Central planning was indeed a disaster for the USSR, communist China, and in Africa, but that may have had more to do with ideology defeating pragmatism than with greed, which is pretty much universal. Singapore presents a counter-example, though tiny in scale, and China now seems to be attempting to do something similar on a large scale (this observation does not mean that I think this is a good thing; I hope democracy continues to succeed, and to develop in China.)
I think we really are entering a new era, as this is the first time in history that we could screw up the future globally, and some form of planning (but not micro-managing) will become necessary for an optimal outcome.
China is still partially a plan-driven economy, which does not need to have a result as long as the Party bosses get theirs.
There, fixed that for ya.
That's true, but it is not an argument against planning.
It has been suggested that democracy is not viable in the long term because it enables selfish behavior on too broad a base to be sustainable. I hope this is wrong, but I fear there's a grain of truth to it.
Mr. Winestock's parallels between server farms and mainframes are reasonable, if unoriginal, and the same can be said for his concerns over privacy and social control. His attempt to claim the former as the causative agent for the latter, however, goes wrong right from the start: 'Mini/micro-computers were supposed to kill the mainframe.'
Not so. They came about firstly because technological advances made them possible, and also because some smart people realized that they would allow us to do things that, in practice, we could not do before. The pioneers of these developments were not interested in reproducing, much less replacing, mainframe computing.
Turing showed us that the form of our hardware doesn't dictate what we can do with it. To understand the arc of privacy erosion and social control, we need to examine social history and human nature, not the artifacts of technological advance.
Basically 4chan, like anonymous, is simply a bastion of the socially immature taking vigilante justice into their own hands. Stoke the fire of society's fears and then claim innocence when someone acts on their "information".
Given its hands-washing statement in response to criticism of its irresponsible amplification of this canard, you can substitute "New York Post" (or "Murdoch's disinformation network") for 4chan in your statement.
All that "process crap" is exactly how any successful engineering project is done. The space program in the 60's and 70's was no exception. Do some reading about the actual engineering that went on and you'll quickly realize it was ALL about developing working processes.
It wasn't all about developing processes. It also required a lot of seriously knowledgeable people doing some seriously clever things.
The problem with process adoption in IT and software development is the widespread tacit belief that you can get all the benefits just by adopting better procedures, without regard to the technical issues that make the problem non-trivial. This failure of understanding is often amplified by the expectation that you can cheat on the process and still get the benefits.
CMM level 1 is perhaps the ultimate expression of this self-delusion. Both IT and software development need effective processes, but just saying that's what you are doing doesn't get the job done.
I've looked at the decision to leave port. I can't really fault that. Navy captains routinely make that same decision. The Coast Guard, likewise.
All that shows is that you cannot automatically conclude it was a bad decision. Whether it was depends on the specifics of the ship, its crew, the ship's location, the storm's predicted development and the degree of certainty of those predictions, and the other options available.
If the ship not truly seaworthy, if housekeeping is a threat to that seaworthiness, then the captain must rectify the situation, or refrain from going to sea and/or chasing that storm.
Exactly - that is one of the specifics of the ship.
The decision to turn south and west to follow the storm seems somewhat less responsible.
By turning westwards when he did, the Captain was not following the storm, he was crossing in front of it. It certainly looks reckless, but I guess we will never know if the captain had come to conclude that the ship would likely founder regardless of its course, and was seeking to improve the chances of a rescue.
Cathy O'Neil (Mathbabe) offers a well-argued criticism of Nate Silver when he stepped beyond his area of expertise in his recent, popular book, '"The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t"
This may off-topic, but by 'septic environment', I was also thinking of the fact that we have to live with the bad decisions of businesses and government agencies that we have to deal with.
If only that were feasible. Unfortunately, we have created a septic environment and the only way to be sure of staying clean is to live in a bubble.
Not that I'm excusing the irresponsible decisions that are routinely made over security issues. That's how we got into this mess in the first place - one small, dumb step after another.
