There are some types of injuries to the back that an X-ray will not show.
That's true but that does not change the fact that the xray (properly called a radiograph or roentgenograph by the way) is likely the correct thing to try first. A xray is a screening test in this case. It's relatively cheap and the strengths and weaknesses are well understood and quantified. If it discovers the problem there is no reason to do a much more expensive MRI. If the doctor has reason to suspect from clinical indications that the xray wouldn't show anything he certainly can go straight to the MRI when appropriate.
Screening tests are standard and appropriate practice for a a huge variety of conditions. Use an inexpensive and well understood screening test which will catch most of the problems and then move to more complicated/expensive/accurate tests when needed. Thoughtlessly using a gold standard test right off the bat is very often wasteful and unnecessary and probably fraudulent as well. An MRI doesn't diagnose a broken bone any better than an xray and any doctor who orders such unnecessarily expensive tests is committing insurance fraud.
Another key question when ordering a test is whether the test results could result in a difference in treatment. There is no point in ordering a more complicated and expensive test if the patient will receive the same treatment in the end anyway.
In this day and age, you should already know about weight and diet.
Should, yes I agree. But if you've ever actually worked with the general public you should realize how foolish the general public can be. Even if they know, they might be unwilling/unable to take action. Furthermore physicians often run into patients (especially older patients) who are, often through no fault of their own, mentally incompetent, psychologically damaged, or just not very bright. You're absolutely right that diet and exercise matter but even motivated high functioning people struggle with controlling their diet and getting to the gym.
BTW, there already is a sort of best practices book out there. It lists all the generally accepted treatments for a variety of injuries.
Ha! I'm married to a physician and I've done statistical studies of medical data and there is FAR more debate about what constitutes "best practices" than you could possibly imagine. Insurance companies and medicare have their version of it but have NO illusion that there is any kind of universal consensus for many, many, many conditions. Very often there simply is insufficient or conflicting data on what exactly results in the best patient outcomes. Many court cases are precisely because of this fact - we often have to rely on professional judgment, experience and intuition because the standard of care isn't always agreed upon.
Even agreeing on diagnostic criteria can be a difficult process - never mind treatment options. Pathology involves far more judgment and educated guesses than you probably would be comfortable knowing about. Medicine is a science but there is a LOT we still don't know.
1. Your company is less likely to send managerial positions over seas.
Hah! Who are you going to manage if your entire department is sent out of the country? You can't just send work to China or India and expect the workers to manage themselves. You WILL need someone on site or disaster is all but assured. Yes there is some need for some local folks but someone is going to be shown the door. I've got a lot of experience in global sourcing and anyone who thinks management won't need to go overseas along with the workforce are deluding themselves.
2. At age 40, you should have aquired experience that makes your time more valuable than gold.
Easy to say but not really possible for everyone in the real world. The world needs specialists and if your specialty changes underneath you you're probably going to struggle. Even if you plan for various contingencies, sometimes life just isn't so cooperative with even the best laid plans. Changing careers at age 40+ can be incredibly challenging, especially if you have family depending on you.
3. If you're in a managerial position, being fully trained on new technology is not necessary. You only need to know enough to properly manage your associates.
And if you are management with no technology expertise you are that much easier to replace. There's no free lunch here. Management is a skill just like engineering and managers can be replaced too.
4. New college graduates do not have the experience needed to effectively and efficiently manage.
This is generally but not universally true. I graduated much older than many of my classmates because I worked through college. I certainly had the experience to manage small teams and in fact did.
5. Ok, so you can't do too much about absurd deadline demands. This is not unique to IT by any means. But with higher levels of experience comes more bargaining power.
Sometimes the Faustian bargain you make to get more experience or higher in management is to submit to more absurd deadlines. Customers are often the ones setting the deadlines and they are notoriously unforgiving if you can't meet their expectations - realistic or otherwise.
If Google was shut down for 3.5 days in 2008 it would have cost them $209 million in revenue. A few more days of that and it might become real money.
How many lives will be seriously inconvenienced (much less endangered) by its downtime?
Lives won't but investments will be endangered and that does "seriously inconvenience" people. I present our current economy as Exhibit A. You think Google or Amazon or Yahoo would be the economic powerhouses they are if they were down for half a week per year? Customers wouldn't trust the service, investors would be wary, slashdot would bash them and they would all be right to do so. An internet site can't get revenue when it is shut down. It's a 24/7 business and the guys who run Twitter need to behave like they understand that if they have any aspirations of turning it into a real business.
Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it.
Ahh, the old "99% is good enough" argument. Occasionally 99% is actually good enough but you have to be VERY careful with that argument. It is extremely easy to come up with examples where 99% is absolutely miserable performance. All you need is a large number of transactions or severe consequences for a failure. The former definitely applies here and possibly the latter too once money gets involved.
For example if 99% were good enough reliability for air traffic controllers, each year 640,000 flights would be at serious risk during takeoff and landings. Granted, no lives are at risk with Twitter but it illustrates my point that 99% can be terrible performance. Trust me when I say you do NOT want your bank thinking 99% is good enough.
Downtime of 3.5 days per year is pathetic for a company with serious e-commerce ambitions. There really is no excuse since the technology to ensure high availability is widely available and well understood. If Twitter were some tiny little startup with two guys in a garage doing the programming I might be more forgiving but they aren't anymore. They've gotten millions of dollars in financing and ought to be able to afford some real equipment and talent. If/when they start getting serious money and paying customers involved they had better raise their game.
