One might as well ask "Is the weather good?" and the answer would depend one's point of view.
It is well that such people exist to question established beliefs or to see the extent of a notion's validity. Whether you agree with Lomborg's book or not, the discourse is nothing but healthy.
Frankly, given the way that money is raised for scientific research, I'm not surprised that a lot of present day research is slanted toward a sensational outcome. Research that confirms the mundane simply isn't attractive enough to attract the kind of funding and publicity that many in the environmentalist movement seek.
On the other hand, it's not wise to dismiss these discoveries simply because we suspect the motives of those who found them. We need verification. And books like this give public officials adequate cause to fund more research to verify these claims.
Yes, it's political. So are the sensational claims made by so many who think that global warming will become a major disaster. The truth is that there simply isn't enough information to determine who is right yet. By forcing a debate, maybe we will finally be able to put the parameters of this debate in to focus.
Could it also be that kids are discouraged from experimenting in their own back yards?
Precisely! You see, science is all about the unknown. It's not "safe" for suburban living.
Kids can't get in to ham radio because they're not even allowed to erect a wire antenna outside their house. God help you if the neighborhood nazis find you turning a wrench on your own car. Chemistry sets have been largely banned because a kid might make a small amount of toxic waste if he or she abuses it. Even tree houses are subjected to neighborhood covenants.
The dimwitted busybodies of our world have been allowed to take over. Most of the laws governing living areas are designed to make "safe" havens where nothing except sports can happen to your little children. And you have to cart them everywhere in your home away from home, the minivan.
Well, nothing's happening. Their brains are filled with nothing. Homer Hickam's October Sky would be even more impossible in today's world of "safe" living.
Welcome to the wonderful world of lobotomized science education and rotton opportunities.
I have two and a third may be coming soon. You learn to reorient your priorities. If you can pay your mortgage, grocery bill, and some sort of affordable transportation, you'll do ok.
I worried about where the money was going to come from when my kids were born. It turned out that I didn't really need to be that concerned. You probably already have the money in disposable income. You just don't know it yet. Don't go moonlighting right away. Caring for a new kid is something you don't want to leave to your spouse.
You may briefly go in to debt while you reorganize your priorities, but you will probably come out of it in better financial shape than you thought. But if you go moonlighting, you'll never know what you've missed...
A book like that would never make it to the class-room. The crackpots would then start asking for "equal time." This is why so many get tripped up with the creationism/evolution legitimacy debate. Ultimately, it's based on the fact that a crackpot won't take anyone's study and educated conclusions at face value. Instead they propose outrageous conspiracy theories.
For people like that, the only way to prove them wrong is to repeat the experiment right in front of them. While I'd love to see someone return to the moon, I don't want to see so much wasted just to prove that it was done.
No the best move for NASA is not to give a crackpot the limelight in the first place. They'll discredit themselves very quickly. Crackpots don't see eye to eye with each other --let alone NASA. But faced with a torrent of criticism from an authority, they'll line right up.
NASA is a government research organization. Debunking the ignorant rantings of those who are out to sell books is a function of the schools and the scientific community as a whole but not really one of NASA itself.
They probably could if they put many *more* antenna's on the listening job (a beowulf cluster of antenna's?:-), but NASA is already backlogged on communication with probes...
1) NASA's Deep Space Network is in shambles. It needs a massive upgrade.
2) A "Beowulf Cluster of Antennas" --Ever heard of the Very Large Array?;-) I've heard of a guy who erected a scaled down version of this array using surplus TVRO dishes and a $10k NASA grant. I'd like to try that some day.
3) Pioneer uses a deliberately undermodulated form of PSK so that they could lock on to the carrier phase for reliable demodulation of the signal. I suspect the carrier was buried so far in to the noise that the sidebands were undetectable.
...was how to discourage innovation. And on most counts, I agree with him.
Yes, there is much technical innovation in the US, but this country certainly doesn't have a monopoly on technical progress --no matter how you define such things.
