Yes, this is a son of the old "company store" scam. I just looked at the California Labor Code section on this:
212. (a) No person, or agent or officer thereof, shall issue in payment of wages due, or to become due, or as an advance on wages to
be earned:
(1) Any order, check, draft, note, memorandum, or other
acknowledgment of indebtedness, unless it is negotiable and payable
in cash, on demand, without discount, at some established place of
business in the state, the name and address of which must appear on
the instrument, and at the time of its issuance and for a reasonable
time thereafter, which must be at least 30 days, the maker or drawer
has sufficient funds in, or credit, arrangement, or understanding
with the drawee for its payment.
(2) Any scrip, coupon, cards, or other thing redeemable, in
merchandise or purporting to be payable or redeemable otherwise than
in money. ...
(c) Notwithstanding paragraph (1) of subdivision (a), if the
drawee is a bank, the bank's address need not appear on the
instrument and, in that case, the instrument shall be negotiable and
payable in cash, on demand, without discount, at any place of
business of the drawee chosen by the person entitled to enforce the
instrument.
So California law prohibits the "company store" scam - employers can't pay with a "gift card" that doesn't convert to cash. And if they pay using a bank, the check or card must be cashable, without fees, at any branch of that bank. The problem is ATM fees for off-network ATMs, which have become a huge profit center for banks.
If the card is from a bank with a huge number of branches and lots of ATMs, it may not be too bad. If it's from some second-tier bank, it's a rip-off.
I haven't seen this at a Century theater in Silicon Valley in the last year, and I see about two movies a month. Even at the Mountain View theater complex, which is surrounded by Google's campus, it doesn't happen. Century runs two warning messages, a cute one from Sprint ("When you turn off your phone, does it dream?") and a hard line one from Century ("You will be asked to leave the theater.") I've seen people using a smartphone when they're running commercials (not trailers), before the house lights go down, but not once the theater goes dark.
The Nao is a quite capable little robot. It costs $16,000, though. (There are promotional discounts, developer discounts, academic discounts, etc. But that's the list price.) The lowest priced good humanoid (the Bioloid) is around $1200, so these things are approaching affordability in half-meter size. The low-end robots use improved R/C servos (ones that talk on a bus and provide useful feedback info). Nao has custom mechanics and even a 3-fingered hand.
The locomotion control of the little guys is still rather disappointing. They're mostly still at the "walking on big feet" level. The actuators and inertial sensors are good enough for dynamic running, and there's enough processing power, but the control theory and software aren't there yet.
It used to be that if you went to a major academic robotics lab, none of the robots were running. Now, there will usually be something going.
Are there actually any big clubs left in SF? I mean warehouse big, not like big for a coffeeshop or something.
Movie-theater-big like Ruby Skye, yes. Warehouse-big like King St. Garage (closed 2002), no. All the vacant warehouses in SOMA were converted into dot-coms or torn down for new buildings. Oakland has some warehouse-sized nightclubs, but those have too many shootings.
San Francisco is not as "fun" as it used to be. Higher rents drove the artists out a decade ago. SF has about 8,000 homeless people, out of a population of only 750,000. Most of the bookstores have closed. The nightclub scene is slowly being crushed by gentrification.
The financial district is struggling to stay relevant. The big SF banks either tanked or merged with banks elsewhere.
AltaVista was a huge innovation. Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free. DEC rented the old vacant telephone building behind the Walgreens in downtown Palo Alto. (That building now houses the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which at one time was the major Silicon Valley switching node for the Internet.) They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines. The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.
That was a huge change from previous data center construction. Until then, most data centers had raised floors and nice cabinets. Telephone central offices, though, had tall open racks firmly bolted to the building, with cable trays overhead. AltaVista was the first big data center built that way. Telcos were better at cable management than computer services in those days. Using telco-style cable management turned out to be a huge win.
You are really narrow-sighted about the concept of cloud simulation. Yes, it's a tool to host the VRC. It also has many other benefits for education at the highschool and college level, and hosting other educational competitions. With a little spit and polish it could be a be a mechanism to crowd-source robot design, and environment building. I haven't even touch upon the concept of running many simulation simultaneously as a prediction tool for physical robots.
