Shutting down WWV* in the near term is bad. Recommending shutting down WWV* in the near term is brilliant. Shutting down WWV* in the long term is a reasonable possibility to consider.
Shutting down WWV* in the near term is bad. Many things depend on them, without having time, plan, or anything leading to reducing dependency on them, by switching to the available alternatives.
Recommending shutting down WWV* in the near term is brilliant. NIST and WWV* have very little in the way of name recognition let alone appreciation. Does the packaging on products that rely on WWV* mention WWV or NIST? Usually they call themselves "Atomic clocks" or say that they rely on radio signals, without saying from who or where. The controversy raised by the recommendation will serve to raise awareness of the value provided by NIST to the USA and the world.
Shutting down WWV* in the long term is a reasonable possibility to consider. There is an alternative radio time signal. Using signals from several satellites, GPS receivers figure out the time to within 100 ns. I believe this is more accurate than WWV* receivers can accomplish, due to propagation variations and not knowing where they are. Less expensive and lower power receivers could get just time at accuracy a little better WWV* receivers.
Who pays for replacing devices? In the consumer space, countries handle this for analog TV, and in some countries, AM and FM radio. In both consumer and commercial space, vendors often drop support for older technologies: New applications that don't run on older hardware. Phones that don't get OS upgrades. Software that doesn't get security updates, etc.
What about technology that many users do not pay for, or at least not directly? This starts with non-toll roads funded by taxes & registration fees and extends through DNS to search engines funded by advertisements.
What obliges the provider of that technology to continue to do so at its own expense or when its funding runs out?
Is it reasonable for the transmitter of a streaming broadcast to encrypt it and charge a fee for the decryption key? Satellite and cable TV operators operate that way. Non-military GPS could become a fee service.
I did this in 1986 to the predecessor to the M, the keyboard for the PC/AT, with the 10 function keys on the left:
The keycaps were two parts. The upper parts were interchangeable with keycaps for the newer 3270 terminals. Every 3179 terminal came with a box containing an alternative set of keycaps with both normal and APL symbols. I salvaged a set from the trash and installed them on my PC/AT's keyboard.
Fortunately, with only two or three exceptions, the placement of the APL symbols for APL\PC matched what was on the keycaps. I took care of those inconsistencies with a fine point permanent marker. Viola, no stickers needed.
The subject line was edited to fit length constraints. The intended subject line: IMHO: IBM Management has been very dubious of the ethics, legality, and safety of unpaid labor, whether called internship or apprenticeship. From IBM's perspective, TANSTAAFL.
DISCLOSURE: I am no longer an IBMer. This post is opinion, not based in current knowledge.
IBM operates in many countries, with varying labor laws, including minimum wage laws. Managers, until they get a go-ahead from legal, are not going to pay less than minimum wage. Where terminating an employee is restricted and subject to messy reporting and regulations, the company has to weigh effort vs. value. Also, IBM values what comes along with a documented employer-employee relationship, namely the accompanying assignment of intellectual capital rights and work product to the employer, non-disclosure obligations, etc.
Don't demean what it means for IBM to embrace internships and apprenticeships. Assuredly there was a lot of work on the part of HR and legal at the global level and in each country to do it in ways that are legal and safe for the company, and then to communicate to departmental managers and HR staff exactly how to do it.
Disclosure: Over 40 years ago, I was a "summer student" at IBM. We were paid better than minimum wage. The expectation was that the company did not expect a lot of value from the students' work, other than the ability to observe a potential future employee, how the student learned, worked, and fit in with the culture. There was a lot of evangelizing by the employees to the students about how terrific IBM was as a company and an employer. It worked for me. After grad school, I came back for another 33 years.
One full page newspaper ad from the week the IBM PC was announced, called it "The IBM of Personal Computers." The "B" in IBM is for "Business." The IBM PC was a business machine, not a toy. What distinguished it from Apple and Radio Shack computers? It was the first PC to provide parity memory.
The IBM PC had parity memory, not ECC. On a parity error, BIOS displayed an error message on the top line of the display and stopped the computer (HALT or disabled interrupts then loop, such that the error message remained visible.) If I recall correctly, restart required the BRS (Big Red Switch) to power down and then up, rather than <alt><ctrl><del>. When the computer was powered up again, as always back then, BIOS did a Power On Self Test that among other things, tested memory.
