Also think in terms of what MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers) have done to changes societies attitudes towards drunk drivers.
In many respects once the robotic car technology is sufficiently mature any human driver will have about the same "impairment" compared to a robotic vehicle as a drunk driver does today compared to a non drunk driver.
MADD jumped through hoops (and is very good and experienced at what they do) to get rid of drunk drivers to save potentially 20,000 lives a year. They may be very interested in doing the same to save upwards of 40,000 a year.
Look forward to MAHD (Mothers Against Human Drivers).
Which is exactly why the smart car (robotic car) revolution will take place in China (or India or Singapore or Taiwan or Indonesia) where the government will simply mandate the insurance and impose the solution.
The result of course will mean that the expertise and manufacturing of them will also take place there bypassing the litigious first world entirely.
And after they have proved and perfected the technology they'll flood the market in the first world but the jobs and the profits will remain elsewhere.
Yes, but you then have to convert the sugar cane to something else (ethanol for example). So you have to look at how much energy you get out of the ethanol you get after you convert the sugar cane which you created with 7-8% efficiency.
I suspect that if you are converting directly to a usable energy source at around 5% it would be fairly competitive and may require less steps (capture hydrogen, compress and store, versus grow sugar, harvest, then truck somewhere to a chemical plant to covert to alcohol etc etc.)
De-soldering and accessing the flash directly would allow access to flash sectors that where previously used, and are currently on the list of sectors available for erasing but that have not yet been erased. These are the sectors that a good GC in the SSD firmware will quickly erase as long as power is available.
Also erasing is done in pages which contain multiple sectors. So a previously used sector that is free to recycle may remain unerased if the GC algorithm does not consider the page it is in a suitable candidate for recycling (e.g. if most of the other sectors are still in use.) So in this case these sectors may be available for forensic analysis if the chips are removed and mounted into a new controller.
It would be a simple modification to the SSD firmware to fix this. Erasing sets all of the bits in a sector (e.g. all zero.) You can change those bits by writing to them (e.g. changing 0 to 1). But you cannot change back (e.g. 1 to 0) without erasing again. But you CAN effectively and quickly remove any information content in a sector that is no longer needed simply by writing to it again changing all remaining bits (e.g. so a byte might change from 0x00 to 0x10 for the initial write of data to a sector and then from 0x10 to 0xff to remove the information content while waiting to be erased.)
This change would make any and all freed sectors immediately (as of when released) unusable and unreadable even if a well armed attacker could physically remove the chips and analyze directly through his own controller. The cost is low as a simple write to a sector is reasonably fast (unlike an erase.)
I've always suggested that Linux (any Unix) servers should be rebooted once a year just to make sure that they can reboot and get all their services restarted.. Pick a time when usage is down, e.g. between Xmas and New Years for non-commerce type servers. If it breaks your Unix admin has a week to put the pieces back together before people show up expecting to use it.
Typically this is really just a test of the hardware and startup scripts (for updated packages that may not have correctly updated their startup scripts.)
Which is FAR FAR FAR more than the number of deaths you can attribute to terrorists....
Hysteria certainly describes TSA and Homeland security.
Given the resources being allocated to reducing drunk driving (compared to TSA and Homeland security) I'd say it is better spent.
Most likely though at this point it would not be unreasonable to start looking at just making all cars and passengers safer regardless of whether there is any alcohol involved as there are more potential lives saved that way.
Just think of how safe you could design an automobile if you directed half of the TSA / Homeland security budget into R&D.
While we have this topic out we should point out that cell phone bans in hospitals have about the same effect as banning in commercial airliners. The bans also tend to be mostly ignored and reasons for the bans make about as much sense.
yes, I'm up to about 3-4 spams a week in my gmail accounts... not including what was caught by gmail of course (and that is for email addresses that have been around on the Internet for more than ten years.)
I ran my own smtp servers for two decades ('87-'07)... much simpler and cheaper and effective to let Google Gmail handle it all.
This is simply a case of a prosecutor attending to his own agenda.... specifically raise his own local profile by pursuing a very high profile person of interest.
Doesn't matter much what the final outcome is, every time they get quoted or mentioned in the local (Swedish) press they are happy and have succeeded.
The most recent evidence is that anyone trying the above would be mobbed fairly quickly.
Until 9/l11 passengers understood that the safest thing was to sit and wait for rescue.