The key is to be able to recognize and use the discoveries of others, never mind who they are or where they came from. This is a strength of a multi-cultural homogeneous society. The "not invented here" syndrom should be less common in a society such as this.
What Ben Stein wrote was very simply a diatribe against a bunch of idiotic and luddite behaviors which various influential and powerful organizations seem to be perpetrating.
He nailed the issues on lack of ethics, ignorant politicians who don't understand the legislation they're proposing, teachers who aren't allowed to teach, bosses who squelch innovation for fear of a law suit, and so on and so forth.
The only question is not whether the US is suffering from this, but whether any other country is managing to stay ahead of these problems.
I work for a water and sewer utility. Here's some interesting background to consider:
Sewer systems do rely on gravity --to get them to the nearest pumping station. Now where do you go? Wastewater stations are usually in some low lying area, some are close to or even inside a 100 year floodplain. Is this really a good place for a fiber switching center?
Several of you mentioned that sewage leaks in to the ground water. Uhh folks, it goes both ways. The term we use for this phenomenon is infiltration and inflow. Often the problem isn't leakage in to the ground water, it's leakage of ground water in to the sewer and overloading wastewater treatement plants. Problems include tree roots cutting through sewer pipes, shifting soil, and pipe deterioration. I'll be impressed if a robot can negotiate all of that. We have enough trouble getting our sewer pipe TV cameras in there to investigate blockage problems.
Someone is going to have to convince the sewer company that this extra volume of fiber in the sewer pipe isn't going to cause additional grease buildup, and isn't going to restrict flow. Many new and even the not-so-new suburban areas are stressing the capacity of existing sewer systems well beyond original design limits. Unless the system is very well maintained (it almost never is) or the pipe is very new and well below designed flow limits, I don't forsee many companies agreeing to this.
Most fast moving objects leave a substantial bow-shock as they pass. The beauty of aircraft is that their shock wave and wake turbulence happen at a substantial altitude so that they have a chance to dissipate.
No matter what technology you use, maglev, wheeled, or whatever, the faster it goes, the more space it will need to keep humans away from the shock-wave.
So now, let's look at land use policies: Where the hell are they going to put this thing?
Let's not confuse identical with redundancy or diversity.
Identical networks may or may not offer any backup depending on how they're managed. If there is a strict policy regarding how each network is tested and debugged before changes are implemented on the other, then it might help. Otherwise, in a large network such as this, you'll perpetually be scratching your head as to why the two are different.
Redundancy merely implies redundant functionality, a backup link. This helps only if the backup links use different infrastructure to get from one place to another. But, again, if the two networks are bridging traffic with spanning trees then I still don't see how this helps the situation much.
Diversity is the solution. Use seperately powered routers, different links, even seperate wiring closets. It's not cheap. It's not easy to manage. But it will provide a connection with far more reliability than the others.
This Hospital network seems to me to be something that just plain grew without much planning. Somehow, it became the greate big switched network of everything. This works until someone makes a short circuit link from one node to another and then the spanning tree falls in to its belly-button.
I've seen the people with all the right certifications dive right in to that recursive problem and run themselves in to testing circles. The problem is that we don't teach diagnostic thinking in schools or in training classes. I'm not even sure that we can. Problems like this demand a scientific method approach (as outlined so nicely in Robert Pirsig's book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"). It's slow. It's tedious. And in really tough problems such as this, it's the only method left that will repair the situation. I know of very few people who know how to do diagnostic thinking this way.
It's sort of like the difference between hacking a bunch of code together, doing limited testing and then saying "It Works" --or thinking of a concept, carefully planning the code around it, planning all the testing of each segment of the code, demonstrating that the final assembly of the software works, and then tentatively calling the product "Functional."
I feel sorry for the hospital staff who had to endure this. I hope their misfortune serves as an object lesson to pointy haired bosses about giant switched networks where everybody can see everything. But somehow, I'm almost certain the object lesson from this will be lost on them as they blame a black box rather than the people maintaining it.
