Actually I deal with real-world problems daily as a network admin. I do not manage the building controls themselves, but the network that they're supposed to communicate on. Trouble is, they're implemented quite poorly and those who are supposed to maintain them end up calling me because their device in some far-off site isn't responding anymore or isn't behaving properly. I routinely have to deal with problems with security cameras that continue to draw PoE after they malfunction but don't respond to IP anymore, keypads that stop responding, gate and door solenoid controllers whose relay channels burn out and stop signalling or else stop sensing gate or door status, HVAC controllers that shut off when the network has a problem so that the buildings get hot or cold when they can't communicate with a central controller, marquees that stop associating with the wireless point-to-point network and can't be updated, and commercial freezers that stop responding over wireless to their controllers monitoring their temperatures. And that isn't even getting into the wireless access points, point-of-sale terminals, and everyone's one-off server that they've got stashed somewhere that is still set for DHCP.
In short, the bulk of it is garbage. Trash, clear and simple. These devices are not ready for prime-time.
And this isn't even accounting for the Internet of Broken Crap, or the Internet of Badly-Implemented Crap.
Think it's annoying when that one door at work won't open because cheapass RFID controller has a channel burned out that's supposed to trigger the solenoid? Imagine when your coffee maker won't work because it doesn't detect that you've gotten up and into the shower, or the HVAC doesn't kick on for the room you've just entered because the house computer didn't detect occupancy, or the surround sound system malfunctions and thinks there's a party, so it turns on the music loudly at 3am, or the fridge's inventory list gets corrupted and it reorders everything that you have in an already full fridge...
I expect the future to be more like Brazil than like Star Trek.
If you want to risk the inherent problems in confronting the police when they do something illegal, I'm sure that there would be an organization that would sue on your behalf, something like the ACLU. Unfortunately it's very likely that it'd be a rough few years and that the police would not give you any benefit of the doubt in encounters with you.
In my neighborhood our backyard fences are 6' high. We also have dozens of thorny rose bushes that were here when we bought the place that we've maintained. There is no practical way to casually trespass.
What they should probably do is marry the control system for the Phalanx with something like Metal Storm, which uses cartridgeless ammunition stacked in the barrels, to make a man or crew-operated portable device that can put a lot of rounds into the air very quickly without having a whole lot of moving parts. It would essentially be a sentry gun, but close anti-air instead of long-range anti-air or anti-personnel.
And I don't doubt that they are concerned about tiny little bits of explosives being brought in on drones. A modern hand grenade is not very big and not very heavy, and a drone capable of carrying an SLR with long lens could probably carry a few of them, dropping them as called for.
I'm not really all that concerned about the physical aspect- it's all solid-state so if the housing of the mouse is decent then it should last assuming it's not dropped from height or crushed, but I just wonder when the point of diminishing return will be reached. Seems like it makes more sense to build the computer into the display or into something the size of a small portable hard disk drive, so that it can have USB ports or bluetooth for the keyboard and mouse, and could literally hang on the HDMI port on the TV like the "Amazon Fire TV Stick" works.
There is a subsequent ruling that essentially allows a drone to spot what's in plain view in the backyard of a home, even if that stuff is within the curtilage behind a fence, but Katz seems to establish the right to privacy where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy, so long as there isn't a warrant.
Any technology that could see into someone's home through an opaque barrier would seem to be in violation of that.
...and wasn't the conclusion that we were waiting on a ruling through the courts?
If a police dog is considered equipment, and cannot be used without a warrant when dealing with homes, and if other law-enforcement devices whose specific purpose is to detect into homes have been ruled in the past to need warrants, then wouldn't it follow that once this does reach the courts, it'll be found inadmissable because of a lack of warrant?
A new business-grade laptop is at least $1500 for a fully-loaded model, this really isn't a whole lot more assuming that they can deliver on everything they've promised.
I'll be amazed if they manage to get all of that into 4.4lb with the presence of the optical drive.
My wife's Thinkpad X301 is ~3.25lb, designed to be as absolutely light-weight as possible while being durable, with an optical drive.
Her new Thinkpad Yoga 12 with the i7 is a hair over 3.5lb, also designed to be as light-weight as possible while being durable with a convertible 2-in-1 setup, without an optical drive.
If they succeed I'll consider getting one, but I'm still wondering what the catch is.
