What market forces? There are no market forces when there are only one or two ISPs in most areas. The free market is driven by competition. If there's no competition (two providers are not enough to provide said competition) then there's no free market.
There's a difference between "defending yourself from nuclear attacks" and "not being the target of nuclear attacks in the first place".
Sure, being a long way away from the nuclear blast will make sure that you aren't hit by the blast wave, but it's by no means a "defense". A defense would be something that can prevent taking damage from a weapon that's targeted at you. For example, an anti-missile system or a shield. The problem is that anti-missile systems don't actually work all that well yet and no one has made a shelter that can survive a direct attack from a nuclear weapon.
The sad thing is that I'm not surprised they showed up. People can't even fly an RC plane around without someone calling the cops. The terrorists have won, we're all terrified of everything now.
The problem here is that the contacts already have safeties. They're shielded contacts that are only accessible by sticking thin strips of metal into the device. This is much safer than, say, a car battery with exposed terminals. You suggest that, rather than tell people not to stick thin strips of metal into shielded electrical connectors, we should redesign the entire kindle to put in circuitry that limits the power draw to safe levels in the even someone goes completely out of their way to defeat the safety feature. Ridiculous.
Personally, I think it's stupid that power is being supplied by these mechanical connectors, but more circuitry is still a stupid idea. If you really want to redesign the kindle then a much better solution would be to make an electrical connector to supply power to the cover separate from the mechanical hooks. Of course, this still wouldn't solve the problem because there's already a lot of kindles out there with the current electrical connectors.
Amazon is already issuing a refund for the cover, so it's much easier to redesign the cover and exchange it via the current program. Redesigning the kindle would take a lot longer and then amazon would have to set up an exchange system for that as well.
I'm all for safety features. I'm one of the biggest safety "nazis" with regard to safety around electromechanical devices. (Particularly robots, as that's where I do most of my work) But at some point it's no longer "safety first" and it becomes "safety for the purpose of seeing how many times we can say the word 'safety'".
That won't work. The kindle runs off of the battery too. If the battery supplies ANY power then it will all go through the metal hook (a metal bar having a resistance close to 0) and none through the kindle. Even if the metal hook had a resistance high enough to allow a non-zero voltage across the actual circuits of the kindle, you'd still be wasting power.
Long story short, if the battery cuts power then the kindle stops working. Thus, this really isn't a solution to anything.
The real solution would be to make a cover that DOESN'T SHORT OUT THE BATTERY.
That's actually a terrible idea. Limiting the current through the hooks would still result in lots power being wasted, just not enough to crash the device. Over time this will cause the battery to discharge completely, which results in the owner charging it, which leads to greatly reduced battery lifetime.
If you run your batteries between 20% and 80% charge, you get orders of magnitude more life out of them compared to running them between 10% and 95% charge.
"Remember, "ideas are a dime a dozen" and "invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".
This little catch-phrase is such bullshit."
No, you're ranting about how ideas are so much more important than work is bullshit. When all you hear about is how Amazon, Facebook, and Google were all made by people who had a great idea and then suddenly made a shitload of money then your perspective is more than a little bit skewed. There's a lot more people that had great ideas and then failed because they didn't implement it properly, they didn't hammer out the details, they didn't work hard enough, etc.
For example, there was this one company (forgot their name) that was founded circa 2000. The idea was to have bike messengers deliver small things locally very quickly (within roughly 30 minutes). For example, video games, pizzas, coffee, etc. They had a great idea but still went poof when the dot com bubble burst because their business model was complete shit.
There's a lot more to making things happen than just "having an idea". It doesn't happen by sheer chance, either. You start with an idea, then you spend one hell of a lot of time and probably a lot of money refining the idea. Working out problems, changing designs, hammering out details, finding bugs, implementing things, etc. An idea will get absolutely NOWHERE if you don't do a lot of work.
In what world does using a fucking CNC MILLING MACHINE qualify as "at home". 99.999% of people do not have machining tools worth more than a car sitting around their house.
