I think the reality is that no matter how much we armchair pontificate, there are people who have PhD's in this stuff and have spent the last 40 years of their life thinking about it, working on it, and sharing ideas with those who are in a similar field. For us to walk in from our layman's perspective and suddenly claim large flaws in things that they have undoubtedly thought through many times over seems just a bit naive. Chances are that we don't begin to understand half of the complexities of the models they use, and for all we know they just need 3 days of reasonably good recordings in order to get their model fully primed and ready to predict the next 20k years.
Really, we speak from an area of very little expertise on this topic, and just like I'd get pissed off if some climatologist heard something on TV and started lecturing me on the inaccuracies of the work I'm doing because there's no chance he'll understand all the nuances without years of work in the subject, so I suspect it goes much the same the other way. So if a climatologist says that he's pretty damn sure that his models are now accurate enough to reliably predict a catastrophic climate change event, I'm going to listen. Especially if the rest of them start agreeing with him.
And I don't think it's too unreasonable to predict the next 100 years given the past 100 years.
CRC can be cracked on the fly, MD5 in a few hours. Use something like SHA-512 if you just want a checksum, or sign it using a private key kept on removable media in a restricted-access safe if you want to be able to possibly run other code in the future.
It's about as long as we've had mass produced accurate thermometers along with a wide enough spread of people that had them. Any other measure (tree rings etc) are secondary and aren't as accurate as there is an extra layer of error, eg they may be affected by rainfall and not just temperature.
The other thing is that you need to be honest with them - you know how easy it is for you to miss some subtle social que that women give? They find it just as easy to miss some subtle flirting. Guys are hardwired to see sex everywhere they go, women not as much. If you have a female friend that you have feelings for, don't do subtle flirting. Do it the classic way. Ask her out for dinner. At the end of the meal, insist on paying. Drive her home. When you drop her off, tell her you really like her. Do things that will build her up, and that she will giggle about with her girlfriends. Don't be a friend - court her. Start the relationship over, or at least change your behaviour enough to redefine it. It's the only way to break out of the friendzone. And if you're not willing to risk making the relationship awkward, you need to consider that you might just be satisfied where you are.
No, everybody owns your code, including you. GPL makes the code free (as in freedom), BSD makes the developer who uses the code free. It depends where your priorities are. If *you* are making a big project like this open source, surely you don't want tons of people leeching off of your work? Surely you want to see what probable uses are?
Also, just because RootBeer is GPL doesn't mean *your* code has to be GPL, only the changes you make to RootBeer have to be GPL. Just like if you compiled something with GCC it doesn't mean you need to GPL your code.
The radiation this thing emits is NOTHING compared to the solar and cosmic radiation it would experience both in transit and on Mars. Putting everything in a metal box only helps so much, you still need specifically designed electronics which can handle the odd bit of radiation without dying. Even with a thick metal box you can't run an i7 on Mars, or not for very long at least. Your standard DDR3 isn't going to work either, or your standard EEPROM.
The other thing to remember is that although this project is extremely important, they're still not going to throw more capabilities in than they need, because that is more that can go wrong. For a remote sensing platform, the amount of EEPROM isn't that important - you just need enough to hold your communication protocols, some basic reaction-to-obstacle algorithms and the motor control code. You aren't going to be pulling massive libraries in. The emphasis is on making it as simple as possible, so that there is less chance for bugs to creep in. Those extra MIPS will come in handy for the navigation and onboard image processing, and the flash for storing interesting info until you can upload, so those are what they have upgraded the most.
That's easy, they have a 3d map of the road from their LIDAR system. Even if they don't see the lines, they can keep to their side if it is wide enough.
You seem to be so obsessed with global warming that you have mistaken the aim of the scientists' research. They are not out to prove global warming, they are out to make a more accurate model of our weather systems. They're not changing the coefficients to make the model give them global warming. They're changing them to fit the last 100 years of data, and then seeing what the model says about the future. Which, regardless of whether you like what the model tells us, is still science.
That's how science works. It's how the research for your computer's transistors was done, it's how the engine in the car you drive was designed and tuned. People have a brainwave, test it, and see if it works better than the old way. This exact process is what has brought you pretty much every piece of technology since the stone ages. The scientists are attempting to create a tool which can be used to help us make decisions about our actions for the future.
What would you rather have them do? Throw away all models of the weather system that have been built over the last 50 years and start from scratch, so they can find a way to fit the data that doesn't give a future prediction of global warming? Because that would be bad science...
If you want to go back to living in a cave chanting to the fire gods for lightning to strike so you can have a fire for tonight, go ahead, but don't drag the rest of us back with you.
With the latest firmware OCZ seem to have sorted their dead drives problem out. Of course, now that they're moving away from the Sandforce controllers it will only get better. And you're not the only one in a secondary market, South Africa is just as bad. I still managed to get a Vertex3 for my laptop though... it even came with the latest firmware flashed.