The parity memory meant that the IBM PC produced results as programmed, or not at all.
Some customers did not really care. They preferred results, even if incorrect ones. Clone companies started providing a BIOS setup option to disable the parity checking. Next they started saving 11% on memory costs by not including parity memory bits at all. Customers did not care. The IT trade press and personal computing trade press did not raise a ruckus, and almost never included the presence or absence of parity memory in product reviews.
Then IBM had started to become "Market Driven." The market did not value it, so eventually, IBM dropped parity memory from end-user PC's, but retained ECC memory for servers. At an internal IBM technical conference, I asked IBM Executives whether anything had changed that made parity memory unnecessary in PC's. The heads of both the PC Division and IBM Microelectronics (IBM made its own memory back then) agreed that dropping parity memory was the wrong thing to do, from both technical and validity-of-results perspectives, but was something the market did not value.
The follow-on was for the industry to create premium "workstation" class end-user computers with ECC. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no company offers laptops, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, or IoT devices with ECC.
It's time for laptops, notebooks, phones, desktops, and anything else that needs to be trusted or taken seriously to switch to ECC RAM. As memories get cheaper, larger in total and smaller in geometry, and especially when people use devices at 35,000 feet, there is no excuse for everything (executable code and the content) to be untrustworthy.
Once again, a slashdot post quotes an article that ascribes a claim to some other article that made no such claim. Lesson: Follow the chain of references.
Article quotes: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-electric-vehicles-drivers-percent-road.html Electric vehicles can meet drivers' needs enough to replace 90 percent of vehicles now on the road. "Roughly 90 percent of the personal vehicles on the road daily could be replaced by a low-cost electric vehicle available on the market today, even if the cars can only charge overnight," But the team found that the vast majority of cars on the road consume no more energy in a day than the battery energy capacity in affordable EVs available today.
FALSE!! The original article http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2016112 made NO SUCH CLAIM. The team found that the vast majority of cars DO experience a day when they consume more energy than the battery energy capacity in affordable EVs available today. The original article talked about vehicle-days, not vehicles. Most vehicles only go on extended road trips a small percentage of days during their ownership, but that percentage is not zero.
IN FACT, the original article stated that, "We also find that for the highest-energy days, other vehicle technologies are likely to be needed even as batteries improve and charging infrastructure expands. Car sharing or other means to serve this small number of high-energy days could play an important role in the electrification and decarbonization of transportation."
I may not be able to expect better from phys.org, but I do expect better from people who post on slashdot.org.
I think the following could be considered a thunk hack:
This was an IBM 1130, where integers were 16 bits, but Extended Precision Floats had a 32 bit significand. I wanted to be able to float 32 bit integers. I wrote an EFLOAT(J) function in Assembler. It returned an extended precision FLOAT, but totally ignored the input parameter, except for stepping past its address when returning. Actual usage was, E=EFLOAT(K*L), where E is an extended precision float, and both K and L are integers. I knew that integer multiplication actually produced a 32 bit result spread over two particular registers. EFLOAT floated whatever was in those registers, still lying around from the function call. It totally produced the wrong result if you actually called it with just an integer variable as input.
Would it have been less obtuse to write the function as taking two integers and multiply them inside the function, EMFLOAT(J,K)? Sure, but less fun.
Out, by some definitions of "gadget": blacksmith {tongs, bellows, hammer, anvil}. Tongs are listed by the ancient Rabbis (Pirkei Avot, Chapter 5, Mishna 8) as first being made by God, because blacksmiths need a set of tongs to make new ones.
The sensor could be back at the laser location if there is a corner cube reflector at the far end. http://www.edmundoptics.com/optics/prisms/retroreflection-prisms/mounted-n-bk7-corner-cube-retroreflectors/2056/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector
Don Herbert, was Bill Nye's professional antecedent. He brought science to children's television from the 1950's (me) through the 1980's (my children). He was a general science and English major at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, flew bombers in WWII, and acted in children's programs such as the documentary health series It's Your Life (1949). see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Herbert
As Mr. Wizard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Mr._Wizard ), he was my first science teacher. I saw on his show things that I never saw again in my education (breaking a yard stick with a piece of newspaper) or saw only in graduate school, such as Schlieren Optics. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren )
May the fleas of 10,000 camels pester anyone who speaks ill of either Don Herbert or Bill Nye.
