MIT's PR operation is becoming embarrassing. At least once every two months, there's some announcement about "nano" something that's going to change the world. Then we never hear about it again. You look at the details, and it turns out somebody did something at lab scale which might possibly someday be useful, if there weren't other ways to do the same thing already.
If everything is to go SSL, we now need widespread "man-in-the-middle" intercept detection. This requires a few things:
SSL certs need to be published publicly and widely, so tampering will be detected.
Any CA issuing a bogus or wildcard cert needs to be downgraded immediately, even if it invalidates every cert they've issued. Browsers should be equipped to raise warning messages when this happens.
MITM detection needs to be implemented within the protocol. This is tricky, but possible. A MITM attack results in the crypto bits changing while the plaintext doesn't. If the browser can see both, there are ways to detect attacks. Some secure phones have a numeric display where they show you two or three digits derived from the crypto stream. The two parties then verbally compare the numbers displayed. If they're different, someone is decrypting and reencrypting the bit stream.
If you want an all-in-one food, it's available. Most drug stores stock "liquid nutrition" drinks which offer a balanced diet. In Japan, such products are popular. Calorie Mate, from Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company Ltd. "Handy solid type Balance protective foods which gives your lips. Each 100-kcal serving contains Protein, Lipid, Carbohydrate, 6 different types of minerals, 11 different vitamins, Contains dietary fiber." Popular with Japanese salarymen who eat lunch at their desks.
Learn to write a clear, concise one-page business memo. Cover one subject clearly. Send it as an email only to the people who really need to know. Chat systems are too ephemeral.
For style guidance, read Churchill's memos from WWII. You don't have to be that good, but try.
"Take the money and disappear" is normal behavior for Bitcoin exchanges. Sometimes they just disappear, sometimes they get broken into and robbed, and sometimes you're not sure whether the robbery was an inside job.
The list of failed Bitcoin exchanges is long. Bitcash.cz just closed yesterday. There's an academic paper with a list. 18 of the 40 exchanges on the list had failed. But that was last January. Since then, Bitfloor and Bitme shut down, and Intersango and Mt. Gox stopped paying out customer funds on demand.
Not one Bitcoin exchange is a bank or a registered broker/dealer in its home jurisdiction. That's part of the problem.
This is why anarchy sucks. What anarchy looks like is Somalia, not L. Neil Smith fiction.
Now move the fucking battery pack so this shit stops. 1/4" aluminum armor 'a good idea' and all, but only because you mounted the battery in a stupid fucking position.
Moving the battery is a big deal; the whole car is designed around the battery. You want the battery low, to keep the CG down. In the Tesla Model S, the vehicle is below the floor pan. Stronger armor would help, but if the aluminum was replaced by steel, it would add 7 pounds per square foot to a battery pack that has about 30 square feet of bottom. So that's over 200 pounds. (It already weighs 4640 pounds empty.) Kevlar, maybe?
There are bad, overhyped ideas that are well executed and actually work. The Segway, for example.
A few historical examples:
The S. S. United States. Fastest transatlantic ocean liner ever built. 3 days, 10 hours from New York to England. Worked great. Still afloat and being restored as a museum ship. Built too late - by 1952, airliners were already crossing the Atlantic.
Home control. Tried over and over since the 1950s, first with 24VDC relay systems, then X10 ("X10! X10! X10!...") in the 1980s, and now being re-hyped again. Works fine. Solves a non-problem.
Maglev trains. Work fine. Go fast. Track costs too much.
Supersonic airliners. The Concorde worked well for decades. Supersonic booms over land were unacceptable, which limited routes. Supersonic fuel consumption is 3x subsonic. Just not economic.
Short takeoff and landing (STOL) aircraft. Not quite a flying car, but workable aircraft with very low stall speeds and very short runway requirements have been built for decades. Just taxi out of your driveway and take off on the street, right? No.
Google's head-mounted things may be in this category.
From the video, the door hold-up mechanism needs work. When they open the "suicide doors", which rotate backwards and upward, it looks like the counterbalancing system isn't quite right. The demonstrator has to adjust the door to keep it open, and then it shakes.
