Not all the information is in the books, or the lab notes. Even with recorded lectures and interactive material, a lot is learned by interacting with others. IRC cannot replace personal interactions.
So where is the chem lab and the bio lab in this scheme? Are we not going to train doctors or chemists or physicists any more? I don't see a lot of homes with lab benches these days.
Working in groups is enhanced by physical proximity. Look at all the big tech firms. What do they call their big central facilities? The Campus These is a good practical reason for that.There is telecommuting, but that is in addition to, not a replacement of, the academic environment.
Online teaching is wide open to abuse. On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog. Who is going to be taking that test and doing the homework, exactly? It's already a problem in traditional schools settings, and this lowers the barrier dramatically for bad behavior.
The current system works. It has known problems, but the higher level educational environment has evolved (at least in the West) since the middle ages. Yes, undergraduates can be treated as cattle, but graduate education is based on the master/apprentice model of learning a craft. Why do you think it's called a "Master's" degree? This is truly one of those "it it ain't broke don't fix it" situations.
This could so easily turn education into a meaningless and worthless way of extracting money from people with false promises with nothing to show at the end but a big debt. In fact, when it comes to many of the for profit national schools, it already has.
You want to waste a bunch of time and money? Just enroll in a for profit school that claims it will turn you into one of those well paid game developers or CGI artists. The actual post graduation success rate is near zero. The classes are too simple to do much good, because the goal is to keep getting that tuition, not to impart useful knowledge. I had a friend who worked in the film industry, and then tried teaching. He got in trouble with both the school management and the students for showing them how to type on the command line. It was "too technical", "too hard", and it made the students "uncomfortable".
Remember "Sully" Sullenberger and the incredible safe landing of US Airways Flight 1549 int the Hudson river? All the crew members were in unions. And Sullenberger was the safety chairman of the Air Lines Pilots Association, which is the pilots bargaining unit.
In fact all the first responders were union members. Of course the fire, police and paramedics were in union. So were the water taxi operators and the ferry boat personal who, on their own initiative, got to the crash site in the river and risked their lives to get passengers and crew off the aircraft before it sank and before they were injured by exposure to the harsh winter conditions on the river.
Compare that to the crash of Continental Flight 3407 outside of Buffalo. This is a feeder airline, and feeder airline crew have very little clout because their unions are weak or non-existent. If the airline engages in dangerous corner cutting, they can put up with it or quit. This is exactly what happened in this case. The airline had inadequate procedures and training. In addition the crew was sleep deprived.
The Board further found that: "The pilots' performance was likely impaired because of fatigue, but the extent of their impairment and the degree to which it contributed to the performance deficiencies that occurred during the flight cannot be conclusively determined." Chairman Hersman, while concurring, was clear in considering that fatigue was a contributing factor. She compared the twenty years that fatigue has remained on the NTSB's Most Wanted List of Transportation Safety Improvements (without getting substantial action on the matter from regulators) to the changes in tolerance for alcohol over the same time period, noting that the performance impacts of fatigue and alcohol were similar.
So this plane crashed because safety took a back seat to profit. The pilots were tired because the rules let them fly right after they commuted in on another flight. Unions care about stuff like this, because their members are literally going to be the first to die in an accident (an old pilots joke). Remember, no managers ever suffer death or injury in a crash.
Having the group with the most to loose and the most direct relevant experience be a part of the decision making process is completely rational. Excluding them and letting MBAs and accountants make safety critical decisions in without any real world exposure is deranged.
I saw Sullenberger on the Letterman show, and he said that when they went to the emergency procedures manual, it had no page tabs. The only way to find the right section was to look it up in the index. This lost them precious seconds in a highly volatile situation. Fortunately, it was not the margin between life and death, but it could have been. No flight crew would have ever accepted this downgrade, but they were never asked. That's what you get in the real world when you leave the people doing the work out of the loop, and let management make unilateral decisions.
Personally, I hope you fly on a lot of these cost cutting feeder airlines with no effective unions and you die in a plane crash. The world would be a better place. I'd rather fly knowing that the people who have my life in their hands are safety conscious and can make sure that the trip is safe for them and the passengers.
You are right. The forces that will lead to ARM powered laptop (and desk tops) systems lie outside the traditional PC platform. A key enabling technology is System on a Chip, which is normal for smart phone ARM platforms. SOC means that a big player who wants to deploy an ARM solution can save considerable integration cost, as you described in your post. This is not theoretical, it's here: the iPad
It's both pathetic and typical how Slashdot Pundits take the narrow view of the evolution of technology. Once they decide that something is "The True Way", they refuse to consider that familiar technology has flaws allowing competing products to overtake existing solutions.
The mass amnesia about ARM chips in the iPad is a classic case of how deeply most Slashdot members cling to common perceived wisdom. They are not innovators at heart, but tend to be much more comfortable with what they already know.
I'd also like to point out that ARM for laptops does not automatically have to come from Western economies. If some indigenous manufacturer in China decides that they can sell a large number of systems in China by taking advantage of ARM integration, they will. Compatibility with legacy code could easily be discarded if the price difference makes the hardware cheap enough.
