Puny human eyeballs only have three kinds of cones, one that peaks in response to red, one to green, and one to blue. While our superior alien overlords may be pleased with this new technology, physiologically, you can't tell the difference.
Looking at 150-4000 years of noise on a billion year old planet and declaring that the sky is falling unless we start riding our bikes through the freezing cold while they jet around the world to Raise Awareness is not anything close to science. Period. And demanding drastic cultural changes as a hedge against uncertain extrapolation with ginormous error bars on it is not within the realm of scientific inquiry. Period.
Science, with a capital S and maybe some ones and exclamation points after it is about truth, not activism. The merit of an investigator is the quality of his discoveries, not the quantity of his pronouncements.
But Wikipedia rarely (if ever) gets away with someone pushing designs for perpetual motion machines without it being fixed promptly. The discovery channel had a thing on "future cars" a couple years back where they claimed that marrying regenerative braking to compressed air power cars will make a perpetual motion machine. No joke.
It's a stupid idea because it's your house and your money that pays the electric bill. Instead of trying to figure out new ways to charge more for less, the power companies need to be building more capacity so that you can have your air conditioning on however you want it without bringing down the grid.
In./ parlance, this is stupid the same way download caps on your broadband are stupid.
Anything that lets you automagically configure a firewall from outside of it is a potential exploit waiting to happen. Things that are stupid, slow, and require physical access are that much more secure.
Having had my ear to the ground in robotics for the last few years, it seems to me that this is a wasted effort. Much more fundamental problems in robot-human interaction, basic things like being able to track a moving object in the room, or walking on two legs without having each movement preprogrammed, have yet to be solved reliably. Even if she looked perfect, the fact that she'd trip and fall over any unexpected bump in the floor and won't have the software to make eye contact or shake your hand will make the valley very very deep.
We'd call a guy like this Lovelock character a Dangerous Moron. I don't know what the accepted terminology is in this Era of Hope and Change. Comrade Stalin used to like terms like "[left|right]wing [counterrevolutionary|reactionary|deviant]". Perhaps we could resurrect some of those.
What kind of foggy-minded, mushy-headed, morality-agnostic incorrectness is this?!? We're talking about curing a physical disability. Something that doesn't just give someone a 'different', 'unique' or 'special' perspective on reality, but an affliction that removes and impedes capability to function as well as the rest of us. Would it be wrong to cure paralysis because it would destroy the culture of wheelchair basketball?
I don't think this will sell well as most cars and trucks because it's so small. It's like a Prius, small and 'cutesy'.
A prius isn't that small. It's about 'average' sized when compared against a mini, a smart, or even some of the smaller fords and chevys.
Thing is most people when they buy a vehicle want big, bold/macho, not small and tiny. This is why so many people own trucks, not because they have a need to use it to load things from point a to point b, it's because they want it to be big and send a type of message.
People want big vehicles because a whole heck of a lot of Americans live in suburbs or quasi suburbs, where its 5+ miles to the nearest supermarket and the population density is not sufficient to justify a direct bus route from here to there. So even if you are within walking distance to mass transit in these areas, it's a one hour trip vs a 10 minute trip, without having to wait for the bus to come, and without having to crowd on to said bus with enough food to feed a typical family of 2 adults + 2.3 children for a week, and without having to deal with bad weather.
That's a sufficiently drastic difference in quality of life for many people to object to. To put it politely.
As for why trucks/SUVs: Well, until the end of the 1980's you could go out and buy a big station wagon that gave you all the cargo space you could ever want to go grocery shopping for the wife and 2.3 kids, haul plywood and sheetrock for your remodeling/renovation project, and pack the wife and ceil(2.3) kids in comfortably for a road trip, all while getting about 20-25 mpg highway.
Then the first CAFE standards were passed (to stop global warming/reduce dependence on foreign oil, whatever got Al Gore off at the time), and station wagons were no longer profitable to manufacture, what with the huge ass federal tax on them. Trucks, OTOH, weren't covered by CAFE, and people still needed cargo space, so the SUV was invented, and now you get people driving vehicles that are 'bigger' (read: taller), get worse milage than the station wagons did, and don't really have any bigger cargo space. Some are actually shorter and narrower than the station wagons were, and the extra height is taken up by the suspension, so you actually get less cargo space.
So the answer is, as always, blame your congressman.
Bring on the flamebait mods for treading on the American way of life, call me a tree-loving hippie communist global warming conspirator, I don't care.