I would love a cloud based simulation solution for development purposes. Please, spare me from the tedium of install and maintaining software. All I want to do is get work done.
Just because it can run on Amazon AWS doesn't mean it's free. Each job running in simulation ties up three large AWS machines and one small one. You'd have to rent machine time from Amazon and load up your own instances. There's no free world simulator to connect to. This thing takes a lot of engine behind it.
Actually, they're currently working to incorporate Simbody, a simulation engine designed for engineering applications. That should provide much better realism.
SimBody, like its predecessor, SD/Fast, is an excellent system for implementing Featherstone's method for articulated systems. The big market for it is protein folding, for which a rigid-body Newtonian model is apparently good enough.
I'm looking forward to seeing how they handle collisions, contacts, and friction. That's the hard part.
What DARPA is providing for Gazebo is adult supervision. They're paying for getting the bugs fixed. Gazebo has been around for years, and like most open-source projects with modest user bases, it sort of worked. Now it's finally getting fixed. It still only installs easily on Ubuntu 12.04, has tons of dependencies including limitations on supported graphics cards, has lots of bugs, and way too many configuration files. But it's now usable.
The "cloud" business is merely a way to make the DARPA competition honest. For competition purposes, the simulator runs in an Amazon AWS instance controlled by DARPA, with the simulated robot controlled through an API that only provides information a real robot would provide. The robot control programs written by competitors can't see the map of the world; all it gets is simulated vision and LIDAR data. It's a lot like the server/client relationship of an MMORPG. Each user has their own server instance; the world is not, as yet, shared.
The "cloud" is not otherwise necessary, or even desirable. For development purposes, you'd usually run the simulator and the control programs on the same machine, or at least a local machine.
A big problem with Gazebo is that the physics engine is only game-quality. Here it matters, because foot/ground contact is what supports the simulated robot, and most game simulators don't do contacts very well. Gazebo is in the process of switching from ODE to Bullet, which should help.
The point of this is to improve performance for tiny HTTP transactions. The need for all those tiny transactions comes from ads and tracking data and their associated tiny bits of Javascript and CSS. The useful content is usually one big TCP send.
I've been a TechShop member for years. I've been a member of Hacker Dojo. I've visited Noisebridge.
These places are fun, but they're not changing the world. It's good to have more people using tools. But the work there isn't that impressive.
TechShop is basically a workshop. Lots of people make furniture, repair their bikes, or build some cool toy. It's not a startup incubator. There are startups who send their people to Techshop to use the machines, but they're not based at TechShop. Most of the people programming Ardunos are just making lights blink. There are robots, but they're at the FIRST level, not anything cutting-edge. (The Willow Robotics people, who do cutting-edge work, do stop by now and then.)
Hacker Dojo is more of a shared business workspace. People work there. Some rent office space, others just bring laptops. Hacker Dojo's main resource is tables, power outlets, and good WiFi bandwidth. And vending machines. They do have a small machine shop, though.
This is about Google eliminating non-Google adult ads on Blogger sites. A site has to have both adult content and adult ads to have a problem. Presumably the adult ads are not coming from Google.
Wordpress doesn't allow third-party advertising on their hosted blogs at all. Blogger probably does only for historical reasons. Google may be planning to transition all Blogger sites to Google ads only. Their pitch to new Blogger users suggests that new sites should only have Google ads.
If this bothers you, buy commercial hosting. It's really cheap to host a blog. Less than $10 per month.
Wireless portable devices should be totally wireless. No holes, no connectors, and waterproof. Today's smartphones have radios for GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Some have near-field communications and wireless charging. There's no need for wires.
I'm amazed that Apple hasn't done this, with their fetish for clean industrial design.
(Also, the three competing wireless charging standards need to be reduced to one. Then we'll see more public wireless charging pads and tray tables.)
When lower Manhattan flooded last winter, the systems behind the exchanges were just fine. None of them are actually in Manhattan. (The big NASDAQ billboard at Times Square is just advertising. There is no NASDAQ facility at that location.) NASDAQ doesn't even have a trading floor. NYSE/Euronext was prepared to shift trading control to Chicago, where they also own Arca, another exchange.
