votes are separated from the signed container, moved to a physically different machine, decrypted and counted.
Let me correct that: "the government tells you that votes are separated from the signed container, moved to a physically different machine, decrypted and counted. Now, tell me, who has the most to lose in an election? Is it not those in power who just happen to be the ones organising the election?
Anyone can go and see how all the process is done.
And what can you see? A bunch of computers humming away? How do you know they are counting votes and not mining bitcoins?
To provide anonymity the counting and the voting must be separated. In between ballots must be stored in containers. That does provide opportunity for tampering.
Which is why in France the container is transparent (1), stays in the polling station under the surveillance of the voters for the duration of the elections, and why the ballots are counted by voters right away, still in the polling station. So at no time can the ballot box be tampered with.
The most famous paper vote tampering suspicion that has occurred in US was probably in Florida during Bush's first mandate. The recount was made multiple times and each time the results were a little different.
It points to two major flaws in your election system:
* Voting on a myriad things which requires complex and hard to decipher ballots. In France we vote on one thing at a time and have pre-printed ballots for every candidate or option and there never is any doubt about hanging chads, or partly filled check-boxes. So the counting can be done in about an hour with no doubt about the result.
* Recounts occur hours after the election so that the ballots have been out of the reach of citizens. Thus the only guarantee that the ballots being recounted are the ones that were cast on election day is that the government says so. At that point you might just as well let them designate their heir. In France the counting is done right the first time and the law allows for no recount.
And more, paper vote tampering is usually impossible to be proved and untraceable, unlike most electronic tampering.
Quite the opposite. What makes hacks easy and untraceable is centralization. With a fully decentralized election system like in France you'll need accomplices in a lot of polling stations to actually have an effect on the result. Recruiting them and keeping them quiet makes fraud really hard. In the US the paper ballots counting is centralized which eliminates citizen overview and makes it possible for one bad apple to change a lot of votes. That's what makes fraud easy and undetectable. All electronic voting systems are centralized in their nature: the software and hardware come from a single (county level) or at most a handful of sources (state and federal levels). Anyone having access or able to compromise either can tamper a lot of votes undetectably.
The official republic electronic voting system (reserved for consulate registered voters so far) has never been breached (that is known of).
First that system belongs to Scytl, a Spanish company so the government has little control over it. Second it has been breached:
* First it had an SQL Injection vulnerability in the online support page (handled by Atos). The person who reported this wisely did not further exploit it to see which other systems this would give him access to.
* Then there is this paper shows it's easy to change the Java client so it modifies the user's vote before submitting it. There is also a video and a recipe for exploiting this on a large scale.
* Finally it has been shown that in the second round it was possible to vote for a candidate that had been eliminated during the first round! While voting for an eliminated candidate is not very useful, it did show up in the election result. Also it may open the door to voting for candidates from every other districts. Unfortunately that voter was again not reckless enough to attempt it and blog about the result.
Some other reminders: voting required using a very specific version of Java that Sun made obsolete just days before the election; on Mac OS X one had to register as an Apple developper to get the right version of Java; the applet would happily send your vote over http rather than https (that's a 'feature'); passwords were sent late or lost with no second chance.
So we have a wide range of mess ups and weaknesses and the only proof we have that the vote was not hacked is that the government says so. You trust the government right? They would not have any incentive to hide embarrassing information, right? And a computer hack always leaves obvious traces that point right at the author, right? If you're not sure about any of these claims then you cannot be sure that vote was not hacked.
Now how do you garanty that there will be no interference from familly members, particularly from conservative families...
You're setting the bar higher for online voting than the current system. How do you guarantee no interference from family members now? I know you don't vote the right way. I'm not driving you to the polling station. I'll lock you in your room and monitor you until the election is over.
That results in a family member not voting, whereas Internet voting allows you to force that member to vote against his camp. It also means locking up that member for the whole election day whereas Internet voting usually does not allow you to change your vote so you don't need to lock him up after you've coerced him to vote.
Hum, do you remember the election for the leader of UMP between Fillon and Copé ?
The vote was done with paper ballots, but there have been massive frauds anyway, since Copé stole the election.
First that fraud was done in the result collating stage which is independent from the technology used at the booth. I'll grant you that with Internet voting you only have a single "urn" and thus no collating taking place. But as seen here that does not help prevent fraud at all.
