Unfortunately, I think you're asking someone to prove a logical negative: the applicant has to prove that something isn't obvious by showing... what, exactly?
I hold six patents, and a few times I've had to prove obviousness to an examiner. The gold standard of obviousness is showing that others tried hard to solve the problem and failed. Sometimes, on problems where others have beaten their heads against the wall and there are failed products and projects in the field, you can point the examiner at prior art which shows obviousness. I was the first person to build a ragdoll physics system which could handle the hard cases. Back in the 1990s, early ragdoll systems tended to have characters flying off in random directions, sometimes with the body parts detaching. (Some physics engines still do that, which is lame, because, fifteen years later, several solutions besides mine are known now.) By pointing to previous failures that extended up to and past my patent application date, I was able to demonstrate non-obviousness.
So what? Much of supercomputing is a tax-supported boondoggle. There are few supercomputers in the private sector. Many things that used to require supercomputers, from rocket flight planning to mould design, can now be done on desktops. Most US nuclear weapons were designed on machines with less than 1 MIPS.
Supercomputers have higher cost/MIPS than larger desktop machines. If you need a cluster, Amazon and others will rent you time on theirs. If you're sharing a supercomputer, and not using hours or days of time on single problems, you don't need one.
The "opt in" was more like "we're making you an offer you can't refuse." It was pushed as an update to an existing add-on. The page with the terms was deliberately confusing. The privacy policy was originally missing.
Some users reported that if you refused the tracking, the add-on then blocked major sites such as Flickr.
I was amazed that got past Mozilla's approval process. They've sold out.
Tesla is about to push an 'over-the-air update' to its vehicles' air suspension that will create more ground clearance at highway speeds.
Now that scares me. The suspension can be updated remotely? What could possibly go wrong?
Just how good is the security on that? Who has access to the keys? Are you sure? How are the download servers secured? Is the update system protected against cut-and-paste attacks?
That kind of update could be used as an assassination weapon.
When Tesla was talking about automatic driving, I suggested that there must be a second processor, with completely different software, checking the main system for sanity (like "not approaching obstacle at high speed") and able to force a stop. The backup system should have its program in ROM, and changing that program should require breaking seals and physically plugging in a new program module.
Flight control software for airliners works like that. For the Airbus line, the backup software was written by a different team for a different kind of CPU in a different programming language, to avoid any possibility of a common mode failure.
Mozilla allows that, too. There's a slimeball company that takes over abandoned Firefox add-ons, adds spyware, and puts them up on Mozilla's "store". They did this to BlockSite. Users were very angry.
Mozilla's reaction? Mozilla's add-on policies prohibit this: "Whenever an add-on includes any unexpected* feature that... compromises user privacy or security (like sending data to third parties)"...
"These features cannot be introduced into an update of a fully-reviewed add-on; the opt-in change process must be part of the initial review."
The spyware was just fine with Jorge Villalobos, Mozilla's add-on project manager, who wrote "That's outdated, since we don't enforce that policy."
You can't trust the Mozilla Foundation any more. That's sad.
Of course police cars should be tracked. They're dispatched centrally, after all. The dispatchers need to know who's where.
Traditionally, the approach used is to put cops in small patrol areas ("beats") so dispatch knows roughly where they are. But this is an ineffective use of resources. Dispatch should be moving cops around as necessary depending on the level of activity and coverage.
The problem with Bitcoin now is that it's being used mostly for speculation, not for trade. You can't price anything in Bitcoins when the price changes 30% in one day. If you accept Bitcoins for anything that doesn't have a huge markup, you can get clobbered by the price fluctuation before you get the payment converted.
Worse, the "exchanges" are very, very flaky. Over half of the Bitcoin exchanges have gone bust. Mt. Gox hasn't paid out US dollars since August, large euro payments seem to be randomly delayed, and some days customers can't get Bitcoins out. Coinbase, which is a dealer, not an exchange (you're buying and selling to and from them) will sometimes drop out of the market because they can't buy or sell Bitcoins (and actually get the funds delivered) on some other exchange. Not one Bitcoin exchange is publicly audited or insured, yet they hold customer funds.
Tradehill was going to be the "legitimate Bitcoin exchange". They went bust. Another exchange in China just disappeared last week, with the customer money. A solid exchange, registered as a broker/dealer in some reasonably legit country, would be a big step forward.
Good. It's about time to get those fuel rods out of there.