There is a web site for the company with more specs. The engine is a 6-cylinder boxer type, which seems undersized for the claimed performance. Most supercars have from 8 to 18 cylinders.
Surprisingly, it's not an all-wheel drive vehicle. Most supercar-class sedans are. I'm surprised they can get that acceleration with rear wheel drive only. There are rear wheel drive race cars that can do it, but sedan-sized cars usually need all-wheel drive to get enough traction. The rear tires aren't especially large. There's nothing like Formula I aerodynamics to get huge levels of downforce. I wonder if this thing's claimed acceleration just reflects performance on a dynamometer.
No active suspension, either. That's a real problem with supercars - if they're low enough to go fast, they're too low to go anywhere. See Top Gear's evaluation of the Bugatti Veyron, where it takes them an hour and wooden blocks to get it out of a driveway.
Maintenance: "a team of qualified W engineers will fly to anywhere in the world to service your Hypercar or to help with any problem you might encounter with the Lykan at any given time."
Read "Bin Laden - The Man Who Declared War on America. This was published in 1999, before 9/11, and as a result is a reasonably hype-free biography. It quotes bin Laden during the years he was building up his organization.
I'm doing this from memory, but one of the key points bin Laden made to his followers was that, to defeat the United States, it had to be weakened first. He was writing this in the 1990s. (Situation in the 1990s: USSR was history, previous US war was four days of total victory over Iraq in Kuwait, balanced budget in US, US economically dominant in world, most of world wanted to be more like US.) He discusses how to weaken the US. Bin Laden specifically discusses how to make the US paranoid and more heavy-handed, and thus a less competent opponent and a less desirable alternative to Islam. That was the goal of his terror campaign.
So they managed to make a flexible printed circuit that can't stand soldering. Not too useful.
There are lots of ways to make printed circuits. Etching them photographically is cheap, simple, and produces consistent quality, so that's how it's done commercially. The iron-on transfer thing some hobbyists use isn't that reliable; a substantial number of boards will be defective. There are little desktop milling machines for making circuit boards.
Nobody does that much any more. Commercial board making services take in a file on line and send back a board by FedEx. Prototype board prices today start at $28, so there's not much incentive to do it yourself. You get good quality and plated-through holes to connect traces on opposite sides of the board. The plating-through process is a mess to do on a small-scale basis, but cheap in bulk.
The wavelength at 900 MHz is 333 mm, but their SRR design was only 40 mm on a side (a 1/2 wave dipole would have to be 150 mm or so).
Their waveguide/horn is much bigger than 40mm. More like 150mm x 500mm or so. It looks like a reasonable sized horn for 900MHz. They've been able to reduce the size of the rectenna at the focus, but the whole assembly is still big.
Microwave antenna design is weird. Here's some readable background material if anyone cares. Radio hams are routinely able to build 50% efficient microwave antennas. Above that level it starts to get complicated.
At peak, Blockbuster alone had 9,000 video rental stores.
The last day to rent a video from Blockbuster is tomorrow. All the stores are closing. When will the last DVD/Blu-Ray disk be made?
Bookstores are following the trend of video stores, about ten years behind. Borders went bust two years ago. Barnes and Noble is the last big chain. Soon, no more chain bookstores. Then, no more bookstores. Then, no more printed books.
Tesla's work wasn't that you could just pop up an antenna and get free power. His plans involved putting up a massive transmission tower that would dump power into the air at an efficient frequency. A coil and antenna could then be used to pick up this power wirelessly.
Right. When you read his plans, he's taking about a system where a small town is powered by a massive transmitter, each attic is full of antennas, and each house gets one (1) 40-watt light bulb.
Here's the actual paper's paywall. All the paper claims is that "A maximum of 36.8% of the incident power from a 900âMHz signal is experimentally rectified by an array of metamaterial unit cells." So they built a rectenna with a waveguide.
Rectennas have been around for decades, and 82% efficiency (DC watts out / microwave watts into antenna) has been achieved. So 37% is nothing to be excited about.
