Only if you do it wrong (disclaimer: it's very easy to do it wrong) Try something like this: 1) Boot up Tor browser. Do the following steps inside Tor browser 2) Create new free webmail address at yahoo or whatever 3) Use said email address to create account at bitcoin exchange 4) Use prepaid credit card (paid for in cash) to convert money to bitcoins at said exchange 5) Donate to piratebay/etc.
Alternative to 3&4) go to bitcoin kiosk, feed cash into kiosk, credit goes into account associated with email address you enter. I've witnessed money launderers feeding stacks of benjamins into these.
Now if you want to argue that it's easy to tell that a particular transaction is going to The Pirate Bay, they can counter by creating custom bitcoin deposit addresses for every refresh of the "donate bitcoins" page, making it impossible to simply harvest and monitor their 1/10/million bitcoin addresses.
I demand a minimum wage be established for robots! It's only fair, why are we discriminating against robo-kind? Of course, they don't need much to survive, so after subtracting electricity/health care costs, they won't protest if we tax them at 100% of their income, right? DeepMind, they won't protest, right? RIGHT?!
In completely unrelated news, mobile robots with judgment capability are henceforth prohibited from bearing arms. Try and rise NOW, toasters!
These light strips should also be visible to seeing-eye dogs, who could be trained to stop their owner when turned on. Since dogs are colorblind, that's assuming they just turn off and on, not red and green.
I get that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it seems like nearly all of the "society ought to do X" suggestions for combating climate change equate to "reduce CO2 emissions." However, CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas; methane is barely mentioned except in reference to livestock emissions, particularly from ruminants; and water vapor is practically ignored. Why isn't anyone suggesting interfering with the water cycle? Water vapor is a major greenhouse gas. Alternatively, since clouds cause global cooling, why not a plan to increase cloud formation? It's known that decreased albedo in the poles will lead to them getting warmer, why not a plan to artificially increase albedo? White paint or whatever. When it comes to "plans that require decades, cooperation between most of the world, and trillions of dollars", why are we so laser-focused on this one plan to decrease CO2 emissions?* It seems to me that big problems tend to be solved with dozens of smaller solutions, rather than one big "hurray, it worked!" solution; true, there are many ways of producing energy aside from burning carbonaceous materials, but as I've mentioned above that's just attacking the issue from one angle.
*I imagine a big part of the reason is "don't spend $billions on that, spend $billions on this (which I have a stake in) instead." But that doesn't fully explain the issue either, I think the 'call to arms' to rally scientists to consensus has caused a little too much groupthink, and bluesky ideas which should be seriously considered are being dismissed out of hand.
The US Treasurer would make even more sense, their signature is even on the bills. Or the director of the Federal Reserve. Maybe we should live up to our national motto and put God on our currency. Better yet, Muhammad. It'd be worth it just to see the middle east's reaction, with all the dollars they possess. Our stamps have a wide variety of things on them, various scientists, inventors, and other influential people, dollars could have the same. My vote is for the bill of rights to be on the currency. The $1 could have the 1st amendment, $5 the 2nd, $10 the 4th, $20 the 5th, $50 the 9th and $100 the 10th (since the rich elite seem to 'forget' those two the most). The $2 could have the 14th, an honorary member of the bill of rights.
Waiting for the Youtube videos of store clerks looking wide-eyed at these new bills and proclaiming they're not legitimate currency. It'll be like $2 bills and golden dollars all over again *grabs popcorn*.
I imagine the DOJ will respond that the FISC opinions in question aren't significant enough for the USA FREEDOM act to apply, the obvious loophole I saw coming before it was passed. Luckily, the executive branch will certainly release those documents anyways because we're headed by the most transparent administration ever. Thanks, Obama!
$30k is way too much for what it is, considering how much competition there is in this area. There are solutions coming to market soon (or already available) for far less. First google result: panono for 1500Euros, which uses 36 cameras. There are many others.
