Oh boy. Digital errors are an all-or-nothing affair. If there was a process that introduced errors into dormant magnetic media over time, it would eventually cause uncorrectable sector read errors. That means, pretty much, that you get zeros (or random garbage, depending on behavior of the drive+driver+OS stack) in parts of your image file. Then everything would depend on how you store stuff. Assuming that the errors only affect the data storage area of the files, and not filesystem housekeeping data, everything would depend on image file format. Compressed PNG files are essentially worthless from the point of failure onwards due to format of the zlib-compressed data stream (AFAIK). JPEG files seem to suffer from localized damage, but you may need some massaging before a stock jpeg decoder will correctly cope with such files.
As for the hypothetical error-inducing process: there is none, pretty much. Random reversal of magnetic domains is so slow that you needn't worry about it IIRC at "low" temperatures. If you store a hard drive close to say 5C, purged and sealed in dry air (or nitrogen), it will pretty much last forever. Lowering the temperature helps to slow down the lubricant migration. You may want to warm it up and spin it once a year to break any potential for stiction to build up over time, and to redistribute lubricants on the bearings. Apart from that it's about as permanent of a storage medium as it gets. I have a 10MB full height drive stored like that since 1983, and every year I have it checked out, there are no new errors and everything is peachy. That's more than a quarter of a decade, and my expectation is for the drive to outlast me.
Unfortunately, most corporations who make such decisions are in pretty dire straits. If one uses GM as an example -- it has been pretty much a financial disaster for the last decade. The financials were so bad that any non-monetary arguments wouldn't fly with anyone, much less courts. The company was on a brink for waaaay to long -- there were idiots out there buying its bonds, who the heck knows what they were drinking.
As for management considering anything: it usually isn't for the courts to kick the management out. Shareholders can reboard the slate, and then management can be wiped.
The notion of "trained professionals" as applied to police officers is, um, well, an oxymoron at best. The training, in the U.S. at least, for state- and local police is a joke.
There is nothing in their training that would let them understand their own psychology, and how to cope with and direct their own thoughts. Such a training is provided to members of some special armed services, and it's not something you can go over in a week or two. It requires months of concentrated effort to understand oneself and to be able to direct ones thoughts. A typical police officer gets about as much hands-on academy training on everything as would be required to just cope with oneself in face of terrible violence and suffering out there.
The truth is that police officers are about as prepared to dealing with "serial killer/rape/... cases", on average, as you and me. Just because they have a fancy job title doesn't mean anything here.
Citation please. Since you know about this stuff apparently more than I do, how about a list of currently used commercial launchers, with some indication of how much launches/year they see, and a yes/no for a hold-down?
They don't only reduce costs in assembly and manufacturing. Their whole corporate culture is, AFAIK, built on achieving understandable goals and working towards the end result, not towards placating external or internal politicians. All of their costs are lower, across the board -- sometimes by as much by an order of magnitude. That includes R&D, facility management, you name it. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure their employee morale beats any government bureaucracy hands-down, and also should be beating that of other government contractors.
SpaceX's immediate future may be mostly funded from government checks. Yet their long-term future in absence of another brilliant startup is pretty much destined to be global market takeover for launch services. That's my opinion at this point. On one hand I wish they went public sometime, on another hand part of their success is their independence...
I think that SpaceX are really in business of making affordable LEO deliveries. Their low costs are an indication of what we should really be expecting from corporations. Many people have raised the non-issue of lack of bureaucracy somehow making their efforts less safe. That is quite laughable -- NASA's illogical bureaucracy for its own sake (papers and presentations without real content) and internal isolation are some of the factors pointed out by Feynman as contributing to a culture that's set up for failure.
Just think of the bills you'd be getting had Elon Musk founded a major hospital and medical center somewhere. I'm pretty sure some procedures would cost about as much as some people are paying in "copays".
I was afraid of hearing precisely that. I only wanted to have a rational discussion, but apparently when one discusses sexual crimes people switch into mace-wielding caveman mode.
Putting aside physchological scars: I think that the main issue with pedophiliac rape is that there's irreparable damage done to the victim's body. It's just as well you had cut the kid's limb off. The psychological scars are a whole another story and I wouldn't wish that on anyone, really.