It is absolutely irrelevant. The cable is not the issue for the power adapter, nor is anything about data transfer relevant to the question of charging over USB.
The Green Plug stuff is a proprietary solution to the problem that is insignificant to most people. We already have candidates for standard power ports available. A more intelligent controller system is nice but seriously misses the big picture. I've got nothing against what they are doing but it isn't solving my pain.
I can't charge or sync my phone or camera or ipod without some sort of cable. Nokia forces me to carry a proprietary connectors (TWO!) to do it despite it being unnecessary. Apple also makes me carry a separate and unnecessary proprietary cable. Both are already be powered on the "wall" end by USB. I don't need a special power controller, I need a consistent interface for the power equipment I already have. We'll save far more power by eliminating redundant cable manufacturing than by anything Green Cable would accomplish - especially since no one is adopting their technology.
The iPod dock connector is designed to support accessories and other connections.
The primary purpose of USB is to support accessory devices. There is nothing the iPod connector does that absolutely requires a proprietary cable. It has power, data, sound, s-video, and accessory detection. A proprietary single cable is only one of many ways to provide those services. It would be quite possible to separate the USB for power and data from the rest of the connector pins. Apple made a design decision as is their right but let's not pretend their solution was the only one possible.
A standard USB connection cannot be used for this purpose, because the accessory would then need USB client hardware, and the iPod itself would need to build in bulky and CPU-intensive USB host hardware.
USB hardware is already there and I'm pretty sure Apple can find a way to make it fit if a little more is needed. Plus if apple really needs extra capabilities they could, *gasp*, use a second standard cable when needed. I can't speak for you but NOTHING I do with my iPod that requires a special cable were the device designed appropriately.
Clearly, you simply did not read or comprehend the post.
It said "The other end, on the device, is not the goal of the project, which is to standardize DC power sources to be universal" which is complete and utter nonsense. USB is already a de-facto standard DC power source and works fine for a huge number of devices. Problem solved and moving on. Now I only care about the cables on device end which remains a tower of babel of unnecessarily incompatible connectors.
It wouldn't work. There are three different standard USB connectors (four if you include the square one for printers) alone.
So having unnecessary proprietary cables for each of 50 different manufacturers is somehow preferable to you? Thank $diety you don't do purchasing for my company. Furthermore your logic is faulty. Just because there happen to be 3 or 4 different USB connectors does not mean all three have to be used. It's quite possible to standardize on any one of them.
If you want to create a project to encourage standardized syncing cables for proprietary devices, have at it. This is about standardized charging receptacles.
A charging receptacle is USELESS without a cable to attach to, ergo it matters. USB is already a de-facto standard power source. The wall end is solved as far as I'm concerned despite the flaws in USB as an implementation. I prefer good and available over a perfect, proprietary and impossible to implement any day.
It's hardly wasteful to carry a handful of easily stored, effectively weightless cables, as opposed to bulky, space-wasting wall warts.
Using bank balances as an example of where accuracy isn't required? Seriously? I want whatever drugs the person who wrote that article summary is taking because it must be really good stuff. I'm a certified accountant and believe me there would be hell to pay for even a one penny error in financial calculations. I can't think of a worse example to illustrate inaccuracy being "helpful".
BTW Financial calculations are almost never done using floating point. They use integers on both sides of the decimal point to whatever precision needed precisely because using floating point will inevitably result in an error. It's a pain but it's absolutely necessary because you don't dare have an error of even $0.00001 cents.
All of Apple's portable devices charge over USB or, if it's an older iPod, a Firewire port. This has always been the case. You're looking at the wrong end of the equation.
It's not irrelevant because only one end of many cables (including Apple's) are standard USB connectors, not both ends. There is no technological reason Apple could not sync and charge via a standard USB (or Firewire) connector on the device. They simply chose to use a proprietary cable instead which means we all have to lug around an additional cable which cannot be used with any non-Apple device.
If you only have the one device you might not care but if you are like me and use many portable devices you end up carrying a rats nest of proprietary cables every time you travel. It's unnecessary, annoying, and wasteful.
You still have to bring your own cords.
I don't think anyone said otherwise but we should only have to bring ONE standard USB cord, and one transformer. Not a different power cord, data cord and transformer for each device we wish to charge. For devices with higher power requirements, standard cables could be used as well. There is no reason my Thinkpad needs a special power cord and transformer but every laptop brand has one.
On planes and in public spaces where this would make a difference, you'd always have to supply your own cables, so the device end is mostly irrelevant.
I disagree because it is wasteful to haul around 20 different power and data cables. In my opinion everything should use a standard cable whenever possible. The fact that USB can carry data in addition to power should reduce the needed number of cords further.
For example I have a Nokia phone and Nokia mostly uses their own proprietary power connector. While I have charging cables for my phone with a USB connector on the "wall" end the device end is a proprietary Nokia connector. There is no technological reason I can divine for that choice - it is simply a lock in scheme. Plus if I want to sync my phone's data, Nokia has a *different* cable for that - again for no technological reason whatsoever. I also have to carry a special cable for my iPod for no good reason.
I've started a number of companies and you're saying a bunch of stuff that isn't really accurate.
You don't make money making Open Source Software, you make money supporting it / consulting services, packaging and distribution. Making software is expensive.
Actually making software can be pretty cheap, relatively speaking. Engineering costs for any pure software company are 10%-25% of total costs. Most of the cost is actually in sales, marketing, and administration. Don't take my word for it - look up the income statement of any publicly traded software company from Microsoft on down.
