Tag: Computer

It Only Took 33 Years………

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Compared to peace in the Middle East, I would figure that fixing Windows Notepad to properly handle text files from other operating systems does not seem a heavy lift, but it appears that small startup software company Microsoft simply could not manage to marshal the resources to fix this for over three decades:

Windows Notepad users, rejoice! Microsoft’s text editing app, which has been shipping with Windows since version 1.0 in 1985, has finally been taught how to handle line endings in text files created on Linux, Unix, Mac OS, and macOS devices.

“This has been a major annoyance for developers, IT Pros, administrators, and end users throughout the community,” Microsoft acknowledged in a blog post today, without touching on why the issue was allowed to fester for more than three decades.

………Nonetheless, the app is widely used and does elicit some passion. News of the change at Microsoft’s Build developer conference on Tuesday prompted the loudest cheer of any of the announcements.

“We fixed Notepad,” declared Kevin Gallo, head of Windows developer platform.

Notepad previously recognized only the Windows End of Line (EOL) characters, specifically Carriage Return (CR, r, 0x0d) and Line Feed (LF, n, 0x0a) together.

To paraphrase the great Lily Tomlin, “We don’t care, we don’t have to, we’re Microsoft.”

This Guy Just Cost Himself a Billion Dollars on Principle

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The billionaire chief executive of WhatsApp, Jan Koum, is planning to leave the company after clashing with its parent, Facebook, over the popular messaging service’s strategy and Facebook’s attempts to use its personal data and weaken its encryption, according to people familiar with internal discussions.

Koum, who sold WhatsApp to Facebook for more than $19 billion in 2014, also plans to step down from Facebook’s board of directors, according to these people. The date of his departure isn’t known.

………

The independence and protection of its users’ data is a core tenet of WhatsApp that Koum and his co-founder, Brian Acton, promised to preserve when they sold their tiny start-up to Facebook. It doubled down on its pledge by adding encryption in 2016. The clash over data took on additional significance in the wake of revelations in March that Facebook had allowed third parties to mishandle its users’ personal information.

………

Koum’s exit is highly unusual at Facebook. The inner circle of management, as well as the board of directors, has been fiercely loyal during the scandals that have rocked the social media giant. In addition, Koum is the sole founder of a company acquired by Facebook to serve on its board. Only two other Facebook executives, Zuckerberg and Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg, are members of the board.

………

Acton left the company in November. He has joined a chorus of former executives critical of Facebook. Acton recently endorsed a #DeleteFacebook social media campaign that has gained force in the wake of the controversy over data privacy sparked by Cambridge Analytica, a political marketing firm tied to the Trump campaign that had inappropriately obtained the private information of 87 million Facebook users.

………

WhatsApp executives were comfortable sharing some data with Facebook to measure who was using the service, according to the people. But they opposed using WhatsApp’s data to create a user profile that was unified across Facebook’s multiple platforms, which also include Instagram and Facebook Messenger, and that could be used for ad-targeting or for Facebook’s data-mining.

………

Another point of disagreement was over WhatsApp’s encryption. In 2016, WhatsApp added end-to-end encryption, a security feature that scrambles people’s messages so that outsiders, including WhatsApp’s owners, can’t read them. Facebook executives wanted to make it easier for businesses to use its tools, and WhatsApp executives believed that doing so would require some weakening of its encryption.

Here is the link about him leaving a 10 figure payday on the table.

I’m not sure if it’s really possible to make privacy profitable without charging users, but you sure as hell can’t do it at Facebook.

A Donation Request from Twitter

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The Democrats are suing @WikiLeaks and @JulianAssange for revealing how the DNC rigged the Democratic primaries. Help us counter-sue. We’ve never lost a publishing case and discovery is going to be amazing fun:https://t.co/E1QbYJL4bB

More options:https://t.co/MsNZhrTzTL pic.twitter.com/VbPp7FTNq3

— WikiLeaks (@wikileaks) April 20, 2018

I am well aware that the DNC sued CREEP in the 1970s and got a settlement, but Wikileaks did not hack the DNC, the GRU did.

