The place I used to work used to offer it as a service for $5-10 per SIMM/DIMM. If you can find a local shop that has such a tester, maybe they'd do the same. Otherwise, it's probably not terribly likely to get a low-cost solution, since the volume of such testers is pretty small.
I hadn't heard of this either, but a quick google turned up a description of false parity RAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R... TLazy;DR: To save cost where parity RAM was required by the hardware but not by the operator, modules existed that would calculate the parity bit upon reading the RAM, rather than storing the parity bit. I don't see any evidence that this type of module ever existed for ECC though.
To make sure memory is ECC, it's probably sufficient to count the memory chips on a DIMM. If there are 9 or 18 (or even 36, if it's a particularly large DIMM) identically-marked chips, that's ECC. If there are 4, 8, 16, or 32 chips, then it's probably not. If one of the chips is marked differently than the others, it might be a little more complicated; it might be possible that it's a different memory chip (e.g. if there are 4 x16 memory chips, you'd only need one x8 to get a x72 ECC DIMM, so that last chip would be different). But it's also possible that it's buffered/registered memory, and the different chip is the buffer/register.
And an aside on the topic of buying RAM for yourself: In general, I'm not a fan of cheaping out on memory. I did computer repair for a while, and it shocked me how many problems were caused by bad RAM - from the obvious ("my computer crashes every time I boot it") to less obvious ("every few days, an application crashes") to the rather insidious ("it was running fine, and now I can't mount my hard drive any more"). It got to the point where, when a computer came in with nonspecific symptoms like that, I'd open up the computer and peek at the RAM chips first. If they had no recognizable manufacturer, they were certainly garbage. If they were recognizable but not top-tier, they probably needed some stress testing on our RAM tester. And if they were the good stuff (Samsung always had my vote there, though it's hard to find because they don't sell directly to consumers), then it was probably something else.
That's also where I learned that things like memtest86 or other software diagnostic tools were basically useless too. Only the absolute worst memory would fail a test, even a looped test run for days. Most bad RAM was marginal - after all, it probably passed some manufacturing tests. We had a rather expensive (~$4k-8k) box that would test memory, doing things like varying the supply voltage or self-heating the RAM. When RAM is installed in your PC, you're still limited by the hardware - i.e. the voltage regulator and the memory controller - which probably keep the memory as close to nominal conditions as possible. Obviously, those machines are rather hard to come by, so you have to make do with software tests instead - but a pass on those just means I can't prove it's bad; it doesn't mean the memory is good. Even if I pass all memory testing, I'll still swap/remove/replace DIMMs in an attempt to find which one is bad, because it's often not obvious.
As a follow up, I saw something today after the verdict was announced that quoted his attorney; apparently the pre-trial negotiations didn't offer anything meaningful in terms of a reduced sentence if he were to plead guilty, so they didn't take it.
Ulbricht received a fair trial. The judge was hard on the defense, but that is largely due to how the defense acted and their strange tactical decisions.
In one of the judge's orders (I believe the one excluding his expert witnesses), the Judge blasted the defense as having made a calculated risk - they didn't want to show their hand so that the prosecution couldn't show evidence to counter the defense strategy, so they waited until the last minute to add their experts to the trial. However, the prosecution saw some of this coming and dropped a ton of evidence on the jury - and the judge saw through the defense's strategy and ruled against them:
If defense counsel truly planned his trial strategy around his ability to bend the rules and examine witnesses outside of the scope of their direct, then he should have had a “Plan B” that included complying with the rules. Defense counsel took a calculated risk.
I'm sure that this will get stuck in appeals for quite a long time. The best thing the defense can do in a situation like this where all the evidence points to guilt is to try and stir up confusion by throwing everything at the wall, and waiting to see what sticks. They only have to get lucky once to get a "not guilty" that will forever absolve Ulbricht, thanks to protection from double jeopardy.
They might not have offered him a deal, or he might've been too stupid to take it. The prosecution apparently accused him of thinking he's too smart to be convicted (speaking of Hans Reiser...), and Ars Technica had an Op-Ed speculating that he might not be taking the advice of his lawyer as much as he should be - or his lawyer isn't doing a good job.
Reading Ars Technica's great day-by-day coverage of the trial, I think the prosecution has probably done a great job of tying up all the evidence in a beautiful package for the jury, while the defense laid out a haphazard tale meant to distract and confuse the jury. This is exactly what happened when I served on a jury a couple years ago - maybe 3 of the people on the jury were somewhat swayed by the defense's arguments, but after a little deliberation, the rest of us convinced those 3 that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think the defense attorney probably did his job here in trying to confuse things - but seeing how the evidence was presented in Ars's articles, I think that he'd have to get really lucky with the jury to get an acquittal at this point.
It just shows that they continue to be behind the times. They may be ready to file for bankruptcy now, but all their customers were ready for them to file for bankruptcy 20 years ago!
It depends a bit on the physical structure of the RAM, but for the most part, the errors fall on logically adjacent rows (i.e. nearby memory addresses) in the RAM. So most of the time, you'll only affect other RAM inside your sandbox, and if you affect something outside the sandbox, it won't be far outside.
I remember encountering a similar failure when designing a system; the particular memory controller and the particular DRAM module we were using both met all applicable specs, but when used together in a particular manner, they would fail miserably. The specific test was to alternate writing all zeros and all ones at different addresses. The RAM controller had an oddity where it would enable the drivers for the RAM data pins a very briefly before the data was known. For that particular data pattern, that meant that it would drive all ones on the data pins to the RAM for less than a nanosecond, before starting to drive all zeros (or the reverse). There's nothing really against that in the spec; the data was all correct for all the relevant setup and hold time requirements relative to the control signals. However, it caused a lot of noise on the ground plane of the DRAM module; we measured as much as 0.75V or so. (That's measuring the ground voltage on one side of the SO-DIMM to the ground voltage on the other side; it's shorted by a mostly-solid layer of copper, but that just wasn't enough to carry all the current with this particular access pattern.) So from the point of view of the RAM chips, it's a little like having your 2.5V supply voltage suddenly drop to 1.75V. It messes up all the reference voltages, so a 1 might be interpreted as a 0, or vice versa. The memory controller manufacturer refused to do anything about it (and it would've taken them many months to redesign and respin the chip anyway), but the RAM module manufacturer was friendly to us, and they beefed up the ground plane so that the noise level was much more manageable.