The Wall Street firms panicked at the plan for trading going on without them. They demanded that the exchanges be shut down until the firms could get back up. That was done.
The real question is whether the electrical interface is proprietary. Worst case, there's an encrypted handshake, like Nintendo cartridges or HDCP. But probably not.
This sounds like a MongoDB ad. There's no particular reason that server-side Javascript should use MongoDB. There's "node.js" support for most databases.
So basically you've admitted to spying on innocent people for years, in who-knows-how-big of a trolling operation, and you finally caught two small fish who so far have done nothing more than "shown an interest" in something that might count as illegal?
Right. Most FBI-reported "terrorist plots" are like that, especially the ones that involve informers. They get a report of some loser mouthing off about blowing up something, and they investigate. They get some informer close to the jerk and encourage the wannabe to push their plan forward, often providing resources to help. Then they arrest the loser and announce they've foiled a "terrorist plot".
The most notable example of this kind of FBI activity was the "terrorist plot to blow up the Sears Tower" in 2006. Even the FBI Director said it was "more aspirational than operational".
When Al-Queda set up the 9/11 attacks, they had good operational security. Nobody talked in public about the plan, and many of the participants didn't know the details until hours before takeoff. What the FBI is doing wouldn't stop a real terrorist organization.
The inability to re-clock the GPU frequencies and voltages dynamically based upon load has been a major limiting factor for open-source AMD users where laptops have been warm and there is diminished battery power.
A compute rate that varies with temperature would seem to be a bug, rather than a feature. I don't want a GPU that does that. I need repeatable Gazebo simulations.
It's ridiculously insecure and a horrible idea to attach your name to a website. That's just asking for nonstop trouble, spam, scam calls, scam e-mails, domain scams, threats, etc.
What trouble? My real name and phone have been on all my WHOIS records for two decades. There's some spam, but the filters stop that. Maybe two phone calls a year. One threat in the last decade, from a scammer. He's no longer in business.
If you're running a business, you're supposed to disclose the actual name and address from which the business is conducted, at least in California and in the European Union. "Private registration" is a slimeball indicator for a site with any commercial purpose.
We're finding enough potentially habitable exoplanets that it's worth sending messages to them. Some might have a civilization. It's time for SETI to start transmitting.
This is quite possible. Arecebo could communicate with a similar installation across the galaxy.
Right. Google Shopping was originally a price comparison service. There was no charge for being listed. Then it was changed to an paid ad service. All the links on it changed to Google ad links. Our Ad Limiter browser add-on, which hides all but one Google ad per search result, then started limiting the number of shopping results displayed. We finally allowed more ads to show through on explicit Google shopping pages.
Now, Google Shopping results have changed again, so that they look like real search results. They even have additional Google ads, with the light tan background. But in reality, every result on a Google Shopping page is a paid ad.
Google Voice is just the old Grand Central service. Google has done very little to it since they bought the company.
It's horribly inefficient of network bandwidth. You have to read several megabytes of data to find out that you have no new messages.
The phone numbers used are purchased from some third-tier phone reseller that doesn't have good access to the US phone number database. So some carriers don't recognize Google Voice numbers as accepting SMS.
The interface to the service uses both XML and JSON on the same page, and any program that talks to it must parse both. "Conversations" have unique IDs, but individual messages do not, and it's tough to extract new messages exactly once. You have to page through screen after screen of stored messages, and explicitly archive inactive conversations to declutter the output.
All those problems have been outstanding for years.
If you want to deal with phone and SMS messages from a program, look at Twilio. It's not free, but it actually works.
Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run?
Pretty much, yes. What's going on inside the reactor vessel hasn't changed much in fifty years. None of the more exotic designs has been much of a success. If anything goes wrong with a new design years downstream, a billion dollar plant may have to be retired early.
What's been learned is that the worst cases designed for fifty years ago weren't bad enough. It's necessary to design for bigger earthquakes, bigger tsunamis, bigger fires, bigger floods, bigger leaks, bigger airplane crashes, and bigger screwups than was thought fifty years ago. (All those things have happened.) This runs up costs. Also, decommissioning a damaged reactor is far more expensive than building it. We still don't have a place to put used fuel rods, either.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is a son of the old "company store" scam. I just looked at the California Labor Code section on this:
212. (a) No person, or agent or officer thereof, shall issue in payment of wages due, or to become due, or as an advance on wages to be earned:
...
