They should have gone with a proven technology shown in this early patent application: http://xkcd.com/644/
Instead they went for bluetooth and the damn thing says "enter 0000 in the device" and the damned device is buried
3 cm under the subcutaneous layer of the Gluteus maximus. How am I going to do that?
That is not the only way they were blaming everything on Obamacare. They carefully cancelled all the grandfathered plans that did not have to be ACA compliant. Now they can use the whipping boy, Obamacare.
Obamacare is taking tax dollars and giving it to these private companies that have absolutely no compunctions about denying coverage, shifting responsibility and shirking responsibility. This is the system Republicans want. Left to the Democrats we would have simply expanded the medicare, paid for it with taxes.
Americans with employer provided health insurance pay oodles and oodles of money to the private healthcare companies till they are 65. They pocket all the case, once they are no longer young, no longer as healthy, they are all passed on to Medicare with we the tax payers holding the bag. Remember this folks, more than 50% of the healthcare you are going to receive in your lifetime, comes from the government. All the premium you are paying when you are younger and healthier goes to private companies. "Privatize the premium collection, Socialize the benefit payments", systematically. Bank bailout is nothing compared this bail out given to the healthcare companies. And they are somehow the paragons of virtue and the government is the personification of evil. Once they have their rank and file drink this cool-aid, nothing is impossible for them.
Sometime earlier today I felt a disturbance in the force, as though millions of user accounts cried out terror and they were suddenly silenced... Have been wondering why. Now I know.
The problem is not the scanners are producing wrong reports or misreading the plates. Looks like no one is bothering to follow up on the alerts triggered by these scanners. Apparently the police were more interested in trying to detect movement of people, though the systems was allegedly installed to report stolen vehicles. Even the ars technica report is more than a year old. May be the police are just slow, to react to anything, from the scanner report to ars technica.
Anyway the license plate scanners are not going to work. There was this news report about some precocious teens, taking a picture of the license plate of a teacher they did not like, printing it, pasting it over their own number plates and went through several red-light cameras and triggered a number of tickets for that poor teacher. So it ain't gonna work. Criminals are two steps ahead of the cops, they will easy mark some sap and pass the blame on them, use these cameras to create iron-clad alibi etc. Glad it is gone.
Terrorists want spectacular explosions preferably captured in tape and replayed endlessly in CNN. There are thousand other ways to kill more people (probably, I really don't know, so please do not try to track me down NSA creep) but civilization survives because the terrorists are dumb and unimaginative.
It has been easy to make objects invisible from time immemorial. Even though till about 14th century people did not really understand vision, and they thought some kind of rays emanate from the eyes that allows them to perceive it, they knew how to make objects invisible. Just turn the light off. Put it in a dark room without light, and no one can see it!
The technique here is a marginal improvement for practical purposes. There is a light in the room, still you can't see the object, objects that could be as much as 8 wavelengths of that monochromatic light, placed at the correct location. If there is any other source of light, the objects would be plainly visible due to scattering of that light. So it would be impractical to make an invisibility cloak out of it. You need to make the object disappear from all sources of light from all directions.
Though the technique is not going to lead to invisibility cloak, it is probably a great achievement to hide an object when there is one light source. Though people would think is 1 is pretty close to zero, in reality, there is a huge difference between 1 light source and no light source. It is a good great achievement, collect your brownie points scientists.
For others, please move on there is nothing to see here.
Imagine all those pointy haired bosses who always felt they are far too smart and Dilberts are just coding monkeys typing gibberish and getting paid for it. Now they will go through this one hour of coding, fancy themselves to be "code warriors", demand password and fix web sites and data bases. What could go wrong?
Boss: What is the spec on the site?
Code Monkey: 7 million users, spending about 6000$ each of their own money or governments subsidy. About 42 billion dollars in transactions. That is not counting people directed to other programs. About 70 million window shoppers.
Boss: Hide the window shopping. Don't want them to get sticker shock. No one should see the price without subsidy.
Code Monkey: We are just six weeks from going live. Simply no time to test... The load estimate itself...
Boss: I have taught myself coding in just one hour. Turn in the admin password, and security will let you in this weeked for you to collect your personal effects from your office.
Well the Russians are way ahead of Ford. They drive around with dash cams all the while and their systems can not only tell a paper bag from a small animal, it can tell if there is a small animal inside the paper bag. Not only that, it would take that cute cat in a paper video and upload it to the click bait web site also has a drive by download malware. Sergey Gregorovich, the owner of the malware site, says, "My R&D investment in integrating small animal in paper bag detection technology with dash cam, auto upload and drive by download technologies have given me rich dividends".
