Thanks, I'm in the UK though. I'll have a look at the settings. Actually, it's pretty good, small, stays charged for a long time and inexpensive, if lost.
I have a Samsung GT-E2550, no apps because it's a feature phone. I use it to talk to people and (from time to time) send an SMS. Younger members of my family usually gather by tradition during public holidays to mock me, but they're beginning to wake up now.
Seriously, I don't want a load of badly coded, intrusionware on my phone or for it to declare my location to all and sundry. Of course, it's possible to triangulate with cell tower data, but my view is that this level of intrusion shouldn't be a) default b) 'easy'. Android is now such a tangle that it's not really clear (except maybe via Wireshark, for example, but do you want to live like that?) when everything is genuinely 'off'.
See, Bonzo Dog Band, I'm bored even: https://youtu.be/tz_4qJBAlbc?t... Sorry unable to resist that, I'm very old too and aliens have replaced my brain with porridge.
Yes, you're probably right. If they're pollution sensors etc. it may not matter unless the hack disables them. If they're cameras and/or things connected to actuators of some kind, that's a different picture.
Just a simple thought experiment tells you all you need to know. In scenario one, the sensors are all run by Google and Facebook, in scenario two they are run by the municipality and all the data is open. That's very crude and, in a mixed economy, the ownership is likely to be mixed too, but see below. However, the Roomba discussion provides some indicators about what will eventually happen to data that is in commercial hands.
It's also worth noting that sensor networks and infrastructures are, to some extent rivalrous, in the economics sense. That is, they compete for physical placement, for bandwidth and (probably) for standards and protocols.
There's questions of scope, governance and separation too. For example, I never go into Apple stores and that's a choice, but I may have to go into a hospital. I personally don't mind advertising beacons because I choose not to have a smart phone and don't receive their output. I don't want any of my data sold on, but have zero faith in GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, as proxies for the usual suspects) not to do that.
I think 'we' can do really good things with city data and wrote about it somewhat in 2009 but that was on the basis of municipal control, public health and ecological objectives. The current picture looks a lot more invasive and murkier.
the algorithm revealed unexpected ways of operating the plasma
.
Optimisation and MI is fragile for edge/unexpected cases, so I'm not sure I want this piece of maths used to control an over-white-hot stream of plasma. At least, I'd want decades of testing before deployment and not anywhere near my house or family.
I'm not a big believer in fusion anyway, except that large, conveniently placed fusion reactor that we call 'the Sun'. If we must fiddle around with this, it's worth looking at the Stellerator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that's come on, since 1951.
No, sorry, I go either to Marseilles or towards Monptellier. I've been as far as Barcelona too, some bits are not TGV-ready so the train slows. But, in general, it's quiet, comfortable and (if you are careful, I can travel midweek) good prices.
Air travel is noise polluting, air polluting and fossil fuel driven. Half the time, with network improvements, we can make do with teleconferences. In fact, working in Brussels in the 1980s, we already used teleconference to save trips to the computer centre in Luxembourg.
I'm not saying that we stop air travel, I enjoy my holiday too, but we really need to minimise and substitute. I take the the high speed train (TGV) from Paris to Marseilles now, it's 4 hours, probably less than the flight once I've dealt with two internal airports. So, whilst this is interesting research, it should a be white elephant in a greener, quieter, less polluted world.
Certainly, given the avoidance in the UK by Google etc., it would be nice to know exactly what all the corporates are [not]paying compared to their turnover in the territory. I say turnover, because there's less possibility of manipulation and it will give some guide to profitability.
Profit is easy to manipulate, in order to make tax liabilities disappear, yet the offending company still uses the infrastructure in the country. This is a point made by Warren Buffett, that well-known communist, not specifically by me.
That way, we know which companies to boycott. And yes, since you're asking, I have no FB account, don't buy anything from Google ads and am beginning to minimise my use of Amazon. https://www.hive.co.uk/ support local bookshops in the UK, for example.
