I actually don't drink coffee at all.;-) My wife does - I think Starbucks is a fallback for her - when nothing's familiar, and you don't know a good coffee place, Starbucks has consistent quality. (I make no claims as to whether that is high quality or low quality, however - just consistent.) Of course, she doesn't drink straight coffee either, it's usually a mocha, so having the chocolate helps hide bad coffee too.
I was recently in Australia for a week, and in that time, I found $4 on the street - two $1 coins and a $2 coin. Now losing a couple quarters is no big deal - worth maybe a can of soda. But lose a couple of the quite small $2 coins, and there goes a latte - and you know how us Americans are with our Starbucks! With such small but high-value coins, the wealth that's caught in the couch cushions down under could probably solve the financial crisis of a small European country!
Seriously though, I prefer plastic to paper, and paper to metal. Mainly just because that's what's easiest to carry in my wallet. If I spend cash and get change (which is rare - I usually just do it on small purchases for the benefit of the merchant to avoid high credit card fees), that change sits in my pocket for the rest of the day. At the end of the day it gets dumped on my desk. After a week or two, whatever change is on my desk gets dumped in a jar somewhere. And about every 5 years, that jar goes to the bank. If I start dumping a couple dollars at a time into that jar, it holds a lot more money. And I'm not likely to carry coins around with me, since I rarely go somewhere intending to use cash.
If we ditch the dollar bill, I don't care if we replace it with a particular coin - but let's fix the problem of high credit card fees on tiny transactions so that it makes sense to use a credit card for everything. Then we'll be one step closer to getting rid of the rest of our currency too.
That's not true. In terms of raw packets across the interface, sure. But what they're improving is the speed of TCP. In some older implementations, if a packet is lost, every subsequent packet has to be sent again as well. In addition, in all implementations, packet loss is taken as evidence of network congestion. Because a very congested network means that nobody gets any useful data through, the protocol says that the sender should send less data before waiting for the receiver to acknowledge receipt. Thus, if you have a nearly unused but noisy wireless link, the sender will reduce the rate at which they send, hoping that doing so will reduce the rate of packet loss.
What this (and many other solutions for the same problem) suggests is that instead, we can send MORE data across a known noisy link, and use that extra data to correct transmission errors. By doing so, TCP will not see network congestion where there is none, and will keep sending packets at high speed. Thus, you *can* get a 10x improvement in your useful throughput (sometimes called "goodput") by changing the algorithms a little bit, even if you're only losing 5% of your packets normally.
On the contrary; it depends on how valuable your data is. Google's paper on hard drive failure rates notes that a drive with a single remapping is 15 times more likely to fail in the next 60 days than a disk with no remapped blocks.
Granted, the annualized failure rate for the first 3 months after the remapping is still only ~19% for such a drive - but do you want to take a chance that your drive is about to die?
Go back 5 years; the top-end GPU used ~175-215 watts at peak, and got 2.2-3.4 GFLOPS/Watt of computation (depending on manufacturer). Today, the top end is 250-300 watts of peak power, but at 17-19 GFLOPS/Watt. Yes, they're 50% more power-hungry than they were - but they're also 6.5 times more efficient for the same workload! Overall, they're capable of running calculations about 10x faster than just 5 years ago.
But this regulation won't help you anyway - you seem concerned with maximum power, and they don't do a thing for that. What they limit is idle, off, and sleep power - they cap the total power used in a year, assuming that 55% of the time the computer is off, 40% of the time it's idle, and 5% of the time it's asleep. It might encourage companies to reduce power consumption, but probably not. A GPU generally won't use anything when off or asleep anyway, and it's pretty easy to cheat on idle power consumption; after all, in theory, the GPU should be able to shut everything off except the tiny part of the chip that's sending the display signals to the monitor, and a little bit of memory to remember what to send. Presto, your chip is down to 5 watts. But if you move the mouse, well, then it's back up to 50 watts.
So this regulation is pretty stupid, because it doesn't really measure everything. That said, it'd be wrong to measure the peak power too, because most of the time, the card IS idle. It's even more stupid because, in a couple years, every GPU will be in one of the top categories, even the cheapest $40 video card - such is the progress of Moore's Law. And those cards will be ever more efficient, too. So in a couple years, they'll proclaim the whole thing a success (not due to the regulations though - solely due to the normal progress of technology), and either start over again with brand new numbers, or ditch it when they realize that they'll have to revisit everything every 2 or 3 years to keep it relevant.
I'd also be worried that perhaps the simulation was just to see if it was possible to detect from within the simulation that it was not reality. Thus, proving the simulation from within could result in the termination of our program.
For that matter, we don't know what the operators are simulating. I suggest we all cease any activity that would produce any sort of useful information in an attempt to prolong our simulation's existence. Do it for the children!
In addition to the things already listed, here are two more sites that give some of the technologies that were originally developed for the Space Shuttle specifically or NASA in general, and then found more widespread commercial use:
A quick list of some of the interesting ones: An artificial heart, video stabilization software, material used in prosthetic limbs, the scratch-resistant coating used on eyeglasses, memory foam, and powdered lubricants.
