Actually, I've seen a lot of California... and it's beautiful. Yosemite is my favorite national park. The sequoia's are amazing... the wine country stunning... and SF is one of my favorite cities... but the place is run by kooks... not just SF, but LA too and the State government as well.
I'm not complaining about the emmission control hardware... I'm complaining that California decides what the level of control is, and not the US in general. For instance, suppose CT wanted STRICTER emmission control devices? Too bad. Car companies are far more likely to decide simply to not sell cars in CT than CA. So CA gets to decide what level is correct, and all the other states have to go along for the ride.
My car has "California" emissions and I live in Connecticut. This is just one example of how California mandates things for the rest of the country. They will set some standard for voting machines, and since the state is too big for voting machine companies to write off, it will end up becoming the defacto standard. I don't live in California for a reason (not the least of which their four seasons are Wildfire, Mudslide, Earthquake, and Smog). In California, they make you label everything, including restaurants, informing you that your food might cause cancer. Then they all go outside and breathe air they can see.
I have color blindness, but I can still see colors. Most color blind people can see colors, they simply have trouble distinguishing one color from the other, particularly when they are close... For instance, I have no trouble telling the difference between a red light and a green light, and I have no trouble distinguishing the colors on a weather map. But ask me to identify a particular color as pink or purple, and I can see the color as either or both at the same time. That's why I can't see the damn number on the test page! Most color blind people do not see in Monochrome, as it would seem that most of the non-color-blind world tends to believe. For more info, check out the wikipedia entry...
Amyway, it turns out that they were using iTunes at her school; she thought iTunes and Kazaa were the same! Most normal people (not you or me, obviously) have no clue about any of this shit.
Interesting... she was using iTunes at school and didn't know there was a difference? Does she ever look at her credit card statement? When was the last time Kazaa showed up on her bill?
If you go to IMDB.com and look at the All Time USA Box Office stats, you'll see lots of Star Wars movies at the top... I started from the top and counted down - Movies like Star Wars, ET, etc. are the big special effects movies that are talked about in the article. "Thinking Man" Sci Fi arguably starts after the first 13 or so shoot'em ups with Back To the Future.(A weak argument, IMHO) Terminator 2 follows that, and although I would personally look at the Terminator series as a thinking mans movie, there is no dismissing the fact that it is also a big sfx shoot'em up (Even though Arnold doesn't kill anyone in that particular movie). 3 more big budget shoot'em ups later, you land on the Planet of the Apes remake - BZZZT - sorry just doesn't qualify... 6 more shoot'em ups later, the list ends. Now I get that the list isn't indexed for inflation, but the Sound of Music is on that list, so is the Godfather, and even the Rocky Horror Picture show, all before Star Wars...At the end of the day, "thinking man's" sci fi doesn't sell. We, as a people, only have ourselves to blame for that.
Microsoft goes from a 30-40% share of the market to 60-75% share, and the EU concludes that this is completely due to its "unfair" practices? And yet, Europeans continue to purchase more and more MS products... This just harkens back to the ruling the EU made that MS had to remove Internet Explorer because it was anti-competitive to give away software... boggles the mind. Let the marketplace decide... MS gets lazy with IE, and the next thing you know the hottest browser on the market is Firefox. Why can't Sun do the same thing with servers on its own without government interference???
Administrative law is the most fleeting of all... it is ill-written, and often times unenforceable. It can be challenged in numerous ways, although it takes more time and resources, as you have to exhaust your administrative remedies before you can file in a "normal" court.
As for the executive taking over, I think there was an argument to be made when the Legislative and Executive branches were controlled by one party, but that era is done for now.
I think this issue is emblematic not of the Executive taking over, but the fact that the Judicial branch is finally being stood up to. It is about time. I would say they were on the verge of taking over more than the Executive.
The conflict stems from the fact that the Judicial branch doesn't have the ability to enforce the judgement - they have to rely on the Executive for that... for instance, "just throw them in jail" doesn't necessarily work, since the jail and the jailors are part of the Executive branch. If the Executive branch chooses not to enforce the law, they can be held in contempt - the President can be impeached, etc. But at the end of the day, even though both the Legislative and Judicial branches have the power to impose a sentence (ex. Contempt), they are powerless to enforce.
The reason that this is usually not an issue is that the Executive branch knows that flouting the rulings of the Judicial branch will get them in hot water - the Legislative can impeach, try, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over the impeachment trial. On a smaller scale, the Legislative can hamper the Executive by cutting off funding for his branch, etc.
