I agree with this criticism of tablets except that I always phrase it as "a keyboard is a MUST." I think it might be bullshit, though, because the best controller or keyboard, is the one you have, whether it totally sucks or is good enough or is awesome.
The issue isn't whether or not tablets are good for gaming; it's whether or not you have a tablet on you (that is where they truly fail IMHO; they're too big for my pocket so I don't have one, but different people have different circumstances) and happen to want to play a game. If you have one with you, and want to play a game, then it's a gaming computer. That's how phones turned into gaming computers. It'll happen to tablets too, though to a smaller degree (unless the textile industry creates a new pocket-size standard).
Since you do carry your iPad with you, then regardless of how much you want a better controller, I think you're going to keep playing games on it.:-)
His idea is stupid, but it's not a freedom issue if you replace "company" with "corporation." There are no ethical barriers to imposing conditions in exchange for the miraculous perk of limited liability; there are only performance issues.
There's no technical fix for it, because one isn't needed. If a government does that on a country-wide scale, too many people know that it's happening, for it to remain a secret.
For the same reason that you trust GlobalSign's list, whatever that may be. With a couple exceptions:
1) Unlike faceless names like GlobalSign, the person issuing such a list may be someone you actually meet and/or can get to know. So the lower bound of trustworthiness is the same as GlobalSign's, but the upper bound is unlimited.
2) The assertions provided by the list's publisher are a little less risky to accept, because the list publisher is claiming less. The list publisher is claiming they have seen various identities use certain fingerprints in the past, whereas GlobalSign says something stronger: that they have verified the identities associated with certain fingerprints. Since it's a weaker assertion (analogous to the "I have not checked at all (1)" level of certification under OpenPGP), its failure is less catastrophic, so it's an improvement to the overall security of the system.
And if you're not thinking in terms of "improvements" and degrees of security (and instead you evaluate each statement of identity as "This is probably a fraud attempt" or "this is definitely secure and I can completely trust it") then you're not facing real life and actually working on the problem, yet.
The answer to that question is identical to the answer to: "Will you notice if your bank uses plaintext http?" If you think the answer to that question is No, then whatever you use to turn that into not being a problem, will work the same for both approaches.
Is the 6200 16 physical cores or just 8 dualthreaded ones?
Part of what makes Bulldozer interesting, is that there is no quick straight-forward soundbite answer to that question. It's 16 less-than-complete cores, or 8 more-than-merely-dual-threaded cores.
I look forward to the day when some profiler nerd figures out that most cost-effective ratio is to make a chip with 3 memory busses, 17 integer units and 11 floating point units, with 23 sets of registers./proc/cpuinfo will say it's a 23-core machine so that'll be the soundbite answer, and then some math twit will whine that it's really only an 11 core machine. And everyone will be both wrong and right simultaneously.
False consciousness. According to Marx, one of the most pernicious aspects of industrial age capitalism was that the proles wouldn't even know they were being exploited â" and might even celebrate the very factors behind their exploitation, in a kind of ideological Stockholm Syndrome that concealed and misrepresented the relations of power between classes. How's Marx doing on this score? You tell me. I'll merely point out: America's largest private employer is Walmart. America's second largest employer is McDonald's.
I struggle to think how anyone could have thought up worse examples to undermine their own point, no matter how hard they tried. The turnover at McDonalds and Wal-Mart is amazing, and the very idea that these workers are happy and don't feel like exploited disposable cogs is laughable. Seriously, these two companies may be the very very worst to use as examples, in all the history of humanity, to make an argument for some kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
The dude needs to rewrite that paragraph to avoid distracting readers from his point, with that glaring over-the-top WTF. I almost wonder if he put that into his article as an "are you really reading?" joke or test.
Because in 40 years we haven't matched the accomplishment.
Spoken like someone who hasn't seen satellite TV or used an Iridium phone. Yes, these are closer than the moon but more numerous. And they're commercial and actual useful applications. Their seeming mundaneness is amazing in itself.
Oh, and spoken like someone who hasn't seen photos from the surface of Mars. Or photos from probes that few by Neptune, or orbited Jupiter and Saturn.
