The reason that Unix SAs don't like to reboot is deep seated in the history of Unix running decades ago on hardware for which a reboot cycle meant interrupting potentially dozens of people all sharing the same machine for a sequence that might take 10 to 20 minutes if nothing went wrong. Rebooting was correctly viewed as something to avoid whenever possible.
Windows was not engineered for long uptimes until NT 4.0 and is a johnny-come-lately OS in comparison. Windows didn't run on significant (read: capable of simultaneously supporting more than one user in a non-trivial way) hardware until, what, 1994 or 1995? Meanwhile Unix and its intellectual antecedents had been supporting multi-dozen-user installations for nearly three decades.
When there's only one user, rebooting isn't nearly as big a deal as when there are 20, 30 or more. That dichotomy alone drove the reliability of Unix, and the the lax attitude of Windows.
Personally, even though rebooting my desktop Linux computer with it's fast processor, SSD and RAID disks, takes well under a minute, I still don't like doing it. There's something wrong: It shouldn't need to be done. If I'm rebooting for a non-hardware related issue, it's because I'm being sloppy.
However, at its heart, this is simply an exercise in in data storage, lookup, and statistical probabilities in determining a likely answer.
What, please, is AI if not exactly that?
This system analyses the questions in the game, expressed in highly idiosyncratic human language. How is that done? Add "modeling" to your list above, and that's it. Data storage, lookup, and statstical probabilities. Turns out that's highly likely the way *we* understand human language, too, with an emphasis on the last part.
The system then searches its knowledge base. How is that done? As described above. How do we, as humans do it? We don't fully understand, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it's an exercise in data storage, lookup, and statistical probabilities in determining a likely answer. There's plenty of research in the neuroscience literature (I am a neuroscientist and an alumnus of MIT LCS/AI) about evidence gathering and decision making, and it would appear that we, or at least animals, are highly predictable in that respect as if we are using a fixed, very simple algorithm.
So, if AI isn't doing what humans and other animals do, and therefore what this program Watson is doing, then please enlighten us: What is AI?
Sales tax is a regressive tax, meaning poor people pay more than rich people.
Um, WTF?
How could sales tax be regressive? I suppose it could be regressive if you claimed somehow that the total out-of-pocket tax paid by an individual poor person was higher than an individual rich person. For that to be true, the poor person would have to be buying more stuff than the rich person. What with the rich person having more money and all, that seems, um, backwards. Or maybe you're actually claiming that the total out-of-pocket sales tax when normalized by income is a higher percentage for poor people than for rich people. By that twisted logic even a dead-straight fixed tax of $10 per head per year is regressive. Or maybe you're normalizing by the local cost of living which is lower in poor neighborhoods, and thus the percentage paid in sales tax is higher. But, hey, go ahead and normalize by whatever figure makes you feel good.
Fixed percentage sales tax is the very definition of a flat tax. Anyone who claims it's regressive is trying to pull something.
No, because it does not mutate a value, but only changes the control flow.
I wish I had more time to explain in detail, but that isn't going to happen today, unfortunately. Side-effect in this context is a highly specific term that means, essentially, to change the value of a variable through assignment.
Or an infected CD-ROM or DVD, etc. Or the infected ISO you downloaded and mounted as a drive. Or the network drive that was just mounted. Or your MP3 player mounted in UMS mode. Or an infected external drive. Or a CF or SD/SDHC card mounted through a USB adapter. Or...
You get the picture. Auto-Run was a bad idea. I'm glad they disabled it.
The solution seems pretty simple. If you still wish to include loads upon loads of third-party software, stick it all on a thumb drive and include it with every new machine. Problem solved.
This is about as naive a solution as I've seen suggested on Slashdot in a long time. How did this story even get accepted? The suggested solution is to reduce the effectiveness of the advertising, thus reducing the amount of money the PC manufacturers can charge to the advertisers, and increase the cost of the delivered product by requiring an additional bit of hardware to be included that would also require a coordinated documentation for installation instructions and training for customer service.
Right. That there is a top quality suggestion by someone who is savvy and experienced in the ways of the world.
The aging spacecraft have been flying for close to 30 years, and NASA is retiring them for good reason.
What would that good reason be? Just because they share the same name and basic design as something that started flying 30 years ago? The design *has* evolved, you realize, right? There *have* been updates.
