"Once captured it can be..." reprogrammed and armed with explosives, in order to carry out a different mission than its owner intended. Yay, for capture devices!
Yeah, I know: people who do not fly the things, and want everyone else to also not fly the things, can't tell the difference between a "drone" and a "remotely piloted vehicle".
Here's a clue: drones can operate autonomously or semiautonomously, and won't stop what they are doing if you try to jam the radio signals they aren't using when they are flying in autonomous mode, and will just switch to autonomous mode if they are operating semiautonomously and someone turns on a jammer.
And you know, if they were military drones, and they encountered a jammer, they might just target it and kamikaze.
It seems reasonable to me that San Bernardino county could ask Apple, politely, to please break the encryption. No warrant, no lawsuit, no precedent. Just a customer request.
Because if it's a polite request from a customer, large number theory and computability theory don't apply any more?
Can we get an H-1B in here to do STEM stuff for this guy?
Even though the whole "pathogen" thing is retarded beyond belief, if it is truly county property, then IMO it's a no brainer to let the government access it.
Of course.
The government should have their most excellent programmers access it. No one wants to prevent the government from accessing something they have permission to access. So their most excellent programmers should do an end run around Large Number Theory, and magically access it.
Or they could just apply to a FISA court for a warrant, and ask the NSA for the data, since the NSA PRISM program monitors the communications that would have been used to back up things like the address book in the first place.
It would seem easier to use a Helium balloon to do the lifting bit, then use a parachute to do the falling bit, then the battery to do the landing bit.
On a drone platform, out to sea, right? Because that's the smartest place to land things which have been at high altitude...
Amen to that. The FOIA has a purpose--to maintain open government. It was not designed to allow the merely curious to indulge their historical fantasies. Replying to this kind of stuff costs money, and guess who pays?
Likely whatever agency repeatedly refuses to answer the request pays and pays and pays and pays.
Until they get a clue, answer the request, and so can stop paying, because it's "asked and answered".
So mostly? The agencies who are reluctant to answer the freaking questions they are asked tend to pay the most.
So what you are actually saying... "but the battery had only 4% capacity at the moment of landing"...is that these things need better/bigger batteries.
Imagine Florida-man driving his $500 beater truck when somebody in a new BMW pulls out in front of him. Instead of slowing down to avoid it, Florida-man stomps the gas because he technically has the right of way and wants to teach the other driver an expensive lesson.
I think I will side with the guy who very obviously has a railroad tie bolted onto the front of his truck as a bumper... I mean, you'd have to be stupid to pull in front of a vehicle like that, even if you weren't doing it to cut them off...
Unless you intentionally jump in front of someone and then slam on the brakes, how could it ever be your fault if you're rear ended?
(1) Failure to maintain brake lights. If your brake lights don't go on, then you are not obviously stopping, and therefore you can easily cause an accident.
(2) When antilock braking systems were first introduced, the stopping distance for cars with them got drastically shorter, while the cars not equipped with them kept the old stopping distance. What was previously legally defined as a safe stopping distance was no longer a safe stopping distance for unequipped cars. It's beholden on the person with the shorter stopping distance to take into account the stopping distance of the following vehicle. So lane changing in front of a semi on the freeway and then slamming on your brakes: still not a good idea.
(3) Slow vehicle merges into fast moving traffic. This is a problem, both in terms of lane change merges left (yes, I know: most California drivers are woefully ignorant of traffic laws, because license requirements are so lax compared to other states), but, even more to the point, correct use of acceleration lanes and onramps to get to freeway speeds, rather than getting to freeway speeds only once you are on the freeway.
So: lots of ways to be the guilty party, even if you're the one getting rear ended because you were a dick.
Keep in mind that HoloLens is not targeting VR gaming as its primary market segment. It is targeting AR applications, moving computer operations off the screen and putting them into our world. So the visual field and opacity may be meaningful design choices, to keep you grounded in reality.
Then it makes more sense for the Alpha channel bleed through to be adjustable from partial to full opacity, and then just default to partial.
