116215426
submission
dryriver writes:
Spitting Image was a BAFTA and Emmy award winning British satire show with a viewship of almost 15 Million viewers that parodied famous people — they would be called influencers today — ranging from Michael Jackson and the Queen Of England to Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev using grotesque talking puppets. There was even a Spitting Image Amiga beat-em-up game at the time ( The Pope fighting Miss T: https://youtu.be/2SjcY6C2Hyg?t... ). If you have never seen the show ( example : https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ), you've probably seen the puppets themselves in Genesis's classic "Land Of Confusion" music video ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ). The BBC reports: Satirical puppet show Spitting Image hopes to return to the small screen, 23 years after it last aired. New episodes of the comedy, described as "public service satire" by co-creator Roger Law, will take on Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, among others. "It's pretty chaotic out there. As far as I'm concerned, it's better than shouting at the television set," he told the Guardian. A pilot for the resurrected show has already been filmed, Mr Law added. He told the cultural discussion show's host, Mary Beard, anybody in the public eye would be "fair game" for the Spitting Image satirical treatment. He admitted to the Guardian satirising President Trump offered a challenge "because he's a satire in himself", but said puppets allowed them to go further than actors could.
116204520
submission
dryriver writes:
So everyone and their mother touts Artifical Intelligence, Machine Learning as the wave of the future, and as a reasonably competent coder you want to see what this is all about and to experiment with writing your first AI/ML algorithms. You want to see how difficult AI / ML is, and what it can do for solving problems in your corner of the programming profession. Where do you begin with learning the underlying mathematical techniques, methods and mechanisms of AI and Machine Learning? Are there good tutorial websites with example code for this? Are there must-read books or must-read papers on the subject? Are there forums, groups or email lists that you want to subscribe to? Where would you begin if your objective is "I want to start writing my first AI / ML algorithms to see what AI / ML can do in my field, and to understand through firsthand experience what this trend is all about"?
116157188
submission
dryriver writes:
First, the strange Youtube pre-rendered CGI ad for Facebook Horizon: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... The BBC reports: Facebook is creating an immersive environment called Horizon to tempt people into spending more time in virtual reality. The VR app will be a mix of social places where users can mingle and chat, and other areas where they can play games against each other. People will inhabit and explore the virtual spaces via a cartoon avatar. The app will be made available and tested in early 2020, by a small group of Facebook users. Details about Horizon and early footage of the virtual space were shown off at Facebook's Oculus Connect 6 developer conference this week.
Facebook said anyone using Horizon would be able to call on human "guides" to help them navigate and become more familiar with the virtual environment. The guides will not be "moderators" who will police behaviour, said Facebook. It added that it would include tools that let people manage how they interact with other users. It will also have options that let people shape and build their own part of the environment. They will also be able to design their own avatars. The entire space has been given a cartoon-like feel as it is intended to be used on Facebook's Oculus Quest headset, which does not have the high resolution graphics of PC-linked headsets. Sam Machkovech, a reporter for Ars Technica, who has tried Horizon, said Facebook had put "a ton of work" into the version he saw, to make it as welcoming as possible. But he noted that Horizon was "yet another" combination of apps, chat and avatars which Facebook had produced in just a few years. He suggested that it was still searching for a good combination that proved properly tempting to users. "We're still waiting for Facebook to inspire confidence that it will launch a social-VR app and stick with it for more than two years," he wrote. Anyone interested in joining Horizon can sign up to be an early tester.
116139148
submission
dryriver writes:
The first film titled "Tesla" ( https://www.imdb.com/title/tt5... ) stars Ethan Hawke ( https://www.hollywoodreporter....) as the inventor, is directed by Michael Almereyda, and is listed by IMDB.com as being in 'post-production'. "The biopic, being produced by Passage Pictures and Campbell Grobman Films, will chronicle the life and times of the famed inventor, including his creation of the AC motor and his fierce rivalry with Thomas Edison" according to the Hollywood Reporter. The second film ( https://deadline.com/2019/06/t... ) is titled "Nikola", written and directed by Anand Tucker (who producted Gearl With A Pearl Earring), and starring "Cold War" actor Tomasz Kot as Nikola Tesla. This 2nd film, according to Deadline.com, appears to focus on Tesla's Wardenclyffe experiments: "Based on a screenplay by Leap Year director and Girl With a Pearl Earring producer Anand Tucker, the story will focus on Tesla’s last big experiment, which was regarded as a failure at the time, but may in fact have been among his great triumphs. Tucker will also direct. The character piece will explore Tesla’s personal journey to achieve his scientific ambitions while risking financial security and battling his inner demons."
