Yes, IT infrastructure is complex. So is electrical, HVAC, plumbing. As with those jobs, some of the work is simple maintenance that can be done by almost anyone who has received the proper training, some requires large amounts of experience or talent or both.
The relative complexity of the systems depends on the installation. For some engineering firms, the IT infrastructure may be quite complex relative to the other systems. For some industrial applications (like chip fabs), the environmental control may be extremely complex.
I'm not saying this to diminish IT, it does require excellent people who put in a lot of effort. Its just that other infrastructure support also requires very skilled people, they just happen to have to literally get their hands dirty.
The idea is to use solar to charge an electric car. OK, might work in some locations for some use cases, but hardly innovative. They had a architect design a support for the solar panels that some people may think is aesthetically pleasing. OK, but again not exciting. They want carbon fiber and bamboo. Again OK, but it could have been recycled plastic, or old aluminum cans, or adobe or pick your favorite "green" material of the day.
Why is this slashdot worthy? (except as an ad for BMW)
The government does a lot of things that private industry does not do - generally things for which the economic incentive model can't work, or where we are not looking for the economic optimum.
As an example, look at basic science R&D. A commercial company generally won't to basic science because the value of the results is in their very wide scale applicability and that is very difficult to monetize.
A free market education system would probably not bother to educate the least capable 20% of students, but there is a belief that we want to provide an opportunity for education for everyone.
I don't think the tools are well known. For instance I didn't know I could get at my google info.
A more serious problem is the lack of trust. There is a concern that you will only be able to add information, not remove it, and your spam levels will just increase. (this may not be true, but its a valid concern).
Part of the problem is what I believe to be a flawed business model for marketers. They feel that they need to somehow "steal" people's information and use it to "force" adds on them. The phrase "targeted" adds suggests a hostile approach. My impression is that most people want to see informative adds for products that they might buy. If it were easy for customers to craft their on online profiles so that they would see adds of interest to them, advertisers would be able to directly provide relevant information.
Right now I'm not in the market for a car - all the adds in the world won't do any good. In a few years when I am ready to buy, I will want to see information on the types of cars that I might consider buying. The way things are set up now, immediately after I buy a car I will be flooded with car adds - despite the fact that a recent purchases is the least likely to buy again.
Google and Yahoo make money by selling information that they collect from users. Microsoft makes money by selling software. The typical person is a Microsoft customer, but a Google / Yahoo product.
The original use of free piston engines was as air compressors to drive turbines, so its a good idea. I turned out in practice though that they were not as efficient as expected and they were never widely used despite many years of R*D.
Free piston engines have been around since a least the 50s. Described in detail in Taylor's "The Internal Combustion Engine in Theory and Practice"1977, rev 1985, An excellent set of book on how internal combustion engines work.
The classic version used a turbine for output and was not very efficient. Using direct electromagnetic output for a hybrid is an interesting idea. One of the great weaknesses of the free piston engine is poor low power performance, and that isn't needed in a hybrid. Not clear though that it can do better than the (almost) Atkinson cycle engine in a Prius - (a cycle also described in detail in the Taylor book).
The Toyota design is unusual, most free piston engines use opposing pistons to fix vibration. Not clear why toyota uses a single piston.(or two separate pistons).
As with most engine designs, the devil is in the details - cooling, lubrication, etc. Sometimes a design that is good in concept just can't compete with the enormous amount of development that has been done on conventional designs.
Yes, it has come to this. Whether or not the original was flamebait, there really are people who rationalize that this is OK because we are not the worst. Well, OK we are the worst for prison population, etc, but we aren't the worst at everything......
The US was never the shining example of freedom and democracy that it claimed to be, but at least we seemed to think it was at least worth pretending that we were. Now we execute without trials, have secret courts, near-universal surveillance, use torture (er, "enhanced" interrogation), and celebrate when we kill our enemies by stealth in the dark of the night. We have more of our own citizens in prison than any other country (except possibly N. Korea). We happily support governments that support large scale oppression, and who deny votes to the majority of their populations.
OK, if we are going to go this route, can we please roll the "dark empire" music and start conquering countries and demanding tribute. Instead we do all of the actions of an evil empire, but get nothing in return .
