Well that, and the theft thing. The fact that anonymous entities somehow manage to walk off with other anonymous entities' cryptocurrency despite the purported difficulty of doing so is less than encouraging.
I agree with both posters above. OTOH, the level of motivation and resource available to those who might wish to attack a military aircraft is probably much higher than civil aircraft. And the Iranians dis manage to hijack a USAF drone in flight a few years ago and apparently even managed to land the thing.
BTW, I' worked with command and control of military weapons systems for a number of decades. But that was a LONG time ago and things have changed a lot.
I think military aircraft might be more vulnerable than civilian airliners. On a lot of missions, military craft use information/receive orders from external sources while in flight. Plus which, they may be operating in an environment with sophisticated jamming and countermeasures in place. That said, I would assume that the military has taken a few precautions to discourage folks from diverting/hijacking/repurposing their multimillion dollar weapons systems.
GPS satellite spoofing certainly seems technically feasible. Wikipedia even has a paragraph or three on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Of course there is some possibility that an aircraft crew might be capable of recognizing the problem and of navigating without GPS. My understanding is that Charles Lindbergh managed to find Europe without GPS.
The Japanese are really quite remarkable, and maybe they can make vehicle autonomy work on a two year timeline. But it's not going to be easy. My guess is that autonomous vehicles will be confined to streets with sidewalks and that bicycles, pedestrians, etc will be strictly segregated from the cars according to some set of rules somehow comprehensible to humans and to rather dimwitted vehicles. Not that vehicles and other users can't share narrow roads, but two years isn't a lot of time to work out how to do that
"I remember people on Slashdot saying just about the same thing for Amazon."
OTOH, I also remember folks in the 2000s saying that GM wasn't making profits and was headed for trouble. And indeed, GM -- once the world's wealthiest company -- filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 1, 2009. Sometime the naysayers are right y'know.
Sounds reasonable. Keep in mind that the $28K is just parts and labor. It does not include a share of fixed costs -- overhead, debt servicing, operating costs, taxes... etc. My experience with that sort of accounting is tangential (IANAA) and not really applicable to mass manufacturing. But the costs of running a business tend to be pretty impressive.
What is needed for EVs to take off is a safety regulation compliant, not too uncomfortable, basic vehicle that can be driven away for $15000 USD -- preferably less. Build that and you'll probably find coin operated EV chargers installed at every convenience store and office building parking lot. As long as EVs cost ten times the price of a (well) used Honda Civic, Slashdot will continue its unending stream of articles on EV breakthroughs. And the number in actual use will continue to be minimal.
Trouble is, in a really cold climate, you need to heat not only the seats but also the windshield. Otherwise your breath will condense on the inside of the windshield (unless you drive with the window open which tends to be unpleasant if the outside temp is much below rreezing.). BTW, has anyone tried heating just the seats? I can conceive that it might work OK if you don't mind driving with gloves on, but I can also imagine unexpected side effects like wildlife colonizing the seats in Winter.
How do you plan to heat your EV during Quebec's 9 months of Winter? Wood stove?
" From Dec. 27[2017] to Jan. 1[2018], the maximum temperature in Montreal did not rise above –17 C. This six-day stretch is the longest such cold streak on record, based ondata going back 146 years" http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
(For Americans and those in the Bahamas and Belize -17C=1.4F)
Yep, security is going to be a serious concern. The big problem is that a "flying car" can start its mission as a car and very likely take to the air far closer to potential targets than a conventional aircraft would be allowed to fly.
There are flying cars -- Google Terrafugia.for one example.
Problem is that they are expensive, require a pilots license, aren't energy efficient. They look to be mediocre aircraft and worse cars. But the prototype Terrafugia flies and drives well enough for a lot of folks to believe they will actually ship vehicles within perhaps 18 months. There are other projects, some at least somewhat credible.
It's also true that those with a money can take helicopter taxi services to a few airports -- e.g $99 for Manhattan to JFK (vs less than $10 by rail).
Personally, I suspect that the need for dedicated helipads, dubious fuel economy, questionable safety, need for Air Traffic Control on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than any ever implemented, etc are likely to keep "flying cars" pretty much a thing of the future for many decades or, quite likely, centuries.
