I'm sorry. I assumed 'beat it into parts' was hyperbole. Just what exactly are you planning on using to beat it into parts? Assuming the hard drive is reasonably secured you aren't going to be 'long gone' by the time security shows up. You're still going to be smashing it trying to get at the hard drive when they show up. Sure, you know what a hard drive looks like, but in which of the battleship grey 1/4" tempered steel boxes is it in? Going to grab them all? Well, if I were to design the system I would probably have a lot of that stuff attached together with some pretty thick and heavy duty cable, the kind you use to keep people from stealing stuff, so you're going to have to haul a significant portion of the 300 lbs robot with you and then hope it doesn't have any sort of lo-jack system.
And incidentally, while you are doing all of this you are still in a parking garage being monitored by other cameras. How are you getting it out of there? Loading it up in your truck? Would that be the one that had its license plate visible when you drove into the garage? And that's the same one you plan on using to drive out of the garage after the alert goes off? Gee. I wonder where the human guards should go to head you off.
This isn't meant to be a statement of 'it's impossible! You will never do it!' I am sure all of these hurdles can eventually be surmounted. What it is meant to be is a statement of 'that's probably more work than you're thinking'.
Remember, to each and every complex problem there is inevitably a simple and easy answer, and it is usually wrong.
It's always funny how people jump to 'just hack it'. How do you plan to do that? What protocols is it receiving? What if the camera and microphone can't be turned off remotely but have to be turned off by a physical switch behind a locked access panel? And even if you do turn it off what happens when the server stops receiving transmissions? You're going to send a loop of old footage? Well, a lot of digital footage includes timestamps so the server will probably spot that in a second. Planning on forging your own footage? Let's hope the transmissions aren't digitally signed since you can give up on getting the key until you've been able to completely disassemble the robot.
And if you've got enough skill to do all of this why the Hell are you stealing cars from Uber? Go hack into some banks or something and make some real money.
Now I'm not actually saying the robot has all these protections. I've honestly got no idea what it's got and I would bet money that Knightscope is employing at least a bit of security through obscurity so they won't tell people everything they are doing to protect it. All I'm saying is that is that the idea of 'hack it instead' is largely a Hollywood contrivance. It isn't that it is impossible. It's just that it isn't something that happens because some 19 year old starts pounding on the keys of his keyboard while text scrolls up his screen. It's a lot of work.
Anyone can 'get away' from the robot. It has no ability to stop them. All it does is roam around, take pictures, and call for help.
In a lot of ways it isn't much more than a roaming camera with some smart abilities for generating alerts so that people don't need to monitor it.
Running up a flight of stairs doesn't really impede that. Given that the robot is designed to chase off criminals even if you run up the stairs it's done its job.
Actually, properly done a motion harness -should- decrease motion sickness in most cases. VR motion sickness tends to be caused by your eyes disagreeing with your inner ear with respect to motion and orientation and such. As a result a 3-degrees of motion or 6-degree of motion harness has a strong potential to reduce the motion sickness.
I use terms like 'should' and 'strong potential' because this assumes that the software is all doing its job properly. Obviously if when you turn right in VR the harness lags half a second and then turns you left then it would probably exacerbate the problem rather than reduce it.
Not to be pedantic, but if the issue is that the SDcard dies that is probably more of an issue of the SDcard than the PI. I say 'probably' because it is possible for a machine to be hammering the SDCard and kill it a lot quicker but neither of my RPi's seem to do that as a normal part of operations. Of course I'm using a pair of RPi 2 and the RPi B+ might be different. Also, your specific usage could be such that you're doing a lot more access of the SDCard than I am (although since I'm running a database that is getting updates about every 30 seconds my guess is the only usage case where you are hammering the card more than I am over a sustained period is because of a programming error).
Perfect example. For what you want to do it's 'better'. However, for my project I need to connect a NrF24L01 radio to it. This is necessary because my arduino based sensors are powered by a pair of AA batteries. If I used the GL.iNet networking I would probably have to make my sensors ESP8266 baded and transmit the data via WiFi. This would use 6-8x the amount of power over what the NrF24L01 uses and I would need to buy a WiFi access point if I didn't already have one (although that's last part is probably not much of an issue for most of us).