The full report on the AF447 flight paints a somewhat different picture than the media described. The pilots were at fault, but not as blatantly as it seemed. A badly designed controls interface hid the airspeed indications (which were correct but so low that the computer flagged them as invalid).
The trim feedback system normally adjusts the elevator trim so that the joystick can be kept centered. In this case, since the aircraft pitch wasn't responding normally, the slightly back stick position caused the trim to continuously put in more up elevator.
The pilots set the correct pitch and full power - in normal conditions this would have worked. The problem here was that since the plane was in a deep stall, the angle of attack was much larger than the pitch angle.
The stall indicator cuts out when the angle of attack and airspeed are out of a reasonable range. At one point early on, the co-pilot started to put the nose down, but the stall alarm turned ON (because the angle of attack was no longer to large as to be invalid), and in response he pitched up again - probably having confused the stall indicator with some other warning. Note that the plane was in the coffin-corner where stall speed and mach overspeed are quite close together.
The pilots *should* have figured this all out, but it wasn't trivial to do so with the information they had available. Airliner accidents are almost always due to a long chain of unlikely problems.
On of the problems is that some very positive features may be associated with some very negative ones. Is compulsive behavior linked to high productivity in some jobs? Great leaders and great revolutionaries may have similar traits. Is artistic ability linked to depression?
I fear creating a world full of "ordinary" people, because we don't want a Cesar.
Some human organizations have survived ~1000 years, its taken ~500 years to finish some cathedrals, so the time scale isn't completely unreasonable. OTOH, I don't think advertising our presence is the best idea.
They are really hard. Hard to imagine a magnet that has enough strength to weight to collect enough hydrogen, and much of the hydrogen isn't ionized anyway. Then you need to be pretty efficient or you generate so much drag collecting the hydrogen that you don't gain from fusing it. Then there is the problem that it is almost all H1, not deuterium, and H1 fuses incredibly slowly, so its hard to imagine the reactor.
No crazier than other ideas, but really really hard.
All this is a bit silly. The equivalent of the first human to paddle a log across a river arguing that crossing the ocean is impossible because your arms would get tired. (only the increase in technology is much worse for interstellar from where we are now).
Dust could be an issue - at near C, it will look like very heavy high energy particles. The interstellar gas looks like a very high intensity proton radiation environment.
You are right that slowing down is a big issue. Guess you need to convince the guys on the receive end to build a deceleration laser. ("we are aiming straight at your planet at 0.7C, you can build a laser to slow us down, or not - your choice.....")
There is some drag on the sail from the interstellar medium, but not enough to slow down in a reasonable time.
Light sales (x-ray). A 10KeV X-ray laser (about 0.1 nanometer wavelength) with a 10 kilometer final focus optic has a divergence of 1e-14, will be 10 kilometers wide at 1e18 Meters or about a light-year. the final lens could probably be a 10km zone plate out by the orbit of Neptune. The 10KeV X-rays will be stopped in a few microns of (tungsten) sail material.
The sail will weigh 10s of tons. Need a laser power around a few to tens of terawatts to get around 1G.
Same here. I want to move away from MS but (in my case) LibreOffice doesn't quite make it. It does 90% of what I need, but I also need the remaining 10%. Also too many other people use MS products and the 95% compatibility just isn't enough.
The one exception is LibreOffice draw which I use as my primary quick sketch / drawing package.
In mobile systems (cars, planes, etc), the extra hardware to extract energy from the waste heat adds weight and can reduce the overall efficiency of the vehicle. In fixed power-plant type applications they already extract energy down to pretty low discharge temperatures.
This idea has been around for a LONG time - I remember in the early 70s reading an article in popular science on a system to extract waste heat from car engines. It "worked" but the added weight and expense made it not worth the effort.
An interesting tidbit is that modern aircraft jet engines are LESS efficient than piston aircraft engines in terms of mechanical energy delivered for the fuel used. Almost all modern transport aircraft use jets because the power to weight is so much higher than for piston engines that the overall efficiency of the aircraft is better than with piston engines.
The law should limit what they can collect as well as what they can do with data they have. I don't see any alternative to laws to prevent the government from having access to data. They have the resources to get pretty much any data they want, certainly a non-expert will not be able to secure their data against the NSA.
