Which brings up the real tragedy of the War on Some Drugs: people would be much better served if there was more complete, reliable information available. It's a shame that the issue is so politicized that there isn't good information available in most cases.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you a counter-anecdote. I've known lots of people who take amphetamines in a non-addicting fashion on a regular basis -- most of them on prescription for ADD or similar. I've known a number who use it occasionally as a study aid. Some of the latter used meth sometimes -- it depends on availability. There are people who use meth on prescription, too, though doctors tend to prefer regular amphetamine if it works well enough.
Of course, it does well to remember, the plural of anecdote is not data. Just because you don't know anyone who uses meth responsibly, and I don't know anyone who uses it irresponsibly, doesn't mean that either anecdote tells the whole story.
Not all drugs are actually as addictive as the authorities would like you to believe. I regularly take amphetamines -- on prescription, for ADD. I don't take them every day, and I don't abuse them by staying up for days at a time. Heroin and the other opiates are actually similar -- addictiveness varies person to person, and is dependent on dose, usage pattern, and most interestingly the environment the person is in. People in a happy environment can be regular recreational users without showing evidence of addiction. Perhaps the most interesting lab study of this was the Rat Park study -- interestingly enough, when you stopped stuffing the lab rats in tiny boring cages and gave them an interesting environment to live in, they lost interest in the morphine. Even when the morphine water was sweetened. Perhaps even more interestingly, *some* of the rats *sometimes* used the morphine in the better environment -- a pattern we might call occasional recreational use in a person.
Uh, no. If you paid any attention to Carmack's progress *at* *all*, you would know that's completely false. He posts more details about his rocket than any other group out there, including crash videos (this isn't his first), detailed technical designs, photographs of the interesting guts of the engine, lessons learned, decisions taken and not taken, and far more. Let's see you build a rocket that sets new performance records in your spare time before you criticize too harshly because one of their tech crew is busy working on his real job.
So they're not there yet. Big deal. Armadillo's attitude to safety is that it's ok to risk the vehicle in testing, as long as people aren't at risk. They do a *very* fast development cycle, and they don't pretend to be able to find every problem through analysis -- which means some of them get found the hard way. That's a *good* thing for safety, not a bad thing. You *can't* find every problem through analysis, even if your budget is 5 orders of magnitude larger than Carmack's and you try.
Carmack's approach is to treat the vehicle as a developmental test platform, and that involves a certain level of risk to the vehicle and acceptance of that risk. The result, however, is that he learns things a *lot* faster than he otherwise might, and as a result the entire development program is faster and cheaper, counting the cost of the lost vehicles.
When Carmack shifts the vehicle from developmental status to operational testing status and then to operational status, I'd be happy to trust him when he says it's safe. It's unfair to criticize him for being unsafe now -- crashing the vehicle wasn't a safety risk!
Xylitol is actually a sugar alcohol, not a "true" sugar. Sorbitol is similar. Both are good for you because the bacteria in your teeth try to digest it, but can't actually get any nutrition from it -- so the energy spent trying is wasted.
I'm going to guess Elon Musk (of SpaceX). They have yet to make orbit, but test flight #2 was very, very close -- and it's obvious they know what to fix. They already have a heavier launcher and manned capsule well under way, with NASA contracts to demonstrate ISS flights.
A reporter once asked Elon whether he was creating SpaceX just so he could get a ride to orbit. He answered that if that was all he wanted, a ride on a Russian rocket would be cheaper. What the reporter didn't ask was whether he was trying to get a ride to Mars -- and creating SpaceX is probably the cheapest way to do that.
I haven't seen anyone point this out yet, but there is a very interesting piece of information that matters here that he can get from the code. That is the assumptions about the blood-gas partition constant in use. What the machine is measuring is alcohol content in his breath (actually, content of a number of organics, but alcohol is usually the only relevant one). What it is reporting is the alcohol content of his blood. To get from one to the other requires a number of assumptions, most importantly about a number called the blood-gas partition coefficient -- which relates to how much of the alcohol evaporates out of blood in the lungs. The problem is that this number varies significantly from person to person, and even in one person over time. It is entirely possible he has a reasonable argument to make that the machine's assumptions about his partition constant are not correct. IIRC, the constant can ary over a factor of 2, occasionally more. So the question is, how conservative are the assumptions? How well do they match him?
