Good joke, but really... With a Mars landing, you have to contend with a worst-case atmosphere (thick enough to burn up an unprotected re-entering spacecraft, but awfully thin for parachutes), high winds, and enough gravity to make things falling from high altitude hit hard. With Eros, there is no atmosphere, and gravity is so low I'm surprised the probe didn't bounce off. So it's just a matter of driving up to it very, very carefully. (The challenge is that NEAR-Shoemaker wasn't designed for driving that carefully, it apparently wasn't equipped with landing legs so it could have rolled over onto the antenna, and the controls have malfunctioned badly once before -- it spent nearly two years getting back into position after recovering from that malfunction.)
How did we touch Jupiter? I'd think dropping a probe into the atmosphere does count, and we've done that -- and it went surprisingly deep before transmissions cut off. I don't think Jupiter exactly has "ground" to touch. The atmosphere probably goes down to well over critical pressure (where gas and liquid become indistinguishable). There must be solids of some sort far under that -- the first solid layer may be hydrogen compressed into a metallic phase! But don't expect to get probe data from there in your lifetime -- first, the probe couldn't survive, second, if it survived it would have no way to send the data back.
Not exactly harmless -- you get some gsmma rays, so you'd probably have to shield it like a nuclear reactor. But small enough singularities would be safer than what usually goes inside that shielding -- and it would eat mass and emit radiation, sounds like a power source to me. Too bad we don't have any way to make one...
At that size and mass, they'll all burn up,unless maybe someone orbits a.99 Kg tungsten slug inside of a 10cm cardboard cube... I'm not sure whether or not that could survive re-entry, but you wouldn't know where it was coming down... (A slug with a guidance system could be a very nasty weapon, but it would have to be several times as big to make it through.) Anything reasonable like electronics or a crystal-growth experiment would burn up for sure.
If the tests are given every year, that sort of score-rigging becomes pretty obvious -- if you look at the improvement in scores over one year, I would expect a good teacher with previously low-achieving kids to come out on top...
I think you are right about the impact of the women's movement -- Up to about 1968 the only professions open to women were teaching and nursing, so they got a lot of women with qualifications far too high for the pay scale and status of those jobs, plus a few men who really loved the job. (And I remember one man that was utterly incompetent and had been so for 20 years, but was hanging on, IMHO, because he would have been incompetent at any job.) We've lost most of that core of over-qualified women -- except for the few that love teaching so much as to accept everything that's wrong with the job.
But that's not the whole story. Teachers' pay has increased greatly, but with no quality controls in place, the main effect of this is that poor teachers are less likely to remove themselves from the profession. Teachers' pay isn't much compared to good managers, engineers, and coders, but it is pretty good for someone whose only proven qualification was graduating in the middle ranks of an exceptionally easy college major. Smarter people graduate from tougher majors in the "liberal arts" and take lower-paying jobs such as McDonald's asst managers all the time. Teachers' status is rather low -- that might have something to do with peoples' subliminal awareness that there are no quality controls in the "profession."
What we need is a system in place to identify the good teachers, much higher pay for them, a new job title (for better status), and an up-or-out policy for the rest. For example, five years to make "instructor", ten to make "master instructor", or else you're putting in your application at McDonald's...
And when the parents do try to take responsibility for raising their kids, the schools will assume the parents don't know what they are doing and undercut them.
Maybe the teacher or principal ought to check things ought and apply a little common sense before calling the cops. Wait a minute -- maybe the problem is that neither the teacher nor the principal has any common sense. Consider:
1) Education majors are about the lowest ranking of any group of college students on standardized tests. (There are some bright kids in there too, but the average is abysmal. And I really wonder how the bright ones manage to deal with the stultifying brain-dead courses.)
2) The public schools are unionized, and the first priority of their unions is to make sure that no one ever gets fired for incompetence. The second is to fight any proposal for paying teachers depending on their competence.
So your average teacher or principal is a not too bright person who loves a risk-free environment. And now we want them use common sense and be willing to take responsibility for their judgement in a high-risk case... Lot's of luck. We're homeschooling our grandchildren.
I went to school with someone who really was a threat -- 6'8, poison mean, and six months after graduation he murdered someone. Absolutely no one expressed any surprise when we heard about it. He pled insanity, was released about eight years later, and promptly killed five people.
