For those of you following along at home, they've corrected "sportsware" to "sportswear" in the summary. I guess someone does read the snarky comments.
I care about the quality of your hardware and software, not about what your engineers are wearing. Or, for the "anonymous reader" and the understandably anonymous Dice editors, "waring".
I don't think we'll ever see driving forbidden. It might be restricted to certain roads, maybe even private/closed courses. Or it might be subject to mandatory automated overrides in case the driver tries to do something stupid -- yes, the reverse of the current situation, where laws may require a human operator remain ready to take over in case the machine does something stupid.
I understand that driving can be fun. But do you really want to keep trying to eke out your enjoyment on roads mostly full of people who don't care much about driving, who may be exhausted, drunk or distracted, or who just plain aren't very good at driving on their best days?
This actually reminds me of the Red Flag Laws that were passed when automobiles first began appearing. Because, obviously, the most important thing for an automobile is to avoid spooking the livestock, er, human drivers for whom the roads are really intended.
I hope I live to see the day when driving manually on a public road is viewed the same way as herding livestock or riding a horse on a public road -- quaint and interesting, but mostly disruptive, and almost never actually done.
Hm. I'm not sure how to respond to this. I didn't think I really was disagreeing with the premise in the summary. I was making more of a cynical observation -- perhaps to say that, just as fish might enjoy the bait that lures them into snares without a thought for their future, most "media consumers" enjoy the tripe that's fixing them in front of the tube or YouTube, without a thought for what it's costing them.
My own personal nemesis in the advertising world is the animated margin ad. It sits there, tugging on your attentional processes at a very low level -- it's almost physically impossible not to be distracted by motion in your peripheral vision -- and as HTML5 takes over from Flash, which took over from animated GIFs, it becomes harder and harder to override them. If I could figure out how to propose safety legislation to deal with them, I'd even be willing to dabble in politics for the sake of the fight.
I can't remember ever encountering a Slashdot summary that had me literally shouting in agreement.
The thing is, though, we are being compensated for our attention, with exactly the thing most people are looking for, whether they'd admit to it or not -- novelty and stimulation. It's unfortunate, I think, that this "extraction process" is diverting our attention from more productive outlets. But when has it ever been different? When have the masses, the majority, ever voluntarily directed their attention to productive outlets, instead of directing it to escapism or religious ritual on the rare occasions when it's not consumed by the fight for basic survival?
I'm a bit of a fan of his, but I think this is an awfully silly issue over which to make his music less accessible to everyone. What's he going to do about people who have the temerity to listen to his music while they're driving a car, or getting stoned, or otherwise not dedicating 100% of their attention to its nuances?
Yes, garbage all the way down. If an alarm goes off, they don't just send firefighters to cruise around the outside of the building; they have to go inside and verify that there's no fire. I can't imagine what a drone could report that would prevent a truck from rolling.
I'm very sorry, but Larry Niven lied to us in Ringworld.
Electrical superconductors are not heat superconductors; in fact, as far as I know, nobody has demonstrated true heat superconductivity (all points of the material remain at the same temperature, supporting infinite heat-transfer rates). I found a speculative paper about it from 2012, but it's only speculation.
Ptable.com isn't telling you everything you need to know. The melting point it lists is for the white (yellow) allotrope, the one that spontaneously combusts in air. The red and black allotropes are a lot more refractory, and a lot less chemically reactive.
Oh, and yes, "trespassing" is bad -- that's why I'm sure none of us ever did it as children. Never mind that this kid was probably doing a favor for whomever eventually tries to rehabilitate or demolish the building, by removing hazardous materials from it. Something tells me that they don't always go around pulling all these mercury-bearing switches for "proper disposal" before they start demolition.
But, yeah, if you go in where you're not allowed, you can get in trouble. Especially if you take stuff without permission.
I'm sure they did find substances that could be used to create explosives -- heck, let's call a spade a spade, and acknowledge that they're precursors. Things like:
Water -- simply pass an electric current through it to generate a tremendously explosive mix of hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Air -- a critical component, and by far the major component by volume, of the infamous "fuel-air explosive".
Aluminum foil -- ball-mill it long enough, and it becomes dark aluminum, a controlled substance used to make flash powder.
Lunch meat -- a plentiful source of animal fat, which can be saponified to produce glycerine, which can be nitrated to form nitroglycerin.
Books and other printed material -- almost always printed on paper, consisting mostly of cellulose, which can be nitrated to form nitrocellulose ("smokeless powder").
