You'll notice how they describe other entries as prioritizing solar-receiving area versus aerodynamics. I'm curious to see how their entry performs, since they're focusing on prioritizing aerodynamics.
Of course, modern cars have to actually be practical, squeezing into parking spaces, carrying an engine (or batteries), a trunks for hauling cargo, and seating for four passengers (typically). I don't say that to dismiss the achievements here, as I don't think anyone is pretending these are normal, roadworthy cars (or if they are, they're completely missing the point). It's just a way of seeing where the theoretical state-of-the-art in solar-powered vehicles currently exist. And it's probably a lot of fun to build and race these vehicles.
I was thinking the same thing. But there are apparently three classes of vehicles. Only the top speed racers are solar-powered cycles. The cruiser class, for instance, has vehicles that look like this:
It seems to me that fragile, lightweight solar panel farms could be equally devastated by the next hurricane to come along, destroying a massive investment, possibly before they've even paid for themselves. I'd hope that alternatives such as wave and wind power are considered as well. I'm no expert on solar farm construction, obviously, but as a layman, it seem like those are more suited to surviving a severe hurricane simply due to inherent design and construction methods.
I think the advantage solar might have is if it's very widely distributed, such as on homes and office buildings, which can at least provide small islands of limited power generation and storage. A good many of those will likely be destroyed, of course, but at least some percentage are likely to remain working.
If your card is stolen and you need a replacement, how do the authorities know that you are the legitimate card holder and not the guy who stole a card and then, pretending to be you, requested a replacement?
It's not complicated. You have to go in IN PERSON to a government office and get a card re-issued, using several alternate sources as proof of identity. This is already what I had to do when got a replacement Social Security card or a passport.
Also, there's no need to actually use this new system to replace anything else immediately. It can just be used as a stand-alone authentication. That is, your SSN can still uniquely identify you as a person, but in order to prove who you are when requesting credit, you'd need to perform a one-time validation using your private and public keys. Same as with the passport - initially, this would only be used to acquire the passport, which can be used normally afterwards.
I think with this sort of thing, it's important not to let perfect be the enemy of good. There's probably no such thing as a 100% foolproof system, but I don't think it needs to be. It just needs to be significantly better than what we have right now, which is pretty much broken beyond belief.
This may involved "a public and private key" including "something that could be revoked if it has been compromised," Joyce added.
This problem has already been solved many times already. A randomly generated private key, and an associated public key for validation. That's all that's needed. The private key stays secret from *everyone*. The number never leaves the enclave in your card, and can't be extracted. A simple USB-based reader can perform authentication via a computer or smartphone. There's no need for anyone to EVER have access to that number, since all they need is the public key for validation. Thus, the risk of compromise is limited to physical theft of your ID card - a much higher bar than simply stealing a SSN number.
Initial validation of identity doesn't have to involve anything new. Local SSN offices set up all over the country do this every day. They could also handle revocation and re-issue of new cards as well.
The technology is there to do all this. It's just a matter of political will and moving a massive bureaucracy, which are tough enough challenges. Look at some posters' comments just above, claiming that a national ID will destroy our freedoms and are inherently racist, or something, and you get an idea of the political fight ahead to implement this.
Just 2 years? I've had my current smartphone for 4 years, and I'm just starting to think about a new one. I think it's insane that we don't get at least 4-5 years of guaranteed security updates for a device that costs nearly a thousand dollars.
I don't personally care about a headphone jack or an SD card (although I understand why some people do). I can even live without a removable battery, even though that's the only part of my phone that's slowly degrading. It's the assumption that I'll only be keeping this device for 2 years that's killing me. It may even drive me to Apple for my next device, as they seem to provide better long-term support for their phones, which was quite surprising when I did a bit of investigation into this. Even so, the Pixel is still on the table as a possible next phone.
Okay, as much as I hate to appear like I'm defending Equifax in any way... You simply can't really make such a statement of fact like that from the information given so far.
Smith said when he started with Equifax 12 years ago there was no one in cybersecurity. The company has poured a quarter of a billion dollars into cybersecurity in the last three years and today boasts a 225 person team.
All we can infer for certain is that sometime between 12 years ago and 3 years ago a dedicated cybersecurity team was formed, and what the last three years combined budget was.
That doesn't really mean there were no security-focused employees before that, of course, as the job was probably rolled into the general IT budget and operational responsibilities. As such, it may be difficult for anyone to break down exactly what the budget and head count were specifically for security before there was a dedicated department.
