Nice. Given Disney's interest in converting 2D movies to fake 3D movies, it's not surprising that they're investing in this. It looks like they're able to do this without having to create imagery to fill in occluded areas, which is a problem with some of the other approaches.
Next, Google StreetView needs to be redone with this level of quality.
So register a trademark yourself. You have an earlier priority date.
Domain Name: AROUNDTHEWORLDIN80JOBS.COM
Created on: 23-Oct-11
Expires on: 23-Oct-15
Their priority date (for "Word Mark AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 JOBS") is December 21, 2012.
Because you used the "Domains by Proxy" service to hide the registration information for your domain, you may have trouble proving first use. Another disadvantage of those ownership-hiding services - when you need to prove ownership, you can't.
We're likely to see this in the private sector first. A likely application would be a machine learning system used by investment funds, to decide how to optimally vote stock proxies. What that means is a machine that decides when to fire CEOs. If some fund starts getting better returns that way, it will happen.
You could obfuscate HTML by generating a custom font with glyphs in the Unicode private use space for each message, then using hard-to-read characters.
This is, of course, a monoalphabetic substitution, which is close to the weakest known cryptosystem. At best it might be useful for getting spam through filters.
If anybody started using this font for CAPCHAs, there would be a module to break it for spam programs within weeks. Assuming the existing learning algorithms didn't solve it automatically.
Their highest tier is "Maximum monthly withdrawal of 500,000 USD (or equivalent) capped to a maximum of 100,000 USD per 24 hrs and a 10,000 BTC withdrawal per 24hrs without any monthly limit." That's small in financial terms.
That's a typical Mt. Gox excuse. "We're going to hold onto your money for some vague amount of time for some vague reason." Note that they're only stopping withdrawals from Mt. Gox, not inbound transfers. That's very suspicious. If they'd lost their banking relationship for wire transfers, they couldn't do inbound transfers either.
I've mentioned before that Mt. Gox's withdrawal limits are suspicious. They should be able to pay out 100% of funds they hold on short notice. They're not a bank, and are required by the Payment Services Act of Japan to have 100% of the assets entrusted to them. Even more suspicious is that as Bitcoin has grown, Mt. Gox withdrawal limits have become smaller.
If you have assets in Mt. Gox, get them out now. There are too many red flags about that business.
Look who's pushing for this program. It's Selmer Bringsjord, a professor at Renssalaer who wants to build Skynet and Terminators. For real. From his 1997 paper:"Our engineers must be given the resources to
produce the perfected marriage of a trio: pervasive, all-seeing sensors; automated reasoners; and autonomous, lethal robots. In short, we need small machines that can see and hear in every corner; machines smart enough to understand and reason over
the raw data that these sensing machines perceive;
and machines able to instantly and infallibly fire autonomously on the strength of what the reasoning
implies."
Yes, he really published that. The next paragraph is even worse:
If you are wearing explosives of any kind outside
a subterranean environment, you will be spotted by
intelligent unmanned airborne sensors, and will be
instantly immobilized by a laser or particle beam
from overhead. If you are working with explosives
underground (or toiling to enrich uranium), sensors
on and beneath the surface of the Earth will find you,
and you will be killed soon thereafter by AI-guided
bunker-boring bombs. If you are a murderous dicta-
tor like Sadam or Stalin or Amin, or a leader (e.g.,
Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong II) heading in the direction of such evil, a supersonic robot jet no bigger than
a dragonfly will take off in the States, thousands of
miles from your "impregnable" lair, and streak in a
short time directly into your body, depositing a fatal
poison like Polonium therein. If you, alone or along
with equally doomed cronies, seek to seize a jetliner
with a plan to blow it up or use it as a missile, one
biometric scan of your retina before boarding, and
lightning-quick reasoning behind the scenes will ag
you as a end, and you will be quickly greeted by
law enforcement, and escorted into a system of interrogation that uses sensors to read secret information directly from your brain: lying will be silly. Want to bring a backpack bomb somewhere, and leave it behind? The contents of your pack will be sensed the second you bring it toward civilization, and it will be
vaporized. Interested in the purchase of handguns for
Cho-like mayhem? The slightest blip in your back-
ground will be discovered in a second, and you will
be out of luck. In fact, guns can themselves bear the
trio: If you have one, and wish to fire it, it must sense
your identity and location and purpose, and run a check to clear the trigger pull | all in a nanosecond."
