They spent 4 years developing something that I walked into a hobby shop and purchased lot more that 4 years ago.
Does yours fly up to about 60km, where the pressure is comparable to the one on Mars?
Does it recharge itself in a cloudy day?
Can it operate in about -100 degrees? ...
Ignorance maybe is a bliss, but it's a danger for the others.
Maybe not everybody knows, but the story of Pluto is almost identical to Ceres, and as far as I know there was no official definition of planet before, so it is not like they "redefined", they finally created a clear definition of what planet is.
Anyway, who cares the name in a classification, it's more important to have a logical, standardized and useful classification.
And, by the way, moving the goalposts is not a good thing to do in a discussion. Go re-read the comment I originally replied to. Demanding that my examples meet an expectation that you arbitrarily added which were not in the original post is silly and unproductive.
The point is that SpaceX did accomplish something nobody has done before - a retro-propulsion supersonic landing. It is truly a great achievement.
It has not been done not because nobody bothered, but because it is extremely difficult and was considered not doable for reasonable costs.
And please consider that I do not diminish the other achievements, which you referred to. Instead I provided arguments that your comparisons are not adequate from technical point of view. It seems to me a fair response to your specific claims. And please reread the first sentence of my previous response.
With regard to the post you responded to (which to me seems just sarcastic and funny), the fact that someone swings pendulum in one direction does not justify swinging it the other way.
I keep saying, the following penalty scheme imposed on companies will clean up data breaches right quick:
$1 per name, email, physical address
$2 per phone number
$3 per credit card number
$4 per SSN
And multiply for combinations thereof. You'll see how fast companies move to secure their data.
No, it will not work as long as people responsible are not held accountable.
Most of the cases I know the CEO making decisions retires with multi-million golden parachute and all the penalty costs (if any) are passed on consumers or victims (as is the case of Equifax - people have to pay for locking their accounts, and one pays as long as one wants the lock be active) or ordinary workers.
Top management don't give a damn about penalties, because they make up the rules of profits distribution and by the time anything is out in public, their pockets are usually full or/and their moved to another place if the screw-up was really big. Do you remember the shares selloff by Intel and Equifax executives?
Yeah it'd be much better to do like China, Russia or Iran and just shoot them...
Russia has not used the death penalty in more than 20 years. The last judicial execution was in 1996.
Of course, and still there was:
- Sergei Magnitsky: Magnitsky had died from being beaten and tortured by several officers of the Russian Ministry of Interior
- Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya: tried to be poisoned, finally murdered
- Maksim Borodin: died of injuries from falling out of a window
- and many many others, either poisoned abroad or beaten to death, or just plainly murdered
I assume, that by now everyone able to read have read Orwell's books, so people can differentiate between official statistics and reality in totalitarian countries.
I used to use google news regularly, they seemed a perfect aggregation of news with the option of adding your own sources, however I stopped because:
- there was no option to turn off google pre-selection, so instead of having access to the latest news I kept seeing week old (or even more) posts constantly, I asked google service for such option - no response
- I kept being forced upon with news completely out of mind, I don't even know where they find them, again, no option to select sources, or some basic fact check from google side, to be fair there is an option to disable a source, however they keep popping up, and somehow google algorithm finds them more important then some fact based news
- final decision to abandon the platform was (constant) pseudoscience in science section, like "somebody calculated the end of the world on April...", it might be a curiosity, someone might like it, but science?
I switched to BBC and have never regretted since. I consider going to google news aggregation a waste of my time. In theory would be a great tool to have instant access to fresh news from many sources, but in reality is just annoyance.
You're right, SpaceX did not invent rocket landing, but they were the first company landing an orbital rocket on Earth, which is quite a fit.
Why is it quite a fit? Because before nobody thought it was feasible or economically viable and even some experimented nobody have done it.
- Moon landing - yes, however Moon's gravity, lack of atmosphere and the Moon Lander size and weight make this undoubtful achievement not quite comparable with Earth landing
- Space Shuttle landing - yes, however not supersonic retro-propulsion landing
- New Shepard landing - yes, still not the orbital landing, but suborbital - quite different speeds/energies involved, difference quite comparable to Grasshopper vs New Shepard
- DC-X - yes, but abandoned and not researched further - no orbital implementation
So to summarize, it's true that SpaceX didn't invent the "wheel", but they undoubtedly and truly changed the game of space access.