The Russians are still flying Soyuz. It is a design that's closing in on 50 years old. Should they stop flying it just because it's an old design, despite the fact that it is the most reliable manned space system?
The Boeing 747 was designed in the 1960 and first flew in 1970. A standard 747 airframe is expected to do about 20,000 takeoff-landing cycles and last 25-30 years of daily service. Many of the currently flying airframes were built in the 1980s. Should we junk the entire fleet, too?
The Mars Rovers have lasted well, well beyond their mission lifetimes (about twenty times longer, in fact). Should they have been shut down after 90 Martian days just because they would have been old at that point?
Just because something isn't new and shiny does not automatically mean that it is no longer fit for its designed purpose. It also does not automatically mean that nothing has been done to improve the design.
That said, there are some good reasons that the Shuttle program needs to be shut down now, primary among them being that the program has been in process of retirement for a long time and it would not be possible to reverse that process to continue the program without excessive expenditure. My wholly uneducated speculation is that the proposed $1.5B per year is a gross underestimate because I have yet to see any large project that isn't off by an order of magnitude in the initial numbers. But suggesting by innuendo that the fleet needs to be retired just because it is old is broaching on sophomoric.
So 5,000 pages of paper. That's one case (actually 1/2 a case if you assume duplex printing). Buying high-quality paper, that's going to be $50 or less ($25 for half a case).
An entry-level business-grade B&W laser printer costs maybe $500, will handle 100,000 pages in its lifetime, and takes toner cartridges that print between 7500 and 15000 pages each at about $200 each retail. Being a little excessive and buying a new printer per season, a case of paper per game, and a new toner cart every other game, you get 500 (cost of one printer) + 1 (cases of paper per game) * 16 (games) * 50 (cost of one ream) + 0.5 (carts per game) * 16 (games) * 200 (cost of one toner cart) = $2900, or an amortized total cost of $0.36 per page. And that's being very generous on retail costs and consumables. I routinely print conference proceedings (18k total pages) for an amortized total cost for closer to $0.05 per page by shopping around even just a little. If they're printing in color, I'd expect the amortized total cost to be between 2 and 3 times higher, so, with a little work, perhaps $0.15 per page, but still well under the generous estimate of $2900.
Each iPad costs, what $500? And they need what, one per player, coach, assistant coach, owner, etc.? The so-called savings are a slight-of-hand distraction. They just want iPads.
Even if you were to say that the saved paper, not money, was really the issue, and that saving 16 cases of paper (probably 8, since if they're concerned, they'd already be printing duplex) was important, I'd point to the 10-or-so tons of recycled material per game that envionmentally conscious teams like the Ravens are capable of (http://www.mdstad.com/content/view/96/42/) that dwarf one (1/2) case of paper.
Again, they just want iPads.
As the linked article suggests, there are many things you could do with iPads that you can't do with a traditional printed playbook, like review plays, run simulations, etc., but the teams should be upfront with that and not toss the public a propaganda bone like paper savings that can be shown to be irrelevant in the bigger picture.
If it continues to feel generic, it's going to die.
And yet, here we are all these years later and USAToday is still a viable paper. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article, it's neck-and-neck with the Wall Street Journal for widest distribution.
When USAToday first came out, it was derided as a McPaper. It was called generic. The graphics were panned as simplistic. The very short articles were criticized for being like sound bites. Its quick demise was widely predicted. And, yet...
I expected there to be less swinging and swaying well above the clouds. Commercial jets, at a mere 10 km high (very roughly) are able to often find very still air. Three times higher isn't very very very still? Do we have any experts here?
Pt/Ir has nicer properties, like hardness, formability, fine machineability and lack of reactivity.
Silver would oxidize very quickly. Gold would accumulate surface corrosion too, albeit much more slowly. Both would be quite soft compared to Pt/Ir, and would therefore wear more quickly during cleaning.
You are assuming that the physical object is unchanging. It, however, gets cleaned periodically. That has been a long-troubling aspect of the standard that has received attention before, as cleaning, no matter how careful, undoubtedly removes more than just contamination.
