Actually, it's possible. All you need is lots and lots of offspring, and a bit of luck. Bacteria are very good at this strategy. When you can produce offspring every 15 or 20 minutes, this is a workable strategy. Calculate the number of offspring after 24 hours for a doubling time of 20 minutes. You'll be impressed by how many digits the number requires. The chances that someone in that population will have the needed mutation are actually pretty good.
Of course, most of them still go extinct. We only see the winners in the lottery.
Actually, the story is a bit more complex than that. Some of the Liaoning bird fossils have been dated to (slightly) older than Archaeopterix, and they appear more "modern" in some respects. Not fully modern in all respects, but more like current birds than Archaeopterix.
This isn't really an anomaly. When a new species arises, evolutionary theory doesn't require that all existing relatives die off. Parent species can often exist together with a splitoff species, if they are adapted to different niches. Chimps and gorillas still exist. We have some very old species around today. They were good in their niche, and had no pressure to evolve into something different. Check out the club mosses, for example, which are very primitive plants that are doing just fine in the shade of more modern trees.
The consensus seems to be growing that Archaeopterix was primarily a ground-running bird. This isn't a new idea; they have long been compared with the modern roadrunner, which can fly but usually hunts on the ground. If Archaeopterix was successful in such a niche, it could have easily survived long after other birds had taken more fully to the air. After all, roadrunners are surviving today. (I've seen them walking along sidewalks in southern California towns. Cute critters.;-)
In any case, the term "modern" is really a value judgement. Ma Nature probably doesn't much care about such things. If a "primitive" species is doing fine, why replace it?
Actually, one of the interesting things about Archaeopterix, pointed out decades ago by various biologists, is that its feathers appear fully modern, indistinguishable from the feathers of current birds. Since Archeaopterix appears to have been a weak flyer, this needs explaining.
One hypothesis has been that feathers evolved before flight. Presumably this happened due to the other function of feathers: They are an excellent insulation mechanism, much better than what we mammals evolved. By this hypothesis, flight was a secondary adaptation of the outer "shell" feathers.
We now know that this guess is correct: We have fossils of non-avian dinosaurs with feathers. Their feathers don't look exactly like those of modern birds, but that's not surprising, as they weren't adapted for flight. (And feathers really don't fossilize well, so we don't have many good ones. The fossil Archaeopterix feathers are very unusual in that they were preserved at all.)
In any case, we have no evidence that Archaeopterix left any modern descendants. That species could have been a dead end, perhaps dying out at the time of the fossils that we have. And it could have been losing out to those slightly more modern birds that lived at the same time. But the evidence here is still far too sparse to say for sure. Perhaps we'll find fossils of descendants of Archaeopterix that tell us who their modern descendants are.
There was also the recent story of the tyrannosaur leg bone that contained soft tissues. The analysis by Mary Schweitzer and her staff included the explanation that it was very similar to the leg bone of a female ostrich in an egg-laying stage. Feed the keywords in this paragraph to google and read all about it.
The tyrannosaur branch is considered to be a close relative of the birds, but not an ancestor. The dromaesaurs are believed to be closer to birds, possibly the adjacent branch.
One interesting bit here is that the ratites (ostriches, emus, etc) are the outlying branch of the birds. There have been suggestions that they could be a separate branch, closer to some non-avian dinosaurs than to other modern birds. But this is dubious, because of some features (such as beaks rather than jaws with teeth) that ratites share with birds.
Still, recognizing the tyrannosaur as being very much like a giant bird was a good observation. That's pretty much what the paleontological evidence is saying. The exact details are still to be worked out, but your money should be on the tyrannosaurs and dromaesaurs being among the closest relatives of birds.
Well, as it saith flat-out in bigge, bolde tipe at the Museume of the Historie of Nature in Londone,
THE WORLD IS FLAT.
Then there was the study a couple years ago, in which it was shown by actual measurements that Kansas is about an order of magnitude flatter than a pancake.
Some parts of the world are very flat.
Of course, "flat" in this case refers to surface roughness, not curvature. There are many places in Kansas where one can easily see that there's a horizon, implying that the surface does have a slight curvature.
Those researchers got an IgNobel Prize for their study. As I recall, they were among the few recipients who were quite pleased by the award.
Is there some peak lately in observations on dinosaur fossiles in relation to birds?
If by "lately" you mean the past 25 years or so, then yes, there has been a peak.
The issue is rather old actually. Darwin mentioned it, as did several of his contemporaries. They had noticed that those "dinosaur" fossils that everyone was digging up had a lot of remarkable similarities to bird skeletons. But at the time, the scientific response was mostly "That's interesting, but your data is rather sparse. Can you find some better data"?
