Dean Kamen claims that a technical solution (encrypted digital key) prevents a stolen Segway from being used
Right... but do you really expect this "encrypted digital key" (a.k.a. dongle) to remain not cracked for long? People crack things all the time, for fun more than for profit. Can you imagine an incentive to hack a Segway? That would combine both. Expect to find a.b.w.Segway-Firmware at a newsserver near you:-) If it hasn't happened yet, it's only because Segways are still too expensive to lay a geek's hands on. Just wait until someone steals a Segway and gives it to his pal who has a way with computers... he'll do it just for the heck of it. The Segway runs on IA32 CPUs, IIRC, so it is not nearly as hard to work with as some obscure MIPS would be.
With regard to registrations, cars are registered far more strictly than Segways will ever be. And cars are stolen all the time regardless. There will be a market for Segways (because there are perfectly good uses for the contraption) and some of resold Segways will be stolen goods. Same with cars, if you buy cheap. But a stolen car is hard to register; a stolen Segway needs no registration, and a "see no evil" person can intentionally skip whatever checking is there. If such a person buys the Segway with firmware ID reset to 0x1337D00D and with the "VIN" sticker removed, who is to question the legality of the purchase?
There is another reason for thieves to do their thing. It's called "Fresh Batteries". The batteries will be wearing out, and the new battery, you can bet, will cost an arm and a leg. It will be quite convenient for many to buy a used but still in good condition battery from a "totaled" Segway. I can expect such sales of everything Segway - any parts - on eBay. This is not news with cars either.
You still have to solve the problem of not finding your Segway where you left it. Until you do, you will be better off taking your expensive bike. Or you may want to buy a cheap bike at Wal-Mart, nobody will bother stealing that one.
The problem here is that the Segway is small enough to be lifted off the ground and dropped into a truck all within 10 seconds, by the team of only two. Small motorbikes are often stolen this way. A chain may delay the theft a little, but thieves have hand-operated cutters that silently cut through pretty much anything. (The cutters work as a hydraulic press, offering the same exceptional force multiplier.)
Having insurance for a couple of years is basically the price of a Segway.
No way. Such a person would have to be one hell of a reckless driver, with history of convictions. Or he would have to live in Canada, but then Segway is not much of use anyway:-) I pay about $300/yr. for the insurance on a standard car around here.
Here is an example. I live in warm climate which can allow all-year use of a Segway (aside from rains in the winter.) However I have nowhere to ride. My grocery store and the bank are about 3 miles away, but I wouldn't dare to ride a Segway on that 2-lane road, it would be suicide. I work 2 miles from home but there is a steep, tall bridge in between and I have no illusions about that Segway Power thing:-) And everything else is even farther than that. A trip to electronics store, for example, is about 10 miles, and I have no plans to spend even 30 minutes on the trip when I have a wide and convenient 55 mph rated road from here to there.
There is another factor. People tend to combine trips. In the morning I may buy something at 7-11, at the afternoon I may go somewhere for a lunch, in the evening I may buy some groceries... it would be quite inconvenient to change vehicles between trips.
Additionally, the driver of the van can talk to the group and explain what they are seeing (otherwise how would they know what place of interest is out there?) Within a van this can be easily done by using an intercom or just by talking loud enough.
But when a group of 10 Segway riders is on the road, they will have to keep some safe distance (5 feet at least?) between each other, and so the tour guide can be as far as 50 feet from the tourist. In open air conditions, and lacking any PA, there is no chance to hear the tour guide. Even worse, if a tourist wants to hear the guide he will be forced to come closer and risk a collision with another Segway.
Does this inclination include bad weather? Chicago is not exactly San Diego. If not, then your tour is restricted to good weather, and that leaves your business with much fewer usable days. And when I say "good weather" I mean "the exactly right weather" when it is neither too hot nor too cold. People can be hurt (and older people can require medical help) in such conditions. Does the business wish to restrict the tours only to young and healthy tourists?
