This is all a fantasy, then you do the math, and the math shows it's -- well, still a fantasy. The numbers just don't work out.
A decent laser pointer may have say 0.5mRad beam divergence. Assume we have better optics and improve the divergence by a factor of 500 to say 1uRad. That may be a long shot, I'd think 10uRad may be more practical without using a Hubble-sized mirror.
The nice thing about radians is that the length of the arc -- or, as it were, the diameter of our "pencil" beam -- is simply the angle times radius of the arc. The radius of the arc is the distance from source to Earth.
Geostationary orbit for Earth is 35.8 M meters. 35.8M*10u = 358. So our "pencil" beam is almost half a kilometer wide, and that's assuming it's all done in vacuum.
No we have atmosphere to cope with. Assume a red beam, that's around 700nm. At sea level, the optical transmission of the atmosphere at that wavelength is around 5*10^-2, or a factor of 50m.
So let's say we have a decently powerful 10kW laser up there. By the time we reach ground, it's 10kW*50m = 0.5W, illuminating an area of a quarter of a square kilometer. That's like looking at a 0.5W LED (bright sucker, mind you), with say 60 degree divergence -- that's 1 radian -- from ~400m away. That's an easy enough experiment to do. It looks rather unimpressive unless it's very, very dark out there.
So you'll definitely *see something*, but it'll look like a faint star, and that's about it. You won't see it if there is any sort of a cloud cover, and whether you'd see it during daytime is debatable at best. Maybe someone else can look up the brightness of equatorial sky mid-day and figure it out.
Now obviously, the beam has to be swept. Suppose it'll be swept along 1000km of coastline. Suppose that you want the pulse to last something reasonable - maybe 0.5s? So you have 500m per 0.5s, 1000m/s pan speed. It'll take only about a thousand seconds to pan your coastline, or about 20 minutes.
There goes your pencil beam. Still don't believe me? Well, assume you've ramped up your optical power output to 1MW (factor of 100), and got a better mirror -- 1MW laser and its power source will be big, so you may as well slap a big mirror. So assume we've improved power density by a factor of 1000 total -- 1MW laser + 1uRad divergence. Say you presume that you can then have 1000x shorter blips (0.5ms) still visible to the naked eye due to the integrator that our retina is. Your pan speed has made the blinks happen roughly once per second. And that's perhaps something that is still fantastically impractical -- it can be seen, at night and under clear skies.
Do it on the ground first. When you're satisfied with the optical output and visibility, multiply the power demand by a factor of 10 and start designing your, um, satellite. Good luck.
The trip upwards can be assumed to have a very different attenuation from the downward trip. You can force the atmosphere to be optically nonlinear simply by making the beam powerful enough. It will then self-focus the beam. This effect is normally unwanted when you do laser experimentation, but here it could be perhaps used to minimize the losses. The high power beam can optically saturate the atmosphere, such that absorption will drop by a factor of magnitude or two. What I wonder about, though, is how one is supposed to defocus such a beam once it reaches the satellite "mirror" -- without vaporizing the said mirror.
Even the rad-hardened stuff will be taken out in short order. They won't take a short burst of radiation (that's what they're designed for!) -- there'll be bazillions of particles trapped in Earth's magnetic field, pounding incessantly on everything up there. Remember that it's all in vacuum.
Rad-hardening works for short bursts of radiation coming *from Earth* -- from a ground or airborne nuclear explosion.
There's no rad-hardening for space-based explosions. We're several orders of magnitude away from being anywhere close to that.
It's not about average power. Most of your design must be scaled for peak power, because that will be the actual operating power. Average power comes into play only in sustained heat removal. You still don't wan't anything to locally melt, mind you!
A "10kWh" battery pack would be hard pressed to deliver gigawatts of peak power. Maybe a 1MWh battery pack, configured for high voltage output, could do that...
I guess there's some misconception about what such a "light" would look like.
Everyone seems to react like this was going to be a streetlight type of a thing. You'd need a rather big nuclear powerplant to get that sort of power density on the ground. Assume we want 1W/m^2 on the ground, and a "square" area 5,000km on the side. That's 2.5E10 m^2, so you'd 25GW of optical power output for your illumination. How anyone sees that much power being generated in orbit using current technology -- I don't know. Even getting a 1MW generator in the orbit would be a big feat. You can't exactly put a chiller tower up there. Dissipating all the waste heat would be a huge fucking problem, no kidding.
For what's achievable with current technology, we're talking about a faint star that say can be red, green or blue. So beam forming to a point where "a country could opt-in" etc. is a fantasy at this point. How hard is it *not* to look up?