Wikileaks plays the role of the Washington Post, though they lack the charm of Woodward and Bernstein, in this drama.

Sing It, Brother

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I wholeheartedly agree that the world of deceptive user agreements used to arbitrarily punish customers 6 pounds of sh%$ in a 5 pound bag:

Mark Zuckerberg says it doesn’t matter how creepy and terrible his company is, because you agreed to let him comprehensively f%$# you over from asshole to appetite by clicking “I agree” to a tens of thousands of words’ worth of “agreements” spread out across multiple webpages; when questioned about this in Congress, Zuck grudgingly admitted that “I don’t think the average person likely reads that whole document.” But as far as Zuck is concerned, it doesn’t matter whether you’ve read it, whether you understand it, whether it can be understood — you still “agreed.”

Facebook is far from the worst offender: Paypal has been cutting off the accounts of users who signed up before they were 18, which violated their 50,000+ word ToS (spread across 21 web-pages!); it doesn’t matter if those users are now well over the age of consent, more than a decade later, their failure to read all those terms is a hanging offense.

The self-replicating plague of bullsh%$ “agreements” is finally getting a reckoning, as users wake up to the fact that companies were actually serious when they said that they expected hold us to these absurd legal documents. What’s more, the looming spectre of the EU General Data Protection Regulation, with its mandate for plain language agreements that users have to understand, is calling into question whether it’s possible to even have a business that can only exist if users agree to terms that put the US tax-code to shame.

That is to say, businesses are being told that they are obliged to obtain detailed, informed consent to every single term in their contracts before they can start interacting with their users. The businesses say that undertaking such a process could take hours and that no one would ever use their services if a precondition for their usage is to actually understand what they’re giving away.

To which the EU answers: exactly.

The EU is doing the right thing here.  (I cannot believe that I just said that)

Seriously, the ecology of the commercial internet resembles nothing so much as a petty bunco operation.

Abour F%$#ing Time

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It looks like unions are finally gaining a toe hold in the computer game industry, which is arguably the most abusive workplace in IT:

A concern-trolling panel at the Game Developers Conference was the catalyst that led workers to start organizing in a way they never have before.

At this point, you already know the facts: Game workers crunch too much. They’re underpaid compared to comparable positions in other industries. They burn out fast and young. We’ve had, for years upon years, stories and statistics proving all of this, decades of anonymous interviews with artists and coders desperate for something to change, from EA Spouse to the Rockstar Spouses, from The Guardian to Kotaku to here at Waypoint.

We are all aware. Awareness alone has changed nothing.

A little over a week ago, a blip came over the feed of a small Facebook chat group dedicated to discussing games and their creation. It was a link to a roundtable announcement at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. On March 21st, Jen MacLean, executive director of the International Game Developers Association (IGDA), was heading up a talk on games industry unionization.

………

But in this case, the panel was clearly skewed toward blunting union sentiment. It was right there in the title. “Union Now? Pros, Cons, and Consequences of Unionization for Game Devs Roundtable.” (My emphasis). Perhaps it was the contradictions layered one on top of another which made the union roundtable too much for some to bear this time. Whatever the spark was, it tindered a flame. 

Read the whole article, but it appears that MacLean, was so snarky that it led to people realizing that the IGDA was a tool of management, and not a reasonable alternative to a labor union.

Here’s hoping that the moronic Ayn Rand sensibilities which permeate IT don’t sabotage this effort.

Yeah, This Is Horrifying

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It turns out that in addition to promiscuously sharing user data with anyone who would pay, Facebook was planning to use health data from hospitals for further refine their profiles of their users:

Facebook has asked several major U.S. hospitals to share anonymized data about their patients, such as illnesses and prescription info, for a proposed research project. Facebook was intending to match it up with user data it had collected, and help the hospitals figure out which patients might need special care or treatment.

