Firing thousands of pounds of lead(yearly) into a hill at one end of a field? Am I getting close? And after the range closes does anyone come along and clean up the lead?
Basically you are introducing lead into an environment where it wasn't before.
If you run a lead battery recycling business you must take all kinds of interesting precautions to prevent the lead from soaking into the site. If you are dealing with lead paint taken from houses you must go through all kinds of interesting steps to deal with it. But I have never heard a range owner complaining about the lead abatement measures that some "damn meddling" government types have imposed.
And duck hunting: You gather at a wetland and fire lead pellets up into the air. Do the hunters go out and gather their pellets back up? If they do then I guess I was wrong.
Don't these old media types understand that this just makes an opening for smaller more nimble ISPs to simply say, "We provide the bandwidth and what the hell you do with it is your business!"
I hope that these guys vomit their cheerios when they see how many previously complacent customers jump to the competition and never come back. Most people are barraged with better offers every day but ignore them thinking that it isn't worth the trouble. But when your ISP starts to threaten you then it does become worth the trouble.
But the funniest bit is that I suspect that people will get false positives all the time. I wonder what they would think of my scp transfers, and ssh sessions, not to mention the torrenting of things like Linux.
Plus you get mission creep. Will they start warning people about downloading VLC or even the torrent programs themselves. Or programs critical of the movie industry. Why not start blocking videos made by dissident groups? What about a warning for downloading Snowden's stuff from Wikileaks?
You also have grey areas like Aereo which the courts have greenlighted but the big media companies are saying will cause the end of civilization.
Then you get people not liking being watched. And lastly I really don't want the ISP to ever alter or change the data that I send or receive. To have a popup it means that they have injected something into my data stream. My potentially mission critical data stream.
Years ago I read a great story where a guy sued a group of hunters who had trespassed and target practiced on his land. His suit was to force them to clean up the lead. He was successful and over half of 9 hunters lost their houses paying for the clean-up.
Lead at an indoor shooting range is fine as it only affects those who chose to shoot there. But even at an outdoor range you are creating a superfund clean-up site. But in general hunting you are spraying a toxic material willy nilly which is just anti-social.
This secrecy is just stupid. Even when the reactor was in full melt down they were saying "Don't worry, everything is fine, nothing to see here." But then the news were announcing the various radioactives that were being detected outside the plant. Those isotopes are only produced by a reactor in meltdown and only get out if the reactor is in full meltdown and is interacting with bits found outside the core. So long before they said how bad it was my Physics 101 was telling me Holy Crap! That reactor is way out of control! Not just "low on cooling water". That was like saying that someone shot through the heart was "Low on circulatory capacity."
Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes. But if at this point they come clean with every bit of data people not only would know how far to run (and where not to fish) but a world full of engineers and physicists might contribute something helpful. For example, if they reveal that radioactive and water soluble product X is being produced some guy in the physics department in Argentina might say, "Hey if you put some cheap water soluble Y into the coolant it will not only precipitate product X out of the water solution but it will then absorb neutrons resulting in other stable isotopes of one of the atoms in chemical Y." This might be little known knowledge that the guy learned 20 years ago when he accidentally gummed up the university's reactor 20 years ago.
Also open information allows for people to write better case studies on how(and where) not to build a reactor.
It is just too bad if all this open information makes a few people look bad.
Pedantic versions of material seem to win over plainly written material. I have often turned to Wikipedia for some math help. Yet you might take the article on the parabola. At first it would make for great homework help for a student in grade 10. But in a snap of the fingers it has jumped into university level and then is pushing into graduate level in no time. Much of that material could have been better explained. But instead it is filled with specialist notation with plain English diligently excluded. Math by its nature needs to be precise but precision can co-exist with easy to understand. But if you were to dare to edit such an article so as to add plain English explanations you would be shot in the face by some OCD math twerp in under 5 minutes.
My recommendation is that you gut the power of these editors. If I make a change and some editor disagrees, then it should be put to a vote of the users. I am not saying voting on facts but the presentation of the facts. Also there needs to be a way to neuter some of these OCD editors. Again a vote would be one way. If you find an out of control editor you could make a case, put it to some kind of jury and then boom, they are gone.
I see many articles delete because of various reasons rhyming with "Not notable" But this seems to be randomly applied. The smallest details of some 3rd rate TV episode might get an entry but then some small town hero is deleted. Seeing that the entire back and fourth of creation and deletion is stored why can't articles be marked as "Not notable" but then left in place. If the local pizza place puts up an entry it certainly isn't notable but the data is probably factually correct and useful to a few.
I get this feeling that certain editors are way way out of control on some pedantic mission often with an axe to grind.
The key here is trust. Before people might have said, 'Well AWS, Google, Microsoft won't cave because it would hurt their business models." But now we are even asking if the chips themselves might have back doors. So I suspect that now people are looking at their infrastructure and saying, "Trust nothing" Thus you design your infrastructure to assume that nearly everything is compromised.
But this brings back a new tool into the tool into the toolbox. Security through obscurity. The idea is that if you are using well known protocols and systems then the voracious data monsters may very well have ways to tap into them. But if you adopt the weirdos then you might very well avoid easy data loss. These can be layered. So you might use SSH(or some VPN) for the outer layer but underneath you might even use some homebrew encryption. As everyone knows the chances of getting your own encryption right is low but it takes you out of the realm of automated data harvesting. Some group of humans have to now pick through your protocol and crack it. Then you just keep making regular tweaks to your protocol, not to make it better but to change the weirdness.
But this whole thing is a huge opportunity for a country with good privacy protections. A whole industry of secure routers and whatnot could be created that people would trust. I would infinitely prefer a router from an Icelandic(designed and built) company than a technically better router from Cisco (designed in the US and probably made in China).