Re:Here come the DRM whiners
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I think that the real bummer is apparently poor virtual memory management. Here's an anecdote:
My MacBook Pro spends a lot of time on seeking the disk heads. And that's with 4 GB of RAM, 1/4 of that taken by a 1 GB VMware VM instance open. The only stuff running in the OS X, besides VMware and Finder, is Preview, Safari and iTunes. When it's I/O bound, the CPU meter drops, as expected, and there's noticeable latency to doing things -- say bringing up Spotlight after a period of non-use takes ~5 seconds. Reinstalling the OS, with a clean user account (I only moved data around), made no big change. OSX was reinstalled on a new, faster hard drive (7.2krpm vs 5.4k), and that made some difference, but obviously what was needed is two orders of magnitude worth of improvement.
I didn't look into debugging the actual OS X memory use and the VM stats, so maybe all of that is a simple matter of tuning things. But it certainly doesn't "just work" out of the box. I think that VMware is to blame, because as long as it's not running, I can have lots of memory hogs open and switching between applications is "instantaneous".
I have had the ability to borrow Intel's 1st gen SSD drive from a friend, and test-drove it for a few days. In line with expectations, with the I/O latency essentially gone, everything felt like you think should.
And it wasn't even about the swapfile usage. Since 4GB of RAM seems to support whatever notion of working set OS X has for the applications I use, the swap usage is 0 most of the time. Sometimes it creeps up to 200-300MB, and that's it.
So the issue seems to be related to paging in memmaped stuff from the hard drive, and maintaining the cache of said stuff. Why it's so bad, I just don't know... I sure do agree that it should be better.
I generally agree that homeschooling is an impediment to social mobility, but some of the reasons you cite are a tad off with reality.
I'd think that most grade-school-level science can be done with everyday household items. It's mostly about the quality and ingeniousness of the teacher. CAD/CAM - there's Alibre. Library -- what about public libraries? Of course you have to be able to get to them, so maybe that's a problem. I've never really used the library in my elementary and high schools. Media centre? -- never had one. YouTube + some ingenuity is fine as far as I'm concerned. Gym -- not a real need. Go run in a park or something. Darkroom -- you could do without, it may get arguably somewhat expensive to have a fully blown one, but it's a tad outdated skill to have. As part of science curriculum -- that could be one or two lessons, tops. Other than that, it's a fine hobby, but plays no big role in a curriculum -- certainly not big enough to have a dedicated lab for it. One can fashion a camera obscura, and use regular negative enlargement paper -- that can be processed essentially in a dark bathroom, you don't need a real darkroom for that. Shows the principle, if some kid wants to see the indirect process (negative film + enlargements), one can use some old slides.
So while I agree that "awful lot of resources" sound good on paper, their lack is not a real impediment. Teachers who have ability and time to teach -- that's the real difference maker. Pay teachers enough so that they can actually spend lots of time teaching! Maybe the idea of single teachers wasn't so misguided after all...
It doesn't matter it's supposedly coming from a "bullshit factory" as you claim. The problem is that, sadly, you can expect no better from most U.S. public school systems. Part of it is bureaucrats who have no vested interest in improving things, as there is no system to make sure the bureaucrats face consequences of anything. The labor unions are no better, and act as parasites at best.
Now, don't understand me wrong: I'm all for public schools, and my kids will stay in public schools all the way through high school, at least. There are nice exceptions from the rule: I know of a public elementary school where during last winter the principal would be seen daily shoveling snow in front of school. In her high heels, no less. This is but an example of her work ethic, and I'd steal horses with her any time.
The ETS and the teaching establishment at Garfield High don't want students to learn. They just want kids to regurgitate, without any real understanding of the material. Heaven forbid, they might start thinking for themselves.
The problem is that some teachers, at all levels, just regurgitate, too. The kids learn well from them, but they learn to regurgitate, not to understand. It's sad.
Feynman found about it first hand when he went to teach in Brazil. After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. [...] At the end, he gave a talk explaining his findings: "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!" [...] "Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but is appears to be that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!" I presume they have vastly improved things since then (1950).
Here's a personal anecdote:
I took both GRE and TOEFL. Both of them seemed to be geared to testing how well you prepared for them. So what they test is not your general skills or aptitudes -- the tested skill is only one: that of preparing for a very straitjacket type of a test, where you don't have to understand much if anything. The test had mostly useless content. It was a year or two before they changed GRE from the "analytical thinking" (think IQ test-type puzzles) to writing.
