People, if given the chance, seem to vote for insolvent government.
It is better to have poor government and rich citizens than vice versa.
Poor government is a self-solving problem. No money? They have whole blocks of cities that are full of bureaucrats. Get rid of them. If the entire government of California disappears overnight nobody will even notice. People don't need the government to live; it's an add-on layer that provides fewer and fewer services every year for more and more money. Now they are talking about spending $100B on a train, as if there is anyone who wants to travel light (the Central Valley is an agricultural place, which implies a lot of transportation of bulky goods.)
Poor citizenry, unfortunately, is not a self-solving problem. Just look at the Soviet Union. People were taxed at 99% (invisibly to them, of course) but the government was rich. This led to massive waste of resources on projects like turning rivers around.
Prop 13 prevents the government from raising taxes
Without Proposition 13 many Californians would be losing their homes. Is this what you want? Governments can raise taxes to such high levels that homeowners can't keep paying them. You may live in a house that was built many years ago by your ancestors. You have not much money yourself, but there is no mortgage. So you are OK. Now the tax man comes and says "This here residence, with so many windows and doors, must be about $10M on the open market today, so your tax would be $100K yearly." What are you going to do? The house is not an investment, it doesn't pay dividends or interest. It can't pay for itself. There would be only one thing: to sell your house and to buy something smaller. Who benefits from kicking you off of of your family property, other than the government?
Yes. But, generally speaking, legality of such a thing is not a constant. As an example, it is illegal to walk up to a house at night and look into the window. However is it illegal to do the same using a powerful telescope, from a mile away? Is it illegal to do from 10 miles away? At what point does the viewing become legal? After all, the people inside the house brazenly "broadcast" their actions by means of light waves, a familiar defense of Google.
The law, as written, does not prohibit wardriving, and it does not prohibit collection of data that you can receive. I don't know if the law needs to be changed; probably not - we have too many laws already, and each new law has three new loopholes that are asking for more laws.
But it is obvious that you aren't supposed to be capturing someone else's WiFi data, especially if that data contains private information. If a polite person finds himself within an earshot of a clearly private conversation he will move away or make his presence known. Google not only hasn't done that; they intentionally recorded everything that they heard. To me it indicates that everyone who was involved with that decision has no moral checks and balances. All too common these days, unfortunately. Demise of God removed the last restraint from human minds, and not everyone chooses to use the newly found freedom wisely.
It's not an overwhelming amount of data for each Google car when compared to everything else it's collecting, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was simply left on
If I were in charge of outfitting StreetView cars, I'd load them with everything I could possibly lay my hands on. It costs a lot of money to send a car on a route. So if the car is going it should capture everything that is capturable - as long as that is legal and hopefully ethical.
With this payload capture Google broke law in some countries and broke ethical norms everywhere. This is my own opinion, but that's all I need to stop using Google. My account there hasn't seen a login for at least a year.
Just because you think every penny spent or earned is yours does not make it so, or a good idea.
What? You mean that if I work whole day digging a ditch, that labor does not belong to me? You are saying I'm a slave?
My labor belongs to me; it is mine. (A simple test: I can choose to not work.) For the good of the society we choose to donate some of that money to the state, to be wisely used for specific purposes that are defined by law [*] We call this money "taxes."
[*] Unfortunately, for some reason that also includes $500K vacations of members of Emperor's family.
what's the point of beating that really hard level if you can just fail it and move on to the next one?
Some missions may be too tough for some players. People are different. For example, I couldn't figure out the dance mission in GTA Vice City. There was no way to bypass. I seriously considered soldering wires to the controller so that the mission can be played automatically, by a timer.
As another example, the RC helicopter mission in the same Vice City is needlessly long and complicated. There are many complaints that the game is unplayable just because of that mission (there are no save points during the mission.) Rockstar ensured the "game time" by forcing you to repeat missions over and over and over again until you really learn to operate... what? A fictional RC helicopter that you will never meet IRL?
The same can be said about flight training in GTA San Andreas. There are many complaints. In essence, you'd be better off trying the actual two airplane missions and learning to fly that way.