Also this is where opensource is going to get a whole lot more interesting. Tools like Skype would be better trusted if the code was opensource (they can still retain the copyrights and say, you can poke through it and compile it for your own use but not modify and distribute it). This way when the NSA demands a back door. Skype can say, "No problem but people will discover it in 5 seconds." On top of that it would be great if tools like skype had better plugins for things like encryption and comm. This way you could download 3rd party tools all day to keep shaking things up. Your buddies would have to have the same plugin but among friends or corporations this would not be a problem.
The ideal setups would allow you to know that your ISP was compromized, your software provider was compromised, and the feds hated you, yet you could still use the Internet in complete privacy.
Personally the only security I would trust if I were wanting perfect secrecy would be one time pads. By hand I would deliver one time pads to my trusted companions (divided into slices and delivered by multiple trusted couriers) and use only those for communications. The occasional HD should suffice for nearly all communications. Also the machines being used for communications would not be networked. You would take the transmission from an (assumed compromised) machine, put it on a storage device, then read it on the trusted non-networked machine using the matching one-time-pad, prepare an encrypted response, and then put it back on the compromised machine for sending. Good luck back dooring that setup.
I use cocos2d-x, and am waiting for QT to mature for iOS and Android, and am always keeping my eyes open for new and better multi-device architectures.
Using cocos2d-x as an example, I have little trouble programming away in C++ on my desktop at full speed, then checking to make sure that I haven't broken anything on iOS or android. By programming on my desktop I can change screen ratios and whatnot very quickly to make sure everything looks good. My code for iOS and Android has a minimal number of #ifdefs to tweek the very occasional platform specific bits. I love keeping things C++ as it is so wonderfully multi-platform while being able to access the finer bits of the various OSs. Only once have I even run into a tiny bit of trouble with endianness.
The real trick is to make sure that compiling in iOS and Android is kept as simple as possible. For example I keep the android part all command-line. I run a tiny script that compiles and installs the App while awaiting debug data. This then keeps me out of eclipse. The crazy thing is that if there are any android problems I don't even need to close my desktop IDE; just make the changes there and re-run the script.
The final deployment isn't that hard either. I don't presently even distribute desktop versions of the apps. Development is desktop based as it is just so much faster.
So I don't know what exactly the problem is. Personally I was looking into blasting out a Blackberry version of my latest app just to see how easy it would be. My suspicions are that getting any code running on the BB and then uploading it to the BB store will actually be the hardest bits.
Message me if you have any questions about this setup.
No Java can't run as fast as C++ when C++ is pushing out to the limits. If you have 64Gigs of physical memory and you tightly fill it with 60Gs of carefully designed structs that you are sorting and noodling with in as close to real time as you can get Java won't even be invited to the party. Now you realize that you need to push that data onto a hard drive as fast as humanly possible so you don't use a file system you just directly access the harddrive and write the raw data. Then you realize that you need to use the newest CUDA abilities of the video card which Java technically can do but you need to move those tightly packed structs into the memory as fast as the hardware can handle it. Well seeing that the structs are byte for byte identical in RAM as they will be in the Video Card's memory then there will be no translation at all. You will just squirt them straight into the memory for the GPU.
As I said at this extreme edge Java won't be invited at all. But this is not to say that Java is crap; it is just that it has limitations. A simple example is that when people are making the leading edge games C++ is too clunky and they tend to use mostly C. Java again is just not invited to that party. Was impressed that Mindcraft was done in Java until I saw it done in Python and then realized that it isn't that demanding a game.
I cut our cable cord a while back to go to netflix. This saved around $60 per month (I had about the cheapest cable possible). This was a massive savings with a huge boost in quality. While Netflix does not have everything neither did my cable package. Not one of the 4 people in my household have complained even once about losing cable.
But using an apple TV I was looking at the prices and saw that access to some TV season would cost me $34. That is bonkers. The whole idea of cutting the cord was not only to stop paying my cable company but to break the ridiculous model that Hollywood has been forcing on us for years. If you watch a TV show on some form of broadcast or cable the producer makes around $0.10 to $0.25 per household for the first showing from the advertisers. So a TV series for download (which effectively is a rerun) is somehow expecting to make double or triple that? Even renting an entire series physically was cheaper than that.
So I don't know why the article focused on the 4 systems that seem set on bringing back a variation of a model that has had its neck snapped by Netflix. About the only feature they offer that is newish is the "Downloading is so convenient." A short while ago I was talking with a mid-level movie exec who said a model people were getting excited about was to have new releases available for download for a huge huge price. The idea was that some people had lots of money and huge screens. So they would have their friends over and it would all be exciting. The exec was gleeful about the idea of screwing not only the viewer but the theatres too.
My guess is that all these execs forget about piracy as an ever present competitor. So they dream up spreadsheets that compare their prices to the prices paid to traditional media. Many people are paying well in excess of $100 per month in Cable. So they say "If we can get them to come to our service we could nail them for at least $80!" What they are forgetting is that people are resistant to change. They will hold on and on to their existing package and then when they make the leap it will be a big one.
Quite simply people are getting more and more really cheap and really good options. Also with iTunes I don't know how much I am going to be paying. At $2 minimum per show it would take a lazy rainy Saturday in this house to blow by my monthly fee for Netflix. I could see a household that didn't really monitor its iTunes to blow past $1000 in a month.
A great line I read recently went something like this. "I'm not sure who will change faster, Netflix becoming more like HBO or HBO becoming more like Netflix." I don't think anyone sane will be saying, "How long before Netflix becomes more like Warner?"
I am not saying that Netflix is the be all and end all; it is just that it crosses a critical threshold in that it makes piracy not worth anyone's time. So maybe Netflix won't be the winner. But the winner will be more like Netflix than iTunes.
To me this is not a case of Java being fast enough as good enough. Keep in mind these are people who are building their own microwave towers from one exchange to another to shave microseconds. But also keep in mind that this is is also the era of big data. So you now have a situation where you have to process insanely large amounts of data in near as is possible to real time in order to make trades "Now!"
So if I write a test program in Java that connects to a database and adds up a few columns and then compare it to the same program written in C++ I doubt that there will be a big difference. And if you trading algorithm is small then Java is probably best as your time to market will be shorter.
