There's also the problem that any time somebody using their system gets into an accident, they'll probably try to sue the manufacturer.
As opposed to suing the manufacturer(s) and/or driver(s) like everyone already does for most car accidents?
The old saw about "We'll never have autonomous cars, because the manufacturers will be sued out of existence after the first crash" is pure nonsense. We already have an enormous amount of computer control in cars, and people are already suing the manufacturers, e.g. Toyota, claiming that those systems malfunctioned after a crash. Toyota is still in business, and the costs of those suits are just folded into the manufacturing costs, as always.
In the U.S. alone, human drivers account for 40,000 fatalities, millions of injuries, and $250B in costs due to auto accidents every year. It would take a pretty unreliable computer system to even get within an order of magnitude of what we do to each other through inattentive or drunken driving. Maybe Microsoft could manage it, but it would be a reach even for them.:-)
When the first autonomous cars hit the road around 2020, what everyone is going to see is the exact opposite - accident rates and costs will plummet. When that happens, auto insurance rates will be adjusted accordingly for autonomous vehicles, and soon you'll find that manual driving is not only expensive, but even illegal in many areas.
Human beings have no business driving. I know this statement bothers a lot of people, but the statistics bear it out. I, for one, will gladly hand over my keys the day I can buy an autonomous vehicle, and never think twice about it. Driving is a chore 99% of the time, and one that I'd be just as happy to turn over to a computerized device as any other chore.
with the fill in the oval, scan it system. it worked ok. at least it has a paper trail, and that's all you can ask for
And what happens when the numbers of votes separating the candidates falls with the margin of spoiled ballots? Sure, filling in an oval seems simple enough, but a certain percentage of voters can't manage it.
I can tell you exactly what happens - both sides start fighting over how to interpret and count the spoiled ballots, leading to gridlock and accusations of cheating and vote tampering. I know it will happen, because that exact situation happened in Florida during the 2000 election, leading to the adoption of electronic voting machines in the first place.
Too many people seem to have forgotten this history, or maybe too many Slashdotters are too young to remember it. There's a reason for the switchover to electronic voting, and it's to avoid the inevitable spoiled paper ballot margin of error, and know precisely what every voter intended. Is electronic voting perfect? By no means, but it can most certainly be fixed, and made secure, traceable, and verifiable. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Mr. Kemp seems to be a crank, and like most cranks his writing skills are abysmally bad.
Just read his autobiography on the Amazon web page. Seriously, his description of his professional life is about as compelling as reading the listings from a telephone book. I can only image how mind-numbing the books must be, but I'm certainly not going to pay $150 to find out.
You need to realize Denon doesn't expect to sell that cable. It exists only because some custom integrators absolutely demanded a Denon-qualified interconnect between components. They needed something to a-b test their own configurations against to make sure they don't regress. That's why it exists. You're not expected to buy it. It's really just a plain ethernet cable and Denon themselves don't claim otherwise.
And yet on Denon's own web page, we find the following blurb: "Denon's 1.5 meter (59 in.) proprietary ultra premium Denon Link cable was designed for the audio enthusiast." along with a list price of $499. Not to mention the fact that it is actually for sale on the Amazon web page.
It looks to me as if Denon absolutely expects to sell that cable for the listed price. And I have no doubt that quite a few delusional audiophiles have shelled out $499 (plus shipping) for the AKDL1. Compared to some of the high-end audio scam gadgets I've seen, the AKDL1 is a bargain at the price.
For a humorous spin a related snake oil product, check out the Amazon reviews for the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. Many of the reviews are absolute comedy gems.
To me, the most amusing aspect of this conspiracy theory is that it so perfectly mirrors the conspiracy theory that Tom Bearden (www.cheniere.org) has been spouting over the years, i.e. that the Russians developed "scalar electromagnetic" weapons during the Cold War, and have been using them to create earthquakes, steer hurricanes at the U.S. (e.g. Katrina), and cause most of the unusual weather (heat waves, cold snaps, droughts, etc.) that the U.S. has experienced in the past couple of decades.
So now I guess we've begun shooting back at the Russians with scalar EM weapons of our own. Clearly, the world is now doomed. Let the scalar EM wars begin!
The world is too caught up that the Earth is the one place for any type of life in the universe, we're not prepared to deal with other possibilities. I think that even the course that NASA is demonstrating now - proving that it's possible that there was water on Mars, opening up the possibility of a discovery of some type of life perhaps long extinct - is preparing the general public to slowly get ready to the idea that there's the existiance of extraterrestrial life. Tin foil hat time - Perhaps NASA already knows that this life exists, but they need to get the public ready for acceptance of it by slowly introducing more and more evidence so that society doesn't lose its marbles.
I would argue that the boom in popularity of science fiction/fantasy movies and TV (e.g. E.T., Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, etc.) over the past 40 years has done more to prepare people for the possibility of extraterrestrial life than any NASA press release.
It is not just about outsourcing; a chip fab in this country might have a worker who is on the payroll of the Chinese government, and who tampers with a chip layout just prior to manufacturing. It is pretty expensive to run a secure chip fab, and even if all chip fabs were domestic, you would still have a number of important computers (think of utilities, critical services, etc.) being manufactured at facilities where the employees might be engaging in sabotage of this sort.
