We have reached an interesting point in computing history, where software trends are socially driven. In the past software was for function (balancing the checkbook, word processing, business, education), or entertainment (games, consuming information). Games in and of themselves tend to be trends, like other forms of entertainment such as movies. People play the game until they "beat" it or become bored of it, new games that are (supposedly) better in some way or another come along, people then play those games.
Social software is different, in that the software itself isn't the focus, but the connectivity it provides socially. The quality (or lack thereof) of the software has no impact on its popularity - as long as the software is basically functional and usable. Do you think that one single Facebook user chose to be on Facebook because of the features of their software? Of course not.
Snapchat had one major draw that really kickstarted it. Supposedly, the messages weren't saved and went away after a brief amount of time. That was right around the time there were several high profile cases of high school students getting in trouble for sending pictures / messages that were inappropriate to one another using FB Messenger and texting. Snapchat seemed like a solution to that, so youth adopted it as a way of having privacy among themselves. The other thing it had going for it was that it *wasn't* FB, and their parents (especially the moms) were totally embracing FB. Typical youth to do something different than their parents just to be different.
Snapchat's days are numbered. As are Facebook's (although FB has the money and a more generic, all-encompassing platform so it will hang on for several more years). The social software generations are vastly shorter than human generations, as indicated by massive trends that have already come and gone (Myspace, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc). It's safe to say that within the next three years something will come along that will be the end of Snapchat. Whenever your platform is based on the "anti" anything (doesn't matter if we're talking about styles of music or clothing or software), the days are numbered until the whims of people change again.
Let's assume the networking devices were compromised, and they were part of the private intranet on which trade secrets were transmitted. The data still has to be transmitted off of that network somehow. That would certainly raise major flags with these kinds of tech companies. Unless.... it required some physical connection to the device, such as inserting a USB drive to download data directly.
You jumped the shark with this one. Only someone vested in a company (or working for an advertising company contracted by said company) would say something like this...
Apple's dominance on the high-end laptop space looks shakier than ever, because Microsoft's story is incredibly compelling.
Real people don't talk about market "spaces", describe the totally dominant competition as "shaky", or describe some pieces of hardware as an "incredibly compelling" "story".
When killing helpless children trapped and cowering in a room, any firearm short of a muzzle loader would suffice. There was no tactical advantage to using a gun with feature X, Y or Z because the psycho who committed this atrocity never engaged in a gunfight with anyone.
Besides black on black and gang related killing, which is an entirely different topic, the primary cause for tragedies like Sandy Hook is a complete failure in the treatment and management of people with severe mental disorders.
Google Voice is one of the main gateways being abused. They use Google Voice to get a number in a specific region, then robocall people in that area from that number. Also, for me, at least 95% of calls to my cell are telemarketers. They are using some middleman robocalling system that initiates the call via Google Voice then does some filtering, requiring the person being called to interact in some way and confirm. Then that middleman service calls the actual telemarketer. The telemarketer, legally speaking, is in the clear because they did not initiate the call - they were called. The middleman is probably not in the US and is a fly by night operation that is receiving kickbacks from the telemarketers in some way.
Of course this tech is being spun to "save the children", but it is also used to screen all advertisements that run on FB. They do not want ads to contain much text - less than 20% of the area of the ad image can be text. This is detected automatically using the technology described, and their system will stop the ad if it doesn't meet that requirement.
We've found that images with less than 20% text perform better. To create a better experience for audiences and advertisers, ads that run on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network are subject to a review process that looks at the amount of image text used in your ad. Based on this review, ads with higher amounts of image text may not be shown. Keep in mind that some ad images may qualify for an exception. For example, book covers, album covers and product images usually qualify for an exception.
And this is a perfect example of politicians writing a law to "fix" a problem by giving in to lobbyists, and instead they make a bigger problem. Can't import raw earth metals? Fine, just move all manufacturing to the source of the rare earth metals. Always loopholes waiting to be exploited when myopic politicians listen to even more myopic lobbyists.
Because they want to track what you do and when, and show you dynamic ads for every distinct page view (the search results may stay the same, but the ads do not, as ads may get shown more times than what was paid for if they are cached). But yes, all of this complexity should be totally unnecessary. They just found a way to continue exerting the level of control and tracking they want while not harming performance quite as bad.
