RJ, respect dude. I've got a couple of mates who may be up for the next series, now we just need to get some serious welding practice in.
But an "Americanised version"?!?!??!? The mind boggles! I can appreciate changing the title to fit American terminology, but how do you Americanise the rest of it? Does everyone have their voice dubbed over then with American actors?
If so, this seems a supreme act of arrogance from the producers. "Hell guys, no-one'll watch this if they reckon it's just a bunch of faggot limeys. Let's wipe 'em over with some good ol' boy accents. But leave the chick - she doesn't do much 'cept eye-candy, so she can stay." Correct me if I'm wrong, but...
*agree* on the flamebait poster. I wouldn't have the first idea about biology stuff like cancer research, but I can do the software just fine. So I'll spend my life doing software, thanks all the same. And who says it's not valuable? In 20 years time, when they give you your prosthetic legs to replace the ones you lost in a road accident, be glad they were doing this research!
But as for the "what happens when..?" question above, the answer is: we adapt. The implication is that we need to consider how it's going to affect us b4 we develop it. But we can't, and shouldn't, let that hold up developments which will improve the lives of everyone. The lobby groups were out in force when the car was invented - they reckoned it would spell the end of horses and everyone involved in that. And it did... but that doesn't mean we should have reconsidered allowing cars to be developed.
And BTW, the original cars were merely expensive, unreliable and slow toys. It took a couple of decades from the first working example b4 they were as fast as a horse, and another couple of decades b4 they were as affordable as a horse. And it took several years of work to get that first example working. Compare and contrast to the first human-size walking robot, which took several years to get working, and is still a slow, expensive toy...
Yeah, this is _seriously_ old news on the display front. Whilst it's a funky trick, the optics are nothing new. It doesn't even look like they've improved it from the basic "hovering coin" trick costing $1 in a toy shop - the object being projected is just concealed in the base. The buttons that you press will actually exist, full-size, in the base.
If they ever got this to work with electronic displays then I'd be impressed. But as it is, all they've done is taken a very old bit of optics and added a laser grid to detect your finger breaking a beam. If you've never seen this done b4, you'll think it's impressive. But if you've ever been to a school science display, chances are you've seen this.
So you're not going to have a true 3-D display anytime soon. What they're demonstrating has no use at all for displaying from a computer, since all it can do is project an image of an existing solid object. Sorry.
Hell no. If you want to post your own site under a com/net/org, then feel free. I don't give a damn about that - everything needs somewhere where "anything goes". Just don't expect it to be as easy to find stuff as in a well-documented indexed system.
But if you want to create a ".kids" site, then someone will check that your site is suitable for kids. It's your choice whether you want it to be a ".kids" site or not - that's completely voluntary - but if you do want a ".kids" site then someone will check it, so that you don't get goatse.cx.kids sites.
If you like, have further categorisation into ".young.kids", ".older.kids", ".teen.kids". Or as part of the ".kids" process, get the site-checker to produce a "suggested rating" (eg. PG-13). I don't see anyone complaining about stopping kids watching splatter-movies, so why should we complain about checking what they see on their computer? I'm not a whacko suggesting that it'll twist young and innocent minds so they'll turn into serial killers, but take an example of a site showing snuff pix - that kind of stuff you don't want kids seeing, cos it'll give them nightmares and screw them up for some time to come. Computer games are fine - we all know they're just fancy cartoons - but real-world pix of real-world horrors is not something to face kids with. And trying to explain bestiality to your kid is not a job I'd like to have, either!
"Hat trick" comes from much earlier than ice hockey - it's been used for football ("soccer" for Americans) for ages. But yes, it's always for doing 3 things.
Think of the Internet as a big bookshop. Now I don't know about your local bookshop (maybe you've only ever used Amazon), but my local one has books sorted into shelves about different subjects, so if I want something I know where to start looking, and it helps me find related stuff. In addition, there's sections dedicated to kids stuff only, and usually a section of adult books/magazines too. To stop kids getting at the adult stuff, it's placed on a high shelf out of their reach/line-of-sight. Is this starting to sound very close to the new TLDs?
It's not about censorship, it's about usability. Bear in mind that every search engine can "censor" you, wouldn't you rather have a domain setup where you can find stuff easier? Refining the TLDs is the start of that - hopefully we'll see it get more detailed after that, maybe with a 4-level domain structure or something. We'll still have a huge amount of data, and we'll still have a hell of a job finding stuff, but having somewhere definite to start looking would be a big help. As it is, you often have to pick a high-rating option from Google and then start working through links pages to find the more obscure things.
Censorship may be what stops ppl in Afghanistan from expressing their thoughts, but it's also what stops me from posting animal s3x pix all round my town centre. If you think it's a Bad Thing that I'm prevented from doing that, it's not worth the effort continuing.
Even filtering software, the real censorship stuff on the net, isn't a bad thing. It's a bad implementation, certainly, but as a concept I'd say stopping young kids from getting onto pr0n sites ain't a bad intention - I doubt even PeaceFire would complain about that. The problem comes when you prevent adults from accessing what they choose - an adult has the right to do what they want in the privacy of their own home, so filtering everyone is right out. But to try and stop kids from getting to some of the more "differently-inclined" (aka "WTF are they doing?!?!":-) isn't in itself bad.
*grin* One of the best trash films recently, following in the fine footsteps of the great B movies. If we talk about movies being a star vehicle, then 5th Element was definitely a Jean-Paul Gaultier vehicle - more high camp than an expedition up Everest...
Er, no. Think of electricity and the internal combustion engine? Electricity is used extensively for torture, motors drive tanks. And first-world countries would starve, freeze and die without both of those. Just as a couple of examples.
If you work in the defence industry, or with military funding, then maybe you might want to look at the uses of stuff. I hope the guy who invented napalm has that on his conscience for ever - if there's no obvious other use of your stuff except to kill painfully, then that's not something I could do. But if you had to second-guess everything, there'd be nothing left.
And think on: mil-tech isn't necessarily evil. GPS and the Internet are both military projects; GPS is still funded exclusively by the US military. The jet technology developed for fighters in the 40s and 50s drives the jumbo jet that takes you on holiday.
And there's other stuff too - how's about medicine? The range of "truth drugs" out there have medical uses, and their "truth drug" properties are an accidental side-effect. The original, scopolamine, is a sedative and is also used in small quantities to combat motion sickness.
What's likely to trip us is something we'd never think of. In films, think T2 - a computer becoming sentient and enslaving mankind is not something a geek thinks about when he's working on his latest chip design ("It's not every day you learn you're responsible for the deaths of 6 million people.") Robert Heinlein once wrote, "In the early 1900s, most futurists agreed the car would serve a purpose. Some saw that it would replace the horse. But none of them foresaw the change in mating habits of the American teenager which it caused." Would you have predicted 20 years back that the Internet would reach such a mainstream audience, given the average population of BBSes and their speed and reliability (or lack of)?