The US needs Yucca Mountain. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better to have fuel rods inside a mountain than at reactor sites. After all, Yucca Mountain is in an area so isolated that it used to be used for above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.
I'm surprised the GLONASS people even need permission. A monitoring station is just a fixed GLONASS receiver with a data connection. It receives position information and transmits it back to HQ, where a map of corrections for atmospheric effects is constructed and corrections are sent out via the satellites. Since when do you need permission for a receiver?
The iPhone 4S and later models use GLONASS and GPS together to improve accuracy. So ad-targeting needs this correction system in place so Apple knows exactly what store you're in front of.
ICBM targeting doesn't use satellite signals. It's all inertial, so it can't be jammed. Accurate coordinates for any desired target are available from Google Maps. This has no military significance.
Unlocked phones are becoming more available, and more carriers offer "bring-your-own-device" plans. So this should be offered as something you get installed by small phone retailers or, for more volume, bulk importers of phones and tablets. It's useful for people who don't want to be tied to Google or Apple online services.
It's the same price as the Windows 8 version. (That's listed at $1299, but scroll down for the "$50 off coupon".) This is progress for Dell; most of their previous Linux offerings cost more than the comparable Windows machine.
This idea has come around many times. Howard Hughes, when he was recovering from an accident, had a bed custom-made for him with many foam pads on screw jacks. (This was the inspiration for the CGI version of such a bed in the Wolverine movie.) The Festo Wave surface is a nice implementation, especially because it's composed of a large number of identical units that latch together and make electrical and pneumatic connections.
Back in the 1970s, there was a 3D plotter which had an X-Y positioner and a big spool of stiff wire, which it would push through a sheet of wallboard to the desired height and cut off. Because all the machinery was under the table, it looked impressive, as 3D graphs made of many thin wires appeared above the table.
There's another way to move objects around on a surface. If you have a flat plate which can be vibrated in X, Y, and rotation, you can move objects around on it. If you vibrate something with a sawtooth wave, during the slow part of the ramp, you move objects by static friction. But during the steep return part of the ramp, you accelerate the plate fast enough to get out of the static friction region, so the object slips slightly.
But you can do more. By combining rotational and linear vibration, you can affect some objects more than others. For pure rotational vibration, objects near the center of rotation aren't affected. By appropriate combinations of rotational and translational vibration, multiple objects can be moved around independently. There was a demo of this as a robot chessboard about ten years ago. UPS was interested in it for box sorting, but it didn't work out with mixed real-world boxes.
Fuel from corn, and the subsidy for it, was a giveaway to Archer Daniels Midland. The subsidy expired a few years ago, but the requirement that corn be converted to fuel ethanol drove the price of corn up.
Ethanol from corn is probably a net energy lose. Ethanol refineries don't burn their own product for their own process heat. (Oil refineries do.)
Ethanol for cellulose, if it ever works commercially, has real promise. There's so much excess cellulose in the world produced as farming waste, from corn cobs to straw to wood chips. The first big ethanol from cellulose plants are coming on line in 2014. But they need subsidies to survive.
The Anki system is clever, but it's not as complex as it looks. The black track mat has bar codes visible in IR, and a sensor on the bottom of the car is reading vehicle position. The track has "lanes" invisible to the user but visible to the car. Left to itself, each car will stay in its lane. The phone does the gameplay part, ordering lane and speed changes, and getting position reports from the cars.
It's a nice toy, but it's really a slot car for the 21st century.
Not very many, and declining every year. Actual number for a big dairy farm: 30,000 cows, 400 employees. Feeding, milking, and manure removal are almost entirely automated. Most of the people are dealing with calving, sick animals, and equipment maintenance.
That's old. Here's a current model fully automatic milking robot. The cows aren't pushed around. They're fed tastier food at the milking robot, so they go there willingly. Milk cows need and want to be milked; it relieves pressure. They're herd animals, and will mostly do what the other cows are doing. By exploiting normal cow behavior, the cows do part of the work, and the milking robot does the rest. RFID tags on the cows and tracking computers will detect cows that are having problems.
That's not a prototype or a demo. That's commercial technology. At least three other vendors also produce robotic milking systems.
Commercial farms are very heavily mechanized. There are dairy farms with 30,000 cows (enough to provide milk for a major city), but only 400 employees. Farm employment in the US is only 3% of workers. This is why.
The scary thought is Chinese industry manufacturing a few billion of them. Not big humanoids like the Atlas, or walking trucks like Big Dog. More like huge numbers of little quadrotors and insect to mouse sized machines to snoop around.
