Maybe, but they would have gotten into less trouble if they had fallen asleep, so my guess is that they WERE watching the laptop. Not sure I believe they were looking at company regs though......
Part of the job of a pilot is to keep an eye on all the automation. The problem is that its very difficult to stay alert for long periods of time waiting for a very rare failure. Two pilots tend to keep each other awake and alert. (Yes I know about the plane the overflew its destination while the 2 pilots were looking at something on a laptop - but that is such a rare event that it made the national news).
Humans and automation tend to fail in very different ways - humans are much better at dealing with unexpected situations, automation is much better at doing repetitive jobs without mistakes.
Having a second pilot probably adds about $1/hour per passenger seat (including all overhead etc) - at the moment I think its still a good deal.
The way to solve it is to have the glasses be the projectors rather than modifying the image from a screen. If you need to wear glasses there is no reason (except cost - and that will decrease with time) to have a large screen at all. In principal, with glasses the viewer could even see the perspective change as they moved their heads although this would require filming with a LOT of cameras and a LOT of post-processing.
Even with goggles its not clear how to solve the problem of having the eye focus distance match the perspective distance. Without that I suspect the brain will still notice problems with the 3d effects.
3D still has the problem that for most exciting special effects movies, the action is so far away (exploding spaceships, California sinking into the Pacific, etc) that binocular vision is not significant. About the only real use I can think of for 3D is porn flicks where presumably the viewer wants to be close to the action. (though I'd rather not think to much about how the technology could be used....
Much simpler. You need to use a credit card (not cash) to purchase:
several bottles of peroxide hair bleach 1 RC aircraft control box several 12" lengths of 1" threaded pipe with end caps. several electric cigarette lighters A one-way ticket on a domestic flight - which you then cancel. (you can do this a couple of times) 1 religious text from your favorite extremist group.
The police and FBI will provide free 24 hour / day surveillance for you
Quite possibly - but that may make it even more worrisome. If these patterns were generated intentionally by a person on persons trying to make money they might bleed the marked for some billions, but wouldn't want to do real harm. Emergent, probably chaotic behavior that is unguided could cause all sorts of disruptions that benefit no-one. If we start shutting down the obvious signs of automated trading, the trading algorithms will just learn to mask their behavior to avoid detection. We end up with a group of AIs playing an incomprehensible game with trillions of dollars. Remember that there is a tremendous amount of computing power behind these algorithms and I presume they have various learning algorithms to improve their performance.
Sadly you may not be that far off. MM-wave and backscatter X-ray scanners can't see explosives hidden in body cavities. Pretty soon security checks may get a LOT less fun. (Though if our esteemed lawmakers are required to undergo the same checks I might be willing to accept it ).
Seriously though, who are they protecting? I fly far more than the average person (8 intl. trips/year), and I AM NOT WORRIED ABOUT TERRORISM! I don't want to be protected. I just want a simple metal detector that can pick up a handgun or other large weapon, and maybe a bag scan. I don't care that the occasional plane will blow up - I'll lose more years of life waiting in security lines than I will from terrorists.
Not just funny, also correct. What is your application? Digital or analog? What speed signals? how many channels? Do you need any fancy triggering (often needed for digital)? Are you using to for data acquisition or to debug circuits?
I'm not trying to make this tough, but the more you know about your application the better you can do at buying what you need and not a lot more.
I'm very surprised that a turbine driving an generator, powering an electric motor driving a fan is more efficient (including the extra weight) than a turbine directly driving the fan. Airliners usually cruise at altitudes where the engines are run at near max-efficiency power (at that altitude).
I may depend a lot on the field. In physics the majority of PhD students tuition and a (minimal) wage are paid by their work on their thesis projects. The debt usually comes from the undergraduate education. Of course the 4-10 years spent working full time for minimal money could reasonably be viewed as a very large cost to receive a degree.
