Not quite correct. The law doesn't limit the speed of an electric bicycle; it limits the speed of an electric bicycle that doesn't have the same licensing, registration and insurance requirements as a motorcycle.
In the continuum between non-electric bike and electric motorcycle which happens to have pedals (like this one) there's no sharp dividing line. No matter what speed capability below which you decide not to regulate an e-bike as a motor vehicle, it will always be convenient sometimes to go a little faster.
I'm pretty happy with my fitbit. True, it was a bit pricey, but after over a year of wearing it constantly it's actually met my expectations and helped me make measurable improvements in my health. Amortized over the course of a year the price is acceptable; if it runs for another year as well then I'm quite satisfied.
Of course whether it benefits you depends on whether you actually do anything with the information you collect. If you don't then of course it's silly. It's a bit like people who buy an F-150 pickup. If you need a truck regularly and use it as such it's a good deal. If you use it as a car then it's a "silly" purchase.
Remember North Korea has successfully launched two orbital satellites, so it's not like they're just going through the motions here. That's two successful launches for 4 tries, to LEO with rather small (100kg) payloads. Not too shabby under the circumstances.
So what this thing represents isn't some kind of pie-in-the-sky political boondoggle; it represents an ambitious and attempt to extend NK's technological capabilities. It delivers a much larger payload than the rocket systems which NK's semi-successful orbital launch system was based on but in a single stage. That same technology integrated into a multi-stage rocket would likely give NK the ability to deliver a thousand kg or so to the US mainland. They'd need to build a robust, compact and efficient warhead to put on that rocket, and that is a tall order.
Eventually they'll get there if they keep trying. And well before they have develop a reliable war-fighting weapon they'll have something effective enough to make threats with.
Or maybe it's just hard, especially for a country of 24.9 million people that's largely isolated from the rest of the world. That's about 1/10 the size of the Soviet Union when they launched Sputnik (about 205 million), and the Soviet Union had considerable access to western knowledge both through espionage and German rocket scientists they snapped up.
All that said, the idea that engineers are executed on failures is wishful thinking. The path to success goes through multiple failures, and the best possible scenario for anyone who doesn't want to see North Korea obtain long range missile capabilities would be for the regime to punish failure severely.
It is encouraging that their failure rate is so high. But we shouldn't take too much encouragement from that. Just getting to the point where you can fail isn't exactly easy, and if you learn from those failures and funding doesn't dry up, eventually you will succeed. The German Aggregat rocket series (which culminated in the A4 rocket, more popularly known as the "V2") was riddled with discouraging failures though the early years, but the Germans kept pouring money into it. Granted they had the best rocket minds in the world, but they were living in a vacuum tube world where telemetry was much harder to obtain. They had to guess their way through their failures. The North Koreans don't -- not to the same degree.
If they carry on, the North Koreans will eventually succeed in making something that works well enough to threaten other countries with.
The language in academic papers is inflated because the authors are afraid they don't have enough to say. The exception is that rare, rare animal: the seminal paper; papers that really changes things fundamentally in a field. Those are almost invariably written with stark simplicity. You can usually give them to beginner students in the field and they'll have no problem following.
Are papers seminal because they're clearly written? I don't think so; I think what a seminal paper does is communicate a naked simplifying insight that strips away a lot of confusion. The straightforward language is a kind of brash advertisement of that fact.
The reason I think that is that not hacking your meaning into semantic gobbledygook is almost seen as posing. I worked with some Harvard researchers on a grant proposal, and when I sent the draft of my bits to the Harvard team they sent them back butchered into jargon word stew. "This is terrible writing!" I said. "Yes," the researcher said, "it's deplorable. But trust me, it'll play well." And dammit, it did.
Yes, but the second derivative of phones bought with respect to time is an important factor. In fact to a company that is adapted to an accelerating market with a relative dearth of producers, a growing but decelerating market with more and more low-price producers entering feels exactly like a contracting market.
Either way it's a matter of how many units you produce the market will take at any given price. Even though more units may be purchased globally, when you are forced to drop prices to maintain your sales volume that global growth doesn't make any difference to you.
