Gee, maybe the powers that be will actually have to encourage the training of critical thought in the population at large, so people can approach the marketplace of ideas with some discernment.
Naaah. They'd much rather have sheeple they can trivially manipulate themselves. If they get derailed by some foreign power's propaganda, they can be put right again by doubling down on their own propaganda. I'm sure it'll be fine.
It will be. Imagine going to a business meeting, picking up a pair a VR glasses that look like oakleys, and everything on the meeting table and walls is VR/Augmented reality. That's the future.
Every single one of your examples is AR, not VR.
VR is "going" to a business meeting by putting on your VR goggles while in your pajamas and seeing a fancy board room with you and all the other attendees in suits, even though they're probably in their PJs too, and considering it as good as actually going to a meeting. Which won't happen without a Juanita Marquez doing her thing as depicted in Snow Crash, namely creating an avatar system with virtual facial expressions with high enough fidelity to real faces to match reality, driven by data from both an external camera (for the uncovered parts of the face) and internal cameras that do both eye tracking and facial expression capture (for the covered parts of the face).
Both good AR as you described and really good VR as Neal Stephenson described are hard problems. Very hard problems. It could be everywhere and in everything, but there's quite a big gap between current VR and what's needed to actually achieve that ubiquity.
I have a pretty high income compared to my peers (nearly 100k), very low debt, and yet, my score has always hovered around the "average" to "above average" range, currently hanging out around 680. According to official statistics, I have a income higher than 64% of the US population, I have a debt lower than 84% of the US population, I've never defaulted or been late on anything, and yet somehow my credit risk is only better than 40% of the US population. EXPLAIN THAT.
The credit score formulas weight age above all else. My score hovered around 700 for the entirety of my 30s. Now that I'm in my 40s, it's magically over 800. The only thing that has changed is the age of the accounts. Absolutely nothing else is different. There were no negative reports before and are none now. The accounts simply aged into the 800 bracket.
It's a fairly stupid system. It's not like Boomers aren't capable of defaulting on debt. They do, in droves. Where do you think the spike in health care expense-related bankruptcies is coming from? But age (or lack thereof) imposes an artificial ceiling on your credit score regardless.
Soon Amazon will sell me a robot that buys things for itself off of Amazon...
Soon? They already do. It's called Echo and it already orders stuff when little kids make wishes in its presence. You have to go out of your way to add a confirmation code if you don't want it to just order stuff at the drop of a hat. It's just a "plugin" away from ordering whatever it determines you need.
NCIS has prominently featured a female hacker for more than a decade now. A female hacker who possesses all the same superpowers as every male hacker: she can get through any encryption in as much under 44 minutes as is required to advance the plot.
Warehouse 13 prominently featured a female hacker for very nearly the entirety of its 5 year run, beginning 8 years ago. She didn't exhibit her hacking superpowers nearly as frequently as Abby in NCIS, but Allison Scagliotti made up for it by being improbably beautiful.
Leverage prominently featured a black male hacker for the entirety of its 4 year run, beginning 9 years ago. He too had all the requisite hacking superpowers Hollywood insists on depicting.
Hell, we can go all the way back to Hackers, in 1995, to find a very young Angelina Jolie playing yet another improbably beautiful female hacker. We don't know if she had hacking superpowers because real computers didn't actually appear in that movie, but I'm sure if there were any, she would have.
Other examples are plentiful. In short, Hollywood has been injecting minorities and women into a predominantly white male role for more than a generation, predating even the existence of Google. It doesn't matter. In the face of persistent, even pervasive propaganda for an entire generation, the number of women getting CS degrees has gone down, not up. It's almost as if people object to fake role models routinely doing the impossible, especially when they know damn well that the job is simultaneously boring (to their minds) and insanely complicated, and nothing like what's depicted on TV, because guess what, everybody can use a computer, and nearly everybody has, at least a little, so they know the reality is far different.
Bullshit propaganda is bullshit, and also a demonstrated failure. But you just keep on keepin' on, Google. I'm sure it'll start working. Aaaaany minute now...
(Actually, white males should probably be thanking Google for these efforts. After 25 years of anti-correlation, their propaganda seems to have had the affect of reinforcing their dominance of the field. Want a fake hacker? Hire a pretty girl or a black man. Want your computer fixed? Hire a white man.)
I'm frankly rather disappointed that slashdot keeps trolling us with these articles about how automation is going to cause some sort of holocaust in the work place despite there being zero evidence for it either historical or current.
If you think there are no historical antecedents, you aren't paying attention. The Dickensian Dystopia wasn't a fiction. It was a reflection of English society at the time. The first Industrial Revolution was massively disruptive. As many as three generations of the non-monied classes lived and died as paupers, with zero chance of ever getting out of the hole they were born into. The "social safety net" at the time was poor houses. Essentially warehousing people society had no idea what to do with.
Automation may result in more wealth, but whether or not that wealth is at all distributed is irrelevant to the presence of automation.
Intensive courses sound good, but once the "graduates" get out, they discover that they will be competing with people who have been obsessed with computers since the age of ten; people who would rather code than eat.
Filter violence? It's called Star *WARS*! If you can't handle the violence, go watch the "My little Pony" movie.
The lunatics who want this service think violence is just FINE for children, even very small children. But tits terrify them. And they surely won't let their precious snowflakes watch the My Little Pony movie, which doesn't even thinly veil its advocating for bestiality. (Remember kids, bestiality is best!)
Nah. Lots of people don't want their 5 year old watching "Ghostbusters" and then running around saying "It's true! This man has no dick!" But otherwise it is very appealing to little kids.
A corpse that has rotted nearly to a skeleton in the driver seat of a taxi is A-OK for a 5 year old but a throwaway dick joke is too much? You people live in a fucked up world. Nearly every effects shot in that movie depicts something way too scary for a 5 year old, from the corpse in the taxi to the banshee in the library to the terror dog chasing across the street. Even Slimer is not the friendly squeaky version depicted in the cartoon. In the movie he's greedy and belligerent and somewhat dangerous.
Ghostbusters is rated PG. If your precious parental guidance thinks it's suitable for a 5 year old, you're a bad parent. It is not a children's movie, no matter how hard the marketing tries to make it so.
My main concern is that the vat doesn't have a working immune system, unlike the animals. What will they have to do to ensure the meat is safe?
Chemical antibiotics. Tanker trucks full.
Will this result in the breeding of superbugs that will cause a national pandemic, wiping out 80% of the population? Yes. Yes it will.
The only people left will be the fanatic vegans and the animal meat eaters. Then the animal meat eaters will kill the vegans and eat them, leaving only 10% of the current population, thus ushering in the New Utopia.
Even your writing style and subject matter can identify you. That's how they caught the Unabomber, through content and style of his manifesto. Keep your communications terse, business-like and confine them to the point, and avoid regionalisms.
Just run your English text through Google Translate, from English to German to French and back to English again. You'll end up sounding like you were dropped on your head as a baby, but you'll still be understandable, and it will handily obliterate your personal style in the process. (As opposed to English->Turkish->Japanese->English, which doesn't even result in actual words...)
The problem is the smart battery circuitry needed to monitor currents and voltages, balance cells, thermally monitor strings (or ideally individual cells), gas gauge, and safely disconnect problem cells from the system.
Fortunately Tesla says you can use their battery management system patents royalty free. I haven't read them, so I don't know if they're typical useless patent dreck or not, but at least in theory, there's detailed documentation on the industry-leading many-cell pack and its safety systems, which so far have proven to be fairly impressive. Even if it's only the typical hand-wavy description, it should at least provide a hint about how to handle all of those things you mentioned.
Woops. And also this. I set it all up so long ago I forgot the details. It Just Works(TM).
It's one plugin each for Chrome and Keepass to allow automatic entry of usernames and passwords into websites, plus one plugin for Keepass for database backup and synchronization.
Its fine for me (I actually prefer vim & gpg encrypted file), but non-computer geeks (eg every family member I have tried to get to use KeePass) hate having to: * Stop what they are doing * Open another program * Type in an unlock password * Search for the site they want, * Copy the password * Go back to the browser * Paste the password It takes more like 10-15 seconds for most people I've watched, and adding new passwords is takes longer.
You're doing it wrong. You need this and this. The first gives you automated recognition and entry of username and password into websites, as long as you populate the URL field in KeePass correctly (and it will help you do that). The second syncs to Google Drive, including upload, download, and download-merge-upload options.
Is anyone making a reasonably affordable four-wheel-drive electric (or "range-extended electric" a la Chevy Volt) vehicle?
The Tesla Model 3 will be available in four wheel drive next year. They'll probably only make that feature available together with an expanded battery pack, so it will probably cost ~$45,000. You'll have to decide for yourself if that's affordable to you.
Electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells are all about the supposed "addiction" to fossil fuels, and the damage it may (or may not) be doing to the environment. There is nothing inherently wrong with the internal combustion engine.
Uh, no. The internal combustion engine is fundamentally flawed. It's a heat engine that intentionally throws away all of the heat it generates. It has a torque curve that is so mismatched against the task of providing motive force that it's laughable. The very fact that the automotive shifting transmission even exists is proof that the internal combustion engine is not fit for purpose. It has the concept of idling, meaning it's turning over, wasting power, even while the vehicle is stopped. Even when the vehicle is moving, the engine efficiency is terrible, throwing away 80% of the energy in the fuel. And have you opened a hood or looked under a gasoline car lately? Modern engines are fantastically, absurdly complex, and none of that complexity is optional, because without it the efficiency and reliability of the engine is crap. Finally, providing full time torque vectoring four wheel drive, a feature that should be bog standard and required because it's so incredibly beneficial, using a gasoline engine is absurdly difficult and expensive, to the point where, after 100 years, almost no internal combustion vehicles are available with the feature.
The internal combustion engine is absolutely awful technology, horribly unsuited for the use to which it has been put for the past century. Hell, at the beginning of the last century, it only succeeded against the electric cars available at the time because of mob violence on the part of gasoline car dealers against the electric car dealers. The modern electric car is literally a century behind where it should be, and would have been without criminal activity on the part of internal combustion engine partisans.
Electric motors for motive force are superior in every way. They use zero energy when the vehicle isn't moving, their torque curve is perfectly matched against the needs of moving a vehicle, requiring no transmission, they're incredibly simple and compact, they're as much as 98% efficient (and never less than 80% efficient), and it's easy to provide full time torque vectoring all wheel drive using them.
I don't give a damn about CO2 emissions. I want an electric car because it's better.