The proposal never went past the planning phases and has been put on pause after the Cambridge Analytica data leak scandal raised public concerns over how Facebook and others collect and use detailed information about Facebook users.

“This work has not progressed past the planning phase, and we have not received, shared, or analyzed anyone’s data,” a Facebook spokesperson told CNBC.

But as recently as last month, the company was talking to several health organizations, including Stanford Medical School and American College of Cardiology, about signing the data-sharing agreement.

Let’s be clear about this:  The data would not have been meaningfully anonymized, because you COULD NOT meaningfully anonymize the data.

The data itself would indicate who the individuals in question were, and in fact HAD TO, because otherwise it would serve no use, because it had to be target at SPECIFIC PATIENTS who might, “Need special care or treatment.”

The business plan here was to take the data, merge it with other data to get personalized medical information, and then sell it back to doctors and hospitals.

If that does not chill you, figure that the next step would have been making it available to businesses to allow them to pre-screen applicants to exclude those who would likely have expensive health problems.

Think of it as a FICO score for your life.

Are you horrified yet?

F-35 Sustainment Challenges Mount As Global Fleet Grows | Defense content from Aviation Week

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What a surprise.

Lockheed-Martin promised that the F-35 would have support costs near that of the far smaller F-16, because of it’s advanced logistics software.

Right now, it looks like it will cost more to operate than the twin engine F-15:


………

This specific problem was resolved quickly, but that is not often the case. Across the F-35 enterprise, operators are struggling with severe maintenance challenges of which the most critical are a spare parts shortage, insufficient repair capacity and excessive glitches in the ALIS logistics system that tracks the health of the fleet. Meanwhile at the production level, suppliers and skilled workers are making mistakes that slow down the manufacturing process before a complete aircraft even comes off the line.

The sustainment challenges are emerging at a pivotal time for the program, with F-35 pilot training ramping up, international deliveries accelerating, and the Navy on track to achieve initial operational capability of its F-35Cs in 2019. As the global F-35 fleet is poised to triple by 2021, government and industry officials are facing mounting pressure to solve these challenges—and fast.

Reports emerged recently that the U.S. Air Force—the F-35’s single largest customer—would be forced to cut as many as 590 F-35s from the overall buy, or one-third of the force, if sustainment costs do not come down. The government-industry team must find a way to reduce operations and sustainment (O&S) costs or F-35 customers will have to make “tough decisions,” Air Force Secretary Heather Wilson said ominously during a recent event in Washington.

The Air Force is working with the JPO to reduce overall O&S costs by 38% over the next 10 years, or about $3.8 billion a year, Wilson says. And in the field, the Air Force aims to get the cost to sustain the F-35 down to that of sustaining a legacy F-16, according to Chief of Staff Gen. David Goldfein.

………

The main F-35A training hubs, Luke and Eglin AFB, Florida, arguably are facing the most immediate challenge as the Air Force grapples with a critical pilot shortfall.

………

But it is not just the training bases that are impacted by the spare parts problem. Overall from January through Aug. 7, 2017, F-35s were unable to fly because they were awaiting parts on average about 22% of the time—more than double the Pentagon’s goal of 10%, according to the Government Accountability Office (GAO).

………

ALIS, the maintenance hub of the F-35 enterprise, was designed to ease the burden on maintainers by increasing automation. But today the system, which is based on a 1995 architecture, actually is adding to their workload.

ALIS has an excessive rate of “false positives,” where the system mistakenly tells the maintainers a certain part is broken. Even more troubling, each service continues to rely heavily on contractor-provided information technology experts, rather than service personnel, to manipulate ALIS’s intricate software and complex databases, according to the subcommittee chairman, U.S. Rep. Mike Turner (R-Ohio).