In grad school I have never ever had to take any tests that would demand anywhere near the mindless memorization called for by GRE and TOEFL (thank $DEITY). Quite literally, the only things preparing for GRE and TOEFL has taught me is how silly is the establishment that pushes and uses those things. I have read some papers that supposedly support the use of results from GRE, and they seemed to be worse than some pharma-funded published research "supporting" antidepressants.
You want someone to know if they are any good in English? Have them go through college. If they manage, they obviously are good enough. If they can't, well, tough luck. At least the college gets some money out of it. Same goes for other academic skills. In my undergrad physics, they took pretty much everyone from the street, and by the end of the first year 50% of students were out. Maybe 30% ended up graduating. Yet we have some silly bureaucrats who somehow think such "awfully low graduation rate" is bad. How can it be bad?! What do you want to do, give those people meaningless pieces of papers, with nothing to show for them? Umm, yeah, I know, that's happening all over the place, too...
How does the sticking power of TOS test out in court? Do facebook's TOS actually mean anything, if all you need to do to access their site is to type in a URL? I mean there isn't even a clickthrough to have them pretend like they care. Yes, I seriously would like to know.
OK, so apart from spreading STDs, unwanted pregnancies, and potentially dangerous pleasure, sex is bad how? If the first three were not a problem, would it be OK with you? I don't think so, yet your whole argument is construed as if those three bad things were determining your stance.
One can obviously rather easily deal with the first three rather simply. Heck, I think that many teens must be dealing with #3 for you on the female end for free, just by the fact that quite often it requires a wee bit longer relationship for the guy to be able to actually give pleasure to the girl.
It's all about what's acceptable risk to you. OTOH, according to your cited statistics, it may be enough to pass a law that forces one of the partners to be at least 25 y.o.
Waiting until marriage is effective against the spread of STDs only if you're conservative enough not to do other things that can also spread STDs yet are not considered sex. Ask any teenager if they thing kissing is sex. Yet you can catch a whole bunch of STDs by kissing someone passionately enough.
I fully believe in nothing-barred education. Kids need to learn about STDs in school, they need to know how relevant biological processes work, they need to be taught this stuff not quite unlike doctors are. They need to see pictures of it! It must be something that is *not* a taboo, that kids are expected to openly talk about -- the stigma of STDs is the real killer, and it's the sole doing of religious wingnuts. The kids need to be able to recognize a herpes or syphyllis sore. They need to understand that doing it literally in the dark is at best irresponsible -- look and examine each other before! And so on.
What a strawman. An addiction is not something that once started, you don't stop. If you define things like that, then walking is an addiction too. So that argument is just stupid.
Sex can be an addiction if it quacks like one. If it negatively affects your daily life, then yes it is an addiction. Never mind that married couples have *intramarital* sex addiction problems too, you don't automatically get excluded simply because you married. If you sneak out of work twice a day for sex, it doesn't matter if you do it with your secretary or with your wife/hubby.
Anyway, all of the not-yet-married couples I know or knew, and there were quite a few, were rather definitely not addicted to sex, so I don't see it as a problem of *addiction*. Some of them would be addicted to other things, but not to sex.
Your arguments don't pass the smell test, IOW. They are just one more in an endless stream of religious rhetoric that falls on its face if looked at from any angle other than blind acceptance.
I don't think that people have "major misconceptions" about sex and religion like you insist. You're laying some smoke bombs, OTOH. Catholic Church does *not* allow *married* couples to have sex with contraceptives. That's hardly saying *go for it*, isn't it? There are more examples like this, hopefully you know them and just pretend to ignore them. If you didn't know, then perhaps it's time to get educated?
You don't have to be brilliant to understand a roundabout. If you can't understand it after 2-3 minutes of thinking about it, you should not be driving.
"Secondly, I don't think that anyone should ever be cruising down the road in the fast lane unless traffic is very heavy in the first place."
It just doesn't work that way. Traffic flow depends *heavily* on the average distance between cars. If you have too many cars per mile of *lane* (not *road*), the flow of cars is no more a free flow. There's enough feedback between drivers that you end up having packets of cars flowing down the highway, eventually there are points where the speed of those packets is zero -- A.K.A. localized traffic jams, where there may be "free" road just a mile ahead.
So having everyone in one lane just because they are not passing is *crippling* and you *do not* want that. When traffic on a freeway is heavy enough, you want all lanes to be in use -- and that's what you will see happen, and that's OK and by design.
