Airbus's autopilots are already capable of taking off and landing autonomously. No idea of Boeings can, but I'd assume they either already can or could.
I'd personally rather see the pilots taken out of the loop. Computers can't get tired, can't get drunk.
He simply has not done anything worse than most presidents.
That's flat out wrong. He has charged more whistleblowers with espionage than all previous administrations combined. There's more, but I only need one example to prove you wrong.
I'm not sure why I'm feeding a troll, especially a particularly dim one, but here goes...
Who. The. Fuck. Cares.
a) Obama doesn't charge anyone b) Charging isn't convicting, only the courts can convict. If a law has been broken, its the duty of the DoJ to file those charges. c) Sticking a label of "whistleblower" on someone who broke the law doesn't magically make them innocent. Whistleblowing is (for very good reason) a high bar to meet, and that is determined by a court, not popular opinion.
Did they? I'd be interested to hear how you know that, given that the court opinions are secret. Is there actually oversight, or are the information requests simply rubber-stamped? We don't know, and that's the problem.
I can read. Details of the process, as well as the count of times that warrants were issued with and without changes are public record.
Your premise is wrong if it's "government is an entity that follows laws", because this completely ignores the fact that government is made up of individuals, with personal agendas. The data they collect may not be used against you right now, but that's only because you're not in someone's way yet. Once you step into the crosshairs of someone in power, do you still think all that data is innocent and inert? Do you think regulation is going to save you? Are you willing to accept a society where you cannot poke your head up too high, unless you're of a chosen breed and have greased the right palms?
And do you honestly think someone who could bypass the access controls at the *NSA* would have the slightest problem doing so directly with the companies involved? Hell, when younger and stupider, I'm sure lots of people on Slashdot socially engineered their way to getting information they shouldn't have had. Its not rocket science.
If you've pissed off someone who can do that with the NSA, you've probably got bigger problems than the records of your calls to some tranny chatline or something.
Interesting points about openness and democratic oversight in government as opposed to the corporate world.
So shouldn't you be up in arms about the lack of both openness and democratic oversight shown in the NSA affair? You can't defend the virtues of one system over another, then turn a blind eye when it reneges on those virtues.
The US isn't a democracy. Its a republic, and the people who have been elected into positions to provide that oversight did. They are elected to make those decisions precisely because the "mindless masses" don't have the collective intelligence to make the right ones. (Like "the best way to do covert surveillance is to make sure everyone knows its happening"!)
One needs your consent. One just needs a courts consent.
One has no legal oversight, one does.
The thing I find puzzling about the PRISM uproar is that there's not actually any allegations by Snowden that the NSA ever looks at records without a court order. Only employees with superuser-level access who commit felonies have.
At least there are laws to appropriately punish people like Snowden who step well beyond the legal limits of their roles and violate privacy. Do you think there's anything protecting your personal information at ATT or Verizon from any schmuck who wants to do the same thing? Do you think, even if PRISM wasn't there, that an analyst who is willing to break federal law couldn't do the exact same thing, anyway?
Hell, I'd comfortably argue there is vastly less of a privacy risk having all of that data in NSA systems, than having the NSA one-off requests for each and every bit of data. Assuming an analyst isn't breaking the law, no one but the NSA knows if I'm being investigated. And when it comes to nothing, no one is the wiser. If I happened to be standing too close to a terrorist suspect, and the NSA wanted to verify I hadn't had any contact with that individual, and that request was sent to ATT, my local Telco, maybe my financial institutions -- under a court order, just as legal as with PRISM -- now every one of those institutions knows I was being investigated *and there's no controls about the ramifications of it*. It also reduces the risk of my personal information to social engineering.
Hell, the history of organized crime in the US makes it pretty clear why its a problem for a Telco to know about a wiretap -- because it wasn't at all uncommon to have the telephone engineers who had to do them on the take, not 20 or 30 years ago.
I honestly am baffled how any reasonably intelligent person who has spent more than ten seconds thinking about it is up in arms about PRISM. Its just bizarre.
This old myth again? OP, use paper or papyrus. It won't make much of a difference as long as you learn the real lesson from the Egyptians: Live in the desert and bury yourself and your belongings in large stone vaults.
Worse yet, unless you know how much material was printed on papyrus by the Egyptians, you have literally no data to base the claim on, anyway. You don't know if 99%, 1%, or.000001% of things printed on it survived.
