Posts by c1ue 259 posts • joined 10 Nov 2015
The researchers probably tried to do things the hard way.
The easy way would be to pre-calculate a spoof plane at a specific distance and just hard code that delta onto the signal.
As for encryption: we all know how to make signals more secure. However, the TCAS hardware simply isn't capable of it.
And retrofitting would require all of the planes: commercial, private, new, old to be refitted.
Sadly, while I admire Wyden - the reality is that his liberal views are much more shared by the big tech companies (and their management and employees) than views held by those on the conservative side.
And so it is quite convenient to say that everything is fine.
Perhaps Mr. Wyden can comment on what the remedy ought to be - should this tech persecution be real - because this is why Trump et al are pushing for 203 repeal.
In theory, any satellite can be used for positioning.
In reality, unlikely. Among the issues:
1) Positioning systems all require at least 1 ground station connect. There is more than enough variable atmospheric interference that it has to be accounted for.
2) Power requirements are fairly significant. While the signal at Earth surface isn't strong, the satellite is broadcasting over a very wide area (line of sight Earth coverage). The GPS block 3 satellites are 2 tons in oribit and have 1.9 kilowatt in solar capacity with comparable storage.
3) Ledger info - you can't just throw up a positioning satellite, the users have to have a lexicon to find and handshake to its very weak radio signal.
A microsatellite system that is constantly repositioning, relaunching etc just doesn't seem like a good fit for the above, even if the power requirements are reduced because of closer proximity to the ground - because that closer proximity also makes the ground station atmospheric compensation extremely difficult.
As if Uber and Lyft don't have enough challenges to become (or maybe will never become) viable businesses.
Nor am I the least bit sympathetic.
The medallion system is not perfect by any means, but it was created specifically to address conditions of fair pricing to consumers balanced against fair pay for drivers. The primary outcome of the "gig" economy in pickup transportation is the end-around made around existing regulations since these companies have yet to demonstrate that they achieve even the tiniest amount of increased income for drivers or efficiency for operations. In fact, data I've been following is clearly showing that ride share should be *more* expensive than taxi because of the drive-to-pickup time.
And given that ride-share companies are losing 35 cents on the dollar, their present slight discount vs. taxis is transparently a false economy - one which their present status at billions of dollars of revenue make clear that increased scale won't change.
The subset of Tesla fanbois is pretty interesting: they're all trying to redirect by saying humans cause accidents too/more accidents.
Except that the problem isn't humans causing accidents - it is Teslas on Autopilot causing accidents where a human would not have.
Isn't the whole point of autonomous driving that it is better? And therefore numerous and public examples of the opposite are a serious problem?
Scheier on Security for details, but a summary would be:
1) Apps can't tell if genuine contact was made or not (i.e. a wall between people)
2) Apps can't work if a person doesn't have a functioning smartphone
3) Even Singapore was only able to get 20% adoption rate
In the former case - are you going to quarantine 2 weeks based on this shoddy confidence level?
In the latter case - the app cannot provide any measure of security regarding exposure.
In the middle case - if even Singapore can't get more than 1 in 5 residents to install - why would anywhere else in the world, expect better? Except of course China...
So why bother at all?
I guess the real question is what will this ongoing coronavirus situation impact class relations going forward.
The salaried PMCs (professional, managerial classes) are the least affected: they're still getting paid and they can afford to order everything from Amazon.
However, the people who are paid poorly have just had their noses shoved into the fact that even their crappy jobs aren't reliable for the little money they do get.
The ones who have work: grocery, food delivery, etc get the bonus of playing the coronavirus lottery.
The many who don't...
Deaths are the only hard statistic - and they are the numerator.
The denominator is unknown except that it is higher than the known confirmed cases.
However, what really matters is that the novel coronavirus has a dramatically different mortality rate depending on your age.
Over 60 - really not good.
Under 10 - basically 0 chance of death.
10 to 50 - under 1%
The author did a decent job but didn't think it through.
I worked at AMD just before the Y2K era: the reason AMD had a brief resurgence was that Intel took a generation to ramp towards power efficiency - which AMD ignored and kept focusing on raw compute. The resulting faster AMD processor didn't matter though, because Intel just sliced the cost of top line processors knowing that AMD couldn't churn out enough product in its one fab to significantly change market share.
How does this matter regarding RISC-V? The issue is modern process complexity. The architecture is an important step, but arguably less important than the ability to transform theoretical performance - compute and power/heat efficiency - into reality. While AMD's fabless approach has removed the single fab bottleneck from 20 years ago, the barrier to being able to put in the engineers, test chips and know how to derive product is reinforced by modern $10M+ mask costs.
There will never be more than a handful of startups that can afford even a single tapeout, much less the stream needed to validate a top-end processor.
Or in other words, RISC-V is interesting but has zero chance of turning back, or even slowing down, the ongoing maturation of the processor industry.
I note that world trade is significantly suffering due to fear/precaution over nCOV/novel coronavirus - both in terms of supply chains breaking from China production interruptus and from fear of contagion affecting freighter (from China) docking. As evidence - there appears to be a container shortage in the US.
As a shipping company, Maersk is certainly going to be affected.
Is this Maidenhead move a cost cutting just in that group, or part of an overall change?
Not at all clear to me why this article was written.
If we're going to talk about 8 bit CPUs like the ZX Spectrum - modern systems can perform software emulation to replace legacy DOS, Windows and Mac. All you then need is a copy of the software and some form of pipe to pull the data out of the legacy box.
I'd think the real problem lies with Big Iron systems that fundamentally don't work like x86 architectures, i.e. the PowerPC AS400 systems.
