FCC should be regulating to make sure that the telecoms are providing enough bandwidth and interconnection to meet the demand. Those are technical issues.
FTC should be regulating the business practices to make sure that telecoms which have regional monopoly power are not using that power to extend their monopolies or colluding to restrain trade in violation of the law.
Didn't AOL try this back in the 90s with the 'AOL Keyword'? IIRC, it failed miserably.
Actually AOL keywords were very very successful and AOL charged big bucks to sell keywords to companies, but eventually domain names and URLs were cheaper to get (unless someone else registered it first) and the DNS system wasn't a monopoly so competition drove down prices further.
It's not that Tesla is the only company that has any knowledge of battery chemistry, or that US companies have a monopoly on battery chemistry tech, not even close. There are plenty of batter manufacturers in Asia and Europe who can compete there.
Competition sounds good for consumers.
Tesla has demonstrated they can't meet demand for electric cars so there is plenty of demand if manufacturers want to step up and accelerate their plans to offer more and better electric cars... and incidentally Tesla have also demonstrated it isn't trivial to set up a supply chain, manufacturing line, distribution and sales channels to produce tens of thousands of cars each year on a completely new type of platform. So there is that.
The alternative to this "there are plenty of companies that could do it" view is that there are plenty of companies that haven't done it and choose instead to get as much value out of their existing and proven design and manufacturing capabilities without taking the risk of making major capital and R&D investments since they aren't sure they can make work.
It is the old problem of how to balance getting the most from old investments and the risk of making new investments. Plenty of examples of companies that successfully leveraged their previous success into new successes, plenty of examples of companies that decided to play it safe and had many years of steady revenue and profits, plenty of examples of companies that missed the boat on technology they themselves could have brought to market... Xerox Palo Alto is the classic case study of inventing much of modern computing and then deciding that it would undermine their paper printing business, and to underlie the real risk of making big new capital investments there are plenty of examples of old successful solid companies with new management deciding they need to leverage the company to make some huge new capital investments to remake the company only to fail to grow revenue spectacularly and be eventually crushed by their debt load.
I'm sure the final step would be for a real person to verify the matches to see if there's false positives. The AI in this case would likely be setup to tend to produce false positives rather than outright missing matches because not being able to find anything is worrysome compared to finding a few false positives. You would hope the cops arn't crazy enough to start arresting people based entirely on the matching system and at least look at the profiles to confirm.
This is exactly correct, and why these statements from the ACLU are ridiculous. Would they rather the police just be looking for any tall black guy with a sweatshirt in the area? This type of technology simply provides more information to the police, but it still takes actual policemen and prosecutors to decide who is a real suspect and who should be charged.
Yes and no. So when I have run image recognition through a neural net I get a percentage match... so it depends what the threshold for a match is set at. Is 65% considered a match or 95% or 99.9%? The devils in the details and I could see the percentage being obscured from the end user to the point of police and the courts treating it as a binary value rather than with any relative degree of certainty because the police and the courts want to be right and are under time constraints to be right and move on.
So depending on the percentage match I could see people in the same racial group being matched... but would a court issue a warrant based on someone saying they are in the same racial group... because I could see the police saying that "they were a match using facial recognition" and the court just rubber stamping that because it obscures the real underlying lack of certainty. There is a real danger of abuse depending on how facial recognition is used (like any tool), but neural net algorithms are especially prone to obfuscation.
On the other side, people are often terrible witnesses and have their own underlying lack of certainty that can be obscured without the reproducible and adjustable nature of image recognition. People are often wrong in their recollection and many people have gone to jail because of wrong identification by witnesses, sometimes even multiple witnesses.
In other words their is uncertainty no matter what... the good and the bad news with AI is that you can begin to quantify that uncertainty. So image recognition is good news for improving accuracy over human perception, but bad news if it is either misunderstood or willfully abused to create the misconception of 100% accuracy.
Yup, if I could attach a keyboard to a smartphone so I can type... and a 17" screen so I can see something... we'd have the perfect laptop replacement.
Until then, keep your toy with the stamp-sized screen.
Smartphones and pills (I mean tablets) are nice toys, but suck for even basic web surfing and emailing. Writing an email on a touch screen vs a real keyboard makes me want to toss the device out of a window.
Tablet + keyboard? Sure. But at that point it's a laptop by another name.
Completely agree... and I would add it is not ergonomic so oversized phones can cause hand strain through prolonged use... however, just look at the numbers. The great great majority of people are using phones and tablets for basic computing needs.