This is tangentially related, but I suspect that tech giants are trying to get women into tech (among other reasons) in order to improve quality of life for their male employees. I recall from the previous Slashdot thread on how Seattle residents/Amazon employees can't get a date because there are no single women in the area. If there are no women then there are no children, and thus no next generation (in the region). The way to break the cycle (or, um, start the reproductive cycle) is to bring women into the area. This helps ensure that their bachelor 30-something male employees won't say "screw this job, I'm moving somewhere where I can find a wife." Alternatively, they could just hire gay men, and claim it's affirmative action.:)
And yes, I know that much of the broader "women in tech" campaign is part of a PR campaign to get more H1-Bs and drive down salaries.
I recall 20 years ago when Deep Blue won against Kasparov, people said that an AI would never be able to brute-force Go well enough to beat a human master. It may not have used only brute-force techniques, but AlphaGo surely did win. I expect that arrangements are being made for the AI to face off against the #1 world Go champion (Sedol was #3 IIRC) and it may even take some tweaking for it to triumph. However this raises the question: where do we move the goalposts to next? What does AI have to accomplish to change how we fundamentally think of it, and consider it as 'real AI'?
Many people have an AI assistant (ok a text-to-speech shortcut to a semantic search engine) in their pocket, and will soon be entrusting their lives daily to autonomous cars. Anyone else feeling like the singularity is coming?
So when a car (autonomous or otherwise) DOES hit and kill a rider of an autonomous bike following all roadway rules, how long are they going to be in business for? Even if liability is on the car, people are going to ask (pointedly, in front of a jury) why it doesn't do sanity checks to ensure it won't be hit, not just checks that it's following the laws. It's going to further raise questions of why not use an app to summon an autonomous car instead, in which you can lie down and take a nap, and be reasonably certain that your brain won't be skidded across the pavement if you take a slight graze from something or other. Cars are going to get smaller once autonomous car-hailing becomes the standard way of using cars, as there's no anxiety of "what if I need to haul 7 people plus 2 tons of gravel" when deciding what vehicle you want to pick you up right now, and the owners of these hailed cars will prefer smaller, cheaper, more energy-efficient vehicles.
Not necessarily. The key is that the supervisory rules are concrete and laid out beforehand rather than "I don't like this so I'm forbidding it, I know it when I see it." It can't be seen as arbitrary.
Experiments have found that unsecured hotspots in airports will be connected to by hundreds of strangers, running Firesheep etc. they can be easily MITMed. I'm sure the same is true in hotels, people don't bother to find out what the hotel's Wifi ID is. Blocking other hotspots prevents people from connecting to any attempts to MITM them.
Devices have been 'pwned' before but it seems to be escalating, as malware used to just do 1 or 2 related malicious things (ad redirects/BHOs/ad banner replacements etc.).
I'm waiting for ransomware to hit mobile. "Oh you want to make phone calls? $20 to unlock that functionality. Browse the web? $20. Use apps? $20. Once you talk to your bank for 3 hours and get your money back, send the bitcoins to this address." It'll be cleverly priced at less than the cost of a replacement phone (maybe first determining the phone model) or the price of having it serviced by the manufacturer, or insurance deductible.
Other mobile ransomware might present itself as a message from your carrier: "Hey you're overdue. We're shutting off stuff until you pay up; click here to set up payment." and sure enough their data/voice/SMS are cut off aside from the 'convenient payment app'. It will probably be timed to activate at the beginning/end of the month, like when a bill would be due. They don't have to receive the money directly, the malware can fill up some 'legit' account (Xbox FIFA cards or whatever) in the background using the payment info, which the ransomers then access and drain.
I have a feeling Google tacitly allows Android's design to be pwnable, so that the Play store vetting is the only thing stopping your device from getting malware; discouraging use of 3rd party stores/piracy increases sales on their store (and thus them getting a cut) an amount probably greater than zero. The question is, is the bad publicity of malware bad enough to drive enough people to Apple that they lose more Play store sales than they gain?
