Especially when it will be in Kentucky at their pet "Museum" in front of a cheering section consisting of a stacked deck of closed minds. Really, what's the point?
Even without acting as a bridge to external people, simply having an educate but non-technical resource on hand is useful.
If you can't explain your project to your manager in terms they can understand, you have no hope of explaining it to the end-users, upper management, budget committees, etc. If your non-technical manager sees through your bullshit, its your clue you are doing it wrong.
Just as the act of merely explaining a problem to another programmer will often yield insight into the solution (without the other programmer saying a single word, or perhaps paying all that much attention), explaining stuff to a non-technical manager often helps with the design and implementation. The questions they ask will also be asked by others.
Probably in Canada they are still in the change-over period, where they have to be able to handle both types of cards. In the EU, we were told most places don't have the ability to take the Mag stipe only cards at all any more. Further, almost all restaurant transactions were completed at our table with portable readers, and the card never left our sight.
Its not like this requires totally new technology. The mag stripe could simply be encrypted, and the terminals reprogrammed to send it encrypted. However, the capacity of the magnetic strip is marginal for this, and mag strips are aren't that durable. (I've killed more then one just by wear and tear, never mind that incident when somebody gave me a magnetic money clip as a present).
As a leaf owner, you know this isn't true. You know you never get into your car without a thought about where your next charger is, you avoid any trips that even put you close to your maximum range. Your mind is very much concerned with where chargers are.
And I'd bet you have access to another gas powered car which you use for anything even close to your maximum range.
In the target case, they did not breach targets computer system, the breached the terminals in the stores, by breaching the separate network they use to connect them to the banks.
It isn't the contact-less cards that are being proposed here. Its the cards with smart chips built in, unlike those with mere NFC chips that you see in the US.
The only difference here is that the chip on the card can validate the reader, and transmits data encrypted, so the entire transaction takes place encrypted from your card, to the bank, and back to the merchant's bank. Even if data is stored in the merchant's terminal, or intercepted along the way, its all encrypted.
And, as we all know that encryption is totally unbreakable, and completely safe. *cough*
This requires a change out of every credit card terminal in the country to be useful, and that will take a while. Still its no guarantee, because the processing power to break the encryption is becoming more readily available, and the whole scheme is likely to encounter breaches in the future.
Then put your dollar bills into the machine and never worry.
[rant]
For Christ's sake USA, get rid of the dollar bill already. There's nothing more freaking frustrating that trying to feed *paper* money into a vending machine - Especially crumbled torn and dirty American singles. I don't know what on earth you print your nearly-monochrome money onto but man it sure doesn't survive well... Get some $1 and $2 coins into circulation and make your smallest paper bill a five.
[/rant]
Nobody wants dollar coins. Its been tried and died a dozen times in the US.
In 2005, the Canadian government polled its citizens on the idea of retiring the five-dollar note, replacing it with a five-dollar coin. The money saved in making the coin would then fund the Canadian Olympic team. Canadians resoundingly rejected and ridiculed the idea of a five-dollar coin.
Paper folds. Its in a wallet without jingling and bulging.
And vending machines are very good at accepting even the filthiest of bills, because the vending companies have learned that accepting anything close is better than getting people in the habit of avoiding the machine. Especially when selling a product that costs less than the bottle it is sold in.
Not necessarily. Someone gave it permission, but it wasn't necessarily YOU. Besides, YOU just clicked through the message without reading it anyway, because we all know you can trust Microsoft, right?
The drivers that come with the device or Windows might be outdated, buggy and/or omit new features.
So your thumb drive grows new features over its life? Amazing.
Everybody has the issue. Those that don't think its an issue are like vaccinated children, running around on the playground serving as a conduit for exposing others.
My thoughts exactly. All six people who actually want to put up this monstrosity in their yard will be have their fire insurance go up, their neighbors bitching, their zoning commission objecting and the fire marshal knocking on their door.
It looks to me that Ford was trying strenuously to avoid collection and storage systems that might integrate into existing buildings.
I wonder how many people are going to actually install the car-port? Who is going to fight the zoning issues, get building permits, put up with an ugly structure, and a car that moves by itself to stay in the Fresnel lens sweet spot? How many bikes, toys, and other associated back yard objects get run over?
I suppose the canopy could slide a cover over the lens when the car is absent.
But who wants to climb into an 800 degree car, and spend half the power gained running air conditioning units to cool it down?
If you're really concerned about WER on Windows, just say no when it asks you to send crash reports.
