otakucode

This will be ineffective. Google whitelists many channels by large organizations and they are sheltered from any such reports. If 200k reports came in on the next Microsoft video posted, someone at YouTube might notice, but the video would never be taken down. You should read (as should everyone else) Eric Schmidt's book 'A New Digital Age'. In it he lies out his view. Basically (and obviously this is my perspective, this is the meaning not the language he uses to sell it), because Google is rich, they are Better. The teeming masses of the unwashed must be yolked by their betters. Left to their own devices, the public would destroy themselves and it is the responsibility of Google and other gigacorps to create culture in order to preserve civilization.

A reply to you makes the unsubstantiated claim that YouTube is a profit-seeking company. They ignore the fact that, no, YouTube has not operated as a profit-seeking company. The reason YouTube is, and will remain, the pre-eminent video platform is because it was run at a profound loss for over a decade, losing hundreds of millions of dollars at a clip, for no reason other than to totally suppress competition. Framing them as some kind of capitalist company is genuinely false.

If you wish to build a competitor to YouTube, your first task is to secure a billion dollars or so to build a competitive infrastructure with investors who are prepared to lose money on its operation for no less than a decade and quite possibly forever (or until Google goes bankrupt).

Videos that involve weaponry are already either banned outright or heavily hidden and demonetized on YouTube. There was a channel (not sure if it still exists) that was about making different kinds of slingshots. SLINGSHOTS. And YouTube came for them a few years ago. The content was popular and the audience loved it. Google, however, did not. They declared it in violation of their community guidelines and swiftly stripped away the creators livelihood.

It's important to realize that we're not just talking about "oh some entertainment is no longer available" here but, in most cases, someone or groups of people just went from being able to feed their families to not.

That is true. However, those less performant chips, due to the way NAND storage functions, could easily be used in place of the newer chips. If you need twice as much performance, you just use 2 chips and you're done. Unless dealing with extreme size constraints like in a cell phone (where the high-performance NAND isn't even used for price reasons), there's no real reason to prefer a single chip over two. For the consumer, that is. If you're producing chips and trying to drive per-chip profit margin and trying to make your product look like CPUs and other products that have some complexity behind them, though, it's useful.

I can understand how NAND prices don't look suspect if you're not terribly familiar with the history and low-level factors of the industry, but if you really look into it, it's kind of ridiculous. The same companies price-fixed DRAM chips and got busted. Then they price-fixed LCD panels and got busted. Then they price-fixed DRAM chips again and got busted again. They were being investigated for price-fixing NAND chips, but the South Korean president shut down the investigation. Shortly before being ousted for rampant corruption (and then being bailed out of prison by Samsung). Anything that is present in such a gigantic variety of devices should cost almost nothing. That's just economics. It becomes commoditized. The materials involved and their rarity become the primary drivers of price. Comparing price per terabyte of storage between mechanical drives and NAND-based storage is the most telling to me personally. The technology that goes into modern high density mechanical hard drives is utter madness. They should be, by all accounts, astronomically expensive. They use helium, of which there is a global shortage. They coat the platters with rubidium and other rare materials. They include neodymium magnets. They include high precision mechanical motors that spin platters fast enough that the surface tension against the air becomes a significant factor (leading to the use of helium) and still maintain enough precision to be able to seek to a very precise spot in nanoseconds. Also, you've got 'hybrid' drives that include both the mechanical and NAND storage... which incurs almost no premium over the pure mechanical solution. Now they're beginning to produce drives with integrated lasers for heat-assisted magnetic recording. And these are still many times cheaper on a $/TB basis compared to.... just a dumb parallel array of NAND gates that don't require anything rare?

NAND chips are a commodity, so you're actually undercounting their sales by a tremendous amount. Don't forget the integrated NAND chips in... well, nearly every product produced across every market segment for the past 20 years. If it runs on electricity, it probably has a NAND chip somewhere.

I think that is entirely up to Toshiba/WD. The profit margin on NAND is so astronomical and the price charged for it is so completely decoupled from the cost of production (which is as close to nothing as anything gets) that they could afford to just absorb the 'loss', but it might mess with their projected schedules of how much they had expected to make, so I could see them jacking up the price to compensate. The market and society in general seems to be content with permitting the NAND manufacturers price-fixing even when it's become absurd (do a tally of the raw materials and processes involved in producing 1TB of modern mechanical hard drive storage compared to a dumb regular parallel array of 1TB of NAND gates... it's ludicrous) so they've got whatever flexibility they feel like using.

