"What would happen if they scaled that same excavation technology down so that the tunnel was something like 2 meters in diamater for a miniature train..."
The word you're searching for is a 'mine'.
Or for smaller diameter holes, there are things called oil drills (that can be drilled sideways).
Digging tunnels is difficult. Chicago is so flat that in order to put in the first sewer system, they decided it was cheaper to raise every building in the city 10 feet (~3 meters).
We've seen attack upon attack on various countries by the government of China. These attacks are way beyond simple con jobs for access to government servers or trade secrets.
Why the hell do they have MFN status again?
Except if you immediately remove one who gives notice, that is _exactly_ identical to having an employee quit without notice, which is one of the things disgruntled employees can do to cause as much pain as possible (see posts above). I think it depends on the employee and what they do.
People who give notice tend to be more trustworthy and responsible than those who do not give notice.
I think the waste of too much bureaucracy is a direct result of voters/pols wanting to "prevent" waste.
Counting anything costs money. If we're going to make people apply for something, we need to read all the damned applications. And we need to have rules for what is successful and what isn't on the application. And we need to advertise it to everybody who might be eligible. The laws about hiring contractors and putting out bids are stultifying.
But in a democracy, we make rules based on fantasy and belief implemented by immediate desire. Let's stop this current example of fraud and abuse (one example out of 4,000 purchases) regardless of how much it costs.
That's how bureaucratic policies get implemented and ossified.
And it isn't necessarily bad. If you want "your" property rights enforced, some governmental entity someplace has to have a meticulous record of that.
The sweet spot is finding the correct amount of bureaucracy for each aspect of the job, something the article directly addresses.
It's actually odd plates on odd days, even plates on even days.
Over the long run, that's statistically unfair to the even-plated people since the odd-plated folks can drive consecutive days on
Jan 31/Feb 1 (Feb 29/Mar 1 looooong run;-) Mar 31/Apr1 May 31/Jun1 July 31/Aug 1 Aug 31/Sep 1 Oct 31/Nov 1
If water was properly priced, it would just be an additional variable in the profit calculation. It doesn't mean you'd have to rip out the crop. If you can still make it profitable, despite higher water prices, it makes sense to continue to grow it.
The "real" agricultural problem is that trees aren't like regular crops. You only have to water alfalfa and corn after they've been planted and while they are growing. You don't have to water empty (fallow) fields. You do have to water trees year-round. The economics of almonds only makes sense when you have a steady water price you can count on for decades. Expect the tree growers to scream. And they will scream at politicians and the government, blaming them for the increased price instead of accepting that free market forces work on _everything_ regardless of whether you wish them to or not.
Economics is the study of how we calculate scarce resources. Now that water has become scarce, economics arises.
There was an article in Wired quite awhile ago by a pilot. He said if there was a sudden change in direction, it was probably because the -experienced- pilot who was familiar with all the airports in the area, was looking for a safe airport. In that direction was a 7,000 foot runway. He theorized there was a nosewheel fire, the pilot turned and then everyone was overcome by smoke so the plane continued on untl running out of fuel.
Exactly. No way to get rid of ggression. Sounds like Hawking thinks evolution is done now. The only reason humanity is as smart as it is is because we compete and cooperate as groups with each other for resources. Limited resources leads to war. It's not aggression that _causes_ war. Without aggression, limited resources simply leads to death.
Having an intelligent predator is the best way for a species to "improve" itself. (Unless of course you think you know the future and that evolution can now stop since things will forever remain the same).
...Of course, the last time this weird dichotomy came up, the attackers were state actors because they were so patient and thus weren't plain ol criminals....Sounds a bit clueless to me.
That's because according to all the rabid wannabe economists here on slashdot, if you're a government, you don't need to break into a bank to steal money. In the Sony break-in, there was no actual money to be stolen. Those Hollywood accountants are really good;-)
Aren't they essentially demonstrating how gossip works? The folks that talk the most about stuff you're interested in always seem to have the most credibility.
I support a web system (LAMP stack) written in Perl 10 years. I fell for the library-ization idea of "good" practices when I started. After the three of us have sorted thru each other's code for 10 years and settled onto a somewhat standard approach, the library approach is dead. In a well-designed system, at least for database entry and reporting, there isn't much cause to have multiple functions shared between programs. All the stuff for this set of tables or this functionality ought to be included in this form/report right here and probably not ever used anywhere else.
And if a function is used elsewhere, then it is probably overloaded with parameters which then have to be tracked and managed. That cost in maintenence has not been worth the "advantage" of not writing an almost similar function twice in two different places.