"Actually, Kill-switch based malware is much less valuable in reality than other types of hacks. If this were a server processor, I could see the value in an enhanced remote server-kill. Because these are basic home-use processors though, remote kill viruses probably won't get much farther than proof-of-concept."
Why not? There's plenty of viruses out there that serve to do nothing but destroy data or make the computer unusable. A lot of those are designed mainly to hurt home computers. Yes, a couple viruses are targeted at sabotage of competitor's machines (or nuclear processing facilities), but they're in the minority.
I'm wondering if anyone actually did any research before claiming that it's anonymous behind this. A false flag would be someone pretending to be anonymous while ddosing some website. However, it seems that everyone is simply assuming that anonymous is behind every ddos that happens to any site tangentially connected to wikileaks, even when no one claiming to be anonymous has anything to do with it.
Care to cite your source? The size isn't mentioned in the article and a couple youtube videos I've found (one linked above) from IBM seem to imply that this thing takes up multiple racks filled with blades.
Yes, and had you read the article you would see why you're being redundant. From TFA: "The "Jeopardy!" answer-and-question format is a different kind of challenge. It often requires contestants to deal with subtleties, puns and riddles and come up with answers fast."
The guys at IBM haven't just thrown together a piece of junk that parses text into google and spits out the first result. They've done one hell of a job actually making it understand grammar, puns, etc.
Also, this video shows some examples of watson working as well as having issues. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC3IryWr4c8&feature=related
Look, comcast is a private company that exists to make money. Because they're a private company, the government doesn't regulate the quality of their product. This is because it's assumed that the free market will take over. The assumption is that people will switch to other providers and thus stop buying comcast service. In a market in which there's actually competition, this works quite well.
The problem is that comcast has a monopoly (or duopoly) with regard to internet service pretty much everywhere comcast offers service. Thus, there's no free market to drive prices down and quality up.
The only solution in these situations is government regulation. Either subsidize new providers, cap prices, mandate minimum quality of service, etc. Comcast argues that they don't need regulation because they're doing just fine and that they're serving the public good. These graphs show that this is clearly not the case.
I don't know what "main beams" are, but the regulations for headlight brightness are significantly different between the US and the UK. I don't know much more, but I do know the max and min brightness levels are different.
No offense, but someone who doesn't even know how to turn their high-beams on probably isn't qualified to be posting about headlight performance. There are a lot of places that aren't dense urban centers lit up like the Las Vegas strip. I'm not just talking about the middle of nowhere, there are a lot of very populated places that don't have streetlights. For example, there's a highway about half a mile from my house that has no lighting. There's roads right outside my house with very poor lighting,. In addition, I know of a lot of mountain roads with exactly zero lights.
You apparently live somewhere where there's enough light to make you think it's daytime 24/7. If you find it scary to drive at night without high-beams then please stop driving at night, you aren't qualified. That said, turning your high beams on is an incredibly simple matter. It varies from car to car but it's always one of 3 things. Push the stick that controls the lights forward. Pull the stick that controls the lights back. Turn on a switch next to the steering column. (If your car is incredibly old then you might have a foot switch to turn them on, but if this were the case then you'd already know about it)
"headlights are primarily so that other people can see you, not so you can see the road"
This is simply false. There are park lights (the amber/red lights right next to your blinkers) that allow other drivers to see you at night. Your headlights are so that you can see the road. Have you ever driven anywhere that doesn't have streetlights? Because if you have then you'd know how useful headlights are. Just try turning them off sometime on an empty road and see how far you get before running into a ditch or telephone pole.
"Carriers are increasingly charging for 3G mobile access by the megabyte, to prevent 'unfair' subsidies of heavy users by everyone else."
No, they're not charging more in order to make the network "fair" for everyone. They're charging more because they can get away with it because there are no real alternatives for anyone to switch to (especially with the 2-year contracts they're allowed to lock everyone into). It's just that saying "We're charging more money because we're a company that's driven by making more money" doesn't go over as well as saying "We're charging more money to keep the network fair".
Better yet, there's a lot of printers nowadays that have wireless networking capability built-in.
