I think this is just an experiment to gather information about UBI's in general, not solve a specific problem in Ontario. These are the kinds of tests we (as a species) should be doing now to prepare for a future (50-100+ years off?) when perhaps automation has supplanted enough jobs that we simply have more workers than work. There's no doubt automation will continue, and AI will eat up all kinds of jobs. The question of whether there will be enough new jobs is one I don't think we can definitively answer.
It's tough to imagine that future, but it's better to find out what does and does not work now than when it's too late. These things will probably need to run for a very long time to prove or disprove viability, with lots of different approaches all seemingly hinging on the fickle idiosyncrasies of the human experience.
In the end, we may find that UBI simply doesn't work AND that there will not be enough jobs. In which case there will likely have to be limits placed upon how much a company can automate (or how much people can procreate).
It appears you cannot subscribe to podcasts without enabling Google's web and activity tracking, so on the surface, this app appears to be nothing more than a blatant data grab.
I don't know. It would be awesome if I could choose what I saw. So instead of seeing the earth below a layer of clouds, how about Mars? Or stars streaking by like in Star Trek, or the center of the galaxy in the distance as we appear to traverse the Milky Way at from one spiral arm to the next?
Is an hour 1/24 of a day, or is it 3599-3601 seconds? Because if it's the latter, it has nothing to do with Earth's rotation.
According to NIST: The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
Ok, so ten out of ten for making a salient point on the ludicrous idea of a social media spending app, but minus several million for "Snowflake Generation".
In the very early days of bitcoin, probably 2008-2009, wallet companies were just getting off the ground and they would give you 25 BTC just for signing up for their service. I did that, and put the key and wallet info somewhere I'd never forget.
I forgot.
Every so often I'll find an old CD or DVD backup and think, "Hey, maybe I backed that up on here!", but of course I didn't. The wallet company is probably long-gone anyway.
I think the obvious difference is that these home assistants by Amazon, Apple, and Google are actively listening by design. I have the Google assistant turned off on my Pixel...I know because it keeps notifying me to turn it on. Now could the mic on my phone or pc be activated by an unscrupulous actor a la "Person of Interest"? Sure. But that seems far less likely than a software glitch in a device that's supposed to be listening to me.
Amazon is taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen in the future. I already took steps to ensure it would never happen by not buying a device like that.
I still get the BluRay discs. Some view it as old-fashioned, but how do you do it otherwise? The movie content available for streaming is abysmal on both Netflix and Amazon, but with the disc plan you can get every theatrical movie as soon as it's released to disc.
Otherwise, you'd have to go to a RedBox (are those still a thing?), or gods-forbid an actual movie theater. Yeah, let me pay almost twice as much (for one movie!) to drive to a location to watch a movie on someone else's schedule, that I can't pause, that's front-loaded with tons of commercials, in room full of people that can't STFU.
Many humans walking down the street can pull this plane with just their bare hands and a rope, which just goes to show how far behind ICE vehicles are when it comes to range, range, and duration.
I get that you don't care for electric vehicles, but they are not without their qualities. Off the top of my head: They pollute far less. The energy required to make them work can be derived multiple ways (steam, natural gas, coal, geothermal, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear fission, someday fusion). Some of the ways the energy can be derived are clean and renewable. They have far fewer parts. They don't suffer from as much and/or the same kinds of wear (mostly thinking of engine heat here). They're quiet. They make you far less dependent upon the whims of oil-producing nations (being able to take care of yourself is a good thing).
So it's really a matter of what's important to you. Perhaps you pull 787-9 Dreamliners all day long and an electric vehicle just isn't going to cut it for you. That's fine. There are all kinds of people with all kinds of needs and priorities. It's great we live in a diverse world where many/all of our needs can be met.
I list my immediate family, close friends, and necessary work contacts in my favorites list. I then set my Android phone to silent, unless it's a call, message, or email from someone on the list. The only suck is when I'm streaming music and the incoming unknown caller silently interrupts it. It's a small price to pay though.