I admit to have read only about 1/4 the responses.
A major challenge in teaching the initial course in any subject is making it fit in the context of what the student already knows and, preferably, cares about.
Do kids want to draw? solve puzzles? mazes? tell stories? animate them? shoot things at other things? play bump'm cars? shoot each other? make real things move? Play hide & seek?
Teach them how to do these things.
Afterwards, give the patterns names and extend their applications. This pattern is called an iteration, (a) over items in a list, (b) with counting, (c) while this condition or until that condition. This is an action routine, with side effects. That is a function, with a result, but no side effects. The other thing is a function with side effects, which in our religion is shunned and considered taboo.
In my high school, in 1967, all sophomores learned FORTRAN, taught by math teachers. The next year, I found it very useful to do my homework for me in analytic geometry and beginning calculus I wrote programs to do binomial expansions, numeric differentiation and integration of functions, and to plot equations ( 0= f(x,y) ). That's what I wanted a computer to do for me.
Over the years, I have used many languages and tools to make a computer do what I needed. This has given me the ability to chose among those I (or my client) had available and already used, or to look for, learn, and use something else more appropriate to the problem domain.
For kids, I highly recommend starting them with the puzzles at https://blockly-games.appspot.com/ (Surprisingly, this site sometimes works better on firefox than chrome.)
When they want to create their own, start with http://snap.berkeley.edu/ . Some of these tools let the user switch views between visual and javascript source code.
My 9 year old grandson completed blockly-games. I bought him a Hummingbird Duo because it supports a progression of programming environments and languages starting with SNAP, which is a natural successor to blockly. See http://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/software and http://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/tutorials
David Marcus can say what he wants about telephone numbers going away. Linkedin has 350 entries for David Marcus. When David Smith was my manager, he was one of 22 David Smith's in IBM US. Linkedin now has a total of 22,807 results for David Smith. The problem isn't having 1 number for a person, it is having home, cell, & work phones; personal & business email; and id's on facebook, whatsap, skype,.....................
In 1990, a fellow from Denmark told me that in Denmark everybody's salary was publicly available information. So much for information privacy. Maybe it has changed since then.
If I recall correctly, the Assembler source code listing for the original PC BIOS was included in the IBM Personal Computer Technical Reference, but not the source code for the ROM BASIC, licensed from Microsoft.
re: BitTorrent inherently allows individuals to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights. Yes, it allows... So does a photocopier. That does not mean that a photocopier user or a BitTorrent user inherently does violate copyrights.
If you are interested in reliability of the results you produce, read on.
If you want trustworthy calculations or documents without occasional random mistakes in content, you need a machine with ECC. See http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/technology-briefs/workstation-ecc-memory-brief.pdf
Soon to be available: Lenovo: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9503/lenovo-launches-new-p50-and-p70-mobile-workstations-with-first-mobile-xeon-chips http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960799/laptop-computers/the-first-skylake-laptops-are-lenovos-thinkpad-p50-and-p70-graphics-workstations.html They do not appear yet on Lenovo's shopping site.
HP: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-search/search.html?nores=true&qt=zbook%20ecc Results for “zbook ecc” (0) No results found in All HP.com. Please try again.
Nowadays, with very few exceptions, desktop PC's, laptops, notepads, phones and even low end servers all come with RAM that does not check for soft errors at runtime, and usually not even hard errors at power-on or reboot. No parity checking, no Error Correcting Coding (ECC). Most user-class processors, chipsets, motherboards, and BIOS's do not support it.
On these computers, if a random change happens to a bit of code, if you are fortunate, the program crashes. If a random change happens to bits of the kernel, if you are fortunate, the whole OS crashes. If it happens to your application data, well, it isn't what it used to be. Random alterations to a dirty disk buffer in memory will get written out to disk. If it happened to your data, it changed. If it happened to a directory or file system allocation bit map, some spot that is occupied will maybe appear to be free. If it happened to the table of which dirty disk blocks are where in memory, then data blocks on disk will end up with totally content, with the correct content written someplace else or not at all..
