Google jumped into the smart assistant game today with its new Google Home device: an answer to Amazon's Echo and the rise of personal-assistant things that sit in your kitchen and listen to everything you do. Amazon had a breakout hit with Echo, and Google has shamelessly copied the concept with its new pear-shaped Home speaker. Of course, nothing about Echo was entirely novel: wireless speakers (Jambox), ambient listening (Kinect), natural language queries (Google), and buying lots of things (Amazon), were all ideas floating in the ether, Amazon just managed to pack them into the perfect combo product and put a friendly name on its AI: Alexa.
Now Google wants to try.
Google has some obvious advantages, mostly because it's Google: a...
Apple recently added a new passcode requirement rule for iPhones with Touch ID enabled, according toMacWorld. The new rule requires a user to enter a passcode when an iPhone or iPad has met two conditions: the device has not been unlocked via a passcode for six days and has not been unlocked with Touch ID for the past eight hours.
Users (including this reporter) began noticing this change in the last several weeks, even though an Apple spokesperson says it was added in the first release of iOS 9. However, a bullet point describing this restriction only appeared in the iOS Security Guide on May 12, 2016, according to the guide’s internal PDF timestamp. Apple declined to explain the rationale for this restriction.
The previous five passcode requirements are: the device has been turned on or restarted, the device has not been unlocked for 48 hours, the device has received a remote lock command from Find My iPhone, five unsuccessful Touch ID attempts and adding new fingers to Touch ID.
It's unclear why Apple added the restriction and why it chose an eight-hour window, but the rule comes after a judge granted a search warrant forcing a woman to unlock her iPhone with Touch ID. The decision comes as some believe the biometric nature of Touch ID isn't protected by the Fifth Amendment's protection against self-incrimination. Passcodes, however, are considered protected individual privacies.
Amazon's impulse-buy-perfecting $5 Dash button has been around for about a year now, and comes in over 100 branded flavors, but what we still don't have is a Wi-Fi button for not necessarily buying things. Some enterprising tinkerers have managed to intercept the signal Dash sends to Amazon's servers and do something else with it — like this guy who uses one to start his Tesla — but that's not really an ideal setup.
The real ideal would be a button we can register with an app and have it trigger any action on the internet. It would be the perfect way to make IFTTT physical. And it would likely do nothing for Amazon's bottom line.
So instead we get a compromise: Amazon is building a "limited release" AWS IoT Button, which is exactly...
The Philadelphia Police Department admitted today that a
mysterious unmarked license plate surveillance truck disguised as
a Google Maps vehicle, which Motherboard first reported on this
morning, is its own. […]
“It’s certainly concerning if the city of Philadelphia is running
mass surveillance and going out of its way to mislead people,”
said Dave Maass, a former journalist and researcher at the
nonprofit advocacy group Electronic Frontier Foundation. […] “If
I were Google, I would be seriously rankled over the use of their
logo to hide surveillance,” he said.
For private use, you no longer pay based on how many private repositories you need — you can use as many as you want for the lowest previous plan’s price ($7/month), and business users pay more for other abilities that individuals aren’t likely to need.
Some businesses will presumably need to pay more now, but it’s perfect for me, an individual with a bunch of private repositories, some public ones, and some with contributors (both public and private). I’m now saving $5/month with no more repository limit.
Credit to GitHub for the smoothest transition I’ve ever seen, too: I went in to enroll myself on the new plan, and not only had they already updated me to it, but I’d also been credited for the price difference from my last annual prepayment.
Twitter is teaming up with Shakespeare's Globe theater in London to have a go at proving the infinite monkey theorem: that infinite monkeys randomly hitting infinite typewriters will eventually write any and all given texts, including the complete works of William Shakespeare. In this case, though, the infinite monkeys are Twitter's users, and the typewriter is a real device, sitting in the lobby of the Globe.
The typewriter is hooked up to Twitter (how? Presumably there's some sort of plug), and is looking through the world's tweets in real time. Word by word, it's going to type out all of Shakespeare's 37 plays and 154 sonnets in order, waiting for someone to tweet the next word in the sequence before it types it. It started yesterday...
If you had asked me this morning whether we'd ever reach such technological advancement that we could put dough in a pod and create a tortilla from it, I would have said no way! Years off. But wow was I limited in my pod thinking because tortilla pods are apparently now a reality.
The Flatev, which just launched on Kickstarter, works like both an Easy Bake Oven and Nespresso. Carlos Ruiz, co-founder and CEO, says he came up with the idea because he missed authentic tortillas when he lived in Europe and the US and struggled to make them himself. But really, he just desperately wanted a dang taco. I feel that. So he came up with the Flatev.