The BEST you can get is two out of the three. You can do worse, if you're not careful. The DoD of the United States has a very long history of purchasing substandard products for ridiculously high prices.
Purchasing, maintaining, and operating the aircraft built by the Lockheed Skunk Works is not cheap. It may be inexpensive given the mission it performs, but it's still anything but "cheap" even in the expensive world of aviation.
According to the specifications, the five gallon capacity is so that they can meet the United States Federal Aviation Regulations Part 103 definition for an ultra-light vehicle.
I admit a bias as a fixed wing airplane pilot; the prospect of helicopter kits, especially ultralight helicopter kits, frightens me. Assuming these guys ever make it to market, I sure don't want to be the first on my block to buy one of these things.
Re:Lacks any ability to glide
on
Fanwing Planes?
·
· Score: 2
Uh, no. The birds would suffer a similar fate no matter what kind of aircraft they hit.
The Fanwing is a new name on an old concept: It's called an autogyro. And yes, there are many folks reexaming the autogyro as a less expensive and more reliable alternative to the helicopter. Unfortunately, many don't realize why the autogyro isn't more popular until they look more closely at the performance envelope.
Autogyros can be more efficient than helicopters, but inevitably they are less efficient than fixed wing airplanes. They also suffer from the same problems as other rotary wing aircraft.
As the forward speed of the main rotor wing tip approaches the speed of sound, they lose lift. Rotorcraft are speed limited in ways that fixed wing aircraft are not. The Cartercopter is one of the best attempts at reaching efficent speeds and cruise that I've seen.
It's not revolutionary, it's merely evolutionary. Beware of those who claim otherwise. (Note: Moller has been working on these designs for decades and not one has been sold commercially as a working aircraft in any capacity --even experimental)
The real question is not whether someone was irresponsible for posting the hack, the question is how long should a published flaw have to sit around waiting for a solution?
And there is no hard and fast answer to this question. In this case however, we see a serious vulnerability. At the very least, Microsoft should have been allowed a couple working days to verify the problem, post an acknowledgement, and at least a temporary work-around --even if that work-around cripples their product in some way.
After a couple weeks with a bug this severe, they really ought to have posted a patch of some sort. The fear that the "script kiddies might take this snippet of code and run with it" is almost irrelevant. It's the professional spies and organized crime groups we ought to be scared of.
This script was inevitable. Why blame the messenger?
Time magazine has been shedding staff like crazy too. Word has it that morale is dropping fast there as well.
Yes, in the short term, productivity increases. This is partly due to an inertia effect where existing business is handled by the remaining staff. But while productivity looks good, nothing is growing. There is little new development, and sales are typically flat.
One industry analyst, Jim Pinto, has observed three stages of cuts in business:
Stage 1: Liposuction
Stage 2: Amputation
Stage 3: Dismemberment
I think most places are past stage 1 and well in to stage 2. Many Slashdot threads have also observed how poorly the MBA crowd has served the new technology market. This is what happens when growth moves faster than training and experience for the MBA set.
The people who run the companies we work for don't understand their businesses any more. Technology has changed so many inherent assumptions that almost nobody in management knows where their bread is buttered. They have to fail and then we have to hope that new managers with better understanding take over. Many businesses won't be so lucky and we should failures right and left before we turn this proverbial corner.
And of course, TIME magazine is only one of many such victims. I'll bet their reporters are writing from first hand experience. The up-side to all this is that when things finally do come back together, they'll be more efficient and better organized than before. It sucks that we have to have so much stress and discontent for this to happen, but that's life.
Obligatory joke: "My BRAIN? Why, that's my second favorite organ!"
People are scared of what RF radiation could do to them. That's RF, as in Radio Frequency. Telling them that it's non-ionizing is pointless. They only understand "radiation" and they don't want to understand any more.
Now someone is proposing a nuclear battery. I wish them luck. With so many people believing that putting a cell phone next to their heads is dangerous today, wait until interest groups discover that the battery they're using is a nuclear device.