Never mind that what is a "fast lane" to you on a multi-lane freeway, like most metropolitan rings in the U.S.? Those things may have 5-6 lanes in places. There is no concept of a "fast lane" on those. During rush hour those places are anyway 2 lanes short of being able to sustain the traffic flow, thus the "traffic jams". You definitely don't want to waste a perfectly good lane for some abstract concept, when it just kills the traffic flow.
Go to a traffic control center some time and look at graphs of traffic flow vs. time. You'll see a nice periodic waveform as soon as traffic demand is higher than the number of lanes supports. That periodicity is seen, from drivers perspective, as traffic jams.
The Autobahn isn't constructed anything like the crappy U.S. interstates that need repaving every couple of years. It's constructed like a runway. These days it's laid by continuous-operation machines where you have gravel/underlayment/whatnot on one side, and reinforced concrete on the other. I've seen such a monster in action, and -- by comparison -- the way the U.S. interstates are being built is archaic at best.
I don't see why those checks shouldn't be continuous. It's easy to do, and they can run at a fairly low priority -- say doing a hash of the whole firmware once a minute.
If the ECU is so susceptible to single-bit errors, I'd like to see it getting stuck in IDLE, getting stuck running rich/lean, etc.
I'm pretty sure that if we *do* learn of what the problem was, it will be something rather embarassing, and will have nothing to do with SEUs, seized bushings, etc.
Toyota's technical problem right now is lack of post-mortem diagnostics built into the ECU. Things that are "out of the ordinary" should be logged, ideally with as much of ECUs state logged as possible. That's their only *technical* problem. Everything else is hearsay at this point, from the technical standpoint. Engineering can't work with what amounts to gossip.
Stories of people driving their cars with WOT to the dealerships with *nothing* constructive coming out of it indicate that there's gross lack of competence everywhere in their corporate structure. There's no communication. If a tech gets a "weird example" like that in the dealership, he should be able to get to the engineer who is on the ECU support team. Anything less should get responsible people jailed. Mr Toyoda has lost touch. It's not about incremental improvements. It's simply about corporate inertia and unnecessary shielding of people who should be working towards a common goal. If a tech at a Toyota dealer somewhere in the U.S. thinks he has something really weird going on, he shouldn't be treated like public enemy #1. He should be treated like a source of valuable feedback, potentially averting an ongoing disaster. There's no reason for said tech not to be able to get to the engineering.
No, I don't work for Toyota or their dealers. But I've heard enough corporate idiocy to be able to recognize its symptoms. The blind running around exhibited by Toyota's engineering right now is a *classic* "all red flags" symptom. The first step at the solution isn't technical. It's corporate wetware.
Any assumption of SEUs causing the unintended acceleration is IMHO completely outlandish. Occam's razor FTFY.
If those ECUs were so sensitive to SEUs, there'd be stories all over the place of *other* upsets: cars getting stuck in IDLE, cars running poorly because they are consistently rich/lean, etc.
It makes no sense to assume that cars that otherwise drive OK will have uncontrolled acceleration issues due to SEUs. It's too convenient. I think that prof. Massengill fell under the spell of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
Toyota should simply issue a recall where their ECU firmware starts making snapshots of internal state when accelerator has been at WOT for more than say 5 seconds. They'll find the problem very quickly that way. I'm quite sure they *don't* do that.
The inertia stars in school, or even earlier at home, where kids learn that no matter what the truth is, they will be expected to memorize and repeat lies or half-truths. After some period of being conditioned like that, you can either shoot yourself in the head, or go with the flow.
I have a 5 year old daughter, and all I can say is that her questions, for a good while now, are mindbogglingly hard to answer without stopping oneself for a good while. Even if she won't fully understand an answer, I strive not to lie, and not to force her to accept something without some underlying reason/"proof".
This is hard, and it requires exercise of certain self-control not to just blow the kid off for being "pesky".
Seeing, as it unfortunately is, that kids learn all the wrong answers, and are repeatedly told that they have to take the wrong answers and shut up, results in adults that are just like that. They have learned early on in life, that no matter how it really is, they must stick by some stupidity or else.
There's no deep psychology going on there. Go to the nearest playground, and listen to answers given to kids.
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This is all a fantasy, then you do the math, and the math shows it's -- well, still a fantasy. The numbers just don't work out.
A decent laser pointer may have say 0.5mRad beam divergence. Assume we have better optics and improve the divergence by a factor of 500 to say 1uRad. That may be a long shot, I'd think 10uRad may be more practical without using a Hubble-sized mirror.
The nice thing about radians is that the length of the arc -- or, as it were, the diameter of our "pencil" beam -- is simply the angle times radius of the arc. The radius of the arc is the distance from source to Earth.
