Exactly. And when Congress tries to pass laws forbidding this stuff, they invest millions of dollars in brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign contributions to "protect their freedom to innovate." I'm sick of financial institutions using the word "innovate" as a euphemism for "figuring out new ways to rip people off while obeying the letter of the law."
When external 1Tb HDDs will get extremely cheap i will get them one and setup them for TimeMachine so i'll have less work to do when their internal HDDs will break.
Is $85 at buy.com not extremely cheap enough for you? I think it's fantastic.
(Of course, I paid $600 for a Maxtor 2x512GB array three years ago. And my first external HDD was 325 Megabytes in 1993, for about $400.)
Sure its FUD now, but how much of a technological leap will be required for a swarm of autonomous drones to leave a base, independently traverse the intervening terrain, and then independently attack targets based on whatever parameter is fed into them? All without any human intervention other than the initial order? None?
Quite a bit actually - as in, only within the realm of Science Fiction.
This "rogue swarm" would need to be aware enough to 1) have a motive to do such a thing in the first place, 2) learn enough about outside systems to 2a) break into an outside network and 2b) research information about its target, and 3) learn how to fuel itself or recharge its batteries, 4) socially engineer some E4 to load a few bombs on board (what, you think these things are kept armed in the hangar?), and 5) manage to elude the ground and air traffic controllers long enough to get off the ground and 6) evade fighter interceptors that will eventually chase after them when they're noted missing.
Now, it's reasonably arguable that one of these systems could fall into the hands of someone with foul intentions. But so could a tank, or a Harrier Jet, or a nuke. In fact, it's far easier to take control of something that is not remotely piloted, and that has a standard unencrypted interface like a stick, rudder and throttle.
But to seriously argue that these things could have a mind of their own is ludicrous. Anyone who argues such a position is heedlessly ignorant of how these things are designed, built and operated.
At the very basic level, they don't have enough processing power on board to be any smarter than a moth. We don't put anything more powerful in them than absolutely necessary because we need to conserve as much mass and power as possible for flight endurance.
I'm a little concerned that the "fire authorization" part could be reduced to a dialog box that says, "Fire? Yes. No." Then they'll put one person behind a dozen drones, who will sit there reading a magazine while the drones fly out to the target.
You know, specious strawman arguments like that don't even deserve the honor of a response, but unfortunately they're all too common.
You clearly have absolutely NO idea how operations software is written, nor how pilots behave. But that isn't stopping you from just making shit up and then using it as a basis for a criticism.
Homer Simpson is NOT piloting these UAVs, and Krusty the Clown is NOT writing the software.
Hyperbole is just as fallacious as FUD.
Go ahead. Try and take control of a Global Hawk. Or a Shadow. Or even a Raven. I encourage you to give it a shot.
You'll find it's easier to take control of a Cessna or a 767.
"Turn it off and replace the code" is easy to type, but in practice it is immensely difficult, to the point of impracticality. It's far more likely to just stop working and be a UXO threat... or be salvage for terrorists (if they don't blow an arm off in the process).
Sibling to parent post actually got it right; a compromised system is more of a hazard than anything else.
You're joking, but I work in R&D for one of the biggest US manufacturers of UAVs, and the DuneII/C&C/WarcraftII/Starcraft paradigm for controlling and commanding "swarms" of UAVs, and for displaying the data they retrieve, is exactly the inspiration we're using for multiple platform systems with one operator. We ultimately envision one pilot commanding tens or even hundreds of Protoss Observers...
(And for those of you who are FUDding about "skynet" -- 99.9% of the UAVs in the sky are ISR-only, like the Protoss Observer, not weapon platforms. And the ones that do have weapons don't fire at anything without a human issuing at least two orders, and that human is under observation himself. Please stop the FUD. The only functions these craft do autonomously are piloting (i.e., responding to stick commands and short time constant variations in atmospherics) and waypoint-to-waypoint navigation. The rest is done by human pilots and payload operators.)
And yes, we can't wait for StarcraftII to come out.
Well, if the TV Execs and advertisers were smart (I know, I know, we're talking about TV Execs and advertisers, but bear with me), they'd tailor the commercials to the viewers and design their ads to be effective when viewed by someone with a "30-second skip" feature, who will probably only see a few frames of the commercial, randomly phased within the 30 second window.