Would a snitch system in school have made any difference?It might have put some bounds on his bullying in school, but it wouldn't have made a bit of difference to his nastiest tendencies, unless it gave him a reason to start shooting people sooner. He is a psychopath -- counseling doesn't cure that. Nor does anything else -- heavy doses of drugs, chains and cells, or execution can prevent them from killing any more, but there is no cure.
We can't lock them up until they do commit (or at least attempt) a violent crime. And as for recognizing the symptoms ahead of time -- a committee of psychiatrists much better qualified than anyone in the school system was somehow persuaded to let this guy out once after his first murder!
Counseling, as you skimmed over in the article, is the key ingredient that seems to have been missing in the aforementioned case.
That depends. Forced counseling is a punishment in itself. Also, a good many of the so-called counselors at schools don't have the right training, and even many with the right degrees in psychology just aren't very good at their jobs -- that's why they're in the public schools where no one ever gets fired for incompetence, rather than working for themselves.
Umm... you do know that it was the bad guy who said that in Shakespeare's play, right?
>br> And bad guys can't have good ideas?
It's been about 30 years, but if I remember right that was Hotspur, and I would describe him as overly impulsive (like a teenager) rather than evil (like Richard III)...
All such restrictions can apply only for a limited time after employment ends -- and he says it's been over a year, so most contractual restrictions would have expired anyway. There is a possibility that the company thinks his comments were untrue and therefore libel or slander -- or that they know the comments were true but think that a libel or slander lawsuit will scare others out of criticizing them even if it loses. The US badly needs a "loser pays" principle for cases like this -- yeah, you can sue because we said X, but first we'll prove in court that X is true (and all court proceedings can be reported without fear of lawsuits), and then we'll charge you for the cost of proving it.
Yes, I have read the Communist Manifesto. I've also studied how it worked out in the real world; the main difference was that the Nazis don't lie as much. Nazis claimed that they were going to do really nasty things and then did them. (Shame on everyone who didn't believe that Hitler meant what he said in Mein Kampf.) Communists claimed that they were going to make the world a wonderful place for everyone, then did the same things as the Nazis plus destroyed the economy. Then they lied about that too. (It took all of Stalin's well-publicized 5 year plans just to get Russia back to where they were before they overthrew the Tsar -- and the Tsars were the reason Russia was a backwards nation in 1914 in spite of having far more natural resources than any other nation, including the US. But the commies kept right on claiming that they were making great advances, right up until there was nothing left to "nationalize" (steal)and the Soviet state went bankrupt.)
It's probably much, much longer. It's not the time to toss in another slug that matters, but the time to recharge the capacitors -- for a hobbyist-grade power supply, I'd guess minutes to hours. If you owned a fusion power plant;) you could get that down to under a second, but you also have to let the rails cool down.
Or if the price for a stateroom was about the same as for a tourist class seat on an airplane. But this depends on whether the ride is rough or smooth. The general rule is that the bigger the ship, the less it is tossed around by the waves. With a big ship, you can design it so speed actually stabilizes them, in normal weather. But the North Atlantic makes waves bigger than any ship...
I think what most of us object to is replacing cops like you with a dumb machine. I presume you are capable of using some judgement to nail the bad drivers rather than just handing out tickets to everyone driving 5 mph over regardless of traffic, road conditions, and whether the speed limit in that area made any sense in the first place. You must know that speed is not much of a determinant of safety -- after all, I frequently see cop cars patrolling (not responding to an emergency) at 10-15 mph over.
About your WILD guess: When the car (and other) manufacturers design in new features because the customers want them, then they'll almost always give you a sensible implementation. When it's in response to a government mandate, however, usually you get something that must have been designed by a committee of bureaucrats, not engineers with any knowledge of the usage conditions. E.g., airbags, "automatic" seatbelts, the seatbelt interlock in the '70's that required Michiganders to buckle up to start the car, then unbuckle to clean the ice off the windows,... So I wouldn't just assume that the limiter will just remove itself off when it realizes it's not going to get anymore GPS -- with enough government involvement, it's just as likely that you'll have cars stalling in remote areas of Scotland...
Many games aren't strictly "Zero Sum" in the sense that when I get +1 point you get -1, but in virtually all games an opponent's loss is your gain -- if only because with one less chess piece he's less likely to win. Out in the real (capitalist world), you are unlikely to get as rich by making other people poorer as you can by making other people richer. But there are a whole lot of people that don't realize the difference --not just quasi-socialists and kleptocrats, but also many corporate leaders...