I get that you want people walking around on the moon again (though I don't get why), but let's not get silly and say the accomplishment hasn't been matched. Some pretty amazing space shit happened after Apollo. It's just been a little less symbolic and a little more informative.
They'll pull something clever out of their asses to keep from going down. Maybe they'll power up the lunar module's computer to handle the extra load, or they'll insert a pen into their router's fuse holder.
The mugger analogy is excellent, because even though most people will just hand their wallets over to a mugger, the mugger doesn't know which people actually have money in their wallets and which ones don't, until after he's mugged them. And every mugging carries some risk to the mugger, even though it's fairly low.
If you work as a mugger on a fairly small scale (mug ten people per day), perhaps you can eventually make enough money to retire before you get killed or arrested. I don't know.
But if you set out to mug every single citizen or even a significant fraction of the population (say about 1%; 30 million Americans) then that risk per mugging can be absurdly low, and still nearly guarantee that the mugger will be killed or arrested prior to completing his mission.
Passive snooping doesn't carry that risk, but if The People (rather than merely "people of interest") take the counter-measure of encrypting, then all that's left for abusive power to counter that with, are high-risk strategies that will get them nothing but eventual detection and defeat.
You can't show your wrenches to 30 million people and expect not a single one of them to tell the media what happened. And let's say your goons can show their wrenches convincingly to ten people per hour, and they work for $10 per hour. The project just cost $30 million dollars. Talking about the project in terms of the cost of a wrench in this context, sounds like a pretty slimey sales pitch to me. Do not buy wrenches from Randall Munroe! It's a scam, I promise.
OMG what a fateful day that was, back in the mid-80s when I decided I needed to become proficient in a new-to-me higher-than-assembly language, and for some arbitrary reason decided I only had time at that moment to learn one [Kids! *facepalm*]. It came down to FORTH or C, and all I cared about, was the speed of the code generated by the compilers / speed of interpreters that were available to me at the time. [Kids! *facepalm*] Based solely on that one thing, I went with C.
Thank Fucking Yog-Sothoth. Sometimes an idiot makes the right choice for the wrong reasons.
I wonder how my life had gone, if I had not learned C. Would I have learned FORTH, found little use for it, and then just learned C a few months later? Maybe; I'll never know.
Of course it's worth it, because the cost of a wrench (and using it) is astronomical compared to passively intercepting plaintext. And wrench-use is much more easily detected, too.
the government which can't break your code will focus instead on breaking you.
Increasing the attacker's costs is a good thing. I don't know about your government, but my government can't afford (either economically or politically) to torture hundreds of thousands of their own citizens per day. And they can't do it without those citizens finding out that it's happening ("um.. what's this pain in my knee? Oh, hi there. What are you doing?" "Give me the key!!!"). That's a big step up from the current situation.
Resisting abusive power doesn't make it more ruthless; it reveals and exposes its ruthlessness. Call their bluff, and if it's not a bluff, then they will be voted out.
Actually, even laymen have heard the word "computer virus" and tend to blame any malfunction on it. It's become fairly common knowledge that even a brand new machine right out of the shrinkwrap may have things installed which work to advance the interests of parties who are adversarial to the user. People don't phrase it that way, but they know.
How many people really still don't know that you can't just simply install software on iPhones, or that some carriers disallow tethering, and that some media players' fast-forward buttons don't work during certain parts of a DVD or Blu-ray? "Gray" malware preloaded on new machines has been fairly commonplace for over a decade now.
When you get to used machines, the chances are even higher that it could have any sort of malware (whether it works for the previous owner, or working for someone else, doesn't really matter) and laymen are very aware of this (they are the ones who pay the most for it). Pretending to deal with the problem has become a multi-million-dollar business, siphoning a portion of the economy away from productive uses to everywhere from Best Buy to McAffee.
I'm not going to throw around the word "stupid" or "criminal negligence" but it is negligence, and overtly high risk behavior which even common sense should be aware of. This is not Slashdot-geek knowledge.
You buy a computer, especially used, and you either take your chances or you fresh-install it. And taking your chances is certainly an option, but you don't fucking complain about it, especially to an innocent party (i.e. the person from whom it was originally stolen).
