No need to implant a chip. 99% of the public already is being tracked by cell phone.
Oh and your car license plate is being scanned by numerous public and private entities.
Facial-recognition software is pretty much assumed to be operational in many places.
And if you crash your car, you can't opt-out of the authorities from downloading the black-box data from your car.
Given that there are cases where a vehicle tracker would save lives for missing persons, cars that ran off the road, etc. it probably will be only a matter of time before a mandate is suggested.
So these things are not eventual, they are right now. Maybe they are all good things in the long-run. But the point is this isn't delusion, it is real and you can't realistically avoid it.
Paper standards are worthless 9 times out of 10; typically they are full of ambiguity or have stipulations that are grossly inefficient to implement. There is a necessary research phase to writing airtight, or even usable specs. I call this 'implementation.' So yes, de-facto specifications are the best. You could do the research phase and just throw away the resulting code and test results, but why do that? So the only use I have for a standards body is to perform quality-control on the existing documentation.
RFC's are a good model: you invent something - then just document it and let people file their complaints. But it is not open for general blue-sky speculation.
People are way too willing to believe the hype; the Google driverless car is basically vaporware. Google engineers were recently interviewed for a piece on Slate.com. It was a remarkably well-written article on a technical level that describes the actual limitations of the technology. In short, it is not really autonomous at all, it follows a programmed route with some ability to detect obstacles. For example, the technology won't even observe traffic lights if they are absent from it's internal pre-programmed map. So forget about any compatibility with construction areas with temporary signals.
Ah, but that last step is the biggest one: remove the steering wheel and take a nap on your way to work. Driver assistance is definitely a good thing: better sensors, alerts, controls. At all points in time, the driver is engaged in the current state of the vehicle as a hot failover. To achieve what self-driving cars allude to with no human fail-over is orders of magnitude above that. In fact, to make cars safer, they should demand more attention from the driver even if artificially induced. This is actually something considered in controls for aircraft, trains, and nuclear reactors: positively engage the operator to prevent complacency.
Exactly. And it goes deeper than that. Who will want a driverless car that refuses to speed? Or dutifully reaches a full stop at all stop signs, railroad tracks, paper bag in the road, etc. If the designers deliberately allow shortcuts for any of these things and a single accident occurs - ever -, then Google will have the honor of paying out the largest liability judgment ever in history.
There is certainly some craft to making a sturdy firing pin besides the physical shape: correct alloy, hardening etc.. In fact, the shape has quite some latitude as long as it makes contact in the right places. But, if firing pins were the primary concern for servicing these rifles, there are plenty of gunsmiths / machine shops that can and do make production runs like this.
Exactly this. For some reason I don't understand, this has become political.
So far we've been told:
- "Don't worry, you have to have prolonged contact with an infected person."
- "Don't worry it won't happen in the USA."
- "Uh, ok, it looks like you can get this pretty easily - but only because healthcare workers made careless mistakes..."
- "Don't worry, the CDC knows how to stop this."
But now: "It's pretty much impossible to follow infection control protocols correctly, nurse infected while treating patient in the USA."
Average person: "This is scary now, what we have been told keeps turning out false. If more infected people keep arriving we could expose more of our doctors, nurses, and orderlies. Those are my family and friends, I don't want them to get sick and die. We could get overwhelmed and it would be difficult to control and follow procedures. Maybe we should restrict travel into the USA until we get a handle on how bad this really is."
Apparent Democrat: "You are so stubborn, and darned alarmist conservative aren't you, don't you know it is more dangerous to stop travel than to allow it... "
Stating that you 'support' a feature is a commitment to fix a user's problems when it doesn't 'just work.' That costs real money in terms of staff, phone calls, returns, engineering, etc. - even when it is the user's fault. This is an actual product, not a 'no warranty at all' EULA. The Google EULA disclaims implied warranty, but Express Warranty remains. i.e. the list of supported features have to work or they are legally responsible. Also, as stated in their EULA, not all jurisdictions allow a EULA to simply dispatch implied warranty either.