It does it even if the device itself supplies drivers or uses standard drivers, and even when the driver is already on the local machine and installed. Searching for drivers on windows update is completely unnecessary for about 95% of the things you will ever plug in, and usually fruitless for the other 5%.
It defaults to always searching, and you will only see a choice the very first time, any device is installed, (even a keyboard). So chances are that 99% of computers have device driver fetching turned on, and chances are that 99% of users don't know how to turn it off.
Joe user will never find this, and some are sent silently with no clear ability to turn it off. Even TFA is vague about this, suggesting you route them to an internal server on your network.
If you're really concerned about WER on Windows, just say no when it asks you to send crash reports.
Had you bothered to read TFA (I know, right?) you would have seen that there is a lot of stuff sent each time you plug in a device, USB, or otherwise, and it is sent silently, with no real simple or obvious way to turn it off.
Even turning off WER is buried in places the average user will never find. (hint start / search / type in WER)
In the case of autonomous robots, be they car/drone/cyborg/whatever, I think the same logic would reasonably apply - if you use the built-in control systems and they malfunction in a way that damages someone/thing then the manufacturer is at fault, but if the damage was reasonably traced to the orders it was following, then it's the person giving the orders that's at fault.
These situations are already handled under current law. If YOU use the build-in control systems, YOU are predominantly responsible. Its going to be up to YOU to prove the product was defective.
There needs to be NO changes in the law for this to exempt OEMs from responsibility. A bazillion car analogies suggest themselves, from sticking accelerators to faulty on-board computers. And if the on-board computers fail in specific circumstances that they were warranted to handle, the vehicle manufacturer can pursue a claim against the computer manufacturers.
There is no reason to build air-gaps in the law to protect upstream suppliers, because the burden of proof is well established in current law.
None of this is really what the article is about, though. The thesis is simply that manufacturers of open robotics platforms (which are out there right now) should not be legally responsible for what people do with those platforms. The argument is that making them liable will reduce the pace of innovation.
But again, this is a non-issue.
You buy a Chainsaw from direct from the manufacturer, and that manufacturer is in no way responsible when you murder someone and chop them up with the saw to dispose of the body. Anti-Gun people have been routinely rebuffed by the courts when trying to sue gun manufacturers because someone used their products to commit murder. Nobody holds an automaker responsible when someone intentionally uses their vehicles to commit crimes.
The law and the courts are already pretty good at affixing blame, and in spite of the deep pocket horror stories, these tactics of going after the up-stream manufacturer virtually never work in the real world.
Nah. Just skip it. Sure it's a great product, but so what? If you need to invest 50 times your life savings on testing and insurance and lawyers and regulatory compliance, then why bother even trying?
If you haven't got the legs to get into the business, you haven't got the legs to stay in the business. If you can't obtain financial backing then you probably don't have a worth while product in the first place.
When your wife demands the spare bedroom back and the only place left to go is the tool shed out back, calling it a workshop hardly makes the banishment easier to accept.
Assuming open ROS is holding back development, simply because no one can patent the ROS sort of overlooks the fact they they can still patent the product manufactured while using an open ROS as well as the Robot itself, and they can copyright the specific ROS implementation.
You might as well claim that English or [insert random language] is holding back civilization because no one can patent language in general.
Microsoft's success was because, like the Marines, they arrived "firstest with the mostest." A strictly temporal advantage, which they leveraged with less than scrupulous means. It was not simply because it was closed source. They were for all practical business purposes the only one on the playing field and they had what IBM needed at the time.
but this is article about the USA. the manufacturing by robots for consumer products largely won't be done here. but making robot weapons, yes, that will be done here
the primary purpose and largest market for robotics will be for weapons.
That or manufacturing. Some (most) robotic assembly plants aren't safe for humans already.
In either case, changing product liability laws is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do.
A "product" is not the place for hackers and experimenters. You can build anything you want in your basement or maker shed, but if you want to build a product for sale, you better have some strict testing and insurance.
Slashdot Mirror
Just like cruise control systems on Winnebagos right?
Is THIS what you are babbling on about? http://articles.latimes.com/2005/aug/14/business/fi-tortmyths14
DOH! Clearly I meant to say un-vaccinated.
Especially when it will be in Kentucky at their pet "Museum" in front of a cheering section consisting of a stacked deck of closed minds.
Really, what's the point?
Even without acting as a bridge to external people, simply having an educate but non-technical resource on hand is useful.
