Current trip: 40 minutes by car. Proposed hyperloop: 31 minutes. Supposed speed "up to 760 mph"
So.... Spend how many millions (billions?) to shave off 9 minutes. Certainly pay more per trip than the car or bus trip would have cost. And for how few milliseconds can you actually get anywhere near that top speed and still have the trip take 31 minutes?
I get that you can't maintain that top speed for the entire trip. Is it an accelerating half / decelerating half kind of thing? That kind of speed would make the trip more like ten minutes assuming any kind of acceleration. Throw in an extra hour for your government mandated bad touch, and what's the point other than a technology demo / tax payer boondoggle?.
No immutable audit trail and no possibility to audit internal functioning with anything that's not already internal and thus suspect. What could possibly go wrong?
When the tech nerds are telling you, "Go Luddite and use paper," maybe listen?
I have. Have you ever tried to get someone who isn't a nerd to set one up? Even Logitech Harmony is beyond the ability of most intelligent but non-technical people. Also, by the time you've added an external streaming box and a Harmony, you've eaten most of your cost savings versus the smart TV.
2. is clutter all that important in the grand scheme of things? does it actually interfere with the experience?
Yes. Not everyone is content with a living room that looks like a dorm room or a scene out of/r/cablegore. The idea of a single TV that can be wall mounted with nothing but power running to it is attractive to lots of people. For the mid-budget consumer who lacks the money to pay a professional installer and lacks the skills to do cable management themselves, the integrated option is a VERY attractive feature.
maybe you can get you car mechanic to reduce the clutter under the hood to enhance the driving experience?
If you could close the hood on your TV setup and not have to see it, that might be a viable option. Big bulky "entertainment centers" that hide cables have largely given way to simple open frame shelving or wall-mounting that makes it much more difficult to conceal cabling. A pro installer could clean things up, possibly by cutting into the wall to hide things, but that's $$$$.
3. this story alone is good reason to separate the display from the computer
The number of bricking updates as compared to the number of models of smart TV's and the number of years they've been on the market are pretty good odds to me.
Clearly if any model of internal combustion engine automobile ever had a recall or design flaw that rendered it inoperable, that's sufficient justification to go back to a separate carriage and motive system, and we'd all be smarter buying horses and separate buggies to ride around in.
I know we're all nerds here, but most of the market doesn't like having multiple devices & wires to configure. Given a choice between a TV that "has Netflix on it," versus attaching and configuring a separate Roku, AppleTV, or Chrome-ish stick, the vast majority of consumers will plug the TV into power, connect to their WiFi, and be much happier than if they'd had to deal with yet another box with yet another remote and more wires.
Offering (and choosing to purchase) the integrated model is a rational choice. *Not* offering a plain dumb screen option is annoying to us nerds, but we're kind of a purchasing minority for this stuff.
Inadequate QA on updates and bricking TV's is lousy business, but again it's a minority of customers who are capable of recognizing that the smart TV caused a greater problem than a separate device. Even that is debatable given the number of users who just use streaming at this point. If an update bricked their Roku and left their TV functional but with no available signal to watch... I guess mailing the bricked Roku back for service is easier, and it's cheaper to replace outright, but that's about it.
I haven't seen a smart device that will initially connect to unsecured WiFi without user confirmation. If you're aware of a specific make & model that does so, please share. Otherwise, you're kind of FUDing...
You can always head it off preemptively if you really must. Configure a static MAC->IP mapping for the TV, block all outbound access for that IP at the router, then associate the TV to your WiFi. It's connected and yet also cut off from the world.
Drugs and ransoms aren't anywhere near enough sales volume to push the bubble as big as it is. The value of BTC keeps climbing because people see it keeps climbing and want to "get in on it" while it's rising. Speculators. Whoever's latest to the party gets left holding the bag. It's an effective way to make some money, if you get out at the right time and don't mind participating in something that's eventually going to leave a bunch of people broke.
An asset is worth what you can sell it for, nothing more. As long as you can convert BTC to some government's currency, it's worth that amount. If there's a run out of BTC, and exchanges run out currency to exchange it for, the price of BTC collapses. At that point, the price lands at whatever speculators think they can low-ball purchase it for on the hope of a recovery.
