For some products, that's a good approach, but for VR..... there is, as they say, a history there. The '90s VR market dried up very quickly when people realized that 5 minutes of VR made you nauseous and miserable.
The 2010's VR industry is very anxious not to repeat that debacle, so they are being very careful not to leave it up to the customers to decide what an "enjoyable experience" is. If/when the customers decide that puking is not enjoyable, it will already be too late, and VR will go back onto the curio shelf for another 10 years.
In 20 years you won't be allowed to drive on public roads. Take it to the race track.
Somehow I doubt that. Even if we assume that in 20 years every new car is capable of driving autonomously, the fact will remain that every autonomous car design will have been developed and trained for use in an environment with human drivers present, and therefore will be perfectly capable of sharing the road with human drivers.
Combine that with the large contingent of car enthusiasts who will give up their steering wheels only when you pry them from their cold dead hands -- consider how the NRA feels about guns, and consider that in the USA at least, cars are more of a cultural icon than guns are.
You might well pay more in auto insurance if you drive manually, but assuming you have a clean driving record, probably not a whole lot more. Especially if every car around you can and does reliably react within milliseconds to reduce the impact of any bonehead moves you might make.
I will predict that in 20 years it will be very difficult to sell a new car that isn't capable of driving autonomously.
Don't dot the I's or cross the T's and it's millions and millions in delays. It's a game the environmentalists have learned well. And wind, if subjected to the same abuse would see skyrocketing costs.
Sure, and if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. It's nuclear power's demonstrated ability to seriously screw things up that allows its opponents to slow nuclear development. Wind won't be subject to that level of scrutiny unless/until wind power somehow forces entire cities to be permanently evacuated.
Yeah, because millions of innocent dead is a bright side. Some of the things you say are so stupid they're baffling.
I see you didn't quite follow his reasoning, so let's go over it. The millions of innocent dead are the downside. The fact that it couldn't happen a second time, because after a nuclear exchange the problematic North Korean government would no longer exist, that's the bright side.
Accuse the parent poster of joking in bad taste if you want, but what he posted was perfectly logical.
I wonder how much Wind would cost if every wind installation faced numerous lawsuits
It would cost a lot more. But wind faces less opposition, because if a wind turbine fails, nobody gets irradiated and no land gets poisoned.
Nuclear is expensive because people have succeeded in making it expensive.
And rightly so -- people succeeded in making it expensive because if it ever fails, it's an unrecoverable disaster that renders entire counties uninhabitable. The one thing you don't want is a a cheap, shoddy, half-assed nuclear plant that was built by the lowest bidder.
No jury would find against the human and in favor of the robot.
I would find against the human, if the evidence showed that the human were in fact at fault. I have enough faith in the rationality of my fellow man to predict that most jurors would do the same.
And with a self-driving car there will be no lack of evidence regarding exactly what happened, since it keeps a full audit trail of everything that occurred before and during the accident. (Compare with a typical accident involving human drivers, which often devolves into a he-said-vs-he-said situation, with both sides offering only a partial and subjective subset of the truth)
(6) You could torture people with such a device without leaving any (or at least very much) physical evidence.
No real need for that; if that's your goal, you can waterboard your victims today.
(7) Someone will figure out how to directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain with such a device. That will make meth look like high school kids drinking bad beer on Saturday night.
On the plus side, that would probably end the drug wars. Why buy heroine from seedy guy when you're just going to need to buy more next week, when you can get this device instead and starve to death after 140 hours of continuous orgasm instead?
Really do think for yourself and quit believing all the propaganda
This from a guy who thinks that the government is some sort of monstrous hydra, with every single part of it secretly conspiring together against him because reasons. Sounds like you've swallowed more than a little anti-government propaganda yourself.
Self-destructing bullets are well and good, but if you really want safety then you want to get away from bullets entirely.
What you want is to release the swarm of 10,000 mosquito-sized drones, each carrying a hypodermic needle full of concentrated THC. These will be guaranteed not to kill anyone, while at the same time making it easy for the police to arrest anyone they need to arrest.
Nobody makes the vault company drop by and show you the secret access trick, am I right?
The problem with the physical-vault analogy is that (to my knowledge) nobody has ever produced a physical-vault that was unbreakable by the federal government, so the precedent may stand merely because the government never felt it had the need to coerce a vault manufacturer.