But if you have 5 Gigs of data coming in every 10 minutes that needs to be sifted, sorted, and processed, then again time to market might be better with Java and the processing time might not be that different. But now if you start to get cool and are using crazy Algorithms to squeeze your data dry then you might be pushing up against the limits of the hardware itself. Now you must be in C++ land or you needn't bother. The processing time difference between C++ and Java will be great enough that the market will move faster than your computers can.
Now this last case might seem like the weird case so a person could say well Java covers 95% of our needs. The problem is that if you have no C++ development at all then starting C++ just for this extreme case will not be easy to support. Thus a nice mix of Java and C++ is probably better than just one or the other.
A great example of this sort of experience for us programmers would be Eclipse and Sublime Text 2. Eclipse is mostly Java and for years drove me mad as it would start grinding away at whatever. Or I would start typing code and Eclipse would sit for 10 seconds before a bunch of my typing showed up. It took forever to start and so on. Sublime text starts in a flash, runs at warp speed, and has extra cpu cycles left over for things like the mini-side-view. Again this is not a perfect comparison as Eclipse is much more of an IDE and does 1 billion other things but I find they both are reflective of the Java and C++ philosophies. Java programmers love creating an object for damn near every thought that pops into their heads. They love multiple levels of abstraction. Whereas many C++ programmers are 70% C programmer and 30% C++ programmer which is a near endless war within the C++ world. So C++ programmers tend to head for the simplest possible solution, not the most flexible solution, not even the most maintainable solution.
So in the trading world if I were laying out the staff and the architecture for a large zillion user trading system that will be created and maintained by a large team(s) of programmers then I would stick with Java. If I had a small crack team who are to build a system for implementing an ML system that looks at traffic patterns to predict spot corn prices in the next 5 minutes then C++ all the way baby!
I am willing to bet that there are a number of SlashDotters wondering, "Where's my $500?" While the mathematically inclined among us are nodding knowingly that with every offer they make they have a certain percentage probability of hitting a whistle blower. The question is will they be able to hit the threshold of having enough people to have an impact before they are approaching a near 100% chance of getting busted?
Even if only 1 in 50 would blow the whistle the odds still stack up against you pretty quickly. Plus now we are all going to jump on anyone being a Samsung fanboy. If their next product has a mobile quantum processor we will all be screaming "SHILL! SHILL!" at the poster.
MS will just try to use this as a tool to lure people back to the MS fold instead of seeing it as an opportunity to expand into new markets. I suspect that MS has two competing fears. One is that people who go to Android are never coming back and eventually one of these Linux compatible office suites will be an equal (While things like Open Office are good enough for many they still aren't good enough for say Accounting Pros). So by sticking an Office placeholder they can contain their traitorous users into still sticking with MS Office.
The other competing fear is people will just never come back and simple forget that MS was ever a part of their life. In the past there were PC (MS) people and Apple people. Each identified with their tribe and cast aspersions at the other. But now with tablets and huge mobile phones becoming people's primary computers they probably don't even know what OS they are using. They click on icons and things happen. So if MS wants a future in this world they need to just make products for other operating systems that people want. This might prove to be too painful for MS in that they would be sacrificing their OS dominance.
Looking at the new XBox I don't think that MS is capable of thinking about not abusing any advantage they have.
So my prediction is that any efforts to put office on Android won't actually work for the hard core users of Office like say Accountants. But this can all get a whole lot unpredictable. MS office for Mac seems fine, yet I have never seen someone using it in a expert user scenario. Also I think that when Apple first came out with the Intel Macs the dual boot feature was a huge selling point even though in the end most users just went with the Mac OS. The dual boot gave people the confidence to make the leap.
It wasn't really that long ago that I was arguing that Novell sucked, that the OS 9 sucked and wasn't going anywhere, and that XP was buggy as hell so I was going to stick with NT. All of this is in flux and the very ground we think is so solid could turn out to be ice with summer coming. The company that I am looking for is the one that turns your cell phone into a temporary laptop. That is that you take your phone and connect it to a fold up screen and keyboard for occasional laptop like use. Then you throw the folding thing in your backback and your phone in your pocket and keep going. The key is to make the whole thing non proprietary in that it needs to connect to any phone not just the model A3243. That way you can keep switching phones while keeping the foldy thing for years and years.
A variation on this theme was a two tiered development group. Group 1 came up with every new improvement and product idea. Group 2 finished group 1's ideas. But group 2 didn't answer to group 1 so if group 1 had gone off the rails then group 2 sort of didn't work on it. The recognition was that group 1 was a bit ADD while group 2 was a bit autistic/OCD. The key was that group 1 would not communicate so much with group 2 as that would just end up with blood on the walls but that group 1 communicated with the fairly relaxed group leaders who just herded group 2 into not grumbling and moving forward.
The best interactions with the two groups were when group 2 would get stuck (their faces got closer to their screens) and group 1 would be handed the problem again. Often the solution would be available in 5 minutes.
This way group 2 could use TDD or coding standards, documenting, QA stuff, or whatever they wanted that would have driven group 1 insane. Once group 1 handed it over they could then forget the project existed. What they could often do was insist on certain parameters. 30 fps minimum or whatever they knew was critical to the actual success. Group 2 would then have to obsess over that instead of obsessing over some other religious matter such as excessive logging that dropped performance to 2 fps.
The various companies who want the spectrum should be able to make a few 2 minute spots, not be allowed to spend 1 cent marketing, and then have the public vote on their getting the spectrum. There should be none of this making them spend billions on the spectrum and then charge billions to us to use it. My guess is that the company that promised the best service would get the spectrum. This should be a run off system where there are run-offs with eliminations until one company gets 50% of the vote.
Also companies should be able to lose their spectrum in the same way. Basically they would have to apply to keep it by describing what they did with it while other companies would describe what they would do with it. The threshold would need to be higher but if say 70% voted for a company to lose the spectrum it would be re-auctioned. In Canada the big 3 would lose all their spectrum.
