It depends how you define monarchy. The House of Windsor is a tourist attraction, but they merely represent the more visible parts of a deeply entrenched feudalistic tradition that continues to permeates UK society. The House of Lords is just one example of this. The fact that some guy called the Duke of Westminster owns large parts of central London is another. The special privileges of the City of London is another. I mean, most people have no idea that Winston Churchill was the son of the incredibly wealthy Duke of Marlborough, and was always going to have doors opened for him into the realms of power, and that this sort of thing still continues with the whole Boris-Cameron-Osborne crowd.
None of this is an orchestrated conspiracy though. It is just what you would expect when you never started from scratch (like USA, Australia etc), or had a big clearing out of your ruling class and its institutions (e.g. France, Russia). I just think many British people are so used to these sorts of things that they don't realise that it is not normal that someone from the North without a posh accent grows up believing they can never be prime minister because they weren't born into the right family. In New Zealand/Australia, people genuinely don't have this belief (though it is starting to happen now). Sure they grow out of this ignorance (life is not fair there either) but at least they see it as an injustice, rather than just accepting it as their 'lot in life'.
Yes, it does seem to work well for Germany, though note that the reason they have a proportional system is precisely so that no single party could easily gain total power as in the weimer republic days. It is by design a less 'effective' form of government. My main problem with MMP, from my experiences with it in New Zealand, is that it causes parties to become extremely populist. What I mean by this is that the political discourse gets obsessed with media driven trivial issues (like the current flag debate). Of course you could argue this happens in the UK as well, but actually the govt has some leeway to ignore these things because in the end it is the constituent vote, and hence local issues of local importance, that mostly win elections, rather than winning the popular vote by having a PM with a good smile.
With a two house parliament the UK could potentially mitigate the faults of each system by having a proportional upper 'check' house and retain FPP for the lower house. It would force a government to compromise on its general direction in line with the popular vote, while still being able to pursue a cohesive plan.
Yes, that is the goal. The problem is that physically making stuff is quickly becoming a very low barrier for competition. 20-30 years ago, if you wanted to, say, make furniture, you would need an enormous amount of capital expenditure, a big factory, lots of workers. Now you can buy the machinery (or just outsource it to china) for probably 10% of that cost. It means it is very hard for a big incumbent to maintain large profit margins because a small up-start can jump in and start competing.
Big corporates hate this. The whole idea of being a big corporate is that you can stomp around being wildly inefficient but have so much money you can either crush or buyout anyone who might threaten your position. Reducing competitive barriers to entry scares these people a lot because it may very well expose their incompetence.
So the natural avenue of attack has been to compensate for the loss of scarcity on the physical side with made-up scarcity through this whole notion of 'intellectual property'. First they will get people to accept that someone who admittedly came up with a nice original design, should have this crazy (70 years after their death) monopoly on that design. Then they will expand it to cover things that you would not consider very original at all. Then they will get really sloppy with even checking if there is any originality. Before you know it you will have to have millions of dollars to go to court and invalidate a government-enforced-monopoly if you want to make anything that looks like it could be a chair, which you won't be able to do if you are a small up-start, and so mega-corp goes back to not working very hard and flying around on junkets in corporate jets.
This is the way the world works. What will kill it is the march of technology, and globalisation. The Chinese still don't really care about copyright, and when Westerners realise that they are living in relative poverty because of all these government enforced monopolies that keep a bunch of incompetent lawyers rich, they will get really annoyed. Sadly we are probably a decade or so from that.
That is by design of the First Past the Post electoral system though. I agree that it does sound pretty dumb on the face of it, but it's arguable as to whether the alternatives are that much better. You could have direct democracy, where each bill is put to referendum. This would even be practical with modern technology. But are members of the voting public really going to put effort into understanding the intricacies of complex or niche bills so as to ensure the best outcome for society at large? Maybe, but then you could see many ways this process would just allow big money to hijack the democratic process even more efficiently. It could also lead to a situation where everyone vote for their own self interest, which may create lots of tragedy of the commons like situation.
A more intermediate option is to move to a proportional representation system, such as MMP. The problem this has is that it is possible (and even likely in a partisan environment) for a fringe party to appear and prevent either main party from reaching a majority. This party then holds the balance of power, which can make it impossible for an effective government to form.
Indeed the main argument for FPP is that it allows effective governments to form, and that having an effective government is better than having a proportional one that can't do anything. One of those is good at preserving the status quo, while the other is better at getting things done. I guess which you think is better depends on how bad you think things are now, and whether you have any faith in politician's abilities to improve things.
I think the more immediate problem for the UK is that it still has a bizarre upper house and a far too cosy relationship between the monarchy (and its periphery) and parliament.
This is actually a lot more interesting than might first appear. When doing timed laps such as during qualifying, sure, it is pretty much about just optimising a whole bunch of parameters. I would imagine the superior ability of the driverless car to sense grip and slip on each wheel and create a dynamic map of grip around the track would mean it could quite easily beat a human driver without a lot of 'artificial intelligence'.