I really never get the 'tables aren't scalable' argument. Maybe people are just thinking in fixed page size mentality. Tables are about the only thing that lays out a page in a scaleable way. You just have to know what table properties to use and be willing to allow your page to adjust to window size. I can't predict the exact font scaling on every browser, so why do I care? The table just correctly bounds the text. CSS still seems to get confused or misused quite easily in this regard. It's like web devs are control freaks who need every sentence to be press-ready layout down to the pixel.
Depends what you call embedded. But C++ in the embedded world is not very likely for a variety of reasons. C itself vs. Asm is still a debate I have with my colleagues on a daily basis. I have delusions of a replacement for C in the low-level embedded world - but chances are it would be hard to displace even with all of its flaws.
Exactly, I never understood why purging tables was so important yet we have let slip every list, paragraph, frameset, dynamic content, obfuscated Javascript, flash applet, hover elements, etc.. I feel the web is nearly unusable at this point and we cannot blame tables, not in the slightest.
totally, I thought that was just me that did stuff like that. I'm a very test-compile-test type programmer.
Even more points for actually using the header part of a table. For all the semantics evangelists people who say tables are for tabular data, I see hardly anyone using that effectively.
Exactly, since approximately 1998, I haven't understood why we still called the web 'high'tech.' There is most certainly better ways to represent the information than HTML/CSS/Javascript.
It doesn't take much technology to design protocols and client/server apps to exceed this.
Phone apps and video games are really the only thing that seems able to break through this mindset. But they are all purpose-built. A generalized alternative to the http/html web is conspicuously absent.
But then how could we make annoying 'hover' elements?
But seriously, the pack manager is all I use in Tk/Python, it would have made excellent web pages. HTML tables work almost as well. I don't even bother with grid manager in Tk unless I need strict alignment in 2-D.
Ahh, the classic arguments. I'll avoid my tirade about people who move the goalpost on every web-related standard rather than accepting success and moving on with new actual ideas. But I'll settle that you can have CSS layout and I'll use tables when I damn well feel like it. 20 years of evangelism hasn't really made the web a cleaner place. "Improving" web standards always missed the point that what we have is what we have; old pages will not get updated so we still support them. HTML 5, or whatever is fine, but browsers still have to support what is out there.
1) "Tables are for tabular data" Yeah, 'ya know why? Because tables are precise and predictable. Will puppies and and kittens die if I use tables for layout? No. You cannot deprecate tables and their ability to hold other elements because I could always claim that a series of pictures, links, and text is my tabular set of data. Therefore, why have this argument? Sub-argument: "blind people will be screwed" No, and how does CSS solve that problem? Are the rest of us to continuously suffer layout glitches? CSS creates a series of sections that don't specifically have a semantic order or significance either. The very definition of Zen garden is the ability to re-arrange parts of a web page in any visual orientation. The fundamental problem is that people create pages with too much complexity whether it be nested tables or CSS placement. If we can't design software that could use a few heuristics to locate the main text of a page, then the page is too complicated to be useful, or your screen reader sucks. A few meta-tags, and reasonable discipline on nested tables would have been the simple approach to this supposed problem. Most web pages I see are still a basic 3-panel with header navbar and boilerplate footer. Anything else gets too complicated.
2) "The page has to totally load first" Not really a problem since tables have a variety of ways to define width, justification, etc. Plus, why do I care what a page looks like while it is downloading? This isn't 1994 anymore, we have decent bandwidth. Most websites that actually have tabular data like forums, Facebook, etc. ironically use some form of dynamic content anyway which is far more abusive in terms of the page layout changing unexpectedly. We may as well just deprecate scroll-bars, because they behave erratically when a webpage loads more content halfway through scrolling down a page.
CSS is a great way to take out the redundancy of style and font tags everywhere, but I think the idea of CSS layout is just confounding.
>> Ghandi's success wasn't from conscripting insurgents
>Neither did Ghandi opt-out of modern society to make a point. You've cherry-picked a case where "leading by example" did not cause him to essentially silence himself.