Last Saturday, fans of minimal government gathered for the New York Libertarian Party Convention, which was held in the ballroom of a decidedly unflashy Ukrainian restaurant in Manhattan’s East Village. The attendees, who ranged from shiny-shoed businessmen to scruffy survivalist-looking types, were there to vote for the presidential delegates who will travel to the party’s national gathering in Orlando later this month.
But Nick Spanos had arrived on a slightly different mission. A former Ron Paul campaign consultant, he’s now the CEO of a new company that seeks to replace America's voting system with Bitcoin-derived blockchain technology, and he’d been selected to run the convention’s vote that day. Though the convention was small,...
That's a big DUH! I say bring it on. I'm sure stable boys were worried about horseless carriages back at the turn of the century, but that didn't stop automobiles from putting horses out of business.
Warren Buffett — chairman and CEO of global conglomerate Berkshire Hathaway and one of the wealthiest people in the world — hauls in a good deal of revenue from Berkshire-owned auto insurer Geico. But in the long term, Buffett thinks, insurers like Geico are going to be bringing in less money as self-driving cars start to take over.
jaromil writes: Devuan beta is released today, following up the Debian fork declaration and progress made during the past two years. Devuan now provides an alternative upgrade path to Debian, and switching is easy from both Wheezy and Jessie. From The Register: "Devuan came into being after a rebellion by a self-described 'Veteran Unix Admin collective' argued that Debian had betrayed its roots and was becoming too desktop-oriented. The item to which they objected most vigorously was the inclusion of the systemd bootloader. The rebels therefore decided to fork Debian and 'preserve Init freedom.' The group renamed itself and its distribution 'Devuan' and got work, promising a fork that looked, felt, and quacked like Debian in all regards other than imposing systemd as the default Init option."
It's very tempting to read into this: on the iOS App Store, Twitter is now categorizing itself as a "News" app instead of a "Social Networking" app. So excuse me while I give in to temptation. Sarah Perez over at TechCrunch has a very cogent and level-headed analysis of why this should help Twitter's download numbers and overall rankings. You should read it, then come on back here for the schadenfreude that inevitably follows every single moment in Twitter's long history of trying do define and / or redefine itself.
Back? Cool. So without reading too much into this, I'm going to read too much into this.
The energy world is full of complicated technologies and regulations, usually expressed in a thicket of off-putting acronyms. It's enough to make your brain hurt.
So today, let's look at something simple.
It's a new technology for storing energy, an important part of enabling more wind and solar power on the grid. It's from a company called ARES. Here's how it works:
The train carries big rocks uphill, consuming electricity.
Then the train carries big rocks downhill, generating electricity.
That's it. The energy stored by going uphill is released by going downhill.
Pretty neat. The details are fun too — it's a clever, low-tech solution to some important high-tech problems.
Using gravity to store energy
Say the grid temporarily has more renewable energy than it needs — the wind is blowing, the sun is shining, and there's not enough demand to make use of it.
Advanced rail energy storage (thus "ARES") can absorb that excess energy, using it to power electric trains that pull giant slabs of concrete up a gentle slope. In effect, the trains convert the excess electricity to potential energy.
(ARES)
When the grid needs that energy, the same rail cars carry the giant slabs downhill, converting the potential energy back into electricity. (Thanks, gravity!)
The conversions are done by an electric motor. When it goes uphill, it consumes electricity. When it goes downhill, it runs in reverse, generating electricity (similar to how "regenerative braking" works in cars).
The company claims the process, end to end, is 86 percent efficient, i.e., 86 percent of the energy that's put into storage can be gotten back out. It hopes to improve that number as it dials in the technology.
ARES provides more than storage
ARES already has a test track in the Tehachapi, California, region, but earlier this month, it got approval from the Bureau of Land Managementfor its first commercial-scale project.
That project, called ARES Nevada, will consist in a 5.5-mile track traveling up an 8-degree slope, covering 106 acres of public land near the delightfully named town of Pahrump, Nevada. It will boast 50 MW of power capacity and be capable of producing 12.5 MWh of energy. The company expects to start construction early next year and finish by 2019.
Here's the thing: This first project won't provide energy storage.
The smaller ones (20-50 MW), like the one being built near Pahrump, will provide "ancillary services" to the grid — in this case, the California grid.