The problem with subverting a single employee in the manufacturing process is that it would be extremely difficult for him to hide his tracks. Let's assume Mr. Smith is paid by the Chinese government to insert a logic block of, say, 2000 gates into a router chip to provide them with a remote shutdown capability. First Smith has to find a place to put it, so he reruns the place-and-route software, or else does some custom polygon-pushing and hopes he doesn't screw up something else in the design. Then he has to run LVS (layout versus schematic) and DRC (design rule check) scans to make sure the chip is manufacturable, and he made no layout or wiring errors. In most modern design teams, where layouts are managed and checked by multiple people before tape-out, this would be nearly impossible for a single employee to get away with.
So, Smith decides to subvert the firmware instead. Again, unless he's the only person who touches the firmware, and the only person who maintains the updates and revisions, he won't be able to get away with it for long. What happens when Smith is transferred to another project, and Jones takes over the firmware maintenance and realizes something is screwy about the checksum in the current version? Not to mention having to outthink the test and verification group - what if they come up with test vectors that reveal his tampering?
If you're going to subvert one guy, you need to subvert lots of them, and I think that's what worries the U.S. government. If the Chinese were willing to spend the money, they could set up a fake company that could operate for years, or recruit an entire Chinese design house from the get-go, building up long-term customer relationships and looking for opportunities to infiltrate enterprise products. This would not be cheap, but it is not without precedent (e.g. the Glomar Explorer). The problem is that it would take only one leak and the entire operation would be blown, and every fab and design house in China would suffer as a result.
It's so much easier to work on the back end using software. Bribe or blackmail someone inside the targeted organization, hand him a USB thumb drive with a rootkit installer, and the job is done in a matter of hours. Even if the rootkit is discovered, who can prove where it came from? The IT department re-images the drives and the agent is free to try again later.
Disclaimer: I've been involved in some research in verification of ASICs to uncover trojan hardware. Frankly, I think the threat of hardware hacks tends to be overblown.
The problem with planting Trojan circuits in hardware is that they're traceable. Given a compromised chip, you can locate the manufacturer and the fab it came from, and work backwards to the people who had access to the layout. It would be a financial and P.R. disaster for any third party vendor that allowed such a thing to happen. Who would ever trust them again with a design? These companies want to make money, and allowing government or criminal organizations to compromise the manufacturing process is too big a risk.
On top of that, using a hardware hack is equivalent to firing a shotgun into a swarm of gnats. How can you know that a hacked chip is going to make it into a box that just might happen to be used by a competitor you care about? It's an insane risk with a ridiculously small hope of payoff.
The way to compromise systems is the way that has worked extremely well so far - via software. You can target the attack, you can cover your tracks, and you have plausible deniability if you're caught. If you bribe someone inside the organization, you can place the software you want right on the machines you care about. And as long as organizations keep using Windows, you'll never run out of attack vectors.
As a faculty member who has been involved with web-based coursework, online lectures, and the integration of laptops in the classroom, I am less than impressed with most technology-based pedagogical "innovations".
It's not that teachers are typically anti-technology (although some certainly are), but instead that most teachers realize that adding technology does not necessarily improve the teaching experience, and in many cases can even be a distraction. There's a reason why the Socratic method of the lecturer standing in front of a classroom full of students has persisted so long - it works. It is very hard to beat the teaching effectiveness of a good instructor who can expand on concepts and formulate new examples on the fly, based on the questions asked during a lecture. Furthermore, technology cannot make bad teachers into good teachers, no matter how much money you throw at the problem. The man or woman in front of the class makes all the difference. Most tech-based classroom techniques are generally introduced with great fanfare, but generally fall by the wayside within a few years as everyone realize that they are more trouble than they're worth, i.e. too much time and money involved with no measureable improvement in student comprehension of the subject.
Most faculty are happy enough to use the web to distribute material to the class, or to post grades, but beyond that point you hit diminishing returns very quickly. I don't even try to post my class notes online, because I learned long ago that most students tend not to grasp the material unless you force them to create their own class notes. Beyond the current use of the web to distribute course materials, there are two pieces of technology that I would personally welcome to the classroom:
(1) A pen-based tablet with the ease of use of the Apple UI, for taking class notes. I'm not talking about the Windows / Wacom / OneNote tablets which still haven't gotten it right after years of attempts, but an entirely new concept that is more akin to the iPad experience.
(2) A augmented / virtual reality technology that would enable students to remotely "attend" a class with the same 360-degree audio-visual experience as physically being in the room. That's still a few years in the future, but I think it could make a big impact to education, as it would enormously multiply the effectiveness of good lecturers.
>>Microsoft are going to make a tablet? About fucking time. I want to take notes on it with a stylus, not wave my fingers over the screen going 'oooo, I can >>make pictures big'. I want to be able stuff a USB stick in the side of it and put directories of data on it.
You have been able to a get a stylus-oriented Windows tablet computer with USB ports for ten years.
Bring on the rivals indeed.
I've got one of the latest Windows 7 tablet laptops - a Fujitsu T900 with a Wacom digitizer, 4 GB RAM, OneNote 2010, the works. I bought it so I could digitize my class notes for the courses I teach.