It's a question of measurement accuracy, not just software bugs, and the software can inform greatly about how the measurement is taken.
So, on a serious note, the fiber installer (who has to traverse each edge) is different from the salesman (who has to visit each node). The problem of the installer is the Chinese Postman Problem , and is actually *not* NP-complete. In fact, the current best approximate solutions to the TSP involve transforming it to the CPP, solving that, and then transforming it back. (Sorry, I'm not clear on the details.)
As has been pointed out, that's far from no oxygen -- there's still a fair bit of O2 in your lungs. Also, with vacuum in your lungs, they work in reverse -- pulling O2 out of your blood. Breathing pure N2 is almost as fast. The amazing part is that (with N2) you don't notice anything's wrong until you black out.
IRV (Instant Runoff Voting, the system you describe) is about the worst of the alternatives to the one we have. Of course, it's still far better. I'd much prefer one of the Condorcet systems. I'd happily support almost any well thought out voting reform plan.
The basic problem with IRV (though it's better at this than first past the post) is this: it can elect candidate A such that the majority of people would be happier with candidate B who lost. This is the so-called Condorcet criteria and the Condorcet systems all pick the winner by this criteria. (They differ in how they handle the case of no clear Condorcet winner.) The basic example would be a three party election with two relative extremists and a moderate. The moderate might be very few people's first choice, but no one's last choice. For the example, lets say A gets 39%, B gets 20%, and C gets 41% of the first place votes, with the A and C voters all putting B as second choice and the B voters all putting A as second choice. First past the post and IRV will both pick one of the extremists, though IRV will do a better job (FPP picks C, IRV picks A). Condorcet, however, will correctly pick the moderate candidate.
Not really... after not very long (a minute? two?) your eyes get unhappy (tears rapidly evaporating / boiling off, lack of oxygen), as do your lungs. Easier to do the mechanical pressure plus pressurized helmet thing of a space activity suit.
Actually that's not true. Partial pressure matters, but so does concentration. If the burning material has to heat more total air to heat a given amount of O2, then it will take longer / not get as hot. Look at it this way: flame temperature is largely independent of pressure, and is most certainly dependent upon how much O2 vs inert gas is present. Flammability is affected by many things, including partial pressure of O2, the gas mix present, gravity (flammability is lower in free fall, but seems to peak around 1/6G according to NASA data), and other factors. Combustion is far from simple.
Actually, it's far from that simple. You can also get cases where you get combustion purely by diffusion, but the heat stays, so you have something that is very slowly smoldering... until a draft hits it and it flares up. There is some NASA data suggesting that flammability is a function of gravity, and that it seems to peak somewhere around 1/6G -- about lunar gravity. Things are less flammable either in free fall or Earth gravity. It will be interesting to see what fire precautions NASA ends up taking on the return to the moon flights.
Your lungs can't contain the pressure if you try to hold your breath. And you can do a good enough job trying to destroy your lungs. I don't think you'd exactly explode, though.
That largely resulted from using atmospheric pressure pure O2 for ground operations. Even at reduced pressure (3 psi or so pure O2, equivalent to the partial pressure of atmospheric O2) there is an increased fire risk from the reduced nitrogen content.
At high partial pressure and with reduced buffer gas, ordinarily non-flammable things become flammable (including parts of the human body), which makes the problem even more severe.
the effect of zero pressure is your blood boils at subzero temperature.
A common myth. Your blood would boil if exposed to hard vacuum, just like any liquid. But your skin is quite strong enough to contain the pressure required to prevent that from happening. The problems with vacuum are related to the lack of air, and the fact that you can't hold your breath (your lungs aren't strong enough to contain the pressure).