A ten-passenger van will happily run for many, many years before it breaks down - that is because its technology is simple, mature and well known. Just service it as the manual says. Also, how much of a rough ride you would expect from a bus tour in a city?
Segway, on the other hand, is a tricky thing. Its batteries can run out at any time, and they wear down gradually (your fuel tank doesn't.) Your tourists have to have good body coordination to ride anything (bike, Segway, monocycle - anything), but they need none of that to sit in a van that is carefully driven by your employee on a well-beaten path. Accidents and lawsuits were already mentioned, and anyone who pays for the tour definitely expects some level of safety.
I believe the difference here is that by mixing colors you can get all the colors in between. In fact, it can be mathematically proven (if you don't trust your eyes:-)
However there is no obvious way to mix smell of vanilla with smell of creosote and get the smell of rose, for example. Furthermore, you can not get the smells of varying roses by changing the amount of creosote or vanilla. Smells are not very additive.
This still doesn't mean that such a device is impossible. It only means that you need many different "essential oils" (a.k.a. stinky liquids) to generate some good number of smells.
But on the other hand such a device does not have to generate many smells. A marketdroid may be happy if each "oil" generates just one smell, and that's it - the device just can make 10 or 20 smells at all. This would be acceptably good to accompany TV ads, for example.
However I see no way in hell a device like this can recreate a smell of some good wine. It is even hardly possible to do in a chemical lab. Wine is quite a complex product. Year and age of the wood used to make the barrels may make a big difference; those 10 or so oils can't even approach that precision; I would be even surprised if they can recreate the smell of common beer - because they'd need to stock up on some yeast products among those oils, and these wouldn't last long in that cartridge.
The previous device failed, and this one is likely to follow. The main reason to that is not its limited spectrum of smells, but the absence of any need for the device. Sense of smell is not very strong in humans, and we are not driven by it as we are driven by vision or by hearing. There are
theaters of vision (movies), there are theaters of word (drama) and music (opera etc.) but no smell theaters. We are just mostly blind to smells.
With a PDA or whatever it'll take longer to write notes out, and you'll still need to 'fix them up' when you're done anyway.
The poster has more time during the trip than at home - which justifies use of a PDA. Even if you are a business traveller, you can do a lot while waiting for your airplane, and you don't really care how more or less efficient you are. It's still better than watching clouds:-)
I looked through all the comments so far, and seems like nobody noticed one deficiency of these bikes that will completely ruin their sales in the USA.
These bikes can carry a rider weighing up to 75-100 kg (about 200 lbs.) Thus, majority of potential users here will be excluded. They would simply break the bike:-)
With the exception of California, you either have to fight with pedestrians on the sidewalk, or try your luck in traffic (also depending on local laws).
Don't worry, you have to try your luck even in CA.
For example, if the cache holds 100 images, and all were timestamped within 10 seconds, it sure looks like an automated sequence. But if the images are timestamped 30 seconds from each other, then it is logical to see a browsing pattern there.
There are only a couple of problems with this theory:
Buran was never completed in design, and even if it were, it would be too expensive to just launch satellites.
The Buran program was killed by Andropov / Chernenko / Gorbachev, leaders of the old USSR.
Russian rockets were and are a competition in satellite launch business.
Russia is not relying on economic aid from the West for many years now.
In other words, a competitor would LOVE to force Russia to abandon its dirt cheap rockets and launch everything on Buran. The costs would definitely drive Russia out of satellite business.
Now if you can figure out something like "suspended animation" or a way to prevent bone density loss on the 6+ month trip (each way)
It is not a challenge. First of all, humans can stay in zero-G for at least a year if they follow the exercise program. Also, it is trivial to spin the spacecraft.
