This probably will involve more ads. Google will scan your emails social postings, and purchases for signs of an unhealthy lifestyle and send you appropriate ads. Then they'll offer a free service to hold all your medical records. With ads.
Watch for new Google terms of service which waive HIPPA privacy rules.
It's not that the NYT needs software engineers. It's that they need ad engineers. You know, the slimeballs who figure out how to hang relevant ads on everything. (Including personal email - that was really slimy.) The slimeballs who figure out how to reformat crap to maximize the number of ad impressions. (See any online "Top 10" list.)
Distributing news is straightforward. It's monetizing the process that's hard.
This is a language-support library. It replaces the C runtime system, and the bottom levels of the Java runtime system. For environments where a virtual machine is running one program, or a family of tightly related programs, that's all you really need. The real operating system is the hypervisor underneath and the remote management tools that run the cluster.
Linux, with millions of lines of code, just isn't doing much inside a VM. It's not managing the memory. It's not handling real devices. It's not handling real interrupts. It may not even be managing any file systems - in cloud environments, those are usually out on some storage area network. It's just a big fat pig of an OS that needs to be fed patches and attention to keep it going, while not doing any useful work.
Within the virtual machine, there are no security boundaries. This may be a problem if more than one application is running in the VM. But if you only have one big program with many threads running, the OS isn't doing anything for you in security anyway.
That article is weird. But then, so is the site. In the middle of the article, there are ads for other articles:
New Healing Mechanism Closes Wounds By Up to 50 Percent in 30 Seconds -- And Leaves No Scar
Universe May Contain "Tardis-like: Regions of Spacetime, say Cosmologists
Reliable source problem here.
Anyway, their claim is that, based on Zipf's law, there must be some "long tail" of unknown small financial institutions which have vast but uncounted assets. No way. There's halawa, Indian gold merchants, and Bitcoin, but together they don't add up to one of the big banks.
"It is in the nature of markets to move money from the many to the few."
The ship is now upright. It's not floating; it's sitting on the
underwater platform built for it, sunk several decks deep, and still full of water. Next step is to patch the hole in the hull, get pontoons on both sides, and start pumping. Big job, but now a routine one for a salvage company.
At least it's a job in a nice climate, near shore, in a friendly country. Most salvage jobs are in worse places.
Doing that in a marine sanctuary would have a significant environmental impact.
That's part of it. The other part is that the ship is on the edge of a slope into deeper water. There was real worry that she'd slide down the slope while passengers were still being evacuated. After that, the big worry was that she'd slide down the slope, break up, and leak bunker oil for years, producing a long-term oil spill. The first phase of salvage (by Smit, the Dutch salvage firm) was to drain the fuel tanks and stabilize the hulk. They did that with few problems.
Then it got political. If Smit had been given the contract to finish the job and get rid of the hulk, it would have been cut up and out of there by now. That was their proposal. But there would have been some medium-term damage to the environment in the area.
Hence the rather elaborate plan currently underway. The ship isn't just being pulled upright. That's not enough; it's full of water and wouldn't float. An underwater platform was built to support it, and it's being pulled onto that. Then it gets re-floated and towed away.
This is probably the most elaborate (in the overkill sense) marine salvage operation since the Army Corps of Engineers removed the wreck of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor in 1911. They built an enormous temporary dam around the entire area. Then they pumped out the entire area around the ship. Then they cut up the wreckage and hauled it out. Then they let the water back in and dismantled the dam.
DBI has built control rooms for other agencies. Here's their portfolio. They did the new White House Situation Room (which looks reasonable), the National Counterterrorism Center (overdid the lighting effects), Lockheed Martin (looks like a movie set, overhead lighting grids and all), a NASA auditorium (just rows of seats and some big screens), GeoEye (overdid the ceiling design), Defense Information Security Agency (fancy ceiling, lots of Eames chairs.)
