Everything we know Google is working on for the new year
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
If reports[2] are true that the self-driving car will start testing next month, I predict 2015 may be the year that autonomous vehicles go big. The true goals of Lyft and Uber will finally be accomplished. I hope there won't be much red tape getting these cars into action (although there probably will be).
[1] http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-tracker-2015-e...
[2] http://www.wired.com/2014/12/google-self-driving-car-prototy...
And regulations will be slow to change as well, especially to the degree that autonomous vehicles are seen as toys for rich people. One of the issues will be that, even if they really are statistically safer overall than human-driven cars, they will tend to fail in ways that are different. And you can be sure that those different failures will be highly publicized.
I'd be interested to hear what you define "go big" as.
It's going to be years before driverless cars are seen at all regularly outside the areas Google (and others) are testing them in, and at least a decade before they are common enough to start having a real impact on the road. The economics of car buying alone will show you that: eg, how many 5 year-old cars do you see on the road? And it'll be at least 5 years before you can buy a driverless car, right?.
I hope there won't be much red tape getting these cars into action
Really?!?!?!
I had to pass a driving test to be allowed to drive. I hope something similar happens for driverless car implementations. While I'd trust a Google-coded car, I'm not at all sure I'd trust one coded by <insert a company with less experience at building high-reliability machine-learning software>.
The annoying part will be entering our destination in to Google Maps Car Interface, and having the car tell us:
"Because we searched for Chairs the other day, we'll be making a quick stop at our Sponsor: Furniture Warehouse to see their fantastic selection, with free delivery... After all your appointment isn't for another 45 mins and traffic is clear... (you may override this action at a cost of ${LostAdRevenue}"
Perhaps, on average. But (for example) should someone in the Netherlands trust car trained on US road rules? Or someone in Japan (where they drive on the left hand side of the road) trust software trained in India (where lane discipline is fairly.. loose).
Also, saying a system should be permitted because it kills less than humans seems a bit post-hoc. What happens if a bug is introduced that makes it worse in a specific circumstance?
Licensing seems a good way to deal with this, though I'm interested in alternatives.
Sadly, this probably is not true.
TERRORISTS are the reason we go through ridiculous security theatre at airports - costig many millions of dollars - when the drive to the airport is very much more risky that flying.
People are not rational about risk. They will drive a car because they thinkthey are safe drivers. Giving up control is tricky.
Brand new things can rarely get away with being just a little better. They have to be massively, undeniably better, with a lot of money and marketing and pretty faces and charismatic spokespersons in order to overcome public fear and FUD from the existing competitors. Look at Microsoft's commercials: it doesn't matter that the Surface is better than the Macbook Air (as is claimed in the commercial). It's not better enough, and no one at Microsoft is Steve Jobs, so people aren't willing to take the risk. Better isn't good enough, especially when you're telling a person that they're worse than a robot.
[1] http://www.cfr.org/experts/cybersecurity-iran-technology-and... [2] https://plus.google.com/+GoogleIdeas/posts
Later that year the two co-wrote a policy piece for the Council on Foreign Relations’ journal Foreign Affairs, praising the reformative potential of Silicon Valley technologies as an instrument of US foreign policy. Describing what they called “coalitions of the connected,” Schmidt and Cohen claimed that
Democratic states that have built coalitions of their militaries have the capacity to do the same with their connection technologies. . . . They offer a new way to exercise the duty to protect citizens around the world.
In the same piece they argued that “this technology is overwhelmingly provided by the private sector.” Shortly afterwards, Tunisia. then Egypt, and then the rest of the Middle East, erupted in revolution.
Of course, you have to take Assange's word with a pinch of salt, but he does a good job of explaining how Cohen links the State Department to Google senior management. So much for "Don't be evil."
At the other extreme is adnauseum, which clicks on every ad link in the background (so you don't have to).
Visual content with visual ads isn't really that different, except that some sites vastly overshoot the expected norm for the ad-inconvenience to content ratio. I think those few bad-actors are to blame for most the current online ad-climate.
> Visual content with visual ads isn't really that different, except that some sites vastly overshoot the expected norm for the ad-inconvenience to content ratio. I think those few bad-actors are to blame for most the current online ad-climate.
Yes, convenience is key. Print magazines often have around 50% ads, but they don't bother as much as on a screen.
The best case for an Ad vendor is if they can convert you into a productoholic, trigger your desire, and then satiate it. "ad mortem", as it were.
Ad vendors don't want the best for you. They want the most profitable for them. When everything is terrible, improved ads could be good for both - they profit from things you were going to buy anyway. At any other time, discerning individual nuances of your life is difficult and intensive, blanket trying to change what you want instead is much cheaper.
Sure it is. "Want" is a superset in that it contains useful/life enhancing things as well as other things that are not that.
> The best case for an Ad vendor is if they can convert you into a productoholic, trigger your desire, and then satiate it. "ad mortem", as it were.
The best case for an ad vendor is to maximize profit from you while minimizing negative outcomes to themselves in doing so. Whether that is maximizing profit over the short term or a longer term, and whether some methods produce more negative outcomes for them (such as public displeasure and possible resulting legislation) is really their decision to make, but I don't think a model as simplistic as what you proposed really covers the reality of the situation. I'm sure mine isn't all that much better though.
So we're trying to show you ads that you want to see, rather than ads that try to provoke you into clicking (like Buzzfeed articles)
Edit: looks like Google might be thinking the same https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Google_Contributor
- Increased operator bandwidth charges (REAL money)
- Loss of privacy
- Page download performance
- Garish web sites
- Lost time cleaning up after sites
- Being shown ads for products I already own
I would happily give more money than I pay my operator to content providers in exchange for no ads.
The rest? Not really my problem - I wouldn't redesign a website to save you time when you're (objectively speaking) worth nothing to me - that's bad business
On paying more - You might (might, I don't believe you) but you'd be in the minority. Having a system that allows you to paypal the site a penny every few months would be infeasible anyway
But it's hard to design something that can not be gamed. As a user, there's no reason to adopt the more obvious possible solutions, because I wouldn't be able to verify that I'm not being tracked. (What means that I'd adblock it like any other source, and thus there's no reason for the site owner to use this one service.)
Huh, really? Then why aren't you actually doing that?
No ads ,no charges.
Do you have anything particular in mind? :)
1) fast (instant) performance
2) end-to-end encryption (I wouldn't mind if they used the same Axolotl protocol as TextSecure and Whatsapp)
If it doesn't have any of those, I won't be using it.
I mean, I have a Google account. Why doesn't that just automatically include the Google+ infrastructure? Why do I have to enable a service even if I don't use it?
Support every platform. Not just Android 4 and iOS. You need to go right down to Android 2.3, Windows Phone, Symbian, Blackberry, Nintendo DS, PSP, etc. Even IE6.
The major im apps are all built on xmpp base anyway so what's missing is support for any extensions they create and open access for third party clients using standard xmpp protocols
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/12/google-tracker-2015-e...
Most interesting to me is Calico: