 Green peas Roger, why are you a website? You'll see I'll see okay, literally you'll see it Yeah, well Roger's been doing we started experimenting with this last week, and I'm hearing myself back from somebody now You know it's gone away Starting last week We Roger started showing the web page of whatever story we're talking about Well, we're talking about it. You can take over the screen and put it up in the hangout nice Notice for you people watching the video We are streaming on The same BIOS internet line that we always do but it's under new ownership and Poor frontier communications that took over from Verizon on Friday has been has been having some some trouble No finger-pointing here, but I'm just letting you know that if if the stream did go wonky and the next Little bit could be why This morning the bandwidth went back up close to what I pay for so keep my fingers crossed fingers crossed You go frontier you've solved those issues do it You can do it do it You can stop those outages. I'm just yeah, I'm real lucky that I'm not one of the places that has an actual outage right now So yeah, yeah, you should be happy you have any internet in top first world problems For real for real keeping a real Belmont over there First world Problems I think you mean developed real problems favorite phrase You love that phrase. All right. Let's let's do a show Podcasts about technology in your daily lives from people who like to put pants on frogs and one guy with a trustworthy looking beard The Daily Tech News show with Tom Merritt is brought to you by you and I at Daily Tech news show comm slash donate This is the Daily Tech news from Monday April 4th 2016 I'm Tom Merritt joining me today as she does on most Mondays miss Veronica Belmont I'm dear Veronica on and gadget and co-host with me of the sword and laser podcast. How the heck are you opening day caps on Tom. Oh, where's my cap shoot? Yeah caps on my caps over there No big deal though We can record the show and the Cardinals game is until later So we're fine and the Giants are winning right now knock on wood knock on all that knock on all the woods That's better than the Cardinals did at the beginning. Hey, so We are going to talk a little bit about payment systems We I did an attempt to look up usage numbers and I'll talk about the difficulties in finding that but mostly sort of our Experiences Veronica you actually tried to go a whole day without using your wallet and just use your phone, right? It was kind of a forced use issue because I forgot my wallet at home And I said to myself as I was hurtling down the road in a an uber that I had ordered from my phone Actually on the way to a conference. I said now would be a really good time to test If I can make it a whole day using only devices on my phone and not really give up a ton of freedom or mobility It was not successful. All right, we'll talk a little more about that first. Let's get to the headlines Both Oculus and HTC are shipping their new VR headsets slower than expected Oculus told Rift pre-order customers that the delay is due to a component shortage One that they obviously didn't anticipate Oculus will update pre-orders on April 12 With new estimated shipping dates and they're also going to give you free shipping if you pre-ordered Your Oculus Rift before April not sure what the cutoff date was that I think it's probably up until the point where they're announcing the shipping problems Some HTC Vive orders were declined by credit card companies causing some folks to lose their order or Be bumped to the end of the waiting list when the payment Processing was resolved HTC says it's working to put everyone back in the right order and blamed the credit card companies for processing issues So kind of unrelated but weirdly coincidental things here. Ouch. Yeah, that's rough I especially feel bad for for Oculus to who you would think at this point They wouldn't have such issues as not knowing if there was going to be a problem in their supply chain Especially kind of when you have the backing of a company like Facebook You feel like the resources are kind of all in place where they need to be and there's a massive team working on this project I feel like maybe for a tiny startup like back when they were in the Kickstarter days That would be a little more acceptable, but when you're part of one of the biggest companies in the world It becomes a little less like okay Yeah, and it makes me think because you say that that probably one of the issues has to do with a supplier Not delivering something they promised, you know in other words Oculus not Under anticipating but saying we thought we were gonna get you know a million of these parts And now the manufacturer suddenly tells us they're only gonna get us 800,000 And I feel like the credit card company issue happened previously to with Apple in the past Yeah, I feel as though there were some issues with iPhone pre-orders not being accepted or maybe that was just me That's entirely possible as well But you know my you know the credit card companies are just like girl listen You've got hundreds of thousand dollars in debt, but you can't just go around buying iPhones No, I remember something like that too where there was a There was there was an issue with with credit cards being processed and obviously with patreon this month We had a little processing issue where I got told some my process my credit card had been denied But then it was fixed So I think there's something going on and maybe this relates to our conversation later in the processing of credit card Information with all these new payment systems, maybe Yeah, who knows Brad Sam's at three. Is it it's a throat? Yeah I know his name. I just always I see names and I just assume I'm going to mispronounce them even if I know the person You taught yourself to assume failure Well, he's reporting that Microsoft is testing a premium version of its outlook comm email service for three dollars and ninety-nine cents a month The premium service removes ads adds calendar sharing features and offers five personalized email addresses Outlook.com premium is invite only and if you're invited you can use it for one year for free And a lot of people are very excited about this. I know a few people who use outlook.com as their primary email Location and and and I don't know that five personalized email addresses is a big deal for everyone But a lot of these calendar sharing features and integration features and it's got an updated UI too Which if you're a regular user, you're gonna be excited about This this is cool stuff There's still a rumor out there that we might get this if you're a Microsoft office subscriber as well So that could be interesting. We're seeing finally these integrations of some of the purchases They've made in recent years including sunrise calendar, which I'm sure is going to feature heavily In this new kind of cloud-based system and and and web email address