The images appear to just be.gif type images originating from Bing. There's even a bing logo in the corner of the search window. I suspect it's similar to searching plain old Bing for.gif's. Even in safe search mode porn occasionally comes up.
I see the carpooling part, but the summary also mentions charging fares, not splitting costs. Presumably the car owner is for hire and accepts them, Google just uses something along the lines of "Uber Pool" and "Lyft Line" which also matches riders going in the same direction. Which isn't a differentiator at all, as the article claims.
Being that Uber is already a minimum wage job outside of the weekend bar hours (Fri and Sat 5pm-3am averages $22 hr gross in the MSP metro and is the only time you can actually make decent money), I don't know what they have up their sleeve to make it even cheaper.
Sailfish didn't strike me as too exciting. Similar lock screen to Android, and Apple's familiar grid of icon's home screen interface. At least Palm/webOS looked different.
I dunno, I've seen a cop tear a window out with his bare hands. Look on youtube at "Man refuses to give license, gets tazed" uploaded by instajustice, at 2:13. Crazy.
My daily PC is a Hackintosh, and I've yet to have a kernel panic, unexplained crashing and freezing, or anything like that since I built it over Christmas break. My experience has been that it just works. Everything works as it should... sound, sleep, LAN, Bluetooth, etc. I had some of the stuff already, and some I bought used on eBay. Put it together for under $900 out of pocket. I'm running....
Intel Core i5-4590 (6M Cache, 3.3 GHz) Gigabyte H97 Extreme Multi Graphics Support UEFI DualBIOS Micro ATX DDR3 1600 LGA 1150 Motherboard Crucial Ballistix Tactical 16GB DDR3 1600 MT/s (PC3-12800) EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB SC GAMING, Silent Cooling Graphics Card Samsung 850 EVO 5000GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD Boot drive Thermaltake CORE V21 Black Extreme Micro ATX Cube Chassis Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU Cooler OSXWIFI Combo WiFi and Bluetooth PCIe Card Corsair 750 watt Power Supply 4x 2TB WD Red drives in software raid for a storage volume 24" ASUS 1080p Monitor
OS X El Capitan – Latest version, updates via app store have not been an issue (even though the combo updater is recommended)
UniBeast – Free (Registration required)
MultiBeast – Free (Registration required)
Trust me, driving for Uber is indeed a scam. "Hustle" definitely applies, it's just the driver getting scammed, not doing the scamming:-) But it's better than selling Herbalife...
A lot of times, "knockoffs" aren't even that. If you take a knock-off to be a close approximation in appearance to a known brand, in some cases you'd be wrong. In some cases they don't even have to design or reverse engineer the product. "Second Shifting" is a thing too. A chinese contractor that has an order for 20,000 widgets already has the tooling setup and the materials at hand. It's no problem for the night shift to keep the machines running for their own private production run of an identical product (but often using cheaper then specified materials) and just sell the result on the gray market. No approximation or development needed.
I'm sure Uber could be fined if they let a known unapproved vehicle on their network and let a customer take a ride in an uninspected vehicle too. No different. The difference here is that Uber doesn't allow non-approved drivers on the road, whereas Air BnB has no problem listing and renting out unapproved rooms on their platform.
If Uber and Lyft can do it, ABnB can do it. In Minneapolis/Saint Paul, all TNC drivers are required to present their car for inspection annually to a city designated inspector and pass the same automotive inspection that the taxis and limos go through. It's $50. It's an analog piece of paper with no on-line process available. You get the form, you physically take it to an inspector, have your car inspected, and you pay the fee. You must carry it and have it in your glovebox anytime a police officer asks for it. It's not a big deal. Air BnB should have no problem with this either.
I used to track all my DoorDash deliveries to a T. That gig earns $11.21 an hour in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul market on average. I'd be happy to share my data spreadsheet with anyone interested.
I too am running an El Capitan Hackintosh. I followed the guide and parts list on 9to5mac by Jenn Benjamin, except I used the OSXWIFI card which is natively supported instead of the wifi and bluetooth dongle he recommended. Everything, I mean, everything works as it should. From continuity, handoff, sleep, sound, wake on lan, everything. I bought some parts used on eBay (cpu, ram, cpu cooler) and made out for under $900
It probably varies by street and maybe even county, but in St Paul MN we were assessed for road repaving of our street, new l.e.d streetlamps, and sidewalk widening. $17k added to our own property tax, to be paid out over the next 20 years. No HOA, Not a gated community. Just a simple 900sq ft starter house in the city.