Some custom firmware and all of a sudden you've turned this printer into an access point as well. No glued shut trays, no mysterious power cables, etc.
Obviously a country wouldn't sabotage their own space station. (Unless you want to get into this whole conspiracy theory thing where a government kills its own people in order to make people afraid and seize more power in the ensuing chaos.)
But terrorist organizations or countries that don't have anything on board the ISS may conceivably want to bring it down. The point of doing something like stuxnet, as opposed to simply shooting it with a missile, is that it's hard to find and hard to trace back to whoever did it. The only reason anyone would do this is so that it doesn't get the rest of the world pissed off AT THEM. Also, if you're really, really clever about it you might be able to make it look like a weird bug rather than a piece of malicious software, in which case no one would be pissed off at you anyway.
Why are you and everyone else so mad about wikileaks here? Your anger is completely misdirected. Wikileaks didn't steal the information it got leaked. Common sense tells us that it doesn't matter whether it's wikileaks or some other anonymous post on some website, the information is already out there and available to the parties that wish to use it to do harm.
We should really be asking ourselves WHY THE FUCK CAN'T THE GOVERNMENT KEEP THE NAMES OF CIVILIAN INFORMANTS CONFIDENTIAL?!
Interesting, I don't remember anything in the original constitution or bill of rights that mandated slavery. Could you perhaps indicate what you're referring to, because I think you're making shit up.
Yeah, the free market works really damn well... WHEN THERE'S A MARKET.
You're lucky enough to live in one of the few areas in which there are several broadband providers. In most areas this isn't the case and you don't have anything to bargain with. You can't threaten to switch to another provider because there aren't any. Where I live there's only two. Comcrap and Quest. Both suck and have almost identical prices.
Cell phones, same thing. There's really only 3-4 carriers in the US. Add to this the fact that they're allowed to lock you into 2-year contracts and we start to see why all phone service sucks.
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Your logic seems to be that since we're better than whatever third-world shithole you used to live in we don't need to improve.
What market forces? There are no market forces when there are only one or two ISPs in most areas. The free market is driven by competition. If there's no competition (two providers are not enough to provide said competition) then there's no free market.
There's a difference between "defending yourself from nuclear attacks" and "not being the target of nuclear attacks in the first place".
Sure, being a long way away from the nuclear blast will make sure that you aren't hit by the blast wave, but it's by no means a "defense". A defense would be something that can prevent taking damage from a weapon that's targeted at you. For example, an anti-missile system or a shield. The problem is that anti-missile systems don't actually work all that well yet and no one has made a shelter that can survive a direct attack from a nuclear weapon.
The sad thing is that I'm not surprised they showed up. People can't even fly an RC plane around without someone calling the cops. The terrorists have won, we're all terrified of everything now.
The problem here is that the contacts already have safeties. They're shielded contacts that are only accessible by sticking thin strips of metal into the device. This is much safer than, say, a car battery with exposed terminals. You suggest that, rather than tell people not to stick thin strips of metal into shielded electrical connectors, we should redesign the entire kindle to put in circuitry that limits the power draw to safe levels in the even someone goes completely out of their way to defeat the safety feature. Ridiculous.
Personally, I think it's stupid that power is being supplied by these mechanical connectors, but more circuitry is still a stupid idea. If you really want to redesign the kindle then a much better solution would be to make an electrical connector to supply power to the cover separate from the mechanical hooks.
Of course, this still wouldn't solve the problem because there's already a lot of kindles out there with the current electrical connectors.
Amazon is already issuing a refund for the cover, so it's much easier to redesign the cover and exchange it via the current program. Redesigning the kindle would take a lot longer and then amazon would have to set up an exchange system for that as well.
I'm all for safety features. I'm one of the biggest safety "nazis" with regard to safety around electromechanical devices. (Particularly robots, as that's where I do most of my work) But at some point it's no longer "safety first" and it becomes "safety for the purpose of seeing how many times we can say the word 'safety'".
That won't work. The kindle runs off of the battery too. If the battery supplies ANY power then it will all go through the metal hook (a metal bar having a resistance close to 0) and none through the kindle. Even if the metal hook had a resistance high enough to allow a non-zero voltage across the actual circuits of the kindle, you'd still be wasting power.
