It's clear what Facebook is doing: they're trying to establish themselves as the Tencent WeChat of the United States, the one-stop portal that messaging, mobile commerce, electronic payments, and just about everything else runs through. However, they won't be able to pull it off in the United States for several reasons. One is that in China, the banking infrastructure is weaker, so before they had a chance to step-in, WeChat basically established themselves as the gatekeeper. In the United States at least, banks have already seen what happened with credit cards (MC/Visa monopoly) and are trying to prevent that from happening again with electronic payments. They'll talk, but they're certainly not going to hand this over to a company like Facebook.
Stepping back, this of course was all pre-Facebook data scandals. Now, with general public trust in Facebook weakening, people are probably going to be even less inclined to support a Facebook-based system.
This isn't a "Google" problem, this is an industry-wide problem. What larger tech company ISNT doing this?
This goes beyond even the tech industry to an ongoing global problem . Whether in the United States, Canada, Europe, or East Asia, you have more and more companies opting to use more and more contract labor. It's many of the same reasons: easy to hire and fire / surge, cheaper, etc.
For those who need a primer, here's information on the "Wolf Amendment" that bans NASA from working with the Chinese. The concerns are understandable given that many of the Chinese firms that work on their space programs have direct links to the PLA. Then again, most of the Western space firms, from traditional players to new space, also have ties with the DoD.
Personally, I take the simplest possibility: this was a disgruntled employee who decided to lash out at Tesla. However, if we're going to indulge in conspiracy theories, there are other factions with axes to grind that Elon didn't mention. One is labor, particularly the United Auto Workers (UAW), and the contentious fight about unionization of the NUMMI plant. Increase "safety" issues at an overworked plant to try and drive a narrative of why Tesla autoworkers should unionize to stand their ground against Elon Musk. He has of course mentioned short traders, auto manufacturers, etc.
This is merely taking existing military space activities and consolidating them into a single, independent branch. Things like the GPS system, the large network of military satellites, communication networks, orbital asset and debris tracking, etc. This is an idea that's been debated for years prior to the Trump administration. The main reason is that people were concerned that the US Air Force was so focused on the traditional air superiority and strategic defense missions that they would not be able to properly focus on the space missions. Assets were also spread out among the different services. Therefore, instead of it being the second, less sexy job of an existing service, take all that into a single set of professionals focused on all things space.
The Air Force hates this idea of course, as it takes away their turf (budget, assets). However, the irony is that the Air Force was created under similar circumstances, when people argued that the US Army shouldn't be working space superiority and nuclear deterrence missions.
I came to say the same thing. Which shareholders are these? Does this group represent any of the big institutional shareholders that actually hold real sway? That's what determines if this is a real, credible challenge or simply a high profile publicity stunt.
Indeed. With the Chinese state already building their Social Credit System, expanding Chinese services like Didi Chuxing abroad is a great way to keep their citizens within the Chinese Internet ecosystem while they're overseas where they can be tracked, monitored and scored. Uber has already demonstrated the kind of abuses and tracking that can be done, now take those possibilities and apply them to a state coordinated environment where they deliberately take that information to score you! Oh, you're going to that casino to burn money? Isn't that address an exiled dissident's bookshop? Interesting that you and a few friends are congregating with a known Taiwanese activist we're tracking...
I would argue that the churning labor market idea isn't just obsolete, it's flawed to begin with, hiding what really happened. What they fail to mention is that the people whose jobs were destroyed in previous technological revolutions struggled mightily to gain one of those newly created jobs. Much like how today you can't take an old mill worker and turn them into a AI coder, they couldn't simply take a serf, farmer or craftsman and turn them into a skilled factory worker. In the end, those people were lost, shuffled into slums or revolted in the political upheavals of the 19th century. The problem only "resolved" itself as they died out and their children, who grew up in the new technological age, took on those new jobs.
According to the article, only a dozen or so employees have resigned out a workforce of around 75,000+ employees. It's not that the employees' action isn't significant, but it's such a small number in the grand scheme of things, unless they are key managers or technical leads, it's hard to really say it will have much, if any, impact in the long run.
The accident is more a sign that EMS personnel and scrap yard employee training is going to have to be updated for the handling and management of large automotive lithium ion batteries. Not just for Teslas but for other electric cars and possibly in the future urban VTOL vehicles as well.
This move will probably kill dating apps that were built upon Facebook, notably Coffee Meets Bagel. CMB was built upon the idea of linking up friends-of-friends on Facebook's network. This will probably be one of the major causalities. Other popular dating websites probably glean data from Facebook, but they have their own independent databases allowing them to stay standing albeit with greater competition.