Same can be said about the driving school. But, interestingly enough, it was optional. I could not progress past a certain point. Generally all GTA games are timed so that if you do everything flawlessly you maybe have three to five seconds left. There was zero value in the driving school. I haven't finished it and still I was able to complete the game just fine. I suspect that Rockstar just decided to add play time by reusing existing assets in a way that is easy for them to code but nearly impossible for you to pass.
To summarize, it is very important to be able to skip some missions. Perhaps a certain boss fight that requires agility and reaction time of a teenager can be replaced with an alternative fight that requires planning skills and patience and stealth of a 40 y/o professional sniper. But most games just blindly assume that everyone can do *this* chord on the controller. Assassin's Creed II comes to mind where you need to jump at the wall and at the same time move to the side. This is an essential skill to proceed, mind you! This sequence is pretty hard to do because when you do it it doesn't f. work! The reason is that you need to push the controller's joystick just right and not in any other way. But why not, you have plenty of time, like 20 milliseconds, to do that - time after time after time. I wish I had an alternative path where I'd have to fight 100 guards and solve puzzles but skip this jumping business.
In reality, learning to play the game is pointless. The skill of pushing on joysticks is not translating into anything usable in real life. Limitations of the controller force developers to invent more and more chords. In that Assassin's Creed there are so many control sequences that nobody but the developer himself, on a good day, can voluntarily execute one sword move or another. I could only randomly mash buttons and hope for the best. Any attempt to stop and think - or, even worse, try to execute the combo per instructions - will only get you wounded.
Timer missions are another bane of many games. I'd like to replay Assassin's Creed II, but there are so many timed missions smack-dab in the middle of the story that I fear them. What's the point of chasing a thief across rooftops? IRL there are very few timed missions; maybe if you are a doctor or a CIA agent you need to be able to act quick. But in most cases speed is not as essential as quality. I suspect that game developers just use timers as yet another FAIL criterion, so that you are stuck for hours replaying the same mission again and again and again. In case of that thief (the 1st timed mission of the game) you have to literally study every step of your path, or else you will fail. What is the point of that act, other than to annoy the player? If you want to make it into a decent intro to roof-hopping, get rid of the timer and make the thief wait for you whenever you fall or get delayed. But make the route 100 times as long. It would be actually educational, since the leading thief could show you some tricks.
At the above speed, g-1 = 30020, so you would need to convert 30020 times as much mass as your spacecraft has to energy in order to get to the required speed.
A runner from Marathon would certainly tell you, just before dying, that there is absolutely no way to deliver a message faster than he just did (outside of pigeons, they were in use at that time.)
As far as I know, nobody even suggests battling the light speed barrier head on. The physics is well proven in accelerators. The only hope for FTL is in bypassing the problem altogether.
Of course it is also possible that they think of communication via electromagnetic wave modulation to be as primitive as smoke signals or cave drawings might seem to us.
Communication between star systems using EM radiation is just as pointless as sending carrier pigeons across the Atlantic. When (or if) the message arrives it is hopelessly obsolete. We can't tolerate a 10 year ping time to the nearest star.
The EM communication is useless on this scale. Because of that it does not exist. Perhaps, nothing exists at all if there are other civilizations out there. If there is no FTL travel then these civilizations are hopelessly apart. If there is FTL travel then either a variant of FTL exists for messages, or there are courier drones.
As things are known to us, the likeliest possibility is that there are many civilizations out there, but there is no FTL. Expansion is only possible with generation ships, and communication between colonies is impossible.
But even if we assume for the moment that the homeworld sends broadcasts to their colonies using EM (however delayed that might be,) the antennas will be highly directional. Any civilization that can build an asteroid-sized generation ship can build an antenna of the same size or even larger. You'd have to be directly on the path of the beam, plus or minus 0.01 degree, to receive the message. Also, transmissions will be very energy-consuming, so they will be brief. Also, advanced coding methods (like CDMA) transform the signal into a wideband noise. With millions of time slots, millions of spatial slots, millions of frequencies to choose from, and with millions of chipping codes, our chances of intercepting the transmission are extremely low. SETI is looking for a slow, Morse code equivalent of "Hello, everyone!" but most of modern communications on Earth are super-fast gigabit-per-second groups of packets that carry all kinds of data. If I were to send a broadcast to a colony of my planet I would use such a wideband channel because there is a lot of data to be sent.