When Java first came out, I thought the documentation was extremely good, and a model use of hypertext (I cannot comment on its current state because I no longer use it.) In comparison, Microsoft's documentation leaves a lot to be desired. The pages in the API reference section are very formulaic, oriented towards describing syntax rather than explaining semantics. There is a lot of hyperlinking, but it doesn't necessarily help: you can follow long chains of links from one uninformative place to another - there's no "there" there.
There is some excellent tutorial material to be found on Microsoft's site, by people who clearly both know their stuff and how to communicate it, but it's hit and miss as to whether your current concern has been well covered. These would seem to be good places for the API references to link to, but that does not seem to have been done nearly as often as it should (perhaps the links in the API references are largely machine-generated?)
I get the impression that the overall management of documentation production is driven by objective but superficial metrics, such as the number of pages and links, without regard to qualitative but important considerations such as quality and usefulness. I also imagine that much of the grunt-work is farmed out to masses of asses.
It doesn't help that Microsoft has multiple, overlapping products and APIs, and there does not seem to be an easy way to constrain a search of their sites to your specific domain of interest (unless you are searching for a specific language element and you know its namespace).
I am not an anti-Microsoft partisan, and I am well aware that the documentation in the FOSS word also varies from excellent to execrable. Creating good documentation of complex issues is a hard problem.
TLDR: Iran apparently built at least its second-generation centrifuges in the sense that Boeing and Airbus build airplanes, i.e. with a significant amount of subcontracting. That is moot anyway, because if, as you claim, " Iran can barely make a coffee maker", they will never be able to do anything with the U235 they may extract.
In more detail:
As far as I can tell, Iran neither acquired assembled centrifuges nor assembled them from kits. It did acquire many components and supplies from abroad:
Iran acquired a long list of items, including high-strength aluminum, maraging steel, electron beam welders, balancing machines, vacuum pumps, computer-numerically controlled machine tools, and flow-forming machines for both aluminum and maraging steel. - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2004.
This list of supplies is a long way from being a pre-made centrifuge.
The SCADA system targeted by the Stuxnet worm came from Siemens, and is general-purpose software that has to be configured for each specific use. One of the reasons the Stuxnet worm did not have widespread effects is that its release was very carefully targeted.
Weather was as much a danger for rigid airships as was fire. The US built three big helium-filled airships, and they were all bought down by bad weather. With today's vastly-improved weather forecasting and imaging, perhaps you could operate one successfully, but I think you would have to choose where in the world and when to operate it, to avoid the risk of being caught in a violent storm.
What a terrible situation you are in! You know something, but nobody gives a shit. It must be incredibly galling, and I am deeply sympathetic (would you call that irony, given that I am actually amused by your pedantic petulance?)
The author's use looked reasonable to me, and in agreement with common usage, so I looked into it a bit more, and it is not so simple.
Wikipedia's entry on irony includes these statements:
The American Heritage Dictionary's secondary meaning for irony: "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs". This sense, however, is not synonymous with "incongruous" but merely a definition of dramatic or situational irony.
Situational irony: This is a relatively modern use of the term [citation needed], and describes a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results in a certain situation.
The free online dictionary has this usage note: The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence 'In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York.' Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence 'Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market', where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.
The author describes a situation that involves situational irony as defined by Wikipedia: at an event promoting the use of MongoDB, he sees something that dissuades him for using it, at least temporarily. In fact, there is not just a discrepancy between expected and actual results, but an opposition. Furthermore, it does not fall foul of the 'mere coincidence' rule in the usage note. FWIW, I would not avoid using 'ironically' here.
There are useful hypothetical concepts and harmful ones, and everything in between. To think that a claim about a specific hypothetical concept applies to them all is arse-about thinking, a logical fallacy known as arguing from the specific to the general.
So splitting of a species based on "imaginary boundaries", into different factions and having world wars based on same, resulting in millions of deaths is a "useful hypothetical concept" to you? It seems like there is arse-about thinking and there is talking out of one's arse.