Why is it this way? The story goes back 25 years, when clone makers came out with IBM PC clones without parity memory. IBM's and some other company's PC's had parity memory. The good news was that it would catch soft errors. The bad news was that when BIOS caught a parity error interrupt, it cleared the screen, put a Parity Error message on the first line and halted the computer. Unsaved work? too bad. In the middle of a file write, directory or FAT file system update? too bad. Some manufacturers offered a BIOS option to disable that behavior. Enough customers preferred that option that more companies started using non-parity memory. After all, the parity memory bits add another 12.5% to memory cost. Why not be able to offer a lower price for what the customers want? Eventually, even "market driven" IBM started doing the same.
ECC watches for and corrects soft errors when they happen.
For some people, it may be adequate to use a generic laptop to VNC or RDP into a server class machine with ECC for important work.
From all the text in the original item and Forbes blog, there definitely was a race. Several races, in fact. Aryans, Jews, Italians, Mixed-ethnicity Americans, etc, as well as the race for the bomb. Thank God, the Germans did not win, or come close enough to create lots of radioactive material with which to blitz England with dirty bombs and V2's. They might have been set to explode at 150.. 1000 meters to pollute and require effort to clean up.
Proper use of the scientific method may prove or disprove a hypothesis. A widely publicized hypothesis might cause mass hysteria while being neither proven nor disproven. Could "A hypothesis of panspermia" "act as the delivery system for alien biology to hop from one star system to another" ? NO. Any "delivery system" requires instantiation of a mechanism, which might follow from a provable hypothesis.
In APL, 0/0 is a null vector. In APL the "/" symbol is the dyadic select operator. The left side is a binary scalar or a binary array with the same shape as the right side. The result has the elements of the right side that had 1's on the left side, or in the case where the left side is a scalar, if it's a 1 you get everything from the right, or if it is a 0, you get a null vector.
You might have been thinking of 0÷0. Where ÷ is the division operator U+00F7
I was born with 10 digits. Doesn't that make me a digital native? My sixth grade science fair project was a 1 bit adder made out of a battery, wire, two DPDT relays, switches, and lights. Does that make me a "digital native"? Place me among 1964's digerati? biterati? How about that everyone in my 10th grade learned FORTRAN on our school's IBM 1130? Fortunately for me, I needn't care. Sadly, others do.
If code & data fidelity & valid results are important: ECC (or at least parity) memory is required. Sadly, I don't know of any laptop or notebook computers, even in the "workstation" class, that support ECC memory. For serious work, keep it on a machine that supports ECC. Then VNC into it. VNC sends keystrokes and mouse mickeys from the user and sends back pixels from the target machine. That way, if a keystroke gets mangled in transmission, wrong pixels will be displayed and, hopefully, noticed.
Occaisonally Dell, Lenovo, and distributors such as TigerDirect have good deals on low-end servers with ECC, typically with quadcore-no-hyperthreading single socket Xeons. Caveat emptor: Just because a processor, memory controller, and motherboard support ECC memory, that doesn't mean the system assembler is providing it. Verify with the seller; make sure it is specified in the purchase order documents; check when you receive it.
Almost anything algorithmic expansion creates is
on
Algorithmic Patenting
·
· Score: 1
My understanding is that: Almost anything that algorithmic expansion creates would be in the realm of being obvious to one knowledgeable in that domain. Everything in that category need not be specified in the patent application and is not patentable separately. That means that including those variations is (1)unnecessary, (2) not helpful, and (3) merely adds cost to the patent.
Caveat lector: "My understanding is that," are "weasel words" that indicate I am not a lawyer and I am not giving legal advice and that I am enunciating my understanding, which could be totally incorrect.
Slashdot Mirror
Shutting down WWV* in the near term is bad.
Recommending shutting down WWV* in the near term is brilliant.
Shutting down WWV* in the long term is a reasonable possibility to consider.
Shutting down WWV* in the near term is bad.
Many things depend on them, without having time, plan, or anything leading to reducing dependency on them, by switching to the available alternatives.
Recommending shutting down WWV* in the near term is brilliant.
NIST and WWV* have very little in the way of name recognition let alone appreciation. Does the packaging on products that rely on WWV* mention WWV or NIST? Usually they call themselves "Atomic clocks" or say that they rely on radio signals, without saying from who or where.
