I've been working on an MQTT Broker/Topic tree explorer. It's intended to help someone understand what kinds of data are moving through their broker, what the busiest data is, and just generally be pretty. https://ryanbateman.github.io/mqtt_vis/
What I find most amazing is less the politics aspect and more the moral/ethical issue. For a company to have an explicit stated policy of _actively_ never taking into account the moral/ethical impact of their work is just... astounding.
It is difficult to imagine a more inhuman and bloodless statement.
It's more like a pressure cooker company saying "We build kitchen tools. We don't care who buys them. We will not spend any resources vetting customers to make sure they won't blow up a marathon with our product. Yes, even neo nazis are allowed to buy our product even though we executives disagree with them politically/morally/etc."
That's definitely a position worth considering, but I don't think it relates to the reasons behind this change.
For one, the straw-man argument you put forward relies on the seller not knowing the customer's intention with their product. Given the timing, I think it's absolute reasonable to assume why they put forward this change (though I'd be happy to be told otherwise).
An appliance seller can reasonably deduce that their pressure cooker will reasonably be used for cooking if there's no evidence to the contrary.
If a neo-nazi recently featured on the news for blowing up some people with a pressure cooker turns up at your pressure-cooker store asking to buy a pressure cooker and you knowingly sell them a pressure cooker, yes, you are absolutely complicit if they blow up some people.
Similarly, if a government organisation, recently in the news for putting children in cages, wants to buy or license your software, it's reasonable to assume that they're going to use your software to directly or indirectly further their goals, which may or may not include caging children.
Washing your hands of it, in a pull-request, is a moral and ethical choice, as much as they wish it wasn't.
This is a personal project in which I downloaded, parsed, listened to, and physically indexed every one of my uses of Google's Voice Assistant technology. It is an attempt to get some insight into both the amount and type of metadata contained in these audio recordings, as well as an attempt at understanding the kinds of conclusions that could be drawn from it by people working on 'surveillance capitalism' products.
It consists of 698 annotated index cards and my full voice search audio archive.
Great read, but speaking as someone who lives on one of those houseboats (and passes through Islington occasionally), please don't consider a canal a safe place to 'ditch' potentially exploding things in future.
Well, I think it's tough to tell whether it's Nokia adopting Android or the company that's licensing the Nokia name (a Chinese hardware manufacturer) that's adopting Android. I don't doubt they had sign-off on the Android aspect (and, hopefully, actual device quality) prior to lending their name to it, but it seems like, given their plan to license off the Nokia brand, their "adoption" of anything is kind of moot.
N1 is their product. They just use contract manufacturers just like Apple does. They are also hiring new people for tablet development.
Nokia only sold their phone manufacturing and design to Microsoft. Nokia is Nokia Networks, Mobile Broadband- and Global Services, Nokia HERE ja Nokia Technologies (previously Nokia Research). They also own the patents (just licensed to Microsoft)
> They just use contract manufacturers just like Apple does.
They do more than that; they have outsourced also the business execution (i.e. including selling, warranties, etc.) of the device to Foxconn. They just share in the revenue by licencing the use of their brand and design (and software).
Because earth is overpopulated and we will have to settle new worlds. Because sooner or later earth will go FUBAR, and it'd be nice if not ALL humanity dies.
Because it's safer if we find the Aliens before they find us.
You think that's the only, or even main, reason we explore the universe?
What if we do it because it's in our nature to explore? Just pure curiosity? To increase our understanding of existence and evolve into something more? Also, this concept of it's safer to find aliens before they find us sounds like you're already of the mindset of war and you want a tactical advantage over something that you've never seen or know anything about. I really hope not everyone thinks of exploring the universe as just another military mapping of strategic attack/defense positions. If the human race is still being driven by fear and war when star-trek-style travel becomes possible, then maybe it's better we just die right here rather than export our madness throughout the galaxy.
The second part was simply naive. Please consider game theory.
Yours (and mine) moral is from a society with a functioning police force, rule of law and state violence monopoly. Without that, there is a clan society, where your only security is that others (generally relatives) will revenge you. A form of terror balance. Out moral just doesn't work there, since to avoid violence you have to make people believe you are ready to inflict it.
(I am unaware of a third alternative to state violence monopoly and clan societies. There are obviously places in between, with organized crime (south Italy, Mexico?). Please educate me if I miss something basic?)
Let me take an example:
There is no world police since Obama seems to be abdicating USA's partial role, countries now live in an analogue of a clan society (e.g. do alliances for protection from aggression).
Consider how Russia and China are starting the jingoism garbage again. How do you know other countries/species won't?
I assume you're trolling, but will waste a few more minutes:
Game theory is used for evolution too, so you're a creationist?
A longer answer would be along the lines of:
Humans have a wide range of possible behaviours, the trick is to organize society so we get a "nice" place (i.e. it is not "paying" to be non-"nice", please note quotes for complex PhD thesis definitions). If you're not able to see the world, your decision will have harmful effects according to your own morals. In short, your absolute moral judgements is a problem as much as Putin...
(I just wish that there were some way of educating away moral condemnation of people which refuse to understand stuff which goes against their ideology.)
Knowing idealists, in some generations people like you will want to genetically modify people to follow your morals -- Socialist "new human" style. We know how that goes, not only from science fiction.
But I already wrote an answer and got a non sequitur.
I pointed out that without rule of law, societies generally becomes clan societies. Out of pure game theory. And discussed why and how we know to avoid that.
You quote part of my description of clan societies -- and condemned humanity.
If you're not a teenager, that is too stupid to be anything but bad trolling.
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