Itâ(TM)s amazing how people love getting on the Apple-bashing bandwagon. The Google Home Max is $49 more expensive! Get a sense of perspective. Do you think that Google is also ripping people off? The HomePod is a wonderful product for those that want it. If it is not what you want, so be it. It does not make it a bad product. If you donâ(TM)t want its features, donâ(TM)t pay for them. Why should the rest of us care?
Why does every damn commenter have to go off on a "connected to the internet" sidetrack when the article mentions no such thing?
Agreed. Furthermore, why does every damn poster post about implantables? The term "medical device" covers a broad range of products.
For example, when you visit your GP and get your blood tested, your blood is sent off to a lab where the machine used to conduct those tests is also a medical device, regulated by the FDA (in the US at least, but the FDA has influence in many other jurisdictions). Many of those devices by the way run Windows. Yes, Windows. Usually at least one embedded system too, to handle hard real-time requirements, but the HMI is often Windows-based. And they are network connected. To the lab network, but they are connected nevertheless.
There does need to be an upgrade mechanism for them (and there usually is). However, automatic (or even manual) Windows Update is not that. What if an update interferes with the correct operation of the device? What if e.g. some test results start coming back negative when they should be positive, because of an update? Sure, the device being maliciously compromised is also a risk, but updates cannot just be applied with the hope that the device still operates correctly.
This is not as straight-forward a nut to crack as simply applying O/S vendor-supplied patches. Testing needs to be performed first. Whilst needing this testing is a good thing, maintaining a long-term ability to monitor available updates and then approving them for release substantially increases the cost of ownership of those devices. And only the original device manufacturer can perform those activities.
Having said that, the article refers to the ability to have updates applied, but I did not see a requirement to actually apply updates. I can guess what is likely to happen.
One final point - all medical devices have to undergo a hazard assessment. For some devices, the hazard assessment might have determined that it is safer to burn the software onto a ROM rather than have it on a writeable medium such as FLASH. What happens there? Is ROM no longer an option for medical device firmware?!
When specifying that you want "full self-driving capability" on the Tesla website, there is a disclaimer that you cannot use the car commercially for autonomous ride hailing. Tesla is planning a "Tesla Network", which is the only way that they will authorise commercial ride-sharing/hailing activities (details to be provided next year).
I think that this is the first time that a car company has mentioned restrictions like this. They probably won't be the last.
"Means trade of goods and services. The existance of a market."
No, it doesn't. You've just described all economies.
Capitalism is an economic system that allows the investing of privately-owned capital in enterprises for the purposes of providing such goods or services, usually (but not always) with the intention of making a profit. A more formal definition is "private ownership of the means of production". There are other systems of course, for example communal ownership of the means of production. The best-known is communism (which is more than just an economic system).
We had an HP150 during the 1980s. It ran MS-DOS 2.11, with an Intel 8088, but was not IBM PC compatible.
The touch screen worked quite well, and substituted for a mouse (which the system didn't have - at least, ours didn't). However, since the infrared beams were in front of the screen, it was possible to 'touch' the screen without actually making contact. The actual contact point was a few millimetres off the surface of the screen, but varied in height due to the curve of the CRT.
The mechanism was good for keeping fingerprints off the screen, but I can't see it being that good for attempting to touch a screen with your finger hovering nearby in a moving vehicle. A slight bump in the road and you will touch the wrong button without even appearing to make contact with anything. With physical buttons, you can feel for the button and then press it only once your finger is on it.
I suspect that this is more attractive to the manufacturer than the driver, since it allows a large number of these to be made and used in many different models, with the buttons being a software not a hardware choice.
Lastly, the HP150 system (and so supposedly this one too, although I have not RTFA) was not multi-touch capable, since the locations of two fingers couldn't be unambiguously determined.Place two fingers on the screen on opposite corners of a rectangular area, and the system couldn't determine if the fingers were in fact on the other two corners of the rectangle. The same beams would be interrupted.