Birds have light, fragile skeletons and don't fossilize well. For more than a century, the topic was little more than a curiosity.
Then in the 1970's, a gang of biologists led by John Ostrom started bringing the topic up again. We had accumulated a lot more dinosaur fossils. We still had only the 5 Solnhofer fossils of Archaeopterix at around 140 millions years and nothing else older than about 40 million years. But the growing collection of theropod fossils contributed to the evidence.
Then the critical event happened: In China, the gang that took over from Mao were relaxing their controls on intellectuals. Scientific inquiry became possible again, and fossil digs started up. In a part of Manchuria called Liaoning, some fossil beds were found with new bird fossils, along with other new small dinosaurs. By the 1980's, they had uncovered the remains of a dozen or so birds and bird-like dinosaurs. The evidence became overwhelming, and birds were officially reclassified as theropod dinosaurs.
If you look at the growing collection of bird fossils, you'll find that almost all are from China. There have been a few from other places (South America, Australia, Madegascar), mostly non-avian theropods that fill out that part of the family tree. But the big news has mostly come about from the slow opening of Chinese society.
Anything even vaguely related to evolution invariably degenerates into a religious discussion here.
This is why online biological fora, both newsgroups and wikis, tend to evolve quickly into strictly-moderated forms. If you can't exclude the religious nuts, they spot every discussion of evolution and invade it with the same old religious stuff.
Serious biological discussions absolutely require a way to minimize the impact of religious fundamentalists (mostly American). Without this, you can't have a serious discussion at all.
Actually, slashdot's moderation scheme is reasonably effective at handling this. Not perfect, but good enough to allow those who read at +2 or higher to find the actual information.
There are wild chickens in south Asia. They're not escaped domestic chickens; they're the wild relatives of our chickens. They can still interbreed with domestic chickens, so we haven't quite bred them into a different species.
I will lose all respect of the Canadian government if they actually try to implement such a device.
Well, I'll lose all respect for their product test cycle if it ever gets out of alpha testing.
We've had a Garmin 3600 GPS gadget for a couple of years. It's a nice tool, but you quickly learn that it has certain, uh, limits.
For example, I often take a local street to avoid a busy stretch of our local super-highway (Boston's Route 128). The two roads are only about 10-20m apart for part of the drive, and the GPS map often shows me jumping back and forth between them. The speed limit on one is about twice the limit on the other.
Similarly, if I'm on the main highway, my GPS position often shows as the nearby frontage road. So the proposed gadget would show me going 2-3 times the speed limit of the street that it thinks I'm on. I'm not sure that trying to slow me down to 25 mph on a busy super-highway is all that wonderful an idea. And this problem isn't limited to adjacent "frontage" roads; sometimes my GPS position puts me on a street a block away from my real position.
I've seen cases where my GPS position was more than a mile from my real position. This lasts a few minutes, and then suddenly corrects itself. I wonder if the US military is again playing games with the satellites. But I don't know.
This afternoon, I was driving south on a local street in a nearby town. I glanced at the GPS gadget, and suddenly it showed me headed north on the street at around 150 mph. A few seconds later, it showed me headed south at my actual position, but at over 200 mph. Then my speed dropped back to around 30. I wonder what the proposed gadget would do with my gas pedal and/or brake in this situation?
This gadget has the ability to record a trip, including times, positions and speed. I recently looked at this after a trip, and was a bit amused when it said that my top speed was 350 mph. I've been contemplating the prospect (proposed seriously by some people) that such devices be installed in cars for evidence to be used in court.
In real life, the guys doing the programming and testing have some very interesting problems on their hands.
Actually, I think these problems are interesting. I wonder how one might get a job working on such problems? It seems to me that they might be solvable. But it also seems to me that Garmin hasn't solved them yet. Stories from other GPS users are similar, so apparently nobody (or maybe no commercial developer) has solved them yet.
Of course, for uses like they intended, they don't really need to fix these petty inaccuracies. Users just get a chuckle now and then and quickly learn the gadget's foibles. But making the device responsible for part of the vehicle's operation or use of GPS data by the legal system are something rather different.
My prediction is that it will fail and quietly disappear during alpha testing. Of course, it's always possible that the bureaucracy will ignore this and decree use of the technology anyway. It wouldn't be the first time that stuff was debugged by the victims^Wcustomers.
I don't get all this FUD about there being no exchange functionality on linux. It's all there and in many cases far superior to exhange and costs less...