In any case, I'm sure there are thousands of faults like this that are just waiting to be found and exercised in any given system. No modern computer is 100% tested, they're far too complicated. There will always be some weird sequence of things that could happen and trigger some failure - but hopefully that sequence is so odd, it'll never happen.
Negative. When I served on a jury, the judge *specifically* instructed us that we were not to lend any more credence to the testimony of a police officer than to any other person, solely because he/she was an officer. During jury selection, anybody who either would never trust a cop *or* would *always* trust a cop was dismissed.
That said, we trusted the cops anyway, because their story made a lot more sense than the guy and his wife saying "nuh-uh, that meth wasn't mine, bro," with no other evidence or witnesses to prove it. Meanwhile, the police presented evidence such as the meth pipe, the letters addressed to him that the pipe was sitting on top of in his bedside table, the meth that was in it, and a record from his roommate/alleged dealer/meth cook that he was indebted (the presumption being that it was for meth).
I won't disagree that they are probably trusted by a jury more often than other witnesses for a variety of reasons (a lack of obvious motivation to lie, an appearance of professionalism, a calm demeanor under pressure, etc.), but the court itself does not hold them up as model witnesses.
I was on a jury recently (for someone accused of misdemeanor possession of methamphetamines). Some of the questions that the judge asked every potential juror were exactly along this line: - Do you actively participate with any groups that advocate for or against the legalization of drugs? - Do you believe that possession of a small amount of drugs should be legal? - (If either of the above was true:) Will you follow my instructions regarding the law, even if it disagrees with your beliefs?
Anybody that wasn't willing to follow the judge's directions was excused from service.
Of course, that also meant that a surprisingly large fraction of the people in the jury room claimed that they either used meth themselves, wouldn't convict someone of meth possession, or had a close family member or friend that used it; and that they wouldn't follow the judge's instructions on the law - they all knew they would be immediately excused and not have to show up for the rest of the week.
I told the truth, and ended up on the jury. It was an interesting process... Plus I got $68.16 to compensate me for my week's worth of time!
There are plenty of things that can use all the computing power you can throw at it these days. As you mentioned, weather forecasting - though more generally, climate science. Somebody from one of the National Labs mentioned at a college recruiting event that they use their supercomputer for (among other things) making sure that our aging nukes don't explode while just sitting in storage. There are thousands of applications, from particle physics to molecular dynamics to protein folding to drug discovery... Almost any branch of science you can find has some problem that a supercomputer can help solve.
Additionally, it's worth noting that these generally aren't monolithic systems; they can be split into different chunks. One project might need the whole machine to do its computations, but the next job to run after it might only need a quarter - and so four different projects can use the one supercomputer at once. It's not like the smaller computing problems end up wasting the huge size of the supercomputer. After all, many of these installations spend more in electricity bills over the 3- or 5-year lifetime of the computer than they do to install the computer in the first place, so they need to use it efficiently, 24/7.
I think that's where the determination of willful violation versus accidental can make a difference. Sure, if they knew they were violating the law and did it anyway, then they absolutely deserve a bigger punishment. If it's just a case where they didn't really consider the implications of bringing foreign employees to their US office, a small penalty isn't unreasonable. If they weren't willfully violating the law, they're more likely to follow it for its own sake, rather than due to a financial threat.
It's not clear to me that it was willful avoidance of paying minimum wage - they had a job to do, they got help from some of their existing employees from overseas, who continued to receive their regular wage (in their regular currency) during the time that they were here. So the company paid the back wages to the employees, and a small fine to the government. Doesn't seem unreasonable to give them a little slap on the wrist; save the big punishments for when there are repeated offenses, or more wanton abuse.
I'm more curious what the legal requirement is for paying the local minimum wage instead of a worker's regular salary, when they are working away from their normal office. I certainly wouldn't want to be paid in rupees if I had to travel to an office in India. But if I were there under the same conditions as those workers were here, would there be any violation of US Labor Laws if they paid me the local wage while I was over there? On the other hand, if I go to a college recruiting event in San Francisco for an afternoon, am I entitled to an increased minimum wage of $10.74 for a few hours? What if I'm a driver, paid by the mile, going through different jurisdictions each with their own minimum wage law?
A not-entirely-dissimilar story; I worked for a small company where there was an HR manager and two assistants. During the downturn in 2000, they had to lay off a number of employees, so the manager directed one of the assistants to prepare and assemble kits for each of the earmarked employees giving them information on the benefits and resources available to them. At the meeting where the layoffs were announced, the assistant handed out these packets to the employees, and was then handed her own by the manager. (Ouch.)
Several years later, when things weren't looking terribly rosy, the HR manager quit; there were rumors that there might be another round of layoffs to come, and she didn't want to go through the painful process of doing them again. (Despite the rough delivery above, she was genuinely a nice person; just forced to be less compassionate by corporate need. Case in point; I burned my finger on a soldering iron while at work, and stopped by her office to ask if we had any ice available. I could see on her face that her first reaction was genuine concern and sympathy, followed very shortly afterwards by an "oh dear, there's going to be some paperwork associated with this" look.)
Luckily, we mostly avoided the feared second round of layoffs - 7 people were let go, which was probably more just thinning the herd than layoffs due to purely financial concerns. Thankfully, I had left by the time that the office was shut down several years later. I think everybody knew it was a sinking ship, but nobody was motivated enough to find a different job until they had the engineers packing boxes and disassembling office furniture.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that you didn't buy a "really fat kid" for yourself, and 'splain some things that I've learned as a nerdy Prius owner...
First, it's not gutless as you might think. It's not going to win any awards for acceleration, but it can do 0-60 in 9.7 seconds. That's probably on the slower half of the scale, but still faster than a Yaris Hatchback or Matrix, as well as non-US models like the Avensis, Aygo, or Auris - and that's looking only at Toyota sedans. Most of the gutlessness comes from us schmucks inside the car, who are in no hurry to rush you to the next red light when we can get there at the same time as you, and with half as much fuel, by taking it easy. Some of the gutlessness comes from a software setting that adjusts the throttle response to the gas pedal's position; in Eco mode, you really have to mash the pedal if you want to move, while PWR mode makes it more like most American cars where it's jumpy if you so much as look at the gas pedal. In between is "Normal" mode. There are plenty of Prius owners who hate the car in anything but PWR mode because they like to accelerate fast.
