Once all the coastal cities of the world disappear under 200-300 feet of ocean rise 200-300 feet of ocean rise
Prompting Raenex to respond:
Sea levels rose about 400 feet in the past 10,000 years. It's predicted to rise about 3 feet by 2100. Adjust your expectations of man-made climate change versus natural accordingly.
I neither said nor implied that I expected that much rise in sea levels by the end of his century.
That having been said, I think it's worth noting that every official estimation (i.e. - by the IPCC) of the rate of icecap melting thus far has proven to be wildly over-optimistic within no more than a few years. The goalposts keep moving, in part because the IPCC's reports are subject to political pressure from oil-producing nations, and in part because apparently climate scientists have yet to realize that icecaps, like glaciers, are complex systems (what used to be called "chaotic systems").
Once the base conditions for complex systems change even slightly, they tend to become unstable pretty rapidly, and begin oscillating with logarithmically-increasing intensity.
Ever watched a spinning top lose enough rotational speed to begin to wobble?
If we're all dead, the effect for us is indistinguishable from destruction of the planet. Your point is kind of like claiming the whole city wasn't destroyed, you saw a birds nest on what used to be Elm street that was only smouldering.
Man, you have a limited perspective.
Your statement is EXACTLY equivalent to, "I don't care what happens to future generations, because, when I die, as far as I'm concerned, the world ends... "
The Earth will be fine, regardless of whether we, as a species, manage to solve the slow-motion environmental catastrophe we accidentally created. What's at risk is the current ecosystem to which we're accustomed, including most of the extant species of multi-cellular life.
Prompting Gravis Zero to reply:
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct. I realized this exact thing after I posted and thought, "well fuck..." and moved on with life.
We agree. Technical correctness beats the political kind all hollow... !
Your pedantry aside, does anything in your description of the "Great Dying." sound like something you would like to experience?
Of course not.
Unfortunately, you seem to have entirely missed my actual point - which was that hyperbole is unhelpful in this discussion.
From his response to my reply, it's quite clear that Gravis Zero agrees with that observation, and he would have skipped that part of his comment had he stopped to re-read it before he posted it.
The bulk of my essay was meant to establish that, however great the threat the ongoing extinction event poses to us (and the threat truly is an existential one), our planet will eventually shrug it off.
If draconian knocks on the economy are implemented leading to the former, you are no friend of humanity.
I suspect our definitions of "draconian knocks on the economy" differ rather fundamentally.
Systematically shifting the true costs of energy technology into the future does not eliminate those costs. It simply disguises them. And borrowing usually carries interest expenses - and the price of carried interest compounds over time.
The longer you put off paying compound interest, the more expensive it gets. Unless the lender - which, in this case, is the environment and ecosystem that gave rise to humanity - is willing to forgive your debt, somebody eventually has to pay for it.
You may disagree, but I don't think going Chapter Seven on the environment is a viable option...
There has been a long history of using environmental capital without consequence and that needs to come to an end if we're going to save this planet.
While I agree completely with the first clause of this statement, the second half (which needs a comma after "and," btw) is a popular cliché that never fails to make me groan in frustration.
The Earth will be fine, regardless of whether we, as a species, manage to solve the slow-motion environmental catastrophe we accidentally created. What's at risk is the current ecosystem to which we're accustomed, including most of the extant species of multi-cellular life.
About 250 million years ago, give or take a million years or so, something very similar to what we've set in motion happened to the Earth. In what's known as the Permian-Triassic Extinction event, carbon dioxide levels rose to much higher levels than they are today, for reaons we still don't fully understand. As a result, the global temperature increased by about 10 degrees Centigrade, and the icecaps melted, releasing large amounts of methane from rotting plant life that had been buried under glaciers during the ice age that began the global extinction event. Methane clathrates in the deepest, coldest parts of the ocean (there was only one, at the time) also melted, releasing a whole lot more methane, and turning the ocean into a kind of anoxic fizzy.
In the ocean, 96% of species went extinct. On land, 70% of multi-cellular species disappeared. The entire ecosystem collapsed within about 100,000 years. The P-T extinction event was so severe, that it's often referred to as the "Great Dying." It was so devastating that it took between 4 and 9 million years before the global ecosystem recovered sufficiently for new species to begin to fill the niches the global warming event had created.
But recover it did - and the result was the beginning (in the Triassic Period) of what eventually (in the Jurassic and Cretaceous) became the Age of Dinosaurs. By the time the Chixiculub bolide smacked into the coast of what is now the Yucatán Penninsula in southern Mexico, about 65 million years ago, the dinosaurian Ornithischia, Sauropodomorpha, and Theropoda taxa had dominated the planetary ecosystem for approximetely 120 million years.
And they thrived in the elevated temperatures the Permian-Triassic extinction event created. Once the excess CO2 cleared from the ocean, speciation rapidly filled it with a dizzying variety of fish, invertebrates, plant life - and dinosaurs. From viruses and bacteria to insects and arachnids to grasses, shrubs, and trees to animals of all sizes, the planet teemed with life within a few tens of millions of years after the most devastating extinction event in its history. (Okay, arguably the Oxygen Catastrophe might have caused an even more comprehensive extinction event - but we can't really determine whether that was the case, because, in those earliest days of life on Earth, no species had developed shells or exo- or endo-skeletons, so they didn't leave a fossil record for us to read.)
As evidenced by the eventual recovery from the P-T Extinction, the popular meme of "saving the planet" is hyperbole of the most narcissisitic stripe. The planet - and life itself - will survive the extinction event we have already caused (and will continue to cause for several thousand years to come). Our contemporary varieties of megafauna are almost certainly all doomed (with the possible exception of some familiar commensal and chattel species - I suspect dogs and cats, for instance, will survive as long as humans do). However, you can say "goodbye" to the whales and dolphins, the lions and tigers and bears, the el
Dude, I am an EE. Vacuum tubes are vacuum tubes. That "warmth" you guys always go on about is noise, usually 60Hz noise. You are actually saying "I like all my cars to come with cracked windows. It really makes for optimal clarity." This is exactly what the AC OP was talkin bout, Willis.
You're wrong. Let me explain why.
You are thinking like an engineer who knows nothing at all about tube applications in music. Which is to say you're thinking of tubes as signal processing components where the goal is to amplify an input signal as accurately as possible, without adding distortion or coloration in any way.
But that's not how guitar players use them. We WANT them to distort. We drive the preamp stage(s) hard, to purposefully over-amplify the signal. Some of us use floor effects to increase the distortion of our instrument's signal: overdrives, fuzz boxes, distortion units, and signal boosters (among many other kinds of signal processing units - far too many to list here). Some of us, by contrast (me, for instance), like to use an amp's natural distortion. That's why guitar amps come with overdrive channels. Some of them even have multiple, cascaded preamp sections to overdrive an already-overdriven signal, before it hits the power amp stage (I'm looking at YOU, Peavey 5150).
And, if you have a great amp, and a great guitar to play through it (and assuming you know what you're doing, of course), you can produce lovely, fat, singing tone that can make your guitar sound like it's crying, or screaming, or snarling like a cornered tiger. Or other effects that can only be produced by overdriven tubes feeding power tubes.
Even trad jazz guitarists - the kind of folks who worship at the shrine of Charlie Christian - like to push their signal hard enough to fatten the tone up just that much, as they strive to fill every 64th note with a different chord (none of them actually playing the melody, mind you, because that's just Not Done In Jazz).
I'm here to tell you, based on (mumble) years of experience playing many different makes and models of electric guitar through a wide variety of tube, hybrid, solid-state, and digital modeling amps that tube amps RULE - and the tubes in them make a huge difference in the way that overdriven guitar signals sound.