service that they're that they're launching You you were a fan of sunrise were you not I still use it. I still use that I'm a huge fan huge. Would you would you use outlook? I'm sure I'd be able to port over my domain email address So that wouldn't be a problem, but everything in my life is so tied into Gmail at this point I really don't see how it would work The US FCC released new non-mandatory label guidelines for ISPs to detail prices data caps Overage charges speed latency packet loss and more ISPs that follow the guidelines will fulfill Upcoming transparency requirements under open internet rules those requirements still must be approved by the office of management and budget But once they are these labels would give you safe harbor if you're like amusing the label you you would essentially be safe from Being accused of breaking those rules labels were approved by the FCC's consumer advisory committee Which includes major ISPs the NCTA and several consumer advocacy groups Literally looks like a nutrition label. It is it's a freaking nutrition label for your ISP That's incredible. Yeah, wait. Where does it go? Probably other website is somewhere where it says like if you want to know well what the fees are What speeds we really offer what are independently assessed the latency is? This this is it. So so this is where you say, okay cable company that's promising me 50 megabits per second What do you actually give me and that's where you can go to look and find out like okay? Most of the time it turns out that we delivered this X Y and Z how fascinating that we're getting so many consumer friendly rules Put into place around cable companies and broadband recently Well, I think it has to do with that reclassifications title to which could go away So I'm curious what happens to all this. I mean this this was an interesting aspect of it to me Which is the ISPs sat on a committee with consumer advocacy groups and reached an agreement that's like, okay Yeah, this is not too burdensome. It's information we can provide. It's in an understandable way. This is great We all agree right it was unanimity But those same ISPs are suing the FCC or planning to sue the FCC or going to file amicus briefs of people who are suing The FCC to overturn the classification as title to which would wipe all of this out. Oh Man so complicated. It's like they're they're too so too faced about this whole thing. It's it's incredible It's mostly because they have more than one person working for them Tesla CEO Elon Musk says the company took an unexpectedly high 276,000 pre-orders for its new Tesla Model 3 in the first three days Musk also took to Twitter answering questions and teasing part two of the announcement Musk says the real steering controls for the three will feel like a spaceship. Is that rear steering controls? No, the real real is like he's saying that the steering controls you saw in the demo were not the real one real Steering controls for the three will feel like a spaceship and then the back seats will fold down The first model threes are not expected until the end of 2017 I We have not talked about the model three We have not it's because you you you are in a Tesla household. Yes, you don't have one, but your husband does yes So you're not you're not one get one of your own. Oh We pre-ordered. Oh, you did okay Sorry about the email notification sound turning off notifications now I Yes, we are to car household and we plan on not being too car household Because we don't need two cars and so we are going to downgrade to the model three and share that When that happens, yeah, well and it can self-derive between the two of you. There you go. Yeah, you can just call it and it will come to you Maybe maybe But I'm not surprised. I mean this is really kind of the sweet spot I think I made kind of an inflammatory post just to rile people up on Twitter about how within the next two Or three years this model three is going to you know Basically knock the Prius out of the market and I really do strongly believe that though because I think that a lot of Prius owners Even though it is a far less expensive car. I'm talking to you Tom. I have a 14-year-old Prius So yeah, sort of not who you're talking about, but okay, you're due I think a lot of people and maybe this is gonna piss other people off in your audience too I think people who are driving more expensive cars will downgrade And I think that people who are driving a Prius, but really do want something fully electric that kind of fits our lifestyle will maybe Put up a little more money. I don't know I think it's kind of that sweet spot of cars where it's the right price point and it's fully electric and Now with all the superchargers coming in all around the country. They're gonna double by next year It's just unbelievable the amount of infrastructure They're building in and it's becoming a feasible thing for the average person to have which I think is the tipping point for them But what if you could make the car you have now a self-driving car? I know that doesn't make it electric But George Hott's would like to make every car self-driving and his company comma received $3.1 million from Andreessen Horowitz to keep working on that Hott's has a prototype of the system He showed it off on the internet before and we've talked about it But he needs to hire engineers to help make a finished product that he can bring to market and Andreessen Horowitz is kicking in Some money to make that happen Nice There's a lot of these self-driving car companies I a friend of mine started working for a taxi company that's self-driving Which is interesting as well not as a driver then not as a driver as a technical And it's not legal for them to go out there. So this is a long bet for that company Yeah, absolutely. They're basically saying once it's ready once it's legal will be there They want to be there. They want to be at the forefront ZD Netsa Mary Jo Foley reports Microsoft has formed a strategic partnership with the R3 banking consortium to test and deploy blockchain services R3 is a consortium of 42 financial companies researching blockchain use while mostly associated with the use of Bitcoin A blockchain is a distributed shared ledger that can securely record the complete histories of all kinds of transactions Microsoft began offering Azure blockchain as a service on the Ethereum platform last year Now hold that thought because there is something interesting about Microsoft getting into the fintech aspect of blockchain versus the Bitcoin aspect of Blockchain and that is a big deal, especially with the theory which has a lot of buzz around it But check this out to Toyota announced Monday that it's expanding its partnership with Microsoft to develop interconnect connected car Services Microsoft now has a 5% stake in Toyota connected which will consolidate Toyota's connectivity surfaces into one company located in Plano, Texas Services being developed