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I'm fine with that so long as "infrastructure" = poles and conduits. I am not okay with it if that means "wires, routers, etc".

I trust the government or your socialized monopoly to be able to provide poles and conduits. I want Right of Way for small companies to lay cable. Naturally have REASONABLE licenses to ensure things are done in an orderly manner that respects shared space on the poles and in the conduits.

However, if someone wants to run cable along poles and through conduits where there is room... then with a uniform fee that every agency that runs that much cable through that much space pays... allow them to run their cable.

What I want is competition. I do not want monopolies created by the government simply because it is the most effective way to obtain graft and bribes. This is not in the public's interest. The monopolies only serve the interests of large lazy corporations and corrupt politicians.

I want competition in last mile service. And saying "it can't happen because cost/logistics" is an interesting argument when companies are being legally forbidden to do it. If it were so problematic via cost and logistics then the corrupt political deals that have been struck wouldn't need to forbid the practice by other means. Market forces all by themselves would stop it.

But market forces are not stopping it. Try to run cable in name the city... you will get your permits denied... and if you ignore that... you'll get arrested. That is what is stopping it. And that is what needs to stop.

https://www.wired.com/2013/07/...

Everyone is clapping along like harbor seals to the Net Neutrality narrative. However, is it the lack of competition that is the actual issue.

https://www.wired.com/2013/07/...

Its not NN that is important. That actually solidifies the monopolies. Ensure right of access to poles for other companies besides the big guys. And NN will be irrelevant.

https://www.wired.com/2014/06/...

Sure and you can buy the imperial gardens in Japan for a trillion dollars too... and other things which written on paper but aren't true in fact.

When it comes to franchise agreements they often require that you commit to roll out service in a larger area than you wanted to roll it out. Sometimes the entire city. That means you can't have a local ISP in a city unless you're willing to provide service to the ENTIRE city. This puts the venture beyond the capital reserves of anything but a multi billion dollar corporation. And that all by itself will limit competition.

https://www.wired.com/2013/07/...

have a look...

Urban legend......

https://www.wired.com/story/al...

This could not have happened as described. Amazonâ(TM)s Echo requires a "wake word" to activate; the default is âoeAlexa,â but you can also customize it to âoeEcho,â âoeAmazon,â or âoeComputer.â And while they can make calls, an Alexa-powered device can only call another Alexa-powered device. Not only that, but it can only call other Alexa devices that have enabled calling, and have been added to your contact list. Most importantly, these exchanges don't take place over the public switched telephone network, the worldwide network that allows wireless or land phones to actually make calls.

"I"ve never heard" -> key phrase for someone attempting to peddle bullshit. https://www.wired.com/2011/04/...

The authors of some of the papers that Damore cited seem to think the conclusions he draws are unwarranted: https://www.wired.com/story/th...

Sociobiology has fallen out of fashion because its results are far from solid, and today it is understood that the human brain is extremely malleable. As an example of this, girls in the 80s lagged behind boys in maths. This was often taken as a biological limitation, particularly in areas like geometry that it was thought male brains were better at. But actually when girls spent an equal amount of time studying maths they got equal results, and now surpass boys in many countries (which again is for social reasons).

I can't speak for other posters, only myself. Please try not to lump us together.

There are two issues here, and I have been consistent about this. Firstly, while the studies he cites do have some interesting and valid results, he interprets them in a way that isn't justified in order to make his argument. For example, David Schmitt, the author of the "Why Canâ(TM)t a Man Be More Like a Woman? Sex Difference in Big Five Personality Traits Across 55 Cultures" paper that Damore cites, states that the biological differences account for 10% of the variance, and the other 90% is due to non-biological. Damore greatly over-values the biological component here.

The other issue is that he ignores the successes of attempts to address non-biological factors, except to complain that they make conservatives uncomfortable and to state that they should end (without real explanation of why, other than the implication that he thinks the issue is entirely biological).

He has had opportunities to expand on this and clarify, but instead stuck to his original biological essentialism. For example, in an interview he repeated the claim that pre-natal testosterone exposure has a big influence on career choice, but there is no scientific consensus for that at all. In fact, scientists had largely moved on from the entire nature vs. nurture argument 15+ years ago.

Please stop mis-characterising my arguments and instead make some of your own. We have an opportunity to discuss the details of the memo, rather than fling accusations of bad faith around.