Ignoring these kinds of possibilities is another example of how the majority of Slashdot readers are narrow minded and egocentric. Fortunately for everyone else, Slashdot counts for very little in the big picture.
The only way to save HP is to stage a public hanging of the board of directors, including previous board members for the last 15 years or so. I would include the disinterred remains of any who have already died.
To be thorough, they should be hung with slip knots instead of a hangman's noose, so that they die slowly by strangulation. Then their body should be allowed to rot at the end of the rope. With any luck there eyes will be eaten by ravens, but I wouldn't count on this.
Anything short of this will be useless. Realistically, it is already too late, and all that a mass execution would do is offer a brief moment of cheer to the employees, former employees in the HP pension plan, and stock holders. Given that they are completely screwed, this is the minimum revenge that they are entitled to.
So in your lovely theoretically pure strongly typed language, what do you do when live data doesn't correctly follow the strongly typed paradigm that is part of the language design? There are only two choices, as far as I know. First, you handle every data variation with explicit code in every client side application or you have exception handlers that catch all data type exceptions and keep the code running under all conditions. The two options are equivalent, they only differ in where the special case code resides. It's all just a simple matter of coding, right?
And if you don't explicitly deal with every special case, your strongly typed language will quit working, leaving the user with a cryptic error message and a unusable broken web page. Yes, this is obviously the way to get all browser creators to jump on your bandwagon. Just make their products less reliable and make it much more difficult to write client side code that is robust.
JavaScript has some truly evil parts, but soft run time typing is not one of them. I believe that this is one of the features that has kept it dominant in the browser software domain. If the code encounters something unexpected in the data, it can just keep running. A feature on a web page can not work, or the wrong thing will be displayed, but the rest of the page will be useful. This is critically important to browser usability.
There are clearly problems with this approach. There is a huge amount of bad code out there that is just plain wrong and works badly. Other aspects of JavaScript make it very had to debug code and fix errors. The fact that things still work under these conditions just proves that my position is valid.
The information that passes into you browser is incredibly ill formed. This will not change. To process it correctly, your code has to deal with a lot of bizarre special cases. This is independent of strong or weak typing in the client side language. A strongly typed language makes this problem insurmountable, and a weakly typed language means that you can get useful results even when bugs are present. The choice is between having a useful result, or encountering major malfunctions at every turn.
So do you want to make the Internet work, or do you want to break it?
The obvious next step is that you cannot have car insurance without some kind of automatic data collection. It won't be the law that requires this, but the corporations that now own you. An you can just change insurance plans if you don't like it, but either you will not be able to find an alternative, or the replacement will be horribly expensive and useless. (Just see how health insurance works for and example.) And without car insurance you can't drive in many states.
You want to see how far this can go? In California you now have to give health insurance companies direct access to your bank account or they will cancel your policy. No credit card payments allowed.
It wasn't doomsday. It was just an example of a major corporation turning the screws on a customer to get what it wanted.
In this case, what it wanted was access to Kreuzhage's checking account, rather than her credit card account.
Anthem announced a few months ago that it planned to stop allowing members to automatically pay their bills by credit card. For those still wanting to use plastic, they could call a service rep each month and give their card number over the phone, although this would entail a $15 "convenience fee."
...
Sure, you can still pay by credit card. But you have to remember to call in every month to do so. If you forget, your coverage can disappear.
Kreuzhage, for one, has learned her lesson. She's forked over the checking account number that Anthem wanted all along and now approaches her health insurance with a renewed sense of humility.
"If this is how they treat me when things are perfect, when I file no claims, how are they going to treat me if I ever have a serious medical problem?" Kreuzhage asked.
And big companies never make billing mistakes. Even in those rare occasions when they do, it's always fixed right away. So, for example, if due to a billing error they clean out your account and you miss insurance payments or mortgage payments they'll fix everything like it never happened. And I have some major bridges in New York and San Francisco that I can sell you real cheap.
I know this is a different area of the law, but what are the ramifications of the upcoming changes to US patent law, specifically the "first to file" provision. I am associated with a possible start up, and I have become concerned that as soon as we reveal anything, patent troll companies will scoop up our ideas and turn them against us. I know that provisional patents are supposed to protect me, but I also know that those with deep pockets often prevail because of litigation cost. As a start up, big legal fees could cripple the effort. My current feeling is that this change is another mechanism for entrenched special interests to squash competition and innovation.
is to suck up to the CEO. One way or another the CEO is in charge of their selection, and they are beholding to their boss. In fact they have no actual responsibility to stockholders or even to the authorities like the SEC, or even the DOJ. Have any directors every suffered from making a bad mistake or hiding their head in the sand? Of course not. The corporation buys insurance for them, so they are completely insulated from legal actions based on bad results. They have minimal responsibilities, and they make ridiculous amounts of money for the small amount of time they spend rubber stamping whatever the current management desires.
They get cash and stock, so what is the worst that can happen to them? If the company goes down the tubes they still have the cash, and even if the stock goes down it is still free money. I think this is true for failing companies like HP or soaring companies like Apple.
And as the original post points out, when a board does act they are usually irrational. Their decision process is about as useful as a Magic Eight Ball.
