Archive for the 'Outsourced' Category
Self Driving Truck Makes First Commercial Delivery
October 25th, 2016Via: New York Times: The futurists of Silicon Valley may not have seen this one coming: The first commercial delivery made by a self-driving truck was 2,000 cases of Budweiser beer. On Tuesday, Otto, the Uber-owned self-driving vehicle operation, announced the completion of its first commercial delivery, having delivered its beer load from Fort Collins, […]
All Tesla Cars Being Produced Now Have Hardware Capable of Level 4 Autonomy
October 19th, 2016A validation period of unspecified length will be required before the fully autonomous features become available. Here’s a sentence in the press release that’s worth noting: Before activating the features enabled by the new hardware, we will further calibrate the system using millions of miles of real-world driving to ensure significant improvements to safety and […]
Obama DOJ Drops Charges Against Arms Dealer After Threat to Expose Hillary Clinton’s Libya Role
October 4th, 2016Via: Politico: The Obama administration is moving to dismiss charges against an arms dealer it had accused of selling weapons that were destined for Libyan rebels. Lawyers for the Justice Department on Monday filed a motion in federal court in Phoenix to drop the case against the arms dealer, an American named Marc Turi, whose […]
Yahoo Secretly Scanned Customer Emails for U.S. Intelligence
October 4th, 2016Via: Reuters: Yahoo Inc last year secretly built a custom software program to search all of its customers’ incoming emails for specific information provided by U.S. intelligence officials, according to people familiar with the matter. The company complied with a classified U.S. government demand, scanning hundreds of millions of Yahoo Mail accounts at the behest […]
Not The Onion: ‘A Robot Baby Intended to Make Lonely People More Happy’
October 3rd, 2016Via: Independent: Toyota has created a tiny robot baby that it hopes can make lonely people more happy. The company’s Kirobo Mini is meant to help provide a companion. It looks like a baby – and could even serve that purpose for people in Japan, where it will be sold and where falling birth rates […]
Pentagon Paid for Fake ‘Al Qaeda’ Videos
October 2nd, 2016I wonder if there was a package deal to make ISIS videos as well… Via: Daily Beast: The Pentagon gave a controversial UK PR firm over half a billion dollars to run a top secret propaganda program in Iraq, the Bureau of Investigative Journalism can reveal. Bell Pottinger’s output included short TV segments made in […]
Russia: U.S. Controlling an “International Terrorist Alliance”
September 29th, 2016Via: CBS: Senior Russian officials blasted the United States on Thursday for what they said were Washington’s “invitations to use terrorism as a weapon against Russia.” Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov and others were reacting to comments made the previous day by Pentagon spokesman John Kirby, who suggested terrorists could use the chaotic battleground in […]
AI Legion of Doom: Facebook, Amazon, Google, IBM and Microsoft Form AI Partnership
September 28th, 2016Via: Tech Crunch: The world’s largest technology companies hold the keys to some of the largest databases on our planet. Much like goods and coins before it, data is becoming an important currency for the modern world. The data’s value is rooted in its applications to artificial intelligence. Whichever company owns the data, effectively owns […]
Self-Driving Trucks Threaten One of America’s Top Blue-Collar Jobs
September 25th, 2016Via: Los Angeles Times: Carmaking giants and ride-sharing upstarts racing to put autonomous vehicles on the road are dead set on replacing drivers, and that includes truckers. Trucks without human hands at the wheel could be on American roads within a decade, say analysts and industry executives. At risk is one of the most common […]
Monkeys to Operate Robots
September 24th, 2016Via: IEEE: As if quantum computing wasn’t mind-bending enough, one of D-Wave Systems’ founders is now pursuing another futuristic idea: using artificial intelligence and high-tech exoskeleton suits to allow humans—and, at least according to one description of the technology, monkeys, too—to control and train an army of intelligent robots. Geordie Rose is a co-founder and […]
