I had not heard that the tax rate on the wealth is dropping. I did a quick google search for "United States Tax Rate Wealthy" and the first hit seems to be an informative WSJ article pointing out that the tax rate on the wealthy is increasing.

agreed.

It doesn't work that way today.

There was an example of where a woman claimed she was raped by a police officer. The condom vanished from the evidence lock-up before trial. But the absence of evidence does not good for the woman. Even if it put suspicion on the police officer, that suspicion is not enough to prove rape.

Similarly, there are cases where police car-mounted cameras fail. I don't think those usually work-out well for the defendant who claimed he was attacked just as the camera cut out.

This may sound odd, but that's actually a good thing. In short: If laws are enforced consistently, then bad laws are eventually removed. If laws are enforced selectively, they are used to punish those who don't have the political power to change them.

Let me clarify: When laws are selectively enforced, it introduces the problem that the person doing the selection can "bias" that law. They can apply it to uncooperative people, or ugly people, or certain races, etc. So, for example, everyone speeds. But not everyone is pulled-over for speeding in a completely random distribution. Instead, the law targets the person in the sporty red car, or the one who looks like they might smoke weed, or the minority race. But if *every single person* got pulled-over for speeding every day, we would probably change the law!

Criminal prosecutors cause this kind of problem a lot because they can selectively enforce laws. Wealthy people or businesses are often given a fine, while while an average individual will be given jail time. Or rather than going after everyone using insider information, they pick the high profile TV celebrity. The NSA and the phone companies have no consequence to violating wiretapping laws, but individuals are often frightened to record a phone conversation with tech support.

Everybody on Slashdot talks about how Windows 8's flaw is the Start Screen. But as someone who has used Windows 8 extensively, the fundamental problem isn't just that the start menu is now full-screen. That is just the first big jarring change you see. But fixing that alone won't solve the problem.

The real issue is that half of the OS uses the desktop UI, and the other half uses the "metro" UI. The built-in metro apps are inferior and redundant to the desktop counterparts. The metro photo viewer doesn't have as many features, you can't navigate photos in a folder. There are at least 4 wizards for adding a printer, some are metro-based and some are desktop based. System restore is another one like that, and there are lots more. There is a redundant registry area for desktop IE and the Metro IE, so some things like IE proxy settings can get out of sync between them. You can't even get to some of those settings from Metro. You can't put apps in the Startup folder.

The bottom line is that they just didn't finish the Windows 8 UI.

Look back at the Windows XP and 7 start menu. The shortcuts are usually a mess: folders with only one icon in them. Or folders with 3 icons: the app, the readme, and the uninstall. Can you remember which things are under "Accessories" versus the ones under "System Tools?" How many icons are on there that aren't apps at all? (Ex: I have a Silverlight icon - why?) The Windows 7 start menu is capped at 1/2 the screen height, wasting space and requiring scrolling. Installs typically put icons onto the desktop, the quick launch bar, and the start menu.

There are actually a lot of good improvements to Windows 8. Full-screen apps isn't a *terrible* idea necessarily. But they just haven't figured out how to offer full-screen apps with all the power of the desktop. I'm not sure anyone has figured that out yet. Time will tell.

This is fine so long as the key to do so is held only by the owner of the phone. Ex: It can't be some kind of message like "WIPE PHONE NOW" it needs to be "WIPE " or something like that.

That is an informative link, but nothing in it dispels the claim that they are digging a giant strip mine. If anything, it corroborates the statement by pointing out that they are building more coal plants. All it does is explain *why* they are building the plants, and that they have been planning to do so for a long time.

No one will probably follow that link anyone since you added insults into your post, guaranteeing it never goes above 0.

After reading a shameful article praising clickbait I realize the term isn't negative enough. "Bait" can be good or bad. Instead, please call them "misleading headlines" or "incomplete headlines" or "editorializing headlines."

That parenthetical comment changes the entire thing. When they said "coffee is connected to mugs" I read that as "the system learns that coffee is connected to mugs all by itself" but really that parenthetical part conveys that the human went through the video and made that connection for the computer.

I got the part about querying the system, I just thought they were saying that this "database" that it queried was something it built on its own. Throughout the article they reiterate how this program processed the videos, not that it processed the human's explanation of what is happening the videos. I would think they key about the system is this annotation process and how it works. I'd love to see that. It sounds like a neat Mechanical Turk kind of project.

I don't think they explained that clearly. Thank you for pointing it out.

Correct. Decision trees and neural nets can sorta do that, but they also need a human to mark which sections of the image correspond to those items.

This is completely different from facial recognition. In facial recognition, a human being writes code that defines what a "face" is. I believe the typical approach is to find 2 eyes, a nose, and a mouth. Then they calculate the size and spacing of those items and use that to identify the face. But that isn't general-purpose image recognition. Right now, you could make a program to do the same thing for coffee if you wanted.

The article claims that they wrote an anything recognition algorithm that can find anything, with no help from a human whatsoever, even if that thing is embedded in a video with a bunch of other images. That is not possible today. Even humans can't do that! I have a 5-year-old and a 1-year old. The nly way the 1-year-old would know that coffee is coffee is if I hold it in front of him and say "coffee."

There are actually algorithms that do try to recognize arbitrary objects. But they work on images of just that one object, and everything else cut out, along with some kind of annotation that tells them what the object is. They don't work with just any image.

This article is just a rant, full one one-liner insults and clichés. There are probably good debates on this topic, but this is not one of them.

Solar power in orbit is only useful for powering things that are in orbit, like satellites or space stations. Beaming it back to earth is useless because the energy required to launch the panels far exceeds the power the panels could ever deliver. Searches always reveal the JAXA plans to do this, but those plans never address the launch cost issue. A brief summary of the problem exists in the Wikipedia article on space-based solar.

Is there more information on this project? It sounds awesome, but the article seems quite sensationalized:

Let's break that down.
A robot that can watch someone do something then repeat it would be the height of AI, as far as I know.
Software that can watch a youtube video and generalize what is a "chair" or "coffee" merely from watching videos would be beyond any AI I am currently aware of.
Software that can do that, PLUS recognize that what it is looking at now is coffee is completely unbelievable.
Software + a robot that can do all of the 3 above is not something I expect within my lifetime. Pure science fiction.

I'm sure there is a good project here, but I can't tell what it is from the sensationalistic article. I don't accept that it merely watches youtube videos and learned to make coffee in a completely unrelated environment. There has to be a lot more going on that just watching videos and generalizing.

I'm just playing devil's advocate here:

Suppose we had a technology that allowed us to record the waitress movements, and then play them back. Perhaps a learning robot of some kind. In what ways would that change the scenario? Would the best waitresses be able to demand a royalty on their waitress-bot recordings?

This is one of the differences between intelligent and unintelligent people. Intelligent people are more likely to judge their own skills.

1. There was a study performed where they assigned people various tasks to perform in isolation. Then the researchers asked them to weigh how well they did compared to the general public. In the absense of information, the more intelligent people assumed they did average or below. The less intelligent people thought they did above average. The bad news about this is it means less intelligent people might not actually realize it.

2. I had a neighbor whose son was truly stupid. He was a pre-teen, and his mom was using drugs and alcohol during the pregnancy. Sometimes we would play Dance Dance Revolution together sometimes. No matter what the result of the game, he would always think he did great, or at least was really close to beating me. His responses were completely unrelated to how well he actually did. It was a bit awkward actually.