Second, it is a HUGE car on the inside relative to most of my friends' sedans. A good amount of the space is vertical, so it helps if whatever you're carrying is tall or can be stacked. But I've carried 3'x8' sheets of plywood, an 8-foot ladder, or 4 people and backpacking gear for a 4-day wilderness trip. Many people can carry several bicycles inside the car without taking them apart - my wife and I are both very tall, so we have to take off the front wheel of our bikes to fit our bikes in. Out of all my friends, none have cars that can carry any of those things - except one bicycle with the wheels removed, and the handlebars sticking out the window.
Third, I'd say it doesn't really have two power trains; it has one power train of which the gasoline engine and two motor-generators are an integral part. The car would be incapable of driving if any of them are removed, although it'd be easier to remove the gasoline engine if anything. The Prius doesn't have a normal transmission; there are two planetary gearsets that connect the MGs and engine to the wheels. By adjusting the speed and direction of the MGs, pretty much any gear ratio can be obtained. It's sometimes called an "eCVT" because of this, but it could just as easily be called a single-speed transmission. Get rid of the electronic parts of the powertrain, and you'd have to put in a transmission instead to replace it. Also, you'd lose the regeneration abilities of being a hybrid. Of course, if you remove the engine, you'd have to use a much larger battery instead - and even then, the Prius motors are not designed for high-speed use (over 45 mph, the engine has to be spinning to keep the motors from over-revving; I think the limit is about 60 mph in the plug-in variant of the Prius). So both halves of the powertrain are really required for it to work, much less for it to work as efficiently as it does.
That's not to say it's a car for everybody - and indeed, if your choices come down to a Tesla anything or a Prius, I'd go with the Tesla any day unless you plan on regularly exceeding its range in areas where high-speed charging is not available. But it's a good choice of cars for many people.
That said, I'm not surprised that hybrid sales occasionally have a down year - but the trend still seems to be pretty positive. Even though they mention share dropping from 2009 to 2010, the hybrid share is still up about 15% since 2009, at about 3.2% of all cars. Meanwhile, EVs are starting to take off, and often catch the attention of the same eco-minded type that was purchasing the early hybrid models years ago. Still, they only amount to about 0.6% of all vehicle sales. But I don't think hybrids are a long-term solution, just like gas cars aren't either. Unless we start synthesizing gasoline from something other than oil, we'll need to find an alternative fuel sooner or later - whether that means EVs or something else, only time will tell.
All I can say is that I hope Tesla gets other auto makers fired up, otherwise I may have to find a big pile of cash next time I want to buy a car...
You're misunderstanding. (And I didn't really try to explain it thoroughly, so here you go:)
There are several displays. The speedometer always shows the actual speed. There is another display to the right of the speedometer that shows various settings relating to the radar cruise control - the set following distance, whether the system detects a car in front of you, the set speed, and (if the Lane Keep Assist feature is turned on) whether the car has detected the lane edges or not.
When turning on the cruise control, the set speed shown on the right display is equal to the current speed. When you use the Accel or Coast buttons, it adjusts the set speed shown on the right display, independently of whatever speed you are actually going. Because of this, you can adjust your set speed even when the system is going slower than the set speed due to traffic in front of you. Also because of this, you can adjust your set speed much faster than the car is capable of reacting to match.
There is something to be said for consistency - for example, the Prius fakes "engine drag" when you let up on the accelerator, by drawing power off of the electric generator and charging the battery. It is also programmed to have creep like an automatic car does, where it starts crawling forward when you let off the brake pedal. Both of these are done to make it feel like any other car; there's no inherent reason that it needs to do these. Woz's difficulties with the cruise control stem from the fact that they depart from the standard cruise control behavior. On the other hand, if they didn't, performing some actions (like adjusting your set speed) would be much more difficult, so I don't really fault them for it. Honestly, if you're paying $30k+ for a car with all the bells and whistles, you really ought to RTFM. It may be *mostly* like every other car you've ever driven, but it will also answer a lot of questions you'll probably have, and even a few you didn't know you had.
No, Woz said he had an entirely different problem - one that he later clarified was more akin to a "broken button on the radio" than the alleged unintended acceleration - the cruise control would start accelerating rapidly, but he could still tap the brakes and cruise control would turn off. Initially, he mentioned it as a "hey, this is something different, but maybe it's related and will help you track down the issue!", but later it became clear that this was not an issue.
In the end, it turned out to be an unexpected behavior-as-intended. Most people are used to cruise control where you hold the Accel button until you reach the speed you want; once there, you let go of Accel and it maintains the speed. However, with the radar cruise control on his (and my) Prius, the Accel button adjusts the set speed shown on the LCD on the dashboard independently of (and generally more rapidly than) the vehicle speed - first, by 1 mph at a time, and eventually by 5 mph at a time if you keep holding it. So if you start out at 55 mph, and hold Accel until you're going 70 mph, the set speed shown on the dash might be 110 mph by then. So yes, the car will continue accelerating - but his issue was from not understanding the intended behavior of the system, not from a bug. This is possibly an indicator that the behavior is unintuitive and should be modified, or possibly an indicator that car owners should just read their damn manuals, even if you're Woz.
I nominate this for "understatement of the year". A 4.6 kW braking system would be good for a *bicycle*, which could then stop in about half a second at full braking. As I noted in the GP, the total energy of their vehicle at 160 mph is 4.6 kWh, so it would take an HOUR to stop it at a rate of 4.6 kW. Even if you had 8 discs, it would still take you 7.5 minutes to stop. You'd go well over 10 miles in that time.
4.6kW, eh? That's 6.2 horsepower. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that number is wrong by several orders of magnitude. 4.6MW is more likely.
And, as others have noted, kW is a unit of power anyway, and so is fairly meaningless for a braking system, which is taking huge amounts of kinetic energy and trying to convert them to something else (eg heat) without that something else causing some sort of spectacular show.
But maybe it's just the journalist's error - 4.6 *kWh* would be a reasonable number; eg the equivalent of slowing down a 1000 kg vehicle from 400 mph to 0. Or, in their example, the 160 mph bus must weigh about 6500 kg. Not coincidentally, Wikipedia lists the curb weight of the Bloodhound SSC as 6,422 kg.
(Of course, whether the road is wet or dry has nothing to do with the amount of energy dissipated in stopping the bus. They might as well have said "It's like stopping a bus from 160 mph on a Tuesday.")
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Sir, you will be hearing from my attorney shortly on the basis that you have provided me with illegal advice. I will be seeking PUN-ative damages.
