That's true, though the point is rendered a bit more moot with the last stats coming out showing that Samsung is beating everyone, including Apple, in smartphone sales.
I guarantee you that the noise this guy shat out has more identifiable patterns in it than what you'd get from any RNG not used by Sony.
OK. Point them out to us. I'll listen again.
A pattern is any recognizable characteristic of a thing.
If that's how you're going to define "pattern" then everything in the universe is a pattern. Such definitions are meaningless because there isn't any useful information to glean from them.
The old hypothetical monkeys-at-typewriters eventually banging out a Shakespeare play describes this. Essentially the monkeys are just a bunch of random character generators. Even if they don't write Shakespeare, they'll eventually stumble across some sort of pattern purely by random chance.
Even though the pattern is not intentional, a pattern can be formed.
No, it's someone who doesn't understand the difference between hardware and operating system.
Of course Android has more repairs than Apple or Blackberry. Everyone and his dog can make an Android device. Only Apple and RIM can make the iPhone and Blackberry. So assuming that Apple and RIM maintain high hardware quality standards (manufacturing, not design - to differentiate between quality-of-build and the antenna debacle) then it's a given that an open OS is going to end up getting installed on cheap pieces of crap as well as good hardware.
A more apt comparison would have been between, say, the iPhones and Motorola's line of Android phones. Saying the iPhone is on the average more reliable than Androids is like saying the Packers are a better football team then the average of ALL other football teams, including the peewee leagues. The only appropriate response to such a comparison is "Well duh."
I'm still not sure why you think it's more safe to launch in rapid succession, especially in the early phases of a given program.
As I said, the "hurry up and launch!" attitude was the direct cause of Apollo 1. You could have launched 20 Apollos and never run across the Apollo 1 problems. They only figured out (by which I mean "finally agreed with the astronauts") that the door was a death trap when opening the door quickly was actually needed. If you launch 20 missions that never have an emergency, you don't need the door to open quickly and therefore don't learn anything about the problems with it, whereas you can find out about the problems without launching a single rocket by running a fire drill and discovering that, hey, that door opens kinda slow.
I agree with you that an all-up test is the most complete test of a system, however I don't agree with the implication that we should proceed to all-up tests as quickly as possible, and then consider operational launches to be all-up tests. There is plenty to learn from non-all-up tests. Not to overly harp on the door problem, but it would have been exposed with a static ground test of "pretend the capsule is on fire and try to get out." They could have done that at the factory - they didn't even need the rest of the rocket to be built yet, much less launched.
The crew wanted that as well - remember the famous prayer photograph? But NASA's response was, essentially, "Screw that! We ain't got time! We gotta beat the Ruskies!"
High launch frequencies may be safer when the vehicle is fully tested, and its assembly (if non-reusable) is down to a fine science strictly on the basis of crew familiarity - you're better at things you do often than things you do rarely. But in the experimental stages, launches should be analyzed for problems and near problems that crop up rather than blindly launching rocket after rocket and hoping that there isn't some undiscovered defect somewhere that will bite you when you're not looking.
Apollo 1 was largely the result of rushing into the program without being willing to eliminate problems. The original Apollo capsules were poorly designed, poorly assembled death traps. In addition to the emergency hatch that took too long to open, the lax assembly methods set up the spark that ignited the fire in the first place. And running on 100% oxygen was a pretty obvious mistake as well.
You don't need any launches to figure out that careless assembly, an impossible-to-open-quickly emergency door, and running 100% fire fuel as your atmosphere invites disaster. This, of course, is proven by the fact that there had been no Apollo launches before 1, and the post-1 redesign happened before any further Apollos were launched.
Apollo forced NASA to do what it should have done all along - put the brakes on and examine the program for catastrophes-in-waiting. Many people involved with Apollo have said that if it hadn't been for the fire, the program probably wouldn't have been successful - at least not by 1969. Flip that statement around and you arrive at the idea that Apollo 1 was the result of haste getting priority over right (which actually all NASA loss-of-crew incidents can be traced to). The space race with the Russians was in Apollo's case the cause of that haste, just as the race to give the President something cool to say in his State of the Union address was a contributing factor to the haste that doomed Challenger, and just as the desire to get missions completed was the cause of Columbia because they didn't want to stop and redesign the ET to avoid insulation impacts on the orbiter.