Most Chinese tubes suck donkey balls at making guitar amps sound good. When you overdrive them, they make your signal sound harsh, rather than creamy, spiky, rather than smooth, and shrieky, rather than singing. It's a fact of life for those of us who care about such things, and it means that we have to spend the money to buy matched sets of JJ's (which I favor), or Groove Tubes, or Sovteks, or Electro Harmonix tubes to replace the ones that come in new-from-the-factory amps, because, to reduce manufacturing costs (and thereby increase manufacturers' profits), even multi-thousand-dollar guitar amps come with those ugly-sounding Chinese tubes.
That, in turn, is because (to repurpose an Oscar Wilde quote about cynics) MBAs know the price of everything and the value of nothing. And they're the people who run every corporation of meaningful size on the planet - including all the major musical instrument and amplifier manufacturers.
In the same vein, it may surprise you to learn that recording engineers and producers also favor high-end tubes in things like microphone preamps for the same reason guitar players do: because a subtly-overdriven mic preamp creates a warmth and fatness of tone that a solid-state preamp just can't match. The same is true of tube-driven compressors, and other signal-processing units.
Go ahead and call it noise, if you like. And it may, indeed, look like noise on an oscilloscope - but it's not noise to your ears. It's tone. Glorious, lovely tone that makes rock (and I mean everything from Elvis to indie), blues, progressive jazz, and modern country sound the way they
As the vast majority of music is a reproduction of a traditional performance -- that is, one where the performers are not scattered around, but in a single spot -- it isn't hard to figure out why multi-channel audio never caught on for music.
You realize that's the exact same logic the British music industry used to justify sticking to monaural mixes for half a decade after American record companies had embraced stereo, don't you... ?
I'm fed up with expensive and mostly shitty sounding surround sound systems. I replaced my TV speakers with studio monitors with ribbon tweeters and I couldn't be happier. I don't know of any surround sound system that can compete with the accuracy and detail of a proper studio monitors. The previous Yamaha surround speaker package I was using which costed me over 1k was so bad there's no way in hell I could hear the detail at low volume.
I agree that the vast majority of off-the-shelf 7.1 speaker systems suck donkey balls.
That's why, when I built my own system, I used bookshelf speakers from Polk Audio and Boston Acoustics for the rear and surround speakers, kept the genuine Noname tower speakers (with 15-inch woofers) I've been using since the Stoned Age as my mains, and added a Klipsch center-channel speaker and a 12" Acoustic Research powered subwoofer. They're all fed by a Yamaha RX-765 amplifier, which does a superb job of upmixing stereo, when required, and brings out stunning detail in the 5.1 and 7.1 mixes it was designed to reproduce, even at quite low volumes.
I've heard plenty of shitty-quality 5.1 and 7.1 systems, all of which feature ridiculously-tiny satellite speakers that are simply incapable of reproducing full-range sound. And adding a subwoofer doesn't change or improve that fundamental design flaw. In the real world, bass sounds don't just emanate from a central location. Instead, they come from all directions. Tiny speakers produces tinny audio. There's just no getting around that.
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. By the same token, you can't produce convincing - or even pleasant - 7.1 audio with a system based on 3" speakers...
Audio snobs are the worst neckbeards. Warhammer 40k people chuckle while competitive Magic players draw poor caricatures of audio snobs holding gold-plated cables and artisan vacuum tubes.
Nice conflation there, troll boy.
Overpriced, overhyped, gold-plated connectors and high-quality (NOT "artisan") vacuum tubes are two entirely different things.
While anyone who's actually A-B tested Monster cables knows they're crap, quality tubes (or "valves" in Brit-speak) are a whole different matter. Most of the tubes that modern manufacturers employ in audio amplifiers are made In China, and suffer from the same lack of concern for quality control and focus on quantity over quality for which everything else made in the PRC is infamous. That systematic disregard for quality results in audio that sounds harsh and peaky, and that lacks both warmth and detail. (Western companies, like Apple, who install their own quality-control supervisors at Chinese factories to oversee production can and do establish and maintain excellent, consistent quality standards - but only at the cost of paying Western salaries for those supervisors - a cost which, naturally enough, gets passed along to their customers.)
(I own five all-tube guitar amps and four hybrid ones. I've been recording multitrack audio for almost 50 years now, and my ears are therefore pretty well-trained. I say this to establish that I'm not appealing to false authority here, because I actually am a real-world, no-shit authority in this regard.)
And I'm telling you that quality vacuum tubes make a significant, and easily audible, difference in sound quality, for both production and reproduction. Every guitarist who uses tube-based amplifiers will tell you exactly the same thing, as will every audio engineer who employs tube-based microphone preamplifiers or signal processing gear.
Every flinkin' one of us.
Monster cables are a waste of money, but stick a set of JJ Electronics matched tubes in a new guitar amp - even a very expensive guitar amp - and the quality of the sound immediately improves. Sometimes incredibly so (which, again, is directly related to the particular manufacturer's focus on quality control).
Guitarists, producers, and audio engineers will argue about which manufacturer produces the best replacement tubes, of course. Electro-harmonix, Grove Tubes, JJ, and Sovtek all have their partisans - but everyone agrees that ANY of those manufacturer's products is a vast improvement over the garbage with which tube ampmakers ship their products by default.
So, why do high-end manufacturers choose to use such shitty tubes in the first place?
MBAs, of course. They run every company of any appreciable size nowadays. None of them gives a flying fuck about anything except "maximizing shareholder return" - and they consider quality control a cost center, rather than a competitive advantage...
Can you expand on this? This is the first time I've heard that Dolby is preventing anyone from using 5.1 speakers. At least ten to twenty years ago pretty much every 5.1 system worked fine, what's changed, or what was I missing 10-20 years ago?
It's a genuine question, I suspect there's some context here I'm missing.
They're not.
What they are doing is to try to use their technology licensing contracts to forbid manufacturers who signed those contracts - without which they're unable to employ Dolby's still-patent-protected algorithms to properly decode (which is to say "play") Dolby-encoded video and audio - from employing third-party technology to upmix stereo audio for 5.1 playback.
It's very much a monopolist dick move, which sucks for reasons I detail in my response to the assertion that there's no reason why people should care about 5.1-channel audio, above.
Unfortunately, they're probably going to get away with it, both because Dolby ATMOS is pretty much a de-facto standard for Hollywood, and because, in the current regulatory environment, neither the Commerce Department nor Congress is likely to take any anti-trust action against them.
And who cares about 5.1 speakers except the same people who buy gold monster cables for $1000?
People who have reasonably-good hearing?
After decades of watching movies and TV shows in stereo, last year, when my trusty old Sony amp finally crapped out, I bit the bullet and upgraded my home entertainment system to 7.1 surround sound. It wasn't cheap (although buying second-hand components from high-quality manufacturers let me afford it on my somewhat-restricted budget), but the results entirely justified the investment.
Shows like The Expanse became downright cinematic on our new sound system. Movies became the kind of immersive experience I used to be able to enjoy only in theaters - and without having to put up with narcissistic nitwits determined to ruin the experience for everyone else in the auditorium. Music mixed to multichannel DVD-audio standards was a complete revelation (Alan Parsons's quad mix of Dark Side of the Moon is fucking transcendent!), and even stereo-mastered recordings benefit from my (second-hand) Yamaha RX-V765 amplifier's automagic 7.1 upmixing to an astonishing degree (Giles Martin's digital remix of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an incredible accomplishment to begin with, but the 7.1 upmix gives the instruments vastly improved separation. Actually being able to hear McCartney's bass lines vastly improves the mix all by itself, and, combined with pulling Ringo's drums out of the sonic mud of multiple layers of 4-track overdubs makes those songs just stand up and walk.)
And, yeah, I get it. You don't care about some old Baby Boomer's hippy horseshit. But 7.1 upmixing improves music released yesterday every bit as much as it does classic rock from the 60's and 70's. Amazon, Netflix, HBO Go, and other video streaming services now routinely offer movies and TV shows with 5.1 Dolby and DTS mixes that unquestionably improve the viewing experience, even for Philistines like you.
