Research on vehicle wi-fi comm w/ infrastructure
on
Hack Your Ride
·
· Score: 1
That is not as far off as you might think.
Check out this proposal solicitation from DOT for "In Vehicle Collision Warning System Using Infrastructure Messages":
Here's the link.
(second topic from top)
Okay, it's not vehicles talking to each other, it's about vehicles using wifi to talk to stoplights, stopsigns and other infrastructure. But it's just a small step from that to vehicles communicating among themselves and trying to coordinate.
Some highlights:
"The in vehicle system would utilize Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), High Accuracy Nationwide Differential GPS (HANDGPS), and a handheld Linux based computer to acquire and analyze the infrastructure warnings to alert drivers."
"The interface and data analysis programs would be copyrighted with the Free Software Foundation copyleft statement"
The Japanese do not drink sake with sushi. It is considered redudant, since sushi contains rice and sake is made from rice. They drink beer with their sushi.
Many places do want you to already have a clearance, but there are also plenty that will hire you without one and help you get it. The company I work for is one example, but there are many others.
I would disagree with the statement "it's extremely difficult to get a clearance". It's just a matter of finding any employer who is willing to do it, and there are plenty of them.
It's true that once you have that clearance, many more doors open. But that just reinforces the notion that it is an extremely good career move, because it gives you access to many, many more potential jobs, none of which can be exported.
Furthermore, speaking of that huge demand, if you are a top-notch java programmer in the DC area who might be interested in that kind of job security, send me your resume. Email to kryzx at jeh dot net. Employee-owned company. All java, math intensive AI algorithms. Math, AI, OR, agent, and parallelization skillz are plusses.
If you are a developer in the US and you are worried about outsourcing, get a job that requires a security clearance. That job must always be done by a US citizen, in the US, and therefore can never be moved offshore.
In the Washington DC area there is a huge, huge demand for IT people with clearance, and there are also lots of companies that will hire you and help you get a clearance.
I agree. Excel is a powerful tool that, in the right hands, can be very useful.
I write software to do large statistical computations, for the purpose of inference under uncertainty (Bayesian networks), and I have used excel to verify some pretty complex computations.
I've also used it to model decision theory utility calcuations, similar to TreeAge Data or DPL.
Excel has nothing that prevents you from doing calculations to accurately model uncertianty. Even if you don't want to rely on some of MS's functions, most of the calcuations for that kind of thing are just multiplication and addition.
The problems stated in the article are just user incompetence, not flaws in the spreadsheet concept.
But in spite of this I maintain that for a majority of IT folks, if they are unhappy with their job, dealing with "users", as the poster rather fliply mentions, is not the reason.
There could be any number of other reasons, just to name a few:
Lack of job satisfaction due to
- uninteresting work
- inability to use new and exciting technologies
- lack of change, meaning no oppty to learn new things
- being poorly managed, leading to big panic crunch-times and low quality product
- lack of feeling of ownership in the process and the product
- being under-utilized, under-appreciated, and under-compensated
Let's face it, vast areas of programming work are not that original or exciting, and probably are not what anyone dreamed of doing when they chose IT as a career. But someone's gotta do it, and it pays decent.
I've been there. I've worked several programming jobs that were pure drudgery, and I know dozens or hundreds of people still in those jobs, just toughing it out, for a variety of reasons. I wasn't that tough, it had too much of an effect on my well-being, so I continued to look for something better. I've been fortunate enough to find a job that I find very interesting, challenging and fulfilling. But I still don't know if I'd rate my happiness a 10. That's pretty strong.
Hey, that brings to mind another possible explanation: Maybe IT people are more analytical and numbers oriented, more familiar with gradient scales, and therefore more likely to choose some inbetween number to represent how they feel, whereas most florists are less numerically inclined, and probably just pick 1 or 10 for unhappy or happy. (uh-oh, here come the flames from all those florists who read/.)
This report was based on a survey that asked people to rate their happiness with their job from 1 to 10, and the numbers reported here are the percentage of people that responded with a 10. That is a pretty incomplete view. I like to see all the response counts and draw my own conclusions, then I could test my florist hypothesis. But that info is not provided.