The controversy raised by the recommendation will serve to raise awareness of the value provided by NIST to the USA and the world.
Shutting down WWV* in the long term is a reasonable possibility to consider.
There is an alternative radio time signal. Using signals from several satellites, GPS receivers figure out the time to within 100 ns. I believe this is more accurate than WWV* receivers can accomplish, due to propagation variations and not knowing where they are. Less expensive and lower power receivers could get just time at accuracy a little better WWV* receivers.
Who pays for replacing devices? In the consumer space, countries handle this for analog TV, and in some countries, AM and FM radio.
In both consumer and commercial space, vendors often drop support for older technologies: New applications that don't run on older hardware. Phones that don't get OS upgrades. Software that doesn't get security updates, etc.
What about technology that many users do not pay for, or at least not directly? This starts with non-toll roads funded by taxes & registration fees and extends through DNS to search engines funded by advertisements.
What obliges the provider of that technology to continue to do so at its own expense or when its funding runs out?
Is it reasonable for the transmitter of a streaming broadcast to encrypt it and charge a fee for the decryption key? Satellite and cable TV operators operate that way. Non-military GPS could become a fee service.
I did this in 1986 to the predecessor to the M, the keyboard for the PC/AT, with the 10 function keys on the left:
The keycaps were two parts. The upper parts were interchangeable with keycaps for the newer 3270 terminals. Every 3179 terminal came with a box containing an alternative set of keycaps with both normal and APL symbols. I salvaged a set from the trash and installed them on my PC/AT's keyboard.
Fortunately, with only two or three exceptions, the placement of the APL symbols for APL\PC matched what was on the keycaps. I took care of those inconsistencies with a fine point permanent marker.
Viola, no stickers needed.
How could 40 year old code be written for a processor that was announced 32 years ago? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_80386
The subject line was edited to fit length constraints.
The intended subject line: IMHO: IBM Management has been very dubious of the ethics, legality, and safety of unpaid labor, whether called internship or apprenticeship. From IBM's perspective, TANSTAAFL.
DISCLOSURE: I am no longer an IBMer. This post is opinion, not based in current knowledge.
IBM operates in many countries, with varying labor laws, including minimum wage laws. Managers, until they get a go-ahead from legal, are not going to pay less than minimum wage. Where terminating an employee is restricted and subject to messy reporting and regulations, the company has to weigh effort vs. value. Also, IBM values what comes along with a documented employer-employee relationship, namely the accompanying assignment of intellectual capital rights and work product to the employer, non-disclosure obligations, etc.
Don't demean what it means for IBM to embrace internships and apprenticeships. Assuredly there was a lot of work on the part of HR and legal at the global level and in each country to do it in ways that are legal and safe for the company, and then to communicate to departmental managers and HR staff exactly how to do it.
Disclosure: Over 40 years ago, I was a "summer student" at IBM. We were paid better than minimum wage. The expectation was that the company did not expect a lot of value from the students' work, other than the ability to observe a potential future employee, how the student learned, worked, and fit in with the culture. There was a lot of evangelizing by the employees to the students about how terrific IBM was as a company and an employer. It worked for me. After grad school, I came back for another 33 years.
One full page newspaper ad from the week the IBM PC was announced, called it "The IBM of Personal Computers." The "B" in IBM is for "Business." The IBM PC was a business machine, not a toy. What distinguished it from Apple and Radio Shack computers? It was the first PC to provide parity memory.
The IBM PC had parity memory, not ECC. On a parity error, BIOS displayed an error message on the top line of the display and stopped the computer (HALT or disabled interrupts then loop, such that the error message remained visible.) If I recall correctly, restart required the BRS (Big Red Switch) to power down and then up, rather than <alt><ctrl><del>. When the computer was powered up again, as always back then, BIOS did a Power On Self Test that among other things, tested memory.
The parity memory meant that the IBM PC produced results as programmed, or not at all.
Some customers did not really care. They preferred results, even if incorrect ones. Clone companies started providing a BIOS setup option to disable the parity checking. Next they started saving 11% on memory costs by not including parity memory bits at all. Customers did not care. The IT trade press and personal computing trade press did not raise a ruckus, and almost never included the presence or absence of parity memory in product reviews.