And you should too. Nuclear power plants generate electricity. What in the hell are you thinking that you want to use that electricity to create hydrocarbons, at terrible efficiencies, only to burn it in an internal combustion engine, again at terrible efficiencies, when you could just store the electricity in a battery and use it directly. A single nuclear power plant can power five times as many electric vehicles as it can internal combustion vehicles, at a bare minimum, and it's very likely ten times as many, because of those combined inefficiencies.
Ultimately, it will take a second massive, irrational conspiracy to keep the internal combustion engine around. With any luck, Tesla will manage to prevent that this time.
Fortunately, thanks to 4chan tracking him down, he's looking at a long, LONG time in jail: berkeleyside.com
The thing I find most amusing in that article is that some of the evidence police presented against this guy is the fact that his cell phone was in the area of the riots at the time. A self-proclaimed anarchist attends a riot where he commits premeditated assault and battery and... carries his cell phone with him the entire time.
I asked at a flight qualification panel about this a few years ago and was told that to date, no cots cpu hardware has experienced either an SEI or had problems due to TID.
I'm not too surprised that lattice displacement damage has been minimal. While the station has been up there for a lot of years now, the laptops in use have been rotated out quite regularly. After all, they started with Thinkpad 700 series, which were 80486s of various flavors. Routine upgrades have been sufficient to avoid total ionizing doses big enough to be noticeable.
I'm astonished to hear that absolutely no COTS digital electronics have ever experienced crash or corruption inducing single event effects (When did they change the acronym from SEE to SEI?). I'd be willing to bet that there have been SEE/SEI crashes, but generations of craptacular Microsoft operating systems have concealed them. It's quite clear from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on board that the station is getting pelted with high energy protons day in and day out, not to mention the heavier stuff that contributes significantly to the radiation exposure astronauts have to keep track of. One of those particles hitting the right transistor will most certainly change the value stored in a DRAM cell, and now that we're talking about billions of cells with a transistor each, that's a lot of targets.
I have to ask, when you mention Beaglebones etc. being on station for years, does that involve years of uptime, or are these things being regularly rebooted? If they're being rebooted, how frequently?
Why not do the heavy computing down here on the ground, where it is so much easier?
Bandwidth. ISS has 3 megabit upstream, 10 megabit downstream. Yes, megabit, not gigabit. And that's a massive upgrade over what it had for years, which was 2400 baud. There's any number of science experiments people would like to run that would benefit from beefy local processing handling large amounts of data. So much data that neither transmitting it off station nor storing it and physically transporting it off station is currently feasible. The bandwidth isn't available or the storage is too expensive.
That may change in the 2020s. I'd bet a pizza that SpaceX will be including upward-facing antennas in their satellites, not just Earthward-facing, in order to talk to their own rockets at high bandwidth regardless of where they are in their trajectories. Still, it's going to be quite some time before that option exists, so experiments to determine the feasibility of local processing are worth conducting.
If you look at the ISS webcam when it switches to the interior cam, there's a few laptops (one running Ubuntu) tied to the sides of the walls.
The laptops don't run any essential systems directly. The 80386SX variants they're talking about control lifesystems. The laptops are for user interfaces and monitoring. There's somewhere around 80 of them on board the station, between station interfaces and payload interfaces. In 2013, a bunch of them were migrated to Linux, specifically Debian 6, according to reports. They used to run Windows NT and XP. The article is a press release written to overemphasize the hardened CPUs, which are by far the minority on board, to make this experimental launch of a pair of HP Apollo pc40s seem more impressive than it is.
Information about the reliability of the laptops is damn hard to find. I'm guessing NASA signed some sort of agreement with IBM to prevent publication of such information. IBM had the exclusive right to fly laptops to the US side of the space station for years, and Lenovo retained that right for some time. It was only recently that they lost it and NASA selected HP to provide the newest laptops.
Random forum posts from people involved indicate that the laptops crash with monotonous regularity. I suspect they would be a lot more stable if they had ECC RAM with aggressive scrubbing, but laptops with ECC RAM didn't exist until 2015 when Lenovo finally released a laptop with a Xeon in it. Odds are that none of the laptops on the ISS right now have ECC RAM.
These two HP Apollo modules do have ECC RAM. They're Broadwell core Xeon CPUs with 12 DDR4 DIMM slots and up to 4 nVidia Tesla P100 boards in them. Either the linked article is crap, or the Apollo units don't have any Teslas installed, because the article says their "speed is over 1 TeraFLOP", which is pretty feeble. With 4 P100s in them, each Apollo should be able to produce ~38 single-precision TeraFLOPS. The article is very poor, but at a guess, the P100 boards are not installed for cooling reasons. As it is, they're having to include a liquid cooling cabinet for them, because air cooling doesn't behave too well in microgravity. Either that or the P100s are installed, the liquid cooling can handle them, and the article is garbage. Between the ECC RAM and underclocking the CPUs, they're hoping these machines can run long enough between crashes to be useful.
Trying to be more appealing to women and minorities is a noble goal because in order to relate to all demographics of clients you need all demographics of staff. It's easy to miss out sometimes what another group might find appealing or offensive without valid representation.
Bullshit. One woman's opinion is not representative of what all women find appealing. Neither is a group of women's opinion, unless that group is a representative sample of the target population. And guess what—female software developers and technical 3D artists are by definition not representative, because they're a seriously unusual minority. For a representative sample, you just do short surveys and focus groups. You don't hire the people.
Appeal to minorities and all genders but don't set quotas. As long as Blizzard is really doing this and not just saying they are to look good- they're doing the right thing by my way of thinking.
