Hmmm...news pushed automatically to a device overnight.... omg, I think I've woken up in 1992!
But seriously, what value added service will this provide that users can't already get from one of the dozens of free online newspapers and news aggregator apps?
(interestingly, the title in TFA is "iPad-only newspaper from Apple and News Crop set to launch on January 17" if they really are going to Crop out the fluff from the news, that may make it worth the money)
Because you can't always predict when a pedestrian doesn't see you and is going to step out in front of you. If it was always possible to know when a pedestrian was going to do so, then you wouldn't need the horn, just apply the brakes.
Ignoring the visually impaired pedestrians (which another poster has already pointed out), a distracted pedestrian/bicyclist is not necessarily a stupid one, and probably doesn't deserve to be culled from the herd by silent electric cars.
More than once I've been startled by a silent Prius pulling out from a parking space in front of me. A little noise might make walking through parking lots a bit safer.
Have you worked in a construction site? The sound of a truck 25 feet away backing up in your direction is much more noticable than a truck 100 feet away. The warning sound is especially useful in a busy construction zone where you have trucks in front, behind and to the side of you and you're concentrating on your task at hand, so you're not always facing the truck that is backing up toward you. The backup alarm is typically a directional horn - it is much more noticeable directly behind the truck than to the side.
Likewise, if you hear a cacophony of electric car noises, that probably means that there are a lot of electric cars in that direction so you should pay attention.
High tech solutions like a transponder and receiver have many failure points. A speaker is easy to hear, easy to verify that it's working, and the recipient (which could be a child, a bicyclist, or just a distracted pedestrian) doesn't need to buy and care for a transponder receiver.
Unless they plan on doing the inspection at the browser level *and* lock down the app store like Apple does, the easy way around this problem is to use an encrypted web proxy to visit facebook.
If the browser does URL and/or content inspection to find out if you're using Facebook (either in the browser, or by intercepting SSL traffic with a decrypting proxy with a certificate trusted by your browser) , then the next best thing is for someone to come up with a FreeFacebook app that uses an encrypted connection to a proxy server to serve up your Facebook content.
Unless Facebook cooperates, I'm not sure how the carriers can expect this to work on any smartphone with a way to install apps outside of the official app store.
Unless, of course, they charge more to access any random website than they do to access Facebook.
This sounds like a great use for Facebook's new facial recognition feature -- they should be able to identify pictures with a face similar to the one the thief uploaded and correlate based on geography to narrow down the search. Then a human can review the matches to make a positive ID.
Yes, business class availability to the home would make all of our lives easier, but don't look to Google to do that. There are a lot of telecom companies that will provide services with a variety of SLA's, but in general, you get what you pay for.
Don't expect a residential broadband provider to offer business class SLA's at a price a residential consumer is willing to pay.
Unless you have your home servers on a redundant, hot swappable UPS, a backup generator (with a service contract that includes regular run tests and a fuel delivery contract), redundant cooling if required in your climate, and fully redundant network equipment, you don't have an environment that can support 4 nines of availability. Having an internet connection won't help you when your cat throws up on your internet modem (or fiber converter, or whatever), or a car takes out the power pole feeding your house and your house goes dark for 16 hours while the power company replaces it. (of course, that same car probably took out your internet connection, good thing you have redundant connections delivered over diverse facilities)
As the previous poster said, you can host a Windows server at Amazon for $100/month. If that is too expensive for you, don't expect a 99.99% available 10mbit connection for less.
I'm not saying that you don't deserve such a reliable connection, but unless you're willing to pay for it, you're not going to get it.
Just because you're running your business at home doesn't mean you're a home user.
You have business requirements and you should pay business rates for your reliable internet connection. Though if you really require 4 nines of reliability you should have better service diversity by buying bandwidth from multiple ISP's using completely separate circuits (that don't share a telephone pole or conduit).
Though I know few businesses that would colocate a critical business app that relies on a GUI running over a WAN connection. I suspect that you don't really have 4 nines as a *requirement* otherwise the cost of colocating a windows machine (or a vmware instance running WinXP running on your server) would be inconsequential.