I hate to say it, but I think Apple's "walled garden" formula is probably the one that's most likely to succeed
Yes, it will likely succeed; we already know that it has, as dedicated video game consoles have survived working this way for decades and they still exist even today.
But from even that limited subset of software (games), we also know that people and developers also want markets, because no one worldwide store has ever been able to address all demand (or as it turns out, even a large fraction of demand). A games industry thrived outside of dedicated consoles and people who didn't own dedicated consoles never felt "left out" in the slightest way.
So the question is really whether or not it will dominate.
Long term, whether 5% or 30% of users live within the "walled garden," I can't say, but almost all the big names we know today from the software industry made themselves in the market rather than a garden, and the software divisions of companies like Nintendo and Sony are exceptions.
There also seems to be a pattern where a hardware manufacturer is The One (because there can be only one) toll-collector for the garden gate, so the walled garden really only works to the advantage of that one party, at everyone else's expense. Unless force can be used to limit the number of hardware manufacturers, most of the manufacturers at any one given time is going to be trying to guide users toward markets instead, since all those other manufacturer can't be the toll collector.
Then there's the question of how strong users' desires exert themselves in software in general, as compared to the games subset. A game publisher can get away with telling potential customers "take it or leave it," but pick a few other types of software at random and try that out in your head and see where it takes you.:-)
The days of walking into Best Buy and buying a game or application and getting a physical copy of the software could well be numbered.
Those days disappeared because it was too limited in the face of better (lower overhead) ways to distribute software (combined with the commoditization of certain types of software). It meant users had access to less than 1% of developers and paid too high of a price for the privilege. The very decline you're talking about, is a symptom of the pressures working against walled gardens. Compared to The Internet, Best Buy practically is one. There's hardly anything there!
Anyway, I won't say Apple will lose; they might survive. But they'll hardly win; in the sense that there's no danger you'll ever have to buy Apple stuff unless you actually want it.
I know someone who only communicates to friends through facebook and if you missed their wedding reception it's because you don't check facebook often enough.
..if 99% of Facebook's profiles were fictional people, how would it impact this type of usage? The worst thing I see is that your friends would be initially hard to find and connect to, amongst all the chaff, and then either nobody would show up at their parties, or people would have to meet first and exchange facebook uids so that they could establish connections.
The "What's your facebook uid?" problem becomes identical to the "what's your email address?" problem. The fact that there are an infinite number of email addresses, completely unsearchable without building extra infrastructure (e.g. the pgp wot), and that joeschmoe@example.com may very well might not be the Joe Schmoe that you know, never collapsed civilization.
stalkers, identity theft, fugitives, organized crime and terrorism, or even just having relationships with people you care about ruined because someone else saw fit to forge your communication, or present pictures out of context that have the power to wreck reputations
I'm not sure that these things aren't already possible, and just as easy with facebook's current system where it's inconvenient to build fake profiles.
In other words, if you offer this service to the police, it will soon be abused by people who craft identities..
While that is certainly true..
.. for other, even worse, purposes.
..I'm drawing a total blank on what these purposes could even hypothetically be. Just what are the consequences of Facebook profiles being a hopelessly untrustworthy resource? I think the answer might be "jack shit." To put it another way, Facebook can give you information, but nobody ever relies on Facebook to give them information.
making it cheaper to expose them. That's about it. If a criminal is hell-bent on doing harm to an undercover officer, they're going to spend money and effort anyway
Most problems in life are economic, and criminals are not super-men who have infinite resources. I think the point of TFA is that some countermeasures against infiltration are transitioning from impractical to practical.
I often hear about various companies building vaguely humanoid robots, based on the idea that people will accept such robots better. Or some futurist is talking about AI one second but then digresses into how cool it is that a particular robot not only speaks (that's a good thing) but happens to look exactly like Philip K Dick, as if anyone gives a fuck about that. I roll my eyes at how stupid that all seems to me, but I'm hardly a psychologist or marketing expert, so maybe those people know something I don't know.