But only for the NSA facility did they really go over the top. This is the silliest control center design since the Moscow United electric power control center The layout makes no sense. The person in the "Captain's chair" is in front, and can't see what everybody else is doing. The "captains chair" has no controls or screens of its own, so whomever sits there cannot do anything except shout orders.
A common setup in operational control centers, especially USAF and NASA, is to have the ability for each station to look at screens of other stations in view-only mode. (Originally this was done with an actual channel selector and an analog cable TV system). When something important is happening, a lot of people may need to look at one display. This eliminates everybody crowding around the station that has the key information at the moment. Once you have that, the physical layout doesn't matter as much.
The result is that most modern military command centers are rather boring - they look like a help-desk operation. The current NORAD center looks much less impressive than its predecessors. In the field, a bunch of laptops in a tent can operate as a command center. A modern tactical operations center looks like that, not like one of these fancy overdecorated rooms.
Right, Google's problems with evil are more on the ad side. They had to pay $500,000,000 as a penalty to the Department of Justice to keep Larry Page out of jail when Google was knowingly running ads for drug dealers. (It wasn't about "Canadian pharmacies"; Google was caught in an FBI sting operation involving a fake representative of a Mexican drug lord.)
After that, Google started checking out advertisers in the drug area more closely. But they continued to run ads for fake "foreclosure prevention" services and other rather flaky outfits.
Google's advertiser vetting is very weak. They don't even check whether there's a real business behind the ad. We used to run an automated check on this, and for about 36% of Google advertisers (by domain name), there was no identifiable real-world business behind the ad.
No Right of Privacy tablet technology
users have no right of privacy in their use of tablet technology or the content they access using tablet technology
Review and Monitoring of Usageall tablet technology
use may be reviewed and monitored without notice by GCS administrative staff for any reason, even use
that occurs on personal time or off school property.
For most of history, musicians were nobodies, ranking below, say, bartenders. For a brief period in history, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, being a musician was a Big Deal. That's over. At peak, there were over 8 million bands on Myspace. Some of which didn't suck.
On top of that, music became automated. Between synthesizers and AutoTune, who needs musicianship? All those years of practice, and your job can be done by a box that costs a few hundred dollars.
This is a reasonably good outcome. Yes, it increases Russian influence in the Middle East, but so what? The U.S. now imports 36% of the oil it uses, down from 60% in 2006. The Middle East is losing its strategic importance to the US.
Well, if you would send a letter to someone saying they will die, then that it is most obviously a threat.
It's hard to judge how serious it is.
I own a domain in.com for which a private school in the UK has the same domain in the.co.uk namespace. I used to have a catchall email address for that domain, before spam made that useless. So I would occasionally get misaddressed mail for students at that school, all of whom had addresses within the school domain.
So one day I get an email: "I am going to kill you tonight". It's not addressed to me, but to a student at the school. This was shortly after Columbine, so I thought I should do something. I was able to reach the headmistress of the school by phone. They had to wake her up for this; it's the middle of the night in the UK. I read her the email. She immediately knows who the student is, tells me he's 12 and it's not a serious threat, and says she will deal with it. The impression I get is that the student responsible is going to get a major chewing out, but there's no talk of police involvement.
If it had been a US school, there probably would have been a SWAT callout.
The Epsilon rocket is three stages of solid rocket booster, like an ICBM. So there's no fueling on the pad, no plumbing, no cryogenics, and no turbopumps. The launch team has a lot less to do than with liquid-fueled rockets.
Already done for you! Toyota and Mercedes have taken the technological lead on vehicle based radar systems.
Simple anti-collision automotive radars have been around for almost two decades. The Eaton VORAD, which is a phased-array radar which scans in one axis, is relatively decent. It gets you range, range rate, and bearing on targets of motorcycle size and larger.
Newer radars are down in the millimeter range (77GHz is popular) and can get a return off human-sized targets. But these are strictly anti-collision devices - they cannot profile the ground and see bumps, potholes, curbs, cliffs, etc.