What you're not picking up on is that what the FUDsters are saying is "If it isn't 100% identical to MS's current release of Outlook/Exchange, down to the last pixel and keystroke, it's not acceptable." And if someone manages to do that (without being sued out of business by MS), by then there'll be a new release of the MS tools, so it still won't be acceptable.
Let's face it, email was for the most part born and grew up on unix systems (with more than a little help from our VMS buddies). Anyone who says there's no power email tools for unix/linux is rejecting out of hand most of the power tools that are out there. They are really just saying that they have no intention of switching, no matter how good the tools may be.
And saying you have something "better" is just admitting that your tool isn't identical to MS's. If it were, it couldn't be better, now could it?;-)
Yeah, except if your neighbor is so dang busy they don't even have time to make their own house look respectable again, I might consider moving away from them!
Well, this could easily happen with our house. The south side of the house is easily visible from one of the two streets. (We're on a corner lot so everything is visible from a street). But we normally approach the house from the north, and the entrances are on the east and west sides. We look out the south-facing windows every day, but we can go for weeks without seeing the south side of the house. If someone were to paint something there, we might not notice it for weeks, especially in winter.
So should we be held responsible for something that someone paints on the south side of our house?
This isn't entirely a theoretical question. We live only a couple blocks from a major Jewish college (Brandeis), so if there were a flareup of anti-Semitism hereabouts, slogans on houses in our neighborhood are quite conceivable. It hasn't ever happened, but history gives us no assurance that it won't.
I'd hope that my neighbors would have the decency to just point it out to us, and of course we'd fix it. I'd also expect the neighborhood to go on the watch for similar events, and try to bring the culprits to the attention of the local police.
But I certainly hope that I wouldn't be prosecuted for not noticing the vandalism and fixing it immediately after it happens.
VOIP is getting to use the infrastructure established and created by the big telecoms and cable companies.
Actually, the Internet was developed/established/created by the US Dept of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency, plus thousands of geeks in academia, and a few (mostly startup) companies. GPS has a similar origin. The big telecoms and cable companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age, and are doing everything they can think of to delay it.
This is just one more case of the big, old companies using political clout to interfere with the development of new, better technology. It's an old story.
Funny thing is, if you dig up the earliest docs on the ARPAnet (which became the Internet), you'll see that most of the diagrams showed wireless communication. Now it's 40 years later, and it's barely happening. Much of the reason is the opposition of the big comm companies, and the power that they have to block deployment of new stuff.
User stupidity is a huge factor.... they'll just say "yes", rather than give updated addresses every time they move the device.
Well, in several cases that I've seen, it's not user stupiidity. It's because that's what the device asked them to do.
Most often, it's really a failure in the UI design. The designers (or implementers) didn't realize that when you ask someone for "your address", most native English speakers will give their home address. If you want to know where they are now, you have to ask somethng like "What's your current address?" or "What's the address you're at right now?" But the phrase "your address" without qualifiers normally means "your home address".
Thus, several times I've been away from home and had trouble with a credit card. When I talk to the support person, and they ask me for my address, I've always understood that they want my home address, so they can verify that I know the address that's in their records. When filling in online forms, I've always used my home address rather than the address of wherever I happen to be at the moment (which I often don't even know), because that's the address that I want in their records.
People can be too quick to say "user stupidity" when the real explanation is "poor UI design". And it's an easy trap to fall into, because English has so many ambiguities.
Funny, I read "whether the year is mod 4" in the C sense - it's true if year%4 is nonzero. So 2004 mod 4 is false; 2005 mod 4 is true.
Of course, with that reading, the test appeared backwards.
And it really should be mod 2, because Congress has elections in all even-numbered years, and Congress is the ultimate power in this issue (though they mostly delegate the responsibility).
According to the Register's article, asking that the code be in escrow is exactly what South Carolina did.
"Due to irregularities in the 2004 election traced to touch screen terminals, North Carolina has taken the very reasonable precaution of requiring vendors of electronic voting gizmos to place all of the source code in escrow. Diebold has objected to the possibility of criminal sanctions if they fail to comply, and argued for an exemption before Wake County Superior Court Judge Narley Cashwell. The judge declined to issue an exemption, and Diebold has concluded that it has no choice but withdraw from the state."
Funny thing about the article: That's the second paragraph. In the first paragraph, they talk about Diebold "opening its source code", which isn't exactly what SC has required, except in a most limited sense.
Why do you [Americans] believe your govenment is somehow less corrupt than the rest is beyond me.
Many us don't believe that. That's why there's a bit of a fuss developing.