There are things you can do, like make sure your logo is prominent throughout the length of the commercial, or keeping a hot, scantily-clad female in the frame at all times so that male viewers will back up to watch the whole thing.
I swear, some commercials are doing this already. I predict that in 10 years, all TV commercials will be either static billboard-type ads, or softcore porn vignettes with heavy product placement.
I'm with you. I have PVR with a 30 sec forward skip button. I get to see a few frames of each commercial, essentially. There are a few reasons I'll watch the full commercial; yours is one of them:
- I'm not paying attention anyway. (We make a poor advertising audience if we can't remember the product name.)
- The commercial is for a product or service or program I'm already interested in. (Mac vs PC, anyone?)
- The commercial has a hot babe. (I love Pantene commercials.)
- The commercial is entertaining or attention-grabbing. (Rare, nowadays. I'm a hardened cynic.)
In general, the commercials are ineffective at my house for one reason or another. Therefore, I'm "stealing" television, even though I pay Charter for it.
I used to design these kinds of cameras, and there are at least two potential reasons why this can't be done on the ground:
Firstly, and most likely, there's an essential step that needs to be done in the camera hardware. Perhaps something related to Correlated Double Sampling or Pixel Binning needs to be adjusted. In the first case, the signal and reset measurements need to be done as close together as possible to reduce 1/f noise, which can quickly dominate the noise side of the SNR expression, and it may be the timing of these measurements that is at fault. In the latter case, there would be a sqrt(N) penalty for measuring the charge on each pixel and then adding the N pixels together. Conversely, reading each pixel multiple times may be necessary to overcome an unexpected noise source - a sqrt(N) improvement in readout noise can be had by measuring the pixel N times and calculating the average of the measurements. All of these adjustments can only be made at the camera; there's no way to accomplish this after the data has been digitized and radioed to Earth.
2 - Bandwidth. There's just no bandwidth available to ship down the raw data so it can be processed on Earth. The spacecraft must send down reduced data and derivative results. Therefore, these corrections need to be made onboard.
These reasons aren't necessarily exclusive, either... both could be true.
No - I had already dont those things. The two minute reference was to logging in to the new, named account. And it was repeatable.
Granted, it was a $499 special that I bought for my Mother-in-law. I forget the specs, but the CPU was crippled by design. It was a crime to subject it to Windows XP Home + crapware. Poor thing.
Of course Acrobat is crap on any OS.
I agree with this statement wholeheartedly. On occasion, pdfs will open using AAR (on both my Mac and my Dell laptops) and in every instance, on either platform, the damn thing crashes at some point. How does software like this get released??
FTFA: no big-brand laptop (aside from Apple) is free from crapware
It's one of the reasons I stay with Apple computers. The last time I bought a HP notebook, it took TWO MINUTES for the thing to respond to a left click on the Start menu after first login, due to all of the crapplets in Startup Items loading simultaneously and overwhelming the machine. Before I realized what was happening, I thought the machine was broken.
Have you ever used iWeb? iDVD? Some would consider the whole iLife to be crapware because they plan to get higher-end, more professional applications through which to vent their creativity.
No, I don't use those, but they don't load automatically on startup, either.
You're confusing "amateur" with "crap." Some software is perfectly adequate for laypeople to do basic things, like manage photos, make DVDs of their babys barfing on Grandpa, or fiddling with sampled audio. They may seem like crap to you but they're fun for other folks. If you don't use them, however, they sit on the hard drive and do nothing more than occupy otherwise useful storage space. All that is necessary to delete them is to go into the Applications folder, and delete their directories. [I especially recommend this for Garage Band non-users, as its audio sample files take up over a GB of disk space.]
Other software is installed solely to entice a new computer purchaser to subscribe to an online service, habitually visit an ad-driven website, or buy a full version... and this software all launches at startup, delaying the availability and usability of the computer after power-on, and is difficult to remove. This is 'crapware.' Also known as 'crapplets,' or in my house, 'goddamn AOL.'
Slashdot Mirror
A facepalm, that's what.
