The cliched response to both of these examples is "you have no expectation of privacy in public" - but that is a legal principle formulated in a simpler time before automation (especially automation on the back-end) was even conceivable
True, but irrelevant. A similar argument is made about the Second Amendment, there was a time when it took a minute to reload a rifle, today it takes a few seconds to empty a twenty bullet magazine and reload.
Technology should not change a fundamental right.
I heard the following argument once: someone said that the internet should be censored because it's too easy to publish on the internet. Freedom of expression, the argument went, was meant for an age when only responsible journalists published things.
I think the solution is not to limit the powers of the police but to let citizens use the same technology to fight corruption. Wikileaks is a great example of how this can be done. We should have wikileaks at every town, every neighborhood. Let all citizens keep track of police officers, politicians, judges, public servants and let's see what happens then.
you don't need to screw your head on a crippling dinosaur to understand low level programming
Absolutely. Better teach them C so they will know how data structures and memory management work.
Languages that try to do everything may help you write code faster but can be treacherous.
Let's see a simple example. In Python there is a subtle matter of memory management that can be dangerous to the untrained programmer. When you copy a list like this: a = b you are creating a pointer to the other list, when you copy like this: a = b[:] you are allocating memory for a new list and copying the contents.
When you know C, the difference between the two copy instructions above is obvious, but if you don't know what is memory management this can become very difficult to understand. I bet there are many bugs created by Java, Python, and other modern languages that come from this inability to understand how the language works under the hood.
Working on old computers can be fun for some people, but to train programmers nothing beats learning C. C is close enough to the hardware to let one understand the details of how software runs, yet abstract enough to represent any typical von Neumann computer.
Roulettes have a 97% rate of return. Betting on red or black pays 2:1, there are 18 black numbers, 18 red numbers, and a 37th number which is neither black nor red and pays nothing. Some casinos have two numbers that pay nothing, but the outcome is still 36/38 = 94.7%
char *a[10] = {
"in particular",
"on the other hand",
"however",
"similarly",
"in this regard",
"as a resultant implication",
"based on integral subsystem considerations",
"for example",
"thus",
"in respect to specific goals"},
*b[10] = {
"a large portion of the interface coordinated communication",
"a constant flow of effective information",
"the characterization of specific criteria",
"initiation of critical subsystem development",
"the fully integrated test program",
"the product configuration baseline",
"any associated supporting element",
"the incorporation of additional mission constraints",
"the independent functional principle",
"a primary interrelationship between system and/or subsystem technologies"},
*c[10] = {
"must utilize and be functionally interwoven with",
"maximizes the probability of project success and minimizes the cost and time required for",
"adds explicit performance limits to",
"necessitates that urgent consideration be applied to",
"requires considerable systems analysis and trade off studies to arrive at",
"is further compounded when taking into account",
"presents extremely interesting challenges to",
"recognizes the importance of other systems and the necessity for",
"effects a significant implementation of",
"adds overriding performance constraints to"},
*d[10] = {
"the sophisticated hardware",
"the anticipated next generation equipment",
"the subsystem compatibility testing",
"the structural design based on system engineering concepts",
"the preliminary qualification limits",
"the evolution of specification over a given time period",
"the philosophy of commonality and standardization",
"the top-down development method",
"any discrete configuration mode",
"the total system rationale"};/* orders: abcd, dacb, bacd, adcb */
main() {
int n, order, w, x, y, z;
srand(time(NULL));
for (n = 0; n < 1000; n++)
{
if (!(n % 10)) printf("\n");
w = rand() % 10;
x = rand() % 10;
y = rand() % 10;
z = rand() % 10;
order = rand() % 4;
switch (order)
{
case 0:
printf(" %c%s, %s %s %s.", a[w][0] & 0xDF, a[w] + 1, b[x], c[y], d[z]);
break;
case 1:
printf(" %c%s, %s, %s %s.", d[w][0] & 0xDF, d[w] + 1, a[x], c[y], b[z]);
break;
case 2:
printf(" %c%s, %s, %s %s.", b[w][0] & 0xDF, b[w] + 1, a[x], c[y], d[z]);
Every nurse should physically trace each tube to its receptacle. If there are two tubes in the vicinity but not even in proximity, extra care should be taken to trace the tube tactilely
If the patient is in a crisis there's no time to take extra care.
