Re:My thoughts
on
Oryx and Crake
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
Hmm, maybe worth reading then.
On the "never written a bad book" front, I have to say that I found "The Handmaid's Tale" to be a bit of a misanthropic rant without much to recommend it - the "keen insights" are trite repetitions of stereotypes. That's why I was quite surprised by the comment in the main review, "Atwood's writing doesn't take itself too seriously". THT was so leaden, I'm surprised it didn't bust my bookshelf!
Off-topic - I have to say that THT isn't science fiction, in the same way as 1984 isn't science fiction. For some reason, any novel set in the future is automatically labelled "science fiction", regardless of the actual content. Ho hum.
That's a good point - I'd not thought about crops. Mind you, Rohan was the same. I think this is more a limitation of what you can do in a New Zealand National Park than in a computer, though.;-)
From memory, I think Tolkein describes it as a plain as well. Maybe there should have been some cows or sheep around, but if the people knew about it then they would have brought them inside the walls. Dunno, I'm clutching at straws. Anyway, I obviously wasn't thinking about the city's infrastructure when I saw it - I was far more taken in with the "wow" element!
Depends. Sometimes it's expensive eye-candy, but sometimes it's the only way to do otherwise-impossible stuff.
RotK couldn't create the effect of huge armies meeting, if they didn't have huge armies. No-one these days can afford to hire thousands of extras like in the "old days" of Spartacus, so they hit the computers. And even in the "old days", the zillions of people on set was a "special effect" for the time, bcos it was something no-one had seen before.
I won't disagree that there's a time and a place for it, and you certainly don't need it everywhere. I've seen some really egregious use of F/X in films, where they would have been much better off hiring a scriptwriter.;-)
Some films are just there for the F/X and nothing else, though - there's no content. I think audiences are getting wise to that now and are staying away, which is why films like Daredevil and Hulk bombed so badly, why Matrix fizzled (they may have made their money back on 2, but 3 will probably have lost money), and why I strongly suspect the next edition of Star Wars won't go far either. If the film industry releases a load of high-budget copy-cats which suck, then shame on those who go and see them, and thereby prop up a lousy system. If people stay away, the industry *will* get the message (by Darwinism if nothing else, since studios go bust from bad investments like that).
Sure, the enemy formations were rectangular. I think that was intentional though, rather than a limit of the technology or design. If you noticed the Rohan cavalry charge, the structure was curving with three points, following the three leaders (Theoden, Eomer, Gamling) in the charge. The orcs stand in nice pretty squares when they're winning, but when they start losing (ie. when the cavalry hits them) then their lines disintegrate.
Also cross-reference to the Isengard scene of Saruman addressing his army (Two Towers), which was straight out of the Nuremburg Rally. To me, it makes the point that it's only the bad guys who need strict discipline to hold the army together - the good guys know what they're fighting for.
Maybe I'm less fussy, but the city never looked unrealistic to me. I think having soldiers everywhere gave it the scale. And as for the fields - it's *supposed* to be a plain. It wasn't unrealistically sterile either - variations in colour and height across it. It just looked like a large expanse of flatlands. For what a *bad* bit of landscape looks like, check out Phantom Menace and the Gungans vs Droid Army battle, which looks like it's being fought on a bowling green.
First off, if human life is so sacred, there sure are a whole lot of really *horrible* diseases trying to take it away. And to make it worse, there are genetic conditions which basically mean you're born to die in pain, or destined for total paralysis, or whatever. Sacred? Yeah right.
Second off, we're not talking a human being here. We're talking embryos. This is a collection of cells which certainly could, under the right circumstances, grow into a human being. At that point though they are just another bundle of cells. In case you think that even a "potential human being" has a "right to life", think again: most embryos miscarry in the first days of pregnancy without implanting in the womb, and this is unnoticed by the mother because it happens as part of a normal period. If you believe that creation of life through pregnancy is designed by God, you must also accept that an embryo has no value until it is implanted in the womb, because that's the way God has explicitly designed it.
I won't even get into IVF and other techniques designed to allow infertile men/women to have children - presumably this is evil bcos God ordained that those people shall not have children?
Trouble is that ppl only generally contribute to open-source if it's something they specifically want. Every PC needs an OS, so the number of people who would consider working on an OS project is massive, because everyone wants a stable, powerful, non-crufty OS. Great.
