I wonder if you guys have put any bandwidth preservation measures in place in case of a natural disaster than limits connectivity between the mesh and the outside. I'm thinking if a giant mutant beaver takes out a dam that fries nearby telcos, you don't want somebody on a Skype video chat using up the lone remaining Pringle can-to-mountain top link. But then, that's more of an issue for the Project Byzantium use cases than yours I guess.
PS -- please tell me you didn't create 68 slashdot accounts just to get that UID.
Since we're already talking about cars, I'll have to resort to a phone analogy.
The smartphone equivalent is that "all" this does is provide an API for smartphone apps to access GPS location, tilt sensor data, and battery SOC and drain rate. But really that's pretty huge in itself, it's enough to enable search based on location (be that Yelp, Opentable, or just Bing). It's enough to create crowd-sourced traffic maps, and it might even be enough to do Slashdot style moderation of nearby drivers.
But yeah I'd like the diagnostic info (much of which is going to be model-specific) and even more I'd like to write to the CAN bus to control non-critical stuff. And of course as an app writer I'll want to secretly upload your address book to my servers so I can sell it to information brokers and download targeted advertising. Oops did I say that out loud?
My first app would switch to recirculating air whenever I go near one of the local sewage treatment plants or enter a tunnel. (Or any rectangle I can define via a pair of GPS coordinates, and of course the smell map will be a downloadable crowd-sourced database.) Upon exiting the smelly zone the vent mode returns to whatever it was set to prior. Right now I have a subroutine running on base-brain to handle this task which works well for the frequently travelled areas. But if I forget when driving near that feed lot on I-5, I'm stuck with cow-shit air for *miles*.
So can openxc control things like the air vents? I'm thinking of the Prius which has a recirc button the steering wheel as well as the dash, so it's probably possible to plug into a bus somewhere.
Yes, the Firefox team is finally going to release ESR after all this time. It proves that Mitchell Baker can be very unforgiving if you forget the safe word.
[I came all this way looking for an ESR joke. C'mon people, throw me a bone here.]
No, you've confused the instructions for first responders with the instructions for the dealerships doing post-crash repairs. Per a post elsewhere:
The Volt service manual documents what should be done to inspect the high voltage systems following a collision in Volume 2, section 11, page 332. After a collision as severe as in the side-impact crash test, the battery pack should be removed from the vehicle.
Still it's a good thing NHTSA is looking into this (while not picking solely on GM). After the Toyota unintended acceleration issue the US auto safety regulators looked bad because they appeared to have not paid attention to the early warning signs, and that ended up being bad for the regulator, the regulatee, and the consumers. Even if this turns out to be a total non-problem, it will help debunk fear-mongering against EV technology. IMHO.
Because:
1) you could choose a notary run by someone you trust
2) you could UN-choose a notary if you stop trusting it
3) you can delegate the above to your browser maker or a plugin maker you trust, and not worry about it, just like you already do with the CA system. But *they* can do #s 1 and 2.
With the CA system you don't have have that flexibility in any practical sense.
It doesn't cost $23M/year to attend college only because banks don't expect students to repay a $24M/yr loan. However you'll notice that med students pay a lot closer to $23M/year than history PhD students.
The vast majority of students aren't saying "gee, $20K/year is too much, but I'm all in at $19.5K". They are simply applying for loans at whatever the cost, and if they get them they're in. It's a different twist on the free market dynamic you're imagining. The price is tied to what is lendable, which is determined by the banks based on how much of a students future expected earnings they believe they can grab. Schools are happy to go along for that ride.
As an aside on the relationship of school price to the actual cost of education, schools will claim (and feel) the need to pay competitive salaries to high level administrators and profs in demand. This is partly how the max the bank will lend is ultimately laundered into the "cost of education".
When large segments give up on college the prices will go down. They can only be as high as they are because people are willing to borrow (and others to lend) large amounts of money to pay for them.
This is the key misunderstanding here. It's not a "free market" question. It's ultimately a question of the same corruption that has infected other segments of our system. No matter how many students attend, all of them will have their future earnings taken. Tuitions will not drop in proportion to attendance, they will only rise or fall in proportion to the expected future earnings of their students.