If the cops want to arrest you, they will. If you resist you will only make their job easier. Striking against the part of the system that is designed to take those strikes is not practical.
Well, here's the question though, would these screeners have 'ignored' an explosive for $2,400?
Do these screeners have a portable chemical lab kit right next to the pornoscanner? Are they trained chemists who know what to do with this lab kit to tell the difference between a drug and an explosive?
Of course, once the screeners are paid the courier carries whatever he pleases, and nobody is going to check what it is.
I think a TSA agent is probably more likely to turn a blink eye to cocaine than an actual threat to people's lives.
The same high ranking male can utilize beating with a stick, hitting with a stone, biting, throwing off the tree, chasing away from food... all these things are natural, but it doesn't mean that they are socially progressive or good for you. They are all punishments.
It is amazing really...how often, how companies will grind their W2's (young ones) into the ground, for nothing, willingly lose them, but pay a major premium for a contractor to come in and do the same thing or fix things
Such an approach may make plenty of sense if these are different monies.
For example, you are a poor startup. You hire the youngest, greenest coder you can find. You pay him with one bowl of rice per day (not full, of course.) He puts something together that is garbage, not extensible or maintainable. At best it's a demo.
The demo is successful and your company is acquired. Immediately after that you, if you remain in charge, hire a bunch of expensive graybeards who scrap most of the junk that the green coder constructed and rewrite the whole thing in three weeks, correctly. They charge a lot of money for that, but... it's not your money anymore, and not your expense.
You could have hired graybeards to begin with. However it makes no sense. First, you don't have the money. Second, you aren't sure that the product will be a success.
But do I really need to point out how unlikely it is that the drone is built of commercial grade parts?
If you mean the temperature range (-C and -I) then you can buy both.
If you mean the parts themselves (such as 2N2222 vs. TLA-NPN-2222-LIKE) then pretty much everything everywhere is made from commercially available parts. Even when you need an ASIC you often put an FPGA instead.
On the other hand, I am very much unsure what is easier - to reverse engineer the firmware or to write it all from scratch. FPGA configuration bitstreams can't be translated back into a readable and maintainable VHDL. The reuse value of this work is nearly zero. You only can build more of these drones, with all their bugs and vulnerabilities.
Though most on the folks on/. probably get a serious kick out of getting the chance to crack open their laptop or tablet to put in a superior part.
The screen that your laptop came with is *already* superior, unless you are in the 0.01% of people who use their laptop on a beach.
There certainly are valid applications for such screens. For example, outdoor hardware - for construction, surveying, military. It might be good even in a common car. A typical notebook isn't one of them.
I personally wouldn't be interested in a tablet or an ebook reader that works best under the sunlight. I just don't read in those conditions. I read in the evening, with external lights off.
The real problem is: how do I get my key in a secure manner to the people that want to read my encrypted message, and the other way around?
The PKI system solves this problem. GNUPG/PGP is one such system. S/MIME or SSL/TLS are other examples. When you connect over HTTPS you aren't receiving a secret key with a pigeon, do you?
The primary difference between GNUPG/PGP and other systems is in the way trust is determined. You download a public key (a certificate) of the addressee. However how do you know that this is the right certificate, of the right person? Even if you receive it in email directly from that person it doesn't mean much - it could be sent by a complete stranger. You need a 3rd party to confirm that the certificate is right. PGP does that by having hordes of other people (who you do not know) sign the public key of the person that you are emailing (who you do not know either.) This is vulnerable to a parallel web of trust. S/MIME does that by having a business vouch that he is who he says he is. This is vulnerable to poor business practices and lack of real checking.