The checks and balances usually work out in the end. So far, no one branch of the government has been able to completely take over the others - and its worked for over 200 years.
Who would have thought that we would build a better mosquito rather than continuing to try and control/eradicate them. I am concerned about unintended consequences, but this is fundamentally a new approach to modifying our environment... rather than trying to kill them off and ending up hurting food chains, we just "tweak" them to keep millions of people from dying from them...
From the website...
The dual energy system
"The Series 34 CATs engines can be equipped with and run on dual energies - fossil fuels and compressed air - and incorporate a reheating mechanism (a continuous combustion system, easily controlled to minimize pollution) between the storage tank and the engine.
This mechanism allows the engine to run exclusively on fossil fuel which permits compatible autonomy on the road.
While the car is running on fossil fuel, the compressor refills the compressed air tanks. The control system maintains a zero-pollution emission in the city at speeds up to 60 km/h."
Huh?
As a senior project, I was on a team that built something like this. We were told we had to design the better pogo stick. The first question was whether or not it had to have one foot... we took the liberal notion that a pogo stick didn't need to have one foot, since this clearly removed a lot of man's built in skill in maneuvering...
We modeled our design on the old Wile E. Coyote cartoons - the springs on the feet thing... We quickly found out that the real problem wasn't putting springs on your feet, but being able to stand on them and then bounce. You notice from the pictures the rigs up the legs... without a rigid support, you're just asking for a broken ankle
So in our design iterations, we solved two issues. First, we needed a way to make sure the springs didn't go off in side to side motion. We built an elaborate "outrigger" for that which assured that the things could only compress front to back, not side to side. Second, we solved the broken ankle thing by mounting ski boots to them.
These gas powered things look a lot like what we build, but we had a much bigger footprint. Also, we were not allowed to add power devices, so we couldn't do the whole gas powered thing anyway.
We did outperform one foot designs handily. We also outperformed the two footed designs as well and ended up winning the overall competition. The only thing we didn't win was weight... I think they weighed in at a combined 40 pounds! (They made us weigh the ski boots too, even though we argued they were just "footwear").
At the end of the day, I think the idea of these "kanga-shoes" as we called our device are basically trouble. Although devices such as the Segway give me pause, I'd say that devices such as these end up being about as hard to use as it is to dribble a football.
I agree with your analysis that Comp. Sci. has divided from Software Development. I was not a CS major in school - I was a Mech. Engineer. But I got into CAD systems design, and ended up in the software game. So now, I'm a "Senior Software Engineer" but I have no formal training in CS other than the fact that I had to code Fortran for 4 years in college. We learned bubble sorts, and all that jazz, but I have no idea how a compiler works other than it takes what I write in VB.net and turns it into something the computer can execute.
However, the point of the article is that BOTH CS and Software Development is dead. Just buy a package and your troubles will be over.
Frankly, I wish I could have just 1/10th of what the companies I've worked for have spent on packaged solutions. For that price, I could have built, by myself, a custom package that would do EXACTLY what they want, and I would have become rich in the process.
Instead, I get paid a lot of money to cobble these disparate systems together, make AS400 green screen apps talk to fat client software, I write all the stuff that pulls them together, and if we are lucky, and I'm good, it all works... mostly.
So why do companies do that? Because it simply MUST be cheaper, of course!/laughing maniacally
A friend of mine hacked a Trash80 Model 4 and turned it into a webserver. Yeah, he had to write the webserver himself. Still runs, and not a single malicious break in, I might add.
Why can't we just let the market take care of it? CFL's cost more, but their price has steadily been declining. Incandescents are cheaper right now, but thinking people replace them with CFL's (where appropriate). I buy CFL's in an 8 pack at Sams Club. When an incandescent burns out, I replace it with a CFL. Sure, some people don't do that, but eventually people will figure out the cost savings, savings in time of replacing bulbs (particularly hard to reach bulbs) and this will force the demise of non-CFL bulbs.
Certain places will always be known for certain things... I work in Hartford, CT - Insurance Capital of the World... well maybe not so much anymore, but having a Hartford presence just makes sense - there is a large pool of insurance specialists - in IT, Finance, Underwriting, Accounting, Actuary... Same goes for Silicon Valley, and the loop around the Boston suburbs... software blood will always run thick in those places.