Typically diesels are more efficient than spark ignition engines - though not as much as it seems. Diesel fuel is more dense than gasoline so while the carbon emissions are better per mile, it is not by as much as the miles per gallon would suggest.
Typically diesels are more expensive and heavier than equivalent power spark ignition engines (for similarly advanced designs), so there is some disincentive to consumers. Diesel fuel is somewhat less available in the US.
Possibly a more serious problem is that diesels produce more non-CO2 emissions, especially particulates, than spark engines. This has gotten better over time, but modern spark engines are still cleaner.
A diesel hybrid is still a good idea - but not quite as big a win as it might seem
I completely agree in principal, but in practice it is difficult to implement. The problem is how to compare electric and fossil fuel vehicles. The fossil fuel consumption, toxic emissions and CO2 emissions from electric generation vary dramatically depending on location and time of day. At low use hours most of the inefficient power plants are turned off, most of the low emissions plants (nuclear, wind, hydro) are running. Charging your car at 2am probably contributes fairly little to emissions. On the other hand at peak use hours the power to charge you car may come almost entirely from high emissions plants - even just the very inefficient "peaking" plants. So charging your car during the day at work may be very bad for the environment.
If a large number of people purchase electric cars this will distort the picture even more. A small number of cars won't significantly add to the load and can be considered to have emissions produced by the average energy production at that time and place. If you add a large number of cars to the grid then the utility will be forced to turn on more less-efficient plants and the per-car emissions will go up.
My belief is that you do better taxing this at the source. If you tax fossil fuels for their CO2 output (and other externalities), then the market will do the right thing. Clean electric power will gain a competitive advantage and areas will clean power will be able to provide it more cheaply - making charging your car economically reasonable.
The $1million / 100TB might be real, though it seems high, but he great majority of that is NOT hardware costs. In fact having larger disks than you need may reduce the management costs - less chance a particular disk set will become full, extra space to move data from failing disks, etc.
Its a good point - mis-identifying a customer is so insulting that I would be surprised if it is a net win for marketers.
Negative feelings about brands can to tremendous long term damage. There are a number of companies that I won't buy from if there is any alternative, simply because they have pissed me off in the past.
As things stand, unless the user is technically skilled, the real person can often be tracked to the phone / IP address. I think with enough knowledge you could use the web truly anonymously but not many people have that skill. Many will make mistakes that let the government correlate the computer with the person.
I went to school in scenic Los Angeles in the late 80s. We also had an "honor code", but weren't required to sign anything. This extended to take-home closed book exams. Cheating was sufficiently rare that in 4 years I never heard of a case, and never heard a student complain that others were cheating.
Cheating can get you through a class or two, but you will wind up falling further and further behind and eventually it will show.
I don't know if cheating really is a problem now, if attitudes have changed, or if I was just naive in my youth.
I'm leery of using technology to try to stop cheating - you can rely on honesty, or on technology, but not both. If you use technology, there are people who will fell that it is fair game to try to find a way around it - and will generally find a way.
There are some similarities, but also some big differences. If I lease you land, while it is leased I can't make any other use of it. If I sell you rights to my information content, I can still use the information myself, and sell the same information to other people.
To be clear, I'm in no way saying that information should be free, just that it behaves differently from other goods and a new approach is probably needed.
If the cost of labor and wear and tear on their machinery is low, the shop might do the job form much lower than their typical rate. It would depend on how you negotiated the contract. Presuming there were other machine shops in the area, this particular shop would presumably cut their price to just below what their competitors could offer. This is also an unusual situation, a shop that often found themselves with unused labor or equipment would downsize, or go out of business.
In this case, what makes information different is that the holder of the information has a monopoly on that particular piece of information.
BTW - I'm not at all suggesting that it is OK to trade information, I am in favor of strong intellectual property rights. I think that trying to buy information for money results in global inefficiencies.