Being a 'a true open-source company,' leads to little teeth to get a good competitive advantage.
That doesn't necessarily have to be true at all. If you are the developer of a given piece of software and if companies will pay for services relating to that software, the primary developer is in the best position to provide those services since no one knows the software better. Furthermore it is impossible to undercut open source software on price so deep pockets don't help the big guy like they might if the company depended on revenue via a traditional software business model. Once the software is installed companies find it expensive to switch platforms which can mean recurring revenue and barriers to entry. That's certainly the basis for competitive advantage though not any assurance of such advantage.
If you work harder then everyone else you should deserve more.
Deserve? Maybe, but maybe not. The party that takes the most financial risk is who deserves and will get the most reward or take the biggest losses. Hard work is a factor but not even close to the biggest one. You don't make the biggest bucks unless you have the most skin in the game.
A Small company against the big guys. It will take a while to gain trust. If you start out big(ish) then you can actually get some automatic cred.
A guy with a track record of starting successful organizations (like MySQL) often gets to skip this step. The hardest company to start is usually the first one because no investor knows who the hell you are and they certainly don't trust you. Plus pretty much no one starts off big. Only guys with a track record are able to raise the large dollar amounts necessary to start "big".
Where is funding going to start how will you get a loan. If he does get one the banks are stupider then I thought.
Very, very few startups get funding from a bank. Banks want tangible assets as collateral for the money they loan and startups rarely have such assets. Usually funding comes from friends, family, angels, private equity, venture capital, government small business loans and various other sources. Banks, not so much.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...
Doesn't mean they stay equal or that their outcomes are equal. Hell the Constitution in its original form acknowledged slavery and denied women and minorities the right to vote among other things. (fortunately since amended) Children have many rights but until they are of a certain age they lack the many rights and privileges including but not limited to:
The right to vote
The right to hold office
They cannot enter into any valid contract by themselves
They cannot hold most forms of employment
They cannot drive
They cannot legally purchase alchohol, cigarettes or most prescription medications.
Join the military
Yeah, sounds like equal treatment to me!/sarcasm
That fucker up there said it very simply over two centuries ago.
That "fucker" was also a white slave owner and when they said "men" most of them quite specifically meant white landed men. Not women, not minorities, and certainly not children. We just interpret it differently today.
Copyright should be based on a fixed duration, such as 25 years, perhaps with a registration or notice requirement for it to take effect, and perhaps with a low-cost renewal option (for perhaps another 25 years).
I agree with your argument from the standpoint of what *should* happen. I'm rather pessimistic though on whether it will happen. The US has, for better or worse, based a lot of the economy on intangible goods. This means that those who produce those intangible goods and make a lot of money from them (media, software, etc) are in a powerful position to influence the laws in ways favorable to them and arguably detrimental to society overall. Call it the cynics version of the golden rule ("he who has the gold makes the rules").
The only ways I can see to break this problem is with a well funded and well executed PR/lobbying campaign that embarrasses our lawmakers into action or some sort of ruling from the Supreme Court that these excessive copyrights terms have become unconstitutional. In the former case most of the parties with the money and an interest in copyright that are those who are FOR longer and more stringent copyright "protections". As far as the Supreme Court goes, they've ruled several times that determining copyright length is the responsibility of Congress. While that doesn't mean they won't change their mind in the future, it is unlikely the Supreme Court will be much help anytime soon.
Even public interest groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation aren't working on shortening copyright as far as I can tell. They're too busy fighting off even more egregious legislation like the DMCA and dealing with DRM issues if indeed they are interested in shorter copyright at all.
What parts of an ICBM can you engineer without math?
You'd probably be surprised. Plenty of engineering is done by trial and error and guesswork and estimation. A lot of early aerospace engineering took place before we had computers and calculators to actually model everything that was going on. So a lot of educated guesses and prototypes were used to figure out workable solutions.
Don't get me wrong, engineering without math is a very limiting endeavor. I'm just addressing the misconception that engineering is a subset of math which is simply not true.
In the same way it doesn't have to be a complicated equation to be math, you're using a lot more math subconsciously then you think you are.
Correct but finish the logic of what you've said. Most engineering requires at least simple math but that does not imply all engineering requires math. Take a simple example of a flint arrowhead from ancient times. It's a marvel of engineering in its way but no equations or mathematical calculations are required for its design or construction - not even simple ones. Simply an idea based on observed phenomena and available materials and some trial and error to figure out what worked.
Granted math is critical to engineering so your point is certainly valid as far as it goes. Just be aware that engineering and science are more than just math.
My point was just that it's redundant saying it requires engineering AND mathematics, you can't possibly be an engineer without knowing maths.
Sure you can. Not a very good engineer perhaps but it certainly is possible to do real engineering without math and in fact it happens all the time. I can design and create all sorts of things without using so much as a single equation and that is real engineering. Not very sophisticated granted but engineering nonetheless. Engineering is applied science, not applied mathematics. Math can help a lot but isn't always required.
So I'm not sure why you think the additional work is particularly hard for the same nation state's scientists that originally put the satellite up.
It is hard and I disagree with your assertion that it is not a difficult engineering problem. That said it does not logically follow from the fact that it is hard that it is impossible. They probably can get the problem solved and they have some pretty smart folks to do the job in all likelihood. But being possible and being easy are not the same thing.