This is Slashdot. Since when is it a requirement to *read* any of previous postings, much less comprehend them or post something that makes any sense whatsoever given the context?;-)
Oh well, at least I had the fun of figuring out the gasoline/battery ratio. I had previously calculated that my Prius's battery is basically the equivalent energy storage of two tablespoons of gasoline.
Most of the power is going to hauling a battery around.
That's a bit of an exaggeration/misinterpretation. Yes, the battery can be heavy; on a car with a reasonably long range like the Tesla, about a quarter of the weight (1,000-1,300 pounds) is the battery. On the other hand, some of that weight gain is offset by removing things that aren't needed - like the gas tank, fuel pump and hoses, gasoline itself (about 120 pounds for a full 20-gallon tank), as well as other components that aren't needed on an EV. As another example, a V8 engine weighs around 600 pounds; the Tesla Model S motor apparently weighs about 150 pounds - or 300 pounds if you include the reduction gear and inverter.
Anyway, the reason why range is difficult is that the energy density of gasoline is far higher than that of a battery. An 85 kWh battery, at ~1,300 pounds, has an energy density of 0.24 MJ per pound. Gasoline, on the other hand, contains about 19.2 MJ per pound. Even at the abysmal efficiency of an internal combustion engine (on average, about 20%), they still need 16 times less weight in fuel than an EV does in batteries.
The car companies are solving for a complex set of variables - the volume of the car dedicated to batteries, the weight (and thus power-to-weight ratio), the cost, the range requirements of their target market, etc. Tesla is trying to make the EV people's primary car, by using a huge battery capable of brief ultra-high-power recharging; most other companies have chosen to simplify, by marketing the EV as a family's second car - good for going to work, school, and errands (and 99% of most peoples' driving); but they still have a second car for road trips.
Yeah, this seems true to me too. Not too long ago, I bought a house, which involved faxing a wire request to my bank (in a different state). To prove my identity, they called the number I put on the form, and asked me a series of 10 security questions; I didn't have to give a driver's license or other documentation of my identity.
Honestly, I was a little surprised by how much the bank knew about me.
Similarly, when I needed my birth certificate to get a wedding license, they would have accepted a number of other documents (which are easier to replace) in lieu of a driver's license - like a paycheck and a utility bill.
I would disagree conditionally; security through obscurity is bad if it is your only form of security, and it's bad against a determined, well-funded attacker, but it can still provide some amount of security. Requiring an attacker to acquire an 8-inch-floppy disk (and drive) might serve to deter $SCRIPT_KIDDIE from doing anything to your system, because frankly, it's a pain. It certainly won't do much to deter $FOREIGN_SPY; it'll be a nuisance and probably add time to their planning of an attack (which is still beneficial), but you obviously need other security measures that can prevent their access.
You might think of it like many of the forms of cryptography used online today - the whole point is to create a math problem that would be very difficult for a third party to solve backwards, where "very difficult" is defined in terms of the computation power a potential attacker might have and a period of time after which the encrypted information would no longer have value. This means that encrypted data isn't vulnerable to anybody living today; but some day, it will be. If your goal were to encrypt data for all time (or against somebody with unlimited resources), you would need a very different mechanism to "obscure" your data than today's typical encryption. Security through obscurity is obviously weaker, but it can help to prevent casual attacks. (Then again, so could all the other stuff you have to do to prevent the more determined attackers - so adding obscurity is not helpful, but having it naturally does carry some small value.)
Somebody else already pointed out the link, but you should NEVER put yourself in the situation where you are stopped to let a bicycle pass on the right. Even if I'm 100% absolutely positively certain that a driver has seen me and is waiting for me, I will never pass a car on the right in a situation like that unless there is literally no other option (ie I can't slow down and move behind them or to their left). You should have been paying closer attention, and either known that you could safely turn in front of the bicycle without cutting them off, or slowed down sooner and merged into their lane behind them. The latter is by far the preferable option, since most people tend to overestimate how much time they have to pass a cyclist and make their turn safely - especially if they find their right turn blocked by a pedestrian or another car.
(There are some situations where I will pass a car on the right, like when a long line of traffic is stopped at a traffic light, however once traffic starts moving, I will slow down so that I am in between two cars - so if either of them turns right, I won't be in danger of getting hit.)
This is actually something that the Google car did poorly in the video; when they demonstrate yielding to a bicycle passing on the right, the car should have been on the right in the bike lane, not to the left of the dotted white line. I'm hoping that they did this just to illustrate "hey look, we can see bikes coming from behind the car!", and that the car would normally be in the bike lane/shoulder in order to turn right.
One other thing - often, bicycles need to take the lane even when there is a bike lane. Perhaps the surface in the bike lane is too rough, or there is debris, or a poorly-designed storm sewer grate, or any of a thousand other possibilities. Without knowing the particulars, I can't guess whether one of those is what's happening, or if you just happen to commute along the same route as the world's largest asshole.
That said, yes, there are many crappy bikers out there. I'd like to think that if we started designing our transportation infrastructure more for bicycles (rather than including them as an afterthought), that would go away; more bike paths with fewer grade-level road crossings would go a long way. Also, making some roads (eg residential) nearly dedicated to bicycles can help - for example, put some planter boxes in a few places across the road, so only bicycles can pass through. Car traffic is reduced to only the residents, bicycles get a quiet place to ride, and cars don't have to jockey for position with them on the main thoroughfares. That only works if the bike route is sufficiently straight, goes somewhere interesting, and doesn't have many stop lights and stop signs - otherwise some bikes will prefer riding with more cars in order to have to stop less often.
Enforcement, or even just warnings, would also help. Doubly so if the laws were also adjusted to make sense for cycling; for example, the "Idaho stop", where a cyclist is allowed to treat the stop sign as a yield if there is no traffic approaching. But I'll admit I was amused when I was stopped at a red light, and a cyclist (obviously an inexperienced, low-income, casual biker) biked through, and a cop stopped in the middle of the intersection and yelled at him. ("That other cyclist stopped for the red light. You need to stop too. I don't want to have to fill out the paperwork when you become a road pizza.") The cyclist seemed confused at why he was getting yelled at (or was perhaps just putting on the "no hablo inglés" routine), so I don't know that it made things any better, though.
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The place I used to work used to offer it as a service for $5-10 per SIMM/DIMM. If you can find a local shop that has such a tester, maybe they'd do the same. Otherwise, it's probably not terribly likely to get a low-cost solution, since the volume of such testers is pretty small.
