I'm a boat owner (cruising sailboat, presently 'dry' while I repair the hull). The boatyard where it is kept includes boats and owners of all kinds. The majority of boat owners in my experience in New England is carpenters, guys who have a small business (single restaurant, dry cleaning shop, a guy who transports cars for a living, etc.) There are a few doctors and lawyers, a couple of $1MM+ catamarans, but most of the boats were bought used for $10,000 to $100,000. These folks are just everyday folks. Some people ski for a hobby, some drive boats around. The annual cost for most boat owners is about the same as the skiers - marina costs run $3000 to $10,000 per year depending on the boat, the location, and the amenities. If I had my boat in the water, at the two places I've been it would be costing me either $75 or $105 per foot for six months. It's a 44 foot boat for the purposes of calculating the cost.
Power boat prices have been down just like house prices because many people used their house equity to get into a boat that was too big & expensive, the value of the boat was less than they owed, and they let boat got repossessed right before or after their house got foreclosed. The price of fuel is also a big consideration for power boats - a 36 foot power boat with twin 340-HP gas engines may burn from 1/6 to 2 gallons per mile depending on how you drive it - below 'hull speed' of 6 knots or thereabouts, boats are much more efficient. A "Cigarette"-typeT go-fast boat may cost $100 per hour to drive.
For two or three years there has been a glut on the market, especially at the very low end - a lot of folks just walked away from their old, paid-for boat, leaving the marina to finally take the boat for the back slip fees. So you can go to most marinas right now and find a pretty good boat that maybe needs a bit of work, and the marina may just give it to you if you will pay a year's slip fees in advance.
Sailboat prices did not slump the same way, in part because apparently sailboaters tend to be more conservative about money - i.e. they're cheap.:) They tend not to buy more boat than they could afford. But according to the folks at the boat show I just attended, things are picking up at all levels.
Actually they're remarkably efficient. I don't have the link handy, but USPS handles an amazing amount of stuff, and their overall track record is excellent. They have two basic problems, or three depending on how you count. 1) Congress saddled them with a requirement to pre-fund the retirement account for all their workers, which no other company is required to do; 2) mail volumes of all types (and thus, revenues) have been dropping by 10-20% per year; and 3) bulk emailers (catalogs, junk mail - the stuff that really pays the bills) have pulled way back due both to the internet and to the economy. One might also note that in most countries the cost to mail a letter is substantially (often multiple times) more than in the US, and/or is subsidized or run by the government. USPS, like AmTrak, is a bastard concoction created by Congress to look like a business, act like a business, and be required to be profitable like a business, while being saddled with an impossible set of rules. Others than myself have described both as 'designed to fail'.
Interesting! I am guessing you mean that the 'brightness' of the emission can be found that way, as a black body emitter. Does this also mean the encoding can be discovered as well? I don't see how, but IANA EE.
What about ultra wide band (UWB)? I don't know if it's usable at the distances involved in fighter engagements, but from what I understand it is essentially undetectable unless you know the carrier pattern. It might look a bit like a black body radiator, is all.
Yes. For those who wonder how this works, it is similar to how our own vision works - we see things by the reflected and refracted light (EM waves) off of other objects. The same thing can be done at radio frequencies. Every emitter - cell phone tower, power lines, radio and TV broadcast towers, are essentially shining 'lights' at radio frequencies.
I wonder if they are using some form of Ultra Wide Band. UWB is best for short distances in part because 'optical' effects become important, but if it works it is extremely difficult to discover - at every frequency the signal is below the noise floor. It's only detectable if one knows the digital pattern that is being used, and there are a zillion possible patterns. In the sky, away from reflective and refractive distorting obstacles, it is probably usable over longer distances. IANA EE, however.
I will say there is something 'unchivalrous', unfair and perhaps war-crime-worthy in using weapons that do not expose one's own fighters to some level of risk. Such as people in Kansas City or wherever driving drones over another nation. I think this is something intuitively understood by most people, as demonstrated by the terroristic aspects of various 'robot war' movies such as Terminator et al - viewers intuitively feel something worse than plain fear when the enemy personnel are beyond reach or are controlled entirely by machines. This was also exemplified by Picasso's "Guernica" painting, depicting the horror inflicted on civilians by the new pre-WWII German bombers near the village of Guernica, Spain during that country's Civil War.
I think there is a fundamental difference between overwhelming force, and force that is entirely robotic and controlled remotely by people who are at no risk of harm.
I would not be surprised if, in another hundred or two hundred years, use of such overwhelming tactics has become defined in international law as a war crime.
OTOH, I would also not be surprised if we've gone the other way and agreed that it's OK to use nerve gas to kill anyone we don't like. Either way, it'll be long after I'm outahere.
You just triggered a thought. It is possible to build an emitter (transmitter + antenna) that simulates a completely different emitter, including a diffuse one. This is done by working backwards from the far field equations. This was originally done (AFAIK) to develop a sonic equivalent of a laser that worked underwater - the scientists worked backwards from the far field equation for a coherent sonic beam, and successfully came up with and built a sonic emitter that resulted in the desired coherent beam. Another recent related example of working the equations are the successful experiments in 'invisibility cloaks'. So by determining what the far field of a diffuse emission would be, it should be possible to build a radio transmitting system that was essentially invisible in the sense of determining where it came from, at least from a significant distance.
In fact, a similar methodology might be effective in countering the latest threat to stealth - reading the disturbances in the milieu of the many terrestrial radio sources such as cell towers and power lines. As early as the Kosovo war, experimenters successfully located stealth planes by measuring the distortions in the field that is generated by the cell tower network. This is somewhat like seeing the distortions of ocean waves caused by islands or other fixed objects. So, by continuously monitoring those fields, a stealth plane could compute the necessary interference to make its own distortions of the fields disappear.
Actually from my admittedly limited experience, FAA and airplane mfgrs are downright obsessive about making connections idiot proof and failsafe. It's pretty difficult to find places in an airplane where it's possible to plug the wrong things together or backwards. FAA has been dealing with Murphy for a very long time. In this case, if that's what happened, then it's one that slipped through the design and development process. FAA will mark this as a design failure and require Boeing to make it impossible to connect wrongly.
One thing I've learned from reading NTSB and FAA reports after aviation accidents (they usually come out about a year after the accident) - there is ALWAYS someone who gets pinned to the wall. There's always someone, sometimes multiple someones, who gets blamed. And then corrective actions are set out for all concerned.
AFAIK you are completely incorrect. Just using the 787 for example, the entire thing is built in modules including wiring and all, that are built and tested by subcontractors and then plugged and bolted together at the Boeing assembly plant. All commercial aircraft that I am aware of at least since the 1940s has had connectors. The biggest problem with connectors is not the weight but the unreliability. Each connector is a potential point of failure, so aircraft electrical connectors are actually heavier - they have positive scraping between the two parts of each connection, often have moisture resisting / sealing. and have a threaded ring that holds them together. Then (IIRC) there is an additional set of tabs through which a wire is threaded and itself positively bound - used to be twisted, now I think they use a mechanical crimp. The wire assures that the threaded ring can not unscrew itself due to vibrations.
The most expensive cost for a commercial aircraft after fuel is the cost of downtime - time spent fixing things costs thousands of dollars per hour. Therefore everything on an aircraft is designed to be removed and disconnected quickly, efficiently and safely - including things like wings, tail fins, etc. FAA is not going to allow the mechanics to cut wires and fasten them back together, so again the connectors are designed so that each one can only go one way.
No it's not like that at all. (Read Wikipedia article on heat pumps). A refrigerator is a type of heat pump. Quote, noting the bit about heat being transported (2nd paragraph, 2nd sentence).
Heat spontaneously flows from warmer places to colder spaces. A heat pump can absorb heat from a cold space and release it to a warmer one, and vice-versa. "Heat" is not conserved in this process, which requires some amount of external high grade (i.e., low-entropy) energy to be expended.
Heat pumps are used to provide heating because less high-grade energy is required for their operation than appears in the released heat. Most of the energy for heating comes from the external environment, and only a fraction comes from electricity (or some other high-grade energy source required to run a compressor). In electrically powered heat pumps, the heat transferred can be three or four times larger than the electrical power consumed, giving the system a Coefficient of Performance (COP) of 3 or 4, as opposed to a COP of 1 of a conventional electrical resistance heater, in which all heat is produced from input electrical energy.
But heat pumps can produce up to 4 times as much heat for the same energy!:) (It's sucking heat out of the atmosphere, not generating it). That's equivalent to 300% to 400% 'efficient' in an analogical sense. So that's much better than resistive heating, for the ranges where it works. When it gets too cold outside, it gets less and less effective until it's about the same as resistive heating - essentially at that point you're just using the motor and pump as complicated heaters.