Anyone who claims to be able to spot all future uses of something is lying - it just isn't possible. Futurists are no more accurate than weather forecasters - once something's happening, they may (if they're lucky) be able to tell you with a reasonable chance of success which direction it's going to go in and how fast, but there's no way to predict anything new starting, and there's no way of knowing whether the butterfly you've just seen flap its wings is going to cause the next cyclone.
Classically, science fiction is split into 2 camps. There's the real-world variety (Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc) which is true science fiction (sometimes called "hard" science fiction), and then there's the fantasy variety - Star Wars, Buck Rogers, etc. The fantasy variety is known as "space opera".
Each must be internally consistent. Hard science fiction requires that things follow the laws of physics we know (or at least that it looks like that). If spaceships make noise as they go past, or objects in space slow down from friction, then you're screwed. The film of 2001 became impenetrable by introducing the flashy graphics display, which you only understood what he was trying to show if you'd read the book, since it emphatically DIDN'T follow our known science (being alien technology).
Space opera on the other hand can have its universe run on any set of rules you care to choose, but you have to stay consistent to those rules. Had Luke Skywalker suddenly been able to shoot fireballs at Darth Vader, that's not something any Jedi has been seen doing, so it breaks the rules (unless of course he's some kind of "new breed", in which case that's an essential plot feature). Incidentally, are episodes 2 and 3 going to explain how the Emperor gets to do this? cos that was dodgy in RotJ.
The problem is the overlap. Concepts like "the physics of Star Trek" miss the point, which is to get the crew in a pressure situation then get them to dig themselves out through what looks like ingenuity. It's all complete rubbish ("So if we set up a positive feedback positronic hyperdimensional wave" or shit like that), but it's fantasy and we accept that it's possible. The problem comes when the writer/director tries to inject real world into it. The 2 classic examples here are Phantom Menace's "Jedi cooties" and the Matrix's "human Duracells". Star Wars had managed 3 episodes with the Force as a universal field surrounding everything, and that worked, but suddenly Lucas tries to say what causes it, and the suspension of disbelief breaks down bcos he's not being internally consistent (... and cos it's a crap idea in the first place, but anyway). The human Duracell is a nice image, but it's real-world intruding again - energy processing just doesn't work that way. Suppose (as an example I've just thought up) the Matrix had said, "the humans are actually part of the computer - the real world is just a screensaver to keep the brain occupied while the computer uses each brain's processing power for its own purposes, after it was found that pure processing-only with sensory deprivation causes people to become psychotic and corrupts the computing process". Now that's consistent with what we know about the brain, it gives the computer a reason to supply a meta-world to people, and best of all it doesn't attempt to explain HOW the computer does it.
Any time a film pulls something out of it's ass just to fill a plot-hole, it's failed. I can think of 5 places where Phantom Menace did this without even trying (and I only saw it once). Matrix was a kick-ass film, but that human battery bit interfered with my enjoyment of it. Trekkies have slated Voyager for the "magical photon torpedo generator" - if you notice these things, it'll bug you. If a script-writer, director, continuity man and a team of actors between them don't notice this, they deserve to have their films crash and burn.
Someone has to look after a child. For most ppl, they'd rather keep this in the family, so it's either the husband or the wife who does it. Granted, the woman can breast-feed, but many women these days would rather not, so that evens things up.
The problem is that whilst the feminists were (rightly) campaigning for equality, they didn't think that someone would have to stay at home to look after the kids. This came down the education system, and our generation is the product of that theory. So suddenly we've got a generation of males AND females who don't have the education to look after children. Don't forget that the previous "cultural conditioning" included informal teaching in how to look after kids, cook, keep house, and so on.
If we want equality, allow men to stay at home. The problem here is that the house-husband is only ever (even by feminists) portrayed as a figure of fun, a down-trodden henpecked wimp, so that's not exactly appealing! Although housewives may have had a raw deal in the opportunity stakes, they had a known position in society, and wouldn't be mocked for being in that position.
And another problem is the skills. Schools need (MUST!) have classes for both sexes on home economics and childcare - if the boys can't cook, how can they look after the children?
Personally, I'd be quite happy to look after any children myself and my wife have, and continue my electronics and software as a hobby at home. If my wife was earning more than I was and/or was in a rewarding career at the time, I'd be quite prepared to jack it in. If anyone's married and doesn't feel the same way, frankly you don't deserve to be married - you just want a servant, not a wife as an equal.
Uradu, the resentment that housewives have felt is not due to what they're doing, it's simply bcos they were pressured into it instead of taking it on voluntarily. If we have a choice - and we do now - then there's no reason to resent it.
Cheers for the reply Mark, and good luck with the project. I was curious about the reply on design documentation:-
"Of course, I see no reason to force it on individual programmers. It's something managers should do, themselves."
Yes, the interface must be well-designed, and this can be done at the management stage. But having a readme (or something) to explain obscure elements of the design isn't too surprising an example.
Consider a buffering I/O system. This may have to split its operation over several concurrent tasks, and to define this merely by the overall requirement of "it must do this", and the I/O interface seems to be too high a level. At the very least have a readme or extensive commenting to say what bits are going in what function, and how the functions interact.
Incidentally, for C coders out there, there's an organisation called MISRA which produces standards for safety-related code (specifically for automotive), so they know a bit about getting rid of errors. One of their documents gives a list of rules to follow for defensive programming, which tries to stop silly errors like typos from getting in the way of a working design (as an example, anyone else howled when they spotted an "=" instead of a "=="? well use "if(CONST==variable)" instead of "if(variable==CONST)" and the compiler will always pick up the error). Granted, most of the guidelines are more applicable to embedded development, but I think there's still lessons to learn from that for general coding.
The difference is that crashes of a computer program cause more irritation and dents in pride than anything else, whereas failure of an aircraft engine controller is life-threatening and can't be tolerated. I'd be interested to know how well the safety-related embedded programming and computer science/desktop fields are talking together, whether they're reinventing the wheel, how much overlap there is between methods, and which bits are more relevant to one than the other. I do know that softies and sparkies don't talk as much as they should do!
Yes, missiles do go off-target. Some stuff does have errors in it. But not "all the time" - the examples above (the embassy bombing, friendly fire, etc) are all examples of user error. This is akin to blaming Word bcos you've made a spelling mistake!;-) All this technology is only ever as good as "the people using it", and in this case the technology is performing precisely as required.
The obvious conclusion to draw is not that the technology is faulty, but that the operators are. Therefore what we want is not less tech, but _more_. Eliminate the fallible pilot/bomb aimer/navigator, and install a computer which will never hit a "friendly" target. Give it full authority to fire at what it likes, so long as it's the enemy (or so long as it thinks it's the enemy). Program it with "forbidden" targets (like embassies) and examples of "civilian" targets (like tractors). Then set it loose, and wait for the fireworks.