There's a bigger problem with that though -- if you lower the pressure of the atmosphere, but add more O2 to keep the partial pressure the same, you increase the fire hazard. Inert gases like nitrogen act as a buffer and reduce flammability. Fires in spacecraft are a big deal, which (I believe) is why ISS uses higher pressure.
The major problem with exposure to vacuum isn't the pressure anyway, it's the lack of air. Furthermore, you can't hold your breath, because your lungs aren't strong enough to hold in the air. Without any air in your lungs, you get about 10-15 seconds of consciousness.
You shouldn't be able to hold a patent that you are not using, attempting to bring to market, attempting to sell or license, actively doing research on, etc. In short, making a "good faith" effort to ensure that society gets the benefit of the patent in question. Courts are reasonably good at deciding things like whether or not you're making a good faith effort on something -- intent matters in a lot of legal areas, and courts and lawyers are familiar with the idea of intent as expressed by actions. The important thing here is that you can reasonably be said to be attempting to bring your patent to market even if all you're doing is trying to find someone to sell it to. As long as you're actively pursuing that, I think it makes sense to grant the protection.
The major problem with obviousness is that "no one thought of it before" *doesn't* mean it's not obvious. There are plenty of problems that don't have a solution because they're not a problem -- and then, as soon as they're a problem, the solution is obvious to anyone skilled in the art. Engineers are trained to solve problems they haven't seen before. Should you be allowed patent protection just for being the first to notice that the problem exists, when the solution is obvious to anyone who notices? I think no. Of course, this just makes getting a handle on "obvious" even harder. And from a practical standpoint, these things are often being decided years later, which can make the obviousness test more difficult.
You're thinking about distance in space all wrong. For purposes of impact likelihood, how many kilometers away it is going to be matters. For ease of getting it into orbit, it's close to irrelevant. Given time, moving things long distances in space is easy. You just have to do it slowly. So an asteroid that is very far away (relative to impact distances) at closest approach is not necessarily hard to move. What *is* hard is changing something's *velocity*. That takes propellant (or a long time with a solar sail or whatever -- regardless, it's hard). Apophis has over 5 km/s of "hyperbolic excess velocity" -- ie the speed it would be moving when it got here ignoring Earth's gravity. To bring it into orbit, you have to apply that much delta-v and then some -- so around 6-7 km/s (sorry, not going to do the math in detail right now). In contrast, there are plenty of near Earth asteroids that don't present an impact risk, but have well under 1 km/s of hyperbolic excess velocity. That makes them around 6x easier to bring into orbit per unit mass (or more, if you're stuck with relatively crude propulsion systems).
It's all well and good until you have to take the cat down for maintenance. Have you ever seen a cat that's been wrapped in wire, strapped to a piece of buttered toast, and spun for 3 days? Let's just say it's not happy.
Lets see... $250M / 4000 = $62,500 per server being consolidated? I mean, I know floor space, buildings, racks, power, AC etc cost money... but that's still a *lot*. Anyone care to chime in on how close to normal that is?
Ultimately, any voter should be able to plug in a USB drive, and get a complete dump/snapshot of the voting machines software - source and binaries, logs and it's latest hardware certificates.
No, you shouldn't be able to do that. Why? It provides a false sense of security. If the machine is compromised, it would be all too easy for the machine to lie in the dump. If you want to check the software, you should have to shut the machine down, and pull and dump its program storage -- which would make it much harder to have it lie to you.
Not all voters need to be able to check the software while the machine is running -- it's sufficient that there be a mechanism to examine (publicly!) the software in general, for election officials to be able to inspect individual machines, and most importantly, for each voter to be able to read the paper printout of their ballot that gets counted in a recount and verify its correctness.
Slashdot Mirror
Which brings up the real tragedy of the War on Some Drugs: people would be much better served if there was more complete, reliable information available. It's a shame that the issue is so politicized that there isn't good information available in most cases.
I'll see your anecdote and raise you a counter-anecdote. I've known lots of people who take amphetamines in a non-addicting fashion on a regular basis -- most of them on prescription for ADD or similar. I've known a number who use it occasionally as a study aid. Some of the latter used meth sometimes -- it depends on availability. There are people who use meth on prescription, too, though doctors tend to prefer regular amphetamine if it works well enough.
Of course, it does well to remember, the plural of anecdote is not data. Just because you don't know anyone who uses meth responsibly, and I don't know anyone who uses it irresponsibly, doesn't mean that either anecdote tells the whole story.
Not all drugs are actually as addictive as the authorities would like you to believe. I regularly take amphetamines -- on prescription, for ADD. I don't take them every day, and I don't abuse them by staying up for days at a time. Heroin and the other opiates are actually similar -- addictiveness varies person to person, and is dependent on dose, usage pattern, and most interestingly the environment the person is in. People in a happy environment can be regular recreational users without showing evidence of addiction. Perhaps the most interesting lab study of this was the Rat Park study -- interestingly enough, when you stopped stuffing the lab rats in tiny boring cages and gave them an interesting environment to live in, they lost interest in the morphine. Even when the morphine water was sweetened. Perhaps even more interestingly, *some* of the rats *sometimes* used the morphine in the better environment -- a pattern we might call occasional recreational use in a person.
Uh, no. If you paid any attention to Carmack's progress *at* *all*, you would know that's completely false. He posts more details about his rocket than any other group out there, including crash videos (this isn't his first), detailed technical designs, photographs of the interesting guts of the engine, lessons learned, decisions taken and not taken, and far more. Let's see you build a rocket that sets new performance records in your spare time before you criticize too harshly because one of their tech crew is busy working on his real job.
So they're not there yet. Big deal. Armadillo's attitude to safety is that it's ok to risk the vehicle in testing, as long as people aren't at risk. They do a *very* fast development cycle, and they don't pretend to be able to find every problem through analysis -- which means some of them get found the hard way. That's a *good* thing for safety, not a bad thing. You *can't* find every problem through analysis, even if your budget is 5 orders of magnitude larger than Carmack's and you try.
Carmack's approach is to treat the vehicle as a developmental test platform, and that involves a certain level of risk to the vehicle and acceptance of that risk. The result, however, is that he learns things a *lot* faster than he otherwise might, and as a result the entire development program is faster and cheaper, counting the cost of the lost vehicles.
When Carmack shifts the vehicle from developmental status to operational testing status and then to operational status, I'd be happy to trust him when he says it's safe. It's unfair to criticize him for being unsafe now -- crashing the vehicle wasn't a safety risk!
Also FTA: "I'm due to talk to the head of Tilera's software team, which is actually larger than the company's hardware team."
I'll be very curious what their development toolchain ends up looking like, but it seems clear they understand the issue.
Just to be pedantic...
Xylitol is actually a sugar alcohol, not a "true" sugar. Sorbitol is similar. Both are good for you because the bacteria in your teeth try to digest it, but can't actually get any nutrition from it -- so the energy spent trying is wasted.
I'm going to guess Elon Musk (of SpaceX). They have yet to make orbit, but test flight #2 was very, very close -- and it's obvious they know what to fix. They already have a heavier launcher and manned capsule well under way, with NASA contracts to demonstrate ISS flights.
A reporter once asked Elon whether he was creating SpaceX just so he could get a ride to orbit. He answered that if that was all he wanted, a ride on a Russian rocket would be cheaper. What the reporter didn't ask was whether he was trying to get a ride to Mars -- and creating SpaceX is probably the cheapest way to do that.
