I read it as... laptop taken to China, infected with something which then wormed it's way into all the systems it could when reconnected to the corporate network, which happened to include some network controllable thermostats.
i.e. the Chinese aren't after the thermostat, it was just part of a system which got compromised.
I know a lot of people are going to say things like unit testing through to user acceptance test and everything in between or maybe taking testing off of developers so they can get on with more 'important' stuff (see first post).
But all of that is the technical skills and knowledge that you need to do the job. At the end of the day, you are meant to be an advocate for the end user, argue to get bugs fixed, don't accept "Thats how it's meant to work" just because the spec said that is how it will work if that doesn't help the user etc.
Also, grow thick skin and be prepared for cynism to creep into your view of the world (or maybe good testers are already cynical?)
It's a job which breeds a negative view of live, you spend your time not producing anything directly sellable and tearing other peoples work apart.
The unit in question comes in 2 parts, one is semi-permanently wired into the car, behind the dashboard and is the unit which collects and sends all the data.
The head unit is connected to the dashboard unit via Bluetooth and is as far as I can tell, just as a display for the behind the dashboard unit.
If you think about it, that is the only way it could be done, otherwise you would plug the satnav in when doing your boring morning commute, then leave it at home when you go for a blast at the weekend.
You can't drop the unit because it's not the bit you take with you when you park up.
I'm still unclear on how the rail gun is supposed to take accurate aim on a mobile target (another ship).
Assuming you are shooting at 80 miles, the projectile is moving at 5000 mph. Flight time is about 58 seconds. Not many large ships can radically alter course in that time to avoid the shot.
Also, bear in mind that line of sight at sea level +30 meters is about 13 miles. So a target ship without the ability to see beyond the horizon (either Airborne Radar or Satellite) only has 9 seconds from when the slugs appears above the horizon to impact, and thats assuming the radar picks it up the moment it's above the horizon.
The US already has missile technology which does a very good job.
Missiles can be shot down or guidance interfered with.
There is also an issue with missiles and shells being filled with explosives which if detonated within your ship at the very least significantly damages if not out right sinks it.
Railguns are shooting a solid slug of metal. There is no propellant to be ignited, it's intrinsically safe for the firing ship to handle. The slugs are also far more compact than the missiles or shells because of the lack of propellant so a warship can leave port carrying far more ammo which means less resupply at sea is needed.
typing on an onscreen keyboard is easier to find stuff vs multiple menus layers if you've got a low resolution screen with a finger sized pointer.
In that context Unity is a perfectly acceptable UI for touch screen devices. Doesn't change the fact that it's a terrible interface for traditional keyboard/mouse input.
Re:We all know what will happen
on
Lake Vostok Reached
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Or we could just teach the Norwegians to shoot straight, and maybe take some helicopter flying lessons.
Bullets would have had no effect anyway. It was a lifeform based on completely separate cells which work together and could be assigned to any role needed.
Bullets would have torn a hole in the macro shape, maybe killed a few hundred cells at the impact point, but the remaining cells would have just knitted the hole back together. The only effect bullets would have had on what was shaped like a dog would have been the momentum of the bullet causing the dog to get knocked around.
It's why they had to resort to fire because you needed to kill the each cell individually. Poison might have worked as well.
Kind of, but you are missing an important point, since the point of this is to improve long range accuracy, well beyond the range of standard infantry weapons (SA80 400m, LSW 1000m) the squad who has this technology has a significant advantage against one that doesn't.
There is also another possibility. The laser needs direct line of sight, but the bullet following a ballistic path only needs to find a laser dot far enough out to have time to correct it's course. Stick a recon guy with a laser designator on the ridge of a hill, keep the rest of the squad on the far side of the hill and fire above the ridge line in the general direction of the enemy. Accurate indirect fire using infantry weapons from a position that the enemy could never hit (beyond a 1 in a billion lucky shot).