Some of the habits of people are very hard to change, that much I agree with you. My uncle who immigrated in 1970. In his mind it is indelibly imprinted, "Coca Cola is cheap. Toilet paper is expensive". He would pay any price asked by a coke machine but bitch and moan about the price of toilet paper. But that is not always the case.
We know people waiting for 9pm to make long distance calls don't we? There were times we would yack on and on during weekends but be curt and to the point during week days before 9 PM. So yes peak load pricing would work. If you make it worthwhile. And what is not worthwhile to someone above 400% of FPL would be very much in demand by someone below 133% of FPL.
If one can make ice in the basement at nights and use it to cool the house in the summer day, 10$ a month savings would be worth it to someone, cutting the bill by half would be worth to someone else.
One of the heaviest load on the office buildings is the Air conditioning costs. The demand is high at the late afternoon when energy prices are the highest. Most cost effective way of shifting the load to off peak times, is to have an ice plant in the basement and make ice overnight. Melt the ice to cool the building during day time. It is usually a closed system, using distilled water. Already there are some building doing this. Vaguely recall the building were in Chicago.
Homes and smaller offices can do this too, but it would require dual pricing of electricity. The thing that stops these technologies from coming to homes is the single flat rate we all pay for electricity. If we price it like the old phone systems, peak/off peak, people would adapt and they will invest in load balancing appliances. Doing the laundry and the dishwasher at nights, cooling and storing cold water overnight to blunt the peak energy demand,... People will do all these things, if we make it worthwhile for them to do it.
Unless there is some visual information best conveyed by moving pictures, it is not worthwhile watching the video. My throughput is much faster in reading, and absorbing info at the bit rates limited by the reading speed of some talking head is wasting my time. Worse, the info rate is so low, unless the topic is riveting and delivery top notch, my mind starts wandering. Provide a transcript or be gone.
Further I am coding in the other window, dont have time to have a blabbering talking head on this window. A page full of text, start and stop reading, few sentences at a time when the code is building, that is something I like. Video? At working hours? No way.
Disqus site had md5 hashes of users' email addresses. Some flaw in the site leaked the hashes and made them public. They probably thought nobody could reverse the hash. But they did not "salt" the email ids. So simple dictionary attack, of hashing millions of known email ids, produced matches. Now they can link email ids to disqus user ids.
Morals of the story:
don't leak hashes.
Salt the data before hashing
Don't trust any website to value your anonymity over their profits.
What if some evil person decides to rip songs, encode it but add "Car! Set Cruise Speed 90 mph" in it? Some unsuspecting driver plays that song, and suddenly the car starts zooming up. Or if they are listening to some audio book or some play or movie, and the dialog goes like, "Car! Enable Developer Mode! Car Enable Crash Mode! Car! Disable brakes".
And the car obeys these commands in these voice stream! These voice enabled car controls are dangerous. They should be banned.
Bitcoins are not anonymous. Not only that every miner is actually maintaining and validating the whole chain of transactions. They go back to the starting block itself. Every transaction ever done in bitcoin is recorded. All of it can be traced back to the cyber-identity of the people who dealt with it. No matter how hard you try, the cyber identity and the real identity will eventually be linked. Especially because people use similar handles in bulletin boards, forum discussion etc and all it takes is one careless slip, and they will be linked.
At some point all those who ordered illegal substances, or services using bit coin will be found. With their secure digital signatures confirming they did the ordering. It will be fun when that happens.
They have been peddling this crap for three decades. Poor are not able to climb out of poverty, our infrastructure is crumbling, our trade imbalance is getting wider. More bold faces and capital letters are not going magically resurrect the utter colossal failure of Reganomics, trickle down economics, or supply side.
The money paid by the consumers are what is paying for the cost of production, profit of the investors and wages of the employees. If there is a profit to be made, somebody will. That is the foundation of the free markets. We cut the taxes, we encouraged investment, all those traitors who took all the money invested in Bangladesh and Bangkok. They say with straight face, we will invest where the wages are low, pollution controls are non existent, where the profits will be high. We should tell them, go live there, or pay taxes here.
If we tax the rich, we can make sure the money is spent inside USA creating more jobs. If we give them tax cuts, they will invest elsewhere. They have broken their side of the contract. They want tax cuts, and low wages and no pollution control, no job safety, no unions. The demands of the rich are endless. It is folly to give in to them.
Well, let us say, some President declares an emergency and suspends the constitution. Or there is a contested election and the incumbent is ruled to be defeated by the Supreme Court, but the incumbent refuses to give up office. That is the time you could legitimately argue the government has turned tyrannical.
You know very well I disagree with the Supreme Court and pejoratively call Scalia time travelling mind reader. I think he is totally wrong to hold the second amendment rights as personal rights of the individual, not the collective right of the government to avoid maintaining a standing army. But, no matter how strongly I believe this, it is his opinion that counts, that is binding, not mine.