I haven't seen anyone point this out yet, but there is a very interesting piece of information that matters here that he can get from the code. That is the assumptions about the blood-gas partition constant in use. What the machine is measuring is alcohol content in his breath (actually, content of a number of organics, but alcohol is usually the only relevant one). What it is reporting is the alcohol content of his blood. To get from one to the other requires a number of assumptions, most importantly about a number called the blood-gas partition coefficient -- which relates to how much of the alcohol evaporates out of blood in the lungs. The problem is that this number varies significantly from person to person, and even in one person over time. It is entirely possible he has a reasonable argument to make that the machine's assumptions about his partition constant are not correct. IIRC, the constant can ary over a factor of 2, occasionally more. So the question is, how conservative are the assumptions? How well do they match him?
It's a question of measurement accuracy, not just software bugs, and the software can inform greatly about how the measurement is taken.
So, on a serious note, the fiber installer (who has to traverse each edge) is different from the salesman (who has to visit each node). The problem of the installer is the Chinese Postman Problem , and is actually *not* NP-complete. In fact, the current best approximate solutions to the TSP involve transforming it to the CPP, solving that, and then transforming it back. (Sorry, I'm not clear on the details.)
As has been pointed out, that's far from no oxygen -- there's still a fair bit of O2 in your lungs. Also, with vacuum in your lungs, they work in reverse -- pulling O2 out of your blood. Breathing pure N2 is almost as fast. The amazing part is that (with N2) you don't notice anything's wrong until you black out.
IRV (Instant Runoff Voting, the system you describe) is about the worst of the alternatives to the one we have. Of course, it's still far better. I'd much prefer one of the Condorcet systems. I'd happily support almost any well thought out voting reform plan.
The basic problem with IRV (though it's better at this than first past the post) is this: it can elect candidate A such that the majority of people would be happier with candidate B who lost. This is the so-called Condorcet criteria and the Condorcet systems all pick the winner by this criteria. (They differ in how they handle the case of no clear Condorcet winner.) The basic example would be a three party election with two relative extremists and a moderate. The moderate might be very few people's first choice, but no one's last choice. For the example, lets say A gets 39%, B gets 20%, and C gets 41% of the first place votes, with the A and C voters all putting B as second choice and the B voters all putting A as second choice. First past the post and IRV will both pick one of the extremists, though IRV will do a better job (FPP picks C, IRV picks A). Condorcet, however, will correctly pick the moderate candidate.
Details: Condorcet method
Not really... after not very long (a minute? two?) your eyes get unhappy (tears rapidly evaporating / boiling off, lack of oxygen), as do your lungs. Easier to do the mechanical pressure plus pressurized helmet thing of a space activity suit.
Actually that's not true. Partial pressure matters, but so does concentration. If the burning material has to heat more total air to heat a given amount of O2, then it will take longer / not get as hot. Look at it this way: flame temperature is largely independent of pressure, and is most certainly dependent upon how much O2 vs inert gas is present. Flammability is affected by many things, including partial pressure of O2, the gas mix present, gravity (flammability is lower in free fall, but seems to peak around 1/6G according to NASA data), and other factors. Combustion is far from simple.
Actually, it's far from that simple. You can also get cases where you get combustion purely by diffusion, but the heat stays, so you have something that is very slowly smoldering... until a draft hits it and it flares up. There is some NASA data suggesting that flammability is a function of gravity, and that it seems to peak somewhere around 1/6G -- about lunar gravity. Things are less flammable either in free fall or Earth gravity. It will be interesting to see what fire precautions NASA ends up taking on the return to the moon flights.
Your lungs can't contain the pressure if you try to hold your breath. And you can do a good enough job trying to destroy your lungs. I don't think you'd exactly explode, though.
That largely resulted from using atmospheric pressure pure O2 for ground operations. Even at reduced pressure (3 psi or so pure O2, equivalent to the partial pressure of atmospheric O2) there is an increased fire risk from the reduced nitrogen content.
At high partial pressure and with reduced buffer gas, ordinarily non-flammable things become flammable (including parts of the human body), which makes the problem even more severe.
the effect of zero pressure is your blood boils at subzero temperature.