Second, each voting booth published its own results at the end of the paper vote counting process. So detecting the fraud was just a matter of independently collating the results. So this fraud was easy to detect. Internet fraud however is likely to be undetectable.
The more cynical would say that, having learnt to their expense that hacking a paper-based election without getting caught is hard, the fraudsters are now trying their hand with a new system in a 'small' election so as to be ready when they have to replay that Fillon-Copé election in a few months.
It is: "Is there a way to achieve both anonymity and security"? The answer is unfortunately no. That is true for normal, paper voting as well, by the way.
Unless you're doing it really wrong, paper has no trouble providing both: the voting booth, voter list and id check provide security; while the lack of a link from the paper ballot to anything else provides anonymity.
Maybe before we rush to adopt the Metric system, we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this measurement system such a central position in our lives.
I'd love to get a subsidized phone. 'Subsidized' means I'm not paying full price for the phone, not now, not ever.
If the operator reduces the upfront cost but then makes me pay the rest during the remainder of the contract, then I'm still paying the full amount or more; so the phone is not subsidized. Subsidized means someone else (The government? A charity? The not-for-pofit operator?) pays part of the phone. I have unfortunaly never found a case where the phone was subsidized. Where can I find such fabled deals?
It's cute that you think that monthly bills will be lower if people are required to pay full price for their phones...
Free is a new French mobile operator: they started in 2012. Their business model forgoes so called 'subsidised' phones totally and that let them offer unlimited calls, SMS and 3GB of data for 19.99€ when all the subsidized plans offered less for 70+€. It paid off: they went from 0 to 8% market share in 12 months. But I'll grant you this all requires a will to disrupt the market which is sorely missing from incumbents.
So you're saying World War II stopped, and even reversed, global warming for decades?
Yes, that's a bit surprising. Maybe it has more to do with atmospheric nuclear tests sending 'dust' in the high atmosphere or some other factor.
Great, now we know what he have to do to save the planet. Bomb it into submission again.
You jest but a global thermonuclear war would solve the global warming problem in weeks:
* Ideally the first strike would hit the production centers, that probably means China. With the industry in disarray the consumption of fossil fuels, and thus CO2 emissions, would fall down drastically.
* The retaliatory strike would hit the big first-world metropolitan centers, thereby destroying the main consumption centers. This would ensure there would be no demand for a long while.
* Besides the immediate deaths, the nuclear strikes would likely cause global chaos, thus leading to a lot more deaths through famine and disease. This would reduce the world's population, thereby ensuring a further reduction of carbon emissions.
* With countries at war and international routes likely unsafe, international commerce would dwindle which would further cut down production and hence CO2 emissions.
* Finally the nuclear blasts would have sent tons of dust in the high atmosphere where it will reflect the sunlight, thus causing an immediate cooling of the atmosphere (just like eruptions do). This is the nuclear winter effect.
So there you have it: immediate cooling effect, drastic cut of CO2 emissions, probably way below even the Kyoto targets, which should greatly curb any long-term warming. Of course that comes at the price of a probable long-lasting anarchy in many regions, loss of all the modern comforts, and a few billion deaths. So hopefully no-one will go for this 'quick fix'.
I keep seeing references to 'cff files'. Does this mean that this engine requires fonts to be in a new file format? Will we need someone to create all new fonts using this format?
While I think this is pretty cool and all (Avatar anyone?), once people get a hold of the fact that the enzyme is called 'Luciferase', things could get rather warm for the company (at least in the US).
It seems to me that they are just trying to recreate the holy burning bush. Maybe it's proof that this kickstarter project will succeed and that we will also discover time travel. All the implications in this thread that the holy burning bush was the work of Satan certainly put this whole religious narrative into a new light too.
Further south solar collectors are the way to go. 0.3% of the energy that falls on the Sahara could power all of Europe. They work 24/7 all year round and are ideal of base load.
Unless you pair the solar collectors with some storage technology they don't provide power at night. So they are not '24/7'.
It speaks volumes about USA's litigious culture, the Imaginary Property regime, and the miniscule amount of value added to an individual through managing to graduate from law school and be accepted to practice law.
I've been struck by another thing while following this. In France people keep complaining that you have to file too much paperwork to create a company and how in the US you can do it all in half an hour. But it feels like that's exactly what led to making it so easy to falsify who's the head of AF Holdings. So this simplicity does seem to have drawbacks. Can a company really be held accountable if you don't know who's at its head?
And a male cannot force a woman to have an abortion even if he is the one who has to pay for it for the next 18 years.