To the supplier and consumers, on the other hand, a growing but decelerating market is a happy situation. At least until you find you can't find a phone without crappy, badly thought-out features thrown in by the manufacturers in a desperate attempt not to be sucked into the commodity market black hole. If I were a betting man that's the future I'd wager on to happen in two or three years.
Copper and other non-ferrous metals (including gold) are a huge part of the economy of northern Chile. Which also happens to be where you find the Atacama, one of the places on Earth where sunshine is most reliably abundant. Oh, and vast stretches of unpopulated coastline where you can pretty much stick a pin anywhere and build a shipping terminal without there being any neighbors to complain about it.
And there happen to be methods for efficiently and relatively cleanly separating valuable metals from ore using electricity -- gobs and gobs of electricity so it had better be cheap. It has to be competitive with the nastier, cruder methods like mashing the ore into a pulp with lots and lots of cheap cyanide. So it's real easy to picture a future in which ore from the mountains is processed essentially on site using cheap solar electricity from nearby desert power stations, and then is shipped out in refined form.
But there's a catch-22. You can build your giant electrowinning plants until you have a big, cheap, reliable electricity supply. You've got to build that first. Which means there's a period between when you build your big solar plants and when investors build their electricity-hungry plants where you get a hell of a lot of kilowatt hours of electricity being generated that nobody has a use for. You literally can't even give it all away, but that generation capacity will have you rolling in pesos in a few years.
Do you think the fact that this was instigated by private sector investors might make your point about central planning just a little irrelevant?
Anyhow it helps to know a bit about the entrepreneurial culture in Chile. It can be cutthroat, as relatives of mine who were involved in a risky multi-seven figure project there found out. On one hand there's an impressive enterprising spirit that reaches right down to the laboring classes. On the other hand it's (to an American eye) a very hierarchical society in which a small number of families at the top guard their inherited economic and political privilege. In other words it's a great place to be rich and become richer, but not so great for pulling yourself up by the bootstraps if you're poor. There are few countries where raising yourself up into the highest ranks of the elite is more feasible if you're born into the top decile of families ranked by income. But the mobility picture is bleak if you are born into a median family or below, despite the impressive working class enterprising spirit.
So Chile doesn't represent a planned economy; it represents a market economy which has formed a stable, closed, politically dominant class of relatively wealthy people.
If you think Facebook controls this market, you have to be all of 14 years old.
But you and your coworkers are less valuable than 14 year-olds
There are, however, things you can do to become temporarily more valuable. You can get a new job. You can move to a new city. You can have your first baby. These things make you interesting, because life-disrupting events are opportunities to disrupt existing habits and establish new ones. First-time parents who've never darkened the doorstep of a Target store will be lured in with deals on baby equipment, then kept coming in with diaper coupons until going to Target becomes a mindless habit.
And in the list of life-disrupting events, adolescence is one of the largest and longest-running. Not only is there the direct buying power of the 14 year-olds themselves, there's their influence on others' behavior ("Mom, will you drive me to Target?"). What's more when they're finally and definitively out of adolesence they emerge as newly fledged independent adults with incomes and autonomy and literally no stuff in their lives. They have to buy everything: pots and pans for the kitchen, grown-up clothes for work, sporting goods to rot away in their closets. The value to a vendor of having a foothold at the start of that orgy of acquisition that is young adulthood is immense.
So it's a fair bet that neither you nor your colleagues will never enjoy the consumer-economy prominence of a 14 year-old ever again.
Apparently you've never read the classical economists like Ricardo, who were very cogent about things like rent -- which is the business advertising venue providers are in: renting access to your attention.
They won't stop selling access to you, they'll sell it at lower prices to advertisers who can't afford premium venues. Think of it this way: Social media be the Superbowl, and the stuff *you* enjoy will be a 3am re-runs of M*A*S*H* on a low-power UHF station. As long as there are any eyeball to be sold, someone will be hawking them.