I got an Echo Dot because I wanted to see if it would be at all useful or interesting, as that hit a price point where I didn't mind experimenting. I thought I might also like to develop software for it as well someday.
Generally speaking, I use it for two things: the world's most hilariously over-engineered timer and an interface for adding things to my shopping list. So how does that work out? I can't even remove items from my list using Alexa. WTF? And I can't give it a list of items by saying "Alexa, add bread, milk, and eggs to my shopping list." Nope, you have to say "Alexa, add xxx to my shopping list. Alexa, add yyy to my shopping list. Alexa, add zzz to my shopping list." Again, really? Even it's most basic functionality is pretty half-assed.
Beyond that, I still haven't really found a real use for it, at least not worth the price. It's probably more useful if: * You go all in and put them *everywhere* in your house, so you can more easily access it at any time. * You're not at your computer all day like I am, rendering it largely pointless, as anything Alexa can do, my computer can do faster and easier.
It's the epitome of a first world problem, of course, but to me, it's similar to the hump on the back of the last iPhone case. That is, I'm wondering why someone near the top didn't take a look at that and say "Damn, that's kind of ugly. Apple isn't supposed to release ugly products - especially not flagship products. Let's back up and figure out something else here." Apple has always been known for a company that, whatever else they do, has always been known for its strong sense of aesthetics. It's just surprising to see that slipping a bit, at least in my view.
The proposal is for new cars. Nobody's going to mess with your '83 Citation.
There is no proposal. There have been zero details given yet. It's nothing but a news bite at this point.
I agree it's highly *likely* that this is how it would play out (aside from being even more likely that nothing comes of this at all), but that doesn't make it a fact.
My response was slightly tangential to your point, I suppose. Yeah, I agree an issue is definitely the behavior of that "nearly." If it simply flags an error, no problem - you correct it manually and move on. If it's more ambiguous, then that could be a problem. I looked at the linked article, and didn't see an immediate answer to this. Not that affects me in any way, of course, as I'm not using Swift. Objective-C is far better at interop between my C++ code and the Cocoa APIs, so that's what I'll continue to use.
I used to be somewhat critical of the compatibility-breaking change of Swift, but I'm wondering if this isn't a decent approach for the long-term benefit of the language. It certainly seems to be better to make incompatible changes early in the language's adoption life cycle than to wait too long, then break things, which causes a lot of problem when there's a huge existing body of source code. Moreover, everyone was warned well in advance that Swift would be making changes up to at least version 3 (and apparently, slightly beyond), so it's not like this should catch developers off guard.
I'd imagine the benefit of making changes post-release is that you can account for real-world feedback based on actual experience with the language, rather than purely theoretical designs. I'd have to think this makes for a better language in the long run.
The big caveat here is whether the Swift developers stop tinkering with the core language and allow it to stabilize for the long term, at least in terms of backwards compatibility.
S3 is a generic hosting system. Whether you use it for public or private storage is entirely up to you. Many websites are build with Amazon serving their content, for example.
There's really no way to cure abject stupidity like this. You can always build a better idiot.
Also, how many of you only go to one store for all your food shopping? I sure don't, and I don't know anyone who does, either.
I shop exclusively at my local QFC, as it pretty much has everything I need. Do you shop at multiple stores for price or selection? I can't think of what I'd need that isn't available at that one store, and there's no way I could save enough to justify the extra 30-60 minutes per trip it would take to visit the second-nearest grocery store.
You're arguing that... what? Some horrific accident or series of accidents will turn the public away from autonomous vehicles? If so, I can't agree. People die in horrible car accidents all the time. Same with modern airliners. I'd say we're pretty well immune to that now.
Driving long distances has always been pretty damned boring, and today's drivers are already distracting themselves to death using their smartphones with no assistance from semi-autonomous cars. And I'd posit that future drivers can't really do any worse than current drivers do with black ice - which is to say, typically losing complete control of the vehicle. So, I think that ship has long sailed, and I'm not really sure there's any turning it around.
It's going to be a rough few years of transition, most likely, but the eventual move to fully autonomous systems and their subsequent refinement over the next decade or two are inevitable, after which this will be much less of issue.
China is not a western democracy. You may recall that they're not shy of implementing what we would consider draconian, even brutal measures to solve a perceived problem. Do you recall China's population problem, and how they dealt with that? At the moment, their country is drowning in air pollution.
I'm not saying this admiringly, as this is simply the manifest power of an authoritarian government, and not something we should seek to emulate (speaking of the means, not the end). I'm willing to bet there's a good chance China will follow through with their promises here. It's not for some noble or abstract reason like "saving the planet." They've got a severe pollution problem that's affecting *everyone's* health - including the party elite. As such, there's a very high motivation to solve this issue.
