Nobody would blink an eye at restarting a machine after it was long idle and rotted parts were repaired. But when they consider it happening to a human being, they get tripped up in metaphysical stuff that isn't real.
The metaphysical stuff doesn't bother me (since, like you, I think everything is implemented entirely via physical processes); rather it's the physical stuff. Any biological body that has been "dead" for more than a short while is going to be physically deteriorated to the point where you really wouldn't want to inhabit it any more.
In my (admittedly layman's) understanding, one nice thing about launching from the ground is that you can keep your rocket aimed precisely straight-up at the moment of ignition (and hopefully thereafter as well, until it's time to deliberately modify the rocket's attitude).
Having the rocket strapped to (and then released from) an aircraft, on the other hand, introduces the possibility that when the rocket's engines ignite, the rocket will be pointing in some inappropriate direction and won't be able to re-orient itself "in time" (for whatever definition of "in time" applies in order for it to make it to its intended orbit).
Does anyone know the technique they plan to use to make sure their rockets are pointed in the right direction when they start producing thrust?
What developers? Their software didn't even get to run. As you can see from the error message itself all this sign does is take a video input and display it.
I'm assuming (maybe I'm wrong) that their system consists of both hardware and software, sold together as a package. If so, then they would have the ability to handle even hardware failures gracefully, if they chose to include that in their design (e.g. by using a separate switching mechanism to display a suitable static image from a backup image source whenever the primary computer hasn't been heard from within the last so-many milliseconds).
As a developer, do you routinely spend lots of time on features no one asked for, no one is paying you for, and isn't part of the larger engineering design?
Not routinely, but occasionally -- and at times those features have later turned out to be central to the product's success. Just because nobody else successfully anticipated a need doesn't mean the need doesn't exist.
When this board fails, people post gibberish on social media. No one is going to die or be maimed. I don't mind discussion - people should be interested in the world around them - but lets not lose our minds.
Yes, that's probably the answer -- that nobody really cares enough to implement a watchdog mechanism.
Still, if I was one of the developers writing the sign software, I'd be embarrassed enough that I'd spend the extra time to make sure this failure mode never happens again (at least not on devices running my software).
Dunno how your ass got involved, but this article seems to validate the effectiveness of the walled garden as a security mechanism, in that people who stayed within the walled garden (by only downloading their iOS apps from the App Store and not from third-party websites) were never vulnerable to being exploited by this app.
The idea that massive public electronic displays like these aren't monitored by a human 24/7 is preposterous.
Why bother? They're already monitored by dozens or hundreds of humans 24/7, most of which have cell phones and many of which will happily upload a photo of any malfunction to one or more of the major social-networking sites. All they really need to do is monitor social media for the appropriate keywords, and take action when they see posts appear.
(On a more serious note: shouldn't a massively expensive electronic display like this have some sort of fail-safe mechanism that would do something reasonable in the event of a system crash? Even the lowly intersection stop-light has a watchdog that will automatically put it into blinking-red-stop-sign-emulator-mode when it detects a malfunction)
It's been 70 years since the standardization of the metric system, which is arguably superior to Imperial units in every way -- but Americans still use the latter, because it's what they were taught, and what they know, and what they are comfortable with.
It's been 38 years since the standardization of the Dvorak keyboard layout, which is faster to type with than the Qwerty layout, and yet very few people use Dvorak, because Qwerty is what they were taught, and what they know, and what they are comfortable with.
If you're a computer buyer, chances are the computer(s) you bought came with Windows preinstalled, so that's what you learned to use -- and if you're not "into" computers, you didn't enjoy learning how to use it, and you really don't want to have to repeat that painful experience for some other operating system. Hence, you'll continue to use Windows unless/until there is some really compelling reason not to; because you're not there to learn about new operating systems, you're there to get your primary task done as quickly as possible, and that means going with what ever tools you already know how to use.
The problem is that Quantum Physics already uses the KISS method -- it's just that universe behaves strangely enough that this is the simplest theory they can (currently) come up with that hasn't been already falsified by measured results. Plenty of beautiful, simpler theories (Newtonian mechanics, aether, etc) have already been tried and found wanting.
Correlary: if/when they ever do figure out How The Universe Really Works, it will probably be even weirder and more counterintuitive than their current theories. Buckle up!
Self landing rockets isn't any better than the alternative, which is why no one else continued making them since they were first introduced 40 years ago.
In the future, most cars won't have first owners (unless you count the automated-fleet service's assets department). Most cars will spend their entire services-lives operating as driverless taxis. As for how long they will last before becoming unusable, it will probably be quite a long time, assuming their battery-packs can be economically replaced. Competition will see to that; nobody running a driverless-taxi fleet is going to put up with cars that don't yield a good return on their investment.