I think a one-time rapist has some chance at rehabilitation; it'd have to be shown and evaluated by the parole board. A pedophile who hurt a kid -- I don't think there's much you can do to help those out. If you go too far, it's too far to turn back IMHO.
OK, I wasn't clear: I meant to imply pedophiles who act on their urges. Mere mental issue that somehow never gets a pedophile into abusing a child is not what I was after. I wonder how may of those are out there -- it's a genuine question. Do all pedophiles end up hurting a child? Are there any studies on that out there?
This was rape, yes, but not pedophilia. Doesn't make it any more or less abhorrent. Pedophilia is by definition a sexual interest in prepubescents. The guy is not a pedophile simply due to raping a 12 y.o., as she was likely sexually mature. On top of being a rapist, he may be a pedophile, too, but we can't tell just by what he did now. In my mind pedophiles deserve lifetime prison sentences with no possibility of a parole. This guy deserves a couple decades in jail for sure, but it's really not pedophilia. It's the rape of a minor. Let's call things the way they should be called.
People running the publicly owned corporations are under a very specific kind of pressure that is generally not present in small business. The corporate meltdowns that happened in this millennium, when you look at courtroom testimonies, are pretty much caused by people who changed enough under this pressure to become profit-at-all-cost mindless drones.
You cannot ignore how people are affected by their workplace, you know.
Corporations are just a legal construct - they're run by *people*. They people like money, and they're usually profit-driven. As the parent notes, this doesn't make them evil, it just makes them more concentrated form of what we're like.
You missed the fact that people placed in a corporate environment like that of BPs will adjust their behavior to "fit" within the culture -- the latter having degenerated over the decades. I've personally seen people's whole segments of morality alter almost by 180 degrees simply by spending a decade at a global multinational. It's spooky.
People at the helm of BP are at best immoral bastards you don't want anything personally to do with. They'd sell you and your mother if they could make a profit that'd pass "legal muster" at the time.
The problem isn't lack of gasoline taxes. The problem is that the cars there are mostly poorly maintained junk. When I came to the U.S. at the turn of the millenium, the cheapest gasoline price per gallon in Ohio dropped to $0.95 for a short while. Yet the air around didn't smell significantly worse than it does now, with gas three times as expensive (almost).
That blog format of his is abysmal: it's very hard to explore, you feel like peeling data out of the blog's cold dead hands. Why do people set up their blogs such that even if there is maybe a dozen articles, you have to keep clicking and scrolling forever to see them all? It almost feels like those online news formats where a single page article is split across 15 pages, each with ads covering 80% of screen real estate... </offtopic_rant>
I'd say: citation needed. You have easy access to all sorts of things that are very dangerous, and addictive, and yet somehow you don't have an epidemic of "casual idiots" who take those. Just walk into your friendly home improvement store and look on the shelves.
As far as I'm concerned, maybe the casual idiots should excuse themselves from the gene pool. Why should we spend billions on a "war" that keeps casual idiots living in our society. I don't see how "casual idiots" can generally mature, sorry. I'd tend to think that most of them (50%+) stay casual idiots.
I'd expand by adding that the real cultural difference lies in understanding, or lack thereof. The end goal is the same: good grades. But a lot of cultures around the world push memorization over understanding. Memorization may be just as hard as understanding, but after some practice in the former it's easier to keep going in that direction. Same with understanding -- after you've "cracked" and understood something that was initially tough, you get a knack for it, and have easier time attacking new things.
I believe that the initial push should be given in early childhood, even if the consequences can be seemingly less-than-desirable -- at least initially. Ever since I can remember, it was rather easy for me to understand stuff. Or, it was much easier than remembering things that couldn't be derived from some form of understanding. Memorizing a dozen lines of a poem in early elementary grades seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle -- I'd much rather open some technical book of my father's, and learn new stuff.
Sharing exam and homework solutions is like the copying part of memorization, just that for homework you skip your brain and copy straight from paper to paper. With exams, you copy from paper to brain, and then the other way. It's pretty much a mechanical process. Doesn't matter whether you know what the material is about.