SD cards might not survive very long either. Some of the expensive ones claim 100 years data retention, but so do expensive CD-Rs/DVD-Rs. They key is that they assume ideal conditions, which a locked strong box probably isn't.
Same goes for USB drives and hard drives.
And they're estimated by broad sampling MTBF, and calculating how long data "should" last.
The technology will change and people will have to move the data to another media well before then.
I've been burning optical media since about 1995. Back then a CD burner cost almost $2000 and the discs were $15 each.
I can say, with certainty, that well stored optical discs absolutely do NOT come anywhere close to meeting the shelf lives that are claimed by manufacturers today.
Of the gold discs I have from the mid 90's 100% of them are still readable, but beyond that, virtually every make and brand of media I've got has varying levels of failures up to about four or five years ago. So far I haven't had any fail since then. The failure rate approaches 100% for discs, regardless of brand, bought and burned between maybe nine and twelve years ago. I stopped burning CDs around that range of time, but my DVDs from that period have nearly as high failure rates, as well. I'd say the interim years its probably more like 10-20%, but it'll be five more years until I know if they start to fail at the same rate.
Keep in mind the warranty periods are based on two things -- the fact that virtually no one will ever file a claim for a replacement media, and the fact that the warranties explicitly do not cover losses of the data on the media. They can say 100 year shelf life because in five years if the media fails, no one is going to exchange it for a new version of a media they no longer use regularly, anyway.
The fact is, there's *no* single media durable enough for even mid-term storage at modern data densities. (And by mid-term, I mean "boy I'd like this pictures of my kids to still be readable when they get married" kind of range. Old megabyte-sized harddrives and old 80, 160, maybe 320KB floppies are largely still readable, if you can find the interfaces and hardware. Older low-density tapes are, too, but as I learned the hard way, if you don't write on the tape what software you used to record it, you're pretty much SOL if you want to read it in the future.
Effortless media-shifting is the only real solution these days -- keep copying them from one computer to another.
Maybe they did realize that during this tough economic time (that will probably go on forever since we only consume and don't actually produce anything) it might be a bad thing to force businesses to offer health insurance that is rapidly rising..
Our company only employees 22 people and we provide health insurance that costs us somewhere in the neighborhood of 75k/year.. Having gone up about 20% since obama care passed.
So you're implying (although we all know its incorrect) that the rate of increase was less the two years prior to "Obama care"?
If you want to be accurate and not cherry pick numbers to support an obvious political bias, you should provide accurate numbers to provide contect:
What was the rate of increase the years prior to "Obamacare"?
What is your total payroll cost per employee?
If your average salary is $50k, then your all-up costs per employee are probably around $70k with payroll and unemployment taxes, cost for their work space, etc... in which case your $3400 cost per employee for insurance is about 5% of your total all-up costs per employee.
So you either are feigning ignorance posting your 20% figure and complaining about a very small difference in cost for a huge improvement in your employees, or you're really ignorant about basic economics and math.
Average programmers being forced to write parallel code scares me more than anything else. "The multicore dilemma is actually a substantially worse problem than generally understood: we are headed not just for an era of proportionately slower software, but significantly buggier software, as the human inability to write good parallel code is combined with the widespread need to use available CPU resources and the substantial increase in the number of scientists with no CS background having to write code to get their job done." --The multicore dilemma (in the big data era) is worse than you think
This is probably the most true thing I've seen in this list, and the fact that you're the only person who posted it is a sign of just how bad of a problem it is.
Rounded to the nearest whole number, I think its absolutely safe to say 0% of programmers understand how to write multithreaded code properly.
You think the sack of meat below your neck has anything to do with your consciousness?
Yes, it does. And that's been known with certainty for at least a decade.
Consciousness arises because of the constant feedback between hundreds of generalized areas in your brain, and the nerves that connect them to the real world. The brain alone is no more conscious than your peripheral nervous system alone.
for why the H-1B system ought to be massively reduced and US contracts should be awarded only to actual US companies instead of shell-game "subsidiaries."
Here's the reality, though -- Infosys is one of the real big outsourcing companies that is used by most of the very large software companies in the US.
As a software worker, I think better for this to go to a US company, but the work would likely be done largely by Infosys or another similar company. As a taxpayer, I'd rather the savings on the development go to me, than padding the profits of a government contractor.
I'm saddened by this story, but not shocked. The fact that I'm not shocked makes me even more sad.
Don't be. If you're not substantially in the 1% -- like multimillionaire, you wouldn't have 90% of the stuff you own if it wasn't for people living like that.