Directors of big publicly traded companies are like landed aristocrats in a socially stratified feudal society. Once they join the wealth class they are given more wealth and power because they are the ruling class. Who gets to be a board member? Someone who as already made it. The ruling elite skims wealth out of the economy to stuff into their own pockets, and thus maintain their strangle hold on the economic (and often political) life of their country.
You want a recent example? Just read what the Wall St. Journal says about Warren Buffet when he says that the tax rate for the wealthy is too low. It's like he went into a church and got up in front of the congregation and said "There is no God." They react with a combination of contempt, condemnation and condescension. It's like the crazy rich uncle showing up and talking about flying saucers from inside the hollow earth. The only reason they cut him any slack is that he so successful and rich that they can't ignore him.
When it comes to describing how wealth and power accumulate at the top, Marx was right. He was wrong about everything else, like Hegelianism, the end of history and the workers paradise, but he was right about how the ruling class will sacrifice anything to keep their wealth and privilege.
What is the difference between how Wall St. behaves and how Gaddafi ran Libya? Not much. The US power elite is much more slick, and they have much better PR, and they have some understanding that it's more cost effective to not starve the peasants. A rancher get more meat from a well fed cow that is not sick, but that is in the rancher's interest, not the cows.
If they think that starving the populace will get them more wealth and power, they will. In fact, they are. In the US you can make a lot of money in the immediate term by putting people out of work rather then by investing for the long run. So ship those jobs overseas, merge what remains into a few dominant companies to form cartels, and squeeze the existing wealth out of what remains. If you're rich enough, you can justify anything by insisting that your wealth proves you are righteous.
Of course, this only works for a while. In the longer run it ends up like the situation in many South American countries. A tiny minority with most of the wealth, a very modest size middle class, and a vast majority of dirt poor peasants. Then politics devolves to a seesaw between right wing nationalistic elitists who protect the wealthy and loot the economy (Argentina under the generals) and left wing despots who nationalize everything and buy off the peasants to stay in power while destroying the productive economy (Chávez's in Venezuela).
It may seem like a long way from useless boards of directors, but that is a trick used to keep the cows quite on the way to the slaughterhouse.
is to suck up to the CEO. One way or another the CEO is in charge of their selection, and they are beholding to their boss. In fact they have no actual responsibility to stockholders or even to the authorities like the SEC, or even the DOJ. Have any directors every suffered from making a bad mistake or hiding their head in the sand? Of course not. The corporation buys insurance for them, so they are completely insulated from legal actions based on bad results. They have minimal responsibilities, and they make ridiculous amounts of money for the small amount of time they spend rubber stamping whatever the current management desires.
They get cash and stock, so what is the worst that can happen to them? If the company goes down the tubes they still have the cash, and even if the stock goes down it is still free money. I think this is true for failing companies like HP or soaring companies like Apple.
And as the original post points out, when a board does act they are usually irrational. Their decision process is about as useful as a Magic Eight Ball.
Directors of big publicly traded companies are like landed aristocrats in a socially stratified feudal society. Once they join the wealth class they are given more wealth and power because they are the ruling class. Who gets to be a board member? Someone who as already made it. The ruling elite skims wealth out of the economy to stuff into their own pockets, and thus maintain their strangle hold on the economic (and often political) life of their country.
You want a recent example? Just read what the Wall St. Journal says about Warren Buffet when he says that the tax rate for the wealthy is too low. It's like he went into a church and got up in front of the congregation and said "There is no God." They react with a combination of contempt, condemnation and condescension. It's like the crazy rich uncle showing up and talking about flying saucers from inside the hollow earth. The only reason they cut him any slack is that he so successful and rich that they can't ignore him.
When it comes to describing how wealth and power accumulate at the top, Marx was right. He was wrong about everything else, like Hegelianism, the end of history and the workers paradise, but he was right about how the ruling class will sacrifice anything to keep their wealth and privilege.
What is the difference between how Wall St. behaves and how Gaddafi ran Libya? Not much. The US power elite is much more slick, and they have much better PR, and they have some understanding that it's more cost effective to not starve the peasants. A rancher get more meat from a well fed cow that is not sick, but that is in the rancher's interest, not the cows.
If they think that starving the populace will get them more wealth and power, they will. In fact, they are. In the US you can make a lot of money in the immediate term by putting people out of work rather then by investing for the long run. So ship those jobs overseas, merge what remains into a few dominant companies to form cartels, and squeeze the existing wealth out of what remains. If you're rich enough, you can justify anything by insisting that your wealth proves you are righteous.
Of course, this only works for a while. In the longer run it ends up like the situation in many South American countries. A tiny minority with most of the wealth, a very modest size middle class, and a vast majority of dirt poor peasants. Then politics devolves to a seesaw between right wing nationalistic elitists who protect the wealthy and loot the economy (Argentina under the generals) and left wing despots who nationalize everything and buy off the peasants to stay in power while destroying the productive economy (Chávez's in Venezuela).
It may seem like a long way from useless boards of directors, but that is a trick used to keep the cows quite on the way to the slaughterhouse.
WTF??? "founding fathers, Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Rand".
