Apparently It "only" costed $100m, and they're getting a bit of honorary money from the lunar X prize. It feels like they could almost crowd-fund a second go at it.
Whilst I agree with what you're saying, the likes of Amazon seem to be doing very well selling the Kindle Fire, at massive discount, subsidised by ads. FWIW, I've bought two - more on that in moment. Those things are wall-to-wall ads - on the lock screen, on your home screen, in every app you run - everywhere. All so you can save some money on the purchase price. It's a way to buy a 'proper brand' device at a 'chinese knock-off' price, and in some sense takes the risk out of that purchase.
In my case, I bought them for the kids. The 'kids mode' turns off every single ad, and limits what apps they can use to the ones I allow them to have. For us brits, that means I can load it up with BBC Iplayer Kids + some cbeebies apps and then hand the tablet to my kids knowing they can do what the hell they want without ever seeing any 'bad' (or even questionable) content, and also never, ever seeing an ad. Perfect! When they get old enough that I can take off the training wheels, they'll get a chinese knock-off tablet instead.
Back to the topic at hand - you'd have to be an idiot to want a 'free' phone that shoves apps at you day and night. Given that phones on contract don't cost much (at least, not 'ordinary' phones on 'ordinary' contracts), just pay up the £30/month and be done with it. You won't get an iPhoneX for free on these schemes, so it's not like you'd be getting a 'better' phone for less money than you'd be doing on contract.
That's okay, you'll be able to write apps to perform McQueries, using the McQL Mc-Language to get to the McData that makes up the McMenu, which is McPersonalised to each Mcregion they sell in. You'll be able to run your McApp on a McCloud, using Filet-o-serverless technologies to deliver McContent at the McEdge. We're headed to the Internet of McThings.
I'm an old fart, but I don't understand McDs. A few years back I had a BigMac - the sauce was nice, but every other item in the meal lacked the flavour it's supposed to have. They keep telling us that they only buy quality beef from British farmers, yadda yadda, but how they managed to extract all the flavour from it (and the other ingredients) before serving it is a mystery to me.
I wonder then, if you took a random group of programmers, and gave them all a fixed amount of time to produce some sort of output in different languages, how many of them would (a) finish in time and (b) produce a secure output.
My point is, much like yours, that some languages make it easy to be reasonably secure, others make it quite hard. Any language can produce secure code, but given it's somewhere on the easy/hard spectrum, which one is the quickest to produce a secure output? Additionally, which one produces reasonably secure outputs when programmed by a reasonably competent programmer?
Ultimately - and not answered by TFA - a language is "the most secure" if ordinary programmers can use it without making security mistakes. If it either takes an age to finesse to good quality, or requires none but super-geniuses to program, then it's essentially "insecure". Unlike TFA, it has nothing to do with "number of lines of code written versus number of bugs".
Does this mean we should look for cameras in our hotel rooms, or trust that the hotel owner did it for us already? How do you actually find such cameras?
Absolutely seriously, how could you check into a hotel room and have any confidence it has no cameras in it? Even if you look for them, and even if you find a couple, how would you know you've got them all? I guess if I found one, I'd probably check out immediately in a huff, but then maybe just right into another hotel room that had better hidden cameras.
This isn't really anything new, but I guess the prevalence of 'spy cameras' on Amazon/ebay mean that the last people in the room might have bugged it for whomever comes in next. That's a little different from the room being bugged specifically for errant would-be presidents or whatever.
It's true we don't need this per-se. However, the tokens are the important bit of this - it means that those banks are no longer using actual currency, but are using tokens. It potentially paves the way for tokens not tied to an individual currency, but perhaps to a basket of all the currencies in the group, or maybe tied to some other thing (or not tied to anything at all).
A 'banking currency' alters the global power base quite a bit. It means that banks start to run national economies directly, rather than 'by extension' as they do now. It means that any one countries economic policy doesn't necessarily impact the working and profitability of the banks using these tokens (so they can compete internationally, regardless of their local economic policies). It also provides a possible route to transfer 'value' between countries without having to pay the payment networks. Thus, the older, more entrenched and legacy banks lose a bit of power, whilst the smaller ones gain a little bit. That might not sound a lot, but as I say, it's s shift to global power.
This is indeed small potatoes today, and is largely pointless as it stands. However, it's a 'proof of concept' and if it proves to be workable, then others will join, and then there'll be the option to directly buy and sell each others tokens in local currency, or to speculate on fluctuations or create options, ETLs and all the other weird financial products we already know and love. They might be private to banks for the foreseeable, but they'll provide a whole new 'revenue stream' for those involved and provide other 'benefits' too. This is all 'value' moving from place to place without any of the traditional systems, charges and oversights that exist - as I say, a change in the balance of power.