Ancillary services can get pretty technical (VAR support! grid inertia!), but the simple explanation is that the ARES system can ramp up and down quickly, smoothing out fluctuations in power supply on the grid. That's worth money.
Medium-sized ARES projects (50-200 MW) will provide both ancillary services and short-term storage, roughly two hours' worth. While the former smooths out minute-by-minute variations in wind and solar, the latter can smooth out longer (hourly) fluctuations.
The large ("grid scale") ARES projects could range from 200 MW to 3 GW, which is a hell of a lot of storage — enough, the company says, to provide four to 16 hours of power at full output. At that point, a project starts looking less like a way of smoothing out fluctuations and more like a full-fledged power plant of its own, capable of backing up an enormous amount of renewable energy.
The benefits of rail storage
Rail storage has a lot to recommend it.
For one thing, though ARES is the first company to apply it to the task of energy storage, rail itself is an extremely well-understood technology. Almost everything ARES uses is off-the-shelf — no experimental tech or breakthroughs required. That substantially reduces investment risk.
Rail also compares favorably to other forms of energy storage.
ARES systems do not respond quite as fast as batteries (five to 10 seconds, as opposed to effectively instant), but the company claims its capital costs are far lower. Also, rail cars and concrete slabs, unlike batteries, do not degrade over time.
And rail storage is faster, with lower capital costs, than its main rival in grid-scale storage, pumped hydro (which pushes water up and downhill just like ARES pushes slabs). It's also more scalable than pumped hydro — you can do it incrementally all the way from 20 MW to 3 GW — and can be located in more places. All it needs is some open land and a slope. Notably, it doesn't need water, which allows it to operate in the arid American West.
Finally, rail storage has a relatively small environmental footprint. CEO Jim Kelly has said that rail storage "produces no emissions, burns no fuel, requires no water, does not use environmentally troublesome materials, and sits very lightly on the land." He told trade mag SNL:
When you're done and it's time to decommission, you repurpose the railcars, you recycle the rails, you recycle the railroad ties, you rake up the gravel, you throw down grass seed," he said. "In a year no one knows you were there.
Challenges facing rail storage
There are few easyroads in the energy world. ARES will have to build its projectin Nevada and prove that it can perform as promised, of course. And the bigger projects are still a question mark. Ancillary services are one thing, arbitrage — buying power when it's cheap, selling it back to the grid when its more valuable — is another. (UtilityDive has a nice piece on ARES that delves into the financial challenges, among other things. See also ClimateWire and SNL.)
The vagaries of energy markets, especially in the fast-developing area of energy storage, make it unwise to predict success for any particular technology or company.
Still, rail storage has an appealing low-tech simplicity. It's not some breakthrough in a lab, it's just a clever way of repurposing existing materials. The train goes up. The train goes down. It's so easy to explain.
It's maybe understandable why some male gamers wouldn't want to play as women. They're just not used to being forced to. You could probably count on your fingers the number of major, big-budget games where you have no choice but to play as a woman, never mind having no choice but to play as a black woman. Female gamers are obviously more forgiving — they've been playing games as men for most of their lives.
Rust is a popular first-person survival video game where you start out completely naked, left to a barren environment to build yourself tools, weapons, and a home as other players try to do the same — and potentially try to kill you and steal your stuff. It's a tense game, one in which your friends can suddenly turn against you and basically ruin everything you worked for just for their own personal gain.
But it's not the betrayal and tension that has gamers upset with Rust. Instead, it's a new feature recently added to the game, which has 500,000 players each week, by developer Garry Newman: Your character's gender and race are now randomized. So even if you're a white man in real life, you now may be forced to play a black woman.
Men, particularly white men, are not happy. Newman explained the situation in the Guardian, characterizing the reaction to the change as "extreme":
For race, this seems to be a regional thing. For example, most complaints about being black in the game have generally been from Russian players. With gender it seems to be more of a geography-free complaint.
Here's one of the many messages we've received from disgruntled male players: "Why won't you give the player base an option to choose their gender? I just want to play the game and have a connection to the character like most other games I play. Not have some political movement shoved down my throat because you make the connection we can't choose our gender in reality so let's make it like that in game too."
This is what women and minority gamers have been complaining about for decades
It's totally understandable that some people want to create their characters as they see fit. As someone who enjoys playing role-playing games, if I'm given the option I'll always create a character that I think looks cool. So I can, to some extent, sympathize with this sentiment.
Newman, for his part, says that he just didn't want to spend development resources on a character building tool. And he also sees it as valuable that people are forced to be of a certain race and gender for their entire play-through: Players "should be recognisable consistently and long-term — so anyone likely to commit a crime would be more likely to wear a balaclava or a face mask," Newman wrote.
