"Actually given that bitcoin is based on a public ledger that documents each and every transfer of coins, the blockchain, tracing the transfers between accounts and creating a network of relationships is quite trivial. If a transaction touches the real world, a live visit to a merchant, a delivery to an address, a payment for a service, etc there is no anonymity. Any single member of a network who touches the real world can expose the network."
So why is it that when ransomware attackers are paid in bitcoin, the transactions are not traceable?
Convenience. Easiest way to convert between real currencies and transfer money around the world. Rock solid verification of the transfer in a very short amount of time. And the likelihood that law enforcement in their jurisdiction will not care about a petty financial crime in the jurisdiction of the victim.
That's what this sounds like. Great way for certain Sunni extremists to shift money around.
Actually given that bitcoin is based on a public ledger that documents each and every transfer of coins, the blockchain, tracing the transfers between accounts and creating a network of relationships is quite trivial. If a transaction touches the real world, a live visit to a merchant, a delivery to an address, a payment for a service, etc there is no anonymity. Any single member of a network who touches the real world can expose the network.
Bitcoin is an incredible investigatory tool for law enforcement.
This is a Good Company. I wish more of them did things like this!
They do. Once I took my car in for routine service at the dealership. On the bill it mentioned a complimentary inspection of my seat belt buckle per manufacturer recall XYZ. My car was "old", the warranty expired. I think over the decades I've seen stuff like that three times. Twice the inspections for defect or abnormal wear were negative. Once a part's lot number was such that the part was replaced for free.
On a fourth occasion I received a traditional recall, a letter in the mail saying bring the car in to have part ZYX replaced. The other three were silent recalls, surprises during routine service.
There is no step 2. Bitcoin is a hidden detail, a merchant neither knows nor cares whether a customer's credit card bill will be paid in terms of Euros, Dollars, or Bitcoins. The merchant prices and collects in their local currency and VISA handles everything for them. Bitcoin remains irrelevant to the merchant.
If anything this deal makes bitcoin subservient and less likely to display current payment technologies. Increased interest in bitcoins by individuals will *not* require merchants to accept bitcoins. VISA's payment technology is becoming more important, not less important.
Bitcoin is only a competitor to other peer-to-peer technologies. Paypal for example. Note that VISA has and continues to experiment in peer-to-peer, Apple looks like they will adapt Apple Pay for peer-to-peer. If anything bitcoin's move to the "mainstream" is being cut off.
Someone who is mining bitcoins on a GPU is either losing money or stealing electricity off of someone. Bitcoin is way past the point where it's economically feasible to mine them on a GPU.
Unless the person is cold and would have been running a space heater otherwise. One might think of a GPU as a subsided space heater.:-)
Someone who is mining bitcoins on a GPU is either losing money or stealing electricity off of someone. Bitcoin is way past the point where it's economically feasible to mine them on a GPU.
As I said, its not people who pay their own electricity bill. And its not just the bitcoin and other sha256 altcoins, its also all the scrypt based altcoins. Its an ASIC world now, and only fairly recent ASICs at that.
They pulled drivers for "obsolete* GPUs from the Linux kernel, making all of those cards broken, mine included. Nvidia drivers may be closed, but at least they support pretty much everything they ever made.
Not necessarily. I have old AMD cards in Linux boxes that are now headless servers in the closet. At most a KVM switch will access them in text mode, their GUI days are over.
I don't know if your are joking or not, but know a number of scientist (of the rocket persuasion) who were very into the tech, specifically in engine efficiency, and some who even got patents working with some of the greats of the field.
The rocket scientist that I know, who built stuff sitting on the moon right now, took kids to NASCAR. His father used to participate in amateur motorcycle racing when he (the rocket scientist) was a kid. That was partly responsible for developing his interesting in how mechanical things worked when he was young.
These products [iPad and MacBook] should remain separate.
Where does this leave a high school student who has received an iPad as a gift only to discover that it's not suitable for the programming homework that her computer science teacher has assigned?
The student would SSH to a headless Linux box in a closet somewhere. Hell, a raspberry pi with a wifi adapter would do just fine.
The real killer for productivity in iOS is the lack of user space accessible file system. Either they have to open the up to iOS users - and take the security hit, or they have to hide it from OS X users (over our dead 17 inch laptops).
For mobile devices your file system is "cloud" based. Local storage is just a cache.
