They'd be connected by either satellites or point-to-point wi-fi.
While it's within the means of any standing army to shut down wi-fi traffic, no one proposing that they have a modernized economy is going to be able to do so without destroying huge amounts of mundane usage as well.
Two satellites drops that 45 minutes, three to 30 minutes, 4 to 22.5 minutes...
But more realistically, if you actually had the funding for such a scheme you'd use a pair of geo-stationary satellites as a universally accessible uplink, and have them farm out downlink to low-orbit birds.
Ideally a credit card number would be a public key, and part 1 of a two-factor authentication scheme, where all it did was allow someone to request a payment from a nominated account. Trading entities would publish their keys so requests could be filtered and verified, but required manual confirmation.
They did put in fairly high-cost panels. They'll pay for themselves since the NSW government had an absurdly generous rebate scheme, so we aimed to maximize the wattage (which requires high efficiency).
That's the problem though - residential properties have fairly limited surface area available, so cost per watt is high since you also have to deal with square-meters.
Efficiency is hugely important though. I did the calculations recently to try and figure out if it would be economical to do peak-shaving of my household electricity usage with Lead-Acid. The answer was that, adding up all the costs (lifetime cost of PbA, electricity, efficiency etc.) I would just barely break even.
Now, there would be some advantages to that, but the hassle and parasitic costs would mean it wasn't worth it.
solar panel efficiency is so abysmal a few percentage points more isn't going to help.
Utter nonsense. Photovoltaic efficiency is higher than every other end-to-end solar to electricity conversion process. It's higher than the dominant process (photosynthesis) by an order of magnitude.
The problem with photovoltaics isn't efficiency. It's cost.
Exactly. My parent's recently put about 9 kW of PV on their roof. This used up all the immediately available space, but it is far from the maximum one could actually fit into that area (which would be straight forward - instead of a conventional roof with an apex, you build a single pitched roof and blanket them onto that).
But that 9kW cost $70,000 (with rebates). It's about the upper limit you can do on your own if you really want to make the most of it.
Now if you could get the cost of the panels down enough, that the option in my first paragraph were now viable - then I would bet that 90% of residential households out there could easily power all their electricity requirements from PV.
Actually it's really really hard. The optical transistor is the current holy grail of photonics and optical computing. The person who invents it will be incontinently rich.
We're on the threshold of a lot of things, for a long time, before they become reality.
Newton wasn't a lone genius (parallel development notwithstanding) he was just the right man at the right time, standing on the shoulders of the right giants.
I suspect, once ITER is complete, or maybe it's successor, and practical fusion power becomes reality, then we'll just as equally forget that "we were on the threshold" for over 50 years.
I know that the people who do that also have to a great deal more then just watering some houseplants or emptying a dishwasher.
Unless you're paying your child market rates, you aren't teaching them anything. In fact you're probably harming them - the reason to keep your own place of residence tidy and clean is not because someone pays you to.
Giving your kids money will teach them a strong work ethic if you make it clear that they only get the money when they are doing something (usually basic household chores like filling the dishwasher and watering the planters, ect). If you just give them money, it will teach them the opposite ethic: that they shouldn't have to work and will get things for free.
Because in THE REAL WORLD you will totally be paid a fair living wage for doing basic households tasks...OH WAIT NO YOU WON'T.
XFS still has some pretty poor default settings I have to say. I've still had some instances where a bunch of files got set to 0 bytes due to a system crash (fortunately just some working files of programs that were open).
I'm finding the tendency of software writers of all stripes to set really unsafe defaults on storage hardware very frustrating.
You should check out the Norco cases. They're 4U rackmount units with 24 hot-swap HDD bays, designed to fit regular ATX motherboards. Very cheap for what you get (also include a ton of fans). The build quality is not spectacular, but for a home system where you're not doing a whole lot of swapping they're great.
Power costs. Having a bunch of always on machines starts to add up. That, plus the progress of technology (by the time the kids move away we might be on to using SSDs for everything) means that it's usually better to try and aggregate costs. Plus it can be an interesting hobby!
For some reason you seem to have taken my comments as a personal attack of some kind.
If you might note the context of the discussion: BitCoin itself cannot do computing. You cannot use a BitCoin to produce some amount of FLOPS, for example. You can pay for computer power in BitCoin...but it doesn't generate the electricity needed for it, nor provide the code.
What it does require however, is a considerable input of electricity and hardware to produce. However, once expended, you have no further usable product. Unlike, gold - which at the end, is still gold and can be used and recycled etc. Or regular fiat currency - which has a very minimal production cost.
But "want" is dictated in part by opportunity cost. If you thought the money in your wallet would be more valuable tomorrow then it is today, you would put off spending it on anything. You wouldn't even bother putting it in a bank.