Good ole Dick Feynman -- blessed be his insight into society -- has figured it out half a century ago while teaching in Brazil. The linked-to essay (O Americano, Outra Vez!) should be required reading for every educator. His conclusion was:
I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent - it was terrible!
Rote memorization is well rooted in many cultures, especially in Asia, but also in parts of Europe, and certainly in a lot of grade-level schools everywhere. It's like a big smokescreen covering a whole expensive lot of nothing. Knowledge is understanding, mere recall isn't. If you understand something, you will -- perhaps with a bit of help -- be able to apply it to new, unseen problems. When it comes to quantitative science (say physics), you should be able to re-derive things from simpler principles (again, perhaps with help).
I couldn't agree more. The quality of the work by the production crews is often top-notch in spite of the lead performer being unworthy of that sort of treatment. Highly polished turds, with quantum odor removal.
There are separate issues at play here (with Toyota vehicles).
One is the 3 second hold time needed to STOP the engine using the START/STOP button. If you hit the button repeatedly, it doesn't do anything.
Separate thing is potential for drivetrain management software preventing you from shifting into neutral. I wish someone got off their behinds and actually did a test whether a WOT throttle-by-wire condition causes neutral lockout. This may be a deliberate, albeit retrospectively poor, design decision.
Yet separate issue that may be at play is the poor design of the analog pedal position transducer. The action of the spring makes a pedal really a force transducer. You measure displacement due to the action of some force. So the logical thing would be also to measure the bending in the pedal's beam (the plastic molded assembly) using a strain gage. That way you not only get redundant input from a different sensor, but also a diagnostic for the friction in the pedal's pivot. It seems like a very logical thing to exploit in a safety-critical sensor, but Toyota obviously decided not to play it safe.
Adding the human factor makes it all seem random and unexplicable. Surely there are simple, reproducible reasons for all this behavior -- the $1M prize available for reproducing the problem asks for a wrong thing: you need a random, irrational human in the loop to reproduce it.
Slashdot Mirror
Oh boy. Digital errors are an all-or-nothing affair. If there was a process that introduced errors into dormant magnetic media over time, it would eventually cause uncorrectable sector read errors. That means, pretty much, that you get zeros (or random garbage, depending on behavior of the drive+driver+OS stack) in parts of your image file. Then everything would depend on how you store stuff. Assuming that the errors only affect the data storage area of the files, and not filesystem housekeeping data, everything would depend on image file format. Compressed PNG files are essentially worthless from the point of failure onwards due to format of the zlib-compressed data stream (AFAIK). JPEG files seem to suffer from localized damage, but you may need some massaging before a stock jpeg decoder will correctly cope with such files.
As for the hypothetical error-inducing process: there is none, pretty much. Random reversal of magnetic domains is so slow that you needn't worry about it IIRC at "low" temperatures. If you store a hard drive close to say 5C, purged and sealed in dry air (or nitrogen), it will pretty much last forever. Lowering the temperature helps to slow down the lubricant migration. You may want to warm it up and spin it once a year to break any potential for stiction to build up over time, and to redistribute lubricants on the bearings. Apart from that it's about as permanent of a storage medium as it gets. I have a 10MB full height drive stored like that since 1983, and every year I have it checked out, there are no new errors and everything is peachy. That's more than a quarter of a decade, and my expectation is for the drive to outlast me.
Unfortunately, most corporations who make such decisions are in pretty dire straits. If one uses GM as an example -- it has been pretty much a financial disaster for the last decade. The financials were so bad that any non-monetary arguments wouldn't fly with anyone, much less courts. The company was on a brink for waaaay to long -- there were idiots out there buying its bonds, who the heck knows what they were drinking.
As for management considering anything: it usually isn't for the courts to kick the management out. Shareholders can reboard the slate, and then management can be wiped.
The notion of "trained professionals" as applied to police officers is, um, well, an oxymoron at best. The training, in the U.S. at least, for state- and local police is a joke.
There is nothing in their training that would let them understand their own psychology, and how to cope with and direct their own thoughts. Such a training is provided to members of some special armed services, and it's not something you can go over in a week or two. It requires months of concentrated effort to understand oneself and to be able to direct ones thoughts. A typical police officer gets about as much hands-on academy training on everything as would be required to just cope with oneself in face of terrible violence and suffering out there.