I saw that with Oracle Designer. It was going to generate forms from tables. The reason we abandoned it is because you cannot generate relational forms, only single table forms. One of the odd things was there were 1100 parameters you had to set. But we looked at it and realized that was unavoidable. I can easily write code to display a web form based on table descriptions (version #1). I can create fields for dates vs text vs numbers and can have restrictions on values if those are in the database table/field descriptions somehow. But if I want to let the user choose colors for the forms and different sizes of fonts for the labels and different whatevers, well you end up with 1100 options to set.
There is a cost to abstraction, and it's expensive in java.
Let me see if I've got this straight. If you can watch an episode of the Simpsons and know when to laugh, then you're intelligent.
Or at least a real person.
I think the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris just threw NSA monitors into a scalability tizzie fit.
Apparently, the terrorists e-mailed each other using the subject line CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT!!!
If you cannot safely throw out all the spam that infests the web, then you've got a lot more messages to sift through.
Nonsense, they're just following the most basic of mathmatical formulas:
Money > Ethics
It's probably not quite as simplistic as that. They're mathematicians. They can calculate the odds of going against the NSA. Hence the widespread disinterest in doing so.
I think the development of fire might be one of our defining moments but it may not be measurable in rocks an eon later.
The invention/discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago has been the common starting point and I think those changes would be measurable in rocks by paleontologists of the future.
They essentially rediscovered evolution--how random mutations result in "luck" against survival in the current environment.
The most telling point in the article was when they said the rate of colon cancer was 4 times the rate of small intestine cancer, and that exactly matches their differing rates of stem cell divisions overall. They did note that certain cancers such as lung cancer and skin cancer had environmental effects and that there were also general inheritance effects from your genes (who'da thunk?).
Cancer is evolution in action (just like every other biological process, whether at the individual cell level, the level of the individual, the level of species, and it also acts against the processes that build biological products such as beaver dams, beehives, and human civilization).
You don't think that has anything to do with density of the population? I know urban planners regard density as a main factor in success of public transportation.
car-sharing!?! That's like uberUber.
sounds good to a slashdotter. But I remember seeing lots of VCRs flashing 12:00 constantly in the 80s. I don't think tech for the masses is as ez or intuitive as we like to pretend.
I think their main problem is that they aren't looking for problems non-techie individuals have, therefore they are never going to hit to big market again.
However, the strategy of building a shitload of products and seeing what sticks is probably as good as focusing on actual problems real people have.
Perhaps instead of having the ubergeeks at google spend 20% of their time working on stuff that interests them, google would be better off having 20% of their workforce be regular, average (and below-average) joes, and janes, talking about their every day problems. Android didn't solve a problem; it's just free which is 1) why it is on 80% of phones world-wide and 2) why Apple makes 80% of the mobile app money. Android solved a problem for nerds; Apple solved a problem for consumers.
What is the problem that a driverless car is going to fix?
To paraphrase Henry Ford, it sounds to me like google is actually trying to build a faster horse,
I think a big difference with the iPhone is that Steve Jobs, regardless of personal faults, was trying to solve a problem that bothered _him_.
Same with the folks that built the first search engines, including googol.
Now the company is trying to solve social problems, not personal ones, by using engineering techniques, not political or marketing ones.
Society works according to certain principles, all socio-biological, not engineering-mechanical. Whether it should work that way or not is useless philosophizing. We got where we are today by using those processes and those same processes are going to get us to tomorrow. Or not. The results are optional; the process is not.
Newsflash. Entertainment is bigger than intellectualism. The problem Jobs addressed was how to listen to more music. The problem Google first addressed was how to find web sites, because the searchers were highly interested in finding them.The National Enquirer outsells the New York Times. Not because of the quality of the news; it is because of the quality of the citizenry.
I didn't realize that 11.3% of the US workforce hardly exists.
A lot of people don't realize that. Have you heard about the Ferguson protests? Blacks make up 13% of the US population yet they are treated as an insignificant minority. In America the Black population doesn't count for that much and it is larger than the population of union workers. Draw your own conclusions or analogies using this additional point of view.
It's interesting, the asker asks for information about making games and the posters almost universally reply with information about making code. You guys do know these are two completely different activities? (And that computer games are only a small slice of the total gaming universe?)
He asked about game-making on a computer-oriented site. Sorry if we offended you by focusing on the computer aspect only (did you actually read any of the posts about design with cardboard and the usefulness of Dungeons and Dragons?).
Slashdot Mirror
"What would happen if they scaled that same excavation technology down so that the tunnel was something like 2 meters in diamater for a miniature train..."