It's fairly widely believed in the US that the last two presidential elections were fixed. The Supreme Court's actions are probably just the tip of the iceberg. The use of unverifiable voting equipment is the real evidence that something shady is going on.
It's not just electronic equipment, though. In recent elections, there have been a number of reports, sometimes weeks after the election, of boxes of 10,000 or more paper ballots that weren't counted.
They have always reassured us that these ballots don't change the outcome of the election. But it suggests an obvious question: How many more ballots were "misplaced" and not counted?
We often read about low voter turnout, with many elections getting only 62% or 43% or other low turnout. I often wonder if what really happened was that 90% of the voters showed up, but 40% of their votes were "misplaced" and never discovered.
If they're doing this now to sites that are privately owned and hosted, just imagine how much easier it will be for them to do it when part of the medium is government owned.
Actually, at least in the US it could be more difficult. The First Ammendment applies to government agencies; it doesn't apply to private corporations. So the with a private ISP, the government can just let them know that they will block certain content or there will be, uh, certain tax consequences. Then the ISP does the censoring, and you have no defense, because you can't prove the gummint's involvement.
But it could be legally difficult to keep someone from using a public network, unless it could be shown that they were engaged in illegal activity at the time. That's called "prior restraint", and the courts haven't looked on it with much favor.
Isn't anyone going to come to their defense here? C'mon; there's gotta be someone that likes them and thinks they're being treated unfairly.
(But not me; I'd just suggest that hiding the inner workings of voting equipment should be considered prima facie evidence of intent to defraud the public.;-)
... like saying that the inventor of the hammer contributed to violence and killings.
This has been a constant objection to all advances in knowledge throughout hiistory. It's hard to think of any technical advance that can't be used for both bad and good.
And strictly speaking, it wasn't really the inventor of the hammer that enabled more killings. Rather, the "basic research" that led to better hard-material devices (chipped flint, forged metals, etc.) led to the artisans makng both better tools and better weapons. Some of them (blades, hammers) could be immediately used for both good and bad purposes. Try building your hut or grinding your grain or carving up your deer without a good hammer or quern or knife.
Now that so much of our technology includes software, it's not surprising that the same principle applies. Anyone working on low-level software (OS kernels, runtime libraries, comm systems, whatever) will inevitably find it used for both bad and good. Many of us who foisted the Internet on the world are not at all surprised to see it spin off viruses, phishing, and RIAA lawsuits against children and grandmothers. In fact, we discussed such things long before they arose, but we didn't ever find a way to prevent them.
The problem is that, like knives or hammers or gunpowder, software really can't distinguish bad from good. That can't be done with any of our current technology. We have to use social methods for handling bad/good distinctions.
We won't stop killing by taking away bombs or guns or knives or OS kernels; we can only do it by taking away the social and political structures that support and encourage the killers.
(I can hear people around the world mutter "starting with the current US government".;-)
Only RedHawk Linux was able to ensure the high frame rates required...
My first thought on reading that "Only" was: What other systems was it compared with? Who were the other bidders on the contract? Did all the available RT systems fail the contest with linux? That's a bit hard to believe.
So I read TFA looking for the answer. No clues. Then I noticed the "Concurrent" logo at the top.
This is nothing more than a press release by the vendor. As far as I can tell, it was a no-bid contract. Any information otherwise? What other systems were tested? What were the timing numbers?
An effective ballistic missle defense system... woud probably be most effective against a rogue state with few nuclear weapons,...
Yeah, maybe, but it's not very effective against a bomb delivered via FedEx and triggered via cell phone.
If I were in the business of delivering bombs, that's how I'd do it. Well, ok; maybe not FedEx; I'd ask for bids on the contract. Wouldn't want to waste money on an overly-expensive delivery service.;-)
Actually, the big surprise in the collapse of the Soviet Union was that the Soviets were not killed. Everyone would have understood if they had been executed, with or without show trials, considering their long and bloody record. But it doesn't seem to have happened. Some of the old CP members have even managed to get elected in their own right since then.
Slashdot Mirror
Actually; that's a pretty good definition. ;-)
...
It is a bit wearying to see any story about biological discoveries devolve into the same tired pseudo-discussion.
It's even worse than the climate-change issue
(Have we had the Gulf-Stream discussion yet?)
Actually, it's possible. All you need is lots and lots of offspring, and a bit of luck. Bacteria are very good at this strategy. When you can produce offspring every 15 or 20 minutes, this is a workable strategy. Calculate the number of offspring after 24 hours for a doubling time of 20 minutes. You'll be impressed by how many digits the number requires. The chances that someone in that population will have the needed mutation are actually pretty good.