A common myth. Your blood would boil if exposed to hard vacuum, just like any liquid. But your skin is quite strong enough to contain the pressure required to prevent that from happening. The problems with vacuum are related to the lack of air, and the fact that you can't hold your breath (your lungs aren't strong enough to contain the pressure).
There's a bigger problem with that though -- if you lower the pressure of the atmosphere, but add more O2 to keep the partial pressure the same, you increase the fire hazard. Inert gases like nitrogen act as a buffer and reduce flammability. Fires in spacecraft are a big deal, which (I believe) is why ISS uses higher pressure.
The major problem with exposure to vacuum isn't the pressure anyway, it's the lack of air. Furthermore, you can't hold your breath, because your lungs aren't strong enough to hold in the air. Without any air in your lungs, you get about 10-15 seconds of consciousness.
In reverse order:
You shouldn't be able to hold a patent that you are not using, attempting to bring to market, attempting to sell or license, actively doing research on, etc. In short, making a "good faith" effort to ensure that society gets the benefit of the patent in question. Courts are reasonably good at deciding things like whether or not you're making a good faith effort on something -- intent matters in a lot of legal areas, and courts and lawyers are familiar with the idea of intent as expressed by actions. The important thing here is that you can reasonably be said to be attempting to bring your patent to market even if all you're doing is trying to find someone to sell it to. As long as you're actively pursuing that, I think it makes sense to grant the protection.
The major problem with obviousness is that "no one thought of it before" *doesn't* mean it's not obvious. There are plenty of problems that don't have a solution because they're not a problem -- and then, as soon as they're a problem, the solution is obvious to anyone skilled in the art. Engineers are trained to solve problems they haven't seen before. Should you be allowed patent protection just for being the first to notice that the problem exists, when the solution is obvious to anyone who notices? I think no. Of course, this just makes getting a handle on "obvious" even harder. And from a practical standpoint, these things are often being decided years later, which can make the obviousness test more difficult.
You're thinking about distance in space all wrong. For purposes of impact likelihood, how many kilometers away it is going to be matters. For ease of getting it into orbit, it's close to irrelevant. Given time, moving things long distances in space is easy. You just have to do it slowly. So an asteroid that is very far away (relative to impact distances) at closest approach is not necessarily hard to move. What *is* hard is changing something's *velocity*. That takes propellant (or a long time with a solar sail or whatever -- regardless, it's hard). Apophis has over 5 km/s of "hyperbolic excess velocity" -- ie the speed it would be moving when it got here ignoring Earth's gravity. To bring it into orbit, you have to apply that much delta-v and then some -- so around 6-7 km/s (sorry, not going to do the math in detail right now). In contrast, there are plenty of near Earth asteroids that don't present an impact risk, but have well under 1 km/s of hyperbolic excess velocity. That makes them around 6x easier to bring into orbit per unit mass (or more, if you're stuck with relatively crude propulsion systems).
It's all well and good until you have to take the cat down for maintenance. Have you ever seen a cat that's been wrapped in wire, strapped to a piece of buttered toast, and spun for 3 days? Let's just say it's not happy.
Lets see... $250M / 4000 = $62,500 per server being consolidated? I mean, I know floor space, buildings, racks, power, AC etc cost money... but that's still a *lot*. Anyone care to chime in on how close to normal that is?
Ultimately, any voter should be able to plug in a USB drive, and get a complete dump/snapshot of the voting machines software - source and binaries, logs and it's latest hardware certificates.
No, you shouldn't be able to do that. Why? It provides a false sense of security. If the machine is compromised, it would be all too easy for the machine to lie in the dump. If you want to check the software, you should have to shut the machine down, and pull and dump its program storage -- which would make it much harder to have it lie to you.
Not all voters need to be able to check the software while the machine is running -- it's sufficient that there be a mechanism to examine (publicly!) the software in general, for election officials to be able to inspect individual machines, and most importantly, for each voter to be able to read the paper printout of their ballot that gets counted in a recount and verify its correctness.
No it doesn't. It raises the question. Begging the question is a logical fallacy, much like circular reasoning.