However, when wheel to wheel racing it is a whole different story. Unless you have artificial overtaking aids (DRS, boost modes) then overtaking a car that has the same performance as you is essentially a mind game. A common strategy is simply to hound the other driver using the draft to get right on their tail, fill their mirrors, and try to pressure them into making a mistake. This used to be quite common in F1 before we had fuel and tyre restrictions and DRS. It was a real test of a driver's mental strength to have to perform under that sort of direct pressure.
Another way is to play games with the other driver. For example, on a corner that allows loose racing lines, you can try to trick a car you want to overtake into defending on your weaker line, but then once you've lulled them into believing this is the way they always need to defend, you swap it up. Sometimes this may only get you in position to complete the overtake on a subsequent corner, so these types of moves can be very complex.
However, perhaps the most psychological part of racing, is simply the 'how crazy is the other driver' effect. Sometimes wheel to wheel racing is all about playing a game of chicken into a corner. The most common way is you dive in and rely on the driver you are trying to overtake giving you space, even if it is border line as to whether racing rules would require them to do so. You basically say, I want the corner, you either hit me and we both go out, or you let me through. This plays out in really interesting ways, for example in F1 Bottas and Raikonen have been in this mind battle for the last few races. They had a run in earlier in the year where Raikkonen made a move on Bottas and they collided. Bottas was out of the race and Raikkonen essentially got his place. In a subsequent race, Raikkonen tried a similar move and Bottas didn't give him any space, causing them to both get taken out of the race. Bottas actually said after the race that if he'd given Raikkonen space then everyone would just try that pass on him, knowing he is a soft touch.
When we actually have good wheel-to-wheel racing (which sadly F1 has not had for a while now) motorsport does relies heavily on human performance and it's faults. That is still why a lot of fans watch it, and I think this AI car thing really misses that point.
My guess is that Apple will move to a quantum dot LCD on the iPhone 7. The main tangible advantage of these is that they are more efficient than existing displays that use RGB filters, which will mean they can make the phone a bit thinner (or more battery life, but then again this is Apple). They also can have better colour performance, which I imagine Apple will heavily tout, despite most people not really caring.
After that they will move to OLED, since this will allow them to go even thinner.
For the iPhone 7 I imagine they will:
1. get rid of the headphone jack, allowing them to go thinner.
2. finally get rid of the sim card slot, allowing them to go thinner.
3. go back to a square (iPhone 5) style edge design.
4. move to a multi-element camera, which will allow them to remove the camera bulge from their thinner design.
iPhone 7S will probably just have wireless charging after all these years.
What a bunch of idiots. Not just for sharing the same certificate between multiple devices, but for doing this in devices that clearly have mediocre to non-existent firmware read protection. Knowing how many of these products are put together, there is probably some underpaid graduate developer in China who is whoring out the same firmware to any MBA who wants to pay bottom dollar for everything.
I have worked with some pretty poor embedded developers in my time, but none of them would be this stupid. Their own magic number XOR encryption scheme would at least not have been as obvious as a duplicated X.509 cert sitting in firmware.
I know this is off topic, but the reason metal prices plunged is because regulators finally told the investment banks/hedge funds to stop creating bubbles in the commodity markets. Read up about the Goldman Sachs aluminium racket. Basically they just bought up all the market makers in the aluminium industry so that they could artificially control the marginal price of aluminium. It is really quite sickening. Another hedge fund manager did the same with the global coffee market, buying up a huge portion of a year's crop and then holding it back from the market to artificially raise prices.
They deal with that in their summary - stating that they don't believe engineers are recruited for their utility value. My main problem is that they use this hand-wavey statement:
Even if you make extremely generous assumptions, nine times as many terrorists were engineers as you would expect by chance.
Well, it would be quite useful to have a run down of what assumptions they did make in coming to this conclusion. For example, it appears that most of these terrorists are males, and we know that engineering is heavily male dominated compared to other degree classes. So unless this has been accounted for, you would expect terrorists to be nearly twice as likely to be engineers than the general population anyway (oh scary!), but that is because terrorists are more likely to be males, not more likely to be engineers.
It is pretty obvious that the terrorists identified so far are not representative of a general western population select by 'chance', so there is a lot of stuff that needs to be adjusted for before you can start claiming a particular degree is over represented among them.
There is an interesting talk on TED by the guy who started general fusion. Basically he shows a graph of the progress towards over unity production from commercial reactor designs since the 1950s. The progress has actually been surprisingly good, but the trouble is it has had to come from a long way back. If you consider that there is no fundamental law that makes the over-unity line special, it does seem like we are very close to crossing it now.
I think the biggest question though is whether these reactors will ever make commercial sense. The big benefit of fusion is that it has basically zero fuel costs and the potential to provide endless amounts of energy. But this is basically the same as renewables for all intents and purposes*. In the end it will really be a competition of capital costs, and given how simple something like a solar panel is, it may require an even bigger breakthrough beyond just getting a commercial reactor going to make fusion viable. Of course if they can get the size of the reactor down then that will open up huge opportunities as a high density power source (ships, aircraft, spacecraft), but again, that is going to need big breakthroughs beyond just achieving over-unity.