I know that Libertards don't inhabit the real world, but stop making this kind of shit up. I know that you masturbate to an image of Rand every night, but leave the rest of us out of your deranged fantasy.
In the first place Lincoln was not a Founding Father. Hello, those were the people during the American Revolution, not the Civil War. I guess you threw him in so you could pretend that you are not a racist.
So please keep you cult leader to yourself. This kind of shit is fine if you are in North Korea praising Kim Jong-Il, but outside of crazy land it marks you as an idiot.
In what plane are the motherboards stacked? Are they in the horizontal or vertical plane? Vertical stacking allows the hot air to exit the top, while horizontal implies that external airflow must be provided to get the hot air out. Also, if you have multiple layers of vertical stacks then the top boards are getting the hot air from the lower boards.
A random suggestion: Have the motherboards all parallel at a 45 degree angle. This could provide passive heat driven air flow. The cool air enters at the lower edge and exits at the higher edge, so one side of the stack is the cool side and the opposite side is the warm side, I would think that you want the CPU fan near the upper edge of the board.
Monopolists are incapable fundamental change. They will do everything within their power to alter anything except their core monopoly. This includes lawsuits, buying legislation, corporate espionage, smear campaigns, defamation, etc. Whatever they can get away with.
I don't even have to mention incidents, just company names: IBM, MicroSoft, Oracle, Cisco, Apple, Rambus.
Remember, a lot of the time they get away with it (Windows Office, Powerpoint). Even though they are pushing an aging and ill suited CPU, through shear muscle (overt Mafia reference) they just might succeed.
“Our findings clearly identify nanowires as being the primary catalyst for uranium reduction.They are essentially performing nature’s version of electroplating with uranium, effectively immobilizing the radioactive material and preventing it from leaching into groundwater,” said Gemma Reguera a MSU microbiologist.
The bacteria take uranium out of solution and turn it into nanowires outside their outer membrane. They have tested it outside in a uranium mine tailings pile. The goal is to build a bacterial water treatment cell that produces electricity while it filters out dissolved uranium.
This is not for generating power, the energy produced is a by-product. I doubt that the resultant energy would pay for it's own production. However, the electricity could be used to help pump water through the system, which is a neat trick and will help to reduce cleanup costs.
There are a lot of existing city locations that could be used for this purpose. Two candidates are Las Vegas and Riverside county in Southern California. There are large tracts of existing houses that are empty that the banks would love to unload. The people who own houses here have all seen their value drop by large amounts. A government buyout would be great for them as well.
A commonly held misconception is that film projection is simply a series of individual frames dragged very quickly past the projector's intense light source; this is not the case. If a roll of film were merely passed between the light source and the lens of the projector, all that would be visible on screen would be a continuous blurred series of images sliding from one edge to the other. It is the shutter that gives the illusion of one full frame being replaced exactly on top of another full frame. A rotating petal or gated cylindrical shutter interrupts the emitted light during the time the film is advanced to the next frame. The viewer does not see the transition, thus tricking the brain into believing a moving image is on screen. Modern shutters are designed with a flicker-rate of two times (48 Hz) or even sometimes three times (72 Hz) the frame rate of the film, so as to reduce the perception of screen flickering. (See Frame rate and Flicker fusion threshold.)
Some of these sequences look like shots from the Stargate section of the film 2001.
Specifically the HH1 jet has some of the streaming blob like motion created using light show fluid projections techniques. This is done on an overhead projector with a big watch glass (a big shallow section of a sphere) and volatile fluids. Colors are dripped into the liquid and as the glass is moved they mix around and bubbles form from a combination of the heat of the projector and changing pressure in the liquid.
It's all fluid dynamic, in outer space on a table top.
You can also do the inverse: you act as the computer, the kids act as the programmer. You start with a simple task: making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The sandwich components are the props.
First have the kids define the steps for making the sandwich. Write them on the board. Then "execute" making the sandwich. They will make a bunch of typical mistakes. For example, they will forget steps like taking the bread out of the bag, opening the jam and peanut jars, etc. So as you go through the steps, you stop when there is an obviously wrong action. Each mistake is recorded as a change to the "program" on the board.
This shows how simple the steps have to be, and also shows how programming is about breaking down complex activities into very simple steps. It also shows debugging.
Syntactically, Lua is descended from Pascal, so for example it has BEGIN/END blocks rather then {} like C influenced syntax. Even so, it is familiar to most coders. It has infix numeric notation and short cut logical operators. It doesn't put people off the way that LISP derived languages often do.
It does not have C++ style objects, but it does have object inheritance like PHP, JavaScript, SmallTalk and Pure. It is very reflexive so the programmer can easily access low level behavior. This access is how object inheritance is implemented.
The fun part is how you can use all these features to solve problems. For example, objects can be made in more then one way. You are not stuck with a one size fits all solution. Or you can just use inheritance and have a very lite waight object style. You control the language, the language does not control you.
It also has a single data structure, the table, that can easily map to many data structures. It can be an associative array or a numeric indexed vector. All values, including functions are first class. A table can have any data item as it's index and as a value. For example, a table can be indexed by a function. If the associated value is a table, you could then execute the function using the table as it's input.