I know that people who like semi-transparent terminal windows, and then ask me to come over and look at their code floating on top of their pet cat tend to drive me nuts, since it makes it harder to concentrate on the code instead of the cat, unless the terminal window is 100% opaque, and the irrelevant information (i.e. the cat) is removed from the field of view.
I certainly hope the "...moving computer operations off the screen and putting them into our world" you claim they are targeting are not terminal windows, or I foresee another "But BROWN! Why the hell did you pick BROWN as a Zune color?!?" moment for Microsoft's human factors team.
Baby steps. Not one VR provider will nail it first go especially if they aren't willing to wait for the right moment like Apple did.
Most new products are like this.
Until Apple yells "You're doing it WRONG! You're doing it WRONG! Give me the damn mouse and let me drive for a minute... there! THAT'S how you get past that level to the next level!".
What would the situation be right now, had 100 people decided to quit, en masse, from Disney's IT department, and start their own company, "Happy Dan's outsourced IT solutions", and then come to Disney and said "Hey, we hear you have need of IT services, how about you hire us to do it, since we have a lot of people familiar with your problem domain?".
Even in California, this would have been a *massive* lawsuit.
OK, so instead of these guys deciding to quit, an existing IT outsourcing firm, currently bidding on an IT outsourcing contract with Disney which Disney has already put out to bid, comes in and offers a sweetheart deal to 10% of Disney's existing IT staff. And succeeds in hiring them away. They'd likely be successful, particularly if someone let slip, during the negotiations, that, "hey, your jobs with Disney are going away soon; you *may* want to take our offer".
Again: even in California, this is *massive lawsuit territory*.
So how precisely, would you suggest that the IT people at disney end up working as IT people for the outsourcing company, without causing problems for the IT outsourcing company?
Your hand waving is just semantics, whether they replace an entire department by an outsourcing company or replace the workers individually it is the same net effect. It is like me offering you the option of having your hand amputated with an axe or a saw, either way you lose your hand.
No, it's closer to a bunch of cellular customers deciding they hate AT&T all at once, and switching their service over to T-Mobile.
You're arguing that T-Mobile should be obligated to hire the AT&T employees who are now all just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs.
This type of displacement happens in things like uniform supply companies, custodial companies, and other service industry companies all the time, when a contract comes up for renewal, and the company who previously had the old contract doesn't get the new one.
You need to quit whining about IT workers being some sort of special flowers, rather than being easily replaceable cogs.
The difference is one of fault tolerance, vs. fault recovery. Tolerance, which only requires resetting the card, is more useful than a recovery which requires resetting the system. These systems do not have as their only purpose in life acting as game consoles.
If I can reset the card, and then replay the operations in such a way that the card does not crash again, or at least does not crash again for some period of time, such that I'm able to get to the next saddle point, and repeat the process, that's much more useful than replaying into the card and having it crash yet again, reproducibly, to the point that further progress is blockaded.
It's the difference between "checkpoint and restart" vs. "checkpoint and recrash".
While DirectX is far from perfect, it at least gives up on shaders which fail to run in bounded time, so that you do not lose everything else, along with the shitty shader. Straight use of OpenGL fails this test. It looks to me that Vulkan has this same vulnerability, due to trying to be very low level and low overhead.
I think you are treating this as if these things were games consoles, rather than general purpose computers which sometimes run games, and for which staying up in general is more important than really, really fast graphics which sometimes take the system down completely, necessitating a reboot.
there's no unrolling layer between the instruction stream and the card to protect it.
I've worked on graphics drivers for 3 major vendors, and every one of them can and does unroll loops in OpenGL shaders.
They try, but they do not drop them on the floor entirely when it can not be proven that they will run in bounded time. Google actually has a similar technology that it uses in Chrome to "test the waters", but doesn't deploy it in Linux versions.
The actual situation is complex for both DX and GL, as it involves a myriad of factors such as the version being targeted, whether the loop bounds are statically known by the compiler, and whether they vary per SIMD-channel.
