Re:I think you're onto something there.
on
Greenbacks No More
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· Score: 2
P.S. I also think we should bite the bullet and go metric. But changing the highway signs alone will be crazy expensive.
True, but how much does it cost to deal with the confusion that arises because of the inconsistency between metric and "Imperial" (or whatever you want to call them) units? What was the NASA fiasco with Mars Global Surveyor...
Writing code on paper may not be a "fair" measure of your actual sitting-in-front-of-a-PC programming skills, but that doesn't mean it's entirely useless either. Some reasons it's arguably a good exercise:
One of the things that universities are supposed to do is give you a chance to express your knowledge in new contexts. It's relatively easy to apply things you've learned in familiar contexts, but how good are you at applying them in unfamiliar environments?
Making you work with pencil and paper forces you to plan ahead and architect your solution, not just jump in and start writing code.
When you write by hand, the logic and aesthetics of your code are especially important -- since you (and the reviewers) can't run the code to see whether it works or not, you need to make an extra effort to make it transparent and comprehensible.
I might take issue with an exam that was nothing but one big handwritten coding assignment, but I don't think this is at all out of place as a part of an exam or course. It's a little like essay questions in a soft-science class; they're unrealistic because in the "real" world you have access to reference materials and time to spell-check and so on... but at the same time they are a useful gauge of your ability to articulate a subset of your knowledge, to think on your feet, etc.
Also, in courses I've graded where such exercises where required, we usually didn't worry about things like minor syntax errors that didn't obscure the intent of the author. The goal was to look for an understanding of and ability to solve the problem, not to be human compilers.
The vertically compressed picture is really annoying, particularly as it makes people's features seem unnatural. Maybe it's true what they say about how the TV adds 10 pounds...
Unless something has changed dramatically in the past year or so, Apple hasn't been the major player in the educational market for years. In fact, Dell *alone* sells more machines into schools than Apple (whose market share is somewhere south of 15%, meaning that around 85% of PCs are probably running something Windows-ish). This has been reported in most major newspapers and business mags for years -- do a Google search and I'm sure you'll find plenty of citations.
there's actually a piece of I-240 westbound that goes....east!
Right, but the naming convention is based on the prevailing direction of the highway... i.e., if you stay on it for a while, you will eventually end up west of your current position.
Of course, I don't know what you do with loops like the Beltway around D.C. "Clockwise" and "Counter-clockwise" maybe?;-)
I'm really glad he pulled this off. Poor highway signage has long been a big pet peeve of mine. Here in Seattle there's an offramp from I-5 that splits, with a sign pointing in one direction that reads "North Airport Way S." I'd like to know how many people barrelling down the offramp at 50 mph can tell me definitively whether that means "North Airport Way road, Southbound direction" or "Northbound direction, Airport Way South road".
Similarly, ramps around the country have signs that indicate direction of travel by using place names. So instead of "I-405 North / I-405 South" over the left and right lanes respectively, you get something like "I-405 Everett / I-405 Renton". Unless you live in the area, how the heck are you supposed to know which of these obscure places is north or south of your current position?
I firmly believe that highway signs should be usability tested in PC-based driving simulators or something similar before they can be foisted on the public. Seriously: A little bit of effort to make these things easier to understand could help reduce the traffic snarls that develop when people get confused and slow down or, worse, have to slam on their brakes or cut across traffic at the last minute because the signs weren't clear.
Your computation of the tax amounts is rather incorrect. The amounts you cite are MARGINAL tax rates, i.e. rates on the NEXT DOLLAR of income. At $60K of income you will actually pay about $11,100 a year (18.5%) in Federal income taxes, assuming you are single with one exemption and use the standard deduction. Crossing the threshold to 30.5% means that 30.5% rate applies to income *beyond* the $65,500 floor -- you still pay the lower rates on the first $65,500 you make. Check the tax tables for yourself if you don't believe me.