Geostationary orbit for Earth is 35.8 M meters. 35.8M*10u = 358. So our "pencil" beam is almost half a kilometer wide, and that's assuming it's all done in vacuum.
No we have atmosphere to cope with. Assume a red beam, that's around 700nm. At sea level, the optical transmission of the atmosphere at that wavelength is around 5*10^-2, or a factor of 50m.
So let's say we have a decently powerful 10kW laser up there. By the time we reach ground, it's 10kW*50m = 0.5W, illuminating an area of a quarter of a square kilometer. That's like looking at a 0.5W LED (bright sucker, mind you), with say 60 degree divergence -- that's 1 radian -- from ~400m away. That's an easy enough experiment to do. It looks rather unimpressive unless it's very, very dark out there.
So you'll definitely *see something*, but it'll look like a faint star, and that's about it. You won't see it if there is any sort of a cloud cover, and whether you'd see it during daytime is debatable at best. Maybe someone else can look up the brightness of equatorial sky mid-day and figure it out.
Now obviously, the beam has to be swept. Suppose it'll be swept along 1000km of coastline. Suppose that you want the pulse to last something reasonable - maybe 0.5s? So you have 500m per 0.5s, 1000m/s pan speed. It'll take only about a thousand seconds to pan your coastline, or about 20 minutes.
There goes your pencil beam. Still don't believe me? Well, assume you've ramped up your optical power output to 1MW (factor of 100), and got a better mirror -- 1MW laser and its power source will be big, so you may as well slap a big mirror. So assume we've improved power density by a factor of 1000 total -- 1MW laser + 1uRad divergence. Say you presume that you can then have 1000x shorter blips (0.5ms) still visible to the naked eye due to the integrator that our retina is. Your pan speed has made the blinks happen roughly once per second. And that's perhaps something that is still fantastically impractical -- it can be seen, at night and under clear skies.
So there goes the fantasy, full of glory and all.
Do it on the ground first. When you're satisfied with the optical output and visibility, multiply the power demand by a factor of 10 and start designing your, um, satellite. Good luck.
The trip upwards can be assumed to have a very different attenuation from the downward trip. You can force the atmosphere to be optically nonlinear simply by making the beam powerful enough. It will then self-focus the beam. This effect is normally unwanted when you do laser experimentation, but here it could be perhaps used to minimize the losses. The high power beam can optically saturate the atmosphere, such that absorption will drop by a factor of magnitude or two. What I wonder about, though, is how one is supposed to defocus such a beam once it reaches the satellite "mirror" -- without vaporizing the said mirror.
Even the rad-hardened stuff will be taken out in short order. They won't take a short burst of radiation (that's what they're designed for!) -- there'll be bazillions of particles trapped in Earth's magnetic field, pounding incessantly on everything up there. Remember that it's all in vacuum.
Rad-hardening works for short bursts of radiation coming *from Earth* -- from a ground or airborne nuclear explosion.
There's no rad-hardening for space-based explosions. We're several orders of magnitude away from being anywhere close to that.
It's not about average power. Most of your design must be scaled for peak power, because that will be the actual operating power. Average power comes into play only in sustained heat removal. You still don't wan't anything to locally melt, mind you!
A "10kWh" battery pack would be hard pressed to deliver gigawatts of peak power. Maybe a 1MWh battery pack, configured for high voltage output, could do that...
I guess there's some misconception about what such a "light" would look like.
Everyone seems to react like this was going to be a streetlight type of a thing. You'd need a rather big nuclear powerplant to get that sort of power density on the ground. Assume we want 1W/m^2 on the ground, and a "square" area 5,000km on the side. That's 2.5E10 m^2, so you'd 25GW of optical power output for your illumination. How anyone sees that much power being generated in orbit using current technology -- I don't know. Even getting a 1MW generator in the orbit would be a big feat. You can't exactly put a chiller tower up there. Dissipating all the waste heat would be a huge fucking problem, no kidding.
For what's achievable with current technology, we're talking about a faint star that say can be red, green or blue. So beam forming to a point where "a country could opt-in" etc. is a fantasy at this point. How hard is it *not* to look up?
