Posts by ratfox 3465 posts • joined 3 Sep 2007
[...] will result in his name being plastered everywhere again
Does it? I'm not sure it means that. The injunction could pretty well keep going after the lawsuit is over, even in case of a loss, couldn't it? I'm sure that there are open-ended injunctions.
The loss only means that you will be able to find those websites on Google by looking for his name, whatever that name is, just like you are able to do it now.
they had a duty to build such safeguards into their systems, before they got big
Well actually, the thing is, there is no law forcing those companies to build safeguards. If there was such a law, they'd be getting sued already. What's under discussion is whether they will police themselves, or whether governments will have to write ham-fisted laws forcing them to.
That said, I don't recall big tech ever openly claiming they were too big to be regulated. They might play with the notion, hinting that they'll just leave the country and drop services if regulators attempt to control them; but I've never seen an example where they just go out and use that as an argument. In fact, it'd be pretty stupid of them to do that, because that's precisely the kind of behavior that means regulators should intervene.
Face Vomiting was approved as part of Unicode 10.0 in 2017 under the name “Face With Open Mouth Vomiting” and added to Emoji 5.0 in 2017.
You're welcome!
such as Apple making iCloud a worthwhile competitor.
I'm not sure how that would make a difference? Dropbox already has plenty of competition from Google and Microsoft, and their products are reasonably worthwhile. Were Apple to somehow decide to wake up from their slumber, I doubt they'd go for the people who would otherwise choose Dropbox.
Relatively few problems have known efficient solutions with a quantum computer, but that isn’t the same at all.
The key point is that a QC can execute at least one NP-hard problem in polynomial time.
No! NO! NO!!1!
There is not, I repeat, not a single NP-hard problem for which we have found an algorithm solving it in polynomial time. Even with a quantum computer.
To quote the Wikipedia article on Quantum Computing: "There is a common misconception that quantum computers can solve NP-complete problems in polynomial time. That is not known to be true, and is generally suspected to be false."
The proof is not constructive, it just says it can be done
The proof is constructive, just impractical.
No! The class of algorithms efficiently computable by Quantum Computers (i.e. BQP) does NOT include NP-hard or even NP-complete problems.
To be pedantic: If you can prove your statement, you have a million dollars waiting for you.
I think what you mean is that BQP is not known to include NP-complete problems.
As I understand it, there's terribly few problems whose known complexity is smaller with a quantum computer. In fact, the only that I know is factorizing large numbers. Which sounds very useful to destroy cryptography, until you remember that elliptic-curve cryptography is not affected, so we can just change algorithms and carry on...
So really, what's the use of quantum computers?
I mean, the tech giants are all — technically — following the rules as it is. Why would they sign up for an additional tax? Are governments simply going to decide case by case who should pay that tax?
Apart from that, I'm thinking that Apple, Google and Facebook might be fine with a tax on turnover, because they have massive margins. That's probably going to hurt Amazon a lot more, though.
Let's all use a messaging system which charges you by the message!
Jokes aside, I wonder how many people still use SMS by default and don't use or even know about WhatsApp/Messenger. I suspect it's not much. Facebook claimed in 2016 that Messenger and Whatsapp together had three times as much traffic as SMS worldwide. And I'm pretty sure SMS has lost ground since then...
And how many of these are sent from an iPhone to an Android, since that's what iMessage does in this situation?
No, Damore's memo didn't say discrimination isn't a problem.
Oh really? Then why all the biological argument to explain disparities in engineering? What would be the point, if anyway he agreed that women and black people are discriminated against, and that it is a problem?
He was trying to show that the anti-discrimination training at Google was unnecessary, and to support this assertion, he claimed that the differences where due to biological differences rather than discrimination.
The whole biological argument that made people scream so much is irrelevant unless it implies that discrimination is not a problem.
The issue is that it IS science. It's backed by good quality research, even if you prefer some other supposedly better research.
If your good quality research is contradicted by other good quality research, you're not doing science. Ahem.
That said, no matter how good the science is, it doesn't support Damore's own conclusion that discrimination doesn't exist.
Whatever science he was using did very little to support his conclusion that Google should stop giving their employees training against discrimination.
To begin with, the biology argument he uses, even assuming it helps explaining the disparity between men and women in engineering, does not magically mean that discrimination does not exist. And then, it does absolutely nothing to explain why black people are so rare in engineering.
every victim will have had an hour of their time wasted by whoever bought the list
This particular settlement is not about Google "selling the list of queries" of users. It is about the fact that when requesting a web page, browsers would typically provide as referer the URL of the page the user was coming from. When coming from Google results, that URL used to contain the query.
So website would be able to get, not the list of queries of the user, but the single query which had brought the user to their own web site.
There's a reason the settlement was so low.
While the above data shows that driverless tech is indeed still a while away from being fully reliable, none of the autonomous vehicle makers that we can think of are claiming to be so, and certainly don't intend to be any time before 2020-ish.
I thought that Waymo was going to start a fully-automated service in Phoenix this year?
Now... for the next killer feature for phones
Identity
Apple and Google should work together to standardize a secure method of identifying yourself legally
What the hell are you talking about? The vast majority of countries have an ID card or some other official document which serves this exact purpose. Why would you need a phone for that??
It's like you're claiming we need an app to finally enable us to unlock the door of our home. Killer feature indeed.
Actually, it should also be noted that Google did not sell all of Motorola to Lenovo for $2.91bn. They had already sold another part of the business for $2.6bn; they kept some of the research team; they kept most of the patents and the cash. What's more, by "acquiring" the previous losses of Motorola, they were able to reduce their own taxes for a few years.
As you can read on this most excellent website: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2014/01/30/google_motorola_mobility_lenovo_sale/
The surprising thing is, Google only makes money when people click on ads... And Google makes a shitload of money. So yeah, somewhere, somehow, there must be a lot of people clicking on ads. I don't know who they are either.
As for why people are paying for ads... Well, maybe it's working for them. Or they're stupid. Who knows? In any case, Google is definitely getting it. The money, I mean.
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