One other point of note: IBM are making this happen. That's basically a "tech company' making a global currency and getting into banking. They're shifting away from a crappy mainframe provider, expensive internal IT support and whatnot to being an actual financial services provider to the banks (without needing a banking license). That too is quite a big shift in the 'way of the world' that I'll bet Silicon Valley would love to replicate, and something governments will struggle to understand.
I generally find them pointless too, but (so the thinking goes), they won't ever be any use if we just let Google squish them all. Google will be the only game in town, and whatever they tell us is all we'll know because there won't be any other source of information.
Whatever they are, they do seem to be able to run a business off what they do (albeit on razor thin margins and questionable utility), and so we should probably let the market decide if they're actually any good or not, rather than just leaving it to Google to decide for us.
If these (and millions more) are hard to see, and have large amounts of gravity, could it be that they're what's causing the universe to expand quicker than expected?
Honestly, the only sort of chicken you should eat is the organic sort. Failing that, 'free range', corn-fed. Otherwise, you're getting some bastardised version of chicken. All but the most clueless can taste the difference too.
Look no further than the eggs - if your pack of half a dozen all look about the same, and all crack easily and consistently, then you've got the wrong sort.
I realise that this fast-grown bastardised stuff mostly ends up in 'fast food' rather than the supermarkets, so remember that next time you go to the chicken shop on your way home from the pub.
...and beware, that even with the flag set to "don't send", Calculator will still track you to some degree. It seemingly fetches localisation and currencies from home.
static constexpr auto sc_MetadataUriLocalizeFor = L"https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2041093&localizeFor="; static constexpr auto sc_RatiosUriRelativeTo = L"https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2041339&localCurrency=";
FWIW, I was looking to see where it actually sends telemetry so I could block it on my router (and/or send some spam maybe;-))
Tangentially, so does dotnet (as in the command line tool).
I can't imagine how long that'll last in the first PR against the supposedly open source calculator. If it stays, it'll be the cause of more forks than an Apache web server.
I agree - IMHO, a 'backup driver' should be able to see what the AI is 'thinking'. That is, it should be saying "road clear ahead" at the time of the crash. If it were, and the driver took no action (which she didn't), then she's liable. Knowing Uber's somewhat slap-dash approach to rules, I'll bet the car had no readout that was saying what the AI was up to at the time of the crash though.
If the car's just trundling along, then there's no reason for the human to do much about it - after all, it might swerve at the last minute, it might brake in a moment, or whatever else - none of which require human intervention. After all, this is a car that's supposed to be safe on the roads, right? Otherwise, why was it ever allowed off the test track? If it wasn't about to avert disaster, then it shouldn't be there in the first place - or it should be determining that it's a situation outside of its operating parameters and be asking for human oversight.
IANAL, much less and American one, but I'd imagine that there are plenty of ways to deflect blame from the human onto Uber and whomever issues the licenses for them to drive on the roads. It might not lead to a complete aquittal, but it should reduce any punishment pretty considerably. Uber may not be criminal liable (which I think is a flawed decision to arrive at without the human going on trial), but it's still liable in some sense.
Either way, Uber's going to struggle to get any more 'backup drivers' behind the wheel for the foreseeable.
I get what you're saying - and good grief, if you come to the UK (into Deathrow, of all places), there are better things to see than the 'henge.
However, for anyone in the South East heading to Cornwall for a holiday - you'll be going past (at probably less than 60mph), and if you haven't seen it in a while (or ever), then it's worth a stop. Probably not worth a special trip, and not really worth a long queue to get into (other than you might get some of those crazy 'druid' people coming by with herbs and whatnot - that's an experience all of its own).
IMHO, it's not so much that you're looking at some stones - it's all about what they were for, and how they got there. Despite all the chatter about "it's easy to move the stones" and "anyone could put those up" - the truth is, very few people could do it - and much less could do it in such a way as it would last for thousands of years. As far as I'm concerned, that's pretty cool.
I was in a coffee shop (not starbucks though, because they don't sell coffee) a couple of weeks back and a lady asked if I could watch her stuff while she went to the toilet. I suggested that she lock the screen before she went.
Granted, I'm trustworthy, and I live in a generally low crime sort of area, so the risk is pretty low. However, if you can't even get people to lock the screen, then stuff like this is just lightyears away.
