Sure, in 2015, it wouldn't be so hard for Microsoft to include an SSH client with their OS? I can't think of any other OS that doesn't come with one pre-installed.
How would they restrict them to something that someone with enough money couldn't buy their way around?
Now that it's known to be possible, the drug cartels don't even need to buy or steal the recipe. If necessary, they could just hire some genetic engineers to independently re-discover how to do it.
And that's a perfectly valid argument. The "We must do something!" crowd won't accept that, but it's valid nonetheless.
It seems like there might be a a way to solve this particular problem more cheaply. How much extra safety could be provided without upgrading any track? If we accept (for the sake of this thread) that this was a case of operator error, it seems like that accidents like this could be avoided by installing onto each train a speed governor linked to a GPS receiver and a known-speed-limits database. While that wouldn't handle all the possible issues that PTC would, I doubt that would cost anywhere near as much as upgrading thousands of miles of track. That might be a reasonable safeguard to install in the short term while waiting for a more comprehensive solution to be funded and installed.
In NJ, you aren't allowed to pump your own gas so that you will keep the guy who pumps it employed.
An interesting side-effect of this might be that more full-serve gas-pumping jobs are created (outside of NJ of course). All those self-driving trucks aren't going to be able to pump their own gas...
In theory, the orange cones could have RFID or some other technology added that can be polled indicating that it's in a construction zone. Much like the invisible fence for the iRobot vacuum cleaners.
In practice, though, the self-driving vehicles are simply going to have to be able to see the orange cones, understand what they are and what they mean, and react appropriately. Blind drivers (human or otherwise) are not going to be tolerated on public roadways.
Who is going to do any of this when they're almost certain to be caught and put into prison?
In either case, the tricky part isn't stopping the truck or getting to the goods; the tricky part is getting away with the goods, without being identified and captured.
Robberies depend on anonymity to work. A truck full of two-way digital communications devices and sensors continuously recording its environment makes anonymity quite a bit more difficult to maintain than than the eyewitness testimony of a single (probably quite rattled) human driver with a CB radio.
In other words - reinventing a less efficient version of the railroad.
A railroad that has tracks that go everywhere, can share the tracks with automobiles, and has multiple lanes of tracks on every route so that the faster vehicles can pass slower ones (at any time or place, no less -- try that with a traditional train;))
Certainly it's less fuel-efficient (because the vehicles are shorter, so there's more weight-overhead per vehicle), but the additional flexibility may make up for that. Getting your goods from point A to point B on a train is great, but somewhat less great if you actually need them transported from point C to point D and have to first load them onto trucks, then onto the train, then back onto trucks again to accomplish that.
The graphics workstations for special effects animations are still a very real market. They tend to have high end 10Gig, quite a lot of high speed RAM, flash drives for local processing, and very, very powerful video cards.
Hmm, can you give some example brand names or links? I googled around, and all I could find was this article on the evolution of workstations, which only lists the new Mac Pro and some (unnamed) souped-up Windows/Intel PCs as the modern equivalent of a Unix workstation.
Why spend several hundred thousand of dollars to try to rehabilitate a criminal?
Because rehabilitating a criminal saves society money. A rehabilitated criminal can be released into society and (by definition) won't commit any more crimes. He/she may even contribute productively to society. An unrehabilitated criminal, OTOH, must either be kept in prison indefinitely (which costs society around $60,000 per year per criminal), or gets released and commits more crimes (the costs of which will depend on the crimes, but can easily be more than $60,000 per year).
So, to me, Rust is interesting. It has roughly the expressibility and speed of C++ (in theory), the same low resource usage but is memory safe.
I wonder if it would be at all practical to take Rust's innovations regarding memory-safety and apply them to C++? (Obviously some finessing would be necessary to do that without breaking backwards compatibility, and existing C++ code might not be able to benefit, but then new C++ code could be written with stronger safety guarantees, while still retaining the compatibility and familiarity advantages of C++)
Of course, the wrench technique only works if the attackers have physical access to your body. Most Internet hackers aren't going to be located physically near you (and hopefully most of them wouldn't have the stomach for that either).
