I'm skeptical of this story. They are basically saying that somehow the wiring got messed up in such a way that everything still worked, but the battery was improperly charged/discharged by the APU. The evidence they have is some lights that flickered. This seems fishy to me.
I tend to agree. The summary and TFA are so confusing, its hard to figure where exactly the miss-wiring was. Was it in the APU, or the APU's seperate battery, or the Main Battery, or what? They simply say the APU Battery was "incorrectly connected". Does that mean it was never intended to be connected to the main battery, or was reverse wired, or shorted or operates as a different voltages, or what?
Boeing’s plan would be to redesign the batteries to place insulation inside and around each of the eight cells to minimize the risk that a short circuit or fire in one of thecells could spread to the others, as investigators have said occurred on the battery that caught fire in Boston on Jan. 7. Boeing might also adjust how tightly the batteries are packed.
So no clue what caused it but if we insulate the battery a little better maybe we can contain it? Seems almost as fishy as the article mentioned above.
As soon as these guys clone your mac address (which they can get easily with airsnort) then the only thing stopping them is WPA2. And if you have a lot of machines connected, they will be able to sniff enough traffic to get your WPA2 password fairly quickly.
Yup, way cheaper. Cheap Drones only costs $20,000 each.
No thanks, I'll take the pimply faced kid driving the beat up toyota delivering my pizza any day. If he gets lost he calls me on his cell phone, and delivers the pizza from a "hot-bag" direct to my door, not frozen in flight, and crashed thru my windows, or delivered three houses away because GPS reception is spotty.
"We Privates" do not want these things buzzing around.
Right, fly a drone out, land it somewhere, and deliver an epi-pen somehow, to someone. Because we all know every possible epi-pen is stashed on drones that are on orbit around a city 24/7.
Sending a chopper (or ambulance) full of Paramedics is PRECISELY what you are going to be able to do in almost ALL situations.
In what situation could you not do the same with a simple ambulance dispatched from the nearest fire department, or by sending a helicopter? And when that ambulance or helicopter arrives it will not only have the epi-pen, but oxygen, a defibrillator, a, trache kit, plasma, bandages, most drugs you would ever need in the field, back board, stretcher, and, let me see, there was something else, what was it, OH YEAH, I remember now, TRAINED PARAMEDICS, and TRANSPORT.
"the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty"
Put the nail into any private exploitation loophole : if youa re american you are under the treaty under US supervision and therefore party of the treaty too.
What part of "shall require authorization and continuing supervision" prohibits private exploitation? You need authorization and continuing supervision to drill for oil on land or at sea, yet that hasn't impeded private exploitation of the continental shelf or deep-sea drilling. This is an easy hurdle to jump. Just a few dollars in the right campaign donation bucket buys you all the authorization you need.
Imagine, for example, a fire department sending drones into a burning building in order to assess damage and locate victims before sending personnel to locations where they can do the most good, or an ambulance drone ferrying medication and supplies to accident victims within minutes.
This story is not about radio controlled (RC) toy surveillance drones that might fit in a building. Its about fixed wing Reaper/Predator/Global Hawk sized craft that fly high over cities used for spying. Good luck flying that into a burning building. Firefigters will laugh you out of the skys.
Further, if you are going to deliver medication via drone, you better be able to land the drone anywhere, and have someone there ready to receive the payload. Its a lot cheaper to to send the Paramedics on the chopper with the supplies they need, and the evac capability in one package.
That said, my question regarding domestic drone use is this - what legitimate purpose could they possibly serve, that manned aircraft do not?
Probably nothing, since none of the L.A. PD air assets proved useful in the Dorner case.
Per Wiki,
The Los Angeles Police Air Support Division resources include 17 helicopters ranging from four Bell 206 Jet Rangers to 12 Eurocopter AS350-B2 AStars.
They also have one lame drone, which they didn't even employ, yet which was purchased with riot and barricade situations being publicly stated use scenarios.
You'd do better to focus on why the privacy and security issues cannot be similarly resolved,
No addition to police capabilities has led to better security or better privacy in well over a thousand years. Why should we expect this tool be any different?
We don't need thousands of horseless carriages zipping around on the roads malfunctioning and crashing into things and people.