After 9/11 (actually after only three of the four planes crashed) passengers quickly realized that the ONLY hope for survival was the immediate and violent incapacitation of any would be bomber.
Actually as the fourth 9/11 plane demonstrates, once the passengers know what the score is they are not going to worry about box cutters. Remember that prior to 9/11 passengers where instructed to play it safe if planes where hijacked. That WAS the safe thing to do until 9/11. After 9/11 it is NOT the safe thing to do and passengers no longer do so.
Locked cockpit doors and passengers willing to go to the mat are the ONLY two safety measures that increase your safety when flying. The rest is security theater.
Put a WiFi packet sniffer into a bunch of cars that purposely drive around every habitable road in NA and Europe. Log all captured packets.
Collect enough raw packets for a long enough period and you WILL get sensitive information. Mostly like 99.999% of all the data collected was only useful for its intended purpose (WiFi mapping.) But even.001% will get you lots of hits when you do it across a fleet of cars 40-50 hours a week for a year or two.
And only in aggregate does it start looking like a breach of privacy.
If this was a serious problem, i.e. that people are war driving and collecting this type of data and using it to hack into peoples email and bank accounts... then we should be glad that Google has brought the problem to the public's attention. There is no real use that they (Google) could make use of the data collected (they can get better info faster in their normal course of business.)
Anyone who thinks that automated transportation will be 100% safe and trouble free and with absolutely zero fatalities is just being stupid.
The question is whether it can reduce in some significant way the number of injuries and fatalities incurred. We already have a very dangerous transportation system.
The second question is how much are we willing to pay for such a system.
And what is more interesting is that autonomous cars may actually achieve the former (many times safer) while actually reducing costs significantly.
And we could all move back to the farms use hand implements only to plow and cultivate. That would indeed increase employment. A lot!
That said, yes the biggest impediment to going down this road, after the insurance and liability problems will be the lobbying by the various drivers unions and lobby groups (truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, etc.)
You can preview the debate by following the news anywhere a driver-less train system is contemplated. When Skytrain was being planned for Vancouver back in the 1980's there was a fierce debate from the usual parties about how unsafe a drive-less system would be compared to having a human in each train in case of system failure.
Twenty five years later there has yet to be a fatality due to the automated (driver-less) design. And there was a short note in the paper two days ago that they where adding some extra trains to extend the morning rush hour. The transit authorities attributing some of the flexibility to the lack of requiring drivers. They just needed to keep those trains in the schedule for an extra run.
http://www.asymco.com/2010/08/17/androids-pursuit-of-the-biggest-losers/
From the above: "One problem I see is that Google is making a bet on those same vendors who are now squeezed in the middle of that last pie chart: Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Nokia, Apple and RIM will certainly not take the OS over what they already have as it dilutes their differentiation and margins. That means Android is aligned with the biggest losers in the industry."
And: "In other words, Android’s licensees won’t have the profits or the motivation to spend on R&D so as to make exceptionally competitive products at a time when being competitive is what matters most."
Yes, but, when Apple rolls out an update it is available for all their existing products that are capable or running it. You don't get abandoned until and unless your hardware is simply not up to the requirements. And even then they may (like recent IOS on the original iPhone/iTouch) simply not make some of the new features available.
Much different from the rest of the industry that rolls out a phone with beta software, plans one or at most two upgrades (the first just to get you to production release) and then you are stuck until you buy a new phone from them.
For the size of his work force you would expect about that number of suicides in the general population anyway. I live in Canada and a quick search said 25 males and 5 females per 100,000 of population per year in 1994.
The point is that Chinese companies are not moving to the US because their PERCEPTION of the business climate in the US. For better or worse they believe that they will get sued. So why bother.
Slashdot Mirror
Also think in terms of what MADD (Mothers Against Drunk Drivers) have done to changes societies attitudes towards drunk drivers.
In many respects once the robotic car technology is sufficiently mature any human driver will have about the same "impairment" compared to a robotic vehicle as a drunk driver does today compared to a non drunk driver.
MADD jumped through hoops (and is very good and experienced at what they do) to get rid of drunk drivers to save potentially 20,000 lives a year. They may be very interested in doing the same to save upwards of 40,000 a year.
Look forward to MAHD (Mothers Against Human Drivers).