include insurance rates based on actual driving So providing the data for that connected vehicle networks that connect multiple cars for particular advantages Information services customized to your driving habits and more things like that Microsoft will provide This is the part that might sound familiar from the last story cloud services through Azure and Microsoft already has Ford BMW and Nissan On board for using Azure for their car tech So we always talk about Sacha Nadella's products and services approach and and we talk about the office stuff a lot But here in the background you'll notice over the time we get these Azure stories and Microsoft's like oh, yeah We'll provide that industry with that. Yeah, Amazon web services may be providing the largest number of web companies with this But Microsoft is going and rounding up these non-traditional industries. It's all happening Tom It's all happening the Internet of Things the connected services the cloud-based computing. It's all coming together It's all like in Microsoft is is super poised to be the leader in this and it's fascinating to me Because they are really forward-looking their roadmap is crazy right now and what I love about it The road road there. Yes there. Yes. Thank you. Oh, man. You totally derailed my no But what were you gonna say? I was over the tech set it for your point, but yeah It's it's like they are so forward-looking right now and and their implementation has a lot of times been the problem in the past But I feel really excited about what Microsoft is up to in these spaces Yeah, and it it does seem like what Microsoft is doing and I don't want to get too glowing about it because obviously You know, we talked about the Tim Sweeney criticisms and Microsoft is seem to have Confronted Tim and said okay. We're doing what you want, but it took a little bit of maneuvering There's a lot of privacy issues around the way Windows 10 goes I get all that but what they're doing I think is really interesting is they changed leadership and Reinvigorated themselves and that is really difficult for any company in any industry. Yeah, look at Yahoo Yeah, look at definitely look at Yahoo. Look at eBay. eBay is not even struggling, right? You don't hear people criticizing eBay the way they do Yahoo But he may hasn't really innovated in a long time, right? They're just sort of they're keeping going They're doing well, but they're not they're not rising. They're not leading The way they did in the early part of the 2000s and maybe it's maybe it's unfair to expect companies to always be doing that but a lot of people were looking at Microsoft even as Recently as a couple years ago and saying yeah, they're just you know, they're just stale Yeah, and I think they're proving everyone wrong with that Speaking of kind of depressing company stories Nest announced last month it will turn off support for the Revolve smart home product system as of May 15th a Medium post about it by Arlo Gilbert has drawn attention to the decision Revolve was acquired by Nest and stopped selling its products in October of 2014 so this is an issue now about sunsetting a product and and kind of the the Issues that come along with that and not necessarily letting your customers know exactly what's going on And this is another big issue over at nest We've seen kind of the tumult the tumultuous stuff going on in terms of drop cam And now we're seeing it with this other company that they also acquired You know Google gave nest a lot of money to invest in in the last year and to really build out their product And they were supposed to it was like they were they were looking for like something about $300 million like I think they were supposed to to make and they they kind of hit that but it was all from previous like Drop cam Subscriptions or something it came from like the the momentum that drop cam had already built it wasn't momentum that nest had built within their own company after the acquisitions and Things are looking pretty bad there right now and I think a lot of the people who are working there are starting to lose faith in leadership and I think Google is starting to kind of lose faith in what nest is capable of I think it's Personally, I think it's easy to over interpret dissatisfaction from the outside If this was a startup that wasn't owned by alphabet then you know, I don't I'm sorry I got to disagree with you like out of hand because when you start seeing public complaints from previous employees Happening one after another like that's not something that happens all that often I mean we saw it with Yelp a little bit But that was like a pretty low-level employee coming at the system as a whole But now we're seeing people who have been pretty high up in in leadership positions at companies that were acquired by nest and You know by Google by proxy and so that sounds really bad because you don't burn those kinds of bridges Unless you're super serious about it or your Amazon really messed up What I mean Amazon had the same thing. Well, Amazon has a very weird culture. Yeah, and so does Apple So I guess what I'm saying is if I get to go back to my point You're not wrong that that is That is concerning But I think the fact that nest is within alphabet and therefore got Google glow on it Does two things one is they compare it to the happy go go lucky culture at Google and they're like well people are definitely not happy over there That's not very googly which it's not and that's a fair point Oh, and they also expect it to be profitable and hit all of its targets the way they wouldn't if it was an independent startup It's like well, this is our target. We got close. We keep moving on. We're in the early stages I don't think nest is probably in as much trouble as people think that said that we can have a difference of opinion on that Both approaches there are very legitimate. There's lots of evidence on all sides. This is just my guess. I don't know This is an this is a a feather in your arguments cap to To say, okay, we've stopped making a product since October 2014 They haven't made revolve devices since October 2014 granted There are very few people using revolve products because it took around around a month for people to notice that they had announced That they are shutting down the service on May 15 But still it's not an elegant Sunsetting of it. No when you have people who are like, well, wait, what do I do? You're I'm just gonna brick you're gonna brick my product. I paid for this product. I'm still using it Yeah, that's pretty awful. You need to have some kind of way of Sunsetting that makes the customers feel like they're not getting totally poop canned And you know and maybe transferring them to other services or systems or some way of holding on you want to hold on to that customer You don't want to just lose that customer completely I mean, there's someone who were who paid you money and were loyal to you and used and bought