Actually, although he's been fairly unspecific and rather apocalyptic in the interview, I believe there are some more sneaky and modest things to worry about:
All these ideas have a frog-in-hot-water side, they are incremental, rather than being spectacular, like 'killer robots', but some of the consequences are just as dangerous. They are in two categories a) loss of control b) social cooling and non-democratic loss of liberty.
Agree with all the commentators that say that Uber and Lyft are not ride sharing, or in a wider context 'sharing', they are extractive. Worth reading a little McKenzie Wark on this subject too: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p... see the commentary on 'vectorialists'.
About ten years ago, I started in on this: https://sourceforge.net/projec... now rotting quietly away on sourceforge. One (of many) things that stopped me at the time was that Google Maps was the only source of geo-stuff, now there's Open Street Map. My idea was something that would be useful to what has now become the platform cooperative movement: https://platform.coop/, that would be genuine sharing, both the platform and the rides.
However my madness did not end there. In my mind, I looked forward to routing everything that moved around, a) dealing with half filled vans, lorries and cars, the whole lot b) creating public data that would be performative in that it would advocate for new routes where there was market failure, for example. I note that Amazon has started a project for transport consolidation: http://www.scdigest.com/firstt... so this idea is probably valid but the ownership isn't cooperative.
Ok, I'll end there. This isn't to self congratulate, it's just publication of an idea that I've nearly abandoned and someone younger might want to take up. If you do, give me a shout.
Thanks, saved me a post. I participate and help arrange (one) Pi Jam(s), apart from a certain (cough, cough) quantity of them in my house. The community is always going to make them win out, until something really, really spectacular in terms of spec and price point appears. But, even then.
I will be 67 this year. Because of Perl, I still get quite a lot of well-paid niche work. Also, happily (or because I was a sensible freelancer) I don't need full time either, my health is not too bad and I'm in the UK (admittedly the Conservative party is doing its level best to ruin universal healthcare here).
However I've recently begun to talk with other older technical people about problems that affect 'us' and that we can solve. There are plenty, without thinking about internet connected juicers and multi-zillion funding rounds. In fact, I was just invited into a start-up hothouse (apparently I am a 'talented outlier', whatever that means, perhaps someone younger can youngsplain? haha, only serious) and turned them down. What I/we aim at is more modest, more open and will provide some geeky fun on the journey too.
Ok, that's a bit of a manifesto now too, you know where to find me, just click on some intertubey stuff. Incidentally, I've never had a problem with young bosses and still enjoy new tech (less so, hype-tech). But, I think the best liberation for the seriously old, is to fashion some sort of destiny for ourselves.
Me too. Who needs the Disneyland Anal Probe Experience? I used to go there a lot, like the people for their generosity and optimism, but they've manage to elect a nutcase. Admittedly the choices were pretty bad, but Hilary the Hawk was slightly better and capable of taking advice from informed aides too.
Thanks. So agree. I'm semi-retired now, but my last serious job was in a small, very competent investment bank. Any major change had to survive the change committee and have a detailed, well-documented roll-back plan. We usually did the doing in the middle of the night at the weekend when major markets were closed as well. Also, senior managers were somewhat tech-savvy and very supportive.
This BA thing isn't the first one either: https://www.theguardian.com/mo... and probably won't be the last. Because the other thing that is going on is that senior people and consultants (accountants) have confused resilience (extra hardware etc. to deal with spikes and outages) with inefficiency (oh, that's too much stuff, you can do it with 'less').
I still enjoy computing and computers but I'm frankly glad to be away from this sort of stupidity.
So you're going allow one tentacle of an AI (more a statistical automat, with a bit of natural language) built by a large for-profit/information-gathering company into your home and personal affairs?
That, in exchange for some fairly trivial help on things that you can easily do yourself, 'reminders', 'manual Googling' (or preferably DuckDucking), turning the lights on and off. So you can sit on your sofa and gradually turn into an amorphous blob?
