Got any other impotent rage you'd like to get out?
Sure. You volunteering?
Shove it up your ass. I don't like the Chinese government, and I see no reason why I SHOULD like them. I feel sorry for the Chinese people, having to put up with the unbelievable bullshit they have to put up with from their own government. If you're saying you LIKE the Chinese government, then I invite you to go throw yourself into an operating wood-chipper, because you're a bad human being and a waste of perfectly good oxygen. Better yet, go emigrate there and live under their rule; that's a worse fate than death so far as I'm concerned. Things may be fucked-up right now here in the U.S., but I'd rather be here than there.
No kidding. Chinese government confirmed (yet again) for not valuing human life overly much. If the damned thing strikes in a populated area and people die, I say they drag them into The Hauge for a crime against humanity.
I really honestly don't get the draw of '4k'. If you're running a movie theatre then I can see where it makes sense, your projection screen is 20 feet on a side (or whatever it is), but I've got a 39" TV, and I don't ever notice individual pixels; I notice the quantization of the compression algorithm used when there's fast motion, but that's going to happen at any resolution unless it's totally uncompressed video. Really, it sounds like a 'solution looking for a problem', not anything 'innovative'.
I got rid of cable years ago and never went back; I could no longer justify the expense when out of all the shitty channels offered, there were only a few I even bothered with. Besides which, they recompress the living hell out of everything, so the quality is garbage. I have a DVR and I have more to watch than I have time to watch things. Of course we have lots of local OTA channels and reception is good. I have no interest in streaming, it's just more 'pay TV' which is what I wanted to get away from. I'm not even interested in Netflix. I don't believe in 'The Cloud' or purely digital purchases because you don't really own them, I'd rather have physical media, and DVD is fine, don't even want or see a need for Blu-ray. Despite what some trolls actually would have you believe OTA broadcast isn't going to go away any time soon, not any more than broadcast radio is going away any time soon.
Thank you! That's a way of putting things that hadn't occurred to me. There are more dimensions to the issue of operating a motor vehicle on a public road than just sensory_input->decision_output.
Like too many people you can't seem to think your way through the problem, and furthermore you can't recognize the FACT that you're taking something for granted that you've been doing for years and years. Driving is NOT a trivial task, and it is NOT acceptable for some piece of software to come to the end of a decision-tree and just pull over and come to a stop, because it can't cope with it's input, and that is what will happen -- until they can emulate the human mind, and create something that is REAL AI and not the ersatz they keep trotting out to impress the investors, so they can keep their jobs. You don't understand the complexity of the issue and I do, and that's why you and people like you keep insisting that it's 'here, now' or 'only 5 years away' when that's clearly and simply NOT TRUE.
Oh look, it's this tired-out old argument, which identifies the poster as someone who apparently can't think critically or logically. Do I really have to go through this again, just to show how dumb you're being? An elevator goes up and down in a finite space and that's ALL it does, it's not in any way shape or form comparable to an automobile. Neither is a train, and neither is a plane, and neither is a boat or ship, so stop trying to compare anything to an automobile.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'd prefer to not have something being driven by several hundred volts clamped onto either side of my head. One screw-up or failure of the insulation, and you're re-creating a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in real life.
When I'm talking about 'techies', I'm including the entire spectrum of them; competent, and INcompetent.
Point: Even a 'competent' techie doesn't necessarily have the 'spark' necessary to solve a problem that will improve the overall quality of life for humanity in general; if it was a common trait, we probably wouldn't have many of the problems we have today.
Point: We agree, most problems aren't and can't be solved by technology alone -- but try explaining that to someone with a Masters in Business or to a Marketer; usually, it's like talking to a brick wall, and sometimes a brick wall is more intelligent. These types tend to have one thing and one thing only in mind: making more money. They don't care about (or, sometimes, even seem to be able to conceive of) 100 years down the road, they only seem to be able to think in terms of next fiscal quarter, and whether they'll get their bonus this year. Solving the real problems that face humanity require social solutions, that perhaps are enabled by technology -- but, again, there's usually little to no money (if not a flat-out loss) in solving these sorts of problems, thus nobody other than charity organizations are interested in solving them. It's capitalism gone bad, yes, but sadly that's the world we live in. I can easily see the 'competent' techies, who actually have the spark necessary to do some real good and cause some real change, not doing so because of money -- because when you wife looks at you with that look, that says "I'm not so sure I want to keep being married to you if you're going to go off the rails like this", and he knows he has to provide for his family, often such high-minded ideals go out the window in favor of earning a decent paycheck.
