I'm among that older demographic. I also have a nearly identical job as my father did (faculty at a big, well-known academic institution), and I live in the same city in which I grew up.
The economic structure 50 years ago was such that my father could support his family without any additional income (read: he had only one job, and my mother did not work). He could afford to buy a big house in a nice suburb. He could send his kids to private school. Now, both my wife and I must work, I pick up consulting whenever I can, we can only afford to rent, and private school is so beyond our means that it's amusing.
Things are not better from my simplistic, anecdotal perspective which has the added benefit of being a remarkably close apples-to-apples comparison.
[snark] Do you wear seatbelts? There is only a moderate correlation with wearing seatbelts and health benefit. For the vast majority of the time, they are utterly unnecessary. Sounds like a profit-driven practice.
Oh, wait, except that when they ARE needed, the benefits are potentially avoiding loss of life. That might be pretty big. [/snark]
Same with eye exams. Most of the time, utterly unnecessary and uninteresting. But, if, for example, glaucoma (which can be totally asymptomatic) goes untreated for long enough, it results in blindness. As in irreversible loss of sight. Game over, no undos. Try closing your eyes and walking around your home for five minutes without bumping into something, or hurting yourself. Try feeding yourself from a plate of food with your eyes closed; you can even cheat by looking first so you know where everything is. Try to make your way to the bathroom and brush your teeth. Or get yourself dressed. Find your keys. Trust me: you do not want to lose your sight.
Get your eyes examined regularly. Please. No, wait, if everyone did that I'd be out of a job. Hold on...
The real reason isn't that there is some potential danger from wearing the wrong prescription (in most cases) since doing so results not in harm, but pretty rapid and self-limiting discomfort. You most definitely do not want to wear corrective lenses of any sort that aren't somewhat close to the right prescription. It takes a reasonably skilled practitioner with reasonably advanced equipment to determine what the right prescription is. MORE IMPORTANTLY, though, most people take good vision for granted despite it being critical for normal life. If you've ever put antibiotic ointment in your eyes, you know what it can be to not see well (although most blind individuals would be ecstatic to see as well as that). So GOING TO THE EYE DOCTOR PERIODICALLY TO TEST FOR VARIOUS DISEASES IS A GOOD IDEA. Thus, the requirement for a prescription for eye wear.
Realistically, we have machines that do a reasonably good job of determining your prescription in an automated fashion, and in under a second. They are simple enough to operate that a non-degreed technician (see "reasonably skilled practitioner" above) could measure your eyes at the corner drug store. But there are many very, very good reasons to see an actual eye doctor when you get your corrective lenses that go beyond just getting the measurements made. Most of those reasons are to prevent you from losing your vision. I study low vision (as in people who can barely see well enough to walk through an unfamiliar room). If you are sighted, you most emphatically do not want to lose your vision.
systemd is as overengineered as many Windows components.
I think you mean "overcomplicated". Things that are overengineered are typically robust and reliable. Like the Mercedes 300D automobile (ever looked at one of those engines? zoink! no wonder they have an expected lifetime of 1M kilometers).
I'm running Fedora 26 and... it is no longer robust and reliable. Whether that's systemd or something else, I'm starting to think about jumping ship after having been a RedHat / Fedora user for something over 20 years. I don't typically delve into inits and log files, but systemd asks to send a crash / bug report a couple of times a week on my vanilla hardware, and that's not a good indicator of reliability.
I read the linked article that had not much more detail than the summary, unfortunately.
But the projected count of events seems wrong. The reported data were collected over 530 days it is said. That's about 1-1/2 years, and they observed 1.5 million events, or about 1 million per year. They now want to extend the lifetime of the probe to 5 years, total. Shouldn't that be about 5 million events, give-or-take? We have a discrepancy of 3 orders of magnitude from the projected total count of 10 billion.
So, where does that projection come from, or is this a case of a reporting mistake ("billion" substituted for "million") followed by a basic fact-checking failure? British vs American English combined with incomplete search-and-replace? Something else?
I mean, it's a space probe. Up in space. It's not like you can swap out the detector for a new one with 1000-fold better capture efficiency.
Yes, you're right. Absolutely. Up until the last sentence, though. The now-exemplary social network is Facebook, and, like it or not, it is an institution. Don't believe me? It has a global Alexa rank of 3.
Not 300, not 3000.
3.
That's about as institution-like as you can get. (2 and 1 are Youtube and Google, respectively). Wikipedia is 5. RT is a paltry 397.
Tumblr, for comparison is 54 globally, 23 in the US. Those are also institution-level numbers. While yes, there is expected to be ebb-and-flow in usage and popularity of a site, Tumblr is among the big players. As others have pointed out, Yahoo has a strong history of either buying at the worst possible moment, or of buying and destroying through ineptitude or neglect, and that's far more likely to be driving it's current loss in traffic.
Did you read the article? He wants to check that the earth is flat (take that at face value if you want to) by going up high enough to be able to see for himself. What test is better than direct observation?
This guy is attempting one of the biggest trolls I've ever seen! The best part is his underlying message, which is pure science: "I don't believe you, and I'm going to check for myself." How much more Aristotelian can you get?
Indeed. I spent part of my doctoral work trying to understand the heat issues and trying to come up with solutions. Fundamentally, heat extraction is a surface-area process, whereas heat generation is a bulk process. Thus as you start to increase the thickness of the material, the heat, in general, goes up with the volume, or r^3, but the cooling capacity goes up with the surface, or r^2. If you start from an approximately planar structure, for a while, this is OK, but very quickly you run into trouble. The situation does not scale indefinitely without uncontrolled temperature rise.
One way of mitigating the issue when you are using a cooling fluid is to make the 3D structure porous, and flow the fluid through the device. We did just that. If relying on convection, you can fill the chip carrier with cooling fluid, and make a series of towers instead. We found the thermal latency was too slow for most applications in that case, but there were lots of assumptions that might have been incorrect for a specific situation.
If you are willing to flow coolant, then the obvious way to make it scale is to create a branched structure, not unlike blood vessels, where there is a central macroscopic pump that circulates the coolant through a network of finer and finer tubes until the heat has been extracted, and then through the inverse network of thicker and thicker tubes until you get back to the pump (and external cooling mechanism). Nature has this sort of arrangement all over the place.
My conclusion was that fundamentally 3D structures were going to have limited applicability without active cooling unless someone discovered the equivalent of room-temperature superconductivity for phonons (and thus heat) in an electrical semiconductor.
Helvetica has a history that predates Apple's adoption by what amounts to half a century, and has a reach into our lives that is so deep we are not aware of it. That's how good it is. Your association of Helvetica with Apple's products suggests that you aren't looking around enough with a critical eye. There's a beautiful movie about Helvetica, made in 2007. Here's a link to the trailer:
The trailer includes cool snapshots of typical uses of Helvetica from around NYC. It includes things like the signs in the subways, many company logos, tons and tons of advertising, Helvetica is everywhere. And the movie is well worth watching for typography geeks and normal people, alike.
There is a marvelous history of the development of rocket fuel called, "Ignition!", written by John D. Clark, one of the field's insiders who has an ascerbic wit. The foreword was written by Isaac Asimov, which contains the following fantastic quote:
Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or a mere raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.
Explosions are par for the course. Rocket science is hard.
If nobody looks at the image, or, as some have suggested, the hash is computed client side (so nobody would be able to look at the image) it would be ripe for abuse. I could easily file takedowns for any pictures I want.
Back when the Internet was young, there was a brief period where pornographic images were illegal in the US. There was substantial effort put into automatic detection of the nude human form that was reasonably successful. Shouldn't be that hard to put a first-level filter on submissions, again client-side.
The public reaction to this is understandably somewhat muted and off-put. Why upload nude photos to Facebook, indeed? The claim is that they will compute a hash of the image, and store that to prevent future uploads.
If that is really the case, when why not compute the hash locally on the user's machine, and upload only the hash? Surely that can be done on essentially all modern hardware from cell phone to desktop in a reasonable amount of time.
I understand this issue (or at least one version of it) deeply. Writing a question means committing to certainty something that you are uncertain about. If the question is not understood, or, more likely, poorly expressed, it's very likely the conversation will go off the tracks and not ultimately be helpful. Face-to-face conversations allow for more fine-grained navigation of unfamiliar territory. Ultimately, written conversation is imperfect, and not a good tool for certain modes of communication.
I manage people. Some of them work remotely for a span of weeks-to-months from time to time.
