# Sticky  interesting tech stories



## ae1905

*Bose accused of secretly sharing your listening habits*

engadget.com 2 minutes

The suit notes that while this sort of data can be valuable to Bose, selling it to third-parties represents a "wholesale disregard for consumer privacy rights," as well as violating several federal and state laws.

"Indeed, one's personal audio selections -- including music, radio broadcast, podcast, and lecture choices -- provide an incredible amount of insight into his or her personality, behavior, political views and personal identity," the complaint explains.

Bose Connect acts as a companion app to several models of the company's wireless products, including the well-reviewed QuietComfort 35 headphones. The app provides users with the ability to setup and control parts of their audio experience from a smartphone. During the download and install process, the complaint notes "Bose fails to notify or warn customers that Bose Connect monitors and collects -- in real time -- the music and audio tracks played through their Bose wireless products. Nor does Bose disclose that it transmits the collected listening data to third parties."

This isn't the first time a tech company has come under fire around privacy issues. TV maker Vizio settled with the FTC for $2.2 million in February over claims that it analyzed the viewing habits of its users without consent. Personal vibrator maker We-Vibe also settled a lawsuit over privacy concerns and promised to stop collecting user data.

The current lawsuit seeks an injunction to stop Bose from continuing to track personal data and disclose it, as well as actual and statutory damages. We reached out to Bose for a comment on the matter and we will update this post when we hear back.


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## ae1905

*EFF Says Google Chromebooks Are Still Spying on Students*

news.softpedia.com Gabriela Vatu

[HR][/HR] *Google still hasn't shed its "bad guy" clothes when it comes to the data it collects on underage students. In fact, the Electronic Frontier Foundation says the company continues to massively collect and store information on children without their consent or their parents'. Not even school administrators fully understand the extent of this operation, the EFF says. 
*
This isn't the first time the EFF has had something to say against Google on this topic. In fact, two years ago, it even filed a federal complaint against the company, alleging that it was "collecting and data mining school children's personal information, including their Internet searches."

According to the latest status report from the EFF, Google is still up to no good, trying to eliminate students' privacy without their parent's notice or consent and "without a real choice to opt out." This, they say, is done via the Chromebooks Google is selling to schools across the United States.

"Educational technology services often collect far more information on kids than is necessary and store this information indefinitely," the EFF said.

A mass-collection of student data

The main issue, it seems, is the fact that the education system is changing the way it treats the students' privacy, mostly due to a rollout of low-priced Chromebooks that come with educations services. Often, they are available for a reduced price or even given out for free."Educational technology services often collect far more information on kids than is necessary and store this information indefinitely," the EFF says in its investigation. In fact, they tie personally identifying information, such as kids' names, birthdays, browsing history, search terms, location data, contact lists, and behavioral information.

The worst part is that some programs used on these school-issued Chromebooks upload student data to the cloud automatically and by default. This happens without the express consent of the students or their families', or even their awareness of the situation.

Many complaints about this situation were filed to the EFF by parents who found out schools had mass-enrolled their kids into Google email accounts, using their full names. Furthermore, they posted photos of them on social media sites and enrolled them into other services that collect data without any notification. To make matters worse, the passwords students are assigned are easy to guess, featuring their birthdays or student ID numbers, which makes them extremely easy to guess. Students are also prohibited from changing their passwords.

The EFF investigated 152 ed-tech services that survey respondents reported were in use in their classrooms. The findings weren't too great, as most of these services had privacy policies lacking in encryption, data retention or data sharing rules. One school Chromebook administrator has told the EFF that they're "putting all [their] eggs in one basket that we're not in control of. We don't know where this student data is going."


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## ae1905

https://www.youtube.com/results?search_query=boom+supersonic+back


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## ae1905

*The Electric Lilium Jet Hints at Future Air Taxis*

blogs.discovermagazine.com

[HR][/HR] A prototype of the Lilium Jet takes off on a vertical takeoff and landing test flight. Credit: Lilium

The old science fiction fantasy of a flying car that both drives on the ground and flies in the air is unlikely to revolutionize daily commutes. Instead, Silicon Valley tech entrepreneurs and aerospace companies dream of electric-powered aircraft that can take off vertically like helicopters but have the flight efficiency of airplanes. The German startup Lilium took a very public step forward in that direction by demonstrating the first electric-powered jet capable of vertical takeoff and landing last week.

The Lilium Jet prototype that made its maiden debut resembles a flattened pod with stubby thrusters in front and a longer wing with engines in back. The final design concept shows two wings hold a combined 36 electric turbofan engines that can tilt to provide both vertical lifting thrust and horizontal thrust for forward flight. Such electric engines powered by lithium-ion batteries could enable a quieter breed of aircraft that someday cut travel times for ride-hailing commuters from hours to minutes in cities such as San Francisco or New York. On its website, Lilium promises an air taxi that could eventually carry up to five people at speeds of 190 miles per hour: about the same speed as a Formula One racing car. And it’s promising that passengers could begin booking the Lilium Jet as part of an air taxi service by 2025.
“From a technology point of view, there is not a challenge that cannot be solved,” says Patrick Nathen, a cofounder and head of calculation and design for Lilium. “The biggest challenge right now is to build the company as fast as possible in order to catch that timeline.”

Nathen and his cofounders met just three and a half years ago. But within that short time, they put together a small team and began proving their dream of an electric jet capable of vertical takeoff and landing (VTOL). Lilium began with seed funding from a tech incubator under the European Space Agency, but has since attracted financial backing from private investors and venture capital firms.

Getting Lilium off the ground probably would not have been possible just five years ago, Nathen says. But the team took full advantage of the recent technological changes that have lowered the price on both materials—such as electric circuits and motors—and manufacturing processes such as 3D printing. Lower costs enabled Lilium to quickly and cheaply begin assembling prototypes to prove that their computer simulations could really deliver on the idea of an electric VTOL jet.

*Meet the Air Taxi Competition*

Of course, Lilium is not alone in the race to rule the air taxi services of the future. More than a dozen startups worldwide have been developing some version of an air taxi vehicle, including the Silicon Valley startups Zee.Aero and Kitty Hawk that both have backing from Google cofounder Larry Page. Last week, Lilium joined many additional startups and aerospace giants alike in attending the Uber Elevate Summit hosted by the ride-hailing giant in Dallas, Texas. At the start of the event, Uber announced it had enlisted partners to help demonstrate the first flying taxi services in the cities of Dallas and Dubai by 2020.

Still, Lilium seems confident that its electric VTOL jet can win out over the competition. Nathen pointed to the Lilium Jet’s design as being fairly seamless in moving from the vertical takeoff phase into the forward flight phase. The vertical takeoff phase consumes the most power because the aircraft depends entirely upon the engines to produce downward thrust and lift during that stage. But once a VTOL aircraft transitions into forward flight, it achieves a “very efficient flight state” that requires much less thrust and power from the electric propulsion system.
A concept illustration of Lilium Jets acting as air taxis in the future. Credit: Lilium

Other competitors are likely aiming to achieve a similarly smooth transition into the more efficient flight phase. But Nathen says that the Lilium Jet has an edge because its design gives the pilot full maneuverability and control during the tricky transition phase from vertical takeoff to forward flight.

“With this propulsion system and also the flaps that are always sucking air over the airfoil, we always have attached flow over the wing, and with the moving flaps we are able to steer the body as well,” Nathen says. “This is the main difference compared with the other VTOL concepts that are currently being developed all over the world.”

*Next Steps for Lilium*

The vertical takeoff and landing test performed remotely without a pilot last week was just the beginning for Lilium. The German startup still needs to test its two-seater prototype in the other flight phases beyond vertical takeoff by going through the transition phase and finally achieving forward flight. A first manned flight test with a fully-functioning jet is planned for 2019. The Munich-based startup also has yet to build and test the larger five-person version of the electric VTOL jet that it envisions as a safe, cost-effective and speedy form of travel for future commuters.

Many companies and experts believe that the future belongs to fully-automated air taxis flying on autopilot. Nathen acknowledged that seems to be the direction the industry is moving toward. But he added that Lilium plans to have human pilots operating the Lilium Jets with very simplified manual controls. The startup aims to replace most of the typical cockpit instruments found in modern aircraft with a joystick-steered control system that can give pilots “an extremely easy way to fly this aircraft.”

It sounds like a lot to do before Lilium can deliver on its 2025 promise. But Nathen says he and his cofounders calculated the timeline as a “realistic but conservative” estimate based on their experience with the development process. Lilium has also already begun talking with the European regulators who would need to sign off before the Lilium Jet—or any competitor—takes to the skies.


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## ae1905

*A "World First" Fusion Reactor Just Created Its First Plasma*

*In Brief*


Tokamak Energy's fusion reactor has achieved first plasma and is on track to produce temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit) by 2018. 
Tokamak Energy CEO says to expect fusion energy "in years, not decades.” 
 
*Achieving First Plasma*

After being turned on for the first time, the UK’s newest fusion reactor has achieved first plasma. This simply means that the reactor was able to successfully generate a molten mass of electrically-charged gas — plasma — inside its core.

Called the ST40, the reactor was constructed by Tokamak Energy, one of the leading private fusion energy companies in the world. The company was founded in 2009 with the express purpose of designing and developing small fusion reactors to introduce fusion power into the grid by 2030.
*Click to View Full Infographic* Now that the ST40 is running, the company will commission and install the complete set of magnetic coils needed to reach fusion temperatures. The ST40 should be creating a plasma temperature as hot as the center of the Sun — 15 million degrees Celsius (27 million degrees Fahrenheit) — by Autumn 2017.

By 2018, the ST40 will produce plasma temperatures of 100 million degrees Celsius (180 million degrees Fahrenheit), another record-breaker for a privately owned and funded fusion reactor. That temperature threshold is important, as it is the minimum temperature for inducing the controlled fusion reaction. Assuming the ST40 succeeds, it will prove that its novel design can produce commercially viable fusion power.

Tokamak Energy CEO David Kingham commented in a press release: “Today is an important day for fusion energy development in the UK, and the world. We are unveiling the first world-class controlled fusion device to have been designed, built, and operated by a private venture. The ST40 is a machine that will show fusion temperatures – 100 million degrees – are possible in compact, cost-effective reactors. This will allow fusion power to be achieved in years, not decades.”

*Fusion Power: Coming Sooner*

Nuclear fusion is a potentially revolutionary power source. It is the same process that fuels stars like our Sun, and could produce a potentially limitless supply of clean energy without producing dirty waste or any significant amount of carbon emissions. In contrast to nuclear fission, the atom splitting that today’s nuclear reactors engage in, nuclear fusion requires salt and water, and involves fusing atoms together. Its primary waste product is helium. It’s easy to see why scientists have tried to figure out how to achieve this here on Earth, but thus far it’s been elusive.

The journey toward fusion energy undertaken by Tokamak Energy is planned in the short-term and moving quickly; the company has already achieved its half-way goal for fusion power delivery. Their ultimate targets include producing the first electricity using the ST40 by 2025 and producing commercially viable fusion power by 2030.

Kingham remarked in the press release: “We will still need significant investment, many academic and industrial collaborations, dedicated and creative engineers and scientists, and an excellent supply chain. Our approach continues to be to break the journey down into a series of engineering challenges, raising additional investment on reaching each new milestone.”


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## ae1905

*234 Android Applications Are Currently Using Ultrasonic Beacons to Track Users*

bleepingcomputer.com 

Catalin Cimpanu








A team of researchers from the Brunswick Technical University in Germany has discovered an alarming number of Android applications that employ ultrasonic tracking beacons to track users and their nearby environment.

Their research paper focused on the technology of ultrasound cross-device tracking (uXDT) that became very popular in the last three years.

uXDT is the practice of advertisers hiding ultrasounds in their ads. When the ad plays on a TV or radio, or some ad code runs on a mobile or computer, it emits ultrasounds that are picked up by the microphone of nearby laptops, desktops, tablets or smartphones.

SDKs embedded in apps installed on those devices relay the beacon back to the online advertiser, who then knows that the user of TV "x" is also the owner of smartphone "Y" and links their two previous advertising profiles together, creating a broader picture of the user's interests, device portfolio, home, and even family members.

*uXDT trackers found at four stores in the EU*

SDKs created by Shopkick, Lisnr, or SilverPush provide most of today's support for embedding ultrasonic beacons inside web and classic media streams.

In research sponsored by the German government, a team of researchers conducted extensive tests across the EU to better understand how widespread this practice is in the real world.

Their results revealed Shopkick ultrasonic beacons at 4 of 35 stores in two European cities. The situation isn't that worrisome, as users have to open an app with the Shopkick SDK for the beacon to be picked up.

In the real world, this isn't an issue, as store owners, advertisers, or product manufactures could incentivize users to open various apps as a way to get discounts.

*No uXDT beacons found in TV streams — for now*

The only good news found in this research was that after searching TV streams from seven different countries, researchers failed to discover any ultrasonic beacons, meaning uXDT is not as widespread in television ads as some might have believed.

But researchers don't feel that safe about their findings. "[E]ven if the tracking through TV content is not actively used yet, the monitoring functionality is already deployed in mobile applications and might become a serious privacy threat in the near future," researchers said.

Their worries are based on a scan of 1,3 million applications, which unearthed that 234 Android apps are already using uXDT beacons.

*uXDT is spreading in Android apps*

This number is up from previous scans. For example, a scan of the same data set in April 2015 found only 6 apps using uXDT beacons, while another scan in December 2015, found 39 apps.

The jump from 39 to 234 is staggering, to say the least, especially since some of these apps have millions of downloads and belong to reputable companies, such as McDonald’s and Krispy Kreme.

Earlier this year, researchers showcased a method of tracking and unmasking Tor users using uXDT ultrasonic beacons.

The team's research is entitled Privacy Threats through Ultrasonic Side Channels on Mobile Devices.


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## ae1905




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## ae1905




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## ae1905

*Why Amazon Dreams of Flying Warehouses*

blogs.discovermagazine.com 

[HR][/HR] A delivery drone prototype operated by Amazon Prime Air. Credit: Amazon

Amazon gets to play full-time Santa Claus by delivering almost any imaginable item to customers around the world. But the tech giant does not have a magical sleigh pulled by flying reindeer to carry out its delivery orders. Instead, a recent Amazon patent has revealed the breathtaking idea of using giant airships as flying warehouses that could deploy swarms of delivery drones to customers below.

Many patent filings related to new technology often indulge in fantastical flights of fancy. But it’s worth taking a moment to appreciate some of the truly wilder scenarios being imagined within this Amazon patent filing. One scene envisions human or robot workers going to work busily sorting packages aboard airships hovering 45,000 feet above major cities. Another scene imagines the airship’s kitchen whipping up hot or cold food orders that would be loaded onto delivery drones for delivery within minutes.

A third scene anticipates swarms of delivery drones dropping off orders of food or t-shirts to people attending concerts or sports games. Amazon’s patent filing even considers how the airships could fly at much lower altitudes to act as giant billboards or megaphones that advertise and sell items directly to the crowds below.

There is a method to the madness. Amazon currently aims to attract customers with the promise of getting almost anything—clothing, electronics and groceries—delivered within days or even hours. It is currently racing against Google and delivery drone startups such as Flirtey to become the go-to service for customers who expect speedy deliveries of their purchases. The Amazon patent idea for an “airborne fulfillment center” may never become reality, but it speaks to the company’s ambition to enable an “instant gratification” world for customers.

At its heart, Amazon’s idea for flying warehouses aims to solve two problems. First, a mobile warehouse flying high above cities would theoretically enable Amazon to move its packages and products even closer to customers’ homes and businesses and shorten the time needed for last-mile deliveries. The company could even strategically move certain flying warehouses to different locations depending on temporary demand (such as crowds gathering at stadiums for sporting events or concerts).

Second, the flying warehouse scheme tries to tackle the range problem for delivery drones. The small delivery drones being tested by Amazon have fairly limited range of approximately 10 miles (or 20 miles roundtrip). That poses a challenge for Amazon’s Prime Air service, which recently began its first deliveries near Cambridge, UK with the promise of delivering packages within 30 minutes.

By acting as flying motherships, the lighter-than-air airships could could better enable delivery drones to fulfill that half-hour promise. Normally, delivery drones must use their own battery power starting from the time they take off with a package until they reach the delivery location and then return home. That battery power necessarily limits their delivery range.
By comparison, Amazon’s patent filing envisions the delivery drones simply gliding down from their motherships and relying mostly on gravity instead of their own power. The power savings combined with the extended range provided by the mobile airships could theoretically go a long way toward speedier deliveries. The patent states:

This speed of delivery provides near instant gratification to users for item purchases and greatly increases the breadth of items that can be delivered. For example, perishable items or even prepared meals can be delivered in a timely fashion to a user.
​The small delivery drones would not have to struggle under their own power to return to their motherships hovering at eye-watering heights of 45,000 feet. Instead, Amazon’s patent filing suggests that smaller airships could act as “shuttles” to carry the delivery drones back up to the mothership. Such shuttle airships could also resupply the flying warehouses with new inventory, supplies, fuel and human or robot workers.

Amazon’s patent filing spends much of its time talking about using the airships as flying advertising. Using lighter-than-air aircraft such as blimps for advertising is certainly nothing new. But Amazon’s idea takes this all one step farther because the airship advertising would be dangling the possibility of getting that popular new shoe or hot food delivery within minutes of seeing it being advertised. The patent filing even imagines the airship’s advertising display updating the quantity count of certain items as they sell out.

There is a very long way to go before Amazon’s flying warehouses could ever become remotely feasible. For one thing, the U.S. Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) has yet to figure out a scheme that would allow swarms of delivery drones to operate safely in the skies above densely populated cities. The FAA currently bans any drone from flying within a certain range of the crowded sporting events or concerts. And even if the airships would theoretically fly above the normal operating altitudes of commercial airline flights, it’s less clear how that airspace would be kept safe if dozens of delivery drones were dropping down from the motherships toward the ground at any given moment.

This is only one of several wild Amazon patents related to drones to have surfaced recently. But if you one day see Amazon’s airships flying low overhead and advertising a trip aboard a SpaceX rocket to the Mars colonies, you might want to pinch yourself and check that you’re not having a dream based on a recent viewing of the 1982 science fiction film “Blade Runner.”
MORE ABOUT: Amazon airships, 

Amazon patents, 
Amazon Prime Air, 
computers, 
delivery drones, 
drone delivery, 
drone food delivery, 
flying warehouse, 
robots, 
transportation, 
unmanned aerial vehicles


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## Tropes

ae1905 said:


> There is a method to the madness. Amazon currently aims to attract customers with the promise of getting almost anything—clothing, electronics and groceries—delivered within days or even hours. It is currently racing against Google and delivery drone startups such as Flirtey to become the go-to service for customers who expect speedy deliveries of their purchases. The Amazon patent idea for an “airborne fulfillment center” may never become reality, but it speaks to the company’s ambition to enable an “instant gratification” world for customers.


Interesting. A more likely near future scenario - one relating to another thread - would be to use self driving vehicles as the "mothership", if not quite as literal:





I could easily see a scenario where drone-carrying vans and semitrailers use whatever space isn't filled with existing orders to place whichever products are most likely to be ordered from the areas they'll be driving in, using probabilistic models. It might be efficient enough that keeping the products in transit, in self driving semi trailers and vans that lounge around the areas where an order is most likely, will make more economic sense than keeping the items in a warehouse.

To actually replace warehouses you would need to change not only the output of the system, but the input. Amazon depends on many different supply chains, and suppliers aren't very likely to all move to deliver their goods to Amazon using drones, the general formula is that a supplier will deliver a bunch of boxes with the same products, that Amazon is going to need to then distribute between different vehicles. Perhaps there's a way to connect multiple semi-trailers into a train like structure to move boxes between the supply trucks and the delivery trucks on the go.


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## ae1905

*This Laser Printer Creates High-Res Color Images Without a Single Drop of Ink*

gizmodo.com 

Andrew Liszewski
[HR][/HR]









Anyone with a color printer knows that selling replacement ink cartridges is the quickest way to become a millionaire. But what if your printer never needed a single drop of ink to produce color images at impossibly high resolutions? A new laser printer can already do that by etching microscopic patterns onto sheets of plastic.

Researchers at the Technical University of Denmark have taken inspiration from creatures like butterflies and peacocks, whose wings and feathers create bright, iridescent colors not through light-absorbing pigments, but by bending and scattering light at the molecular level, creating what’s known as structural color.











The new printing method the team has developed starts with sheets of plastic covered in thousands of microscopic pillars spaced roughly 200 nanometers apart. To get those tiny plastic pillars to produce color, or at least appear to, they’re first covered with a thin layer of germanium—a shiny, grayish-white metalloid material. An ultra-fine laser blasts the germanium until it melts onto each pillar, strategically changing their shape and thickness. This is then followed by a protective coating that helps preserves the shape and structure of all those tiny pillars.

When light hits this modified plastic surface, the lightwaves bounce around amongst the various pillars, which end up changing their wavelength as they’re reflected, producing different colors. The researchers were able to predict what colors would be produced by those nanoscale pillars, and by creating specific patterns, they were able to generate recognizable, high-contrast images.

How high contrast? Your average desktop inkjet can produce images with a resolution of around 5,000 dots per inch. Laser printers, which use a fine powder called toner, can muster a resolution closer to 20,000 dots per inch. But this new technology can generate detailed images with an astonishing resolution of 127,000 dots crammed into a single square inch, making it ideal for anti-counterfeiting, since a high-res watermark could be created that’s smaller than a pin head.

Will this technology replace your home inkjet printer that’s always begging for a refill? Not anytime soon, but eventually it could replace paper printing altogether, since those plastic sheets could be easily recycled by the very same laser that prints on them. Eventually, the days of having to constantly reload your printer’s paper tray might end.
[Science Advances via ScienceNews]


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## ae1905

alternet.org 

By Oliver Wainwright / The Guardian

[HR][/HR]










Wooden wonder … the Apple 1 computer. Ed Uthman/Ed Uthman/Flickr
Photo Credit: Ed Uthman/Ed Uthman/Flickr

Next time you drag a document across your desktop and put it in a folder, spare a thought for acid. Organising your files might not seem like a psychedelic experience now, but in 1968, when Douglas Engelbart first demonstrated a futuristic world of windows, hypertext links and video conferencing to a rapt audience in San Francisco, they must have thought they were tripping. Especially because he was summoning this dark magic onto a big screen using a strange rounded controller on the end of a wire, which he called his “mouse”.

Like many California tech visionaries of the time, Engelbart was an enthusiastic advocate for the mind-expanding benefits of LSD. As head of the Augmented Human Intellect Research Center at the Stanford Research Institute, he and his team would drop acid under test conditions in the hope of inspiring new breakthroughs.

His own technological epiphanies while tripping seem to have been limited: in one session, after staring at a blank wall in fascination for hours, he came up with the “tinkle toy”, a potty-training aid in the form of a miniature water wheel that would spin and tinkle when peed on. But he remained convinced that the drug opened doors to alternative realities, including one where people could control computers through screens.