into your system Like that's a big deal. Like you have to figure out a way to retain that person as a customer without like totally You know writing them off completely. Yeah, you want to buy nest products, you know Turn them into nest product users somehow and I understand that maybe you don't want to Support revolve products forever when they're a very small number of people like there There is an economy of scale there that is probably why they're making this decision But then reach out to those people talk to them Turn them into evangelists for you find find another way to do this so that you don't have someone on medium Posting about it angrily and the business insider picks it up and runs with it and suddenly more people are angry with you Then ever bought revolve products, right? Yeah, it's not a good thing Our static is David Kravitz points to a Washington Post article about Alexander L. Bakian I'm and it's she's Kazakhstan. He's so I'm sure I'm not getting the pronunciation exactly, right? She's a 27 year old grad student has a searchable database at Psy dash hub.io a 50 million journal articles Copied from behind paywalls now if you're like wait a minute that brings a bell Aaron Swartz was accused of illegally accessing a journal service called J store He never distributed those but it is one of the reasons that he was he was being prosecuted for alleged computer fraud And it led to his depression and eventual suicide Al Bakian told the Washington Post that education and research copyright laws are especially damaging We don't know where she is. She has gone to universities in the United States like Georgia Tech She's studied in Europe But there is no known reported location for her now and she's leading this charge of saying You are overcharging for journal articles based on the cost remember they don't pay the peer reviewers They don't pay the authors They don't publish the journals in many cases. They only put them online and so this this is more This is a deeper topic than we have time to get into right now But it is the Napster moment. They're saying in the education circles. Wow, that's She must be in hiding I would imagine Yeah, yeah, absolutely Well, thanks to all those who submitted things we used from our subreddit you guys are the best And we love every single one of you so keep submitting keep voting. I know Motang was on there I know Steve I. Oh was on there Franz games Jambine and many many more keep on voting keep on submitting at daily tech news show dot reddit.com and that is look at the headlines So what started off are thinking about Apple pay and Android pay and Samsung pay and all of those today Was an article at the next web that said real users don't care about Apple pay now This was a spin on the transport for London report Transport for London was reporting on the use of contactless payments Which is mostly mobile devices, although it can also include cards that have NFC on them And the report from transport for London was very glowing saying we have so many people using contactless payments Well, the next web pointed out that the 3.2 million journeys that are taken using contactless payments End up being an average of 35,000 of the 13 million trips per day. So from one respect, that's not very many However a transport for London says 27% of pay-as-you-go journeys made with contactless payments So that's a third of the pay-as-you-go journeys Contactless debit cards account for more than half of all debit cards in circulation in the UK According to data from Visa Europe one in five face-to-face card payments under 30 pounds in the UK is contactless So you see the numbers are kind of all over the place next web's got a point But there's also some pretty good numbers So I started looking around trying to find numbers Well in Canada nearly 10% of all domestic transactions are contactless now in the US Repeat usage of Apple pay is down and been declining since March 2014 But mobile payments with the Starbucks and mobile wallet make up 22% of transactions in the US and 40% of Starbucks transactions in China Last May the RFI group put out a study saying that Australia is tops in usage of contactless payments and awareness 67% of Australians aware that they could use their mobile device for payments Singapore second followed by Taiwan Among the people most likely to consider using their mobile devices as a payment device Indonesia United Arab Emirates and China Very bullish on this whereas the least likely 14% or less or said they were likely to use their mobile device for payments in the Australia New Zealand UK US Canada Numbers are all over the place Veronica They really are and I'm You know, I'm kind of blown away by the Starbucks numbers too Especially because I just downloaded that app last week and I was kind of excited to start using it because I went to Starbucks And we were on a road trip and Ryan had taken off to go use the bathroom And I had forgotten my wallet in the car and I was like, oh, I'll just use Apple pay like Starbucks uses Apple pay No, they didn't not at that one at least they only take the Starbucks app And it's just fascinating to me how little pickup This has really gotten in the US at major retailers I feel like every point of point of sale thing I go to at major companies They like oh, we don't take it yet or oh, it's not working or oh this terminals broken And there never seems to be a consistent usage To using things like Apple pay or in the past like square for example, which completely had to change their their model Because Apple stepped in and kind of ate they're very small apparently lunch Not very much to begin with but Apple came along and ate it anyway grapes Cheese, but it's frustrating to me because I you know in all my travels to like Japan and to the UK Like it's been so easy, especially in Japan to pay for things using your phone or NFC and You know whether you're on the subway or whether you're at a little vendor selling sandwiches in the subway it's they all take NFC payments and I really was excited when Apple pay kind of kicked off and launch that this would be the moment that really Flipped things over for us here in the States and that finally it would become Super easy to not have to bring a wallet with you anywhere you went and to just have your phone as being that sold device That kind of takes care of everything Ultimately, I'd love to be there but yeah cash is still king and credit cards and it's hard to get away from that and I don't really know where the Sticking point is and I think it probably has a lot to do with setting up those those point of sale like Apple pay Terminals at small businesses and and teaching them how to figure it out and teaching them how to support it And I think there's just not enough people doing that Yeah Karen Webster writing for piements calm its payments calm But they don't have an a or an e in their domain name not their fault probably taken But payments