Or finding out a way to cheaply extract minerals
I am sure there are many chemists with just the right knowledge. We already know what type of minerals are there.
make Mars have an atmosphere
Aside from use of alien technology, bioengineering is the way to do it. First you need to check if there is native life, because you won't get a chance later. Then you engineer some bacteria that love UV, cold, consume CO2 and exhale O2. Then you release them. Within a very short period of time (bacteria multiply faster than rabbits) you will get what you want. Then you can go there in person.
What may be more difficult, though, is to add some magnetic field to the planet, and to increase its mass. Both are needed to deflect solar wind and to retain a denser atmosphere. At this point my best idea is to just bury a gravity generator at the center of the planet, since anything else would be too damaging. A piece of neutronium will be a good option.
Buran is not used because nobody wants it today. Buran was a prototype, and it did its job, the technology was evaluated and seen as too expensive. Rockets are cheaper, and they do the job just fine. However, the technology and materials that went into Buran are still there, available for the next project.
An average computer user today does not type. Well, you can expect him to type a letter in a wordprocessor. But that letter comes from his head, and is easy to read. Computer commands do not come from his memory (as opposed to you, me and other computer professionals), and so he would need to ask, in this order:
Do I need to click on desktop before I start typing your command, or I can do it right in the Internet Explorer?
Where is that Command Prompt you are talking about? I see no prompt on the screen! (say your thanks to MS for burying the cmd.exe shortcut two levels deep.)
Ok, I see this black window. But none of what you say I should type are words, how do I type them? (Answer: character by character, checking every one of them.)
This thing is telling me something! How do I understand what it is?
There is no "Finish" button to click!
In other words, the consumer is now totally GUI oriented, and only UNIX heads still remember what a command prompt is.
If they get serious abour scanning the surface of the hard drive it's possible to measure the age of data and changes
Restore process, as well as defragmentation / optimization / any rewrite will cause the data to be rewritten into some new place on the HDD without your explicit involvement.
There are some fields in the directory structure to hold "created", "accessed" and "modified" dates, but they are easy to change (touch would do it, for example, and a slew of other tools as well.)
One way to prove the change is to compare your current file with some previous file which is probably hanging around in the free but unclaimed space on the HDD. This is easy if the HDD is large. However, some tools offer wiping of all free blocks clean.
So as usual it is a battle of skills between two parties. One who knows more wins. Unless, of course, the other party pulls out some other weapons that you don't have...
History is filled with examples where children were destined to suffer because of the choices of their parents. If we believe these children were innocent, then we should be comforted to know that by their drowning, God removed them from a wicked society and took their souls to eternal peace and rest.
This is an argument of serial killers. I think the author of the rebuttal needs to think better next time.
Saying "I can't recall" will earn you an interminate stay in the county jug until your memory improves dramatically.
It worked for Reagan, though, and it is possible that he wasn't lying then.
In fact, it is absolutely feasible to forget a long passphrase, especially if you claim that the data is an old archive of obsolete financial records or projections, for example.
I can't see anyone being thrown in jail for inability to remember something that they were never required to remember:
"Yes, the password is so long it was written on a piece of paper, but the paper got lost years ago... I kept the archive because the HDD is large, and on odd chance that the paper will surface one day..."
What do you do then, if the person does not even claim that he ever remembered the passphrase? What exactly would the state accuse him of?
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Right... but do you really expect this "encrypted digital key" (a.k.a. dongle) to remain not cracked for long? People crack things all the time, for fun more than for profit. Can you imagine an incentive to hack a Segway? That would combine both. Expect to find a.b.w.Segway-Firmware at a newsserver near you :-) If it hasn't happened yet, it's only because Segways are still too expensive to lay a geek's hands on. Just wait until someone steals a Segway and gives it to his pal who has a way with computers... he'll do it just for the heck of it. The Segway runs on IA32 CPUs, IIRC, so it is not nearly as hard to work with as some obscure MIPS would be.
