Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.
They are. Here's the biggest Bitcoin mining operation in North America as of Dec. 2013. (Annoying commercials, then skip ahead to 03:15). Generated $8 million/month at the time. Probably about $800K/month now; the difficulty has gone up 5x since then, and the price has dropped by half. It's in upstate Washington, where power is cheap and cooling is easy.
Bitcoin stopped being a distributed system a long time ago. All the serious miners now have data-center sized installations of custom boards with custom ASICs. Some are liquid-cooled. The original idea was millions of end users running Bitcoin mining as a background job on their CPU. That's totally dead.
It won't help. Too much is already under control of remote vendors. Google/Apple and the carrier can muck with your cell phone. Your telco can muck with your router. Your cable provider can muck with your cable box, and maybe your TV. So can your TV vendor. Your game machine is a slave to its vendor and the game providers. Your TV, computers, and Kinect may be watching you right now. Your remote-based security system definitely is.
You don't control any of this stuff. Even if you run Ubuntu, it's always asking to install new stuff.
Right. The European Union has completely different privacy rules for individuals and businesses. For individuals, there's the European Privacy Directive, which gives Europeans much stronger privacy rights than in the US. For businesses, it's completely different. Online businesses face the European Electronic Commerce Directive, and have to disclose who's behind the business.
That's deliberate EU policy. The whole point of the single European market is to make it easy to buy and sell across national boundaries within the EU. So there are lots of EU rules which benefit consumers and prevent businesses from operating in the country with the weakest regulation.
The.us domain registrar doesn't allow anonymous registration, either. Actually, neither does ICANN. The registrant listed in Whois owns the domain. If that's some "private registration" front, they own the domain. This became a big deal when RegisterFly tanked and people with "private registration" discovered they really didn't own domains they thought were theirs. That took months to straighten out.
The price of scopes goes up rapidly with bandwidth. 20MHz is cheap. 100MHz is more expensive. 1GHz and up is very expensive. Tektronix sells a 33GHz scope starting at $30K. That's the first question you have to ask. For kids doing Arduino-level elecronics, 20MHz is fine. None of the I/O goes faster than that. (If you want to look at Ethernet or digital video signals, you need far more bandwith, more than you can afford. Fortunately, today that stuff mostly works.
(Back in the 1990s, I was trying to build a LIDAR unit for a robot. The parts aren't expensive. The problem is that, when it didn't work right, I needed a high-bandwidth scope I didn't have to find out why.)
Facebook is notorious for making the "opt out" icons invisible until you mouse over them. Opting out in Facebook is like playing one of those old Flash games where you mouse around the screen, trying to find the hot spot that will accept a click. Are they going to do that again?
I have an purchased Android phone, a B15 from Caterpillar, not from a carrier. I bought a T-Mobile SIM card for it. When, at first startup, it asked me to sign up for GMail, I exited that dialog. I don't have a Google account. Turned off Google App Store, Google+, Google Market Feedback Agent, Google Play Music, Google Play Store, Google Play Magazines, Google One Time Init, Google Contacts Sync, Google Bookmarks Sync, Google Account Manager, GMail, Google Chrome, and Picasa Uploader. (Kept the phone preloaded apps: CAT Equipment Rental, CAT Parts, etc. Yes, this thing really is from Caterpillar Tractor. Waterproof, shockproof, dustproof, of course.) Works fine. Phone network data consumption is low, about 250MB/month.
There are a few glitches running in this mode. Google Maps will crash if you access Settings, which is a clear bug.. But that's about it. Google Now works, but doesn't know my location. Nothing ever gets updated, since the carrier knows nothing about the phone. Apps have to be side-loaded. I may load up the Amazon app store to see what that's like.
I was thinking of loading Cyanogenmod, but don't see the need now.
If you just have to play Angry Birds, run the Flash version.
The 1960 Curtiss Wright Air Car did this. It's a hovercraft, built to look like a car with bumpers, chrome, two-tone color scheme, and convertible top. Top speed around 38 MPH. 2.5MPG.
Race car design goes in the opposite direction, trying to get as little lift as possible. Some Formula One cars were built with big fans sucking out air from below the vehicle to increase tire contact forces. Worked too well; prohibited by a Formula One rule change.
Just read the statistics for the sheriffs department involved. 133 "crimes against persons" so far this year. But that includes a lot of bad checks, which they list as a crime against a person. It also includes telephone harassment, and "criminal threats". Some assaults, some rapes. No murders. About 63 drug offenses, mostly from traffic stops. Nothing for which an armored vehicle would be useful. It looks like a cop shop that has some real business maybe a few times a day.