calm says that mobile wallets that only exist to pay for things at the point of sale will lose in most developed countries And she says they'll lose in places like the United States when there aren't enough terminals for people to get in the habit of using them And they'll lose in places with ubiquitous contactless terminals like the UK because they're slower than waving plastic For many transactions. Is that so so in the UK? There's a lot more NFC enabled credit cards and people are used to doing that Whereas they're like oh wait I got to pull my phone out But I think I think what Karen's saying and I think it goes with what you were saying It's all about building the habit and I think that and Karen Webster says this too is why Starbucks Has a growing usage because you get a gift certificate you put it in your phone You start using that to pay you link it to your credit card You start using that to pay you get in the habit and you're at Exactly You don't have to and you don't have to wonder now because they have their own system and because Starbucks is so consistent from store to store I mean that's really their thing you go to a Starbucks. You know what you're gonna get Whether it's from the drinks to the food to the way that you pay it's always gonna be the same they're really good at that and That teaches behavior and it gets people comfortable and since they decided to go with their own system Apple and square I mean Starbucks was with squares first launch partner and they lost that and Starbucks did their own thing instead and that's you know, but if we get to the point where every different Every different company every different restaurant every different target every different Walgreens Uses a different kind of system. That's gonna be a problem, too. It's like building an app for every different service that you have out There we don't need I don't want to have to download an app every time I go to a new store You know, I want something that's ubiquitous that works across platforms and works across services and that you know And that is already happening in China one of the reason people are so into contactless payments as we chat We chat became the platform, but we chat isn't catching on in other parts of the world So that's not the platform that's gonna happen in other parts of the world Starbucks is using their own payment system like you said they're not using Apple pay So you're not gonna start using the Starbucks payment system and then start using it elsewhere Yeah, and and for me my habit has been that I use Apple pay at the dog bakery Because the dog bakery is a big Apple pay sticker on its register and I started learning every time I walked in there like oh Right, I can use Apple pay I started doing it because I'm like I want to try this out And now it's just my habit like oh, I'm in the dog bakery. I pull out my phone to pay I'm sure there are other places where I could use it that don't have a sticker up And I don't even realize it so I just go to what I'm used to I pull out the old card or I pull out cash Well, now I have to remember to use my what do they call it the Frickin token that you stick into the machine the pin. Yes. Well, the world is laughing at us for I remember I was in the UK and I couldn't buy a magazine at a bus stand because I didn't have you didn't have a pin or chip Yeah, I didn't have my car wasn't chipped and they're like nope. Sorry can't take it like what do you mean? I want to give you money. Oh, yeah When I went I went to Italy once they would joke when they take my card away to go run it because they're like You know going to steal it because this is like that's not the way it's supposed, you know, I there's no pin on yours I can just take it. Anyway Maybe they did I don't know the so too before we wrap up tell us about your serendipitous day without a wallet Briefly what what did you encounter? I just could not buy anything. I couldn't eat I had to borrow cash from from Peter. I had to like I couldn't I couldn't do anything There was none of the restaurants. I went into took Apple you would have had to post mates your food to you You couldn't actually go into a store Exactly like it's fine if you're home and you don't want to use your wallet You can have anything sent to you that you want on the face of the earth But if you're out in the world, I could get myself home pretty easily with uber or Lyft if I wanted to Pay for a bus ticket. I couldn't you know I couldn't get on the train and be able to pay for my ticket that way I would have to yeah, I'd have to go home and it sucked and it wasn't fun And the only way I got into the conference was by showing them my verified Twitter account on my phone Well, if this makes you feel any better, I wish I had this link At my ready, but I didn't think about it till just the second reporter for Tech in Asia Did an article recently? I think it was Tech in Asia where he tried living with just we chat we chat way More integrated into Chinese society Then what you're talking about you're in the United States where a lot of things just aren't even contactless payments to begin with yet We chat you can pay for lots of things even he had problems. He could buy things at convenience stores But he also had issues with a particular restaurant and this and that so even in China where there's sort of leading the way here You still can't live just on the platform Mm-hmm. It's tough. Well, we'll get there. I'm confident we will get there soon. Oh, yeah, not yet Let's get to our pick of the day which I took from something you tweeted earlier today Veronica This is for me the techies project at techies project comm From their website. They say the techies project is sharing stories of tech employees in Silicon Valley They say we cover subjects who tend to be underrepresented in the greater tech narrative This includes but it's not limited to women people of color folks over 50 LGBT working parents the disabled etc Project has two main goals to show the outside world a more comprehensive picture of people who work in tech and bring a lot of Attention to folks in the industry whose stories have never been heard Considered or celebrated we believe storytelling is a powerful tool for social impact and positive change And I had to stop reading because there's so many fascinating people on this project One in particular that I was the first person I looked at had been poisoned and Could not remember her childhood because of an accident and so Was suffering with pain and migraines and and even like having problems with memory and adulthood and yet is working as a VR Researcher and doing amazing things. So just just an incredible incredibly great project there techies project comm Yeah, I was very fortunate to be interviewed for that as well actually so you can read my little bio on there, too If you want it was a lot of fun Helena price who created it has worked Exceptionally hard on this project for