If we interact face-to-face, everything is good. If the worker is remote, their productivity goes down the tubes, even when I get daily progress reports. When I don't get daily progress reports, essentially nothing gets done.
I have enough experience to be able to see a trend in the 15 or so people I've had work for me, but it clearly isn't enough to generalize to everyone outside my laboratory, nor outside my field, nor to other managers. It doesn't apply to all of the people I've had work for me (and the ones who remain productive while remote are true gems), but the trend is very, very clear.
Who here would want to have their computer analyzed at some later date for an unrelated charge and have what amounts to recruiting material for a terrorist organization found on their laptop? Even if you could explain it away, that might well be only after spending heaploads in lawyer fees.
Sounds like one should not touch any of this release. Bad ju-ju.
No, sorry, that's just wrong by the basic rules of algebra. Multiplication gets precedence over addition. (That newfangled idea of a precedence tree in computer languages is predated by at least a hundred years in mathematics.)
3 + 3 * 3 is 12, period. If your calculator is giving you 18, it is wrong, and is the result of a lazy developer not understanding the appropriate operator precedence. Doing correct arithmetic is non-trivial (it isn't hard, but it isn't trivial: the trivial approach gives you 18 in this case, and that is wrong). This is not a question of "scientific" or "non-scientific" calculators. There is no such thing. Calculators have one kind of function, there is one correct answer,and if they don't get it right, then the designer or implementor is at fault.
"I always do what Teddy says" is a short story by Harry Harrison that appeared in his collection Galactic Dreams. It was about the creation of an assassin by a subversive group who came in to a boy's home and performed moral surgery on his automated companion, a teddy bear. They removed the imperative, "thou shall not kill," from the embedded expert system (now known as an AI), and left the child to grow up before they assigned him the intended political target. There were two beautiful ideas in this short story, first, that a sufficiently complex toy could be created that would provide companionship and education to the child it was assigned to, and, second, that minor manipulation of that expert system could have deep, and difficult to otherwise discern, repercussions.
I read it as a young boy, and a handful of decades later, I still remember the chilling, climactic sentence, "Teddy, I'm going to kill a man." Heck, I even remember exactly where I was when I was reading it.
And if the Halliburton Prize were to honor the best and brightest for the amazing achievements, why not?
Rolex does. Does Rolex have *anything* to do with scientific achievement or leadership, other than by hoping to have a marketing tie-in?
Saatchi & Saatchi does. They're a marketing firm, so, really, really no.
Google does. They're an advertising firm (fundamentally), so in a deep sense no, although we might quibble about it.
Heineken does. A beer manufacturer, so no, no, no.
Need I go on? There are lots and lots of lesser-known prizes for scientific achievement and/or leadership that are from companies that have nothing whatsoever to do with the fields that are being honored. The companies do it as part of their philanthropic mission, and for the marketing opportunities presented.
There's already the requirement that NIH funded research be made publicly available after 1 year via PubMed Central, copyright be damned.
It shouldn't be that hard to extend that kind of requirement to ALL US-government-funded research. I'm sort of surprised it hasn't. Has it?
With a 1 year exclusive, the publishers get to do their jobs, add their value (and yes, I believe that in general publishers DO add value), make some money, and then the situation becomes no different than open-access. Everyone gets their panties in a twist about publishers, but forget that the vast majority of science in the US (which is to say, NIH-funded research) becomes public after a year. The standard counter-argument is that contemporary science moves so fast that one year is too long. To which I say, bunk -- any organization that is moving that quickly has the means to buy access as necessary. Any organization that lacks the funds to buy access, even on an article-by-article basis, lacks the funds to perform contemporary research.
Look at it this way: say you really, really, really want to see an article. You can (a) buy access for some tens of dollars, (b) contact the authors and request a copy, (c) go to a university library and photocopy it. Yes, all of those are different levels of inconvenient, but none are sufficient to block a motivated researcher. I know, I've used all of those options. If you aren't willing to pay those amounts either in time or money personally, you don't have what it takes to be doing contemporary research. If the laboratory you are in does not have access through it's parent organization, and does not have a budget that can support tens of dollars per article, then I argue there's no way that laboratory could perform any relevant, modern research.
That's a practical argument. The moral argument that government-funded research should be free, well, I get that too, which is why the 1 year embargo is a brilliant compromise.
