You'd imagine they could get construction data from the local government office who authorises the work to take place, no? I'm not saying super-detailed information isn't going to be good for maps, but some problems are largely solved already.
FWIW, maps that can take traffic conditions into account, can tell you which lanes you could be in (as opposed to "keep left" or "keep right") and has some way of saying "just get me off this goddam road" would be great. I only use Google occasionally, and so far it can't manage these things very well at all. If apple can do better, then maybe they're in with a chance.
Years ago I used to run a perl script that used a few words (from the 'words' file) and made a Google search out of them. I then fetched a random number of the pages on the results it got.
The problem is, a lot of people are 'adapting' by putting air conditioning into their houses. Once, we built houses out of stone and lime, and painted them white, and drew the curtains during the day. Now you can have a house made out of wood, paint it any colour you like, have the sun shining in and have a lower temperature inside, even on the hottest days of summer.
One method has a low carbon output but high up-front cost, the other has a high output, but lower up-front cost. One takes a small amount of 'adapting', the other takes almost none. I'd say we're a lot less adaptable than we might appear.
...Trump wants to build infrastructure. There are only so many roads around his towers and businesses, and once they're all resurfaced, there won't be much left to do. A few extra tornadoes and hurricanes will make sure there's plenty to keep the construction industry busy and his policy safe.
If something we understand reasonably well and can demonstrate reasonably well, and anecodtally can see happening isn't enough to convince people, then something that hasn't ever happened, and may never happen sure won't.
A lot of UK prisons are pretty small - they're often located in reasonably built up areas, and a lot of them have roads running around their perimeters (fun fact: I once scoped out a student house who's front door faced the back wall of a prison). As such, if you want to fly a drone:
1) You don't need GPS - if you happened to be able to throw uncommonly far (and knew the layout over the wall rather well) you could probably just do that. As it is, a drone with a camera would be plenty. 2) You can rock up in a car (extra bonus points for using a stolen one), fly your drone, drop off your contraband, fly the drone back and drive off. There's no way any sort of radio tracking could keep up with you - you'd probably be there for a maximum of 15 minutes.
This also raises other issues - if you happen to live near a prison, you might legitimately want to fly your drone in your back garden. There's a good chance of 'collateral damage' with the no-fly zone. I doubt anyone would be able to argue they 'need' to have a working drone at their house, but it could open up some problems nonetheless.
So... given you don't need GPS to drone-deliver to many prisons, but you really would need GPS to fly over some of the larger, more controversial government sites, one's left wondering if prisons really are the reason for this proposal.
IPv6 doesn't mean no more firewalls - it just means no more NAT.
NAT provides some protection by its nature, but honestly, not much. Devices that use UPNP or whatever to open up external firewall ports so you can connect to them are going to be a problem with NAT or not.
The flaw in our legislation in this regard is "fit for purpose" - the purpose of a webcam is to take pictures/video and present them on PC/phone or whatever - in that regard they are fit for purpose.
If IoT devices had to additionally state "reasonably safe for internet use" or some such, then you could argue these aren't fit for purpose, but until then you're flat out of luck. Whilst our consumer protections are pretty good (compared to other western countries), they're not really setup for problems such as this. I'm sure our government will find some way to enact some privacy/rights infringing "solutions" to those problems soon though:-(
However eager the British Government are to extradite him to the US, he hasn't committed any crime in the UK, and so can't be arrested for anything, let alone extradited. However, he's alleged to have committed (serious) crimes in Sweden. The Swedes have asked he be sent there for show-trial, and thus he's hidden in the embassy until it can be resolved. Even if he'd been picked up ready for sending to Sweden, the Brits would still have had no grounds to send him to the US without major international fallout (with the Swedes, especially).
IMHO, Assange is a bit of a twat. However, whatever's going on with him is far too fishy to be as clear cut as a lot of people seem to think. Additionally, wherever there's a fishy smell in the proceedings of the UK, the US is frequently involved somewhere in the background. We're something of a puppet, but for some reason we think the puppeteer is in Europe.
Getting from point A in London to Point B doesn't really need AI per-se. It's at worst a heuristics problem, and at best it's simply procedural.
