Windows 8 came across as a kind of entertainment toy device that focused on content consumption and advertisement delivery embedded right in the start menus.
Removing the silly game could be part of Microsoft's agenda to undo the damage that Windows 8 did to its image, and rebrand itself as a "Windows OS is for getting work done" tool, rather than a novelty 'yon dungeon' video game where you try to swipe, swirl, shake, and charm your way through the 7 steps everyone must do to get to the control panel.
Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive. Maybe they put some new chemical nobody heard of into it. Anyway, people are drinking it and getting sick and dying from it left and right.
The motor oil is normally for cars, but the increased sales as a recreational drink is boosting sales. You try to prohibit people from drinking motor oil, but they do it anyway. So you go to the motor oil factory and make the motor oil significantly more poisonous.
People have been dying from this normally, but now faster than ever because the motor oil makes you gag and puke, but they force it down anyway because YOLO.
I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous. Addiction increases cognitive dissonance, making people adhere to incomplete and inaccurate models in order to justify making a villian where none exists and making a victim where none exists.
Suppose you're driving a car and have a crash, and the car detects that you weren't wearing a seat belt. Instead of deploying the air bag, swords and knives shoot out of the dashboard and seat. You were breaking the law, so the car manufacturer and the government can't be blamed. Never mind that the entire point of the law was to protect you, you were breaking the damn law.
An interesting analogy. However the victim in this case simply failed to take a precaution vs willfully went out the way to seek damage.
Punishing people with deadly force for not taking precautions is unauthorized by my calculations. The manufacturer of the air bag would be liable for all damage taken.
How about genetically engineering cannabis so that consuming it causes a pink polka dotted tumor to grow on your forehead to facilitate easy identification of cannabis users?
It should be legalized and then if you take it, it goes on your record, so next time you try to get a job the hiring company can decide based upon the reputation of potheads, whether or not to hire you.
Because your sorry butt marches into our emergency room after you screw yourself up. Taking away extra nice things that could have been. And since we can't drop you off on a deserted island to get rid of you for damaging the rest of us, the next best thing is to try to influence your behavior so you don't damage yourself now.
Its the same thing you do when you find a skunk roaming the house, you either get a broom and shoo it away, or restrict its freedom so at least it doesn't spray anything. What the fuck gives you the right to put the skunk in a box? The right of the others to remain un-sprayed by twitchy tailed skunk.
Should I not bike in my free time, because I might hit a pothole, endo, and break my arm? That would march "[my] sorry butt" into "[your] emergency room" pretty darn quick.
The answer is: that's absurd. Every single thing humans do can result in injury. (Even sitting in a chair injures you!) Cycling probably sends more people to the emergency room than smoking pot does, in fact.
(I don't use marijuana BTW, but I do support its legalization. Sounds like a legitimate recreational activity. I personally prefer coffee.)
"I find it hard to believe the guilty party here is the people who made the poison more poisonous."
Please tell me you're being sarcastic here. Because otherwise I have no idea how to begin a coherent reply. It's as if I'm suddenly confronted with someone adamantly arguing that the sun is pink, or that cars grow on trees.
Cross between ad hominum and straw man. He compared my argument to cars growing on trees the said ha! Look how silly you are. Cars don't grow on trees!
Hmmm you don't say. Can we get back to the argument now?
The group of people who don't drink includes a bunch of very ill people, so it's not surprising to find that group dies sooner than the other group. That doesn't mean that alcohol has any health benefit.
Every doctor I've ever had has recommended that I have 2 drinks a day. "Heart healthy and liver neutral." Is that BS? Totally willing to hear that it is, especially if you have a source.
Health benefit? I'll be sure to tell the kids who's mothers drank during pregnancy that their obvious and life crippling birth defects that nugget of truthiness.
Tell me again how much alcohol stimulates GDP and promotes health in our emergency rooms? To the tune of negative 120 billion annually and overloaded emergency rooms treating throngs of out of work alcoholics needing treatment for alcohol related problems?
Health benefits. Yeah right. Sure you get a dollar, but you lose 1000. Look at the big picture.
This says it's about a 10th of the cost of what you said.
While I regardless agree with you that alcoholism is a problem, your solutions are not only draconian, they are demonstrably ineffective. We've tried them before. They don't work. This isn't about morality, it's about what works.
While I get what you are saying.... this was done knowing what the results were going to be - done specifically to get the results (dangerously poisoning people who's behaviour was determined to not be moral)
So yeah - I do believe the guilty party are those that knowly made something that was going to poison and kill people.
