But apparently, we are now preparing for a population that becomes illiterate. Sure, expiry dates have some leeway, but people figure these out. Also, sensors can only tell when it is already bad and standard human sensors do a pretty good job of that as well.

Sounds like yet another product that nobody needs and that will just serve to create more garbage.

They should put expiration dates on clothing so we men will know when they go out of style. -- Garry Shandling

Or maybe when they need laundering? :-J

Or did anybody else find "The Three-Body Problem" pretty much unreadable? Maybe I just have the wrong cultural background to understand it.

What is that, 19 in pig Latin numerals?

Two smart moves:

1. Make it easy for your customers to upgrade.

2. Don't bog down your gaming network as 20M users all try to re-download 5TB worth of games for their new system.

I own every system since the Atari 2600, but I have been primarily using my PS4 this generation, while I used my 360 primarily last generation. Microsoft made some huge miscalculations with the Xbone and I held off buying it for several years, and since it doesn't have many exclusives, it is mainly a pass through and 360 game player. Hopefully this is more indication of putting the customer first and giving gamers what gamers want first and foremost.

Sony could learn a thing or two in this regard, as well as backwards comparability so that the customer doesn't feel ripped off buying the same game twice...

Hm. Most of the STEM graduates I know are fascinating peoplw, creative problem solvers and artists in their media, be it metals, glass, electronics, plastics, whatever.

Most of the liberal arts majors I know are self absorbed know-it-alls, unable to look past their own interests.

But that's just my experience.

I majored in Math and Minored in Philosophy, at first. I ended up taking more Philosophy than I did Math and getting 2 degrees. Liberal Arts has morphed into something else today though. You can get a Liberal Arts degree without ever taking Ethics, Logic, or even more than an "Intro" class to Philosophy at most schools.

The most valuable people often have deep expertise in TWO fields, so you can apply the knowledge of one to the other. For instance, if you are very knowledgeable about both GPU programming and fluid dynamics, you are going to make a lot of money.

I'm in my 30s and have already had a large amount of success by having a little bit of math, computer science and engineering knowledge. I've received many awards for my work (even one from President Obama at the White House)... but I'm incredibly intimidated by my peers who all specialized in either math OR computer science OR engineering. While I'm always able to put the pieces together in a novel way... which solves interesting problems... I always feel out of my depth when it comes to conversation.

I'm currently back at school doing a PhD in yet another interdisciplinary field: Computational Science and Engineering. But this time I'm specializing in applying it to nuclear energy production. It feels good to specialize a bit and really learn something about _one_ field in particular. I still won't be the world's greatest nuclear engineer... but at least I can hold my own in conversations now.

In addition to just feeling like I don't know much I must admit that publishing is always difficult. Journals tend to be very specialized and deciding where to send my papers or even what audience to target can be tough.

That said: there are not too many generalists out there, so I know that my interdisciplinary skillset will always be valuable... you just have to push past that feeling of knowing "nothing"

MBA / EE is a killer combo.
JD / EE is another one.

Not just that, but a license to manage every server you manage and/or create. It sure would cut down on stuff like this and IoT issues.

(Except that I'm certain that MSFT would use that as a technique for not licensing OSX and Linux users.)

You can actually, you know, go outside if you're bored.

No, thank you.

I decided to finally try that, earlier today. I stepped outside, but the sun got really dark... it was pretty scary. It was obviously a sign I should hightail it back to the safety of my couch.

Any TV manufacturer that advertises a television flat screen will include an ATSC tuner; that is required by federal advertising laws.

A flat screen that does not have a built in ATSC tuner is a monitor or flat screen. They can be used to view "TV" programs, but that does not let vendors advertise them as TVs.

with the exception of one TV show that pre-dated my cord cutting. South Park. Long story short if you give up watching TV cord cutting is effective.

The only streaming service I had for quite a while was Amazon, not that I used it often, but because it came with Prime which I had for shipping. Technically during that era I had a dozen or so TV channels with the absolute bare minimum cable that came with the Internet connection, but considering I didn't even have the cable box plugged in most of the I didn't count it. I think half of those channels were in languages I didn't speak.

Then I got married. My wife brought her Netflix account along and South Park now requires Hulu to watch properly, all in all I've given a lot of time to evaluating the various streaming services over the past few years. That, and I'm watching TV shows again. My findings:

1. Netflix is where it is at. The best software for game consoles, the best interface, the best in reliability, and a great selection and the best originals.