The 3 will be a market changer for the low-end of electric vehicles. If they hit $35K with 200+ mile range, it means all the other electric vehicles in that range, such as the Nissan Leaf, will also have to hit 200+ miles or drop below $25K.
Of course, there is also the Chevy Bolt, scheduled to be released around the same time, for a similar price. I agree with you about the downward pricing pressure these will have on EVs with shorter ranges.
No. What they'll do is take the camera. What are you going to do about it? It's your word against theirs in court, and they're the cop.
Ideally you'd bring to court the camera footage -- either the camera footage that your camera was transmitting to a separate storage device the cop wasn't aware of, or the camera footage from a second camera that the cop wasn't aware of.
Not commonly done these days, but there's no technical reason why it couldn't be done.
(btw I'm not sure I'd consider a cop who perjures himself under oath to be a "decent cop" -- it sounds like standards for decency aren't what they used to be!)
Don't resist arrest, don't get into a wrestling match with a cop; especially don't make a grab for his gun, and you will have nearly zero chance of getting killed or abused.
That may well be true, for white people. Black people (and black men in particular) "fit the profile", regardless of their previous history or present actions, and so their appearance alone is sometimes sufficient to make a police officer feel threatened and cause him to shoot and/or beat them.
But why did the third guy immediately recognize the problem (and put in place a very effective solution) without being prompted? Was that a "skill" he learned in a programming class?
It might have been that he was just a clever guy, but let me offer an alternate possibility -- the new guy recognized the problem precisely because he was the new guy.
Specifically, it's common for people not to think about minor annoyances they have grown used to. It's the boiling-frog effect -- a programmer who has been working on that app every day since the very beginning, as more image assets were slowly added, might not notice the gradual slowdown of the app's startup phase, because at first it was fast enough, and eventually he/she just got used to the slow startup because "that's just how it is with this program".
The new guy, OTOH, sits down with the app and because he's had little or no previous experience with the delay, finds himself noticeably annoyed and says to himself, "that is a problem... maybe I can find a way to improve that".
tl;dr -- a person with fresh eyes can often see problems that the old hands have grown too accustomed to, to notice.
But he was a superstar, and last I checked he is now the CEO of the company, with 95% of the staff gone (and down to 1 or 2 developers), and he is credited with keeping the company afloat.
That's an ingenious way to accomplish layoffs without having to pay for any severance packages...
With how all the anti discrimination crap going around, do you really think that the churches will be allowed to not marry homosexual couples in the future? I just don't see that exception remaining around with all the anti religious positions of the left...
There is actually a good precedent that will predict the answer to your question. 50 years ago, interracial marriage was in a position similar to the position of gay marriage now -- widely considered "unnatural" and banned by many states, but becoming increasingly accepted and the bans were increasingly being found unconstitutional.
So the interesting question is, 50 years later, are churches that disapprove of interracial unions being forced by the law to hold marriage ceremonies for mixed-race couples?
AFAIK the answer is "no"... but what's more interesting is that it's largely a non-issue, since there are so few churches that actually disapprove of interracial marriages anymore. My prediction, then, is that 50 years from now we will see a similar situation regarding gay marriage.
The main problem Christians have with gay marriage is the co-opting of a religious ceremony.
The thing is, nobody is co-opting any religious ceremony. What happens (or doesn't happen) at a church remains completely up to the church. What happens at the marriage license office at City Hall, OTOH, is not a religious ceremony, it is the signing of a legal contract. It is the latter that gay marriage proponents are changing, not the former.
2) Cloud... And the difference [between sunny-day production and cloudy-day production] is less than you'd think - it's about 90% of summer rather than the 25% or similar you might think.
That has not been my experience. For example, here is my system's output on April 25th (which was a cloudy day), and here is the output on April 26th (which was a sunny day). The cloudy-day output was about 10% of the the sunny-day output.
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Sure, in 2015, it wouldn't be so hard for Microsoft to include an SSH client with their OS? I can't think of any other OS that doesn't come with one pre-installed.
How would they restrict them to something that someone with enough money couldn't buy their way around?
Now that it's known to be possible, the drug cartels don't even need to buy or steal the recipe. If necessary, they could just hire some genetic engineers to independently re-discover how to do it.
