There is no one who can freeze your account. There is no one who can set limits on your account. There is no one who can control who you can send money to. There is no one who can turn up the mint rate and destabilize the market.
If only that were true. Ask the users with thousands of dollars stuck in Mt. Gox, or worse, one of the "exchange" or "online wallet" companies that went bust. Sure, you can ship Bitcoins around, but there are serious liquidity problems doing anything with them.
No, that's what it costs to play in this game. There are theoretical problems to be solved, for which solutions may not be known. There are also many practical problems to be solved in mechanical design, actuation, and electronics. Those will yield to money and routine engineering effort.
That was the lesson of the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2003-2005. Until then, the typical robotics project was a professor and three to five grad students, and it took years to make minor advances. DARPA had been putting money into automatic driving since the 1960s without getting anything useful out. Dr. Tony Tether, the DARPA director at the time, decided that academic robotics needed a major kick in the ass. The DARPA Grand Challenge did that.
It wasn't the $1M prize which caused major universities to devote big chunks of their CS departments to that project. It was the threat that if they didn't do well, their DARPA funding would be cut off for failure. Fear worked as a motivator.
A side effect of the 2003-2005 Grand Challenge was that many key components, like integrated INS/GPS combos and LIDAR systems, became smaller, cheaper, and better, now that there was some demand. The original CMU INS/GPS combo took 9U of rack space and required air conditioning. Three years later, you could get that in a box the size of a thick book.
That's a nice piece of machinery. Much good mechanical engineering went into that robot. It took $120 million to get to this point, via BigDog and the LS3. DARPA is really throwing money at this, and it's working.
The DARPA competition in a simulator in August indicates that the perception software is getting reasonably good, but the movement software from the teams still sucks. The best team had 12 falls in simulation. My guess is that the results in December 2013 won't be very impressive, but by round 2, in 2014, the robots will be moving much better.
Teams are provided with a.so file (no source) from Boston Dynamics which allows control of the robot and has some functions for basic walking behavior. But the code Boston Dynamics provides to teams is not the good stuff they use internally.
The government in Beijing has been trying to convert the Cantonese-speaking part of the country (which includes Hong Kong) to Mandarin since Mao's day, without much success. Due to development, internal migration, improved transportation and communications, and pressure from the central government, Mandarin is finally displacing Cantonese in some areas. Shenzhen, the high-tech region near Hong Kong, was mostly using Cantonese two decades ago, but is now mostly Mandarin.
Sonic.net does not have data transfer caps. You buy a bandwidth range, and you can use it all 24/7 if you want. Here's what Sonic's CEO says: "My opinion is that caps make little technical sense, and I believe that the fundamental reason for capping is to prevent disruption of the television entertainment business model that feeds the TV screens in most households."
Sonic is one of the few remaining independent US ISPs. They have to lease local circuits from AT&T, but they buy their own upstream bandwidth. In a few areas they have their own fiber to the home, and there they offer gigabit connections for $70 a month.
Look at the video around 1:54, where Musk is saying "go in there and do what you need to do". But all the video actually shows is someone spinning the model around and using a visual cutting plane to display cross sections. At no point in that video is new geometry created.
What I was expecting to see was a breakthrough in how to do engineering design in 3D. It's not there.
Back in the late 1980s, Autodesk built a virtual reality system as an experiment in CAD. They got about as far as Musk, although at lower resolution - you could look at models and manipulate them with a gloves-and-goggles interface, but trying to draw surfaces in free space was really hard. Some people can do it. They can also do clay models freehand. Today, there's Autodesk Mudbox, a 3D sculpting tool which is used by pros who can visualize clearly and in detail in 3D. Watch this video to see one at work. That's impressive work. Now see something similar done with 3D input devices. It's like trying to sculpt while wearing oven mittens, and the results are awful.
Somebody will eventually make this work, but the computer, not the human, will be doing most of the design.
For open source systems, the person or persons who inserted the weak code should be identified and kicked off the project. It may just be incompetence, but that's a good reason to keep them out of security-critical areas.
Weak keys don't just let the NSA in. They let the People's Liberation Army of China in, too.
Bitcoin is a tiny flicker of a spark in the dark rotten world of finance...
No, Bitcoin is a slimeball magnet. Most "Bitcoin exchanges" turned out to be ripoff operations. Half of them have gone bust, keeping some or all customer assets. Mt. Gox is having real trouble paying out customer balances; they have at least $4 million in customer funds and stopped paying out US dollars back in June. No "Bitcoin exchange" is registered as a brokerage in any jurisdiction. None publish audited financial statements.