If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy.
I'm blowing mod points to reply to your post, but it's important to point out that in this case you are flat out wrong. This story has been in the national news for a month since she went missing. It has been in the national news all along. When her body was found yesterday that was in the national news. Today it was revealed someone was charged with her murder, and it was an illegal immigrant.
You get the idea. Google shows 2.7 million hits from news sources for her name. Just pointing out you have made a massive assumption ("By just reporting every crime committed by an illegal they can create the impression that all illegal immigrants are murderous") based on totally incorrect information ("If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy.")
I have bought ads on Facebook for my project. When you are creating an ad you specify your audience. This can be geographic and / or demographic. As you refine your audience Facebook will show you the potential reach. If the reach is too low (say 70-80 year old males in zipcode 90210) it will warn you that your audience is too narrow and your ad may not reach many people, conversely if it is too large it will also warn you. So it is just a ballpark tool to give an idea of how your filtering has narrowed down the potential audience.
Here's the thing - they don't bill by the potential audience. They bill by the actual impressions and responses served (supposedly, but that is an entirely different matter). So the point is that inaccuracies in the potential audience does not have a financial impact on the person buying ads either way. In fact, if anything, inflated numbers means you will spend *less* money on your ads, because your audience is smaller than you thought and thus FB can't display as many ads.
people all of a sudden start signing up for newsletters
I don't know that people are actually signing up, but the news organizations have big motivation for wanting this be adopted. There are, at least, two reasons for doing this. The first is news companies (especially print based) are switching from subscription based monetization to purely ads based. They are desperately trying to get back to a degree of repeat viewing / consistent readership like in the old days, where they could reach a specific group of people regularly. They want some consistent baseline of readership that also matches the viewpoints and political leaning of their news. This keeps the turmoil and complaining down, since they are showing the news from the angle their readership wants to hear, and provides a baseline of views and thus ad revenue they can count on. In this day and age things are driven by viral sharing, which they have zero control over, and news brokers like Google News that use one representative article for a topic, and whichever news organization that is gets the traffic. No business wants their traffic coming from 3rd parties they have absolutely no control over.
The second is Facebook. Facebook Pages were meant to address this kind of thing, at least within the Facebook walled garden. You could set up a page and post content to it. People like your content, so they like and follow your page. Then they see your content regularly. The problem is Facebook has totally screwed over that concept and thus the content publishers. I have pages with thousands of likes. I can post to the page, and that post will be seen by 20 people. Out of several thousand. People that specifically opted into and liked and followed that page. Facebook turned its back on content publishers a few years ago in their algorithms, and have made the matter worse by threatening to move ALL content from pages off of the user's main news stream (unless the publisher pays to have the post shown to the user). See this article. That is scaring the crap out of content publishers whose readership migrated into Facebook and then began consuming their content there. They are preemptively trying to migrate back into a technology that gives them direct access to their readership again.
So, the newsletter / subscription thing (which uses relatively new HTML Push technology, which is why this is a "new" thing we're seeing) is not actually a bad idea, because it allows the news organizations to, for free (on both ends - theirs and the reader's) reach a consistent readership again, without having to rely on third parties like Facebook or Google News or random viral sharing to reach their audience.
This would be like paying a $20/month fee and getting a card that will pay for all the gas your car ever needs.
For most people, gas for their car is a necessity. Going to the movies is not. Besides selling analytic data, I believe they hoped to make money like Netflix did back before they had streaming. I paid for Netflix monthly, and after I while I just couldn't be bothered to keep track of what DVDs I had and what was in my queue and keep circulating them fast enough. So I only ended up, on average over many months, viewing a few movies a month. It would have been cheaper for me to rent them locally.
If everyone had MoviePass, like it was required car insurance or something, then it would pan out. We could all pay $10 a month and watch movies as often as we wanted. Because most of the public really doesn't have time to watch more than a couple movies a month anyway.
However, what has happened is those people that really do watch a lot of movies are jumping all over this, and not the average person. The average American watches 5 movies a year at the theater. That would work out to $24 a movie if a person was paying $10 a month for Movie Pass, but those people using Movie Pass are watching way more than 5 movies a year - probably at least 5 movies a month.
simulate the entire organism at the biochemical level
I call BS. Every chemical reaction in the entire organism is simulated? Cells replicate? Proteins fold and unfold? Enzymes trigger chemical reactions? The organisms reproduce? Suuuuuure.
