How many stories have trickled out over the years from American c-level execs about China effectively holding a gun to their companies' heads and stealing IP?

And a quasi-state company like Huawei is slated to rake in $1B+ for patent licensing? Unreal.

But the issue isn't with China and its companies. A lion eating a zebra is in the nature of the lion... the animal does what it does. The issue is with American companies that have prostituted and in many cases continue to prostitute themselves for short-term financial gains in the PRC market.

If France owns the trademark on "France", then I own the trademark on "homo sapiens" and "human".

The Chinese aren't concerned with polluting and possibly endangering inhabited swathes of the planet? I'm shocked - shocked - to find such sentiment!

"...there was in fact Russian interference." That's like saying a butterfly flapping its wings in Spain contributed to Hurricane Harvey. Thirteen wage slaves working in a Russian troll farm is cause for the ongoing hysteria and circus? If so, this country is totally screwed.

A picture-based system is only as strong as the protection of its cipher, which can be compromised in its storage medium (i.e., somewhere, somehow there's a key saying "dog" equals "bomb"). With OpenML, which is meant to be a turnkey solution for mitigating complexity, the cipher is the hidden layers. The interesting aspect here is that the state of the art in AI can't fully explain how those hidden layers arrive at their probabilistic results. Hence a potentially strong system.

Admittedly, this concern may be a bridge too far even for the tinfoil hat crowd. But...

If I were a bad guy, knew that intelligence agencies have compromised electronics down to the firmware and hardware levels and needed to securely communicate with other bad guys, then I'd develop image + label data to train Google's service to spit out plaintext results from certain image sets. My compatriots would run images of dogs, cats, etc. through OpenML and receive labels like "Bomb" "Building" "Corner" "Columbus" "Central Park".

Good luck to the good guys when trying to pick up such e-mail traffic.

I now realize I wasn't explicit enough, as i thought this has become common knowledge: tech companies abuse the H1-B program to illegally import not high skill talent but low wage talent. All done under a very official, government sanctioned program..

My cynicism meter went to 11 when I saw a headline about large tech companies banding together ostensibly for the benefit of illeg... errr, "Dreamers".

My first reaction was, "How do they benefit financially with the status quo?" But then I realized this question is of secondary significance. The primary question is, "How does this help distract from the importing of illegal labor via H1-B's?" And then pieces fell into place.

I wonder whether a hundred years from now people will be shaking their heads and saying, "I can't believe people were allowed to go into space without active shielding from ionizing radiation." ...kind of like we shake our heads today after reading about how people worked with microwaves in the 40's and 50's or with x-rays half a century prior to that.

Absent a fundamental breakthrough in propulsion technology (i.e., really energy generation tech), shielding spacecraft with 3 cm to 5 cm layers of lead, thorium, etc. seems impractical if getting from Point A to Point B within a reasonable amount of time is a desired outcome. We'll have to develop active shielding tech that mitigates exposure not only to photons in the x-ray and gamma ray range but also relativistic sub-atomic particles. Not easy.

What follows assumes a B2B or B2D (D = developer, which is a unique creature in its own right) product.

Host a multi-tiered version of your open source software. The value add for which people will pay is twofold:
1. The stack from infrastructure to business software is taken care of and presumably "just works";
2. The subject matter expertise required for accommodating advanced or nuanced use cases.

Tier A = Free, Tier B = $[x] per month, Tier C = $[y] per month and so forth.

Lighten up, Francis: https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

There are so many variables that go into determining comp packages... performance reviews and aggregate internal statistics (e.g., male vs. female comp) are easily discoverable, but they are just two data points among many. For example, I read an article written by a female television news reporter who discussed her first job out of college. She discovered that her male peer with same credentials, role, etc. was making a few thousand dollar more per year. She opted to ask her boss about the discrepancy, and her boss told her that her peer received more "because he asked." I found just that one anecdote so revealing about the myriad factors that go into pay decisions.

I would have thought Silicon Valley would have supported this proposal. More (legal) high-skilled domestic labor means downward pressure on wages. What exactly are tech leaders railing against?? Higher wages in the future for their gardeners and nannies?

I love the optimism and derring-do. But I suspect Elon and his minions have zero experience with East Coast public works unions. Didn't NYC recently open a new subway station that took something like 20 years and a trillion dollars to finish (I exaggerate only slightly)?

Anyone other than me believe that Apple, Samsung et al. (at a minimum) didn't look the other way before the Wikileaks dump? The OS-level issues really were unknowns for a long enough time that the CIA and other agencies could develop and deploy a playbook for hacking high value targets? What about the other elephant in the room... firmware?