First of all, the Prius is 50 mpg, you'd only need 3 people to hit 150 person-miles per gallon. Second, at least in Europe and Japan, there is a version of the new Prius v with a third row of seating, so you can put 7 people in it. A 54 mpg mandate would certainly encourage them to bring that model to the US as well. I understand it's not a roomy third row, but I'd assume that's no problem for kids. (FWIW, I've found the original Prius to have a much roomier back seat than probably 75% of my friends' sedans, many of which I have to tilt my head to avoid it touching the ceiling.) That larger Prius still gets 42 mpg - the 7-seat version uses a more compact LiIon battery than the US 5-seater's NiMH battery, but performs the same.
And there certainly are people (you included) that can justify having a large vehicle - but how often do you or your wife take the van out alone? If you're like most people, you bought your cars (assuming you have more than one) while thinking of the worst case - you need to cram 7 people and their stuff for a long weekend camping trip, for example.
But most people don't fill their car that often. I'm going to generalize beyond you, because you're really not the common case (more than average kids, further than average from a city center). What most people need is a car that can hold a couple of kids (because really, how often do they all want to go to the same place at the same time?), and then maybe share a large vehicle (for example ZipCar, or a car rental) for those occasions where they need something larger. But that would require a societal change, and I doubt it'll happen, at least not while parking is usually free and oversized vehicles are subsidized. Instead, we can push the standards high enough that automakers will start investing in revolutionary changes - hybrids, natural gas vehicles, diesel, plug-ins, EVs, etc.
What you need isn't a large gas-guzzling vehicle - you just need a large vehicle. The gas-guzzling part is optional. And a large vehicle doesn't have to hit 54 mpg, if smaller vehicles surpass that target - 35 or 40 might very well be enough, and is probably easily obtainable in that timeframe.
It seems like every month or two, some article comes out that quotes you saying something incredible, things like that in some ways Android has surpassed iOS. Obviously to you, these are nuanced statements, carefully crafted by an engineer's mind; after all, it'd be ridiculous to say that any one OS is better than any other OS in every single imaginable way. However, the press has a habit of taking statements out of context, or even misquoting in a way that changes the statement (like translating the above example to "Woz thinks Android is better than iPhone").
How often do you find this sort of thing happens to you when you are interviewed? Is it a problem, or is it just an occasional error? Do you think that the journalists are doing the best that they can, but are restricted by a need to have an eye-catching headline and a provocative topic? Or can they make changes to write stories that are both interesting and accurately reflect the thoughts of their sources? And do you sometimes wish you could switch from the nuanced language of an engineer or scientist to the absolute bullet-point clarity that a marketer or PR rep might use to get a point across?
Yes, this. How will the people using it benefit? For example: 1. It makes it easier for multiple people to make changes to the same document at the same time. 2. It keeps a history of all changes ever made, so you can go back to an older version if you make a mistake. 3. Users can provide a comment with each change to say why they made it, and describe what is different. Later, when looking at code, you can look at who made a change and why, which can help you understand the code. 4. Different users can use different versions of a project. For example, say a researcher uses a piece of software to generate data for a paper they're writing; that researcher can continue to use the same version of that software, while the people writing it can continue making changes for other researchers. Down the road, if anybody ever wants to go back to look at what was used to generate that paper's data, it's easily accessible. And if they never need to do that, there aren't files cluttering everything up.
That said, if you're just looking for version control for you and the other web developer, I don't know why you're waiting for your supervisors to approve - I know people that run a version control system just for their own documents - code and otherwise. Everything they do gets version controlled. The only reason you need your supervisors to intervene is if you want the whole department to start using it, or if you want the version control to be supported by an IT group or something like that. Otherwise, just tell your supervisor "Yeah, there's this thing called version control that will help us stay organized. I'm going to download which is free and open-source and we're going to start using it. It'll make our job easier, and we'll be able to get more things done."
They used to literally make a mask by hand, but then the features on the chip got smaller (on the scale of nanometers), and the chips got bigger (up to hundreds of square millimeters, holding billions of transistors). To draw the whole thing, you'd need a piece of acetate 360 meters on each side, at least. These days (and for the last couple decades), it's all CAD. The design then gets sent electronically to the fab, where they make the mask using an electron beam - a little bit like how a CRT works, I believe, using electromagnets to steer the electrons. The mask actually looks very little like the design - today's circuits are measured in tens of nanometers, while the wavelength of the light that is used to pattern the design is in the hundreds of nanometers. So they do complex calculations using all the various optical distortions and interference and diffraction and whatever other effects there are, and work backwards from the desired design to find what the mask should look like to produce that design.
And hand-drawn can be better for a lot of reasons. Computers are great at following a set of rules, but what if you don't really know what the rules are, or how to express them? For example, how would you teach a computer to recognize a bicycle in a photograph? It can be done, but it takes a lot of training - and it's quite likely that it will pick up a lot of things that are not bicycles but look like them (perhaps a bicycle bumper sticker, or a piece of artwork), and it won't pick up bicycles that are different from what it was taught about (say a tandem or a recumbent). A human, on the other hand, will have no difficulty distinguishing a bicycle drawing from the real thing, or recognizing a new type of bicycle. So, at least for now, humans can still recognize optimizations that computers can't, and give it some guidelines to help improve the result. I'm sure much of that chip's layout was done with automated tools, but careful hand adjustments and hints to those tools can make a big difference in performance and power.
I think in addition to the cost of making everything live all the time (not just the hardware, but also network access for tens of thousands of devices), it's also not possible to guarantee network access. There are places in the area where, due to mountains, even a cell signal is unreliable. Additionally, the system has to work without a network anyway, in case the wireless provider or server goes down, so it'd have to be a best-effort double-check that your card balance is correct. And if you do have network access, you have the same options that you do if you can trace a violation after-the-fact to a particular person; you could deny them boarding, write a citation, take them to court...
