I said 'millions'. And it's not just about the power. It's about the overall electromagnetic effects hoardes of these might have. Just saying "oh, it'll probably be fine" doesn't cut it. Someone would have to do a study.
You know what? WHATEVER. I think shit like this is just a solution in search of a problem, especially in poor countries that would be happy to get just plain old-fashioned stethoscopes and actual doctors. Everything has to get more complicated and more expensive because I'm sure the profit margin on a plain-old-stethoscope is small, so let's make some fancy thing that needs power and if it breaks you can't fix it so we can charge more and make more profit. Don't even pretend that isn't a major portion of the motivation behind things like this.
You're not realizing the potential scope of what I'm talking about: you're thinking one person, I'm thinking millions of people, plus someone comes up with stationary installations using this technology for whatever purposes. In other words: what are the effects when you scale this up massively?
I'm sure that people could be trained to defeat this technology for when it's used for interrogation purposes, but still: the Ultimate invasion of privacy, and the possibility of a new dark era of human history: thought crime.
You're being sarcastic, right? It probably takes, what, maybe half an hour on the outside to teach someone the basics of using a stethoscope, being a very simple device with no moving parts, needs no power, and is very durable, and most of all, very very cheap to produce? Not everything needs a gods-be-damned AI in it.
Go ahead, produce this and things like it and deploy them in vast quantities and find out what happens. You change the resonance of whole neighborhoods and suddenly wireless communications are interfered with. Even if that didn't happen, this is not 'free energy', it gets popular enough and some broadcasters would start demanding some sort of payment to them to pay for the power their transmitters are using that's being piggybacked off of. You want 'free energy'? Get solar panels charging battery banks, or a hand-crank generator, or for that matter a pedal-driven generator, since people are so stupidly fat they could at least burn some of those excess calories off charging their own phones a little.
..in fact, I've seen a schematic for an amplified TRF AM radio receiver that uses a second tuned wideband receiver to harvest RF energy to power a FET RF amplifier stage for the actual AM receiver, improving it's sensitivity. Old ideas.
Well gee whiz guess what AC, I could put a much higher-gain antenna much higher up on my roof, refocus it, and get stations all the way over from the San Francisco Bay Area; is someone going to slap me with a lawsuit for receiving an 'illegal' signal or something? No such thing will ever happen. They should be glad someone is trying to facilitate the survival of OTA broadcast television in an age where 'streaming' over the internet (for pay which I think is stupid) is pulling people away from it.
I don't have to prove any such thing, and the guy I responded to orginally is making claims about how the human mind works that cannot be proven one way or another. Also since you won't even be bothered to use a NAME behind your shitty comment I see no reason to do a damned thing for you except tell you to fuck off, troll.
In any 'market area' served by one or more television stations, there are always 'dead zones' for the signal(s): your house has a hill in the way. Or you live where there's a HOA that bans antennas on your house. Or you live in an apartment complex and cannot have an antenna at all except indoors, and it doesn't work worth a damn. Or, maybe, you don't own a TV at all. A service like this fills in those gaps in signal coverage.
Locast is a public service to Americans, providing local broadcast signals over the Internet in select cities. All you have to do is sign up online, provide your name and email address, and certify that you live in, and are logging on from, one of the select US cities (“Designated Market Area”). Then, you can select among local broadcasters and stream your favorite local station.
Locast.org is a “digital translator,” meaning that Locast.org operates just like a traditional broadcast translator service, except instead of using an over-the-air signal to boost a broadcaster’s reach, we stream the signal over the Internet to consumers located within select US cities.
Ever since the dawn of TV broadcasting in the mid-20th Century, non-profit organizations have provided “translator” TV stations as a public service. Where a primary broadcaster cannot reach a receiver with a strong enough signal, the translator amplifies that signal with another transmitter, allowing consumers who otherwise could not get the over-the-air signal to receive important programming, including local news, weather and of course, sports. Locast.org provides the same public service, except instead of an over-the-air signal transmitter, we provide the local broadcast signal via online streaming.
You need a broadband Internet connection for optimal performance. Using a laptop, smartphone, or computer connected to the Internet, point your browser to www.Locast.org to sign up. You then can choose which local broadcast station to watch from your Internet-enabled device.
This service is essentially no different, really, than what the earliest days of cable TV services were: a way for everyone in a market area to receive the television stations in that market area without having to have an antenna. I, myself, in the 70's and 80's in a housing tract where the HOA did not allow you to have an antenna on your roof; it was using the cable TV service or have an antenna in your attic or inside your house. We opted for cable TV. 'Locast' is, as it states, an internet-age updated version of that early 'antenna service'. So long as they can ensure within reasonable bounds that people outside the markets it's serving can't receive those stations, then I don't see a problem, really. They're not editing out commercials or inserting commercials, they're not recording content (if you don't count an AV data stream, even transcoded-on-the-fly, as 'recorded', that is) and they're not really 'selling' the signals themselves, they're selling a service to facilitate reception of stations within the market area to people who geographically-speaking should be able to receive it, but may not be able to do so for extenuating circumstances. So I can see why they'd want to be sued: if they win they create the legal precedent for services like this to be legally allowed.