A better hypothetical might be a vault whose interior walls are lined with explosives, such that if anybody tries to cut in the vault will blow up, obliterating its contents. If the Feds were sufficiently motivated to obtain the contents of that vault, would they go after the vault's manufacturer with lawyers? Quite possibly.
Off topic a bit, but does anybody but me think the 'erase phone after 10 bad password tries' feature takes 'security' too far?
It would be a bit over-the-top if erasing the phone meant losing all the data you had stored on the phone. But then again, if you didn't have your phone backed up somewhere, dropping your phone into the sink would have the exact same effect. So of course you do have your important data backed up, right? In which case, having your kid brother accidentally wipe your phone is only a minor inconvenience, not a big disaster -- just restore it when you get your phone back.
I am more surprised that he does not realize you cannot create a specific solution for this that is not also a general solution for all phones.
Err, can't you? Since only Apple has the private key necessary to sign iOS firmware updates, AFAICT that means that Apple could release a nerfed firmware that would run only on an iPhone 5c with Sayed Farouk's phone's hardware ID, and refuse to run on any other device, and nobody would be able to modify it without breaking its signature.
I understand there is also a principle of legal precedent to consider, but from a technical standpoint I don't see how it's impossible.
They have long needed a reason to give that they charge a large markup on their hardware compared to their competitors.
Actually, they don't need a reason. Plenty of people are happy to buy their product already, without them needing to come up with any new motivations for people to do so.
I know it's tough for the haters to accept, but they produce a quality product that people are willing to pay a premium for.
If Apple caves... entire markets will look for other options.
I don't think that's quite true. If Apple caves, most people won't care, since most people think the government has a right to search an ex-terrorist's cell phone, and most people won't consider the implications.
The scenario where the shit hits the fan for Apple is some months or years later, when the technique Apple provided the government to unlock the phone somehow escapes into the wild, and suddenly every iPhone is easy game for hackers and identify thieves.
That's when Apple's ability to sell cell phones goes away, and probably they get hit with a number of expensive lawsuits as well.
which again leaves me wondering about the relevance of not being able to back it up to the cloud.
The idea was that they could bring the iPhone back into range of a WiFi network it already knows (e.g. the WiFi network at the terrorists' condo) and within a day or two it would do another automatic cloud backup.
Once that completed, Apple (and therefore the government) would have access to that backup, and therefore could try to break the backup's encryption via brute force without triggering the 10-attempt-failure auto-erase that is present on the phone.
However, since the password was changed, it seems that now the phone will be unable to initiate a backup without someone logging in to the phone first.
Well one reason to keep hard drives around is because their capacity can be measured in terabytes, instead of SSD's which are apparently measured in terabytes.
The Terebyte is a common unit of measurement for Imperial bytes.
Imperial bytes are similar to standard bytes, except that they were invented before the widespread adoption of Arabic numbers, so instead of storing the bits as 0's and 1's, they store them as I's and II's.
If all else fails, they can always replace the fuel cell and hydrogen tank with some batteries and sell it as a pure electric... at least they'll have an eye-catching electric car, maybe to compete with the Tesla Roaster.
(what, you thought they pressed the invisible RESET PASSWORD button you couldn't find on the circuit board??).
At the risk of asking a stupidly obvious question, why not just have a "reset to factory defaults" button somewhere on the device? That's what all the routers seem to have these days, and assuming that you can keep the device physically out of the wrong hands, that seems like a reasonable solution to the inevitable "I don't remember my password anymore" problems.
You can't order someone to do the impossible. For practical purposes, breaking the end to end encryption on an iphone is impossible. Who better than the people who developed the software to know this??
I thought that once you had physical access to a device, it was just a matter of time and expertise before you could crack it. Does Apple know some secret techniques that nobody else does, such that an iPhone 5c is physically tamper-proof even by the people who built it and know everything about its design and manufacturing?
Slashdot Mirror
Well, there is always the possibility of hooking up an external GPU via Thunderbolt -- in principle, anyway, dunno if it will be well-supported or practical.
... what an "enjoyable experience" is.
For some products, that's a good approach, but for VR..... there is, as they say, a history there. The '90s VR market dried up very quickly when people realized that 5 minutes of VR made you nauseous and miserable.
The 2010's VR industry is very anxious not to repeat that debacle, so they are being very careful not to leave it up to the customers to decide what an "enjoyable experience" is. If/when the customers decide that puking is not enjoyable, it will already be too late, and VR will go back onto the curio shelf for another 10 years.