Entanglement is a cornerstone of modern technology? Say what?
Welcome to Slashdot.
That's very right, would mod up if I had mod points left.
However I suppose the original statement was based on the fact that quantum entanglement is basis for existing (being developed) technologies as quantum encryption and quantum computing. The former has been demonstrated over long distances between satellites and Earth, the latter is being actively researched at the moment and if mastered would be a game changing technology in e.g. medicine and metallurgy allowing people to calculate new drugs and alloys - not to mention other uses.
Additionally to that usually Apple products have long lasting support, aka updates, whilst most of the less expensive routers stop being updated after a year or so.
I am not commenting on the notion that some people can effort private rockets and some cannot food, however Bezos is unique in that:
- he created the Amazon corporation selling books online, when books sales were falling down and nobody else thought it was a good idea
- also cloud computing practically started to matter because of Amazon
- also electronic book readers
Lets also not forget, that most of the people having money buy 100th Ferrari, or yet another luxury yacht or cover their toilets with gold and some spend their wealth on pushing humankind a little bit further.
There are so many benefits of people expanding into space, which are now prevented by costs, that if Blue Origin pulls this off, and we had both SpaceX and Blue Origin having reusable launchers making Moon settlement and asteroid mining affordable it would be a new chapter in humankind history.
Congratulations indeed, however is it only about the site or also about the owners and their infrastructure? How about the customers? It should be easy to check if they just tested their own services or were involved in some malicious activity.
One cannot have DDOS without proper infrastructure, either hacked or own, so there are much more details I would be interested to read about this issue.
I think it is time for more then just a public show of shamming in front of the Congress.
The best would be to decouple SSN from private lives and use it as it was intended to, just as your social security ID.
I would also add a requirement for any company to use up-to-date encryption standards when processing personal information and explicit permission of the mentioned when storing such information for longer then 'n' weeks (government agencies can be exempt from the explicit permission of course).
At first the company was just warned and requested to discipline it's management (firing 4 and reducing bonuses for about 30), the company agreed and... didn't do it, then came the ban - it's hard to feel sorry in this case, if at all then only for the not involved workforce.
This was in 2005 when it kicked off. Android tablets weren't a viable option back then
They still aren't. The OLPC is unique and not meant primarily for "western" countries:
- it can run on very little power
- can create mesh network with other OLPCs
- can be used in direct sunlight (special display)
- it can be powered with a hand generator
- it is actually very inexpensive (the online price includes second laptop for a child in developing countries)
- it's OS is designed for learning, sources in python are available easily for any OS component (Linux with Sugar as far as I remember)
I keep seeing major misconception about the OLPC as just another cheap notebook - it is much more then that.
Science is intended for the masses, the problem is that the masses are not interested in science and with time progressing not even capable of understanding basic concepts (aka flat Earth).
From what I read, in XIX (19th) century science was a common topic of discussions at homes and publicly, people were interested, were talking about science and participated in public lectures organized for non-scientists. Leaders consulted scientists, artists took inspiration from science. And to the contrary, nowadays being interested in science has pejorative meaning. It is OK to publicly boost of never being good at math, but not knowing how many Kardashians there are means somebody is socially inept.
I hope that masses will come to realization, that it's thank to scientists that their lives are so easy and comfortable nowadays and that there are adorable cat videos they can watch with a tap of their finger.
The money supply should expand slightly faster than the economy so that holding money is discouraged as a means of holding value (you want people to invest in things that improve productivity, not keep piles of cash under their bed).
I know that this is what economic books teach us, but my question is why? To be clear, I know the reason "to stimulate economy", just I am not familiar with any historical evidence to support it. Isn't it that there were economically stable times when currency had an intrinsic value, and quite to contrary - most big financial collapses happened under "modern" economy rules, and lastly isn't it the right of a human being to be rewarded for their work with something of intrinsic value and keep it under their bed if they chose so?
Exactly, this was quite a basic scenario. Not to mention total ignorance by the operator, who was there to deal with dangerous situations.
1. Test software in countless virtual reality based on real data.
2. Build a semi-virtual room with display walls, ceiling and floor and test the software and sensors there with countless hours of real recordings (it will test only passive sensors in visual spectrum - but it's a start)
In both cases the testing recordings cannot be the training one
3. Only then take the car to the road, but with a human driver and working computer in a passive mode - to check its reactions, any event when computer makes a decision after human or makes a wrong decision go to point 1.