But this is NASA. They don't need to sell their robot to housewives; their robot is for working with professionals, who presumably aren't making decisions about whether or not to use the robot, based on what color it is, whether or not it has tailfins, or yes, whether or not it is human-shaped. Why does NASA care about humanoid robots? Is it just about the form factor ("our boxes happen to be good at carrying this size+shape") or what?
When I RTFA it's because (implied) money is coming from GM on this project, so at first I thought the robot was doubling as crash-test dummy, where human modeling makes sense. But that's not what TFA says: GM's interest is in sensors, visual processing, and stuff that would be built into cars. (Good projects; that all makes sense to me.) So it doesn't sound like anything being worked on here, is really human-shape oriented.
So why humanoid? Do people really want humanoid robots?
BTW, I get that robots may need to walk; it's silly that I can stop an army of Daleks led by R2D2 by building a 3-inch high wall. But bipedalism is so rare in nature that you wouldn't think people would immediately decide it's the best answer. I just can't believe humanoid is about functionality, so there's something else going on here, that makes people think other people want human-like (in spite of how distant human-like behavior is, always 20 years away).
If being humanoid-shaped is good for a robot's consumer acceptability, then perhaps it's also time to introduce a humanoid coffee cup, a humanoid lamp, a humanoid washing machine, a humanoid car, a humanoid bookshelf...
Can't you setup browsers to prompt to create local storage?
The article does a major disservice to everyone (and I wish we could mod it down) by making up the term "zombie cookies." This new bullshit term hides what's going on and makes us all a little bit stupider. All I have to do to answer your question, is tell you what the article is really about. Instead of making up a bullshit term to confuse you, I'll use a descriptive term.
Ready?
Flash Cookies. The article is about websites caught using Flash cookies instead of browser cookies.
See, asshole-who-wrote-the-article, that wasn't hard. Flash cookies. Now instead of misleading people into thinking their browsers have a problem with cookies and other local storage, people see that the real problem they have with their browsers is plugins, which allows them to run native code that totally bypasses all the browsers' policies.
Flash cookies. Watch all the questions disappear.. but oops.. all the traffic to the fucking article disappears too, since people don't have to click through, read the first article that makes the weird reference to zombies, then click through to another article that explains WTF "zombie cookies" are about.
Slashdot should not have linked to this piece of shit.
Dude 1: "I lost my job to someone named B. B. Rodriguez."
Dude 2: "Those bastards!! They're destroying the economy with their outsourcing! Jobs jobs jobs! Jobs!"
Dude 3: "I lost my job to Bender the Robot."
Dude 2: "Well, that's the price of progress, and ultimately, technology is the one and only thing that ever really lifts the economy. At least you didn't end up like Dude 1."
I wish everyone would stop trying to half-heartedly re-invent partial subsets of OpenPGP. Just use the real thing, and you can have all you want and a whole lot more.
Slashdot Mirror
I have a representative from the rickshaw porter's union here, and he's telling me that Toyota's main business is making robots.
He says: "They're moving away from heavy automation? You're moving toward it every time you turn the ignition key in your Corolla!"
I agree with this criticism of tablets except that I always phrase it as "a keyboard is a MUST." I think it might be bullshit, though, because the best controller or keyboard, is the one you have, whether it totally sucks or is good enough or is awesome.
The issue isn't whether or not tablets are good for gaming; it's whether or not you have a tablet on you (that is where they truly fail IMHO; they're too big for my pocket so I don't have one, but different people have different circumstances) and happen to want to play a game. If you have one with you, and want to play a game, then it's a gaming computer. That's how phones turned into gaming computers. It'll happen to tablets too, though to a smaller degree (unless the textile industry creates a new pocket-size standard).
Since you do carry your iPad with you, then regardless of how much you want a better controller, I think you're going to keep playing games on it. :-)
His idea is stupid, but it's not a freedom issue if you replace "company" with "corporation." There are no ethical barriers to imposing conditions in exchange for the miraculous perk of limited liability; there are only performance issues.
There's no technical fix for it, because one isn't needed. If a government does that on a country-wide scale, too many people know that it's happening, for it to remain a secret.
