People seem to think that because a fax machine scans physical documents that it represents an authentic signature on a document. Solid reasoning? Not a chance, but when has that stopped anyone from reaching stupid conclusions?
Your post is very thoughtful and an interesting read - thank you. I can only take it as an argument in favor of depopulation of Earth in favor of the moon and Mars. On those other rocks there are no people and plenty of resources, so we can begin the encheapening cycle anew.
It's also worth pointing out that direct-democracy frequently produces laws that generate expenditures but rarely generate revenue. Just as people like spending but not paying at the consumer level, they behave the same way at the societal level. California has a lot of individually poorly-funded, but expense-in-aggregate social programs that do not exist elsewhere in the country. The hyper-partisanship that divides agricultural California from urban California also paralyzes the government against accomplishing anything beyond money-sinking feel-good legislation. It would make my day if the governor had the power to delete anything off of any budget at any time - a huge extension beyond the controversial "line-item veto".
Yes, actually, it is. Al Jazeera is has remarkably high journalistic standards. They're thorough, generally correct, and surprisingly unbiased. They're unquestionably superior to any US cable news, and usually more in-depth in their stories than the BBC.
Stuff happens, people die. One of my best friends in high school was killed when his car was hit by a drunk. To me, I'd rather the drunk lost his license rather than my car fitted with an interlock. I don't even drink, why should I have to pay for someone else's irresponsibility?
Measures like this are a waste of everyone's resources that distract from more serious problems - broken education, declining scientific investment, an uncompetitive economy, etc.
Companies the world over are trying to build better and cheaper solar panels. Many of them have received very significant government investment. Take a look at Emcore, Spectrolab, Sunpower, First Solar, Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, REC, etc etc. The list extends beyond the eye can see.
You do have a point, however. Our current patent and copyright system is an exercise in absurdity and needs to be fixed - somehow. But those systems are not a problem for the solar industry yet. The field is growing far too quickly for anyone to be worried about stalling innovation with patents.
I bet you're going to tell me that car companies have been holding out on a carburetor that could give us 300mpg cars too, huh?
It's not as bleak as you think. The GM record was set with 15 square meters of solar panels, and the UNSW team broke it with 6 square meters of panels. Both are using commercial grade rooftop cells that you can buy right now.
When crossing streets I pay no attention to noise whatsoever. There's already so much of it that there's no information in the din. Vision is the way to go if you can. If you're blind, you're already used to taking precautions - using a guide dog, relying on crosswalks, etc. Is that a perfect, foolproof solution? No. You can't protect everyone from everything, and we haven't figured that out as a society.
Nobody has demonstrated that blind people being run over by electric vehicles is a real problem, yet here we are championing a legislative solution. What about the 400k people dying every year from smoking related lung cancer? What about the ginormous budget deficit? Declining quality of public education? Wars abroad? You'd think our legislators would have some idea of how to prioritize. Instead, they're coming up with silly solutions to non-problems. If this proves to be a big problem in the future, then by all means, we should deal with it. But until then, we're fixing what isn't broken.
Society needs to figure out that it can't have it both ways. You can't desire educated kids without giving them the freedom to explore, particularly so long as the damage they do is limited to their own lives and property. Alpha double plusses require a large bottle, right?
I happen to work in the same shop as that vehicle. It's an extremely impressive piece of work, both hardware and software. The grad students put in a lot of time to make it happen.
Simply being confident in your position down to a fraction of an inch is no small feat. They have multiple error-corrected GPS units, wheel encoders, slip detection, and a finely tuned-in Kalman filter cleaning up the whole mess. And that's just to know where they are.
Modeling this kind of motion isn't easy. You have slip and spin, variable friction between wheels, body roll and yaw, etc. It took armies of engineers decades to get missile guidance working as well as it does. Plus, criticizing the actual stunt completely misses the point of the exercise. Their interest is in dynamically using the best aspects of multiple models, choosing which elements are important in real-time.
I carry seven keys and a flash drive. The carabiner is great because it goes on and comes off quickly, and it's easy to pat myself down to know I still have it. I've made a habit of checking for keys, wallet, cell phone every time I go through a door.