Of course, most of them still go extinct. We only see the winners in the lottery.
Actually, the story is a bit more complex than that. Some of the Liaoning bird fossils have been dated to (slightly) older than Archaeopterix, and they appear more "modern" in some respects. Not fully modern in all respects, but more like current birds than Archaeopterix.
;-)
This isn't really an anomaly. When a new species arises, evolutionary theory doesn't require that all existing relatives die off. Parent species can often exist together with a splitoff species, if they are adapted to different niches. Chimps and gorillas still exist. We have some very old species around today. They were good in their niche, and had no pressure to evolve into something different. Check out the club mosses, for example, which are very primitive plants that are doing just fine in the shade of more modern trees.
The consensus seems to be growing that Archaeopterix was primarily a ground-running bird. This isn't a new idea; they have long been compared with the modern roadrunner, which can fly but usually hunts on the ground. If Archaeopterix was successful in such a niche, it could have easily survived long after other birds had taken more fully to the air. After all, roadrunners are surviving today. (I've seen them walking along sidewalks in southern California towns. Cute critters.
In any case, the term "modern" is really a value judgement. Ma Nature probably doesn't much care about such things. If a "primitive" species is doing fine, why replace it?
Actually, one of the interesting things about Archaeopterix, pointed out decades ago by various biologists, is that its feathers appear fully modern, indistinguishable from the feathers of current birds. Since Archeaopterix appears to have been a weak flyer, this needs explaining.
One hypothesis has been that feathers evolved before flight. Presumably this happened due to the other function of feathers: They are an excellent insulation mechanism, much better than what we mammals evolved. By this hypothesis, flight was a secondary adaptation of the outer "shell" feathers.
We now know that this guess is correct: We have fossils of non-avian dinosaurs with feathers. Their feathers don't look exactly like those of modern birds, but that's not surprising, as they weren't adapted for flight. (And feathers really don't fossilize well, so we don't have many good ones. The fossil Archaeopterix feathers are very unusual in that they were preserved at all.)
In any case, we have no evidence that Archaeopterix left any modern descendants. That species could have been a dead end, perhaps dying out at the time of the fossils that we have. And it could have been losing out to those slightly more modern birds that lived at the same time. But the evidence here is still far too sparse to say for sure. Perhaps we'll find fossils of descendants of Archaeopterix that tell us who their modern descendants are.
There was also the recent story of the tyrannosaur leg bone that contained soft tissues. The analysis by Mary Schweitzer and her staff included the explanation that it was very similar to the leg bone of a female ostrich in an egg-laying stage. Feed the keywords in this paragraph to google and read all about it.
The tyrannosaur branch is considered to be a close relative of the birds, but not an ancestor. The dromaesaurs are believed to be closer to birds, possibly the adjacent branch.
One interesting bit here is that the ratites (ostriches, emus, etc) are the outlying branch of the birds. There have been suggestions that they could be a separate branch, closer to some non-avian dinosaurs than to other modern birds. But this is dubious, because of some features (such as beaks rather than jaws with teeth) that ratites share with birds.
Still, recognizing the tyrannosaur as being very much like a giant bird was a good observation. That's pretty much what the paleontological evidence is saying. The exact details are still to be worked out, but your money should be on the tyrannosaurs and dromaesaurs being among the closest relatives of birds.
Well, as it saith flat-out in bigge, bolde tipe at the Museume of the Historie of Nature in Londone,
THE WORLD IS FLAT.
Then there was the study a couple years ago, in which it was shown by actual measurements that Kansas is about an order of magnitude flatter than a pancake.
Some parts of the world are very flat.
Of course, "flat" in this case refers to surface roughness, not curvature. There are many places in Kansas where one can easily see that there's a horizon, implying that the surface does have a slight curvature.
Those researchers got an IgNobel Prize for their study. As I recall, they were among the few recipients who were quite pleased by the award.
Is there some peak lately in observations on dinosaur fossiles in relation to birds?
If by "lately" you mean the past 25 years or so, then yes, there has been a peak.
The issue is rather old actually. Darwin mentioned it, as did several of his contemporaries. They had noticed that those "dinosaur" fossils that everyone was digging up had a lot of remarkable similarities to bird skeletons. But at the time, the scientific response was mostly "That's interesting, but your data is rather sparse. Can you find some better data"?
Birds have light, fragile skeletons and don't fossilize well. For more than a century, the topic was little more than a curiosity.
