So if I understand this correctly, this company gets certain information about 911 calls, and then sells it to third parties?
I wonder how much information they get, because this could get a lot darker. Imagine if calls to the police reporting domestic violence resulted in advertising material from divorce lawyers. (A domestic violence victim might well want a divorce lawyer, but unsolicited material showing up in their mailbox may put them at risk by enraging their already-violent spouse.)
I was in a car crash on a Sat. night and flew to Boston for work the next day. I got weird calls from out of state the following days telling me I had to call the impound lot who had my crashed car and fax a release form.
Wondering why I had to do this, I called the impound lot who explained that there was a shady company that would make off with your crashed car if they could talk you into releasing it, which then they could strongarm you into repairs with them or they would get the totaled vehicle if insurance went that way. That has got to be illegal, so I contacted the local PD and they simply did not care.
Shady people get rich in businesses where the police do not care. Anything car related seems to be filled with bad behavior.
"Imagine if calls to the police reporting domestic violence resulted in advertising material from divorce lawyers."
While not nearly as cryptic, Target had to adjust their advertising a few years ago because they were accurately predicting women's pregnancies through their analytics. Women received targeted mailings. In many cases probably not problematic, but there's potential for that data to be horribly misused.
There is a lot of doubt as to weather that story is real. The story supposedly happened in 2009 when the online Target store was hosted and run by Amazon. Even now Amazon's (or anyone else's) recommendations are not anywhere close to that despite having a decade more experience building recommendations systems. (Yes, Amazon, I want to buy another TV after ordering one yesterday)
I bet you're right about there being value to the spirit. But if I understand correctly escape was also regarded as a matter of duty. By escaping you would not only stand a chance of making it back to Allied lines, but you would also tie up German forces searching for you.
I'm a Brit who has worked in finance and AI. I honestly want to move into building hardware. My background is physics, I want to build things that make the world better. But the businesses just seem absent. One of the UK's most exciting hardware projects was Reaction Engines, and they went bankrupt recently.
I really want to know what we can do to fix this. As a country, we aren't building things that people want. Which means we are less powerful.
Same. I'm in the UK, I've been a software dev for a long time (with forays into physical consumer products, not electronics/hardware).
I tinker with robotics, rpis, embedded tools, and the potential _power_ there is huge. But I never hear or see of jobs or opportunities (in the ballpark compensation of software).
> As a country, we aren't building things that people want.
The key distinction is between "what people want", "what people are prepared to pay for", and "what the people with all the money really want to buy".
The huge success of gatcha games which understand the economic inequality among their audience is important. Most of the free users are effectively there as an audience for the few whales who pay for the whole thing.
Similarly, startups are not so much about serving unmet needs as about fishing for whale VCs, of which there are very few and all searching in the same pond of Silicon Valley. They in turn want whale companies: a mere profitable business isn't enough, it has to be world-dominating.
The financial sector makes a lot of money because it serves the customers who have the money.
This is very cool. I did my PhD in tidal interactions, but in the context of stars and giant planets - bodies that can typically be treated as having spheroidal symmetry. (In fact, one thing I was looking at was the corrections as you moved away from as assumption of spherical symmetry to include the equatorial bulge.)
The Earth's tides are far more complex because of the shape of the ocean basins, and it has quite a high dissipation rate. I'm not sure how much the internal tide contributes to that, but I suspect a lot given that the amplitude (tens of meters) is much greater than the surface displacement.
looks interesting. a network of maybe solar-powered scrapped commodity hardware or cheap raspis. maximum of 1kB/sec bandwidth. fully encrypted. no logging. all peer to peer networked. messaging / chat, text-based websites. maybe some simple images (black / white, svg) but optional.
i don't think this would be in and off itself a game changer but it could be a seed for further development of anarchistic technology culture.
Maybe worth remembering that "trees" have evolved many times on earth. i.e. trees do not all share a common tree-like ancestor. The woody-trunk-and-branches pattern was just useful enough that it evolved many times. Which makes me suspect that aliens would likely have something tree-like on their home world, and would have also learned to build using it.
Cargo airships are not going to replace container ships, but they may well have their niche. One such use-case is prompt delivery of supplies that are urgently needed in high quantity in underdeveloped areas. For example, delivering some grammar to the parent comment.
We should crack down on these firms. They're a net negative for Britain.
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