Then IBM had started to become "Market Driven." The market did not value it, so eventually, IBM dropped parity memory from end-user PC's, but retained ECC memory for servers. At an internal IBM technical conference, I asked IBM Executives whether anything had changed that made parity memory unnecessary in PC's. The heads of both the PC Division and IBM Microelectronics (IBM made its own memory back then) agreed that dropping parity memory was the wrong thing to do, from both technical and validity-of-results perspectives, but was something the market did not value.
The follow-on was for the industry to create premium "workstation" class end-user computers with ECC. Unfortunately, as far as I know, no company offers laptops, notebooks, tablets, smartphones, or IoT devices with ECC.
It's time for laptops, notebooks, phones, desktops, and anything else that needs to be trusted or taken seriously to switch to ECC RAM. As memories get cheaper, larger in total and smaller in geometry, and especially when people use devices at 35,000 feet, there is no excuse for everything (executable code and the content) to be untrustworthy.
Ideas cannot be patented.
Novel and useful implementations of ideas can be patented.
Once again, a slashdot post quotes an article that ascribes a claim to some other article that made no such claim.
Lesson: Follow the chain of references.
Article quotes: http://phys.org/news/2016-08-electric-vehicles-drivers-percent-road.html
Electric vehicles can meet drivers' needs enough to replace 90 percent of vehicles now on the road.
"Roughly 90 percent of the personal vehicles on the road daily could be replaced by a low-cost electric vehicle available on the market today, even if the cars can only charge overnight,"
But the team found that the vast majority of cars on the road consume no more energy in a day than the battery energy capacity in affordable EVs available today.
FALSE!! The original article http://www.nature.com/articles/nenergy2016112 made NO SUCH CLAIM. The team found that the vast majority of cars DO experience a day when they consume more energy than the battery energy capacity in affordable EVs available today. The original article talked about vehicle-days, not vehicles. Most vehicles only go on extended road trips a small percentage of days during their ownership, but that percentage is not zero.
IN FACT, the original article stated that, "We also find that for the highest-energy days, other vehicle technologies are likely to be needed even as batteries improve and charging infrastructure expands. Car sharing or other means to serve this small number of high-energy days could play an important role in the electrification and decarbonization of transportation."
I may not be able to expect better from phys.org, but I do expect better from people who post on slashdot.org.
I think the following could be considered a thunk hack:
This was an IBM 1130, where integers were 16 bits, but Extended Precision Floats had a 32 bit significand. I wanted to be able to float 32 bit integers. I wrote an EFLOAT(J) function in Assembler. It returned an extended precision FLOAT, but totally ignored the input parameter, except for stepping past its address when returning. Actual usage was, E=EFLOAT(K*L), where E is an extended precision float, and both K and L are integers. I knew that integer multiplication actually produced a 32 bit result spread over two particular registers. EFLOAT floated whatever was in those registers, still lying around from the function call. It totally produced the wrong result if you actually called it with just an integer variable as input.
Would it have been less obtuse to write the function as taking two integers and multiply them inside the function, EMFLOAT(J,K)? Sure, but less fun.
Out, by some definitions of "gadget":
blacksmith {tongs, bellows, hammer, anvil}. Tongs are listed by the ancient Rabbis (Pirkei Avot, Chapter 5, Mishna 8) as first being made by God, because blacksmiths need a set of tongs to make new ones.
sewing needle
spinning wheel
screwdriver, hammer, pliers
knife
Allowed, by all:
toaster
clocks & watches, including sundials
spirit level
lock washer
laser pointer
safety razor
electric shaver
pencils (wooden, mechanical)
pens (fountain, ball point, etc.)
Whiteboard markers
mop, broom, dustpan, vacuum cleaner
sponge, scotchbrite pads
Norelco Philips Carrycorder 150 (Cassette)
ratchet {screw or socket} driver
Vice Grip Pliers
Hand Egg Beater
Coffee Grinder
Coffee Maker {Percolator, French Press, Mr. Coffee, siphon / vacuum}
vegetable peeler
can opener
Slide rule {especially circular}
international power socket adapter (with or without a transformer)
The sensor could be back at the laser location if there is a corner cube reflector at the far end.
