Exactly. They were flipping out about this on some car forums a few weeks back (yeah,/. is behind the curve here) but I don't really see the issue. First off, TPMS monitors receive three kinds of signals: "This is my ID," "This is the tire pressure," and "Error."
It's not like you can send a "shut off the motor" signal through TPMS. It's not set up to receive that (and would therefore just drop it as junk data) and even if it were, it's not set up to carry out the command. At best on some of the better cars you could disable traction control by reporting pressures outside the limits of TCS to handle.
I'm pretty sure that was staged for entertainment purposes. Most cars require that the key be *inside* the car, or very close to it in order to start. A guy sitting in a diner with a wall/window and several feet of parking space/sidewalk/restaurant between him and his car probably wasn't close enough.
on most cars these days there are several: one on the outside, a few scattered on the inside, and one in the trunk to detect when you're about to lock your keys in there.
Try playing a FPS on a touch pad sometime. Even beyond the "I don't need to be looking down at the keyboard when someone has an RPG pointed at my head," I'm sure we've all whacked the spacebar a little more violently than necessary when the game is tense.
For that reason alone, I expect keyboards in one form or another to be around for awhile.
Also, I defy anyone to make a touch interface that I can type 100wpm on, without looking at the virtual keyboard. The tactile keys give the fingers the clues they need to remain in the right spot when you're typing from handwritten notes. Swype is great, but I think the record for swyping is something like 60wpm. Doesn't sound like much of a difference, but tell that to a medical transcriptionist who gets paid by the page.
Why would that be? Because we're so much smarter than the Germans in the 30's and US citizens in the 17/1800's, or because we can look at the history of when it happened before and tell ourselves we don't ever want to even consider going there again?
Hint: If anything, the world is getting dumber. Expecting them to do the right thing while also expecting them to forget about every wrong thing that's ever been done is crazy, and stupid.
Which of course means the majority of people have to be politically plugged in. And that doesn't happen until something occurs which makes life unpleasant, at which point it's usually too late.
Yeah, like I said to the AC, I was hoping someone would glom onto that, because that's my point: At this point, we do not have the means to make a guaranteed-forever-free-and-open new internet. You're right that human designed and built systems CAN be free and open, but all it takes is for one of the critical designers to be secretly paid a fortune by a telecom for them to put in a back door that the corporation can then use to either harm or convert the free-and-open network into one that won't compete with the commercial internet (say, for instance, the programming of the automated operation of the network - - bribe the lead programmer). And if you think that kind of crap doesn't happen, you'd be amazed. Corporations have slush funds of tens of millions of dollars set up specifically to bribe people and organizations into letting them have their way.
The only real way for this to work would be to have a small subset of people - digital hippies, essentially - who design a self-replicating network that builds itself. There's no way you could guarantee homogeneity of philosophy or resistance to corporate bribery/influence if you got as many people as it would take to build a replacement internet on the project. The project has to build itself. We aren't at that technological level yet, and so what the article is proposing is a neat pipe dream, but it's not happening any time soon.
"Or you run your wire to the next town, through four other towns to circle back to the other side of your town, and thus to your friend across town. "
Any network has x number of possible routes between any two given points. As long as someone can get control of enough nodes so that any route must pass through one of theirs, they get to control the network. If you run your wire in that loop around 4 towns, all the corporation has to do is get the exit node from one of the towns, and they've just eliminated your detour. So you'll get into an arms race - - you build a new pathway, and the corporation takes over one node. You're spending thousands and more per pathway, and the corporation is spending maybe 5-10 grand to bribe the bastard on a critical node. Who's gonna run out of money first?
Because that would work great at first, until a few of us get greedy and start trying to swing the network in a direction that will be profitable for us.
What we're really talking about here is communism. Whether economic or data-resource-sharing, the concept is the same. Everything gets shared equally. This works great on paper, but paper never considers the human factor, which is that there are ALWAYS in any sizable group, a subset of greedy bastards who are willing to screw it up for everyone else for personal gain.
Yes, I came in here to say this. Glad you already did.
The sad fact is that 95% or more of the public doesn't give a damn if a corporation influences the internet. As long as they can still get their porn and play Farmville, they're happy. Those of us who understand what's actually at stake with net neutrality are in the vast minority, and everyone else is being inundated with messages from the corporation about how terrible it would be if they weren't allowed to shit all over the net. Those people won't care about net neutrality until they start having to pay $15/day in data fees to get new sheep in Farmville, and by then it'll be too late. We're long past the days when the government actually breaks up monopolies, and so unlike what happened when Bell Telephone got to big for the public's good, the few major companies who control the internet will be allowed to retain that control.