So Lua is flexible. It supports many programming styles, including traditional script style imperative programming. It can also be Scheme like and support a much more functional style, if you so choose. It's like s Swiss army knife. You can fix things and also open a bottle of beer or wine. That's why it's fun. As a bonus, it also is one of the fastest and smallest scripting languages around. What's not to like?
TeX is moving to Lua. http://www.luatex.org/. TeX has been around a really long time, it has a huge user base. It has adapted to change and will continue to thrive in the future. The choice of Lua shows that a community with deep technical roots sees that Lua is a good long term solution.
From their FAQ.
Why not use language X instead of Lua?
We needed a language that matched all of the following criteria:
Freely available
Embeddable integrate within pdfTeX
Very small footprint
Portable
Easy to extend with pdfTeX-specific functionality
Fun to work with
Lua was the first language to match all the criteria. The known scripting
languages tend to be much too large for our use. Specifically, we have rejected Java, Perl,
Python, Ruby, Scheme on one or more of those criteria.
I think that one of the most important points is "Fun to work with". Lua is fun.
How crowed is our local stellar neighborhood? Is there any estimate of how many stars are within 50 or 100 light years of the Sun, and if such a number exists, what are the error ranges? It seems like the technology is available for an organized effort for a local star census. Is anything like this currently happening?
It is a really great time for astronomy right know. I hope there are more posts like this.
Watch out!!! There are radioactive scorpions under your bed!!!
Over here in the real world, there are vast evil conspiracies that succeed in manipulating your life. This is not one of them. The real manipulators have names like "Chiat/Day Advertising Agencie", " Fox News", "NRA", or "U.S. Chamber of Commerce". When you worry about the government rounding you up you give these groups a free pass to do whatever they want. "Ignore that man behind the curtain."
I suggest that you find some real conspiracies and try to free yourself from them. You might actually get some where and make the world a better place.
Over here in the real world, Fox is the least reliable source of information available. Here is a current example based on actual collected data, reporting on the News of the World phone hacking scandal:
The study found that during the time period studied, CNN and MSNBC each devoted roughly 16 minutes per night to the topic, compared with only three minutes on Fox.
In daytime coverage, CNN spent about four minutes per hour on the scandal, while MSNBC spent about half that much time. The total at Fox was closer to 30 seconds per hour.
All three channels carried live daytime coverage of Tuesday's hearing before the British Parliament, where Murdoch and his son James appeared.
So "AP Poll: Economic worries pose new snags for Obama" becomes "AP: Obama Has A Big Problem with White Women". This is not news, it's organized lying.
If you think this is "Fair and Balanced" and that it's OK because they "admit their bias" then you have serious mental problems. I suspect that you should be under professional mental health care. There are many treatment options that will address your delusional thinking. Current drugs along with cognitive therapy are very effective. I urge you get evaluated, because in your current state you are a danger to yourself and others. You should not be diving or operating heavy equipment, or be allowed access to sharp objects or guns without close supervision. It would be a shame if someone got hurt because of your untreated mental illness.
Slashdot Mirror
So where is the chem lab and the bio lab in this scheme? Are we not going to train doctors or chemists or physicists any more? I don't see a lot of homes with lab benches these days.
Working in groups is enhanced by physical proximity. Look at all the big tech firms. What do they call their big central facilities? The Campus These is a good practical reason for that.There is telecommuting, but that is in addition to, not a replacement of, the academic environment.
Online teaching is wide open to abuse. On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog. Who is going to be taking that test and doing the homework, exactly? It's already a problem in traditional schools settings, and this lowers the barrier dramatically for bad behavior.
The current system works. It has known problems, but the higher level educational environment has evolved (at least in the West) since the middle ages. Yes, undergraduates can be treated as cattle, but graduate education is based on the master/apprentice model of learning a craft. Why do you think it's called a "Master's" degree? This is truly one of those "it it ain't broke don't fix it" situations.
This could so easily turn education into a meaningless and worthless way of extracting money from people with false promises with nothing to show at the end but a big debt. In fact, when it comes to many of the for profit national schools, it already has.
You want to waste a bunch of time and money? Just enroll in a for profit school that claims it will turn you into one of those well paid game developers or CGI artists. The actual post graduation success rate is near zero. The classes are too simple to do much good, because the goal is to keep getting that tuition, not to impart useful knowledge. I had a friend who worked in the film industry, and then tried teaching. He got in trouble with both the school management and the students for showing them how to type on the command line. It was "too technical", "too hard", and it made the students "uncomfortable".
So no, it is not a good idea.
In fact all the first responders were union members. Of course the fire, police and paramedics were in union. So were the water taxi operators and the ferry boat personal who, on their own initiative, got to the crash site in the river and risked their lives to get passengers and crew off the aircraft before it sank and before they were injured by exposure to the harsh winter conditions on the river.
Compare that to the crash of Continental Flight 3407 outside of Buffalo. This is a feeder airline, and feeder airline crew have very little clout because their unions are weak or non-existent. If the airline engages in dangerous corner cutting, they can put up with it or quit. This is exactly what happened in this case. The airline had inadequate procedures and training. In addition the crew was sleep deprived.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colgan_Air_Flight_3407
So this plane crashed because safety took a back seat to profit. The pilots were tired because the rules let them fly right after they commuted in on another flight. Unions care about stuff like this, because their members are literally going to be the first to die in an accident (an old pilots joke). Remember, no managers ever suffer death or injury in a crash.