See how stupid that sounds now?
An engine failure in an autonomous car doesn't lead to is crashing thru someone's roof. A communications failure, doesn't send them headlong into buildings .
They skies are relatively empty compared to the roads. Still there is the problem of keeping these things in the sky. Its bad enough when well trained professionals sitting in Creech can't keep the Taliban from hacking video feeds or the Iranians from capturing a drone. Imagine handing one to Barney Fife or Seattle PD (already on the DOJ watch list)
There is no reason police in America need this technology. Let alone private industry. No matter how cool it might sound to you.
You keep banging that drum, but your own scientists tell you its crazy talk. To date, nobody has found a single health risk in GM food or GM Grain. I suspect EU will hit a famine one of these days and will be eating GM food or nothing at all.
This doesn't stop until all food is proprietary. I think this fact is where the discussion should start.
Agreed.
This is a dangerous road to go down, and there is really no need to go down it.
We need the courts or congress to just tell Monsanto that their rights to the seed extinguished upon the bag of seed leaving their factory. As far as terminator seed goes, I suspect the market will take care of that. Farmers just won't buy it.
This is exactly what will happen, and so Monsanto will put and end to many farmers' current practice of saving part of this years crop as next year's seed--since their seed yield will be reduced they negatively impact their future yield due to a percentage of the seed being sterile.
Except your crop is mostly pollinated by itself, and you can largely protect against cross pollination by simply arranging your crop planting to be earlier than the neighbor with Terminator seed, or later. Or, if you don't get along with your neighbor, threaten to sue.
Except for the problem that the pollen of these plants is not contained to the field that they are planted. That pollen will blow on the wind and can travel hundreds of miles on trucks, cars, birds and other animals and could then find its way onto other soybean plants which did not have the terminator gene. What happens then?
Like many other hybrid seeds, the terminator seed extinguishes its line in a single season. Its likelihood of getting into the wild is vastly reduced. The risk would be to the crops along the boundaries of immediate neighboring farmer.
Remember that the terminator seed probably has to produce pollen that works enough to allow the plant to produce seed. Its just that the seed produced won't germinate (or something). So the neighbor's crop might grow just fine even when cross fertilized, but some portion of his seed may not work the following year. The rest would grow fine.
Perhaps it could be contrived by engineering the "terminator"crop to produce seed later than normal, when the other crops would have already produced their pollen, and set seed that would be virile.
Monsanto's argument will be that by spraying the field with round up, farmer B was deliberately selecting for the gene that Monsanto has patented.
Saving the best of a crop for next year's planting is also a time honored farming method. Selecting for some quality that is already present in your crop is perfectly normal. It was how crops were improved over centuries. One could probably get by using round up every other year, then Monsanto would be going after grandchild crops.
Because Monsanto can tweak this crop annually (on once every 17 years, or never, and just pretend they did), this is a patent that will never expire. There has to be some limits, and now is a good time to set them.
Lets just imagine this same technique is applied to controlling human genetics. Imagine parents paying for a in vitro genetic treatment that prevents cancer (or something) forever. Then the company come's after the children, demanding payment before the are allowed to procreate. This is a dangerous precedent to set.
So is terminator seed. Big fire at Monsanto, and the world starves because no seed grows? Stupid.
Bowman bought the seeds from a grain elevator, the natural market for seed crops. The farmers legally sold their seed into the market, and the market legally sold it to food producers and Bowman. Monsanto's claim to the seed was exhausted.
The ATLAS system's funding is a step in the right direction but as the article mentions the southern pole would remain a blind spot. Still, having one to two day's notice for an affected area would go a long way. We seem to have most of the >150m asteroids located through current efforts but that still leaves thousands or millions of undetected objects capable of wiping out a city and causing further catastrophe for nuclear facilities. The cost vs. benefit seems evident, better late than never.
Further catastrophe for nuclear facilities?
Come on, playing the nuclear card when the chances of a nuclear plant being hit by a meteor is vanishingly small seems to be a bit over the top, don't you think?. Maybe throw in your local school, so we can "think of the children" while you are at it...