Psychology, like religion, can be quantified in generalities by science but cannot be true subjects as statistics are useless when counting unique entities.
Sounds fair.
By the way, have you ever heard of quantum mechanics?
The problem with this reasoning is, you have no choice BUT to "speculate". At some point, Bitcoins must have a value relative to fiat currencies, either implicitly or explicitly, in order to be used as a "medium for exchange". Otherwise, they aren't anything. The value is either explicit (how many dollars a Bitcoin exchange will give you for a bitcoin) or implicit (how many dollars it costs to buy X vs. how many bitcoins it costs to by X).
It doesn't matter which it is (in reality, it is both, and in a way they are the same thing). With a reducing supply of bitcoins, they remain a depreciating "currency". This is fatal for an economy based on such a currency, as I stated above. Of course there is infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin which allows it to be used as a "medium for exchange", i.e. a "payment network". That is only part of it, and is not the relevant part. The other, relevant part is its supply (generation). This is what is broken, whether deliberate or not.
There is another significant distinction between Bitcoin and a Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi scheme, you put money into it with the expectation of getting more money out than you put in. In Bitcoin, you don't do this -- or rather, nothing in Bitcoin will tell you that you can.
If you can point to the bit of Bitcoin that attempts to give you this expectation, then great: please do so. However, please don't point at a person pulling a scam involving Bitcoin -- that would be like pointing to Charles Ponzi to explain why the US dollar is a scam. Similarly, please don't point to all the speculators: they are essentially the same thing as Wall Street day traders, and they don't make the US dollar a scam either.
Bitcoin is a payment network. To make a payment using Bitcoin, you buy some bitcoins on an exchange, then you send them to the seller, who sells them on an exchange. Where is the scam in all this? You paid your $x, the seller got his $x. That's not a scam, that's mission accomplished.
Bitcoin is in fact a clever Ponzi scheme, in that the founders can profit without even being identified. (It makes sense that they don't want to be identified now, doesn't it?)
Bitcoin's fundamental problem, and why it has all the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme (if it walks like a duck...) is that it is a deflationary currency by design due to the deliberate reduction in the supply of bit coins over time and the consequent artificial scarcity. No, being able to divide bitcoins into smaller parts does not solve this problem! It remains deflationary.
One can assume one of two things about the designer(s) of Bitcoin:
a. He/she/they did not understand economics well enough; or
b. He/she/they did understand economics well enough.
If (a), then the dangers of a deflationary currency (which encourages hoarding and not spending / investing) were unknown to him/her/them.
If (b), then these consequences were understood and were therefore considered desirable.
Assumption (a) makes this an accidental Ponzi scheme, but a Ponzi scheme nevertheless. Assumption (b) makes this a deliberate Ponzi scheme. Either way, the net result is the same. The original miners (which will have included the founders) make a whole lot of money. Late entrants provide them the money and in so doing lose theirs.
Bitcoin cannot be used as an alternative currency because it is deflationary. End of story. If you think it can be, then please provide your new theory of economics, and we can all go back onto the gold standard.
Podkletnov's earlier work was described as gravitational shielding, since the weight of objects appeared to be reduced by a few percent. In fact, if you read the wired article, Podkletnov describes a newer effect involving reflection of gravitational waves:
But wait; there's more. He has news that hasn't been reported elsewhere. Despite the hardships in Moscow, during the past year he says he conducted research at an unnamed "chemical scientific research center" where he built a device that reflects gravity. Supposedly it's based around a Van de Graaff generator - a high-voltage machine dating back to the earliest days of electrical research. "Normally there are two spheres," he explains, "and a spark jumps between them. Now imagine the spheres are flat surfaces, superconductors, one of them a coil or O-ring. Under specific conditions, applying resonating fields and composite superconducting coatings, we can organize the energy discharge in such a way that it goes through the center of the electrode, accompanied by gravitation phenomena - reflecting gravitational waves that spread through the walls and hit objects on the floors below, knocking them over."