many many months and I'm so happy for her that it finally launched Yeah, go take a look just read a couple of them if you don't have much time It will definitely be worth your time a stoic squirrel real fast stoic squirrel in the chat room says people who don't drink Soylent actually I drink Soylent and I'm on the project so See it's it's Bustin your stereotypes already There you go said your picks to feedback at daily tech news show comm you can find more picks at daily tech news show comm Slash picks got a couple emails before we get out of here Rich from lovely Cleveland sadly resigned to driving the beige beauty for the foreseeable future You'll find out why that's important in a second said just to put in perspective How big Tesla Model 3 pre-order numbers are if they were able to fulfill all of them within a model Year, which they probably won't be able to do the number would be comparable to the Honda Civic the fifth best-selling car in the United States Or to put it another way the pre-orders are just about the same number of Nissan Leafs and Chevy Volts sold combined since 2010 Obviously not everyone who put down a thousand dollars over the weekend is gonna end up buying a car But when given context it does make Tesla's apparent surprise that the numbers seem justified Oh told you told you guys. Yeah, no, it's a good perspective studying there And again, they won't ship all of those in a year But those are the number of people who would have been interested in walking off the dealership with one potentially Brian wrote in aka Tyree I work as a multi-channel sales associate for Best Buy and that means I spend a lot of my day talking to customers on the Store telephone the number of calls that I'm getting from ransomware and other call center social hacking of individuals have sharply Increased in the last couple of months. That's the one where somebody cold calls you and says, oh, we have an alert I am calling from Microsoft. You have a virus now. You have to do these things and then they hack your computer Or they've downloaded something and it's locked up their computer and they're being asked to pay money to unlock the computer Anyway, Brian says please tell your listeners not to be careful themselves I assume they're far too savvy to false victim to stuff like this rather I would ask them to take time to talk to their tech muggle loved ones put it on Facebook No one proactively calls people about viral infections No antiviral software prompts the users to call a call center and making a mistake can cost them their data So yeah, that's that is a good point And maybe put it on Facebook for your family members to say like hey if someone calls you about a problem with your computer Hang up. They're lying. Mm-hmm. They're definitely lying unless it's me and somehow I found your number, which is almost worse What why are you why are you doing ransomware now? I'm just telling people and they've got problems with their computers and it's a public service really you're doing this You're calling them and telling them don't answer the phone what people tell you That's a better idea don't do that Josiah writes regarding digital assistance even if the artificial intelligence and algorithms of predictive assistance gets super good They'll always require more information than I want to share with any one company when they make mistakes And they'll always make mistakes it will typically be more aggravating and dissatisfying than if it came from a person who actually knew me Well enough to make those suggestions He just doesn't think it's gonna be perfect enough Hey, we should put a link to the show notes to your media post too. I meant to do that and I forgot Yeah, I'm sorry. I was I was not really focused when you read that last email, but now I'm reading it more thoroughly Yeah, I don't know. I don't think I agree, but it's still so early in this process I mean the the hope is that you know learning agents will get better through time and they can't get better unless they have more Information and they get more information through use and also through connecting to other places where you exist on the web So yeah security might be an issue perhaps But if they're going through API's that are secure then that's not really going to be a problem You just have to decide how much information you want and you need to understand that you have to kind of give that up a little Bit in order to improve the process and and some people like Josiah may never feel comfortable enough to do that Totally yeah, I believe we just hit a home run and so now it's 10 to 3 that explains your divided attention I'm literally getting texts and MLB app alerts at the same time, so I apologize baseball season guys. It's back. Yeah Busted more stereotypes. This is a hey, it's speaking of busting stereotypes good medium posts from Veronica bots and gender I'll put a link in the show notes. You should go check it out. Thank you Yeah, it's it's more of a thought exercise, but it's getting a lot of great responses and I love the feedback. It's generating Yeah Well, thank you Veronica Belmont, of course to follow her on medium at Veronica But also follow her to gadget dear Veronica sword and laser sword and laser comm anything else No, but I should let you guys know we're wrapping up dear Veronica I'm shooting the last two episodes this week and one of the final episodes is going to be about bots I'm doing another themed episode because obviously I'm super passionate about it right now So if you have questions about bots or artificial intelligence or smart agents Or anything in that world send them to me using the hashtag dear Veronica and it'll be on the last or second to last episode Thanks to everybody who supports the show and makes it possible for us to do this for you every day We love doing it and we want to do it for more and more people So if you support the show thank you if you've been thinking about supporting the show Go to daily tech news show comm slash support and pick one of your favorite ways Maybe a couple of ways buy a mug and support us at patreon.com slash dTns And if if you do nothing else So I would ask to every single one of you to tell someone about us You can leave a review on iTunes you can just tell someone on the street You can post it on Facebook let people know about daily tech news show if the if you think they'll be interested in People who are into tech if they're not into tech don't waste your time But if they're into technology we think they'll like the show our email address is feedback at daily tech news show comm You can give us a call 51259 daily. That's 5932459 catch the shows live Monday through Friday at 4 30 p.m Eastern at alpha geek radio comm and diamond club TV and visit our website at daily tech news show comm back tomorrow with Patrick Beja early in the morning in Japan the next day talk to you then This show is part of the broad pants network get more at frog