The whole reason not Cortana and why Microsoft chose Bing is that they envisioned the name of their search being verbed and used by the masses. "Hey how many carbon atoms in a buckyball? One sec, let me Bing it". They did some product placement a few years ago in several shows to prominently display Bing and for characters to actually say "bing it". An episode of Big Bang Theory, and one of Criminal Minds I think. It was actually kind of funny.
The article is actually rather funny. The whole article is obviously product placement. Microsoft has not approached anything like respect since, well, since they strong armed IBM out of the way and IBM DOS actually became MS DOS.
I actually do use Bing occasionally, though not directly. I use it because it is the major provider of results for duckduckgo, which I use for the privacy. Duckduckgo does some value added stuff with the results, which I like, but the main search results are unfortunately Bing. It's useful for everyday stuff, but if I ever need to get serious, if it's something marginal or I need it to understand my query as something more than just keywords, then I have to turn to Google. Luckily Duckduckgo knows its search partner is shite and makes it easy to turn to Google by just adding a "!g" to the search terms.
You know, my experience with Bing is kind of Microsoft in a nutshell nowadays. A necessary evil, maybe even somewhat useful for some things, but something quickly sidelined when possible, definitely sidelined if serious work needs doing.
They spend more time arranging criminal charges for its customers than innovating. They can call their search whatever they want, no one will use it. Just as the internet moves to heal censorship, it also moves to contain Microsoft.
He gave CDs to make computers that had already had licensed versions of Windows on them able to run Windows again. It's not like those licensed versions of Windows were moved to another computer.
"But we've changed", said Microsoft. "We're different. We're not the same bully we used to be. We're a kinder gentler Microsoft. See, we have Linux stuff in Windows now. Lots of nerdy Linux stuff. How could we be evil with Linux stuff, that automatically makes us good, right?"
It's no wonder the PC market as a whole has taken a beating over phones and tablets. It doesn't matter that most laptops still have Windows when most people for their day-to-day interactions want nothing to do with laptops, and desktops are essentially non-existent outside the corporate environment where they survive only because they are easier to physically chain to a desk. It's for this very reason, where Microsoft sues and arranges charges for its customers, where they have been high-handedly trying to extinguish anything like true innovation for decades that causes people to want to move away from the platform entirely.
It's telling how Microsoft's attempts to break out of the PC market have universally failed. It's like people have put Microsoft in its own jail. We have reluctantly accepted they remain a necessary evil for certain things, but no one will let them into any other market or paradigm because, quite frankly, they have repeatedly demonstrated (and still are) they simply cannot be trusted. Just as the internet moves to heal censorship, the computing world naturally moves to contain zMicrosoft. Their short and medium term strategies that were antagonistic to their consumers just can't create long term goodwill.
It's also interesting that Microsoft appears to have decided that they simply cannot innovate, since their strategy continues to be to threaten and extort their user base to continue to pay them.
Let's take it as a given that Huawei does indeed have spyware/tracking hooks in their phones right down to the hardware level. Let's also take it as a given that the NSA, therefore, doesn't have hooks into those phones. What does that mean for us?
Will Chinese authorities arrest someone in US, UK, or Canada if they find out someone here is doing a Google search for Al Qaeda on a Huawei phone? Unlikely. WIll they turn over GPS tracking of me to law enforcement?
If I take it as a given that someone will be watching everything I do on my phone, I can't think of anyone I would rather have watching than a government that is antagonistic to the NSA.
They are not looking for modulating of a star. No one is thinking an alien race is going to be modulating a star. Stars don't emit on the hydrogen line. Lord.
When looking for a frequency to search for transmissions on, you can't use nice round numbers and expect that those nice round numbers for us are going to be nice round numbers for them too. 1.000000GHz for us won't be 1.000000GWhatevers for them because every race will have a different measurement for time. So they look for frequencies that are built into the fabric of the universe and use those as the base reference, with the belief that if that idea makes sense for us it would make sense for others too. Hydrogen is the most basic element, the most abundant element in space, and the precession frequency of neutral hydrogen atoms (1.42ishGHz) is a radio frequency that propagates reasonably well. The hope is if that idea makes sense to us, it will make sense to an alien race who might be looking for a frequency to send on that others will think to listen to. Hydrogen line times pi is another one.
Qualcom "has a monopoly on smartwatch chips and doesn't seem interested in making any smartwatch chips,"
I don't get it either. How can you have a monopoly on something that you're not making? Either they are making them and have a monopoly, or they aren't making them and don't have a monopoly and the market is open for someone else to come in and make them.