Exactly. And when Congress tries to pass laws forbidding this stuff, they invest millions of dollars in brib^H^H^H^Hcampaign contributions to "protect their freedom to innovate." I'm sick of financial institutions using the word "innovate" as a euphemism for "figuring out new ways to rip people off while obeying the letter of the law."
All this talk of 3x3's and 4x4's is making me hungry!
Is $85 at buy.com not extremely cheap enough for you? I think it's fantastic.
(Of course, I paid $600 for a Maxtor 2x512GB array three years ago. And my first external HDD was 325 Megabytes in 1993, for about $400.)
Or you can just leave it like it is and wait for someone like ikee to change the SSH password for you.
How else do you think I got 18's in both INT -and- WIS??
/don't ask what my STR and CON scores are
The hi-Wis/lo-INT example you're looking for is Forrest Gump.
Sorry - I was trying for the first [on-topic] post. On slashdot. Reading TFA seemed kind of pointless.
Any RPGer knows that Prof. Stanovich is attempting to correlate INT scores with WIS scores.
Silly scientist. No bonus priest spells for you.
/2nd Edition devotee
Mensa and testing agencies have been making it clear for a couple decades now that IQ only measures your ability to take tests.
While that's strongly correlated with general intelligence, it means nothing specific for a specific individual.
We're doing that, too!
Also, this.
Quite a bit actually - as in, only within the realm of Science Fiction.
This "rogue swarm" would need to be aware enough to 1) have a motive to do such a thing in the first place, 2) learn enough about outside systems to 2a) break into an outside network and 2b) research information about its target, and 3) learn how to fuel itself or recharge its batteries, 4) socially engineer some E4 to load a few bombs on board (what, you think these things are kept armed in the hangar?), and 5) manage to elude the ground and air traffic controllers long enough to get off the ground and 6) evade fighter interceptors that will eventually chase after them when they're noted missing.
Now, it's reasonably arguable that one of these systems could fall into the hands of someone with foul intentions. But so could a tank, or a Harrier Jet, or a nuke. In fact, it's far easier to take control of something that is not remotely piloted, and that has a standard unencrypted interface like a stick, rudder and throttle.
But to seriously argue that these things could have a mind of their own is ludicrous. Anyone who argues such a position is heedlessly ignorant of how these things are designed, built and operated.
At the very basic level, they don't have enough processing power on board to be any smarter than a moth. We don't put anything more powerful in them than absolutely necessary because we need to conserve as much mass and power as possible for flight endurance.
You know, specious strawman arguments like that don't even deserve the honor of a response, but unfortunately they're all too common.
You clearly have absolutely NO idea how operations software is written, nor how pilots behave. But that isn't stopping you from just making shit up and then using it as a basis for a criticism.
Homer Simpson is NOT piloting these UAVs, and Krusty the Clown is NOT writing the software.
Hyperbole is just as fallacious as FUD. Go ahead. Try and take control of a Global Hawk. Or a Shadow. Or even a Raven. I encourage you to give it a shot. You'll find it's easier to take control of a Cessna or a 767.
"Turn it off and replace the code" is easy to type, but in practice it is immensely difficult, to the point of impracticality. It's far more likely to just stop working and be a UXO threat... or be salvage for terrorists (if they don't blow an arm off in the process).
Sibling to parent post actually got it right; a compromised system is more of a hazard than anything else.
You're joking, but I work in R&D for one of the biggest US manufacturers of UAVs, and the DuneII/C&C/WarcraftII/Starcraft paradigm for controlling and commanding "swarms" of UAVs, and for displaying the data they retrieve, is exactly the inspiration we're using for multiple platform systems with one operator. We ultimately envision one pilot commanding tens or even hundreds of Protoss Observers...
(And for those of you who are FUDding about "skynet" -- 99.9% of the UAVs in the sky are ISR-only, like the Protoss Observer, not weapon platforms. And the ones that do have weapons don't fire at anything without a human issuing at least two orders, and that human is under observation himself. Please stop the FUD. The only functions these craft do autonomously are piloting (i.e., responding to stick commands and short time constant variations in atmospherics) and waypoint-to-waypoint navigation. The rest is done by human pilots and payload operators.)
