Curating the Internet: Science and technology digest for December 9, 2019
T-Mobile deploys nationwide 5G coverage in the US; Robots that can repair and augment themselves; Legacy social media platforms have fake account problems, too; Ethereum Istanbul hardfork has been completed; and a Steem essay providing a deep dive into IP addressing and subnetting
Straight from my RSS feed | Whatever gets my attention |
Links and micro-summaries from my 1000+ daily headlines. I filter them so you don't have to.
- T-Mobile just pushed the button for its 5G network that it says will cover way more Americans than AT&T and Verizon - On Monday, December 2, T-Mobile announced the launch of its 5G network, providing coverage for about 200 million Americans. This coverage is far broader than 5G offerings from competitors, but the "longer range low-band 600MHz spectrum" used to attain such broad reach supports slower transfer speeds than other firms' "ultra-fast gigabit speeds". Here is a coverage map for the entire US, although it doesn't zoom in quite enough for my needs. T-Mobile says it covers 1 million miles in 5,000 towns, which represents 20,000% more customers than its competitors' networks. The firm also says it offers more rural coverage, and its signal will reach indoor locations. T-Mobile says their 5G plan will cost roughly the same as their existing 4G plans. The article doesn't give specific speed comparison numbers, but it says that T-Mobile's 5G speeds should be markedly faster than its existing 4G LTE network.
- Japanese Researchers Teaching Robots to Repair Themselves - Researchers from the University of Tokyo demonstrated to the Humanoids 2019 conference that they had trained a PR2 to tighten its own screws and perform minor repairs on itself. This skill also enabled the robot to augment itself by attaching accessories. The robot cannot yet tell when a screw needs tightening, although it can automatically tighten them from time to time. Like humans who need assistance when applying sun screen in some locations, the robot cannot reach all of its screws, so may need assistance from a companion robot.
Here is a video:
Ethereum is not a toy anymore, it’s a platform with a sizable investment and a big reach, and as such changes like this need to be professionally measured before being taken.reminds me of this argument,
I think we should have more than our intuitions to guide a decision like this, and a more mature approach is needed before tampering with blockchain economicsfrom my own post before the most recent Steem hardforks.
In order to help bring Steem's content to a new audience, if you think this post was informative, please consider sharing it through your other social media accounts.
And to help make Steem the go-to place for timely information on diverse topics, I invite you to discuss any of these links in the comments and/or your own response post.
Beneficiaries
- Burn STEEM/SBD - @null - 10%
- Cited author(s) - @joshman - 10%
- Posting and/or scheduling service (steempeak.com) - @steempeak - 5%
- Steem/API services (anyx.io) - anyx - 5%
- Steem/RSS services (steemrss.com) - torrey.blog - 5%
- SteemWorld (steemworld.org) support - steemchiller - 5%
- Support STEM curation efforts - @steemstem - 5%
About this series
Sharing a link does not imply endorsement or agreement, and I receive no incentives for sharing from any of the content creators.
Follow on steem: @remlaps-lite, @remlaps
If you are not on Steem yet, you can follow through RSS: remlaps-lite, remlaps.
Thanks to SteemRSS from philipkoon, doriitamar, and torrey.blog for the Steem RSS feeds!
0
0
0.000
Hello,
Your post has been manually curated by a @stem.curate curator.
We are dedicated to supporting great content, like yours on the STEMGeeks tribe.
Please join us on discord.
Shared on Twitter for #posh, here.
Definitions and expectations vary. As always, I appreciate your curiosity.
Thanks!
Right, and it's easy to argue that "self regulation is not working", but the hard part is left undone. No one demonstrated that there's any other option that would be better. As Thomas Sowell always reminds, "Compared to what?"
Most folks aren't significantly impacted by such mechanisms in ways apparent to them, and thus remain on such platforms. As mesh networks remain nominally discouraged, by the time that impact becomes apparent - existential, in other words - the development and adoption of mechanisms able to disseminate free speech will be virtually impossible.
Falun Gong, Uighurs, and other dissidents in China today are strongly provided incentive to exercise free speech, but are shown to be incompetent to develop and deploy mechanisms able to do so. For more than a decade such dissidents have been horrifically oppressed by having their organs terminally removed and sold, their families torn apart with men going to concentration camps, and their women and children given as chattel to politically acceptable men.
In the West deception and restraint by state actors has maintained the willingness of the public to utilize platforms demonstrably using disinformation and propaganda mechanisms, such as the bots under discussion, while the window of opportunity to develop and deploy alternatives that provide censorship resistance and security increasingly shrinks.
Today it is too late for Chinese dissidents, and their deaths and enslavement in droves exemplary of their inability to do so. Hong Kong dissidents have deployed mesh networks competent to enable free speech, but they remain dependent on infrastructure that is able to be prevented from providing that capability. China could easily end that communication today, but apparently uses that network for surveillance and future enforcement activities for various reasons.