That list is so redudant, A) every thing on the list is a subset of mathematics
I am an engineer and if you think engineering is nothing more than a subset of mathematics you don't understand engineering. There are many aspects to engineering that have nothing whatsoever to do with mathematics. With a little poetic license math could rightly be called the language of engineering but that does not make engineering a sub domain of mathematics. Math is indispensable to the study and practice of science and engineering but don't ever confuse the the tool with the discipline.
Riiiight... That's why the term "rocket scientist" is used as a synonym for intelligence - because the engineering is so easy anyone can do it...
Oh wait, it requires expertise in (per wikipedia) fluid mechanics, structural mechanics, orbital mechanics, flight dynamics, physics, mathematics, control engineering, materials science, aeroelasticity, avionics, reliability engineering, noise control, and flight testing among other domains. Yeah, real easy.
Sure you can if the information is in the form of a secret and obtained illegally. Could be a trade secret or it could be a state secret. Once it is stolen it loses its status as a secret and with it potentially significant value to the holder of the secret. That's what spies do, they steal information or more accurately secret information. There may be legal ways to obtain the information an that is not stealing but the illegal methods are colloquially (and accurately IMO) referred to as theft.
Yes, pat your selves on the back. America (9,161,923 SQ KM) has over taken Germany (357,021 SQ KM).
Way to argue against yourself. The power has to be transmitted and good turbine locations are often not especially close to population centers. This can add dramatically to the cost. Germany's higher population density makes transmission costs notably lower since they don't have to build and maintain the infrastructure.
Long after the bombings have stopped, that weapon still kills random civilians. It does everything else the other bombs do, PLUS poisoning people.
You question my mental abilities but but arguing about something you haven't really thought through while calling someone else stupid doesn't aid your cause. It just makes you look bad.
Let's examine other types of weapons that kill after the peace treaty shall we? They include land mines, unexploded munitions, diseases (both from weaponized and natural sources), residual chemical toxicity, low level radiation from sources such as depleted uranium shells, mental trauma (PTSD and others), and I can keep going if you like. Nuclear weapons don't blow people's legs off 5 years after the conflict ends like land mines now do they? So by your own logic nuclear weapons do NOT do "all the evils of conventional weapons, and then some."
Aid workers (yes I know some personally) will tell you that they can predict outbreaks of diseases like malaria or cholera by looking where armed conflicts occur. These kill people just as dead as if they had been hit by a bomb. Nuclear weapons are not the only weapon that continues to kill after the conflict is over and in fact aren't even the only potential source of cancer after a conflict is over. Your argument is both wrong and completely misses the point about why nuclear weapons matter.
We care about nuclear weapons because they are an efficient (for lack of a better word) way to kill a lot of people and destroy property very quickly. Used in mass they might even wipe out all of humanity. THAT is what is special about them. Arguing about residual cancer deaths or that they are somehow "special" ignores the elephant in the room about nuclear weapons.
Honestly we NEED a led light bulb that will DIM acceptably for people.
OK, I'm down with this. A low energy consumption dimmable bulb would be a useful thing indeed.
...most people want to be able to use dimmers
"Most"? Really? I think your argument ran off the rails here. There is nothing preventing people from using dimmer switches now - they just can't use most CFLs in those sockets. I think "most" people don't really care and the evidence for that is that CFL bulbs, which generally aren't dimmable, are selling like hotcakes and increasing rapidly. Many houses might have some dimmers but usually not everywhere. That's not to say dimmable switches aren't a good idea but let's not overestimate the demand for them shall we?
So you think none of those were caused by nuclear weapons?
Would you be so kind as to point exactly where I said that?
Notice how you claim that I don't care about "death" in reply to my comment about deaths. Quite the reasonable argument you're building there...
You said "kids that later died of cancer makes them special as hell." Your save-the-children argument is apparently that secondary cancer deaths of kids from nuclear radiation are somehow magically more special than any other kind of death. It takes a really craven sort of logic to think that any kind of death in war is special. Being killed in a war horrible in any form and by any means. The type of weapon and the age of the victim doesn't change that on little bit.
...Japanese by dropping it near the shore so they could witness their impending doom before having to taste it.
They could have shown them footage of project Trinity. Also remember that there was a three day window between the first detonation and the second. Given that the Japanese didn't surrender after the detonation of the first weapon on an actual city, one can make a pretty reasonable argument that detonating the bomb off shore would have been unlikely to trigger a surrender. The offshore demonstration is a nice idea but probably unrealistically optimistic.
You don't measure the effectiveness of a weapon by the payload, but by how much damage it will do per unit of time.
That's kind of a silly definition. A weapon is judged by its ability to accomplish the objectives of its user. In that sense the Hiroshima bomb was a failure because it did not trigger the immediate unconditional surrender of Japan. That took another bomb three days later.
The nuke at Hiroshima killed 80,000 people the moment it exploded.
You have your facts wrong. The Little Boy bomb was estimated to have killed 66,000 people outright in the initial blast. The final fatality count due to injuries, radiation and other effects is unclear but probably somewhere over 100,000 by the end of 1945.
...damages the moral of the enemy far more greatly than any other weapon.
I'd give that honor (for lack of a better word) to biological weapons - though that is my own opinion. They are MUCH scarier because they are much easier to produce, harder to detect, more insidious in their effect, and harder to control. The only real defense against many biological attacks even today is quarantine.
Not that nukes aren't scary as hell... You're completely right about that.
Slashdot Mirror
There are some types of injuries to the back that an X-ray will not show.
