It's even worse than that. Apparently Braintree is not accepting Bitcoin themselves. They're passing the buck to Coinbase. Merchants who want to accept Bitcoin have to get their own Coinbase account. Coinbase is a broker; they exchange Bitcoins for dollars and pay dollars to the merchant. The merchant never sees Bitcoins.
Coinbase is flaky. Their business address is a mailbox company in SF. Their address registered with the SEC and FinCen is somebody's apartment. They have a "slow pay" reputation on bitcointalk. They have terms and conditions that make PayPal look good.
Nothing ever came along to replace COBOL which took data storage as seriously as COBOL did. COBOL has DATA DIVISION syntax for talking about file formats and databases. No other language has syntax for talking about the external representation of data. This is a lack.
Look at how much code goes into taking data out of an SQL database and into an object in Java or Python. And what a pain it is to change the code when the table format changes. It really is a lack that modern languages don't deal with external data well.
This is a special case of the marshalling problem. Programs are always packing data into some specified form for transport or storage. It's an operation which often needs to go fast, and is a clear win if done in hard-compiled code. Yet there's little language support for this. There are precompilers which compile Google protocol buffer definitions into C++ or Go. There are interpreters for Python which understand a SOAP protocol spec and decode, slowly, the XML accordingly. Those are add-ons. Language support for marshalling is very rare, if not nonexistent.
Read the article. PayPal is not accepting Bitcoin. Braintree, which is owned by PayPal, sells a shopping cart checkout system which accepts various forms of payment. They're adding Bitcoin for merchants that want it. PayPal is not itself accepting Bitcoin, nor is eBay.
A number of shopping cart systems already offer Bitcoin as a payment method. Braintree is just catching up.
Whatever happened to that "startup house" in Kansas City? Much the same idea. Google PR made a big deal about how a 1GB network connection made it possible for a house in KC to do big-time development.
There are already a few places like this in the SF Bay Area. They're mostly sweatshops for producing appcrap. Now if the Willow Garage guy was doing robotics again, it might be interesting. But Willow Garage robotics tanked, and the people involved mostly went off to a "telepresence" startup which sells a Segway-like teleoperator with a camera and screen. It's controlled from an app, of course.
No, it's not, according to the USPTO. It passed their examination for similarity within classification. A key point is that Twitter did not have an image service at the time the Twitpic application was filed. So, under trademark rules, Twitter was in a different business.
Twitter has filed an opposition, and the schedule for a trial before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was set.
Smolin is worth reading, even if you don't agree with him. One of his comments is "Smart people should not program". He wants physicists to push the programming work down to lower-level people.
His big problem with physics is mostly with string theory. String theory is an elegant mathematical description of how physics might work. It doesn't make any predictions that are experimentally testable, at least not without orders of magnitude more accelerator power than currently available. String theory may be just an amusing mathematical exercise. We don't know. Smolin's complaint is that string theory ate physics - for a while, you had to be a string theorist to have a career in theoretical physics.
I need to read more about this. At first glance, it's kind of like BitTorrent, but at a lower level in the protocol stack. Or like Universal Resource Identifiers (remember those?) at a higher level. The general idea seems to be to make cacheing easier at the expense of making everything else more complex.
This story is from the Epoch Times, the poltiical paper of the Falun Gong movement. Anything there that's not political is filler to make it look like a real newspaper. Probably not a good source for programming wisdom.
Every Windows driver with WHDL certification has passed the
Microsoft Static Driver Verifier, which is a proof of correctness checker. Passing means that the driver won't blow away the rest of the OS with a bad pointer, subscript error, or other fatal error. Since Microsoft started requring this in Windows 7, Windows OS crashes have been way down.
About 5% of verifications either require too much time or too much memory. Any formally undecidable program would hit one of those limits. If it's that hard to tell if a driver has a bug, they assume the driver has a bug.