On the "alcohol" is poison argument (WTF?) Fine - it turned from a known poison with known, acceptable results to something that that wasn't known and killed people.
If I was there when they decided to poison the factory alcohol. I would have advised against it. You'll never hear the end of it. All the victims will blame you for the damage taken, because it was more than they expected.
I'd say ratchet up the poison in 1 percent increments once every two months. Then the people seeking damage would receive the expected amount of damage, and everyone gets exactly what they want.
1.Damage for the damage seeker, no big surprises.
2. Prohibition for the prohibition seeker, just takes a bit longer
Lets suppose some company hired scientists at great expense to make 10w30 motor oil incredibly addictive.
The logical approach in this case would be the make the firm halt their motor-oil enhancing activity, not to let them keep doing it and adding your own poison. This is a silly analogy.
That's lame analogy. Alcohol can kill when consumed to excess, but you find no fault in killing people because they consume a drug that you disapprove of?
Alcohol is still denatured, you know. I think they just made it taste bad instead of making it poisonous. The intent was not for people to drink it but for people to avoid diversion (using industrial alcohol as drinking alcohol).
No, it's still poisonous, because it contains the head of distillation, which contains methanol which would be discarded in alcohol made for human consumption. Yes, they add other denaturants to make it taste foul as well. However there are still a few cases of serious alcoholics who try to drink methylated spirit.
Amusingly, the treatment for methanol poisoning is to get the patient drunk with the good stuff, although this is usually done under medically-induced coma with a purified ethanol drip. The ethanol competes with the methanol for the alcohol dehydrogenase enzyme, reducing the rate at which methanol is broken down in the body into really poisonous formic acid. There was a case in 2007 where a hospital ran out of medical ethanol, and substituted vodka in a drip while treating poisoning with ethylene glycol, which has the same treatment. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/world/asia-pacific/7037443.stm
I don't disapprove of drinking poison. Its the people drinking poison who are disapproving of the decision to make poison poisonous. The phenomenon to explain is why the blame is quickly shifted from people drinking poison and getting hurt, to intelligent people who allowed it to continue.
Its part of the "shift blame onto the non idiots" agenda in america. Someone get hurt by being stupid? Then find the nearest responsible person and make him pay up to remedy everything.
I've got a better idea. How about we laugh at the idiots being idiots and try to encourage the poisoners to at least ratchet up their poisoning poison more slowly. As to make the dying idiots once again the responsible party by choosing to get hurt by drinking poison.
The fact that its addictive and damages people. That should be the illegal thing: using a factory to make things that people get addicted to and it harms them.
People 1000 years from now are going to look at us in the way we look at witch trials. Likt wtf bro? Why don't you go making bombs that get set off on a hair trigger and just lay them around? They only hurt once in a while if you get them close to your face.
Wtf really? Well you see, it was addictive! And... We really liked it! mmm hmmm. I can think of better defenses for the witch trials.
My mother was an alcoholic and her abuse of it killed her. Millions of other people are able to use it responsibly.
Would you care to dance around and laugh and sing "ha ha, your mommy's dead and the bitch deserved it!" Because that's the tune you're carrying.
Today we have an obesity epidemic that is responsible for significant health problems. By your logic all food should be poisoned too. You are one sick fucker.
So let me get this straight, your mom died from alcohol and I still here you defending it? I guess I tripped your cognitive dissonance algorithms, your genetic line can't simultaneously be 'good' and the thing that caused great damage in it also good. So the defective party must be the one pointing out the truth in the situation.
What Snowden did, or more specifically what the faceless, unaccountable and un-nameable NSA directors did was what George Orwell was trying to capture in his famous novel.
The notion of thoughtcrime and crimethink being the punishable event in the minds of the people. Where people are afraid to research something because of the perception that the secret unaccountable police will come take you away if you give the idea too much thought. And there is nothing you or anyone can do about it because the entity doing the enforcing is completely hidden. Even asking for the names of the directors and writing about what they've done is crimethink. Thinking about or asking for the document describing which thoughts are crimethink is also crimethink.
But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put a stop to it there?
We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper classes.
>> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way...
Perhaps in such a civilization George Orwell's 1984 would be illegal too.
>> We could live in a post-crime society...