Dramatically increased electricity demand is going to push up the price of electricity.
This is only true in a small part. You need to consider that electric power can be generated locally. Today it is not practical because oil is cheaper than wind or solar. These methods will be competitive once the oil becomes scarce.
Still, it doesn't mean that a common man would be able to drive to mountains just to see how it is up there. Travel will be prohibitively expensive (just as it was before the industrial revolution) unless you are one of them techs, or whoever gets paid well. The current situation with the job market in the USA is not very optimistic. In essence, human labor in most part (except creative/engineering) will be not required at all. Truck drivers will be replaced with robot cars, for example - what are they to do? Can a truck driver learn to program neural networks?
Considering we pump highly flammable gasoline into the same thing I would say yes.
Pumping gasoline is still safer. There are very few parts involved, and their failure is not that likely to result in fire. The parts (such as the hose, the tank, the lid) are not under much stress; they never wear out. The gasoline, as we pour it, is inactive - it is not burning, and it will take some effort to burn it.
However a battery charging circuit will contain hundreds of components, each working close to their theoretical limit. You will have semiconductors, bus bars, flexible kA-rated cables, and lots and lots of Lithium. If anything goes wrong and is not instantly detected by safety circuits the car can literally explode. Some faults (such as fire within Lithium cells) can be indistinguishable from normal charging unless you are monitoring the size and the temperature of each cell.
I can agree with that. Today the reference range of a Leaf is what, 60-80 miles in fair weather? That is marginal for majority of drivers who don't buy the EV as a 17th car in their garage. Even if you drive 5 miles to work every day and a Leaf would be fine, every other weekend you load the family into the car and drive 100 miles to see relatives. Leaf can't do this, and so it becomes irrelevant. An EV with only double range (120-150 miles) would cover most of reasonable trips that people are likely to do. Once you have that covered then you can say that longer trips require a rental car.
If you're simply driving your vehicle, why should anyone have the ability to log what happens in your vehicle?
A Devil's Advocate will say that nobody wants to log what's happening inside of your vehicle. However the vehicle itself is open to public view, and anyone can measure its speed and acceleration if they want to. Therefore access to the black box does not reveal anything that an external observer would be able to learn. The black box will only provide most accurate measurements.
So the following scenario will play out:
"Citizen, I observed your car moving 10 mph over the speed limit. You can consent to retrieval of the black box data, and if the black box doesn't register a violation I will let you go. Or you can refuse the read of the black box, then I will treat it as an admission of guilt."
Stop everyone, of course, including Amish carts. 100% will have something in the black box to hang them.
Who pays when law enforcement buys and installs the instrumentation?
OK, let me rephrase then. The new law makes sure that every car owner pays a new invisible tax. Works for Obamacare...
P.S. This "Slow down, Cowboy" thing on/. is extremely annoying. What are they trying to do there? I'm not aware of any other blog that has such a silly constraint. Sane blogs *want* people to post, but/. chases them away. Good that I even noticed that the post didn't go through.
There are plenty of roads that are good for 70 mph but are marked as 55. Modern cars are somewhat better than what was available 40 years ago.
It is also possible to be speeding while driving under the speed limit. A month ago I was crossing a mountain pass. The speed limit there was 55, I think. I was doing 1 mph at times. Why? Because I couldn't see past the hood of my car because of the snowstorm.
With regard to fuel, it's the driver's choice, and is completely unrelated to the speed limit. A surgeon may be in a hurry to get to the hospital because his patient developed internal bleeding; should he slow down and save 10 cents? If a worker is about to be late for his shift, should he save 15 cents on fuel and lose his job?
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People, if given the chance, seem to vote for insolvent government.
It is better to have poor government and rich citizens than vice versa.
Poor government is a self-solving problem. No money? They have whole blocks of cities that are full of bureaucrats. Get rid of them. If the entire government of California disappears overnight nobody will even notice. People don't need the government to live; it's an add-on layer that provides fewer and fewer services every year for more and more money. Now they are talking about spending $100B on a train, as if there is anyone who wants to travel light (the Central Valley is an agricultural place, which implies a lot of transportation of bulky goods.)