I think that the real bummer is apparently poor virtual memory management. Here's an anecdote:
My MacBook Pro spends a lot of time on seeking the disk heads. And that's with 4 GB of RAM, 1/4 of that taken by a 1 GB VMware VM instance open. The only stuff running in the OS X, besides VMware and Finder, is Preview, Safari and iTunes. When it's I/O bound, the CPU meter drops, as expected, and there's noticeable latency to doing things -- say bringing up Spotlight after a period of non-use takes ~5 seconds. Reinstalling the OS, with a clean user account (I only moved data around), made no big change. OSX was reinstalled on a new, faster hard drive (7.2krpm vs 5.4k), and that made some difference, but obviously what was needed is two orders of magnitude worth of improvement.
I didn't look into debugging the actual OS X memory use and the VM stats, so maybe all of that is a simple matter of tuning things. But it certainly doesn't "just work" out of the box. I think that VMware is to blame, because as long as it's not running, I can have lots of memory hogs open and switching between applications is "instantaneous".
I have had the ability to borrow Intel's 1st gen SSD drive from a friend, and test-drove it for a few days. In line with expectations, with the I/O latency essentially gone, everything felt like you think should.
And it wasn't even about the swapfile usage. Since 4GB of RAM seems to support whatever notion of working set OS X has for the applications I use, the swap usage is 0 most of the time. Sometimes it creeps up to 200-300MB, and that's it.
So the issue seems to be related to paging in memmaped stuff from the hard drive, and maintaining the cache of said stuff. Why it's so bad, I just don't know... I sure do agree that it should be better.
I generally agree that homeschooling is an impediment to social mobility, but some of the reasons you cite are a tad off with reality.
I'd think that most grade-school-level science can be done with everyday household items. It's mostly about the quality and ingeniousness of the teacher. CAD/CAM - there's Alibre. Library -- what about public libraries? Of course you have to be able to get to them, so maybe that's a problem. I've never really used the library in my elementary and high schools. Media centre? -- never had one. YouTube + some ingenuity is fine as far as I'm concerned. Gym -- not a real need. Go run in a park or something. Darkroom -- you could do without, it may get arguably somewhat expensive to have a fully blown one, but it's a tad outdated skill to have. As part of science curriculum -- that could be one or two lessons, tops. Other than that, it's a fine hobby, but plays no big role in a curriculum -- certainly not big enough to have a dedicated lab for it. One can fashion a camera obscura, and use regular negative enlargement paper -- that can be processed essentially in a dark bathroom, you don't need a real darkroom for that. Shows the principle, if some kid wants to see the indirect process (negative film + enlargements), one can use some old slides.
So while I agree that "awful lot of resources" sound good on paper, their lack is not a real impediment. Teachers who have ability and time to teach -- that's the real difference maker. Pay teachers enough so that they can actually spend lots of time teaching! Maybe the idea of single teachers wasn't so misguided after all...
It doesn't matter it's supposedly coming from a "bullshit factory" as you claim. The problem is that, sadly, you can expect no better from most U.S. public school systems. Part of it is bureaucrats who have no vested interest in improving things, as there is no system to make sure the bureaucrats face consequences of anything. The labor unions are no better, and act as parasites at best.
Now, don't understand me wrong: I'm all for public schools, and my kids will stay in public schools all the way through high school, at least. There are nice exceptions from the rule: I know of a public elementary school where during last winter the principal would be seen daily shoveling snow in front of school. In her high heels, no less. This is but an example of her work ethic, and I'd steal horses with her any time.
What if it wasn't an error, but the answer key was wrong?
The ETS and the teaching establishment at Garfield High don't want students to learn. They just want kids to regurgitate, without any real understanding of the material. Heaven forbid, they might start thinking for themselves.
The problem is that some teachers, at all levels, just regurgitate, too. The kids learn well from them, but they learn to regurgitate, not to understand. It's sad.
Feynman found about it first hand when he went to teach in Brazil. After a lot of investigation, I finally figured out that the students had memorized everything, but they didn't know what anything meant. [...] At the end, he gave a talk explaining his findings: "The main purpose of my talk is to demonstrate to you that no science is being taught in Brazil!" [...] "Mr. Feynman has told us some things that are very hard for us to hear, but is appears to be that he really loves science, and is sincere in his criticism. Therefore, I think we should listen to him. I came here knowing we have some sickness in our system of education; what I have learned is that we have a cancer!" I presume they have vastly improved things since then (1950).
Here's a personal anecdote:
I took both GRE and TOEFL. Both of them seemed to be geared to testing how well you prepared for them. So what they test is not your general skills or aptitudes -- the tested skill is only one: that of preparing for a very straitjacket type of a test, where you don't have to understand much if anything. The test had mostly useless content. It was a year or two before they changed GRE from the "analytical thinking" (think IQ test-type puzzles) to writing.
