Can't repay them? The US debt as a percent of GDP isn't even the highest it has ever been. It was higher right after WWII. The way to reduce the debt is simple - either raise taxes or reduce spending or both. We merely lack to political will to do this at the present. The notion that we have debts that "cannot" be repaid is nonsense. As for individuals there is copious data showing that individuals and households have been paying down debt levels significantly since 2008. Companies have balance sheets that are historically very strong with large amounts of cash and relatively low debt levels overall.

Actually, we cannot pay off our debts. Most of the money in circulation is created by the banks creating loans. These loans have to be paid back, with interest. We owe more money to the banks than actually exists. Or in other words, if everyone tried to pay back their loans, we'd end up in a situation where the banks would literally have all the money, yet the loans would still not be paid off.

The only way the system keeps on running is that new debt is constantly created to pay off the old debt. Well that, and the money the fed creates out of thin air.

I thnk their core business WAS the web directory but that seemed to become irrelevent and less useful once Google came around. Their age and size has allowed them a certain amount of inertia with users who simply don't know or care for anything better.

I think there's some value in a high-quality curated web directory. Given what Wikipedia accomplishes with volunteers and no advertising, I would think that Yahoo could have come up with some way to basically pay people to browse the web and curate a directory given the money they have to spend.

Google search is better in some regards and use cases but in some ways, if it isn't on the first page of results it probably won't be useful, especially if you don't know what to search for or are looking for a class of information or type of web site.

But they seemed to have given up on that in favor of "web services" which they probably can't ever compete with. Their technology isn't competitive, they don't have any media clout and nothing unique to offer.

This excellent blog article describes a technique developed by Judea Pearl decades ago to do exactly this. Would be interested to understand how this is different/better.

Still, when talking about a "Liberal Arts education," you're talking about a generalized and broad education in a variety of topics, including subjects related to math and science. That's what the term means. No, that doesn't mean that you will study literally every subject, but it's not claiming to be about any particular subject. STEM, meanwhile, seems to be trying to claim to be a valid classification of a particular type of study, distinct from that kind of "broad, well rounded education."

If you say you want to get a Liberal Arts degree, you're telling me, "I'm not going to college for job training in a specific career. I'm going for a general education." If you say you want to get a BS in CompSci, you're basically telling me, "I'm going to college to get training for a career in software development," or something along those lines. Already that's kind of vague, because there are a number of different career paths that involve computer science, and computer science is already a fairly broad field. But if you tell me, "I want a STEM degree," you're telling me, "I have no idea why I'm going to school. I guess I want an education in sciencey stuff that will focus in on a particular field for career training, but I don't actually have any understanding of what field I want to study."

I'm struggling to come up with a good analogy, but it's like if you said, "I really want to travel!" and I asked, "Are you just interested in travelling generally and seeing the world? Or is there a particular place that you want to go?" and you respond, "No, there's a very specific place that I want to go."

So then I ask, "Where's that?" and you say, "Europe or Asia."

Now, I point out, "You're not narrowing it down very much there, you know."

And you respond, "Well you weren't narrowing it down much either, when you asked me if I wanted to see the world!"

And you're not wrong, but it's also a bit of a silly argument now, since the point of talking about "the world" was to be broad and cover everything. Liberal Arts covers everything. I guess that STEM is supposed to be "everything, minus that faggy art stuff, and stuff that makes you think about things."

That was one of my thoughts, as well. I think I understand the concept, and it seems like an interesting and possibly useful approach. However, it doesn't seem like it will necessarily give us causal links in a very certain way, since many real-life situations have many factors with complex relationships. Like: Z causes X and Y, but perhaps it always causes X and only makes Y more likely. Or: A, B, and C all independently increase the chances of E, but only when an unknown factor D is present.

So I'd guess that this isn't going to be anything like a magic bullet, but I don't know that the people who came up with it expected it to be. It might just be another useful tool for analysis.

Teaching jobs and various educational administrative jobs, marketing jobs, customer service jobs (not all of which include fries) and office worker jobs. Lawyers and associated jobs (paralegal). Sales jobs. Political positions.

I think the point here is there are loads and loads of jobs out there that don't require specific technical knowledge, or even many that make use a of broad education. The idea that there are no good jobs aside from technical/engineering jobs is pretty senseless and dumb.

But again, you miss the point entirely. If you were correct, it would be appropriate to use the line from The Big Lebowski, "You're not wrong. You're just an asshole." But you happen to be wrong too.

The larger issue here is that even if a certain education would lead you exclusively into the service industry, it would not excuse you being insufferably condescending about the prospects of having a job in the service industry. That's if a liberal arts degree were to make you unsuitable for any career other than food service, which I don't accept other than for the sake of argument.

Maybe if you had gotten a real education instead of merely vocational training, you'd be capable of understanding the distinctions being made. As it is, I encourage you to go back to being a code monkey and let the adults talk.

Totally in agreement. I would go further and say that it is not only in bad taste, it is probably illegal. I mean, the plot of the movie seems to be the killing a living person, whether he is a leader or not is irrelevant. How could this be funny? They could have chosen someone fictitious or historical as the arch-villain but they didn't. I can't believe how many people on slash.dot seem unaware of how blatantly evil this is. Mod parent up.

I would hack your ass into global thermonuclear war if you did this movie about me.

I think I understand... vaguely. To simplify, you're saying it's been trained on a specific dataset, and it chooses whichever image in the dataset the input is most like. It doesn't really have the ability to choose "unknown" and must choose an image from the dataset that it's most like. Its "confidence" in the choice is not really based on similarity to the image it has chosen, but instead based on dissimilarity to any of the other images. Therefore, when you give it garbage, it chooses the image that it's most similar to, and it gives a high confidence rating because it doesn't resemble anything else.