From the footnotes:
"Very happy constitutes those who rated their level of happiness as 10 out of 10. Respondents were asked to grade their level of happiness on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being very unhappy and 10 being very happy Unhappy constitutes those who rated their level of happiness from 1-3 out of 10."
"But then again, very few plumbers have to deal with users who consistently download BonziBuddy, blindly click on suspicious email attachments and use their cd trays as cupholders."
I would guess that most IT professionals are not in tech support. I've not seen numbers on it, but if you lump together programmers, DBA's, web developers, analysts, etc, vs. sysads and tech support I bet you get something like an 80/20 ratio. Anyone seen stats on it?
But, for those in tech support, I think there are inherent conflicts. People attracted to tech are often more introverted. You take people like that and force them to deal with users who know nothing, are resentful of their utter dependence on others, want immediate results, and blame tech support for the problem in the first place, and you get
BOFH.
Take, choosing a company totally at random, say... Diebold. Think they would "do the right thing?"
Those companies with the biggest vulnerabilities and the most depending on their security would have the least incentive to report their issues, and probably are the least likely to have to ethical fortitude to do it, given the choice.
(Yes, there is an assumption hidden in there: critical sw with major security flaws, which linger for years without being resolved, is a certain indication of ethical laxness.)
I couldn't disagree more. This is the future of email. It's the only way to solve the spam problem. This is the way to control you own email; namely, to control who is permitted to send you messages.
Your pronouncements of doom and gloom don't wash. There is no reason to assume that if you are not *on* the whitelist you can't *get* on it. There are any number of ways to manage this sensibly.
Just as a couple examples, consider existing systems that it could be modeled after:
1) You want to join a mailing list. You send a "subscribe" message to the list owner. He looks at it and approves you, then you are able to mail to the list.
2) Many phone systems have a service where anonymous (caller ID blocked) calls hear a message saying that number doesn't accept solicitation calls, then they have the option to state their name, the name is then played for the recipient and they decide whether to take the call.
Just starting from these I can envision several ways to manage whitelists. Maybe anyone who sends a message and is not on the whitelist gets an automated reply (to the "reply" address) inviting them to send request to be put on the whitelist. The message could include some kind of
text-in-image Turing test to make sure only a human can submit the right code. Valid requests would be presented to the recipient, who would decide whether to add them to the whitelist. These requests could easily be identified and treated different from normal emails.
Another interesting point is that you could start by getting a trusted whitelist from some organization, then customize it to your own needs - remove mail servers that seem to be problematic, add known trusted servers, etc. And any message you get would come with info about the mail server it came from.
If reasonable systems were set up to do this it would work. I'd used it immediately.
No, those links you list are to blacklists. What AT&T is doing is exactly the opposite, a whitelist. Rather than making a list of spam servers to block, they make a list of trusted mail servers that are allowed to send to them.
This is the future of mail, and the only reasonable way to solve the spam problem. In the future you will have the ability to specifically grant email addresses or mail servers the right to send you messages, denying all others.
The arial pix are pretty cool, but I am amazed at how old they are. I live in a new neighborhood that's been under construction for about five years and is near completion. In the arial pix my part of the neighborhood is still a forest with no roads, and the model homes up at the front are under construction, along with the first road. That definitely places the age of the pix between four and five years.
The question is: would Diebold be just too damn idiotic and incompetent to even notice shennanigans like that (95% probability), OR are they more capable and devious than they appear - meaning they've locked down access by anyone but themselves, so *They'll* be in control (05% probability)? Frankly, either way it's scary. But the rampant security issues, rather than one carefully managed secret hole, indicate that the first option is much more likely.
They do a review of my #1 pick for worst movie physics,
Armageddon.
But they left out the most annoying part, my movie physics pet peeve: Space ships that swoosh, bank, and crash like airplanes. You can't get much worse than the scene where they are "flying" into the asteroid, they swish back and forth to dodge things, then spend about 40 seconds crashing onto it.
Come on. In reality, you would never need to approach something that fast, the orientation of your ship wouldn't matter, you couldn't bank a hard left turn, and if you smacked into an object like that it would only happen once, as you would then bounce off it, out of control, and out into space.
