I believe that I read of a similar scheme as an aside in _The Adolescence of P1_. VIRUS messes up your computer but you get it free; VACCINE removes VIRUS but it'll cost ya.
What the virus author should be asking himself is: "should I worry more about the FBI tracing the thing back to me, or the minions of some mobster who just had his, uh, business records zapped by this indiscriminate attack?"
Hmmm, what about a Rube Goldberg Virus Contest to produce the most complicated infection scheme imaginable that actually works?:-) for the humor-impaired.
Path optimization has very little to do with it, fuel economy aside. The travelling salesman problem doesn't deal with salesmen breaking their legs by walking into ditches, does it?
"How do I get there efficiently, given that I can see the whole area from above" is not nearly as interesting, in this application, as "what is that in front of me and what do I do about it?"
The problem with Autonomous Zones is the transition. What does the car do if the driver, for whatever reason, doesn't reclaim control? How will the car even know if the driver is fit to drive?
You are thinking of watercooled engines. The VW Type 1's engine was aircooled -- the cylinders stick way out of the crankcase in open air and have fins all over them. They are just stuck into holes in the crankcase and bolted down. It's much more like an aircraft engine, at least in this way.
I understood it to be a bunch of cars, each of which is given a destination (or several) and has to determine its own routes. That's about as far from a slot-track, or 1950s notions of the radio-guided handsfree highway, as you can get.
Neither inertial nav nor GPS can help you when you find something that wasn't there when the route was planned. Trees fall across roads, opponents dig ditches or pile up berms, bridges wash away in floods, other vehicles are disabled on the road....
An autonomous vehicle must be *autonomous*. It must be able to sense *and evaluate* its environment in realtime, and to update its route plan whenever conditions require it. Knowing where it is, and where it could have gone had it gone hours ago, is valuable, yet it is only the smallest and most insignificant part of that capability. An autonomous vehicle must be able at all times to make good decisions about how to proceed.
You have *buses* in Atlanta? I hear we have buses in Indianapolis -- come to think of it, I see them every now and then...*downtown*. There are no buses anywhere near my home. I'd have to drive to the bus stop, so why bother with the bus at all?
(We *had* a nice rail system but we tore it out decades ago. Stop 11 and Stop 12 Roads are about the only part left, and those are just names. And it didn't go anywhere near my home either.)
What does the number of CS degrees have to do with the supply of IT workers? CS is important work, but most of the people who can do it would be wasted running cables or sloshing the latest version of Office onto a flock of PCs.
What most employers are looking for is not computer science. Wal*Mart doesn't need hundreds of people who can analyze algorithms or invent new data structures. They probably don't even need hundreds of people who can write decent code. That's not even 5% of IT.
Much of what gets shoved in our faces isn't information; it is noise. Things we don't want to know are not helpful. Meanwhile it is often hard to get the information that we *do* want. User interfaces distract us with data we don't care about and features we don't use, but we have to dig and dig and dig for hints about how the useful bits work.
Clippy, for example, was almost always noise. I would estimate that about 50% of the words in the Windows Resource Kits are noise. Rah-rah, let's-all-get-on-the-bandwagon stuff sent to technical workers is noise. Innovation without improvement is noise.
I really, really hope that a way is found to prevent disabling such things. Because I would love to come up with a script to get rid of that annoying "install Flash now?" popup, since I decided that I do not want Flash now or ever and don't need to view sites which are useless without it. Maybe I can even detect those smarmy "get a current browser" pages (which are incorrect; I have the latest browser, but I've chosen not to punish myself with an optional add-on) and do something more intelligent than insulting the visitor.
The Web was a lot more pleasant before people started trying to turn HTML into PDF.
That's "pains-taking", not "pain staking". One takes pains; one does not stake pain.
Yes, yes, yes -- I understood it anyway. But such errors slow me down, because I have to engage a part of my brain that isn't needed to understand proper spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage. It's like stepping in a patch of quicksand on a running track.
By sharing knowledge one loses the ability to sell it, but that is not the only way to profit from knowledge.
You can continue to use it yourself, of course.
If by using your shared knowledge others work in ways that make it easier for you to do your work, that's profitable too.
If your knowledge is found to be useful, people will be more inclined to listen to you the next time you have something to say. Some people have to pay money to get their way, but you get yours directly.
Anybody who believes that the only way to profit from knowledge is to trade it for money is not very clever.
"wissen" is knowledge, plain enough. "Herrschaft" would be the craft or practice of being "Herr", but "Herr" is one of those words that's too slippery for me to translate well -- it seems to have a broad range of meanings.
The word makes me think of guild secrets, and fraternal orders that won't let members talk about what goes on at their meetings.
Ever seen what a library pays for those journals? Many hundreds of pounds a year, even thousands, for a single title, in many cases. And your taxes ultimately pay the bill.
A public library is a great, great deal. But it could, and should, be even better.
Something else that's insane is that some of that research was paid for with public funds. Taxpayers support research which is then locked up in some journal and the same taxpayers have to pay $5000.00/yr just to see the results they already paid for.
Publisher may charge whatever the market will bear for the value that they add, but I don't see why *exclusive* deals for public property are even legal.
Slashdot Mirror
I believe that I read of a similar scheme as an aside in _The Adolescence of P1_. VIRUS messes up your computer but you get it free; VACCINE removes VIRUS but it'll cost ya.
Get yourself a VM/CMS system and you can run CHRISTMA EXEC, which does both! :->
(Okay, it paints a Christmas tree, not fireworks.)
What the virus author should be asking himself is: "should I worry more about the FBI tracing the thing back to me, or the minions of some mobster who just had his, uh, business records zapped by this indiscriminate attack?"