Its not quite the same. The cost to produce information doesn't depend on the number of users of that information. (not counting distribution and support costs). If I write a new piece of software, it doesn't change my costs if 10 or 10 million people use it. If I am providing a service, it takes more effort to mow 2 lawns than to mow one.
What the "kid" is selling is not the ability to mow lawns, but the mowing of this particular lawn.
One way to encourage out of the box thinking is to present some ideas that are flawed, but might be on the right track. In this case I think we need something that is fundamentally different from money for exchanging information.
I use "reputation" as an example because though its flawed, it has some of the right features. We see in discussion groups like this, on wikipedia, and in freeware development that people will go to a lot of effort to gain public acclaim.
We see that famous people can get all sorts of perks based on that fame, not on their money. For example, I doubt that well known athletes ever need to buy their own shoes. Well known people are often flown around the world and put up in nice hotels in return for their speaking.
I'm not saying this is the solution, but it feels like it might point in the right direction
Food and rent are normal physical goods and can be bought and sold with conventional money. The "reputation" exchange, or some other type of currency would be a parallel system.
I don't think the system I mentioned would work - I'm just presenting it as an idea of a different sort of currency for the purpose of discussion.
For normal physical goods like say cars, money and goods are a reasonable exchange. If I have money and you have a car, after the transaction, I have a car but no money, you have money but no car.
For information the transaction is different. If I have money and you have information, after the transaction, I have information but no money, you have money AND still have the information. It is a fundamentally different sort of transaction. This difference is at the heart of most discussions on information sharing / stealing / selling. We want to make it look like a physical good, but it isn't!
This might require a radical solution. For instance Charles Strouse in "accelerando" suggests a "reputation exchange". where there is a way to track someones reputation / cred on various topics. Reputation acts sort of like information: I can boost your reputation without losing any myself - assuming that the boost was deserved. There are of course a huge number of obstacles to this, but maybe we need to think about more radical ideas.
I used a SSH tunnel from a western hotel in Shanghai and another in Beijing in the fall of 2009. In this case the requirement was to tunnel into my US work account, not bypass the firewall. As far as I know though, this would have had the side effect of bypassing the firewall. I also did some non-tunneled web surfing when I was in China. I didn't notice the firewall, but I didn't try to go anywhere suspect.
I agree with the above poster - foxyproxy works very well.
In general its not a good idea to break the law in a foreign country. Unless you are familiar with the legal system you can find surprisingly severe penalties for crimes that are trivial in your home country. I had no problems in China and very much enjoyed my time there, but I would not mess with the Chinese government unless I was trying to make some political point - and was willing to suffer to make it.
I think that at best science can tell us what will happen in response to various decisions. It can't tell us which decision to make. Sometimes there is a problem when scientists start to try to define "right an wrong".
I think the problem is that the public and science may have very different ideas of truth. I could say that special relativity is TRUE. By the standards of normal discussion I would be right - it has been tested in a wide variety of ways over a wide variety of conditions. Then some wise-guy (probably a scientist) will come along an say that special relativity isn't true: it doesn't apply in curved space-time, or at small length scales. The public hears "scientist A says special relativity is true, scientist B says it is false", and thinks the issue is undecided and maybe we can travel faster than light. Both scientists get annoyed.
I think it is important for science to stay within the context of a discussion: If we are talking about the possibility of interstellar travel, then special relativity is TRUE. Under those conditions it is as true as anything we know. (I'm waiting for someone to mention wormholes, then I'll need to describe how they are quantum-mechanically unstable... and we've lost the public again)
There are also problems when there data is not clear. is global warming TRUE? That isn't a simple question. It depends on what you mean by "global warming", and how certain you want to be. Does CO2 affect the climate: YES. How big is the effect: some data, but lots of variation in the answers. Should we reduce CO2 production: This is not science, but a political question - science can only tell us what might happen, not whether we need to do something.
