It better be. Here, such shenanigans might earn you at worst a trip to the police stations where the cops will turn you out after a coffee and a brief interview. In China... hope you like breaking rocks for a living.
Typical primitive machine learning, it doesn't "figure out" anything. It goes like "Pixels... pixels... pixels.... oh! I have seen that arrangement of pixels before, looks like a 'face', better have a closer look."
So they train it to ignore 5 foot tall faces. Then it will catch the face of a motorist making a U turn.
That basic infrastructure will already be in place. For instance: an autopark feature, where you get out and the car goes off to find an empty spot to park itself, after which you can summon it using an app. Or your wife needs the car so you send it to her location and take the train home. If these features exist, why would you want to be able to transfer control to the police? Because if the car gets stolen, they will have to decide what to do based on its location, available units etc. If they have access, they can decide to send officers to wherever it is parked, or have a unit intercept it then simply order it to pull over, etc. Works a lot better than having to have you on the phone the whole time.
Any sort of remote access on these cars is a potential avenue of attack, but you will have to features in future self driving cars. Perhaps the paranoid will be able to opt out. And in any case, one safety feature that I certainly would expect in any car is an emergency brake", a button that makes the car pull over and unlock the doors. No more remote kidnapping even if they still can steal your car remotely, even if it means the police can no longer kidnap your car thieves to jail.
Would be a good feature if it is under the owner's control. For example: the car comes with a PIN code in a sealed envelope (or the owner sets a PIN); the PIN is unknown to the manufacturer or the dealer. The police can take over the car remotely, but only after supplying the correct PIN, given to them by the owner.
Of course thieves will try and thwart this: they can already jam GPS trackers so presumably they can jam or shield against remote control. Or they send a number of incorrect PINs to the car to lock out the feature. So it would need to be pretty resilient against DOS attacks as well.
To some degree this is already happening: some large firms outsourcing not just a couple of teams or some projects, but entire departments like IT or R&D to low wage countries. The local shops are predominantly run by local cheap managers.
On the other hand, I've known a few managers who are good at managing remote workers, organizing remote teams or organisations, getting results where others failed and blamed it on the rubbish foreign workers. That's a valuable and highly sought after skill, and it seems that this Liemandt guy is one of those people who have it. Good for him... though he seems one of those scumbags who are hell bent on turning every job into a gig.
We know what the root problem is. We don't have a fix though, one that is technically, economically, socially and politically viable. It looks like renewables, new nukes, or reducing our energy usage might not cut it unless we seriously step up our efforts... which will come with increased social and economic upheaval. This might be a relatively cheap "solution" that buys us some much needed time at least. Worth a study or even a limited trial. Of course the danger of this solution is people demanding they can hang on to their gas guzzlers and that we simply dump more crap in the upper atmosphere to compensate... but that's the objection environmentalists make to every technological measure.
I hear you... I haven't watched any cable in ages, though it's included in my Internet subscription and I still have the set top box. The other day I did some channel surfing. And holy crap aren't there a lot of ads? And isn't every single one a personal insult to our intelligence? I can't remember how we put up with that crap, but for the life of me I can't imagine why anyone would, these days.
Scream all you want, the sad truth about online advertising is that it is cheap. Even cheaper with targeted ads... no, that doesn't mean that they magically know you need new shoes so they show you ads for shoes, it means that they can target a certain demographic with a fair accuracy. And because it is so cheap, they can afford to show their ads to tens of thousands of people if only one of them decides to buy their product.
My wife likes to watch a couple of Youtube streamers, and I sometimes watch instructional videos for work or hobbies (I prefer text but beggars can't always be choosers I suppose). We got so sick of the ads that we got a subscription. Worth it, in my opinion, even if it doesn't compare to Netflix in terms of € per hour of use.
Android TV is pretty good for set top boxes. I use a couple of nVidia Shields around the house, for paid streaming services, plus Kodi for locally stored content, and I can stream Steam games from the big rig in the office. And watch Youtube... unfortunately I can't block the ads on Android TV.