While the GL.iNet has better networking capabilities the RPi 2 has a quad core CPU running at 900 MHz instead of 400 MHz. Since I store the data to a SQL database and then use JPGraph to convert it to images on the web pages that I use to view the data summary the CPU is a bigger issue for me. And for $13 more I have a device that can be repurposed into a media center at a later date if I find another solution to use as a reciever/database/webserver.
Which isn't to say that the GL.iNet is a bad device. If I want to build a portable TOR modem it would be a much better choice than the RPi. 'Better' all comes down to what you are doing.
I don't like it because I think that it is an illustration of a broken system. It's like someone in a race who is throwing things to tangle up the other people's feet. Yes, they represent their people but that doesn't necessarily excuse their actions. It merely explains them.
Their actions are no more righteous than if the people of their districts directly voted to put obstructions in the way of SpaceX in order to protect their own interests. I only raised the issue of who they represent because the claim was made that they were not representing the American people (which is true).
Yeah. Like I said, he's not completely powerless. It is simply that the office has less power than Congress' (though again, it isn't divided up). I didn't really mean to turn this into a major discussion of Presidential power. It was more an answer to 'why do people listen to Congress?'. Because we have to.
At the risk of defending them (because really, I don't like these guys any more than you do), the are representatives of the people -who elected them-. That means the people in their district, so protecting businesses that bring money to those districts (and thus to the people they represent) isn't -completely- without merit.
Please note that I'm not advocating that they protect those businesses at the expense of their people by loosening regulations or anything like that. I'm just saying that in -this instance- some argument can be made that they are protecting and representing their people, at least in the short run, and it is almost impossible for anyone to get elected appealing to people on the grounds of 'yes, this is going to cost you money, but in fifty years from now you children will really benefit'.
This kind of action is more a symptom of what needs to be fixed than an illness in and of itself. Unfortunately going the other way and creating a system where representatives only look at the big picture instead of their smaller constituent group causes its own problems.
. ..more importantly why is anyone listening to people from a division of government with a 16%!!!!! approval rating. ..
Because crappy approval rating or not they are still the legislative branch of our government. That means that they are the ones who actually make the laws. The President only has the power to execute laws and other decisions of Congress* and the Supreme Court only has the power to interpret those laws (part of that power, however, means they could decide a law violates the Constitution and is unenforcable, but in such a case they are still interpreting law).
Congress actually has much more power than the President. The thing is that the power is divided up between 535 people so the office of the President is still more powerful than any one of them.
*The President does also hold a few other powers such as Veto but pretty much all of these powers can be overridden by Congress.
Audio tape is sequential access, not random access. The same thing with the magnetic strip. Usually this isn't a problem because the magnetic strip on your card contains a very small amount of information so it is quick to read the entire sequence but if you had to sequentially load just 16k of information from a tape it could take some time.
Ask anyone who had a home computer before floppy disks became available.
This is resistive random access memory, which is non-volatile. Yes, with transistor you could have printer other forms or RAM before, but you would have to keep supplying power or that memory would erase itself.
Let's assume you carve your page up into 'pixels'. If each 'pixel' is one bit (2 colors or on or off) then you would have to have pixels of 100 microns (.1mm) on a side to have the same information density as this process. If each 'pixel' is 4 bits (16 colors) then your pixels would only have to be.2mm on a side to retain the same information density. I kind of doubt you could distinguish between 256 different colors reliably enough for computer reading of data under varying light conditions but if we assume you can that would mean your pixels could be just under half a millimeter in size.
No. Laws may be employed to control the populace, but they originated to prevent harm.
Kind of like how contracts originated so that both parties would fully know and understand their responsibilities and what they were agreeing to (and so third parties would have evidence of what the first two had agreed to). The fact that they are sometimes (or often) employed to trick or trap people doesn't change what the were originally intended to do.
Except that's not what the article is saying. The article doesn't claim that the system's bios was remotely compromised using audio. What it is saying is that a system that _has been compromised_ is using its sound equipment to communicate with other systems that have likewise been compromised, allowing infected systems to maintain communication with one another despite an airgap.