To clarify a bit: popularity matters mostly among competing languages. I hope people here understand that Python isn't really competing with C++, so the relative difference in popularity between those two doesn't really matter much at all. You might notice how among the top 20 "popular" languages, there's a very broad range of specialties, which I don't think is a coincidence at all.
Example: Lua ranks something like #35 on the TIOBE index, but is by far the most popular lightweight embeddable application extension language for native code. Obviously, it's quite specialized, which is why it's so far down in the general rankings. But it's essentially a #1 ranking language among its peers.
Yeah, this one was a bit of a brain burner. I actually had to RTFA to get a clue as well. Hopefully we get more of these articles. Wouldn't that be nice: tech-heavy stories on a tech-site...
I'm still going to point out some silliness in the article, mainly, this quote:
There’s not much time left to develop reversible machines, because progress in conventional semiconductor technology could grind to a halt soon. And if it does, the industry could stagnate, making forward progress that much more difficult. So the time is indeed ripe now to pursue this technology, as it will probably take at least a decade for reversible computers to become practical.
That seems like a stretch. As soon as we actually hit the wall, there's going to be a great incentive to push forward with alternative technology. In the meantime, the world is not going to collapse because we can't keep increasing our computational power at the same ridiculous rate. In fact, it might actually be nice to take a bit of a breather and just work at hardening and optimizing our existing infrastructure (hah!).
Rather, it sounds like a marketing pitch for more funding, and seem more than a little self-serving. Still, that's fine. I hope there remains some amount of funding for blue-sky projects like this and quantum computing. Even if it doesn't pan out as hoped, it's very likely we still learn valuable things.
Slashdot Mirror
Check out this entry, which is pretty close to a perfect airfoil shape:
https://www.worldsolarchalleng...
You'll notice how they describe other entries as prioritizing solar-receiving area versus aerodynamics. I'm curious to see how their entry performs, since they're focusing on prioritizing aerodynamics.
Of course, modern cars have to actually be practical, squeezing into parking spaces, carrying an engine (or batteries), a trunks for hauling cargo, and seating for four passengers (typically). I don't say that to dismiss the achievements here, as I don't think anyone is pretending these are normal, roadworthy cars (or if they are, they're completely missing the point). It's just a way of seeing where the theoretical state-of-the-art in solar-powered vehicles currently exist. And it's probably a lot of fun to build and race these vehicles.
I was thinking the same thing. But there are apparently three classes of vehicles. Only the top speed racers are solar-powered cycles. The cruiser class, for instance, has vehicles that look like this:
https://www.worldsolarchalleng...
Not exactly mainstream, but it's most definitely a "car".
How certain are we that solar panels are the way to go in a hurricane-prone region?
https://cdn.theatlantic.com/as...
It seems to me that fragile, lightweight solar panel farms could be equally devastated by the next hurricane to come along, destroying a massive investment, possibly before they've even paid for themselves. I'd hope that alternatives such as wave and wind power are considered as well. I'm no expert on solar farm construction, obviously, but as a layman, it seem like those are more suited to surviving a severe hurricane simply due to inherent design and construction methods.
I think the advantage solar might have is if it's very widely distributed, such as on homes and office buildings, which can at least provide small islands of limited power generation and storage. A good many of those will likely be destroyed, of course, but at least some percentage are likely to remain working.
If your card is stolen and you need a replacement, how do the authorities know that you are the legitimate card holder and not the guy who stole a card and then, pretending to be you, requested a replacement?
It's not complicated. You have to go in IN PERSON to a government office and get a card re-issued, using several alternate sources as proof of identity. This is already what I had to do when got a replacement Social Security card or a passport.
Also, there's no need to actually use this new system to replace anything else immediately. It can just be used as a stand-alone authentication. That is, your SSN can still uniquely identify you as a person, but in order to prove who you are when requesting credit, you'd need to perform a one-time validation using your private and public keys. Same as with the passport - initially, this would only be used to acquire the passport, which can be used normally afterwards.
I think with this sort of thing, it's important not to let perfect be the enemy of good. There's probably no such thing as a 100% foolproof system, but I don't think it needs to be. It just needs to be significantly better than what we have right now, which is pretty much broken beyond belief.
From TFA:
This may involved "a public and private key" including "something that could be revoked if it has been compromised," Joyce added.
