Twenty years ago, Nicholas Negroponte pointed out the irony that when he passed through Singapore customs, they searched his atoms but not his bits.
Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No!
There’s no problem with this in principle. The problem is that it’s silly, and it causes a privacy and security violation while not accomplishing anything.
Hey Tloewald, please don't pretend to speak for everyone when you say "being searched" isn't a problem in the first place.
It's not a problem for you, fine. I'd ask you to let me search you but that'd only be to prove a point, so by all means keep accepting it. But when you say it's not a problem, you do not speak for me.
It's pointless, degrading, and above all it's sad that you and many others accept it without questioning it.
The principle here is people can agree to surrender some of their privacy for safety. The problem isn’t that searching my bits is a greater violation than searching my atoms, but that it’s not useful. Right now there’s no pattern of bits I can carry with me to blow up a plane and in any event I could easily bypass the search.
I’m not thrilled by the social contract, but it’s a good deal more convenient than driving across country.
I'll sometimes surrender some privacy for some form of safety or convenience, but that safety/convenience has to exist, not be theoretical.
Positive example: I use Google Drive. I know full well Google could read and analyze all my shit if they wanted to. I surrender to that possibility in exchange for the very cheap and convenient online storage I get.
Negative example: Fuck the TSA and all its theatrics. Those aren't useful. Please do convince me they are; I don't see anyone even trying to pretend they are.
> Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No!
Of course it is. We're simply used to it, because we're sheep and cowards. But it is. Searching everyone, without probable cause or reasonable suspicion of anything, is a violation of civil liberties, and of basic human decency. It's also pure theater and useless.
And because we have accepted this, other privacy agressions seem justified.
It is an infringement. I certainly don't think I should have to explain everything in my bag to little hitlers.
I'm willing to entertain arguments that it is a worthwhile trade-off, but we must acknowledge that it is an infringement on everyone's rights.
Every additional infringement should come with a justification, an analysis considering whether it will be effective, and a harm minimisation strategy.
If there’s one thing Apple did, with Steve Jobs, other than build fantastic user experience out of mature but unapproachable technologies, it was communicating the fact that it had done so. Not only has Amazon failed to do this, the writer has as well.
I think it’s pretty cool that, in theory, I could say “Alexa, turn on the oven to 450” and it would (a) turn the correct device to the correct setting and (b) remind me when it was ready (or if it’s being super duper smart, tell me that it was 2 mins or so away from being ready) so that I could stagger over to the kitchen, pull a pizza out of the fridge or freezer, unwrap it, and stick it in the oven. All I need to do is have a bunch of speakers bugging my home, a new oven, ideally probably not two new ovens or not a new oven and a new toaster oven because god knows what will happen, and all this stuff networked.
Or I can walk over to the oven, turn it to 450, and say “Hey Siri, set timer for ten minutes” and wander off. When my wrist buzzes, I go stick a pizza in the oven and I say, “Hey Siri, set timer for thirteen minutes” and go do stuff.
I don’t need a new oven. I don’t need to worry that I’ll pick the wrong oven. I’m not inviting Amazon to parse all my conversations. I don’t need to learn a new magic phrase.
Oh and imagine the hilarity when you try to sell or rent your house and the internet gets turned off. We had a smart sprinkler system which, when we sold the house, we essentially had to rip out because it was easier to install a conventional replacement than figure out how to talk to it without an active WiFi.
I'm with you on that, but what I would want is the ability to know is the status of my oven.
My wife and I are always (excessively) concerned with whether we left our gas stove on/off, the doors are locked and that the garage door is closed.
For that stuff, I'd be willing to pay for the ability to check on that stuff that worries me. Having said that though, knowing that you left your stove on and not having the ability to turn it off would probably be kind of pointless.
You will get a much better ROI if you address excessive worriness. It has to affect more of your life than just the owen. Elevated Adrenalin can cost you a few years of your life.
Suffering from that issue myself, one thing that helps is a checklist, and go through that when you leave.
Another way is to unplug them, because then one remembers doing that.
Ovens can also suffer failures where the gas is turned on, but it fails to ignite. This is no issue when you're there and notice the gas smell and the burners not going on. If you're not there, the house fills with gas and explodes.
We do the checklist thing, and I find it helps to say stuff out loud while you're going through it.
Fortunately, our range is a "dual fuel" stove, which means the oven is electric but the stove burners are gas. Having said that, stuff being left on is still a concern irrespective of whether a burner is electric or gas.
Verbal checklists are extremely effective. It's why flying is incredibly safe, and they're also used in some operating theatres (see the Checklist Manifest).
Works even better with two people as you're forced to cross-check every item.
It's important to keep it a sane length and at a suitably high level, otherwise users have a tendency to skip items that are "obvious".
Hah, I had a "Hotpoint" GE range until recently when it started having a fun issue. If you Google the reviews, well it randomly turns on the oven....at the best of times like when you aren't home example. Because the stupid potentiometer used for the oven control has a piss poor "off" position that goes bad over time and the oven either a.) refuses to turn off or b.) oscillates on/off over an extended period.
Perhaps slantyyz was thinking that the IoT portion of the oven should be an isolated piece of hardware that is only capable of monitoring, and absolutely incapable of performing actions like turning on the oven.
However, this can still be hacked to say that the oven is off, while it is in fact on and you’re leaving for the airport.
I would as it takes a longish time to do which is annoying to wait for. So if it could be remotely turned on when I’m at the store or on the way home that would be a big convenience.
Likewise with most async things that I forget to do, like watering plants or cleaning the house. If I can throw money at it and reasonably expect it to work (sprinkler system, house cleaner) I will do it.
Reading the entire comment will help in this case.
The paragraph after what you quoted:
[instead of buying a new oven]..