Yeah, people on Vodafone do think they need 5G because their current 4G is so terrible. The Three network used to be able to out-perform 4G using their 3G network because 'the big guys' did such a terrible job of making 4G work.
Vodafone (and O2, and EE) will all say the "only" solution is 5G - that's the only way people can get better coverage, better speeds etc. The truth is of course that it's because they've already bid on the frequencies and so want to get them making money as soon as possible. Those without the frequencies will just squeeze more out of their existing tech than you could ever hope to get out 'the big guys'. Heaven forbid that they should put up a few more cells in places where their coverage is terrible.
The mobile telcos have consistently shown themselves to be as slimy as US ISPs when it comes to making networks actually work. They've had to be regulated into doing anything useful for the consumer on numerous occasions, and I wouldn't be surprised to find this will be another one.
Same here. Unless their recommendation algorithm is actually a 'scrape the crap out of the catalogue to see if some idiot will watch it' sort of thing.
A mesh network sounds cool - but I'm sorry Amazon, I'm still not buying anything with Alexa in it (without a hardware button on it, at least).
I know it all depends on your circumstances, and I've got cat6 all over the house so don't really need a mesh, but I've gotta say, one Ubiquiti AP fills pretty much every corner of my house with very fast wifi. It's got all the guest network and potentially logon-to-use features you might want too - all for the sake of one cat6 cable to the router.
You're lucky - I have a Galaxy tablet that stopped getting updates 18 months after I bought it (about 2 years after it came out - not enough sales, so not worth looking after those of us that bought it). It's not a problem though, I've just bought any-brand-except-Samsung ever since, and get updates all over the place when I need them. My little Doogee phone might not get an upgrade, but then it cost about £40, so I'll just throw it out and buy a new one instead.
Slashdot Mirror
Looks pretty cool - in the homepage video, it also seems to make it possible for the woman to ride backwards too (see the aerial shot)
Apparently It "only" costed $100m, and they're getting a bit of honorary money from the lunar X prize. It feels like they could almost crowd-fund a second go at it.
Okay, so don't do criminal shit for 9 years. Better cut it short at 5 years. Okay, got it.
In other words, like all crime* - be unexpected, be awesome at it, and do it well enough that you have so much money you never need to do it again.
* Doesn't include stock trading, banking, insurance - the rules are different there.
Whilst I agree with what you're saying, the likes of Amazon seem to be doing very well selling the Kindle Fire, at massive discount, subsidised by ads. FWIW, I've bought two - more on that in moment. Those things are wall-to-wall ads - on the lock screen, on your home screen, in every app you run - everywhere. All so you can save some money on the purchase price. It's a way to buy a 'proper brand' device at a 'chinese knock-off' price, and in some sense takes the risk out of that purchase.
In my case, I bought them for the kids. The 'kids mode' turns off every single ad, and limits what apps they can use to the ones I allow them to have. For us brits, that means I can load it up with BBC Iplayer Kids + some cbeebies apps and then hand the tablet to my kids knowing they can do what the hell they want without ever seeing any 'bad' (or even questionable) content, and also never, ever seeing an ad. Perfect! When they get old enough that I can take off the training wheels, they'll get a chinese knock-off tablet instead.
Back to the topic at hand - you'd have to be an idiot to want a 'free' phone that shoves apps at you day and night. Given that phones on contract don't cost much (at least, not 'ordinary' phones on 'ordinary' contracts), just pay up the £30/month and be done with it. You won't get an iPhoneX for free on these schemes, so it's not like you'd be getting a 'better' phone for less money than you'd be doing on contract.
That's okay, you'll be able to write apps to perform McQueries, using the McQL Mc-Language to get to the McData that makes up the McMenu, which is McPersonalised to each Mcregion they sell in. You'll be able to run your McApp on a McCloud, using Filet-o-serverless technologies to deliver McContent at the McEdge. We're headed to the Internet of McThings.
I'm an old fart, but I don't understand McDs. A few years back I had a BigMac - the sauce was nice, but every other item in the meal lacked the flavour it's supposed to have. They keep telling us that they only buy quality beef from British farmers, yadda yadda, but how they managed to extract all the flavour from it (and the other ingredients) before serving it is a mystery to me.
I wonder then, if you took a random group of programmers, and gave them all a fixed amount of time to produce some sort of output in different languages, how many of them would (a) finish in time and (b) produce a secure output.