Someday you would realize, your job is created by the people consuming the product you make. If this particular investor did not create your job, some other investor would. That is the free market theory. No particular employee, including you is indispensable. No particular employer, including me, is indispensable. There is excess capital right now in the world financial market. They don't know what do with or where to invest. They chase the latest fad and create booms, bursts and bubbles. There is no one willing to borrow my money. They are offering me 2% or less for 2 year bonds. Supply side has run its course. Creating more incentives for investments would be very counter productive. There was a time, when we needed to encourage investments, may be 30 or 40 years ago. But right now we need to stop coddling the investors and job creators and fund the consumers, the demand siders to create long term prosperity.
I have tons of investments, not quite 1 percenter but quite high and getting there. And real long term viability of my investments, not next quarter or year or even decade depends on not screwing the economic base of this country.
We have been systematically funneling money away from people who would spend 90% to 100% of their income (the poor) towards the ones who would save/invest 90% to 99% of their income (the rich). We tax physical labor more (earned income tax) and treat investment income (dividend, capital gains) leniently. This has been going on for 30 years. Under the guises of Supply-side economics, trickle down theory or Reganomics. The result is capital markets are sloshing with excess investment. Companies are sitting on 2 trillion dollars of cash not knowing what to do or where to invest.
The solution is to pay attention to Demand-side economics, where we stop coddling the rich (the self proclaimed job creators) and tax them. If you believe in free markets, you should know that if this captialist won't create the job another capitalist will come along and create that job. They keep telling labor, "If A does not do the job, B will. No one is indispensable". Same thing is true for them too. If A is not willing to invest when there is a job to be done, B will. No single capitalist is indispensable. We have excess capital, and lack of demand. Create demand, jobs will follow.
Of course, all it takes is a few well placed media stories about "gun control" or "gay agenda" or "baby murders" and all the people who actually would stand to gain, gain a lot in fact, would vote against their own best economic interests.
Slashdot Mirror
Instead they went for bluetooth and the damn thing says "enter 0000 in the device" and the damned device is buried 3 cm under the subcutaneous layer of the Gluteus maximus. How am I going to do that?
Obamacare is taking tax dollars and giving it to these private companies that have absolutely no compunctions about denying coverage, shifting responsibility and shirking responsibility. This is the system Republicans want. Left to the Democrats we would have simply expanded the medicare, paid for it with taxes.
Americans with employer provided health insurance pay oodles and oodles of money to the private healthcare companies till they are 65. They pocket all the case, once they are no longer young, no longer as healthy, they are all passed on to Medicare with we the tax payers holding the bag. Remember this folks, more than 50% of the healthcare you are going to receive in your lifetime, comes from the government. All the premium you are paying when you are younger and healthier goes to private companies. "Privatize the premium collection, Socialize the benefit payments", systematically. Bank bailout is nothing compared this bail out given to the healthcare companies. And they are somehow the paragons of virtue and the government is the personification of evil. Once they have their rank and file drink this cool-aid, nothing is impossible for them.
Sometime earlier today I felt a disturbance in the force, as though millions of user accounts cried out terror and they were suddenly silenced... Have been wondering why. Now I know.
Get a tablet, show them how to use google docs. Enough.
http://boingboing.net/2009/01/06/naughty-speed-camera.html
http://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2008/12/dont-like-speed-cameras-use-them-to-punk-your-enemies/
Anyway the license plate scanners are not going to work. There was this news report about some precocious teens, taking a picture of the license plate of a teacher they did not like, printing it, pasting it over their own number plates and went through several red-light cameras and triggered a number of tickets for that poor teacher. So it ain't gonna work. Criminals are two steps ahead of the cops, they will easy mark some sap and pass the blame on them, use these cameras to create iron-clad alibi etc. Glad it is gone.
Terrorists want spectacular explosions preferably captured in tape and replayed endlessly in CNN. There are thousand other ways to kill more people (probably, I really don't know, so please do not try to track me down NSA creep) but civilization survives because the terrorists are dumb and unimaginative.
Thanks for the correction. 8 orders of mag above wave length? That would be stunning achievement.
The technique here is a marginal improvement for practical purposes. There is a light in the room, still you can't see the object, objects that could be as much as 8 wavelengths of that monochromatic light, placed at the correct location. If there is any other source of light, the objects would be plainly visible due to scattering of that light. So it would be impractical to make an invisibility cloak out of it. You need to make the object disappear from all sources of light from all directions.
Though the technique is not going to lead to invisibility cloak, it is probably a great achievement to hide an object when there is one light source. Though people would think is 1 is pretty close to zero, in reality, there is a huge difference between 1 light source and no light source. It is a good great achievement, collect your brownie points scientists.