Hasn't it already been tested and settled (in the US) as a First Amendment right? People are free to photograph and shoot video of public spaces that have no expectation of privacy.
So it sounds like the ad was scraping the form fields, or doing a kind of man-in-the-middle attack on the form page? It's the acceptance of active advertising that opened the door for this type of behavior. The promise of highly targeted advertising based on tracking users across not only your site but the whole of the internet, gets content providers salivating at higher ad rates and willing to let XYZ ad network to run whatever scripts they want on their site.
How many more stories like this are we going to have to endure before someone figures out a better way to do this? I personally don't feel that anything other than a static image is acceptable for web advertising, and since that seems ever unlikely, I'll happily run script, tracking, and ad blockers and not lose sleep about any content provider's ad-based revenue model...like Slashdot/BizX.
What other kinds of weapons systems might the Pentagon pursue in the future, thinking they can always turn to Google to solve those niggling ethical issues...like killing completely innocent people in the name of collateral damage? This could force Google and its employees into the "Well if we don't, the new mega-bad weapon will kill civilians...we have to" way of thinking. It's not Google's job to ensure the safety or accuracy of weapons systems unless they want it to be. And at least some of the employees clearly don't.
Of course, minimizing civilian casualties should be a priority. A great way to start, is not to not bomb a populated area! But if you must, then sure, either hire engineers in-house or outsource. But if you do the latter, it's up to those contractors as a company, and their employees on a personal level, to decide what of the world's problems they want to apply their abilities and education solving.
They might feel their time is better spent solving a problem that may save millions of lives (like sanitary water), and not the hundreds or thousands of lives accidentally killed in combat.
I believe this is true, and what happens when you allow a bunch of 20-somethings attempt to bring products to market. While it's possible they are reasonably intelligent, they lack vision, drive, wisdom, and long-term focus. Google isn't too bad at developing technologies, but they are utterly abysmal at delivering those technologies to consumers.
It's an ethos that appears to driven by the Silicon Valley mentality of constantly throwing things at the wall. I recently heard that no one in the valley takes you seriously unless you've had at least two failed startups. Everyone wants to know how many things you've thrown at the wall, how many stuck, how many didn't.
No one cares that you spent countless amounts of time and money very cleverly building tech that can't clear regulatory hurdles, solves problems no one has, isn't affordable by the time it hits the market, or has no real-world applications.
Hey, you built a wall of unusable tech blobs? We love those! Here's a $3M salary to sit in an open-air office not too far from the ping-pong table, just to think about things that we could possibly monetize.
The rented software model is why I'm still using Creative Suite CS3. I'll bite the bullet eventually, and maybe this has worked out just fine for Adobe, but it kept me from doing any upgrades so there's at a couple of lost sales. Adobe's position is pretty locked right now with so much infrastructure and workflow built around their products, but had anyone made a serious move into the space, I think they would have been given a hard look as a replacement.
So that's my take. It's easy to build a business using rented tools, but it's tough to sustain one because you are at the mercy of the company who owns the tools. I will always look for alternatives first. It's usually companies who have the hubris to believe that their products are irreplaceable that take a fall. While they seemed to have managed the transition, Adobe should still be mindful of the fall of QuarkXPress.
Yes, but only if the higher level of government has the legal authority to enact such laws over the lower level, and while the FCC is a federal agency, it does not have specific legal authority to overturn state laws. This lack of authority was unanimously upheld in the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in August of 2016.
At that time Tom Wheeler was chair and was trying to block states and municipalities from enacting local laws that prevented the growth of municipal broadband. All of the ISPs and their congress-critter shills rushed to the defense of states' rights at that time.
In fact, Section 2 of a bill introduced to amend section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 stated: It is the sense of Congress that the Federal Communications Commission does not have the authority under section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (47 U.S.C. 1302) to prevent any State from implementing any law of such State with respect to the provision of broadband Internet access service (as defined in section 8.11 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations) by such State or a municipality or other political subdivision of such State.