Trouble is that the market for video editting is pretty damn small. Maybe it'll get larger now that digital video cameras are more popular, and normal digital cameras (and even mobile phones) can take movies. But it's still very much a niche thing, so there simply won't be the number of ppl working on it. That'll affect how stable, useable and featureful any software is. Maybe some company will get generous and donate some of their engineers' time to it, but you can't assume that.
Dead right - glad someone else gets annoyed by assholes who can't speak their own language.
"Regardless" = "without regard to"
So I suppose "irregardless" would be "with regard to"? Who knows? And more to the point, which asshole came up with that corruption of the word in the first place, bcos they deserve to be killed with a sharpened dictionary!;-)
I can't remember if it's a Spiel des Jahres, but the card game "Citadels" is very good. Rules are simple, there's a lot of strategy involved (you can be nasty if you want to:-) and a bit of luck, and you can have up to 9 people playing it.
As far as traditional games go, I *love* Mah-Jongg. (No, I *don't* mean the computer version where you match tiles!) If you can play Rummy, then Mah-Jongg is very similar. There's also something very tactilely appealing about using chunky tiles instead of cards.
Slightly OT, but that's one nice thing about a decent digi-camera. If you get one that allows you to twiddle everything (rather than the boring auto-everything ones), you can experiment with changing stuff like ISO, aperture, etc and see instantly what the effect is. If you mess up the settings, you can try again. With film, your only option to start with is to fire off a lot of film at all the different settings, noting down carefully what settings you used at each point, and see what the results are when you get the film back 2 weeks later. (I'm assuming a beginner isn't going to have a full darkroom setup;-)
Frankly though, I'm not sure why *anyone* would want to buy a 35mm camera right now. The great advantage of a 35mm camera over a digi-camera is that good photographers using high-quality film can take better quality photos. A beginner with a 35mm camera (and probably cheaper film for experimenting with) is going to take average-quality photos for some time. But the high-end digi-cameras now (10MP) are finally better than any film. They're vastly expensive of course, but then 2 years ago you'd be talking the same price for a 4MP camera and they're down to 300 or less now. Give it another two years and digital will be wiping the floor with film (it's already happened to the "point-and-click" type camera). By the time this hypothetical beginner gets the hang of it, his gear is going to be as obsolete as a 78 record.
Trouble is that once the cells have mutated to become cancerous, you can't (so far as anyone knows) change them back again. Nor would you want to, because you'd still have a large growth at that point, even if it was no longer expanding. The *only* solution is to break down the cancer in some way. Surgery does this by physical removal, other methods do this by killing the cancer in situ and allowing the body to clean up the remains. Actually the success rates are pretty damn good if you catch the tumour early, and are improving all the time. Your post suggests that you fundamentally disagree with the "kill the tumour" strategy, which I don't understand - is shooting down a missile with a laser also "stone-age" because it's comparable to throwing a stone at a bird?
Cells naturally turn cancerous for the simple reason of mutation due to incorrect DNA reproduction, which seems to be a fundamental feature of all multicellular organisms. Preventing this would be a hell of a job - either you need to genetically engineer a human that *can* reproduce DNA 100% correctly, or you need to insert some kind of nanosites into your body to check every cell and kill the ones that don't match. The former will *never* happen, because public opinion wouldn't allow it. The latter might eventually be technically possible, but (a) it'll fall over on cases like chimerism, and (b) it involves injecting more exotic crap into your body which ain't necessarily a great idea. There may be an option (c) but it doesn't seem to be around yet.
Quick review - back in 1969, three guys landed on the Moon. They had the same escape velocity that a Mars mission would, and they had *no* aerobraking. Flipping the ship round and using the main rocket for braking worked just fine, and no Apollo mission crashed on landing. On the plus side, gravity was a lot less, but the main problem here seems to be the approach speed rather than gravity. So maybe the issue is the solution chosen, not the mission itself.
Re aerobraking, there's no law that says you have to touch down in minutes. If you want to be cost-effective, you swing round the atmosphere for a few months until your speed is reduced. If you want to be time-effective, you retain a load of fuel after launch so that you can land directly.
The further problem is that this gear is dumb, so even a minor problem like a loose bolt isn't fixable. Ironically, although a manned mission would be significantly more expensive, its chances of success are much greater because humans can adapt. A manned mission would need a closed environment with full recycling over that time period, so an extra month or two up there waiting for the ship to slow down is not a big deal.