But yeah, fixing the problem and preventing the fraud is the obvious best solution. It still wouldn't surprise me if they don't fix it, at least not any time soon, just because it's probably not going to be a huge cost. I'd expect them more to collect data to figure out how often it's happening, and if it's a significant problem, only then will they bother to find a solution.
The terminals don't necessarily have live network access, but they do get updates periodically; for example, when the bus gets back to the bus barn, they plug it in to transfer data. Thus, if you add value to your card with a credit card online, within a few days, every terminal has been updated to know that they may need to increase the value stored on your card, if a different terminal hasn't already added that value. It would be trivially possible to make this a two-way conduit, if it isn't already - save the data from the card to the terminal (eg current balance, or whether a fare was deducted), and correlate all the data. For example, if the balance ever goes up, make sure that they added value somewhere (either online or at a terminal or retail store). The hard part would be figuring out who you are from the available records (CCTV, usage records, etc.), especially if you pay cash.
That said, they probably won't care as long as only a few people are doing it. There have been much easier ways to game the system; for example, in the SF area, you could buy a card with $2 value, then use it for a ride that costs more than $2; the card allows a balance down to -$10, so you can get up to $12 from your $2 investment. Throw away the card with the negative value, buy a new one for your next trip, and repeat. Recently, they attempted to fix this by charging $3 for the card (in addition to any value you put on it), unless you also tie it to your credit card for automatic refills. I have no idea if this actually really fixes the problem or not - but they claim that such abuse was never rampant to begin with.
This is both carrier and iOS version-specific. I believe iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 did not have the option at all, while 5.1 restored it, but not on some networks, including AT&T. (I have a 4S with iOS 5.1.1 on AT&T, and can confirm that there is no option to disable 3G in the Network settings.)
My company does pay all the costs, except for income tax on the value of the benefit. And they do the instant vesting of stock that's mentioned in the article too. Google has some uncommonly good benefits, but this ain't one of them. I guess Forbes writers don't get life insurance, otherwise maybe the association would have occurred to her.
I have a standing desk. I find it most comfortable to use when I change my position frequently; I'll stand for a while, sit for a while, put my feet up on a cabinet for a while, go back to standing, etc. Half my postures (especially sitting) would probably make an ergonomics expert cringe. But I find it nice to change things up regularly. Sometimes I'm too lazy to stand for long, and I can tell, because my back gets sore. Once I spend a day or two standing more, I feel fine again. But only standing would never be comfortable for me either.
Maybe if I could be walking on a treadmill... I find walking much more comfortable than standing...
They have a Nevada license plate on at least one car, but they can legally drive elsewhere. One of the articles linked from the link in the OP (I know, I know - slashdotters won't read the article, so how could they read things that the article LINKS to???) mentioned that it is legal in California, because the human driver is present to correct any errors the computer may make. Indeed, they've been spotted many times in the SF bay area, although are usually just ignored.
In that sense, their car is not dissimilar to my Prius as far as the law is concerned - it has radar cruise control (so it can slow down with traffic), a video camera (so it can steer a little bit, or warn when leaving a lane), and can park itself. But in any condition, I am responsible for what the car does. Since they sold that car in all 50 states, I bet driving their autonomous car is fine in all 50 too.
I'm not sure what the Nevada plate entitles them to. Perhaps full autonomous operation, without a driver? I can't imagine they'd be comfortable doing that yet though.
I believe the implication is it's 300,000 miles on public roads with no accidents. So zero were on controlled tracks.
But I'm sure they've logged many miles in controlled spaces too, such as the video of the car tooling around an empty parking garage when they showed it off to the press one time.
I'd disagree with that; most colleges don't really care how many degrees they hand out, in fact they try to get as many through as they can. What they do (usually) want, though, is to be respected; top schools attract top talent (both students and faculty), big grants, etc., which all help the school's growth. They don't succeed at that if they produce mediocre students. One way to get rid of the mediocre students (as well as some good ones) is to have hard classes that require you to prove that you can learn. In my college career, I took some classes that others probably would've considered "weed-out" classes (like Calc 3 and Physics), but they generally provided a good background for later classes (like Electrodynamics and Microelectronic Devices).
After I graduated, they unified the different disciplines of Engineering so that you can take a prescribed freshman year of courses, without deciding which branch of Engineering you want to be in. This had the side effect of requiring Chemistry for us computer types, where it is perhaps less useful. However, I don't think it's outright a bad idea - I don't make transistors, I work with boolean logic. But without knowing how a transistor works, how it's made, how circuits behave, and lots of analog properties, I'd be a much worse engineer.
The same thing applies to CS. A CS degree does not make you a good programmer. It teaches you a lot of things that will provide you a good background for your learning later in life, and a few things that are directly useful for programming like data structures and algorithms. It also teaches you about computer hardware, operating systems, etc.
If all you want to be is a programmer, you can do that easily enough on your own. Just sit down and start studying your language(s) of choice. But trust me, you don't want to just be a programmer. Anybody can write code, it doesn't take long to learn how; for an example, see OP and millions of others doing it in high school. To be really good at it, you need to have the background so that you can go beyond just writing lines of code. You can develop a deeper understanding of what you need to do and why if you have the broad background that a degree can provide.