Don't look any sillier than you have to - it obviously falls into the category of harmful concepts (though not, unfortunately, hypothetical ones). This tells us nothing about whether or not cyberspace is a useful concept, let alone a 'stupid' one.
In fact, you have, apparently unconsciously, turned your original argument around. Instead of "if the concept of cyberspace is stupid, so is the concept of political boundaries. Both are merely hypothetical concepts devised by men" you might equally say "If the concept of cyberspace is stupid, so is the concept of [warfare, Nazism, Communism, homeopathy, charity, God, pixies]. Both are merely hypothetical concepts devised by men."
There is one other possibility that could account for your peculiar post: that you are only attempting to argue that cyberspace is some sort of concept (even whether you think it is hypothetical one is unclear, as you switch your argument (such as it is) from "political boundaries", which you call hypothetical, to a particular type of political division (nations), which you call "real" (your quotes).) If that is the case, then firstly, the original sentence is a case of begging the question, and secondly, you have utterly missed the point. Everyone else here knows that cyberspace is a concept, and broadly share a common idea of what it means. The question is whether it is a useful concept.
You seem to be one of those people who are incapable of logical reasoning, and whose reactions to language are purely emotional. One aspect of this is that when something that superficially resembles a logical argument crosses your mind, you assume it is just that.
The author of the article is a moron
Before you fall for the temptation to use any more gratuitous insults and thereby look foolish, do yourself a favor and look up the Dunning-Kruger effect.
But the base problem remains (which is probably why he finds so dificult to model his data): hierarchical datasets and relational model are not good friends.
Data modeling should be performed at a level of abstraction higher than the access methods of a DBMS. The relational model is at a higher level and handles hierarchical models very easily, while not being limited to them. If, on the other hand, you are trying to think about the semantic structure of your data in SQL terms, you are doing it wrong.
I don't know whats worse, Google applied for this, or the USPTO approved it.
I am no particular fan of Google, but if the USPTO is approving this sort of thing, Google (and every other business) has to worry that some troll will land a patent on some basic part of their everyday operations, and if you can afford it, one defense is to attempt to patent everything that you do and use. They may have been as surprised as we are that it was approved.
For the USPTO this is a wonderful business model: do a crappy job and increase the demand for your services. Another recent example of this business model in practice was the way S&P rated mortgage-backed securities.
However, the one claim of Broder's that Tesla doesn't try to debunk is the loss of charge from overnight cold. Looking at the graphs, somewhere around mile 400, there is a sudden drop in charge from ~45% to ~38%, with a corresponding drop in estimated range from ~80 miles to ~20 miles (the two are not linearly related, presumably because of the intrincacies of the charge/discharge curve being nonlinear). This seems to correspond to what Broder said, that by letting the car sit in the cold, it lost 2/3 of its range.
This is a valid issue. My guess about the disproportionate drop in range is that it is a consequence, at least in part, of the range calculation taking into account the additional cabin heating needed on a colder day.
did he leave it running in a parking spot for a few hours with the heater blasting?... actually there is a spike in the 'cabin temperature' right at that point...)
The spike could be due to him turning up the heat in the morning. Assuming that the car was stationary overnight, that night is represented by a point on the milage axis.
After Musk's initial complaint, the Times doubled-down and defended their report as accurate, and then Musk presented this quantitative evidence. Someone at the Times is going to be very pissed with Mr. Broder if Tesla's data stand up to scrutiny.
The plots show a precipitous drop in charge level around the 400 mile mark that doesn't match the constant discharge slopes elsewhere. The only thing that happened at that time was the temperature increasing from 70F to 75F. It seems odd that at 35% charge the heaters would have that effect when nothing seemed to happen at other times with the temp above 74F.
