Who Is The Only Person To Have Played Themselves In The Star Trek Universe? |
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from How-To Geek http://bit.ly/2s3fM1r
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Monday, December 31, 2018
Geek Trivia: Who Is The Only Person To Have Played Themselves In The Star Trek Universe?
from How-To Geek http://bit.ly/2s3fM1r
Go-Jek extends ride-hailing service to the rest of Singapore
After a limited rollout, Go-Jek said today that it will extend its ride-hailing service to all of Singapore tomorrow while continuing its beta phase. The Indonesian-based company began offering rides in Singapore at the end of November, but only for passengers riding to and from certain areas. It http://bit.ly/2Roif56 dynamic pricing there, which increases prices during peak times, a few days ago.
“We continue to welcome feedback from driver-partners and riders during this enhanced beta phase, as we work to fine-tune the app and create the best experience for our users,” the company said in a statement.
After Uber exited from Southeast Asia earlier this year by selling its local business to Grab, Go-Jek became Grab’s main rival. Uber still maintains a presence in the region, however, thanks to its 27.5 percent stake in Grab.
There is currently a waiting list for Go-Jek in Singapore, with customers of DBS/POSB being given priority.
When asked about how long new users need to wait, a Go-Jek spokesperson said in a statement that the time depends on supply and demand. “The response from the driver community since we opened pre-registration has been overwhelming with tens of thousands of drivers signing up via the pre-registration portal. While we can’t disclose figure at this moment, we are confident we can meet consumer expectations during the beta service period.”
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2GRNQIb
FCC will suspend most operations on Thursday if the shutdown continues
The Federal Communications Commission said on Monday that it will need to suspend most of its operations by the middle of Thursday if the partial government shutdown continues.
The FCC will continue “work required for the protection of life and property,” as well as work related to spectrum auctions, since those are funded by the money raised by auctioning off spectrum licenses. The Office of the Inspector General, responsible for conducting internal reviews, audits, and investigations of FCC programs and operations, will also remain open until further notice.
In a document outlining what needs to happen for an “orderly shutdown,” the FCC said suspended activities will include: “Consumer complaint and inquiry phone lines cannot be answered; consumer protection and local competition enforcement must cease; licensing services, including broadcast, wireless, and wireline, must cease; management of radio spectrum and the creation of new opportunities for competitive technologies and services for the American public must be suspended; and equipment authorizations, including those bringing new electronic devices to American consumers, cannot be provided.”
The FCC added that it will release more information on Wednesday about what will happen if it needs to suspend operations, including how it will affect electronic filing and database systems, filing deadlines, regulatory and application fee payments, and “shot clocks,” AKA the length of time allocated for approving or denying pending transactions.
The partial government shutdown continued into its 11th day as President Donald Trump refuses to back down on his demands for a wall on the U.S.-Mexico border, forcing 800,000 federal employees to go without work or work without pay. House Democrats have said they are preparing to introduce bills that will put an end to the shutdown but not include funding for the wall.
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2St9Jih
How to Sell Stuff on Facebook: The Best Tips for Success
Facebook has become one of the best places to sell your stuff online. Hundreds of millions of people use Facebook Marketplace every month. And there are other ways to sell stuff on Facebook too.
In this article we look at the different ways you can sell your unwanted items on Facebook, as well as share some crucial tips for making a successful sale.
Facebook Marketplace
Facebook Marketplace is definitely the first place you’ll want to try if you’re looking to to make a quick sale.
Since Facebook already knows your location when you’re logged in, it automatically calls up sales from your local area. This means when you click the Sell Something button on the left, Facebook will tailor the listing for buyers near you who are looking for that item.
Selling is also fast. You’ll pick from one of the main categories; Item for Sale, Vehicle for Sale, or Home for Rent.
Depending on which category you choose, you’ll see a simple form to fill out your details.
Filling out this form and adding photos can take as little as one to five minutes, depending how descriptive you get.
In just a few steps you’ll have a live listing, accessible to all the buyers using Facebook Marketplace in your local area.
