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[Kagus]

Again, to be fair, octopuses kinda need to have good problem-solving abilities, what with having worse memory than a goldfish.

Bunch o' eight-legged senile geniuses.


...hey, maybe that's it! Earth was just the latest step in a series of elderly care budget cuts, where they just dumped all their seniors on another planet and hoped for the best.

Shit, that reminds me of a dreadful B-movie I saw on TV back in the day...

[wierd]

I was leaning more toward "Large memory capacity in a very competitive resource environment (Reefs, et al), is not evolutionarily advantageous enough to be retained, so over the aeons, the proto-octopus, designed to become sentient, never did."  Instead, it did what evolution favors; Found a happy local maxima, and tailored itself to that niche. Very clever at exploiting food sources, not very bright about long term planning or acts of personal volition.

"Water world engineering is always a problem"

Etc.

[Kagus]

I think I only ever saw parts of Water World as a kid, don't remember much about it. But one question keeps coming back to haunt me...

Was it diesel in that tanker, or gas? Either way, that scene doesn't make sense.

[wierd]

Presumably crude oil.

Crude oil is a mixture of all manner of weights of hydrocarbon compounds, including highly volatile ones. In an enclosed space, it could very well out-gas, and those cases could be very highly flammable.

The issue with that scene, is that it is a rusty tub, and this is a deep post apocalypse.  That crude oil's volatiles would have evaporated into the air centuries ago, leaving only a thick asphaltum tar in the tank. That and an enclosed space would have reduced atmospheric oxygen, so it would only really burn right there at the cargo hold porhole without some kind of back-draft to pull oxygen into the tank. (that also means the old man in the row-boat would have asphyxiated long ago.)

Basically, Hollywood gets science wrong.  AGAIN.

But I was meaning "water world" in the astrophysical sense.  Worlds where the surface is totally, or almost totally, ocean.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ocean_planet

Earth is ~70% ocean.  Depending on prevailing climactic conditions, surface life might have been very unfavorable when the aliens arrived. (Siberian traps might have been erupting--- or it could have been a snowball earth, or even the cambrian mass extinction (possible nearby supernova event sterilized most of the surface).)

As such, they would uplift the lifeforms they felt most likely to survive.

[Reelya]

I'd have to see a citation on the octopus = bad memory thing, I can't find any articles backing that idea up.

https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2008/06/080617102853.htm

The only theory that comes to mind is that it's an old wive's tale passed down to make people feel better about eating octopus.

[Starver]

I've been seeing this unfold. Much aside from the politics issue (there not seemngly being a thread for it at the moment, but certainly not this one) I'm wondering if with GPS + GLONASS + GALILEO + BEIDOU + QZSS + SBAS systems (never mind the possibility of a British Beacon Constellation system if we're cast adrift and decide it's something we'd want to do) there are enough cross-references between systems to get a higher accuracy.

Or maybe it's subject to the Cocked Hat error (actually more likely to be outside the resulting shape than inside it) if you try to combine multiple inaccurate results.

[Reelya]

If you have lots of data sources saying similar things, but aren't sure on how to weight them, then that seems like an area where machine learning would actually be helpful, because machine learning works well in situations where you have a lot of data but you're not actually sure which of it is important, but you know what a right answer looks like (e.g. getting the right coordinate).

e.g. even if you only have a single source such as GPS, and are worried about glitches in positioning data due to the locations of satellites, then a machine learning tool fed the right ground coordinates might learn whatever patterns are occurring and be able to predict your location better (on average) than raw GPS.

Even an erroneous source might help increase overall accuracy if you added it to the mix and had enough training data. e.g. say there was some wildly inaccurate GPS-like source and you were adding it to the source data. Sure, just averaging that out with GPS data would make the GPS data worse. However, a good filter might be able to isolate some usable signal from all the noise, which it then cross-calibrates with the GPS signal to get a slightly-better reading.

[Reelya]

https://yro.slashdot.org/story/18/05/26/0554231/amazon-explains-why-alexa-recorded-and-emailed-a-private-conversation

Amazon has issued the following statement about why their Alexa device recorded a woman's private conversation and then emailed it to one of her friends:

Echo woke up due to a word in background conversation sounding like "Alexa." Then, the subsequent conversation was heard as a "send message" request. At which point, Alexa said out loud "To whom?" At which point, the background conversation was interpreted as a name in the customers contact list. Alexa then asked out loud, "[contact name], right?" Alexa then interpreted background conversation as "right." As unlikely as this string of events is, we are evaluating options to make this case even less likely.

[Reelya]

https://slashdot.org/story/18/05/28/1730244/europe-plans-ban-on-plastic-cutlery-straws-and-more

EU says to manufacturers to stop making plastic forks and stuff. In total, they're banning 10 products that account for about 75% of litter.