This way to the future … a page from Susan Kare’s sketchbook. Photograph: kareprints.com/Design Museum

In a grainy black and white film of his 1968 conference demonstration – since known in the tech hall of fame as “



” – Engelbart calmly introduces the embryonic forms of what would become word processing, email, Skype and Google Docs, all shown on a screen with scalable windows controlled by a mouse. For computer scientist Alan Kay, who would go on to develop these ideas at the Xerox PARC research institute, it changed everything. “The demo was one of the greatest experiences of my life,” he later said. “To me, it was Moses opening the Red Sea. It reset the whole conception of what was reasonable to think about in personal computing.”
Engelbart’s video will be on display in the London Design Museum’s forthcoming exhibition, California: Designing Freedom, a show that aims to shine a kaleidoscopic spotlight on the cross fertilisation of counterculture and tech culture on America’s “left coast” over the last 50 years.

“Think of ‘California design’ and you tend to think of Charles and Ray Eames and the world of mid-century modernism,” says curator Justin McGuirk. “We wanted to focus on what came next, and show how the hippie movement combined with the hacker culture to develop tools of personal liberation.”

From skateboards and LSD blotting paper tabs to iPhones and Google’s self-driving car, the exhibition will unpick the west coast ethos that has fostered the development of devices for escapism and self-sufficiency. It shows how, as frontier territory on the edge of a continent, California has always incubated a culture of self-reliance and reinvention, as a place that attracts people fond of fantasy, freedom and rebellion – and how they have mobilised design to meet these ends.

The development of user interface design is one of the most fascinating threads in the story, and one of the least obvious, because it has become second nature to us all. “These things now seem so intuitive,” says co-curator Brendan McGetrick, “that a computer document looks like a white piece of paper with text on it, that it sits on an office-like ‘desktop’, that you delete things by dragging them into a trash can. It didn’t have to be this way – these are the results of specific design decisions.”

Friendly face … Susan Kare’s Mac welcome icon greeted users booting up. Photograph: kareprints.com/Design Museum

The now-ubiquitous desktop metaphor first emerged from Kay’s Xerox PARC work in the form of the Alto computer in 1973, and later the Star in 1981, the first device to use windows, icons and drop-down menus. It is shown in the exhibition as an early mock-up with pieces of paper pasted on to a slate. On a tour of the Xerox facility in 1979, a 24-year-old Steve Jobs was captivated. “I thought it was the best thing I’d ever seen in my life,” he said. “Within 10 minutes, it was obvious to me that all computers would work like this someday.”

It turned out that Jobs, Steve Wozniak and his hippie chums from the Homebrew Computer Club, who together founded Apple in 1976, had a better knack for communicating the potential of this new technology than the corporate folks at Xerox. A quick comparison of their TV adverts tells you everything you need to know about the importance of design and marketing to the commercial fate of the two companies.

While the 1981 ad for the Xerox Star is set in a workaday office, and methodically explains how the computer will revolutionise secretarial work and filing, Apple’s 



 for the first Macintosh was a thrilling teaser directed by Ridley Scott, showing a room of grey human automatons being lectured by a Big Brother figure on a big screen – which is then dramatically shattered by dashing female athlete hurtling a big hammer. Apple, it seemed to say, would provide salvation. The Mac would be the disruptive tool to achieving ultimate personal freedom.

Alternative realities … LSD tabs with a California design. Photograph: Design Museum
In the grid-ruled notebooks of graphic designer Susan Kare, also on show, it is possible to see how Apple understood the importance of humour and familiarity in translating something that had always been the preserve of big corporations and the military into something people would welcome into their homes – and be able to understand. Kare famously developed the smiling Mac icon, displayed as the computer booted up, along with the lasso, paint-bucket and trash can, transforming the cold and intimidating early desktop computers into something friendly.

The Apple 1’s handmade wooden case, also on show, was a direct link to the hippie, maker culture of the communes. It is a theme that continued in the “skeuomorphic” design of Apple icons and software, with digital tools aping their real-world counterparts, be it calculator buttons or the yellow squares of sticky Post-it notes.

In a world where our smartphones are often the first things we touch in the morning and the last things we touch at night, and toddlers grow up pinching and swiping before they can read, priorities have changed. As Apple’s chief designer Jony Ive recalls, when he and his team sat down to redesign the iPhone operating system in 2012, it did away with many of the classic skeuomorphic elements: “We understood that people had already become comfortable with touching glass, they didn’t need physical buttons, they understood the benefits. So there was an incredible liberty in not having to reference the physical world so literally. We were trying to create an environment that was less specific. It got design out of the way.”

Having ignored design for a decade, Google recently united the graphical language of its different platforms with the launch of Material Design. In an exhibit that comes as a surprising time-warp, the paper and cardboard mock-ups of its new icons are on show, revealing how the design team 



 and developed lighting rigs to cast accurate shadows, with the aim of creating an illusion of layers of paper-like cards sliding around inside your device. It was a process that produced some interesting outcomes: why should buttons appear to press down when you touch the screen, when there’s no sense of pressing something beyond the glass? So instead they hover upwards, as if subject to a magical magnetic attraction from your finger.

With Silicon Valley tech companies pumping increasingly hefty resources into voice recognition technology, McGetrick says the next frontier for user interface will be aural, building on our new surreal world of people shouting across the room to summon help from Siri, Alexa and Cortana.

“We’re entering a new phase where we decreasingly need screens,” he says. “The trajectory of miniaturisation is crystal clear, from computers to laptops to digital organisers to phones to watches. The end-game is that technology will become invisible and we’ll have Google inside our heads.”



California: Designing Freedom is at the Design Museum, London, 24 May–15 October. 

Oliver Wainwright is the Guardian's architecture and design critic. Trained as an architect, he has worked for a number of practices, both in the UK and overseas, and written extensively on architecture and design for many international publications. He is also a visiting critic at several architecture schools.


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## ae1905

*The intelligent intersection could banish traffic lights forever*

The intelligent intersection could banish traffic lights forever New vehicle-in-the-loop simulation proves intelligent intersection is 100x more efficient.https://arstechnica.com/cars/2017/05/the-intelligent-intersection-could-banish-traffic-lights-for-ever/


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## ae1905

*Israel Tests Wireless Charging Roads for Electric Vehicles*

scientificamerican.com 
Abigail Fagan

[HR][/HR]








New roads that enable wireless charging eliminate the need for an electrical port. But are they financially viable? _Credit: Oren Ezer_ 

Electric vehicles have long been a promising option for sustainable transportation. They come with practical headaches like expensive, bulky batteries that often need recharging, however. Israel is tackling those hurdles by investing in roads that power electric buses—as they ride down the street. The government is collaborating with Israeli start-up ElectRoad to install a public bus route in Tel Aviv, using an under-the-pavement wireless technology that eliminates the need for plug-in recharging stations.

Although still in its infancy, the technology could clear the three biggest hurdles—cost, weight and range—that have held back the widespread adoption of battery-powered vehicles for more than a century. First, though, ElectRoad will have to demonstrate that its “inductive charging” technology can be scaled up cheaply enough to be adopted on roadways worldwide. “It’s exciting because it’s charging without wires,” says Tim Cleary, director of BATTERY, an energy-storage research laboratory at The Pennsylvania State University, who is not involved in the project. “But unless it’s affordable and cost-effective it’s not going to take off.”

ElectRoad is betting it will. Wireless charging means the electric buses can carry a light, inexpensive battery instead of a bulky, costly one—and never have to stop for recharging. And once a roadway is outfitted with the technology, it can continuously power properly equipped vehicles. “You only need to pave for the infrastructure one time, and that’s it. You can use it for all kinds of vehicles, so that’s a big advantage,” says Oren Ezer, chief executive and co-founder of the four-year-old company.

So far, the firm’s only proving ground has been an 80-foot test route at its headquarters in Caesarea. But the technology performed well enough for the company to win a $120,000 grant from Israel’s Ministry of Transport and Road Safety and approval to outfit a portion of a Tel Aviv bus route with their technology, says Shay Soffer, chief scientist at the ministry. The route will be around half a mile long and is slated to open in 2018. If all goes well, the government plans to deploy the technology more widely, starting with an 11-mile shuttle between the city of Eilat and the Ramon International Airport. “Tel Aviv is the biggest city [in Israel], like New York on a small scale. If it will work in Tel Aviv, it will work anywhere,” Soffer says.“I think in 10 years you’ll see a lot of solutions like ElectRoad in our transportation.”

ElectRoad’s Ezer declined to give the price of the Tel Aviv project but says the total cost of construction will be shared by the transport ministry, the city and the company. The cost per kilometer of roadway will be a crucial factor in future years as the company attempts to scale up. Israel joins a growing number of nations exploring the technology. South Korea, for example, already has several wireless bus routes around the country. The European Union is studying the feasibility of widespread wireless charging, too. ElectRoad’s technology is different, Ezer says, because the transformers are less expensive and the installation process is faster and more efficient.

Inductive charging has been around since the 1890s, when inventor Nicola Tesla first discovered he could wirelessly power lightbulbs. Since then it has been used in an array of devices ranging from phones to toothbrushes—but only recently on the scale of a 13-ton bus. The buses are charged and propelled by power from the interaction of two electromagnetic fields. Inverters installed along the side of the road provide power to plates of copper embedded in the road. Similar copper plates are installed on the bus’s underside. As the vehicle passes over the charged roadway, the two fields interact and generate power.

ElectRoad says it can install the technology in an existing road with minimal disruption, using two tractors that can fully equip one kilometer of roadway in a single night. Each bus still needs a small onboard battery for a couple of reasons: The first is to accelerate, because the jolt of energy required to propel a stationary bus is far more than the energy it needs to coast down the street. The second is to provide power on short stretches of road that are not fitted with the technology. ElectRoad’s buses can travel off the charging road for about three miles.
The biggest advantages of wireless charging are that it allows for significantly smaller batteries or the ability to travel longer distances with a larger battery. Both are convenient, says Burak Ozpineci, who works on wireless technologies at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. 

However, the cost of the infrastructure and materials, especially copper, will likely be expensive, he says. Currently, the metal costs about $2.60 per pound. In addition to costing more, wireless power might not be as straightforward as simply plugging into a socket—the bus could stray from the main strip, becoming misaligned and delivering less power, according to Penn State’s Cleary.

In addition, the advantages of ElectRoad’s technology may become less important as electric vehicle batteries get cheaper, lighter and more efficient. Breakthroughs in engineering and chemistry have made batteries much more cost-efficient over the past 15 years, says Dustin Grace, director of battery engineering at Proterra, an electric bus company. A few years ago a typical electric vehicle battery cost about $1,000 per kilowatt hour. But now many companies are down to $200 to $300 per kilowatt hour, and a few, including Tesla, General Motors and Nissan, are even lower, according to Grace. “I’m in the camp where I see the cost of lithium ions and energy storage just plummeting,” Grace says. “What these auto manufacturers are finding when they’re getting into the $100-to-$200-per-kilowatt-hour range is these vehicles are really on parity with other vehicles. They’re no longer looking at batteries as this challenge that has to be solved.”

Ezer acknowledges battery prices are falling but emphasizes ElectRoad’s solution is not for individual vehicles but for all-encompassing infrastructure that can eventually serve entire cities. That’s where the savings are, he says. And remember that small, light battery onboard? It is only used about 6 percent of the time the vehicle is running, and thus can last as long as 25 years, Ezer asserts. By contrast, conventional batteries in electric buses, like those made by Proterra, last around six years.

Despite the challenges of scaling up, ElectRoad is optimistic about the growing synergies between its vehicles and electric grids that are transitioning to renewable energy sources like solar and wind, instead of fossil fuels. Eventually, the company even hopes to make wireless charging a two-way street: not only from road to bus but vice versa with the energy generated from braking, according to Ezer.

And down the road, the start-up’s dreams are even bigger, Ezer says. “We plan to start with buses, of course, but we believe in revolutionizing the entirety of transportation.”


----------



## ae1905

*Israel Tests Wireless Charging Roads for Electric Vehicles*

scientificamerican.com 
Abigail Fagan

[HR][/HR]








New roads that enable wireless charging eliminate the need for an electrical port. But are they financially viable? _Credit: Oren Ezer_ 

Electric vehicles have long been a promising option for sustainable transportation. They come with practical headaches like expensive, bulky batteries that often need recharging, however. Israel is tackling those hurdles by investing in roads that power electric buses—as they ride down the street. The government is collaborating with Israeli start-up ElectRoad to install a public bus route in Tel Aviv, using an under-the-pavement wireless technology that eliminates the need for plug-in recharging stations.

Although still in its infancy, the technology could clear the three biggest hurdles—cost, weight and range—that have held back the widespread adoption of battery-powered vehicles for more than a century. First, though, ElectRoad will have to demonstrate that its “inductive charging” technology can be scaled up cheaply enough to be adopted on roadways worldwide. “It’s exciting because it’s charging without wires,” says Tim Cleary, director of BATTERY, an energy-storage research laboratory at The Pennsylvania State University, who is not involved in the project. “But unless it’s affordable and cost-effective it’s not going to take off.”

ElectRoad is betting it will. Wireless charging means the electric buses can carry a light, inexpensive battery instead of a bulky, costly one—and never have to stop for recharging. And once a roadway is outfitted with the technology, it can continuously power properly equipped vehicles. “You only need to pave for the infrastructure one time, and that’s it. You can use it for all kinds of vehicles, so that’s a big advantage,” says Oren Ezer, chief executive and co-founder of the four-year-old company.

So far, the firm’s only proving ground has been an 80-foot test route at its headquarters in Caesarea. But the technology performed well enough for the company to win a $120,000 grant from Israel’s Ministry of Transport and Road Safety and approval to outfit a portion of a Tel Aviv bus route with their technology, says Shay Soffer, chief scientist at the ministry. The route will be around half a mile long and is slated to open in 2018. If all goes well, the government plans to deploy the technology more widely, starting with an 11-mile shuttle between the city of Eilat and the Ramon International Airport. “Tel Aviv is the biggest city [in Israel], like New York on a small scale. If it will work in Tel Aviv, it will work anywhere,” Soffer says.“I think in 10 years you’ll see a lot of solutions like ElectRoad in our transportation.”

ElectRoad’s Ezer declined to give the price of the Tel Aviv project but says the total cost of construction will be shared by the transport ministry, the city and the company. The cost per kilometer of roadway will be a crucial factor in future years as the company attempts to scale up. Israel joins a growing number of nations exploring the technology. South Korea, for example, already has several wireless bus routes around the country. The European Union is studying the feasibility of widespread wireless charging, too. ElectRoad’s technology is different, Ezer says, because the transformers are less expensive and the installation process is faster and more efficient.

Inductive charging has been around since the 1890s, when inventor Nicola Tesla first discovered he could wirelessly power lightbulbs. Since then it has been used in an array of devices ranging from phones to toothbrushes—but only recently on the scale of a 13-ton bus. The buses are charged and propelled by power from the interaction of two electromagnetic fields. Inverters installed along the side of the road provide power to plates of copper embedded in the road. Similar copper plates are installed on the bus’s underside. As the vehicle passes over the charged roadway, the two fields interact and generate power.

ElectRoad says it can install the technology in an existing road with minimal disruption, using two tractors that can fully equip one kilometer of roadway in a single night. Each bus still needs a small onboard battery for a couple of reasons: The first is to accelerate, because the jolt of energy required to propel a stationary bus is far more than the energy it needs to coast down the street. The second is to provide power on short stretches of road that are not fitted with the technology. ElectRoad’s buses can travel off the charging road for about three miles.

The biggest advantages of wireless charging are that it allows for significantly smaller batteries or the ability to travel longer distances with a larger battery. Both are convenient, says Burak Ozpineci, who works on wireless technologies at Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee. However, the cost of the infrastructure and materials, especially copper, will likely be expensive, he says. Currently, the metal costs about $2.60 per pound. In addition to costing more, wireless power might not be as straightforward as simply plugging into a socket—the bus could stray from the main strip, becoming misaligned and delivering less power, according to Penn State’s Cleary.

In addition, the advantages of ElectRoad’s technology may become less important as electric vehicle batteries get cheaper, lighter and more efficient. Breakthroughs in engineering and chemistry have made batteries much more cost-efficient over the past 15 years, says Dustin Grace, director of battery engineering at Proterra, an electric bus company. A few years ago a typical electric vehicle battery cost about $1,000 per kilowatt hour. But now many companies are down to $200 to $300 per kilowatt hour, and a few, including Tesla, General Motors and Nissan, are even lower, according to Grace. “I’m in the camp where I see the cost of lithium ions and energy storage just plummeting,” Grace says. “What these auto manufacturers are finding when they’re getting into the $100-to-$200-per-kilowatt-hour range is these vehicles are really on parity with other vehicles. They’re no longer looking at batteries as this challenge that has to be solved.”

Ezer acknowledges battery prices are falling but emphasizes ElectRoad’s solution is not for individual vehicles but for all-encompassing infrastructure that can eventually serve entire cities. That’s where the savings are, he says. And remember that small, light battery onboard? It is only used about 6 percent of the time the vehicle is running, and thus can last as long as 25 years, Ezer asserts. By contrast, conventional batteries in electric buses, like those made by Proterra, last around six years.

Despite the challenges of scaling up, ElectRoad is optimistic about the growing synergies between its vehicles and electric grids that are transitioning to renewable energy sources like solar and wind, instead of fossil fuels. Eventually, the company even hopes to make wireless charging a two-way street: not only from road to bus but vice versa with the energy generated from braking, according to Ezer.

And down the road, the start-up’s dreams are even bigger, Ezer says. “We plan to start with buses, of course, but we believe in revolutionizing the entirety of transportation.”


----------



## ae1905

*How AI is used to infer human emotion*

oreilly.comNicole Tache

[HR][/HR]







Faces. (source: Pixabay). For more on the untapped opportunities of applied AI, check out O'Reilly Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York, June 26-29, 2017.
Rana el Kaliouby is the co-founder and CEO of Affectiva, an emotion measurement technology company that grew out of MIT's Media Lab. Rana is giving a talk, _The science and applications of the emerging field of artificial emotional intelligence_, at the Artificial Intelligence Conference in New York City on June 28, 2017. We recently caught up with Rana to discuss the techniques, possibilities, and challenges around emotion AI today. Our conversation has been edited for clarity.

*For those less familiar with emotion AI, can you describe what the field encompasses?
*
Emotion AI is the idea that devices should sense and adapt to emotions like humans do. This can be done in a variety of ways—understanding changes in facial expressions, gestures, physiology, and speech. Our relationship with technology is changing, as it’s becoming a lot more conversational and relational. If we are trying to build technology to communicate with people, that technology should have emotional intelligence (EQ). This manifests in a broad range of applications: from Siri on your phone to social robots, even applications in your car.

*How is emotion AI related to sentiment analysis for natural language processing? *
Social scientists who have studied how people portray emotions in conversation found that only 7-10% of the emotional meaning of a message is conveyed through the words. We can mine Twitter, for example, on text sentiment, but that only gets us so far. About 35-40% is conveyed in tone of voice—how you say something—and the remaining 50-60% is read through facial expressions and gestures you make. Technology that reads your emotional state, for example by combining facial and voice expressions, represents the emotion AI space. They are the subconscious, natural way we communicate emotion, which is nonverbal and which complements our language. What we say is also very cognitive—we have to think about what we are going to say. Facial expressions and speech actually deal more with the subconscious, and are more unbiased and unfiltered expressions of emotion.

*What techniques and training data do machines use to perceive emotion?*
At Affectiva, we use a variety of computer vision and machine learning approaches, including deep learning. Our technology, like many computer vision approaches, relies on machine learning techniques in which algorithms learn from examples (training data). Rather than encoding specific rules that depict when a person is making a specific expression, we instead focus our attention on building intelligent algorithms that can be trained to recognize expressions.

Through our partnerships across the globe, we have amassed an enormous emotional database from people driving cars, watching media content, etc. A portion of the data is then passed on to our labeling team, who are certified in the Facial Action Coding System (FACS). Their day-to-day job is to take video from a repository and label it as training data for the algorithms. We are continuously investing in approaches such as active learning (human-assisted machine learning) and transfer learning (the idea that a model-specific modality or data set can then transfer to a different data set, so a video analyzed for facial expression can also be labeled for the speech modality).

*Where is emotion AI currently seeing the most market traction?*
*Safari*



We got our start in ad content testing applications. We work with a third of the Fortune 500 companies, helping them to understand consumers’ emotional responses to their ads. The problem we were able to solve was to assist them in developing deep emotional content with their customers, then help them understand if that content was successful or not. The recent Pepsi ad is a great example of how emotion AI may be used—they created this ad, and it caused a huge backlash. Think of how much incentive there was to find this out earlier in order to intervene; they could have pulled the campaign, edited, and re-shot before the PR disaster. Our technology provides a moment-by-moment readout of the viewers’ emotional journey to online ads, a tv show, or a movie trailer. We recently released the capability to test a full-length movie.

More recently, we have seen the most traction around conversational interfaces. There are the obvious devices—Amazon’s Alexa or Google Home—but we’ve also seen an increasing need for emotion AI manifesting in automotive, social robotics, and the Internet of Things (IoT). The idea is to better connect with these devices so they can more efficiently do things for you. We are in the proof-of-concept phase for many of these markets and are actively figuring out platform integrations.

*As Affectiva has grown from a research project at MIT to a company, what has been most surprising to you? *
When we first started as company, I underestimated the value of the data we collected—it has a number of dimensions. Affectiva’s emotion database has grown to nearly six million faces analyzed in 75 countries. To be precise, we have gathered 5,313,751 face videos, for a total of 38,944 hours of data, representing nearly two billion facial frames analyzed. Our data is also global, spanning ages and ethnicities, in a variety of contexts (from people sitting on their couches to driving a car).

The wealth of data we collected also allowed us to mine our robust data set for cross-cultural and gender differences in expressing emotions. We recently released findings from the largest cross-cultural study on gender differences in facial expressions, which used our technology. In this paper, for example, we found that women smile more and longer than men, while men show expressions that are indicative of anger more frequently and longer than women.

Lastly, this data gives us unique business insights around how emotions in ads vary across the world and by product category. For example, we've seen that pet care and baby ads in the U.S. elicit more enjoyment than cereal ads—which see the most enjoyment in Canada.

*Your Ph.D. is in computer science. Are there any specialized skills you needed to learn to enable computers to recognize human expressions?*
Experience in machine learning was key, as was computer vision, pattern recognition, and just being really curious. I had no degree in psychology, but had to brush up on the basics of psych, the science of emotion, and neuroscience to really understand how humans and the human brain process emotion. We borrow a lot of that science and embed it into our technology.

*Tell us about the use case for emotion AI that has been personally most compelling or fun for you to see.*
Personally, the most compelling use case for me tackles mental health applications: the capabilities here are quite powerful. Early on, we partnered with a company called Brain Power to bring use cases to market. They use our technology and Google Glass to help autistic children with emotion recognition and understanding, an area of identified need in many children and adults with autism. Outside of that use case, I am particularly interested in applications that monitor mental health for emotional well-being and suicide prevention. In our current world of the quantified self—featuring fitness data from wearables and fitness apps—what if your emotional health played a role as well? We are exploring product concepts that will be able to do just that, so users can better monitor their emotional health and well-being around the clock, and can flag when they are having a bad day.


----------



## Eefje

@ae1905 just want to show you my gratitude for all the interesting stuff you keep on posting. Props!


----------



## ae1905

*Google’s AlphaGo AI defeats the world’s best human Go player*

engadget.com 2 minutes

We've embedded the entire match here, but for those not completely up to speed with Go, the AI player picked up a 10-15 point lead early on, which limited the possibilities for Jie to respond. Jie was occasionally winning during the flow of the match, but AlphaGo would soon reclaim the lead, ensuring that his human opponent had limited options to win as the game progressed.