There's enough gullible/greedy people in the world for that game to probably work a few times. Given the volatility and lock of oversight of BTC, I wouldn't be surprised to see that level of crash happen in a matter of an hour or two. Probably the fact that blockchain transactions can take so long to complete would be the only thing slowing it down.
Calculators scraping your contact lists, flashlists harvesting your call history, and now many apps even harvest audio clips. Facebook talking about harvesting periodic images from the phone's camera
Have you looked at iOS permissions recently? None of the stuff you've described is permitted by iOS without explicit user authorization and in many cases an OS-rendered on-screen indication that it's occurring (location, audio capture, and camera activity).
I agree that trying to kludge the same apps to be usable on a 4" screen with no keyboard and a 30+" screen with no touch capability is unlikely to yield good results on either form factor. Don't condemn every mobile app infrastructure just because Android and WinMob erred on the side of giving developers whatever they wanted without consideration for users' preferences. As an iOS developer, I'll admit it's a damned pain in the ass sometimes and annoying when the OS prevents you from doing something the hardware & technology could easily support. As an iOS user, I'm often grateful for it.
I'd bet the sum of that settlement there's language in the agreement to the effect that the settlement and payment stand even if the patent is later found invalid. There's nothing you could do to reverse that.
Transaction volume within a currency isn't the same thing as transfer in/out volume. Bajillions of dollars worth of transactions are conducted in USD every day. If suddenly everyone who had USD tried to sell it for some other currency, the price of USD would plummet.
The fact that lots of transactions fly back & forth within BTC doesn't mean you'd find the equivalent in value of people willing to give you fiat currency for your BTC. The guy with $43mill? That's over 10% of the daily volume. Try to shift 10% of a currency's daily volume into sales to another currency. You're in Zimbabwe territory at that point.
Agree with almost all you said negative about blockchain, but it's not worse than cash in terms of reversing fraud. Someone steals your pile of green paper (or yellow metal for that matter), and the only way you get it back is by catching them and physically retrieving it. With theft on a blockchain, you have to catch them, extract their private keys, then execute new transactions to reverse all of the fraudulent ones. Either way, there's no justice for the fraud without catching the perpetrator. Granted, 'coin is in many cases easier to steal in large enough quantities to make it worth it while also harder to catch the criminals.
Owning a share of stock means you own a percentage of the corporation's assets.
You might want to read the fine print on the "normal people" stocks that you can actually buy on an exchange or have in your retirement portfolio. All but the most preferred of preferred stock offerings are subordinate to basically everything in any kind of bankruptcy or reorganization. Generally the employees pensions come before common stock. You don't realistically own even a paper clip's worth of assets from any company you hold stock in. In the event of the company collapsing, the amount of leverage held by most companies means common stock isn't much better than junk paper in terms of what investors will recover. Literal pennies on the dollar would be a exceptionally good outcome.
Honestly, I have a doubt it's third party code that's holding them back. I'd lay even odds on a polite reminder from a Three Letter Agency was all it took to scuttle any plans of revealing their backdoor source code.
The beer alone with no other changes is a little over a pound per month lost. (Assuming: Average 150 Kcal per 12 oz, 3800 Kcal per pound of fat, divides to 25.333 beers per pound.)
I'll see your anecdote and raise you another... I lost about 200 lbs on a keto-based diet (PSMF technically), all while drinking 2-3 liters of diet soda daily. Your calorie control is more accurate this time than it has been in past attempts. That's the only relevant difference.
Both SSH and all standard VPN traffic is distinguishable from unencrypted HTTP, SSL/TLS, and other traffic types. You need firewall gear that examines things like packet size & frequency, but the detection is reliable and fairly quick. It's not a complete block the way you can block an IP address or port from starting a connection in the first place. Within a few seconds of opening the connection, the traffic type is detected and the connection reset.
Add a little analytics to determine source or destination addresses that trigger lots of these detections, then outright block those, perhaps for a period of time, perhaps followed up by LEO action. Net effect should be a pretty consistent and effective block of out-bound tunneled traffic.
A dedicated & well funded attacker with privileged network position can in fact MitM and block any and all tunneled traffic with a high degree of success. China fits all the requirements to accomplish this.
Slashdot Mirror
Current trip: 40 minutes by car. Proposed hyperloop: 31 minutes. Supposed speed "up to 760 mph"
So.... Spend how many millions (billions?) to shave off 9 minutes. Certainly pay more per trip than the car or bus trip would have cost. And for how few milliseconds can you actually get anywhere near that top speed and still have the trip take 31 minutes?