"Follow what you think is best" has unfortunately led to the many crap sites out there. As you say though, that advice (NOT rules!) isn't written in stone. The better moral is "follow what gives a more useable solution".
The only reason for having so-called "rules" like that is that: (a) graphic designers will tend to produce something which looks stunning but is utterly unuseable; (b) software designers will tend to produce something which enables you to get anywhere instantly, but only if you know precisely where in the site to click from months of experience of using the site; (c) focus groups will suggest stuff which improves useability but generally won't be technically possible or visually appealing; and (d) managers will never be able to choose between the possibilities without some kind of hand-holding. Call me cynical...;-)
Depends. You don't have a backup winder on your electric windows, do you?
The point of this system was that fail-safe was doors-closed. Makes sense if you think that this is designed to protect presidents and stuff - you don't want all the doors to pop open the moment the battery is disconnected (by the terrorists who've just surrounded the car and killed the security detail). If there's a mechanical means to unlock the doors from the outside, that's a weak point security-wise. I agree though that a mechanical means to unlock from the *inside* would be a good thing in hindsight!:-)
Re imperfect electronics, mechanical systems go wrong with far greater frequency than electrical systems. If the article said "consumer locked in (or out of) car because mechanical door lock failed" then it wouldn't get a second glance. Our company was prepping a demonstration Jaguar when the door lock failed because a valeter slammed the door too hard! The only reason people trust mechanical systems more is because it's easier for them to understand.
Ahem. Your fuel injections system and engine timing aren't being so much as breathed on by MS software, if you'll read the article. Nor could they be, since WinCE isn't designed for hard real-time control and requires significantly more processing power and memory than that found in a car engine controller.
But today, you may have a new version of Encarta each year. Job done, and it'll only take 1 foot of bookshelf space for the CDs! I don't see why the web is referred to as the standard for information, when the web is just the front end into a zillion version-controlled databases of articles, all archived to way back when. Archiving data onto CD or onto hard drive combines the best of both worlds - information stored forever in a convenient format.
(OK, CDs die over time. But archiving in a RAID disk system would be robust to failure of drives, and would allow any upgrades for as long into the future as you want. And if RAID ever becomes obsolete, you can simply transfer the data to your next robust backup system, since it's all in a convenient format already.)
They chose not to, but it took all their will-power to do it. Gandalf even says "Don't offer it to me, I'm not strong enough to refuse it" or words to that effect - generally he acts like Frodo has just prodded him with a red-hot poker. Gandalf and Galadriel are two of the most powerfully magical people in Middle Earth, and they had a seriously hard time refusing it. And the Council of Elrond gets pretty damn stirred up about it too.
You've not seen the many, many Vietnam films then which show the Americans winning? And the recent game Vietcong involves the Americans winning as well.
a) Sure, but the reason the Germans abandoned it was public pressure, not technical.
b) Er, fast-breeder reactors? The "thousands of years" waste is plutonium, which can be used as fuel. Other stuff has shorter half-lives, making storage easier. Vitrification is also good. The major problem is not how to store it, it's that no-one is prepared to have it anywhere near them, no matter how good the solution is.
c) A good reason why not to have electricity companies the American way, as if you needed another after Enron and the blackout.
d) With the nuclear plant here, it will do naff all. And even your bog-standard version, the plane will likely bounce off the dome. In fact, these days just hijacking a plane would be quite a feat - in fact it was always quite a feat in every country except the US where security was a joke. (Incidentally, maybe I'm callous, but my amazement at 9/11 was not that the terrorists tried it, but that on three of the four planes they managed it without anyone trying to fight them.) And if you want to be worried about terrorists hijacking planes, I suggest you be more concerned about chemical factories, oil refineries and drilling rigs, all of which are utterly unprotected.
It certainly is. I spent a significant fraction of my childhood sailing in an estuary on the Irish Sea. But what worried me was: untreated sewage; Weil's disease; ICI, Unilever and other heavy industry; waste dumped by ships; and oil spills. Waste water from nuclear plants only becomes a significant danger when assholes from Greenpeace decide to block the pipelines and the plant can't get rid of the waste water - at that point, the people at the plant find out how good their safety measures are!
FYI, the reason why fish from the Irish Sea (especially shellfish) are not good news is simply that they accumulate heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. This comes from the chemical industry, not the nuclear industry. You're jumping up and down about the right thing, but you're blaming the wrong people, man - try the factories in St Helens, Birkenhead, Runcorn, etc.