In the field, maintainers must rely on inefficient workarounds and manual tracking processes when ALIS is not performing as it should, officials say. In some of the Air Force’s maintenance units, for example, airmen are assigned to tackle ALIS glitches as their primary job, says Harris, which was certainly not in the original plan.

(emphasis mine)

Lockheed-Martin developed a tightly integrated system as a way of maximizing their ability to lock in customers to their support services,

So you have a gargantuan mass of interdependent code, and fixing problems is like untying the Gordian knot.

The F-35 is never going to be as cheap to operate as an F-16, the JSF’s MTOW is 65% more than the that of the F-16, but right now, it’s simply too expensive to operate in significant numbers.

A Feature, Not a Bug

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I’m calling bullsh%$. Every time something like this happens, it ALWAYS results in more data collection.

It was policy:

Facebook has been caught archiving videos users thought they had deleted. The New York Magazine flagged the problem to the company last week, after a user downloaded their Facebook archive and was surprised to discover multiple takes of a video they had thought had been discarded at the time the recording was made, years earlier.

Facebook has now apologized for failing to delete the videos, saying “a bug” prevented draft videos from being deleted. It adds that it’s in the process of deleting the content now.

A company spokesperson told us: “We investigated a report that some people were seeing their old draft videos when they accessed their information from our Download Your Information tool. We discovered a bug that prevented draft videos from being deleted. We are deleting them and apologize for the inconvenience.”

They had previously been caught storing unposted status updates, so I am fairly sure that only regret that they got caught.

I Want My Pieces of Paper with Numbers on Them, and a Honda with a Trunk Full of Silver.*

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Sweden is probably further along than any other nation on earth on moving toward a cashless society, and people are starting to get nervous about it:

It is hard to argue that you cannot trust the government when the government isn’t really all that bad. This is the problem facing the small but growing number of Swedes anxious about their country’s rush to embrace a cash-free society.

Most consumers already say they manage without cash altogether, while shops and cafes increasingly refuse to accept notes and coins because of the costs and risk involved. Until recently, however, it has been hard for critics to find a hearing.

“The Swedish government is a rather nice one, we have been lucky enough to have mostly nice ones for the past 100 years,” says Christian Engström, a former MEP for the Pirate Party and an early opponent of the cashless economy.

………

There are signs this might be changing. In February, the head of Sweden’s central bank warned that Sweden could soon face a situation where all payments were controlled by private sector banks.

The Riksbank governor, Stefan Ingves, called for new legislation to secure public control over the payments system, arguing that being able to make and receive payments is a “collective good” like defence, the courts, or public statistics.

“Most citizens would feel uncomfortable to surrender these social functions to private companies,” he said.

“It should be obvious that Sweden’s preparedness would be weakened if, in a serious crisis or war, we had not decided in advance how households and companies would pay for fuel, supplies and other necessities.”

The central bank governor’s remarks are helping to bring other concerns about a cash-free society into the mainstream, says Björn Eriksson, 72, a former national police commissioner and the leader of a group called the Cash Rebellion, or Kontantupproret.

Until now, Kontantupproret has been dismissed as the voice of the elderly and the technologically backward, Eriksson says.

“When you have a fully digital system you have no weapon to defend yourself if someone turns it off,” he says.

………

But an opinion poll this month revealed unease among Swedes, with almost seven out of 10 saying they wanted to keep the option to use cash, while just 25% wanted a completely cashless society. MPs from left and right expressed concerns at a recent parliamentary hearing. Parliament is conducting a cross-party review of central bank legislation that will also investigate the issues surrounding cash. 

I would also add that with a fully digital system controlled by private banks, they could effectively hold a country hostage for a bailout when they need one, and all banking sectors eventually need a bailout.

In fact, when you account for various bailouts, the banking industry has not made a profit throughout its entire existence.

*It’s a very old internet meme, nothing to see here, move along.

Microsoft is Conspiring to Silence Me

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It appears that Microsoft is instituting terms of service that ban profanity on things like Offic3 365 and Skype.