That said, it's only what you make of it. I've recruited at college career fairs, and I'd say only a single-digit percentage of students (even at a school ranked in the top 10 in the field) have a good understanding of their field. So many students just go to class, memorize what they need to in order to get a decent GPA, then forget it. To get the most out of things, you need to develop connections between your classes, applying things that you learn in one to help your learning in another. To understand your Operating Systems class, you should know how a CPU works. To understand how a CPU works, you should know about digital logic. A good understanding of digital logic would include knowing about circuits. That circuits knowledge can be boosted by understanding the physics and chemistry behind it. Do you need to know chemistry to understand an OS? No. But it can be helpful in ways you might not imagine.
That knowledge can make the difference between somebody that can make an incremental improvement to a design, and somebody that can understand the whole system and create a fundamental change to
+1 to this. As long as the slower-moving car waits for an acceptable opening in the fast lane so as to not cut anybody off, and is actually passing slower-moving traffic in the lane(s) to the right, there's nothing wrong with it. There's no race to see who can be the fastest one in the fast lane... Otherwise one could say the same thing about the GP himself; "You gotta love the $STEREOTYPICAL_GROUP cruising along at 75 MPH in the fast lane during rush hour with their eyes glued on the radar detector. Unbelievably annoying. They are the new Prius (but for $MOTIVATION instead of MPG). Meanwhile people are risking lives to get around them by swerving into the slow lanes and get back up to 85-90 MPH."
Two other observations - if you're driving in a way that risks lives, it sure as hell isn't the fault of the people you're going around. Take a chill pill, wait for a safe opportunity to get around slower-moving traffic, and then resume your reckless behavior far from the rest of us. Second, I rarely see people actually driving in the fast lane for long periods when they shouldn't be - Prius or not. If you give them a chance to move over, they might just take it. As an example, I avoid cutting off semi trucks, at least in part because my brother was a semi driver, and related many stories where cars would pass him, pull into his lane, and then (either intentionally or accidentally) slow down, nearly getting flattened in the process. So if I'm passing a semi at 70 MPH and somebody approaches from behind at 85, I may speed up a little for their benefit (and to get them off my bumper), but I won't cut off the semi to get out of their way. They often have no such qualms, however, and will go from tailgating me to cutting off the truck the instant there's a car length's difference between my bumper and the semi's. This means I then have to wait for them to pass me before I can move over - and if the cars behind them are just as rude and follow suit, I can end up stuck in the fast lane while a few morons zip by, at least until one of them gives me a chance to signal and move over. Not saying the GP does this, but it happens way more often than it should.
I'm always amazed by the people who completely ignore the speed limit, and seem to think that they have some sort of speed entitlement to which they are guaranteed.
Not true; I bought my car 2.5 years ago, and some of the included literature clearly spelled out that the bumper was designed to protect against impacts with a fixed barrier up to 2.5 mph. (This is roughly equivalent to a 5 mph impact with a similarly-sized car, though.)
If there's something that law enforcement shouldn't be able to do, then make a law. I don't really care here - limit non-anonymous non-aggregate data retention to 2 weeks, for example. Or say that power usage data with a granularity smaller than one month is not usable by law enforcement or as evidence. Whatever. My point is, if there's a problem, solve it with a law (or with implementation details), not by stonewalling the technology as a whole.
For criminals, installing a smart meter will not create a criminal. It also will not make existing criminals any smarter, as they would likely have to be to gain access to and take advantage of smart meter data. The solution here can be technological, additional enforcement, whatever. Deployment of ATMs didn't create new criminals that skim for cards and PINs; in a world without ATMs, they might just as well have been bank robbers or muggers. Solutions to skimming include the technological (devices that detect and disable electronics attached to the outside of an ATM), legal (limiting victims' liability), and deterrence (investigating and prosecuting perpetrators).
My point is, there's no inherent reason that smart meters are a bad idea. Certain implementations may have weaknesses that should be fixed prior to roll-out, but smart meters in general are beneficial both to consumers and the utility.
Considering that most smart meters only gather data in 60-minute increments anyway, the most invasive data (eg that you have a particular medical device that has a particular surge characteristic when it first turns on) isn't even available.
Law enforcement can already get a search warrant to come in my home any time they want, given sufficient justification in the eyes of a judge. Make accessing smart meter data no different than tearing your house apart, and you've basically solved that problem. If your power usage were REALLY interesting, I'm sure they could get a warrant to put a measuring device at the utility pole today. Frankly, I doubt they care; there are far easier ways to investigate you.
Criminals can tear apart my house without a search warrant anyway. Or they can walk onto my property and look at my meter to see if I'm currently using power or not. Or drive by and see that the lights are off and the lawn is unmowed. Criminals will be criminals, whatever the technology may be. Again, I doubt they'll care either; it's far easier to just wait for some moron to post a picture of their credit card online than to analyze your power usage to figure out that you have a 56" plasma TV and you are on vacation.
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I actually don't drink coffee at all. ;-) My wife does - I think Starbucks is a fallback for her - when nothing's familiar, and you don't know a good coffee place, Starbucks has consistent quality. (I make no claims as to whether that is high quality or low quality, however - just consistent.) Of course, she doesn't drink straight coffee either, it's usually a mocha, so having the chocolate helps hide bad coffee too.
