One of the great pleasures of using OS X is that Apple's linking of hardware to software eliminates the activation crap that Microsoft puts its users through. As far as I'm concerned Windows 2K was the last usable Microsoft OS. XP's activation process is infuriating, because it makes you jump through so many hoops to transfer the license from one machine to another. And Vista? Don't make me laugh.
If companies like Psystar destroy Apple's hardware revenues, and force it to become a pure-play software vendor, Apple will add the same activation garbage to OS 10.6 and beyond. And if that happens, I will curse every crap-box manufacturer like Psystar for causing it.
Putting on the "wild speculation" hat, I'd say that since they were obviously tipped off, that it was likely whoever was sent out to identify the item was told to leave by his commanding officer, who then tipped them off "we're coming back in 30 minutes and it better not be there when we return". Gotta love how things like that work in rural towns. Any competent law enforcement would have left the stolen property under observation until the badges showed up.
It is infinitely more likely that the controller was stolen and later returned by one of the groundskeeper's own employees, or one of the people he works with. This sort of thing happens all the time in construction and landscaping companies. The same guys you hire to install the stuff come back late at night and steal it. They know what it's worth, they know how to find a buyer, and they know how to install it at the new location.
When the groundskeeper found out that the controller had been located, he probably mentioned it to other people, including the thief, who wasted no time putting the controller back where it belonged.
I agree. If I were a property owner (particularly with livestock) and suddenly a bunch of folks with GPS units showed up on my land and headed for a specific spot without so much as a 'by your leave' or 'Hi, we're here to do X. We'll do X quickly and be gone,' I'd be suspicious as well and likely to reach for the biggest gun I own. The geohashers could just as easily have been livestock rustlers.
Or they could have intended to make a drug deal out in the boonies. Or they could have been out there to steal gasoline or diesel fuel from a remote storage tank (a huge problem for many farmers and ranchers nowadays). How is the property owner supposed to know?
Seriously, what is it with the XKCD guys? If their hashed coordinates led them to the inside of someone's house, would they kick down the door and walk in? Of course not! But somehow, because it's a remote area, they think it's perfectly okay to trespass. They're being idiots, and eventually someone is going to get hurt.
The best way is personal experience. Have a strongly held belief effectively challenged and have an epic fail. Then don't do what most of humanity does and use cognitive dissonance defenses to justify why you are still incredibly smart despite the fact you were in this regard a complete tool.
James Randi has a very easy and entertaining experiment that he often uses on high school and college classes. He asks every student to provide their name and birthday, and in turn promises a personalized horoscope for each of them. A couple of days later, he shows up and passes out the horoscopes. Each student reads his/her horoscope, then Randi asks for a show of hands for the people who feel that their horoscope is very accurate. Typically an overwhelming majority of students raise their hands. Then Randi asks each student to switch horoscopes with the person next to them, and of course the horoscopes are all identical.
The first step to skepticism is to show people how easily they can fool themselves by wishful thinking. Randi's experiment (or something similar) would be a great lesson for students.
I guess many evangelists can't wait to go there to ruin their culture by 'making them see the light'.
Ah, it goes beyond that. Many evangelical Christians believe that one of the requirements for the Second Coming is that the Word of God be preached to all the peoples of the world. In other words, God won't bring about Armageddon until every man, woman, and child has had the opportunity to convert first.
So you can be certain that a few misguided individuals, who simply can't wait for God to punish the wicked and destroy the world, will make it their business to try and locate these people.
I don't think the movie was garbage (hey, there's a reason Frankenstein was such a classic), but calling it "I, Robot" was just false advertising, even if the script subverted an Asimov idea while borrowing a couple character names.
On the contrary, the basic plot twist for "I, Robot" came right out of two of Asimov's robot stories: "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" and especially "The Evitable Conflict", which was part of Asimov's "I, Robot" anthology. You can find summaries for both on Wikipedia. Also look up the Wikipedia article on the Three Laws, and read the section about the Zeroth Law of Robotics, whose basic concept is introduced in "The Evitable Conflict".
I don't understand how people can claim that the movie had nothing to do with the book titled "I, Robot". The book was an anthology, not a novel. The basic theme that the movie addressed was right out of "The Evitable Conflict". V.I.K.I. (from the movie) was only doing what the Machines (from the short story) were doing, but in a more blatant manner. Within the limitations of the sci-fi action genre, I thought the movie did a pretty good job.
And even then, is going from 99.9% accuracy on the vote to 99.99% accuracy on the vote really worth spending billions of dollars on voting machines?
And what happens when the difference between two candidates is only 0.05% after the votes are counted, and the loser demands a recount? Suddenly that difference between 99.9% and 99.99% accuracy matters very much.
In the U.S., the entire fuss over electronic voting machines began because the 2000 presidential election hinged on determining a majority that was within the error margin of spoiled ballots. The problem is that paper voting will always produce spoiled ballots. It doesn't matter how simple you make the process (e.g. "Just put in an X in one of these two boxes"), a certain percentage of the electorate (e.g. the mentally ill, the illiterate, the very elderly, the mentally handicapped) will screw it up.
So in typical fashion, U.S. politicians went overboard and tried to "fix" the spoiled ballot problem with electronic voting machines. The problem with that method is that you'll never get people to have 100% trust in computerized voting. Someone, somewhere, will always make accusations of vote fixing, even if you create a paper trail. So now the pendulum is swinging back to paper ballots.