Speaking of torture, it took years before Google finally rolled out their premium Youtube subscriptions in this country. And I noticed that they really stepped up the ads a couple of months before. They went from having a skippable ad at the beginning of a video every so often, to having more of these and some of them unskippable, to having more and more ads during videos. So I got the paid subscription... I don't mind paying for a service if it's ad-free. As long as they don't get greedy and start showing ads to paid subscribers, while slowly reducing the payout to streamers. I guess it's only a matter of time before we'll "cut the cord" on Youtube as well...
It's anything but realistic. Too cartoonish, I think. I tried the other popular Battle Royale game as well: PUBG. That goes too far the other way in terms of realism; for instance not having a threat direction indicator. But Counter Strike is fun and requires some physical skill (reflexes), or you'll end up dead quickly. Not for me, as an old fart I cannot compete except in LAN parties with some other old farts at work. I found a happy medium in the Battlefield series: quick fun rounds with fast respawning so you don't sit around waiting for very long, and a klutz like me can still end up in the middle of the scoreboard or sometimes even on top (after a few drinks). Currently having fun with Battlefield 5, which has the added bonus of experiencing what my old neighborhood looked like before the Germans bombed it all to hell.
As for the rest of the gaming market, there's a lot of other good stuff out there. I was surprised, after I stopped following the gaming market for ages, my wife started watching some guys streaming games on YouTube, and we tried a few fun titles like Prison Architect, Rimworld, and Oxygen not included.
Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates
And therein lies the heart of the problem. In my experience, most HR depts are not that good at shortlisting candidates for tech positions, and some are downright terrible. Here's a tip: if you are hiring techies but you are not happy with the level of candidates HR sent you, ask them for all of the resumes that were submitted. You may be surprised at what you'll find there.
Maybe we ought to install this software at HR to clean resumes before they are read. Or perhaps replace the selection process entire with a machine learning system. (Although that comes with its own dangers, like hidden bias and spurious correlation).
Nothing is wrong insofar as the probe is concerned. They are just doing their jobs, they have done those probes before, and Boeing is getting the full treatment as well. The actual reason probably had more to do with the recent mishap with Soyuz. Stating that this is because of Musk having one single toke (the article summary amazingly getting that part right for a change) and a sip of liquor is 100% political PR bullshit. Either someone has an axe to grind with Musk, or some Puritan exec somewhere in the pecking order got his panties in a bunch.
It'll probably be economy service at business/first price levels, if it's anything like the Concorde. Decent leg room, very narrow if comfortable seats. And I doubt they'll have room for the full first class food & beverage treatment.
Why I mentioned Soros? The guy bet against the UK Pound, then dumped assloads of that currency to get it to tank... he made about a billion dollars in that little stunt. Enough for me to question his motives when he meddles in EU politics. The Kochs are probably as bad (perhaps worse) but they get plenty of negative press (in mainstream publications, not just crackpot blogs), and there's plenty of commentary on what they are doing. In contrast, everybody seems to love Soros. EU politicians decry the US practice of rich people buying political influence, but they'd kill for a lunch date with Soros. He does have lunch with the top EU dogs... behind closed doors, and who knows what is being discussed there. I can well understand why Hungary wants to curb his influence in that country and shut down his education and "free press" initiatives. And no, the guy being Jewish has fuck all to do with all that. Nor the fact that he's left leaning. I don't trust his motives, but he is not the only one with suspect motives or undue influence. What scares me about him is that there's zero pushback against his influence from the people who are usually very critical about whom they associate with.
Also, as a European, I care very little about Dems and Reps and who donates to them.
A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe
I thought that the whole point of quantum computers was that there's no need to describe or process all possible states. And that the difficulty of practical quantum computers is that the qubits need to "work together": you can't just make 1 cubit, then make 1023 more and build yourself a 1024 cubit computer.
The guy obviously knows way more about quantum computers than I do. But I've never seen the difficulties of quantum computing described in this manner.