Also, meteors are far less likely to approach us from the poles. Like most things, their orbits tend to generally align with the plane of the major planets. Slightly tilted with regard to our orbit, but polar approach seem very unlikely.
Right off the top, you can write off 3/4 of meteors as they will statistically land in the ocean. (And no they won't cause a tsunami). Then you can write off another large percentage that will hit farm land or forests. Finally you get down to about 1% of the earths surface that is occupied by people.
Then lets measure the damage? 1908 = nill. 2013, several million to replace broken glass, and patch up cuts and scrapes. (Lesson: Don't watch meteors thru windows).
Seriously, this is statistically a huge waste of money.
He had already licensed the technology. He wasn't holding out. It was a simple bill of materials problem as you surmised.
He failed to notice the electronics age obviated the need for a spring as an energy storage method.
Since all he actually held a patent on was the clockwork for releasing spring tension, when that method became un-necessary, he lost out.
John Hutchinson, chief technology officer at Freeplay, said Mr Baylis had voluntarily sold his shares in the company and that technology had moved on, leaving his original patent outdated. He said: “Freeplay developed its own technology and by 2000 no more clockwork radios were made. The method was to use human power to recharge a battery.
I fail to see what his complaint in here. Competitors aren't using the ONLY thing his 40 year old patent covered. He had stock in the company that was making radios with his invention, and sold it. Had he held on to that he would still be making some money, or at least have a nest egg.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm skeptical of this story. They are basically saying that somehow the wiring got messed up in such a way that everything still worked, but the battery was improperly charged/discharged by the APU. The evidence they have is some lights that flickered. This seems fishy to me.
I tend to agree. The summary and TFA are so confusing, its hard to figure where exactly the miss-wiring was. Was it in the APU, or the APU's seperate battery, or the Main Battery, or what? They simply say the APU Battery was "incorrectly connected". Does that mean it was never intended to be connected to the main battery, or was reverse wired, or shorted or operates as a different voltages, or what?
So far Boeing is mum on this particular report.
Instead they are proceeding with insulation between battery cells and cooling.
Boeing’s plan would be to redesign the batteries to place insulation inside and around each of the eight cells to minimize the risk that a short circuit or fire in one of thecells could spread to the others, as investigators have said occurred on the battery that caught fire in Boston on Jan. 7. Boeing might also adjust how tightly the batteries are packed.
So no clue what caused it but if we insulate the battery a little better maybe we can contain it? Seems almost as fishy as the article mentioned above.
Don't you have to crack the WPA2 before you can find one of the valid mac addresses?
Don't think so.
Stations brodcasts its mac address to the access point in clear text.
http://www.maxi-pedia.com/how+to+break+MAC+filtering
The stations may also send beacons, depending on how they are configured.
http://www.wi-fiplanet.com/tutorials/article.php/1492071
There is an app for that.
Won't work if the hackers are on the same transformer leg as you. In an apartment building, that is almost guaranteed to be the case.
Which authorities would you suggest he call?
Please name only those that you know won't simply laugh at him.
Yeah, call the FBI. That will work. Chuckle.
As soon as these guys clone your mac address (which they can get easily with airsnort) then the only thing stopping them is WPA2.
And if you have a lot of machines connected, they will be able to sniff enough traffic to get your WPA2 password fairly quickly.
It works this way today. Surprisingly well, in fact.
Waiting for a drone to be dispatched from the nearest airport? Not so much.
Yup, way cheaper. Cheap Drones only costs $20,000 each.
No thanks, I'll take the pimply faced kid driving the beat up toyota delivering my pizza any day. If he gets lost he calls me on his cell phone, and delivers the pizza from a "hot-bag" direct to my door, not frozen in flight, and crashed thru my windows, or delivered three houses away because GPS reception is spotty.
"We Privates" do not want these things buzzing around.
Right, fly a drone out, land it somewhere, and deliver an epi-pen somehow, to someone.
Because we all know every possible epi-pen is stashed on drones that are on orbit around a city 24/7.
Sending a chopper (or ambulance) full of Paramedics is PRECISELY what you are going to be able to do in almost ALL situations.