*while fusion has the potential to provide more energy than harvestable insolation, this would represent a massive injection of heat into the biosphere and I doubt that would have good implications for climate change. It is also hard to imagine what we could possibly do with that much energy without causing serious issues.
According to Tesla, more than 1 million cars have already installed a recently released over-the-air software upgrade to the Model S sedan's Autopilot feature
That is quite some feat, considering that most analysts estimate the total number of Model S sedans delivered so far at under 100,000
A 3D-printed gimbal is strapped over the existing joystick, but does not prevent it from still being used normally by caregivers. The gimbal's servo motors actuate the joystick with commands from the Eyegaze.
In other words, the most complicated way yet devised of sending an electrical signal about 10cm.
Apparently the Charlie Hebdo attackers bought an RPG. How is it possible that you can't get on a plane in Western Europe with a bottle of water, but you can buy an RPG in Brussels for less than $5k? That just seems incredible.
An unarmed civilian population (which I think is something hugely preferable to the USA alternative) should not be exposed to this level of risk. Even if all they could get were hand-guns it would have been a much less bloody outcome than mowing down people with assault weapons. I realise it isn't realistic to eradicate all the AK47s floating around, but it would seem if you really squeezed availability it would make these attacks more difficult and likely make the acquisition of weapons more noisy so that these people can be detected before they use them.
Why do we hear so much about how the government needs to empower a bunch of spooks sitting in air conditioned computing centres, while nobody is talking about how the EU can fix this assault weapons problem?
Maybe, but on the other hand he is also hedging his bets. If the iPad Pro proves to be popular, then it will be relatively easy for them to adapt their strategy. If anything I find their lineup quite confused now (certainly not the focus that Jobs had) with the MacBook, MacBook Pro and now iPad Pro kind of throwing a range of products out there at roughly the same price and asking the customers to decide what they value most.
I think this is to be expected though now their oracle is dead. I think the breaking of the 'perfect screen size' taboo that Jobs cast on the iPhone 5 was a bit of a watershed. It would have undoubtedly been driven by data and market testing, and I'm sure there were many reservations because of Jobs' hatred of phablets. Ultimately though, it proved spectacularly correct. It's great to say you're going to skate to where the puck is if you have a big ego who can back himself to keep making the right calls, but otherwise the standard operating practice for billion dollar companies is market research, market research, market research.
There has also been a lot of convergence in OSX/iOS development tools over the last few xcode releases. AppKit has UiKit style autolayout now and many of the back end services and apis are being normalised.
The Apple Pencil makes a mouse oriented UI usable on an iPad like device, and I wouldn't be surprised if by the iPad Pro 2 it is reasonably trivial to make an OSX app that builds for iPad Pro with minimal UI tweaks.
The link you include points out why, as I described, a receiver has to measure phase anyway. The only question is whether that phase detector is accurate enough to resolve the doppler contribution from the receiver's motion as well. I don't know why you think this is insignificant. The orbital velocity is around 14,000kph, so a vehicle driving down a motorway is already contributing nearly 1% towards the doppler shift. This is most certainly measurable by the phase detector and if you work through the numbers it isn't that onerous to resolve below 1kph in terms of phase noise SNR, especially since the GPS receiver already has a very low phase noise reference clock built-in.
A very common way to get better velocity data (used for example in consumer grade ublox and mediatek receivers) is to directly measure the doppler shift of each satellite signal. Since you accurately know where each satellite is and their velocities, you can use the doppler shift between each satellite's signal to determine your own velocity with respect to them. The main advantage of this technique is that it is not affected by atmospheric propagation-delay variations (the signal might come later, but the doppler shift is not affected) which is the main source of error in civilian GPS system.
One of the reasons it is commonly used is that you need to compensate for the doppler shift in your receiver front end anyway, so you get this data essentially for free if you can be bothered doing the calculations with it. I have worked on projects that used this technique and you could easily get around 1% cumulative error on distance measurement with at 4Hz sample rate.
Replying to AC because this is a good point to explain. The reason you can do this is two fold (a) automation will be producing a more elastic supply. If robots are cheap enough then expanding supply does not put pressure on labour (no need to hire more workers). This means there is no pressure on the labour market to increase wages, so you don't get an inflation cycle from the extra demand. You are essentially just triggering consumption of latent supply capacity, which in a competitive market cannot easily produce price increases. (b) if robots really do displace large numbers of workers (i.e. we don't find other stuff for them to do) then we will need something like this to prevent a situation where you have under-utilised robot factories and displaced workers out on the street, simply because they cannot compete with the robots to get bank notes that they can use to create demand from the idle robot factories.