That's true but that does not change the fact that the xray (properly called a radiograph or roentgenograph by the way) is likely the correct thing to try first. A xray is a screening test in this case. It's relatively cheap and the strengths and weaknesses are well understood and quantified. If it discovers the problem there is no reason to do a much more expensive MRI. If the doctor has reason to suspect from clinical indications that the xray wouldn't show anything he certainly can go straight to the MRI when appropriate.
Screening tests are standard and appropriate practice for a a huge variety of conditions. Use an inexpensive and well understood screening test which will catch most of the problems and then move to more complicated/expensive/accurate tests when needed. Thoughtlessly using a gold standard test right off the bat is very often wasteful and unnecessary and probably fraudulent as well. An MRI doesn't diagnose a broken bone any better than an xray and any doctor who orders such unnecessarily expensive tests is committing insurance fraud.
Another key question when ordering a test is whether the test results could result in a difference in treatment. There is no point in ordering a more complicated and expensive test if the patient will receive the same treatment in the end anyway.
In this day and age, you should already know about weight and diet.
Should, yes I agree. But if you've ever actually worked with the general public you should realize how foolish the general public can be. Even if they know, they might be unwilling/unable to take action. Furthermore physicians often run into patients (especially older patients) who are, often through no fault of their own, mentally incompetent, psychologically damaged, or just not very bright. You're absolutely right that diet and exercise matter but even motivated high functioning people struggle with controlling their diet and getting to the gym.
BTW, there already is a sort of best practices book out there. It lists all the generally accepted treatments for a variety of injuries.
Ha! I'm married to a physician and I've done statistical studies of medical data and there is FAR more debate about what constitutes "best practices" than you could possibly imagine. Insurance companies and medicare have their version of it but have NO illusion that there is any kind of universal consensus for many, many, many conditions. Very often there simply is insufficient or conflicting data on what exactly results in the best patient outcomes. Many court cases are precisely because of this fact - we often have to rely on professional judgment, experience and intuition because the standard of care isn't always agreed upon.
Even agreeing on diagnostic criteria can be a difficult process - never mind treatment options. Pathology involves far more judgment and educated guesses than you probably would be comfortable knowing about. Medicine is a science but there is a LOT we still don't know.
1. Your company is less likely to send managerial positions over seas.
Hah! Who are you going to manage if your entire department is sent out of the country? You can't just send work to China or India and expect the workers to manage themselves. You WILL need someone on site or disaster is all but assured. Yes there is some need for some local folks but someone is going to be shown the door. I've got a lot of experience in global sourcing and anyone who thinks management won't need to go overseas along with the workforce are deluding themselves.
2. At age 40, you should have aquired experience that makes your time more valuable than gold.
Easy to say but not really possible for everyone in the real world. The world needs specialists and if your specialty changes underneath you you're probably going to struggle. Even if you plan for various contingencies, sometimes life just isn't so cooperative with even the best laid plans. Changing careers at age 40+ can be incredibly challenging, especially if you have family depending on you.
3. If you're in a managerial position, being fully trained on new technology is not necessary. You only need to know enough to properly manage your associates.
And if you are management with no technology expertise you are that much easier to replace. There's no free lunch here. Management is a skill just like engineering and managers can be replaced too.
4. New college graduates do not have the experience needed to effectively and efficiently manage.
This is generally but not universally true. I graduated much older than many of my classmates because I worked through college. I certainly had the experience to manage small teams and in fact did.
5. Ok, so you can't do too much about absurd deadline demands. This is not unique to IT by any means. But with higher levels of experience comes more bargaining power.
Sometimes the Faustian bargain you make to get more experience or higher in management is to submit to more absurd deadlines. Customers are often the ones setting the deadlines and they are notoriously unforgiving if you can't meet their expectations - realistic or otherwise.
84 hours is not as devastating as it can sound.
If Google was shut down for 3.5 days in 2008 it would have cost them $209 million in revenue. A few more days of that and it might become real money.
How many lives will be seriously inconvenienced (much less endangered) by its downtime?
Lives won't but investments will be endangered and that does "seriously inconvenience" people. I present our current economy as Exhibit A. You think Google or Amazon or Yahoo would be the economic powerhouses they are if they were down for half a week per year? Customers wouldn't trust the service, investors would be wary, slashdot would bash them and they would all be right to do so. An internet site can't get revenue when it is shut down. It's a 24/7 business and the guys who run Twitter need to behave like they understand that if they have any aspirations of turning it into a real business.
Sure, that's not great compared to 99.95%, but it was down less than 1 in every 100 times you tried to reach it.
Ahh, the old "99% is good enough" argument. Occasionally 99% is actually good enough but you have to be VERY careful with that argument. It is extremely easy to come up with examples where 99% is absolutely miserable performance. All you need is a large number of transactions or severe consequences for a failure. The former definitely applies here and possibly the latter too once money gets involved.
For example if 99% were good enough reliability for air traffic controllers, each year 640,000 flights would be at serious risk during takeoff and landings. Granted, no lives are at risk with Twitter but it illustrates my point that 99% can be terrible performance. Trust me when I say you do NOT want your bank thinking 99% is good enough.
Downtime of 3.5 days per year is pathetic for a company with serious e-commerce ambitions. There really is no excuse since the technology to ensure high availability is widely available and well understood. If Twitter were some tiny little startup with two guys in a garage doing the programming I might be more forgiving but they aren't anymore. They've gotten millions of dollars in financing and ought to be able to afford some real equipment and talent. If/when they start getting serious money and paying customers involved they had better raise their game.
My iPod doesn't get charged by USB. My friend's iPhone doesn't get charged by USB.