While the Pentagon has been dabbling for a long time in artificial intelligence in areas like autonomy and analytics, there's been a newfound urgency because of very active Chinese PLA efforts to incorporate AI into all aspects of their military.
The PLA anticipates that the advent of AI could fundamentally change the character of warfare, resulting in a transformation from today’s “informatized” () ways of warfare to future “intelligentized” () warfare, in which AI will be critical to military power. The PLA will likely leverage AI to enhance its future capabilities, including in intelligent and autonomous unmanned systems; AI-enabled data fusion, information processing, and intelligence analysis; war-gaming, simulation, and training; defense, offense, and command in information warfare; and intelligent support to command decision-making. At present, the PLA is funding a wide range of projects involving AI, and the Chinese defense industry and PLA research institutes are pursuing extensive research and development, in some cases partnering with private enterprises. Battlefield Singularity: Artificial Intelligence, Military Revolution, and China's Future Military Power
Indeed, the Chinese have been much better than many other countries, including the United States, in coordinating government, academia and industry in AI research. Whereas in the US, there is still a lot of friction between leading private sector AI companies and the DoD, in China, they are in lock step. And unlike other peer adversaries in the past, China is approaching parity, or even exceeding, Western nations in AI development.
For better or worse, this was the choice that consumers made back in the 1990s and early 2000s with regards to Internet services. Services gave different models, paid subscription or free with advertising, and most consumers, perhaps in ignorance of the risk (or simply not caring), chose the latter.
Agreed. If you want to be even more cynical, the notch creates a much more unique screen that adds just one more headache to developers who want to build applications for more than one operating system.
Uber's decision to settle quickly isn't necessarily because they thought they couldn't win. The company might simply be trying to get the news off the headlines which could hurt the reputation of driverless vehicles instead of having it dragged out for years as it goes through the legal process. Or they might have done the math and found it was simply cheaper to just pay the family and be done with it versus hire an army of lawyers for the next five years. It could be too that they didn't want to go too deep into their technology in a public court case, and this was a way to protect their proprietary findings.
The article neatly outlines the problem. Can you retrain thousands of older, high school educated factory workers to become coders, creative types, etc.? Even if you theoretically could, would they want to, or do we have the systems in place to do it? In the United States at least, worker retraining has not proven that effective. Finally, even if you could retrain them, how can they afford to go where the jobs are? Can a retrained air condition factory worker afford to move to Silicon Valley, New York City, or some other high cost area to leverage those shiny new skills? Even if they get there, would companies even want to hire a middle aged, retrained worker especially with existing age discrimination?
Agreed in that it's all about circumstances. If a person was randomly found dead and was unidentifiable, I think it's perfectly reasonable to do this to try and identify who they were, reach out to next of kin. Same with a murder victim in that the fingerprint could help lead to their killer. However, if this is someone gunned down by police, or they find a victim who they can identify, unless there is an immediate threat as defined by the law (e.g. a bomb is planted and about to go off), I don't think there's any reason for police to be able to dig through their phone.
In context, this is from the same country where the government mandates that tutoring centers (known as hagwon or "cram schools") all close at 10pm because students would be there until 2am in the morning during weekdays. Also to be noted that students and parents protested this government ordinance because they were afraid that students would fall behind their peers in the high pressure education environment in Korea. To this day, students and hagwon operators regularly flout the law, covering up windows and going cloak and dagger when government inspectors come by.
If you think this situation started with the refugee crisis, think again.
Completely agree. I'd also add that Germany has had a long existing Turkish minority in the country which has created tensions for a while. In fact, before the refugee crisis, Chancellor Merkel had a speech in which she declared failure in Germany's efforts at multiculturalism and integrating its minorities. Mind you, we should also remember the German context in that it imported Turkish workers and effectively ghettoized them, making only token efforts to integrate them in hopes they'd go back home when no longer needed. Instead, three generations later, Germany is waking up to the fact that maybe they should have been more proactive in bringing them into the fold. This tension was already there, and the refugee crisis simply blew it up even further.
But Rogers also made clear that he had not been granted what he called "the day-to-day authority" to disrupt Russian hacking operations at their point of origin.
To be fair, the range of actions to go after attacks "at their origin" in Russia would probably be a high risk no matter who was president, especially if it turns out the source is a Russian government agency. Admiral Rogers put it best near the end of the article:
Even if he were granted authority to act, Rogers questioned during the Senate hearing whether his agencies' capabilities would be the best or only response to those attacks.
"Be mindful of falling in the trap that just because someone comes at us in cyber that we have to default to immediately going back and doing the exact same thing," he warned. "I've always believed we need to step back and think a little bit more broadly about it and just don't default — it's because of that, you know, that I have not done that to date."