(Oh, and I fell for the Monster cable bullshit exactly once, back in the 1980's, because, in theory, gold-plated connectors ought to have altgether eliminated corrosion-related audio degradation. I don't know how they did it, but Monster, instead, somehow managed to created a gold plating that not only corroded every bit as badly as copper, but actually deteriorated faster, and thereby degraded the signal path sooner. It was a truly impressive feat of metallurgical incompetence, and I never would have believed it was possible had I not heard its effects with my own ears... )
Yeah I know. My family regularly goes into the living room and we all sit down for a lovely movie night. We only have one headphone socket so we share the Beats headphones and then sit down after and each person tells the rest what happened in their 1/5th of the movie.
I know you're just being facetious, but, in my home studio, I use the Sterling Audio S204HA 4-channel headphone amplifier, when multiple musicians need to hear the same monitor mix simultaneously.
(Sterling also makes an 8-channel version, and there are plenty of other competitors in the same space, as well... )
If a phone can't be unlocked so I can install whatever OS I want, then it should not be allowed to be imported into the USA.
They try to give some bullshit about how it is to protect the network, but that is a load of horseshit.
It is, indeed, a load of horseshit.
What's important to grasp here is that it is, in all likelihood, the Chinese government that has ordered Huawei to lock their bootloaders, in order to keep end users from deleting the same Chinese government spyware that led to ZTE being barred from exporting their phones to the USA (and which the idiot has defied his own intelligence agencies to announce that he's going to help ZTE get export licenses to resume).
If you buy a new Huawei phone from here on out, you'd best assume the Chinese government is getting copies of everything on it, and listening in on every transaction that you use it for - including calls, texts, social media interactions, and so-called "encrypted" communications (which aren't encrypted at the keyboard, at all)...
I was in China recently and 501s were on sale in big chain shops at normal prices.
That's interesting. My next-door neighbor - who's married to a Chinese national - visits there fairly regularly. He's the one who informed me otherwise.
Are you sure the ones you saw were genuine Levis? After all, the counterfeiting of U.S. brands by Chinese companies is a perennial issue in trade negotiations, n'est ce pas... ?
China has been the #2 source of illegal immigrants to the US for a long long time, at least two decades..... but it used to be very common to see headlines like,
"Cargo container seized at port of Long Beach found with fifty Chinese migrants living inside while being unloaded from cargo ship."
(Quote above edited to remove gratuitous xenophobia.)
The "#2" claim is bullshit - but the People's Republic is, in fact, a non-trivial source of unauthorized immigrants to the USA. According to the New York Times, there are currently 268,000 of them here.
That number is dwarfed by the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America, but it's still more than the population of Newark, NJ (at least, as of the 2010 census). And China refuses to accept deportees, so we're basically stuck with them, even if the current administration manages to locate them all - which it won't, because it's focused exclusively on Hispanics.
It's also worth noting that Chinese immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, tend to be younger, and have skills that are better-suited to the American job market, than the average Hispanic immigrant. They also tend not to arrive in shipping containers. Most of them arrive legally, on tourist visas - which they blithely overstay, because there's nowhere near the level of effort expended on tracking them down as there is on tracking down Hispanics.
In my experience (and I know several such Chinese), they tend to be highly entrepreneurial. The ones I know are engaged in smuggling consumer goods - not from China to the USA, but from the USA to China. (Levis 501's are hugely popular - and extremely costly - in China, for instance.) In a twisted way, you could say they're actually contributing to this country's economy, and doing a tiny bit to redress our trade imbalance with China.
In another way, you could say they're probably laundering money for the Chinese mob - and I'd bet a shiny, new, Ohio quarter you'd be right...
"the people" are better benefited by robots, the workers maybe not so much but the customers, they will be
Mmm - not so much, I think.
If you're talking about, say, dishwashers, then, yeah, replacing them with semi-autonomous robots to load and unload trays of dishes, etc, from industrial-grade dishwashing machines makes perfect sense. Anyone who expects those jobs to last forever has not been paying attention. But, if you're talking about actual food preparation, then, no, the people will definitely not be "better benefited" by robots replacing chefs and their assistants.
Cooked-to-order food is a craft that demands a pretty high order of adaptability and experience. The first commercially-available burger-flipping robot is limited to doing exactly that - and nothing more. Humans have to put cheese slices on the patties, because Flippy the robot only flips them and takes them off the grill. (Apparently humans have to stage patties for Flippy to flip, as well.) Industrial robots are currently not anywhere close to being capable of doing the complex series of tasks required to craft even fairly straightforward recipes. They can do one or two, highly-repetitive things, as long as conditions don't stray from the parameters they're programmed to work within.
Let me give you an example from the auto parts industry, with which a friend of mine who has spent decades programming industrial robots recently regaled me, to illustrate the kind of limitations I'm talking about here:
My friend now works for a very large OEM manufacturer of automotive parts for basically every car company in the USA. One particular production line (they have lots of them) kept shutting down at the same work cell half-a-dozen times a day, which is VERY expensive, since the entire line has to be cleared before it can be re-started. This problem was creating a major backlog for the company, and costing it considerable money. So the automation department convened an all-hands meeting to address it - basically all the programmers on the day shift were there, plus my friend (who was nominally on the night shift, but was called in, because he's a wizard at this stuff, and everyone there understands that).
When the decision was made to form a task force, and the programming staff began being divided into committees, my buddy asked to be excused to go to the men's room. Everybody there knows he smokes cigarettes, and they all assumed that's what he was going to do, so his absence wasn't really noticed once the debating society got into full swing.
Meanwhile, my friend did, indeed, go outside to smoke. But then, instead of going back to the meeting, he went down to the production floor, loaded a bunch of widgets that had stacked up outside the problematic work cell into its parts supply bin, and ran it through a sufficient number of cycles to reproduce the problem. He then inspected the piece in-situ, and determined (after a few additonal cycles) that the problem was that particular station's task was to insert and tighten down a single, hex-head bolt. To determine whether it had accomplished that successfully, it was equipped with an optical sensor, that measured the light reflecting from the bolt's head.
As it turned out, the system was calibrated to flag the task as having failed, if the bolt's head was oriented with a vertex facing the sensor. It'd pass the test only if the bolt's head was oriented so that the lightsource was reflected from a flat face - and, of course, that didn't always happen. So my pal reprogrammed the sensor parameters to pass a bolt that was oriented either way, but fail one that hadn't been installed at all.
After running the cell through its paces a sufficient number of times to be certain his fix had actually solved the problem, he went back to the meeting he'd left 90 minutes earlier, and announced
Journalists that I know personally try very hard to have accurate facts and to not let their bias taint their work. While not all journalists are like that I believe most try to be. Editors and publications do have to care more about the bottom line and sadly getting the news out quickly is more important then accuracy.
As a former computer industry trade journalist and columnist, I agree with your assessment of what has come to be called "mainstream media" journalists. Most of them try to get their facts straight.
What complicates their effort is both time pressure considerations (which is to say deadlines and the constant quest for "scoops"), and the standard "three sources" requirement for news stories. The second of those generally means having to include quotes from critics, and there are a lot of those in the auto industry, when it comes to Elon Musk.
(Which only stands to reason, since Tesla is a major disruptive force in that industry, and Detroit has been playing catch-up ever since reality caught up to their pet journalists' confident prediction that Elon's company would fold before he shipped a single car.)
And, speaking again from experience in the trade journal industry (albeit in a totally different sector), those guys - and they're almost all guys in the auto industry version - have the same ethical problems that I found many of my former tech colleagues had. To put it bluntly, a lot of them are basically whores.