Which is exactly why the smart car (robotic car) revolution will take place in China (or India or Singapore or Taiwan or Indonesia) where the government will simply mandate the insurance and impose the solution.
The result of course will mean that the expertise and manufacturing of them will also take place there bypassing the litigious first world entirely.
And after they have proved and perfected the technology they'll flood the market in the first world but the jobs and the profits will remain elsewhere.
Yes, but you then have to convert the sugar cane to something else (ethanol for example). So you have to look at how much energy you get out of the ethanol you get after you convert the sugar cane which you created with 7-8% efficiency.
I suspect that if you are converting directly to a usable energy source at around 5% it would be fairly competitive and may require less steps (capture hydrogen, compress and store, versus grow sugar, harvest, then truck somewhere to a chemical plant to covert to alcohol etc etc.)
After it silts up who is going to pay to clean things up? Yes hydro-electric projects do have a life span.
De-soldering and accessing the flash directly would allow access to flash sectors that where previously used, and are currently on the list of sectors available for erasing but that have not yet been erased. These are the sectors that a good GC in the SSD firmware will quickly erase as long as power is available.
Also erasing is done in pages which contain multiple sectors. So a previously used sector that is free to recycle may remain unerased if the GC algorithm does not consider the page it is in a suitable candidate for recycling (e.g. if most of the other sectors are still in use.) So in this case these sectors may be available for forensic analysis if the chips are removed and mounted into a new controller.
It would be a simple modification to the SSD firmware to fix this. Erasing sets all of the bits in a sector (e.g. all zero.) You can change those bits by writing to them (e.g. changing 0 to 1). But you cannot change back (e.g. 1 to 0) without erasing again. But you CAN effectively and quickly remove any information content in a sector that is no longer needed simply by writing to it again changing all remaining bits (e.g. so a byte might change from 0x00 to 0x10 for the initial write of data to a sector and then from 0x10 to 0xff to remove the information content while waiting to be erased.)
This change would make any and all freed sectors immediately (as of when released) unusable and unreadable even if a well armed attacker could physically remove the chips and analyze directly through his own controller. The cost is low as a simple write to a sector is reasonably fast (unlike an erase.)
I've always suggested that Linux (any Unix) servers should be rebooted once a year just to make sure that they can reboot and get all their services restarted.. Pick a time when usage is down, e.g. between Xmas and New Years for non-commerce type servers. If it breaks your Unix admin has a week to put the pieces back together before people show up expecting to use it.
Typically this is really just a test of the hardware and startup scripts (for updated packages that may not have correctly updated their startup scripts.)
Guilty as charged to all nine counts...
Yes, but, there are 9000 est. deaths a year...
Which is FAR FAR FAR more than the number of deaths you can attribute to terrorists ....
Hysteria certainly describes TSA and Homeland security.
Given the resources being allocated to reducing drunk driving (compared to TSA and Homeland security) I'd say it is better spent.
Most likely though at this point it would not be unreasonable to start looking at just making all cars and passengers safer regardless of whether there is any alcohol involved as there are more potential lives saved that way.
Just think of how safe you could design an automobile if you directed half of the TSA / Homeland security budget into R&D.
While we have this topic out we should point out that cell phone bans in hospitals have about the same effect as banning in commercial airliners. The bans also tend to be mostly ignored and reasons for the bans make about as much sense.
yes, I'm up to about 3-4 spams a week in my gmail accounts... not including what was caught by gmail of course (and that is for email addresses that have been around on the Internet for more than ten years.)
I ran my own smtp servers for two decades ('87-'07) ... much simpler and cheaper and effective to let Google Gmail handle it all.
> DO have a configuration file that is an ASCII file, not a binary blob.
And by ASCII we mean something that can be edited by any editor.
XML is the equivalent of a binary blob when you are up to your ass in alligators trying to get things working again with minimal tools available.
No deep conspiracy required.
This is simply a case of a prosecutor attending to his own agenda.... specifically raise his own local profile by pursuing a very high profile person of interest.
Doesn't matter much what the final outcome is, every time they get quoted or mentioned in the local (Swedish) press they are happy and have succeeded.
The most recent evidence is that anyone trying the above would be mobbed fairly quickly.
Until 9/l11 passengers understood that the safest thing was to sit and wait for rescue.