I've had many people tell me they have a *requirement* for 3, 4, even 5 nines of uptime for various services until they saw the price tag. Each 9 becomes exponentially more expensive to provide.
I didn't see anywhere in the article where they say that Sodium Chloride (i.e. table salt) was going to be used. I thought power plants typically used a different kind of salt (Sodium Nitrate?) to store thermal energy?
Since the diagram in the article shows the "cold" tank being at 550 degF, then they must not be using sodium chloride or it would be a solid in that tank.
You need 4 9's of uptime on your home internet connection? You really can't tolerate more than 53 minutes of loss of access to your cloud computing assets in a year?
You sound more like a business user, and hopefully you're willing to pay business rates (and potentially trench in more than one circuit from opposite sides of your house) for this level of availability. In the past year, our $5000/mo DS3 hasn't even given 4 9's of availability (though in the prior year, it provided 5 9's of availability). I think most home users would be fine with 2.5 nine's. My parents have been getting around 2 nine's of reliability (3 separate 1 day outages) and they aren't annoyed enough to switch providers.
I didn't say "tens of thousands", I said "scores" because you said "scores"...perhaps that word does not mean what you think it means. One score is "20". I suppose when you said "scores" you meant "500 scores", but that's would not be typical usage. Most people wouldn't say "hundreds of editors" if they really meant 10,000. I think most people would assume "scores" would mean 100 at the most.
In any case, even if there are 10,000 editors disenfranchised by Wikipedia's management and each was willing to donate $100, that only gives Wikipedia a million dollars.
And yes, most USERS don't care, but that isn't the issue.
I thought that was exactly the issue - rather than trying to extract $500 from 10,000 editors (who are already donating their time), Wikipedia can go after 400 million users to donate a much smaller amount. Such a small amount per user is needed that it could easily be made up by running banner ads. And I thought that was what we're talking about in this Should Wikipedia Just Accept Ads Already article.
They have that system now. It's called a donation. Give them $5 - $15/year and you can have full and free access. (which coincidentally is the same access that you get if you do not subscribe).
If a small percentage of their userbase did this - they claim 400M people/month visit the site - then they would have all the money they need.
I don't care if they play unobtrusive ads, but it's the tracking that worries me -- Google already knows enough about me, I don't want them tracking every article I visit on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia runs their own ad network I'd be fine with them playing ads. If they use someone else's ad network I'd probably block the ads.
I think ads would do quite well on Wikipedia -- often I'm browsing Wikipedia when I don't have anything else to do -- if I was looking up helicopters and saw an ad for model helicopters, I'd probably click over to it and check it out.
Um, no you are wrong. There are scores of people with the means to donate to Wikipedia, and were serious editors at one time, but the "system" turned us away from helping in any way.
There may very well be scores of former editors that were once willing to donate but got turned off by Wikipedia's mananagement, but unless those scores of people were millionaires willing to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash, they aren't really going to have any effect at all on Wikipedia's need for donations.
The vast majority of Wikipedia users neither know, nor care, about Wikipedia's management or the problems faced by editors. As long as the Lady Gaga article is there, that's all they care about. There are hundreds of millions of these people, so these are the ones that they are seeking donations from - it only takes pennies from each viewer. (or some advertising revenue).
Just to put this into perspective - $30M is about 12 hours worth of profit (not revenue, profit) for Exxon. Even with the oil spill costs, it's about a day of profit for BP.
They have "disenfranchised their users" and caused a big "breach in trust that may well be impossible to regain"?? Really?
I thought the hacked sites were all glorified blog sites. I had a gizmodo username and I just don't care if someone hacked it. I changed my password when I heard about th ehack, but really, its not like they stole my credit card, or for that matter, not even any true identifying data about myself. The email address was the same email address I give out to all such sites that exists just so I can receive the registration verification emails.
Did some people have something of real value stolen? I have had my credit card number stolen (Thanks Nashbar!) and that was more of a pain, I had to get a new card and move some recurring payments to the new card. But I really find it hard to get worked up about someone stealing my gizmodo identity.