This problem has already been solved many times already. A randomly generated private key, and an associated public key for validation. That's all that's needed. The private key stays secret from *everyone*. The number never leaves the enclave in your card, and can't be extracted. A simple USB-based reader can perform authentication via a computer or smartphone. There's no need for anyone to EVER have access to that number, since all they need is the public key for validation. Thus, the risk of compromise is limited to physical theft of your ID card - a much higher bar than simply stealing a SSN number.
Initial validation of identity doesn't have to involve anything new. Local SSN offices set up all over the country do this every day. They could also handle revocation and re-issue of new cards as well.
The technology is there to do all this. It's just a matter of political will and moving a massive bureaucracy, which are tough enough challenges. Look at some posters' comments just above, claiming that a national ID will destroy our freedoms and are inherently racist, or something, and you get an idea of the political fight ahead to implement this.
Just 2 years? I've had my current smartphone for 4 years, and I'm just starting to think about a new one. I think it's insane that we don't get at least 4-5 years of guaranteed security updates for a device that costs nearly a thousand dollars.
I don't personally care about a headphone jack or an SD card (although I understand why some people do). I can even live without a removable battery, even though that's the only part of my phone that's slowly degrading. It's the assumption that I'll only be keeping this device for 2 years that's killing me. It may even drive me to Apple for my next device, as they seem to provide better long-term support for their phones, which was quite surprising when I did a bit of investigation into this. Even so, the Pixel is still on the table as a possible next phone.
Okay, as much as I hate to appear like I'm defending Equifax in any way... You simply can't really make such a statement of fact like that from the information given so far.
Smith said when he started with Equifax 12 years ago there was no one in cybersecurity. The company has poured a quarter of a billion dollars into cybersecurity in the last three years and today boasts a 225 person team.
All we can infer for certain is that sometime between 12 years ago and 3 years ago a dedicated cybersecurity team was formed, and what the last three years combined budget was.
That doesn't really mean there were no security-focused employees before that, of course, as the job was probably rolled into the general IT budget and operational responsibilities. As such, it may be difficult for anyone to break down exactly what the budget and head count were specifically for security before there was a dedicated department.
Well, I'd say they just got it wrong in a different way then. Pedantically speaking, of course.
I love how, in the comparison images, someone actually felt the need to label darker areas as "less lights" and brighter areas as "more lights."
Also, how pedantic would it be of me to point out that it should be "fewer" lights, not "less"?
I got an Echo Dot because I wanted to see if it would be at all useful or interesting, as that hit a price point where I didn't mind experimenting. I thought I might also like to develop software for it as well someday.
Generally speaking, I use it for two things: the world's most hilariously over-engineered timer and an interface for adding things to my shopping list. So how does that work out? I can't even remove items from my list using Alexa. WTF? And I can't give it a list of items by saying "Alexa, add bread, milk, and eggs to my shopping list." Nope, you have to say "Alexa, add xxx to my shopping list. Alexa, add yyy to my shopping list. Alexa, add zzz to my shopping list." Again, really? Even it's most basic functionality is pretty half-assed.
Beyond that, I still haven't really found a real use for it, at least not worth the price. It's probably more useful if:
* You go all in and put them *everywhere* in your house, so you can more easily access it at any time.
* You're not at your computer all day like I am, rendering it largely pointless, as anything Alexa can do, my computer can do faster and easier.
It's the epitome of a first world problem, of course, but to me, it's similar to the hump on the back of the last iPhone case. That is, I'm wondering why someone near the top didn't take a look at that and say "Damn, that's kind of ugly. Apple isn't supposed to release ugly products - especially not flagship products. Let's back up and figure out something else here." Apple has always been known for a company that, whatever else they do, has always been known for its strong sense of aesthetics. It's just surprising to see that slipping a bit, at least in my view.
The proposal is for new cars. Nobody's going to mess with your '83 Citation.
There is no proposal. There have been zero details given yet. It's nothing but a news bite at this point.
I agree it's highly *likely* that this is how it would play out (aside from being even more likely that nothing comes of this at all), but that doesn't make it a fact.
My response was slightly tangential to your point, I suppose. Yeah, I agree an issue is definitely the behavior of that "nearly." If it simply flags an error, no problem - you correct it manually and move on. If it's more ambiguous, then that could be a problem. I looked at the linked article, and didn't see an immediate answer to this. Not that affects me in any way, of course, as I'm not using Swift. Objective-C is far better at interop between my C++ code and the Cocoa APIs, so that's what I'll continue to use.