I was recently in Australia for a week, and in that time, I found $4 on the street - two $1 coins and a $2 coin. Now losing a couple quarters is no big deal - worth maybe a can of soda. But lose a couple of the quite small $2 coins, and there goes a latte - and you know how us Americans are with our Starbucks! With such small but high-value coins, the wealth that's caught in the couch cushions down under could probably solve the financial crisis of a small European country!
Seriously though, I prefer plastic to paper, and paper to metal. Mainly just because that's what's easiest to carry in my wallet. If I spend cash and get change (which is rare - I usually just do it on small purchases for the benefit of the merchant to avoid high credit card fees), that change sits in my pocket for the rest of the day. At the end of the day it gets dumped on my desk. After a week or two, whatever change is on my desk gets dumped in a jar somewhere. And about every 5 years, that jar goes to the bank. If I start dumping a couple dollars at a time into that jar, it holds a lot more money. And I'm not likely to carry coins around with me, since I rarely go somewhere intending to use cash.
If we ditch the dollar bill, I don't care if we replace it with a particular coin - but let's fix the problem of high credit card fees on tiny transactions so that it makes sense to use a credit card for everything. Then we'll be one step closer to getting rid of the rest of our currency too.
That's not true. In terms of raw packets across the interface, sure. But what they're improving is the speed of TCP. In some older implementations, if a packet is lost, every subsequent packet has to be sent again as well. In addition, in all implementations, packet loss is taken as evidence of network congestion. Because a very congested network means that nobody gets any useful data through, the protocol says that the sender should send less data before waiting for the receiver to acknowledge receipt. Thus, if you have a nearly unused but noisy wireless link, the sender will reduce the rate at which they send, hoping that doing so will reduce the rate of packet loss.
What this (and many other solutions for the same problem) suggests is that instead, we can send MORE data across a known noisy link, and use that extra data to correct transmission errors. By doing so, TCP will not see network congestion where there is none, and will keep sending packets at high speed. Thus, you *can* get a 10x improvement in your useful throughput (sometimes called "goodput") by changing the algorithms a little bit, even if you're only losing 5% of your packets normally.
Not just WWDC, but both MacWorlds and other events too. And they used to do satellite broadcasts of the events as well.
But, you know, slashdot has to keep up with the slogan of Yesterday's News Tomorrow, so...
On the contrary; it depends on how valuable your data is. Google's paper on hard drive failure rates notes that a drive with a single remapping is 15 times more likely to fail in the next 60 days than a disk with no remapped blocks.
Granted, the annualized failure rate for the first 3 months after the remapping is still only ~19% for such a drive - but do you want to take a chance that your drive is about to die?
Go back 5 years; the top-end GPU used ~175-215 watts at peak, and got 2.2-3.4 GFLOPS/Watt of computation (depending on manufacturer). Today, the top end is 250-300 watts of peak power, but at 17-19 GFLOPS/Watt. Yes, they're 50% more power-hungry than they were - but they're also 6.5 times more efficient for the same workload! Overall, they're capable of running calculations about 10x faster than just 5 years ago.
But this regulation won't help you anyway - you seem concerned with maximum power, and they don't do a thing for that. What they limit is idle, off, and sleep power - they cap the total power used in a year, assuming that 55% of the time the computer is off, 40% of the time it's idle, and 5% of the time it's asleep. It might encourage companies to reduce power consumption, but probably not. A GPU generally won't use anything when off or asleep anyway, and it's pretty easy to cheat on idle power consumption; after all, in theory, the GPU should be able to shut everything off except the tiny part of the chip that's sending the display signals to the monitor, and a little bit of memory to remember what to send. Presto, your chip is down to 5 watts. But if you move the mouse, well, then it's back up to 50 watts.
So this regulation is pretty stupid, because it doesn't really measure everything. That said, it'd be wrong to measure the peak power too, because most of the time, the card IS idle. It's even more stupid because, in a couple years, every GPU will be in one of the top categories, even the cheapest $40 video card - such is the progress of Moore's Law. And those cards will be ever more efficient, too. So in a couple years, they'll proclaim the whole thing a success (not due to the regulations though - solely due to the normal progress of technology), and either start over again with brand new numbers, or ditch it when they realize that they'll have to revisit everything every 2 or 3 years to keep it relevant.
I'd also be worried that perhaps the simulation was just to see if it was possible to detect from within the simulation that it was not reality. Thus, proving the simulation from within could result in the termination of our program.
For that matter, we don't know what the operators are simulating. I suggest we all cease any activity that would produce any sort of useful information in an attempt to prolong our simulation's existence. Do it for the children!
I, for one, welcome our new sysop overlords!
In addition to the things already listed, here are two more sites that give some of the technologies that were originally developed for the Space Shuttle specifically or NASA in general, and then found more widespread commercial use:
http://spinoff.nasa.gov/shuttle.htm
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NASA_spin-off_technologies
http://dsc.discovery.com/tv-shows/curiosity/topics/ten-nasa-inventions.htm
A quick list of some of the interesting ones: An artificial heart, video stabilization software, material used in prosthetic limbs, the scratch-resistant coating used on eyeglasses, memory foam, and powdered lubricants.