In other words, that China appears to be taking things slow is not something they should be ashamed of or mocked for.
NASA did the first docking 4 years after the first flight because they were racing for the moon. We've already gotten to the moon, and so China doesn't need to race. Instead, they can go slower and more thoughtfully (and had we done that, arguably Apollo 1 would never have happened) and end up with something stronger at the end (unlike us, who ended up going to the moon 6 times and then pretty much giving up on space advancement beyond an LEO pickup truck).
This is a board full of nerds. As such, we're all used to people looking funny at us. People looked funny at me in kindergarten when I joined the computer club (PC Jr baby!). They looked funny at me in middle school when I was programming HGR graphics screen saver analogues on Apple IIs. They looked at me funny in high school when I was typing notes on a Sharp Wizard OZ9600 II.
And I'm sure most of you had similar experiences because like me you've been early adopters for basically your whole life, and early adopters of computer technology who were born in the 70's almost always got funny looks if not beatdowns from their gradeschool classmates.
As such, I'm not sure why people looking funny at you for giving voice commands to a phone is of particular concern to this group.
If you're really worried about it, get a safe deposit box (or just a safe, if you don't want to pay monthly fees) and keep the key on your keyring (or the combination on a card in your wallet, depending on the safe's locking mechanism).
Keep an "I'm dead" file in your file cabinet and tell your relative-of-choice where the file is. In the file, include a note that says where the key/combo is, and that the safe contains documents including all your logins/passwords and whatever else you want them to see only after you're dead.
I cannot imagine a scenario that does not involve you being or harboring a suspected criminal in which you would be subpoenaed for the contents of your safe.
In the USA, we theoretically (theoretically because in practice it does not always work that way) have the principle that we are innocent until proven guilty, and the burden of proof rests on the accuser. In other words, I don't have to prove that I'm innocent by signing a declaration. THEY have to prove that I'm guilty by showing that they know I am the one who was driving.
Nothing in the article says how it gets around the problem with all the other photo radars out there - They get a picture of your license plate, but they have no evidence that YOU were driving, instead of your wife, or kid, or even a rogue valet parking attendant.
If you can't prove it's me, I'm not inclined to pay the fine.
Plus, previously the argument has been "if you don't want to be searched, then don't travel by a private airline where you know you'll be searched."
That doesn't hold water in the case of the people who traveled by train, not knowing they would be searched, and then were not searched until they got OFF the train, where they could not refuse the search by declining the travel. Whole new ballgame there.
Actual criminals are. . Criminals. They don't particularly care if impersonating a fire inspector is illegal.
As for whether it will ever happen - well, at a lot of places it probably won't because you don't have to get that tricky to get what you want. Just call a high-placed exec's secretary, say you're from IT, and need his l/p to fix his computer. 9 times out of 10 it'll work.
As he says in the article, the fire inspector ruse comes out when the bank is more sophisticated than most and therefore a harder target.
I can see it working. We just had a fire inspector in my office a few weeks ago giving me crap about an extension cord. Now, I happen to actually know the guy from past encounteers, and I know that he really *is* a fire inspector, but not everyone in the building does, and no one batted an eye when he was crawling around under desks looking for those nefarious extension cords.
Right at the end of September I decorated the porch with all the typical fall crap. Pumpkins (fake), hay bales, corn stalks, and a life-sized scarecrow in an Adirondack chair right next to the front door.
The neighbors are all very used to seeing that scarecrow.
Halloween night, I will be dressing as a scarecrow and replace the stuffed one with myself. Subtle movements when the kids ring the doorbell are usually enough to send them howling from the porch, without revealing to anyone farther away that the scarecrow is not as it seems.
It worked like a charm last year, and since then I've moved, which means I get to do it again with no one expecting it;)
It's not exactly original (I remember getting the idea from some old 80's show), but it's very effective.
Yes. Actually I wish updates were optional and reversible rather than being pushed out whether you want them or not. The last Froyo update brought my OG Droid to a crawl and I had to endure a slow piece of junk for 6 months until my 2 years were up and I could get another at less than full price. Hopefully the specs of the Bionic will keep it from that fate even when they upgrade it beyond ICS.
