The court order itself is bad. Google has a distinct corporate entity, with distinct storage, operating in a different nation... and the US courts are essentially saying, "Because you have the same top level owners and your partnership agreements give you access to the data, you're going to get it for us and other nation's laws be damned".
The best Google (US) can do if this insanity proceeds would be to fully sever business ties with foreign Google entities. Presumably that will mean a huge reduction in their efficiency and capabilities.
I'd have expected the Americans to use covert means to get the data they want and to pretend to play nicely in public.
Such a policy would immediately cause every foreign nation to ban using any American company if they might collect any data that might violate their privacy or security policies... and corporations might just beat their government to the punch on that.
The American government gets a little bit of above-board data access at the cost of crippling their global competitiveness in IT. That seems like an exceptionally stupid trade-off.
My experience with industrial accidents is that it's almost certainly human error. I've seen someone deliberately disable the safety systems because they were inconvenient, then get mutilated doing something stupid the safeties would have prevented them from doing.
Personally, I've operated machinery on manual override when it should have been on automatic, the machine blaring warnings at me the whole time which just didn't register because I heard them so often at work. Luckily, the passive safety systems (the big steel protective cage I was in) kept me from harm.
With robots, failures are more likely to stop the system than to start it up. To accidentally start something when it shouldn't be started usually takes human interference.
There was a recession when I hit the workforce after university. It was tough getting a job. REALLY tough. So I did manual labour for a few years before I finally got into my chosen career's industry. This happens. In retrospect, even fresh out of school I wasn't really ready. Too many expectations beyond what my worth as an employee could justify.
Now I'm seeing more or less the same situation with the current generation. The world doesn't owe you shit, life doesn't have to be fair, and no matter how recent your education, chances are there's a grumpy asshole who is of more practical use to an employer because they can handle social interactions in a workplace and understand the way work life works, with enough experience (in precisely what their employer requires!) to more than raise their net value above an inexperienced applicants'.
The problem isn't underemployment of the youth (suck it up, Buttercup, that's how almost everyone starts while they're learning all the things schools don't teach), the problem is the jobs where they can get their real world experience are drying up and it's only going to get worse.
However, as long as there are jobs to be done by humans and humans aren't immortal, eventually older people retire, lose it, or die off and have to be replaced. Hiring will happen. If kids aren't getting hired, it's because there are less jobs overall required to maintain our currently desired economic productivity.
That's a sociopolitical issue to be resolved not by minimum wage hikes or make-work programs, but by legislating shorter standard work weeks and nationalizing health benefits. Make it affordable for employers to hire more people to do the work, make it less life-affecting for people to work less.
>That said, isn't Reddit about 10x more popular (or more!) than Slashdot??
Probably. But while Slashdot is not without its faults, Reddit's designed with them intentionally.
Community moderation by self-elected individuals (with professionals only stepping in if it looks like it could affect Reddit legally, and then only with the corporation's best interests in mind as is to be expected) means Reddit is fractured into thousands of toxic echo chambers, and discussion consists of chasing 'karma'. That in turn results in people posting 'easy karma' meme posts, agreeing mindlessly with groupthink, and no way to filter genuine discussion-driving dissent from trolling.
But it 'works' because it's ego-driven and people eat that shit up even as it makes them miserable.
Actually, a few heavy duty servos driven by a ruggedized laptop taking input from a camera can do a pretty good job of movement / face detection and can aim faster and more accurately than a human.
The problem is lugging them around and setting them up (and the not insignificant issue of Friend-Or-Foe detection...) Ultimately you have a lot more flexibility just handing a rifle to a human... which is why real military sentry guns are for major fixed installations like the Korean border.
Good list, but I'd add one. There needs to be a remote manual override... if for some reason a police officer wants a car to stop, it needs to stop. If emergency vehicles need a clear path, the car needs to get out of the way.
Yes, this will mean there will be a minimum level of exploit possible by malicious individuals, but it's necessary to make autonomous vehicles behave appropriately on public roads.
The USA gave us a dual usage-based / geo-politically based domain system.