In industry tanks and tubing are color coded. Oxygen, for instance, is green. When pressurized oxygen comes in contact with grease it explodes spontaneously, so all threaded fittings in oxygen tubing must be scrupulously clean. No one will lubricate the threads if the tube is green.
Hospitals should do likewise, have a color stripe running the length of each hose, making it clear where it should be connected.
It makes me more likely to think the person who writes this has never written actual code in a real, production system when you have things like actual deadlines to worry about.
I wrote the GP you are talking about and let me assure you I have over a million lines of code under my belt, 99% of them for real time process control systems and the rest for corporate applications.
In a complicated program where there are literally millions of things that can go wrong, not thinking foremost about leap seconds should be expected.
There's a solution for that, it's called "brainstorming". You gather all the experts in a series of meetings where *everything* is discussed.
I once worked on a software where timing was important, we investigated the matter and came to the conclusion that the following time standards should be studied in more detail:
Universal Time (UT) Universal Time (UT1) Ephemeris Time(ET) International Atomic Time (TAI) Coordinated Universal Time (UTC) Terrestrial Dynamic Time (TDT) Barycentric Dynamical Time (TDB) Terrestrial Time (TT) Geocentric Coordinate Time (TGC) Barycentric Coordinate Time (TCB) GPS Time
When you develop systems where human life or large investments are at stake you have no other alternative, you *must* go into this level of detail.
If you think you can overlook something because the problem is "complicated" you better stay away from high responsibility jobs. I expect more from a company like Oracle, whose products are so widely used.
In strong light situations you either close your diaphragm letting less light in or do a shorter exposure. The problem is with low light situations.
In your bucket analogy, there will be a situation when only one drop will fall, it will hit one of the four buckets. Averaging them you have 0.25 drops in each of the buckets, but looking at the four buckets separately you will have one bucket with a pixel and three with none, i.e. a noisy picture.
Or are you sincerely saying "Well, we have a 120 megapixel imager, but in order to get good dynamic range we have to process it back to 10 megapixels, just like your crappy cell phone camera."
He's saying we have a 120 megapixel imager with great dynamic range (much, much better than any cell phone camera) and we can process it back to 10 megapixels to get awesome dynamic range.
Considering how big this chip is, even at 120 megapixels there's much more light gathering surface per pixel than in a shitty phone camera.
the only reason AMD is still alive and well is because they've been innovating and building good products for a while now. Itanium, anyone?
A processor that's nearly ten years old is relevant today exactly how?
TFA says: "all good things must come to an end and with the development of the very impressive Nehalem architecture from Intel, and the upcoming Sandy Bridge, AMDs primary CPU architecture is certainly showing its age"
The market is ruthless, no one buys products from a company that used to do great things if that's all in the past. A new and innovative product line from AMD is long overdue now.
I started with Linux in 1995, too. It was Yggdrasil, took twenty minutes to boot on a 386/33 MHz machine. To make it boot faster one had to configure it to look only for the available hardware, otherwise it would look for everything it had drivers for and wait for timeout.
Then I learned about Slackware and never looked back.
Besides, since we already have GMT, would this not be indicative that we should use the UK Midday as the World Midday?
By an incredible coincidence, GMT is very near the best choice for a global midday, because it's one of the options that cause less disturbance by the date line.
Actually the capital with the best longitude would be Copenhagen, but London is pretty close to optimal. There's a small wiggle around meridian 180 in the date line between Alaska and Siberia. If meridian zero went through Copenhagen the date line would be straight.
With 1/1000s adjustment every 1024 seconds (which is the polling interval for most stable ntp client) the leap seconds adjustment need less than 2 week to complete
The problem is that it would introduce variable seconds, which would cause much worse problems.