And that's the more legitimate end of the Bitcoin world. It goes downhill from there; the "online wallet" businesses that stole their customers' assets, the various Bitcoin Ponzi schemes, the "mining hardware" vendors with prepaid preorders who never deliver, and the drug dealers on Silk Road.
The lesson of Bitcoin is that anonymous, irrevocable, remote funds transfer is the scammer's dream.
I miss the Usenet too, but its job has been replaced by web forums almost entirely.
Actually, no. The serious discussions on language standardization still take place on Usenet. The spammers are all gone. If you want to influence the design of C or C++ or Python or Go, that's the place where it's discussed. The major players are on there.
This is just round one. Samsung also has a flexible display technology, and a patent application for a phone with a flexible display that wraps around the wearer's wrist. That has a lot more promise.
A wristband phone can offer much more vertical space. than a watch-like clunker. Wristbands can be wide or narrow, and can be made to look like jewelry. Twisting your wrist can control scrolling. Much more convenient than carrying a brick in your hand, and doesn't look so dweebish.
This could be the beginning of the end for round-cornered brick smartphones.
San Francisco's hosting of this event was a big mistake. For an event that consists of two boats going round and round some can buoys, it seems to require way too much infrastructure. A mile of the San Francisco waterfront is full of Americas Cup tents, towers, and related crap.
Don't build big convex glass buildings
on
Building Melts Car
·
· Score: 1
This has been a problem with other big convex glass buildings. A hotel in Vegas had this problem.
Another no-no is building tall buildings where the ground floor level is mostly columns with a small enclosed lobby. Some of the air hitting the building face is forced through the columned area. In a windy area this can produce high wind speeds. MIT's Green Building had this problem until more buildings were built around it.
I can give a specific example where a single fresh out of university salesman outsold the other 11 salesman combined. He had been put in a crap area where they thought his average sale would be around $10,000-$30,000. So they put him on a small base salary with a 30% commission. His average sale(he made many) was actually around $500,000 and they refused to pay out the commission. They said it wouldn't be fair to the other salesmen and that he would get the same 6% that they did. Oddly enough he took this for a few years but left in the end.
As the CEO of Avis once said, "That's what you want to happen, stupid."
Something similar happened to Ross Perot at IBM. He was on commission, and one year he made more than the CEO of IBM. Then IBM imposed an annual cap on commissions. He hit his cap in late January, and wondered what to do with the rest of the year. So he started EDS and became a billionaire.
If the system had allowed the elevators to respond would the plane have stalled and made the problem even worse?
From what I have read on this it looks like the pilots put the plane into essentially a non-win situation.
Yes, and the pilot was convicted of manslaughter. Flying at minimum airspeed at idle power at 100 feet altitude was just stupid. With passengers, it's criminal. The Airbus control system managed to bring the plane down smoothly even after running into trees. Other than a handicapped boy, a young girl who was unable to remove her seatbelt, and a woman who tried to get the girl out, all passengers and crew survived.
John Craven. author of Ocean Engineering Systems, MIT Press. Chief Scientist US Navy Special Projects Office, project manager on Polaris submarine program, SEALAB, Marine Affairs Coordinator for Hawaii, Dean of marine programs at U. Hawaii, etc. Yes, a wizard.
Wave power has been talked up for years. No project is beyond the prototype stage, even the one in Scotland, and none of them are profitable. It's just not a very good idea.
Anything with moving parts at the ocean surface is going to be a maintenance headache. "Remember that the free surface is neither ocean nor air and that man cannot walk upon it nor will equipments remain stable in its presence. So design your equipments that they tarry not long and that they need neither servicing nor repair at this unseemly interface." - MIT/U.S. Navy ocean engineering expert. Most wave power schemes involve many big mechanical devices at the ocean surface. Fully submerged equipment or windmills above the ocean work better.
Tidal power is only feasible at a few locations worldwide. I read a study once that found ten potential sites in the world. The ideal site for maximum power output is the Bay of Fundy, but it's a long way from potential loads. Also, the way to get the most power out is to build a dam and hydroelectric plant, which totally changes the ecology in the area.
This isn't new. It's been that way in high-energy physics since A-bombs stopped being cool. After WWII, there was a huge interest in getting into physics, and large numbers of PhD physicists were produced. The U.S. Government hired a lot of them. Nuclear weapon design became excessively fancy, much to the annoyance of today's workers who have to maintain the old bombs.