What's odd, instead, is that these same complaints from male, white gamers would very likely fall on deaf ears if they were made by another group — by, say, a black, Hispanic, or female gamer. After all, originally, everyone on Rust was forced to play a bald white man — and there was no similar uproar.
Or worse, such complaints would fall on actively aggressive ears. Consider Gamergate: The movement began in part as a response to journalists trying to encourage more diversity in the gaming industry — not just by opening the door to more women and minority developers, but also making sure that games reflected the potentially diverse audience playing them. This was widely perceived as such a vitriolic concept to a large group of gamers that they rose up and harassed the journalists and activists pushing for this increase in diversity, which Gamergaters said was an attempt to ruin games with political correctness (which doesn't exist).
Given Gamergate, there's a bit of irony to the Rust controversy.
Take this feedback Newman received from one male gamer: "I just want to play the game and have a connection to the character like most other games I play." What this misses is that this male gamer is able to have a connection to the character he plays in most video games because he's a man. Meanwhile, minority and women gamers have for a long time just grown to accept that they're probably going to be stuck playing white male heroes if they pick up a mainstream triple-A game.
Newman made this point in his piece for the Guardian:
It's maybe understandable why some male gamers wouldn't want to play as women. They're just not used to being forced to. You could probably count on your fingers the number of major, big-budget games where you have no choice but to play as a woman, never mind having no choice but to play as a black woman. Female gamers are obviously more forgiving — they've been playing games as men for most of their lives.
It's not that these gamers are wrong to be disappointed that they can no longer play as the character they would like in Rust. I agree that character customization is great. The issue is that many of the same people complaining now would probably be rolling their eyes if a Hispanic man or black woman asked why they aren't well-represented in Halo, Call of Duty, Metal Gear Solid, The Witcher, The Legend of Zelda, or almost any other triple-A title that's come out over the years.
Man, I wants it. but I have no clue what I'd do with 96 TB's. But I bet Abinadi could find something to do with it! haha
At today's National Association of Broadcasters Convention (or NAB), LaCie announced the new 12big Thunderbolt 3 professional 12-bay desktop RAID storage solution.
The 12big combines a storage capacity of up to 96TB with the performance speeds of Thunderbolt 3 and RAID 5/6, aimed at helping video professionals and other creatives manage data from high-end cameras that record 4/5/and 6K footage. With enterprise-class 7200RPM drives with 256MB cache and a RAID controller, the 12big can reach speeds of up to 2600MB/s or 2400MB/s in RAID 5.
According to LaCie, the transfer speeds can "slash time off nearly every post-production workflow task," and with Thunderbolt 3, users can daisy chain dual 4K displays or a single 5K display to the 12big.
"LaCie is committed to helping video professionals master ever-increasing data demands by ensuring their irreplaceable data is secure, available on demand and always driving value," said Tim Bucher, Senior Vice President of Seagate and LaCie Branded Solutions, "The combination of higher spatial resolution and 3D imagery, as well as higher dynamic range and frame rates, is driving the need for high-capacity and high-speed digital storage systems. We purpose-built the LaCie 12big to have the speed, capacity and reliability to efficiently download and edit even the most demanding content--so our customers can focus on making their creative vision a reality."
The 12big includes a new LaCie RAID manager with a more intuitive interface for managing the 12big, with access to diagnostics and settings plus built-in tools for easily creating and managing volumes based on individual needs. The aluminum enclosure of the 12big is designed to efficiently dissipate heat, and for thermoregulated fans keep drives cool. Drive health and RAID build status can be tracked using exterior drive status LEDs located on the front of the 12big.
LaCie plans to begin selling the 12big this summer in 48, 72, and 96TB capacities both through the LaCie website and LaCie resellers.
It's fun to ponder a future filled with self-driving cars, a world with breezy commutes where robot navigators have made deadly crashes a thing of the past. But how far off is that future, really?
Last month, Google suggested that this driverless utopia may actually be much further away than many people may realize. In a speech at SXSW in Austin, Google's car project director Chris Urmson explained that the day when fully autonomous vehicles are widely available, going anywhere that regular cars can, might be as much as 30 years away. There are still serious technical and safety challenges to overcome. In the near term, self-driving cars may be limited to more narrow situations and clearer weather.
As Lee Gomes pointed out at IEEE Spectrum, this was the most conservative roadmap yet offered by Google, which has been operating and tweaking autonomous cars for years on private and public roads. If they're saying it's hard, we ought to listen.
