Even when you do develop "to that standard", bugs creep in. Most of the times the bugs are non-critical, but once in a while you get critical bugs even in software developed to these insanely strict quality-standards.
Mariner 1 was destructed 300 seconds after launch because a bug in the navigation-software caused it to veer dangerously off course, and it was thought it might crash in populated areas so the self-destruct command was sent.
The Deep Space folks at NASA lost a probe. Why ? The command-sequence sent to the probe on one occasion was lacking one crucial last command: "when done maneuvering, turn receiving-antenna back towards earth"
These things happen more *seldom* when you use insane amounts of quality-control, however they still happen.
How about sympathy for those of us who are female and work in the industry, then arrive at a trade-show only to see women used purely as decoration over-and-over-and-over again ?
It's insulting, and sends the message that this is a thing for guys, that we don't really *belong* here (other than as decoration)
No you can't. And if you think you can, you're deluded. No non-trivial real-world program has ever been bug-free. Especially not programs large enough to have more than one developer.
Even programs which are *very* carefully specified and written, and tested thoroughly, end up having bugs. These programs cost atleast one order of magnitude more than normal programs, and *still* have bugs.
When the first pentiums had bugs that caused them to do floating-point-division wrong, it wasn't because they where sloppy, or because they where untested. They where tested 3 orders of magnitude more than most comercial software will ever be - and *still* launched buggy.
Given that guaranteed bug-free is unattainable, the right question is what amount of quality-control and testing is worth it. Sometimes it's worth it to spend 10 times the amount in order to get rid of half of the most serious bugs, but often it's not.
I agree, 5 is likely below optimum for many classes of works. On the other hand the current bullshit of Life of author + 70 years is insane, if you write a book when you're 25, and live to 85, that amounts to 130 years of protection.
10 years from publication, or 15 from creation, whichever is shorter sounds about sane to me. The precise term is debatable, but I've never seen -anyone- arguing that creative work would suffer if the current 100+ years where reduced substantially.
That only applies if you're unwilling or unable to outspend your opponent.
The US military has certainly used weapons that cost a lot more than whatever they've destroyed in Afghanistan, and that's fine, if they are both able and willing to spend ten times or hundred times what the opposition is spending.
How many copies you keep of the data is entirely beside the point.
The point is that a disk full of data from a decade back, is only going to fill 1.5% of a new disc.
Yes, if you keep 2 separate backups plus your primary storage, you're going to need *3* new discs, not one. But the presence of the old data doesn't change this noticeably.
My point is "All my files from the last decade" are always going to be ~2 order of magnitude larger than "all my files from before that", thus deleting the latter is never going to save you more than a tiny percentage.
Even if you keep 100 separate backups, deleting all the decade-old files will *still* only save you 1-2% of your total storage-needs.
That seems not worth it. The thing is, both drive-space and data-volume tends to double every ~18 months or so. You wait first "a couple of years", then on a network drive, then once a decade has passed, they go in the trash.
But a decade ago the cheapest storage was a 40GB drive costing $130 or thereabouts. Today 40GB worth of space is 1.5% of that shiny new 3TB-disk costing $150 or thereabouts.
There's essentially no benefit to deleting old data, because old data is *always* small data, and so copying it to the new disk will use a miniscule portion of the new disc and have essentially no cost. $150/3TB is equivalent to $2 for saving those 40GB.
The only data that's potentially worthwhile to delete is *new* data that you have no need for. There is no such thing as "old but large data".
Avoiding clutter is a different issue, but that's easily solved by copying all the old data to a named folder, then move out of that folder and into the current file-system only those files you actually use.
The context was social networking, more specifically a dance-teacher. Most (say) Facebook-users have absolutely nothing in their Facebook-stream that is of such a nature that school-children needs shielding from it.
I quote: "Is it OK for students to see their teacher's private life - including all the stupid stuff that they did 5 years ago? Probably not, especially not at the primary grades - kids don't need to see adult stuff."
I dunno what level of "stupid" they're talking here, but I'd say if the stuff the teacher did 5 years ago is bad enough that kids would be scarred from just -hearing- about it, then I wonder if that person should be a teacher at all.
