Except that your 'slightly bigger copter' is 'not even fractionally as capable'
It exists. That's what an autonomous helicopter with onboard sensors can do as of a year or two ago.
Environment sensing is coming along. Check out Advanced Scientific Concepts' flash LIDAR. (Still too expensive, but it's a tenth the size of what it was five years ago. I saw the optical bench prototype in 2003, when it was the size of a desk.)
Simultaneous Localization and Mapping finally works.
All that fixed motion tracking gear is a debug environment.
Actually, Apple used NeXT because they had to buy the worthless company for $400 million, bailing out Jobs' personal net worth, to get Jobs back.
Apple's in-house OS, MacOS 8, made it to first developer release before Jobs killed it. This is not what Apple eventually released as "MacOS 8"; that was a warmed-over System 7. The real MacOS 8 was a completely new kernel, with protected memory and a CPU dispatcher, both of which the original MacOS lacked. (Deep down, the original MacOS was like DOS - no memory management, no CPU dispatching, no I/O concurrency, and way too many low-level hacks into the OS at the app level. It had to fit in 64K, remember.) The claim was that using the Next OS would allow getting to market within a year. In fact, it took over three years before the desktop MacOS X shipped.
A real bottleneck was developing a "penalty box" in which old apps could run. The original "MacOS 8" didn't have that. Apple used to assume that they had enough control over their application developers to make them convert their apps to a new OS.
But by 1997, the big application developers, especially Microsoft, weren't willing to jump through hoops for Apple. The PowerPC transition had driven away many developers; most of the engineering apps were never ported, because the PowerPC had a shorter FPU length than the M68000 or Intel x86 lines, there were major data compatibility problems. Jobs' real job at the time was to cut a deal with Microsoft to keep Office on the Mac.
There's already an effect by which Google Trends and Google Suggest to drive traffic to a popular search phrase. This may make it worse.
Google Suggest "suggestions" are based, not on Google search results, but on Google Trends, the most popular searches in the last hour or so. Thus, if a phrase with likely first few letters gets near the top of Google Trends momentarily, it appears in the search boxes of large numbers of users, many of whom just pick top phrase. That's how long, unlikely phrases make it to the top of Google Trends.
I had a program tracking Google Trends for a while. The Trends system is clearly being spammed, as a form of "search engine optimization". Occasionally, an unlikely phrase which clearly aims the user at a specific site will surface. The life cycle of such a spam is about 45 minutes.
Adding command completion to Google's search box should accelerate this effect.
Very nice. For research purposes, they're using a cheap copter and expensive fixed motion tracking gear. That saves money during debugging crashes. It doesn't have to be that way. With a slightly bigger copter they could carry around 3 axes of fibre-optic gyro, good accelerometers, and a good dynamic GPS. Expect to see that soon, with DoD funding.
Robots are going to have faster reflexes than humans. Humans are stuck at 200ms or so, while computers get faster.
Speed Limit if High Speed Data Allowance Exceeded (kbps): 28.8
Monthly Access Fee (from 15 April 2009): $49.95
'yes' DSL Unlimited
High Speed Data Allowance: 12 GB
Speed Limit if High Speed Data Allowance Exceeded (kbps): 64
Monthly Access Fee (from 15 April 2009) $91.95
Yes, they really call it "unlimited", in the same table with the limits.
That table isn't easy to find. You have to go through three web pages, then download several Word documents
That's their DSL service. Their cable service has similar tiers and terms, but slightly different pricing.
The big secrets are out. Everybody understands generally how an atomic bomb works. There remain smaller secrets, along the lines of construction tips. Machining plutonium is very difficult; in addition to being radioactive and poisonous, it has weird physical properties - it expands when heated, but doesn't contract fully when cooled, because the crystalline structure changes. The detailed techniques for doing that and compensating for the changes aren't public knowledge. Exactly how plutonium behaves when compressed by a shock wave is still being studied.
The tricks by which atomic bombs are made smaller and more efficient are not well known. There are neutron reflectors, tampers, and such. The data from the experimental work to develop those items is still classified.
Developing that data independently requires a sizable research operation. All the big nuclear powers had to build big R&D operations to struggle with those problems. (Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea probably used leaked data from one of the big powers.)
The interesting question with this guy is whether this guy fed the FBI real classified data, or just faked up some plausible design numbers.
This has nothing to do with "default passwords". It's worse than that. The Windows-level part of the attack was signed code signed with a Microsoft-issued key. The signing keys involved has been revoked. US-CERT isn't saying who had them.
