I find it amusing that the same debate is ongoing in formula one, though testing is rather easier there. Regulations limiting the performance of the cars in specified ways have now been in place for decades.
Part of the problem is that there is no sane way to discover this app. For example, I wanted a calculator app which diddn't request stupid permissions. The only way to do this was to go down the list, click install - for every app.
Because this is hard and slow, even technically adept users are not likely to always do this. So the apps that don't request excess permissions don't get found and used preferentially over those that do. So the permission list tends to expand, as publishers are not penalised for it.
If there is a 'good' app at 6th in the list, it takes about 50 interactions with the device to find it.
Of the top 6 calculator apps, 5 require full access to the internet.
They make no mention of why they wish full access to the internet in their description.
Speaking personally, I would greatly prefer it if it was required for developers to provide a brief justification for every single capability they use. And that these capabilities are actually required for the apps function, as outlined on the brief description.
A way to search for apps without certain capabilities as default would be good too.
The article on which the submission was based simply stated it used too much fuel. This was a quote from another article. Yes, it used a lot of fuel, however at the time of the accident, the fuel and other costs were handily made up by the ticket prices. Every flight was full as I understand it. Could concorde substitute in the low-cost carrier role - of course not. Did it have a profitable (after writing off development costs) buisness going forward - yes, as long as the planes remained in good order. Was it possible that at some point in the future that they would no longer be able to fill the seats - sure.
For a truly niche service, for the very rich, I question that they wouldn't be able to fill the seats at prices enough to pay all the costs now.
I suspect passwords are important for another reason. Previous caselaw, as I understand it has established that there may not be a reasonable expectation of privacy for texts.
If you know that a user of a phone has their phone secured, so that only the user can easily access it - this may be sufficiently different so as to make this earlier caselaw not apply. Then there may be a 'reasonable expectation of privacy', that users do not know the phone they are sending to is locked may not have.
Well - there is a problem. Batteries. The power requirements on a small phone are identical to those of a large one, but for the screen. If you half the power use of the screen, by shrinking it to half its area (by 40% linearly), and want to maintain a similar thickness, the battery needs to get quite a lot smaller. This means it has lower capacity, so you need to keep the power use really low. This makes quadcore, lots of RAM, and such problematic.
There are a few ways to do this. Pretending that it's for the moment typing a letter in response to some other letter. If the correct response to a stimulus 'A' is 'a' - then the server can take a response to a randomly chosen phrase - AQRGS, and then get response fqrgs, and hand both of these over to an authentication server, which determines the match.
Or, it can contact an authentication server, which deals with both the exact challenge to be sent, and verifies the response. In some apps, this may be a valid way to do things.
If you can get a reliable enough response from the user in a binary manner that you can determine the exact key, then you can simply hash this as any other password. Having one server know all the passwords is a weakness, but it's a very known weakness.
So - no CSI/DSI - for which there are no drivers anyway. No ethernet port. I do wonder what that white blob in place of the ethernet/USB hub chip is. Is it simply a bit of tape, to cover some wires linking the USB directly to the SoC, or something else.
As to why this is an interesting bit of hardware - it's not. It's interesting because it's a relatively open platform, at a reasonable price point.
Devices I want a model A for. Wifi weather-station controller. Heating controller. Door camera system.
You can't do this with the GPL license, if you're not OK with other people putting up binaries, as they have the right to distribute, and even sell binaries.
If they see that mobile, or !x86, or non-windows is worth the development time for what may be a whole new infrastructure. I note there are a few flash-only sites that don't have iOS versions, for example.
I personally want flash on my new device. Do I want flash to die - yes. Unfortunately, some websites that I am locked into require flash, and being unable to use these on my new device will simply mean lack of flexibility and me needing to lug two devices, or use my old one.
If this occurs, then Microsoft has every reason to properly secure the bootloader, so that running other OSs is absolutely impossible. The golden dream for Microsoft in this is that there are two companies making and selling hardware - Apple and Microsoft. Two, to avoid anti-trust concerns.
To make a secure device, you need perhaps $1 or $2 extra in hardware, and $100K or so spent on getting it audited by someone with a cryptographic clue. Microsoft has this money, and the incentive to spend this money. Your average tabletmaker doesn't care that much.