Even if there was a 100% tax on the electricity used to power EVs, it would still be cheaper!
Which means the tax would be more than that. The tax must be equal to the current tax or the roads won't be funded. This "bubble" will burst as the percentage of EVs on the road cross some threshold and those vehicles must pay an equivalent amount of tax as a ICE vehicle.
Trucking companies are effectively being subsidized by everyone else.
And so the cost of goods will go up (because obviously the trucking companies will pass transportation costs directly on to those who need things shipped), which will result in trucking companies being subsidized by everyone else.
Using different terminology to try and frame these things in a different light doesn't change the facts. Vehicles using roads will have to pay taxes to have those roads built and maintained. Doesn't matter if EV, ICE or powered by mice running on exercise wheels.
If by "Downtown Charlotte" you mean a tiny, tiny area of only 12 x 12 city blocks, then you're correct. However suburban sprawl doesn't begin to be a factor when a city is still only 12 x 12 blocks. Something else happened (or more than likely something didn't happen) very early on in the city's development to result in this level of disorganization.
Look for yourself if you don't believe me. Check out "Morehead St", "Central Ave", "N Graham St", "Rt 49" - these seem to be the seeds of disorganization that led to the helter-skelter arrangement of their streets.
I believe one thing that is happening is targeting ads based on the client IP address. If the IP address is that in the range of a typical ISP, then there is a very good chance that all of the devices with that IP address are in the same household, and targeting ads across devices would be profitable. About a week ago my girlfriend and I were talking about my old camper, and the work we did towards restoring it. She googled "vintage campers" on her cell phone, and on my laptop I had googled for my exact make and model camper. A little bit later I used my cell phone, and when I opened Facebook, it took me directly to a promoted Facebook Group called "Vintage Campers" and a listing of someone selling my model camper.
So, search terms and websites visited on two different devices somehow funneled into Facebook, which then showed me a Facebook group and post on a third device. It was so seamless I almost overlooked it, but the software developer in me quickly realized something deeper was going on as I had not done any searching on my phone at all (or within FB for that matter), nor did I use the term "vintage" in my searches on my laptop.
My point in all of this is it is trivial for ad services to put one and one together and deliver targeted ads in this way, and we could easily have misinterpreted it that my phone was "listening" to our conversation since I never did any of that searching on my phone yet it targeted me with ads. In these anecdotal reports, very likely one or the other person in the conversation was online and searching in regards to the topic at hand, and then ads were pushed to other devices due to using the same IP address.
TFA does not give any actual numbers - only relative percentages. It is possible Alexa's user base has actually grown, but since China now has some sort of similar service, the global market share percentage of Alex will have dropped. That is a pointless statistic, especially if Amazon has not been targeting China in the first place.
Because China still generates plastics from raw materials cheaper than recycled plastic can be processed. If it was cost effective (with AI / robotics or otherwise) then someone would be doing it.
So random control inputs are fired over and over until the image of the gameplay the AI is doing very closely matches that of an expert human player. There really is no intelligence to this at all. If the slightest bit of randomness occurs in the game then it will fail, because that would not match the game the human played originally.
the agent was able to exceed average human players
Uh, that's because the "average human" would suck at these kinds of games, and the AI has merely copied the exact gameplay of an expert human who played it originally. So an expert human at a given game exceeds the average human. I hope it didn't take too much research money to come to that conclusion.
Slashdot Mirror
We have reached an interesting point in computing history, where software trends are socially driven. In the past software was for function (balancing the checkbook, word processing, business, education), or entertainment (games, consuming information). Games in and of themselves tend to be trends, like other forms of entertainment such as movies. People play the game until they "beat" it or become bored of it, new games that are (supposedly) better in some way or another come along, people then play those games.
Social software is different, in that the software itself isn't the focus, but the connectivity it provides socially. The quality (or lack thereof) of the software has no impact on its popularity - as long as the software is basically functional and usable. Do you think that one single Facebook user chose to be on Facebook because of the features of their software? Of course not.