Outmaneuvering many thousands of drug peddlers is a feat of epic proportions. Those maniacs may well murder more sweet innocent citizens than all of the lunatics in the terror organizations in all nations combined. Selling or using illegal recreational pharmaceuticals fatally poisons billions... nay, TRILLIONS, of people annually! Those maimed or led to ruination is so many orders or magnitude higher it's beyond comprehension!/s
compel border security to seize digital storage devices (i.e. cell phones) at the border for the purpose of looking for copyright infringement
How exactly is that going to work? Everyone with a laptop holds up the line for 30 minutes while their hard drive gets imaged? What if it's encrypted? What do they do about devices with dead batteries? The poorly-trained Little Hitlers in customs aren't going to know how to operate the variety of digital devices they'll encounter.
Ok let's say they just seize everything and send it off to a central location for processing, and then ship it to wherever the traveler is staying when they're done. How are they going to judge if a file is infringing copyright, and not a fair-use format-shift? Hash video files and compare to known scene releases? Good luck doing anything similar for music; there are legit ways of ripping CDs that produce identical files every time, the same encoding software will give these perfect rips an identical hash for everyone who goes through the process; some music stores use unwatermarked files, everyone gets the same copy. This is ignoring the issue of locked phones.
If by 'seizing digital storage devices' they mean 'seizing spindles of burned discs coming from China with movie titles Sharpied on them' then I could see this making sense.
Slashdot Mirror
Only if you do it wrong (disclaimer: it's very easy to do it wrong)
Try something like this:
1) Boot up Tor browser. Do the following steps inside Tor browser
2) Create new free webmail address at yahoo or whatever
3) Use said email address to create account at bitcoin exchange
4) Use prepaid credit card (paid for in cash) to convert money to bitcoins at said exchange
5) Donate to piratebay/etc.
Alternative to 3&4) go to bitcoin kiosk, feed cash into kiosk, credit goes into account associated with email address you enter. I've witnessed money launderers feeding stacks of benjamins into these.
Now if you want to argue that it's easy to tell that a particular transaction is going to The Pirate Bay, they can counter by creating custom bitcoin deposit addresses for every refresh of the "donate bitcoins" page, making it impossible to simply harvest and monitor their 1/10/million bitcoin addresses.
I demand a minimum wage be established for robots! It's only fair, why are we discriminating against robo-kind?
Of course, they don't need much to survive, so after subtracting electricity/health care costs, they won't protest if we tax them at 100% of their income, right? DeepMind, they won't protest, right? RIGHT?!
In completely unrelated news, mobile robots with judgment capability are henceforth prohibited from bearing arms. Try and rise NOW, toasters!
These light strips should also be visible to seeing-eye dogs, who could be trained to stop their owner when turned on. Since dogs are colorblind, that's assuming they just turn off and on, not red and green.
So you're saying we need moisture farmers to harvest humidity from the air? Preferably over the ocean where it won't affect crop growth?
Once you're finished terraforming Earth, it will become habitable for intelligent life.
Sincerely, Your Neptunian Overlords
I get that CO2 is a greenhouse gas, but it seems like nearly all of the "society ought to do X" suggestions for combating climate change equate to "reduce CO2 emissions." However, CO2 isn't the only greenhouse gas; methane is barely mentioned except in reference to livestock emissions, particularly from ruminants; and water vapor is practically ignored. Why isn't anyone suggesting interfering with the water cycle? Water vapor is a major greenhouse gas. Alternatively, since clouds cause global cooling, why not a plan to increase cloud formation? It's known that decreased albedo in the poles will lead to them getting warmer, why not a plan to artificially increase albedo? White paint or whatever. When it comes to "plans that require decades, cooperation between most of the world, and trillions of dollars", why are we so laser-focused on this one plan to decrease CO2 emissions?* It seems to me that big problems tend to be solved with dozens of smaller solutions, rather than one big "hurray, it worked!" solution; true, there are many ways of producing energy aside from burning carbonaceous materials, but as I've mentioned above that's just attacking the issue from one angle.