Somebody must know. You know what would be cool? If we got those millions of people out there that have these odd bits of information to pool their personal knowledge into, I dunno, some kind of Internet-based encyclopedia. Then you wouldn't need to rail impotently about your lack of knowledge about anything.
Or there's Samsung, whose "smart" tv puts up notices about changes to services you don't use in the middle of shows you're watching, and because it's built into the TV you can't do anything about it. Fortunately the backlight failed (common problem on Samsungs) so I replaced it with a "Roku TV" from Hitachi where the smart TV functions are on a HDMI dongle you can chuck out if you don't want it anymore. And in fact the Roku is a much better desktop box than any of the built in smartTV functions I've had in the last several TVs I've bought.
Pretty much if you want a TV larger than 19" you have to put up with mandatory software features designed by someone who's not out to make you happy with your purchase, but to turn your entertainment consumption into a regular revenue stream. That means "intrusive" is a given in the user interface. There is no respect for the user in these designs.
Yes, the component is only capable of sustaining a minute or so of continuous attention; but embedded in a system (e.g. social media) feedback mechanisms can sustain a collective population response for days, sometimes even months.
But cyptography and marketing don't really mix. The marketing subtext is that because this uses the very best chips and is too expensive for ordinary people to own, it's secure. But of course that's nonsense. Security is a system property. It's not the chips or algorithms, it's how you use them. And it costs money to figure out how to use them securely, an expense that you amortize over the total number of units sold.
And at number of units you'll sell at a unit price of $14K, the gross revenues you have to lavish on really serious engineering (as opposed to Lego style snap-together system integration) is pretty small.
Look at the iPhone 6. At about $700 retail, an iPhone 6 costs about 1/20 of the phone in question. At $14K, how many of these things do you think Sirin will ship? Well, whatever that gross units sold may be, people were talking at the end of last year about a slowdown in iPhone sales because Apple shipped "only" seventy-four frickin' million of them in the last quarter. What can you do with big economies of scale? You can design something like the A8 chip, which puts a pretty serious crypto-coprocessor on the CPU die so that sensitive information like encryption keys can't be read off the system bus. Does that make the iPhone 6 more secure than the an Bernadino iPhone 5 the FBI hacked? Not necessarily, because security is a system property. But it shuts off entire lines of attack where you analyze the phone in an EE lab. That's like putting a massive steel back door on your house; it's no guarantee you didn't leave a first floor window open.
There's really only one way something like this is likely to end up more secure than an iPhone 6 with encrypted storage, and that's monkeying with the security/convenience trade-off. The impressive thing about the iPhone 6's security isn't how tough it is to break (which nobody can be sure of until they try), but how much thought went into securing it without imposing any kind of user experience cost. If you're willing to impose some inconvenience on users, that would enable you to add security without assembling a committee of genius crypto and UX experts. For example you could replace a four digit user-chosen PIN with a seven digit randomly chosen PIN.
Well on the flip side, the headphone plug/jack connector is a common point of failure across multiple failure modes. You snag the cord and the phone goes flying, the thread-like conductors used in the cable break at the plug; water infiltrates through the jack into the case; mechanical wear caused by frequent insertions/removals degrades the electrical connection.
These are all addressable issues, of course, to some degree at least. But you can just go wireless.That's what I do; I keep my Android phone in a waterproof case and never open the USB or headphone port covers. I use a Qi charger and a wireless headphone adapter which is practically weightless and stays plugged into the headphones all the time if I want to make calls. When I just want to listen to media I use a bluetooth headset.
For many people the wireless charging and interconnect technologies probably aren't good enough yet, but that's an engineering problem, not a problem in concept. It wouldn't surprise me at all if in the future the connectors we're accustomed to on phones become as obsolete as 25 pin parallel ports on laptop computers are today. There's no reason in principle that phones can't be sleek, uncluttered and especially waterproof bricks, provided the various problems existing connectors solve are addressed adequately.
Well, it's a continuum. Dividing a problem into a trillion cases and dividing them into two might be the same in principle, but not in practice.