Well, my plan is to consider electrics once they're at the 150-mile-range point in a pricepoint that I can afford, assuming that they're not butt-ugly like so many of them have been. I'm not exactly a Ford fan, but that hatchback electric based on a conventional car isn't too bad. Given that my commute is about 20 miles round-trip, I'd probably drive it like I stole it rather than driving it like a little old lady that only goes to church on Sundays...
I wouldn't be surprised if people put up honeypots on Tor just to mess with 'em, and log all of the output over serial or something so that even if they get in, they can't purge the logs of their attempts.
And the fact that $100/barrel oil and $4.00/gallon gasoline means that consumers have a strong incentive to look at alternate forms of energy. Houses get built that don't use "home heating oil" for their furnaces, cars that are increasingly fuel efficient become more popular, and some car buyers actually look at their driving patterns to see if electrics can meet their needs.
If oil remains expensive for the long-term, oil finds its customer base slowly evaporating, until a tipping-point is reached where economies of scale suddenly make the new stuff even more practical, and as that happens, politicians start seeing an opportunity to restrict the manufacture of new products that operate the old way, and then the oil market shrinks even further.
I'm not saying that internal combustion engines in cars would go away quickly as soon as extremely cheap electric cars come into production, but look at the number of cars still on the road that lack airbags, or that lack antilock brakes, or that have carburetors instead of some form of fuel injection. It takes less than fifteen years for the bulk of cars on the road to no longer have the older technology once the new one is standard, and less than 20 years for the old way to be legitimately rare. That's the danger the oil producers face with $100/barrel oil, that the car companies will start making electrics due to customer demand, and that more and more customers will like them and buy them.
I expect that many of them make as much money doing Youtube videos as many local TV newscasters, reporters, and Radio DJs do, if they've been smart about how they do things. They certainly could do a lot worse for themselves.
It's pretty clear that old-media isn't quite sure what to make of new-media. Jerry Seinfeld's show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee exemplified this by bringing Miranda Sings on as one of the comedians- it was one of the few that I simply couldn't watch and ended up turning off. I did not find her in-character schtick to be funny, and it seemed like quite a step down compared to Carl Reiner and Jay Leno.
President Obama already did meet with Youtubers once; Hannah Hart, who came to prominence for My Drunk Kitchen and later started producing videos on the challenges of being homosexual was among them.
I get Hank Green to an extent, he's a little goofy, but his videos seem to be more in the manner of Bill Nye crossed with Andy Rooney, plus his status has been elevated through his collaborations with his brother, but I'm not sure about the other two. I hadn't heard of them before, and when I pulled up their channels from the article summary I was greeted with opening presentations that didn't really make me want to watch their videos. There may be something deeper about what they do, but it wasn't instantly obvious to me as a new viewer.
It should be interesting, to see what the topics of the conversation actually are. Youtube today seems to have replaced what livejournal and blogger and other web log sites did fifteen years ago, so perhaps this is an attempt to engage the upcoming generation on their own terms, but by letting that generation bring their media to prominence rather than attempting to co-opt their media and failing at it badly.
Typing this on a MackBook Pro, I wholeheartedly agree that the shiny reflective screen thing is a huge annoyance. In complex lighting I'm having to adjust the screen angle as I change my seating position from time to time.
I'm running OSX on this MacBook, but mainly because while I'm a Linux geek first, I work in a Windows/AD shop that formerly was a Netware shop that has had Macintoshes and Linux servers. I can use anything. OSX gives me enough command-line to be functional doing network administration easily and lets me interface to Linux boxes, and with the multitouch touchpad is quite good, the touchpad on my Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga running Windows is *almost* as good, the touchpad on my Alienware 17" running Linux kind of sucks compared all of the others.
To me it doesn't matter, the software I want to use runs on just about everything, and all of the platforms have their strengths and weaknesses.
Given the crazy volume of laws imposed by our governments, it's almost certain everyone commits multiple crimes daily.
Which is why one should exercise one's right to remain silent. The police do not decide to prosecute or not, and do not get to 'make deals' or not. That's firmly in the prosecutor's realm, with required agreement from a judge in the case of plea deals. Police offers to, "go easy on you," if you cooperate now, or to, "put in a good word to X," are also meaningless, as once the evidence is turned over to the prosecutor, the police have only as much influence as the prosecutor is willing to accept.
Don't do the police's job for them, you're not required to tell them anything or to admit guilt. There's always another opportunity to "make a deal", with your lawyer and the prosecutor negotiating that deal, not you and the plainclothes detective.