This is of course something that should be easily demonstrable, yet it hasn't as yet been credibly demonstrated or reproduced. Of course TFA also falls into this category.
Eugene Podkletnov has been claiming for some time to have produced gravity shielding using levitated superconducting disks. The scientific community has mostly rejected his work, although NASA was for a time attempting to reproduce it. There's an article on it from a few years back on wired:
From TFA: <i>"Sensor drift is a perfect but unfortunate example of the problems encountered in near-real-time analysis. We stress, however, that this error in no way changes the scientific conclusions about the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice, which is based on the the consistent, quality-controlled data archive discussed above."</i>
If the media outlets and attention seekers sensationalise the real-time output, then unreasonable conclusions might well be drawn. What's the alternative though? To not make this real-time data available? Scientific hypotheses will be tested against the corrected data, so this sensor drift doesn't affect them. These are preliminary measurements only, not full-blown experiments with scientific conclusions. The polar bears are still going to have to become better swimmers.
It's a little ironic that this data will have been used by one group with an agenda to sensationalise climate change, and now will be used by the (perhaps overly) sceptical amongst us to poo poo it. Some have an agenda to sensationalise both. All serve to cloud the real message.
...doesn't make sense, not least because TFA notes that 13 out of 20 predicted baryons have been observed, leaving 7 still to be discovered. Surely these will be just as noteworthy as this discovery. Is the LHC the only accelerator capable of creating and observing these remaining baryons?
Also, to nit-pick, TFA states that the Omega-sub-b travels 1 mm in a trillionth of a second. This seems a little high to me, given that c is about 3*10^8 m/s = 3^10^11 mm/s. Rounding errors?
Researchers at Macquarie University in Australia have used selective breeding rather than genetic engineering to develop a strain of yeast that can ferment C5 sugars (xylose). There was a Catalyst television program about it in October of last year. The transcript is here. Fermenting xylose allows a large part of what would otherwise be waste (bagasse) from the sugar cane to be converted into ethanol as well. They say that waste paper could be converted too. An interesting quote fom the article:
"There's something like a 150 to 200 billion tonnes of plant material made per annum in agriculture and forestry processes and that would be more than we need to make total replacement of petrol."
Around ten years ago scientists were investigating something somewhat similar to what you are proposing, except minus the genetic engineering and toxic blooms. Some parts of the oceans are iron poor. Iron is of course an essential component for life. By adding small amounts of it to these parts of the ocean, significant quantities of phytoplankton grow, consuming large quantities of CO2.
There is an article on this here.
I agree that it is more likely to be for marketing purposes. If someone does call that fits the "fishing for a name" profile, give them a deliberately wrong name. Then, if anyone calls you using that name you know it's a marketing call and you can just hang up.
Take a look at this article on micro turbines. Another option would be super capacitors. It also doesn't need significant range or endurance. It could be deployed from a UAV like an ultra-smart bomb, from quite close to the intended target. It could even glide to its destination. Since it doesn't have to be shaped anything like a real hornet (and some of the largest wasps are classified as hornets), it could also be quite large.
I like this question, but I would ask it differently:
An e-voting system can be compromised before, during, or after the casting of ballots. In your opinion, what are the greatest risks during these periods?
It would be fairly hard for the batsmen to put gum on the bails and not be noticed. There would at least be the wicket keeper nearby, and one or both umpires would end up seeing it pretty soon. Also, batsmen wear gloves and so would battle to have the dexterity to apply gum without removing them (which would draw unwanted attention to themselves anyway). At the end of each over (six deliveries), the play continues from the opposite end of the pitch, so a stuck down bail would probably be noticed before too long.
For those not familiar with the term "sticky wicket", it is a cricketing term referring to the state of the cricket pitch. A sticky wicket is typically one that contains too much surface moisture, and can cause the ball to deviate unpredictably as it bounces in front of the batsman. A cricket ball is similar in size and mass to a baseball, and can be bowled at a batsman's body (or head:). Batting on a sticky wicket is a lot less fun than bowling (pitching) on it!