One example is electric power systems. The frequency in the AC power system is what determines how much power should be generated, if the frequency is above or below 60 Hz (or 50 Hz) then each power station should decrease or increase their generation by some amount proportional to the frequency difference.
The accumulated difference in total cycles over a period is used to calculate what was the difference between total energy needed and generated on that period. With leap seconds all you need to do is to divide total cycles by total seconds to get average frequency. With slow adjustment this would be much more difficult.
This may seem like nothing, but swimming is a sport of hundredths of a second, so every little bit counts.
So why don't attach propellers to the swimmers?
You practice sports in schools for the sake of exercise, spending $500 million for a few hundredths of a second doesn't seem to be the objective of a public school.
Five and a half years, turbodork (2^10 is eleven doublings)...
I have ONE right now, let's double: 1) 2 2) 4 3) 8 4) 16 5) 32 6) 64 7) 128 8) 256 9) 512 10) 1024
Satisfied?
Seriously now, the way graphics chips are growing is awesome, if you think in terms of using the GPU for calculations.
There have been a bunch of articles these last days on AI and I have posted on them that, by my calculations, a million cores machine has more or less the capacity needed to run a neural network equivalent to a human brain.
Today one could assemble a desktop computer with almost a thousand GPU cores, using two high end graphics cards. If (that's s big IF) we can extrapolate this trend for the next five years this means a desktop machine with a hardware capability on the same order of magnitude of a human brain.
HAL in 2001 was based on hard science and reasonable expectations of 1969
And yet there are things that no one predicted. No one predicted the internet, Google, or Wikipedia, for instance.
Isaac Asimov's Multivac was the model of what people expected the future to be, one giant supercomputer. It was also like this in Arthur Clarke's 1976 novel "Imperial Earth" and in 1975 movie "Rollerball" for instance. A huge central computer that knew all the answers. Today Google and Wikipedia perform more or less the same function, only in a radically different way.
I think the current situation of distributed processing that started evolving in the late 1970s is much more promising than the vision of a central computer that people had in the past.
Extrapolating from the trend I have observed in my personal computers of the last quarter century, I expect to have a million-core desktop computer in 25 years. That would be so much power no one today can imagine what will be the result of that.
Even today, one can build a desktop computer with a thousand cores, but the applications lag behind. Developing software capable of using all that power will take time, parallel processing software is still in its infancy.
one of the big unsolved problems of the future is the inefficiency of artificial systems
That's because our nanotechnology is still non-existent or very primitive at best.
However, if you take a look at what our machines do well, they do it much better than biologic systems. Data storage and mathematical calculations, for instance.
Given the huge processing power our brains have, why do we struggle so much at simple arithmetic? Our hardware isn't geared for that. And why do we have to write down such small things like telephone numbers? Your netbook computer could store a billion phone numbers, try to memorize those.
Everyone thinks a sentient machine will be built, and I'll agree that sentience can be easily faked; I've written fake AI that seems real. There is no artificial sentience on earth, why is it supposed that machines can be made sentient?
So we must have simulations of C. elegans little brain running, right? Nope, not even close. We are still in the early stages of simply characterizing the behavior of these 302 neurons.
You are 25 years behind in your reading. C. elegans is *old* stuff, the state of the art in brain simulations is Felis Catus.
Isn't that what they call "phariseism"? It's ironic that those who are most adamant in calling themselves "Christians" follow exactly the line of thought that Jesus decried so much.
Because NASA and the US Air Force in the 1950s were the home of rugged anti-government individualism, free of all political pressure?
Not anti-government, but with much less political pressure. The goal then was to get to the moon before the Soviets, engineers and scientists had more freedom to do their stuff.
NASA goals today are dictated by which representative in this or that Congress subcommittee has which subassemblies made by a company in his state.
Only in direct monetary terms. Many politicians got votes from NASA projects. If you plot the geographic locations of NASA subcontractors you'll see they are spread all over the USA, every one gets a piece of that pork barrel.
why does it sound to me like 1950's space research?