The trouble is that as we know from all the bullshit RIAA lawsuits (going after 75 year olds who don't own computers, etc) the media publishing industry is somewhere in 1975 and would like to keep it that way as long as possible. This is an industry famous for fighting every advance in technology that later ends up making that industry craploads of money. Tapes, VCRs, etc, were all fought tooth and nail. Hell, Sony had to get Mr. Rogers to testify for them in court before the VCR was finally acknowledged as legal.
With that model, not playing ball with them at this stage means that they will take that ball and go home, and Netflix will be back to streaming the crap content they were putting out when they first put their streaming online.
They're going to have to walk a fine line for awhile until the entertainment industry gets their head out long enough to realize that streaming content will make them a lot of money.
Yeh... You might... end up in a wheelchair if you fell and broke something!
No, you might end up in a coffin. Bone breaks, especially large bone breaks like a hip, are very bad news for the elderly.
Great, so a device specifically designed to do the balancing part for him would have been great as he'd still have been able to push it forwards a bit with his own strength?
Balancing the legs is 1/4 of the equation. The device shown isn't going to be capable of balancing the upper body, which is going to end up flopping all over the place.
The quadriplegic will fall over if he tries it (because he's going to have to continue leaning forward in order to keep going forward unless the contraption is on a down-hill and eventually he will lean far enough forward that he tumps over)
The old-infirm guy would be a more likely candidate, but again the likelihood of falling over would be far greater than with a walker or a wheelchair, and falls when you're old and infirm can be very bad news.
One thing I learned when my dad slowly degenerated from a muscle disease is that strength is secondary to balance. He was falling long (as in, over a decade) before he didn't have the strength to move his legs. Walking really doesn't require all that much strength from a forward-motion point of view. The real muscle work comes from keeping everything properly positioned so that you stay upright. Just giving him a walking-leg setup like this would have had him face-planting every few steps because it has no means of correcting out-of-balance body parts.
Of greater interest from a disability front is the leg-assist exoskeleton they're working on right now for the military.
The rest simply find themselves scrambling harder and harder for the fewer and fewer remaining jobs. Ultimately, everyone becomes unemployed.
Absolutely. And it is at that point that money goes away (though the actual going away part might be exceedingly unpleasant for a time). The rich who own the means to make products have no one to sell them to, and the poor who have nothing either revolt and take back all the resources that the rich have gobbled up or, less likely, get together with the rich and forge a money-less society.
In short, the "socialism" crap that everyone's so terrified of in politics today is going to be brought about by the rich and their efficiency-machines that allow them to fire more and more people.
BTW, I think you're right about what's happening today (3rd paragraph) and I also think you're right that it's happening naturally and not through some global conspiracy - - a formal conspiracy need not exist when compatible interests are on the playing field.
Re:Some day humanity will manage things a better
on
The Real Job Threat
·
· Score: 1
The Star Trek ideal is that everyone contributes to society not because they get an instant-gratification reward of wads of cash, but because humanity has evolved to the point where individuals strive to better humanity rather than line their own pockets.
And as mentioned, that ideal was brought about by the replicator. If you can make anything you want out of thin air, money is useless.
Things got confused in the lore, btw, because Kirk mentions selling his house in Generations, but DS9 had several scenes where Jake and Nog argue over the fact that humanity has abandoned money. Voyager also mentions Fort Knox having been converted to a museum after humans abandoned money.
The robots we're discussing are going to be our replicators.
Sure, they can't make scarce materials, but they can go get them whereever they are, for free. Found oil somewhere that currently isn't exploited because it's too expensive to extract? Robot labor is free. Go get it.
Find raw materials for making solar panels on Mars? (assuming we ever run out of. . Sand) A robot-crewed spacecraft is on the way.
In short, once robots are making everything for us, we might as well have replicators. Hell we probably WILL have replicators by the time we manage to run out of something - after all, with robots doing all our work for us we can concentrate on higher pursuits. Even the most prolific inventor today still has to take time to mow the lawn, cook dinner, and pay bills.
BTW, you might want to give DS9 another shot. I hated it too, but decided to give it a second chance and am watching it on Netflix streaming. It's actually pretty good, and is much more nuanced and complex than any of the other ST shows.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm very disappointed that this wasn't the first post, but am pleased to see it here nonetheless ;)
Not really. Comparing Apple to Samsung is comparing hardware to hardware. Comparing Apple to Android is comparing hardware to software.