The word you're searching for is a 'mine'.
Or for smaller diameter holes, there are things called oil drills (that can be drilled sideways).
Digging tunnels is difficult. Chicago is so flat that in order to put in the first sewer system, they decided it was cheaper to raise every building in the city 10 feet (~3 meters).
We've seen attack upon attack on various countries by the government of China. These attacks are way beyond simple con jobs for access to government servers or trade secrets. Why the hell do they have MFN status again?
Probably for the same reason the US does.
Except if you immediately remove one who gives notice, that is _exactly_ identical to having an employee quit without notice, which is one of the things disgruntled employees can do to cause as much pain as possible (see posts above).
I think it depends on the employee and what they do.
People who give notice tend to be more trustworthy and responsible than those who do not give notice.
I think the waste of too much bureaucracy is a direct result of voters/pols wanting to "prevent" waste.
Counting anything costs money. If we're going to make people apply for something, we need to read all the damned applications. And we need to have rules for what is successful and what isn't on the application. And we need to advertise it to everybody who might be eligible. The laws about hiring contractors and putting out bids are stultifying.
But in a democracy, we make rules based on fantasy and belief implemented by immediate desire.
Let's stop this current example of fraud and abuse (one example out of 4,000 purchases) regardless of how much it costs.
That's how bureaucratic policies get implemented and ossified.
And it isn't necessarily bad. If you want "your" property rights enforced, some governmental entity someplace has to have a meticulous record of that.
The sweet spot is finding the correct amount of bureaucracy for each aspect of the job, something the article directly addresses.
It's actually odd plates on odd days, even plates on even days.
Over the long run, that's statistically unfair to the even-plated people since the odd-plated folks can drive consecutive days on ;-) Mar 31/Apr1 May 31/Jun1 July 31/Aug 1 Aug 31/Sep 1 Oct 31/Nov 1
Jan 31/Feb 1 (Feb 29/Mar 1 looooong run
If water was properly priced, it would just be an additional variable in the profit calculation. It doesn't mean you'd have to rip out the crop. If you can still make it profitable, despite higher water prices, it makes sense to continue to grow it.
The "real" agricultural problem is that trees aren't like regular crops. You only have to water alfalfa and corn after they've been planted and while they are growing. You don't have to water empty (fallow) fields. You do have to water trees year-round. The economics of almonds only makes sense when you have a steady water price you can count on for decades. Expect the tree growers to scream. And they will scream at politicians and the government, blaming them for the increased price instead of accepting that free market forces work on _everything_ regardless of whether you wish them to or not.
Economics is the study of how we calculate scarce resources. Now that water has become scarce, economics arises.
There was an article in Wired quite awhile ago by a pilot. He said if there was a sudden change in direction, it was probably because the -experienced- pilot who was familiar with all the airports in the area, was looking for a safe airport. In that direction was a 7,000 foot runway. He theorized there was a nosewheel fire, the pilot turned and then everyone was overcome by smoke so the plane continued on untl running out of fuel.
http://www.wired.com/2014/03/mh370-electrical-fire/
Exactly. No way to get rid of ggression. Sounds like Hawking thinks evolution is done now. The only reason humanity is as smart as it is is because we compete and cooperate as groups with each other for resources. Limited resources leads to war. It's not aggression that _causes_ war. Without aggression, limited resources simply leads to death.
Having an intelligent predator is the best way for a species to "improve" itself. (Unless of course you think you know the future and that evolution can now stop since things will forever remain the same).
...Of course, the last time this weird dichotomy came up, the attackers were state actors because they were so patient and thus weren't plain ol criminals....Sounds a bit clueless to me.
That's because according to all the rabid wannabe economists here on slashdot, if you're a government, you don't need to break into a bank to steal money. In the Sony break-in, there was no actual money to be stolen. Those Hollywood accountants are really good ;-)
Aren't they essentially demonstrating how gossip works? The folks that talk the most about stuff you're interested in always seem to have the most credibility.
I support a web system (LAMP stack) written in Perl 10 years. I fell for the library-ization idea of "good" practices when I started. After the three of us have sorted thru each other's code for 10 years and settled onto a somewhat standard approach, the library approach is dead. In a well-designed system, at least for database entry and reporting, there isn't much cause to have multiple functions shared between programs. All the stuff for this set of tables or this functionality ought to be included in this form/report right here and probably not ever used anywhere else.
And if a function is used elsewhere, then it is probably overloaded with parameters which then have to be tracked and managed. That cost in maintenence has not been worth the "advantage" of not writing an almost similar function twice in two different places.