"Zero Sum" is a poor choice of words. What Cliff was trying to point out was the great distinction between games -- where an opponent's loss is your gain, in some way -- and the capitalist world, where you are unlikely to get as rich by making other people poorer as you can by making other people richer.
"Being Biggest and Baddest is used to sell, efficiency is not. I expect this will soon change..." Not while the State of California is subsidizing cheap power with taxes levied on the inefficient and efficient alike. When they let the electric rates rise to match the supply/demand situation, then there might be a little interest in efficiency. Or maybe just a lot of interest in building new plants to crank out more not-quite-as-cheap electricity -- because it's quite likely that making computers more efficient really isn't all that cost-effective, as compared to all the other ways you could save energy, and that new power plants are both cheaper and less environmentally harmful than many ways of "saving" electricity.
About GE, I would think that it was no coincidence, but not a sinister plan either. They just had someone smart enough to realize that CA's half-assed so-called "de-regulation" was bound to lead to shortages. And that didn't require a genius. I learned enough economics in the 6th grade to know that's the probable outcome of de-regulating the wholesale market while freezing retail prices. Add increasing demand (the population of CA is increasing) and severe restrictions on increased supply, and it's not probable, it's certain.
Sorry, but no way are you going to be able to hot swap RAM or CPU without significantly slowing down system operation all the time. Hot-swapping RAM would require that all signals in and out of the socket go through special buffer chips that allow turning off one side (the hot-swappable device) while leaving the other side (the motherboard) running. Besides costing a lot, it would add several nanoseconds delay -- and high performance computers can't spare the time.
What you can do, maybe, is to put your RAM and CPU (or maybe 4 CPU's) together on a plug-in board and hot-swap that. The backplane connecting several CPU boards and disk controllers wouldn't have to run quite as fast as the CPU to RAM bus. So I don't see any fundamental problems with it -- but I know from experience that designing even low-speed hot swap hardware is very tricky.
Slashdot Mirror
Good joke, but really... With a Mars landing, you have to contend with a worst-case atmosphere (thick enough to burn up an unprotected re-entering spacecraft, but awfully thin for parachutes), high winds, and enough gravity to make things falling from high altitude hit hard. With Eros, there is no atmosphere, and gravity is so low I'm surprised the probe didn't bounce off. So it's just a matter of driving up to it very, very carefully. (The challenge is that NEAR-Shoemaker wasn't designed for driving that carefully, it apparently wasn't equipped with landing legs so it could have rolled over onto the antenna, and the controls have malfunctioned badly once before -- it spent nearly two years getting back into position after recovering from that malfunction.)
How did we touch Jupiter? I'd think dropping a probe into the atmosphere does count, and we've done that -- and it went surprisingly deep before transmissions cut off. I don't think Jupiter exactly has "ground" to touch. The atmosphere probably goes down to well over critical pressure (where gas and liquid become indistinguishable). There must be solids of some sort far under that -- the first solid layer may be hydrogen compressed into a metallic phase! But don't expect to get probe data from there in your lifetime -- first, the probe couldn't survive, second, if it survived it would have no way to send the data back.
And attacking a comet instead of an asteroid.
Not exactly harmless -- you get some gsmma rays, so you'd probably have to shield it like a nuclear reactor. But small enough singularities would be safer than what usually goes inside that shielding -- and it would eat mass and emit radiation, sounds like a power source to me. Too bad we don't have any way to make one...
At that size and mass, they'll all burn up,unless maybe someone orbits a .99 Kg tungsten slug inside of a 10cm cardboard cube... I'm not sure whether or not that could survive re-entry, but you wouldn't know where it was coming down... (A slug with a guidance system could be a very nasty weapon, but it would have to be several times as big to make it through.) Anything reasonable like electronics or a crystal-growth experiment would burn up for sure.
If the tests are given every year, that sort of score-rigging becomes pretty obvious -- if you look at the improvement in scores over one year, I would expect a good teacher with previously low-achieving kids to come out on top...
I think you are right about the impact of the women's movement -- Up to about 1968 the only professions open to women were teaching and nursing, so they got a lot of women with qualifications far too high for the pay scale and status of those jobs, plus a few men who really loved the job. (And I remember one man that was utterly incompetent and had been so for 20 years, but was hanging on, IMHO, because he would have been incompetent at any job.) We've lost most of that core of over-qualified women -- except for the few that love teaching so much as to accept everything that's wrong with the job.