It seems like a few stereo cameras would be a cheaper solution.
Stereo vision isn't as reliable as LIDAR. Stereo systems need edges to lock on, and aren't good with smooth surfaces. Camera systems are also vulnerable to glare. If you get a return from a LIDAR, you have good confidence there isn't anything closer than that return.
The high mounting position usually used on driverless vehicles is to allow imaging the road ahead. LIDARs up high image potholes and such easily.
"The problem with Google's current approach is that the sensor system is too expensive" - Musk
He's referring to the expensive Velodyne rotating array of 64 LIDARs found on top of Google's cars. It's a useful device, but it's a research tool, not something that belongs on top of production vehicles.
What's needed is a compact solid-state 3D LIDAR for outdoor use. Advanced Scientific Concepts makes such things, but they're sold to DoD for about $100K each. Typical performance is 300 meter range, 128x128 pixels, 30 FPS. There's no fundamental reason the technology needs to be that expensive; it's just that the things are hand-made at a lab in Santa Barbara, CA. (I visited them a decade ago when we were doing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. Back then, they had the technology working on an optical bench, but didn't have usable hardware yet.) This technology needs to be turned into a mass market product. The current generation Kinect, (which is a true LIDAR, not a trianguation sensor like the previous model) does roughly the same thing, but with a less sensitive sensor and a weaker laser. Eventually somebody will put enough money behind this to get it right.
If you're driving on the Parkway (a New Jersey toll highway), there are plenty of places where you can see EZPass pickups buried in the road surface that are nowhere near the toll sites.
Loops in the road surface are a different kind of sensor. Those just count vehicles, and if installed in pairs, measure speed. At least in California, that's where the CALTRANS road data comes from. That's been around since at least the 1980s; LA used to have a cable channel which just showed the freeway status map.
Interestingly, the LA area and the SF area have quite different privacy policies. Compare Bay Area Fastrak, which is quite reasonable, to LA Metro, which asks "customers for demographic information, including but not limited to, zip code and income level."
That's a good point. While the US and the UK have had a formal agreement on intelligence sharing since WWII (the UKUSA agreement), they're allies of the US, with a mutual defense treaty (under NATO) with the US.
Israel is not formally an ally of the US. While the US provides "security assistance" to Israel, there's no mutual defense treaty. There was an "exchange of diplomatic notes on mutual defense assistance" in 1952, and there's the Camp David agreement (US, Egypt, Israel) from 1979 which ended the wars between Israel and Egypt. Other assistance from the US is on an ad-hoc basis, and it's mostly money, not troops.
The issued patent from the application linked above is US 8,446,248. The claims are quite narrow, because, over five years of rejections and reexaminations, the USPTO examiners found prior art and narrowed the patent coverage.
Back in 2003, Geoffery Landis at NASA (also a visiting professor of aeronautics at MIT and an SF writer with a Hugo) proposed something similar, and that was patented. The NASA patent says "The present inventive technique provides for wireless, charging power and/or primary power to electronic/electrical devices whereby microwave energy is employed. The microwave energy is focused by one or more adaptively-phased microwave array emitters in a power transmitter portion of the system onto a device to be charged. Rectennas within the device to be charged receive and rectify the microwave energy and use it for battery charging and/or for primary power. A locator signal generated by the device to be charged is analyzed by the system to determine the location of the device to be charged relative to the microwave array emitters, permitting the microwave energy to be directly specifically towards the device to be charged.". That's the basic idea here.
The Landis patent gives a much clearer idea of the concept. It's simply a steerable microwave beam aimed at the receiver. That's known to transmit power just fine. You could do that with a mechanically steered dish. There are some tricks; one is noticing backscatter from the beam, indicating that it's hitting something that isn't a receiver, so stop aiming there. Another is finding the receiver with low power, then upping the power once on target. Much of this is borrowed from the solar power satellite scheme of the 1980s, with ground based "rectennas", which is why this came out of NASA.