If you hook up two long wires or plates to a diode, any RF in the vicinity will produce some DC across the diode. This is the principle behind "crystal radios". The problem is that you need big antennas to get much power from ambient RF.
Right. They've been open about it for years. NSA has a long history in computing.
At one time, going to NSA HQ was very mysterious, and travel expenses were paid with a check from a furniture company. But they gave up on that years ago. Now, like the CIA, they have signs outside.
Until the USSR went down, all NSA really cared about was what the USSR was doing. Anything else had lower priority. After the USSR went down, there were lots of retirements and layoffs. After 9/11, everything changed. Suddenly the threat was from little groups, not a superpower. Huge internal realignment. Much more pressure for timely info (the USSR was a slow-moving opponent) and for data sharing with law enforcement. That's when NSA became more intrusive.
The XBox unit is profitable. The entire first generation of the XBox was financial lose, but in the last few years, the business finally started to make money.
Bing, not so much.
Bing seems to be a dumping ground for Microsoft managers. Every year or so, there's a new management team at Bing. Their business strategy is "copy Google". To some extent, they have to - for a while, their ad system was completely different from Google's, and advertisers wouldn't bother to use it. Something like 80% of Bing users use Internet Explorer. Those are the people who don't know how to change the default search engine.
Google as the only major search engine, though, is scary. The remaining competition in web search is tiny in the US - IAC, InfoSeek, Yandex, and Baidu. (DuckDuckGo and Bleeko are resellers of Bing and Yandex, respectively.) With no competition, Google could charge much more for ads and become even more intrusive.
Why do you think the big push was made to give everyone a VISA or MC debit card? It provides the banks with an incredible amount of information about you that they can then sell.
The funny thing is that banks don't do that much. Their merchant customers don't like their sales info being given to other merchants.
I have three projects on SourceForge. Fortunately, none of them release an executable, so SourceForge's drive-by installer doesn't corrupt my projects. But I'll move one project off of SourceForge soon.
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MIT's PR operation is becoming embarrassing. At least once every two months, there's some announcement about "nano" something that's going to change the world. Then we never hear about it again. You look at the details, and it turns out somebody did something at lab scale which might possibly someday be useful, if there weren't other ways to do the same thing already.
If everything is to go SSL, we now need widespread "man-in-the-middle" intercept detection. This requires a few things:
Kepner-Tregoe
I haven't heard that mentioned in decades. I once found some forms for it in a filing cabinet.
Is this because porn sites are serving actual exploits that use Flash or browser bugs, or because people downloaded and ran .exe files?
If you want an all-in-one food, it's available. Most drug stores stock "liquid nutrition" drinks which offer a balanced diet. In Japan, such products are popular. Calorie Mate, from Otsuka Pharmaceutical Company Ltd. "Handy solid type Balance protective foods which gives your lips. Each 100-kcal serving contains Protein, Lipid, Carbohydrate, 6 different types of minerals, 11 different vitamins, Contains dietary fiber." Popular with Japanese salarymen who eat lunch at their desks.
Learn to write a clear, concise one-page business memo. Cover one subject clearly. Send it as an email only to the people who really need to know. Chat systems are too ephemeral.
For style guidance, read Churchill's memos from WWII. You don't have to be that good, but try.
"Take the money and disappear" is normal behavior for Bitcoin exchanges. Sometimes they just disappear, sometimes they get broken into and robbed, and sometimes you're not sure whether the robbery was an inside job.
The list of failed Bitcoin exchanges is long. Bitcash.cz just closed yesterday. There's an academic paper with a list. 18 of the 40 exchanges on the list had failed. But that was last January. Since then, Bitfloor and Bitme shut down, and Intersango and Mt. Gox stopped paying out customer funds on demand.
Not one Bitcoin exchange is a bank or a registered broker/dealer in its home jurisdiction. That's part of the problem.
This is why anarchy sucks. What anarchy looks like is Somalia, not L. Neil Smith fiction.