There are very different standards in trade journalism than there are in the mainstream version. For one thing, there's bribery, both direct, and via major advertisers (who are the exact same companies about which these people supposedly provide objective coverage) bringing pressure to bear on these rags' publishers to run stories that are favorable to them. For instance, I was fired from my first job at McGraw-Hill's LAN Times when the pubilsher gave the editor who had hired me the boot, and replaced her and her staff with a bunch of ex-PC Week clowns. The first I heard about the new regime was a call from the new Features editor, who opened by telling me, "We want to coordinate content in the back of the book with the News section."
"So, you're telling me you want me to write columns about the latest dot-zero release of Microsoft's crapware, or Intel's me-too networking gear, instead of writing about Internet policy and technology - which is what I was hired to do to begin with?" I replied.
"I wouldn't put it like that," he responded, "but, yes, that's basically what we're looking for."
When I declined to accept the invitation to spread my legs for the magazine's advertisers, I was informed that my services would no longer be required. A year later, McGraw-Hill dispatched the useless, smudgy Xerox of Network World that LAN Times had been transmogrified into to a farm upstate.
So, I went to work for a different mag - which folded after 3 issues - and eventually wound up at Boardwatch, where I spent six glorious years, before the bumbling idiots at Penton Media did the same clueless thing to it that McGraw-Hill had done to LAN TImes. (That happened just months before the first dot-com bubble kerploded, taking most of the computer trade pub industry with it - including the animated corpse of Boardwatch, btw.)
But, a couple of years before that happend, I got so sick of the advertisers dictating content, that, in a column headlined "Crystal Blue Persuasion" (from November, 1999), I closed with a whole section addressed to PR people on how properly to bribe me to write about their clients' products or services.
(What I did not do - what I would never do - is to promise that what I wrote would be flattering. That's something that whatever gadget or service I'm writing about has to convince me it deserves And most of 'em don't.)
You should read it, when and if my ISP gets its Apache fu
Too bad their last stable release (V24 SP1) is from 9 years ago. They are almost done with the SP2!
And by 100% open source, you mean is heavily dependent on closed source drivers obtained from broadcom under NDA?
With outdated info on their wiki on how to build the source?
As the AC who posted after your comment pointed out, there are beta releases all the time - many of which are by BrainSlayer (who was the principal architect for V24 SPI, and is the principal architect for SP2, as well). For popular routers (i.e. - inexpensive and relatively powerful ones), there are often 2 or 3 betas per month. So who the hell cares about the "stable" release of SP2, when Kong's v3.0-r33675M (which I use on all 3 of my ASUS RT-56U's) is reliable, stable, has all relevant security issues patched, and supports more functions than most users will ever need?
(BTW - I agree with that guy about ignoring the router database, too. It's full of misinformation and outdated releases that no sane admin would choose to install on an Internet-exposed router. Newbies to DD-WRT should search the forums for advice on the best forks and versions to install for their particular make and model, instead.)
As for the Broadcom code, again, openwrt uses a set of reverse-engineered drivers, and it is a freakin' nightmare to configure. DD-WRT is straighforward. I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut that the comm driver is proprietary. I care that it works.
I will grant your point that, for Broadcom-based routers (including mine), the DD-WRT drivers are proprietary. I just don't care - and the fact that the DD-WRT developers choose to use them, rather than replace them with the reverse-engineered versions speaks volumes about how efficient, stable, and reliable they believe the open-source ones are...
The thought occurs that an inevitable explosion of fake video and audio recordings will drive the development of encrypted authentication networks that verify that a supposed recording came from a sealed, supposedly tamper-proof recording device from a manufacturer whose production lines, parts suppliers, and design teams are closely monitored by government agencies and nonprofit organizations against the possibility of firmware tampering. Recordings produced by unvetted devices will be automatically assumed by courts and other interested parties to be inherently unreliable and very likely fake in all cases of controversy.
I don't think you have a lot of experience with how courts work in actual practice - or legislatures, either.
Judges are basically free to accept or reject evidence according to their own rules. In the USA, for instance, some of them still admit latent fingerprint testimony, despite the fact that an AAAS panel of expert forensic scientists has completely debunked the science behind it. Another such AAAS panel also determined that much of the "science" behind forensic arson analysis is equally worthless. And the National Commission on Forensic Science - whose members included career prosecutors, forensics experts, and criminal defense groups - called for the establishment of a comprehensive, national set of forensic standards for evidence submitted to criminal justice courts.
(Jeff Sessions has disbanded the NCFS, and is planning to replace it with a panel composed of prosecutors and forensics "experts", because, of course he has.)
Despite all the accumulated evidence that much of forensic science is largely based on handwaving and bullshit, there are no prohibitions against its use in criminal courts, even for capital crimes.
Meanwhile, I can't speak knowledgeably about other countries' criminal justice systems (although I'm pretty sure that Commonwealth countries and a bunch of EU member states have equally screwed up standards), but here in the USA, there is little sign that either state legislatures or Congress have any trace of will to fix these problems - although, to be fair, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, of all unlikely bellwethers, has determined that bite mark analysis has no scientific basis, and recommended that it be banned from being used in state courts.
Naturally, the Texas legislature has not enacted the recommended ban, so even Texas criminal court judges are still free to admit bite mark analysis into evidence - including in capital cases.
So, your prediction seems to me to have little in the way of either fact or precedent to support it.
Not to mention the chorus of outrage that would undoubtedly follow the instant any bill is introduced to mandate the authenticity verification scheme you propose would pretty much guarantee its instant demise...
Have you done an audit of the code yourself? Are you sure anyone else has? Would you know what to look for?
I use DD-WRT exclusively on all my routers.
It's 100% open source, and there are several people who are still actively developing it. In addition, there's a lot of security-savvy users who closely examine and pen-test each release.
In 2008, a pair of backdoor IP addresses were discovered in the code (placed there by one of the developers, at a customer's request). Both were accessible only from the NAT side of the router, and both were removed within an hour of being reported...
In any space game this unusual object would certainly be an important artifact.
In reality it would still be quite interesting to analyse its composition.
I don't disagree about the scientific importance of this body. OTOH, "send a probe" is a non-trivial undertaking, when that probe will have to overcome the Earth's orbital velocity, then further accelerate to the orbital velocity of this retrograde object.
That's a helluva lot of delta vee.
I'm not saying it's impossible. Taking advantage of carefully-calculated gravitational slingshot trajectories ought to permit it - but it's going to take a more powerful launch system than currently exists, regardless. So we're talking about needing the SLS, or SpaceX's BFR, or Blue Origin's New Glenn booster to make it happen.
The first one won't be operational until no earlier than 2026 (assuming it hits its development schedule, which I don't think is at all a safe assumption). New Glenn might be launch-ready by, say, 2022 or so. Or it might not. The BFR? I'm guessing late 2020 at the earliest. And all three of those systems will have a LONG list of payloads lined up ahead of any at-this-point-theoretical probe to this admittedly-interesting destination - for which there's certainly no room in NASA's budget at the moment.
New, multiple-billion-dollar, 10-year or more NASA projects don't just appear AIBFM - and the current Congress seems to have little appetite for pure science projects. Or were you expecting the ESA, Roscsmos, or the CNSA to tackle it?
Because I don't think any one of them has the capability. Or the mandate...
Slashdot Mirror
I predicted:
Once all the coastal cities of the world disappear under 200-300 feet of ocean rise 200-300 feet of ocean rise
Prompting Raenex to respond:
Sea levels rose about 400 feet in the past 10,000 years. It's predicted to rise about 3 feet by 2100. Adjust your expectations of man-made climate change versus natural accordingly.
I neither said nor implied that I expected that much rise in sea levels by the end of his century.
That having been said, I think it's worth noting that every official estimation (i.e. - by the IPCC) of the rate of icecap melting thus far has proven to be wildly over-optimistic within no more than a few years. The goalposts keep moving, in part because the IPCC's reports are subject to political pressure from oil-producing nations, and in part because apparently climate scientists have yet to realize that icecaps, like glaciers, are complex systems (what used to be called "chaotic systems").