There's a safety issue. The US safety standard for microwave exposure is 10 mW/cm^2 for periods of 0.1-hour or more. To get 1 watt at the receiver, it's going to take maybe 10 watts of output at the transmitter. If the emitting area is about two square meters, as in his demo, the energy is spread out over 20,000 cm^2, so there's only about 0.5mW/cm^2 in front of the transmitter array. That's OK.
At the receiver end, all that power is supposed to be focused to a point, or at least down to the size of his little box. That should focus at least 1 or 2 watts onto his little box, with maybe 25cm^2 area. Now we're up to 40 to 80 mW/cm^2, which is well above the safe limit for prolonged exposure.
Since you may be wearing or carrying that little box, and it's going to take a while to charge the battery, this isn't too good.
It's a nice demo, but a system which focuses microwave power beams on handheld devices probably isn't going to be acceptable. What it looks like he did here was to gang together a lot of off the shelf devices which individually can't emit enough power to be dangerous, but when combined into a phased array put too much power in one place.
It's one of the old monopoly laws. Another one would be movie theaters. They used to be owned almost entirely by movie studios. That is, Universal, etc would literally own the theater.
It's similar. Universal, though, was never rich enough to own its own theaters. There are still lots of old theaters around the us labelled Paramount, Warner, and Fox. There's still a Laemmle Theatre art-house chain in LA, a spin-off from Universal in 1939 when the Laemmles were kicked out of the company.
If it is now merely feeding the pool as one of multiple sources, then it's OK. If anything is directly exposed to raw rdrand output, something is very wrong.
That's exactly right. Even if the hardware RdRand has a "work reduction factor" built in, i.e. it's not as random as it seems to be, there's some randomness there, and it can be fed into the entropy pool along with other sources of randomness.
Randomness sources inside deterministic computers are scarce. Disk timing, clock jitter, network arrival times, etc. are useful, but generate random bits at a low rate. Thus, "/dev/random" will block if not enough random bits are currently available. This usually isn't a problem, but if every TCP connection you open is SSL and you need random bits for key generation, the supply could run out.
If, say, you wanted to fill a DVD with random bits for a one-time key system,/dev/random would probably be a bottleneck. Is Torvalds making that argument?
There's another application of randomness. The only known theoretically unbreakable cryptosystem is a one-time key system where 1) the keys are truly random and 2) are used only once, 3) then destroyed. One time key systems have been broken in practice due to violations of each of those rules. Venona violated rule 1 and 2, and there have been spy cases where the spy hadn't destroyed their keying material when captured.
A reasonable cryptosystem is to make two identical DVDs of random bits. Each party has a DVD, and they can communicate as many bits as they have random bits in common. This is a pain, but it works. Such systems are used by the US for embassy-to-capital links. In the paper-tape era, this was a huge pain, but a DVD can store enough data for a thousand hours of phone calls.
Any reduction in randomness in a one-time key system makes it very vulnerable. It doesn't take much to provide an entry into the cypher.
Either that or coincidentally this was just about the time when effective computer vision techniques (frame decompression->frame stabilization->multi-gaussian/edge/optical flow->motion map recognizer->Useful meta data) could run at decent framerates without very large and expensive hardware.
No, the vision systems used were much dumber than that. The vision system in the winning Stanford car really answered only one question - is the distant part of the road, beyond LIDAR range, like the near part of the road, where a full 3D profile was available from the LIDAR units? If so, and the near part of the road looked flat and safe, the vehicle could speed up and out-drive its LIDAR range. In difficult areas, almost all vehicles relied on LIDAR data.
Slashdot Mirror
This probably will involve more ads. Google will scan your emails social postings, and purchases for signs of an unhealthy lifestyle and send you appropriate ads. Then they'll offer a free service to hold all your medical records. With ads.
Watch for new Google terms of service which waive HIPPA privacy rules.
This is either a major breakthrough or utter bullshit. It's too early to tell which. If it's real, it's a Nobel Prize in physics.