I'm not saying all children should have completely unfiltered access to everything. But the kinds of everyday-stories from everyday-lives that people tend to share in Facebook aren't typically particularily scary.
It's not about being able to afford the power-bill.
It's about the fact that it makes no financial sense to spend (say) $30 in electricity keeping a bunch of old drives running when the same additional capacity in a new disk costs $10.
It's backed by very good facts, and the evidence has been mounting every year for many years now. It's great to be skeptical, I recommend it generally. But really, the case for AGW has been made to the point where even a reasonable skeptic is convinced - not convinced as in mathemathically certain (that's rare in the real world) but convinced as in the hypothesis is substantially more likely than the null-hypothesis, likely enough that action is warranted.
As for the metric system, offcourse you *can* do anything in imperial. It's an imperial pain in the butt, but it's absolutely doable. For most people it doesn't matter so much, because they do very few physics-calculations. For those who do, it's really convenient to have units that make sense though.
If you push an object massing 1kg with a force of 1N, it accelerates at 1m/s^2. If you do this over a distance of 1m, you've just spent 1 joule of energy, and if the duration was 1 second, your power was 1 watt.
Do the same thing with imperial units !
Yes it's totally doable. But it *is* a hassle, and a impediment to inituitive understanding of physics at a high-school-level.
I'm not so sure. CO2-emissions are a typical case of tragedy of the commons. Even if I accept the premise that releasing CO2 will in create such-and-such harm, which is larger than the benefit I derive from releasing that CO2, it *still* makes sense for me to continue to pollute, in economic terms.
Let's say we agree that releasing a metric ton of CO2 creates $100 worth of damage, while I have some process that releases a ton of CO2, while benefiting me $50. The problem is that the $50 of benefits are for me only, while the $100 of harm are spread out over humanity, thus for me personally it's a huge win, even though it's a loss for humanity in sum total.
The same logic applies on any scale that's substantially smaller than global. if USA benefits $1 trillion from not reducing CO2-emissions, while the world in total suffers $3 trillion in damages from those emissions - it's still a win for USA (or any other country)
What you need to beat this, is binding international agreements, adhered to by atleast a solid majority of countries. And that's bloody politically hard.
Economically talking, the best solution would just to decide what level of global CO2-emissions are acceptable, then issue emission-allowances for this amount, and sell them on an open market to the highest bidder. This would ensure that those industries that derive the least benefit from the most pollution, stop first, which makes sense economically.
Unfortunately, this solution is damn-near impossible to realise politically.
Are you asserting that only a person who is a distant authority-figure can teach you something ? That once a person is someone you know, perhaps even someone you're friends with, that person is henceforth permanently unable to teach you anything ?
That's odd. I've had precisely the opposite experience.
Right. Let's create a separate "kids" world. The kids-world will have no swearing, no nudity, no death, no kissing, no money-problems, no divorces. Let's do our level best to shut our kids in these fictional, boring, sterile, pink-plastic worlds, where they can grow up dealing as little as possible with the real world.
Then, once they hit some magical age, 14 or 18 or whatever, let's open the floodgates and assume they're now well-prepared to deal with a world we've done our level best to ensure they've learnt nothing about.
On second thought, let's not do that. Instead, let's be guides and teachers to the real world. Let's try to explain in language a child can understand, rather than try to hide.
Makes sense - but the level of insurance should be adapted to the perceived risk, otherwise you end up spending a lot of money to guard against very small risks.
It's pretty orthodox at this point to claim that earth is roughly spherical. It'd be insane to dedicate 10% - or even 1% of the money we use for researching the geography of the world to flat-world-research.
Especially in cases where there's an infinite amount of *wrong* theories, but only one *right* theory, dedicating 10% of the money spent on the right theory to each of the wrong ones, would lead to most money being spent on nonsense.
For example, there must be hundreds of creation-myths, but very few of them deserve to be taken seriously to the degree that the Big Bang theory is taken seriously.
It's hard to say - some planets we've known about and observed for less than one of their years, so we essentially have no data.
What we -do- know with fair certanity is that *if* they are warming over the last 40 years, it's not due to increased solar influx, because the solar influx has on the average fallen somewhat over that period.