And that's a perfectly valid argument. The "We must do something!" crowd won't accept that, but it's valid nonetheless.
It seems like there might be a a way to solve this particular problem more cheaply. How much extra safety could be provided without upgrading any track? If we accept (for the sake of this thread) that this was a case of operator error, it seems like that accidents like this could be avoided by installing onto each train a speed governor linked to a GPS receiver and a known-speed-limits database. While that wouldn't handle all the possible issues that PTC would, I doubt that would cost anywhere near as much as upgrading thousands of miles of track. That might be a reasonable safeguard to install in the short term while waiting for a more comprehensive solution to be funded and installed.
they should be force-marched to Federal prison, like the rest of the hoi-palloi.
hoi-polloi means "the masses; the common people". That's quite a radical position you're taking there. ;)
In NJ, you aren't allowed to pump your own gas so that you will keep the guy who pumps it employed.
An interesting side-effect of this might be that more full-serve gas-pumping jobs are created (outside of NJ of course). All those self-driving trucks aren't going to be able to pump their own gas...
In theory, the orange cones could have RFID or some other technology added that can be polled indicating that it's in a construction zone. Much like the invisible fence for the iRobot vacuum cleaners.
In practice, though, the self-driving vehicles are simply going to have to be able to see the orange cones, understand what they are and what they mean, and react appropriately. Blind drivers (human or otherwise) are not going to be tolerated on public roadways.
Who is going to do any of this when they're almost certain to be caught and put into prison?
In either case, the tricky part isn't stopping the truck or getting to the goods; the tricky part is getting away with the goods, without being identified and captured.
Robberies depend on anonymity to work. A truck full of two-way digital communications devices and sensors continuously recording its environment makes anonymity quite a bit more difficult to maintain than than the eyewitness testimony of a single (probably quite rattled) human driver with a CB radio.
In other words - reinventing a less efficient version of the railroad.
A railroad that has tracks that go everywhere, can share the tracks with automobiles, and has multiple lanes of tracks on every route so that the faster vehicles can pass slower ones (at any time or place, no less -- try that with a traditional train ;))
Certainly it's less fuel-efficient (because the vehicles are shorter, so there's more weight-overhead per vehicle), but the additional flexibility may make up for that. Getting your goods from point A to point B on a train is great, but somewhat less great if you actually need them transported from point C to point D and have to first load them onto trucks, then onto the train, then back onto trucks again to accomplish that.
Cats kill at least an order of magnitude more birds than windmills do.
... while generating very little usable power. Practical cat-based renewable energy is at least 30 years away from commercial use.
The graphics workstations for special effects animations are still a very real market. They tend to have high end 10Gig, quite a lot of high speed RAM, flash drives for local processing, and very, very powerful video cards.
Hmm, can you give some example brand names or links? I googled around, and all I could find was this article on the evolution of workstations, which only lists the new Mac Pro and some (unnamed) souped-up Windows/Intel PCs as the modern equivalent of a Unix workstation.
Why spend several hundred thousand of dollars to try to rehabilitate a criminal?
Because rehabilitating a criminal saves society money. A rehabilitated criminal can be released into society and (by definition) won't commit any more crimes. He/she may even contribute productively to society. An unrehabilitated criminal, OTOH, must either be kept in prison indefinitely (which costs society around $60,000 per year per criminal), or gets released and commits more crimes (the costs of which will depend on the crimes, but can easily be more than $60,000 per year).
I was of the same opinion too. A Mac Pro is a cheap UNIX workstation.
Just out of curiosity, what these days would be considered a not-so-cheap UNIX workstation? Does anyone still sell such a thing?
So, to me, Rust is interesting. It has roughly the expressibility and speed of C++ (in theory), the same low resource usage but is memory safe.
I wonder if it would be at all practical to take Rust's innovations regarding memory-safety and apply them to C++? (Obviously some finessing would be necessary to do that without breaking backwards compatibility, and existing C++ code might not be able to benefit, but then new C++ code could be written with stronger safety guarantees, while still retaining the compatibility and familiarity advantages of C++)
Of course, the wrench technique only works if the attackers have physical access to your body. Most Internet hackers aren't going to be located physically near you (and hopefully most of them wouldn't have the stomach for that either).