I could go on in this vein at great length, but why bother? I've already outlined the case against anyone on the surface of the planet, or off it for that matter.
Sure, germanium is rarer and more expensive than silicon. And given the mass of germanium required to add the necessary layer to a single chip, that might raise the per-unit material cost by multiple cents -- but probably not.
SiGe devices are more expensive because they're harder to make and (so far) don't enjoy the same economies of scale as silicon. As I understand it, material cost, especially raw material cost, is a vanishingly small contributor.
I'll freely admit that I was too much of a newbie to really appreciate Multics during the precious year or two I had access to it, but the single abstraction for memory and files seemed like a great approach...
Most articles I've read about this point out that the risk to any given swimmer is still extremely low. We all know that humans are bad at weighting risks from very low-probability but high-horror events.
By the same token, though, the risk to any given golfer out on a course during a thunderstorm is pretty low -- but nearly everybody agrees that going out on a large, open expanse and holding a metal stick over your head during a thunderstorm is kind of stupid.
I can't say that I blame people for deciding to stay out of the water.
I started out with a TRS-80 Model I in high school. I spent a lot of time on that machine, and applied a lot of the "canned hacks" developed by others -- add-on hardware better than that Radio Shack sold, a memory remapper to let it run CP/M, soldering in another 1024x1 RAM chip to support lowercase video, jumpering the clock divider chain to effectively overclock the CPU, and so on.
Eventually, I noticed that I was starting to have wrist problems, especially when I used WordStar -- that WP used the non-existent Control key quite a lot, and the CP/M port mapped it to one of the arrow keys, which was an ergonomic nightmare. But I happened to find a pair of foot switches on clearance at Radio Shack, pre-wired to mini audio plugs. I drilled two holes in my system unit, mounted two mini jacks, and wired them to the keyboard in the same position as the shift key and that arrow key. Stomp-K-D for the win! My wrists were better in no time.
Later, I got a state-of-the-art 1200bps modem, but my poor terminal program couldn't keep up. Any time the screen had to scroll, I dropped characters. The solution: I rewired the 40Hz real-time interrupt to fire at 160Hz, and wrote a little interrupt-driven driver to catch and buffer characters coming in over the RS232 interface. It was completely bulletproof. Unfortunately, it also sped up the keyboard timing (repeat delay and rate) by 4x in CP/M.
I guess the biggest hack, though, was building a full character-based video display subsystem that hung off the expansion port. Forty or fifty SS/MS LSTTL packages spread across eight or ten solderless breadboards, with a couple of static RAM chips thrown in for character generation and storage. It ended up being something like 30 lines of 100 characters, comfortably larger than the original 16x64 display or even the 24x80 displays in the computer labs, and each cell was 8x16 pixels, so they were nicely readable characters. Luxury. I used that "in production" for a year or two, until I managed to land a Lisa.
...reading your op-ed (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, an actual report containing actual facts).
One of the unique characteristics of the Internet is that it provides a way to monetize tiny minority tastes. That way, bozos can produce books or videos on "Down is Up", "Beanie Babies: The New Future-Proof Investment", or "The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age", and find enough paying customers to make it worth their while.
Golly! How do you suppose that having one person at a time writing code, with the rest of the team effectively doing simultaneous code review, magically produces "fewer features" but "better code quality" than having everybody writing code, then throwing it together and maybe doing a cursory bit of code review at the end?
Next, you'll be telling me that having one or two testers per developer produces better-quality software than spending all your money on developers so you can "get more features".
Turning the shield (conductive layer around the craft) into an antenna? I like this idea. And with the full paper freely available through the link in the source article, I could in principle learn more -- if only my math and EM physics were up to it. Sigh.
I've been waiting and hoping for that little probe to wake up and start chatting again. I know it's only a lump of machinery, but developing emotional responses to lumps of machinery is built into humans at a pretty low level.
Slashdot Mirror
For those of you following along at home, they've corrected "sportsware" to "sportswear" in the summary. I guess someone does read the snarky comments.
I care about the quality of your hardware and software, not about what your engineers are wearing. Or, for the "anonymous reader" and the understandably anonymous Dice editors, "waring".
I don't think we'll ever see driving forbidden. It might be restricted to certain roads, maybe even private/closed courses. Or it might be subject to mandatory automated overrides in case the driver tries to do something stupid -- yes, the reverse of the current situation, where laws may require a human operator remain ready to take over in case the machine does something stupid.