As a guy who did software QA for decades, I can tell you that a generally valid argument for strong typing is that it permits compile time checking for problems that otherwise won't be seen until unit test, or (worse) system test, or (much worse) production.
As a programmer, I'm on your side. If I wanted constant aggravation, I'd have picked a different profession.
The PEP asserts that sort of thing bypasses (most) malware scanners and file access controls because there is no file written to disk. Could be. The problem from the sys admin point of view is that you (hypothetically) can't just forbid running Python scripts because you have users in accounting, shipping, marketing, etc that need Python in order to do their job. The language is everywhere. And there is no real provision for distinguishing OK Python from malicious Python.
The PEP apparently provides some capability to spot Python scripts doing stuff that seems suspiscious. I'm hazy on how. For details, try the PEP.
I read through the comments and still didn't have a clue what the article is about. So I took the drastic step of actually reading the PEP.
AFAICS, What is proposed is that the Python runtime provide some hooks that allow system administrators to observe/log some events occurring in scripts. That's useful because Python provides access to just about anything one might want to do via dynamically loadable modules.
Will it actually be usable for anything? I haven't a clue. My gut feeling is probably not very. But what do I know?
Can it be used for evil? Probably. But I should think that the risk from malicious modules and code vastly outweighs any additional risk from these hooks.
If you need static typing, you probably shouldn't be using Python. You might want to look into Perl which is similar to Python in many ways and has stricter variable typing. However, many (most?) folks find Perl code to be very difficult to read. Might have something to do with stricter typing. Or maybe it's something else.
"where i live it's 30C. with 40C days and 30C nights for weeks at a time. with 80-90% humidity to top it off."
You could try living underground or with enough insulation (and no windows) to approximate underground. But I think you'll need at least a dehumidifier or your residence is likely going to be mold-heaven.
That was my initial reaction also as brick buildings tend to be cold in Winter and intolerably hot in Summer here in Vermont. But after thinking about it, I suspect he's thinking of adobe brick walls a good part of a meter thick. And yes, those will moderate temperature quite a lot -- at the cost of likely being lethal in a earthquake.
I'll bet your used tennis shoe souffles are great also. In any case, you are in luck. The vast majority of humanity finds kale to be as "you would put it" Fucking inedible. The more for you.
BTW, have you ever considered growing some manners?
I will give kale that it is a decent cold climate decorative plant. Just don't try to eat the stuff.
Yep. Ada was a construct created by the US Dept Of Defense in the late 1970s ostensively for programming embedded computer systems -- a task for which it was monumentally unsuited because the embedded computer hardware of the time had low clock speeds and very limited memory and Ada demands a lot of resource.
The DoD then decided that a single computer language -- Ada -- should be used across all its applications. The problem was that no one was able to create an Ada eco-system -- compiler, libraries, etc that was actually usable on most of the computers that the DoD owned at the time, so the edict that all.new code be in Ada was pretty much universally ignored.
AFAICS, Ada wasn't, and isn't a terrible language. But it couldn't do what was needed at the time it needed to do it.
I did take the time to sort of study it back around 1980 during the short interval when it appeared that the gubmint might force all us Beltway Bandits to use it. I wasn't impressed.and subsequently forgot everything I had learned. I think most of my fellow bandits felt much the same way.
Vinegar (dilute Acetic Acid) works pretty well although it may take two or three applications. It's cheap, and nearby crop or decorative plants may survive one accidental spraying.
So you say. I'm pretty sure Kale is actually an Indian goddess with too many arms and serious anger management issues.
The purported vegetable that some people call kale is actually a failed US government attempt to develop a packing material so flavorless and devoid of nutiritive value that even bacteria can't (or don't want to) attack it.
Slashdot Mirror
"except for how easy it can be manipulated."
Well that, and the theft thing. The fact that anonymous entities somehow manage to walk off with other anonymous entities' cryptocurrency despite the purported difficulty of doing so is less than encouraging.
I agree with both posters above. OTOH, the level of motivation and resource available to those who might wish to attack a military aircraft is probably much higher than civil aircraft. And the Iranians dis manage to hijack a USAF drone in flight a few years ago and apparently even managed to land the thing.