Long story short, if the battery cuts power then the kindle stops working. Thus, this really isn't a solution to anything.
The real solution would be to make a cover that DOESN'T SHORT OUT THE BATTERY.
That's actually a terrible idea. Limiting the current through the hooks would still result in lots power being wasted, just not enough to crash the device. Over time this will cause the battery to discharge completely, which results in the owner charging it, which leads to greatly reduced battery lifetime.
If you run your batteries between 20% and 80% charge, you get orders of magnitude more life out of them compared to running them between 10% and 95% charge.
"Remember, "ideas are a dime a dozen" and "invention is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration".
This little catch-phrase is such bullshit."
No, you're ranting about how ideas are so much more important than work is bullshit. When all you hear about is how Amazon, Facebook, and Google were all made by people who had a great idea and then suddenly made a shitload of money then your perspective is more than a little bit skewed. There's a lot more people that had great ideas and then failed because they didn't implement it properly, they didn't hammer out the details, they didn't work hard enough, etc.
For example, there was this one company (forgot their name) that was founded circa 2000. The idea was to have bike messengers deliver small things locally very quickly (within roughly 30 minutes). For example, video games, pizzas, coffee, etc. They had a great idea but still went poof when the dot com bubble burst because their business model was complete shit.
There's a lot more to making things happen than just "having an idea". It doesn't happen by sheer chance, either. You start with an idea, then you spend one hell of a lot of time and probably a lot of money refining the idea. Working out problems, changing designs, hammering out details, finding bugs, implementing things, etc. An idea will get absolutely NOWHERE if you don't do a lot of work.
"Make Your Own DHS Threat Level Display At Home"
In what world does using a fucking CNC MILLING MACHINE qualify as "at home". 99.999% of people do not have machining tools worth more than a car sitting around their house.
Yeah, but that's without any tooling.
"Actually, Kill-switch based malware is much less valuable in reality than other types of hacks. If this were a server processor, I could see the value in an enhanced remote server-kill. Because these are basic home-use processors though, remote kill viruses probably won't get much farther than proof-of-concept."
Why not? There's plenty of viruses out there that serve to do nothing but destroy data or make the computer unusable. A lot of those are designed mainly to hurt home computers. Yes, a couple viruses are targeted at sabotage of competitor's machines (or nuclear processing facilities), but they're in the minority.
I'm wondering if anyone actually did any research before claiming that it's anonymous behind this. A false flag would be someone pretending to be anonymous while ddosing some website. However, it seems that everyone is simply assuming that anonymous is behind every ddos that happens to any site tangentially connected to wikileaks, even when no one claiming to be anonymous has anything to do with it.
Care to cite your source? The size isn't mentioned in the article and a couple youtube videos I've found (one linked above) from IBM seem to imply that this thing takes up multiple racks filled with blades.
Yes, and had you read the article you would see why you're being redundant.
From TFA: "The "Jeopardy!" answer-and-question format is a different kind of challenge. It often requires contestants to deal with subtleties, puns and riddles and come up with answers fast."
The guys at IBM haven't just thrown together a piece of junk that parses text into google and spits out the first result. They've done one hell of a job actually making it understand grammar, puns, etc.
Also, this video shows some examples of watson working as well as having issues.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FC3IryWr4c8&feature=related
Look, comcast is a private company that exists to make money. Because they're a private company, the government doesn't regulate the quality of their product. This is because it's assumed that the free market will take over. The assumption is that people will switch to other providers and thus stop buying comcast service. In a market in which there's actually competition, this works quite well.
The problem is that comcast has a monopoly (or duopoly) with regard to internet service pretty much everywhere comcast offers service. Thus, there's no free market to drive prices down and quality up.
The only solution in these situations is government regulation. Either subsidize new providers, cap prices, mandate minimum quality of service, etc. Comcast argues that they don't need regulation because they're doing just fine and that they're serving the public good. These graphs show that this is clearly not the case.
