I would also add that kids have to learn that anything that is done on a school network or computer is not private.
If they were monitoring the school networks and computers, that would be one thing, but this goes far beyond that. That software is designed to monitor the public social media feeds of the students outside of school. This by itself is not what I object to. After all, some school officials and some parents are probably doing some of that monitoring already, and since these are public posts, it's not like students can complain.
What I am concerned with however is that school staff are rarely a neutral party when it comes the speech of their students. Because let's not fool ourselves, the primary reason school officials are searching through social media posts is to look for their own names first, the second thing they look for are videos of themselves (just in case a student recorded them losing it in front of students), and the third thing they look for is anything that might paint their school in a potential negative light. And of course, I am sure that cyberbullying, suicide signs, and other warning signs, are things that they'll look for as well, but in my opinion that's a distant 4th, 5th, and 6th priority for them.
And so if the school is going to spend 18k a year on this stuff, I don't think they should be the ones doing it. They're not capable of being impartial observers. And if a dean really wants to monitor his own/her own reputation online, he/she should be doing it on her own dime and outside of working hours. And as to the safety issue, I do believe that parents, other kids, the general public, tattle tales, and law enforcement authorities, are still going to be the best and quickest sources of information when something bad publicly crops up on the internet.
Most peoples (French and Swiss) that commute into Switzerland do that because it's cheaper to live in France. The introduction of the UBI will be dramatic in all cases: 1) Apply to them: the advantage to live in France will be greatly reduced, making the price of appartement even more higher in Geneva because there is a lack of space, so that quickly all the prices will absorbe the UBI in the direction of the previous situation. 2) Do not apply to them. As all those peoples already have a provable job in Switzerland, there will have no problem to legally migrate in Switzerland to get the UBI, causing the exact same situation as in 1).
If legal residency is the only requirement, then I would envision a third possibility: 3) People will legally migrate to Switzerland, but won't actually live there. This is already happening in Andorra where people are required to own a residence there in order to take advantage of the tax haven status, but no one actually stays in Andorra overnight except for a tiny sliver of the official population.
But of course, this will depend on the exact requirements of Universal Income. If staying in a single room is enough, many houses and apartment buildings will be converted into studio apartment buildings. Or if audits are performed, then the residents will try to live there during the audits. It really comes down to implementation.
But of course, this "Universal Income" is mostly a move to pander to the voting population, so I would expect that even Swiss expats living outside of Switzerland would be eligible for it since I assume those expats would also be eligible to vote in national matters.
I see people making pennies assembling iPhones in China, children working in sweatshops in Vietnam making Nike clothing.
Technically, that wouldn't stop with Universal Income. For instance, giving guaranteed income to anyone who is related to the Saudi family didn't stop poverty in Saudi Arabia. It only created a bigger vacuum for immigrants to fill in. This is already happening to an extent in Switzerland. Over 50% of the workers in Geneva already commute into the country every day. And this "Universal Income" certainly wouldn't apply to those folks.
When Google discontinued Songza. I stopped using Songza. Google Play Music doesn't really replicate the simplicity of Songza.
It's a welcome move -- whenever it actually happens. Google, unlike Apple and Microsoft, as of today doesn't offer any built-in app in its mobile operating system which could allow users to subscribe and listen to their favorite podcasts.
Why would it be a welcome move? There are perfectly valid free podcast listening apps on Android. The worst that could happen is that Google buys out those podcasting apps, discontinues them, and replaces them with something half as good, like it did with Songza.
This move is not demand-driven, I can assure you. No one is asking Google to meddle with Podcasting. They can compete with podcasting apps if they want, but my worry is that they'll take the shortcut of buying out the competition before their own offerings get good enough.
Fix should be simple: when an app's installed remotely from the browser, queue the installation and put up a notification asking the user to confirm the installation.
No, the fix already exists. If you're worried about someone accessing your google play account from a web browser, turn on 2-factor authentication. 2-factor authentication is still there, it just needs to be done through the web browser instead of the phone.
Personally, I need to be able to control/access my phone remotely if it ever gets lost/stolen. So keep it the way it is, be sure to have 2-factor authentication turned on already, because doing an halfway measure like what you're suggesting will only decrease security, not increase it.
So instead of regulating Uber and other "ride sharing" services......they just create another thing with potentially the same problems.