$130/sq ft. You read correctly. That's Santa Clara county government. It's because the school is non-profit and the bureaucrats decided they needed another way to get money. It's a 8000 sq ft concrete pad with 6000 square feet of interior space. It cost $4M to build.
My jobs have all had much less wasted space. 1-2 handicapped spots out of 40-50 spots. Not 1-2 handicapped spots out of 5 total. They don't have multiple eye-wash stations within 5 seconds' walk of each other. They have more than 2 urinals / 400 sq ft in the bathroom. It's being treated differently than commercial space because it's considered an academic lab.
My school, working with VW, built a new building for automotive projects. It has handicapped parking spaces, handicapped showers and bathroom stalls, male and female restrooms, and multiple chemical showers. There are few handicapped people in the school, fewer in engineering, and none on any of the automotive teams - for obvious reasons. There are also very few females, to the point that unisex bathrooms (like those used in more gender-normal parts of campus) would have been a fine option.
There's also wasted space for clearance around electrical panels (which are everywhere), inspection points, etc. All told, some 30% of the square footage of the new building is wasted by complying with regulations. And the government charged us $130/sq ft just for the permit.
They'll often spend enormous sums of money and huge amounts of time trying to do something. Many try to communicate around the world on five watts (DXers) or try to bounce their signal off the moon (EME).
The difference, however, is that usually the amateur radio types also happen to have instruments that can provide some measure of success. The also tend to do things that are far cooler than having a vacuum tube amplifier.
But maybe I'm biased... I'm an amateur radio operator, after all.
That said, I think hams usually try and decode the signal they receive. Just hearing it come in from the air is a little bit less exciting.
Solder is already conductive, so the eddy current losses won't be localized in the iron particles. Further, copper traces are even more conductive.
This must be based on the hysteresis losses in the iron B-H curves. That means he's probably got a very high frequency magnetic field generator that he's using to heat up the iron. Seems like a simple principle.
That said, I still don't want iron filings in my solder!
It really can also get boring after a while. You see only live video. There are no explanatory diagrams, no alternative camera angles, and prolonged silences of many minutes where almost nothing happens. When there is commentary, it's giving useless minutiae that I couldn't care less about.
NASA TV needs some good prepared commentary to explain what's going on and some good diagrams to go with it. They also need commentators that don't just tell me the obvious or fill in some numbers, but rather make it clear what I'm watching, why it's important, who is involved, and what we're going to learn from it.
This is simple stuff to increase the intellectual value of the content. It's not "dumbing it down". If you want dumb "educational" content, watch today's Discovery, TLC, etc.
So she didn't have access to a printer and isn't fond of the Israeli government's behavior towards the Palestinians. Neither of those make her computer a serious threat to security nor justify the behavior of guards. They were clearly acting out of malice. It's precisely this kind of behavior that breeds discontent with a government both at home and abroad.
What governments need to realize is that it's important to take the high ground. They must act logically, thoughtfully, consistently, honestly, and fairly regardless of the immediate consequences of doing the right thing. Doing otherwise may seem profitable in the short term, but will only create discontent in the long term.
All of that said, it would have been easy for this girl to have avoided all of this if she had been interested in doing so. She must have known that her items would catch the attention of the guards, or she must have been an idiot.
I suppose all I've proven here is that guards are unthinking thugs (ask any American Slashdotters of their opinion of the TSA) and that there are attention-whores with travel plans. Nothing to see here...
I had this problem for a while at school. Ultimately it went away when everyone else got a laptop or an iphone.
In the interim, I just said very straightforwardly, "I'm not comfortable letting other people use my computer. It's part of my personal space and deserves to be respected that way." Most people understood and let it go. Some people were not understanding and pushed it and got nasty about it. Luckily my friends were in the first category.
Slashdot Mirror
People seem to think that because a fax machine scans physical documents that it represents an authentic signature on a document. Solid reasoning? Not a chance, but when has that stopped anyone from reaching stupid conclusions?
I think Palm had "black slab touchscreen tablets" covered in the mid 90's.
Your post is very thoughtful and an interesting read - thank you. I can only take it as an argument in favor of depopulation of Earth in favor of the moon and Mars. On those other rocks there are no people and plenty of resources, so we can begin the encheapening cycle anew.