Read his paper. This guy is scary. And Congress is listening to him.
Constant remote reporting of vehicle location via OnStar, etc. - bad.
Record of speed, braking, etc. for the last few seconds before airbag deployment, readable only if someone plugs a reader into the wreckage - probably OK.
I used to read Megatokyo, but when the artist lost his writer years ago, the plot also got lost. Then the updates became so infrequent that it became a joke. Read the Wikipedia entry.
If you knew anything about how exchanges work John, you'd know that withdrawal limits are typically imposed by the banks themselves and/or AML rules.
Yeah, right. Mt. Gox regularly blames the businesses they deal with for their own problems. If you have unencumbered assets with a a real brokerage firm, and you want it converted to cash and sent to your bank account, you can have it in three days, or they're in big trouble. Brokerages routinely deliver amounts in nine figures on demand. Mt. Gox wants a delay of two weeks to over one month for just US$10,000.
Right. Many of them have gone bust, usually without returning the money. Bitcoin is the con man's dream - untraceable, irrevocable one-way money transfer from sucker to anonymous scammer. No worries about the mark coming back with the cops, or a few friends with baseball bats.
Getting money out of the various exchanges is hard. Even Mt. Gox has severe limits on withdrawal rates. That's suspicious. They should have 100% of the assets entrusted to them by their customers, and should be able to deliver them on demand. Because they resist that, I suspect they don't have all the assets they should. Withdrawal rate limits are commonly associated with Ponzi schemes and "high yield investment programs", where if the customers take out their money, the whole thing collapses.
The article makes little sense. The site of the DEEP project is more useful. It has the look of an EU publicly funded boondoggle. Those have a long history; see Plan Calcul, the 1966 plan to create a major European computing industry. That didn't do too well.
There's something to be said for trying to come up with better ways of making sequential computation more parallel. But the track record of failures is discouraging. The game industry beat their head against the wall for five years trying to get the Cell processors in the PS3 to do useful work. Sony has given up; the PS4 is an ordinary shared-memory multiprocessor. So are all the XBox machines.
It's encouraging to see how much useful work people are getting out of GPUs, though.
If you have some system like Slashdot's which moves junk comments to lower rating positions, this isn't a problem. Everybody should get to blither, but nobody should have to read or listen to their blithering.
Space-X is planning a manned flight in 2015. Space-X will have their own private astronauts. They'll probably be ex-NASA astronauts initially, test-pilot types. Once Space-X has flight crew, that will probably be the place to go.
NASA still has 49 active astronauts, most of whom (but not all) have been in space. They don't have much to do. There are lot of recent astronaut layoffs and quits. NASA had over 80 astronauts at peak. That's not where you go if you want to go into space. It's surprising that they're training new ones, but they probably want to keep the training operation going.
Being a former astronaut sucks today. It's not like being John Glenn. Ex-astronauts used to have a pass to NASA facilities, but one found out last year that his pass to HSC was no longer valid. Even worse, they're now portrayed as unemployed losers on TV. There was an episode of Blue Bloods on this, where a has-been alcoholic ex-astronaut is begging his old friend the police commissioner to find him a job.
About a decade ago, there was a fad for "smart office buildings". The concept was that companies would get their computing resources (or at least their networking resources) from the building landlord, It didn't work out well. Property managers are terrible at network operation. The landlord mindset of doing minimal work on maintenance and the data center operations mindset of 24/7 availability were too far apart.
It lights up. It can be turned on and off and dimmed remotely That's where we were with X10 in the 1980s. It doesn't relay data around for other WiFi devices.
It has over-the-air firmware updates. Your smartphone doesn't really talk to the lamps. It talks to their "cloud server", to which the lamps phone home. What could possibly go wrong?
We're no longer constrained by the need to have deep specialized knowledge in the low-level components to get basic access to this technology.
That's what it is really about. The unit of computational resource is a standardized, empty server. It's not "maintained", it's wiped and reloaded. If something goes wrong with it, its load is sent elsewhere, and eventually the unit will be replaced by someone who unplugs it and plugs in another one. Nobody in the data center really has to have much of an idea of what's going on with the computers. Their concerns are power, cooling, cabling, and physical security.