The truth is that police officers are about as prepared to dealing with "serial killer/rape/... cases", on average, as you and me. Just because they have a fancy job title doesn't mean anything here.
Yet it is now held that this was a judicial mistake, and blindly citing it makes one look lame.
SpaceX has been profitable for a couple of years now. Where did you get your data from?!
Citation please. Since you know about this stuff apparently more than I do, how about a list of currently used commercial launchers, with some indication of how much launches/year they see, and a yes/no for a hold-down?
They don't only reduce costs in assembly and manufacturing. Their whole corporate culture is, AFAIK, built on achieving understandable goals and working towards the end result, not towards placating external or internal politicians. All of their costs are lower, across the board -- sometimes by as much by an order of magnitude. That includes R&D, facility management, you name it. Not only that, but I'm pretty sure their employee morale beats any government bureaucracy hands-down, and also should be beating that of other government contractors.
SpaceX's immediate future may be mostly funded from government checks. Yet their long-term future in absence of another brilliant startup is pretty much destined to be global market takeover for launch services. That's my opinion at this point. On one hand I wish they went public sometime, on another hand part of their success is their independence...
I think that SpaceX are really in business of making affordable LEO deliveries. Their low costs are an indication of what we should really be expecting from corporations. Many people have raised the non-issue of lack of bureaucracy somehow making their efforts less safe. That is quite laughable -- NASA's illogical bureaucracy for its own sake (papers and presentations without real content) and internal isolation are some of the factors pointed out by Feynman as contributing to a culture that's set up for failure.
Just think of the bills you'd be getting had Elon Musk founded a major hospital and medical center somewhere. I'm pretty sure some procedures would cost about as much as some people are paying in "copays".
I was afraid of hearing precisely that. I only wanted to have a rational discussion, but apparently when one discusses sexual crimes people switch into mace-wielding caveman mode.
Putting aside physchological scars: I think that the main issue with pedophiliac rape is that there's irreparable damage done to the victim's body. It's just as well you had cut the kid's limb off. The psychological scars are a whole another story and I wouldn't wish that on anyone, really.
I think a one-time rapist has some chance at rehabilitation; it'd have to be shown and evaluated by the parole board. A pedophile who hurt a kid -- I don't think there's much you can do to help those out. If you go too far, it's too far to turn back IMHO.
OK, I wasn't clear: I meant to imply pedophiles who act on their urges. Mere mental issue that somehow never gets a pedophile into abusing a child is not what I was after. I wonder how may of those are out there -- it's a genuine question. Do all pedophiles end up hurting a child? Are there any studies on that out there?
This was rape, yes, but not pedophilia. Doesn't make it any more or less abhorrent. Pedophilia is by definition a sexual interest in prepubescents. The guy is not a pedophile simply due to raping a 12 y.o., as she was likely sexually mature. On top of being a rapist, he may be a pedophile, too, but we can't tell just by what he did now. In my mind pedophiles deserve lifetime prison sentences with no possibility of a parole. This guy deserves a couple decades in jail for sure, but it's really not pedophilia. It's the rape of a minor. Let's call things the way they should be called.
People running the publicly owned corporations are under a very specific kind of pressure that is generally not present in small business. The corporate meltdowns that happened in this millennium, when you look at courtroom testimonies, are pretty much caused by people who changed enough under this pressure to become profit-at-all-cost mindless drones.
You cannot ignore how people are affected by their workplace, you know.
Corporations are just a legal construct - they're run by *people*. They people like money, and they're usually profit-driven. As the parent notes, this doesn't make them evil, it just makes them more concentrated form of what we're like.
You missed the fact that people placed in a corporate environment like that of BPs will adjust their behavior to "fit" within the culture -- the latter having degenerated over the decades. I've personally seen people's whole segments of morality alter almost by 180 degrees simply by spending a decade at a global multinational. It's spooky.
People at the helm of BP are at best immoral bastards you don't want anything personally to do with. They'd sell you and your mother if they could make a profit that'd pass "legal muster" at the time.