Apple is probably correct that taking convergence to the point of merging a tablet and a laptop is going too far, counterproductive. Well, at least for the software. Hardware that might work. Basically the "laptop" has no integrated screen, the "tablet" docks with it in order to use the "laptop". However when docked the "tablet" is just a "display". It is only a "computer" itself when it is undocked. So the "laptop" runs MacOS X and the "tablet" is just a "display". When undocked the "tablet" now runs iOS and offers its own user interface. That might be as far as convergence should go. Yes, storage should sync when docked. Yes, iOS may be running in the background when docked and offer MacOS X the ability to offload some computational work. Maybe the "laptop" is just a keyboard, touchpad and SSD; the CPU on board the "tablet" running MacOS X when docked. Perhaps in a budget system but I personally frown on such an approach because I think the "laptop" should actually have "desktop" grade CPU and video. CPU and video optimized for performance not power consumption. More of a portable "docking station" than a "laptop"? I'm not ruling out running such a "laptop" in a mobile setting on battery, just thinking that doing so for extended periods of time would be more the exception and not the rule so high performance components would be more practical.
No built-in network port on the latest laptops, even the supposedly professional grade MacBook Pro. If you tell me that most users don't need network ports, I and the rest of Slashdot will collectively laugh in your face. And, no, the add-on dongle does not count.
You know what does count. The ethernet port being on the monitor and the wired internet being delivered via the thunderbolt connector. Wired internet does not necessarily need an ethernet port on the laptop itself. When you are somehow "docked" at your desk you have more options than that. My MacBook Pro has an ethernet port, it is the 2nd least used port, only the firewire port is least used. Thunderbolt having made both obsolete, moving both to thunderbolt dongles for rare "legacy" uses seems an appropriate move. Moving to the current MacBook Pro would have no impact to myself nor many other MacBook Pro users with older models equipped with an ethernet port.
I''m not sure if there's a significant demand for making person-to-person cash transfers, though. The only person I ever give any cash to is my daughter, and in any case I can do it through my bank's iOS app already.
Baby sitter, friend picking up stuff for you at the store, settling a bet, paying your dealer (not exactly advisable), etc.
Splitting the lunch/dinner bill. At the drive though you transfer to the driver rather than passing cash. Or at a sit-down restaurant one person pays the bill with a credit card and the others transfer their portion of the bill to that person. Friends/co-workers have done this for many years, except we're usually passing cash to whoever paid. Internally we refer to it as friends ATM.
Software just isn't good at pattern recognition and this is far from the first project to seek the public's help in these type of things, but this could potentially harness more participation than previous attempts. Zooniverse started with getting people to classify types of galaxies, now they have a few dozen science projects that use the pattern recognition humans do better than computers. These areas of science span physics, anthropology, biology, and linguistics, even a project that you can sift through LHC data to help find exotic matter (haven't done that one so I don't know how good it is. I did the Planet Hunters one for a while and they managed to locate 7 exo-planets that year using the Kepler data.
Software can be very good at pattern recognition. However all software is not created equal. I'm not talking about software that the scientists wrote themselves, or some computer science grad that had an image processing class or even a single computer vision class. I'm talking about post grad computer science folks doing research in computer vision. Seriously, the sort of things you describe *are* / *have* been done as computer vision projects. Go to a university library and sit down in the computer vision journals area and start flipping through the journals. I've done that. I've done research in this field.
Now, again, consider that we are talking about lay people with no expertise in the field being briefly and informally trained to do these tasks. This suggests the task is one well within the reach machine evaluation.
And yes, my area of research in grad school was computer vision and this is the sort of project someone would do for a master's or phd thesis. If you look through the computer vision literature you will find that machine analysis of medical imagery is a very common research project and that techniques are quite advanced.
You bet they tried. This problem is a bit harder than some standard image recognition project you'd assign to an undergrad. You also bet that many undergrads have failed at this already.
As I said, grad students not undergrads. In particular those who are doing their research in the area of computer vision. Who would be writing a master's or PhD thesis as part of such a project. We are *not* talking about people taking a single computer vision class as an undergrad.
Because they don't have any algorithms that do as good of a job at classifying them as humans do. If you can design one, I'm sure they'll be happy to help you write the paper describing your methodology.
And humans can do a better job evaluating all the other medical imagery I mentioned above, yet computer vision is increasingly used to augment and screen these human evaluations. And we're talking trained medical personnel in these case. Not gamers who received abbreviated and casual training. The fact that a regular person can be quickly trained in these evaluations suggest that machine interpretation is quite feasible.