This will render me mute:

Microsoft has advised customers that offensive language on Skype, in an Outlook.com email, or in an Office 365 Word document is a potentially account-closing offense under its updated terms of use.

The tweaked services agreement, which comes into effect on May 1, 2018, now includes the following code-of-conduct item:

Don’t publicly display or use the Services to share inappropriate content or material (involving, for example, nudity, bestiality, pornography, offensive language, graphic violence, or criminal activity).

And if you disobey?

If you violate these Terms, we may stop providing Services to you or we may close your Microsoft account. We may also block delivery of a communication (like email, file sharing or instant message) to or from the Services in an effort to enforce these Terms or we may remove or refuse to publish Your Content for any reason. When investigating alleged violations of these Terms, Microsoft reserves the right to review Your Content in order to resolve the issue. However, we cannot monitor the entire Services and make no attempt to do so.

Microsoft lists its online services covered by the agreement here. To save you the click, the list includes:

………

On The Register’s reading of the rules, a profanity-laden file written in Office 365, or an email with a nude selfie attached sent using Outlook.com, fall on the wrong side of the code, if reported to Microsoft by someone. As would asking Bing to look up “Simon Sharwood of The Register is sh*t” or telling Cortana to “f*ck off” if it somehow caused offense.

Obviously, I do NOT think that the changes to the Microflaccid TOS is a specific attempt to target me.

I am saying two separate things, that the folks from Redmond are conspiring (clearly, since it is a group effort), and that if fully implemented, it would have the effect of silencing me, because I am profoundly profane in my speech and writing.

I am simply a bug plastered to Bill Gates’ windshield.

And Arizona Understands Why California Banned Uber’s Self-Driving Cars Now

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Once again, Gov. Doug Ducey’s dislike for government regulation has resulted in injury to Arizona, this time with tragic result.

Ducey on Monday rescinded Uber’s ability to test its self- driving vehicles in Arizona, citing the video of last week’s fatal crash into a Tempe pedestrian.

“As governor, my top priority is public safety,” Ducey wrote, in a letter to the San Francisco-based company.

This from the same governor, who in 2015 signed an executive order aimed at enticing Uber to use Arizona’s roads as a guinea pig.

The same governor who in December 2016 crowed over Uber’s decision to bring hundreds of its driverless cars to Arizona for testing “due to California’s burdensome regulations.”

………

The Ducey administration actually bragged about its lack of oversight of driverless vehicles.

………

Earlier this month, Ducey went a step further, issuing a new executive order decreeing that self-driving cars no longer need a driver behind the wheel, as long as they follow all the traditional traffic laws and rules for cars and drivers.

“As technology advances, our policies and priorities must adapt to remain competitive in today’s economy,” Ducey said. “This executive order embraces new technologies by creating an environment that supports autonomous vehicle innovation and maintains a focus on public safety.”

Now Elaine Herzberg is dead.

………

It’s not the first time Ducey’s preoccupation with bypassing government has caused problems.

Remember Theranos?

Ducey and the Legislature in 2015 cleared the way for Theranos to operate in our state, pushing though a new law that allowed consumers to purchase lab tests from a company without a doctor’s orders.

California shut down Uber’s self driving car program because they refused to get permits or report to regulators.

Even if you think that self-driving cars are just around the corner (I don’t), and you feel that development of self driving cars should be accelerated (again, I don’t), and that self driving cars will create a transportation utopia, Uber is a bad actor in their space, and they have ALWAYS been a bad actor in their space.

Smoothing the way for Uber is irresponsible and reckless.

You Would Know This If You Talked to Doctors

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It appears that at least SOME of the mainstream media are beginning to notice that electronic health records are neither saving money nor improving the quality of health care:

We trust computer technology to solve problems, save time and money, and improve our lives. It has. Why didn’t it work with electronic health records?