They mention Cadillac's self-driving car, recently demonstrated to lawmakers in Washington. Cadillac is confident enough now to let members of Congress ride in the thing as it drives from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon in traffic. That's impressive. There's video, but it's all chopped into short pieces for short attention span TV viewers. I'd like to see an uncut half hour of automatic driving in traffic.
The problem here is that the press reports are just rehashes of what the cops are putting out. Somebody should find this guy and interview him. He may be in hiding for reasons of his own.
His book is self-published on Amazon. It's been out since 2011, and you can read a sample there. This guy is not the next Steven King. A typical sentence: "As Zea approaches her partner she cannot restrain herself from hyperventilating as she peers at the black embossed letters on the translucent glass sign above the entrance to the central atrium".
Today, the Los Angeles Times quotes cops as saying "Everybody knew about the book in 2012", and that this is more about a four-page letter he recently sent to officials in Dorchester County, containing "complaints of alleged harassment and an alleged possible crime". There may be more clarity over the next few days, now that the story is getting attention.
Leaving any orthodox religion is hard, after so many years of hard-line indoctrination.
In Israel, it's very hard to leave. There are extensive Government benefits for ultra-orthodox, including subsidized housing, pay for religious study, and unlimited draft deferments. This is on top of the heavy social pressure, the lack of marketable skills, and the language barrier (the ultra-orthodox in Israel speak Yiddish, not Hebrew.)
"Wind is a particular hazard, because drones weigh so little compared with regular planes."
Small drones don't have much inertia. They can be easily flipped by a small local wind gust. This is a big problem for drones that operate close to buildings, where there are eddies and turbulence as air hits the building. Pass the corner of a building and the wind situation may be completely different.
Very smart and aggressive stability control systems are able to overcome this. See this drone from PSI Tactical, which weighs about 0.5Kg and is supposed to be able to operate in winds up to 30MPH.
Battery storage for bulk power has been talked up for years. Mostly by the wind industry. With solar power, you get peak power and peak air conditioning load around the same time. Wind varies about 4:1 over 24 hours, even when averaged across big areas (California or the eastern seaboard). So the wind guys desperately need to store power generated at 4AM, when it's nearly worthless, so they can resell at 2PM. When the wind farm companies start installing batteries at their own expense, this will be a real technology.
With the US glut of natural gas, this isn't needed right now. Natural gas peaking plants aren't all that expensive to build, and make money even if they only run for maybe 6 hours a day. That covers most peak needs.
There are other ways to store energy. Some of the dams of the California Water Project have reversible turbines, which can run either as pumps or generators. They pump water uphill at night, when power is cheap, and let it down during the afternoon to generate power. Since the dams and pumps are needed for water handling anyway, this adds little cost.
A few years ago, those Google NFC payment terminals were all over Silicon Valley. Nobody used them. Newer credit card terminals show no sign of supporting them, although some apparently have the hardware inside for it.
Another problem is that if the technology just requires the phone's presence, not interaction on the phone, it's insecure. "Near field communication" is only supposed to be up to 20cm, but a 2013 paper at Black Hat demonstrated connectivity at 100cm, which is good enough for crime.
If it does require interaction on the phone, the user has to activate the phone, navigate to some app, and deal with the app. This is slower than swiping a credit card.
There are ultra-orthodox ISPs with filtering.
The filtering is very stringent, based on a rabbi-approved whitelist. "That's all you get, and nothing else."
There are kosher cell phones. "Kosher Phone has no camera, no Bluetooth capabilities, no memory card slot and cannot be connected to a computer."
The only reason SLS exists is to keep the congresscritters from the former shuttle supply chain districts happy. That's it.
Right. NASA also still has way too many "centers". Ames (except for the big wind tunnel) and Glenn (except for the test facilities at Sandusky) ought to go.
Quake audio consists mostly of footsteps and bangs. This might be fun for, say, GTA IV/V, where the NPCs have conversations to which you can listen if you're close enough.
Google isn't detecting potholes? Back in 1985, we had that on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. The LIDAR on top of the vehicle was generating a ground profile. This was for off-road driving, where that's essential. I'd assumed Google was doing that; they have a Velodyne laser scanner that provides enough information.
