Yes, good old balloons make much more sense if you just need to get up high and stay there.
I bet good old fashioned communications satellites make even more sense. Despite being expensive to deploy, the cost per person covered is probably drastically less expensive than balloons.
How long will it be before this stuff is commercially available?
Like all futuristic things that never materialize, we can expect this material to be commercially available in five years. Just need to hammer out a few details.
I never understood the solar powered drones for internet access. Solar powered drones only make sense if you need to move large distances over many days. That's not what you need for internet access.
Personally, I can think of a few knee-jerk reactions that I might have to discovering this. None would be to just click on the links unless I knew ahead of time that it would work. My response would certainly not be blindly following directions given to me by ransomware - In this case to my own detriment.
"I don't negotiate with terrorists", says the person who has never been held hostage.
The Tesla autopilot is closer to an airplane autopilot and requires a human driver at the wheel ready to take over
Not at all! An airplane pilot on autopilot does not need to takeover the wheel in a split second, the autopilot has automated collision avoidance systems. If the pilot passes out, the airplane won't crash (until it runs out of fuel). In a Tesla, the driver has to maintain complete control and awareness over the vehicle at all times. It's really no different than driving without their "Autopilot".
This is a fun example, but it suggests that ransomware can be used to induce people to do much more than paying a fee. On the more benign side, you could easily see some ransomware require you to click on a dozen or so affiliate links. More troubling, in another iteration the ransomware would only decrypt your files if you order products using a stolen credit card that is provided to you, or if you transfer some child porn from server A to B. Sounds like it could be out of a Black Mirror episode.
The notion that any of these ideas is particularly innovative is ridiculous.
I'd go further and say that the fact that Facebook copied these feature should surprise no one, and even further, most people should not care. It's hard to get worked up over stealing meaningless technology that makes the world dumber.
Self driving cars using just cameras and radar is still an open research problem. Even when using more advanced (and expensive) sensors like LIDAR, there are still a huge number of problems that are not solved. Either Tesla has a vastly better self-driving algorithm than every other University in the world, every other car manufacturer in the world, Google, AND Uber, or they are putting a half-baked product on the road.
I'm not sure how fraud can possibly apply to sex unless there is a quid pro quo involved in the sex
Easy, consider twins. A twin brother has sex with his brother's girlfriend. The girlfriend does not realize that he isn't her boyfriend, but figures it out later. There is no quid pro quo here, the women was deceived into having sex with a different person.
Besides twins, this can also happen in a dark room where a person may not be able to fully recognize the other but relies on what they say.
I do get your point that it's too tempting to abuse such a perk, and chances are that it is. Which is why I prefer going to work and separating it from my personal life
I don't think the problem is abuse. You want people to interact and challenge each other with different ideas. It's really hard to do that informally over the internet. Saying something on a company slack channel or creating a pull request comes with a lot more friction than walking into a co-workers office down the hall and running your "crazy" idea by them.
The thing with the "hey you got a minute" is that your productivity is not all that matters.
I couldn't agree more. I've created so much from going to other offices (and others coming to mine), half informally, half trying to solve some problem. Sitting down and enforcing 100% productivity can often be counter-productive. Anyone can make a new implementation of quicksort or implement some well defined API, but these unscheduled quasi meetings where engineers wander into other engineers' offices is where the real inventing happens.
I had only one dev job where they had a virtual jukebox loaded with music which played at annoying volumes all day long.
The only thing worse than a live jukebox is a live speakerphone. I had an officemate that would routinely sit through one or two hour meetings with the speaker phone on. I confronted him several times but he didn't stop until I escalated it to our bosses, at which point we both looked stupid. I'd take top 40 any day over that.
I worked for years as a programmer, and I agree that working in an isolated environment is more conducive to efficiency of the particular task. That said, it's just a task. To create and invent, you need other people around.
Just an anecdotal point: in my last large engineering firm, I went to another engineer's office almost daily and we would go back and forth about dozens of ideas. Only one tenth of them would be implemented, only one half of those would be shown to management, and only one third of those would make it into the product. Easily 60 ideas for each one that makes it into a product. That is how creating happens.
this is easily the worst description of any technological subject I've seen on Slashdot for a long time: "The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work." It does give you a way to store, share, and collaborate, but the mechanisms are drastically different. Google Docs collaboration is synchronous, GitHub's is serial....