Is that about the gist? I'm probably not going to understand things about higher dimensions without a lot of additional information.

But if I'm on the right track on that, do you foresee a possible solution being reached by feeding it a very large dataset? Or is there basically no possibility of it handling a dataset big enough? Like if you gave it enough computing power and fed it all of Google images, would that help to solve the issue?

I ask because, though I understand computers, I'm not remotely an expert in current AI approaches and theory, but I do know a fair bit about philosophy and psychology, and I suspect that the idea of optical illusions and biases are going to be really import AI image recognition, and not just as "an obstacle to be overcome". I think people misunderstand and think that the optical illusions are examples of our vision and perception "being dumb" because we're seeing things incorrectly, but on the contrary, it's often caused by our perception being very smart/efficient at seeing particular things. Our image processing is (loosely speaking) built to see the things that were important to our survival and to disregard things that don't matter. That's how it works. So I would suspect that in "training" an image recognition system, it would be important to think about what the AI is looking for.

Because, you know, when we see a school bus, we don't simply associate the image with the words "school bus". We also recognize it as a method of transportation, as a possible source of danger (if you're standing in front of it when it's moving), and we might associate it with various memories and feelings that we had regarding school during our formative years. When we see a painting of a school bus, we understand it not only as an image of a school bus, but a painting, a work of expression which might have meaning beyond its literal content.

Maybe it seems like I'm going off on a complete tangent here, but I think it's worth understanding that seeing and understanding images, and linking them to meaning, might be more complicated than being able to accurately compare it to other images and find correlation of shape and color.

Shit the government better fits you "aggregation of money" description better than big companies do. Hell it even prints its own money. Your use of the term capital gives away your commie sympathies.

So companies aren't people, but ginormous government is your mommy. Got it.

Are you joking? I thought it was well established that there were chemical weapons in Iraq we just only found weapons designed by us, built by Europeans in factories in Iraq. And therefore the US didn't trumpet their achievements. In the case of Iraqi chemical weapons, the US established that Iraq had chemical weapons not because they said so but because Western countries had all the receipts.

I agree with this in principle, but I worry that there's a certain naivete to it -- making surveillance harder will not cause the security apparatus to give up mass surveillance.

In a world with only limited use of encryption, surveillance was generally a matter of just listening, and targets that used encryption were either immune because of the extra effort and/or low profile but if they were high enough profile, they were attacked through other more resource intensive vectors.

In a world of mass encryption, the security apparatus will instead attack the infrastructure of encryption -- root CAs, encryption technologies and software, neutralizing the value of encryption and eliminating the utility value of it while retaining all the costs to the implementer (CAs, extra CPU cycles, complexity, etc). I think it also destroys trust in some existential way, which may be one of the worst aspects of this.

I think the entire encryption system needs to become decentralized in some way that forces attacks on encryption to be more difficult. Locally generated keys without the need for centralized trust seems to be part of the solution, but the existing CA system provides the trust component making it more difficult to rely on random keys.

You could at least read the Wikipedia page you're linking :

Do we have reason to believe that this group is actually capable of or prepared to carry out the attacks that they're threatening? If theaters around the country showed the movie, can these terrorists bomb them all?

Or did all these companies simply buckle to a random threat without anything behind it? Because, yeah, I guess if someone calls in a bomb threat to the local high school, you might have to go evacuate the school while the police check it out, but you should have some plan for keeping the kids from calling in new threats every day and shutting the school down permanently.

When people talk about getting a "Liberal Arts education", they're usually talking about getting an education that is supposed to be 'well rounded', giving exposure to subjects like philosophy, literature, art, and even various branches of math and science.

So you ask, "Do you mean sculpture, writing, philosophy, music, or whatever?"

And I answer, "Yes."

I think you're missing the point that grcumb was making, which I think was a good one. I don't believe he was arguing anything like, "If you want to optimize your chances of success, drop out of school and don't get a diploma." He was responding directly to the quote, "most of the jobs with a liberal arts degree involve asking 'Do you want fries with that?'"

I think what he was saying is something more like, "You have no ground to be so glib about other people's lives."

People who work in service industry jobs deserve some measure of dignity. People who never got a degree can still go on to do amazing things. There are people who have no connection to "STEM" fields who have made huge contributions to your life without developing software. And finally, liberal arts degrees do actually have a use.

There are no guarantees that you will be successful in any case, and there's always a vanishingly small slice of the human population that makes it to the top of their field. But who said that was the point?

If you want to make movies for example, you could pursue that. Maybe you'll be a complete failure. Maybe you'll make something great that's a commercial failure. Maybe you'll make an absolute piece of crap movie that's a commercial success. There's a very small chance that you'll ever be rich and famous as a result.

If you want to make software, you could pursue that. Maybe you'll be a complete failure. Maybe you'll make something great that's a commercial failure. Maybe you'll make an absolute piece of crap application that's a commercial success. There's a very small chance that you'll ever be rich and famous as a result. And so what? Pursue what you want to pursue. If you just want to make money and live a comfortable life, then do some research and figure out whatever career provides that, and be prepared if demand for that job dries up, because that can happen to any job.

But in any case, there's really no reason to be a glib, condescending asshole about other people's lives. There are a lot of good, hard working people out there who are making good use of their liberal arts educations. Some may even have a job that involves asking the question, "Do you want fries with that?" If you're ready to condemn them all as 'losers' because they don't write software for a living, then you're an asshole.