The only thing more hubristic than assuming something will definitely work is assuming something will never work.
Of course autonomous driving software will have bugs in it, and those bugs will lead to accidents. The status-quo alternative (biology-based driving software) also has bugs in it, which regularly leads to accidents.
The difference is that bugs in the autonomous driving software will eventually be diagnosed and fixed. Bugs in biological driving software, OTOH, will never be fixed, because every new person has to learn to drive from scratch; even if someone eventually becomes a flawless driver, sooner or later that person will die and replaced by another newbie, who will repeat the same newbie mistakes as everyone else. Lessons "learned" by software (and software designers) OTOH, can stay "learned" indefinitely, as long as they don't lose the source code.
What gives this programmer pleasure is happy users who like using my software, and are able to do cool things with it.
Given that, my primary goal usually isn't optimal efficiency, but rather 100% program correctness (nobody likes a buggy program), and acceptable worst-case performance (nobody likes a slow program either).
Users aren't going to care if my program is a few milliseconds slower than it could be. They are going to care if it crashes or bogs down in certain situations. Therefore it's better to have a predictably medium-speed program than one that is usually very-fast but occasionally very-slow.
China is the EV leader because it is not tied to the fantasy of AI and self-driving as pre-requisite for emissions reduction.
Heh, no. It's simpler than that. China is the EV leader because they have a population of 1.4 billion people and a centralized/top-down system of government that can (to a large degree) simply declare "okay, we're all going to do this now" and coerce the nation into obeying.
Combine that with some of the world's worst environmental problems, and presto -- you've got a country making a beeline for EVs.
You missed a key detail: O'Rourke was running as a Democrat in Texas.
The last Democrat to win a Senate seat in Texas was Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. O'Rourke lost, but he lost by an unusually narrow margin (2.6%; compare against the usual 10-20% margin for the Democrat in those races); whether you consider that an accomplishment, or just a reflection of the times and the unlikeability of his opponent, is up to you.
The usual formula applies: with a laissez-faire commenting policy, the trolls will proliferate to the point where the forum's content is too toxic and offensive for anyone else to dare to participate.
Then the trolls will eventually realize that the only people left to troll are each other, and they will abandon the platform for greener pastures.
Then the forum will be deserted, except for the occasional "is anybody still here lol" tumbleweed. Finally, the hosting company will realize that they are paying IT people to keep an empty forum running, and decide to shut it down.
So if I leave my laptop out when I go to the bathroom at Starbucks and nobody steals it, and I come back and there's some weird thing hanging off a Thunderbolt port, I guess I unplug it?
By the time you're back from the bathroom, the weird Thunderbolt thing has already copied out your private information and been removed again. Its owner is now in line to buy a Frappucino, to be paid for from your bank account:)
I for one am fine with the change, these days adding support for another architecture is not THAT bad and Apple pulled it off really well before.
Hmm, maybe. As someone who enjoys developing on a Mac and running Linux and Windows as VMWare VMs when necessary, it's hard to see how an ARM-based Mac could do the necessary x86 emulation at an acceptable speed. Maybe they have some Rosetta-style tricks up their sleeve, but IIRC Rosetta was able to deliver acceptable performance largely because the x86 CPUs of the day were sufficiently faster than the PPC CPUs they were emulating. I'm not confident that is true of today's ARMs (relative to x86).
Potential solution: allow people to submit comments, but the comments donâ(TM)t become publicly visible unless/until the videoâ(TM)s owner approves them.
(Yes, this would drastically reduce both the number of comments and the incentive to comment. I think that would be a good thing)
An actual self-sufficient colony yes. We're not remotely close to that though, it'll be an outpost. Earth dies, it dies.
Sure, but that's going to be true no matter what. As human beings who evolved very specifically to live on Earth, we are 100% dependent on Earth's biosphere, and barring some unforeseen technological breakthroughs (nanotechnology, maybe?), we will be for a very long time.
We can't even construct a viable self-sustaining biosphere-replacement here on Earth, never mind trying to make one work inside the additional constraints imposed by space travel.
Slashdot Mirror
Nobody would blink an eye at restarting a machine after it was long idle and rotted parts were repaired. But when they consider it happening to a human being, they get tripped up in metaphysical stuff that isn't real.
The metaphysical stuff doesn't bother me (since, like you, I think everything is implemented entirely via physical processes); rather it's the physical stuff. Any biological body that has been "dead" for more than a short while is going to be physically deteriorated to the point where you really wouldn't want to inhabit it any more.