For head-removal-from arse, I suggest you think about data CDs for a minute more (which may be 59 seconds longer than you originally did). If I was suggesting archiving to some proprietary format like a ZipDisk, then fair enough. But this is a CD-R.
The CD data format is is a published ISO standard, and the interface to a CD drive is also a published standard. The only "proprietary hardware" is in the implementation of those standards, to transfer data off the (standard) CD and across the (standard) electrical/data drive interface, and in the motherboard to support this.
Whether all OSes will continue to support them is certainly unknown, but every OS today supports them, including all variants of Unix. For damn sure I can find you a non-proprietary OS that supports it. And if you'd like to bet that Unix variants won't survive for a few years, I'll take your money any time you like.
As an incidental effect of this, you will now have all your data in a digital format as well. If CDs are obsolete in 10 years time, it's all just data so you can decide on a new storage format and copy every bit of archived data to that new storage format.
As opposed to storing on paper, where you just put in a no-smoking policy and hope for the best (hope that the roof doesn't leak, you don't get rats/mice in the archive area, wiring doesn't short and create an electrical fire, someone reading a page doesn't accidentally spill coffee on it, etc). As a long-term storage medium, paper is not a solution. The Egyptians thought it was, which is why we now know very little about their civilisation, because all the data has rotted away.
maybe it should be 'should cars have software based controls in the first place?' Not just cars, but lots of things.
Answer: yes, if you want the emissions, performance and fuel economy required for modern vehicles. It is impossible (not just difficult, literally impossible) to meet all three of these using a mechanical system, which is the reason no new car for 10 years has used a carbuerettor. There are now legal limits for emissions which cannot be met by a purely mechanical system.
Regarding your paper archives, one dropped match and the whole damn lot is gone. Much of our knowledge of the "Ancient World" was lost in the fire of the Library of Alexandria. Paper is also vulnerable to damage from water, humidity (too much or too little), skin acids, microorganisms, etc. Digital backups are not so vulnerable, and in any case contain error correction mechanisms to improve the chances of getting stuff back.
You may need to reburn a CD every 5 years or so to ensure the data isn't lost (CDs do degrade over time) but that is not a great hardship. The mechanisms for long-term archiving of digital data are pretty well established. And if you're burning 1 CD, you might as well burn a dozen and store them at physically separate locations to give guaranteed backup capabilities. With a warehouse full of paper, this will never be possible. I suggest you look at the number of firms which have been put out of business by not having offsite backups to retrieve their data after a disaster such as a fire. OK, a city can't go out of business, but it'll screw the whole system over pretty dramatically.
There's no great secret to controlling an engine, so I don't see the point. If we want to think about this in computer terms, the engine controller is comparable to a text editor. Everyone knows what they do, there's a standard file format, no surprises. You don't like one, or the person maintaining it gives up, you use another one.
For some time now, you have been able to buy generic engine controllers which just need calibrating to work with your car's engine (I know, I work for a company who makes them). These aftermarket ones used to be pretty dumb - time, emissions legislation and cheaper microcontrollers have made a big difference to this now though. In fact, it's not inconceivable that an aftermarket one would give better performance/economy/emissions than the old one, by having more accurate calculation, better modelling of engine behaviour, etc.
Maybe there's someone who's desperate to use only original equipment, who will insist on using an engine controller with a dodgy old 8-bit micro when the cheapest Ford is coming off the production line with a 32-bit micro. I don't see the point in it myself. The engine controller doesn't change the character of the car (if calibrated to give a similar response to the old one), so replacing it shouldn't be an issue.
Round here we get a bonus of 1 week salary at Xmas. That's fine by me.
If your engineers have been pulling long hours, you may want to boost that to reflect that they're working above and beyond. Better to make the latter kind of bonus contingent on release dates though, so it's obvious that it's targetted at completing work to time and quality, rather than just an Xmas thing.
Don't suck too much cash out of the company though. Employees would rather have less bonus and keep their jobs, than get high bonuses but get fired at the next downturn!
Slashdot Mirror
Hmm, maybe worth reading then.
