You take a goat-herder from a third world country, drop a keyboard in front of him, and expect him to develop software that won't cause an airplane on the other side of the world to crash whilst paying said goat-herder just a tad more than a bag of rice each week?
Well, not quite. The thing is, the outsourced chap is more likely than not Indian, so he won't actually be a goat herder. Chances are that instead he'll have a side job like looking after Zinga the Temple Elephant, to make sure she is happy and well fed, and ready to participate in indescribably bizarre and convoluted religious rituals at the local temple.
Which, in all fairness, is a reasonably good mental background for anyone trying to write software which works in a Microsoft Windows environment.
Also, I think you making a slight mistake putting Pascal and C into the same bucket. Pascal is, while able to do quite low level stuff (good old Turbo Pascal days, how I miss them), nevertheless a higher level language than C with more abstract structures, so, in a way, somewhat more modern (alas, very much dead).
I also have very fond memories of Turbo Pascal: back in the day, I liked it a lot better than C. But preferences do change over time, and whatever Borland did to Turbo Pascal in the longer run probably deserves to be rated "R".
Granted, but what exactly is the alternative? At the end of the day, computers are still about sequentially executing instructions which operate on data. that is being held in memory somewhere. So having some sort of model like that is certainly helpful when developing applications - of course notwithstanding that on a modern machine, the whole "sequential" thing has become rather fuzzy. But the basic model is still quite useful, as a baseline to start thinking on (so to speak).
Point in case, in the other direction: functional languages. Arguably, these go full monty in the direction of "screw thinking about the machine this will run on, let's talk functionality". With the end result that the average functional version of a given application can very well serve as screening test for Mensa membership (disclaimer: I can actually program functional languages, and am a Mensa member). Wickedly cool these things are, but maintainable... and accessible to the general public... well, maybe not so much. I'd argue that the good old "sequential lego building blocks of logic" approach which is typical of C or Pascal or any other dog standard old time language has passed the test of time precisely because of their comparative simplicity and maintainability.
Thanks a lot, that was a very intriguing read! I do have a contrarian viewpoint on this, though. Namely, I would contend that the structure of C as it is now does not represent "computing in the age of the PDP-11". And that it is therefore obsolete.
I'd rather argue that C is indeed still a highly useful low level language insofar as it maps fairly directly to an abstract machine of sorts. By the standards of today, this abstract machine is much simplified compared to actual hardware - but it is still a workable model of how computing works "on the metal". As a consequence, of this, the enduring appeal of C comes from the fact that this abstract machine (flat memory, in order execution, etc) hits a sweet spot between still being human comprehensible (!), while still being close enough to what actually goes on in hardware.
Try turning the argument in the article on its head: imagine a low-level language which actually exposes all the shenanigans that are going on in a modern CPU to the programmer. And then imagine the nightmare of making something like this portable between machines. There is a reason we still do not have really stable programming interfaces on GPUs: and GPUs are actually, in their own way, simpler than a modern CPU. At least if you want to fiddle with all the little things that are there in hardware.
Is C the end all of programming languages? No, of course not. Should the glaring defects the author mentions in that article be fixed? Also yes. But to the credit of C, it is not the dinosaur he makes it out to be. And it certainly does not shackle programmers to an obsolete hardware model. Rather, there was a point in time when the hardware more or less matched the abstract model C is using. But the fact that this is no longer the case does not mean C itself is useless: especially as taking C into the realm of directly mapping to the internals of modern processors would make it a lot less comprehensible to the average programmer - and also a lot less portable.
FWD, and for that matter, parts from the Ford toolbox, were not the problem. My 2003 S60 D5 has 420k km on the clock, and is showing no signs of deteriorating. That thing is built like a tank, handles like one, and will hopefully last another 200k km. There is also a fairly minimal amount of electronics, by modern standards. If they had stuck to building cars like that, they would still be my top choice, if that S60 ever croaks.