Slashdot Mirror
It's clear what Facebook is doing: they're trying to establish themselves as the Tencent WeChat of the United States, the one-stop portal that messaging, mobile commerce, electronic payments, and just about everything else runs through. However, they won't be able to pull it off in the United States for several reasons. One is that in China, the banking infrastructure is weaker, so before they had a chance to step-in, WeChat basically established themselves as the gatekeeper. In the United States at least, banks have already seen what happened with credit cards (MC/Visa monopoly) and are trying to prevent that from happening again with electronic payments. They'll talk, but they're certainly not going to hand this over to a company like Facebook.
Stepping back, this of course was all pre-Facebook data scandals. Now, with general public trust in Facebook weakening, people are probably going to be even less inclined to support a Facebook-based system.
This isn't a "Google" problem, this is an industry-wide problem. What larger tech company ISNT doing this?
This goes beyond even the tech industry to an ongoing global problem . Whether in the United States, Canada, Europe, or East Asia, you have more and more companies opting to use more and more contract labor. It's many of the same reasons: easy to hire and fire / surge, cheaper, etc.
For those who need a primer, here's information on the "Wolf Amendment" that bans NASA from working with the Chinese. The concerns are understandable given that many of the Chinese firms that work on their space programs have direct links to the PLA. Then again, most of the Western space firms, from traditional players to new space, also have ties with the DoD.
Personally, I take the simplest possibility: this was a disgruntled employee who decided to lash out at Tesla. However, if we're going to indulge in conspiracy theories, there are other factions with axes to grind that Elon didn't mention. One is labor, particularly the United Auto Workers (UAW), and the contentious fight about unionization of the NUMMI plant. Increase "safety" issues at an overworked plant to try and drive a narrative of why Tesla autoworkers should unionize to stand their ground against Elon Musk. He has of course mentioned short traders, auto manufacturers, etc.
This is merely taking existing military space activities and consolidating them into a single, independent branch. Things like the GPS system, the large network of military satellites, communication networks, orbital asset and debris tracking, etc. This is an idea that's been debated for years prior to the Trump administration. The main reason is that people were concerned that the US Air Force was so focused on the traditional air superiority and strategic defense missions that they would not be able to properly focus on the space missions. Assets were also spread out among the different services. Therefore, instead of it being the second, less sexy job of an existing service, take all that into a single set of professionals focused on all things space.
The Air Force hates this idea of course, as it takes away their turf (budget, assets). However, the irony is that the Air Force was created under similar circumstances, when people argued that the US Army shouldn't be working space superiority and nuclear deterrence missions.
I came to say the same thing. Which shareholders are these? Does this group represent any of the big institutional shareholders that actually hold real sway? That's what determines if this is a real, credible challenge or simply a high profile publicity stunt.
Indeed. With the Chinese state already building their Social Credit System, expanding Chinese services like Didi Chuxing abroad is a great way to keep their citizens within the Chinese Internet ecosystem while they're overseas where they can be tracked, monitored and scored. Uber has already demonstrated the kind of abuses and tracking that can be done, now take those possibilities and apply them to a state coordinated environment where they deliberately take that information to score you! Oh, you're going to that casino to burn money? Isn't that address an exiled dissident's bookshop? Interesting that you and a few friends are congregating with a known Taiwanese activist we're tracking...
I would argue that the churning labor market idea isn't just obsolete, it's flawed to begin with, hiding what really happened. What they fail to mention is that the people whose jobs were destroyed in previous technological revolutions struggled mightily to gain one of those newly created jobs. Much like how today you can't take an old mill worker and turn them into a AI coder, they couldn't simply take a serf, farmer or craftsman and turn them into a skilled factory worker. In the end, those people were lost, shuffled into slums or revolted in the political upheavals of the 19th century. The problem only "resolved" itself as they died out and their children, who grew up in the new technological age, took on those new jobs.
Sounds like a troll from Airbus. ;)
According to the article, only a dozen or so employees have resigned out a workforce of around 75,000+ employees. It's not that the employees' action isn't significant, but it's such a small number in the grand scheme of things, unless they are key managers or technical leads, it's hard to really say it will have much, if any, impact in the long run.
The accident is more a sign that EMS personnel and scrap yard employee training is going to have to be updated for the handling and management of large automotive lithium ion batteries. Not just for Teslas but for other electric cars and possibly in the future urban VTOL vehicles as well.
This move will probably kill dating apps that were built upon Facebook, notably Coffee Meets Bagel. CMB was built upon the idea of linking up friends-of-friends on Facebook's network. This will probably be one of the major causalities. Other popular dating websites probably glean data from Facebook, but they have their own independent databases allowing them to stay standing albeit with greater competition.
I suppose that's one way to burn down that stockpile of highly enriched uranium.
For those higher paid employees, an equally interesting question is how many days of vacation do they actually use?