This movie was made by a bunch of english lit. guys and it never occurred to them to get the opinion of someone who had passed at least one science or math class in high school. I saw it years ago, and it still pisses me off that this kind of crap can get through the Hollywood corporate machine. What kind of idiots to they think we are?
But then again, it appears that they are right, and we are idiots, because it made
assloads of money. And I can't even exclude myself from the idiocy, because I saw it too. Therein lies the problem. Any film you've can criticize, you have seen, and therefore you have supported, and therefore they will make more like that. There is no escape.
We've all seen this so many times before. Artificial Intelligence is a sham. It's analagous to alchemy.
It's only a sham because no one has succeeded yet. That doesn't mean we should stop working on it. Someone will succeed sooner or later. And we are getting closer to it so rapidly that it kinda frightening. It is inevitable.
So in one sense you are right, anyone talking about AI they have now is blowing a little smoke.
On the other hand it is a legitimate field with tons of really exciting research going on, much of which has immediate uses and benefits, even if it is not the end-all be-all general intelligence AI. And it's a field that is creeping steadily toward that end-all be-all AI, the singularity.
I don't know if these guys have something for real or not. Their press release is - perhaps unsurprisingly - fluff...
I agree about that. I'd like to hear more guts, less fluff. Though it is rather fascinating fluff.
But they do seem to have a new idea: attempt to model the cognitive process of your user, notice where the results of your model differ from the user's actual behavior, and use those differences to improve your model.
It's applying concepts of machine learning to a good problem in an interesting way.
I think many of the posters here confused things a bit, the "cognitive" part refers to the thought processes driving the behavior of the user. Despite the use of the hype-laden term "Synthetic human" (that was only their initial goal) it's not claiming to be AI, only an adaptive model of the user's behavior patterns.
Until we have a techical paper that describes their approach in detail and can be peer reviewed I will remain sceptical.
Exactly. And given that it is a gov't funded DARPA project, I suspect that we won't be seeing that for a while. Although many DARPA projects ostensibly have commercialization as the ultimate goal, if something like this were to really succeed it's highly likely that it would be tagged as valuable and/or dangerous and classified.
Slashdot Mirror
(second topic from top)
Okay, it's not vehicles talking to each other, it's about vehicles using wifi to talk to stoplights, stopsigns and other infrastructure. But it's just a small step from that to vehicles communicating among themselves and trying to coordinate.
Some highlights:
"The in vehicle system would utilize Dedicated Short Range Communications (DSRC), High Accuracy Nationwide Differential GPS (HANDGPS), and a handheld Linux based computer to acquire and analyze the infrastructure warnings to alert drivers."
"The interface and data analysis programs would be copyrighted with the Free Software Foundation copyleft statement"
And you thought Sake was only good with Sushi?
The Japanese do not drink sake with sushi.
It is considered redudant, since sushi contains rice and sake is made from rice.
They drink beer with their sushi.
Many places do want you to already have a clearance, but there are also plenty that will hire you without one and help you get it. The company I work for is one example, but there are many others.
I would disagree with the statement "it's extremely difficult to get a clearance". It's just a matter of finding any employer who is willing to do it, and there are plenty of them.
It's true that once you have that clearance, many more doors open. But that just reinforces the notion that it is an extremely good career move, because it gives you access to many, many more potential jobs, none of which can be exported.
True, that can happen, although it is very unusual.
But,
1) if that foreign national is the only one who can do the job, no US citizen was put out of a job
2) Most likely that job is being performed here in the US
So, I stick to my assertion that this kind of job can't be sent overseas.
Amen brother.
Furthermore, speaking of that huge demand, if you are a top-notch java programmer in the DC area who might be interested in that kind of job security, send me your resume. Email to kryzx at jeh dot net. Employee-owned company. All java, math intensive AI algorithms. Math, AI, OR, agent, and parallelization skillz are plusses.
</advertisement>
...at least on an individual level.
If you are a developer in the US and you are worried about outsourcing, get a job that requires a security clearance. That job must always be done by a US citizen, in the US, and therefore can never be moved offshore.
In the Washington DC area there is a huge, huge demand for IT people with clearance, and there are also lots of companies that will hire you and help you get a clearance.
I agree. Excel is a powerful tool that, in the right hands, can be very useful.