They don't need an MRAP. They need a collection agency for the bad checks and a social worker for the domestic disturbances.
There's a commercial telemarketing system AI which makes cold calls and holds conversations. It's only slightly lamer than human telemarketers working from scripts.
I posted about the IPMI threat on Slashdot years ago, after reading the IPMI docs. Now, it's not only a real threat, it's one that's probably being widely exploited.
Even if IPMI packets aren't being accepted from the outside Internet, an IPMI vulnerability means that any break-in to any server allows an easy attack on all servers inside the firewall.
Anyway, for now, if you have a server, do
ipmitool -A NONE -H 1.2.3.4 bmc guid
(replacing 1.2.3.4 with the IP address) and see if it answers. If it responds to that from the outside world, you have a big problem.
That's a good idea. China needs an economic incentive to clean up their air pollution problem. They can certainly do it. It took less than 20 years after the US Clean Air Act to get air pollution under control.
The last line of the story is "He had finished now and had to prepare for the operation. He placed his strong hands into the heating oven and let them reach the dull red-hot glow that would sterilize them completely. For all his impassioned words, his voice had never risen, and on his burnished metal face there was (as always) no sign of expression."
Asimov once wrote a great short story about this. A surgeon is talking someone about whether humans should be augmented or repaired with mechanical parts. The surgeon argues that the biological integrity of humans should be maintained, rather than creating mixtures of man and machine.
At the end of the story, the surgeon is revealed to be a robot.
This is somebody asking for money for a TV commercial for an "integrated space plan"?
We're almost done with space. Seen the moon; it's boring. Seen Mars, it's boring. Seen Phobos and Deimos; they're just rocks. No off-earth life; might find bacteria someday. Venus and inward are too hot; outward of Mars is too cold. Satellites work fine, both at GEO and LEO. Sending people to LEO is expensive fun; might catch on if gets cheaper.
Do web design, and want to do something useful? Contact the company, in Saskatchewan, and offer to redesign their 2009 web site with bad layout, non-streaming video, and a lack of testimonials.
A more ambitious plan would be to use computer vision and robotic control on this thing. It needs an aimbot. Something where the operator aims the boom at the pothole, a Kinect-type sensor maps the pothole, and the computers handle the job of cleaning out the edges of the hole, dumping the right amount of asphalt in the right places, and tamping it down. Then you'd get a consistently good job even with a mediocre operator.
The "lettuce bot" is an agricultural implement towed behind a tractor, not a robot. It's apparently a vision system that triggers fertilizer sprays. It's probably using the vision libraries that come with ROS, which are mostly improved versions of Intel's old OpenCV library.
Vision-guided weeding is useful, but not new. Here's a computer vision controlled plasma weeding system. As the tractor pulls this implement along, the control system recognizes plants vs weeds, and zaps the weeds with a plasma jet, missing the plants. It's a sentry gun for weeding.
There are more computer vision systems used in food processing than most people realize. Vegetable sorting is highly automated. The flawless tomatoes go to retail stores, and the flawed ones go to the tomato sauce plant. Vision-based sorting is so fast and cheap it can be applied to peas. This isn't exotic technology - it's production.
Too many of these supposed "high tech hardware startups" are producing the kind of crap that came from China two decades ago and Japan four decades ago. Bicycle lights. iPhone cases. Even the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino are just PC boards stuck under systems on a chip made in China. This is not high tech.
There were some guys at TechShop last year making a plastic gizmo for attaching an iWhatever to a an auto dashboard. They had a big "Made in Silicon Valley" poster. I felt they were embarassing Silicon Valley.
Warren Buffett once suggested a 100% capital gains tax on assets held less than a year. One of the big problems we have with current markets is that short-term gains are way undertaxed. Funds are allowed to trade without paying taxes; taxes are assessed only when money comes out of the fund.
Slashdot Mirror
Coming soon, the rapist app that finds hot women near you who are alone at home right now. The data is available.
Schools are probably teaching it because their staff knows how and they have the equipment. Not because it's a useful, saleable, or even particularly interesting skill.
'serious' miners are actually doing this.
They are. Here's the biggest Bitcoin mining operation in North America as of Dec. 2013. (Annoying commercials, then skip ahead to 03:15). Generated $8 million/month at the time. Probably about $800K/month now; the difficulty has gone up 5x since then, and the price has dropped by half. It's in upstate Washington, where power is cheap and cooling is easy.