To put it bluntly - it sucks. For example, no matter how I calibrate the screen, as I write from the left side to the right side of the screen, the registration of the pen tip on the screen shifts by about 1/16 of an inch. It's just enough to drive me crazy when I try to sketch a large circuit, or write a long equation, that covers the full width of the screen. My co-worker, who bought the same model, has exactly the same problem. Sometimes as I write, my hand hits the "flip orientation" button on the edge of the screen, and I have to stop and re-flip the screen back to the correct orientation. I could go on and on about the various glitches, bugs, and bad design choices, but the point is that this is a top-of-the-line $2500+ pen-based laptop, the very best that Microsoft, Wacom, and Fujitsu working together could manage after years of refinement, and I simply want to toss it in the trash when I compare it to my Macbook.
It's the same old story, over and over. When Microsoft defines a market, they define it with mediocrity. Microsoft unseat the iPad? Only in their dreams. If Apple were to release a pen-based iPad, I would run, not walk, to the nearest Apple store and buy it.
So if you use the wrong tool for the job and it doesn't work wouldn't you call that failing?
No, I'd call it "using the wrong tool for the job". If you need a screwdriver, and I offer you a hammer, that hammer didn't "fail". It's a perfectly good hammer, it does what it's supposed to do, but it is the wrong tool for the task you require.
Right now the U.S. military is looking for new weapons to deal with the Taliban insurgency on the Pakistan border. They're not dealing with massive crowds of civilian rioters in Kabul. If they were, there would be an operational need for the ADS, and it would be deployed.
I do expect that we'll be seeing more of the ADS in the future, but more likely in urban environments where crowd control and perimeter defense are required.
RTFA. There's nothing in the linked story about it "failing" any test. What happened is that the military decided that no operational need for the weapon existed in Afghanistan.
The ADS does work for crowd control, but generally the military isn't dealing with crowds of rioting civilians attacking their outposts. They're dealing with insurgents fighting with guerilla tactics and IEDs. The ADS is the wrong tool for the job.
I really can't think of any new revenue sources that have come along in the Ballmer era. If all he's doing is treading water, then they might as well pay peanuts to a chimp - it'll shriek and gibber and fling chairs just as well as Uncle Fester.
And as a bonus, the chimp would fling its feces at competitors and members of the press, at no extra charge!
The cell phone radiation scare reminds me so much of the AC power line scare of 15 years ago, which got to the point where people were seriously questioning whether electric blankets would give them cancer. Back at the height of that scare, my friends and I half-jokingly came up with the idea of marketing an electric blanket AC-to-DC rectifier. We had the TV commercial all figured out; the late night TV salesman would pass a field strength meter tuned to 60 Hz over a blanket, and show how the evil cancer-causing electromagnetic RADIATION was making the needle deflect. Then he would plug the blanket into the rectifier, and show how the needle barely budged. Yes, for only $39.95, you and your family would be safe!
Today, of course, we see exactly the same pseudoscientific scare tactics being applied to cell phones. The funny thing is that electric blankets haven't changed a bit, but no one worries about them any more. People pick a target of fear to fixate on, and completely ignore everything else with equal or greater risk, even the "old" hazards that used to frighten them. The psychology of risk assessment never ceases to fascinate me.
I somehow feel our military has more important things to do than play Starcraft II on deployment.
Troop boredom and depression during deployment in remote locations is one of the biggest problems that military commanders must deal with. They generally encourage any form of entertainment as long as it doesn't interfere with military duties.
In fact, if you have any old games you want to get rid of, go to www.anysoldier.com and I guarantee you can find thousands of enlisted men and women more than happy to take them off your hands.
In my analog signals class, there is a large contingent that cheats on the homework and artificially inflates their grades. This class is also heavily curved, and since analog signals are not my strong suit, I ended up getting bit by the cheaters by dragging my letter grade down.
I've dealt with this situation in my own circuits classes. I've developed a strategy that seems to work fairly well:
(1) I tell the students on the very first day that I am fully aware of the web sites where you can download textbook solutions. Then I tell them that homework is given to prepare them for the exams, and that copying the solutions manual is counter-productive to that goal.
(2) Make the homework count for only 10% of the grade - just enough to encourage students to turn it in, but not enough to permit them to pass the course if they fail the exams.
(3) Put the last six years of exams online for students to download, and make up completely original exams each semester. (It's more work for me not to re-use problems, but it completely eliminates any hope of students using rote memorization to pass.)
Every semester, I wind up failing a few students with nearly perfect homework scores and abysmal exam grades, but most students quickly figure out that there is no shortcut to a good grade short of actually doing the work.
My observation from years of teaching is that cheating is pretty much inversely proportional to the level of effort put forth by the instructor. Professors who create original exams every semester, and who apply a "trust but verify" policy to exams, generally keep cheating under control in their courses. Professors who re-use old exam problems and make no effort to police the class wind up with rampant cheating.
Come on now. These are adults. If they choose to skip class because they feel their time is better spent elsewhere, that's their business.
You've obviously never dealt with helicopter parents who demand to know why the dean didn't send someone over to their child's dorm room to force them to get up and go to class.
If it were up to me, I'd have a high-resolution webcam (no sound needed) installed in every classroom, pointed at the students. Send Mom and Dad a copy of John or Jane's class schedule, along with the web addresses of the appropriate cameras. Then just let the parents log in and check on attendance. Far more effective, and far less hassle for the administration.
At the weekend I was reading a story in a newspaper where some real-world forensics investigators were complaining that shows like CSI have given the public the impression that they are magicians to the extent that juries are acquitting people because the police don't have a CSI-style case...