That's true, though the point is rendered a bit more moot with the last stats coming out showing that Samsung is beating everyone, including Apple, in smartphone sales.
I guarantee you that the noise this guy shat out has more identifiable patterns in it than what you'd get from any RNG not used by Sony.
OK. Point them out to us. I'll listen again.
A pattern is any recognizable characteristic of a thing.
If that's how you're going to define "pattern" then everything in the universe is a pattern. Such definitions are meaningless because there isn't any useful information to glean from them.
A random number generator can generate patterns.
The old hypothetical monkeys-at-typewriters eventually banging out a Shakespeare play describes this. Essentially the monkeys are just a bunch of random character generators. Even if they don't write Shakespeare, they'll eventually stumble across some sort of pattern purely by random chance.
Even though the pattern is not intentional, a pattern can be formed.
No, it's someone who doesn't understand the difference between hardware and operating system.
Of course Android has more repairs than Apple or Blackberry. Everyone and his dog can make an Android device. Only Apple and RIM can make the iPhone and Blackberry. So assuming that Apple and RIM maintain high hardware quality standards (manufacturing, not design - to differentiate between quality-of-build and the antenna debacle) then it's a given that an open OS is going to end up getting installed on cheap pieces of crap as well as good hardware.
A more apt comparison would have been between, say, the iPhones and Motorola's line of Android phones. Saying the iPhone is on the average more reliable than Androids is like saying the Packers are a better football team then the average of ALL other football teams, including the peewee leagues. The only appropriate response to such a comparison is "Well duh."
I'm still not sure why you think it's more safe to launch in rapid succession, especially in the early phases of a given program.
As I said, the "hurry up and launch!" attitude was the direct cause of Apollo 1. You could have launched 20 Apollos and never run across the Apollo 1 problems. They only figured out (by which I mean "finally agreed with the astronauts") that the door was a death trap when opening the door quickly was actually needed. If you launch 20 missions that never have an emergency, you don't need the door to open quickly and therefore don't learn anything about the problems with it, whereas you can find out about the problems without launching a single rocket by running a fire drill and discovering that, hey, that door opens kinda slow.
I agree with you that an all-up test is the most complete test of a system, however I don't agree with the implication that we should proceed to all-up tests as quickly as possible, and then consider operational launches to be all-up tests. There is plenty to learn from non-all-up tests. Not to overly harp on the door problem, but it would have been exposed with a static ground test of "pretend the capsule is on fire and try to get out." They could have done that at the factory - they didn't even need the rest of the rocket to be built yet, much less launched.
The crew wanted that as well - remember the famous prayer photograph? But NASA's response was, essentially, "Screw that! We ain't got time! We gotta beat the Ruskies!"
High launch frequencies may be safer when the vehicle is fully tested, and its assembly (if non-reusable) is down to a fine science strictly on the basis of crew familiarity - you're better at things you do often than things you do rarely. But in the experimental stages, launches should be analyzed for problems and near problems that crop up rather than blindly launching rocket after rocket and hoping that there isn't some undiscovered defect somewhere that will bite you when you're not looking.
Apollo 1 was largely the result of rushing into the program without being willing to eliminate problems. The original Apollo capsules were poorly designed, poorly assembled death traps. In addition to the emergency hatch that took too long to open, the lax assembly methods set up the spark that ignited the fire in the first place. And running on 100% oxygen was a pretty obvious mistake as well.
You don't need any launches to figure out that careless assembly, an impossible-to-open-quickly emergency door, and running 100% fire fuel as your atmosphere invites disaster. This, of course, is proven by the fact that there had been no Apollo launches before 1, and the post-1 redesign happened before any further Apollos were launched.
Apollo forced NASA to do what it should have done all along - put the brakes on and examine the program for catastrophes-in-waiting. Many people involved with Apollo have said that if it hadn't been for the fire, the program probably wouldn't have been successful - at least not by 1969. Flip that statement around and you arrive at the idea that Apollo 1 was the result of haste getting priority over right (which actually all NASA loss-of-crew incidents can be traced to). The space race with the Russians was in Apollo's case the cause of that haste, just as the race to give the President something cool to say in his State of the Union address was a contributing factor to the haste that doomed Challenger, and just as the desire to get missions completed was the cause of Columbia because they didn't want to stop and redesign the ET to avoid insulation impacts on the orbiter.