In traffic, sometimes you can't see a pothole because it's obscured by a vehicle ahead, but if the vehicle ahead doesn't change speed, direction, or attitude, it's probably safe to proceed over the ground it just covered. On high speed roads, you can't see distant potholes clearly because the angle is unfavorable, but if the road ahead looks like the near road, and the near road profiles OK with the LIDAR, the far road is probably good. That's what the Stanford team used to out-drive their LIDAR range. (We didn't do that and were limited to 17MPH).
Fixed road components should be handleable. People, bicycles, and animals are tough.
This is fascinating. It's not the classic "people don't have social lives in the real world because they are on line too much" argument. The authors argue that following people who are "different" from you is bad for you. They write:
"Compared to face-to-face interactions, online networks allow users to silently observe the opinions and behaviors of an immensely wider share of their fellow citizens. The
psychological literature has shown that most people tend to overestimate the extent to which their beliefs
or opinions are typical of those of others. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are âoenormalâ and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias leads to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, or a 'false consensus' (Gamba, 2013)."
"The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt afterwards; the more they used Facebook over two weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. The effects found by the authors were not moderated by the size of people's Facebook networks, their perceived supportiveness, motivation for using Facebook, gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression, thus suggesting the existence of a direct link between SNSs' use and subjective well-being."
This is a new result, and needs confirmation. Are homogeneous societies happier ones? Should that be replicated on line?
Should efforts be made in Facebook to keep people from having "different" friends?
Here's a more technical discussion from NHTSA. At page 74-75, the data elements of the Basic Safety Message I and II are listed. The BSM Part I message doesn't contain the vehicle ID, but it does contain latitude and longitude. The BSM Part II message has the vehicle's VIN. So this is explicitly not anonymous.
Back in the 1980s, when Caltrans was working on something similar, they used a random ID which was generated each time the ignition was switched on. That's all that's needed for safety purposes. This system has a totally unnecessary tracking feature.
Most of this stuff only works if all vehicles are equipped. It also relies heavily on very accurate GPS positions. However, there's no new sensing - no vehicle radar or LIDAR. The head of Google's autonomous car program is on record as being against V2V systems, because they don't provide reliable data for automatic driving and have the wrong sensors.
If something is going to be required, it should be "smart cruise" anti-collision radar. That's already on many high-end cars and has a good track record. It's really good at eliminating rear-end collisions, and starts braking earlier in other situations such as a car coming out of a cross street. Mercedes did a study once that showed that about half of all collisions are eliminated if braking starts 500ms earlier.
V2V communications should be an extension of vehicle radar. It's possible to send data from one radar to another. Identify-Friend-Foe systems do that, as does TCAS for aircraft. The useful data would be something like "Vehicle N to vehicle M. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 110 relative. No collision predicted". A reply would be "Vehicle M to vehicle N. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 205 relative. No collision predicted". That sort of info doesn't involve tracking; it's just what's needed to know what the other cars are doing. It's also independent of GPS. Useful additional info would be "This vehicle is a bus/delivery truck, is stopped, and will probably be moving in 5 seconds.", telling you that the big vehicle ahead is about to move and you don't need to change lanes to go around it.
Slashdot Mirror
This will be a big seller for the big-butt crowd. It should sell well at Wal-Mart.
It's even worse than that. Apparently Braintree is not accepting Bitcoin themselves. They're passing the buck to Coinbase. Merchants who want to accept Bitcoin have to get their own Coinbase account. Coinbase is a broker; they exchange Bitcoins for dollars and pay dollars to the merchant. The merchant never sees Bitcoins.
Coinbase is flaky. Their business address is a mailbox company in SF. Their address registered with the SEC and FinCen is somebody's apartment. They have a "slow pay" reputation on bitcointalk. They have terms and conditions that make PayPal look good.
Nothing ever came along to replace COBOL which took data storage as seriously as COBOL did. COBOL has DATA DIVISION syntax for talking about file formats and databases. No other language has syntax for talking about the external representation of data. This is a lack.