Eg. getting from Bank to Mansion House is best done on foot - but that can be known by various factors:
- The distance from any platform at Bank and any District/Circle line platform at Monument (ostensibly the same station, but my god the walk between them is a long way) - The distance from any platform at Bank and the street - The distance of the exits at Bank (of which there are many, over quite a wide area) and the exits at Mansion House (of which there are a couple, either side of a wide road) - The speed people walk, and the levels of congestion in the walkways at one or both stations (which can be approximated by time of day)
I guess you could get fancy and throw in the current weather conditions, and maybe road traffic conditions, and the time it takes for the pedestrian crossings to change to "green man" (although jay-walking is okay here, so you probably don't have to wait that long every time). You could also improve the resolution of the time estimates by looking at which carriage the person was in when they arrived at the station (and on which line), and thus how far they were from the platform exit.
So to navigate you really don't need much AI. There are (albeit complex - but only as complex as you like) definitive answers. Of course, putting voice rec and natural language processing on the front of it makes it an AI project, but it's just "AI operates a website" because there are already London navigators available.
Not to belittle anyone's work here, and it's good to see someone using London as a playground, but I'm wondering what's actually been achieved here?
...and I think we know Microsoft AI just simply will not be the next big thing. If Pets At Home decided to create an AI division they could probably come up with more winners than Microsoft will.
All they're really doing here is re-arranging the deck chairs. They're on a ship that looks like, smells like and swims like the Titanic. It's just a matter of time until someone looks over the edge and sees the name painted on the side.
In Bowling for Columbine there's an animated video describing how scared Americans are (of just about anything). The number of bunkers screams fear to me - I'm sure there are a handful of such bunkers in the UK (or Europe, generally), they're mostly for politicians who must survive nuclear war, because only cockroaches will survive (apparently). I seriously doubt there's more than a couple for private citizens (and most of those are just swimming pools in the basement).
What's the point? I mean, if there's a nuclear war, you're better off just letting the galactic dice decide your fate. For low-level issues, such as no food for a few months, you're going to need to live in a tiny bunker for the entire duration. The rest of us will all just be mucking-in together to work out ways to collectively survive it. Sure, someone will come and steal the potatoes I'm growing in my back garden, but they can't steal all the potatoes in the neighbourhood. Besides, why steal them when you can just ask and we'll give you some?
They're buying Samsung because Samsung are soooo good at software. The marriage of those crappy devs and HP's massive bloatware is just what the industry needs!
We have an HP all-in-one 'pro' printer at home. It's actually pretty good, but the scanner stopped working the other day, just saying "cannot connect to server". Some googling turned up some settings clearing and rebooting, but nothing worked. Just one comment said "it could just be HPs servers are down". Thankfully there were some workarounds (shockingly, the Windows10 integration worked really well, so we used that instead).
Why does my scanner need HP's servers? It scans, and emails the results - how hard it that? How much 'innovation' do we need here? All that shit about being able to email stuff to your printer to print it - sorry, don't need it, especially if it's dependent on something I can't control. If I could configure which mail server it pulled from, that would be one thing, but the 'magic' in the thing is what makes it so supremely hard to use.
There are two kinds of insurance on cars, and so, I'd imagine there would be on aeroplanes, space rockets and just about anything else that flies about.
Third Party - we'll pay to fix up anyone, or anything that is damaged by you Fully comprehensive - We'll pay to fix you up as well as anything you hit along the way
The first is mandatory (depending on jurisdiction), the second is not. Seemingly Spacecom decided not to bother with the fully comp. insurance and now think that SpaceX should provide the services of that sort of insurance for free.
This all gets complicated because I suspect SpaceX have insurance against this sort of problem. However, just because they have doesn't mean they should have to pay out. Somewhere there's a very thick contract, and it'll state who pays for what - I'll bet it's not SpaceX in this case though.
Yes, but Ars have superior business skillz to the leadership at SpaceX (a quick check of company financials between the two will confirm, I'm sure), and so in all good conscience had say their piece (not in private, where it may have been useful, but in public so everyone on earth gets to stir the pot).