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I can distinctly remember reading a magazine article about 30 years ago where prosecutors were complaining how "Perry Mason" and similar programs made it harder to convict criminals, because the jury expected the guilty party to crack and confess to the crime in court - just like on TV.
Maybe those were just smart enough to know that they will be caught eventually?
Frankly, I think you (and several others) are being overly cynical.
I've worked with a lot of engineering professionals in my career. What I have found is that the overwhelming majority of engineers have a strong moral / ethical compass. Most of them try to do the right thing, and do a good job. And in general, the higher the level of engineering competence, the stronger the moral compass.
Most engineers are not closet sociopaths. In fact, most of the truly intelligent people I've known, regardless of their political or religious leanings, understand that the world works best when people don't walk around looking for opportunities to screw the other guy. Compared to your average attorney, politician, or businessman, engineers tend to be saints by comparison.
...Then a life of crime is all that awaits. It's easy to say you have high standards shutting potentially talented people out of your organization, but no one should be surprised if those people turn to illegitimate activities again.
"Potentially talented"? One of the most common memes I keep hearing is that malware writers are programming geniuses who need only a guiding hand to become productive members of society.
I've met or worked with a lot of very sharp programmers over the years. All of them made a good salary from their skills. A few of them have made a significant amount of money. Any one of them would be capable of creating his own botnet without difficulty. Furthermore, many of them are sharp enough to pull off some impressive social engineering to gain access to systems, a la Kevin Mitnick.
But none of them did that, because they had the ethics to understand that subverting millions of other peoples' computers for your own financial gain is wrong. Not just illegal, but wrong.
If these botnet writers are so brilliant, where are the useful programs they have written? That's right, they don't exist. These guys are more likely marginally talented shmucks who have demonstrated an ability that hundreds of thousands of more talented programmers could easily replicate. All they lacked were the morals to do the right thing.
If these guys are actually good programmers who want to be productive members of society, let them prove it writing and marketing useful software on their own, instead of malware. But let them on my systems, or deal with my customers? Not in a million years. I can hire honest programmers for that.
The only difference is that when the same thing happens to the iPad -- and it has happened to iPhones -- you'll have a proprietary monoculture that's wirelessly connected, even over a cell network (so always, always on), and it will be the sort of thing that is that much more difficult for us geeks to deal with. A desktop computer, if something goes wrong, you may not be able to fix it, but we can. Something goes wrong with your iPad, you can either jailbreak it or take it to Apple.
Now, you can get most of the supposed advantages you're talking about with Android. A centralized app store, a pretty UI, but the sanctioned ability to get apps through other means if you really want it. Keep in mind that the average user isn't likely to do that, any more than they're likely to jailbreak their iWhatever, but I'd much rather have the option than not.
So why does the closed Apple ecosystem bother you when you freely admit that the Android ecosystem is a viable alternative to those who wish to hack their handheld devices? Apple is not forcing Android out of the market - on the contrary, Android is doing very nicely. But that Apple monoculture has clearly been a boon to developers and consumers alike, far more so than Android to date.
If Apple was the only choice for smartphones, I'd be unhappy too. But Apple is only one player of many in that market. How does Joe Average's choice of the Apple monoculture diminish Android in any way?
The irony is that we've had just such a geek paradise for most of a decade -- any popular Linux distro is going to have a large repository of free apps, all of which have gone through some sort of quality control, and are delivered securely. Users can install third-party apps, but it's a channel that geeks avoid and ordinary users won't necessarily understand.
And yet the iPad will probably sell more units in the first year than all the installed Linux desktop distros in the U.S. It's not just the concept, it's the implementation. Apple takes ideas that have been tried by others, and makes them mainstream and popular. I have nothing against Linux (I use it myself for part of my work), but even at its best you can't begin to compare it with Apple's ease of use.
But to the extent that they "need" a computer, they need certain things which tend to work well on a general-purpose computer, with a real, actual keyboard.
Like what? Games? Books? Music? Movies? Occasional word processing? Web surfing? You've got all of that in spades with the iPad, plus a real, actual external keyboard if you want one.
What "certain things" do 95% of consumers need that an appliance like the iPad won't satisfy? And please don't list programming as one of them! Like I said: 95% of consumers.
Here's where I'm confused: The appliance thing was tried, extensively, in the late 90's. Remember WebTV?
Why do you think this will be any better?
Because like so many markets that Apple has chosen to enter, they have figured out how to do it right. Apple did not create the MP3 player, the smartphone, or the appliance computer. But their genius is in figuring out how to make them reliable and easy to use. We saw it with the iPod and iPhone, and now we're seeing it with the iPad.
What I find puzzling is that you seem to be happy about this.
And what I find puzzling is why you (and so many others) are unhappy about it. How does the existence of the iPhone and iPad diminish the utility of Android or Linux in any way, shape, or form? We've still got our general-purpose computers, and Apple's success hasn't hurt them in the slightest. Nothing has been taken away from you. I am no more unhappy with Apple for creating a closed information appliance than I am with my TV manufacturer for creating a TV that is equally "closed". I can buy a consumer TV, or I can hack together my own MythTV box. How does one choice diminish the other?
The era of the geek driving computer development is dead: people want easy to use features, and Apple is giving it to them.
And beyond that, Apple is building a computing platform that is completely appropriate for 95% of users out there.