In other words, that China appears to be taking things slow is not something they should be ashamed of or mocked for.
NASA did the first docking 4 years after the first flight because they were racing for the moon. We've already gotten to the moon, and so China doesn't need to race. Instead, they can go slower and more thoughtfully (and had we done that, arguably Apollo 1 would never have happened) and end up with something stronger at the end (unlike us, who ended up going to the moon 6 times and then pretty much giving up on space advancement beyond an LEO pickup truck).
This is a board full of nerds. As such, we're all used to people looking funny at us. People looked funny at me in kindergarten when I joined the computer club (PC Jr baby!). They looked funny at me in middle school when I was programming HGR graphics screen saver analogues on Apple IIs. They looked at me funny in high school when I was typing notes on a Sharp Wizard OZ9600 II.
And I'm sure most of you had similar experiences because like me you've been early adopters for basically your whole life, and early adopters of computer technology who were born in the 70's almost always got funny looks if not beatdowns from their gradeschool classmates.
As such, I'm not sure why people looking funny at you for giving voice commands to a phone is of particular concern to this group.
If you're really worried about it, get a safe deposit box (or just a safe, if you don't want to pay monthly fees) and keep the key on your keyring (or the combination on a card in your wallet, depending on the safe's locking mechanism).
Keep an "I'm dead" file in your file cabinet and tell your relative-of-choice where the file is. In the file, include a note that says where the key/combo is, and that the safe contains documents including all your logins/passwords and whatever else you want them to see only after you're dead.
I cannot imagine a scenario that does not involve you being or harboring a suspected criminal in which you would be subpoenaed for the contents of your safe.
In the USA, we theoretically (theoretically because in practice it does not always work that way) have the principle that we are innocent until proven guilty, and the burden of proof rests on the accuser. In other words, I don't have to prove that I'm innocent by signing a declaration. THEY have to prove that I'm guilty by showing that they know I am the one who was driving.
Nothing in the article says how it gets around the problem with all the other photo radars out there - They get a picture of your license plate, but they have no evidence that YOU were driving, instead of your wife, or kid, or even a rogue valet parking attendant.
If you can't prove it's me, I'm not inclined to pay the fine.
Plus, previously the argument has been "if you don't want to be searched, then don't travel by a private airline where you know you'll be searched."
That doesn't hold water in the case of the people who traveled by train, not knowing they would be searched, and then were not searched until they got OFF the train, where they could not refuse the search by declining the travel. Whole new ballgame there.
Actual criminals are. . Criminals. They don't particularly care if impersonating a fire inspector is illegal.
As for whether it will ever happen - well, at a lot of places it probably won't because you don't have to get that tricky to get what you want. Just call a high-placed exec's secretary, say you're from IT, and need his l/p to fix his computer. 9 times out of 10 it'll work.
As he says in the article, the fire inspector ruse comes out when the bank is more sophisticated than most and therefore a harder target.
I can see it working. We just had a fire inspector in my office a few weeks ago giving me crap about an extension cord. Now, I happen to actually know the guy from past encounteers, and I know that he really *is* a fire inspector, but not everyone in the building does, and no one batted an eye when he was crawling around under desks looking for those nefarious extension cords.
The point was that they're not stealing physical money. As in, not running out of the bank with bags full of bills.
Right at the end of September I decorated the porch with all the typical fall crap. Pumpkins (fake), hay bales, corn stalks, and a life-sized scarecrow in an Adirondack chair right next to the front door.
The neighbors are all very used to seeing that scarecrow.
Halloween night, I will be dressing as a scarecrow and replace the stuffed one with myself. Subtle movements when the kids ring the doorbell are usually enough to send them howling from the porch, without revealing to anyone farther away that the scarecrow is not as it seems.
It worked like a charm last year, and since then I've moved, which means I get to do it again with no one expecting it ;)
It's not exactly original (I remember getting the idea from some old 80's show), but it's very effective.
Yes. Actually I wish updates were optional and reversible rather than being pushed out whether you want them or not. The last Froyo update brought my OG Droid to a crawl and I had to endure a slow piece of junk for 6 months until my 2 years were up and I could get another at less than full price. Hopefully the specs of the Bionic will keep it from that fate even when they upgrade it beyond ICS.