EHRs are costly, clunky, error prone failures we seem unable to fix. It’s as if we took off in a hastily designed rocket, realize we need to come back, but are stuck in orbit without a reentry plan.

The Obama administration set aside tens of billions in 2009 to forcibly drag doctors and hospitals out of the Stone Age of paper into the brave new world of bites and bits. It promised a Nirvana of heath care quality, efficiency and cost savings. Hundreds of billions more were spent by hospital systems, too, under government mandates. In retrospect much of that money was wasted.

……… Snipping the example of automated check in at the airport.

Assuming [airline] employees get $30 an hour, that’s $1,500 saved for each and every flight. With hundreds of flights from each airport that’s big money. Employees cost a lot ongoing. Touch screens work for years on one investment. We, passengers, were the happy, healthy — and unpaid — labor that made it possible. The airline’s question had been, “How can computers save money and employee time on passenger check-in?” It got the right answer by asking the right question.

In medicine, the customer is the patient, not the passenger. If we could get patients to check into the medical office, hospital or emergency room, go to a touch screen, populate the computer screens with their correct diagnosis, order their tests and imaging and prescribe their own treatments that would be peachy, but unlike passengers, patients can’t do that on their best days. There is almost nothing in medicine that can be done, ordered or documented by the patient/customer. Doctors and nurses do all that.

Before the EHR, I dictated hospital admission histories on a phone and a typist getting $30 an hour typed them. I do that on an EHR now and it’s slower. It takes me triple the time it used to. There is a complex template used, not much like the way I think about care.

Similarly, I used to hand write orders and give them to a clerk. It took but a few minutes. Entering it all by computer is complex. The EHR does not allow me to just write what I want. It offers drop downs, many suggestions, and reminders, and pages of choices to click and to select options, not to mention all the time taken to just get in and out of the triple layer of security built into every such program. That alone takes more time than handwritten orders used to take.

So in the hospital I have become a very highly paid clerk. It is as if Qantas required the pilot to do the data entry for billing and boarding of each passenger. Insane, you say? But that’s exactly what current EHRs do in medicine.

This does not just happen with medicine.

Cheer the IT Revolution

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It turns out that the increasing use of electronic health records saves neither time nor money, but this hasn’t stopped a rush by the government and the private healthcare industry from

I thought of working words like “debacle,” “scam,” or “bezzle” into the headline, but today is my day to be kind (and the entire topic really demands that I pull on my yellow waders and write another “Credentialism and Corruption” post, which I might do at a later time). However, the headlines give a sense of what a bombshell this study should be for the EHR industry. On the spectrum from reluctant admissions all the way through to The Bezzle:

  1. Electronic health records don’t cut administrative costs Harvard Gazette (February 20, 2018).
  2. Electronic Health Records Don’t Reduce Administrative Costs Harvard Business School (February 20, 2018).
  3. EHRs fall short in reducing administrative costs Health Data Management (February 21, 2018).
  4. Why health IT experts think Apple will succeed where Google failed with medical records Health IT and CIO Review
  5. An Introduction to Medicalchain: Blockchain for Electronic Health Records CryptoSlate. (This is from February 8, but I couldn’t resist.)

The complete study (an “Original Investigation”) is here at the Journal of the American Medical Association. Unfortunately, the study is paywalled, and the study material that JAMA exposes muffles the bombshell. From the abtract, the methodology:

IT is going to change the world making unachievable claims based on bad/non-existent evidence, and all we have to do throw money at them.

While the Extoll the Virtues of Tech in Education

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The Nomenklatura of Silicon have decided that when their children are education, they want a human touch with an absolute minimum of computers:

The Waldorf School of the Peninsula is small, exclusive and packed with the children of Silicon Valley executives who love the role that technology plays in the pupils’ education there. That is, it plays no role whatsoever.

Instead children at the $25,000-a-year elementary school in Los Altos, California, are learning to explore the world through physical experiences and tasks that are designed to nurture their imagination, problem-solving ability and collaborative skills.