You'd hope so, but I ain't hopeful. You dont' get round-earth level of blatantly obvious evidence for changes that occur over decades or generations. Peoples memory for what is "normal" weather is very short-lived, a decade or two tops. I don't -actually- remember how much snow was common for how many days when I was a kid, and neither do most of the people who *believe* they remember it.
The evidence in favor of evolution is scientifically as close to iron-clad as you can reasonably be, there's multiple independent tests that each match up exactly, and no competing theory whatsoever. Nevertheless lots of university-educated Americans remain firmly convinced that it's total bullshit.
I've rarely seen that. But I've seen some worry about potential side-effects from some of the proposed fixes.
I mean, it's obvious that orbiting a sufficient number of large enough sun-shades will lower temperature, but it's equally obvious that letting measurable less sunlight reach earth, may well have side-effects.
Fertilizing the oceans with iron, would cause algae to absorb more CO2. It's somewhat unknown how much of this CO2 would stay trapped for how long though, and who is to say if dropping gigatons of biologically absorbable iron on the oceans might not have other side-effects ?
An engineered fix is fine. But it's not alarmist to consider it sensible to investigate side-effect thoroughly prior to doing mega-scale engineering on the climate of our planet.
I'm still waiting for the first bomb to go off in the security-checkpoint-waiting-line. At which point they'd need a checkpoint to check the passengers prior to the security-checkpoint-waiting-line, but offcourse this new checkpoint would also get a line, whereafter a bomb goes off in the waiting-line for *this* checkpoint repeat as necessary.
This bullshit is a *much* larger threat to both life and freedom than terrorists ever where. People fly 900 million trips a year (that's USA only), thus if every one of them spend 5 minutes extra in the security-theatre, that means more than 100 lifetimes are wasted standing in line every year. That's without considering the resources used, and the costs incurred, and the other inconveniences resulting.
Thus the TSA has almost certainly killed more people than they've saved.
You still didn't answer the question. The task is to design a plane that is capable of the same speed, and the same altitude as the B-52, while having the best possible performance with respect to *what* ?
If faced with 2 different planes that are both capable of flying at that altitude and that speed, how do you decide which one is "best" ? Do you pick the cheapest one ? The one with the best range ? The one with the lowest service-requirements ? The one with the greatest cargo-capacity ?
I think the B-52 frame (or any similar frame) wins only if you prioritize cost highly. (and perhaps you should!), flying-wing configurations consume less fuel, can lift heavier loads and can have longer range than cigar-plus-wings-configuration. But they're substantially more expensive to build.
Agreed. And that's actually a problem. In effect, Americas enemies have learned that the best way of getting unwanted American troops out of the countriy, is to see too it that a steady stream of them go home in body-bags. Not by meeting them in open combat, but by using IEDs and similar tactics to harass and kill one or a few at a time.
It's not possible to "police" a country on the ground, without exposing yourself sufficiently that a determined attacker *will* succeed in killing many. Sending more soldiers doesn't help. Even if security goes up a bit as a result such that a smaller *fraction* of them get killed, it's still likely to result in a higher number of killed soldiers.
Sorry, but that's as they say "not even wrong". When demand drops, you can produce at less than peak. This saves fuel in a heat-based powerplant, and reduces water-consumption in a hydro-power one. That fuel or water *does* trivially store for months or even years.
Produced electricity stores poorly, but you don't do that.
It's worth it in a democracy. The US public has substantially larger patience with a war costing a gazillion dollars than they do, over time, with coffins arriving in a steady stream.
Killing american soldiers who walk around on the ground is a lot easier to do than killing those that are in planes many kilometres up, or that control drones from dozens of miles away.
The only way to beat the US military at the moment is to take away their support at home in the USA. Make Americans demand that they come home. Beating them on the field of battle is not currently reasonably possible for any nation. This ain't surprising given that the expenditures are larger than for the next 3 runners-up combined.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't. It's still stupid and insulting. I'm guessing that "stupid and insulting" is not the image these companies are going for.
Even when you do develop "to that standard", bugs creep in. Most of the times the bugs are non-critical, but once in a while you get critical bugs even in software developed to these insanely strict quality-standards.