In what situation could you not do the same with a simple ambulance dispatched from the nearest fire department, or by sending a helicopter? And when that ambulance or helicopter arrives it will not only have the epi-pen, but oxygen, a defibrillator, a, trache kit, plasma, bandages, most drugs you would ever need in the field, back board, stretcher, and, let me see, there was something else, what was it, OH YEAH, I remember now, TRAINED PARAMEDICS, and TRANSPORT.
"the activities of non-governmental entities in outer space, including the Moon and other celestial bodies, shall require authorization and continuing supervision by the appropriate State Party to the Treaty"
Put the nail into any private exploitation loophole : if youa re american you are under the treaty under US supervision and therefore party of the treaty too.
What part of "shall require authorization and continuing supervision" prohibits private exploitation?
You need authorization and continuing supervision to drill for oil on land or at sea, yet that hasn't impeded private exploitation of the continental shelf or deep-sea drilling. This is an easy hurdle to jump. Just a few dollars in the right campaign donation bucket buys you all the authorization you need.
Imagine, for example, a fire department sending drones into a burning building in order to assess damage and locate victims before sending personnel to locations where they can do the most good, or an ambulance drone ferrying medication and supplies to accident victims within minutes.
This story is not about radio controlled (RC) toy surveillance drones that might fit in a building. Its about fixed wing Reaper/Predator/Global Hawk sized craft that fly high over cities used for spying. Good luck flying that into a burning building. Firefigters will laugh you out of the skys.
Further, if you are going to deliver medication via drone, you better be able to land the drone anywhere, and have someone there ready to receive the payload. Its a lot cheaper to to send the Paramedics on the chopper with the supplies they need, and the evac capability in one package.
That said, my question regarding domestic drone use is this - what legitimate purpose could they possibly serve, that manned aircraft do not?
Probably nothing, since none of the L.A. PD air assets proved useful in the Dorner case.
Per Wiki,
The Los Angeles Police Air Support Division resources include 17 helicopters ranging from four Bell 206 Jet Rangers to 12 Eurocopter AS350-B2 AStars.
They also have one lame drone, which they didn't even employ, yet which was purchased with riot and barricade situations being publicly stated use scenarios.
You'd do better to focus on why the privacy and security issues cannot be similarly resolved,
No addition to police capabilities has led to better security or better privacy in well over a thousand years. Why should we expect this tool be any different?
We don't need thousands of horseless carriages zipping around on the roads malfunctioning and crashing into things and people.
See how stupid that sounds now?
An engine failure in an autonomous car doesn't lead to is crashing thru someone's roof. A communications failure, doesn't send them headlong into buildings .
They skies are relatively empty compared to the roads. Still there is the problem of keeping these things in the sky. Its bad enough when well trained professionals sitting in Creech can't keep the Taliban from hacking video feeds or the Iranians from capturing a drone. Imagine handing one to Barney Fife or Seattle PD (already on the DOJ watch list)
There is no reason police in America need this technology. Let alone private industry.
No matter how cool it might sound to you.
Seed stock are only sold for one purpose. To plant.
Its not logical that you can buy a seed that can't be planted.
If it were an animal, could you not breed it? Does the owner of Secretariat get to say a stud descended from Secretariat can't be bred?
Living things can not be ruled as if they were widgets.
You keep banging that drum, but your own scientists tell you its crazy talk.
To date, nobody has found a single health risk in GM food or GM Grain.
I suspect EU will hit a famine one of these days and will be eating GM food or nothing at all.
This doesn't stop until all food is proprietary. I think this fact is where the discussion should start.
Agreed.
This is a dangerous road to go down, and there is really no need to go down it.
We need the courts or congress to just tell Monsanto that their rights to the seed extinguished upon the bag of seed leaving their factory. As far as terminator seed goes, I suspect the market will take care of that. Farmers just won't buy it.
This is exactly what will happen, and so Monsanto will put and end to many farmers' current practice of saving part of this years crop as next year's seed--since their seed yield will be reduced they negatively impact their future yield due to a percentage of the seed being sterile.
Except your crop is mostly pollinated by itself, and you can largely protect against cross pollination by simply arranging your crop planting to be earlier than the neighbor with Terminator seed, or later. Or, if you don't get along with your neighbor, threaten to sue.