Why not just cut the BS and just regulate Uber like we do Taxi companies.......like what should have happened a long time ago.
You do have a point. Some cities do require that taxis have partitions that protect the taxi driver.
That being said, you're not reading between the lines. If that startup only wants to give rides to women, then it means that they're really afraid of customers assaulting/harassing the drivers, not the other way around. I know Uber women drivers and the main reason they don't like working at night, or in certain neighborhoods, is because of their personal safety.
Uber drivers assaulting passengers does happen, but it actually happens much less than Taxi drivers assaulting passengers, and of course it happens much-much less than passengers assaulting drivers. With the over abundance of Uber drivers in the US right now, all it takes is one or two negative one star reviews, and the Uber system automatically blacklists those drivers from being able to get fares. But if we're talking about a customer who harasses a driver, there is no system for rating or blacklisting that passenger.
Also another reason Uber drivers are more afraid is because they can't easily discriminate. If they accept a fare, they have to pick them up, otherwise the system penalizes them. On the other hand, if a taxi accepts the request of a pick up, and sees the customer acting sketchy, or throwing up on the sidewalk, he probably won't pick that person up. That's not exactly legal, but that's the reality of the taxi system right now.
"the capabilities of what IBM has created are nothing short of amazing... Just like a real person, the underlying AI can get a read on people through movement and cognitive analysis of their speech. It can determine mood, tone, inflection, and so forth."
I'll believe it when I see it.
Thus far, emotional analysis is an over-hyped category and I am getting tired of marketers beating that dead horse over and over again.
I'm not going to do it either. Mozilla has really jumped the shark on this one (actually, my mistake, it's not Mozilla that's backing this, it's one of the Mozilla co-founders that's backing it, but still that guy is an idiot).
What they're suggesting is already happening. You can get loyalty points if you watch ads and fill out surveys. And you can convert these loyalty points to cash (not that you can make much from this unless you're doing it from India with puppet accounts and proxies in the United States).
This is nothing new. The only thing they're adding is bitcoins into the mix.
Most prostitutes these days are virtually, or literally, slaves. They are often kidnapped or trafficked into the US. They are then beaten into submission by their pimps until they no longer resist, and then sold to men on the streets. Regardless of your views on the morality of prostitution, I would hope we can agree that sex-slavery is evil.
Sex-slavery is evil, yes.
That's one reason prostitution should be legalized and regulated everywhere in the United States. If the government can guarantee that legal prostitutes are disease-free, of legal age, and legally protected, then those prostitutes wouldn't have to stand on street corners, nor do blow jobs inside of cars with perfect strangers (which exponentially increases the risks they're undertaking).
And regardless of your views on the morality of prostitution, or regardless of your possible personal hatred of Johns or prostitutes, I would hope that you would do everything in your power to have prostitution legalized and regulated.
Its crazy with being charged for *incoming* calls,
This part is a side-effect. The original intent was to make sure that if you called a mobile phone, you would not be charged more than if you were calling a landline.
The Congress is usually against regulations, but in this case, it actually added more regulations than Europe. In Europe, they had operators solve that issue by giving different area codes to mobile phones that required more money to call them (that being said, a European can still choose to pay for incoming calls if he wants to, so that people don't have to pay extra to call him, in that case, he just gets a normal-looking phone number).
In other words, in that particular case Europe chose the free market approach and chose to let consumers chose for themselves, but the US did not.
Why would the network care if you change handsets?
It doesn't. This is just an excuse. In the US, cell phone networks are greedy bastards.
For instance, during the time that cell phone networks would charge outrageous fees to the parents of new teenagers for going over their texting limit, or would charge $15 for a ringtone, my low level developer friends who worked at those companies had unlimited expense accounts and would waste money like they were top-tier investment bankers. Those were the good times for them.
It's a time they're desperately trying to get back to. Adding unusual fees all over the place allows them to continue milking consumers while at the same time quoting supposedly lower fees in their advertisements.
Can't you just buy a new phone from the local tech-shop and swap the SIM over?
Switching sim card doesn't work because Congress refused to require phone networks to be GSM compliant. In other words, even if you have an already paid-for Verizon phone, you can not switch to another GSM network as your main provider, and CDMA being what it is, you can not even switch your phone to a different CDMA network. You're basically screwed. From a technical standpoint, this lack of interoperability is completely by design.