Slashdot Mirror
Maybe, but they would have gotten into less trouble if they had fallen asleep, so my guess is that they WERE watching the laptop. Not sure I believe they were looking at company regs though......
Part of the job of a pilot is to keep an eye on all the automation. The problem is that its very difficult to stay alert for long periods of time waiting for a very rare failure. Two pilots tend to keep each other awake and alert. (Yes I know about the plane the overflew its destination while the 2 pilots were looking at something on a laptop - but that is such a rare event that it made the national news).
Humans and automation tend to fail in very different ways - humans are much better at dealing with unexpected situations, automation is much better at doing repetitive jobs without mistakes.
Having a second pilot probably adds about $1/hour per passenger seat (including all overhead etc) - at the moment I think its still a good deal.
The way to solve it is to have the glasses be the projectors rather than modifying the image from a screen. If you need to wear glasses there is no reason (except cost - and that will decrease with time) to have a large screen at all. In principal, with glasses the viewer could even see the perspective change as they moved their heads although this would require filming with a LOT of cameras and a LOT of post-processing.
Even with goggles its not clear how to solve the problem of having the eye focus distance match the perspective distance. Without that I suspect the brain will still notice problems with the 3d effects.
3D still has the problem that for most exciting special effects movies, the action is so far away (exploding spaceships, California sinking into the Pacific, etc) that binocular vision is not significant. About the only real use I can think of for 3D is porn flicks where presumably the viewer wants to be close to the action. (though I'd rather not think to much about how the technology could be used....
We could fix this tricky programming issue by regularly adjusting the earth's orbit....
Much simpler. You need to use a credit card (not cash) to purchase:
several bottles of peroxide hair bleach
1 RC aircraft control box
several 12" lengths of 1" threaded pipe with end caps.
several electric cigarette lighters
A one-way ticket on a domestic flight - which you then cancel. (you can do this a couple of times)
1 religious text from your favorite extremist group.
The police and FBI will provide free 24 hour / day surveillance for you
Quite possibly - but that may make it even more worrisome. If these patterns were generated intentionally by a person on persons trying to make money they might bleed the marked for some billions, but wouldn't want to do real harm. Emergent, probably chaotic behavior that is unguided could cause all sorts of disruptions that benefit no-one. If we start shutting down the obvious signs of automated trading, the trading algorithms will just learn to mask their behavior to avoid detection. We end up with a group of AIs playing an incomprehensible game with trillions of dollars. Remember that there is a tremendous amount of computing power behind these algorithms and I presume they have various learning algorithms to improve their performance.
Sadly you may not be that far off. MM-wave and backscatter X-ray scanners can't see explosives hidden in body cavities. Pretty soon security checks may get a LOT less fun. (Though if our esteemed lawmakers are required to undergo the same checks I might be willing to accept it ).
Seriously though, who are they protecting? I fly far more than the average person (8 intl. trips/year), and I AM NOT WORRIED ABOUT TERRORISM! I don't want to be protected. I just want a simple metal detector that can pick up a handgun or other large weapon, and maybe a bag scan. I don't care that the occasional plane will blow up - I'll lose more years of life waiting in security lines than I will from terrorists.
Not just funny, also correct. What is your application?
Digital or analog?
What speed signals?
how many channels?
Do you need any fancy triggering (often needed for digital)?
Are you using to for data acquisition or to debug circuits?
I'm not trying to make this tough, but the more you know about your application the better you can do at buying what you need and not a lot more.
I'm very surprised that a turbine driving an generator, powering an electric motor driving a fan is more efficient (including the extra weight) than a turbine directly driving the fan. Airliners usually cruise at altitudes where the engines are run at near max-efficiency power (at that altitude).
I may depend a lot on the field. In physics the majority of PhD students tuition and a (minimal) wage are paid by their work on their thesis projects. The debt usually comes from the undergraduate education. Of course the 4-10 years spent working full time for minimal money could reasonably be viewed as a very large cost to receive a degree.