I think Musk's reply has been successful - whatever the final denouement, the original bad publicity has been converted to an opportunity to make many more people aware of Tesla.
IANA EE or automotive engineer, but I would probably use a heat pump rather than resistive heating. A heat pump has two purposes, air conditioning and heating. As a heater it is more than efficient, it can provide 300 or 400 watts of heat for 100 watts of power. (Efficiency is not the correct term - 'transfer' is better - 'coefficient of performance'). The only disadvantage would be that heat pumps are noisy compared to a resistive heater, but that's not that big a deal in a car. And, of course, it can be used as an air conditioner in the summer - but then it uses a lot of power.
Not an urban legend if you read the links I included. Airbus gets more permissive, but never goes as far as Boeing. I've also been told this by a pilot for American, who flies both.
In historic military practice (WWII+) fighter planes often had a 'wartime emergency power' button/switch. This was used when the bad guy was on your tail and you were in imminent danger of dying. When activated, it removed the RPM governors and allowed the engine to get 10%-20% more power for a few minutes - but the engine would require an overhaul if/when you made it back to base. Airbus was formed as a bureaucratic political entity (overriding the individual company traditions). As such, I think that on Airbus, the 'rules' (as implemented by the computers) take the emphasis vs. the pilot.
Haha, that's what they want you to think. In reality, the tinfoil _focuses_ the radio signals, making it easier to pick up the data - and to send commands to that controller they inserted last time you got a vaccination - or was it a 'routine blood test'?
Airplane manufactures do it for their fly by wire systems so that the pilot always stays in control, even when the system would rather beg to differ on the matter.
If I recall correctly, this corresponds to somewhat of a philosophic difference between Airbus and Boeing. From what I read a few years ago, Airbus absolutely limits what the pilot can do - he/she can not make the plane do something the computer doesn't approve of. Boeing, assumes the pilot knows best, and allows the pilot to 'override' the system (do things with the controls that seem unwise to the computer). Boeing's POV is that the computer may be wrong, and/or the situation may not be one the computer is ready for.
I did a bit of Googling 'airbus and boeing philosophy' and found many interesting links. Boeing still insists on classic controls, which require the pilot to act like a pilot instead of automating everything (even though it's automated). And the autopilot automatically disengages as soon as the pilot takes the controls. Airbus philosophy is to automate everything to avoid human error - but slashdotters generally know that computers are only as smart as their programs, and are _never_ as adaptable as their programmers.
As a putative armchair economist, I have to say 'good luck with that'. The conflict between those who want to monopolize, those who want everyone to be a proletarian, and those who want a dynamic, chaotic, organic garden will never end.
Free enterprise, free politics and ecosystems all have the characteristic some call "The Edge of Chaos" (there's a book. Some disagree with the principle, but it's a useful model) - that confusing, frustrating, infinitely complex, most adaptable and ever-changing middle ground between one guy rules and nobody rules.
That would be 'venerable' as in 'having the characteristics of a venerial disease'?
Evidence: It is contracted as a reault of poor hygienic practices, is endemic among the poorly educated and areas of poor sanitation, it itches where you can't scratch, and may cause brain damage if left untreated.
Interestingly, studies have shown that it is not the absolute wait time that is significant, it is the variance. People rapidly become used to the wait time for programs to launch, etc. (if it's not too extreme) but if it takes one second one time and 10 seconds the second, then they perceive it as having taken too long. In at least one case I was peripherally involved with (quite a while back), the operators of a mainframe system that received continuing complaints about the slowness of response changed the system so that it always took at least two seconds to respond to any command. Complaints stopped.
I'll just add a second reply - there is one common exception these days, which is web programming. Because of the rapid application development cycle, the ubiquity of scripting languages (making changes easy and cheap) and the continuous design change paradigm, web programming tends commonly to be closer to the 'quick hack to make it go'.
For my own projects these days, which are not web programming but pulling data from outside data sources that tend to change a lot, it is not cost effective to spend a lot of time making the code more efficient or shiny. Instead the code is written to be adaptable to changing inputs, failing softly (i.e. not blowing up the database, crashing or looping forever) and letting people know that it has broken so it can be fixed. It is not uncommon for the fix to be undoing a fix done the previous week or month, because the environment changed back. In this case 'quality' has a somewhat different meaning, closer to 'garbage in, sweet-smelling roses out'.