First of all, the Prius is 50 mpg, you'd only need 3 people to hit 150 person-miles per gallon. Second, at least in Europe and Japan, there is a version of the new Prius v with a third row of seating, so you can put 7 people in it. A 54 mpg mandate would certainly encourage them to bring that model to the US as well. I understand it's not a roomy third row, but I'd assume that's no problem for kids. (FWIW, I've found the original Prius to have a much roomier back seat than probably 75% of my friends' sedans, many of which I have to tilt my head to avoid it touching the ceiling.) That larger Prius still gets 42 mpg - the 7-seat version uses a more compact LiIon battery than the US 5-seater's NiMH battery, but performs the same.
And there certainly are people (you included) that can justify having a large vehicle - but how often do you or your wife take the van out alone? If you're like most people, you bought your cars (assuming you have more than one) while thinking of the worst case - you need to cram 7 people and their stuff for a long weekend camping trip, for example.
But most people don't fill their car that often. I'm going to generalize beyond you, because you're really not the common case (more than average kids, further than average from a city center). What most people need is a car that can hold a couple of kids (because really, how often do they all want to go to the same place at the same time?), and then maybe share a large vehicle (for example ZipCar, or a car rental) for those occasions where they need something larger. But that would require a societal change, and I doubt it'll happen, at least not while parking is usually free and oversized vehicles are subsidized. Instead, we can push the standards high enough that automakers will start investing in revolutionary changes - hybrids, natural gas vehicles, diesel, plug-ins, EVs, etc.
What you need isn't a large gas-guzzling vehicle - you just need a large vehicle. The gas-guzzling part is optional. And a large vehicle doesn't have to hit 54 mpg, if smaller vehicles surpass that target - 35 or 40 might very well be enough, and is probably easily obtainable in that timeframe.
It seems like every month or two, some article comes out that quotes you saying something incredible, things like that in some ways Android has surpassed iOS. Obviously to you, these are nuanced statements, carefully crafted by an engineer's mind; after all, it'd be ridiculous to say that any one OS is better than any other OS in every single imaginable way. However, the press has a habit of taking statements out of context, or even misquoting in a way that changes the statement (like translating the above example to "Woz thinks Android is better than iPhone").
How often do you find this sort of thing happens to you when you are interviewed? Is it a problem, or is it just an occasional error? Do you think that the journalists are doing the best that they can, but are restricted by a need to have an eye-catching headline and a provocative topic? Or can they make changes to write stories that are both interesting and accurately reflect the thoughts of their sources? And do you sometimes wish you could switch from the nuanced language of an engineer or scientist to the absolute bullet-point clarity that a marketer or PR rep might use to get a point across?
Yes, this. How will the people using it benefit? For example:
1. It makes it easier for multiple people to make changes to the same document at the same time.
2. It keeps a history of all changes ever made, so you can go back to an older version if you make a mistake.
3. Users can provide a comment with each change to say why they made it, and describe what is different. Later, when looking at code, you can look at who made a change and why, which can help you understand the code.
4. Different users can use different versions of a project. For example, say a researcher uses a piece of software to generate data for a paper they're writing; that researcher can continue to use the same version of that software, while the people writing it can continue making changes for other researchers. Down the road, if anybody ever wants to go back to look at what was used to generate that paper's data, it's easily accessible. And if they never need to do that, there aren't files cluttering everything up.
That said, if you're just looking for version control for you and the other web developer, I don't know why you're waiting for your supervisors to approve - I know people that run a version control system just for their own documents - code and otherwise. Everything they do gets version controlled. The only reason you need your supervisors to intervene is if you want the whole department to start using it, or if you want the version control to be supported by an IT group or something like that. Otherwise, just tell your supervisor "Yeah, there's this thing called version control that will help us stay organized. I'm going to download which is free and open-source and we're going to start using it. It'll make our job easier, and we'll be able to get more things done."
They used to literally make a mask by hand, but then the features on the chip got smaller (on the scale of nanometers), and the chips got bigger (up to hundreds of square millimeters, holding billions of transistors). To draw the whole thing, you'd need a piece of acetate 360 meters on each side, at least. These days (and for the last couple decades), it's all CAD. The design then gets sent electronically to the fab, where they make the mask using an electron beam - a little bit like how a CRT works, I believe, using electromagnets to steer the electrons. The mask actually looks very little like the design - today's circuits are measured in tens of nanometers, while the wavelength of the light that is used to pattern the design is in the hundreds of nanometers. So they do complex calculations using all the various optical distortions and interference and diffraction and whatever other effects there are, and work backwards from the desired design to find what the mask should look like to produce that design.
And hand-drawn can be better for a lot of reasons. Computers are great at following a set of rules, but what if you don't really know what the rules are, or how to express them? For example, how would you teach a computer to recognize a bicycle in a photograph? It can be done, but it takes a lot of training - and it's quite likely that it will pick up a lot of things that are not bicycles but look like them (perhaps a bicycle bumper sticker, or a piece of artwork), and it won't pick up bicycles that are different from what it was taught about (say a tandem or a recumbent). A human, on the other hand, will have no difficulty distinguishing a bicycle drawing from the real thing, or recognizing a new type of bicycle. So, at least for now, humans can still recognize optimizations that computers can't, and give it some guidelines to help improve the result. I'm sure much of that chip's layout was done with automated tools, but careful hand adjustments and hints to those tools can make a big difference in performance and power.
I think in addition to the cost of making everything live all the time (not just the hardware, but also network access for tens of thousands of devices), it's also not possible to guarantee network access. There are places in the area where, due to mountains, even a cell signal is unreliable. Additionally, the system has to work without a network anyway, in case the wireless provider or server goes down, so it'd have to be a best-effort double-check that your card balance is correct. And if you do have network access, you have the same options that you do if you can trace a violation after-the-fact to a particular person; you could deny them boarding, write a citation, take them to court...