Learning how to appeal to target audiences is called market research. Any entertainment business bigger than a mom and pop shop should be doing at least a little of it as a matter of course, and the more money available, the more research they should be doing. But that has fuck all to do with who they hire. You hire for the skills you need to produce a profitable product.
When you've saturated your traditional target audience and are looking to branch out, you keep that in mind. When you're hiring people for market research, you're looking for a particular set of skills, and hey presto! you'll be hiring mostly women, because the majority of people graduating with psychology and social sciences and marketing degrees are, wonder of wonders, women. When you're hiring a development team to make a game based on their research, it's going to be mostly men, because the majority of people graduating with computer science, computer engineering, math, and technical art degrees are men.
Unless your marketing department is absurdly bloated, a computer game company is going to be majority men. That's what candidates are available who have the skills you need at the ratios you need them.
Slashdot, by the way, needs to do more market research. I see at least three different comments being snide about the breast size of female avatars. I've known quite a few female gamers over the years, because of the genres I play, and here's a news flash. Women who choose female avatars (and not all of them do) will choose a character with bigger breasts just as frequently as they'll choose one with smaller breasts. More interestingly, if there's an avatar customization system in the game, they will push that slider up quite a ways. They will nearly always meet or beat their own personal physical attributes. Some of them do it ironically, pushing the slider right to the Ludicrous wall. I know because they've told me so. Most give their characters C or D cups, and do it because they want their avatar to be "pretty". I know because they've told me so. I didn't have to hire them as software developers to find this out.
I bet a new hire with a feminist agenda would fuck that up, insisting on limiting the slider to half its previous affect, because women don't actually want what women want, according to one woman with an agenda. And that would be sexist.
Also stupid. People choose game avatars based on an ideal, not reality. How many pale, skinny white guys with glasses do you see as avatars? None. (Dr. Gordon Freeman isn't very pale, nor all that skinny.) The male avatars are tall, craggy of visage, with broad shoulders, deep chests, and narrow hips, and according to the female artist I lived with, no penises. Their armor rarely bulges where it needs to bulge. The female avatars are short, pretty of visage, with slim shoulders, big breasts, and round hips, and according to the female artist I lived with, they're obviously ten times better at hand to hand combat than the men, because their armor is useless,
Yeah because shit male developers never get hired apart from all the fucking time. I love how only the bad female developers are separated out for comment.
There were two shit male developers. Both of them were even on the same team as the shit female developers. One of them was in charge of the build system. What he created was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I taught myself CMake in an afternoon just so I could at least partially unfuck it. He got fired as part of a mass layoff six months later. The other one was one of those guys who tried to make himself indispensable by hiding his code, never checking it in to source control. He was in charge of the installation system. He too created a clusterfuck of epic proportions. He got fired as part of a different mass layoff. When we finally got a look at his code after he was gone and some of us had to salvage his shit off his hard drive, it basically wasn't worth saving. Meanwhile she stayed on through four layoff cycles, never really improving in skill.
The sexism in favor of women gets really fucking blatant when there are four shit developers on the same team, and the two males are fired and the two females are retained.
No one seems to ever consider "that guy" (you know the one) to some how cast doubt and suspicion on all male developers, yet when you get bad female developers there's suspicion and spillover.
Wanna bet? The rest of that team were two men and a third woman. They were competent, but everyone was suspicious of everything that came out of that team, for years. And for good reason. Nine times out of ten when something broke, it was collectively their shit code at the heart of it. After the two incompetent men were fired, it took two years for the rest of them to start to dig out from under the stigma, and they still lived under a permanent pall even then, because everyone knew damn well the two incompetent women were still on the team.
Ultimately it was a bad team because of an incompetent manager who could neither assure quality nor get his team to improve without simply getting rid of part of his team. Their seats were never filled, either. The other managers didn't want the guy hiring more idiots.
What the fuck ever happened to merit over gender?
It got burned to the ground by third wave feminism.
I've had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men.
I've seen this happen to a female developer at my last job. Superficially it looked like sexism. In actuality, it was merit-based. She would regularly, even frequently, make comments or ask questions that revealed a profound lack of understanding of the language we were all developing in, and she was not new to the language. On the rare occasions when her comment or question had merit, it required a man to rephrase it before anyone would listen to it seriously because she had trained everyone around her to ignore her or discount her input or answer her only to correct her.
There were half a dozen female developers on the floor. Two of them, including the aforementioned one, were obvious diversity hires who would have been laid off if they were men. The second one didn't even have a technology related degree. Her degree was in English composition, and she did not have an additional one, yet she wrote code all day. It was blatant sexism—in favor of women. The two of them made the lives of the other female developers miserable, just from suspicion and spillover, though they were good developers. It took extra time for new hires to separate their reactions appropriately simply because of those two.
Having said that, everybody did separate their reactions. No one talked over, ignored, rephrased, or repeated the questions and comments of the female developers who were actually good at their jobs. Merit matters in tech. A lot. Sexist policies that are retaining and promoting women out of proportion to their merit are hurting the cause of women in tech far more than anyone is willing to acknowledge. It needs to stop.
Slashdot Mirror
Gee, maybe the powers that be will actually have to encourage the training of critical thought in the population at large, so people can approach the marketplace of ideas with some discernment.
Naaah. They'd much rather have sheeple they can trivially manipulate themselves. If they get derailed by some foreign power's propaganda, they can be put right again by doubling down on their own propaganda. I'm sure it'll be fine.