Poor citizenry, unfortunately, is not a self-solving problem. Just look at the Soviet Union. People were taxed at 99% (invisibly to them, of course) but the government was rich. This led to massive waste of resources on projects like turning rivers around.
Prop 13 prevents the government from raising taxes
Without Proposition 13 many Californians would be losing their homes. Is this what you want? Governments can raise taxes to such high levels that homeowners can't keep paying them. You may live in a house that was built many years ago by your ancestors. You have not much money yourself, but there is no mortgage. So you are OK. Now the tax man comes and says "This here residence, with so many windows and doors, must be about $10M on the open market today, so your tax would be $100K yearly." What are you going to do? The house is not an investment, it doesn't pay dividends or interest. It can't pay for itself. There would be only one thing: to sell your house and to buy something smaller. Who benefits from kicking you off of of your family property, other than the government?
Yes. But, generally speaking, legality of such a thing is not a constant. As an example, it is illegal to walk up to a house at night and look into the window. However is it illegal to do the same using a powerful telescope, from a mile away? Is it illegal to do from 10 miles away? At what point does the viewing become legal? After all, the people inside the house brazenly "broadcast" their actions by means of light waves, a familiar defense of Google.
The law, as written, does not prohibit wardriving, and it does not prohibit collection of data that you can receive. I don't know if the law needs to be changed; probably not - we have too many laws already, and each new law has three new loopholes that are asking for more laws.
But it is obvious that you aren't supposed to be capturing someone else's WiFi data, especially if that data contains private information. If a polite person finds himself within an earshot of a clearly private conversation he will move away or make his presence known. Google not only hasn't done that; they intentionally recorded everything that they heard. To me it indicates that everyone who was involved with that decision has no moral checks and balances. All too common these days, unfortunately. Demise of God removed the last restraint from human minds, and not everyone chooses to use the newly found freedom wisely.
It's not an overwhelming amount of data for each Google car when compared to everything else it's collecting, and I wouldn't be surprised if it was simply left on
If I were in charge of outfitting StreetView cars, I'd load them with everything I could possibly lay my hands on. It costs a lot of money to send a car on a route. So if the car is going it should capture everything that is capturable - as long as that is legal and hopefully ethical.
With this payload capture Google broke law in some countries and broke ethical norms everywhere. This is my own opinion, but that's all I need to stop using Google. My account there hasn't seen a login for at least a year.
Just because you think every penny spent or earned is yours does not make it so, or a good idea.
What? You mean that if I work whole day digging a ditch, that labor does not belong to me? You are saying I'm a slave?
My labor belongs to me; it is mine. (A simple test: I can choose to not work.) For the good of the society we choose to donate some of that money to the state, to be wisely used for specific purposes that are defined by law [*] We call this money "taxes."
[*] Unfortunately, for some reason that also includes $500K vacations of members of Emperor's family.
what's the point of beating that really hard level if you can just fail it and move on to the next one?
Some missions may be too tough for some players. People are different. For example, I couldn't figure out the dance mission in GTA Vice City. There was no way to bypass. I seriously considered soldering wires to the controller so that the mission can be played automatically, by a timer.
As another example, the RC helicopter mission in the same Vice City is needlessly long and complicated. There are many complaints that the game is unplayable just because of that mission (there are no save points during the mission.) Rockstar ensured the "game time" by forcing you to repeat missions over and over and over again until you really learn to operate ... what? A fictional RC helicopter that you will never meet IRL?
The same can be said about flight training in GTA San Andreas. There are many complaints. In essence, you'd be better off trying the actual two airplane missions and learning to fly that way.
Same can be said about the driving school. But, interestingly enough, it was optional. I could not progress past a certain point. Generally all GTA games are timed so that if you do everything flawlessly you maybe have three to five seconds left. There was zero value in the driving school. I haven't finished it and still I was able to complete the game just fine. I suspect that Rockstar just decided to add play time by reusing existing assets in a way that is easy for them to code but nearly impossible for you to pass.