pants comm I Mean club hopes you have enjoyed this program boom It is now 11 to 3 a back-to-back homers. Oh What do you eat? Yeah, there's no tension. No, it's 12 to 3. Oh my god three back three homers in a row. Oh My god, what is happening? I'm glad your team is having a good start to the season. Oh My god You and Justin's team are both doing well show titles. Yes Leading the pack is sexy self-driving robot followed by living in the robot ghetto or get who Third is the ball was born This ISP contains no MSG and Nobody's touching contactless payments. I like what you did there bio cow Um your ISP is loaded with trans trash fat Says he's a lot of high fructose cost services Unblock those sandy passages. That's not very googly Veronica goes hobo. I don't get that one because you were without your wallet your Cash is still king with dollar signs for all the S's Shane POS POS systems help the tech muggles Don't poop can be pro Sends in the poop can three two one contactless Contactless isn't paying off Tesla Model 3 electric Boogaloo That's every electric car headline Nissan leave Chevy Volt electric Boogaloo too many payment systems Uh, your highest piece loaded with trans vets funny Tries my favorite. Nobody's touching contactless payment systems is leading the pack And it's your favorite both It it defines it describes the episode pretty well. I think nobody's touching contactless payments is pretty funny. All right motion carried Veronica we were hearing echo from you. Oh, I'm sorry it came and went throughout the show Okay, here it now, right? Headphones because they weren't I don't usually wear headphones if you had told if that had been an issue before I would have worn headphones It wasn't an issue till right before the show started. Oh, it came and went But I hear it now. Yeah, I go apologize, I used to work with someone who would get mad at me when I didn't wear headphones I learned Oh She was my my kid does the exact same thing she does she'll put her head on Hands on her head. She'll do this like oh, and I don't know why she doesn't if she's stretching or she's actually kind of Upset You should meet her sometime I have She walks and everything now she's like a little human Well another good show Veronica good chatty. I mean I am still a cash person. I'm an old guy also don't trust I try to avoid using my credit card if possible because I Do it I do it for two reasons the minor reason is I'm slightly paranoid about just having a paper trail of where I've Been but more importantly for me. It just helps to control my spending Yeah, I Gotcha All right, I'm gonna go listen to this game. Can I go? Yes, go watch your Giants win the game that they've already won with all the take your echoey audio with you I will I will goodbye. I promise that we're good friends next time. Thanks. Good stuff. Thanks. Bye Now she's off Now I can say what we really thought which is it was very insightful and an enjoyable conversation Literally what I thought it's it's a bigger. It's a it's a it spawns a number of larger questions Probably not fit for the show, but like it's cash going the way of the dodo You know like a host of other yeah, you know I have a feeling and this is entirely gut feeling so I this is one of those things where I'm like I'm gonna test this premise as things to Develop I have a feeling that contactless payments mobile payments will replace credit cards, but they won't replace cash. I Agree with you up to the but I think it will take much longer than people anticipate like I think Yeah, it might I'm not I'm not I'm not Remarking on that You may be right, but I think I think credit cards will go away and people will have And maybe maybe credit cards won't go away But maybe they'll be like a simplified device for people who don't want to use a phone But so many people have phones even in the developing world. I can't just can't imagine The phones not replacing the car I still I never understood why they couldn't come up with a system that you would put your thumb print or fingerprint And then you would put a pin number Well, you don't need the pin Well, no, no, well the idea of course all of some or something instead of having, you know Huh, that's what Apple pays. Well, no, but that's my point is that you don't need that intermediary, right? It's like, oh, we take visa. I'm in the visa database So yeah, well for now it's it's it's a it is a necessary evil to transition To have that credit card, but I see what you're saying problem is if you use your thumb print as your number Then how do you switch banks? Well, the idea of course is that oh, this is the thing is that instead of having Apple I guess you could or whatever but like you your intermediary would be the visa master or whatever and they would connect your bank to the payment system In other words, they would always be that person that connects the user to their money Even if it wasn't, you know, they're directly their bank I mean your bank could do it too, but I mean the whole idea is like four different Entities involved with any credit card transaction anyway. It's not it's not you your bank and your money. Yeah No, no, no, I yeah, I totally understand it. The idea is of course to to whittle it down to the bare minimum Or just go barter stuff I think cash has a different reason which is why credit cards haven't wiped out cash Or else debit cards would have just doesn't like cash would have gone away But people like cash because in some cases it's more convenient in some places It provides advantages that may or may not be entirely above board And it's it's just it's a different way of Transacting because it's a physical item that you can see and count Versus relying on a third party to verify your transaction. And those are just two different systems. That's that's why I Hypothesize I'm not predicting necessarily, but I hypothesize that because they're two different systems Cash will will stick around and maybe not forever But for a long long time long after the actual card The credit card just goes away because everybody's got a device that has that ability on Cashless society it's like the paperless office. I Can't so Barter is a cashless society cash Comes around because it's in a convenient way to store value Yes, and the difference between cash and a credit card is it's a way to store value that doesn't rely on anyone else All it relies on is the full faith and credit of everyone in the system, obviously, but It doesn't you know, if you've got a five dollar bill It's a five dollar bill You're not relying on someone to keep it for you or verify that it went from one person to another You have the five dollar bill you give it to someone else That's the attractiveness of Bitcoin is that it can be like cash where it doesn't rely on a third party It relies on the blockchain But even then I think because it needs the blockchain and it needs that ledger It's different than cash. It can never actually be the