And yes, we can't wait for StarcraftII to come out.
Well, if the TV Execs and advertisers were smart (I know, I know, we're talking about TV Execs and advertisers, but bear with me), they'd tailor the commercials to the viewers and design their ads to be effective when viewed by someone with a "30-second skip" feature, who will probably only see a few frames of the commercial, randomly phased within the 30 second window.
There are things you can do, like make sure your logo is prominent throughout the length of the commercial, or keeping a hot, scantily-clad female in the frame at all times so that male viewers will back up to watch the whole thing.
I swear, some commercials are doing this already. I predict that in 10 years, all TV commercials will be either static billboard-type ads, or softcore porn vignettes with heavy product placement.
I'm with you. I have PVR with a 30 sec forward skip button. I get to see a few frames of each commercial, essentially. There are a few reasons I'll watch the full commercial; yours is one of them:
- I'm not paying attention anyway. (We make a poor advertising audience if we can't remember the product name.)
- The commercial is for a product or service or program I'm already interested in. (Mac vs PC, anyone?)
- The commercial has a hot babe. (I love Pantene commercials.)
- The commercial is entertaining or attention-grabbing. (Rare, nowadays. I'm a hardened cynic.)
In general, the commercials are ineffective at my house for one reason or another. Therefore, I'm "stealing" television, even though I pay Charter for it.
Sounds like the ideal input device for something like this!
I used to design these kinds of cameras, and there are at least two potential reasons why this can't be done on the ground:
Firstly, and most likely, there's an essential step that needs to be done in the camera hardware. Perhaps something related to Correlated Double Sampling or Pixel Binning needs to be adjusted. In the first case, the signal and reset measurements need to be done as close together as possible to reduce 1/f noise, which can quickly dominate the noise side of the SNR expression, and it may be the timing of these measurements that is at fault. In the latter case, there would be a sqrt(N) penalty for measuring the charge on each pixel and then adding the N pixels together. Conversely, reading each pixel multiple times may be necessary to overcome an unexpected noise source - a sqrt(N) improvement in readout noise can be had by measuring the pixel N times and calculating the average of the measurements. All of these adjustments can only be made at the camera; there's no way to accomplish this after the data has been digitized and radioed to Earth.
2 - Bandwidth. There's just no bandwidth available to ship down the raw data so it can be processed on Earth. The spacecraft must send down reduced data and derivative results. Therefore, these corrections need to be made onboard.
These reasons aren't necessarily exclusive, either... both could be true.
No - I had already dont those things. The two minute reference was to logging in to the new, named account. And it was repeatable.
Granted, it was a $499 special that I bought for my Mother-in-law. I forget the specs, but the CPU was crippled by design. It was a crime to subject it to Windows XP Home + crapware. Poor thing.
Dammit. The first time in weeks I don't preview and I commit a Blockquote close tag fail.
I'd try a facepalm, but I'm afraid I'd fail that, too.
FTFA: no big-brand laptop (aside from Apple) is free from crapware
It's one of the reasons I stay with Apple computers. The last time I bought a HP notebook, it took TWO MINUTES for the thing to respond to a left click on the Start menu after first login, due to all of the crapplets in Startup Items loading simultaneously and overwhelming the machine. Before I realized what was happening, I thought the machine was broken.
No, I don't use those, but they don't load automatically on startup, either.
You're confusing "amateur" with "crap." Some software is perfectly adequate for laypeople to do basic things, like manage photos, make DVDs of their babys barfing on Grandpa, or fiddling with sampled audio. They may seem like crap to you but they're fun for other folks. If you don't use them, however, they sit on the hard drive and do nothing more than occupy otherwise useful storage space. All that is necessary to delete them is to go into the Applications folder, and delete their directories. [I especially recommend this for Garage Band non-users, as its audio sample files take up over a GB of disk space.]
Other software is installed solely to entice a new computer purchaser to subscribe to an online service, habitually visit an ad-driven website, or buy a full version... and this software all launches at startup, delaying the availability and usability of the computer after power-on, and is difficult to remove. This is 'crapware.' Also known as 'crapplets,' or in my house, 'goddamn AOL.'