Also if it's war...where is the Congress declaration authorizing this?
Obama needs to be impeached.
What, for cyberattacks that affect non-target systems, or drone attacks that kill non-combatants?
In any case, declaration of war? What century are you living in? The last US declaration of war was on December 11, 1941 against Germany. Last time I checked there have been six wars that were undeclared but "authorized" by US legislation. Seven or eight were undertaken under UN security council resolutions and funded, but not expressly authorized by Congress. One was undertaken without any congressional approval or funding (Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada). There have been countless *acts* of war undertaken without the permission of Congress and sometimes without Congress being informed.
I suspect just about every act of war we've been involved with since WW2, under Democratic or Republican presidents, is unconstitutional, but everyone looks the other way.
Federal law trumps state law. The auto manufactures could encrypt the computers and any attempt to crack it would be grounds for violating the DMCA (anti-circumvention portion).
Saying the have to *reveal* their diagnostic codes is entirely consistent with rules against circumvention. In fact, THAT'S THE POINT: allow users to repair their property without circumventing anything.
So there is no issue of Federal preemption here. It preempts private companies from doing certain things which would entice their customers to break Federal law.
Actually, it's more like the Pathetic Fallacy in which an inanimate or abstract thing is ascribed human thoughts and emotions:
fearing change is contrary to the genuine intent of capitalism.
"Capitalism" can have no intent, genuine or otherwise. It's just a category that describes economic systems that have evolved from people pursuing goals under certain conditions. The *people* in those have intent, but their intent isn't necessarily logically consistent with the things we admire about capitalism. For example, one of the good things about capitalism is the competition it forces, but companies spend a lot of time trying to avoid competition because it shaves their profit margins. Sometimes their approach is innovative (creating new products that do things nobody else has thought of). Other times their approach is anti-innovative (attempting to corner the market or erect barriers to entry in their markets).
David Brin, in his critique of Ayn Rand's writing makes the point that one of the oldest repeating patterns in human history are the barbarians who've grown lean and hungry on the outside overwhelming some decadent oligarchy grown fat and complacent through the safety entrenched power brings. Rand rightly admires the barbarians, but Brin thinks she ignores the next step in the pattern: the barbarians digging in and becoming exactly the kind of fat, complacent, change-killing aristocracy they displaced.
The only thing that's more foolish than ignoring the past is expecting the past to repeat itself. Circumstances matter. Differences in capabilities matter. Timing matters. Why did Apple succeed with tablets where Microsoft failed? All three.
You can find instances to support either end of this stick: companies who failed to get out of an eroding business in time, and those that neglected what they were good at and got lost in markets they weren't equipped to enter.
Armchair strategists like to spin scenarios from very superficial knowledge of the facts, and so manage to produce "strategies" that are at once fanciful, yet unimaginative, like futurists of the late 19th C who thought in a hundred years people would commute to their jobs in the city by airship. Real strategy requires brain-cracking gymnastics where you sweat the details while tying to keep hold of the big picture.
It seems to me that Samsung's strategic position is flexible. They're differentiating themselves on a software platform that is open. Their relationship to Google may sour after the Motorola deal, but they have the option of forking Android if need be. Meanwhile they're working on using software to differentiate their offerings from other hardware vendors, which positions them well to differentiate an Android fork or entirely new OS if that is in the cards. It won't be totally untested waters for them, they'll have valuable experience and maybe even customer loyalty if their offerings are good enough. But they don't *have* to burn their bridges yet (including customer access to Google's App marketplace).Dipping their toe into software gives them a stronger bargaining position with Google without forcing anyone's hand.
So it seems to me they've taken a reasonable position in a very competitive market. Where they should go from here, I don't know and can't know. It is possible even Samsung is not entirely sure if we're talking two or three years out -- they'd need a crystal ball to tell them what their competitors and current allies are going to do. It would probably be prudent for them to be doing contingency planning and some preparation for the Google relationship going sour, but to do so quietly.
Well, plenty of that old 24fps stuff looked good too -- even black and white.
I wouldn't assume that any 48fps movie necessarily looks better than any 24fps movie, or even that a given movie will necessarily look better in 48 than 24. I'm guessing that it will depend on whether the people lighting and shooting the 48fps know what they're doing. Yes there are bound to be use cases where 48fps is necessarily better, but overall I wouldn't underestimate the ability of incompetent people to shoot themselves in the foot with it.