Look at how much code goes into taking data out of an SQL database and into an object in Java or Python. And what a pain it is to change the code when the table format changes. It really is a lack that modern languages don't deal with external data well.
This is a special case of the marshalling problem. Programs are always packing data into some specified form for transport or storage. It's an operation which often needs to go fast, and is a clear win if done in hard-compiled code. Yet there's little language support for this. There are precompilers which compile Google protocol buffer definitions into C++ or Go. There are interpreters for Python which understand a SOAP protocol spec and decode, slowly, the XML accordingly. Those are add-ons. Language support for marshalling is very rare, if not nonexistent.
Read the article. PayPal is not accepting Bitcoin. Braintree, which is owned by PayPal, sells a shopping cart checkout system which accepts various forms of payment. They're adding Bitcoin for merchants that want it. PayPal is not itself accepting Bitcoin, nor is eBay.
A number of shopping cart systems already offer Bitcoin as a payment method. Braintree is just catching up.
Whatever happened to that "startup house" in Kansas City? Much the same idea. Google PR made a big deal about how a 1GB network connection made it possible for a house in KC to do big-time development.
There are already a few places like this in the SF Bay Area. They're mostly sweatshops for producing appcrap. Now if the Willow Garage guy was doing robotics again, it might be interesting. But Willow Garage robotics tanked, and the people involved mostly went off to a "telepresence" startup which sells a Segway-like teleoperator with a camera and screen. It's controlled from an app, of course.
The guy who made that mistake realized the next morning he'd made a serious design error. But by then, he writes, he already had three users. Really.
It's a pretty clear infringement.
No, it's not, according to the USPTO. It passed their examination for similarity within classification. A key point is that Twitter did not have an image service at the time the Twitpic application was filed. So, under trademark rules, Twitter was in a different business. Twitter has filed an opposition, and the schedule for a trial before the Trademark Trial and Appeal Board was set.
Twitter was afraid that Twitpic might win.
Smolin is worth reading, even if you don't agree with him. One of his comments is "Smart people should not program". He wants physicists to push the programming work down to lower-level people.
His big problem with physics is mostly with string theory. String theory is an elegant mathematical description of how physics might work. It doesn't make any predictions that are experimentally testable, at least not without orders of magnitude more accelerator power than currently available. String theory may be just an amusing mathematical exercise. We don't know. Smolin's complaint is that string theory ate physics - for a while, you had to be a string theorist to have a career in theoretical physics.
I need to read more about this. At first glance, it's kind of like BitTorrent, but at a lower level in the protocol stack. Or like Universal Resource Identifiers (remember those?) at a higher level. The general idea seems to be to make cacheing easier at the expense of making everything else more complex.
This story is from the Epoch Times, the poltiical paper of the Falun Gong movement. Anything there that's not political is filler to make it look like a real newspaper. Probably not a good source for programming wisdom.
Been there, done that, 30 years ago.
Every Windows driver with WHDL certification has passed the Microsoft Static Driver Verifier, which is a proof of correctness checker. Passing means that the driver won't blow away the rest of the OS with a bad pointer, subscript error, or other fatal error. Since Microsoft started requring this in Windows 7, Windows OS crashes have been way down.
About 5% of verifications either require too much time or too much memory. Any formally undecidable program would hit one of those limits. If it's that hard to tell if a driver has a bug, they assume the driver has a bug.
So there. Solved problem in practice.
They mention Cadillac's self-driving car, recently demonstrated to lawmakers in Washington. Cadillac is confident enough now to let members of Congress ride in the thing as it drives from Capitol Hill to the Pentagon in traffic. That's impressive. There's video, but it's all chopped into short pieces for short attention span TV viewers. I'd like to see an uncut half hour of automatic driving in traffic.
The problem here is that the press reports are just rehashes of what the cops are putting out. Somebody should find this guy and interview him. He may be in hiding for reasons of his own.