In grad school I have never ever had to take any tests that would demand anywhere near the mindless memorization called for by GRE and TOEFL (thank $DEITY). Quite literally, the only things preparing for GRE and TOEFL has taught me is how silly is the establishment that pushes and uses those things. I have read some papers that supposedly support the use of results from GRE, and they seemed to be worse than some pharma-funded published research "supporting" antidepressants.
You want someone to know if they are any good in English? Have them go through college. If they manage, they obviously are good enough. If they can't, well, tough luck. At least the college gets some money out of it. Same goes for other academic skills. In my undergrad physics, they took pretty much everyone from the street, and by the end of the first year 50% of students were out. Maybe 30% ended up graduating. Yet we have some silly bureaucrats who somehow think such "awfully low graduation rate" is bad. How can it be bad?! What do you want to do, give those people meaningless pieces of papers, with nothing to show for them? Umm, yeah, I know, that's happening all over the place, too...
How does the sticking power of TOS test out in court? Do facebook's TOS actually mean anything, if all you need to do to access their site is to type in a URL? I mean there isn't even a clickthrough to have them pretend like they care. Yes, I seriously would like to know.
OK, so apart from spreading STDs, unwanted pregnancies, and potentially dangerous pleasure, sex is bad how? If the first three were not a problem, would it be OK with you? I don't think so, yet your whole argument is construed as if those three bad things were determining your stance.
One can obviously rather easily deal with the first three rather simply. Heck, I think that many teens must be dealing with #3 for you on the female end for free, just by the fact that quite often it requires a wee bit longer relationship for the guy to be able to actually give pleasure to the girl.
LOL.
Sex is pleasurable, yet it doesn't have to be you goal in life, and merely having sex is not making you a hedonist.
Doing stuff without thinking of the consequences is not narcissism. It's being stupid. Narcissism is something else, go read about it.
As for self-righteousness, well, you define it quite well.
But frankly, your posts make very little sense. On the surface they look good, but it's all bondo. Hopefully you'll get the car analogy.
It's all about what's acceptable risk to you. OTOH, according to your cited statistics, it may be enough to pass a law that forces one of the partners to be at least 25 y.o.
Waiting until marriage is effective against the spread of STDs only if you're conservative enough not to do other things that can also spread STDs yet are not considered sex. Ask any teenager if they thing kissing is sex. Yet you can catch a whole bunch of STDs by kissing someone passionately enough.
I fully believe in nothing-barred education. Kids need to learn about STDs in school, they need to know how relevant biological processes work, they need to be taught this stuff not quite unlike doctors are. They need to see pictures of it! It must be something that is *not* a taboo, that kids are expected to openly talk about -- the stigma of STDs is the real killer, and it's the sole doing of religious wingnuts. The kids need to be able to recognize a herpes or syphyllis sore. They need to understand that doing it literally in the dark is at best irresponsible -- look and examine each other before! And so on.
What a strawman. An addiction is not something that once started, you don't stop. If you define things like that, then walking is an addiction too. So that argument is just stupid.
Sex can be an addiction if it quacks like one. If it negatively affects your daily life, then yes it is an addiction. Never mind that married couples have *intramarital* sex addiction problems too, you don't automatically get excluded simply because you married. If you sneak out of work twice a day for sex, it doesn't matter if you do it with your secretary or with your wife/hubby.
Anyway, all of the not-yet-married couples I know or knew, and there were quite a few, were rather definitely not addicted to sex, so I don't see it as a problem of *addiction*. Some of them would be addicted to other things, but not to sex.
Your arguments don't pass the smell test, IOW. They are just one more in an endless stream of religious rhetoric that falls on its face if looked at from any angle other than blind acceptance.
I don't think that people have "major misconceptions" about sex and religion like you insist. You're laying some smoke bombs, OTOH. Catholic Church does *not* allow *married* couples to have sex with contraceptives. That's hardly saying *go for it*, isn't it? There are more examples like this, hopefully you know them and just pretend to ignore them. If you didn't know, then perhaps it's time to get educated?
You don't have to be brilliant to understand a roundabout. If you can't understand it after 2-3 minutes of thinking about it, you should not be driving.
"Secondly, I don't think that anyone should ever be cruising down the road in the fast lane unless traffic is very heavy in the first place."
It just doesn't work that way. Traffic flow depends *heavily* on the average distance between cars. If you have too many cars per mile of *lane* (not *road*), the flow of cars is no more a free flow. There's enough feedback between drivers that you end up having packets of cars flowing down the highway, eventually there are points where the speed of those packets is zero -- A.K.A. localized traffic jams, where there may be "free" road just a mile ahead.