I used to be somewhat critical of the compatibility-breaking change of Swift, but I'm wondering if this isn't a decent approach for the long-term benefit of the language. It certainly seems to be better to make incompatible changes early in the language's adoption life cycle than to wait too long, then break things, which causes a lot of problem when there's a huge existing body of source code. Moreover, everyone was warned well in advance that Swift would be making changes up to at least version 3 (and apparently, slightly beyond), so it's not like this should catch developers off guard.
I'd imagine the benefit of making changes post-release is that you can account for real-world feedback based on actual experience with the language, rather than purely theoretical designs. I'd have to think this makes for a better language in the long run.
The big caveat here is whether the Swift developers stop tinkering with the core language and allow it to stabilize for the long term, at least in terms of backwards compatibility.
S3 is a generic hosting system. Whether you use it for public or private storage is entirely up to you. Many websites are build with Amazon serving their content, for example.
There's really no way to cure abject stupidity like this. You can always build a better idiot.
Also, how many of you only go to one store for all your food shopping? I sure don't, and I don't know anyone who does, either.
I shop exclusively at my local QFC, as it pretty much has everything I need. Do you shop at multiple stores for price or selection? I can't think of what I'd need that isn't available at that one store, and there's no way I could save enough to justify the extra 30-60 minutes per trip it would take to visit the second-nearest grocery store.
If the music major had any IT smarts, Equifax wouldn't be in this mess to begin with.
Shut up Trump supporter. No one cares what you think!
That's similar to what I told the Ubuntu for Windows subsystem. Shut up Linux emulator! No one cares what you thunk!
I tried some clever trolling, but got modded +Insightful instead. Very frustrating.
You're arguing that... what? Some horrific accident or series of accidents will turn the public away from autonomous vehicles? If so, I can't agree. People die in horrible car accidents all the time. Same with modern airliners. I'd say we're pretty well immune to that now.
Driving long distances has always been pretty damned boring, and today's drivers are already distracting themselves to death using their smartphones with no assistance from semi-autonomous cars. And I'd posit that future drivers can't really do any worse than current drivers do with black ice - which is to say, typically losing complete control of the vehicle. So, I think that ship has long sailed, and I'm not really sure there's any turning it around.
It's going to be a rough few years of transition, most likely, but the eventual move to fully autonomous systems and their subsequent refinement over the next decade or two are inevitable, after which this will be much less of issue.
China is not a western democracy. You may recall that they're not shy of implementing what we would consider draconian, even brutal measures to solve a perceived problem. Do you recall China's population problem, and how they dealt with that? At the moment, their country is drowning in air pollution.
I'm not saying this admiringly, as this is simply the manifest power of an authoritarian government, and not something we should seek to emulate (speaking of the means, not the end). I'm willing to bet there's a good chance China will follow through with their promises here. It's not for some noble or abstract reason like "saving the planet." They've got a severe pollution problem that's affecting *everyone's* health - including the party elite. As such, there's a very high motivation to solve this issue.
To clarify a bit: popularity matters mostly among competing languages. I hope people here understand that Python isn't really competing with C++, so the relative difference in popularity between those two doesn't really matter much at all. You might notice how among the top 20 "popular" languages, there's a very broad range of specialties, which I don't think is a coincidence at all.
Example: Lua ranks something like #35 on the TIOBE index, but is by far the most popular lightweight embeddable application extension language for native code. Obviously, it's quite specialized, which is why it's so far down in the general rankings. But it's essentially a #1 ranking language among its peers.
You're sure it wasn't Emacs? I mean, there's good ol' C-x M-c M-Butterfly, right?
Yeah, this one was a bit of a brain burner. I actually had to RTFA to get a clue as well. Hopefully we get more of these articles. Wouldn't that be nice: tech-heavy stories on a tech-site...
I'm still going to point out some silliness in the article, mainly, this quote:
There’s not much time left to develop reversible machines, because progress in conventional semiconductor technology could grind to a halt soon. And if it does, the industry could stagnate, making forward progress that much more difficult. So the time is indeed ripe now to pursue this technology, as it will probably take at least a decade for reversible computers to become practical.
That seems like a stretch. As soon as we actually hit the wall, there's going to be a great incentive to push forward with alternative technology. In the meantime, the world is not going to collapse because we can't keep increasing our computational power at the same ridiculous rate. In fact, it might actually be nice to take a bit of a breather and just work at hardening and optimizing our existing infrastructure (hah!).
Rather, it sounds like a marketing pitch for more funding, and seem more than a little self-serving. Still, that's fine. I hope there remains some amount of funding for blue-sky projects like this and quantum computing. Even if it doesn't pan out as hoped, it's very likely we still learn valuable things.