Even excluding bandwidth caps, any satellite internet service will always suck due to latency. Latency on Iridium is around 1800ms, Hughesnet is around 800ms.
"Why Can't They Make It Work?" was answered in TFA. Satellite phone service is capital intensive and has a small market.
In many industries you make up for capital costs by increasing the size of the market, but you can't easily do that with sat-phones. There are real constraints both in the number of satellites (there are more than 200,000 cell towers in the USA -- Iridium has 66 satellites to cover the globe) and in bandwidth. AT&T can use the same cell frequencies across the USA because they know that phones associated with a particular tower won't cause interference with those same frequencies a few miles away. (ok, CDMA and other spread spectrum technologies makes this more complicated but the same theory applies - there is a limited to how many users you can handle within a particular frequency band). A single satellite covers a huge area - whereas a cell site may cover a few square miles (or less), a satellite may cover many thousands of square miles.
Even if you could physically launch 100,000 satellites to give global satellite coverage and carefully tune their antennas to minimize overlap, unless you can find a geosynchronous orbit to park them in to concentrate coverage over populated areas, each satellite would still cover 2000 square miles or territory.
Does this same condition exist for the Millimeter Wave RF scanners too, or do they have better resolution or discrimination abilities?
I haven't traveled much since these scanners went into effect, but so far I've only seen the RF scanners.
Last time I encountered one I asked the TSA rep if it was RF or X-ray, and she said "It's millimeter wave, and it's the same as an ultrasound". I told her that that can't be true since an ultrasound doesn't use RF energy, and she said "It *is* the same, now move along". I reported her misinformation to a supervisor, but I'm not sure he even understood the difference between ultrasound and an RF scanner.
I'm fine with the RF scanners (I don't think they are all that effective since a determined terrorist will use one of the many holes in airport security to bring in his weapon -- plus my "junk" isn't all that interesting), but I don't like being lied too (or worse someone directing me into a device that she doesn't even have a basic understanding of -- surely the difference between sound and RF energy is not too hard for a TSA agent to understand)
It's great that they finally figured out that letting employees write secret data to a storage device is a security risk, but are they also auditing outbound communication? Will they notice if an employee emails the data to his Gmail account? Or deposits it on some hacked server somewhere? Will they notice it if he uses steganography to hide it in other data?
Or maybe he'll use a program that converts the data to visible data that can be recorded by a camera (sure sure, cameras are against regulations, but stealing data is against regulations too...if he's a determined data thief, cameras can be hidden in all sorts of objects and body cavities). For example, a QR code can hold 4KB of alphanumeric data. If someone writes a program that displays 15 frames/second of QR encoded data and records it with a camera, that's 200MB of data every hour.
If he's patient, he can record it as a 2400 baud data stream and record it on his MP3 player - he can steal around 10MB/hour using this method.
Or maybe he can record it as a bit patter on a laser printer - if he can write at 100dpi reliably, thats around 100KB per piece of paper. If that can be stretched to 500dpi he'll get around 2MB per piece of paper, and will look like a grey piece of paper to the naked eye so security won't pay any attention "Oh that, it's scrap paper I'm taking home to my kids".
How will he get such a data theft program onto the computer? Simple -- if he can't download it off the internet (perhaps a "gif" that just needs the first 128 bytes stripped off to make it an executable), he can plug in a USB keyboard dongle that acts as a keyboard and then let it type in the program for him.
How secure *is* our secret data? Hopefully banning USB drives is just one layer and they are taking greater steps to securing who has access to such data.
The biggest question this article raises in my mind is.... why does the USDA need 120,000 employees? There are only around 960,000 farmers in the USA - is it really necessary to have 1 USDA employee for every 9 farmers?
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Hmmm...news pushed automatically to a device overnight.... omg, I think I've woken up in 1992!
But seriously, what value added service will this provide that users can't already get from one of the dozens of free online newspapers and news aggregator apps?
(interestingly, the title in TFA is "iPad-only newspaper from Apple and News Crop set to launch on January 17" if they really are going to Crop out the fluff from the news, that may make it worth the money)
You mean something like this?
http://www.cent-21.com/laws/exhaust-us.htm
Why cant you just use the Horn ?