How about the TSA stop checking people that don't need to be checked? If you're transiting from one (reasonably organised) country to another, then no need to go through security again (or go via a fast track that has less checks)? The US has special secure areas at some non-US airports because they have their own special checks - surely they are secure enough not to have to recheck all the people on transit.
Years ago, I traveled to Canada via the US with a buddy of mine. He got an extra frisk 3 times before we got to Security (in Heathrow, UK). Even though we were traveling together, I only got the standard check at security. I was left wondering what the first frisk missed that it needed repeating two more times just to be sure. Why not just train the first guy to be better at his job (and arguably frisk me at the same time) rather than have the other two goons?
If they've been running a competition for a 'solution' to their problems and haven't found a winner yet, then they aren't listening. There's got to be a thousand ways to improve whilst making them more effective and do so at less cost/inconvenience.
How about your immediate manager? His/her manager? You country's president/PM/king/queen/chairman etc? I suspect many of us would say 'yes' to most of those. It's a bit of a stupid question really.
They can't exactly say "we have no plans now, but hey, if someone offers us a truck load of money...". However, if they really wanted to engender some trust, they could (probably) say "we have no plans to sell any data, and we will never sell any data from 2016".
But sadly, expecting any commitment is like expecting a unicorn to shit out your next gourmet dinner;-)
I'd agree - the startups I've worked for weren't necessarily going for a buy-out, although that'd have kept the VCs happy. Along the way though, we got to play with some cool tech, got some (potential) customer interaction experience, occasionally flew a few places, got some 'everything's broken, you're the only one here, so make it work' type experience and drank a boatload of beer at various places when the bosses got their credit cards out. Of course, when the company went down the pan, we all got left with nothing, but it wasn't a surprise so we all had a 'plan b' lined up.
I wouldn't go for that now as I like the 9-5 so I can be at the right places at the right times for my kids. But back when I was (mostly) single, it was great fun, and rewarded me in a lot more ways than a regular salary.
Just as a side note, one startup I was at really did try to go for quality. We still had to move too fast quite a bit towards the end, but the foundations were pretty solid. All that means nothing now, because the product is long lost in some vault somewhere and provides no benefit to the customers we (nearly) had, or indeed the world as a whole. The question is, was all that quality worth it?
I wish they'd recall my Galaxy Note 8.0 (tablet). It's a nice bit of hardware, and was great when I got it. They let Android 4 onto it, so now I can't use the SD card properly, and then they stopped doing any more software updates for it. In other words, they took away functionality and then cut it loose.
I'm sure I don't need to go on about their shockingly poor 'value add' software that you can't uninstall. I've had 4 Samsung devices over the last few years. Yeah, I'm disappointed. I still can't quite bring myself to go Sony though, so Samsung might make another sale out of me - not by being the best, but by being slightly less bad. Go Samsung! Job well done there!
And the constant repeating of completely bone-headed decisions that weren't right 10 years ago and aren't right now (T&M versus fixed price - I'm looking at you;-)
The old adage: "you can't outsource a problem" springs to mind. For people to actually 'get it' though, they have to understand what their problem is. It's almost never the individual techies that do the grunt work.
This is a shame for Nasa though - they ought to be a major force in all things to do with space, and shouldn't be in the news for having crappy IT.
The wording on that was misleading enough I had to go check - the quote you made is indeed from official tesla.com blurb. I'm wondering how 5 adults and 2 children can fit in that car!? I mean, do the kids have to sit in the boot? When I was a kid we occasionally had to sit in the boot for a quick trip to the park with half a dozen of our friends, but these days I doubt it's even legal (and certainly not something claimed by the car manufacturers).
The pictures of the model S have two seats at the front. There aren't many pictures to go on, but I assume a three-person bench seat in the middle and luggage space at the back. I can see how 5 adults can get in there, but not sure about the kids. Anyone know?
I have to say though, a ~300 mile range is really pretty good - not far off our conventional car. Interesting stuff - now they just need to get the cost down and we'll buy one;-)
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You'd imagine they could get construction data from the local government office who authorises the work to take place, no? I'm not saying super-detailed information isn't going to be good for maps, but some problems are largely solved already.