Having the group with the most to loose and the most direct relevant experience be a part of the decision making process is completely rational. Excluding them and letting MBAs and accountants make safety critical decisions in without any real world exposure is deranged.
I saw Sullenberger on the Letterman show, and he said that when they went to the emergency procedures manual, it had no page tabs. The only way to find the right section was to look it up in the index. This lost them precious seconds in a highly volatile situation. Fortunately, it was not the margin between life and death, but it could have been. No flight crew would have ever accepted this downgrade, but they were never asked. That's what you get in the real world when you leave the people doing the work out of the loop, and let management make unilateral decisions.
Personally, I hope you fly on a lot of these cost cutting feeder airlines with no effective unions and you die in a plane crash. The world would be a better place. I'd rather fly knowing that the people who have my life in their hands are safety conscious and can make sure that the trip is safe for them and the passengers.
It's both pathetic and typical how Slashdot Pundits take the narrow view of the evolution of technology. Once they decide that something is "The True Way", they refuse to consider that familiar technology has flaws allowing competing products to overtake existing solutions.
The mass amnesia about ARM chips in the iPad is a classic case of how deeply most Slashdot members cling to common perceived wisdom. They are not innovators at heart, but tend to be much more comfortable with what they already know.
I'd also like to point out that ARM for laptops does not automatically have to come from Western economies. If some indigenous manufacturer in China decides that they can sell a large number of systems in China by taking advantage of ARM integration, they will. Compatibility with legacy code could easily be discarded if the price difference makes the hardware cheap enough.
Ignoring these kinds of possibilities is another example of how the majority of Slashdot readers are narrow minded and egocentric. Fortunately for everyone else, Slashdot counts for very little in the big picture.
To be thorough, they should be hung with slip knots instead of a hangman's noose, so that they die slowly by strangulation. Then their body should be allowed to rot at the end of the rope. With any luck there eyes will be eaten by ravens, but I wouldn't count on this.
Anything short of this will be useless. Realistically, it is already too late, and all that a mass execution would do is offer a brief moment of cheer to the employees, former employees in the HP pension plan, and stock holders. Given that they are completely screwed, this is the minimum revenge that they are entitled to.
And if you don't explicitly deal with every special case, your strongly typed language will quit working, leaving the user with a cryptic error message and a unusable broken web page. Yes, this is obviously the way to get all browser creators to jump on your bandwagon. Just make their products less reliable and make it much more difficult to write client side code that is robust.
JavaScript has some truly evil parts, but soft run time typing is not one of them. I believe that this is one of the features that has kept it dominant in the browser software domain. If the code encounters something unexpected in the data, it can just keep running. A feature on a web page can not work, or the wrong thing will be displayed, but the rest of the page will be useful. This is critically important to browser usability.
There are clearly problems with this approach. There is a huge amount of bad code out there that is just plain wrong and works badly. Other aspects of JavaScript make it very had to debug code and fix errors. The fact that things still work under these conditions just proves that my position is valid.
The information that passes into you browser is incredibly ill formed. This will not change. To process it correctly, your code has to deal with a lot of bizarre special cases. This is independent of strong or weak typing in the client side language. A strongly typed language makes this problem insurmountable, and a weakly typed language means that you can get useful results even when bugs are present. The choice is between having a useful result, or encountering major malfunctions at every turn.
So do you want to make the Internet work, or do you want to break it?
You want to see how far this can go? In California you now have to give health insurance companies direct access to your bank account or they will cancel your policy. No credit card payments allowed.
http://www.latimes.com/business/la-fi-lazarus-20110920,0,2211923.column
And big companies never make billing mistakes. Even in those rare occasions when they do, it's always fixed right away. So, for example, if due to a billing error they clean out your account and you miss insurance payments or mortgage payments they'll fix everything like it never happened. And I have some major bridges in New York and San Francisco that I can sell you real cheap.
I know this is a different area of the law, but what are the ramifications of the upcoming changes to US patent law, specifically the "first to file" provision. I am associated with a possible start up, and I have become concerned that as soon as we reveal anything, patent troll companies will scoop up our ideas and turn them against us. I know that provisional patents are supposed to protect me, but I also know that those with deep pockets often prevail because of litigation cost. As a start up, big legal fees could cripple the effort. My current feeling is that this change is another mechanism for entrenched special interests to squash competition and innovation.
They get cash and stock, so what is the worst that can happen to them? If the company goes down the tubes they still have the cash, and even if the stock goes down it is still free money. I think this is true for failing companies like HP or soaring companies like Apple.
And as the original post points out, when a board does act they are usually irrational. Their decision process is about as useful as a Magic Eight Ball.
Directors of big publicly traded companies are like landed aristocrats in a socially stratified feudal society. Once they join the wealth class they are given more wealth and power because they are the ruling class. Who gets to be a board member? Someone who as already made it. The ruling elite skims wealth out of the economy to stuff into their own pockets, and thus maintain their strangle hold on the economic (and often political) life of their country.