I recently spent a few months abroad, and the company which sent me there gave me a brand new Toyota with all the bells and whistles. I still have nightmares about that thing: tons of half-assed "assistance" systems which keep bothering you with false alarms, dreadful user interfaces... those months with the Toyota re-inforced my resolve to keep that S60 alive for as long as technically possible.
That UI, and the structure of the software system underneath, were way ahead of their time. I want this UI on my Mac, on a retina display. That would make me feel young again.:)
Yeah, I know, at some point I'll have to update the panel of my ship. But as I'm a computer scientist, a day of flying for me means getting away from it all. So I try to keep the amount of (visible) electronics in my plane to a bare minimum, and do the flying hipster thing of navigating with paper maps as much as possible. There is of course a FLARM, already now, even though I think these devices are far less useful than they are purported to be. But it can't hurt to broadcast your position to others, so why not.
But the inane airspace structure in the country I usually fly in might force me to get something fancy, like an LX9050 or similar. I'd prefer not to have yet another computer display to watch, but tracking airspace boundaries on my smartphone while trying to extricate myself from the demented 3D onion layers which surround my home airfield is just too error prone and dangerous. And mounting a tablet in the glider is not for me: anything that gets in the way of bailing out in an emergency is a no-no. I recently borrowed a friend's plane, and it was so full of gizmos and gadgets on stalks and additional mountings that the interior almost looked like the inside of a squirrel nest. One could hardly extricate oneself from that cockpit whilst on the ground: so getting out in an emergency would not really be an option. At least one saves the money one would normally need for the emergency parachute, in such a set-up...
Right, thanks a lot for this piece of information, which probably solves an issue that has been puzzling to me for years.
In my free time, I fly gliders. These things are very simple craft, but usually still have some sort of on-board computer which is used for basic navigation tasks (such as "given our glide capabilities, can we still reach airfield X from where we are right now?"). And as part of that, these on-board computers of course have to use GPS. As they are permanently installed in the cockpit, these devices tend to be quite rugged, and usually are kept around for many, many years: replacements are costly, and changing something in the panel of an aircraft, no matter how small, is a major PITA (what with the necessary regulatory paperwork, and all that). So a lot of gliders fly around with positively antique - but functional - electronics on their dashboards.
In my particular glider, which is not exactly a new plane, this function is provided by a slightly ancient device from the early 90ies: a Filser DX50, which has been in the plane since it was built. And few years ago, this thing developed the classical sort of "GPS dementia" which is typical for devices that can't handle a roll-over. For my purposes (purely recreational flying), this is not a big issue: I don't care that the thing thinks it's 1995 all over again, as long as the position is correct. Which it, interestingly, still is.
The only thing about the failure which was (and still is) a bit of a head-scratcher was that it occurred far away from any actual GPS decade roll-over: as far as I remember, it croaked during the change-over from 2014 to 2015. But your explanation might be the answer: when they created the device, they probably assumed "no one will use this device beyond 20 or 22 years after manufacture", and only patched the loop-around for that long.
I see you have given much thought to the problem of how easy it is to find traces of one particular organic compound (of many, many potential culprits) in dead insects which are not there in the first place (what with the population having collapsed).
See, buster, if it only were that easy. Pesticides could of course cause mass insect deaths if they were spread around the environment evenly, and at easily detectable levels. So that, if you don't see as many insects around as you used to, you only have to take e.g. a soil sample. And if that soil sample contains measurable amounts of some insecticide, presto, you have your culprit.
But this is of course ignoring that there are thousands of chemical compounds out there which are being used as insecticides: and that you have to test for pretty much each of them separately to find them (and if you test for n-1 of them, and by chance miss the test for the one which is actually out there, you come out seemingly clean). This is also ignoring the fact that a lot of these compounds are, sometimes even by design, highly chemically unstable, and do not linger in the ecosystem. You use the pesticide: and a few weeks later, you will not find any trace of the stuff in the environment, as it breaks up into generic substances which are impossible to trace. The insects are dead, sure, but the chemical compound is gone as well.