Gerrymandering has been legal for a long long time... It shouldn't be. The Supreme Court and the lower courts have come as close as they have ever come to saying that party should not be used as a criteria in creating political districts... But they didn't.
We need a simple rule that says that political affiliation should not be used to draw political district lines, so when we see these crazy geographically gerrymandered districts the courts can reject them unless the states can prove that they were based purely on population and not on partisan politics.
You will also need a table that lists every item to determine if it is taxable or not. Every 'item' is not taxed the same in every state/county/city. This table is going to get really, really big...
I hope states will take a hard look at their tax code and look to make them uniform with other states.
What made SMS popular was that it's nearly instantaneous and, particularly at a time when people paid for phone calls or had a limited bundle of minutes, it was generally low-cost.
My experience was the opposite... I paid $0.20 per text message until about 2008 on TMobile and actively discouraged people from texting me, but everyone had email. I was a bit late to SMS for that reason, but still most mobile plans had SMS limits until the mid aughts.
I could at least read emails for free on my phone with data. Email was and still is more convenient as a free multiplatform communications system. Really the only thing SMS has going for it over email is the twitteresque simplicity... because of limits on subjects and de facto character limits. But the cost was really a barrier for SMS until all plans became unlimited SMS. And still is a barrier in the literal sense that you have to have a paid plan to have SMS versus anyone can get a free email account from multiple providers.
If Apple loses this, then maybe they'll be forced to provide options for allowing side-loading apps with the general populace. This would allow GPL licensed libraries and applications to become available on iOS devices. The GPL requires that code licensed under it be redistributal and usable anywhere; however, there is a license agreement when you make and publish apps on the App Store that limits the code reuse capabilities. Some relevant links, 12.
Technical legal merits aside... and yes I think the Supreme Court will send this back to the lower courts because the plaintiffs should have standing to sue, but the crux of the issue is whether this is good or bad for consumers.
And it is clearly bad for consumers to allow Apple to continue to monopolize their ecosystem from top to bottom. Apple is too big for that now. This has or inevitably will lead to stagnation in the marketplace, higher costs for consumers, less choice already. It is the classic situation of bad for consumers and bad for the free market that drives anti-trust laws.
Actually technically RFC 2822 says that the subject is optional... so it is really on the app side that we should have made the subject line optional (or even hidden) in the UI.
Although I seem to recall I could send messages in the early days of the Internet. ICQ, Zephyr, Jabber, OSCAR, YMSG,...
It is really a shame that the IETF didn't get ahead of the curve and simply make the subject optional and specify a more SMS like use case and user interface to go along with email.
Having to specify a subject and having apps that primarily display messages by subject really has really hurt email. Most of the time you don't need a subject line and it is redundant with the first line of the message. Otherwise the use case is exactly the same and email is universally addressable using the user@domain address rather than a phone number which is locked in to a telecom provider.
The issue today is universal addressability and routing. Email is an open protocol which is universally addressable and supported by an Internet infrastructure. SMS is a walled off communications protocol which you need gateways to get on the Internet. It happened to gain popularity because cell phone providers made it easier than email (don't have to have a subject, message and recipient, just a message and recipient). But it's big downside is that you can only send SMS to someone with a phone number and you can't send SMS using Internet addresses directly. You need an SMS gateway which seems to add a bunch of routing garbage that makes it less clear who sent what.
sure sounds more reasonable than what I have been hearing.
Sure, it usually takes 15 to 20 years for even a wildly successful technology to permeate an economy from the first commercial implementations... Blackberry (1999) and Palm both had successful smartphones in the early aughts, but the technology really didn't take off until 2008-2012 time frame. And you could argue the less powerful Palm PDAs of the 1990s and were the pioneers in that commercial space and smartphones today are just the evolution of those devices.
The twenty teens for smart cars are like the 90s for smartphones. That doesn't mean we won't see fairly widespread adoption of smart cars. We already have many cars with semi autonomous driving and supervised autonomous driving and I see pretty well developed plans for fully autonomous cars to be rolling out into select markets in the next 5 years.
So in 5 years you will be able to buy rides on fully autonomous vehicles in more places around the US, probably dozens of cities and more around the world and more consumer focused cars will have more semi autonomous features including maybe one or two with fully autonomous capabilities. In ten years you will have a few more car companies with at least one fully autonomous vehicle to buy and probably autonomous car services in every major city, but with costs that are merely competitive with human driven car services like Uber today.