Yes. And if they *aren't* statically known by the compiler, it should drop the things on the floor, like Windows tends to. It's not a very ideal solution, but it works well enough that I would not have been resetting my G5 desktop when something decided to go crazy and take the card with it.
Furthermore, GL supports device restart on hung shaders, and this is tested for in many common test suites.
You have to maintain a non-blocked channel with the card in order to do this. And it's a fairly recent feature that vendors tended to leave out of their cards, until Microsoft forced them to include it to get the little badge on the outside of the box that let them claim compatibility with Direct X.
So, your post is almost entirely incorrect. Charitably, we can chalk it to innocent ignorance rather than a vested interest in spreading misinformation about platform-independed APIs.
I have no vested interest in supporting the DirectX platform, or even running Windows. And I'm aware that the Mac OS X nVidia drivers are encapsulated versions of the Windows nVidia drivers, just ported to run on Mac OS X. I occasionally worked with the people nVidia had on site at Apple, in order to resolve bugs, although Charles and Brian did so more frequently. The ATI folks, less so (less bugs, or at least less that came to my attention as a kernel panic).
The issue is the glue layer that Windows has, which adds more overhead, but at the same time provides some safety from bad graphics programming. I'm certain that Microsoft probably lucked into it, and didn't write things that way on purpose.
Thank you. One of the big things in you notice was "self reported". That implies they are doing things correctly.
But there needs to be a better way to handle radioactive waste.
There is. Instead of keeping it in pools, do what the French, Russians, and other countries do, including the UK, and reprocess it into additional fuel for breeder reactors, and into medical grade radioactives.
The recent theft of the medical grade radioactives in Mexico occurred because they were on their way to being shipped to the U.S., mostly because we don't manufacture most medical grade radioactives ourselves (e.g. the pellets used to treat prostate cancer, the pellets used to treat glioblastoma multiforme, contract radioactives with short half-lives which are used for medical imaging, radioactive iodine for use in thyroid and parathyroid tumor treatment, the Amercanium used in the manufacture of smoke detectors, etc.).
I have issues with the statement "the cross-platform alternative to DirectX". OpenGL was a cross-platform graphics standard before DirectX even existed.
I have similar issues, but for other reasons.
Once commanding benefit to DirectX is that it attempts to loop unroll shaders and effects, and if it can't do it -- it drops them on the floor. While this may mean that that graphical dust storm isn't as pretty as it might have been otherwise, it also means that you don't crash or hang the video card, and as of DirectX 9 and later, even if you do, to get the compatibility sticker, the manufacture has to make it possible to reset the card and restart pending operations. So if you are able to hang the card anyway, despite the unrolling, the OS can unhang the card, and go merrily on its way.
One of the big problems with games on Mac OS X or Linux is that they tend to directly target OpenGL, rather than an OpenGL emulation running on top of Direct X, as is done on Windows. Which means it's possible to take down the cards hard, because there's no unrolling layer between the instruction stream and the card to protect it. Apple tries to make this happy by always keeping a spare channel lying around, so it can talk to the card to recover, but it doesn't always work out.
Vulkan seems to have the same problem that OpenGL itself has, in this regard. So it is *NOT*, in fact, a crossplatform alternative to using DirectX, it's a replacement for OpenGL to make it more difficult to buy other people's graphics cards. Which I kind of could care less about, if it supported the unrolling the way Direct X does, rather than just being different for the sake of being different. To me, it just looks like a handy way to hang your system, instead of using the even handier OpenGL.
Slashdot Mirror
"Once captured it can be..." reprogrammed and armed with explosives, in order to carry out a different mission than its owner intended. Yay, for capture devices!
A radio jammer would be better.
The article is about a drone, not about an RPV.
Yeah, I know: people who do not fly the things, and want everyone else to also not fly the things, can't tell the difference between a "drone" and a "remotely piloted vehicle".
Here's a clue: drones can operate autonomously or semiautonomously, and won't stop what they are doing if you try to jam the radio signals they aren't using when they are flying in autonomous mode, and will just switch to autonomous mode if they are operating semiautonomously and someone turns on a jammer.