For the same reason that you trust GlobalSign's list, whatever that may be. With a couple exceptions:
1) Unlike faceless names like GlobalSign, the person issuing such a list may be someone you actually meet and/or can get to know. So the lower bound of trustworthiness is the same as GlobalSign's, but the upper bound is unlimited.
2) The assertions provided by the list's publisher are a little less risky to accept, because the list publisher is claiming less. The list publisher is claiming they have seen various identities use certain fingerprints in the past, whereas GlobalSign says something stronger: that they have verified the identities associated with certain fingerprints. Since it's a weaker assertion (analogous to the "I have not checked at all (1)" level of certification under OpenPGP), its failure is less catastrophic, so it's an improvement to the overall security of the system.
And if you're not thinking in terms of "improvements" and degrees of security (and instead you evaluate each statement of identity as "This is probably a fraud attempt" or "this is definitely secure and I can completely trust it") then you're not facing real life and actually working on the problem, yet.
The answer to that question is identical to the answer to: "Will you notice if your bank uses plaintext http?" If you think the answer to that question is No, then whatever you use to turn that into not being a problem, will work the same for both approaches.
Part of what makes Bulldozer interesting, is that there is no quick straight-forward soundbite answer to that question. It's 16 less-than-complete cores, or 8 more-than-merely-dual-threaded cores.
I look forward to the day when some profiler nerd figures out that most cost-effective ratio is to make a chip with 3 memory busses, 17 integer units and 11 floating point units, with 23 sets of registers. /proc/cpuinfo will say it's a 23-core machine so that'll be the soundbite answer, and then some math twit will whine that it's really only an 11 core machine. And everyone will be both wrong and right simultaneously.
I struggle to think how anyone could have thought up worse examples to undermine their own point, no matter how hard they tried. The turnover at McDonalds and Wal-Mart is amazing, and the very idea that these workers are happy and don't feel like exploited disposable cogs is laughable. Seriously, these two companies may be the very very worst to use as examples, in all the history of humanity, to make an argument for some kind of Stockholm Syndrome.
The dude needs to rewrite that paragraph to avoid distracting readers from his point, with that glaring over-the-top WTF. I almost wonder if he put that into his article as an "are you really reading?" joke or test.
Spoken like someone who hasn't seen satellite TV or used an Iridium phone. Yes, these are closer than the moon but more numerous. And they're commercial and actual useful applications. Their seeming mundaneness is amazing in itself.
Oh, and spoken like someone who hasn't seen photos from the surface of Mars. Or photos from probes that few by Neptune, or orbited Jupiter and Saturn.
I get that you want people walking around on the moon again (though I don't get why), but let's not get silly and say the accomplishment hasn't been matched. Some pretty amazing space shit happened after Apollo. It's just been a little less symbolic and a little more informative.
They'll pull something clever out of their asses to keep from going down. Maybe they'll power up the lunar module's computer to handle the extra load, or they'll insert a pen into their router's fuse holder.
The mugger analogy is excellent, because even though most people will just hand their wallets over to a mugger, the mugger doesn't know which people actually have money in their wallets and which ones don't, until after he's mugged them. And every mugging carries some risk to the mugger, even though it's fairly low.
If you work as a mugger on a fairly small scale (mug ten people per day), perhaps you can eventually make enough money to retire before you get killed or arrested. I don't know.
But if you set out to mug every single citizen or even a significant fraction of the population (say about 1%; 30 million Americans) then that risk per mugging can be absurdly low, and still nearly guarantee that the mugger will be killed or arrested prior to completing his mission.
Passive snooping doesn't carry that risk, but if The People (rather than merely "people of interest") take the counter-measure of encrypting, then all that's left for abusive power to counter that with, are high-risk strategies that will get them nothing but eventual detection and defeat.
You can't show your wrenches to 30 million people and expect not a single one of them to tell the media what happened. And let's say your goons can show their wrenches convincingly to ten people per hour, and they work for $10 per hour. The project just cost $30 million dollars. Talking about the project in terms of the cost of a wrench in this context, sounds like a pretty slimey sales pitch to me. Do not buy wrenches from Randall Munroe! It's a scam, I promise.