However, you are correct that we are still fundamentally resource limited in terms of energy and raw materials. This is where I think there needs to be more thought on how the Basic Income works. I suspect you could make something work on the basis that while all humans want to be 'rich', most lack the drive to do anything about it once they get to a middle class level. Further, it is possible to expand resource availability through technology. If we continue to develop more abundant energy sources without destroying the biosphere, we could easily produce more food, building materials, fresh water using the pretty incredible technology arsenal we have available now.
The Basic Income has issues, but it is a starting point for a discussion we need to have. Technology is changing the economy rapidly, and in my experience with projects, if you don't bother thinking about where you are going, you will eventually end up in a bad place.
If this bank doesn't help them find some work, there's going to be hell to raise, especially when 15 million people is about a quarter of the entire UK's population. If a fourth of the US was layed off, do you think that would end peacefully?
Yes, and this is where I get so annoyed at idealistic neo-liberals. They harp on about how they should be free to do whatever they want while ignoring the massive benefit of social stability that things like paying taxes and having a centralised government gives them. I would love to live in some enlightened society where we can do away with the apparatus of central government and things like taxes, but that is not going to happen if it involves humans.
The real danger we have from the 1% is that they become so disconnected from society that they do a Marie Antoinette, and take all us middle class folk to the chopping block with them.
The thing that made Bluetooth LE popular was that Apple let you connect to the phone using it without having to go through their silly control-freak MFI program. Before they did this (I think starting with the iPhone 4) you had to either pay them lots of money, or do something like hack the headphone connector. I don't know why they won't just enable the SPP protocol on classic Bluetooth - its not like they have a whole bunch of accessories they don't want you to compete with - but maybe it is one of those legacy of Jobs' sociopathy things.
Anyway, that is why LE has become the big wireless interface. I guess the Bluetooth Sig group are trying to capitalise on this situation to expand into the wider IoT (at the moment LE is very very limiting due to the short range). The real question will be whether Apple allows these 4.2 changes to propagate through to their developers, or puts artificial limitations on it (such as the existing LE packet throttling) again.
Call me skeptical but I'd love to know how they've managed that short of a major breakthrough in RF transmitter or DSP technology.
Bluetooth LE uses a rather basic GFSK radio interface. If they moved to a more spectrally efficient modulation scheme (such as the one regular BT uses) they can improve things significantly. They have also increased the packet size, which will improve the ratio of data to overhead when you are sending larger amounts of data (which is probably not most IoT applications).
This is not really a surprise. One of the ways you get around domestic anti-surveillance laws is to ask some friendly allies to do it for you. Basically you spy on their citizens and they spy on yours. Each government can then say it is not infringing its own citizen's rights.
I believe the USA - UK - Canada - Australia - New Zealand have a reasonably formal agreement to this effect.
The irony is that over the last few years it has become apparent that most westerners really don't give a stuff about whether their government is spying on them or not, so all that effort was largely a waste of time.
I cook regularly and enjoy it, but there is no doubt it is not a particularly time efficient process. Even making a simple meal from scratch takes about a minimum of 30 minutes, and something more interesting can easily take an hour. When I have time it is great fun, but sometimes it is nothing more than a chore and I have many friends who hate cooking, and would happily live in a world that did not require them to do it. This makes it ripe for optimisation.
However, I really doubt we are going to see a domestic kitchen robot in our homes any time soon. What I imagine will happen is that low cost robotic delivery services will become available first and these will allow you to get industrially prepared meals delivered to your home each night from a local factory. Initially this can just be traditional ready-to-eat food, but as robotics technology improves these meals will become more and more lavish. In the end you could imagine a Pasta factory in your neighbourhood that is basically able to supply the entire area with 100's of different fresh Pasta meals, made to a high-quality restaurant level, delivered hot faster than you can make it yourself, and for a small margin above the costs of the ingredients. Next to that might be the robotic Thai food factory, etc etc. Like the garment industry it is entirely possible that it becomes uneconomical to cook your own food vs these machines, leaving cooking as a hobby for the wealthy.
Again as someone who likes to cook and currently has the time, this sort of feels wrong, but I have enough friends who would happily eat food they didn't prepare everyday for the rest of their lives to know that this will be immensely popular once it is possible.
There seem to be two camps of people. Those that think we will be living on mars and have fully autonomous cars in a couple of years, and those that actually look into it and see how hard it is going to be. For some reason, the media seems to prefer the first one. Reality prefers the second one.
I'm guessing you're either a taxi driver or a martian. Reality prefers the first one, but boy would life be more exciting if it was the second.
Agree. People keep bringing up this scenario, but it really is very unrealistic. If you are travelling at motorway speeds, then why is there a crowd of people near the motorway? If you are travelling at urban speeds (50kph) then a car can come to a stop on dry tarmac within 15m. At 30kph (the actual speed in many busy urban areas) the stopping distance is only 5m. Most of the stopping distance you normally have to leave is due to the really rubbish reaction time of humans (> 1 second). If the Google car's 3D scanner can detect the wall of people at 15m out, then it can just slam on the brakes and come to a stop. I would imagine the Google car can see a bit further than 15m which means it can either go faster, or not have to use full emergency braking so you can avoid hurtling into the crowd in comfort as well.