If you can't explain your project to your manager in terms they can understand, you have no hope of explaining it to the end-users, upper management, budget committees, etc. If your non-technical manager sees through your bullshit, its your clue you are doing it wrong.
Just as the act of merely explaining a problem to another programmer will often yield insight into the solution (without the other programmer saying a single word, or perhaps paying all that much attention), explaining stuff to a non-technical manager often helps with the design and implementation. The questions they ask will also be asked by others.
Probably in Canada they are still in the change-over period, where they have to be able to handle both types of cards.
In the EU, we were told most places don't have the ability to take the Mag stipe only cards at all any more.
Further, almost all restaurant transactions were completed at our table with portable readers, and the card never left our sight.
Its not like this requires totally new technology. The mag stripe could simply be encrypted, and the terminals reprogrammed to send it encrypted. However, the capacity of the magnetic strip is marginal for this, and mag strips are aren't that durable. (I've killed more then one just by wear and tear, never mind that incident when somebody gave me a magnetic money clip as a present).
Its an arms race, and it always will be.
Like Chevy did with the Volt, where the still lose money on every single sale, and most users still run on its gas engine 80% of the time.
You do not drive from charger to charger.
As a leaf owner, you know this isn't true.
You know you never get into your car without a thought about where your next charger is, you avoid any trips that even put you close to your maximum range. Your mind is very much concerned with where chargers are.
And I'd bet you have access to another gas powered car which you use for anything even close to your maximum range.
In the target case, they did not breach targets computer system, the breached the terminals in the stores, by breaching the separate network they use to connect them to the banks.
VPNs are easily breached these days.
It isn't the contact-less cards that are being proposed here.
Its the cards with smart chips built in, unlike those with mere NFC chips that you see in the US.
While traveling in the EU, we were advised by our bank to use a chip card, which they provided to us for nothing.
Image: http://www.mastercard.com/au/personal/en/images/Chip%20Card.jpg
The only difference here is that the chip on the card can validate the reader, and transmits data encrypted, so the entire transaction takes place encrypted from your card, to the bank, and back to the merchant's bank. Even if data is stored in the merchant's terminal, or intercepted along the way, its all encrypted.
And, as we all know that encryption is totally unbreakable, and completely safe. *cough*
This requires a change out of every credit card terminal in the country to be useful, and that will take a while.
Still its no guarantee, because the processing power to break the encryption is becoming more readily available, and the whole scheme is likely to encounter breaches in the future.
Then put your dollar bills into the machine and never worry.
[rant]
For Christ's sake USA, get rid of the dollar bill already. There's nothing more freaking frustrating that trying to feed *paper* money into a vending machine - Especially crumbled torn and dirty American singles. I don't know what on earth you print your nearly-monochrome money onto but man it sure doesn't survive well... Get some $1 and $2 coins into circulation and make your smallest paper bill a five.
[/rant]
Nobody wants dollar coins. Its been tried and died a dozen times in the US.
Seems even Canadians, once fooled, are twice shy about converting paper to coins:
In 2005, the Canadian government polled its citizens on the idea of retiring the five-dollar note, replacing it with a five-dollar coin. The money saved in making the coin would then fund the Canadian Olympic team. Canadians resoundingly rejected and ridiculed the idea of a five-dollar coin.
Paper folds. Its in a wallet without jingling and bulging.
And vending machines are very good at accepting even the filthiest of bills, because the vending companies have learned that accepting anything close is better than getting people in the habit of avoiding the machine. Especially when selling a product that costs less than the bottle it is sold in.
Not necessarily. Someone gave it permission, but it wasn't necessarily YOU. Besides, YOU just clicked through the message without reading it anyway, because we all know you can trust Microsoft, right?
The drivers that come with the device or Windows might be outdated, buggy and/or omit new features.
So your thumb drive grows new features over its life? Amazing.
Everybody has the issue. Those that don't think its an issue are like vaccinated children, running around on the playground serving as a conduit for exposing others.
My thoughts exactly.
All six people who actually want to put up this monstrosity in their yard will be have their fire insurance go up, their neighbors bitching, their zoning commission objecting and the fire marshal knocking on their door.
It looks to me that Ford was trying strenuously to avoid collection and storage systems that might integrate into existing buildings.
I wonder how many people are going to actually install the car-port? Who is going to fight the zoning issues, get building permits, put up with an ugly structure, and a car that moves by itself to stay in the Fresnel lens sweet spot? How many bikes, toys, and other associated back yard objects get run over?
I suppose the canopy could slide a cover over the lens when the car is absent.