Schools expect you will earn money, so they justify higher tuitions (which they then spend profligately on salaries and expansion projects while monetizing every aspect of the "academic" process). Banks expect you will earn money, so they lend in proportion. The banks and the schools have rigged the game.
What happens when there are two billion sites (like Moxie hoped) that all need to be queried once a day by every notary? Who pays those bandwidth bills?
In Convergence notaries do not poll those sites once a day or ever. Notaries only contact a server when there is a mismatch between what the client reports seeing and what's already in the notary's cache. That means the notary only contacts a site when the site has changed its cert.
Honestly I think you might have missed his point. A larger excerpt of the blog post:
Given that essentially the whole population of Chrome users would use the default notary settings, those notaries will get a large amount of traffic. Also, we have a very strong interest for the notaries to function, otherwise Chrome stops working. Combined, that means that Google would end up running the notaries.
There is some truth to that -- a performance concern leading to a privacy concern.
But given that the notaries are only queried for the very first contact to a secure site (browser uses its cache for future contacts), I wonder if he's overestimating the amount of traffic at the notaries and it's impact on the browser experience. Plus, as you pointed out, users can have their own notary lists like the anti-phishing ones, so if they don't want to trust Google they can pick non-Google servers.
Or Google could fund (perhaps in consortium) an external party to provide high-availability notaries that firewall Google from the privacy issues around notarizing Chrome users' https requests. Convergence can also use an intermediate proxy in order to hide the browser's IP address from the notaries it uses. So long as the default is to use a non-Google proxy to talk to Google's notaries, Google would be safe from privacy accusations on that front.
Average users could simply subscribe to a list of notaries like most users do with the filter lists for Adblock Plus or IE9's Tracking Protection lists. Someone trustworthy who cares maintains the "EasyTrust" list that most users will subscribe to, and the community of knowledgeable geeks keeps an eye on that and cries foul if it gets taken over by a Sith lord or something.
But hell, even if the default list is maintained by the browser vendor, it's still way better than and more agile in response to problems than what we have now.
El Reg has reported on Google's Adam Langley in reponse to Convergence. Langley says' he doesn't see including it in Chrome because users would never change the default notaries, and Google would have to run their own notaries in order to ensure performance. And that would mean a privacy issue for Chrome as it "phones home" every user's https requests to Google. [Doesn't Chrome already have some kind of anti-phishing Safe Browsing feature that does this anyway?]
However Langley was good enough to open the door to the possibility of future API tweaks that would allow a third-party Convergence extension for Chrome (Chrome doesn't currently have a way for extensions to sit in the SSL cert decision path).
From the talk, Convergence is based on Perspectives, with some updates: - Once a client has confirmed a certificate through the notaries, it is cached locally. Future contacts for that site will not need re-notarization until the site's cert is changed. That way your browsing history is not exposed through your notary contacts very often. - Contact to the notaries can be done through a trusted proxy over SSL, to protect exposure of your browser history. - The user can choose one or more notaries, and choose to distrust any of them at any time. - Each notary can use any backend validation method it wants. It could check certs stored in DNSSEC, it could use the existing CA system, the EFF will have one that uses their SSL observatory, etc.
I talking to an architect working in Beijing the other day. She said they keep an ipad in every room of their large office.
Tablets are going to catch on in the workplace, and the ones that lock down and integrate with corporate IT policies are going to be sold at profitable margins. HP could have aimed for that, but it's clearly in Microsoft's DNA. And clearly *not* in Apple's, despite the anecdote above.
Indeed. It's *nix under the hood for iOS and android just as it is for webOS (sitting on a Linux kernel just like android, no?). This debacle is hardly a case of Betmax vs. VHS in the sense of objectively superior underlying tech losing out to non-technical market factors. The TouchPad simply fails to distinguish itself in the current marketplace *and* has no "tapes" available to play on it.
Now HP might have been able to hang on to a proprietary platform (webOS above Linux) and aim for a profitable niche: enterprises are going to be flooded with pads, and they are going to be more friendly and less price sensitive to units that lock-down and integrate with IT policies. Apple doesn't have a history of focusing on that, and android's openness will frighten any sensible corporate IT department.