This could be viewed as 'extraordinary' in the sense of 'something that does not ordinarily happen', but it is not 'extraordinary' in the sense of 'something that defies conventional belief'. As many people have pointed out this is the same basic principle that modems use, merely in a somewhat different 'packaging'.
In that sense it is no more extraordinary than claiming that someone has painted an elephant blue. It is not something which commonly happens yet the possibility of its existence hardly defy belief.
The government isn't asking you to do anything. It's asking the fuel companies to come up with a 100 octane fuel that will run in your older engine that doesn't contain lead.
Now if you want to get indignant about the poor, put upon oil companies, have at it.
Three thousand hours, three thousand hours clicking on that mouse, collecting weapons and gold. It's almost as if it was a huge waste of time. --Sheldon Cooper
Mercifully it looks like the math error might be on the part of the poster rather than the article. I did a quick skim of the article and didn't see anywhere were they mentioned anything like how far apart people would be if stretched from coast to coast.
Of course it is always possible that the article was edited by the time I saw it but since the post doesn't appear to be a quote ripped from the site Occam's Razor is that the poster wrote up the post, did the math, and got it wrong.
Seriously. Ignore for a moment any questions about energy or mass. The distance to the moon is 384,403,000 meters, give or take. At 1G you accelerate at 9.8 m/s. This means if you fly straight to the moon (or to where the moon will be when you arrive) under 1G of acceleration you're looking at about 2 1/2 hours to get there, at which point you plow into the moon at some god awful speed because there's no way to slow down in time. Assuming you only accelerate half the time then turn around and decelerate the remaining half so that you arrive at something approaching a sane velocity it would take about 3 1/2 hours.
That's an awful long time in terms of combat and the moon is incredibly close (if you are considering targets like Mars). Sure, it is incredibly fast in comparison to our current technology but a lifetime when people are shooting at you.
(N.B. The numbers provided are 'back of the envelope' calculations. The actual time would be quite a bit different because you could accelerate faster as you clear Earth's gravity well since a 1G acceleration would mean the astronauts would be subjected to 2G's on the ground. Assuming you were staying at a constant 2G's of force on the passengers your acceleration would increase the further you got from Earth until you reached your halfway point. However the math to deal with all of that is way, way to ugly for me to even consider right now).
Not sure if anyone else has posted this since a 'space combat' thread on Slashdot generates so much traffic it seems as if it should crash the servers (Dude, I heard you liked Slashdot....)
Anyway, it's kind of hard to talk about what 'space combat' will look like since 'space' is simply the theater for the conflict to occur in. Its like asking what 'land combat' looks like. When? 2012? 2025? 1942? 550 A.D.?
You probably need to start of with some assumptions concerning your technology. Lasers are a big one. I am not a laser physicist but as I understand it there's certain maximums of focal range that are related to the size of the lens. As I understand it in order to focus a laser at a spot about half a light second away you would need an absolutely gargantuan lens, one so big as to be impractical for combat. Now maybe I am wrong on this but this is an example as to why using lasers over such long distances might not be as easy as some people think.
Of course that assumes we don't find 'loopholes' around the problem such as somehow creating a synthetic lens through spatial warpage or some other technology. On the other hand if you've got some kind of technology that allows spatial warping then you quite possibly have much more effective weapons than photons.
My guess, in shorthand, is that combat in space will bear a certain resemblance to current combat. I suspect you will see guns for a long time (when jets were first becoming widely used by the military a lot of theorists thought that guns were going to go away because of the ranges and speeds jets would be engaging at. You'll notice they are still there because it turns out that at short ranges a missile often isn't the best option). I suspect you will have lots of your 'cheap' units (infantry, drones, spearmen, etc.) backed up with heavier units (tanks, fighter planes, knights on horseback, etc.) often employed along with small numbers of 'heavy hitters' (bombers, battleships, catapults, etc.).
The exact form these all take will be dependent upon the technology of the day.
Slashdot Mirror
Microsoft will 'solve' cancer within 10 years by 'reprogramming' diseased cells
I think I've seen this movie before.
It doesn't end well.
