Why can't a cellphone app do the same? Why buy Yet Another Small Computer? Factor, people. Idontgettit
1. Being "always on" would drain the cellphone battery. 2. If I tell my cellphone "Play some music", it will sound terrible on the tiny speakers. 3. I can say "Alexa, turn on the kitchen light", without going upstairs to get my cellphone. 4. My cellphone can't monitor my house (door lock, motion sensors) when I am not home. 5. The whole family can use it, including young children who don't have cellphones.
You can't do full voice recognition and semantic analysis on $149 worth of hardware.
Of course you can.
Great, then do it! Come back and submit an announcement. I am sure it will make the Slashdot front page. If your device retails for $149, then it should cost half that in parts and assembly. You need to do noise filtering, voice recognition of any speaker without pre-training, speech-to-text, and then do semantic analysis of the result to figure out what the speaker meant. Good luck.
Until there are serious assurances that my privacy will be respected.
There are serious assurances. What assurance would you be willing to accept?
Ideally my device would process all of the sounds, discarding anything that did not generate an inquiry.
That is exactly how Amazon Echo works. It listens for the keyword (default: "Alexa") and only processes queries following that keyword.
Inquiries should be send to the best source of that information, not all to the company that made the device.
This is not feasible within a reasonable price point. You can't do full voice recognition and semantic analysis on $149 worth of hardware. So you need to send the query back to the company's server before you can know "the best source of that information".
An obvious explanation for no bids, is that other interested parties already have the tools. If some amatuer hackers were able to steal them, it is likely the Russians and Chinese got them long ago.
Except in this case it is not open source because the source isn't open. Just because you call yourself "open source" doesn't make it so. You have to actually open the source, and they haven't.
The public is quickly being conditioned to just ignore the alerts. All the alerts that I have received are about some kid kidnapped hundreds of miles from where I live, with no useful information other than the color of the car. Like I am supposed to call the police if I notice a silver car with a kid in it? Later on the news, I find out that the kidnapper was the non-custodial dad trying to get his child away from an abusive alcoholic mother.
Are benefit payments really that large in US industry.
H1-B workers are entitled to the same benefits as any other employee, so this is not an issue.
If benefit payments are that large, why aren't US corporations openly for single payer healthcare?
Managing corporate healthcare programs is much easier for big companies than for small companies, so big companies see it as a competitive advantage. Small companies don't come out for single-payer because they are generally not politically engaged at all.
Single-payer healthcare would likely be a big win for American businesses if it was managed well, but that is unlikely. Medicare and Medicaid are very badly managed, and a bigger program to cover everyone may be even worse.
Deploying the National Guard to the southern border of the United States of America would be less expensive than building, maintaining, and patrolling a wall.
We already tried that back in the 1990s. On one of the first patrols, a Marine shot and killed an American citizen. The military is not trained nor equipped to act as law enforcement.
Net immigration from Mexico is near zero. The main reason for the decline is economic growth and opportunities in Mexico. It is mostly a non-problem, and it is silly that it is the biggest issue in the election.
When two companies fight about something it usually boils down to money being their motivation.
There have been many corporate feuds have have been mutually self-destructive and financially insane. These conflicts are often more about ego than money.
these are fucking hobby drones that weight less than 1lbs. Do you see a giant fucking camera rig slung underneath it? No? Then it's not taking pictures of your fucking hairy ass.
My son has a drone that weighs 200g. It has a 4M pixel camera.
I think the registration program is stupid government overreach for the opposite reason: privacy is a real concern, but registration doesn't really solve the problem. Plenty of drones below the limit (500g) have high res-cameras, and soon there will be 499.5g drones available.
The company claimed on official government forms for multiple years that the drug is a generic.
The drug, epinephrine, is generic. It is adrenaline, which your body produces naturally. There is no patent stopping generic injectors, but so far none have been approved by the FDA. Teva submitted an injector, but the FDA denied approval for reasons that are not clear.
What about it? We already have autonomous vehicles moving vertically (elevators), and existing liability laws seem to work for that. So why would horizontal movement be different?
it would give you enough power that hills wouldn't be a problem.