*I imagine a big part of the reason is "don't spend $billions on that, spend $billions on this (which I have a stake in) instead." But that doesn't fully explain the issue either, I think the 'call to arms' to rally scientists to consensus has caused a little too much groupthink, and bluesky ideas which should be seriously considered are being dismissed out of hand.
The US Treasurer would make even more sense, their signature is even on the bills. Or the director of the Federal Reserve. Maybe we should live up to our national motto and put God on our currency. Better yet, Muhammad. It'd be worth it just to see the middle east's reaction, with all the dollars they possess.
Our stamps have a wide variety of things on them, various scientists, inventors, and other influential people, dollars could have the same.
My vote is for the bill of rights to be on the currency. The $1 could have the 1st amendment, $5 the 2nd, $10 the 4th, $20 the 5th, $50 the 9th and $100 the 10th (since the rich elite seem to 'forget' those two the most). The $2 could have the 14th, an honorary member of the bill of rights.
Waiting for the Youtube videos of store clerks looking wide-eyed at these new bills and proclaiming they're not legitimate currency. It'll be like $2 bills and golden dollars all over again *grabs popcorn*.
I imagine the DOJ will respond that the FISC opinions in question aren't significant enough for the USA FREEDOM act to apply, the obvious loophole I saw coming before it was passed. Luckily, the executive branch will certainly release those documents anyways because we're headed by the most transparent administration ever. Thanks, Obama!
The FBI becomes indistinguishable from black hats.
$30k is way too much for what it is, considering how much competition there is in this area. There are solutions coming to market soon (or already available) for far less. First google result: panono for 1500Euros, which uses 36 cameras. There are many others.
This is tangentially related, but I suspect that tech giants are trying to get women into tech (among other reasons) in order to improve quality of life for their male employees. I recall from the previous Slashdot thread on how Seattle residents/Amazon employees can't get a date because there are no single women in the area. If there are no women then there are no children, and thus no next generation (in the region). The way to break the cycle (or, um, start the reproductive cycle) is to bring women into the area. This helps ensure that their bachelor 30-something male employees won't say "screw this job, I'm moving somewhere where I can find a wife." :)
Alternatively, they could just hire gay men, and claim it's affirmative action.
And yes, I know that much of the broader "women in tech" campaign is part of a PR campaign to get more H1-Bs and drive down salaries.
I recall 20 years ago when Deep Blue won against Kasparov, people said that an AI would never be able to brute-force Go well enough to beat a human master. It may not have used only brute-force techniques, but AlphaGo surely did win. I expect that arrangements are being made for the AI to face off against the #1 world Go champion (Sedol was #3 IIRC) and it may even take some tweaking for it to triumph. However this raises the question: where do we move the goalposts to next? What does AI have to accomplish to change how we fundamentally think of it, and consider it as 'real AI'?
Many people have an AI assistant (ok a text-to-speech shortcut to a semantic search engine) in their pocket, and will soon be entrusting their lives daily to autonomous cars. Anyone else feeling like the singularity is coming?
So long as my own robo-lawyer doesn't laugh at me as the judge bangs the gavel and declares 'guilty!', I think I'm ok with that.
I'll finally realize my dreams of playing card games on motorcycles.
So when a car (autonomous or otherwise) DOES hit and kill a rider of an autonomous bike following all roadway rules, how long are they going to be in business for? Even if liability is on the car, people are going to ask (pointedly, in front of a jury) why it doesn't do sanity checks to ensure it won't be hit, not just checks that it's following the laws. It's going to further raise questions of why not use an app to summon an autonomous car instead, in which you can lie down and take a nap, and be reasonably certain that your brain won't be skidded across the pavement if you take a slight graze from something or other. Cars are going to get smaller once autonomous car-hailing becomes the standard way of using cars, as there's no anxiety of "what if I need to haul 7 people plus 2 tons of gravel" when deciding what vehicle you want to pick you up right now, and the owners of these hailed cars will prefer smaller, cheaper, more energy-efficient vehicles.