Interesting. I think that's the overnight stop, during which the outside temperature dropped significantly, reducing the available charge in the battery. The much larger drop (in % terms) of the range at that time may have been a combination of the reduced usable charge and the additional cabin heating load.
Airliners can detect other aircraft. I believe there was an incident where an airliner's collision detection radar atually detected an F117 and had to temporarily abort a climb, due to a near miss.
The Traffic Collision Avoidance System uses transponders of a particular type: they communicate with one another to determine mutual range (from round-trip signal times), azimuth (by using directional antennas) and altitude (as reported by the transponders). TCAS is mandatory for all but small airliners in most of the world, and the military use it when they are not in combat.
If the concept of cyberspace is stupid, so is the concept of political boundaries. Both are merely hypothetical concepts devised by men.
There are useful hypothetical concepts and harmful ones, and everything in between. To think that a claim about a specific hypothetical concept applies to them all is arse-about thinking, a logical fallacy known as arguing from the specific to the general.
The author of the article is a moron
I think that's unlikely, but if he is, he has some company.
Slashdot Mirror
Central planning was indeed a disaster for the USSR, communist China, and in Africa, but that may have had more to do with ideology defeating pragmatism than with greed, which is pretty much universal. Singapore presents a counter-example, though tiny in scale, and China now seems to be attempting to do something similar on a large scale (this observation does not mean that I think this is a good thing; I hope democracy continues to succeed, and to develop in China.)
I think we really are entering a new era, as this is the first time in history that we could screw up the future globally, and some form of planning (but not micro-managing) will become necessary for an optimal outcome.
China is still partially a plan-driven economy, which does not need to have a result as long as the Party bosses get theirs.
There, fixed that for ya.
That's true, but it is not an argument against planning.
It has been suggested that democracy is not viable in the long term because it enables selfish behavior on too broad a base to be sustainable. I hope this is wrong, but I fear there's a grain of truth to it.
Mr. Winestock's parallels between server farms and mainframes are reasonable, if unoriginal, and the same can be said for his concerns over privacy and social control. His attempt to claim the former as the causative agent for the latter, however, goes wrong right from the start: 'Mini/micro-computers were supposed to kill the mainframe.'
Not so. They came about firstly because technological advances made them possible, and also because some smart people realized that they would allow us to do things that, in practice, we could not do before. The pioneers of these developments were not interested in reproducing, much less replacing, mainframe computing.
Turing showed us that the form of our hardware doesn't dictate what we can do with it. To understand the arc of privacy erosion and social control, we need to examine social history and human nature, not the artifacts of technological advance.
Personally I hope the FSB and CIA start working together on the 'Islam' problem.
Is that like the Jewish problem? Someone tried to take care of that a while back too.
Nicely done, Kilfarsnar! you have made a valid point, yet avoided triggering Godwin's law.
Basically 4chan, like anonymous, is simply a bastion of the socially immature taking vigilante justice into their own hands. Stoke the fire of society's fears and then claim innocence when someone acts on their "information".
Given its hands-washing statement in response to criticism of its irresponsible amplification of this canard, you can substitute "New York Post" (or "Murdoch's disinformation network") for 4chan in your statement.
All that "process crap" is exactly how any successful engineering project is done. The space program in the 60's and 70's was no exception. Do some reading about the actual engineering that went on and you'll quickly realize it was ALL about developing working processes.
It wasn't all about developing processes. It also required a lot of seriously knowledgeable people doing some seriously clever things.
The problem with process adoption in IT and software development is the widespread tacit belief that you can get all the benefits just by adopting better procedures, without regard to the technical issues that make the problem non-trivial. This failure of understanding is often amplified by the expectation that you can cheat on the process and still get the benefits.
CMM level 1 is perhaps the ultimate expression of this self-delusion. Both IT and software development need effective processes, but just saying that's what you are doing doesn't get the job done.
I've looked at the decision to leave port. I can't really fault that. Navy captains routinely make that same decision. The Coast Guard, likewise.