We need clear laws on what law enforcement and government agencies are allow to know about us, not how they gain that data. Do we want the government to be able to track everyone's motions. If not, then it shouldn't matter if they use cell phone data, face recognition, satellite photos, tracking implants, or invisible flying monkeys that follow people around, it shouldn't be legal.
If we do want to allow the government to track out motions, then we should let them us the least expensive, most efficient technology available. Simply making it difficult but not impossible is crazy , WE (the tax payers of the country in question) are the ones paying for the service, we are just making it more expensive for ourselves.
People clearly disagree on how much tracking is OK, but that it true for a wide variety of societal decisions, we should go through the normal legislative process.
5 year old girls want a pony with sparkles - or maybe a unicorn, but they can't have one. Commuters want a flying car but they can't have one either.
Aircraft fly by moving a lot of air downward in order to counteract gravity. If they move less air quickly the total power the need goes up (force goes as mass/second * velocity, power goes as mass/second * velocity SQUARED). So, in order to be efficient they need to have very big wings, or very big helicopter rotors, or very big low density volumes.
Look at all conventional aircraft, they have BIG wings. Those wings will not fit on roads. So if you want a flying car you are left with a clunky folding wing contraption that is a terrible car AND a terrible airplane. No matter how pretty the CGI or fiberglass mock-up design it just isn't going to work.
If a military organization discovers a weakness in an enemy country's defenses, it is perfectly reasonable for them to keep this weakness secret and use it in future conflicts. Cyber security is different. Since we are all using roughly the same technology, by discovering a weakness in the defenses of another country, they have discovered a weakness in OUR defenses.
At the moment the US has a strong advantage in conventional warfare, but not so much in cyber warfare. In looking at overall national defense, patching holes in everyone's cyber defenses reduces the effectiveness of cyber war (where we are not clearly dominant), and moves the focus to conventional war where we are dominant.
Slashdot Mirror
Wish I had points to mod parent further up.
Yes, IT infrastructure is complex. So is electrical, HVAC, plumbing. As with those jobs, some of the work is simple maintenance that can be done by almost anyone who has received the proper training, some requires large amounts of experience or talent or both.
The relative complexity of the systems depends on the installation. For some engineering firms, the IT infrastructure may be quite complex relative to the other systems. For some industrial applications (like chip fabs), the environmental control may be extremely complex.
I'm not saying this to diminish IT, it does require excellent people who put in a lot of effort. Its just that other infrastructure support also requires very skilled people, they just happen to have to literally get their hands dirty.
The idea is to use solar to charge an electric car. OK, might work in some locations for some use cases, but hardly innovative. They had a architect design a support for the solar panels that some people may think is aesthetically pleasing. OK, but again not exciting. They want carbon fiber and bamboo. Again OK, but it could have been recycled plastic, or old aluminum cans, or adobe or pick your favorite "green" material of the day.
Why is this slashdot worthy? (except as an ad for BMW)
note the "may".
I completely agree, we may contact aliens in the next 50-100 years. The probability isn't zero.
The government does a lot of things that private industry does not do - generally things for which the economic incentive model can't work, or where we are not looking for the economic optimum.
As an example, look at basic science R&D. A commercial company generally won't to basic science because the value of the results is in their very wide scale applicability and that is very difficult to monetize.
A free market education system would probably not bother to educate the least capable 20% of students, but there is a belief that we want to provide an opportunity for education for everyone.
There really is no way to know what is real and what isn't with propaganda machines going full out on both sides.
Considering that investment firms cost the government HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS OF DOLLARS in bailouts, can they really argue that porn stars are "risky"?
I don't think the tools are well known. For instance I didn't know I could get at my google info.
A more serious problem is the lack of trust. There is a concern that you will only be able to add information, not remove it, and your spam levels will just increase. (this may not be true, but its a valid concern).
Part of the problem is what I believe to be a flawed business model for marketers. They feel that they need to somehow "steal" people's information and use it to "force" adds on them. The phrase "targeted" adds suggests a hostile approach. My impression is that most people want to see informative adds for products that they might buy. If it were easy for customers to craft their on online profiles so that they would see adds of interest to them, advertisers would be able to directly provide relevant information.