But from the perspective of the Congress, it's all about letting the free market decide in this particular case.
Never mind that the rest of the world is on GSM. Even China made the switch a couple of years ago.
Most current keyless systems have a back up way to get into the car, whether it's a hidden mechanical lock, a back up numerical keypad, or an NFC card reader (that is powered by the car, not by the phone). That being said, the last two methods require a working car battery, so that might cause problems too.
An asian co-worker of mine who's family name is Teh has found that his name is almost impossible to type in tools like microsoft word, which auto correct Teh to The.
In other words, your friend was just one google answer away from finding out how to add his name to a custom dictionary in Word.
The hololens will fail, the FOV is too narrow to be useful. The meta 2 is already better.
Yes, Hololens will fail, but not because of the Meta 2. The Meta 2 gets its processing power from a tethered top of the line desktop computer. Hololens on the other hand is untethered. It has all the processing power it needs inside its helmet. The two devices are not comparable at all.
That being said, I agree with you. What Microsoft originally bought from ODG for $120 million was a license to their AR technology, it was never meant to double as an immersive VR gaming platform. If Microsoft couldn't acquire the right technology from the get go for the strategy it had in mind, it should just have started from scratch like MagicLeap did.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, but your credit union won't pay Slashdot to have their ad featured as a news story. So tough for them.
I would also add that kids have to learn that anything that is done on a school network or computer is not private.
If they were monitoring the school networks and computers, that would be one thing, but this goes far beyond that. That software is designed to monitor the public social media feeds of the students outside of school. This by itself is not what I object to. After all, some school officials and some parents are probably doing some of that monitoring already, and since these are public posts, it's not like students can complain.
What I am concerned with however is that school staff are rarely a neutral party when it comes the speech of their students. Because let's not fool ourselves, the primary reason school officials are searching through social media posts is to look for their own names first, the second thing they look for are videos of themselves (just in case a student recorded them losing it in front of students), and the third thing they look for is anything that might paint their school in a potential negative light. And of course, I am sure that cyberbullying, suicide signs, and other warning signs, are things that they'll look for as well, but in my opinion that's a distant 4th, 5th, and 6th priority for them.
And so if the school is going to spend 18k a year on this stuff, I don't think they should be the ones doing it. They're not capable of being impartial observers. And if a dean really wants to monitor his own/her own reputation online, he/she should be doing it on her own dime and outside of working hours. And as to the safety issue, I do believe that parents, other kids, the general public, tattle tales, and law enforcement authorities, are still going to be the best and quickest sources of information when something bad publicly crops up on the internet.
Most peoples (French and Swiss) that commute into Switzerland do that because it's cheaper to live in France. The introduction of the UBI will be dramatic in all cases:
1) Apply to them: the advantage to live in France will be greatly reduced, making the price of appartement even more higher in Geneva because there is a lack of space, so that quickly all the prices will absorbe the UBI in the direction of the previous situation.
2) Do not apply to them. As all those peoples already have a provable job in Switzerland, there will have no problem to legally migrate in Switzerland to get the UBI, causing the exact same situation as in 1).
If legal residency is the only requirement, then I would envision a third possibility:
3) People will legally migrate to Switzerland, but won't actually live there. This is already happening in Andorra where people are required to own a residence there in order to take advantage of the tax haven status, but no one actually stays in Andorra overnight except for a tiny sliver of the official population.
But of course, this will depend on the exact requirements of Universal Income. If staying in a single room is enough, many houses and apartment buildings will be converted into studio apartment buildings. Or if audits are performed, then the residents will try to live there during the audits. It really comes down to implementation.
But of course, this "Universal Income" is mostly a move to pander to the voting population, so I would expect that even Swiss expats living outside of Switzerland would be eligible for it since I assume those expats would also be eligible to vote in national matters.
I see people making pennies assembling iPhones in China, children working in sweatshops in Vietnam making Nike clothing.
Technically, that wouldn't stop with Universal Income. For instance, giving guaranteed income to anyone who is related to the Saudi family didn't stop poverty in Saudi Arabia. It only created a bigger vacuum for immigrants to fill in. This is already happening to an extent in Switzerland. Over 50% of the workers in Geneva already commute into the country every day. And this "Universal Income" certainly wouldn't apply to those folks.