That was written by Rep. Marsha Blackburn(R-Tenn) who, I'll point out, has telecom services as one of her top-10 industry contributors. At that time, ISPs were desperate to try to frame this as a political issue to gain support, but 3/4 of all municipal broadband projects at that time where voted into action by communities that voted Republican. That's because whether you ride a donkey or an elephant, we all want fast internet and if the ISPs aren't going to provide it where we live, we should be able to do it ourselves. It was a serious issue for rural America, where ISPs do not want to invest. But rural America is also largely right-leaning, so those citizens weren't having it and demanding muni-broadband.
In the end though, Wheeler and rural America lost. The ISPs were able to make the case that the FCC did not have the right to stop the states...maybe rightly so. The citizens of a state can always vote to enact or repeal state laws they feel do not serve their interests.
So here we are again. The ISPs are once-again trying to frame this as political issue, with more success this time I might add. Only now, they are against the states' rights they so gleefully endorsed two years ago. Judging from the rhetoric I've seen, most of those against the principles of Net Neutrality do not actually understand Net Neutrality, and simply regurgitate the talking points they hear on Fox News. So it's not inconceivable that the states will lose here, despite the massive flip-flop and obvious hypocrisy.
Slashdot Mirror
Could hardly be worse than:
Thank you for calling Conseco. Please listen carefully as our menu options have changed.
If you are calling regarding an existing case, please say, "I have an existing ticket."
I have an existing ticket
I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear that.
If you are calling regarding an existing case, please say, "I have an existing ticket."
I...have...an...existing...ticket.
If you do not have an existing ticket, please say, "New issue."
I HAVE AN EXISTING TICKET!
I'm sorry, I didn't quite hear that.
Let me connect you to an operator for additional help.
(connection sounds)
(different voice)We're sorry, our office is now closed. Please call back between the hours of 8am and 6pm Pacific Time.
(it's 5:50pm PST)
Uganda be kidding me!
I think this is just an experiment to gather information about UBI's in general, not solve a specific problem in Ontario. These are the kinds of tests we (as a species) should be doing now to prepare for a future (50-100+ years off?) when perhaps automation has supplanted enough jobs that we simply have more workers than work. There's no doubt automation will continue, and AI will eat up all kinds of jobs. The question of whether there will be enough new jobs is one I don't think we can definitively answer.
It's tough to imagine that future, but it's better to find out what does and does not work now than when it's too late. These things will probably need to run for a very long time to prove or disprove viability, with lots of different approaches all seemingly hinging on the fickle idiosyncrasies of the human experience.
In the end, we may find that UBI simply doesn't work AND that there will not be enough jobs. In which case there will likely have to be limits placed upon how much a company can automate (or how much people can procreate).
It appears you cannot subscribe to podcasts without enabling Google's web and activity tracking, so on the surface, this app appears to be nothing more than a blatant data grab.
I don't know. It would be awesome if I could choose what I saw. So instead of seeing the earth below a layer of clouds, how about Mars? Or stars streaking by like in Star Trek, or the center of the galaxy in the distance as we appear to traverse the Milky Way at from one spiral arm to the next?
Sign me up for that flight!
Is an hour 1/24 of a day, or is it 3599-3601 seconds? Because if it's the latter, it has nothing to do with Earth's rotation.
According to NIST: The second is the duration of 9,192,631,770 periods of the radiation corresponding to the transition between the two hyperfine levels of the ground state of the cesium 133 atom.
Ok, so ten out of ten for making a salient point on the ludicrous idea of a social media spending app, but minus several million for "Snowflake Generation".
In the very early days of bitcoin, probably 2008-2009, wallet companies were just getting off the ground and they would give you 25 BTC just for signing up for their service. I did that, and put the key and wallet info somewhere I'd never forget.
I forgot.
Every so often I'll find an old CD or DVD backup and think, "Hey, maybe I backed that up on here!", but of course I didn't. The wallet company is probably long-gone anyway.
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of RobLimo's!
RIP good sir.