Looking at their WebOS powered tablet at BestBuy next to the iPad2 and android units like the Galaxy Tab, all I can think is WTF, HP? But thanks for buying my Palm shares.
The US Federal gov't gives a 30% tax credit on the installed cost through 2016.
States and municipalities offer a patchwork of different incentives. California currently gives one-time rebates of about $1.10/kW of installed capacity on residential systems, or about $0.20/kWh generated by larger non-residential systems. The rebates started out at $3.50/kW installed, and slope down to zero after a total of 1800MW have been installed. $1.10/kW is in the ballpark of 12% of installed cost.
The home generated power tends to be bought at retail equivalent, i.e. the meter runs backwards when generation exceeds usage, and the user pays for net wattage. In most areas users are not compensated for a positive net production (annually), but this appears to be changing.
There are also some market forces at work. The price/kW of solar panels has dropped considerably over just the last 5 years. Obviously there are many more experienced sellers and installers now. Financing is smoother (banks know what a solar panel is now), insuring is smoother, etc.
So it's a little like the Prius. Hybrids had a tax incentive at first, but now that's well over and it's selling extremely well, people have become familiar with them, and in the end it makes sense for enough people to sustain a profitable market. The incentives did their job.
One of the nice things about Linux was that it was lean & mean, then the desktop guys trashed that reputation.
I too would like to see more emphasis on performance for Linux desktop components. When Ubuntu started they made it a stated aim to run well on whatever hardware Dell was selling for $500. So neither third-world nor top-of-the-line. Today versus even 5 years ago a $500 Dell is a lot faster, with more RAM, and better graphics hardware. Why hamstring the OS experience of Ubuntu or Fedora to not take advantage of all this? There are other distros that focus on running well on special-needs hardware, without the "bloat" of GNOME etc.
I have only love for GNOME, but it is interesting to consider whether the resistance to LightDM from within GNOME is a reasonable caution of dominance by Ubuntu or an inertial stop on needed improvements to the Linux desktop experience.
The guy comments about environmental responsibility and you change the subject to $$?
Let me take a shot. A quick search says americans watch an average of 151 hours of TV/month: 1812 hrs/year, which is a penalty of (1812 hrTV/year * 0.177kWh/hrTV =~ ) 321 kWh / year.
A quick search says on average, 1kWh generated in america puts out 1.3lbs CO2. So the average american would generate about (321KWh/year * 1.3lbsCO2/kWh =~) 417 lbs of CO2/year from using an Xbox 360 instead of an Apple TV.
By comparison, a gallon of gas has about 19.56 lbs of CO2 (citing same source). So the average american's added CO2 from a year of Xbox-TV watching is equivalent to using about (417lbs CO2/yr / 19.56 lbsCo2/gallon =~) 21.3 gallons gas.
Upshot: Xbox vs. Apple TV is equivalent to about one tank of gas per year in extra CO2.
Considering that the example of utter devastation in WWI didn't prevent WWII, and considering that the global political landscape can shift within the 50-ish year lifespan of any reactor (rise of China, re-alignment of the Middle East, etc.), and considering the proliferation of nuclear reactors into possibly unstable countries (India, Iran, China, etc.) it's hard to claim that war is an unlikely threat to nuclear reactors. IMHO. History is long and unforgiving.
Consider also the revealed history of possible mutally-assured-destruction between the US and former USSR. According to SecDef Robert MacNamara, we came to the very brink of nuclear war on *more than one* occasion aside from the Cuban Missile Crisis. (That fact alone should give any sane person pause.) And if we could come that close, others will surely come closer to insanely devastating wars.
Again, the chances may seem small, but the consequences are totally unacceptable.
Nuclear is dangerous but Japan is in a difficult position because it has little in the way of natural resources like oil, gas and coal with which to generate electricity. There is also the "benefit", if you can call it that, of having the facilities to manufacture weapons grade uranium very quickly which allows Japan to remain a non-nuclear country but have the ability to rapidly arm themselves if the situation deteriorates that far.