Once again, we have what is probably a technically elegant solution being offered to a seriously ignorant public. Expect the risks to be blown entirely out of proportion while "harmless" chemical batteries are added by the ton to landfills every day. Thank-you Jeremy Rifkin. Thank-you Paul Brodur. Thank-you Nancy Wertheimer. Thank-you Rachel Carson. You and your successors have taught a generation of idiots all about fear-mongering. Now we can all pay for the wages of stupidity and political grandstanding.
Meanwhile, because of our societal phobias we'll continue making a mess of our environment.
(Rifkin: Fearmonger on Genetically modified foods. Brodur: wrote the "Zapping of America", a treatise on RF phobias and science by innunendo. Nancy Werthiemer: Co-author of a seriously flawed paper on powerline exposure and lukemia. Rachael Carson: "Silent Spring"; although her cause was reasonable, her facts were not.)
Let me guess: fasteners are all the same, so let's use a hammer to pound in a screw.
Most languages have a focus toward a particular aspect of programming. Some are very good for Object orientation. Some are good for low level hardware I/O. Some are designed to parse input in optimal fashion. Others are designed for terse code.
They all have a purpose. That's why we have software tool chests with lots of languages and tools which can be used in so many ways.
Forth is good for low level I/O work. It's often used in Robotics and control systems. It is a minimalist language and it generates very fast, memory efficient code. These are good traits when dealing with embedded processors. But once you try scaling it up to do more complex tasks, you discover its limitations. That's when higher level languages start to shine.
Mod that AC back up, he's asking a legitimate question and it deserves a decent answer.
Yes, the earth's resources are finite. Yet the market works well toward curbing consumption when there really is sufficient motive to do so. Note the recent work on fuel cell technology.
The problem with many of these chicken little environmental defense groups are several: First, they don't put their money where their mouthes are; they put their mouths on wherever your money is. No, I'm not going to listen to some wanker tell me how not to spend my money.
Some, such as the Nature Conservancy, actually do buy up land or resources they wish to protect. I generally approve of approaches such as this. If it matters to you that much, go ahead and buy those wetlands, or compensate those who happen to own them if they shouldn't be allowed to develop them. But don't arbitrarily reduce someone's property value just because they have something these groups would like to see left alone.
Second, they make some really poor assumptions about technology, markets, policies and population. This gem of an article is no different. Most models predict the earth's population growing exponentially. Recent data disputes that however. Most models don't allow for new technologies of any sort. Based on the models and practices of the 1960's and 70's we should have run out of food by now. Yet, with modern farming techniques we're feeding more than those prognosticators from thirty some years ago ever dreamed.
Are there people starving in the world today? Unfortunately, yes, though most of these cases are due to repressive governments blocking distribution channels, not because there is no food.
Are resources finite? Yes. We won't all reach the living standards we have in the first and second worlds. But most of the world is working to improve their lot in life and to find less expensive ways of living. The world will not end tomorrow. So this organization is worried about 83% of the earth? I think they're looking at just one number and making policy all over it.
This is what gives real environmentalists heartburn.
Folks, please understand that digital modulation doesn't imply good audio quality. DRM is actually a suite of standards which may fit in to existing MW and SW AM broadcast band plans. Most modes aren't meant for good fidelity, though some modes are designed for quality up to FM broadcast standards. The beauty of DRM is in it's robust nature, with Forward Error Correction coding designed to survive tough signal propagation paths such as those found on MW at night and on shortwave.
Another significant difference is that DRM makes no attempt at transmitting analog program along with the digital stream. It's all digital. It can be anywhere from a 16 state QAM signal to a 64 state QAM signal. Channel bandwidth requirements can be anywhere from 10 kHz to 30 kHz, depending on which modulation scheme is used. So it will fit in existing band plan channel schemes, but it won't be backward compatible.
Another issue about DRM's effort: getting it in to a radio receiver economically. Right now the only receivers are a few prototype modified high performance receivers with sound-card based demodulators. For it to be viable, they need to find someone to produce ASICs for common radio configurations so that we can buy something the size of a Walkman for under $100. Until they reach that configuration in a format any idiot can use, this will be yet another failed MW attempt, similar to AM Stereo.