It really ought to be have been solely geo-politically based with a byte or two's worth of flags to indicate content type, and domains restricted to appropriate use.
[domain].[state/province].[nation].[super-national grouping]. With tiered DNS that assumes most of that for you if you leave it out. And you know what? Something to distinguish the domain from the other parts so you could have arbitrary numbers of sub-domain categorizations and not have to rely on how many parts are in the name to know what each part represents.
Just because the Internet is great and useful for the world doesn't mean it's perfect or that we should blindly accept it as it is. Just because the USA built it and most of the traffic passes through their borders doesn't mean you can't find fault with aspects of it that stem from that truth.
TLDs haven't been used properly anyway. It's a waste.
But that's what you get when you have the legacy of an American-built, American-centric system, designed with imperfect foresight, and there's too much invested to wipe and reload.
Finding LRO [with ground-based radar, as implied by the entire point of TFA] was relatively easy, as we were working with the mission's navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located
So yes, it was easy to confirm the position of a lunar satellite using Earth-based radar given a position pre-calculated with high confidence.
Hopefully, at least now that it's been spelled out for you, you can grasp why this is interesting and not some kind of joke only were clever enough to spot.
Then there's the extra issue that (for its length) it is no more difficult for a computer to crack but orders of magnitude more difficult for a human to remember - making it more likely to be written down somewhere convenient for the human.
>Saturn's 9.5 au from the sun, so gets 1/9.5^2 = ~1.1% the light we do. It's dark out there.
Which makes it equivalent to dawn or dusk on Earth with clear skies. Dim, but human eyes would still adjust and get the job done... and still plenty of light for a good imaging system (though adding in the incredible distances, the hazardous environment, and the ruggedness requirements just to survive the launch from Earth makes it impressive).
A minimum length, a maximum age, and a requirement to include upper, lower, and a special character are good things.
Length, case, and special characters all massively increase the search space and help to defeat brute forcing and rainbow tables.
People who insist on stupid passwords like, "OM#*&!N!lkjasdf_###7" are the problem. Such passwords are difficult to remember (or type!) and easy to crack. Use a normal sentence (or two short ones) with a proper noun somewhere in it and use normal punctuation. Easy to remember, hard to crack.
>The choice ends up being either not to watch or to pirate. There's no real damage to the industry in such cases.
Except of course most people who don't pirate (presumably because they don't know how) will simply settle for what's otherwise available.
You may not recall the 'good old days' of broadcast television pre-On Demand and pre-VCR... but if one of the handful of channels you could get in your area didn't have what you wanted and you didn't feel like doing something other than sit in front of the tube, you would cycle through whatever was on until you found the least objectionable thing.
Essentially, the industry loses eyeballs when you pirate instead of looking at whatever they've decided to serve to you. (And I'm crying a river for them, obviously...)
It used to be that art was more or less done because either the artist was driven or a patron was willing to fund it.
Right now, art in various forms draws a lot of money... but it isn't piracy that will kill Hollywood, it's machinima. Once an affordable computer can replicate the real world (plus special effects)realistically, the current system will fail completely.
Then our problem will be wading through all the polished turds produced by people who only think they're talented while we're trying to find an actual precious stone.
>this stupid marketing stunt did remind me of one thing that really needs to be examined, how does GRAVITY and the (partial) lack thereof affect our LONG-TERM prospects in space and throughout the solar system?
Yep. We have lots of data on 1G and a lot on ~0G, but nothing significant on 0.16g (the Moon) or 0.38g (Mars).
That's why I'd really like to see us send a couple of experiment modules to Mars to see a few generations of mice and a few generations of plants under low-g.
The problem is when there is an effective cooperative oligopoly, or a monopoly.
Have you tried to buy a phone case for something that isn't an iPhone lately? The iPhone is the current standard for accessories, so if you want accessories you're under heavy pressure to buy Apple.
When that kind of thing happens, you can either allow the market to drift towards an abusive monopoly or you can attempt to correct things legislatively.