Dividing something into countably infinite cases probably counts as even more of an "insight-based" proof, because then carrying out the proof by induction requires organizing those cases in some way that makes your argument convenient.
Well, let me take the devil's advocate position for a moment.
Yes, it proves the conjecture, but by relying upon a mechanical process you miss out on something that is required by humans to bring the problem within the grasp of our limited attention spans and working memory: insight. So we know the answer to the conjecture, but it doesn't advance our understanding of the problem and its related problems the way a human proof would.
So you could say it's proof of the conjecture in the sense that it's convincing evidence of the truth of the conjecture. But it doesn't necessarily contribute to mathematical knowledge in the same way you'd expect a traditional proof to. So you could well look at it as a "proof" but in only a restricted sense. This would be fairly typical of the way we use words.
I think one might well be justified in putting computerized proofs into a different class of evidence than traditional mathematical proofs; we might need to distinguish between the two by some kind of retronym.
What exactly did this guy do wrong? Let's swap "bitcoin" with "money orders" just so we can sidestep that aspect of it. In what way is it his business what anyone does with the money order after he sells it?
A couple years ago a guy tried laundering $98K in cocaine and heroin money by dividing it up into 54 money orders of roughly $1800 each -- each well under the $2000 reporting limit. The thing is that splitting up a transaction that's mandatory to report into smaller chunks doesn't magically make it OK not to report it. It's still a $98K transaction, you're just trying to hide it.
If money laundering regs could be evaded just be restructuring the transaction so it doesn't trigger any scrutiny, then they'd be pointless because that's what money laundering is.
So not only did the prosecutors get this guy on failing to report the transaction, they slapped him with conspiracy charges to boot.
One of the things that transformed Silicon Valley into a high tech center was (hard to believe now) cheap land to put office parks up in. By the time that changed, the absurd cost of office space and housing was offset by economies of scale.
From a planning standpoint Denver feels like a lot like San Jose -- plenty of sprawl. In fact in some ways it's better -- not being hemmed in by mountains, it's got unlimited room for a tech region to grow eastward. It's got the Colorado School of Mines, which is a well-regarded engineering institution. The main long-term limitation I see is water. That's going to severely hamper growth eventually.
But in the short term, why not Denver? A one room apartment in Denver will set you back a little shy of $1200; that seems like a lot in most parts of the country, but anywhere near San Jose you'd pay twice as much. And it has a hub airport -- it's a huge plus to be able to fly direct from just about anywhere, and being in the eastern part of the west means it's not a long flight from anywhere in the US. It's four hours to or from New York, and it's close enough to the Bay Area to fly out and back in a day for a meeting. Flying around the country from Boston I used to envy my colleagues from Chicago who had cheap direct flights to everywhere.
Of course you could make similar arguments for Saint Louis. It's reputation as kind of a racist, third-world enclave doesn't make it attractive for young engineers to relocate, but a one bedroom apartment cost $730. The difference between that and San Jose works out to about $20,000 over the course of a year in your pocket. And of course there's WUSTL, which is very well regarded tech school (you've probably downloaded Linux from one of their mirrors). If you could figure out a way to rebrand Saint Louis as a cool place to live, then it'd have potential.
It's great when a tool is built to be a pleasure to use; and smart language and system developers try to design stuff that will capture developer enthusiasm and mindshare. But ultimately as a disciplined, professional developer your decisions should not be driven by your enjoyment. That's just a nice to have. They should be driven by doing right by the people who use the system and the people who pay your salary.
People who don't understand this are a disaster. They run the clock out mucking around with the interesting bits of a system rather than tackling the important stuff first. They throw out old, proven code because it's more fun to write new code than maintain old stuff.
Sometimes you do have to rewrite from scratch; and it's important to try to incorporate interesting things into every project you undertake because you can never be at your best just going through the motions. But ultimately your job is to make sure needs are met at an affordable price.
Slashdot Mirror
Not quite correct. The law doesn't limit the speed of an electric bicycle; it limits the speed of an electric bicycle that doesn't have the same licensing, registration and insurance requirements as a motorcycle.