Mariner 1 was destructed 300 seconds after launch because a bug in the navigation-software caused it to veer dangerously off course, and it was thought it might crash in populated areas so the self-destruct command was sent.
The mistake ? A missing overbar when transcribing a mathemathical formula. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mariner_1#Overbar_transcription_error
The Deep Space folks at NASA lost a probe. Why ? The command-sequence sent to the probe on one occasion was lacking one crucial last command: "when done maneuvering, turn receiving-antenna back towards earth"
These things happen more *seldom* when you use insane amounts of quality-control, however they still happen.
How about sympathy for those of us who are female and work in the industry, then arrive at a trade-show only to see women used purely as decoration over-and-over-and-over again ?
It's insulting, and sends the message that this is a thing for guys, that we don't really *belong* here (other than as decoration)
No you can't. And if you think you can, you're deluded. No non-trivial real-world program has ever been bug-free. Especially not programs large enough to have more than one developer.
Even programs which are *very* carefully specified and written, and tested thoroughly, end up having bugs. These programs cost atleast one order of magnitude more than normal programs, and *still* have bugs.
When the first pentiums had bugs that caused them to do floating-point-division wrong, it wasn't because they where sloppy, or because they where untested. They where tested 3 orders of magnitude more than most comercial software will ever be - and *still* launched buggy.
Given that guaranteed bug-free is unattainable, the right question is what amount of quality-control and testing is worth it. Sometimes it's worth it to spend 10 times the amount in order to get rid of half of the most serious bugs, but often it's not.
The description isn't a novel.
Slap a barcode for a $39.95 lego-boat on a $129.95 larger lego-ship and the scanner will say something like "lego boat".
I don't know how you expect a bored cashier at minimum wage to catch that.
I agree, 5 is likely below optimum for many classes of works. On the other hand the current bullshit of Life of author + 70 years is insane, if you write a book when you're 25, and live to 85, that amounts to 130 years of protection.
10 years from publication, or 15 from creation, whichever is shorter sounds about sane to me. The precise term is debatable, but I've never seen -anyone- arguing that creative work would suffer if the current 100+ years where reduced substantially.
That only applies if you're unwilling or unable to outspend your opponent.
The US military has certainly used weapons that cost a lot more than whatever they've destroyed in Afghanistan, and that's fine, if they are both able and willing to spend ten times or hundred times what the opposition is spending.
How many copies you keep of the data is entirely beside the point.
The point is that a disk full of data from a decade back, is only going to fill 1.5% of a new disc.
Yes, if you keep 2 separate backups plus your primary storage, you're going to need *3* new discs, not one. But the presence of the old data doesn't change this noticeably.
My point is "All my files from the last decade" are always going to be ~2 order of magnitude larger than "all my files from before that", thus deleting the latter is never going to save you more than a tiny percentage.
Even if you keep 100 separate backups, deleting all the decade-old files will *still* only save you 1-2% of your total storage-needs.
That seems not worth it. The thing is, both drive-space and data-volume tends to double every ~18 months or so. You wait first "a couple of years", then on a network drive, then once a decade has passed, they go in the trash.
But a decade ago the cheapest storage was a 40GB drive costing $130 or thereabouts. Today 40GB worth of space is 1.5% of that shiny new 3TB-disk costing $150 or thereabouts.
There's essentially no benefit to deleting old data, because old data is *always* small data, and so copying it to the new disk will use a miniscule portion of the new disc and have essentially no cost. $150/3TB is equivalent to $2 for saving those 40GB.
The only data that's potentially worthwhile to delete is *new* data that you have no need for. There is no such thing as "old but large data".
Avoiding clutter is a different issue, but that's easily solved by copying all the old data to a named folder, then move out of that folder and into the current file-system only those files you actually use.
The context was social networking, more specifically a dance-teacher. Most (say) Facebook-users have absolutely nothing in their Facebook-stream that is of such a nature that school-children needs shielding from it.
I quote: "Is it OK for students to see their teacher's private life - including all the stupid stuff that they did 5 years ago? Probably not, especially not at the primary grades - kids don't need to see adult stuff."