Same goes for California -- it's 9.3% on the income above $37,725 (after deductions), not 9.3% on the total income.
P.S. This isn't to say that I like anything about the current tax system. I've lived in wonderful places like NYC, so I know what it's like to have more than 50% of your income spirited away without so much as a word of thanks...
In California, where I got my first license, the way it works is that you take a written test to prove that you know some basic rules of the road, and then get a learner's permit that allows you to drive under the supervision of a licensed driver in the passenger seat. Then you get your practice (I think there may have been a minimum number of hours or something) and you can take the road test. Problem solved.
Study a little history and/or geology. Climate changes. Humans have adapted their lifestyles to these changing climates for a long time. Realizing that the climate is changing, and that this will have cultural impacts, isn't by itself reason to freak out.
Look, I live in Seattle -- a city which, just 10,000 years ago, was buried under a sheet of ice three thousand feet thick.
Or consider Greenland, which is quite inhospitable today but was inhabited by the Vikings in the unusually warm period about a thousand years ago. Then things started to get colder again, and all the (relatively few by modern standards) people who were living there died off. They went through almost the exact reverse of the situation you are describing, but the cause of that climate change was certainly not the actions of humans.
Note that I'm not making any statements about the degree to which global warming is occurring, how much humans are contributing to it, or how much we should do about it. All I'm saying is that when you say "that's [i.e. climate change on the order of a decade or two] beyond my comprehension," you ought to realize that this is hardly the first time such things have occurred and will certainly not be the last. The planet is a dynamic system, and changes are the norm, not the exception.
I have one of those "magic" VCRs that is supposed to automatically pick up the time. It does, sort of -- it's usually off, sometimes by 2 hours, sometimes by 8 hours... never seems to be right. But since I've gotten TiVo I don't really care anyway...
No, cholesterol does not exist in plants. Eating just fruits and vegetables can be unhealthy if you don't balance them carefully to make sure you get proper amounts of the eight amino acids that the human body needs but can't make on its own.
I say theoretically because some Slashdot nitpicker is inevitably going to try to karma whore by pointing out that 8088s could only use 16 bits of memory addresses, and you'd need way more.
Well, since you brought it up...
The 8088 could actually address 20 bits of memory (1MB), a relatively impressive feat at the time, though you had to use that goofy addressing technique with segment:offset registers and 64K pages. Of course, if 1MB was not enough you could always swap stuff out to slower storage (e.g. disk) -- a technique that I became altogether too familiar with in the Z80 days when machines had 64K of *total* RAM that was expected to accommodate your OS, code, and data all at once.
Anyway, I am just nitpicking because it's the Slashdot way. I think your explanation was actually quite informative. (And I'm not whoring for karma either -- hit the max a long time ago.)
GPS signals are quite easily jammable or disruptible. Here is an example from Defense Daily News:
Jamming is the most common mode of intentional disruption. Russian handheld 4-watt jammers are said to disrupt the signal over an area 100 nautical miles in radius. Jamming devices are available and can be easily built, Carroll said. One-watt jammers, the size of a Coke can, can easily be moved around and deployed. "There is a fairly large GPS disruption industry," he said. (full story)
Using the inverse-square law, this implies that a kilowatt transmitter could disrupt GPS over an area of about 1,500 miles in radius. Admittedly, line-of-sight limitations would probably make a wide-range jammer impractical unless you could get it to altitude as you suggest -- but in any case, it would hardly take a nuclear EMP to impact the efficacy of the GPS system over a large portion of Europe.
Here's one other thought-provoking item, from Aviation International News:
Carroll also stressed the danger of "spoofing," where false GPS signals could slowly divert an aircraft off track, undetected by the pilot. This could be hazardous during an approach. Current civil receiver designs cannot counter spoofing and few provide immediate failure warnings, Carroll noted, so he proposed that new certification standards be developed. (full story)
...what they're doing. When I was a CS TA, we used to get some good laughs off the people who copied the work of someone else who obviously didn't know WTF was going on. You're right, there are not that many ways to implement something trivial like an alarm class correctly. But there are a fair number of creative ways to bungle it if you don't have a clue, and if two people blow it in exactly the same absurd way it tends to make the graders wonder if there might be a connection. A closer look might show that the programs are identical (whitespace, comments, etc.) EXCEPT for the variable names (I guess they figured that would be too obvious)...
