>>> The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
Read the whole story and you will see how IBM makes money !
[Ford] slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.
It wasn’t insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.
It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
> [Ford] slowly drew out from the wallet a single and insanely exciting piece of plastic that was nestling amongst a bunch of receipts.
> It wasn’t insanely exciting to look at. It was rather dull in fact. It was smaller and a little thicker than a credit card and semi-transparent. If you held it up to the light you could see a lot of holographically encoded information and images buried pseudo-inches deep beneath its surface.
> It was an Ident-i-Eeze, and was a very naughty and silly thing for Harl to have lying around in his wallet, though it was perfectly understandable. There were so many different ways in which you were required to provide absolute proof of your identity these days that life could easily become extremely tiresome just from that factor alone, never mind the deeper existential problems of trying to function as a coherent consciousness in an epistemologically ambiguous physical universe. Just look at cash point machines, for instance. Queues of people standing around waiting to have their fingerprints read, their retinas scanned, bits of skin scraped from the nape of the neck and undergoing instant (or nearly instant - a good six or seven seconds in tedious reality) genetic analysis, then having to answer trick questions about members of their family they didn’t even remember they had, and about their recorded preferences for tablecloth colours. And that was just to get a bit of spare cash for the weekend. If you were trying to raise a loan for a jetcar, sign a missile treaty or pay an entire restaurant bill things could get really trying.
> Hence the Ident-i-Eeze. This encoded every single piece of information about you, your body and your life into one all-purpose machine-readable card that you could then carry around in your wallet, and therefore represented technology’s greatest triumph to date over both itself and plain common sense.
Personally, I just stick the > in front even though HN doesn't apply special formatting to it. Most people are familiar with that convention, either from Markdown or from stuff like emails.
The point of pretty quote formatting is to highlight distinction between your own and borrowed text. But in this case the quote is the main content of the message, so there is no need to format it.
The modern convention for such quotations is called "copypasta": you put your quote in the beginning of your message without additional formatting, and attribute it to the author in the end of your message or in the reply to yourself, or ever in the username of account you created to post the quote (such account would be called "novelty account" because THGTTG is in fact a novel).
Attribution after the quote has additional benefit of giving people the pleasure to recognize the source of the quote themself while they read it.
Just Realized : Face recognition unlock : Biggest Security Scare
- Case 1 : Imagine crossing security check or border crossing. Guards just take your phone and point it to you : UNLOCKED . No need to resis to give passwd
- Case 2 : drug the activist and point unconscious victim ! Voila !
- Case 3 : Steal the phone, and change the cover and flash it in front of the real owner !
Case 1: "Look at the phone straight-ahead with your eyes or we'll beat you with the rubber-hose again"
Case 2: Hold open the eyelids with tape. Even if the eyes have rolled-back in their sockets they can be re-positioned with some manual adjustment enough to get the system to work.
Just Realized : Face recognition unlock : Biggest Security Scare
- Case 1 : Imagine crossing security check or border crossing. Guards just take your phone and point it to you : UNLOCKED . No need to resis to give passwd
- Case 2 : drug the activist and point unconscious victim ! Voila !
- Case 3 : Steal the phone, and change the cover and flash it in front of the real owner !
There is a fundamental problem with uber freight : availability of trucks. In case of the uber taxi, most of US population owns the car and drivers working for uber already had a license.
for uber frieght : trucks are owned by companies, who will not work with uber, u need a special license to drive truck: these drivers will not work with uber.
> The way most shipping works for most companies today is by going through a brokerage firm, which makes calls to trucking companies and arranges the best deals for its customers. The broker takes a commission of between 15 and 20%. To start, the Uber Freight marketplace will eliminate that middleman and offer shippers real-time pricing of what it will cost to move their goods based on supply and demand.
Yes. Uber Freight is basically a freight brokerage that's being operated at break-even levels:
> UberFreight, which would not control the trucks it relies upon to move customers' freight, is building in only a 5-percent average margin for its net revenue per transaction, according to another person familiar with the matter. On average, net revenue, defined as the revenue a broker generates after its cost of purchased transportation, is around three times that for established brokers. UberFreight's other costs would then be subtracted from its net revenue threshold, leaving the brokerage business either to operate at break-even levels or be a loss leader for the San Francisco-based parent.
So if I'm understanding it properly, they are offering drastically lower prices by cutting out the broker and passing on the savings, but still need the truckers and the truckers will be forced to use them because that's where the jobs will be (not sure if they'll see any pay boost or if it will just be customers seeing savings).
Once Uber gets autonomous trucks everywhere they cut out the drivers and add that revenue to their margins while still under cutting everyone else.
I think Uber realizes if someone else has autonomous tech first, that company will cut out the drivers and they will all be out of jobs. So either way, it doesn't really matter who does it first.
And it's also why Uber is probably running towards getting autonomous tech developed, because ultimately its a fight for it's survival.
In the mean time, they will run transport markets that need people to run it until that tech comes. And it could take 5 years to 20 years for all we know.
Uber started as a limo company, competing with specially licenced drivers working for small businesses. They are into that market. I see this as comparable to what they will do to the trucking industry.
The drivers will go where the work is. If Uber lets them utilize their truck more often and/or with more certainty, and pays them on delivery without them having to send out invoices and wait 30+ days, then they'll drive for Uber instead of their local brokerage.
I'm pretty sure Uber has done their research into how to make this work. It's probably not a question of whether they can solve this, it's most likely a question of what they've already done to solve it. This announcement is probably them just getting ready to open it at beta scale. Pretty sure this isn't an MVP esque landing page where someone said "what if we did Uber for freight?" (just want to make it clear that those are my words and totally not what you said :) ). My guess is that Uber already has a list of small partners they've manually brought on. If history is any indication, they'll do whatever subsidizing they can to own this market.
I was in india till 2001 and very few people in urban areas has cellular phone. Even in US during studies, very few students had cell phones (2001-2002).
The advent of cellphone is definitely from 2000 (not before). atleast my experience.
https://www.forbes.com/asap/2002/0624/044.html
>>> The chief blue suit orchestrated the presentation of the seven patents IBM claimed were infringed, the most prominent of which was IBM's notorious "fat lines" patent: To turn a thin line on a computer screen into a broad line, you go up and down an equal distance from the ends of the thin line and then connect the four points. You probably learned this technique for turning a line into a rectangle in seventh-grade geometry, and, doubtless, you believe it was devised by Euclid or some such 3,000-year-old thinker. Not according to the examiners of the USPTO, who awarded IBM a patent on the process.
Read the whole story and you will see how IBM makes money !