Because they are doing it the way true pioneers do. Not by requesting grants from some big government and untangling miles of red tape. Not by licking some politicians ass helping him get a few votes subcontracting some part to a company in his district.
it means individuals are close to mastering trans continental missiles, and that worries me a bit
Why? Why would a hobbyist's dream worry you more than some dictator's nightmare?
Better live in a society where people have constructive hobbies like this than in a society where the only encouraged activity is to memorize some long dead prophet's words.
basically a glorified carnival ride, a couple of magnitudes easier than fully orbital.
Considering they are launching it from a sea launch platform they built, which will be towed to sea with the submarine they built, I'd say this is several orders of magnitude more awesome than what anybody else ever did.
Let's see, how many orders of magnitude harder things have you ever done? Links, please.
Slashdot Mirror
True, but irrelevant. A similar argument is made about the Second Amendment, there was a time when it took a minute to reload a rifle, today it takes a few seconds to empty a twenty bullet magazine and reload.
Technology should not change a fundamental right.
I heard the following argument once: someone said that the internet should be censored because it's too easy to publish on the internet. Freedom of expression, the argument went, was meant for an age when only responsible journalists published things.
I think the solution is not to limit the powers of the police but to let citizens use the same technology to fight corruption. Wikileaks is a great example of how this can be done. We should have wikileaks at every town, every neighborhood. Let all citizens keep track of police officers, politicians, judges, public servants and let's see what happens then.
Absolutely. Better teach them C so they will know how data structures and memory management work.
Languages that try to do everything may help you write code faster but can be treacherous.
Let's see a simple example. In Python there is a subtle matter of memory management that can be dangerous to the untrained programmer. When you copy a list like this: a = b you are creating a pointer to the other list, when you copy like this: a = b[:] you are allocating memory for a new list and copying the contents.
When you know C, the difference between the two copy instructions above is obvious, but if you don't know what is memory management this can become very difficult to understand. I bet there are many bugs created by Java, Python, and other modern languages that come from this inability to understand how the language works under the hood.
Working on old computers can be fun for some people, but to train programmers nothing beats learning C. C is close enough to the hardware to let one understand the details of how software runs, yet abstract enough to represent any typical von Neumann computer.
Roulettes have a 97% rate of return. Betting on red or black pays 2:1, there are 18 black numbers, 18 red numbers, and a 37th number which is neither black nor red and pays nothing. Some casinos have two numbers that pay nothing, but the outcome is still 36/38 = 94.7%
#include <time.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <stdio.h>
#define kase(tipo,stmt) case(tipo):{stmt;break;}
char *a[10] = {
"in particular",
"on the other hand",
"however",
"similarly",
"in this regard",
"as a resultant implication",
"based on integral subsystem considerations",
"for example",
"thus",
"in respect to specific goals"},
*b[10] = {
"a large portion of the interface coordinated communication",
"a constant flow of effective information",
"the characterization of specific criteria",
"initiation of critical subsystem development",
"the fully integrated test program",
"the product configuration baseline",
"any associated supporting element",
"the incorporation of additional mission constraints",
"the independent functional principle",
"a primary interrelationship between system and/or subsystem technologies"},
*c[10] = {
"must utilize and be functionally interwoven with",
"maximizes the probability of project success and minimizes the cost and time required for",
"adds explicit performance limits to",
"necessitates that urgent consideration be applied to",
"requires considerable systems analysis and trade off studies to arrive at",
"is further compounded when taking into account",
"presents extremely interesting challenges to",
"recognizes the importance of other systems and the necessity for",
"effects a significant implementation of",
"adds overriding performance constraints to"},
*d[10] = { /* orders: abcd, dacb, bacd, adcb */
"the sophisticated hardware",
"the anticipated next generation equipment",
"the subsystem compatibility testing",
"the structural design based on system engineering concepts",
"the preliminary qualification limits",
"the evolution of specification over a given time period",
"the philosophy of commonality and standardization",
"the top-down development method",
"any discrete configuration mode",
"the total system rationale"};
main()
{
int n, order, w, x, y, z;
srand(time(NULL));
for (n = 0; n < 1000; n++)
{
if (!(n % 10)) printf("\n");
w = rand() % 10;
x = rand() % 10;
y = rand() % 10;
z = rand() % 10;
order = rand() % 4;
switch (order)
{
case 0:
printf(" %c%s, %s %s %s.", a[w][0] & 0xDF, a[w] + 1, b[x], c[y], d[z]);
break;
case 1:
printf(" %c%s, %s, %s %s.", d[w][0] & 0xDF, d[w] + 1, a[x], c[y], b[z]);
break;
case 2:
printf(" %c%s, %s, %s %s.", b[w][0] & 0xDF, b[w] + 1, a[x], c[y], d[z]);
If the patient is in a crisis there's no time to take extra care.