From this listing page, you’ll manage questions from potential buyers. People can also send private messages, make offers, and arrange a pickup time and place.
Because there are so many people on Facebook Marketplace, you’ll find that in most cases you’ll have far more interested buyers than you’ll know what to do with. Most items can sell in as little as one to four days.
Tips for Selling on Facebook Marketplace
- Make your titles interesting and descriptive.
- Use a brief description that covers what buyers care about, such as quality, history, and why you’re selling.
- Take advantage of the 10 images, and make them all clear and detailed.
- Answer buyer questions quickly, and consider taking lower offers if you want to sell fast.
- Arrange to meet somewhere safe and in public to close the sale.
Buy and Sell Groups on Facebook
While Facebook Marketplace is the most popular way to sell things on Facebook, it isn’t the only way.
There are entire Facebook Groups, many that have thousands or hundreds of thousands of members, dedicated to buying and selling things. In many cases, you can find groups focused on selling specific types of items like antiques, vehicles, real estate, and more.
You can find these groups by clicking on Groups in the left navigation pane, and then searching for “buy and sell groups”.
If you’re having difficulty finding what you’re looking for, read through these useful Facebook search tips.
The main differences between selling on these groups and selling on Facebook Marketplace is that the groups aren’t always localized. You may land a buyer who lives halfway across the country from you. So you’ll need to arrange shipping (and make sure to charge the buyer shipping costs).
With that said, you can sometimes find a local buy and sell group near you as well. Posting your item in a Facebook Group can increase the odds of selling (as well as the final selling price). This is because people in the group are already interested, and they’re usually willing to pay more.
Some of these groups are public (meaning you can join and start posting immediately), but most are private. So once you click Join, you’ll need to wait until the group Admin accepts you into the group.
Tips for Selling on Facebook Groups
- Use good formatting so buyers can easily scan the post for features that are important to them.
- Photos appear larger than in Facebook Marketplace, so take high-detail pictures.
- Include your location in the post along with estimated shipping costs.
Buy and Sell Pages on Facebook
If you’re doing more than just doing a one-time sale, a better option might be creating a buy-and-sell Facebook Page.
If you own your own store and you’re looking to build a community of people interested in the kind of items you sell, a Facebook Page is the perfect way to do it. Once you’ve attracted enough members, you can post daily updates to your page with items from your shop. You can even do this if your entire business is digital.
Beyond selling things, you can also use your own Facebook page to promote special events or promotions.
The one downside of launching your own page is that, unlike Facebook Marketplace, you aren’t starting out with an existing community of buyers.
But on the flip side, once you’ve built a large enough following, you’ll have a devoted group of people who are interested in the stuff that only you are selling. There’s no competing with other sellers on your own Facebook page.
Tips for Selling on a Facebook Page
- Focus your early efforts on promoting your new Facebook page.
- Post items for sale frequently to generate and maintain interest with your followers.
- Promote your Facebook page to your real world customers and everyone you know.
- Include your Facebook page on business cards.
- Offer frequent discounts and special deals to your followers.
Sell on Your Facebook Wall
One of the most common ways people occasionally sell items on Facebook is by posting that item for sale on their own wall.
This is the easiest and fastest solution, because you don’t have to search for a group or fill out a form on Facebook Marketplace. You just take a few photos of the item and write up a status update as you normally would.
If you have even just a few hundred friends, the odds are pretty good that one of your family or friends will want what you’re selling. You can also feel great about giving one of your family or friends a great deal on something they need.
Tips for Selling Through a Facebook Post
- Create the post on a 3rd party site (like eBay or YouTube), and share the post to your Facebook wall.
- Take large, high-quality photos to attract eyes to your post (read through our photography tips for beginners if you need help).
- Make your post public, rather than private.
- Offer to deliver the item (if a local friend or family member buys it).
- List it far enough below its true value to attract interest.
Selling Stuff on Facebook Is Easy
All of the methods listed above to sell things on Facebook are simple and straightforward. It doesn’t take very long, and usually your item will sell much faster than if you posted it elsewhere. Best of all, sales should be hassle-fee.