If a previous single-source provider decides to get out of the market and no one else even wants to enter it after that, that's simply because there is no market. Which is almost the opposite of monopoly.
Are Slashdot editors trained to pick the stories that make the least sense on their face in order to simply create controversy and get comments? Clickbait for commenters. Damn. Why am I doing this?
The frightening thing about "AI" is not action at a distance, it's self-motivated action. What you describe isn't "AI" killing someone. It's someone using a tool that incorporates a computer. Tools are just catalysts, they reduce the activation energy required to perform a task. Sure, a drone is scary, but it's no more scary than a shooter on a grassy knoll blowing the head off an American president, or a sniper taking out a target from a mile away. It's not AI, it's just an automated programmed remote weapon.
AI as it currently exists is no more exciting than the assembly line. Robotics is great for automation of tasks. The type of AI we have now is great for expert systems and chewing through large amounts of data. The combination of machine learning and robotics have exciting prospects for eliminating mundane jobs. However we are no closer to hard AI today than we were forty years ago. At least forty years ago we were coming down off the pinacle of the first mount stupid. Today we are, in fact, back where we were in the 50's. It was in the 50's, with the birth of computers and science fiction that we naively assumed that human ingenuity was rendering artificial sentience into something that was right around the corner. In the 70's and 80's at least we realized we didn't even really have a clue how to do it and we learned a bit of wisdom. Now with new machine learning techniques we are climbing right back onto mount stupid again. I am no more impressed with computers winning at Go and Chess than I am impressed that a hydraulic press can exert several (thousand) times my strength. The software that is winning at Chess and Go are, in fact, little smarter than that same hydraulic press. The software knows from analyzing millions of games that humans have played what winning strategies are, and combines that with brute force strength to know where to optimize its searches.
We are not close to hard AI. We are not close to soft AI. For AI to be AI it has to be BOTH A and I, and one out of two doesn't count.
Not AI. Still, the whole world can be united in rejoicing at the birth of... steganography. Congratulations boys, it's revolutionary.
I love how the story is presented, like there is some huge achievement in making something machine readable that isn't easily human readable. Like 256-level quadrature amplitude modulation wasn't already that. Or a binary zip file, or well, or a compiled executable, or pretty forking much anything that's not straight text on your computer.
It wasn't quite live. There is obviously a long enough delay inserted that they were able to shut down the feed before the world saw the main rocket crash. I wouldn't call that part catastrophic. I don't intend to rain on the parade, because all in all this is a brilliant achievement, but losing the main vehicle isn't the small blip that SpaceX said it was either. Two of the three engines failed. That's significant in and of itself. Losing the main vehicle because of that isn't a minor event. Still, it represents mission success, which is the main thing. And it's nice to see something outside of government with that kind of heavy lift ability.
It's not the fact that the NSA isn't allowed to hack. It's the fact that they discovered multiple critical vulnerabilities in an OS used by hundreds of millions of American citizens and other American agencies and governments, and instead of disclosing it responsibly so that Americans would be protected, they sat on that information. Worse, they weaponized it, then they let the weapon escape out into the wild. NSA exploits are responsible for more billions of dollars in ransomeware attacks than any single source.
The NSA failed to protect Americans, weaponized a weakness shared by virtually every citizen, and then failed to keep their weapons locked up. Imagine if the US Air Force lost a few nukes. The property damage by NSA leaks is about akin to dropping a nuke on medium sized city. The NSA leadership responsible for those decisions shouldn't just be fired, they should be hauled (in chains) before congress to answer publicly for those decisions. I cannot fathom why the American people aren't still howling for their arrest.
I've done this for ages and it works for me. All my IDs are photographed and scanned into KeePass entries. If I ever don't have my wallet I pull it up on my phone. The one time I was stopped the cop puzzled on it for a few seconds, shrugged, and told me to be on my way. Since essentially every police force in the free world can look up your drivers license on their in-car computer, it's hard for them to argue that not physically holding it is so terrible anyway.
You can't say what his beliefs are. The man is getting attention - that is, after all, what some people crave. Whether or not they are his real beliefs or the man is just a huge troll, no one can ever really know. Poe's law holds true.
The correct response in either case is the same, however. Quietly call the man an idiot, and refuse to engage in the argument or discussion.