I don't get it, what is the big tech challenge to overcome here?
The biggest challenge is putting up the miles of anti-gyrocopter netting to keep the event pest-free.
The 3 will be a market changer for the low-end of electric vehicles. If they hit $35K with 200+ mile range, it means all the other electric vehicles in that range, such as the Nissan Leaf, will also have to hit 200+ miles or drop below $25K.
Of course, there is also the Chevy Bolt, scheduled to be released around the same time, for a similar price. I agree with you about the downward pricing pressure these will have on EVs with shorter ranges.
He who sees the world through the lens of race........
... may well be a police officer.
No. What they'll do is take the camera. What are you going to do about it? It's your word against theirs in court, and they're the cop.
Ideally you'd bring to court the camera footage -- either the camera footage that your camera was transmitting to a separate storage device the cop wasn't aware of, or the camera footage from a second camera that the cop wasn't aware of.
Not commonly done these days, but there's no technical reason why it couldn't be done.
(btw I'm not sure I'd consider a cop who perjures himself under oath to be a "decent cop" -- it sounds like standards for decency aren't what they used to be!)
Don't resist arrest, don't get into a wrestling match with a cop; especially don't make a grab for his gun, and you will have nearly zero chance of getting killed or abused.
That may well be true, for white people. Black people (and black men in particular) "fit the profile", regardless of their previous history or present actions, and so their appearance alone is sometimes sufficient to make a police officer feel threatened and cause him to shoot and/or beat them.
But why did the third guy immediately recognize the problem (and put in place a very effective solution) without being prompted? Was that a "skill" he learned in a programming class?
It might have been that he was just a clever guy, but let me offer an alternate possibility -- the new guy recognized the problem precisely because he was the new guy.
Specifically, it's common for people not to think about minor annoyances they have grown used to. It's the boiling-frog effect -- a programmer who has been working on that app every day since the very beginning, as more image assets were slowly added, might not notice the gradual slowdown of the app's startup phase, because at first it was fast enough, and eventually he/she just got used to the slow startup because "that's just how it is with this program".
The new guy, OTOH, sits down with the app and because he's had little or no previous experience with the delay, finds himself noticeably annoyed and says to himself, "that is a problem... maybe I can find a way to improve that".
tl;dr -- a person with fresh eyes can often see problems that the old hands have grown too accustomed to, to notice.
But he was a superstar, and last I checked he is now the CEO of the company, with 95% of the staff gone (and down to 1 or 2 developers), and he is credited with keeping the company afloat.
That's an ingenious way to accomplish layoffs without having to pay for any severance packages...
With how all the anti discrimination crap going around, do you really think that the churches will be allowed to not marry homosexual couples in the future? I just don't see that exception remaining around with all the anti religious positions of the left...
There is actually a good precedent that will predict the answer to your question. 50 years ago, interracial marriage was in a position similar to the position of gay marriage now -- widely considered "unnatural" and banned by many states, but becoming increasingly accepted and the bans were increasingly being found unconstitutional.
So the interesting question is, 50 years later, are churches that disapprove of interracial unions being forced by the law to hold marriage ceremonies for mixed-race couples?
AFAIK the answer is "no"... but what's more interesting is that it's largely a non-issue, since there are so few churches that actually disapprove of interracial marriages anymore. My prediction, then, is that 50 years from now we will see a similar situation regarding gay marriage.
The main problem Christians have with gay marriage is the co-opting of a religious ceremony.
The thing is, nobody is co-opting any religious ceremony. What happens (or doesn't happen) at a church remains completely up to the church. What happens at the marriage license office at City Hall, OTOH, is not a religious ceremony, it is the signing of a legal contract. It is the latter that gay marriage proponents are changing, not the former.
What mechanism does Rust use to prevent 32-bit counter overflows?
2) Cloud... And the difference [between sunny-day production and cloudy-day production] is less than you'd think - it's about 90% of summer rather than the 25% or similar you might think.
That has not been my experience. For example, here is my system's output on April 25th (which was a cloudy day), and here is the output on April 26th (which was a sunny day). The cloudy-day output was about 10% of the the sunny-day output.