Because you can't always predict when a pedestrian doesn't see you and is going to step out in front of you. If it was always possible to know when a pedestrian was going to do so, then you wouldn't need the horn, just apply the brakes.
Ignoring the visually impaired pedestrians (which another poster has already pointed out), a distracted pedestrian/bicyclist is not necessarily a stupid one, and probably doesn't deserve to be culled from the herd by silent electric cars.
More than once I've been startled by a silent Prius pulling out from a parking space in front of me. A little noise might make walking through parking lots a bit safer.
Have you worked in a construction site? The sound of a truck 25 feet away backing up in your direction is much more noticable than a truck 100 feet away. The warning sound is especially useful in a busy construction zone where you have trucks in front, behind and to the side of you and you're concentrating on your task at hand, so you're not always facing the truck that is backing up toward you. The backup alarm is typically a directional horn - it is much more noticeable directly behind the truck than to the side.
Likewise, if you hear a cacophony of electric car noises, that probably means that there are a lot of electric cars in that direction so you should pay attention.
High tech solutions like a transponder and receiver have many failure points. A speaker is easy to hear, easy to verify that it's working, and the recipient (which could be a child, a bicyclist, or just a distracted pedestrian) doesn't need to buy and care for a transponder receiver.
Unless they plan on doing the inspection at the browser level *and* lock down the app store like Apple does, the easy way around this problem is to use an encrypted web proxy to visit facebook.
If the browser does URL and/or content inspection to find out if you're using Facebook (either in the browser, or by intercepting SSL traffic with a decrypting proxy with a certificate trusted by your browser) , then the next best thing is for someone to come up with a FreeFacebook app that uses an encrypted connection to a proxy server to serve up your Facebook content.
Unless Facebook cooperates, I'm not sure how the carriers can expect this to work on any smartphone with a way to install apps outside of the official app store.
Unless, of course, they charge more to access any random website than they do to access Facebook.
This sounds like a great use for Facebook's new facial recognition feature -- they should be able to identify pictures with a face similar to the one the thief uploaded and correlate based on geography to narrow down the search. Then a human can review the matches to make a positive ID.
Yes, business class availability to the home would make all of our lives easier, but don't look to Google to do that. There are a lot of telecom companies that will provide services with a variety of SLA's, but in general, you get what you pay for.
Don't expect a residential broadband provider to offer business class SLA's at a price a residential consumer is willing to pay.
Unless you have your home servers on a redundant, hot swappable UPS, a backup generator (with a service contract that includes regular run tests and a fuel delivery contract), redundant cooling if required in your climate, and fully redundant network equipment, you don't have an environment that can support 4 nines of availability. Having an internet connection won't help you when your cat throws up on your internet modem (or fiber converter, or whatever), or a car takes out the power pole feeding your house and your house goes dark for 16 hours while the power company replaces it. (of course, that same car probably took out your internet connection, good thing you have redundant connections delivered over diverse facilities)
As the previous poster said, you can host a Windows server at Amazon for $100/month. If that is too expensive for you, don't expect a 99.99% available 10mbit connection for less.
I'm not saying that you don't deserve such a reliable connection, but unless you're willing to pay for it, you're not going to get it.
Ahh, so I was right, you are a business user.
Just because you're running your business at home doesn't mean you're a home user.
You have business requirements and you should pay business rates for your reliable internet connection. Though if you really require 4 nines of reliability you should have better service diversity by buying bandwidth from multiple ISP's using completely separate circuits (that don't share a telephone pole or conduit).
Though I know few businesses that would colocate a critical business app that relies on a GUI running over a WAN connection. I suspect that you don't really have 4 nines as a *requirement* otherwise the cost of colocating a windows machine (or a vmware instance running WinXP running on your server) would be inconsequential.
I've had many people tell me they have a *requirement* for 3, 4, even 5 nines of uptime for various services until they saw the price tag. Each 9 becomes exponentially more expensive to provide.