I'm not recommending this at all - the idea of a full-authority automaton in charge of a fighter plane is very worrying! - but it seems the more logical conclusion to draw. "The missile hit the target it was told to, but the target was actually a friendly, therefore it's a failure of the missile" seems a strange conclusion.
Having said all this, though, I've not read the book - I'm only going through the filter of Jon Katz's review. You may have another sale come Xmas, if only to get the full story!:-)
I've yet to see anything that says how long it has to be to pick up enough light. If it's short, then great. If it's 1m or so, it's hardly practical as a screen or goggles!
I've a feeling that this may also be fundamentally limited by the amount of light around. 30 x 0 is still 0, so for night work, you may need some more severe amplification.
I see the point of the person who modded this up as funny. The American system of public service is rather a classic example to the world of how _not_ to do it.
Hey guys, let's stop folks leaving to start their own businesses! They're too afraid of losing their medical insurance benefits, and couldn't guarantee to pay for any major illness/injury to themselves or their family if they were self-employed. Hell yes, why not? We don't need free enterprise, after all.
How's about making your quality of medical care dependent on your income? Sounds neat - no-one unemployed really needs a hip replacement, do they? Or cancer treatment. Let the cheap bastards die!
Anyone fancy making your right to a fair trial dependent on your income? Sure thing - you wouldn't be a crook, a murderer or a rapist if you were rich or came from a rich family, would you? It's only poor folks who do that. And if the victim is poor, they're obviously lying anyway.
I just hope you were trolling there. If you were serious, it's too scarey for words...
One of my pet peeves is lack of design, documentation, commenting and testing. I'd appreciate your views on how much you believe these are necessary. Do you design before you code, or do you just dive in? Do you like to provide loads of support documentation for users and co-workers, or are you of the "the-code-is-my-documentation" school?
More importantly, how do you enforce any such standard on your project, given that you've got other people submitting you code patches which may be technically perfect but visually obfuscated? And has this caused any friction, since managing coders is a "herding cats" scenario, and criticising someone's coding style is often taken very personally?
I've not read the book, only the review, so take this into account. However...
Poole says that pixels lie. He's obviously a pundit, not a real technical person, then, or he'd know that pixels rarely, if at all, lie. What lies is either the person who fed the data in, or the person who programmed it. Let's look at examples:-
1) Bombing of the embassy: purely due to a cockup by the CIA, no technical involvement at all.
2) Bombing of civilian convoys: purely due to a failure of the Mk.I human eyeball on the part of the pilot. He'd been told there were armoured columns in the area, he saw what he thought was one, he hit it. No technical involvement; in fact, it was technical expertise that enabled the target to be taken out effectively. The fact that the target was a group of unarmed civilians is reprehensible, but doesn't change the fact that the technology worked as specified.
3) Friendly fire in the Gulf: purely due to the troops in the personnel carrier removing the identifying panels from their vehicle. Had they kept them on, they would not have been attacked by the pilot who shot them. The technology did a perfect job of targeting the vehicle.
So Poole hasn't many legs to stand on with this. The moral of the story: it's PEOPLE who screw up. The technology is designed to be as near to failure-proof as possible, for the very reason that if things go wrong, your soldiers may be killed. What it can't protect against is human error, or human incompetance.
Maybe there's a bug in the code though, I hear ppl suggest? Well most of the ppl here who do programming will likely just be dealing with non-embedded and/or non-critical stuff - Linux, Windows, databases, GUIs, etc. Once you get into embedded safety-critical stuff, there's responsibilities on you to work to standards which ensure safety and prevent bugs by thorough review of the design, review of the code, and even review of the tests to ensure that you're testing all conceivable failure modes.
There are many well-publicised software failures, such as Airbus, the Mars lander, etc. All these are caused by a failure to test properly. In the case of the Mars lander, a very simple integration test would have caught that bug. Obviously they tested each part in isolation, but never tested it all together. This is negligence, plain and simple, and avoiding these problems is the task of the current generation of software engineers. It's not even like the problems aren't well publicised (Len Hutton's been writing about them for years), it's just that there's an arrogance about programmers to assume that they don't need to test bcos they're "3133t" or whatever. Bullshit - you're fallible. Learn that and live with it, bcos if you don't, you'll never grow up, and eventually you'll cause some major problem by assuming you're God and can't fail. If the same software integrity had been used for Windows, there'd be no need for Linux cos there'd already be a strong, reliable OS, and then we'd not be bashing MS today.
WARNING! This is a hardware project. Do NOT attempt it if you don't know at least a little electronics. This isn't trolling, it's straightforward common sense. Would you advise someone to go kernel-hacking if they didn't even know what a computer was? If you can't navigate a soldering iron and don't know what a resistor is, you really need more electronics skills, so practice on something simpler (and cheaper!) first.
A Berg connector - I don't know, but there's all sorts of connectors named after their manufacturers/designers/specifiers.
A threaded spacer - a metal or plastic post, with a threaded hole at each end so you can put a screw in to bolt it onto something. The idea is you use these to stand a PCB off from the case, or similar uses.
How to program it? Well, you learn the language these chips use, and write your program in it. Then you download the program to the chip's EPROM memory to program it, and once the program's in the EPROM, it stays there. There's programmers available (or you can build one) which pull certain pins up to certain voltages to activate programming mode.
EPROM can only be erased by UV light. EEPROM and Flash can be erased by special commands on the programming port. So they're semi-permanent memory. This is known as "firmware", ie. it stays around, but you can erase it and reprogram it if you want.
The NERDS! Saw you guys the other week on Scrapheap. You'll have to learn if you come over here again - Britain's a nation of amateurs. If you get it right, and win bcos of that, it's just not sporting. Not cricket at all, old chap!;-) Of course, the opposite school of thought says, if the other guys can't get it right then hammer the buggers into the ground and stomp on them.
There's a few of us giving serious consideration to entering a Scrapheap team. Of course, we're going to need some practice welding b4 we do. Or we could get more duct tape instead.
I quit my last job bcos I didn't think it was going anywhere. It wasn't a very big company in itself, but it was a part of a very large corporation and as such had some real inertia to improvement and change, and some really bad corporate decisions coming down the tree.
Typical duff decisions, and I assure you these are all true:-
1) To start with, in spite of the fact that we all had PCs, all had WordPerfect (the company standard word-processor) and were mostly pretty fast on the keys, all specs had to be written in draft form and then given to the typists to retype into a template.
2) Eventually this stopped, and we were allowed to use WordPerfect for generating documents. However, storage (and retrieval and reprinting) of documents was paper hardcopies in filing cabinets, plus microfiches for archiving.