FWIW, maps that can take traffic conditions into account, can tell you which lanes you could be in (as opposed to "keep left" or "keep right") and has some way of saying "just get me off this goddam road" would be great. I only use Google occasionally, and so far it can't manage these things very well at all. If apple can do better, then maybe they're in with a chance.
Years ago I used to run a perl script that used a few words (from the 'words' file) and made a Google search out of them. I then fetched a random number of the pages on the results it got.
Might be time to dust that off again.
The problem is, a lot of people are 'adapting' by putting air conditioning into their houses. Once, we built houses out of stone and lime, and painted them white, and drew the curtains during the day. Now you can have a house made out of wood, paint it any colour you like, have the sun shining in and have a lower temperature inside, even on the hottest days of summer.
One method has a low carbon output but high up-front cost, the other has a high output, but lower up-front cost. One takes a small amount of 'adapting', the other takes almost none. I'd say we're a lot less adaptable than we might appear.
...Trump wants to build infrastructure. There are only so many roads around his towers and businesses, and once they're all resurfaced, there won't be much left to do. A few extra tornadoes and hurricanes will make sure there's plenty to keep the construction industry busy and his policy safe.
If something we understand reasonably well and can demonstrate reasonably well, and anecodtally can see happening isn't enough to convince people, then something that hasn't ever happened, and may never happen sure won't.
A lot of UK prisons are pretty small - they're often located in reasonably built up areas, and a lot of them have roads running around their perimeters (fun fact: I once scoped out a student house who's front door faced the back wall of a prison). As such, if you want to fly a drone:
1) You don't need GPS - if you happened to be able to throw uncommonly far (and knew the layout over the wall rather well) you could probably just do that. As it is, a drone with a camera would be plenty.
2) You can rock up in a car (extra bonus points for using a stolen one), fly your drone, drop off your contraband, fly the drone back and drive off. There's no way any sort of radio tracking could keep up with you - you'd probably be there for a maximum of 15 minutes.
This also raises other issues - if you happen to live near a prison, you might legitimately want to fly your drone in your back garden. There's a good chance of 'collateral damage' with the no-fly zone. I doubt anyone would be able to argue they 'need' to have a working drone at their house, but it could open up some problems nonetheless.
So... given you don't need GPS to drone-deliver to many prisons, but you really would need GPS to fly over some of the larger, more controversial government sites, one's left wondering if prisons really are the reason for this proposal.
IPv6 doesn't mean no more firewalls - it just means no more NAT.
NAT provides some protection by its nature, but honestly, not much. Devices that use UPNP or whatever to open up external firewall ports so you can connect to them are going to be a problem with NAT or not.
The flaw in our legislation in this regard is "fit for purpose" - the purpose of a webcam is to take pictures/video and present them on PC/phone or whatever - in that regard they are fit for purpose.
If IoT devices had to additionally state "reasonably safe for internet use" or some such, then you could argue these aren't fit for purpose, but until then you're flat out of luck. Whilst our consumer protections are pretty good (compared to other western countries), they're not really setup for problems such as this. I'm sure our government will find some way to enact some privacy/rights infringing "solutions" to those problems soon though :-(
However eager the British Government are to extradite him to the US, he hasn't committed any crime in the UK, and so can't be arrested for anything, let alone extradited. However, he's alleged to have committed (serious) crimes in Sweden. The Swedes have asked he be sent there for show-trial, and thus he's hidden in the embassy until it can be resolved. Even if he'd been picked up ready for sending to Sweden, the Brits would still have had no grounds to send him to the US without major international fallout (with the Swedes, especially).
IMHO, Assange is a bit of a twat. However, whatever's going on with him is far too fishy to be as clear cut as a lot of people seem to think. Additionally, wherever there's a fishy smell in the proceedings of the UK, the US is frequently involved somewhere in the background. We're something of a puppet, but for some reason we think the puppeteer is in Europe.
So, apparently, is 'unpossible' (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/unpossible) - it doesn't make it a word you should use though.
Getting from point A in London to Point B doesn't really need AI per-se. It's at worst a heuristics problem, and at best it's simply procedural.