I understand that driving can be fun. But do you really want to keep trying to eke out your enjoyment on roads mostly full of people who don't care much about driving, who may be exhausted, drunk or distracted, or who just plain aren't very good at driving on their best days?
This actually reminds me of the Red Flag Laws that were passed when automobiles first began appearing. Because, obviously, the most important thing for an automobile is to avoid spooking the livestock, er, human drivers for whom the roads are really intended.
I hope I live to see the day when driving manually on a public road is viewed the same way as herding livestock or riding a horse on a public road -- quaint and interesting, but mostly disruptive, and almost never actually done.
Hm. I'm not sure how to respond to this. I didn't think I really was disagreeing with the premise in the summary. I was making more of a cynical observation -- perhaps to say that, just as fish might enjoy the bait that lures them into snares without a thought for their future, most "media consumers" enjoy the tripe that's fixing them in front of the tube or YouTube, without a thought for what it's costing them.
My own personal nemesis in the advertising world is the animated margin ad. It sits there, tugging on your attentional processes at a very low level -- it's almost physically impossible not to be distracted by motion in your peripheral vision -- and as HTML5 takes over from Flash, which took over from animated GIFs, it becomes harder and harder to override them. If I could figure out how to propose safety legislation to deal with them, I'd even be willing to dabble in politics for the sake of the fight.
I can't remember ever encountering a Slashdot summary that had me literally shouting in agreement.
The thing is, though, we are being compensated for our attention, with exactly the thing most people are looking for, whether they'd admit to it or not -- novelty and stimulation. It's unfortunate, I think, that this "extraction process" is diverting our attention from more productive outlets. But when has it ever been different? When have the masses, the majority, ever voluntarily directed their attention to productive outlets, instead of directing it to escapism or religious ritual on the rare occasions when it's not consumed by the fight for basic survival?
Still waiting to lazily evaluate which year, are we?
...from a guy with an 8-bit voice.
I'm a bit of a fan of his, but I think this is an awfully silly issue over which to make his music less accessible to everyone. What's he going to do about people who have the temerity to listen to his music while they're driving a car, or getting stoned, or otherwise not dedicating 100% of their attention to its nuances?
Yes, garbage all the way down. If an alarm goes off, they don't just send firefighters to cruise around the outside of the building; they have to go inside and verify that there's no fire. I can't imagine what a drone could report that would prevent a truck from rolling.
This doesn't even begin to pass the sniff test.
I'm very sorry, but Larry Niven lied to us in Ringworld.
Electrical superconductors are not heat superconductors; in fact, as far as I know, nobody has demonstrated true heat superconductivity (all points of the material remain at the same temperature, supporting infinite heat-transfer rates). I found a speculative paper about it from 2012, but it's only speculation.
Ptable.com isn't telling you everything you need to know. The melting point it lists is for the white (yellow) allotrope, the one that spontaneously combusts in air. The red and black allotropes are a lot more refractory, and a lot less chemically reactive.
What does the melting point of an element have to do with structures formed from atoms of that element?
Since a phase change is also a structural change, I'd say "everything".
However, as you say, the black allotrope has a very high melting point. It's only the white/yellow allotrope that's low-melting.
Oh, and yes, "trespassing" is bad -- that's why I'm sure none of us ever did it as children. Never mind that this kid was probably doing a favor for whomever eventually tries to rehabilitate or demolish the building, by removing hazardous materials from it. Something tells me that they don't always go around pulling all these mercury-bearing switches for "proper disposal" before they start demolition.
But, yeah, if you go in where you're not allowed, you can get in trouble. Especially if you take stuff without permission.
I'm sure they did find substances that could be used to create explosives -- heck, let's call a spade a spade, and acknowledge that they're precursors. Things like:
Water -- simply pass an electric current through it to generate a tremendously explosive mix of hydrogen and oxygen gas.
Air -- a critical component, and by far the major component by volume, of the infamous "fuel-air explosive".
Aluminum foil -- ball-mill it long enough, and it becomes dark aluminum, a controlled substance used to make flash powder.
Lunch meat -- a plentiful source of animal fat, which can be saponified to produce glycerine, which can be nitrated to form nitroglycerin.
Books and other printed material -- almost always printed on paper, consisting mostly of cellulose, which can be nitrated to form nitrocellulose ("smokeless powder").