I've been observing with great amusement the geek outrage over Apple's closed, locked-down ecosystem, starting with the iPod and iPhone, and culminating with the iPad, and I say: more power to Apple.
To paraphrase Spider-man: "With great computing power comes great computing responsibility." Manufacturers have placed general-purpose computers into the hands of the masses, and what have we gotten in return? Mountains of spam, malware galore, and tens of millions of zombie boxes. A general-purpose programmable device has proven, overall, a disaster for the Internet. In the hands of typical non-technical users, they are just begging to be exploited, and that's exactly what happens to them.
Steve Jobs has it exactly right. The overwhelming majority of people don't need a computer with a general purpose operating system. They need an iPad or something like it - an appliance that meets the needs of 95% of users, and is locked down so tightly that it is very hard to exploit via user stupidity.
Personally, I don't want an iPad. I don't need an iPad, because I'm capable of managing a general-purpose computer. But the appeal of the iPad to the average consumer is blatantly obvious. Apple is going to sell a lot of iPads.
For your next trick, can you fix thermodynamics in the Matrix?
Easily done. You change the line about the machines using us as heat engines to a line about the machines needing human brains as a computational matrix, because the war fried the ozone layer / magnetosphere / etc., rendering high-level computational devices incapable of functioning. So in effect the Agents are all software running in a huge organic computer network, and the attack drones are simply remotely operated devices.
It requires about 10 to 15 seconds of extra dialogue, and (once again) makes the plot a bit less cringeworthy.
I can't do squat about Matrix 2 or 3, however. Like most folks, I try to pretend they don't exist.:-)
That doesn't work because the aliens were able to decipher and hack into the satellites. Therefore, the aliens are probably highly advanced in cryptography.
Right - and that's the plot point I would have removed. After all, the entire idea of them needing our satellites to coordinate their attack was blindingly stupid. What, these advanced aliens can't synchronize their own clocks prior to an attack?
The "satellite hacking" bit was written into the movie to give Goldblum something to figure out and try to warn everyone about. It never made sense in the context of the aliens' capabilities. It was just the best idea the writers could come up with.
Slashdot Mirror
As opposed to suing the manufacturer(s) and/or driver(s) like everyone already does for most car accidents?
The old saw about "We'll never have autonomous cars, because the manufacturers will be sued out of existence after the first crash" is pure nonsense. We already have an enormous amount of computer control in cars, and people are already suing the manufacturers, e.g. Toyota, claiming that those systems malfunctioned after a crash. Toyota is still in business, and the costs of those suits are just folded into the manufacturing costs, as always.
In the U.S. alone, human drivers account for 40,000 fatalities, millions of injuries, and $250B in costs due to auto accidents every year. It would take a pretty unreliable computer system to even get within an order of magnitude of what we do to each other through inattentive or drunken driving. Maybe Microsoft could manage it, but it would be a reach even for them. :-)
When the first autonomous cars hit the road around 2020, what everyone is going to see is the exact opposite - accident rates and costs will plummet. When that happens, auto insurance rates will be adjusted accordingly for autonomous vehicles, and soon you'll find that manual driving is not only expensive, but even illegal in many areas.
Human beings have no business driving. I know this statement bothers a lot of people, but the statistics bear it out. I, for one, will gladly hand over my keys the day I can buy an autonomous vehicle, and never think twice about it. Driving is a chore 99% of the time, and one that I'd be just as happy to turn over to a computerized device as any other chore.
And what happens when the numbers of votes separating the candidates falls with the margin of spoiled ballots? Sure, filling in an oval seems simple enough, but a certain percentage of voters can't manage it.
I can tell you exactly what happens - both sides start fighting over how to interpret and count the spoiled ballots, leading to gridlock and accusations of cheating and vote tampering. I know it will happen, because that exact situation happened in Florida during the 2000 election, leading to the adoption of electronic voting machines in the first place.
Too many people seem to have forgotten this history, or maybe too many Slashdotters are too young to remember it. There's a reason for the switchover to electronic voting, and it's to avoid the inevitable spoiled paper ballot margin of error, and know precisely what every voter intended. Is electronic voting perfect? By no means, but it can most certainly be fixed, and made secure, traceable, and verifiable. Let's not throw out the baby with the bathwater.
Mr. Kemp seems to be a crank, and like most cranks his writing skills are abysmally bad.
Just read his autobiography on the Amazon web page. Seriously, his description of his professional life is about as compelling as reading the listings from a telephone book. I can only image how mind-numbing the books must be, but I'm certainly not going to pay $150 to find out.
And yet on Denon's own web page, we find the following blurb: "Denon's 1.5 meter (59 in.) proprietary ultra premium Denon Link cable was designed for the audio enthusiast." along with a list price of $499. Not to mention the fact that it is actually for sale on the Amazon web page.
It looks to me as if Denon absolutely expects to sell that cable for the listed price. And I have no doubt that quite a few delusional audiophiles have shelled out $499 (plus shipping) for the AKDL1. Compared to some of the high-end audio scam gadgets I've seen, the AKDL1 is a bargain at the price.
For a humorous spin a related snake oil product, check out the Amazon reviews for the Denon AKDL1 Dedicated Link Cable. Many of the reviews are absolute comedy gems.