To summarize, it is very important to be able to skip some missions. Perhaps a certain boss fight that requires agility and reaction time of a teenager can be replaced with an alternative fight that requires planning skills and patience and stealth of a 40 y/o professional sniper. But most games just blindly assume that everyone can do *this* chord on the controller. Assassin's Creed II comes to mind where you need to jump at the wall and at the same time move to the side. This is an essential skill to proceed, mind you! This sequence is pretty hard to do because when you do it it doesn't f. work! The reason is that you need to push the controller's joystick just right and not in any other way. But why not, you have plenty of time, like 20 milliseconds, to do that - time after time after time. I wish I had an alternative path where I'd have to fight 100 guards and solve puzzles but skip this jumping business.
In reality, learning to play the game is pointless. The skill of pushing on joysticks is not translating into anything usable in real life. Limitations of the controller force developers to invent more and more chords. In that Assassin's Creed there are so many control sequences that nobody but the developer himself, on a good day, can voluntarily execute one sword move or another. I could only randomly mash buttons and hope for the best. Any attempt to stop and think - or, even worse, try to execute the combo per instructions - will only get you wounded.
Timer missions are another bane of many games. I'd like to replay Assassin's Creed II, but there are so many timed missions smack-dab in the middle of the story that I fear them. What's the point of chasing a thief across rooftops? IRL there are very few timed missions; maybe if you are a doctor or a CIA agent you need to be able to act quick. But in most cases speed is not as essential as quality. I suspect that game developers just use timers as yet another FAIL criterion, so that you are stuck for hours replaying the same mission again and again and again. In case of that thief (the 1st timed mission of the game) you have to literally study every step of your path, or else you will fail. What is the point of that act, other than to annoy the player? If you want to make it into a decent intro to roof-hopping, get rid of the timer and make the thief wait for you whenever you fall or get delayed. But make the route 100 times as long. It would be actually educational, since the leading thief could show you some tricks.
At the above speed, g-1 = 30020, so you would need to convert 30020 times as much mass as your spacecraft has to energy in order to get to the required speed.
A runner from Marathon would certainly tell you, just before dying, that there is absolutely no way to deliver a message faster than he just did (outside of pigeons, they were in use at that time.)
As far as I know, nobody even suggests battling the light speed barrier head on. The physics is well proven in accelerators. The only hope for FTL is in bypassing the problem altogether.
Drugs and wars over drugs killed more people than all airplane crashes, by all causes, combined.
Of course it is also possible that they think of communication via electromagnetic wave modulation to be as primitive as smoke signals or cave drawings might seem to us.
Communication between star systems using EM radiation is just as pointless as sending carrier pigeons across the Atlantic. When (or if) the message arrives it is hopelessly obsolete. We can't tolerate a 10 year ping time to the nearest star.
The EM communication is useless on this scale. Because of that it does not exist. Perhaps, nothing exists at all if there are other civilizations out there. If there is no FTL travel then these civilizations are hopelessly apart. If there is FTL travel then either a variant of FTL exists for messages, or there are courier drones.
As things are known to us, the likeliest possibility is that there are many civilizations out there, but there is no FTL. Expansion is only possible with generation ships, and communication between colonies is impossible.
But even if we assume for the moment that the homeworld sends broadcasts to their colonies using EM (however delayed that might be,) the antennas will be highly directional. Any civilization that can build an asteroid-sized generation ship can build an antenna of the same size or even larger. You'd have to be directly on the path of the beam, plus or minus 0.01 degree, to receive the message. Also, transmissions will be very energy-consuming, so they will be brief. Also, advanced coding methods (like CDMA) transform the signal into a wideband noise. With millions of time slots, millions of spatial slots, millions of frequencies to choose from, and with millions of chipping codes, our chances of intercepting the transmission are extremely low. SETI is looking for a slow, Morse code equivalent of "Hello, everyone!" but most of modern communications on Earth are super-fast gigabit-per-second groups of packets that carry all kinds of data. If I were to send a broadcast to a colony of my planet I would use such a wideband channel because there is a lot of data to be sent.