In the continuum between non-electric bike and electric motorcycle which happens to have pedals (like this one) there's no sharp dividing line. No matter what speed capability below which you decide not to regulate an e-bike as a motor vehicle, it will always be convenient sometimes to go a little faster.
I'm pretty happy with my fitbit. True, it was a bit pricey, but after over a year of wearing it constantly it's actually met my expectations and helped me make measurable improvements in my health. Amortized over the course of a year the price is acceptable; if it runs for another year as well then I'm quite satisfied.
Of course whether it benefits you depends on whether you actually do anything with the information you collect. If you don't then of course it's silly. It's a bit like people who buy an F-150 pickup. If you need a truck regularly and use it as such it's a good deal. If you use it as a car then it's a "silly" purchase.
The captain nailed a gold doubloon to the mast.
Remember North Korea has successfully launched two orbital satellites, so it's not like they're just going through the motions here. That's two successful launches for 4 tries, to LEO with rather small (100kg) payloads. Not too shabby under the circumstances.
So what this thing represents isn't some kind of pie-in-the-sky political boondoggle; it represents an ambitious and attempt to extend NK's technological capabilities. It delivers a much larger payload than the rocket systems which NK's semi-successful orbital launch system was based on but in a single stage. That same technology integrated into a multi-stage rocket would likely give NK the ability to deliver a thousand kg or so to the US mainland. They'd need to build a robust, compact and efficient warhead to put on that rocket, and that is a tall order.
Eventually they'll get there if they keep trying. And well before they have develop a reliable war-fighting weapon they'll have something effective enough to make threats with.
Or maybe it's just hard, especially for a country of 24.9 million people that's largely isolated from the rest of the world. That's about 1/10 the size of the Soviet Union when they launched Sputnik (about 205 million), and the Soviet Union had considerable access to western knowledge both through espionage and German rocket scientists they snapped up.
All that said, the idea that engineers are executed on failures is wishful thinking. The path to success goes through multiple failures, and the best possible scenario for anyone who doesn't want to see North Korea obtain long range missile capabilities would be for the regime to punish failure severely.
It is encouraging that their failure rate is so high. But we shouldn't take too much encouragement from that. Just getting to the point where you can fail isn't exactly easy, and if you learn from those failures and funding doesn't dry up, eventually you will succeed. The German Aggregat rocket series (which culminated in the A4 rocket, more popularly known as the "V2") was riddled with discouraging failures though the early years, but the Germans kept pouring money into it. Granted they had the best rocket minds in the world, but they were living in a vacuum tube world where telemetry was much harder to obtain. They had to guess their way through their failures. The North Koreans don't -- not to the same degree.
If they carry on, the North Koreans will eventually succeed in making something that works well enough to threaten other countries with.
The language in academic papers is inflated because the authors are afraid they don't have enough to say. The exception is that rare, rare animal: the seminal paper; papers that really changes things fundamentally in a field. Those are almost invariably written with stark simplicity. You can usually give them to beginner students in the field and they'll have no problem following.
Are papers seminal because they're clearly written? I don't think so; I think what a seminal paper does is communicate a naked simplifying insight that strips away a lot of confusion. The straightforward language is a kind of brash advertisement of that fact.
The reason I think that is that not hacking your meaning into semantic gobbledygook is almost seen as posing. I worked with some Harvard researchers on a grant proposal, and when I sent the draft of my bits to the Harvard team they sent them back butchered into jargon word stew. "This is terrible writing!" I said. "Yes," the researcher said, "it's deplorable. But trust me, it'll play well." And dammit, it did.
Yes, but the second derivative of phones bought with respect to time is an important factor. In fact to a company that is adapted to an accelerating market with a relative dearth of producers, a growing but decelerating market with more and more low-price producers entering feels exactly like a contracting market.
Either way it's a matter of how many units you produce the market will take at any given price. Even though more units may be purchased globally, when you are forced to drop prices to maintain your sales volume that global growth doesn't make any difference to you.