I find it unlikely that the tech sector will ever even get close to parity. Too many boys get interested in tech as a reaction to be ostracized from other groups. They develop a culture all their own, and that culture is usually not particularly friendly to people that are different from them, that have not gotten along with them terribly well, or that they don't think measure-up. Girls, and later women, squarely hit all three for the the vast majority of them, and when that's the base to which others entering technical fields through career planning rather than through personal interest have to deal with, that will turn-off people that don't like what they find.
When one looks at scandals like "gamergate" and other situations where women are finding themselves subject to personal attack when they disagree with other members of the community, you can begin to see the underbelly of the problem. Boys that don't get along with girls, objectify girls because of their own needs, and never are taught to behave otherwise will automatically reinforce an environment that's struggled with gender parity from the beginning.
The solution is to fix this when boys are in their tween and teen years, but that takes effort and a willingness to deal with the social issues that led to the problem in the first place. Screeching about the problem after it's become established won't fix it.
He's no fan of Philip K. Dick. If he were, he wouldn't have gone on trying to claim that Deckard is a replicant, and he wouldn't have claimed in an interview that he never read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? before making Blade Runner.
Don't get me wrong. I like a lot of Scott's movies and TV shows that he's been involved with, but being good at making adaptations or good with stories doesn't mean that he's interested in maintaining the feel of the author's work.
The GOP maybe, but this has been a hot-button issue for conservatives for a while, and the current sentiment is "wait, who did this wonderful thing, I must have heard you wrong". The difference between conservatives and the GOP is left as an exercise for the reader.
One thing it does do, is to take the wind out of the GOP's sails if they want to themselves pursue a change the asset forfeiture laws. If this has been contentious in the Republican Party (the law-and-order types against stopping it, the small-government times for stopping it) then not only does it deny the small-government side from being able to claim a victory over the incumbent position, but it opens a window to possibly see ugly GOP infighting. In such infighting, the law-and-order types will look bad because the excesses in asset forfeiture will be front and center, and the small-government types will be smeared for agreeing with the President.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually I deal with real-world problems daily as a network admin. I do not manage the building controls themselves, but the network that they're supposed to communicate on. Trouble is, they're implemented quite poorly and those who are supposed to maintain them end up calling me because their device in some far-off site isn't responding anymore or isn't behaving properly. I routinely have to deal with problems with security cameras that continue to draw PoE after they malfunction but don't respond to IP anymore, keypads that stop responding, gate and door solenoid controllers whose relay channels burn out and stop signalling or else stop sensing gate or door status, HVAC controllers that shut off when the network has a problem so that the buildings get hot or cold when they can't communicate with a central controller, marquees that stop associating with the wireless point-to-point network and can't be updated, and commercial freezers that stop responding over wireless to their controllers monitoring their temperatures. And that isn't even getting into the wireless access points, point-of-sale terminals, and everyone's one-off server that they've got stashed somewhere that is still set for DHCP.
In short, the bulk of it is garbage. Trash, clear and simple. These devices are not ready for prime-time.
And this isn't even accounting for the Internet of Broken Crap, or the Internet of Badly-Implemented Crap.
Think it's annoying when that one door at work won't open because cheapass RFID controller has a channel burned out that's supposed to trigger the solenoid? Imagine when your coffee maker won't work because it doesn't detect that you've gotten up and into the shower, or the HVAC doesn't kick on for the room you've just entered because the house computer didn't detect occupancy, or the surround sound system malfunctions and thinks there's a party, so it turns on the music loudly at 3am, or the fridge's inventory list gets corrupted and it reorders everything that you have in an already full fridge...
I expect the future to be more like Brazil than like Star Trek.
If you want to risk the inherent problems in confronting the police when they do something illegal, I'm sure that there would be an organization that would sue on your behalf, something like the ACLU. Unfortunately it's very likely that it'd be a rough few years and that the police would not give you any benefit of the doubt in encounters with you.
In my neighborhood our backyard fences are 6' high. We also have dozens of thorny rose bushes that were here when we bought the place that we've maintained. There is no practical way to casually trespass.
You mean, Phalanx CIWS?
What they should probably do is marry the control system for the Phalanx with something like Metal Storm, which uses cartridgeless ammunition stacked in the barrels, to make a man or crew-operated portable device that can put a lot of rounds into the air very quickly without having a whole lot of moving parts. It would essentially be a sentry gun, but close anti-air instead of long-range anti-air or anti-personnel.