But yeah, fixing the problem and preventing the fraud is the obvious best solution. It still wouldn't surprise me if they don't fix it, at least not any time soon, just because it's probably not going to be a huge cost. I'd expect them more to collect data to figure out how often it's happening, and if it's a significant problem, only then will they bother to find a solution.
The terminals don't necessarily have live network access, but they do get updates periodically; for example, when the bus gets back to the bus barn, they plug it in to transfer data. Thus, if you add value to your card with a credit card online, within a few days, every terminal has been updated to know that they may need to increase the value stored on your card, if a different terminal hasn't already added that value. It would be trivially possible to make this a two-way conduit, if it isn't already - save the data from the card to the terminal (eg current balance, or whether a fare was deducted), and correlate all the data. For example, if the balance ever goes up, make sure that they added value somewhere (either online or at a terminal or retail store). The hard part would be figuring out who you are from the available records (CCTV, usage records, etc.), especially if you pay cash.
That said, they probably won't care as long as only a few people are doing it. There have been much easier ways to game the system; for example, in the SF area, you could buy a card with $2 value, then use it for a ride that costs more than $2; the card allows a balance down to -$10, so you can get up to $12 from your $2 investment. Throw away the card with the negative value, buy a new one for your next trip, and repeat. Recently, they attempted to fix this by charging $3 for the card (in addition to any value you put on it), unless you also tie it to your credit card for automatic refills. I have no idea if this actually really fixes the problem or not - but they claim that such abuse was never rampant to begin with.
This is both carrier and iOS version-specific. I believe iOS 5.0 and 5.0.1 did not have the option at all, while 5.1 restored it, but not on some networks, including AT&T. (I have a 4S with iOS 5.1.1 on AT&T, and can confirm that there is no option to disable 3G in the Network settings.)
My company does pay all the costs, except for income tax on the value of the benefit. And they do the instant vesting of stock that's mentioned in the article too. Google has some uncommonly good benefits, but this ain't one of them. I guess Forbes writers don't get life insurance, otherwise maybe the association would have occurred to her.
I have a standing desk. I find it most comfortable to use when I change my position frequently; I'll stand for a while, sit for a while, put my feet up on a cabinet for a while, go back to standing, etc. Half my postures (especially sitting) would probably make an ergonomics expert cringe. But I find it nice to change things up regularly. Sometimes I'm too lazy to stand for long, and I can tell, because my back gets sore. Once I spend a day or two standing more, I feel fine again. But only standing would never be comfortable for me either.
Maybe if I could be walking on a treadmill... I find walking much more comfortable than standing...
They have a Nevada license plate on at least one car, but they can legally drive elsewhere. One of the articles linked from the link in the OP (I know, I know - slashdotters won't read the article, so how could they read things that the article LINKS to???) mentioned that it is legal in California, because the human driver is present to correct any errors the computer may make. Indeed, they've been spotted many times in the SF bay area, although are usually just ignored.
In that sense, their car is not dissimilar to my Prius as far as the law is concerned - it has radar cruise control (so it can slow down with traffic), a video camera (so it can steer a little bit, or warn when leaving a lane), and can park itself. But in any condition, I am responsible for what the car does. Since they sold that car in all 50 states, I bet driving their autonomous car is fine in all 50 too.
I'm not sure what the Nevada plate entitles them to. Perhaps full autonomous operation, without a driver? I can't imagine they'd be comfortable doing that yet though.
I believe the implication is it's 300,000 miles on public roads with no accidents. So zero were on controlled tracks.
But I'm sure they've logged many miles in controlled spaces too, such as the video of the car tooling around an empty parking garage when they showed it off to the press one time.
I'd disagree with that; most colleges don't really care how many degrees they hand out, in fact they try to get as many through as they can. What they do (usually) want, though, is to be respected; top schools attract top talent (both students and faculty), big grants, etc., which all help the school's growth. They don't succeed at that if they produce mediocre students. One way to get rid of the mediocre students (as well as some good ones) is to have hard classes that require you to prove that you can learn. In my college career, I took some classes that others probably would've considered "weed-out" classes (like Calc 3 and Physics), but they generally provided a good background for later classes (like Electrodynamics and Microelectronic Devices).
After I graduated, they unified the different disciplines of Engineering so that you can take a prescribed freshman year of courses, without deciding which branch of Engineering you want to be in. This had the side effect of requiring Chemistry for us computer types, where it is perhaps less useful. However, I don't think it's outright a bad idea - I don't make transistors, I work with boolean logic. But without knowing how a transistor works, how it's made, how circuits behave, and lots of analog properties, I'd be a much worse engineer.
The same thing applies to CS. A CS degree does not make you a good programmer. It teaches you a lot of things that will provide you a good background for your learning later in life, and a few things that are directly useful for programming like data structures and algorithms. It also teaches you about computer hardware, operating systems, etc.
If all you want to be is a programmer, you can do that easily enough on your own. Just sit down and start studying your language(s) of choice. But trust me, you don't want to just be a programmer. Anybody can write code, it doesn't take long to learn how; for an example, see OP and millions of others doing it in high school. To be really good at it, you need to have the background so that you can go beyond just writing lines of code. You can develop a deeper understanding of what you need to do and why if you have the broad background that a degree can provide.