Most of them will be paid at security-guard levels.
Apple, Microsoft and Google don't need to grow to survive. They can continue to operate profitably at their present size. AAPL has a P/E ratio of 10. MSFT, 18. GOOG, 26. Those are all reasonable price/earnings ratios for successful mature companies. F (Ford Motor) is at 10, and IBM is at 13. Both are century-old companies, still doing well.
Now look at Facebook, P/E of 514. And that's after the stock declined 37% since "the world's most hyped IPO." Facebook just doesn't generate much profits. Facebook's traffic and revenue peaked in 2012. In revenue terms, Facebook was never that big. It's in the class with Adobe, not the big boys like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. If Facebook didn't have a two-tier stock structure that gives most of the votes to Zuckerberg, he would have been fired by now.
That's Facebook, the biggest success in "social". Everybody else is doing worse. Zynga just had a big layoff. Social looks like the first dot-com boom and crash - the players were talking about "clicks now, worry about the revenue later". Well, "later" is here.
The fundamental problem with "social" is that the revenue model is to crank up the ad density, which annoys the users. In the last year, Facebook introduced "sponsored stories" and Twitter introduced "sponsored tweets". Myspace tried that strategy. It didn't end well.
If the U.S. Government has the signing key to Windows Update, and can mess with upstream routers, it can put spyware on any Windows machine worldwide. No "exploit" needed.
Somebody needs to start doing security analyses of everything that comes in via Windows Update. Comparing the updates that are sent to different computers is a good first step.
Slashdot Mirror
Nice. Given Disney's interest in converting 2D movies to fake 3D movies, it's not surprising that they're investing in this. It looks like they're able to do this without having to create imagery to fill in occluded areas, which is a problem with some of the other approaches.
Next, Google StreetView needs to be redone with this level of quality.
So register a trademark yourself. You have an earlier priority date.
Domain Name: AROUNDTHEWORLDIN80JOBS.COM Created on: 23-Oct-11 Expires on: 23-Oct-15
Their priority date (for "Word Mark AROUND THE WORLD IN 80 JOBS") is December 21, 2012.
Because you used the "Domains by Proxy" service to hide the registration information for your domain, you may have trouble proving first use. Another disadvantage of those ownership-hiding services - when you need to prove ownership, you can't.
We're likely to see this in the private sector first. A likely application would be a machine learning system used by investment funds, to decide how to optimally vote stock proxies. What that means is a machine that decides when to fire CEOs. If some fund starts getting better returns that way, it will happen.
You could obfuscate HTML by generating a custom font with glyphs in the Unicode private use space for each message, then using hard-to-read characters. This is, of course, a monoalphabetic substitution, which is close to the weakest known cryptosystem. At best it might be useful for getting spam through filters.
If anybody started using this font for CAPCHAs, there would be a module to break it for spam programs within weeks. Assuming the existing learning algorithms didn't solve it automatically.
(Correction: that paper is from 2007.)
Their highest tier is "Maximum monthly withdrawal of 500,000 USD (or equivalent) capped to a maximum of 100,000 USD per 24 hrs and a 10,000 BTC withdrawal per 24hrs without any monthly limit." That's small in financial terms.
That's a typical Mt. Gox excuse. "We're going to hold onto your money for some vague amount of time for some vague reason." Note that they're only stopping withdrawals from Mt. Gox, not inbound transfers. That's very suspicious. If they'd lost their banking relationship for wire transfers, they couldn't do inbound transfers either.
I've mentioned before that Mt. Gox's withdrawal limits are suspicious. They should be able to pay out 100% of funds they hold on short notice. They're not a bank, and are required by the Payment Services Act of Japan to have 100% of the assets entrusted to them. Even more suspicious is that as Bitcoin has grown, Mt. Gox withdrawal limits have become smaller.
If you have assets in Mt. Gox, get them out now. There are too many red flags about that business.
Look who's pushing for this program. It's Selmer Bringsjord, a professor at Renssalaer who wants to build Skynet and Terminators. For real. From his 1997 paper: "Our engineers must be given the resources to produce the perfected marriage of a trio: pervasive, all-seeing sensors; automated reasoners; and autonomous, lethal robots. In short, we need small machines that can see and hear in every corner; machines smart enough to understand and reason over the raw data that these sensing machines perceive; and machines able to instantly and infallibly fire autonomously on the strength of what the reasoning implies."