A low-cost video camera and a computer at the local library is all you really need these days to be notable and show what you have been doing. If you have good ideas, people will follow.
>> I'm all for reducing environmental impact and saving animals, but we need to find ways to do it that everyone can afford.
> So... Why aren't you giving up cars? Whenever some people are take action there is always some asshole who comes along and tells them "you aren't doing it right." That's just cover for, "I don't like your cause but I'm not man enough to tell you it is wrong, so I'm going to attack you from another direction."
I'm just a follower. I'd rather follow people who demonstrate something workable rather than something too idealistic to actually work.
Yes, exactly. The most successful way to convince people is leading by example. Ghandi's success wasn't from conscripting insurgents, he didn't lobby the British Parliament in hopes of winning politically or through the legal system. i.e. he didn't force his way or ask for permission. He simply demonstrated a method of resistance that people could follow and lived it every day at great sacrifice.
I give a lot of respect to people who try simple living, reducing carbon footprint, installing solar, etc. At least they are experimenting, innovating, and sacrificing creature comforts to show what is possible. They will discover what works and what doesn't. I have no patience for the self-righteous who can throw money at telling us we are wrong to assuage their guilt, stop by Starbucks driving a Lexus SUV on their way home to a 3000 sq. foot home. Al Gore can chide us all he wants, I'm not going to listen unless he actually gives up his carbon footprint rather than buying offsets.
I'm all for reducing environmental impact and saving animals, but we need to find ways to do it that everyone can afford.
Slashdot Mirror
I assume you are being sarcastic about engineers? I guess it depends what discipline and type of work you do. :)
In electrical engineering there is a saying:
"Never discuss in polite company: Politics, religion, or grounding."
No need to implant a chip. 99% of the public already is being tracked by cell phone.
Oh and your car license plate is being scanned by numerous public and private entities.
Facial-recognition software is pretty much assumed to be operational in many places.
And if you crash your car, you can't opt-out of the authorities from downloading the black-box data from your car.
Given that there are cases where a vehicle tracker would save lives for missing persons, cars that ran off the road, etc. it probably will be only a matter of time before a mandate is suggested.
So these things are not eventual, they are right now. Maybe they are all good things in the long-run. But the point is this isn't delusion, it is real and you can't realistically avoid it.
nah.. it really means "one time programmable." Silly acronyms.
Paper standards are worthless 9 times out of 10; typically they are full of ambiguity or have stipulations that are grossly inefficient to implement. There is a necessary research phase to writing airtight, or even usable specs. I call this 'implementation.' So yes, de-facto specifications are the best. You could do the research phase and just throw away the resulting code and test results, but why do that? So the only use I have for a standards body is to perform quality-control on the existing documentation.
RFC's are a good model: you invent something - then just document it and let people file their complaints. But it is not open for general blue-sky speculation.
People are way too willing to believe the hype; the Google driverless car is basically vaporware. Google engineers were recently interviewed for a piece on Slate.com. It was a remarkably well-written article on a technical level that describes the actual limitations of the technology. In short, it is not really autonomous at all, it follows a programmed route with some ability to detect obstacles. For example, the technology won't even observe traffic lights if they are absent from it's internal pre-programmed map. So forget about any compatibility with construction areas with temporary signals.
http://www.slate.com/articles/...
Ah, but that last step is the biggest one: remove the steering wheel and take a nap on your way to work. Driver assistance is definitely a good thing: better sensors, alerts, controls. At all points in time, the driver is engaged in the current state of the vehicle as a hot failover. To achieve what self-driving cars allude to with no human fail-over is orders of magnitude above that. In fact, to make cars safer, they should demand more attention from the driver even if artificially induced. This is actually something considered in controls for aircraft, trains, and nuclear reactors: positively engage the operator to prevent complacency.