There is no such thing as a post-crime society. Crime is subjective. It's fine when you think about murder etc as a crime in a democratic setting where citizenry has equal rights. But, the definition of crime is never a constant - It was a crime to consume/buy/sell alcohol or drugs once, it isn't anymore (some drugs in some places). Human torture was legal once, it isn't anymore. Even now, in some places of the world, education/equal rights for women is a crime, freedom of religion is a crime. So, there is no such thing as a post-crime society. All that can be is transparency, which democracy and free press have best provided. Hidden policing/courts etc are a step backward as there is no oversight on their operation.
> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event. If your neighbor is thinking about how to make a bomb, or how to kill someone, or how to commit suicide, or how to defraud and deceive others, wouldn't it be better if the secret police put a stop to it there?
> We could live in a post-crime society. Where everyone is un-corruptable and all humans treat each other as lovingly as we treat our own bodies. The problem with this is that the secret police only enforce the rules of the rulers, which has a thicker script for the lower classes than the upper classes.
In the past, philosophers have been discussing about "The problem of evil"[0] - which is the paradox of an omnibenevolent, omniscient, and omnipotent God allowing (morally) evil to exist. Obviously, it's normally discussed in a theological context, but one argument would apply to a non-theological context as well: the defense of free will. Since free will is the more important/ preferable than non-existent of evil, you can't have human with free will but without the choice of being evil. So as long as free will exists, you will have to be content with having evil/ crime etc as well.
Just to be clear, "evil" in the previous paragraph is being used in the sense of morally bad, and not the invisible, flying, human-haunting type.
It is not clear that notion of free will is even a consistent concept however. E.g. free will is perfectly explained as what a deterministic decision process feels like from the inside.
> maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event.
Can't tell if you're being sarcastic or not but you're certainly not describing my utopia. So there, the idea that an "objective" utopia exists is disproven. Taking that argument further, who now decides whose utopia becomes the utopia? I admire Snowden a great deal for both his courage and his intellect, and one of the strongest arguments he makes against your utopia (again, I just can't tell if you're being sarcastic) is to remind us of the ancient-seeming idea of a "security state". That is, close to 100% security can be had, at the cost of liberty. In other words, it's a tradeoff. We can quibble about whether that tradeoff could be improved (the equivalent of a free lunch or "Pareto improvement" in economics), but "thoughtcrime" and "crimethink" is so far beyond where I would draw the line, you can't even see the line anymore from there…
How would you know if you had a utopian society yet?
Who gets to define what is a "thought of evil"? Is freeing slaves evil, or against the natural order of things? What about considering interracial marriage? Or living an openly homosexual lifestyle?
Would it be better if the police put a stop to it before such people started doing such horrible things? Locked up people before they had a chance to make their morally corrupting case to society? Suppressed discussion so that ideas could not be thrashed out, improved, built upon and weaponised in a memetic fashion to spread like some awful disease through the minds of right-thinking folks?
We may think we're incredibly moral, because we've got to the point where we now recognise these past beliefs as wrong, even if we're still a few steps from getting everyone to accept them. But for those growing up now who realise the importance of LGBT rights, the generation before you were convinced of their morality for recognising mixed-marriage rights over their predecessors, who were convinced of their morality for recognising the evil of slavery over their predecessors.
If history is any guide at all, it's likely there are things which you think are just the natural order, that will in the future be successfully argued to be morally reprehensible. Our descendants will wonder how we ever let ourselves do such things. I've no idea what those things will be; it might be environmental destruction, or carnivorism, laws/mores against public nudity. But I'm pretty sure we want those thinkers out there, as we're no where near utopia yet.
> But perhaps I'm looking at this the wrong way, maybe a utopian civilization would consider thoughts of evil, thoughts of crime and intentions to harm others as a justifiably punishable event.
Maybe. And yet, I seem to remember reading an essay a while ago about the difference between cities and companies, and why some cities have lasted for thousands of years, whereas most companies are lucky to make twenty. The answer in the author's opinion was a tolerance for dissent.
So, you may be right about stopping violence, but do you think those in charge of surveillance will stop there? Because I do wonder whether, in a world where thoughtcrime is a real possibility, things might not get end up in a permanently rigid status quo, rather than the free-flowing and ever-changing conversation that we call culture.
Strangely the creeping Orwellian scenario may be the most optimistic view to take. If the monitoring is unnecessary it can be rolled back one day. The threat can be removed.
But what if the monitoring really is vitally important in preventing violent crime? The government will loose the spying capability soon enough as technology and understanding evolves. What will happen then?
> But what if the monitoring really is vitally important in preventing violent crime? The government will loose the spying capability soon enough as technology and understanding evolves. What will happen then?