That's one thing. It's quite another when they say, "Oh, it seems we overestimated the amount of H2O vapour which would be present when the increased CO2 levels are taken into account. Let's try adjusting our understanding of evaporation and see if it better fits the last 6 months worth of data. Oh, it does? Wow, this seems to be a better model of physical interactions. Cool, I'll publish a paper on it."
What's happening here isn't the same as happened with string theory, what is happening is we pretty much know all of the basic interactions, we're just trying to figure out weighting coefficients of how much one process interacts with another, then running massive simulations to see what this tweaked model says. If it agrees with the data, we say, "Wow, this model must be pretty accurate. I wonder what it says will happen in 10/50/100 years time?" Otherwise we discard this set of tweaks and try another.
Scientists have thrown out String Theory anyways. Yet, more and more of them seem to accept global warming. Odd that, isn't it?
That's because there is so much evidence backing it that if you don't believe it you are clearly just a nutcase. The evidence for GW is building, so yes, in the not so distant future, if the amount of evidence passes the "we're damn sure now" threshold, people who say it doesn't exist may also be taken for nutcases. If you don't want to read and believe peer-reviewed work and instead substitute your source of knowledge with some crackpot TV presenter, then you'll just have to face the consequences. Life is tough like that.
I agree, however if contraception is is easily enough available than, hopefully, the only people who do get pregnant are those who want the kid. Personally, I think mandatory contraception starting at puberty for both sexes should be implemented. If you want to have children you should have to take a test. After all, which is more of a responsibility: raising a child, or driving a car?
Perhaps if YOU took a moment to listen, instead of saying "We've heard that one before", you might come to gain some knowledge as to the working of the weather systems?
without insulting the intelligence of someone who posted a well-reasoned dissent.
Well, let's see:
It's not supposed to be about millenialist/apocalyptic fear-mongering, religious dogma, or viciously attacking everyone who dares question your hypothesis as an unbeliever who should be excommunicated.
Hmm, labelling anybody who disagrees with you as vicious, fear-mongering and dogmatic. Yup. Sounds well-reasoned.
Slashdot Mirror
I think the reality is that no matter how much we armchair pontificate, there are people who have PhD's in this stuff and have spent the last 40 years of their life thinking about it, working on it, and sharing ideas with those who are in a similar field. For us to walk in from our layman's perspective and suddenly claim large flaws in things that they have undoubtedly thought through many times over seems just a bit naive. Chances are that we don't begin to understand half of the complexities of the models they use, and for all we know they just need 3 days of reasonably good recordings in order to get their model fully primed and ready to predict the next 20k years.
Really, we speak from an area of very little expertise on this topic, and just like I'd get pissed off if some climatologist heard something on TV and started lecturing me on the inaccuracies of the work I'm doing because there's no chance he'll understand all the nuances without years of work in the subject, so I suspect it goes much the same the other way. So if a climatologist says that he's pretty damn sure that his models are now accurate enough to reliably predict a catastrophic climate change event, I'm going to listen. Especially if the rest of them start agreeing with him.
And I don't think it's too unreasonable to predict the next 100 years given the past 100 years.
CRC can be cracked on the fly, MD5 in a few hours. Use something like SHA-512 if you just want a checksum, or sign it using a private key kept on removable media in a restricted-access safe if you want to be able to possibly run other code in the future.
It's about as long as we've had mass produced accurate thermometers along with a wide enough spread of people that had them. Any other measure (tree rings etc) are secondary and aren't as accurate as there is an extra layer of error, eg they may be affected by rainfall and not just temperature.
The other thing is that you need to be honest with them - you know how easy it is for you to miss some subtle social que that women give? They find it just as easy to miss some subtle flirting. Guys are hardwired to see sex everywhere they go, women not as much. If you have a female friend that you have feelings for, don't do subtle flirting. Do it the classic way. Ask her out for dinner. At the end of the meal, insist on paying. Drive her home. When you drop her off, tell her you really like her. Do things that will build her up, and that she will giggle about with her girlfriends. Don't be a friend - court her. Start the relationship over, or at least change your behaviour enough to redefine it. It's the only way to break out of the friendzone. And if you're not willing to risk making the relationship awkward, you need to consider that you might just be satisfied where you are.
No, everybody owns your code, including you. GPL makes the code free (as in freedom), BSD makes the developer who uses the code free. It depends where your priorities are. If *you* are making a big project like this open source, surely you don't want tons of people leeching off of your work? Surely you want to see what probable uses are?
Also, just because RootBeer is GPL doesn't mean *your* code has to be GPL, only the changes you make to RootBeer have to be GPL. Just like if you compiled something with GCC it doesn't mean you need to GPL your code.
It's not about the video analysis, it's about the commodity-priced RGBD camera.
Kinect 1 did 30FPS, although lots of movement made the visual component blurry. As to what the Kinect 2 can do... wait and see like the rest of us.
Molecular Disruption Device, AKA the Dr. Device.
I write in Java Bytecode, you insensitive clod!