4. Let independent authority test the car in environment as point 3.
5. Let the car drive in closed safe environments.
6. Let the car drive on public roads not with an operator but with a professional driver NOT watching his cellphone or tablet.
It seems obvious, but after the accident it does not seem like it was obvious for everybody.
... AMD engineering in the CPU space has basically always been significantly superior to Intel, except for raw speed...
Some time ago I did basic performance tests for AMD (PC), Intel (PC) and PowerPC (Mac) CPUs of similar class.
The test was designed to check floating-point unit (povray) and overall performance (compiling a large project), and AMD beat Intel significantly in povray, whilst lost in compilation. Later tests showed that compilation was strongly correlated to the cache size (my testing machine with AMD had half the cache of the one with Intel CPU). PowerPC lost in both categories.
Cisco says that an attacker could exploit this vulnerability...
I like it - "could" is such a euphemism for a hard-coded password.
Decades ago people dreamed of flying to the stars in XXI century, and instead we have:
* cars with intelligent performance management, which cheat on emission tests and cause thousands premature deaths
* notebooks which intelligently improve user experience, by hijacking encrypted communication injecting ads and rendering all the security useless
* music discs, which (again) improve users experience helping them manage their collections by bypassing their system security to install malware in core of their OS
* brand CPUs, which are designed to be so fast, that they do not even bother to check who is accessing the data, and of course no-one should be worried since it affects "all" CPUs in existence
* and apps with hard-coded password, which could, just potentially could be considered a vulnerability
* not to mention the best business model ever, when one makes money by being lousy with guarding sensitive personal information and later gets payed to inform that the very data might not identify proper person, because it was stolen
The linked article requires subscription, so I am not sure about the details, but wouldn't it be better to lift the human driver requirement only for vehicles, which showed some reliability first, not to any driver-less car?
Slashdot Mirror
They spent 4 years developing something that I walked into a hobby shop and purchased lot more that 4 years ago.
Does yours fly up to about 60km, where the pressure is comparable to the one on Mars?
...
Does it recharge itself in a cloudy day?
Can it operate in about -100 degrees?
Ignorance maybe is a bliss, but it's a danger for the others.
Maybe not everybody knows, but the story of Pluto is almost identical to Ceres, and as far as I know there was no official definition of planet before, so it is not like they "redefined", they finally created a clear definition of what planet is.
Anyway, who cares the name in a classification, it's more important to have a logical, standardized and useful classification.
Why invader? Why not a guest or visitor?
Is there some magic spell cast on the humankind recently making everybody angry about everything?
And, by the way, moving the goalposts is not a good thing to do in a discussion. Go re-read the comment I originally replied to. Demanding that my examples meet an expectation that you arbitrarily added which were not in the original post is silly and unproductive.
The point is that SpaceX did accomplish something nobody has done before - a retro-propulsion supersonic landing. It is truly a great achievement. It has not been done not because nobody bothered, but because it is extremely difficult and was considered not doable for reasonable costs.
And please consider that I do not diminish the other achievements, which you referred to. Instead I provided arguments that your comparisons are not adequate from technical point of view. It seems to me a fair response to your specific claims. And please reread the first sentence of my previous response.
With regard to the post you responded to (which to me seems just sarcastic and funny), the fact that someone swings pendulum in one direction does not justify swinging it the other way.
I keep saying, the following penalty scheme imposed on companies will clean up data breaches right quick: $1 per name, email, physical address $2 per phone number $3 per credit card number $4 per SSN And multiply for combinations thereof. You'll see how fast companies move to secure their data.
No, it will not work as long as people responsible are not held accountable.
Most of the cases I know the CEO making decisions retires with multi-million golden parachute and all the penalty costs (if any) are passed on consumers or victims (as is the case of Equifax - people have to pay for locking their accounts, and one pays as long as one wants the lock be active) or ordinary workers.
Top management don't give a damn about penalties, because they make up the rules of profits distribution and by the time anything is out in public, their pockets are usually full or/and their moved to another place if the screw-up was really big. Do you remember the shares selloff by Intel and Equifax executives?
Yeah it'd be much better to do like China, Russia or Iran and just shoot them...
Russia has not used the death penalty in more than 20 years. The last judicial execution was in 1996.