While you can software emulate PowerPC, the emulation cannot replace the hot swap, highly parallel and other architectural features of AS400 OS+PowerPC systems - and it isn't entirely clear to me that an FPGA could easily do the same either. This is disregarding potential copyright/patent issues IBM may have.
The timeline and details, to me, implies a physical server or desktop.
But the question then is: why would super secret stuff be on a single physical server or desktop, as opposed to a centrally managed cloud device?
This matters because the evidence talked about all appears to be endpoint - there is hardly any, if any, network data.
Whatever superuser access the defendent may or may not have had - surely he didn't have the ability to access and modify network logs?
I understand what you're saying, but in this case - the gold medal is accompanied by gold.
Not so much the Kaggle gold, but the extra work and pay that the #1 position yields.
So it isn't necessarily an ego thing as Pleskov says as it more likely is a financial thing:
Kaggle Grandmaster, hire me!
A huge question which I see is: ok, the present Google machine has 56 qubits = 2exp56 size solution set.
How do you verify that an algorithm is working correctly over this range of solution set? Existing systems can't seem to do a very good job of testing/quality control - will quantum magically change this situation?
I wonder because once you start going into the 2exp100+ range - this is literally the million monkeys on typewriters for a million years scenario. Makes hash collision really interesting - in cryptography, for example.
I should note that United frequent fliers are automatically entered into the lists for upgrade. There are upgrade capabilities which guarantee an upgrade if availability is there, but the upgrade generally occurs long before the lists. The lists are also available online at united.com - examination of flights departing many hours from now will shown significant numbers of upgrade list people as soon as they check in.
It isn't that all 183 or whatever passengers were DYKWIA - likely most didn't think it would happen.
This story is based on inaccurate assumptions.
To be clear, I think most companies' policies is that any personal data put on a work computer is:
1) No longer subject to personal privacy laws
2) Is not going to be officially supported by the company - i.e. backup, recovery, IT help etc
I don't think I've seen policies that prevent all personal use of the computer - these are impossible to enforce, or at least enforce without being extremely intrusive.
Ultimately, if the issue was that the IT people didn't want to move the data because it was personal under 2), that's one thing. If the issue was objection over the material itself - this seems odd since it shouldn't matter if the material is sexual or just a lot of saved games of Minecraft - particularly since there is no mention of said CEO showing this to anyone.
Having personal data on a work computer is generally against policy, but isn't inherently improper or illegal, right?
My question is this: the people doing the transfers clearly were perusing the data on said executive's computer. Isn't this also against good IT practice as well as potentially against IT policy?
There is likely all manner of sensitive information on a CEO's computer - work as well as anything else. Is it acceptable that an IT person tasked with data transfer is looking at any of it, for any reason? I'm talking not just about personal pics, but work evaluations of other employees, corporate budgets, board level reports, discussions with potential partners, acquirers or acquirees etc.
If this is not proper or acceptable, the reporting of personal pics on said CEO's computer would be like a john complaining to a policeman that the prostitute he solicited ran away with the money without giving sex...
The general points are valid, but the problem is that the specific issues being decried aren't clearly as objective as these spokespeople say they are.
For example, I watched a video of John Stamos talking to at Stanford about the challenges which Facebook has moderating content.
He put up 2 examples, after talking about how some of his investigators are ex-NSA.
The problem with his example is that the display of hate-mongering ads isn't necessarily ideological.
Wired published an article in 2017 (Inside the Macedonian Fake News complex) about a bunch of young people in Macedonia have been publishing exactly such ads - specifically targeting the 2016 election - purely in order to make money. They had very poor English and no ideological agenda - but the economics of online advertising is what drove their activity. Even the content they published was sourced from others; they simply chose what they deemed the most "effective" for clickbait purposes.
So there are at least one Macedonian town's worth of such muckrakers. Why should that be the only one?
Then there's the scale of which "the Russians" are supposed to have done ill. That may well be true, but it is still not clear to me how the $100,000 of spending by the RIA somehow significantly mattered vs. the $1.8 billion spent online - $1.1 billion by the Clinton campaign and $750M by Trump. We're talking literally 0.01% of the spend (vs. Clinton) - an addition of 0.013% to "pro-Trump" ad spend.
Note that Stamos said that the data on spend ($100K, RIA, ads used etc) was all from his team - so he can't claim ignorance as the the provenance of this figure, nor should he be ignorant of just how much revenue Facebook generated as a result of 2016 presidential spending.
Note that overall political spending in 2016 was $10 billion...
The cost of agar - what is used to grow stuff in petri dishes - was $35-$45 a pound before a shortage hit.
That's the beginning bottom limit of what any "grown" meat is going to cost: the feedstock.
Then there's the economics of growing 200+ pounds of meat per American - half of which is not-poultry = 60 billion plus pounds per year per percent of market share. The washing and refilling of growth containers. The monitoring and harvesting. The transport. The quality control. The extra processing needed for texture.
This entire sector is Theranos level bullshit, except for the tiny sliver that understands it is selling $200 burgers to virtue signaling rich people.
A better comparison is the algae grown replacement for oil that was "hot" not so long ago: where's that gone?
Nowhere, because the scale simply isn't achievable by non-magical means. Even having a variety of algae that could directly spit out oil, the capability to farm enough algae, harvest and process to replace even 1% of oil consumption at even 10x prices vs actual oil is simply utterly impossible.
This is confusing to me. RingCentral is doing reasonably well, but this deal seems like they're plowing all their cash and a lot of their stock valuation into Avaya.
I guess it makes sense if RingCentral is basically buying Avaya's customer list, but this looks like a guppy swallowing a whale: RingCentral is giving $500M to Avaya when their annual revenue is $800M. The stock part makes more sense - it is way up,
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