Speaking of war, in all the press coverage of earthquake-proofing the reactors, I haven't seen a single mention of the potential hazards from nuclear power plants damaged by war. In the US we actively worry about terrorism, but a war in which bombs or missiles strike one or more reactors is a realistic possibility, and much more so in Japan.
With nuclear, the probabilities of leaks may be small, but the possible consequences are unacceptably high. And as each serious accident has shown, neither the risks nor the consequences are adequately understood.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if you guys have put any bandwidth preservation measures in place in case of a natural disaster than limits connectivity between the mesh and the outside. I'm thinking if a giant mutant beaver takes out a dam that fries nearby telcos, you don't want somebody on a Skype video chat using up the lone remaining Pringle can-to-mountain top link. But then, that's more of an issue for the Project Byzantium use cases than yours I guess.
PS -- please tell me you didn't create 68 slashdot accounts just to get that UID.
Since we're already talking about cars, I'll have to resort to a phone analogy.
The smartphone equivalent is that "all" this does is provide an API for smartphone apps to access GPS location, tilt sensor data, and battery SOC and drain rate. But really that's pretty huge in itself, it's enough to enable search based on location (be that Yelp, Opentable, or just Bing). It's enough to create crowd-sourced traffic maps, and it might even be enough to do Slashdot style moderation of nearby drivers.
But yeah I'd like the diagnostic info (much of which is going to be model-specific) and even more I'd like to write to the CAN bus to control non-critical stuff. And of course as an app writer I'll want to secretly upload your address book to my servers so I can sell it to information brokers and download targeted advertising. Oops did I say that out loud?
My first app would switch to recirculating air whenever I go near one of the local sewage treatment plants or enter a tunnel. (Or any rectangle I can define via a pair of GPS coordinates, and of course the smell map will be a downloadable crowd-sourced database.) Upon exiting the smelly zone the vent mode returns to whatever it was set to prior. Right now I have a subroutine running on base-brain to handle this task which works well for the frequently travelled areas. But if I forget when driving near that feed lot on I-5, I'm stuck with cow-shit air for *miles*.
So can openxc control things like the air vents? I'm thinking of the Prius which has a recirc button the steering wheel as well as the dash, so it's probably possible to plug into a bus somewhere.
I'd say paying BestBuy $1100 for an HDMI cable *is* being mauled by weasels, so no problem there.
My faith is restored. I salute you.
Yes, the Firefox team is finally going to release ESR after all this time. It proves that Mitchell Baker can be very unforgiving if you forget the safe word.
[I came all this way looking for an ESR joke. C'mon people, throw me a bone here.]
But they have to make up for the cost of billing you for it somehow....
No, you've confused the instructions for first responders with the instructions for the dealerships doing post-crash repairs.
Per a post elsewhere:
Still it's a good thing NHTSA is looking into this (while not picking solely on GM). After the Toyota unintended acceleration issue the US auto safety regulators looked bad because they appeared to have not paid attention to the early warning signs, and that ended up being bad for the regulator, the regulatee, and the consumers. Even if this turns out to be a total non-problem, it will help debunk fear-mongering against EV technology. IMHO.
Because:
1) you could choose a notary run by someone you trust
2) you could UN-choose a notary if you stop trusting it
3) you can delegate the above to your browser maker or a plugin maker you trust, and not worry about it, just like you already do with the CA system. But *they* can do #s 1 and 2.
With the CA system you don't have have that flexibility in any practical sense.
It doesn't cost $23M/year to attend college only because banks don't expect students to repay a $24M/yr loan. However you'll notice that med students pay a lot closer to $23M/year than history PhD students.
The vast majority of students aren't saying "gee, $20K/year is too much, but I'm all in at $19.5K". They are simply applying for loans at whatever the cost, and if they get them they're in. It's a different twist on the free market dynamic you're imagining. The price is tied to what is lendable, which is determined by the banks based on how much of a students future expected earnings they believe they can grab. Schools are happy to go along for that ride.
As an aside on the relationship of school price to the actual cost of education, schools will claim (and feel) the need to pay competitive salaries to high level administrators and profs in demand. This is partly how the max the bank will lend is ultimately laundered into the "cost of education".