IANALu (I am not a Luddite, as opposed to IANAL) but, as they say, "I don't think so". Really, I don't.
That's the reason I mentioned the entertainment system, this has 'probably' happened for in-flight: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05... so why not cars? Easy mitigation/prevention of course, but hey, that's extra work that cuts into profits.
I wonder why no-one thinks about this, the car is always connected to the network. So someone can probably take over your car and drive you to the police station. That is a better outcome, anyway, than driving you to the outskirts, robbing and shooting you.
Of course, the cars will be fully protected from this kind of behaviour, firewalls, virus protection until something sneaks in through the entertainment system. In other words, fully protected, until it isn't, business as usual.
Just thought I'd mention this, with the ransomware thing, it's been that kind of week.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read the referenced article. Scratch is one of the mainstays (with Python, for older, more advanced kids) of https://www.codeclub.org.uk/ and has been for 4/5 years, at least.
We also teach it as part of Raspberry Pi Jams: https://www.raspberrypi.org/ja... as well as assorted hardware and robotics projects based on the Raspberry PI.
Most of this is volunteer supported. I've just finished a year in a local primary, that's probably 1st to 5th grade in the US system. There's a little more of this in the US now, go find some, it's fun. And I agree, not every kid will want to progress, but this is a good way of dipping toes in and finding out.
Hi, thanks for annotating this, you've helped me (and others, I hope). A great many of my non-tech friends don't understand the implications of being 'digitally married' to some big corporate statistical AI. Another thing, I want to look at is a platform cooperative for this kind of work, looks like the work you mention may provide a good basis, too.
Slashdot Mirror
Thanks, I'm in the UK though. I'll have a look at the settings. Actually, it's pretty good, small, stays charged for a long time and inexpensive, if lost.
I have a Samsung GT-E2550, no apps because it's a feature phone. I use it to talk to people and (from time to time) send an SMS. Younger members of my family usually gather by tradition during public holidays to mock me, but they're beginning to wake up now.
Seriously, I don't want a load of badly coded, intrusionware on my phone or for it to declare my location to all and sundry. Of course, it's possible to triangulate with cell tower data, but my view is that this level of intrusion shouldn't be a) default b) 'easy'. Android is now such a tangle that it's not really clear (except maybe via Wireshark, for example, but do you want to live like that?) when everything is genuinely 'off'.
See, Bonzo Dog Band, I'm bored even: https://youtu.be/tz_4qJBAlbc?t... Sorry unable to resist that, I'm very old too and aliens have replaced my brain with porridge.
Yes, you're probably right. If they're pollution sensors etc. it may not matter unless the hack disables them. If they're cameras and/or things connected to actuators of some kind, that's a different picture.
Just a simple thought experiment tells you all you need to know. In scenario one, the sensors are all run by Google and Facebook, in scenario two they are run by the municipality and all the data is open. That's very crude and, in a mixed economy, the ownership is likely to be mixed too, but see below. However, the Roomba discussion provides some indicators about what will eventually happen to data that is in commercial hands.
It's also worth noting that sensor networks and infrastructures are, to some extent rivalrous, in the economics sense. That is, they compete for physical placement, for bandwidth and (probably) for standards and protocols.
There's questions of scope, governance and separation too. For example, I never go into Apple stores and that's a choice, but I may have to go into a hospital. I personally don't mind advertising beacons because I choose not to have a smart phone and don't receive their output. I don't want any of my data sold on, but have zero faith in GAFAM (Google, Amazon, Facebook and Microsoft, as proxies for the usual suspects) not to do that.
I think 'we' can do really good things with city data and wrote about it somewhat in 2009 but that was on the basis of municipal control, public health and ecological objectives. The current picture looks a lot more invasive and murkier.
. Optimisation and MI is fragile for edge/unexpected cases, so I'm not sure I want this piece of maths used to control an over-white-hot stream of plasma. At least, I'd want decades of testing before deployment and not anywhere near my house or family.