Then, after the US had produced enough bombs for the next few world wars, the nuclear establishment wound down. Los Alamos got into all sorts of strange non-nuclear stuff like chaos theory. Lawrence Livermore became a senior activity center for aging physicists. The average age of the membership in the American Physical Society went up by six months each year. That was back in the 1990s. It hasn't gotten better.
When the USSR wound down, there was a US effort to find jobs for old Soviet nuclear experts. The worry was that they'd go to work for somebody who still wanted to build a bomb or two. Some came to the US.
I thought dotless domains were coming, and put full support for dotless domains in SiteTruth.
There was a long discussion of this on the Mozilla developers mailing list. There are some dotless domains right now. A few country codes will resolve to an IP address, and one or two actually have a web site there. Try ac
A lot of software, some of it very low level, mishandles dotless domains. If you look up "ac" in DNS, you'll get a valid IP address. Browsers, though, usually try using it as a search keyword, or try it with ".com" suffixed. There was a concern that if every word typed into a browser's input box had to be checked for being a TLD domain name, it would overload the root servers and delay search responses. DNS TLD "no finds" are relatively expensive operations.
Down at the "getaddrinfo()" level, there's a known bug. There's an exploit for this that drives traffic to subdomains of "com.com", which is set up so that all subdomains of.com.com" are full of ad pages. Right now this is just annoying, but it could be exploited in more ways if single-component domain names became popular.
That's really hard to fix, because it's in the C library on most machines. Applications would have to be rebuilt.
If you put a "." at the end of a domain name, it's "rooted", and local lookups on your local network do not apply. Type "ac." into your browser's input box, and you'll get some domain registrar who bought the Ascension Island TLD.
Slashdot Mirror
There is no one who can freeze your account. There is no one who can set limits on your account. There is no one who can control who you can send money to. There is no one who can turn up the mint rate and destabilize the market.
If only that were true. Ask the users with thousands of dollars stuck in Mt. Gox, or worse, one of the "exchange" or "online wallet" companies that went bust. Sure, you can ship Bitcoins around, but there are serious liquidity problems doing anything with them.
Boston Dynamics is a black hole for funding.
No, that's what it costs to play in this game. There are theoretical problems to be solved, for which solutions may not be known. There are also many practical problems to be solved in mechanical design, actuation, and electronics. Those will yield to money and routine engineering effort.
That was the lesson of the DARPA Grand Challenge in 2003-2005. Until then, the typical robotics project was a professor and three to five grad students, and it took years to make minor advances. DARPA had been putting money into automatic driving since the 1960s without getting anything useful out. Dr. Tony Tether, the DARPA director at the time, decided that academic robotics needed a major kick in the ass. The DARPA Grand Challenge did that.
It wasn't the $1M prize which caused major universities to devote big chunks of their CS departments to that project. It was the threat that if they didn't do well, their DARPA funding would be cut off for failure. Fear worked as a motivator.
A side effect of the 2003-2005 Grand Challenge was that many key components, like integrated INS/GPS combos and LIDAR systems, became smaller, cheaper, and better, now that there was some demand. The original CMU INS/GPS combo took 9U of rack space and required air conditioning. Three years later, you could get that in a box the size of a thick book.
That's a nice piece of machinery. Much good mechanical engineering went into that robot. It took $120 million to get to this point, via BigDog and the LS3. DARPA is really throwing money at this, and it's working.
The DARPA competition in a simulator in August indicates that the perception software is getting reasonably good, but the movement software from the teams still sucks. The best team had 12 falls in simulation. My guess is that the results in December 2013 won't be very impressive, but by round 2, in 2014, the robots will be moving much better.
Teams are provided with a .so file (no source) from Boston Dynamics which allows control of the robot and has some functions for basic walking behavior. But the code Boston Dynamics provides to teams is not the good stuff they use internally.
The government in Beijing has been trying to convert the Cantonese-speaking part of the country (which includes Hong Kong) to Mandarin since Mao's day, without much success. Due to development, internal migration, improved transportation and communications, and pressure from the central government, Mandarin is finally displacing Cantonese in some areas. Shenzhen, the high-tech region near Hong Kong, was mostly using Cantonese two decades ago, but is now mostly Mandarin.
Sonic.net does not have data transfer caps. You buy a bandwidth range, and you can use it all 24/7 if you want. Here's what Sonic's CEO says: "My opinion is that caps make little technical sense, and I believe that the fundamental reason for capping is to prevent disruption of the television entertainment business model that feeds the TV screens in most households."
