Drones that can employ facial recognition can also employ firearm recognition, and avoid the projected trajectory of its projectiles. They can also spread out enough you wouldn't take out more than a couple per shot. If you're in public, you're unlikely to want to start shooting randomly, particularly if they're level with you. They could just wait until you're asleep, have your pants down, have to reload, or don't have your shotpistol on you. You're also assuming you see/hear them coming, which may not be a safe bet.
Furthermore, anyone likely to bother assassinating someone is likely to have more resources than their target, so a defensive swarm would get overwhelmed in swarm-to-swarm combat. Random non-celeb with a massive counter-swarm? Found the spy! You're also forgetting that there are many other types of killbots, not just microdrones. For example, something that perches on rooftops and snipes you from a mile away. Your defensive microdrone won't do much against a.50 bullet. I suspect the eventual countermeasures will be "no-drone zones" enforced by automated directed-energy weapons, and licensed transponders that give exemptions to certain drones.
I'm kinda surprised there haven't been any terrorist drone attacks yet. However, consider that there was that one devastating truck attack, and then terrorists started copycatting that left and right shortly afterward, even though such attacks had been promoted by terrorists for years prior. Once the first drone attack happens, it will become commonplace. What's easier than pulling a trigger? Running a kill-script for your drone (although I suppose you'd have to mod it first, 3d printers will make this much simpler eventually.)
The Pirate Bay had little luck trying to base their data out of Sealand, maybe they'll try again... IN SPAAAAACE! I'd like to see the MAFIAA try to get their cronies to raid a satellite. I expect that the nationality of the owner would determine the jurisdiction for crimes done involving storing data on the satellite, with a similar situation to Pitcairn Island.
Concentrated solar with molten salt storage, plus electric vehicles, could easily produce energy independence for Belmont. Water could be a problem, but if cables are run, they could use some of that electricity to power a desalination plant on the west coast (and pump the water back via pipeline). Given that high-speed internet is a major part of the city, that suggests fiber. Electric lines could be buried underground along with the fiber. Bonus points if there's a hyperloop between Belmont and the Bay Area. The only reasons I can think of this being done in Arizona rather than, say, Nebraska, are proximity to Silicon Valley, and effective solar power.
Nerd: *tapa tapa tapa* Oh my god! The Intel Managament Engine... it's gone rogue! It's out of control! Man With Shades And Many Chevrons: Shut it down! Nerd: *tapa tapa tapa* I'm trying! But it's not responding to the shutdown code! Man With Shades And Many Chevrons: Just pull the plug or something! Nerd: It already has control over our systems! We'll need to do a manual override! Man With Shades And Many Chevrons: Dammit! Where's Bruce Willis when you need him?!
If you buy a 24-pack of Snickers every month, does that automatically tell the insurance company that you're obese and your insurance premiums should go up? No. It's possible to eat 24 candy bars a month and not be obese, and you may not be eating all (or any) of them. Correlations between consumption of specific foods and health problems are so low it'd be impossible to do that; without knowing your entire diet (of what you're actually swallowing, not just ordering online) it'd be impossible to tell e.g. your total saturated fat intake. I'd be way more worried about buying a box of Rogaine as a gag gift for my dad, and starting to receive spam from Hair Club For Men; or me buying some condoms and a 'helpful note' being emailed to my wife that I bought some and may be cheating on her because they know her contraceptive pill prescription is still active.
Retail stores have no privacy though; the computerized registers timestamp your purchase, which is correlated to the CCTV timestamp, and your face is identified via facial recognition. Paid cash? It's still known exactly what you bought. Police catch people this way, it takes a little work, but can easily be automated.
I had a roommate who worked at an auto factory. He had to quit when he almost sliced his thumb off. His job was to slice off plastic tabs from some plastic part. He admitted that the only reason those plastic tabs existed was because the union mandated they continue to be part of the manufacturing process so that a job would exist removing them. It was literal makework, enshrined in contract. Not saying all auto factory jobs are like that, it has to be just few enough that it's cheaper to keep the humans than to fully automate.