That gives another ten years for market penetration to where I think by 2040 it is reasonable to expect the majority of cars on the roads, at least in some areas of the US, will be autonomous.
But a lot will depend on the cost of full autonomy versus semi autonomy. Right now it appears that semi autonomous safety features on the market today add about $3000 to the cost of a car. That represents additional computing power, sensor packages and likely largely software development costs. Representing around some $50 per month on a 3 year lease depending on how you depreciate that feature... which is good on a luxury car or an up-sell on a middle priced model, but $3000 is still a lot of money on the bottom third of the car market, so it really will take a large reduction in costs and increase in computing power to get that down to really fully dominate the market.
Not just Apple really... but yes especially Apple. Companies seem to be very focused on a mobile first approach. Which is perfectly fine. The reality is that many of us still need mouse and/or keyboard and large screens for productive applications. And we probably don't need faster processing, or more RAM or much more storage so spec. stagnation is real in the desktop and laptop space.
Personally I would like to see better "docking" abilities for smartphones in hardware and software so you can just plop your phone down on a desk with a big monitor and keyboard/mouse and start working on a larger screen where you can get all the apps you need. And it would be good if it was much more seamless across android and iphone.
There is another level of creativity and productivity to be had if we can realize more of that future level of integration that has been the stuff of sci-fi for years.
We seem to be closer than ever, but the impediments are both the security of letting devices communicate more freely and the arbitrary divisions of proprietary software hardware stacks that keep our technology apart and makes it less useful than it could be.
The Chicago system is expected to be able to handle nearly 2,000 passengers per direction per hour
Capacity's a bit low, isn't it? That's the equivalent of something like a conventional metro train running once every 30 mins...
A bit low if they need to transport more than 2000 passengers in each direction per hour. Or just right if they need to transport 2000 or fewer passengers per hour. Or overkill if they need to transport substantially fewer than that amount. All depends on the forecast usage which can also be limited by limiting supply.
These are numbers that apparently the government was comfortable with when determining this as the winning bid and putting together the requirements.
The goal of transportation planning isn't merely to maximize the number of passengers per hour regardless of time and cost. Maybe considering there are multiple modes then they are perfectly happy with increasing the combined total capacity by bringing an additional 2000 per hour capacity into the mix. Or they are happy to limit capacity to save on costs.
Limiting size in order to save on costs is at the heart of this innovation.
Basically he's denying China cheats like the wind. To be fair, when USA industry was young, we played intellectual property games with Europe also.
Yup. If the Chinese economy gains advantage and then comes to rely on intellectual property and trade secrets and the US tries to catch up by stealing trade secrets and not enforcing intellectual property laws of just Chinese companies I expect they would feel the same way as US companies do now.
And the hypocrisy and lack of empathy on both sides is palpable. China is in many ways following a US model of development... including the theft of intellectual property from competitors.
Also, fundamentally our trade imbalance is as a practical matter untenable in even the medium term. Trade imbalances will invariably lower the quality of life in the US or at least reduce our ability to import goods and services in the future to the extent that we will need to devalue our currency to account for those imbalances.
I hope that both the US and China focus on the numbers and what they mean in the short, medium and longer term. If anything I think the US and China will be better off in their relations focusing on finding a better balance on trade issues of substance than they would be squabbling over artificial islands in the middle of the ocean based on emotion and pride.
I fundamentally disagree. Unless you have reason to believe that your participation will directly enable some unethical action, then it is unethical to walk away from the defense of your nation.
What exactly these guidelines will stipulate isn't clear, but Google says they will include a ban on the use of artificial intelligence in weaponry.
Even if Google follows this, how is it going to prevent the DoD from weaponizing what Google develops? Google is clearly not naive so this all reeks of a public show for something they’ll never be able to enforce.
Right... fair point. But to expect a company to be responsible for the actions of a third party is unreasonable, so "enforce" really just means what Google will allow its employees to do as part of a contract.
Take the likeliest and obvious use case... image recognition.
So you train an AI to identify someone. Almost trivial from a software perspective, except to scale. A system could be used to comb through millions of pictures or video surveillance and the match could then be used for A) some non-violent purpose like writing a speeding ticket or creating some intelligence dossier of patterns of behavior and likely connections and/or B) used as targeting information to kill them, say as a subsystem of a smart munition that can use last millisecond image recognition to help steer a bullet to kill an individual in a crowd with less risk to the surrounding people (or maybe even self destruct if there isn't a 98% match or better).