Pencils, paper, blackboards and craft materials abound while tablets, smartphones and other personal electronic devices are banned from the classrooms until they are teenagers studying at the middle and high school campus nearby. Even then technology is only introduced slowly and used sparingly.

Alumni and present pupils include the children of Alan Eagle, a director of communications at Google, who helped to write the New York Times bestseller How Google Works, as well as those of a chief technology officer at eBay and senior executives at Apple and Yahoo. Their outlook is in line with some of the most powerful figures in the industry. Last month Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, said he did not want his nephew, who is about 12, to use social media. Last year Sean Parker, the billionaire and an early Facebook investor, admitted that he and the other creators of the publishing site had deliberately made it as addictive as possible. “God only knows what it’s doing to our children’s brains,” he said.

………

Ms [Beverly] Amico [Head of outreach at Waldorf Schools] sees no contradiction. “It’s a very attractive option for people in the tech world for their children,” she said. “All employers, tech world or not, are looking for graduates these days that can think independently, take initiative, are capable of collaborating, have curiosity and creativity.”

The approach contrasts starkly with the new classroom orthodoxy in most American schools where children are spending more and more time staring at screens in lessons. There too, however, a grassroots movement is beginning to build against the relentless march of technology, supported by research illuminating the harmful effects of smartphone use on young brains and new shareholder pressure on the IT giants that make them.

These folks know that at best, they are peddling digital crap, and at worst, they are peddling digital crack, and they want their children to have none of it.

Think about that the next time that you hear about your local school district, or charter school, going all “high tech”.

Not a Surprise

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When I worked on Future Combat Systems in the early 200s, one of the things it was supposed to do was to save fuel because it used hybrid propulsion.

Because it was carrying a large number of batteries, it was also supposed to be able to spend an significant amount of time running on battery power in “silent watch mode”, where it would be hard to detect, because it would be operating without running its engine while its sensors took in information about its immediate vicinity and relayed it across the network.

It turned out that a “significant amount of time” ended up to be something less than an hour because of the power consumption of the sensors, computers, and communications systems.

It turns out something very similar is happening with self-driving cars:

For longtime residents of Pittsburgh, seeing self-driving cars built by Uber, Argo AI, and others roam their streets is nothing new. The city’s history with robot cars goes back to the late 1980s, when students at Carnegie Mellon University caught the occasional glimpse of a strange vehicle lumbering across campus. The bright-blue Chevy panel van, chugging along at slower than a walking pace, may not have looked like much. But NavLab 1 was slowly—very slowly—pioneering the age of autonomous driving.

Why did the researchers at CMU’s Robotics Institute use the van instead of, say, a Prius? First, this was a decade before Toyota started making the hybrid. Second, the NavLab (that’s Navigational Laboratory) was one of the first autonomous vehicles to carry its computers with it. They needed space, and lots of it. For the four researchers monitoring computer workstations, with their bulky cathode ray monitors stretched across a workbench. For the on-board supercomputer, camera, giant laser scanner, and air-conditioner. And for the four-cylinder gasoline engine that did nothing but generate electricity to keep the kit running.

Thirty years on, the companies carrying that early research into reality have proven that cars can indeed drive themselves, and now they’re swiveling to sort out the practical bits. Those include regulations, liability, security, business models, and turning prototypes into production vehicles, by miniaturizing the electronics and reducing that massive electricity draw.

Today’s self-drivers don’t need extra engines, but they still use terrific amounts of power to run their onboard sensors and do all the calculations needed to analyze the world and make driving decisions. And it’s becoming a problem.

A production car you can buy today, with just cameras and radar, generates something like 6 gigabytes of data every 30 seconds. It’s even more for a self-driver, with additional sensors like lidar. All the data needs to be combined, sorted, and turned into a robot-friendly picture of the world, with instructions on how to move through it. That takes huge computing power, which means huge electricity demands. Prototypes use around 2,500 watts, enough to light 40 incandescent light bulbs.