According to his human opponent, AlphaGo made many elegant moves: Jie pointed out the AI's 24th move as a particularly high-level strategy that apparently made "all the stones work across the board." Intriguingly, the Go prodigy even pitted some of AlphaGo's own moves and strategies early into the match.

After the game, the DeepMind team explained that AlphaGo was programmed with a goal to win, but other versions of the AI could be made with different goals in mind, including "maximising the gap" -- an aim of trouncing its opponent with a high-score win. Hassabis said: "We want to use AlphaGo as a tool that the Go community can use to improve their games."

"We'll release some details of the architecture, of the games that AlphaGo plays against itself, later this week," said the DeepMind CEO. "The reason, ultimately, is to use [AI] more widely in science and medicine to help human experts make faster breakthroughs. We have a lot of work ahead of us in the coming years."

The second match takes place on Thursday, with the final third match scheduled for Saturday. Because a computer doesn't get tired, AlphaGo 'Master' will also take part in two other showcases. In one match, it'll act as a teammate to two Chinese pros playing each other. In another, it'll challenge five pro players at once. (Which is just showing off, surely.)


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## ae1905

*When a robot AI doctor misdiagnoses you, who's to blame?*

qz.com 

Written by Robert Hart
[HR][/HR] Artificial intelligence is not just creeping into our personal lives and workplaces—it’s also beginning to appear in the doctor’s office. The prospect of being diagnosed by an AI might feel foreign and impersonal at first, but what if you were told that a robot physician was more likely to give you a correct diagnosis?
Medical error is currently the third leading cause of death in the US, and as many as one in six patients in the British NHS receive incorrect diagnoses. With statistics like these, it’s unsurprising that researchers at Johns Hopkins University believe diagnostic errors to be “the next frontier for patient safety.”

Enter artificial intelligence. AI can potentially transform medical practice and drastically reduce the number of medical errors, as well as provide a host of other benefits. In some areas, AI systems are already capable of matching, or even exceeding, the performances of experienced clinicians. In an interview for _Smart Planet_, MIT scientist Andrew McAfee, co-author of _The Second Machine Age_, is convinced, “If it’s not already the world’s best diagnostician, it will be soon.”

Recent reports show systems already capable of matching specialists when diagnosing skin cancer or identifying a rare eye condition responsible for around 10% of global childhood vision-loss. AI systems can even exceed human doctors in identifying certain types of lung cancer. These successes will continue to grow as the technology matures. Add to this the benefits derived from faster diagnoses, reduced costs, and a more personalized medicine, and it’s easy to see there are compelling reasons to adopt AI throughout medical practice.

Of course, there are downsides. AI raises profound questions regarding medical responsibility. Usually when something goes wrong, it is a fairly straightforward matter to determine blame. A misdiagnosis, for instance, would likely be the responsibility of the presiding physician. A faulty machine or medical device that harms a patient would likely see the manufacturer or operator held to account. What would this mean for an AI?
Doctors using AI today are expected to use it as an aid to clinical decision-making, not as a replacement for standard procedure. In this sense, the doctor is still responsible for errors that may occur. However, it is unclear whether doctors will actually be able to assess the reliability or usefulness of information derived from AI, and whether they can have a meaningful understanding of the consequences of those actions.

It’s impossible to understand why an AI has made the decision it has, merely that it has done so based upon the information it’s been fed. This inability arises from the opacity of AI systems, which—as a side effect of how machine-learning algorithms work—operate as black boxes. It’s impossible to understand why an AI has made the decision it has, merely that it has done so based upon the information it’s been fed. Even if it were possible for a technically literate doctor to inspect the process, many AI algorithms are unavailable for review, as they are treated as protected proprietary information. Further still, the data used to train the algorithms is often similarly protected or otherwise publicly unavailable for privacy reasons. This will likely be complicated further as doctors come to rely on AI more and more and it becomes less common to challenge an algorithm’s result.

So if a doctor cannot be held fully responsible for a decision made using AI, who is there to fill the gap? There are several options. One would be to hold the AI system itself responsible, though this is tricky owing to the inability to punish, reprimand, or seek compensation from software. It is also likely to leave affected patients unsatisfied, as well as invoking deep, potentially unanswerable philosophical questions on the nature of machine intelligence.

A second option would be to hold the designers of the AI responsible. This too has its problems, not least the difficulty in pinning down individuals responsible for particular features, as the teams creating these AI can often number in the hundreds. The temporal and physical distance between research, design, and implementation also often preclude any awareness of later use. Consider IBM’s Watson, which is today used in clinical decision-making. Though now used as a medical tool, Watson was initially designed to compete in the quiz show _Jeopardy_. It would be unreasonable to hold these researchers—who designed Watson to answer trivia questions—responsible for its potential failings as a medical aid. Furthermore, even if it were reasonable to hold designers to account, doing so would likely dissuade many from entering the field, and therefore delay the many benefits of AI from being realized.

A final option would be to hold the organization running the system accountable. For Watson, this would mean IBM. While this has the benefit of providing a clear target for retribution, it is unclear whether this path would work, either. In the absence of design failures or other misconduct, it is unlikely one could hold such an organization responsible for how others have used its product; this would be like holding car manufacturers responsible for each and every accident involving one of their cars. Even if it were reasonable to do this, doing so would likely lead many to abandon the field, as it would offer considerable risks with very few opportunities.

In order to fully realize the benefits of AI in healthcare, we need to know who will be responsible when something goes wrong. Not knowing undermines patient trust, places doctors in difficult positions, and potentially deters investment in the field. Incomplete models of responsibility benefit no one, and while there will be no easy solutions, not finding one will only delay the further development and use of this lifesaving technology.


----------



## ae1905

*NVIDIA Neural Network Generates Photorealistic Faces With Disturbingly Natural Result*

hothardware.com 

by Paul Lilly — Monday, October 30, 2017
[HR][/HR] Imagine playing a game like Skyrim or a sports title where the characters you encounter look like real people or creatures, and not rendered graphics. If implemented correctly, it could add a new level of immersion to 
gaming. It may not be far off, either. 

NVIDIA released a paper over the weekend detailing a new training methodology for generating unique and realistic looking faces using a generative adversarial network (GAN).








_Everyone of these faces are machine-rendered...
_​ The result is the ability to render photorealistic faces of "unprecedented quality." How NVIDIA achieves this is by using an algorithm that pairs two neural networks—a generator and a discriminator—that compete against each other. The generator starts from a low resolution image and builds upon it, while the discriminator assesses the results, sort of like a constant critic pointing out where things have gone wrong or off track.

GAN in and of itself is not a new technology, but where NVIDIA differentiates itself is through a progressive training method it developed. NVIDIA took a database of photographs of famous people and used that to train its system. By working together, the neural networks were able to produce fake images that are nearly indistinguishable from real human photographs. Here is a look at the process:

"We describe a new training methodology for generative adversarial networks. The key idea is to grow both the generator and discriminator progressively, starting from low-resolution images, and add new layers that deal with higher resolution details as the training progresses. This greatly stabilizes the training and allows us to produce images of unprecedented quality, e.g., CelebA images at 1024² resolution. We also propose a simple way to increase the variation in generated images, and achieve a record inception score of 8.80 in unsupervised CIFAR10," NVIDIA explains.

There are issues with NVIDIA's method, one of them being the relatively small size of the images. Warping and other abnormalities tend to occur as well. But it is still promising, with plenty of real-world applications ranging from content creation to video games. There is also the potential for abuse, such as upping the fake news ante, but that is a topic for another day.


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## ae1905

^

generator and discriminator sound like Ne and Ti (or Fi), respectively


----------



## The red spirit

Not a story, but video speaks for itself:





Amazing how proper filtering can completely transform aging video games


----------



## Pifanjr

The red spirit said:


> Amazing how proper filtering can completely transform aging video games


I was thinking that 4k still seemed pretty blurry, until I realized I was watching the video in 360p...


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## The red spirit

Pifanjr said:


> I was thinking that 4k still seemed pretty blurry, until I realized I was watching the video in 360p...


Wanna hear a magic trick? You can do the same on PC in graphics card control panel. Even old games, that had crappy graphics can look like you just put on glasses. That truly works, just crank up anisotropic filtering, anti-aliasing and other enhancements.


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## The red spirit

The past...


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## s2theizay

I was going to place this in science, but I think tech is a better fit. A new map recently won a design award. It is said to be the most accurate map there is.


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## ae1905




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## ae1905

blogs.discovermagazine.com *

New Fabric Warms or Cools Depending How You Wear It*
[HR][/HR] 









If you’ve ever worked in an office, you know about the battle of the thermostat. This futile clash costs quite a bit of energy: some 12 percent of the United States’ total energy consumption goes to regulating building temperature with air conditioning.

Now, a new fabric could end that war and save energy at the same time. The textile, described Friday in the journal _Science Advances_, offers wearers dual heating and cooling, allowing individuals to control their personal temperature.

“Our human body loses heat,” says Yi Cui, a materials engineer at Stanford University who holds a doctorate in chemistry. “If we can control this radiation loss in the summer time, letting the heat go as fast as it can, we would be able to save energy in cooling. In the winter time, we want to slow down this heat loss, keeping this radiation in the human body so we can feel warm.”

*Hot Then You’re Cold*

Last year, Cui and his research team revealed a new fabric that could cool human skin 4 degrees Fahrenheit better than cotton. Using plastic polyethylene, the researchers engineered a material with nanosized pores that makes it easier for heat to escape.

This latest fabric builds on that original technology.

It’s essentially a single piece of that same polyethylene material with two layers of coating embedded within it. One coating is carbon, a chemical that’s pretty efficient at emitting thermal energy. The other coating is copper, a metal that’s great at trapping heat.

To adjust the temperature, it’s as easy as turning the material inside out.

“If we want to have the cooling effect, we have the layer facing outside that has the ability to radiate out heat fast,” Cui explains. “But if we want to do heating, we wear the other layer facing outside because its ability to radiate out heat is very weak.”







The layered structure of the warming, cooling textile. _ (Credit: Hsu et al., Sci. Adv. 2017;3: e1700895)_

Tests on artificial skin showed the textile can enhance our comfort level by nearly 12 degrees Fahrenheit. At its fullest potential, the researchers predict the material could heat or warm humans by 22 degrees Fahrenheit.

What’s more, because these materials naturally retain and release radiation, they don’t require any outside energy to work. No electricity. No batteries. Nothing.

Coupled with the potential to spend less energy on indoor heating and cooling, that pretty’s exciting, Cui says.

He adds, “The textiles we are wearing today have a thousand-year-old history. But in the next five to 10 years, we are going to see more and more functions in our clothing. We are experiencing a textile revolution.”

Cui hopes the material becomes commercially available in the next two or three years.


----------



## Pifanjr

https://sploid.gizmodo.com/this-guy-hacked-together-a-glove-that-makes-time-appear-1820288746/amp


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## ae1905

All 500 of the World's Top 500 Supercomputers Are Running Linux Freshly Exhumed shares a report from ZDnet: Linux rules supercomputing. This day has been coming since 1998, when Linux first appeared on the TOP500 Supercomputer list. Today, it finally happened: All 500 of the world's fastest supercomputers are running Linux. The last two non-Linux systems, a pair of Chinese IBM POWER computers running AIX, dropped off the November 2017 TOP500 Supercomputer list. When the first TOP500 supercomputer list was compiled in June 1993, Linux was barely more than a toy. It hadn't even adopted Tux as its mascot yet. It didn't take long for Linux to start its march on supercomputing. From when it first appeared on the TOP500 in 1998, Linux was on its way to the top. Before Linux took the lead, Unix was supercomputing's top operating system. Since 2003, the TOP500 was on its way to Linux domination. By 2004, Linux had taken the lead for good. This happened for two reasons: First, since most of the world's top supercomputers are research machines built for specialized tasks, each machine is a standalone project with unique characteristics and optimization requirements. To save costs, no one wants to develop a custom operating system for each of these systems. With Linux, however, research teams can easily modify and optimize Linux's open-source code to their one-off designs. The semiannual TOP500 Supercomputer List was released yesterday. It also shows that China now claims 202 systems within the TOP500, while the United States claims 143 systems.


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## ae1905

*Amazon's automated convenience stores edge closer to public debut*

The company has worked out some of Amazon Go's major technical issues.

Mallory Locklear, @mallorylocklear 8m ago in Food and Drink 








David Ryder via Getty Images 

Last year, Amazon opened its first convenience store embedded with its "just walk out technology." Located in Seattle, the Amazon Go store, which lets shoppers walk in, load up on the items they want and walk out without having to pay for the items in a checkout line, has been testing its technology with Amazon employees. Now, as _Bloomberg_ reports, the company has worked through some of the hangups with the technology and is making moves towards opening its store and others to the public.

In March, the _Wall Street Journal_ reported that while the Amazon Go store did well with a small amount of customers who were shopping fairly slowly, it couldn't keep up when there were more than 20 shoppers in the store at once. The store uses cameras, sensors and deep learning algorithms to track shoppers as they move around, log which items they take and charge them once they leave. Those technical bugs pushed the public opening of the store from an initial projection of early 2017 to an undetermined future date. But now, at least some of the issues have been fixed. One source told _Bloomberg_ that three Amazon employees, each dressed in Pikachu costumes, went into the store and shopped as a way to challenge the technology. But once they were finished, the store charged each of the shoppers' Amazon accounts accurately.

Some problems are still being addressed. Shoppers wandering the store in groups and families with "grabby" kids still pose a challenge to the technology. But in the meantime, Amazon appears to be preparing for a public launch. The company is reportedly hiring construction managers and marketers for the Amazon Go team rather than just engineers and researchers. And earlier this year, it filed trademark registrations for Amazon Go slogans with the UK Intellectual Property Office and the European Commission.

While the next step is likely to be standalone Amazon Go stores, some think that the technology could be worked into Whole Foods following Amazon's acquisition of the chain earlier this year.


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## ae1905

*Amazon tried to fool the tech in its new cashier-less store with people dressed in Pikachu costumes (AMZN)*








Getty/Tomohiro Ohsumi



*Amazon is on the cusp of opening its high-tech cashier-less store.* 
*It even tested the tech with people wearing Pikachu costumes, and it was successful.* 
*The store's tech struggled with families, however.* 
 [HR][/HR] 
In a bizarre twist, it's the Pikachus that were doing the choosing in a test for Amazon's new cashier-less store.

According to a new report by Bloomberg, it's almost go-time for the cashier-less store called Amazon Go. Customers scan their Amazon app as they walk in. The store uses cameras and sensors embedded in shelves to track what customers pick up, then charges them for what they took when they walk out the door.

The tech has gotten much better since it debuted late last year, the report says. It's now so good that even costumes can't trick it.

Amazon sent in a threesome of employees dressed in Pikachu costumes, but the yellow felt did not trip up the sensors. Each costumed employee was charged correctly for the items he or she took, according to the report, even though they looked virtually indistinguishable.

The store's tech has struggled, however, to track groups like families with children who take things off the shelves, as it's challenging to identify who took what.


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## ae1905

*Is This The Tesla Killer?*

*We all know the story behind Fisker*, it was one of the world’s first plug-in hybrid electric vehicles in 2008, and even had a legal spat between Tesla, but *shortly after in 2012 the company crashed and burned in bankruptcy.* Last year, Henrik Fisker decided to relaunch his brand. He thought that one failure wasn’t enough—-just like Elon Musk’s SpaceX rockets. During Fisker’s relaunch, he made a shocking comment that caught the attention of Musk and it was on the claims of a new breakthrough in battery technology using graphene-based hybrid material that would revolutionize battery storage and make Musk’s batteries appear obsolete.

*Thirteen months passed, and Musk wrote off Fisker’s claims, as Musk decided to focus on other things like his Boring company.* That might of been Musk’s fatal flaw, because Fisker just came out and dropped a bombshell on the electric vehicle (EV) industry: *‘New Fisker Batteries 2.5x Density, 500 Miles Per Charge & Charging in 1 Minute’..*
Musk will shortly developed uncontrollable convulsions with the understanding *his Gigafactory producing thin-film lithium batteries could be obsolete.*

Autoblog reports the new breakthrough, calling it a solid-state battery revolution: 

*It seems that we’re on the cusp of a solid-state battery revolution. *The latest company to announce progress in developing the new type of battery is Fisker. *It has filed patents for solid-state batteries and it expects the batteries to be produced on a mass scale around 2023.*​ 
In the game of electric vehicles it’s all about batteries. Musk’s technology would be considered legacy when compared to solid-state. Here is why: 



Greater energy density 
Rapid charging times 
 *
Fisker claims the batteries underdevelopment have a density of 2.5x when compared to the standard EV batteries. *This should give the range of a Fisker vehicle well over a 500-mile and recharging capabilities in as little as a minute.

Here’s what Dr. Fabio Albano, VP of battery systems at Fisker Inc. claims:

*This breakthrough marks the beginning of a new era in solid-state materials and manufacturing technologies. *

We are addressing all of the hurdles that solid-state batteries have encountered on the path to commercialization, such as performance in cold temperatures; the use of low cost and scalable manufacturing methods; and the ability to form bulk solid-state electrodes with significant thickness and high active material loadings. We are excited to build on this foundation and move the needle in energy storage. ​ 
Here’s a representation of the 3-dimensional electrodes:

*Easily Explained: The Solid State Battery Revolution*

The current standards for Tesla Model S depending on the type of charge ranges from 10 minutes to 1:15 for a max distance up to 300 miles.
_*Fisker on the other hand, claims their battery will enable ranges of more than 500 miles and a charge as low as one minute. *_Fisker’s technology would increase distance by over 66% and drastically reduce charging time, along with no explosions something that Teslsa has a long history of.

Roberto Baldwin of Engadget asks one question: _*Can Tesla avoid becoming the BlackBerry of electric cars? 
*_
*The simple answer is no. 
*
As we have highlighted the short thesis for Tesla in yesterday’s post titled: Jim Chanos Adds To Tesla Short, Sees Musk Stepping Down… We had to make one adjustment and add line 8, which now includes the understanding of Fisker’s solid-state battery technology and how it could disrupt the entire EV party.

*1. Negative Cash Flows*
“If you can’t make money selling a $100,000 car to rich people, how are you going to make money selling a $45,000 car to normal people?” Rocker told The Times. He was referring to the upcoming mass-market Model 3. “I’m saying they’re going to lose money on every Model 3 they build and sell,” Spiegel said. Based on Tesla’s Q4 2016 earnings report, he figured the combined average selling price for non-leased Model S and X is about $104,000 and the combined average cost of building them about $82,000.

*2. Competition from the Big Guys*
Electric vehicles are still only a tiny fraction of total new vehicle sales in the US. Tesla sold about half of them. In March, according to Autodata, Tesla sold 4,050 vehicles in the US, similar to Porsche. All automakers combined sold 1.56 million new vehicles. This gave Tesla a market share of 0.26%. “Tesla faces a formidable set of competitors, and they’re coming in with guns blazing,” Wahlman told The Times. “Once the market is flooded with electric vehicles from manufacturers who can cross-subsidize them with profits from their conventional cars, somewhere around 2020 or 2021, Tesla will be driven into bankruptcy,” Spiegel said.

*3. Tesla’s vanishing tax credits*
The federal tax credit of $7,500 that EV buyers currently get is limited to 200,000 vehicles for each automaker. Once that automaker hits that point, tax credits are reduced and then phased out. Of all automakers, Tesla is closest to the 200,000 mark. Under its current production goals, the tax credits for its cars could start declining in 2018. This would give competitors, whose customers still get the full tax credit, a major advantage. About 370,000 folks put down a refundable $1,000 deposit on Tesla’s Model 3, perhaps figuring they’d get the $7,500 tax credit. But as it stands, many won’t. Rocker thinks that this is going to be an issue. The refundable deposit “commits them to nothing,” he said. Those that don’t get the tax credit may just ask for their money back and buy an EV that is still eligible for the credit.

*4. The Question of patent protection*
Tesla has made its patents available to all comers, thus lowering its patent protections against competitors. Also, the key part of an EV, the battery, is produced by suppliers; they, and not Tesla, own the intellectual property. This is true for all automakers. But Tesla might still be closely guarding crucial trade secrets that are not patented.

*5. Musk’s distractions from his day job*
Musk has a lot of irons in the fire: Tesla, SpaceX (with which he wants to build a colony on Mars or something), solar-panel installer SolarCity which Tesla bailed out last year; projects ranging from artificial intelligence to tunnel digging; venture capital activities…. “He’s all over the map, from tunneling to flights to Mars to solar roof tiles,” Rocker said. These announcements have the effect of boosting Tesla’s stock: “It’s ‘Let’s get the acolytes excited. Implant in the brain! Let’s buy Tesla stock!’”

*6. Execution risk*
“Investing is all about possibility and probability,” Yusko said. “Is it possible that Tesla will produce 500,000 cars in the next two or three years? Yes. Is it probable? No.” Tesla has missed many deadlines and goals, and quality problems cropped up in early production models. As Tesla is trying to make the transition to a mass-market automaker, execution risk will grow since mass-market customers are less forgiving.

*7. Investor fatigue*
Having lost money in every one of its 10 years of existence, Tesla asks investors regularly for more money to fill the new holes. In March, it got $1.2 billion. In May last year, it got $1.5 billion. Tesla will need many more billions to scale up production and to digest the losses. Tesla has been ingenious in this department. But when will investors get tired of it? “We’re awfully close to the point where people wake up and realize these guys are seriously diluting our equity” with new stock and convertible bond issues, Yusko said. According to The Times, Yusko “is looking for the moment when the true believers begin to lose faith.”
_*Update
_
*8. Emerging solid-state battery technology *
Musk has invested a lot into his Gigafactory and technology producing lithium-ion batteries. The EV game is all about the best battery technology and a new threat has emerged using solid-state technology. If Tesla does not adopt to these new battery trends consumers would likely gravitate to EVs who posses such technology, because of the longer distance and shorter charge time.











Read full post


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*Even Pills Are Going Digital*
By Lauren Sigfusson | 
November 15, 2017 4:38 pm 

_(Credit: Proteus Digital Health)_

Not following medicine as prescribed can be costly — like $100 billion to $289 billion, as reported by _The Atlantic_ in 2012. Not only that, but it can also harm patients and set back their treatment.
But a new digital pill could change that.

The Food and Drug Administration (FDA) on Monday approved the first pill in the United States that comes loaded with a digital ingestion tracking system. After taking one of these new pills, the IEM sensor communicates to a patch worn by the patient. The patch then sends information to an app on a smartphone.

The treatment, called Abilify MyCite, pairs the sensor with medication (Abilify) used to treat adults diagnosed with schizophrenia, bipolar I disorder and depression. Both parties involved in making this new-age pill — Otsuka Pharmaceutical makes the tablet, Proteus Digital Health makes the IEM and patch — hope this digital medicine system will help patients and physicians improve treatment.

“Being able to track ingestion of medications prescribed for mental illness may be useful for some patients,” said Dr. Mitchell Mathis, director of the division of psychiatry products in the FDA’s center for drug evaluation and research, in a news release. “The FDA supports the development and use of new technology in prescription drugs and is committed to working with companies to understand how technology might benefit patients and prescribers.”