You need controlled, low-level inflation in a currency in order to stimulate people to invest it somehow. If the currency just increases on value on it's own (because it gets harder and harder to get, by say, mathematics) then the most sensible option is always to spend the absolute minimum of it that you need to. Investment peters out because simply holding the currency becomes the safest possible investment - it's literally zero risk.
BitCoin does have some degree of inflation - in the form of the risk that nobody will want to trade it from you, but this is a very uncontrolled and random element - it's a poor way to run a real currency.
255 photos is still a pain. Why not just have a keyboard (much easier to resolve symbols then scaled photos).
It does occur to me from your idea though that a simple anti-smear system would just be to display the photo at say, 50% size, with a random position and orientation each time. Easy for a person to resolve, but meaning that the smear pattern would become much more random (although I suppose one could consider an attack which correlates the spatial distribution, but I suspect it becomes much harder).
The supply may be limited by mathematics, but it can't respond to demand at all. There is never a reason to spend BitCoins if you can hold onto them, since they'll only increase in value. This is economic suicide for any real-world currency (gold, by contrast, had the benefit of being continuously mined over the timespan it was used as currency).
Worse still, BitCoins don't even represent a useful commodity (unlike gold) - yet use considerable actual commodity resources in order to create. You cannot, for example, use a BitCoin to do a certain amount of computer processing, or generate a certain amount of electricity whereas at minimum at the end of the day with gold, you still have some actual value of gold (although gold is not particularly useful unless you sell it to a scientist, biotech company or semiconductor firm).
Incorrect. Gold has value because there is some difficulty in obtaining it. Every kilogram of gold in the world represents a certain number of manhours of labor. If you needed gold - for any reason - you have to somehow recompense whoever has it for that labor.
The issue is, that gold is a physical commodity with practical uses - a gold coin could be smelted down and turned into electronic circuits, CD reflective layers, or the substrate of a glucose sensor (gaining considerable value in the process).
Contrast with BitCoin, which has no practical commodity uses (but still takes a fair amount of manhours to create in the form of electricity and computers). You can't "use" a BitCoin for anything other then being a BitCoin.
Gold works as a currency when your ability to verify and control your currency is limited (because it's hard to get, and its uses are limited to ordinary people). It's a damn useless currency though in the modern age, when you can replace it with fiat currency which costs nearly nothing to produce and can have much stronger verification (and can have it's inflation/deflation dialed in essentially on demand).
BitCoin is some weird synthesis of both these concepts that makes it about the worst possible compromise.
BitCoin just doesn't matter. It can't be used to extinguish tax obligations, and it is illegal for companies within the US to pay their employees in BitCoin (which would be functionally indistinguishable to "company scrip" payment).
Therefore it is in fact, just a money transfer service.
Its not about the probability of other fingerprints on the device - all you need is a fairly good idea of where someone has been tapping on a photo, and from the photo you will probably be able to guess which points they've used.
> If you suddenly start using encryption, it'll throw up a big flag.
> If you've always been using strong encryption, then there's no > change in behavior to be noticed.
Yes, and if you suddenly stop sending plain-text messages for three months (because you are on vacation), your behavior will be interpreted as you having gone underground plotting to overthrow the free world.
Seriously, where do you come up with stuff like that? That's what I call a paranoid mindset, not the person's, who wants to simply use crypto to keep his/her privacy!
If you don't think anyone's ever going to be specifically looking for your details, then why bother with the encryption? The goal isn't to deal with the common-case, it's to try and mitigate the worst-case: i.e. the chances that someone will intercept my credit card details in unencrypted form going over the net are pretty low, since how many nefarious backbone carriers are there really?
But that's not a possibility I want to leave out there.
Similarly, the reason to encrypt everything is to ensure that if it turns out I do have something I need to remain hidden, who can have it and when, is a better defined factor then it might otherwise be.
Why care about privacy at all? Because of a fear it could, in some capacity be used against you. Whether that's one's plans to take down Wall St, or an unusual sexual fetish, or you think the government really is targeting you, it stems very much from that paranoid mindset.
You could configure the under-side of the car to have a grid of potential electrical contacts, and once the panel raised up the car would negotiate which ones it was actually connected to, and only engage them. If the mating was flush (or slightly recessed) then it wouldn't be possible to touch them.
Slashdot Mirror
They'd be connected by either satellites or point-to-point wi-fi.
While it's within the means of any standing army to shut down wi-fi traffic, no one proposing that they have a modernized economy is going to be able to do so without destroying huge amounts of mundane usage as well.
Two satellites drops that 45 minutes, three to 30 minutes, 4 to 22.5 minutes...