I think the obvious difference is that these home assistants by Amazon, Apple, and Google are actively listening by design. I have the Google assistant turned off on my Pixel...I know because it keeps notifying me to turn it on. Now could the mic on my phone or pc be activated by an unscrupulous actor a la "Person of Interest"? Sure. But that seems far less likely than a software glitch in a device that's supposed to be listening to me.
Amazon is taking steps to make sure this doesn't happen in the future. I already took steps to ensure it would never happen by not buying a device like that.
I still get the BluRay discs. Some view it as old-fashioned, but how do you do it otherwise? The movie content available for streaming is abysmal on both Netflix and Amazon, but with the disc plan you can get every theatrical movie as soon as it's released to disc.
Otherwise, you'd have to go to a RedBox (are those still a thing?), or gods-forbid an actual movie theater. Yeah, let me pay almost twice as much (for one movie!) to drive to a location to watch a movie on someone else's schedule, that I can't pause, that's front-loaded with tons of commercials, in room full of people that can't STFU.
Talk about old-fashioned!
Many humans walking down the street can pull this plane with just their bare hands and a rope, which just goes to show how far behind ICE vehicles are when it comes to range, range, and duration.
I get that you don't care for electric vehicles, but they are not without their qualities. Off the top of my head: They pollute far less. The energy required to make them work can be derived multiple ways (steam, natural gas, coal, geothermal, hydro, wind, solar, nuclear fission, someday fusion). Some of the ways the energy can be derived are clean and renewable. They have far fewer parts. They don't suffer from as much and/or the same kinds of wear (mostly thinking of engine heat here). They're quiet. They make you far less dependent upon the whims of oil-producing nations (being able to take care of yourself is a good thing).
So it's really a matter of what's important to you. Perhaps you pull 787-9 Dreamliners all day long and an electric vehicle just isn't going to cut it for you. That's fine. There are all kinds of people with all kinds of needs and priorities. It's great we live in a diverse world where many/all of our needs can be met.
I list my immediate family, close friends, and necessary work contacts in my favorites list. I then set my Android phone to silent, unless it's a call, message, or email from someone on the list. The only suck is when I'm streaming music and the incoming unknown caller silently interrupts it. It's a small price to pay though.
Hasn't it already been tested and settled (in the US) as a First Amendment right? People are free to photograph and shoot video of public spaces that have no expectation of privacy.
Planet Earth: pretty public.
So it sounds like the ad was scraping the form fields, or doing a kind of man-in-the-middle attack on the form page? It's the acceptance of active advertising that opened the door for this type of behavior. The promise of highly targeted advertising based on tracking users across not only your site but the whole of the internet, gets content providers salivating at higher ad rates and willing to let XYZ ad network to run whatever scripts they want on their site.
How many more stories like this are we going to have to endure before someone figures out a better way to do this? I personally don't feel that anything other than a static image is acceptable for web advertising, and since that seems ever unlikely, I'll happily run script, tracking, and ad blockers and not lose sleep about any content provider's ad-based revenue model...like Slashdot/BizX.
What other kinds of weapons systems might the Pentagon pursue in the future, thinking they can always turn to Google to solve those niggling ethical issues...like killing completely innocent people in the name of collateral damage? This could force Google and its employees into the "Well if we don't, the new mega-bad weapon will kill civilians...we have to" way of thinking. It's not Google's job to ensure the safety or accuracy of weapons systems unless they want it to be. And at least some of the employees clearly don't.
Of course, minimizing civilian casualties should be a priority. A great way to start, is not to not bomb a populated area! But if you must, then sure, either hire engineers in-house or outsource. But if you do the latter, it's up to those contractors as a company, and their employees on a personal level, to decide what of the world's problems they want to apply their abilities and education solving.
They might feel their time is better spent solving a problem that may save millions of lives (like sanitary water), and not the hundreds or thousands of lives accidentally killed in combat.
What is a "magazine"?
The difference between a "digital magazine" and a web site is the ads are always full-page in the magazine.