All that shows is that you cannot automatically conclude it was a bad decision. Whether it was depends on the specifics of the ship, its crew, the ship's location, the storm's predicted development and the degree of certainty of those predictions, and the other options available.
If the ship not truly seaworthy, if housekeeping is a threat to that seaworthiness, then the captain must rectify the situation, or refrain from going to sea and/or chasing that storm.
Exactly - that is one of the specifics of the ship.
The decision to turn south and west to follow the storm seems somewhat less responsible.
By turning westwards when he did, the Captain was not following the storm, he was crossing in front of it. It certainly looks reckless, but I guess we will never know if the captain had come to conclude that the ship would likely founder regardless of its course, and was seeking to improve the chances of a rescue.
Cathy O'Neil (Mathbabe) offers a well-argued criticism of Nate Silver when he stepped beyond his area of expertise in his recent, popular book, '"The Signal and the Noise: Why so many predictions fail – but some don’t"
http://mathbabe.org/2012/12/20/nate-silver-confuses-cause-and-effect-ends-up-defending-corruption/
According to Ms. O'Neil, Mr. Silver fails to recognize situations where bad models are deliberately used to game that system.
This may off-topic, but by 'septic environment', I was also thinking of the fact that we have to live with the bad decisions of businesses and government agencies that we have to deal with.
If only that were feasible. Unfortunately, we have created a septic environment and the only way to be sure of staying clean is to live in a bubble.
Not that I'm excusing the irresponsible decisions that are routinely made over security issues. That's how we got into this mess in the first place - one small, dumb step after another.
When Java first came out, I thought the documentation was extremely good, and a model use of hypertext (I cannot comment on its current state because I no longer use it.) In comparison, Microsoft's documentation leaves a lot to be desired. The pages in the API reference section are very formulaic, oriented towards describing syntax rather than explaining semantics. There is a lot of hyperlinking, but it doesn't necessarily help: you can follow long chains of links from one uninformative place to another - there's no "there" there.
There is some excellent tutorial material to be found on Microsoft's site, by people who clearly both know their stuff and how to communicate it, but it's hit and miss as to whether your current concern has been well covered. These would seem to be good places for the API references to link to, but that does not seem to have been done nearly as often as it should (perhaps the links in the API references are largely machine-generated?)
I get the impression that the overall management of documentation production is driven by objective but superficial metrics, such as the number of pages and links, without regard to qualitative but important considerations such as quality and usefulness. I also imagine that much of the grunt-work is farmed out to masses of asses.
It doesn't help that Microsoft has multiple, overlapping products and APIs, and there does not seem to be an easy way to constrain a search of their sites to your specific domain of interest (unless you are searching for a specific language element and you know its namespace).
I am not an anti-Microsoft partisan, and I am well aware that the documentation in the FOSS word also varies from excellent to execrable. Creating good documentation of complex issues is a hard problem.
TLDR: Iran apparently built at least its second-generation centrifuges in the sense that Boeing and Airbus build airplanes, i.e. with a significant amount of subcontracting. That is moot anyway, because if, as you claim, " Iran can barely make a coffee maker", they will never be able to do anything with the U235 they may extract.
In more detail:
As far as I can tell, Iran neither acquired assembled centrifuges nor assembled them from kits. It did acquire many components and supplies from abroad:
Iran acquired a long list of items, including high-strength aluminum,
maraging steel, electron beam welders, balancing machines, vacuum
pumps, computer-numerically controlled machine tools, and flow-forming
machines for both aluminum and maraging steel.
- Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, March/April 2004.
This list of supplies is a long way from being a pre-made centrifuge.
The original design apparently came from Pakistan, and it seems they needed help getting the first-generation centrifuges running, but now they seem to have designed and built the second generation themselves. ( http://blog.foreignpolicy.com/posts/2008/02/12/meet_irans_new_centrifuge )
The SCADA system targeted by the Stuxnet worm came from Siemens, and is general-purpose software that has to be configured for each specific use. One of the reasons the Stuxnet worm did not have widespread effects is that its release was very carefully targeted.