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It depends how you define monarchy. The House of Windsor is a tourist attraction, but they merely represent the more visible parts of a deeply entrenched feudalistic tradition that continues to permeates UK society. The House of Lords is just one example of this. The fact that some guy called the Duke of Westminster owns large parts of central London is another. The special privileges of the City of London is another. I mean, most people have no idea that Winston Churchill was the son of the incredibly wealthy Duke of Marlborough, and was always going to have doors opened for him into the realms of power, and that this sort of thing still continues with the whole Boris-Cameron-Osborne crowd.
None of this is an orchestrated conspiracy though. It is just what you would expect when you never started from scratch (like USA, Australia etc), or had a big clearing out of your ruling class and its institutions (e.g. France, Russia). I just think many British people are so used to these sorts of things that they don't realise that it is not normal that someone from the North without a posh accent grows up believing they can never be prime minister because they weren't born into the right family. In New Zealand/Australia, people genuinely don't have this belief (though it is starting to happen now). Sure they grow out of this ignorance (life is not fair there either) but at least they see it as an injustice, rather than just accepting it as their 'lot in life'.
Yes, it does seem to work well for Germany, though note that the reason they have a proportional system is precisely so that no single party could easily gain total power as in the weimer republic days. It is by design a less 'effective' form of government. My main problem with MMP, from my experiences with it in New Zealand, is that it causes parties to become extremely populist. What I mean by this is that the political discourse gets obsessed with media driven trivial issues (like the current flag debate). Of course you could argue this happens in the UK as well, but actually the govt has some leeway to ignore these things because in the end it is the constituent vote, and hence local issues of local importance, that mostly win elections, rather than winning the popular vote by having a PM with a good smile.
With a two house parliament the UK could potentially mitigate the faults of each system by having a proportional upper 'check' house and retain FPP for the lower house. It would force a government to compromise on its general direction in line with the popular vote, while still being able to pursue a cohesive plan.
Yes, that is the goal. The problem is that physically making stuff is quickly becoming a very low barrier for competition. 20-30 years ago, if you wanted to, say, make furniture, you would need an enormous amount of capital expenditure, a big factory, lots of workers. Now you can buy the machinery (or just outsource it to china) for probably 10% of that cost. It means it is very hard for a big incumbent to maintain large profit margins because a small up-start can jump in and start competing.
Big corporates hate this. The whole idea of being a big corporate is that you can stomp around being wildly inefficient but have so much money you can either crush or buyout anyone who might threaten your position. Reducing competitive barriers to entry scares these people a lot because it may very well expose their incompetence.
So the natural avenue of attack has been to compensate for the loss of scarcity on the physical side with made-up scarcity through this whole notion of 'intellectual property'. First they will get people to accept that someone who admittedly came up with a nice original design, should have this crazy (70 years after their death) monopoly on that design. Then they will expand it to cover things that you would not consider very original at all. Then they will get really sloppy with even checking if there is any originality. Before you know it you will have to have millions of dollars to go to court and invalidate a government-enforced-monopoly if you want to make anything that looks like it could be a chair, which you won't be able to do if you are a small up-start, and so mega-corp goes back to not working very hard and flying around on junkets in corporate jets.
This is the way the world works. What will kill it is the march of technology, and globalisation. The Chinese still don't really care about copyright, and when Westerners realise that they are living in relative poverty because of all these government enforced monopolies that keep a bunch of incompetent lawyers rich, they will get really annoyed. Sadly we are probably a decade or so from that.
That is by design of the First Past the Post electoral system though. I agree that it does sound pretty dumb on the face of it, but it's arguable as to whether the alternatives are that much better. You could have direct democracy, where each bill is put to referendum. This would even be practical with modern technology. But are members of the voting public really going to put effort into understanding the intricacies of complex or niche bills so as to ensure the best outcome for society at large? Maybe, but then you could see many ways this process would just allow big money to hijack the democratic process even more efficiently. It could also lead to a situation where everyone vote for their own self interest, which may create lots of tragedy of the commons like situation.
A more intermediate option is to move to a proportional representation system, such as MMP. The problem this has is that it is possible (and even likely in a partisan environment) for a fringe party to appear and prevent either main party from reaching a majority. This party then holds the balance of power, which can make it impossible for an effective government to form.
Indeed the main argument for FPP is that it allows effective governments to form, and that having an effective government is better than having a proportional one that can't do anything. One of those is good at preserving the status quo, while the other is better at getting things done. I guess which you think is better depends on how bad you think things are now, and whether you have any faith in politician's abilities to improve things.
I think the more immediate problem for the UK is that it still has a bizarre upper house and a far too cosy relationship between the monarchy (and its periphery) and parliament.
This is actually a lot more interesting than might first appear. When doing timed laps such as during qualifying, sure, it is pretty much about just optimising a whole bunch of parameters. I would imagine the superior ability of the driverless car to sense grip and slip on each wheel and create a dynamic map of grip around the track would mean it could quite easily beat a human driver without a lot of 'artificial intelligence'.