I did want the first Wii, my kids wanted one, my wife wanted one. I dutifully got into line at 6am and got one for Christmas (The year after they came out).
So now we have the new Wii U and my kids haven't peeped about it, none of their friends have one, my wife doesn't know it exists, and Nintendo hasn't shown me anything interesting.
I am not saying that the thing is great or that it sucks. I just don't know and haven't seen anything cool about it.
If it wasn't windows then I would put this phone on my candidates list. I don't understand why they got into bed with Microsoft. I program apps for the iPhone and then port them to Android but would love to have a better Android as my primary phone. I don't want to wear the hair shirt of BlackBerry or Windows. It is sort of like the days when a few of my friends were all wound up about BeOS and before that OS/2. They could come up with all kinds of reasons that BeOS or OS/2 were awesome OSs but sticking to the mainstream OSs is just so much easier and when developing, profitable.
One thing though. I watched the video of the two dogs and while crisp it was odd looking. The colours were sometimes wonky and the dogs went weird when they moved fast. As an example the driveway turns quite blue for a moment while panning.
If the paper is published then I am 100% sure that you will see actual car thefts; which is bad. But I would not be 100% sure that this isn't already happening. I recently watched a video where people were remotely opening new high-end cars to break into them. The video claimed that this was a new and unknown attack. http://abcnews.go.com/US/video/car-thieves-tech-gadgets-baffle-police-18891078
This may or may not be the same attack but regardless open information that names and shames is critical not only to getting these companies to fix the problem but to be more vigilant about preventing this from ever happening. This prevention will be far less a problem for the car companies if some lawyer can just shut down their critics. To me this is little different than using a lawyer to silence someone from giving you a bad review using the argument that it might hurt sales. Using the argument that this is also protecting the consumer would still be like silencing the bad review if it were a "10 worst used cars to buy" review. That review too would hurt the consumer. The reality is that the consumer bought a car from a company that couldn't be bothered to properly secure their car.
I really really hope that now that the fact there is a problem will spur some other researchers to quickly identify the problem and I hope they release the details in full into the wild. My only hope is that they give full credit to the original and now censored researchers for their original work.
As for consumers being hurt; once proof is released that your car is susceptible to theft it is your fault if it gets stolen (in that you know asshat thieves want to steal your car) so it is your responsibility to prevent the theft. Previously you comfortably relied upon the built in security but just like if you found out that a bunch of thieves had a copy of the key to your front door you would change the lock. So this is when you either demand that the car company fix it or you go to a third party and get them to put in something cool and new. The problem is that you don't quite know what is broken and thus what needs fixing. The more information available the better.
Free running in theory is the more theatrical. The purist parkour is looking for the most efficient way to go from A to B which could involve jumping gaps, shooting through tiny holes, climbing walls, etc. So a parkour purist won't be doing flips and whatnot. Where the showing off comes is that A and B have a maze in between.
My guess for robots is that they will end up being insectile in design. Most of the tasks that we will assign them will be more like ants. I have never complete understood the general Japanese direction of attempting humanoid robots. While cool we already have lots of humans. Some might argue that we also have lots of tools designed for people and these would then be available to humanoid robots. But if I wanted a robot to drill holes all day I am pretty sure that I would just design the drill as an a attachment in a multi purpose robot or build it right into a single purpose robot.
Many kudos to the designer of this robot by virtue that a key obstacle to useful robots are obstacles. A great example of terrible locomotion robots would be those bomb disposal robots. They just lumber along looking like they are going to tip and most don't look like they could negotiate a curb and certainly not some stairs.
My only complaint about this innovative robot would be that its nemesis would be dental floss. That badboy would become a tangled mess moments after encountering something like floss.
One store tracking me is bad. I'll just stop shopping there. It is when they start sharing the data. This is a clear case of where data privacy laws need to be very very clear and strong. You might think "Who cares if a store or two tracked someone" But the moment you buy something with a CC or debit card, then they can go back through all their data and tie your face (or cellphone ID) to your actual person. If they are sharing the data you now have a trail.
The worst would be if the cellphone company just started to sell your location data. This way someone going from car dealership to car dealership but not leaving their name or number could then suddenly start getting calls and emails. Or if you have just walked into your first dealership they could see that you hadn't been to any competitors and might be a complete sucker.
I have long been an advocate that no organization should be allow to share their customer data with any other organization. I even think this should be internal. I don't want the bank calling and trying to sell me products because they see my balance is way up. So even a bank's marketing department should be kept away from my private data.
There is never just one cockroach. The key is to thwart people who connive their way into a job. I watched one woman spend years undermining her boss all the while setting herself up to replace him. Just as she was succeeding a friend of the big big boss came in out of nowhere and took over. His first assignment to her was to send her into the bowels of a lost project. In a drunken conversation he implied that prior to starting he had been given a copy of everybody's emails including all her conniving.
This might seem like a win but he was a Grade-A D-Bag who zero idea how to run anything. This was a medium sized tech company and he had been running a used-record store.
As I say it would be better to line up a series of the best candidates and then just roll the dice. This way the benefits of conniving lose much of their allure. If you are in an organization where you only have one good candidate there are only three possibilities. One is that your organization is populated with incompetents. Two is that a conniving backstabber has eliminated the competition. Three is that the conniving backstabber has made the other qualified candidates look unqualified.
I don't know how many places I have been where there were 3 or more people vieing for a senior position with the result that either some other completely unqualified candidate came along or the least qualified got the position. Either way random chance(among the possibles) would have worked better.
I am not suggesting that for the next HP CEO they just pick randomly from the entire employee pool but from the at least 10-20 people who might qualify. The only problem is that this is not a short term solution as many people near the top are also conniving backstabbing frauds. So this would take a while of using this quazi random system for promotion.
Slashdot Mirror
Firing thousands of pounds of lead(yearly) into a hill at one end of a field? Am I getting close? And after the range closes does anyone come along and clean up the lead?
Basically you are introducing lead into an environment where it wasn't before.
