Not familiar with the concept of phone number portability? Everybody knows the first 3 digits of your phone number indicates where you were living in 1999!
It's not worth the effort to port numbers every time I change prepaid providers (if they'll port at all), and it gets annoying when the pizza place won't deliver to me because I'm calling from out of the area.
There's nothing wrong with the Cloud for this. We cede of a lot of things to centralized generation and control.
Well, except for the automatic software update that broke it. My 8 year old smart thermostat has never been broken by the cloud and has no remote security vulnerabilities. And it keeps my house warm when I want it to be.
In the past 15 years, I've been through over a dozen phone numbers in 5 different area codes, but have had a single email address (using my own domain).
Why would I count on an particular vendor's IM service to be my "phone number"? If I'm going to trust something to be a permanent identifier to reach me, I'm not going to use a company that's only been a public company for 4 years.
my wife managed to somehow (she has no idea how) turn the volume on the GPS (dubbed Miss Guided in honor of it's sometimes problematic routings) to zero. She called the dealer service department, but was apparently unable to describe the problem in terms they could deal with. Or maybe they simply didn't know how to fix the problem.
It took me way too many hours of my life to discover that I could restore the volume to normal by turning on the GPS, turning on the radio, driving somewhere, waiting for the radio volume to fade when approaching a turn indicating that the GPS was trying to talk, and then (and only then) adjusting the volume control.
If this is indicative of life in the future, you folks have a truly dismal experience to look forward to.
How could she not explain it to the dealership? Even if English is not her (or their) first language, it seems to be easy enough to explain, here's a perfect English sentence she can use: "GPS no make sound. Me no hear direction. You fix". If that doesn't work, it would just take a trip around the neighborhood with a service tech, or even a sales guy to demonstrate the problem.
The part I find really funny is the claim that they don't even know where the updates came from.
Yeah, haha, we don't use version control either! Oh, wait, yes we do. It is free and saves time and money.
You push out firmware updates without version control?! I guess George just makes a zip file, and emails it to Frank who burns a CD and mails it to the company flashing the EEPROMs... oh wait.
And if you read about how deeply the Russians infiltrated the US nuclear program, then you'll realize that there is no need for outsourcing to enable foreign governments to be responsible for some fraction of the discovered exploits, back doors, side doors, trap doors, and dishonest press releases.
If they don't even have their software under version control, how can we trust them to know what press releases they actually made? Maybe it was planted in their files after they didn't give it, and they never gave it! They can't even trust themselves, if they're paying attention. But I suspect they're paying enough attention to not to be paying attention.
Without code signing (and few companies do it), Version control only tells you who the VCS system thinks made the update, which may have a very loose correlation to who actually made the update. If a hacker gained access to their VCS server, he could have inserted the changes into the VCS database with no identifying information at all.
Considering we don't manufacture much of anything anymore, and Silicon Valley was one of our few shining beacons of prosperity, I wonder how the traitorous assholes at NSA sleep at night. Was it worth it?
Why assume it came from the NSA? Since, as you say, we don't manufacture much of anything anymore (including software which is increasing outsourced), and Juniper has development offices around the world, then the backdoor could have come from any number of foreign governments.
Well, it can also do highway driving with someone in the car monitoring it (even from the back seat as demonstrated by some idiot on youTube). They still have some ways to go, sure, but "can barely back itself out of a garage" isn't really fair.
That's not what he's claiming:
“If you’re in New York and the car’s in Los Angeles, you can summon your car to you from your phone and tell the car to find you, and it’ll automatically charge itself along the journey,”
Nothing in there about needing someone in the back seat to keep an eye on the car.
How would you more fairly describe the "self parking" feature that can only move in a straight line in and out of a garage or parking space... and for no more than 39 feet.
There's three corridors of Supercharger stations across the US all along Interstate highways. I-70 is one of these corridors These stations are no more than 170 miles apart.
What Musk is claiming, without explicitly stating it.... factory to home delivery of Tesla vehicles without requiring a car carrier or driver.