I predicted this would be cracked with relative ease, but I had no idea it would crack itself. My prediction was based on FaceID using the exact same tech as Microsoft Hello, which was cracked within days of its release. I was more than a little surprised that FaceID was able to be cracked with only a partial mask, when Hello required a full mask. It could very well be that nobody tried the partial mask against Hello but, either way, this is truly disheartening as many people will rely on the feature as though it is actually secure.

The common defense, of course, is that "they trained it by entering the passcode." On its face, this seems a valid defense, but...

My wife asks me to do things on her phone all the time while she's driving, so she can keep her eyes on the road. I know her passcode so I can do these things, and FaceID tries to scan every time the screen is turned on. That means, intentional or not, if she had an iPhone X with FaceID enabled, I'd be training it to recognize my face every single time I unlocked it using the passcode. Eventually, we'd both be able to unlock it.

Since her and I look nothing alike, the phone would ostensibly unlock for anyone with facial features similar to hers or mine, in varied combinations; possibly even within a range between her facial features and mine. Since we look so different form each other, I would be less than surprised if the odds of a random match were way greater than 1:1,000,000, or even the 1:50,000 odds Apple claims for a random fingerprint match, on a device used in such a manner.

And I wouldn't think that usage pattern is too uncommon; most couples I know who are in healthy relationships ask each other to check messages and whatnot from time to time, which necessitates the sharing of passcodes.

The "learning" aspect of FaceID is its primary weakness. There are solutions, of course, and a proper implementation would apply them.

One possible solution would be a "guest" passcode, which does not trigger the learning mechanism. This could also lock out purchases and changes to certain settings. It would just be a good security measure, in general, regardless of FaceID. But, in the context of FaceID, it would all but solve the PIN/passcode "learning" weakness.

Doesn't do anything for kids or people with siblings, of course. Nor does it do anything for the fact that the 1:1,000,000 claim is explicitly limited to "random matching"; that is, if you pointed the phone at 1,000,000 random people, one of them would unlock it. If you point the phone at 5 people who look a lot like you, one of them will unlock it, as well, and we've seen that borne out in reality. I can take a picture of you as I'm stealing your phone and use it to find 5 people who look enough like you to likely be able to unlock it.

What I can't to is take a picture of you as I steal your phone and use it to find 5 people with similar fingerprints. The 1:50,000 odds are actually stringer than the 1:1,000,000 in this case, because there's no way around the randomness, other than a direct attack on the scanner itself. Of course, that's entirely possible and not all that difficult; but we've also seen that it's entirely possible and not all that difficult to attack FaceID, so the point is relatively moot, anyway.

I'd venture that it's easier to, say, walk down a busy city street with your victim's phone and photo and approach someone who looks similar enough to them and ask "have you seen the new iPhone yet?" as you hold it up to their face... than it is to find a clean enough print and reproduce it accurately enough to fool the fingerprint scanner. That's sad, here, is that the bar for fooling the fingerprint scanner was already too low. Apple must be trying to win a limbo competition with FaceID.

Ball Lightning is a stable plasma structure. Paul Koloc thought that they were a field-reversed configuration and created these is his garage on his Plasmak machine. I saw it myself. Paul was a plasma physicist, not a nut job.

Since his death (he was near eighty) his website went down. I found this article https://www.wired.com/2009/02/... .

As the article notes it received very little funding.

Because Yellow Pages were given to you free but you pay for your internet service.

Wha?..

You — a business — paid for your telephone service. For the customers to be able to call you. And your number was listed in the phone book.

To be listed prominently you had to pay the phone book publisher extra — the phone company itself.

Now FedEx starts going to those businesses and telling them [...]

The only thing stopping FedEx from quadrupling their fees every week is the fear of competition.

Since they have no other choice to ship to you

They do have a choice — there is UPS, there is USPS, and a bunch of smaller guys ready to offer themselves as the alternative.

What you are about to say is that yes, but ISPs are monopolies!.. Yes, in some places of the country they are — thanks to the Statists like you. Your "solution", to solve a government-created problem with more government intervention is not only laughable, it is also dangerous to our freedoms. You aren't merely wrong — your belief in the right to tell others, what they can and can not do with their equipment makes you a bad person. An asshole...

Now wouldn't you be furious at this?

You sound like you believe, that anyone in the (bogus) scenario you described — the shipper, the recipient, the delivery company — owe anybody anything. Nobody does. You can pop your lid off in fury, but FedEx still does not owe you a delivery, that was not paid for at the price they choose to set.

as if their opinions are somehow more valid, important, or enlightened than the rest of us.