Yes, Microsoft is only 15 years late to the party.
I say 15 years because unlike WordLens (now Google Translate), the Microsoft app only seems to work server-side.
Your post is ignoring the fact that people have been buying Macs.
Hell, I even bought for a Mac for my software development purpose, and I don't own any other Apple product.
The market has proved this.
People want the HTC Vive. The market is proving this as we speak.
Birth control.
When you cut through all the environmentalism BS, you see that the real underlying problem is obviously overpopulation.
Thankfully for most Slashdotters, involuntary abstinence is a very good form of birth control.
Don't confuse elitist CA politics with a consensus view.
Elitists? Those H1B employees working at Facebook for half the pay are not elitists.
They do have legitimate fears about Trump.
When Google discontinued Songza. I stopped using Songza. Google Play Music doesn't really replicate the simplicity of Songza.
It's a welcome move -- whenever it actually happens. Google, unlike Apple and Microsoft, as of today doesn't offer any built-in app in its mobile operating system which could allow users to subscribe and listen to their favorite podcasts.
Why would it be a welcome move? There are perfectly valid free podcast listening apps on Android. The worst that could happen is that Google buys out those podcasting apps, discontinues them, and replaces them with something half as good, like it did with Songza.
This move is not demand-driven, I can assure you. No one is asking Google to meddle with Podcasting. They can compete with podcasting apps if they want, but my worry is that they'll take the shortcut of buying out the competition before their own offerings get good enough.
AI beating a top human player at Go
http://www.wired.com/2016/01/i...
where does the FBI think it has 25K to offer up?? I mean yes its a shame, but shouldnt reward money be paid for by the victim, not the taxpayer???
Most likely, it's the insurance that is offering that reward and the FBI is just acting as an intermediary.
And saying that the FBI is offering that money ensures that people don't flood the insurance company's normal business phone number.
Japan is also much more densely populated than the United States.
Fix should be simple: when an app's installed remotely from the browser, queue the installation and put up a notification asking the user to confirm the installation.
No, the fix already exists. If you're worried about someone accessing your google play account from a web browser, turn on 2-factor authentication. 2-factor authentication is still there, it just needs to be done through the web browser instead of the phone.
Personally, I need to be able to control/access my phone remotely if it ever gets lost/stolen. So keep it the way it is, be sure to have 2-factor authentication turned on already, because doing an halfway measure like what you're suggesting will only decrease security, not increase it.
So instead of regulating Uber and other "ride sharing" services......they just create another thing with potentially the same problems.
Why not just cut the BS and just regulate Uber like we do Taxi companies.......like what should have happened a long time ago.
You do have a point. Some cities do require that taxis have partitions that protect the taxi driver.
That being said, you're not reading between the lines. If that startup only wants to give rides to women, then it means that they're really afraid of customers assaulting/harassing the drivers, not the other way around. I know Uber women drivers and the main reason they don't like working at night, or in certain neighborhoods, is because of their personal safety.
Uber drivers assaulting passengers does happen, but it actually happens much less than Taxi drivers assaulting passengers, and of course it happens much-much less than passengers assaulting drivers. With the over abundance of Uber drivers in the US right now, all it takes is one or two negative one star reviews, and the Uber system automatically blacklists those drivers from being able to get fares. But if we're talking about a customer who harasses a driver, there is no system for rating or blacklisting that passenger.
Also another reason Uber drivers are more afraid is because they can't easily discriminate. If they accept a fare, they have to pick them up, otherwise the system penalizes them. On the other hand, if a taxi accepts the request of a pick up, and sees the customer acting sketchy, or throwing up on the sidewalk, he probably won't pick that person up. That's not exactly legal, but that's the reality of the taxi system right now.
"the capabilities of what IBM has created are nothing short of amazing... Just like a real person, the underlying AI can get a read on people through movement and cognitive analysis of their speech. It can determine mood, tone, inflection, and so forth."
I'll believe it when I see it.
Thus far, emotional analysis is an over-hyped category and I am getting tired of marketers beating that dead horse over and over again.
This is why we can't have nice things.
Starve a person for years and of course given an all-you-can-eat buffet he's going to binge eat until he busts a gut.