The publisher, the Simmons Foundation, is a project of a rich weirdo from Texas.
It's not that the NYT needs software engineers. It's that they need ad engineers. You know, the slimeballs who figure out how to hang relevant ads on everything. (Including personal email - that was really slimy.) The slimeballs who figure out how to reformat crap to maximize the number of ad impressions. (See any online "Top 10" list.)
Distributing news is straightforward. It's monetizing the process that's hard.
This is a language-support library. It replaces the C runtime system, and the bottom levels of the Java runtime system. For environments where a virtual machine is running one program, or a family of tightly related programs, that's all you really need. The real operating system is the hypervisor underneath and the remote management tools that run the cluster.
Linux, with millions of lines of code, just isn't doing much inside a VM. It's not managing the memory. It's not handling real devices. It's not handling real interrupts. It may not even be managing any file systems - in cloud environments, those are usually out on some storage area network. It's just a big fat pig of an OS that needs to be fed patches and attention to keep it going, while not doing any useful work.
Within the virtual machine, there are no security boundaries. This may be a problem if more than one application is running in the VM. But if you only have one big program with many threads running, the OS isn't doing anything for you in security anyway.
That article is weird. But then, so is the site. In the middle of the article, there are ads for other articles:
New Healing Mechanism Closes Wounds By Up to 50 Percent in 30 Seconds -- And Leaves No Scar
Universe May Contain "Tardis-like: Regions of Spacetime, say Cosmologists
Reliable source problem here.
Anyway, their claim is that, based on Zipf's law, there must be some "long tail" of unknown small financial institutions which have vast but uncounted assets. No way. There's halawa, Indian gold merchants, and Bitcoin, but together they don't add up to one of the big banks.
"It is in the nature of markets to move money from the many to the few."
The ship is now upright. It's not floating; it's sitting on the underwater platform built for it, sunk several decks deep, and still full of water. Next step is to patch the hole in the hull, get pontoons on both sides, and start pumping. Big job, but now a routine one for a salvage company.
At least it's a job in a nice climate, near shore, in a friendly country. Most salvage jobs are in worse places.
Doing that in a marine sanctuary would have a significant environmental impact.
That's part of it. The other part is that the ship is on the edge of a slope into deeper water. There was real worry that she'd slide down the slope while passengers were still being evacuated. After that, the big worry was that she'd slide down the slope, break up, and leak bunker oil for years, producing a long-term oil spill. The first phase of salvage (by Smit, the Dutch salvage firm) was to drain the fuel tanks and stabilize the hulk. They did that with few problems.
Then it got political. If Smit had been given the contract to finish the job and get rid of the hulk, it would have been cut up and out of there by now. That was their proposal. But there would have been some medium-term damage to the environment in the area.
Hence the rather elaborate plan currently underway. The ship isn't just being pulled upright. That's not enough; it's full of water and wouldn't float. An underwater platform was built to support it, and it's being pulled onto that. Then it gets re-floated and towed away.
This is probably the most elaborate (in the overkill sense) marine salvage operation since the Army Corps of Engineers removed the wreck of the U.S.S. Maine in Havana harbor in 1911. They built an enormous temporary dam around the entire area. Then they pumped out the entire area around the ship. Then they cut up the wreckage and hauled it out. Then they let the water back in and dismantled the dam.
DBI has built control rooms for other agencies. Here's their portfolio. They did the new White House Situation Room (which looks reasonable), the National Counterterrorism Center (overdid the lighting effects), Lockheed Martin (looks like a movie set, overhead lighting grids and all), a NASA auditorium (just rows of seats and some big screens), GeoEye (overdid the ceiling design), Defense Information Security Agency (fancy ceiling, lots of Eames chairs.)
But only for the NSA facility did they really go over the top. This is the silliest control center design since the Moscow United electric power control center The layout makes no sense. The person in the "Captain's chair" is in front, and can't see what everybody else is doing. The "captains chair" has no controls or screens of its own, so whomever sits there cannot do anything except shout orders.