I'm just hoping I won't see another presidential election so close in my lifetime, because no matter what voting technique you use, the loser will cry foul in a very close race. Fortunately it only seems to happen every 40 years or so (Kennedy's election being the previous example), which provides enough time for the fuss to die down.
I'm one of the people who was interviewed for this article. Several people in my department spent an afternoon talking to the IEEE Spectrum technical writer. Although it didn't really come out in the article, our take on the kill-switch concept was that it was possible but very unlikely.
Adding a trojan at the hardware level would be incredibly difficult and risky. In the first place, reverse-engineering a design from its GDS files, determining how and where to add hidden circuitry, and then incorporating the trojan circuitry into the design would be extremely difficult, as others have pointed out. The trojan would have to be customized for every design - not a trivial task. Second, if any foundry was caught producing a compromised chip, it would be ruined overnight. No commercial or government vendor would ever trust its products again. Ditto for any software vendor whose CAD tools were found to add hidden backdoors. Even if it were possible, no sane company would take the risk.
Attacking at the firmware level is more plausible, but still unlikely. If you're using an FPGA-based design, and you let some fly-by-night offshore company write the firmware for it, hidden functionality could be slipped in if you were sloppy about vetting the code. Even if the firmware was written in the U.S., you could bribe an engineer at the company to add the trojan, but again you're gambling no one else checks the code.
Our ultimate conclusion was that the most likely scenario for future compromised computer systems was exactly the one we're seeing today - worms and trojans attacking at the OS / applications level. It's an attack vector where plausible deniability by the originator can be easily maintained. It's worked pretty well so far, and it should continue to work as long as complex systems are placed in the hands of millions of technically illiterate and careless users. DARPA is spending a relatively tiny amount of money to check out the likelihood of a hardware trojan, but I doubt many people directly involved in commercial IC hardware design are truly worried about it.
I was working in Arizona several years back, and attended several corporate presentations by Motorola. Once I flew up to Schaumburg for a day-long event where Motorola was trumpeting their "rebirth" just after the Freescale spinoff. The other attendees and I had some interesting conversations about the future of Motorola. We were all pretty pessimistic about the company's outlook.
Personally, I think that the Six Sigma movement was what started Motorola down the road to ruin. The entire management structure became fixated on playing the Six Sigma game, and lost sight of actually watching the competition or designing new products. Six Sigma became the perfect management circle-jerk. As the digital revolution in cell phones began, and cell phone networks spread throughout the third world, Motorola management was too busy computing error statistics for Six Sigma presentations to realize that their product line and the planned Iridium satellite system were already obsolete.
One event in particular sticks in my mind from the Schaumburg visit. During one presentation, a Motorola manager showed an org chart of the "old" Motorola, and then an org chart of the "new" Motorola, and assured everyone that Motorola was going to be back at the forefront of communications technology in short order thanks to the new corporate reorganization. The problem was that if you took the old org chart and rotated it 90 degrees, it looked exactly like the new one. Everyone I was with had a good laugh about that on the way back to the airport.
We live in an age where the press routinely goes over every single word spoken by celebrities, politicians, and public figures, and tries to make a scandal out of any off-hand comment that can be construed to embarrass the speaker.
Any officer who has not learned to cover his ass and keep his mouth shut will have a short career in today's military.
This CNET article misses the point entirely. Google is not, and never will be, the problem. The problem is going to be the following:
(1) The local city government monitoring your car at every intersection and every stretch of road, and mailing you a ticket every time you exceed the speed limit by 5 mph or fail to beat the red light by 0.01 seconds. Go drive around the Phoenix suburbs and you'll see your future. You can pick up half a dozen robo-tickets just driving to the local mall and back.
(2) Every local business and every neighbor on your street recording you every time you go out for a stroll or take your dog for a walk.
(3) Your own spouse/parents/children/significant other putting you under 24/7 surveillance without your knowledge "for your own good".
The "Death of Privacy" scenario is inevitable, thanks to Moore's Law. And it won't be Google or the federal government doing most of the watching - it will be your family members, or the people in your neighborhood, or the folks running the local business nearby, or the city councilperson you voted for, because every one of them will rationalize that no one is really being hurt, and because the technology will make it so easy to do that they won't be able to resist the temptation. You won't be able to stop this trend any more than the RIAA and MPAA can stop unauthorized digital distribution of music and movies.
It is dumbed down. I highly recommend that everyone takes a hard look at the math curriculum in your areas schools. Too many now are using programs like TERC and Everyday Mathematics that stress self discovery, group work, calculator usage, and a spiraling learning path instead of mastering a topic and moving forward. They deemphasize standard algorithms, multiplication table memorization, and long division. Thank god there are states like Texas and California that have recently found these programs to be deficient, and are no longer using them in their schools.
I teach introductory electrical engineering courses, and am constantly dismayed at the number of engineering students who (a) cannot read a graph, (b) cannot determine the slope and y-intercept of a straight line drawn on an x-y plane, and (c) cannot take two equations with two variables (e.g. x+y=5, 2x-3y=1) and solve for those variables. This is stuff that was taught to me in high school, and it is completely beyond the capability of many of my students.