But it gets even better: a lot of these substances also cause very specific damage to ecosystems by bio-accumulating in particular places. Say, in the flowers of specific plants, and then in the eggs of certain insect species feeding on those flowers (eggs which then fail to develop properly, due to the pesticide having accumulated there). In such cases, you will not find measurable amounts of the stuff in the general environment: you will have to look in very specific places, and at exactly the right time. In this example, you'll have to find the non-viable eggs of that particular insect species, and have to have the intuition to test for exactly the right chemicals, to figure out that bio-accumulation of one particular pesticide caused this species to disappear. Bonus points if the compound which bio-accumulates in the eggs is unstable enough to quickly degrade along with the dead eggs, so you can't find it in the soil afterwards (this is actually what usually happens).
So if you don't do that particular complicated chemical test on those non-viable eggs at precisely the right time (assuming you found these eggs in the first place), all you will ever see is that suddenly, that particular insect species is gone.
And if you are a knobhead, you then go on to claim, without any real evidence, that "global warming caused this". And claim that "if it had been pesticides, we would be seeing those". Yeah, right.
Aren't you a great armchair pilot, AC? What a pity that you weren't in charge of that flight, instead of Sully.
In all seriousness: what you wrote is beyond moronic, speaking from the perspective of someone with a pilot's license. Grow up and do some research on the decision making during in flight emergencies before posting such drivel.
Maybe Sully's A320 could theoretically have glided to one of the two airports iff everything needed for that to happen had been done immediately, and with perfect knowledge of what the root cause of the emergency actually was. But even in that case, you have to get loads of other aircraft out of the way in a real hurry to make that happen (it's not like the area around NYC isn't one of the most congested airspaces on the planet). And you have to run the huge risk of taking a disabled, engine-less aircraft full of fuel (they had just taken off) across built-up areas for a one shot landing on a crowded airport which likely had dozens of a/c full of passengers taxiing around at that very moment. And you have to make that decision without knowing what other systems beyond the engines are affected: it's not like anyone on board reliably observed the bird strike in a fashion that enabled them to rule out further damage to, say, flight surfaces on the tail.
Incidentally, this uncertainty would also apply to any automated landing system faced with this emergency. I would be very surprised if in the face of all these fuzzy data available to the in-aircraft systems then and there, even a perfect algorithmic decision would have chosen anything but ditching away from built up areas.
And as cool as X-plane is, from a tech viewpoint: Austin Meyer is not known for modesty, or always totally level headed tech claims. A brilliant dude in many ways: but if he talked less, he could do quite a bit to improve his brand.
As if. For instance, the bodywork of most cars is anodised these days, for rust protection. Getting the zinc off the scrap metal afterwards is nigh impossible, though, so you end up with a lot of sub-par scrap steel.
And that's not even talking about all the plastics. "Recyclable" is a very flexible term, and can mean a lot of things. Up to, and including, just shredding the stuff in question, and using it as low-grade plastic for disposable items. Which, by itself, hardly counts as particularly long-term thinking in and by itself.
No, because tampering with evidence in what may become a serious federal investigation may get you into even more trouble.
What I meant was actually to send an FBI geek over, not any random sysadmin dude. In a situation like this, it can be quite advantageous if the people who placed any such device are not immediately alerted to the fact that their gizmo might have been discovered.
Instead, they sent the cavalry. Inconspicuous this ain't.
Even if it had explosives, the helicopter wouldn't be much use.
Except to bring in a ordnance disposal team, in case that was the quickest way to get specialists there. Hazmat and bomb disposal people often need a lot of kit, so a larger helicopter like a Blackie can, depending on circumstances and the threat in question, actually be warranted.
The sane response to that would be to send a geek with a screwdriver to unmount it, and have it analysed in a lab. Not to lock everything down, and send a Blackhawk.