“To put such a system into a combustion-engined car doesn’t make any sense, because the fuel consumption will go up tremendously,” says Wilko Stark, Mercedes-Benz’s vice president of strategy. Switch over to electric cars, and that draw translates to reduced range, because power from the battery goes to the computers instead of the motors.

Don’t be depressed.  Self driving cars are only 10 years away, and will be just 10 years away for the next few decades, just like fusion and the Iranian nuclear arsenal.

This Business Will get out of Control. It Will get out of Control and we’ll be Lucky to Live Through It.

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A prankster who created the joke Cryptocurrency PonziCoin has called it off, because too many people want to keep giving him money:

People will never cease to amaze and the level of stupidity that human beings express sometimes surpasses any that we have seen before. It is one thing to fall for a Ponzi Scheme that was disguised as something legitimate but when someone takes the extra effort of warning you that you may lose all your money and you still jump in with your two feet, that is on you.

………

With the sudden spiral of cryptocurrency in the world, we have already seen quite a number of people lose money through fake ICOs (Initial Coin Offerings) and collapsing platforms, but people never learn and to prove this, a San Francisco based developer, Rishab Hegde, “jokingly” built a cryptocurrency based on Ethereum and named it PonziCoin – an exact copycat of what happened back in 2014.

Rishab Hedge went ahead to warn the investors on the coin that it was a Ponzi Scheme, “The world’s first legitimate Ponzi scheme,” reads the coin’s landing page. The bliss does not end there, the developer adds more warnings in the Frequently Asked Questions section:

Q: Is this a scam?

A: Yes, it’s as much a scam as 99% of the ICOs out there, but it’s more transparent about it 🙂

………

Now here’s the major news; People actually invested in the Ponzi scheme. Maybe with the hopes of being the early investors and cashing out before everything collapses. After around 8 hours, PonziCoin had attracted attention and the platform had collected around 250 Ether coins ( valued at more than $25,000).

Mr Rishab seems to have gotten cold feet due to the attention and he decided to pull the plug on PonziCoin, leaving investors out it the cold and possibly making away with their money since none of the investors got a payout on their investment. An update on the website reads:

This has gotten crazy out of hand, I apologize but we will no longer be selling PonziCoin on this site because this was a joke. I cannot terminate the contract but I will not be selling any coins that I own.

Tulips, Schmulips, this is a REAL bubble.

This is Insane

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It appears that the Pentagon is planning for nuclear retaliation in response to cyber attacks:

A newly drafted United States nuclear strategy that has been sent to President Trump for approval would permit the use of nuclear weapons to respond to a wide range of devastating but non-nuclear attacks on American infrastructure, including what current and former government officials described as the most crippling kind of cyberattacks.

For decades, American presidents have threatened “first use” of nuclear weapons against enemies in only very narrow and limited circumstances, such as in response to the use of biological weapons against the United States. But the new document is the first to expand that to include attempts to destroy wide-reaching infrastructure, like a country’s power grid or communications, that would be most vulnerable to cyberweapons.

The draft document, called the Nuclear Posture Review, was written at the Pentagon and is being reviewed by the White House. Its final release is expected in the coming weeks and represents a new look at the United States’ nuclear strategy. The draft was first published last week by HuffPost.

It called the strategic picture facing the United States quite bleak, citing not only Russian and Chinese nuclear advances but advances made by North Korea and, potentially, Iran.

“We must look reality in the eye and see the world as it is, not as we wish it to be,” the draft document said. The Trump administration’s new initiative, it continued, “realigns our nuclear policy with a realistic assessment of the threats we face today and the uncertainties regarding the future security environment.”
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The Pentagon declined to comment on the draft assessment because Mr. Trump has not yet approved it. The White House also declined to comment.

This is full, “Protecting our purity of essence,” (Dr. Strangelove) nsane.