At the same time, these same students often have multiple AP credits in mathematics that allows them to skip the first or even second semester of calculus. The result? Few of them can take a simple derivative or integral either. I'm not talking about integration by parts, or the chain rule. I'm talking about taking the derivative or integral of x^2, or e^2x.
Clearly something is missing from current high school math curriculums compared to 20 years ago. Personally I would love to ban AP credits at my place of work as well, but as everyone points out: "If we don't accept AP credits, the students will simply apply to a school that does." It's dumbing down by the lowest common denominator.
Even if the technical issues were all resolved (which is not guaranteed by any stretch of the imagination), what about the legal and insurance issues? Until the insurance companies jump on the bandwagon, this will go nowhere.
I don't think it would work to well in crowded downtown areas either. Imagine a mix of driverless and regular cars. The driverless cars will have to follow a, let's call it, fully legal driving plan. That means not taking chances and allways err on the safe side but that makes them vulnerable to "bullying" from regular drivers that can force the driverless car to yield. They would risk to become more or less a second-class citizen in that traffic. That type of vulnerability would me much smaller outside city traffic.
Are you guys kidding? The insurance companies are going to love driverless cars. Right now more U.S. citizens are killed and maimed on U.S. highways in one month than have been killed and maimed in the entire Iraq war. The cost to the U.S. economy due to traffic accidents is estimated at $230 billion per year. By contrast, the Iraq war has averaged $120 billion per year. How could driverless cars possibly do worse than human drivers? Once people realize how much safer cars become once humans are no longer in control, the insurance companies and politicians are going to demand that this technology be implemented as quickly as possible.
As for human drivers "bullying" computer-controlled cars, the solution is simple: reserve special lanes strictly for computer control, just like HOV lanes today. If a human attempts to "cheat" and use one of those lanes, the soon-to-be ubiquitous camera networks monitoring our cities' roads will have his image snapped and his $1000 traffic fine in the mail before he gets home. Once people get sick of the traffic jams and accidents on the human-driven roads, they'll make the switch quickly enough.
Personally, I cannot wait for the day when I can get into a car for an overnight trip, lean back, go to sleep, and wake up at my destination the next morning. This technology will revolutionize leisure and business travel by eliminating the drudgery and boredom of driving.
As for being stuck in time, bear in mind the cost of the 3010. You paid blood money to get one of these when they were new. The EEE is reasonable money for most folks, and practically pocket cash for the more well-heeled geeks. The magic is the combination of form-factor and price. This is the first time we've been able to get something this small, this cheaply.
Exactly. What the OP forgets is that Moore's Law pushes in two directions. The first direction is to give you more performance for the same amount of money. The second direction (and often less appreciated) is to give you the same performance for less money. That's what the ASUS Eee PC does - it gives you the equivalent performance of the older 3010 at a fraction of the price.
This may be the first intelligent thing this women has done in this case. I mean she was obviously guilty, lied in an attempt to cover it up, and miserably failed to prove anything to the contrary at trial.
Based on the interview with the juror in her case, it seems that part of the reason for the fine was that the jury resented being lied to in such a transparent fashion, and wanted to make a point. An appeal is a good strategy as long as she does not attempt the same lies again.
I watched her and her lawyer on CNN after the trial, and was wincing when she began spouting about how she believed she was a victim of "identity theft", and that someone must have stolen her identity to upoad the songs. I kept thinking, "Is she really stupid enough to use that as the basis for her appeal?" Fortunately someone must have smacked her and her attorney with a clue stick before the actual appeal was filed.
Since we can build a demonstrable betavoltaic cell NOW, it cannot be pseudoscience.
It most certainly is pseudoscience, because a few simple calculations will quickly show that a practical 25W laptop battery powered by tritium cannot be constructed using the betavoltaic effect.
I'm fully aware that the betavoltaic effect actually exists. So does zero point energy, for that matter. The pseudoscience begins when people make outrageous claims about these effects that have no basis in reality.
Let's run some numbers. A 25W laptop battery generates 25 joules per second. A beta decay in tritium releases 0.186 MeV of energy, or 2.98 femtojoules. Now assuming that 25% of that energy can be captured as generated charge carriers in a semiconductor energy collector, and 75% released as waste heat, that means you'd need 33.58 E15 tritium beta decays per second to power your battery.
One curie is 3.7 E10 decays per second. Tritium has a specific activity of 9800 curies / gram. Therefore, you'd need 92.6 grams (0.2 pounds) of tritium to power your laptop battery. This is exclusive of the casing, shielding, collection substrate, etc. Let's assume the material for the rest of the battery increases the mass by a factor of ten, or 2 pounds total. That's probably a very conservative number due to concerns over accidental release of so much radioactive material, but let's go with it.
So now you've got a 2 pound battery that generates 25 W of electricity while generating 75 W of waste heat. This is not something you're going to put on your lap. On top of that, as of 2005 the estimated tritium inventory for the entire U.S.A. was 75 kg, which is just enough for 810 laptop batteries. You see where this is going?
Now here's where the pseudoscience really kicks in. Show these numbers to one of the promoters of betavoltaic batteries, and watch the arm-waving begin. They'll tell you how they have discovered new physics, and they can get much more energy out of their invention than standard physics predicts, etc. Of course they can never show you a working unit.
So I stand by my original statement - betavoltaic batteries of the type promoted in the original article are pseudoscience, plain and simple.