Or have malls been giving sweet deals to the big end cap stores?
Many mall owners are desperate. No new enclosed mall has been built in the US in the last ten years. (American Dream Meadowlands in New Jersey doesn't count; after two bankruptcies and a roof collapse, they're "on hold".) There are hundreds of dead malls in the US. If you have a use for mall-type space that doesn't have to be near customers, there's plenty of space available.
For all those people that drive them only for a status symbol but don't actually make use of them, then that might be a good market for them.
A surprisingly large fraction of pickup owners never put anything in the bed of their pickup. Despite this, the Ford Bronco/Chevy Blazer class of vehicle, essentially a pickup with a built-in bed shell, was discontinued years ago in favor of much lighter SUVs built on car-type platforms. (I still own a Ford Bronco. It's basically an 4WD F-250 with a shorter wheelbase. Good for towing a horse trailer. 12 MPG when not towing, so not good for much else.)
SourceForge has shown it can't be trusted. The only way they could regain trust at this point is by legally committing themselves to never bundling anything with an installer, and using an open source installer. Instead, their terms still read "We reserve the right at our sole discretion and at any time to... change the terms and conditions of this Agreement."
Sorry, SourceForge. You got caught. Promising you won't do it again isn't good enough. That's just PR spin.
The Chevy Volt comes with a 150,000 mile, 10 year warranty on the battery. GM started with 100,000 miles with the original Volt, 8 years, but then upgraded the battery technology in later models.
Why would the crypto bits change if I intercept the packet mid-stream, copy it, send the original packet along to its destination, and decrypt the copy to peek at its juicy internals?
That requires actually breaking the cypher. That's hard, sometimes impossible with currently available compute resources. A MITM attack doesn't require breaking the cypher. The node in the middle does its own key negotiation with each end, so each end thinks it's talking to the other end. But each end is really talking to the "man in the middle" node, which has access to the plaintext and just copies it from one connection to the other.
Slashdot Mirror
1. Fix "obviousness."
Unfortunately, I think you're asking someone to prove a logical negative: the applicant has to prove that something isn't obvious by showing... what, exactly?
I hold six patents, and a few times I've had to prove obviousness to an examiner. The gold standard of obviousness is showing that others tried hard to solve the problem and failed. Sometimes, on problems where others have beaten their heads against the wall and there are failed products and projects in the field, you can point the examiner at prior art which shows obviousness. I was the first person to build a ragdoll physics system which could handle the hard cases. Back in the 1990s, early ragdoll systems tended to have characters flying off in random directions, sometimes with the body parts detaching. (Some physics engines still do that, which is lame, because, fifteen years later, several solutions besides mine are known now.) By pointing to previous failures that extended up to and past my patent application date, I was able to demonstrate non-obviousness.
"Obvious" does not mean "obvious in hindsight".
So what? Much of supercomputing is a tax-supported boondoggle. There are few supercomputers in the private sector. Many things that used to require supercomputers, from rocket flight planning to mould design, can now be done on desktops. Most US nuclear weapons were designed on machines with less than 1 MIPS.
Supercomputers have higher cost/MIPS than larger desktop machines. If you need a cluster, Amazon and others will rent you time on theirs. If you're sharing a supercomputer, and not using hours or days of time on single problems, you don't need one.
As long as the feature is opt in...
The "opt in" was more like "we're making you an offer you can't refuse." It was pushed as an update to an existing add-on. The page with the terms was deliberately confusing. The privacy policy was originally missing. Some users reported that if you refused the tracking, the add-on then blocked major sites such as Flickr.
I was amazed that got past Mozilla's approval process. They've sold out.
Tesla is about to push an 'over-the-air update' to its vehicles' air suspension that will create more ground clearance at highway speeds.
Now that scares me. The suspension can be updated remotely? What could possibly go wrong? Just how good is the security on that? Who has access to the keys? Are you sure? How are the download servers secured? Is the update system protected against cut-and-paste attacks?
That kind of update could be used as an assassination weapon.
When Tesla was talking about automatic driving, I suggested that there must be a second processor, with completely different software, checking the main system for sanity (like "not approaching obstacle at high speed") and able to force a stop. The backup system should have its program in ROM, and changing that program should require breaking seals and physically plugging in a new program module.
Flight control software for airliners works like that. For the Airbus line, the backup software was written by a different team for a different kind of CPU in a different programming language, to avoid any possibility of a common mode failure.