Bitcoin stopped being a distributed system a long time ago. All the serious miners now have data-center sized installations of custom boards with custom ASICs. Some are liquid-cooled. The original idea was millions of end users running Bitcoin mining as a background job on their CPU. That's totally dead.
It won't help. Too much is already under control of remote vendors. Google/Apple and the carrier can muck with your cell phone. Your telco can muck with your router. Your cable provider can muck with your cable box, and maybe your TV. So can your TV vendor. Your game machine is a slave to its vendor and the game providers. Your TV, computers, and Kinect may be watching you right now. Your remote-based security system definitely is.
You don't control any of this stuff. Even if you run Ubuntu, it's always asking to install new stuff.
This will probably be a feature in new TV sets. Of course, all this data will be transmitted to advertisers.
(On the other hand, it would be great for gyms and for workout programs.)
Right. The European Union has completely different privacy rules for individuals and businesses. For individuals, there's the European Privacy Directive, which gives Europeans much stronger privacy rights than in the US. For businesses, it's completely different. Online businesses face the European Electronic Commerce Directive, and have to disclose who's behind the business.
That's deliberate EU policy. The whole point of the single European market is to make it easy to buy and sell across national boundaries within the EU. So there are lots of EU rules which benefit consumers and prevent businesses from operating in the country with the weakest regulation.
The .us domain registrar doesn't allow anonymous registration, either. Actually, neither does ICANN. The registrant listed in Whois owns the domain. If that's some "private registration" front, they own the domain. This became a big deal when RegisterFly tanked and people with "private registration" discovered they really didn't own domains they thought were theirs. That took months to straighten out.
The price of scopes goes up rapidly with bandwidth. 20MHz is cheap. 100MHz is more expensive. 1GHz and up is very expensive. Tektronix sells a 33GHz scope starting at $30K. That's the first question you have to ask. For kids doing Arduino-level elecronics, 20MHz is fine. None of the I/O goes faster than that. (If you want to look at Ethernet or digital video signals, you need far more bandwith, more than you can afford. Fortunately, today that stuff mostly works.
(Back in the 1990s, I was trying to build a LIDAR unit for a robot. The parts aren't expensive. The problem is that, when it didn't work right, I needed a high-bandwidth scope I didn't have to find out why.)
Facebook is notorious for making the "opt out" icons invisible until you mouse over them. Opting out in Facebook is like playing one of those old Flash games where you mouse around the screen, trying to find the hot spot that will accept a click. Are they going to do that again?
I have an purchased Android phone, a B15 from Caterpillar, not from a carrier. I bought a T-Mobile SIM card for it. When, at first startup, it asked me to sign up for GMail, I exited that dialog. I don't have a Google account. Turned off Google App Store, Google+, Google Market Feedback Agent, Google Play Music, Google Play Store, Google Play Magazines, Google One Time Init, Google Contacts Sync, Google Bookmarks Sync, Google Account Manager, GMail, Google Chrome, and Picasa Uploader. (Kept the phone preloaded apps: CAT Equipment Rental, CAT Parts, etc. Yes, this thing really is from Caterpillar Tractor. Waterproof, shockproof, dustproof, of course.) Works fine. Phone network data consumption is low, about 250MB/month.
There are a few glitches running in this mode. Google Maps will crash if you access Settings, which is a clear bug.. But that's about it. Google Now works, but doesn't know my location. Nothing ever gets updated, since the carrier knows nothing about the phone. Apps have to be side-loaded. I may load up the Amazon app store to see what that's like.
I was thinking of loading Cyanogenmod, but don't see the need now.
If you just have to play Angry Birds, run the Flash version.
The 1960 Curtiss Wright Air Car did this. It's a hovercraft, built to look like a car with bumpers, chrome, two-tone color scheme, and convertible top. Top speed around 38 MPH. 2.5MPG.
Race car design goes in the opposite direction, trying to get as little lift as possible. Some Formula One cars were built with big fans sucking out air from below the vehicle to increase tire contact forces. Worked too well; prohibited by a Formula One rule change.
Just read the statistics for the sheriffs department involved. 133 "crimes against persons" so far this year. But that includes a lot of bad checks, which they list as a crime against a person. It also includes telephone harassment, and "criminal threats". Some assaults, some rapes. No murders. About 63 drug offenses, mostly from traffic stops. Nothing for which an armored vehicle would be useful. It looks like a cop shop that has some real business maybe a few times a day.
They don't need an MRAP. They need a collection agency for the bad checks and a social worker for the domestic disturbances.