Well, what do you expect? The thing is a bloated mess.
This sounds like a Vesta WindFloat 2MW turbine. Is this really a Mitsubishi product?
Now move the fucking battery pack so this shit stops. 1/4" aluminum armor 'a good idea' and all, but only because you mounted the battery in a stupid fucking position.
Moving the battery is a big deal; the whole car is designed around the battery. You want the battery low, to keep the CG down. In the Tesla Model S, the vehicle is below the floor pan. Stronger armor would help, but if the aluminum was replaced by steel, it would add 7 pounds per square foot to a battery pack that has about 30 square feet of bottom. So that's over 200 pounds. (It already weighs 4640 pounds empty.) Kevlar, maybe?
For a good overview of what the bottom side of a Tesla Model S battery is like, see this video for first responders. (Starts where they're showing a Tesla Model S on its side.) Probably more than you ever wanted to know about how to deal with wrecked electric vehicles.
Never heard of this guy.
There are bad, overhyped ideas that are well executed and actually work. The Segway, for example.
A few historical examples:
Google's head-mounted things may be in this category.
From the video, the door hold-up mechanism needs work. When they open the "suicide doors", which rotate backwards and upward, it looks like the counterbalancing system isn't quite right. The demonstrator has to adjust the door to keep it open, and then it shakes.
There is a web site for the company with more specs. The engine is a 6-cylinder boxer type, which seems undersized for the claimed performance. Most supercars have from 8 to 18 cylinders.
Surprisingly, it's not an all-wheel drive vehicle. Most supercar-class sedans are. I'm surprised they can get that acceleration with rear wheel drive only. There are rear wheel drive race cars that can do it, but sedan-sized cars usually need all-wheel drive to get enough traction. The rear tires aren't especially large. There's nothing like Formula I aerodynamics to get huge levels of downforce. I wonder if this thing's claimed acceleration just reflects performance on a dynamometer.
No active suspension, either. That's a real problem with supercars - if they're low enough to go fast, they're too low to go anywhere. See Top Gear's evaluation of the Bugatti Veyron, where it takes them an hour and wooden blocks to get it out of a driveway.
Maintenance: "a team of qualified W engineers will fly to anywhere in the world to service your Hypercar or to help with any problem you might encounter with the Lykan at any given time."
Read "Bin Laden - The Man Who Declared War on America. This was published in 1999, before 9/11, and as a result is a reasonably hype-free biography. It quotes bin Laden during the years he was building up his organization.
I'm doing this from memory, but one of the key points bin Laden made to his followers was that, to defeat the United States, it had to be weakened first. He was writing this in the 1990s. (Situation in the 1990s: USSR was history, previous US war was four days of total victory over Iraq in Kuwait, balanced budget in US, US economically dominant in world, most of world wanted to be more like US.) He discusses how to weaken the US. Bin Laden specifically discusses how to make the US paranoid and more heavy-handed, and thus a less competent opponent and a less desirable alternative to Islam. That was the goal of his terror campaign.
Mission accomplished.
So they managed to make a flexible printed circuit that can't stand soldering. Not too useful.
There are lots of ways to make printed circuits. Etching them photographically is cheap, simple, and produces consistent quality, so that's how it's done commercially. The iron-on transfer thing some hobbyists use isn't that reliable; a substantial number of boards will be defective. There are little desktop milling machines for making circuit boards.
Nobody does that much any more. Commercial board making services take in a file on line and send back a board by FedEx. Prototype board prices today start at $28, so there's not much incentive to do it yourself. You get good quality and plated-through holes to connect traces on opposite sides of the board. The plating-through process is a mess to do on a small-scale basis, but cheap in bulk.
The wavelength at 900 MHz is 333 mm, but their SRR design was only 40 mm on a side (a 1/2 wave dipole would have to be 150 mm or so).
Their waveguide/horn is much bigger than 40mm. More like 150mm x 500mm or so. It looks like a reasonable sized horn for 900MHz. They've been able to reduce the size of the rectenna at the focus, but the whole assembly is still big.