Most 'techies' are wage slaves, and do what their employers pay them to do -- and if that's the 457th version of Candy Crush, then that's what they work on. The exception, I suppose, is the self-employed, and the Kickstarter types, but they are a tiny minority. Also last time I checked many things that are innovative and/or revolutionary or that will 'change the world' either get sued out of existence, or gobbled up by some mega-corp, and then either twisted into something else, or buried. We live in a nascent dystopia, after all. Ther'e's still some hope, but it's dwindling.
Won't happen. Facebook is common, but they don't have everybody.
Since you don't seem to read and/or comprehend everything posted, I'll reiterate: I'm describing a possible dystopian future where Facebook is required. Sadly, I also think it's not too far-fetched, just like I don't think it's too far-fetched that in another possible dystopian future, everyone on the gods-be-damned Internet will be required to log in somehow using their real name, no more anonymity allowed -- at which points, I go back to using Public Libraries with printed books for everything, and paying my bills with checks instead of electronically -- or with cash, in person.
More often than not posts are considered "trolls" because they differ from, or harm the opposition.
Friend, you're FAR from being alone in that. Happens to me all the time. Finally, I gave up any semblance of civility and just cut loose, because it's not like the real trolls are holding anything back. Any attempts to defend myself in 'dignified' ways just gets twisted into something else anyway. Largely, the Internet has become just a sewer for the lowest common denominators of humanity. The vast majority of civil, intelligent, insightful conversations I have, are still face-to-face.
It's more likely that we'll wake up one day to a world where you have to have a Facebook account, with your real name and all your real, personal information, or you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymore. The Internet is already largely one big data-collection and surveillance network, and even not using your real name anywhere is trivial for someone with the right level of access to information to circumvent and discover who and where you are. The next step if this 'consolidation' continues will be to make sure there is no anonymity allowed for anyone; you'll have to log in to everything using a Facebook account, or something similar, so all your activity can be thoroughly tracked and logged by the 'proper agencies' -- for your own protection, of course.
Or so they'd like it to be. I'd sooner not even have the Internet anymore, and go back to using libraries for information, receiving paper bills for money I owe, and mailing paper checks to pay them. We all survived and thrived just fine before the Internet, and we'd all survive and thrive just fine without it. It'd be a pain at first but we'd get used to it. The more people that realize all that, the better. If people start leaving the Internet in droves then either it'd have to change or die.
Global warming, famine, disease, asteroid impacts? These are not the things that will destroy humanity. RELIGION will destroy humanity.
You do not worship the Invisible Sky God in the way that He has told our Prophets we must, therefore we must erradicate you heretics, in His name!
THAT is what will destroy us: Endless cycles of war over something that exists only in people's minds, never in reality. Man makes the Gods in his own image -- and at our core, we're just animals, who happen to have access to weapons of mass destruction.
I'm not sure you understand. I want a hardware switch that write-protects the entire phone from anyone installing or writing anything to any of it's memory devices for any reason, working RAM excepted, of course (the OS and existing software need stack and heap space, of course). Of course, as you say, and as I've already pointed out, the whole game is rigged before you even get the phone; the manufacturer can put whatever on it and you'd never know, and the wireless company will put whatever on it, and you have no say in the matter. Really, it's enough to make me strongly consider abandoning cellphones completely and just go back to a plain, dumb, landline phone and an answering machine. Currently I have the cheapest flip-phone I could get, and even that could easily be compromised, wirelessly even, even though I've completely disabled any ability it has to connect it's minimal web browser to the Internet, AT&T I'm sure could push whatever code they want to the thing. At least I can turn it completely off, and remove the battery from it.
Why isn't there user-controlled write-protect on phones to prevent this sort of thing? You don't need to be able to install software on your goddamned phone so often that it needs to be in read/write mode all the time.
Of course my question is rhetorical and the answer is obvious: smartphones are just surveillance and data collection devices. Read my new sigline, it says it all.
Let's see their 'deep learning tool' identify something that's got a featureless black box over it, or someone's face that's got a black box or oval over it.