It's also worth pointing out that direct-democracy frequently produces laws that generate expenditures but rarely generate revenue. Just as people like spending but not paying at the consumer level, they behave the same way at the societal level. California has a lot of individually poorly-funded, but expense-in-aggregate social programs that do not exist elsewhere in the country. The hyper-partisanship that divides agricultural California from urban California also paralyzes the government against accomplishing anything beyond money-sinking feel-good legislation. It would make my day if the governor had the power to delete anything off of any budget at any time - a huge extension beyond the controversial "line-item veto".
Yes, actually, it is. Al Jazeera is has remarkably high journalistic standards. They're thorough, generally correct, and surprisingly unbiased. They're unquestionably superior to any US cable news, and usually more in-depth in their stories than the BBC.
But nobody uses Ogg Theora.
Stuff happens, people die. One of my best friends in high school was killed when his car was hit by a drunk. To me, I'd rather the drunk lost his license rather than my car fitted with an interlock. I don't even drink, why should I have to pay for someone else's irresponsibility?
Measures like this are a waste of everyone's resources that distract from more serious problems - broken education, declining scientific investment, an uncompetitive economy, etc.
I have a quad core i7 with 4GB of RAM running Chrome. Browsing comments is slow. What gives?
Companies the world over are trying to build better and cheaper solar panels. Many of them have received very significant government investment. Take a look at Emcore, Spectrolab, Sunpower, First Solar, Solyndra, Evergreen Solar, REC, etc etc. The list extends beyond the eye can see.
You do have a point, however. Our current patent and copyright system is an exercise in absurdity and needs to be fixed - somehow. But those systems are not a problem for the solar industry yet. The field is growing far too quickly for anyone to be worried about stalling innovation with patents.
I bet you're going to tell me that car companies have been holding out on a carburetor that could give us 300mpg cars too, huh?
It's not as bleak as you think. The GM record was set with 15 square meters of solar panels, and the UNSW team broke it with 6 square meters of panels. Both are using commercial grade rooftop cells that you can buy right now.
When crossing streets I pay no attention to noise whatsoever. There's already so much of it that there's no information in the din. Vision is the way to go if you can. If you're blind, you're already used to taking precautions - using a guide dog, relying on crosswalks, etc. Is that a perfect, foolproof solution? No. You can't protect everyone from everything, and we haven't figured that out as a society.
Nobody has demonstrated that blind people being run over by electric vehicles is a real problem, yet here we are championing a legislative solution. What about the 400k people dying every year from smoking related lung cancer? What about the ginormous budget deficit? Declining quality of public education? Wars abroad? You'd think our legislators would have some idea of how to prioritize. Instead, they're coming up with silly solutions to non-problems. If this proves to be a big problem in the future, then by all means, we should deal with it. But until then, we're fixing what isn't broken.
Society needs to figure out that it can't have it both ways. You can't desire educated kids without giving them the freedom to explore, particularly so long as the damage they do is limited to their own lives and property. Alpha double plusses require a large bottle, right?
I happen to work in the same shop as that vehicle. It's an extremely impressive piece of work, both hardware and software. The grad students put in a lot of time to make it happen.
Simply being confident in your position down to a fraction of an inch is no small feat. They have multiple error-corrected GPS units, wheel encoders, slip detection, and a finely tuned-in Kalman filter cleaning up the whole mess. And that's just to know where they are.
Modeling this kind of motion isn't easy. You have slip and spin, variable friction between wheels, body roll and yaw, etc. It took armies of engineers decades to get missile guidance working as well as it does. Plus, criticizing the actual stunt completely misses the point of the exercise. Their interest is in dynamically using the best aspects of multiple models, choosing which elements are important in real-time.
I carry seven keys and a flash drive. The carabiner is great because it goes on and comes off quickly, and it's easy to pat myself down to know I still have it. I've made a habit of checking for keys, wallet, cell phone every time I go through a door.
Google bought some bandwidth to be able to send site content to users. Those users bought some bandwidth to be able to receive it. What's the problem?