I'll just say that freedom of movement across large distances, such as the continental US, is a good thing for the everyman to be able to do. It's a sign of egalitarianism that not just the super rich aristocrats can afford to go to the opposite coast for business or pleasure. Everyone should have this freedom. It's sad that some people would like to deprive their fellow man of it.
That's exactly the point. If obtaining a degree of certainty in one measurement takes a bookload of theory to do 'properly', and is 'hard', obtaining a the same degree of certainty in a space with N channels should be 'hard'^N. The OP's point was that people assume that it should be just as easy, and don't go to the trouble of learning what it takes to do it right.
People who deal with raw physical measurements (radar engineers, astronomers, the guy who makes airspeed sensor of the B2--er,um...) have had this problem figured out for a while.
The result, repeatedly proven mathematically and by experience, is that the magic number is always Signal-to-Noise-Ratio. You can't get good information from crappy, scant, data.
Humanities and social-"science" types, and unfortunately the med school set, are by and large composed of people with varying degrees of pathological fear of mathematics, computation, and computer programming. I'd be willing to bet that a largish portion of even the post-PhD scientists who 'know' how to make a proper calculation for a statistical test don't really understand the physical meaning of the numbers they're copying and pasting in and out of excel.
When your attention and skill set are focused on looking through a microscope, or cutting up lab rats, or synthesizing chemicals, you probably never have the experience of being up to your eyeballs in noise estimates and P_FA's that bludgeon in the fact that your data really sucks because it's too noisy, and never need to answer fundamental questions like 'what's the probability that the ruskies will fire off a missile and this radar won't see it'/[insert biologically relevant example here], which *requires* learning the right way to do statistics.
If memory serves, there was a case a few years back when it was ruled that encryption keys (for hard disks?) were protected under the 5th amendment, ie you couldn't be compelled to reveal it in a criminal case. There's precedent on the side of privacy, too.
I know that Obama is more tech-savvy than any President prior and is trying to do everything he can to boost the current US economy
Your naivette is refreshing, but I would not like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Having an ipod doesn't make you tech-savvy. Neither does having a cool campaign website or having a twitter feed. The man's just as clueless about the nuts and bolts of tech and tech policy as any other career politician whose education was in the law and not in engineering. The only branch of government that's historically had any semblance of a clue about tech has been the military, and even then, they farm most of the heavy thinking out to academia and defense contractors, those being the people who actually understand this stuff by virtue of having created it.
That's why any government involvement in tech policy should be approached with caution. In the case of the military, it's tapping an existing source of knowledge, and it happens to have some good side effects in the civilian world (medicine, materials science, computers, etc). In the case of legislation, it's awfully close to the Indiana pi bill.
Automatic trannies in these cars use the shifter as advice only. If shifted into neutral at speed, the engine would spin out, which is very damaging.
That's the thing. Somehow or other, before the days of computers, cars had all-mechanical transmissions that would let you do all sorts of damage to them but let you have all the control you could want. (within reason of course. You can obviously do more with software that senses everything than you can with a single cable that's pulled by your foot). The point is, there's always a tradeoff between control (operator safety) and stupidity (equipment safety). The only solution so far has been operator awareness and the simple truth that safety is a state of mind. Time to dial back the machine intelligence and rely more on the intelligence between the ears.
As an aside, this prius stuff is only an issue because the drive train is tied to both the engine and the electric motor. Things like the (supposedly) soon-to-be-in-production Volt just have a direct drive electric motor. It'd be much easier to put an E-stop in there (just disconnect the drive motor leads, and let the gas engine controller do whatever it wants) than it is to try to coordinate the gas engine, the electric motor, and an automatic transmission. Lower complexity=higher reliability.
A microcontroller intermediary would probably be the best way to go:
PC -> usb ->usb2serial -> microcontroller -> serial -> machinery
A bunch of PICs come with two built-in UARTs, and can be coded to do exact timing on the side where it matters.
In Soviet Russia they kept track of how many Jews people were hiring, just to make sure they stayed in line. Here they're trying to keep tabs on the Blacks. Good intentions be damned, this just doesn't smell good.
I think the civilized advice to people who refuse to fight is to pray to whatever god(s) you believe in that there are enough otherwise good-natured people around you who don't refuse to fight and will protect you. Otherwise, you're SOL.
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Puny human eyeballs only have three kinds of cones, one that peaks in response to red, one to green, and one to blue. While our superior alien overlords may be pleased with this new technology, physiologically, you can't tell the difference.
Looking at 150-4000 years of noise on a billion year old planet and declaring that the sky is falling unless we start riding our bikes through the freezing cold while they jet around the world to Raise Awareness is not anything close to science. Period. And demanding drastic cultural changes as a hedge against uncertain extrapolation with ginormous error bars on it is not within the realm of scientific inquiry. Period.