2. Hulu is a reasonable substitute with a few alright original shows. They pissed me off early on because nearly everything I wanted to watch gave me a message about not being able to use my TV to watch it and they had commercials even if you paid. Those issues are a thing of the past, but I actually canceled my free trial account early over those issues early on. Again, my wife brought along an account so I gave it another shot. We got the more expensive no commercials tier which is now available and it's better than it was. We have problems with it dropping out occasionally like it just can't make due to lack of bandwidth. She likes to have Hulu around because apparently the best yoga videos are on there. We aren't paying for it right now - I think the plan is to pay for it during South Park season and let it go otherwise.

3. Amazon Prime. The interface is crappy - it's written for a 1080p widescreen and even if you're using an original Wii that didn't do 1080 or you're using a Playstation 3 in SD mode it is hard-coded to wide screen. You can't read hardly any of the text on an SD screen due to the crappy interface. Even when using a 1080 screen the interface - regardless of console - feels constrained and a little unintuitive. They have some reasonably good shows, not that I watch them. My coworkers have raved about how great The Man in the High Castle is. I'll go ahead and believe them, I don't have time for another show. That being said I'm going to make sure I watch The Tick. Their selection is reasonable at times, but feels lacking most of the time. The poor arrangement of their interface and their tactics of only giving one season free etc... Is all geared around getting you to shell out extra money. Used to all the Prime stuff was in one bucket, but they're beginning to introduce new buckets. Almost like they're cable and they want you to pay for the Horror channel now. I know for a fact some of the shows that were in the general bucket in the past were pulled out and put into the new specialized buckets. The juries still out on this being a good idea or not. I'm not messing with it for one, I can't stand using their software on my consoles because it's so crappy, I can't bring myself to care about their add-on buckets.

So, even though I don't give a rats ass about live TV at all I have lots of family that really wants local channels and channels in general. I've given a serious look at Playstation Vue but haven't subscribed, because as I said, I don't care about channels. I think if I were to have either of my parents/either of my parent in laws, or my grandmother move into me for whatever reason I would seriously consider at least giving Playstation Vue a go. It's cheaper than cable.

If what you want is cable, get cable. Don't expect to be able to replace cable with "internet" cable and save money.

You cut the cable when you are no longer interested in very many TV shows, and cable no longer fits with your media consumption habits.

If you watch regular TV shows all the time, like ESPN, Bravo, FX, HBO, etc., then what you want is a cable package. That's what they excel at. Get a whole bunch of shows produced for the masses*, you're just not going to beat the mass market model that is cable TV.

However a lot of people no longer fit that mold. In my case for example, I have a ~$60 cable package for literally one show that my roommate likes to watch. He's moving out, so I'm dropping cable completely, because 99% of my media consumption has nothing at all to do with Hollywood. I'm only interested in a handful of shows, and I'm more likely to look up sports clips than I am to sit down and watch ESPN, so I can drop the $60 a month cable bill and just spend $100 a year on full seasons of shows I like instead. There just aren't that many of them.

But if my nightly habit were to sit down in front of a TV and watch a couple hours of TV, then cutting cable is almost certainly not going to be better in almost any way.

*I'm not disparaging shows produced for the masses. That's how they can afford to create large amounts of high quality content. It's just economics.

Shitty 'self driving cars' will fail spectacularly in the marketplace once people truly understand the reality of them: your real freedom taken away, as you're strapped into some machine that you have zero real control over.

I for one will be very happy to have a machine do the driving for me. I already use adaptive cruise control and traffic jam assist on my commute, and I would happily turn over the drudgery of driving to a machine. I derive no joy from driving, though I know many people who do, and I don't begrudge them that.

But I question the common perception that self driving cars are going to lead huge drops in car ownership. Right now my golf clubs and gym bag are in my car, and my sunglasses, and my bike rack, and my music collection. And compared to the amount of crap I see in other peoples vechicles, I am the model of tidiness. Music can migrate to my phone, and I can carry my sunglasses easily enough, but how do I call for a car that has a bike rack that fits a recumbent bike? I can take my golf clubs in an uber type car to work, then to the course, then back home, but that is a bunch of schlepping that is easier when I can just leave my clubs in the trunk. What about child seats? Will parents have to provide their own car seats, or count on calling a car that has one or more available?

None of these things is a showstopper, but if I am already spending money to own my car, why wouldn't I spend money to own my self driving car, that already has my stuff in it? I can see two car families turning into one car families, but I suspect many people will still want to own their own vehicle.

The guy who had "no fault of his own" drove his car in to the side of a semi-truck. That is the very definition of his fault. He didn't apply the brakes, didn't swerve, he drove straight in to the side of a truck.