I'm not a big believer in fusion anyway, except that large, conveniently placed fusion reactor that we call 'the Sun'. If we must fiddle around with this, it's worth looking at the Stellerator: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... that's come on, since 1951.
No, sorry, I go either to Marseilles or towards Monptellier. I've been as far as Barcelona too, some bits are not TGV-ready so the train slows. But, in general, it's quiet, comfortable and (if you are careful, I can travel midweek) good prices.
That quote was from Negroponte in the time of Wired: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Air travel is noise polluting, air polluting and fossil fuel driven. Half the time, with network improvements, we can make do with teleconferences. In fact, working in Brussels in the 1980s, we already used teleconference to save trips to the computer centre in Luxembourg.
I'm not saying that we stop air travel, I enjoy my holiday too, but we really need to minimise and substitute. I take the the high speed train (TGV) from Paris to Marseilles now, it's 4 hours, probably less than the flight once I've dealt with two internal airports. So, whilst this is interesting research, it should a be white elephant in a greener, quieter, less polluted world.
Not sure. Like Roomba etc. they just go somewhere, hide out and plug themselves in to recharge. That would be logical and quite 'easy'.
Certainly, given the avoidance in the UK by Google etc., it would be nice to know exactly what all the corporates are [not]paying compared to their turnover in the territory. I say turnover, because there's less possibility of manipulation and it will give some guide to profitability.
Profit is easy to manipulate, in order to make tax liabilities disappear, yet the offending company still uses the infrastructure in the country. This is a point made by Warren Buffett, that well-known communist, not specifically by me.
That way, we know which companies to boycott. And yes, since you're asking, I have no FB account, don't buy anything from Google ads and am beginning to minimise my use of Amazon. https://www.hive.co.uk/ support local bookshops in the UK, for example.
See karoshi: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
All these ideas have a frog-in-hot-water side, they are incremental, rather than being spectacular, like 'killer robots', but some of the consequences are just as dangerous. They are in two categories a) loss of control b) social cooling and non-democratic loss of liberty.
Agree with all the commentators that say that Uber and Lyft are not ride sharing, or in a wider context 'sharing', they are extractive. Worth reading a little McKenzie Wark on this subject too: http://www.shaviro.com/Blog/?p... see the commentary on 'vectorialists'.
About ten years ago, I started in on this: https://sourceforge.net/projec... now rotting quietly away on sourceforge. One (of many) things that stopped me at the time was that Google Maps was the only source of geo-stuff, now there's Open Street Map. My idea was something that would be useful to what has now become the platform cooperative movement: https://platform.coop/, that would be genuine sharing, both the platform and the rides.
However my madness did not end there. In my mind, I looked forward to routing everything that moved around, a) dealing with half filled vans, lorries and cars, the whole lot b) creating public data that would be performative in that it would advocate for new routes where there was market failure, for example. I note that Amazon has started a project for transport consolidation: http://www.scdigest.com/firstt... so this idea is probably valid but the ownership isn't cooperative.
Ok, I'll end there. This isn't to self congratulate, it's just publication of an idea that I've nearly abandoned and someone younger might want to take up. If you do, give me a shout.
Thanks, saved me a post. I participate and help arrange (one) Pi Jam(s), apart from a certain (cough, cough) quantity of them in my house. The community is always going to make them win out, until something really, really spectacular in terms of spec and price point appears. But, even then.
That's the key phrase, there's so much space junk there already, that maybe, just maybe, we need to think about that instead.
Tiny flecks of stuff, let alone decent sized cubesats, have the power to cause a lot of damage to the ISS, for example.
I will be 67 this year. Because of Perl, I still get quite a lot of well-paid niche work. Also, happily (or because I was a sensible freelancer) I don't need full time either, my health is not too bad and I'm in the UK (admittedly the Conservative party is doing its level best to ruin universal healthcare here).