Mozilla allows that, too. There's a slimeball company that takes over abandoned Firefox add-ons, adds spyware, and puts them up on Mozilla's "store". They did this to BlockSite. Users were very angry.
Mozilla's reaction? Mozilla's add-on policies prohibit this: "Whenever an add-on includes any unexpected* feature that ... compromises user privacy or security (like sending data to third parties)" ...
"These features cannot be introduced into an update of a fully-reviewed add-on; the opt-in change process must be part of the initial review."
The spyware was just fine with Jorge Villalobos, Mozilla's add-on project manager, who wrote "That's outdated, since we don't enforce that policy."
You can't trust the Mozilla Foundation any more. That's sad.
Of course police cars should be tracked. They're dispatched centrally, after all. The dispatchers need to know who's where.
Traditionally, the approach used is to put cops in small patrol areas ("beats") so dispatch knows roughly where they are. But this is an ineffective use of resources. Dispatch should be moving cops around as necessary depending on the level of activity and coverage.
The problem with Bitcoin now is that it's being used mostly for speculation, not for trade. You can't price anything in Bitcoins when the price changes 30% in one day. If you accept Bitcoins for anything that doesn't have a huge markup, you can get clobbered by the price fluctuation before you get the payment converted.
Worse, the "exchanges" are very, very flaky. Over half of the Bitcoin exchanges have gone bust. Mt. Gox hasn't paid out US dollars since August, large euro payments seem to be randomly delayed, and some days customers can't get Bitcoins out. Coinbase, which is a dealer, not an exchange (you're buying and selling to and from them) will sometimes drop out of the market because they can't buy or sell Bitcoins (and actually get the funds delivered) on some other exchange. Not one Bitcoin exchange is publicly audited or insured, yet they hold customer funds.
Tradehill was going to be the "legitimate Bitcoin exchange". They went bust. Another exchange in China just disappeared last week, with the customer money. A solid exchange, registered as a broker/dealer in some reasonably legit country, would be a big step forward.
Political violence doesn't work to actually implement social change.
Shooting JFK was effective in changing policy.
Good. It's about time to get those fuel rods out of there.
The US needs Yucca Mountain. It's not perfect, but it's a lot better to have fuel rods inside a mountain than at reactor sites. After all, Yucca Mountain is in an area so isolated that it used to be used for above-ground testing of nuclear weapons.
I'm surprised the GLONASS people even need permission. A monitoring station is just a fixed GLONASS receiver with a data connection. It receives position information and transmits it back to HQ, where a map of corrections for atmospheric effects is constructed and corrections are sent out via the satellites. Since when do you need permission for a receiver?
The iPhone 4S and later models use GLONASS and GPS together to improve accuracy. So ad-targeting needs this correction system in place so Apple knows exactly what store you're in front of.
ICBM targeting doesn't use satellite signals. It's all inertial, so it can't be jammed. Accurate coordinates for any desired target are available from Google Maps. This has no military significance.
Unlocked phones are becoming more available, and more carriers offer "bring-your-own-device" plans. So this should be offered as something you get installed by small phone retailers or, for more volume, bulk importers of phones and tablets. It's useful for people who don't want to be tied to Google or Apple online services.
Good point, but I think you meant to post this under How Big Companies Can Hamper the Surveillance Infrastructure.
It's the same price as the Windows 8 version. (That's listed at $1299, but scroll down for the "$50 off coupon".) This is progress for Dell; most of their previous Linux offerings cost more than the comparable Windows machine.
This idea has come around many times. Howard Hughes, when he was recovering from an accident, had a bed custom-made for him with many foam pads on screw jacks. (This was the inspiration for the CGI version of such a bed in the Wolverine movie.) The Festo Wave surface is a nice implementation, especially because it's composed of a large number of identical units that latch together and make electrical and pneumatic connections.
Back in the 1970s, there was a 3D plotter which had an X-Y positioner and a big spool of stiff wire, which it would push through a sheet of wallboard to the desired height and cut off. Because all the machinery was under the table, it looked impressive, as 3D graphs made of many thin wires appeared above the table.
There's another way to move objects around on a surface. If you have a flat plate which can be vibrated in X, Y, and rotation, you can move objects around on it. If you vibrate something with a sawtooth wave, during the slow part of the ramp, you move objects by static friction. But during the steep return part of the ramp, you accelerate the plate fast enough to get out of the static friction region, so the object slips slightly.
