I don't necessarily disagree with where you're going here, but can you elaborate on this:

I've worked at government contractors that had real air-gaps for things like their databases, but that does not seem to be the norm for the rest of the world. How would ordinary businesses make use of their databases if they are not network accessible under any circumstances, printed reports? Some sort of unidirectional transmission? What sort of data ingress are they using?

I ask this because I have been involved in the transfer of data in highly regulated, air-gapped systems, and they are incredibly expensive. Are you really indicating that true air-gap databases will be ubiquitous (or at least commonplace) in the forseeable future?

It's a cool idea and they stand for a lot of great ideals, but laptops are incredibly hard to get right, drivers are hard to get right, and they are a small team trying to support a large number of possible configurations. Hardware gets more complicated by the year: forget the CPU and various GPUs, just look at how many other devices in a modern computer have a full-on processor, e.g. fancy touchbars, displays, even hard drives! Hell, your CPU probably has its own secondary general-purpose processors for things like security, and our CPUs themselves get firmware updates now to change how their instructions function. They are doing great work, but the deck is so stacked against them that it's not funny.

Most space launch companies are inefficient and ineffective. SpaceX has the margin to pay these taxes, those unfortunates don't. If you want to kill competition in an industry, tax it enough that only the large corporations can survive the loss, and add some complicated regulations in for extra effect. No one else has anything close to what Starship may become, and further reduction in margins will ensure that SpaceX will have a defacto monopoly on non-military space launches while their competitors are strangled paying for FAA services that is disproportionately benefit owners of private jets and charter flights for the rich.

As you may know, Netflix released an Exploding Kittens game, as they have a contract with the guy to make an Exploding Kittens show. The game was flaky as hell, and I figured out an easy way to steal another player's Defuse card. Between those factors and the cheap graphics, I deleted it and went back to the o.g. Exploding Kittens game, which is stuff fun.

The idea that software not signed by some entity in the country that they represent is installed any high-level official's phone is absurd. How did the world get this way?

I've been using this site for over twenty years, and it's a been most of a decade since I've commented. This is the best thing I've seen on here since then. Whatever you do, keep drumming up the fight against ignorance and propaganda, and the people who've fallen victims of it. I don't want to get personal, but lets just say that I know from intimate experience what brainwashing does to a person, and the tremendous cost of clawing one's way out of it. Division in modern society is inevitable--and we must fight against those who seek to destroy rational thought!--but without empathy for those infected by bad ideas, shortchanged by their personal experiences, we'll end up punishing and alientating those victimized by bad actors exploiting cognitive vulnerabilities that every one of us has, we will push them out of sheer self-defense into voting in the people who will undo us.

Not the person you're responding to, but I'm pretty sure their less-than-polite phrasing meant "biological female who has ever been involved in jetpack development or *jetpack* flying".

Everyone knows Amelia Earhart was a big part of aviation history in that era, but I strongly suspect that she didn't moonlight as the Rocketeer.

Indeed, people should take in the full context here, not just platitudes. They should look at how China has interacted with Europe and the US in the context of world wars, trade wars, cultural exchange and economic interdependence. ...then they should call Xi on his tantrums and fragility. He chooses to be this way.

Hello! You may remember me from LinuxPPC's greatest hits, here on Slashdot! And that little life-altering car crash that happened twenty years ago...

I've served as a Milwaukee County Supervisor, an elected position here in Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, for most of the past decade. We need to adhere to open meetings laws. And as part of the County Board Finance & Audit Committee, we are in charge of making decisions on how to spend millions of dollars on contracts and spending and overseeing the $1.2 billion budget.

That committee has been meeting since 11AM today. Now, usually we have seven supervisors in attendance, along with the chief legislative researcher, a committee clerk, legislative analyst, committee coordinator, and a host of other staff from the office of corp counsel, comptroller, audit, etc. Additionally, we usually have at least 25 people (at least!) who attend to speak on items, either as a supporter or a departmental representative, etc.

Today, we had six members attending in person and a seventh on part of the meeting via Skype. More importantly, everyone in the room was seated at least six feet apart. That meant we had a comparatively empty room. I did have the option to call in via Skype. Hopefully this will not result in me being a Darwin award nominee.

I don't yet know how we will handle the next full County Board meeting in a week or so. Or how the COVID-19 situation will impact the swearing in of the next County Board and County Executive, which happens around May 5, with several weeks of transition prior to then. That said, we have really good people working in our local government. We'll make the best of it. Public health and safety is our highest priority. Hence we will look at everything we can do to preserve that and carry out our duties.

"Good luck -- we're all counting on you."

No pressure.

Again, I challenge you to set it up so you can outperform his amazing performance. And, I challenge you to out-fundraise him. See if you can raise $4,000, maybe $8,000 for childrens healthcare research. Do your best, champ. Show us what you got!