Wealth redistribution from the middle to the upper classes, sure. With contractors like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed, Blackwater (nee Xe), or Halliburton, it's curious the media suggests the US govt. should draw the line at Amazon. Most of the US welfare institutions involve the govt. giving large amounts of money to megacorporations, and calling it a win for the little guy. Actually, nearly ALL actions by the US govt. can be summarized as thus.
Thanks for the confirmation that it's possible. I know the ps4 lets you disable this functionality, although I expect the hypothetical TV would just show the ad anyways, and you'd have to back up to see what you missed.
Recall that the Kindle/Fire line of e-readers/tablets have a slightly cheaper version which shows large ads on the lock screen. In my experience they resemble the scrolling ads on Netflix for shows they offer, that works as a screen saver, which I haven't heard anyone complain about or even mention. If that bothers you, you can spend a few dollars more for the model with no ads. So silent ads as screen savers, sure why not.
Pausing the content you're actively trying to consume, and inserting additional ads, is enough of an annoyance I imagine people would purposely avoid TV models that do this. It's not like there's no competition between manufacturers, as it's the end manufacturers and not the panel manufacturers who would do this. There are lots of other companies you can buy from, unless you want something unique like a 2017 OLED TV. That said, the TV would have to be able to pause the content, meaning the content is running from the TV's smart features; since TVs are now able to control connected devices via HDMI I could see them sending a 'pause' signal to a Bluray player, but am not sure if pause signals are actually one of the commands that can be sent over HDMI. The TV would have to connect to the net to verify how many times the ad was watched, so not connecting your TV to the net would probably disable ads.
The amount of ad revenue earned by TV manufacturers would be so minuscule that it wouldn't be worth the backlash or reduced sales. Consumers buying $2k TVs would do the research beforehand, and nearly anyone would rather pay $10 more for a TV without the ads. Cord-cutters using smart TV features are the people MOST likely to abhor ads, so the placement is horrible; a better idea would be to replace the bootup splash screen with a static ad image.
People have been saying that we're no closer to general AI now than we were 50 years ago, while others say that progress isn't linear and we might just stumble upon it one day accidentally while trying to do something else. I'm of the opinion that the specialist systems we're creating today are indirectly leading to the creation of general purpose AI. Eventually, someone will look at the dozens of sensory pattern-matching, deep learning and analysis specialist systems, wonder 'what would happen if I stitched all of these together into one system?' and accidentally create something capable of things that no one system does by itself, due to emergent behavior. This proto general AI will be buggy as hell, and you'll kind of have to squint in order to see the intelligence... but it'll resemble something we haven't seen before. After lots of finagling, it might even be stable (and mentally stable) enough to impress lay persons.
What I'm wondering is: how much will people (perhaps retroactively) see the moral status of these early alphas -- as beings deserving rights -- to be like gametes (or even early fetuses) of humans? Even if it gets into infinite loops and is less than sound in its output, would people demand it have rights just like the more advanced versions would be likely to have advocated for? How many running instances would it then be entitled to?
The way a private organization could make money on this is to charge astronomers and research projects for observation time. This could work, since there is usually a greater demand for research time than available observatories.
How many of those astronomers and researchers are receiving funding from the US Govt? Paying the $14 million/year will likely be cheaper than privatizing it then paying for access. Of course, NASA might save money themselves and not care that the govt. is spending 2 dollars to save 1.
A few of those example results are a little uncanny valley-ish, but the best are nearly good enough to serve as my dating profile picture. Google Image Search THIS!
Old tech made obsolete, slowly disappears from new products. News at 11. Seriously though, I had nothing but trouble with SPDIF. The finicky connection would often desync with my Xbox360 and IIRC then I'd have to turn the receiver off and back on to resync it, and it'd make a weird noise until I did. Bending the cable just wrong would exacerbate the issue.