To the supplier and consumers, on the other hand, a growing but decelerating market is a happy situation. At least until you find you can't find a phone without crappy, badly thought-out features thrown in by the manufacturers in a desperate attempt not to be sucked into the commodity market black hole. If I were a betting man that's the future I'd wager on to happen in two or three years.
Copper and other non-ferrous metals (including gold) are a huge part of the economy of northern Chile. Which also happens to be where you find the Atacama, one of the places on Earth where sunshine is most reliably abundant. Oh, and vast stretches of unpopulated coastline where you can pretty much stick a pin anywhere and build a shipping terminal without there being any neighbors to complain about it.
And there happen to be methods for efficiently and relatively cleanly separating valuable metals from ore using electricity -- gobs and gobs of electricity so it had better be cheap. It has to be competitive with the nastier, cruder methods like mashing the ore into a pulp with lots and lots of cheap cyanide. So it's real easy to picture a future in which ore from the mountains is processed essentially on site using cheap solar electricity from nearby desert power stations, and then is shipped out in refined form.
But there's a catch-22. You can build your giant electrowinning plants until you have a big, cheap, reliable electricity supply. You've got to build that first. Which means there's a period between when you build your big solar plants and when investors build their electricity-hungry plants where you get a hell of a lot of kilowatt hours of electricity being generated that nobody has a use for. You literally can't even give it all away, but that generation capacity will have you rolling in pesos in a few years.
Do you think the fact that this was instigated by private sector investors might make your point about central planning just a little irrelevant?
Anyhow it helps to know a bit about the entrepreneurial culture in Chile. It can be cutthroat, as relatives of mine who were involved in a risky multi-seven figure project there found out. On one hand there's an impressive enterprising spirit that reaches right down to the laboring classes. On the other hand it's (to an American eye) a very hierarchical society in which a small number of families at the top guard their inherited economic and political privilege. In other words it's a great place to be rich and become richer, but not so great for pulling yourself up by the bootstraps if you're poor. There are few countries where raising yourself up into the highest ranks of the elite is more feasible if you're born into the top decile of families ranked by income. But the mobility picture is bleak if you are born into a median family or below, despite the impressive working class enterprising spirit.
So Chile doesn't represent a planned economy; it represents a market economy which has formed a stable, closed, politically dominant class of relatively wealthy people.
If you think Facebook controls this market, you have to be all of 14 years old.
But you and your coworkers are less valuable than 14 year-olds
There are, however, things you can do to become temporarily more valuable. You can get a new job. You can move to a new city. You can have your first baby. These things make you interesting, because life-disrupting events are opportunities to disrupt existing habits and establish new ones. First-time parents who've never darkened the doorstep of a Target store will be lured in with deals on baby equipment, then kept coming in with diaper coupons until going to Target becomes a mindless habit.
And in the list of life-disrupting events, adolescence is one of the largest and longest-running. Not only is there the direct buying power of the 14 year-olds themselves, there's their influence on others' behavior ("Mom, will you drive me to Target?"). What's more when they're finally and definitively out of adolesence they emerge as newly fledged independent adults with incomes and autonomy and literally no stuff in their lives. They have to buy everything: pots and pans for the kitchen, grown-up clothes for work, sporting goods to rot away in their closets. The value to a vendor of having a foothold at the start of that orgy of acquisition that is young adulthood is immense.
So it's a fair bet that neither you nor your colleagues will never enjoy the consumer-economy prominence of a 14 year-old ever again.
Apparently you've never read the classical economists like Ricardo, who were very cogent about things like rent -- which is the business advertising venue providers are in: renting access to your attention.
They won't stop selling access to you, they'll sell it at lower prices to advertisers who can't afford premium venues. Think of it this way: Social media be the Superbowl, and the stuff *you* enjoy will be a 3am re-runs of M*A*S*H* on a low-power UHF station. As long as there are any eyeball to be sold, someone will be hawking them.
Somebody must know. You know what would be cool? If we got those millions of people out there that have these odd bits of information to pool their personal knowledge into, I dunno, some kind of Internet-based encyclopedia. Then you wouldn't need to rail impotently about your lack of knowledge about anything.