(1) Any order, check, draft, note, memorandum, or other acknowledgment of indebtedness, unless it is negotiable and payable in cash, on demand, without discount, at some established place of business in the state, the name and address of which must appear on the instrument, and at the time of its issuance and for a reasonable time thereafter, which must be at least 30 days, the maker or drawer has sufficient funds in, or credit, arrangement, or understanding with the drawee for its payment.
(2) Any scrip, coupon, cards, or other thing redeemable, in merchandise or purporting to be payable or redeemable otherwise than in money.
(c) Notwithstanding paragraph (1) of subdivision (a), if the drawee is a bank, the bank's address need not appear on the instrument and, in that case, the instrument shall be negotiable and payable in cash, on demand, without discount, at any place of business of the drawee chosen by the person entitled to enforce the instrument.
So California law prohibits the "company store" scam - employers can't pay with a "gift card" that doesn't convert to cash. And if they pay using a bank, the check or card must be cashable, without fees, at any branch of that bank. The problem is ATM fees for off-network ATMs, which have become a huge profit center for banks.
If the card is from a bank with a huge number of branches and lots of ATMs, it may not be too bad. If it's from some second-tier bank, it's a rip-off.
I haven't seen this at a Century theater in Silicon Valley in the last year, and I see about two movies a month. Even at the Mountain View theater complex, which is surrounded by Google's campus, it doesn't happen. Century runs two warning messages, a cute one from Sprint ("When you turn off your phone, does it dream?") and a hard line one from Century ("You will be asked to leave the theater.") I've seen people using a smartphone when they're running commercials (not trailers), before the house lights go down, but not once the theater goes dark.
The Nao is a quite capable little robot. It costs $16,000, though. (There are promotional discounts, developer discounts, academic discounts, etc. But that's the list price.) The lowest priced good humanoid (the Bioloid) is around $1200, so these things are approaching affordability in half-meter size. The low-end robots use improved R/C servos (ones that talk on a bus and provide useful feedback info). Nao has custom mechanics and even a 3-fingered hand.
The locomotion control of the little guys is still rather disappointing. They're mostly still at the "walking on big feet" level. The actuators and inertial sensors are good enough for dynamic running, and there's enough processing power, but the control theory and software aren't there yet.
It used to be that if you went to a major academic robotics lab, none of the robots were running. Now, there will usually be something going.
"Creates a direct connection between your wallet and our bank account."
Are there actually any big clubs left in SF? I mean warehouse big, not like big for a coffeeshop or something.
Movie-theater-big like Ruby Skye, yes. Warehouse-big like King St. Garage (closed 2002), no. All the vacant warehouses in SOMA were converted into dot-coms or torn down for new buildings. Oakland has some warehouse-sized nightclubs, but those have too many shootings.
San Francisco is not as "fun" as it used to be. Higher rents drove the artists out a decade ago. SF has about 8,000 homeless people, out of a population of only 750,000. Most of the bookstores have closed. The nightclub scene is slowly being crushed by gentrification.
The financial district is struggling to stay relevant. The big SF banks either tanked or merged with banks elsewhere.
AltaVista was a huge innovation. Nobody at the time thought that someone could provide a search service for the entire internet for free. DEC rented the old vacant telephone building behind the Walgreens in downtown Palo Alto. (That building now houses the Palo Alto Internet Exchange, which at one time was the major Silicon Valley switching node for the Internet.) They installed DEC Alpha rack-mounted machines. The whole thing was a demo of DEC Alpha technology, to show that a large number of DEC machines could do things no mainframe could.
That was a huge change from previous data center construction. Until then, most data centers had raised floors and nice cabinets. Telephone central offices, though, had tall open racks firmly bolted to the building, with cable trays overhead. AltaVista was the first big data center built that way. Telcos were better at cable management than computer services in those days. Using telco-style cable management turned out to be a huge win.