BTW, I' worked with command and control of military weapons systems for a number of decades. But that was a LONG time ago and things have changed a lot.
I think military aircraft might be more vulnerable than civilian airliners. On a lot of missions, military craft use information/receive orders from external sources while in flight. Plus which, they may be operating in an environment with sophisticated jamming and countermeasures in place. That said, I would assume that the military has taken a few precautions to discourage folks from diverting/hijacking/repurposing their multimillion dollar weapons systems.
GPS satellite spoofing certainly seems technically feasible. Wikipedia even has a paragraph or three on the subject. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/.... Of course there is some possibility that an aircraft crew might be capable of recognizing the problem and of navigating without GPS. My understanding is that Charles Lindbergh managed to find Europe without GPS.
The Japanese are really quite remarkable, and maybe they can make vehicle autonomy work on a two year timeline. But it's not going to be easy. My guess is that autonomous vehicles will be confined to streets with sidewalks and that bicycles, pedestrians, etc will be strictly segregated from the cars according to some set of rules somehow comprehensible to humans and to rather dimwitted vehicles. Not that vehicles and other users can't share narrow roads, but two years isn't a lot of time to work out how to do that
"I remember people on Slashdot saying just about the same thing for Amazon."
OTOH, I also remember folks in the 2000s saying that GM wasn't making profits and was headed for trouble. And indeed, GM -- once the world's wealthiest company -- filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy on June 1, 2009. Sometime the naysayers are right y'know.
"It could be easier if one were to partner with Tesla*, but what's in it for them?"
Aggravation? Lots and lots of aggravation.
Sounds reasonable. Keep in mind that the $28K is just parts and labor. It does not include a share of fixed costs -- overhead, debt servicing, operating costs, taxes ... etc. My experience with that sort of accounting is tangential (IANAA) and not really applicable to mass manufacturing. But the costs of running a business tend to be pretty impressive.
What is needed for EVs to take off is a safety regulation compliant, not too uncomfortable, basic vehicle that can be driven away for $15000 USD -- preferably less. Build that and you'll probably find coin operated EV chargers installed at every convenience store and office building parking lot. As long as EVs cost ten times the price of a (well) used Honda Civic, Slashdot will continue its unending stream of articles on EV breakthroughs. And the number in actual use will continue to be minimal.
"Oh, the horror, how shall we survive?"
YOU probably won't. Folks with more sense will probably opt for something like a Hybrid or Plug-In Hybrid that is better suited to the local climate.
Trouble is, in a really cold climate, you need to heat not only the seats but also the windshield. Otherwise your breath will condense on the inside of the windshield (unless you drive with the window open which tends to be unpleasant if the outside temp is much below rreezing.). BTW, has anyone tried heating just the seats? I can conceive that it might work OK if you don't mind driving with gloves on, but I can also imagine unexpected side effects like wildlife colonizing the seats in Winter.
How do you plan to heat your EV during Quebec's 9 months of Winter? Wood stove?
" From Dec. 27[2017] to Jan. 1[2018], the maximum temperature in Montreal did not rise above –17 C. This six-day stretch is the longest such cold streak on record, based ondata going back 146 years" http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/...
(For Americans and those in the Bahamas and Belize -17C=1.4F)
Yep, security is going to be a serious concern. The big problem is that a "flying car" can start its mission as a car and very likely take to the air far closer to potential targets than a conventional aircraft would be allowed to fly.
There are flying cars -- Google Terrafugia.for one example.
Problem is that they are expensive, require a pilots license, aren't energy efficient. They look to be mediocre aircraft and worse cars. But the prototype Terrafugia flies and drives well enough for a lot of folks to believe they will actually ship vehicles within perhaps 18 months. There are other projects, some at least somewhat credible.
It's also true that those with a money can take helicopter taxi services to a few airports -- e.g $99 for Manhattan to JFK (vs less than $10 by rail).
Personally, I suspect that the need for dedicated helipads, dubious fuel economy, questionable safety, need for Air Traffic Control on a scale many orders of magnitude greater than any ever implemented, etc are likely to keep "flying cars" pretty much a thing of the future for many decades or, quite likely, centuries.