3) At some point, the notion of electronic storage hit management. But instead of keeping the electronic version of the document (at maybe 50-100K), they decided to print the document and then scan it in at 50dpi, single-bit! Text was just about readable, but diagrams were hosed, and the documents took up many times the space the would have done otherwise. Incidentally, they didn't (AFAIK) zip them up to reduce storage space either.
4) We stayed with WordPerfect. Of course we kept the DOS character-based version and didn't move to the WYSIWYG version, so all new hires cursed it and we couldn't read a lot of customers' documents. Eventually the global decision was taken to change to Word 6, so we did, breathed a sigh of relief, and then found that no-one had thought to upgrade the document templates, so we couldn't write specs in Word 6 for the next couple of months.
5) We used the Transputer as a platform for our work - a worthy chip in its time, but sadly past it even by when I started. No work was done on finding a new platform until Inmos decided they'd finally close down Transputer production, at which point all hell broke loose, and we had to order a mass shipment of Transputers to cover all jobs for the next 2 years. Incidentally, that also means that any old project is unmaintainable - BTW these are running the national grids in several countries (including the UK).
6) The classic, I'll save until last. After surviving a round of job cuts (25% of the ppl there), I decided to jump ship. In the meantime, the organisation had floated, and the company newsletters were talking about new management styles and improving employee relations, but none of us thought it'd happen. Anyway, the day I was leaving, I looked for my managers, to say goodbye and tidy up some loose ends. It turns out all the managers in the company were being sent on a course, and none of them had told the ppl working for them - they just didn't turn up that day! The kicker - the course was about improving communications in the company....:-)
Is this ancient history? I'm afraid not. This all happened between 1994 and 1999.
Incidentally, if you are still there (you know who you are!:-) and are reading this, drop me a line - I'm working somewhere much better now!
I don't see anything wrong with selecting a desired embyro from a "shortlist". The embryos only ever have combinations of the parents' genes, so if you've both got brown eyes, it's unlikely that you'll be able to have a child with blue eyes.
For starters, medical reasons are _always_ justified. I'm sure there's plenty of ppl with Down's Syndrome, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, sickle-cell anaemia, etc who would say that they're leading perfectly fulfilling lives, but I'm equally sure that given the option, they'd all like to be able to wipe out the disease they're suffering from. On Newsnight (UK) last night, there was a guy saying "we shouldn't allow this, bcos there's always suffering in the world and trying to eliminate suffering isn't possible, we just have to face up to it", which is possibly the most unpleasant idea I've ever heard, right up there alongside race-hatred - no-one in their right mind would _choose_ for their child to suffer, and if you are prepared to put religious or intellectual dogma over your child's life, you're not fit to be a parent.
Selecting for physical characteristics - well that's more complex, but I don't have a problem with it. If anyone can come up with a reason not to do this which doesn't involve either "God's Law" or "Brave New World"/"Gattaca" type distopias, then I'd be interested to hear it. I personally don't believe that trying to ensuring your baby has the best possible start in life is wrong. Equally, I also know that genetics only plays a small part in your makeup - there's also factors from the mother's hormones during pregnancy, from how they're fed during childhood, and from psychological factors in their upbringing. So this is just another contribution to bringing up a child, like trying to get them into a decent school.
Compared to the parents forgetting birth control? Or compared to some poor woman getting off her head at a party and waking up next to some bloke she's never seen b4?
Read the news. The parents were going to have another child _anyway_. The only difference is that they elected to have a second child who could maybe stop their first child dying of a fatal disease.
Yep. The state of the art has been, and always will be, expensive. However, second-hand stuff has been, and always will be, cheap. The advance of the Pentium Era (well, I have to call it something!:-) is that now the second-hand stuff is really useful. When state of the art was a 486, a 286 wasn't useable for much more than a doorstop. But now that state of the art is a 1 Gig processor, 2 generations back is stuff like the P233, which are perfectly adequate processors and can do a decent job on all Windows programs, run most games (albeit at low-rez), etc. We're into the diminishing returns stage, where the advances are no longer paying back as much as they did.
The only application that any of us are likely to see for a 1 Gig processor is running games REALLY fast - Office and other desktop apps aren't going to go that much faster with it. So there's no longer any need to buy a faster machine. You're in the situation of owning a Ferrarri in a 20mph limit world - it can accelerate really fast from 0-20, but the top speed is limited by what's being asked of it. If you bought it for racing (games or other serious processing, in the analogy), then you'll get the most out of it. If you bought it for occasional track-days (occasional games-players, to maintain the analogy), then you'll get a bit of fun out of it. If you just bought it to pose around town (the "gear-head") then all you're getting out of it is being able to say "Mine's faster than yours" down the pub.
Is that really what it says? That's a bit of a giggle.
"We came in peace": Except that it was only the Cold War that made them do such insanely risky things in such badly-engineered rockets. And there were all the theories about space-based weapons platforms, for which the Moon would be ideal.
"for all mankind": Yeah right. Then they plant a US flag to say, "We did it, not the Russkies". All mankind, apart from those who are Communist, Asian, African, or anyone else who isn't prepare to knuckle under when Uncle Sam throws a tantrum, apparently.
Yes, it was a great achievement, just as climbing Everest was a great achievement. But there's no intention of claiming Everest as a New Zealand national monument, just cos Hillary came from there. Some ppl are as bad as cats: "Ooh, this is mine, I've got to mark it as being mine, so everyone knows it's mine". For God's sake, guys...
Nope. Firestone are only changing the recommended PSI AFTER the problem's come up. Maybe it'll solve it, maybe it won't, but the recommended PSI BEFORE the problem is exactly what Ford used.
Also, other Firestone tyres of the same type from other Firestone plants are OK. Ford say that they asked Firestone repeatedly if there were any problems being reported, Firestone said no, and it wasn't until it was blindingly obvious that something was wrong that Firestone owned up to Ford.
Difficult to know what's what with corporate finger-pointing though - it's all lawsuit-dodging. And this is all off-topic anyway.
Incidentally, you're perfectly safe to say that Firestone has made dangerous tyres. It is a provable fact that in normal running conditions, a recent batch of tyres have, when set up properly, failed in a way which endangers the lives of the occupants of the car. Therefore they have made dangerous tyres. To say that they STILL MAKE dangerous tyres is where you'll get hit...
You never been to a scrapyard? Many of the car engines in there are actually OK - it's the rest of the car that usually wears out first! Having put 2 cars with fine engines out of their misery after bodywork rust, I know of what I speak!
It's different in hot countries - in Italy for example, cars just don't rust, so if you look after the engine then it can last just about forever, so in places like that the engine will be the first thing to go.
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RJ, respect dude. I've got a couple of mates who may be up for the next series, now we just need to get some serious welding practice in.