Science, with a capital S and maybe some ones and exclamation points after it is about truth, not activism. The merit of an investigator is the quality of his discoveries, not the quantity of his pronouncements.
But Wikipedia rarely (if ever) gets away with someone pushing designs for perpetual motion machines without it being fixed promptly. The discovery channel had a thing on "future cars" a couple years back where they claimed that marrying regenerative braking to compressed air power cars will make a perpetual motion machine. No joke.
How about we keep the fissionable material in the fission reactor. It might actually generate electricity there.
It's a stupid idea because it's your house and your money that pays the electric bill. Instead of trying to figure out new ways to charge more for less, the power companies need to be building more capacity so that you can have your air conditioning on however you want it without bringing down the grid.
./ parlance, this is stupid the same way download caps on your broadband are stupid.
In
Anything that lets you automagically configure a firewall from outside of it is a potential exploit waiting to happen. Things that are stupid, slow, and require physical access are that much more secure.
Having had my ear to the ground in robotics for the last few years, it seems to me that this is a wasted effort. Much more fundamental problems in robot-human interaction, basic things like being able to track a moving object in the room, or walking on two legs without having each movement preprogrammed, have yet to be solved reliably. Even if she looked perfect, the fact that she'd trip and fall over any unexpected bump in the floor and won't have the software to make eye contact or shake your hand will make the valley very very deep.
We'd call a guy like this Lovelock character a Dangerous Moron. I don't know what the accepted terminology is in this Era of Hope and Change. Comrade Stalin used to like terms like "[left|right]wing [counterrevolutionary|reactionary|deviant]". Perhaps we could resurrect some of those.
That's how we roll in the People's Republic of Massachusetts. Speed enforcement by shitty road quality.
What kind of foggy-minded, mushy-headed, morality-agnostic incorrectness is this?!? We're talking about curing a physical disability. Something that doesn't just give someone a 'different', 'unique' or 'special' perspective on reality, but an affliction that removes and impedes capability to function as well as the rest of us. Would it be wrong to cure paralysis because it would destroy the culture of wheelchair basketball?
I don't think this will sell well as most cars and trucks because it's so small. It's like a Prius, small and 'cutesy'.
A prius isn't that small. It's about 'average' sized when compared against a mini, a smart, or even some of the smaller fords and chevys.
Thing is most people when they buy a vehicle want big, bold/macho, not small and tiny. This is why so many people own trucks, not because they have a need to use it to load things from point a to point b, it's because they want it to be big and send a type of message.
People want big vehicles because a whole heck of a lot of Americans live in suburbs or quasi suburbs, where its 5+ miles to the nearest supermarket and the population density is not sufficient to justify a direct bus route from here to there. So even if you are within walking distance to mass transit in these areas, it's a one hour trip vs a 10 minute trip, without having to wait for the bus to come, and without having to crowd on to said bus with enough food to feed a typical family of 2 adults + 2.3 children for a week, and without having to deal with bad weather.
That's a sufficiently drastic difference in quality of life for many people to object to. To put it politely.
As for why trucks/SUVs: Well, until the end of the 1980's you could go out and buy a big station wagon that gave you all the cargo space you could ever want to go grocery shopping for the wife and 2.3 kids, haul plywood and sheetrock for your remodeling/renovation project, and pack the wife and ceil(2.3) kids in comfortably for a road trip, all while getting about 20-25 mpg highway.
Then the first CAFE standards were passed (to stop global warming/reduce dependence on foreign oil, whatever got Al Gore off at the time), and station wagons were no longer profitable to manufacture, what with the huge ass federal tax on them. Trucks, OTOH, weren't covered by CAFE, and people still needed cargo space, so the SUV was invented, and now you get people driving vehicles that are 'bigger' (read: taller), get worse milage than the station wagons did, and don't really have any bigger cargo space. Some are actually shorter and narrower than the station wagons were, and the extra height is taken up by the suspension, so you actually get less cargo space.
So the answer is, as always, blame your congressman.
Bring on the flamebait mods for treading on the American way of life, call me a tree-loving hippie communist global warming conspirator, I don't care.
I'll just say that freedom of movement across large distances, such as the continental US, is a good thing for the everyman to be able to do. It's a sign of egalitarianism that not just the super rich aristocrats can afford to go to the opposite coast for business or pleasure. Everyone should have this freedom. It's sad that some people would like to deprive their fellow man of it.