Or there's Samsung, whose "smart" tv puts up notices about changes to services you don't use in the middle of shows you're watching, and because it's built into the TV you can't do anything about it. Fortunately the backlight failed (common problem on Samsungs) so I replaced it with a "Roku TV" from Hitachi where the smart TV functions are on a HDMI dongle you can chuck out if you don't want it anymore. And in fact the Roku is a much better desktop box than any of the built in smartTV functions I've had in the last several TVs I've bought.
Pretty much if you want a TV larger than 19" you have to put up with mandatory software features designed by someone who's not out to make you happy with your purchase, but to turn your entertainment consumption into a regular revenue stream. That means "intrusive" is a given in the user interface. There is no respect for the user in these designs.
Only if it promises gold and delivers brass.
Yes, the component is only capable of sustaining a minute or so of continuous attention; but embedded in a system (e.g. social media) feedback mechanisms can sustain a collective population response for days, sometimes even months.
But cyptography and marketing don't really mix. The marketing subtext is that because this uses the very best chips and is too expensive for ordinary people to own, it's secure. But of course that's nonsense. Security is a system property. It's not the chips or algorithms, it's how you use them. And it costs money to figure out how to use them securely, an expense that you amortize over the total number of units sold.
And at number of units you'll sell at a unit price of $14K, the gross revenues you have to lavish on really serious engineering (as opposed to Lego style snap-together system integration) is pretty small.
Look at the iPhone 6. At about $700 retail, an iPhone 6 costs about 1/20 of the phone in question. At $14K, how many of these things do you think Sirin will ship? Well, whatever that gross units sold may be, people were talking at the end of last year about a slowdown in iPhone sales because Apple shipped "only" seventy-four frickin' million of them in the last quarter. What can you do with big economies of scale? You can design something like the A8 chip, which puts a pretty serious crypto-coprocessor on the CPU die so that sensitive information like encryption keys can't be read off the system bus. Does that make the iPhone 6 more secure than the an Bernadino iPhone 5 the FBI hacked? Not necessarily, because security is a system property. But it shuts off entire lines of attack where you analyze the phone in an EE lab. That's like putting a massive steel back door on your house; it's no guarantee you didn't leave a first floor window open.
There's really only one way something like this is likely to end up more secure than an iPhone 6 with encrypted storage, and that's monkeying with the security/convenience trade-off. The impressive thing about the iPhone 6's security isn't how tough it is to break (which nobody can be sure of until they try), but how much thought went into securing it without imposing any kind of user experience cost. If you're willing to impose some inconvenience on users, that would enable you to add security without assembling a committee of genius crypto and UX experts. For example you could replace a four digit user-chosen PIN with a seven digit randomly chosen PIN.
You expect reporters to understand that?
Well on the flip side, the headphone plug/jack connector is a common point of failure across multiple failure modes. You snag the cord and the phone goes flying, the thread-like conductors used in the cable break at the plug; water infiltrates through the jack into the case; mechanical wear caused by frequent insertions/removals degrades the electrical connection.
These are all addressable issues, of course, to some degree at least. But you can just go wireless.That's what I do; I keep my Android phone in a waterproof case and never open the USB or headphone port covers. I use a Qi charger and a wireless headphone adapter which is practically weightless and stays plugged into the headphones all the time if I want to make calls. When I just want to listen to media I use a bluetooth headset.
For many people the wireless charging and interconnect technologies probably aren't good enough yet, but that's an engineering problem, not a problem in concept. It wouldn't surprise me at all if in the future the connectors we're accustomed to on phones become as obsolete as 25 pin parallel ports on laptop computers are today. There's no reason in principle that phones can't be sleek, uncluttered and especially waterproof bricks, provided the various problems existing connectors solve are addressed adequately.
Well, it's a continuum. Dividing a problem into a trillion cases and dividing them into two might be the same in principle, but not in practice.
Dividing something into countably infinite cases probably counts as even more of an "insight-based" proof, because then carrying out the proof by induction requires organizing those cases in some way that makes your argument convenient.