That seems like a lot of liability to assume to save a few hundred dollars in transportation costs.
Personally, I want a white light during the daytime, but a yellower light in the evening. It does less to mess with my circadian rhythm that way. So I want white lights at work, but my lights at home should be warmer (in the color sense, meaning lower color temperature).
while still maintaining a warm old-fashioned glow.
Is this old fashioned warm glow really better, or is it just more familiar? (much like the "warmer" sound from vacuum tube amplifiers that some people prefer)
I've used CFL's for over a decade, and started moving to LED's about 2 years ago, and I really have no problem with the LED light - I use "warm" 2700K LED's almost everywhere and they are fine. I still have a rarely used desk light with an incandescent, and I don't think it puts out any better light than the LED's.
Their "self parking car" can just barely back itself out of a garage (limited to up to 39 feet) without anyone in the car. It seems unlikely that they'll transition from this to true autonomous long distance operation in 3 years.
Is he claiming he found a way to safely have backdoored communications?
Not sure what "safely backdoored" means. The system is spread out amongst many different countries in such a way that many different governments must agree to use the back door. If the USA, the Netherlands, and Russia can agree, for example, then it is probably criminal investigation and not spying going on. I reviewed many of the early drafts of this paper. It's pretty cool.
Or, another way to put it, a government needs to compromise only those 9 users to gain unlimited access to all encrypted communications through the system.
The video shows the car moving up to 39 feet in a straight line to get out of a tight garage. That's not really "parking". A "real" autopark would be if I could get out of the car at the door to my office, then send the car to go park itself in the lot.
No warhead. No guidance system. So basically we shipped them a big paperweight.
Or so the Pentagon says. But that's the same pentagon that lost the missile in the first place, so I wouldn't assume that they really know how inert it is.
My car was built in 2003, the year the Pentium 4 (single core, 4GB max addressable memory) was released and WinXP was mainstream, but only 2 years old, maybe my car would have had Win98 or WinME.
What are the chances that these "smart cars" will be getting software updates and have upgradable hardware. (and even if they do have hardware upgrades, will it be affordable? I replaced my old factory stereo with a new USB+MP3+Bluetooth+speakerphone player for $150 - the OEM AM/FM/CD-only replacement costs $500)
Manufacturers of "smart cars" should be required to publish full programming and interface specs so third party manufacturers can release alternative hardware.
There are some places in Paris that will happily charge you more than that. Frankly, Starbucks may be a luxury for most people, but it isn't really high end for rich people.
Ahh, so by "society" he meant wealthy people in Paris? I wasn't aware they were the ones driving the App market. I'm sure there are $8 Lattes in the USA (and €8 Lattes in Paris (or Café crème or whatever they call it)), but usually "we as a society" isn't referring to the most wealthy in the society.
We don't just "allow" them, as a society, we demand them.
We're a society that happily spends $8 on a latte we drink in under a minute but refuses to pay $1 for a game we'd spend hours on.
Where do you spend $8 on a Latte? Even in California, the most expensive Latte I see on Starbucks menu is $6.75, but that's for a 20 ounce Venti and it'd be hard to drink 20 ounces of hot coffee in less than a minute.
Why exaggerate? Couldn't you have made the same point by saying "We happily spend $4 on a latte we drink in under 5 minutes"?
I don't have any evidence that they make flying safer. This is a very hard question because a) If I decide not be attack a plane because I fear getting caught by security - then the scanners have worked - but these stats aren't possible to record b) You don't shout about most people you catch - because you don't want the bad people to know what things you can detect easily
Are they worth the X billion per year it costs the program? We'll never know. I don't know how much one plane attack costs - but I suspect it's in a billions, so if they just foil 1 attack per year they've made a good return on the investment
Ahh yes, the old "We're doing so good that we can't even tell you how good we are -- but we need more money so we can do it better!" excuse.
That's not a good way to ensure responsible spending of public dollars.
Horses need infrastructure and logistics to house, water, and feed them.