And yes, my area of research in grad school was computer vision and this is the sort of project someone would do for a master's or phd thesis. If you look through the computer vision literature you will find that machine analysis of medical imagery is a very common research project and that techniques are quite advanced.
Might make more sense to apply computer vision to the problem, have a software based evaluation of the image and then flag promising images to be viewed by actual medical personnel. This is an approach already widely in use today. Scanning sonogram, x-ray, mri, etc imagery for "anomalies" and highlighting those for medical personnel.
I would think the real threat would come from swarms loaded with TATP or some other easy to manufacture explosive. Simply attack a target by swarming it and then exploding upon impact. What do you do when there are huge swarms of flying suicide bombers coming at you?
Close the hatch on the armored vehicle, repaint the exterior as needed when you get back to base?
Slight mod to your design. Ditch the homemade stuff and just go with a low tech claymore mine. Its hard to image that the army has not already mounted a claymore to the bottom of a drone at some testing range.
As has been demonstrated by a wayward military blimp recently, if you hang a long cables from drones and fly them into high voltage power lines, you have a pretty good chance of taking down part of the power grid.
Such weapons already exist. Aerial bombs that release long strings of conductive material above ground, the material then drifts down onto power lines and power stations and shorts things out. NATO used such weapons in the Balkans in the 1990s to avoid casualties and permanent infrastructure damage.
I could easily see drones being used to resupply both ammo and medical consumables. Heavy duty drones could also possibly be used to ferry the wounded off the field of battle...though I guess it also just makes another target.
The current medevac helicopters with white and red international medical evacuation markings are already targets for some enemies. The problem with the drone is that medevac (unarmed, marked) and casevac (armed, unmarked) aircraft not only provide quick transportation but also have medics and corpsmen (Navy medical personnel that go into combat with Marines) onboard to provide treatment during the flight. Drones would be a step back to WW2 and Korean War days where helicopters could only provide transportation.
Maybe a hybrid approach. If the landing zone is hot (under fire) medevac/casevac land somewhere "safe" nearby and the drones only ferry the wounded to them. Hopefully only a few blocks in an urban environment, 1/4 mile in undeveloped terrain?
What is the advantage of a Chromebook over, say, a tablet with a keyboard? I'm curious, as it sounds like the latter would cover your use case there... I don't use either so I don't know.
Chromebook is locked down and far more secure that Android. Want to do online banking, a chromebook would be a far better idea than a tablet or a PC.
On Okinawa (as well as Saipan), many of those "suicides" were arranged by the Japanese army.
Yes. I recall the story of a Japanese nurse who was given a grenade by a soldier. When she later tried to use the grenade it failed. When an American soldier approached her, took out his knife and began cutting open her pants she was expecting a rape. As she was taught by the Japanese military that would be part of a long line of abuse and torture the Americans will commit. She was shocked when the American soldier began sprinkling a disinfecting powder over a wound on her leg and began bandaging it up. She began to realize the degree to which she had been lied to and mourned for her many colleagues who had committed suicide due to these lies.
There was also some rationality for continuing to resist. The original grand strategy was to grab a bunch of territory and defend it tenaciously, believing that the Allies would lose stomach for the fighting and negotiate a peace in Japan's favor. Given estimated casualties for a couple of invasions (two islands), that grand strategy had not yet been proven wrong.
I tend to think otherwise. After the casualties the Americans took at Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (on both land and at sea) and the fact they they continued suggested otherwise. Plus the American air campaign was largely ineffectively opposed. Even if the blockade route was chosen over invasion Imperial Japan was doomed due to the air campaign. Plus in Europe units were already being told there were going to retrain and re-equip and be deployed to the pacific for the invasion of Japan. The Japanese strategy was not working and in fact this strategy contributed greatly to the decision to use the atomic bombs. It not only failed but backfired immensely.
There really was nothing rational about this plan in August 1945. It was the same irrational "the superior spirit of the Japanese soldier will ultimately prevail" nonsense that Admiral Yamamoto confronted when in 1940 (?) he spoke against alliance with Germany and against attacking the Americans. When he confronted the militarists with facts and figures of American manpower and industrial production, with his first hand impressions of the American spirit he gained from living and going to school in the US.
Slashdot Mirror
"Actually given that bitcoin is based on a public ledger that documents each and every transfer of coins, the blockchain, tracing the transfers between accounts and creating a network of relationships is quite trivial. If a transaction touches the real world, a live visit to a merchant, a delivery to an address, a payment for a service, etc there is no anonymity. Any single member of a network who touches the real world can expose the network."