And you know, if they were military drones, and they encountered a jammer, they might just target it and kamikaze.
The phone should be decrypted and the results made known to the courts.
The better to infect them with the cyber pathogen in question.
The first rule of the envelope full of Anthrax: DON'T OPEN THE ENVELOPE FULL OF ANTHRAX!
The second rule of the envelope full of Anthrax: ...
It seems reasonable to me that San Bernardino county could ask Apple, politely, to please break the encryption. No warrant, no lawsuit, no precedent. Just a customer request.
Because if it's a polite request from a customer, large number theory and computability theory don't apply any more?
Can we get an H-1B in here to do STEM stuff for this guy?
Why don't you post those death threats to an elected official under your real name?
No need. The FBI will just order Apple to decrypt "Anonymous Coward" and they will capture him/her immediately.
Even though the whole "pathogen" thing is retarded beyond belief, if it is truly county property, then IMO it's a no brainer to let the government access it.
Of course.
The government should have their most excellent programmers access it. No one wants to prevent the government from accessing something they have permission to access. So their most excellent programmers should do an end run around Large Number Theory, and magically access it.
Or they could just apply to a FISA court for a warrant, and ask the NSA for the data, since the NSA PRISM program monitors the communications that would have been used to back up things like the address book in the first place.
No need to involve Apple at all!
It would seem easier to use a Helium balloon to do the lifting bit, then use a parachute to do the falling bit, then the battery to do the landing bit.
On a drone platform, out to sea, right? Because that's the smartest place to land things which have been at high altitude...
Meaning you don't have to worry about currently in use attacks, right?
Amen to that. The FOIA has a purpose--to maintain open government. It was not designed to allow the merely curious to indulge their historical fantasies. Replying to this kind of stuff costs money, and guess who pays?
Likely whatever agency repeatedly refuses to answer the request pays and pays and pays and pays.
Until they get a clue, answer the request, and so can stop paying, because it's "asked and answered".
So mostly? The agencies who are reluctant to answer the freaking questions they are asked tend to pay the most.
So what you are actually saying... "but the battery had only 4% capacity at the moment of landing" ...is that these things need better/bigger batteries.
LOL
OK
"I have one question, father... how fast was the bastard going when he backed into you?"
OK, what exactly is wrong with "Steve Jobs Wozniak"?
I know I can.
No jury would find against the human and in favor of the robot.
Just because the robot took your job doesn't mean the robot gets a paycheck. Sue the robot all you want: it's not going to be able to pay you.
That's proprietary info, you are not going to have access to it until after a couple of gigantic court cases involving dead children.
Or one court case involving a gigantic dead child?
Where do you draw the line?
Typically, it is drawn between the lanes...
Imagine Florida-man driving his $500 beater truck when somebody in a new BMW pulls out in front of him. Instead of slowing down to avoid it, Florida-man stomps the gas because he technically has the right of way and wants to teach the other driver an expensive lesson.
I think I will side with the guy who very obviously has a railroad tie bolted onto the front of his truck as a bumper... I mean, you'd have to be stupid to pull in front of a vehicle like that, even if you weren't doing it to cut them off...
Unless you intentionally jump in front of someone and then slam on the brakes, how could it ever be your fault if you're rear ended?
(1) Failure to maintain brake lights. If your brake lights don't go on, then you are not obviously stopping, and therefore you can easily cause an accident.
(2) When antilock braking systems were first introduced, the stopping distance for cars with them got drastically shorter, while the cars not equipped with them kept the old stopping distance. What was previously legally defined as a safe stopping distance was no longer a safe stopping distance for unequipped cars. It's beholden on the person with the shorter stopping distance to take into account the stopping distance of the following vehicle. So lane changing in front of a semi on the freeway and then slamming on your brakes: still not a good idea.
(3) Slow vehicle merges into fast moving traffic. This is a problem, both in terms of lane change merges left (yes, I know: most California drivers are woefully ignorant of traffic laws, because license requirements are so lax compared to other states), but, even more to the point, correct use of acceleration lanes and onramps to get to freeway speeds, rather than getting to freeway speeds only once you are on the freeway.