Indeed. I used to run a SW QA workshop for a large-ish company. The math is as you say. Based on analysis of years of data from multiple high-quality large software development projects (many of them defense- and space- related) using the latest quality assurance methods, only about 2/3 to 85% of bugs were caught prior to release. White box testing can only find about 1/3 of existing bugs - there's some interesting math behind that - note the word 'can'.
Most interestingly, given said quality engineering methods, the majority of bugs are built into the original design - they are not coding errors. (I think that a significant portion of those 'bugs' are arguably based on differences of opinion about how things ought to work.) From my work on these workshops I came up with the saying that "writing a small software program is like writing a 400 page book with no typos, no spelling or grammar errors, no ambiguous phrases, and no plot holes." (A 400 page book will have about 20,000 lines of text.)
About that time, I heard a talk at a conference by the then-head of IBM's OS 360 maintenance team, when OS360 was the OS for IBM mainframes that 'ruled the world' at the time. IIRC OS360 contained three million lines of code and had a 3 month maintenance release cycle. The speaker said that each cycle on average fixed two to three thousand new bugs.
More recently (late 1990s, early 2000s), analysis of a variety of software - again developed using 'good' methods', found that there was an average of one bug in every 200 lines of released, shipped code. I think it was about that time that Microsoft said they averaged about one bug in every 75 lines. (NB: It is not known if these numbers used the same metrics, so it is not evidence of any difference in coding quality.)
So, bottom line - no matter how carefully the code is designed and written, it will certainly have bugs - especially as you count design changes as bugs.
Well, technically each of these sugars is metabolized somewhat differently, and uses up different amounts of B vitamins in the enzyme conversion chain. IANA biochemist but it takes, IIRC, two molecules of B-something to assist in the splitting of a sucrose molecule to its constituent frucose and glucose molecules, and so forth. I forget which vitamins are used where. So again, different people will be affected differently depending on your vitamin levels as well as your phenotype.
Funny how these things go, it wasn't that long ago that you could buy fructose at the health food store, as a 'healthy alternative' to sucrose - coming from fruit and all.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm a boat owner (cruising sailboat, presently 'dry' while I repair the hull). The boatyard where it is kept includes boats and owners of all kinds. The majority of boat owners in my experience in New England is carpenters, guys who have a small business (single restaurant, dry cleaning shop, a guy who transports cars for a living, etc.) There are a few doctors and lawyers, a couple of $1MM+ catamarans, but most of the boats were bought used for $10,000 to $100,000. These folks are just everyday folks. Some people ski for a hobby, some drive boats around. The annual cost for most boat owners is about the same as the skiers - marina costs run $3000 to $10,000 per year depending on the boat, the location, and the amenities. If I had my boat in the water, at the two places I've been it would be costing me either $75 or $105 per foot for six months. It's a 44 foot boat for the purposes of calculating the cost.
Power boat prices have been down just like house prices because many people used their house equity to get into a boat that was too big & expensive, the value of the boat was less than they owed, and they let boat got repossessed right before or after their house got foreclosed. The price of fuel is also a big consideration for power boats - a 36 foot power boat with twin 340-HP gas engines may burn from 1/6 to 2 gallons per mile depending on how you drive it - below 'hull speed' of 6 knots or thereabouts, boats are much more efficient. A "Cigarette"-typeT go-fast boat may cost $100 per hour to drive.
For two or three years there has been a glut on the market, especially at the very low end - a lot of folks just walked away from their old, paid-for boat, leaving the marina to finally take the boat for the back slip fees. So you can go to most marinas right now and find a pretty good boat that maybe needs a bit of work, and the marina may just give it to you if you will pay a year's slip fees in advance.
Sailboat prices did not slump the same way, in part because apparently sailboaters tend to be more conservative about money - i.e. they're cheap. :) They tend not to buy more boat than they could afford. But according to the folks at the boat show I just attended, things are picking up at all levels.
Wow.
Actually they're remarkably efficient. I don't have the link handy, but USPS handles an amazing amount of stuff, and their overall track record is excellent. They have two basic problems, or three depending on how you count. 1) Congress saddled them with a requirement to pre-fund the retirement account for all their workers, which no other company is required to do; 2) mail volumes of all types (and thus, revenues) have been dropping by 10-20% per year; and 3) bulk emailers (catalogs, junk mail - the stuff that really pays the bills) have pulled way back due both to the internet and to the economy. One might also note that in most countries the cost to mail a letter is substantially (often multiple times) more than in the US, and/or is subsidized or run by the government. USPS, like AmTrak, is a bastard concoction created by Congress to look like a business, act like a business, and be required to be profitable like a business, while being saddled with an impossible set of rules. Others than myself have described both as 'designed to fail'.