So does complex robotics. The latter also requires large supplies of replacement parts, specialists, to fix them, and special facilities where they can be fixed.
Send in a few modularized repair kits - if one breaks and you can't fix it in 5 minutes by sliding in a replacement part, then kick it to the side and send it home later for repair by specialists and use the spare robot that you've brought just for this reason.
Yes, robot repairs can be complicated, but you don't have to do complicated repairs in the battlefield. But you've still got to have staff take care of livestock 24x7 if you want them to be ready to deploy.
I don't understand what the big deal is. The TSA want to scan you in an effort to make flying safer. Isn't this a good thing? What's there to be worried about? That a TSA agent will see you've got a tiny dick? Because I'm sure this is why TSA agents join up - they've all secretly got a fettish so looking at peoples dicks in gainy black and white.
This reminds me of my first job. I had a boss that was petrified I would spend all day reading everyone else email if I was given access to the production mail servers to do some security checks on. It took a lot on convincing to explain to him that
Do you have any support for the statement that TSA scanners make flying safer? Many security professionals doubt the efficacy of the scanners and pretty much the entire TSA problem even though it costs billions in direct costs, and billions more in indirect costs.
While watching the video I thought this looks just like a horse. Even the feet (hooves) looked identical. So to your point, why not bring a horse or two to pack the gear. Just let it go or shoot it and make burgers once the mission is complete.
Horses require a lot of care and feeding. You can keep the mechanical mules in a warehouse until needed, parachute them in, then let them sit in a pile for a few weeks until ready to use them, then just gas them up and go, any time day or night.
Horses need infrastructure and logistics to house, water, and feed them.
Slashdot Mirror
Not familiar with the concept of phone number portability? Everybody knows the first 3 digits of your phone number indicates where you were living in 1999!
It's not worth the effort to port numbers every time I change prepaid providers (if they'll port at all), and it gets annoying when the pizza place won't deliver to me because I'm calling from out of the area.
There's nothing wrong with the Cloud for this. We cede of a lot of things to centralized generation and control.
Well, except for the automatic software update that broke it. My 8 year old smart thermostat has never been broken by the cloud and has no remote security vulnerabilities. And it keeps my house warm when I want it to be.
In the past 15 years, I've been through over a dozen phone numbers in 5 different area codes, but have had a single email address (using my own domain).
Why would I count on an particular vendor's IM service to be my "phone number"? If I'm going to trust something to be a permanent identifier to reach me, I'm not going to use a company that's only been a public company for 4 years.
my wife managed to somehow (she has no idea how) turn the volume on the GPS (dubbed Miss Guided in honor of it's sometimes problematic routings) to zero. She called the dealer service department, but was apparently unable to describe the problem in terms they could deal with. Or maybe they simply didn't know how to fix the problem.
It took me way too many hours of my life to discover that I could restore the volume to normal by turning on the GPS, turning on the radio, driving somewhere, waiting for the radio volume to fade when approaching a turn indicating that the GPS was trying to talk, and then (and only then) adjusting the volume control.
If this is indicative of life in the future, you folks have a truly dismal experience to look forward to.
How could she not explain it to the dealership? Even if English is not her (or their) first language, it seems to be easy enough to explain, here's a perfect English sentence she can use: "GPS no make sound. Me no hear direction. You fix". If that doesn't work, it would just take a trip around the neighborhood with a service tech, or even a sales guy to demonstrate the problem.
The part I find really funny is the claim that they don't even know where the updates came from.
Yeah, haha, we don't use version control either! Oh, wait, yes we do. It is free and saves time and money.
You push out firmware updates without version control?! I guess George just makes a zip file, and emails it to Frank who burns a CD and mails it to the company flashing the EEPROMs... oh wait.
And if you read about how deeply the Russians infiltrated the US nuclear program, then you'll realize that there is no need for outsourcing to enable foreign governments to be responsible for some fraction of the discovered exploits, back doors, side doors, trap doors, and dishonest press releases.