At the controller level, Siemens has issued a bulletin:Previously analyzed properties and the behavior of the virus in the software environment of the test system suggest that we are not dealing with the random development of one hacker, but with the product of a team of experts who must have IT expertise as well as specific know-how about industrial controls, their deployment in industrial production processes and corresponding engineering knowledge.... The behavioral pattern of Stuxnet suggests that the virus is apparently only activated in plants with a specific configuration. It deliberately searches for a certain technical constellation with certain modules and certain program patterns which apply to a specific production process. This pattern can, for example, be localized by one specific data block and two code blocks.
This means that Stuxnet is obviously targeting a specific process or a plant and not a particular brand or process technology and not the majority of industrial applications.
So this is an attack on a specific industrial plant. But whose? Neither Seimens nor US-CERT is saying.
This is cyber-warfare. Someone is trying to sabotage a specific plant somewhere.
This cost problem stalled robotics for years. Only in the last decade have research platform prices come down to even vaguely sane levels. Now, most universities with robotics programs have reasonable numbers of standard platforms running around, instead of just one or two hand-made units.
This thing needs to come down to $50K or so. The Aldebaran Nao, which is a decent research humanoid robot, tops out at EUR 12,000. The best Japanese hobbyist machines are in the $1K to $2K range. The only sensor that's still way overpriced is LIDAR, and there's no fundamental reason for that.
This isn't about Blu-Ray. That's already copyable. It's about cable, satellite, and Internet pay TV. What this really does is allow building a DVR that will record anything you can get out on an HDCP port.
It's also an issue in that manufacturers who are not paying fees under the HDCP contract could now make HDCP devices. Displays, for example. We're going to see a big boom in cut-rate grey market displays.
Shape-memory alloys have been around for decades, but there are almost no applications for them. Yes, they change shape when heated, and return to the original shape when cooled. So do bimetallic strips, used in thermostats since
1880 or so. There are some toy engines based on this.
Some flapping-wing devices have been built in toy size, but they're not strong enough to take off. There was some NASA enthusiasm for using this effect to control minor airfoils on aircraft, but that never went very far.
As actuators, SMAs are inefficient. You can run a current through an SMA wire, and after a while, it changes shape.
That's because of resistive heating raising the temperature of the metal. Most of the electrical energy goes into waste heat, so this is far less efficient than an ordinary motor or solenoid. Then you have to wait for it to cool down, so cycle times are slow. Some small valves have been built; with SMA wire in liquid, the cool-down times are fast enough to be useful.
Anyone else immediately flash to Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica?
Of course. But Principia Mathematic isn't about physics; it's a development of mathematics from minimal axioms, step by step.
The modern version of that is A Computational Logic, by Boyer and Moore. This is a theorem prover which starts from a minimal set of axioms and, when fed the right theorems to prove in the right order, builds up number theory and set theory from a cold start, using only constructive mathematics.
Neither the Slashdot article nor the linked article makes it clear what's so asymmetrical about the game. Most
video game controllers are on the symmetrical side.
Interestingly, the Airbus family of aircraft, which fly with sidesticks, put the right-seat sidestick in a right-handed position, and the left-seat sidestick on the left. The single set of throttles is in the middle. The comment from most pilots is that this is a non-issue. It's considered more annoying that the displays are reversed between the two seats.
This is a spam. The same review text appears on Amazon.com, EzineArticles, Anobii, etc. On the other hand, none of the Google search results (there are only 68) that mention the book come from any source even vaguely qualified in physics.
Clearly fringe, may be nutty.
First, a "privacy system" with "central servers"? What's wrong with this picture?
Second, if you need to hide traffic, you need a big bidirectional flow to an "approved" site to hide it in. Who has that role? Iran blocks Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Google, plus 5 million other sites, so finding some place outside Iran to hide the traffic will be tough.
Why should I pay money for a device which uses my power and my DSL connection to relay my calls, and then let the cellular carrier charge me for the "airtime"? Especially since there are WiFi alternatives?
We also don't read EULAs. So we don't read account agreements in general. Bank account agreements included. So it's unlikely we'll read the Paypal account agreement and see where it isn't in agreement with any bank account agreement we've ever not read. So our surprise upon finding out they're not a bank and don't have the same regulations as a bank is genuine, if self-inflicted.
The way to do a merchant account, if you're serious, is to go in person to a big bank, where you have other accounts, and open a business checking account or two. They'll want to see various documents. Do all that.
You may have to put down a deposit if you're a new merchant, but that's negotiable.
Then, when you start accepting payments on line, find a credit card processor who will connect directly to your bank. The legit processors, like "authorize.net", will do this.