I could go on in this vein at great length, but why bother? I've already outlined the case against anyone on the surface of the planet, or off it for that matter.
Sure, germanium is rarer and more expensive than silicon. And given the mass of germanium required to add the necessary layer to a single chip, that might raise the per-unit material cost by multiple cents -- but probably not.
SiGe devices are more expensive because they're harder to make and (so far) don't enjoy the same economies of scale as silicon. As I understand it, material cost, especially raw material cost, is a vanishingly small contributor.
I'll freely admit that I was too much of a newbie to really appreciate Multics during the precious year or two I had access to it, but the single abstraction for memory and files seemed like a great approach...
This has been going so well for such a long time. It will be absolutely heartbreaking if the probe is incapacitated just during the flyby window.
Most articles I've read about this point out that the risk to any given swimmer is still extremely low. We all know that humans are bad at weighting risks from very low-probability but high-horror events.
By the same token, though, the risk to any given golfer out on a course during a thunderstorm is pretty low -- but nearly everybody agrees that going out on a large, open expanse and holding a metal stick over your head during a thunderstorm is kind of stupid.
I can't say that I blame people for deciding to stay out of the water.
I started out with a TRS-80 Model I in high school. I spent a lot of time on that machine, and applied a lot of the "canned hacks" developed by others -- add-on hardware better than that Radio Shack sold, a memory remapper to let it run CP/M, soldering in another 1024x1 RAM chip to support lowercase video, jumpering the clock divider chain to effectively overclock the CPU, and so on.
Eventually, I noticed that I was starting to have wrist problems, especially when I used WordStar -- that WP used the non-existent Control key quite a lot, and the CP/M port mapped it to one of the arrow keys, which was an ergonomic nightmare. But I happened to find a pair of foot switches on clearance at Radio Shack, pre-wired to mini audio plugs. I drilled two holes in my system unit, mounted two mini jacks, and wired them to the keyboard in the same position as the shift key and that arrow key. Stomp-K-D for the win! My wrists were better in no time.
Later, I got a state-of-the-art 1200bps modem, but my poor terminal program couldn't keep up. Any time the screen had to scroll, I dropped characters. The solution: I rewired the 40Hz real-time interrupt to fire at 160Hz, and wrote a little interrupt-driven driver to catch and buffer characters coming in over the RS232 interface. It was completely bulletproof. Unfortunately, it also sped up the keyboard timing (repeat delay and rate) by 4x in CP/M.
I guess the biggest hack, though, was building a full character-based video display subsystem that hung off the expansion port. Forty or fifty SS/MS LSTTL packages spread across eight or ten solderless breadboards, with a couple of static RAM chips thrown in for character generation and storage. It ended up being something like 30 lines of 100 characters, comfortably larger than the original 16x64 display or even the 24x80 displays in the computer labs, and each cell was 8x16 pixels, so they were nicely readable characters. Luxury. I used that "in production" for a year or two, until I managed to land a Lisa.
...reading your op-ed (as opposed to, oh, I don't know, an actual report containing actual facts).
One of the unique characteristics of the Internet is that it provides a way to monetize tiny minority tastes. That way, bozos can produce books or videos on "Down is Up", "Beanie Babies: The New Future-Proof Investment", or "The Unexpected Triumph of Old Media in the Digital Age", and find enough paying customers to make it worth their while.
Golly! How do you suppose that having one person at a time writing code, with the rest of the team effectively doing simultaneous code review, magically produces "fewer features" but "better code quality" than having everybody writing code, then throwing it together and maybe doing a cursory bit of code review at the end?
Next, you'll be telling me that having one or two testers per developer produces better-quality software than spending all your money on developers so you can "get more features".
Turning the shield (conductive layer around the craft) into an antenna? I like this idea. And with the full paper freely available through the link in the source article, I could in principle learn more -- if only my math and EM physics were up to it. Sigh.
I've been waiting and hoping for that little probe to wake up and start chatting again. I know it's only a lump of machinery, but developing emotional responses to lumps of machinery is built into humans at a pretty low level.
...DO NOT welcome our new, tentacular, inner-body-exploring robotic overlords. Ick.
But if they turn out to be the effective solution for a life-threatening health condition, I'll find a way to cope.
Some of us are heteroromantic, biromantic, homoromantic, panromantic, demiromantic, or even aromantic.
We realize that different cultures have different hygiene practices, but really, can't you put on a bit of deodorant in the morning?
Oh, wait. Never mind.