If they don't even have their software under version control, how can we trust them to know what press releases they actually made? Maybe it was planted in their files after they didn't give it, and they never gave it! They can't even trust themselves, if they're paying attention. But I suspect they're paying enough attention to not to be paying attention.
Without code signing (and few companies do it), Version control only tells you who the VCS system thinks made the update, which may have a very loose correlation to who actually made the update. If a hacker gained access to their VCS server, he could have inserted the changes into the VCS database with no identifying information at all.
Considering we don't manufacture much of anything anymore, and Silicon Valley was one of our few shining beacons of prosperity, I wonder how the traitorous assholes at NSA sleep at night. Was it worth it?
Why assume it came from the NSA? Since, as you say, we don't manufacture much of anything anymore (including software which is increasing outsourced), and Juniper has development offices around the world, then the backdoor could have come from any number of foreign governments.
Well, it can also do highway driving with someone in the car monitoring it (even from the back seat as demonstrated by some idiot on youTube). They still have some ways to go, sure, but "can barely back itself out of a garage" isn't really fair.
That's not what he's claiming:
“If you’re in New York and the car’s in Los Angeles, you can summon your car to you from your phone and tell the car to find you, and it’ll automatically charge itself along the journey,”
Nothing in there about needing someone in the back seat to keep an eye on the car.
How would you more fairly describe the "self parking" feature that can only move in a straight line in and out of a garage or parking space... and for no more than 39 feet.
There's three corridors of Supercharger stations across the US all along Interstate highways. I-70 is one of these corridors These stations are no more than 170 miles apart.
What Musk is claiming, without explicitly stating it.... factory to home delivery of Tesla vehicles without requiring a car carrier or driver.
That seems like a lot of liability to assume to save a few hundred dollars in transportation costs.
Personally, I want a white light during the daytime, but a yellower light in the evening. It does less to mess with my circadian rhythm that way. So I want white lights at work, but my lights at home should be warmer (in the color sense, meaning lower color temperature).
I think Phillps has just what you need.
while still maintaining a warm old-fashioned glow.
Is this old fashioned warm glow really better, or is it just more familiar? (much like the "warmer" sound from vacuum tube amplifiers that some people prefer)
I've used CFL's for over a decade, and started moving to LED's about 2 years ago, and I really have no problem with the LED light - I use "warm" 2700K LED's almost everywhere and they are fine. I still have a rarely used desk light with an incandescent, and I don't think it puts out any better light than the LED's.
I think the current 33-foot limit is caused by early prudence rather than technology limitations.
I think it's chosen because it's very close to 10 meters, a figure that actually means something to most of the world.
But the limit is 39 feet, 11.9m.
Their "self parking car" can just barely back itself out of a garage (limited to up to 39 feet) without anyone in the car. It seems unlikely that they'll transition from this to true autonomous long distance operation in 3 years.
Is he claiming he found a way to safely have backdoored communications?
Not sure what "safely backdoored" means. The system is spread out amongst many different countries in such a way that many different governments must agree to use the back door. If the USA, the Netherlands, and Russia can agree, for example, then it is probably criminal investigation and not spying going on. I reviewed many of the early drafts of this paper. It's pretty cool.
Or, another way to put it, a government needs to compromise only those 9 users to gain unlimited access to all encrypted communications through the system.
The video shows the car moving up to 39 feet in a straight line to get out of a tight garage. That's not really "parking". A "real" autopark would be if I could get out of the car at the door to my office, then send the car to go park itself in the lot.
No warhead. No guidance system. So basically we shipped them a big paperweight.
Or so the Pentagon says. But that's the same pentagon that lost the missile in the first place, so I wouldn't assume that they really know how inert it is.
I keep my cars a lot longer than my computers.
My car was built in 2003, the year the Pentium 4 (single core, 4GB max addressable memory) was released and WinXP was mainstream, but only 2 years old, maybe my car would have had Win98 or WinME.