You are really narrow-sighted about the concept of cloud simulation. Yes, it's a tool to host the VRC. It also has many other benefits for education at the highschool and college level, and hosting other educational competitions. With a little spit and polish it could be a be a mechanism to crowd-source robot design, and environment building. I haven't even touch upon the concept of running many simulation simultaneously as a prediction tool for physical robots.
I would love a cloud based simulation solution for development purposes. Please, spare me from the tedium of install and maintaining software. All I want to do is get work done.
Just because it can run on Amazon AWS doesn't mean it's free. Each job running in simulation ties up three large AWS machines and one small one. You'd have to rent machine time from Amazon and load up your own instances. There's no free world simulator to connect to. This thing takes a lot of engine behind it.
Actually, they're currently working to incorporate Simbody, a simulation engine designed for engineering applications. That should provide much better realism.
SimBody, like its predecessor, SD/Fast, is an excellent system for implementing Featherstone's method for articulated systems. The big market for it is protein folding, for which a rigid-body Newtonian model is apparently good enough.
I'm looking forward to seeing how they handle collisions, contacts, and friction. That's the hard part.
What DARPA is providing for Gazebo is adult supervision. They're paying for getting the bugs fixed. Gazebo has been around for years, and like most open-source projects with modest user bases, it sort of worked. Now it's finally getting fixed. It still only installs easily on Ubuntu 12.04, has tons of dependencies including limitations on supported graphics cards, has lots of bugs, and way too many configuration files. But it's now usable.
The "cloud" business is merely a way to make the DARPA competition honest. For competition purposes, the simulator runs in an Amazon AWS instance controlled by DARPA, with the simulated robot controlled through an API that only provides information a real robot would provide. The robot control programs written by competitors can't see the map of the world; all it gets is simulated vision and LIDAR data. It's a lot like the server/client relationship of an MMORPG. Each user has their own server instance; the world is not, as yet, shared.
The "cloud" is not otherwise necessary, or even desirable. For development purposes, you'd usually run the simulator and the control programs on the same machine, or at least a local machine.
A big problem with Gazebo is that the physics engine is only game-quality. Here it matters, because foot/ground contact is what supports the simulated robot, and most game simulators don't do contacts very well. Gazebo is in the process of switching from ODE to Bullet, which should help.
The point of this is to improve performance for tiny HTTP transactions. The need for all those tiny transactions comes from ads and tracking data and their associated tiny bits of Javascript and CSS. The useful content is usually one big TCP send.
Blocking of all known tracking systems is a simpler solution.
I've been a TechShop member for years. I've been a member of Hacker Dojo. I've visited Noisebridge.
These places are fun, but they're not changing the world. It's good to have more people using tools. But the work there isn't that impressive.
TechShop is basically a workshop. Lots of people make furniture, repair their bikes, or build some cool toy. It's not a startup incubator. There are startups who send their people to Techshop to use the machines, but they're not based at TechShop. Most of the people programming Ardunos are just making lights blink. There are robots, but they're at the FIRST level, not anything cutting-edge. (The Willow Robotics people, who do cutting-edge work, do stop by now and then.)
Hacker Dojo is more of a shared business workspace. People work there. Some rent office space, others just bring laptops. Hacker Dojo's main resource is tables, power outlets, and good WiFi bandwidth. And vending machines. They do have a small machine shop, though.
This is about Google eliminating non-Google adult ads on Blogger sites. A site has to have both adult content and adult ads to have a problem. Presumably the adult ads are not coming from Google.
Wordpress doesn't allow third-party advertising on their hosted blogs at all. Blogger probably does only for historical reasons. Google may be planning to transition all Blogger sites to Google ads only. Their pitch to new Blogger users suggests that new sites should only have Google ads.
If this bothers you, buy commercial hosting. It's really cheap to host a blog. Less than $10 per month.
Wireless portable devices should be totally wireless. No holes, no connectors, and waterproof. Today's smartphones have radios for GSM, WiFi, Bluetooth, and GPS. Some have near-field communications and wireless charging. There's no need for wires.
I'm amazed that Apple hasn't done this, with their fetish for clean industrial design.
(Also, the three competing wireless charging standards need to be reduced to one. Then we'll see more public wireless charging pads and tray tables.)