And don't claim it was the car's fault. The car was not self driving, you can't buy a self driving car at this point, nobody claimed the car could drive itself, and he had to agree to, and ignore, many warnings that it could not before operating it.

In response to that incident, Musk did the horribly irresponsible, and illegal, thing, by reaching in to people's previously bought and paid for vehicles without their permission and removing functionality.

Musk never said that the system in place on that vehicle needed a few more tweaks to achieve self driving, he said that the system on that car was never meant for self driving, and never advertised as such. He also said that future models of the car would include self driving by using different hardware and software. That's not "minor tweaks"

Of course that said, the system on that "insanely dangerous" vehicle, is already several times safer than your average driver, so even that would be a step in the right direction.

Unfortunately idiots like you are costing people lives every day by holding back these sorts of advances because people die (even if fewer than would die without them) And worse yet, people like Elon are listening to idiots like you and doing stupid things in response to make their products more dangerous than they were before stupid people complained.

If you take a model S, and add cross traffic and rear radars, it will have the hardware to be 100% self driving. (Don't believe Tesla when they take your money for "full self driving" without those basic necessities, they're flat out lying as they have done so often in the past)

Beyond that though, there's a LOT of software work to be done, and I really don't know how far away that is. There are just so many edge cases in driving that I'm not confident that we'll get to 100% self driving with zero driver input under any circumstances for a very long time (and that's what you need if you want to get out of the car at work and send the car to pick your kid up at school without you)

Ford though is talking about the next stage, once self driving is around, you won't want what the Model S offers. sitting facing forward with a steering wheel in your lap and with the primary entertainment display off to the side and out of your line of sight will be awkward and unnecessary. Thing is, that's talking about what a self driving car CAN be, not what a self driving car MUST be, these are 2 very different things, and I don't think Ford understands that. Too many people think that you must have complete revolution, instead of simple evolution. The first fully self driving cars will be just like today's cars, but with radar, lidar, and cameras mounted on them, plus some pretty powerful computers and software. They'll evolve from there to include more vehicle to vehicle communication, and to change the interior away from a driving focus, and towards an entertainment focus, but none of that will happen instantly, nor does it need to.

The people who expect a full self driving revolution don't tend to be happy with the slow evolution that actually could get us there, and therefore these people are holding back progress.

That's not actually the whole story. Ford had written a cost-benefit analysis of changing fuel systems across all cars, not just Pintos, as part of a presentation to NHTSA about moving to a 30mph fixed-barrier standard. The standards were rapidly shifting during the development of the Pinto - there was no rear-collision standard at all when the design began and the original proposal was a 20 mph moving-barrier standard, which Ford supported and designed the Pinto around.

The NHTSA then solicited opinions on a future change to a 30mph fixed-barrier standard, which was the reason Ford provided that analysis. The Pinto was one of dozens of vehicles which would be affected by such a change. Mother Jones magazine got the report and turned it into a series of stories about the Pinto being a death trap. The NHTSA then tested the Pinto using non-standard methods (different levels of gasoline, the use of a "bullet" car instead of a barrier that was designed to ram under the gas tank, and a 35mph speed that had never been discussed). Based on a set of tests that were designed specifically to cause a gas leak and exceeded any standards even being discussed, the car was recalled.

Pretty much any station wagon or hatchback of the era would have failed that test. I'm glad that we now have even more stringent tests but it's clear that this was a rigged test and a media generated controversy rather than specifically nefarious company wrongdoing. Every applicable standard of the time was met - it just couldn't pass a test specifically designed to make it fail.

The privacy-preserving search engine, DuckDuckGoogle.

Google - by itself, as a word - implies nothing about internet search.
Ostensibly, it's a number ( in fact it's a homonym of googol, coined to mean 10^100).

If the summary is correct, essentially they're arguing that Google's market success means they lose their trademark ala generification like kleenex, xerox, etc. But it doesn't make any sense at all to assert "There is no single word other than google that conveys the action of searching the Internet using any search engine" without intrinsically crediting the entity Google with the credit for it meaning that.

It seems like a pretty arbitrary taking to simply de-list their owned trademark by government fiat, PARTICULARLY when it's not like they're abusing it.

We used to love Dan Pirisi here on slashdot. The guy made a habit out of registering things he didn't like with "Sucks" at the end of it.

http://www.salon.com/2001/06/2...

His case was hard fought and he won with the defense of registering a domain name with "sucks" in it is a criticism of the companies being featured. Good story from the early days of slashdot/the internet.

So should Coca-cola Company lose their trademark because a bunch of Georgians erroneously call all soft drinks "coke" ?