I didn't see anywhere in the article where they say that Sodium Chloride (i.e. table salt) was going to be used. I thought power plants typically used a different kind of salt (Sodium Nitrate?) to store thermal energy?
Since the diagram in the article shows the "cold" tank being at 550 degF, then they must not be using sodium chloride or it would be a solid in that tank.
You need 4 9's of uptime on your home internet connection? You really can't tolerate more than 53 minutes of loss of access to your cloud computing assets in a year?
You sound more like a business user, and hopefully you're willing to pay business rates (and potentially trench in more than one circuit from opposite sides of your house) for this level of availability. In the past year, our $5000/mo DS3 hasn't even given 4 9's of availability (though in the prior year, it provided 5 9's of availability). I think most home users would be fine with 2.5 nine's. My parents have been getting around 2 nine's of reliability (3 separate 1 day outages) and they aren't annoyed enough to switch providers.
Their annual reports are here:
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Annual_Report
Last year they spent about 45% of their budget on bandwidth, equipment and salaries (including contractors).
I didn't say "tens of thousands", I said "scores" because you said "scores"...perhaps that word does not mean what you think it means. One score is "20". I suppose when you said "scores" you meant "500 scores", but that's would not be typical usage. Most people wouldn't say "hundreds of editors" if they really meant 10,000. I think most people would assume "scores" would mean 100 at the most.
In any case, even if there are 10,000 editors disenfranchised by Wikipedia's management and each was willing to donate $100, that only gives Wikipedia a million dollars.
And yes, most USERS don't care, but that isn't the issue.
I thought that was exactly the issue - rather than trying to extract $500 from 10,000 editors (who are already donating their time), Wikipedia can go after 400 million users to donate a much smaller amount. Such a small amount per user is needed that it could easily be made up by running banner ads. And I thought that was what we're talking about in this Should Wikipedia Just Accept Ads Already article.
They have that system now. It's called a donation. Give them $5 - $15/year and you can have full and free access. (which coincidentally is the same access that you get if you do not subscribe).
If a small percentage of their userbase did this - they claim 400M people/month visit the site - then they would have all the money they need.
I don't care if they play unobtrusive ads, but it's the tracking that worries me -- Google already knows enough about me, I don't want them tracking every article I visit on Wikipedia. If Wikipedia runs their own ad network I'd be fine with them playing ads. If they use someone else's ad network I'd probably block the ads.
I think ads would do quite well on Wikipedia -- often I'm browsing Wikipedia when I don't have anything else to do -- if I was looking up helicopters and saw an ad for model helicopters, I'd probably click over to it and check it out.
Um, no you are wrong. There are scores of people with the means to donate to Wikipedia, and were serious editors at one time, but the "system" turned us away from helping in any way.
There may very well be scores of former editors that were once willing to donate but got turned off by Wikipedia's mananagement, but unless those scores of people were millionaires willing to donate hundreds of thousands of dollars of cash, they aren't really going to have any effect at all on Wikipedia's need for donations.
The vast majority of Wikipedia users neither know, nor care, about Wikipedia's management or the problems faced by editors. As long as the Lady Gaga article is there, that's all they care about. There are hundreds of millions of these people, so these are the ones that they are seeking donations from - it only takes pennies from each viewer. (or some advertising revenue).
Depends on the source of the biomass, there is some work in developing Algae with a high lipid content for use in creating biofuels.
Just to put this into perspective - $30M is about 12 hours worth of profit (not revenue, profit) for Exxon. Even with the oil spill costs, it's about a day of profit for BP.
They have "disenfranchised their users" and caused a big "breach in trust that may well be impossible to regain"?? Really?
I thought the hacked sites were all glorified blog sites. I had a gizmodo username and I just don't care if someone hacked it. I changed my password when I heard about th ehack, but really, its not like they stole my credit card, or for that matter, not even any true identifying data about myself. The email address was the same email address I give out to all such sites that exists just so I can receive the registration verification emails.
Did some people have something of real value stolen? I have had my credit card number stolen (Thanks Nashbar!) and that was more of a pain, I had to get a new card and move some recurring payments to the new card. But I really find it hard to get worked up about someone stealing my gizmodo identity.