So why is it that when ransomware attackers are paid in bitcoin, the transactions are not traceable?
Convenience. Easiest way to convert between real currencies and transfer money around the world. Rock solid verification of the transfer in a very short amount of time. And the likelihood that law enforcement in their jurisdiction will not care about a petty financial crime in the jurisdiction of the victim.
That's what this sounds like. Great way for certain Sunni extremists to shift money around.
Actually given that bitcoin is based on a public ledger that documents each and every transfer of coins, the blockchain, tracing the transfers between accounts and creating a network of relationships is quite trivial. If a transaction touches the real world, a live visit to a merchant, a delivery to an address, a payment for a service, etc there is no anonymity. Any single member of a network who touches the real world can expose the network.
Bitcoin is an incredible investigatory tool for law enforcement.
This is a Good Company. I wish more of them did things like this!
They do. Once I took my car in for routine service at the dealership. On the bill it mentioned a complimentary inspection of my seat belt buckle per manufacturer recall XYZ. My car was "old", the warranty expired. I think over the decades I've seen stuff like that three times. Twice the inspections for defect or abnormal wear were negative. Once a part's lot number was such that the part was replaced for free.
On a fourth occasion I received a traditional recall, a letter in the mail saying bring the car in to have part ZYX replaced. The other three were silent recalls, surprises during routine service.
Step 2: Replace existing payment technology.
There is no step 2. Bitcoin is a hidden detail, a merchant neither knows nor cares whether a customer's credit card bill will be paid in terms of Euros, Dollars, or Bitcoins. The merchant prices and collects in their local currency and VISA handles everything for them. Bitcoin remains irrelevant to the merchant.
If anything this deal makes bitcoin subservient and less likely to display current payment technologies. Increased interest in bitcoins by individuals will *not* require merchants to accept bitcoins. VISA's payment technology is becoming more important, not less important.
Bitcoin is only a competitor to other peer-to-peer technologies. Paypal for example. Note that VISA has and continues to experiment in peer-to-peer, Apple looks like they will adapt Apple Pay for peer-to-peer. If anything bitcoin's move to the "mainstream" is being cut off.
Can the card be personalized with your favorite Magic The Gathering artwork? :-)
Someone who is mining bitcoins on a GPU is either losing money or stealing electricity off of someone. Bitcoin is way past the point where it's economically feasible to mine them on a GPU.
Unless the person is cold and would have been running a space heater otherwise. One might think of a GPU as a subsided space heater. :-)
Someone who is mining bitcoins on a GPU is either losing money or stealing electricity off of someone. Bitcoin is way past the point where it's economically feasible to mine them on a GPU.
As I said, its not people who pay their own electricity bill. And its not just the bitcoin and other sha256 altcoins, its also all the scrypt based altcoins. Its an ASIC world now, and only fairly recent ASICs at that.
How often do you game not much else pushes a modern card.
Someone is running a bitcoin miner (or altcoin) screen saver. Someone who doesn't pay their own electricity bill. :-)
They pulled drivers for "obsolete* GPUs from the Linux kernel, making all of those cards broken, mine included. Nvidia drivers may be closed, but at least they support pretty much everything they ever made.
Not necessarily. I have old AMD cards in Linux boxes that are now headless servers in the closet. At most a KVM switch will access them in text mode, their GUI days are over.
I don't know if your are joking or not, but know a number of scientist (of the rocket persuasion) who were very into the tech, specifically in engine efficiency, and some who even got patents working with some of the greats of the field.
The rocket scientist that I know, who built stuff sitting on the moon right now, took kids to NASCAR. His father used to participate in amateur motorcycle racing when he (the rocket scientist) was a kid. That was partly responsible for developing his interesting in how mechanical things worked when he was young.
These products [iPad and MacBook] should remain separate.
Where does this leave a high school student who has received an iPad as a gift only to discover that it's not suitable for the programming homework that her computer science teacher has assigned?
The student would SSH to a headless Linux box in a closet somewhere. Hell, a raspberry pi with a wifi adapter would do just fine.
The real killer for productivity in iOS is the lack of user space accessible file system. Either they have to open the up to iOS users - and take the security hit, or they have to hide it from OS X users (over our dead 17 inch laptops).
For mobile devices your file system is "cloud" based. Local storage is just a cache.