Weather was as much a danger for rigid airships as was fire. The US built three big helium-filled airships, and they were all bought down by bad weather. With today's vastly-improved weather forecasting and imaging, perhaps you could operate one successfully, but I think you would have to choose where in the world and when to operate it, to avoid the risk of being caught in a violent storm.
IRAN can barely make a coffee maker.
If only that were so, then there would be no more worrying over Uranium centrifuges.
... irony ... irony ... fucking horse shit ... ironic ... gaggle of shitwicks ... irony
What a terrible situation you are in! You know something, but nobody gives a shit. It must be incredibly galling, and I am deeply sympathetic (would you call that irony, given that I am actually amused by your pedantic petulance?)
I hope you are not permanently discouraged by the unproductive complaining that everyone who tries to do something useful on the web gets.
The author's use looked reasonable to me, and in agreement with common usage, so I looked into it a bit more, and it is not so simple.
Wikipedia's entry on irony includes these statements:
The American Heritage Dictionary's secondary meaning for irony: "incongruity between what might be expected and what actually occurs". This sense, however, is not synonymous with "incongruous" but merely a definition of dramatic or situational irony.
Situational irony: This is a relatively modern use of the term [citation needed], and describes a discrepancy between the expected result and actual results in a certain situation.
The free online dictionary has this usage note:
The words ironic, irony, and ironically are sometimes used of events and circumstances that might better be described as simply "coincidental" or "improbable," in that they suggest no particular lessons about human vanity or folly. Thus 78 percent of the Usage Panel rejects the use of ironically in the sentence 'In 1969 Susie moved from Ithaca to California where she met her husband-to-be, who, ironically, also came from upstate New York.' Some Panelists noted that this particular usage might be acceptable if Susie had in fact moved to California in order to find a husband, in which case the story could be taken as exemplifying the folly of supposing that we can know what fate has in store for us. By contrast, 73 percent accepted the sentence 'Ironically, even as the government was fulminating against American policy, American jeans and videocassettes were the hottest items in the stalls of the market', where the incongruity can be seen as an example of human inconsistency.
The author describes a situation that involves situational irony as defined by Wikipedia: at an event promoting the use of MongoDB, he sees something that dissuades him for using it, at least temporarily. In fact, there is not just a discrepancy between expected and actual results, but an opposition. Furthermore, it does not fall foul of the 'mere coincidence' rule in the usage note. FWIW, I would not avoid using 'ironically' here.
There are useful hypothetical concepts and harmful ones, and everything in between. To think that a claim about a specific hypothetical concept applies to them all is arse-about thinking, a logical fallacy known as arguing from the specific to the general.
So splitting of a species based on "imaginary boundaries", into different factions and having world wars based on same, resulting in millions of deaths is a "useful hypothetical concept" to you? It seems like there is arse-about thinking and there is talking out of one's arse.
Don't look any sillier than you have to - it obviously falls into the category of harmful concepts (though not, unfortunately, hypothetical ones). This tells us nothing about whether or not cyberspace is a useful concept, let alone a 'stupid' one.
In fact, you have, apparently unconsciously, turned your original argument around. Instead of "if the concept of cyberspace is stupid, so is the concept of political boundaries. Both are merely hypothetical concepts devised by men" you might equally say "If the concept of cyberspace is stupid, so is the concept of [warfare, Nazism, Communism, homeopathy, charity, God, pixies]. Both are merely hypothetical concepts devised by men."
There is one other possibility that could account for your peculiar post: that you are only attempting to argue that cyberspace is some sort of concept (even whether you think it is hypothetical one is unclear, as you switch your argument (such as it is) from "political boundaries", which you call hypothetical, to a particular type of political division (nations), which you call "real" (your quotes).) If that is the case, then firstly, the original sentence is a case of begging the question, and secondly, you have utterly missed the point. Everyone else here knows that cyberspace is a concept, and broadly share a common idea of what it means. The question is whether it is a useful concept.