So what are the big hold-ups, anyway? After watching Urmson's presentation, I called two experts — Edwin Olson of the University of Michigan and Nidhi Kalra of the RAND Corporation — to dive more into the obstacles that stand between us and our glorious self-driving future. None of these things are deal-breakers per se, and there are tons of smart people working on these problems. Instead, think of this as a big to-do list:
1) Creating (and maintaining) maps for self-driving cars is difficult work
First, a quick clarification: Lots of car companies, from GM to BMW to Tesla to Uber, are working on various species of autonomous technology. Some of this is partial autonomy, as with Honda's Civic LX, a car now on the market that can stay within its lane. But I'm mostly going to focus on full autonomy — cars that don't need drivers at all. And right now, Google seems to be the furthest along with that technology:
(Karen Bleier/AFP/Getty Images)
The Google self-driving car maneuvers through the streets of in Washington, DC, May 14, 2012.
Google's self-driving cars work by relying on a combination of detailed pre-made maps as well as sensors that "see" obstacles on the road in real time. Both systems are crucial and they work in tandem.
Before Google can test a self-driving car in any new city or town, its employees first manually drive the vehicles all over the streets and build a rich, detailed 3-D map of the area using the rotating Lidar camera on the car's roof. The camera sends out laser pulses to gauge its surroundings, and the people on Google's mapping team then pore over the data to categorize different features such as intersections, driveways, or fire hydrants. Like so:
(Google)
Google makes specialized maps for self-driving cars with features such as the length of a crosswalk, height of a traffic light, and the curve of a turn.
This is a time-intensive process, but Google thinks it's the best way forward. The idea is that building the map ahead of the time can free up processing power for the car's software to be "alert" while puttering around autonomously. The car uses the map as a reference and then deploys its sensors to look out for other vehicles, pedestrians, as well as any new objects that weren't on the map, such as unexpected signs or construction.
Olson points out that relying on this mapping system will pose some major challenges. Right now, Google has only built detailed 3-D maps for a relatively limited number of test areas, like Mountain View. For self-driving cars to go mainstream, Google would have to build and maintain detailed maps all over the country — across 4 million miles of public roads — and update them constantly. After all, roads change a lot: Researchers at Oxford University recently tracked a single 6-mile stretch of road in England over the course of a year and found its features were constantlyshifting. One rotary along the path was moved three times.
Google is confident it can pull this off — mapping, after all, is something the company is extremely good at. As more and more self-driving cars hit the road, they will constantly be encountering new objects and obstacles that they can relay to the mapping team and update other cars. Still, it's an incredibly daunting and potentially costly undertaking. Over at MIT Technology Review, Will Knight recently argued that driverless technology might advance more quickly if all the companies testing such vehicles shared the data that their sensors were collecting.
By the way, some car companies don't seem to think that Google's precise mapping is the way to go. Tesla is hoping to build self-driving cars that rely more prominently on imaging and sensor processing. We'll see which approach wins out.
2) Driving requires many complex social interactions — which are still tough for robots
A far more difficult hurdle, meanwhile, is the fact that driving is an intensely social process that frequently involves intricate interactions with other drivers, cyclists, and pedestrians. In many of those situations, humans rely on generalized intelligence and common sense that robots still very much lack.
Much of the testing that Google has been doing over the years has involved "training" the cars' software to recognize various thorny situations that pop up on the roads. For example, the company says its cars can now recognize cyclists and interpret their hand signals — slowing down, say, if the cyclist intends to turn. Here's a demonstration:
So far, so nifty. But Olson points out that there are thousands and thousands of other challenges that pop up, many of them quite subtle andunpredictable. Just imagine, for instance, that you're a driver coming up on a crosswalk and there's a pedestrian standing on the curb looking down at his smartphone. A human driver will use her judgment to figure out whether that person is standing in place or absent-mindedly about to cross the street while absorbed in his phone. A computer can't (yet) make that call.
Or think of all the different driving situations that involve eye contact and subtle communication, like navigating four-way intersections, or a cop waving cars around an accident scene. Easy for us. Still hard for a robot. As Harvard's Sam Anthony points out, AI cars are incredibly easy to troll.
Olson explains that fully self-driving cars will ultimately need to be adept at four key tasks: 1) understanding the environment around them; 2) understanding why thepeople they encounter on the road are behaving the way they are; 3) deciding how to respond (it's tough to come up with a rule of thumb for four-way stop signs that works every single time); and 4) communicating with other people.