Finally, the biggest bugaboo of all: Once you have a digital signal, what do you do with it? Music migrated to FM stereo in the 1960s and 1970's because it was a good medium for the task. DRM can't improve on it enough to make a significant difference.
So DRM faces the same old problem: Yeah, it's cool, but how can I make money with it? I don't know. It's a chicken and egg market. And from what I've seen, this consortium isn't producing much result in bringing either a chicken or an egg to the scene. At best, I give them a 10% chance at success. One submarine patent and it's finished.
A friend of mine pointed out that Domino.com could be easily claimed by any one of several companies: A pizza company, a sugar company, or a software company.
This is a very sordid and very nasty issue. If you want a view from the front lines look here.
I'm surprised Jan Hendrik Schon didn't win
on
Ig Nobels Awarded
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· Score: 1
Slashdot Mirror
It is well that such people exist to question established beliefs or to see the extent of a notion's validity. Whether you agree with Lomborg's book or not, the discourse is nothing but healthy.
Frankly, given the way that money is raised for scientific research, I'm not surprised that a lot of present day research is slanted toward a sensational outcome. Research that confirms the mundane simply isn't attractive enough to attract the kind of funding and publicity that many in the environmentalist movement seek.
On the other hand, it's not wise to dismiss these discoveries simply because we suspect the motives of those who found them. We need verification. And books like this give public officials adequate cause to fund more research to verify these claims.
Yes, it's political. So are the sensational claims made by so many who think that global warming will become a major disaster. The truth is that there simply isn't enough information to determine who is right yet. By forcing a debate, maybe we will finally be able to put the parameters of this debate in to focus.
Precisely! You see, science is all about the unknown. It's not "safe" for suburban living.
Kids can't get in to ham radio because they're not even allowed to erect a wire antenna outside their house. God help you if the neighborhood nazis find you turning a wrench on your own car. Chemistry sets have been largely banned because a kid might make a small amount of toxic waste if he or she abuses it. Even tree houses are subjected to neighborhood covenants.
The dimwitted busybodies of our world have been allowed to take over. Most of the laws governing living areas are designed to make "safe" havens where nothing except sports can happen to your little children. And you have to cart them everywhere in your home away from home, the minivan.
Well, nothing's happening. Their brains are filled with nothing. Homer Hickam's October Sky would be even more impossible in today's world of "safe" living.
Welcome to the wonderful world of lobotomized science education and rotton opportunities.
I worried about where the money was going to come from when my kids were born. It turned out that I didn't really need to be that concerned. You probably already have the money in disposable income. You just don't know it yet. Don't go moonlighting right away. Caring for a new kid is something you don't want to leave to your spouse.
You may briefly go in to debt while you reorganize your priorities, but you will probably come out of it in better financial shape than you thought. But if you go moonlighting, you'll never know what you've missed...
Congratulations and Good Luck!
For people like that, the only way to prove them wrong is to repeat the experiment right in front of them. While I'd love to see someone return to the moon, I don't want to see so much wasted just to prove that it was done.
No the best move for NASA is not to give a crackpot the limelight in the first place. They'll discredit themselves very quickly. Crackpots don't see eye to eye with each other --let alone NASA. But faced with a torrent of criticism from an authority, they'll line right up.
NASA is a government research organization. Debunking the ignorant rantings of those who are out to sell books is a function of the schools and the scientific community as a whole but not really one of NASA itself.
1) NASA's Deep Space Network is in shambles. It needs a massive upgrade.
2) A "Beowulf Cluster of Antennas" --Ever heard of the Very Large Array?
3) Pioneer uses a deliberately undermodulated form of PSK so that they could lock on to the carrier phase for reliable demodulation of the signal. I suspect the carrier was buried so far in to the noise that the sidebands were undetectable.