I dunno what level of "stupid" they're talking here, but I'd say if the stuff the teacher did 5 years ago is bad enough that kids would be scarred from just -hearing- about it, then I wonder if that person should be a teacher at all.
I'm not saying all children should have completely unfiltered access to everything. But the kinds of everyday-stories from everyday-lives that people tend to share in Facebook aren't typically particularily scary.
It's not about being able to afford the power-bill.
It's about the fact that it makes no financial sense to spend (say) $30 in electricity keeping a bunch of old drives running when the same additional capacity in a new disk costs $10.
It's backed by very good facts, and the evidence has been mounting every year for many years now. It's great to be skeptical, I recommend it generally. But really, the case for AGW has been made to the point where even a reasonable skeptic is convinced - not convinced as in mathemathically certain (that's rare in the real world) but convinced as in the hypothesis is substantially more likely than the null-hypothesis, likely enough that action is warranted.
As for the metric system, offcourse you *can* do anything in imperial. It's an imperial pain in the butt, but it's absolutely doable. For most people it doesn't matter so much, because they do very few physics-calculations. For those who do, it's really convenient to have units that make sense though.
If you push an object massing 1kg with a force of 1N, it accelerates at 1m/s^2. If you do this over a distance of 1m, you've just spent 1 joule of energy, and if the duration was 1 second, your power was 1 watt.
Do the same thing with imperial units !
Yes it's totally doable. But it *is* a hassle, and a impediment to inituitive understanding of physics at a high-school-level.
I'm not so sure. CO2-emissions are a typical case of tragedy of the commons. Even if I accept the premise that releasing CO2 will in create such-and-such harm, which is larger than the benefit I derive from releasing that CO2, it *still* makes sense for me to continue to pollute, in economic terms.
Let's say we agree that releasing a metric ton of CO2 creates $100 worth of damage, while I have some process that releases a ton of CO2, while benefiting me $50. The problem is that the $50 of benefits are for me only, while the $100 of harm are spread out over humanity, thus for me personally it's a huge win, even though it's a loss for humanity in sum total.
The same logic applies on any scale that's substantially smaller than global. if USA benefits $1 trillion from not reducing CO2-emissions, while the world in total suffers $3 trillion in damages from those emissions - it's still a win for USA (or any other country)
What you need to beat this, is binding international agreements, adhered to by atleast a solid majority of countries. And that's bloody politically hard.
Economically talking, the best solution would just to decide what level of global CO2-emissions are acceptable, then issue emission-allowances for this amount, and sell them on an open market to the highest bidder. This would ensure that those industries that derive the least benefit from the most pollution, stop first, which makes sense economically.
Unfortunately, this solution is damn-near impossible to realise politically.
Are you asserting that only a person who is a distant authority-figure can teach you something ? That once a person is someone you know, perhaps even someone you're friends with, that person is henceforth permanently unable to teach you anything ?
That's odd. I've had precisely the opposite experience.
Right. Let's create a separate "kids" world. The kids-world will have no swearing, no nudity, no death, no kissing, no money-problems, no divorces. Let's do our level best to shut our kids in these fictional, boring, sterile, pink-plastic worlds, where they can grow up dealing as little as possible with the real world.
Then, once they hit some magical age, 14 or 18 or whatever, let's open the floodgates and assume they're now well-prepared to deal with a world we've done our level best to ensure they've learnt nothing about.
On second thought, let's not do that. Instead, let's be guides and teachers to the real world. Let's try to explain in language a child can understand, rather than try to hide.
Makes sense - but the level of insurance should be adapted to the perceived risk, otherwise you end up spending a lot of money to guard against very small risks.
It's pretty orthodox at this point to claim that earth is roughly spherical. It'd be insane to dedicate 10% - or even 1% of the money we use for researching the geography of the world to flat-world-research.
Especially in cases where there's an infinite amount of *wrong* theories, but only one *right* theory, dedicating 10% of the money spent on the right theory to each of the wrong ones, would lead to most money being spent on nonsense.
For example, there must be hundreds of creation-myths, but very few of them deserve to be taken seriously to the degree that the Big Bang theory is taken seriously.