What are the chances that these "smart cars" will be getting software updates and have upgradable hardware. (and even if they do have hardware upgrades, will it be affordable? I replaced my old factory stereo with a new USB+MP3+Bluetooth+speakerphone player for $150 - the OEM AM/FM/CD-only replacement costs $500)
Manufacturers of "smart cars" should be required to publish full programming and interface specs so third party manufacturers can release alternative hardware.
He gets how to keep the story paced so that you're caught up in the current episode, then you're left with a cliffhanger.
Julian Fellows has successfully re-invented the "chapter."
That's chappter.
Want to know what it's like to lose your job to automation? Ask the girls down in the steno pool. (*)
* It's ok to call them girls since that's what they were called back in the day.
There are some places in Paris that will happily charge you more than that. Frankly, Starbucks may be a luxury for most people, but it isn't really high end for rich people.
Ahh, so by "society" he meant wealthy people in Paris? I wasn't aware they were the ones driving the App market. I'm sure there are $8 Lattes in the USA (and €8 Lattes in Paris (or Café crème or whatever they call it)), but usually "we as a society" isn't referring to the most wealthy in the society.
We don't just "allow" them, as a society, we demand them.
We're a society that happily spends $8 on a latte we drink in under a minute but refuses to pay $1 for a game we'd spend hours on.
Where do you spend $8 on a Latte? Even in California, the most expensive Latte I see on Starbucks menu is $6.75, but that's for a 20 ounce Venti and it'd be hard to drink 20 ounces of hot coffee in less than a minute.
Why exaggerate? Couldn't you have made the same point by saying "We happily spend $4 on a latte we drink in under 5 minutes"?
I don't have any evidence that they make flying safer. This is a very hard question because
a) If I decide not be attack a plane because I fear getting caught by security - then the scanners have worked - but these stats aren't possible to record
b) You don't shout about most people you catch - because you don't want the bad people to know what things you can detect easily
Are they worth the X billion per year it costs the program? We'll never know. I don't know how much one plane attack costs - but I suspect it's in a billions, so if they just foil 1 attack per year they've made a good return on the investment
Ahh yes, the old "We're doing so good that we can't even tell you how good we are -- but we need more money so we can do it better!" excuse.
That's not a good way to ensure responsible spending of public dollars.
It's not surprising that it hasn't changed -- it's not like arithmetic has changed over 75 years.
So does complex robotics. The latter also requires large supplies of replacement parts, specialists, to fix them, and special facilities where they can be fixed.
Send in a few modularized repair kits - if one breaks and you can't fix it in 5 minutes by sliding in a replacement part, then kick it to the side and send it home later for repair by specialists and use the spare robot that you've brought just for this reason.
Yes, robot repairs can be complicated, but you don't have to do complicated repairs in the battlefield. But you've still got to have staff take care of livestock 24x7 if you want them to be ready to deploy.
I don't understand what the big deal is. The TSA want to scan you in an effort to make flying safer. Isn't this a good thing?
What's there to be worried about? That a TSA agent will see you've got a tiny dick? Because I'm sure this is why TSA agents join up - they've all secretly got a fettish so looking at peoples dicks in gainy black and white.
This reminds me of my first job. I had a boss that was petrified I would spend all day reading everyone else email if I was given access to the production mail servers to do some security checks on. It took a lot on convincing to explain to him that
Do you have any support for the statement that TSA scanners make flying safer? Many security professionals doubt the efficacy of the scanners and pretty much the entire TSA problem even though it costs billions in direct costs, and billions more in indirect costs.
While watching the video I thought this looks just like a horse. Even the feet (hooves) looked identical. So to your point, why not bring a horse or two to pack the gear. Just let it go or shoot it and make burgers once the mission is complete.
Horses require a lot of care and feeding. You can keep the mechanical mules in a warehouse until needed, parachute them in, then let them sit in a pile for a few weeks until ready to use them, then just gas them up and go, any time day or night.
Horses need infrastructure and logistics to house, water, and feed them.