The pill manufacturers and the FDA are quick to point out that it hasn’t been shown that digitizing this pill improves patient compliance. However, it has sparked some worries about granting “Big Brother” the ability to know if you’re properly medicated. For example, as reported in the _New York Times, _insurers may push medical practitioners to prescribe digital pills so they make certain drugs are being used, and being used correctly. A digital scrip might also become a condition for parole or releasing patients from mental health facilities.

At this time, these digital pills are only being rolled out to a select number of healthcare plans and providers and patients. However, there are other companies working on their own versions of digitized medicine. Otsuka said the slow roll-out of Abilify MyCite will help them learn from the patient’s experiences.


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Christopher Mims, writing for the Wall Street Journal:_ 

A funny thing is happening to the most basic building blocks of nearly all our devices. Microchips, which are usually thin and flat, are being stacked like pancakes (Editor's note: the link could be paywalled). Chip designers -- now playing with depth, not just length and width -- are discovering a variety of unexpected dividends in performance, power consumption and capabilities. Without this technology, the Apple Watch wouldn't be possible. Nor would the most advanced solid-state memory from Samsung, artificial-intelligence systems from Nvidia and Google, or Sony's crazy-fast next-gen camera. Think of this 3-D stacking as urban planning. Without it, you have sprawl -- microchips spread across circuit boards, getting farther and farther apart as more components are needed. But once you start stacking chips, you get a silicon cityscape, with everything in closer proximity. 

The advantage is simple physics: When electrons have to travel long distances through copper wires, it takes more power, produces heat and reduces bandwidth. Stacked chips are more efficient, run cooler and communicate across much shorter interconnections at lightning speed, says Greg Yeric, director of future silicon technology for ARM Research, part of microchip design firm ARM._


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247wallst.com *

The Earth Is Getting Much Brighter, Which May Not Be Good*

By Paul Ausick
[HR][/HR] The earth is losing its night. As new, more efficient, and cheaper artificial lighting becomes more available, people tend to offset the savings by using more light. Half of Europe and a quarter of North America already live with radically altered light-dark cycles.

Artificial lighting has reduced the number of stars visible in some cities to just a few hundred of the masses of stars that populate the night sky. Some researchers suggest that by 2025 an unadulterated view of the night sky will be extinct in the United States.

In a new study published in the journal Science Advances, researchers reported that from 2012 to 2016, the earth’s artificially lit outdoor area increased by 2.2% a year.

The adoption of solid-state lighting technology (LED bulbs) was supposed to result in a decrease in energy consumption. What appears to be happening instead is that the lower cost of lighting has driven an increase in the use of lighting.

Using data gathered from the first calibrated satellite radiometer designed to assess night lighting, the researchers found no reduction in global scale energy. The data indicate that light pollution is increasing “with corresponding negative consequences for flora, fauna, and human well-being.”

Unsurprisingly, most of the growth in light emission occurred in areas that were poorly lit to begin with. Using a threshold of 5 radiance units to measure both total lit area and the radiance of previously lit area, overall radiance rose by 1.8% a year over the study’s period.

In areas where wars are being fought — Syria and Yemen — radiance decreased and in only a few areas — including well-lit countries like the United States, Italy, Netherlands, and Spain — did radiance levels remain mostly unchanged. Lighting growth occurred in South America, Africa, and Asia.

According to the report, for most countries more than half of national light emission above the 5 unit threshold came from areas lit below 20 radiance units. A small town in the American West with a population of several hundred typically generates light emissions only slightly above the 5 unit threshold. An international airport typically emits about 150 radiance units.
Compared to China, the United States has twice as much area illuminated with radiances in the range of 5 to 6.1 units but nearly 20 times as much area illuminated in the range of 132 to 162 units. In many countries, there is little or no area lit above 100 radiance units.

The study’s findings are in line with the historical trend that improvements in lighting efficacy (in this case, the development of LED lighting) results in greater light use rather than in energy savings. The authors note:

Outdoor lighting became commonplace with the introduction of electric light and grew at an estimated rate of 3 to 6% per year during the second half of the 20th century. As a result, the world has experienced widespread “loss of the night,” with half of Europe and a quarter of North America experiencing substantially modified light-dark cycles.​
One of the report’s authors, ecologist Franz Hölker told the New York Post:

In addition to threatening 30 percent of vertebrates that are nocturnal and over 60 percent of invertebrates that are nocturnal, artificial light also affects plants and microorganisms. It threatens biodiversity through changed night habits, such as reproduction or migration patterns, of many different species: insects, amphibians, fish, birds, bats and other animals.​
Humans spend about 0.7% of global GDP on artificial lighting, and that number is relatively constant regardless of historical or geographical context, and because LED lighting is cheaper to operate, light pollution is likely to increase as cities and towns increase night-time lighting more than ever.

The full research report is available at Science Advances.
By Paul Ausick


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Video: An Affordable Supercomputing Testbed based on Rasberry Pi
https://insidehpc.com/2017/11/video-affordable-supercomputing-testbed-based-rasberry-pi/


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Windows 10's future look could be Sets, a tabbed app interface Microsoft will start testinghttps://www.pcworld.com/article/3238524/windows/windows-10-sets-timeline.html


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Two Teams Create “Quantum Simulators” Two Teams Create “Quantum Simulators” - D-brief


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Microsoft: We're razing our Redmond campus to build a mini city.............. No more cars, new soccer and cricket fields, cafes, bike tracks, bridges, light rail, and more.............. Microsoft: We're razing our Redmond campus to build a mini city | ZDNet


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engadget.com Amazon wants Alexa to be your new office assistant


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https://www.scientificamerican.com/...on-world-rsquo-s-biggest-lithium-ion-battery/


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https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/living-material-made-from-bacteria/


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scientificamerican.com 

*Shape-Shifting Metals Could Generate Electricity from Wasted Heat*

Nick Stockton

[HR][/HR] Half a decade ago a scientist, an engineer and a businessman met in a Dublin backyard to conduct an experiment. They heated water in an electric tea maker, then poured it into a bisected segment of pipe. At the bottom of the half-pipe lay a length of wire, and one of the men held a ruler next to it. As the hot water gushed through the pipe, the wire shortened by several centimeters; when they poured cold water over it, it returned to its original length. The trio thought they might be onto something big.

The strange, morphing wire they tested was made of a material called shape memory alloy. Such metals(and some nonmetals)shift into and out of predetermined shapes when subjected to certain temperatures or to pressure or electrical stimuli. Invented 60 years ago, shape memory alloy has been used in fields such as biomedicine and aeronautical engineering. But one of its most stubbornly elusive applications is harvesting energy from hot water. Now those former backyard experimentalists—founders of a company called Exergyn—say they have created an engine that uses morphing wire and hot water left over from industrial processes to generate electricity.

About a third of the energy used by industry in the U.S. is lost as heat, according to some estimates. “A lot of energy is wasted in industrial processes or during heat exchange, when water is used to cool off machinery or power plants,” says Rigoberto Advincula, a professor of macromolecular science at Case Western University and a waste-heat expert who is not connected to Exergyn. The heated water produced as a by-product of industrial applications—including electricity generation—is not quite hot enough to produce steam that can power an engine to run a generator.

Some power plants and industrial users send their hot waste water through secondary engines, which convert a small percentage of energy in that water into electricity using a process called the organic Rankine cycle. This technology, however, requires chemicals to generate power from the heated water. Some of the best chemicals for doing this are dangerous or harmful to the environment, and therefore often banned or restricted. Cleaner chemicals do not draw energy from waste water as efficiently. This adds to the operational costs of running these engines, which means they are not always cost-effective, according to Jonathan Koomey, an energy industry consultant at Stanford University who is not associated with Exergyn.

This is where the morphing wires come in. Shape memory alloys have unique molecular properties—they shift between predetermined shapes depending on their temperatures. That is why this material is the heart of Exergyn's new engine, which uses nitinol, a variation on the original shape memory alloy. “The name represents the fact that it is an alloy of nickel (Ni) and titanium (Ti) and the NOL refers to the [former] Naval Ordnance Laboratory, where nitinol was invented,” says Preston MacDougall, professor of chemistry at Middle Tennessee State University, who is not connected to Exergyn.

At the molecular scale, nitinol is oddly orderly. “Most alloys have no real structure at the molecular level. They are like solutions of metals, as opposed to the orderly arrangement inside something like a salt crystal or a diamond,” MacDougall says. Nitinol's molecules, however, form regular cuboids with 90-degree angles. Under a microscope, MacDougall says, it looks like a bunch of stacked shoe boxes*.* Heat those molecules and they reorient themselves ever so slightly—the right angles become acute or obtuse—such that the material contracts.Cool the material and the molecules regain their right angles, and the shape memory alloy returns to its original size and shape.

Exergyn's engine exploits this shape-shifting behavior to turn waste-heat water into electricity. Its developers say the engine could be installed in a waste-heat plumbing system, where it would cycle hot water into its cylindrical piston chambers. Each piston is attached to a nitinol wire. “As the hot water comes in, [the wire] contracts a relatively small amount, but does so very powerfully,” says Alan Healy, Exergyn's CEO. Then the engine cycles cold water into the piston chamber. The nitinol expands, and the piston springs out again. On the other side of the piston is a viscous fluid. The moving piston pushes the fluid through a hydraulic transmission that spins a generator, creating electricity. “Using the properties of these materials to generate energy sounds counterintuitive*,* but it’s not unique,” Advincula says. After all, scientists invented shape memory alloys over half a century ago, and engineers have long recognized these materials had energy-harvesting potential.

In the 1970s a mechanical engineer named Ridgway Banks, working at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, developed a shape memory alloy engine that he believed would save the power industry and other sectors billions in energy costs. Banks patented the engine, but it never revolutionized the energy sector as he hoped. Its technology was complex and required too many chemicals, and the morphing wires wore out too quickly to be practical.

But academics and engineers kept the idea alive in journals and laboratories around the world. In 2010 General Motors partnered with the U.S. Department of Energy’s Advanced Research Projects Agency–Energy to invent an array of waste-heat recovery technologies, including some based on shape memory alloys. So far, however, GM has only used shape memory alloy to replace more complicated mechanical errata on its vehicles, such as a device that makes it easier to close a Corvette's trunk.

Exergyn is not claiming a major technological breakthrough. Healy says the company applied its brainpower to several decades of existing research to create more durable nitinol wires—although exactly how they tweaked the formula is a closely held proprietary information. This advance was needed, according to Healy, because shape memory alloy wears out after a certain amount of morphing. Replacing the wires on a large scale is annoying and costly—major impediments to an engine’s market readiness. “A couple of years ago the best anyone had accomplished was a million cycles,” he says. “We've got over 10 million cycles on our wire.” Healy says he is eyeing the biogas industry for his first customers. “But there’s no shortage of potential applications,” he adds. “Some food companies have waste-heat water from cleaning their machinery or there are data centers using water to cool their servers.”

Still, Exergyn has not yet proved its worth. A company that buys one of Exergyn's engines will want to know the technology will pay for itself after a given period of time, via savings in the company's electricity bill. “One point of reference would be looking at the average cost of electricity for industrial customers,” Koomey says. Exergyn will also compete with the organic Rankine cycle engines that businesses already use to recover energy from waste heat—which Exergyn might have an inherent advantage over, according to Koomey. “Something with lots of moving parts and esoteric fluids [like the organic Rankine cycle engine] will probably be much more expensive than an engine that just uses metal moving back and forth in water,” he notes. “But, the proof is in the device.”

At the moment that proof is still a prototype in Exergyn's Dublin offices. It is capable of pumping out upward of five kilowatts of electricity; 24 hours of that amount would power four U.S. households for a day. The first real field tests will come next year, when Exergyn will devote a serious chunk of the $9 million its raised from investors and grants toward installing 10-kilowatt trial engines at several biogas plants in Dublin. Healy believes the trials will finally show a cost-effective path toward energy efficiency. “Businesses won’t do the right thing,” he says, “unless you give them [an] option that saves them money.”


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zdnet.com *

Microsoft debuts Windows 10 on ARM*

Mary Jo Foley
[HR][/HR]







(Image: HP) Windows PCs with multi-day battery life soon may no longer be just a pipe dream.

A year ago, Microsoft announced it was working with its PC partners to bring Windows 10 to Qualcomm's ARM processors. The resulting machines, part of the "Always Connected PC" ecosystem, would start rolling out before the end of calendar 2017, officials said.

Today, Dec. 5, Microsoft provided a progress report on Windows on ARM at Qualcomm's Snapdragon Tech Summit. Microsoft and PC makers Asus and HP showed off new PCs running Windows 10 on Snapdragon 835 at the event.

*See:* Qualcomm announces 'always connected' Windows 10 mobile PCs

Asus' NovoGo will begin shipping at least in quantities before year-end, I've heard. Models with 4GB of RAM and 16GB of storage will be available starting at $599, and 8GB/256GB storage model at $799, Asus officials said today. Asus is claiming 22 hours of continuous video playback and 30 days of standby.

HP's Envy x2 -- like most of the ARM-based Always Connected Windows 10 devices -- won't be available until spring 2018. Users can get up to 20 hours of active use and 700 hours of "Connected Modern Standby." Pricing is not yet available.








(Image: Qualcomm) Microsoft is providing OEMs with a version of its Windows 10 S operating system that works natively on ARM. It also is providing emulation technology so that Win32 apps to also work on Always Connected devices. The company extended the Windows-on-Windows (WoW) compatibility layer that it currently uses to enable x86 applications to run on x64 to ARM devices.

(What about Intel's thinly veiled threat over patents for Win32 emulation on ARM from earlier this year? Neither Microsoft nor Intel will comment on what has/hasn't happened there.)

HP and Asus will ship their Always Connected devices with Windows 10S preinstalled, but will give users the option of moving to Windows 10 Pro for free for a limited period of time. Microsoft earlier this year extended the free 10 S to Pro upgrade to March 2018. Asus said that it will offer the 10 S to Pro upgrade for free until September 2018. Windows 10 S is a version of Windows 10 that runs Microsoft Store apps only.

While much of the excitement around Always Connected devices centers around their reported battery-life numbers (thanks to the integration of LTE in the ARM chip, making room for bigger batteries inside these PCs), Intel also is part of the Always Connected PC ecosystem. Always Connected is the branding for PCs that include built-in gigabit LTE and Wi-Fi; long battery life (in ARM devices' case, allegedly multiple days without a recharge); run Windows 10; and be thin, light, and fan-less.

Unsurprisingly, Microsoft officials are not positioning these as low-end netbook 2.0 devices or as successors to the short-lived Windows RT ones. Always Connected PCs are for those who want the simplicity and connectivity of a phone, blended with the power of a PC, said Matt Barlow, corporate vice president of Windows Marketing. That means everyone from students, to road warriors, to consumers are potential targets for these devices.

Over time, Microsoft believes Always Connected thin and light devices also could work for enterprise users, as LTE networks could eventually replace pricey, private Wi-i networks with faster and more secure service, Barlow said.

In May this year, Microsoft said that Asus, HP and Lenovo would be among the first OEMs providing ARM-based Always Connected PCs. It also said at that time that AT&T, BT/EE, DTAG/T Mobile, Vodafone, Orange, Tele2, Swisscom, 3, KDDI, Gemalto, Oberthur, Gigsky, and Transatel would be the first mobile operators backing the platform.

The Win32 emulation in these ARM-based devices is meant to win over those who need Win32 apps that may or may not be available in the Store. Microsoft is touting the availability of key, commonly used Win32 apps, especially full Microsoft Office, as working well on these devices. Over time, Microsoft and partners plan to broaden the set of tested Win32 apps that will work well via emulation, officials said.


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engadget.com *

MIT researchers made a living ink that responds to its surroundings*

[HR][/HR] To demonstrate the living ink's abilities, the researchers printed the hydrogel in a tree pattern with different sections of the tree's branches containing bacteria sensitive to different types of chemicals. They then smeared those chemicals on a person's skin and put the 3D-printed tree-shaped "living tattoo" on top. When the branches came in contact with those chemicals, the bacteria were triggered to fluoresce.








"This is very future work, but we expect to be able to print living computational platforms that could be wearable," researcher Hyunwoo Yuk said in a statement. Some examples of possible future applications of this type of technology could be living sensors programmed to monitor inflammatory biomarkers or ingestible versions that can affect gut microbiota. Bacteria-loaded materials like this could also be used to sense pollutants in the environment or changes in temperature, for example.

The research was published today in _Advanced Materials_ and you can check out the video below for more information on the project.
Image: Liu et al.


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engadget.com *

Researchers 3D-print WiFi-connected objects that don't need power*

[HR][/HR] To do this, the team used things like 3D-printed springs, gears and switches that could be used to translate motion into antenna-transmitted information. For example, they created an anemometer, which measures wind speed, and attached it to a gear. When the gear spins, the teeth connect with an antenna embedded into the object and that antenna then reflects ambient WiFi signal, which can be decoded by a WiFi receiver. The faster the wind, the faster the gear spins and the more rapidly those signals are transmitted. They also created a scale and a flowmeter that can measure water speed.








Additionally, they printed three widgets -- a button, a knob and a slider -- that work in similar ways and can be used to talk to other smart devices. The researchers also developed two smart objects -- a detergent bottle with an attached flowmeter that can track the amount of remaining detergent and order it when it gets low and a test tube holder that can be used to measure the amount of liquid test tubes contain and track inventory. And lastly, they developed a way to print iron into 3D objects in distinct patterns, which when read by a magnetometer in a smartphone, for instance, can be used to convey important information about that object such as what it is, who made it or how a robot is meant to interact with it. "It looks like a regular 3D-printed object but there's invisible information inside that can be read with your smartphone," said Justin Chan, another student on the project.

The team is making their 3D models available to the public so that anyone can utilize these objects at home. The work was recently presented at the Association for Computing Machinery's SIGGRAPH Conference and Exhibition on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques in Asia and you can check out a video about the work below.

Image: Mark Stone/UW Photography


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## ae1905

scientificamerican.com *

Quantum Leaps in Quantum Computing?*

Charles Q. Choi
[HR][/HR] New “qubit” designs could enable more robust quantum machines

Quantum computers can theoretically blow away conventional ones at solving important problems. But they face major hurdles: their basic computational units, called quantum bits or qubits, are difficult to control and are easily corrupted by heat or other environmental factors. Now researchers have designed two kinds of qubits that may help address these challenges.

Conventional computer bits represent either a one or a zero. But thanks to an eerie quantum effect known as superposition—which allows an atom, electron or other particle to exist in two or more states, such as “spinning” in opposite directions at once—a single qubit made of a particle in superposition can simultaneously encompass both digits. When multiple qubits become “entangled” (referring to a quantum property that links one particle's actions to those of its partners), computing capacity can rise exponentially with the number of qubits. In principle, a 300-qubit quantum computer could perform more calculations at once than there are atoms in the observable universe.








Credit: Brown Bird Design; Source: “Silicon Quantum Processor with Robust Long-Distance Qubit Couplings,” by Guilherme Tosi et al., in _Nature Communications_, Vol. 8, Article No. 450; September 6, 2017 

Currently qubits based on a particle's spin direction must be positioned about 15 nanometers apart—any more, and their entanglement fails. But quantum engineer Andrea Morello of the University of New South Wales in Australia and his colleagues now claim to have designed qubits that can be separated by up to 500 nanometers. This provides much more room for vital apparatus to control the qubits. To create one of these so-called flip-flop qubits (_graphic_), an electron is pulled some distance from an atom's nucleus. This causes the atom to exhibit positive and negative electric poles that can interact over relatively large distances, the researchers reported in September in _Nature Communications_.

Another proposed qubit design is based on “quasiparticles,” which are formed from negatively charged electrons interacting with positively charged “holes” in superconducting material. In work reported in August in _Nature_, scientists at the Delft University of Technology and Eindhoven University of Technology, both in the Netherlands, and their colleagues created structures in which a pair of separated quasiparticles can “braid,” or exchange places, acting as a single qubit. The distance between them would decrease the chance that environmental effects could perturb both particles at once, which potentially makes such qubits highly stable, says study co-lead author Hao Zhang, a quantum physicist at Delft.

Both teams say they hope to create working versions of the new qubits soon. “I think it's very exciting that scientists are still pursuing new roads to build large-scale quantum computers,” says quantum physicist Seth Lloyd of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who did not take part in either study.


This article was originally published with the title "Quantum Leaps"


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## ae1905

futurism.com *

China Has Launched the World's First All-Electric Cargo Ship*

[HR][/HR]*In Brief*

The first ever all-electric cargo ship is in operation in China's Pearl River. While it's a step in the right direction to eliminate fossil fuels, the ship is being used to carry coal — the very material that encouraged the shift to clean energy. 

*First of Its Kind: Electric Cargo Ship*

China is now the proud owner of the world’s first all-electric cargo ship and has already put the vehicle to use. As reported by _China Daily_, the 2,000-metric-ton ship was launched in the city of Guangzhou last month and runs in the inland section of the Pearl River.
*Click to View Full Infographic* Constructed by Guangzhou Shipyard International Company Ltd, it can travel 80 kilometers (approximately 50 miles) after being charged for 2 hours. As noted by _Clean Technica_, 2 hours is roughly the amount of time it would take to unload the ship’s cargo while docked.

Other stats for China’s cargo ship include being 70.5 meters (230 feet) in length, a battery capacity of 2,400 kWh, and a travel speed of 12.8 kilometers per hour (8 mph). It’s definitely not the fastest electric vehicle we’ve seen hit the water, but it’s designed for transporting numerous objects rather than speed.

*Oh, the Irony*

“As the ship is fully electric powered, it poses no threats to the environment,” said Huang Jialin, general manager of Hangzhou Modern Ship Design & Research Co, the company behind the ship’s design.

“The technology will soon be likely … used in passenger or engineering ships.”







China’s all-electric cargo ship. Image Credit: China News/Peng Yonggui While the ship is yet another sign of the changes coming to our relationship with fossil fuels, its cargo shows we’re still a ways off from a complete shift. Ironically, the world’s first all-electric cargo ship is being used to move coal, according to Chen Ji, general manger of Guangzhou Shipyard International. Yes, despite generating zero emissions on its own, the cargo ship is still, in a way, contributing to the generation and spread of gas emissions that led to global warming.

It’s still an objectively better scenario that a traditional cargo ship carrying coal, but one can easily see how using clean energy to make coal cheaper misses the entire point of clean energy. Hopefully the electric cargo ship won’t be carrying coal for long, and China can find it better haulage. Perhaps parts for wind turbine construction. Or even additional lithium-ion batteries. Whatever the short-term future holds, we’re seeing more of the means we need to improve in the long-term.


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## ae1905




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## ae1905




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## ae1905

engadget.com *

This year we took small, important steps toward the Singularity*

[HR][/HR] In the last year, we've seen Google form the DeepMind Ethics & Society to investigate the implications of its AI in society, and we've witnessed the rise of intelligent sex dolls. We've had to take a deep look at whether the warbots we're developing will actually comply with our commands and whether tomorrow's robo-surgeons will honor the Hippocratic Oath. So it's not to say that such restrictions can't be hard-coded into an AI operating system, just that additional nuance is needed, especially as 2018 will see AI reach deeper into our everyday lives.

Asimov's famous three laws of robotics is "a wonderful literary vehicle but not a pragmatic way to design robotic systems," said Dr. Ron Arkin, Regents' professor and director of Mobile Robot Laboratory at the Georgia Institute of Technology. Envisioned in 1942, when the state of robotics was rudimentary at best, the laws were too rigid for use in 2017.