Eg. getting from Bank to Mansion House is best done on foot - but that can be known by various factors:
- The distance from any platform at Bank and any District/Circle line platform at Monument (ostensibly the same station, but my god the walk between them is a long way)
- The distance from any platform at Bank and the street
- The distance of the exits at Bank (of which there are many, over quite a wide area) and the exits at Mansion House (of which there are a couple, either side of a wide road)
- The speed people walk, and the levels of congestion in the walkways at one or both stations (which can be approximated by time of day)
I guess you could get fancy and throw in the current weather conditions, and maybe road traffic conditions, and the time it takes for the pedestrian crossings to change to "green man" (although jay-walking is okay here, so you probably don't have to wait that long every time). You could also improve the resolution of the time estimates by looking at which carriage the person was in when they arrived at the station (and on which line), and thus how far they were from the platform exit.
So to navigate you really don't need much AI. There are (albeit complex - but only as complex as you like) definitive answers. Of course, putting voice rec and natural language processing on the front of it makes it an AI project, but it's just "AI operates a website" because there are already London navigators available.
Not to belittle anyone's work here, and it's good to see someone using London as a playground, but I'm wondering what's actually been achieved here?
...and I think we know Microsoft AI just simply will not be the next big thing. If Pets At Home decided to create an AI division they could probably come up with more winners than Microsoft will.
All they're really doing here is re-arranging the deck chairs. They're on a ship that looks like, smells like and swims like the Titanic. It's just a matter of time until someone looks over the edge and sees the name painted on the side.
In Bowling for Columbine there's an animated video describing how scared Americans are (of just about anything). The number of bunkers screams fear to me - I'm sure there are a handful of such bunkers in the UK (or Europe, generally), they're mostly for politicians who must survive nuclear war, because only cockroaches will survive (apparently). I seriously doubt there's more than a couple for private citizens (and most of those are just swimming pools in the basement).
What's the point? I mean, if there's a nuclear war, you're better off just letting the galactic dice decide your fate. For low-level issues, such as no food for a few months, you're going to need to live in a tiny bunker for the entire duration. The rest of us will all just be mucking-in together to work out ways to collectively survive it. Sure, someone will come and steal the potatoes I'm growing in my back garden, but they can't steal all the potatoes in the neighbourhood. Besides, why steal them when you can just ask and we'll give you some?
They're buying Samsung because Samsung are soooo good at software. The marriage of those crappy devs and HP's massive bloatware is just what the industry needs!
We have an HP all-in-one 'pro' printer at home. It's actually pretty good, but the scanner stopped working the other day, just saying "cannot connect to server". Some googling turned up some settings clearing and rebooting, but nothing worked. Just one comment said "it could just be HPs servers are down". Thankfully there were some workarounds (shockingly, the Windows10 integration worked really well, so we used that instead).
Why does my scanner need HP's servers? It scans, and emails the results - how hard it that? How much 'innovation' do we need here? All that shit about being able to email stuff to your printer to print it - sorry, don't need it, especially if it's dependent on something I can't control. If I could configure which mail server it pulled from, that would be one thing, but the 'magic' in the thing is what makes it so supremely hard to use.
Other hot Social Media news:
Twitter is planning to change their blue colour from #63aeee to #63aeed - date to be confirmed, but two sources claim it'll be October 12th.
There are two kinds of insurance on cars, and so, I'd imagine there would be on aeroplanes, space rockets and just about anything else that flies about.
Third Party - we'll pay to fix up anyone, or anything that is damaged by you
Fully comprehensive - We'll pay to fix you up as well as anything you hit along the way
The first is mandatory (depending on jurisdiction), the second is not. Seemingly Spacecom decided not to bother with the fully comp. insurance and now think that SpaceX should provide the services of that sort of insurance for free.
This all gets complicated because I suspect SpaceX have insurance against this sort of problem. However, just because they have doesn't mean they should have to pay out. Somewhere there's a very thick contract, and it'll state who pays for what - I'll bet it's not SpaceX in this case though.
Yes, but Ars have superior business skillz to the leadership at SpaceX (a quick check of company financials between the two will confirm, I'm sure), and so in all good conscience had say their piece (not in private, where it may have been useful, but in public so everyone on earth gets to stir the pot).
You may have an idea there...