115960280
submission
dryriver writes:
Reuters reports: "Nuclear power is losing ground to renewables in terms of both cost and capacity as its reactors are increasingly seen as less economical and slower to reverse carbon emissions, an industry report said. In mid-2019, new wind and solar generators competed efficiently against even existing nuclear power plants in cost terms, and grew generating capacity faster than any other power type, the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) ( https://www.worldnuclearreport... ) showed. 'Stabilizing the climate is urgent, nuclear power is slow,' said Mycle Schneider, lead author of the report. 'It meets no technical or operational need that low-carbon competitors cannot meet better, cheaper and faster.' The report estimates that since 2009 the average construction time for reactors worldwide was just under 10 years, well above the estimate given by industry body the World Nuclear Association (WNA) of between 5 and 8.5 years.The extra time that nuclear plants take to build has major implications for climate goals, as existing fossil-fueled plants continue to emit CO2 while awaiting substitution. 'To protect the climate, we must abate the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time,' Schneider said. The WNA said in an emailed statement that studies have shown that nuclear energy has a proven track record in providing new generation faster than other low-carbon options, and added that in many countries nuclear generation provides on average more low-carbon power per year than solar or wind. It said that reactor construction times can be as short as four years when several reactors are built in sequence."
115960056
submission
dryriver writes:
Reuters reports: "German prosecutors have accused Volkswagen’s CEO of holding back market-moving information on rigged emissions tests four years ago, raising the prospect of fresh upheaval at the carmaker just as it tries to reinvent itself as a champion of clean driving. Prosecutors in the city of Braunschweig said on Tuesday they would press criminal charges of stock market manipulation against Volkswagen CEO Herbert Diess, as well as non-executive Chairman Hans Dieter Poetsch and former CEO Martin Winterkorn. The charges show how the German company, which in September 2015 admitted using illegal software to cheat U.S. diesel engine tests, is struggling to move on from a scandal which has cost it more than $30 billion in vehicle refits, fines and provisions. In a statement issued after an emergency meeting, the (VW supervisory) board’s executive committee said it 'cannot see that there was any deliberate attempt not to inform the capital market'. The former U.S. regulator who helped bring Volkswagen’s cheating to light dismissed the company’s arguments. 'The excuse that top managers knew nothing is very weak,' Alberto Ayala, who served at the California Air Resources Board (CARB) until 2017, told German news magazine Spiegel. Separately on Tuesday, German prosecutors hit rival carmaker Daimler with an 870 million euro fine for breaking diesel emissions rules. The Stuttgart-based maker of Mercedes-Benz cars said it would not appeal. "
115951122
submission
dryriver writes:
Physics and graphics programmer, game developer Dennis Gustafsson has begun showing a Voxel based game ( https://www.youtube.com/watch?... ) that features incredibly advanced destruction physics — everything and anything is destructible in a very physically realistic way, dynamic smoke and fire interacts naturally with destroyed environments — as well as raytracing that doesn't need an RTX GPU, and does 60 FPS on a midrange Nvidia 1070 GPU. The game engine looks like Minecraft with much smaller cubes or voxels, but the engine tech, particularly the physics, is far more advanced than Minecraft's. Gustafsson has a Twitter feed ( https://twitter.com/tuxedolabs ) where he posts demo videos and explains where he is trying to take his Voxel based technology. The game doesn't have a name yet, but some people think that it may very well become the next Minecraft. A lot of comments on the new engine state that "it does pretty much what we hoped the new Battlefield games would be able to do in terms of destruction".
115928596
submission
dryriver writes:
For the benefit of those who are not much into 3D technologies, as far back as the year 2000 and even earlier, there was excitement about "Web3D" — interactive 3D content embedded in HTML webpages, using technologies like VRML and ShockWave3D. 2D vector based Flash and Flash animation was a big deal back then. Very popular with internet users. The more powerful but less installed ShockWave browser plugin — also made by Macromedia — got a fairly capable DirectX 7 / OpenGL based realtime 3D engine developed by Intel Labs around 2001 that could put 3D games, 3D product configurators and VR-style building/environment walkthroughs into an HTML page, and also go full-screen on demand. There were significant problems on the hardware side — 20 years ago, not every PC or Mac connected to the Internet had a decently capable 3D GPU by a long shot. But the 3D software technology was there, it was promising even then, and somehow it died — ShockWave3D was neglected and killed off by Adobe shortly after they bought Macromedia, VRML died pretty much on its own. Now we are in 2019. Mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, PCs/Macs as well as Game Consoles have powerful 3D GPUs in them that could render geat interactive 3D experiences into a Web browser. The hardware is there, but 99% of the Internet today is in flat 2D. Why is this? Why do tens of millions of gamers spend hours in 3D game worlds every day, and even the websites that cater to this "3D loving" demographic use nothing but text, 2D JPEGs and 2D Youtube video on their webpages? Everything 3D — 3D software, 3D hardware, 3D programming and scripting languages — is far more evolved than it was around 2000. And yet there appears to be very little interest in putting interactive 3D anything into webpages. What causes this? Do people want to go into the 2020s with a 2D based Internet? Is the future of the Internet text, 2D images and streaming 2D videos?