In my (admittedly layman's) understanding, one nice thing about launching from the ground is that you can keep your rocket aimed precisely straight-up at the moment of ignition (and hopefully thereafter as well, until it's time to deliberately modify the rocket's attitude).
Having the rocket strapped to (and then released from) an aircraft, on the other hand, introduces the possibility that when the rocket's engines ignite, the rocket will be pointing in some inappropriate direction and won't be able to re-orient itself "in time" (for whatever definition of "in time" applies in order for it to make it to its intended orbit).
Does anyone know the technique they plan to use to make sure their rockets are pointed in the right direction when they start producing thrust?
What developers? Their software didn't even get to run. As you can see from the error message itself all this sign does is take a video input and display it.
I'm assuming (maybe I'm wrong) that their system consists of both hardware and software, sold together as a package. If so, then they would have the ability to handle even hardware failures gracefully, if they chose to include that in their design (e.g. by using a separate switching mechanism to display a suitable static image from a backup image source whenever the primary computer hasn't been heard from within the last so-many milliseconds).
As a developer, do you routinely spend lots of time on features no one asked for, no one is paying you for, and isn't part of the larger engineering design?
Not routinely, but occasionally -- and at times those features have later turned out to be central to the product's success. Just because nobody else successfully anticipated a need doesn't mean the need doesn't exist.
When this board fails, people post gibberish on social media. No one is going to die or be maimed. I don't mind discussion - people should be interested in the world around them - but lets not lose our minds.
Yes, that's probably the answer -- that nobody really cares enough to implement a watchdog mechanism.
Still, if I was one of the developers writing the sign software, I'd be embarrassed enough that I'd spend the extra time to make sure this failure mode never happens again (at least not on devices running my software).
will it be too predictable?
Dunno how your ass got involved, but this article seems to validate the effectiveness of the walled garden as a security mechanism, in that people who stayed within the walled garden (by only downloading their iOS apps from the App Store and not from third-party websites) were never vulnerable to being exploited by this app.
The idea that massive public electronic displays like these aren't monitored by a human 24/7 is preposterous.
Why bother? They're already monitored by dozens or hundreds of humans 24/7, most of which have cell phones and many of which will happily upload a photo of any malfunction to one or more of the major social-networking sites. All they really need to do is monitor social media for the appropriate keywords, and take action when they see posts appear.
(On a more serious note: shouldn't a massively expensive electronic display like this have some sort of fail-safe mechanism that would do something reasonable in the event of a system crash? Even the lowly intersection stop-light has a watchdog that will automatically put it into blinking-red-stop-sign-emulator-mode when it detects a malfunction)
It's been 70 years since the standardization of the metric system, which is arguably superior to Imperial units in every way -- but Americans still use the latter, because it's what they were taught, and what they know, and what they are comfortable with.
It's been 38 years since the standardization of the Dvorak keyboard layout, which is faster to type with than the Qwerty layout, and yet very few people use Dvorak, because Qwerty is what they were taught, and what they know, and what they are comfortable with.
If you're a computer buyer, chances are the computer(s) you bought came with Windows preinstalled, so that's what you learned to use -- and if you're not "into" computers, you didn't enjoy learning how to use it, and you really don't want to have to repeat that painful experience for some other operating system. Hence, you'll continue to use Windows unless/until there is some really compelling reason not to; because you're not there to learn about new operating systems, you're there to get your primary task done as quickly as possible, and that means going with what ever tools you already know how to use.
Eventually EV makers will find out that there is a limited market of people who can work around the current disadvantages of an EV.
Eventually EV makers will resolve that problem, by reducing or eliminating the current disadvantages of an EV.
What, you think you own your data with the other players? Someone's delusional...
Step 1: Make up an unwarranted assumption about what somebody thinks
Step 2: Criticise them for thinking the thing you assumed they thought.
Step 3: Derp
But I guess they have never heard of KISS.
The problem is that Quantum Physics already uses the KISS method -- it's just that universe behaves strangely enough that this is the simplest theory they can (currently) come up with that hasn't been already falsified by measured results. Plenty of beautiful, simpler theories (Newtonian mechanics, aether, etc) have already been tried and found wanting.
Correlary: if/when they ever do figure out How The Universe Really Works, it will probably be even weirder and more counterintuitive than their current theories. Buckle up!
Self landing rockets isn't any better than the alternative, which is why no one else continued making them since they were first introduced 40 years ago.
I guess somebody better tell the ESA they are wasting their money, then. https://www.popularmechanics.c...
In the future most cars won't have second owners.