On the "never written a bad book" front, I have to say that I found "The Handmaid's Tale" to be a bit of a misanthropic rant without much to recommend it - the "keen insights" are trite repetitions of stereotypes. That's why I was quite surprised by the comment in the main review, "Atwood's writing doesn't take itself too seriously". THT was so leaden, I'm surprised it didn't bust my bookshelf!
Off-topic - I have to say that THT isn't science fiction, in the same way as 1984 isn't science fiction. For some reason, any novel set in the future is automatically labelled "science fiction", regardless of the actual content. Ho hum.
Grab.
That's a good point - I'd not thought about crops. Mind you, Rohan was the same. I think this is more a limitation of what you can do in a New Zealand National Park than in a computer, though. ;-)
From memory, I think Tolkein describes it as a plain as well. Maybe there should have been some cows or sheep around, but if the people knew about it then they would have brought them inside the walls. Dunno, I'm clutching at straws. Anyway, I obviously wasn't thinking about the city's infrastructure when I saw it - I was far more taken in with the "wow" element!
Grab.
Depends. Sometimes it's expensive eye-candy, but sometimes it's the only way to do otherwise-impossible stuff.
;-)
RotK couldn't create the effect of huge armies meeting, if they didn't have huge armies. No-one these days can afford to hire thousands of extras like in the "old days" of Spartacus, so they hit the computers. And even in the "old days", the zillions of people on set was a "special effect" for the time, bcos it was something no-one had seen before.
I won't disagree that there's a time and a place for it, and you certainly don't need it everywhere. I've seen some really egregious use of F/X in films, where they would have been much better off hiring a scriptwriter.
Some films are just there for the F/X and nothing else, though - there's no content. I think audiences are getting wise to that now and are staying away, which is why films like Daredevil and Hulk bombed so badly, why Matrix fizzled (they may have made their money back on 2, but 3 will probably have lost money), and why I strongly suspect the next edition of Star Wars won't go far either. If the film industry releases a load of high-budget copy-cats which suck, then shame on those who go and see them, and thereby prop up a lousy system. If people stay away, the industry *will* get the message (by Darwinism if nothing else, since studios go bust from bad investments like that).
Grab.
Sure, the enemy formations were rectangular. I think that was intentional though, rather than a limit of the technology or design. If you noticed the Rohan cavalry charge, the structure was curving with three points, following the three leaders (Theoden, Eomer, Gamling) in the charge. The orcs stand in nice pretty squares when they're winning, but when they start losing (ie. when the cavalry hits them) then their lines disintegrate.
Also cross-reference to the Isengard scene of Saruman addressing his army (Two Towers), which was straight out of the Nuremburg Rally. To me, it makes the point that it's only the bad guys who need strict discipline to hold the army together - the good guys know what they're fighting for.
Maybe I'm less fussy, but the city never looked unrealistic to me. I think having soldiers everywhere gave it the scale. And as for the fields - it's *supposed* to be a plain. It wasn't unrealistically sterile either - variations in colour and height across it. It just looked like a large expanse of flatlands. For what a *bad* bit of landscape looks like, check out Phantom Menace and the Gungans vs Droid Army battle, which looks like it's being fought on a bowling green.
Grab.
First off, if human life is so sacred, there sure are a whole lot of really *horrible* diseases trying to take it away. And to make it worse, there are genetic conditions which basically mean you're born to die in pain, or destined for total paralysis, or whatever. Sacred? Yeah right.
Second off, we're not talking a human being here. We're talking embryos. This is a collection of cells which certainly could, under the right circumstances, grow into a human being. At that point though they are just another bundle of cells. In case you think that even a "potential human being" has a "right to life", think again: most embryos miscarry in the first days of pregnancy without implanting in the womb, and this is unnoticed by the mother because it happens as part of a normal period. If you believe that creation of life through pregnancy is designed by God, you must also accept that an embryo has no value until it is implanted in the womb, because that's the way God has explicitly designed it.
I won't even get into IVF and other techniques designed to allow infertile men/women to have children - presumably this is evil bcos God ordained that those people shall not have children?
Grab.
Trouble is that ppl only generally contribute to open-source if it's something they specifically want. Every PC needs an OS, so the number of people who would consider working on an OS project is massive, because everyone wants a stable, powerful, non-crufty OS. Great.
Trouble is that the market for video editting is pretty damn small. Maybe it'll get larger now that digital video cameras are more popular, and normal digital cameras (and even mobile phones) can take movies. But it's still very much a niche thing, so there simply won't be the number of ppl working on it. That'll affect how stable, useable and featureful any software is. Maybe some company will get generous and donate some of their engineers' time to it, but you can't assume that.