Apple is probably correct that taking convergence to the point of merging a tablet and a laptop is going too far, counterproductive. Well, at least for the software. Hardware that might work. Basically the "laptop" has no integrated screen, the "tablet" docks with it in order to use the "laptop". However when docked the "tablet" is just a "display". It is only a "computer" itself when it is undocked. So the "laptop" runs MacOS X and the "tablet" is just a "display". When undocked the "tablet" now runs iOS and offers its own user interface. That might be as far as convergence should go. Yes, storage should sync when docked. Yes, iOS may be running in the background when docked and offer MacOS X the ability to offload some computational work. Maybe the "laptop" is just a keyboard, touchpad and SSD; the CPU on board the "tablet" running MacOS X when docked. Perhaps in a budget system but I personally frown on such an approach because I think the "laptop" should actually have "desktop" grade CPU and video. CPU and video optimized for performance not power consumption. More of a portable "docking station" than a "laptop"? I'm not ruling out running such a "laptop" in a mobile setting on battery, just thinking that doing so for extended periods of time would be more the exception and not the rule so high performance components would be more practical.
No built-in network port on the latest laptops, even the supposedly professional grade MacBook Pro. If you tell me that most users don't need network ports, I and the rest of Slashdot will collectively laugh in your face. And, no, the add-on dongle does not count.
You know what does count. The ethernet port being on the monitor and the wired internet being delivered via the thunderbolt connector. Wired internet does not necessarily need an ethernet port on the laptop itself. When you are somehow "docked" at your desk you have more options than that. My MacBook Pro has an ethernet port, it is the 2nd least used port, only the firewire port is least used. Thunderbolt having made both obsolete, moving both to thunderbolt dongles for rare "legacy" uses seems an appropriate move. Moving to the current MacBook Pro would have no impact to myself nor many other MacBook Pro users with older models equipped with an ethernet port.
I''m not sure if there's a significant demand for making person-to-person cash transfers, though. The only person I ever give any cash to is my daughter, and in any case I can do it through my bank's iOS app already.
Baby sitter, friend picking up stuff for you at the store, settling a bet, paying your dealer (not exactly advisable), etc.
Splitting the lunch/dinner bill. At the drive though you transfer to the driver rather than passing cash. Or at a sit-down restaurant one person pays the bill with a credit card and the others transfer their portion of the bill to that person. Friends/co-workers have done this for many years, except we're usually passing cash to whoever paid. Internally we refer to it as friends ATM.
Software just isn't good at pattern recognition and this is far from the first project to seek the public's help in these type of things, but this could potentially harness more participation than previous attempts. Zooniverse started with getting people to classify types of galaxies, now they have a few dozen science projects that use the pattern recognition humans do better than computers. These areas of science span physics, anthropology, biology, and linguistics, even a project that you can sift through LHC data to help find exotic matter (haven't done that one so I don't know how good it is. I did the Planet Hunters one for a while and they managed to locate 7 exo-planets that year using the Kepler data.
Software can be very good at pattern recognition. However all software is not created equal. I'm not talking about software that the scientists wrote themselves, or some computer science grad that had an image processing class or even a single computer vision class. I'm talking about post grad computer science folks doing research in computer vision. Seriously, the sort of things you describe *are* / *have* been done as computer vision projects. Go to a university library and sit down in the computer vision journals area and start flipping through the journals. I've done that. I've done research in this field.
Now, again, consider that we are talking about lay people with no expertise in the field being briefly and informally trained to do these tasks. This suggests the task is one well within the reach machine evaluation.
And yes, my area of research in grad school was computer vision and this is the sort of project someone would do for a master's or phd thesis. If you look through the computer vision literature you will find that machine analysis of medical imagery is a very common research project and that techniques are quite advanced.
You bet they tried. This problem is a bit harder than some standard image recognition project you'd assign to an undergrad. You also bet that many undergrads have failed at this already.
As I said, grad students not undergrads. In particular those who are doing their research in the area of computer vision. Who would be writing a master's or PhD thesis as part of such a project. We are *not* talking about people taking a single computer vision class as an undergrad.
In that hybrid approach I mentioned I was envisioning the casevac aircraft carrying in and deploying the drone for that last "1/4 mile".
Because they don't have any algorithms that do as good of a job at classifying them as humans do. If you can design one, I'm sure they'll be happy to help you write the paper describing your methodology.
And humans can do a better job evaluating all the other medical imagery I mentioned above, yet computer vision is increasingly used to augment and screen these human evaluations. And we're talking trained medical personnel in these case. Not gamers who received abbreviated and casual training. The fact that a regular person can be quickly trained in these evaluations suggest that machine interpretation is quite feasible.