In the future, most cars won't have first owners (unless you count the automated-fleet service's assets department). Most cars will spend their entire services-lives operating as driverless taxis. As for how long they will last before becoming unusable, it will probably be quite a long time, assuming their battery-packs can be economically replaced. Competition will see to that; nobody running a driverless-taxi fleet is going to put up with cars that don't yield a good return on their investment.
The only thing more hubristic than assuming something will definitely work is assuming something will never work.
Of course autonomous driving software will have bugs in it, and those bugs will lead to accidents. The status-quo alternative (biology-based driving software) also has bugs in it, which regularly leads to accidents.
The difference is that bugs in the autonomous driving software will eventually be diagnosed and fixed. Bugs in biological driving software, OTOH, will never be fixed, because every new person has to learn to drive from scratch; even if someone eventually becomes a flawless driver, sooner or later that person will die and replaced by another newbie, who will repeat the same newbie mistakes as everyone else. Lessons "learned" by software (and software designers) OTOH, can stay "learned" indefinitely, as long as they don't lose the source code.
What gives this programmer pleasure is happy users who like using my software, and are able to do cool things with it.
Given that, my primary goal usually isn't optimal efficiency, but rather 100% program correctness (nobody likes a buggy program), and acceptable worst-case performance (nobody likes a slow program either).
Users aren't going to care if my program is a few milliseconds slower than it could be. They are going to care if it crashes or bogs down in certain situations. Therefore it's better to have a predictably medium-speed program than one that is usually very-fast but occasionally very-slow.
China is the EV leader because it is not tied to the fantasy of AI and self-driving as pre-requisite for emissions reduction.
Heh, no. It's simpler than that. China is the EV leader because they have a population of 1.4 billion people and a centralized/top-down system of government that can (to a large degree) simply declare "okay, we're all going to do this now" and coerce the nation into obeying.
Combine that with some of the world's worst environmental problems, and presto -- you've got a country making a beeline for EVs.
This is just a Model 3, inflated like a balloon...
I prefer to think of it as the Model X, Tom Brady Edition.
You missed a key detail: O'Rourke was running as a Democrat in Texas.
The last Democrat to win a Senate seat in Texas was Lloyd Bentsen in 1988. O'Rourke lost, but he lost by an unusually narrow margin (2.6%; compare against the usual 10-20% margin for the Democrat in those races); whether you consider that an accomplishment, or just a reflection of the times and the unlikeability of his opponent, is up to you.
Google know where you go anyway, your cell phone tell it.
The usual formula applies: with a laissez-faire commenting policy, the trolls will proliferate to the point where the forum's content is too toxic and offensive for anyone else to dare to participate.
Then the trolls will eventually realize that the only people left to troll are each other, and they will abandon the platform for greener pastures.
Then the forum will be deserted, except for the occasional "is anybody still here lol" tumbleweed. Finally, the hosting company will realize that they are paying IT people to keep an empty forum running, and decide to shut it down.
So if I leave my laptop out when I go to the bathroom at Starbucks and nobody steals it, and I come back and there's some weird thing hanging off a Thunderbolt port, I guess I unplug it?
By the time you're back from the bathroom, the weird Thunderbolt thing has already copied out your private information and been removed again. Its owner is now in line to buy a Frappucino, to be paid for from your bank account :)
If I were him, I'd be more careful what I post on Twitter. In fact, I wouldn't post to Twitter at all. There, problem solved.
I for one am fine with the change, these days adding support for another architecture is not THAT bad and Apple pulled it off really well before.
Hmm, maybe. As someone who enjoys developing on a Mac and running Linux and Windows as VMWare VMs when necessary, it's hard to see how an ARM-based Mac could do the necessary x86 emulation at an acceptable speed. Maybe they have some Rosetta-style tricks up their sleeve, but IIRC Rosetta was able to deliver acceptable performance largely because the x86 CPUs of the day were sufficiently faster than the PPC CPUs they were emulating. I'm not confident that is true of today's ARMs (relative to x86).
Potential solution: allow people to submit comments, but the comments donâ(TM)t become publicly visible unless/until the videoâ(TM)s owner approves them.
(Yes, this would drastically reduce both the number of comments and the incentive to comment. I think that would be a good thing)
An actual self-sufficient colony yes. We're not remotely close to that though, it'll be an outpost. Earth dies, it dies.
Sure, but that's going to be true no matter what. As human beings who evolved very specifically to live on Earth, we are 100% dependent on Earth's biosphere, and barring some unforeseen technological breakthroughs (nanotechnology, maybe?), we will be for a very long time.
We can't even construct a viable self-sustaining biosphere-replacement here on Earth, never mind trying to make one work inside the additional constraints imposed by space travel.
If the answer is no, then forget about it.
What should I do if the answer is yes?