I don't know what "main beams" are, but the regulations for headlight brightness are significantly different between the US and the UK. I don't know much more, but I do know the max and min brightness levels are different.
No offense, but someone who doesn't even know how to turn their high-beams on probably isn't qualified to be posting about headlight performance. There are a lot of places that aren't dense urban centers lit up like the Las Vegas strip. I'm not just talking about the middle of nowhere, there are a lot of very populated places that don't have streetlights. For example, there's a highway about half a mile from my house that has no lighting. There's roads right outside my house with very poor lighting,. In addition, I know of a lot of mountain roads with exactly zero lights.
You apparently live somewhere where there's enough light to make you think it's daytime 24/7. If you find it scary to drive at night without high-beams then please stop driving at night, you aren't qualified. That said, turning your high beams on is an incredibly simple matter. It varies from car to car but it's always one of 3 things. Push the stick that controls the lights forward. Pull the stick that controls the lights back. Turn on a switch next to the steering column. (If your car is incredibly old then you might have a foot switch to turn them on, but if this were the case then you'd already know about it)
"headlights are primarily so that other people can see you, not so you can see the road"
This is simply false. There are park lights (the amber/red lights right next to your blinkers) that allow other drivers to see you at night. Your headlights are so that you can see the road. Have you ever driven anywhere that doesn't have streetlights? Because if you have then you'd know how useful headlights are. Just try turning them off sometime on an empty road and see how far you get before running into a ditch or telephone pole.
"Carriers are increasingly charging for 3G mobile access by the megabyte, to prevent 'unfair' subsidies of heavy users by everyone else."
No, they're not charging more in order to make the network "fair" for everyone. They're charging more because they can get away with it because there are no real alternatives for anyone to switch to (especially with the 2-year contracts they're allowed to lock everyone into).
It's just that saying "We're charging more money because we're a company that's driven by making more money" doesn't go over as well as saying "We're charging more money to keep the network fair".
Better yet, there's a lot of printers nowadays that have wireless networking capability built-in.
Some custom firmware and all of a sudden you've turned this printer into an access point as well. No glued shut trays, no mysterious power cables, etc.
Obviously a country wouldn't sabotage their own space station. (Unless you want to get into this whole conspiracy theory thing where a government kills its own people in order to make people afraid and seize more power in the ensuing chaos.)
But terrorist organizations or countries that don't have anything on board the ISS may conceivably want to bring it down. The point of doing something like stuxnet, as opposed to simply shooting it with a missile, is that it's hard to find and hard to trace back to whoever did it. The only reason anyone would do this is so that it doesn't get the rest of the world pissed off AT THEM. Also, if you're really, really clever about it you might be able to make it look like a weird bug rather than a piece of malicious software, in which case no one would be pissed off at you anyway.
Why are you and everyone else so mad about wikileaks here? Your anger is completely misdirected. Wikileaks didn't steal the information it got leaked. Common sense tells us that it doesn't matter whether it's wikileaks or some other anonymous post on some website, the information is already out there and available to the parties that wish to use it to do harm.
We should really be asking ourselves WHY THE FUCK CAN'T THE GOVERNMENT KEEP THE NAMES OF CIVILIAN INFORMANTS CONFIDENTIAL?!
"Will it prove useful to anyone is probably a difficult question to answer,"
No it's not, this is completely worthless to EVERYONE. Simple test: Can you name a single way this could be useful? I can't.
Interesting, I don't remember anything in the original constitution or bill of rights that mandated slavery. Could you perhaps indicate what you're referring to, because I think you're making shit up.
Yeah, the free market works really damn well... WHEN THERE'S A MARKET.
You're lucky enough to live in one of the few areas in which there are several broadband providers. In most areas this isn't the case and you don't have anything to bargain with. You can't threaten to switch to another provider because there aren't any. Where I live there's only two. Comcrap and Quest. Both suck and have almost identical prices.
Cell phones, same thing. There's really only 3-4 carriers in the US. Add to this the fact that they're allowed to lock you into 2-year contracts and we start to see why all phone service sucks.