If you run a lead battery recycling business you must take all kinds of interesting precautions to prevent the lead from soaking into the site. If you are dealing with lead paint taken from houses you must go through all kinds of interesting steps to deal with it. But I have never heard a range owner complaining about the lead abatement measures that some "damn meddling" government types have imposed.
And duck hunting: You gather at a wetland and fire lead pellets up into the air. Do the hunters go out and gather their pellets back up? If they do then I guess I was wrong.
Don't these old media types understand that this just makes an opening for smaller more nimble ISPs to simply say, "We provide the bandwidth and what the hell you do with it is your business!"
I hope that these guys vomit their cheerios when they see how many previously complacent customers jump to the competition and never come back. Most people are barraged with better offers every day but ignore them thinking that it isn't worth the trouble. But when your ISP starts to threaten you then it does become worth the trouble.
But the funniest bit is that I suspect that people will get false positives all the time. I wonder what they would think of my scp transfers, and ssh sessions, not to mention the torrenting of things like Linux.
Plus you get mission creep. Will they start warning people about downloading VLC or even the torrent programs themselves. Or programs critical of the movie industry. Why not start blocking videos made by dissident groups? What about a warning for downloading Snowden's stuff from Wikileaks?
You also have grey areas like Aereo which the courts have greenlighted but the big media companies are saying will cause the end of civilization.
Then you get people not liking being watched. And lastly I really don't want the ISP to ever alter or change the data that I send or receive. To have a popup it means that they have injected something into my data stream. My potentially mission critical data stream.
Years ago I read a great story where a guy sued a group of hunters who had trespassed and target practiced on his land. His suit was to force them to clean up the lead. He was successful and over half of 9 hunters lost their houses paying for the clean-up.
Lead at an indoor shooting range is fine as it only affects those who chose to shoot there. But even at an outdoor range you are creating a superfund clean-up site. But in general hunting you are spraying a toxic material willy nilly which is just anti-social.
This secrecy is just stupid. Even when the reactor was in full melt down they were saying "Don't worry, everything is fine, nothing to see here." But then the news were announcing the various radioactives that were being detected outside the plant. Those isotopes are only produced by a reactor in meltdown and only get out if the reactor is in full meltdown and is interacting with bits found outside the core. So long before they said how bad it was my Physics 101 was telling me Holy Crap! That reactor is way out of control! Not just "low on cooling water". That was like saying that someone shot through the heart was "Low on circulatory capacity."
Hiding the truth does nothing to help them look good, and in the long term adds to their list of mistakes. But if at this point they come clean with every bit of data people not only would know how far to run (and where not to fish) but a world full of engineers and physicists might contribute something helpful. For example, if they reveal that radioactive and water soluble product X is being produced some guy in the physics department in Argentina might say, "Hey if you put some cheap water soluble Y into the coolant it will not only precipitate product X out of the water solution but it will then absorb neutrons resulting in other stable isotopes of one of the atoms in chemical Y." This might be little known knowledge that the guy learned 20 years ago when he accidentally gummed up the university's reactor 20 years ago.
Also open information allows for people to write better case studies on how(and where) not to build a reactor.
It is just too bad if all this open information makes a few people look bad.
Pedantic versions of material seem to win over plainly written material. I have often turned to Wikipedia for some math help. Yet you might take the article on the parabola. At first it would make for great homework help for a student in grade 10. But in a snap of the fingers it has jumped into university level and then is pushing into graduate level in no time. Much of that material could have been better explained. But instead it is filled with specialist notation with plain English diligently excluded. Math by its nature needs to be precise but precision can co-exist with easy to understand. But if you were to dare to edit such an article so as to add plain English explanations you would be shot in the face by some OCD math twerp in under 5 minutes.
My recommendation is that you gut the power of these editors. If I make a change and some editor disagrees, then it should be put to a vote of the users. I am not saying voting on facts but the presentation of the facts. Also there needs to be a way to neuter some of these OCD editors. Again a vote would be one way. If you find an out of control editor you could make a case, put it to some kind of jury and then boom, they are gone.
I see many articles delete because of various reasons rhyming with "Not notable" But this seems to be randomly applied. The smallest details of some 3rd rate TV episode might get an entry but then some small town hero is deleted. Seeing that the entire back and fourth of creation and deletion is stored why can't articles be marked as "Not notable" but then left in place. If the local pizza place puts up an entry it certainly isn't notable but the data is probably factually correct and useful to a few.
I get this feeling that certain editors are way way out of control on some pedantic mission often with an axe to grind.
The key here is trust. Before people might have said, 'Well AWS, Google, Microsoft won't cave because it would hurt their business models." But now we are even asking if the chips themselves might have back doors. So I suspect that now people are looking at their infrastructure and saying, "Trust nothing" Thus you design your infrastructure to assume that nearly everything is compromised.
But this brings back a new tool into the tool into the toolbox. Security through obscurity. The idea is that if you are using well known protocols and systems then the voracious data monsters may very well have ways to tap into them. But if you adopt the weirdos then you might very well avoid easy data loss. These can be layered. So you might use SSH(or some VPN) for the outer layer but underneath you might even use some homebrew encryption. As everyone knows the chances of getting your own encryption right is low but it takes you out of the realm of automated data harvesting. Some group of humans have to now pick through your protocol and crack it. Then you just keep making regular tweaks to your protocol, not to make it better but to change the weirdness.
But this whole thing is a huge opportunity for a country with good privacy protections. A whole industry of secure routers and whatnot could be created that people would trust. I would infinitely prefer a router from an Icelandic(designed and built) company than a technically better router from Cisco (designed in the US and probably made in China).
Also this is where opensource is going to get a whole lot more interesting. Tools like Skype would be better trusted if the code was opensource (they can still retain the copyrights and say, you can poke through it and compile it for your own use but not modify and distribute it). This way when the NSA demands a back door. Skype can say, "No problem but people will discover it in 5 seconds." On top of that it would be great if tools like skype had better plugins for things like encryption and comm. This way you could download 3rd party tools all day to keep shaking things up. Your buddies would have to have the same plugin but among friends or corporations this would not be a problem.