$130/sq ft. You read correctly. That's Santa Clara county government. It's because the school is non-profit and the bureaucrats decided they needed another way to get money. It's a 8000 sq ft concrete pad with 6000 square feet of interior space. It cost $4M to build.
My jobs have all had much less wasted space. 1-2 handicapped spots out of 40-50 spots. Not 1-2 handicapped spots out of 5 total. They don't have multiple eye-wash stations within 5 seconds' walk of each other. They have more than 2 urinals / 400 sq ft in the bathroom. It's being treated differently than commercial space because it's considered an academic lab.
Yep, they also put in exhaust removers. Too bad all of the research cars are electric.
My school, working with VW, built a new building for automotive projects. It has handicapped parking spaces, handicapped showers and bathroom stalls, male and female restrooms, and multiple chemical showers. There are few handicapped people in the school, fewer in engineering, and none on any of the automotive teams - for obvious reasons. There are also very few females, to the point that unisex bathrooms (like those used in more gender-normal parts of campus) would have been a fine option.
There's also wasted space for clearance around electrical panels (which are everywhere), inspection points, etc. All told, some 30% of the square footage of the new building is wasted by complying with regulations. And the government charged us $130/sq ft just for the permit.
And we wonder why China is whipping our ass...
10e-34 error rate overall, cosmic rays at earth's surface included
Assume we check 8 bits of acceleration data 20 times per second
Assume each car runs for 10000 hours
Assume there are on order of 100 million Toyotas in the US
Multiply all these together and you find that the odds of this happening even once are on the order of 10e-17
They'll often spend enormous sums of money and huge amounts of time trying to do something. Many try to communicate around the world on five watts (DXers) or try to bounce their signal off the moon (EME).
The difference, however, is that usually the amateur radio types also happen to have instruments that can provide some measure of success. The also tend to do things that are far cooler than having a vacuum tube amplifier.
But maybe I'm biased... I'm an amateur radio operator, after all.
That said, I think hams usually try and decode the signal they receive. Just hearing it come in from the air is a little bit less exciting.
Solder is already conductive, so the eddy current losses won't be localized in the iron particles. Further, copper traces are even more conductive.
This must be based on the hysteresis losses in the iron B-H curves. That means he's probably got a very high frequency magnetic field generator that he's using to heat up the iron. Seems like a simple principle.
That said, I still don't want iron filings in my solder!
It really can also get boring after a while. You see only live video. There are no explanatory diagrams, no alternative camera angles, and prolonged silences of many minutes where almost nothing happens. When there is commentary, it's giving useless minutiae that I couldn't care less about.
NASA TV needs some good prepared commentary to explain what's going on and some good diagrams to go with it. They also need commentators that don't just tell me the obvious or fill in some numbers, but rather make it clear what I'm watching, why it's important, who is involved, and what we're going to learn from it.
This is simple stuff to increase the intellectual value of the content. It's not "dumbing it down". If you want dumb "educational" content, watch today's Discovery, TLC, etc.
So she didn't have access to a printer and isn't fond of the Israeli government's behavior towards the Palestinians. Neither of those make her computer a serious threat to security nor justify the behavior of guards. They were clearly acting out of malice. It's precisely this kind of behavior that breeds discontent with a government both at home and abroad.
What governments need to realize is that it's important to take the high ground. They must act logically, thoughtfully, consistently, honestly, and fairly regardless of the immediate consequences of doing the right thing. Doing otherwise may seem profitable in the short term, but will only create discontent in the long term.
All of that said, it would have been easy for this girl to have avoided all of this if she had been interested in doing so. She must have known that her items would catch the attention of the guards, or she must have been an idiot.
I suppose all I've proven here is that guards are unthinking thugs (ask any American Slashdotters of their opinion of the TSA) and that there are attention-whores with travel plans. Nothing to see here...
I had this problem for a while at school. Ultimately it went away when everyone else got a laptop or an iphone.
In the interim, I just said very straightforwardly, "I'm not comfortable letting other people use my computer. It's part of my personal space and deserves to be respected that way." Most people understood and let it go. Some people were not understanding and pushed it and got nasty about it. Luckily my friends were in the first category.
If this features makes it in, I see a new fork of Adblock coming out pretty quickly.