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Comment Re:Makes sense to use the A9 (Score 1) 90

by Plumpaquatsch (#48928835) Attached to: Germany Plans Highway Test Track For Self-Driving Cars

The A9 connects Munich to Ingolstadt, which are respectively the main hubs for BMW and Audi, so it makes sense to use that road for testing. Moreover, both cities are in the state of Bavaria, which makes it easier to get things going on the government level.

Bavaria is also the home state of the traffic minister Dobrindt - so pork.

Comment Re:Your situation isn't everybody's. (Score 1) 90

by Plumpaquatsch (#48928819) Attached to: Germany Plans Highway Test Track For Self-Driving Cars

And 10% savings with no changes to technology (apart from the platooning system of course) or driving is pretty good, isn't it?

Only on a closed track, and remember that my assertion isn't that the gas savings aren't there, it's that even with self-driving cars 8 meters isn't safe once you start trying to move it to production, especially when you'd have cars of different makes, and maintenance levels in the 'platoons'. It'd also be limited(mostly) to the highway systems, which doesn't do much for most commutes.

The safety brake system (used in production cars) I mentioned was obviously tested to avoid collisions with suddenly breaking cars just 8 meters away without even pre-charging the breaks. Not to mention that the 10% saving is for 15 meters.

But you sure do know more about these things than the people who build them. Volvo. The guys with the car safety record.
Security

Why Screen Lockers On X11 Cannot Be Secure 375

Posted by Soulskill from the targeted-for-improvement dept.
jones_supa writes: One thing we all remember from Windows NT is the security feature requiring the user to press CTRL-ALT-DEL to unlock the workstation (this can still be enabled with a policy setting). The motivation was to make it impossible for other programs to mimic a lock screen, as they couldn't react to the special key combination. Martin Gräßlin from the KDE team takes a look at the lock screen security on X11. On a protocol level, X11 doesn't know anything of screen lockers. Also the X server doesn't know that the screen is locked as it doesn't understand the concept. This means the screen locker can only use the core functionality available to emulate screen locking. That in turn also means that any other client can do the same and prevent the screen locker from working (for example opening a context menu on any window prevents the screen locker from activating). That's quite a bummer: any process connected to the X server can block the screen locker, and even more it could fake your screen locker.
Handhelds

The iPad Is 5 Years Old This Week, But You Still Don't Need One 307

Posted by Soulskill from the interactive-chopping-boards dept.
HughPickens.com writes: Five years ago, Steve Jobs introduced the iPad and insisted that it would do many things better than either a laptop or a smartphone. Will Oremus writes at Future Tense that by most standards, the iPad has been a success, and the tablet has indeed emerged as a third category of computing device. But there's another way of looking at the iPad. According to Oremus, Jobs was right to leave out the productivity features and go big on the simple tactile pleasure of holding the Internet in your hands.

But for all its popularity and appeal, the iPad never has quite cleared the bar Jobs set for it, which was to be "far better" at some key tasks than a laptop or a smartphone. The iPad may have been "far better" when it was first released, but smartphones have come a long way. The iPhone 6 and 6 Plus and their Android equivalents are now convenient enough for most mobile computing tasks that there's no need to carry around a tablet as well. That helps explain why iPad sales have plateaued, rather than continuing to ascend to the stratospheric levels of the iPhone. "The iPad remains an impressive machine. But it also remains a luxury item rather than a necessity," concludes Oremus. "Again, by most standards, it is a major success. Just not by the high standards that Jobs himself set for it five years ago."

Comment Re:Your situation isn't everybody's. (Score 1) 90

by Plumpaquatsch (#48919317) Attached to: Germany Plans Highway Test Track For Self-Driving Cars

15 meters is the max they measured, you really need to be within 9 meters to realize 10% fuel savings.

No, 8 meters is the closest they have measured with cars, and they only didn't g closer because the build-in proximity sensors (safety standard in the production cars) didn't allow them to go closer without the breaks pre-charging, ruining mileage. And 10% savings with no changes to technology (apart from the platooning system of course) or driving is pretty good, isn't it? Of course the least saving was showing for the big petrol engined car, so it's clear that this isn't for America with its huge engines.