It's hard to say - some planets we've known about and observed for less than one of their years, so we essentially have no data.
What we -do- know with fair certanity is that *if* they are warming over the last 40 years, it's not due to increased solar influx, because the solar influx has on the average fallen somewhat over that period.
You'd hope so, but I ain't hopeful. You dont' get round-earth level of blatantly obvious evidence for changes that occur over decades or generations. Peoples memory for what is "normal" weather is very short-lived, a decade or two tops. I don't -actually- remember how much snow was common for how many days when I was a kid, and neither do most of the people who *believe* they remember it.
The evidence in favor of evolution is scientifically as close to iron-clad as you can reasonably be, there's multiple independent tests that each match up exactly, and no competing theory whatsoever. Nevertheless lots of university-educated Americans remain firmly convinced that it's total bullshit.
I've rarely seen that. But I've seen some worry about potential side-effects from some of the proposed fixes.
I mean, it's obvious that orbiting a sufficient number of large enough sun-shades will lower temperature, but it's equally obvious that letting measurable less sunlight reach earth, may well have side-effects.
Fertilizing the oceans with iron, would cause algae to absorb more CO2. It's somewhat unknown how much of this CO2 would stay trapped for how long though, and who is to say if dropping gigatons of biologically absorbable iron on the oceans might not have other side-effects ?
An engineered fix is fine. But it's not alarmist to consider it sensible to investigate side-effect thoroughly prior to doing mega-scale engineering on the climate of our planet.
I'm still waiting for the first bomb to go off in the security-checkpoint-waiting-line. At which point they'd need a checkpoint to check the passengers prior to the security-checkpoint-waiting-line, but offcourse this new checkpoint would also get a line, whereafter a bomb goes off in the waiting-line for *this* checkpoint repeat as necessary.
This bullshit is a *much* larger threat to both life and freedom than terrorists ever where. People fly 900 million trips a year (that's USA only), thus if every one of them spend 5 minutes extra in the security-theatre, that means more than 100 lifetimes are wasted standing in line every year. That's without considering the resources used, and the costs incurred, and the other inconveniences resulting.
Thus the TSA has almost certainly killed more people than they've saved.
You still didn't answer the question. The task is to design a plane that is capable of the same speed, and the same altitude as the B-52, while having the best possible performance with respect to *what* ?
If faced with 2 different planes that are both capable of flying at that altitude and that speed, how do you decide which one is "best" ? Do you pick the cheapest one ? The one with the best range ? The one with the lowest service-requirements ? The one with the greatest cargo-capacity ?
I think the B-52 frame (or any similar frame) wins only if you prioritize cost highly. (and perhaps you should!), flying-wing configurations consume less fuel, can lift heavier loads and can have longer range than cigar-plus-wings-configuration. But they're substantially more expensive to build.
Agreed. And that's actually a problem. In effect, Americas enemies have learned that the best way of getting unwanted American troops out of the countriy, is to see too it that a steady stream of them go home in body-bags. Not by meeting them in open combat, but by using IEDs and similar tactics to harass and kill one or a few at a time.
It's not possible to "police" a country on the ground, without exposing yourself sufficiently that a determined attacker *will* succeed in killing many. Sending more soldiers doesn't help. Even if security goes up a bit as a result such that a smaller *fraction* of them get killed, it's still likely to result in a higher number of killed soldiers.
Sorry, but that's as they say "not even wrong". When demand drops, you can produce at less than peak. This saves fuel in a heat-based powerplant, and reduces water-consumption in a hydro-power one. That fuel or water *does* trivially store for months or even years.
Produced electricity stores poorly, but you don't do that.
Why would you care about that ?
It's worth it in a democracy. The US public has substantially larger patience with a war costing a gazillion dollars than they do, over time, with coffins arriving in a steady stream.
Killing american soldiers who walk around on the ground is a lot easier to do than killing those that are in planes many kilometres up, or that control drones from dozens of miles away.
The only way to beat the US military at the moment is to take away their support at home in the USA. Make Americans demand that they come home. Beating them on the field of battle is not currently reasonably possible for any nation. This ain't surprising given that the expenditures are larger than for the next 3 runners-up combined.