Usually there’s no packaging or shipping, and often you can meet with the buyer and get rid of the item on the same day.
Selling things is only one way Facebook can be a powerful tool. But like all large communities, it’s important to stay safe. This is especially true when dealing with people you don’t know.
Before you get started selling, make sure to review our Facebook privacy guide and ensure that you’re protecting yourself and your information along the way.
Image Credit: jhansen2/Depositphotos
Read the full article: How to Sell Stuff on Facebook: The Best Tips for Success
from MakeUseOf http://bit.ly/2TfZY72
Source: Netflix to hire Activision Blizzard's Spencer Neumann as its new CFO starting in early 2019; Activision said it intended to fire Neumann in a filing (Kenneth Li/Reuters)
Source: Netflix to hire Activision Blizzard's Spencer Neumann as its new CFO starting in early 2019; Activision said it intended to fire Neumann in a filing — (Reuters) - Netflix Inc is expected to announce in the next few days that it has poached media finance veteran Spencer Neumann …
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2RnJKf0
All photos uploaded to Twinning, Popsugar's tool to match a user's photo with a celebrity's, were accessible from a public AWS storage bucket that is now locked (Zack Whittaker/TechCrunch)
All photos uploaded to Twinning, Popsugar's tool to match a user's photo with a celebrity's, were accessible from a public AWS storage bucket that is now locked — I thought the worst thing about Popsugar's Twinning tool was that it matched me with James Corden.
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2F1r0w9
Tech trends for 2019: foldable phones, 5G, cashierless retail, privacy legislation, autonomous delivery wagons, IoT edge computing, and more (Wall Street Journal)
Tech trends for 2019: foldable phones, 5G, cashierless retail, privacy legislation, autonomous delivery wagons, IoT edge computing, and more — From delivery wagons and foldable phones to privacy crackdowns and corporate health tracking, the coming year will make good on some of the tech industry's biggest promises
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2s0cE6J
In 2018 the ticketing industry finally killed the ‘sold out’ show
Among the many myths that were laid low in 2018, perhaps none was as welcome to throngs of live event fans as the fantasy of the sold-out show. Indeed, as the ticket market has moved to adopt new technology the new-found transparency has had one prime victim: The Sellout.
The highest-profile debunking of the sellout in sports for 2018 came from Washington, DC.
Originally reported by the Washington Post, the Washington Redskins officially ended their decade-long season-ticket waitlist this June. Once claimed to be 200,000 fans deep, the reality of Redskins demand hadn’t been as rosy since the glory days of Riggins and Theisman. In 2018, the Redskins have been selling single game tickets like never before — even using the secondary market as a favorable point of comparison.
Other high-profile examples of this shift include the Golden State Warriors, who, despite selling out 100% of their regular season games, had hundreds of tickets available on for Game 1 of the NBA finals in the minutes before tip-off.
If the Redskins and Warriors signaled a shift away from the sellout era in sports, Taylor Swift’s Reputation tour did the same for music. Having wrapped up earlier this month, Reputation finished as the highest grossing US Tour in history, despite a flurry of articles lambasting the artist for not selling out many shows. Ironically, it turns out that the most important factor in her record-breaking success was exactly that: not selling out.
Rather than a lack of demand, these unsold tickets for high-profile events are the result of the latest trend in the ticketing industry — making sure you have tickets to sell when fans want to buy them. Anyone that has purchased tickets on the Internet knows that the most active buying window is in the days and hours leading up to an event.
Before the Internet, while this last-minute market existed, it was contained to street corners and run by local brokers. For most of the 20th century, managing this aftermarket was a job ticket owners were comfortable outsourcing. With it’s limitless reach and real-time distribution, however, Internet-based selling changed their comfort level dramatically, by removing the ticket owner from the supply chain and costing them billions in margin. It also created a product category that became one of the worst, if not the worst, on the Internet.