My point is, much like yours, that some languages make it easy to be reasonably secure, others make it quite hard. Any language can produce secure code, but given it's somewhere on the easy/hard spectrum, which one is the quickest to produce a secure output? Additionally, which one produces reasonably secure outputs when programmed by a reasonably competent programmer?
Ultimately - and not answered by TFA - a language is "the most secure" if ordinary programmers can use it without making security mistakes. If it either takes an age to finesse to good quality, or requires none but super-geniuses to program, then it's essentially "insecure". Unlike TFA, it has nothing to do with "number of lines of code written versus number of bugs".
Does this mean we should look for cameras in our hotel rooms, or trust that the hotel owner did it for us already? How do you actually find such cameras?
Absolutely seriously, how could you check into a hotel room and have any confidence it has no cameras in it? Even if you look for them, and even if you find a couple, how would you know you've got them all? I guess if I found one, I'd probably check out immediately in a huff, but then maybe just right into another hotel room that had better hidden cameras.
This isn't really anything new, but I guess the prevalence of 'spy cameras' on Amazon/ebay mean that the last people in the room might have bugged it for whomever comes in next. That's a little different from the room being bugged specifically for errant would-be presidents or whatever.
It's true we don't need this per-se. However, the tokens are the important bit of this - it means that those banks are no longer using actual currency, but are using tokens. It potentially paves the way for tokens not tied to an individual currency, but perhaps to a basket of all the currencies in the group, or maybe tied to some other thing (or not tied to anything at all).
A 'banking currency' alters the global power base quite a bit. It means that banks start to run national economies directly, rather than 'by extension' as they do now. It means that any one countries economic policy doesn't necessarily impact the working and profitability of the banks using these tokens (so they can compete internationally, regardless of their local economic policies). It also provides a possible route to transfer 'value' between countries without having to pay the payment networks. Thus, the older, more entrenched and legacy banks lose a bit of power, whilst the smaller ones gain a little bit. That might not sound a lot, but as I say, it's s shift to global power.
This is indeed small potatoes today, and is largely pointless as it stands. However, it's a 'proof of concept' and if it proves to be workable, then others will join, and then there'll be the option to directly buy and sell each others tokens in local currency, or to speculate on fluctuations or create options, ETLs and all the other weird financial products we already know and love. They might be private to banks for the foreseeable, but they'll provide a whole new 'revenue stream' for those involved and provide other 'benefits' too. This is all 'value' moving from place to place without any of the traditional systems, charges and oversights that exist - as I say, a change in the balance of power.
One other point of note: IBM are making this happen. That's basically a "tech company' making a global currency and getting into banking. They're shifting away from a crappy mainframe provider, expensive internal IT support and whatnot to being an actual financial services provider to the banks (without needing a banking license). That too is quite a big shift in the 'way of the world' that I'll bet Silicon Valley would love to replicate, and something governments will struggle to understand.
I generally find them pointless too, but (so the thinking goes), they won't ever be any use if we just let Google squish them all. Google will be the only game in town, and whatever they tell us is all we'll know because there won't be any other source of information.
Whatever they are, they do seem to be able to run a business off what they do (albeit on razor thin margins and questionable utility), and so we should probably let the market decide if they're actually any good or not, rather than just leaving it to Google to decide for us.
If these (and millions more) are hard to see, and have large amounts of gravity, could it be that they're what's causing the universe to expand quicker than expected?
Honestly, the only sort of chicken you should eat is the organic sort. Failing that, 'free range', corn-fed. Otherwise, you're getting some bastardised version of chicken. All but the most clueless can taste the difference too.
Look no further than the eggs - if your pack of half a dozen all look about the same, and all crack easily and consistently, then you've got the wrong sort.
I realise that this fast-grown bastardised stuff mostly ends up in 'fast food' rather than the supermarkets, so remember that next time you go to the chicken shop on your way home from the pub.
That's the sort of thing you get when you reply on NatWest for innovation :-(
...and beware, that even with the flag set to "don't send", Calculator will still track you to some degree. It seemingly fetches localisation and currencies from home.
static constexpr auto sc_MetadataUriLocalizeFor = L"https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2041093&localizeFor=";
static constexpr auto sc_RatiosUriRelativeTo = L"https://go.microsoft.com/fwlink/?linkid=2041339&localCurrency=";
FWIW, I was looking to see where it actually sends telemetry so I could block it on my router (and/or send some spam maybe ;-))
Oh I don't know... I'm sure slashdot will help 'em out in that regard.
Tangentially, so does dotnet (as in the command line tool).