When you do it this way, the money goes directly from the customer to your bank account. There may still be chargebacks, and the bank may place holds on your withdrawals. But the money is in your account, and subject to published banking regulations. Chase is considered the big dog of banks for merchant accounts.
Avoid PayPal, "Value-Added Resellers", and other non-bank middlemen.
If you have to use a "merchant service provider", pick one that's owned by a bank, and deal with them directly, not through some reseller.
Of course, you have to be a legitimate business to do this. Your business licenses and D/B/A names should be current, and having a Dun and Bradstreet rating helps. You have to have a good credit rating personally. And if you have too many chargebacks, the bank will dump you, so you have to keep your customers happy. Otherwise, you get kicked down to the sub-prime merchant account market, which is not a happy place. You'll pay more periodic fees, but lower per-transaction fees.
Incidentally, don't keep more than $100,000 in any one US bank. Banks go bust all the time. 10 more banks went bust last month.
I have only Sumatra PDF on my machine. Sumatra PDF is too dumb to offer much attack surface - no Javascript, no WebBuy, no phoning home, no updater, no embedding in browsers.
When I bought my most recent computer, I put on the sales order "No preloaded crapware", and the supplier (which is in Silicon Valley, they have a clue) complied. No Adobe Reader.
No one is saying that device drives will magically start working flawlessly because their source code is open, although it will make it easier to track down bugs (see Linus Torvalds' quote about the number of eyeballs).
Microsoft has something better than "eyeballs": the Static Driver Verifier. This has been under development for a few years, and now, Windows 7 drivers don't get signed unless they pass static verification.
This is real proof of correctness, in actual production use. It doesn't guarantee that the driver will run the device properly, but it does guarantee that the driver won't crash the OS.
I'm annoyed with Rackspace sucking up to religious zealots. I don't care what religion they're from. It's worth pulling the chain of each religion once in a while. It makes people think about whether religions should be taken seriously.
I'm old enough that there weren't any lunch choices when I was in school. You got whatever the day's meal was. The military was like that back then, too. Federal prisons still work that way; the menu repeats every 35 days.
Slashdot Mirror
Except that your 'slightly bigger copter' is 'not even fractionally as capable'
It exists. That's what an autonomous helicopter with onboard sensors can do as of a year or two ago.
Environment sensing is coming along. Check out Advanced Scientific Concepts' flash LIDAR. (Still too expensive, but it's a tenth the size of what it was five years ago. I saw the optical bench prototype in 2003, when it was the size of a desk.) Simultaneous Localization and Mapping finally works.
All that fixed motion tracking gear is a debug environment.
Actually, Apple used NeXT because they had to buy the worthless company for $400 million, bailing out Jobs' personal net worth, to get Jobs back.
Apple's in-house OS, MacOS 8, made it to first developer release before Jobs killed it. This is not what Apple eventually released as "MacOS 8"; that was a warmed-over System 7. The real MacOS 8 was a completely new kernel, with protected memory and a CPU dispatcher, both of which the original MacOS lacked. (Deep down, the original MacOS was like DOS - no memory management, no CPU dispatching, no I/O concurrency, and way too many low-level hacks into the OS at the app level. It had to fit in 64K, remember.) The claim was that using the Next OS would allow getting to market within a year. In fact, it took over three years before the desktop MacOS X shipped.
A real bottleneck was developing a "penalty box" in which old apps could run. The original "MacOS 8" didn't have that. Apple used to assume that they had enough control over their application developers to make them convert their apps to a new OS. But by 1997, the big application developers, especially Microsoft, weren't willing to jump through hoops for Apple. The PowerPC transition had driven away many developers; most of the engineering apps were never ported, because the PowerPC had a shorter FPU length than the M68000 or Intel x86 lines, there were major data compatibility problems. Jobs' real job at the time was to cut a deal with Microsoft to keep Office on the Mac.
There's already an effect by which Google Trends and Google Suggest to drive traffic to a popular search phrase. This may make it worse.
Google Suggest "suggestions" are based, not on Google search results, but on Google Trends, the most popular searches in the last hour or so. Thus, if a phrase with likely first few letters gets near the top of Google Trends momentarily, it appears in the search boxes of large numbers of users, many of whom just pick top phrase. That's how long, unlikely phrases make it to the top of Google Trends.
I had a program tracking Google Trends for a while. The Trends system is clearly being spammed, as a form of "search engine optimization". Occasionally, an unlikely phrase which clearly aims the user at a specific site will surface. The life cycle of such a spam is about 45 minutes.