So: lots of ways to be the guilty party, even if you're the one getting rear ended because you were a dick.
Keep in mind that HoloLens is not targeting VR gaming as its primary market segment. It is targeting AR applications, moving computer operations off the screen and putting them into our world. So the visual field and opacity may be meaningful design choices, to keep you grounded in reality.
Then it makes more sense for the Alpha channel bleed through to be adjustable from partial to full opacity, and then just default to partial.
I know that people who like semi-transparent terminal windows, and then ask me to come over and look at their code floating on top of their pet cat tend to drive me nuts, since it makes it harder to concentrate on the code instead of the cat, unless the terminal window is 100% opaque, and the irrelevant information (i.e. the cat) is removed from the field of view.
I certainly hope the "...moving computer operations off the screen and putting them into our world" you claim they are targeting are not terminal windows, or I foresee another "But BROWN! Why the hell did you pick BROWN as a Zune color?!?" moment for Microsoft's human factors team.
Baby steps. Not one VR provider will nail it first go especially if they aren't willing to wait for the right moment like Apple did.
Most new products are like this.
Until Apple yells "You're doing it WRONG! You're doing it WRONG! Give me the damn mouse and let me drive for a minute... there! THAT'S how you get past that level to the next level!".
Look. I will break it down very simply for you.
What would the situation be right now, had 100 people decided to quit, en masse, from Disney's IT department, and start their own company, "Happy Dan's outsourced IT solutions", and then come to Disney and said "Hey, we hear you have need of IT services, how about you hire us to do it, since we have a lot of people familiar with your problem domain?".
Even in California, this would have been a *massive* lawsuit.
OK, so instead of these guys deciding to quit, an existing IT outsourcing firm, currently bidding on an IT outsourcing contract with Disney which Disney has already put out to bid, comes in and offers a sweetheart deal to 10% of Disney's existing IT staff. And succeeds in hiring them away. They'd likely be successful, particularly if someone let slip, during the negotiations, that, "hey, your jobs with Disney are going away soon; you *may* want to take our offer".
Again: even in California, this is *massive lawsuit territory*.
So how precisely, would you suggest that the IT people at disney end up working as IT people for the outsourcing company, without causing problems for the IT outsourcing company?
Your hand waving is just semantics, whether they replace an entire department by an outsourcing company or replace the workers individually it is the same net effect. It is like me offering you the option of having your hand amputated with an axe or a saw, either way you lose your hand.
No, it's closer to a bunch of cellular customers deciding they hate AT&T all at once, and switching their service over to T-Mobile.
You're arguing that T-Mobile should be obligated to hire the AT&T employees who are now all just sitting around, twiddling their thumbs.
This type of displacement happens in things like uniform supply companies, custodial companies, and other service industry companies all the time, when a contract comes up for renewal, and the company who previously had the old contract doesn't get the new one.
You need to quit whining about IT workers being some sort of special flowers, rather than being easily replaceable cogs.
Incorrect.
The difference is one of fault tolerance, vs. fault recovery. Tolerance, which only requires resetting the card, is more useful than a recovery which requires resetting the system. These systems do not have as their only purpose in life acting as game consoles.
If I can reset the card, and then replay the operations in such a way that the card does not crash again, or at least does not crash again for some period of time, such that I'm able to get to the next saddle point, and repeat the process, that's much more useful than replaying into the card and having it crash yet again, reproducibly, to the point that further progress is blockaded.
It's the difference between "checkpoint and restart" vs. "checkpoint and recrash".
While DirectX is far from perfect, it at least gives up on shaders which fail to run in bounded time, so that you do not lose everything else, along with the shitty shader. Straight use of OpenGL fails this test. It looks to me that Vulkan has this same vulnerability, due to trying to be very low level and low overhead.
I think you are treating this as if these things were games consoles, rather than general purpose computers which sometimes run games, and for which staying up in general is more important than really, really fast graphics which sometimes take the system down completely, necessitating a reboot.
there's no unrolling layer between the instruction stream and the card to protect it.