You say that the software that launches the shuttle is bug-free, but I wouldn't count on it. Certainly there have been numerous examples of severe bugs in other spacecraft control systems. I can think of two off the top of my head. One was Ariane 501, a rocket which had to be destroyed half a minute into its first test flight because of what was essentially an overflow condition that led it off course. As the ESA report explains, "This loss of information was due to specification and design errors in the software of the inertial reference system."
Second, remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? NASA lost that one thanks to a confusion between metric and imperial units. "Mission control computers had incorrectly gauged the velocity of the craft throughout the entire four-month trip from Earth to Mars." Oops.
By the way, as a pilot, I have to tell you that I certainly would not count on an autopilot being bug-free either. (Probably one reason my flight instructor made me learn five different ways to disable it should it start misbehaving.)
Re:Tips from the Marquis de Sade School of HCI
on
Computing Pet Peeves?
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· Score: 2
Nope, this has happened to me too... and it can also happen if/. hiccups and returns a 404 after timing out. Bye, bye message text.
probably because it was shabbily written and edited... but what he's trying to say is that intrepreted languages had proven their advantage in most (ie, non-high-performance) apps, leaving just one niche (high-performance apps) for compiled languages.
Whether this claim has any merit or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
inarguable truths that indicate a stance that is green-er (not Green, but greener) is necessary. Ever taken a trip to a solid waste facility? All those guys can talk about is how they are running out of space because of all the unnecessary trash we generate.
Remember The Princess Bride? "Inconceivable!" "I do not think that word means what you think it means."
I'd have to say the same about your "inarguable", because I'm now going to argue agsint it. You're saying that we generate too much trash, and the proof is that solid-waste facilities are running out of space. Fine, so existing facilities are running out of space. But there is plenty of space for trash on the planet. Ever been to, say, Montana?
Yes, there are downsides to generating too much trash, and we don't want to have to truck it all around, and we don't want the world to become a big dump, and we shouldn't use virgin resources when we can easily recycle. I agree with all those things. But your conclusion that it's "inarguable" that we're running out of space for solid waste is just stupid.
As for your oil argument, I'm curious to know which countries are "doing it right". Modern life requires energy. How do you propose to generate said energy? Gas has the same potential supply problems as oil (though it's cleaner), nuclear generates nasty waste, dams destroy river ecosystems, windmills and solar only work in some places and in any case are only suitable as complementary sources of power (you can't store energy for use when the sun is down or the wind isn't blowing), etc. Personally I hope fuel cells work out for cars, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has successfully mass-produced those yet.
You took the words out of my mouth. I'm keeping an open mind about Lomberg's claims and trying to examine more evidence, but I was infuriated by the rebuttals that claim Lomberg is wrong but provide no concrete evidence to back up their assertions. The SA article in particular really angered me.
Yes, it absolutely CAN hurt us to be eco-friendly. In some cases it can literally kill us.
Consider malaria. Malaria infects 300-500 million people annually and kills around 2 million of them. (source) The single most effective way to kill mosquitos and to reduce the incidence of malaria is DDT. Unfortunately, DDT has potent negative effects on the environment, so your naive "it can't hurt us" position would argue that we should totally ban DDT. Unfortunately, that's literally a death sentence for thousands if not millions of people living in tropical nations.
This is a somewhat dramatic example, but my point is that eco-friendliness DOES have very real consequences in some cases, and we need to be careful about weighing those consequences against the benefits. If we're talking about recycling paper and plastic in a developed country, well, yeah, the benefits are reasonably large and the consequences are probably trivial. But don't assume that's true for every environmental problem the world faces.