Interesting! I am guessing you mean that the 'brightness' of the emission can be found that way, as a black body emitter. Does this also mean the encoding can be discovered as well? I don't see how, but IANA EE.
What about ultra wide band (UWB)? I don't know if it's usable at the distances involved in fighter engagements, but from what I understand it is essentially undetectable unless you know the carrier pattern. It might look a bit like a black body radiator, is all.
Yes. For those who wonder how this works, it is similar to how our own vision works - we see things by the reflected and refracted light (EM waves) off of other objects. The same thing can be done at radio frequencies. Every emitter - cell phone tower, power lines, radio and TV broadcast towers, are essentially shining 'lights' at radio frequencies.
I wonder if they are using some form of Ultra Wide Band. UWB is best for short distances in part because 'optical' effects become important, but if it works it is extremely difficult to discover - at every frequency the signal is below the noise floor. It's only detectable if one knows the digital pattern that is being used, and there are a zillion possible patterns. In the sky, away from reflective and refractive distorting obstacles, it is probably usable over longer distances. IANA EE, however.
I will say there is something 'unchivalrous', unfair and perhaps war-crime-worthy in using weapons that do not expose one's own fighters to some level of risk. Such as people in Kansas City or wherever driving drones over another nation. I think this is something intuitively understood by most people, as demonstrated by the terroristic aspects of various 'robot war' movies such as Terminator et al - viewers intuitively feel something worse than plain fear when the enemy personnel are beyond reach or are controlled entirely by machines. This was also exemplified by Picasso's "Guernica" painting, depicting the horror inflicted on civilians by the new pre-WWII German bombers near the village of Guernica, Spain during that country's Civil War.
I think there is a fundamental difference between overwhelming force, and force that is entirely robotic and controlled remotely by people who are at no risk of harm.
I would not be surprised if, in another hundred or two hundred years, use of such overwhelming tactics has become defined in international law as a war crime.
OTOH, I would also not be surprised if we've gone the other way and agreed that it's OK to use nerve gas to kill anyone we don't like. Either way, it'll be long after I'm outahere.
You just triggered a thought. It is possible to build an emitter (transmitter + antenna) that simulates a completely different emitter, including a diffuse one. This is done by working backwards from the far field equations. This was originally done (AFAIK) to develop a sonic equivalent of a laser that worked underwater - the scientists worked backwards from the far field equation for a coherent sonic beam, and successfully came up with and built a sonic emitter that resulted in the desired coherent beam. Another recent related example of working the equations are the successful experiments in 'invisibility cloaks'. So by determining what the far field of a diffuse emission would be, it should be possible to build a radio transmitting system that was essentially invisible in the sense of determining where it came from, at least from a significant distance.
In fact, a similar methodology might be effective in countering the latest threat to stealth - reading the disturbances in the milieu of the many terrestrial radio sources such as cell towers and power lines. As early as the Kosovo war, experimenters successfully located stealth planes by measuring the distortions in the field that is generated by the cell tower network. This is somewhat like seeing the distortions of ocean waves caused by islands or other fixed objects. So, by continuously monitoring those fields, a stealth plane could compute the necessary interference to make its own distortions of the fields disappear.
Actually from my admittedly limited experience, FAA and airplane mfgrs are downright obsessive about making connections idiot proof and failsafe. It's pretty difficult to find places in an airplane where it's possible to plug the wrong things together or backwards. FAA has been dealing with Murphy for a very long time. In this case, if that's what happened, then it's one that slipped through the design and development process. FAA will mark this as a design failure and require Boeing to make it impossible to connect wrongly.
One thing I've learned from reading NTSB and FAA reports after aviation accidents (they usually come out about a year after the accident) - there is ALWAYS someone who gets pinned to the wall. There's always someone, sometimes multiple someones, who gets blamed. And then corrective actions are set out for all concerned.