The PLA anticipates that the advent of AI could fundamentally change the character of warfare, resulting in a transformation from today’s “informatized” () ways of warfare to future “intelligentized” () warfare, in which AI will be critical to military power. The PLA will likely leverage AI to enhance its future capabilities, including in intelligent and autonomous unmanned systems; AI-enabled data fusion, information processing, and intelligence analysis; war-gaming, simulation, and training; defense, offense, and command in information warfare; and intelligent support to command decision-making. At present, the PLA is funding a wide range of projects involving AI, and the Chinese defense industry and PLA research institutes are pursuing extensive research and development, in some cases partnering with private enterprises. Battlefield Singularity: Artificial Intelligence, Military Revolution, and China's Future Military Power
Indeed, the Chinese have been much better than many other countries, including the United States, in coordinating government, academia and industry in AI research. Whereas in the US, there is still a lot of friction between leading private sector AI companies and the DoD, in China, they are in lock step. And unlike other peer adversaries in the past, China is approaching parity, or even exceeding, Western nations in AI development.
For better or worse, this was the choice that consumers made back in the 1990s and early 2000s with regards to Internet services. Services gave different models, paid subscription or free with advertising, and most consumers, perhaps in ignorance of the risk (or simply not caring), chose the latter.
Agreed. If you want to be even more cynical, the notch creates a much more unique screen that adds just one more headache to developers who want to build applications for more than one operating system.
Uber's decision to settle quickly isn't necessarily because they thought they couldn't win. The company might simply be trying to get the news off the headlines which could hurt the reputation of driverless vehicles instead of having it dragged out for years as it goes through the legal process. Or they might have done the math and found it was simply cheaper to just pay the family and be done with it versus hire an army of lawyers for the next five years. It could be too that they didn't want to go too deep into their technology in a public court case, and this was a way to protect their proprietary findings.
The article neatly outlines the problem. Can you retrain thousands of older, high school educated factory workers to become coders, creative types, etc.? Even if you theoretically could, would they want to, or do we have the systems in place to do it? In the United States at least, worker retraining has not proven that effective. Finally, even if you could retrain them, how can they afford to go where the jobs are? Can a retrained air condition factory worker afford to move to Silicon Valley, New York City, or some other high cost area to leverage those shiny new skills? Even if they get there, would companies even want to hire a middle aged, retrained worker especially with existing age discrimination?
Agreed in that it's all about circumstances. If a person was randomly found dead and was unidentifiable, I think it's perfectly reasonable to do this to try and identify who they were, reach out to next of kin. Same with a murder victim in that the fingerprint could help lead to their killer. However, if this is someone gunned down by police, or they find a victim who they can identify, unless there is an immediate threat as defined by the law (e.g. a bomb is planted and about to go off), I don't think there's any reason for police to be able to dig through their phone.
In context, this is from the same country where the government mandates that tutoring centers (known as hagwon or "cram schools") all close at 10pm because students would be there until 2am in the morning during weekdays. Also to be noted that students and parents protested this government ordinance because they were afraid that students would fall behind their peers in the high pressure education environment in Korea. To this day, students and hagwon operators regularly flout the law, covering up windows and going cloak and dagger when government inspectors come by.
If you think this situation started with the refugee crisis, think again.
Completely agree. I'd also add that Germany has had a long existing Turkish minority in the country which has created tensions for a while. In fact, before the refugee crisis, Chancellor Merkel had a speech in which she declared failure in Germany's efforts at multiculturalism and integrating its minorities. Mind you, we should also remember the German context in that it imported Turkish workers and effectively ghettoized them, making only token efforts to integrate them in hopes they'd go back home when no longer needed. Instead, three generations later, Germany is waking up to the fact that maybe they should have been more proactive in bringing them into the fold. This tension was already there, and the refugee crisis simply blew it up even further.
But Rogers also made clear that he had not been granted what he called "the day-to-day authority" to disrupt Russian hacking operations at their point of origin.
To be fair, the range of actions to go after attacks "at their origin" in Russia would probably be a high risk no matter who was president, especially if it turns out the source is a Russian government agency. Admiral Rogers put it best near the end of the article:
Even if he were granted authority to act, Rogers questioned during the Senate hearing whether his agencies' capabilities would be the best or only response to those attacks.
"Be mindful of falling in the trap that just because someone comes at us in cyber that we have to default to immediately going back and doing the exact same thing," he warned. "I've always believed we need to step back and think a little bit more broadly about it and just don't default — it's because of that, you know, that I have not done that to date."
Maybe it was the previous owner of your phone number? Or even worse, someone using your number as a fake filler for their own account?
How do we know SETI doesn't want the GPUs to mine cryptocurrency themselves to fund their program? :P