I hadn't heard of this either, but a quick google turned up a description of false parity RAM: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
TLazy;DR: To save cost where parity RAM was required by the hardware but not by the operator, modules existed that would calculate the parity bit upon reading the RAM, rather than storing the parity bit. I don't see any evidence that this type of module ever existed for ECC though.
To make sure memory is ECC, it's probably sufficient to count the memory chips on a DIMM. If there are 9 or 18 (or even 36, if it's a particularly large DIMM) identically-marked chips, that's ECC. If there are 4, 8, 16, or 32 chips, then it's probably not. If one of the chips is marked differently than the others, it might be a little more complicated; it might be possible that it's a different memory chip (e.g. if there are 4 x16 memory chips, you'd only need one x8 to get a x72 ECC DIMM, so that last chip would be different). But it's also possible that it's buffered/registered memory, and the different chip is the buffer/register.
And an aside on the topic of buying RAM for yourself:
In general, I'm not a fan of cheaping out on memory. I did computer repair for a while, and it shocked me how many problems were caused by bad RAM - from the obvious ("my computer crashes every time I boot it") to less obvious ("every few days, an application crashes") to the rather insidious ("it was running fine, and now I can't mount my hard drive any more"). It got to the point where, when a computer came in with nonspecific symptoms like that, I'd open up the computer and peek at the RAM chips first. If they had no recognizable manufacturer, they were certainly garbage. If they were recognizable but not top-tier, they probably needed some stress testing on our RAM tester. And if they were the good stuff (Samsung always had my vote there, though it's hard to find because they don't sell directly to consumers), then it was probably something else.
That's also where I learned that things like memtest86 or other software diagnostic tools were basically useless too. Only the absolute worst memory would fail a test, even a looped test run for days. Most bad RAM was marginal - after all, it probably passed some manufacturing tests. We had a rather expensive (~$4k-8k) box that would test memory, doing things like varying the supply voltage or self-heating the RAM. When RAM is installed in your PC, you're still limited by the hardware - i.e. the voltage regulator and the memory controller - which probably keep the memory as close to nominal conditions as possible. Obviously, those machines are rather hard to come by, so you have to make do with software tests instead - but a pass on those just means I can't prove it's bad; it doesn't mean the memory is good. Even if I pass all memory testing, I'll still swap/remove/replace DIMMs in an attempt to find which one is bad, because it's often not obvious.
As a follow up, I saw something today after the verdict was announced that quoted his attorney; apparently the pre-trial negotiations didn't offer anything meaningful in terms of a reduced sentence if he were to plead guilty, so they didn't take it.
I found this Ars article rather illuminating:
http://arstechnica.com/tech-po...
Specifically, this quote at the end:
Ulbricht received a fair trial. The judge was hard on the defense, but that is largely due to how the defense acted and their strange tactical decisions.
In one of the judge's orders (I believe the one excluding his expert witnesses), the Judge blasted the defense as having made a calculated risk - they didn't want to show their hand so that the prosecution couldn't show evidence to counter the defense strategy, so they waited until the last minute to add their experts to the trial. However, the prosecution saw some of this coming and dropped a ton of evidence on the jury - and the judge saw through the defense's strategy and ruled against them:
If defense counsel truly planned his trial strategy around his ability to bend the rules and examine witnesses outside of the scope of their direct, then he should have had a “Plan B” that included complying with the rules. Defense counsel took a calculated risk.
I'm sure that this will get stuck in appeals for quite a long time. The best thing the defense can do in a situation like this where all the evidence points to guilt is to try and stir up confusion by throwing everything at the wall, and waiting to see what sticks. They only have to get lucky once to get a "not guilty" that will forever absolve Ulbricht, thanks to protection from double jeopardy.
They might not have offered him a deal, or he might've been too stupid to take it. The prosecution apparently accused him of thinking he's too smart to be convicted (speaking of Hans Reiser...), and Ars Technica had an Op-Ed speculating that he might not be taking the advice of his lawyer as much as he should be - or his lawyer isn't doing a good job.
Reading Ars Technica's great day-by-day coverage of the trial, I think the prosecution has probably done a great job of tying up all the evidence in a beautiful package for the jury, while the defense laid out a haphazard tale meant to distract and confuse the jury. This is exactly what happened when I served on a jury a couple years ago - maybe 3 of the people on the jury were somewhat swayed by the defense's arguments, but after a little deliberation, the rest of us convinced those 3 that he was guilty beyond a reasonable doubt.
I think the defense attorney probably did his job here in trying to confuse things - but seeing how the evidence was presented in Ars's articles, I think that he'd have to get really lucky with the jury to get an acquittal at this point.
It just shows that they continue to be behind the times. They may be ready to file for bankruptcy now, but all their customers were ready for them to file for bankruptcy 20 years ago!
It depends a bit on the physical structure of the RAM, but for the most part, the errors fall on logically adjacent rows (i.e. nearby memory addresses) in the RAM. So most of the time, you'll only affect other RAM inside your sandbox, and if you affect something outside the sandbox, it won't be far outside.
I remember encountering a similar failure when designing a system; the particular memory controller and the particular DRAM module we were using both met all applicable specs, but when used together in a particular manner, they would fail miserably. The specific test was to alternate writing all zeros and all ones at different addresses. The RAM controller had an oddity where it would enable the drivers for the RAM data pins a very briefly before the data was known. For that particular data pattern, that meant that it would drive all ones on the data pins to the RAM for less than a nanosecond, before starting to drive all zeros (or the reverse). There's nothing really against that in the spec; the data was all correct for all the relevant setup and hold time requirements relative to the control signals. However, it caused a lot of noise on the ground plane of the DRAM module; we measured as much as 0.75V or so. (That's measuring the ground voltage on one side of the SO-DIMM to the ground voltage on the other side; it's shorted by a mostly-solid layer of copper, but that just wasn't enough to carry all the current with this particular access pattern.) So from the point of view of the RAM chips, it's a little like having your 2.5V supply voltage suddenly drop to 1.75V. It messes up all the reference voltages, so a 1 might be interpreted as a 0, or vice versa. The memory controller manufacturer refused to do anything about it (and it would've taken them many months to redesign and respin the chip anyway), but the RAM module manufacturer was friendly to us, and they beefed up the ground plane so that the noise level was much more manageable.
In any case, I'm sure there are thousands of faults like this that are just waiting to be found and exercised in any given system. No modern computer is 100% tested, they're far too complicated. There will always be some weird sequence of things that could happen and trigger some failure - but hopefully that sequence is so odd, it'll never happen.