There was an interesting guest on Planet Money a few weeks back. They studied the whole notion of "retraining" and education when jobs go away (mining jobs, buggy whip jobs, whatever). Turns out people aren't as flexible as a "rational person" economics theroy would have you believe. Generally the real person - even with retraining - never finds equally paying employment for the rest of their life, and has financial obligtions in line with the old lifestyle which almost always results in spending the rest of your life struggling or entering bankruptcy.
Austin Limo's and Taxis are already fingerprinted. All they wanted was for Lyft and Uber to make a one time 30 minute visit to get fingerprinted like the other drivers.
This is not about Austin getting in on Uber and Lyft's cash. It would be a one time fee, and you know it would be paid for by the drivers as independent contractors - just like the required vehicle inspection is, so how is Austin getting in on that sweet, sweet rideshare money?
I disagree about your premise of the quality of the rideshare background checks too. Uber and Lyft background check the input of the phone app - which could be anything. Uber never meets you in person after all. "Borrowing" an identity someone else isn't too hard in that case. At least doing it by fingerprint matches up the human to the background check.
BearTooth and GoTenna are communications companies looking for off-grid comms. I can see why "the company" would be interested in this off the shelf solution. They both pair your Android or iOS devices via Bluetooth to their off-grid communications product.
Beartooth forms a mesh network with other Beartooth units it can "see", operates in the 900mhz band, and offers text private and group messaging, gps sharing, and voice messaging across the mesh network it creates between it's users. It also charges your device via it's onboard battery pack.
GoTenna is more expensive but does less. It offers point to point (meaning the person you want has to be in range of you, there is no mesh network) text communication and gps location sharing. It operates on the MURS bands. The only bonus is that it supposedly offers better battery life than BearTooth, and you can get it at consumer retailers like REI rather than ordering online.
I didn't read the article, but I heard the interview on NPR. Basically his reasoning is this: Cybersecurity is our biggest defense gap. It's clear now that the chinese have stolen designs for expensive weapon systems of ours and we've seen signs that foreign entities have the ability to manipulate our power grid and infrastructure, and possibly the stock market. In this context, building in any weakness at all - even for a seemingly slam dunk case such as terrorism, we should be cautious. In a landscape so woefully filled with security holes, it is more incumbent upon us to protect Americans by tightening security, than gaining a little extra information about some lone wolf shooters.
At the end of the 1990's I worked for one of the phone company "bells" that later became part of Verizon. At the time, customer service could pull up a webpage that had your account password as a field, but in display it was hidden with bullets (HTML input tag, type password IIRC). So all you could do was clear the field, type in a new password for the customer and click update. (The customer was then supposed to use that password to go online and change it to something else). Anyway, some technical support rep on customer service duty picking up an extra shift figured out you could just view that page's source and see the existing password in the clear, since it was the html tag obscuring it and not the database being hashed or anything. Well designed security there:-)
The purpose of this new blockchain is to cut out the Fed and ACH system middlemen (and associated fees) to settle funds between banks. Chase customers may write checks to BoA customers. BoA customers also write checks to Chase (and so on). At the end of each day, banks need to settle up with each other and transfer funds to make up the difference. The distributed ledger will be used for this purpose, where previously settlement funds would be routed through the Fed or the ACH system at a cost.
It will not be exposed in anyway to consumer facing channels, no will it allow you to move bitcoins into or out of your consumer checking account. No does it use Bitcoin as an alternative currency or legitimize it. It's simply using the blockchain technology as a new distributed settlement network to save money. So you can still say "Bitcoin is a failure" as a consumer payments system or alternative currency while at the same time using the technology for a very limited purpose for a very limited number of big banks to swap funds.
Slashdot Mirror
The images appear to just be .gif type images originating from Bing. There's even a bing logo in the corner of the search window. I suspect it's similar to searching plain old Bing for .gif's. Even in safe search mode porn occasionally comes up.
I see the carpooling part, but the summary also mentions charging fares, not splitting costs. Presumably the car owner is for hire and accepts them, Google just uses something along the lines of "Uber Pool" and "Lyft Line" which also matches riders going in the same direction. Which isn't a differentiator at all, as the article claims.