And if someone, once people realize how screwed they are, starts making this new-internet-that's-not-the-internet, the companies will suddenly make Farmville data and 30 minutes per day of porn data-charge-free, and all the people who were pissed off will be placated, leaving once again only those of us who pay attention to what's going on, and again, there aren't enough of us to build the uncorruptable network of our dreams.
Works great, until 10 of the houses in the middle get together and decide to start charging you for sending data across their wires. You either pay, or you don't have your little network anymore.
plus you have to trust that a coalition of nodes on your non-internet doesn't form and start to control the direction of the network. And the likelihood of avoiding that is somewhere between 0 and never. At worst, the corporations would band together and make their own nodes, and make so many of them that the network became dependent on them. Or they'd just bribe the people who ran the nodes to run them the way the corporations want.
As long as humans are in control of a system in any way, those humans can be corrupted to bend the system to a large entity's will. That means that logically, the only way we can have a global information network that remains free and open is to have it designed, built, and run, entirely by machines.
Yes. This. Thank you. Amazing how this "fragmentation recipe for failure" has caused the PC to fail so badly that PC sales have blown Mac out of the water for *decades.*
Here's another way to look at it: If you don't like something about the iPhone, you buy an Android. If you don't like something about the Droid X, you buy a . . different Android. So if developers want to write for a single-device market, and not get sales from everyone on an Android phone, have at. Enjoy. Let us know how that works for you.
Well, I'm not arguing that we should be *given* housing and food as a matter of course, but let's look at the scenario:
You get food. Nutritionally balanced, but nothing fancy. It'd probably be like those food packets they make for starving kids - Rice, cornmeal, chicken powder for protein, and dried vegetables for vitamins. I tried some of that once. I wouldn't want it to be my breakfast lunch and dinner 365 days a year.
You get housing. A tiny little apartment in a soulless cement block building somewhere. It has a bathroom, and a bedroom, and a portable stove to heat the food packs. It'd basically be a jail cell without bars.
You're saying you wouldn't be motivated to go make money so that you could buy *better* stuff than that?
And by the way, as far as filling the time with drugs, hey, drugs cost money, which means they have to get it somehow.
Come to think of it, what would probably happen is that employers would be forced to start paying decent wages and stop treating their employees like shit, because the employee no longer has to worry about starving and being homeless if he stands up to his jackass boss.
Of course, such a move would have to be made only after we repeal NAFTA and GATT so that companies can't just outsource their jobs to countries where people still ARE afraid of starving to death.
Plus in general airflow in the cheap cases just sucks, and so you have to put a bunch of high-rpm noisy fans in there just to keep it barely cool. Contrast that with the Armor that my machine is in (and it's the 3rd build I've done in the same case). I've got a few large fans in there. It's quieter than the ceiling fan. And I *never* overheat. Also, I mentioned that this was the 3rd computer I've put in this case for a reason: That means instead of spending $50 per case for crappy cases on the last three builds, I spent $150 at the front end and got an excellent case that will probably house builds 4 and 5 as well. If you do it that way, you end up saving money long term.
I'll put forth that Dell suffered because they sucked. They used to be great. I swore by them in the 90's. Then they got greedy, started putting cheap crap in the boxes and scaled back customer service to where you couldn't get a warranty fix unless you practically got the Mafia involved.
I'll also say the same thing I say about the ricermobiles: As long as it's not dangerous, and you like it, do it and be happy. And unlike the ricers who do stupid shit like cutting their springs so that their handling goes in the toilet, it's pretty hard to be unsafe with a PC mod unless you get a cheap inverter for the CCD's.
I build computers from time to time for people who want extreme gaming machines, and sometimes they ask me to doll them up. And I do it, because it's cheap and makes them happy.
I'm also glad that the era of the beige box is at an end. As functional as it was, my black TT Armor looks much better (in addition to being a fantastic case for airflow). Maybe I have an untapped artistic side or something, but I kind of like some of the cooler case mods, just like I like hot rods. No, making your case look like the warp core from the Enterprise doesn't add any functionality, but. ..actually that would be pretty cool. I might have to look in to doing that;)
You know, I thought you were just rude, but now I realize you're an asshole. Even if you're convinced you're right, there are nicer ways to go about saying it, but you can't quite manage them, can you? I'm not trying to deceive, or use trickery to prove a point. You, on the other hand, are attempting to veil your complete failure to grasp basic concepts in insults. Internet bullies don't impress me or anyone else with a modicum of intelligence. Next time, try harder when you want to troll.