Negative. When I served on a jury, the judge *specifically* instructed us that we were not to lend any more credence to the testimony of a police officer than to any other person, solely because he/she was an officer. During jury selection, anybody who either would never trust a cop *or* would *always* trust a cop was dismissed.
That said, we trusted the cops anyway, because their story made a lot more sense than the guy and his wife saying "nuh-uh, that meth wasn't mine, bro," with no other evidence or witnesses to prove it. Meanwhile, the police presented evidence such as the meth pipe, the letters addressed to him that the pipe was sitting on top of in his bedside table, the meth that was in it, and a record from his roommate/alleged dealer/meth cook that he was indebted (the presumption being that it was for meth).
I won't disagree that they are probably trusted by a jury more often than other witnesses for a variety of reasons (a lack of obvious motivation to lie, an appearance of professionalism, a calm demeanor under pressure, etc.), but the court itself does not hold them up as model witnesses.
I was on a jury recently (for someone accused of misdemeanor possession of methamphetamines). Some of the questions that the judge asked every potential juror were exactly along this line:
- Do you actively participate with any groups that advocate for or against the legalization of drugs?
- Do you believe that possession of a small amount of drugs should be legal?
- (If either of the above was true:) Will you follow my instructions regarding the law, even if it disagrees with your beliefs?
Anybody that wasn't willing to follow the judge's directions was excused from service.
Of course, that also meant that a surprisingly large fraction of the people in the jury room claimed that they either used meth themselves, wouldn't convict someone of meth possession, or had a close family member or friend that used it; and that they wouldn't follow the judge's instructions on the law - they all knew they would be immediately excused and not have to show up for the rest of the week.
I told the truth, and ended up on the jury. It was an interesting process... Plus I got $68.16 to compensate me for my week's worth of time!
I guess this undersea broadband deployment means that a certain sea sponge who lives in a pineapple under the sea can finally get broadband!
I wonder if this means that the Krusty Krab will start offering free Wi-Fi?
There are plenty of things that can use all the computing power you can throw at it these days. As you mentioned, weather forecasting - though more generally, climate science. Somebody from one of the National Labs mentioned at a college recruiting event that they use their supercomputer for (among other things) making sure that our aging nukes don't explode while just sitting in storage. There are thousands of applications, from particle physics to molecular dynamics to protein folding to drug discovery... Almost any branch of science you can find has some problem that a supercomputer can help solve.
Additionally, it's worth noting that these generally aren't monolithic systems; they can be split into different chunks. One project might need the whole machine to do its computations, but the next job to run after it might only need a quarter - and so four different projects can use the one supercomputer at once. It's not like the smaller computing problems end up wasting the huge size of the supercomputer. After all, many of these installations spend more in electricity bills over the 3- or 5-year lifetime of the computer than they do to install the computer in the first place, so they need to use it efficiently, 24/7.
I think that's where the determination of willful violation versus accidental can make a difference. Sure, if they knew they were violating the law and did it anyway, then they absolutely deserve a bigger punishment. If it's just a case where they didn't really consider the implications of bringing foreign employees to their US office, a small penalty isn't unreasonable. If they weren't willfully violating the law, they're more likely to follow it for its own sake, rather than due to a financial threat.
It's not clear to me that it was willful avoidance of paying minimum wage - they had a job to do, they got help from some of their existing employees from overseas, who continued to receive their regular wage (in their regular currency) during the time that they were here. So the company paid the back wages to the employees, and a small fine to the government. Doesn't seem unreasonable to give them a little slap on the wrist; save the big punishments for when there are repeated offenses, or more wanton abuse.
I'm more curious what the legal requirement is for paying the local minimum wage instead of a worker's regular salary, when they are working away from their normal office. I certainly wouldn't want to be paid in rupees if I had to travel to an office in India. But if I were there under the same conditions as those workers were here, would there be any violation of US Labor Laws if they paid me the local wage while I was over there? On the other hand, if I go to a college recruiting event in San Francisco for an afternoon, am I entitled to an increased minimum wage of $10.74 for a few hours? What if I'm a driver, paid by the mile, going through different jurisdictions each with their own minimum wage law?
A not-entirely-dissimilar story; I worked for a small company where there was an HR manager and two assistants. During the downturn in 2000, they had to lay off a number of employees, so the manager directed one of the assistants to prepare and assemble kits for each of the earmarked employees giving them information on the benefits and resources available to them. At the meeting where the layoffs were announced, the assistant handed out these packets to the employees, and was then handed her own by the manager. (Ouch.)
Several years later, when things weren't looking terribly rosy, the HR manager quit; there were rumors that there might be another round of layoffs to come, and she didn't want to go through the painful process of doing them again. (Despite the rough delivery above, she was genuinely a nice person; just forced to be less compassionate by corporate need. Case in point; I burned my finger on a soldering iron while at work, and stopped by her office to ask if we had any ice available. I could see on her face that her first reaction was genuine concern and sympathy, followed very shortly afterwards by an "oh dear, there's going to be some paperwork associated with this" look.)
Luckily, we mostly avoided the feared second round of layoffs - 7 people were let go, which was probably more just thinning the herd than layoffs due to purely financial concerns. Thankfully, I had left by the time that the office was shut down several years later. I think everybody knew it was a sinking ship, but nobody was motivated enough to find a different job until they had the engineers packing boxes and disassembling office furniture.
...Ford is offering a rebate on a new Fiesta (with power locks and windows!) for anybody willing to trade in their Tesla Model S.
I'm going to go ahead and assume that you didn't buy a "really fat kid" for yourself, and 'splain some things that I've learned as a nerdy Prius owner...
First, it's not gutless as you might think. It's not going to win any awards for acceleration, but it can do 0-60 in 9.7 seconds. That's probably on the slower half of the scale, but still faster than a Yaris Hatchback or Matrix, as well as non-US models like the Avensis, Aygo, or Auris - and that's looking only at Toyota sedans. Most of the gutlessness comes from us schmucks inside the car, who are in no hurry to rush you to the next red light when we can get there at the same time as you, and with half as much fuel, by taking it easy. Some of the gutlessness comes from a software setting that adjusts the throttle response to the gas pedal's position; in Eco mode, you really have to mash the pedal if you want to move, while PWR mode makes it more like most American cars where it's jumpy if you so much as look at the gas pedal. In between is "Normal" mode. There are plenty of Prius owners who hate the car in anything but PWR mode because they like to accelerate fast.