His book is self-published on Amazon. It's been out since 2011, and you can read a sample there. This guy is not the next Steven King. A typical sentence: "As Zea approaches her partner she cannot restrain herself from hyperventilating as she peers at the black embossed letters on the translucent glass sign above the entrance to the central atrium".
Today, the Los Angeles Times quotes cops as saying "Everybody knew about the book in 2012", and that this is more about a four-page letter he recently sent to officials in Dorchester County, containing "complaints of alleged harassment and an alleged possible crime". There may be more clarity over the next few days, now that the story is getting attention.
Leaving any orthodox religion is hard, after so many years of hard-line indoctrination.
In Israel, it's very hard to leave. There are extensive Government benefits for ultra-orthodox, including subsidized housing, pay for religious study, and unlimited draft deferments. This is on top of the heavy social pressure, the lack of marketable skills, and the language barrier (the ultra-orthodox in Israel speak Yiddish, not Hebrew.)
"Wind is a particular hazard, because drones weigh so little compared with regular planes."
Small drones don't have much inertia. They can be easily flipped by a small local wind gust. This is a big problem for drones that operate close to buildings, where there are eddies and turbulence as air hits the building. Pass the corner of a building and the wind situation may be completely different.
Very smart and aggressive stability control systems are able to overcome this. See this drone from PSI Tactical, which weighs about 0.5Kg and is supposed to be able to operate in winds up to 30MPH.
Battery storage for bulk power has been talked up for years. Mostly by the wind industry. With solar power, you get peak power and peak air conditioning load around the same time. Wind varies about 4:1 over 24 hours, even when averaged across big areas (California or the eastern seaboard). So the wind guys desperately need to store power generated at 4AM, when it's nearly worthless, so they can resell at 2PM. When the wind farm companies start installing batteries at their own expense, this will be a real technology.
With the US glut of natural gas, this isn't needed right now. Natural gas peaking plants aren't all that expensive to build, and make money even if they only run for maybe 6 hours a day. That covers most peak needs.
There are other ways to store energy. Some of the dams of the California Water Project have reversible turbines, which can run either as pumps or generators. They pump water uphill at night, when power is cheap, and let it down during the afternoon to generate power. Since the dams and pumps are needed for water handling anyway, this adds little cost.
A few years ago, those Google NFC payment terminals were all over Silicon Valley. Nobody used them. Newer credit card terminals show no sign of supporting them, although some apparently have the hardware inside for it.
Another problem is that if the technology just requires the phone's presence, not interaction on the phone, it's insecure. "Near field communication" is only supposed to be up to 20cm, but a 2013 paper at Black Hat demonstrated connectivity at 100cm, which is good enough for crime. If it does require interaction on the phone, the user has to activate the phone, navigate to some app, and deal with the app. This is slower than swiping a credit card.
It's easier to do than card-reader skimmers.
Many ultra-orthodox rabbis who demand their followers not use uncensored smartphones or uncensored internet access. In 2012, a big anti-Internet rally for ultra-orthodox Jews was held in New York. "The siren song of the Internet entices us! It brings out the worst of us!" The event was streamed live and is summarized on YouTube.
There are ultra-orthodox ISPs with filtering. The filtering is very stringent, based on a rabbi-approved whitelist. "That's all you get, and nothing else."
There are kosher cell phones. "Kosher Phone has no camera, no Bluetooth capabilities, no memory card slot and cannot be connected to a computer."
That's in the US. In Israel, kosher cell phones are so locked down that only approved numbers can be called. Even rape crisis centers are blocked.
The only reason SLS exists is to keep the congresscritters from the former shuttle supply chain districts happy. That's it.
Right. NASA also still has way too many "centers". Ames (except for the big wind tunnel) and Glenn (except for the test facilities at Sandusky) ought to go.
Quake audio consists mostly of footsteps and bangs. This might be fun for, say, GTA IV/V, where the NPCs have conversations to which you can listen if you're close enough.