Right now I'm not in the market for a car - all the adds in the world won't do any good. In a few years when I am ready to buy, I will want to see information on the types of cars that I might consider buying. The way things are set up now, immediately after I buy a car I will be flooded with car adds - despite the fact that a recent purchases is the least likely to buy again.
Google and Yahoo make money by selling information that they collect from users. Microsoft makes money by selling software. The typical person is a Microsoft customer, but a Google / Yahoo product.
The original use of free piston engines was as air compressors to drive turbines, so its a good idea. I turned out in practice though that they were not as efficient as expected and they were never widely used despite many years of R*D.
Free piston engines have been around since a least the 50s. Described in detail in Taylor's "The Internal Combustion Engine in Theory and Practice"1977, rev 1985, An excellent set of book on how internal combustion engines work.
The classic version used a turbine for output and was not very efficient. Using direct electromagnetic output for a hybrid is an interesting idea. One of the great weaknesses of the free piston engine is poor low power performance, and that isn't needed in a hybrid. Not clear though that it can do better than the (almost) Atkinson cycle engine in a Prius - (a cycle also described in detail in the Taylor book).
The Toyota design is unusual, most free piston engines use opposing pistons to fix vibration. Not clear why toyota uses a single piston.(or two separate pistons).
As with most engine designs, the devil is in the details - cooling, lubrication, etc. Sometimes a design that is good in concept just can't compete with the enormous amount of development that has been done on conventional designs.
Yes, it has come to this. Whether or not the original was flamebait, there really are people who rationalize that this is OK because we are not the worst. Well, OK we are the worst for prison population, etc, but we aren't the worst at everything......
The US was never the shining example of freedom and democracy that it claimed to be, but at least we seemed to think it was at least worth pretending that we were. Now we execute without trials, have secret courts, near-universal surveillance, use torture (er, "enhanced" interrogation), and celebrate when we kill our enemies by stealth in the dark of the night. We have more of our own citizens in prison than any other country (except possibly N. Korea). We happily support governments that support large scale oppression, and who deny votes to the majority of their populations.
OK, if we are going to go this route, can we please roll the "dark empire" music and start conquering countries and demanding tribute. Instead we do all of the actions of an evil empire, but get nothing in return .
The full report on the AF447 flight paints a somewhat different picture than the media described. The pilots were at fault, but not as blatantly as it seemed. A badly designed controls interface hid the airspeed indications (which were correct but so low that the computer flagged them as invalid).
The trim feedback system normally adjusts the elevator trim so that the joystick can be kept centered. In this case, since the aircraft pitch wasn't responding normally, the slightly back stick position caused the trim to continuously put in more up elevator.
The pilots set the correct pitch and full power - in normal conditions this would have worked. The problem here was that since the plane was in a deep stall, the angle of attack was much larger than the pitch angle.
The stall indicator cuts out when the angle of attack and airspeed are out of a reasonable range. At one point early on, the co-pilot started to put the nose down, but the stall alarm turned ON (because the angle of attack was no longer to large as to be invalid), and in response he pitched up again - probably having confused the stall indicator with some other warning. Note that the plane was in the coffin-corner where stall speed and mach overspeed are quite close together.
The pilots *should* have figured this all out, but it wasn't trivial to do so with the information they had available. Airliner accidents are almost always due to a long chain of unlikely problems.
On of the problems is that some very positive features may be associated with some very negative ones. Is compulsive behavior linked to high productivity in some jobs? Great leaders and great revolutionaries may have similar traits. Is artistic ability linked to depression?
I fear creating a world full of "ordinary" people, because we don't want a Cesar.
Some human organizations have survived ~1000 years, its taken ~500 years to finish some cathedrals, so the time scale isn't completely unreasonable. OTOH, I don't think advertising our presence is the best idea.
They are really hard. Hard to imagine a magnet that has enough strength to weight to collect enough hydrogen, and much of the hydrogen isn't ionized anyway. Then you need to be pretty efficient or you generate so much drag collecting the hydrogen that you don't gain from fusing it. Then there is the problem that it is almost all H1, not deuterium, and H1 fuses incredibly slowly, so its hard to imagine the reactor.
No crazier than other ideas, but really really hard.