A common setup in operational control centers, especially USAF and NASA, is to have the ability for each station to look at screens of other stations in view-only mode. (Originally this was done with an actual channel selector and an analog cable TV system). When something important is happening, a lot of people may need to look at one display. This eliminates everybody crowding around the station that has the key information at the moment. Once you have that, the physical layout doesn't matter as much.
The result is that most modern military command centers are rather boring - they look like a help-desk operation. The current NORAD center looks much less impressive than its predecessors. In the field, a bunch of laptops in a tent can operate as a command center. A modern tactical operations center looks like that, not like one of these fancy overdecorated rooms.
Right, Google's problems with evil are more on the ad side. They had to pay $500,000,000 as a penalty to the Department of Justice to keep Larry Page out of jail when Google was knowingly running ads for drug dealers. (It wasn't about "Canadian pharmacies"; Google was caught in an FBI sting operation involving a fake representative of a Mexican drug lord.)
After that, Google started checking out advertisers in the drug area more closely. But they continued to run ads for fake "foreclosure prevention" services and other rather flaky outfits.
Google's advertiser vetting is very weak. They don't even check whether there's a real business behind the ad. We used to run an automated check on this, and for about 36% of Google advertisers (by domain name), there was no identifiable real-world business behind the ad.
The "Tablet privacy policy:
No Right of Privacy
tablet technology users have no right of privacy in their use of tablet technology or the content they access using tablet technology
Review and Monitoring of Usage all tablet technology use may be reviewed and monitored without notice by GCS administrative staff for any reason, even use that occurs on personal time or off school property.
For most of history, musicians were nobodies, ranking below, say, bartenders. For a brief period in history, from the early 1960s to the late 1980s, being a musician was a Big Deal. That's over. At peak, there were over 8 million bands on Myspace. Some of which didn't suck.
On top of that, music became automated. Between synthesizers and AutoTune, who needs musicianship? All those years of practice, and your job can be done by a box that costs a few hundred dollars.
This is a reasonably good outcome. Yes, it increases Russian influence in the Middle East, but so what? The U.S. now imports 36% of the oil it uses, down from 60% in 2006. The Middle East is losing its strategic importance to the US.
Well, if you would send a letter to someone saying they will die, then that it is most obviously a threat.
It's hard to judge how serious it is.
I own a domain in .com for which a private school in the UK has the same domain in the .co.uk namespace. I used to have a catchall email address for that domain, before spam made that useless. So I would occasionally get misaddressed mail for students at that school, all of whom had addresses within the school domain.
So one day I get an email: "I am going to kill you tonight". It's not addressed to me, but to a student at the school. This was shortly after Columbine, so I thought I should do something. I was able to reach the headmistress of the school by phone. They had to wake her up for this; it's the middle of the night in the UK. I read her the email. She immediately knows who the student is, tells me he's 12 and it's not a serious threat, and says she will deal with it. The impression I get is that the student responsible is going to get a major chewing out, but there's no talk of police involvement.
If it had been a US school, there probably would have been a SWAT callout.
The Epsilon rocket is three stages of solid rocket booster, like an ICBM. So there's no fueling on the pad, no plumbing, no cryogenics, and no turbopumps. The launch team has a lot less to do than with liquid-fueled rockets.
Already done for you! Toyota and Mercedes have taken the technological lead on vehicle based radar systems.
Simple anti-collision automotive radars have been around for almost two decades. The Eaton VORAD, which is a phased-array radar which scans in one axis, is relatively decent. It gets you range, range rate, and bearing on targets of motorcycle size and larger.
Newer radars are down in the millimeter range (77GHz is popular) and can get a return off human-sized targets. But these are strictly anti-collision devices - they cannot profile the ground and see bumps, potholes, curbs, cliffs, etc.
It seems like a few stereo cameras would be a cheaper solution.