Being that Uber is already a minimum wage job outside of the weekend bar hours (Fri and Sat 5pm-3am averages $22 hr gross in the MSP metro and is the only time you can actually make decent money), I don't know what they have up their sleeve to make it even cheaper.
Sailfish didn't strike me as too exciting. Similar lock screen to Android, and Apple's familiar grid of icon's home screen interface. At least Palm/webOS looked different.
I dunno, I've seen a cop tear a window out with his bare hands. Look on youtube at "Man refuses to give license, gets tazed" uploaded by instajustice, at 2:13. Crazy.
My daily PC is a Hackintosh, and I've yet to have a kernel panic, unexplained crashing and freezing, or anything like that since I built it over Christmas break. My experience has been that it just works. Everything works as it should... sound, sleep, LAN, Bluetooth, etc. I had some of the stuff already, and some I bought used on eBay. Put it together for under $900 out of pocket. I'm running....
Intel Core i5-4590 (6M Cache, 3.3 GHz)
Gigabyte H97 Extreme Multi Graphics Support UEFI DualBIOS Micro ATX DDR3 1600 LGA 1150 Motherboard
Crucial Ballistix Tactical 16GB DDR3 1600 MT/s (PC3-12800)
EVGA GeForce GTX 970 4GB SC GAMING, Silent Cooling Graphics Card
Samsung 850 EVO 5000GB 2.5-Inch SATA III Internal SSD Boot drive
Thermaltake CORE V21 Black Extreme Micro ATX Cube Chassis
Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo CPU Cooler
OSXWIFI Combo WiFi and Bluetooth PCIe Card
Corsair 750 watt Power Supply
4x 2TB WD Red drives in software raid for a storage volume
24" ASUS 1080p Monitor
OS X El Capitan – Latest version, updates via app store have not been an issue (even though the combo updater is recommended)
UniBeast – Free (Registration required)
MultiBeast – Free (Registration required)
Installed with the iMac 14,2 profile
@NBCDelayed . Plenty of comedy last time. Hoping for the same this time :-)
Trust me, driving for Uber is indeed a scam. "Hustle" definitely applies, it's just the driver getting scammed, not doing the scamming :-) But it's better than selling Herbalife...
A lot of times, "knockoffs" aren't even that. If you take a knock-off to be a close approximation in appearance to a known brand, in some cases you'd be wrong. In some cases they don't even have to design or reverse engineer the product. "Second Shifting" is a thing too. A chinese contractor that has an order for 20,000 widgets already has the tooling setup and the materials at hand. It's no problem for the night shift to keep the machines running for their own private production run of an identical product (but often using cheaper then specified materials) and just sell the result on the gray market. No approximation or development needed.
I'm sure Uber could be fined if they let a known unapproved vehicle on their network and let a customer take a ride in an uninspected vehicle too. No different. The difference here is that Uber doesn't allow non-approved drivers on the road, whereas Air BnB has no problem listing and renting out unapproved rooms on their platform.
If Uber and Lyft can do it, ABnB can do it. In Minneapolis/Saint Paul, all TNC drivers are required to present their car for inspection annually to a city designated inspector and pass the same automotive inspection that the taxis and limos go through. It's $50. It's an analog piece of paper with no on-line process available. You get the form, you physically take it to an inspector, have your car inspected, and you pay the fee. You must carry it and have it in your glovebox anytime a police officer asks for it. It's not a big deal. Air BnB should have no problem with this either.
They are almost a direct rip off of "littleBits" which have been out for a couple of years.
I used to track all my DoorDash deliveries to a T. That gig earns $11.21 an hour in the Minneapolis/Saint Paul market on average. I'd be happy to share my data spreadsheet with anyone interested.
I too am running an El Capitan Hackintosh. I followed the guide and parts list on 9to5mac by Jenn Benjamin, except I used the OSXWIFI card which is natively supported instead of the wifi and bluetooth dongle he recommended. Everything, I mean, everything works as it should. From continuity, handoff, sleep, sound, wake on lan, everything. I bought some parts used on eBay (cpu, ram, cpu cooler) and made out for under $900
It probably varies by street and maybe even county, but in St Paul MN we were assessed for road repaving of our street, new l.e.d streetlamps, and sidewalk widening. $17k added to our own property tax, to be paid out over the next 20 years. No HOA, Not a gated community. Just a simple 900sq ft starter house in the city.
