There's an OSS variant (probably several) which aren't given due attention in the article.

The Mycroft project currently listens locally for the watch word, and aggregates ALL of the subsequent queries as audio through a single source to the online engines like Google, Wolfram or others. This anonymizes a lot of what the engines could learn about individual users.

Their next stage is to expand on the local processing even more, so they will only be sharing plain text to the online engine third parties. This version is due in the first half of this year.

For me, the benefit is simple local Linux-based Python-based skill development. When my kid was young I would make a family computer into a sort of daily-schedule-keeper, announcing the daily tasks like bathtime or bedtime. I would ssh into the machine when my kid started having "conversations" with the computer. So now I can rebuild a little bit of that in my own personalized smart speaker.

The term "open source" existed long before this point, but not in the realm of software. It's generally used in the realm of export regulation and national signal intelligence. You know the phrase "top secret"? The inverse extreme was public knowledge... if a bit of intel is discovered through simple research such as finding it printed in a newspaper or magazine, it's "open source."

While this phrase was not bandied about in the press at the time, there is an example in PGP. The whole fight over encryption technology being exported centered on this distinction somewhat, as printed books had different regulation from encryption technology which was controlled like munitions. So they printed the source code to PGP in a book, published it, and used OCR in other parts of the globe to reconstitute it into computer software.

Published by The MIT Press, 1995. ISBN 0-262-24039-4.
(no longer in print)

Now that it's shown to be possible to scan a fingerprint without an obvious fingerprint scanning area, be ready for the fingerprint wars. Any touchscreen anywhere, from a gas station pump to an ATM to a plain glass door, could be outfitted with a collection device to gather all our greasy fingertip data. And with the courts assuming that you have no expectation of privacy with third party data, everywhere is open season for state actors.

Shout out to Thunderf00t and Dave EEBlog Jones who have gathered all the successes and failures of the concept. Especially Dave who walks through the watt/sq meter math and shows how it comes up short, no matter how you slice it.

Last year some cities actually talking about requiring trucks to use catenary (overhead) power lines in the city, like many city buses and streetcar trolleys do. But the energy capacity to feed all those rails looks to be in doubt.

Trying to recharge vehicle batteries wirelessly like a huge Qi charger is even more lossy. The inefficiencies would kill any such plan.

I don't use imgur in any sort of commentary capacity. You don't need to log in to post images, and that's the key draw, or so I thought. To me it's simply an anonymous pastebin for images. I'm actually amazed anyone has given imgur their email address to begin with.

I expect quite a few folks here are going to question the figure, "a million dollars per line changed."

1. The airlines operate under a huge amount of regulatory oversight, and structure the development of avionics or engine control software accordingly. The terms ARP4754 and DO-178C are to aviation as ISO9002 is to business models. They provide guidelines on creating a rigorous development process, and regulators are keen to track how well companies develop logic and physical designs in line with best practices described by those guidelines.

2. If you summarize DO-178C in one sentence, it might be "document the rationale for every change, and the means you employed to ensure it is the right change." Most companies follow a V-shaped change model where you trace from high level requirements to lower level requirements to implementation details, and then verify the code does what is expected and then validate that the requirements are being met (and the requirements are even proper in the first place). Once you have that framework in place, you have to document every step of the chain of review.

3. For every change to a high level requirement, a low level requirement, an implementation, and sometimes even a change in a verification method, there typically has to be an independent review: you cannot trust the implementors to check that the change was appropriate and done correctly as it's easy to be blinded by your own thought process during development.

So in a case like this, the customer needs to inject several new top-level requirement (which shockingly may not have been there in the first place), "the system shall be hardened against unauthorized changes in configuration/operation/state" and that has to flow down to subsystems "the component XYZ shall be hardened..." and that has to flow down a few more tiers before you even identify the protocols or chips or attack vectors to be changed. Then you have to verify the code change works in each component. Then a system-level review. Then a regulatory review to have the updated design certified as safe for test flight and finally safe for revenue service.

Does this sound like a desktop software change control process? Sure, maybe you're really disciplined, but it's a matter of degree. It really can take fifty people or more, from regulators to systems engineers to coders to integration testers to work the process. And that all adds up in terms of time, opportunity costs, tools and tooling, lab test, systems test, hours and hours of live aircraft flight test, and so on.

I grew up in Arizona, and let me tell you, a couple decades ago it was HOT. Like, 122 F in Tucson and Phoenix was not unheard of. Now, it's fairly likely to hit that every year.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arcosanti

Since the 1950s, people have thought that the cheap land could be tamed and "new ideas" would just blossom out of the goodness in people's hearts. Arcosanti is a great example, but not the only one. Last I saw the place, it had a gift shop where the hippy owners took money selling semi-erotic paintings and charcoal drawings, and invited the young folks to spend some quality time mixing concrete with desert sand... or pose for the artist. There's never going to be an Arcosanti the way it was originally envisioned, or even with a population over 10.

So the Switch is still very hard to get in Japan, where you have to show up on shipment day at dawn, or you have to get a lottery draw through a mobile app. If you pay an extra 10000 yen (US$100), you can get one right away, so there's a scalper's economy. It's starting to ship regularly to USA and Europe, with 1-per-customer limits still in place in some areas. This is all what, 8~9 months after release? Add on top of that, the way-under-produced mini-NES/mini-SNES batches. Where is Nintendo's supply chain management? They have good relations with their assembly suppliers, they should be able to say "dedicate another couple lines for this month." They should have good relations with their memory, screen and other component suppliers also. Few other devices out there are struggling to get their parts, anything like Nintendo this year. It's like printing money, but the printer is broken.

In aerospace, independent verification and validation is a critical part of the regulatory process. Every change has a reason, every reason is documented, and every change is reviewed by someone else.

Hey, 1990 called and wants their headline back.

There was a LOT of discussion about the "Nintendo Warriors" and the precision ordnance guided by soldiers with years of training in their parents' basements. Operation Desert Strike, and then later Desert Storm.

In Japan, you can buy a special locker which the delivery companies can open. Inside it, you have a small tethered "signature stamp" so they can drop off a package and stamp their paperwork with your stamp. The lockers vary from flimsy vinyl rainproofing tents to steel boxes, and you can buy any of them from Amazon.JP.

I always wondered why they didn't just say "rounded corners were functional; they don't rip pockets or carrying sleeves." A design patent has no functional component. Boom, dead patent.

Emotion is a fact.

I take from this short statement the same sentiment that Bruce Schneier was speaking about, when he stopped whining about how everything "security theater" was completely irrelevant, and started exploring the real and tangible impact and importance of the feeling of safety IN ADDITION TO actual safety controls. You cannot just dismiss grandma's warm and fuzzy acceptance of strict authoritarian searches, you have to actually include it in the calculus, the whole of which can inform the security methodology.

Security is both a feeling and a reality. The propensity for security theater comes from the interplay between the public and its leaders. When people are scared, they need something done that will make them feel safe, even if it doesn't truly make them safer. Politicians naturally want to do something in response to crisis, even if that something doesn't make any sense.

Religion is the same: you can't just dismiss religion, it's a palpable phenomenon for a large number of stakeholders. Often, you can coexist with their philosophy while still doing real science. Galileo wasn't locked up in house arrest for his science, he was locked up for being an ass to the church. The church actually had little problem with the already-common views on the shape of the solar system, and would have "come around" on the matter much faster without his goading.

So, we all know how well this worked out for Dmitry Sklyarov last time. Learning how DRM is a self-defeating technology is kinda like the cycles in the fashion industry: everything old is new again. The stakes just get higher and higher with all the maximalist lobbying that goes on between each cycle.