I write software to do large statistical computations, for the purpose of inference under uncertainty (Bayesian networks), and I have used excel to verify some pretty complex computations.
I've also used it to model decision theory utility calcuations, similar to TreeAge Data or DPL.
Excel has nothing that prevents you from doing calculations to accurately model uncertianty. Even if you don't want to rely on some of MS's functions, most of the calcuations for that kind of thing are just multiplication and addition.
The problems stated in the article are just user incompetence, not flaws in the spreadsheet concept.
So true.
/.)
Good point.
But in spite of this I maintain that for a majority of IT folks, if they are unhappy with their job, dealing with "users", as the poster rather fliply mentions, is not the reason.
There could be any number of other reasons, just to name a few:
Lack of job satisfaction due to
- uninteresting work
- inability to use new and exciting technologies
- lack of change, meaning no oppty to learn new things
- being poorly managed, leading to big panic crunch-times and low quality product
- lack of feeling of ownership in the process and the product
- being under-utilized, under-appreciated, and under-compensated
Let's face it, vast areas of programming work are not that original or exciting, and probably are not what anyone dreamed of doing when they chose IT as a career. But someone's gotta do it, and it pays decent.
I've been there. I've worked several programming jobs that were pure drudgery, and I know dozens or hundreds of people still in those jobs, just toughing it out, for a variety of reasons. I wasn't that tough, it had too much of an effect on my well-being, so I continued to look for something better. I've been fortunate enough to find a job that I find very interesting, challenging and fulfilling. But I still don't know if I'd rate my happiness a 10. That's pretty strong.
Hey, that brings to mind another possible explanation: Maybe IT people are more analytical and numbers oriented, more familiar with gradient scales, and therefore more likely to choose some inbetween number to represent how they feel, whereas most florists are less numerically inclined, and probably just pick 1 or 10 for unhappy or happy. (uh-oh, here come the flames from all those florists who read
This report was based on a survey that asked people to rate their happiness with their job from 1 to 10, and the numbers reported here are the percentage of people that responded with a 10. That is a pretty incomplete view. I like to see all the response counts and draw my own conclusions, then I could test my florist hypothesis. But that info is not provided.
From the footnotes:
"Very happy constitutes those who rated their level of happiness as 10 out of 10. Respondents were asked to grade their level of happiness on a scale of 1-10 with 1 being very unhappy and 10 being very happy
Unhappy constitutes those who rated their level of happiness from 1-3 out of 10."
I would guess that most IT professionals are not in tech support. I've not seen numbers on it, but if you lump together programmers, DBA's, web developers, analysts, etc, vs. sysads and tech support I bet you get something like an 80/20 ratio. Anyone seen stats on it?
But, for those in tech support, I think there are inherent conflicts. People attracted to tech are often more introverted. You take people like that and force them to deal with users who know nothing, are resentful of their utter dependence on others, want immediate results, and blame tech support for the problem in the first place, and you get BOFH.
Take, choosing a company totally at random, say... Diebold.
Think they would "do the right thing?"
Those companies with the biggest vulnerabilities and the most depending on their security would have the least incentive to report their issues, and probably are the least likely to have to ethical fortitude to do it, given the choice.
(Yes, there is an assumption hidden in there: critical sw with major security flaws, which linger for years without being resolved, is a certain indication of ethical laxness.)
It's that kids from "Toy Story".
Mmmmm... "statistically attractive".
One would be hard pressed to find another phrase so succinct, and yet containing so much "essence of UberDork".
The author called us Scholars!!! Woohooo!!
Your pronouncements of doom and gloom don't wash. There is no reason to assume that if you are not *on* the whitelist you can't *get* on it. There are any number of ways to manage this sensibly.
Just as a couple examples, consider existing systems that it could be modeled after:
1) You want to join a mailing list. You send a "subscribe" message to the list owner. He looks at it and approves you, then you are able to mail to the list.
2) Many phone systems have a service where anonymous (caller ID blocked) calls hear a message saying that number doesn't accept solicitation calls, then they have the option to state their name, the name is then played for the recipient and they decide whether to take the call.