I saw that with Oracle Designer. It was going to generate forms from tables. The reason we abandoned it is because you cannot generate relational forms, only single table forms. One of the odd things was there were 1100 parameters you had to set. But we looked at it and realized that was unavoidable. I can easily write code to display a web form based on table descriptions (version #1). I can create fields for dates vs text vs numbers and can have restrictions on values if those are in the database table/field descriptions somehow. But if I want to let the user choose colors for the forms and different sizes of fonts for the labels and different whatevers, well you end up with 1100 options to set.
There is a cost to abstraction, and it's expensive in java.
Let me see if I've got this straight. If you can watch an episode of the Simpsons and know when to laugh, then you're intelligent.
Or at least a real person.
Better go with answer number two. Doh!
I think the Charlie Hebdo attacks in Paris just threw NSA monitors into a scalability tizzie fit.
Apparently, the terrorists e-mailed each other using the subject line CONSOLIDATE YOUR DEBT!!!
If you cannot safely throw out all the spam that infests the web, then you've got a lot more messages to sift through.
Nonsense, they're just following the most basic of mathmatical formulas:
Money > Ethics
It's probably not quite as simplistic as that. They're mathematicians. They can calculate the odds of going against the NSA. Hence the widespread disinterest in doing so.
Logistics is a vital part of _any_ war machine.
I think the development of fire might be one of our defining moments but it may not be measurable in rocks an eon later. The invention/discovery of agriculture 10,000 years ago has been the common starting point and I think those changes would be measurable in rocks by paleontologists of the future.
They essentially rediscovered evolution--how random mutations result in "luck" against survival in the current environment.
The most telling point in the article was when they said the rate of colon cancer was 4 times the rate of small intestine cancer, and that exactly matches their differing rates of stem cell divisions overall. They did note that certain cancers such as lung cancer and skin cancer had environmental effects and that there were also general inheritance effects from your genes (who'da thunk?).
Cancer is evolution in action (just like every other biological process, whether at the individual cell level, the level of the individual, the level of species, and it also acts against the processes that build biological products such as beaver dams, beehives, and human civilization).
You don't think that has anything to do with density of the population? I know urban planners regard density as a main factor in success of public transportation.
car-sharing!?! That's like uberUber.
sounds good to a slashdotter. But I remember seeing lots of VCRs flashing 12:00 constantly in the 80s. I don't think tech for the masses is as ez or intuitive as we like to pretend.
I think their main problem is that they aren't looking for problems non-techie individuals have, therefore they are never going to hit to big market again.
However, the strategy of building a shitload of products and seeing what sticks is probably as good as focusing on actual problems real people have.
Perhaps instead of having the ubergeeks at google spend 20% of their time working on stuff that interests them, google would be better off having 20% of their workforce be regular, average (and below-average) joes, and janes, talking about their every day problems. Android didn't solve a problem; it's just free which is 1) why it is on 80% of phones world-wide and 2) why Apple makes 80% of the mobile app money. Android solved a problem for nerds; Apple solved a problem for consumers.
What is the problem that a driverless car is going to fix?
To paraphrase Henry Ford, it sounds to me like google is actually trying to build a faster horse,
I think a big difference with the iPhone is that Steve Jobs, regardless of personal faults, was trying to solve a problem that bothered _him_.
Same with the folks that built the first search engines, including googol.
Now the company is trying to solve social problems, not personal ones, by using engineering techniques, not political or marketing ones.
Society works according to certain principles, all socio-biological, not engineering-mechanical. Whether it should work that way or not is useless philosophizing. We got where we are today by using those processes and those same processes are going to get us to tomorrow. Or not. The results are optional; the process is not.
Newsflash. Entertainment is bigger than intellectualism. The problem Jobs addressed was how to listen to more music. The problem Google first addressed was how to find web sites, because the searchers were highly interested in finding them.The National Enquirer outsells the New York Times. Not because of the quality of the news; it is because of the quality of the citizenry.
I didn't realize that 11.3% of the US workforce hardly exists.
A lot of people don't realize that. Have you heard about the Ferguson protests? Blacks make up 13% of the US population yet they are treated as an insignificant minority. In America the Black population doesn't count for that much and it is larger than the population of union workers. Draw your own conclusions or analogies using this additional point of view.
It's interesting, the asker asks for information about making games and the posters almost universally reply with information about making code. You guys do know these are two completely different activities? (And that computer games are only a small slice of the total gaming universe?)
He asked about game-making on a computer-oriented site. Sorry if we offended you by focusing on the computer aspect only (did you actually read any of the posts about design with cardboard and the usefulness of Dungeons and Dragons?).