Does this really matter? A) the scores they are striking aren't even in the top 10 any more, and B) they are striking him from #20 on the high score list for playing on MAME when it was supposed to have been played on a console, and the current #3, #10, #13, and #15 on the same list were admittedly played on MAME? How does that even make sense?
The man has a publicly viewed score of 933,900. It's not like he doesn't have the talent. It's a tempest in an emulated teapot if you ask me.
Not necessarily wrong. Google wants to splooge Chrome all over every notebook screen. What a great idea - a whole OS dedicated to giving away as much of our data as possible and placing all our reliance on Google.
Fair enough, but why would they want to buy it in the first place? They bought PayPal only to spin it off and now dump it. How does that make sense, and how would it make sense to try to do it over again?
Violating Google's policies does not mean it's a bad app. A favourite recipe app of mine was capable of downloading recipes from multiple sources if you had logins to those sites. That's hardly malware. Neither are computer and game system emulation apps, nor spoof apps to morph your photo to look like other racial stereotypes. Sure some of them are controversial in their own ways, but they are hardly malware. Google doesn't release stats on which terms of their service that apps were removed for, so we can hardly say they are the stalwart paladins of Android by removing 700,000 "bad" apps. I would be unsurprised to see most of that number are simply falling afoul of Google's army of lawyers for rather benign infractions.
Anyone who uses Facebook for news deserves everything they get. Including the president they got saddled with. But don't worry folks, only 1085 days 2 hours to go!
Holy Lord, that is the point. The whole idea behind nationalizing the network is to protect against US networks using compromised Chinese components which they are concerned would make (are making) the network vulnerable to their eavesdropping. Which is particularly rich, considering that the US government has been forcing US manufacturers to embed weaknesses into their networking and telecom equipment for years. *cough*CISCO*cough*
The kind of protection spoken of is not to protect against Chinese superiority, it's to protect US networks against using compromised Chinese components which they are concerned would make the network vulnerable to their eavesdropping. Which is particularly rich, considering that the US government has been forcing US manufacturers to embed weaknesses into their networking and telecom equipment for years. *cough*CISCO*cough*
Slashdot Mirror
The whole reason not Cortana and why Microsoft chose Bing is that they envisioned the name of their search being verbed and used by the masses. "Hey how many carbon atoms in a buckyball? One sec, let me Bing it". They did some product placement a few years ago in several shows to prominently display Bing and for characters to actually say "bing it". An episode of Big Bang Theory, and one of Criminal Minds I think. It was actually kind of funny.
The article is actually rather funny. The whole article is obviously product placement. Microsoft has not approached anything like respect since, well, since they strong armed IBM out of the way and IBM DOS actually became MS DOS.
I actually do use Bing occasionally, though not directly. I use it because it is the major provider of results for duckduckgo, which I use for the privacy. Duckduckgo does some value added stuff with the results, which I like, but the main search results are unfortunately Bing. It's useful for everyday stuff, but if I ever need to get serious, if it's something marginal or I need it to understand my query as something more than just keywords, then I have to turn to Google. Luckily Duckduckgo knows its search partner is shite and makes it easy to turn to Google by just adding a "!g" to the search terms.
You know, my experience with Bing is kind of Microsoft in a nutshell nowadays. A necessary evil, maybe even somewhat useful for some things, but something quickly sidelined when possible, definitely sidelined if serious work needs doing.
They spend more time arranging criminal charges for its customers than innovating. They can call their search whatever they want, no one will use it. Just as the internet moves to heal censorship, it also moves to contain Microsoft.
He gave CDs to make computers that had already had licensed versions of Windows on them able to run Windows again. It's not like those licensed versions of Windows were moved to another computer.
"But we've changed", said Microsoft. "We're different. We're not the same bully we used to be. We're a kinder gentler Microsoft. See, we have Linux stuff in Windows now. Lots of nerdy Linux stuff. How could we be evil with Linux stuff, that automatically makes us good, right?"
It's no wonder the PC market as a whole has taken a beating over phones and tablets. It doesn't matter that most laptops still have Windows when most people for their day-to-day interactions want nothing to do with laptops, and desktops are essentially non-existent outside the corporate environment where they survive only because they are easier to physically chain to a desk. It's for this very reason, where Microsoft sues and arranges charges for its customers, where they have been high-handedly trying to extinguish anything like true innovation for decades that causes people to want to move away from the platform entirely.