I have a handful of solar powered watches. The normal kind, that just tell time. They have mechanical faces. They are just awesome, and, like the proposed semi-smart watches (without a display, they aren't smart, sorry), only need a modicum of sunlight, or somewhat more office light, every day to run just fine indefinitely. The only time I've had problems is when I inadvertently left one in a dark closet for a couple of months. Even then, bright sun for a few hours, and all was well again.
Not having to replace batteries, ever, is AWESOME, doubly so because watch batteries are really tiny, by the constraints imposed by the size of the watches and so replacing them is a right royal pain in the patootie. Recharging, daily? No thank you. I'm the one who runs my life, not my watch. I need to be able to trust the reliability of the things I use, and if forgetting to do a daily charging cycle means the thing is no longer useful for the day, well, then it wasn't really useful to start with.
Funny, when I start typing on the command line, and hit tab, the same thing happens. Only then, after I select the application, I'm free to type the name of the file that I want to open, too. And any options that I want to select.
And, from what I recall, those aspects were present in the command line, oh, back when I started with TOPS-20 in the mid 1980s, and might not have been new, then. Indeed, as I recall with the TOPS-20 command line, you were free to type a question mark at the start of any argument to see what the possible values were; now THAT was a sweet thing, because it eliminated 75% of the times I needed to look up the documentation.
And, if the reader does not care to recognize computer history quite that old because of some encephalopathic imperfection, add-ons like Launchy have been doing exactly the same thing (type on the Windows desktop automatically engages searching for applications) for just over a decade now (since early 2007), and works under Linux, too.
So, new feature? In no way or sense, except a perhaps incredibly narrow one such as "the developers never heard of it because they're too inexperienced."
Slashdot Mirror
I'm among that older demographic. I also have a nearly identical job as my father did (faculty at a big, well-known academic institution), and I live in the same city in which I grew up.
The economic structure 50 years ago was such that my father could support his family without any additional income (read: he had only one job, and my mother did not work). He could afford to buy a big house in a nice suburb. He could send his kids to private school. Now, both my wife and I must work, I pick up consulting whenever I can, we can only afford to rent, and private school is so beyond our means that it's amusing.
Things are not better from my simplistic, anecdotal perspective which has the added benefit of being a remarkably close apples-to-apples comparison.
[snark]
Do you wear seatbelts? There is only a moderate correlation with wearing seatbelts and health benefit. For the vast majority of the time, they are utterly unnecessary. Sounds like a profit-driven practice.
Oh, wait, except that when they ARE needed, the benefits are potentially avoiding loss of life. That might be pretty big.
[/snark]
Same with eye exams. Most of the time, utterly unnecessary and uninteresting. But, if, for example, glaucoma (which can be totally asymptomatic) goes untreated for long enough, it results in blindness. As in irreversible loss of sight. Game over, no undos. Try closing your eyes and walking around your home for five minutes without bumping into something, or hurting yourself. Try feeding yourself from a plate of food with your eyes closed; you can even cheat by looking first so you know where everything is. Try to make your way to the bathroom and brush your teeth. Or get yourself dressed. Find your keys. Trust me: you do not want to lose your sight.
Get your eyes examined regularly. Please. No, wait, if everyone did that I'd be out of a job. Hold on ...
The real reason isn't that there is some potential danger from wearing the wrong prescription (in most cases) since doing so results not in harm, but pretty rapid and self-limiting discomfort. You most definitely do not want to wear corrective lenses of any sort that aren't somewhat close to the right prescription. It takes a reasonably skilled practitioner with reasonably advanced equipment to determine what the right prescription is. MORE IMPORTANTLY, though, most people take good vision for granted despite it being critical for normal life. If you've ever put antibiotic ointment in your eyes, you know what it can be to not see well (although most blind individuals would be ecstatic to see as well as that). So GOING TO THE EYE DOCTOR PERIODICALLY TO TEST FOR VARIOUS DISEASES IS A GOOD IDEA. Thus, the requirement for a prescription for eye wear.
Realistically, we have machines that do a reasonably good job of determining your prescription in an automated fashion, and in under a second. They are simple enough to operate that a non-degreed technician (see "reasonably skilled practitioner" above) could measure your eyes at the corner drug store. But there are many very, very good reasons to see an actual eye doctor when you get your corrective lenses that go beyond just getting the measurements made. Most of those reasons are to prevent you from losing your vision. I study low vision (as in people who can barely see well enough to walk through an unfamiliar room). If you are sighted, you most emphatically do not want to lose your vision.