You want a recent example? Just read what the Wall St. Journal says about Warren Buffet when he says that the tax rate for the wealthy is too low. It's like he went into a church and got up in front of the congregation and said "There is no God." They react with a combination of contempt, condemnation and condescension. It's like the crazy rich uncle showing up and talking about flying saucers from inside the hollow earth. The only reason they cut him any slack is that he so successful and rich that they can't ignore him.
When it comes to describing how wealth and power accumulate at the top, Marx was right. He was wrong about everything else, like Hegelianism, the end of history and the workers paradise, but he was right about how the ruling class will sacrifice anything to keep their wealth and privilege.
What is the difference between how Wall St. behaves and how Gaddafi ran Libya? Not much. The US power elite is much more slick, and they have much better PR, and they have some understanding that it's more cost effective to not starve the peasants. A rancher get more meat from a well fed cow that is not sick, but that is in the rancher's interest, not the cows.
If they think that starving the populace will get them more wealth and power, they will. In fact, they are. In the US you can make a lot of money in the immediate term by putting people out of work rather then by investing for the long run. So ship those jobs overseas, merge what remains into a few dominant companies to form cartels, and squeeze the existing wealth out of what remains. If you're rich enough, you can justify anything by insisting that your wealth proves you are righteous.
Of course, this only works for a while. In the longer run it ends up like the situation in many South American countries. A tiny minority with most of the wealth, a very modest size middle class, and a vast majority of dirt poor peasants. Then politics devolves to a seesaw between right wing nationalistic elitists who protect the wealthy and loot the economy (Argentina under the generals) and left wing despots who nationalize everything and buy off the peasants to stay in power while destroying the productive economy (Chávez's in Venezuela).
It may seem like a long way from useless boards of directors, but that is a trick used to keep the cows quite on the way to the slaughterhouse.
They get cash and stock, so what is the worst that can happen to them? If the company goes down the tubes they still have the cash, and even if the stock goes down it is still free money. I think this is true for failing companies like HP or soaring companies like Apple.
And as the original post points out, when a board does act they are usually irrational. Their decision process is about as useful as a Magic Eight Ball.
Directors of big publicly traded companies are like landed aristocrats in a socially stratified feudal society. Once they join the wealth class they are given more wealth and power because they are the ruling class. Who gets to be a board member? Someone who as already made it. The ruling elite skims wealth out of the economy to stuff into their own pockets, and thus maintain their strangle hold on the economic (and often political) life of their country.
You want a recent example? Just read what the Wall St. Journal says about Warren Buffet when he says that the tax rate for the wealthy is too low. It's like he went into a church and got up in front of the congregation and said "There is no God." They react with a combination of contempt, condemnation and condescension. It's like the crazy rich uncle showing up and talking about flying saucers from inside the hollow earth. The only reason they cut him any slack is that he so successful and rich that they can't ignore him.
When it comes to describing how wealth and power accumulate at the top, Marx was right. He was wrong about everything else, like Hegelianism, the end of history and the workers paradise, but he was right about how the ruling class will sacrifice anything to keep their wealth and privilege.
What is the difference between how Wall St. behaves and how Gaddafi ran Libya? Not much. The US power elite is much more slick, and they have much better PR, and they have some understanding that it's more cost effective to not starve the peasants. A rancher get more meat from a well fed cow that is not sick, but that is in the rancher's interest, not the cows.
If they think that starving the populace will get them more wealth and power, they will. In fact, they are. In the US you can make a lot of money in the immediate term by putting people out of work rather then by investing for the long run. So ship those jobs overseas, merge what remains into a few dominant companies to form cartels, and squeeze the existing wealth out of what remains. If you're rich enough, you can justify anything by insisting that your wealth proves you are righteous.
Of course, this only works for a while. In the longer run it ends up like the situation in many South American countries. A tiny minority with most of the wealth, a very modest size middle class, and a vast majority of dirt poor peasants. Then politics devolves to a seesaw between right wing nationalistic elitists who protect the wealthy and loot the economy (Argentina under the generals) and left wing despots who nationalize everything and buy off the peasants to stay in power while destroying the productive economy (Chávez's in Venezuela).
It may seem like a long way from useless boards of directors, but that is a trick used to keep the cows quite on the way to the slaughterhouse.
I know that Libertards don't inhabit the real world, but stop making this kind of shit up. I know that you masturbate to an image of Rand every night, but leave the rest of us out of your deranged fantasy.
In the first place Lincoln was not a Founding Father. Hello, those were the people during the American Revolution, not the Civil War. I guess you threw him in so you could pretend that you are not a racist.
So please keep you cult leader to yourself. This kind of shit is fine if you are in North Korea praising Kim Jong-Il, but outside of crazy land it marks you as an idiot.
A random suggestion: Have the motherboards all parallel at a 45 degree angle. This could provide passive heat driven air flow. The cool air enters at the lower edge and exits at the higher edge, so one side of the stack is the cool side and the opposite side is the warm side, I would think that you want the CPU fan near the upper edge of the board.
I don't even have to mention incidents, just company names: IBM, MicroSoft, Oracle, Cisco, Apple, Rambus.