And that's good living compared to the people who made most of the stuff you own.
That's the thing -- everyone feels bad for people who live like that, but virtually no one would be willing to give up their lifestyle for it.
DirectX is a standard. It may not be the one you like, for technical, political or zealotry reasons, but the fact is, it is a standard available on the bulk of systems that can play "advanced" games.
I think what he meant was that on electric cars you tend to take advantage of regenerative braking (i.e. braking with the engine instead of with the brakes themselves). This should make your brake pads last a lot longer, though I'm not sure it'd be "forever".
When I was a constantly-broke student I used to drive very carefully in order to save fuel. One of my techniques was to brake using the engine as much as possible (fuel consumption drops down to zero when doing this). When I took the car to a routine inspection the mechanic made a point to say that typically he'd replace the pads on a car that old, but they were still almost new.
So yeah, you can save a lot of wear on the brake pads if you try. Of course it also helps if you don't live in the city.
FYI, that's not particularly great to do for your car -- you're wearing your engine parts instead of your brake pads.
That's not even remotely like what an EV does, which is turn the electric motor into a generator. Its designed for that, your IC engine isn't.
Some EVs, like the Volt, don't use the physical brakes unless you hit the brake pedal pretty hard. I believe the Tesla, though, the brakes are 100% mechanical and only when you let off the accelerator do you get regenerative braking.
Slashdot Mirror
Liquid metal has been around for a while in fiction, but now in the real world?
Its been around for a reasonable number of billions of years, as long as you're somewhere with the proper ambient temperature.
Tolerate those who have crazy beliefs.
Never tolerate, for one second, someone who wants to hurt others because of those beliefs.
That doesn't mean I have to give him my money, though.
Why even give him your tolerance? He's a douchebag. There's nothing wrong with being intolerant of douchebags.
The irony is, tolerance of the intolerant just empowers them.
The system can't charge a discounted penalty for younger smokers.
So its not that the system will limit, its actually that the system won't limit the penalties.
So to speak.
Airbus's autopilots are already capable of taking off and landing autonomously. No idea of Boeings can, but I'd assume they either already can or could.
I'd personally rather see the pilots taken out of the loop. Computers can't get tired, can't get drunk.
He simply has not done anything worse than most presidents.
That's flat out wrong. He has charged more whistleblowers with espionage than all previous administrations combined. There's more, but I only need one example to prove you wrong.
I'm not sure why I'm feeding a troll, especially a particularly dim one, but here goes ...
Who. The. Fuck. Cares.
a) Obama doesn't charge anyone
b) Charging isn't convicting, only the courts can convict. If a law has been broken, its the duty of the DoJ to file those charges.
c) Sticking a label of "whistleblower" on someone who broke the law doesn't magically make them innocent. Whistleblowing is (for very good reason) a high bar to meet, and that is determined by a court, not popular opinion.
Will that infect my lawnmower? I'd better destroy it then before it gets dangerous...
You should get a shovel and double check ... your lawn may be full of worms.
Did they? I'd be interested to hear how you know that, given that the court opinions are secret. Is there actually oversight, or are the information requests simply rubber-stamped? We don't know, and that's the problem.
I can read. Details of the process, as well as the count of times that warrants were issued with and without changes are public record.
Your premise is wrong if it's "government is an entity that follows laws", because this completely ignores the fact that government is made up of individuals, with personal agendas. The data they collect may not be used against you right now, but that's only because you're not in someone's way yet. Once you step into the crosshairs of someone in power, do you still think all that data is innocent and inert? Do you think regulation is going to save you? Are you willing to accept a society where you cannot poke your head up too high, unless you're of a chosen breed and have greased the right palms?
And do you honestly think someone who could bypass the access controls at the *NSA* would have the slightest problem doing so directly with the companies involved? Hell, when younger and stupider, I'm sure lots of people on Slashdot socially engineered their way to getting information they shouldn't have had. Its not rocket science.
If you've pissed off someone who can do that with the NSA, you've probably got bigger problems than the records of your calls to some tranny chatline or something.
Interesting points about openness and democratic oversight in government as opposed to the corporate world.
So shouldn't you be up in arms about the lack of both openness and democratic oversight shown in the NSA affair? You can't defend the virtues of one system over another, then turn a blind eye when it reneges on those virtues.
The US isn't a democracy. Its a republic, and the people who have been elected into positions to provide that oversight did. They are elected to make those decisions precisely because the "mindless masses" don't have the collective intelligence to make the right ones. (Like "the best way to do covert surveillance is to make sure everyone knows its happening"!)