It will be. Imagine going to a business meeting, picking up a pair a VR glasses that look like oakleys, and everything on the meeting table and walls is VR/Augmented reality. That's the future.
Every single one of your examples is AR, not VR.
VR is "going" to a business meeting by putting on your VR goggles while in your pajamas and seeing a fancy board room with you and all the other attendees in suits, even though they're probably in their PJs too, and considering it as good as actually going to a meeting. Which won't happen without a Juanita Marquez doing her thing as depicted in Snow Crash, namely creating an avatar system with virtual facial expressions with high enough fidelity to real faces to match reality, driven by data from both an external camera (for the uncovered parts of the face) and internal cameras that do both eye tracking and facial expression capture (for the covered parts of the face).
Both good AR as you described and really good VR as Neal Stephenson described are hard problems. Very hard problems. It could be everywhere and in everything, but there's quite a big gap between current VR and what's needed to actually achieve that ubiquity.
I have a pretty high income compared to my peers (nearly 100k), very low debt, and yet, my score has always hovered around the "average" to "above average" range, currently hanging out around 680. According to official statistics, I have a income higher than 64% of the US population, I have a debt lower than 84% of the US population, I've never defaulted or been late on anything, and yet somehow my credit risk is only better than 40% of the US population. EXPLAIN THAT.
The credit score formulas weight age above all else. My score hovered around 700 for the entirety of my 30s. Now that I'm in my 40s, it's magically over 800. The only thing that has changed is the age of the accounts. Absolutely nothing else is different. There were no negative reports before and are none now. The accounts simply aged into the 800 bracket.
It's a fairly stupid system. It's not like Boomers aren't capable of defaulting on debt. They do, in droves. Where do you think the spike in health care expense-related bankruptcies is coming from? But age (or lack thereof) imposes an artificial ceiling on your credit score regardless.
Soon Amazon will sell me a robot that buys things for itself off of Amazon...
Soon? They already do. It's called Echo and it already orders stuff when little kids make wishes in its presence. You have to go out of your way to add a confirmation code if you don't want it to just order stuff at the drop of a hat. It's just a "plugin" away from ordering whatever it determines you need.
NCIS has prominently featured a female hacker for more than a decade now. A female hacker who possesses all the same superpowers as every male hacker: she can get through any encryption in as much under 44 minutes as is required to advance the plot.
Warehouse 13 prominently featured a female hacker for very nearly the entirety of its 5 year run, beginning 8 years ago. She didn't exhibit her hacking superpowers nearly as frequently as Abby in NCIS, but Allison Scagliotti made up for it by being improbably beautiful.
Leverage prominently featured a black male hacker for the entirety of its 4 year run, beginning 9 years ago. He too had all the requisite hacking superpowers Hollywood insists on depicting.
Hell, we can go all the way back to Hackers, in 1995, to find a very young Angelina Jolie playing yet another improbably beautiful female hacker. We don't know if she had hacking superpowers because real computers didn't actually appear in that movie, but I'm sure if there were any, she would have.
Other examples are plentiful. In short, Hollywood has been injecting minorities and women into a predominantly white male role for more than a generation, predating even the existence of Google. It doesn't matter. In the face of persistent, even pervasive propaganda for an entire generation, the number of women getting CS degrees has gone down, not up. It's almost as if people object to fake role models routinely doing the impossible, especially when they know damn well that the job is simultaneously boring (to their minds) and insanely complicated, and nothing like what's depicted on TV, because guess what, everybody can use a computer, and nearly everybody has, at least a little, so they know the reality is far different.
Bullshit propaganda is bullshit, and also a demonstrated failure. But you just keep on keepin' on, Google. I'm sure it'll start working. Aaaaany minute now...
(Actually, white males should probably be thanking Google for these efforts. After 25 years of anti-correlation, their propaganda seems to have had the affect of reinforcing their dominance of the field. Want a fake hacker? Hire a pretty girl or a black man. Want your computer fixed? Hire a white man.)
I'm frankly rather disappointed that slashdot keeps trolling us with these articles about how automation is going to cause some sort of holocaust in the work place despite there being zero evidence for it either historical or current.
If you think there are no historical antecedents, you aren't paying attention. The Dickensian Dystopia wasn't a fiction. It was a reflection of English society at the time. The first Industrial Revolution was massively disruptive. As many as three generations of the non-monied classes lived and died as paupers, with zero chance of ever getting out of the hole they were born into. The "social safety net" at the time was poor houses. Essentially warehousing people society had no idea what to do with.
Automation may result in more wealth, but whether or not that wealth is at all distributed is irrelevant to the presence of automation.
Intensive courses sound good, but once the "graduates" get out, they discover that they will be competing with people who have been obsessed with computers since the age of ten; people who would rather code than eat.
Hey, I eat at my keyboard you insensitive clod!
Filter violence? It's called Star *WARS*! If you can't handle the violence, go watch the "My little Pony" movie.
The lunatics who want this service think violence is just FINE for children, even very small children. But tits terrify them. And they surely won't let their precious snowflakes watch the My Little Pony movie, which doesn't even thinly veil its advocating for bestiality. (Remember kids, bestiality is best!)
Nah. Lots of people don't want their 5 year old watching "Ghostbusters" and then running around saying "It's true! This man has no dick!" But otherwise it is very appealing to little kids.