Just starting from these I can envision several ways to manage whitelists. Maybe anyone who sends a message and is not on the whitelist gets an automated reply (to the "reply" address) inviting them to send request to be put on the whitelist. The message could include some kind of text-in-image Turing test to make sure only a human can submit the right code. Valid requests would be presented to the recipient, who would decide whether to add them to the whitelist. These requests could easily be identified and treated different from normal emails.
Another interesting point is that you could start by getting a trusted whitelist from some organization, then customize it to your own needs - remove mail servers that seem to be problematic, add known trusted servers, etc. And any message you get would come with info about the mail server it came from.
If reasonable systems were set up to do this it would work. I'd used it immediately.
No, those links you list are to blacklists. What AT&T is doing is exactly the opposite, a whitelist. Rather than making a list of spam servers to block, they make a list of trusted mail servers that are allowed to send to them.
This is the future of mail, and the only reasonable way to solve the spam problem. In the future you will have the ability to specifically grant email addresses or mail servers the right to send you messages, denying all others.
The arial pix are pretty cool, but I am amazed at how old they are. I live in a new neighborhood that's been under construction for about five years and is near completion. In the arial pix my part of the neighborhood is still a forest with no roads, and the model homes up at the front are under construction, along with the first road. That definitely places the age of the pix between four and five years.
Have you heard of AOL?
The question is: would Diebold be just too damn idiotic and incompetent to even notice shennanigans like that (95% probability), OR are they more capable and devious than they appear - meaning they've locked down access by anyone but themselves, so *They'll* be in control (05% probability)?
Frankly, either way it's scary.
But the rampant security issues, rather than one carefully managed secret hole, indicate that the first option is much more likely.
Come on. In reality, you would never need to approach something that fast, the orientation of your ship wouldn't matter, you couldn't bank a hard left turn, and if you smacked into an object like that it would only happen once, as you would then bounce off it, out of control, and out into space.
This movie was made by a bunch of english lit. guys and it never occurred to them to get the opinion of someone who had passed at least one science or math class in high school. I saw it years ago, and it still pisses me off that this kind of crap can get through the Hollywood corporate machine. What kind of idiots to they think we are?
But then again, it appears that they are right, and we are idiots, because it made assloads of money. And I can't even exclude myself from the idiocy, because I saw it too. Therein lies the problem. Any film you've can criticize, you have seen, and therefore you have supported, and therefore they will make more like that. There is no escape.
It's only a sham because no one has succeeded yet. That doesn't mean we should stop working on it. Someone will succeed sooner or later. And we are getting closer to it so rapidly that it kinda frightening. It is inevitable.
So in one sense you are right, anyone talking about AI they have now is blowing a little smoke.
On the other hand it is a legitimate field with tons of really exciting research going on, much of which has immediate uses and benefits, even if it is not the end-all be-all general intelligence AI. And it's a field that is creeping steadily toward that end-all be-all AI, the singularity.
I agree about that. I'd like to hear more guts, less fluff. Though it is rather fascinating fluff.
But they do seem to have a new idea: attempt to model the cognitive process of your user, notice where the results of your model differ from the user's actual behavior, and use those differences to improve your model.
It's applying concepts of machine learning to a good problem in an interesting way.
I think many of the posters here confused things a bit, the "cognitive" part refers to the thought processes driving the behavior of the user. Despite the use of the hype-laden term "Synthetic human" (that was only their initial goal) it's not claiming to be AI, only an adaptive model of the user's behavior patterns.
Until we have a techical paper that describes their approach in detail and can be peer reviewed I will remain sceptical.
Exactly. And given that it is a gov't funded DARPA project, I suspect that we won't be seeing that for a while. Although many DARPA projects ostensibly have commercialization as the ultimate goal, if something like this were to really succeed it's highly likely that it would be tagged as valuable and/or dangerous and classified.
Hey, CmdrTaco, Slashdot staff, is there any way you can get an interview with these guys?
/. interview with these guys would just be awesome. I bet they are /. reader, too.
This is some awesome work, but the article is so thin. A real
Anyone care to second the motion?
If I found out I'd spent my whole life somewhere uncool that would just be depressing.
Exactly.
This should be filed under the "geek->ubergeek->alphaGeek->patheticLoser " category.
Love J.R.R.T.s works, but come on.