Yes, there is much technical innovation in the US, but this country certainly doesn't have a monopoly on technical progress --no matter how you define such things.
The key is to be able to recognize and use the discoveries of others, never mind who they are or where they came from. This is a strength of a multi-cultural homogeneous society. The "not invented here" syndrom should be less common in a society such as this.
What Ben Stein wrote was very simply a diatribe against a bunch of idiotic and luddite behaviors which various influential and powerful organizations seem to be perpetrating.
He nailed the issues on lack of ethics, ignorant politicians who don't understand the legislation they're proposing, teachers who aren't allowed to teach, bosses who squelch innovation for fear of a law suit, and so on and so forth.
The only question is not whether the US is suffering from this, but whether any other country is managing to stay ahead of these problems.
Sewer systems do rely on gravity --to get them to the nearest pumping station. Now where do you go? Wastewater stations are usually in some low lying area, some are close to or even inside a 100 year floodplain. Is this really a good place for a fiber switching center?
Several of you mentioned that sewage leaks in to the ground water. Uhh folks, it goes both ways. The term we use for this phenomenon is infiltration and inflow. Often the problem isn't leakage in to the ground water, it's leakage of ground water in to the sewer and overloading wastewater treatement plants. Problems include tree roots cutting through sewer pipes, shifting soil, and pipe deterioration. I'll be impressed if a robot can negotiate all of that. We have enough trouble getting our sewer pipe TV cameras in there to investigate blockage problems.
Someone is going to have to convince the sewer company that this extra volume of fiber in the sewer pipe isn't going to cause additional grease buildup, and isn't going to restrict flow. Many new and even the not-so-new suburban areas are stressing the capacity of existing sewer systems well beyond original design limits. Unless the system is very well maintained (it almost never is) or the pipe is very new and well below designed flow limits, I don't forsee many companies agreeing to this.
the hottest and/or coolest music should always be played as loud as possible.
No matter what technology you use, maglev, wheeled, or whatever, the faster it goes, the more space it will need to keep humans away from the shock-wave.
So now, let's look at land use policies: Where the hell are they going to put this thing?
Identical networks may or may not offer any backup depending on how they're managed. If there is a strict policy regarding how each network is tested and debugged before changes are implemented on the other, then it might help. Otherwise, in a large network such as this, you'll perpetually be scratching your head as to why the two are different.
Redundancy merely implies redundant functionality, a backup link. This helps only if the backup links use different infrastructure to get from one place to another. But, again, if the two networks are bridging traffic with spanning trees then I still don't see how this helps the situation much.
Diversity is the solution. Use seperately powered routers, different links, even seperate wiring closets. It's not cheap. It's not easy to manage. But it will provide a connection with far more reliability than the others.
This Hospital network seems to me to be something that just plain grew without much planning. Somehow, it became the greate big switched network of everything. This works until someone makes a short circuit link from one node to another and then the spanning tree falls in to its belly-button.
I've seen the people with all the right certifications dive right in to that recursive problem and run themselves in to testing circles. The problem is that we don't teach diagnostic thinking in schools or in training classes. I'm not even sure that we can. Problems like this demand a scientific method approach (as outlined so nicely in Robert Pirsig's book "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance"). It's slow. It's tedious. And in really tough problems such as this, it's the only method left that will repair the situation. I know of very few people who know how to do diagnostic thinking this way.
It's sort of like the difference between hacking a bunch of code together, doing limited testing and then saying "It Works" --or thinking of a concept, carefully planning the code around it, planning all the testing of each segment of the code, demonstrating that the final assembly of the software works, and then tentatively calling the product "Functional."
I feel sorry for the hospital staff who had to endure this. I hope their misfortune serves as an object lesson to pointy haired bosses about giant switched networks where everybody can see everything. But somehow, I'm almost certain the object lesson from this will be lost on them as they blame a black box rather than the people maintaining it.
I stand by my statement.
Purchasing, maintaining, and operating the aircraft built by the Lockheed Skunk Works is not cheap. It may be inexpensive given the mission it performs, but it's still anything but "cheap" even in the expensive world of aviation.