I believe this is true, and what happens when you allow a bunch of 20-somethings attempt to bring products to market. While it's possible they are reasonably intelligent, they lack vision, drive, wisdom, and long-term focus. Google isn't too bad at developing technologies, but they are utterly abysmal at delivering those technologies to consumers.
It's an ethos that appears to driven by the Silicon Valley mentality of constantly throwing things at the wall. I recently heard that no one in the valley takes you seriously unless you've had at least two failed startups. Everyone wants to know how many things you've thrown at the wall, how many stuck, how many didn't.
No one cares that you spent countless amounts of time and money very cleverly building tech that can't clear regulatory hurdles, solves problems no one has, isn't affordable by the time it hits the market, or has no real-world applications.
Hey, you built a wall of unusable tech blobs? We love those! Here's a $3M salary to sit in an open-air office not too far from the ping-pong table, just to think about things that we could possibly monetize.
Yeah, I was wondering why not just surround the thing in a small Faraday cage and call it a day.
I would only buy from an online tailor called Pendel and Braithwaite. "Tailor of Panama" reference. Great movie.
Bah! I was just about to make this joke. I didn't know that xkcd already beat me to it!
The rented software model is why I'm still using Creative Suite CS3. I'll bite the bullet eventually, and maybe this has worked out just fine for Adobe, but it kept me from doing any upgrades so there's at a couple of lost sales. Adobe's position is pretty locked right now with so much infrastructure and workflow built around their products, but had anyone made a serious move into the space, I think they would have been given a hard look as a replacement.
So that's my take. It's easy to build a business using rented tools, but it's tough to sustain one because you are at the mercy of the company who owns the tools. I will always look for alternatives first. It's usually companies who have the hubris to believe that their products are irreplaceable that take a fall. While they seemed to have managed the transition, Adobe should still be mindful of the fall of QuarkXPress.
You have to accept the mission before you can be told what it is.
I think I'd prefer a metaphorical language like that of the Tamarians:
"Darmok and Jalad at Tenagra."
Federal law -> state law -> local law
Yes, but only if the higher level of government has the legal authority to enact such laws over the lower level, and while the FCC is a federal agency, it does not have specific legal authority to overturn state laws. This lack of authority was unanimously upheld in the US Court of Appeals for the Sixth Circuit in August of 2016.
At that time Tom Wheeler was chair and was trying to block states and municipalities from enacting local laws that prevented the growth of municipal broadband. All of the ISPs and their congress-critter shills rushed to the defense of states' rights at that time.
In fact, Section 2 of a bill introduced to amend section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 stated: It is the sense of Congress that the Federal Communications Commission does not have the authority under section 706 of the Telecommunications Act of 1996 (47 U.S.C. 1302) to prevent any State from implementing any law of such State with respect to the provision of broadband Internet access service (as defined in section 8.11 of title 47, Code of Federal Regulations) by such State or a municipality or other political subdivision of such State.
That was written by Rep. Marsha Blackburn(R-Tenn) who, I'll point out, has telecom services as one of her top-10 industry contributors. At that time, ISPs were desperate to try to frame this as a political issue to gain support, but 3/4 of all municipal broadband projects at that time where voted into action by communities that voted Republican. That's because whether you ride a donkey or an elephant, we all want fast internet and if the ISPs aren't going to provide it where we live, we should be able to do it ourselves. It was a serious issue for rural America, where ISPs do not want to invest. But rural America is also largely right-leaning, so those citizens weren't having it and demanding muni-broadband.
In the end though, Wheeler and rural America lost. The ISPs were able to make the case that the FCC did not have the right to stop the states...maybe rightly so. The citizens of a state can always vote to enact or repeal state laws they feel do not serve their interests.
So here we are again. The ISPs are once-again trying to frame this as political issue, with more success this time I might add. Only now, they are against the states' rights they so gleefully endorsed two years ago. Judging from the rhetoric I've seen, most of those against the principles of Net Neutrality do not actually understand Net Neutrality, and simply regurgitate the talking points they hear on Fox News. So it's not inconceivable that the states will lose here, despite the massive flip-flop and obvious hypocrisy.