So despite the description being accurate, it's "the worst description of any technological subject I've seen" because of your made-up pedantic formalism? Who cares if it's synchronous or serial, the article did a good job explaining a complex product;
I bet Marissa Mayer is still fuming about ever taking the CEO position and associating herself with such a f'd up company. If she had only known in advance.
I hope this is a joke... Yahoo has been in a tailspin for years, there was no way Meyer wouldn't know about it.
We covered this in college in our Manufacturing Management course. The law in the UK has a lot of grey areas concerning what constitutes and employer/employee relationship,...
Same in the US. Everyone here thinks there is a perfectly black and white divide between employee and independent contractor, when in reality, it's a hundred shades of gray. In the U.S. The IRS has a 11 factor test for determining if someone is an independent contractor. No factor is necessary or sufficient, and each factor itself can be subject to gradations.
Just because traditional cabs are such vile and corrupt system, doesn't mean that Uber that replaces them with gig drivers is not a corrupt and vile system.
Couldn't agree more. But the effect of this is that while I disagree with Uber's policies, it's hard for me to get worked about them.
First, nobody except my Aunt Josephine calls anything a "program" any more
Oh Aunty J... made it a pleasure to hike through the snow to remove the spywares from her Windows 98 AOL message chat rooms just for a taste of warm new england charm.
What a lot of people fail to take into consideration about self-driving cars is that driving (in a city) is a deeply social activity... It will be difficult for software to ever match a human in these tasks.
I agree, but still very disappointed about Google's decision. Self driving cars will likely require thousands, or perhaps millions of little computer programs that can catch every possible scenario or combination thereof. It's a huge undertaking, but if anyone could do it, Google could. Now it seems they are backpeddling from that in order to get something to market faster. We'll end up seeing more half-assed product rushed to market (e.g., Tesla Autopilot) to please investors and the press. Long term prospects are not good.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, good old balloons make much more sense if you just need to get up high and stay there.
I bet good old fashioned communications satellites make even more sense. Despite being expensive to deploy, the cost per person covered is probably drastically less expensive than balloons.
How long will it be before this stuff is commercially available?
Like all futuristic things that never materialize, we can expect this material to be commercially available in five years. Just need to hammer out a few details.
Google just finally recognized it.
I never understood the solar powered drones for internet access. Solar powered drones only make sense if you need to move large distances over many days. That's not what you need for internet access.
Personally, I can think of a few knee-jerk reactions that I might have to discovering this. None would be to just click on the links unless I knew ahead of time that it would work. My response would certainly not be blindly following directions given to me by ransomware - In this case to my own detriment.
"I don't negotiate with terrorists", says the person who has never been held hostage.
The Tesla autopilot is closer to an airplane autopilot and requires a human driver at the wheel ready to take over
Not at all! An airplane pilot on autopilot does not need to takeover the wheel in a split second, the autopilot has automated collision avoidance systems. If the pilot passes out, the airplane won't crash (until it runs out of fuel). In a Tesla, the driver has to maintain complete control and awareness over the vehicle at all times. It's really no different than driving without their "Autopilot".
This is a fun example, but it suggests that ransomware can be used to induce people to do much more than paying a fee. On the more benign side, you could easily see some ransomware require you to click on a dozen or so affiliate links. More troubling, in another iteration the ransomware would only decrypt your files if you order products using a stolen credit card that is provided to you, or if you transfer some child porn from server A to B. Sounds like it could be out of a Black Mirror episode.
The notion that any of these ideas is particularly innovative is ridiculous.
I'd go further and say that the fact that Facebook copied these feature should surprise no one, and even further, most people should not care. It's hard to get worked up over stealing meaningless technology that makes the world dumber.
Self driving cars using just cameras and radar is still an open research problem. Even when using more advanced (and expensive) sensors like LIDAR, there are still a huge number of problems that are not solved. Either Tesla has a vastly better self-driving algorithm than every other University in the world, every other car manufacturer in the world, Google, AND Uber, or they are putting a half-baked product on the road.
I'm not sure how fraud can possibly apply to sex unless there is a quid pro quo involved in the sex
Easy, consider twins. A twin brother has sex with his brother's girlfriend. The girlfriend does not realize that he isn't her boyfriend, but figures it out later. There is no quid pro quo here, the women was deceived into having sex with a different person.
Besides twins, this can also happen in a dark room where a person may not be able to fully recognize the other but relies on what they say.
Yes: 1/60 final productivity rate is pretty normal - and larger teams tend to have even lower rates.
Not sure I would call that a "productivity" rate, it's simply (# ideas in product)/(# ideas in company).