NASA is not at the moment a space organisation. They are a welfare organisation for aerospace.
For example - taking the budget for the Space Launch System up till the first couple of flights, and purchasing commercial launch from SpaceX gets you 85000 tons or so launched. (Assuming that reusability does not kick in)
Everything done in space by NASA is driven by launch costs.
The size of spacecraft has to be reduced, and they have to be more carefully engineered and built, which dramatically raises costs.
NASAs previous attempt to lower launch costs (X33) picked a major aerospace companies bid. This company proposed, with NASAs encouragement to use three seperate fundamentally untried technologies on the one vehicle. (Linear aerospike, conformal tanks, and metallic TPS).
SpaceX (for example) is building on their successful rocket launches so far, with the aim of reusing their rockets several-many times. At the moment, space launch costs several thousand dollars a kilo. The soon-to-be-launched http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Grasshopper is a test stage, to test propulsive landing for the first stage - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE is a video outlining this.
The absolute starting point for any space program has to be getting things into space. Doing this expensively, for political reasons (SLS,...) means you have a welfare reason, not a space reason.
A sane space agency should have very limited mission definitions. 'Fly safely to ISS, dock using this adaptor'. Previously they've made a practice of making proposals that effectively pick from one of several large aerospace corporations. By requiring technologies they've developed, for no good reason, rather than simple functional requirements.
A fundamental change in space could occur if SpaceX (or one of the other new entrants) gets reusability up and running. The fuel cost for a launch is well under $10/kg. Even if you 'only' get to $100/kg, from the current $5000/kg or so, that enables a dramatically different space program. It becomes feasible to put a lot more people up, and have them debug stuff on orbit. It becomes comparatively cheap to have massive redundancy in systems, based on comparatively inexpensive and massive designs.
You don't end up spending 220 million to design an air-conditioner. You launch 5 candidate systems built by bidders for $10M, and see which one works.
The nasty part - your argument in response to the original comments about 'IP is important too' - somewhat miss the point. At the moment - for example - Apple is making large amounts of money from stuff produced in China, and managing to extract large amounts of money from that value-chain, into 'US' hands.
However, unless you believe that customers simply will not ever buy products not designed in the USA - at some point Chinese owned companies in China, will start doing development competently enough, and the US arm will be merely a sales organisation.
At this point - the balance of trade gets a lot worse - as the entire profit stays in China.
It's of course true, because little about SpaceX's designs are explicitly 'high tech'. They do not use metallic thermal protection, linear aerospikes, conformal tanks,...
However - it's false because it assumes those things are useful at a given stage in technology.
As an example, trying to bring in turbocharged engines into mass production at Ford in 1910 would have been a great leap forward in terms of technology - but likely an utter failure due to cost and lack of reliability. Things that are not exciting in terms of technology can if well-implemented enormously boost whole areas of the economy. The interstate network was an example of this, as was the invention of containerised transport.
The use of cross-feed is new. No launcher yet has used this concept of feeding from the edge boosters to the middle, so the middle boosters tanks remain full until the outside ones seperate.
This has significant advantages over having either the middle stage light on the pad, and deplete its fuel, or light in mid-air once seperation is over - losing the thrust and increasing gravity losses.
It also has significant (in principle) cost and compatibility advantages. If you can use most of the same parts for a Falcon 9, or a falcon heavy launch that both reduces your production cost, lowers inventory, and allows you perhaps to much more easily develop global reusability.
Detecting impulsive noise, that correlates between sensors is enormously easier than detecting speech. It's the difference between detecting a car parked on your foot, and a cat.
Slashdot Mirror
I would be lots more impressed with this if parliaments could even design their code (laws) without bugs or loopholes.
I find it amusing that the same debate is ongoing in formula one, though testing is rather easier there.
Regulations limiting the performance of the cars in specified ways have now been in place for decades.
Part of the problem is that there is no sane way to discover this app.
For example, I wanted a calculator app which diddn't request stupid permissions.
The only way to do this was to go down the list, click install - for every app.
Because this is hard and slow, even technically adept users are not likely to always do this.
So the apps that don't request excess permissions don't get found and used preferentially over those that do.
So the permission list tends to expand, as publishers are not penalised for it.