Typically diesels are more efficient than spark ignition engines - though not as much as it seems. Diesel fuel is more dense than gasoline so while the carbon emissions are better per mile, it is not by as much as the miles per gallon would suggest.
Typically diesels are more expensive and heavier than equivalent power spark ignition engines (for similarly advanced designs), so there is some disincentive to consumers. Diesel fuel is somewhat less available in the US.
Possibly a more serious problem is that diesels produce more non-CO2 emissions, especially particulates, than spark engines. This has gotten better over time, but modern spark engines are still cleaner.
A diesel hybrid is still a good idea - but not quite as big a win as it might seem
I completely agree in principal, but in practice it is difficult to implement. The problem is how to compare electric and fossil fuel vehicles. The fossil fuel consumption, toxic emissions and CO2 emissions from electric generation vary dramatically depending on location and time of day. At low use hours most of the inefficient power plants are turned off, most of the low emissions plants (nuclear, wind, hydro) are running. Charging your car at 2am probably contributes fairly little to emissions. On the other hand at peak use hours the power to charge you car may come almost entirely from high emissions plants - even just the very inefficient "peaking" plants. So charging your car during the day at work may be very bad for the environment.
If a large number of people purchase electric cars this will distort the picture even more. A small number of cars won't significantly add to the load and can be considered to have emissions produced by the average energy production at that time and place. If you add a large number of cars to the grid then the utility will be forced to turn on more less-efficient plants and the per-car emissions will go up.
My belief is that you do better taxing this at the source. If you tax fossil fuels for their CO2 output (and other externalities), then the market will do the right thing. Clean electric power will gain a competitive advantage and areas will clean power will be able to provide it more cheaply - making charging your car economically reasonable.
The $1million / 100TB might be real, though it seems high, but he great majority of that is NOT hardware costs. In fact having larger disks than you need may reduce the management costs - less chance a particular disk set will become full, extra space to move data from failing disks, etc.
Its a good point - mis-identifying a customer is so insulting that I would be surprised if it is a net win for marketers.
Negative feelings about brands can to tremendous long term damage. There are a number of companies that I won't buy from if there is any alternative, simply because they have pissed me off in the past.
As things stand, unless the user is technically skilled, the real person can often be tracked to the phone / IP address. I think with enough knowledge you could use the web truly anonymously but not many people have that skill. Many will make mistakes that let the government correlate the computer with the person.
I went to school in scenic Los Angeles in the late 80s. We also had an "honor code", but weren't required to sign anything. This extended to take-home closed book exams. Cheating was sufficiently rare that in 4 years I never heard of a case, and never heard a student complain that others were cheating.
Cheating can get you through a class or two, but you will wind up falling further and further behind and eventually it will show.
I don't know if cheating really is a problem now, if attitudes have changed, or if I was just naive in my youth.
I'm leery of using technology to try to stop cheating - you can rely on honesty, or on technology, but not both. If you use technology, there are people who will fell that it is fair game to try to find a way around it - and will generally find a way.
There are some similarities, but also some big differences. If I lease you land, while it is leased I can't make any other use of it. If I sell you rights to my information content, I can still use the information myself, and sell the same information to other people.
To be clear, I'm in no way saying that information should be free, just that it behaves differently from other goods and a new approach is probably needed.
If the cost of labor and wear and tear on their machinery is low, the shop might do the job form much lower than their typical rate. It would depend on how you negotiated the contract. Presuming there were other machine shops in the area, this particular shop would presumably cut their price to just below what their competitors could offer. This is also an unusual situation, a shop that often found themselves with unused labor or equipment would downsize, or go out of business.
In this case, what makes information different is that the holder of the information has a monopoly on that particular piece of information.
BTW - I'm not at all suggesting that it is OK to trade information, I am in favor of strong intellectual property rights. I think that trying to buy information for money results in global inefficiencies.