I get that you can't maintain that top speed for the entire trip. Is it an accelerating half / decelerating half kind of thing? That kind of speed would make the trip more like ten minutes assuming any kind of acceleration. Throw in an extra hour for your government mandated bad touch, and what's the point other than a technology demo / tax payer boondoggle?.
The App appers killed it.
Clearly a unique recognizable shape has held Coca-Cola back for years.
You need smarter monkeys for that, apparently.
"WE FUCKING TOLD YOU SO!"
No immutable audit trail and no possibility to audit internal functioning with anything that's not already internal and thus suspect. What could possibly go wrong?
When the tech nerds are telling you, "Go Luddite and use paper," maybe listen?
it can't be worse
Have you seen COBOL? FORTRAN? It can *always* be worse.
1. you've never heard of a universal remote?
I have. Have you ever tried to get someone who isn't a nerd to set one up? Even Logitech Harmony is beyond the ability of most intelligent but non-technical people. Also, by the time you've added an external streaming box and a Harmony, you've eaten most of your cost savings versus the smart TV.
2. is clutter all that important in the grand scheme of things? does it actually interfere with the experience?
Yes. Not everyone is content with a living room that looks like a dorm room or a scene out of /r/cablegore. The idea of a single TV that can be wall mounted with nothing but power running to it is attractive to lots of people. For the mid-budget consumer who lacks the money to pay a professional installer and lacks the skills to do cable management themselves, the integrated option is a VERY attractive feature.
maybe you can get you car mechanic to reduce the clutter under the hood to enhance the driving experience?
If you could close the hood on your TV setup and not have to see it, that might be a viable option. Big bulky "entertainment centers" that hide cables have largely given way to simple open frame shelving or wall-mounting that makes it much more difficult to conceal cabling. A pro installer could clean things up, possibly by cutting into the wall to hide things, but that's $$$$.
3. this story alone is good reason to separate the display from the computer
The number of bricking updates as compared to the number of models of smart TV's and the number of years they've been on the market are pretty good odds to me.
Clearly if any model of internal combustion engine automobile ever had a recall or design flaw that rendered it inoperable, that's sufficient justification to go back to a separate carriage and motive system, and we'd all be smarter buying horses and separate buggies to ride around in.
I know we're all nerds here, but most of the market doesn't like having multiple devices & wires to configure. Given a choice between a TV that "has Netflix on it," versus attaching and configuring a separate Roku, AppleTV, or Chrome-ish stick, the vast majority of consumers will plug the TV into power, connect to their WiFi, and be much happier than if they'd had to deal with yet another box with yet another remote and more wires.
Offering (and choosing to purchase) the integrated model is a rational choice. *Not* offering a plain dumb screen option is annoying to us nerds, but we're kind of a purchasing minority for this stuff.
Inadequate QA on updates and bricking TV's is lousy business, but again it's a minority of customers who are capable of recognizing that the smart TV caused a greater problem than a separate device. Even that is debatable given the number of users who just use streaming at this point. If an update bricked their Roku and left their TV functional but with no available signal to watch... I guess mailing the bricked Roku back for service is easier, and it's cheaper to replace outright, but that's about it.
I haven't seen a smart device that will initially connect to unsecured WiFi without user confirmation. If you're aware of a specific make & model that does so, please share. Otherwise, you're kind of FUDing...
You can always head it off preemptively if you really must. Configure a static MAC->IP mapping for the TV, block all outbound access for that IP at the router, then associate the TV to your WiFi. It's connected and yet also cut off from the world.
Set a password on your wifi. Don't enter the password in the TV.
In case of insecure neighbors, it might be tinfoil TV hat time.
Drugs and ransoms aren't anywhere near enough sales volume to push the bubble as big as it is. The value of BTC keeps climbing because people see it keeps climbing and want to "get in on it" while it's rising. Speculators. Whoever's latest to the party gets left holding the bag. It's an effective way to make some money, if you get out at the right time and don't mind participating in something that's eventually going to leave a bunch of people broke.
It bursts because you *can't* dump it.
An asset is worth what you can sell it for, nothing more. As long as you can convert BTC to some government's currency, it's worth that amount. If there's a run out of BTC, and exchanges run out currency to exchange it for, the price of BTC collapses. At that point, the price lands at whatever speculators think they can low-ball purchase it for on the hope of a recovery.