During his work with the Army Research Office, Arkin's team strived to develop an ethical robot architecture -- a software system that guided robots' behavior on the battlefield. "In this case, we looked at how a robotic software system can remain within the prescribed limits extracted from international humanitarian law," Arkin said.

"We do this in very narrow confines," Arkin continued. "We make no claims these kinds of systems are substitutes for human moral reasoning in a broader sense, but rather we can give the same guidelines -- in a different format, obviously -- that you would give for a human warfighter when instructed how to engage with the enemy, to a robotic system."

Specifically, the context of these instructions is dictated by us. "A human being is given the constraints, and restraints, if you will, for the robotic system to adhere to," he said. It's not simply a matter of what to shoot at, Arkin explained, but whether to shoot at all. "There are certain prohibitions that must be satisfied," Arkin said, so that "if it finds itself near cultural property which should not be destroyed, or if that individual or target is near civilian property like a mosque or a school, it should not initiate in those circumstances."

This "boundary morality," as Arkin puts it, likely won't be enough for robots and drones to replace human warfighters, and certainly not next year. But in certain scenarios, such as clearing buildings or counter-sniper operations, where collateral damage is common, "put a robot in that situation and give it suitable guidance to perhaps do better, ultimately, than a given warfighter could," Arkin concluded.

In these narrowly-defined operations, it is possible to have a three-laws-like sense of ethics in an AI operating system. "The constraints are hard-coded," Arkin explained, "just like the Geneva Conventions say what is acceptable and what is not acceptable."

Machine-learning techniques may empower future AI systems to play an expanded role on the battlefield, though they are themselves not without risk. "There are some cases of machine-learning which I believe should not be used in the battlefield," Arkin said. "One is the in-the-field target designation where the system figures out who and what it should engage with under different circumstances." This level of independence is not one that we are currently ethically or technologically equipped to handle and should instead be vetted first by a human-in-the-loop "even at the potential expense of the mission. The rules of engagement don't change during the action."

"I believe that if we are going to be foolish enough to continue killing each other in warfare that we must find ways to better protect noncombatants. And I believe that this is one possible way to do that," Arkin concluded.

While 2017 saw the rise in interactions between robots and humans in the supermarket -- looking at you, Amazon Go. In the coming year, care must still be taken to avoid potential conflict. "These robots, as they actuate in the physical space, they'll encounter more human bodies," said Manuela Veloso, Professor at Carnegie Mellon's School of Computer Science and head of CMU SCS's Machine Learning Department. "It's similar to autonomous cars and how they'll interact with people: robots will eventually need to have to make ethical decisions." We're already seeing robots encroach on production lines and fulfillment centers. This sense of caution will be especially necessary when it comes to deciding who to run over.

And, unlike military applications, civil society has many more subtle nuances guiding social mores, making machine learning techniques a more realistic option. Veloso states, "Machine learning has a much higher probability of handling the complexity of the spectrum of things that may be encountered," but that "it probably will be a complement of both."

In this way, fundamental social rules -- such as no biting, no shouting, et cetera -- can be hard-coded into the AI while machine learning can help guide the AI through its day-to-day tasks. "Machine learning has a very beautiful kind of promise -- in some sense humans, they are not as good in terms of explaining everything they care about in terms of actually rules and statements," Veloso added. "But they do reveal themselves how they act by example."

Like Arkin, Veloso doesn't exactly think we'll be handing robots the keys to the kingdom next year. "AI systems for a long time should be assistants, they should be recommenders," she said. And we've already witnessed that trend in 2017, with digital assistants moving from our phones to our homes. It's one that will very likely continue into the new year. But a long time doesn't mean never. "These AI systems have the potential to be great other 'people'," Veloso continued. "Great other minds, data processors and advisors." Just maybe don't give them guns just yet.

Humans will have responsibilities towards their mechanical counterparts as well, specifically treating them with respect. Now, whether robots -- especially anthropomorphic ones like Hanson Robotics' Sophia, which debuted this year -- "deserve" respect anymore than your Keurig or Echo do is a slippery ethical slope that only Chidi would relish sliding down. But social standards on acceptable behavior are constantly in flux, and this something that needs codifying in 2018.

"We feel responsible to not hurt dogs and cats," Veloso explained. "I don't think that [robots] will have 'feelings' like a dog or a cat does. I think that it's probably that people have to get used to appreciate the function, like you're not going to kick your refrigerator or disconnect your toaster" when they don't function properly.

"I believe that if we don't make these robots look a lot like people -- with skin and everything -- people will always treat them as machines," Veloso concluded. "Which they are."

Our relationship with technology, especially AI systems that approach (and will eventually exceed) human intelligence are changing whether we like it or not. For example, we've already seen Google's AlphaGo AI beat the pants off of human masters repeatedly this year. We're not likely to see America's military rolling out autonomous smart tanks and Terminator-style battle robots within the next two decades, let alone 12 months, Arkin estimates.

The US Army is already reaching out to industry for help in designing and deploying machine learning and AI systems to counter foreign cyberattacks, the first results of which will begin rolling out next year. In the immediate future beyond that, we're likely to see a slate of smart technologies, from self-guided helicopters to in-the-field part printing (assuming Elon Musk doesn't get his way). The state of the art for battlefield AI is simply too far within its infancy to reliably deploy such technology. Instead, that change will likely be driven by civilian society.

"I think humans are amazing in the sense of being extremely open minded with respect to technology," Veloso said. "Look at the world in which we live versus the world in which our grandparents lived. The amount of technology we are surrounded by is absolutely fascinating. We aren't taught in school anything different from what our grandparents were taught in school: it's history and geometry and algebra and we still manage to live with so much more technology because humans are so smart."

Hopefully we'll prove smart enough to treat tomorrow's robots better than we treat each other today.

_Check out all of Engadget's year-in-review coverage right here._


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## ae1905




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## Pifanjr

ae1905 said:


>


I think I would actually prefer this over my phone shutting down all the time. I'm pretty sure my current phone (a Moto G4) has the same problem where my phone shuts off when it tries to draw too much power from my phone and it's really obnoxious.


----------



## ae1905

Pocket-Sized DNA Reader Used To Scan Entire Human Genome Sequence  (arstechnica.com)


----------



## The red spirit

Pifanjr said:


> It's the next step in automation. There's so much data being recorded that it's impossible for humans to go through it all and draw conclusions from it. For example, AI has allowed several advances in medical science to be made by discovering new possible treatments or by being able to diagnose diseases earlier.


But why AI is something so much talked about in consumer stuff? For example Cortana, cars, human-alike robots. It's not like personal assistants like Cortana can do anything faster and better than human. It's not like we need human-alike robots much, besides it being cool. And so many people hate AI on roads, especially enthusiasts. I don't get why people want to robotize such things and remove human factor. In the end human will not do anything as simple as that himself, so seriously what's the point of living? Of course that's hypothetic, but looking at computers, now even retards can use them, meanwhile 30 years before they wouldn't be able to do anything without help or manual. It looks like humans hate learning and try to not want to learn, even some useful skills. Our lives are slowly, but steady starting to look like in Wall-E movie. Until we reach the deepest bottom, we won't stop. Besides such grand thoughts I can't really think of any reasons why AI is becoming a big thing for normal people. For scientific reasons and such advancement like you said, it seems alright, but much for normal, simple people. Twenty years ago it would had been unimaginable for people to text while driving, for people to be walking in the streets while starring at their smartphones and now it's more or less OK. It's like we are losing life skills, but actually have nothing greater in our lives to fill that new hole. Now human interaction is rather weird in many situations and it's normal to not know even the ones you live near. Not like there wasn't people like that before, but in this era stupidly advanced useless tech (mostly social media) this thing is amplified. Stronger than ever. Human to human has cold walls, slightly asocial behaviour is normal (in Japan and other highly (or lowly) advanced countries issues are much stronger and widespread problems). That's not really okay, but when it comes slowly, then it doesn't create big noticeable effect of something that has changed. Tech in general made a big effect in that, but AI is just such a big hit. Too bad media mostly praises the advances in that and that's imo just really silly, besides rare cases of scientific usage or other mostly aright things. So why AI is such a big thing even for normal people? Do we really like that stuff so much for no reason, besides natural desire to be lazy?


----------



## Pifanjr

The red spirit said:


> But why AI is something so much talked about in consumer stuff? For example Cortana, cars, human-alike robots. It's not like personal assistants like Cortana can do anything faster and better than human. It's not like we need human-alike robots much, besides it being cool.


Most of that is just marketing. Cortana and human-alike robots are fancy gadgets, but no one really needs them, nor are they really intelligent. The thing is that, if AI researchers want money for research, they have to market what they're researching.



> And so many people hate AI on roads, especially enthusiasts. I don't get why people want to robotize such things and remove human factor.


For roads AI can actually be very beneficial. They're quickly getting to the point where they perform better than humans, mostly because humans simply suck at driving.



> In the end human will not do anything as simple as that himself, so seriously what's the point of living?


Is being able to drive your own car really so important to being alive? Do you feel like your life is worth less because you're not planting your own crops, hunting your own meat or washing your clothes by hand? Automation doesn't take away the point of living.



> Of course that's hypothetic, but looking at computers, now even retards can use them, meanwhile 30 years before they wouldn't be able to do anything without help or manual. It looks like humans hate learning and try to not want to learn, even some useful skills. Our lives are slowly, but steady starting to look like in Wall-E movie.


I doubt it will ever go that far. Maybe for some people, but a lot of people are already realizing that more technology isn't making them happier.



> Until we reach the deepest bottom, we won't stop. Besides such grand thoughts I can't really think of any reasons why AI is becoming a big thing for normal people. For scientific reasons and such advancement like you said, it seems alright, but much for normal, simple people.


I don't think AI is going to be that important in everyday life, except for the few parts of our lives where automation makes a big difference (like self-driving cars).



> Twenty years ago it would had been unimaginable for people to text while driving, for people to be walking in the streets while starring at their smartphones and now it's more or less OK. It's like we are losing life skills, but actually have nothing greater in our lives to fill that new hole. Now human interaction is rather weird in many situations and it's normal to not know even the ones you live near. Not like there wasn't people like that before, but in this era stupidly advanced useless tech (mostly social media) this thing is amplified. Stronger than ever. Human to human has cold walls, slightly asocial behaviour is normal (in Japan and other highly (or lowly) advanced countries issues are much stronger and widespread problems). That's not really okay, but when it comes slowly, then it doesn't create big noticeable effect of something that has changed. Tech in general made a big effect in that, but AI is just such a big hit.


I'm pretty sure technology isn't the biggest factor for why people don't connect to those near them. The movement from small communities to big cities seems to be a way more important factor in this. If anything, technology has made it easier for a lot of people to talk to like-minded people.



> Too bad media mostly praises the advances in that and that's imo just really silly, besides rare cases of scientific usage or other mostly aright things. So why AI is such a big thing even for normal people? Do we really like that stuff so much for no reason, besides natural desire to be lazy?


AI is novel, so it's currently "cool". It'll pass.


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## ae1905

Ford Patents Driverless Police Car That Ambushes Lawbreakers Using AI  (washingtonpost.com)


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## The red spirit

Pifanjr said:


> For roads AI can actually be very beneficial. They're quickly getting to the point where they perform better than humans, mostly because humans simply suck at driving.


Oh you triggering car enthusiast in me.




Pifanjr said:


> Is being able to drive your own car really so important to being alive?


Definitely yes. 




Pifanjr said:


> Do you feel like your life is worth less because you're not planting your own crops


That's normal in villages and I did that last year. So if you are lazy cunt, then yeah, life sucks. 



Pifanjr said:


> hunting your own meat or washing your clothes by hand? Automation doesn't take away the point of living.


Those later two are more legit statements for me. Yet I would say that automation does really take away some things out of our lives. You say it's alright, I won't agree with you, because I think differently. What we do, shapes what we are. Therefore we should at least put some effort in what we do, just like we put into survival. I would gladly see automation in some really human wasting stuff, not the things of culture. Automation is a tool for us, not a replacement for us.




Pifanjr said:


> I doubt it will ever go that far. Maybe for some people, but a lot of people are already realizing that more technology isn't making them happier.


But the question is, maybe we already went that far? Looking at some places on Earth, it's pretty clear that they are horribly polluted and barely are enough for humans to survive. So we only need spaceship and Wall-Es. Of course that's rare, but still.




Pifanjr said:


> I don't think AI is going to be that important in everyday life, except for the few parts of our lives where automation makes a big difference (like self-driving cars).


Seriously stop with your self-driving cars, they are cancer.




Pifanjr said:


> I'm pretty sure technology isn't the biggest factor for why people don't connect to those near them. The movement from small communities to big cities seems to be a way more important factor in this.


Ever heard of kitchen meetings in eastern Europe? They were a thing when neighbours came to you to talk with each other. Mostly after fall of USSR. That existed and I participated in those too. Not a lot, but sometimes. They became a tradition of everyday life, but sadly is going extinct.




Pifanjr said:


> If anything, technology has made it easier for a lot of people to talk to like-minded people.


Also introduced never seen problems too



Pifanjr said:


> AI is novel, so it's currently "cool". It'll pass.


[/QUOTE]
Novelty? This hasn't been novelty since early 00s. This is old crap and hasn't improved much. It should just die out as being useless and not innovative thing.


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## The red spirit

@Pifanjr

If you think that driving AI in cars is okay, then I have reasons why it's not. Please have at least 2 hours to watch it:

1)




Obviously Akio doesn't give a shit about dying. He loves to drive his car and it's very important in his life

2)http://ww2.cartooncrazy.net/watch/ex-driver-episode-1-english-dubbed/

Here's a glimpse of our so beloved driving AI future. I can say it fucking sucks. Sure it's very popular to think that shit will go wrong without driver, but it can be true, especially when we know that computer viruses are so widespread and so many people don't even know about them, until shit happens. Also hackers everywhere ready to make your day much worse than it should be.

3)




This is so ironic

4)There are people like that....






...who can't live without drifting

5)http://personalitycafe.com/isfp-for...ar-driving-thread-perc-eurobeat-included.html

Obviously you would get hate for that there too


And you say that AI is fine and (probably) should replace human in that task. Oh you know nothing m8. It doesn't matter if people suck at driving, what matters is how they feel when they drive. Some don't give a shit, but some can't live without it. And government thinking about safety as top priority is sort of trying to make communism in ethical things. We know how that is bad and shouldn't be done. Even worse is when some people like you think it's okay for AI to replace human factor from such things, then the minority (which is pretty big) suffers. Also people hate things are doing something for them and they have no control of that. In Murica it's normal to drive cars with automatic trannies, in Europe you can receive lots of hate. It's technically better to have electric cars, but so many people love combustion cars. Hybrids are hated so much, yet they are technically better. Safer cars are better, but design flaws (fat interiors, weight, fat exteriors) of them are something that people hate. So many good things people hate and I see why. Because people like to feel the car, enjoy it's raw experience, connect to it, understand it and feel comfortable in it. Replacing human in driver's position is one of the worst things that could be done for such a direct experience. It shouldn't be airbag to protect your ass, it should your skills protecting you from disaster. It's not traction control, lots of buttons and screens that make you connect to your tool, those are only things that make you worse at that. People trust more something that they can do, instead of someone else doing shit for them. Driverless cars will probably never could offer such luxury. Car manufacturers barely introduced anything new in cars that is somewhat important in its raw capabilities. Actually they made it worse as so many cars became much heavier, filled with shit ton of nerd carp. Evolution is stagnating and only things that are being introduced are LEDs, screens, lots of buttons, horrible car exterior designs, some software, replacements for things that are superior, moar plastic. Look man, I totally can't agree with you here. Driverless cars, at least to me, will never look good. I have spent a lots of time in studying about cars, their history, how they work and their evolution. They are not really getting much better anymore and we are actually receiving truly horrendous things, mostly because so many people don't give a shit and it makes money anyway. Especially in modern times so many things are becoming retarded that it is almost like a need to resist these horrible times. It's not a fact and don't take it as one. It's purely my feelings that I strongly feel. They are somewhat based on logic, but that's just dry and irrelevant. I judge because I think it's alright to do that. Especially when by definition judging is a process when we choose what's right and wrong. So please no hate for my opinion.


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## Pifanjr

@The red spirit, what if you could still drive a car yourself on a circuit?

I understand that there are downsides to driverless cars, but the question is whether they are worse than the downsides of driverfull(?) cars, most notably the millions of accidents each year.


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## The red spirit

Pifanjr said:


> @The red spirit, what if you could still drive a car yourself on a circuit?


That's definitely a move that pressures normal cars into being obsolete. I'm not saying that you should drive like maniac in streets, but having a direct feeling of your own transportation tool shouldn't disappear. And there's way too many years of improvement until driverless cars could match the capabilities of good driver.




Pifanjr said:


> I understand that there are downsides to driverless cars, but the question is whether they are worse than the downsides of driverfull(?) cars, most notably the millions of accidents each year.


Could you say some of those downsides? Because biggest of it isn't the car's fault, but the driver's. I have read that 95% accidents are caused by driver or poor decision making.

I could rant a lot about how bad is when your car is as heavy as tractor and on top of that is obese, while inside isn't spacious. It's all about inertia and bad visibility. Just before that I would want to know your opinion.


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## Pifanjr

The red spirit said:


> Could you say some of those downsides? Because biggest of it isn't the car's fault, but the driver's. I have read that 95% accidents are caused by driver or poor decision making.


The driver is exactly the part of the car a driverless car is supposed to be improving on though.


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## The red spirit

Pifanjr said:


> The driver is exactly the part of the car a driverless car is supposed to be improving on though.


There should be more education and less stupid laws like you can drive at age 16. 16 year old is far from trustworthy person. 

But besides driver to me it appeared like you wanted to say something about cars themselves.

I can say that today's trends are bad for safety. Now cars care very big, heavy and some stupid stuff like crossovers, crossover-coupes, incapable of offroading SUVs exist. Also manufacturers don't seem to care about weight center height much. All of these are bad for safety in every way possible. On top of that many cars have obese pillars, that truly impair visibility. Digital speedometers will never be as good as analog ones. Now emergency wheels either don't exist or are small. That smallness truly impairs safety in emergency. Sure it's rare, but still. Lots of new gadgets also don't help to safety. They are distractions. Imo it's especially bad when there's integrated hands free functionality. That's one of the biggest distractions imaginable to me. Super bright car bulbs or LEDs are okay for driver, bad for others. They truly tend to blind much more than the older ones. For the end I would want to mention big grilles that in most cases are oversized and neither help aerodynamics, neither help safety and personally I find them being ugly as hell. Barely nothing truly good was made for safety in the last decade and actually made worse. 

In terms of good cars for enjoyability, USA, South Korea and UK really stepped up in this game. Most disappointing are German and Japanese cages. Sure they are probably fast, but rarely anything from them is affordable or looks good.


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## ae1905

Airbus’ Self-Flying Taxi Drone Takes First Flight By Lauren Sigfusson | February 2, 2018


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## ae1905

https://www.scientificamerican.com/video/a-mini-magnetic-all-terrain-robot/


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## ae1905

Tesla will create 'virtual power plant' with 50,000 Australian homes
https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/04/tesla-creates-virtual-power-plant-with-50000-australian-homes/


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## ae1905

engadget.com Intel unveils smart glasses that you might want to wear


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## ae1905

blog.usejournal.com What Really Happened with Vista: An Insider’s Retrospective


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## ae1905

Former Google/Facebook/Mozilla Employees Will Fight Addictive Technologies  (qz.com)


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## ae1905

New Digital Technology Can, in Some Circumstances, Make Businesses Less Productive  (bloomberg.com)


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## ae1905

https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/chemistry-may-yield-lucrative-use-for-wasted-methane/


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## ae1905

https://www.engadget.com/2018/02/07/deepheart-diabetes-cardiogram-ai/


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## ae1905

https://www.scientificamerican.com/...-speeding-bullet-mdash-it-rsquo-s-super-wood/


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## ae1905

Hilarious (and Terrifying?) Ways Algorithms Have Outsmarted Their Creators  (popularmechanics.com)


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## Pifanjr

ae1905 said:


> Hilarious (and Terrifying?) Ways Algorithms Have Outsmarted Their Creators  (popularmechanics.com)


The original PDF mentions a case I read about in The Science of Discworld, but haven't been able to find myself when searching for it on Google. I think it's one of the best examples of the power of evolution.


* *





This off-loading is similar to seminal work by Adrian Thompson in evolving real-world electronic
circuits [86]. In Thompson’s experiment, an EA evolved the connectivity of a reconfigurable Field
Programmable Gate Area (FPGA) chip, with the aim of producing circuits that could distinguish between
a high-frequency and a lower-frequency square wave signal. After 5, 000 generations of evolution, a perfect
solution was found that could discriminate between the waveforms. This was a hoped-for result, and not
truly surprising in itself. However, upon investigation, the evolved circuits turned out to be extremely
unconventional. The circuit had evolved to work only in the specific temperature conditions in the lab, and
exploited manufacturing peculiarities of the particular FPGA chip used for evolution. Furthermore, when
attempting to analyze the solution, Thompson disabled all circuit elements that were not part of the main
powered circuit, assuming that disconnected elements would have no effect on behavior. However, he
discovered that performance degraded after such pruning! Evolution had learned to leverage some type of
subtle electromagnetic coupling, something a human designer would not have considered (or perhaps even
have known how to leverage).


----------



## ae1905

engadget.com Floating calcium 'sun shield' could protect the Great Barrier Reef


----------



## The red spirit

Best tech story:
Besides Intel and AMD, there is third x86 cpu maker, that is still alive. It's VIA and they are making Zhaoxin processors. Sure they are unknown and all (yet they were famous in early 00s), but it's a big step for them. 

Article: 
VIA and Zhaoxin ZX- family of x86 processors roadmap shared - CPU - News - HEXUS.net

Hell, they are even thinking of catching up AMD. Too bad their market seems to be China. Anyway, long live VIA!


----------



## ae1905

An Up-Close Look At the Parker Solar Probe -- the Spacecraft That Will Skim the Sun's Surface (arstechnica.com)


----------



## ae1905

Microsoft Is 'Demoting' Windows for the Cloud, Says CNN (cnn.com)


----------



## ae1905

Adobe Is Helping Some 60 Companies Track People Across Devices (neowin.net)


----------



## ae1905

A Struggling Town Is Reviving Itself With... Geocaching  (vice.com)


----------



## ae1905

engadget.com Google equips school buses with WiFi for homework in rural areas


----------



## ae1905

Move Over Moore's Law, Make Way For Huang's Law  (ieee.org)


----------



## ae1905

engadget.com $20,000 mail drone takes flight -- and hits a wall


----------



## ae1905

*Apple Working on Touchless Control and Curved iPhone Screen  (bloomberg.com)*


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

Microsoft Touts Breakthrough In Making Chatbots More Conversational (windowscentral.com)


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

MIT's wearable device can 'hear' the words you say in your headSubvocalization signals are detected by electrodes and turned into words using AI.


https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/06/mit-wearable-silent-words/


----------



## ae1905

Microsoft will bring 64-bit app support to ARM-based PCs in MayThe SDK will be available when the Build developer conference rolls around.


https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/05/microsoft-windows-arm-pc-64-bit-sdk-build/


----------



## ae1905

Web standard brings password-free sign-ins to virtually any siteUse your fingerprint reader or camera in a wide variety of browsers.


https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/10/fido-w3c-web-authentication/


----------



## ae1905

You won't have to sign for credit card purchases much longerThey won't completely go away, but it's a start.

https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/09/us-credit-cards-will-no-longer-require-signatures/


----------



## ae1905

Apple warns Mac users that 32-bit apps will soon stop working You'll see an alert if you open an app that needs upgrading.



https://www.engadget.com/2018/04/12/apple-mac-32-bit-app-warning/


----------



## ae1905

Researchers Devise a Way To Generate Provably Random Numbers Using Quantum Mechanics  (newatlas.com)


----------



## ae1905

World's First Electrified Road For Charging Vehicles Opens In Sweden (theguardian.com)


----------



## ae1905

Cops Around the Country Can Now Unlock iPhones, Records Show (vice.com)


----------



## ae1905

scientificamerican.com Can AI Really Solve Facebook's Problems?