But more realistically, if you actually had the funding for such a scheme you'd use a pair of geo-stationary satellites as a universally accessible uplink, and have them farm out downlink to low-orbit birds.
Ideally a credit card number would be a public key, and part 1 of a two-factor authentication scheme, where all it did was allow someone to request a payment from a nominated account. Trading entities would publish their keys so requests could be filtered and verified, but required manual confirmation.
No "silent" charges.
They did put in fairly high-cost panels. They'll pay for themselves since the NSW government had an absurdly generous rebate scheme, so we aimed to maximize the wattage (which requires high efficiency).
That's the problem though - residential properties have fairly limited surface area available, so cost per watt is high since you also have to deal with square-meters.
Efficiency is hugely important though. I did the calculations recently to try and figure out if it would be economical to do peak-shaving of my household electricity usage with Lead-Acid. The answer was that, adding up all the costs (lifetime cost of PbA, electricity, efficiency etc.) I would just barely break even.
Now, there would be some advantages to that, but the hassle and parasitic costs would mean it wasn't worth it.
solar panel efficiency is so abysmal a few percentage points more isn't going to help.
Utter nonsense. Photovoltaic efficiency is higher than every other end-to-end solar to electricity conversion process. It's higher than the dominant process (photosynthesis) by an order of magnitude.
The problem with photovoltaics isn't efficiency. It's cost.
Exactly. My parent's recently put about 9 kW of PV on their roof. This used up all the immediately available space, but it is far from the maximum one could actually fit into that area (which would be straight forward - instead of a conventional roof with an apex, you build a single pitched roof and blanket them onto that).
But that 9kW cost $70,000 (with rebates). It's about the upper limit you can do on your own if you really want to make the most of it.
Now if you could get the cost of the panels down enough, that the option in my first paragraph were now viable - then I would bet that 90% of residential households out there could easily power all their electricity requirements from PV.
Actually it's really really hard. The optical transistor is the current holy grail of photonics and optical computing. The person who invents it will be incontinently rich.
We're on the threshold of a lot of things, for a long time, before they become reality.
Newton wasn't a lone genius (parallel development notwithstanding) he was just the right man at the right time, standing on the shoulders of the right giants.
I suspect, once ITER is complete, or maybe it's successor, and practical fusion power becomes reality, then we'll just as equally forget that "we were on the threshold" for over 50 years.
I know that the people who do that also have to a great deal more then just watering some houseplants or emptying a dishwasher.
Unless you're paying your child market rates, you aren't teaching them anything. In fact you're probably harming them - the reason to keep your own place of residence tidy and clean is not because someone pays you to.
No you asked a rhetorical question. Now you're backpedaling because your condescending point has been so thoroughly shot down.
If you make a stupid comment own it, don't be a coward.
Giving your kids money will teach them a strong work ethic if you make it clear that they only get the money when they are doing something (usually basic household chores like filling the dishwasher and watering the planters, ect). If you just give them money, it will teach them the opposite ethic: that they shouldn't have to work and will get things for free.
Because in THE REAL WORLD you will totally be paid a fair living wage for doing basic households tasks...OH WAIT NO YOU WON'T.
Operative word being "fast". Native ZFS on Linux is nice, but it's still not nearly as fast as OpenSolaris's implementation - yet.
XFS still has some pretty poor default settings I have to say. I've still had some instances where a bunch of files got set to 0 bytes due to a system crash (fortunately just some working files of programs that were open).
I'm finding the tendency of software writers of all stripes to set really unsafe defaults on storage hardware very frustrating.
You should check out the Norco cases. They're 4U rackmount units with 24 hot-swap HDD bays, designed to fit regular ATX motherboards. Very cheap for what you get (also include a ton of fans). The build quality is not spectacular, but for a home system where you're not doing a whole lot of swapping they're great.
Last I tried with OpenSolaris it choked trying to get the USB2 drivers up and running (not optional when you don't have PS/2 ports anymore).
I would love to use it (since there's no fast ZFS implementation for Linux yet) but it just doesn't seem practical.
Power costs. Having a bunch of always on machines starts to add up. That, plus the progress of technology (by the time the kids move away we might be on to using SSDs for everything) means that it's usually better to try and aggregate costs. Plus it can be an interesting hobby!
For some reason you seem to have taken my comments as a personal attack of some kind.
If you might note the context of the discussion: BitCoin itself cannot do computing. You cannot use a BitCoin to produce some amount of FLOPS, for example. You can pay for computer power in BitCoin...but it doesn't generate the electricity needed for it, nor provide the code.
