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Comment Situation in Germany (Score 1) 327

by soccerisgod (#58453102) Attached to: Why the Swiss Still Love Cash
People in Germany will usually pay for their groceries either with debit card ("EC card") or in cash. Anything small, take-awayish is almost always paid with cash and people look at you funny if you ask if you can pay with credit card or other similar new fangled stuff. I don't know about the Swiss, but we Germany sure do love our cash way too much. I went on several business trips to Sweden and the difference in culture when it comes to paying for stuff is huge. A Swedish business contact related a story of how she ended up holding a weird piece of metal at the end of a business transaction and it took her a while of research to find out that was normal Swedish coinage that had been in circulation for years - and she'd never seen it because she and her coworkers never use cash for anything. It was as hard for them to understand our love of cash as it was for us to understand their love for cashless payment. I think the reason we love cash so much is two fold: for one we love us our privacy and hate if people keep track of our spendings (or anything else in fact) and also there's this sense that if civilization ends tomorrow, then cash is probably more use than phone-based micropayment systems. It's the bird in the hand, so to speak.
AI

AI Mistakes Ad On a Bus For an Actual CEO, Then Publicly Shames Them For 'Jaywalking' (scmp.com) 154

Posted by EditorDavid from the virtual-realities dept.
An anonymous reader quotes the South China Morning Post: Since last year, many Chinese cities have cracked down on jaywalking by investing in facial recognition systems and AI-powered surveillance cameras. Jaywalkers are identified and shamed by displaying their photographs on large public screens... Developments are also underway to engage the country's mobile network operators and social media platforms, such as Tencent Holdings' WeChat and Sina Weibo, to establish a system in which offenders will receive personal text messages as soon as they are caught violating traffic rules....

Making a compelling case for change is the recent experience of Dong Mingzhu, chairwoman of China's biggest maker of air conditioners Gree Electric Appliances, who found her face splashed on a huge screen erected along a street in the port city of Ningbo... That artificial intelligence-backed surveillance system, however, erred in capturing Dong's image on Wednesday from an advertisement on the side of a moving bus. The traffic police in Ningbo, a city in the eastern coastal province of Zhejiang, were quick to recognise the mistake, writing in a post on microblog Sina Weibo on Wednesday that it had deleted the snapshot. It also said the surveillance system would be completely upgraded to cut incidents of false recognition in future.
The article says the mistakenly-accused CEO's company later thanked the traffic police for their hard work, and "called on people to obey traffic rules to keep the streets safe."

"The Chinese government is currently working to combine the operations of more than 170 million public security cameras to strengthen its surveillance network's ability to track and monitor the country's 1.4 billion citizens. Research firm IHS Markit has estimated that the number of surveillance cameras in China could reach 450 million by 2020."
Earth

What Image Should Represent All of Humanity On Wikipedia? (wired.com) 349

Posted by msmash from the interesting-question dept.
An anonymous reader writes: If aliens ever do come across the Pioneer spacecraft and make assumptions about the entire human species based on the man and woman etched onto the plaque it carries, this is what they will think of us: We all look like white people; we all look about 30ish years old; we do not wear clothes. It's a problem you encounter anytime you have to choose a few individuals to represent an entire group, and it's one that the editors of Wikipedia have debated for years: What image should grace the top of the "human" entry in the online dictionary?

The photo that's there now, after years of feverish debate, is of an Akha couple from a region of Thailand along the Mekong river. "The photo of the Akha couple remain humanity's type specimens on Wikipedia," writes author Ellen Airhart. "Just as a shriveled northeastern leopard frog at the University of Michigan Museum of Zoology represents its whole species, so this couple stands for all of us."

Such musing about the taxonomic representation of the human species could actually have a big impact on our digital future. "Future scientists will have to teach computers, not aliens, to recognize the human image. Right now, software engineers program artificial intelligence to recognize people by feeding them millions of pictures of faces," she writes. "But whose faces? Computer scientists run into the same questions about gender, race, and culture that the Wikipedia editors encountered. Being able to use more than one photo expands the conversation but does not necessarily make it easier."
Iphone

Virgin Mobile Becomes World's First iPhone-Exclusive Carrier, Offers Year of Service For $1 (betanews.com) 99

Posted by BeauHD from the inner-circle dept.
BrianFagioli quotes a report via BetaNews: Goodness gracious, Virgin Mobile USA has made quite the bold moves today. The cellular service provider has become the world's first iPhone-exclusive carrier. In other words, it will no longer offer Android at all. Crazy, right? This is through a partnership with Apple, and Virgin will offer many versions of the device, including iPhone 6, 6S, 7, and SE. The craziness doesn't stop there, however, as there is even something much more exciting -- Virgin Mobile USA is offering unlimited talk, text and data for a dollar. No, that is not a typo -- a single buck will get you unlimited everything for up to a year! This is through a new scheme called "Inner Circle."

Comment You lost me (Score 1) 90

by soccerisgod (#54133393) Attached to: The Galaxy S8 Will Be Samsung's Biggest Test Ever

You know what's coming tomorrow, you've known and waited for it for months now.

[ ] omgomgomg I can't wait!
[ ] I'm somewhat excited, and I know what this is all about
[ ] Wait, I don't even have a "smart" phone
[x] wtf are you drivelling on about?