I'm not going to do it either. Mozilla has really jumped the shark on this one (actually, my mistake, it's not Mozilla that's backing this, it's one of the Mozilla co-founders that's backing it, but still that guy is an idiot).
What they're suggesting is already happening. You can get loyalty points if you watch ads and fill out surveys. And you can convert these loyalty points to cash (not that you can make much from this unless you're doing it from India with puppet accounts and proxies in the United States).
This is nothing new. The only thing they're adding is bitcoins into the mix.
Most prostitutes these days are virtually, or literally, slaves. They are often kidnapped or trafficked into the US. They are then beaten into submission by their pimps until they no longer resist, and then sold to men on the streets. Regardless of your views on the morality of prostitution, I would hope we can agree that sex-slavery is evil.
Sex-slavery is evil, yes.
That's one reason prostitution should be legalized and regulated everywhere in the United States. If the government can guarantee that legal prostitutes are disease-free, of legal age, and legally protected, then those prostitutes wouldn't have to stand on street corners, nor do blow jobs inside of cars with perfect strangers (which exponentially increases the risks they're undertaking).
And regardless of your views on the morality of prostitution, or regardless of your possible personal hatred of Johns or prostitutes, I would hope that you would do everything in your power to have prostitution legalized and regulated.
Its crazy with being charged for *incoming* calls,
This part is a side-effect. The original intent was to make sure that if you called a mobile phone, you would not be charged more than if you were calling a landline.
The Congress is usually against regulations, but in this case, it actually added more regulations than Europe. In Europe, they had operators solve that issue by giving different area codes to mobile phones that required more money to call them (that being said, a European can still choose to pay for incoming calls if he wants to, so that people don't have to pay extra to call him, in that case, he just gets a normal-looking phone number).
In other words, in that particular case Europe chose the free market approach and chose to let consumers chose for themselves, but the US did not.
Why would the network care if you change handsets?
It doesn't. This is just an excuse. In the US, cell phone networks are greedy bastards.
For instance, during the time that cell phone networks would charge outrageous fees to the parents of new teenagers for going over their texting limit, or would charge $15 for a ringtone, my low level developer friends who worked at those companies had unlimited expense accounts and would waste money like they were top-tier investment bankers. Those were the good times for them.
It's a time they're desperately trying to get back to. Adding unusual fees all over the place allows them to continue milking consumers while at the same time quoting supposedly lower fees in their advertisements.
Can't you just buy a new phone from the local tech-shop and swap the SIM over?
Switching sim card doesn't work because Congress refused to require phone networks to be GSM compliant. In other words, even if you have an already paid-for Verizon phone, you can not switch to another GSM network as your main provider, and CDMA being what it is, you can not even switch your phone to a different CDMA network. You're basically screwed. From a technical standpoint, this lack of interoperability is completely by design.
But from the perspective of the Congress, it's all about letting the free market decide in this particular case.
Never mind that the rest of the world is on GSM. Even China made the switch a couple of years ago.
Most current keyless systems have a back up way to get into the car, whether it's a hidden mechanical lock, a back up numerical keypad, or an NFC card reader (that is powered by the car, not by the phone). That being said, the last two methods require a working car battery, so that might cause problems too.
An asian co-worker of mine who's family name is Teh has found that his name is almost impossible to type in tools like microsoft word, which auto correct Teh to The.
In other words, your friend was just one google answer away from finding out how to add his name to a custom dictionary in Word.
The hololens will fail, the FOV is too narrow to be useful. The meta 2 is already better.
Yes, Hololens will fail, but not because of the Meta 2. The Meta 2 gets its processing power from a tethered top of the line desktop computer. Hololens on the other hand is untethered. It has all the processing power it needs inside its helmet. The two devices are not comparable at all.
That being said, I agree with you. What Microsoft originally bought from ODG for $120 million was a license to their AR technology, it was never meant to double as an immersive VR gaming platform. If Microsoft couldn't acquire the right technology from the get go for the strategy it had in mind, it should just have started from scratch like MagicLeap did.
So more people are being given access to source code, and more eyeballs make all bugs shallow. I call it a win.
Except when FISA courts are involved, they're looking for security bugs to exploit, not actually fix.
Facebook Messenger is Emacs in disguise?
No, it's more like Facebook's Messenger is trying to reinvent Google Wave's cool - but thoroughly useless bot ecosystem.