physical object I think there's something intrinsically different about that. It doesn't need to be an infrastructure Well, technically with cash, you do need infrastructure because you need the government I mean you do for for Unbacked cash, but you wouldn't for gold coins or whatever Yeah, I guess you always need somebody to press the money and handle the system But it's less involvement than a block. I mean ideally what you're saying about the full faith like, you know, if it Like a dollar or a pound sterling. No, you have a faith that those respective governments will back and and and and Give you the what the worth that's ideally on the on the face of of the currency Which is why if you have a country that's going down the Drain and it's just like falling apart, you know, you get hyperinflation and everyone's trying to change the cash out for something Yeah For sure and that and that's a good point is that cash isn't without its issues It's not, you know, it's some people act like cash is something that they can just you know It solves all the problems. It's perfect. It's perfect. It's not there are problems There's a level. There's also a level of Control, I think people feel for example, like I don't like my bank I'm gonna take all my money as bills and shove it in my mattress and close my account and this is this is this is this was a thought experiment done because recently when Sweden's central bank went into negative rates and Sweden is Among developed nations has the highest number of people who use electronic forms of payment in every day Society so people use less cash than say like Britain or the US. That's counting credit cards as an electronic payment Yeah, the case people are like, wait a minute. You just said China had 40% if we were not talking about contactless payment We're talking about like not using cash for payment and The whole ideal is like well, you know with with negative interest rates that means you aren't getting any value out of your savings account and Unless you had a way to withdraw your money and take it as cash like say they got rid of cash currency entirely in Sweden You would be at the mercy of the bank making sure they wouldn't screw you on rates So like that $100 you have in your account doesn't slowly whittle down to like $98 or nine or 99 Kroner or whatever As it goes down because there's no other way for you to take it out unless you transfer it to another bank Because it's electronic Unless you get like a giant IOU digital IOU from the central bank right Which is why I never understood how star Future societies like Star Trek worked like you need some you need something I guess I think I Feel like it was a a not fully developed concept I think the concept was very simple Which was like we everything is in such abundance because of replicators and such that you don't need to buy things And so they jumped from there to saying and there's no money But I do think there was money there had to be money for for other types of things Well, it must have been some kind of transactional system even if it wasn't for profit Well, they've they've mentioned costs the cost of things right ships and this is like well if something has cost then What do you pay is you're not So the cost the cost of a ship is the metal and the and the labor and that and whatever Maybe the labor is free because everybody can be fed and clothed and housed in whatever level of luxury they like But the cost of the metal still is there like you have to take metal from somewhere and make it into a ship And then that's metal that you can't use for something else that is a cost Everyone mentions gold press latinum But the way I understood gold press latinum was it was a medium exchange of outside of the Federation If you're going to trade with a foreign medium of exchange with the Fringy or with the or with ever like Romulans or the Klingons That's what you would pay them with that's that was a currency But it wasn't something that you needed to use in the Federation. I Wonder if you could just replicate your way out of like like oh man. I need to pay this guy back I need to replicate some gold bars You know what? I mean our conversation really didn't go there I guess but I'm a little disappointed we didn't bring up in Pesa and And the fact that you know because one criticism is like not everybody can get a credit card And it's this isn't about credit cards. It's about electronic contactless payments and Pesa is one of the first Contactless payment systems Shane was saying pointing out very rightly that low-income folks find bank and credit card systems very difficult And then and that is very true, but there are systems that allow for cash transactions through electronic means At low fees like in Pesa Replicate gold bars. Oh, yeah, Harry mud traded with jewel Why would jewels have any value in the future like jewels don't really have any value now? overall like like especially precious stones precious stones things like diamonds have a Horrible rate of return like say you pay a thousand bucks on an awesome rock for your wife Or something like that. I guarantee you in the in 50 years that value of that diamond will go down. It just doesn't Gold good goes up and down sober goes up and down, but diamonds precious gems They all go down the can with time. So don't buy it. Don't invest in diamonds I mean if you need to To do the marriage appraisal. Yeah, I understand that but you know, then that's just then that's just an act of good faith I already talked to my wife about that. She was like, yeah, I got I went with a set and go with a sapphire I wanted a gem that looked had the same colors Bombay sapphire the the alcoholic beverage and regular sapphire fires. I think we're a little too Blue I forgot it came out to be a pretty awesome stone. So I'm not worried about it. She married me in the end anyway, so That's what matters. Yeah, because marriage is built on the solid foundation of routine Remember that that's what I learned for this instance when oh What the what the heck is Bart's best friend millhouse. What's the mill van house and then house and split up One day Homer you're gonna come home and you're gonna find a bunch of hot dogs defrosting in the sink. Oh Yeah, I see now that you were you were only telling me in the slack about the echoey audio That you should put stuff like that in the general or the daily I guess maybe the daily so that everybody could see it because I Was hearing it too and so if I knew you were hearing it and also when you when you hear it The person you don't hear the echo on is usually the person that's causing the echo. Yeah, that's what I thought so So no one told Veronica and I'm yeah, my bed. I should have told her. Oh There's a standard payment term change at a vendor that I haven't worked with in Five decades. Yeah, but I'm still in their email list All right. Well, thanks everybody for watching or listening and we'll talk to you later