The ideal setups would allow you to know that your ISP was compromized, your software provider was compromised, and the feds hated you, yet you could still use the Internet in complete privacy.
Personally the only security I would trust if I were wanting perfect secrecy would be one time pads. By hand I would deliver one time pads to my trusted companions (divided into slices and delivered by multiple trusted couriers) and use only those for communications. The occasional HD should suffice for nearly all communications. Also the machines being used for communications would not be networked. You would take the transmission from an (assumed compromised) machine, put it on a storage device, then read it on the trusted non-networked machine using the matching one-time-pad, prepare an encrypted response, and then put it back on the compromised machine for sending. Good luck back dooring that setup.
I use cocos2d-x, and am waiting for QT to mature for iOS and Android, and am always keeping my eyes open for new and better multi-device architectures.
Using cocos2d-x as an example, I have little trouble programming away in C++ on my desktop at full speed, then checking to make sure that I haven't broken anything on iOS or android. By programming on my desktop I can change screen ratios and whatnot very quickly to make sure everything looks good. My code for iOS and Android has a minimal number of #ifdefs to tweek the very occasional platform specific bits. I love keeping things C++ as it is so wonderfully multi-platform while being able to access the finer bits of the various OSs. Only once have I even run into a tiny bit of trouble with endianness.
The real trick is to make sure that compiling in iOS and Android is kept as simple as possible. For example I keep the android part all command-line. I run a tiny script that compiles and installs the App while awaiting debug data. This then keeps me out of eclipse. The crazy thing is that if there are any android problems I don't even need to close my desktop IDE; just make the changes there and re-run the script.
The final deployment isn't that hard either. I don't presently even distribute desktop versions of the apps. Development is desktop based as it is just so much faster.
So I don't know what exactly the problem is. Personally I was looking into blasting out a Blackberry version of my latest app just to see how easy it would be. My suspicions are that getting any code running on the BB and then uploading it to the BB store will actually be the hardest bits.
Message me if you have any questions about this setup.
No Java can't run as fast as C++ when C++ is pushing out to the limits. If you have 64Gigs of physical memory and you tightly fill it with 60Gs of carefully designed structs that you are sorting and noodling with in as close to real time as you can get Java won't even be invited to the party. Now you realize that you need to push that data onto a hard drive as fast as humanly possible so you don't use a file system you just directly access the harddrive and write the raw data. Then you realize that you need to use the newest CUDA abilities of the video card which Java technically can do but you need to move those tightly packed structs into the memory as fast as the hardware can handle it. Well seeing that the structs are byte for byte identical in RAM as they will be in the Video Card's memory then there will be no translation at all. You will just squirt them straight into the memory for the GPU.
As I said at this extreme edge Java won't be invited at all. But this is not to say that Java is crap; it is just that it has limitations. A simple example is that when people are making the leading edge games C++ is too clunky and they tend to use mostly C. Java again is just not invited to that party. Was impressed that Mindcraft was done in Java until I saw it done in Python and then realized that it isn't that demanding a game.
4 people each choosing different things and then not watching the whole season. That is going to add up.
I cut our cable cord a while back to go to netflix. This saved around $60 per month (I had about the cheapest cable possible). This was a massive savings with a huge boost in quality. While Netflix does not have everything neither did my cable package. Not one of the 4 people in my household have complained even once about losing cable.
But using an apple TV I was looking at the prices and saw that access to some TV season would cost me $34. That is bonkers. The whole idea of cutting the cord was not only to stop paying my cable company but to break the ridiculous model that Hollywood has been forcing on us for years. If you watch a TV show on some form of broadcast or cable the producer makes around $0.10 to $0.25 per household for the first showing from the advertisers. So a TV series for download (which effectively is a rerun) is somehow expecting to make double or triple that? Even renting an entire series physically was cheaper than that.
So I don't know why the article focused on the 4 systems that seem set on bringing back a variation of a model that has had its neck snapped by Netflix. About the only feature they offer that is newish is the "Downloading is so convenient." A short while ago I was talking with a mid-level movie exec who said a model people were getting excited about was to have new releases available for download for a huge huge price. The idea was that some people had lots of money and huge screens. So they would have their friends over and it would all be exciting. The exec was gleeful about the idea of screwing not only the viewer but the theatres too.
My guess is that all these execs forget about piracy as an ever present competitor. So they dream up spreadsheets that compare their prices to the prices paid to traditional media. Many people are paying well in excess of $100 per month in Cable. So they say "If we can get them to come to our service we could nail them for at least $80!" What they are forgetting is that people are resistant to change. They will hold on and on to their existing package and then when they make the leap it will be a big one.
Quite simply people are getting more and more really cheap and really good options. Also with iTunes I don't know how much I am going to be paying. At $2 minimum per show it would take a lazy rainy Saturday in this house to blow by my monthly fee for Netflix. I could see a household that didn't really monitor its iTunes to blow past $1000 in a month.
A great line I read recently went something like this. "I'm not sure who will change faster, Netflix becoming more like HBO or HBO becoming more like Netflix." I don't think anyone sane will be saying, "How long before Netflix becomes more like Warner?"
I am not saying that Netflix is the be all and end all; it is just that it crosses a critical threshold in that it makes piracy not worth anyone's time. So maybe Netflix won't be the winner. But the winner will be more like Netflix than iTunes.
First I am not saying that Java has no place.
To me this is not a case of Java being fast enough as good enough. Keep in mind these are people who are building their own microwave towers from one exchange to another to shave microseconds. But also keep in mind that this is is also the era of big data. So you now have a situation where you have to process insanely large amounts of data in near as is possible to real time in order to make trades "Now!"
So if I write a test program in Java that connects to a database and adds up a few columns and then compare it to the same program written in C++ I doubt that there will be a big difference. And if you trading algorithm is small then Java is probably best as your time to market will be shorter.