I think broadcasters should welcome a service like this, if they want to save the OTA broadcast industry as a whole. I'm not saying they should ditch their megawatt transmitters and huge broadcast antennas, but they should allow services like this to exist as a supplement to OTA signals for the reason specified by Locast and companies like them: to fill in the gaps in signal coverage.
Are there going to be technically-inclined people who will find a way around technologically-enforced restrictions on who can stream what markets' stations? Yes, of course. But that will always be a minority; there's always going to be 'pilfering' of some kind with just about anything, and trying to stop 100% of it is an endless game of Whack-a-Mole, as the RIAA and MPAA damned well know, and as such it's not worth doing. There is a need for a service like this, which differs from 'streaming' services like Spotify or Hulu and their ilk, and I think it's time has come. The broadcast televsion industry would be wise to welcome it instead of fighting against it.
Apparently nobody wants to listen to your piss and vinegar rantings any more than I do otherwise you wouldn't be forced to post as an AC, you jackass. Did Slashdot ban you? Is that why you're posting as an AC? Or do you just not want to be accountable for the raw sewage that spews forth from your mouth?
Hopefully this will also lead to more affordable solid state storage solutions for laptops too.
One problem with that: unless it's on a user-replaceable module, if something unrecoverable happens to it, your laptop becomes a brick.
On the other hand if they can get 1TB on a single IC, then imagine the capacity of a standard 2.5" SSD! Virtually unlimited space for a single user.
Now people will be encouraged and enabled to keep everything on their phones, so it'll be one-stop-shopping for all the three-letter government agencies when they decide to sift your life. I'd encourage everyone to put as much scat porn on their phones as possible against future possibility of this.
Raise your hand if you regularly use a computer/laptop with far less than 1TB of hard disc/SSD capacity.
The Ubuntu box I've been building up over time lately boots off a 512GB SSD, and only 64GB of it is actually used. If I hadn't got such a great deal on this SSD it'd be running on a significantly smaller SSD, and I wouldn't feel bad about it at all.
There's no such thing as 'future proof' just like there's no such thing as 'a standard' -- or at the very least a 'standard' only exists until it becomes inconvenient to someone, who them breaks the standard to accomplish what they want, then so much for the 'standard' being a 'standard' anymore.
Also, so-called 'AI' is completely incapable of one vital ingredient: human creativity. Very often human ingenuity and creativity has no rhyme or reason to it, it's seemingly random, and very often astonishing, and that's one of the qualities that defines us. No 'AI' is really capable of this, so far as I've ever seen; all attempts at 'AI art', for instance, are just hideously derivative.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting more than a little sick of hearing about 'AI' this and 'AI' that, when this half-assed excuse for 'AI' that keeps being trotted out to us like it's something New and Fresh and Innovative is really Old and Busted and really not very good. 'AI', as it currently sits, is 20% fat content ground round (cooked well, to the point of being cardboard), versus the human brains' Filet Mignon (medium rare, of course). They'll both feed you, but honestly which would you rather have? I'll get excited over 'AI' when we can figure out how the little things like 'consciousness' and 'cognition' and 'personality' actually work, so we can create analogues of that in hardware and actually be able to converse in a very real freeform way with a real AI. What we have currently isn't even as smart as an amoeba.
This shit has GOT. TO. STOP. NOW.
These asshole corporations aren't even bothering to TRY to hide their overreaching ways anymore. What's next? Are they going to go to Congress and DEMAND legislation REQUIRING citizens to hand over all their personal data and communications to them? REQUIRE everyone to have so-called 'smart speakers/digital assistants' in every room of their houses so they can be spied on directly 24/7?
The so-called 'AI revolution' is all a bunch of marketing department and media company driven bullshit. The shitty excuse for AI everyone keeps hyping is nowhere near as good as they all claim it is and everyone needs to understand that. I don't care what parlor tricks they've got the things doing it's still mostly smoke and mirrors. Show me a general AI that can pass for a human being in ALL circumstances and we'll have a different conversation but until then these half-assed 'learning algorithms' are just garbage.
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I said 'millions'. And it's not just about the power. It's about the overall electromagnetic effects hoardes of these might have. Just saying "oh, it'll probably be fine" doesn't cut it. Someone would have to do a study.