If not for the universal appeal of live events, ticketing as a product would have died with Pets.com. Instead, teams, artists and promoters became the poster children for the Internet’s power to disrupt. The response from many ticket owners was to simply to hang up a ‘Sold Out’ sign at the box office in the weeks, days and hours before the game — one that is just now starting to be taken down.
Photo courtesy of Getty Images
To understand why that happened, it’s important to recognize that when the Internet took off, teams were principally in the season-ticket business, while artists and promoters were in the record-selling business. Selling last-minute, ‘on-demand’ tickets simply wasn’t a focus. The Internet, however, turned that secondary market niche into a product category worth $10 to $15 billion at it’s peak — two to three times the size of the primary market it was based on.
In order to compete in this always-on marketplace, ticketing technology has received billions of dollars of investment in the last decade, with the goal of making it more compatible with the Web itself. In the last two years, Ticketmaster, Seatgeek and Eventbrite have all announced ‘open platform’ models that make it as easy to sell tickets in places like Facebook and Youtube as it does in Stubhub.
In January, Ticketmaster and the NFL announced a new platform deal that, for the first time ever, allows teams and leagues to define their own distribution ecosystem. As one of the biggest destinations for ticket buying online, sites like Stubhub and my company, TicketIQ, have become direct-to-fan distribution channels in the new ticketing marketplace.
(AP Photo/Jeff Chiu)
Before we singlehandedly credit technology for killing the sell out, it’s worth asking whether the decline in sellouts is simply the result of exorbitant ticket prices and increased competition for consumer attention. While there’s no question that it’s become harder to get people off of their couches for average events, the robust growth of the experience economy suggests the opposite trend.
According to a December 2017 McKinsey report, millennials spend 60% more on live experiences than GenXers — all in search of not only genuine connection, but also fresh social-media content. For the Reputation tour specifically, last-minute tickets on the secondary market were actually 35% cheaper than 1989 tour, which made buying tickets day-of the event more affordable than ever.
As for the Redskins, while their 2018 season hasn’t turned out as they’d hoped, at the box office, they’ve set themselves up for success in the years to come. When demand spikes, whether as the result of a new stadium or a championship run, they’ll benefit directly and handsomely. As a point of reference for what kind of profit they might expect, the Financial Times reported that Taylor Swift’s per-show gross for Reputation increased by $1.4 million, including two dates in July at Fedex Field, home of the Redskins.
In “Look what you Made Me Do” the sixth song on the Reputation album, Taylor Swift sings about past “games”, “a tilted stage” and “unfair disadvantage”, for which she now seeks retribution. As a statement about her artistic and commercial stature, it’s clear she no longer wants to play nice. In addition to a jab at her artistic nemesis, Kanye West, it also reads like a farewell to the ticket market of old that has frustrated consumers for almost two decades.
Despite claims that she sold out her fans to achieve Reputation’s record-breaking success, the numbers mean that it’s a model we’ll be seeing much more of in the years to come. Regardless of how you feel about her forcing fans to Buy, Like and Watch to get their place in line for tickets, the good news for the ticket market overall is that it was her decision to make.
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2F2kvt5
How to Disable Ad Banners on Firefox’s New Tab Page
Mozilla just “experimented” with advertisement banners for Booking.com, a hotel reservation website, on Firefox’s New Tab page. Here’s how to disable all those banners so you never see any of these ads in the future.
A Mozilla spokesperson told VentureBeat that this “was not a paid placement or advertisement,” and was “an experiment to provide more value to Firefox users through offers provided by a partner.” Who does Mozilla think they’re fooling?
Anyway, if you don’t want to see these advertisement banners in the future, there’s a simple solution.
Click Menu > Options > Home, or just click the gear-shaped “Options” button at the top-right corner of FIrefox’s New Tab page.
Under Firefox Home Content, uncheck “Snippets.” This will disable all those message banners at the bottom of Firefox’s New Tab page, including ones hawking hotel booking websites.
While you’re at it, you may also want to uncheck Pocket’s Sponsored Stories, which are another type of advertisement that Mozilla places on your New Tab page.