But who wants to climb into an 800 degree car, and spend half the power gained running air conditioning units to cool it down?
If you're really concerned about WER on Windows, just say no when it asks you to send crash reports.
It does it even if the device itself supplies drivers or uses standard drivers, and even when the driver is already on the local machine and installed. Searching for drivers on windows update is completely unnecessary for about 95% of the things you will ever plug in, and usually fruitless for the other 5%.
It defaults to always searching, and you will only see a choice the very first time, any device is installed, (even a keyboard). So chances are that 99% of computers have device driver fetching turned on, and chances are that 99% of users don't know how to turn it off.
Joe user will never find this, and some are sent silently with no clear ability to turn it off.
Even TFA is vague about this, suggesting you route them to an internal server on your network.
If you're really concerned about WER on Windows, just say no when it asks you to send crash reports.
Had you bothered to read TFA (I know, right?) you would have seen that there is a lot of stuff sent each time you plug in a device, USB, or otherwise, and it is sent silently, with no real simple or obvious way to turn it off.
Even turning off WER is buried in places the average user will never find. (hint start / search / type in WER)
In the case of autonomous robots, be they car/drone/cyborg/whatever, I think the same logic would reasonably apply - if you use the built-in control systems and they malfunction in a way that damages someone/thing then the manufacturer is at fault, but if the damage was reasonably traced to the orders it was following, then it's the person giving the orders that's at fault.
These situations are already handled under current law.
If YOU use the build-in control systems, YOU are predominantly responsible. Its going to be up to YOU to prove the product was defective.
There needs to be NO changes in the law for this to exempt OEMs from responsibility. A bazillion car analogies suggest themselves, from sticking accelerators to faulty on-board computers. And if the on-board computers fail in specific circumstances that they were warranted to handle, the vehicle manufacturer can pursue a claim against the computer manufacturers.
There is no reason to build air-gaps in the law to protect upstream suppliers, because the burden of proof is well established in current law.
None of this is really what the article is about, though. The thesis is simply that manufacturers of open robotics platforms (which are out there right now) should not be legally responsible for what people do with those platforms. The argument is that making them liable will reduce the pace of innovation.
But again, this is a non-issue.
You buy a Chainsaw from direct from the manufacturer, and that manufacturer is in no way responsible when you murder someone and chop them up with the saw to dispose of the body. Anti-Gun people have been routinely rebuffed by the courts when trying to sue gun manufacturers because someone used their products to commit murder. Nobody holds an automaker responsible when someone intentionally uses their vehicles to commit crimes.
The law and the courts are already pretty good at affixing blame, and in spite of the deep pocket horror stories, these tactics of going after the up-stream manufacturer virtually never work in the real world.
Nah. Just skip it. Sure it's a great product, but so what? If you need to invest 50 times your life savings on testing and insurance and lawyers and regulatory compliance, then why bother even trying?
If you haven't got the legs to get into the business, you haven't got the legs to stay in the business.
If you can't obtain financial backing then you probably don't have a worth while product in the first place.
When your wife demands the spare bedroom back and the only place left to go is the tool shed out back, calling it a workshop hardly makes the banishment easier to accept.
ut then again, it's not straightforward how to extend liability laws to Amazon delivery drones or driverless cars.
You don't have to "expand" the laws, they already apply.
You just have to prevent boneheads like those in TFA from limiting liability for things like Amazon's scheme.
Assuming open ROS is holding back development, simply because no one can patent the ROS sort of overlooks the fact they they can still patent the product manufactured while using an open ROS as well as the Robot itself, and they can copyright the specific ROS implementation.
You might as well claim that English or [insert random language] is holding back civilization because no one can patent language in general.
Microsoft's success was because, like the Marines, they arrived "firstest with the mostest." A strictly temporal advantage, which they leveraged with less than scrupulous means. It was not simply because it was closed source. They were for all practical business purposes the only one on the playing field and they had what IBM needed at the time.
but this is article about the USA. the manufacturing by robots for consumer products largely won't be done here. but making robot weapons, yes, that will be done here
Really: http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/images/stories/large/2011/01/02/97967037.jpg
the primary purpose and largest market for robotics will be for weapons.
That or manufacturing. Some (most) robotic assembly plants aren't safe for humans already.
In either case, changing product liability laws is EXACTLY the wrong thing to do.
A "product" is not the place for hackers and experimenters. You can build anything you want in your basement or maker shed, but if you want to build a product for sale, you better have some strict testing and insurance.