Well, let me take the devil's advocate position for a moment.
Yes, it proves the conjecture, but by relying upon a mechanical process you miss out on something that is required by humans to bring the problem within the grasp of our limited attention spans and working memory: insight. So we know the answer to the conjecture, but it doesn't advance our understanding of the problem and its related problems the way a human proof would.
So you could say it's proof of the conjecture in the sense that it's convincing evidence of the truth of the conjecture. But it doesn't necessarily contribute to mathematical knowledge in the same way you'd expect a traditional proof to. So you could well look at it as a "proof" but in only a restricted sense. This would be fairly typical of the way we use words.
I think one might well be justified in putting computerized proofs into a different class of evidence than traditional mathematical proofs; we might need to distinguish between the two by some kind of retronym.
Well, I'm with you on legalizing drugs, but money laundering has other applications, like hiding funds from embezzlement and extortion rackets.
What exactly did this guy do wrong? Let's swap "bitcoin" with "money orders" just so we can sidestep that aspect of it. In what way is it his business what anyone does with the money order after he sells it?
A couple years ago a guy tried laundering $98K in cocaine and heroin money by dividing it up into 54 money orders of roughly $1800 each -- each well under the $2000 reporting limit. The thing is that splitting up a transaction that's mandatory to report into smaller chunks doesn't magically make it OK not to report it. It's still a $98K transaction, you're just trying to hide it.
If money laundering regs could be evaded just be restructuring the transaction so it doesn't trigger any scrutiny, then they'd be pointless because that's what money laundering is.
So not only did the prosecutors get this guy on failing to report the transaction, they slapped him with conspiracy charges to boot.
One of the things that transformed Silicon Valley into a high tech center was (hard to believe now) cheap land to put office parks up in. By the time that changed, the absurd cost of office space and housing was offset by economies of scale.
From a planning standpoint Denver feels like a lot like San Jose -- plenty of sprawl. In fact in some ways it's better -- not being hemmed in by mountains, it's got unlimited room for a tech region to grow eastward. It's got the Colorado School of Mines, which is a well-regarded engineering institution. The main long-term limitation I see is water. That's going to severely hamper growth eventually.
But in the short term, why not Denver? A one room apartment in Denver will set you back a little shy of $1200; that seems like a lot in most parts of the country, but anywhere near San Jose you'd pay twice as much. And it has a hub airport -- it's a huge plus to be able to fly direct from just about anywhere, and being in the eastern part of the west means it's not a long flight from anywhere in the US. It's four hours to or from New York, and it's close enough to the Bay Area to fly out and back in a day for a meeting. Flying around the country from Boston I used to envy my colleagues from Chicago who had cheap direct flights to everywhere.
Of course you could make similar arguments for Saint Louis. It's reputation as kind of a racist, third-world enclave doesn't make it attractive for young engineers to relocate, but a one bedroom apartment cost $730. The difference between that and San Jose works out to about $20,000 over the course of a year in your pocket. And of course there's WUSTL, which is very well regarded tech school (you've probably downloaded Linux from one of their mirrors). If you could figure out a way to rebrand Saint Louis as a cool place to live, then it'd have potential.
Why is this news? Were people expecting North Korean admins of off-the-shelf websites to somehow be better than ones in the rest of the world?
This.
It's great when a tool is built to be a pleasure to use; and smart language and system developers try to design stuff that will capture developer enthusiasm and mindshare. But ultimately as a disciplined, professional developer your decisions should not be driven by your enjoyment. That's just a nice to have. They should be driven by doing right by the people who use the system and the people who pay your salary.
People who don't understand this are a disaster. They run the clock out mucking around with the interesting bits of a system rather than tackling the important stuff first. They throw out old, proven code because it's more fun to write new code than maintain old stuff.
Sometimes you do have to rewrite from scratch; and it's important to try to incorporate interesting things into every project you undertake because you can never be at your best just going through the motions. But ultimately your job is to make sure needs are met at an affordable price.