But if you have 5 Gigs of data coming in every 10 minutes that needs to be sifted, sorted, and processed, then again time to market might be better with Java and the processing time might not be that different. But now if you start to get cool and are using crazy Algorithms to squeeze your data dry then you might be pushing up against the limits of the hardware itself. Now you must be in C++ land or you needn't bother. The processing time difference between C++ and Java will be great enough that the market will move faster than your computers can.
Now this last case might seem like the weird case so a person could say well Java covers 95% of our needs. The problem is that if you have no C++ development at all then starting C++ just for this extreme case will not be easy to support. Thus a nice mix of Java and C++ is probably better than just one or the other.
A great example of this sort of experience for us programmers would be Eclipse and Sublime Text 2. Eclipse is mostly Java and for years drove me mad as it would start grinding away at whatever. Or I would start typing code and Eclipse would sit for 10 seconds before a bunch of my typing showed up. It took forever to start and so on. Sublime text starts in a flash, runs at warp speed, and has extra cpu cycles left over for things like the mini-side-view. Again this is not a perfect comparison as Eclipse is much more of an IDE and does 1 billion other things but I find they both are reflective of the Java and C++ philosophies. Java programmers love creating an object for damn near every thought that pops into their heads. They love multiple levels of abstraction. Whereas many C++ programmers are 70% C programmer and 30% C++ programmer which is a near endless war within the C++ world. So C++ programmers tend to head for the simplest possible solution, not the most flexible solution, not even the most maintainable solution.
So in the trading world if I were laying out the staff and the architecture for a large zillion user trading system that will be created and maintained by a large team(s) of programmers then I would stick with Java. If I had a small crack team who are to build a system for implementing an ML system that looks at traffic patterns to predict spot corn prices in the next 5 minutes then C++ all the way baby!
I am willing to bet that there are a number of SlashDotters wondering, "Where's my $500?" While the mathematically inclined among us are nodding knowingly that with every offer they make they have a certain percentage probability of hitting a whistle blower. The question is will they be able to hit the threshold of having enough people to have an impact before they are approaching a near 100% chance of getting busted?
Even if only 1 in 50 would blow the whistle the odds still stack up against you pretty quickly. Plus now we are all going to jump on anyone being a Samsung fanboy. If their next product has a mobile quantum processor we will all be screaming "SHILL! SHILL!" at the poster.
MS will just try to use this as a tool to lure people back to the MS fold instead of seeing it as an opportunity to expand into new markets. I suspect that MS has two competing fears. One is that people who go to Android are never coming back and eventually one of these Linux compatible office suites will be an equal (While things like Open Office are good enough for many they still aren't good enough for say Accounting Pros). So by sticking an Office placeholder they can contain their traitorous users into still sticking with MS Office.
The other competing fear is people will just never come back and simple forget that MS was ever a part of their life. In the past there were PC (MS) people and Apple people. Each identified with their tribe and cast aspersions at the other. But now with tablets and huge mobile phones becoming people's primary computers they probably don't even know what OS they are using. They click on icons and things happen. So if MS wants a future in this world they need to just make products for other operating systems that people want. This might prove to be too painful for MS in that they would be sacrificing their OS dominance.
Looking at the new XBox I don't think that MS is capable of thinking about not abusing any advantage they have.
So my prediction is that any efforts to put office on Android won't actually work for the hard core users of Office like say Accountants. But this can all get a whole lot unpredictable. MS office for Mac seems fine, yet I have never seen someone using it in a expert user scenario. Also I think that when Apple first came out with the Intel Macs the dual boot feature was a huge selling point even though in the end most users just went with the Mac OS. The dual boot gave people the confidence to make the leap.
It wasn't really that long ago that I was arguing that Novell sucked, that the OS 9 sucked and wasn't going anywhere, and that XP was buggy as hell so I was going to stick with NT. All of this is in flux and the very ground we think is so solid could turn out to be ice with summer coming. The company that I am looking for is the one that turns your cell phone into a temporary laptop. That is that you take your phone and connect it to a fold up screen and keyboard for occasional laptop like use. Then you throw the folding thing in your backback and your phone in your pocket and keep going. The key is to make the whole thing non proprietary in that it needs to connect to any phone not just the model A3243. That way you can keep switching phones while keeping the foldy thing for years and years.
A variation on this theme was a two tiered development group. Group 1 came up with every new improvement and product idea. Group 2 finished group 1's ideas. But group 2 didn't answer to group 1 so if group 1 had gone off the rails then group 2 sort of didn't work on it. The recognition was that group 1 was a bit ADD while group 2 was a bit autistic/OCD. The key was that group 1 would not communicate so much with group 2 as that would just end up with blood on the walls but that group 1 communicated with the fairly relaxed group leaders who just herded group 2 into not grumbling and moving forward.
The best interactions with the two groups were when group 2 would get stuck (their faces got closer to their screens) and group 1 would be handed the problem again. Often the solution would be available in 5 minutes.
This way group 2 could use TDD or coding standards, documenting, QA stuff, or whatever they wanted that would have driven group 1 insane. Once group 1 handed it over they could then forget the project existed. What they could often do was insist on certain parameters. 30 fps minimum or whatever they knew was critical to the actual success. Group 2 would then have to obsess over that instead of obsessing over some other religious matter such as excessive logging that dropped performance to 2 fps.
The various companies who want the spectrum should be able to make a few 2 minute spots, not be allowed to spend 1 cent marketing, and then have the public vote on their getting the spectrum. There should be none of this making them spend billions on the spectrum and then charge billions to us to use it. My guess is that the company that promised the best service would get the spectrum. This should be a run off system where there are run-offs with eliminations until one company gets 50% of the vote.
Also companies should be able to lose their spectrum in the same way. Basically they would have to apply to keep it by describing what they did with it while other companies would describe what they would do with it. The threshold would need to be higher but if say 70% voted for a company to lose the spectrum it would be re-auctioned. In Canada the big 3 would lose all their spectrum.
I did want the first Wii, my kids wanted one, my wife wanted one. I dutifully got into line at 6am and got one for Christmas (The year after they came out).