It's virtually guaranteed that they will some day ;)
The next step is for a holographic full-sized office with a holographic representation of a laptop on the desk ;)
The trouble is that as we know from all the bullshit RIAA lawsuits (going after 75 year olds who don't own computers, etc) the media publishing industry is somewhere in 1975 and would like to keep it that way as long as possible. This is an industry famous for fighting every advance in technology that later ends up making that industry craploads of money. Tapes, VCRs, etc, were all fought tooth and nail. Hell, Sony had to get Mr. Rogers to testify for them in court before the VCR was finally acknowledged as legal.
With that model, not playing ball with them at this stage means that they will take that ball and go home, and Netflix will be back to streaming the crap content they were putting out when they first put their streaming online.
They're going to have to walk a fine line for awhile until the entertainment industry gets their head out long enough to realize that streaming content will make them a lot of money.
Yeh... You might... end up in a wheelchair if you fell and broke something!
No, you might end up in a coffin. Bone breaks, especially large bone breaks like a hip, are very bad news for the elderly.
Great, so a device specifically designed to do the balancing part for him would have been great as he'd still have been able to push it forwards a bit with his own strength?
Balancing the legs is 1/4 of the equation. The device shown isn't going to be capable of balancing the upper body, which is going to end up flopping all over the place.
No.
The quadriplegic will fall over if he tries it (because he's going to have to continue leaning forward in order to keep going forward unless the contraption is on a down-hill and eventually he will lean far enough forward that he tumps over)
The old-infirm guy would be a more likely candidate, but again the likelihood of falling over would be far greater than with a walker or a wheelchair, and falls when you're old and infirm can be very bad news.
One thing I learned when my dad slowly degenerated from a muscle disease is that strength is secondary to balance. He was falling long (as in, over a decade) before he didn't have the strength to move his legs. Walking really doesn't require all that much strength from a forward-motion point of view. The real muscle work comes from keeping everything properly positioned so that you stay upright. Just giving him a walking-leg setup like this would have had him face-planting every few steps because it has no means of correcting out-of-balance body parts.
Of greater interest from a disability front is the leg-assist exoskeleton they're working on right now for the military.
The rest simply find themselves scrambling harder and harder for the fewer and fewer remaining jobs. Ultimately, everyone becomes unemployed.
Absolutely. And it is at that point that money goes away (though the actual going away part might be exceedingly unpleasant for a time). The rich who own the means to make products have no one to sell them to, and the poor who have nothing either revolt and take back all the resources that the rich have gobbled up or, less likely, get together with the rich and forge a money-less society.
In short, the "socialism" crap that everyone's so terrified of in politics today is going to be brought about by the rich and their efficiency-machines that allow them to fire more and more people.
BTW, I think you're right about what's happening today (3rd paragraph) and I also think you're right that it's happening naturally and not through some global conspiracy - - a formal conspiracy need not exist when compatible interests are on the playing field.
The Star Trek ideal is that everyone contributes to society not because they get an instant-gratification reward of wads of cash, but because humanity has evolved to the point where individuals strive to better humanity rather than line their own pockets.
And as mentioned, that ideal was brought about by the replicator. If you can make anything you want out of thin air, money is useless.
Things got confused in the lore, btw, because Kirk mentions selling his house in Generations, but DS9 had several scenes where Jake and Nog argue over the fact that humanity has abandoned money. Voyager also mentions Fort Knox having been converted to a museum after humans abandoned money.
The robots we're discussing are going to be our replicators.
Sure, they can't make scarce materials, but they can go get them whereever they are, for free. Found oil somewhere that currently isn't exploited because it's too expensive to extract? Robot labor is free. Go get it.
Find raw materials for making solar panels on Mars? (assuming we ever run out of. . Sand) A robot-crewed spacecraft is on the way.
In short, once robots are making everything for us, we might as well have replicators. Hell we probably WILL have replicators by the time we manage to run out of something - after all, with robots doing all our work for us we can concentrate on higher pursuits. Even the most prolific inventor today still has to take time to mow the lawn, cook dinner, and pay bills.
BTW, you might want to give DS9 another shot. I hated it too, but decided to give it a second chance and am watching it on Netflix streaming. It's actually pretty good, and is much more nuanced and complex than any of the other ST shows.