Re: Missing the point
Thus humans can more accurately discern the trolls than any machine.
False comparison: we're optimised for dealing with natural language; driving cars isn't a comparable skill.
12169 publicly visible posts • joined 16 Apr 2007
The advantage of autonomous vehicles is that computers can become better drivers than people, especially in urban setting.
I'm a huge fan of public transport and don't own a car because where I live I don't need one and couldn't find somewhere to park it if I could. So my perspective on the "me" side of car ownership is a bit different to golfers who live in Woking. OTOH I've got a better appreciation of mobility: I have my bike, a season ticket for local transport and am happy to use a taxi if the the trip requires it. Although I have a valid driving licence I find driving in modern cities extremely testing and nerve-wracking and our cognitive abilities are never as good as we think they are: we find it very, very difficult to concentrate on things for a sustained period but this is something that computers excel at.
I won't claim to be at the vanguard of a revolution but the statistics indicate that many younger people are much less keen on car ownership than their parents. This has as much to do with moving from the suburbs into the cities to live, work and play as anything else because this means this highlights the problems car ownership in areas of high population densities: traffic and no parking spaces.
I also don't buy the inflexion point argument that until all cars are automated autonomous cars will be at a disadvantage. I think people will see the advantages of using and or owning them and decide for themselves.
Still, I've been badly off with predictions in the past and could be again. I guess only time will tell.
Why is it always cancer that people are worried about? Quick answer unlikely at the suggested frequencies. I'd worry more about queasiness and disorientation for anything using magnetic resonance at the kind of power that would need to work at distance.
Anyway, with FCC approval any lawsuits can be sent to the government.
I really fail to see why there is all this Hype over wireless charging is going on.
For mobile phones you can argue about the problems of mechanical connections but it is really about convenience in the home or office. Shared facilities such as those provided at airports offer actual efficiencies: single transformer, fewer cables, etc.
However, wireless charging is also appealing for industry. There is already a pilot service for electric powered-buses: no faffing around with plugging in a heavy duty cable, just park correctly and you're done. In this respect wireless charging has the same advantage of other contactless systems. None of these are really earth-shattering but they can still make sense.
I believe that it only starts really pumping out the energy when it resonates with a receiving device.
Maybe, but how's it going to do this? Without some kind of focussed beam you've got the usual dispersion problems.
It's possible that magnetic resonance is reasonably efficient as it's less likely to be attenuated by the air but then you have to worry about the strength of the field so you're talking about going from being on a mat to being just next to it. In practice I think bigger losses are incurred going between the various form of EMF.
The arguments advanced by both Energous and Ossia are typical of those with perhaps better technology but poorer understanding of the market. That Apple went with Qi suggests that they lost patience with alternatives. Qi's out there in millions, and possibly soon billions, of devices and is good enough™ as Andrew was quick to point out when it was included in Nokia phones.
It's going to be nigh on impossible replacing the devices and the infrastructure. All companies can hope for is having their technology bought an rolled into future iterations of Qi.
"Intelligent Design" was debunked years ago and is now little more than a thought experiment in introductory philosophy. Not that it stops the god-botherers from wheeling it out again and again.
Notwithstanding that none of the claims about the universe made by any of the various religious texts stands up to scientific scrutiny, there is also the problem of trying to reconcile what one group holds for divine truth with what all the others do.
But it is all by the by. Even if there is a supreme being then why would that stop us investigating the rules that they have laid down? There might be the small matter of reconciling a self-contained universe with some kind of external control, but why not?
OTOH continuing to peddle myth of humanity's exceptionalism not only gets harder to do convicingly (not that true believers care) but more worringly leads to faith-based policy including indoctrination, discriminaton and war.
Well, Jupiter does not orbit the sun, but Sol/Jupiter orbits a common point in space outside the surface of the objects themselves.
I think this is yours… ;-)
So, if "planet" is an object that orbits a star, then Jupiter is not a planet.