But that's not the whole story. Teachers' pay has increased greatly, but with no quality controls in place, the main effect of this is that poor teachers are less likely to remove themselves from the profession. Teachers' pay isn't much compared to good managers, engineers, and coders, but it is pretty good for someone whose only proven qualification was graduating in the middle ranks of an exceptionally easy college major. Smarter people graduate from tougher majors in the "liberal arts" and take lower-paying jobs such as McDonald's asst managers all the time. Teachers' status is rather low -- that might have something to do with peoples' subliminal awareness that there are no quality controls in the "profession."
What we need is a system in place to identify the good teachers, much higher pay for them, a new job title (for better status), and an up-or-out policy for the rest. For example, five years to make "instructor", ten to make "master instructor", or else you're putting in your application at McDonald's...
And when the parents do try to take responsibility for raising their kids, the schools will assume the parents don't know what they are doing and undercut them.
Maybe the teacher or principal ought to check things ought and apply a little common sense before calling the cops. Wait a minute -- maybe the problem is that neither the teacher nor the principal has any common sense. Consider:
1) Education majors are about the lowest ranking of any group of college students on standardized tests. (There are some bright kids in there too, but the average is abysmal. And I really wonder how the bright ones manage to deal with the stultifying brain-dead courses.)
2) The public schools are unionized, and the first priority of their unions is to make sure that no one ever gets fired for incompetence. The second is to fight any proposal for paying teachers depending on their competence.
So your average teacher or principal is a not too bright person who loves a risk-free environment. And now we want them use common sense and be willing to take responsibility for their judgement in a high-risk case... Lot's of luck. We're homeschooling our grandchildren.
I went to school with someone who really was a threat -- 6'8, poison mean, and six months after graduation he murdered someone. Absolutely no one expressed any surprise when we heard about it. He pled insanity, was released about eight years later, and promptly killed five people.
Would a snitch system in school have made any difference?It might have put some bounds on his bullying in school, but it wouldn't have made a bit of difference to his nastiest tendencies, unless it gave him a reason to start shooting people sooner. He is a psychopath -- counseling doesn't cure that. Nor does anything else -- heavy doses of drugs, chains and cells, or execution can prevent them from killing any more, but there is no cure.
We can't lock them up until they do commit (or at least attempt) a violent crime. And as for recognizing the symptoms ahead of time -- a committee of psychiatrists much better qualified than anyone in the school system was somehow persuaded to let this guy out once after his first murder!
Counseling, as you skimmed over in the article, is the key ingredient that seems to have been missing in the aforementioned case.
That depends. Forced counseling is a punishment in itself. Also, a good many of the so-called counselors at schools don't have the right training, and even many with the right degrees in psychology just aren't very good at their jobs -- that's why they're in the public schools where no one ever gets fired for incompetence, rather than working for themselves.
Umm... you do know that it was the bad guy who said that in Shakespeare's play, right? >br>
And bad guys can't have good ideas?
It's been about 30 years, but if I remember right that was Hotspur, and I would describe him as overly impulsive (like a teenager) rather than evil (like Richard III)...
All such restrictions can apply only for a limited time after employment ends -- and he says it's been over a year, so most contractual restrictions would have expired anyway. There is a possibility that the company thinks his comments were untrue and therefore libel or slander -- or that they know the comments were true but think that a libel or slander lawsuit will scare others out of criticizing them even if it loses. The US badly needs a "loser pays" principle for cases like this -- yeah, you can sue because we said X, but first we'll prove in court that X is true (and all court proceedings can be reported without fear of lawsuits), and then we'll charge you for the cost of proving it.
Yes, I have read the Communist Manifesto. I've also studied how it worked out in the real world; the main difference was that the Nazis don't lie as much. Nazis claimed that they were going to do really nasty things and then did them. (Shame on everyone who didn't believe that Hitler meant what he said in Mein Kampf.) Communists claimed that they were going to make the world a wonderful place for everyone, then did the same things as the Nazis plus destroyed the economy. Then they lied about that too. (It took all of Stalin's well-publicized 5 year plans just to get Russia back to where they were before they overthrew the Tsar -- and the Tsars were the reason Russia was a backwards nation in 1914 in spite of having far more natural resources than any other nation, including the US. But the commies kept right on claiming that they were making great advances, right up until there was nothing left to "nationalize" (steal)and the Soviet state went bankrupt.)