Grab.
Dead right - glad someone else gets annoyed by assholes who can't speak their own language.
;-)
"Regardless" = "without regard to"
So I suppose "irregardless" would be "with regard to"? Who knows? And more to the point, which asshole came up with that corruption of the word in the first place, bcos they deserve to be killed with a sharpened dictionary!
Grab.
I can't remember if it's a Spiel des Jahres, but the card game "Citadels" is very good. Rules are simple, there's a lot of strategy involved (you can be nasty if you want to :-) and a bit of luck, and you can have up to 9 people playing it.
As far as traditional games go, I *love* Mah-Jongg. (No, I *don't* mean the computer version where you match tiles!) If you can play Rummy, then Mah-Jongg is very similar. There's also something very tactilely appealing about using chunky tiles instead of cards.
Grab.
Slightly OT, but that's one nice thing about a decent digi-camera. If you get one that allows you to twiddle everything (rather than the boring auto-everything ones), you can experiment with changing stuff like ISO, aperture, etc and see instantly what the effect is. If you mess up the settings, you can try again. With film, your only option to start with is to fire off a lot of film at all the different settings, noting down carefully what settings you used at each point, and see what the results are when you get the film back 2 weeks later. (I'm assuming a beginner isn't going to have a full darkroom setup ;-)
;-)
Frankly though, I'm not sure why *anyone* would want to buy a 35mm camera right now. The great advantage of a 35mm camera over a digi-camera is that good photographers using high-quality film can take better quality photos. A beginner with a 35mm camera (and probably cheaper film for experimenting with) is going to take average-quality photos for some time. But the high-end digi-cameras now (10MP) are finally better than any film. They're vastly expensive of course, but then 2 years ago you'd be talking the same price for a 4MP camera and they're down to 300 or less now. Give it another two years and digital will be wiping the floor with film (it's already happened to the "point-and-click" type camera). By the time this hypothetical beginner gets the hang of it, his gear is going to be as obsolete as a 78 record.
(flame on...
Grab.
When you work it out, I suggest you tell Microsoft so they can use this for keeping track of when to renew their Hotmail domain names...
Grab.
Trouble is that once the cells have mutated to become cancerous, you can't (so far as anyone knows) change them back again. Nor would you want to, because you'd still have a large growth at that point, even if it was no longer expanding. The *only* solution is to break down the cancer in some way. Surgery does this by physical removal, other methods do this by killing the cancer in situ and allowing the body to clean up the remains. Actually the success rates are pretty damn good if you catch the tumour early, and are improving all the time. Your post suggests that you fundamentally disagree with the "kill the tumour" strategy, which I don't understand - is shooting down a missile with a laser also "stone-age" because it's comparable to throwing a stone at a bird?
Cells naturally turn cancerous for the simple reason of mutation due to incorrect DNA reproduction, which seems to be a fundamental feature of all multicellular organisms. Preventing this would be a hell of a job - either you need to genetically engineer a human that *can* reproduce DNA 100% correctly, or you need to insert some kind of nanosites into your body to check every cell and kill the ones that don't match. The former will *never* happen, because public opinion wouldn't allow it. The latter might eventually be technically possible, but (a) it'll fall over on cases like chimerism, and (b) it involves injecting more exotic crap into your body which ain't necessarily a great idea. There may be an option (c) but it doesn't seem to be around yet.
Grab.
Quick review - back in 1969, three guys landed on the Moon. They had the same escape velocity that a Mars mission would, and they had *no* aerobraking. Flipping the ship round and using the main rocket for braking worked just fine, and no Apollo mission crashed on landing. On the plus side, gravity was a lot less, but the main problem here seems to be the approach speed rather than gravity. So maybe the issue is the solution chosen, not the mission itself.
Re aerobraking, there's no law that says you have to touch down in minutes. If you want to be cost-effective, you swing round the atmosphere for a few months until your speed is reduced. If you want to be time-effective, you retain a load of fuel after launch so that you can land directly.
The further problem is that this gear is dumb, so even a minor problem like a loose bolt isn't fixable. Ironically, although a manned mission would be significantly more expensive, its chances of success are much greater because humans can adapt. A manned mission would need a closed environment with full recycling over that time period, so an extra month or two up there waiting for the ship to slow down is not a big deal.