We will not have cars running around with nobody inside it at the controls in five years. We also won't have cars without controls for a human driver because that's INSANE. We won't have this because only an insane person would trust it. We'll have to have DECADES of humans behind the wheel overseeing anything 'autonomous' before any lawmaker will even CONSIDER allowing them to drive around unattended, and that is the way it should be. Do you have PhD's in computer science, specializing in (so-called) artificial intelligence? No? That's why you don't understand ANY of this. I at least read and listen to more than just media hype and Google press releases, and I KNOW that there is no such thing as true 'AI', there is only clever pieces of software that mimick some aspects of human cognition, but that are not self-aware or conscious, because science does not even begin to understand yet how human brains accomplish that. Until such time as we have the equivalent of Commander Data walking around, you'll have to keep your drivers license current and oversee your so-called 'self driving car' for when (not IF, but WHEN) it comes across things it can't handle, so get used to it -- assuming you can afford the expensive luxury cars that'll come as an option in. Meanwhile the rest of us will be 'self driving' ourselves and not give a fuck.
Goddamnit.. It is not 'here, now'. What we have 'now' is research vehicles that have to have two engineers/scientists/whatever riding in the thing, hovering over the standard automobile controls in case it fucks up. What we have 'now' is something that can't handle driving on the freeway. What we have 'now' is not available for sale to the public. What we have 'now' is not in any way shape or form ready to be called a 'product', it is just 'research and development'. It is NOT going to be ready in 'FIVE YEARS'. At best in 'FIVE YEARS' we'll have some fancy cruise control that will still mean you have to have a drivers license and can pass all the required tests. You and people like you just bought into the hype and have no idea what you're talking about!
They don't want to appear to be non-progressive technologically-speaking, so they spend a little money 'researching' it, even if it seems like it's going to be non-viable anytime in the next 20 years or so. Of course at best this will be a sophisticated 'cruise control' and never anything you could actually trust to not kill people by accident if you let it loose all by itself, but even a sophisticated cruise-control would make for a nicely profitable option on expensive luxury vehicles, so I'm sure they'll be more than happy to have that to sell. But despite the two-digit IQ crowd insisting that they'll have robotic overlords to drive them around while they snooze, it's not going to happen anytime within decades. Meanwhile I just laugh at the foolishness of some people, and their inability to distinguish stuff they see in movies from reality.
Slashdot Mirror
..which, by the way, is how I framed this story when *I* submitted it yesterday. How about 'credit where credit is due', BeauHD?
Got any other impotent rage you'd like to get out?
Sure. You volunteering?
Shove it up your ass. I don't like the Chinese government, and I see no reason why I SHOULD like them. I feel sorry for the Chinese people, having to put up with the unbelievable bullshit they have to put up with from their own government. If you're saying you LIKE the Chinese government, then I invite you to go throw yourself into an operating wood-chipper, because you're a bad human being and a waste of perfectly good oxygen. Better yet, go emigrate there and live under their rule; that's a worse fate than death so far as I'm concerned. Things may be fucked-up right now here in the U.S., but I'd rather be here than there.
No kidding. Chinese government confirmed (yet again) for not valuing human life overly much. If the damned thing strikes in a populated area and people die, I say they drag them into The Hauge for a crime against humanity.
I really honestly don't get the draw of '4k'. If you're running a movie theatre then I can see where it makes sense, your projection screen is 20 feet on a side (or whatever it is), but I've got a 39" TV, and I don't ever notice individual pixels; I notice the quantization of the compression algorithm used when there's fast motion, but that's going to happen at any resolution unless it's totally uncompressed video. Really, it sounds like a 'solution looking for a problem', not anything 'innovative'.
I got rid of cable years ago and never went back; I could no longer justify the expense when out of all the shitty channels offered, there were only a few I even bothered with. Besides which, they recompress the living hell out of everything, so the quality is garbage. I have a DVR and I have more to watch than I have time to watch things. Of course we have lots of local OTA channels and reception is good. I have no interest in streaming, it's just more 'pay TV' which is what I wanted to get away from. I'm not even interested in Netflix. I don't believe in 'The Cloud' or purely digital purchases because you don't really own them, I'd rather have physical media, and DVD is fine, don't even want or see a need for Blu-ray. Despite what some trolls actually would have you believe OTA broadcast isn't going to go away any time soon, not any more than broadcast radio is going away any time soon.
FUCK YOU, ASSHOLES.
Come back when OTA broadcast stations are UHD, until then I'm not even remotely interested.
Not just decision making, but understanding.
Thank you! That's a way of putting things that hadn't occurred to me. There are more dimensions to the issue of operating a motor vehicle on a public road than just sensory_input->decision_output.