The requirements for human life as we know it are pretty strict.
FTFY.
If the cops want to arrest you, they will. If you resist you will only make their job easier. Striking against the part of the system that is designed to take those strikes is not practical.
Bad news, bruddah - only Congress has the power to impeach the President
Exactly. That's why the US Constitution starts with words "We, Congress of the United States, ..."
Well, here's the question though, would these screeners have 'ignored' an explosive for $2,400?
Do these screeners have a portable chemical lab kit right next to the pornoscanner? Are they trained chemists who know what to do with this lab kit to tell the difference between a drug and an explosive?
Of course, once the screeners are paid the courier carries whatever he pleases, and nobody is going to check what it is.
I think a TSA agent is probably more likely to turn a blink eye to cocaine than an actual threat to people's lives.
Cocaine may be more destructive than explosives.
And people say gay sex isn't natural why again?
The same high ranking male can utilize beating with a stick, hitting with a stone, biting, throwing off the tree, chasing away from food... all these things are natural, but it doesn't mean that they are socially progressive or good for you. They are all punishments.
It is amazing really...how often, how companies will grind their W2's (young ones) into the ground, for nothing, willingly lose them, but pay a major premium for a contractor to come in and do the same thing or fix things
Such an approach may make plenty of sense if these are different monies.
For example, you are a poor startup. You hire the youngest, greenest coder you can find. You pay him with one bowl of rice per day (not full, of course.) He puts something together that is garbage, not extensible or maintainable. At best it's a demo.
The demo is successful and your company is acquired. Immediately after that you, if you remain in charge, hire a bunch of expensive graybeards who scrap most of the junk that the green coder constructed and rewrite the whole thing in three weeks, correctly. They charge a lot of money for that, but... it's not your money anymore, and not your expense.
You could have hired graybeards to begin with. However it makes no sense. First, you don't have the money. Second, you aren't sure that the product will be a success.
But do I really need to point out how unlikely it is that the drone is built of commercial grade parts?
If you mean the temperature range (-C and -I) then you can buy both.
If you mean the parts themselves (such as 2N2222 vs. TLA-NPN-2222-LIKE) then pretty much everything everywhere is made from commercially available parts. Even when you need an ASIC you often put an FPGA instead.
On the other hand, I am very much unsure what is easier - to reverse engineer the firmware or to write it all from scratch. FPGA configuration bitstreams can't be translated back into a readable and maintainable VHDL. The reuse value of this work is nearly zero. You only can build more of these drones, with all their bugs and vulnerabilities.
Though most on the folks on /. probably get a serious kick out of getting the chance to crack open their laptop or tablet to put in a superior part.
The screen that your laptop came with is *already* superior, unless you are in the 0.01% of people who use their laptop on a beach.
There certainly are valid applications for such screens. For example, outdoor hardware - for construction, surveying, military. It might be good even in a common car. A typical notebook isn't one of them.
I personally wouldn't be interested in a tablet or an ebook reader that works best under the sunlight. I just don't read in those conditions. I read in the evening, with external lights off.
The real problem is: how do I get my key in a secure manner to the people that want to read my encrypted message, and the other way around?
The PKI system solves this problem. GNUPG/PGP is one such system. S/MIME or SSL/TLS are other examples. When you connect over HTTPS you aren't receiving a secret key with a pigeon, do you?
The primary difference between GNUPG/PGP and other systems is in the way trust is determined. You download a public key (a certificate) of the addressee. However how do you know that this is the right certificate, of the right person? Even if you receive it in email directly from that person it doesn't mean much - it could be sent by a complete stranger. You need a 3rd party to confirm that the certificate is right. PGP does that by having hordes of other people (who you do not know) sign the public key of the person that you are emailing (who you do not know either.) This is vulnerable to a parallel web of trust. S/MIME does that by having a business vouch that he is who he says he is. This is vulnerable to poor business practices and lack of real checking.