How about the TSA stop checking people that don't need to be checked? If you're transiting from one (reasonably organised) country to another, then no need to go through security again (or go via a fast track that has less checks)? The US has special secure areas at some non-US airports because they have their own special checks - surely they are secure enough not to have to recheck all the people on transit.
Years ago, I traveled to Canada via the US with a buddy of mine. He got an extra frisk 3 times before we got to Security (in Heathrow, UK). Even though we were traveling together, I only got the standard check at security. I was left wondering what the first frisk missed that it needed repeating two more times just to be sure. Why not just train the first guy to be better at his job (and arguably frisk me at the same time) rather than have the other two goons?
If they've been running a competition for a 'solution' to their problems and haven't found a winner yet, then they aren't listening. There's got to be a thousand ways to improve whilst making them more effective and do so at less cost/inconvenience.
What about the stuff from the pick your own, or the local farmer's market?
I agree this looks like a terrible way to go about this 'problem', but there are lots of likewise terrible ideas looking for this 'problem'.
How about your immediate manager? His/her manager? You country's president/PM/king/queen/chairman etc? I suspect many of us would say 'yes' to most of those. It's a bit of a stupid question really.
They can't exactly say "we have no plans now, but hey, if someone offers us a truck load of money...". However, if they really wanted to engender some trust, they could (probably) say "we have no plans to sell any data, and we will never sell any data from 2016".
But sadly, expecting any commitment is like expecting a unicorn to shit out your next gourmet dinner ;-)
I'd agree - the startups I've worked for weren't necessarily going for a buy-out, although that'd have kept the VCs happy. Along the way though, we got to play with some cool tech, got some (potential) customer interaction experience, occasionally flew a few places, got some 'everything's broken, you're the only one here, so make it work' type experience and drank a boatload of beer at various places when the bosses got their credit cards out. Of course, when the company went down the pan, we all got left with nothing, but it wasn't a surprise so we all had a 'plan b' lined up.
I wouldn't go for that now as I like the 9-5 so I can be at the right places at the right times for my kids. But back when I was (mostly) single, it was great fun, and rewarded me in a lot more ways than a regular salary.
Just as a side note, one startup I was at really did try to go for quality. We still had to move too fast quite a bit towards the end, but the foundations were pretty solid. All that means nothing now, because the product is long lost in some vault somewhere and provides no benefit to the customers we (nearly) had, or indeed the world as a whole. The question is, was all that quality worth it?
I wish they'd recall my Galaxy Note 8.0 (tablet). It's a nice bit of hardware, and was great when I got it. They let Android 4 onto it, so now I can't use the SD card properly, and then they stopped doing any more software updates for it. In other words, they took away functionality and then cut it loose.
I'm sure I don't need to go on about their shockingly poor 'value add' software that you can't uninstall. I've had 4 Samsung devices over the last few years. Yeah, I'm disappointed. I still can't quite bring myself to go Sony though, so Samsung might make another sale out of me - not by being the best, but by being slightly less bad. Go Samsung! Job well done there!
And the constant repeating of completely bone-headed decisions that weren't right 10 years ago and aren't right now (T&M versus fixed price - I'm looking at you ;-)
The old adage: "you can't outsource a problem" springs to mind. For people to actually 'get it' though, they have to understand what their problem is. It's almost never the individual techies that do the grunt work.
This is a shame for Nasa though - they ought to be a major force in all things to do with space, and shouldn't be in the news for having crappy IT.
The wording on that was misleading enough I had to go check - the quote you made is indeed from official tesla.com blurb. I'm wondering how 5 adults and 2 children can fit in that car!? I mean, do the kids have to sit in the boot? When I was a kid we occasionally had to sit in the boot for a quick trip to the park with half a dozen of our friends, but these days I doubt it's even legal (and certainly not something claimed by the car manufacturers).
The pictures of the model S have two seats at the front. There aren't many pictures to go on, but I assume a three-person bench seat in the middle and luggage space at the back. I can see how 5 adults can get in there, but not sure about the kids. Anyone know?
I have to say though, a ~300 mile range is really pretty good - not far off our conventional car. Interesting stuff - now they just need to get the cost down and we'll buy one ;-)