With regard to registrations, cars are registered far more strictly than Segways will ever be. And cars are stolen all the time regardless. There will be a market for Segways (because there are perfectly good uses for the contraption) and some of resold Segways will be stolen goods. Same with cars, if you buy cheap. But a stolen car is hard to register; a stolen Segway needs no registration, and a "see no evil" person can intentionally skip whatever checking is there. If such a person buys the Segway with firmware ID reset to 0x1337D00D and with the "VIN" sticker removed, who is to question the legality of the purchase?
There is another reason for thieves to do their thing. It's called "Fresh Batteries". The batteries will be wearing out, and the new battery, you can bet, will cost an arm and a leg. It will be quite convenient for many to buy a used but still in good condition battery from a "totaled" Segway. I can expect such sales of everything Segway - any parts - on eBay. This is not news with cars either.
The problem here is that the Segway is small enough to be lifted off the ground and dropped into a truck all within 10 seconds, by the team of only two. Small motorbikes are often stolen this way. A chain may delay the theft a little, but thieves have hand-operated cutters that silently cut through pretty much anything. (The cutters work as a hydraulic press, offering the same exceptional force multiplier.)
No way. Such a person would have to be one hell of a reckless driver, with history of convictions. Or he would have to live in Canada, but then Segway is not much of use anyway :-) I pay about $300/yr. for the insurance on a standard car around here.
There is another factor. People tend to combine trips. In the morning I may buy something at 7-11, at the afternoon I may go somewhere for a lunch, in the evening I may buy some groceries... it would be quite inconvenient to change vehicles between trips.
But when a group of 10 Segway riders is on the road, they will have to keep some safe distance (5 feet at least?) between each other, and so the tour guide can be as far as 50 feet from the tourist. In open air conditions, and lacking any PA, there is no chance to hear the tour guide. Even worse, if a tourist wants to hear the guide he will be forced to come closer and risk a collision with another Segway.
Does this inclination include bad weather? Chicago is not exactly San Diego. If not, then your tour is restricted to good weather, and that leaves your business with much fewer usable days. And when I say "good weather" I mean "the exactly right weather" when it is neither too hot nor too cold. People can be hurt (and older people can require medical help) in such conditions. Does the business wish to restrict the tours only to young and healthy tourists?
I will not be surprised if all seven are stolen or wrecked within a year.
Segway, on the other hand, is a tricky thing. Its batteries can run out at any time, and they wear down gradually (your fuel tank doesn't.) Your tourists have to have good body coordination to ride anything (bike, Segway, monocycle - anything), but they need none of that to sit in a van that is carefully driven by your employee on a well-beaten path. Accidents and lawsuits were already mentioned, and anyone who pays for the tour definitely expects some level of safety.
I guess my reference to Perry Rhodan was not very obvious :-)
Does anyone wonder why names Rutan and Rhodan are so similar?
However there is no obvious way to mix smell of vanilla with smell of creosote and get the smell of rose, for example. Furthermore, you can not get the smells of varying roses by changing the amount of creosote or vanilla. Smells are not very additive.
This still doesn't mean that such a device is impossible. It only means that you need many different "essential oils" (a.k.a. stinky liquids) to generate some good number of smells.
But on the other hand such a device does not have to generate many smells. A marketdroid may be happy if each "oil" generates just one smell, and that's it - the device just can make 10 or 20 smells at all. This would be acceptably good to accompany TV ads, for example.
However I see no way in hell a device like this can recreate a smell of some good wine. It is even hardly possible to do in a chemical lab. Wine is quite a complex product. Year and age of the wood used to make the barrels may make a big difference; those 10 or so oils can't even approach that precision; I would be even surprised if they can recreate the smell of common beer - because they'd need to stock up on some yeast products among those oils, and these wouldn't last long in that cartridge.
The previous device failed, and this one is likely to follow. The main reason to that is not its limited spectrum of smells, but the absence of any need for the device. Sense of smell is not very strong in humans, and we are not driven by it as we are driven by vision or by hearing. There are theaters of vision (movies), there are theaters of word (drama) and music (opera etc.) but no smell theaters. We are just mostly blind to smells.