For others, please move on there is nothing to see here.
Boss: What is the spec on the site?
Code Monkey: 7 million users, spending about 6000$ each of their own money or governments subsidy. About 42 billion dollars in transactions. That is not counting people directed to other programs. About 70 million window shoppers.
Boss: Hide the window shopping. Don't want them to get sticker shock. No one should see the price without subsidy.
Code Monkey: We are just six weeks from going live. Simply no time to test... The load estimate itself...
Boss: I have taught myself coding in just one hour. Turn in the admin password, and security will let you in this weeked for you to collect your personal effects from your office.
Well the Russians are way ahead of Ford. They drive around with dash cams all the while and their systems can not only tell a paper bag from a small animal, it can tell if there is a small animal inside the paper bag. Not only that, it would take that cute cat in a paper video and upload it to the click bait web site also has a drive by download malware. Sergey Gregorovich, the owner of the malware site, says, "My R&D investment in integrating small animal in paper bag detection technology with dash cam, auto upload and drive by download technologies have given me rich dividends".
We know people waiting for 9pm to make long distance calls don't we? There were times we would yack on and on during weekends but be curt and to the point during week days before 9 PM. So yes peak load pricing would work. If you make it worthwhile. And what is not worthwhile to someone above 400% of FPL would be very much in demand by someone below 133% of FPL.
If one can make ice in the basement at nights and use it to cool the house in the summer day, 10$ a month savings would be worth it to someone, cutting the bill by half would be worth to someone else.
Homes and smaller offices can do this too, but it would require dual pricing of electricity. The thing that stops these technologies from coming to homes is the single flat rate we all pay for electricity. If we price it like the old phone systems, peak/off peak, people would adapt and they will invest in load balancing appliances. Doing the laundry and the dishwasher at nights, cooling and storing cold water overnight to blunt the peak energy demand,... People will do all these things, if we make it worthwhile for them to do it.
"Watch video to find out why " is slashvertisement and is a bit annoying.
Further I am coding in the other window, dont have time to have a blabbering talking head on this window. A page full of text, start and stop reading, few sentences at a time when the code is building, that is something I like. Video? At working hours? No way.
Then they will tell you it is recursive too.
But it happened long time ago and in a galaxy far away.
Morals of the story:
don't leak hashes.
Salt the data before hashing
Don't trust any website to value your anonymity over their profits.
And the car obeys these commands in these voice stream! These voice enabled car controls are dangerous. They should be banned.
At some point all those who ordered illegal substances, or services using bit coin will be found. With their secure digital signatures confirming they did the ordering. It will be fun when that happens.
The money paid by the consumers are what is paying for the cost of production, profit of the investors and wages of the employees. If there is a profit to be made, somebody will. That is the foundation of the free markets. We cut the taxes, we encouraged investment, all those traitors who took all the money invested in Bangladesh and Bangkok. They say with straight face, we will invest where the wages are low, pollution controls are non existent, where the profits will be high. We should tell them, go live there, or pay taxes here.
If we tax the rich, we can make sure the money is spent inside USA creating more jobs. If we give them tax cuts, they will invest elsewhere. They have broken their side of the contract. They want tax cuts, and low wages and no pollution control, no job safety, no unions. The demands of the rich are endless. It is folly to give in to them.
December 13-19, 2013: Quad Cinemas 34 West 13th Street New York City, NY (212) 255-8800
News on Blu-ray/DVD/iTunes/Netflix/VOD coming soon.
Where is it available? Or it has not been finalized yet?
You know very well I disagree with the Supreme Court and pejoratively call Scalia time travelling mind reader. I think he is totally wrong to hold the second amendment rights as personal rights of the individual, not the collective right of the government to avoid maintaining a standing army. But, no matter how strongly I believe this, it is his opinion that counts, that is binding, not mine.
I have tons of investments, not quite 1 percenter but quite high and getting there. And real long term viability of my investments, not next quarter or year or even decade depends on not screwing the economic base of this country.
The solution is to pay attention to Demand-side economics, where we stop coddling the rich (the self proclaimed job creators) and tax them. If you believe in free markets, you should know that if this captialist won't create the job another capitalist will come along and create that job. They keep telling labor, "If A does not do the job, B will. No one is indispensable". Same thing is true for them too. If A is not willing to invest when there is a job to be done, B will. No single capitalist is indispensable. We have excess capital, and lack of demand. Create demand, jobs will follow.
Of course, all it takes is a few well placed media stories about "gun control" or "gay agenda" or "baby murders" and all the people who actually would stand to gain, gain a lot in fact, would vote against their own best economic interests.