A man from Milwaukee, Wisconsin is trying to play pinball long enough to break the standing Guinness World Record for Longest Marathon Pinball Play of 30 hours 10 minutes. Heâ(TM)s using the Extra Life gaming/DIY fundraising platform to webcast his attempt and raise money for Childrenâ(TM)s Hospital of Wisconsin. He gets a five minute break every hour, and yes, he is wearing an adult diaper.

So, my wife and are geeks. Well, I'm a geek; she's a nerd. When she was pregnant and we confirmed it was a boy, thus began the question of what to name him. We were both interested in something a little archaic, or possibly iconic. An online baby name generator suggested "Steele Rod." We weren't going to name him after Isaac Asmiov, as my wife thought Isaac Haas would be a tad too close to Isaac Hayes. Meanwhile, my daughter asked if we could name him Cudahy. (A real Milwaukee joke: "That way we know he'd be musical... he'd have a lot of bars.") One night, after ticking off a list of science fiction authors, I suggested Ellison. My wife remembered Lt. Col. Ellison Onizuka, the mission specialist who died on the Space Shuttle Challenger's last mission in 1986. A few days later, our science fiction baby was born with Spock ears and bearing the name of a curmudgeonly writer and an astronaut. I hope it's a fitting name for a bright, thoughtful, and as yet un-curmudgeonly boy.

I like the general sentiment here, but I think there are a lot of details to iron out, and we would have to be careful regarding unintended consequences.

For instance, there's the matter of how to treat trade secrets, which are common in computer code. In many cases, the creator of a work doesn't even have a right to distribute source code that they've purchased a license to (say, a game engine) and have modified, so this is untenable unless you are willing to make entire business models completely flat.

I suspect on re-reading your comment that you mean the portion of a work that is distributed--in this case the game client. There are less issues with that, but still licensed assets are a fairly reasonable part of the copyrighted works market. Perhaps unlimited duplication after a lapse time would be allowed, but derivative works would not be?

It's an interesting thought. It's not going to happen, but something like it's now on my wishlist.

Actually, at 30 mentions of owners and ownership in Title 17, Chapter 2 alone, you are dead wrong:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.copyright.gov%2Ftitl...:

Read all of the laws there. You will find plenty more mentions. And in case you try to backpedal and amend your statement, since the term is used to describe the copyright itself, and not the work, you can find the term "owner of a work" and "ownership of a work" in multiple official documents associated with our government's various copyright bodies:
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.federalregister.go...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.copyright.gov%2Fdocs...
https://ancillary-proxy.atarimworker.io?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.copyright.gov%2Fpoli...

I'm not saying I agree with US copyright law, but lets get our facts straight. Your conclusions may (or may not) be valid, but that particular argument regarding legal wording is so wrong that I have to wonder if you've even read these laws.

Bonus: Contrary to your main argument, DCMA *does* in fact prohibit actions involving circumvention of copyright--many of which are actions taken for personal use, say, displaying a legitimate copy of a video from a computer by illegally circumventing HDCP or the like. This is absurd, but that's how the law was written, and I doubt it was put there by accident.

So, one problem is that there is not always more data. In my field, we have a surplus of some sorts of data, but other data requires hundreds of thousands of hours of human input, and we only have so much of that to go around. Processing all of that is easy enough, getting more is not.

Also, by "effective", I should have made it clear that I meant "an effective overall solution to the problem", which includes all costs of training a wider, lower-precision network. This includes input data collection, storage and processing, all of the custom software to handle this odd floating point format, including FP16-specific test code and documentation, run time server costs and latency, any increased risks introduced by using code paths in training and , etc.

I'm not saying that I don't believe it's possible, I've just seen absolutely no evidence that this is a significant win in most or even a sizable fraction of cases, or that it represents a "best practice" in the field. Our own experiments have shown a severe degradation in performance when using these nets w/out a complete retraining, the software engineering costs will be nontrivial, and much of the hardware we are forced to run on does not even support this functionality.

As an analog, when we use integer based nets and switch between 16-bit and 8-bit integers, we see an unacceptable level of degradation, even though there is a modest speedup and we can use slightly larger neural nets. I'm very wary of anything with a mantissa much smaller than 16 bits for that reason--those few bits seem to make a significant difference, at least for what we're doing. We're solving a very difficult constrained optimization problem using markov chains in real time, and if the observational features are lower fidelity, the optimization search will run out of time to explore the search space effectively before the result is returned to the rest of the system. It's possible that the sensitivity of our optimization algorithm to input quality is the issue here, not the fundamental usefulness of FP16, but I'm still quite skeptical. If this were a "slam dunk", I'd expect to see it move through the literature in a wave like the Restricted Boltzmann Machine did.

Oh, and thank you for the like (great reading) and the thoughtful reply. Not always easy to find on niche topics online.