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Comment Re:Publicly Funded Research (Score 3, Interesting) 39

You are just part of a brainwashed generation that demands to have everything you want paid for AND given to you, not only for free, but with zero effort on your part.

I'm 50. Is that the generation you're referring to? I'm also 1/2 of a two-engineer household. My yearly income taxes are significantly more than an entry level engineering salary - you know, the taxes that already helped to pay for the research. Don't tell me I'm not making any effort and don't jump to conclusions about "my generation" because you obviously know fuck all about it.

But hey. You're a smart person. You know all about me. My political views. My library status. Guess what? You're just as wrong about all of them. Absolutely every assumption you made was 100% wrong. Amazing. I would imagine you must get used to being wrong a lot though.

Instead of blathering on with your erroneous, ignorant opinions, maybe you ought to take a good long look at yourself and realize you're actually preaching to yourself. Geez. What a douchebag.

Comment Re:Publicly Funded Research (Score 3, Insightful) 39

When you say "go to a library" you are implying that everyone has access to a University library or similarly large, well-funded location. Not all libraries have access to journals. Although I don't have a reference for this, I suspect that the vast majority of libraries don't. I'm fortunate in the fact that I can spend an hour of total travel time (granted, 20 minutes of this will be spent waiting for the train) to get to a major University. I envision that one day there will be a series of tubes that give us access to this type of information from nearly anywhere and not a severely limited number of physical locations.

Comment Publicly Funded Research (Score 5, Insightful) 39

According to the articles, the alloy isn't particularly exotic and the processing isn't difficult. I'd love to know what they specifically used. Sadly, they published in Nature. So I can view the paper for $5 or download as PDF for $32. Or, you know, subscribe for $200. What I don't get is why I, as one of the millions of taxpayers that funded this research, don't have free access to the paper.

Yes. I know. Preaching to the choir, OA journals, etc. That still doesn't change the fact that I find this both irritating and wrong.

Submission + - NSA Planned to Hijack Google App Store to Hack Smartphones (firstlook.org)

Submitted by Advocatus Diaboli
Advocatus Diaboli writes: "The National Security Agency and its closest allies planned to hijack data links to Google and Samsung app stores to infect smartphones with spyware, a top-secret document reveals. The surveillance project was launched by a joint electronic eavesdropping unit called the Network Tradecraft Advancement Team, which includes spies from each of the countries in the “Five Eyes” alliance — the United States, Canada, the United Kingdom, New Zealand and Australia."

"The newly published document shows how the agencies wanted to “exploit” app store servers – using them to launch so-called “man-in-the-middle” attacks to infect phones with the implants. A man-in-the-middle attack is a technique in which hackers place themselves between computers as they are communicating with each other; it is a tactic sometimes used by criminal hackers to defraud people. In this instance, the method would have allowed the surveillance agencies to modify the content of data packets passing between targeted smartphones and the app servers while an app was being downloaded or updated, inserting spyware that would be covertly sent to the phones."
Transportation

The Economic Consequences of Self-Driving Trucks 615

Posted by Soulskill from the honk-if-you-have-free-will dept.
An anonymous reader writes: Last week we learned that self-driving big-rig trucks were finally being deployed on public roads in Nevada for testing purposes. Experts consider trucking to be ripe for replacement with AI because of the sheer volume of trucks on the road, and the relative simplicity of their routes. But the eventual replacement of truck drivers with autonomous driving systems will have a huge impact on the U.S. economy: there are 3.5 million professional truck drivers, and millions more are employed to support and coordinate them. Yet more people rely on truckers to stay in business — gas stations, motels, and restaurants along trucking routes, to name a few.

Now, that's not to say moving forward with autonomous driving is a bad idea — in 2012, roughly 4,000 people died in accidents with large trucks, and almost all of the accidents were caused by driver error. Saving most of those lives (and countless injuries) is important. But we need to start thinking about how to handle the 10 million people looking for work when the (human) trucking industry falls off a cliff. It's likely we'll see another wave of ghost towns spread across the poor parts of the country, as happened when the interstate highway system changed how long-range transportation worked in the U.S.

Comment Re:Requires Almost Direct Access (Score 1) 93

It would seem that way. I haven't looked at the protocols, but I do have the OS X Server app ($19.99) running on a Mini on my home network with the caching functionality turned on. It appears to be nothing but a CDN that caches various Apple downloads (software, media..) locally and acts similarly to a transparent proxy. I wouldn't be horribly surprised if it was running Squid, but - like I said - I haven't looked at it. So if we're now at the point that content caching is anathema, then we'd better all just unplug from our ISPs and start sneaker netting everything. Or something.

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