Sure, sometimes trademarks become genericized. And sometimes the trademark is lost, and other times the courts decide that the trademarks are still valid. Usually the newer the trademark the less likely it is to be lost, probably because modern courts are corporation-friendly.

Good thing they changed their name to Alphabet. They'll never have any problems with that.

Intel has lost the crown for performance, never had the crown for being low power and has even discarded all attempt to enter the IoT market. It seems like all these releases are Intel's attempt at throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. Meanwhile, I wonder how much cash they are doling out to prevent people from selling systems with AMD chips.

Prior to this, Intel would charge north of $1000 for their top-of-the-line CPUs and AMD forced them to sell for more competitive prices.

"Obviously, nothing is free" [so speed had to go down to pay for other improvements].

I assure you, sir, that in the past, we got stuff for free all the time. Basically, every new generation had more complex circuitry (oh, man, that jump from 16-bit to 32!) with more instructions and a drop in cycles/operation, **A*N*D** the chip ran faster.

The curve has been bending for some time, of course - I read these things because I got a high-end i7 in 2013 that had come out in 2012, (i7-3930K CPU @ 3.20GHz) and I'm still not sure if I would *notice* the speedup if I bought a 2017 system to replace it. A gamer friend tells me I will notice, but only if I get the latest thing in RAM and the latest thing in SSD disks, each on the latest thing in buses. All of that together will not double the performance of my early-2013 purchase, and "double" used to be every couple of years.

But, anyway, it was that "of course" that got to me. It means that the psychology has changed; the lack of automatic silicon progress has been accepted at a deep level, and people are planning around an era of Limits To Growth. "Moores Law" as a *social* era, has ended. We no longer expect next year's progress to solve this year's problems. We'll have to make some Hard Choices, give up something, to solve a resource lack.

I honestly would've liked to see Intel keeping Atom development going to see next generations to Cherry Trail... low powered small PCs seemed to have a good future there if only Atom kept going for some more years.

Nazi speech is not political, it is hate crime. And remember, while religions are protected - even muslim, yet, ISIS speech won't be protected.

And now we get to see how easy it is to label something a hate crime. "You said so." And now to restrict, to censor, to hide, to let it fester. To show people "yes, we really are being persecuted. Join us because we do have answers ye downtrodden!" Living in Canada and having seen "hate crime" law in action, where the CHRC(Canadian Human Rights Commission) manufactured evidence to go after political opponents, this is why the censoring of non-harmful speech is so dangerous. It's one of the reasons that Section 13 of the CHRC was revoked.

Since when did being Neo-Nazi get downgraded to merely a "political opinion"?

Since the alt-left started calling people nazis over any deviation from feminism and identity politics.

That is total bullshit. No one is saying every Republican is a Nazi.

Sorry, you are being too reasonable.

Plenty of the "Alt-Left" on Twitter think all Republicans are Nazis - there is even a hash tag - #RepublicansAreNazis

https://twitter.com/hashtag/RepublicansAreNazis?src=hash

And more besides the hash tag:

https://twitter.com/search?q=REPUBLICANS%20ARE%20NAZIS%20-not&src=typd

And a writer at The Guardian says Republicans do "the bidding of white supremacists"

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/aug/19/republican-party-white-supremacists-charlottesville

So, QED, your statement is untrue. Plenty call *all* Republicans Nazis.

When there is only two sides to choose from, and I don't want to choose the side that wants to silence those that disagree, you will end up with very, very odd bedfellows...

An imaginary group said all that, eh?

Let's play a game. You name a group and/or a prominent person, who did not endorse/vote for Hillary Clinton, and I'll find a group and/or a prominent person denouncing him/them as a "Nazi".

Considering the current state of the art in storage devices... probably something that degrades to unreadable before it leaves our solar system.
"progress" has not been good in the "improve longevity" part of data storage.

So... You think we are going to get such speeds soon? Right now, the best we can manage it likely about 1/2 C using ion engines (unmanned one way trip, no stopping at destination). The limiting factor is how much propellant we can actually get onto a craft along with a nuclear reactor big enough to power things. Also, the most efficient ion engines use Xenon which is in pretty limited supply.

I'm not seeing any promising space propulsion technologies that will get something useful going any faster myself.

Hard to know what we might invent in 500 years, but if you are working on any kind of propellant based system you will be limited by nozzle velocities and the weight of the propellant. Assuming you can get 90% of C nozzle velocities, you are going to have a problem getting any useful load going 50% C while keeping enough propellant to stop when you get there. If you want a two way trip, just the propellant weight will increase exponentially.

50 % C is simply not fast enough, assuming we could actually get to that speed...