I can't imagine how long that'll last in the first PR against the supposedly open source calculator. If it stays, it'll be the cause of more forks than an Apache web server.
I agree - IMHO, a 'backup driver' should be able to see what the AI is 'thinking'. That is, it should be saying "road clear ahead" at the time of the crash. If it were, and the driver took no action (which she didn't), then she's liable. Knowing Uber's somewhat slap-dash approach to rules, I'll bet the car had no readout that was saying what the AI was up to at the time of the crash though.
If the car's just trundling along, then there's no reason for the human to do much about it - after all, it might swerve at the last minute, it might brake in a moment, or whatever else - none of which require human intervention. After all, this is a car that's supposed to be safe on the roads, right? Otherwise, why was it ever allowed off the test track? If it wasn't about to avert disaster, then it shouldn't be there in the first place - or it should be determining that it's a situation outside of its operating parameters and be asking for human oversight.
IANAL, much less and American one, but I'd imagine that there are plenty of ways to deflect blame from the human onto Uber and whomever issues the licenses for them to drive on the roads. It might not lead to a complete aquittal, but it should reduce any punishment pretty considerably. Uber may not be criminal liable (which I think is a flawed decision to arrive at without the human going on trial), but it's still liable in some sense.
Either way, Uber's going to struggle to get any more 'backup drivers' behind the wheel for the foreseeable.
I get what you're saying - and good grief, if you come to the UK (into Deathrow, of all places), there are better things to see than the 'henge.
However, for anyone in the South East heading to Cornwall for a holiday - you'll be going past (at probably less than 60mph), and if you haven't seen it in a while (or ever), then it's worth a stop. Probably not worth a special trip, and not really worth a long queue to get into (other than you might get some of those crazy 'druid' people coming by with herbs and whatnot - that's an experience all of its own).
IMHO, it's not so much that you're looking at some stones - it's all about what they were for, and how they got there. Despite all the chatter about "it's easy to move the stones" and "anyone could put those up" - the truth is, very few people could do it - and much less could do it in such a way as it would last for thousands of years. As far as I'm concerned, that's pretty cool.
Oh damn-it - I was hoping it could tell me when to avoid the second floor toilets :-(
I was in a coffee shop (not starbucks though, because they don't sell coffee) a couple of weeks back and a lady asked if I could watch her stuff while she went to the toilet. I suggested that she lock the screen before she went.
Granted, I'm trustworthy, and I live in a generally low crime sort of area, so the risk is pretty low. However, if you can't even get people to lock the screen, then stuff like this is just lightyears away.
They had to use a lossy algorithm because they can't keep data perfectly compressed in the vacuum of space.
Yeah, people on Vodafone do think they need 5G because their current 4G is so terrible. The Three network used to be able to out-perform 4G using their 3G network because 'the big guys' did such a terrible job of making 4G work.
Vodafone (and O2, and EE) will all say the "only" solution is 5G - that's the only way people can get better coverage, better speeds etc. The truth is of course that it's because they've already bid on the frequencies and so want to get them making money as soon as possible. Those without the frequencies will just squeeze more out of their existing tech than you could ever hope to get out 'the big guys'. Heaven forbid that they should put up a few more cells in places where their coverage is terrible.
The mobile telcos have consistently shown themselves to be as slimy as US ISPs when it comes to making networks actually work. They've had to be regulated into doing anything useful for the consumer on numerous occasions, and I wouldn't be surprised to find this will be another one.
Come on - this is Slashdot, it'd be more like the SlashdotBrainMusher or SlashdotIQReducer ;-)
Same here. Unless their recommendation algorithm is actually a 'scrape the crap out of the catalogue to see if some idiot will watch it' sort of thing.
A mesh network sounds cool - but I'm sorry Amazon, I'm still not buying anything with Alexa in it (without a hardware button on it, at least).
I know it all depends on your circumstances, and I've got cat6 all over the house so don't really need a mesh, but I've gotta say, one Ubiquiti AP fills pretty much every corner of my house with very fast wifi. It's got all the guest network and potentially logon-to-use features you might want too - all for the sake of one cat6 cable to the router.
You're lucky - I have a Galaxy tablet that stopped getting updates 18 months after I bought it (about 2 years after it came out - not enough sales, so not worth looking after those of us that bought it). It's not a problem though, I've just bought any-brand-except-Samsung ever since, and get updates all over the place when I need them. My little Doogee phone might not get an upgrade, but then it cost about £40, so I'll just throw it out and buy a new one instead.