Unless you are also suspecting that any espionage kit you find will be booby-trapped with an insanely strong explosive. But that is pushing things *very* far.
I think the article is far too one-sided, but he does have some points of sorts. A lot, and I really mean a huge lot, depends on where you are looking. For instance, in Vienna, Austria, the place I studied CS, there is a proud (?) tradition that the typical CS professor knows jack all about actual software development or programming. Because that is for peons, you understand - they are there for Better Things (tm).
As a consequence, CS curricula there are, while not totally terrible, not particularly excellent, either. You can learn a lot there, typically not from the professors (who tend to be Big Picture guys, and hate questions on what they actually do all day, or what their core competence is, aside from being tenured and getting paid quite a lot), but rather from some over-worked assistant or tutor who actually knows what they are talking about.
But there are plenty of other unis and countries where CS professors are of course fully aware that CS != programming, and where they do not discount programming abilities as a useful tool for a CS graduate to master. From my limited experience with U.S. universities, this sort of divide seems to run right through the academic landscape there: some unis are "hands on plus all the theory you want", while others are like the article portrays. And which is which is sometimes hard to say.
Seriously, I've heard from multiple chemists in such companies, that basically, they try varying modifications, until one turns out to have an interesting effect.... They honestly can't tell in advance... I'm OK with that. I'm just not OK with acting like it is oh-so scientific and skilled.
Because being able to isolate the active ingredient(s) in some natural remedy, manipulating its chemical structure in a controlled fashion, and conducting meaningful and repeatable experiments on whether the modified compound is any better than the original is of course not science by any standard, right?
Just because the question of which modifications actually increase or decrease the viability of a given compound is not easily answered up front, this does not automatically mean that the entire process is bogus. Or, for that matter, particularly cheap for the entity which conducts the research (and which, predictably, wants to see some return on investment later). In turn, this of course means that if there was some way to conduct pharma research in a more focused manner, the profit seekers would be all over it. Trouble is, computational chemistry (especially in organics) has been a long way in coming, so there is no real alternative to tinkering. Yet.
...is it considered even remotely acceptable that downloading an (expletive deleted) font package puts you at risk of malware installation? Which parallel universe does one have to be in to not immediately send the person in charge of security for this product to the Uranium mines?
Oh, wait, this is Windows we are talking about. All good, move on, nothing new to see here.
Not if the guys have electronics. In that case they will have been watching our TV programs for the past few decades, and a few of their nerds might be quite fluent in English. And guess who they would send to tap on that lens?
Amen to all you write, dude. Another tenured prof here. "Disgusting" is the only word apt to describe the mentality of those who set up the current academic system.
Look up how high the orbit of the GPS satellite constellation is. These things are too far up to do much useful reconnaissance from there. So the motivation to put a lot of sensors on them is not that high.
I'll remain on the fence about this one. If it was that easy to get rid of Borreliosis - don't you think that someone, somewhere, would have tried doing this, along the lines of the recipe you suggest?
And if they haven't - maybe, just maybe, this is not quite as easy as you make it sound? Say, because an IV injection of specially cultivated phages might not actually get to later stage Borreliosis any better than current antibiotics, because the problem with such a scenario is more in the realm of getting whatever treatment one fancies to these damn micro-organisms, once they have migrated into the CNS? What with the blood-brain barrier preventing most treatments from really taking hold?
You might have studied micro-biology, but apparently not medicine. There are cases where you do want to take antibiotics in scenarios short of amputation or death: such as those where you are trying to ward off an infection becoming chronic. Borreliosis is a good example of this: if you trample on this early enough with antibiotics, you can actually get rid of it. But once it has spread far enough in your body, even antibiotics become ineffective against it, and you are in for one hell of a ride with the chronic form of the disease.
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You take a goat-herder from a third world country, drop a keyboard in front of him, and expect him to develop software that won't cause an airplane on the other side of the world to crash whilst paying said goat-herder just a tad more than a bag of rice each week?