That does not explain why Bush's version for the Columbia disaster was so weak in comparison. Read here. It's a horrible speech that attempts to make political hay out of the loss of the Columbia. There is no sense of humanity. No sense of honor, no inspiration. Instead of being reassuring, it reads (and I remember it sounding) like a bully delivering a tough-luck Charlie message. Instead of closing with lines from poetry, he chose words to resonate with his conservative religious base: "may God continue to bless America." What a pitiful echo of Reagan's speech.
If these speeches were prepared in advance, and thus there was plenty of time to work on this one, then Bush's writers were even worse than we know them to have been.
It turns out that President Ronald Reagan was due to deliver the State of the Union Address on that day, 25 years ago. The event was cancelled, and, instead, he gave this very moving speech, perhaps the best of his presidency. In case anyone doesn't recognize the two lines he quotes at the end, they are from a poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., called "High Flight".
Ladies and Gentlemen, I'd planned to speak to you tonight to report on the state of the Union, but the events of earlier today have led me to change those plans. Today is a day for mourning and remembering. Nancy and I are pained to the core by the tragedy of the shuttle Challenger. We know we share this pain with all of the people of our country. This is truly a national loss.
Nineteen years ago, almost to the day, we lost three astronauts in a terrible accident on the ground. But, we've never lost an astronaut in flight; we've never had a tragedy like this. And perhaps we've forgotten the courage it took for the crew of the shuttle; but they, the Challenger Seven, were aware of the dangers, but overcame them and did their jobs brilliantly. We mourn seven heroes: Michael Smith, Dick Scobee, Judith Resnik, Ronald McNair, Ellison Onizuka, Gregory Jarvis, and Christa McAuliffe. We mourn their loss as a nation together.
For the families of the seven, we cannot bear, as you do, the full impact of this tragedy. But we feel the loss, and we're thinking about you so very much. Your loved ones were daring and brave, and they had that special grace, that special spirit that says, 'Give me a challenge and I'll meet it with joy.' They had a hunger to explore the universe and discover its truths. They wished to serve, and they did. They served all of us.
We've grown used to wonders in this century. It's hard to dazzle us. But for twenty-five years the United States space program has been doing just that. We've grown used to the idea of space, and perhaps we forget that we've only just begun. We're still pioneers. They, the members of the Challenger crew, were pioneers.
And I want to say something to the schoolchildren of America who were watching the live coverage of the shuttle's takeoff. I know it is hard to understand, but sometimes painful things like this happen. It's all part of the process of exploration and discovery. It's all part of taking a chance and expanding man's horizons. The future doesn't belong to the fainthearted; it belongs to the brave. The Challenger crew was pulling us into the future, and we'll continue to follow them.
I've always had great faith in and respect for our space program, and what happened today does nothing to diminish it. We don't hide our space program. We don't keep secrets and cover things up. We do it all up front and in public. That's the way freedom is, and we wouldn't change it for a minute. We'll continue our quest in space. There will be more shuttle flights and more shuttle crews and, yes, more volunteers, more civilians, more teachers in space. Nothing ends here; our hopes and our journeys continue. I want to add that I wish I could talk to every man and woman who works for NASA or who worked on this mission and tell them: "Your dedication and professionalism have moved and impressed us for decades. And we know of your anguish. We share it."
There's a coincidence today. On this day 390 years ago, the great explorer Sir Francis Drake died aboard ship off the coast of Panama. In his lifetime the great frontiers were the oceans, and a historian later said, 'He lived by the sea, died on it, and was buried in it.' Well, today we can say of the Challenger crew: Their dedication was, like Drake's, complete.
The crew of the space shuttle Challenger honoured us by the manner in which they lived their lives. We will never forget them, nor the last time we saw them, this morning, as they prepared for the journey and waved goodbye and 'slipped the surly bonds of earth' to 'touch the face of God.'
Your browser has space to have toolbars. The left floater masks half of the screen on a blackberry, overlaying the content I am trying to read. So, until this is fixed my productivity in meetings will go up.
Good point about normal-sized screens, and the Blackberry version sounds like a major oversight. On my normal-sized screen, my browser only has the toolbars that I think are absolutely necessary (in other words, exactly zero third-party toolbars). Slashdot has decided that their toolbar is a must-have to use the site. I disagree and would like to disable it.
I agree. It's like another toolbar on my browser, effectively reducing the available screen area. Same for the excessive (and visually distracting) excessive whitespace. Now if I ever managed to USE the icons / links at the top of the Slashdot page (and now on the Slashdot toolbar) more than once every 3 months, it might be good to have them handy. But that really almost never happens, so it's wasted area.