It's similar model except with online versions of the books. In short: For $9.95 a month (IIRC) you get five points (or $14.95/month = 10 points, and so on). Most books are one point, so in effect you get subscriptions to the content of five books. You can swap out any book(s) for new titles once a month. Nice way to give yourself a kind of rotating tech library. I'm not throwing away the shelf full of O'Reilly books I've got, but this lets me explore some new technologies or look at stuff that I need temporarily for a particular project.
How many sites would I pay $5/month for? Virtually none. But if somebody like AOL Time Warner (insert obligatory "hiss, boo" here) said hey, you can get all the content and services on all our publication sites, plus some interesting new music releases at high quality, then I *might* be willing to pay $5/month for that. Then again, I might not because it could all be crap (we are talking about AOL-TW here!), but aggregating things this way is a lot more likely to convince me to ante up than asking me to pay on an individual publication basis.
maybe paying should give you extra +1 bonus
on
End of the Free Internet
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· Score: 3, Interesting
Presumably if you're willing to pay for the site you're a semi-serious contributor and not somebody posting reams of crap. So an extra +1 posting bonus might be justified. Maybe only if your karma is above a base threshold (to avoid letting losers pay their way to higher-rated posts).
Slashdot Mirror
True, but how much does it cost to deal with the confusion that arises because of the inconsistency between metric and "Imperial" (or whatever you want to call them) units? What was the NASA fiasco with Mars Global Surveyor...
One of the things that universities are supposed to do is give you a chance to express your knowledge in new contexts. It's relatively easy to apply things you've learned in familiar contexts, but how good are you at applying them in unfamiliar environments?
Making you work with pencil and paper forces you to plan ahead and architect your solution, not just jump in and start writing code.
When you write by hand, the logic and aesthetics of your code are especially important -- since you (and the reviewers) can't run the code to see whether it works or not, you need to make an extra effort to make it transparent and comprehensible.
I might take issue with an exam that was nothing but one big handwritten coding assignment, but I don't think this is at all out of place as a part of an exam or course. It's a little like essay questions in a soft-science class; they're unrealistic because in the "real" world you have access to reference materials and time to spell-check and so on... but at the same time they are a useful gauge of your ability to articulate a subset of your knowledge, to think on your feet, etc.
Also, in courses I've graded where such exercises where required, we usually didn't worry about things like minor syntax errors that didn't obscure the intent of the author. The goal was to look for an understanding of and ability to solve the problem, not to be human compilers.
The vertically compressed picture is really annoying, particularly as it makes people's features seem unnatural. Maybe it's true what they say about how the TV adds 10 pounds...
Unless something has changed dramatically in the past year or so, Apple hasn't been the major player in the educational market for years. In fact, Dell *alone* sells more machines into schools than Apple (whose market share is somewhere south of 15%, meaning that around 85% of PCs are probably running something Windows-ish). This has been reported in most major newspapers and business mags for years -- do a Google search and I'm sure you'll find plenty of citations.
Right, but the naming convention is based on the prevailing direction of the highway... i.e., if you stay on it for a while, you will eventually end up west of your current position.
Of course, I don't know what you do with loops like the Beltway around D.C. "Clockwise" and "Counter-clockwise" maybe? ;-)
Similarly, ramps around the country have signs that indicate direction of travel by using place names. So instead of "I-405 North / I-405 South" over the left and right lanes respectively, you get something like "I-405 Everett / I-405 Renton". Unless you live in the area, how the heck are you supposed to know which of these obscure places is north or south of your current position?
I firmly believe that highway signs should be usability tested in PC-based driving simulators or something similar before they can be foisted on the public. Seriously: A little bit of effort to make these things easier to understand could help reduce the traffic snarls that develop when people get confused and slow down or, worse, have to slam on their brakes or cut across traffic at the last minute because the signs weren't clear.