Well, not quite. The thing is, the outsourced chap is more likely than not Indian, so he won't actually be a goat herder. Chances are that instead he'll have a side job like looking after Zinga the Temple Elephant, to make sure she is happy and well fed, and ready to participate in indescribably bizarre and convoluted religious rituals at the local temple.
Which, in all fairness, is a reasonably good mental background for anyone trying to write software which works in a Microsoft Windows environment.
Also, I think you making a slight mistake putting Pascal and C into the same bucket. Pascal is, while able to do quite low level stuff (good old Turbo Pascal days, how I miss them), nevertheless a higher level language than C with more abstract structures, so, in a way, somewhat more modern (alas, very much dead).
I also have very fond memories of Turbo Pascal: back in the day, I liked it a lot better than C. But preferences do change over time, and whatever Borland did to Turbo Pascal in the longer run probably deserves to be rated "R".
Granted, but what exactly is the alternative? At the end of the day, computers are still about sequentially executing instructions which operate on data. that is being held in memory somewhere. So having some sort of model like that is certainly helpful when developing applications - of course notwithstanding that on a modern machine, the whole "sequential" thing has become rather fuzzy. But the basic model is still quite useful, as a baseline to start thinking on (so to speak).
Point in case, in the other direction: functional languages. Arguably, these go full monty in the direction of "screw thinking about the machine this will run on, let's talk functionality". With the end result that the average functional version of a given application can very well serve as screening test for Mensa membership (disclaimer: I can actually program functional languages, and am a Mensa member). Wickedly cool these things are, but maintainable... and accessible to the general public... well, maybe not so much. I'd argue that the good old "sequential lego building blocks of logic" approach which is typical of C or Pascal or any other dog standard old time language has passed the test of time precisely because of their comparative simplicity and maintainability.
Thanks a lot, that was a very intriguing read! I do have a contrarian viewpoint on this, though. Namely, I would contend that the structure of C as it is now does not represent "computing in the age of the PDP-11". And that it is therefore obsolete.
I'd rather argue that C is indeed still a highly useful low level language insofar as it maps fairly directly to an abstract machine of sorts. By the standards of today, this abstract machine is much simplified compared to actual hardware - but it is still a workable model of how computing works "on the metal". As a consequence, of this, the enduring appeal of C comes from the fact that this abstract machine (flat memory, in order execution, etc) hits a sweet spot between still being human comprehensible (!), while still being close enough to what actually goes on in hardware.
Try turning the argument in the article on its head: imagine a low-level language which actually exposes all the shenanigans that are going on in a modern CPU to the programmer. And then imagine the nightmare of making something like this portable between machines. There is a reason we still do not have really stable programming interfaces on GPUs: and GPUs are actually, in their own way, simpler than a modern CPU. At least if you want to fiddle with all the little things that are there in hardware.
Is C the end all of programming languages? No, of course not. Should the glaring defects the author mentions in that article be fixed? Also yes. But to the credit of C, it is not the dinosaur he makes it out to be. And it certainly does not shackle programmers to an obsolete hardware model. Rather, there was a point in time when the hardware more or less matched the abstract model C is using. But the fact that this is no longer the case does not mean C itself is useless: especially as taking C into the realm of directly mapping to the internals of modern processors would make it a lot less comprehensible to the average programmer - and also a lot less portable.
Modern computers are very different to a PDP11, yet C more or less forces them into these constraints.
Care to elaborate on what part of modern C resembles a constraint found on the PDP11?
FWD, and for that matter, parts from the Ford toolbox, were not the problem. My 2003 S60 D5 has 420k km on the clock, and is showing no signs of deteriorating. That thing is built like a tank, handles like one, and will hopefully last another 200k km. There is also a fairly minimal amount of electronics, by modern standards. If they had stuck to building cars like that, they would still be my top choice, if that S60 ever croaks.