It's a symptom of developers who have big monitors: they forget that many people don't have a huge amount of screen real estate, and actually like to look at content.
... that balancing such an object requires the use of several fancy algorithms:
This is proof that, just exactly as I asserted, all you need is relatively simple feedback as long as it's fast enough.
Yep, that was me. I guess I should go back to my MIT professors and let them all know that they're full of hooey. I've sure been shown up by Jane Q. Public!
Or, on the other hand, I could look at the video these fellows provided. Doing that, I might notice that the system is barely stable, very noisy, does not deal with perturbation very well, and accumulates error. I could then read the paper and see, under the section called "VI Control System" it explicitly states that they are using a PD system (proportional and derivative), as described in the system of two differential equations. Then I could read the sentence, "Our system normally balances an object for several minutes before losing it..." which would probably be because they don't have an I term to worry about accumulating error. Lack of an I term makes the system drift, and you can see in the video that it nearly hits the edge of the actuator workspace a few times. Striking the limit of motion would be a catastrophic change in actuator impedance and cause the pencil to be dropped. The fact that they had to include a D term means that there is more than just straight (linear) feedback. But, hey, I guess those MIT professors didn't actually know what they were talking about when they taught us 18.03 Differential Equations. Either that or Ms. Public can't read papers very well, and doesn't recognize a differential equation when she sees one.
Again, I'll state, Ms. Public, please stay away from designing any systems that are critical to support or protection of human life. You have now repeatedly demonstrated your incompetence to do so in a public forum.
There is a huge difference between a one-time purchase of a relatively low-cost item, a screwdriver in your example, and the establishment of a binding contract that carries substantial monthly fees and is good until cancelled.
Selling someone something they do not need by convincing them they do, even by something as seemingly innocent as not mentioning that they don't actually need it, with potentially large eventual cost, is called a predatory business practice. Using such means to take advantage of a vulnerable population, like the elderly or the handicapped, is illegal.
If you don't already know about this important part of daily life, then I would suggest some studying. If you didn't realize from reading the summary that AOL is predating on the elderly (there's that phrase, "many of whom are older people"), I would suggest working on your reading comprehension.
No, I'm being serious. This is an abusive business practice. In financial circles, similar actions to intentionally mislead clients, especially elderly ones, especially by omission of whether a particular service is needed or not, is a very big deal and results in loss of license to the sales agent and potentially punitive action by the SEC to the employing firm. The scales of money are different, but the sleazy flavor is the same.
So, back in the day, there were these things called "radios" and "televisions" and the airwaves were partitioned so that the frequencies used by avionics didn't overlap too much with the transmissions for these other devices.
But, the standard technology for radios and televisions include something called a superheterodyne circuit that can be, especially when malfunctioning, a radio transmitter. It was not unreasonable to expect that under some circumstances the radios and televisions that passengers carried on board might interfere with the avionics radios, especially since the TV frequencies were quite close to the avionics frequencies. Even a minor interference with plane avionics puts potentially hundreds of lives at risk.
There was a very important phrase I used in the previous paragraph: "especially when malfunctioning." While the FAA (by way of regulations imposed on the airlines) might be able to control the condition of the plane in general and the avionics in particular, they have absolutely no control over the devices brought on board by the passengers. Those devices could very well be (a) badly designed, (b) badly manufactured, or (c) malfunctioning so as to be transmitting on the wrong frequencies.
Thus, there was an entirely reasonable ban instituted on operating any transmitting devices on airplanes.
Today, the ban has been expanded to include things like cell phones (not so much expanded, but explicitly includes, since they are transmitting devices, all of which are disallowed). But, since so many more people have cell phones, the idea that they could interfere seems laughable to the public. After all, there are plenty of other electronic devices that are brought on board! The problem still remains that malfunctioning devices could easily interfere with airplane radio transmissions, which could have deadly consequences. The fact still remains that any device that is part of the airplane is under the control of the aircraft owner, thus can be certified as non-interfereing, and will be under the regular schedule of maintenance checks, whereas any device carried by a passenger is completely uncontrolled and should be assumed to be malfunctioning.