AFAIK you are completely incorrect. Just using the 787 for example, the entire thing is built in modules including wiring and all, that are built and tested by subcontractors and then plugged and bolted together at the Boeing assembly plant. All commercial aircraft that I am aware of at least since the 1940s has had connectors. The biggest problem with connectors is not the weight but the unreliability. Each connector is a potential point of failure, so aircraft electrical connectors are actually heavier - they have positive scraping between the two parts of each connection, often have moisture resisting / sealing. and have a threaded ring that holds them together. Then (IIRC) there is an additional set of tabs through which a wire is threaded and itself positively bound - used to be twisted, now I think they use a mechanical crimp. The wire assures that the threaded ring can not unscrew itself due to vibrations.
The most expensive cost for a commercial aircraft after fuel is the cost of downtime - time spent fixing things costs thousands of dollars per hour. Therefore everything on an aircraft is designed to be removed and disconnected quickly, efficiently and safely - including things like wings, tail fins, etc. FAA is not going to allow the mechanics to cut wires and fasten them back together, so again the connectors are designed so that each one can only go one way.
Maxwell be damned! :D
No it's not like that at all. (Read Wikipedia article on heat pumps). A refrigerator is a type of heat pump. Quote, noting the bit about heat being transported (2nd paragraph, 2nd sentence).
Heat spontaneously flows from warmer places to colder spaces. A heat pump can absorb heat from a cold space and release it to a warmer one, and vice-versa. "Heat" is not conserved in this process, which requires some amount of external high grade (i.e., low-entropy) energy to be expended.
Heat pumps are used to provide heating because less high-grade energy is required for their operation than appears in the released heat. Most of the energy for heating comes from the external environment, and only a fraction comes from electricity (or some other high-grade energy source required to run a compressor). In electrically powered heat pumps, the heat transferred can be three or four times larger than the electrical power consumed, giving the system a Coefficient of Performance (COP) of 3 or 4, as opposed to a COP of 1 of a conventional electrical resistance heater, in which all heat is produced from input electrical energy.
But heat pumps can produce up to 4 times as much heat for the same energy! :) (It's sucking heat out of the atmosphere, not generating it). That's equivalent to 300% to 400% 'efficient' in an analogical sense. So that's much better than resistive heating, for the ranges where it works. When it gets too cold outside, it gets less and less effective until it's about the same as resistive heating - essentially at that point you're just using the motor and pump as complicated heaters.
I think Musk's reply has been successful - whatever the final denouement, the original bad publicity has been converted to an opportunity to make many more people aware of Tesla.
You do realize that BBC won the court case because it argued that "top gear reviews are not actual reviews but scripted comedy skits" successfully?
The New York Times is not generally considered a "comedy" publication, grouped into the same category as The Onion.
Though I guess that could change.
Many conservatives believe it has been for years. :D
IANA EE or automotive engineer, but I would probably use a heat pump rather than resistive heating. A heat pump has two purposes, air conditioning and heating. As a heater it is more than efficient, it can provide 300 or 400 watts of heat for 100 watts of power. (Efficiency is not the correct term - 'transfer' is better - 'coefficient of performance'). The only disadvantage would be that heat pumps are noisy compared to a resistive heater, but that's not that big a deal in a car. And, of course, it can be used as an air conditioner in the summer - but then it uses a lot of power.
Not an urban legend if you read the links I included. Airbus gets more permissive, but never goes as far as Boeing. I've also been told this by a pilot for American, who flies both.
In historic military practice (WWII+) fighter planes often had a 'wartime emergency power' button/switch. This was used when the bad guy was on your tail and you were in imminent danger of dying. When activated, it removed the RPM governors and allowed the engine to get 10%-20% more power for a few minutes - but the engine would require an overhaul if/when you made it back to base. Airbus was formed as a bureaucratic political entity (overriding the individual company traditions). As such, I think that on Airbus, the 'rules' (as implemented by the computers) take the emphasis vs. the pilot.
Haha, that's what they want you to think. In reality, the tinfoil _focuses_ the radio signals, making it easier to pick up the data - and to send commands to that controller they inserted last time you got a vaccination - or was it a 'routine blood test'?
Airplane manufactures do it for their fly by wire systems so that the pilot always stays in control, even when the system would rather beg to differ on the matter.
If I recall correctly, this corresponds to somewhat of a philosophic difference between Airbus and Boeing. From what I read a few years ago, Airbus absolutely limits what the pilot can do - he/she can not make the plane do something the computer doesn't approve of. Boeing, assumes the pilot knows best, and allows the pilot to 'override' the system (do things with the controls that seem unwise to the computer). Boeing's POV is that the computer may be wrong, and/or the situation may not be one the computer is ready for.