But an "Americanised version"?!?!??!? The mind boggles! I can appreciate changing the title to fit American terminology, but how do you Americanise the rest of it? Does everyone have their voice dubbed over then with American actors?
If so, this seems a supreme act of arrogance from the producers. "Hell guys, no-one'll watch this if they reckon it's just a bunch of faggot limeys. Let's wipe 'em over with some good ol' boy accents. But leave the chick - she doesn't do much 'cept eye-candy, so she can stay." Correct me if I'm wrong, but...
Grab.
*agree* on the flamebait poster. I wouldn't have the first idea about biology stuff like cancer research, but I can do the software just fine. So I'll spend my life doing software, thanks all the same. And who says it's not valuable? In 20 years time, when they give you your prosthetic legs to replace the ones you lost in a road accident, be glad they were doing this research!
But as for the "what happens when..?" question above, the answer is: we adapt. The implication is that we need to consider how it's going to affect us b4 we develop it. But we can't, and shouldn't, let that hold up developments which will improve the lives of everyone. The lobby groups were out in force when the car was invented - they reckoned it would spell the end of horses and everyone involved in that. And it did... but that doesn't mean we should have reconsidered allowing cars to be developed.
And BTW, the original cars were merely expensive, unreliable and slow toys. It took a couple of decades from the first working example b4 they were as fast as a horse, and another couple of decades b4 they were as affordable as a horse. And it took several years of work to get that first example working. Compare and contrast to the first human-size walking robot, which took several years to get working, and is still a slow, expensive toy...
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Yeah, this is _seriously_ old news on the display front. Whilst it's a funky trick, the optics are nothing new. It doesn't even look like they've improved it from the basic "hovering coin" trick costing $1 in a toy shop - the object being projected is just concealed in the base. The buttons that you press will actually exist, full-size, in the base.
If they ever got this to work with electronic displays then I'd be impressed. But as it is, all they've done is taken a very old bit of optics and added a laser grid to detect your finger breaking a beam. If you've never seen this done b4, you'll think it's impressive. But if you've ever been to a school science display, chances are you've seen this.
So you're not going to have a true 3-D display anytime soon. What they're demonstrating has no use at all for displaying from a computer, since all it can do is project an image of an existing solid object. Sorry.
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Hell no. If you want to post your own site under a com/net/org, then feel free. I don't give a damn about that - everything needs somewhere where "anything goes". Just don't expect it to be as easy to find stuff as in a well-documented indexed system.
But if you want to create a ".kids" site, then someone will check that your site is suitable for kids. It's your choice whether you want it to be a ".kids" site or not - that's completely voluntary - but if you do want a ".kids" site then someone will check it, so that you don't get goatse.cx.kids sites.
If you like, have further categorisation into ".young.kids", ".older.kids", ".teen.kids". Or as part of the ".kids" process, get the site-checker to produce a "suggested rating" (eg. PG-13). I don't see anyone complaining about stopping kids watching splatter-movies, so why should we complain about checking what they see on their computer? I'm not a whacko suggesting that it'll twist young and innocent minds so they'll turn into serial killers, but take an example of a site showing snuff pix - that kind of stuff you don't want kids seeing, cos it'll give them nightmares and screw them up for some time to come. Computer games are fine - we all know they're just fancy cartoons - but real-world pix of real-world horrors is not something to face kids with. And trying to explain bestiality to your kid is not a job I'd like to have, either!
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"Hat trick" comes from much earlier than ice hockey - it's been used for football ("soccer" for Americans) for ages. But yes, it's always for doing 3 things.
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Flamebait, man...
:-) isn't in itself bad.
Think of the Internet as a big bookshop. Now I don't know about your local bookshop (maybe you've only ever used Amazon), but my local one has books sorted into shelves about different subjects, so if I want something I know where to start looking, and it helps me find related stuff. In addition, there's sections dedicated to kids stuff only, and usually a section of adult books/magazines too. To stop kids getting at the adult stuff, it's placed on a high shelf out of their reach/line-of-sight. Is this starting to sound very close to the new TLDs?
It's not about censorship, it's about usability. Bear in mind that every search engine can "censor" you, wouldn't you rather have a domain setup where you can find stuff easier? Refining the TLDs is the start of that - hopefully we'll see it get more detailed after that, maybe with a 4-level domain structure or something. We'll still have a huge amount of data, and we'll still have a hell of a job finding stuff, but having somewhere definite to start looking would be a big help. As it is, you often have to pick a high-rating option from Google and then start working through links pages to find the more obscure things.
Censorship may be what stops ppl in Afghanistan from expressing their thoughts, but it's also what stops me from posting animal s3x pix all round my town centre. If you think it's a Bad Thing that I'm prevented from doing that, it's not worth the effort continuing.
Even filtering software, the real censorship stuff on the net, isn't a bad thing. It's a bad implementation, certainly, but as a concept I'd say stopping young kids from getting onto pr0n sites ain't a bad intention - I doubt even PeaceFire would complain about that. The problem comes when you prevent adults from accessing what they choose - an adult has the right to do what they want in the privacy of their own home, so filtering everyone is right out. But to try and stop kids from getting to some of the more "differently-inclined" (aka "WTF are they doing?!?!"
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*grin* One of the best trash films recently, following in the fine footsteps of the great B movies. If we talk about movies being a star vehicle, then 5th Element was definitely a Jean-Paul Gaultier vehicle - more high camp than an expedition up Everest...
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Er, no. Think of electricity and the internal combustion engine? Electricity is used extensively for torture, motors drive tanks. And first-world countries would starve, freeze and die without both of those. Just as a couple of examples.
If you work in the defence industry, or with military funding, then maybe you might want to look at the uses of stuff. I hope the guy who invented napalm has that on his conscience for ever - if there's no obvious other use of your stuff except to kill painfully, then that's not something I could do. But if you had to second-guess everything, there'd be nothing left.
And think on: mil-tech isn't necessarily evil. GPS and the Internet are both military projects; GPS is still funded exclusively by the US military. The jet technology developed for fighters in the 40s and 50s drives the jumbo jet that takes you on holiday.
And there's other stuff too - how's about medicine? The range of "truth drugs" out there have medical uses, and their "truth drug" properties are an accidental side-effect. The original, scopolamine, is a sedative and is also used in small quantities to combat motion sickness.
What's likely to trip us is something we'd never think of. In films, think T2 - a computer becoming sentient and enslaving mankind is not something a geek thinks about when he's working on his latest chip design ("It's not every day you learn you're responsible for the deaths of 6 million people.") Robert Heinlein once wrote, "In the early 1900s, most futurists agreed the car would serve a purpose. Some saw that it would replace the horse. But none of them foresaw the change in mating habits of the American teenager which it caused." Would you have predicted 20 years back that the Internet would reach such a mainstream audience, given the average population of BBSes and their speed and reliability (or lack of)?