Remember that air travel is very, very safe. Part of this is because the FAA (in the US) has worked hard to eliminate the causes of exceedingly rare events. While your cell phone might not interfere while transmitting with one particular plane's avionics, guaranteeing that every single one of the (hundreds of?) millions of cell phones in the US will not interefere with every single plane's avionics is not possible, especially given the large and active secondary repair market for cell phones. Reducing the chances of interference by requiring all cell phones to be off is prudent (and if anyone thinks that this requirement results in 100% compliance, I have this very nice bridge to sell you; all of these regulations are concerned with reducing probability, not eliminating it).
Personally, I'm fine with all transmitters being turned off for the entire flight. I don't need to have my cell phone working for the relatively short periods I might be on a plane. They're essentially equivalent to the daily blackout periods in my communication when I'm asleep, and, often, flights are much shorter. Most people's lives will not be affected if they cannot be in contact for a planned, well-scheduled period of time. Same for the internet. I don't *need* to browse the web while I'm at 30,000 ft. I have plenty to do, work or personally, that I can keep myself busy for a few hours every now and then, especially when I know well in advance that the period of isolation is coming.
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The reason that Unix SAs don't like to reboot is deep seated in the history of Unix running decades ago on hardware for which a reboot cycle meant interrupting potentially dozens of people all sharing the same machine for a sequence that might take 10 to 20 minutes if nothing went wrong. Rebooting was correctly viewed as something to avoid whenever possible.
Windows was not engineered for long uptimes until NT 4.0 and is a johnny-come-lately OS in comparison. Windows didn't run on significant (read: capable of simultaneously supporting more than one user in a non-trivial way) hardware until, what, 1994 or 1995? Meanwhile Unix and its intellectual antecedents had been supporting multi-dozen-user installations for nearly three decades.
When there's only one user, rebooting isn't nearly as big a deal as when there are 20, 30 or more. That dichotomy alone drove the reliability of Unix, and the the lax attitude of Windows.
Personally, even though rebooting my desktop Linux computer with it's fast processor, SSD and RAID disks, takes well under a minute, I still don't like doing it. There's something wrong: It shouldn't need to be done. If I'm rebooting for a non-hardware related issue, it's because I'm being sloppy.
However, at its heart, this is simply an exercise in in data storage, lookup, and statistical probabilities in determining a likely answer.
What, please, is AI if not exactly that?
This system analyses the questions in the game, expressed in highly idiosyncratic human language. How is that done? Add "modeling" to your list above, and that's it. Data storage, lookup, and statstical probabilities. Turns out that's highly likely the way *we* understand human language, too, with an emphasis on the last part.
The system then searches its knowledge base. How is that done? As described above. How do we, as humans do it? We don't fully understand, but you can bet your bottom dollar that it's an exercise in data storage, lookup, and statistical probabilities in determining a likely answer. There's plenty of research in the neuroscience literature (I am a neuroscientist and an alumnus of MIT LCS/AI) about evidence gathering and decision making, and it would appear that we, or at least animals, are highly predictable in that respect as if we are using a fixed, very simple algorithm.
So, if AI isn't doing what humans and other animals do, and therefore what this program Watson is doing, then please enlighten us: What is AI?
Sales tax is a regressive tax, meaning poor people pay more than rich people.
Um, WTF?
How could sales tax be regressive? I suppose it could be regressive if you claimed somehow that the total out-of-pocket tax paid by an individual poor person was higher than an individual rich person. For that to be true, the poor person would have to be buying more stuff than the rich person. What with the rich person having more money and all, that seems, um, backwards. Or maybe you're actually claiming that the total out-of-pocket sales tax when normalized by income is a higher percentage for poor people than for rich people. By that twisted logic even a dead-straight fixed tax of $10 per head per year is regressive. Or maybe you're normalizing by the local cost of living which is lower in poor neighborhoods, and thus the percentage paid in sales tax is higher. But, hey, go ahead and normalize by whatever figure makes you feel good.
Fixed percentage sales tax is the very definition of a flat tax. Anyone who claims it's regressive is trying to pull something.
Isn't throwing an error a side-effect?
No, because it does not mutate a value, but only changes the control flow.
I wish I had more time to explain in detail, but that isn't going to happen today, unfortunately. Side-effect in this context is a highly specific term that means, essentially, to change the value of a variable through assignment.