It's telling how Microsoft's attempts to break out of the PC market have universally failed. It's like people have put Microsoft in its own jail. We have reluctantly accepted they remain a necessary evil for certain things, but no one will let them into any other market or paradigm because, quite frankly, they have repeatedly demonstrated (and still are) they simply cannot be trusted. Just as the internet moves to heal censorship, the computing world naturally moves to contain zMicrosoft. Their short and medium term strategies that were antagonistic to their consumers just can't create long term goodwill.
It's also interesting that Microsoft appears to have decided that they simply cannot innovate, since their strategy continues to be to threaten and extort their user base to continue to pay them.
Let's take it as a given that Huawei does indeed have spyware/tracking hooks in their phones right down to the hardware level. Let's also take it as a given that the NSA, therefore, doesn't have hooks into those phones. What does that mean for us?
Will Chinese authorities arrest someone in US, UK, or Canada if they find out someone here is doing a Google search for Al Qaeda on a Huawei phone? Unlikely. WIll they turn over GPS tracking of me to law enforcement?
If I take it as a given that someone will be watching everything I do on my phone, I can't think of anyone I would rather have watching than a government that is antagonistic to the NSA.
I know what my next handset will be.
They are not looking for modulating of a star. No one is thinking an alien race is going to be modulating a star. Stars don't emit on the hydrogen line. Lord.
When looking for a frequency to search for transmissions on, you can't use nice round numbers and expect that those nice round numbers for us are going to be nice round numbers for them too. 1.000000GHz for us won't be 1.000000GWhatevers for them because every race will have a different measurement for time. So they look for frequencies that are built into the fabric of the universe and use those as the base reference, with the belief that if that idea makes sense for us it would make sense for others too. Hydrogen is the most basic element, the most abundant element in space, and the precession frequency of neutral hydrogen atoms (1.42ishGHz) is a radio frequency that propagates reasonably well. The hope is if that idea makes sense to us, it will make sense to an alien race who might be looking for a frequency to send on that others will think to listen to. Hydrogen line times pi is another one.
I don't get it either. How can you have a monopoly on something that you're not making? Either they are making them and have a monopoly, or they aren't making them and don't have a monopoly and the market is open for someone else to come in and make them.
If a previous single-source provider decides to get out of the market and no one else even wants to enter it after that, that's simply because there is no market. Which is almost the opposite of monopoly.
Are Slashdot editors trained to pick the stories that make the least sense on their face in order to simply create controversy and get comments? Clickbait for commenters. Damn. Why am I doing this?
The frightening thing about "AI" is not action at a distance, it's self-motivated action. What you describe isn't "AI" killing someone. It's someone using a tool that incorporates a computer. Tools are just catalysts, they reduce the activation energy required to perform a task. Sure, a drone is scary, but it's no more scary than a shooter on a grassy knoll blowing the head off an American president, or a sniper taking out a target from a mile away. It's not AI, it's just an automated programmed remote weapon.
AI as it currently exists is no more exciting than the assembly line. Robotics is great for automation of tasks. The type of AI we have now is great for expert systems and chewing through large amounts of data. The combination of machine learning and robotics have exciting prospects for eliminating mundane jobs. However we are no closer to hard AI today than we were forty years ago. At least forty years ago we were coming down off the pinacle of the first mount stupid. Today we are, in fact, back where we were in the 50's. It was in the 50's, with the birth of computers and science fiction that we naively assumed that human ingenuity was rendering artificial sentience into something that was right around the corner. In the 70's and 80's at least we realized we didn't even really have a clue how to do it and we learned a bit of wisdom. Now with new machine learning techniques we are climbing right back onto mount stupid again. I am no more impressed with computers winning at Go and Chess than I am impressed that a hydraulic press can exert several (thousand) times my strength. The software that is winning at Chess and Go are, in fact, little smarter than that same hydraulic press. The software knows from analyzing millions of games that humans have played what winning strategies are, and combines that with brute force strength to know where to optimize its searches.
We are not close to hard AI. We are not close to soft AI. For AI to be AI it has to be BOTH A and I, and one out of two doesn't count.
Fake news. We all know that all Chinese look the same.
And yes, this corresponds with what I have reverse engineered from the iPhone, so it appears legit.
Subbed, as in substituted, or...ahem....subbed?
Not AI. Still, the whole world can be united in rejoicing at the birth of... steganography. Congratulations boys, it's revolutionary.