Second, it is a HUGE car on the inside relative to most of my friends' sedans. A good amount of the space is vertical, so it helps if whatever you're carrying is tall or can be stacked. But I've carried 3'x8' sheets of plywood, an 8-foot ladder, or 4 people and backpacking gear for a 4-day wilderness trip. Many people can carry several bicycles inside the car without taking them apart - my wife and I are both very tall, so we have to take off the front wheel of our bikes to fit our bikes in. Out of all my friends, none have cars that can carry any of those things - except one bicycle with the wheels removed, and the handlebars sticking out the window.
Third, I'd say it doesn't really have two power trains; it has one power train of which the gasoline engine and two motor-generators are an integral part. The car would be incapable of driving if any of them are removed, although it'd be easier to remove the gasoline engine if anything. The Prius doesn't have a normal transmission; there are two planetary gearsets that connect the MGs and engine to the wheels. By adjusting the speed and direction of the MGs, pretty much any gear ratio can be obtained. It's sometimes called an "eCVT" because of this, but it could just as easily be called a single-speed transmission. Get rid of the electronic parts of the powertrain, and you'd have to put in a transmission instead to replace it. Also, you'd lose the regeneration abilities of being a hybrid. Of course, if you remove the engine, you'd have to use a much larger battery instead - and even then, the Prius motors are not designed for high-speed use (over 45 mph, the engine has to be spinning to keep the motors from over-revving; I think the limit is about 60 mph in the plug-in variant of the Prius). So both halves of the powertrain are really required for it to work, much less for it to work as efficiently as it does.
That's not to say it's a car for everybody - and indeed, if your choices come down to a Tesla anything or a Prius, I'd go with the Tesla any day unless you plan on regularly exceeding its range in areas where high-speed charging is not available. But it's a good choice of cars for many people.
That said, I'm not surprised that hybrid sales occasionally have a down year - but the trend still seems to be pretty positive. Even though they mention share dropping from 2009 to 2010, the hybrid share is still up about 15% since 2009, at about 3.2% of all cars. Meanwhile, EVs are starting to take off, and often catch the attention of the same eco-minded type that was purchasing the early hybrid models years ago. Still, they only amount to about 0.6% of all vehicle sales. But I don't think hybrids are a long-term solution, just like gas cars aren't either. Unless we start synthesizing gasoline from something other than oil, we'll need to find an alternative fuel sooner or later - whether that means EVs or something else, only time will tell.
All I can say is that I hope Tesla gets other auto makers fired up, otherwise I may have to find a big pile of cash next time I want to buy a car...
You're misunderstanding. (And I didn't really try to explain it thoroughly, so here you go:)
There are several displays. The speedometer always shows the actual speed. There is another display to the right of the speedometer that shows various settings relating to the radar cruise control - the set following distance, whether the system detects a car in front of you, the set speed, and (if the Lane Keep Assist feature is turned on) whether the car has detected the lane edges or not.
When turning on the cruise control, the set speed shown on the right display is equal to the current speed. When you use the Accel or Coast buttons, it adjusts the set speed shown on the right display, independently of whatever speed you are actually going. Because of this, you can adjust your set speed even when the system is going slower than the set speed due to traffic in front of you. Also because of this, you can adjust your set speed much faster than the car is capable of reacting to match.
There is something to be said for consistency - for example, the Prius fakes "engine drag" when you let up on the accelerator, by drawing power off of the electric generator and charging the battery. It is also programmed to have creep like an automatic car does, where it starts crawling forward when you let off the brake pedal. Both of these are done to make it feel like any other car; there's no inherent reason that it needs to do these. Woz's difficulties with the cruise control stem from the fact that they depart from the standard cruise control behavior. On the other hand, if they didn't, performing some actions (like adjusting your set speed) would be much more difficult, so I don't really fault them for it. Honestly, if you're paying $30k+ for a car with all the bells and whistles, you really ought to RTFM. It may be *mostly* like every other car you've ever driven, but it will also answer a lot of questions you'll probably have, and even a few you didn't know you had.
No, Woz said he had an entirely different problem - one that he later clarified was more akin to a "broken button on the radio" than the alleged unintended acceleration - the cruise control would start accelerating rapidly, but he could still tap the brakes and cruise control would turn off. Initially, he mentioned it as a "hey, this is something different, but maybe it's related and will help you track down the issue!", but later it became clear that this was not an issue.
In the end, it turned out to be an unexpected behavior-as-intended. Most people are used to cruise control where you hold the Accel button until you reach the speed you want; once there, you let go of Accel and it maintains the speed. However, with the radar cruise control on his (and my) Prius, the Accel button adjusts the set speed shown on the LCD on the dashboard independently of (and generally more rapidly than) the vehicle speed - first, by 1 mph at a time, and eventually by 5 mph at a time if you keep holding it. So if you start out at 55 mph, and hold Accel until you're going 70 mph, the set speed shown on the dash might be 110 mph by then. So yes, the car will continue accelerating - but his issue was from not understanding the intended behavior of the system, not from a bug. This is possibly an indicator that the behavior is unintuitive and should be modified, or possibly an indicator that car owners should just read their damn manuals, even if you're Woz.
4.6 kW is a bit low for a system
I nominate this for "understatement of the year".
A 4.6 kW braking system would be good for a *bicycle*, which could then stop in about half a second at full braking. As I noted in the GP, the total energy of their vehicle at 160 mph is 4.6 kWh, so it would take an HOUR to stop it at a rate of 4.6 kW. Even if you had 8 discs, it would still take you 7.5 minutes to stop. You'd go well over 10 miles in that time.
4.6kW, eh? That's 6.2 horsepower. I'm gonna go out on a limb and say that number is wrong by several orders of magnitude. 4.6MW is more likely.
And, as others have noted, kW is a unit of power anyway, and so is fairly meaningless for a braking system, which is taking huge amounts of kinetic energy and trying to convert them to something else (eg heat) without that something else causing some sort of spectacular show.
But maybe it's just the journalist's error - 4.6 *kWh* would be a reasonable number; eg the equivalent of slowing down a 1000 kg vehicle from 400 mph to 0. Or, in their example, the 160 mph bus must weigh about 6500 kg. Not coincidentally, Wikipedia lists the curb weight of the Bloodhound SSC as 6,422 kg.
(Of course, whether the road is wet or dry has nothing to do with the amount of energy dissipated in stopping the bus. They might as well have said "It's like stopping a bus from 160 mph on a Tuesday.")