Snapchat had one major draw that really kickstarted it. Supposedly, the messages weren't saved and went away after a brief amount of time. That was right around the time there were several high profile cases of high school students getting in trouble for sending pictures / messages that were inappropriate to one another using FB Messenger and texting. Snapchat seemed like a solution to that, so youth adopted it as a way of having privacy among themselves. The other thing it had going for it was that it *wasn't* FB, and their parents (especially the moms) were totally embracing FB. Typical youth to do something different than their parents just to be different.
Snapchat's days are numbered. As are Facebook's (although FB has the money and a more generic, all-encompassing platform so it will hang on for several more years). The social software generations are vastly shorter than human generations, as indicated by massive trends that have already come and gone (Myspace, AIM, Yahoo Messenger, ICQ, etc). It's safe to say that within the next three years something will come along that will be the end of Snapchat. Whenever your platform is based on the "anti" anything (doesn't matter if we're talking about styles of music or clothing or software), the days are numbered until the whims of people change again.
Let's assume the networking devices were compromised, and they were part of the private intranet on which trade secrets were transmitted. The data still has to be transmitted off of that network somehow. That would certainly raise major flags with these kinds of tech companies. Unless.... it required some physical connection to the device, such as inserting a USB drive to download data directly.
a Super Mario film produced by Illumination Entertainment (Minions, Despicable Me).
Why not Sony? Ha!
You jumped the shark with this one. Only someone vested in a company (or working for an advertising company contracted by said company) would say something like this...
Apple's dominance on the high-end laptop space looks shakier than ever, because Microsoft's story is incredibly compelling.
Real people don't talk about market "spaces", describe the totally dominant competition as "shaky", or describe some pieces of hardware as an "incredibly compelling" "story".
Fortunately, California hasn't figured out how to legislate the Nobel Prize yet.
When killing helpless children trapped and cowering in a room, any firearm short of a muzzle loader would suffice. There was no tactical advantage to using a gun with feature X, Y or Z because the psycho who committed this atrocity never engaged in a gunfight with anyone.
Besides black on black and gang related killing, which is an entirely different topic, the primary cause for tragedies like Sandy Hook is a complete failure in the treatment and management of people with severe mental disorders.
Google Voice is one of the main gateways being abused. They use Google Voice to get a number in a specific region, then robocall people in that area from that number.
Also, for me, at least 95% of calls to my cell are telemarketers. They are using some middleman robocalling system that initiates the call via Google Voice then does some filtering, requiring the person being called to interact in some way and confirm. Then that middleman service calls the actual telemarketer. The telemarketer, legally speaking, is in the clear because they did not initiate the call - they were called. The middleman is probably not in the US and is a fly by night operation that is receiving kickbacks from the telemarketers in some way.
If they're talking 15 percent of infinity then I'm all in!!
Of course this tech is being spun to "save the children", but it is also used to screen all advertisements that run on FB. They do not want ads to contain much text - less than 20% of the area of the ad image can be text. This is detected automatically using the technology described, and their system will stop the ad if it doesn't meet that requirement.
We've found that images with less than 20% text perform better.
To create a better experience for audiences and advertisers, ads that run on Facebook, Instagram and Audience Network are subject to a review process that looks at the amount of image text used in your ad. Based on this review, ads with higher amounts of image text may not be shown. Keep in mind that some ad images may qualify for an exception. For example, book covers, album covers and product images usually qualify for an exception.
https://www.facebook.com/busin...
And from the blurb:
detect text that is present, at which point the characters are placed inside a bounding box
Thus the area of the bounding boxes (after performing a union) can be at most 20% of the area of the image.
And this is a perfect example of politicians writing a law to "fix" a problem by giving in to lobbyists, and instead they make a bigger problem. Can't import raw earth metals? Fine, just move all manufacturing to the source of the rare earth metals. Always loopholes waiting to be exploited when myopic politicians listen to even more myopic lobbyists.
Because they want to track what you do and when, and show you dynamic ads for every distinct page view (the search results may stay the same, but the ads do not, as ads may get shown more times than what was paid for if they are cached). But yes, all of this complexity should be totally unnecessary. They just found a way to continue exerting the level of control and tracking they want while not harming performance quite as bad.
