I thought we just called those people Browncoats.

First of all, it's only control power that's off (sensors are always on). Measuring a voltage is one thing, but if you need to replace a motor, you have to lock out the energy. Secondly, the electrical devices that do the controlling are usually located in electrical panels accessible from outside the guarding. Third the cell is normally designed so you can see pretty well what's going on from outside (the guarding is typically something you can see through like lexan or square mesh painted black).

I can't believe I heard about this story on the radio this morning, with the radio hosts likening it to the movie Terminator. I work in industrial automation and let me assure you that these industrial robots have absolutely nothing even remotely approaching "AI". An industrial robot is no more than a multi-axis motion control system with some fancy co-ordinate transformation math on top of it. The programs are as simple as "wait for this input, then move to this point, turn on this output, wait for this input", etc.

When we're starting up any industrial automation workcell (whether it as a robot or not), the cell design has to be certified (stamped by a professional engineer in our jurisdiction) that the safety system meets appropriate regulations and is built with certified components, all of which are specified to specific safety requirements based on hazard, etc.

The thing is, those regulations are there to protect factory workers and people interacting with the cell in normal operations. If you take any machine apart using a wrench, you're supposed to be properly trained in how to lock out all sources of energy in the machine. That said, when you're programming the cell, you're allowed to be inside the cell and power up the robot using a teach pendant with a special enabling switch you have to hold down. This requires you to put the robot in a special teach mode which also limits the robot speed to less than 250 mm/s. If the cell was built correctly, the interlock switches on the gates have to be wired into the gate inputs on the robot, and when you open the guarding, the robot can only be energized while in teach mode with the teach pendant enabled.

The system isn't fool proof. We all know impatient people. Maybe the person programming the robot didn't check that the gate switches were wired in properly, or maybe he asked his buddy to close the gate behind him and press the reset button because he wanted to see what was going on (something I've seen several people do, and have always chastised them for). Maybe the guarding wasn't completely installed yet. Maybe he mistakenly put it in "Teach 2" mode which allows full speed operation with the teach pendant enabled. This mode is generally illegal in the United States, but some jurisdictions do allow it as long as you take other safeguards, like striping out a dedicated area on the floor where the robot can't reach where you're allowed to stand.

That's why this is most certainly human error. The question is, who is liable? Did a manager pressure the guy to continue programming the robot even though proper safeguards weren't in place? Did he just get impatient and ignore his own safety training? I see lots of people do that, and I also see lots of people with missing fingers - go figure.

Presumably your card # and other information were stolen manually or via an online transaction. The article is specifically mentioning going after the data from the mag stripe. I have presumed, but don't know enough about it, that the chipped cards encrypt the verification between the card and the bank, so the vendor doesn't ever have that info, and thus any malware running on their POS terminal can't access it either. That doesn't stop your waiter from writing down your card details of course... it's just a matter of degree.

Data most targeted: In 31 percent of cases Trustwave investigators found attackers targeted payment card track data (up 12 percentage points over 2013). Track data is the information on the back of a payment card that’s needed for an in-person transaction. Twenty percent of the time attackers sought either financial credentials or proprietary information (compared to 45 percent in 2013) meaning attackers shifted their focus back to payment card data.

I assume this is mostly because the US still doesn't have chipped credit cards, or has that changed since a year or so ago when I was there? I thought the magstripe was going away.

No, I'm saying if there was a STEM shortage, then these people would all be able to find better jobs, and the game companies would have to pay better and provide better working conditions.

There's no STEM shortage, just a shortage of people willing to work 80 hours per week for under $50k per year.

I think the GP's point is obvious. When you see/read the Hunger Games, your first reaction is disbelief that this could happen, and then it hits you that it did happen (Rome, etc.). I think that was one of the major points of the book: same old human cruelty in a different setting.

Nothing you do in school, no project, certainly not a "keystone project", can come anywhere close to the complexity of a real-life engineering, IT, or software project. All of the things like best practices and methodology you were learning in school were methods for managing complexity, and yet they could never actually show you real complexity like you're going to see in the workforce.

There's a lot of talk about the fact that this would mean tracking everywhere you went. Why not just track miles driven by your odometer? I don't know about Oregon, but here you report your odometer reading when you pay for your license plate. You could just also pay the estimated tax (you already tell your insurance company how far you're probably going to drive) when you license your vehicle, and then pay/receive the difference when you re-register it next year, plus when you sell it. Seems a lot simpler and less expensive than a GPS tracker.

Also, seems like there should be a per-distance tax for roads, plus a gas consumption tax just to cover the increased societal costs of using gas. Use the gas tax to build out charging stations.

Yeah, no kidding. My wife wanted one for Christmas, so she got one (not from me). Thankfully it's a Keurig 1.0. I insisted on finding one of the good re-usable stainless steel filters and I just put regular ground coffee in it. Works great for me. She only cares about the convenience, and won't use the re-usable one. It's sad to me, but it's her choice. Honestly, how people can think throwing out all these plastic k-cups are a great idea is beyond me.

I also live in Ontario and did a calculation for that based on prices of Chinese lithium ion batteries at the time (6 months ago). Back of the napkins said it would be greater than 10 years to get a payback, but the prices are still dropping. I'd say this kind of stuff is going to happen soon. I recently installed a whole home power monitor for interest sake, and honestly for $3500 even if it paid itself back to break-even over the 10 year warranty period it would be an interesting project to take on. Still I imaging the switching equipment you need to install along with this is pretty serious cost, and I don't think this comes with a charger/inverter either.

Exactly what kind of support are they getting? Just telephone type "my cup holder broke"? Seems like internal IT could handle most of that. Or are they actually fixing Windows XP bugs for them?

There is some truth to this. I am a "successful" programmer (in my opinion, since I get paid to do it and people are generally happy with the results). My job every day consists of a series of frustrating problems where the solution is not obvious, but I'm sure it should be possible to solve it. A 3rd party library causes a heap corruption about once a week, or customers refuse to send data files in a consistent format. The print spooler service keeps stopping.

People come to me with the *simplest* of problems, and they can't even be bothered to type their question into Google, let alone *read* the results that come up! Most people aren't even willing to try it or learn for themselves, just waiting for someone's permission, I guess.

"It just doesn't work" is such a commonly repeated phrase, right next to "the Internet's not working". What doesn't work? Did you try doing it like this? Did it work yesterday? Has it ever worked? Can anyone else get it to work? Don't you want to know how it works? Do you even want it to work, or are you just relieved that you have something external to blame for why you couldn't get your work done?

Seriously, the key to success is just not giving up when you know something's possible.

There's a difference between a "surveillance society" which is where a small class of people or organizations owns or has access to all the surveillance, or just a "public society" where lots of private individuals have cameras, phones, etc., and decent means of communication. In the latter case, it's the people (society) who actually have the power. It's much more democratic, i.e. "I'm publicly shaming this person because the vast majority of people feel their behavior is unacceptable." In the former, it's about centralized power, i.e. "Make this person's life miserable because they're a threat to my power." I'm all for distributed cameras and communications, I just wish people would keep the data local by default, and not provide it so willingly to 3rd parties to aggregate it.