The way I use Google Maps a lot is for discovery. I look at the map of New York to see cities around it. When I look at a more zoomed in level of the city I want to see different boroughs and major roads. More zoomed in you want to discover shops and businesses. The bareness of the current Google Maps makes it very unsuitable for these functions. For example, even at full zoom level it only shows a few (<5%) of the shops and bars at the city center where i live. If i want to get a feel for a city (where are the most restaurants, where are the shopping centres, etc) the maps are really bad for that unless i go searching for the specific terms in the search bar. But that is the down side of the search bar: you never finf something you didn't know you were looking for.
HN user
rrockstar
I think legislature should focus on the core of a problem and create laws that solve that problem. The core of the problem is anonymous payment, not 'cash is the best payment system'. I think that laws should focus on increasing privacy of (electronic) payment information, not force cash to be kept around. In the Netherlands more than the US, cash is being phased out more and more. I would rather pay with a debit card with increased privacy than force businesses to keep cash registers.
I wonder if the minister wants this right to be enforced at every shop. Should I always be able to pay cash for goods/services? What if I buy something online?
Card payments also have many upsides besides ease of use for the customer. Currently the Amsterdam transport company is planning to disallow cash payments in buses because of the many armed robberies of bus drivers.
Exactly. The truth is, paying electronically is so much easier than with cash. Either way, paying with cash is the past and will (slowly) move away. I'd much rather be an anonymous technologist than an anonymous luddite.
"The author is also still on Windows 7, which is a 6-year-old OS and probably not the highest priority for Google's testing of Chrome." What? At the time of the bug 50% of laptops/desktops on the world ran Windows 7. How could Win7 not be the highest priority for the Chrome team?
While I agree that auto-update makes live a lot easier for web developers, i think this strategy of actively preventing users from running an older version requires more responsibility on the developers of Chrome to make sure the browser is stable.
That is why I suspect this is mainly a PR move by Facebook to show they are concerned about your privacy. Although the suggestion in the article about Facebook going in the PGP mail business is much more excited. Not that i would want to host my email on facebook servers, but if they are able to lay the groundwork for usable encrypted email that would be really great.
We cannot say that AI's will not be dangerous just because they will not have human-like behaviour. We shouldn't let inaccurate sci-fi movies cloud our judgement like that. Just because the future will most certainly not look like Terminator does not mean AI's are not a danger. The Elon Musk comment about the demon was not anthropomorphizing AI's; he was saying the invention of superintelligent general AI's could be like summoning the demon and trying to contain it in the sense that it could be a point of no return. We may find out after the fact that we made a huge mistake and cannot control it. I think the remarks of Elon Musk and Stephen Hawkings sound very alarmist, but they want to make sure that we will think about the implications of superintelligent AIs now, and not after we invent them. I am sure we can think of proper ways to 'contain the demon', but we need to think about that now and not when they are already 'set free'.