I know that NAND involves no exotic raw materials, so does that enable them to recycle any of the damaged/lost wafers? I don't know very much about the physical processing/preparation of the raw silicon and such that goes into making a wafer, could you simply grind up or perhaps chemically dissolve everything back to base components and re-create a fresh wafer?

The utility of "lie detectors", which I personally imagine most law enforcement people understand, is as a tool of coercion and deception. It's not so much that they believe the devices actually function how they are claimed to, but that it gives the officers some 'legitimate' excuse to prosecute people based upon the intuition of the officer. It's not an accident that all of these systems require a human being to look at whatever readings are taken and "interpret" them. Any real system would include no such feature at all, because putting a human in the loop does nothing but invalidate whatever determination is made by opening up the inevitability of human error. At the end of the day, the verdict of a lie detector is nothing more than "the examiner has a gut hunch the person is lying/telling the truth" + a little bit of extra credibility in the eyes of the uneducated.

There will be a time, I'm not sure when, that the whole "its a license!" nonsense will die a hard death. It would be unwise for any company to rely too heavily upon it. This is not a new tactic at all. It works only temporarily, but has been used in a multitude of different industries through history - and the end is always the same. Eventually some company will push it too far. They will rip the wrong people off, and there will be a court case. The court is a very sensible place, usually. They will ask "when the consumer gave you money, what did you provide to them?" And if the answer boils down to "nothing. We assumed no obligation to them, and they gained no rights to anything" then the court is going to see it for the fraud it is.

Personally I'd just like to see some 'false advertising' lawsuits. It should be illegal to say "Buy the book!" if you literally are not being offered a sale. If you're being offered a licensing opportunity, it should have to be marketed as such. Yes, this would confuse consumers. I want it to. I want them to actually ask what they're getting, since up to this point the entire marketplace is founded upon tricking people into thinking they are buying a copy (like they would in a store), but in reality they are only getting a license (which grants no rights, places no obligations on the licensor, and can be cancelled at any time for any or no reason... in other words, you're throwing money at a company and hoping they don't screw you too bad).

I believe he is implying the NSA or other entity using the microphone input from cellphones (or maybe the microphones placed around many major cities on utility poles?) to do the locating. I think it would probably be theoretically possible, but I don't recall anything in the leaks about them ever researching that sort of capability.

>They are the most sophisticated intelligence collection entity in the world, after all.

Who were caught completely off guard by the fall of the Berlin Wall, the collapse of the USSR, the Arab Spring, and basically every single geopolitical event in history. I wouldn't invest too much in their abilities.

This is a flaw of the fundamental nature of the service. If it were a clientside application, keeping track of your entire viewing history forever would be trivial. But because it's on a remote server, keeping everyones history forever would be very difficult. I would guess they're probably using a bloom filter and just not dedicating enough resources to it per-user. Or, maybe even more likely, they ran 1 experiment 1 time on a few users and discovered that re-watching previously watched content was popular and extrapolated from that - ignoring that their sample size included a great many children (since they outnumber adults) resulting in them just expecting everyone to act like children.

I would imagine the issue is certainly because they can't. What is hateful to you is charming and encouraging to someone else. Social norms and cultural differences are gigantic. Look at the recent controversy with the conservative guy on YouTube who referred to a reported from Vox as their 'queer Latino reporter' and it was seen as hate speech... despite the Vox reporter openly and frequently labelling themselves as Voxs queer Latino reporter. How is a computer supposed to interpret that? How is it supposed to know that when person A says something and when person B says the exact same words, referring to the exact same subject, that the greater context of the speakers background political affiliations and those of their audience actually determine the 'meaning' behind the statement, not the statement itself?

This is not an easy problem, and it does no one any good to pretend that it is. Tackling the issue also requires those considering it to consider other social situations. Is someone supporting equal treatment of women in Saudia Arabia practicing hate speech against the conservative ruling party? If we'd had systems that let us actively regulate speech in the way we can now, would it have been appropriate to block Martin Luther King Jr. because his message was growing civil disobedience and causing families to bicker over race politics? Why are we so damn certain that any argument today will necessarily be decided by a regression rather than a wider acceptance of more progress? Change in human societies is always ugly, always comes at the cost of pain and strife, and on the balance has usually moved us in a forward direction. I can't say the same for censorship. Censorship makes impossible any forward movement, and only serves to leave regressive mindsets to fester and make-believe that they have more support than they actually do.