"The rest of us" being the minority of the population who votes right wing? Look at the right wing right now. Yes, they are more enlightened than you are.

More evidence of insufficient management at Apple:

iPhone X Owners Complain About Distortion, Crackling Sounds From Earpiece

It's important that this issue not become off-topic. All that is being theorized is that Apple CEO Tim Cook, like almost everyone, is not sufficiently capable of being the top-level manager of a huge company like Apple.

Is the iPhone X face ID a good idea? Watch a 10-Year-Old's Face Unlock His Mom's iPhone X

How come there are ***never*** any leaks from these autocratic countries?

Never??? You can go to Wikileak and use the function 'search'. In case of it takes you too much time, here is a story published on Slashdot:
Wikileaks Releases Documents It Claims Detail Russia Mass Surveillance Apparatus

Keep in mind that Wikileaks is a tool to publish anonymous documents, you can't ask Wikileaks to publish what they don't have.

By the way, when you are SO angry that Assange 'seems to support repressive regimes', and DEMAND Wikileaks 'to do somethings' with these governments, I don't know where you were at those topic:
YouTube Suspends Account of Popular Chinese Dissident
Apple Pulls Anti-Censorship Apps from China's App Store

Bonus, don't blame Wikileaks and Assange for his 'so-called-anti-USA':
Cisco Leak: 'Great Firewall' of China Was a Chance to Sell More Routers

alphago human masters new moves

Long list of results... here's a typical one.

https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...

SEOUL, SOUTH KOREA â" In Game Two, the Google machine made a move that no human ever would. And it was beautiful. As the world looked on, the move so perfectly demonstrated the enormously powerful and rather mysterious talents of modern artificial intelligence.

But in Game Four, the human made a move that no machine would ever expect. And it was beautiful too. Indeed, it was just as beautiful as the move from the Google machineâ"no less and no more. It showed that although machines are now capable of moments of genius, humans have hardly lost the ability to generate their own transcendent moments. And it seems that in the years to come, as we humans work with these machines, our genius will only grow in tandem with our creations.

Although machines are now capable of moments of genius, humans have hardly lost the ability to generate their own.

This week saw the end of the historic match between Lee Sedol, one of the world's best Go players, and AlphaGo, an artificially intelligent system designed by a team of researchers at DeepMind, a London AI lab now owned by Google. The machine claimed victory in the best-of-five series, winning four games and losing only one. It marked the first time a machine had beaten the very best at this ancient and enormously complex gameâ"a feat that, until recently, experts didn't expect would happen for another ten years.
===
alphago methodology

typical good result
https://www.dcine.com/2016/01/...

===
Interesting article on the new "alphago zero" which absolutely kicked alphago's ass.

https://medium.com/intuitionma...

Beat the previous version of AlphaGo (Final score: 100â"0).
Learn to perform this task from scratch, without learning from previous human knowledge (i.e. recorded game play).
World champion level Go playing in just 3 days of training.
Do so with an order of magnitude less neural networks ( 4 TPUs vs 48 TPUs).
Do this with less training data (3.9 million games vs 30 millions games). ...
Humans learn languages through metaphors and stories. The human strategies discovered in Go are referred to with names so as to be recognizable by a player. It could be possible that the human language of Go is inefficient in that it is unable to express more complex compound concepts. What AlphaGo Zero seems to be able to do is perform its moves in a way that satisfies multiple objectives at the same time. So humans and perhaps earlier versions of AlphaGo were constrained to a relatively linear way of thinking, while AlphaGo Zero was not encumbered with an inefficient language of strategy. It is also interesting that one may consider this a system that actually doesnâ(TM)t use the implicit bias that may reside in a language. David Silver, of DeepMind, has an even more bold claim:

Itâ(TM)s more powerful than previous approaches because by not using human data, or human expertise in any fashion, weâ(TM)ve removed the constraints of human knowledge and it is able to create knowledge itself.

===

You can also watch alpha go analysis on youtube. It's pretty dry but you typically get commentary by a go expert on the moves made.

---

The biggest limitation on A.I. is human. We don't have the right theories yet. We don't know how to formulate some problems for machine learning. In those areas where we do, machines rapidly exceed human capabilities.

btw, to me "brute

You are so wrong that people already hacked the IME and proved you wrong long ago.

https://www.wired.com/2017/05/...