And by the way, no, we're not talking purely about metal fatigue, or had you forgotten that airplanes aren't just slugs of steel?
On second thought, don't bother answering that. I try not to waste too much time arguing with jackasses.
What's easier on you, if I put my hand on your head and push, or if I punch you? Call it silly all you want, but the sudden impact start is going to be harder on the airframe than the sloped acceleration.
And if you give the launcher full power from the beginning, it jolts the aircraft. My entire point was that avoiding the jolt is easier on the aircraft. If you think that's a poor-silly-incorrect-false-logic-formed opinion designed to misdirect, then it says something about your grasp of physics, much less that of common sense.
Why would that be a reasonable assumption. Far more reasonable would be that the curve would get steeper over time. It would be easier on the airplane if you started (relatively) slow and increased power to get to the required takeoff speed by the end.
Think of a car. It's pretty easy to take 1g of lateral acceleration if you're on a skid pad and build up to it - quite another to take 1g when it's from being hit by a truck.
Looking at current common applications of these motors in launch situation - roller coasters, you'll notice that the LIM doesn't just blast them instantly to 90mph. It actually starts out somewhat slow and then accelerates them (relatively) gently over time.
Even if they sniff the data coming down as a result of the web request?
I'm not trying to argue, but to get educated here - - Wouldn't it be possible (technically, leave legal aside) to analyze the data coming across, discover "oh, hey, this is coming from cbs.com, and since Comcast just merged with NBC, we're gonna drop the speed until we see data that is *not* coming from cbs.com?"
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly. They were flipping out about this on some car forums a few weeks back (yeah, /. is behind the curve here) but I don't really see the issue. First off, TPMS monitors receive three kinds of signals: "This is my ID," "This is the tire pressure," and "Error."
It's not like you can send a "shut off the motor" signal through TPMS. It's not set up to receive that (and would therefore just drop it as junk data) and even if it were, it's not set up to carry out the command. At best on some of the better cars you could disable traction control by reporting pressures outside the limits of TCS to handle.
I'm pretty sure that was staged for entertainment purposes. Most cars require that the key be *inside* the car, or very close to it in order to start. A guy sitting in a diner with a wall/window and several feet of parking space/sidewalk/restaurant between him and his car probably wasn't close enough.
on most cars these days there are several: one on the outside, a few scattered on the inside, and one in the trunk to detect when you're about to lock your keys in there.
Try playing a FPS on a touch pad sometime. Even beyond the "I don't need to be looking down at the keyboard when someone has an RPG pointed at my head," I'm sure we've all whacked the spacebar a little more violently than necessary when the game is tense.
For that reason alone, I expect keyboards in one form or another to be around for awhile.
Also, I defy anyone to make a touch interface that I can type 100wpm on, without looking at the virtual keyboard. The tactile keys give the fingers the clues they need to remain in the right spot when you're typing from handwritten notes. Swype is great, but I think the record for swyping is something like 60wpm. Doesn't sound like much of a difference, but tell that to a medical transcriptionist who gets paid by the page.
Oh really?
Does the US have slaves again?
Is Germany going after the Jews again?
Do you think either country ever will?
Why would that be? Because we're so much smarter than the Germans in the 30's and US citizens in the 17/1800's, or because we can look at the history of when it happened before and tell ourselves we don't ever want to even consider going there again?
Hint: If anything, the world is getting dumber. Expecting them to do the right thing while also expecting them to forget about every wrong thing that's ever been done is crazy, and stupid.
Which of course means the majority of people have to be politically plugged in. And that doesn't happen until something occurs which makes life unpleasant, at which point it's usually too late.
Yeah, like I said to the AC, I was hoping someone would glom onto that, because that's my point: At this point, we do not have the means to make a guaranteed-forever-free-and-open new internet. You're right that human designed and built systems CAN be free and open, but all it takes is for one of the critical designers to be secretly paid a fortune by a telecom for them to put in a back door that the corporation can then use to either harm or convert the free-and-open network into one that won't compete with the commercial internet (say, for instance, the programming of the automated operation of the network - - bribe the lead programmer). And if you think that kind of crap doesn't happen, you'd be amazed. Corporations have slush funds of tens of millions of dollars set up specifically to bribe people and organizations into letting them have their way.