I'm sorry. I assumed 'beat it into parts' was hyperbole. Just what exactly are you planning on using to beat it into parts? Assuming the hard drive is reasonably secured you aren't going to be 'long gone' by the time security shows up. You're still going to be smashing it trying to get at the hard drive when they show up. Sure, you know what a hard drive looks like, but in which of the battleship grey 1/4" tempered steel boxes is it in? Going to grab them all? Well, if I were to design the system I would probably have a lot of that stuff attached together with some pretty thick and heavy duty cable, the kind you use to keep people from stealing stuff, so you're going to have to haul a significant portion of the 300 lbs robot with you and then hope it doesn't have any sort of lo-jack system.
And incidentally, while you are doing all of this you are still in a parking garage being monitored by other cameras. How are you getting it out of there? Loading it up in your truck? Would that be the one that had its license plate visible when you drove into the garage? And that's the same one you plan on using to drive out of the garage after the alert goes off? Gee. I wonder where the human guards should go to head you off.
This isn't meant to be a statement of 'it's impossible! You will never do it!' I am sure all of these hurdles can eventually be surmounted. What it is meant to be is a statement of 'that's probably more work than you're thinking'.
Remember, to each and every complex problem there is inevitably a simple and easy answer, and it is usually wrong.
It's always funny how people jump to 'just hack it'. How do you plan to do that? What protocols is it receiving? What if the camera and microphone can't be turned off remotely but have to be turned off by a physical switch behind a locked access panel? And even if you do turn it off what happens when the server stops receiving transmissions? You're going to send a loop of old footage? Well, a lot of digital footage includes timestamps so the server will probably spot that in a second. Planning on forging your own footage? Let's hope the transmissions aren't digitally signed since you can give up on getting the key until you've been able to completely disassemble the robot.
And if you've got enough skill to do all of this why the Hell are you stealing cars from Uber? Go hack into some banks or something and make some real money.
Now I'm not actually saying the robot has all these protections. I've honestly got no idea what it's got and I would bet money that Knightscope is employing at least a bit of security through obscurity so they won't tell people everything they are doing to protect it. All I'm saying is that is that the idea of 'hack it instead' is largely a Hollywood contrivance. It isn't that it is impossible. It's just that it isn't something that happens because some 19 year old starts pounding on the keys of his keyboard while text scrolls up his screen. It's a lot of work.
Anyone can 'get away' from the robot. It has no ability to stop them. All it does is roam around, take pictures, and call for help.
In a lot of ways it isn't much more than a roaming camera with some smart abilities for generating alerts so that people don't need to monitor it.
Running up a flight of stairs doesn't really impede that. Given that the robot is designed to chase off criminals even if you run up the stairs it's done its job.
Except for the footage stored and the internal hard drive, or were you planning on staying around long enough to pry it open and find it?
Actually, properly done a motion harness -should- decrease motion sickness in most cases. VR motion sickness tends to be caused by your eyes disagreeing with your inner ear with respect to motion and orientation and such. As a result a 3-degrees of motion or 6-degree of motion harness has a strong potential to reduce the motion sickness.
I use terms like 'should' and 'strong potential' because this assumes that the software is all doing its job properly. Obviously if when you turn right in VR the harness lags half a second and then turns you left then it would probably exacerbate the problem rather than reduce it.
CRACUNS, brought to you by the Department of Improbable but Possible Word and Acronym Development Services.
Not to be pedantic, but if the issue is that the SDcard dies that is probably more of an issue of the SDcard than the PI. I say 'probably' because it is possible for a machine to be hammering the SDCard and kill it a lot quicker but neither of my RPi's seem to do that as a normal part of operations. Of course I'm using a pair of RPi 2 and the RPi B+ might be different. Also, your specific usage could be such that you're doing a lot more access of the SDCard than I am (although since I'm running a database that is getting updates about every 30 seconds my guess is the only usage case where you are hammering the card more than I am over a sustained period is because of a programming error).
Perfect example. For what you want to do it's 'better'. However, for my project I need to connect a NrF24L01 radio to it. This is necessary because my arduino based sensors are powered by a pair of AA batteries. If I used the GL.iNet networking I would probably have to make my sensors ESP8266 baded and transmit the data via WiFi. This would use 6-8x the amount of power over what the NrF24L01 uses and I would need to buy a WiFi access point if I didn't already have one (although that's last part is probably not much of an issue for most of us).