If there is a 'good' app at 6th in the list, it takes about 50 interactions with the device to find it.
Of the top 6 calculator apps, 5 require full access to the internet.
They make no mention of why they wish full access to the internet in their description.
Speaking personally, I would greatly prefer it if it was required for developers to provide a brief justification for every single capability they use.
And that these capabilities are actually required for the apps function, as outlined on the brief description.
A way to search for apps without certain capabilities as default would be good too.
The article on which the submission was based simply stated it used too much fuel.
This was a quote from another article.
Yes, it used a lot of fuel, however at the time of the accident, the fuel and other costs were handily made up by the ticket prices. Every flight was full as I understand it.
Could concorde substitute in the low-cost carrier role - of course not.
Did it have a profitable (after writing off development costs) buisness going forward - yes, as long as the planes remained in good order.
Was it possible that at some point in the future that they would no longer be able to fill the seats - sure.
For a truly niche service, for the very rich, I question that they wouldn't be able to fill the seats at prices enough to pay all the costs now.
Same here.
A) My phone has 32G, and I'm pairing with it anyway for 3G.
B) I can put a 32G SD card in a keychain reader, with a tiny adaptor.
I suspect passwords are important for another reason.
Previous caselaw, as I understand it has established that there may not be a reasonable expectation of privacy for texts.
If you know that a user of a phone has their phone secured, so that only the user can easily access it - this may be sufficiently different so as to make this earlier caselaw not apply.
Then there may be a 'reasonable expectation of privacy', that users do not know the phone they are sending to is locked may not have.
Well - there is a problem.
Batteries.
The power requirements on a small phone are identical to those of a large one, but for the screen.
If you half the power use of the screen, by shrinking it to half its area (by 40% linearly), and want to maintain a similar thickness, the battery needs to get quite a lot smaller.
This means it has lower capacity, so you need to keep the power use really low.
This makes quadcore, lots of RAM, and such problematic.
You missed a step.
Unless you have a negligible amount of traffic, you need to pay.
Sort of - there are caveats.
There are a few ways to do this.
Pretending that it's for the moment typing a letter in response to some other letter.
If the correct response to a stimulus 'A' is 'a' - then the server can take a response to a randomly chosen phrase -
AQRGS, and then get response fqrgs, and hand both of these over to an authentication server, which determines the match.
Or, it can contact an authentication server, which deals with both the exact challenge to be sent, and verifies the response.
In some apps, this may be a valid way to do things.
If you can get a reliable enough response from the user in a binary manner that you can determine the exact key, then you can simply hash this as any other password.
Having one server know all the passwords is a weakness, but it's a very known weakness.
So - no CSI/DSI - for which there are no drivers anyway.
No ethernet port.
I do wonder what that white blob in place of the ethernet/USB hub chip is.
Is it simply a bit of tape, to cover some wires linking the USB directly to the SoC, or something else.
As to why this is an interesting bit of hardware - it's not.
It's interesting because it's a relatively open platform, at a reasonable price point.
Devices I want a model A for.
Wifi weather-station controller.
Heating controller.
Door camera system.
You can't do this with the GPL license, if you're not OK with other people putting up binaries, as they have the right to distribute, and even sell binaries.
If they see that mobile, or !x86, or non-windows is worth the development time for what may be a whole new infrastructure.
I note there are a few flash-only sites that don't have iOS versions, for example.
I personally want flash on my new device.
Do I want flash to die - yes.
Unfortunately, some websites that I am locked into require flash, and being unable to use these on my new device will simply mean lack of flexibility and me needing to lug two devices, or use my old one.
Indeed - the rabbits should be re-homed afterwards.
Mmmm - delicious rabbit pie.
If this occurs, then Microsoft has every reason to properly secure the bootloader, so that running other OSs is absolutely impossible.
The golden dream for Microsoft in this is that there are two companies making and selling hardware - Apple and Microsoft.
Two, to avoid anti-trust concerns.
To make a secure device, you need perhaps $1 or $2 extra in hardware, and $100K or so spent on getting it audited by someone with a cryptographic clue.
Microsoft has this money, and the incentive to spend this money.
Your average tabletmaker doesn't care that much.
You can't code reliably for complex hardware without specifications.
Which are not released.