And 'right-to-repair'... well, that should be the playing field for all manufacturers regardless of the amount of weight they carry. The idea that you can be sold an object but not actually have complete ownership rights over it is ridiculous. That idea becoming fact is obscene.
Making products deliberately difficult to service or alter, then lobbying for laws to prohibit circumventing those artificial difficulties is not something that should be tolerated in a free society. Not for printer ink, not for gaming consoles, and not for tractors.
>So many of these concepts that I've seen are only for two people or single people in a row.
The vast majority of driving is one person, perhaps with a few bags. The standard vehicle ought to be something that can cover 95% of work commutes and also allow you to stow a few bags of groceries. It doesn't need to go highway speeds either (or be crash-rated for them).
The trick is to make that vehicle (which has been done a few times already) and to get legislators to make said vehicles legal on a standard license. As it is, we get vehicles limited to bicycle speeds or running on 3 wheels and requiring a motorcycle license (and helmet).
All we need is something with a 30 km range (~20 miles), permitted to do 55 km/h (35 mph), with four wheels, and operated by someone with a standard licence. We're essentially talking about a fancy golf cart, but this has been regularly rejected by legislators. We could all have been zipping around in electric cars (for most of our trips) decades ago.
If your product is in stackable containers, you can put them on standard skids and have a robot load them into standard racks. You can go one further and stack product on skids so it is both stable and individual units can be removed by robots.
Orders can be picked by robots, stacked by robots, wrapped by robots. I'm not sure we're ready for loading onto trucks by robots (things just get too messy dealing with LTL when you don't know what's already in the truck).
Still, it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a fairly large robot with one guy who resolves issues the robots can't, maybe loads supplies into label printers and drives a small forklift to load skids into trucks.
You'd probably want to hire two for safety reasons.
When I was working in warehousing decades ago, the forklifts were already partially automated, as were the packaging, ordering, labelling, and even the delivery truck selection systems. The humans were mostly there to sweep the floors, package up less-than-carton amounts of product, apply shipping labels, and load/unload trucks.
> I have never "come across" kiddie images...That said, if I did, I wouldn't report.
This depends on where you live, and how much empathy you have vs. fear of persecution.
I have 'come across' kiddie images, in the early days of the Internet when I'm pretty sure cops didn't even know what the Internet was. Did I report? Hell no.
Today, however, I'm older, I have kids of my own (which really ups the empathy), and I am mature enough to admit I was looking for porn and found something illegal while doing so, if that can assist the police in tracking down someone who is abusing children.
Persecution by the legal system isn't really a thing here, but if I was hesitant to directly contact the police it's not like there aren't a bunch of ways to do so indirectly.
There's a lot of 'Mars stuff' I'm surprised we don't toy with more. Or maybe we are, but it's all in some lab because (so far) that's good enough given our current level of technology and knowledge.
You'd think, for instance, somewhere someone should be experimenting with the minimum requirements for rendering Martian regolith into non-toxic, fertile ground. Toying around with the power requirements to augment Martian sunlight and temperatures to levels required to support Terran plants or trying to engineer plants that will grow and thrive at Martian insolation levels. Figuring out how to reliably supply the required power.
Or playing around with in situ production of building materials, automated mining and refining equipment, etc. Maybe we just don't have a firm enough grasp on what the Martian surface is actually like to bother starting with that. Send a robot to make a little red brick igloo, you know?
I'd certainly be up for a really inhumane experiment - sending a colony of mice in a sealed environment to see multiple generations of mammals under 0.38g. And it might be nice to attempt a small terrarium with some automated environmental systems to see how long we can keep it going. And while we're at that... drop a scale model of an airlock and cycle it until it fails so we can see how bad the dust problem is.
Slashdot Mirror
The court order itself is bad. Google has a distinct corporate entity, with distinct storage, operating in a different nation... and the US courts are essentially saying, "Because you have the same top level owners and your partnership agreements give you access to the data, you're going to get it for us and other nation's laws be damned".