It's still greed all the way down.
This is the key misunderstanding here. It's not a "free market" question. It's ultimately a question of the same corruption that has infected other segments of our system. No matter how many students attend, all of them will have their future earnings taken. Tuitions will not drop in proportion to attendance, they will only rise or fall in proportion to the expected future earnings of their students.
Schools expect you will earn money, so they justify higher tuitions (which they then spend profligately on salaries and expansion projects while monetizing every aspect of the "academic" process). Banks expect you will earn money, so they lend in proportion. The banks and the schools have rigged the game.
In Convergence notaries do not poll those sites once a day or ever. Notaries only contact a server when there is a mismatch between what the client reports seeing and what's already in the notary's cache. That means the notary only contacts a site when the site has changed its cert.
Honestly I think you might have missed his point. A larger excerpt of the blog post:
There is some truth to that -- a performance concern leading to a privacy concern.
But given that the notaries are only queried for the very first contact to a secure site (browser uses its cache for future contacts), I wonder if he's overestimating the amount of traffic at the notaries and it's impact on the browser experience. Plus, as you pointed out, users can have their own notary lists like the anti-phishing ones, so if they don't want to trust Google they can pick non-Google servers.
Or Google could fund (perhaps in consortium) an external party to provide high-availability notaries that firewall Google from the privacy issues around notarizing Chrome users' https requests. Convergence can also use an intermediate proxy in order to hide the browser's IP address from the notaries it uses. So long as the default is to use a non-Google proxy to talk to Google's notaries, Google would be safe from privacy accusations on that front.
Average users could simply subscribe to a list of notaries like most users do with the filter lists for Adblock Plus or IE9's Tracking Protection lists. Someone trustworthy who cares maintains the "EasyTrust" list that most users will subscribe to, and the community of knowledgeable geeks keeps an eye on that and cries foul if it gets taken over by a Sith lord or something.
But hell, even if the default list is maintained by the browser vendor, it's still way better than and more agile in response to problems than what we have now.
El Reg has reported on Google's Adam Langley in reponse to Convergence. Langley says' he doesn't see including it in Chrome because users would never change the default notaries, and Google would have to run their own notaries in order to ensure performance. And that would mean a privacy issue for Chrome as it "phones home" every user's https requests to Google. [Doesn't Chrome already have some kind of anti-phishing Safe Browsing feature that does this anyway?]
However Langley was good enough to open the door to the possibility of future API tweaks that would allow a third-party Convergence extension for Chrome (Chrome doesn't currently have a way for extensions to sit in the SSL cert decision path).
From the talk, Convergence is based on Perspectives, with some updates:
- Once a client has confirmed a certificate through the notaries, it is cached locally. Future contacts for that site will not need re-notarization until the site's cert is changed. That way your browsing history is not exposed through your notary contacts very often.
- Contact to the notaries can be done through a trusted proxy over SSL, to protect exposure of your browser history.
- The user can choose one or more notaries, and choose to distrust any of them at any time.
- Each notary can use any backend validation method it wants. It could check certs stored in DNSSEC, it could use the existing CA system, the EFF will have one that uses their SSL observatory, etc.
OMG!!!
Going off and getting a life? Hey that's no fair!
I talking to an architect working in Beijing the other day. She said they keep an ipad in every room of their large office.
Tablets are going to catch on in the workplace, and the ones that lock down and integrate with corporate IT policies are going to be sold at profitable margins. HP could have aimed for that, but it's clearly in Microsoft's DNA. And clearly *not* in Apple's, despite the anecdote above.
Indeed. It's *nix under the hood for iOS and android just as it is for webOS (sitting on a Linux kernel just like android, no?). This debacle is hardly a case of Betmax vs. VHS in the sense of objectively superior underlying tech losing out to non-technical market factors. The TouchPad simply fails to distinguish itself in the current marketplace *and* has no "tapes" available to play on it.
Now HP might have been able to hang on to a proprietary platform (webOS above Linux) and aim for a profitable niche: enterprises are going to be flooded with pads, and they are going to be more friendly and less price sensitive to units that lock-down and integrate with IT policies. Apple doesn't have a history of focusing on that, and android's openness will frighten any sensible corporate IT department.