Of course it does. In my case it does so for ebooks, or rather it used to do so.
"We're sorry but this ebook is not available in your country (but we are happy to ship a hardcopy)"
Oh well maybe I can fool it by paying with credit card... Nope
Ok, maybe I can fool it by using PayPal and entering the address of some random US hotel... Nope
Oh look, the Pirate Bay has the torrent.
I do try to buy my stuff legally. Music is generally available these days, legally, with decent terms, no DRM, at a decent price... the last time I actually pirated music must be 15 years ago. And it looks like the ebook publishers - unlike the movie industry - are learning hard lessons in a hurry. But if you refuse to sell to me in my country, for whatever messed up reason (I don't really care what it is), then I will pirate your stuff, with a hearty f*ck you and a bottle of rum. And guess what: that was the position my government held as well, until the EU forced them otherwise.
I don't mind rich guys making a show out of doing a big donation, or engaging in feel good rich man's hobbies. It beats them using their money to buy political favors or spread misinformation that furthers their goals. Better Bloomberg and Gates than Soros.
That's an interesting detail... It's early days (they only dug a small single section of tunnel yet), but given their long term plans, I wonder if this is something they've addressed in upcoming designs, since it sounds like a key issue if accurate.
That's exactly where the innovation is. Many small scale end points instead of a single huge one (the train station). Moving things by train or subway is not a new concept, but the sucky part isn't the train itself but getting your stuff on there. That's why large companies have their own train yards. What if medium size companies that have a lot of logistics to deal with in an urban setting (big box stores, supermarkets, local Amazon / UPS depots), could afford their own hookup to the underground Loop?
Slashdot Mirror
the getaway could be quick.
It better be. Here, such shenanigans might earn you at worst a trip to the police stations where the cops will turn you out after a coffee and a brief interview. In China... hope you like breaking rocks for a living.
Typical primitive machine learning, it doesn't "figure out" anything. It goes like "Pixels... pixels... pixels.... oh! I have seen that arrangement of pixels before, looks like a 'face', better have a closer look."
So they train it to ignore 5 foot tall faces. Then it will catch the face of a motorist making a U turn.
The whole point of having a locally set PIN / password is that there is no database of access tokens.
That basic infrastructure will already be in place. For instance: an autopark feature, where you get out and the car goes off to find an empty spot to park itself, after which you can summon it using an app. Or your wife needs the car so you send it to her location and take the train home. If these features exist, why would you want to be able to transfer control to the police? Because if the car gets stolen, they will have to decide what to do based on its location, available units etc. If they have access, they can decide to send officers to wherever it is parked, or have a unit intercept it then simply order it to pull over, etc. Works a lot better than having to have you on the phone the whole time.
Any sort of remote access on these cars is a potential avenue of attack, but you will have to features in future self driving cars. Perhaps the paranoid will be able to opt out. And in any case, one safety feature that I certainly would expect in any car is an emergency brake", a button that makes the car pull over and unlock the doors. No more remote kidnapping even if they still can steal your car remotely, even if it means the police can no longer kidnap your car thieves to jail.
Would be a good feature if it is under the owner's control. For example: the car comes with a PIN code in a sealed envelope (or the owner sets a PIN); the PIN is unknown to the manufacturer or the dealer. The police can take over the car remotely, but only after supplying the correct PIN, given to them by the owner.
Of course thieves will try and thwart this: they can already jam GPS trackers so presumably they can jam or shield against remote control. Or they send a number of incorrect PINs to the car to lock out the feature. So it would need to be pretty resilient against DOS attacks as well.
I wish they would just sell me their damn movies (DRM-free, download-to-own).
There's fucking involved? No wonder the sport's popularity is picking up...
To some degree this is already happening: some large firms outsourcing not just a couple of teams or some projects, but entire departments like IT or R&D to low wage countries. The local shops are predominantly run by local cheap managers.