Time to dump Python 3.x resume development on the 2.x branch. The ridiculous lack of backwards compatibility hurts far more than it helps.
If you can prove that these lead to accidents less frequently than a human driver that's an improvement.
But where is the proof? Why haven't Uber and Tesla publicly released accident statistics? Me-thinks it's cause they have no proof.
I do get your point that it's too tempting to abuse such a perk, and chances are that it is. Which is why I prefer going to work and separating it from my personal life
I don't think the problem is abuse. You want people to interact and challenge each other with different ideas. It's really hard to do that informally over the internet. Saying something on a company slack channel or creating a pull request comes with a lot more friction than walking into a co-workers office down the hall and running your "crazy" idea by them.
The thing with the "hey you got a minute" is that your productivity is not all that matters.
I couldn't agree more. I've created so much from going to other offices (and others coming to mine), half informally, half trying to solve some problem. Sitting down and enforcing 100% productivity can often be counter-productive. Anyone can make a new implementation of quicksort or implement some well defined API, but these unscheduled quasi meetings where engineers wander into other engineers' offices is where the real inventing happens.
I had only one dev job where they had a virtual jukebox loaded with music which played at annoying volumes all day long.
The only thing worse than a live jukebox is a live speakerphone. I had an officemate that would routinely sit through one or two hour meetings with the speaker phone on. I confronted him several times but he didn't stop until I escalated it to our bosses, at which point we both looked stupid. I'd take top 40 any day over that.
I worked for years as a programmer, and I agree that working in an isolated environment is more conducive to efficiency of the particular task. That said, it's just a task. To create and invent, you need other people around.
Just an anecdotal point: in my last large engineering firm, I went to another engineer's office almost daily and we would go back and forth about dozens of ideas. Only one tenth of them would be implemented, only one half of those would be shown to management, and only one third of those would make it into the product. Easily 60 ideas for each one that makes it into a product. That is how creating happens.
Yahoo has been saying from the beginning that these attacks were "state sponsored". But why would a State try to sell the database on the dark web?
this is easily the worst description of any technological subject I've seen on Slashdot for a long time: "The startup operates a sort of Google Docs for programmers, giving them a place to store, share and collaborate on their work." It does give you a way to store, share, and collaborate, but the mechanisms are drastically different. Google Docs collaboration is synchronous, GitHub's is serial. ...
So despite the description being accurate, it's "the worst description of any technological subject I've seen" because of your made-up pedantic formalism? Who cares if it's synchronous or serial, the article did a good job explaining a complex product;
. . . . .where, if you're lucky, 10-15% of proceeds actually go to the cause. . . .
What? In this case, the cause is wikipedia, so 100% of the proceeds go to the cause. There's no middleman here.
I bet Marissa Mayer is still fuming about ever taking the CEO position and associating herself with such a f'd up company. If she had only known in advance.
I hope this is a joke... Yahoo has been in a tailspin for years, there was no way Meyer wouldn't know about it.
We covered this in college in our Manufacturing Management course. The law in the UK has a lot of grey areas concerning what constitutes and employer/employee relationship, ...
Same in the US. Everyone here thinks there is a perfectly black and white divide between employee and independent contractor, when in reality, it's a hundred shades of gray. In the U.S. The IRS has a 11 factor test for determining if someone is an independent contractor. No factor is necessary or sufficient, and each factor itself can be subject to gradations.
Just because traditional cabs are such vile and corrupt system, doesn't mean that Uber that replaces them with gig drivers is not a corrupt and vile system.
Couldn't agree more. But the effect of this is that while I disagree with Uber's policies, it's hard for me to get worked about them.
First, nobody except my Aunt Josephine calls anything a "program" any more
Oh Aunty J... made it a pleasure to hike through the snow to remove the spywares from her Windows 98 AOL message chat rooms just for a taste of warm new england charm.
What a lot of people fail to take into consideration about self-driving cars is that driving (in a city) is a deeply social activity ... It will be difficult for software to ever match a human in these tasks.
I agree, but still very disappointed about Google's decision. Self driving cars will likely require thousands, or perhaps millions of little computer programs that can catch every possible scenario or combination thereof. It's a huge undertaking, but if anyone could do it, Google could. Now it seems they are backpeddling from that in order to get something to market faster. We'll end up seeing more half-assed product rushed to market (e.g., Tesla Autopilot) to please investors and the press. Long term prospects are not good.
I really hate that website Slash[removed for your protection].