Read the remaining 7 paragraphs
from How-To Geek http://bit.ly/2R1Sub9
Screenshots suggest Google is testing group calling and a low light mode in its Duo video chat app for Android (Scott Scrivens/Android Police)
Screenshots suggest Google is testing group calling and a low light mode in its Duo video chat app for Android — Group calling and a low light mode in Google Duo have been rumored for some time, but we now have our first glimpse of the features in action.
from Techmeme http://bit.ly/2SuBNC6
This clever AI hid data from its creators to cheat at its appointed task
Depending on how paranoid you are, this research from Stanford and Google will be either terrifying or fascinating. A machine learning agent intended to transform aerial images into street maps and back was found to be cheating by hiding information it would need later in “a nearly imperceptible, high-frequency signal.” Clever girl!
This occurrence reveals a problem with computers that has existed since they were invented: they do exactly what you tell them to do.
The intention of the researchers was, as you might guess, to accelerate and improve the process of turning satellite imagery into Google’s famously accurate maps. To that end the team was working with what’s called a CycleGAN — a neural network that learns to transform images of type X and Y into one another, as efficiently yet accurately as possible, though a great deal of experimentation.
In some early results, the agent was doing well — suspiciously well. What tipped the team off was that, when the agent reconstructed aerial photographs from its street maps, there were lots of details that didn’t seem to be on the latter at all. For instance, skylights on a roof that were eliminated in the process of creating the street map would magically reappear when they asked the agent to do the reverse process:
The original map, left; the street map generated from the original, center; and the aerial map generated only from the street map. Note the presence of dots on both aerial maps not represented on the street map.
Although it is very difficult to peer into the inner workings of a neural network’s processes, the team could easily audit the data it was generating. And with a little experimentation, they found that the CycleGAN had indeed pulled a fast one.
The intention was for the agent to be able to interpret the features of either type of map and match them to the correct features of the other. But what the agent was actually being graded on (among other things) was how close an aerial map was to the original, and the clarity of the street map.
So it didn’t learn how to make one from the other. It learned how to subtly encode the features of one into the noise patterns of the other. The details of the aerial map are secretly written into the actual visual data of the street map: thousands of tiny changes in color that the human eye wouldn’t notice, but that the computer can easily detect.
In fact, the computer is so good at slipping these details into the street maps that it had learned to encode any aerial map into any street map! It doesn’t even have to pay attention to the “real” street map — all the data needed for reconstructing the aerial photo can be superimposed harmlessly on a completely different street map, as the researchers confirmed:
The map at right was encoded into the maps at left with no significant visual changes.
The colorful maps in (c) are a visualization of the slight differences the computer systematically introduced. You can see that they form the general shape of the aerial map, but you’d never notice it unless it was carefully highlighted and exaggerated like this.
This practice of encoding data into images isn’t new; it’s an established science called steganography, and it’s used all the time to, say, watermark images or add metadata like camera settings. But a computer creating its own steganographic method to evade having to actually learn to perform the task at hand is rather new. (Well, the research came out last year, so it isn’t new new, but it’s pretty novel.)
One could easily take this as a step in the “the machines are getting smarter” narrative, but the truth is it’s almost the opposite. The machine, not smart enough to do the actual difficult job of converting these sophisticated image types to each other, found a way to cheat that humans are bad at detecting. This could be avoided with more stringent evaluation of the agent’s results, and no doubt the researchers went on to do that.
As always, computers do exactly what they are asked, so you have to be very specific in what you ask them. In this case the computer’s solution was an interesting one that shed light on a possible weakness of this type of neural network — that the computer, if not explicitly prevented from doing so, will essentially find a way to transmit details to itself in the interest of solving a given problem quickly and easily.
This is really just a lesson in the oldest adage in computing: PEBKAC. “Problem exists between keyboard and computer.” Or as HAL put it: “It can only be attributable to human error.”
The paper, “CycleGAN, a Master of Steganography,” was presented at the Neural Information Processing Systems conference in 2017. Thanks to Fiora Esoterica and Reddit for bringing this old but interesting paper to my attention.
from TechCrunch https://tcrn.ch/2QgiH0o
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