I've subscribed to GameFly a few times, I bet they're crapping their pants about now. Let's see, I can pay $16/mo. to rent one game at a time via GameFly, or what works out to $10/mo. through Power Pass. With the former, I have to wait for the post office to deliver the game, and it's usually a surprise which of the games in my queue I end up getting; with the latter, I walk into any GameStop, find out what they have right now, and get it immediately. If I don't like the selection at one GameStop I can drive a few minutes away for a different selection. Ok, someone who doesn't have a car, or lives in a rural area that only has one GameStop nearby, may prefer the convenience of mail delivery. If there's only a couple games you'd care to rent, then that 6 months would be mostly wasted. I have a feeling that the vast majority of the most profitable customers will switch to Power Pass, I know I'm tempted.
I don't like wasting a large portion of each month (when I'm paying by the month) waiting for the mail to deliver my next game; GameFly cross-ships, but I still end up waiting 3-4 business days (in suburban Chicago; YMMV) They really ought to credit your account for days you spend waiting for shipping (they track this already.) Having two games out at a time lessens the impact of this, although that costs $23/mo. About 1/4 of the time, the disc is scratched and can't be installed/played through; wasting yet more time waiting for a replacement (worse if I'm partway through the game) adds insult to injury, and having two games out doesn't help with this. Popular games are most likely to be scratched, and are least available, so the chances you'll get a good copy are unusually bad. Being able to immediately go to a GameStop and exchange for another copy/different game would be game-changing (no pun intended.) Oh and then at the end of the 6 months, I can keep any used game I want (presumably, that they have on hand.)
I've also rented games from RedBox, but paying by the day (and the small selection) is unlikely to compete with a 6 month subscription to a much wider range of games. Staying up until 8am to beat a game because I refuse to pay for one additional day of rental (and then rushing to drop it off before work) is something I'd rather not repeat. That said, it's useful for trialing games you're unsure you'd like. Casual gamer whose friends are raving about Dark Souls 3? Rent it for a day. Renting an RPG from RedBox long enough to play through it would be insane, though.
I imagine so many GameStop customers will make use of this Power Pass that it'll be self-defeating: people will be less likely to purchase games and subsequently resell them to GameStop, leading to reduced availability of used copies, making the Power Pass less useful. One benefit of GameFly is they always buy some new copies, so you have a chance of getting a new highly-anticipated game; whereas with Power Pass you have to wait until some people resell the title (and if it's a long, excellent title like Breath of the Wild, that may be quite the wait... although in that case you should maybe just buy it new.)
Don't worry, there's no way the designer of the system would give details of the backdoor to a sexy enemy spy posing as an industrial espionage spy. Noone could make strategic use of that vulnerability unless they did something audacious like nuke all the colonies at once./s
A vulnerability like this was speculated to be the mysterious method the NSA used to supposedly be able to break SSL connections, as revealed in the Snowden documents. It's probably not this exact vuln, though, as this seems to mostly be a problem in hardware used to route to VPNs.
Apps given access to your GPS can pass that data on to advertisers. Evil Stuff (tm) can then be done with that data. I would say "nothing to see here" but I'm surprised that ads can be customized to only be shown to devices with a specific ID at a specific GPS location. The chances someone will sniff your MAID, and know the ad networks of the apps you leave running that have location access, seems really low though. I imagine the more reputable (i.e. common) ad networks will/already prohibit such specific targeting.
Interesting but probably part of a different problem: that police tend to return runaway children to their abusive parents. Silent abuse is better than a whining parent making a ruckus at a police station about their missing child, apparently. They should've confirmed who his parents/guardian actually were, though.
Slashdot Mirror
Drones that can employ facial recognition can also employ firearm recognition, and avoid the projected trajectory of its projectiles. They can also spread out enough you wouldn't take out more than a couple per shot. If you're in public, you're unlikely to want to start shooting randomly, particularly if they're level with you. They could just wait until you're asleep, have your pants down, have to reload, or don't have your shotpistol on you. You're also assuming you see/hear them coming, which may not be a safe bet.
