Posts by De Facto

Tired of smoke-screen AI research claims that a vendor does not know how its AI works

Algorithms behind neural network modeling AI methods use an ancient and well-known Bayesian probability math and its derivatives, so pretty much anything what neural networks are programmed by humans to do can be explained exactly in mathematical terms. As any probabilistic statistics driven algorithms, their output is probabilistic, it tells us only likelihood of the specific outcome, eg., 95% likelihood that a self-driving car should stop immediately, and 5% likelihood it can drive on. To continue to argue that humans do not know how neural networks work and therefore big vendors should not be held responsible for their AI assisted products failures, is a wishful thinking at the loose inspiration level at best. The worst case would be intentional corporate evil using the ubiquitous ignorance of the people about AI mathematics strict rules to get away without corporate responsibility for consequences. Mathematicly any likelihood statistics driven computing technology inevitably will yield certain amount of failed predictions, resulting into car crashes, collisions of planes etc, affecting human society everywhere where neural network AI will be applied. Deep Learning AI math is based on statistics rules, it's not based on rules of human logic. Likelihood based software use for life or death decisions is irresponsible.

Ubiquitous VAT scams are the real EU tax system problem, not the corporate tax

EU should better care about their VAT scams made legally possible, where tax-payers money is simply being stolen through VAT re-payments, according to some reports, up to 300 Bn loss annually. Historic VAT legislation in EU with its monthly or even longer VAT tax reporting periods is so hopelessly outdated, that in some countries up to 30% of VAT tax money is simply stolen, using multi-country rings of fake deals by maveric businesses, who take advantage of modern cross-border electronic transactions that are 100x faster than legacy VAT tax reporting legal requirements. European VAT legal system was designed for unwired paperwork era of deal making. It is the biggest Europe's taxation system fail in the modern digital age. No surprise US companies outcompete European ones all the way to the bank and tax crimes are hardly possible with its dead-simple to administer federal sales tax system.

Probably it is just another very unethical tax optimization

Reduce billions of cash money stashed abroad in tax-heavens by buying a loss-making operational business that almost solely depends on advertising money, then get a tax reduction from the write-off of the acquired company loss and debts? US government is considering to start taxing money sheltered in offshores for multinationals soon. The only fools will then be MS shareholders who do not own LinkedIn stock and the government's tax office.

True hyperscale operations do not use virtualization

In large scale clusters from hundreds to few thousands of servers hosting the same very large data corpus nobody is going to use virtualization due to dramatic efficiency loss for distributed computing tasks. When multi-node networking should be done among multiple servers for a single search or analytics query, computing efficiency loss because of virtualization can run up to 40%, compared to bare metal. The culprit is pure signaling physics in packetized digital networks. Virtualization needs to encapsulate network data packets. It can easily double the total traffic to be processed and that increases data nanagement workload across many computing stack layers. Neither Google, nor Facebook use virtualization in their inhouse computing kingdoms when doing very large hyperscale computing.

Hint - time to blame cheap offshore programmers?

It started as a corporate evil materialized and uncovered by heroic scientists.

Now it starts looking as a corporate product ignorance and plain stupidity at nearly all VW management levels.

I would not be surprised that in the end VW will start blaming, for instance, a couple of Russian or Bulgarian programmers, doing some cheap software development outsourcing work for them, that nobody in VW cared much about. It might be even true, with ongoing confusion among VW top brass and continuing new revealations of the dieselgate.

I hope that German beer production is not yet outsourced.

Ant mightier than the elephant?

No other energy source compares to the energy potential of sunshine. Solar energy is the most abundant energy source on the planet, by far. The world's total energy consumption was 16 Terawatts in 2009, expected to be 28 Terawatts in 2050. Solar energy hitting the Earth surface with potential for renewables is 23,000 Terawatts per year!

Climatologists, warmists, CO2-quotas merchants and naive politicians turned alarmists perhaps are lavishly paid to do their job, but they can not prove laws of thermodynamics and physics wrong!

A picture is worth a thousand words:

http://cleantechnica.com/files/2011/08/energy-resources-renewables-fossil-fuel-uranium.png

The full article can be found here (clearly not a coal- or oil- industry resource either):

http://cleantechnica.com/solar-power/

Back to typewriters following Putin's footsteps?