Slashdot Mirror
Itâ(TM)s amazing how people love getting on the Apple-bashing bandwagon. The Google Home Max is $49 more expensive! Get a sense of perspective. Do you think that Google is also ripping people off? The HomePod is a wonderful product for those that want it. If it is not what you want, so be it. It does not make it a bad product. If you donâ(TM)t want its features, donâ(TM)t pay for them. Why should the rest of us care?
Why does every damn commenter have to go off on a "connected to the internet" sidetrack when the article mentions no such thing?
Agreed. Furthermore, why does every damn poster post about implantables? The term "medical device" covers a broad range of products.
For example, when you visit your GP and get your blood tested, your blood is sent off to a lab where the machine used to conduct those tests is also a medical device, regulated by the FDA (in the US at least, but the FDA has influence in many other jurisdictions). Many of those devices by the way run Windows. Yes, Windows. Usually at least one embedded system too, to handle hard real-time requirements, but the HMI is often Windows-based. And they are network connected. To the lab network, but they are connected nevertheless.
There does need to be an upgrade mechanism for them (and there usually is). However, automatic (or even manual) Windows Update is not that. What if an update interferes with the correct operation of the device? What if e.g. some test results start coming back negative when they should be positive, because of an update? Sure, the device being maliciously compromised is also a risk, but updates cannot just be applied with the hope that the device still operates correctly.
This is not as straight-forward a nut to crack as simply applying O/S vendor-supplied patches. Testing needs to be performed first. Whilst needing this testing is a good thing, maintaining a long-term ability to monitor available updates and then approving them for release substantially increases the cost of ownership of those devices. And only the original device manufacturer can perform those activities.
Having said that, the article refers to the ability to have updates applied, but I did not see a requirement to actually apply updates. I can guess what is likely to happen.
One final point - all medical devices have to undergo a hazard assessment. For some devices, the hazard assessment might have determined that it is safer to burn the software onto a ROM rather than have it on a writeable medium such as FLASH. What happens there? Is ROM no longer an option for medical device firmware?!
When specifying that you want "full self-driving capability" on the Tesla website, there is a disclaimer that you cannot use the car commercially for autonomous ride hailing. Tesla is planning a "Tesla Network", which is the only way that they will authorise commercial ride-sharing/hailing activities (details to be provided next year). I think that this is the first time that a car company has mentioned restrictions like this. They probably won't be the last.
"Means trade of goods and services. The existance of a market." No, it doesn't. You've just described all economies. Capitalism is an economic system that allows the investing of privately-owned capital in enterprises for the purposes of providing such goods or services, usually (but not always) with the intention of making a profit. A more formal definition is "private ownership of the means of production". There are other systems of course, for example communal ownership of the means of production. The best-known is communism (which is more than just an economic system).
I suspect that you're thinking of a pebble-bed reactor.
We had an HP150 during the 1980s. It ran MS-DOS 2.11, with an Intel 8088, but was not IBM PC compatible. The touch screen worked quite well, and substituted for a mouse (which the system didn't have - at least, ours didn't). However, since the infrared beams were in front of the screen, it was possible to 'touch' the screen without actually making contact. The actual contact point was a few millimetres off the surface of the screen, but varied in height due to the curve of the CRT. The mechanism was good for keeping fingerprints off the screen, but I can't see it being that good for attempting to touch a screen with your finger hovering nearby in a moving vehicle. A slight bump in the road and you will touch the wrong button without even appearing to make contact with anything. With physical buttons, you can feel for the button and then press it only once your finger is on it. I suspect that this is more attractive to the manufacturer than the driver, since it allows a large number of these to be made and used in many different models, with the buttons being a software not a hardware choice. Lastly, the HP150 system (and so supposedly this one too, although I have not RTFA) was not multi-touch capable, since the locations of two fingers couldn't be unambiguously determined.Place two fingers on the screen on opposite corners of a rectangular area, and the system couldn't determine if the fingers were in fact on the other two corners of the rectangle. The same beams would be interrupted.
