers may still be working for their employers? Snowden was willing to leave everything behind and move to another country, but not everyone has that option (family obligations, etc).

You're probably getting downvoted because your first question is a matter of public record and your assumption that he wants to be extremely visible is inconsistent with the number of interviews of a biographical nature he has conducted. Almost all of his interviews with the press have focused on the NSA, GCHQ, and the like. He explicitly redirects journalists to the real news when they probe too much into his personal life. In this light, your comment could be interpreted as a poor attempt at character assassination.

Did you even read the article? Right before the part you quoted the author defined customer service to be the un-automatable parts of what we now consider customer service, the purpose of the redefinition being to make people realize that not all aspects of it can be automated. You mentioned problems with the computerized components of what we today call "customer service". You're arguing with a definition the author didn't use, not to mention making a speculative ad hominem attack...

While state-enforced identity controls are used to enforce travel controls, it need not be so. You only need identity controls for state sponsored benefits (insurance, welfare, licensure, etc). There is no necessity for your mobility to be imparied by those identity controls; it is only how states have chosen to do it.

My point was that identity controls predated travel controls and were a prerequisite for a "papers please" kind of society. Each state chooses (either directly or by will of its voters) what responsibilities it owes to non-citizens in its territory. Those responsibilities can range from almost nonexistent to very generous, but it is ultimately the choice of the state, and not the visitors to that state.

I've been looking for a task-based alarm app (i.e. solve math problems before you can disable it) that doesn't require any more access than knowing whether or not I am currently in a call (to reduce or mute the alarm). So far, all the apps I have found require some combination of the following priveleges:

  - Identity
  - Wi-fi
  - Location
  - Photos/Media/Files
  - Camera/Microphone
  - Device & app history
  - In-app purchases
  - Device ID & call info

Only the last is required (and only the "call info" part). I can't imagine anyone who would ever want an alarm app to track their location or have access to their identity information, but perhaps such people exist.

I'd prefer no ads, so I'm willing to pay for a no-ads version. But ONLY if the app is not a power grab by the developer so that any conceivable monetization strategy is available to them in the future. If I can't find such an app I'll just have to use the built in Android alarm (which isn't task-based, sadly).

Indeed. For thousands of years people were able to move about relatively freely in most parts of the world, exceptions most often due to war. Only relatively recently has it become the norm to need permission from multiple states to move between them. Prior to the U.S. Civil War, it was difficult to even determine who someone was if they left their area of birth. Most forms of identity were informal and ultimately relied on a community attesting to who someone is. Identity systems weren't formalized and reliable, so you could start a new life in a new place under a new identity if you wanted to.

It's simply a historical observation. If it was obvious what kind of jobs there would be in the future, companies would have already sprang up around those ideas and would be hiring, which would make them the jobs of today. Anything less would be equivalent to the whole world having an understanding that Apple stock will rise by 100% in the next two years but nobody buying it.

Basically, the future is unknowable. But as Marc Andressen likes to say, human needs and wants are unlimited. As long as people can provide for the wants and needs of others via jobs, there will be jobs.

I'd take it one step further, in fact. If we imagine the robot dominated future that so many people fear, it stands to reason (given human nature) that robot-produced goods and services will be viewed as inferior, cheaper, or less personal than human-produced goods. Robots and AI are by nature easily copyable, thus fungible. Sure, AI can be trained and tailored to specific needs, but competitors can simply copy the successful training methods once they are apparent.

A widespread perception of AI/robot produced goods/services as inferior or less personal will happen irrespective of the actual merits of of the products and services in question. There will probably be a few field-specific exceptions to this, but primarily in areas where exact precision, scalability, or replicability are the primary competitive advantages (precision machinery, automobiles, aircraft, etc).

In industries that are very cost or precision-sensitive, robotic automation will do well. In industries sensitive to quality of service, humans will still be useful.

Ordinary products such as food & clothing, and especially services, can be marketed based on a "human touch and taste" differentiating advantage that robot-based corporations will be unable to compete with. You can go into RoboDonalds and order your hamburger with all the ingredients you want, and that will be fine. Or you can go into a traditional steakhouse, talk with the chef about the cuts of meat available, select one, tell him/her how you'd like it prepared, and enjoy conversing with the waitstaff. Until AI can hold human-like conversations and understand all the nuances of human communication, any product or service that differentiates itself based on a non-trivial communication with the customer will be robust to AI/robotic disruption.