Remember, a lot of the time they get away with it (Windows Office, Powerpoint). Even though they are pushing an aging and ill suited CPU, through shear muscle (overt Mafia reference) they just might succeed.
The bacteria take uranium out of solution and turn it into nanowires outside their outer membrane. They have tested it outside in a uranium mine tailings pile. The goal is to build a bacterial water treatment cell that produces electricity while it filters out dissolved uranium.
This is not for generating power, the energy produced is a by-product. I doubt that the resultant energy would pay for it's own production. However, the electricity could be used to help pump water through the system, which is a neat trick and will help to reduce cleanup costs.
Italian Dark Matter. Do you mean Espresso?
This article lists Riverside/San Bernadino a having the worst outlook for recovery of the housing market. http://www.businessinsider.com/thirteen-housing-markets-that-will-never-recover-2010-5#1-riverside-ca-housing-prices-are-down-52-and-unemployment-is-at-18-13
Housing prices are down 52% and unemployment is at 18%. Why build a bunch of new empty houses when some many new houses are sitting idle right now?
Specifically the HH1 jet has some of the streaming blob like motion created using light show fluid projections techniques. This is done on an overhead projector with a big watch glass (a big shallow section of a sphere) and volatile fluids. Colors are dripped into the liquid and as the glass is moved they mix around and bubbles form from a combination of the heat of the projector and changing pressure in the liquid.
It's all fluid dynamic, in outer space on a table top.
First have the kids define the steps for making the sandwich. Write them on the board. Then "execute" making the sandwich. They will make a bunch of typical mistakes. For example, they will forget steps like taking the bread out of the bag, opening the jam and peanut jars, etc. So as you go through the steps, you stop when there is an obviously wrong action. Each mistake is recorded as a change to the "program" on the board.
This shows how simple the steps have to be, and also shows how programming is about breaking down complex activities into very simple steps. It also shows debugging.
And at the end, you can eat the sandwich!!!
Under the hood Lua is a lot more like Scheme. It supports closures http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_science) and tail recursion http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tail_recursion. Both these concepts are prominent in Scheme.
It does not have C++ style objects, but it does have object inheritance like PHP, JavaScript, SmallTalk and Pure. It is very reflexive so the programmer can easily access low level behavior. This access is how object inheritance is implemented.
The fun part is how you can use all these features to solve problems. For example, objects can be made in more then one way. You are not stuck with a one size fits all solution. Or you can just use inheritance and have a very lite waight object style. You control the language, the language does not control you.
It also has a single data structure, the table, that can easily map to many data structures. It can be an associative array or a numeric indexed vector. All values, including functions are first class. A table can have any data item as it's index and as a value. For example, a table can be indexed by a function. If the associated value is a table, you could then execute the function using the table as it's input.
So Lua is flexible. It supports many programming styles, including traditional script style imperative programming. It can also be Scheme like and support a much more functional style, if you so choose. It's like s Swiss army knife. You can fix things and also open a bottle of beer or wine. That's why it's fun. As a bonus, it also is one of the fastest and smallest scripting languages around. What's not to like?
Are you volunteering to replace the test animals? Or are you going to give up all medical treatment because of the history of animal testing?
From their FAQ.
Why not use language X instead of Lua?
We needed a language that matched all of the following criteria:
Lua was the first language to match all the criteria. The known scripting languages tend to be much too large for our use. Specifically, we have rejected Java, Perl, Python, Ruby, Scheme on one or more of those criteria.
I think that one of the most important points is "Fun to work with". Lua is fun.
It is a really great time for astronomy right know. I hope there are more posts like this.
Over here in the real world, there are vast evil conspiracies that succeed in manipulating your life. This is not one of them. The real manipulators have names like "Chiat/Day Advertising Agencie", " Fox News", "NRA", or "U.S. Chamber of Commerce". When you worry about the government rounding you up you give these groups a free pass to do whatever they want. "Ignore that man behind the curtain."
I suggest that you find some real conspiracies and try to free yourself from them. You might actually get some where and make the world a better place.
Just take drugs and watch it. Any hallucinogen will do. We'll come and visit you in the mental institution afterwords.
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/43829568/ns/business-us_business/t/truthiness-fox-going-light-scandal-coverage/ This article is on MSNBC, but the study quoted is from the Pew Media Research Center.
For some other, more amusing examples, look at these Actual Headlines vs. Fox News Headlines
http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/actual-news-headlines-vs-fox-news-headlines and http://www.buzzfeed.com/mjs538/more-fox-news-headlines-vs-actual-news-headlines
So "AP Poll: Economic worries pose new snags for Obama" becomes "AP: Obama Has A Big Problem with White Women". This is not news, it's organized lying.
If you think this is "Fair and Balanced" and that it's OK because they "admit their bias" then you have serious mental problems. I suspect that you should be under professional mental health care. There are many treatment options that will address your delusional thinking. Current drugs along with cognitive therapy are very effective. I urge you get evaluated, because in your current state you are a danger to yourself and others. You should not be diving or operating heavy equipment, or be allowed access to sharp objects or guns without close supervision. It would be a shame if someone got hurt because of your untreated mental illness.