I have yet to find any car that can refuel in 5 minutes. A gas stop is 10 minutes to 15 minutes.
That's ridiculous. My gas stops (for about 6 gallons, about 65% of the tank's capacity) take about 2 minutes.
Dramatically increased electricity demand is going to push up the price of electricity.
This is only true in a small part. You need to consider that electric power can be generated locally. Today it is not practical because oil is cheaper than wind or solar. These methods will be competitive once the oil becomes scarce.
Still, it doesn't mean that a common man would be able to drive to mountains just to see how it is up there. Travel will be prohibitively expensive (just as it was before the industrial revolution) unless you are one of them techs, or whoever gets paid well. The current situation with the job market in the USA is not very optimistic. In essence, human labor in most part (except creative/engineering) will be not required at all. Truck drivers will be replaced with robot cars, for example - what are they to do? Can a truck driver learn to program neural networks?
Considering we pump highly flammable gasoline into the same thing I would say yes.
Pumping gasoline is still safer. There are very few parts involved, and their failure is not that likely to result in fire. The parts (such as the hose, the tank, the lid) are not under much stress; they never wear out. The gasoline, as we pour it, is inactive - it is not burning, and it will take some effort to burn it.
However a battery charging circuit will contain hundreds of components, each working close to their theoretical limit. You will have semiconductors, bus bars, flexible kA-rated cables, and lots and lots of Lithium. If anything goes wrong and is not instantly detected by safety circuits the car can literally explode. Some faults (such as fire within Lithium cells) can be indistinguishable from normal charging unless you are monitoring the size and the temperature of each cell.
Except that statistically that argument is true.
I can agree with that. Today the reference range of a Leaf is what, 60-80 miles in fair weather? That is marginal for majority of drivers who don't buy the EV as a 17th car in their garage. Even if you drive 5 miles to work every day and a Leaf would be fine, every other weekend you load the family into the car and drive 100 miles to see relatives. Leaf can't do this, and so it becomes irrelevant. An EV with only double range (120-150 miles) would cover most of reasonable trips that people are likely to do. Once you have that covered then you can say that longer trips require a rental car.
If you're simply driving your vehicle, why should anyone have the ability to log what happens in your vehicle?
A Devil's Advocate will say that nobody wants to log what's happening inside of your vehicle. However the vehicle itself is open to public view, and anyone can measure its speed and acceleration if they want to. Therefore access to the black box does not reveal anything that an external observer would be able to learn. The black box will only provide most accurate measurements.
So the following scenario will play out:
"Citizen, I observed your car moving 10 mph over the speed limit. You can consent to retrieval of the black box data, and if the black box doesn't register a violation I will let you go. Or you can refuse the read of the black box, then I will treat it as an admission of guilt."
Stop everyone, of course, including Amish carts. 100% will have something in the black box to hang them.
If you were ever burned on someone "this persons word vs this persons word" on an accident, this additional data can be useful to find the truth.
You are dealing with the government. Both will be found guilty of something.
Who pays when law enforcement buys and installs the instrumentation?
OK, let me rephrase then. The new law makes sure that every car owner pays a new invisible tax. Works for Obamacare...
P.S. This "Slow down, Cowboy" thing on /. is extremely annoying. What are they trying to do there? I'm not aware of any other blog that has such a silly constraint. Sane blogs *want* people to post, but /. chases them away. Good that I even noticed that the post didn't go through.
Speeding is also dangerous and wastes fuel.
There are plenty of roads that are good for 70 mph but are marked as 55. Modern cars are somewhat better than what was available 40 years ago.
It is also possible to be speeding while driving under the speed limit. A month ago I was crossing a mountain pass. The speed limit there was 55, I think. I was doing 1 mph at times. Why? Because I couldn't see past the hood of my car because of the snowstorm.
With regard to fuel, it's the driver's choice, and is completely unrelated to the speed limit. A surgeon may be in a hurry to get to the hospital because his patient developed internal bleeding; should he slow down and save 10 cents? If a worker is about to be late for his shift, should he save 15 cents on fuel and lose his job?