The betavoltaic battery is nothing more than pseudoscience. It's higher quality pseudoscience than junk such as zero-point free energy generators or gravity wheel generators, but it is pseudoscience nonetheless. Every few years you see these sorts of claims about betavoltaic devices pop up again, then fade away.
Despite years of claims, no one has ever come close to demonstrating a device with the sort of power densities claimed in the article. Furthermore, the biggest proponent of betavoltaic technology is Ruggero Santilli, an infamous pseudoscientist with a litany of nutty claims and bizarre theories of physics.
If you look at the web pages of the companies that are involved in betavoltaics (e.g. betavoltaic.com or nuclearsolutions.com), you'll find that they have no physical facilities outside of a rented post office box or the home of one of the principals. None of them have any product to sell or even demo. I don't expect that will ever change.
Hrmmmm.... looking at the "device" from the images on the link makes me think the police overreacted. Come on now.... holding her at gunpoint? Granted, it was likely not the smartest move on her part not to respond about the "device" when asked, but once again, I am dismayed that people are getting owned by fears of terrorism and things and people that look "abnormal".
Yes, it does look innocuous enough to someone who knows something about electronics. It looks like a solderable protoboard with some LEDs and a battery. She was probably using an NE555 or something similar to flash the LEDs. Harmless enough, although it looks tacky as hell. Someone needs to teach her good construction technique.
However, to a layman that circuit board would be completely incomprehensible. I know from personal experience that airport screeners are also paranoid about 9 V batteries, as I was questioned about a bunch that I was carrying in a bag with some video equipment. Add to that the fact that she was carrying modeling clay, which just so happens to look like plastic explosive (or at least what a layman would think plastic explosive looks like).
Assuming this was a truly harmless mistake on her part, and not some misguided prank, then she has just learned a valuable lesson that all techie types should take to heart: laymen do NOT understand what we do, or what we perceive as "harmless". In their minds, "I do not know what that is" equates to "it may be dangerous". You simply cannot walk into a government facility or an airport with a homemade electronic device in plain view and not expect to be challenged about it!
Tell a local TV station owner/franchisee that you (a network) will be making torrents freely available.
Watch the explosion. That owner would go ballistic. The networks make a shitload from each market they have penetration in. This is a cozy arrangement nobody wants to change. Same for the a la carte cable movement.
Then why aren't they going ballistic over the shows already being streamed from network sites, or the shows already available from iTunes? The secret to keeping the franchisee happy is simple: you don't make the show available for downloading until a few days after it has aired on local TV.
Given the number of TV shows that can now be streamed directly from the networks' own web sites, why don't they take the next logical step and seed their own torrents complete with embedded commercials?
They wouldn't even have to make the torrents particularly high in quality. I suspect that most viewers would be perfectly happy with 352x480 pixel (DVD-lo) quality if it was free and legal. They're not looking for full DVD quality for archival purposes. They just want to see the episodes they missed. And yes, although the commercials could be stripped out, most people simply wouldn't bother.
Sell the higher-quality commercial-free episodes on DVD or iTunes, and everyone is happy. You're no worse off than now, bandwidth requirements would actually go down (TV torrents are invariably HD quality, with corresponding larger file sizes), and advertisers would still reach viewers. The networks could even reseed old torrents with new commercials on a periodic basis.
Moller may never produce a 'flying car', but someone will eventually.
Not unless and until some pretty fundamental changes occur in both the U.S. domestic security situation and the technology of civil aviation.
Moller's decades-long obsession with his "air car" has been an exercise in futility and a waste of investor funding. He has failed to consider how U.S. society has been transformed by both 9/11 and the explosive growth of litigation. Sure, someone could build an air car, but lots of luck actually flying it in U.S. airspace.
Let's look at the statistics. In 2006, 766 people died in U.S. civil aviation accidents (source: NTSB). That's with approximately 600,000 licensed private pilots, all of whom had at least 40 hours of instruction before their first solo flight. If automobile drivers had the same annual fatality rate, we'd have 250,000 deaths on U.S. highways annually - and that's assuming the automobile drivers had the same rigorous training! Insurance premiums for civil aviation are already extremely high by automotive standards. Sure, you could build a flying car, but just trying getting affordable insurance for it. Personal air travel is expensive compared to the cost of automotive travel, and nothing is going to change that in the near future unless fatality rates can somehow be dramatically reduced.
Beyond that, the flying car concept would completely subvert many of the security measures used at government buildings and facilities. With tens of millions of vehicles cruising around without flight plans, it would be child's play to convert one of them to a flying bomb. Do you really think that the U.S. government is going to allow tens of millions of unregulated flying vehicles to be unleashed in U.S. airspace, and constantly have to worry about domestic terrorist attacks from the air?
A flying car, if produced, will never be anything but a heavily regulated specialty toy. The concept of a low-cost flying car that anyone can own and operate with minimal licensing is a pipe dream that ignores 21st century realities.
Bad arguments and bad reasoning
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The DRM Scorecard
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· Score: 5, Insightful
Okay, let's try Alex Wolfe's argument in a different context:
"When you list every major law implemented to "protect" life and property, they've all been broken. Can anyone think of a law which hasn't been broken, and of course this begs the obvious question: Why doesn't society just give up and go law-free?"