I worked on the Y2K bug, and I think that 20 years from now, one of two things will happen. First, the one that everyone assumes will happen, is that it will be remembered as a big non-event. There will be some who point out that without the work that went into it, it would have been a huge crash. But you can't prove it now.
The second option: I like to think that one day, historians will look back on it as the most successful software project in history. Think about it - a software project that was enormous and had an immovable date. And it came in on time and succeeeded beyond anyone's expectations. I hope that the media will wax nostalgic on it, cover it in the light of a heroic effort that was a brilliant success. Maybe we weren't the "greatest generation" but I hope that one day, the people who made Y2K a non-event will get the lavish credit they deserve.
OK, I can't believe I'm going to defend Branson here but...
The $25 Million is for the solution, not the implementation. So if I can figure out how to viably remove lots of CO2 from the atmosphere, I don't actually have to DO it, I just have to show how it can be done.
//Tired of eco-celebrities telling us what WE need to do, but still riding in limos and flying either first class or in private jets
I'm sorry that I didn't get to read your whole post. The guy in the cube next to me let out his own version of the "Big Rip" and so I just needed to go get some air...
Why do legislators believe that they HAVE to DO something? Here's the answer: Our system is built such that everything is permitted EXCEPT that which is prohibited. Essentially, the job of lawmakers is to prohibit things. So everytime they pass a law in the US, they are banning something, or requiring someone to stop doing something, or, if they can't get away with that, they TAX it instead.
At some point, so many things will be banned that it will make sense to change our constitution to prohibit EVERYTHING except that which is permitted. Then, when our lawmakers make laws, it will be to permit things instead.
Don't get me wrong, I don't want it to come to that - I'd rather see the current system, with lawmakers REPEALING laws that no longer make sense. But that won't happen. See, lawmakers are always smarter than us, more insightful, have the bigger picture... in short, they are better than us. At least that is the way they see it.
So they ban the light bulb because I'm apparently not smart enough to see that putting in a CFL will save me money, result in me changing the bulb less often, and generally takes one more nuisance - that of changing a light bulb - off my plate of things to do.
I'm glad the government is there to think for me. Otherwise my wife would have to spend even MORE time thinking for the both of us!
Slashdot Mirror
Actually, I've seen a lot of California... and it's beautiful. Yosemite is my favorite national park. The sequoia's are amazing... the wine country stunning... and SF is one of my favorite cities... but the place is run by kooks... not just SF, but LA too and the State government as well.
I'm not complaining about the emmission control hardware... I'm complaining that California decides what the level of control is, and not the US in general. For instance, suppose CT wanted STRICTER emmission control devices? Too bad. Car companies are far more likely to decide simply to not sell cars in CT than CA. So CA gets to decide what level is correct, and all the other states have to go along for the ride.
My car has "California" emissions and I live in Connecticut. This is just one example of how California mandates things for the rest of the country. They will set some standard for voting machines, and since the state is too big for voting machine companies to write off, it will end up becoming the defacto standard. I don't live in California for a reason (not the least of which their four seasons are Wildfire, Mudslide, Earthquake, and Smog). In California, they make you label everything, including restaurants, informing you that your food might cause cancer. Then they all go outside and breathe air they can see.
I have color blindness, but I can still see colors. Most color blind people can see colors, they simply have trouble distinguishing one color from the other, particularly when they are close... For instance, I have no trouble telling the difference between a red light and a green light, and I have no trouble distinguishing the colors on a weather map. But ask me to identify a particular color as pink or purple, and I can see the color as either or both at the same time. That's why I can't see the damn number on the test page! Most color blind people do not see in Monochrome, as it would seem that most of the non-color-blind world tends to believe. For more info, check out the wikipedia entry...
Interesting... she was using iTunes at school and didn't know there was a difference? Does she ever look at her credit card statement? When was the last time Kazaa showed up on her bill?
If you go to IMDB.com and look at the All Time USA Box Office stats, you'll see lots of Star Wars movies at the top... I started from the top and counted down - Movies like Star Wars, ET, etc. are the big special effects movies that are talked about in the article. "Thinking Man" Sci Fi arguably starts after the first 13 or so shoot'em ups with Back To the Future.(A weak argument, IMHO) Terminator 2 follows that, and although I would personally look at the Terminator series as a thinking mans movie, there is no dismissing the fact that it is also a big sfx shoot'em up (Even though Arnold doesn't kill anyone in that particular movie). 3 more big budget shoot'em ups later, you land on the Planet of the Apes remake - BZZZT - sorry just doesn't qualify... 6 more shoot'em ups later, the list ends. Now I get that the list isn't indexed for inflation, but the Sound of Music is on that list, so is the Godfather, and even the Rocky Horror Picture show, all before Star Wars...At the end of the day, "thinking man's" sci fi doesn't sell. We, as a people, only have ourselves to blame for that.