When lower Manhattan flooded last winter, the systems behind the exchanges were just fine. None of them are actually in Manhattan. (The big NASDAQ billboard at Times Square is just advertising. There is no NASDAQ facility at that location.) NASDAQ doesn't even have a trading floor. NYSE/Euronext was prepared to shift trading control to Chicago, where they also own Arca, another exchange.
The Wall Street firms panicked at the plan for trading going on without them. They demanded that the exchanges be shut down until the firms could get back up. That was done.
The real question is whether the electrical interface is proprietary. Worst case, there's an encrypted handshake, like Nintendo cartridges or HDCP. But probably not.
This sounds like a MongoDB ad. There's no particular reason that server-side Javascript should use MongoDB. There's "node.js" support for most databases.
So basically you've admitted to spying on innocent people for years, in who-knows-how-big of a trolling operation, and you finally caught two small fish who so far have done nothing more than "shown an interest" in something that might count as illegal?
Right. Most FBI-reported "terrorist plots" are like that, especially the ones that involve informers. They get a report of some loser mouthing off about blowing up something, and they investigate. They get some informer close to the jerk and encourage the wannabe to push their plan forward, often providing resources to help. Then they arrest the loser and announce they've foiled a "terrorist plot".
The most notable example of this kind of FBI activity was the "terrorist plot to blow up the Sears Tower" in 2006. Even the FBI Director said it was "more aspirational than operational".
When Al-Queda set up the 9/11 attacks, they had good operational security. Nobody talked in public about the plan, and many of the participants didn't know the details until hours before takeoff. What the FBI is doing wouldn't stop a real terrorist organization.
The inability to re-clock the GPU frequencies and voltages dynamically based upon load has been a major limiting factor for open-source AMD users where laptops have been warm and there is diminished battery power.
A compute rate that varies with temperature would seem to be a bug, rather than a feature. I don't want a GPU that does that. I need repeatable Gazebo simulations.
It's ridiculously insecure and a horrible idea to attach your name to a website. That's just asking for nonstop trouble, spam, scam calls, scam e-mails, domain scams, threats, etc.
What trouble? My real name and phone have been on all my WHOIS records for two decades. There's some spam, but the filters stop that. Maybe two phone calls a year. One threat in the last decade, from a scammer. He's no longer in business.
If you're running a business, you're supposed to disclose the actual name and address from which the business is conducted, at least in California and in the European Union. "Private registration" is a slimeball indicator for a site with any commercial purpose.
We're finding enough potentially habitable exoplanets that it's worth sending messages to them. Some might have a civilization. It's time for SETI to start transmitting.
This is quite possible. Arecebo could communicate with a similar installation across the galaxy.
Right. Google Shopping was originally a price comparison service. There was no charge for being listed. Then it was changed to an paid ad service. All the links on it changed to Google ad links. Our Ad Limiter browser add-on, which hides all but one Google ad per search result, then started limiting the number of shopping results displayed. We finally allowed more ads to show through on explicit Google shopping pages.
Now, Google Shopping results have changed again, so that they look like real search results. They even have additional Google ads, with the light tan background. But in reality, every result on a Google Shopping page is a paid ad.
Google Voice is just the old Grand Central service. Google has done very little to it since they bought the company.
If you want to deal with phone and SMS messages from a program, look at Twilio. It's not free, but it actually works.
There are copyright restrictions on Hostess recipes.
No, no, you cannot copyright how to make a functional object. That's what patents are for, and they run out after 20 years.
Is the article suggesting that in fifty years there has been little progress in making them more economical to build and run?
Pretty much, yes. What's going on inside the reactor vessel hasn't changed much in fifty years. None of the more exotic designs has been much of a success. If anything goes wrong with a new design years downstream, a billion dollar plant may have to be retired early.
What's been learned is that the worst cases designed for fifty years ago weren't bad enough. It's necessary to design for bigger earthquakes, bigger tsunamis, bigger fires, bigger floods, bigger leaks, bigger airplane crashes, and bigger screwups than was thought fifty years ago. (All those things have happened.) This runs up costs. Also, decommissioning a damaged reactor is far more expensive than building it. We still don't have a place to put used fuel rods, either.