As a guy who did software QA for decades, I can tell you that a generally valid argument for strong typing is that it permits compile time checking for problems that otherwise won't be seen until unit test, or (worse) system test, or (much worse) production.
As a programmer, I'm on your side. If I wanted constant aggravation, I'd have picked a different profession.
We're way beyond my tiny area of competence here, but PEP551 https://www.python.org/dev/pep... includes an example:
The PEP asserts that sort of thing bypasses (most) malware scanners and file access controls because there is no file written to disk. Could be. The problem from the sys admin point of view is that you (hypothetically) can't just forbid running Python scripts because you have users in accounting, shipping, marketing, etc that need Python in order to do their job. The language is everywhere. And there is no real provision for distinguishing OK Python from malicious Python.
The PEP apparently provides some capability to spot Python scripts doing stuff that seems suspiscious. I'm hazy on how. For details, try the PEP.
I read through the comments and still didn't have a clue what the article is about. So I took the drastic step of actually reading the PEP.
AFAICS, What is proposed is that the Python runtime provide some hooks that allow system administrators to observe/log some events occurring in scripts. That's useful because Python provides access to just about anything one might want to do via dynamically loadable modules.
Will it actually be usable for anything? I haven't a clue. My gut feeling is probably not very. But what do I know?
Can it be used for evil? Probably. But I should think that the risk from malicious modules and code vastly outweighs any additional risk from these hooks.
If you need static typing, you probably shouldn't be using Python. You might want to look into Perl which is similar to Python in many ways and has stricter variable typing. However, many (most?) folks find Perl code to be very difficult to read. Might have something to do with stricter typing. Or maybe it's something else.
Python does not ignore semicolons. Python allows multiple, semicolon separated, statements on the same line.
The Python Style Guide discourages that, but it's a guide, not a language rule.
"where i live it's 30C. with 40C days and 30C nights for weeks at a time. with 80-90% humidity to top it off."
You could try living underground or with enough insulation (and no windows) to approximate underground. But I think you'll need at least a dehumidifier or your residence is likely going to be mold-heaven.
"You've got that completely backwards."
That was my initial reaction also as brick buildings tend to be cold in Winter and intolerably hot in Summer here in Vermont. But after thinking about it, I suspect he's thinking of adobe brick walls a good part of a meter thick. And yes, those will moderate temperature quite a lot -- at the cost of likely being lethal in a earthquake.
I'll bet your used tennis shoe souffles are great also. In any case, you are in luck. The vast majority of humanity finds kale to be as "you would put it" Fucking inedible. The more for you.
BTW, have you ever considered growing some manners?
I will give kale that it is a decent cold climate decorative plant. Just don't try to eat the stuff.
Yep. Ada was a construct created by the US Dept Of Defense in the late 1970s ostensively for programming embedded computer systems -- a task for which it was monumentally unsuited because the embedded computer hardware of the time had low clock speeds and very limited memory and Ada demands a lot of resource.
The DoD then decided that a single computer language -- Ada -- should be used across all its applications. The problem was that no one was able to create an Ada eco-system -- compiler, libraries, etc that was actually usable on most of the computers that the DoD owned at the time, so the edict that all .new code be in Ada was pretty much universally ignored.
AFAICS, Ada wasn't, and isn't a terrible language. But it couldn't do what was needed at the time it needed to do it.
I did take the time to sort of study it back around 1980 during the short interval when it appeared that the gubmint might force all us Beltway Bandits to use it. I wasn't impressed.and subsequently forgot everything I had learned. I think most of my fellow bandits felt much the same way.
Vinegar (dilute Acetic Acid) works pretty well although it may take two or three applications. It's cheap, and nearby crop or decorative plants may survive one accidental spraying.
"Kale is a vegetable"
So you say. I'm pretty sure Kale is actually an Indian goddess with too many arms and serious anger management issues.
The purported vegetable that some people call kale is actually a failed US government attempt to develop a packing material so flavorless and devoid of nutiritive value that even bacteria can't (or don't want to) attack it.