Its not quite the same. The cost to produce information doesn't depend on the number of users of that information. (not counting distribution and support costs). If I write a new piece of software, it doesn't change my costs if 10 or 10 million people use it. If I am providing a service, it takes more effort to mow 2 lawns than to mow one.
What the "kid" is selling is not the ability to mow lawns, but the mowing of this particular lawn.
One way to encourage out of the box thinking is to present some ideas that are flawed, but might be on the right track. In this case I think we need something that is fundamentally different from money for exchanging information.
I use "reputation" as an example because though its flawed, it has some of the right features. We see in discussion groups like this, on wikipedia, and in freeware development that people will go to a lot of effort to gain public acclaim.
We see that famous people can get all sorts of perks based on that fame, not on their money. For example, I doubt that well known athletes ever need to buy their own shoes. Well known people are often flown around the world and put up in nice hotels in return for their speaking.
I'm not saying this is the solution, but it feels like it might point in the right direction
Food and rent are normal physical goods and can be bought and sold with conventional money. The "reputation" exchange, or some other type of currency would be a parallel system.
I don't think the system I mentioned would work - I'm just presenting it as an idea of a different sort of currency for the purpose of discussion.
For normal physical goods like say cars, money and goods are a reasonable exchange. If I have money and you have a car, after the transaction, I have a car but no money, you have money but no car.
For information the transaction is different. If I have money and you have information, after the transaction, I have information but no money, you have money AND still have the information. It is a fundamentally different sort of transaction. This difference is at the heart of most discussions on information sharing / stealing / selling. We want to make it look like a physical good, but it isn't!
This might require a radical solution. For instance Charles Strouse in "accelerando" suggests a "reputation exchange". where there is a way to track someones reputation / cred on various topics. Reputation acts sort of like information: I can boost your reputation without losing any myself - assuming that the boost was deserved. There are of course a huge number of obstacles to this, but maybe we need to think about more radical ideas.
I used a SSH tunnel from a western hotel in Shanghai and another in Beijing in the fall of 2009. In this case the requirement was to tunnel into my US work account, not bypass the firewall. As far as I know though, this would have had the side effect of bypassing the firewall. I also did some non-tunneled web surfing when I was in China. I didn't notice the firewall, but I didn't try to go anywhere suspect.
I agree with the above poster - foxyproxy works very well.
In general its not a good idea to break the law in a foreign country. Unless you are familiar with the legal system you can find surprisingly severe penalties for crimes that are trivial in your home country. I had no problems in China and very much enjoyed my time there, but I would not mess with the Chinese government unless I was trying to make some political point - and was willing to suffer to make it.
I think that at best science can tell us what will happen in response to various decisions. It can't tell us which decision to make. Sometimes there is a problem when scientists start to try to define "right an wrong".
I think the problem is that the public and science may have very different ideas of truth. I could say that special relativity is TRUE. By the standards of normal discussion I would be right - it has been tested in a wide variety of ways over a wide variety of conditions. Then some wise-guy (probably a scientist) will come along an say that special relativity isn't true: it doesn't apply in curved space-time, or at small length scales. The public hears "scientist A says special relativity is true, scientist B says it is false", and thinks the issue is undecided and maybe we can travel faster than light. Both scientists get annoyed.
I think it is important for science to stay within the context of a discussion: If we are talking about the possibility of interstellar travel, then special relativity is TRUE. Under those conditions it is as true as anything we know. (I'm waiting for someone to mention wormholes, then I'll need to describe how they are quantum-mechanically unstable... and we've lost the public again)
There are also problems when there data is not clear. is global warming TRUE? That isn't a simple question. It depends on what you mean by "global warming", and how certain you want to be. Does CO2 affect the climate: YES. How big is the effect: some data, but lots of variation in the answers. Should we reduce CO2 production: This is not science, but a political question - science can only tell us what might happen, not whether we need to do something.