Microsoft goes from a 30-40% share of the market to 60-75% share, and the EU concludes that this is completely due to its "unfair" practices? And yet, Europeans continue to purchase more and more MS products... This just harkens back to the ruling the EU made that MS had to remove Internet Explorer because it was anti-competitive to give away software... boggles the mind. Let the marketplace decide... MS gets lazy with IE, and the next thing you know the hottest browser on the market is Firefox. Why can't Sun do the same thing with servers on its own without government interference???
Administrative law is the most fleeting of all... it is ill-written, and often times unenforceable. It can be challenged in numerous ways, although it takes more time and resources, as you have to exhaust your administrative remedies before you can file in a "normal" court.
As for the executive taking over, I think there was an argument to be made when the Legislative and Executive branches were controlled by one party, but that era is done for now.
I think this issue is emblematic not of the Executive taking over, but the fact that the Judicial branch is finally being stood up to. It is about time. I would say they were on the verge of taking over more than the Executive.
The conflict stems from the fact that the Judicial branch doesn't have the ability to enforce the judgement - they have to rely on the Executive for that... for instance, "just throw them in jail" doesn't necessarily work, since the jail and the jailors are part of the Executive branch. If the Executive branch chooses not to enforce the law, they can be held in contempt - the President can be impeached, etc. But at the end of the day, even though both the Legislative and Judicial branches have the power to impose a sentence (ex. Contempt), they are powerless to enforce.
The reason that this is usually not an issue is that the Executive branch knows that flouting the rulings of the Judicial branch will get them in hot water - the Legislative can impeach, try, and the Chief Justice of the Supreme Court presides over the impeachment trial. On a smaller scale, the Legislative can hamper the Executive by cutting off funding for his branch, etc.
The checks and balances usually work out in the end. So far, no one branch of the government has been able to completely take over the others - and its worked for over 200 years.
Who would have thought that we would build a better mosquito rather than continuing to try and control/eradicate them. I am concerned about unintended consequences, but this is fundamentally a new approach to modifying our environment... rather than trying to kill them off and ending up hurting food chains, we just "tweak" them to keep millions of people from dying from them...
I think it is a good thing.
//now, let the killer bee comparison commence
From the website... The dual energy system "The Series 34 CATs engines can be equipped with and run on dual energies - fossil fuels and compressed air - and incorporate a reheating mechanism (a continuous combustion system, easily controlled to minimize pollution) between the storage tank and the engine. This mechanism allows the engine to run exclusively on fossil fuel which permits compatible autonomy on the road. While the car is running on fossil fuel, the compressor refills the compressed air tanks. The control system maintains a zero-pollution emission in the city at speeds up to 60 km/h." Huh?
As a senior project, I was on a team that built something like this. We were told we had to design the better pogo stick. The first question was whether or not it had to have one foot... we took the liberal notion that a pogo stick didn't need to have one foot, since this clearly removed a lot of man's built in skill in maneuvering...
We modeled our design on the old Wile E. Coyote cartoons - the springs on the feet thing... We quickly found out that the real problem wasn't putting springs on your feet, but being able to stand on them and then bounce. You notice from the pictures the rigs up the legs... without a rigid support, you're just asking for a broken ankle
So in our design iterations, we solved two issues. First, we needed a way to make sure the springs didn't go off in side to side motion. We built an elaborate "outrigger" for that which assured that the things could only compress front to back, not side to side. Second, we solved the broken ankle thing by mounting ski boots to them.
These gas powered things look a lot like what we build, but we had a much bigger footprint. Also, we were not allowed to add power devices, so we couldn't do the whole gas powered thing anyway.
We did outperform one foot designs handily. We also outperformed the two footed designs as well and ended up winning the overall competition. The only thing we didn't win was weight... I think they weighed in at a combined 40 pounds! (They made us weigh the ski boots too, even though we argued they were just "footwear").
At the end of the day, I think the idea of these "kanga-shoes" as we called our device are basically trouble. Although devices such as the Segway give me pause, I'd say that devices such as these end up being about as hard to use as it is to dribble a football.