"Or I can walk over to the oven, turn it to 450, and say “Hey Siri, set timer for ten minutes” and wander off. When my wrist buzzes, I go stick a pizza in the oven and I say, “Hey Siri, set timer for thirteen minutes” and go do stuff.
I don’t need a new oven. I don’t need to worry that I’ll pick the wrong oven."
My wife is a real estate agent and let me tell you - smart homes are a nightmare for buyers. My advice? Stay away from it. Not until there’s a fully-interoperable standard and it doesn’t matter whether your buyer is partial to the Google, Apple or Amazon ecosystems and there’s a smart gateway allowing you to quickly transition from one owner to another. Until then? No. Just no.
the internet connectivity requirement is silly, especially if you want to build a long term system.
This guy has a great youtube channel[1] which documents how he builds his home automation system (in house). Would highly recommend watching his videos.
It's definitely not easier to manually set a timer than it is to use Siri. Also, you can do multiple timers at once and they follows you around (versus being screamed at because the timer in the kitchen is beeping and no-one has noticed for half an hour and now the fire alarm is going off).
I joined a successful startup about ten months before it was acquired for several hundred million. The deal somehow led to a lot of employees losing their options (myself included). There was some discussion of a lawsuit but it fizzled.
If I understood the details I would never have signed the contract. At the time I was pretty desperate for a job (I’d moved to the US from Australia and my own company had gone belly up and I was living in Santa Barbara with a mortgage).
what needs to be explained, a several hundred million exit is LOWWWWWW. If they had a series B for 20 million or so, or a series C for close to or above 100 million, then the valuation itself was WAY more than that.
A few hundred million exit will result in ZILCH (almost $zero) for any common stock shareholder every single time, unless the company was in series A or lower.
VCs have a separate share class called Preferred, and they also negotiate "Liquidation Preferences" with a multiple. So a Liquidation Preference x1 means they get their money back, as much as possible. A Liquidation Preference x2 means they get double their money no matter what, before anybody else - like common stockholders - get paid.
And this is before your stock options' strike price matters.
Its a shitty deal, investor protection laws should be extended to cover this, because the information and transparency is lacking.
The exit was in 2005, and several hundred million was not bad (although it came after a failed effort to go public for somewhere north of a billion). I was very new to the startup game and had comparatively little at stake and didn’t understand any of the language but I was invited to some gatherings of engineers who had been screwed by the deal.
My impression is that founders or early investors often have a lot of ability to dilute the value of stock prior to making a deal (there’s description of similar shenanigans early in “Chaos Monkeys”)
Energy storage technologies are all about nasty chemistry. Nasty chemistry is where the energy is. Commercializing the chemistry isn’t easy or everyone would do it.
No clue if these guys are viable but the science is solid.
You do understand that the whole point of hydrides is addressing hydrogen’s storage issues (energy density and need to store under pressure). Using hydrides with fuel cells was what everyone expected electric cars to use before lithium ion batteries took off.
Interesting idea. But is the cloud version a complete image (perhaps out of sync)? If so then it’s a performance disaster, if not it’s very fragile.
It seems to me what we really want is a cloud file system with local cache (like Dropbox or iCloud conceptually) so that if our local device is vaporized we have a pretty much up to date logical store alive and well (and we can work on any number of machines). The word “swapping” seems to me to be based on the virtual memory model which means that if anything goes wrong you have two disconnected piles of crap.
At a file level you could theoretically have a giant file that is never wholly local, but how useful is this as a feature in real terms?
I think Borg or Tarsnap use the right approach here: a map of blocks, updating a file updates only the changed block(s). It balances the efficiency of updates and the completeness of the copy. Sort of like FAT filesystem, only with block-level deduplication built in.
Of course you don't get a nice mirror of your files right in the cloud, unless you run a separate server that reconstructs it and makes available as traditional buckets.
I use a Rubric appliance, that does block level dedupe and extends to cloud. I was able to instantiate a multi TB db, from the backup to a physical server in minutes. Extremely impressed .
I decided against a block- level system with Zero because I'm trying to make predictions about which files will be needed next locally and that's hard on a block level, I think.
Yes, the cloud version is a complete image (without the file names though) that should be eventually consistent.
And yes, performance is a disaster right now simply because the code is not optimized at all. But the sync to the cloud happens in the background so it should not affect your performance unless you have a "cache miss".
What about often-locally-changed data which are part of a coherent set, the classic case being a file used by a database engine to store data? We nearly always need to mirror/backup a consistent version of it (just after a successful nesting transaction, in the SQL world the upper-level "COMMIT"), but AFAIK for the time being the HSM+backup software cannot detect such a state. trapping existing system calls (fsync and co, in order to copy to the remote storage data in a sync'ed state) but this is not robust because their semantics is not "upon return of this call the whole dataset (in all files) is consistent".
Moreover if the application using the DB engine is not perfect such inconsistency may reside at application level => after a COMMIT the file is consistent for the DB engine, but not for the application.
I wonder if some users of such HSM+backup software felt some major disappointment after restoring an inconsistent version of such a file. Even a minor loss (garbled index) may be hard to detect and lead to a "fork" of the data.
A dedicated system function called to signal "in my set of opened files the data are consistent" would be useful but is AFAIK missing, and even if someone adds it to some libc/kernel it will only be useful when the application code will actually call it.
The kludge is a procedure "order to engine to sync the data ; throttle the engine in 'no write mode' ; create a RO snapshot ; backup the snapshot; unthrottle the engine ; delete the snapshot", which seems not exactly "transparent".
Is being searched before you get on a plane or enter a customs checkpoint some kind of hideous infringement of your civil liberties? No!
There’s no problem with this in principle. The problem is that it’s silly, and it causes a privacy and security violation while not accomplishing anything.