Furthermore, anyone likely to bother assassinating someone is likely to have more resources than their target, so a defensive swarm would get overwhelmed in swarm-to-swarm combat. Random non-celeb with a massive counter-swarm? Found the spy! .50 bullet. I suspect the eventual countermeasures will be "no-drone zones" enforced by automated directed-energy weapons, and licensed transponders that give exemptions to certain drones.
You're also forgetting that there are many other types of killbots, not just microdrones. For example, something that perches on rooftops and snipes you from a mile away. Your defensive microdrone won't do much against a
I'm kinda surprised there haven't been any terrorist drone attacks yet. However, consider that there was that one devastating truck attack, and then terrorists started copycatting that left and right shortly afterward, even though such attacks had been promoted by terrorists for years prior. Once the first drone attack happens, it will become commonplace. What's easier than pulling a trigger? Running a kill-script for your drone (although I suppose you'd have to mod it first, 3d printers will make this much simpler eventually.)
The Pirate Bay had little luck trying to base their data out of Sealand, maybe they'll try again... IN SPAAAAACE!
I'd like to see the MAFIAA try to get their cronies to raid a satellite.
I expect that the nationality of the owner would determine the jurisdiction for crimes done involving storing data on the satellite, with a similar situation to Pitcairn Island.
Concentrated solar with molten salt storage, plus electric vehicles, could easily produce energy independence for Belmont. Water could be a problem, but if cables are run, they could use some of that electricity to power a desalination plant on the west coast (and pump the water back via pipeline). Given that high-speed internet is a major part of the city, that suggests fiber. Electric lines could be buried underground along with the fiber. Bonus points if there's a hyperloop between Belmont and the Bay Area. The only reasons I can think of this being done in Arizona rather than, say, Nebraska, are proximity to Silicon Valley, and effective solar power.
Nerd: *tapa tapa tapa* Oh my god! The Intel Managament Engine... it's gone rogue! It's out of control!
Man With Shades And Many Chevrons: Shut it down!
Nerd: *tapa tapa tapa* I'm trying! But it's not responding to the shutdown code!
Man With Shades And Many Chevrons: Just pull the plug or something!
Nerd: It already has control over our systems! We'll need to do a manual override!
Man With Shades And Many Chevrons: Dammit! Where's Bruce Willis when you need him?!
Minimal
If you buy a 24-pack of Snickers every month, does that automatically tell the insurance company that you're obese and your insurance premiums should go up? No. It's possible to eat 24 candy bars a month and not be obese, and you may not be eating all (or any) of them. Correlations between consumption of specific foods and health problems are so low it'd be impossible to do that; without knowing your entire diet (of what you're actually swallowing, not just ordering online) it'd be impossible to tell e.g. your total saturated fat intake. I'd be way more worried about buying a box of Rogaine as a gag gift for my dad, and starting to receive spam from Hair Club For Men; or me buying some condoms and a 'helpful note' being emailed to my wife that I bought some and may be cheating on her because they know her contraceptive pill prescription is still active.
Retail stores have no privacy though; the computerized registers timestamp your purchase, which is correlated to the CCTV timestamp, and your face is identified via facial recognition. Paid cash? It's still known exactly what you bought. Police catch people this way, it takes a little work, but can easily be automated.
unauthorized as in counterfeit
I had a roommate who worked at an auto factory. He had to quit when he almost sliced his thumb off. His job was to slice off plastic tabs from some plastic part. He admitted that the only reason those plastic tabs existed was because the union mandated they continue to be part of the manufacturing process so that a job would exist removing them. It was literal makework, enshrined in contract. Not saying all auto factory jobs are like that, it has to be just few enough that it's cheaper to keep the humans than to fully automate.