I don't think that's the current favoured defintion. I think it's more to do with the strength of the planet's gravity and it's ability to form itself and dominate it's local orbit, like wot Pluto don't.
What we do know is that it appears to of happened once during the time life has been on Earth, which seems to indicate that it is very rare.
More reductivism. We suspect there is no complex life in the solar system but are still prepared to send a probe to look in the oceans.
It is, however, reasonable to assume that energy is key to the development of life for things like food chains which might explain why the older anaerobic life forms round the vents on the ocean floor have remained as simple as they have.
The argument cherry picks items to lead to an almost inevitable conclusion. While there is no doubt that life on earth is pretty spectacular and unlikely, we also have a terribly poor understanding for just how big our galaxy is. I thought that some of the results from the probes to Jupiter and Saturn indicated that many of the factors that we think are so unique also exist there and that Venus and Mars are both "near misses" when it comes to being viable for life, ie. life itself is less spectacular than we used to think.
The chances might be small but on a galactic scale that still leaves an awful lot of possibilities. What hasn't changed is that complex life really struggles outside of protective bubble because space is hazardous.
The authors suggested the complex gravitational interactions between Jupiter and Saturn are to blame.
Which makes the argument somewhat self-defeating because Jupiter and Saturn didn't just appear one day in the solar system: they are an integral part of it. So the question really is: why did we get Jupiter and Saturn?
It's also a bit early to be claiming that we have enough data on planetary systems to be drawing conclusions.
The 4th amendment explicitly allows the executive branch to help itself to your papers and effects
Sure, but another amendment means that people cannot be compelled to provide passwords.
It's a side-show: want to catch crooks then do normal police work and following the money is a good way to start.
Surely they will have to wait in the French half of the tunnel until cleared to enter Britannia ?
Probably, though there may also been a load abandoned by the non-English drivers who find themselves no longer welcome on the sceptred isle. Along with health and farm workers…
So hopefully there'll also be a transitional period of at least two years with no deviation from EU law or the UK will be screwed.
As things stand at the moment the transitional period can only run until midnight of 31st December 2020 because otherwise the UK has to sign up for the next budget…
Of course, the current fudge allows for a maintenance of the status quo sans voting rights because of the Irish question.
Of course, Britain can take it! Cue stirring black and white footage of the new volunteer army of border and customs officers skillfully and knowledgeably handing everything. Thank goodness, Mr Chalmondely-Warner!
A lot of the modern tech companies make extensive use of open source and participate actively in projects including making their own stuff available. The logic behind this seems largely to be a continuation of IBM's EWS (employee written software) rules: if you can't sell it then you might as well give it away. You get peer review and possibly investment in the project from others. For free. It's also cheap but targeted advertising for companies looking for developers.
ART looks at first glance to be a proof of concept implementation of something that Facebook itself is not yet using in either WhatsApp or Facebook Messenger, ie. it wants peer review of the technology because secure, serverless group chat is hard.
No. It's the exact opposite of that.
Is it fuck: Apple has already made the changes to its own code and is now post facto trying to get them included in the standard. Apple only works on Webkit when it wants something new hence the lack of support for WebP or service workers and lots of other stuff. And then there's the ban on other rendering engines on IOS.
Encryption is best done in hardware so new stuff is almost inevitable as a lot of routers won't have CPUs beefy enough to everything in software only.
I think this is reasonable given the timeframe: announcement that they're going to start to work on a new framework. WPA2 with fixes is going to be around for a while yet and is good enough for most situations. People who can't trust it run VPNs over it anyway.
Rinse and repeat for child distractions over the last 50 years: television, video games, etc. Parental controls aren't the solution: more engagement with the offspring and eductation of them by the parents is what's required. I'm going to get on with this myself just as soon as I put my I-Pad down.
Dude, the GPL is never a problem unless you try to use GPL code without respecting the license.