Google isn't detecting potholes? Back in 1985, we had that on our DARPA Grand Challenge vehicle. The LIDAR on top of the vehicle was generating a ground profile. This was for off-road driving, where that's essential. I'd assumed Google was doing that; they have a Velodyne laser scanner that provides enough information.
In traffic, sometimes you can't see a pothole because it's obscured by a vehicle ahead, but if the vehicle ahead doesn't change speed, direction, or attitude, it's probably safe to proceed over the ground it just covered. On high speed roads, you can't see distant potholes clearly because the angle is unfavorable, but if the road ahead looks like the near road, and the near road profiles OK with the LIDAR, the far road is probably good. That's what the Stanford team used to out-drive their LIDAR range. (We didn't do that and were limited to 17MPH).
Fixed road components should be handleable. People, bicycles, and animals are tough.
This is my news printer. Each morning I turn it on, and it prints a paper tape with the Reuters news summaries.
This is 1926 technology. The machine talks to a standard serial port at 45 baud, 5 bits, no parity, 1.5 stop bits.
This is fascinating. It's not the classic "people don't have social lives in the real world because they are on line too much" argument. The authors argue that following people who are "different" from you is bad for you. They write:
"Compared to face-to-face interactions, online networks allow users to silently observe the opinions and behaviors of an immensely wider share of their fellow citizens. The psychological literature has shown that most people tend to overestimate the extent to which their beliefs or opinions are typical of those of others. There is a tendency for people to assume that their own opinions, beliefs, preferences, values, and habits are âoenormalâ and that others also think the same way that they do. This cognitive bias leads to the perception of a consensus that does not exist, or a 'false consensus' (Gamba, 2013)."
"The more people used Facebook at one time point, the worse they felt afterwards; the more they used Facebook over two weeks, the more their life satisfaction levels declined over time. The effects found by the authors were not moderated by the size of people's Facebook networks, their perceived supportiveness, motivation for using Facebook, gender, loneliness, self-esteem, or depression, thus suggesting the existence of a direct link between SNSs' use and subjective well-being."
This is a new result, and needs confirmation. Are homogeneous societies happier ones? Should that be replicated on line? Should efforts be made in Facebook to keep people from having "different" friends?
The Mozilla Foundation has sold out. Don't donate to them, either money or code.
Here's a more technical discussion from NHTSA. At page 74-75, the data elements of the Basic Safety Message I and II are listed. The BSM Part I message doesn't contain the vehicle ID, but it does contain latitude and longitude. The BSM Part II message has the vehicle's VIN. So this is explicitly not anonymous.
Back in the 1980s, when Caltrans was working on something similar, they used a random ID which was generated each time the ignition was switched on. That's all that's needed for safety purposes. This system has a totally unnecessary tracking feature.
Most of this stuff only works if all vehicles are equipped. It also relies heavily on very accurate GPS positions. However, there's no new sensing - no vehicle radar or LIDAR. The head of Google's autonomous car program is on record as being against V2V systems, because they don't provide reliable data for automatic driving and have the wrong sensors.
If something is going to be required, it should be "smart cruise" anti-collision radar. That's already on many high-end cars and has a good track record. It's really good at eliminating rear-end collisions, and starts braking earlier in other situations such as a car coming out of a cross street. Mercedes did a study once that showed that about half of all collisions are eliminated if braking starts 500ms earlier.
V2V communications should be an extension of vehicle radar. It's possible to send data from one radar to another. Identify-Friend-Foe systems do that, as does TCAS for aircraft. The useful data would be something like "Vehicle N to vehicle M. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 110 relative. No collision predicted". A reply would be "Vehicle M to vehicle N. I see you at range 120m, closing rate 5m/sec, bearing 205 relative. No collision predicted". That sort of info doesn't involve tracking; it's just what's needed to know what the other cars are doing. It's also independent of GPS. Useful additional info would be "This vehicle is a bus/delivery truck, is stopped, and will probably be moving in 5 seconds.", telling you that the big vehicle ahead is about to move and you don't need to change lanes to go around it.