A corpse that has rotted nearly to a skeleton in the driver seat of a taxi is A-OK for a 5 year old but a throwaway dick joke is too much? You people live in a fucked up world. Nearly every effects shot in that movie depicts something way too scary for a 5 year old, from the corpse in the taxi to the banshee in the library to the terror dog chasing across the street. Even Slimer is not the friendly squeaky version depicted in the cartoon. In the movie he's greedy and belligerent and somewhat dangerous.
Ghostbusters is rated PG. If your precious parental guidance thinks it's suitable for a 5 year old, you're a bad parent. It is not a children's movie, no matter how hard the marketing tries to make it so.
My main concern is that the vat doesn't have a working immune system, unlike the animals. What will they have to do to ensure the meat is safe?
Chemical antibiotics. Tanker trucks full.
Will this result in the breeding of superbugs that will cause a national pandemic, wiping out 80% of the population? Yes. Yes it will.
The only people left will be the fanatic vegans and the animal meat eaters. Then the animal meat eaters will kill the vegans and eat them, leaving only 10% of the current population, thus ushering in the New Utopia.
Even your writing style and subject matter can identify you. That's how they caught the Unabomber, through content and style of his manifesto. Keep your communications terse, business-like and confine them to the point, and avoid regionalisms.
Just run your English text through Google Translate, from English to German to French and back to English again. You'll end up sounding like you were dropped on your head as a baby, but you'll still be understandable, and it will handily obliterate your personal style in the process. (As opposed to English->Turkish->Japanese->English, which doesn't even result in actual words...)
The problem is the smart battery circuitry needed to monitor currents and voltages, balance cells, thermally monitor strings (or ideally individual cells), gas gauge, and safely disconnect problem cells from the system.
Fortunately Tesla says you can use their battery management system patents royalty free. I haven't read them, so I don't know if they're typical useless patent dreck or not, but at least in theory, there's detailed documentation on the industry-leading many-cell pack and its safety systems, which so far have proven to be fairly impressive. Even if it's only the typical hand-wavy description, it should at least provide a hint about how to handle all of those things you mentioned.
Woops. And also this. I set it all up so long ago I forgot the details. It Just Works(TM).
It's one plugin each for Chrome and Keepass to allow automatic entry of usernames and passwords into websites, plus one plugin for Keepass for database backup and synchronization.
Its fine for me (I actually prefer vim & gpg encrypted file), but non-computer geeks (eg every family member I have tried to get to use KeePass) hate having to:
* Stop what they are doing
* Open another program
* Type in an unlock password
* Search for the site they want,
* Copy the password
* Go back to the browser
* Paste the password
It takes more like 10-15 seconds for most people I've watched, and adding new passwords is takes longer.
You're doing it wrong. You need this and this. The first gives you automated recognition and entry of username and password into websites, as long as you populate the URL field in KeePass correctly (and it will help you do that). The second syncs to Google Drive, including upload, download, and download-merge-upload options.
Is anyone making a reasonably affordable four-wheel-drive electric (or "range-extended electric" a la Chevy Volt) vehicle?
The Tesla Model 3 will be available in four wheel drive next year. They'll probably only make that feature available together with an expanded battery pack, so it will probably cost ~$45,000. You'll have to decide for yourself if that's affordable to you.
Electric cars and hydrogen fuel cells are all about the supposed "addiction" to fossil fuels, and the damage it may (or may not) be doing to the environment. There is nothing inherently wrong with the internal combustion engine.
Uh, no. The internal combustion engine is fundamentally flawed. It's a heat engine that intentionally throws away all of the heat it generates. It has a torque curve that is so mismatched against the task of providing motive force that it's laughable. The very fact that the automotive shifting transmission even exists is proof that the internal combustion engine is not fit for purpose. It has the concept of idling, meaning it's turning over, wasting power, even while the vehicle is stopped. Even when the vehicle is moving, the engine efficiency is terrible, throwing away 80% of the energy in the fuel. And have you opened a hood or looked under a gasoline car lately? Modern engines are fantastically, absurdly complex, and none of that complexity is optional, because without it the efficiency and reliability of the engine is crap. Finally, providing full time torque vectoring four wheel drive, a feature that should be bog standard and required because it's so incredibly beneficial, using a gasoline engine is absurdly difficult and expensive, to the point where, after 100 years, almost no internal combustion vehicles are available with the feature.
The internal combustion engine is absolutely awful technology, horribly unsuited for the use to which it has been put for the past century. Hell, at the beginning of the last century, it only succeeded against the electric cars available at the time because of mob violence on the part of gasoline car dealers against the electric car dealers. The modern electric car is literally a century behind where it should be, and would have been without criminal activity on the part of internal combustion engine partisans.
Electric motors for motive force are superior in every way. They use zero energy when the vehicle isn't moving, their torque curve is perfectly matched against the needs of moving a vehicle, requiring no transmission, they're incredibly simple and compact, they're as much as 98% efficient (and never less than 80% efficient), and it's easy to provide full time torque vectoring all wheel drive using them.
I don't give a damn about CO2 emissions. I want an electric car because it's better.
And you should too. Nuclear power plants generate electricity. What in the hell are you thinking that you want to use that electricity to create hydrocarbons, at terrible efficiencies, only to burn it in an internal combustion engine, again at terrible efficiencies, when you could just store the electricity in a battery and use it directly. A single nuclear power plant can power five times as many electric vehicles as it can internal combustion vehicles, at a bare minimum, and it's very likely ten times as many, because of those combined inefficiencies.