However, when wheel to wheel racing it is a whole different story. Unless you have artificial overtaking aids (DRS, boost modes) then overtaking a car that has the same performance as you is essentially a mind game. A common strategy is simply to hound the other driver using the draft to get right on their tail, fill their mirrors, and try to pressure them into making a mistake. This used to be quite common in F1 before we had fuel and tyre restrictions and DRS. It was a real test of a driver's mental strength to have to perform under that sort of direct pressure.
Another way is to play games with the other driver. For example, on a corner that allows loose racing lines, you can try to trick a car you want to overtake into defending on your weaker line, but then once you've lulled them into believing this is the way they always need to defend, you swap it up. Sometimes this may only get you in position to complete the overtake on a subsequent corner, so these types of moves can be very complex.
However, perhaps the most psychological part of racing, is simply the 'how crazy is the other driver' effect. Sometimes wheel to wheel racing is all about playing a game of chicken into a corner. The most common way is you dive in and rely on the driver you are trying to overtake giving you space, even if it is border line as to whether racing rules would require them to do so. You basically say, I want the corner, you either hit me and we both go out, or you let me through. This plays out in really interesting ways, for example in F1 Bottas and Raikonen have been in this mind battle for the last few races. They had a run in earlier in the year where Raikkonen made a move on Bottas and they collided. Bottas was out of the race and Raikkonen essentially got his place. In a subsequent race, Raikkonen tried a similar move and Bottas didn't give him any space, causing them to both get taken out of the race. Bottas actually said after the race that if he'd given Raikkonen space then everyone would just try that pass on him, knowing he is a soft touch.
When we actually have good wheel-to-wheel racing (which sadly F1 has not had for a while now) motorsport does relies heavily on human performance and it's faults. That is still why a lot of fans watch it, and I think this AI car thing really misses that point.
My guess is that Apple will move to a quantum dot LCD on the iPhone 7. The main tangible advantage of these is that they are more efficient than existing displays that use RGB filters, which will mean they can make the phone a bit thinner (or more battery life, but then again this is Apple). They also can have better colour performance, which I imagine Apple will heavily tout, despite most people not really caring.
After that they will move to OLED, since this will allow them to go even thinner.
For the iPhone 7 I imagine they will:
iPhone 7S will probably just have wireless charging after all these years.
What a bunch of idiots. Not just for sharing the same certificate between multiple devices, but for doing this in devices that clearly have mediocre to non-existent firmware read protection. Knowing how many of these products are put together, there is probably some underpaid graduate developer in China who is whoring out the same firmware to any MBA who wants to pay bottom dollar for everything.
I have worked with some pretty poor embedded developers in my time, but none of them would be this stupid. Their own magic number XOR encryption scheme would at least not have been as obvious as a duplicated X.509 cert sitting in firmware.
I know this is off topic, but the reason metal prices plunged is because regulators finally told the investment banks/hedge funds to stop creating bubbles in the commodity markets. Read up about the Goldman Sachs aluminium racket. Basically they just bought up all the market makers in the aluminium industry so that they could artificially control the marginal price of aluminium. It is really quite sickening. Another hedge fund manager did the same with the global coffee market, buying up a huge portion of a year's crop and then holding it back from the market to artificially raise prices.
They deal with that in their summary - stating that they don't believe engineers are recruited for their utility value. My main problem is that they use this hand-wavey statement:
Even if you make extremely generous assumptions, nine times as many terrorists were engineers as you would expect by chance.
Well, it would be quite useful to have a run down of what assumptions they did make in coming to this conclusion. For example, it appears that most of these terrorists are males, and we know that engineering is heavily male dominated compared to other degree classes. So unless this has been accounted for, you would expect terrorists to be nearly twice as likely to be engineers than the general population anyway (oh scary!), but that is because terrorists are more likely to be males, not more likely to be engineers.
It is pretty obvious that the terrorists identified so far are not representative of a general western population select by 'chance', so there is a lot of stuff that needs to be adjusted for before you can start claiming a particular degree is over represented among them.
There is an interesting talk on TED by the guy who started general fusion. Basically he shows a graph of the progress towards over unity production from commercial reactor designs since the 1950s. The progress has actually been surprisingly good, but the trouble is it has had to come from a long way back. If you consider that there is no fundamental law that makes the over-unity line special, it does seem like we are very close to crossing it now.
I think the biggest question though is whether these reactors will ever make commercial sense. The big benefit of fusion is that it has basically zero fuel costs and the potential to provide endless amounts of energy. But this is basically the same as renewables for all intents and purposes*. In the end it will really be a competition of capital costs, and given how simple something like a solar panel is, it may require an even bigger breakthrough beyond just getting a commercial reactor going to make fusion viable. Of course if they can get the size of the reactor down then that will open up huge opportunities as a high density power source (ships, aircraft, spacecraft), but again, that is going to need big breakthroughs beyond just achieving over-unity.