One has your consent, the other doesn't?
One needs your consent. One just needs a courts consent.
One has no legal oversight, one does.
The thing I find puzzling about the PRISM uproar is that there's not actually any allegations by Snowden that the NSA ever looks at records without a court order. Only employees with superuser-level access who commit felonies have.
At least there are laws to appropriately punish people like Snowden who step well beyond the legal limits of their roles and violate privacy. Do you think there's anything protecting your personal information at ATT or Verizon from any schmuck who wants to do the same thing? Do you think, even if PRISM wasn't there, that an analyst who is willing to break federal law couldn't do the exact same thing, anyway?
Hell, I'd comfortably argue there is vastly less of a privacy risk having all of that data in NSA systems, than having the NSA one-off requests for each and every bit of data. Assuming an analyst isn't breaking the law, no one but the NSA knows if I'm being investigated. And when it comes to nothing, no one is the wiser. If I happened to be standing too close to a terrorist suspect, and the NSA wanted to verify I hadn't had any contact with that individual, and that request was sent to ATT, my local Telco, maybe my financial institutions -- under a court order, just as legal as with PRISM -- now every one of those institutions knows I was being investigated *and there's no controls about the ramifications of it*. It also reduces the risk of my personal information to social engineering.
Hell, the history of organized crime in the US makes it pretty clear why its a problem for a Telco to know about a wiretap -- because it wasn't at all uncommon to have the telephone engineers who had to do them on the take, not 20 or 30 years ago.
I honestly am baffled how any reasonably intelligent person who has spent more than ten seconds thinking about it is up in arms about PRISM. Its just bizarre.
or are a weird mix of paranoid and careless.
Welcome to Slashdot.
This old myth again? OP, use paper or papyrus. It won't make much of a difference as long as you learn the real lesson from the Egyptians: Live in the desert and bury yourself and your belongings in large stone vaults.
Worse yet, unless you know how much material was printed on papyrus by the Egyptians, you have literally no data to base the claim on, anyway. You don't know if 99%, 1%, or .000001% of things printed on it survived.
SD cards might not survive very long either. Some of the expensive ones claim 100 years data retention, but so do expensive CD-Rs/DVD-Rs. They key is that they assume ideal conditions, which a locked strong box probably isn't.
Same goes for USB drives and hard drives.
And they're estimated by broad sampling MTBF, and calculating how long data "should" last.
I.e., the estimates mean absolutely nothing.
The shelf life is FAR longer than Slashdot nerds would have you believe.
No one specified a time frame here, certainly not the original story.
As far as I'm concerned, 100 years is more than adequate. Beyond that its someone elses problem.
The technology will change and people will have to move the data to another media well before then.
I've been burning optical media since about 1995. Back then a CD burner cost almost $2000 and the discs were $15 each.
I can say, with certainty, that well stored optical discs absolutely do NOT come anywhere close to meeting the shelf lives that are claimed by manufacturers today.
Of the gold discs I have from the mid 90's 100% of them are still readable, but beyond that, virtually every make and brand of media I've got has varying levels of failures up to about four or five years ago. So far I haven't had any fail since then. The failure rate approaches 100% for discs, regardless of brand, bought and burned between maybe nine and twelve years ago. I stopped burning CDs around that range of time, but my DVDs from that period have nearly as high failure rates, as well. I'd say the interim years its probably more like 10-20%, but it'll be five more years until I know if they start to fail at the same rate.
Keep in mind the warranty periods are based on two things -- the fact that virtually no one will ever file a claim for a replacement media, and the fact that the warranties explicitly do not cover losses of the data on the media. They can say 100 year shelf life because in five years if the media fails, no one is going to exchange it for a new version of a media they no longer use regularly, anyway.
The fact is, there's *no* single media durable enough for even mid-term storage at modern data densities. (And by mid-term, I mean "boy I'd like this pictures of my kids to still be readable when they get married" kind of range. Old megabyte-sized harddrives and old 80, 160, maybe 320KB floppies are largely still readable, if you can find the interfaces and hardware. Older low-density tapes are, too, but as I learned the hard way, if you don't write on the tape what software you used to record it, you're pretty much SOL if you want to read it in the future.
Effortless media-shifting is the only real solution these days -- keep copying them from one computer to another.
Maybe they did realize that during this tough economic time (that will probably go on forever since we only consume and don't actually produce anything) it might be a bad thing to force businesses to offer health insurance that is rapidly rising..