What it does require however, is a considerable input of electricity and hardware to produce. However, once expended, you have no further usable product. Unlike, gold - which at the end, is still gold and can be used and recycled etc. Or regular fiat currency - which has a very minimal production cost.
Need yes.
But "want" is dictated in part by opportunity cost. If you thought the money in your wallet would be more valuable tomorrow then it is today, you would put off spending it on anything. You wouldn't even bother putting it in a bank.
You need controlled, low-level inflation in a currency in order to stimulate people to invest it somehow. If the currency just increases on value on it's own (because it gets harder and harder to get, by say, mathematics) then the most sensible option is always to spend the absolute minimum of it that you need to. Investment peters out because simply holding the currency becomes the safest possible investment - it's literally zero risk.
BitCoin does have some degree of inflation - in the form of the risk that nobody will want to trade it from you, but this is a very uncontrolled and random element - it's a poor way to run a real currency.
255 photos is still a pain. Why not just have a keyboard (much easier to resolve symbols then scaled photos).
It does occur to me from your idea though that a simple anti-smear system would just be to display the photo at say, 50% size, with a random position and orientation each time. Easy for a person to resolve, but meaning that the smear pattern would become much more random (although I suppose one could consider an attack which correlates the spatial distribution, but I suspect it becomes much harder).
A deflationary currency is a very bad thing.
The supply may be limited by mathematics, but it can't respond to demand at all. There is never a reason to spend BitCoins if you can hold onto them, since they'll only increase in value. This is economic suicide for any real-world currency (gold, by contrast, had the benefit of being continuously mined over the timespan it was used as currency).
Worse still, BitCoins don't even represent a useful commodity (unlike gold) - yet use considerable actual commodity resources in order to create. You cannot, for example, use a BitCoin to do a certain amount of computer processing, or generate a certain amount of electricity whereas at minimum at the end of the day with gold, you still have some actual value of gold (although gold is not particularly useful unless you sell it to a scientist, biotech company or semiconductor firm).
Incorrect. Gold has value because there is some difficulty in obtaining it. Every kilogram of gold in the world represents a certain number of manhours of labor. If you needed gold - for any reason - you have to somehow recompense whoever has it for that labor.
The issue is, that gold is a physical commodity with practical uses - a gold coin could be smelted down and turned into electronic circuits, CD reflective layers, or the substrate of a glucose sensor (gaining considerable value in the process).
Contrast with BitCoin, which has no practical commodity uses (but still takes a fair amount of manhours to create in the form of electricity and computers). You can't "use" a BitCoin for anything other then being a BitCoin.
Gold works as a currency when your ability to verify and control your currency is limited (because it's hard to get, and its uses are limited to ordinary people). It's a damn useless currency though in the modern age, when you can replace it with fiat currency which costs nearly nothing to produce and can have much stronger verification (and can have it's inflation/deflation dialed in essentially on demand).
BitCoin is some weird synthesis of both these concepts that makes it about the worst possible compromise.
BitCoin just doesn't matter. It can't be used to extinguish tax obligations, and it is illegal for companies within the US to pay their employees in BitCoin (which would be functionally indistinguishable to "company scrip" payment).
Therefore it is in fact, just a money transfer service.
Its not about the probability of other fingerprints on the device - all you need is a fairly good idea of where someone has been tapping on a photo, and from the photo you will probably be able to guess which points they've used.
> If you suddenly start using encryption, it'll throw up a big flag.
> If you've always been using strong encryption, then there's no
> change in behavior to be noticed.
Yes, and if you suddenly stop sending plain-text messages for three months (because you are on vacation), your behavior will be interpreted as you having gone underground plotting to overthrow the free world.
Seriously, where do you come up with stuff like that? That's what I call a paranoid mindset, not the person's, who wants to simply use crypto to keep his/her privacy!
If you don't think anyone's ever going to be specifically looking for your details, then why bother with the encryption? The goal isn't to deal with the common-case, it's to try and mitigate the worst-case: i.e. the chances that someone will intercept my credit card details in unencrypted form going over the net are pretty low, since how many nefarious backbone carriers are there really?
But that's not a possibility I want to leave out there.
Similarly, the reason to encrypt everything is to ensure that if it turns out I do have something I need to remain hidden, who can have it and when, is a better defined factor then it might otherwise be.
Why care about privacy at all? Because of a fear it could, in some capacity be used against you. Whether that's one's plans to take down Wall St, or an unusual sexual fetish, or you think the government really is targeting you, it stems very much from that paranoid mindset.
You could configure the under-side of the car to have a grid of potential electrical contacts, and once the panel raised up the car would negotiate which ones it was actually connected to, and only engage them. If the mating was flush (or slightly recessed) then it wouldn't be possible to touch them.