Maybe you have some special iPod and iPhone that is somehow different from every iPod produced since 2004. Somehow I doubt it though...
It is absolutely irrelevant. The cable is not the issue for the power adapter, nor is anything about data transfer relevant to the question of charging over USB.
The Green Plug stuff is a proprietary solution to the problem that is insignificant to most people. We already have candidates for standard power ports available. A more intelligent controller system is nice but seriously misses the big picture. I've got nothing against what they are doing but it isn't solving my pain.
I can't charge or sync my phone or camera or ipod without some sort of cable. Nokia forces me to carry a proprietary connectors (TWO!) to do it despite it being unnecessary. Apple also makes me carry a separate and unnecessary proprietary cable. Both are already be powered on the "wall" end by USB. I don't need a special power controller, I need a consistent interface for the power equipment I already have. We'll save far more power by eliminating redundant cable manufacturing than by anything Green Cable would accomplish - especially since no one is adopting their technology.
The iPod dock connector is designed to support accessories and other connections.
The primary purpose of USB is to support accessory devices. There is nothing the iPod connector does that absolutely requires a proprietary cable. It has power, data, sound, s-video, and accessory detection. A proprietary single cable is only one of many ways to provide those services. It would be quite possible to separate the USB for power and data from the rest of the connector pins. Apple made a design decision as is their right but let's not pretend their solution was the only one possible.
A standard USB connection cannot be used for this purpose, because the accessory would then need USB client hardware, and the iPod itself would need to build in bulky and CPU-intensive USB host hardware.
USB hardware is already there and I'm pretty sure Apple can find a way to make it fit if a little more is needed. Plus if apple really needs extra capabilities they could, *gasp*, use a second standard cable when needed. I can't speak for you but NOTHING I do with my iPod that requires a special cable were the device designed appropriately.
Clearly, you simply did not read or comprehend the post.
It said "The other end, on the device, is not the goal of the project, which is to standardize DC power sources to be universal" which is complete and utter nonsense. USB is already a de-facto standard DC power source and works fine for a huge number of devices. Problem solved and moving on. Now I only care about the cables on device end which remains a tower of babel of unnecessarily incompatible connectors.
It wouldn't work. There are three different standard USB connectors (four if you include the square one for printers) alone.
So having unnecessary proprietary cables for each of 50 different manufacturers is somehow preferable to you? Thank $diety you don't do purchasing for my company. Furthermore your logic is faulty. Just because there happen to be 3 or 4 different USB connectors does not mean all three have to be used. It's quite possible to standardize on any one of them.
If you want to create a project to encourage standardized syncing cables for proprietary devices, have at it. This is about standardized charging receptacles.
A charging receptacle is USELESS without a cable to attach to, ergo it matters. USB is already a de-facto standard power source. The wall end is solved as far as I'm concerned despite the flaws in USB as an implementation. I prefer good and available over a perfect, proprietary and impossible to implement any day.
It's hardly wasteful to carry a handful of easily stored, effectively weightless cables, as opposed to bulky, space-wasting wall warts.
First off, they aren't weigh
Using bank balances as an example of where accuracy isn't required? Seriously? I want whatever drugs the person who wrote that article summary is taking because it must be really good stuff. I'm a certified accountant and believe me there would be hell to pay for even a one penny error in financial calculations. I can't think of a worse example to illustrate inaccuracy being "helpful".
BTW Financial calculations are almost never done using floating point. They use integers on both sides of the decimal point to whatever precision needed precisely because using floating point will inevitably result in an error. It's a pain but it's absolutely necessary because you don't dare have an error of even $0.00001 cents.
All of Apple's portable devices charge over USB or, if it's an older iPod, a Firewire port. This has always been the case. You're looking at the wrong end of the equation.
It's not irrelevant because only one end of many cables (including Apple's) are standard USB connectors, not both ends. There is no technological reason Apple could not sync and charge via a standard USB (or Firewire) connector on the device. They simply chose to use a proprietary cable instead which means we all have to lug around an additional cable which cannot be used with any non-Apple device.
If you only have the one device you might not care but if you are like me and use many portable devices you end up carrying a rats nest of proprietary cables every time you travel. It's unnecessary, annoying, and wasteful.
You still have to bring your own cords.
I don't think anyone said otherwise but we should only have to bring ONE standard USB cord, and one transformer. Not a different power cord, data cord and transformer for each device we wish to charge. For devices with higher power requirements, standard cables could be used as well. There is no reason my Thinkpad needs a special power cord and transformer but every laptop brand has one.
On planes and in public spaces where this would make a difference, you'd always have to supply your own cables, so the device end is mostly irrelevant.
I disagree because it is wasteful to haul around 20 different power and data cables. In my opinion everything should use a standard cable whenever possible. The fact that USB can carry data in addition to power should reduce the needed number of cords further.
For example I have a Nokia phone and Nokia mostly uses their own proprietary power connector. While I have charging cables for my phone with a USB connector on the "wall" end the device end is a proprietary Nokia connector. There is no technological reason I can divine for that choice - it is simply a lock in scheme. Plus if I want to sync my phone's data, Nokia has a *different* cable for that - again for no technological reason whatsoever. I also have to carry a special cable for my iPod for no good reason.
I've started a number of companies and you're saying a bunch of stuff that isn't really accurate.
You don't make money making Open Source Software, you make money supporting it / consulting services, packaging and distribution. Making software is expensive.