The entire system has to run, every part is dependent upon the other in a chain of trust.

"Many parts of it have to be expressly enabled in the BIOS."

Actually, no, and the most recent news revealed was that there was an accessible NSA-specific command HARDCODED INTO THE IME.

But please, by all means keep covering up when almost all of us know better. That's the sure sign of a shill.

You couldn't actually argue anything Damore wrote, could you?

It's already been done.

https://www.wired.com/story/th...

It's pretty good too. The creator was already making documentary about the Hulk Hogan sex tape trail, and all this Thiel stuff blew up, with him in the middle. Pretty interesting. Wired review of Nobody Speak.

There are already unauthorized traffic signal pre-emption systems that change red lights to green https://www.wired.com/2005/08/... The authorized versions are intended for fire/police/ambulance use. I could easily see somebody compromising the V2V system to broadcast a "get out of my way" message, to make their own commute faster. Even worse, overpower other cars' signals and cause accidents. Dumb computers, just following orders, could cause lots of deaths. Can I slip in a Godwin here?

California has it's own standards. The EPA can go and fsck themselves.

Bad example. California only gets away with that because they have a special exemption from the EPA. And of course the trump kakistocracy is trying to invalidate that exemption.

First, see what kind of social and economic mischief you can carry out in the West by way of "anonymous" activity on the Internet - do it cheap, like get kids to help out, and take note how hard it is to trace back to the culprit.
(in parallel, see how much actual damage can be carried out, using Ukraine as a guinea-pig).
Next, notice well it all worked, beyond all reasonable expectations, even to the extent of swaying elections of public officials in the U.S. (they're holding Congressional hearings about us!), and encouraging open revolt against the state and inflaming street unrest.
Third, in view of the fact that Russian officials do not tolerate street unrest and open revolt against the state, conclude that this "research experiment" has proven without question that the Internet is a danger to the Motherland and its beloved leader, Valdimir Putin.
Fourth and finally, take pre-emptive action based on this valuable research to crush this threat and make sure it don't never happen here (Russian military take note... could be useful someday; continue research).
P.S.: President Xi says to Putin in his heavy Chinese accent, "way ahead of you."
P.P.S.: Kim Jong-un says it was all my idea.

They're already in service... and putting black tar in pilots lungs.

https://www.wired.com/2013/02/...

Don't worry though. Even though the pilots refused to fly and were risking court marshals, the Air Force "grounded" the plans for a week to investigate and found "no issues" and resumed flights.

Black shit in your lungs is normal according to the fully respectable Air Force. Especially when the military-industrial-complex desires a larger budget.

You do realize that FaceID is the same technology Microsoft used for Hello, right? It's been cracked. FaceID was cracked before Apple implemented it and we'll see this when security researchers get their hands on it. From the lined article:

After all, even 3-D facial recognition systems have been spoofed before: Two years ago Berlin-based SR Labs used a plaster mold of a test subject's face to cast a model that beat Microsoft's Hello facial recognition system. That setup was implemented in multiple brands of laptops and used the same sort of infrared depth-sensing cameras [as the iPhone X].

I'd venture to guess that the one of us who doesn't understand why FaceID has not yet been publicly put to shame is the one with shit for brains, if you wish to insist that one of us does. That's on you, though.

Now I can pay ten bucks for a pound of rice that was watered by the bollock sweat of buddhist monks and get it delivered to my door!

To your door? Where have you been? Amazon will deliver through your door and into your house. Joy!

And still the DNC never had denied the FBI access to the server.

Why, you almost make it sound like the FBI never wanted the physical server... But as reported in January, 2017 I don't believe that to be the case.

"straightforward, deeply practical determination shines"
Right!

https://sf.budgetchallenge.org... (this is an official SFO city page)
This projection reveals deficits of $86 million in FY 2016-17 and $161 million in FY 2017-18, a total deficit of approximately $246.4 million over the next two years.
This is simultaneous with their floating a $3.5 BILLION bond to desperately try to fix BART infrastructure: https://www.wired.com/2016/03/...
Oh wait, not really: http://www.mercurynews.com/201...
"Less than three months after voters passed a $3.5 billion BART bond for capital projects, transit officials presented budget forecasts in which the district reneges on its part of the deal."