Anyone who claims to be able to spot all future uses of something is lying - it just isn't possible. Futurists are no more accurate than weather forecasters - once something's happening, they may (if they're lucky) be able to tell you with a reasonable chance of success which direction it's going to go in and how fast, but there's no way to predict anything new starting, and there's no way of knowing whether the butterfly you've just seen flap its wings is going to cause the next cyclone.
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Classically, science fiction is split into 2 camps. There's the real-world variety (Arthur C. Clarke, Kim Stanley Robinson, etc) which is true science fiction (sometimes called "hard" science fiction), and then there's the fantasy variety - Star Wars, Buck Rogers, etc. The fantasy variety is known as "space opera".
Each must be internally consistent. Hard science fiction requires that things follow the laws of physics we know (or at least that it looks like that). If spaceships make noise as they go past, or objects in space slow down from friction, then you're screwed. The film of 2001 became impenetrable by introducing the flashy graphics display, which you only understood what he was trying to show if you'd read the book, since it emphatically DIDN'T follow our known science (being alien technology).
Space opera on the other hand can have its universe run on any set of rules you care to choose, but you have to stay consistent to those rules. Had Luke Skywalker suddenly been able to shoot fireballs at Darth Vader, that's not something any Jedi has been seen doing, so it breaks the rules (unless of course he's some kind of "new breed", in which case that's an essential plot feature). Incidentally, are episodes 2 and 3 going to explain how the Emperor gets to do this? cos that was dodgy in RotJ.
The problem is the overlap. Concepts like "the physics of Star Trek" miss the point, which is to get the crew in a pressure situation then get them to dig themselves out through what looks like ingenuity. It's all complete rubbish ("So if we set up a positive feedback positronic hyperdimensional wave" or shit like that), but it's fantasy and we accept that it's possible. The problem comes when the writer/director tries to inject real world into it. The 2 classic examples here are Phantom Menace's "Jedi cooties" and the Matrix's "human Duracells". Star Wars had managed 3 episodes with the Force as a universal field surrounding everything, and that worked, but suddenly Lucas tries to say what causes it, and the suspension of disbelief breaks down bcos he's not being internally consistent (... and cos it's a crap idea in the first place, but anyway). The human Duracell is a nice image, but it's real-world intruding again - energy processing just doesn't work that way. Suppose (as an example I've just thought up) the Matrix had said, "the humans are actually part of the computer - the real world is just a screensaver to keep the brain occupied while the computer uses each brain's processing power for its own purposes, after it was found that pure processing-only with sensory deprivation causes people to become psychotic and corrupts the computing process". Now that's consistent with what we know about the brain, it gives the computer a reason to supply a meta-world to people, and best of all it doesn't attempt to explain HOW the computer does it.
Any time a film pulls something out of it's ass just to fill a plot-hole, it's failed. I can think of 5 places where Phantom Menace did this without even trying (and I only saw it once). Matrix was a kick-ass film, but that human battery bit interfered with my enjoyment of it. Trekkies have slated Voyager for the "magical photon torpedo generator" - if you notice these things, it'll bug you. If a script-writer, director, continuity man and a team of actors between them don't notice this, they deserve to have their films crash and burn.
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Someone has to look after a child. For most ppl, they'd rather keep this in the family, so it's either the husband or the wife who does it. Granted, the woman can breast-feed, but many women these days would rather not, so that evens things up.
The problem is that whilst the feminists were (rightly) campaigning for equality, they didn't think that someone would have to stay at home to look after the kids. This came down the education system, and our generation is the product of that theory. So suddenly we've got a generation of males AND females who don't have the education to look after children. Don't forget that the previous "cultural conditioning" included informal teaching in how to look after kids, cook, keep house, and so on.
If we want equality, allow men to stay at home. The problem here is that the house-husband is only ever (even by feminists) portrayed as a figure of fun, a down-trodden henpecked wimp, so that's not exactly appealing! Although housewives may have had a raw deal in the opportunity stakes, they had a known position in society, and wouldn't be mocked for being in that position.
And another problem is the skills. Schools need (MUST!) have classes for both sexes on home economics and childcare - if the boys can't cook, how can they look after the children?
Personally, I'd be quite happy to look after any children myself and my wife have, and continue my electronics and software as a hobby at home. If my wife was earning more than I was and/or was in a rewarding career at the time, I'd be quite prepared to jack it in. If anyone's married and doesn't feel the same way, frankly you don't deserve to be married - you just want a servant, not a wife as an equal.
Uradu, the resentment that housewives have felt is not due to what they're doing, it's simply bcos they were pressured into it instead of taking it on voluntarily. If we have a choice - and we do now - then there's no reason to resent it.
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Cheers for the reply Mark, and good luck with the project. I was curious about the reply on design documentation:-
"Of course, I see no reason to force it on individual programmers. It's something managers should do, themselves."
Yes, the interface must be well-designed, and this can be done at the management stage. But having a readme (or something) to explain obscure elements of the design isn't too surprising an example.
Consider a buffering I/O system. This may have to split its operation over several concurrent tasks, and to define this merely by the overall requirement of "it must do this", and the I/O interface seems to be too high a level. At the very least have a readme or extensive commenting to say what bits are going in what function, and how the functions interact.
Incidentally, for C coders out there, there's an organisation called MISRA which produces standards for safety-related code (specifically for automotive), so they know a bit about getting rid of errors. One of their documents gives a list of rules to follow for defensive programming, which tries to stop silly errors like typos from getting in the way of a working design (as an example, anyone else howled when they spotted an "=" instead of a "=="? well use "if(CONST==variable)" instead of "if(variable==CONST)" and the compiler will always pick up the error). Granted, most of the guidelines are more applicable to embedded development, but I think there's still lessons to learn from that for general coding.
The difference is that crashes of a computer program cause more irritation and dents in pride than anything else, whereas failure of an aircraft engine controller is life-threatening and can't be tolerated. I'd be interested to know how well the safety-related embedded programming and computer science/desktop fields are talking together, whether they're reinventing the wheel, how much overlap there is between methods, and which bits are more relevant to one than the other. I do know that softies and sparkies don't talk as much as they should do!
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Steven,
;-) All this technology is only ever as good as "the people using it", and in this case the technology is performing precisely as required.
:-)
Yes, missiles do go off-target. Some stuff does have errors in it. But not "all the time" - the examples above (the embassy bombing, friendly fire, etc) are all examples of user error. This is akin to blaming Word bcos you've made a spelling mistake!