I recently spent a few months abroad, and the company which sent me there gave me a brand new Toyota with all the bells and whistles. I still have nightmares about that thing: tons of half-assed "assistance" systems which keep bothering you with false alarms, dreadful user interfaces... those months with the Toyota re-inforced my resolve to keep that S60 alive for as long as technically possible.
That UI, and the structure of the software system underneath, were way ahead of their time. I want this UI on my Mac, on a retina display. That would make me feel young again. :)
Yeah, I know, at some point I'll have to update the panel of my ship. But as I'm a computer scientist, a day of flying for me means getting away from it all. So I try to keep the amount of (visible) electronics in my plane to a bare minimum, and do the flying hipster thing of navigating with paper maps as much as possible. There is of course a FLARM, already now, even though I think these devices are far less useful than they are purported to be. But it can't hurt to broadcast your position to others, so why not.
But the inane airspace structure in the country I usually fly in might force me to get something fancy, like an LX9050 or similar. I'd prefer not to have yet another computer display to watch, but tracking airspace boundaries on my smartphone while trying to extricate myself from the demented 3D onion layers which surround my home airfield is just too error prone and dangerous. And mounting a tablet in the glider is not for me: anything that gets in the way of bailing out in an emergency is a no-no. I recently borrowed a friend's plane, and it was so full of gizmos and gadgets on stalks and additional mountings that the interior almost looked like the inside of a squirrel nest. One could hardly extricate oneself from that cockpit whilst on the ground: so getting out in an emergency would not really be an option. At least one saves the money one would normally need for the emergency parachute, in such a set-up...
Right, thanks a lot for this piece of information, which probably solves an issue that has been puzzling to me for years.
In my free time, I fly gliders. These things are very simple craft, but usually still have some sort of on-board computer which is used for basic navigation tasks (such as "given our glide capabilities, can we still reach airfield X from where we are right now?"). And as part of that, these on-board computers of course have to use GPS. As they are permanently installed in the cockpit, these devices tend to be quite rugged, and usually are kept around for many, many years: replacements are costly, and changing something in the panel of an aircraft, no matter how small, is a major PITA (what with the necessary regulatory paperwork, and all that). So a lot of gliders fly around with positively antique - but functional - electronics on their dashboards.
In my particular glider, which is not exactly a new plane, this function is provided by a slightly ancient device from the early 90ies: a Filser DX50, which has been in the plane since it was built. And few years ago, this thing developed the classical sort of "GPS dementia" which is typical for devices that can't handle a roll-over. For my purposes (purely recreational flying), this is not a big issue: I don't care that the thing thinks it's 1995 all over again, as long as the position is correct. Which it, interestingly, still is.
The only thing about the failure which was (and still is) a bit of a head-scratcher was that it occurred far away from any actual GPS decade roll-over: as far as I remember, it croaked during the change-over from 2014 to 2015. But your explanation might be the answer: when they created the device, they probably assumed "no one will use this device beyond 20 or 22 years after manufacture", and only patched the loop-around for that long.
Pesticide use is hard to hide.
I see you have given much thought to the problem of how easy it is to find traces of one particular organic compound (of many, many potential culprits) in dead insects which are not there in the first place (what with the population having collapsed).
See, buster, if it only were that easy. Pesticides could of course cause mass insect deaths if they were spread around the environment evenly, and at easily detectable levels. So that, if you don't see as many insects around as you used to, you only have to take e.g. a soil sample. And if that soil sample contains measurable amounts of some insecticide, presto, you have your culprit.
But this is of course ignoring that there are thousands of chemical compounds out there which are being used as insecticides: and that you have to test for pretty much each of them separately to find them (and if you test for n-1 of them, and by chance miss the test for the one which is actually out there, you come out seemingly clean). This is also ignoring the fact that a lot of these compounds are, sometimes even by design, highly chemically unstable, and do not linger in the ecosystem. You use the pesticide: and a few weeks later, you will not find any trace of the stuff in the environment, as it breaks up into generic substances which are impossible to trace. The insects are dead, sure, but the chemical compound is gone as well.