People naturally are freaking out "but this is an outrage, and attack on the frrrrrrreeeedom of the manufacturer to sell whatever they want. It's not the manufacturer's fault if people don't dispose properly of their waste. We should 'just' train everyone to dispose of their litter properly, and leave the manufacturer's civil rights alone".

Haha, I think that if something like this is a problem that needs fixing, then it would in fact be a much bigger attack on freedom (and cost to the taxpayers) if we had inspectors on beaches and in camping areas fining people for disposing of plastic cutlery, to create a sort of social engineering thing where we ensure everyone is a Stepford Wife who disposes properly of their toxic plastic stuff made by "Bastardcorp", who's civil right to make and sell toxic crap, because it's the cheapest option, needs to be respected.

e.g. the fewest people you inconvenience the more of a "free" solution it is. And in this case, telling manufacturers that they cannot use certain materials, which cause the waste problem, limits the freedom of the fewest people the least. Manufacturers are still free to use other materials, and the consumer would still be free to buy and dispose of the products as they see fit. It would certainly be more "free" than having "fork inspectors" at recreational sites.

[Folly]

https://krebsonsecurity.com/2018/05/fbi-kindly-reboot-your-router-now-please/

VPNFilter is infecting people's routers. Everybody panic!

[martinuzz]

A foreign state trying to obtain the power to shut down the internets / civilian communication systems for most users is worrisome.
It's close to an act of war.
The fact that it's digital and doesn't require foreign operatives to work in your country makes it less obvious.
But what they are trying to do can be compared to, say, if 70 years ago, foreign spies were caught planting dynamite under most telephone poles and telegraph lines.

[Reelya]

Valve has put out an official statement saying that they're no longer going to intervene in controversial games unless the content is straight-up illegal or is a scam.

This is a good move from both gamers and Valve's position. If Steam actually went through and starts removing legal "sexy" games to "sanitize" their store, then it wouldn't end there. Various other groups would get the message that you can harass steam to remove violent content, gay content, pro-choice content, "satanic" content, pretty much every type of content. There would be a lot of "think of the children!" stuff to justify it.

Steam would then become a de facto censor, and whenever anything unliked by anyone's zeitgeist slips through the cracks, suddenly you get angry mobs asking "why Steam why?", with people on the Left demanding certain types of content be blocked, and people on the Right demanding certain other types of content be blocked.

It would end in a situation where Steam's right to remove your game, becomes Steam's obligation to ensure that only "tasteful" games that can't possibly offend anyone are the ones that get approved. Effectively, Steam would end up railroaded into a situation where they only support games which are "teen safe" and don't contain strong political messages of any stripe, because the whole company becomes controversy averse.

Valve/Steam are perfectly right to say it's not their job to dictate what people can or should like or create.

[Parsely]

I agree as long as they give us ways to filter specific content from the Steam store page.

[syvarris]

Oh, so if I want to start paying for porn I now have the option to do it on a gaming social media platform, so everyone I play Dark Souls with can see what fetishes I have?

That's pretty Nito, I guess.

[Teneb]

Valve has put out an official statement saying that they're no longer going to intervene in controversial games unless the content is straight-up illegal or is a scam.

This is a good move from both gamers and Valve's position. If Steam actually went through and starts removing legal "sexy" games to "sanitize" their store, then it wouldn't end there. Various other groups would get the message that you can harass steam to remove violent content, gay content, pro-choice content, "satanic" content, pretty much every type of content. There would be a lot of "think of the children!" stuff to justify it.

Steam would then become a de facto censor, and whenever anything unliked by anyone's zeitgeist slips through the cracks, suddenly you get angry mobs asking "why Steam why?", with people on the Left demanding certain types of content be blocked, and people on the Right demanding certain other types of content be blocked.

It would end in a situation where Steam's right to remove your game, becomes Steam's obligation to ensure that only "tasteful" games that can't possibly offend anyone are the ones that get approved. Effectively, Steam would end up railroaded into a situation where they only support games which are "teen safe" and don't contain strong political messages of any stripe, because the whole company becomes controversy averse.

Valve/Steam are perfectly right to say it's not their job to dictate what people can or should like or create.

This is most certainly not right. Negligence is not the right way to run a store. Because when you do have a store, you are responsible for what is being sold there. Would you say that a store that sold clothes made after SS uniforms, or merchandise that outright does not work is perfectly justified if they just went and said "it's not illegal, so we won't do shit"? Because Valve is letting shit like Active Shooter and AIDS Simulator, not to mention the "games" that don't even have working .exe files in the first place. So no, they are not justified because it is their job to police their own store, not to sanitize visual novels but to keep out the actual garbage.