DRM doesn't have to be perfect to do its job, anymore than law enforcement has to be "perfect". It just has to be effective enough to keep Joe Average from copying the file. Whether or not DRM is actually "good" or "bad" for media producers is a completely different argument, but Wolfe's sophomoric reasoning does nothing to address it.
Having your cake and eating it too ...
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A CIO's View of Ubuntu
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· Score: 3, Interesting
For the impatient, here's Halamka's conclusion: "A balanced approach of Windows for the niche business application user, Macs for the graphic artists/researchers, SUSE for enterprise kiosks/thin clients, and Ubuntu for power users seems like the sweet spot for 2008."
Sweet. And with my Macbook and a copy of Parallels, I can have them all.
That's the beauty of virtualization on the Intel Macs. You cease worrying about which OS is the best compromise; you simply use the best OS for the task at hand.
What confuses me as soon as it says "$100 more" is that you are at $299 and for another $150 you can wander into BestBuy and splash $450 on a decent laptop that comes with Vista. Knocking $80 or what ever for the OEM version means that you are talking $370 or so for a decent laptop with a decent screen and a decent disk et al and this is for something with a dual core Intel processor.
For the market this laptop is intended for, 4 GB of storage is probably perfectly adequate. Keep in mind that 4 GB hard drives were standard for laptops just ten years ago, and lots of people did real work with that much storage. At $199 a pop, Asus will have a laptop that is nearly cheap enough to become an impulse buy for a lot of people.
Sure, you can always get a much better machine for a little more money, but a certain segment of the market is always attracted by the lowest possible price. Clearly this is what Asus is aiming for.
Something else the designers are overlooking: this floor will be dangerous. Let's assume a floor block has to depress 1 cm to get a useful amount of power out of the step. Now you've got a 1 cm lip around that block relative to the adjacent blocks. Inevitably someone is going to catch a toe on the edge of a block, trip, and fall. A certain percentage of those people who fall will injure themselves and require medical treatment. With thousands of people walking across the floor every day, you're going to need a full-time medical team on site just to treat the injuries.
This isn't just a bad idea for economic or engineering reasons, although there are plenty of those. As far as customer safety is concerned, it's downright imbecilic.
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...and I want it for a purely selfish reason.
One of the great pleasures of using OS X is that Apple's linking of hardware to software eliminates the activation crap that Microsoft puts its users through. As far as I'm concerned Windows 2K was the last usable Microsoft OS. XP's activation process is infuriating, because it makes you jump through so many hoops to transfer the license from one machine to another. And Vista? Don't make me laugh.
If companies like Psystar destroy Apple's hardware revenues, and force it to become a pure-play software vendor, Apple will add the same activation garbage to OS 10.6 and beyond. And if that happens, I will curse every crap-box manufacturer like Psystar for causing it.
It is infinitely more likely that the controller was stolen and later returned by one of the groundskeeper's own employees, or one of the people he works with. This sort of thing happens all the time in construction and landscaping companies. The same guys you hire to install the stuff come back late at night and steal it. They know what it's worth, they know how to find a buyer, and they know how to install it at the new location.
When the groundskeeper found out that the controller had been located, he probably mentioned it to other people, including the thief, who wasted no time putting the controller back where it belonged.
Or they could have intended to make a drug deal out in the boonies. Or they could have been out there to steal gasoline or diesel fuel from a remote storage tank (a huge problem for many farmers and ranchers nowadays). How is the property owner supposed to know?
Seriously, what is it with the XKCD guys? If their hashed coordinates led them to the inside of someone's house, would they kick down the door and walk in? Of course not! But somehow, because it's a remote area, they think it's perfectly okay to trespass. They're being idiots, and eventually someone is going to get hurt.
James Randi has a very easy and entertaining experiment that he often uses on high school and college classes. He asks every student to provide their name and birthday, and in turn promises a personalized horoscope for each of them. A couple of days later, he shows up and passes out the horoscopes. Each student reads his/her horoscope, then Randi asks for a show of hands for the people who feel that their horoscope is very accurate. Typically an overwhelming majority of students raise their hands. Then Randi asks each student to switch horoscopes with the person next to them, and of course the horoscopes are all identical.
The first step to skepticism is to show people how easily they can fool themselves by wishful thinking. Randi's experiment (or something similar) would be a great lesson for students.
Ah, it goes beyond that. Many evangelical Christians believe that one of the requirements for the Second Coming is that the Word of God be preached to all the peoples of the world. In other words, God won't bring about Armageddon until every man, woman, and child has had the opportunity to convert first.
So you can be certain that a few misguided individuals, who simply can't wait for God to punish the wicked and destroy the world, will make it their business to try and locate these people.
On the contrary, the basic plot twist for "I, Robot" came right out of two of Asimov's robot stories: "That Thou Art Mindful of Him" and especially "The Evitable Conflict", which was part of Asimov's "I, Robot" anthology. You can find summaries for both on Wikipedia. Also look up the Wikipedia article on the Three Laws, and read the section about the Zeroth Law of Robotics, whose basic concept is introduced in "The Evitable Conflict".
I don't understand how people can claim that the movie had nothing to do with the book titled "I, Robot". The book was an anthology, not a novel. The basic theme that the movie addressed was right out of "The Evitable Conflict". V.I.K.I. (from the movie) was only doing what the Machines (from the short story) were doing, but in a more blatant manner. Within the limitations of the sci-fi action genre, I thought the movie did a pretty good job.