Sonic is one of the few remaining independent US ISPs. They have to lease local circuits from AT&T, but they buy their own upstream bandwidth. In a few areas they have their own fiber to the home, and there they offer gigabit connections for $70 a month.
Mod parent up.
Look at the video around 1:54, where Musk is saying "go in there and do what you need to do". But all the video actually shows is someone spinning the model around and using a visual cutting plane to display cross sections. At no point in that video is new geometry created. What I was expecting to see was a breakthrough in how to do engineering design in 3D. It's not there.
Back in the late 1980s, Autodesk built a virtual reality system as an experiment in CAD. They got about as far as Musk, although at lower resolution - you could look at models and manipulate them with a gloves-and-goggles interface, but trying to draw surfaces in free space was really hard. Some people can do it. They can also do clay models freehand. Today, there's Autodesk Mudbox, a 3D sculpting tool which is used by pros who can visualize clearly and in detail in 3D. Watch this video to see one at work. That's impressive work. Now see something similar done with 3D input devices. It's like trying to sculpt while wearing oven mittens, and the results are awful.
Somebody will eventually make this work, but the computer, not the human, will be doing most of the design.
There are a surprisingly large number of public key generators with weak random number generators:
And those are the ones we know about.
For open source systems, the person or persons who inserted the weak code should be identified and kicked off the project. It may just be incompetence, but that's a good reason to keep them out of security-critical areas.
Weak keys don't just let the NSA in. They let the People's Liberation Army of China in, too.
Bitcoin is a tiny flicker of a spark in the dark rotten world of finance...
No, Bitcoin is a slimeball magnet. Most "Bitcoin exchanges" turned out to be ripoff operations. Half of them have gone bust, keeping some or all customer assets. Mt. Gox is having real trouble paying out customer balances; they have at least $4 million in customer funds and stopped paying out US dollars back in June. No "Bitcoin exchange" is registered as a brokerage in any jurisdiction. None publish audited financial statements.
And that's the more legitimate end of the Bitcoin world. It goes downhill from there; the "online wallet" businesses that stole their customers' assets, the various Bitcoin Ponzi schemes, the "mining hardware" vendors with prepaid preorders who never deliver, and the drug dealers on Silk Road.
The lesson of Bitcoin is that anonymous, irrevocable, remote funds transfer is the scammer's dream.
I miss the Usenet too, but its job has been replaced by web forums almost entirely.
Actually, no. The serious discussions on language standardization still take place on Usenet. The spammers are all gone. If you want to influence the design of C or C++ or Python or Go, that's the place where it's discussed. The major players are on there.
it's been decades since we've had to carry a brick-like phone
Most smartphones are a boring rectangular solid with rounded corners - a brick.
This is just round one. Samsung also has a flexible display technology, and a patent application for a phone with a flexible display that wraps around the wearer's wrist. That has a lot more promise.
A wristband phone can offer much more vertical space. than a watch-like clunker. Wristbands can be wide or narrow, and can be made to look like jewelry. Twisting your wrist can control scrolling. Much more convenient than carrying a brick in your hand, and doesn't look so dweebish.
This could be the beginning of the end for round-cornered brick smartphones.
There's still Usenet. Peer to peer, fully distributed, works with multiple clients, no ads, fully operational.
San Francisco's hosting of this event was a big mistake. For an event that consists of two boats going round and round some can buoys, it seems to require way too much infrastructure. A mile of the San Francisco waterfront is full of Americas Cup tents, towers, and related crap.
This has been a problem with other big convex glass buildings. A hotel in Vegas had this problem.
Another no-no is building tall buildings where the ground floor level is mostly columns with a small enclosed lobby. Some of the air hitting the building face is forced through the columned area. In a windy area this can produce high wind speeds. MIT's Green Building had this problem until more buildings were built around it.
"We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas." - Steve Jobs.
Well, sometimes that comes back and bites you.
"the data will bolster VirnetX's arguments that its patents are technologically significant, hard to work around, and deserve a high royalty rate."
None of this would have happened if IPv6 had been deployed by now, and everything had a static IP address. Then peer to peer services just work.
I can give a specific example where a single fresh out of university salesman outsold the other 11 salesman combined. He had been put in a crap area where they thought his average sale would be around $10,000-$30,000. So they put him on a small base salary with a 30% commission. His average sale(he made many) was actually around $500,000 and they refused to pay out the commission. They said it wouldn't be fair to the other salesmen and that he would get the same 6% that they did. Oddly enough he took this for a few years but left in the end.