Stereo vision isn't as reliable as LIDAR. Stereo systems need edges to lock on, and aren't good with smooth surfaces. Camera systems are also vulnerable to glare. If you get a return from a LIDAR, you have good confidence there isn't anything closer than that return.
The high mounting position usually used on driverless vehicles is to allow imaging the road ahead. LIDARs up high image potholes and such easily.
"The problem with Google's current approach is that the sensor system is too expensive" - Musk
He's referring to the expensive Velodyne rotating array of 64 LIDARs found on top of Google's cars. It's a useful device, but it's a research tool, not something that belongs on top of production vehicles.
What's needed is a compact solid-state 3D LIDAR for outdoor use. Advanced Scientific Concepts makes such things, but they're sold to DoD for about $100K each. Typical performance is 300 meter range, 128x128 pixels, 30 FPS. There's no fundamental reason the technology needs to be that expensive; it's just that the things are hand-made at a lab in Santa Barbara, CA. (I visited them a decade ago when we were doing a DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. Back then, they had the technology working on an optical bench, but didn't have usable hardware yet.) This technology needs to be turned into a mass market product. The current generation Kinect, (which is a true LIDAR, not a trianguation sensor like the previous model) does roughly the same thing, but with a less sensitive sensor and a weaker laser. Eventually somebody will put enough money behind this to get it right.
If you're driving on the Parkway (a New Jersey toll highway), there are plenty of places where you can see EZPass pickups buried in the road surface that are nowhere near the toll sites.
Loops in the road surface are a different kind of sensor. Those just count vehicles, and if installed in pairs, measure speed. At least in California, that's where the CALTRANS road data comes from. That's been around since at least the 1980s; LA used to have a cable channel which just showed the freeway status map.
Interestingly, the LA area and the SF area have quite different privacy policies. Compare Bay Area Fastrak, which is quite reasonable, to LA Metro, which asks "customers for demographic information, including but not limited to, zip code and income level."
XKCD's count of how many times Voyager has left the solar system.
That's a good point. While the US and the UK have had a formal agreement on intelligence sharing since WWII (the UKUSA agreement), they're allies of the US, with a mutual defense treaty (under NATO) with the US.
Israel is not formally an ally of the US. While the US provides "security assistance" to Israel, there's no mutual defense treaty. There was an "exchange of diplomatic notes on mutual defense assistance" in 1952, and there's the Camp David agreement (US, Egypt, Israel) from 1979 which ended the wars between Israel and Egypt. Other assistance from the US is on an ad-hoc basis, and it's mostly money, not troops.
This is significant. When some parties in Israel were talking about bombing Iran, and expecting the US to help, the chairman of the US Joint Chiefs of Staff told Israel that the US would not become involved. Not Congress, not the President, the head of the JCS. No treaty, no support without orders from higher.
OK, let's take a closer look.
The issued patent from the application linked above is US 8,446,248. The claims are quite narrow, because, over five years of rejections and reexaminations, the USPTO examiners found prior art and narrowed the patent coverage.
Back in 2003, Geoffery Landis at NASA (also a visiting professor of aeronautics at MIT and an SF writer with a Hugo) proposed something similar, and that was patented. The NASA patent says "The present inventive technique provides for wireless, charging power and/or primary power to electronic/electrical devices whereby microwave energy is employed. The microwave energy is focused by one or more adaptively-phased microwave array emitters in a power transmitter portion of the system onto a device to be charged. Rectennas within the device to be charged receive and rectify the microwave energy and use it for battery charging and/or for primary power. A locator signal generated by the device to be charged is analyzed by the system to determine the location of the device to be charged relative to the microwave array emitters, permitting the microwave energy to be directly specifically towards the device to be charged.". That's the basic idea here.
The Landis patent gives a much clearer idea of the concept. It's simply a steerable microwave beam aimed at the receiver. That's known to transmit power just fine. You could do that with a mechanically steered dish. There are some tricks; one is noticing backscatter from the beam, indicating that it's hitting something that isn't a receiver, so stop aiming there. Another is finding the receiver with low power, then upping the power once on target. Much of this is borrowed from the solar power satellite scheme of the 1980s, with ground based "rectennas", which is why this came out of NASA.