Once the base conditions for complex systems change even slightly, they tend to become unstable pretty rapidly, and begin oscillating with logarithmically-increasing intensity.
Ever watched a spinning top lose enough rotational speed to begin to wobble?
Remember what happens next ... ?
sjames insisted:
If we're all dead, the effect for us is indistinguishable from destruction of the planet. Your point is kind of like claiming the whole city wasn't destroyed, you saw a birds nest on what used to be Elm street that was only smouldering.
Man, you have a limited perspective.
Your statement is EXACTLY equivalent to, "I don't care what happens to future generations, because, when I die, as far as I'm concerned, the world ends ... "
I predicted:
The Earth will be fine, regardless of whether we, as a species, manage to solve the slow-motion environmental catastrophe we accidentally created. What's at risk is the current ecosystem to which we're accustomed, including most of the extant species of multi-cellular life.
Prompting Gravis Zero to reply:
You are technically correct, the best kind of correct. I realized this exact thing after I posted and thought, "well fuck..." and moved on with life.
We agree. Technical correctness beats the political kind all hollow ... !
sjames demanded:
Your pedantry aside, does anything in your description of the "Great Dying." sound like something you would like to experience?
Of course not.
Unfortunately, you seem to have entirely missed my actual point - which was that hyperbole is unhelpful in this discussion.
From his response to my reply, it's quite clear that Gravis Zero agrees with that observation, and he would have skipped that part of his comment had he stopped to re-read it before he posted it.
The bulk of my essay was meant to establish that, however great the threat the ongoing extinction event poses to us (and the threat truly is an existential one), our planet will eventually shrug it off.
As it has done at least once before ...
Impy the Impiuos Imp criticized:
If draconian knocks on the economy are implemented leading to the former, you are no friend of humanity.
I suspect our definitions of "draconian knocks on the economy" differ rather fundamentally.
Systematically shifting the true costs of energy technology into the future does not eliminate those costs. It simply disguises them. And borrowing usually carries interest expenses - and the price of carried interest compounds over time.
The longer you put off paying compound interest, the more expensive it gets. Unless the lender - which, in this case, is the environment and ecosystem that gave rise to humanity - is willing to forgive your debt, somebody eventually has to pay for it.
You may disagree, but I don't think going Chapter Seven on the environment is a viable option ...
scottrocket stated:
It's nice to read a long, thoughtful cited post, in contrast to the political shills & trolls that have come to sludge up /. Thanks.
Thank you for the compliment, sir. I try my best to add to discussions, rather than subtract from them ...
Gravis Zero opined:
There has been a long history of using environmental capital without consequence and that needs to come to an end if we're going to save this planet.
While I agree completely with the first clause of this statement, the second half (which needs a comma after "and," btw) is a popular cliché that never fails to make me groan in frustration.
The Earth will be fine, regardless of whether we, as a species, manage to solve the slow-motion environmental catastrophe we accidentally created. What's at risk is the current ecosystem to which we're accustomed, including most of the extant species of multi-cellular life.
About 250 million years ago, give or take a million years or so, something very similar to what we've set in motion happened to the Earth. In what's known as the Permian-Triassic Extinction event, carbon dioxide levels rose to much higher levels than they are today, for reaons we still don't fully understand. As a result, the global temperature increased by about 10 degrees Centigrade, and the icecaps melted, releasing large amounts of methane from rotting plant life that had been buried under glaciers during the ice age that began the global extinction event. Methane clathrates in the deepest, coldest parts of the ocean (there was only one, at the time) also melted, releasing a whole lot more methane, and turning the ocean into a kind of anoxic fizzy.
In the ocean, 96% of species went extinct. On land, 70% of multi-cellular species disappeared. The entire ecosystem collapsed within about 100,000 years. The P-T extinction event was so severe, that it's often referred to as the "Great Dying." It was so devastating that it took between 4 and 9 million years before the global ecosystem recovered sufficiently for new species to begin to fill the niches the global warming event had created.
But recover it did - and the result was the beginning (in the Triassic Period) of what eventually (in the Jurassic and Cretaceous) became the Age of Dinosaurs. By the time the Chixiculub bolide smacked into the coast of what is now the Yucatán Penninsula in southern Mexico, about 65 million years ago, the dinosaurian Ornithischia, Sauropodomorpha, and Theropoda taxa had dominated the planetary ecosystem for approximetely 120 million years.
And they thrived in the elevated temperatures the Permian-Triassic extinction event created. Once the excess CO2 cleared from the ocean, speciation rapidly filled it with a dizzying variety of fish, invertebrates, plant life - and dinosaurs. From viruses and bacteria to insects and arachnids to grasses, shrubs, and trees to animals of all sizes, the planet teemed with life within a few tens of millions of years after the most devastating extinction event in its history. (Okay, arguably the Oxygen Catastrophe might have caused an even more comprehensive extinction event - but we can't really determine whether that was the case, because, in those earliest days of life on Earth, no species had developed shells or exo- or endo-skeletons, so they didn't leave a fossil record for us to read.)
As evidenced by the eventual recovery from the P-T Extinction, the popular meme of "saving the planet" is hyperbole of the most narcissisitic stripe. The planet - and life itself - will survive the extinction event we have already caused (and will continue to cause for several thousand years to come). Our contemporary varieties of megafauna are almost certainly all doomed (with the possible exception of some familiar commensal and chattel species - I suspect dogs and cats, for instance, will survive as long as humans do). However, you can say "goodbye" to the whales and dolphins, the lions and tigers and bears, the el
An Anonymous Coward insisted:
Dude, I am an EE. Vacuum tubes are vacuum tubes. That "warmth" you guys always go on about is noise, usually 60Hz noise. You are actually saying "I like all my cars to come with cracked windows. It really makes for optimal clarity." This is exactly what the AC OP was talkin bout, Willis.
You're wrong. Let me explain why.
You are thinking like an engineer who knows nothing at all about tube applications in music. Which is to say you're thinking of tubes as signal processing components where the goal is to amplify an input signal as accurately as possible, without adding distortion or coloration in any way.
But that's not how guitar players use them. We WANT them to distort. We drive the preamp stage(s) hard, to purposefully over-amplify the signal. Some of us use floor effects to increase the distortion of our instrument's signal: overdrives, fuzz boxes, distortion units, and signal boosters (among many other kinds of signal processing units - far too many to list here). Some of us, by contrast (me, for instance), like to use an amp's natural distortion. That's why guitar amps come with overdrive channels. Some of them even have multiple, cascaded preamp sections to overdrive an already-overdriven signal, before it hits the power amp stage (I'm looking at YOU, Peavey 5150).
And, if you have a great amp, and a great guitar to play through it (and assuming you know what you're doing, of course), you can produce lovely, fat, singing tone that can make your guitar sound like it's crying, or screaming, or snarling like a cornered tiger. Or other effects that can only be produced by overdriven tubes feeding power tubes.
Even trad jazz guitarists - the kind of folks who worship at the shrine of Charlie Christian - like to push their signal hard enough to fatten the tone up just that much, as they strive to fill every 64th note with a different chord (none of them actually playing the melody, mind you, because that's just Not Done In Jazz).
I'm here to tell you, based on (mumble) years of experience playing many different makes and models of electric guitar through a wide variety of tube, hybrid, solid-state, and digital modeling amps that tube amps RULE - and the tubes in them make a huge difference in the way that overdriven guitar signals sound.
Most Chinese tubes suck donkey balls at making guitar amps sound good. When you overdrive them, they make your signal sound harsh, rather than creamy, spiky, rather than smooth, and shrieky, rather than singing. It's a fact of life for those of us who care about such things, and it means that we have to spend the money to buy matched sets of JJ's (which I favor), or Groove Tubes, or Sovteks, or Electro Harmonix tubes to replace the ones that come in new-from-the-factory amps, because, to reduce manufacturing costs (and thereby increase manufacturers' profits), even multi-thousand-dollar guitar amps come with those ugly-sounding Chinese tubes.