That said, it's only what you make of it. I've recruited at college career fairs, and I'd say only a single-digit percentage of students (even at a school ranked in the top 10 in the field) have a good understanding of their field. So many students just go to class, memorize what they need to in order to get a decent GPA, then forget it. To get the most out of things, you need to develop connections between your classes, applying things that you learn in one to help your learning in another. To understand your Operating Systems class, you should know how a CPU works. To understand how a CPU works, you should know about digital logic. A good understanding of digital logic would include knowing about circuits. That circuits knowledge can be boosted by understanding the physics and chemistry behind it. Do you need to know chemistry to understand an OS? No. But it can be helpful in ways you might not imagine.
That knowledge can make the difference between somebody that can make an incremental improvement to a design, and somebody that can understand the whole system and create a fundamental change to
It's not just a hipster thing. Everybody in the bay area calls it "the city". Conversely, only tourists will call it "frisco" or "San Fran".
+1 to this. As long as the slower-moving car waits for an acceptable opening in the fast lane so as to not cut anybody off, and is actually passing slower-moving traffic in the lane(s) to the right, there's nothing wrong with it. There's no race to see who can be the fastest one in the fast lane... Otherwise one could say the same thing about the GP himself; "You gotta love the $STEREOTYPICAL_GROUP cruising along at 75 MPH in the fast lane during rush hour with their eyes glued on the radar detector. Unbelievably annoying. They are the new Prius (but for $MOTIVATION instead of MPG). Meanwhile people are risking lives to get around them by swerving into the slow lanes and get back up to 85-90 MPH."
Two other observations - if you're driving in a way that risks lives, it sure as hell isn't the fault of the people you're going around. Take a chill pill, wait for a safe opportunity to get around slower-moving traffic, and then resume your reckless behavior far from the rest of us. Second, I rarely see people actually driving in the fast lane for long periods when they shouldn't be - Prius or not. If you give them a chance to move over, they might just take it. As an example, I avoid cutting off semi trucks, at least in part because my brother was a semi driver, and related many stories where cars would pass him, pull into his lane, and then (either intentionally or accidentally) slow down, nearly getting flattened in the process. So if I'm passing a semi at 70 MPH and somebody approaches from behind at 85, I may speed up a little for their benefit (and to get them off my bumper), but I won't cut off the semi to get out of their way. They often have no such qualms, however, and will go from tailgating me to cutting off the truck the instant there's a car length's difference between my bumper and the semi's. This means I then have to wait for them to pass me before I can move over - and if the cars behind them are just as rude and follow suit, I can end up stuck in the fast lane while a few morons zip by, at least until one of them gives me a chance to signal and move over. Not saying the GP does this, but it happens way more often than it should.
I'm always amazed by the people who completely ignore the speed limit, and seem to think that they have some sort of speed entitlement to which they are guaranteed.
Not true; I bought my car 2.5 years ago, and some of the included literature clearly spelled out that the bumper was designed to protect against impacts with a fixed barrier up to 2.5 mph. (This is roughly equivalent to a 5 mph impact with a similarly-sized car, though.)
Also, the that the "no damage" part only applied for model years 1980-82, and it wasn't really no damage - the bumper was allowed a 3/8-inch dent and a 3/4 inch displacement from the impact. Since 1979, there has been a requirement of no damage to other safety systems or the rest of the car body, though.
If there's something that law enforcement shouldn't be able to do, then make a law. I don't really care here - limit non-anonymous non-aggregate data retention to 2 weeks, for example. Or say that power usage data with a granularity smaller than one month is not usable by law enforcement or as evidence. Whatever. My point is, if there's a problem, solve it with a law (or with implementation details), not by stonewalling the technology as a whole.
For criminals, installing a smart meter will not create a criminal. It also will not make existing criminals any smarter, as they would likely have to be to gain access to and take advantage of smart meter data. The solution here can be technological, additional enforcement, whatever. Deployment of ATMs didn't create new criminals that skim for cards and PINs; in a world without ATMs, they might just as well have been bank robbers or muggers. Solutions to skimming include the technological (devices that detect and disable electronics attached to the outside of an ATM), legal (limiting victims' liability), and deterrence (investigating and prosecuting perpetrators).
My point is, there's no inherent reason that smart meters are a bad idea. Certain implementations may have weaknesses that should be fixed prior to roll-out, but smart meters in general are beneficial both to consumers and the utility.
Considering that most smart meters only gather data in 60-minute increments anyway, the most invasive data (eg that you have a particular medical device that has a particular surge characteristic when it first turns on) isn't even available.
Law enforcement can already get a search warrant to come in my home any time they want, given sufficient justification in the eyes of a judge. Make accessing smart meter data no different than tearing your house apart, and you've basically solved that problem. If your power usage were REALLY interesting, I'm sure they could get a warrant to put a measuring device at the utility pole today. Frankly, I doubt they care; there are far easier ways to investigate you.
Criminals can tear apart my house without a search warrant anyway. Or they can walk onto my property and look at my meter to see if I'm currently using power or not. Or drive by and see that the lights are off and the lawn is unmowed. Criminals will be criminals, whatever the technology may be. Again, I doubt they'll care either; it's far easier to just wait for some moron to post a picture of their credit card online than to analyze your power usage to figure out that you have a 56" plasma TV and you are on vacation.