Posts by Paul Hovnanian 2000 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Mar 2008
Excellent observation.
And as we climb the corporate hierarchy (see the Dilbert Principle) it should be increasingly easy to replace the higher ranks with simple shell scripts.
"There is also the tax situation. People that live at work effectively pay half the tax that people do that have a separate place to live."
Bingo! We simply can't have people escaping the residential development market (where they negotiate as individuals with less clout) and have a large employer use their economic power to carve out a bit of living space for their employees.
It's not just the developers, but the tax base they represent for a city. Businesses are often given tax cuts to keep them in town. The lost revenue being recoverable from residential properties.
New shed? Just call it a remodel.
Years ago, when working for the power company, I went to identify a service location for a new(?) waterfront mini mansion. Upon arriving, I noted that the building (under construction) was pretty close to the lake. And I asked the architect if this was going to cause code problems. He informed me that this was not a new house, just a remodel. From about 400 square feet to 6000. He pointed to a patch of ancient-looking linoleum flooring in one corner of the laundry room. The "old" house.
So, we are looking at a very young galaxy populated by large, young, metal poor stars. And it's much closer (20 million light years) than most of the other young, metal poor galaxies. So then it's a new point on the graph of galaxy creation dates. Galaxies in the local neighborhood are still being born.
We get a change to tweak our current understanding of galaxy birth.
Theory states that very large Pop III stars burn through their hydrogen/helium fuel very quickly generating the metallic elements. And then they go nova or supernova, distributing these components to seed newer generation stars.
The existance of this galaxy may provide evidence for a new stellar evolution route. Where smaller, old stars hang around for billions of years. Not burning through their fuel quickly and, as a result, not producing great quantities of heavy elements.
"Wage theft is very common in the U.S."
True. But the tax and financial systems here have a vested interest in maintaining the idea that labor and wages are two separate things. If labor was afforded a value*, then a shortchanged worker could just file a contractor's lien against the employers property to recover the agreed upon amount.
*A bit of a Marxist idea, granted. And it would devastate our tax system in that my giving an employer $100 worth of labor in exchange for the same in wages could be written off as an expense, making my income tax liability zero.
"It's like bribing the state."
Sort of. It's about maintaining eligibility to continue to participate in government contracts. Something one is not permitted to do with a criminal conviction on their records.
It's sad that our justice system pursues some people into court and eventually prison to demonstrate that "justice has been done". Even when such efforts result in a net cost to society. But others are allowed to pay some amount to be determined to erase that bad mark. Payment as a punishment is OK, but wrong is wrong and that should stand on a record by itself.
... on Exchange than on Rackspace?
Had all of these Exchange servers been sitting on customers' premises, would the attacks still be possible? It would be a matter of attacking systems hosted on different subnets, behind a wider variety of firewalls. But as these have to interoperate between different enterprises, they are already exposed to the Internet. Or how would Company A send a messsge to Company B?
From the article:
"According to the LSE research, while C-suite level executives in many large businesses are asking for workers to come into the office a specific number of days per week, 'in practice they are being ignored, with managers often favouring a remote first approach that satisfies local operational needs.'"
It's the executives that want the butts back in the chairs. While the managers (closer to the actual work force) are OK with remote work. It's these managers that are responding to the need to get actual work done. While the execs may have other priorities. Like explaining to the board of directors why they had to pony up for a shiny new headquarters building. Or having to face the cities chamber of commerce snd explain why they are not doing their part to keep the real estate market overheated.
"The only "value" they have is some perceived rarity"
Which, in the beginning, wasn't a bad thing. Fixed money supply, whether due to being backed by gold or some software enforced limit prevented central banks from diddling with the economy (in theory). But when the exchanges became banks and started making loans, they descended to the same level of mistrust that fiat currencies have. Lower even. Because although our Federal Reserve is only a quasi-governmental institution, they to have to explain themselves to Congress from time to time.
SBF answered to no-one but SBF.
... ending badly. At least on my side of the pond (sorry). Our municipal water utilities have always taken a dim view of people bypassing the water meter (their revenue) by installing rainwater cisterns for irrigation and other gray water uses.
They backed down on rain barrels. But anything of a significant size is a significant prermitting headache. Not that they are completely wrong in principal. Parking lot and rooftop precipitation diverted from the local groundwater inputs can affect stream and lake levels.
But that's the essence of democracy. That which is held dear to the soon-to-be tormented classes that populate(d) the Twit-verse.
I guess the actual process involves the silencing of opposing ideas by deplatforming. And then submitting a sanitized ballot to the plebiscite with limited choices for a thumbs up/down. You can have Spam, bacon, eggs and Spam. That's not got much Spam in it.
Imagine if the Monty Python argument sketch was written today:
"An argument is a connected series of statement intended to establish a proposition."
Downvoted.
"Argument is an intellectual process. Contradiction is just the automatic gainsaying of anything the other person says."
Downvoted.