Yes, he really published that. The next paragraph is even worse:
If you are wearing explosives of any kind outside a subterranean environment, you will be spotted by intelligent unmanned airborne sensors, and will be instantly immobilized by a laser or particle beam from overhead. If you are working with explosives underground (or toiling to enrich uranium), sensors on and beneath the surface of the Earth will find you, and you will be killed soon thereafter by AI-guided bunker-boring bombs. If you are a murderous dicta- tor like Sadam or Stalin or Amin, or a leader (e.g., Ahmadinejad or Kim Jong II) heading in the direction of such evil, a supersonic robot jet no bigger than a dragonfly will take off in the States, thousands of miles from your "impregnable" lair, and streak in a short time directly into your body, depositing a fatal poison like Polonium therein. If you, alone or along with equally doomed cronies, seek to seize a jetliner with a plan to blow it up or use it as a missile, one biometric scan of your retina before boarding, and lightning-quick reasoning behind the scenes will ag you as a end, and you will be quickly greeted by law enforcement, and escorted into a system of interrogation that uses sensors to read secret information directly from your brain: lying will be silly. Want to bring a backpack bomb somewhere, and leave it behind? The contents of your pack will be sensed the second you bring it toward civilization, and it will be vaporized. Interested in the purchase of handguns for Cho-like mayhem? The slightest blip in your back- ground will be discovered in a second, and you will be out of luck. In fact, guns can themselves bear the trio: If you have one, and wish to fire it, it must sense your identity and location and purpose, and run a check to clear the trigger pull | all in a nanosecond."
Read his paper. This guy is scary. And Congress is listening to him.
Constant remote reporting of vehicle location via OnStar, etc. - bad.
Record of speed, braking, etc. for the last few seconds before airbag deployment, readable only if someone plugs a reader into the wreckage - probably OK.
The day may come when Apple is just the distribution arm of Foxconn. Apple needs Foxconn more than Foxconn needs Apple.
I used to read Megatokyo, but when the artist lost his writer years ago, the plot also got lost. Then the updates became so infrequent that it became a joke. Read the Wikipedia entry.
If you knew anything about how exchanges work John, you'd know that withdrawal limits are typically imposed by the banks themselves and/or AML rules.
Yeah, right. Mt. Gox regularly blames the businesses they deal with for their own problems. If you have unencumbered assets with a a real brokerage firm, and you want it converted to cash and sent to your bank account, you can have it in three days, or they're in big trouble. Brokerages routinely deliver amounts in nine figures on demand. Mt. Gox wants a delay of two weeks to over one month for just US$10,000.
And we haven't even covered the Dwolla/Mt Gox/Mutum Sigillum LLC/Homeland Security debacle. Mt. Gox apparently claimed their money-transfer business unit wasn't in the money transfer business. That didn't end well for the customers.
Coin exchanges have a terrible track record...
Right. Many of them have gone bust, usually without returning the money. Bitcoin is the con man's dream - untraceable, irrevocable one-way money transfer from sucker to anonymous scammer. No worries about the mark coming back with the cops, or a few friends with baseball bats.
Getting money out of the various exchanges is hard. Even Mt. Gox has severe limits on withdrawal rates. That's suspicious. They should have 100% of the assets entrusted to them by their customers, and should be able to deliver them on demand. Because they resist that, I suspect they don't have all the assets they should. Withdrawal rate limits are commonly associated with Ponzi schemes and "high yield investment programs", where if the customers take out their money, the whole thing collapses.
The article makes little sense. The site of the DEEP project is more useful. It has the look of an EU publicly funded boondoggle. Those have a long history; see Plan Calcul, the 1966 plan to create a major European computing industry. That didn't do too well.
The trouble with supercomputers is that only governments buy them. When they do, they tend not to use them very effectively. The US has pork programs like the Alabama Supercomputer Center. One of their main activities is providing the censorware for Alabama schools.
