Not necessarily excluded from the trial, just kept out of the public record.

There are many legal protections in place, as others are now discussing, for this very reason. It would be easy to abuse lawsuits, use a lawsuit to force competitors to discover trade secrets, use a lawsuit to force confidential records to be publicly exposed, etc. We have a legal system that allows for documents to be redacted, for documents to be filed under seal, for information to be kept eyes-only, and for some things to only be evaluated by outside experts who in turn give testimony rather than the thing itself being considered as evidence. There is a huge range of reasons the various protections apply. Those protections are important both to the businesses and the individual, and to maintain trust in government.

When the protections are warranted --- and they very often are for information normally treated as confidential or trade secrets --- there are plenty of ways they can be incorporated to the trial without public disclosure.

The point is that "room and board" is not a living expense unique to school, so it isn't an academic expense. You have to have food and housing regardless of if you're in school or not.

The article starts out with a bogus number: Today it costs at least $104,108 on average to attend four years of public university.

Open the details, and you'll see they pulled it from a "total costs" that includes not just the tuition, books, and other school costs, but also a category "daily living expenses" adding about 20K/year. Those are for on-campus housing and a campus meal plan. For some reason, they treat the fact that you'll need to live somewhere and eat something as academic expenses.

Look up the details a little more, and the national average cost of tuition is $9678 for a 4-year school. The 2-year school is $3501 on average. Both are for in-state tuition rates. You can find schools that charge more, some of the most premium private schools exceed $50K/year. You can also find schools that are far cheaper, around 4K or 5K per year in various states.

A student who gets their associates degree at a community college then gets a bachelor's degree at 'average cost' an in-state university is around $27K.

A student who gets a 4 year degree entirely at the 'average cost' university will be around $38K.

A student who chooses to go to a school that costs far more than the average is making that choice. Some people choose to attend schools where a single semester costs more than a full 4 years elsewhere.

Even more, many schools are moving to accredited 3-year bachelor's degree programs. An increasing number are dropping from a typical 120 credit hours to 90 or 96 credit hours. Some schools don't accept them for graduate studies, but as the long list of major schools shifting to 3-year programs expands, that's changing.

What you describe is exactly the well-established fact that extroverts do better in the office, while introverts tend to do better outside it.

Most of the /. crowd tends to be in creative fields introverts favor. WFH also tended to do best with creative fields, including programming. Many of us saw huge improvements in terms of both output and created value when we transitioned away from the in-office distractions.

Yes, it is upsetting to people in management who are often extroverted focusing on people, and yes, the people who have better soft skills and are more extroverted can leverage their social powers to get along better with other extroverted people. But to not realize most programmers are at least somewhat introverted is to be blind to who your workers actually are.

Fortunately, many companies recognize that programmers and creatives are generally introverts who do better with maker hours rather than manager hours, and the even better news is that these companies are already hiring remotely! No need to move to find a better job with an employer located thousands of miles away who is thrilled to have someone with your skill set.

This is more of what I expect on Reddit or Twitter. The /. crowd is usually more adept at tech than that.

Nope, it is not doing anything with the math.

The training data includes math books, conversations about math, tutorials about solving math problems, and Common Crawl includes math education websites and random discussion where people explain and argue about why they think 1+2*5 should be 15 instead of 11.

Neither the math problems nor those conversations are directly encoded. Instead the model has encountered enough similar statements among the billions of messages that the probably of those specific words following other words happened to be quite probable. Just like language phrases, number families form clusters that you are likely to see together. If you see 1 and 2 you have a high probability you are going to see a 3 next. When the training data includes so many billion discussion group messages including reddit subs for math education, it sees what happens to have similar clusters of words all the time.

The model knows nothing about the math it happens to explain. The model has simply scanned enough math conversations that guessing the most probable words merely happened to include a correct answer.

Let's not soften the language.

Theft.

The luggage and containers don't simply vanish to the far corners of the airports. Very often they are intentionally pulled aside by thieves, searched for valuables, and discarded somewhere unobserved.

The airlines consider it "mishandled" and "lost", but it is employees in a secure facility boosting their wages through theft.

Correct, and I never said there was. Only you have written that requirement.

The model guidelines from WIPO (which you can find under their requirements for patents FAQ in addition to the legal documents), which most nations have adopted, include something called the enablement clause:

The invention must be disclosed in an application in a manner sufficiently clear and complete to enable it to be replicated by a person with an ordinary level of skill in the relevant technical field.

A model legal wording is: The specification shall contain a written description of the invention, and of the manner and process of making and using it, in such full, clear, concise, and exact terms as to enable any person skilled in the art to which it pertains, or with which it is most nearly connected, to make and use the same, and shall set forth the best mode contemplated by the inventor of carrying out his invention.

So while nobody is required to replicate it, if people in the field are unable to replicate it based on the patent alone, then the patent is invalid.

Subtle strawman there, changing from what I wrote.

