Non-IT News Thread
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Chinese customers hate “new car smell,” so Ford files a patent to bake it out
A premium smell to one country is a disgusting distraction to another.
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Report: Uber self-driving team was preparing for CEO demo before fatal crash
Engineers were reportedly encouraged to limit "bad experiences" to one per trip.
We've known since May that serious flaws in Uber's self-driving software contributed to the fatal crash that killed pedestrian Elaine Herzberg in Tempe, Arizona, back in March. For example, Uber had disabled emergency braking on its vehicles to make its cars' driving behavior less erratic. A new report from Business Insider's Julie Bort sheds light on why Uber's software may have been so flawed at the time of the March crash.
In early 2018, Uber's Advanced Technology Group—the team developing self-driving cars—was focused on getting ready for a forthcoming demo ride with Uber's recently hired CEO, Dara Khosrowshahi. Business Insider reports that in November 2017, Uber circulated a document asking engineers on the self-driving car team to think about "rider experience metrics." Engineers were encouraged to try to limit the number of "bad experiences" to one per ride.
Two days later, another email went out announcing that Uber was "turning off the car's ability to make emergency decisions on its own like slamming on the brakes or swerving hard."...
...Hard braking was still disabled in March when Elaine Herzberg stepped into the Tempe roadway ahead of an Uber vehicle. According to the NTSB's report, "at 1.3 seconds before impact, the self-driving system determined that an emergency braking maneuver was needed to mitigate a collision." However, "emergency braking maneuvers" were "not enabled." Even worse, "the system is not designed to alert" the safety driver about an imminent collision.
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The Boring Company’s first tunnel is all dug up
Tunnel reportedly ends on property The Boring Company recently bought.
On Friday night, Boring Company CEO Elon Musk tweeted images of his tunnel-boring machine appearing to emerge from the dirt into a cavernous hole, with bystanders at the hole's edge watching the spinning boring head.
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Mom jailed after child misses 26 days of school
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mom-jailed-child-misses-26-days-school/story?id=59468167 -
@black3dynamite said in Non-IT News Thread:
Mom jailed after child misses 26 days of school
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mom-jailed-child-misses-26-days-school/story?id=59468167This is really sad but it sounds like the mom just really doesn't care, about her daughter or anything.
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@black3dynamite said in Non-IT News Thread:
Mom jailed after child misses 26 days of school
https://abcnews.go.com/US/mom-jailed-child-misses-26-days-school/story?id=59468167Well we might not have the entire story. Maybe mom needed help with her crack farm?
Do kids still get exclusions if "working on a farm"?
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George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States, dies at 94
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-hw-bush-41st-president-of-the-united-states-dies-at-94/2018/11/30/42fa2ea2-61e2-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.html -
Alaska earthquake: Anchorage rocked by aftershocks
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@black3dynamite said in Non-IT News Thread:
George H.W. Bush, 41st president of the United States, dies at 94
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/george-hw-bush-41st-president-of-the-united-states-dies-at-94/2018/11/30/42fa2ea2-61e2-11e8-99d2-0d678ec08c2f_story.htmlWe were notified by an alert from a Japanese news site to my wife’s phone about 60 seconds before NBC broke into the tonight show with the news.
I dont allow any news apps or such to send notifications on my phone. I did pop open my google news feed and it was not there yet. I went to CNN and they had the banner, and that was when NBC broke in.
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Verizon/AOL helped advertisers track kids online, must now pay $5M fine
AOL knowingly violated children's privacy law with billions of targeted ads.
Verizon-owned AOL helped advertisers track children online in order to serve targeted ads, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, and has agreed to pay a fine of $4.95 million, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced today.
"The Attorney General's Office found that AOL conducted billions of auctions for ad space on hundreds of websites the company knew were directed to children under the age of 13," Underwood's announcement said. "Through these auctions, AOL collected, used, and disclosed personal information from the websites' users in violation of COPPA [Children's Online Privacy Protection Act], enabling advertisers to track and serve targeted ads to young children."
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Facebook chief's emails exposed by MPs
Damian Collins MP, the chair of the parliamentary committee involved, highlighted several "key issues" in an introductory note.