----------



## ae1905

engadget.com Google AI experiment has you talking to books


----------



## ae1905

engadget.com Google made an AR microscope that can help detect cancer


----------



## ae1905

engadget.com Nike's 3D-printed textiles make running shoes even lighter


----------



## ae1905

NASA's Got a Plan For a 'Galactic Positioning System' To Save Astronauts Lost in Space  (space.com)


----------



## ae1905

engadget.com Google's Safe Browsing now comes integrated into Android apps


----------



## ae1905

MIT Discovers Way To Mass-Produce Graphene In Large Sheets  (inhabitat.com)


----------



## Pifanjr

Facebook removes 1.5 billion users from protection of EU privacy law


----------



## ae1905

*Russia Launches Floating Nuclear Power Plant That's Head To the Arctic*


----------



## ae1905

*Atmospheric harvesters will enable arid nations to drink from thin air*


----------



## ae1905

*Graphene Makes Concrete Twice As Strong While Reducing Carbon Emissions*


----------



## ae1905

*Researchers Want To Turn Your Entire House Into a Co-Processor Using the Local Wi-Fi Signal*


----------



## ae1905

*This is Uber's first air taxi prototype*


----------



## ae1905

*A Hangover Pill? Tests on Drunk Mice Show Promise*


----------



## ae1905

*AI Re-Creates Activity Patterns That Brain Cells Use in Navigation*


----------



## Asmodaeus

https://foreignpolicy.com/2010/06/28/the-geopolitics-of-the-iphone/


----------



## ae1905

*AI Can't Reason Why*


----------



## ae1905

*Tesla Unveils New Large Powerpack Project For Grid Balancing In Europe*


----------



## ae1905

*Facebook and Qualcomm are bringing super-fast WiFi to cities*


----------



## ae1905

*New Toronto Declaration Calls On Algorithms To Respect Human Rights*


----------



## ae1905

*Robots can learn tasks by watching and mimicking humans*


----------



## Asmodaeus

https://cpianalysis.org/2018/04/10/the-historical-geopolitics-of-the-chinese-ai-initiative/


----------



## ae1905

*'Impossible' EM drive may actually be impossible after all*


----------



## Pifanjr

https://techcrunch.com/2018/05/25/f...irst-gdpr-complaints-over-forced-consent/amp/

I had to make a script to delete personal information from canceled accounts for one of the clients of our company. Got it done yesterday, just in time.

Today I found out I deleted a little bit too much, so hopefully the backup I have is up to date enough to restore the lost data...


----------



## ae1905

*Gut Sensor Could Monitor Health -- and Beam Results to a Smartphone*


----------



## ae1905

*Companies Are Using California Homes As Batteries To Power the Grid*


----------



## Pifanjr

On the recently signed FOSTA-SESTA bills:
When Leaders Who Don't Understand The Web Try To Control It | Cracked.com

sources mentioned in the article:
PROPOSED FEDERAL TRAFFICKING LEGISLATION HAS SURPRISING OPPONENTS: ADVOCATES WHO WORK WITH TRAFFICKING VICTIMS
After Craigslist personals go dark, sex workers fear what's next
Hours After FOSTA Passes, Reddit Bans 'Escorts' and 'SugarDaddy' Communities
Major Tech Companies Have Stopped Fighting an Internet Sex Trafficking Bill
SESTA May Encourage the Adoption of Broken Automated Filtering Technologies

These bills make sites responsible for what users put on it, which means sites now have to use bots to filter user content, but the technology to properly filter content does not exist yet.


----------



## ae1905

*Intel Launches Optane DIMMs Up To 512GB*


----------



## ae1905

*Nvidia Debuts Cloud Server Platform To Unify AI and High-Performance Computing*


----------



## ae1905

*Samsung Won't Be Forced To Update Old Smartphones*


----------



## ae1905

*Arm Unveils Next-Gen 76-Series Mobile CPU, GPU Cores*


----------



## ae1905

*Google's In-House Incubator Made a Waze-Like App For the New York City Subway*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple is already working on custom Mac processors in 'secret' lab*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft has discussed buying code giant GitHub*


----------



## ae1905

*Fiat Chrysler will launch over 30 EVs and hybrids by 2022*


----------



## ae1905

*NVIDIA wants to power intelligent robots with Jetson Xavier*


----------



## ae1905

*Doctors Hail World First as Woman's Advanced Breast Cancer is Eradicated*


----------



## ae1905

*Intel Hits 50 Years and Its CPUs Hit 5.0 GHz*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft’s deep sea data center is now operational*


----------



## ae1905

*Emirates Planes Could Be Going Windowless*


----------



## ae1905

*Can An 'OS For Electricity' Double the Efficiency of the Grid?*


----------



## ae1905

*How E-commerce With Drone Delivery is Taking Flight in China*


----------



## ae1905

*Google's Free Wifi is Becoming a Way of Life in India*


----------



## ae1905

*Netherlands Will Welcome Its First Community of 3D-Printed Homes*


----------



## ae1905

*US Once Again Boasts the World's Fastest Supercomputer*


----------



## ae1905

*Secret Pentagon AI Program Hunts Hidden Nuclear Missiles*


----------



## ae1905

*Powder Pulls Drinking Water from Desert Air*


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft To Stop Offering Support For Windows 7, Windows 8.1, Old Surface Devices in Forums*


----------



## ae1905

*The One-Name Email, a Silicon Valley Status Symbol, Is Wreaking Havoc*


----------



## ae1905

*MIT experts pioneer a way to recover drinking water from power plants*


----------



## ae1905

*Two Quantum Computing Bills Are Coming To Congress*


----------



## ae1905

To Hit Climate Goals, Bill Gates and His Billionaire Friends Are Betting on Energy Storage  (qz.com)


----------



## ae1905

*China's Ambitions To Power the World's Electric Cars Took a Huge Leap Forward This Week*


----------



## ae1905

*MIT's AI Uses Radio Signals To See People Through Walls*


----------



## ae1905

*Nearly Half the Patents on Marine Genes Belong To Just One Company*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft is Working on Technology That Would Eliminate Cashiers and Checkout Lines From Stores, Says Report*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft is using AI to make Windows 10 updates smoother*


----------



## ae1905

*That Vision Thing: New AI System Can Imagine What It Hasn't Seen*


----------



## ae1905

*World's largest ARM supercomputer is headed to a nuclear security lab*


----------



## ae1905

*New IBM Robot Holds Its Own In a Debate With a Human*


----------



## ae1905

ae1905 said:


> *New IBM Robot Holds Its Own In a Debate With a Human*



out-arguing a human is not bad but contradicting an intp would be more impressive


----------



## ae1905

*A startup raised $40 million to catapult rockets into space — an idea Jeff Bezos once said had 'all sorts of practical problems'*


----------



## ae1905

*Tiny MIT chip helps bee-sized drones navigate*


----------



## ae1905

*Privacy browser Brave pays 'crypto tokens' for watching its ads*


----------



## ae1905

*The Weather Channel's mixed reality broadcasts debut tomorrow*


----------



## ae1905

*Organs Grown to Order*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft Employees Protest Work With ICE, as Tech Industry Mobilizes Over Immigration*


----------



## ae1905

*Researchers Invent a Way to Speed Intel's 3D XPoint Computer Memory*


----------



## ae1905

*Humans Can Now Correct Robots With Brainwaves*


----------



## ae1905

*Burger Robot Startup Opens First Restaurant*


----------



## ae1905

*The World's Smallest Computer Can Fit on the Tip of a Grain of Rice*


----------



## ae1905

*Researchers Fish Yellowcake Uranium From the Sea With a Piece of Yarn*


----------



## ae1905

*'Snapdragon 1000' chip may be designed for PCs from the ground up*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft Quietly Cuts Off Windows 7 Support For Older Intel Computers*


----------



## ae1905

*Navy backs 'omniphobic' coatings to help ships travel farther*


----------



## ae1905

*DARPA wheels change from tires to tracks without stopping*


----------



## ae1905

*Google Opens Its Human-Sounding Duplex AI To Public Testing*


----------



## ae1905

*Scientists Develop Thermal Camouflage That Can Dupe Infrared Cameras*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple, Samsung Settle After Fighting Seven Years in Court*


----------



## ae1905

*You may soon store your entire media collection on one SD card*


----------



## Pifanjr

*Everything you need to know about the RAMpage security exploit*


----------



## ae1905

*DARPA Invests $100 Million In a Silicon Compiler*


----------



## ae1905

*'Why You Should Not Use Google Cloud'*


----------



## ae1905

*Is Google's Promotion of HTTPS Misguided?*


----------



## ae1905

*UK Police Plan To Deploy 'Staggeringly Inaccurate' Facial Recognition in London*


----------



## ae1905

*BYD Claims New Battery Factory Will Be 'Largest In the World'*


----------



## The red spirit

Rotten Apple stories yet again. Poor design for lots of cash. Nothing new here, just new problem.


----------



## ae1905

*NASA will publicly test quiet supersonic technology in November*


----------



## ae1905

*Sydney Airport Launches Face Scan Check-In Trials*


----------



## ae1905

*Samsung, Arm Team Up: Expect New Mobile Chipset Faster Than 3GHz*


----------



## ae1905

*Google's Controversial Voice Assistant Could Talk Its Way Into Call Centers*


----------



## ae1905

*Scientists Break Quantum Entanglement Record At 18 Qubits*


----------



## ae1905

*MIT researchers automate drug design with machine learning*


----------



## ae1905

*Crystals could be the answer to keeping our gadgets cool*


----------



## ae1905

*Kenya To Use Alphabet's Balloons For Rural Internet*


----------



## ae1905

*As Computer Vendors Focus On Making Their Laptops Thinner and Lighter, They Are Increasingly Neglecting Performance Needs of Their Customers*


----------



## ae1905

*Google is Building 'Virtual Agents' To Handle Call Centers' Grunt Work*


Google is officially building AI technology to replace some of the work in call centers, the company announced at its Cloud Next conference today, confirming earlier reports.


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*Scientists Perfect Technique To Create Most Dense, Solid-State Memory in History that Could Soon Exceed the Capabilities of Current Hard Drives By 1,000 Times*


----------



## ae1905

*Opera Browser Raises $115 Million In Its Stock Market Debut*


----------



## ae1905

*Can Hoover Dam Become a Giant $3B Battery?*


----------



## ae1905

*Samsung's 'Unbreakable' OLED Display Gets Certified*


----------



## ae1905

*Researchers use Google Glass to help kids with autism*


----------



## ae1905

*Why iPhone and Android Phone Prices Will Get Even Higher*


----------



## ae1905

*ISPs' Listed Speeds Drop Up To 41 Percent After UK Requires Accurate Advertising*
[advertising] 8/6/2018, 4:43:00 PM

An anonymous reader quotes a report from Ars Technica: Most broadband providers in the UK "have been forced to cut the headline speeds they advertise when selling deals" because of new UK rules requiring accurate speed claims, according to a consumer advocacy group. "Eleven major suppliers have had to cut the advertised speed of some of their deals, with the cheapest deals dropping by 41 percent," the group wrote last week.


----------



## ae1905

*You no longer need a card to get cash from nearly every Chase ATM (JPM)*


----------



## ae1905

*Samsung is building a high-speed 4TB SSD for everyone*


----------



## ae1905

*West Virginia will try mobile voting for troops serving abroad*


----------



## ae1905

*The Ultra-Pure, Super-Secret Sand That Makes Your Phone Possible*


----------



## ae1905

*Engineers Teach a Drone To Herd Birds Away From Airports Autonomously*


----------



## ae1905




----------



## Pifanjr

ae1905 said:


> *Engineers Teach a Drone To Herd Birds Away From Airports Autonomously*


I wonder how long it will take for the birds to understand the drone is harmless and they can ignore it.


----------



## Tropes

Pifanjr said:


> I wonder how long it will take for the birds to understand the drone is harmless and they can ignore it.


Possibly never, and it might be possible to integrate various sounds and bird calls to help it.

If we use drones like that to herd birds from high danger areas - like airports or industrial areas or even city centers were it isn't uncommon for them to have issues with glass buildings and we so consistently enough for a long period of time, it might even create an evolutionary pressure, favoring birds that pay attention to drones over birds that do not.



ae1905 said:


>


I can't be the only one who saw this design and thought it would be programmed to push/tug on things, right? If you are going to roll around on my table you better help set up dinner.


----------



## Tropes

Personally what excites me about the ML1 as a dev' is the detailed level of built in hand tracking software. It will be unfortunate if doesn't gain the user base because of graphical glitches and FOV issues.


----------



## ae1905

*Intel's first 'ruler' SSD holds 32TB*


----------



## ae1905

Pifanjr said:


> I wonder how long it will take for the birds to understand the drone is harmless and they can ignore it.




did they ever figure out the scarecrow?


----------



## ae1905

*Chromebooks May Get Apple Boot Camp-Like Windows 10 Dual Boot With 'Campfire'*


----------



## Pifanjr

ae1905 said:


> did they ever figure out the scarecrow?


Depends on the scarecrow apparently.
Do Scarecrows Actually Work? | Mental Floss


----------



## Tropes

Pifanjr said:


> Depends on the scarecrow apparently.
> Do Scarecrows Actually Work? | Mental Floss


Flailing models you say...

Sounds like they are using high tech lasers when all they really need is this:





(I mean, this is technically technology. Someone invented it)


----------



## sanari

ae1905 said:


>


I read a news article about this robot. I think it is adorable, and I would like one.

I have been searching for a robot for my home. Just something I can chat with occasionally. Or teach.


----------



## DoIHavetohaveaUserName

https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/12/17680384/intels-9th-generation-processors-october-release-date-rumors


----------



## ae1905

*A Community-Run ISP Is the Highest Rated Broadband Company In America*


----------



## ae1905

Sangam swadik said:


> https://www.theverge.com/2018/8/12/...ration-processors-october-release-date-rumors




amd has been doing 16 cores, 32 threads for a year now (threadripper) and they just announced 32 cores, 64 threads (threadripper 2)


if you need massive multitasking amd, not intel, has been the way to go


----------



## ae1905

*Scientists Find Way To Make Mineral Which Can Remove CO2 From Atmosphere*


----------



## ae1905

Engineers Say They've Created Way To Detect Weapons Using Wi-Fi  (gizmodo.com)


----------



## ae1905

*ARM says its next processors will outperform Intel laptop chips*


----------



## ae1905

*Analysts Say We Are Headed For a Flash Memory Price Crash*


----------



## ae1905

*Baseball Players Want Robots To Be Their Umps*


----------



## ae1905

*China's Xiaomi Announces New Venture To Bring Budget Flagship Smartphones To Over 50 Markets; Announces $300 Handset Featuring Qualcomm's Snapdragon 845*


----------



## sanari

https://www.extremetech.com/extreme...l-intelligence-is-here-and-impala-is-its-name

AI called Impala.


----------



## ae1905

*Senators Demand Voting Machine Vendor Explain Why It Dismisses Researchers Prodding Its Devices*

Four US senators, members of the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, sent a letter on Wednesday to Election Systems and Software (ES&S), the largest voting machine vendor in the US, asking for clarifications on why the vendor is trying to discourage independent security reviews of its products.


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*Intel's Latest 8th-Gen Core Processors Focus on Improving Wi-Fi Speeds*


----------



## Pifanjr

Computers Can Now Make You The Greatest Dancer In The World | Cracked.com

Direct link to paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1808.07371.pdf


----------



## ae1905

*Should We Dim the Skies to Save the World?*


----------



## sanari

Neuroweapons!!

https://www.yahoo.com/news/scientists-say-neuroweapons-behind-cuba-attacks-170009735.html


----------



## Tropes

The red spirit said:


> MS doesn't make sense. They literally gave away 10 for free and now for people, who bought 7 they make them pay again.


I suspect what has happened is that while individuals users upgraded to 10 during the free upgrade period or have simply bought new devices with 10 already installed since then, a lot of organizations did not, and that's what they want to cash in on.

At least that is the case for my area - municipality offices, welfare offices, public schools, hospitals, the police station, the firefighter station & the post office... They are all either running windows 7 or xp. I would guess that is the same for many other places.


----------



## ae1905

*New York State Approves Two Dollar-based Cryptocurrencies*


----------



## ae1905

*Someone With an iMac, iPhone, and iPad Might Soon Need Three Different Headphone Adapters*


----------



## ae1905

*About a Quarter of Rural Americans Say Access To High-Speed Internet Is a Major Problem*


----------



## ae1905

*Engineering Firm Plans To Tow Icebergs From Antarctica To Parched Dubai*


----------



## ae1905

engadget.com *

These robotic 'trees' can turn CO2 into concrete*


----------



## ae1905

*HP’s Metal Jet could be a huge leap for commercial 3D printing*


----------



## The red spirit

Tropes said:


> I suspect what has happened is that while individuals users upgraded to 10 during the free upgrade period or have simply bought new devices with 10 already installed since then, a lot of organizations did not, and that's what they want to cash in on.
> 
> At least that is the case for my area - municipality offices, welfare offices, public schools, hospitals, the police station, the firefighter station & the post office... They are all either running windows 7 or xp. I would guess that is the same for many other places.


And do you think they will pay? It's only some updates what you would be paying for, yet you can use 7 without updates for free as I understand.

Anyway, it looks like they want something. They made good money from 7, they saw that masterpieces like XP can last a long time. It makes sense that they are trying to make more money out of 7 for special purpose computer users, who don't upgrade for their own reasons, but what was the point of forcing 10 and literally giving it away for free? That really doesn't make sense. This is bothering me a bit. Some people said that MS is going to make 10 as service instead of standalone software. I thought it was bullshit or conspiracy. It still didn't happen. I'm not sure if making 7 paid service is just one isolated move or some sort of bigger strategy, but really it's weird that they wanted people to get 10 so desperately and then they make 7 paid. 

BTW no one should be using XP at this time, I don't care for reasons, but for services that you mentioned they should definitely upgrade. I totally don't get people, who stay with 7 and don't get 10. Not even when upgrade is free. XP usage at least can be explained with compatibility of archaic software, but either way they should upgrade software and XP, it's not really safe.


----------



## Tropes

The red spirit said:


> And do you think they will pay? It's only some updates what you would be paying for


Possibly - security is a strong trigger word to get organizations to pay. Out of those who won't, once there is a security breach they start spending money on security updates, even when those updates have nothing to do with the security breach.



The red spirit said:


> what was the point of forcing 10 and literally giving it away for free?


Probably to push cortana, edge and bing in an attempt to compete with alphabet apple & fb in the other market (the user data one).



The red spirit said:


> BTW no one should be using XP at this time, I don't care for reasons, but for services that you mentioned they should definitely upgrade. I totally don't get people, who stay with 7 and don't get 10. Not even when upgrade is free. XP usage at least can be explained with compatibility of archaic software, but either way they should upgrade software and XP, it's not really safe.


You might not care, but there are many good reasons why organizations don't like upgrading:

- Your users are stuck in their ways and aren't particularly sevvy, if you work in an IT department and upgrade an OS you absolutely know you are going to get hundreds of stupid calls about "where's the internet?" because an icon has changed or something isn't in the exact same place it used to be.
- Many computers might use specific management software that take over the screen and do everything through and approach their computers like terminals for the specific use without ever interacting with the OS except during reboot. CCTVs systems with PTZ cam controls, snail mail & delivery management systems, police filing systems, even cashiers. Upgrading in such cases raises question of software compatibility, and often offers no real benefits.
- Many such systems run on local networks without direct internet access for security reasons. Newer OS's tend to be more problematic about it, windows 10 in particular, I don't know if it even has an avenue for upgrading and registering a user without an internet connection.


----------



## The red spirit

Tropes said:


> Possibly - security is a strong trigger word to get organizations to pay. Out of those who won't, once there is a security breach they start spending money on security updates, even when those updates have nothing to do with the security breach.


I think that those, who keep 7 in services mentioned, don't care about OS much and basically unless computer stops workings they won't upgrade. I really don't have high hopes that they will pay money for security updates or shit.




Tropes said:


> Probably to push cortana, edge and bing in an attempt to compete with alphabet apple & fb in the other market (the user data one).


But what's the point, they are free things and MS should know that all their attempts stink. Nobody uses Bing, they change it to Google. Edge was nice at launch, but due to lack of major feature upgrades it's dying. I really don't think that digital assistants will ever gain much traction, even perfectly working ones. Cortana is competent, but there's still lack of desire for such feature.




Tropes said:


> You might not care, but there are many good reasons why organizations don't like upgrading


I would listen to good reasons, besides saving money or they didn't know what Windows 10 is.




Tropes said:


> - Your users are stuck in their ways and aren't particularly sevvy, if you work in an IT department and upgrade an OS you absolutely know you are going to get hundreds of stupid calls about "where's the internet?" because an icon has changed or something isn't in the exact same place it used to be.


I don't really think it counts as legit reason. Workers should know how to do such tasks in various OSes. Windows 7 and 10 are almost identical in this aspect. You press same stuff. IT staff can say that they installed fancy skin called Windows 10 and some panic could be prevented.



Tropes said:


> - Many computers might use specific management software that take over the screen and do everything through and approach their computers like terminals for the specific use without ever interacting with the OS except during reboot. CCTVs systems with PTZ cam controls, snail mail & delivery management systems, police filing systems, even cashiers. Upgrading in such cases raises question of software compatibility, and often offers no real benefits.


Basically Windows 7 software works totally fine in 10. It's not the same jump as it was from Windows 95 to XP or from XP to 7. 




Tropes said:


> - Many such systems run on local networks without direct internet access for security reasons. Newer OS's tend to be more problematic about it, windows 10 in particular, I don't know if it even has an avenue for upgrading and registering a user without an internet connection.


You can add users perfectly fine with net or without it. There are such things called Windows Server or Linux (same applies for quote above).


----------



## Tropes

The red spirit said:


> But what's the point, they are free things and MS should know that all their attempts stink. Nobody uses Bing, they change it to Google. Edge was nice at launch, but due to lack of major feature upgrades it's dying. I really don't think that digital assistants will ever gain much traction, even perfectly working ones. Cortana is competent, but there's still lack of desire for such feature.


Competent? Cortana responded to the command "mute pc" by bringing up the bing search results to "mute pc"... I wouldn't call it competent. 

nevertheless, they are developers working on all of these in the hopes they'll get used and will be competitive. This isn't without precedent - there was once a time when IE brought netscape to the ground, when MSN pushed ICQ and AOL aside, they have had success stories, their OS included. 