Or an infected CD-ROM or DVD, etc. Or the infected ISO you downloaded and mounted as a drive. Or the network drive that was just mounted. Or your MP3 player mounted in UMS mode. Or an infected external drive. Or a CF or SD/SDHC card mounted through a USB adapter. Or ...
You get the picture. Auto-Run was a bad idea. I'm glad they disabled it.
The solution seems pretty simple. If you still wish to include loads upon loads of third-party software, stick it all on a thumb drive and include it with every new machine. Problem solved.
This is about as naive a solution as I've seen suggested on Slashdot in a long time. How did this story even get accepted? The suggested solution is to reduce the effectiveness of the advertising, thus reducing the amount of money the PC manufacturers can charge to the advertisers, and increase the cost of the delivered product by requiring an additional bit of hardware to be included that would also require a coordinated documentation for installation instructions and training for customer service.
Right. That there is a top quality suggestion by someone who is savvy and experienced in the ways of the world.
The aging spacecraft have been flying for close to 30 years, and NASA is retiring them for good reason.
What would that good reason be? Just because they share the same name and basic design as something that started flying 30 years ago? The design *has* evolved, you realize, right? There *have* been updates.
The Russians are still flying Soyuz. It is a design that's closing in on 50 years old. Should they stop flying it just because it's an old design, despite the fact that it is the most reliable manned space system?
The Boeing 747 was designed in the 1960 and first flew in 1970. A standard 747 airframe is expected to do about 20,000 takeoff-landing cycles and last 25-30 years of daily service. Many of the currently flying airframes were built in the 1980s. Should we junk the entire fleet, too?
The Mars Rovers have lasted well, well beyond their mission lifetimes (about twenty times longer, in fact). Should they have been shut down after 90 Martian days just because they would have been old at that point?
Just because something isn't new and shiny does not automatically mean that it is no longer fit for its designed purpose. It also does not automatically mean that nothing has been done to improve the design.
That said, there are some good reasons that the Shuttle program needs to be shut down now, primary among them being that the program has been in process of retirement for a long time and it would not be possible to reverse that process to continue the program without excessive expenditure. My wholly uneducated speculation is that the proposed $1.5B per year is a gross underestimate because I have yet to see any large project that isn't off by an order of magnitude in the initial numbers. But suggesting by innuendo that the fleet needs to be retired just because it is old is broaching on sophomoric.
So 5,000 pages of paper. That's one case (actually 1/2 a case if you assume duplex printing). Buying high-quality paper, that's going to be $50 or less ($25 for half a case).
An entry-level business-grade B&W laser printer costs maybe $500, will handle 100,000 pages in its lifetime, and takes toner cartridges that print between 7500 and 15000 pages each at about $200 each retail. Being a little excessive and buying a new printer per season, a case of paper per game, and a new toner cart every other game, you get 500 (cost of one printer) + 1 (cases of paper per game) * 16 (games) * 50 (cost of one ream) + 0.5 (carts per game) * 16 (games) * 200 (cost of one toner cart) = $2900, or an amortized total cost of $0.36 per page. And that's being very generous on retail costs and consumables. I routinely print conference proceedings (18k total pages) for an amortized total cost for closer to $0.05 per page by shopping around even just a little. If they're printing in color, I'd expect the amortized total cost to be between 2 and 3 times higher, so, with a little work, perhaps $0.15 per page, but still well under the generous estimate of $2900.
Each iPad costs, what $500? And they need what, one per player, coach, assistant coach, owner, etc.? The so-called savings are a slight-of-hand distraction. They just want iPads.
Even if you were to say that the saved paper, not money, was really the issue, and that saving 16 cases of paper (probably 8, since if they're concerned, they'd already be printing duplex) was important, I'd point to the 10-or-so tons of recycled material per game that envionmentally conscious teams like the Ravens are capable of (http://www.mdstad.com/content/view/96/42/) that dwarf one (1/2) case of paper.
Again, they just want iPads.
As the linked article suggests, there are many things you could do with iPads that you can't do with a traditional printed playbook, like review plays, run simulations, etc., but the teams should be upfront with that and not toss the public a propaganda bone like paper savings that can be shown to be irrelevant in the bigger picture.
If it continues to feel generic, it's going to die.
And yet, here we are all these years later and USAToday is still a viable paper. In fact, according to the Wikipedia article, it's neck-and-neck with the Wall Street Journal for widest distribution.