I purchased the MP3 of the original cast recording of the Broadway musical "Hair", and was blown away by how good it sounds, and it was recorded in 1968. I don't think that's because of any vacuum tube pixie dust, I think it's because it was skillfully recorded and mixed by people who knew how to get the most out of the equipment they had. Singers came across particularly well, because the dynamic range of the recording gave them room to be expressive. CDs have a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, but that does not good if the engineers don't *use* it.
Bubonic plague has been endemic (sustaining itself permanently, in this case in the animal population) in the western part of the US for years, although it is news to public health officials when a human contracts it. There was a case two years ago, also in Oregon.
The reason it doesn't sweep the nation the way it swept Europe is advances in hygiene, public health and medical treatment. Rats and fleas in the house aren't unheard of these days, but they're no longer universal. If people are getting bit by fleas they'll call the exterminator or the board of health; they won't just accept it as a fact of life. If they contract plague they'll go to the doctor who will cure it relatively easily.
Why is it that Microsoft can't seem to do anything until some one else does it and it's usually Apple?
Corporate culture. Microsoft is famously a competitive environment, but from what I've read it's not companies like Apple that's the enemy, it's other projects at Microsoft that might siphon resources from yours. When an outside vendor introduces a successful product, nobody can say, "it'll never sell." When the product is *wildly* successful, like the iPad, it can even overcome "we tried that before and it doesn't work."
The idea of a $100 master's degree is subversive, especially considering that a master's is the basic qualification to hold a professorship at a modern university. It attacks the one of the main roles that academic degrees have assumed in our society: being a certification of social class. If there's any doubt of that consider this: recent studies have shown that the average amount of time college students spend studying has dropped from 24 hours/week to 15. Some have put the current figure as low as 10-13 hours/week spent outside of class. Even engineering students spend a mere nineteen hours per week outside of class; today's *nerds* spend five fewer hours per week studying than the average student in their grandparent's generation.
This lack of rigor is reflected in how degrees are used after graduation. Most jobs that require a nonspecific bachelor's degree (i.e. not in an area like engineering) could be done by an intelligent and well-read high school graduate. Many jobs that require master's degrees could be done by a bachelor's degree holder in that field. It is difficult (although obviously not impossible) for someone who has to work to put bread on the table to obtain those kinds of credentials. So a bachelor's degree reflects having middle class parents more than it does intelligence, knowledge, or intellectual sophistication.
Now if you can get the actual education for $100, then there'd be no justification to withhold accreditation from a program like this. That would mean that *anybody* could get degrees to use as a credential provided they can do the work. That would completely undermine the higher education system in the country as it now stands. It might spell the end of widespread college education.
Well, magnetic core was pretty new back then. Choosing to go with mercury delay lines is the kind of choice you'd make as a designer because you were familiar with the technology and were confident it would do the job. Cambridge (UK) University's EDSAC was very similar to this Australian beast and successful computer that operated between 1949 and 1958; it's successor EDSAC 2 operated until the mid 60s. Despite being archaic in certain details (memory storage, logic circuitry) these were very architecturally sophisticated computers for their time.
I suspect planning for this computer went back several years before the actual construction, too. It may be that by the time they started building this thing they might have preferred core memory, but redesigning the memory system would have delayed the project for no particular benefit. They'd probably have to revisit the design of the whole system to make the change worthwhile.
Unrelated aside here. A sci-fi writer friend of mine asked for advice on how a steampunk automaton might store its program and data. I suggested the program be loaded by jacquard-style punchcards into a maze of tiny mercury delay tubes coupled with tuning forks and clockwork. I think mercury, being shiny and toxic, has a certain steampunk vibe.
As for still having access, I wouldn't know. That would require testing for it.
I've never been fired, but I have left jobs where I had access to sensitive information. What I did was write an distribute memo which listed everything I could think of that I needed to be locked out of, then sat down on my last day with the person who was supposed to do it and made sure it happened.
Protection is a two-way street. Not only does it protect my former employer from me, if anything happens after I leave it makes it less likely suspicion will fall on me. Besides that revenge is a juvenile act. It feels better to do the right thing and move on than to gloat over the power you wield over the people you left behind.