Microwave antenna design is weird. Here's some readable background material if anyone cares. Radio hams are routinely able to build 50% efficient microwave antennas. Above that level it starts to get complicated.
And I think that will happen when 4k TV takes off. I donâ(TM)t hear anybody talking about shipping physical media for that format.
That's going to be a real problem. You'll need 130Mb/sec to do a good job. (If you're going to play lower-res video, why have a 2K x 4K display?)
At peak, Blockbuster alone had 9,000 video rental stores. The last day to rent a video from Blockbuster is tomorrow. All the stores are closing. When will the last DVD/Blu-Ray disk be made?
Bookstores are following the trend of video stores, about ten years behind. Borders went bust two years ago. Barnes and Noble is the last big chain. Soon, no more chain bookstores. Then, no more bookstores. Then, no more printed books.
Tesla's work wasn't that you could just pop up an antenna and get free power. His plans involved putting up a massive transmission tower that would dump power into the air at an efficient frequency. A coil and antenna could then be used to pick up this power wirelessly.
Right. When you read his plans, he's taking about a system where a small town is powered by a massive transmitter, each attic is full of antennas, and each house gets one (1) 40-watt light bulb.
Here's the actual paper's paywall. All the paper claims is that "A maximum of 36.8% of the incident power from a 900âMHz signal is experimentally rectified by an array of metamaterial unit cells." So they built a rectenna with a waveguide.
Rectennas have been around for decades, and 82% efficiency (DC watts out / microwave watts into antenna) has been achieved. So 37% is nothing to be excited about.
If you hook up two long wires or plates to a diode, any RF in the vicinity will produce some DC across the diode. This is the principle behind "crystal radios". The problem is that you need big antennas to get much power from ambient RF.
Right. They've been open about it for years. NSA has a long history in computing.
At one time, going to NSA HQ was very mysterious, and travel expenses were paid with a check from a furniture company. But they gave up on that years ago. Now, like the CIA, they have signs outside.
Until the USSR went down, all NSA really cared about was what the USSR was doing. Anything else had lower priority. After the USSR went down, there were lots of retirements and layoffs. After 9/11, everything changed. Suddenly the threat was from little groups, not a superpower. Huge internal realignment. Much more pressure for timely info (the USSR was a slow-moving opponent) and for data sharing with law enforcement. That's when NSA became more intrusive.
The XBox unit is profitable. The entire first generation of the XBox was financial lose, but in the last few years, the business finally started to make money.
Bing, not so much. Bing seems to be a dumping ground for Microsoft managers. Every year or so, there's a new management team at Bing. Their business strategy is "copy Google". To some extent, they have to - for a while, their ad system was completely different from Google's, and advertisers wouldn't bother to use it. Something like 80% of Bing users use Internet Explorer. Those are the people who don't know how to change the default search engine.
Google as the only major search engine, though, is scary. The remaining competition in web search is tiny in the US - IAC, InfoSeek, Yandex, and Baidu. (DuckDuckGo and Bleeko are resellers of Bing and Yandex, respectively.) With no competition, Google could charge much more for ads and become even more intrusive.
Why do you think the big push was made to give everyone a VISA or MC debit card? It provides the banks with an incredible amount of information about you that they can then sell.
The funny thing is that banks don't do that much. Their merchant customers don't like their sales info being given to other merchants.
I have three projects on SourceForge. Fortunately, none of them release an executable, so SourceForge's drive-by installer doesn't corrupt my projects. But I'll move one project off of SourceForge soon.
Is GitHub still OK?
Starship Troopers was better than either robocop or especially Total Recall.
Better than the original Total Recall with Arnold and Sharon Stone, maybe. Better than the remake of Total Recall, definitely.
Action moviemaking today seems to consist of silly plots and weak acting coupled with technically excellent CGI.
Heinlein did not intend for the message to be one of a farcical satire. He meant it.
Right. That was Heinlein. Verhoeven, though, intended the movie to be a satire. I wish he'd done it straight, just to annoy people.
The trouble is, if he'd done it straight, few people would have watched it.