While the GL.iNet has better networking capabilities the RPi 2 has a quad core CPU running at 900 MHz instead of 400 MHz. Since I store the data to a SQL database and then use JPGraph to convert it to images on the web pages that I use to view the data summary the CPU is a bigger issue for me. And for $13 more I have a device that can be repurposed into a media center at a later date if I find another solution to use as a reciever/database/webserver.
Which isn't to say that the GL.iNet is a bad device. If I want to build a portable TOR modem it would be a much better choice than the RPi. 'Better' all comes down to what you are doing.
I don't like it because I think that it is an illustration of a broken system. It's like someone in a race who is throwing things to tangle up the other people's feet. Yes, they represent their people but that doesn't necessarily excuse their actions. It merely explains them.
Their actions are no more righteous than if the people of their districts directly voted to put obstructions in the way of SpaceX in order to protect their own interests. I only raised the issue of who they represent because the claim was made that they were not representing the American people (which is true).
Yeah. Like I said, he's not completely powerless. It is simply that the office has less power than Congress' (though again, it isn't divided up). I didn't really mean to turn this into a major discussion of Presidential power. It was more an answer to 'why do people listen to Congress?'. Because we have to.
At the risk of defending them (because really, I don't like these guys any more than you do), the are representatives of the people -who elected them-. That means the people in their district, so protecting businesses that bring money to those districts (and thus to the people they represent) isn't -completely- without merit.
Please note that I'm not advocating that they protect those businesses at the expense of their people by loosening regulations or anything like that. I'm just saying that in -this instance- some argument can be made that they are protecting and representing their people, at least in the short run, and it is almost impossible for anyone to get elected appealing to people on the grounds of 'yes, this is going to cost you money, but in fifty years from now you children will really benefit'.
This kind of action is more a symptom of what needs to be fixed than an illness in and of itself. Unfortunately going the other way and creating a system where representatives only look at the big picture instead of their smaller constituent group causes its own problems.
. . .more importantly why is anyone listening to people from a division of government with a 16%!!!!! approval rating. . .
Because crappy approval rating or not they are still the legislative branch of our government. That means that they are the ones who actually make the laws. The President only has the power to execute laws and other decisions of Congress* and the Supreme Court only has the power to interpret those laws (part of that power, however, means they could decide a law violates the Constitution and is unenforcable, but in such a case they are still interpreting law).
Congress actually has much more power than the President. The thing is that the power is divided up between 535 people so the office of the President is still more powerful than any one of them.
*The President does also hold a few other powers such as Veto but pretty much all of these powers can be overridden by Congress.
Audio tape is sequential access, not random access. The same thing with the magnetic strip. Usually this isn't a problem because the magnetic strip on your card contains a very small amount of information so it is quick to read the entire sequence but if you had to sequentially load just 16k of information from a tape it could take some time.
Ask anyone who had a home computer before floppy disks became available.
This is resistive random access memory, which is non-volatile. Yes, with transistor you could have printer other forms or RAM before, but you would have to keep supplying power or that memory would erase itself.
Let's assume you carve your page up into 'pixels'. If each 'pixel' is one bit (2 colors or on or off) then you would have to have pixels of 100 microns (.1mm) on a side to have the same information density as this process. If each 'pixel' is 4 bits (16 colors) then your pixels would only have to be .2mm on a side to retain the same information density. I kind of doubt you could distinguish between 256 different colors reliably enough for computer reading of data under varying light conditions but if we assume you can that would mean your pixels could be just under half a millimeter in size.
No. Laws may be employed to control the populace, but they originated to prevent harm.
Kind of like how contracts originated so that both parties would fully know and understand their responsibilities and what they were agreeing to (and so third parties would have evidence of what the first two had agreed to). The fact that they are sometimes (or often) employed to trick or trap people doesn't change what the were originally intended to do.
Quickly! To the Batdetector!