He wrote that:
- Facebook allowed some companies to maintain "full access" to users' friends data even after announcing changes to its platform in 2014/2015 to limit what developers' could see. "It is not clear that there was any user consent for this, nor how Facebook decided which companies should be whitelisted," Mr Collins wrote
- Facebook had been aware that an update to its Android app that let it collect records of users' calls and texts would be controversial. "To mitigate any bad PR, Facebook planned to make it as hard as possible for users to know that this was one of the underlying features," Mr Collins wrote
- Facebook used data provided by the Israeli analytics firm Onavo to determine which other mobile apps were being downloaded and used by the public. It then used this knowledge to decide which apps to acquire or otherwise treat as a threat
- there was evidence that Facebook's refusal to share data with some apps caused them to fail
- there had been much discussion of the financial value of providing access to friends' data
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Tom Cruise finally takes a stand… on your parents’ terrible TV settings
The "soap opera effect" is a common default setting on most high-definition TVs.
Anyone who owns a high-definition TV has likely experienced the nagging sensation of something being not quite right when watching films. It's not all in your head. The effect is called video interpolation, or motion smoothing, and last night, Tom Cruise and writer/director Chris McQuarrie dropped a surprise PSA on Twitter (apparently filmed on the set of Mission Impossible: Fallout) to warn us about this evil.
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@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Verizon/AOL helped advertisers track kids online, must now pay $5M fine
AOL knowingly violated children's privacy law with billions of targeted ads.
Verizon-owned AOL helped advertisers track children online in order to serve targeted ads, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, and has agreed to pay a fine of $4.95 million, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced today.
"The Attorney General's Office found that AOL conducted billions of auctions for ad space on hundreds of websites the company knew were directed to children under the age of 13," Underwood's announcement said. "Through these auctions, AOL collected, used, and disclosed personal information from the websites' users in violation of COPPA [Children's Online Privacy Protection Act], enabling advertisers to track and serve targeted ads to young children."
pocket change - who cares. Make it 100M, then maybe, maybe Verizon will actually change something.
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@Dashrender said in Non-IT News Thread:
@mlnews said in Non-IT News Thread:
Verizon/AOL helped advertisers track kids online, must now pay $5M fine
AOL knowingly violated children's privacy law with billions of targeted ads.
Verizon-owned AOL helped advertisers track children online in order to serve targeted ads, in violation of a federal children's privacy law, and has agreed to pay a fine of $4.95 million, New York Attorney General Barbara Underwood announced today.
"The Attorney General's Office found that AOL conducted billions of auctions for ad space on hundreds of websites the company knew were directed to children under the age of 13," Underwood's announcement said. "Through these auctions, AOL collected, used, and disclosed personal information from the websites' users in violation of COPPA [Children's Online Privacy Protection Act], enabling advertisers to track and serve targeted ads to young children."
pocket change - who cares. Make it 100M, then maybe, maybe Verizon will actually change something.
I think anything less than something that seriously hurts their pocketbooks is foolish. I'm thinking in the neighborhood of 20% of their net profit, or $250 million for each year that the COPPA was violated., minimum fine is 10% for one year, while freezing them from any rate hikes or increases until the fines are paid.
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Even self-driving leader Waymo is struggling to reach full autonomy
After 48 hours we haven't seen any sign people are using Waymo's service.
The Wednesday rollout of Waymo One, Waymo's commercial self-driving taxi service, falls far short of expectations the company itself set earlier in the year.
In late September, a Waymo spokeswoman told Ars by email that the Phoenix service would be fully driverless and open to members of the public—claims I reported in this article.
We now know that Waymo One won't be fully driverless; there will be a driver in the driver's seat. And Waymo One is open to the public in only the narrowest, most technical sense: initially it will only be available to early riders—the same people who have been participating in Waymo's test program for months.
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Why driving is hard—even for AIs
Despite promises of "soon," the infrastructure to support the driverless future isn't there yet.
I have a couple of kids of learner’s permit age, and it’s my fatherly duty to give them some driving tips so they won’t be a menace to themselves and to everyone else. So I’ve been analyzing the way I drive: How did I know that the other driver was going to turn left ahead of me? Why am I paying attention to the unleashed dog on the sidewalk but not the branches of the trees overhead? What subconscious cues tell me that a light is about to change to red or that the door of a parked car is about to open?
This exercise has given me a renewed appreciation for the terrible complexity of driving—and that’s just the stuff I know to think about. The car itself already takes care of a million details that make the car go, stop, and steer, and that process was complex enough when I was young and cars were essentially mechanical and electric. Now, cars have become rolling computers, with humans controlling (at most) speed, direction, and comfort.