The red spirit said:


> Workers should know how to do such tasks in various OSes.


That's optimistic - I once heard the accountant in the office next to mine shout "WTF EVERYTHING IS CHANGED, WHAT DO I DO?" because her new assistant changed her background image. 

Regarding the software compatibility - yes it turned out to be compatible, but people weren't sure about it before updating.

Regarding registering users offline - I would need to check on that -but from experience i can tell you that if I am not sure if it's doable, the IT department in my workplace is probably clueless.


----------



## The red spirit

Tropes said:


> Competent? Cortana responded to the command "mute pc" by bringing up the bing search results to "mute pc"... I wouldn't call it competent.


Google translate is one of the best, but it's full of shit too. Cortana as useless as it could be is still rather alright. 




Tropes said:


> nevertheless, they are developers working on all of these in the hopes they'll get used and will be competitive. This isn't without precedent - there was once a time when IE brought netscape to the ground, when MSN pushed ICQ and AOL aside, they have had success stories, their OS included.


But now it's not those times. They could have made Edge awesome, but they didn't. At launch it was kinda awesome, but now not. It lacked any decent further development, but had lots of potential. Especially after that Windows battery drain fiasco. They just needed to come in and hold strong advantage, but did that happen? Nope. I have nothing against free software and wanting to be the best, but really they miss opportunities and they just can't keep up. As consumer I want to see real product working great. Edge is fine, but is below average internet browser.




Tropes said:


> That's optimistic - I once heard the accountant in the office next to mine shout "WTF EVERYTHING IS CHANGED, WHAT DO I DO?" because her new assistant changed her background image.


No offense, but really how did she became an accountant? That's horrendous, I would think of firing her.




Tropes said:


> Regarding the software compatibility - yes it turned out to be compatible, but people weren't sure about it before updating.


Honestly, it was quite obvious at least to me that 10 is just new 8.1 and 8.1 was perfectly compatible with 7 software. IT staff could just install their software on one PC for testing purposes and try that out. it wouldn't be too hard and in worst case scenario for company one lost Windows license cost isn't a huge loss.




Tropes said:


> Regarding registering users offline - I would need to check on that -but from experience i can tell you that if I am not sure if it's doable, the *IT department in my workplace is probably clueless.*


They need to go back to punch card times...


----------



## Tropes

The red spirit said:


> They could have made Edge awesome, but they didn't. At launch it was kinda awesome, but now not. It lacked any decent further development, but had lots of potential. Especially after that Windows battery drain fiasco. They just needed to come in and hold strong advantage, but did that happen? Nope. I have nothing against free software and wanting to be the best, but really they miss opportunities and they just can't keep up. As consumer I want to see real product working great. Edge is fine, but is below average internet browser.


It is a below average browser, but I don't think they set that as a goal. I mean, I'd imagine they are trying to make a winning product, but just aren't doing the right things to do so.

Honestly I don't see an opportunity for a major shift happening right now, but right now would be the time to start developing and taking a little bit more risks. ATM a tiny shift in loading efficiency isn't going to do much in terms of competitiveness, and the interface and design for web browsing the way we do now was pretty much optimized - there isn't much room for taking risks with crowd-winning features. But the fact we've heard several declarations of games in production for the next console generation means that industry insiders are in the know regarding the current state of development of the next generation of gaming consoles, and my bet is that both Sony and Microsoft are going to try to make the big push into VR/AR built into those consoles... All of which can technically run current browsers as floating windows. but none of them are really optimized for the environment. That is a big opportunity for companies that are willing to take risks and experiment. 

Unfortunately neither the accountant nor the IT guys constitute part of my staff, so I can't fire them.


----------



## The red spirit

Tropes said:


> It is a below average browser, but I don't think they set that as a goal. I mean, I'd imagine they are trying to make a winning product, but just aren't doing the right things to do so.


But do you know what it means? Look at AMD for example, especially at pre-Ryzen era AMD. They were trying, but were failing. The thing is that dreams don't matter here. If they are not doing the right things, then they are failing. Of course, everyone wants to be the best, but only the ones, who do right things are the best. And being sometimes the best doesn't count, stability in quality of work is also very important.




Tropes said:


> Honestly I don't see an opportunity for a major shift happening right now, but right now would be the time to start developing and taking a little bit more risks. ATM a tiny shift in loading efficiency isn't going to do much in terms of competitiveness, and the interface and design for web browsing the way we do now was pretty much optimized - there isn't much room for taking risks with crowd-winning features. But the fact we've heard several declarations of games in production for the next console generation means that industry insiders are in the know regarding the current state of development of the next generation of gaming consoles, and my bet is that both Sony and Microsoft are going to try to make the big push into VR/AR built into those consoles...


lol what MS did in VR or AR, they are literally picking snots out of their nose. Sony has VR and AR.




Tropes said:


> Unfortunately neither the accountant nor the IT guys constitute part of my staff, so I can't fire them.


That's sad, because they are really unfit for their job. The saddest thing is that they are in a job they can't do properly and don't feel bad for being s*** in it. I personally wouldn't even think of being in a job I can't do or get some training before taking such job.


----------



## ae1905

*Windows 10 Preview highlights its 'silent' storage assistant*








Ahead of its Windows 10 October update, Microsoft is giving Insiders the jump on Storage Sense: a "silent assistant" that automatically frees up disk space by shifting older, unused, local files online.


----------



## ae1905

*Tech elites are paying $7,000 to freeze stem cells from liposuctioned fat as a 'back up' for a longer life*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple is about to ship its two billionth iOS device*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft is Interrupting Chrome and Firefox Installations To Promote Its Edge Browser in the Newest Windows 10 Build*


----------



## ae1905

*BMW developed a self-driving motorcycle to further its safety efforts*


----------



## ae1905

*Boring Company Approved To Build Futuristic Garage That Would Connect To Underground Commuter Tunnel*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple, Huawei Both Claim First 7nm Smartphone Chips*


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

^

why apple (or anyone else, for that matter) can't build phones in the us


not, that is, until the assembly becomes almost completely automated


----------



## Tropes

ae1905 said:


> *Boring Company Approved To Build Futuristic Garage That Would Connect To Underground Commuter Tunnel*


Wait, just a skate? Not some pod for the car to go into, but just a maglev platform pushing the car directly into a hyperloop, with passengers in a near vacuum environment with nothing but a leaky car to keep the air inside?

I feel like the article is missing some crucial details. Either there is some sort of transfer, or it's only for specific vacuum-certified cars or something...


----------



## ae1905

*Virgin to use eco-friendly jet fuel on commercial flight this October*


----------



## ae1905

ae1905 said:


> *Microsoft is Interrupting Chrome and Firefox Installations To Promote Its Edge Browser in the Newest Windows 10 Build*



*Microsoft Windows U-turn Removes Warning About Installing Chrome, Firefox*

Earlier last week, several users with a new Windows 10 build reported that they were seeing a warning when they attempted to install Chrome or Firefox browser. It turns out, Microsoft has listened to the complaints and is reversing course.


----------



## ae1905

*The Cybersecurity 202: California's Internet of Things cybersecurity bill could lay groundwork for federal action* 

The state is a leader in tech policy.


----------



## wutwutwut

That's pretty interesting.


----------



## ae1905

*Here's the Data Behind Apple's New Heart Monitoring App* 

FDA is reviewing evidence from hundreds of people that used the company’s watch


----------



## ae1905

*The world's first hydrogen train is now in service*


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> ^
> 
> why apple (or anyone else, for that matter) can't build phones in the us
> 
> 
> not, that is, until the assembly becomes almost completely automated


It's cheaper to do so in China and workers there have lower requirements.


----------



## ae1905

*Firefox brings the thrills of web browsing to VR*


----------



## ae1905

*Renault’s EZ-PRO is a workspace, coffee truck and rolling post office*


----------



## ae1905

*Chrome OS Revamp Delivers a New Look and Linux App Support*


----------



## ae1905

*A mind-reading headset lets people fly drones using their thoughts*

A group of people learnt how to pilot drones with their thoughts, using a headset that converts brain waves into flying instructions


----------



## ae1905

*John Hancock Will Include Fitness Tracking In All Life Insurance Policies*

An anonymous reader quotes a report from VentureBeat: John Hancock, one of the oldest and largest North American life insurers, will stop underwriting traditional life insurance and instead sell only interactive policies that track fitness and health data through wearable devices and smartphones, the company said on Wednesday. The move by the 156-year-old insurer, owned by Canada's Manulife Financial, marks a major shift for the company, which unveiled its first interactive life insurance policy in 2015. It is now applying the model across all of its life coverage. Policyholders score premium discounts for hitting exercise targets tracked on wearable devices such as a Fitbit or Apple Watch and get gift cards for retail stores and other perks by logging their workouts and healthy food purchases in an app. In theory, everybody wins, as policyholders are incentivized to adopt healthy habits and insurance companies collect more premiums and pay less in claims if customers live longer.


----------



## ae1905

*Facebook's Dating feature aims to prevent harassment and dick pics*


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*Walmart Is Putting 17,000 Oculus Go Headsets In Its Stores To Help Train Employees In VR*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple Watch ECG Feature Could Take Years To Be Approved In UK*


----------



## ae1905

*Scientists Formulate New Method To Create Low-Cost High Efficiency Solar Cells*


----------



## ae1905

*Arrays of Atoms Emerge As Dark Horse Candidate To Power Quantum Computers*


----------



## ae1905

*Facebook Faces Class-Action Lawsuit Over Massive New Hack*


----------



## ae1905

*Tim Berners-Lee Announces Solid, an Open Source Project Which Would Aim To Decentralize the Web*


----------



## ae1905

*Rechargeable Zinc-Air Battery Nears Commercial Release*


----------



## ae1905

trending?


*HP made a laptop out of leather*




huawei released a phone with a leather back


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*Netflix Eats Up 15% of All Internet Downstream Traffic Worldwide, Study Finds*


----------



## ae1905

*California Governor Jerry Brown Signs a Bill That Bans Bots From Pretending To be Real People*

California governor Jerry Brown signed a bill last week that bans automated accounts, more commonly known as bots, from pretending to be real people in pursuit of selling products or influencing elections.


----------



## ae1905

*DARPA Is Researching Quantized Inertia, a Theory Many Think Is Pseudoscience*


----------



## Tropes

ae1905 said:


> *DARPA Is Researching Quantized Inertia, a Theory Many Think Is Pseudoscience*


I've been thinking about that, or more specifically of James Beacham's "building a particle accelerator around the moon" concept... The core message being that we don't have a complete picture and we don't know where to look to find the next missing piece. It gave me the general impression that we're probably going to have to do just that - not to make advancement in physics wait until we can built planetary megastructures - but rather spend a few years going a little loose exploring theories that come off as pseudoscience, or even hypothesis that don't have theory status, but produce a prediction we can check, most of which will probably be wrong, but we only need to find one which isn't. 

And I am noticing a trend for lot of theories that try to reframe the math but don't make good testable predictions. Multiverse theory isn't testable, the world as a hologram produces nothing testable... Say what you will, Quantized Inertia has testable predictions, it is consistent with known physics but it isn't merely reframing it, it is taking a risk of making assumptions that can be proven correct or incorrect, and now we'll actually know. We need that kind of risk taking in physicists. 

(Which is expansive, but on an institutional level it's not as expansive as the cost of not making further progress)


----------



## ae1905

*The next generation of wireless networking will be called WiFi 6*


----------



## ae1905

*Japan Set to Allow Gene Editing in Human Embryos* 

Draft guidelines permit gene-editing tools for research into early human development, but would discourage manipulation of embryos for reproduction


----------



## ae1905

Tropes said:


> I've been thinking about that, or more specifically of James Beacham's "building a particle accelerator around the moon" concept... The core message being that we don't have a complete picture and we don't know where to look to find the next missing piece. It gave me the general impression that we're probably going to have to do just that - not to make advancement in physics wait until we can built planetary megastructures - but rather spend a few years going a little loose exploring theories that come off as pseudoscience, or even hypothesis that don't have theory status, but produce a prediction we can check, most of which will probably be wrong, but we only need to find one which isn't.
> 
> And I am noticing a trend for lot of theories that try to reframe the math but don't make good testable predictions. Multiverse theory isn't testable, the world as a hologram produces nothing testable... Say what you will, Quantized Inertia has testable predictions, it is consistent with known physics but it isn't merely reframing it, it is taking a risk of making assumptions that can be proven correct or incorrect, and now we'll actually know. We need that kind of risk taking in physicists.
> 
> (Which is expansive, but on an institutional level it's not as expansive as the cost of not making further progress)




$1.6 million is pocket change so there is no downside to darpa's flyer


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft Is Embracing Android As the Mobile Version of Windows*

Microsoft unveiled a bunch of new hardware during a press event last night, but one of the most interesting announcements the company made was their new "Your Phone" app for Windows 10. Basically, the feature will let Android users mirror any app on their device to a Windows 10 desktop. The Verge's Tom Warren writes about how Microsoft is embracing Android as the mobile version of Windows


----------



## ae1905

*New Autonomous Farm Wants To Produce Food Without Human Workers*


----------



## ae1905

*Lockheed Martin Unveils Plans For Huge Reusable Moon Lander For Astronauts*


----------



## ae1905

anyone have experience with this?



*Microsoft's latest Windows 10 update is reportedly wiping user data*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple's New Proprietary Software Locks Kill Independent Repair On New MacBook Pros*


----------



## ae1905

Pifanjr said:


> While that sounds nice, it costs $100 for a screen repair kit, which I'm pretty sure I can get done for maybe $70 at a shop.




parts _and labor _for $70?



call me skeptical


----------



## ae1905

*Uber Planning Fleet of Food Delivery Drones 'As Soon As 2021'*


----------



## ae1905

*Big Brother is Being Increasingly Outsourced To Silicon Valley, Says Report*


----------



## ae1905

*Thousands of Swedes Are Inserting Microchips Under Their Skin*


----------



## ae1905

*In First Ruling of Its Kind, Apple and Samsung Fined For Deliberately Slowing Down Old Phones*


----------



## ae1905

*Samsung is Suing Its Brand Ambassador For Using an iPhone in Public*


----------



## ae1905

*Tech To Blame For Ever-Growing Car Repair Costs, AAA Says*


----------



## ae1905

*20 Top Lawyers Were Beaten By Legal AI*

In a landmark study, 20 top US corporate lawyers with decades of experience in corporate law and contract review were pitted against an AI. Their task was to spot issues in five Non-Disclosure Agreements (NDAs), which are a contractual basis for most business deals. The study, carried out with leading legal academics and experts, saw the LawGeex AI achieve an average 94% accuracy rate, higher than the lawyers who achieved an average rate of 85%. It took the lawyers an average of 92 minutes to complete the NDA issue spotting, compared to 26 seconds for the LawGeex AI. The longest time taken by a lawyer to complete the test was 156 minutes, and the shortest time was 51 minutes.


----------



## ae1905

*Creating the First Quantum Internet*


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> *Samsung is Suing Its Brand Ambassador For Using an iPhone in Public*


That just sounds cruel


----------



## ae1905

*These tiny drones can lift 40 times their own weight*


----------



## ae1905

*McLaren’s $2.25 million Speedtail hybrid boasts 250MPH speeds*


----------



## The red spirit




----------



## ae1905

*China Produces Nano Fibre That Can Lift 160 Elephants - and a Space Elevator?*


----------



## The red spirit




----------



## The red spirit




----------



## ae1905

*UK Announces Digital Services Tax on Tech Giants*


----------



## ae1905

*Your Brain Waves Could Soon Replace Passwords Entirely*


----------



## ae1905

*Forget Better Batteries, Nothing That Exists Or is in Development Can Store Energy as Well, And as Cheaply, as Compressed Air*


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> *Forget Better Batteries, Nothing That Exists Or is in Development Can Store Energy as Well, And as Cheaply, as Compressed Air*


I dare to differ. Don't reactive elements actually store so much energy that they can blow up huge areas and contaminate huge territories for a long time? If we could actually make stable elements into reactive ones, wouldn't it be as efficient as it could be energy storage option, especially in compressed states?


----------



## ae1905

The red spirit said:


> I dare to differ. Don't reactive elements actually store so much energy that they can blow up huge areas and contaminate huge territories for a long time? If we could actually make stable elements into reactive ones, wouldn't it be as efficient as it could be energy storage option, especially in compressed states?




chemical reactants may be more concentrated sources of energy, making them portable (eg, gasoline, batteries, etc) but compressed gas can be stored in larger quantities (eg, in underground caves, rock, etc) so the total energy that can be stored is probably greater for gas, especially compared to battery farms a la tesla


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> chemical reactants may be more concentrated sources of energy, making them portable (eg, gasoline, batteries, etc) but compressed gas can be stored in larger quantities (eg, in underground caves, rock, etc) so the total energy that can be stored is probably greater for gas, especially compared to battery farms a la tesla


Not sure about that, but all gases have very low density. Isn't that bad for storing energy? Wouldn't higher density make it better?


----------



## ae1905

The red spirit said:


> Not sure about that, but all gases have very low density. Isn't that bad for storing energy? Wouldn't higher density make it better?




that's why it's compressed


the vastly larger scale of potential storage solutions--like caves--offsets the lower energy density, viz



energy = energy density * _volume_


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> that's why it's compressed
> 
> 
> the vastly larger scale of potential storage solutions--like caves--offsets the lower energy density, viz
> 
> 
> 
> energy = energy density * _volume_


But what about E=mc2?

It pretty much says that to get more atomical energy you want more mass and more speed (reactivity). Gases are very lightweight and aren't very reactive or fast. So to store more energy we would need more mass (which can be in other words dense) and more speed. 

I heard you can even compress gases into liquids, wouldn't that be even better than compressed air. In the end we know that liquids aren't very dense and then we enter solid state. Not sure if possible, but if it is that could store a lots of energy. But at that point as your article says it wouldn't be cheap.

BTW there are also reaction like these with big energy output:









If we somehow slowed those down and captured their energy it would be quite nice way to make a new 'battery', but it probably wouldn't be cheap at all, so as article says compressed air is more promising, but then what about hydrogen fuel cells. Those things are mostly forgotten, yet they were used for powering car.


----------



## ae1905

The red spirit said:


> But what about E=mc2?




chemical energy is stored in the bonds _between atoms_, not in atomic nuclei


einstein's equation still applies but the scale of energy stored in chemical bonds is much smaller than in nuclei and the equation is not typically used to calculate the energy of chemical reactions


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> chemical energy is stored in the bonds _between atoms_, not in atomic nuclei
> 
> 
> einstein's equation still applies but the scale of energy stored in chemical bonds is much smaller than in nuclei and the equation is not typically used to calculate the energy of chemical reactions


Chemical energy might not be in nuclei, but to hold electrons nuclei must have energy. So it's energetic unit too. The important function is to control the energy in atom. It must have positive polarity to hold electrons and the more it has, the more energy it will hold.

Air only has density of 22.4 l/mol. 1 mole of oxygen is 1 mol*(16 g/mol *2)= 32 grams. 1 mole of nitrogen is 1 mol*(14g/mol)*2= 28 grams grams. So by rough calculation we can say that 1 mole of air should weight something like that:
(32+32+28)/3=30.(6) grams. So in 22.4 liters there's only around 31 grams of air. That's very little. I wonder how much will it be compressed. Anyway if we compress it to 2 atm we can only achieve twice the mass. So it would be very lightweight. Air doesn't have much energy nor mass by itself, neither is very reactive or anything.

BTW if the goal is to compress very not dense material we could probably fit more hydrogen atoms than air molecules and hydrogen is pretty much everywhere, where we can get water.


----------



## The red spirit

Articles about CPU history:
https://www.techjunkie.com/a-cpu-history/
https://medium.com/dotmachines/history-of-amd-advanced-micro-devices-inc-c4e6bfa35a24


----------



## ae1905

The red spirit said:


> Chemical energy might not be in nuclei, but to hold electrons nuclei must have energy. So it's energetic unit too. The important function is to control the energy in atom. It must have positive polarity to hold electrons and the more it has, the more energy it will hold.




the electric charge of nuclei attract and hold electrons in their orbits thereby enabling chemical bonding, but the nuclear force that holds nuclei together are not electromagnetic (or chemical) in nature and do not contribute to chemical reactions





> Air only has density of 22.4 l/mol. 1 mole of oxygen is 1 mol*(16 g/mol *2)= 32 grams. 1 mole of nitrogen is 1 mol*(14g/mol)*2= 28 grams grams. So by rough calculation we can say that 1 mole of air should weight something like that:
> (32+32+28)/3=30.(6) grams. So in 22.4 liters there's only around 31 grams of air. That's very little. I wonder how much will it be compressed. Anyway if we compress it to 2 atm we can only achieve twice the mass. So it would be very lightweight. Air doesn't have much energy nor mass by itself, neither is very reactive or anything.




I'm sure higher pressures than 2 atm can be achieved


and, again, the low density of air is offset by the much larger capacities of natural storage solutions





> BTW if the goal is to compress very not dense material we could probably fit more hydrogen atoms than air molecules and hydrogen is pretty much everywhere, where we can get water.



hydrogen fuel cells have been around for a long time...the problem with hydrogen, however, is it is reactive and doesn't lend itself to natural storage as air does


----------



## Pifanjr

I think the point of the article was that using compressed air is cheaper and works for far longer than batteries. It's not as portable, but the scope of the article was about storing excess wind and solar energy, not powering a remote or a car.


----------



## ae1905

*Apple Announces New MacBook Air With Retina Display, Touch ID and Sketchy Keyboard*


----------



## ae1905

*Why Jupyter is Data Scientists' Computational Notebook of Choice*


----------



## ae1905

*Bitcoin Mining Alone Could Raise Global Temperatures Above Critical Limit By 2033*


----------



## ae1905

*It's Becoming Increasingly Unlikely that We'll See a Major Shift To Virtual Reality Any Time Soon*


----------



## Pifanjr

*Google's reCAPTCHA v3 stops bots without interrupting users*


----------



## The red spirit




----------



## The red spirit

Not much of tech story, but I would like to show now obsolete positional audio technologies EAX and Aureal 3D:











More information about EAX:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Environmental_Audio_Extensions

More information about Aureal 3D (A3D):
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A3D


----------



## The red spirit




----------



## ae1905

*iOS 12.1 Extends Controversial Processor Throttling Feature To the iPhone 8, 8 Plus, and X*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple, Amazon, Google and More Than 50 Other Companies Sign Letter Against Trump Administration's Proposed Gender Definition Changes*


----------



## The red spirit

The kings of all time:
https://www.theinquirer.net/inquirer/feature/2462973/10-of-the-greatest-microprocessors-of-all-time
https://www.pcworld.com/article/171171/components/influential-processors.html#slide12
https://www.techradar.com/news/comp...s/the-10-most-influential-processors-900620/2


----------



## ae1905

*'Hologram' Lecturers To Teach Students at Imperial College London*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple Launches Program To Repair Old Devices Like the iPhone 4S*


----------



## ae1905

The ISS Has a Supercomputer! Never Mind the Fried Disks | WIRED


----------



## ae1905

*Meet The Scientists Connecting Lab-Grown "Mini Brains" to Robots*


----------



## ae1905

*Chinese Video Sensation TikTok Surpassed Facebook, Instagram, Snapchat and YouTube in Downloads Last Month*


----------



## ae1905

*Bill Gates Backs A Company That Doubles the Shelf Life of Vegetables*


----------



## ae1905

The world's first floating farm making waves in Rotterdam - BBC News


----------



## The red spirit




----------



## ae1905

*It's Not Your Imagination: Smartphone Battery Life Is Getting Worse*


----------



## ae1905

*GM Is Getting Into the Electric Bike Business*


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> *GM Is Getting Into the Electric Bike Business*


That's really weird thing. Especially when their own cars aren't very good.


----------



## The red spirit




----------



## ae1905

*Amazon Is Hiring Fewer Workers This Holiday Season, a Sign That Robots Are Replacing Them*


----------



## ae1905

*Google Has Enlisted NASA To Help it Prove Quantum Supremacy Within Months*


----------



## ae1905

*A New Supercomputer Is the World's Fastest Brain-Mimicking Machine* 

The computer has one million processors and 1,200 interconnected circuit boards


----------



## ae1905

*Mining Cryptocurrency Uses More Energy Than Actual Mining For Metals*

Mining cryptocurrency uses more energy than conventional mining of copper or platinum and at least as much as mining gold finds new research published today in the journal Nature Sustainability.


----------



## ae1905




----------



## Pifanjr

ae1905 said:


>


This has been a thing in the Netherlands since about 5 years, although it took a few years before most stores and users adopted the technology.


----------



## ae1905

*Ford buys e-scooter sharing startup Spin*


----------



## ae1905

*Harley-Davidson shows off its road-ready LiveWire electric bike*


----------



## ae1905

*UK Renewable Energy Capacity Surpasses Fossil Fuels For First Time*


----------



## ae1905

*A Robot Scientist Will Dream Up New Materials To Advance Computing*


----------



## The red spirit

So we have folding phones now, they are THICC gimicks.

Ba dum tssss


----------



## ae1905

*Paris launches world's biggest e-bike fleet to curb pollution*


----------



## ae1905

*Chinese News Agency Adds AI Anchors To Its Broadcast Team*


----------



## ae1905

ae1905 said:


> *Chinese News Agency Adds AI Anchors To Its Broadcast Team*


----------



## ae1905

*Researchers Defeat Perceptual Ad Blockers, Declare 'New Arms Race'*


----------



## The Veteran

ae1905 said:


>


I love watching BBC One News. It is one of my favourite things to watch. I watched this news and I found it fascinating.

What are your reactions on this video? My mouth gaped open to this video. It was so fascinating and astonishing.


----------



## ae1905

khanrumell1 said:


> I love watching BBC One News. It is one of my favourite things to watch. I watched this news and I found it fascinating.
> 
> What are your reactions on this video? My mouth gaped open to this video. It was so fascinating and astonishing.




gives new meaning to "fake news"


----------



## The Veteran

ae1905 said:


> gives new meaning to "fake news"


I agree. Everything is real in BBC One.


----------



## ae1905

*Quantum 'compass' promises navigation without using GPS*


----------



## ae1905

*New Air-Conditioner Absorbs Solar Energy and Blasts Radiation Into Space*


----------



## ae1905

*Only 22% of Americans Now Trust Facebook's Handling of Personal Info*


----------



## ae1905

*'Why PC Builders Should Stock Up on Components Now'*


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> *'Why PC Builders Should Stock Up on Components Now'*


lol no. That simply is meaningless for anyone outside USA. In perC only 16 percent of people are from USA. That title is misleading.


----------



## ae1905

The red spirit said:


> lol no. That simply is meaningless for anyone outside USA. In perC only 16 percent of people are from USA. That title is misleading.



slashdot is a us site


and I bet more than 16% of pc builders live in us


----------



## ae1905

*Google Suffered a Brief Outage on Monday Which Pushed Some of Its Traffic Through Russia, China and Nigeria; Company Says It Will Do an Investigation*


----------



## ae1905

*The Next Version of HTTP Won't Be Using TCP*


----------



## Abbaladon Arc V

The red spirit said:


>


o myy god

This video was sooooooooooooo good


----------



## The red spirit

ae1905 said:


> slashdot is a us site
> 
> 
> and I bet more than 16% of pc builders live in us


This is perC, where you are writing in. That's your audience. There have been some threads about computer building and Americans were quite rare there. Most people are from random places (mostly Europe and Asia). You have to acknowledge that as overall in perC very tiny fraction of users even care about their computer and even less of them actually are interested in their hardware. I think that person, who doesn't care even if checked out your thread a bit, would probably get a wrong idea about situation. It's not really hard to mention that it's applicable to USA only. Even then it's a bit shitty news. Because it's unreasonable to buy hardware just for buying. Like it was said only 10% increase in prices will appear and for stuff that is made in China (imported from). That doesn't affect quite a bit of parts. For example CPUs from AMD aren't made in China, they are either made in Malaysia or Germany. Not sure about Intel. Hard drives aren't made in china. Graphics cards more likely are at least partially made in China, but I would bet that they are made in Taiwan. Quite a bit of Motherboards aren't made in China, Asrock could be a great example of that (made in Taiwan). Power Supplies are made worldwide, only some will be affected. Cases are also made everywhere, so doesn't matter. RAM also is made in various places (mostly Asia), but mostly not in China. 

So even if that site's advice is applicable to tiny audience, then they spread wrong advice and make out bigger deal than it ever was. Their own example is NZXT, which many builders don't care about. Don't get me wrong, there are other great and more well known case manufactures like Cooler Master and Corsair. NZXT is minority. Their motherboards aren't great either.

And in the end, I think that it's okay to have 10% tax. Again, don't get me wrong. I'm not racist, but the way manufacturing is done in China is truly bad. People there or at least management is very human unfriendly. There are lots of stories about lack of proper hygiene, about workers being forced to work when they are ill, about unimaginably high working hours, about people dying in factories and managers telling workers to just continue working (yep, near corpses). I have heard that such brutality is more than in manufacturing, it's also in roads. If you hit person on road, he can sue you and can win lots of cash, so there have been people, who hit people and then ran over them again to make sure they are dead. Then just blamed them. Other people don't come to help, because they would be suspects of crime and can be fined unreasonably. 

That got a bit off-topic, but what I want to say is that it's cultural thing to be like that. I, personally, wouldn't mind choosing products from other manufacturers and that 10% tax gives me more reason. At least with my money I could support more ethical ways of manufacturing and it doesn't look like a difficult thing to do.

In the end, if we talked about product quality, I guess we could all agree that China is most notorious for making crap. Sure they can make higher quality products, but reality is that majority of Chinese goods are low in quality and now to think that their manufacturing is unethical, I guess it's better for everyone to just forget Chinese goods.

Articles like you linked show poor thinking. The only reason, why you would buy hardware is if you wanted to build computer a bit later. It's only better reason to build it now if you honestly don't care about anything I said above and just want absolutely cheapest thing to just work. 

Look at this video:





Lots of Chinese stuff is only available for their own country and rarely exported anywhere else. Their own products are usually low end and sketchy as hell. You can't get them anywhere else outside of China or without some extensive search for them, which almost no one would do and would have no reason to do.

So really, that article is spreading some fake news and unwise advice.


----------



## ae1905

*The Secret Service Wants To Test Facial Recognition Around the White House*


----------



## ae1905

*This ridiculous $4,500 all-in-one PC is built into a standing desk*


----------



## ae1905

*Amazon workers hospitalized after warehouse robot releases bear repellent*


----------



## ae1905

*The Technology 202: More than 200 companies are calling for a national privacy law. Here's an inside look at their proposal.* 

The privacy debate moves far beyond Silicon Valley.


----------



## ae1905

*Australia Passes Anti-Encryption Laws [Update]*


----------



## ae1905

*Snapdragon 8cx Gives Windows Its Most Extreme Arm Chip Yet






*


----------



## ae1905

*DeepMind Produces a General-Purpose Game-Playing System, Capable of Mastering Games Like Chess and Go Without Human Help*


----------



## ae1905

*Aston Martin Will Make Old Cars Electric So They Don't Get Banned From Cities*


----------



## ae1905

*Scientists Develop 10-Minute Universal Cancer Test*


----------



## ae1905

*Intel Optimistic About Its Next-Gen 7nm Process Technology*


----------



## ae1905

*Musicians Have Now Used Artificial Intelligence to Master Millions of Songs*


----------



## The red spirit

Personally I think he has a good point about PS1 classic. I think PS1 like that at best is souvenir and it does what it does reasonably well. I think that fans or whatever else touched it kinda miss a point a bit. Sure Nintendo did release NES and SNES minis, which are good, but on Sony's side PS1 classic is good, just not perfect. After all you get console, two gamepads and 20 decent games. The idea is good enough plug and play experience and imo it does deliver that. 

Imagine person in store near Christmas looking at the box of this thing "Oh I would like to relive days like this". 100 dollars ins't a lot and person like that would just get it and play it without any major complaints, maybe even call a friend to play split screen multiplayer. It's not a sketchy chinese Mega Game 99 in 1, it's made by Sony and it does reasonably well. 

While I do emulate PS1 myself to play some games, I still see a point in PS1 classic. After all PS1 emulation can get really heavy and require actually powerful hardware. 

And just quick note for people, who will say something about PI. I have myself gen 1 B+ and at the time people said it's gonna run Quake 3 port and some emulators. The reality was that even heavily overclocked Pi couldn't reach 20 fps in Quake and emulation was either poor and if it wasn't poor, it was pain in the rear to actually import games. Some games don't even start for no reason and Pi at best just writes that there is a loading error. It was absolute garbage. Maybe emulation quality is better now, but people must realize that Pi gets emulator updates after Windows and after Linux. It's gonna be late and PS1 emulation even on Windows isn't perfect. Actual real accurate emulation is most likely too heavy for any PC on planet. My point he is that emulation on computers of PS1 is not user friendly, meanwhile PS1 classic even with tiny library works reasonably good.


----------



## ae1905

*Apple Store Employees Aren't Allowed To Say 'Crash', 'Bug', or 'Problem'*


----------



## ae1905

*Google's Android file manager now supports USB drives*


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*The Electric Airplane Revolution May Come Sooner Than You Think*


----------



## ae1905

*China grants Qualcomm a ban on some iPhone sales*


----------



## The red spirit

New Creative Sound Blaster is being made!










https://www.pcworld.com/article/332...igh-end-sound-blasterx-ae-9-breaks-cover.html

This time new card has some serious power. It features replaceable OP AMPs, absolutely monstrous 129 dB SNR and one of those legendary ESS Sabre DACs, that are used even in the most high end audio equipment, which costs more than 2k dollars.

This monster will require 6 pin power connector.

Also it's currently only known that it will have a breakout box to adjust volume and have easier access to audio port.

Expected price for this thing is 300 dollars. This time Creative truly has an excellent product. Hopefully it will be made.


----------



## ae1905

*Evelyn Berezin, Who Built the First True Word Processor, Has Died at 93*


----------



## ae1905

*Californians Have Now Purchased Half a Million EVs*


----------



## ae1905

*Google pulled 'millions' of junk Play Store ratings in one week*


----------



## The red spirit

This PC mod is next level


----------



## ae1905

*Apple Tweaks iOS Animation In China In Attempt To Avoid Sales Ban*


----------



## ae1905

*Forget Dot Com, 2019 Will Finally be the Year of Weird Domain Names*


----------



## ae1905

*President poised to sign bill creating quantum computing initiative*








Visions of an American quantum computing initiative are close to becoming a practical reality. The House of Representatives has passed its version of a bill that would establish a National Quantum Initiative Program


----------



## ae1905

*Apple Confirms Some iPad Pros Ship Slightly Bent, But Says It's Normal
*


word is, apple is planning to rename the straight ipad pro _s_ and charge $200 more for it


----------



## ae1905

*An Amoeba-Based Computer Found Solutions To 8-City Traveling Salesman Problem*


----------



## ae1905

*SpaceX completes its first US national security mission*


----------



## ae1905

*Artificial General Intelligence is Nowhere Close To Being a Reality*


----------



## ae1905

*Banana Pi 24-Core ARM Server Running Ubuntu Breaks Cover*


----------



## ae1905

*'Beware Silicon Valley's Gifts To Our Schools'*


----------



## ae1905

*How the Artificial Intelligence Program AlphaZero Mastered Its Games*

James Somers on AlphaZero, an artificial-intelligence program animated by an algorithm so powerful that you could give it the rules of humanity’s richest and most studied games and, later that day, it would become the best player there has ever been.


----------



## ae1905

*Samsung Wants To Bring Web Browsing, Office Work To the TV*

Samsung's 2019 smart TVs will allow consumers to browse the web, access their PCs and even edit work documents from the comfort of their living room couch.


----------



## ae1905

*How retailers are using mobile AR to blend the online and in-store shopping journeys*


----------



## ae1905

$1,000 is a psychological price point...anything above that and people start thinking, "I could buy a really nice laptop..."



*Did Apple Retail Prices Get Too High in 2018? Consumers Say Yes.*


----------



## ae1905

*Mark Zuckerberg-Funded Researchers Test Implantable Brain Devices*

Mark Zuckerberg and his pediatrician wife Priscilla Chan have sold close to 30 million shares of Facebook to fund an ambitious biomedical research project, called the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI), with a goal of curing all disease within a generation. A less publicized component of that US$5 billion program includes work on brain-machine interfaces, devices that essentially translate thoughts into commands.


----------



## ae1905

*Australian Autonomous Train is Being Called The 'World's Largest Robot'*


----------



## ae1905

*Windows 10 Passes Windows 7 in Market Share*


----------



## ae1905

*Be it Smartwatches or Smart Speakers, It's Never Been Easier To Make Gadgets. But Only the Big Players Have the Muscle To Survive.*


----------



## ae1905

*The Commerce Department is Considering National Security Restrictions on AI*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple blames China struggles and slow iPhone upgrades for earnings miss*


----------



## ae1905

*Almost a Third of New Cars Sold In Norway Last Year Were Pure Electric*

Almost a third of new cars sold in Norway last year were pure electric, a new world record as the country strives to end sales of fossil-fueled vehicles by 2025.


----------



## ae1905

*Samsung's first Exynos Auto chip is coming to future Audi cars*


----------



## ae1905

*Tesla Will Cut Prices To Combat Tax Credit Phase Out*


----------



## ae1905

*Meatless 'Beyond Burgers' come to Carl's Jr. restaurants*


----------



## ae1905

*Segway is getting into autonomous deliveries*


----------



## ae1905

ae1905 said:


> *Apple blames China struggles and slow iPhone upgrades for earnings miss*





*Did Apple Retail Prices Get Too High in 2018? Consumers Say Yes.*


----------



## ae1905

apple hasn't created a game-changing product since the iphone/ipad


it's apple that should've created the smart speaker, not amazon/google


they're missing out on the iot revolution


----------



## ae1905

but why did they opt to repair and not replace, tim?


answer: the price/innovation ratio of your new iphones is too high



*Tim Cook to Investors: People Bought Fewer New iPhones Because They Repaired Their Old Ones*


----------



## ae1905

even with the iphone, apple isn't innovating, eg


----------



## ae1905

*Video Services May Use AI To Crack Down on Password Sharing*

An anonymous reader shares a report: Still using your ex-roommates cable credentials to watch "Game of Thrones?" That may soon be getting a lot harder, thanks to new efforts to crack down on password sharing for pay TV and online video services.


----------



## ae1905

*Apple To Pull Some iPhones From German Stores After Qualcomm Enforces Ban*

Qualcomm is enforcing a court order banning the sale of some iPhones in Germany that violate its patents on power-saving technology.


----------



## Pifanjr

ae1905 said:


> *Video Services May Use AI To Crack Down on Password Sharing*
> 
> An anonymous reader shares a report: Still using your ex-roommates cable credentials to watch "Game of Thrones?" That may soon be getting a lot harder, thanks to new efforts to crack down on password sharing for pay TV and online video services.


I hope Netflix doesn't start using this... because we're using my in-laws' account 

The problem is that streaming services really have no incentive not to use this, as there is little competition between streaming services, at least if you care about watching their exclusives. I expect that enough people that get cut off because of this will get their own account to make it worth it.


----------



## ae1905

*Texas Has Enough Sun and Wind To Quit Coal, Rice Researchers Say*

According to new research from Rice University, Texas has enough natural patterns of wind and sun to operate without coal.


----------



## ae1905

*PepsiCo is using robots to deliver snacks to college students*


----------



## ae1905

*D-Link's latest router uses 5G for super fast home broadband*


----------



## ae1905

*Neutrogena app 3D scans your face to create perfect-fit sheet masks*


----------



## ae1905

*Hyundai imagines a future where EVs can charge themselves*


----------



## ae1905

*Hyundai Joins the Linux Foundation To Embrace AGL's Open Source Connected Car Tech*

Hyundai has become the latest car company to explore serious open source alternatives for developing its in-car services.


----------



## ae1905

*Loon's Balloons Will Fly Over Kenya in First Commercial Telecom Tryout*

Kenya runs on mobile phones. And yet, outside of major cities like Nairobi, the infrastructure for mobile telephony is lacking. That's why, in 2019, telecommunications provider Telkom Kenya will begin turning to high-altitude balloons built by the Alphabet subsidiary Loon to provide mobile phone service.


----------



## ae1905

*IBM Tops 2018 Patent List as AI and Quantum Computing Gain Prominence*

IBM earned a record 9,100 U.S. patents in 2018, marking the 26th year in a row the Armonk, New York-based company has been the top recipient.



from the linked article:


*IBM Tops 2018 Patent List as A.I. and Quantum Computing Gain Prominence*




 
 



By Jeff John Roberts 11:56 PM EST 


IBM earned a record 9,100 U.S. patents in 2018, marking the 26th year in a row the Armonk, New York-based company has been the top recipient. Samsung was second with 5,850 patents while tech giants Apple and Microsoft also appeared in the top ten, according to a list compiled by research service IFI Claims.

IBM’s latest patent haul, which topped the 9,043 it received last year, includes a growing number of inventions related to artificial intelligence and quantum computing, which many people see as critical technologies of the future.

Here is the full list of the leading 2018 patent recipients:









Google, which came in at number seven on last year’s list, did not crack the top ten patent recipients for 2018. Meanwhile, Apple rose to ninth from eleventh.

Among 1,600 A.I.-related patents awarded to IBM, one is for Project Debater, a tool that uses machine learning techniques to simulate real life debates on a wide for variety of topics.

According to IBM research Jeff Welser, Project Debater is capable of understanding how two identical sentences can convey different meanings depending on the context, and anticipates a world where computers will better understand human interactions.

In an interview with _Fortune_, Welser added that quantum computing will start having a real world impact in the next few years as scientists learn how to add more qubits—the unit of information analogous to bits in classical computing—and store them in a stable state.

“We’ll see quantum computing’s first impact in the areas of chemistry and science. Once you get to 100 qubits, you can suddenly do stuff you can’t do other ways,” said Welser, adding that 50 qubits is the maximum viable number of qubits today.

In addition to those for AI.. and quantum computing, IBM received numerous patents for cloud computing and also one for blockchain.

While patents can be a useful proxy for innovation, this is not always the case. In recent years, lawmakers and businesses have criticized the U.S. Patent Office for granting too many low quality patents. Many of these can end up in the hands of “patent trolls“—shell companies that acquire patents in order to sue or extract settlements from productive companies.

Welser says IBM is mindful of patents role in the larger tech eco-system, and that many of the company’s most prolific patent recipients also contribute to open source initiatives that make technology available to everyone.

In a statement, IBM also noted that patents it received last year were granted to “a diverse group of more than 8,500 IBM inventors in 47 different U.S. states and 48 countries.”


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*Windows 10 Will Reserve 7GB of Your Computer's Storage in its Next Major Release So That Big Updates Don't Fail*

In the next major release of Windows 10, Microsoft will reserve 7GB of your device's storage to resolve a Windows 10 bug thrown up by Windows Update not checking whether a PC has enough storage space before launching after big updates.


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*Razer integrates Alexa with its color-changing PC hardware*


----------



## ae1905

first laptop I can remember where you can swap out the cpu...problem is, intel changes its socket architecture every other generation of chips, so you won't be able to upgrade to newer (and faster) 11th gen chips, defeating the purpose of the open design


https://www.engadget.com/2019/01/08/alienware-area-51m-upgradable-cpu-gpu/


----------



## ae1905

*Dell's XPS 13 is its first laptop with Dolby Vision*


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*CES might be the home of tech, but not all gadgets are welcome*


----------



## ae1905

*Intel's Mobileye will help China's public transport go autonomous*


----------



## ae1905




----------



## ae1905

*Fat shame your cat with this smart treadmill*


----------



## ae1905

*DARPA Wants To Build an AI To Find the Patterns Hidden in Global Chaos*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple is reportedly cutting iPhone production by 10 percent*


----------



## ae1905

*Apple has big plans for health in 2019*


----------



## ae1905

*Samsung Phone Users Perturbed To Find They Can't Delete Facebook*


----------



## ae1905

*The Impossible Burger 2.0 Is a Plant-Based Beef Replacement That Uses Soy Instead Wheat Protein To Take On New Forms*


----------



## ae1905

*Presenting the Best of CES 2019 finalists!*


----------



## ae1905

*Google Maps Deterring Outback Tourists, Say Small Firms*

Tourism operators in Australia claim inaccuracies in Google Maps are deterring potential visitors, by making remote attractions appear further away than they actually are.


----------



## ae1905

*Professors From 7 US Colleges, Including MIT and Stanford, Have Teamed Up To Design a Cryptocurrency Capable Of Processing Thousands of Transactions a Second*


----------



## ae1905

*Netflix Says It Has 10 Percent of All TV Time In the US*


----------



## ae1905

*Bioacoustic Devices Could Help Save Rainforests*

"Researchers writing in Science argue that networked audio recording devices mounted in trees could be used to monitor wildlife populations and better evaluate whether conservation projects are working or not,"


----------



## ae1905

*Google Maps speed limit signs appear in more US cities*


----------



## ae1905

*Lightning's $13,000 electric motorbike boasts a top speed of 150mph*


----------



## ae1905

*Swiss watchmaker's latest jab at the Apple Watch has no hands*


----------



## ae1905

*Two computer models predict who will win the NFL conference championship games*


----------



## ae1905

*A Poker-Playing Robot Goes To Work for the Pentagon*


----------



## ae1905

ae1905 said:


> *Two computer models predict who will win the NFL conference championship games*




the model got both games wrong, not a surprise since it was right about 60% of the time during the season


----------



## ae1905

*Facebook Appears To Be Quietly Building Laser Satellites For Global Communications*


----------



## ae1905

*Carbon Capture System Turns CO2 Into Electricity and Hydrogen Fuel*


----------



## ae1905

*Program Allows Ordinary Digital Camera To See Around Corners*


----------



## ae1905

*New 3D Printing Technique Is 100 Times Faster Than Standard 3D Printers*


----------



## ae1905

*Now Your Groceries See You, Too*


----------



## ae1905

*Under Armour will make the space suits for Virgin Galactic flights*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft and MIT can detect AI 'blind spots' in self-driving cars*


----------



## ae1905

*World's Oldest Nobel Prize Winner Is Working On Light 'Concentrators' That May Give Everyone Clean, Cheap Energy*


----------



## ae1905

*UK ISP is turning broadband infrastructure into EV charging stations*


----------



## ae1905

*Microsoft Warns Internet Explorer 10 Will Be Terminated In January 2020*


----------