The problem started again though. I was able to figure out that power management/suspend in linux was disabling the nic
Linux ACPI is pretty good in my experience. The kind of problem you're describing is often caused by glitchy ACPI data supplied by the manufacturer -- especially with crappy consumer-grade systems.
There's a structure in the firmware called a "Differentiated System Description Table", or DSDT. Why is it "differentiated"? Because it can return different information to different operating systems -- utter crap from an architectural standpoint, but there you go. This kind of problem happens when the manufacture pays careful attention to the data returned to Windows family operating systems, but leaves their non-windows entries incomplete or in an inconsistent state. This shouldn't be possible, but the Microsoft compiler for ASL (ACPI Source Language) lets you get away with it. Intel's compiler (I am told) makes you fix it.
The upshot is that even when a host operating system other than Windows implements ACPI *perfectly*, users may experience many ACPI related glitches. Your glitch is *classic*. I had similar problems with sound on Toshiba laptops, which went away entirely when I booted with ACPI off. Some ACPI related glitches don't appear to users to be power related (e.g., system reports the wrong number and type of hardware ports provided by the motherboard's sound card).
The solution varies. Sometimes you can use Linux boot parameters to spoof the hardware by claiming to be Windows instead of Linux. Other times you have to extract the DSDT, de-compile it, fix it, re-compile it, and have the Linux kernel load your fixed version -- although you'll have to repeat this every time you upgrade your kernel.
The simplest problem might be to get a different NIC other than the one provided by the manufacturer -- possibly a USB adapter.
Now as to who's fault this is, it's definitely the manufacturer. Unfortunately returning the computer isn't going to help because every computer of that model is going to have the same problem.
That's right. The CHOSE to buy windows, rather than pay for alternatives whose costs and inconvenience were artificially inflated by Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly powers.
This is very true. But it's true of conventional warfare too. The sixteen unarmed Afghani civilians killed by a an army solider (or soldiers) in March didn't do us much good either. But in the end that was not really any more preventable than the innocent people killed by drones either by mistake or as "collateral damage". Every army in history has had sick people in it, and we've made our soldiers so lethal that one bad (or sick) apple do untold damage.
That a drone attack antagonizes the populace doesn't distinguish it from conventional warfare or counter-insurgency, which also antagonize the populace. The unique aspect of drone strikes may ironically be the terror they inspire; that an attack can come at any time or any place and that there is nowhere safe.
The question of whether to rely on drones versus troops is not a morally simple one, or one that can be answered out of context. A drone campaign is worse for the terror it strikes in the innocent, but if ends a conflict quicker that may justify it (if a conflict isn't winnable it's immoral to keep fighting it). Other context specific factors are culture and politics. You can't argue about the relative morality of drone attacks vs. counter-insurgency without taking into account the probable results of each approach.
There are only two sure things you can conclude from recent US wars: it's a bad idea to get into a war where winning the hearts and minds of the enemy populace is a condition of success and if you do find yourself in such a war, get out of it as quickly as possible.
Well, I just gave up and got an external keyboard and folding laptop stand. This is not only more ergonomic, it has the advantage of extending the lifetime of my laptops. I write so much the keys fall off. My palms even wear through the finish of the palm rests. Who knew that the plastic under the black Thinkpad finish was blue-green?
Some people are sickened by the thousands of hours of perfectly good broadcast time that are wasted on the hyenas in question each week.
To quote Harry Shearer, whose Le Show followed Car Talk at the time, "Memo to the Car Talk guys: Stop Laughing."
I recently went over some Burns and Allen Show scripts, and discovered something very interesting: most of the jokes aren't that funny on the page, even though the shows are hilarious when you watch them. The strongest material is at the start and end of the routine, the stuff in the middle is usually just mildly amusing at best. It's all about timing. Not only could they do mediocre material in a way that made it funnier than it really was, but they made shrewd use of it, using it to keep the ball rolling once they'd got you laughing. If you flipped past the sketch and caught one or two gags in the middle, you'd wonder what all the fuss was about.
In any case there are different kinds of humor, and "Car Talk" just doesn't happen to be Shearer's kind of humor; it's not *comedy*, nor is it *satire*. It's a couple of guys having a good time poking fun at themselves. Shearer is a funny guy, but I suspect the idea of not taking yourself seriously might hit a little close to home for him.