As the CEO of Avis once said, "That's what you want to happen, stupid."
Something similar happened to Ross Perot at IBM. He was on commission, and one year he made more than the CEO of IBM. Then IBM imposed an annual cap on commissions. He hit his cap in late January, and wondered what to do with the rest of the year. So he started EDS and became a billionaire.
Exercise and diet weren't cool when Boomers were growing up, and it shows.
You missed the early 1980s, when everybody did aerobics.
In the 1960s, you almost never saw oinkers of high school age. Now they're common.
This sort of view can result in writing horrifically inefficient code that is layered on top of other code that you don't understand at all.
See the last Java stack backtrace that appeared in your browser when some server-side code aborted.
This is an automated form of sales training. That could be quite marketable.
Read up on the legal issue of a "battle of the forms".
If the system had allowed the elevators to respond would the plane have stalled and made the problem even worse?
From what I have read on this it looks like the pilots put the plane into essentially a non-win situation.
Yes, and the pilot was convicted of manslaughter. Flying at minimum airspeed at idle power at 100 feet altitude was just stupid. With passengers, it's criminal. The Airbus control system managed to bring the plane down smoothly even after running into trees. Other than a handicapped boy, a young girl who was unable to remove her seatbelt, and a woman who tried to get the girl out, all passengers and crew survived.
Are you sure that wasn't said by a wizard?
John Craven. author of Ocean Engineering Systems, MIT Press. Chief Scientist US Navy Special Projects Office, project manager on Polaris submarine program, SEALAB, Marine Affairs Coordinator for Hawaii, Dean of marine programs at U. Hawaii, etc. Yes, a wizard.
Wave power has been talked up for years. No project is beyond the prototype stage, even the one in Scotland, and none of them are profitable. It's just not a very good idea.
Anything with moving parts at the ocean surface is going to be a maintenance headache. "Remember that the free surface is neither ocean nor air and that man cannot walk upon it nor will equipments remain stable in its presence. So design your equipments that they tarry not long and that they need neither servicing nor repair at this unseemly interface." - MIT/U.S. Navy ocean engineering expert. Most wave power schemes involve many big mechanical devices at the ocean surface. Fully submerged equipment or windmills above the ocean work better.
Tidal power is only feasible at a few locations worldwide. I read a study once that found ten potential sites in the world. The ideal site for maximum power output is the Bay of Fundy, but it's a long way from potential loads. Also, the way to get the most power out is to build a dam and hydroelectric plant, which totally changes the ecology in the area.
This isn't new. It's been that way in high-energy physics since A-bombs stopped being cool. After WWII, there was a huge interest in getting into physics, and large numbers of PhD physicists were produced. The U.S. Government hired a lot of them. Nuclear weapon design became excessively fancy, much to the annoyance of today's workers who have to maintain the old bombs.
Then, after the US had produced enough bombs for the next few world wars, the nuclear establishment wound down. Los Alamos got into all sorts of strange non-nuclear stuff like chaos theory. Lawrence Livermore became a senior activity center for aging physicists. The average age of the membership in the American Physical Society went up by six months each year. That was back in the 1990s. It hasn't gotten better.
When the USSR wound down, there was a US effort to find jobs for old Soviet nuclear experts. The worry was that they'd go to work for somebody who still wanted to build a bomb or two. Some came to the US.
I thought dotless domains were coming, and put full support for dotless domains in SiteTruth.
There was a long discussion of this on the Mozilla developers mailing list. There are some dotless domains right now. A few country codes will resolve to an IP address, and one or two actually have a web site there. Try ac
A lot of software, some of it very low level, mishandles dotless domains. If you look up "ac" in DNS, you'll get a valid IP address. Browsers, though, usually try using it as a search keyword, or try it with ".com" suffixed. There was a concern that if every word typed into a browser's input box had to be checked for being a TLD domain name, it would overload the root servers and delay search responses. DNS TLD "no finds" are relatively expensive operations.
Down at the "getaddrinfo()" level, there's a known bug. There's an exploit for this that drives traffic to subdomains of "com.com", which is set up so that all subdomains of .com.com" are full of ad pages. Right now this is just annoying, but it could be exploited in more ways if single-component domain names became popular.
That's really hard to fix, because it's in the C library on most machines. Applications would have to be rebuilt.
If you put a "." at the end of a domain name, it's "rooted", and local lookups on your local network do not apply. Type "ac." into your browser's input box, and you'll get some domain registrar who bought the Ascension Island TLD.
ICANN actually did something right.