Actually making software can be pretty cheap, relatively speaking. Engineering costs for any pure software company are 10%-25% of total costs. Most of the cost is actually in sales, marketing, and administration. Don't take my word for it - look up the income statement of any publicly traded software company from Microsoft on down.
Being a 'a true open-source company,' leads to little teeth to get a good competitive advantage.
That doesn't necessarily have to be true at all. If you are the developer of a given piece of software and if companies will pay for services relating to that software, the primary developer is in the best position to provide those services since no one knows the software better. Furthermore it is impossible to undercut open source software on price so deep pockets don't help the big guy like they might if the company depended on revenue via a traditional software business model. Once the software is installed companies find it expensive to switch platforms which can mean recurring revenue and barriers to entry. That's certainly the basis for competitive advantage though not any assurance of such advantage.
If you work harder then everyone else you should deserve more.
Deserve? Maybe, but maybe not. The party that takes the most financial risk is who deserves and will get the most reward or take the biggest losses. Hard work is a factor but not even close to the biggest one. You don't make the biggest bucks unless you have the most skin in the game.
A Small company against the big guys. It will take a while to gain trust. If you start out big(ish) then you can actually get some automatic cred.
A guy with a track record of starting successful organizations (like MySQL) often gets to skip this step. The hardest company to start is usually the first one because no investor knows who the hell you are and they certainly don't trust you. Plus pretty much no one starts off big. Only guys with a track record are able to raise the large dollar amounts necessary to start "big".
Where is funding going to start how will you get a loan. If he does get one the banks are stupider then I thought.
Very, very few startups get funding from a bank. Banks want tangible assets as collateral for the money they loan and startups rarely have such assets. Usually funding comes from friends, family, angels, private equity, venture capital, government small business loans and various other sources. Banks, not so much.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal...
Doesn't mean they stay equal or that their outcomes are equal. Hell the Constitution in its original form acknowledged slavery and denied women and minorities the right to vote among other things. (fortunately since amended) Children have many rights but until they are of a certain age they lack the many rights and privileges including but not limited to:
Yeah, sounds like equal treatment to me! /sarcasm
That fucker up there said it very simply over two centuries ago.
That "fucker" was also a white slave owner and when they said "men" most of them quite specifically meant white landed men. Not women, not minorities, and certainly not children. We just interpret it differently today.
Copyright should be based on a fixed duration, such as 25 years, perhaps with a registration or notice requirement for it to take effect, and perhaps with a low-cost renewal option (for perhaps another 25 years).
I agree with your argument from the standpoint of what *should* happen. I'm rather pessimistic though on whether it will happen. The US has, for better or worse, based a lot of the economy on intangible goods. This means that those who produce those intangible goods and make a lot of money from them (media, software, etc) are in a powerful position to influence the laws in ways favorable to them and arguably detrimental to society overall. Call it the cynics version of the golden rule ("he who has the gold makes the rules").
The only ways I can see to break this problem is with a well funded and well executed PR/lobbying campaign that embarrasses our lawmakers into action or some sort of ruling from the Supreme Court that these excessive copyrights terms have become unconstitutional. In the former case most of the parties with the money and an interest in copyright that are those who are FOR longer and more stringent copyright "protections". As far as the Supreme Court goes, they've ruled several times that determining copyright length is the responsibility of Congress. While that doesn't mean they won't change their mind in the future, it is unlikely the Supreme Court will be much help anytime soon.
Even public interest groups like the ACLU and the Electronic Frontier Foundation aren't working on shortening copyright as far as I can tell. They're too busy fighting off even more egregious legislation like the DMCA and dealing with DRM issues if indeed they are interested in shorter copyright at all.
Semantics.
Semantics are important. Just ask any programmer.
What parts of an ICBM can you engineer without math?
You'd probably be surprised. Plenty of engineering is done by trial and error and guesswork and estimation. A lot of early aerospace engineering took place before we had computers and calculators to actually model everything that was going on. So a lot of educated guesses and prototypes were used to figure out workable solutions.
Don't get me wrong, engineering without math is a very limiting endeavor. I'm just addressing the misconception that engineering is a subset of math which is simply not true.
In the same way it doesn't have to be a complicated equation to be math, you're using a lot more math subconsciously then you think you are.
Correct but finish the logic of what you've said. Most engineering requires at least simple math but that does not imply all engineering requires math. Take a simple example of a flint arrowhead from ancient times. It's a marvel of engineering in its way but no equations or mathematical calculations are required for its design or construction - not even simple ones. Simply an idea based on observed phenomena and available materials and some trial and error to figure out what worked.
Granted math is critical to engineering so your point is certainly valid as far as it goes. Just be aware that engineering and science are more than just math.
My point was just that it's redundant saying it requires engineering AND mathematics, you can't possibly be an engineer without knowing maths.
Sure you can. Not a very good engineer perhaps but it certainly is possible to do real engineering without math and in fact it happens all the time. I can design and create all sorts of things without using so much as a single equation and that is real engineering. Not very sophisticated granted but engineering nonetheless. Engineering is applied science, not applied mathematics. Math can help a lot but isn't always required.
So I'm not sure why you think the additional work is particularly hard for the same nation state's scientists that originally put the satellite up.
It is hard and I disagree with your assertion that it is not a difficult engineering problem. That said it does not logically follow from the fact that it is hard that it is impossible. They probably can get the problem solved and they have some pretty smart folks to do the job in all likelihood. But being possible and being easy are not the same thing.
All of those are just applied mathematics.
Actually most of them are applied SCIENCE aka engineering. Huge difference.