MR CUNNINGHAM
It couldn't be that you had too much to drink, now could it?
RICHIE
Oh that's silly! All we had was some beer in teeny weeny glasses.
MR CUNNINGHAM
How many teeny weeny glasses did you have?
RICHIE (sheepish)
72.
systemd is as overengineered as many Windows components.
I think you mean "overcomplicated". Things that are overengineered are typically robust and reliable. Like the Mercedes 300D automobile (ever looked at one of those engines? zoink! no wonder they have an expected lifetime of 1M kilometers).
I'm running Fedora 26 and ... it is no longer robust and reliable. Whether that's systemd or something else, I'm starting to think about jumping ship after having been a RedHat / Fedora user for something over 20 years. I don't typically delve into inits and log files, but systemd asks to send a crash / bug report a couple of times a week on my vanilla hardware, and that's not a good indicator of reliability.
There are people for whom that 5$ coffee is a luxury they are treating themselves to.
These are not the people I most often see in line when walking past Starbucks.
I read the linked article that had not much more detail than the summary, unfortunately.
But the projected count of events seems wrong. The reported data were collected over 530 days it is said. That's about 1-1/2 years, and they observed 1.5 million events, or about 1 million per year. They now want to extend the lifetime of the probe to 5 years, total. Shouldn't that be about 5 million events, give-or-take? We have a discrepancy of 3 orders of magnitude from the projected total count of 10 billion.
So, where does that projection come from, or is this a case of a reporting mistake ("billion" substituted for "million") followed by a basic fact-checking failure? British vs American English combined with incomplete search-and-replace? Something else?
I mean, it's a space probe. Up in space. It's not like you can swap out the detector for a new one with 1000-fold better capture efficiency.
Yes, you're right. Absolutely. Up until the last sentence, though. The now-exemplary social network is Facebook, and, like it or not, it is an institution. Don't believe me? It has a global Alexa rank of 3.
Not 300, not 3000.
3.
That's about as institution-like as you can get. (2 and 1 are Youtube and Google, respectively). Wikipedia is 5. RT is a paltry 397.
Tumblr, for comparison is 54 globally, 23 in the US. Those are also institution-level numbers. While yes, there is expected to be ebb-and-flow in usage and popularity of a site, Tumblr is among the big players. As others have pointed out, Yahoo has a strong history of either buying at the worst possible moment, or of buying and destroying through ineptitude or neglect, and that's far more likely to be driving it's current loss in traffic.
Did you read the article? He wants to check that the earth is flat (take that at face value if you want to) by going up high enough to be able to see for himself. What test is better than direct observation?
Ah, someone gets it!
This guy is attempting one of the biggest trolls I've ever seen! The best part is his underlying message, which is pure science: "I don't believe you, and I'm going to check for myself." How much more Aristotelian can you get?
Indeed. I spent part of my doctoral work trying to understand the heat issues and trying to come up with solutions. Fundamentally, heat extraction is a surface-area process, whereas heat generation is a bulk process. Thus as you start to increase the thickness of the material, the heat, in general, goes up with the volume, or r^3, but the cooling capacity goes up with the surface, or r^2. If you start from an approximately planar structure, for a while, this is OK, but very quickly you run into trouble. The situation does not scale indefinitely without uncontrolled temperature rise.
One way of mitigating the issue when you are using a cooling fluid is to make the 3D structure porous, and flow the fluid through the device. We did just that. If relying on convection, you can fill the chip carrier with cooling fluid, and make a series of towers instead. We found the thermal latency was too slow for most applications in that case, but there were lots of assumptions that might have been incorrect for a specific situation.
If you are willing to flow coolant, then the obvious way to make it scale is to create a branched structure, not unlike blood vessels, where there is a central macroscopic pump that circulates the coolant through a network of finer and finer tubes until the heat has been extracted, and then through the inverse network of thicker and thicker tubes until you get back to the pump (and external cooling mechanism). Nature has this sort of arrangement all over the place.
My conclusion was that fundamentally 3D structures were going to have limited applicability without active cooling unless someone discovered the equivalent of room-temperature superconductivity for phonons (and thus heat) in an electrical semiconductor.