Oh, yes, that is the documentary I watched. It was really great, getting to hear it from Mr. Stoll's mouth directly. He was much less enthusiastic than he tends to be in Numberphile videos, I imagine that might be down to the director of the film. It is available on YouTube if anyone cares to give it a watch! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EcKxaq1FTac

That sort of nepotism can be a problem. It's why Amazon's search sucks so bad. In the book 'The Everything Store', it tells the story of when a team at Amazon responsible for something else saw how bad search was and decided to fix it. So they built a prototype with Elasticsearch and whatnot. It worked great. The dude at the head of the search team, good friends with Bezos, got all territorial and angry. Bezos solution? Have a test between the two solutions to determine which was best. Bezos idiocy? He let the head of the search team decide who won. So, no surprise, the head of the search team said the search team won. So the improved search was shut down and the garbage search we all have to deal with regularly got to stay.

Once you've got that kind of thing going on, only retirements and deaths can effect good change at an organization.

Interesting article, and it points out real problems that large organizations face. It made me think of the issues I've seen dealing with government contracts in the US. Policies can create perverse incentives and have unintended consequences regardless of their intention, and when dealing with large organizations those sorts of things have to be considered as they end up steering the ship.

Near the end of the article the author mentions that 5 people can look each other in the eye and trust each other, while 11,000 can't. This suggested a question to me: Where does that stop? How many people do you have to have before a 'local culture' isn't enough and trust breaks down? I've read things in the past about Dunbar's Number which suggests this number is around 110. That seems to be about the number of people that individuals can 'keep in mind'. I have often wondered whether organizations might benefit from taking that limit into mind and structuring things so that no level or group would be permitted to grow beyond that. To grow larger, build a hierarchy where groups of about 100 choose a representative whose task is to know the concerns of everyone in the group and represent those concerns when discussing with reps from other groups, etc.

Are you familiar with a mobius strip? A ribbon with a twist in it produces a one-sided band. A klein bottle is essentially like a levelling-up of that by a dimension. It is a 4D surface which is, just like the mobius strip, single-sided. If you were 4th dimensional, you could trade from the 'outside' to the 'inside' and back without crossing any boundary. Of course, the klein bottles you can buy or see renderings of are 3D embeddings of this, so they have to include a bit of self-intersection that wouldn't actually occur in the real 4D version.

I wish I lived in the area, I would love to meet Mr. Stoll. I only recently watched The Cuckoo's Egg, which is from the 1980s and which he is the star of. A tremendously interesting story for anyone unfamiliar with it who uses this site I am sure, he was basically the first person to really track international hackers and did so at a time when law enforcement didn't even know if any laws had been broken despite military computers being compromised and secrets stolen. What I also found surprisingly and interesting was that in the film, parts of it were filmed in his home. The exact same home I recognized from his appearances in Numberphile videos where I first found out about his klein bottles. He does seem like a genuinely curious person, with a zest for life that can only come from being terribly interested in everything, and those are often the greatest people to know.

I have a mid-2015 Retina MBP I'd be willing to part with... i7 2.2GHz, 16GB RAM, 256GB SSD. Fair warning... there's apparently a battery recall active for this model. It is, however, commonly referred to as "the last good one", just prior to the touchbar and butterfly switch keys.

My own claims to be eligible, so I guess I'll be sending it away to Apple camp for a couple weeks. Luckily I don't rely upon it for anything critical. I would imagine if yours says its not eligible that it probably isn't affected... or at least, it's affected but they don't yet fear the legal repercussions enough to offer free battery replacements for your model yet...

>I'm sure there is some justification is for this beyond "we want you to buy a new one if something goes wrong", but I'm coming up blank.

"We want you to use our cloud storage for all data storage, and our cloud services for all application use."

Map ever calling anything with 3 arguments is absolutely strange and surprising and should be borderline offensive to most anyone familiar with the operation from ANY other language.

Then don't decide what to block based on content. Decide what to block either based upon the users express choice (the tool would empower the user, not dictate a lifestyle to them) or possibly based upon observation of where the user spends the most time.

The main problem I see with the concept is that it has a poor intellectual foundation. I'd like to see a better explanation of why learning is so dangerous.