The best Google (US) can do if this insanity proceeds would be to fully sever business ties with foreign Google entities. Presumably that will mean a huge reduction in their efficiency and capabilities.
I'd have expected the Americans to use covert means to get the data they want and to pretend to play nicely in public.
Such a policy would immediately cause every foreign nation to ban using any American company if they might collect any data that might violate their privacy or security policies... and corporations might just beat their government to the punch on that.
The American government gets a little bit of above-board data access at the cost of crippling their global competitiveness in IT. That seems like an exceptionally stupid trade-off.
My experience with industrial accidents is that it's almost certainly human error. I've seen someone deliberately disable the safety systems because they were inconvenient, then get mutilated doing something stupid the safeties would have prevented them from doing.
Personally, I've operated machinery on manual override when it should have been on automatic, the machine blaring warnings at me the whole time which just didn't register because I heard them so often at work. Luckily, the passive safety systems (the big steel protective cage I was in) kept me from harm.
With robots, failures are more likely to stop the system than to start it up. To accidentally start something when it shouldn't be started usually takes human interference.
There was a recession when I hit the workforce after university. It was tough getting a job. REALLY tough. So I did manual labour for a few years before I finally got into my chosen career's industry. This happens. In retrospect, even fresh out of school I wasn't really ready. Too many expectations beyond what my worth as an employee could justify.
Now I'm seeing more or less the same situation with the current generation. The world doesn't owe you shit, life doesn't have to be fair, and no matter how recent your education, chances are there's a grumpy asshole who is of more practical use to an employer because they can handle social interactions in a workplace and understand the way work life works, with enough experience (in precisely what their employer requires!) to more than raise their net value above an inexperienced applicants'.
The problem isn't underemployment of the youth (suck it up, Buttercup, that's how almost everyone starts while they're learning all the things schools don't teach), the problem is the jobs where they can get their real world experience are drying up and it's only going to get worse.
However, as long as there are jobs to be done by humans and humans aren't immortal, eventually older people retire, lose it, or die off and have to be replaced. Hiring will happen. If kids aren't getting hired, it's because there are less jobs overall required to maintain our currently desired economic productivity.
That's a sociopolitical issue to be resolved not by minimum wage hikes or make-work programs, but by legislating shorter standard work weeks and nationalizing health benefits. Make it affordable for employers to hire more people to do the work, make it less life-affecting for people to work less.
>That said, isn't Reddit about 10x more popular (or more!) than Slashdot??
Probably. But while Slashdot is not without its faults, Reddit's designed with them intentionally.
Community moderation by self-elected individuals (with professionals only stepping in if it looks like it could affect Reddit legally, and then only with the corporation's best interests in mind as is to be expected) means Reddit is fractured into thousands of toxic echo chambers, and discussion consists of chasing 'karma'. That in turn results in people posting 'easy karma' meme posts, agreeing mindlessly with groupthink, and no way to filter genuine discussion-driving dissent from trolling.
But it 'works' because it's ego-driven and people eat that shit up even as it makes them miserable.
Actually, a few heavy duty servos driven by a ruggedized laptop taking input from a camera can do a pretty good job of movement / face detection and can aim faster and more accurately than a human.
The problem is lugging them around and setting them up (and the not insignificant issue of Friend-Or-Foe detection...) Ultimately you have a lot more flexibility just handing a rifle to a human... which is why real military sentry guns are for major fixed installations like the Korean border.
Good list, but I'd add one. There needs to be a remote manual override... if for some reason a police officer wants a car to stop, it needs to stop. If emergency vehicles need a clear path, the car needs to get out of the way.
Yes, this will mean there will be a minimum level of exploit possible by malicious individuals, but it's necessary to make autonomous vehicles behave appropriately on public roads.
The USA gave us a dual usage-based / geo-politically based domain system.
It really ought to be have been solely geo-politically based with a byte or two's worth of flags to indicate content type, and domains restricted to appropriate use.
[domain].[state/province].[nation].[super-national grouping]. With tiered DNS that assumes most of that for you if you leave it out. And you know what? Something to distinguish the domain from the other parts so you could have arbitrary numbers of sub-domain categorizations and not have to rely on how many parts are in the name to know what each part represents.