After 9/11 (actually after only three of the four planes crashed) passengers quickly realized that the ONLY hope for survival was the immediate and violent incapacitation of any would be bomber.
Who cares ... if there is a problem it will result in some anonymous server in the cloud getting infected :-)
Actually as the fourth 9/11 plane demonstrates, once the passengers know what the score is they are not going to worry about box cutters. Remember that prior to 9/11 passengers where instructed to play it safe if planes where hijacked. That WAS the safe thing to do until 9/11. After 9/11 it is NOT the safe thing to do and passengers no longer do so.
Locked cockpit doors and passengers willing to go to the mat are the ONLY two safety measures that increase your safety when flying. The rest is security theater.
It doesn't appear to be possible to get a US account without a credit card. There is no free option anymore (as described in the above links.)
Put a WiFi packet sniffer into a bunch of cars that purposely drive around every habitable road in NA and Europe. Log all captured packets.
Collect enough raw packets for a long enough period and you WILL get sensitive information. Mostly like 99.999% of all the data collected was only useful for its intended purpose (WiFi mapping.) But even .001% will get you lots of hits when you do it across a fleet of cars 40-50 hours a week for a year or two.
And only in aggregate does it start looking like a breach of privacy.
If this was a serious problem, i.e. that people are war driving and collecting this type of data and using it to hack into peoples email and bank accounts... then we should be glad that Google has brought the problem to the public's attention. There is no real use that they (Google) could make use of the data collected (they can get better info faster in their normal course of business.)
You can still buy them new from Unicomp: http://pckeyboards.stores.yahoo.net/keyboards.html
They even have models with the Windows key :-)
I keep meaning to buy some new ones but mine refuse to die.... (purchased in the mid '90s).
You don't think kids should be allowed to use laptops and the best way to accomplish that is to ban wifi?
Anyone who thinks that automated transportation will be 100% safe and trouble free and with absolutely zero fatalities is just being stupid.
The question is whether it can reduce in some significant way the number of injuries and fatalities incurred. We already have a very dangerous transportation system.
The second question is how much are we willing to pay for such a system.
And what is more interesting is that autonomous cars may actually achieve the former (many times safer) while actually reducing costs significantly.
See here for a much broader discussion: http://www.templetons.com/brad/robocars/
And we could all move back to the farms use hand implements only to plow and cultivate. That would indeed increase employment. A lot! That said, yes the biggest impediment to going down this road, after the insurance and liability problems will be the lobbying by the various drivers unions and lobby groups (truck drivers, taxi drivers, bus drivers, etc.) You can preview the debate by following the news anywhere a driver-less train system is contemplated. When Skytrain was being planned for Vancouver back in the 1980's there was a fierce debate from the usual parties about how unsafe a drive-less system would be compared to having a human in each train in case of system failure. Twenty five years later there has yet to be a fatality due to the automated (driver-less) design. And there was a short note in the paper two days ago that they where adding some extra trains to extend the morning rush hour. The transit authorities attributing some of the flexibility to the lack of requiring drivers. They just needed to keep those trains in the schedule for an extra run.
http://www.asymco.com/2010/08/17/androids-pursuit-of-the-biggest-losers/ From the above: "One problem I see is that Google is making a bet on those same vendors who are now squeezed in the middle of that last pie chart: Samsung, LG, Motorola and Sony Ericsson. Nokia, Apple and RIM will certainly not take the OS over what they already have as it dilutes their differentiation and margins. That means Android is aligned with the biggest losers in the industry." And: "In other words, Android’s licensees won’t have the profits or the motivation to spend on R&D so as to make exceptionally competitive products at a time when being competitive is what matters most."
Yes, but, when Apple rolls out an update it is available for all their existing products that are capable or running it. You don't get abandoned until and unless your hardware is simply not up to the requirements. And even then they may (like recent IOS on the original iPhone/iTouch) simply not make some of the new features available.
Much different from the rest of the industry that rolls out a phone with beta software, plans one or at most two upgrades (the first just to get you to production release) and then you are stuck until you buy a new phone from them.
For the size of his work force you would expect about that number of suicides in the general population anyway. I live in Canada and a quick search said 25 males and 5 females per 100,000 of population per year in 1994.
The point is that Chinese companies are not moving to the US because their PERCEPTION of the business climate in the US. For better or worse they believe that they will get sued. So why bother.