That's exactly the point. If obtaining a degree of certainty in one measurement takes a bookload of theory to do 'properly', and is 'hard', obtaining a the same degree of certainty in a space with N channels should be 'hard'^N. The OP's point was that people assume that it should be just as easy, and don't go to the trouble of learning what it takes to do it right.
Good try, but actually it is 92.951% +-0.0003. You can find the source here.
In my sampling, the probability of over-reporting of precision by extraneous sig figs is 1.00000000.
Hmmm.
Warming->torrential rains->good crop yields->less pirates
Cooling->drought->poor crop yields->bad economy->pirates
Flawless
People who deal with raw physical measurements (radar engineers, astronomers, the guy who makes airspeed sensor of the B2--er,um...) have had this problem figured out for a while.
The result, repeatedly proven mathematically and by experience, is that the magic number is always Signal-to-Noise-Ratio. You can't get good information from crappy, scant, data.
Humanities and social-"science" types, and unfortunately the med school set, are by and large composed of people with varying degrees of pathological fear of mathematics, computation, and computer programming. I'd be willing to bet that a largish portion of even the post-PhD scientists who 'know' how to make a proper calculation for a statistical test don't really understand the physical meaning of the numbers they're copying and pasting in and out of excel.
When your attention and skill set are focused on looking through a microscope, or cutting up lab rats, or synthesizing chemicals, you probably never have the experience of being up to your eyeballs in noise estimates and P_FA's that bludgeon in the fact that your data really sucks because it's too noisy, and never need to answer fundamental questions like 'what's the probability that the ruskies will fire off a missile and this radar won't see it'/[insert biologically relevant example here], which *requires* learning the right way to do statistics.
If memory serves, there was a case a few years back when it was ruled that encryption keys (for hard disks?) were protected under the 5th amendment, ie you couldn't be compelled to reveal it in a criminal case. There's precedent on the side of privacy, too.
(and if you want to use the word, learn to spell "naïveté", good grief!)?
I'll give you the extraneous 't', but you can pry the lack of funny marks over the vowels from my cold, dead hands.
I know that Obama is more tech-savvy than any President prior and is trying to do everything he can to boost the current US economy
Your naivette is refreshing, but I would not like to subscribe to your newsletter.
Having an ipod doesn't make you tech-savvy. Neither does having a cool campaign website or having a twitter feed. The man's just as clueless about the nuts and bolts of tech and tech policy as any other career politician whose education was in the law and not in engineering. The only branch of government that's historically had any semblance of a clue about tech has been the military, and even then, they farm most of the heavy thinking out to academia and defense contractors, those being the people who actually understand this stuff by virtue of having created it.
That's why any government involvement in tech policy should be approached with caution. In the case of the military, it's tapping an existing source of knowledge, and it happens to have some good side effects in the civilian world (medicine, materials science, computers, etc). In the case of legislation, it's awfully close to the Indiana pi bill.
Start a third party. Yeah, it's hard, but guess what, freedom is hard. .
Automatic trannies in these cars use the shifter as advice only. If shifted into neutral at speed, the engine would spin out, which is very damaging.
That's the thing. Somehow or other, before the days of computers, cars had all-mechanical transmissions that would let you do all sorts of damage to them but let you have all the control you could want. (within reason of course. You can obviously do more with software that senses everything than you can with a single cable that's pulled by your foot). The point is, there's always a tradeoff between control (operator safety) and stupidity (equipment safety). The only solution so far has been operator awareness and the simple truth that safety is a state of mind. Time to dial back the machine intelligence and rely more on the intelligence between the ears.
As an aside, this prius stuff is only an issue because the drive train is tied to both the engine and the electric motor. Things like the (supposedly) soon-to-be-in-production Volt just have a direct drive electric motor. It'd be much easier to put an E-stop in there (just disconnect the drive motor leads, and let the gas engine controller do whatever it wants) than it is to try to coordinate the gas engine, the electric motor, and an automatic transmission. Lower complexity=higher reliability.
A microcontroller intermediary would probably be the best way to go: PC -> usb ->usb2serial -> microcontroller -> serial -> machinery A bunch of PICs come with two built-in UARTs, and can be coded to do exact timing on the side where it matters.
Worked out great for the Soviets.
In Soviet Russia they kept track of how many Jews people were hiring, just to make sure they stayed in line. Here they're trying to keep tabs on the Blacks. Good intentions be damned, this just doesn't smell good.
I think the civilized advice to people who refuse to fight is to pray to whatever god(s) you believe in that there are enough otherwise good-natured people around you who don't refuse to fight and will protect you. Otherwise, you're SOL.