http://www.edmundoptics.com/optics/prisms/retroreflection-prisms/mounted-n-bk7-corner-cube-retroreflectors/2056/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Retroreflector
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corner_reflector
UPVOTE
Don Herbert, was Bill Nye's professional antecedent. He brought science to children's television from the 1950's (me) through the 1980's (my children). He was a general science and English major at the University of Wisconsin - La Crosse, flew bombers in WWII, and acted in children's programs such as the documentary health series It's Your Life (1949). see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Don_Herbert
As Mr. Wizard ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Watch_Mr._Wizard ), he was my first science teacher. I saw on his show things that I never saw again in my education (breaking a yard stick with a piece of newspaper) or saw only in graduate school, such as Schlieren Optics. ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schlieren )
May the fleas of 10,000 camels pester anyone who speaks ill of either Don Herbert or Bill Nye.
I admit to have read only about 1/4 the responses.
A major challenge in teaching the initial course in any subject is making it fit in the context of what the student already knows and, preferably, cares about.
Do kids want to draw? solve puzzles? mazes? tell stories? animate them? shoot things at other things? play bump'm cars? shoot each other? make real things move? Play hide & seek?
Teach them how to do these things.
Afterwards, give the patterns names and extend their applications. This pattern is called an iteration, (a) over items in a list, (b) with counting, (c) while this condition or until that condition. This is an action routine, with side effects. That is a function, with a result, but no side effects. The other thing is a function with side effects, which in our religion is shunned and considered taboo.
In my high school, in 1967, all sophomores learned FORTRAN, taught by math teachers. The next year, I found it very useful to do my homework for me in analytic geometry and beginning calculus I wrote programs to do binomial expansions, numeric differentiation and integration of functions, and to plot equations ( 0= f(x,y) ). That's what I wanted a computer to do for me.
Over the years, I have used many languages and tools to make a computer do what I needed. This has given me the ability to chose among those I (or my client) had available and already used, or to look for, learn, and use something else more appropriate to the problem domain.
For kids, I highly recommend starting them with the puzzles at https://blockly-games.appspot.com/
(Surprisingly, this site sometimes works better on firefox than chrome.)
When they want to create their own, start with http://snap.berkeley.edu/ . Some of these tools let the user switch views between visual and javascript source code.
My 9 year old grandson completed blockly-games. I bought him a Hummingbird Duo because it supports a progression of programming environments and languages starting with SNAP, which is a natural successor to blockly. See http://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/software and http://www.hummingbirdkit.com/learning/tutorials
David Marcus can say what he wants about telephone numbers going away. Linkedin has 350 entries for David Marcus. .....................
When David Smith was my manager, he was one of 22 David Smith's in IBM US. Linkedin now has a total of 22,807 results for David Smith.
The problem isn't having 1 number for a person, it is having home, cell, & work phones; personal & business email; and id's on facebook, whatsap, skype,
In 1990, a fellow from Denmark told me that in Denmark everybody's salary was publicly available information. So much for information privacy. Maybe it has changed since then.
If I recall correctly, the Assembler source code listing for the original PC BIOS was included in the IBM Personal Computer Technical Reference, but not the source code for the ROM BASIC, licensed from Microsoft.
re: BitTorrent inherently allows individuals to infringe Plaintiffs' copyrights.
Yes, it allows... So does a photocopier. That does not mean that a photocopier user or a BitTorrent user inherently does violate copyrights.
If you are interested in reliability of the results you produce, read on.
If you want trustworthy calculations or documents without occasional random mistakes in content, you need a machine with ECC. See http://www.intel.com/content/dam/www/public/us/en/documents/technology-briefs/workstation-ecc-memory-brief.pdf
Soon to be available:
Lenovo: http://www.anandtech.com/show/9503/lenovo-launches-new-p50-and-p70-mobile-workstations-with-first-mobile-xeon-chips
http://www.pcworld.com/article/2960799/laptop-computers/the-first-skylake-laptops-are-lenovos-thinkpad-p50-and-p70-graphics-workstations.html
They do not appear yet on Lenovo's shopping site.
HP: http://www8.hp.com/us/en/hp-search/search.html?nores=true&qt=zbook%20ecc
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Nowadays, with very few exceptions, desktop PC's, laptops, notepads, phones and even low end servers all come with RAM that does not check for soft errors at runtime, and usually not even hard errors at power-on or reboot. No parity checking, no Error Correcting Coding (ECC). Most user-class processors, chipsets, motherboards, and BIOS's do not support it.