Like too many people you can't seem to think your way through the problem, and furthermore you can't recognize the FACT that you're taking something for granted that you've been doing for years and years. Driving is NOT a trivial task, and it is NOT acceptable for some piece of software to come to the end of a decision-tree and just pull over and come to a stop, because it can't cope with it's input, and that is what will happen -- until they can emulate the human mind, and create something that is REAL AI and not the ersatz they keep trotting out to impress the investors, so they can keep their jobs. You don't understand the complexity of the issue and I do, and that's why you and people like you keep insisting that it's 'here, now' or 'only 5 years away' when that's clearly and simply NOT TRUE.
Oh look, it's this tired-out old argument, which identifies the poster as someone who apparently can't think critically or logically. Do I really have to go through this again, just to show how dumb you're being? An elevator goes up and down in a finite space and that's ALL it does, it's not in any way shape or form comparable to an automobile. Neither is a train, and neither is a plane, and neither is a boat or ship, so stop trying to compare anything to an automobile.
If you're not rolling your eyes at 'news' like this then you just don't get it.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'd prefer to not have something being driven by several hundred volts clamped onto either side of my head. One screw-up or failure of the insulation, and you're re-creating a scene from One Flew Over The Cuckoo's Nest in real life.
When I'm talking about 'techies', I'm including the entire spectrum of them; competent, and INcompetent.
Point: Even a 'competent' techie doesn't necessarily have the 'spark' necessary to solve a problem that will improve the overall quality of life for humanity in general; if it was a common trait, we probably wouldn't have many of the problems we have today.
Point: We agree, most problems aren't and can't be solved by technology alone -- but try explaining that to someone with a Masters in Business or to a Marketer; usually, it's like talking to a brick wall, and sometimes a brick wall is more intelligent. These types tend to have one thing and one thing only in mind: making more money. They don't care about (or, sometimes, even seem to be able to conceive of) 100 years down the road, they only seem to be able to think in terms of next fiscal quarter, and whether they'll get their bonus this year. Solving the real problems that face humanity require social solutions, that perhaps are enabled by technology -- but, again, there's usually little to no money (if not a flat-out loss) in solving these sorts of problems, thus nobody other than charity organizations are interested in solving them. It's capitalism gone bad, yes, but sadly that's the world we live in. I can easily see the 'competent' techies, who actually have the spark necessary to do some real good and cause some real change, not doing so because of money -- because when you wife looks at you with that look, that says "I'm not so sure I want to keep being married to you if you're going to go off the rails like this", and he knows he has to provide for his family, often such high-minded ideals go out the window in favor of earning a decent paycheck.
Most 'techies' are wage slaves, and do what their employers pay them to do -- and if that's the 457th version of Candy Crush, then that's what they work on. The exception, I suppose, is the self-employed, and the Kickstarter types, but they are a tiny minority. Also last time I checked many things that are innovative and/or revolutionary or that will 'change the world' either get sued out of existence, or gobbled up by some mega-corp, and then either twisted into something else, or buried. We live in a nascent dystopia, after all. Ther'e's still some hope, but it's dwindling.
Won't happen. Facebook is common, but they don't have everybody.
Since you don't seem to read and/or comprehend everything posted, I'll reiterate: I'm describing a possible dystopian future where Facebook is required. Sadly, I also think it's not too far-fetched, just like I don't think it's too far-fetched that in another possible dystopian future, everyone on the gods-be-damned Internet will be required to log in somehow using their real name, no more anonymity allowed -- at which points, I go back to using Public Libraries with printed books for everything, and paying my bills with checks instead of electronically -- or with cash, in person.
Just wondering whether you'd start tracking your clients or not.
Screw you, jackass.
More often than not posts are considered "trolls" because they differ from, or harm the opposition.
Friend, you're FAR from being alone in that. Happens to me all the time. Finally, I gave up any semblance of civility and just cut loose, because it's not like the real trolls are holding anything back. Any attempts to defend myself in 'dignified' ways just gets twisted into something else anyway. Largely, the Internet has become just a sewer for the lowest common denominators of humanity. The vast majority of civil, intelligent, insightful conversations I have, are still face-to-face.
It's more likely that we'll wake up one day to a world where you have to have a Facebook account, with your real name and all your real, personal information, or you won't be allowed to use the Internet anymore. The Internet is already largely one big data-collection and surveillance network, and even not using your real name anywhere is trivial for someone with the right level of access to information to circumvent and discover who and where you are. The next step if this 'consolidation' continues will be to make sure there is no anonymity allowed for anyone; you'll have to log in to everything using a Facebook account, or something similar, so all your activity can be thoroughly tracked and logged by the 'proper agencies' -- for your own protection, of course.