On the other hand, I've known a few managers who are good at managing remote workers, organizing remote teams or organisations, getting results where others failed and blamed it on the rubbish foreign workers. That's a valuable and highly sought after skill, and it seems that this Liemandt guy is one of those people who have it. Good for him... though he seems one of those scumbags who are hell bent on turning every job into a gig.
Now there's a good use for the marine fuels that will soon be banned because of high sulphur content. Can we make a Concorde fly on nr. 6 bunker fuel?
We know what the root problem is. We don't have a fix though, one that is technically, economically, socially and politically viable. It looks like renewables, new nukes, or reducing our energy usage might not cut it unless we seriously step up our efforts... which will come with increased social and economic upheaval. This might be a relatively cheap "solution" that buys us some much needed time at least. Worth a study or even a limited trial. Of course the danger of this solution is people demanding they can hang on to their gas guzzlers and that we simply dump more crap in the upper atmosphere to compensate... but that's the objection environmentalists make to every technological measure.
I hear you... I haven't watched any cable in ages, though it's included in my Internet subscription and I still have the set top box. The other day I did some channel surfing. And holy crap aren't there a lot of ads? And isn't every single one a personal insult to our intelligence? I can't remember how we put up with that crap, but for the life of me I can't imagine why anyone would, these days.
Scream all you want, the sad truth about online advertising is that it is cheap. Even cheaper with targeted ads... no, that doesn't mean that they magically know you need new shoes so they show you ads for shoes, it means that they can target a certain demographic with a fair accuracy. And because it is so cheap, they can afford to show their ads to tens of thousands of people if only one of them decides to buy their product.
My wife likes to watch a couple of Youtube streamers, and I sometimes watch instructional videos for work or hobbies (I prefer text but beggars can't always be choosers I suppose). We got so sick of the ads that we got a subscription. Worth it, in my opinion, even if it doesn't compare to Netflix in terms of € per hour of use.
Android TV is pretty good for set top boxes. I use a couple of nVidia Shields around the house, for paid streaming services, plus Kodi for locally stored content, and I can stream Steam games from the big rig in the office. And watch Youtube... unfortunately I can't block the ads on Android TV.
Speaking of torture, it took years before Google finally rolled out their premium Youtube subscriptions in this country. And I noticed that they really stepped up the ads a couple of months before. They went from having a skippable ad at the beginning of a video every so often, to having more of these and some of them unskippable, to having more and more ads during videos. So I got the paid subscription... I don't mind paying for a service if it's ad-free. As long as they don't get greedy and start showing ads to paid subscribers, while slowly reducing the payout to streamers. I guess it's only a matter of time before we'll "cut the cord" on Youtube as well...
As the Rifftrax crew commented on Avatar: "Wow, papyrus subtitles... they must be savages..."
It's anything but realistic. Too cartoonish, I think. I tried the other popular Battle Royale game as well: PUBG. That goes too far the other way in terms of realism; for instance not having a threat direction indicator. But Counter Strike is fun and requires some physical skill (reflexes), or you'll end up dead quickly. Not for me, as an old fart I cannot compete except in LAN parties with some other old farts at work. I found a happy medium in the Battlefield series: quick fun rounds with fast respawning so you don't sit around waiting for very long, and a klutz like me can still end up in the middle of the scoreboard or sometimes even on top (after a few drinks). Currently having fun with Battlefield 5, which has the added bonus of experiencing what my old neighborhood looked like before the Germans bombed it all to hell.
As for the rest of the gaming market, there's a lot of other good stuff out there. I was surprised, after I stopped following the gaming market for ages, my wife started watching some guys streaming games on YouTube, and we tried a few fun titles like Prison Architect, Rimworld, and Oxygen not included.
Apparently, 10 seconds is long enough for a recruiter to eliminate many candidates
And therein lies the heart of the problem. In my experience, most HR depts are not that good at shortlisting candidates for tech positions, and some are downright terrible. Here's a tip: if you are hiring techies but you are not happy with the level of candidates HR sent you, ask them for all of the resumes that were submitted. You may be surprised at what you'll find there.