Exactly. And it goes deeper than that. Who will want a driverless car that refuses to speed? Or dutifully reaches a full stop at all stop signs, railroad tracks, paper bag in the road, etc. If the designers deliberately allow shortcuts for any of these things and a single accident occurs - ever -, then Google will have the honor of paying out the largest liability judgment ever in history.
There is certainly some craft to making a sturdy firing pin besides the physical shape: correct alloy, hardening etc.. In fact, the shape has quite some latitude as long as it makes contact in the right places. But, if firing pins were the primary concern for servicing these rifles, there are plenty of gunsmiths / machine shops that can and do make production runs like this.
just to put this in context:
People eat 8 billion chickens in the US per year.
Number of birds estimated killed by windfarms is well under 1 million.
So I guess if they 'don't go to waste' then society doesn't care much.
Exactly this. For some reason I don't understand, this has become political.
So far we've been told:
- "Don't worry, you have to have prolonged contact with an infected person."
- "Don't worry it won't happen in the USA."
- "Uh, ok, it looks like you can get this pretty easily - but only because healthcare workers made careless mistakes..."
- "Don't worry, the CDC knows how to stop this."
But now: "It's pretty much impossible to follow infection control protocols correctly, nurse infected while treating patient in the USA."
Average person: "This is scary now, what we have been told keeps turning out false. If more infected people keep arriving we could expose more of our doctors, nurses, and orderlies. Those are my family and friends, I don't want them to get sick and die. We could get overwhelmed and it would be difficult to control and follow procedures. Maybe we should restrict travel into the USA until we get a handle on how bad this really is."
Apparent Democrat: "You are so stubborn, and darned alarmist conservative aren't you, don't you know it is more dangerous to stop travel than to allow it... "
Average person: "wha?!?"
Stating that you 'support' a feature is a commitment to fix a user's problems when it doesn't 'just work.' That costs real money in terms of staff, phone calls, returns, engineering, etc. - even when it is the user's fault. This is an actual product, not a 'no warranty at all' EULA. The Google EULA disclaims implied warranty, but Express Warranty remains. i.e. the list of supported features have to work or they are legally responsible. Also, as stated in their EULA, not all jurisdictions allow a EULA to simply dispatch implied warranty either.
filtered_value = (filtered_value*a) + (new_value*(1-a)); // where a > 0 and a 1
I really never get the 'tables aren't scalable' argument. Maybe people are just thinking in fixed page size mentality. Tables are about the only thing that lays out a page in a scaleable way. You just have to know what table properties to use and be willing to allow your page to adjust to window size. I can't predict the exact font scaling on every browser, so why do I care? The table just correctly bounds the text. CSS still seems to get confused or misused quite easily in this regard. It's like web devs are control freaks who need every sentence to be press-ready layout down to the pixel.
So if I have tabular data that is semantically acceptable to be a table, how do I ensure that will look good?
Depends what you call embedded. But C++ in the embedded world is not very likely for a variety of reasons. C itself vs. Asm is still a debate I have with my colleagues on a daily basis. I have delusions of a replacement for C in the low-level embedded world - but chances are it would be hard to displace even with all of its flaws.
Exactly, I never understood why purging tables was so important yet we have let slip every list, paragraph, frameset, dynamic content, obfuscated Javascript, flash applet, hover elements, etc.. I feel the web is nearly unusable at this point and we cannot blame tables, not in the slightest.
What is the semantic meaning of a div tag? How do I know where that div appears in logical order?
totally, I thought that was just me that did stuff like that. I'm a very test-compile-test type programmer.
Even more points for actually using the header part of a table. For all the semantics evangelists people who say tables are for tabular data, I see hardly anyone using that effectively.
Exactly, since approximately 1998, I haven't understood why we still called the web 'high'tech.' There is most certainly better ways to represent the information than HTML/CSS/Javascript.
It doesn't take much technology to design protocols and client/server apps to exceed this.
Phone apps and video games are really the only thing that seems able to break through this mindset. But they are all purpose-built. A generalized alternative to the http/html web is conspicuously absent.
My tabular data happens to be an array on navbar buttons.