But you can do more. By combining rotational and linear vibration, you can affect some objects more than others. For pure rotational vibration, objects near the center of rotation aren't affected. By appropriate combinations of rotational and translational vibration, multiple objects can be moved around independently. There was a demo of this as a robot chessboard about ten years ago. UPS was interested in it for box sorting, but it didn't work out with mixed real-world boxes.
Fuel from corn, and the subsidy for it, was a giveaway to Archer Daniels Midland. The subsidy expired a few years ago, but the requirement that corn be converted to fuel ethanol drove the price of corn up.
Ethanol from corn is probably a net energy lose. Ethanol refineries don't burn their own product for their own process heat. (Oil refineries do.)
Ethanol for cellulose, if it ever works commercially, has real promise. There's so much excess cellulose in the world produced as farming waste, from corn cobs to straw to wood chips. The first big ethanol from cellulose plants are coming on line in 2014. But they need subsidies to survive.
The Anki system is clever, but it's not as complex as it looks. The black track mat has bar codes visible in IR, and a sensor on the bottom of the car is reading vehicle position. The track has "lanes" invisible to the user but visible to the car. Left to itself, each car will stay in its lane. The phone does the gameplay part, ordering lane and speed changes, and getting position reports from the cars.
It's a nice toy, but it's really a slot car for the 21st century.
Not very many, and declining every year. Actual number for a big dairy farm: 30,000 cows, 400 employees. Feeding, milking, and manure removal are almost entirely automated. Most of the people are dealing with calving, sick animals, and equipment maintenance.
That's old. Here's a current model fully automatic milking robot. The cows aren't pushed around. They're fed tastier food at the milking robot, so they go there willingly. Milk cows need and want to be milked; it relieves pressure. They're herd animals, and will mostly do what the other cows are doing. By exploiting normal cow behavior, the cows do part of the work, and the milking robot does the rest. RFID tags on the cows and tracking computers will detect cows that are having problems.
That's not a prototype or a demo. That's commercial technology. At least three other vendors also produce robotic milking systems.
Then there's the feeding robot the automatic manure removal system, and the barn cleaning robot.
Commercial farms are very heavily mechanized. There are dairy farms with 30,000 cows (enough to provide milk for a major city), but only 400 employees. Farm employment in the US is only 3% of workers. This is why.
The scary thought is Chinese industry manufacturing a few billion of them. Not big humanoids like the Atlas, or walking trucks like Big Dog. More like huge numbers of little quadrotors and insect to mouse sized machines to snoop around.
Or have malls been giving sweet deals to the big end cap stores?
Many mall owners are desperate. No new enclosed mall has been built in the US in the last ten years. (American Dream Meadowlands in New Jersey doesn't count; after two bankruptcies and a roof collapse, they're "on hold".) There are hundreds of dead malls in the US. If you have a use for mall-type space that doesn't have to be near customers, there's plenty of space available.
For all those people that drive them only for a status symbol but don't actually make use of them, then that might be a good market for them.
A surprisingly large fraction of pickup owners never put anything in the bed of their pickup. Despite this, the Ford Bronco/Chevy Blazer class of vehicle, essentially a pickup with a built-in bed shell, was discontinued years ago in favor of much lighter SUVs built on car-type platforms. (I still own a Ford Bronco. It's basically an 4WD F-250 with a shorter wheelbase. Good for towing a horse trailer. 12 MPG when not towing, so not good for much else.)
SourceForge has shown it can't be trusted. The only way they could regain trust at this point is by legally committing themselves to never bundling anything with an installer, and using an open source installer. Instead, their terms still read "We reserve the right at our sole discretion and at any time to ... change the terms and conditions of this Agreement."
Sorry, SourceForge. You got caught. Promising you won't do it again isn't good enough. That's just PR spin.
The Chevy Volt comes with a 150,000 mile, 10 year warranty on the battery. GM started with 100,000 miles with the original Volt, 8 years, but then upgraded the battery technology in later models.
So this is not a technology problem.
But if there is a man in the middle, whats to stop them from changing the numbers in the voice?
You can make the attacker work arbitrarily hard to fake something.
Why would the crypto bits change if I intercept the packet mid-stream, copy it, send the original packet along to its destination, and decrypt the copy to peek at its juicy internals?
That requires actually breaking the cypher. That's hard, sometimes impossible with currently available compute resources. A MITM attack doesn't require breaking the cypher. The node in the middle does its own key negotiation with each end, so each end thinks it's talking to the other end. But each end is really talking to the "man in the middle" node, which has access to the plaintext and just copies it from one connection to the other.