Hmmm, what about a Rube Goldberg Virus Contest to produce the most complicated infection scheme imaginable that actually works? :-) for the humor-impaired.
Path optimization has very little to do with it, fuel economy aside. The travelling salesman problem doesn't deal with salesmen breaking their legs by walking into ditches, does it?
"How do I get there efficiently, given that I can see the whole area from above" is not nearly as interesting, in this application, as "what is that in front of me and what do I do about it?"
The problem with Autonomous Zones is the transition. What does the car do if the driver, for whatever reason, doesn't reclaim control? How will the car even know if the driver is fit to drive?
You are thinking of watercooled engines. The VW Type 1's engine was aircooled -- the cylinders stick way out of the crankcase in open air and have fins all over them. They are just stuck into holes in the crankcase and bolted down. It's much more like an aircraft engine, at least in this way.
I understood it to be a bunch of cars, each of which is given a destination (or several) and has to determine its own routes. That's about as far from a slot-track, or 1950s notions of the radio-guided handsfree highway, as you can get.
Just remember that every weapon we *don't* invent can still be used against us when someone else invents it.
Neither inertial nav nor GPS can help you when you find something that wasn't there when the route was planned. Trees fall across roads, opponents dig ditches or pile up berms, bridges wash away in floods, other vehicles are disabled on the road....
An autonomous vehicle must be *autonomous*. It must be able to sense *and evaluate* its environment in realtime, and to update its route plan whenever conditions require it. Knowing where it is, and where it could have gone had it gone hours ago, is valuable, yet it is only the smallest and most insignificant part of that capability. An autonomous vehicle must be able at all times to make good decisions about how to proceed.
Speak for yourself. There are times when I would love to have a Bolo on my side.
You have *buses* in Atlanta? I hear we have buses in Indianapolis -- come to think of it, I see them every now and then...*downtown*. There are no buses anywhere near my home. I'd have to drive to the bus stop, so why bother with the bus at all?
(We *had* a nice rail system but we tore it out decades ago. Stop 11 and Stop 12 Roads are about the only part left, and those are just names. And it didn't go anywhere near my home either.)
Your Mindstorms vehicle has a range of more than 175 miles and can avoid or bridge ditches, boulders, and tank traps? This I must see.
What does the number of CS degrees have to do with the supply of IT workers? CS is important work, but most of the people who can do it would be wasted running cables or sloshing the latest version of Office onto a flock of PCs.
What most employers are looking for is not computer science. Wal*Mart doesn't need hundreds of people who can analyze algorithms or invent new data structures. They probably don't even need hundreds of people who can write decent code. That's not even 5% of IT.
Much of what gets shoved in our faces isn't information; it is noise. Things we don't want to know are not helpful. Meanwhile it is often hard to get the information that we *do* want. User interfaces distract us with data we don't care about and features we don't use, but we have to dig and dig and dig for hints about how the useful bits work.
Clippy, for example, was almost always noise. I would estimate that about 50% of the words in the Windows Resource Kits are noise. Rah-rah, let's-all-get-on-the-bandwagon stuff sent to technical workers is noise. Innovation without improvement is noise.
That reminds me: we need a blacklist plugin so we can avoid ever, ever linking to sites run by people who think our browsers belong to them.
I really, really hope that a way is found to prevent disabling such things. Because I would love to come up with a script to get rid of that annoying "install Flash now?" popup, since I decided that I do not want Flash now or ever and don't need to view sites which are useless without it. Maybe I can even detect those smarmy "get a current browser" pages (which are incorrect; I have the latest browser, but I've chosen not to punish myself with an optional add-on) and do something more intelligent than insulting the visitor.
The Web was a lot more pleasant before people started trying to turn HTML into PDF.
That's "pains-taking", not "pain staking". One takes pains; one does not stake pain.
Yes, yes, yes -- I understood it anyway. But such errors slow me down, because I have to engage a part of my brain that isn't needed to understand proper spelling, punctuation, grammar, and usage. It's like stepping in a patch of quicksand on a running track.
By sharing knowledge one loses the ability to sell it, but that is not the only way to profit from knowledge.
You can continue to use it yourself, of course.
If by using your shared knowledge others work in ways that make it easier for you to do your work, that's profitable too.
If your knowledge is found to be useful, people will be more inclined to listen to you the next time you have something to say. Some people have to pay money to get their way, but you get yours directly.
Anybody who believes that the only way to profit from knowledge is to trade it for money is not very clever.
Plus it's hard to ask a shopkeeper to measure out three liters of knowledge. It's rather chunky.
"wissen" is knowledge, plain enough. "Herrschaft" would be the craft or practice of being "Herr", but "Herr" is one of those words that's too slippery for me to translate well -- it seems to have a broad range of meanings.
The word makes me think of guild secrets, and fraternal orders that won't let members talk about what goes on at their meetings.
Ever seen what a library pays for those journals? Many hundreds of pounds a year, even thousands, for a single title, in many cases. And your taxes ultimately pay the bill.
A public library is a great, great deal. But it could, and should, be even better.
Something else that's insane is that some of that research was paid for with public funds. Taxpayers support research which is then locked up in some journal and the same taxpayers have to pay $5000.00/yr just to see the results they already paid for.
Publisher may charge whatever the market will bear for the value that they add, but I don't see why *exclusive* deals for public property are even legal.
How much research does it take to go 'round with a ruler and smack the hands of the coders who are putting in all the buffer overflows?
"Offered for sale on the websites were pornography, pills, pirated software and fake fancy watches."
Wow, that's 98% of my daily home email even *after* filtering. [applause]