*while fusion has the potential to provide more energy than harvestable insolation, this would represent a massive injection of heat into the biosphere and I doubt that would have good implications for climate change. It is also hard to imagine what we could possibly do with that much energy without causing serious issues.
From the article:
According to Tesla, more than 1 million cars have already installed a recently released over-the-air software upgrade to the Model S sedan's Autopilot feature
That is quite some feat, considering that most analysts estimate the total number of Model S sedans delivered so far at under 100,000
A 3D-printed gimbal is strapped over the existing joystick, but does not prevent it from still being used normally by caregivers. The gimbal's servo motors actuate the joystick with commands from the Eyegaze.
In other words, the most complicated way yet devised of sending an electrical signal about 10cm.
The real issue I see here is how easy it appears to be to get military assault weapons in the EU. An interesting Washington Post article here:
https://www.washingtonpost.com...
Apparently the Charlie Hebdo attackers bought an RPG. How is it possible that you can't get on a plane in Western Europe with a bottle of water, but you can buy an RPG in Brussels for less than $5k? That just seems incredible.
An unarmed civilian population (which I think is something hugely preferable to the USA alternative) should not be exposed to this level of risk. Even if all they could get were hand-guns it would have been a much less bloody outcome than mowing down people with assault weapons. I realise it isn't realistic to eradicate all the AK47s floating around, but it would seem if you really squeezed availability it would make these attacks more difficult and likely make the acquisition of weapons more noisy so that these people can be detected before they use them.
Why do we hear so much about how the government needs to empower a bunch of spooks sitting in air conditioned computing centres, while nobody is talking about how the EU can fix this assault weapons problem?
Maybe, but on the other hand he is also hedging his bets. If the iPad Pro proves to be popular, then it will be relatively easy for them to adapt their strategy. If anything I find their lineup quite confused now (certainly not the focus that Jobs had) with the MacBook, MacBook Pro and now iPad Pro kind of throwing a range of products out there at roughly the same price and asking the customers to decide what they value most.
I think this is to be expected though now their oracle is dead. I think the breaking of the 'perfect screen size' taboo that Jobs cast on the iPhone 5 was a bit of a watershed. It would have undoubtedly been driven by data and market testing, and I'm sure there were many reservations because of Jobs' hatred of phablets. Ultimately though, it proved spectacularly correct. It's great to say you're going to skate to where the puck is if you have a big ego who can back himself to keep making the right calls, but otherwise the standard operating practice for billion dollar companies is market research, market research, market research.
There has also been a lot of convergence in OSX/iOS development tools over the last few xcode releases. AppKit has UiKit style autolayout now and many of the back end services and apis are being normalised.
The Apple Pencil makes a mouse oriented UI usable on an iPad like device, and I wouldn't be surprised if by the iPad Pro 2 it is reasonably trivial to make an OSX app that builds for iPad Pro with minimal UI tweaks.
The link you include points out why, as I described, a receiver has to measure phase anyway. The only question is whether that phase detector is accurate enough to resolve the doppler contribution from the receiver's motion as well. I don't know why you think this is insignificant. The orbital velocity is around 14,000kph, so a vehicle driving down a motorway is already contributing nearly 1% towards the doppler shift. This is most certainly measurable by the phase detector and if you work through the numbers it isn't that onerous to resolve below 1kph in terms of phase noise SNR, especially since the GPS receiver already has a very low phase noise reference clock built-in.
A very common way to get better velocity data (used for example in consumer grade ublox and mediatek receivers) is to directly measure the doppler shift of each satellite signal. Since you accurately know where each satellite is and their velocities, you can use the doppler shift between each satellite's signal to determine your own velocity with respect to them. The main advantage of this technique is that it is not affected by atmospheric propagation-delay variations (the signal might come later, but the doppler shift is not affected) which is the main source of error in civilian GPS system.
One of the reasons it is commonly used is that you need to compensate for the doppler shift in your receiver front end anyway, so you get this data essentially for free if you can be bothered doing the calculations with it. I have worked on projects that used this technique and you could easily get around 1% cumulative error on distance measurement with at 4Hz sample rate.
Replying to AC because this is a good point to explain. The reason you can do this is two fold (a) automation will be producing a more elastic supply. If robots are cheap enough then expanding supply does not put pressure on labour (no need to hire more workers). This means there is no pressure on the labour market to increase wages, so you don't get an inflation cycle from the extra demand. You are essentially just triggering consumption of latent supply capacity, which in a competitive market cannot easily produce price increases. (b) if robots really do displace large numbers of workers (i.e. we don't find other stuff for them to do) then we will need something like this to prevent a situation where you have under-utilised robot factories and displaced workers out on the street, simply because they cannot compete with the robots to get bank notes that they can use to create demand from the idle robot factories.
However, you are correct that we are still fundamentally resource limited in terms of energy and raw materials. This is where I think there needs to be more thought on how the Basic Income works. I suspect you could make something work on the basis that while all humans want to be 'rich', most lack the drive to do anything about it once they get to a middle class level. Further, it is possible to expand resource availability through technology. If we continue to develop more abundant energy sources without destroying the biosphere, we could easily produce more food, building materials, fresh water using the pretty incredible technology arsenal we have available now.