Adding command completion to Google's search box should accelerate this effect.
Snazzyspace only tried three times to put a cookie on my machine. Slashdot tried 33 times up to the point I posted this message.
Very nice. For research purposes, they're using a cheap copter and expensive fixed motion tracking gear. That saves money during debugging crashes. It doesn't have to be that way. With a slightly bigger copter they could carry around 3 axes of fibre-optic gyro, good accelerometers, and a good dynamic GPS. Expect to see that soon, with DoD funding.
Robots are going to have faster reflexes than humans. Humans are stuck at 200ms or so, while computers get faster.
If you don't subscribe to Optus's "premium" tiers, your service can be throttled to 28.8 Kb/s. From the Optus price list:
'yes' DSL Basic 200MB
'yes' DSL Unlimited
Yes, they really call it "unlimited", in the same table with the limits. That table isn't easy to find. You have to go through three web pages, then download several Word documents
That's their DSL service. Their cable service has similar tiers and terms, but slightly different pricing.
The helicopter crew is out of hospital. All four of them.
The big secrets are out. Everybody understands generally how an atomic bomb works. There remain smaller secrets, along the lines of construction tips. Machining plutonium is very difficult; in addition to being radioactive and poisonous, it has weird physical properties - it expands when heated, but doesn't contract fully when cooled, because the crystalline structure changes. The detailed techniques for doing that and compensating for the changes aren't public knowledge. Exactly how plutonium behaves when compressed by a shock wave is still being studied. The tricks by which atomic bombs are made smaller and more efficient are not well known. There are neutron reflectors, tampers, and such. The data from the experimental work to develop those items is still classified.
Developing that data independently requires a sizable research operation. All the big nuclear powers had to build big R&D operations to struggle with those problems. (Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea probably used leaked data from one of the big powers.)
The interesting question with this guy is whether this guy fed the FBI real classified data, or just faked up some plausible design numbers.
This has nothing to do with "default passwords". It's worse than that. The Windows-level part of the attack was signed code signed with a Microsoft-issued key. The signing keys involved has been revoked. US-CERT isn't saying who had them.
At the controller level, Siemens has issued a bulletin: Previously analyzed properties and the behavior of the virus in the software environment of the test system suggest that we are not dealing with the random development of one hacker, but with the product of a team of experts who must have IT expertise as well as specific know-how about industrial controls, their deployment in industrial production processes and corresponding engineering knowledge. ... The behavioral pattern of Stuxnet suggests that the virus is apparently only activated in plants with a specific configuration. It deliberately searches for a certain technical constellation with certain modules and certain program patterns which apply to a specific production process. This pattern can, for example, be localized by one specific data block and two code blocks.
This means that Stuxnet is obviously targeting a specific process or a plant and not a particular brand or process technology and not the majority of industrial applications.
So this is an attack on a specific industrial plant. But whose? Neither Seimens nor US-CERT is saying.
This is cyber-warfare. Someone is trying to sabotage a specific plant somewhere.
Wait until Google gets these. Google Maps could be updated in real time.
Somebody has a manufacturing cost problem.
This cost problem stalled robotics for years. Only in the last decade have research platform prices come down to even vaguely sane levels. Now, most universities with robotics programs have reasonable numbers of standard platforms running around, instead of just one or two hand-made units.
This thing needs to come down to $50K or so. The Aldebaran Nao, which is a decent research humanoid robot, tops out at EUR 12,000. The best Japanese hobbyist machines are in the $1K to $2K range. The only sensor that's still way overpriced is LIDAR, and there's no fundamental reason for that.
This isn't about Blu-Ray. That's already copyable. It's about cable, satellite, and Internet pay TV. What this really does is allow building a DVR that will record anything you can get out on an HDCP port.
It's also an issue in that manufacturers who are not paying fees under the HDCP contract could now make HDCP devices. Displays, for example. We're going to see a big boom in cut-rate grey market displays.
Shape-memory alloys have been around for decades, but there are almost no applications for them. Yes, they change shape when heated, and return to the original shape when cooled. So do bimetallic strips, used in thermostats since 1880 or so. There are some toy engines based on this. Some flapping-wing devices have been built in toy size, but they're not strong enough to take off. There was some NASA enthusiasm for using this effect to control minor airfoils on aircraft, but that never went very far.
As actuators, SMAs are inefficient. You can run a current through an SMA wire, and after a while, it changes shape. That's because of resistive heating raising the temperature of the metal. Most of the electrical energy goes into waste heat, so this is far less efficient than an ordinary motor or solenoid. Then you have to wait for it to cool down, so cycle times are slow. Some small valves have been built; with SMA wire in liquid, the cool-down times are fast enough to be useful.