Just because the Internet is great and useful for the world doesn't mean it's perfect or that we should blindly accept it as it is. Just because the USA built it and most of the traffic passes through their borders doesn't mean you can't find fault with aspects of it that stem from that truth.
TLDs haven't been used properly anyway. It's a waste.
But that's what you get when you have the legacy of an American-built, American-centric system, designed with imperfect foresight, and there's too much invested to wipe and reload.
Finding LRO [with ground-based radar, as implied by the entire point of TFA] was relatively easy, as we were working with the mission's navigators and had precise orbit data where it was located
So yes, it was easy to confirm the position of a lunar satellite using Earth-based radar given a position pre-calculated with high confidence.
Hopefully, at least now that it's been spelled out for you, you can grasp why this is interesting and not some kind of joke only were clever enough to spot.
It's too short.
Then there's the extra issue that (for its length) it is no more difficult for a computer to crack but orders of magnitude more difficult for a human to remember - making it more likely to be written down somewhere convenient for the human.
>Saturn's 9.5 au from the sun, so gets 1/9.5^2 = ~1.1% the light we do. It's dark out there.
Which makes it equivalent to dawn or dusk on Earth with clear skies. Dim, but human eyes would still adjust and get the job done... and still plenty of light for a good imaging system (though adding in the incredible distances, the hazardous environment, and the ruggedness requirements just to survive the launch from Earth makes it impressive).
A minimum length, a maximum age, and a requirement to include upper, lower, and a special character are good things.
Length, case, and special characters all massively increase the search space and help to defeat brute forcing and rainbow tables.
People who insist on stupid passwords like, "OM#*&!N!lkjasdf_###7" are the problem. Such passwords are difficult to remember (or type!) and easy to crack. Use a normal sentence (or two short ones) with a proper noun somewhere in it and use normal punctuation. Easy to remember, hard to crack.
>The choice ends up being either not to watch or to pirate. There's no real damage to the industry in such cases.
Except of course most people who don't pirate (presumably because they don't know how) will simply settle for what's otherwise available.
You may not recall the 'good old days' of broadcast television pre-On Demand and pre-VCR... but if one of the handful of channels you could get in your area didn't have what you wanted and you didn't feel like doing something other than sit in front of the tube, you would cycle through whatever was on until you found the least objectionable thing.
Essentially, the industry loses eyeballs when you pirate instead of looking at whatever they've decided to serve to you. (And I'm crying a river for them, obviously...)
It used to be that art was more or less done because either the artist was driven or a patron was willing to fund it.
Right now, art in various forms draws a lot of money... but it isn't piracy that will kill Hollywood, it's machinima. Once an affordable computer can replicate the real world (plus special effects)realistically, the current system will fail completely.
Then our problem will be wading through all the polished turds produced by people who only think they're talented while we're trying to find an actual precious stone.
>this stupid marketing stunt did remind me of one thing that really needs to be examined, how does GRAVITY and the (partial) lack thereof affect our LONG-TERM prospects in space and throughout the solar system?
Yep. We have lots of data on 1G and a lot on ~0G, but nothing significant on 0.16g (the Moon) or 0.38g (Mars).
That's why I'd really like to see us send a couple of experiment modules to Mars to see a few generations of mice and a few generations of plants under low-g.
The problem is when there is an effective cooperative oligopoly, or a monopoly.
Have you tried to buy a phone case for something that isn't an iPhone lately? The iPhone is the current standard for accessories, so if you want accessories you're under heavy pressure to buy Apple.
When that kind of thing happens, you can either allow the market to drift towards an abusive monopoly or you can attempt to correct things legislatively.
And 'right-to-repair'... well, that should be the playing field for all manufacturers regardless of the amount of weight they carry. The idea that you can be sold an object but not actually have complete ownership rights over it is ridiculous. That idea becoming fact is obscene.