I love it when people make really stupid assumptions based on their own fanboy experiences :)
Government

This Blog Is Republishing All the Animal Welfare Records the USDA Deleted (vice.com) 91

Posted by msmash from the how-about-that dept.
Last year, thousands of animal welfare records were removed from the web by the Department of Agriculture. Now, a government transparency blog is on a mission to recover and republish as many of these records as possible. From a report on Motherboard: "Whenever there are documents that were online, but got pulled offline, they're automatically important," said Russ Kick, who runs the blog The Memory Hole 2, where many of the documents have already been re-published. "Nobody's going to go through the trouble to delete something that doesn't matter." The documents, which were removed by the USDA's Animal and Plant Health Inspection Service (APHIS) late last week, included inspection records and annual reports made under the Animal Welfare Act and the Horse Protection Act. The USDA indicated that removing the documents was in response to a court decision, but a spokesperson contacted by Motherboard would not specify what court case. The records were typically used by animal welfare groups to keep tabs on how well these laws were being enforced, but were also used by the general public to research the inspection records of everything from dog breeders to circuses and zoos. "I've learned that if I see something and think 'I'm really surprised the government posted this,' I need to download it," Kick told me. "So when I found these reports, I thought 'this is surprising,' and I downloaded them."
Open Source

Will The Death of the PC Bring 'An End To Openness'? (infoworld.com) 501

Posted by EditorDavid from the walled-gardens-of-the-future dept.
Slashdot reader snydeq shared "11 Predictions For the Future of Programming" by InfoWorld's contributing editor -- and one prediction was particularly dire: The passing of the PC isn't only the slow death of a particular form factor. It;s the dying of a particularly open and welcoming marketplace... Consoles are tightly locked down. No one gets into that marketplace without an investment of capital. The app stores are a bit more open, but they're still walled gardens that limit what we can do. Sure, they are still open to programmers who jump through the right hoops but anyone who makes a false move can be tossed...

For now, most of the people reading this probably have a decent desktop that can compile and run code, but that's slowly changing. Fewer people have the opportunity to write code and share it. For all of the talk about the need to teach the next generation to program, there are fewer practical vectors for open code to be distributed.
Robotics

Robots Are Already Replacing Fast-Food Workers (recode.net) 414

Posted by EditorDavid from the may-I-take-your-order dept.
An anonymous reader quotes Recode: Technology that replaces food service workers is already here. Sushi restaurants have been using machines to roll rice in nori for years, an otherwise monotonous and time-consuming task. The company Suzuka has robots that help assemble thousands of pieces of sushi an hour. In Mountain View, California, the startup Zume is trying to disrupt pizza with a pie-making machine. In Shanghai, there's a robot that makes ramen, and some cruise ships now mix drinks with bartending machines.

More directly to the heart of American fast-food cuisine, Momentum Machines, a restaurant concept with a robot that can supposedly flip hundreds of burgers an hour, applied for a building permit in San Francisco and started listing job openings this January, reported Eater. Then there's Eatsa, the automat restaurant where no human interaction is necessary, which has locations popping up across California.
The Almighty Buck

Rich People Pay Less Attention To Other People, Says Study (businessinsider.com) 259

Posted by BeauHD from the made-you-look dept.
An anonymous reader quotes a report from Business Insider: In a small recent study, researchers from New York University found that those who considered themselves in higher classes looked at people who walked past them less than those who said they were in a lower class did. The results were published in the journal of the Association for Psychological Science. According to Pia Dietze, a social psychology doctoral student at NYU and a lead author of the study, previous research has shown that people from different social classes vary in how they tend to behave towards other people. So, she wanted to shed some light on where such behaviors could have originated. The research was divided into three separate studies. For the first, Dietze and NYU psychology lab director Professor Eric Knowles asked 61 volunteers to walk along the street for one block while wearing Google Glass to record everything they looked at. These people were also asked to identify themselves as from a particular social class: either poor, working class, middle class, upper middle class, or upper class. An independent group watched the recordings and made note of the various people and things each Glass wearer looked at and for how long. The results showed that class identification, or what class each person said they belonged to, had an impact on how long they looked at the people who walked past them. During Study 2, participants viewed street scenes while the team tracked their eye movements. Again, higher class was associated with reduced attention to people in the images. For the third and final study, the results suggested that this difference could stem from the way the brain works, rather than being a deliberate decision. Close to 400 participants took part in an online test where they had to look at alternating pairs of images, each containing a different face and five objects. Whereas higher class participants took longer to notice when the face was different in the alternate image compared to lower classes, the amount of time it took to detect the change of objects did not differ between them. The team reached the conclusion that faces seem to be more effective in grabbing the attention of individuals who come from relatively lower class backgrounds.
Privacy

A Google Maps Glitch Turned This Korean Fishing Town Into a 'Pokemon Go' Haven (vice.com) 82

Posted by msmash from the moral-dilemma dept.
Madison Margolin, reporting for Motherboard: A glitch in Google Maps has turned the small fishing town of Sokcho, South Korea, into a Pokemon Go tourist haven. The globally popular mobile game hasn't launched yet in South Korea, but that hasn't stopped clever gamers from finding a way to play it anyways. The city of Sokcho is taking full advantage of it, according to this video by the Wall Street Journal. Because of Cold War era laws preventing North Korea from obtaining maps of the country, the use of Google Maps is restricted in South Korea, the WSJ reports. However, a fluke in the system allows it to work in Sokcho, in the northeast corner of the country, just outside the DMZ (demilitarized zone) between North and South Korea. Sokcho is outside the range of indexing grids that Pokemon Go developers used for mapping restrictions of South Korea and other countries.

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