How did it go? The system freezes up and posts a dialog that says something like "Unexpected system error: -72." And there's only an "OK" button...
Same goes for California -- it's 9.3% on the income above $37,725 (after deductions), not 9.3% on the total income.
P.S. This isn't to say that I like anything about the current tax system. I've lived in wonderful places like NYC, so I know what it's like to have more than 50% of your income spirited away without so much as a word of thanks...
So find someone who's over 21 (perhaps a driving school instructor?), get the parents to sign off on him/her, and your friend is good to go.
In California, where I got my first license, the way it works is that you take a written test to prove that you know some basic rules of the road, and then get a learner's permit that allows you to drive under the supervision of a licensed driver in the passenger seat. Then you get your practice (I think there may have been a minimum number of hours or something) and you can take the road test. Problem solved.
Look, I live in Seattle -- a city which, just 10,000 years ago, was buried under a sheet of ice three thousand feet thick.
Or consider Greenland, which is quite inhospitable today but was inhabited by the Vikings in the unusually warm period about a thousand years ago. Then things started to get colder again, and all the (relatively few by modern standards) people who were living there died off. They went through almost the exact reverse of the situation you are describing, but the cause of that climate change was certainly not the actions of humans.
Note that I'm not making any statements about the degree to which global warming is occurring, how much humans are contributing to it, or how much we should do about it. All I'm saying is that when you say "that's [i.e. climate change on the order of a decade or two] beyond my comprehension," you ought to realize that this is hardly the first time such things have occurred and will certainly not be the last. The planet is a dynamic system, and changes are the norm, not the exception.
I have one of those "magic" VCRs that is supposed to automatically pick up the time. It does, sort of -- it's usually off, sometimes by 2 hours, sometimes by 8 hours... never seems to be right. But since I've gotten TiVo I don't really care anyway...
I'm not a vegetarian, BTW.
Well, since you brought it up...
The 8088 could actually address 20 bits of memory (1MB), a relatively impressive feat at the time, though you had to use that goofy addressing technique with segment:offset registers and 64K pages. Of course, if 1MB was not enough you could always swap stuff out to slower storage (e.g. disk) -- a technique that I became altogether too familiar with in the Z80 days when machines had 64K of *total* RAM that was expected to accommodate your OS, code, and data all at once.
Anyway, I am just nitpicking because it's the Slashdot way. I think your explanation was actually quite informative. (And I'm not whoring for karma either -- hit the max a long time ago.)
Jamming is the most common mode of intentional disruption. Russian handheld 4-watt jammers are said to disrupt the signal over an area 100 nautical miles in radius. Jamming devices are available and can be easily built, Carroll said. One-watt jammers, the size of a Coke can, can easily be moved around and deployed. "There is a fairly large GPS disruption industry," he said. (full story)
Using the inverse-square law, this implies that a kilowatt transmitter could disrupt GPS over an area of about 1,500 miles in radius. Admittedly, line-of-sight limitations would probably make a wide-range jammer impractical unless you could get it to altitude as you suggest -- but in any case, it would hardly take a nuclear EMP to impact the efficacy of the GPS system over a large portion of Europe.
Here's one other thought-provoking item, from Aviation International News:
Carroll also stressed the danger of "spoofing," where false GPS signals could slowly divert an aircraft off track, undetected by the pilot. This could be hazardous during an approach. Current civil receiver designs cannot counter spoofing and few provide immediate failure warnings, Carroll noted, so he proposed that new certification standards be developed. (full story)
...what they're doing. When I was a CS TA, we used to get some good laughs off the people who copied the work of someone else who obviously didn't know WTF was going on. You're right, there are not that many ways to implement something trivial like an alarm class correctly. But there are a fair number of creative ways to bungle it if you don't have a clue, and if two people blow it in exactly the same absurd way it tends to make the graders wonder if there might be a connection. A closer look might show that the programs are identical (whitespace, comments, etc.) EXCEPT for the variable names (I guess they figured that would be too obvious)...