If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy.
I'm blowing mod points to reply to your post, but it's important to point out that in this case you are flat out wrong. This story has been in the national news for a month since she went missing. It has been in the national news all along. When her body was found yesterday that was in the national news. Today it was revealed someone was charged with her murder, and it was an illegal immigrant.
This was a month ago (People magazine): https://people.com/crime/unive...
Three weeks ago (Fox News): http://www.foxnews.com/transcr...
Three weeks ago (CNN): https://www.cnn.com/2018/07/26...
This was two weeks ago (USA Today): https://www.usatoday.com/story...
You get the idea. Google shows 2.7 million hits from news sources for her name. Just pointing out you have made a massive assumption ("By just reporting every crime committed by an illegal they can create the impression that all illegal immigrants are murderous") based on totally incorrect information ("If the murderer had been a citizen, I really doubt the site would have seen it as newsworthy.")
I have bought ads on Facebook for my project. When you are creating an ad you specify your audience. This can be geographic and / or demographic. As you refine your audience Facebook will show you the potential reach. If the reach is too low (say 70-80 year old males in zipcode 90210) it will warn you that your audience is too narrow and your ad may not reach many people, conversely if it is too large it will also warn you. So it is just a ballpark tool to give an idea of how your filtering has narrowed down the potential audience.
Here's the thing - they don't bill by the potential audience. They bill by the actual impressions and responses served (supposedly, but that is an entirely different matter). So the point is that inaccuracies in the potential audience does not have a financial impact on the person buying ads either way. In fact, if anything, inflated numbers means you will spend *less* money on your ads, because your audience is smaller than you thought and thus FB can't display as many ads.
people all of a sudden start signing up for newsletters
I don't know that people are actually signing up, but the news organizations have big motivation for wanting this be adopted. There are, at least, two reasons for doing this. The first is news companies (especially print based) are switching from subscription based monetization to purely ads based. They are desperately trying to get back to a degree of repeat viewing / consistent readership like in the old days, where they could reach a specific group of people regularly. They want some consistent baseline of readership that also matches the viewpoints and political leaning of their news. This keeps the turmoil and complaining down, since they are showing the news from the angle their readership wants to hear, and provides a baseline of views and thus ad revenue they can count on. In this day and age things are driven by viral sharing, which they have zero control over, and news brokers like Google News that use one representative article for a topic, and whichever news organization that is gets the traffic. No business wants their traffic coming from 3rd parties they have absolutely no control over.
The second is Facebook. Facebook Pages were meant to address this kind of thing, at least within the Facebook walled garden. You could set up a page and post content to it. People like your content, so they like and follow your page. Then they see your content regularly. The problem is Facebook has totally screwed over that concept and thus the content publishers. I have pages with thousands of likes. I can post to the page, and that post will be seen by 20 people. Out of several thousand. People that specifically opted into and liked and followed that page. Facebook turned its back on content publishers a few years ago in their algorithms, and have made the matter worse by threatening to move ALL content from pages off of the user's main news stream (unless the publisher pays to have the post shown to the user). See this article. That is scaring the crap out of content publishers whose readership migrated into Facebook and then began consuming their content there. They are preemptively trying to migrate back into a technology that gives them direct access to their readership again.
So, the newsletter / subscription thing (which uses relatively new HTML Push technology, which is why this is a "new" thing we're seeing) is not actually a bad idea, because it allows the news organizations to, for free (on both ends - theirs and the reader's) reach a consistent readership again, without having to rely on third parties like Facebook or Google News or random viral sharing to reach their audience.
This still must pale in comparison to the loss of sleep due to the advent of television.
This would be like paying a $20/month fee and getting a card that will pay for all the gas your car ever needs.
For most people, gas for their car is a necessity. Going to the movies is not. Besides selling analytic data, I believe they hoped to make money like Netflix did back before they had streaming. I paid for Netflix monthly, and after I while I just couldn't be bothered to keep track of what DVDs I had and what was in my queue and keep circulating them fast enough. So I only ended up, on average over many months, viewing a few movies a month. It would have been cheaper for me to rent them locally.
If everyone had MoviePass, like it was required car insurance or something, then it would pan out. We could all pay $10 a month and watch movies as often as we wanted. Because most of the public really doesn't have time to watch more than a couple movies a month anyway.