That list is so redudant, A) every thing on the list is a subset of mathematics
I am an engineer and if you think engineering is nothing more than a subset of mathematics you don't understand engineering. There are many aspects to engineering that have nothing whatsoever to do with mathematics. With a little poetic license math could rightly be called the language of engineering but that does not make engineering a sub domain of mathematics. Math is indispensable to the study and practice of science and engineering but don't ever confuse the the tool with the discipline.
It's not a very difficult engineering problem.
Riiiight... That's why the term "rocket scientist" is used as a synonym for intelligence - because the engineering is so easy anyone can do it...
Oh wait, it requires expertise in (per wikipedia) fluid mechanics, structural mechanics, orbital mechanics, flight dynamics, physics, mathematics, control engineering, materials science, aeroelasticity, avionics, reliability engineering, noise control, and flight testing among other domains. Yeah, real easy.
"You can't steal information." It's intangible. Thank you.
Sure you can if the information is in the form of a secret and obtained illegally. Could be a trade secret or it could be a state secret. Once it is stolen it loses its status as a secret and with it potentially significant value to the holder of the secret. That's what spies do, they steal information or more accurately secret information. There may be legal ways to obtain the information an that is not stealing but the illegal methods are colloquially (and accurately IMO) referred to as theft.
Yes, pat your selves on the back. America (9,161,923 SQ KM) has over taken Germany (357,021 SQ KM).
Way to argue against yourself. The power has to be transmitted and good turbine locations are often not especially close to population centers. This can add dramatically to the cost. Germany's higher population density makes transmission costs notably lower since they don't have to build and maintain the infrastructure.
Long after the bombings have stopped, that weapon still kills random civilians.
It does everything else the other bombs do, PLUS poisoning people.
You question my mental abilities but but arguing about something you haven't really thought through while calling someone else stupid doesn't aid your cause. It just makes you look bad.
Let's examine other types of weapons that kill after the peace treaty shall we? They include land mines, unexploded munitions, diseases (both from weaponized and natural sources), residual chemical toxicity, low level radiation from sources such as depleted uranium shells, mental trauma (PTSD and others), and I can keep going if you like. Nuclear weapons don't blow people's legs off 5 years after the conflict ends like land mines now do they? So by your own logic nuclear weapons do NOT do "all the evils of conventional weapons, and then some."
Aid workers (yes I know some personally) will tell you that they can predict outbreaks of diseases like malaria or cholera by looking where armed conflicts occur. These kill people just as dead as if they had been hit by a bomb. Nuclear weapons are not the only weapon that continues to kill after the conflict is over and in fact aren't even the only potential source of cancer after a conflict is over. Your argument is both wrong and completely misses the point about why nuclear weapons matter.
We care about nuclear weapons because they are an efficient (for lack of a better word) way to kill a lot of people and destroy property very quickly. Used in mass they might even wipe out all of humanity. THAT is what is special about them. Arguing about residual cancer deaths or that they are somehow "special" ignores the elephant in the room about nuclear weapons.
Honestly we NEED a led light bulb that will DIM acceptably for people.
OK, I'm down with this. A low energy consumption dimmable bulb would be a useful thing indeed.
...most people want to be able to use dimmers
"Most"? Really? I think your argument ran off the rails here. There is nothing preventing people from using dimmer switches now - they just can't use most CFLs in those sockets. I think "most" people don't really care and the evidence for that is that CFL bulbs, which generally aren't dimmable, are selling like hotcakes and increasing rapidly. Many houses might have some dimmers but usually not everywhere. That's not to say dimmable switches aren't a good idea but let's not overestimate the demand for them shall we?
So you think none of those were caused by nuclear weapons?
Would you be so kind as to point exactly where I said that?
Notice how you claim that I don't care about "death" in reply to my comment about deaths. Quite the reasonable argument you're building there...
You said "kids that later died of cancer makes them special as hell." Your save-the-children argument is apparently that secondary cancer deaths of kids from nuclear radiation are somehow magically more special than any other kind of death. It takes a really craven sort of logic to think that any kind of death in war is special. Being killed in a war horrible in any form and by any means. The type of weapon and the age of the victim doesn't change that on little bit.
...Japanese by dropping it near the shore so they could witness their impending doom before having to taste it.
They could have shown them footage of project Trinity. Also remember that there was a three day window between the first detonation and the second. Given that the Japanese didn't surrender after the detonation of the first weapon on an actual city, one can make a pretty reasonable argument that detonating the bomb off shore would have been unlikely to trigger a surrender. The offshore demonstration is a nice idea but probably unrealistically optimistic.
You don't measure the effectiveness of a weapon by the payload, but by how much damage it will do per unit of time.
That's kind of a silly definition. A weapon is judged by its ability to accomplish the objectives of its user. In that sense the Hiroshima bomb was a failure because it did not trigger the immediate unconditional surrender of Japan. That took another bomb three days later.
The nuke at Hiroshima killed 80,000 people the moment it exploded.
You have your facts wrong. The Little Boy bomb was estimated to have killed 66,000 people outright in the initial blast. The final fatality count due to injuries, radiation and other effects is unclear but probably somewhere over 100,000 by the end of 1945.
...damages the moral of the enemy far more greatly than any other weapon.
I'd give that honor (for lack of a better word) to biological weapons - though that is my own opinion. They are MUCH scarier because they are much easier to produce, harder to detect, more insidious in their effect, and harder to control. The only real defense against many biological attacks even today is quarantine.
Not that nukes aren't scary as hell... You're completely right about that.