The obvious conclusion to draw is not that the technology is faulty, but that the operators are. Therefore what we want is not less tech, but _more_. Eliminate the fallible pilot/bomb aimer/navigator, and install a computer which will never hit a "friendly" target. Give it full authority to fire at what it likes, so long as it's the enemy (or so long as it thinks it's the enemy). Program it with "forbidden" targets (like embassies) and examples of "civilian" targets (like tractors). Then set it loose, and wait for the fireworks.
I'm not recommending this at all - the idea of a full-authority automaton in charge of a fighter plane is very worrying! - but it seems the more logical conclusion to draw. "The missile hit the target it was told to, but the target was actually a friendly, therefore it's a failure of the missile" seems a strange conclusion.
Having said all this, though, I've not read the book - I'm only going through the filter of Jon Katz's review. You may have another sale come Xmas, if only to get the full story!
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I've yet to see anything that says how long it has to be to pick up enough light. If it's short, then great. If it's 1m or so, it's hardly practical as a screen or goggles!
I've a feeling that this may also be fundamentally limited by the amount of light around. 30 x 0 is still 0, so for night work, you may need some more severe amplification.
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I see the point of the person who modded this up as funny. The American system of public service is rather a classic example to the world of how _not_ to do it.
Hey guys, let's stop folks leaving to start their own businesses! They're too afraid of losing their medical insurance benefits, and couldn't guarantee to pay for any major illness/injury to themselves or their family if they were self-employed. Hell yes, why not? We don't need free enterprise, after all.
How's about making your quality of medical care dependent on your income? Sounds neat - no-one unemployed really needs a hip replacement, do they? Or cancer treatment. Let the cheap bastards die!
Anyone fancy making your right to a fair trial dependent on your income? Sure thing - you wouldn't be a crook, a murderer or a rapist if you were rich or came from a rich family, would you? It's only poor folks who do that. And if the victim is poor, they're obviously lying anyway.
I just hope you were trolling there. If you were serious, it's too scarey for words...
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One of my pet peeves is lack of design, documentation, commenting and testing. I'd appreciate your views on how much you believe these are necessary. Do you design before you code, or do you just dive in? Do you like to provide loads of support documentation for users and co-workers, or are you of the "the-code-is-my-documentation" school?
More importantly, how do you enforce any such standard on your project, given that you've got other people submitting you code patches which may be technically perfect but visually obfuscated? And has this caused any friction, since managing coders is a "herding cats" scenario, and criticising someone's coding style is often taken very personally?
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I've not read the book, only the review, so take this into account. However...
Poole says that pixels lie. He's obviously a pundit, not a real technical person, then, or he'd know that pixels rarely, if at all, lie. What lies is either the person who fed the data in, or the person who programmed it. Let's look at examples:-
1) Bombing of the embassy: purely due to a cockup by the CIA, no technical involvement at all.
2) Bombing of civilian convoys: purely due to a failure of the Mk.I human eyeball on the part of the pilot. He'd been told there were armoured columns in the area, he saw what he thought was one, he hit it. No technical involvement; in fact, it was technical expertise that enabled the target to be taken out effectively. The fact that the target was a group of unarmed civilians is reprehensible, but doesn't change the fact that the technology worked as specified.
3) Friendly fire in the Gulf: purely due to the troops in the personnel carrier removing the identifying panels from their vehicle. Had they kept them on, they would not have been attacked by the pilot who shot them. The technology did a perfect job of targeting the vehicle.
So Poole hasn't many legs to stand on with this. The moral of the story: it's PEOPLE who screw up. The technology is designed to be as near to failure-proof as possible, for the very reason that if things go wrong, your soldiers may be killed. What it can't protect against is human error, or human incompetance.
Maybe there's a bug in the code though, I hear ppl suggest? Well most of the ppl here who do programming will likely just be dealing with non-embedded and/or non-critical stuff - Linux, Windows, databases, GUIs, etc. Once you get into embedded safety-critical stuff, there's responsibilities on you to work to standards which ensure safety and prevent bugs by thorough review of the design, review of the code, and even review of the tests to ensure that you're testing all conceivable failure modes.
There are many well-publicised software failures, such as Airbus, the Mars lander, etc. All these are caused by a failure to test properly. In the case of the Mars lander, a very simple integration test would have caught that bug. Obviously they tested each part in isolation, but never tested it all together. This is negligence, plain and simple, and avoiding these problems is the task of the current generation of software engineers. It's not even like the problems aren't well publicised (Len Hutton's been writing about them for years), it's just that there's an arrogance about programmers to assume that they don't need to test bcos they're "3133t" or whatever. Bullshit - you're fallible. Learn that and live with it, bcos if you don't, you'll never grow up, and eventually you'll cause some major problem by assuming you're God and can't fail. If the same software integrity had been used for Windows, there'd be no need for Linux cos there'd already be a strong, reliable OS, and then we'd not be bashing MS today.
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WARNING! This is a hardware project. Do NOT attempt it if you don't know at least a little electronics. This isn't trolling, it's straightforward common sense. Would you advise someone to go kernel-hacking if they didn't even know what a computer was? If you can't navigate a soldering iron and don't know what a resistor is, you really need more electronics skills, so practice on something simpler (and cheaper!) first.
A Berg connector - I don't know, but there's all sorts of connectors named after their manufacturers/designers/specifiers.
A threaded spacer - a metal or plastic post, with a threaded hole at each end so you can put a screw in to bolt it onto something. The idea is you use these to stand a PCB off from the case, or similar uses.
How to program it? Well, you learn the language these chips use, and write your program in it. Then you download the program to the chip's EPROM memory to program it, and once the program's in the EPROM, it stays there. There's programmers available (or you can build one) which pull certain pins up to certain voltages to activate programming mode.
EPROM can only be erased by UV light. EEPROM and Flash can be erased by special commands on the programming port. So they're semi-permanent memory. This is known as "firmware", ie. it stays around, but you can erase it and reprogram it if you want.
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The NERDS! Saw you guys the other week on Scrapheap. You'll have to learn if you come over here again - Britain's a nation of amateurs. If you get it right, and win bcos of that, it's just not sporting. Not cricket at all, old chap! ;-) Of course, the opposite school of thought says, if the other guys can't get it right then hammer the buggers into the ground and stomp on them.
There's a few of us giving serious consideration to entering a Scrapheap team. Of course, we're going to need some practice welding b4 we do. Or we could get more duct tape instead.
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I quit my last job bcos I didn't think it was going anywhere. It wasn't a very big company in itself, but it was a part of a very large corporation and as such had some real inertia to improvement and change, and some really bad corporate decisions coming down the tree.
:-)
:-) and are reading this, drop me a line - I'm working somewhere much better now!
Typical duff decisions, and I assure you these are all true:-
1) To start with, in spite of the fact that we all had PCs, all had WordPerfect (the company standard word-processor) and were mostly pretty fast on the keys, all specs had to be written in draft form and then given to the typists to retype into a template.