Having "enough power" is NOT the problem. DC motors produce plenty of power and plenty of torque at low speeds. The problem is that at those low speeds there is little back-EMF, so the only thing impeding the current is the resistance of the coils. So the motor gets you up the hill, but when you reach the top, the coils are hot, and the battery is empty. The problem is not power, but efficiency.
I'm not going to say for certain if you can design a motor to give you high enough torque at low speeds and also have high efficiency at high speeds, but you probably can.
Of course you can. That is trivial. All DC motors give high torque at low speeds and high efficiency at high speeds. In fact, they give the highest torque at zero speed. That is why a Tesla can go from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds. The problem is doing the opposite: high efficiency at low speed. DC motors are terrible at that.
Inverter drives are used with AC power supplies. Scooters use DC batteries and DC motors. So this doesn't even apply to the situation.
AC motors work best in fixed speed, fixed load situations, such as a fan, or a pump with a constant head. If run outside their spec, they will usually just stall (try sticking your finger in a fan, and it will just stop rather than pushing harder). An inverter can make an AC system more efficient under variable load and variable speed. But it will still be relatively inefficient if used far outside of its nominal range. If you ride an electric scooter up long and steep hills, you will soon have a hot motor and a dead battery.
it drives me crazy when they sweep up damp leaves and set them on fire. It is illegal and yet everyone does it.
Obvious solution: Rodrigo Duterte could declare that it is legal to shoot anyone burning leaves. After a few extra-judicial executions, you should notice the air quality improving.
Nice troll, but you are lying. Amazon doesn't give the email addresses to the vendors. They send the email on behalf of the vendors (for a fee of course), and the sending address is always <???>@marketplace.amazon.com.
As usual, Yahoo is missing the market. Rather than a binary porn/not-porn, there would be a MUCH bigger market for a porn classifier that could help people find what they like. If their DL-NN is based on RBMs they could even use it in generative mode to create porn to individual tastes.
If the scooters can regen, you'll get back most of the power on the descent.
It doesn't work that way. Electric motors are very inefficient when used in low speed / high torque situations, unless they are specifically geared for that. So most of the energy is used to heat up the coils rather than to climb the hill.
If I purchased their product, I've initiated a relationship with this company and I do not mind the follow up e-mail.
It isn't a "followup" since there is no human behind it, and there is generally no way to directly respond to the email. It is just machine generated spam, trying to generate a statistical response. If I receive one message, I delete it. If I receive another from the same vendor, I go to Amazon and give them a one-star review. If you do this too (and I hope you do) then do NOT mention the spam as a reason for the bad review. If you do that, Amazon will remove the review, since reviews must be about the product and not the company selling it. So just make something up instead.
If enough people do this, the spam will stop.
An even better solution would be for Amazon to allow the customers to opt out of having their email shared with vendors.
In epidemiology, the most important number is the Basic Reproduction Number, or "R0", which is the average number of future cases directly caused by each current case. If R0>1 the infection will spread, and if R0<1 it till die out. Ebola has a R0 far less than 1.0 in any environment where soap is generally available. In 2015, a few case happened in soap using countries, but they soon fizzled out. Ebola also died out in areas where people were given soap, and told how to use it. In Guinea, where the epidemic is believed to have started, about 70% of victims contracted the disease by directly handling corpses without washing their hands afterwards. When this practice stopped, mainly due to person-to-person education through tribal networks, R0 dramatically declined.
entering a room that somebody who had ebola weeks ago could still transmit it.
This is nonsense. From your own citation: Ebola disease spreads only by direct contact with the blood or other body fluids of a person who has developed symptoms of the disease.... Human-to-human transmission of EBOV through the air has not been reported to occur during EVD outbreaks.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup, it's true. That's why it's still very easy to buy a high-end phone with user-replaceable batteries.
Indeed. There are dozens to choose from. Here is a list. Here are many more.
And every stinkin' one that you'll want to buy will be jackless by the next model rev.
That is not how capitalism works. If the demand is there, there will be jacked cellphones for a long time.