My first thought when such claims are made is "how do they think brain development works?" The brain does not develop except in response to novel intense experience. If we were to shield children from exposure to language until age 5 when the language centers of the brain typically mature, the language centers of their brain would not mature. It is exactly the exposure to those things that they are "not ready for" that cause brains to develop at all. Without such exposure, the brain does not develop. And there are critical periods, as well, where the brain can lose the ability to ever develop certain facilities if not challenged. If you were to put an eyepatch on one eye of an infant at birth, for example, in order to protect them from the challenge of binocular vision until their visual cortex was 'mature' which usually happens 3-6 months after birth, you would guarantee that child would never be capable of mastering binocular vision.

The stress over the Internet in particular is doubly troublesome because of the profound and abundant safety of the Internet. Compare it to literally any other way of acquiring information and you'll see it's the only one that protects the viewer from having to directly and physically interact with other people, which removes almost all danger. Of course, 'almost all' is not 'all' and some people will reject even stupendous protection if it means there remains even a single sliver of risk. Those people I think can be dismissed out of hand because they are waiting for an impossible option to be presented to them.

And for that, at least in this sort of situation, I'd expect a company to at least temporarily look into the various services that enable you to rent a MacOS device in the cloud for the moments you need it (usually app builds).

I don't imagine we will actually see this change in the way expected. Rather than companies making it so employees can leave on time and still feel secure in their job, I imagine companies will eventually find themselves destroyed by competition that are smart enough to forego having an office at all. Offices are a massive expense, and while they were crucial and profitable in the era of difficult communications, they're now nothing but a source for value destruction, amplified even greater by the tremendously negative impact on cognitive productivity interruptions have. The exact things that made offices valuable in the past, physical proximity of coworkers, are their greatest weakness now.

This show is not seeking to do this. Note this part of the article which barely gets a mention:

"In the novel, the decision to work overtime leads to her downfall: She becomes addicted to work, ends up in the hospital and loses a new beau, who has a decidedly more relaxed attitude toward his own job. But on the TV show, which began airing in April, Ms. Higashiyama is destined for a happier fate, said the producers"

They're subverting the novel and using it as a tool to support the obsession with putting in more hours, not avoid it, apparently.

I do not understand why in this article it is permitted to only be mentioned in passing that the creators of the TV show are completely and fundamentally changing the core message of the novel it is based upon. In the novel, the characters decision to overwork ruins her life. In the TV show, they're going to have it do the opposite. So while they toy with the idea of leaving on time, they're just going to feed more into the social disease of overwork.

I realize that the change from a manufacturing-oriented economy to a knowledge-work-oriented economy is going to take decades, and there are going to be a lot of bumps along the way and likely a good bit of bloodshed, but it doesn't make it any more pleasant to watch.

The first thing I do when I read a news article that includes any company or organization saying that they are 'serious about security' is go to their website and check their job listings. Sometimes they have openings for security-related positions, but what is actually telling is their software openings. They NEVER so much as mention a single thing about security or knowing how to create secure applications. I've literally not seen a single exception, personally. Most companies do seem to have reached a level of 'caring about security' but it amounts to hiring some people to play Patch Patrol and nothing more. I guess that's better than nothing, but it won't actually help much.

Government jobs like creating software are required by law in most cases to be done as contracts that are put out for bid. Then the lowest cost or most corrupt choice wins. This entire system creates massive perverse incentives. Failing to complete the project on time is a business win. Making it hard to maintain is a business win (because maintenance will be separate ongoing contract and the company that authored it is thought to have some advantage on getting that contract). Making it hard to modify is a business win. Delivering as little actual functionality as possible is a business win (they might make new contracts or contract mods to add more functionality).

I worked on a system for over a decade that originally got awarded as a contract to build 3 systems. When all was said and done, 3 contracts had been awarded to get it to completion and 1 system (which required 9 months of full time work to get into a state to be used in production) was delivered. There are only 2 words for that in the contracting world: stellar success. That was a bigger win than they could ever have dreamed. Just drag it on, hiring the lowest paid new grads you can find to slap something together, stack the project with absurd layers of management, and collect the checks. Eventually, after years and years of this leeching, someone in the government will decide to make it an achievement in their career that they actually got the thing across the finish line. To do that they will sign off on the project and accept it no matter how short of contract requirements anything is. Their goal is to get the thing in the door and get credit for that, no one is going to blame them when its terrible. And the idea of actually punishing the companies that do this, penalizing them financially and legally for violating their contract when they don't deliver a working system on time? Forget it. Never happen. The companies will get the public fighting against 'big government' and crying crocodile tears for how harangued the billion-dollar megaconglomerates are with the RNC clanging finger cymbals while whirling around chanting 'jobs jobs jobs'.