However I've recently begun to talk with other older technical people about problems that affect 'us' and that we can solve. There are plenty, without thinking about internet connected juicers and multi-zillion funding rounds. In fact, I was just invited into a start-up hothouse (apparently I am a 'talented outlier', whatever that means, perhaps someone younger can youngsplain? haha, only serious) and turned them down. What I/we aim at is more modest, more open and will provide some geeky fun on the journey too.
Ok, that's a bit of a manifesto now too, you know where to find me, just click on some intertubey stuff. Incidentally, I've never had a problem with young bosses and still enjoy new tech (less so, hype-tech). But, I think the best liberation for the seriously old, is to fashion some sort of destiny for ourselves.
Me too. Who needs the Disneyland Anal Probe Experience? I used to go there a lot, like the people for their generosity and optimism, but they've manage to elect a nutcase. Admittedly the choices were pretty bad, but Hilary the Hawk was slightly better and capable of taking advice from informed aides too.
Thanks. So agree. I'm semi-retired now, but my last serious job was in a small, very competent investment bank. Any major change had to survive the change committee and have a detailed, well-documented roll-back plan. We usually did the doing in the middle of the night at the weekend when major markets were closed as well. Also, senior managers were somewhat tech-savvy and very supportive.
This BA thing isn't the first one either: https://www.theguardian.com/mo... and probably won't be the last. Because the other thing that is going on is that senior people and consultants (accountants) have confused resilience (extra hardware etc. to deal with spikes and outages) with inefficiency (oh, that's too much stuff, you can do it with 'less').
I still enjoy computing and computers but I'm frankly glad to be away from this sort of stupidity.
So you're going allow one tentacle of an AI (more a statistical automat, with a bit of natural language) built by a large for-profit/information-gathering company into your home and personal affairs?
That, in exchange for some fairly trivial help on things that you can easily do yourself, 'reminders', 'manual Googling' (or preferably DuckDucking), turning the lights on and off. So you can sit on your sofa and gradually turn into an amorphous blob?
IANALu (I am not a Luddite, as opposed to IANAL) but, as they say, "I don't think so". Really, I don't.
So agree. However, that message needs to go towards the manufacturers. I hope this week will be something of a wake-up too.
That's the reason I mentioned the entertainment system, this has 'probably' happened for in-flight: http://edition.cnn.com/2015/05... so why not cars? Easy mitigation/prevention of course, but hey, that's extra work that cuts into profits.
Yes, sorry. I'm getting really old and forgetful. I'll need my self-driving car to remember where I need to go, real soon now.
I wonder why no-one thinks about this, the car is always connected to the network. So someone can probably take over your car and drive you to the police station. That is a better outcome, anyway, than driving you to the outskirts, robbing and shooting you.
Of course, the cars will be fully protected from this kind of behaviour, firewalls, virus protection until something sneaks in through the entertainment system. In other words, fully protected, until it isn't, business as usual.
Just thought I'd mention this, with the ransomware thing, it's been that kind of week.
I didn't know whether to laugh or cry when I read the referenced article. Scratch is one of the mainstays (with Python, for older, more advanced kids) of https://www.codeclub.org.uk/ and has been for 4/5 years, at least.
We also teach it as part of Raspberry Pi Jams: https://www.raspberrypi.org/ja... as well as assorted hardware and robotics projects based on the Raspberry PI.
Most of this is volunteer supported. I've just finished a year in a local primary, that's probably 1st to 5th grade in the US system. There's a little more of this in the US now, go find some, it's fun. And I agree, not every kid will want to progress, but this is a good way of dipping toes in and finding out.
Hi, thanks for annotating this, you've helped me (and others, I hope). A great many of my non-tech friends don't understand the implications of being 'digitally married' to some big corporate statistical AI. Another thing, I want to look at is a platform cooperative for this kind of work, looks like the work you mention may provide a good basis, too.