When USAToday first came out, it was derided as a McPaper. It was called generic. The graphics were panned as simplistic. The very short articles were criticized for being like sound bites. Its quick demise was widely predicted. And, yet ...
I know nothing about balloon design. How do you dampen perturbations?
With water.
Seriously? As in, you put a small amount of water in the balloon along with the helium?
Their balloon had no provisions to efficiently damp acquired oscillations.
I know nothing about balloon design. How do you dampen perturbations?
I also suspect the swinging parts of the video were more interesting. The camera would not show as much when it was not moving around.
I thought about that ... seems a shortcoming of the imaging mechanism they chose. More than one camera might have been useful.
I expected there to be less swinging and swaying well above the clouds. Commercial jets, at a mere 10 km high (very roughly) are able to often find very still air. Three times higher isn't very very very still? Do we have any experts here?
Pt/Ir has nicer properties, like hardness, formability, fine machineability and lack of reactivity.
Silver would oxidize very quickly. Gold would accumulate surface corrosion too, albeit much more slowly. Both would be quite soft compared to Pt/Ir, and would therefore wear more quickly during cleaning.
You are assuming that the physical object is unchanging. It, however, gets cleaned periodically. That has been a long-troubling aspect of the standard that has received attention before, as cleaning, no matter how careful, undoubtedly removes more than just contamination.
Hey -- look at that, the Slashdot folks listened to the users and removed the header-toolbar and made the page normal again!
Thanks Taco, et al!!
That does not explain why Bush's version for the Columbia disaster was so weak in comparison. Read here. It's a horrible speech that attempts to make political hay out of the loss of the Columbia. There is no sense of humanity. No sense of honor, no inspiration. Instead of being reassuring, it reads (and I remember it sounding) like a bully delivering a tough-luck Charlie message. Instead of closing with lines from poetry, he chose words to resonate with his conservative religious base: "may God continue to bless America." What a pitiful echo of Reagan's speech.
If these speeches were prepared in advance, and thus there was plenty of time to work on this one, then Bush's writers were even worse than we know them to have been.
It turns out that President Ronald Reagan was due to deliver the State of the Union Address on that day, 25 years ago. The event was cancelled, and, instead, he gave this very moving speech, perhaps the best of his presidency. In case anyone doesn't recognize the two lines he quotes at the end, they are from a poem by John Gillespie Magee, Jr., called "High Flight".
Your browser has space to have toolbars.
The left floater masks half of the screen on a blackberry, overlaying the content I am trying to read. So, until this is fixed my productivity in meetings will go up.
Good point about normal-sized screens, and the Blackberry version sounds like a major oversight. On my normal-sized screen, my browser only has the toolbars that I think are absolutely necessary (in other words, exactly zero third-party toolbars). Slashdot has decided that their toolbar is a must-have to use the site. I disagree and would like to disable it.
I agree. It's like another toolbar on my browser, effectively reducing the available screen area. Same for the excessive (and visually distracting) excessive whitespace. Now if I ever managed to USE the icons / links at the top of the Slashdot page (and now on the Slashdot toolbar) more than once every 3 months, it might be good to have them handy. But that really almost never happens, so it's wasted area.
It's a symptom of developers who have big monitors: they forget that many people don't have a huge amount of screen real estate, and actually like to look at content.
Thumbs down on the new look.
... that balancing such an object requires the use of several fancy algorithms:
This is proof that, just exactly as I asserted, all you need is relatively simple feedback as long as it's fast enough.
Yep, that was me. I guess I should go back to my MIT professors and let them all know that they're full of hooey. I've sure been shown up by Jane Q. Public!
Or, on the other hand, I could look at the video these fellows provided. Doing that, I might notice that the system is barely stable, very noisy, does not deal with perturbation very well, and accumulates error. I could then read the paper and see, under the section called "VI Control System" it explicitly states that they are using a PD system (proportional and derivative), as described in the system of two differential equations. Then I could read the sentence, "Our system normally balances an object for several minutes before losing it..." which would probably be because they don't have an I term to worry about accumulating error. Lack of an I term makes the system drift, and you can see in the video that it nearly hits the edge of the actuator workspace a few times. Striking the limit of motion would be a catastrophic change in actuator impedance and cause the pencil to be dropped. The fact that they had to include a D term means that there is more than just straight (linear) feedback. But, hey, I guess those MIT professors didn't actually know what they were talking about when they taught us 18.03 Differential Equations. Either that or Ms. Public can't read papers very well, and doesn't recognize a differential equation when she sees one.