Then in the 1970's, a gang of biologists led by John Ostrom started bringing the topic up again. We had accumulated a lot more dinosaur fossils. We still had only the 5 Solnhofer fossils of Archaeopterix at around 140 millions years and nothing else older than about 40 million years. But the growing collection of theropod fossils contributed to the evidence.
Then the critical event happened: In China, the gang that took over from Mao were relaxing their controls on intellectuals. Scientific inquiry became possible again, and fossil digs started up. In a part of Manchuria called Liaoning, some fossil beds were found with new bird fossils, along with other new small dinosaurs. By the 1980's, they had uncovered the remains of a dozen or so birds and bird-like dinosaurs. The evidence became overwhelming, and birds were officially reclassified as theropod dinosaurs.
If you look at the growing collection of bird fossils, you'll find that almost all are from China. There have been a few from other places (South America, Australia, Madegascar), mostly non-avian theropods that fill out that part of the family tree. But the big news has mostly come about from the slow opening of Chinese society.
Do not turn this into a religious fracas.
;-)
You must be new here.
Anything even vaguely related to evolution invariably degenerates into a religious discussion here.
This is why online biological fora, both newsgroups and wikis, tend to evolve quickly into strictly-moderated forms. If you can't exclude the religious nuts, they spot every discussion of evolution and invade it with the same old religious stuff.
Serious biological discussions absolutely require a way to minimize the impact of religious fundamentalists (mostly American). Without this, you can't have a serious discussion at all.
Actually, slashdot's moderation scheme is reasonably effective at handling this. Not perfect, but good enough to allow those who read at +2 or higher to find the actual information.
There are wild chickens in south Asia. They're not escaped domestic chickens; they're the wild relatives of our chickens. They can still interbreed with domestic chickens, so we haven't quite bred them into a different species.
I will lose all respect of the Canadian government if they actually try to implement such a device.
Well, I'll lose all respect for their product test cycle if it ever gets out of alpha testing.
We've had a Garmin 3600 GPS gadget for a couple of years. It's a nice tool, but you quickly learn that it has certain, uh, limits.
For example, I often take a local street to avoid a busy stretch of our local super-highway (Boston's Route 128). The two roads are only about 10-20m apart for part of the drive, and the GPS map often shows me jumping back and forth between them. The speed limit on one is about twice the limit on the other.
Similarly, if I'm on the main highway, my GPS position often shows as the nearby frontage road. So the proposed gadget would show me going 2-3 times the speed limit of the street that it thinks I'm on. I'm not sure that trying to slow me down to 25 mph on a busy super-highway is all that wonderful an idea. And this problem isn't limited to adjacent "frontage" roads; sometimes my GPS position puts me on a street a block away from my real position.
I've seen cases where my GPS position was more than a mile from my real position. This lasts a few minutes, and then suddenly corrects itself. I wonder if the US military is again playing games with the satellites. But I don't know.
This afternoon, I was driving south on a local street in a nearby town. I glanced at the GPS gadget, and suddenly it showed me headed north on the street at around 150 mph. A few seconds later, it showed me headed south at my actual position, but at over 200 mph. Then my speed dropped back to around 30. I wonder what the proposed gadget would do with my gas pedal and/or brake in this situation?
This gadget has the ability to record a trip, including times, positions and speed. I recently looked at this after a trip, and was a bit amused when it said that my top speed was 350 mph. I've been contemplating the prospect (proposed seriously by some people) that such devices be installed in cars for evidence to be used in court.
In real life, the guys doing the programming and testing have some very interesting problems on their hands.
Actually, I think these problems are interesting. I wonder how one might get a job working on such problems? It seems to me that they might be solvable. But it also seems to me that Garmin hasn't solved them yet. Stories from other GPS users are similar, so apparently nobody (or maybe no commercial developer) has solved them yet.
Of course, for uses like they intended, they don't really need to fix these petty inaccuracies. Users just get a chuckle now and then and quickly learn the gadget's foibles. But making the device responsible for part of the vehicle's operation or use of GPS data by the legal system are something rather different.
My prediction is that it will fail and quietly disappear during alpha testing. Of course, it's always possible that the bureaucracy will ignore this and decree use of the technology anyway. It wouldn't be the first time that stuff was debugged by the victims^Wcustomers.
I don't get all this FUD about there being no exchange functionality on linux. It's all there and in many cases far superior to exhange and costs less ...
;-)
What you're not picking up on is that what the FUDsters are saying is "If it isn't 100% identical to MS's current release of Outlook/Exchange, down to the last pixel and keystroke, it's not acceptable." And if someone manages to do that (without being sued out of business by MS), by then there'll be a new release of the MS tools, so it still won't be acceptable.
