We've had some questions so we updated this post to be more clear. To answer the top one: No we don't store photos, we don't share them and we only use them to guess your age and gender. The photos are discarded from memory once we guess. While we use the terms of service very common in our industry, and similar to most other online services, we have chosen not to store or use the photos in any way other than to temporarily process them to guess your age."
So, if you become a Microsoft star you probably have a very good legal case. IANAL.
I tried several photos. I got as low as 23 and as high as 46 with photos from within the past 3 years (I'm in my mid-30's). In one photo I'm standing next to my mother who is in her late 60's in the photo. In that photo it says I'm 46 and she's 40. I believe the difference is that my hair is starting to go gray but my mother still colors her hair. In the picture where it says I'm 23 my hair is cut short and isn't noticeably going gray. However, I used the exact same picture and adjusted the lighting and it changed my age from 23 to 27.
Curiously, it seems to have a problem with infants. I have a 22 month nephew that depending on lighting says is either a 5 or 16 year old girl. I also tried a picture of my nephew being held by his mother at only a few months old and it guessed he was 5 years old. The algorithm is definitely using just the face as if it used other contextual clues it'd be very obvious a 5 year old is much larger than a 3 month old or that a 16 years old is much taller than a 5 year old.
Interesting concept but it appears hair color and lighting play large roles (simply based on my own manipulation of identical pictures).
They're called trollybusses and lots of cities used to have them. Apparently hundreds of cities in the US had them but most of them went away in the 1950's and 1960's. Currently they're only in use in Boston, Dayton, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco (List of US Trollybusses). I was recently in San Francisco on a tour bus and they said the reason they use them is the electric motor has more torque which is needed to go up the steep hills. I can't speak for why they're still in use in the other cities or why they went out of style in all but 5 cities. Growing up in Dayton I thought they were more common than they are since Dayton isn't that big of a city compared to the others on the list.
I haven't done it because I have severe myopia and all my ophthalmologists recommended that LASIK is not a good idea because it would thin my cornea too much. They have told me surgeons will do it at my level but if it were their eyes they wouldn't risk it. So, the only option for me is intraocular lens which I've been told costs $5,000 per eye and I'd rather use contact lenses to correct my vision to 20:20 than shell out $10,000. If I could do LASIK I'd sign up tomorrow.
Also keep an eye out for BIOS Disassembly Ninjutsu Uncovered by Darmawan Salihun. People are asking $1500 for it on Amazon since it's out of print. I guess it's a collector's item. The company I used to work for paid $700 for it on amazon 6 months ago and as soon as I heard that I googled the book to see why it was in such demand and discovered it was out of print and the author had even posted a PDF of the book on his blog. So, there was no reason to even buy it for the information; it's only worthwhile buying it as a collectible. The funny thing is they didn't know any of this and wrote their name all over it with a sharpie thus destroying its collectible value. What's not funny is they probably just billed the government for the price of a book they could've read for free...
I see no problems with this. The post office will still need door to door delivery for packages. If someone is disabled or elderly then I'm sure it'd still be cheaper to create a registry where the post office delivers mail to the door of those people. As an added bonus every cluster box I've seen has a key to your mailbox so your mail is more secure and nobody other than the mailman can put mail in your box.
This isn't new either; as was mentioned already. I grew up in a small town of 700. Nobody in the whole town had a mailbox. Everyone in town had to go to the post office and get their mail form a PO Box. Sure, for some it was a mile away but your mail was always delivered at 9 AM if you wanted to check that early. This was in the 1980's and as far as I know it'd been like that the previous 30 years. Then when I went to college all the mail was centralized near the cafeteria. When I graduated and moved to small city in Indiana all the houses in my subdivision had cluster boxes for every 10-20 houses. This was a subdivision built in the early 1990's. Now I'm living in MD in a gated community and it has cluster boxes too although for some odd reason I have to walk past the nearest cluster box and down the street to next one to get my mail from that box. So, from my point of view I've never had door to door service.
In other news Massachusetts also is looking to pass a law redefining the term "police car" to be any traffic light, street sign, lamp post, or tree on public property.
Agreed. The question was how much an American military subcontractor would want to develop this and the GP answered himself saying it cost $1390. I was merely trying to point out that development cost and the cost of the materials and labor to build one are two different things.
Unless the guy that invented it works for free the true cost is surely much higher than $1390. This IEEE article from a month ago says it took him a year and a half to develop so I'd include the guy's salary, lab equipment, CAD tool licenses, etc. unless he worked on it in his free time with all free open source software...
Why? At the risk of quoting John Wayne, war isn't about giving your life for your country - it's about making the other bastard give his life for his.
That was not John Wayne, it was George C. Scott in the movie Patton. The whole quote is "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
Eventually, this will be flying more than our own pilots will be, due to the fact that pilots cannot be mass-produced.
Also, an autonomous aircraft can maneuver better than a plane with a human pilot. When you remove the pilot you no longer need to worry about what kind of G-forces they are subjected to. You can build an airplane that can withstand way more G-forces than you could ever train a pilot to withstand.
Slashdot Mirror
On the site under the "Use your own photo" button it very explicitly says "P.S. We don't keep the photo".