Simpler trajectories such as basic orbits could once be calculated by hand, at least if you were Richard Feynman [1]:

>"The process of orbit determination is fairly taken for granted today. During the effort to launch America's first artificial Earth satellites, the JPL craft Explorers 1 and 2, a room-sized IBM computer was employed to figure a new satellite's trajectory using Doppler data acquired from Cape Canaveral and a few other tracking sites. The late Caltech physics professor Richard Feynman was asked to come to the Lab and assist with difficulties encountered in processing the data. He accomplished all of the calculations by hand, revealing the fact that Explorer 2 had failed to achieve orbit and had come down in the Atlantic ocean. The IBM mainframe was eventually coaxed to reach the same result, hours after Professor Feynman had departed for the weekend."

For more complicated paths such as the Rosetta mission, my understanding is that since the 3 body problem remains unsolved for general initial conditions, a numerical solution has to be derived. This numerical solution, at least until recently, seems to have required some fine tuning and intelligent guessing of initial mission parameters [2]:

> “It took only two days of computing time on an ordinary desktop computer and no other user input to reproduce the Cassini mission configuration — a trajectory that originally took extremely talented designers many months to develop.”

Since this mission launched before the development of the software in the above reference, it's likely that a team of experienced engineers spent some time fine tuning it from an initial guess.

[1] http://www2.jpl.nasa.gov/basics/bsf13-1.php

[2] http://www.nasa.gov/content/goddard/nasa-technologist-makes-...

Machine learning, in this context supervised machine learning, is a useful tool for deriving unintuitive relationships between different parts of complex data sets. To do this, there must be some discernible correlation between the parameters of interest that isn't subsumed within the noise of the system+measuring device(s).

In this case, those parameters would be the image data and whatever health parameter is of interest (e.g. white blood cell count). My initial skepticism, perhaps that of the parent comments as well, has more to do with whether the measurements are of high enough quality for any reliable analysis to be done. The app doesn't seem to require any background or contextual data either (though I haven't verified this). If not, false positives and negatives could be problematic.

Anyway, machine learning isn't a form of magic that can transform data with no meaningful sensitivity to something into a something that is sensitive to it.

Having fought a LIDAR ticket before, the officer simply claims that he or she targeted your car and the judge admits the claim as a fact without question. Any attempts on your part to question this will be met with a reminder that the officer is Certified and Trained and you are just a random person with no qualifications to question the officer's abilities.

You can ask the officer if there was a wind that day, and if so how heavy. You can ask if the officer used a tripod or held the gun freehanded. Even if the officer admits that there was a heavy wind, the gun was used freehanded, and he or she pinged you in traffic at 950 ft, the judge will still accept the officer's word that your car, and only your car, was targeted.

Why? Because it's easier for the court, because they know you can't prove without a doubt that the officer targeted a different car, and because it is an important source of income for the city or county which has summoned you.

It's a scam, but it's one which Americans in general are comfortable with because it gives them the illusion of safety.

> "Not 100%, but an amount they agreed to"

They are holdouts precisely because they didn't agree to a haircut. Argentina declined to write a collective action clause into their bonds so that they could sell them for a higher premium. This is the price associated with accepting that risk.

There is nothing odd about it. Argentina agreed to a debt contract without a collective action clause so that they could sell bonds at a higher premium. When they later needed a collective action clause to enforce the majority will on the minority, they complained that the agreement was unfair. But it was an agreement the country's leadership agreed to; the law in this case is fairly straightforward.

> "Without enforcing proper merge behavior on both sides, zipper merge just becomes a big Prisoners' Dilemma game with a few defectors screwing all of the cooperators."

Except unlike prisoner's dilemma, it's not a zero (or negative) sum game. The entire traffic flow can speed up if zipper merging is done. The "late mergers" don't have to risk losing their game of "chicken" while the "vigilantes" don't have to deal with the reckless maneuvers of some of the former.

People don't do zipper merging because people are human and drive emotionally [1]. The stereotypes of the conservative early merger claiming the moral high ground and the reckless late merger doing anything to save a few minutes are the cultural results of this mentality.

[1] Another example is the special breed of driver who stops the traffic flow on a major road (which has the right of way) to let someone on a minor cross road or parking lot exit onto the major road, thus inconveniencing everyone behind them for the self satisfaction of having helped the one person they can see.

That would only be anonymous to the recipient. Google still has a map from your actual account and phone number to your Google voice number.