You know what? WHATEVER. I think shit like this is just a solution in search of a problem, especially in poor countries that would be happy to get just plain old-fashioned stethoscopes and actual doctors. Everything has to get more complicated and more expensive because I'm sure the profit margin on a plain-old-stethoscope is small, so let's make some fancy thing that needs power and if it breaks you can't fix it so we can charge more and make more profit. Don't even pretend that isn't a major portion of the motivation behind things like this.
You're not realizing the potential scope of what I'm talking about: you're thinking one person, I'm thinking millions of people, plus someone comes up with stationary installations using this technology for whatever purposes. In other words: what are the effects when you scale this up massively?
I'm sure that people could be trained to defeat this technology for when it's used for interrogation purposes, but still: the Ultimate invasion of privacy, and the possibility of a new dark era of human history: thought crime.
Yo, dawg..
You're being sarcastic, right? It probably takes, what, maybe half an hour on the outside to teach someone the basics of using a stethoscope, being a very simple device with no moving parts, needs no power, and is very durable, and most of all, very very cheap to produce? Not everything needs a gods-be-damned AI in it.
Go ahead, produce this and things like it and deploy them in vast quantities and find out what happens. You change the resonance of whole neighborhoods and suddenly wireless communications are interfered with. Even if that didn't happen, this is not 'free energy', it gets popular enough and some broadcasters would start demanding some sort of payment to them to pay for the power their transmitters are using that's being piggybacked off of. You want 'free energy'? Get solar panels charging battery banks, or a hand-crank generator, or for that matter a pedal-driven generator, since people are so stupidly fat they could at least burn some of those excess calories off charging their own phones a little.
..in fact, I've seen a schematic for an amplified TRF AM radio receiver that uses a second tuned wideband receiver to harvest RF energy to power a FET RF amplifier stage for the actual AM receiver, improving it's sensitivity. Old ideas.
Well gee whiz guess what AC, I could put a much higher-gain antenna much higher up on my roof, refocus it, and get stations all the way over from the San Francisco Bay Area; is someone going to slap me with a lawsuit for receiving an 'illegal' signal or something? No such thing will ever happen. They should be glad someone is trying to facilitate the survival of OTA broadcast television in an age where 'streaming' over the internet (for pay which I think is stupid) is pulling people away from it.
Stop using 'The Cloud', it's stupid.
As usual you're a prime example of what NOT to be and what NOT to say. Keep being awesome.
Stop anthropomorphizing shitty software programs, you're embarassing yourself.
I don't have to prove any such thing, and the guy I responded to orginally is making claims about how the human mind works that cannot be proven one way or another. Also since you won't even be bothered to use a NAME behind your shitty comment I see no reason to do a damned thing for you except tell you to fuck off, troll.
In any 'market area' served by one or more television stations, there are always 'dead zones' for the signal(s): your house has a hill in the way. Or you live where there's a HOA that bans antennas on your house. Or you live in an apartment complex and cannot have an antenna at all except indoors, and it doesn't work worth a damn. Or, maybe, you don't own a TV at all. A service like this fills in those gaps in signal coverage.
Locast is a public service to Americans, providing local broadcast signals over the Internet in select cities. All you have to do is sign up online, provide your name and email address, and certify that you live in, and are logging on from, one of the select US cities (“Designated Market Area”). Then, you can select among local broadcasters and stream your favorite local station.
Locast.org is a “digital translator,” meaning that Locast.org operates just like a traditional broadcast translator service, except instead of using an over-the-air signal to boost a broadcaster’s reach, we stream the signal over the Internet to consumers located within select US cities.
Ever since the dawn of TV broadcasting in the mid-20th Century, non-profit organizations have provided “translator” TV stations as a public service. Where a primary broadcaster cannot reach a receiver with a strong enough signal, the translator amplifies that signal with another transmitter, allowing consumers who otherwise could not get the over-the-air signal to receive important programming, including local news, weather and of course, sports. Locast.org provides the same public service, except instead of an over-the-air signal transmitter, we provide the local broadcast signal via online streaming.
You need a broadband Internet connection for optimal performance. Using a laptop, smartphone, or computer connected to the Internet, point your browser to www.Locast.org to sign up. You then can choose which local broadcast station to watch from your Internet-enabled device.
This service is essentially no different, really, than what the earliest days of cable TV services were: a way for everyone in a market area to receive the television stations in that market area without having to have an antenna. I, myself, in the 70's and 80's in a housing tract where the HOA did not allow you to have an antenna on your roof; it was using the cable TV service or have an antenna in your attic or inside your house. We opted for cable TV. 'Locast' is, as it states, an internet-age updated version of that early 'antenna service'. So long as they can ensure within reasonable bounds that people outside the markets it's serving can't receive those stations, then I don't see a problem, really. They're not editing out commercials or inserting commercials, they're not recording content (if you don't count an AV data stream, even transcoded-on-the-fly, as 'recorded', that is) and they're not really 'selling' the signals themselves, they're selling a service to facilitate reception of stations within the market area to people who geographically-speaking should be able to receive it, but may not be able to do so for extenuating circumstances. So I can see why they'd want to be sued: if they win they create the legal precedent for services like this to be legally allowed.