I admit a bias as a fixed wing airplane pilot; the prospect of helicopter kits, especially ultralight helicopter kits, frightens me. Assuming these guys ever make it to market, I sure don't want to be the first on my block to buy one of these things.
The Fanwing is a new name on an old concept: It's called an autogyro. And yes, there are many folks reexaming the autogyro as a less expensive and more reliable alternative to the helicopter. Unfortunately, many don't realize why the autogyro isn't more popular until they look more closely at the performance envelope.
Autogyros can be more efficient than helicopters, but inevitably they are less efficient than fixed wing airplanes. They also suffer from the same problems as other rotary wing aircraft.
As the forward speed of the main rotor wing tip approaches the speed of sound, they lose lift. Rotorcraft are speed limited in ways that fixed wing aircraft are not. The Cartercopter is one of the best attempts at reaching efficent speeds and cruise that I've seen.
For examples of other autogyros see Gyrobee and The Popular Rotorcraft Association
It's not revolutionary, it's merely evolutionary. Beware of those who claim otherwise. (Note: Moller has been working on these designs for decades and not one has been sold commercially as a working aircraft in any capacity --even experimental)
And there is no hard and fast answer to this question. In this case however, we see a serious vulnerability. At the very least, Microsoft should have been allowed a couple working days to verify the problem, post an acknowledgement, and at least a temporary work-around --even if that work-around cripples their product in some way.
After a couple weeks with a bug this severe, they really ought to have posted a patch of some sort. The fear that the "script kiddies might take this snippet of code and run with it" is almost irrelevant. It's the professional spies and organized crime groups we ought to be scared of.
This script was inevitable. Why blame the messenger?
Yes, in the short term, productivity increases. This is partly due to an inertia effect where existing business is handled by the remaining staff. But while productivity looks good, nothing is growing. There is little new development, and sales are typically flat.
One industry analyst, Jim Pinto, has observed three stages of cuts in business:
Stage 1: Liposuction
Stage 2: Amputation
Stage 3: Dismemberment
I think most places are past stage 1 and well in to stage 2. Many Slashdot threads have also observed how poorly the MBA crowd has served the new technology market. This is what happens when growth moves faster than training and experience for the MBA set.
The people who run the companies we work for don't understand their businesses any more. Technology has changed so many inherent assumptions that almost nobody in management knows where their bread is buttered. They have to fail and then we have to hope that new managers with better understanding take over. Many businesses won't be so lucky and we should failures right and left before we turn this proverbial corner.
And of course, TIME magazine is only one of many such victims. I'll bet their reporters are writing from first hand experience. The up-side to all this is that when things finally do come back together, they'll be more efficient and better organized than before. It sucks that we have to have so much stress and discontent for this to happen, but that's life.
People are scared of what RF radiation could do to them. That's RF, as in Radio Frequency. Telling them that it's non-ionizing is pointless. They only understand "radiation" and they don't want to understand any more.
Now someone is proposing a nuclear battery. I wish them luck. With so many people believing that putting a cell phone next to their heads is dangerous today, wait until interest groups discover that the battery they're using is a nuclear device.
Once again, we have what is probably a technically elegant solution being offered to a seriously ignorant public. Expect the risks to be blown entirely out of proportion while "harmless" chemical batteries are added by the ton to landfills every day. Thank-you Jeremy Rifkin. Thank-you Paul Brodur. Thank-you Nancy Wertheimer. Thank-you Rachel Carson. You and your successors have taught a generation of idiots all about fear-mongering. Now we can all pay for the wages of stupidity and political grandstanding.
Meanwhile, because of our societal phobias we'll continue making a mess of our environment.
(Rifkin: Fearmonger on Genetically modified foods. Brodur: wrote the "Zapping of America", a treatise on RF phobias and science by innunendo. Nancy Werthiemer: Co-author of a seriously flawed paper on powerline exposure and lukemia. Rachael Carson: "Silent Spring"; although her cause was reasonable, her facts were not.)