The poster has more time during the trip than at home - which justifies use of a PDA. Even if you are a business traveller, you can do a lot while waiting for your airplane, and you don't really care how more or less efficient you are. It's still better than watching clouds :-)
Let me guess, your bikes are welded together, have a single gasoline motor, and a roof? @=:-)
These bikes can carry a rider weighing up to 75-100 kg (about 200 lbs.) Thus, majority of potential users here will be excluded. They would simply break the bike :-)
Don't worry, you have to try your luck even in CA.
For example, if the cache holds 100 images, and all were timestamped within 10 seconds, it sure looks like an automated sequence. But if the images are timestamped 30 seconds from each other, then it is logical to see a browsing pattern there.
Forest is the place where all the logs are kept, in case you didn't know :-)
In other words, a competitor would LOVE to force Russia to abandon its dirt cheap rockets and launch everything on Buran. The costs would definitely drive Russia out of satellite business.
It is not a challenge. First of all, humans can stay in zero-G for at least a year if they follow the exercise program. Also, it is trivial to spin the spacecraft.
Or finding out a way to cheaply extract minerals
I am sure there are many chemists with just the right knowledge. We already know what type of minerals are there.
make Mars have an atmosphere
Aside from use of alien technology, bioengineering is the way to do it. First you need to check if there is native life, because you won't get a chance later. Then you engineer some bacteria that love UV, cold, consume CO2 and exhale O2. Then you release them. Within a very short period of time (bacteria multiply faster than rabbits) you will get what you want. Then you can go there in person.
What may be more difficult, though, is to add some magnetic field to the planet, and to increase its mass. Both are needed to deflect solar wind and to retain a denser atmosphere. At this point my best idea is to just bury a gravity generator at the center of the planet, since anything else would be too damaging. A piece of neutronium will be a good option.
Buran is not used because nobody wants it today. Buran was a prototype, and it did its job, the technology was evaluated and seen as too expensive. Rockets are cheaper, and they do the job just fine. However, the technology and materials that went into Buran are still there, available for the next project.
The 9.1 is released already, see www.suse.de
An average computer user today does not type. Well, you can expect him to type a letter in a wordprocessor. But that letter comes from his head, and is easy to read. Computer commands do not come from his memory (as opposed to you, me and other computer professionals), and so he would need to ask, in this order:
In other words, the consumer is now totally GUI oriented, and only UNIX heads still remember what a command prompt is.
Restore process, as well as defragmentation / optimization / any rewrite will cause the data to be rewritten into some new place on the HDD without your explicit involvement.
There are some fields in the directory structure to hold "created", "accessed" and "modified" dates, but they are easy to change (touch would do it, for example, and a slew of other tools as well.)
One way to prove the change is to compare your current file with some previous file which is probably hanging around in the free but unclaimed space on the HDD. This is easy if the HDD is large. However, some tools offer wiping of all free blocks clean.
So as usual it is a battle of skills between two parties. One who knows more wins. Unless, of course, the other party pulls out some other weapons that you don't have...
History is filled with examples where children were destined to suffer because of the choices of their parents. If we believe these children were innocent, then we should be comforted to know that by their drowning, God removed them from a wicked society and took their souls to eternal peace and rest.
This is an argument of serial killers. I think the author of the rebuttal needs to think better next time.
It worked for Reagan, though, and it is possible that he wasn't lying then.
In fact, it is absolutely feasible to forget a long passphrase, especially if you claim that the data is an old archive of obsolete financial records or projections, for example.
I can't see anyone being thrown in jail for inability to remember something that they were never required to remember:
"Yes, the password is so long it was written on a piece of paper, but the paper got lost years ago... I kept the archive because the HDD is large, and on odd chance that the paper will surface one day..."
What do you do then, if the person does not even claim that he ever remembered the passphrase? What exactly would the state accuse him of?