Again, I'll state, Ms. Public, please stay away from designing any systems that are critical to support or protection of human life. You have now repeatedly demonstrated your incompetence to do so in a public forum.
There is a huge difference between a one-time purchase of a relatively low-cost item, a screwdriver in your example, and the establishment of a binding contract that carries substantial monthly fees and is good until cancelled.
Selling someone something they do not need by convincing them they do, even by something as seemingly innocent as not mentioning that they don't actually need it, with potentially large eventual cost, is called a predatory business practice. Using such means to take advantage of a vulnerable population, like the elderly or the handicapped, is illegal.
If you don't already know about this important part of daily life, then I would suggest some studying. If you didn't realize from reading the summary that AOL is predating on the elderly (there's that phrase, "many of whom are older people"), I would suggest working on your reading comprehension.
Sounds like a class action lawsuit to me.
No, I'm being serious. This is an abusive business practice. In financial circles, similar actions to intentionally mislead clients, especially elderly ones, especially by omission of whether a particular service is needed or not, is a very big deal and results in loss of license to the sales agent and potentially punitive action by the SEC to the employing firm. The scales of money are different, but the sleazy flavor is the same.
Diamond, on the other hand, has a band gap of 5.5 eV, and has _excellent_ thermal properties.
So, back in the day, there were these things called "radios" and "televisions" and the airwaves were partitioned so that the frequencies used by avionics didn't overlap too much with the transmissions for these other devices.
But, the standard technology for radios and televisions include something called a superheterodyne circuit that can be, especially when malfunctioning, a radio transmitter. It was not unreasonable to expect that under some circumstances the radios and televisions that passengers carried on board might interfere with the avionics radios, especially since the TV frequencies were quite close to the avionics frequencies. Even a minor interference with plane avionics puts potentially hundreds of lives at risk.
There was a very important phrase I used in the previous paragraph: "especially when malfunctioning." While the FAA (by way of regulations imposed on the airlines) might be able to control the condition of the plane in general and the avionics in particular, they have absolutely no control over the devices brought on board by the passengers. Those devices could very well be (a) badly designed, (b) badly manufactured, or (c) malfunctioning so as to be transmitting on the wrong frequencies.
Thus, there was an entirely reasonable ban instituted on operating any transmitting devices on airplanes.
Today, the ban has been expanded to include things like cell phones (not so much expanded, but explicitly includes, since they are transmitting devices, all of which are disallowed). But, since so many more people have cell phones, the idea that they could interfere seems laughable to the public. After all, there are plenty of other electronic devices that are brought on board! The problem still remains that malfunctioning devices could easily interfere with airplane radio transmissions, which could have deadly consequences. The fact still remains that any device that is part of the airplane is under the control of the aircraft owner, thus can be certified as non-interfereing, and will be under the regular schedule of maintenance checks, whereas any device carried by a passenger is completely uncontrolled and should be assumed to be malfunctioning.
Remember that air travel is very, very safe. Part of this is because the FAA (in the US) has worked hard to eliminate the causes of exceedingly rare events. While your cell phone might not interfere while transmitting with one particular plane's avionics, guaranteeing that every single one of the (hundreds of?) millions of cell phones in the US will not interefere with every single plane's avionics is not possible, especially given the large and active secondary repair market for cell phones. Reducing the chances of interference by requiring all cell phones to be off is prudent (and if anyone thinks that this requirement results in 100% compliance, I have this very nice bridge to sell you; all of these regulations are concerned with reducing probability, not eliminating it).
Personally, I'm fine with all transmitters being turned off for the entire flight. I don't need to have my cell phone working for the relatively short periods I might be on a plane. They're essentially equivalent to the daily blackout periods in my communication when I'm asleep, and, often, flights are much shorter. Most people's lives will not be affected if they cannot be in contact for a planned, well-scheduled period of time. Same for the internet. I don't *need* to browse the web while I'm at 30,000 ft. I have plenty to do, work or personally, that I can keep myself busy for a few hours every now and then, especially when I know well in advance that the period of isolation is coming.