"There's a long ways to go in all of these areas," he says. "And reliability is the biggest challenge of all. Humans aren't perfect, but we're amazingly good drivers when you think about it, with 100 million miles driven for every fatality. The reality is that a robot system has to perform at least at that level, and getting all these weird interactions right can make the difference between a fatality every 100 million miles and a fatality every 1 million miles."
In the interim, to deal with the very toughest situations, companies (or regulators) might end up settling on a compromise: self-driving cars that hand the controls back over to humans when the computer is unsure what to do. Google's cars are meant to be completely driverless, but more traditional car companies such as BMW or Audi are working on autonomous vehicles that can flip between computer and driver control, depending on the situation.
The huge drawback to the latter approach, as plenty of analysts have noted, is that shared control could potentially make self-driving cars much more dangerous. Imagine, say, that the human inside the car has been drifting off but then suddenly has to snap to attention to prevent a crash. (This has been a growing problem in the airline industry as autopilot becomes more prevalent.) Plus, it's a bit of a high-wire act to hand over controls on a highway when the car is going 60 mph.
3) Bad weather makes everything trickier
(Ian Forsyth/Getty Images)
Not a happy car.
Compounding these challenges is the fact that weather still poses a major challenge for self-driving vehicles. Much like our eyes, car sensors don't work as well in fog or rain or snow. What's more, companies are currently testing cars in locations with benign climates, like Mountain View, California — and not, say, up in the Colorado Rockies.
Olson classifies this as a real, but lesser, hurdle. "Weather adds to the difficulty, but it's not a fundamental challenge," he says. "Also, even if you had a car that only worked in fair weather, that's still enormously valuable. I suspect it might take longer to overcome weather challenges, but I don't think this will derail the technology."
Urmson took a similar view in his SXSW talk: "This technology is almost certainly going to come out incrementally," he said. "We imagine we are going to find places where the weather is good, where the roads are easy to drive — the technology might come there first. And then once we have confidence with that, we will move to more challenging locations."
4) We may have to design regulations before we know how safe self-driving cars really are
(Bill Pugliano/Getty Images)
Don't ask us.
Another big obstacle for self-driving cars isn't technical — it's political. Before self-driving cars can hit the roads, regulators are going to have to approve them for use. One thing they're going to want to ask is: How safe are these things, anyway?
And here's the tricky part: We probably won't know!
Kalra laid this all out in a recent paper for RAND. As noted above, drivers in the United States currently get into fatal accidents at a rate of about one for every 100 million miles driven. Ideally, we'd want self-driving cars to be at least that safe. But it's unlikely we'll be able to prove that any time soon. Google only drove its cars 1.3 million miles total between 2009 and 2015 — not nearly enough to draw rigorous statistical conclusions about safety. It would take many decades to drive the hundreds and hundreds of millions of miles needed to prove safety.
"My hunch is that by the time automakers are ready to sell these things, we still won't know how safe they are," says Kalra. "We're going to have to make these decisions under uncertainty."
What might that look like? Regulators could come up with alternative testing procedures — such as modeling or simulations or even pilot programs in volunteer cities. We might also look to other technologies that get approved even when their safety is uncertain, such as personalized medicine. But this is going to be something to think hard about.
(There are separate legal questions too, such as how these cars will be insured and who exactly will be liable — the driver or the manufacturer — in the event of a crash. But Kalra suspects our courts and insurance industry will be flexible enough to figure that stuff out eventually.)
5) Cybersecurity will likely be an issue — though a surmountable one
(The Verge)
Chevy's next-generation touchscreen interface.
"Another issue is cybersecurity," says Kalra. "How do you make sure these cars can't be hacked? As vehicles get smarter and more connected, there are more ways to get into them and disrupt what they're doing."
This shouldn't be impossible to fix. Software companies have been dealing with this issue for a long time. But as Vox's Timothy Lee has written, it will likely require a culture change in the auto industry, which hasn't traditionally worried much about cybersecurity issues.
Olson raises a related issue: Many car enthusiasts already modify their own vehicles to improve performance. What happens if they do this for self-driving cars and inadvertently compromise the computers' decision-making ability? "Just as an example, someone puts on oversized wheels that distorts' the cars sense of how fast it's going," he notes. "It's hard to stop anyone from doing that."
Olson points out this could be a particular challenge if the auto industry tries to develop systems that enable different vehicles to talk to each other on the road (say, to make merging easier). "The whole premise of using V2V [vehicle-to-vehicle communication] for safety is that if you get a message to slam on the brakes, you better be able to trust that message. But securing that system could be extremely difficult." Again, not fatal. But something to ponder.