Wealth redistribution from the middle to the upper classes, sure. With contractors like Raytheon, Boeing, Northrop-Grumman, Lockheed, Blackwater (nee Xe), or Halliburton, it's curious the media suggests the US govt. should draw the line at Amazon. Most of the US welfare institutions involve the govt. giving large amounts of money to megacorporations, and calling it a win for the little guy. Actually, nearly ALL actions by the US govt. can be summarized as thus.
Please tell me one of the rats was named Nicodemus.
Thanks for the confirmation that it's possible. I know the ps4 lets you disable this functionality, although I expect the hypothetical TV would just show the ad anyways, and you'd have to back up to see what you missed.
Recall that the Kindle/Fire line of e-readers/tablets have a slightly cheaper version which shows large ads on the lock screen. In my experience they resemble the scrolling ads on Netflix for shows they offer, that works as a screen saver, which I haven't heard anyone complain about or even mention. If that bothers you, you can spend a few dollars more for the model with no ads. So silent ads as screen savers, sure why not.
Pausing the content you're actively trying to consume, and inserting additional ads, is enough of an annoyance I imagine people would purposely avoid TV models that do this. It's not like there's no competition between manufacturers, as it's the end manufacturers and not the panel manufacturers who would do this. There are lots of other companies you can buy from, unless you want something unique like a 2017 OLED TV. That said, the TV would have to be able to pause the content, meaning the content is running from the TV's smart features; since TVs are now able to control connected devices via HDMI I could see them sending a 'pause' signal to a Bluray player, but am not sure if pause signals are actually one of the commands that can be sent over HDMI. The TV would have to connect to the net to verify how many times the ad was watched, so not connecting your TV to the net would probably disable ads.
The amount of ad revenue earned by TV manufacturers would be so minuscule that it wouldn't be worth the backlash or reduced sales. Consumers buying $2k TVs would do the research beforehand, and nearly anyone would rather pay $10 more for a TV without the ads. Cord-cutters using smart TV features are the people MOST likely to abhor ads, so the placement is horrible; a better idea would be to replace the bootup splash screen with a static ad image.
People have been saying that we're no closer to general AI now than we were 50 years ago, while others say that progress isn't linear and we might just stumble upon it one day accidentally while trying to do something else. I'm of the opinion that the specialist systems we're creating today are indirectly leading to the creation of general purpose AI. Eventually, someone will look at the dozens of sensory pattern-matching, deep learning and analysis specialist systems, wonder 'what would happen if I stitched all of these together into one system?' and accidentally create something capable of things that no one system does by itself, due to emergent behavior. This proto general AI will be buggy as hell, and you'll kind of have to squint in order to see the intelligence... but it'll resemble something we haven't seen before. After lots of finagling, it might even be stable (and mentally stable) enough to impress lay persons.
What I'm wondering is: how much will people (perhaps retroactively) see the moral status of these early alphas -- as beings deserving rights -- to be like gametes (or even early fetuses) of humans? Even if it gets into infinite loops and is less than sound in its output, would people demand it have rights just like the more advanced versions would be likely to have advocated for? How many running instances would it then be entitled to?
Projections for just 2022 [...] That's only 7 years away. It's not science fiction or magic.
How are you posting from 2015? Is it science or magic? Want stock tips?
The way a private organization could make money on this is to charge astronomers and research projects for observation time. This could work, since there is usually a greater demand for research time than available observatories.
How many of those astronomers and researchers are receiving funding from the US Govt? Paying the $14 million/year will likely be cheaper than privatizing it then paying for access. Of course, NASA might save money themselves and not care that the govt. is spending 2 dollars to save 1.
A few of those example results are a little uncanny valley-ish, but the best are nearly good enough to serve as my dating profile picture. Google Image Search THIS!
Old tech made obsolete, slowly disappears from new products. News at 11.
Seriously though, I had nothing but trouble with SPDIF. The finicky connection would often desync with my Xbox360 and IIRC then I'd have to turn the receiver off and back on to resync it, and it'd make a weird noise until I did. Bending the cable just wrong would exacerbate the issue.