To me, the most amusing aspect of this conspiracy theory is that it so perfectly mirrors the conspiracy theory that Tom Bearden (www.cheniere.org) has been spouting over the years, i.e. that the Russians developed "scalar electromagnetic" weapons during the Cold War, and have been using them to create earthquakes, steer hurricanes at the U.S. (e.g. Katrina), and cause most of the unusual weather (heat waves, cold snaps, droughts, etc.) that the U.S. has experienced in the past couple of decades.
So now I guess we've begun shooting back at the Russians with scalar EM weapons of our own. Clearly, the world is now doomed. Let the scalar EM wars begin!
I would argue that the boom in popularity of science fiction/fantasy movies and TV (e.g. E.T., Star Trek, Star Wars, Babylon 5, Stargate SG-1, etc.) over the past 40 years has done more to prepare people for the possibility of extraterrestrial life than any NASA press release.
The problem with subverting a single employee in the manufacturing process is that it would be extremely difficult for him to hide his tracks. Let's assume Mr. Smith is paid by the Chinese government to insert a logic block of, say, 2000 gates into a router chip to provide them with a remote shutdown capability. First Smith has to find a place to put it, so he reruns the place-and-route software, or else does some custom polygon-pushing and hopes he doesn't screw up something else in the design. Then he has to run LVS (layout versus schematic) and DRC (design rule check) scans to make sure the chip is manufacturable, and he made no layout or wiring errors. In most modern design teams, where layouts are managed and checked by multiple people before tape-out, this would be nearly impossible for a single employee to get away with.
So, Smith decides to subvert the firmware instead. Again, unless he's the only person who touches the firmware, and the only person who maintains the updates and revisions, he won't be able to get away with it for long. What happens when Smith is transferred to another project, and Jones takes over the firmware maintenance and realizes something is screwy about the checksum in the current version? Not to mention having to outthink the test and verification group - what if they come up with test vectors that reveal his tampering?
If you're going to subvert one guy, you need to subvert lots of them, and I think that's what worries the U.S. government. If the Chinese were willing to spend the money, they could set up a fake company that could operate for years, or recruit an entire Chinese design house from the get-go, building up long-term customer relationships and looking for opportunities to infiltrate enterprise products. This would not be cheap, but it is not without precedent (e.g. the Glomar Explorer). The problem is that it would take only one leak and the entire operation would be blown, and every fab and design house in China would suffer as a result.
It's so much easier to work on the back end using software. Bribe or blackmail someone inside the targeted organization, hand him a USB thumb drive with a rootkit installer, and the job is done in a matter of hours. Even if the rootkit is discovered, who can prove where it came from? The IT department re-images the drives and the agent is free to try again later.
Disclaimer: I've been involved in some research in verification of ASICs to uncover trojan hardware. Frankly, I think the threat of hardware hacks tends to be overblown.
The problem with planting Trojan circuits in hardware is that they're traceable. Given a compromised chip, you can locate the manufacturer and the fab it came from, and work backwards to the people who had access to the layout. It would be a financial and P.R. disaster for any third party vendor that allowed such a thing to happen. Who would ever trust them again with a design? These companies want to make money, and allowing government or criminal organizations to compromise the manufacturing process is too big a risk.
On top of that, using a hardware hack is equivalent to firing a shotgun into a swarm of gnats. How can you know that a hacked chip is going to make it into a box that just might happen to be used by a competitor you care about? It's an insane risk with a ridiculously small hope of payoff.
The way to compromise systems is the way that has worked extremely well so far - via software. You can target the attack, you can cover your tracks, and you have plausible deniability if you're caught. If you bribe someone inside the organization, you can place the software you want right on the machines you care about. And as long as organizations keep using Windows, you'll never run out of attack vectors.
As a faculty member who has been involved with web-based coursework, online lectures, and the integration of laptops in the classroom, I am less than impressed with most technology-based pedagogical "innovations".
It's not that teachers are typically anti-technology (although some certainly are), but instead that most teachers realize that adding technology does not necessarily improve the teaching experience, and in many cases can even be a distraction. There's a reason why the Socratic method of the lecturer standing in front of a classroom full of students has persisted so long - it works. It is very hard to beat the teaching effectiveness of a good instructor who can expand on concepts and formulate new examples on the fly, based on the questions asked during a lecture. Furthermore, technology cannot make bad teachers into good teachers, no matter how much money you throw at the problem. The man or woman in front of the class makes all the difference. Most tech-based classroom techniques are generally introduced with great fanfare, but generally fall by the wayside within a few years as everyone realize that they are more trouble than they're worth, i.e. too much time and money involved with no measureable improvement in student comprehension of the subject.
Most faculty are happy enough to use the web to distribute material to the class, or to post grades, but beyond that point you hit diminishing returns very quickly. I don't even try to post my class notes online, because I learned long ago that most students tend not to grasp the material unless you force them to create their own class notes. Beyond the current use of the web to distribute course materials, there are two pieces of technology that I would personally welcome to the classroom:
(1) A pen-based tablet with the ease of use of the Apple UI, for taking class notes. I'm not talking about the Windows / Wacom / OneNote tablets which still haven't gotten it right after years of attempts, but an entirely new concept that is more akin to the iPad experience.
(2) A augmented / virtual reality technology that would enable students to remotely "attend" a class with the same 360-degree audio-visual experience as physically being in the room. That's still a few years in the future, but I think it could make a big impact to education, as it would enormously multiply the effectiveness of good lecturers.
