The Great A.I. AwakeningHow Google used artificial intelligence to transform Google Translate, one of its more popular services — and how machine learning is poised to reinvent computing itself.
A great article about Google's recent AI research and how it is now driving their Translate service.
Mobsters ran a fake U.S. Embassy in Ghana for 10 years, flying the flag and issuing visas for $6,000For a decade, an American flag flew outside a battered pink building in Ghana’s capital city, welcoming out-of-town visitors who, once inside, found a photo of President Obama hanging on the wall. Signs confirmed to travelers — who had been bused in from the most remote parts of West Africa — that they had arrived at the U.S. Embassy in Accra.
The "consular officers" working there were not Americans, but they spoke English and Dutch and issued official-looking visas and identification papers. They charged their customers $6,000.
Incredible. Both for the sheer audacity of Turkish mobsters to run a fake embassy, and for the fact that they were able to operate for 10 years without the US government finding out.
How many people actually came in to the US with these fake visas and passports? The article doesn't say, but one can assume that it was a high percentage because even the most incompetent immigration system would start to get a hint if they were rejecting hundreds of fake visas all coming from Ghana.
More disturbing is that this gang was apparently issuing legitimate, but fraudulently-obtained, US visas. Sounds like some people in the real US embassy were in on the scam.
Read the whole article from The Washington Post and the original article from Ghana Business News for more details.
I've referred to this speech in casual conversation many times in the past and most of my Leftie friends have insisted that no such thing was ever said. I assume they'll assume that this video is also a forgery, but for everybody else, here is Jim Moran, former Congresscritter from Northern Virginia, speaking in 2008. In this clip, he summarizes the American Left more succinctly than I've heard any pundit ever do:
Now, in the last seven years we have had the highest corporate profit ever in American history. Highest corporate profit. We've had the highest productivity. The American worker has produced more per person than at any time. But it hasn't been shared and that's the problem. Because we have been guided by a Republican administration who believes in the simplistic notion that people who have wealth are entitled to keep it, and they have an antipathy towards the means of redistributing wealth. And they may be able to sustain that for a while, but it doesn't work in the long run.
And that's ultimately what the entire divide in this country is about. The Left (all of the Democrat leadership, along with many Republicans, and an unknown percentage of ordinary Americans) believe that if you work and slave at a job for 50 years in order to make yourself wealthy, you have no right to keep it, but the government has a mandate to confiscate everything you've earned and give it to other people who (as determined by the government) deserve it more.
We may disagree about how much charity wealthy people and corporations give, and we may disagree about how much we think they should give and to whom they should give it, but that's nothing compared to the Left's belief that these people should not even be allowed to decide, or even to voice an opinion on the subject.
This is flat-out communism. Marx, Lenin, Stalin and Mao couldn't have said it any clearer. This is what Obama and Hillary are all about. This is what Bernie Sanders is about. This is what Nancy Pelosi, Chuck Schumer, and all the rest of the DNC leadership is about.
Everything else you may hear is a distraction calculated to prevent you from thinking about this one simple fact: The Left doesn't believe you have a right to keep any of your property. Period.
Nyan Cat on Your TouchBar Is the Easiest Way to Justify Buying a New MacBook Pro
Andrew Liszewski 11/07/16 8:43am
Apple packed its latest event with countless examples of why the new TouchBar feature on its updated MacBook Pro will make your life inconceivably better. But the company should have just started and finished with this Nyan Cat animation that flies across the new touch-sensitive display strip.
Emojis are now being displayed in the Museum of Modern Art, this is how it all began in 1999The first emoji was created in 1998 or 1999 by Japanese designer Shigetaka Kurita, who was at the time working on a mobile internet platform, called i-mode, at Japanese carrier NTT. Kurita was inspired by the way weather forecasts and street signs used simple, but universally recognizable, symbols to convey meaning, and decided to adopt this approach for his project. The first set of emoji was comprised of just 176 pictograms, each with resolution of 12 x 12 pixels, and was aimed to differentiate i-mode's messaging features from other such services.
A fascinating bit of history. Many different news outlets have written different stories about this event, each telling something else interesting about the history of emoji:
Enjoy.