And what happens when the difference between two candidates is only 0.05% after the votes are counted, and the loser demands a recount? Suddenly that difference between 99.9% and 99.99% accuracy matters very much.
In the U.S., the entire fuss over electronic voting machines began because the 2000 presidential election hinged on determining a majority that was within the error margin of spoiled ballots. The problem is that paper voting will always produce spoiled ballots. It doesn't matter how simple you make the process (e.g. "Just put in an X in one of these two boxes"), a certain percentage of the electorate (e.g. the mentally ill, the illiterate, the very elderly, the mentally handicapped) will screw it up.
So in typical fashion, U.S. politicians went overboard and tried to "fix" the spoiled ballot problem with electronic voting machines. The problem with that method is that you'll never get people to have 100% trust in computerized voting. Someone, somewhere, will always make accusations of vote fixing, even if you create a paper trail. So now the pendulum is swinging back to paper ballots.
I'm just hoping I won't see another presidential election so close in my lifetime, because no matter what voting technique you use, the loser will cry foul in a very close race. Fortunately it only seems to happen every 40 years or so (Kennedy's election being the previous example), which provides enough time for the fuss to die down.
I'm one of the people who was interviewed for this article. Several people in my department spent an afternoon talking to the IEEE Spectrum technical writer. Although it didn't really come out in the article, our take on the kill-switch concept was that it was possible but very unlikely.
Adding a trojan at the hardware level would be incredibly difficult and risky. In the first place, reverse-engineering a design from its GDS files, determining how and where to add hidden circuitry, and then incorporating the trojan circuitry into the design would be extremely difficult, as others have pointed out. The trojan would have to be customized for every design - not a trivial task. Second, if any foundry was caught producing a compromised chip, it would be ruined overnight. No commercial or government vendor would ever trust its products again. Ditto for any software vendor whose CAD tools were found to add hidden backdoors. Even if it were possible, no sane company would take the risk.
Attacking at the firmware level is more plausible, but still unlikely. If you're using an FPGA-based design, and you let some fly-by-night offshore company write the firmware for it, hidden functionality could be slipped in if you were sloppy about vetting the code. Even if the firmware was written in the U.S., you could bribe an engineer at the company to add the trojan, but again you're gambling no one else checks the code.
Our ultimate conclusion was that the most likely scenario for future compromised computer systems was exactly the one we're seeing today - worms and trojans attacking at the OS / applications level. It's an attack vector where plausible deniability by the originator can be easily maintained. It's worked pretty well so far, and it should continue to work as long as complex systems are placed in the hands of millions of technically illiterate and careless users. DARPA is spending a relatively tiny amount of money to check out the likelihood of a hardware trojan, but I doubt many people directly involved in commercial IC hardware design are truly worried about it.
I was working in Arizona several years back, and attended several corporate presentations by Motorola. Once I flew up to Schaumburg for a day-long event where Motorola was trumpeting their "rebirth" just after the Freescale spinoff. The other attendees and I had some interesting conversations about the future of Motorola. We were all pretty pessimistic about the company's outlook.
Personally, I think that the Six Sigma movement was what started Motorola down the road to ruin. The entire management structure became fixated on playing the Six Sigma game, and lost sight of actually watching the competition or designing new products. Six Sigma became the perfect management circle-jerk. As the digital revolution in cell phones began, and cell phone networks spread throughout the third world, Motorola management was too busy computing error statistics for Six Sigma presentations to realize that their product line and the planned Iridium satellite system were already obsolete.
One event in particular sticks in my mind from the Schaumburg visit. During one presentation, a Motorola manager showed an org chart of the "old" Motorola, and then an org chart of the "new" Motorola, and assured everyone that Motorola was going to be back at the forefront of communications technology in short order thanks to the new corporate reorganization. The problem was that if you took the old org chart and rotated it 90 degrees, it looked exactly like the new one. Everyone I was with had a good laugh about that on the way back to the airport.
Did anyone seriously expect anything else?
We live in an age where the press routinely goes over every single word spoken by celebrities, politicians, and public figures, and tries to make a scandal out of any off-hand comment that can be construed to embarrass the speaker.
Any officer who has not learned to cover his ass and keep his mouth shut will have a short career in today's military.
This CNET article misses the point entirely. Google is not, and never will be, the problem. The problem is going to be the following:
(1) The local city government monitoring your car at every intersection and every stretch of road, and mailing you a ticket every time you exceed the speed limit by 5 mph or fail to beat the red light by 0.01 seconds. Go drive around the Phoenix suburbs and you'll see your future. You can pick up half a dozen robo-tickets just driving to the local mall and back.
(2) Every local business and every neighbor on your street recording you every time you go out for a stroll or take your dog for a walk.
(3) Your own spouse/parents/children/significant other putting you under 24/7 surveillance without your knowledge "for your own good".
The "Death of Privacy" scenario is inevitable, thanks to Moore's Law. And it won't be Google or the federal government doing most of the watching - it will be your family members, or the people in your neighborhood, or the folks running the local business nearby, or the city councilperson you voted for, because every one of them will rationalize that no one is really being hurt, and because the technology will make it so easy to do that they won't be able to resist the temptation. You won't be able to stop this trend any more than the RIAA and MPAA can stop unauthorized digital distribution of music and movies.