At least up until recently the woman could not force the 'male' to pay for the child: all he had to do is claim the child is not his to walk away free. Even now proving the child is his would require a DNA test but I'm not sure the mother would have a legal way to force him to provide a DNA sample.
Finally you also forget the converse which is that the woman cannot force her partner to share the cost of her abortion.
And yet that's exactly how it works here in New Zealand - the customer pays for as much data as they download via data caps
Was there a time when there was no data cap at all in New Zealand? Because it's the introduction of data caps which is going to be hard to manage for ISPs. So if you had data caps all along your ISPs never had to face that issue. Now if they did have to deal with the transition, how did they do it? How did the first ISP to introduce data caps avoid losing most of its customers?
also, I can access the net throught that SIM card using wifi... wherever an open (unlocked) wifi net is caught.
Actually the cool thing is not really being able to access unlocked hotspots (anyone can) but being able to access Free's network of hotspots: essentially anywhere there's a Free ADSL customer there's a hotspot just for other Free/Free Mobile customers. And before someone asks, yes the ADSL customer can disable it (but then he cannot access other customer's hotspots); and hotspot traffic is kept completely separate from the ADSL customer's traffic. This preserves privacy of your own WiFi traffic; allows bandwidth limitation so you won't get crowded out of your ADSL connection; and ensures you won't get sued for what happens on the hotspot.
I was under the impression that end users were paying for bandwidth they're using. Now ISPs want usage paid for by the user AND the content provider? Nice business model.
It used to be that ISPs could arrange for the traffic at their peering points to be quite symmetrical (e.g. provide cheap hosting on your network). When that's the case both peering partners call it a wash and peering is done for free. So ISPs set the price to cover support, maintaining the network and developping some new services. But sites like YouTube changed all that. Now their traffic is asymmetrical and hosting a few more regular web site won't change a thing. So now they have to pay through the nose for their peering. The problem is that raising prices or introducing data caps (there's none in France) is clearly not going to be popular with customers at the best of times, and that the first ISP to raise its prices will loose big to its competitors, particularly in France as the competition there is very fierce. So they're trying everything else which means getting Google to either peer directly with them for free, or to pay for the bandwith.
Another factor is that in France ISPs provide television and VoD services (they all do) and as such are asked to fund French culture (movies, shows, music) through taxes. So they get pretty riled up when they see that Google too is providing VoD services and yet not only is not subject to those taxes, but also almost does not pay any corporate tax in France at all.
The Internet IS DATA. I don't get ISPs. They provide low quality service at exorbitant prices, and then complain about clients using their services.
The quality and price are not so bad. What's wrong with paying $50 for as much bandwidth as your phone line supports (up to 25Mbps); no data cap; a fixed IPv4 address; IPv6; unlimited phone calls to France and 100+ other countries, including the US, Canada and most of Europe; unlimited phone calls to French cellphones (which you normally have to pay for otherwise); a SIP phone line if you wish; a fax line; millions of WiFi hotspots; a box that's a Blu-Ray drive; lets you watch 100+ free TV channels; free and non-free VoD services; play games; another box that includes a 4 port 1Gbps switch; 802.11n WiFi; CPL; DECT phone; 250GB NAS for your TV recordings (which you can transfer out of the box) and to watch videos you downloaded; works as a BitTorrent seedbox.
... areas where Google could not get around its network..
This is clearer in the French interview. What Stephane Richard said is that they leveraged the fact that Orange is a major player in many countries, particularly in African countries, where Google has been looking for some kind of deal with them. So they made clear to Google that it wouldn't get those deal if they couldn't also come to some kind of agreement on the YouTube issue.
As a user, I pay for my cap that includes up and down.
There is no data cap on ADSL connections in France. Never has and likely never will given Orange's competitor, Free, said they think data caps make no sense.
So they're going to bring jobs back by increasing productivity? The cause of 2/3rd's of the job losses?
It seems their plan is to make american companies more competitive than Chinese ones, so that they can sell cheaper and thus get more orders so that they will then have to increase their production capacity. This is where the job creation should happen. Their gobelet assembly line employs one robot and maybe 3 or 4 people (sadly the article is not very specific), so that if they have to create a second assembly line to meet demand they will have to add one robot and 3 or 4 new jobs. Of course a lot of things could derail this so it's not clear it will play out that way.