I don't think the military is going to purchase goods or services from Google in any scenario if the contract prohibits offensive military use. Maybe some non-military departments would, but not the Pentagon. And I even doubt Google would scope its work or services under a contract to assume that it could control what is done with the results of an image recognition type of product, system or service. Usually there is a contract clause that covers a service only being used for "legal uses", "legal purposes" or some other CYA language. But in the case of the military and national security "legal uses" also means killing in war.
And as a citizen of the US I recognize that harming the enemy in a time of war is a legitimate and sometimes even the primary purpose of government. I wouldn't want the government to purchase products or services from Google or any other company if they somehow legally couldn't be used in a time of war to harm the enemy.
I think the intrusive ways in which Google and other companies surveil their customers and monetize that data is having a palpably negative impact on society. Far worse than a weapon system used in defense of foreign threats ever could.
I'll tell you why I am still on Facebook... and then I will tell you how I am going to leave.
I am still on Facebook, because I still maintain a lot of second tier social connections that otherwise would just not happen. Facebook groups and the ability to find people online in a somewhat structured less anonymous way (and therefore somewhat less abusive or maybe at least less criminal).
There needs to be a renewed push for open communications and online community standards (which I am happy to help push for). I don't need all of Facebook's functionality to be able to walk away, but I do need some of the ability to keep up with people and find social network contacts. And I need a far greater ability to filter out the commercial spam than Facebook currently provides. It will be possible to replace Facebook with an open Internet, just like AOL was replaced.
Facebook may be quite evil, but it is by no means has a monopoly on social media. It may occupy a particular niche in the social media eco-system. But I am not sure that there can really be more than one in a given niche. For social media to work at all, the majority of people who are interested in social media have to be in the same place.
Put limits on data collection and retention, sure. But break them up? All that'll happen is that another player will fill the niche. And being aware of what had been done to FB, they'll manage to be more evil: they'll do the same thing, but hide it even better.
Better would be for Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and others to come to agreement (or be dragged kicking and screaming) to use open standards for text, voice, and video messaging and directory services.
It is absurd and undermines everything the Internet stands for that I have to buy into one of the "Ecosystems" of products from a single company in order to have basic communications over the Internet.
Really it is sad that we have allowed ourselves to be so completely owned by and dependent on these companies.
Arbitration is for when you do have a contract, that someone feels the other violated. Employment contracts should be subject to binding arbitration.
"Arbitration" is what the courts are for. Professional arbitrators know damn well who is paying their hourly rates and who to please in their judgements to get repeat business. It is an inherent conflict of interest which undermines the rule of law to outsource our civil court system to a bunch of lawyers on the take from big business.
Judges are paid by the public and serve the public interests. Arbitration should only be enforced by the courts if both parties continue to be in agreement throughout the arbitration and even after. There should be no such thing as "binding" arbitration that supersedes people's right to go to a civil court to seek an equitable resolution of a contract dispute.
That is a slippery slope if we can bargain away our rights under the law for a few bucks under some fine print nobody reads.
Trump does not have the authority to address the legal status of "Dreamers". Only Congress can do that....something which Trump has asked them to do.
Maybe. The courts hadn't ruled on whether DACA was legal or not. I tend to agree that it wasn't legal. But I also think that penalizing people for actions that their parents took while they were under 18 isn't something the courts should uphold either.
If you were an illegal immigrant before you turned 18 then that time spent in the US illegally shouldn't be held against you for the purposes of denying you an opportunity to apply for things like student or other visas like any other immigrant. I don't think it should bring you to the front of the line either, but at the very least Trump could probably say that going forward when illegal immigrants turn 18 they can still apply for one of the legally sanctioned Visa programs and go from there. Or when DACA ends that people that were on DACA are not penalized by being forced from the country for 3 or 10 years before they are eligible to apply to come back.
It seems that currently the issue that prevents Dreamers from applying for legal immigration is the question on the immigration forms that requires people to declare if they came to the US illegally in the past and spent time in the US illegally and are subject to 3 or 10 year bans... Seems the simplest solution is to just update the form and regulations to specify that it only applies to time you were in the US illegally when you were over 18 years old. If you came before you were 18 then you were a child and not legally responsible as an adult and shouldn't be penalized...
You shouldn't be given special benefit over people that followed US immigration law, but kids under 18 shouldn't be penalized for their parents mistakes. That means when you turn 18 you would have a few months to apply for a legal immigration status before the penalties kick in. For current dreamers I would think that there should be some discretion for people to initiate some legal immigration process if you have complied with the dreamer program requirements up until now.