Sure, that will protect the CD's, until some Butch Cassidy wanna-be decides you've got money in there and uses too much dynamite. ;)
It's probably much, much longer. It's not the time to toss in another slug that matters, but the time to recharge the capacitors -- for a hobbyist-grade power supply, I'd guess minutes to hours. If you owned a fusion power plant ;) you could get that down to under a second, but you also have to let the rails cool down.
Or if the price for a stateroom was about the same as for a tourist class seat on an airplane. But this depends on whether the ride is rough or smooth. The general rule is that the bigger the ship, the less it is tossed around by the waves. With a big ship, you can design it so speed actually stabilizes them, in normal weather. But the North Atlantic makes waves bigger than any ship...
"I must have been very unlucky then..." Sounds like a personal problem to me. Do you look like you're late with a drug delivery?
I think what most of us object to is replacing cops like you with a dumb machine. I presume you are capable of using some judgement to nail the bad drivers rather than just handing out tickets to everyone driving 5 mph over regardless of traffic, road conditions, and whether the speed limit in that area made any sense in the first place. You must know that speed is not much of a determinant of safety -- after all, I frequently see cop cars patrolling (not responding to an emergency) at 10-15 mph over.
Maybe 4 times as bad. Energy = 1/2 mass times(velocity squared).
About your WILD guess: When the car (and other) manufacturers design in new features because the customers want them, then they'll almost always give you a sensible implementation. When it's in response to a government mandate, however, usually you get something that must have been designed by a committee of bureaucrats, not engineers with any knowledge of the usage conditions. E.g., airbags, "automatic" seatbelts, the seatbelt interlock in the '70's that required Michiganders to buckle up to start the car, then unbuckle to clean the ice off the windows, ... So I wouldn't just assume that the limiter will just remove itself off when it realizes it's not going to get anymore GPS -- with enough government involvement, it's just as likely that you'll have cars stalling in remote areas of Scotland...
Many games aren't strictly "Zero Sum" in the sense that when I get +1 point you get -1, but in virtually all games an opponent's loss is your gain -- if only because with one less chess piece he's less likely to win. Out in the real (capitalist world), you are unlikely to get as rich by making other people poorer as you can by making other people richer. But there are a whole lot of people that don't realize the difference --not just quasi-socialists and kleptocrats, but also many corporate leaders...
"Zero Sum" is a poor choice of words. What Cliff was trying to point out was the great distinction between games -- where an opponent's loss is your gain, in some way -- and the capitalist world, where you are unlikely to get as rich by making other people poorer as you can by making other people richer.
"Being Biggest and Baddest is used to sell, efficiency is not. I expect this will soon change..." Not while the State of California is subsidizing cheap power with taxes levied on the inefficient and efficient alike. When they let the electric rates rise to match the supply/demand situation, then there might be a little interest in efficiency. Or maybe just a lot of interest in building new plants to crank out more not-quite-as-cheap electricity -- because it's quite likely that making computers more efficient really isn't all that cost-effective, as compared to all the other ways you could save energy, and that new power plants are both cheaper and less environmentally harmful than many ways of "saving" electricity.
About GE, I would think that it was no coincidence, but not a sinister plan either. They just had someone smart enough to realize that CA's half-assed so-called "de-regulation" was bound to lead to shortages. And that didn't require a genius. I learned enough economics in the 6th grade to know that's the probable outcome of de-regulating the wholesale market while freezing retail prices. Add increasing demand (the population of CA is increasing) and severe restrictions on increased supply, and it's not probable, it's certain.
Sorry, but no way are you going to be able to hot swap RAM or CPU without significantly slowing down system operation all the time. Hot-swapping RAM would require that all signals in and out of the socket go through special buffer chips that allow turning off one side (the hot-swappable device) while leaving the other side (the motherboard) running. Besides costing a lot, it would add several nanoseconds delay -- and high performance computers can't spare the time.
What you can do, maybe, is to put your RAM and CPU (or maybe 4 CPU's) together on a plug-in board and hot-swap that. The backplane connecting several CPU boards and disk controllers wouldn't have to run quite as fast as the CPU to RAM bus. So I don't see any fundamental problems with it -- but I know from experience that designing even low-speed hot swap hardware is very tricky.