Hogwash: the GPL's biggest problem has always been trying to infect other code with the licence and where this hasn't worked, duplicating existing code with its own.
With you until you got to Android. Android? Seriously?
Well, only in the sense that we'll probably seem more desktop systems with Android than Linux ones. We all know it isn't ready for prime time yet but it has the advantage of the apps: want MS Word on a non-MS machine? Well, with Android you can have it. I also think we'll see Samsung developing and pushing DeX for enterprise. This won't suit everyone but I think the market is big enough for Samsung to want to continue it.
Google is also, of course, trying to merge the castrated Chrome OS with Android for the kidz but it probably won't be until Fuchsia is around that we'll see what's really possible. 'Course Fuchsia might remove much of the remaining ties to Linux…
Colour me unconvinced. Gnome is years behind all the other major GUI systems and isn't even that popular among Linux diehards – not that these are the people who do lots of GUI development.
Now, Android on a desktop is a more interesting and likely development.
I'm by no means an expert in US history but I've always understood Franklin's quote to refer to the fallacy of trying to restrict citizens' rights to improve security. AFAIK Franklin's ideas were key to the protections granted by the constitution. Not only does the comparison with the I-Phone cheapen the debate, it's also completely off the mark because it's about convenience.
It's been noted elsewhere that biometric systems do not require the person's consent to be unlocked, which makes them per se less secure than a passcode.
If you are worried about security make sure you don't have anything worth stealing on a device that you have a high chance of losing, forgetting or breaking.
But Apple's latest "innovation" is really all about reassuring the punters that it was worth spending all that money to stay ahead of the plebs. Apple does make some fantastic products but it's even better an manufacturing demand for them.
but the average will still be an hour a day
Statistics 101: define average. In this case the modal average is of greater interest for the operators. But given 10 million subscribers you need a lot of heavy users to signficantly shift the mean and in such cases the usual "nudges" can be applied.
Broadcast licensing is a complete mess because the publishers wanted to have their cake and eat it: promote shit by getting it played a lot. As a result, for years now most radio stations play more or less what the publishers tell them to. Hardly surprising that some listeners got fed up and started looking for alternatives.
Personally, I don't like the streaming model but I think you're numbers are inflated. There will be some people listening to that much but I suspect the majority will be close to 10 - 20 hours a month. This is the same calculation for all streaming services: get people hooked by the promise of unlimited and then just enjoy the cashflow as people fail to cancel their subscriptions.
Yes, SIP can be disabled but Apple tries to make this as dfficult as possible. The real beef with SIP is that it promises more than it can really deliver while making perfectly reasonable stuff harder to do. The thinking might be about reducing Apple's potential liability because, in general, users have to disable the protection.
Yes, but the Department of Culture, Music and Also Sport likes to be seen to taking an interest in the plebs. You know, with things like salary caps for sportsmen…
The proposed solution is unworkable and easily contestable but as usual, it's all about grabbing some headlines.
Next week, of course, the touts will be invited to tender for the new NHS bed lottery…
Comparison with a Psion isn't really realistic because full-colour screen as opposed to passive LCD and radios. But the spec suggests that the device should be good for at least a day's real work: ie. at least several hours with the keyboard. Should outclass a lot of other devices with similar size but the productivity boost is the real winner.
Maybe in a tag-team with Liam Fox? Or even better with the 18th Century Throwback and Gove as part of the Brexiteers? We could all breathe so much easier if they were helping Kim Jong Eun with his transformation of North Korea into a UK-style state of mass surveillance.
The fact that they are no longer serving _shouldn't_ make a big difference.
It doesn't but the timescale does. At a pinch this could be seem to be similar to the NoW phone hacking stuff, but the referral to the ICO rather than the CPS would seem to indicate that no one really thinks the law was broken here.
If there is a court case then it will be primarily with the Metropolitan Police and why let the leak to happen. But everyone expects this to blow over over Christmas now that Green has resigned.