We can look at data in regions where monitoring is most egregious and see whether improvements correlate with monitoring, or if they could be explained by other factors.
In R.A. Lafferty's Hugo & Nebula nominated "Past Master", a time machine is used to retrieve Sir Thomas More to help fix their attempted utopian society, http://irosf.com/q/zine/article/10456
"Thomas's initial reaction to Astrobe is perplexity: how can the people of Cathead reject happiness when they have been offered it on a platter? Why choose misery over a golden life? The people of the slums inform Thomas that a miserable life is better than no life at all. As he asks questions and explores this brave new world, Thomas discovers that the best people on the planet, those of finest intellect and judgment, have migrated to Cathead."
Also watch out for a bait and switch on Airbnb. I'm actually sitting in a nice apt now from airbnb. So I am happy with it. But there is another host who is trying to get me for an $1800 cleaning fee. What happens is you book a room in advance for a month. Then the host waits until 12 hours before the point of no cancelation to say "its not available but there is another one for a lot less cost that is a lot worse.". You say no before the cutoff window but then he lowers the cost to bargain basement levels. You accept. And he accepts by booking a different apartment under the haggling text message agreement. Naturally you move to requisition the disagreement as he said he would. But he stalls until the last minute and unsweetens the deal until you cancel. Boom. He has your money and can point to the fine print and his strict cancellation policy that the trouble he went through to clean the room and get it " fixed up" justifies the $1800 charge for a room I didn't set foot in.
Moral if the story. If you don't get prompt reply and if any changes occur after booking. Stay away from that host. They are fishing for free money playing the rules of Airbnb.
Airbnb is supposedly going to get back to me about this disagreement, and there is a ticket to deal with it. But its been 5 days after the event and I pinged them twice with email. My other option may be to contest the charge on my credit card. Scammers are everywhere that rules and large sums of money can be found. And many of those scammers will be right there along side you jockeying for victimhood status.
Just call your bank and you'll get your money back immediately. The chargeback process is hugely biased in favor of the cardholder. You can even win the chargeback if you had stayed in the place and it was not as advertised. If you start filing a lot of chargebacks, though, you'll likely be flagged by the card network.
Just talk to Airbnb. They have really good customer support and if a host is doing anything fishy they will offer full refunds with an additional credit for a future booking.
I encountered a similar situation in Portland a couple weeks ago and Airbnb was great!
"Can you, at the same time, read this sentence and think about yourself reading it?"
The moments before I fall asleep is when I sometimes can get a glimpse of how the machinery of reading and thought work under the hood. It looks like a computer program that runs thousands of commands in parallel, and it's not controlled by the command-giver between your ears.
There is a shutdown process that occurs when you fall asleep, to most people it's like a switch where it goes from totally on to totally off, but I've come to see it like a janitor walking from room to room in a large building and flicking off lights in each room one after another.
And you can change the order of the shutdown procedure to keep the command-giver in your mind awake until last, and watch what happens that requires your thinking mind to go away while it brings up new processes. The most fascinating part is those 4 seconds before falling asleep. Where you get the halting of ordinary thought, and the machinery that does deep learning rumbles to life one by one, in various order.
It's hard to describe, one thing I see, it all operates in parallel. And it's like a democracy. It's not a line of execution, it's everything all at once. All experiences being dumped into modified networks to solve for objectives. If a superior model is found to map input to motor output, the new model is made dominant. We do learning during the day, but the model generation that glues it all together happens at night. And you can watch it do its work in those moments before sleep.
One way to help the government establish tight controls over what kinds of programs you can run on any of your computers is to implement a single point of control and a single point of failure for the internet through ISP's. That way any programs anywhere that don't follow the agency's lead have to do their work without internet connectivity, or proportionally throttled speeds.
Then when these devices come closer and closer to who we are and what we think, the government will have the proverbial "internet delete button" for ideas and programs that should not be running through human minds or their devices.
The government wants backdoor and root access into the computer in everyone's pocket. This is for the best because the government is deeply concerned about the health and wellness of every single citizen.
How about we turn it around, and give the people guaranteed rights and root access into all of the smartphones of the senators, politicians, and lobbyists doing secret deals and bribes so that the civilization can help reign in rampant corruption that is destroying this country? I get a feeling this alternative "society wellness program" would get quietly blocked. Since when did the government become responsible for health and wellness? I thought government was only responsible for a few things that the free market could not do for themselves?