The Basic Income has issues, but it is a starting point for a discussion we need to have. Technology is changing the economy rapidly, and in my experience with projects, if you don't bother thinking about where you are going, you will eventually end up in a bad place.
If this bank doesn't help them find some work, there's going to be hell to raise, especially when 15 million people is about a quarter of the entire UK's population. If a fourth of the US was layed off, do you think that would end peacefully?
Yes, and this is where I get so annoyed at idealistic neo-liberals. They harp on about how they should be free to do whatever they want while ignoring the massive benefit of social stability that things like paying taxes and having a centralised government gives them. I would love to live in some enlightened society where we can do away with the apparatus of central government and things like taxes, but that is not going to happen if it involves humans.
The real danger we have from the 1% is that they become so disconnected from society that they do a Marie Antoinette, and take all us middle class folk to the chopping block with them.
The thing that made Bluetooth LE popular was that Apple let you connect to the phone using it without having to go through their silly control-freak MFI program. Before they did this (I think starting with the iPhone 4) you had to either pay them lots of money, or do something like hack the headphone connector. I don't know why they won't just enable the SPP protocol on classic Bluetooth - its not like they have a whole bunch of accessories they don't want you to compete with - but maybe it is one of those legacy of Jobs' sociopathy things.
Anyway, that is why LE has become the big wireless interface. I guess the Bluetooth Sig group are trying to capitalise on this situation to expand into the wider IoT (at the moment LE is very very limiting due to the short range). The real question will be whether Apple allows these 4.2 changes to propagate through to their developers, or puts artificial limitations on it (such as the existing LE packet throttling) again.
Call me skeptical but I'd love to know how they've managed that short of a major breakthrough in RF transmitter or DSP technology.
Bluetooth LE uses a rather basic GFSK radio interface. If they moved to a more spectrally efficient modulation scheme (such as the one regular BT uses) they can improve things significantly. They have also increased the packet size, which will improve the ratio of data to overhead when you are sending larger amounts of data (which is probably not most IoT applications).
This is not really a surprise. One of the ways you get around domestic anti-surveillance laws is to ask some friendly allies to do it for you. Basically you spy on their citizens and they spy on yours. Each government can then say it is not infringing its own citizen's rights.
I believe the USA - UK - Canada - Australia - New Zealand have a reasonably formal agreement to this effect.
The irony is that over the last few years it has become apparent that most westerners really don't give a stuff about whether their government is spying on them or not, so all that effort was largely a waste of time.
I cook regularly and enjoy it, but there is no doubt it is not a particularly time efficient process. Even making a simple meal from scratch takes about a minimum of 30 minutes, and something more interesting can easily take an hour. When I have time it is great fun, but sometimes it is nothing more than a chore and I have many friends who hate cooking, and would happily live in a world that did not require them to do it. This makes it ripe for optimisation.
However, I really doubt we are going to see a domestic kitchen robot in our homes any time soon. What I imagine will happen is that low cost robotic delivery services will become available first and these will allow you to get industrially prepared meals delivered to your home each night from a local factory. Initially this can just be traditional ready-to-eat food, but as robotics technology improves these meals will become more and more lavish. In the end you could imagine a Pasta factory in your neighbourhood that is basically able to supply the entire area with 100's of different fresh Pasta meals, made to a high-quality restaurant level, delivered hot faster than you can make it yourself, and for a small margin above the costs of the ingredients. Next to that might be the robotic Thai food factory, etc etc. Like the garment industry it is entirely possible that it becomes uneconomical to cook your own food vs these machines, leaving cooking as a hobby for the wealthy.
Again as someone who likes to cook and currently has the time, this sort of feels wrong, but I have enough friends who would happily eat food they didn't prepare everyday for the rest of their lives to know that this will be immensely popular once it is possible.
There seem to be two camps of people. Those that think we will be living on mars and have fully autonomous cars in a couple of years, and those that actually look into it and see how hard it is going to be. For some reason, the media seems to prefer the first one. Reality prefers the second one.
I'm guessing you're either a taxi driver or a martian. Reality prefers the first one, but boy would life be more exciting if it was the second.
Agree. People keep bringing up this scenario, but it really is very unrealistic. If you are travelling at motorway speeds, then why is there a crowd of people near the motorway? If you are travelling at urban speeds (50kph) then a car can come to a stop on dry tarmac within 15m. At 30kph (the actual speed in many busy urban areas) the stopping distance is only 5m. Most of the stopping distance you normally have to leave is due to the really rubbish reaction time of humans (> 1 second). If the Google car's 3D scanner can detect the wall of people at 15m out, then it can just slam on the brakes and come to a stop. I would imagine the Google car can see a bit further than 15m which means it can either go faster, or not have to use full emergency braking so you can avoid hurtling into the crowd in comfort as well.