So having everyone in one lane just because they are not passing is *crippling* and you *do not* want that. When traffic on a freeway is heavy enough, you want all lanes to be in use -- and that's what you will see happen, and that's OK and by design.
Never mind that what is a "fast lane" to you on a multi-lane freeway, like most metropolitan rings in the U.S.? Those things may have 5-6 lanes in places. There is no concept of a "fast lane" on those. During rush hour those places are anyway 2 lanes short of being able to sustain the traffic flow, thus the "traffic jams". You definitely don't want to waste a perfectly good lane for some abstract concept, when it just kills the traffic flow.
Go to a traffic control center some time and look at graphs of traffic flow vs. time. You'll see a nice periodic waveform as soon as traffic demand is higher than the number of lanes supports. That periodicity is seen, from drivers perspective, as traffic jams.
Nor to Turkey! :)
The Autobahn isn't constructed anything like the crappy U.S. interstates that need repaving every couple of years. It's constructed like a runway. These days it's laid by continuous-operation machines where you have gravel/underlayment/whatnot on one side, and reinforced concrete on the other. I've seen such a monster in action, and -- by comparison -- the way the U.S. interstates are being built is archaic at best.
Finally a voice of reason.
I don't see why those checks shouldn't be continuous. It's easy to do, and they can run at a fairly low priority -- say doing a hash of the whole firmware once a minute.
If the ECU is so susceptible to single-bit errors, I'd like to see it getting stuck in IDLE, getting stuck running rich/lean, etc.
I'm pretty sure that if we *do* learn of what the problem was, it will be something rather embarassing, and will have nothing to do with SEUs, seized bushings, etc.
Toyota's technical problem right now is lack of post-mortem diagnostics built into the ECU. Things that are "out of the ordinary" should be logged, ideally with as much of ECUs state logged as possible. That's their only *technical* problem. Everything else is hearsay at this point, from the technical standpoint. Engineering can't work with what amounts to gossip.
Stories of people driving their cars with WOT to the dealerships with *nothing* constructive coming out of it indicate that there's gross lack of competence everywhere in their corporate structure. There's no communication. If a tech gets a "weird example" like that in the dealership, he should be able to get to the engineer who is on the ECU support team. Anything less should get responsible people jailed. Mr Toyoda has lost touch. It's not about incremental improvements. It's simply about corporate inertia and unnecessary shielding of people who should be working towards a common goal. If a tech at a Toyota dealer somewhere in the U.S. thinks he has something really weird going on, he shouldn't be treated like public enemy #1. He should be treated like a source of valuable feedback, potentially averting an ongoing disaster. There's no reason for said tech not to be able to get to the engineering.
No, I don't work for Toyota or their dealers. But I've heard enough corporate idiocy to be able to recognize its symptoms. The blind running around exhibited by Toyota's engineering right now is a *classic* "all red flags" symptom. The first step at the solution isn't technical. It's corporate wetware.
Any assumption of SEUs causing the unintended acceleration is IMHO completely outlandish. Occam's razor FTFY.
If those ECUs were so sensitive to SEUs, there'd be stories all over the place of *other* upsets: cars getting stuck in IDLE, cars running poorly because they are consistently rich/lean, etc.
It makes no sense to assume that cars that otherwise drive OK will have uncontrolled acceleration issues due to SEUs. It's too convenient. I think that prof. Massengill fell under the spell of "when all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail".
Toyota should simply issue a recall where their ECU firmware starts making snapshots of internal state when accelerator has been at WOT for more than say 5 seconds. They'll find the problem very quickly that way. I'm quite sure they *don't* do that.
The inertia stars in school, or even earlier at home, where kids learn that no matter what the truth is, they will be expected to memorize and repeat lies or half-truths. After some period of being conditioned like that, you can either shoot yourself in the head, or go with the flow.
I have a 5 year old daughter, and all I can say is that her questions, for a good while now, are mindbogglingly hard to answer without stopping oneself for a good while. Even if she won't fully understand an answer, I strive not to lie, and not to force her to accept something without some underlying reason/"proof".
This is hard, and it requires exercise of certain self-control not to just blow the kid off for being "pesky".
Seeing, as it unfortunately is, that kids learn all the wrong answers, and are repeatedly told that they have to take the wrong answers and shut up, results in adults that are just like that. They have learned early on in life, that no matter how it really is, they must stick by some stupidity or else.
There's no deep psychology going on there. Go to the nearest playground, and listen to answers given to kids.