So now we have the new Wii U and my kids haven't peeped about it, none of their friends have one, my wife doesn't know it exists, and Nintendo hasn't shown me anything interesting.
I am not saying that the thing is great or that it sucks. I just don't know and haven't seen anything cool about it.
If it wasn't windows then I would put this phone on my candidates list. I don't understand why they got into bed with Microsoft. I program apps for the iPhone and then port them to Android but would love to have a better Android as my primary phone. I don't want to wear the hair shirt of BlackBerry or Windows. It is sort of like the days when a few of my friends were all wound up about BeOS and before that OS/2. They could come up with all kinds of reasons that BeOS or OS/2 were awesome OSs but sticking to the mainstream OSs is just so much easier and when developing, profitable.
One thing though. I watched the video of the two dogs and while crisp it was odd looking. The colours were sometimes wonky and the dogs went weird when they moved fast. As an example the driveway turns quite blue for a moment while panning.
If the paper is published then I am 100% sure that you will see actual car thefts; which is bad. But I would not be 100% sure that this isn't already happening. I recently watched a video where people were remotely opening new high-end cars to break into them. The video claimed that this was a new and unknown attack.
http://abcnews.go.com/US/video/car-thieves-tech-gadgets-baffle-police-18891078
This may or may not be the same attack but regardless open information that names and shames is critical not only to getting these companies to fix the problem but to be more vigilant about preventing this from ever happening. This prevention will be far less a problem for the car companies if some lawyer can just shut down their critics. To me this is little different than using a lawyer to silence someone from giving you a bad review using the argument that it might hurt sales. Using the argument that this is also protecting the consumer would still be like silencing the bad review if it were a "10 worst used cars to buy" review. That review too would hurt the consumer. The reality is that the consumer bought a car from a company that couldn't be bothered to properly secure their car.
I really really hope that now that the fact there is a problem will spur some other researchers to quickly identify the problem and I hope they release the details in full into the wild. My only hope is that they give full credit to the original and now censored researchers for their original work.
As for consumers being hurt; once proof is released that your car is susceptible to theft it is your fault if it gets stolen (in that you know asshat thieves want to steal your car) so it is your responsibility to prevent the theft. Previously you comfortably relied upon the built in security but just like if you found out that a bunch of thieves had a copy of the key to your front door you would change the lock. So this is when you either demand that the car company fix it or you go to a third party and get them to put in something cool and new. The problem is that you don't quite know what is broken and thus what needs fixing. The more information available the better.
Here is a list of all the things that can take a short (but not instant) 60,000 Gs:
...
...
...
...
...
...
I've got nothing.
I'm now trying to think of how to build something that can take 60,000Gs:
I've still got nothing.
Energy efficient, yes. Distance efficient, no. If you are being chased by the police going over it will be better than going around it.
Free running in theory is the more theatrical. The purist parkour is looking for the most efficient way to go from A to B which could involve jumping gaps, shooting through tiny holes, climbing walls, etc. So a parkour purist won't be doing flips and whatnot. Where the showing off comes is that A and B have a maze in between.
My guess for robots is that they will end up being insectile in design. Most of the tasks that we will assign them will be more like ants. I have never complete understood the general Japanese direction of attempting humanoid robots. While cool we already have lots of humans. Some might argue that we also have lots of tools designed for people and these would then be available to humanoid robots. But if I wanted a robot to drill holes all day I am pretty sure that I would just design the drill as an a attachment in a multi purpose robot or build it right into a single purpose robot.
Many kudos to the designer of this robot by virtue that a key obstacle to useful robots are obstacles. A great example of terrible locomotion robots would be those bomb disposal robots. They just lumber along looking like they are going to tip and most don't look like they could negotiate a curb and certainly not some stairs.
My only complaint about this innovative robot would be that its nemesis would be dental floss. That badboy would become a tangled mess moments after encountering something like floss.
One store tracking me is bad. I'll just stop shopping there. It is when they start sharing the data. This is a clear case of where data privacy laws need to be very very clear and strong. You might think "Who cares if a store or two tracked someone" But the moment you buy something with a CC or debit card, then they can go back through all their data and tie your face (or cellphone ID) to your actual person. If they are sharing the data you now have a trail.
The worst would be if the cellphone company just started to sell your location data. This way someone going from car dealership to car dealership but not leaving their name or number could then suddenly start getting calls and emails. Or if you have just walked into your first dealership they could see that you hadn't been to any competitors and might be a complete sucker.
I have long been an advocate that no organization should be allow to share their customer data with any other organization. I even think this should be internal. I don't want the bank calling and trying to sell me products because they see my balance is way up. So even a bank's marketing department should be kept away from my private data.
There is never just one cockroach. The key is to thwart people who connive their way into a job. I watched one woman spend years undermining her boss all the while setting herself up to replace him. Just as she was succeeding a friend of the big big boss came in out of nowhere and took over. His first assignment to her was to send her into the bowels of a lost project. In a drunken conversation he implied that prior to starting he had been given a copy of everybody's emails including all her conniving.
This might seem like a win but he was a Grade-A D-Bag who zero idea how to run anything. This was a medium sized tech company and he had been running a used-record store.
As I say it would be better to line up a series of the best candidates and then just roll the dice. This way the benefits of conniving lose much of their allure. If you are in an organization where you only have one good candidate there are only three possibilities. One is that your organization is populated with incompetents. Two is that a conniving backstabber has eliminated the competition. Three is that the conniving backstabber has made the other qualified candidates look unqualified.
I don't know how many places I have been where there were 3 or more people vieing for a senior position with the result that either some other completely unqualified candidate came along or the least qualified got the position. Either way random chance(among the possibles) would have worked better.
I am not suggesting that for the next HP CEO they just pick randomly from the entire employee pool but from the at least 10-20 people who might qualify. The only problem is that this is not a short term solution as many people near the top are also conniving backstabbing frauds. So this would take a while of using this quazi random system for promotion.