All this is a bit silly. The equivalent of the first human to paddle a log across a river arguing that crossing the ocean is impossible because your arms would get tired. (only the increase in technology is much worse for interstellar from where we are now).
Dust could be an issue - at near C, it will look like very heavy high energy particles. The interstellar gas looks like a very high intensity proton radiation environment.
You are right that slowing down is a big issue. Guess you need to convince the guys on the receive end to build a deceleration laser. ("we are aiming straight at your planet at 0.7C, you can build a laser to slow us down, or not - your choice.....")
There is some drag on the sail from the interstellar medium, but not enough to slow down in a reasonable time.
Light sales (x-ray). A 10KeV X-ray laser (about 0.1 nanometer wavelength) with a 10 kilometer final focus optic has a divergence of 1e-14, will be 10 kilometers wide at 1e18 Meters or about a light-year. the final lens could probably be a 10km zone plate out by the orbit of Neptune. The 10KeV X-rays will be stopped in a few microns of (tungsten) sail material.
The sail will weigh 10s of tons. Need a laser power around a few to tens of terawatts to get around 1G.
All depends on what you consider "plausible".
Same here. I want to move away from MS but (in my case) LibreOffice doesn't quite make it. It does 90% of what I need, but I also need the remaining 10%. Also too many other people use MS products and the 95% compatibility just isn't enough.
The one exception is LibreOffice draw which I use as my primary quick sketch / drawing package.
In mobile systems (cars, planes, etc), the extra hardware to extract energy from the waste heat adds weight and can reduce the overall efficiency of the vehicle. In fixed power-plant type applications they already extract energy down to pretty low discharge temperatures.
This idea has been around for a LONG time - I remember in the early 70s reading an article in popular science on a system to extract waste heat from car engines. It "worked" but the added weight and expense made it not worth the effort.
An interesting tidbit is that modern aircraft jet engines are LESS efficient than piston aircraft engines in terms of mechanical energy delivered for the fuel used. Almost all modern transport aircraft use jets because the power to weight is so much higher than for piston engines that the overall efficiency of the aircraft is better than with piston engines.
The law should limit what they can collect as well as what they can do with data they have. I don't see any alternative to laws to prevent the government from having access to data. They have the resources to get pretty much any data they want, certainly a non-expert will not be able to secure their data against the NSA.
We need clear laws on what law enforcement and government agencies are allow to know about us, not how they gain that data. Do we want the government to be able to track everyone's motions. If not, then it shouldn't matter if they use cell phone data, face recognition, satellite photos, tracking implants, or invisible flying monkeys that follow people around, it shouldn't be legal.
If we do want to allow the government to track out motions, then we should let them us the least expensive, most efficient technology available. Simply making it difficult but not impossible is crazy , WE (the tax payers of the country in question) are the ones paying for the service, we are just making it more expensive for ourselves.
People clearly disagree on how much tracking is OK, but that it true for a wide variety of societal decisions, we should go through the normal legislative process.
You may have the luxury of choosing between multiple job offers, but many people don't.
5 year old girls want a pony with sparkles - or maybe a unicorn, but they can't have one. Commuters want a flying car but they can't have one either.
Aircraft fly by moving a lot of air downward in order to counteract gravity. If they move less air quickly the total power the need goes up (force goes as mass/second * velocity, power goes as mass/second * velocity SQUARED). So, in order to be efficient they need to have very big wings, or very big helicopter rotors, or very big low density volumes.
Look at all conventional aircraft, they have BIG wings. Those wings will not fit on roads. So if you want a flying car you are left with a clunky folding wing contraption that is a terrible car AND a terrible airplane. No matter how pretty the CGI or fiberglass mock-up design it just isn't going to work.
If a military organization discovers a weakness in an enemy country's defenses, it is perfectly reasonable for them to keep this weakness secret and use it in future conflicts. Cyber security is different. Since we are all using roughly the same technology, by discovering a weakness in the defenses of another country, they have discovered a weakness in OUR defenses.
At the moment the US has a strong advantage in conventional warfare, but not so much in cyber warfare. In looking at overall national defense, patching holes in everyone's cyber defenses reduces the effectiveness of cyber war (where we are not clearly dominant), and moves the focus to conventional war where we are dominant.