And yes, my area of research in grad school was computer vision and this is the sort of project someone would do for a master's or phd thesis. If you look through the computer vision literature you will find that machine analysis of medical imagery is a very common research project and that techniques are quite advanced.
Might make more sense to apply computer vision to the problem, have a software based evaluation of the image and then flag promising images to be viewed by actual medical personnel. This is an approach already widely in use today. Scanning sonogram, x-ray, mri, etc imagery for "anomalies" and highlighting those for medical personnel.
I would think the real threat would come from swarms loaded with TATP or some other easy to manufacture explosive. Simply attack a target by swarming it and then exploding upon impact. What do you do when there are huge swarms of flying suicide bombers coming at you?
Close the hatch on the armored vehicle, repaint the exterior as needed when you get back to base?
Slight mod to your design. Ditch the homemade stuff and just go with a low tech claymore mine. Its hard to image that the army has not already mounted a claymore to the bottom of a drone at some testing range.
As has been demonstrated by a wayward military blimp recently, if you hang a long cables from drones and fly them into high voltage power lines, you have a pretty good chance of taking down part of the power grid.
Such weapons already exist. Aerial bombs that release long strings of conductive material above ground, the material then drifts down onto power lines and power stations and shorts things out. NATO used such weapons in the Balkans in the 1990s to avoid casualties and permanent infrastructure damage.
I could easily see drones being used to resupply both ammo and medical consumables. Heavy duty drones could also possibly be used to ferry the wounded off the field of battle...though I guess it also just makes another target.
The current medevac helicopters with white and red international medical evacuation markings are already targets for some enemies. The problem with the drone is that medevac (unarmed, marked) and casevac (armed, unmarked) aircraft not only provide quick transportation but also have medics and corpsmen (Navy medical personnel that go into combat with Marines) onboard to provide treatment during the flight. Drones would be a step back to WW2 and Korean War days where helicopters could only provide transportation.
Maybe a hybrid approach. If the landing zone is hot (under fire) medevac/casevac land somewhere "safe" nearby and the drones only ferry the wounded to them. Hopefully only a few blocks in an urban environment, 1/4 mile in undeveloped terrain?
What is the advantage of a Chromebook over, say, a tablet with a keyboard? I'm curious, as it sounds like the latter would cover your use case there... I don't use either so I don't know.
Chromebook is locked down and far more secure that Android. Want to do online banking, a chromebook would be a far better idea than a tablet or a PC.
Hacksaw blades? For crying out loud, what century is this again?
Its a century without handheld phasers for cursing through steel. :-)
On Okinawa (as well as Saipan), many of those "suicides" were arranged by the Japanese army.
Yes. I recall the story of a Japanese nurse who was given a grenade by a soldier. When she later tried to use the grenade it failed. When an American soldier approached her, took out his knife and began cutting open her pants she was expecting a rape. As she was taught by the Japanese military that would be part of a long line of abuse and torture the Americans will commit. She was shocked when the American soldier began sprinkling a disinfecting powder over a wound on her leg and began bandaging it up. She began to realize the degree to which she had been lied to and mourned for her many colleagues who had committed suicide due to these lies.
There was also some rationality for continuing to resist. The original grand strategy was to grab a bunch of territory and defend it tenaciously, believing that the Allies would lose stomach for the fighting and negotiate a peace in Japan's favor. Given estimated casualties for a couple of invasions (two islands), that grand strategy had not yet been proven wrong.
I tend to think otherwise. After the casualties the Americans took at Saipan, Iwo Jima and Okinawa (on both land and at sea) and the fact they they continued suggested otherwise. Plus the American air campaign was largely ineffectively opposed. Even if the blockade route was chosen over invasion Imperial Japan was doomed due to the air campaign. Plus in Europe units were already being told there were going to retrain and re-equip and be deployed to the pacific for the invasion of Japan. The Japanese strategy was not working and in fact this strategy contributed greatly to the decision to use the atomic bombs. It not only failed but backfired immensely.
There really was nothing rational about this plan in August 1945. It was the same irrational "the superior spirit of the Japanese soldier will ultimately prevail" nonsense that Admiral Yamamoto confronted when in 1940 (?) he spoke against alliance with Germany and against attacking the Americans. When he confronted the militarists with facts and figures of American manpower and industrial production, with his first hand impressions of the American spirit he gained from living and going to school in the US.