The problem isn't lack of gasoline taxes. The problem is that the cars there are mostly poorly maintained junk. When I came to the U.S. at the turn of the millenium, the cheapest gasoline price per gallon in Ohio dropped to $0.95 for a short while. Yet the air around didn't smell significantly worse than it does now, with gas three times as expensive (almost).
Pumping "as much out as possible" -- you mean depleting the oil field? It'd take a couple of decades at best through that single well...
That blog format of his is abysmal: it's very hard to explore, you feel like peeling data out of the blog's cold dead hands. Why do people set up their blogs such that even if there is maybe a dozen articles, you have to keep clicking and scrolling forever to see them all? It almost feels like those online news formats where a single page article is split across 15 pages, each with ads covering 80% of screen real estate... </offtopic_rant>
I'd say: citation needed. You have easy access to all sorts of things that are very dangerous, and addictive, and yet somehow you don't have an epidemic of "casual idiots" who take those. Just walk into your friendly home improvement store and look on the shelves.
As far as I'm concerned, maybe the casual idiots should excuse themselves from the gene pool. Why should we spend billions on a "war" that keeps casual idiots living in our society. I don't see how "casual idiots" can generally mature, sorry. I'd tend to think that most of them (50%+) stay casual idiots.
Amen.
Care to tell me how the fsck am I going to clean the pee off the recliner?
I'd expand by adding that the real cultural difference lies in understanding, or lack thereof. The end goal is the same: good grades. But a lot of cultures around the world push memorization over understanding. Memorization may be just as hard as understanding, but after some practice in the former it's easier to keep going in that direction. Same with understanding -- after you've "cracked" and understood something that was initially tough, you get a knack for it, and have easier time attacking new things.
I believe that the initial push should be given in early childhood, even if the consequences can be seemingly less-than-desirable -- at least initially. Ever since I can remember, it was rather easy for me to understand stuff. Or, it was much easier than remembering things that couldn't be derived from some form of understanding. Memorizing a dozen lines of a poem in early elementary grades seemed to be an insurmountable obstacle -- I'd much rather open some technical book of my father's, and learn new stuff.
Sharing exam and homework solutions is like the copying part of memorization, just that for homework you skip your brain and copy straight from paper to paper. With exams, you copy from paper to brain, and then the other way. It's pretty much a mechanical process. Doesn't matter whether you know what the material is about.
Good ole Dick Feynman -- blessed be his insight into society -- has figured it out half a century ago while teaching in Brazil. The linked-to essay (O Americano, Outra Vez!) should be required reading for every educator. His conclusion was:
I knew the system was bad, but 100 percent - it was terrible!
Rote memorization is well rooted in many cultures, especially in Asia, but also in parts of Europe, and certainly in a lot of grade-level schools everywhere. It's like a big smokescreen covering a whole expensive lot of nothing. Knowledge is understanding, mere recall isn't. If you understand something, you will -- perhaps with a bit of help -- be able to apply it to new, unseen problems. When it comes to quantitative science (say physics), you should be able to re-derive things from simpler principles (again, perhaps with help).
I couldn't agree more. The quality of the work by the production crews is often top-notch in spite of the lead performer being unworthy of that sort of treatment. Highly polished turds, with quantum odor removal.
There are separate issues at play here (with Toyota vehicles).
One is the 3 second hold time needed to STOP the engine using the START/STOP button. If you hit the button repeatedly, it doesn't do anything.
Separate thing is potential for drivetrain management software preventing you from shifting into neutral. I wish someone got off their behinds and actually did a test whether a WOT throttle-by-wire condition causes neutral lockout. This may be a deliberate, albeit retrospectively poor, design decision.
Yet separate issue that may be at play is the poor design of the analog pedal position transducer. The action of the spring makes a pedal really a force transducer. You measure displacement due to the action of some force. So the logical thing would be also to measure the bending in the pedal's beam (the plastic molded assembly) using a strain gage. That way you not only get redundant input from a different sensor, but also a diagnostic for the friction in the pedal's pivot. It seems like a very logical thing to exploit in a safety-critical sensor, but Toyota obviously decided not to play it safe.
Adding the human factor makes it all seem random and unexplicable. Surely there are simple, reproducible reasons for all this behavior -- the $1M prize available for reproducing the problem asks for a wrong thing: you need a random, irrational human in the loop to reproduce it.