But it gets even better: a lot of these substances also cause very specific damage to ecosystems by bio-accumulating in particular places. Say, in the flowers of specific plants, and then in the eggs of certain insect species feeding on those flowers (eggs which then fail to develop properly, due to the pesticide having accumulated there). In such cases, you will not find measurable amounts of the stuff in the general environment: you will have to look in very specific places, and at exactly the right time. In this example, you'll have to find the non-viable eggs of that particular insect species, and have to have the intuition to test for exactly the right chemicals, to figure out that bio-accumulation of one particular pesticide caused this species to disappear. Bonus points if the compound which bio-accumulates in the eggs is unstable enough to quickly degrade along with the dead eggs, so you can't find it in the soil afterwards (this is actually what usually happens).
So if you don't do that particular complicated chemical test on those non-viable eggs at precisely the right time (assuming you found these eggs in the first place), all you will ever see is that suddenly, that particular insect species is gone.
And if you are a knobhead, you then go on to claim, without any real evidence, that "global warming caused this". And claim that "if it had been pesticides, we would be seeing those". Yeah, right.
You contribute nothing to life. Go commit suicide and help the planet.
I wish I had mod points to mod you up. :)
Aren't you a great armchair pilot, AC? What a pity that you weren't in charge of that flight, instead of Sully.
In all seriousness: what you wrote is beyond moronic, speaking from the perspective of someone with a pilot's license. Grow up and do some research on the decision making during in flight emergencies before posting such drivel.
Maybe Sully's A320 could theoretically have glided to one of the two airports iff everything needed for that to happen had been done immediately, and with perfect knowledge of what the root cause of the emergency actually was. But even in that case, you have to get loads of other aircraft out of the way in a real hurry to make that happen (it's not like the area around NYC isn't one of the most congested airspaces on the planet). And you have to run the huge risk of taking a disabled, engine-less aircraft full of fuel (they had just taken off) across built-up areas for a one shot landing on a crowded airport which likely had dozens of a/c full of passengers taxiing around at that very moment. And you have to make that decision without knowing what other systems beyond the engines are affected: it's not like anyone on board reliably observed the bird strike in a fashion that enabled them to rule out further damage to, say, flight surfaces on the tail.
Incidentally, this uncertainty would also apply to any automated landing system faced with this emergency. I would be very surprised if in the face of all these fuzzy data available to the in-aircraft systems then and there, even a perfect algorithmic decision would have chosen anything but ditching away from built up areas.
And as cool as X-plane is, from a tech viewpoint: Austin Meyer is not known for modesty, or always totally level headed tech claims. A brilliant dude in many ways: but if he talked less, he could do quite a bit to improve his brand.
As if. For instance, the bodywork of most cars is anodised these days, for rust protection. Getting the zinc off the scrap metal afterwards is nigh impossible, though, so you end up with a lot of sub-par scrap steel.
And that's not even talking about all the plastics. "Recyclable" is a very flexible term, and can mean a lot of things. Up to, and including, just shredding the stuff in question, and using it as low-grade plastic for disposable items. Which, by itself, hardly counts as particularly long-term thinking in and by itself.
No, because tampering with evidence in what may become a serious federal investigation may get you into even more trouble.
What I meant was actually to send an FBI geek over, not any random sysadmin dude. In a situation like this, it can be quite advantageous if the people who placed any such device are not immediately alerted to the fact that their gizmo might have been discovered.
Instead, they sent the cavalry. Inconspicuous this ain't.
Even if it had explosives, the helicopter wouldn't be much use.
Except to bring in a ordnance disposal team, in case that was the quickest way to get specialists there. Hazmat and bomb disposal people often need a lot of kit, so a larger helicopter like a Blackie can, depending on circumstances and the threat in question, actually be warranted.
Someone finds an espionage device on the tower?