I think broadcasters should welcome a service like this, if they want to save the OTA broadcast industry as a whole. I'm not saying they should ditch their megawatt transmitters and huge broadcast antennas, but they should allow services like this to exist as a supplement to OTA signals for the reason specified by Locast and companies like them: to fill in the gaps in signal coverage.
Are there going to be technically-inclined people who will find a way around technologically-enforced restrictions on who can stream what markets' stations? Yes, of course. But that will always be a minority; there's always going to be 'pilfering' of some kind with just about anything, and trying to stop 100% of it is an endless game of Whack-a-Mole, as the RIAA and MPAA damned well know, and as such it's not worth doing. There is a need for a service like this, which differs from 'streaming' services like Spotify or Hulu and their ilk, and I think it's time has come. The broadcast televsion industry would be wise to welcome it instead of fighting against it.
Creativity is just random search filtered through utility.
Prove it. Rhetorical; you can't.
Apparently nobody wants to listen to your piss and vinegar rantings any more than I do otherwise you wouldn't be forced to post as an AC, you jackass. Did Slashdot ban you? Is that why you're posting as an AC? Or do you just not want to be accountable for the raw sewage that spews forth from your mouth?
Hopefully this will also lead to more affordable solid state storage solutions for laptops too.
One problem with that: unless it's on a user-replaceable module, if something unrecoverable happens to it, your laptop becomes a brick.
On the other hand if they can get 1TB on a single IC, then imagine the capacity of a standard 2.5" SSD! Virtually unlimited space for a single user.
Now people will be encouraged and enabled to keep everything on their phones, so it'll be one-stop-shopping for all the three-letter government agencies when they decide to sift your life. I'd encourage everyone to put as much scat porn on their phones as possible against future possibility of this.
Raise your hand if you regularly use a computer/laptop with far less than 1TB of hard disc/SSD capacity.
The Ubuntu box I've been building up over time lately boots off a 512GB SSD, and only 64GB of it is actually used. If I hadn't got such a great deal on this SSD it'd be running on a significantly smaller SSD, and I wouldn't feel bad about it at all.
There's no such thing as 'future proof' just like there's no such thing as 'a standard' -- or at the very least a 'standard' only exists until it becomes inconvenient to someone, who them breaks the standard to accomplish what they want, then so much for the 'standard' being a 'standard' anymore.
Also, so-called 'AI' is completely incapable of one vital ingredient: human creativity. Very often human ingenuity and creativity has no rhyme or reason to it, it's seemingly random, and very often astonishing, and that's one of the qualities that defines us. No 'AI' is really capable of this, so far as I've ever seen; all attempts at 'AI art', for instance, are just hideously derivative.
I don't know about anyone else, but I'm getting more than a little sick of hearing about 'AI' this and 'AI' that, when this half-assed excuse for 'AI' that keeps being trotted out to us like it's something New and Fresh and Innovative is really Old and Busted and really not very good. 'AI', as it currently sits, is 20% fat content ground round (cooked well, to the point of being cardboard), versus the human brains' Filet Mignon (medium rare, of course). They'll both feed you, but honestly which would you rather have? I'll get excited over 'AI' when we can figure out how the little things like 'consciousness' and 'cognition' and 'personality' actually work, so we can create analogues of that in hardware and actually be able to converse in a very real freeform way with a real AI. What we have currently isn't even as smart as an amoeba.
This shit has GOT. TO. STOP. NOW.
These asshole corporations aren't even bothering to TRY to hide their overreaching ways anymore. What's next? Are they going to go to Congress and DEMAND legislation REQUIRING citizens to hand over all their personal data and communications to them? REQUIRE everyone to have so-called 'smart speakers/digital assistants' in every room of their houses so they can be spied on directly 24/7?
FUCK THIS SHIT. IT HAS TO STOP!
I hope more schools do this. Wean them off smartphones and their addiction to them.
Seriously, how much more of this shit are people going to put up with before they demand that Facebook be burned to the ground?
The so-called 'AI revolution' is all a bunch of marketing department and media company driven bullshit. The shitty excuse for AI everyone keeps hyping is nowhere near as good as they all claim it is and everyone needs to understand that. I don't care what parlor tricks they've got the things doing it's still mostly smoke and mirrors. Show me a general AI that can pass for a human being in ALL circumstances and we'll have a different conversation but until then these half-assed 'learning algorithms' are just garbage.