I've worked on graphics drivers for 3 major vendors, and every one of them can and does unroll loops in OpenGL shaders.
They try, but they do not drop them on the floor entirely when it can not be proven that they will run in bounded time. Google actually has a similar technology that it uses in Chrome to "test the waters", but doesn't deploy it in Linux versions.
The actual situation is complex for both DX and GL, as it involves a myriad of factors such as the version being targeted, whether the loop bounds are statically known by the compiler, and whether they vary per SIMD-channel.
Yes. And if they *aren't* statically known by the compiler, it should drop the things on the floor, like Windows tends to. It's not a very ideal solution, but it works well enough that I would not have been resetting my G5 desktop when something decided to go crazy and take the card with it.
Furthermore, GL supports device restart on hung shaders, and this is tested for in many common test suites.
You have to maintain a non-blocked channel with the card in order to do this. And it's a fairly recent feature that vendors tended to leave out of their cards, until Microsoft forced them to include it to get the little badge on the outside of the box that let them claim compatibility with Direct X.
So, your post is almost entirely incorrect. Charitably, we can chalk it to innocent ignorance rather than a vested interest in spreading misinformation about platform-independed APIs.
I have no vested interest in supporting the DirectX platform, or even running Windows. And I'm aware that the Mac OS X nVidia drivers are encapsulated versions of the Windows nVidia drivers, just ported to run on Mac OS X. I occasionally worked with the people nVidia had on site at Apple, in order to resolve bugs, although Charles and Brian did so more frequently. The ATI folks, less so (less bugs, or at least less that came to my attention as a kernel panic).
The issue is the glue layer that Windows has, which adds more overhead, but at the same time provides some safety from bad graphics programming. I'm certain that Microsoft probably lucked into it, and didn't write things that way on purpose.
I'm just laying out my own personal experience.
Thank you. One of the big things in you notice was "self reported". That implies they are doing things correctly.
But there needs to be a better way to handle radioactive waste.
There is. Instead of keeping it in pools, do what the French, Russians, and other countries do, including the UK, and reprocess it into additional fuel for breeder reactors, and into medical grade radioactives.
The recent theft of the medical grade radioactives in Mexico occurred because they were on their way to being shipped to the U.S., mostly because we don't manufacture most medical grade radioactives ourselves (e.g. the pellets used to treat prostate cancer, the pellets used to treat glioblastoma multiforme, contract radioactives with short half-lives which are used for medical imaging, radioactive iodine for use in thyroid and parathyroid tumor treatment, the Amercanium used in the manufacture of smoke detectors, etc.).
I have issues with the statement "the cross-platform alternative to DirectX". OpenGL was a cross-platform graphics standard before DirectX even existed.
I have similar issues, but for other reasons.
Once commanding benefit to DirectX is that it attempts to loop unroll shaders and effects, and if it can't do it -- it drops them on the floor. While this may mean that that graphical dust storm isn't as pretty as it might have been otherwise, it also means that you don't crash or hang the video card, and as of DirectX 9 and later, even if you do, to get the compatibility sticker, the manufacture has to make it possible to reset the card and restart pending operations. So if you are able to hang the card anyway, despite the unrolling, the OS can unhang the card, and go merrily on its way.
One of the big problems with games on Mac OS X or Linux is that they tend to directly target OpenGL, rather than an OpenGL emulation running on top of Direct X, as is done on Windows. Which means it's possible to take down the cards hard, because there's no unrolling layer between the instruction stream and the card to protect it. Apple tries to make this happy by always keeping a spare channel lying around, so it can talk to the card to recover, but it doesn't always work out.
Vulkan seems to have the same problem that OpenGL itself has, in this regard. So it is *NOT*, in fact, a crossplatform alternative to using DirectX, it's a replacement for OpenGL to make it more difficult to buy other people's graphics cards. Which I kind of could care less about, if it supported the unrolling the way Direct X does, rather than just being different for the sake of being different. To me, it just looks like a handy way to hang your system, instead of using the even handier OpenGL.