Second, remember the Mars Climate Orbiter? NASA lost that one thanks to a confusion between metric and imperial units. "Mission control computers had incorrectly gauged the velocity of the craft throughout the entire four-month trip from Earth to Mars." Oops.
By the way, as a pilot, I have to tell you that I certainly would not count on an autopilot being bug-free either. (Probably one reason my flight instructor made me learn five different ways to disable it should it start misbehaving.)
Nope, this has happened to me too... and it can also happen if /. hiccups and returns a 404 after timing out. Bye, bye message text.
Whether this claim has any merit or not is left as an exercise to the reader.
Remember The Princess Bride? "Inconceivable!" "I do not think that word means what you think it means."
I'd have to say the same about your "inarguable", because I'm now going to argue agsint it. You're saying that we generate too much trash, and the proof is that solid-waste facilities are running out of space. Fine, so existing facilities are running out of space. But there is plenty of space for trash on the planet. Ever been to, say, Montana?
Yes, there are downsides to generating too much trash, and we don't want to have to truck it all around, and we don't want the world to become a big dump, and we shouldn't use virgin resources when we can easily recycle. I agree with all those things. But your conclusion that it's "inarguable" that we're running out of space for solid waste is just stupid.
As for your oil argument, I'm curious to know which countries are "doing it right". Modern life requires energy. How do you propose to generate said energy? Gas has the same potential supply problems as oil (though it's cleaner), nuclear generates nasty waste, dams destroy river ecosystems, windmills and solar only work in some places and in any case are only suitable as complementary sources of power (you can't store energy for use when the sun is down or the wind isn't blowing), etc. Personally I hope fuel cells work out for cars, but to the best of my knowledge nobody has successfully mass-produced those yet.
You took the words out of my mouth. I'm keeping an open mind about Lomberg's claims and trying to examine more evidence, but I was infuriated by the rebuttals that claim Lomberg is wrong but provide no concrete evidence to back up their assertions. The SA article in particular really angered me.
Consider malaria. Malaria infects 300-500 million people annually and kills around 2 million of them. (source) The single most effective way to kill mosquitos and to reduce the incidence of malaria is DDT. Unfortunately, DDT has potent negative effects on the environment, so your naive "it can't hurt us" position would argue that we should totally ban DDT. Unfortunately, that's literally a death sentence for thousands if not millions of people living in tropical nations.
This is a somewhat dramatic example, but my point is that eco-friendliness DOES have very real consequences in some cases, and we need to be careful about weighing those consequences against the benefits. If we're talking about recycling paper and plastic in a developed country, well, yeah, the benefits are reasonably large and the consequences are probably trivial. But don't assume that's true for every environmental problem the world faces.
More information here.
It's similar model except with online versions of the books. In short: For $9.95 a month (IIRC) you get five points (or $14.95/month = 10 points, and so on). Most books are one point, so in effect you get subscriptions to the content of five books. You can swap out any book(s) for new titles once a month. Nice way to give yourself a kind of rotating tech library. I'm not throwing away the shelf full of O'Reilly books I've got, but this lets me explore some new technologies or look at stuff that I need temporarily for a particular project.
How many sites would I pay $5/month for? Virtually none. But if somebody like AOL Time Warner (insert obligatory "hiss, boo" here) said hey, you can get all the content and services on all our publication sites, plus some interesting new music releases at high quality, then I *might* be willing to pay $5/month for that. Then again, I might not because it could all be crap (we are talking about AOL-TW here!), but aggregating things this way is a lot more likely to convince me to ante up than asking me to pay on an individual publication basis.
Presumably if you're willing to pay for the site you're a semi-serious contributor and not somebody posting reams of crap. So an extra +1 posting bonus might be justified. Maybe only if your karma is above a base threshold (to avoid letting losers pay their way to higher-rated posts).