Our company only employees 22 people and we provide health insurance that costs us somewhere in the neighborhood of 75k/year.. Having gone up about 20% since obama care passed.
So you're implying (although we all know its incorrect) that the rate of increase was less the two years prior to "Obama care"?
If you want to be accurate and not cherry pick numbers to support an obvious political bias, you should provide accurate numbers to provide contect:
What was the rate of increase the years prior to "Obamacare"?
What is your total payroll cost per employee?
If your average salary is $50k, then your all-up costs per employee are probably around $70k with payroll and unemployment taxes, cost for their work space, etc ... in which case your $3400 cost per employee for insurance is about 5% of your total all-up costs per employee.
So you either are feigning ignorance posting your 20% figure and complaining about a very small difference in cost for a huge improvement in your employees, or you're really ignorant about basic economics and math.
I think he's only referring to union shops with their soon-to-be-taxed-out-of-existence gold level coverage plans.
Negative. Having had one of those "Cadillac" plans for a few years, my single cost out of pocket was $0, but my employer was over $3k a month.
$10,000 per employee would be bottom-of-the-barrel coverage, unless the employer isn't covering much of the employee's cost.
Average programmers being forced to write parallel code scares me more than anything else. "The multicore dilemma is actually a substantially worse problem than generally understood: we are headed not just for an era of proportionately slower software, but significantly buggier software, as the human inability to write good parallel code is combined with the widespread need to use available CPU resources and the substantial increase in the number of scientists with no CS background having to write code to get their job done." --The multicore dilemma (in the big data era) is worse than you think
This is probably the most true thing I've seen in this list, and the fact that you're the only person who posted it is a sign of just how bad of a problem it is.
Rounded to the nearest whole number, I think its absolutely safe to say 0% of programmers understand how to write multithreaded code properly.
What are you trying to say?
You think the sack of meat below your neck has anything to do with your consciousness?
Yes, it does. And that's been known with certainty for at least a decade.
Consciousness arises because of the constant feedback between hundreds of generalized areas in your brain, and the nerves that connect them to the real world. The brain alone is no more conscious than your peripheral nervous system alone.
for why the H-1B system ought to be massively reduced and US contracts should be awarded only to actual US companies instead of shell-game "subsidiaries."
Here's the reality, though -- Infosys is one of the real big outsourcing companies that is used by most of the very large software companies in the US.
As a software worker, I think better for this to go to a US company, but the work would likely be done largely by Infosys or another similar company. As a taxpayer, I'd rather the savings on the development go to me, than padding the profits of a government contractor.
I'm saddened by this story, but not shocked. The fact that I'm not shocked makes me even more sad.
Don't be. If you're not substantially in the 1% -- like multimillionaire, you wouldn't have 90% of the stuff you own if it wasn't for people living like that.
And that's good living compared to the people who made most of the stuff you own.
That's the thing -- everyone feels bad for people who live like that, but virtually no one would be willing to give up their lifestyle for it.
DirectX is an API, not a standard. It doesnt even have a spec doc like OpenGL does.
And yet its the standard that the majority of games use.
Go figure. Your definition doesn't match reality, I guess.
DirectX is a standard. It may not be the one you like, for technical, political or zealotry reasons, but the fact is, it is a standard available on the bulk of systems that can play "advanced" games.
I think what he meant was that on electric cars you tend to take advantage of regenerative braking (i.e. braking with the engine instead of with the brakes themselves).
This should make your brake pads last a lot longer, though I'm not sure it'd be "forever".
When I was a constantly-broke student I used to drive very carefully in order to save fuel. One of my techniques was to brake using the engine as much as possible (fuel consumption drops down to zero when doing this).
When I took the car to a routine inspection the mechanic made a point to say that typically he'd replace the pads on a car that old, but they were still almost new.
So yeah, you can save a lot of wear on the brake pads if you try. Of course it also helps if you don't live in the city.
FYI, that's not particularly great to do for your car -- you're wearing your engine parts instead of your brake pads.
That's not even remotely like what an EV does, which is turn the electric motor into a generator. Its designed for that, your IC engine isn't.
Some EVs, like the Volt, don't use the physical brakes unless you hit the brake pedal pretty hard. I believe the Tesla, though, the brakes are 100% mechanical and only when you let off the accelerator do you get regenerative braking.
There are many, many more red dwarfs than other types of stars and their expected life expectancy is longer the estimated end of the universe.
I'm not sure "end" means what you think it means.