Also, while it could create jobs in the US and in the short to mid term, if you take a look at the world-wide picture it still results in a net job loss. And in the long term it's even more likely to result in job losses globally as these robots become cheaper and more flexible. That said we may still have a bit of time before us as this robot did not seem particularly sophisticated.
With a planet full of starving people I continue to fail to understand how using food crops for fuel makes any kind of rational sense at all.
This does not seem to be limited to food crops. Sure they mention "corn, sugar cane, molasses" but immediately add that it also works with "woody biomass or plant biomass", "grass" and "Eucalyptus". So as long as we (as a species) are smart enough to apply this technology to the right sources it should be fine on the hunger front (sure, us being smart enough is questionable).
What I really wonder is whether that means they've solved the cellulose conversion issues. Given that the article does not brag about it I'm skeptical and thus I don't really see what makes this technique so interesting.
Slashdot Mirror
votes are separated from the signed container, moved to a physically different machine, decrypted and counted.
Let me correct that: "the government tells you that votes are separated from the signed container, moved to a physically different machine, decrypted and counted. Now, tell me, who has the most to lose in an election? Is it not those in power who just happen to be the ones organising the election?
Anyone can go and see how all the process is done.
And what can you see? A bunch of computers humming away? How do you know they are counting votes and not mining bitcoins?
To provide anonymity the counting and the voting must be separated. In between ballots must be stored in containers. That does provide opportunity for tampering.
Which is why in France the container is transparent (1), stays in the polling station under the surveillance of the voters for the duration of the elections, and why the ballots are counted by voters right away, still in the polling station. So at no time can the ballot box be tampered with.
The most famous paper vote tampering suspicion that has occurred in US was probably in Florida during Bush's first mandate. The recount was made multiple times and each time the results were a little different.
It points to two major flaws in your election system:
And more, paper vote tampering is usually impossible to be proved and untraceable, unlike most electronic tampering.
Quite the opposite. What makes hacks easy and untraceable is centralization. With a fully decentralized election system like in France you'll need accomplices in a lot of polling stations to actually have an effect on the result. Recruiting them and keeping them quiet makes fraud really hard. In the US the paper ballots counting is centralized which eliminates citizen overview and makes it possible for one bad apple to change a lot of votes. That's what makes fraud easy and undetectable. All electronic voting systems are centralized in their nature: the software and hardware come from a single (county level) or at most a handful of sources (state and federal levels). Anyone having access or able to compromise either can tamper a lot of votes undetectably.
The official republic electronic voting system (reserved for consulate registered voters so far) has never been breached (that is known of).
First that system belongs to Scytl, a Spanish company so the government has little control over it. Second it has been breached:
Some other reminders: voting required using a very specific version of Java that Sun made obsolete just days before the election; on Mac OS X one had to register as an Apple developper to get the right version of Java; the applet would happily send your vote over http rather than https (that's a 'feature'); passwords were sent late or lost with no second chance.
So we have a wide range of mess ups and weaknesses and the only proof we have that the vote was not hacked is that the government says so. You trust the government right? They would not have any incentive to hide embarrassing information, right? And a computer hack always leaves obvious traces that point right at the author, right? If you're not sure about any of these claims then you cannot be sure that vote was not hacked.
Now how do you garanty that there will be no interference from familly members, particularly from conservative families...
You're setting the bar higher for online voting than the current system. How do you guarantee no interference from family members now? I know you don't vote the right way. I'm not driving you to the polling station. I'll lock you in your room and monitor you until the election is over.
That results in a family member not voting, whereas Internet voting allows you to force that member to vote against his camp. It also means locking up that member for the whole election day whereas Internet voting usually does not allow you to change your vote so you don't need to lock him up after you've coerced him to vote.
lrn2crypto
You'll have to be clearer about that one.
Hum, do you remember the election for the leader of UMP between Fillon and Copé ? The vote was done with paper ballots, but there have been massive frauds anyway, since Copé stole the election.
First that fraud was done in the result collating stage which is independent from the technology used at the booth. I'll grant you that with Internet voting you only have a single "urn" and thus no collating taking place. But as seen here that does not help prevent fraud at all.
Second, each voting booth published its own results at the end of the paper vote counting process. So detecting the fraud was just a matter of independently collating the results. So this fraud was easy to detect. Internet fraud however is likely to be undetectable.
The more cynical would say that, having learnt to their expense that hacking a paper-based election without getting caught is hard, the fraudsters are now trying their hand with a new system in a 'small' election so as to be ready when they have to replay that Fillon-Copé election in a few months.