OMG what a fateful day that was, back in the mid-80s when I decided I needed to become proficient in a new-to-me higher-than-assembly language, and for some arbitrary reason decided I only had time at that moment to learn one [Kids! *facepalm*]. It came down to FORTH or C, and all I cared about, was the speed of the code generated by the compilers / speed of interpreters that were available to me at the time. [Kids! *facepalm*] Based solely on that one thing, I went with C.
Thank Fucking Yog-Sothoth. Sometimes an idiot makes the right choice for the wrong reasons.
I wonder how my life had gone, if I had not learned C. Would I have learned FORTH, found little use for it, and then just learned C a few months later? Maybe; I'll never know.
Of course it's worth it, because the cost of a wrench (and using it) is astronomical compared to passively intercepting plaintext. And wrench-use is much more easily detected, too.
Increasing the attacker's costs is a good thing. I don't know about your government, but my government can't afford (either economically or politically) to torture hundreds of thousands of their own citizens per day. And they can't do it without those citizens finding out that it's happening ("um.. what's this pain in my knee? Oh, hi there. What are you doing?" "Give me the key!!!"). That's a big step up from the current situation.
Resisting abusive power doesn't make it more ruthless; it reveals and exposes its ruthlessness. Call their bluff, and if it's not a bluff, then they will be voted out.
Actually, even laymen have heard the word "computer virus" and tend to blame any malfunction on it. It's become fairly common knowledge that even a brand new machine right out of the shrinkwrap may have things installed which work to advance the interests of parties who are adversarial to the user. People don't phrase it that way, but they know.
How many people really still don't know that you can't just simply install software on iPhones, or that some carriers disallow tethering, and that some media players' fast-forward buttons don't work during certain parts of a DVD or Blu-ray? "Gray" malware preloaded on new machines has been fairly commonplace for over a decade now.
When you get to used machines, the chances are even higher that it could have any sort of malware (whether it works for the previous owner, or working for someone else, doesn't really matter) and laymen are very aware of this (they are the ones who pay the most for it). Pretending to deal with the problem has become a multi-million-dollar business, siphoning a portion of the economy away from productive uses to everywhere from Best Buy to McAffee.
I'm not going to throw around the word "stupid" or "criminal negligence" but it is negligence, and overtly high risk behavior which even common sense should be aware of. This is not Slashdot-geek knowledge.
You buy a computer, especially used, and you either take your chances or you fresh-install it. And taking your chances is certainly an option, but you don't fucking complain about it, especially to an innocent party (i.e. the person from whom it was originally stolen).
I see through your transparent attempt to trade for my CueCat. I'm not falling for it.
Yes, it will likely succeed; we already know that it has, as dedicated video game consoles have survived working this way for decades and they still exist even today.
But from even that limited subset of software (games), we also know that people and developers also want markets, because no one worldwide store has ever been able to address all demand (or as it turns out, even a large fraction of demand). A games industry thrived outside of dedicated consoles and people who didn't own dedicated consoles never felt "left out" in the slightest way.
So the question is really whether or not it will dominate.
Long term, whether 5% or 30% of users live within the "walled garden," I can't say, but almost all the big names we know today from the software industry made themselves in the market rather than a garden, and the software divisions of companies like Nintendo and Sony are exceptions.
There also seems to be a pattern where a hardware manufacturer is The One (because there can be only one) toll-collector for the garden gate, so the walled garden really only works to the advantage of that one party, at everyone else's expense. Unless force can be used to limit the number of hardware manufacturers, most of the manufacturers at any one given time is going to be trying to guide users toward markets instead, since all those other manufacturer can't be the toll collector.
Then there's the question of how strong users' desires exert themselves in software in general, as compared to the games subset. A game publisher can get away with telling potential customers "take it or leave it," but pick a few other types of software at random and try that out in your head and see where it takes you. :-)
Those days disappeared because it was too limited in the face of better (lower overhead) ways to distribute software (combined with the commoditization of certain types of software). It meant users had access to less than 1% of developers and paid too high of a price for the privilege. The very decline you're talking about, is a symptom of the pressures working against walled gardens. Compared to The Internet, Best Buy practically is one. There's hardly anything there!