There's enough gullible/greedy people in the world for that game to probably work a few times. Given the volatility and lock of oversight of BTC, I wouldn't be surprised to see that level of crash happen in a matter of an hour or two. Probably the fact that blockchain transactions can take so long to complete would be the only thing slowing it down.
HUNGRIES!
All the Gifts...
Have you looked at iOS permissions recently? None of the stuff you've described is permitted by iOS without explicit user authorization and in many cases an OS-rendered on-screen indication that it's occurring (location, audio capture, and camera activity).
I agree that trying to kludge the same apps to be usable on a 4" screen with no keyboard and a 30+" screen with no touch capability is unlikely to yield good results on either form factor. Don't condemn every mobile app infrastructure just because Android and WinMob erred on the side of giving developers whatever they wanted without consideration for users' preferences. As an iOS developer, I'll admit it's a damned pain in the ass sometimes and annoying when the OS prevents you from doing something the hardware & technology could easily support. As an iOS user, I'm often grateful for it.
I'd bet the sum of that settlement there's language in the agreement to the effect that the settlement and payment stand even if the patent is later found invalid. There's nothing you could do to reverse that.
Transaction volume within a currency isn't the same thing as transfer in/out volume. Bajillions of dollars worth of transactions are conducted in USD every day. If suddenly everyone who had USD tried to sell it for some other currency, the price of USD would plummet.
The fact that lots of transactions fly back & forth within BTC doesn't mean you'd find the equivalent in value of people willing to give you fiat currency for your BTC. The guy with $43mill? That's over 10% of the daily volume. Try to shift 10% of a currency's daily volume into sales to another currency. You're in Zimbabwe territory at that point.
Agree with almost all you said negative about blockchain, but it's not worse than cash in terms of reversing fraud. Someone steals your pile of green paper (or yellow metal for that matter), and the only way you get it back is by catching them and physically retrieving it. With theft on a blockchain, you have to catch them, extract their private keys, then execute new transactions to reverse all of the fraudulent ones. Either way, there's no justice for the fraud without catching the perpetrator. Granted, 'coin is in many cases easier to steal in large enough quantities to make it worth it while also harder to catch the criminals.
You might want to read the fine print on the "normal people" stocks that you can actually buy on an exchange or have in your retirement portfolio. All but the most preferred of preferred stock offerings are subordinate to basically everything in any kind of bankruptcy or reorganization. Generally the employees pensions come before common stock. You don't realistically own even a paper clip's worth of assets from any company you hold stock in. In the event of the company collapsing, the amount of leverage held by most companies means common stock isn't much better than junk paper in terms of what investors will recover. Literal pennies on the dollar would be a exceptionally good outcome.
Honestly, I have a doubt it's third party code that's holding them back. I'd lay even odds on a polite reminder from a Three Letter Agency was all it took to scuttle any plans of revealing their backdoor source code.
The beer alone with no other changes is a little over a pound per month lost. (Assuming: Average 150 Kcal per 12 oz, 3800 Kcal per pound of fat, divides to 25.333 beers per pound.)
I'll see your anecdote and raise you another... I lost about 200 lbs on a keto-based diet (PSMF technically), all while drinking 2-3 liters of diet soda daily. Your calorie control is more accurate this time than it has been in past attempts. That's the only relevant difference.
You don't have to jail everyone. Just jail enough to terrify everyone else into compliance.
^^ This. VPN detection is a checkbox on most modern firewall kit these days. SSH too.
Both SSH and all standard VPN traffic is distinguishable from unencrypted HTTP, SSL/TLS, and other traffic types. You need firewall gear that examines things like packet size & frequency, but the detection is reliable and fairly quick. It's not a complete block the way you can block an IP address or port from starting a connection in the first place. Within a few seconds of opening the connection, the traffic type is detected and the connection reset.
Add a little analytics to determine source or destination addresses that trigger lots of these detections, then outright block those, perhaps for a period of time, perhaps followed up by LEO action. Net effect should be a pretty consistent and effective block of out-bound tunneled traffic.
A dedicated & well funded attacker with privileged network position can in fact MitM and block any and all tunneled traffic with a high degree of success. China fits all the requirements to accomplish this.
So it lasted about 2x longer than most /. commenters in bed? Not bad...