If the companies that makes these cards and the banks that back them know they have issues like this then why on Earth would the push them?
As I said here higher up in the thread but after your post.
It's about making cards fast enough to replace cash, when they do, they can take a small percentage of every transaction made in the legal economy, and log all those transactions as well.
It all about speed. No PIN numbers and no direct contact in a small fiddly slot means the transaction will be quicker, which makes cards usable in those low value high volume transactions where cash still reigns supreme.
PayWave and those types of authentication schemes are not about security, they are about finding away to replace the last of the legal anonymous cash transactions.
And the CC companies are quiet happy to refund any fraudulent transactions in the short term in order to get to that long term goal, as is pretty much every government I would be as well.
And yet the card readers at stores are still the same size as normal chip and pin card readers. Like a very chunky PDA.
Besides, scanning a room is a stupid way to do it, everyone has to walk though a narrow door to get into the room, stick the reader near the door frame.
Actually, I never even think about the american flag being on the moon, it's such a non-issue I think it would be hard to think of it as a finger to other nations.
Of course, I'm saying this from the UK, so American has never been the competition for us, more of a dodgy ally. Maybe it has more significance to people living in Russia or maybe China?
The history of the 20th century shows that technological achievement and superior ethics, or environmental consciousness, do not necessarily go hand in hand where humans are concerned. Why assume otherwise for aliens?
I'd say there are two possible outcomes as technology advances.
1) As weapons become ever more advanced, we suddenly realise that we are all in the same boat and using said weapons is really a stupid idea. Not ethics as such, but hopefully a more cooperative approach.
2) We use the weapons... The End.
That period of cooperation could form the seed of a more collective approach to problem solving which carries forward as as part of the culture as technology improves. See Western and Eastern European relations post cold war.
Of course, the counter argument to that is that we are cooperating with balancing miltary/political power blocks but we are still waging war on anyone who does roll over and who can't put up much of a fight. So maybe that hope of a cooperative approach is just a day dream.
people don't want to be seen riding them. I would suggest that it could be the same with these cars
I think you are right in that I don't think anyone would buy one of these as their own vehicle but there is one very obvious use that I can see.
Assuming they are as self guiding as the article makes out, you could use them as driverless taxi services running people to/from supermarkets and train stations etc.
I don't think the white upstream of the plant is turbulence, those look like sand/gravel bars in the stream to me, you can see the same structures downstream of the plant.
But you are right, even google earth clearly shows pollution changing the colour of the water and the point where it flows into a larger river and mixes in.
If you're a manager employing any range of employees from this range of occupations, you're likely to have a use for some sort of data juggling tools. However, there'll be a bunch of chefs who cook what they're told to cook, lumberjacks who cut down the trees they're told to cut down, and casino dealers who deals the cards they're told to deal
So at school age, kids have already been divided up into Manual Labour for ever and managers?
There's also nothing wrong with giving basic carpentry skills to everyone, but there'lll still be a large portion of people who will just "call the guy" whenever they need some woodwork done.
I had to do a bit of woodwork, metal work, electronics at school, I also had to take French, German, Maths, Stats, English Lit, English Lang, Physics, Biology, Art (broken up into drawing, painting, sculpture etc)
None of the stuff I learned back then has been used in my day to day life since full time education, it was all a basic introduction to each subject, just enough to show what was involved and provide a starter, a base to build upon later in life if you decide to, either through higher education in that subject or just later in life for fun.
None of those people download financial information from a bank to see how spending compares to a budget? Even just as part of their private lifes rather than in a business sense?
Lumberjacks don't need to estimate costs for extracting wood based on variables such as wages and fuel and access distance?
casino dealers/chefs/cashiers don't need to deal with resource scheduling. etc
You're right, none of those people would need to deal with data to do their jobs on a day to day basis and all will already have some sort of manual system to deal with what data they do handle, but whats wrong with giving them some basic skills to automate what data handling tasks they do encounter, or even the basic problem solving skills that an introductory course would give them.