I am a geek attorney, but not your geek attorney unless you've already retained me. This is not legal advice.
Sir, you will be hearing from my attorney shortly on the basis that you have provided me with illegal advice. I will be seeking PUN-ative damages.
This is Slashdot. Since when is it a requirement to *read* any of previous postings, much less comprehend them or post something that makes any sense whatsoever given the context? ;-)
Oh well, at least I had the fun of figuring out the gasoline/battery ratio. I had previously calculated that my Prius's battery is basically the equivalent energy storage of two tablespoons of gasoline.
Most of the power is going to hauling a battery around.
That's a bit of an exaggeration/misinterpretation. Yes, the battery can be heavy; on a car with a reasonably long range like the Tesla, about a quarter of the weight (1,000-1,300 pounds) is the battery. On the other hand, some of that weight gain is offset by removing things that aren't needed - like the gas tank, fuel pump and hoses, gasoline itself (about 120 pounds for a full 20-gallon tank), as well as other components that aren't needed on an EV. As another example, a V8 engine weighs around 600 pounds; the Tesla Model S motor apparently weighs about 150 pounds - or 300 pounds if you include the reduction gear and inverter.
Anyway, the reason why range is difficult is that the energy density of gasoline is far higher than that of a battery. An 85 kWh battery, at ~1,300 pounds, has an energy density of 0.24 MJ per pound. Gasoline, on the other hand, contains about 19.2 MJ per pound. Even at the abysmal efficiency of an internal combustion engine (on average, about 20%), they still need 16 times less weight in fuel than an EV does in batteries.
The car companies are solving for a complex set of variables - the volume of the car dedicated to batteries, the weight (and thus power-to-weight ratio), the cost, the range requirements of their target market, etc. Tesla is trying to make the EV people's primary car, by using a huge battery capable of brief ultra-high-power recharging; most other companies have chosen to simplify, by marketing the EV as a family's second car - good for going to work, school, and errands (and 99% of most peoples' driving); but they still have a second car for road trips.
Yeah, this seems true to me too. Not too long ago, I bought a house, which involved faxing a wire request to my bank (in a different state). To prove my identity, they called the number I put on the form, and asked me a series of 10 security questions; I didn't have to give a driver's license or other documentation of my identity.
Honestly, I was a little surprised by how much the bank knew about me.
Similarly, when I needed my birth certificate to get a wedding license, they would have accepted a number of other documents (which are easier to replace) in lieu of a driver's license - like a paycheck and a utility bill.
I would disagree conditionally; security through obscurity is bad if it is your only form of security, and it's bad against a determined, well-funded attacker, but it can still provide some amount of security. Requiring an attacker to acquire an 8-inch-floppy disk (and drive) might serve to deter $SCRIPT_KIDDIE from doing anything to your system, because frankly, it's a pain. It certainly won't do much to deter $FOREIGN_SPY; it'll be a nuisance and probably add time to their planning of an attack (which is still beneficial), but you obviously need other security measures that can prevent their access.
You might think of it like many of the forms of cryptography used online today - the whole point is to create a math problem that would be very difficult for a third party to solve backwards, where "very difficult" is defined in terms of the computation power a potential attacker might have and a period of time after which the encrypted information would no longer have value. This means that encrypted data isn't vulnerable to anybody living today; but some day, it will be. If your goal were to encrypt data for all time (or against somebody with unlimited resources), you would need a very different mechanism to "obscure" your data than today's typical encryption. Security through obscurity is obviously weaker, but it can help to prevent casual attacks. (Then again, so could all the other stuff you have to do to prevent the more determined attackers - so adding obscurity is not helpful, but having it naturally does carry some small value.)
Somebody else already pointed out the link, but you should NEVER put yourself in the situation where you are stopped to let a bicycle pass on the right. Even if I'm 100% absolutely positively certain that a driver has seen me and is waiting for me, I will never pass a car on the right in a situation like that unless there is literally no other option (ie I can't slow down and move behind them or to their left). You should have been paying closer attention, and either known that you could safely turn in front of the bicycle without cutting them off, or slowed down sooner and merged into their lane behind them. The latter is by far the preferable option, since most people tend to overestimate how much time they have to pass a cyclist and make their turn safely - especially if they find their right turn blocked by a pedestrian or another car.
(There are some situations where I will pass a car on the right, like when a long line of traffic is stopped at a traffic light, however once traffic starts moving, I will slow down so that I am in between two cars - so if either of them turns right, I won't be in danger of getting hit.)
This is actually something that the Google car did poorly in the video; when they demonstrate yielding to a bicycle passing on the right, the car should have been on the right in the bike lane, not to the left of the dotted white line. I'm hoping that they did this just to illustrate "hey look, we can see bikes coming from behind the car!", and that the car would normally be in the bike lane/shoulder in order to turn right.
One other thing - often, bicycles need to take the lane even when there is a bike lane. Perhaps the surface in the bike lane is too rough, or there is debris, or a poorly-designed storm sewer grate, or any of a thousand other possibilities. Without knowing the particulars, I can't guess whether one of those is what's happening, or if you just happen to commute along the same route as the world's largest asshole.
That said, yes, there are many crappy bikers out there. I'd like to think that if we started designing our transportation infrastructure more for bicycles (rather than including them as an afterthought), that would go away; more bike paths with fewer grade-level road crossings would go a long way. Also, making some roads (eg residential) nearly dedicated to bicycles can help - for example, put some planter boxes in a few places across the road, so only bicycles can pass through. Car traffic is reduced to only the residents, bicycles get a quiet place to ride, and cars don't have to jockey for position with them on the main thoroughfares. That only works if the bike route is sufficiently straight, goes somewhere interesting, and doesn't have many stop lights and stop signs - otherwise some bikes will prefer riding with more cars in order to have to stop less often.
Enforcement, or even just warnings, would also help. Doubly so if the laws were also adjusted to make sense for cycling; for example, the "Idaho stop", where a cyclist is allowed to treat the stop sign as a yield if there is no traffic approaching. But I'll admit I was amused when I was stopped at a red light, and a cyclist (obviously an inexperienced, low-income, casual biker) biked through, and a cop stopped in the middle of the intersection and yelled at him. ("That other cyclist stopped for the red light. You need to stop too. I don't want to have to fill out the paperwork when you become a road pizza.") The cyclist seemed confused at why he was getting yelled at (or was perhaps just putting on the "no hablo inglés" routine), so I don't know that it made things any better, though.
Well, one rant begets another, I suppose... ;-)