Why can't a cellphone app do the same? Why buy Yet Another Small Computer? Factor, people. Idontgettit
1. Being "always on" would drain the cellphone battery.
2. If I tell my cellphone "Play some music", it will sound terrible on the tiny speakers.
3. I can say "Alexa, turn on the kitchen light", without going upstairs to get my cellphone.
4. My cellphone can't monitor my house (door lock, motion sensors) when I am not home.
5. The whole family can use it, including young children who don't have cellphones.
You can't do full voice recognition and semantic analysis on $149 worth of hardware.
Of course you can.
Great, then do it! Come back and submit an announcement. I am sure it will make the Slashdot front page. If your device retails for $149, then it should cost half that in parts and assembly. You need to do noise filtering, voice recognition of any speaker without pre-training, speech-to-text, and then do semantic analysis of the result to figure out what the speaker meant. Good luck.
The echo was a disaster.
As of April 2016, they have sold 3 million. That doesn't seem like a disaster.
Disclaimer: I have one. There is plenty of room for improvement, but I am mostly happy with it.
Until there are serious assurances that my privacy will be respected.
There are serious assurances. What assurance would you be willing to accept?
Ideally my device would process all of the sounds, discarding anything that did not generate an inquiry.
That is exactly how Amazon Echo works. It listens for the keyword (default: "Alexa") and only processes queries following that keyword.
Inquiries should be send to the best source of that information, not all to the company that made the device.
This is not feasible within a reasonable price point. You can't do full voice recognition and semantic analysis on $149 worth of hardware. So you need to send the query back to the company's server before you can know "the best source of that information".
An obvious explanation for no bids, is that other interested parties already have the tools. If some amatuer hackers were able to steal them, it is likely the Russians and Chinese got them long ago.
Surely if it's Open Source ...
Except in this case it is not open source because the source isn't open. Just because you call yourself "open source" doesn't make it so. You have to actually open the source, and they haven't.
Either Slashdot is not as intelligent as I thought, or it is more right-wing than I thought
Trump is not "right-wing". He is a populist, with an eclectic and shifting mix of the worst of both left and right.
"Right-wing" means fiscal responsibility, balanced budgets, free trade, and cutting entitlements, ... like Bill Clinton.
The public is quickly being conditioned to just ignore the alerts. All the alerts that I have received are about some kid kidnapped hundreds of miles from where I live, with no useful information other than the color of the car. Like I am supposed to call the police if I notice a silver car with a kid in it? Later on the news, I find out that the kidnapper was the non-custodial dad trying to get his child away from an abusive alcoholic mother.
Are benefit payments really that large in US industry.
H1-B workers are entitled to the same benefits as any other employee, so this is not an issue.
If benefit payments are that large, why aren't US corporations openly for single payer healthcare?
Managing corporate healthcare programs is much easier for big companies than for small companies, so big companies see it as a competitive advantage. Small companies don't come out for single-payer because they are generally not politically engaged at all.
Single-payer healthcare would likely be a big win for American businesses if it was managed well, but that is unlikely. Medicare and Medicaid are very badly managed, and a bigger program to cover everyone may be even worse.
Deploying the National Guard to the southern border of the United States of America would be less expensive than building, maintaining, and patrolling a wall.
We already tried that back in the 1990s. On one of the first patrols, a Marine shot and killed an American citizen. The military is not trained nor equipped to act as law enforcement.
Net immigration from Mexico is near zero. The main reason for the decline is economic growth and opportunities in Mexico. It is mostly a non-problem, and it is silly that it is the biggest issue in the election.
When two companies fight about something it usually boils down to money being their motivation.
There have been many corporate feuds have have been mutually self-destructive and financially insane. These conflicts are often more about ego than money.
these are fucking hobby drones that weight less than 1lbs. Do you see a giant fucking camera rig slung underneath it? No? Then it's not taking pictures of your fucking hairy ass.
My son has a drone that weighs 200g. It has a 4M pixel camera.
I think the registration program is stupid government overreach for the opposite reason: privacy is a real concern, but registration doesn't really solve the problem. Plenty of drones below the limit (500g) have high res-cameras, and soon there will be 499.5g drones available.
The company claimed on official government forms for multiple years that the drug is a generic.
The drug, epinephrine, is generic. It is adrenaline, which your body produces naturally. There is no patent stopping generic injectors, but so far none have been approved by the FDA. Teva submitted an injector, but the FDA denied approval for reasons that are not clear.