Ultimately, it will take a second massive, irrational conspiracy to keep the internal combustion engine around. With any luck, Tesla will manage to prevent that this time.
Fortunately, thanks to 4chan tracking him down, he's looking at a long, LONG time in jail: berkeleyside.com
The thing I find most amusing in that article is that some of the evidence police presented against this guy is the fact that his cell phone was in the area of the riots at the time. A self-proclaimed anarchist attends a riot where he commits premeditated assault and battery and... carries his cell phone with him the entire time.
They don't make anarchists like they used to.
(helicopter parents isn't the best term, can't think of a better one now)
Back in my day, the phrase 'helicopter parents' didn't exist. We called them what they are: control freaks.
I asked at a flight qualification panel about this a few years ago and was told that to date, no cots cpu hardware has experienced either an SEI or had problems due to TID.
I'm not too surprised that lattice displacement damage has been minimal. While the station has been up there for a lot of years now, the laptops in use have been rotated out quite regularly. After all, they started with Thinkpad 700 series, which were 80486s of various flavors. Routine upgrades have been sufficient to avoid total ionizing doses big enough to be noticeable.
I'm astonished to hear that absolutely no COTS digital electronics have ever experienced crash or corruption inducing single event effects (When did they change the acronym from SEE to SEI?). I'd be willing to bet that there have been SEE/SEI crashes, but generations of craptacular Microsoft operating systems have concealed them. It's quite clear from the Alpha Magnetic Spectrometer on board that the station is getting pelted with high energy protons day in and day out, not to mention the heavier stuff that contributes significantly to the radiation exposure astronauts have to keep track of. One of those particles hitting the right transistor will most certainly change the value stored in a DRAM cell, and now that we're talking about billions of cells with a transistor each, that's a lot of targets.
I have to ask, when you mention Beaglebones etc. being on station for years, does that involve years of uptime, or are these things being regularly rebooted? If they're being rebooted, how frequently?
Why not do the heavy computing down here on the ground, where it is so much easier?
Bandwidth. ISS has 3 megabit upstream, 10 megabit downstream. Yes, megabit, not gigabit. And that's a massive upgrade over what it had for years, which was 2400 baud. There's any number of science experiments people would like to run that would benefit from beefy local processing handling large amounts of data. So much data that neither transmitting it off station nor storing it and physically transporting it off station is currently feasible. The bandwidth isn't available or the storage is too expensive.
That may change in the 2020s. I'd bet a pizza that SpaceX will be including upward-facing antennas in their satellites, not just Earthward-facing, in order to talk to their own rockets at high bandwidth regardless of where they are in their trajectories. Still, it's going to be quite some time before that option exists, so experiments to determine the feasibility of local processing are worth conducting.
If you look at the ISS webcam when it switches to the interior cam, there's a few laptops (one running Ubuntu) tied to the sides of the walls.
The laptops don't run any essential systems directly. The 80386SX variants they're talking about control lifesystems. The laptops are for user interfaces and monitoring. There's somewhere around 80 of them on board the station, between station interfaces and payload interfaces. In 2013, a bunch of them were migrated to Linux, specifically Debian 6, according to reports. They used to run Windows NT and XP. The article is a press release written to overemphasize the hardened CPUs, which are by far the minority on board, to make this experimental launch of a pair of HP Apollo pc40s seem more impressive than it is.
Information about the reliability of the laptops is damn hard to find. I'm guessing NASA signed some sort of agreement with IBM to prevent publication of such information. IBM had the exclusive right to fly laptops to the US side of the space station for years, and Lenovo retained that right for some time. It was only recently that they lost it and NASA selected HP to provide the newest laptops.
Random forum posts from people involved indicate that the laptops crash with monotonous regularity. I suspect they would be a lot more stable if they had ECC RAM with aggressive scrubbing, but laptops with ECC RAM didn't exist until 2015 when Lenovo finally released a laptop with a Xeon in it. Odds are that none of the laptops on the ISS right now have ECC RAM.
These two HP Apollo modules do have ECC RAM. They're Broadwell core Xeon CPUs with 12 DDR4 DIMM slots and up to 4 nVidia Tesla P100 boards in them. Either the linked article is crap, or the Apollo units don't have any Teslas installed, because the article says their "speed is over 1 TeraFLOP", which is pretty feeble. With 4 P100s in them, each Apollo should be able to produce ~38 single-precision TeraFLOPS. The article is very poor, but at a guess, the P100 boards are not installed for cooling reasons. As it is, they're having to include a liquid cooling cabinet for them, because air cooling doesn't behave too well in microgravity. Either that or the P100s are installed, the liquid cooling can handle them, and the article is garbage. Between the ECC RAM and underclocking the CPUs, they're hoping these machines can run long enough between crashes to be useful.
WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! WHAM! /Why not vacation in beautiful Bellingham, Washington?
.
While it's still there.
Trying to be more appealing to women and minorities is a noble goal because in order to relate to all demographics of clients you need all demographics of staff. It's easy to miss out sometimes what another group might find appealing or offensive without valid representation.
Bullshit. One woman's opinion is not representative of what all women find appealing. Neither is a group of women's opinion, unless that group is a representative sample of the target population. And guess what—female software developers and technical 3D artists are by definition not representative, because they're a seriously unusual minority. For a representative sample, you just do short surveys and focus groups. You don't hire the people.