It is: "Is there a way to achieve both anonymity and security"? The answer is unfortunately no. That is true for normal, paper voting as well, by the way.
Unless you're doing it really wrong, paper has no trouble providing both: the voting booth, voter list and id check provide security; while the lack of a link from the paper ballot to anything else provides anonymity.
Maybe before we rush to adopt the Metric system, we should stop to consider the consequences of blithely giving this measurement system such a central position in our lives.
Someone has just read xkcd.
If you don't have a good definition of what you're trying to replicate, you can't replicate it.
Oh! So that's why Slashdotters can't have kids!
I'd love to get a subsidized phone. 'Subsidized' means I'm not paying full price for the phone, not now, not ever.
If the operator reduces the upfront cost but then makes me pay the rest during the remainder of the contract, then I'm still paying the full amount or more; so the phone is not subsidized. Subsidized means someone else (The government? A charity? The not-for-pofit operator?) pays part of the phone. I have unfortunaly never found a case where the phone was subsidized. Where can I find such fabled deals?
It's cute that you think that monthly bills will be lower if people are required to pay full price for their phones...
Free is a new French mobile operator: they started in 2012. Their business model forgoes so called 'subsidised' phones totally and that let them offer unlimited calls, SMS and 3GB of data for 19.99€ when all the subsidized plans offered less for 70+€. It paid off: they went from 0 to 8% market share in 12 months. But I'll grant you this all requires a will to disrupt the market which is sorely missing from incumbents.
So you're saying World War II stopped, and even reversed, global warming for decades?
Yes, that's a bit surprising. Maybe it has more to do with atmospheric nuclear tests sending 'dust' in the high atmosphere or some other factor.
Great, now we know what he have to do to save the planet. Bomb it into submission again.
You jest but a global thermonuclear war would solve the global warming problem in weeks:
So there you have it: immediate cooling effect, drastic cut of CO2 emissions, probably way below even the Kyoto targets, which should greatly curb any long-term warming. Of course that comes at the price of a probable long-lasting anarchy in many regions, loss of all the modern comforts, and a few billion deaths. So hopefully no-one will go for this 'quick fix'.
I keep seeing references to 'cff files'. Does this mean that this engine requires fonts to be in a new file format? Will we need someone to create all new fonts using this format?
While I think this is pretty cool and all (Avatar anyone?), once people get a hold of the fact that the enzyme is called 'Luciferase', things could get rather warm for the company (at least in the US).
It seems to me that they are just trying to recreate the holy burning bush. Maybe it's proof that this kickstarter project will succeed and that we will also discover time travel. All the implications in this thread that the holy burning bush was the work of Satan certainly put this whole religious narrative into a new light too.
Further south solar collectors are the way to go. 0.3% of the energy that falls on the Sahara could power all of Europe. They work 24/7 all year round and are ideal of base load.
Unless you pair the solar collectors with some storage technology they don't provide power at night. So they are not '24/7'.
It speaks volumes about USA's litigious culture, the Imaginary Property regime, and the miniscule amount of value added to an individual through managing to graduate from law school and be accepted to practice law.
I've been struck by another thing while following this. In France people keep complaining that you have to file too much paperwork to create a company and how in the US you can do it all in half an hour. But it feels like that's exactly what led to making it so easy to falsify who's the head of AF Holdings. So this simplicity does seem to have drawbacks. Can a company really be held accountable if you don't know who's at its head?
Patent trolling is of interest to many a nerd.
They're not patent trolls but copyright trolls. Still trolls though...
And a male cannot force a woman to have an abortion even if he is the one who has to pay for it for the next 18 years.
At least up until recently the woman could not force the 'male' to pay for the child: all he had to do is claim the child is not his to walk away free. Even now proving the child is his would require a DNA test but I'm not sure the mother would have a legal way to force him to provide a DNA sample.
Finally you also forget the converse which is that the woman cannot force her partner to share the cost of her abortion.
And yet that's exactly how it works here in New Zealand - the customer pays for as much data as they download via data caps
Was there a time when there was no data cap at all in New Zealand? Because it's the introduction of data caps which is going to be hard to manage for ISPs. So if you had data caps all along your ISPs never had to face that issue. Now if they did have to deal with the transition, how did they do it? How did the first ISP to introduce data caps avoid losing most of its customers?
also, I can access the net throught that SIM card using wifi... wherever an open (unlocked) wifi net is caught.