There was an interesting guest on Planet Money a few weeks back. They studied the whole notion of "retraining" and education when jobs go away (mining jobs, buggy whip jobs, whatever). Turns out people aren't as flexible as a "rational person" economics theroy would have you believe. Generally the real person - even with retraining - never finds equally paying employment for the rest of their life, and has financial obligtions in line with the old lifestyle which almost always results in spending the rest of your life struggling or entering bankruptcy.
Congress and Zuck will still call for more H1-B's and STEM education in schools, because there's not enough tech talent out there /rollseyes
But...but...but.... there's a shortage of IT workers! If only we had kids coding in school and a focus on STEM training in high school!
Austin Limo's and Taxis are already fingerprinted. All they wanted was for Lyft and Uber to make a one time 30 minute visit to get fingerprinted like the other drivers.
This is not about Austin getting in on Uber and Lyft's cash. It would be a one time fee, and you know it would be paid for by the drivers as independent contractors - just like the required vehicle inspection is, so how is Austin getting in on that sweet, sweet rideshare money?
I disagree about your premise of the quality of the rideshare background checks too. Uber and Lyft background check the input of the phone app - which could be anything. Uber never meets you in person after all. "Borrowing" an identity someone else isn't too hard in that case. At least doing it by fingerprint matches up the human to the background check.
BearTooth and GoTenna are communications companies looking for off-grid comms. I can see why "the company" would be interested in this off the shelf solution. They both pair your Android or iOS devices via Bluetooth to their off-grid communications product.
Beartooth forms a mesh network with other Beartooth units it can "see", operates in the 900mhz band, and offers text private and group messaging, gps sharing, and voice messaging across the mesh network it creates between it's users. It also charges your device via it's onboard battery pack.
GoTenna is more expensive but does less. It offers point to point (meaning the person you want has to be in range of you, there is no mesh network) text communication and gps location sharing. It operates on the MURS bands. The only bonus is that it supposedly offers better battery life than BearTooth, and you can get it at consumer retailers like REI rather than ordering online.
I didn't read the article, but I heard the interview on NPR. Basically his reasoning is this: Cybersecurity is our biggest defense gap. It's clear now that the chinese have stolen designs for expensive weapon systems of ours and we've seen signs that foreign entities have the ability to manipulate our power grid and infrastructure, and possibly the stock market. In this context, building in any weakness at all - even for a seemingly slam dunk case such as terrorism, we should be cautious. In a landscape so woefully filled with security holes, it is more incumbent upon us to protect Americans by tightening security, than gaining a little extra information about some lone wolf shooters.
Back in the 90's, I always though of 'apps' as 'applets' - little utilities that lived in my Apple Menu. Calculator and AfterDark and whatnot...
The migration document clearly shows you can run it self hosted if you choose, as long as your environment supports Node.js
At the end of the 1990's I worked for one of the phone company "bells" that later became part of Verizon. At the time, customer service could pull up a webpage that had your account password as a field, but in display it was hidden with bullets (HTML input tag, type password IIRC). So all you could do was clear the field, type in a new password for the customer and click update. (The customer was then supposed to use that password to go online and change it to something else). Anyway, some technical support rep on customer service duty picking up an extra shift figured out you could just view that page's source and see the existing password in the clear, since it was the html tag obscuring it and not the database being hashed or anything. Well designed security there :-)
The purpose of this new blockchain is to cut out the Fed and ACH system middlemen (and associated fees) to settle funds between banks. Chase customers may write checks to BoA customers. BoA customers also write checks to Chase (and so on). At the end of each day, banks need to settle up with each other and transfer funds to make up the difference. The distributed ledger will be used for this purpose, where previously settlement funds would be routed through the Fed or the ACH system at a cost.
It will not be exposed in anyway to consumer facing channels, no will it allow you to move bitcoins into or out of your consumer checking account. No does it use Bitcoin as an alternative currency or legitimize it. It's simply using the blockchain technology as a new distributed settlement network to save money. So you can still say "Bitcoin is a failure" as a consumer payments system or alternative currency while at the same time using the technology for a very limited purpose for a very limited number of big banks to swap funds.