Slashdot Mirror
How many kids today actually write programs for their phone?
Probably more kids than ever wrote programs for their calculators.
FCC should be regulating to make sure that the telecoms are providing enough bandwidth and interconnection to meet the demand. Those are technical issues.
FTC should be regulating the business practices to make sure that telecoms which have regional monopoly power are not using that power to extend their monopolies or colluding to restrain trade in violation of the law.
Didn't AOL try this back in the 90s with the 'AOL Keyword'? IIRC, it failed miserably.
Actually AOL keywords were very very successful and AOL charged big bucks to sell keywords to companies, but eventually domain names and URLs were cheaper to get (unless someone else registered it first) and the DNS system wasn't a monopoly so competition drove down prices further.
It's not that Tesla is the only company that has any knowledge of battery chemistry, or that US companies have a monopoly on battery chemistry tech, not even close. There are plenty of batter manufacturers in Asia and Europe who can compete there.
Competition sounds good for consumers.
Tesla has demonstrated they can't meet demand for electric cars so there is plenty of demand if manufacturers want to step up and accelerate their plans to offer more and better electric cars... and incidentally Tesla have also demonstrated it isn't trivial to set up a supply chain, manufacturing line, distribution and sales channels to produce tens of thousands of cars each year on a completely new type of platform. So there is that.
The alternative to this "there are plenty of companies that could do it" view is that there are plenty of companies that haven't done it and choose instead to get as much value out of their existing and proven design and manufacturing capabilities without taking the risk of making major capital and R&D investments since they aren't sure they can make work.
It is the old problem of how to balance getting the most from old investments and the risk of making new investments. Plenty of examples of companies that successfully leveraged their previous success into new successes, plenty of examples of companies that decided to play it safe and had many years of steady revenue and profits, plenty of examples of companies that missed the boat on technology they themselves could have brought to market... Xerox Palo Alto is the classic case study of inventing much of modern computing and then deciding that it would undermine their paper printing business, and to underlie the real risk of making big new capital investments there are plenty of examples of old successful solid companies with new management deciding they need to leverage the company to make some huge new capital investments to remake the company only to fail to grow revenue spectacularly and be eventually crushed by their debt load.
I'm sure the final step would be for a real person to verify the matches to see if there's false positives. The AI in this case would likely be setup to tend to produce false positives rather than outright missing matches because not being able to find anything is worrysome compared to finding a few false positives. You would hope the cops arn't crazy enough to start arresting people based entirely on the matching system and at least look at the profiles to confirm.
This is exactly correct, and why these statements from the ACLU are ridiculous. Would they rather the police just be looking for any tall black guy with a sweatshirt in the area? This type of technology simply provides more information to the police, but it still takes actual policemen and prosecutors to decide who is a real suspect and who should be charged.
Yes and no. So when I have run image recognition through a neural net I get a percentage match... so it depends what the threshold for a match is set at. Is 65% considered a match or 95% or 99.9%? The devils in the details and I could see the percentage being obscured from the end user to the point of police and the courts treating it as a binary value rather than with any relative degree of certainty because the police and the courts want to be right and are under time constraints to be right and move on.
So depending on the percentage match I could see people in the same racial group being matched... but would a court issue a warrant based on someone saying they are in the same racial group... because I could see the police saying that "they were a match using facial recognition" and the court just rubber stamping that because it obscures the real underlying lack of certainty. There is a real danger of abuse depending on how facial recognition is used (like any tool), but neural net algorithms are especially prone to obfuscation.
On the other side, people are often terrible witnesses and have their own underlying lack of certainty that can be obscured without the reproducible and adjustable nature of image recognition. People are often wrong in their recollection and many people have gone to jail because of wrong identification by witnesses, sometimes even multiple witnesses.
In other words their is uncertainty no matter what... the good and the bad news with AI is that you can begin to quantify that uncertainty. So image recognition is good news for improving accuracy over human perception, but bad news if it is either misunderstood or willfully abused to create the misconception of 100% accuracy.
Yup, if I could attach a keyboard to a smartphone so I can type ... and a 17" screen so I can see something ... we'd have the perfect laptop replacement.
Until then, keep your toy with the stamp-sized screen.
And get off my lawn ya darn kids!
Smartphones and pills (I mean tablets) are nice toys, but suck for even basic web surfing and emailing. Writing an email on a touch screen vs a real keyboard makes me want to toss the device out of a window.