CSS is great - for controlling style.
But then how could we make annoying 'hover' elements?
But seriously, the pack manager is all I use in Tk/Python, it would have made excellent web pages. HTML tables work almost as well. I don't even bother with grid manager in Tk unless I need strict alignment in 2-D.
Ahh, the classic arguments. I'll avoid my tirade about people who move the goalpost on every web-related standard rather than accepting success and moving on with new actual ideas. But I'll settle that you can have CSS layout and I'll use tables when I damn well feel like it. 20 years of evangelism hasn't really made the web a cleaner place. "Improving" web standards always missed the point that what we have is what we have; old pages will not get updated so we still support them. HTML 5, or whatever is fine, but browsers still have to support what is out there.
1) "Tables are for tabular data" Yeah, 'ya know why? Because tables are precise and predictable. Will puppies and and kittens die if I use tables for layout? No. You cannot deprecate tables and their ability to hold other elements because I could always claim that a series of pictures, links, and text is my tabular set of data. Therefore, why have this argument? Sub-argument: "blind people will be screwed" No, and how does CSS solve that problem? Are the rest of us to continuously suffer layout glitches? CSS creates a series of sections that don't specifically have a semantic order or significance either. The very definition of Zen garden is the ability to re-arrange parts of a web page in any visual orientation. The fundamental problem is that people create pages with too much complexity whether it be nested tables or CSS placement. If we can't design software that could use a few heuristics to locate the main text of a page, then the page is too complicated to be useful, or your screen reader sucks.
A few meta-tags, and reasonable discipline on nested tables would have been the simple approach to this supposed problem. Most web pages I see are still a basic 3-panel with header navbar and boilerplate footer. Anything else gets too complicated.
2) "The page has to totally load first" Not really a problem since tables have a variety of ways to define width, justification, etc. Plus, why do I care what a page looks like while it is downloading? This isn't 1994 anymore, we have decent bandwidth. Most websites that actually have tabular data like forums, Facebook, etc. ironically use some form of dynamic content anyway which is far more abusive in terms of the page layout changing unexpectedly. We may as well just deprecate scroll-bars, because they behave erratically when a webpage loads more content halfway through scrolling down a page.
CSS is a great way to take out the redundancy of style and font tags everywhere, but I think the idea of CSS layout is just confounding.
>> Ghandi's success wasn't from conscripting insurgents
>Neither did Ghandi opt-out of modern society to make a point. You've cherry-picked a case where "leading by example" did not cause him to essentially silence himself.
A low-cost video camera and a computer at the local library is all you really need these days to be notable and show what you have been doing. If you have good ideas, people will follow.
>> I'm all for reducing environmental impact and saving animals, but we need to find ways to do it that everyone can afford.
> So... Why aren't you giving up cars? Whenever some people are take action there is always some asshole who comes along and tells them "you aren't doing it right." That's just cover for, "I don't like your cause but I'm not man enough to tell you it is wrong, so I'm going to attack you from another direction."
I'm just a follower. I'd rather follow people who demonstrate something workable rather than something too idealistic to actually work.
good point
Yes, exactly. The most successful way to convince people is leading by example. Ghandi's success wasn't from conscripting insurgents, he didn't lobby the British Parliament in hopes of winning politically or through the legal system. i.e. he didn't force his way or ask for permission. He simply demonstrated a method of resistance that people could follow and lived it every day at great sacrifice.
I give a lot of respect to people who try simple living, reducing carbon footprint, installing solar, etc. At least they are experimenting, innovating, and sacrificing creature comforts to show what is possible. They will discover what works and what doesn't. I have no patience for the self-righteous who can throw money at telling us we are wrong to assuage their guilt, stop by Starbucks driving a Lexus SUV on their way home to a 3000 sq. foot home. Al Gore can chide us all he wants, I'm not going to listen unless he actually gives up his carbon footprint rather than buying offsets.
I'm all for reducing environmental impact and saving animals, but we need to find ways to do it that everyone can afford.