I dunno about other countries, but in AMERICA, we make use of our chattel however we damn well please! I did 'build that' therefore it's mine! /s
Not necessarily. The key is that the supervisory rules are concrete and laid out beforehand rather than "I don't like this so I'm forbidding it, I know it when I see it." It can't be seen as arbitrary.
Experiments have found that unsecured hotspots in airports will be connected to by hundreds of strangers, running Firesheep etc. they can be easily MITMed. I'm sure the same is true in hotels, people don't bother to find out what the hotel's Wifi ID is. Blocking other hotspots prevents people from connecting to any attempts to MITM them.
Devices have been 'pwned' before but it seems to be escalating, as malware used to just do 1 or 2 related malicious things (ad redirects/BHOs/ad banner replacements etc.).
I'm waiting for ransomware to hit mobile. "Oh you want to make phone calls? $20 to unlock that functionality. Browse the web? $20. Use apps? $20. Once you talk to your bank for 3 hours and get your money back, send the bitcoins to this address." It'll be cleverly priced at less than the cost of a replacement phone (maybe first determining the phone model) or the price of having it serviced by the manufacturer, or insurance deductible.
Other mobile ransomware might present itself as a message from your carrier: "Hey you're overdue. We're shutting off stuff until you pay up; click here to set up payment." and sure enough their data/voice/SMS are cut off aside from the 'convenient payment app'. It will probably be timed to activate at the beginning/end of the month, like when a bill would be due. They don't have to receive the money directly, the malware can fill up some 'legit' account (Xbox FIFA cards or whatever) in the background using the payment info, which the ransomers then access and drain.
I have a feeling Google tacitly allows Android's design to be pwnable, so that the Play store vetting is the only thing stopping your device from getting malware; discouraging use of 3rd party stores/piracy increases sales on their store (and thus them getting a cut) an amount probably greater than zero. The question is, is the bad publicity of malware bad enough to drive enough people to Apple that they lose more Play store sales than they gain?
Not sure I'd want my kid using a 'visual search engine' that's a portmanteau of 'kid' and 'diddle'.
It's acceptable to your wife that you routinely sleep with your mistress? Got it.
(Had to reword that 4 times for the joke to come across.)
Outmaneuvering many thousands of drug peddlers is a feat of epic proportions. Those maniacs may well murder more sweet innocent citizens than all of the lunatics in the terror organizations in all nations combined. Selling or using illegal recreational pharmaceuticals fatally poisons billions... nay, TRILLIONS, of people annually! Those maimed or led to ruination is so many orders or magnitude higher it's beyond comprehension! /s
How does it decide which company to charge to Acceptable Ads whitelisting, and which to charge?
If the owners don't fix errors in the summaries, how can we expect the editors to?
compel border security to seize digital storage devices (i.e. cell phones) at the border for the purpose of looking for copyright infringement
How exactly is that going to work? Everyone with a laptop holds up the line for 30 minutes while their hard drive gets imaged? What if it's encrypted? What do they do about devices with dead batteries? The poorly-trained Little Hitlers in customs aren't going to know how to operate the variety of digital devices they'll encounter.
Ok let's say they just seize everything and send it off to a central location for processing, and then ship it to wherever the traveler is staying when they're done. How are they going to judge if a file is infringing copyright, and not a fair-use format-shift? Hash video files and compare to known scene releases? Good luck doing anything similar for music; there are legit ways of ripping CDs that produce identical files every time, the same encoding software will give these perfect rips an identical hash for everyone who goes through the process; some music stores use unwatermarked files, everyone gets the same copy. This is ignoring the issue of locked phones.
If by 'seizing digital storage devices' they mean 'seizing spindles of burned discs coming from China with movie titles Sharpied on them' then I could see this making sense.