Psychology, like religion, can be quantified in generalities by science but cannot be true subjects as statistics are useless when counting unique entities.
Sounds fair. By the way, have you ever heard of quantum mechanics?
The problem with this reasoning is, you have no choice BUT to "speculate". At some point, Bitcoins must have a value relative to fiat currencies, either implicitly or explicitly, in order to be used as a "medium for exchange". Otherwise, they aren't anything. The value is either explicit (how many dollars a Bitcoin exchange will give you for a bitcoin) or implicit (how many dollars it costs to buy X vs. how many bitcoins it costs to by X). It doesn't matter which it is (in reality, it is both, and in a way they are the same thing). With a reducing supply of bitcoins, they remain a depreciating "currency". This is fatal for an economy based on such a currency, as I stated above. Of course there is infrastructure surrounding Bitcoin which allows it to be used as a "medium for exchange", i.e. a "payment network". That is only part of it, and is not the relevant part. The other, relevant part is its supply (generation). This is what is broken, whether deliberate or not.
There is another significant distinction between Bitcoin and a Ponzi scheme. In a Ponzi scheme, you put money into it with the expectation of getting more money out than you put in. In Bitcoin, you don't do this -- or rather, nothing in Bitcoin will tell you that you can.
If you can point to the bit of Bitcoin that attempts to give you this expectation, then great: please do so. However, please don't point at a person pulling a scam involving Bitcoin -- that would be like pointing to Charles Ponzi to explain why the US dollar is a scam. Similarly, please don't point to all the speculators: they are essentially the same thing as Wall Street day traders, and they don't make the US dollar a scam either.
Bitcoin is a payment network. To make a payment using Bitcoin, you buy some bitcoins on an exchange, then you send them to the seller, who sells them on an exchange. Where is the scam in all this? You paid your $x, the seller got his $x. That's not a scam, that's mission accomplished.
Bitcoin is in fact a clever Ponzi scheme, in that the founders can profit without even being identified. (It makes sense that they don't want to be identified now, doesn't it?)
Bitcoin's fundamental problem, and why it has all the hallmarks of a Ponzi scheme (if it walks like a duck...) is that it is a deflationary currency by design due to the deliberate reduction in the supply of bit coins over time and the consequent artificial scarcity. No, being able to divide bitcoins into smaller parts does not solve this problem! It remains deflationary. One can assume one of two things about the designer(s) of Bitcoin:
a. He/she/they did not understand economics well enough; or
b. He/she/they did understand economics well enough.
If (a), then the dangers of a deflationary currency (which encourages hoarding and not spending / investing) were unknown to him/her/them. If (b), then these consequences were understood and were therefore considered desirable.
Assumption (a) makes this an accidental Ponzi scheme, but a Ponzi scheme nevertheless. Assumption (b) makes this a deliberate Ponzi scheme. Either way, the net result is the same. The original miners (which will have included the founders) make a whole lot of money. Late entrants provide them the money and in so doing lose theirs.
Bitcoin cannot be used as an alternative currency because it is deflationary. End of story. If you think it can be, then please provide your new theory of economics, and we can all go back onto the gold standard.
I suggest getting out of Bitcoin now.
But wait; there's more. He has news that hasn't been reported elsewhere. Despite the hardships in Moscow, during the past year he says he conducted research at an unnamed "chemical scientific research center" where he built a device that reflects gravity. Supposedly it's based around a Van de Graaff generator - a high-voltage machine dating back to the earliest days of electrical research. "Normally there are two spheres," he explains, "and a spark jumps between them. Now imagine the spheres are flat surfaces, superconductors, one of them a coil or O-ring. Under specific conditions, applying resonating fields and composite superconducting coatings, we can organize the energy discharge in such a way that it goes through the center of the electrode, accompanied by gravitation phenomena - reflecting gravitational waves that spread through the walls and hit objects on the floors below, knocking them over."