I've subscribed to GameFly a few times, I bet they're crapping their pants about now. Let's see, I can pay $16/mo. to rent one game at a time via GameFly, or what works out to $10/mo. through Power Pass. With the former, I have to wait for the post office to deliver the game, and it's usually a surprise which of the games in my queue I end up getting; with the latter, I walk into any GameStop, find out what they have right now, and get it immediately. If I don't like the selection at one GameStop I can drive a few minutes away for a different selection. Ok, someone who doesn't have a car, or lives in a rural area that only has one GameStop nearby, may prefer the convenience of mail delivery. If there's only a couple games you'd care to rent, then that 6 months would be mostly wasted. I have a feeling that the vast majority of the most profitable customers will switch to Power Pass, I know I'm tempted.
I don't like wasting a large portion of each month (when I'm paying by the month) waiting for the mail to deliver my next game; GameFly cross-ships, but I still end up waiting 3-4 business days (in suburban Chicago; YMMV) They really ought to credit your account for days you spend waiting for shipping (they track this already.) Having two games out at a time lessens the impact of this, although that costs $23/mo. About 1/4 of the time, the disc is scratched and can't be installed/played through; wasting yet more time waiting for a replacement (worse if I'm partway through the game) adds insult to injury, and having two games out doesn't help with this. Popular games are most likely to be scratched, and are least available, so the chances you'll get a good copy are unusually bad. Being able to immediately go to a GameStop and exchange for another copy/different game would be game-changing (no pun intended.) Oh and then at the end of the 6 months, I can keep any used game I want (presumably, that they have on hand.)
I've also rented games from RedBox, but paying by the day (and the small selection) is unlikely to compete with a 6 month subscription to a much wider range of games. Staying up until 8am to beat a game because I refuse to pay for one additional day of rental (and then rushing to drop it off before work) is something I'd rather not repeat. That said, it's useful for trialing games you're unsure you'd like. Casual gamer whose friends are raving about Dark Souls 3? Rent it for a day. Renting an RPG from RedBox long enough to play through it would be insane, though.
I imagine so many GameStop customers will make use of this Power Pass that it'll be self-defeating: people will be less likely to purchase games and subsequently resell them to GameStop, leading to reduced availability of used copies, making the Power Pass less useful. One benefit of GameFly is they always buy some new copies, so you have a chance of getting a new highly-anticipated game; whereas with Power Pass you have to wait until some people resell the title (and if it's a long, excellent title like Breath of the Wild, that may be quite the wait... although in that case you should maybe just buy it new.)
Don't worry, there's no way the designer of the system would give details of the backdoor to a sexy enemy spy posing as an industrial espionage spy. Noone could make strategic use of that vulnerability unless they did something audacious like nuke all the colonies at once. /s
A vulnerability like this was speculated to be the mysterious method the NSA used to supposedly be able to break SSL connections, as revealed in the Snowden documents. It's probably not this exact vuln, though, as this seems to mostly be a problem in hardware used to route to VPNs.
Would've modded you up if you'd given a citation. The President has the Football and AFAIK can use it at any time for any reason.
U.S. orders are dwarfed by those from China
Sir, we must close the Robot Gap!
Well this was covered recently
Apps given access to your GPS can pass that data on to advertisers. Evil Stuff (tm) can then be done with that data. I would say "nothing to see here" but I'm surprised that ads can be customized to only be shown to devices with a specific ID at a specific GPS location. The chances someone will sniff your MAID, and know the ad networks of the apps you leave running that have location access, seems really low though. I imagine the more reputable (i.e. common) ad networks will/already prohibit such specific targeting.
Interesting but probably part of a different problem: that police tend to return runaway children to their abusive parents. Silent abuse is better than a whining parent making a ruckus at a police station about their missing child, apparently. They should've confirmed who his parents/guardian actually were, though.