And I don't doubt that they are concerned about tiny little bits of explosives being brought in on drones. A modern hand grenade is not very big and not very heavy, and a drone capable of carrying an SLR with long lens could probably carry a few of them, dropping them as called for.
I wonder how secure l33t sp34k is now; if it's automatically being tried simply because it's so ubiquitous.
I'm not really all that concerned about the physical aspect- it's all solid-state so if the housing of the mouse is decent then it should last assuming it's not dropped from height or crushed, but I just wonder when the point of diminishing return will be reached. Seems like it makes more sense to build the computer into the display or into something the size of a small portable hard disk drive, so that it can have USB ports or bluetooth for the keyboard and mouse, and could literally hang on the HDMI port on the TV like the "Amazon Fire TV Stick" works.
...on the keyboard...
For the purposes of searches, they're considered equipment.
Florida V. Jardines
Actually, the distinction is "naked eye".
Katz v. United States.
There is a subsequent ruling that essentially allows a drone to spot what's in plain view in the backyard of a home, even if that stuff is within the curtilage behind a fence, but Katz seems to establish the right to privacy where one has a reasonable expectation of privacy, so long as there isn't a warrant.
Any technology that could see into someone's home through an opaque barrier would seem to be in violation of that.
...and wasn't the conclusion that we were waiting on a ruling through the courts?
If a police dog is considered equipment, and cannot be used without a warrant when dealing with homes, and if other law-enforcement devices whose specific purpose is to detect into homes have been ruled in the past to need warrants, then wouldn't it follow that once this does reach the courts, it'll be found inadmissable because of a lack of warrant?
A new business-grade laptop is at least $1500 for a fully-loaded model, this really isn't a whole lot more assuming that they can deliver on everything they've promised.
I'll be amazed if they manage to get all of that into 4.4lb with the presence of the optical drive.
My wife's Thinkpad X301 is ~3.25lb, designed to be as absolutely light-weight as possible while being durable, with an optical drive.
Her new Thinkpad Yoga 12 with the i7 is a hair over 3.5lb, also designed to be as light-weight as possible while being durable with a convertible 2-in-1 setup, without an optical drive.
If they succeed I'll consider getting one, but I'm still wondering what the catch is.
Well, my plan is to consider electrics once they're at the 150-mile-range point in a pricepoint that I can afford, assuming that they're not butt-ugly like so many of them have been. I'm not exactly a Ford fan, but that hatchback electric based on a conventional car isn't too bad. Given that my commute is about 20 miles round-trip, I'd probably drive it like I stole it rather than driving it like a little old lady that only goes to church on Sundays...
I wouldn't be surprised if people put up honeypots on Tor just to mess with 'em, and log all of the output over serial or something so that even if they get in, they can't purge the logs of their attempts.
And the fact that $100/barrel oil and $4.00/gallon gasoline means that consumers have a strong incentive to look at alternate forms of energy. Houses get built that don't use "home heating oil" for their furnaces, cars that are increasingly fuel efficient become more popular, and some car buyers actually look at their driving patterns to see if electrics can meet their needs.
If oil remains expensive for the long-term, oil finds its customer base slowly evaporating, until a tipping-point is reached where economies of scale suddenly make the new stuff even more practical, and as that happens, politicians start seeing an opportunity to restrict the manufacture of new products that operate the old way, and then the oil market shrinks even further.
I'm not saying that internal combustion engines in cars would go away quickly as soon as extremely cheap electric cars come into production, but look at the number of cars still on the road that lack airbags, or that lack antilock brakes, or that have carburetors instead of some form of fuel injection. It takes less than fifteen years for the bulk of cars on the road to no longer have the older technology once the new one is standard, and less than 20 years for the old way to be legitimately rare. That's the danger the oil producers face with $100/barrel oil, that the car companies will start making electrics due to customer demand, and that more and more customers will like them and buy them.
I expect that many of them make as much money doing Youtube videos as many local TV newscasters, reporters, and Radio DJs do, if they've been smart about how they do things. They certainly could do a lot worse for themselves.
It's pretty clear that old-media isn't quite sure what to make of new-media. Jerry Seinfeld's show Comedians in Cars Getting Coffee exemplified this by bringing Miranda Sings on as one of the comedians- it was one of the few that I simply couldn't watch and ended up turning off. I did not find her in-character schtick to be funny, and it seemed like quite a step down compared to Carl Reiner and Jay Leno.