That, in turn, is because (to repurpose an Oscar Wilde quote about cynics) MBAs know the price of everything and the value of nothing. And they're the people who run every corporation of meaningful size on the planet - including all the major musical instrument and amplifier manufacturers.
In the same vein, it may surprise you to learn that recording engineers and producers also favor high-end tubes in things like microphone preamps for the same reason guitar players do: because a subtly-overdriven mic preamp creates a warmth and fatness of tone that a solid-state preamp just can't match. The same is true of tube-driven compressors, and other signal-processing units.
Go ahead and call it noise, if you like. And it may, indeed, look like noise on an oscilloscope - but it's not noise to your ears. It's tone. Glorious, lovely tone that makes rock (and I mean everything from Elvis to indie), blues, progressive jazz, and modern country sound the way they
chill hypothesized:
As the vast majority of music is a reproduction of a traditional performance -- that is, one where the performers are not scattered around, but in a single spot -- it isn't hard to figure out why multi-channel audio never caught on for music.
You realize that's the exact same logic the British music industry used to justify sticking to monaural mixes for half a decade after American record companies had embraced stereo, don't you ... ?
An Anonymous Coward insisted:
I'm fed up with expensive and mostly shitty sounding surround sound systems. I replaced my TV speakers with studio monitors with ribbon tweeters and I couldn't be happier. I don't know of any surround sound system that can compete with the accuracy and detail of a proper studio monitors. The previous Yamaha surround speaker package I was using which costed me over 1k was so bad there's no way in hell I could hear the detail at low volume.
I agree that the vast majority of off-the-shelf 7.1 speaker systems suck donkey balls.
That's why, when I built my own system, I used bookshelf speakers from Polk Audio and Boston Acoustics for the rear and surround speakers, kept the genuine Noname tower speakers (with 15-inch woofers) I've been using since the Stoned Age as my mains, and added a Klipsch center-channel speaker and a 12" Acoustic Research powered subwoofer. They're all fed by a Yamaha RX-765 amplifier, which does a superb job of upmixing stereo, when required, and brings out stunning detail in the 5.1 and 7.1 mixes it was designed to reproduce, even at quite low volumes.
I've heard plenty of shitty-quality 5.1 and 7.1 systems, all of which feature ridiculously-tiny satellite speakers that are simply incapable of reproducing full-range sound. And adding a subwoofer doesn't change or improve that fundamental design flaw. In the real world, bass sounds don't just emanate from a central location. Instead, they come from all directions. Tiny speakers produces tinny audio. There's just no getting around that.
You can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear. By the same token, you can't produce convincing - or even pleasant - 7.1 audio with a system based on 3" speakers ...
An Anonymous Coward sneered:
Audio snobs are the worst neckbeards. Warhammer 40k people chuckle while competitive Magic players draw poor caricatures of audio snobs holding gold-plated cables and artisan vacuum tubes.
Nice conflation there, troll boy.
Overpriced, overhyped, gold-plated connectors and high-quality (NOT "artisan") vacuum tubes are two entirely different things.
While anyone who's actually A-B tested Monster cables knows they're crap, quality tubes (or "valves" in Brit-speak) are a whole different matter. Most of the tubes that modern manufacturers employ in audio amplifiers are made In China, and suffer from the same lack of concern for quality control and focus on quantity over quality for which everything else made in the PRC is infamous. That systematic disregard for quality results in audio that sounds harsh and peaky, and that lacks both warmth and detail. (Western companies, like Apple, who install their own quality-control supervisors at Chinese factories to oversee production can and do establish and maintain excellent, consistent quality standards - but only at the cost of paying Western salaries for those supervisors - a cost which, naturally enough, gets passed along to their customers.)
(I own five all-tube guitar amps and four hybrid ones. I've been recording multitrack audio for almost 50 years now, and my ears are therefore pretty well-trained. I say this to establish that I'm not appealing to false authority here, because I actually am a real-world, no-shit authority in this regard.)
And I'm telling you that quality vacuum tubes make a significant, and easily audible, difference in sound quality, for both production and reproduction. Every guitarist who uses tube-based amplifiers will tell you exactly the same thing, as will every audio engineer who employs tube-based microphone preamplifiers or signal processing gear.
Every flinkin' one of us.
Monster cables are a waste of money, but stick a set of JJ Electronics matched tubes in a new guitar amp - even a very expensive guitar amp - and the quality of the sound immediately improves. Sometimes incredibly so (which, again, is directly related to the particular manufacturer's focus on quality control).
Guitarists, producers, and audio engineers will argue about which manufacturer produces the best replacement tubes, of course. Electro-harmonix, Grove Tubes, JJ, and Sovtek all have their partisans - but everyone agrees that ANY of those manufacturer's products is a vast improvement over the garbage with which tube ampmakers ship their products by default.
So, why do high-end manufacturers choose to use such shitty tubes in the first place?
MBAs, of course. They run every company of any appreciable size nowadays. None of them gives a flying fuck about anything except "maximizing shareholder return" - and they consider quality control a cost center, rather than a competitive advantage ...
squiggleslash inquired:
Can you expand on this? This is the first time I've heard that Dolby is preventing anyone from using 5.1 speakers. At least ten to twenty years ago pretty much every 5.1 system worked fine, what's changed, or what was I missing 10-20 years ago?
It's a genuine question, I suspect there's some context here I'm missing.
They're not.
What they are doing is to try to use their technology licensing contracts to forbid manufacturers who signed those contracts - without which they're unable to employ Dolby's still-patent-protected algorithms to properly decode (which is to say "play") Dolby-encoded video and audio - from employing third-party technology to upmix stereo audio for 5.1 playback.
It's very much a monopolist dick move, which sucks for reasons I detail in my response to the assertion that there's no reason why people should care about 5.1-channel audio, above.
Unfortunately, they're probably going to get away with it, both because Dolby ATMOS is pretty much a de-facto standard for Hollywood, and because, in the current regulatory environment, neither the Commerce Department nor Congress is likely to take any anti-trust action against them.
An Anonymous Coward blathered:
And who cares about 5.1 speakers except the same people who buy gold monster cables for $1000?
People who have reasonably-good hearing?
After decades of watching movies and TV shows in stereo, last year, when my trusty old Sony amp finally crapped out, I bit the bullet and upgraded my home entertainment system to 7.1 surround sound. It wasn't cheap (although buying second-hand components from high-quality manufacturers let me afford it on my somewhat-restricted budget), but the results entirely justified the investment.
Shows like The Expanse became downright cinematic on our new sound system. Movies became the kind of immersive experience I used to be able to enjoy only in theaters - and without having to put up with narcissistic nitwits determined to ruin the experience for everyone else in the auditorium. Music mixed to multichannel DVD-audio standards was a complete revelation (Alan Parsons's quad mix of Dark Side of the Moon is fucking transcendent!), and even stereo-mastered recordings benefit from my (second-hand) Yamaha RX-V765 amplifier's automagic 7.1 upmixing to an astonishing degree (Giles Martin's digital remix of Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band is an incredible accomplishment to begin with, but the 7.1 upmix gives the instruments vastly improved separation. Actually being able to hear McCartney's bass lines vastly improves the mix all by itself, and, combined with pulling Ringo's drums out of the sonic mud of multiple layers of 4-track overdubs makes those songs just stand up and walk.)
And, yeah, I get it. You don't care about some old Baby Boomer's hippy horseshit. But 7.1 upmixing improves music released yesterday every bit as much as it does classic rock from the 60's and 70's. Amazon, Netflix, HBO Go, and other video streaming services now routinely offer movies and TV shows with 5.1 Dolby and DTS mixes that unquestionably improve the viewing experience, even for Philistines like you.