Of course, and still there was:
- Sergei Magnitsky: Magnitsky had died from being beaten and tortured by several officers of the Russian Ministry of Interior
- Anna Stepanovna Politkovskaya: tried to be poisoned, finally murdered
- Maksim Borodin: died of injuries from falling out of a window
- and many many others, either poisoned abroad or beaten to death, or just plainly murdered
I assume, that by now everyone able to read have read Orwell's books, so people can differentiate between official statistics and reality in totalitarian countries.
I used to use google news regularly, they seemed a perfect aggregation of news with the option of adding your own sources, however I stopped because: ...", it might be a curiosity, someone might like it, but science?
- there was no option to turn off google pre-selection, so instead of having access to the latest news I kept seeing week old (or even more) posts constantly, I asked google service for such option - no response
- I kept being forced upon with news completely out of mind, I don't even know where they find them, again, no option to select sources, or some basic fact check from google side, to be fair there is an option to disable a source, however they keep popping up, and somehow google algorithm finds them more important then some fact based news
- final decision to abandon the platform was (constant) pseudoscience in science section, like "somebody calculated the end of the world on April
I switched to BBC and have never regretted since. I consider going to google news aggregation a waste of my time. In theory would be a great tool to have instant access to fresh news from many sources, but in reality is just annoyance.
NASA developed vertical landing technology for the Apollo Lunar Module. ...
You're right, SpaceX did not invent rocket landing, but they were the first company landing an orbital rocket on Earth, which is quite a fit.
Why is it quite a fit? Because before nobody thought it was feasible or economically viable and even some experimented nobody have done it.
- Moon landing - yes, however Moon's gravity, lack of atmosphere and the Moon Lander size and weight make this undoubtful achievement not quite comparable with Earth landing
- Space Shuttle landing - yes, however not supersonic retro-propulsion landing
- New Shepard landing - yes, still not the orbital landing, but suborbital - quite different speeds/energies involved, difference quite comparable to Grasshopper vs New Shepard
- DC-X - yes, but abandoned and not researched further - no orbital implementation
So to summarize, it's true that SpaceX didn't invent the "wheel", but they undoubtedly and truly changed the game of space access.
Entanglement is a cornerstone of modern technology? Say what?
Welcome to Slashdot.
That's very right, would mod up if I had mod points left.
However I suppose the original statement was based on the fact that quantum entanglement is basis for existing (being developed) technologies as quantum encryption and quantum computing. The former has been demonstrated over long distances between satellites and Earth, the latter is being actively researched at the moment and if mastered would be a game changing technology in e.g. medicine and metallurgy allowing people to calculate new drugs and alloys - not to mention other uses.
Additionally to that usually Apple products have long lasting support, aka updates, whilst most of the less expensive routers stop being updated after a year or so.
I am not commenting on the notion that some people can effort private rockets and some cannot food, however Bezos is unique in that:
- he created the Amazon corporation selling books online, when books sales were falling down and nobody else thought it was a good idea
- also cloud computing practically started to matter because of Amazon
- also electronic book readers
Lets also not forget, that most of the people having money buy 100th Ferrari, or yet another luxury yacht or cover their toilets with gold and some spend their wealth on pushing humankind a little bit further.
There are so many benefits of people expanding into space, which are now prevented by costs, that if Blue Origin pulls this off, and we had both SpaceX and Blue Origin having reusable launchers making Moon settlement and asteroid mining affordable it would be a new chapter in humankind history.
Congratulations indeed, however is it only about the site or also about the owners and their infrastructure? How about the customers? It should be easy to check if they just tested their own services or were involved in some malicious activity.
One cannot have DDOS without proper infrastructure, either hacked or own, so there are much more details I would be interested to read about this issue.
I think it is time for more then just a public show of shamming in front of the Congress.
The best would be to decouple SSN from private lives and use it as it was intended to, just as your social security ID.
I would also add a requirement for any company to use up-to-date encryption standards when processing personal information and explicit permission of the mentioned when storing such information for longer then 'n' weeks (government agencies can be exempt from the explicit permission of course).
At first the company was just warned and requested to discipline it's management (firing 4 and reducing bonuses for about 30), the company agreed and ... didn't do it, then came the ban - it's hard to feel sorry in this case, if at all then only for the not involved workforce.