Comment Re:So stupid (Score 1) 90

by Plumpaquatsch (#48918489) Attached to: Germany Plans Highway Test Track For Self-Driving Cars

Isn't the point to test automatic cars under real conditions? Google did this years ago. With hand-picked, pre-mapped roads, but still under real conditions with real human-driven traffic. Remember the euro search engine? The euro book digitizing project? Every time Germany/EU tries to copy what Google does, only years later, by government decree and without Google, the result is the same. Burnt money. Next thing they will try to ban undeutsche autonomous cars from deutsche autobahn.

German (and others) scientists did that years before Google even existed. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eureka_Prometheus_Project

PROMETHEUS profited from the participation of Ernst Dickmanns, the 1980s pioneer of driverless cars, and his team at Bundeswehr Universität München, collaborating with Daimler-Benz. A first culmination point was achieved in 1994, when their twin robot vehicles VaMP and VITA-2 drove more than one thousand kilometers on a Paris multi-lane highway in standard heavy traffic at speeds up to 130 km/h. They demonstrated autonomous driving in free lanes, convoy driving, automatic tracking of other vehicles, and lane changes left and right with autonomous passing of other cars.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EH3R6c7Ufg
Japan

Japanese Nobel Laureate Blasts His Country's Treatment of Inventors 191

Posted by Soulskill from the let-the-makers-make dept.
schwit1 writes: Shuji Nakamura won the 2014 Nobel Prize in Physics (along with two other scientists) for his work inventing blue LEDs. But long ago he abandoned Japan for the U.S. because his country's culture and patent law did not favor him as an inventor. Nakamura has now blasted Japan for considering further legislation that would do more harm to inventors.

"In the early 2000s, Nakamura had a falling out with his employer and, it seemed, all of Japan. Relying on a clause in Japan's patent law, article 35, that assigns patents to individual inventors, he took the unprecedented step of suing his former employer for a share of the profits his invention was generating. He eventually agreed to a court-mediated $8 million settlement, moved to the University of California, Santa Barbara (UCSB) and became an American citizen. During this period he bitterly complained about Japan's treatment of inventors, the country's educational system and its legal procedures. 'The problem is now the Japanese government wants to eliminate patent law article 35 and give all patent rights to the company. If the Japanese government changes the patent law it means basically there would no compensation [for inventors].'"

There is a similar problem with copyright law in the U.S., where changes to the law in the 1970s and 1990s have made it almost impossible for copyrights to ever expire. The changes favor the corporations rather than the individuals who might actually create the work.

Comment Re:Remember the Maine! (Score 1) 154

Actually, the second bomb and the threat of 9 more produced "peace".

Many have suggested that the second bomb brought hostilities to a close a day or two earlier than would otherwise have happened. It was taking the Japanese a while to get their heads around the problem of not being invincible.

Others have suggested it was removing the clause to indict the Emperor for war crimes (and instead leave him be head of state) from the conditions of surrender that let the Japanese allow to surrender without losing face.
Advertising

Micromax Remotely Installing Unwanted Apps and Showing Ads 50

Posted by timothy from the what-will-you-tolerate dept.
jones_supa (887896) writes "Reports are coming in that users of certain devices by Indian phone manufacturer Micromax noticed apps being silently installed without their consent or permission. Uninstalling these apps won't help, as they will be automatically reinstalled. Alternatively, instead of downloading apps, the phone might litter the UI with stack of notifications which are advertisements for online stores and other apps. It turns out that the "System Update" application is responsible for all of this. When starting to tear down the application (which is actually called FWUpgrade.apk on the filesystem), the first thing you notice is that it's a third-party application. A Chinese company named Adups developed it as a replacement for the stock Google OTA service. The article shows the potential abilities of this app and how Micromax customers can work around the disruptive behavior."
Security

19,000 French Websites Hit By DDoS, Defaced In Wake of Terror Attacks 206

Posted by timothy from the just-don't-say-mon-dieu dept.
An anonymous reader writes Since the three day terror attack that started in France on January 7 with the attack on satirical newspaper Charlie Hebdo, 19,000 websites of French-based companies have been targeted by cyber attackers. This unprecedented avalanche of cyber attacks targeted both government sites and that of big and small businesses. Most were low-level DDoS attacks, and some were web defacements. Several websites in a number of towns in the outskirts of Paris have been hacked and covered with an image of an ISIS flag. The front pages of the official municipality websites have been covered with the Jihadist militant group's black flag. In a report, Radware researchers noted that Islamic hacker group AnonGhost has also launched a "digital jihad" against France.

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