Grab.
"Follow what you think is best" has unfortunately led to the many crap sites out there. As you say though, that advice (NOT rules!) isn't written in stone. The better moral is "follow what gives a more useable solution".
;-)
The only reason for having so-called "rules" like that is that: (a) graphic designers will tend to produce something which looks stunning but is utterly unuseable; (b) software designers will tend to produce something which enables you to get anywhere instantly, but only if you know precisely where in the site to click from months of experience of using the site; (c) focus groups will suggest stuff which improves useability but generally won't be technically possible or visually appealing; and (d) managers will never be able to choose between the possibilities without some kind of hand-holding. Call me cynical...
Grab.
Depends. You don't have a backup winder on your electric windows, do you?
:-)
The point of this system was that fail-safe was doors-closed. Makes sense if you think that this is designed to protect presidents and stuff - you don't want all the doors to pop open the moment the battery is disconnected (by the terrorists who've just surrounded the car and killed the security detail). If there's a mechanical means to unlock the doors from the outside, that's a weak point security-wise. I agree though that a mechanical means to unlock from the *inside* would be a good thing in hindsight!
Re imperfect electronics, mechanical systems go wrong with far greater frequency than electrical systems. If the article said "consumer locked in (or out of) car because mechanical door lock failed" then it wouldn't get a second glance. Our company was prepping a demonstration Jaguar when the door lock failed because a valeter slammed the door too hard! The only reason people trust mechanical systems more is because it's easier for them to understand.
Grab.
Ahem. Your fuel injections system and engine timing aren't being so much as breathed on by MS software, if you'll read the article. Nor could they be, since WinCE isn't designed for hard real-time control and requires significantly more processing power and memory than that found in a car engine controller.
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But today, you may have a new version of Encarta each year. Job done, and it'll only take 1 foot of bookshelf space for the CDs! I don't see why the web is referred to as the standard for information, when the web is just the front end into a zillion version-controlled databases of articles, all archived to way back when. Archiving data onto CD or onto hard drive combines the best of both worlds - information stored forever in a convenient format.
(OK, CDs die over time. But archiving in a RAID disk system would be robust to failure of drives, and would allow any upgrades for as long into the future as you want. And if RAID ever becomes obsolete, you can simply transfer the data to your next robust backup system, since it's all in a convenient format already.)
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They chose not to, but it took all their will-power to do it. Gandalf even says "Don't offer it to me, I'm not strong enough to refuse it" or words to that effect - generally he acts like Frodo has just prodded him with a red-hot poker. Gandalf and Galadriel are two of the most powerfully magical people in Middle Earth, and they had a seriously hard time refusing it. And the Council of Elrond gets pretty damn stirred up about it too.
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You've not seen the many, many Vietnam films then which show the Americans winning? And the recent game Vietcong involves the Americans winning as well.
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a) Sure, but the reason the Germans abandoned it was public pressure, not technical.
b) Er, fast-breeder reactors? The "thousands of years" waste is plutonium, which can be used as fuel. Other stuff has shorter half-lives, making storage easier. Vitrification is also good. The major problem is not how to store it, it's that no-one is prepared to have it anywhere near them, no matter how good the solution is.
c) A good reason why not to have electricity companies the American way, as if you needed another after Enron and the blackout.
d) With the nuclear plant here, it will do naff all. And even your bog-standard version, the plane will likely bounce off the dome. In fact, these days just hijacking a plane would be quite a feat - in fact it was always quite a feat in every country except the US where security was a joke. (Incidentally, maybe I'm callous, but my amazement at 9/11 was not that the terrorists tried it, but that on three of the four planes they managed it without anyone trying to fight them.) And if you want to be worried about terrorists hijacking planes, I suggest you be more concerned about chemical factories, oil refineries and drilling rigs, all of which are utterly unprotected.
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It certainly is. I spent a significant fraction of my childhood sailing in an estuary on the Irish Sea. But what worried me was: untreated sewage; Weil's disease; ICI, Unilever and other heavy industry; waste dumped by ships; and oil spills. Waste water from nuclear plants only becomes a significant danger when assholes from Greenpeace decide to block the pipelines and the plant can't get rid of the waste water - at that point, the people at the plant find out how good their safety measures are!