Microsoft Announces Surface Book i7, Desktop PC 'Surface Studio,' and Windows 10 Creators UpdateAt its media event today in New York City, Microsoft announced a new update coming to Windows 10 devices that's focused on creativity and productivity tools, as well as two major new pieces of hardware: the Surface Book i7 and Surface Studio. The Surface Book is the second generation of last year's original model, while the Surface Studio is the company's all new, all-in-one desktop PC that's aimed at the high-end, enterprise market with a starting price of $2,999.
Nice systems. (And unlike Samsung's latest offerings, these are distinct Microsoft designs and are not knock-offs of what other companies are shipping.)
I especially like their large Surface Studio. The idea of being able to quickly fold a desktop-style workstation into a flat drafting-board-like surface for pen-based interaction is great. I've seen concepts like this, but I think this is the first time the concept will ship in an commercial product. And I love the concept of the Surface Dial - hopefully we'll see some great apps that can take advantage of this device.
Samsung's cylindrical ArtPC Pulse computer apes design of Apple's Mac Pro
Samsung, in conjunction with Harman Kardon, has quietly revealed the new cylindrical consumer-grade ArtPC Pulse line powered by the sixth generation Skylake processor, which has already begun to draw many comparisons to Apple's 2013 Mac Pro design.
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A configuration with a dual-core 2.7 GHz Kaby Lake i5 processor, 256GB of NVMe storage, 8GB of RAM is up for pre-order at Amazon for $1199.99.
Gee, can't Samsung sell anything that's not a copy of some other company's product? Nobody in the world was shipping or even talking about a small-black-cylinder form factor before Apple released the 2013 Mac Pro and now Samsung ships one. And don't get me started on their iPhone clones. Don't they have any product designers capable of original thought?
What SMART Stats Tell Us About Hard DrivesWhat if a hard drive could tell you it was going to fail before it actually did? Is that possible? Each day Backblaze records the SMART stats that are reported by the 67,814 hard drives we have spinning in our Sacramento data center. SMART stands for Self-Monitoring, Analysis and Reporting Technology and is a monitoring system included in hard drives that reports on various attributes of the state of a given drive.
While we’ve looked at SMART stats before, this time we’ll dig into the SMART stats we use in determining drive failure and we’ll also look at a few other stats we find interesting.
This is a really interesting article about some parts of SMART and how the statistics may be used to heuristically predict drive failure.
Facebook Now Testing Autoplay Videos With Sound in iOS AppStarting today, Facebook will begin testing autoplay videos -- including ads -- with sound in its iOS and Android apps. Facebook told Mashable the test will be limited to Australian users and rolled out in two different ways to gauge how users react. In both versions of the test, sound will only play if the iPhone's volume is turned up, and sound can also be turned to "always off" in Facebook settings.
I've been ticked off at Facebook for quite some time now. I suspended my account briefly in 2010 and then for real in 2013. Mostly because of policies that make the site less and less interesting to users and more and more ruled by advertisers.
At this point, I really wonder why it exists or should be used by anyone. You are forced to work in a straightjacket. There's almost no opportunity for personalization anymore (aside from a banner image), they censor what you're allowed to read and write, and now they're going to be forcing auto-play videos with sound on you, despite the fact that users have overwhelmingly said they don't want this.
Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump gave a new policy speech on immigration and terrorism Monday in Youngstown, Ohio.
In the fiery speech, Trump said that he would institute “extreme vetting” of visa applicants, citing domestic terrorism incidents like the shootings in San Bernardino and Orlando as examples of a failed immigration policy.
I'm no particular fan of Trump (although I think he's far better than the other choices we will have to choose from in November) but this speech is spot-on.
I've been hearing these opinions for many years from conservative national security sources (like the Secure Freedom Radio podcast) but most of the public is probably hearing about this for the first time, thanks to media outlets and politicians that prefer to pretend that (depending on the day of the week) there is no war, the enemy has no relationship to Islam, we can't possibly win, and it is morally wrong to take even the slightest steps to do something about it.
Now, if only we could get people to actually read the full text of Trump's speech instead of just repeating the media mantra of "he's a racist bigot homophobe evil rich white man so you should ignore everything he says no matter what it is."
But that's never going to happen, will it?
h/t to the Dry Bones blog for giving me the link to the full text of Trump's speech. Until now, all I heard was a few clips on the Mark Levin Show.
(Given the fact that half of Republicans and almost all Democrats hate Trump with a passion, I'm expecting more comments than usual (meaning more than zero) here. Please remember to keep your points civil and factual. Anything insulting or abusive or off-topic will not be posted.)