Except that's not what the article is saying. The article doesn't claim that the system's bios was remotely compromised using audio. What it is saying is that a system that _has been compromised_ is using its sound equipment to communicate with other systems that have likewise been compromised, allowing infected systems to maintain communication with one another despite an airgap.
This could be viewed as 'extraordinary' in the sense of 'something that does not ordinarily happen', but it is not 'extraordinary' in the sense of 'something that defies conventional belief'. As many people have pointed out this is the same basic principle that modems use, merely in a somewhat different 'packaging'.
In that sense it is no more extraordinary than claiming that someone has painted an elephant blue. It is not something which commonly happens yet the possibility of its existence hardly defy belief.
It's so infectious it's already reproducing on Slashdot?
The government isn't asking you to do anything. It's asking the fuel companies to come up with a 100 octane fuel that will run in your older engine that doesn't contain lead.
Now if you want to get indignant about the poor, put upon oil companies, have at it.
Three thousand hours, three thousand hours clicking on that mouse, collecting weapons and gold. It's almost as if it was a huge waste of time.
--Sheldon Cooper
Mercifully it looks like the math error might be on the part of the poster rather than the article. I did a quick skim of the article and didn't see anywhere were they mentioned anything like how far apart people would be if stretched from coast to coast.
Of course it is always possible that the article was edited by the time I saw it but since the post doesn't appear to be a quote ripped from the site Occam's Razor is that the poster wrote up the post, did the math, and got it wrong.
Because everything is so far apart.
Seriously. Ignore for a moment any questions about energy or mass. The distance to the moon is 384,403,000 meters, give or take. At 1G you accelerate at 9.8 m/s. This means if you fly straight to the moon (or to where the moon will be when you arrive) under 1G of acceleration you're looking at about 2 1/2 hours to get there, at which point you plow into the moon at some god awful speed because there's no way to slow down in time. Assuming you only accelerate half the time then turn around and decelerate the remaining half so that you arrive at something approaching a sane velocity it would take about 3 1/2 hours.
That's an awful long time in terms of combat and the moon is incredibly close (if you are considering targets like Mars). Sure, it is incredibly fast in comparison to our current technology but a lifetime when people are shooting at you.
(N.B. The numbers provided are 'back of the envelope' calculations. The actual time would be quite a bit different because you could accelerate faster as you clear Earth's gravity well since a 1G acceleration would mean the astronauts would be subjected to 2G's on the ground. Assuming you were staying at a constant 2G's of force on the passengers your acceleration would increase the further you got from Earth until you reached your halfway point. However the math to deal with all of that is way, way to ugly for me to even consider right now).
Not sure if anyone else has posted this since a 'space combat' thread on Slashdot generates so much traffic it seems as if it should crash the servers (Dude, I heard you liked Slashdot....)
Anyway, it's kind of hard to talk about what 'space combat' will look like since 'space' is simply the theater for the conflict to occur in. Its like asking what 'land combat' looks like. When? 2012? 2025? 1942? 550 A.D.?
You probably need to start of with some assumptions concerning your technology. Lasers are a big one. I am not a laser physicist but as I understand it there's certain maximums of focal range that are related to the size of the lens. As I understand it in order to focus a laser at a spot about half a light second away you would need an absolutely gargantuan lens, one so big as to be impractical for combat. Now maybe I am wrong on this but this is an example as to why using lasers over such long distances might not be as easy as some people think.
Of course that assumes we don't find 'loopholes' around the problem such as somehow creating a synthetic lens through spatial warpage or some other technology. On the other hand if you've got some kind of technology that allows spatial warping then you quite possibly have much more effective weapons than photons.
My guess, in shorthand, is that combat in space will bear a certain resemblance to current combat. I suspect you will see guns for a long time (when jets were first becoming widely used by the military a lot of theorists thought that guns were going to go away because of the ranges and speeds jets would be engaging at. You'll notice they are still there because it turns out that at short ranges a missile often isn't the best option). I suspect you will have lots of your 'cheap' units (infantry, drones, spearmen, etc.) backed up with heavier units (tanks, fighter planes, knights on horseback, etc.) often employed along with small numbers of 'heavy hitters' (bombers, battleships, catapults, etc.).
The exact form these all take will be dependent upon the technology of the day.