Unfortunately, that means they have to be several kilometers in width...

If government revenue as a percent of GDP stays roughly constant while a larger and larger share of GDP goes into the hands of the top percentiles, it's pretty easy to end up with a system that redistributes more while still taking in the same amount of money as a whole. Imagine two economies: One where everybody is equal and one with one super wealthy person and a whole bunch of poor people. Both have governments that consume the same amount of GDP. The second economy is likely to transfer more wealth, simply because the wealth starts out massively skewed and becomes less so after taxes and government expenditures.

It's not that it can't do useful things for everyone; it's that you have to balance that against things like time wasted. For the head of a major agency with private secretaries and aids at her call, checking and sending emails might not be the best use of her time.

Robin Hood. Dick Turpin. Butch Cassidy. Bonnie and Clyde. Joaquín "El Chapo" Guzmán.

People who break the law have always been the subject of fascination, and for a certain subset of the fascinated, glorification. We still enjoy caper movies about criminals pulling off complicated heists, movies which gloss over the innocent victims of crime or even depict the criminal as an instrument of poetic justice. For the vast majority of people fascination with criminals is harmless. Living in a civilized society requires restraint that makes fantasies of anarchic behavior attractive. In moderation, some measure of admiration of rule breakers probably helps keep the people who run things in check (e.g. the Edward Snowden case).

The problem is that some people have difficulty separating fantasy from reality, keeping to moderation, or understanding how complex or ambiguous people can be. Julian Assange is neither an angel nor a devil, but a flawed, complicated person who did something that needed doing. George Washington wasn't the childhood paragon of the cherry tree legend, but an ambitious, rash, somewhat dishonest social climber who achieved greatness under the pressure of circumstance.

Honestly, I think any sort of skill at all would do. People holding a college degree or certification of mastery of some skilled labor or anything else would be a positive addition to our society. We're probably fine in the "people who can push a broom" category, though. It would only involve normalizing our immigration policies to those of most other countries. Intra-EU aside, most other countries aren't falling all over themselves to get as many of the unskilled, "immediately dependent on the state or crime" class of immigrants as possible.

This is (one of the reasons) why the idea of amnesty for current illegal immigrants is so backwards. Highly motivated people with money and PhDs take many years and tens of thousands of dollars to (sometimes unsuccessfully) get citizenship, but people with no skills, money, or education slip across a border (thus breaking laws in their first steps on US soil) and we'd give citizenship to them? Exactly what sort of society are we trying to build here?

I think you nailed it in calling out that Eric Schmidt realizes this was a very bad move for Facebook and shows that Facebook is not really competition. "Good for them" is simply a way of saying that these guys made out like bandits at someone else's expense.

Facebook can only pull off a few more of these big deals before their cash is gone and their stock is worthless. If they have to do this every time a new startup starts to take users away (which seems to be what really happened with WhatsApp - losing everyone but the US to another messaging platform couldn't have been good for FB), they'll be out of money and equity quicker than you can launch a startup at SXSW.

Eric Schmidt knows this and hance can easily laugh it off. I'm sure Eric also knows what Facebook's actual user base is (hint: there's no way it's anywhere near 1B people, some simple top-down modeling should be enough to convince anyone that there is no way 1/7 of the world's population is actively using FB, kinda like when the Oscars used to claim 1B viewers). WhatsApp was probably just the confirmation he needed to write off Facebook as a competitor.

Ok... hopefully that's all the DST-sleep-deprivation ranting I'll do today...

-Chris

How do you know you didn't take any courses not related to your degree? I find this very surprising coming from someone in AI, as it's a very interdisciplinary field, borrowing from statistics, optimization, logic, neuroscience, psychology, control theory, language, etc.. Look at your own field and the failure of expert systems. For a long time, statistics was not core to AI research. Now, some of the most successful AI techniques in robotics have a foundation in statistics. Or consider reinforcement learning, which has roots in animal psychology. As an artificial intelligence researcher in the 80s, you might have looked at animal psychology and said "Bah! I don't want to learn that! It's not a core degree requirement! When would I ever need that?" Because of the interdisciplinary work of researchers in the 80s, animal psychology in the form of reinforcement learning is now a core component of your field.

I think the bottom line is you just don't know where you'll find inspiration. Maybe you've missed out on a lot yourself, and I don't think that's something to be proud of.

How does that work? What database dump requires an executable? All the ones I know simply create a very large human readable text file.

Who the fuck would execute an executable from a bunch of hackers who claim to have hacked a financial site related to a whole digital currency with said currency residing on the same machine as the one you are running the exe on.

And I thought people that ran kitten.scr.exe were idiots.

First off, I get what you are saying and it seems pretty obvious to me.

But now for the hard and funny until you think about it, then you have to laugh so you don't cry.

Here it is:

And is your post part of such a program?

Where does the dis-information begin/end?

No I don't think you are, the shill accounts are rather obvious to stop, no real posting history, no jokes, no human observations, just shill posts. But when the lying has spread so far, how does a normal person know what is true and what isn't anymore.

And if you ask, why would they do that? So ordinary people give up because they just can't deal with it anymore. The feeling I am having for the last year.

That would be this one.

We're tied for third lowest homicide rate in the country, so why would I want to carry a firearm? Our rate of *total* homicide is 1/4 the rate of *accidental* firearms in Florida, even though our firearm ownership rate is 1/2.

Our accident rate per gun owner is half, because we require gun purchasers to take a basic firearms safety course. That's not so onerous. A 4 hour course with an NRA certified instructor, which costs around $100. It's a *little* intrusive, but so is having the guy in the next apartment negligently discharge his handgun in a cleaning accident.

I wrote Falling Bodies, the ragdoll physics plug-in for Softimage, back in 1996-1997, so I got to see this happen. Back then, Softimage was #1 in Hollywood. Microsoft bought them, and when I went up to Redmond, the Microsoft guys were talking about making Softimage mass-market software. But that never happened. It was too hard to use, and required more graphics hardware than most users had back then. (I had a $2000 Dynamic Graphics card in an NT workstation back then. Every low-end GPU today has far more power.)

So Microsoft sold Softimage to Avid. Avid made overpriced film and video editing systems, sold with semi-customer hardware and built into cool-looking furniture. Softimage had a good video editor in addition to the 3D line, and that's what Avid really wanted. They had no clue what to do with the 3D product. They did convert from Softimage to "Softimage XSI", which broke all existing plug-ins and didn't have a plug-in API that worked. That's when I dropped Softimage.

As video editing went mainstream and Avid's sales of overpriced furniture declined, Avid sold off the 3D product to Autodesk. Autodesk had sort of become the default acquirer of 3D animation products. Most of them came from small companies with tiny product lines. Maya came from the merger of Alias and Wavefront and the mess at SGI. Autodesk picked up Lightwave and some other stuff, and of course they already had lots of 3D engineering tools.

This worked out well at Autodesk. The architectural design programs were integrated with the good renderers from the animation world, and images of what new buildings were going to look like got really good. (Adding a radioisity renderer with very realistic lighting models allowed architects to get all the right light fixtures in the right places.) Autodesk's real business is tools for making real physical stuff (their internal slogan is "If God didn't design it, one of our customers did"), but there's a lot of crossover between 3D design of real-world stuff and 3D design of animated stuff.

Softimage has pretty much been a has-been product for years now. After 20 years, it's probably time to phase it out.

Who you calling "old", Sonny?