Tablet + keyboard? Sure. But at that point it's a laptop by another name.
Completely agree... and I would add it is not ergonomic so oversized phones can cause hand strain through prolonged use... however, just look at the numbers. The great great majority of people are using phones and tablets for basic computing needs.
"coinciding with laptops replacing desktops as our primary devices"
Here let me fix that for you... coinciding with smartphones and tablets replacing laptops and desktops as our primary devices
Gerrymandering has just been legalized.
Gerrymandering has been legal for a long long time... It shouldn't be. The Supreme Court and the lower courts have come as close as they have ever come to saying that party should not be used as a criteria in creating political districts... But they didn't.
We need a simple rule that says that political affiliation should not be used to draw political district lines, so when we see these crazy geographically gerrymandered districts the courts can reject them unless the states can prove that they were based purely on population and not on partisan politics.
You will also need a table that lists every item to determine if it is taxable or not. Every 'item' is not taxed the same in every state/county/city. This table is going to get really, really big...
I hope states will take a hard look at their tax code and look to make them uniform with other states.
If Apple loses this, then maybe they'll be forced to provide options for allowing side-loading apps with the general populace. This would allow GPL licensed libraries and applications to become available on iOS devices. The GPL requires that code licensed under it be redistributal and usable anywhere; however, there is a license agreement when you make and publish apps on the App Store that limits the code reuse capabilities. Some relevant links, 1 2.
Technical legal merits aside... and yes I think the Supreme Court will send this back to the lower courts because the plaintiffs should have standing to sue, but the crux of the issue is whether this is good or bad for consumers.
And it is clearly bad for consumers to allow Apple to continue to monopolize their ecosystem from top to bottom. Apple is too big for that now. This has or inevitably will lead to stagnation in the marketplace, higher costs for consumers, less choice already. It is the classic situation of bad for consumers and bad for the free market that drives anti-trust laws.
Actually technically RFC 2822 says that the subject is optional... so it is really on the app side that we should have made the subject line optional (or even hidden) in the UI.
https://tools.ietf.org/html/rf...
Although I seem to recall I could send messages in the early days of the Internet. ICQ, Zephyr, Jabber, OSCAR, YMSG, ...
It is really a shame that the IETF didn't get ahead of the curve and simply make the subject optional and specify a more SMS like use case and user interface to go along with email.
Having to specify a subject and having apps that primarily display messages by subject really has really hurt email. Most of the time you don't need a subject line and it is redundant with the first line of the message. Otherwise the use case is exactly the same and email is universally addressable using the user@domain address rather than a phone number which is locked in to a telecom provider.
The issue today is universal addressability and routing. Email is an open protocol which is universally addressable and supported by an Internet infrastructure. SMS is a walled off communications protocol which you need gateways to get on the Internet. It happened to gain popularity because cell phone providers made it easier than email (don't have to have a subject, message and recipient, just a message and recipient). But it's big downside is that you can only send SMS to someone with a phone number and you can't send SMS using Internet addresses directly. You need an SMS gateway which seems to add a bunch of routing garbage that makes it less clear who sent what.
sure sounds more reasonable than what I have been hearing.
Sure, it usually takes 15 to 20 years for even a wildly successful technology to permeate an economy from the first commercial implementations... Blackberry (1999) and Palm both had successful smartphones in the early aughts, but the technology really didn't take off until 2008-2012 time frame. And you could argue the less powerful Palm PDAs of the 1990s and were the pioneers in that commercial space and smartphones today are just the evolution of those devices.
The twenty teens for smart cars are like the 90s for smartphones. That doesn't mean we won't see fairly widespread adoption of smart cars. We already have many cars with semi autonomous driving and supervised autonomous driving and I see pretty well developed plans for fully autonomous cars to be rolling out into select markets in the next 5 years.
So in 5 years you will be able to buy rides on fully autonomous vehicles in more places around the US, probably dozens of cities and more around the world and more consumer focused cars will have more semi autonomous features including maybe one or two with fully autonomous capabilities. In ten years you will have a few more car companies with at least one fully autonomous vehicle to buy and probably autonomous car services in every major city, but with costs that are merely competitive with human driven car services like Uber today.
That gives another ten years for market penetration to where I think by 2040 it is reasonable to expect the majority of cars on the roads, at least in some areas of the US, will be autonomous.