And let's not forget:
http://sanfrancisco.cbslocal.c...
Gov. Jerry Brown has proposed a $122.5 billion budget for California and is warning of a possible $2 billion deficit in the coming fiscal year.

Not sure what the OP is peddling, but the fact is that SFO's budget is sheer fantasy already without adding the ridiculous cost of shoving fiber-internet everywhere.

Even in California you can't build infrastructure out of candy, unicorns, and rainbows.

When I heard about farmers whose tractors (John Deere) stopped working because they repaired it with a non-OEM part and the tractors telematics shut down because it didn't recognize the new part (non-electronic part BTW). I knew a shit-storm was coming. Then when I saw how John Deere responded to the outcry I knew it would be a protracted battle to get companies to do the right thing.

Give them this and in 10 years they'll be whining about how unfair it is that they need a warrant to read your mind.

You laugh, but this has been tried.

In the case cited, fMRI scans were used to determine whether the plaintiff's "intent". IOW, they were using the scans to determine whether the doctor has "intent" to defraud the insurance agencies.

Here's a video review of the phone:
https://www.theverge.com/2017/...

The attachable wireless modules are unique, and it has a 360 degree camera option. It has a 5.7" screen and a smaller body than 5.5" screen Androids and iPhones. No bloatware isn't unique, but it's better than most Android phones. Interesting and functional materials.

Their home page highlights these differences:
https://www.essential.com/

More than the current features is the promise of seamless integration with other devices.
https://www.wired.com/story/in...

I'm not buying this iteration of this phone, but I hope enough people do to keep this company alive - it looks like it has a lot of promise.

So some Canadian parties claim a monopoly on "democratic" positions and want to ban anything and anyone contradicting their views.

The censoring is outsourced to private companies like Facebook to circumvent pesky anti-censoring laws. That has the additional benefit, that there is no constitutional oversight and no address for anyone wronged by out of hand censoring.

This authoritarian approach is justified with talk of "Fake-News" and "Hate-Speech", but what it comes down to is censoring of unwanted political viewpoints or even uncomfortable truths. A few hand picked extreme cases are presented to justify implementing censorship.

Here is a nice wired article, how Facebook "learned" to do "the right thing (TM)" ahead of German elections:
https://www.wired.com/story/fa...
In Germany a law threatening up to 50M fines to companies like Facebook was rushed through legislation just before elections. It's not hard to imagine how FB in response will crack down on anything deemed "politically incorrect".

And please spare me the "private companies can do as they like" drivel. Companies like Facebook and Google are nowadays at the hub of information flow. It's ridiculous to make a big deal about the alleged "Russians" influence on public opinion and elections by means of RT and a few bots, but turn a blind eye when FB or google push a political agenda (either of their own accord or because they are instrumentalized by political parties).

https://www.wired.com/story/eq...

It does not matter what you run if you treat your security in the way Equifax does..

That should make people more, not less, likely to buy the original.

Proof by first derivative. Works every time. No dilemma ever.

Er, um, hold the presses.

No Google books: authors control most revenue, no soup for Google.

Partial Google books: one author rats out the other (economically) by signing up. Author who signs up wins, author who holds out loses. Plenty of canned alphabet soup for Google.

Full Google books: Google creams almost the whole of the economic surplus due to better consumption matching, authors left in roughly the same place (though a smaller piece of the whole pie). Cream of truffle soup for Google.

Society usually ends up deciding these matter in the large by a process of fait accompli.

Sun on Privacy: 'Get Over It' — January 1999

The chief executive officer of Sun Microsystems said Monday that consumer privacy issues are a "red herring."

"You have zero privacy anyway," Scott McNealy told a group of reporters and analysts Monday night at an event to launch his company's new Jini technology.

"Get over it."

McNealy's comments came only hours after competitor Intel reversed course under pressure and disabled identification features in its forthcoming Pentium III chip.

It's so routine that McNealy completely forgot himself in his rush to get their before the fait accompli paint was dry.

The judge decides that the authors have already lost the power game, crosses that cell off the game theory matrix (out of superficial prudence), and then—Lo and Behold—corporate America wins again.

We shoot ourselves in the foot by claiming victory for network effects that aren't network effects.

This is a power heuristic, make no mistake about it. With enough power, no network required (though of course, actually having a network does tend to boost power, as well).

I actually am looking forward to the days of either 100% self driving cars, or everybody having dash cams.

So you're not happy with the way things currently are here?

On the one hand, if these allegations are true, heads should damn roll.