Maybe we ought to install this software at HR to clean resumes before they are read. Or perhaps replace the selection process entire with a machine learning system. (Although that comes with its own dangers, like hidden bias and spurious correlation).
Nothing is wrong insofar as the probe is concerned. They are just doing their jobs, they have done those probes before, and Boeing is getting the full treatment as well. The actual reason probably had more to do with the recent mishap with Soyuz. Stating that this is because of Musk having one single toke (the article summary amazingly getting that part right for a change) and a sip of liquor is 100% political PR bullshit. Either someone has an axe to grind with Musk, or some Puritan exec somewhere in the pecking order got his panties in a bunch.
It'll probably be economy service at business/first price levels, if it's anything like the Concorde. Decent leg room, very narrow if comfortable seats. And I doubt they'll have room for the full first class food & beverage treatment.
Why I mentioned Soros? The guy bet against the UK Pound, then dumped assloads of that currency to get it to tank... he made about a billion dollars in that little stunt. Enough for me to question his motives when he meddles in EU politics. The Kochs are probably as bad (perhaps worse) but they get plenty of negative press (in mainstream publications, not just crackpot blogs), and there's plenty of commentary on what they are doing. In contrast, everybody seems to love Soros. EU politicians decry the US practice of rich people buying political influence, but they'd kill for a lunch date with Soros. He does have lunch with the top EU dogs... behind closed doors, and who knows what is being discussed there. I can well understand why Hungary wants to curb his influence in that country and shut down his education and "free press" initiatives. And no, the guy being Jewish has fuck all to do with all that. Nor the fact that he's left leaning. I don't trust his motives, but he is not the only one with suspect motives or undue influence. What scares me about him is that there's zero pushback against his influence from the people who are usually very critical about whom they associate with.
Also, as a European, I care very little about Dems and Reps and who donates to them.
A useful quantum computer needs to process a set of continuous parameters that is larger than the number of subatomic particles in the observable universe
I thought that the whole point of quantum computers was that there's no need to describe or process all possible states. And that the difficulty of practical quantum computers is that the qubits need to "work together": you can't just make 1 cubit, then make 1023 more and build yourself a 1024 cubit computer.
The guy obviously knows way more about quantum computers than I do. But I've never seen the difficulties of quantum computing described in this manner.
Of course it does. In my case it does so for ebooks, or rather it used to do so.
"We're sorry but this ebook is not available in your country (but we are happy to ship a hardcopy)"
Oh well maybe I can fool it by paying with credit card... Nope
Ok, maybe I can fool it by using PayPal and entering the address of some random US hotel... Nope
Oh look, the Pirate Bay has the torrent.
I do try to buy my stuff legally. Music is generally available these days, legally, with decent terms, no DRM, at a decent price... the last time I actually pirated music must be 15 years ago. And it looks like the ebook publishers - unlike the movie industry - are learning hard lessons in a hurry. But if you refuse to sell to me in my country, for whatever messed up reason (I don't really care what it is), then I will pirate your stuff, with a hearty f*ck you and a bottle of rum. And guess what: that was the position my government held as well, until the EU forced them otherwise.
I don't mind rich guys making a show out of doing a big donation, or engaging in feel good rich man's hobbies. It beats them using their money to buy political favors or spread misinformation that furthers their goals. Better Bloomberg and Gates than Soros.
That's an interesting detail... It's early days (they only dug a small single section of tunnel yet), but given their long term plans, I wonder if this is something they've addressed in upcoming designs, since it sounds like a key issue if accurate.
That's exactly where the innovation is. Many small scale end points instead of a single huge one (the train station). Moving things by train or subway is not a new concept, but the sucky part isn't the train itself but getting your stuff on there. That's why large companies have their own train yards. What if medium size companies that have a lot of logistics to deal with in an urban setting (big box stores, supermarkets, local Amazon / UPS depots), could afford their own hookup to the underground Loop?