Appeal to minorities and all genders but don't set quotas. As long as Blizzard is really doing this and not just saying they are to look good- they're doing the right thing by my way of thinking.
Learning how to appeal to target audiences is called market research. Any entertainment business bigger than a mom and pop shop should be doing at least a little of it as a matter of course, and the more money available, the more research they should be doing. But that has fuck all to do with who they hire. You hire for the skills you need to produce a profitable product.
When you've saturated your traditional target audience and are looking to branch out, you keep that in mind. When you're hiring people for market research, you're looking for a particular set of skills, and hey presto! you'll be hiring mostly women, because the majority of people graduating with psychology and social sciences and marketing degrees are, wonder of wonders, women. When you're hiring a development team to make a game based on their research, it's going to be mostly men, because the majority of people graduating with computer science, computer engineering, math, and technical art degrees are men.
Unless your marketing department is absurdly bloated, a computer game company is going to be majority men. That's what candidates are available who have the skills you need at the ratios you need them.
Slashdot, by the way, needs to do more market research. I see at least three different comments being snide about the breast size of female avatars. I've known quite a few female gamers over the years, because of the genres I play, and here's a news flash. Women who choose female avatars (and not all of them do) will choose a character with bigger breasts just as frequently as they'll choose one with smaller breasts. More interestingly, if there's an avatar customization system in the game, they will push that slider up quite a ways. They will nearly always meet or beat their own personal physical attributes. Some of them do it ironically, pushing the slider right to the Ludicrous wall. I know because they've told me so. Most give their characters C or D cups, and do it because they want their avatar to be "pretty". I know because they've told me so. I didn't have to hire them as software developers to find this out.
I bet a new hire with a feminist agenda would fuck that up, insisting on limiting the slider to half its previous affect, because women don't actually want what women want, according to one woman with an agenda. And that would be sexist.
Also stupid. People choose game avatars based on an ideal, not reality. How many pale, skinny white guys with glasses do you see as avatars? None. (Dr. Gordon Freeman isn't very pale, nor all that skinny.) The male avatars are tall, craggy of visage, with broad shoulders, deep chests, and narrow hips, and according to the female artist I lived with, no penises. Their armor rarely bulges where it needs to bulge. The female avatars are short, pretty of visage, with slim shoulders, big breasts, and round hips, and according to the female artist I lived with, they're obviously ten times better at hand to hand combat than the men, because their armor is useless,
Yeah because shit male developers never get hired apart from all the fucking time. I love how only the bad female developers are separated out for comment.
There were two shit male developers. Both of them were even on the same team as the shit female developers. One of them was in charge of the build system. What he created was a clusterfuck of epic proportions. I taught myself CMake in an afternoon just so I could at least partially unfuck it. He got fired as part of a mass layoff six months later. The other one was one of those guys who tried to make himself indispensable by hiding his code, never checking it in to source control. He was in charge of the installation system. He too created a clusterfuck of epic proportions. He got fired as part of a different mass layoff. When we finally got a look at his code after he was gone and some of us had to salvage his shit off his hard drive, it basically wasn't worth saving. Meanwhile she stayed on through four layoff cycles, never really improving in skill.
The sexism in favor of women gets really fucking blatant when there are four shit developers on the same team, and the two males are fired and the two females are retained.
No one seems to ever consider "that guy" (you know the one) to some how cast doubt and suspicion on all male developers, yet when you get bad female developers there's suspicion and spillover.
Wanna bet? The rest of that team were two men and a third woman. They were competent, but everyone was suspicious of everything that came out of that team, for years. And for good reason. Nine times out of ten when something broke, it was collectively their shit code at the heart of it. After the two incompetent men were fired, it took two years for the rest of them to start to dig out from under the stigma, and they still lived under a permanent pall even then, because everyone knew damn well the two incompetent women were still on the team.
Ultimately it was a bad team because of an incompetent manager who could neither assure quality nor get his team to improve without simply getting rid of part of his team. Their seats were never filled, either. The other managers didn't want the guy hiring more idiots.
What the fuck ever happened to merit over gender?
It got burned to the ground by third wave feminism.
I've had my comments frequently interrupted and my ideas ignored until they were rephrased by men.
I've seen this happen to a female developer at my last job. Superficially it looked like sexism. In actuality, it was merit-based. She would regularly, even frequently, make comments or ask questions that revealed a profound lack of understanding of the language we were all developing in, and she was not new to the language. On the rare occasions when her comment or question had merit, it required a man to rephrase it before anyone would listen to it seriously because she had trained everyone around her to ignore her or discount her input or answer her only to correct her.
There were half a dozen female developers on the floor. Two of them, including the aforementioned one, were obvious diversity hires who would have been laid off if they were men. The second one didn't even have a technology related degree. Her degree was in English composition, and she did not have an additional one, yet she wrote code all day. It was blatant sexism—in favor of women. The two of them made the lives of the other female developers miserable, just from suspicion and spillover, though they were good developers. It took extra time for new hires to separate their reactions appropriately simply because of those two.
Having said that, everybody did separate their reactions. No one talked over, ignored, rephrased, or repeated the questions and comments of the female developers who were actually good at their jobs. Merit matters in tech. A lot. Sexist policies that are retaining and promoting women out of proportion to their merit are hurting the cause of women in tech far more than anyone is willing to acknowledge. It needs to stop.