Let's face it, email was for the most part born and grew up on unix systems (with more than a little help from our VMS buddies). Anyone who says there's no power email tools for unix/linux is rejecting out of hand most of the power tools that are out there. They are really just saying that they have no intention of switching, no matter how good the tools may be.
And saying you have something "better" is just admitting that your tool isn't identical to MS's. If it were, it couldn't be better, now could it?
Yeah, except if your neighbor is so dang busy they don't even have time to make their own house look respectable again, I might consider moving away from them!
Well, this could easily happen with our house. The south side of the house is easily visible from one of the two streets. (We're on a corner lot so everything is visible from a street). But we normally approach the house from the north, and the entrances are on the east and west sides. We look out the south-facing windows every day, but we can go for weeks without seeing the south side of the house. If someone were to paint something there, we might not notice it for weeks, especially in winter.
So should we be held responsible for something that someone paints on the south side of our house?
This isn't entirely a theoretical question. We live only a couple blocks from a major Jewish college (Brandeis), so if there were a flareup of anti-Semitism hereabouts, slogans on houses in our neighborhood are quite conceivable. It hasn't ever happened, but history gives us no assurance that it won't.
I'd hope that my neighbors would have the decency to just point it out to us, and of course we'd fix it. I'd also expect the neighborhood to go on the watch for similar events, and try to bring the culprits to the attention of the local police.
But I certainly hope that I wouldn't be prosecuted for not noticing the vandalism and fixing it immediately after it happens.
VOIP is getting to use the infrastructure established and created by the big telecoms and cable companies.
Actually, the Internet was developed/established/created by the US Dept of Defense's Advanced Research Project Agency, plus thousands of geeks in academia, and a few (mostly startup) companies. GPS has a similar origin. The big telecoms and cable companies have been dragged kicking and screaming into the Internet age, and are doing everything they can think of to delay it.
This is just one more case of the big, old companies using political clout to interfere with the development of new, better technology. It's an old story.
Funny thing is, if you dig up the earliest docs on the ARPAnet (which became the Internet), you'll see that most of the diagrams showed wireless communication. Now it's 40 years later, and it's barely happening. Much of the reason is the opposition of the big comm companies, and the power that they have to block deployment of new stuff.
User stupidity is a huge factor. ... they'll just say "yes", rather than give updated addresses every time they move the device.
Well, in several cases that I've seen, it's not user stupiidity. It's because that's what the device asked them to do.
Most often, it's really a failure in the UI design. The designers (or implementers) didn't realize that when you ask someone for "your address", most native English speakers will give their home address. If you want to know where they are now, you have to ask somethng like "What's your current address?" or "What's the address you're at right now?" But the phrase "your address" without qualifiers normally means "your home address".
Thus, several times I've been away from home and had trouble with a credit card. When I talk to the support person, and they ask me for my address, I've always understood that they want my home address, so they can verify that I know the address that's in their records. When filling in online forms, I've always used my home address rather than the address of wherever I happen to be at the moment (which I often don't even know), because that's the address that I want in their records.
People can be too quick to say "user stupidity" when the real explanation is "poor UI design". And it's an easy trap to fall into, because English has so many ambiguities.
Funny, I read "whether the year is mod 4" in the C sense - it's true if year%4 is nonzero. So 2004 mod 4 is false; 2005 mod 4 is true.
Of course, with that reading, the test appeared backwards.
And it really should be mod 2, because Congress has elections in all even-numbered years, and Congress is the ultimate power in this issue (though they mostly delegate the responsibility).
According to the Register's article, asking that the code be in escrow is exactly what South Carolina did.
"Due to irregularities in the 2004 election traced to touch screen terminals, North Carolina has taken the very reasonable precaution of requiring vendors of electronic voting gizmos to place all of the source code in escrow. Diebold has objected to the possibility of criminal sanctions if they fail to comply, and argued for an exemption before Wake County Superior Court Judge Narley Cashwell. The judge declined to issue an exemption, and Diebold has concluded that it has no choice but withdraw from the state."
Funny thing about the article: That's the second paragraph. In the first paragraph, they talk about Diebold "opening its source code", which isn't exactly what SC has required, except in a most limited sense.
Why do you [Americans] believe your govenment is somehow less corrupt than the rest is beyond me.
Many us don't believe that. That's why there's a bit of a fuss developing.
It's fairly widely believed in the US that the last two presidential elections were fixed. The Supreme Court's actions are probably just the tip of the iceberg. The use of unverifiable voting equipment is the real evidence that something shady is going on.