On the other, Tesla is a great target for a he-said-he-said lawsuit. High profile, lots of cash, great timing right before the make-or-break moment where they have to make good on their affordable cars before GM and the other old guys power into the market.

Tesla's got to be a pressure-cooker company right now to get that production up. But if floor management is creating problems like this, there's a huge incentive to for senior management to give a beat-down to the floor managers. No workers, no Tesla 3's, no Tesla... and there goes Elon Musk puttering around dog-faced in a Bolt.

Who the fuck to believe. To my knowledge, these Tesla things are not sticking like the way they stuck on Uber. But who the fuck knows... news and lawsuits are full of bullshit these days, it's not easy to know truth from some Russian kid with a smartphone masquerading as a Texan. All that's reliably true is Tesla has money, and any cheap-suit lawyer would see an opportunity to make a quick settlement out of them, rather than risk more bad press and production delays as they try like mad to make their delivery date.

According to this article, there's very good reasons this joystick idea never took off, the same reasons I iterated before.

The bottom line is we are on a slippery slope, losing our rights inherent in ownership itself.

Who is Apple to tell me what to do with a product that I purchased? Nikon does not sabotage the competition by embedding DRM into its lenses. Apple was intentionally breaking the phones when original parts weren't detected. By breaking, than fixing the problem, the evidence clearly indicates that Apple intended to interfere with a transaction between the owner of a product and third party support. At minimum, Apple's apparent sabotage should be investigated as monopolistic anti-competitive behavior.

HP was (?) doing something similar recently with ink cartridges. Are you telling me that they can force me to buy HP paper and ink forever simply because I purchased an HP printer?

What right does a company have to use software to force me to purchase overpriced replacement parts for their products that I already own? The last time that I checked, all of my vehicles don't brick themselves when Fram oil filters are installed. Then again, I don't own a John Deere tractor.

Here's an old story you might find apolitically interesting. We knew way before the election that Kaspersky was KGB trained and a Putin loyalist. You can read my comment history of you're an actual skeptic rather than a Russian botnik. But I also recommend anyone who doubts Putin's viciousness to hear the story of how he murdered his way into office from this PBS Documentary.

As a sidenote, I'm a slashdot reader from more than a decade ago, and I've been really disappointed to see the amount of denialism present on this issue. I remember this as a place for pragmatic, intelligent, realistic people. And here's the reality: Putin is at war with you, he doesn't give a shit about you or your family or even his own citizens' families, and he actively hopes that you are confused about what he is doing, or denying it entirely.

I don't even get the question. Microsoft is already—to a first and second approximation—Lotus Notes 2.0.

Their primary lock on the enterprise is their proprietary document format, and its extensive integration ecosystem—the many of COBOL-grade regoliths of Jericho—extending from BASIC to Visual Basic to Visual Studio to .NET to SharePoint and beyond.

Windows 10 these days is barely more than a cash register on a busy toll bridge (with a special, express lane for native DirectX 12).

Aside from a legacy investment lock-in (self-inflicted), the four surviving reasons to run Windows 10: you don't care (it came with the damn machine), you play immersive games, you work for a tired corporation, or you exchange documents with a tired corporation.

Make no mistake, this giant pile of dusty rock is built to last. But Microsoft's active relevance is already 80% in the rear-view mirror.

The one thing I will say, though it pains me, is that I've heard it said on more than one machine learning podcast that Microsoft Research is considered among the very best and most progressive of all giant, cutting-edge research labs.

MS Office Helper Not Dead Yet — April 2001

The company has one of the leading centers for research into computational Bayesian systems at its Redmond, Washington, campus. It is also launching a Bayesian research group at its new Cambridge research center.

The company employs three of the leading researchers in the field: Jack Breese, David Heckerman and Eric Horvitz.

"They are three of the best of their generation," D'Ambrosio said. "They are clearly right at the top. They are all world-class people, not only in their theoretical capabilities but in how to inject technology into real-world products."

So we've seen this movie before.

In the mid-90s, the lab built a sophisticated Bayesian prototype called Lumiere that included a "deep" model of user confusion. Microsoft is using the software to help build a smart-help system that knows when to jump in and offer people assistance.
...
But thanks to time constraints, this unfinished component hasn't made its way into any version of Microsoft Office, including the soon-to-be-released Office XP.
...
Horvitz recommended that users should be able to control when Clippy comes forward —advice that was also ignored by the decision makers at Microsoft.