(Oh, and I fell for the Monster cable bullshit exactly once, back in the 1980's, because, in theory, gold-plated connectors ought to have altgether eliminated corrosion-related audio degradation. I don't know how they did it, but Monster, instead, somehow managed to created a gold plating that not only corroded every bit as badly as copper, but actually deteriorated faster, and thereby degraded the signal path sooner. It was a truly impressive feat of metallurgical incompetence, and I never would have believed it was possible had I not heard its effects with my own ears ... )
thegarbz quipped:
Yeah I know. My family regularly goes into the living room and we all sit down for a lovely movie night. We only have one headphone socket so we share the Beats headphones and then sit down after and each person tells the rest what happened in their 1/5th of the movie.
I know you're just being facetious, but, in my home studio, I use the Sterling Audio S204HA 4-channel headphone amplifier, when multiple musicians need to hear the same monitor mix simultaneously.
(Sterling also makes an 8-channel version, and there are plenty of other competitors in the same space, as well ... )
r_naked demanded:
If a phone can't be unlocked so I can install whatever OS I want, then it should not be allowed to be imported into the USA.
They try to give some bullshit about how it is to protect the network, but that is a load of horseshit.
It is, indeed, a load of horseshit.
What's important to grasp here is that it is, in all likelihood, the Chinese government that has ordered Huawei to lock their bootloaders, in order to keep end users from deleting the same Chinese government spyware that led to ZTE being barred from exporting their phones to the USA (and which the idiot has defied his own intelligence agencies to announce that he's going to help ZTE get export licenses to resume).
If you buy a new Huawei phone from here on out, you'd best assume the Chinese government is getting copies of everything on it, and listening in on every transaction that you use it for - including calls, texts, social media interactions, and so-called "encrypted" communications (which aren't encrypted at the keyboard, at all) ...
AmiMoJo noted:
I was in China recently and 501s were on sale in big chain shops at normal prices.
That's interesting. My next-door neighbor - who's married to a Chinese national - visits there fairly regularly. He's the one who informed me otherwise.
Are you sure the ones you saw were genuine Levis? After all, the counterfeiting of U.S. brands by Chinese companies is a perennial issue in trade negotiations, n'est ce pas ... ?
Spy Handler stated, in part:
China has been the #2 source of illegal immigrants to the US for a long long time, at least two decades. .... but it used to be very common to see headlines like,
"Cargo container seized at port of Long Beach found with fifty Chinese migrants living inside while being unloaded from cargo ship."
(Quote above edited to remove gratuitous xenophobia.)
The "#2" claim is bullshit - but the People's Republic is, in fact, a non-trivial source of unauthorized immigrants to the USA. According to the New York Times, there are currently 268,000 of them here.
That number is dwarfed by the number of unauthorized immigrants from Mexico and Central and South America, but it's still more than the population of Newark, NJ (at least, as of the 2010 census). And China refuses to accept deportees, so we're basically stuck with them, even if the current administration manages to locate them all - which it won't, because it's focused exclusively on Hispanics.
It's also worth noting that Chinese immigrants, both authorized and unauthorized, tend to be younger, and have skills that are better-suited to the American job market, than the average Hispanic immigrant. They also tend not to arrive in shipping containers. Most of them arrive legally, on tourist visas - which they blithely overstay, because there's nowhere near the level of effort expended on tracking them down as there is on tracking down Hispanics.
In my experience (and I know several such Chinese), they tend to be highly entrepreneurial. The ones I know are engaged in smuggling consumer goods - not from China to the USA, but from the USA to China. (Levis 501's are hugely popular - and extremely costly - in China, for instance.) In a twisted way, you could say they're actually contributing to this country's economy, and doing a tiny bit to redress our trade imbalance with China.
In another way, you could say they're probably laundering money for the Chinese mob - and I'd bet a shiny, new, Ohio quarter you'd be right ...
ganjadude posited:
"the people" are better benefited by robots, the workers maybe not so much but the customers, they will be
Mmm - not so much, I think.
If you're talking about, say, dishwashers, then, yeah, replacing them with semi-autonomous robots to load and unload trays of dishes, etc, from industrial-grade dishwashing machines makes perfect sense. Anyone who expects those jobs to last forever has not been paying attention. But, if you're talking about actual food preparation, then, no, the people will definitely not be "better benefited" by robots replacing chefs and their assistants.
Cooked-to-order food is a craft that demands a pretty high order of adaptability and experience. The first commercially-available burger-flipping robot is limited to doing exactly that - and nothing more. Humans have to put cheese slices on the patties, because Flippy the robot only flips them and takes them off the grill. (Apparently humans have to stage patties for Flippy to flip, as well.) Industrial robots are currently not anywhere close to being capable of doing the complex series of tasks required to craft even fairly straightforward recipes. They can do one or two, highly-repetitive things, as long as conditions don't stray from the parameters they're programmed to work within.
Let me give you an example from the auto parts industry, with which a friend of mine who has spent decades programming industrial robots recently regaled me, to illustrate the kind of limitations I'm talking about here:
My friend now works for a very large OEM manufacturer of automotive parts for basically every car company in the USA. One particular production line (they have lots of them) kept shutting down at the same work cell half-a-dozen times a day, which is VERY expensive, since the entire line has to be cleared before it can be re-started. This problem was creating a major backlog for the company, and costing it considerable money. So the automation department convened an all-hands meeting to address it - basically all the programmers on the day shift were there, plus my friend (who was nominally on the night shift, but was called in, because he's a wizard at this stuff, and everyone there understands that).
When the decision was made to form a task force, and the programming staff began being divided into committees, my buddy asked to be excused to go to the men's room. Everybody there knows he smokes cigarettes, and they all assumed that's what he was going to do, so his absence wasn't really noticed once the debating society got into full swing.
Meanwhile, my friend did, indeed, go outside to smoke. But then, instead of going back to the meeting, he went down to the production floor, loaded a bunch of widgets that had stacked up outside the problematic work cell into its parts supply bin, and ran it through a sufficient number of cycles to reproduce the problem. He then inspected the piece in-situ, and determined (after a few additonal cycles) that the problem was that particular station's task was to insert and tighten down a single, hex-head bolt. To determine whether it had accomplished that successfully, it was equipped with an optical sensor, that measured the light reflecting from the bolt's head.
As it turned out, the system was calibrated to flag the task as having failed, if the bolt's head was oriented with a vertex facing the sensor. It'd pass the test only if the bolt's head was oriented so that the lightsource was reflected from a flat face - and, of course, that didn't always happen. So my pal reprogrammed the sensor parameters to pass a bolt that was oriented either way, but fail one that hadn't been installed at all.
After running the cell through its paces a sufficient number of times to be certain his fix had actually solved the problem, he went back to the meeting he'd left 90 minutes earlier, and announced
AlanBDee confided:
Journalists that I know personally try very hard to have accurate facts and to not let their bias taint their work. While not all journalists are like that I believe most try to be. Editors and publications do have to care more about the bottom line and sadly getting the news out quickly is more important then accuracy.
As a former computer industry trade journalist and columnist, I agree with your assessment of what has come to be called "mainstream media" journalists. Most of them try to get their facts straight.
What complicates their effort is both time pressure considerations (which is to say deadlines and the constant quest for "scoops"), and the standard "three sources" requirement for news stories. The second of those generally means having to include quotes from critics, and there are a lot of those in the auto industry, when it comes to Elon Musk.
(Which only stands to reason, since Tesla is a major disruptive force in that industry, and Detroit has been playing catch-up ever since reality caught up to their pet journalists' confident prediction that Elon's company would fold before he shipped a single car.)
And, speaking again from experience in the trade journal industry (albeit in a totally different sector), those guys - and they're almost all guys in the auto industry version - have the same ethical problems that I found many of my former tech colleagues had. To put it bluntly, a lot of them are basically whores.