It's not just electronic equipment, though. In recent elections, there have been a number of reports, sometimes weeks after the election, of boxes of 10,000 or more paper ballots that weren't counted.
They have always reassured us that these ballots don't change the outcome of the election. But it suggests an obvious question: How many more ballots were "misplaced" and not counted?
We often read about low voter turnout, with many elections getting only 62% or 43% or other low turnout. I often wonder if what really happened was that 90% of the voters showed up, but 40% of their votes were "misplaced" and never discovered.
If they're doing this now to sites that are privately owned and hosted, just imagine how much easier it will be for them to do it when part of the medium is government owned.
Actually, at least in the US it could be more difficult. The First Ammendment applies to government agencies; it doesn't apply to private corporations. So the with a private ISP, the government can just let them know that they will block certain content or there will be, uh, certain tax consequences. Then the ISP does the censoring, and you have no defense, because you can't prove the gummint's involvement.
But it could be legally difficult to keep someone from using a public network, unless it could be shown that they were engaged in illegal activity at the time. That's called "prior restraint", and the courts haven't looked on it with much favor.
Isn't anyone going to come to their defense here? C'mon; there's gotta be someone that likes them and thinks they're being treated unfairly.
;-)
(But not me; I'd just suggest that hiding the inner workings of voting equipment should be considered prima facie evidence of intent to defraud the public.
You might be right. I'll keep that in mind if I'm ever in charge of a bomb-delivery "solution".
... like saying that the inventor of the hammer contributed to violence and killings.
;-)
This has been a constant objection to all advances in knowledge throughout hiistory. It's hard to think of any technical advance that can't be used for both bad and good.
And strictly speaking, it wasn't really the inventor of the hammer that enabled more killings. Rather, the "basic research" that led to better hard-material devices (chipped flint, forged metals, etc.) led to the artisans makng both better tools and better weapons. Some of them (blades, hammers) could be immediately used for both good and bad purposes. Try building your hut or grinding your grain or carving up your deer without a good hammer or quern or knife.
Now that so much of our technology includes software, it's not surprising that the same principle applies. Anyone working on low-level software (OS kernels, runtime libraries, comm systems, whatever) will inevitably find it used for both bad and good. Many of us who foisted the Internet on the world are not at all surprised to see it spin off viruses, phishing, and RIAA lawsuits against children and grandmothers. In fact, we discussed such things long before they arose, but we didn't ever find a way to prevent them.
The problem is that, like knives or hammers or gunpowder, software really can't distinguish bad from good. That can't be done with any of our current technology. We have to use social methods for handling bad/good distinctions.
We won't stop killing by taking away bombs or guns or knives or OS kernels; we can only do it by taking away the social and political structures that support and encourage the killers.
(I can hear people around the world mutter "starting with the current US government".
Only RedHawk Linux was able to ensure the high frame rates required ...
My first thought on reading that "Only" was: What other systems was it compared with? Who were the other bidders on the contract? Did all the available RT systems fail the contest with linux? That's a bit hard to believe.
So I read TFA looking for the answer. No clues. Then I noticed the "Concurrent" logo at the top.
This is nothing more than a press release by the vendor. As far as I can tell, it was a no-bid contract. Any information otherwise? What other systems were tested? What were the timing numbers?
An effective ballistic missle defense system ... woud probably be most effective against a rogue state with few nuclear weapons, ...
;-)
Yeah, maybe, but it's not very effective against a bomb delivered via FedEx and triggered via cell phone.
If I were in the business of delivering bombs, that's how I'd do it. Well, ok; maybe not FedEx; I'd ask for bids on the contract. Wouldn't want to waste money on an overly-expensive delivery service.
...oh wait, the Soviets are dead...
Actually, the big surprise in the collapse of the Soviet Union was that the Soviets were not killed. Everyone would have understood if they had been executed, with or without show trials, considering their long and bloody record. But it doesn't seem to have happened. Some of the old CP members have even managed to get elected in their own right since then.
[P]roject managers use the milestone phrase "code complete" to mean that it's just testing and QA from there ...
Yeah; I've heard that sort of logic a lot. What I like to do is produce a C program named like the next product, containing the code:
main() {
printf("Hello, world!\n");
}
I then claim that, except for adding a few features and doing all the testing and QA, it's the finished product.
Sometimes I mention that I know of one bug in the code already, but I think I can have a fix for it by next week.
(Trivia question for C programmers: What's the bug?)
int i = 11;
(;-)