Making products deliberately difficult to service or alter, then lobbying for laws to prohibit circumventing those artificial difficulties is not something that should be tolerated in a free society. Not for printer ink, not for gaming consoles, and not for tractors.
Yes, it seems like they're trying to conflate popularity and gross revenue and complaining the results aren't useful for measuring one or the other.
After the first report:
"HEY! I indexed all you guys who don't want to be indexed, because you tell me you don't want to be indexed!"
After the second report:
"If I ignore how much I ignored due to 'do not index me' requests, it looks like everybody is gone!"
Yeah, perhaps not the best methodology.
>So many of these concepts that I've seen are only for two people or single people in a row.
The vast majority of driving is one person, perhaps with a few bags. The standard vehicle ought to be something that can cover 95% of work commutes and also allow you to stow a few bags of groceries. It doesn't need to go highway speeds either (or be crash-rated for them).
The trick is to make that vehicle (which has been done a few times already) and to get legislators to make said vehicles legal on a standard license. As it is, we get vehicles limited to bicycle speeds or running on 3 wheels and requiring a motorcycle license (and helmet).
All we need is something with a 30 km range (~20 miles), permitted to do 55 km/h (35 mph), with four wheels, and operated by someone with a standard licence. We're essentially talking about a fancy golf cart, but this has been regularly rejected by legislators. We could all have been zipping around in electric cars (for most of our trips) decades ago.
If your product is in stackable containers, you can put them on standard skids and have a robot load them into standard racks. You can go one further and stack product on skids so it is both stable and individual units can be removed by robots.
Orders can be picked by robots, stacked by robots, wrapped by robots. I'm not sure we're ready for loading onto trucks by robots (things just get too messy dealing with LTL when you don't know what's already in the truck).
Still, it wouldn't be unreasonable to have a fairly large robot with one guy who resolves issues the robots can't, maybe loads supplies into label printers and drives a small forklift to load skids into trucks.
You'd probably want to hire two for safety reasons.
When I was working in warehousing decades ago, the forklifts were already partially automated, as were the packaging, ordering, labelling, and even the delivery truck selection systems. The humans were mostly there to sweep the floors, package up less-than-carton amounts of product, apply shipping labels, and load/unload trucks.
> I have never "come across" kiddie images...That said, if I did, I wouldn't report.
This depends on where you live, and how much empathy you have vs. fear of persecution.
I have 'come across' kiddie images, in the early days of the Internet when I'm pretty sure cops didn't even know what the Internet was. Did I report? Hell no.
Today, however, I'm older, I have kids of my own (which really ups the empathy), and I am mature enough to admit I was looking for porn and found something illegal while doing so, if that can assist the police in tracking down someone who is abusing children.
Persecution by the legal system isn't really a thing here, but if I was hesitant to directly contact the police it's not like there aren't a bunch of ways to do so indirectly.
That would be an awesome thing to see. If you do it, please put it up on a DIY project site and link to it here.
There's a lot of 'Mars stuff' I'm surprised we don't toy with more. Or maybe we are, but it's all in some lab because (so far) that's good enough given our current level of technology and knowledge.
You'd think, for instance, somewhere someone should be experimenting with the minimum requirements for rendering Martian regolith into non-toxic, fertile ground. Toying around with the power requirements to augment Martian sunlight and temperatures to levels required to support Terran plants or trying to engineer plants that will grow and thrive at Martian insolation levels. Figuring out how to reliably supply the required power.
Or playing around with in situ production of building materials, automated mining and refining equipment, etc. Maybe we just don't have a firm enough grasp on what the Martian surface is actually like to bother starting with that. Send a robot to make a little red brick igloo, you know?
I'd certainly be up for a really inhumane experiment - sending a colony of mice in a sealed environment to see multiple generations of mammals under 0.38g. And it might be nice to attempt a small terrarium with some automated environmental systems to see how long we can keep it going. And while we're at that... drop a scale model of an airlock and cycle it until it fails so we can see how bad the dust problem is.
>But without something to keep the atmosphere there it's pointless.
You know how I know you didn't RTFA? Or even the summary?