FYI, the reason why fish from the Irish Sea (especially shellfish) are not good news is simply that they accumulate heavy metals like cadmium and mercury. This comes from the chemical industry, not the nuclear industry. You're jumping up and down about the right thing, but you're blaming the wrong people, man - try the factories in St Helens, Birkenhead, Runcorn, etc.
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For head-removal-from arse, I suggest you think about data CDs for a minute more (which may be 59 seconds longer than you originally did). If I was suggesting archiving to some proprietary format like a ZipDisk, then fair enough. But this is a CD-R.
The CD data format is is a published ISO standard, and the interface to a CD drive is also a published standard. The only "proprietary hardware" is in the implementation of those standards, to transfer data off the (standard) CD and across the (standard) electrical/data drive interface, and in the motherboard to support this.
Whether all OSes will continue to support them is certainly unknown, but every OS today supports them, including all variants of Unix. For damn sure I can find you a non-proprietary OS that supports it. And if you'd like to bet that Unix variants won't survive for a few years, I'll take your money any time you like.
As an incidental effect of this, you will now have all your data in a digital format as well. If CDs are obsolete in 10 years time, it's all just data so you can decide on a new storage format and copy every bit of archived data to that new storage format.
As opposed to storing on paper, where you just put in a no-smoking policy and hope for the best (hope that the roof doesn't leak, you don't get rats/mice in the archive area, wiring doesn't short and create an electrical fire, someone reading a page doesn't accidentally spill coffee on it, etc). As a long-term storage medium, paper is not a solution. The Egyptians thought it was, which is why we now know very little about their civilisation, because all the data has rotted away.
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Forget dying, one of them was surfing on a shield! That's got to be somewhere on the "gratuitous use of effects" deathlist.
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maybe it should be 'should cars have software based controls in the first place?' Not just cars, but lots of things.
Answer: yes, if you want the emissions, performance and fuel economy required for modern vehicles. It is impossible (not just difficult, literally impossible) to meet all three of these using a mechanical system, which is the reason no new car for 10 years has used a carbuerettor. There are now legal limits for emissions which cannot be met by a purely mechanical system.
Regarding your paper archives, one dropped match and the whole damn lot is gone. Much of our knowledge of the "Ancient World" was lost in the fire of the Library of Alexandria. Paper is also vulnerable to damage from water, humidity (too much or too little), skin acids, microorganisms, etc. Digital backups are not so vulnerable, and in any case contain error correction mechanisms to improve the chances of getting stuff back.
You may need to reburn a CD every 5 years or so to ensure the data isn't lost (CDs do degrade over time) but that is not a great hardship. The mechanisms for long-term archiving of digital data are pretty well established. And if you're burning 1 CD, you might as well burn a dozen and store them at physically separate locations to give guaranteed backup capabilities. With a warehouse full of paper, this will never be possible. I suggest you look at the number of firms which have been put out of business by not having offsite backups to retrieve their data after a disaster such as a fire. OK, a city can't go out of business, but it'll screw the whole system over pretty dramatically.
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There's no great secret to controlling an engine, so I don't see the point. If we want to think about this in computer terms, the engine controller is comparable to a text editor. Everyone knows what they do, there's a standard file format, no surprises. You don't like one, or the person maintaining it gives up, you use another one.
For some time now, you have been able to buy generic engine controllers which just need calibrating to work with your car's engine (I know, I work for a company who makes them). These aftermarket ones used to be pretty dumb - time, emissions legislation and cheaper microcontrollers have made a big difference to this now though. In fact, it's not inconceivable that an aftermarket one would give better performance/economy/emissions than the old one, by having more accurate calculation, better modelling of engine behaviour, etc.
Maybe there's someone who's desperate to use only original equipment, who will insist on using an engine controller with a dodgy old 8-bit micro when the cheapest Ford is coming off the production line with a 32-bit micro. I don't see the point in it myself. The engine controller doesn't change the character of the car (if calibrated to give a similar response to the old one), so replacing it shouldn't be an issue.
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Round here we get a bonus of 1 week salary at Xmas. That's fine by me.
If your engineers have been pulling long hours, you may want to boost that to reflect that they're working above and beyond. Better to make the latter kind of bonus contingent on release dates though, so it's obvious that it's targetted at completing work to time and quality, rather than just an Xmas thing.
Don't suck too much cash out of the company though. Employees would rather have less bonus and keep their jobs, than get high bonuses but get fired at the next downturn!
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