It was recently reported, that after Russians snatched Snowden, Putin's first response was ordering of 300 legacy typewriters for Kremlin staffers. When none of broadly worldwide used US designed PCs and other digital devices, american built OSes and smartphones were free from NSA introduced backdoors and encryption vulnerabilities, while NSA was fully busy in hiding from public their secretely found zero-day software exploits, perhaps Obama should had to follow the only logically possible sound advice. One can not hack what is not there. It was only a matter of time that foreign governments and criminals beyond NSA controls would understand how americans shot themselves in the foot and start doing the same in reverse. Sadly, that is how Russia's new führer outsmarted Obama. One can assume that there would not even be a war between Russia and Ukraine, if American spying data, agents, policies would not be exposed now to any government who want to make fun of them now.

Rights to remove links to pirated US content should not apply on google.de, google.fr etc?

Following the Google's logic, Google should stop removing links to disputed copyrighted content of American companies everywhere else but on google.com. Because only 5% of Europeans, if we had to believe to Google's lawyers, go to search for the American content on google.com.

Jokes aside, it is obvious that collecting a 'dirt' about milions of private people with outdated content ruining their private life or damaging their reputation, posted at some time as some anonymous comments on thousands of web sites of fairly decent reputation, such as local news or media sites, it generates more interest to search by person or company name. For instance, Google is often used to dig up something negative for an opponent bushing, or for playing kids having evil fun about each other searching on Google about their parents, or just for other casual evil. Therefore linking to outdated 'dirt' satisfies such an nefarious human interest and naturally generates more search traffic to Google and more dirty advertising revenues to Google. That explains Googles's millions shelled out for laywers and panel advisors, with obvious intent to keep maximum number of links to those evil postings about people private matters forever on the Google search index, in contrast to their policy of immediate removal of disputed copyrighted (pirated) content. That is the best evidence that number of Rights to Forget removal requests is not a technical problem for Goggle, and Google should stop misleading European regulators and just follow the court ruling same technical way they are already dealing with copyright disputes. I am amazed that European legal system falled victim to this obvious Google's tactics.

I also believe it will backfire for Goggle in their home country. Americans are the least protected nation from this privacy failure, and it is only a matter of time when Google is going to face a multi-billion legal class action on the American soil and pay a penalty as a total company failure to protect own home country citizens rights to forget.

Nokia Reborn

Blend an iphone-sized touch-screen display with Nokia E-series ergonomic QWERTY keyboard. Whoever will do it, will rewrite the smart-phone devices history again. A bit longer device in one piece, yet so much more productive for business people. Longer amps for battery too. So anti-Jobsian thing, that perhaps only Finns can figure it out and pull it off again.

Copyrights protection for real code vs patents of trivial ideas - what is more evil?

Focus on bashing the copyright protection ruling by the court is unprofessional and a communist ideology. Books, artworks and software code are best protected by copyrights to prevent stealing without compensating authors for months and years of their work. It's also unethical propoganda Russian style, kind of 'we would take what others own en masse'. In contrast, all those coments about software copyrights as evil principle are purely delusional about the true evil - software patents based only on trivial ideas and no copyrighted code substantiating those patent claims. The truly difficult part of the software invention is a working code vs paperwork ideas that multibillion companies lawyers can patent in droves. Google's position that software patents matter, not real code, is orders of magnitudes more evil that most of comentators realize. A time when Google will become a real patent troll and extorter of money for their thousands of patented 'ideas' will come sooner than most of us think. In fact, I believe they will try to kill both open source and copyrights with their patents, if their ads revenue one day will start diminishing. That's inevitable logic for a publicly traded giant company. I see no other reason to spend billions on buying patent-rich companies. It's insurance policy, their pension plan when their company starts getting into serious financial troubles.

Caveat Emptor

European Union flag-ship technology company just follows EU directives for spying on its citizens, in my opinion. You know, a lot of talking about protection of privacy, while actually doing the opposite. They should better keep silent about privacy when caught red-handed.