Anyone else immediately flash to Whitehead and Russell's Principia Mathematica?
Of course. But Principia Mathematic isn't about physics; it's a development of mathematics from minimal axioms, step by step.
The modern version of that is A Computational Logic, by Boyer and Moore. This is a theorem prover which starts from a minimal set of axioms and, when fed the right theorems to prove in the right order, builds up number theory and set theory from a cold start, using only constructive mathematics.
Neither the Slashdot article nor the linked article makes it clear what's so asymmetrical about the game. Most video game controllers are on the symmetrical side.
Interestingly, the Airbus family of aircraft, which fly with sidesticks, put the right-seat sidestick in a right-handed position, and the left-seat sidestick on the left. The single set of throttles is in the middle. The comment from most pilots is that this is a non-issue. It's considered more annoying that the displays are reversed between the two seats.
This is a spam. The same review text appears on Amazon.com, EzineArticles, Anobii, etc. On the other hand, none of the Google search results (there are only 68) that mention the book come from any source even vaguely qualified in physics. Clearly fringe, may be nutty.
First, a "privacy system" with "central servers"? What's wrong with this picture?
Second, if you need to hide traffic, you need a big bidirectional flow to an "approved" site to hide it in. Who has that role? Iran blocks Myspace, Facebook, Twitter, and Google, plus 5 million other sites, so finding some place outside Iran to hide the traffic will be tough.
Why should I pay money for a device which uses my power and my DSL connection to relay my calls, and then let the cellular carrier charge me for the "airtime"? Especially since there are WiFi alternatives?
We also don't read EULAs. So we don't read account agreements in general. Bank account agreements included. So it's unlikely we'll read the Paypal account agreement and see where it isn't in agreement with any bank account agreement we've ever not read. So our surprise upon finding out they're not a bank and don't have the same regulations as a bank is genuine, if self-inflicted.
You mean you don't Google for "Paypal sucks" before considering dealing with them?
The way to do a merchant account, if you're serious, is to go in person to a big bank, where you have other accounts, and open a business checking account or two. They'll want to see various documents. Do all that. You may have to put down a deposit if you're a new merchant, but that's negotiable. Then, when you start accepting payments on line, find a credit card processor who will connect directly to your bank. The legit processors, like "authorize.net", will do this.
When you do it this way, the money goes directly from the customer to your bank account. There may still be chargebacks, and the bank may place holds on your withdrawals. But the money is in your account, and subject to published banking regulations. Chase is considered the big dog of banks for merchant accounts.
Avoid PayPal, "Value-Added Resellers", and other non-bank middlemen. If you have to use a "merchant service provider", pick one that's owned by a bank, and deal with them directly, not through some reseller.
Of course, you have to be a legitimate business to do this. Your business licenses and D/B/A names should be current, and having a Dun and Bradstreet rating helps. You have to have a good credit rating personally. And if you have too many chargebacks, the bank will dump you, so you have to keep your customers happy. Otherwise, you get kicked down to the sub-prime merchant account market, which is not a happy place. You'll pay more periodic fees, but lower per-transaction fees.
Incidentally, don't keep more than $100,000 in any one US bank. Banks go bust all the time. 10 more banks went bust last month.
The project has a 10-member "ethics board".
I have only Sumatra PDF on my machine. Sumatra PDF is too dumb to offer much attack surface - no Javascript, no WebBuy, no phoning home, no updater, no embedding in browsers.
When I bought my most recent computer, I put on the sales order "No preloaded crapware", and the supplier (which is in Silicon Valley, they have a clue) complied. No Adobe Reader.
No one is saying that device drives will magically start working flawlessly because their source code is open, although it will make it easier to track down bugs (see Linus Torvalds' quote about the number of eyeballs).
Microsoft has something better than "eyeballs": the Static Driver Verifier. This has been under development for a few years, and now, Windows 7 drivers don't get signed unless they pass static verification.
This is real proof of correctness, in actual production use. It doesn't guarantee that the driver will run the device properly, but it does guarantee that the driver won't crash the OS.
I'm annoyed with Rackspace sucking up to religious zealots. I don't care what religion they're from. It's worth pulling the chain of each religion once in a while. It makes people think about whether religions should be taken seriously.
I'm old enough that there weren't any lunch choices when I was in school. You got whatever the day's meal was. The military was like that back then, too. Federal prisons still work that way; the menu repeats every 35 days.