However, what has happened is those people that really do watch a lot of movies are jumping all over this, and not the average person. The average American watches 5 movies a year at the theater. That would work out to $24 a movie if a person was paying $10 a month for Movie Pass, but those people using Movie Pass are watching way more than 5 movies a year - probably at least 5 movies a month.
simulate the entire organism at the biochemical level
I call BS. Every chemical reaction in the entire organism is simulated? Cells replicate? Proteins fold and unfold? Enzymes trigger chemical reactions? The organisms reproduce? Suuuuuure.
Even if there was a 100% tax on the electricity used to power EVs, it would still be cheaper!
Which means the tax would be more than that. The tax must be equal to the current tax or the roads won't be funded. This "bubble" will burst as the percentage of EVs on the road cross some threshold and those vehicles must pay an equivalent amount of tax as a ICE vehicle.
Trucking companies are effectively being subsidized by everyone else.
And so the cost of goods will go up (because obviously the trucking companies will pass transportation costs directly on to those who need things shipped), which will result in trucking companies being subsidized by everyone else.
Using different terminology to try and frame these things in a different light doesn't change the facts. Vehicles using roads will have to pay taxes to have those roads built and maintained. Doesn't matter if EV, ICE or powered by mice running on exercise wheels.
If by "Downtown Charlotte" you mean a tiny, tiny area of only 12 x 12 city blocks, then you're correct. However suburban sprawl doesn't begin to be a factor when a city is still only 12 x 12 blocks. Something else happened (or more than likely something didn't happen) very early on in the city's development to result in this level of disorganization.
Look for yourself if you don't believe me. Check out "Morehead St", "Central Ave", "N Graham St", "Rt 49" - these seem to be the seeds of disorganization that led to the helter-skelter arrangement of their streets.
https://www.google.com/maps/@3...
When he blocked the rock with his hand the rock was rendered over top of his hand, not behind it. That totally breaks the immersiveness of the AR.
I believe one thing that is happening is targeting ads based on the client IP address. If the IP address is that in the range of a typical ISP, then there is a very good chance that all of the devices with that IP address are in the same household, and targeting ads across devices would be profitable. About a week ago my girlfriend and I were talking about my old camper, and the work we did towards restoring it. She googled "vintage campers" on her cell phone, and on my laptop I had googled for my exact make and model camper. A little bit later I used my cell phone, and when I opened Facebook, it took me directly to a promoted Facebook Group called "Vintage Campers" and a listing of someone selling my model camper.
So, search terms and websites visited on two different devices somehow funneled into Facebook, which then showed me a Facebook group and post on a third device. It was so seamless I almost overlooked it, but the software developer in me quickly realized something deeper was going on as I had not done any searching on my phone at all (or within FB for that matter), nor did I use the term "vintage" in my searches on my laptop.
My point in all of this is it is trivial for ad services to put one and one together and deliver targeted ads in this way, and we could easily have misinterpreted it that my phone was "listening" to our conversation since I never did any of that searching on my phone yet it targeted me with ads. In these anecdotal reports, very likely one or the other person in the conversation was online and searching in regards to the topic at hand, and then ads were pushed to other devices due to using the same IP address.
The parachutes were not on the plane. They were provided to him as part of the ransom and they mistakenly gave him a dummy chute.
TFA does not give any actual numbers - only relative percentages. It is possible Alexa's user base has actually grown, but since China now has some sort of similar service, the global market share percentage of Alex will have dropped. That is a pointless statistic, especially if Amazon has not been targeting China in the first place.
Because China still generates plastics from raw materials cheaper than recycled plastic can be processed. If it was cost effective (with AI / robotics or otherwise) then someone would be doing it.
So random control inputs are fired over and over until the image of the gameplay the AI is doing very closely matches that of an expert human player. There really is no intelligence to this at all. If the slightest bit of randomness occurs in the game then it will fail, because that would not match the game the human played originally.
the agent was able to exceed average human players
Uh, that's because the "average human" would suck at these kinds of games, and the AI has merely copied the exact gameplay of an expert human who played it originally. So an expert human at a given game exceeds the average human. I hope it didn't take too much research money to come to that conclusion.