How much of this generation's cutting-edge work coming out of Microsoft Research will also be Clippified?

Stay tune for the next soul-crushing chapter.

Or perhaps their new embrace of the Linux ecosystem portends that they've finally learned from their past mistakes (someone remind me to check back again in another five years).

The US government considers it so, and prosecutes for it.

"A hacker charged with federal crimes for obtaining the personal data of more than 100,000 iPad owners from AT&T’s publicly accessible website was sentenced on Monday to 41 months in prison followed by three years of supervised release."

https://www.wired.com/2013/03/...

Autonomous car makers get the the house to relax nearly all regulations on autonomous cars. Now they want us to just trust them? I don't even trust the senate isn't as well paid off and this will become law.

15 may 2016:

Tesla promised to start deliveries by the end of 2017, and to move 500,000 units a year (including Model S and Model X sales) by 2020.

Musk, apparently feeling his company isn't under quite enough pressure, upped the ante during Wednesday's call, saying he'll deliver 100,000 cars by the end of 2017 and hit the half-million threshold in 2018.

I'll repeat: Tesla accelerated their own schedule. Their original schedule was "something, at some point, in 2017". They changed it to an extremely aggressive S curve starting in July. As for the latter part:

"I think it’s worth explaining sort of how manufacturing a complex object with several thousand unique components actually works. And what date’s relevant and – in order to achieve volume production of a new car with several thousand unique items, you actually have to set a target date internally and with suppliers that is quite aggressive.”

According to Musk, that target date in July 1 of 2017. That doesn’t mean that the Model 3 will enter production on July 1st, because as Musk explains:

“Now, will we actually be able to achieve volume production on July 1 next year? Of course, not. The reason is that even if 99% of the internally produced items and supplier items are available on July 1, we still cannot produce the car because you cannot produce a car that is missing 1% of its component.”

Musk says that actual production will be “some number of months later,” due to supply chain issues and internal production problems. This, according to Musk, is how the entire automotive industry works. In some ways then,start of production for the Model 3 is not entirely controlled by Tesla.

Musk concluded this part of the discussion with this statement:

“So in order for us to be confident of achieving volume production of Model 3 by late 2017, we actually have to set a date of mid-2017 and really hold people’s feet to the fire internally and externally to achieve an actual volume production date of late 2017.”

He then provided a production target, which is way beyond what we’d expected to hear:

“So as a rough guess, I would say we would aim to produce 100,000 to 200,000 Model 3s in the second half of next year. That’s my expectation right now.

The catch is they just lost a Loon lawsuit. Google tried to steal technology and patents pretending to be interested in buying out a startup.

https://www.wired.com/story/th...

its not the first time Google flat out steals someone elses technology, to the point of being sued for racketeering http://www.mercurynews.com/201...

https://www.wired.com/story/th...

story links to an article about Loon in puerto rico not to the Space Data Lawsuit.

"Space Data pulled off something big: It convinced the US Patent and Trademark Office to cancel most of one of Project Loon’s foundational patents, and say that Space Data came up with the idea first. Loon’s patent for changing a balloon’s direction by adjusting its altitude—a core feature of both systems—is now legally back in Space Data’s hands."

The expected value of goodwill and roaming fees from this outweighs the expected costs associated with patent royalty liabilities and negative goodwill costs for Space Data associated with a lawsuit for this situation?

Hey, where do I sign up for all these anniversary parties at!? https://www.wired.com/2007/10/...

Even if we make an AGI some day, it's going to have the goals that it's programmed with.

I agree with your overall reasoning, but I don't think intelligence is programmable. I also don't think strong AI will come from computer sciences. Maybe from a neuro-biological lab, with lots of physicists around.

As to how to achieve it, Here's an interesting insight on the matter

Hyperloop One has nothing to do with Musk other than they are running with his idea that he pushed out to the foreground.

Apparently he found some free time, "Great News for Everyone! Elon Musk Is Building a Hyperloop".

But that doesn't answer my question.

For reference, Musk didn't found Tesla. Martin Eberhard and Marc Tarpenning did and there was a lawsuit that Eberhard pushed that partially had to do with rewriting the history of the company:

https://www.wired.com/2009/06/...

While certainly Musk is forever linked to the company and important to its future, he did not found Tesla.

For the readers too young to remember: https://www.wired.com/2000/02/...