115928084
submission
dryriver writes:
BBC Tech reports: "Google has said it will let its human reviewers listen to audio recordings made by its virtual assistant only if users give it fresh permission to do so. The company said the option had always been opt-in but it had not been explicit enough that people were involved in transcribing the clips. The pledge follows Apple's switch to an opt-in model in August. Amazon and Facebook, by contrast, make users ask if they want to be excluded. Google's move has been welcomed by digital rights campaigners. 'Companies should do the right thing and make sure people choose to be recorded,' Open Rights Group executive director Jim Killock said. 'They shouldn't be forced into checking that every company isn't intruding into their homes and daily conversations.' Google has said about one in 500 of all user audio snippets would be subject to the human checks."
115922042
submission
dryriver writes:
The BBC reports that Digital Archeologists who are examining the source code of the long forgotten 1982 Atari maze game Entombed are stumped by how maze generation in the game actually works. Entombed didn't store its mazes as 1s and 0s due to lacking memory. It generated the maze procedurally — walls and gaps were placed based on a mysterious lookup table in the source code. What is mysterious about the lookup table? It works perfectly — the mazes are navigable — but the researchers cannot figure out the scientific principle behind how the Atari table actually works. Why bother with this? The researchers believe that cleverly coded 1980s games may contain long forgotten math and programming tricks that are applicable to modern computing problems, but that programmers today do not know anything about. So we may see more 8-Bit or 16-Bit games pulled apart to see what "makes the games tick".
115866644
submission
dryriver writes:
Comparitech.com has published a report ( https://www.comparitech.com/vp... ) and spreadsheet ( https://docs.google.com/spread... ) laying out how many CCTV cameras are in operation in 120 different cities around the world, and data for the crime rates in these cities. The report notes 'We found little correlation between the number of public CCTV cameras and crime or safety.' 8 of the 10 most surveilled cities are in China, even though London and Atlana also make the cut, and the report says that — depending on what numbers you believe — China will have between 200 Million and 626 Million CCTV cameras, or possibly even more, in operation by 2020. That would be almost 1 CCTV camera per 2 citizens in the country, and the number could go up. The Top 20 surveilled cities with camera-count:
Based on the number of cameras per 1,000 people, these cities are the top 20 most surveilled in the world:
Chongqing, China – 2,579,890 cameras for 15,354,067 people = 168.03 cameras per 1,000 people
Shenzhen, China – 1,929,600 cameras for 12,128,721 people = 159.09 cameras per 1,000 people
Shanghai, China – 2,985,984 cameras for 26,317,104 people = 113.46 cameras per 1,000 people
Tianjin, China – 1,244,160 cameras for 13,396,402 people = 92.87 cameras per 1,000 people
Ji’nan, China – 540,463 cameras for 7,321,200 people = 73.82 cameras per 1,000 people
London, England (UK) – 627,707 cameras for 9,176,530 people = 68.40 cameras per 1,000 people
Wuhan, China – 500,000 cameras for 8,266,273 people = 60.49 cameras per 1,000 people
Guangzhou, China – 684,000 cameras for 12,967,862 people = 52.75 cameras per 1,000 people
Beijing, China – 800,000 cameras for 20,035,455 people = 39.93 cameras per 1,000 people
Atlanta, Georgia (US) – 7,800 cameras for 501,178 people = 15.56 cameras per 1,000 people
Singapore – 86,000 cameras for 5,638,676 people = 15.25 cameras per 1,000 people
Abu Dhabi, UAE – 20,000 cameras for 1,452,057 people = 13.77 cameras per 1,000 people
Chicago, Illinois (US) – 35,000 cameras for 2,679,044 people = 13.06 cameras per 1,000 people
Urumqi, China – 43,394 cameras for 3,500,000 people = 12.40 cameras per 1,000 people
Sydney, Australia – 60,000 cameras for 4,859,432 people = 12.35 cameras per 1,000 people
Baghdad, Iraq – 120,000 cameras for 9,760,000 people = 12.30 cameras per 1,000 people
Dubai, UAE – 35,000 cameras for 2,883,079 people = 12.14 cameras per 1,000 people
Moscow, Russia – 146,000 cameras for 12,476,171 people = 11.70 cameras per 1,000 people
Berlin, Germany – 39,765 cameras for 3,556,792 people = 11.18 cameras per 1,000 people
New Delhi, India – 179,000 cameras for 18,600,000 people = 9.62 cameras per 1,000 people
115838372
submission
dryriver writes:
First, two academic papers on the topic: Capurro 2005 ( https://www.academia.edu/31906... ) and Cannataci 2009 ( https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/soc/... ). Now to the question itself: Different cultures (e.g. North American, Latin American, European, African, Asian), different World religions (Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Hinduism...) and different international treaties (e.g. the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, the 1990 Cairo Declaration on Human Rights in Islam) each have their own accepted rules and norms regarding a human being's "Right To Privacy". Many of these norms — even in now highly secular and non-religious countries and societies — have their ancient roots in Religious texts, practices and doctrines that prohibit hurting or disadvantaging "your fellow man" in various ways. To put it bluntly, most major World religions don't take kindly to privacy invasions like someone peeking through a neighbor's curtains without their knowledge, or deliberately spreading information of a private or embarassing nature about someone else as "gossip" or "rumors". Long before "Privacy" in the modern sense of the word became subject to legislative protections post WW2, many cultures, civilizations and societies had strong ideas and norms about certain aspects of an individual's life being "private" or "off limits to outsiders" — family life for example. Now to the giant tech companies doing the bulk of privacy-violating and privacy-intruding in the modern world. Most of the leadership of these companies appears to regard humans as essentially "highly evolved primates not created by any kind of deity". In other words, humans are neither creation, nor have fundamental God-given rights, and nor is there a "punishing Thunder God" who will throw lethal lightning bolts from the sky when a Tech giant pries deep into the life, habits, traits and psyche of a technology user through information technology. Is THIS what is driving the rampant privacy violations we are witnessing in the Internet, IoT and tech realm? Are Tech giant CEOs and Managers so ultra-secular or Atheist in their cognitive-philosophical model of the World, and of their human clients, that they simply regard their users as "tech using lifeforms" who do note have any sort of "God-given right to privacy" at all, because in their mental model of reality God doesn't exist, and never did exist in the first place?
115788972
submission
dryriver writes:
ZDNet reports: "Speaking with Bloomberg, Microsoft co-founder Gates said it is better to regulate big tech companies. Breaking them up will simply result in two companies indulging in bad behavior. 'I don't know the last time a company was broken up but you have to really think,"Is that the best thing if there's a way that a company's behaving that you want to get rid of?" Then you should just say, "Hey, OK, that's a banned behavior",' said Gates. 'Splitting a company in two and having two people doing the bad thing, you know that doesn't seem like a solution,' he added. Gates said it was a 'pretty narrow set of things' where a break-up would be a suitable solution. "
115765396
submission
dryriver writes:
Most "solutions" to Climate Change center on reducing Greenhouse Gas emissions on Earth and using renewable energy where possible. What if you could work a bit closer to the root of the problem, by thinking about the problem as an excess number of photons traveling from the Sun to the Earth? Would it be completely physically impossible to place or project some kind of electrical or other field into space that alters the flight paths of photons — which are energy packets — that pass through it? What if you could make say 2% of photons that would normally hit the Earth miss the Earth, or at the very least enter Earth's atmosphere at an altered angle? Given that the fight against Climate Change will likely swallow hundreds of Billions of Dollars over the next years, is it completely unfeasible to spend a few Billion Dollars on figuring out how to manipulate the flight paths of photons out in Space?
115651578
submission
dryriver writes:
FT.com reports (and appears to be non-paywalled today): "Climate activists are wasting their time lobbying investors to ditch fossil fuel stocks, according to Bill Gates, the billionaire Microsoft co-founder who is one of the world’s most prominent philanthropists. Those who want to change the world would do better to put their money and energy behind the disruptive technologies that slow carbon emissions and help people adapt to a warming world, Mr Gates told the Financial Times. 'Divestment, to date, probably has reduced about zero tonnes of emissions. It’s not like you’ve capital-starved [the] people making steel and gasoline,' he said. 'I don’t know the mechanism of action where divestment [keeps] emissions [from] going up every year. I’m just too damn numeric.' Mr Gates questioned the divestment movement’s 'theory of change', arguing that investors who want to use their money to promote progress will have better results by funding innovative businesses such as Beyond Meat and Impossible Foods, two alternative protein companies he has backed."