Anyway, I won't say Apple will lose; they might survive. But they'll hardly win; in the sense that there's no danger you'll ever have to buy Apple stuff unless you actually want it.
You're probably right.
But..
The "What's your facebook uid?" problem becomes identical to the "what's your email address?" problem. The fact that there are an infinite number of email addresses, completely unsearchable without building extra infrastructure (e.g. the pgp wot), and that joeschmoe@example.com may very well might not be the Joe Schmoe that you know, never collapsed civilization.
I'm not sure that these things aren't already possible, and just as easy with facebook's current system where it's inconvenient to build fake profiles.
While that is certainly true..
Most problems in life are economic, and criminals are not super-men who have infinite resources. I think the point of TFA is that some countermeasures against infiltration are transitioning from impractical to practical.
Spread it out among many people working together. Join Friends of Privacy. :-)
I often hear about various companies building vaguely humanoid robots, based on the idea that people will accept such robots better. Or some futurist is talking about AI one second but then digresses into how cool it is that a particular robot not only speaks (that's a good thing) but happens to look exactly like Philip K Dick, as if anyone gives a fuck about that. I roll my eyes at how stupid that all seems to me, but I'm hardly a psychologist or marketing expert, so maybe those people know something I don't know.
But this is NASA. They don't need to sell their robot to housewives; their robot is for working with professionals, who presumably aren't making decisions about whether or not to use the robot, based on what color it is, whether or not it has tailfins, or yes, whether or not it is human-shaped. Why does NASA care about humanoid robots? Is it just about the form factor ("our boxes happen to be good at carrying this size+shape") or what?
When I RTFA it's because (implied) money is coming from GM on this project, so at first I thought the robot was doubling as crash-test dummy, where human modeling makes sense. But that's not what TFA says: GM's interest is in sensors, visual processing, and stuff that would be built into cars. (Good projects; that all makes sense to me.) So it doesn't sound like anything being worked on here, is really human-shape oriented.
So why humanoid? Do people really want humanoid robots?
BTW, I get that robots may need to walk; it's silly that I can stop an army of Daleks led by R2D2 by building a 3-inch high wall. But bipedalism is so rare in nature that you wouldn't think people would immediately decide it's the best answer. I just can't believe humanoid is about functionality, so there's something else going on here, that makes people think other people want human-like (in spite of how distant human-like behavior is, always 20 years away).
If being humanoid-shaped is good for a robot's consumer acceptability, then perhaps it's also time to introduce a humanoid coffee cup, a humanoid lamp, a humanoid washing machine, a humanoid car, a humanoid bookshelf...
The article does a major disservice to everyone (and I wish we could mod it down) by making up the term "zombie cookies." This new bullshit term hides what's going on and makes us all a little bit stupider. All I have to do to answer your question, is tell you what the article is really about. Instead of making up a bullshit term to confuse you, I'll use a descriptive term.
Ready?
Flash Cookies. The article is about websites caught using Flash cookies instead of browser cookies.
See, asshole-who-wrote-the-article, that wasn't hard. Flash cookies. Now instead of misleading people into thinking their browsers have a problem with cookies and other local storage, people see that the real problem they have with their browsers is plugins, which allows them to run native code that totally bypasses all the browsers' policies.
Flash cookies. Watch all the questions disappear .. but oops .. all the traffic to the fucking article disappears too, since people don't have to click through, read the first article that makes the weird reference to zombies, then click through to another article that explains WTF "zombie cookies" are about.
Slashdot should not have linked to this piece of shit.
Dude 1: "I lost my job to someone named B. B. Rodriguez."
Dude 2: "Those bastards!! They're destroying the economy with their outsourcing! Jobs jobs jobs! Jobs!"
Dude 3: "I lost my job to Bender the Robot."
Dude 2: "Well, that's the price of progress, and ultimately, technology is the one and only thing that ever really lifts the economy. At least you didn't end up like Dude 1."
I wish everyone would stop trying to half-heartedly re-invent partial subsets of OpenPGP. Just use the real thing, and you can have all you want and a whole lot more.