Slashdot Mirror
I read it as... laptop taken to China, infected with something which then wormed it's way into all the systems it could when reconnected to the corporate network, which happened to include some network controllable thermostats.
i.e. the Chinese aren't after the thermostat, it was just part of a system which got compromised.
He didn't say ideology, he said religion; and then backed that up even further by mentioning irrational beliefs.
I know a lot of people are going to say things like unit testing through to user acceptance test and everything in between or maybe taking testing off of developers so they can get on with more 'important' stuff (see first post).
But all of that is the technical skills and knowledge that you need to do the job. At the end of the day, you are meant to be an advocate for the end user, argue to get bugs fixed, don't accept "Thats how it's meant to work" just because the spec said that is how it will work if that doesn't help the user etc.
Also, grow thick skin and be prepared for cynism to creep into your view of the world (or maybe good testers are already cynical?)
It's a job which breeds a negative view of live, you spend your time not producing anything directly sellable and tearing other peoples work apart.
http://redlettermedia.com/plinkett/star-wars/star-wars-episode-1-the-phantom-menace/
The unit in question comes in 2 parts, one is semi-permanently wired into the car, behind the dashboard and is the unit which collects and sends all the data.
The head unit is connected to the dashboard unit via Bluetooth and is as far as I can tell, just as a display for the behind the dashboard unit.
If you think about it, that is the only way it could be done, otherwise you would plug the satnav in when doing your boring morning commute, then leave it at home when you go for a blast at the weekend.
You can't drop the unit because it's not the bit you take with you when you park up.
fuel isn't an issue on a nuclear ship.
Assuming you are shooting at 80 miles, the projectile is moving at 5000 mph. Flight time is about 58 seconds. Not many large ships can radically alter course in that time to avoid the shot.
Also, bear in mind that line of sight at sea level +30 meters is about 13 miles. So a target ship without the ability to see beyond the horizon (either Airborne Radar or Satellite) only has 9 seconds from when the slugs appears above the horizon to impact, and thats assuming the radar picks it up the moment it's above the horizon.
Missiles can be shot down or guidance interfered with.
There is also an issue with missiles and shells being filled with explosives which if detonated within your ship at the very least significantly damages if not out right sinks it.
Railguns are shooting a solid slug of metal. There is no propellant to be ignited, it's intrinsically safe for the firing ship to handle. The slugs are also far more compact than the missiles or shells because of the lack of propellant so a warship can leave port carrying far more ammo which means less resupply at sea is needed.
Not based on Hollywood Accounting ;-)
Oh the glorious irony, their tax dodge from year . now makes it look like they don't bring in enough money to be worth saving as an industry.
typing on an onscreen keyboard is easier to find stuff vs multiple menus layers if you've got a low resolution screen with a finger sized pointer.
In that context Unity is a perfectly acceptable UI for touch screen devices. Doesn't change the fact that it's a terrible interface for traditional keyboard/mouse input.
Bullets would have had no effect anyway. It was a lifeform based on completely separate cells which work together and could be assigned to any role needed.
Bullets would have torn a hole in the macro shape, maybe killed a few hundred cells at the impact point, but the remaining cells would have just knitted the hole back together. The only effect bullets would have had on what was shaped like a dog would have been the momentum of the bullet causing the dog to get knocked around.
It's why they had to resort to fire because you needed to kill the each cell individually. Poison might have worked as well.
Kind of, but you are missing an important point, since the point of this is to improve long range accuracy, well beyond the range of standard infantry weapons (SA80 400m, LSW 1000m) the squad who has this technology has a significant advantage against one that doesn't.
There is also another possibility. The laser needs direct line of sight, but the bullet following a ballistic path only needs to find a laser dot far enough out to have time to correct it's course. Stick a recon guy with a laser designator on the ridge of a hill, keep the rest of the squad on the far side of the hill and fire above the ridge line in the general direction of the enemy. Accurate indirect fire using infantry weapons from a position that the enemy could never hit (beyond a 1 in a billion lucky shot).