Helvetica has a history that predates Apple's adoption by what amounts to half a century, and has a reach into our lives that is so deep we are not aware of it. That's how good it is. Your association of Helvetica with Apple's products suggests that you aren't looking around enough with a critical eye. There's a beautiful movie about Helvetica, made in 2007. Here's a link to the trailer:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?...
The trailer includes cool snapshots of typical uses of Helvetica from around NYC. It includes things like the signs in the subways, many company logos, tons and tons of advertising, Helvetica is everywhere. And the movie is well worth watching for typography geeks and normal people, alike.
There is a marvelous history of the development of rocket fuel called, "Ignition!", written by John D. Clark, one of the field's insiders who has an ascerbic wit. The foreword was written by Isaac Asimov, which contains the following fantastic quote:
Now it is clear that anyone working with rocket fuels is outstandingly mad. I don't mean garden-variety crazy or a mere raving lunatic. I mean a record-shattering exponent of far-out insanity.
There are, after all, some chemicals that explode shatteringly, some that flame ravenously, some that corrode hellishly, some that poison sneakily, and some that stink stenchily. As far as I know, though, only liquid rocket fuels have all these delightful properties combined into one delectable whole.
Explosions are par for the course. Rocket science is hard.
If nobody looks at the image, or, as some have suggested, the hash is computed client side (so nobody would be able to look at the image) it would be ripe for abuse. I could easily file takedowns for any pictures I want.
Back when the Internet was young, there was a brief period where pornographic images were illegal in the US. There was substantial effort put into automatic detection of the nude human form that was reasonably successful. Shouldn't be that hard to put a first-level filter on submissions, again client-side.
The public reaction to this is understandably somewhat muted and off-put. Why upload nude photos to Facebook, indeed? The claim is that they will compute a hash of the image, and store that to prevent future uploads.
If that is really the case, when why not compute the hash locally on the user's machine, and upload only the hash? Surely that can be done on essentially all modern hardware from cell phone to desktop in a reasonable amount of time.
[pedantic]
DST is Daylight Saving Time.
Not "savings".
[/pedantic]
I understand this issue (or at least one version of it) deeply. Writing a question means committing to certainty something that you are uncertain about. If the question is not understood, or, more likely, poorly expressed, it's very likely the conversation will go off the tracks and not ultimately be helpful. Face-to-face conversations allow for more fine-grained navigation of unfamiliar territory. Ultimately, written conversation is imperfect, and not a good tool for certain modes of communication.
I manage people. Some of them work remotely for a span of weeks-to-months from time to time.
If we interact face-to-face, everything is good. If the worker is remote, their productivity goes down the tubes, even when I get daily progress reports. When I don't get daily progress reports, essentially nothing gets done.
I have enough experience to be able to see a trend in the 15 or so people I've had work for me, but it clearly isn't enough to generalize to everyone outside my laboratory, nor outside my field, nor to other managers. It doesn't apply to all of the people I've had work for me (and the ones who remain productive while remote are true gems), but the trend is very, very clear.
Who here would want to have their computer analyzed at some later date for an unrelated charge and have what amounts to recruiting material for a terrorist organization found on their laptop? Even if you could explain it away, that might well be only after spending heaploads in lawyer fees.
Sounds like one should not touch any of this release. Bad ju-ju.
No, sorry, that's just wrong by the basic rules of algebra. Multiplication gets precedence over addition. (That newfangled idea of a precedence tree in computer languages is predated by at least a hundred years in mathematics.)
3 + 3 * 3 is 12, period. If your calculator is giving you 18, it is wrong, and is the result of a lazy developer not understanding the appropriate operator precedence. Doing correct arithmetic is non-trivial (it isn't hard, but it isn't trivial: the trivial approach gives you 18 in this case, and that is wrong). This is not a question of "scientific" or "non-scientific" calculators. There is no such thing. Calculators have one kind of function, there is one correct answer,and if they don't get it right, then the designer or implementor is at fault.
"I always do what Teddy says" is a short story by Harry Harrison that appeared in his collection Galactic Dreams. It was about the creation of an assassin by a subversive group who came in to a boy's home and performed moral surgery on his automated companion, a teddy bear. They removed the imperative, "thou shall not kill," from the embedded expert system (now known as an AI), and left the child to grow up before they assigned him the intended political target. There were two beautiful ideas in this short story, first, that a sufficiently complex toy could be created that would provide companionship and education to the child it was assigned to, and, second, that minor manipulation of that expert system could have deep, and difficult to otherwise discern, repercussions.