In 20 years you won't be allowed to drive on public roads. Take it to the race track.
Somehow I doubt that. Even if we assume that in 20 years every new car is capable of driving autonomously, the fact will remain that every autonomous car design will have been developed and trained for use in an environment with human drivers present, and therefore will be perfectly capable of sharing the road with human drivers.
Combine that with the large contingent of car enthusiasts who will give up their steering wheels only when you pry them from their cold dead hands -- consider how the NRA feels about guns, and consider that in the USA at least, cars are more of a cultural icon than guns are.
You might well pay more in auto insurance if you drive manually, but assuming you have a clean driving record, probably not a whole lot more. Especially if every car around you can and does reliably react within milliseconds to reduce the impact of any bonehead moves you might make.
I will predict that in 20 years it will be very difficult to sell a new car that isn't capable of driving autonomously.
The A-10 Warthog is thrilled to lose the title!
Don't dot the I's or cross the T's and it's millions and millions in delays. It's a game the environmentalists have learned well. And wind, if subjected to the same abuse would see skyrocketing costs.
Sure, and if my aunt had balls she'd be my uncle. It's nuclear power's demonstrated ability to seriously screw things up that allows its opponents to slow nuclear development. Wind won't be subject to that level of scrutiny unless/until wind power somehow forces entire cities to be permanently evacuated.
Yeah, because millions of innocent dead is a bright side. Some of the things you say are so stupid they're baffling.
I see you didn't quite follow his reasoning, so let's go over it. The millions of innocent dead are the downside. The fact that it couldn't happen a second time, because after a nuclear exchange the problematic North Korean government would no longer exist, that's the bright side.
Accuse the parent poster of joking in bad taste if you want, but what he posted was perfectly logical.
I wonder how much Wind would cost if every wind installation faced numerous lawsuits
It would cost a lot more. But wind faces less opposition, because if a wind turbine fails, nobody gets irradiated and no land gets poisoned.
Nuclear is expensive because people have succeeded in making it expensive.
And rightly so -- people succeeded in making it expensive because if it ever fails, it's an unrecoverable disaster that renders entire counties uninhabitable. The one thing you don't want is a a cheap, shoddy, half-assed nuclear plant that was built by the lowest bidder.
No jury would find against the human and in favor of the robot.
I would find against the human, if the evidence showed that the human were in fact at fault. I have enough faith in the rationality of my fellow man to predict that most jurors would do the same.
And with a self-driving car there will be no lack of evidence regarding exactly what happened, since it keeps a full audit trail of everything that occurred before and during the accident. (Compare with a typical accident involving human drivers, which often devolves into a he-said-vs-he-said situation, with both sides offering only a partial and subjective subset of the truth)
(6) You could torture people with such a device without leaving any (or at least very much) physical evidence.
No real need for that; if that's your goal, you can waterboard your victims today.
(7) Someone will figure out how to directly stimulate the pleasure centers of the brain with such a device. That will make meth look like high school kids drinking bad beer on Saturday night.
On the plus side, that would probably end the drug wars. Why buy heroine from seedy guy when you're just going to need to buy more next week, when you can get this device instead and starve to death after 140 hours of continuous orgasm instead?
Well, it wouldn't be the first time the conservatives have stood on the side of a corporation to be free of government regulation and control.
Really do think for yourself and quit believing all the propaganda
This from a guy who thinks that the government is some sort of monstrous hydra, with every single part of it secretly conspiring together against him because reasons. Sounds like you've swallowed more than a little anti-government propaganda yourself.
Disco Stu: Did you know that disco record sales were up 400% for the year ending 1976? If these trends continue --- A-y-y-y!
(puts his feet up on his desk wearing see-through platform shoes with water and fish inside)
Homer: Uh, your fish are dead.
Disco Stu: Yeah, I know. I... can't get them out of there.
Self-destructing bullets are well and good, but if you really want safety then you want to get away from bullets entirely.
What you want is to release the swarm of 10,000 mosquito-sized drones, each carrying a hypodermic needle full of concentrated THC. These will be guaranteed not to kill anyone, while at the same time making it easy for the police to arrest anyone they need to arrest.
Nobody makes the vault company drop by and show you the secret access trick, am I right?