What about liability both civil and criminal?
What about it? We already have autonomous vehicles moving vertically (elevators), and existing liability laws seem to work for that. So why would horizontal movement be different?
it would give you enough power that hills wouldn't be a problem.
Having "enough power" is NOT the problem. DC motors produce plenty of power and plenty of torque at low speeds. The problem is that at those low speeds there is little back-EMF, so the only thing impeding the current is the resistance of the coils. So the motor gets you up the hill, but when you reach the top, the coils are hot, and the battery is empty. The problem is not power, but efficiency.
I'm not going to say for certain if you can design a motor to give you high enough torque at low speeds and also have high efficiency at high speeds, but you probably can.
Of course you can. That is trivial. All DC motors give high torque at low speeds and high efficiency at high speeds. In fact, they give the highest torque at zero speed. That is why a Tesla can go from 0 to 60 in 3.5 seconds. The problem is doing the opposite: high efficiency at low speed. DC motors are terrible at that.
They are? Even inverter drive motors?
Inverter drives are used with AC power supplies. Scooters use DC batteries and DC motors. So this doesn't even apply to the situation.
AC motors work best in fixed speed, fixed load situations, such as a fan, or a pump with a constant head. If run outside their spec, they will usually just stall (try sticking your finger in a fan, and it will just stop rather than pushing harder). An inverter can make an AC system more efficient under variable load and variable speed. But it will still be relatively inefficient if used far outside of its nominal range. If you ride an electric scooter up long and steep hills, you will soon have a hot motor and a dead battery.
it drives me crazy when they sweep up damp leaves and set them on fire. It is illegal and yet everyone does it.
Obvious solution: Rodrigo Duterte could declare that it is legal to shoot anyone burning leaves. After a few extra-judicial executions, you should notice the air quality improving.
Nice troll, but you are lying. Amazon doesn't give the email addresses to the vendors. They send the email on behalf of the vendors (for a fee of course), and the sending address is always <???>@marketplace.amazon.com.
As usual, Yahoo is missing the market. Rather than a binary porn/not-porn, there would be a MUCH bigger market for a porn classifier that could help people find what they like. If their DL-NN is based on RBMs they could even use it in generative mode to create porn to individual tastes.
If the scooters can regen, you'll get back most of the power on the descent.
It doesn't work that way. Electric motors are very inefficient when used in low speed / high torque situations, unless they are specifically geared for that. So most of the energy is used to heat up the coils rather than to climb the hill.
If I purchased their product, I've initiated a relationship with this company and I do not mind the follow up e-mail.
It isn't a "followup" since there is no human behind it, and there is generally no way to directly respond to the email. It is just machine generated spam, trying to generate a statistical response. If I receive one message, I delete it. If I receive another from the same vendor, I go to Amazon and give them a one-star review. If you do this too (and I hope you do) then do NOT mention the spam as a reason for the bad review. If you do that, Amazon will remove the review, since reviews must be about the product and not the company selling it. So just make something up instead.
If enough people do this, the spam will stop.
An even better solution would be for Amazon to allow the customers to opt out of having their email shared with vendors.
Ebola can be stopped dead in its track with soap.
Do you have a citation?
In epidemiology, the most important number is the Basic Reproduction Number, or "R0", which is the average number of future cases directly caused by each current case. If R0>1 the infection will spread, and if R0<1 it till die out. Ebola has a R0 far less than 1.0 in any environment where soap is generally available. In 2015, a few case happened in soap using countries, but they soon fizzled out. Ebola also died out in areas where people were given soap, and told how to use it. In Guinea, where the epidemic is believed to have started, about 70% of victims contracted the disease by directly handling corpses without washing their hands afterwards. When this practice stopped, mainly due to person-to-person education through tribal networks, R0 dramatically declined.
entering a room that somebody who had ebola weeks ago could still transmit it.
This is nonsense. From your own citation: Ebola disease spreads only by direct contact with the blood or other body fluids of a person who has developed symptoms of the disease .... Human-to-human transmission of EBOV through the air has not been reported to occur during EVD outbreaks.