There's something to be said for trying to come up with better ways of making sequential computation more parallel. But the track record of failures is discouraging. The game industry beat their head against the wall for five years trying to get the Cell processors in the PS3 to do useful work. Sony has given up; the PS4 is an ordinary shared-memory multiprocessor. So are all the XBox machines.
It's encouraging to see how much useful work people are getting out of GPUs, though.
If you have some system like Slashdot's which moves junk comments to lower rating positions, this isn't a problem. Everybody should get to blither, but nobody should have to read or listen to their blithering.
Space-X is planning a manned flight in 2015. Space-X will have their own private astronauts. They'll probably be ex-NASA astronauts initially, test-pilot types. Once Space-X has flight crew, that will probably be the place to go.
NASA still has 49 active astronauts, most of whom (but not all) have been in space. They don't have much to do. There are lot of recent astronaut layoffs and quits. NASA had over 80 astronauts at peak. That's not where you go if you want to go into space. It's surprising that they're training new ones, but they probably want to keep the training operation going.
Being a former astronaut sucks today. It's not like being John Glenn. Ex-astronauts used to have a pass to NASA facilities, but one found out last year that his pass to HSC was no longer valid. Even worse, they're now portrayed as unemployed losers on TV. There was an episode of Blue Bloods on this, where a has-been alcoholic ex-astronaut is begging his old friend the police commissioner to find him a job.
About a decade ago, there was a fad for "smart office buildings". The concept was that companies would get their computing resources (or at least their networking resources) from the building landlord, It didn't work out well. Property managers are terrible at network operation. The landlord mindset of doing minimal work on maintenance and the data center operations mindset of 24/7 availability were too far apart.
Now in theaters:
Coming Soon, Monsters N+1 and Despicable Me 2.
Hollywood has a severe idea shortage.
Find some "publisher" that went bust and acquire the name.
It's going to be a long time before anyone holds another major international meeting in London. Geneva, maybe.
It lights up. It can be turned on and off and dimmed remotely That's where we were with X10 in the 1980s. It doesn't relay data around for other WiFi devices.
It has over-the-air firmware updates. Your smartphone doesn't really talk to the lamps. It talks to their "cloud server", to which the lamps phone home. What could possibly go wrong?
Well, there's Nekomimi - cat ears controlled by brain waves. They recognize "relaxed", "alert", and "startled".
We're no longer constrained by the need to have deep specialized knowledge in the low-level components to get basic access to this technology.
That's what it is really about. The unit of computational resource is a standardized, empty server. It's not "maintained", it's wiped and reloaded. If something goes wrong with it, its load is sent elsewhere, and eventually the unit will be replaced by someone who unplugs it and plugs in another one. Nobody in the data center really has to have much of an idea of what's going on with the computers. Their concerns are power, cooling, cabling, and physical security.
Most of them will be paid at security-guard levels.
Apple, Microsoft and Google don't need to grow to survive. They can continue to operate profitably at their present size. AAPL has a P/E ratio of 10. MSFT, 18. GOOG, 26. Those are all reasonable price/earnings ratios for successful mature companies. F (Ford Motor) is at 10, and IBM is at 13. Both are century-old companies, still doing well.
Now look at Facebook, P/E of 514. And that's after the stock declined 37% since "the world's most hyped IPO." Facebook just doesn't generate much profits. Facebook's traffic and revenue peaked in 2012. In revenue terms, Facebook was never that big. It's in the class with Adobe, not the big boys like Microsoft, Google, and Apple. If Facebook didn't have a two-tier stock structure that gives most of the votes to Zuckerberg, he would have been fired by now.
That's Facebook, the biggest success in "social". Everybody else is doing worse. Zynga just had a big layoff. Social looks like the first dot-com boom and crash - the players were talking about "clicks now, worry about the revenue later". Well, "later" is here.
The fundamental problem with "social" is that the revenue model is to crank up the ad density, which annoys the users. In the last year, Facebook introduced "sponsored stories" and Twitter introduced "sponsored tweets". Myspace tried that strategy. It didn't end well.
If the U.S. Government has the signing key to Windows Update, and can mess with upstream routers, it can put spyware on any Windows machine worldwide. No "exploit" needed.
Somebody needs to start doing security analyses of everything that comes in via Windows Update. Comparing the updates that are sent to different computers is a good first step.