You're not allowed to carry any encrypted traffic on ham radio. And there are restrictions on commercial traffic.
So maybe you can get away with sending emails to Mom through an unencrypted SMTP gateway, but don't expect to be able to order from Amazon.
You'll get somewhere between 300 - 9600 baud, so don't expect it to be fast.
Even excluding bandwidth caps, any satellite internet service will always suck due to latency. Latency on Iridium is around 1800ms, Hughesnet is around 800ms.
"Why Can't They Make It Work?" was answered in TFA. Satellite phone service is capital intensive and has a small market.
In many industries you make up for capital costs by increasing the size of the market, but you can't easily do that with sat-phones. There are real constraints both in the number of satellites (there are more than 200,000 cell towers in the USA -- Iridium has 66 satellites to cover the globe) and in bandwidth. AT&T can use the same cell frequencies across the USA because they know that phones associated with a particular tower won't cause interference with those same frequencies a few miles away. (ok, CDMA and other spread spectrum technologies makes this more complicated but the same theory applies - there is a limited to how many users you can handle within a particular frequency band). A single satellite covers a huge area - whereas a cell site may cover a few square miles (or less), a satellite may cover many thousands of square miles.
Even if you could physically launch 100,000 satellites to give global satellite coverage and carefully tune their antennas to minimize overlap, unless you can find a geosynchronous orbit to park them in to concentrate coverage over populated areas, each satellite would still cover 2000 square miles or territory.
Does this same condition exist for the Millimeter Wave RF scanners too, or do they have better resolution or discrimination abilities?
I haven't traveled much since these scanners went into effect, but so far I've only seen the RF scanners.
Last time I encountered one I asked the TSA rep if it was RF or X-ray, and she said "It's millimeter wave, and it's the same as an ultrasound". I told her that that can't be true since an ultrasound doesn't use RF energy, and she said "It *is* the same, now move along". I reported her misinformation to a supervisor, but I'm not sure he even understood the difference between ultrasound and an RF scanner.
I'm fine with the RF scanners (I don't think they are all that effective since a determined terrorist will use one of the many holes in airport security to bring in his weapon -- plus my "junk" isn't all that interesting), but I don't like being lied too (or worse someone directing me into a device that she doesn't even have a basic understanding of -- surely the difference between sound and RF energy is not too hard for a TSA agent to understand)
It's great that they finally figured out that letting employees write secret data to a storage device is a security risk, but are they also auditing outbound communication? Will they notice if an employee emails the data to his Gmail account? Or deposits it on some hacked server somewhere? Will they notice it if he uses steganography to hide it in other data?
Or maybe he'll use a program that converts the data to visible data that can be recorded by a camera (sure sure, cameras are against regulations, but stealing data is against regulations too...if he's a determined data thief, cameras can be hidden in all sorts of objects and body cavities). For example, a QR code can hold 4KB of alphanumeric data. If someone writes a program that displays 15 frames/second of QR encoded data and records it with a camera, that's 200MB of data every hour.
If he's patient, he can record it as a 2400 baud data stream and record it on his MP3 player - he can steal around 10MB/hour using this method.
Or maybe he can record it as a bit patter on a laser printer - if he can write at 100dpi reliably, thats around 100KB per piece of paper. If that can be stretched to 500dpi he'll get around 2MB per piece of paper, and will look like a grey piece of paper to the naked eye so security won't pay any attention "Oh that, it's scrap paper I'm taking home to my kids".
How will he get such a data theft program onto the computer? Simple -- if he can't download it off the internet (perhaps a "gif" that just needs the first 128 bytes stripped off to make it an executable), he can plug in a USB keyboard dongle that acts as a keyboard and then let it type in the program for him.
How secure *is* our secret data? Hopefully banning USB drives is just one layer and they are taking greater steps to securing who has access to such data.
The biggest question this article raises in my mind is.... why does the USDA need 120,000 employees? There are only around 960,000 farmers in the USA - is it really necessary to have 1 USDA employee for every 9 farmers?