But a lot will depend on the cost of full autonomy versus semi autonomy. Right now it appears that semi autonomous safety features on the market today add about $3000 to the cost of a car. That represents additional computing power, sensor packages and likely largely software development costs. Representing around some $50 per month on a 3 year lease depending on how you depreciate that feature... which is good on a luxury car or an up-sell on a middle priced model, but $3000 is still a lot of money on the bottom third of the car market, so it really will take a large reduction in costs and increase in computing power to get that down to really fully dominate the market.
Not just Apple really... but yes especially Apple. Companies seem to be very focused on a mobile first approach. Which is perfectly fine. The reality is that many of us still need mouse and/or keyboard and large screens for productive applications. And we probably don't need faster processing, or more RAM or much more storage so spec. stagnation is real in the desktop and laptop space.
Personally I would like to see better "docking" abilities for smartphones in hardware and software so you can just plop your phone down on a desk with a big monitor and keyboard/mouse and start working on a larger screen where you can get all the apps you need. And it would be good if it was much more seamless across android and iphone.
There is another level of creativity and productivity to be had if we can realize more of that future level of integration that has been the stuff of sci-fi for years.
We seem to be closer than ever, but the impediments are both the security of letting devices communicate more freely and the arbitrary divisions of proprietary software hardware stacks that keep our technology apart and makes it less useful than it could be.
The Chicago system is expected to be able to handle nearly 2,000 passengers per direction per hour
Capacity's a bit low, isn't it? That's the equivalent of something like a conventional metro train running once every 30 mins...
A bit low if they need to transport more than 2000 passengers in each direction per hour. Or just right if they need to transport 2000 or fewer passengers per hour. Or overkill if they need to transport substantially fewer than that amount. All depends on the forecast usage which can also be limited by limiting supply.
These are numbers that apparently the government was comfortable with when determining this as the winning bid and putting together the requirements.
The goal of transportation planning isn't merely to maximize the number of passengers per hour regardless of time and cost. Maybe considering there are multiple modes then they are perfectly happy with increasing the combined total capacity by bringing an additional 2000 per hour capacity into the mix. Or they are happy to limit capacity to save on costs.
Limiting size in order to save on costs is at the heart of this innovation.
Basically he's denying China cheats like the wind. To be fair, when USA industry was young, we played intellectual property games with Europe also.
Yup. If the Chinese economy gains advantage and then comes to rely on intellectual property and trade secrets and the US tries to catch up by stealing trade secrets and not enforcing intellectual property laws of just Chinese companies I expect they would feel the same way as US companies do now.
And the hypocrisy and lack of empathy on both sides is palpable. China is in many ways following a US model of development... including the theft of intellectual property from competitors.
Also, fundamentally our trade imbalance is as a practical matter untenable in even the medium term. Trade imbalances will invariably lower the quality of life in the US or at least reduce our ability to import goods and services in the future to the extent that we will need to devalue our currency to account for those imbalances.
I hope that both the US and China focus on the numbers and what they mean in the short, medium and longer term. If anything I think the US and China will be better off in their relations focusing on finding a better balance on trade issues of substance than they would be squabbling over artificial islands in the middle of the ocean based on emotion and pride.
I fundamentally disagree. Unless you have reason to believe that your participation will directly enable some unethical action, then it is unethical to walk away from the defense of your nation.
What exactly these guidelines will stipulate isn't clear, but Google says they will include a ban on the use of artificial intelligence in weaponry.
Even if Google follows this, how is it going to prevent the DoD from weaponizing what Google develops? Google is clearly not naive so this all reeks of a public show for something they’ll never be able to enforce.
Right... fair point. But to expect a company to be responsible for the actions of a third party is unreasonable, so "enforce" really just means what Google will allow its employees to do as part of a contract.
Take the likeliest and obvious use case... image recognition.
So you train an AI to identify someone. Almost trivial from a software perspective, except to scale. A system could be used to comb through millions of pictures or video surveillance and the match could then be used for A) some non-violent purpose like writing a speeding ticket or creating some intelligence dossier of patterns of behavior and likely connections and/or B) used as targeting information to kill them, say as a subsystem of a smart munition that can use last millisecond image recognition to help steer a bullet to kill an individual in a crowd with less risk to the surrounding people (or maybe even self destruct if there isn't a 98% match or better).