There are very different standards in trade journalism than there are in the mainstream version. For one thing, there's bribery, both direct, and via major advertisers (who are the exact same companies about which these people supposedly provide objective coverage) bringing pressure to bear on these rags' publishers to run stories that are favorable to them. For instance, I was fired from my first job at McGraw-Hill's LAN Times when the pubilsher gave the editor who had hired me the boot, and replaced her and her staff with a bunch of ex-PC Week clowns. The first I heard about the new regime was a call from the new Features editor, who opened by telling me, "We want to coordinate content in the back of the book with the News section."
"So, you're telling me you want me to write columns about the latest dot-zero release of Microsoft's crapware, or Intel's me-too networking gear, instead of writing about Internet policy and technology - which is what I was hired to do to begin with?" I replied.
"I wouldn't put it like that," he responded, "but, yes, that's basically what we're looking for."
When I declined to accept the invitation to spread my legs for the magazine's advertisers, I was informed that my services would no longer be required. A year later, McGraw-Hill dispatched the useless, smudgy Xerox of Network World that LAN Times had been transmogrified into to a farm upstate.
So, I went to work for a different mag - which folded after 3 issues - and eventually wound up at Boardwatch, where I spent six glorious years, before the bumbling idiots at Penton Media did the same clueless thing to it that McGraw-Hill had done to LAN TImes. (That happened just months before the first dot-com bubble kerploded, taking most of the computer trade pub industry with it - including the animated corpse of Boardwatch, btw.)
But, a couple of years before that happend, I got so sick of the advertisers dictating content, that, in a column headlined "Crystal Blue Persuasion" (from November, 1999), I closed with a whole section addressed to PR people on how properly to bribe me to write about their clients' products or services.
(What I did not do - what I would never do - is to promise that what I wrote would be flattering. That's something that whatever gadget or service I'm writing about has to convince me it deserves And most of 'em don't.)
You should read it, when and if my ISP gets its Apache fu
fred6666 sneered:
Too bad their last stable release (V24 SP1) is from 9 years ago. They are almost done with the SP2!
And by 100% open source, you mean is heavily dependent on closed source drivers obtained from broadcom under NDA? With outdated info on their wiki on how to build the source?
As the AC who posted after your comment pointed out, there are beta releases all the time - many of which are by BrainSlayer (who was the principal architect for V24 SPI, and is the principal architect for SP2, as well). For popular routers (i.e. - inexpensive and relatively powerful ones), there are often 2 or 3 betas per month. So who the hell cares about the "stable" release of SP2, when Kong's v3.0-r33675M (which I use on all 3 of my ASUS RT-56U's) is reliable, stable, has all relevant security issues patched, and supports more functions than most users will ever need?
(BTW - I agree with that guy about ignoring the router database, too. It's full of misinformation and outdated releases that no sane admin would choose to install on an Internet-exposed router. Newbies to DD-WRT should search the forums for advice on the best forks and versions to install for their particular make and model, instead.)
As for the Broadcom code, again, openwrt uses a set of reverse-engineered drivers, and it is a freakin' nightmare to configure. DD-WRT is straighforward. I don't give a flying fuck at a rolling donut that the comm driver is proprietary. I care that it works.
I will grant your point that, for Broadcom-based routers (including mine), the DD-WRT drivers are proprietary. I just don't care - and the fact that the DD-WRT developers choose to use them, rather than replace them with the reverse-engineered versions speaks volumes about how efficient, stable, and reliable they believe the open-source ones are ...
resistant hypothesized:
The thought occurs that an inevitable explosion of fake video and audio recordings will drive the development of encrypted authentication networks that verify that a supposed recording came from a sealed, supposedly tamper-proof recording device from a manufacturer whose production lines, parts suppliers, and design teams are closely monitored by government agencies and nonprofit organizations against the possibility of firmware tampering. Recordings produced by unvetted devices will be automatically assumed by courts and other interested parties to be inherently unreliable and very likely fake in all cases of controversy.
I don't think you have a lot of experience with how courts work in actual practice - or legislatures, either.
Judges are basically free to accept or reject evidence according to their own rules. In the USA, for instance, some of them still admit latent fingerprint testimony, despite the fact that an AAAS panel of expert forensic scientists has completely debunked the science behind it. Another such AAAS panel also determined that much of the "science" behind forensic arson analysis is equally worthless. And the National Commission on Forensic Science - whose members included career prosecutors, forensics experts, and criminal defense groups - called for the establishment of a comprehensive, national set of forensic standards for evidence submitted to criminal justice courts.
And don't get me started on bite mark analysis.
(Jeff Sessions has disbanded the NCFS, and is planning to replace it with a panel composed of prosecutors and forensics "experts", because, of course he has.)
Despite all the accumulated evidence that much of forensic science is largely based on handwaving and bullshit, there are no prohibitions against its use in criminal courts, even for capital crimes.
Meanwhile, I can't speak knowledgeably about other countries' criminal justice systems (although I'm pretty sure that Commonwealth countries and a bunch of EU member states have equally screwed up standards), but here in the USA, there is little sign that either state legislatures or Congress have any trace of will to fix these problems - although, to be fair, the Texas Forensic Science Commission, of all unlikely bellwethers, has determined that bite mark analysis has no scientific basis, and recommended that it be banned from being used in state courts.
Naturally, the Texas legislature has not enacted the recommended ban, so even Texas criminal court judges are still free to admit bite mark analysis into evidence - including in capital cases.
So, your prediction seems to me to have little in the way of either fact or precedent to support it.
Not to mention the chorus of outrage that would undoubtedly follow the instant any bill is introduced to mandate the authenticity verification scheme you propose would pretty much guarantee its instant demise ...
ArchieBunker demanded:
Have you done an audit of the code yourself? Are you sure anyone else has? Would you know what to look for?
I use DD-WRT exclusively on all my routers.
It's 100% open source, and there are several people who are still actively developing it. In addition, there's a lot of security-savvy users who closely examine and pen-test each release.
In 2008, a pair of backdoor IP addresses were discovered in the code (placed there by one of the developers, at a customer's request). Both were accessible only from the NAT side of the router, and both were removed within an hour of being reported ...
DarthVain confided:
I believe it used a parallel port (or it may have been SCSI).
Definitely a parallel port.
And you're right - it produced excellent color printouts ...
Zorpheus observed:
In any space game this unusual object would certainly be an important artifact.
In reality it would still be quite interesting to analyse its composition.
I don't disagree about the scientific importance of this body. OTOH, "send a probe" is a non-trivial undertaking, when that probe will have to overcome the Earth's orbital velocity, then further accelerate to the orbital velocity of this retrograde object.
That's a helluva lot of delta vee.
I'm not saying it's impossible. Taking advantage of carefully-calculated gravitational slingshot trajectories ought to permit it - but it's going to take a more powerful launch system than currently exists, regardless. So we're talking about needing the SLS, or SpaceX's BFR, or Blue Origin's New Glenn booster to make it happen.
The first one won't be operational until no earlier than 2026 (assuming it hits its development schedule, which I don't think is at all a safe assumption). New Glenn might be launch-ready by, say, 2022 or so. Or it might not. The BFR? I'm guessing late 2020 at the earliest. And all three of those systems will have a LONG list of payloads lined up ahead of any at-this-point-theoretical probe to this admittedly-interesting destination - for which there's certainly no room in NASA's budget at the moment.
New, multiple-billion-dollar, 10-year or more NASA projects don't just appear AIBFM - and the current Congress seems to have little appetite for pure science projects. Or were you expecting the ESA, Roscsmos, or the CNSA to tackle it?
Because I don't think any one of them has the capability. Or the mandate ...
The real question is, "Did Slashdot's editors come from the Weekly World News ... ?"