I've got one of the latest Windows 7 tablet laptops - a Fujitsu T900 with a Wacom digitizer, 4 GB RAM, OneNote 2010, the works. I bought it so I could digitize my class notes for the courses I teach.
To put it bluntly - it sucks. For example, no matter how I calibrate the screen, as I write from the left side to the right side of the screen, the registration of the pen tip on the screen shifts by about 1/16 of an inch. It's just enough to drive me crazy when I try to sketch a large circuit, or write a long equation, that covers the full width of the screen. My co-worker, who bought the same model, has exactly the same problem. Sometimes as I write, my hand hits the "flip orientation" button on the edge of the screen, and I have to stop and re-flip the screen back to the correct orientation. I could go on and on about the various glitches, bugs, and bad design choices, but the point is that this is a top-of-the-line $2500+ pen-based laptop, the very best that Microsoft, Wacom, and Fujitsu working together could manage after years of refinement, and I simply want to toss it in the trash when I compare it to my Macbook.
It's the same old story, over and over. When Microsoft defines a market, they define it with mediocrity. Microsoft unseat the iPad? Only in their dreams. If Apple were to release a pen-based iPad, I would run, not walk, to the nearest Apple store and buy it.
No, I'd call it "using the wrong tool for the job". If you need a screwdriver, and I offer you a hammer, that hammer didn't "fail". It's a perfectly good hammer, it does what it's supposed to do, but it is the wrong tool for the task you require.
Right now the U.S. military is looking for new weapons to deal with the Taliban insurgency on the Pakistan border. They're not dealing with massive crowds of civilian rioters in Kabul. If they were, there would be an operational need for the ADS, and it would be deployed.
I do expect that we'll be seeing more of the ADS in the future, but more likely in urban environments where crowd control and perimeter defense are required.
RTFA. There's nothing in the linked story about it "failing" any test. What happened is that the military decided that no operational need for the weapon existed in Afghanistan.
The ADS does work for crowd control, but generally the military isn't dealing with crowds of rioting civilians attacking their outposts. They're dealing with insurgents fighting with guerilla tactics and IEDs. The ADS is the wrong tool for the job.
And as a bonus, the chimp would fling its feces at competitors and members of the press, at no extra charge!
The cell phone radiation scare reminds me so much of the AC power line scare of 15 years ago, which got to the point where people were seriously questioning whether electric blankets would give them cancer. Back at the height of that scare, my friends and I half-jokingly came up with the idea of marketing an electric blanket AC-to-DC rectifier. We had the TV commercial all figured out; the late night TV salesman would pass a field strength meter tuned to 60 Hz over a blanket, and show how the evil cancer-causing electromagnetic RADIATION was making the needle deflect. Then he would plug the blanket into the rectifier, and show how the needle barely budged. Yes, for only $39.95, you and your family would be safe!
Today, of course, we see exactly the same pseudoscientific scare tactics being applied to cell phones. The funny thing is that electric blankets haven't changed a bit, but no one worries about them any more. People pick a target of fear to fixate on, and completely ignore everything else with equal or greater risk, even the "old" hazards that used to frighten them. The psychology of risk assessment never ceases to fascinate me.
Troop boredom and depression during deployment in remote locations is one of the biggest problems that military commanders must deal with. They generally encourage any form of entertainment as long as it doesn't interfere with military duties.
In fact, if you have any old games you want to get rid of, go to www.anysoldier.com and I guarantee you can find thousands of enlisted men and women more than happy to take them off your hands.
I've dealt with this situation in my own circuits classes. I've developed a strategy that seems to work fairly well:
(1) I tell the students on the very first day that I am fully aware of the web sites where you can download textbook solutions. Then I tell them that homework is given to prepare them for the exams, and that copying the solutions manual is counter-productive to that goal.
(2) Make the homework count for only 10% of the grade - just enough to encourage students to turn it in, but not enough to permit them to pass the course if they fail the exams.
(3) Put the last six years of exams online for students to download, and make up completely original exams each semester. (It's more work for me not to re-use problems, but it completely eliminates any hope of students using rote memorization to pass.)
Every semester, I wind up failing a few students with nearly perfect homework scores and abysmal exam grades, but most students quickly figure out that there is no shortcut to a good grade short of actually doing the work.
My observation from years of teaching is that cheating is pretty much inversely proportional to the level of effort put forth by the instructor. Professors who create original exams every semester, and who apply a "trust but verify" policy to exams, generally keep cheating under control in their courses. Professors who re-use old exam problems and make no effort to police the class wind up with rampant cheating.
You've obviously never dealt with helicopter parents who demand to know why the dean didn't send someone over to their child's dorm room to force them to get up and go to class.
If it were up to me, I'd have a high-resolution webcam (no sound needed) installed in every classroom, pointed at the students. Send Mom and Dad a copy of John or Jane's class schedule, along with the web addresses of the appropriate cameras. Then just let the parents log in and check on attendance. Far more effective, and far less hassle for the administration.
The more things change, the more they stay the same.
I can distinctly remember reading a magazine article about 30 years ago where prosecutors were complaining how "Perry Mason" and similar programs made it harder to convict criminals, because the jury expected the guilty party to crack and confess to the crime in court - just like on TV.
Frankly, I think you (and several others) are being overly cynical.