I teach introductory electrical engineering courses, and am constantly dismayed at the number of engineering students who (a) cannot read a graph, (b) cannot determine the slope and y-intercept of a straight line drawn on an x-y plane, and (c) cannot take two equations with two variables (e.g. x+y=5, 2x-3y=1) and solve for those variables. This is stuff that was taught to me in high school, and it is completely beyond the capability of many of my students.
At the same time, these same students often have multiple AP credits in mathematics that allows them to skip the first or even second semester of calculus. The result? Few of them can take a simple derivative or integral either. I'm not talking about integration by parts, or the chain rule. I'm talking about taking the derivative or integral of x^2, or e^2x.
Clearly something is missing from current high school math curriculums compared to 20 years ago. Personally I would love to ban AP credits at my place of work as well, but as everyone points out: "If we don't accept AP credits, the students will simply apply to a school that does." It's dumbing down by the lowest common denominator.
Are you guys kidding? The insurance companies are going to love driverless cars. Right now more U.S. citizens are killed and maimed on U.S. highways in one month than have been killed and maimed in the entire Iraq war. The cost to the U.S. economy due to traffic accidents is estimated at $230 billion per year. By contrast, the Iraq war has averaged $120 billion per year. How could driverless cars possibly do worse than human drivers? Once people realize how much safer cars become once humans are no longer in control, the insurance companies and politicians are going to demand that this technology be implemented as quickly as possible.
As for human drivers "bullying" computer-controlled cars, the solution is simple: reserve special lanes strictly for computer control, just like HOV lanes today. If a human attempts to "cheat" and use one of those lanes, the soon-to-be ubiquitous camera networks monitoring our cities' roads will have his image snapped and his $1000 traffic fine in the mail before he gets home. Once people get sick of the traffic jams and accidents on the human-driven roads, they'll make the switch quickly enough.
Personally, I cannot wait for the day when I can get into a car for an overnight trip, lean back, go to sleep, and wake up at my destination the next morning. This technology will revolutionize leisure and business travel by eliminating the drudgery and boredom of driving.
Exactly. What the OP forgets is that Moore's Law pushes in two directions. The first direction is to give you more performance for the same amount of money. The second direction (and often less appreciated) is to give you the same performance for less money. That's what the ASUS Eee PC does - it gives you the equivalent performance of the older 3010 at a fraction of the price.
Based on the interview with the juror in her case, it seems that part of the reason for the fine was that the jury resented being lied to in such a transparent fashion, and wanted to make a point. An appeal is a good strategy as long as she does not attempt the same lies again.
I watched her and her lawyer on CNN after the trial, and was wincing when she began spouting about how she believed she was a victim of "identity theft", and that someone must have stolen her identity to upoad the songs. I kept thinking, "Is she really stupid enough to use that as the basis for her appeal?" Fortunately someone must have smacked her and her attorney with a clue stick before the actual appeal was filed.
It most certainly is pseudoscience, because a few simple calculations will quickly show that a practical 25W laptop battery powered by tritium cannot be constructed using the betavoltaic effect.
I'm fully aware that the betavoltaic effect actually exists. So does zero point energy, for that matter. The pseudoscience begins when people make outrageous claims about these effects that have no basis in reality.
Let's run some numbers. A 25W laptop battery generates 25 joules per second. A beta decay in tritium releases 0.186 MeV of energy, or 2.98 femtojoules. Now assuming that 25% of that energy can be captured as generated charge carriers in a semiconductor energy collector, and 75% released as waste heat, that means you'd need 33.58 E15 tritium beta decays per second to power your battery.
One curie is 3.7 E10 decays per second. Tritium has a specific activity of 9800 curies / gram. Therefore, you'd need 92.6 grams (0.2 pounds) of tritium to power your laptop battery. This is exclusive of the casing, shielding, collection substrate, etc. Let's assume the material for the rest of the battery increases the mass by a factor of ten, or 2 pounds total. That's probably a very conservative number due to concerns over accidental release of so much radioactive material, but let's go with it.
So now you've got a 2 pound battery that generates 25 W of electricity while generating 75 W of waste heat. This is not something you're going to put on your lap. On top of that, as of 2005 the estimated tritium inventory for the entire U.S.A. was 75 kg, which is just enough for 810 laptop batteries. You see where this is going?
Now here's where the pseudoscience really kicks in. Show these numbers to one of the promoters of betavoltaic batteries, and watch the arm-waving begin. They'll tell you how they have discovered new physics, and they can get much more energy out of their invention than standard physics predicts, etc. Of course they can never show you a working unit.
So I stand by my original statement - betavoltaic batteries of the type promoted in the original article are pseudoscience, plain and simple.
The betavoltaic battery is nothing more than pseudoscience. It's higher quality pseudoscience than junk such as zero-point free energy generators or gravity wheel generators, but it is pseudoscience nonetheless. Every few years you see these sorts of claims about betavoltaic devices pop up again, then fade away.
Despite years of claims, no one has ever come close to demonstrating a device with the sort of power densities claimed in the article. Furthermore, the biggest proponent of betavoltaic technology is Ruggero Santilli, an infamous pseudoscientist with a litany of nutty claims and bizarre theories of physics.
If you look at the web pages of the companies that are involved in betavoltaics (e.g. betavoltaic.com or nuclearsolutions.com), you'll find that they have no physical facilities outside of a rented post office box or the home of one of the principals. None of them have any product to sell or even demo. I don't expect that will ever change.