I read it as a young boy, and a handful of decades later, I still remember the chilling, climactic sentence, "Teddy, I'm going to kill a man." Heck, I even remember exactly where I was when I was reading it.
Life imitating art.
And if the Halliburton Prize were to honor the best and brightest for the amazing achievements, why not?
Rolex does. Does Rolex have *anything* to do with scientific achievement or leadership, other than by hoping to have a marketing tie-in?
Saatchi & Saatchi does. They're a marketing firm, so, really, really no.
Google does. They're an advertising firm (fundamentally), so in a deep sense no, although we might quibble about it.
Heineken does. A beer manufacturer, so no, no, no.
Need I go on? There are lots and lots of lesser-known prizes for scientific achievement and/or leadership that are from companies that have nothing whatsoever to do with the fields that are being honored. The companies do it as part of their philanthropic mission, and for the marketing opportunities presented.
There's already the requirement that NIH funded research be made publicly available after 1 year via PubMed Central, copyright be damned.
It shouldn't be that hard to extend that kind of requirement to ALL US-government-funded research. I'm sort of surprised it hasn't. Has it?
With a 1 year exclusive, the publishers get to do their jobs, add their value (and yes, I believe that in general publishers DO add value), make some money, and then the situation becomes no different than open-access. Everyone gets their panties in a twist about publishers, but forget that the vast majority of science in the US (which is to say, NIH-funded research) becomes public after a year. The standard counter-argument is that contemporary science moves so fast that one year is too long. To which I say, bunk -- any organization that is moving that quickly has the means to buy access as necessary. Any organization that lacks the funds to buy access, even on an article-by-article basis, lacks the funds to perform contemporary research.
Look at it this way: say you really, really, really want to see an article. You can (a) buy access for some tens of dollars, (b) contact the authors and request a copy, (c) go to a university library and photocopy it. Yes, all of those are different levels of inconvenient, but none are sufficient to block a motivated researcher. I know, I've used all of those options. If you aren't willing to pay those amounts either in time or money personally, you don't have what it takes to be doing contemporary research. If the laboratory you are in does not have access through it's parent organization, and does not have a budget that can support tens of dollars per article, then I argue there's no way that laboratory could perform any relevant, modern research.
That's a practical argument. The moral argument that government-funded research should be free, well, I get that too, which is why the 1 year embargo is a brilliant compromise.
I have a handful of solar powered watches. The normal kind, that just tell time. They have mechanical faces. They are just awesome, and, like the proposed semi-smart watches (without a display, they aren't smart, sorry), only need a modicum of sunlight, or somewhat more office light, every day to run just fine indefinitely. The only time I've had problems is when I inadvertently left one in a dark closet for a couple of months. Even then, bright sun for a few hours, and all was well again.
Not having to replace batteries, ever, is AWESOME, doubly so because watch batteries are really tiny, by the constraints imposed by the size of the watches and so replacing them is a right royal pain in the patootie. Recharging, daily? No thank you. I'm the one who runs my life, not my watch. I need to be able to trust the reliability of the things I use, and if forgetting to do a daily charging cycle means the thing is no longer useful for the day, well, then it wasn't really useful to start with.
Funny, when I start typing on the command line, and hit tab, the same thing happens. Only then, after I select the application, I'm free to type the name of the file that I want to open, too. And any options that I want to select.
And, from what I recall, those aspects were present in the command line, oh, back when I started with TOPS-20 in the mid 1980s, and might not have been new, then. Indeed, as I recall with the TOPS-20 command line, you were free to type a question mark at the start of any argument to see what the possible values were; now THAT was a sweet thing, because it eliminated 75% of the times I needed to look up the documentation.
And, if the reader does not care to recognize computer history quite that old because of some encephalopathic imperfection, add-ons like Launchy have been doing exactly the same thing (type on the Windows desktop automatically engages searching for applications) for just over a decade now (since early 2007), and works under Linux, too.
So, new feature? In no way or sense, except a perhaps incredibly narrow one such as "the developers never heard of it because they're too inexperienced."