The sane response to that would be to send a geek with a screwdriver to unmount it, and have it analysed in a lab. Not to lock everything down, and send a Blackhawk.
Unless you are also suspecting that any espionage kit you find will be booby-trapped with an insanely strong explosive. But that is pushing things *very* far.
I think the article is far too one-sided, but he does have some points of sorts. A lot, and I really mean a huge lot, depends on where you are looking. For instance, in Vienna, Austria, the place I studied CS, there is a proud (?) tradition that the typical CS professor knows jack all about actual software development or programming. Because that is for peons, you understand - they are there for Better Things (tm).
As a consequence, CS curricula there are, while not totally terrible, not particularly excellent, either. You can learn a lot there, typically not from the professors (who tend to be Big Picture guys, and hate questions on what they actually do all day, or what their core competence is, aside from being tenured and getting paid quite a lot), but rather from some over-worked assistant or tutor who actually knows what they are talking about.
But there are plenty of other unis and countries where CS professors are of course fully aware that CS != programming, and where they do not discount programming abilities as a useful tool for a CS graduate to master. From my limited experience with U.S. universities, this sort of divide seems to run right through the academic landscape there: some unis are "hands on plus all the theory you want", while others are like the article portrays. And which is which is sometimes hard to say.
Seriously, I've heard from multiple chemists in such companies, that basically, they try varying modifications, until one turns out to have an interesting effect. ... They honestly can't tell in advance ... I'm OK with that. I'm just not OK with acting like it is oh-so scientific and skilled.
Because being able to isolate the active ingredient(s) in some natural remedy, manipulating its chemical structure in a controlled fashion, and conducting meaningful and repeatable experiments on whether the modified compound is any better than the original is of course not science by any standard, right?
Just because the question of which modifications actually increase or decrease the viability of a given compound is not easily answered up front, this does not automatically mean that the entire process is bogus. Or, for that matter, particularly cheap for the entity which conducts the research (and which, predictably, wants to see some return on investment later). In turn, this of course means that if there was some way to conduct pharma research in a more focused manner, the profit seekers would be all over it. Trouble is, computational chemistry (especially in organics) has been a long way in coming, so there is no real alternative to tinkering. Yet.
...is it considered even remotely acceptable that downloading an (expletive deleted) font package puts you at risk of malware installation? Which parallel universe does one have to be in to not immediately send the person in charge of security for this product to the Uranium mines?
Oh, wait, this is Windows we are talking about. All good, move on, nothing new to see here.
Not if the guys have electronics. In that case they will have been watching our TV programs for the past few decades, and a few of their nerds might be quite fluent in English. And guess who they would send to tap on that lens?
Amen to all you write, dude. Another tenured prof here. "Disgusting" is the only word apt to describe the mentality of those who set up the current academic system.
Shhh, don't say things like that. Their small brains might over-heat and explode. And who will then clean up the mess?
Look up how high the orbit of the GPS satellite constellation is. These things are too far up to do much useful reconnaissance from there. So the motivation to put a lot of sensors on them is not that high.
I'll remain on the fence about this one. If it was that easy to get rid of Borreliosis - don't you think that someone, somewhere, would have tried doing this, along the lines of the recipe you suggest?
And if they haven't - maybe, just maybe, this is not quite as easy as you make it sound? Say, because an IV injection of specially cultivated phages might not actually get to later stage Borreliosis any better than current antibiotics, because the problem with such a scenario is more in the realm of getting whatever treatment one fancies to these damn micro-organisms, once they have migrated into the CNS? What with the blood-brain barrier preventing most treatments from really taking hold?
You might have studied micro-biology, but apparently not medicine. There are cases where you do want to take antibiotics in scenarios short of amputation or death: such as those where you are trying to ward off an infection becoming chronic. Borreliosis is a good example of this: if you trample on this early enough with antibiotics, you can actually get rid of it. But once it has spread far enough in your body, even antibiotics become ineffective against it, and you are in for one hell of a ride with the chronic form of the disease.