Even though I prefer Windows to Linux, it is not much of an endorsement when the uber-efficient State government endorses your products...
I agree with your analysis that Comp. Sci. has divided from Software Development. I was not a CS major in school - I was a Mech. Engineer. But I got into CAD systems design, and ended up in the software game. So now, I'm a "Senior Software Engineer" but I have no formal training in CS other than the fact that I had to code Fortran for 4 years in college. We learned bubble sorts, and all that jazz, but I have no idea how a compiler works other than it takes what I write in VB.net and turns it into something the computer can execute. However, the point of the article is that BOTH CS and Software Development is dead. Just buy a package and your troubles will be over. Frankly, I wish I could have just 1/10th of what the companies I've worked for have spent on packaged solutions. For that price, I could have built, by myself, a custom package that would do EXACTLY what they want, and I would have become rich in the process. Instead, I get paid a lot of money to cobble these disparate systems together, make AS400 green screen apps talk to fat client software, I write all the stuff that pulls them together, and if we are lucky, and I'm good, it all works... mostly. So why do companies do that? Because it simply MUST be cheaper, of course! /laughing maniacally
A friend of mine hacked a Trash80 Model 4 and turned it into a webserver. Yeah, he had to write the webserver himself. Still runs, and not a single malicious break in, I might add.
Why can't we just let the market take care of it? CFL's cost more, but their price has steadily been declining. Incandescents are cheaper right now, but thinking people replace them with CFL's (where appropriate). I buy CFL's in an 8 pack at Sams Club. When an incandescent burns out, I replace it with a CFL. Sure, some people don't do that, but eventually people will figure out the cost savings, savings in time of replacing bulbs (particularly hard to reach bulbs) and this will force the demise of non-CFL bulbs.
Taxes and prohibitions are simply not necessary.
Certain places will always be known for certain things... I work in Hartford, CT - Insurance Capital of the World... well maybe not so much anymore, but having a Hartford presence just makes sense - there is a large pool of insurance specialists - in IT, Finance, Underwriting, Accounting, Actuary... Same goes for Silicon Valley, and the loop around the Boston suburbs... software blood will always run thick in those places.
I worked on the Y2K bug, and I think that 20 years from now, one of two things will happen. First, the one that everyone assumes will happen, is that it will be remembered as a big non-event. There will be some who point out that without the work that went into it, it would have been a huge crash. But you can't prove it now. The second option: I like to think that one day, historians will look back on it as the most successful software project in history. Think about it - a software project that was enormous and had an immovable date. And it came in on time and succeeeded beyond anyone's expectations. I hope that the media will wax nostalgic on it, cover it in the light of a heroic effort that was a brilliant success. Maybe we weren't the "greatest generation" but I hope that one day, the people who made Y2K a non-event will get the lavish credit they deserve.
OK, I can't believe I'm going to defend Branson here but...
The $25 Million is for the solution, not the implementation. So if I can figure out how to viably remove lots of CO2 from the atmosphere, I don't actually have to DO it, I just have to show how it can be done.
//Tired of eco-celebrities telling us what WE need to do, but still riding in limos and flying either first class or in private jets
I'm sorry that I didn't get to read your whole post. The guy in the cube next to me let out his own version of the "Big Rip" and so I just needed to go get some air...
Why do legislators believe that they HAVE to DO something? Here's the answer: Our system is built such that everything is permitted EXCEPT that which is prohibited. Essentially, the job of lawmakers is to prohibit things. So everytime they pass a law in the US, they are banning something, or requiring someone to stop doing something, or, if they can't get away with that, they TAX it instead. At some point, so many things will be banned that it will make sense to change our constitution to prohibit EVERYTHING except that which is permitted. Then, when our lawmakers make laws, it will be to permit things instead. Don't get me wrong, I don't want it to come to that - I'd rather see the current system, with lawmakers REPEALING laws that no longer make sense. But that won't happen. See, lawmakers are always smarter than us, more insightful, have the bigger picture... in short, they are better than us. At least that is the way they see it. So they ban the light bulb because I'm apparently not smart enough to see that putting in a CFL will save me money, result in me changing the bulb less often, and generally takes one more nuisance - that of changing a light bulb - off my plate of things to do. I'm glad the government is there to think for me. Otherwise my wife would have to spend even MORE time thinking for the both of us!