In industry tanks and tubing are color coded. Oxygen, for instance, is green. When pressurized oxygen comes in contact with grease it explodes spontaneously, so all threaded fittings in oxygen tubing must be scrupulously clean. No one will lubricate the threads if the tube is green.
Hospitals should do likewise, have a color stripe running the length of each hose, making it clear where it should be connected.
I wrote the GP you are talking about and let me assure you I have over a million lines of code under my belt, 99% of them for real time process control systems and the rest for corporate applications.
There's a solution for that, it's called "brainstorming". You gather all the experts in a series of meetings where *everything* is discussed.
I once worked on a software where timing was important, we investigated the matter and came to the conclusion that the following time standards should be studied in more detail:
Universal Time (UT)
Universal Time (UT1)
Ephemeris Time(ET)
International Atomic Time (TAI)
Coordinated Universal Time (UTC)
Terrestrial Dynamic Time (TDT)
Barycentric Dynamical Time (TDB)
Terrestrial Time (TT)
Geocentric Coordinate Time (TGC)
Barycentric Coordinate Time (TCB)
GPS Time
When you develop systems where human life or large investments are at stake you have no other alternative, you *must* go into this level of detail.
If you think you can overlook something because the problem is "complicated" you better stay away from high responsibility jobs. I expect more from a company like Oracle, whose products are so widely used.
In strong light situations you either close your diaphragm letting less light in or do a shorter exposure. The problem is with low light situations.
In your bucket analogy, there will be a situation when only one drop will fall, it will hit one of the four buckets. Averaging them you have 0.25 drops in each of the buckets, but looking at the four buckets separately you will have one bucket with a pixel and three with none, i.e. a noisy picture.
He's saying we have a 120 megapixel imager with great dynamic range (much, much better than any cell phone camera) and we can process it back to 10 megapixels to get awesome dynamic range.
Considering how big this chip is, even at 120 megapixels there's much more light gathering surface per pixel than in a shitty phone camera.
A processor that's nearly ten years old is relevant today exactly how?
TFA says: "all good things must come to an end and with the development of the very impressive Nehalem architecture from Intel, and the upcoming Sandy Bridge, AMDs primary CPU architecture is certainly showing its age"
The market is ruthless, no one buys products from a company that used to do great things if that's all in the past. A new and innovative product line from AMD is long overdue now.
I started with Linux in 1995, too. It was Yggdrasil, took twenty minutes to boot on a 386/33 MHz machine. To make it boot faster one had to configure it to look only for the available hardware, otherwise it would look for everything it had drivers for and wait for timeout.
Then I learned about Slackware and never looked back.
By an incredible coincidence, GMT is very near the best choice for a global midday, because it's one of the options that cause less disturbance by the date line.
Actually the capital with the best longitude would be Copenhagen, but London is pretty close to optimal. There's a small wiggle around meridian 180 in the date line between Alaska and Siberia. If meridian zero went through Copenhagen the date line would be straight.
The problem is that it would introduce variable seconds, which would cause much worse problems.
One example is electric power systems. The frequency in the AC power system is what determines how much power should be generated, if the frequency is above or below 60 Hz (or 50 Hz) then each power station should decrease or increase their generation by some amount proportional to the frequency difference.