Then on the blog it says:
"Updated 5/2/2015
We've had some questions so we updated this post to be more clear. To answer the top one: No we don't store photos, we don't share them and we only use them to guess your age and gender. The photos are discarded from memory once we guess. While we use the terms of service very common in our industry, and similar to most other online services, we have chosen not to store or use the photos in any way other than to temporarily process them to guess your age."
So, if you become a Microsoft star you probably have a very good legal case. IANAL.
I tried several photos. I got as low as 23 and as high as 46 with photos from within the past 3 years (I'm in my mid-30's). In one photo I'm standing next to my mother who is in her late 60's in the photo. In that photo it says I'm 46 and she's 40. I believe the difference is that my hair is starting to go gray but my mother still colors her hair. In the picture where it says I'm 23 my hair is cut short and isn't noticeably going gray. However, I used the exact same picture and adjusted the lighting and it changed my age from 23 to 27.
Curiously, it seems to have a problem with infants. I have a 22 month nephew that depending on lighting says is either a 5 or 16 year old girl. I also tried a picture of my nephew being held by his mother at only a few months old and it guessed he was 5 years old. The algorithm is definitely using just the face as if it used other contextual clues it'd be very obvious a 5 year old is much larger than a 3 month old or that a 16 years old is much taller than a 5 year old.
Interesting concept but it appears hair color and lighting play large roles (simply based on my own manipulation of identical pictures).
I guess trolleybuses would be a more correct way to spell the plural...
They're called trollybusses and lots of cities used to have them. Apparently hundreds of cities in the US had them but most of them went away in the 1950's and 1960's. Currently they're only in use in Boston, Dayton, Philadelphia, Seattle, and San Francisco (List of US Trollybusses). I was recently in San Francisco on a tour bus and they said the reason they use them is the electric motor has more torque which is needed to go up the steep hills. I can't speak for why they're still in use in the other cities or why they went out of style in all but 5 cities. Growing up in Dayton I thought they were more common than they are since Dayton isn't that big of a city compared to the others on the list.
I haven't done it because I have severe myopia and all my ophthalmologists recommended that LASIK is not a good idea because it would thin my cornea too much. They have told me surgeons will do it at my level but if it were their eyes they wouldn't risk it. So, the only option for me is intraocular lens which I've been told costs $5,000 per eye and I'd rather use contact lenses to correct my vision to 20:20 than shell out $10,000. If I could do LASIK I'd sign up tomorrow.
Also keep an eye out for BIOS Disassembly Ninjutsu Uncovered by Darmawan Salihun. People are asking $1500 for it on Amazon since it's out of print. I guess it's a collector's item. The company I used to work for paid $700 for it on amazon 6 months ago and as soon as I heard that I googled the book to see why it was in such demand and discovered it was out of print and the author had even posted a PDF of the book on his blog. So, there was no reason to even buy it for the information; it's only worthwhile buying it as a collectible. The funny thing is they didn't know any of this and wrote their name all over it with a sharpie thus destroying its collectible value. What's not funny is they probably just billed the government for the price of a book they could've read for free...
I see no problems with this. The post office will still need door to door delivery for packages. If someone is disabled or elderly then I'm sure it'd still be cheaper to create a registry where the post office delivers mail to the door of those people. As an added bonus every cluster box I've seen has a key to your mailbox so your mail is more secure and nobody other than the mailman can put mail in your box.
This isn't new either; as was mentioned already. I grew up in a small town of 700. Nobody in the whole town had a mailbox. Everyone in town had to go to the post office and get their mail form a PO Box. Sure, for some it was a mile away but your mail was always delivered at 9 AM if you wanted to check that early. This was in the 1980's and as far as I know it'd been like that the previous 30 years. Then when I went to college all the mail was centralized near the cafeteria. When I graduated and moved to small city in Indiana all the houses in my subdivision had cluster boxes for every 10-20 houses. This was a subdivision built in the early 1990's. Now I'm living in MD in a gated community and it has cluster boxes too although for some odd reason I have to walk past the nearest cluster box and down the street to next one to get my mail from that box. So, from my point of view I've never had door to door service.
In other news Massachusetts also is looking to pass a law redefining the term "police car" to be any traffic light, street sign, lamp post, or tree on public property.
Agreed. The question was how much an American military subcontractor would want to develop this and the GP answered himself saying it cost $1390. I was merely trying to point out that development cost and the cost of the materials and labor to build one are two different things.
Unless the guy that invented it works for free the true cost is surely much higher than $1390. This IEEE article from a month ago says it took him a year and a half to develop so I'd include the guy's salary, lab equipment, CAD tool licenses, etc. unless he worked on it in his free time with all free open source software...
If you look at the statistics of who's rating they list Alaska as a country separate from the US!
Why? At the risk of quoting John Wayne, war isn't about giving your life for your country - it's about making the other bastard give his life for his.
That was not John Wayne, it was George C. Scott in the movie Patton. The whole quote is "No bastard ever won a war by dying for his country. He won it by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his country."
Movie Quote
Eventually, this will be flying more than our own pilots will be, due to the fact that pilots cannot be mass-produced.
Also, an autonomous aircraft can maneuver better than a plane with a human pilot. When you remove the pilot you no longer need to worry about what kind of G-forces they are subjected to. You can build an airplane that can withstand way more G-forces than you could ever train a pilot to withstand.