I love how the story is presented, like there is some huge achievement in making something machine readable that isn't easily human readable. Like 256-level quadrature amplitude modulation wasn't already that. Or a binary zip file, or well, or a compiled executable, or pretty forking much anything that's not straight text on your computer.
It wasn't quite live. There is obviously a long enough delay inserted that they were able to shut down the feed before the world saw the main rocket crash. I wouldn't call that part catastrophic. I don't intend to rain on the parade, because all in all this is a brilliant achievement, but losing the main vehicle isn't the small blip that SpaceX said it was either. Two of the three engines failed. That's significant in and of itself. Losing the main vehicle because of that isn't a minor event. Still, it represents mission success, which is the main thing. And it's nice to see something outside of government with that kind of heavy lift ability.
It's not the fact that the NSA isn't allowed to hack. It's the fact that they discovered multiple critical vulnerabilities in an OS used by hundreds of millions of American citizens and other American agencies and governments, and instead of disclosing it responsibly so that Americans would be protected, they sat on that information. Worse, they weaponized it, then they let the weapon escape out into the wild. NSA exploits are responsible for more billions of dollars in ransomeware attacks than any single source.
The NSA failed to protect Americans, weaponized a weakness shared by virtually every citizen, and then failed to keep their weapons locked up. Imagine if the US Air Force lost a few nukes. The property damage by NSA leaks is about akin to dropping a nuke on medium sized city. The NSA leadership responsible for those decisions shouldn't just be fired, they should be hauled (in chains) before congress to answer publicly for those decisions. I cannot fathom why the American people aren't still howling for their arrest.
I've done this for ages and it works for me. All my IDs are photographed and scanned into KeePass entries. If I ever don't have my wallet I pull it up on my phone. The one time I was stopped the cop puzzled on it for a few seconds, shrugged, and told me to be on my way. Since essentially every police force in the free world can look up your drivers license on their in-car computer, it's hard for them to argue that not physically holding it is so terrible anyway.
You can't say what his beliefs are. The man is getting attention - that is, after all, what some people crave. Whether or not they are his real beliefs or the man is just a huge troll, no one can ever really know. Poe's law holds true.
The correct response in either case is the same, however. Quietly call the man an idiot, and refuse to engage in the argument or discussion.
Does this really matter? A) the scores they are striking aren't even in the top 10 any more, and B) they are striking him from #20 on the high score list for playing on MAME when it was supposed to have been played on a console, and the current #3, #10, #13, and #15 on the same list were admittedly played on MAME? How does that even make sense?
The man has a publicly viewed score of 933,900. It's not like he doesn't have the talent. It's a tempest in an emulated teapot if you ask me.
Not necessarily wrong. Google wants to splooge Chrome all over every notebook screen. What a great idea - a whole OS dedicated to giving away as much of our data as possible and placing all our reliance on Google.
Fair enough, but why would they want to buy it in the first place? They bought PayPal only to spin it off and now dump it. How does that make sense, and how would it make sense to try to do it over again?
Violating Google's policies does not mean it's a bad app. A favourite recipe app of mine was capable of downloading recipes from multiple sources if you had logins to those sites. That's hardly malware. Neither are computer and game system emulation apps, nor spoof apps to morph your photo to look like other racial stereotypes. Sure some of them are controversial in their own ways, but they are hardly malware. Google doesn't release stats on which terms of their service that apps were removed for, so we can hardly say they are the stalwart paladins of Android by removing 700,000 "bad" apps. I would be unsurprised to see most of that number are simply falling afoul of Google's army of lawyers for rather benign infractions.
Anyone who uses Facebook for news deserves everything they get. Including the president they got saddled with. But don't worry folks, only 1085 days 2 hours to go!
Holy Lord, that is the point. The whole idea behind nationalizing the network is to protect against US networks using compromised Chinese components which they are concerned would make (are making) the network vulnerable to their eavesdropping. Which is particularly rich, considering that the US government has been forcing US manufacturers to embed weaknesses into their networking and telecom equipment for years. *cough*CISCO*cough*
The kind of protection spoken of is not to protect against Chinese superiority, it's to protect US networks against using compromised Chinese components which they are concerned would make the network vulnerable to their eavesdropping. Which is particularly rich, considering that the US government has been forcing US manufacturers to embed weaknesses into their networking and telecom equipment for years. *cough*CISCO*cough*
I am Pentium of Borg. Division is futile. You will be approximated.
Ah. That never gets old.