A patent containing enough to replicate it is not the same as actually requiring anybody to replicate it. The first is a requirement held by most nations and WIPO, the second is not.

Regardless, it is irrelevant to the point. It is exactly the scientific method: either people will validate the results and the breakthrough validated, or it will not be validated by others leaving their reputation broken. Either it works as a superconductor as described or it doesn't. People being skeptical or not are irrelevant, it either behaves as they described (which doesn't require any belief nor skepticism) or it does not.

Atypical method of livestream, but that's exactly how science is supposed to work.

Publish your findings and way to reproduce the effect. Other people follow it and attempt to reproduce the effect. If it works, get congratulations on the advancement, your Nobel Prize is in the mail. If it doesn't work or others see mixed results, take the reputation hit, figure it out and publish again.

The oddity with their patents already being filed is that to be valid, a patent must be enough to replicate it. The process must work as described, nothing omitted, or it can be challenged. Theories are not valid patents. The article reads like this is the case, they are trying to cash in on their theory, not do science.

Either way, both scientific method and patents require others to replicate it. It's an easy enough one to do. Either the initial publisher will be famous in a week, or a laughing stock.

Came to say the same.

Even if it was a loss of cash -- which it isn't -- the amount would literally be pocket change. According to their latest financial report they have over 7 billion in cash on hand, and over 130B in assets.

And even then, this isn't a loss of "we had 7 billion in cash, now we have 6 billion".

Starliner has been in planning since early 2000's, officially announced publicly 13 years ago. It has been a long-term investment the company has funded as it goes. This announcement is a reach-forward loss. Those words mean something. They aren't losses today, they aren't expenses today, instead they're accounting department stating they'll likely get less money than they hoped on the R&D project when it completes. They had hoped to get the spacecraft up in 2017, instead of the 2019 and 2022 launches they've had. They were getting partially funded by NASA, along with SpaceX, but the spacecraft has always been an R&D cost to the company for many billion dollars.

NASA has been granting contracts to help partially offset the costs a few million dollars at a time, but they're only a small portion. From day one this was seen as a corporate R&D project paid for by Boeing, in the hopes of it being a successful commercial spacecraft recovering those R&D investments.

The announcement is just that for the over 30 billion already spent going into the R&D is going to be another billion or so at this point. Yes it is a lot of money by itself, but relative to the Starliner project and to Boeing as a whole, it is nothing.

Yes. Federal law already protects them with protection around intrusion, appropriation, unreasonable publicity, and false light. Notable actors and actresses have made claims on trademark for their likeness including voice, and copyright covers direct copies and derived works pretty well.

They are calling for additional protection both through contract and through additional laws.

The law currently has a gray area around appropriation when it comes to generated, synthetic voice. There is very little case law.

I am sympathetic to wanting specific authorization for each use. The law probably already covers it under personality right appropriation, but it is not completely clear, settled law.

I believe the technology itself is strictly neutral. It is the people using it, and the way they use it, that is problematic. Most humans are great, and will choose to do the decent thing. Some are not. A few criminals have already latched on to them.

• * We already have AI-driven drones that are completely computer controlled. Some of them are used in warfare, with weapons. By international treaty against booby-traps and for better control the militaries have a human that gives the order to fire, but it could easily be fully automated.
• * We already have AI-driven turrets that can identify a single individual in a crowd and track them. In commercial environments usually they're used in sports tracking the ball carrier, or sometimes used by news agencies to track key people, or even paparazzi to find stars for photos. It wouldn't take much to make them into a lethal AI-driven weapon.
• * We already have AI-driven vehicles that are completely computer controlled. Right now in many major cities you can have an automated taxi pull up and deliver you to your destination. Honestly it's only a matter of time before someone straps a bomb in one as the passenger.
• * We already have AI-driven smart weapons, ranging from guided missiles to smart bullets. Currently they're controlled by militaries and by smart engineers and not in the hands of crazy folks who want to see the world burn, but eventually someone with enough technical know-how and also world-burning desire will collide.
• * We already have systems that make deep fakes, a few minutes of video can give a convincing image and convincing voice. There are sadly already people out there who will fake a kidnapping and use automated voices to simulate a victim to blackmail a family who thinks a loved one is being held for ransom.

For the most part people do good things, or at least not terrible things. But there are people who won't hesitate to use the technology to commit major crimes, and that's the difficulty.

The anonymous coward brings up another good point: they are the nanny state. They dictate your medical care without medical training nor knowledge of the situation, they dictate education despite not being trained as educators nor knowing the details of the child, and otherwise work to eliminate self-determination and claim it is freedom.

It's a strong political message, but little more.

The new law was going to be for two years, and it passed.

The courts can change it back to 2 years. The next legislature can change it. The next governor can change it.

It's really only gullible people who would think the state's education budget is now set in stone for four centuries. Sadly, there are plenty of gullible people and clickbait-writing reporters, but really that's bound to make the political message that much bigger.