I did a bit of Googling 'airbus and boeing philosophy' and found many interesting links. Boeing still insists on classic controls, which require the pilot to act like a pilot instead of automating everything (even though it's automated). And the autopilot automatically disengages as soon as the pilot takes the controls. Airbus philosophy is to automate everything to avoid human error - but slashdotters generally know that computers are only as smart as their programs, and are _never_ as adaptable as their programmers.
As a putative armchair economist, I have to say 'good luck with that'. The conflict between those who want to monopolize, those who want everyone to be a proletarian, and those who want a dynamic, chaotic, organic garden will never end.
Free enterprise, free politics and ecosystems all have the characteristic some call "The Edge of Chaos" (there's a book. Some disagree with the principle, but it's a useful model) - that confusing, frustrating, infinitely complex, most adaptable and ever-changing middle ground between one guy rules and nobody rules.
That would be 'venerable' as in 'having the characteristics of a venerial disease'?
Evidence: It is contracted as a reault of poor hygienic practices, is endemic among the poorly educated and areas of poor sanitation, it itches where you can't scratch, and may cause brain damage if left untreated.
Interestingly, studies have shown that it is not the absolute wait time that is significant, it is the variance. People rapidly become used to the wait time for programs to launch, etc. (if it's not too extreme) but if it takes one second one time and 10 seconds the second, then they perceive it as having taken too long. In at least one case I was peripherally involved with (quite a while back), the operators of a mainframe system that received continuing complaints about the slowness of response changed the system so that it always took at least two seconds to respond to any command. Complaints stopped.
I'll just add a second reply - there is one common exception these days, which is web programming. Because of the rapid application development cycle, the ubiquity of scripting languages (making changes easy and cheap) and the continuous design change paradigm, web programming tends commonly to be closer to the 'quick hack to make it go'.
For my own projects these days, which are not web programming but pulling data from outside data sources that tend to change a lot, it is not cost effective to spend a lot of time making the code more efficient or shiny. Instead the code is written to be adaptable to changing inputs, failing softly (i.e. not blowing up the database, crashing or looping forever) and letting people know that it has broken so it can be fixed. It is not uncommon for the fix to be undoing a fix done the previous week or month, because the environment changed back. In this case 'quality' has a somewhat different meaning, closer to 'garbage in, sweet-smelling roses out'.
Indeed. I used to run a SW QA workshop for a large-ish company. The math is as you say. Based on analysis of years of data from multiple high-quality large software development projects (many of them defense- and space- related) using the latest quality assurance methods, only about 2/3 to 85% of bugs were caught prior to release. White box testing can only find about 1/3 of existing bugs - there's some interesting math behind that - note the word 'can'.
Most interestingly, given said quality engineering methods, the majority of bugs are built into the original design - they are not coding errors. (I think that a significant portion of those 'bugs' are arguably based on differences of opinion about how things ought to work.) From my work on these workshops I came up with the saying that "writing a small software program is like writing a 400 page book with no typos, no spelling or grammar errors, no ambiguous phrases, and no plot holes." (A 400 page book will have about 20,000 lines of text.)
About that time, I heard a talk at a conference by the then-head of IBM's OS 360 maintenance team, when OS360 was the OS for IBM mainframes that 'ruled the world' at the time. IIRC OS360 contained three million lines of code and had a 3 month maintenance release cycle. The speaker said that each cycle on average fixed two to three thousand new bugs.
More recently (late 1990s, early 2000s), analysis of a variety of software - again developed using 'good' methods', found that there was an average of one bug in every 200 lines of released, shipped code. I think it was about that time that Microsoft said they averaged about one bug in every 75 lines. (NB: It is not known if these numbers used the same metrics, so it is not evidence of any difference in coding quality.)
So, bottom line - no matter how carefully the code is designed and written, it will certainly have bugs - especially as you count design changes as bugs.
Well, technically each of these sugars is metabolized somewhat differently, and uses up different amounts of B vitamins in the enzyme conversion chain. IANA biochemist but it takes, IIRC, two molecules of B-something to assist in the splitting of a sucrose molecule to its constituent frucose and glucose molecules, and so forth. I forget which vitamins are used where. So again, different people will be affected differently depending on your vitamin levels as well as your phenotype.
Funny how these things go, it wasn't that long ago that you could buy fructose at the health food store, as a 'healthy alternative' to sucrose - coming from fruit and all.