Or so they'd like it to be. I'd sooner not even have the Internet anymore, and go back to using libraries for information, receiving paper bills for money I owe, and mailing paper checks to pay them. We all survived and thrived just fine before the Internet, and we'd all survive and thrive just fine without it. It'd be a pain at first but we'd get used to it. The more people that realize all that, the better. If people start leaving the Internet in droves then either it'd have to change or die.
You do not worship the Invisible Sky God in the way that He has told our Prophets we must, therefore we must erradicate you heretics, in His name!
THAT is what will destroy us: Endless cycles of war over something that exists only in people's minds, never in reality. Man makes the Gods in his own image -- and at our core, we're just animals, who happen to have access to weapons of mass destruction.
I'm not sure you understand. I want a hardware switch that write-protects the entire phone from anyone installing or writing anything to any of it's memory devices for any reason, working RAM excepted, of course (the OS and existing software need stack and heap space, of course). Of course, as you say, and as I've already pointed out, the whole game is rigged before you even get the phone; the manufacturer can put whatever on it and you'd never know, and the wireless company will put whatever on it, and you have no say in the matter. Really, it's enough to make me strongly consider abandoning cellphones completely and just go back to a plain, dumb, landline phone and an answering machine. Currently I have the cheapest flip-phone I could get, and even that could easily be compromised, wirelessly even, even though I've completely disabled any ability it has to connect it's minimal web browser to the Internet, AT&T I'm sure could push whatever code they want to the thing. At least I can turn it completely off, and remove the battery from it.
Why isn't there user-controlled write-protect on phones to prevent this sort of thing? You don't need to be able to install software on your goddamned phone so often that it needs to be in read/write mode all the time.
Of course my question is rhetorical and the answer is obvious: smartphones are just surveillance and data collection devices. Read my new sigline, it says it all.
Let's see their 'deep learning tool' identify something that's got a featureless black box over it, or someone's face that's got a black box or oval over it.
We will not have cars running around with nobody inside it at the controls in five years.
We also won't have cars without controls for a human driver because that's INSANE.
We won't have this because only an insane person would trust it. We'll have to have DECADES of humans behind the wheel overseeing anything 'autonomous' before any lawmaker will even CONSIDER allowing them to drive around unattended, and that is the way it should be. Do you have PhD's in computer science, specializing in (so-called) artificial intelligence? No? That's why you don't understand ANY of this. I at least read and listen to more than just media hype and Google press releases, and I KNOW that there is no such thing as true 'AI', there is only clever pieces of software that mimick some aspects of human cognition, but that are not self-aware or conscious, because science does not even begin to understand yet how human brains accomplish that. Until such time as we have the equivalent of Commander Data walking around, you'll have to keep your drivers license current and oversee your so-called 'self driving car' for when (not IF, but WHEN) it comes across things it can't handle, so get used to it -- assuming you can afford the expensive luxury cars that'll come as an option in. Meanwhile the rest of us will be 'self driving' ourselves and not give a fuck.
Goddamnit.. It is not 'here, now'. What we have 'now' is research vehicles that have to have two engineers/scientists/whatever riding in the thing, hovering over the standard automobile controls in case it fucks up. What we have 'now' is something that can't handle driving on the freeway. What we have 'now' is not available for sale to the public. What we have 'now' is not in any way shape or form ready to be called a 'product', it is just 'research and development'. It is NOT going to be ready in 'FIVE YEARS'. At best in 'FIVE YEARS' we'll have some fancy cruise control that will still mean you have to have a drivers license and can pass all the required tests. You and people like you just bought into the hype and have no idea what you're talking about!
They don't want to appear to be non-progressive technologically-speaking, so they spend a little money 'researching' it, even if it seems like it's going to be non-viable anytime in the next 20 years or so. Of course at best this will be a sophisticated 'cruise control' and never anything you could actually trust to not kill people by accident if you let it loose all by itself, but even a sophisticated cruise-control would make for a nicely profitable option on expensive luxury vehicles, so I'm sure they'll be more than happy to have that to sell. But despite the two-digit IQ crowd insisting that they'll have robotic overlords to drive them around while they snooze, it's not going to happen anytime within decades. Meanwhile I just laugh at the foolishness of some people, and their inability to distinguish stuff they see in movies from reality.