Except for the problem that the pollen of these plants is not contained to the field that they are planted. That pollen will blow on the wind and can travel hundreds of miles on trucks, cars, birds and other animals and could then find its way onto other soybean plants which did not have the terminator gene. What happens then?
Like many other hybrid seeds, the terminator seed extinguishes its line in a single season. Its likelihood of getting into the wild is vastly reduced. The risk would be to the crops along the boundaries of immediate neighboring farmer.
Remember that the terminator seed probably has to produce pollen that works enough to allow the plant to produce seed.
Its just that the seed produced won't germinate (or something). So the neighbor's crop might grow just fine even when cross fertilized, but some portion of his seed may not work the following year. The rest would grow fine.
Perhaps it could be contrived by engineering the "terminator"crop to produce seed later than normal, when the other crops would have already produced their pollen, and set seed that would be virile.
Monsanto's argument will be that by spraying the field with round up, farmer B was deliberately selecting for the gene that Monsanto has patented.
Saving the best of a crop for next year's planting is also a time honored farming method. Selecting for some quality that is already present in your crop is perfectly normal. It was how crops were improved over centuries. One could probably get by using round up every other year, then Monsanto would be going after grandchild crops.
Because Monsanto can tweak this crop annually (on once every 17 years, or never, and just pretend they did), this is a patent that will never expire. There has to be some limits, and now is a good time to set them.
Lets just imagine this same technique is applied to controlling human genetics. Imagine parents paying for a in vitro genetic treatment that prevents cancer (or something) forever. Then the company come's after the children, demanding payment before the are allowed to procreate. This is a dangerous precedent to set.
So is terminator seed. Big fire at Monsanto, and the world starves because no seed grows? Stupid.
But nothing was stolen here.
Bowman bought the seeds from a grain elevator, the natural market for seed crops. The farmers legally sold their seed into the market, and the market legally sold it to food producers and Bowman. Monsanto's claim to the seed was exhausted.
Nothing was stolen.
The ATLAS system's funding is a step in the right direction but as the article mentions the southern pole would remain a blind spot. Still, having one to two day's notice for an affected area would go a long way. We seem to have most of the >150m asteroids located through current efforts but that still leaves thousands or millions of undetected objects capable of wiping out a city and causing further catastrophe for nuclear facilities. The cost vs. benefit seems evident, better late than never.
Further catastrophe for nuclear facilities?
Come on, playing the nuclear card when the chances of a nuclear plant being hit by a meteor is vanishingly small seems to be a bit over the top, don't you think?. Maybe throw in your local school, so we can "think of the children" while you are at it...
Also, meteors are far less likely to approach us from the poles. Like most things, their orbits tend to generally align with the plane of the major planets. Slightly tilted with regard to our orbit, but polar approach seem very unlikely.
Right off the top, you can write off 3/4 of meteors as they will statistically land in the ocean. (And no they won't cause a tsunami).
Then you can write off another large percentage that will hit farm land or forests.
Finally you get down to about 1% of the earths surface that is occupied by people.
Then lets measure the damage? 1908 = nill. 2013, several million to replace broken glass, and patch up cuts and scrapes. (Lesson: Don't watch meteors thru windows).
Seriously, this is statistically a huge waste of money.
The article he indicated said that the funding was to be 5mil beginning Jan 2013. They just got a wake up call
that January 1 was past
What percentage of this will the Russians fund do you suppose?
He had already licensed the technology. He wasn't holding out. It was a simple bill of materials problem as you surmised.
He failed to notice the electronics age obviated the need for a spring as an energy storage method.
Since all he actually held a patent on was the clockwork for releasing spring tension, when that method became un-necessary, he lost out.
John Hutchinson, chief technology officer at Freeplay, said Mr Baylis had voluntarily sold his shares in the company and that technology had moved on, leaving his original patent outdated.
He said: “Freeplay developed its own technology and by 2000 no more clockwork radios were made. The method was to use human power to recharge a battery.
I fail to see what his complaint in here. Competitors aren't using the ONLY thing his 40 year old patent covered.
He had stock in the company that was making radios with his invention, and sold it. Had he held on to that
he would still be making some money, or at least have a nest egg.
I see nothing to complain about here.
Or a shim to get from one API set to another API set.