The only real way for this to work would be to have a small subset of people - digital hippies, essentially - who design a self-replicating network that builds itself. There's no way you could guarantee homogeneity of philosophy or resistance to corporate bribery/influence if you got as many people as it would take to build a replacement internet on the project. The project has to build itself. We aren't at that technological level yet, and so what the article is proposing is a neat pipe dream, but it's not happening any time soon.
"Or you run your wire to the next town, through four other towns to circle back to the other side of your town, and thus to your friend across town. "
Any network has x number of possible routes between any two given points. As long as someone can get control of enough nodes so that any route must pass through one of theirs, they get to control the network. If you run your wire in that loop around 4 towns, all the corporation has to do is get the exit node from one of the towns, and they've just eliminated your detour. So you'll get into an arms race - - you build a new pathway, and the corporation takes over one node. You're spending thousands and more per pathway, and the corporation is spending maybe 5-10 grand to bribe the bastard on a critical node. Who's gonna run out of money first?
Because that would work great at first, until a few of us get greedy and start trying to swing the network in a direction that will be profitable for us.
What we're really talking about here is communism. Whether economic or data-resource-sharing, the concept is the same. Everything gets shared equally. This works great on paper, but paper never considers the human factor, which is that there are ALWAYS in any sizable group, a subset of greedy bastards who are willing to screw it up for everyone else for personal gain.
-grin-
I was hoping someone would catch that.
Yes, I came in here to say this. Glad you already did.
The sad fact is that 95% or more of the public doesn't give a damn if a corporation influences the internet. As long as they can still get their porn and play Farmville, they're happy. Those of us who understand what's actually at stake with net neutrality are in the vast minority, and everyone else is being inundated with messages from the corporation about how terrible it would be if they weren't allowed to shit all over the net. Those people won't care about net neutrality until they start having to pay $15/day in data fees to get new sheep in Farmville, and by then it'll be too late. We're long past the days when the government actually breaks up monopolies, and so unlike what happened when Bell Telephone got to big for the public's good, the few major companies who control the internet will be allowed to retain that control.
And if someone, once people realize how screwed they are, starts making this new-internet-that's-not-the-internet, the companies will suddenly make Farmville data and 30 minutes per day of porn data-charge-free, and all the people who were pissed off will be placated, leaving once again only those of us who pay attention to what's going on, and again, there aren't enough of us to build the uncorruptable network of our dreams.
Works great, until 10 of the houses in the middle get together and decide to start charging you for sending data across their wires. You either pay, or you don't have your little network anymore.
plus you have to trust that a coalition of nodes on your non-internet doesn't form and start to control the direction of the network. And the likelihood of avoiding that is somewhere between 0 and never. At worst, the corporations would band together and make their own nodes, and make so many of them that the network became dependent on them. Or they'd just bribe the people who ran the nodes to run them the way the corporations want.
As long as humans are in control of a system in any way, those humans can be corrupted to bend the system to a large entity's will. That means that logically, the only way we can have a global information network that remains free and open is to have it designed, built, and run, entirely by machines.
Unless you consider that whole "any society sufficiently advanced will appear magic to a primitive one" idea.
You know, the one proposed by Clarke. ;)
Yes. This. Thank you. Amazing how this "fragmentation recipe for failure" has caused the PC to fail so badly that PC sales have blown Mac out of the water for *decades.*
Here's another way to look at it: If you don't like something about the iPhone, you buy an Android. If you don't like something about the Droid X, you buy a . . different Android. So if developers want to write for a single-device market, and not get sales from everyone on an Android phone, have at. Enjoy. Let us know how that works for you.
Well, I'm not arguing that we should be *given* housing and food as a matter of course, but let's look at the scenario:
You get food. Nutritionally balanced, but nothing fancy. It'd probably be like those food packets they make for starving kids - Rice, cornmeal, chicken powder for protein, and dried vegetables for vitamins. I tried some of that once. I wouldn't want it to be my breakfast lunch and dinner 365 days a year.
You get housing. A tiny little apartment in a soulless cement block building somewhere. It has a bathroom, and a bedroom, and a portable stove to heat the food packs. It'd basically be a jail cell without bars.
You're saying you wouldn't be motivated to go make money so that you could buy *better* stuff than that?