Actually the cool thing is not really being able to access unlocked hotspots (anyone can) but being able to access Free's network of hotspots: essentially anywhere there's a Free ADSL customer there's a hotspot just for other Free/Free Mobile customers. And before someone asks, yes the ADSL customer can disable it (but then he cannot access other customer's hotspots); and hotspot traffic is kept completely separate from the ADSL customer's traffic. This preserves privacy of your own WiFi traffic; allows bandwidth limitation so you won't get crowded out of your ADSL connection; and ensures you won't get sued for what happens on the hotspot.
I was under the impression that end users were paying for bandwidth they're using. Now ISPs want usage paid for by the user AND the content provider? Nice business model.
It used to be that ISPs could arrange for the traffic at their peering points to be quite symmetrical (e.g. provide cheap hosting on your network). When that's the case both peering partners call it a wash and peering is done for free. So ISPs set the price to cover support, maintaining the network and developping some new services. But sites like YouTube changed all that. Now their traffic is asymmetrical and hosting a few more regular web site won't change a thing. So now they have to pay through the nose for their peering. The problem is that raising prices or introducing data caps (there's none in France) is clearly not going to be popular with customers at the best of times, and that the first ISP to raise its prices will loose big to its competitors, particularly in France as the competition there is very fierce. So they're trying everything else which means getting Google to either peer directly with them for free, or to pay for the bandwith.
Another factor is that in France ISPs provide television and VoD services (they all do) and as such are asked to fund French culture (movies, shows, music) through taxes. So they get pretty riled up when they see that Google too is providing VoD services and yet not only is not subject to those taxes, but also almost does not pay any corporate tax in France at all.
The Internet IS DATA. I don't get ISPs. They provide low quality service at exorbitant prices, and then complain about clients using their services.
The quality and price are not so bad. What's wrong with paying $50 for as much bandwidth as your phone line supports (up to 25Mbps); no data cap; a fixed IPv4 address; IPv6; unlimited phone calls to France and 100+ other countries, including the US, Canada and most of Europe; unlimited phone calls to French cellphones (which you normally have to pay for otherwise); a SIP phone line if you wish; a fax line; millions of WiFi hotspots; a box that's a Blu-Ray drive; lets you watch 100+ free TV channels; free and non-free VoD services; play games; another box that includes a 4 port 1Gbps switch; 802.11n WiFi; CPL; DECT phone; 250GB NAS for your TV recordings (which you can transfer out of the box) and to watch videos you downloaded; works as a BitTorrent seedbox.
From the article:
This is clearer in the French interview. What Stephane Richard said is that they leveraged the fact that Orange is a major player in many countries, particularly in African countries, where Google has been looking for some kind of deal with them. So they made clear to Google that it wouldn't get those deal if they couldn't also come to some kind of agreement on the YouTube issue.
As a user, I pay for my cap that includes up and down.
There is no data cap on ADSL connections in France. Never has and likely never will given Orange's competitor, Free, said they think data caps make no sense.
So they're going to bring jobs back by increasing productivity? The cause of 2/3rd's of the job losses?
It seems their plan is to make american companies more competitive than Chinese ones, so that they can sell cheaper and thus get more orders so that they will then have to increase their production capacity. This is where the job creation should happen. Their gobelet assembly line employs one robot and maybe 3 or 4 people (sadly the article is not very specific), so that if they have to create a second assembly line to meet demand they will have to add one robot and 3 or 4 new jobs. Of course a lot of things could derail this so it's not clear it will play out that way.
Also, while it could create jobs in the US and in the short to mid term, if you take a look at the world-wide picture it still results in a net job loss. And in the long term it's even more likely to result in job losses globally as these robots become cheaper and more flexible. That said we may still have a bit of time before us as this robot did not seem particularly sophisticated.
With a planet full of starving people I continue to fail to understand how using food crops for fuel makes any kind of rational sense at all.
This does not seem to be limited to food crops. Sure they mention "corn, sugar cane, molasses" but immediately add that it also works with "woody biomass or plant biomass", "grass" and "Eucalyptus". So as long as we (as a species) are smart enough to apply this technology to the right sources it should be fine on the hunger front (sure, us being smart enough is questionable).
What I really wonder is whether that means they've solved the cellulose conversion issues. Given that the article does not brag about it I'm skeptical and thus I don't really see what makes this technique so interesting.