Angry Turds.
Draw something brown.
Beautiful wedgies.
A way to stab people in the face over the internet.
NASA is not at the moment a space organisation.
They are a welfare organisation for aerospace.
For example - taking the budget for the Space Launch System up till the first couple of flights, and purchasing commercial launch from SpaceX gets you 85000 tons or so launched. (Assuming that reusability does not kick in)
Everything done in space by NASA is driven by launch costs.
The size of spacecraft has to be reduced, and they have to be more carefully engineered and built, which dramatically raises costs.
NASAs previous attempt to lower launch costs (X33) picked a major aerospace companies bid.
This company proposed, with NASAs encouragement to use three seperate fundamentally untried technologies on the one vehicle.
(Linear aerospike, conformal tanks, and metallic TPS).
SpaceX (for example) is building on their successful rocket launches so far, with the aim of reusing their rockets several-many times.
At the moment, space launch costs several thousand dollars a kilo.
The soon-to-be-launched http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Grasshopper is a test stage, to test propulsive landing for the first stage - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sSF81yjVbJE is a video outlining this.
The absolute starting point for any space program has to be getting things into space. ...) means you have a welfare reason, not a space reason.
Doing this expensively, for political reasons (SLS,
A sane space agency should have very limited mission definitions.
'Fly safely to ISS, dock using this adaptor'.
Previously they've made a practice of making proposals that effectively pick from one of several large aerospace corporations.
By requiring technologies they've developed, for no good reason, rather than simple functional requirements.
A fundamental change in space could occur if SpaceX (or one of the other new entrants) gets reusability up and running.
The fuel cost for a launch is well under $10/kg.
Even if you 'only' get to $100/kg, from the current $5000/kg or so, that enables a dramatically different space program.
It becomes feasible to put a lot more people up, and have them debug stuff on orbit.
It becomes comparatively cheap to have massive redundancy in systems, based on comparatively inexpensive and massive designs.
You don't end up spending 220 million to design an air-conditioner.
You launch 5 candidate systems built by bidders for $10M, and see which one works.
I misread the topic as 'Nasa, Congress Reach Around'
The nasty part - your argument in response to the original comments about 'IP is important too' - somewhat miss the point.
At the moment - for example - Apple is making large amounts of money from stuff produced in China, and managing to extract large amounts of money from that value-chain, into 'US' hands.
However, unless you believe that customers simply will not ever buy products not designed in the USA - at some point Chinese owned companies in China, will start doing development competently enough, and the US arm will be merely a sales organisation.
At this point - the balance of trade gets a lot worse - as the entire profit stays in China.
"not a major step forward in space technology"
This is both true, and completely false.
It's of course true, because little about SpaceX's designs are explicitly 'high tech'. ...
They do not use metallic thermal protection, linear aerospikes, conformal tanks,
However - it's false because it assumes those things are useful at a given stage in technology.
As an example, trying to bring in turbocharged engines into mass production at Ford in 1910 would have been a great leap forward in terms of technology - but likely an utter failure due to cost and lack of reliability.
Things that are not exciting in terms of technology can if well-implemented enormously boost whole areas of the economy.
The interstate network was an example of this, as was the invention of containerised transport.
The use of cross-feed is new.
No launcher yet has used this concept of feeding from the edge boosters to the middle, so the middle boosters tanks remain full until the outside ones seperate.
This has significant advantages over having either the middle stage light on the pad, and deplete its fuel, or light in mid-air once seperation is over - losing the thrust and increasing gravity losses.
It also has significant (in principle) cost and compatibility advantages.
If you can use most of the same parts for a Falcon 9, or a falcon heavy launch that both reduces your production cost, lowers inventory, and allows you perhaps to much more easily develop global reusability.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grasshopper_(rocket)#Grasshopper is the prototype vehicle for stage 1 of falcon 9 (and if falcon heavy stages are identical...) which will if successful allow the first stage(s) to be recovered and reflown.
Again - this isn't technically interesting.
There are no new technologies in this.
But to use the old quote 'Quantity has a quality all of its own.'.
Detecting impulsive noise, that correlates between sensors is enormously easier than detecting speech.
It's the difference between detecting a car parked on your foot, and a cat.
Oh, g.
I overthought. :)