This was in 2005 when it kicked off. Android tablets weren't a viable option back then
They still aren't. The OLPC is unique and not meant primarily for "western" countries:
- it can run on very little power
- can create mesh network with other OLPCs
- can be used in direct sunlight (special display)
- it can be powered with a hand generator
- it is actually very inexpensive (the online price includes second laptop for a child in developing countries)
- it's OS is designed for learning, sources in python are available easily for any OS component (Linux with Sugar as far as I remember)
I keep seeing major misconception about the OLPC as just another cheap notebook - it is much more then that.
I hope good times will come for the OLPC project.
Well, we do not assassinate our journalists for being critical of the government.
Science is intended for the masses, the problem is that the masses are not interested in science and with time progressing not even capable of understanding basic concepts (aka flat Earth).
From what I read, in XIX (19th) century science was a common topic of discussions at homes and publicly, people were interested, were talking about science and participated in public lectures organized for non-scientists. Leaders consulted scientists, artists took inspiration from science. And to the contrary, nowadays being interested in science has pejorative meaning. It is OK to publicly boost of never being good at math, but not knowing how many Kardashians there are means somebody is socially inept.
I hope that masses will come to realization, that it's thank to scientists that their lives are so easy and comfortable nowadays and that there are adorable cat videos they can watch with a tap of their finger.
Shouldn't the title be more appropriate then, e.g. "Yet another Einstein ring discovered ..."?
The money supply should expand slightly faster than the economy so that holding money is discouraged as a means of holding value (you want people to invest in things that improve productivity, not keep piles of cash under their bed).
I know that this is what economic books teach us, but my question is why? To be clear, I know the reason "to stimulate economy", just I am not familiar with any historical evidence to support it. Isn't it that there were economically stable times when currency had an intrinsic value, and quite to contrary - most big financial collapses happened under "modern" economy rules, and lastly isn't it the right of a human being to be rewarded for their work with something of intrinsic value and keep it under their bed if they chose so?
Wasn't the very similar case long time ago between Compaq and IBM, when APIs were declared not protected, wouldn't it be a precedence?
Exactly, this was quite a basic scenario. Not to mention total ignorance by the operator, who was there to deal with dangerous situations.
1. Test software in countless virtual reality based on real data.
2. Build a semi-virtual room with display walls, ceiling and floor and test the software and sensors there with countless hours of real recordings (it will test only passive sensors in visual spectrum - but it's a start)
In both cases the testing recordings cannot be the training one
3. Only then take the car to the road, but with a human driver and working computer in a passive mode - to check its reactions, any event when computer makes a decision after human or makes a wrong decision go to point 1.
4. Let independent authority test the car in environment as point 3.
5. Let the car drive in closed safe environments.
6. Let the car drive on public roads not with an operator but with a professional driver NOT watching his cellphone or tablet.
It seems obvious, but after the accident it does not seem like it was obvious for everybody.
... AMD engineering in the CPU space has basically always been significantly superior to Intel, except for raw speed...
Some time ago I did basic performance tests for AMD (PC), Intel (PC) and PowerPC (Mac) CPUs of similar class. The test was designed to check floating-point unit (povray) and overall performance (compiling a large project), and AMD beat Intel significantly in povray, whilst lost in compilation. Later tests showed that compilation was strongly correlated to the cache size (my testing machine with AMD had half the cache of the one with Intel CPU). PowerPC lost in both categories.
Cisco says that an attacker could exploit this vulnerability ...
I like it - "could" is such a euphemism for a hard-coded password.
Decades ago people dreamed of flying to the stars in XXI century, and instead we have:
* cars with intelligent performance management, which cheat on emission tests and cause thousands premature deaths
* notebooks which intelligently improve user experience, by hijacking encrypted communication injecting ads and rendering all the security useless
* music discs, which (again) improve users experience helping them manage their collections by bypassing their system security to install malware in core of their OS
* brand CPUs, which are designed to be so fast, that they do not even bother to check who is accessing the data, and of course no-one should be worried since it affects "all" CPUs in existence
* and apps with hard-coded password, which could, just potentially could be considered a vulnerability
* not to mention the best business model ever, when one makes money by being lousy with guarding sensitive personal information and later gets payed to inform that the very data might not identify proper person, because it was stolen
"... car then ..." should be " ... car than ..."
The linked article requires subscription, so I am not sure about the details, but wouldn't it be better to lift the human driver requirement only for vehicles, which showed some reliability first, not to any driver-less car?