The accumulated difference in total cycles over a period is used to calculate what was the difference between total energy needed and generated on that period. With leap seconds all you need to do is to divide total cycles by total seconds to get average frequency. With slow adjustment this would be much more difficult.
Wrong. They exist because the solar day is getting longer every time. The tides caused by the moon are slowing down the earth's rotation rate.
They should. If a programmer is so incompetent he can't get leap seconds right, I shudder to think what else he did wrong.
So why don't attach propellers to the swimmers?
You practice sports in schools for the sake of exercise, spending $500 million for a few hundredths of a second doesn't seem to be the objective of a public school.
I have ONE right now, let's double:
1) 2
2) 4
3) 8
4) 16
5) 32
6) 64
7) 128
8) 256
9) 512
10) 1024
Satisfied?
Seriously now, the way graphics chips are growing is awesome, if you think in terms of using the GPU for calculations.
There have been a bunch of articles these last days on AI and I have posted on them that, by my calculations, a million cores machine has more or less the capacity needed to run a neural network equivalent to a human brain.
Today one could assemble a desktop computer with almost a thousand GPU cores, using two high end graphics cards. If (that's s big IF) we can extrapolate this trend for the next five years this means a desktop machine with a hardware capability on the same order of magnitude of a human brain.
Now lets start on the software...
And yet there are things that no one predicted. No one predicted the internet, Google, or Wikipedia, for instance.
Isaac Asimov's Multivac was the model of what people expected the future to be, one giant supercomputer. It was also like this in Arthur Clarke's 1976 novel "Imperial Earth" and in 1975 movie "Rollerball" for instance. A huge central computer that knew all the answers. Today Google and Wikipedia perform more or less the same function, only in a radically different way.
I think the current situation of distributed processing that started evolving in the late 1970s is much more promising than the vision of a central computer that people had in the past.
Extrapolating from the trend I have observed in my personal computers of the last quarter century, I expect to have a million-core desktop computer in 25 years. That would be so much power no one today can imagine what will be the result of that.
Even today, one can build a desktop computer with a thousand cores, but the applications lag behind. Developing software capable of using all that power will take time, parallel processing software is still in its infancy.
That's because our nanotechnology is still non-existent or very primitive at best.
However, if you take a look at what our machines do well, they do it much better than biologic systems. Data storage and mathematical calculations, for instance.
Given the huge processing power our brains have, why do we struggle so much at simple arithmetic? Our hardware isn't geared for that. And why do we have to write down such small things like telephone numbers? Your netbook computer could store a billion phone numbers, try to memorize those.
These experts seem to agree with you.
You are 25 years behind in your reading. C. elegans is *old* stuff, the state of the art in brain simulations is Felis Catus .
I've got some bad news for you. Helium leaks through solid metal, in 30 years your tank will be empty.
Isn't that what they call "phariseism"? It's ironic that those who are most adamant in calling themselves "Christians" follow exactly the line of thought that Jesus decried so much.
Not anti-government, but with much less political pressure. The goal then was to get to the moon before the Soviets, engineers and scientists had more freedom to do their stuff.
NASA goals today are dictated by which representative in this or that Congress subcommittee has which subassemblies made by a company in his state.
Only in direct monetary terms. Many politicians got votes from NASA projects. If you plot the geographic locations of NASA subcontractors you'll see they are spread all over the USA, every one gets a piece of that pork barrel.
Because they are doing it the way true pioneers do. Not by requesting grants from some big government and untangling miles of red tape. Not by licking some politicians ass helping him get a few votes subcontracting some part to a company in his district.
Why? Why would a hobbyist's dream worry you more than some dictator's nightmare?
Better live in a society where people have constructive hobbies like this than in a society where the only encouraged activity is to memorize some long dead prophet's words.
Considering they are launching it from a sea launch platform they built, which will be towed to sea with the submarine they built, I'd say this is several orders of magnitude more awesome than what anybody else ever did.
Let's see, how many orders of magnitude harder things have you ever done? Links, please.