On these computers, if a random change happens to a bit of code, if you are fortunate, the program crashes. If a random change happens to bits of the kernel, if you are fortunate, the whole OS crashes. If it happens to your application data, well, it isn't what it used to be. Random alterations to a dirty disk buffer in memory will get written out to disk. If it happened to your data, it changed. If it happened to a directory or file system allocation bit map, some spot that is occupied will maybe appear to be free. If it happened to the table of which dirty disk blocks are where in memory, then data blocks on disk will end up with totally content, with the correct content written someplace else or not at all..
Why is it this way? The story goes back 25 years, when clone makers came out with IBM PC clones without parity memory. IBM's and some other company's PC's had parity memory. The good news was that it would catch soft errors. The bad news was that when BIOS caught a parity error interrupt, it cleared the screen, put a Parity Error message on the first line and halted the computer. Unsaved work? too bad. In the middle of a file write, directory or FAT file system update? too bad. Some manufacturers offered a BIOS option to disable that behavior. Enough customers preferred that option that more companies started using non-parity memory. After all, the parity memory bits add another 12.5% to memory cost. Why not be able to offer a lower price for what the customers want? Eventually, even "market driven" IBM started doing the same.
ECC watches for and corrects soft errors when they happen.
For some people, it may be adequate to use a generic laptop to VNC or RDP into a server class machine with ECC for important work.
From all the text in the original item and Forbes blog, there definitely was a race. Several races, in fact. Aryans, Jews, Italians, Mixed-ethnicity Americans, etc, as well as the race for the bomb. Thank God, the Germans did not win, or come close enough to create lots of radioactive material with which to blitz England with dirty bombs and V2's. They might have been set to explode at 150 .. 1000 meters to pollute and require effort to clean up.
Proper use of the scientific method may prove or disprove a hypothesis.
A widely publicized hypothesis might cause mass hysteria while being neither proven nor disproven.
Could "A hypothesis of panspermia" "act as the delivery system for alien biology to hop from one star system to another" ?
NO. Any "delivery system" requires instantiation of a mechanism, which might follow from a provable hypothesis.
In APL, 0/0 is a null vector. In APL the "/" symbol is the dyadic select operator. The left side is a binary scalar or a binary array with the same shape as the right side. The result has the elements of the right side that had 1's on the left side, or in the case where the left side is a scalar, if it's a 1 you get everything from the right, or if it is a 0, you get a null vector.
You might have been thinking of 0÷0. Where ÷ is the division operator U+00F7
I was born with 10 digits. Doesn't that make me a digital native?
My sixth grade science fair project was a 1 bit adder made out of a battery, wire, two DPDT relays, switches, and lights. Does that make me a "digital native"?
Place me among 1964's digerati? biterati?
How about that everyone in my 10th grade learned FORTRAN on our school's IBM 1130?
Fortunately for me, I needn't care.
Sadly, others do.
If code & data fidelity & valid results are important: ECC (or at least parity) memory is required.
Sadly, I don't know of any laptop or notebook computers, even in the "workstation" class, that support ECC memory.
For serious work, keep it on a machine that supports ECC. Then VNC into it. VNC sends keystrokes and mouse mickeys from the user and sends back pixels from the target machine. That way, if a keystroke gets mangled in transmission, wrong pixels will be displayed and, hopefully, noticed.
Occaisonally Dell, Lenovo, and distributors such as TigerDirect have good deals on low-end servers with ECC, typically with quadcore-no-hyperthreading single socket Xeons. Caveat emptor: Just because a processor, memory controller, and motherboard support ECC memory, that doesn't mean the system assembler is providing it. Verify with the seller; make sure it is specified in the purchase order documents; check when you receive it.
My understanding is that: Almost anything that algorithmic expansion creates would be in the realm of being obvious to one knowledgeable in that domain. Everything in that category need not be specified in the patent application and is not patentable separately. That means that including those variations is (1)unnecessary, (2) not helpful, and (3) merely adds cost to the patent.
Caveat lector: "My understanding is that," are "weasel words" that indicate I am not a lawyer and I am not giving legal advice and that I am enunciating my understanding, which could be totally incorrect.