Yes, it does look innocuous enough to someone who knows something about electronics. It looks like a solderable protoboard with some LEDs and a battery. She was probably using an NE555 or something similar to flash the LEDs. Harmless enough, although it looks tacky as hell. Someone needs to teach her good construction technique.
However, to a layman that circuit board would be completely incomprehensible. I know from personal experience that airport screeners are also paranoid about 9 V batteries, as I was questioned about a bunch that I was carrying in a bag with some video equipment. Add to that the fact that she was carrying modeling clay, which just so happens to look like plastic explosive (or at least what a layman would think plastic explosive looks like).
Assuming this was a truly harmless mistake on her part, and not some misguided prank, then she has just learned a valuable lesson that all techie types should take to heart: laymen do NOT understand what we do, or what we perceive as "harmless". In their minds, "I do not know what that is" equates to "it may be dangerous". You simply cannot walk into a government facility or an airport with a homemade electronic device in plain view and not expect to be challenged about it!
Then why aren't they going ballistic over the shows already being streamed from network sites, or the shows already available from iTunes? The secret to keeping the franchisee happy is simple: you don't make the show available for downloading until a few days after it has aired on local TV.
Given the number of TV shows that can now be streamed directly from the networks' own web sites, why don't they take the next logical step and seed their own torrents complete with embedded commercials?
They wouldn't even have to make the torrents particularly high in quality. I suspect that most viewers would be perfectly happy with 352x480 pixel (DVD-lo) quality if it was free and legal. They're not looking for full DVD quality for archival purposes. They just want to see the episodes they missed. And yes, although the commercials could be stripped out, most people simply wouldn't bother.
Sell the higher-quality commercial-free episodes on DVD or iTunes, and everyone is happy. You're no worse off than now, bandwidth requirements would actually go down (TV torrents are invariably HD quality, with corresponding larger file sizes), and advertisers would still reach viewers. The networks could even reseed old torrents with new commercials on a periodic basis.
Not unless and until some pretty fundamental changes occur in both the U.S. domestic security situation and the technology of civil aviation.
Moller's decades-long obsession with his "air car" has been an exercise in futility and a waste of investor funding. He has failed to consider how U.S. society has been transformed by both 9/11 and the explosive growth of litigation. Sure, someone could build an air car, but lots of luck actually flying it in U.S. airspace.
Let's look at the statistics. In 2006, 766 people died in U.S. civil aviation accidents (source: NTSB). That's with approximately 600,000 licensed private pilots, all of whom had at least 40 hours of instruction before their first solo flight. If automobile drivers had the same annual fatality rate, we'd have 250,000 deaths on U.S. highways annually - and that's assuming the automobile drivers had the same rigorous training! Insurance premiums for civil aviation are already extremely high by automotive standards. Sure, you could build a flying car, but just trying getting affordable insurance for it. Personal air travel is expensive compared to the cost of automotive travel, and nothing is going to change that in the near future unless fatality rates can somehow be dramatically reduced.
Beyond that, the flying car concept would completely subvert many of the security measures used at government buildings and facilities. With tens of millions of vehicles cruising around without flight plans, it would be child's play to convert one of them to a flying bomb. Do you really think that the U.S. government is going to allow tens of millions of unregulated flying vehicles to be unleashed in U.S. airspace, and constantly have to worry about domestic terrorist attacks from the air?
A flying car, if produced, will never be anything but a heavily regulated specialty toy. The concept of a low-cost flying car that anyone can own and operate with minimal licensing is a pipe dream that ignores 21st century realities.
Okay, let's try Alex Wolfe's argument in a different context:
"When you list every major law implemented to "protect" life and property, they've all been broken. Can anyone think of a law which hasn't been broken, and of course this begs the obvious question: Why doesn't society just give up and go law-free?"
DRM doesn't have to be perfect to do its job, anymore than law enforcement has to be "perfect". It just has to be effective enough to keep Joe Average from copying the file. Whether or not DRM is actually "good" or "bad" for media producers is a completely different argument, but Wolfe's sophomoric reasoning does nothing to address it.
Sweet. And with my Macbook and a copy of Parallels, I can have them all.
That's the beauty of virtualization on the Intel Macs. You cease worrying about which OS is the best compromise; you simply use the best OS for the task at hand.
For the market this laptop is intended for, 4 GB of storage is probably perfectly adequate. Keep in mind that 4 GB hard drives were standard for laptops just ten years ago, and lots of people did real work with that much storage. At $199 a pop, Asus will have a laptop that is nearly cheap enough to become an impulse buy for a lot of people.
Sure, you can always get a much better machine for a little more money, but a certain segment of the market is always attracted by the lowest possible price. Clearly this is what Asus is aiming for.
Something else the designers are overlooking: this floor will be dangerous. Let's assume a floor block has to depress 1 cm to get a useful amount of power out of the step. Now you've got a 1 cm lip around that block relative to the adjacent blocks. Inevitably someone is going to catch a toe on the edge of a block, trip, and fall. A certain percentage of those people who fall will injure themselves and require medical treatment. With thousands of people walking across the floor every day, you're going to need a full-time medical team on site just to treat the injuries.
This isn't just a bad idea for economic or engineering reasons, although there are plenty of those. As far as customer safety is concerned, it's downright imbecilic.