2) Eventually this stopped, and we were allowed to use WordPerfect for generating documents. However, storage (and retrieval and reprinting) of documents was paper hardcopies in filing cabinets, plus microfiches for archiving.
3) At some point, the notion of electronic storage hit management. But instead of keeping the electronic version of the document (at maybe 50-100K), they decided to print the document and then scan it in at 50dpi, single-bit! Text was just about readable, but diagrams were hosed, and the documents took up many times the space the would have done otherwise. Incidentally, they didn't (AFAIK) zip them up to reduce storage space either.
4) We stayed with WordPerfect. Of course we kept the DOS character-based version and didn't move to the WYSIWYG version, so all new hires cursed it and we couldn't read a lot of customers' documents. Eventually the global decision was taken to change to Word 6, so we did, breathed a sigh of relief, and then found that no-one had thought to upgrade the document templates, so we couldn't write specs in Word 6 for the next couple of months.
5) We used the Transputer as a platform for our work - a worthy chip in its time, but sadly past it even by when I started. No work was done on finding a new platform until Inmos decided they'd finally close down Transputer production, at which point all hell broke loose, and we had to order a mass shipment of Transputers to cover all jobs for the next 2 years. Incidentally, that also means that any old project is unmaintainable - BTW these are running the national grids in several countries (including the UK).
6) The classic, I'll save until last. After surviving a round of job cuts (25% of the ppl there), I decided to jump ship. In the meantime, the organisation had floated, and the company newsletters were talking about new management styles and improving employee relations, but none of us thought it'd happen. Anyway, the day I was leaving, I looked for my managers, to say goodbye and tidy up some loose ends. It turns out all the managers in the company were being sent on a course, and none of them had told the ppl working for them - they just didn't turn up that day! The kicker - the course was about improving communications in the company....
Is this ancient history? I'm afraid not. This all happened between 1994 and 1999.
Incidentally, if you are still there (you know who you are!
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I don't see anything wrong with selecting a desired embyro from a "shortlist". The embryos only ever have combinations of the parents' genes, so if you've both got brown eyes, it's unlikely that you'll be able to have a child with blue eyes.
For starters, medical reasons are _always_ justified. I'm sure there's plenty of ppl with Down's Syndrome, cerebral palsy, spina bifida, sickle-cell anaemia, etc who would say that they're leading perfectly fulfilling lives, but I'm equally sure that given the option, they'd all like to be able to wipe out the disease they're suffering from. On Newsnight (UK) last night, there was a guy saying "we shouldn't allow this, bcos there's always suffering in the world and trying to eliminate suffering isn't possible, we just have to face up to it", which is possibly the most unpleasant idea I've ever heard, right up there alongside race-hatred - no-one in their right mind would _choose_ for their child to suffer, and if you are prepared to put religious or intellectual dogma over your child's life, you're not fit to be a parent.
Selecting for physical characteristics - well that's more complex, but I don't have a problem with it. If anyone can come up with a reason not to do this which doesn't involve either "God's Law" or "Brave New World"/"Gattaca" type distopias, then I'd be interested to hear it. I personally don't believe that trying to ensuring your baby has the best possible start in life is wrong. Equally, I also know that genetics only plays a small part in your makeup - there's also factors from the mother's hormones during pregnancy, from how they're fed during childhood, and from psychological factors in their upbringing. So this is just another contribution to bringing up a child, like trying to get them into a decent school.
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Compared to the parents forgetting birth control? Or compared to some poor woman getting off her head at a party and waking up next to some bloke she's never seen b4?
Read the news. The parents were going to have another child _anyway_. The only difference is that they elected to have a second child who could maybe stop their first child dying of a fatal disease.
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Yep. The state of the art has been, and always will be, expensive. However, second-hand stuff has been, and always will be, cheap. The advance of the Pentium Era (well, I have to call it something! :-) is that now the second-hand stuff is really useful. When state of the art was a 486, a 286 wasn't useable for much more than a doorstop. But now that state of the art is a 1 Gig processor, 2 generations back is stuff like the P233, which are perfectly adequate processors and can do a decent job on all Windows programs, run most games (albeit at low-rez), etc. We're into the diminishing returns stage, where the advances are no longer paying back as much as they did.
The only application that any of us are likely to see for a 1 Gig processor is running games REALLY fast - Office and other desktop apps aren't going to go that much faster with it. So there's no longer any need to buy a faster machine. You're in the situation of owning a Ferrarri in a 20mph limit world - it can accelerate really fast from 0-20, but the top speed is limited by what's being asked of it. If you bought it for racing (games or other serious processing, in the analogy), then you'll get the most out of it. If you bought it for occasional track-days (occasional games-players, to maintain the analogy), then you'll get a bit of fun out of it. If you just bought it to pose around town (the "gear-head") then all you're getting out of it is being able to say "Mine's faster than yours" down the pub.
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Is that really what it says? That's a bit of a giggle.
"We came in peace": Except that it was only the Cold War that made them do such insanely risky things in such badly-engineered rockets. And there were all the theories about space-based weapons platforms, for which the Moon would be ideal.
"for all mankind": Yeah right. Then they plant a US flag to say, "We did it, not the Russkies". All mankind, apart from those who are Communist, Asian, African, or anyone else who isn't prepare to knuckle under when Uncle Sam throws a tantrum, apparently.
Yes, it was a great achievement, just as climbing Everest was a great achievement. But there's no intention of claiming Everest as a New Zealand national monument, just cos Hillary came from there. Some ppl are as bad as cats: "Ooh, this is mine, I've got to mark it as being mine, so everyone knows it's mine". For God's sake, guys...
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Nope. Firestone are only changing the recommended PSI AFTER the problem's come up. Maybe it'll solve it, maybe it won't, but the recommended PSI BEFORE the problem is exactly what Ford used.
Also, other Firestone tyres of the same type from other Firestone plants are OK. Ford say that they asked Firestone repeatedly if there were any problems being reported, Firestone said no, and it wasn't until it was blindingly obvious that something was wrong that Firestone owned up to Ford.
Difficult to know what's what with corporate finger-pointing though - it's all lawsuit-dodging. And this is all off-topic anyway.
Incidentally, you're perfectly safe to say that Firestone has made dangerous tyres. It is a provable fact that in normal running conditions, a recent batch of tyres have, when set up properly, failed in a way which endangers the lives of the occupants of the car. Therefore they have made dangerous tyres. To say that they STILL MAKE dangerous tyres is where you'll get hit...
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You never been to a scrapyard? Many of the car engines in there are actually OK - it's the rest of the car that usually wears out first! Having put 2 cars with fine engines out of their misery after bodywork rust, I know of what I speak!
It's different in hot countries - in Italy for example, cars just don't rust, so if you look after the engine then it can last just about forever, so in places like that the engine will be the first thing to go.
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