Want to read Slashdot from your mobile device? Point it at m.slashdot.org and keep reading!

 



Forgot your password?
typodupeerror
×

Comment Bulk Herbicides: Now Unnecessary (Score 5, Interesting) 435

Computer vision is more than adequate to have robots roll around a field, identify weeds, and use either thermal disruption, plucking, or extremely localized weedkiller injection (mLs) right at the base of the weed. All of these approaches are working at the research scale: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SSxNBwegfo8 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aMF7EuCAVbI http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TtgMNj6xCkk and for harvesting: http://www.optoiq.com/index/display/article-display/303062/articles/vision-systems-design/volume-12/issue-8/features/profile-in-industry-solutions/vision-system-simplifies-robotic-fruit-picking.html but with below-minimum-wage foreign labor and generic Roundup too cheap to bother, it will take legislative action to make the switch. Write your congressman.

Comment New, Problematic Protocol Introduced (Score -1, Troll) 127

Available here. What's missing from this PROTOCOL.agent document?
  • Any sign it's been reviewed by competent cryptographers.
  • Any discussion of weaknesses, implementation errors to avoid, etc.
  • Any plausible arguments that the extra lines of code needed for X.509 really outweigh the benefits of 22 years of review and practice.

Use at your own risk.

Comment Re:Or (Score 5, Interesting) 123

Their [ideogrammatic] way of writing is not worse or better, it is simply different and based on other principles.

This is unambiguously false when measured by utility. Ideogrammatic scripts take longer to learn, are slower to read and write, and mostly convey no information on pronunciation. There are numerous studies (child development, comprehension timing, etc) if you're curious about this topic. Why they persist is an interesting historical question, but there were several strong movements to eliminate them for both Chinese and Japanese in the 1860-1960 period.

Comment Not actually safe (Score 3, Interesting) 831

From a brief review of the language and implementation, this doesn't appear to use what we've learned about correctness over the last thirty years. Buffer overflows are just one bug class among dozens, and if you're going to create a language from scratch, why let integers overflow without making people explicitly request that behavior? Why ignore what we've learned about verification and formal languages? Microsoft has actually been far more responsible about this recently, thanks to the Java people they hired (Rustan etc); see Spec# for details.

Slashdot Top Deals

"Most of us, when all is said and done, like what we like and make up reasons for it afterwards." -- Soren F. Petersen

Working...