"Unable to establish LAN session" is good. If you can establish an IPMI connection, per Dan Farmer's paper, an attack is likely to succeed.
There's a commercial telemarketing system AI which makes cold calls and holds conversations. It's only slightly lamer than human telemarketers working from scripts.
I posted about the IPMI threat on Slashdot years ago, after reading the IPMI docs. Now, it's not only a real threat, it's one that's probably being widely exploited.
Even if IPMI packets aren't being accepted from the outside Internet, an IPMI vulnerability means that any break-in to any server allows an easy attack on all servers inside the firewall.
Anyway, for now, if you have a server, do
ipmitool -A NONE -H 1.2.3.4 bmc guid
(replacing 1.2.3.4 with the IP address) and see if it answers. If it responds to that from the outside world, you have a big problem.
That's a good idea. China needs an economic incentive to clean up their air pollution problem. They can certainly do it. It took less than 20 years after the US Clean Air Act to get air pollution under control.
The last line of the story is "He had finished now and had to prepare for the operation. He placed his strong hands into the heating oven and let them reach the dull red-hot glow that would sterilize them completely. For all his impassioned words, his voice had never risen, and on his burnished metal face there was (as always) no sign of expression."
The surgeon was secretly a robot bigot who wanted to preserve the mechanical purity of robot-kind? That's a spicy social commentary!
Not secretly. The robot is roughly human-form, but clearly metal. The story is "Segregationist", published in 1967.
Asimov once wrote a great short story about this. A surgeon is talking someone about whether humans should be augmented or repaired with mechanical parts. The surgeon argues that the biological integrity of humans should be maintained, rather than creating mixtures of man and machine.
At the end of the story, the surgeon is revealed to be a robot.
This is somebody asking for money for a TV commercial for an "integrated space plan"?
We're almost done with space. Seen the moon; it's boring. Seen Mars, it's boring. Seen Phobos and Deimos; they're just rocks. No off-earth life; might find bacteria someday. Venus and inward are too hot; outward of Mars is too cold. Satellites work fine, both at GEO and LEO. Sending people to LEO is expensive fun; might catch on if gets cheaper.
Mission accomplished!
The can do the job. One-person operation. No need to leave the cab to patch a pothole. A patching job takes only a few minutes. Good quality patches. Requires a skilled operator who's good with a complex joystick, controlling air jets, asphalt conveyors, and rollers.
Do web design, and want to do something useful? Contact the company, in Saskatchewan, and offer to redesign their 2009 web site with bad layout, non-streaming video, and a lack of testimonials.
A more ambitious plan would be to use computer vision and robotic control on this thing. It needs an aimbot. Something where the operator aims the boom at the pothole, a Kinect-type sensor maps the pothole, and the computers handle the job of cleaning out the edges of the hole, dumping the right amount of asphalt in the right places, and tamping it down. Then you'd get a consistently good job even with a mediocre operator.
I have this horrible vision of a system where, as you advance from level to level, the touch-screen buttons keep getting smaller.
The "lettuce bot" is an agricultural implement towed behind a tractor, not a robot. It's apparently a vision system that triggers fertilizer sprays. It's probably using the vision libraries that come with ROS, which are mostly improved versions of Intel's old OpenCV library.
Vision-guided weeding is useful, but not new. Here's a computer vision controlled plasma weeding system. As the tractor pulls this implement along, the control system recognizes plants vs weeds, and zaps the weeds with a plasma jet, missing the plants. It's a sentry gun for weeding.
There are more computer vision systems used in food processing than most people realize. Vegetable sorting is highly automated. The flawless tomatoes go to retail stores, and the flawed ones go to the tomato sauce plant. Vision-based sorting is so fast and cheap it can be applied to peas. This isn't exotic technology - it's production.
Too many of these supposed "high tech hardware startups" are producing the kind of crap that came from China two decades ago and Japan four decades ago. Bicycle lights. iPhone cases. Even the Raspberry Pi and the Arduino are just PC boards stuck under systems on a chip made in China. This is not high tech.
There were some guys at TechShop last year making a plastic gizmo for attaching an iWhatever to a an auto dashboard. They had a big "Made in Silicon Valley" poster. I felt they were embarassing Silicon Valley.
We need to do better than this.
Warren Buffett once suggested a 100% capital gains tax on assets held less than a year. One of the big problems we have with current markets is that short-term gains are way undertaxed. Funds are allowed to trade without paying taxes; taxes are assessed only when money comes out of the fund.