I don't think the military is going to purchase goods or services from Google in any scenario if the contract prohibits offensive military use. Maybe some non-military departments would, but not the Pentagon. And I even doubt Google would scope its work or services under a contract to assume that it could control what is done with the results of an image recognition type of product, system or service. Usually there is a contract clause that covers a service only being used for "legal uses", "legal purposes" or some other CYA language. But in the case of the military and national security "legal uses" also means killing in war.
And as a citizen of the US I recognize that harming the enemy in a time of war is a legitimate and sometimes even the primary purpose of government. I wouldn't want the government to purchase products or services from Google or any other company if they somehow legally couldn't be used in a time of war to harm the enemy.
I think the intrusive ways in which Google and other companies surveil their customers and monetize that data is having a palpably negative impact on society. Far worse than a weapon system used in defense of foreign threats ever could.
I'll tell you why I am still on Facebook... and then I will tell you how I am going to leave.
I am still on Facebook, because I still maintain a lot of second tier social connections that otherwise would just not happen. Facebook groups and the ability to find people online in a somewhat structured less anonymous way (and therefore somewhat less abusive or maybe at least less criminal).
There needs to be a renewed push for open communications and online community standards (which I am happy to help push for). I don't need all of Facebook's functionality to be able to walk away, but I do need some of the ability to keep up with people and find social network contacts. And I need a far greater ability to filter out the commercial spam than Facebook currently provides. It will be possible to replace Facebook with an open Internet, just like AOL was replaced.
And it will take time. The clock is now ticking.
Facebook may be quite evil, but it is by no means has a monopoly on social media. It may occupy a particular niche in the social media eco-system. But I am not sure that there can really be more than one in a given niche. For social media to work at all, the majority of people who are interested in social media have to be in the same place.
Put limits on data collection and retention, sure. But break them up? All that'll happen is that another player will fill the niche. And being aware of what had been done to FB, they'll manage to be more evil: they'll do the same thing, but hide it even better.
Better would be for Facebook, Apple, Google, Microsoft and others to come to agreement (or be dragged kicking and screaming) to use open standards for text, voice, and video messaging and directory services.
It is absurd and undermines everything the Internet stands for that I have to buy into one of the "Ecosystems" of products from a single company in order to have basic communications over the Internet.
Really it is sad that we have allowed ourselves to be so completely owned by and dependent on these companies.
Arbitration is for when you do have a contract, that someone feels the other violated. Employment contracts should be subject to binding arbitration.
"Arbitration" is what the courts are for. Professional arbitrators know damn well who is paying their hourly rates and who to please in their judgements to get repeat business. It is an inherent conflict of interest which undermines the rule of law to outsource our civil court system to a bunch of lawyers on the take from big business.
Judges are paid by the public and serve the public interests. Arbitration should only be enforced by the courts if both parties continue to be in agreement throughout the arbitration and even after. There should be no such thing as "binding" arbitration that supersedes people's right to go to a civil court to seek an equitable resolution of a contract dispute.
That is a slippery slope if we can bargain away our rights under the law for a few bucks under some fine print nobody reads.
Trump does not have the authority to address the legal status of "Dreamers". Only Congress can do that....something which Trump has asked them to do.
Maybe. The courts hadn't ruled on whether DACA was legal or not. I tend to agree that it wasn't legal. But I also think that penalizing people for actions that their parents took while they were under 18 isn't something the courts should uphold either.
If you were an illegal immigrant before you turned 18 then that time spent in the US illegally shouldn't be held against you for the purposes of denying you an opportunity to apply for things like student or other visas like any other immigrant. I don't think it should bring you to the front of the line either, but at the very least Trump could probably say that going forward when illegal immigrants turn 18 they can still apply for one of the legally sanctioned Visa programs and go from there. Or when DACA ends that people that were on DACA are not penalized by being forced from the country for 3 or 10 years before they are eligible to apply to come back.
It seems that currently the issue that prevents Dreamers from applying for legal immigration is the question on the immigration forms that requires people to declare if they came to the US illegally in the past and spent time in the US illegally and are subject to 3 or 10 year bans ... Seems the simplest solution is to just update the form and regulations to specify that it only applies to time you were in the US illegally when you were over 18 years old. If you came before you were 18 then you were a child and not legally responsible as an adult and shouldn't be penalized...
You shouldn't be given special benefit over people that followed US immigration law, but kids under 18 shouldn't be penalized for their parents mistakes. That means when you turn 18 you would have a few months to apply for a legal immigration status before the penalties kick in. For current dreamers I would think that there should be some discretion for people to initiate some legal immigration process if you have complied with the dreamer program requirements up until now.