I've worked with a lot of engineering professionals in my career. What I have found is that the overwhelming majority of engineers have a strong moral / ethical compass. Most of them try to do the right thing, and do a good job. And in general, the higher the level of engineering competence, the stronger the moral compass.
Most engineers are not closet sociopaths. In fact, most of the truly intelligent people I've known, regardless of their political or religious leanings, understand that the world works best when people don't walk around looking for opportunities to screw the other guy. Compared to your average attorney, politician, or businessman, engineers tend to be saints by comparison.
"Potentially talented"? One of the most common memes I keep hearing is that malware writers are programming geniuses who need only a guiding hand to become productive members of society.
I've met or worked with a lot of very sharp programmers over the years. All of them made a good salary from their skills. A few of them have made a significant amount of money. Any one of them would be capable of creating his own botnet without difficulty. Furthermore, many of them are sharp enough to pull off some impressive social engineering to gain access to systems, a la Kevin Mitnick.
But none of them did that, because they had the ethics to understand that subverting millions of other peoples' computers for your own financial gain is wrong. Not just illegal, but wrong.
If these botnet writers are so brilliant, where are the useful programs they have written? That's right, they don't exist. These guys are more likely marginally talented shmucks who have demonstrated an ability that hundreds of thousands of more talented programmers could easily replicate. All they lacked were the morals to do the right thing.
If these guys are actually good programmers who want to be productive members of society, let them prove it writing and marketing useful software on their own, instead of malware. But let them on my systems, or deal with my customers? Not in a million years. I can hire honest programmers for that.
So why does the closed Apple ecosystem bother you when you freely admit that the Android ecosystem is a viable alternative to those who wish to hack their handheld devices? Apple is not forcing Android out of the market - on the contrary, Android is doing very nicely. But that Apple monoculture has clearly been a boon to developers and consumers alike, far more so than Android to date.
If Apple was the only choice for smartphones, I'd be unhappy too. But Apple is only one player of many in that market. How does Joe Average's choice of the Apple monoculture diminish Android in any way?
And yet the iPad will probably sell more units in the first year than all the installed Linux desktop distros in the U.S. It's not just the concept, it's the implementation. Apple takes ideas that have been tried by others, and makes them mainstream and popular. I have nothing against Linux (I use it myself for part of my work), but even at its best you can't begin to compare it with Apple's ease of use.
Like what? Games? Books? Music? Movies? Occasional word processing? Web surfing? You've got all of that in spades with the iPad, plus a real, actual external keyboard if you want one.
What "certain things" do 95% of consumers need that an appliance like the iPad won't satisfy? And please don't list programming as one of them! Like I said: 95% of consumers.
Because like so many markets that Apple has chosen to enter, they have figured out how to do it right. Apple did not create the MP3 player, the smartphone, or the appliance computer. But their genius is in figuring out how to make them reliable and easy to use. We saw it with the iPod and iPhone, and now we're seeing it with the iPad.
And what I find puzzling is why you (and so many others) are unhappy about it. How does the existence of the iPhone and iPad diminish the utility of Android or Linux in any way, shape, or form? We've still got our general-purpose computers, and Apple's success hasn't hurt them in the slightest. Nothing has been taken away from you. I am no more unhappy with Apple for creating a closed information appliance than I am with my TV manufacturer for creating a TV that is equally "closed". I can buy a consumer TV, or I can hack together my own MythTV box. How does one choice diminish the other?
And beyond that, Apple is building a computing platform that is completely appropriate for 95% of users out there.
I've been observing with great amusement the geek outrage over Apple's closed, locked-down ecosystem, starting with the iPod and iPhone, and culminating with the iPad, and I say: more power to Apple .
To paraphrase Spider-man: "With great computing power comes great computing responsibility." Manufacturers have placed general-purpose computers into the hands of the masses, and what have we gotten in return? Mountains of spam, malware galore, and tens of millions of zombie boxes. A general-purpose programmable device has proven, overall, a disaster for the Internet. In the hands of typical non-technical users, they are just begging to be exploited, and that's exactly what happens to them.
Steve Jobs has it exactly right. The overwhelming majority of people don't need a computer with a general purpose operating system. They need an iPad or something like it - an appliance that meets the needs of 95% of users, and is locked down so tightly that it is very hard to exploit via user stupidity.
Personally, I don't want an iPad. I don't need an iPad, because I'm capable of managing a general-purpose computer. But the appeal of the iPad to the average consumer is blatantly obvious. Apple is going to sell a lot of iPads.
Easily done. You change the line about the machines using us as heat engines to a line about the machines needing human brains as a computational matrix, because the war fried the ozone layer / magnetosphere / etc., rendering high-level computational devices incapable of functioning. So in effect the Agents are all software running in a huge organic computer network, and the attack drones are simply remotely operated devices.
It requires about 10 to 15 seconds of extra dialogue, and (once again) makes the plot a bit less cringeworthy.
I can't do squat about Matrix 2 or 3, however. Like most folks, I try to pretend they don't exist. :-)
Right - and that's the plot point I would have removed. After all, the entire idea of them needing our satellites to coordinate their attack was blindingly stupid. What, these advanced aliens can't synchronize their own clocks prior to an attack?
The "satellite hacking" bit was written into the movie to give Goldblum something to figure out and try to warn everyone about. It never made sense in the context of the aliens' capabilities. It was just the best idea the writers could come up with.