Install a hosts file on his machine that redirects everything which might be affected by SOPA to localhost.
See how long it is before he complains that he can't do anything.
As I said here higher up in the thread but after your post.
It's about making cards fast enough to replace cash, when they do, they can take a small percentage of every transaction made in the legal economy, and log all those transactions as well.
Yeah, I know, I was talking more from the national pride point of view not any sort of legal idea of ownership.
It all about speed. No PIN numbers and no direct contact in a small fiddly slot means the transaction will be quicker, which makes cards usable in those low value high volume transactions where cash still reigns supreme.
PayWave and those types of authentication schemes are not about security, they are about finding away to replace the last of the legal anonymous cash transactions.
And the CC companies are quiet happy to refund any fraudulent transactions in the short term in order to get to that long term goal, as is pretty much every government I would be as well.
And yet the card readers at stores are still the same size as normal chip and pin card readers. Like a very chunky PDA.
Besides, scanning a room is a stupid way to do it, everyone has to walk though a narrow door to get into the room, stick the reader near the door frame.
They are working on the basis that potential fraud will be less than the cost to improve the security.
It's why wireless/pinless transactions are limited to £15 and what ever the limit in the US is.
Actually, I never even think about the american flag being on the moon, it's such a non-issue I think it would be hard to think of it as a finger to other nations.
Of course, I'm saying this from the UK, so American has never been the competition for us, more of a dodgy ally. Maybe it has more significance to people living in Russia or maybe China?
And I would guess he has to make the transaction before the card is next used or the one time CVV will be out of step with the server.
I'd say there are two possible outcomes as technology advances.
1) As weapons become ever more advanced, we suddenly realise that we are all in the same boat and using said weapons is really a stupid idea. Not ethics as such, but hopefully a more cooperative approach.
2) We use the weapons... The End.
That period of cooperation could form the seed of a more collective approach to problem solving which carries forward as as part of the culture as technology improves. See Western and Eastern European relations post cold war.
Of course, the counter argument to that is that we are cooperating with balancing miltary/political power blocks but we are still waging war on anyone who does roll over and who can't put up much of a fight. So maybe that hope of a cooperative approach is just a day dream.
To be fair, laws like that are designed specifically to prevent another rise of the far right.
I think you are right in that I don't think anyone would buy one of these as their own vehicle but there is one very obvious use that I can see.
Assuming they are as self guiding as the article makes out, you could use them as driverless taxi services running people to/from supermarkets and train stations etc.
I don't think the white upstream of the plant is turbulence, those look like sand/gravel bars in the stream to me, you can see the same structures downstream of the plant.
But you are right, even google earth clearly shows pollution changing the colour of the water and the point where it flows into a larger river and mixes in.
So at school age, kids have already been divided up into Manual Labour for ever and managers?
I had to do a bit of woodwork, metal work, electronics at school, I also had to take French, German, Maths, Stats, English Lit, English Lang, Physics, Biology, Art (broken up into drawing, painting, sculpture etc)
None of the stuff I learned back then has been used in my day to day life since full time education, it was all a basic introduction to each subject, just enough to show what was involved and provide a starter, a base to build upon later in life if you decide to, either through higher education in that subject or just later in life for fun.
None of those people download financial information from a bank to see how spending compares to a budget? Even just as part of their private lifes rather than in a business sense?
Lumberjacks don't need to estimate costs for extracting wood based on variables such as wages and fuel and access distance?
casino dealers/chefs/cashiers don't need to deal with resource scheduling. etc
You're right, none of those people would need to deal with data to do their jobs on a day to day basis and all will already have some sort of manual system to deal with what data they do handle, but whats wrong with giving them some basic skills to automate what data handling tasks they do encounter, or even the basic problem solving skills that an introductory course would give them.