There's a safety issue. The US safety standard for microwave exposure is 10 mW/cm^2 for periods of 0.1-hour or more. To get 1 watt at the receiver, it's going to take maybe 10 watts of output at the transmitter. If the emitting area is about two square meters, as in his demo, the energy is spread out over 20,000 cm^2, so there's only about 0.5mW/cm^2 in front of the transmitter array. That's OK.
At the receiver end, all that power is supposed to be focused to a point, or at least down to the size of his little box. That should focus at least 1 or 2 watts onto his little box, with maybe 25cm^2 area. Now we're up to 40 to 80 mW/cm^2, which is well above the safe limit for prolonged exposure. Since you may be wearing or carrying that little box, and it's going to take a while to charge the battery, this isn't too good.
It's a nice demo, but a system which focuses microwave power beams on handheld devices probably isn't going to be acceptable. What it looks like he did here was to gang together a lot of off the shelf devices which individually can't emit enough power to be dangerous, but when combined into a phased array put too much power in one place.
It's one of the old monopoly laws. Another one would be movie theaters. They used to be owned almost entirely by movie studios. That is, Universal, etc would literally own the theater.
It's similar. Universal, though, was never rich enough to own its own theaters. There are still lots of old theaters around the us labelled Paramount, Warner, and Fox. There's still a Laemmle Theatre art-house chain in LA, a spin-off from Universal in 1939 when the Laemmles were kicked out of the company.
Texas is trying to convince Space-X to build a launch facility near Brownsville, TX. Someone may have forgotten that Elon Musk runs both Space-X and Tesla.
If it is now merely feeding the pool as one of multiple sources, then it's OK. If anything is directly exposed to raw rdrand output, something is very wrong.
That's exactly right. Even if the hardware RdRand has a "work reduction factor" built in, i.e. it's not as random as it seems to be, there's some randomness there, and it can be fed into the entropy pool along with other sources of randomness.
Randomness sources inside deterministic computers are scarce. Disk timing, clock jitter, network arrival times, etc. are useful, but generate random bits at a low rate. Thus, "/dev/random" will block if not enough random bits are currently available. This usually isn't a problem, but if every TCP connection you open is SSL and you need random bits for key generation, the supply could run out. If, say, you wanted to fill a DVD with random bits for a one-time key system, /dev/random would probably be a bottleneck. Is Torvalds making that argument?
There's another application of randomness. The only known theoretically unbreakable cryptosystem is a one-time key system where 1) the keys are truly random and 2) are used only once, 3) then destroyed. One time key systems have been broken in practice due to violations of each of those rules. Venona violated rule 1 and 2, and there have been spy cases where the spy hadn't destroyed their keying material when captured.
A reasonable cryptosystem is to make two identical DVDs of random bits. Each party has a DVD, and they can communicate as many bits as they have random bits in common. This is a pain, but it works. Such systems are used by the US for embassy-to-capital links. In the paper-tape era, this was a huge pain, but a DVD can store enough data for a thousand hours of phone calls.
Any reduction in randomness in a one-time key system makes it very vulnerable. It doesn't take much to provide an entry into the cypher.
Either that or coincidentally this was just about the time when effective computer vision techniques (frame decompression->frame stabilization->multi-gaussian/edge/optical flow->motion map recognizer->Useful meta data) could run at decent framerates without very large and expensive hardware.
No, the vision systems used were much dumber than that. The vision system in the winning Stanford car really answered only one question - is the distant part of the road, beyond LIDAR range, like the near part of the road, where a full 3D profile was available from the LIDAR units? If so, and the near part of the road looked flat and safe, the vehicle could speed up and out-drive its LIDAR range. In difficult areas, almost all vehicles relied on LIDAR data.