This is of course something that should be easily demonstrable, yet it hasn't as yet been credibly demonstrated or reproduced. Of course TFA also falls into this category.
Although perhaps i should qualify that ;-)
Unless it's negative...
Eugene Podkletnov has been claiming for some time to have produced gravity shielding using levitated superconducting disks. The scientific community has mostly rejected his work, although NASA was for a time attempting to reproduce it. There's an article on it from a few years back on wired:
From TFA:
<i>"Sensor drift is a perfect but unfortunate example of the problems encountered in near-real-time analysis. We stress, however, that this error in no way changes the scientific conclusions about the long-term decline of Arctic sea ice, which is based on the the consistent, quality-controlled data archive discussed above."</i>
If the media outlets and attention seekers sensationalise the real-time output, then unreasonable conclusions might well be drawn. What's the alternative though? To not make this real-time data available? Scientific hypotheses will be tested against the corrected data, so this sensor drift doesn't affect them. These are preliminary measurements only, not full-blown experiments with scientific conclusions. The polar bears are still going to have to become better swimmers.
It's a little ironic that this data will have been used by one group with an agenda to sensationalise climate change, and now will be used by the (perhaps overly) sceptical amongst us to poo poo it. Some have an agenda to sensationalise both. All serve to cloud the real message.
...doesn't make sense, not least because TFA notes that 13 out of 20 predicted baryons have been observed, leaving 7 still to be discovered. Surely these will be just as noteworthy as this discovery. Is the LHC the only accelerator capable of creating and observing these remaining baryons?
Also, to nit-pick, TFA states that the Omega-sub-b travels 1 mm in a trillionth of a second. This seems a little high to me, given that c is about 3*10^8 m/s = 3^10^11 mm/s. Rounding errors?
Perhaps you can help Billy with his visa then?
Sounds like he needs a Bussard collection.
Around ten years ago scientists were investigating something somewhat similar to what you are proposing, except minus the genetic engineering and toxic blooms. Some parts of the oceans are iron poor. Iron is of course an essential component for life. By adding small amounts of it to these parts of the ocean, significant quantities of phytoplankton grow, consuming large quantities of CO2. There is an article on this here.
I agree that it is more likely to be for marketing purposes. If someone does call that fits the "fishing for a name" profile, give them a deliberately wrong name. Then, if anyone calls you using that name you know it's a marketing call and you can just hang up.
Take a look at this article on micro turbines. Another option would be super capacitors. It also doesn't need significant range or endurance. It could be deployed from a UAV like an ultra-smart bomb, from quite close to the intended target. It could even glide to its destination. Since it doesn't have to be shaped anything like a real hornet (and some of the largest wasps are classified as hornets), it could also be quite large.
I like this question, but I would ask it differently:
An e-voting system can be compromised before, during, or after the casting of ballots. In your opinion, what are the greatest risks during these periods?
It would be fairly hard for the batsmen to put gum on the bails and not be noticed. There would at least be the wicket keeper nearby, and one or both umpires would end up seeing it pretty soon. Also, batsmen wear gloves and so would battle to have the dexterity to apply gum without removing them (which would draw unwanted attention to themselves anyway). At the end of each over (six deliveries), the play continues from the opposite end of the pitch, so a stuck down bail would probably be noticed before too long.
Sounds like you have mastered the basics.
For those not familiar with the term "sticky wicket", it is a cricketing term referring to the state of the cricket pitch. A sticky wicket is typically one that contains too much surface moisture, and can cause the ball to deviate unpredictably as it bounces in front of the batsman. A cricket ball is similar in size and mass to a baseball, and can be bowled at a batsman's body (or head :). Batting on a sticky wicket is a lot less fun than bowling (pitching) on it!