...than the blog post.

Released in the 1978, "Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record" is a great book with most of the record's images and a bunch of cool info. I have a copy - very fun reading.

(Posted as FYI for those who didn't know)

It should be immediately obvious to anyone who examined it under any sort of microscope (regardless of their sensory inputs) that there's analog data encoded there on the grooves. They shouldn't even need "instructions" to recognize that and digitize the data. A spectral analysis should show variations in frequencies, with all sorts of clustering. Regardless of what senses they perceive through, they should be able to map it to one or more of them - either as 1d data, or in 2d as a spectrogram. Enough analysis should allow them to determine that most of the audio is acoustic vibrations, so they'd map it to whatever method they best use when studying or perceiving acoustic vibrations.

Analysis of the the image section should readily show that there are 115 distinct groupings, each comprised of 3 similar patterns of 512 separate signals, and that each separate signal is correlated with but subtly different to the one before it. This should suggest 115 groupings of 2-axis data measured over 3 related but distinct parameters. Which they can then map to whatever they use best to perceive 2-axis or 3-axis data. Again, further analysis should be able to figure out analogues of certain images to natural phenomenon that they recognize (for example, images of planets and moons, or the solar spectrum diagram). This would then let them figure out that the images represent optical data on specific frequencies of light in the visual spectrum, which they could then map to however they best prefer to represent light in that spectrum.

In short, I have no doubt that they could properly "read" the records. It's more a question of how much they could actually understand of the content. The silhouettes look to be particularly confusing. And even "natural place" images could be highly deceptive - for example, this island. If they knew nothing of trees, that might be percieved as a type of aa lava on top two dissimilar layered volcanic or sedimentary features.

Because I just applied and was accepted, so none of the rest of you need apply!

Oh, and possibly Frist Psot!

Anyone who thinks they didn't already have someone lined up for this position and were just semi-posting it for legal reasons has no idea how the job market really works.

if it's a "secret" and highly specialist skillset it's likely to be for an H1B1 visa application "conform with the advertising in the USA so you can prove there were no applicants suitable" compliance. of course that is now completely messed up as they would be deluged with applicants by now...

secret posting can be used to hire 1HB's and get around rules about having to post the job.

We posted the job and got very few USC's and the ones that we did got failed at X stage. (we all ready had an H1B ready to go and just needed make it look like we tried for an USC)

I beg to differ, they hid them in the best place possible, the MS App store! Guaranteed to not be seen by anyone!
I would have posted this on my Lumia 635, but as the browser keeps crashing, as it's ALWAYS done, had to post my Mint laptop.

Piracy has always been microsoft's biggest ally...
They may pay lip service to anti-piracy efforts, but were it not for piracy microsoft wouldn't be in the position they are in today. Microsoft depend on lock-in and inertia, and a huge proportion of those users who are locked in got that way with pirate versions.

If you couldn't pirate windows or its applications, then millions of users would have found something else that they could obtain for free, which would likely have resulted in millions more linux users. Many users can't or won't pay for software, and in eastern europe, asia and africa pretty much all software is pirated.

If there were that many active linux users, there would be very little (if any) windows specific software out there, it would be much easier for users in the west to switch away from windows and many would do so. windows if it still existed at all would end up as an expensive niche brand, rather like osx is, running on expensive niche hardware.

3) How much background noise? Are these from people calling from cell phones. Or a LAN line.

Why does it matter? If it doesn't function in a standard operating environment then it isn't doing as claimed. What would you say to a watch maker who claimed their product was unscratchable but testing consisted of rubbing it with microfibre cloth?

It still showed up at the South Park "Save Films from their Directors" club for the wrong reason when it heard, "Free Hat".

(For those that aren't South Park followers...)

Cartman writes "Free Hat" on the advertising poster in the belief that freebies are necessary to attract people. However, the crowd mistakenly thinks the rally is to free Hat McCullough, a convicted baby killer they believe was innocent.

Now thinking that "Free Hat" would be a great name of one of those Windows App Store pirate streaming apps ...

3.... I've tried various voice recognition software over the years and can say they are getting much better but if there is any background noise forget it.

I quit trying to use siri because when I get in the car and ask siri for directions if my wife is with me I get siri saying "I couldn't find, 102 why the fuck street don't you type in the address like a regular shut up person damn it.

I'm not a statistician but it's possible that once you can prove that the neural network can produce answers at a success rate higher than humans you would be introducing error by allowing humans to review it. I'm not saying it shouldn't be done but this is one of the weird questions that people will have to ask on a case-by-case basis as these technologies are applied to real problems.