Self-driving cars are coming — but perhaps not all at once
So when might we overcome all these challenges?I asked Olson to wager a prediction, and he (wisely) countered that it's complicated. "What most people envision when they envision autonomous vehicles probably won't be the reality anytime soon. I'm skeptical that you'll be able to buy a car in 2020 that you can just put your kid in and ship off to school. That kind of complete trust and autonomy is a ways off."
"But," he added, "limited forms of autonomy are very plausible. We already have the technology to do automatic parking in garage structures. Or you could envision something like low-speed autonomous vehicles in retirement communities." Singapore, for instance, is hoping to install driverless pods that work on smaller roads in gated communities or school campuses by the end of the year.
Similarly, it wouldn't be surprising to see self-driving buses along fixed routes or trucks that can use autonomous technology to platoon and save fuel on highways. The technology is advancing rapidly, and it's likely to become useful in all sorts of unexpected places.
Google's Urmson took a similar view in his SXSW presentation: "How quickly can we get this into people's hands? If you read the papers, you see maybe it's three years, maybe it's 30 years. And I am here to tell you that honestly, it's a bit of both."
Kickstarter and Indiegogo have become the go-to destinations for quirky, weird, and sometimes plain daft gadget ideas, but we used to have those even before crowdfunding was a thing. One of my favourites has always been the concept of keyboard jeans, first presented by Dutch design student Eric De Nijs back in 2008. Eric's idea was rather self-explanatory: integrate a full QWERTY keyboard into a set of hard-wearing jeans and include a nice big rear pocket to tote a mouse around as well.
In its day, the keyboard pants idea was entertaining, but mostly found itself the victim of jokes about its impracticality and self-evident social awkwardness. I don't think any of that has changed today, but it's fascinating to consider it in the...
MarkWhittington writes: The EmDrive, the so-called "impossible" space drive that uses no propellant, has roiled the aerospace world for the past several years ever since it was proposed by British aerospace engineer Robert Shawyer. In essence, the claim advanced by Shawyer and others is that if you bounced microwaves in a truncated cone, thrust would be produced out the open end. Most scientists have snorted at the idea, noting correctly that such a thing would violate physical laws. However, organizations as prestigious as NASA have replicated the same results, that prototypes of the EmDrive produces thrust. How does one reconcile the experimental results with the apparent scientific impossibility? MIT Technology Review suggested a reason why.
Ultra-popular online shooter Counter-Strike rewards precise aim, careful planning, and planned movements, all of which are pretty tricky to do on a smartphone when your fingers are covering the screen — but that doesn't stop this unofficial Android port of the 13-year-old Counter-Strike 1.6 from being an impressive accomplishment. It's the work of programmer Alibek Omarov, who has experience in making old PC games run on Android, having been part of a team that converted Valve's classic Half-Life to the platform last year.
If you want to get either Counter-Strike or Half-Life working on your Android device, you'll first need to download Xash3D software, and to have the games on your Steam account to copy across files. If you get sick of...
An anonymous reader writes: The Journal of Applied Microbiology published a report claiming Dyson Airblade hand-driers spread 60 times more germs than standard air dryers, and 1,300 times more than standard paper towels. The researchers from University of Westminster conducted their research by dipping their hands in water containing a harmless virus. Then, they dried their hands with either a Dyson Airblade, a standard hot-air dryer, or a paper towel. Their research shows the Dyson drier's 430mph blasts of air are capable of spreading viruses up to 3 meters across a bathroom. Typical driers spread viruses up to 75cm (about 2.5ft), and the hand towels 25cm (less than 1ft).
If you’re a neat freak—and I’m convinced almost everybody has a little bit of neat freak inside them—then Things Organized Neatly: The Art of Arranging the Everyday may be the most satisfying photo book you could possibly purchase.
Created by blogger and photographer Austin Radcliffe, the book is based on his Webby award-winning Tumblr blog by the same name, a blog dedicated to “the process of arranging related objects in parallel or 90-degree angles…” also known as Knolling.
In short, it’s like a warm bath for your brain: no item out of place, everything arranged perfectly by size, color, shape, type, or all of the above.
Six years after Radcliffe started the blog and two years after Rizzoli approached him with the idea for the book, Things Organized Neatly is finally up and available for purchase. Get it in hardcover for $17.
A Nebraska inmate who has professed his allegiance to the divine Flying Spaghetti Monster lost his bid demanding that prison officials accommodate his Pastafarianism faith.