Whack-a-mole legislation on the internet isn't working, people just route around the damaged parts, what we need is a centralized government internet white list. A constantly updated list of things anyone can do, or any particular person can do, rather than a list of things that are illegal.
The programmer recruiting industry is counter productive, adding less than no value to the people who need coders as well as the the programmers who want to work. Less than no value means they are a net drain on society, as worthless as hiring people to dig holes in the ocean.
These recruiter tactics would be acceptable for food service jobs though. There you would need to find a candidate with a high tolerance for complete bullshit.
The entire programming recruiter industry can be replaced by the following:
Throw a party with free drinks and food, of the people who show up, present a coding test on the board and the first 10 people to submit a correct solution gets on the short list.
And if you are so poor and can't do that (HR is vetoing), just do a basic coding test online. Of the people who submit correct answers, short list the best ones.
But perhaps I'm wrong, perhaps social skills are more important in programmers than coding skill.
I'll offer some counter points, but my view point is skewed.
- The best programmers come from all over the world. While it'd be great if they can attend these parties, it's not practical, even if they are within the same country.
- Companies do throw/host a lot of meetups to attract top coders. Top coders are usually kept very happy by their current employers and not looking to leave so they don't usually attend recruiting functions unless they are the ones recruiting.
- If you want to see parties thrown as recruiting events, go to Uncubed in SF. It's a wonderful time, but most people are just entering into the industry, so not many senior level guys.
- * Most programmers I meet at my workplace thought the interview was pretty easy, to which I say "Of course you did, you're here, but think about the 30-40 candidates before you that failed miserably." I meet a lot of skilled programmers that hate coding tests/interviews, the reason? They already know they can do the job, they know they're gonna ace the interview because they're awesome. But guess what? A lot, and I mean a lot, of people that fail thought the same.
- Don't discount social skills. Some roles are more client facing than others, or working with non-technical folks. Communication is key to projects.
I think any programmer that's been a hiring manager will agree there are many senior level people that just can't code,entry level grads with CS degrees that can't write algorithms or figure out time complexity.
Perhaps it's a good idea to have random take downs of the internet in large areas for extended periods of time so that there is more motivation for people to create a second, non-centralized single-point-of-failure single-point-of-control internet.
We have to prepare for the inevitable future reality where many layers of government can terminate the internet connection of any person based on what content they are providing, or what service they are serving.
When an evil agent discovers the power to shut down my internet connection, or the internet connection of an entire area based on what people are doing on it, it is only a matter of days or weeks before that power is wielded to expand their power and create money from thin air through it. If the internet is to become a medium through which people think through, it must be as reliable and un-stoppable as two people talking and listening in a private room.
>Perhaps it's a good idea to have random take downs of the internet in large areas for extended periods of time so that there is more motivation for people to create a second, non-centralized single-point-of-failure single-point-of-control internet.
That's not a good idea. That's a very bad idea, considering how much critical infrastructure, globally, depends on the internet working -- what you're suggesting, to even work as "motivation", would be akin to randomly poisoning pharmaceuticals to discourage overdependence on antibiotics.
That said though, if such a change could be pulled off without essentially destroying the economies of whole countries, I would be all for it.
I guess we should give up on trying to keep the definition of the word "Hacker" as "brilliant programmer and technical expert".
We can't continue going around calling ourselves "Criminals", and that when we do a brilliant piece of work on an intractable software problem that we really "Hacked" it together, meaning we broke the law to steal it and kept all the money for ourselves.
The word "Hacker" has got to go, it is the same as the word "Criminal", "Burglar" or "Felon" now.
You say Executive pay is not an asset. So if an executive owns the deed to a house, you'd agree that's an asset, but if the executive maintains a skill to be hired for 200k/day, that this is not an asset?
Doesn't an executive's ability to convince a company to pay 200k/day fluctuate based on market forces just like how people price homes or tulip bulbs?
Absolutely. They cost so much more than they did before precisely because of market forces.
Good luck convincing all of the underpaid $120k/yr salaried engineers, though. 95% of the world would kill to live in the cozy little bubble of tech, but that doesn't matter because those other guys over there are getting even more.
No matter how much you have, you always want more.
Removing the silly game could be part of Microsoft's agenda to undo the damage that Windows 8 did to its image, and rebrand itself as a "Windows OS is for getting work done" tool, rather than a novelty 'yon dungeon' video game where you try to swipe, swirl, shake, and charm your way through the 7 steps everyone must do to get to the control panel.