Most languages have a focus toward a particular aspect of programming. Some are very good for Object orientation. Some are good for low level hardware I/O. Some are designed to parse input in optimal fashion. Others are designed for terse code.
They all have a purpose. That's why we have software tool chests with lots of languages and tools which can be used in so many ways.
Forth is good for low level I/O work. It's often used in Robotics and control systems. It is a minimalist language and it generates very fast, memory efficient code. These are good traits when dealing with embedded processors. But once you try scaling it up to do more complex tasks, you discover its limitations. That's when higher level languages start to shine.
Yes, the earth's resources are finite. Yet the market works well toward curbing consumption when there really is sufficient motive to do so. Note the recent work on fuel cell technology.
The problem with many of these chicken little environmental defense groups are several: First, they don't put their money where their mouthes are; they put their mouths on wherever your money is. No, I'm not going to listen to some wanker tell me how not to spend my money.
Some, such as the Nature Conservancy, actually do buy up land or resources they wish to protect. I generally approve of approaches such as this. If it matters to you that much, go ahead and buy those wetlands, or compensate those who happen to own them if they shouldn't be allowed to develop them. But don't arbitrarily reduce someone's property value just because they have something these groups would like to see left alone.
Second, they make some really poor assumptions about technology, markets, policies and population. This gem of an article is no different. Most models predict the earth's population growing exponentially. Recent data disputes that however. Most models don't allow for new technologies of any sort. Based on the models and practices of the 1960's and 70's we should have run out of food by now. Yet, with modern farming techniques we're feeding more than those prognosticators from thirty some years ago ever dreamed.
Are there people starving in the world today? Unfortunately, yes, though most of these cases are due to repressive governments blocking distribution channels, not because there is no food.
Are resources finite? Yes. We won't all reach the living standards we have in the first and second worlds. But most of the world is working to improve their lot in life and to find less expensive ways of living. The world will not end tomorrow. So this organization is worried about 83% of the earth? I think they're looking at just one number and making policy all over it.
This is what gives real environmentalists heartburn.
Another significant difference is that DRM makes no attempt at transmitting analog program along with the digital stream. It's all digital. It can be anywhere from a 16 state QAM signal to a 64 state QAM signal. Channel bandwidth requirements can be anywhere from 10 kHz to 30 kHz, depending on which modulation scheme is used. So it will fit in existing band plan channel schemes, but it won't be backward compatible.
Another issue about DRM's effort: getting it in to a radio receiver economically. Right now the only receivers are a few prototype modified high performance receivers with sound-card based demodulators. For it to be viable, they need to find someone to produce ASICs for common radio configurations so that we can buy something the size of a Walkman for under $100. Until they reach that configuration in a format any idiot can use, this will be yet another failed MW attempt, similar to AM Stereo.
Finally, the biggest bugaboo of all: Once you have a digital signal, what do you do with it? Music migrated to FM stereo in the 1960s and 1970's because it was a good medium for the task. DRM can't improve on it enough to make a significant difference.
So DRM faces the same old problem: Yeah, it's cool, but how can I make money with it? I don't know. It's a chicken and egg market. And from what I've seen, this consortium isn't producing much result in bringing either a chicken or an egg to the scene. At best, I give them a 10% chance at success. One submarine patent and it's finished.
Uh, lots, actually. Since OSCAR 1, 40 satellites have made it in to orbit with some functionality.
There is even a proposal afloat by AMSAT-DL to send one to Mars.
A friend of mine pointed out that Domino.com could be easily claimed by any one of several companies: A pizza company, a sugar company, or a software company.
This is a very sordid and very nasty issue. If you want a view from the front lines look here.
It was certainly irreproducible.
A one way glass is a half silvered mirror. Walking on a mirror has it's own, uh, hazards.
By the way, I don't see how this is sexist. I understand that kilts are becoming more and more popular among men.
By the way, I have never seen a glass floor anywhere, let alone a one way mirror. Anyone else?