A federal judge dismissed the suit (PDF) Tuesday brought by Stephen Cavanaugh, who is serving a 4- to 8-year term on assault and weapons charges at the Nebraska State Penitentiary. US District Judge John Gerrard ruled that "FSMism" isn't a religion like the ones protected under the Constitution.
"The Court finds that FSMism is not a 'religion' within the meaning of the relevant federal statutes and constitutional jurisprudence. It is, rather, a parody, intended to advance an argument about science, the evolution of life, and the place of religion in public education. Those are important issues, and FSMism contains a serious argument—but that does not mean that the trappings of the satire used to make that argument are entitled to protection as a 'religion,'" the judge ruled. (PDF)
I am delighted to sell you flowers. Please use this Messenger window to tell me where to deliver them. (credit: Caprica)
Facebook has become a social network for cyborgs. It happened yesterday at Facebook developer conference F8 while everyone was busy eye-rolling over Mark Zuckerberg's keynote about saving the world. The company has launched a bot revolution, and ironically (or not), these bots will eventually replace tech workers in the exact emerging markets that Zuck vowed to rescue with his largesse.
The core of Facebook's idea is to chase its ever-expanding audience, which is flocking to Messenger. Last year, Messenger was the fastest growing app in the US, and now it has almost a billion users. Though Facebook itself claims 1.59 billion monthly active users, it's obvious that Messenger has grown massively since becoming a standalone app in 2014. So Facebook is turning Messenger into a platform with open APIs. And just as developers once built apps on top of Facebook, they'll now build bots on top of Messenger.
What does that mean? Facebook obviously doesn't have the answer yet—that's why they're inviting developers to figure it out for them. That said, there are a few hints of the bot ecosystem to come. In its announcement of the Messenger Platform, the company explains:
Russian photographer and art student Egor Tsvetkov used his own photos and a facial recognition app to destroy any illusion of privacy we might have with his latest project “Your Face is Big Data.”
The aptly named project was simple. First, he took photos of about 100 strangers on the subway. “The people did not react in any way,” said Egor, “although I was quite obviously photographing them.”
Then came the main step. He put his photos into an app called FindFace to see if it could identify the people he had taken pictures of on Russia’s main social media site VKontakte. Long story short: the app did VERY well.
He was easily able to identify 70% of the people he photographed, even though many of them looked (or at least their expressions looked) vastly different on the subway than in their social media profile pictures.
The message Egor is trying to convey is simple: “My project is a clear illustration of the future that awaits us if we continue to disclose as much about ourselves on the internet as we do now.” You can see the full project, including all the photos, here.
Photographer Serena Hodson of Dry Dog Wet Dog fame is back, and she’s not stopped capturing adorable, viral photos of dogs. Her new series The Upside of Dogs is blowing up now too, and it’s bound to put a smile on your face.
The whole point behind Serena’s dog photos—past and present—is to capture dogs’ idiosyncrasies. In The Upside of Dogs, that idiosyncrasy is their propensity to sleep upside down, melting into the bed as they do it.
“I have bulldogs who constantly sleep on their backs,” she told Mashable, “and it always gives me a laugh at the look they gives when they melt into these wrinkles.”
But the Upside series doesn’t just feature bull dogs; several pups you might remember from the Dry Dog Wet Dog series made a comeback, this time comfortably dry and either fast asleep or waiting eagerly for a belly rub.
“Dogs seem to be so happy and joyful on their backs,” says Serena. And there’s no doubt she captured that pure happiness in these photos:
You can find more of Serena’s photography on her website and Facebook.
Facebook is attempting to tackle its freebooting issue with a new tool for content creators. Called Rights Manager, the tool allows video makers to set parameters that prevent copyright violators from lifting original content and uploading them elsewhere. The launch represents Facebook's first big move to uphold copyright, and should please users looking to build their audiences on the platform.
Dictionary.com describes fighting as "to engage in battle or in single combat; attempt to defend oneself against or to subdue, defeat, or destroy an adversary." Merriam-Webster describes Dictionary.com as a punk-ass buster. The two dictionaries, the biggest on the internet, have been engaging in a war of Twitter words today that started when Merriam-Webster called Dictionary.com out over a picture of coffee.
The image originally appeared alongside a quote from Abigail Reynolds' From Pemberly by the Sea — "I like my coffee with cream and my literature with optimism" — on Dictionary.com's Twitter feed. "There's no cream in that coffee," Merriam-Webster shot back.
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