[etc]
"there are networks of many thousands of high value accounts sharing knowledge and insight"
and
"who are corruptible and often have dubious intentions with no sense of civic duty"
I suspect that both are true in many cases. And without assurances that they can continue to pursue their agenda, they'll be leaving for more amenable venues. And I think Musk didn't know the extent of this sub rosa network.
It can be done. Not practically for a system that trains on a few billion cat pictures and attempts to find cats in some input. But for a restricted training dataset*, when training the neural network, it's possible to save a link to each instance of each training input that results in some change to a 'neuron' weight. And backtrack through deeper layers of the network.
It's a question of whether it's a requirement of the system. And if your AI is providing decisions in a process regulated by some three letter agency and they ask, "What did you base this decision on?" You had better have a list of pilots' trouble reports or whatever it is before you go fiddling with the systems.
*Which arguably GitHub is.
I think the law has already dealt with AI "creativity", intellectual property and patent issues in some sense. If it doesn't pass through a human, it's not novel.
I can read Github packages for insights into how certain problems have been solved. I can even teach myself how to code. But if that knowledge doesn't pass through a person's mind, it must be attributed to it's source or training dataset.
Strange that Github can't trace its Copilot output back to a source package (where the authorship and license resides). Several AI systems I've worked on provided just such an "explain your reasoning" function. After all, it's just a database and walking through the relational links is just another SQL query. Humans, on the other hand, are always having strange stuff pop into their head. In fact, I suspect that such untracability may be a design feature of some AI.
At a time long, long ago, I worked for an outfit and administered a system which was critical to production. I had produced a set of diagrams, notes and other instructions on how the Beast worked. Which servers were where and what to do in the event of a system crash. These were contained neatly in a three-ring binder on a bookshelf over my desk.
Our IT department, always looking to expand their baliwick, asked that they be given access to these notes. Just in case I was unreachable, hit by a bus or some such thing when the system went down.
"Will a Xerox copy do?" I asked.
"How about you just save a document on one of your servers", was the reply.
"Oh, you mean the crashed server that you are attempting to bring back on line? Think about that for a sec. At least with a hard copy, you can read it with a flashlight while trying to find the main breaker."
And they let these people run around with floppy disks ...
"They refused to buy any insurance they weren't legally required to buy. They knew first hand what a massive scam the whole industry is."
Liability insurance can be. If the terms are open-ended, you are just paying for someone else's eventual benefit.
If a visitor trips over a loose rug and takes me to court, in the discovery phase they determine that my net worth is $1 million. They sue me for $1 million. If the court finds that I have a $1 million liability policy, I get sued for $2 million. If I try to hide the existance of a policy, I could end up sitting in a jail cell on contempt of court charges.
And there I was, ready to hand over the details of a turboencabulator to the Chinese for millions.
"So the basic security messages have to be repeated endlessly if we are not going to miss informing the late entrants."
I would think that these warnings would repeat for every suspect file, for all of eternity. The last thing I want, as an experienced user, is to miss a popup and think that I'm OK opening something. Because I'm smart and know all this stuff already.
The easiest people to con are often the highly educated ones.
"bought a gallon of gas lately?"
There's some truth to the instability claim. When the underlying resource price goes up (crude prices), petrol goes up. When the crude price drops, some outlets try to hang on to the higher price. It doesn't work. The spread between the highest and lowest prices increases. Discount outlets cut their prices, even though the "average" area price stays high*. And our FTC (the consumer watchdog) actually watches this metric for signs of market manipulation (refineries withholding supplies from discounters).
*In our area, the "average" price is advertised by an outfit called Gas Buddy. They take frequent surveys of advertised prices and publish the average. Problem: The high priced stations just sit empty, or selling the odd pack of cigarettes at the cash register. The discounters have lines of people waiting at the pumps. In fact, My favorite station (Costco) occasionally has a line of delivery trucks refilling their tanks. The price spread today is well over $1.00/gallon.
... isn't the site located some miles away from the nearest town (Arecibo), through the mountains? And there are some other instruments up there, still working. So perhaps keep it in reserve for possible future observatory work. There's the University of Puerto Rico campus in town. Perhaps a better site for a bunch of STEM students.
"I wonder if Starlink will get something"
Shirley, you jest. All that money was promised to the incumbents. And reallocating any will trigger a response akin to taking a cookie from a toddler.
"or they are threatening him with prison."
Not until they can seal a deal to line up someone else to launch NASA payloads.
Musk's comment may indeed have been triggered by the refusal by our FCC to fund Starlink rural access. But what he needs to understand is that this fund was negotiated between the US government and the incumbent telecoms. For the benefit of the latter. It is not to be shared with newcomers who might seek to put up a few microwave towers. Or satellites.
The FCC rejected Starkink's application, claiming that they failed to demonstrate the ability to provide the promised service. Well, Ukraine can serve as that demonstration. But it won't matter. Because the telecoms have repeatedly failed to demonstrate the same sorts of service delivery despite the reciept of piles of cash.
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