Looking at their WebOS powered tablet at BestBuy next to the iPad2 and android units like the Galaxy Tab, all I can think is WTF, HP?
But thanks for buying my Palm shares.
The US Federal gov't gives a 30% tax credit on the installed cost through 2016.
States and municipalities offer a patchwork of different incentives. California currently gives one-time rebates of about $1.10/kW of installed capacity on residential systems, or about $0.20/kWh generated by larger non-residential systems. The rebates started out at $3.50/kW installed, and slope down to zero after a total of 1800MW have been installed. $1.10/kW is in the ballpark of 12% of installed cost.
The home generated power tends to be bought at retail equivalent, i.e. the meter runs backwards when generation exceeds usage, and the user pays for net wattage. In most areas users are not compensated for a positive net production (annually), but this appears to be changing.
There are also some market forces at work. The price/kW of solar panels has dropped considerably over just the last 5 years. Obviously there are many more experienced sellers and installers now. Financing is smoother (banks know what a solar panel is now), insuring is smoother, etc.
So it's a little like the Prius. Hybrids had a tax incentive at first, but now that's well over and it's selling extremely well, people have become familiar with them, and in the end it makes sense for enough people to sustain a profitable market. The incentives did their job.
I too would like to see more emphasis on performance for Linux desktop components. When Ubuntu started they made it a stated aim to run well on whatever hardware Dell was selling for $500. So neither third-world nor top-of-the-line. Today versus even 5 years ago a $500 Dell is a lot faster, with more RAM, and better graphics hardware. Why hamstring the OS experience of Ubuntu or Fedora to not take advantage of all this? There are other distros that focus on running well on special-needs hardware, without the "bloat" of GNOME etc.
I have only love for GNOME, but it is interesting to consider whether the resistance to LightDM from within GNOME is a reasonable caution of dominance by Ubuntu or an inertial stop on needed improvements to the Linux desktop experience.
The guy comments about environmental responsibility and you change the subject to $$?
Let me take a shot. A quick search says americans watch an average of 151 hours of TV/month: 1812 hrs/year, which is a penalty of (1812 hrTV/year * 0.177kWh/hrTV =~ ) 321 kWh / year.
A quick search says on average, 1kWh generated in america puts out 1.3lbs CO2.
So the average american would generate about (321KWh/year * 1.3lbsCO2/kWh =~) 417 lbs of CO2/year from using an Xbox 360 instead of an Apple TV.
By comparison, a gallon of gas has about 19.56 lbs of CO2 (citing same source).
So the average american's added CO2 from a year of Xbox-TV watching is equivalent to using about (417lbs CO2/yr / 19.56 lbsCo2/gallon =~) 21.3 gallons gas.
Upshot: Xbox vs. Apple TV is equivalent to about one tank of gas per year in extra CO2.
Considering that the example of utter devastation in WWI didn't prevent WWII, and considering that the global political landscape can shift within the 50-ish year lifespan of any reactor (rise of China, re-alignment of the Middle East, etc.), and considering the proliferation of nuclear reactors into possibly unstable countries (India, Iran, China, etc.) it's hard to claim that war is an unlikely threat to nuclear reactors. IMHO. History is long and unforgiving.
Consider also the revealed history of possible mutally-assured-destruction between the US and former USSR. According to SecDef Robert MacNamara, we came to the very brink of nuclear war on *more than one* occasion aside from the Cuban Missile Crisis. (That fact alone should give any sane person pause.) And if we could come that close, others will surely come closer to insanely devastating wars.
Again, the chances may seem small, but the consequences are totally unacceptable.
Speaking of war, in all the press coverage of earthquake-proofing the reactors, I haven't seen a single mention of the potential hazards from nuclear power plants damaged by war. In the US we actively worry about terrorism, but a war in which bombs or missiles strike one or more reactors is a realistic possibility, and much more so in Japan.
With nuclear, the probabilities of leaks may be small, but the possible consequences are unacceptably high. And as each serious accident has shown, neither the risks nor the consequences are adequately understood.