The problem with the physical-vault analogy is that (to my knowledge) nobody has ever produced a physical-vault that was unbreakable by the federal government, so the precedent may stand merely because the government never felt it had the need to coerce a vault manufacturer.
A better hypothetical might be a vault whose interior walls are lined with explosives, such that if anybody tries to cut in the vault will blow up, obliterating its contents. If the Feds were sufficiently motivated to obtain the contents of that vault, would they go after the vault's manufacturer with lawyers? Quite possibly.
Off topic a bit, but does anybody but me think the 'erase phone after 10 bad password tries' feature takes 'security' too far?
It would be a bit over-the-top if erasing the phone meant losing all the data you had stored on the phone. But then again, if you didn't have your phone backed up somewhere, dropping your phone into the sink would have the exact same effect. So of course you do have your important data backed up, right? In which case, having your kid brother accidentally wipe your phone is only a minor inconvenience, not a big disaster -- just restore it when you get your phone back.
I am more surprised that he does not realize you cannot create a specific solution for this that is not also a general solution for all phones.
Err, can't you? Since only Apple has the private key necessary to sign iOS firmware updates, AFAICT that means that Apple could release a nerfed firmware that would run only on an iPhone 5c with Sayed Farouk's phone's hardware ID, and refuse to run on any other device, and nobody would be able to modify it without breaking its signature.
I understand there is also a principle of legal precedent to consider, but from a technical standpoint I don't see how it's impossible.
They have long needed a reason to give that they charge a large markup on their hardware compared to their competitors.
Actually, they don't need a reason. Plenty of people are happy to buy their product already, without them needing to come up with any new motivations for people to do so.
I know it's tough for the haters to accept, but they produce a quality product that people are willing to pay a premium for.
If Apple caves... entire markets will look for other options.
I don't think that's quite true. If Apple caves, most people won't care, since most people think the government has a right to search an ex-terrorist's cell phone, and most people won't consider the implications.
The scenario where the shit hits the fan for Apple is some months or years later, when the technique Apple provided the government to unlock the phone somehow escapes into the wild, and suddenly every iPhone is easy game for hackers and identify thieves.
That's when Apple's ability to sell cell phones goes away, and probably they get hit with a number of expensive lawsuits as well.
which again leaves me wondering about the relevance of not being able to back it up to the cloud.
The idea was that they could bring the iPhone back into range of a WiFi network it already knows (e.g. the WiFi network at the terrorists' condo) and within a day or two it would do another automatic cloud backup.
Once that completed, Apple (and therefore the government) would have access to that backup, and therefore could try to break the backup's encryption via brute force without triggering the 10-attempt-failure auto-erase that is present on the phone.
However, since the password was changed, it seems that now the phone will be unable to initiate a backup without someone logging in to the phone first.
Of course, this does assume that the ransomers won't come back and ask for more money next week.
Well one reason to keep hard drives around is because their capacity can be measured in terabytes, instead of SSD's which are apparently measured in terabytes.
The Terebyte is a common unit of measurement for Imperial bytes.
Imperial bytes are similar to standard bytes, except that they were invented before the widespread adoption of Arabic numbers, so instead of storing the bits as 0's and 1's, they store them as I's and II's.
If all else fails, they can always replace the fuel cell and hydrogen tank with some batteries and sell it as a pure electric... at least they'll have an eye-catching electric car, maybe to compete with the Tesla Roaster.
(what, you thought they pressed the invisible RESET PASSWORD button you couldn't find on the circuit board??).
At the risk of asking a stupidly obvious question, why not just have a "reset to factory defaults" button somewhere on the device? That's what all the routers seem to have these days, and assuming that you can keep the device physically out of the wrong hands, that seems like a reasonable solution to the inevitable "I don't remember my password anymore" problems.
You can't order someone to do the impossible. For practical purposes, breaking the end to end encryption on an iphone is impossible. Who better than the people who developed the software to know this??
I thought that once you had physical access to a device, it was just a matter of time and expertise before you could crack it. Does Apple know some secret techniques that nobody else does, such that an iPhone 5c is physically tamper-proof even by the people who built it and know everything about its design and manufacturing?
That's possible I suppose, but I doubt it.
A counter-revolution, to be more precise. Preferably, one that outlaws Islam - in the same way Communism was outlawed in Russia after 1991.
99.4% of Iranians are Muslims. Good luck with that.