President Obama already did meet with Youtubers once; Hannah Hart, who came to prominence for My Drunk Kitchen and later started producing videos on the challenges of being homosexual was among them.
I get Hank Green to an extent, he's a little goofy, but his videos seem to be more in the manner of Bill Nye crossed with Andy Rooney, plus his status has been elevated through his collaborations with his brother, but I'm not sure about the other two. I hadn't heard of them before, and when I pulled up their channels from the article summary I was greeted with opening presentations that didn't really make me want to watch their videos. There may be something deeper about what they do, but it wasn't instantly obvious to me as a new viewer.
It should be interesting, to see what the topics of the conversation actually are. Youtube today seems to have replaced what livejournal and blogger and other web log sites did fifteen years ago, so perhaps this is an attempt to engage the upcoming generation on their own terms, but by letting that generation bring their media to prominence rather than attempting to co-opt their media and failing at it badly.
...and apparently no one got the joke, since Macintoshes don't have internal blu-ray drives or software to play blu-ray discs...
Every village/town/city, county, and state has its own laws and regulations, and those jurisdictions get to decide on their own rules.
Typing this on a MackBook Pro, I wholeheartedly agree that the shiny reflective screen thing is a huge annoyance. In complex lighting I'm having to adjust the screen angle as I change my seating position from time to time.
I'm running OSX on this MacBook, but mainly because while I'm a Linux geek first, I work in a Windows/AD shop that formerly was a Netware shop that has had Macintoshes and Linux servers. I can use anything. OSX gives me enough command-line to be functional doing network administration easily and lets me interface to Linux boxes, and with the multitouch touchpad is quite good, the touchpad on my Lenovo Thinkpad Yoga running Windows is *almost* as good, the touchpad on my Alienware 17" running Linux kind of sucks compared all of the others.
To me it doesn't matter, the software I want to use runs on just about everything, and all of the platforms have their strengths and weaknesses.
Yeah! I can enjoy those Blu-Rays I have on my 5K iMac amd make use of the high resolution!
Which is why one should exercise one's right to remain silent. The police do not decide to prosecute or not, and do not get to 'make deals' or not. That's firmly in the prosecutor's realm, with required agreement from a judge in the case of plea deals. Police offers to, "go easy on you," if you cooperate now, or to, "put in a good word to X," are also meaningless, as once the evidence is turned over to the prosecutor, the police have only as much influence as the prosecutor is willing to accept.
Don't do the police's job for them, you're not required to tell them anything or to admit guilt. There's always another opportunity to "make a deal", with your lawyer and the prosecutor negotiating that deal, not you and the plainclothes detective.
I find it unlikely that the tech sector will ever even get close to parity. Too many boys get interested in tech as a reaction to be ostracized from other groups. They develop a culture all their own, and that culture is usually not particularly friendly to people that are different from them, that have not gotten along with them terribly well, or that they don't think measure-up. Girls, and later women, squarely hit all three for the the vast majority of them, and when that's the base to which others entering technical fields through career planning rather than through personal interest have to deal with, that will turn-off people that don't like what they find.
When one looks at scandals like "gamergate" and other situations where women are finding themselves subject to personal attack when they disagree with other members of the community, you can begin to see the underbelly of the problem. Boys that don't get along with girls, objectify girls because of their own needs, and never are taught to behave otherwise will automatically reinforce an environment that's struggled with gender parity from the beginning.
The solution is to fix this when boys are in their tween and teen years, but that takes effort and a willingness to deal with the social issues that led to the problem in the first place. Screeching about the problem after it's become established won't fix it.
He's no fan of Philip K. Dick. If he were, he wouldn't have gone on trying to claim that Deckard is a replicant, and he wouldn't have claimed in an interview that he never read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? before making Blade Runner.
Don't get me wrong. I like a lot of Scott's movies and TV shows that he's been involved with, but being good at making adaptations or good with stories doesn't mean that he's interested in maintaining the feel of the author's work.
One thing it does do, is to take the wind out of the GOP's sails if they want to themselves pursue a change the asset forfeiture laws. If this has been contentious in the Republican Party (the law-and-order types against stopping it, the small-government times for stopping it) then not only does it deny the small-government side from being able to claim a victory over the incumbent position, but it opens a window to possibly see ugly GOP infighting. In such infighting, the law-and-order types will look bad because the excesses in asset forfeiture will be front and center, and the small-government types will be smeared for agreeing with the President.
This was a masterful move, politically.