You seem to be one of those people who are incapable of logical reasoning, and whose reactions to language are purely emotional. One aspect of this is that when something that superficially resembles a logical argument crosses your mind, you assume it is just that.
The author of the article is a moron
Before you fall for the temptation to use any more gratuitous insults and thereby look foolish, do yourself a favor and look up the Dunning-Kruger effect.
But the base problem remains (which is probably why he finds so dificult to model his data): hierarchical datasets and relational model are not good friends.
Data modeling should be performed at a level of abstraction higher than the access methods of a DBMS. The relational model is at a higher level and handles hierarchical models very easily, while not being limited to them. If, on the other hand, you are trying to think about the semantic structure of your data in SQL terms, you are doing it wrong.
I don't know whats worse, Google applied for this, or the USPTO approved it.
I am no particular fan of Google, but if the USPTO is approving this sort of thing, Google (and every other business) has to worry that some troll will land a patent on some basic part of their everyday operations, and if you can afford it, one defense is to attempt to patent everything that you do and use. They may have been as surprised as we are that it was approved.
For the USPTO this is a wonderful business model: do a crappy job and increase the demand for your services. Another recent example of this business model in practice was the way S&P rated mortgage-backed securities.
However, the one claim of Broder's that Tesla doesn't try to debunk is the loss of charge from overnight cold. Looking at the graphs, somewhere around mile 400, there is a sudden drop in charge from ~45% to ~38%, with a corresponding drop in estimated range from ~80 miles to ~20 miles (the two are not linearly related, presumably because of the intrincacies of the charge/discharge curve being nonlinear). This seems to correspond to what Broder said, that by letting the car sit in the cold, it lost 2/3 of its range.
This is a valid issue. My guess about the disproportionate drop in range is that it is a consequence, at least in part, of the range calculation taking into account the additional cabin heating needed on a colder day.
did he leave it running in a parking spot for a few hours with the heater blasting? ... actually there is a spike in the 'cabin temperature' right at that point...)
The spike could be due to him turning up the heat in the morning. Assuming that the car was stationary overnight, that night is represented by a point on the milage axis.
After Musk's initial complaint, the Times doubled-down and defended their report as accurate, and then Musk presented this quantitative evidence. Someone at the Times is going to be very pissed with Mr. Broder if Tesla's data stand up to scrutiny.
The plots show a precipitous drop in charge level around the 400 mile mark that doesn't match the constant discharge slopes elsewhere. The only thing that happened at that time was the temperature increasing from 70F to 75F. It seems odd that at 35% charge the heaters would have that effect when nothing seemed to happen at other times with the temp above 74F.
Interesting. I think that's the overnight stop, during which the outside temperature dropped significantly, reducing the available charge in the battery. The much larger drop (in % terms) of the range at that time may have been a combination of the reduced usable charge and the additional cabin heating load.
Airliners can detect other aircraft. I believe there was an incident where an airliner's collision detection radar atually detected an F117 and had to temporarily abort a climb, due to a near miss.
The Traffic Collision Avoidance System uses transponders of a particular type: they communicate with one another to determine mutual range (from round-trip signal times), azimuth (by using directional antennas) and altitude (as reported by the transponders). TCAS is mandatory for all but small airliners in most of the world, and the military use it when they are not in combat.
http://www.ll.mit.edu/publications/journal/pdf/vol02_no3/2.3.7.TCAS.pdf
If the concept of cyberspace is stupid, so is the concept of political boundaries. Both are merely hypothetical concepts devised by men.
There are useful hypothetical concepts and harmful ones, and everything in between. To think that a claim about a specific hypothetical concept applies to them all is arse-about thinking, a logical fallacy known as arguing from the specific to the general.
The author of the article is a moron
I think that's unlikely, but if he is, he has some company.