And by the way, as far as filling the time with drugs, hey, drugs cost money, which means they have to get it somehow.
Come to think of it, what would probably happen is that employers would be forced to start paying decent wages and stop treating their employees like shit, because the employee no longer has to worry about starving and being homeless if he stands up to his jackass boss.
Of course, such a move would have to be made only after we repeal NAFTA and GATT so that companies can't just outsource their jobs to countries where people still ARE afraid of starving to death.
"while other companies like Dell or Sun just suffered for no reason but not being appetising."
Yeah, I know, reading is hard.
If you swap the front fan for a non-LED one, the Sword-M is pretty much what you're looking for, including under-mobo cable management.
This, this, and this.
Plus in general airflow in the cheap cases just sucks, and so you have to put a bunch of high-rpm noisy fans in there just to keep it barely cool. Contrast that with the Armor that my machine is in (and it's the 3rd build I've done in the same case). I've got a few large fans in there. It's quieter than the ceiling fan. And I *never* overheat. Also, I mentioned that this was the 3rd computer I've put in this case for a reason: That means instead of spending $50 per case for crappy cases on the last three builds, I spent $150 at the front end and got an excellent case that will probably house builds 4 and 5 as well. If you do it that way, you end up saving money long term.
I'll put forth that Dell suffered because they sucked. They used to be great. I swore by them in the 90's. Then they got greedy, started putting cheap crap in the boxes and scaled back customer service to where you couldn't get a warranty fix unless you practically got the Mafia involved.
I'll also say the same thing I say about the ricermobiles: As long as it's not dangerous, and you like it, do it and be happy. And unlike the ricers who do stupid shit like cutting their springs so that their handling goes in the toilet, it's pretty hard to be unsafe with a PC mod unless you get a cheap inverter for the CCD's.
I build computers from time to time for people who want extreme gaming machines, and sometimes they ask me to doll them up. And I do it, because it's cheap and makes them happy.
I'm also glad that the era of the beige box is at an end. As functional as it was, my black TT Armor looks much better (in addition to being a fantastic case for airflow). Maybe I have an untapped artistic side or something, but I kind of like some of the cooler case mods, just like I like hot rods. No, making your case look like the warp core from the Enterprise doesn't add any functionality, but. . .actually that would be pretty cool. I might have to look in to doing that ;)
You know, I thought you were just rude, but now I realize you're an asshole. Even if you're convinced you're right, there are nicer ways to go about saying it, but you can't quite manage them, can you? I'm not trying to deceive, or use trickery to prove a point. You, on the other hand, are attempting to veil your complete failure to grasp basic concepts in insults. Internet bullies don't impress me or anyone else with a modicum of intelligence. Next time, try harder when you want to troll.
And by the way, no, we're not talking purely about metal fatigue, or had you forgotten that airplanes aren't just slugs of steel?
On second thought, don't bother answering that. I try not to waste too much time arguing with jackasses.
What's easier on you, if I put my hand on your head and push, or if I punch you? Call it silly all you want, but the sudden impact start is going to be harder on the airframe than the sloped acceleration.
And if you give the launcher full power from the beginning, it jolts the aircraft. My entire point was that avoiding the jolt is easier on the aircraft. If you think that's a poor-silly-incorrect-false-logic-formed opinion designed to misdirect, then it says something about your grasp of physics, much less that of common sense.
Why would that be a reasonable assumption. Far more reasonable would be that the curve would get steeper over time. It would be easier on the airplane if you started (relatively) slow and increased power to get to the required takeoff speed by the end.
Think of a car. It's pretty easy to take 1g of lateral acceleration if you're on a skid pad and build up to it - quite another to take 1g when it's from being hit by a truck.
Looking at current common applications of these motors in launch situation - roller coasters, you'll notice that the LIM doesn't just blast them instantly to 90mph. It actually starts out somewhat slow and then accelerates them (relatively) gently over time.
Of course they are. Don't forget the Russians have fucking nuclear missiles too, and they have an annoying plan to launch them if we ever launch ours.
The nukes will be deployed only when it's obvious we're about to lose the conventional war in a big way, just as theirs will be.
Even if they sniff the data coming down as a result of the web request?
I'm not trying to argue, but to get educated here - - Wouldn't it be possible (technically, leave legal aside) to analyze the data coming across, discover "oh, hey, this is coming from cbs.com, and since Comcast just merged with NBC, we're gonna drop the speed until we see data that is *not* coming from cbs.com?"