The radiation this thing emits is NOTHING compared to the solar and cosmic radiation it would experience both in transit and on Mars. Putting everything in a metal box only helps so much, you still need specifically designed electronics which can handle the odd bit of radiation without dying. Even with a thick metal box you can't run an i7 on Mars, or not for very long at least. Your standard DDR3 isn't going to work either, or your standard EEPROM.
The other thing to remember is that although this project is extremely important, they're still not going to throw more capabilities in than they need, because that is more that can go wrong. For a remote sensing platform, the amount of EEPROM isn't that important - you just need enough to hold your communication protocols, some basic reaction-to-obstacle algorithms and the motor control code. You aren't going to be pulling massive libraries in. The emphasis is on making it as simple as possible, so that there is less chance for bugs to creep in. Those extra MIPS will come in handy for the navigation and onboard image processing, and the flash for storing interesting info until you can upload, so those are what they have upgraded the most.
And all your colleagues lose their last few years of work.
You clearly missed the article in the New York Times...
That's easy, they have a 3d map of the road from their LIDAR system. Even if they don't see the lines, they can keep to their side if it is wide enough.
You seem to be so obsessed with global warming that you have mistaken the aim of the scientists' research. They are not out to prove global warming, they are out to make a more accurate model of our weather systems. They're not changing the coefficients to make the model give them global warming. They're changing them to fit the last 100 years of data, and then seeing what the model says about the future. Which, regardless of whether you like what the model tells us, is still science.
That's how science works. It's how the research for your computer's transistors was done, it's how the engine in the car you drive was designed and tuned. People have a brainwave, test it, and see if it works better than the old way. This exact process is what has brought you pretty much every piece of technology since the stone ages. The scientists are attempting to create a tool which can be used to help us make decisions about our actions for the future.
What would you rather have them do? Throw away all models of the weather system that have been built over the last 50 years and start from scratch, so they can find a way to fit the data that doesn't give a future prediction of global warming? Because that would be bad science...
If you want to go back to living in a cave chanting to the fire gods for lightning to strike so you can have a fire for tonight, go ahead, but don't drag the rest of us back with you.
The scientific community is not split on global warming, unless you consider 97 - 98% believing global warming and 2-3% against a 'split'. http://www.pnas.org/content/early/2010/06/04/1003187107.abstract
Or if that's a bit dry, try http://www.npr.org/2011/06/21/137309964/climate-change-public-skeptical-scientists-sure
Truth is like the sun. You can shut it out for a time, but it ain't goin' away.
It does fill up with metal shavings though, and those don't lubricate quite as well...
With the latest firmware OCZ seem to have sorted their dead drives problem out. Of course, now that they're moving away from the Sandforce controllers it will only get better. And you're not the only one in a secondary market, South Africa is just as bad. I still managed to get a Vertex3 for my laptop though... it even came with the latest firmware flashed.
That's one thing. It's quite another when they say,
"Oh, it seems we overestimated the amount of H2O vapour which would be present when the increased CO2 levels are taken into account. Let's try adjusting our understanding of evaporation and see if it better fits the last 6 months worth of data. Oh, it does? Wow, this seems to be a better model of physical interactions. Cool, I'll publish a paper on it."
What's happening here isn't the same as happened with string theory, what is happening is we pretty much know all of the basic interactions, we're just trying to figure out weighting coefficients of how much one process interacts with another, then running massive simulations to see what this tweaked model says. If it agrees with the data, we say, "Wow, this model must be pretty accurate. I wonder what it says will happen in 10/50/100 years time?" Otherwise we discard this set of tweaks and try another.
Scientists have thrown out String Theory anyways. Yet, more and more of them seem to accept global warming. Odd that, isn't it?
That's because there is so much evidence backing it that if you don't believe it you are clearly just a nutcase. The evidence for GW is building, so yes, in the not so distant future, if the amount of evidence passes the "we're damn sure now" threshold, people who say it doesn't exist may also be taken for nutcases. If you don't want to read and believe peer-reviewed work and instead substitute your source of knowledge with some crackpot TV presenter, then you'll just have to face the consequences. Life is tough like that.
Obama is also a Conservative, he just happens to be a member of the Democratic conservative party instead of the Republican neo-conservative party.
Politicians...
I believe this is from Roald Dahl, the book "Little Billy". Another great one is "hoodwinklers".
*then
I agree, however if contraception is is easily enough available than, hopefully, the only people who do get pregnant are those who want the kid. Personally, I think mandatory contraception starting at puberty for both sexes should be implemented. If you want to have children you should have to take a test. After all, which is more of a responsibility: raising a child, or driving a car?
Perhaps if YOU took a moment to listen, instead of saying "We've heard that one before", you might come to gain some knowledge as to the working of the weather systems?
without insulting the intelligence of someone who posted a well-reasoned dissent.
Well, let's see:
It's not supposed to be about millenialist/apocalyptic fear-mongering, religious dogma, or viciously attacking everyone who dares question your hypothesis as an unbeliever who should be excommunicated.
Hmm, labelling anybody who disagrees with you as vicious, fear-mongering and dogmatic. Yup. Sounds well-reasoned.