I once had a client where the project manager handling our contract often sat on deliveries for a month or more before looking at them -- and here I am with a three man development team dedicated to this project. Finally we fly down install the production software and train the users. A week later the project manager is fired and nobody looks at the system for over two years until a new manager starts to procure a system and realizes that his predecessor already paid for one. Word gets to the board of directors, and then we get letter threatening.to sue us for not delivering the system.We have no way of proving to them that we flew a team down there and actually did the installation and training, because everybody we trained had subsequently left the organization. But we had the bills we submitted that were paid by the client, which is at least prima facie evidence we did the work.
Now we had the source in our source code control system, but so much time had gone by that just getting all the stuff together needed to build and package the system would have been a pain (this is why you should be using maven, folks, which we weren't at the time). And there is no doubt the system was probably so riddled with bugs that getting it working would have taken much, much more work, but the client made it impossible for us to deliver a quality product. The project manager accepted deliveries with only cursory examination, and so late that it forced us to work on this product intermittently, dropping it and picking it up weeks later.
The lesson is build client responsibilities and support limitations into the contract.
Standing behind your work doesn't mean delivering unlimited support. It means delivering more than you promised. That starts by setting clear limits and conditions on what you are promising.
Most of the time the first steps in learning anything practical aren't particularly interesting. If you were forced to take a sailing class that was limited to learning how to tie a couple of knots and name the parts of a sailboat, you probably wouldn't look back on your "sailing education" as the high point of your school years.
Now take high school chemistry lab, which is typically the dullest lab experience most students will ever have. But gaining the advanced chemistry lab skills to synthesize interesting stuff or do useful analyses would be an entirely different kind of experience..
Making rockets is one of those things that sounds like it's the answer, but in truth schools *do* a lot of that stuff these days, particularly elementary schools. What they don't do is take activities like that to the point they become intellectually and creatively challenging.
When they do really important and secret things, you can guarantee that we never even know it happened at all.
I dunno about that reasoning. If it went up for a single *day*, you'd be able to rule out some things, but since it was up there for a full year, it could have been up to *anything* that could be accomplished in that time window. For all we know it might have been put up there for an entire year just for one day's work, the nature of which would have been more effectively hidden this way than if they'd attempted a secret launch.
Personally, I buy that it is a technology demonstrator, but this kind of long mission is one that has lots of military applications, some of which would be highly unpopular with people outside the US. The US military already uses drones, and they understand the value of loitering time. The technical boundary between the atmosphere and space is where the transition from travel dominated by aerodynamic forces to travel dominated by momentum. 100km is roughly where the speed needed to maintain altitude by lift exceeds orbital velocity. In other words a spaceplane has nearly unlimited loiter time because it just stays up there without requiring a continuous expenditure of energy.
They could re-enter something like this anywhere on the Earth within a day or so. If you had a dozen of spaceplanes like this loitering in low Earth orbit, you could put a drone anywhere you wanted in a matter of hours. I wonder whether there is anything a spaceplane could do better than something simpler and cheaper that doesn't involve that capability.
Looking at TFA, it looks to me like it makes some dubious extrapolations. I think it's highly questionable to conflate intelligence with creativity, or creativity with mental fecundity, although these phenomena clearly must be related. For example:
Studies on word associations that ask participants to list all the words that come to mind in relation to a stimulus word like "tulip" found that bipolar patients experiencing mild mania can generate three times as many word associations in the same amount of time as the general population.
This result may be true, but you can't measure creativity this way. Creativity is generating novel and *appropriate* responses to challenges. You can't look at mere mental fecundity because creativity also involves discrimination between novel and better approaches from novel and worse.
On the other hand, I think your response has the same problems. You seem to presuppose that mania or the processes involved with schizophrenia are an entirely adulterants to normal mental functioning, and that you can extrapolate the way you can with, say, water in your brake fluid: a lot is bad, therefore a little can't be helpful. It's quite possible that many forms of mental illness are simply distortions or imbalances of normal mental function, in which case some situations would be more like water in a cake batter: too much is bad, too little is bad also.
Delusions are wrong beliefs that are refractory, but without a crystal ball they're not so easy to distinguish in the moment from original ideas which currently contradict the preponderance of evidence. People who pursue unlikely ideas to the point where they alter the preponderance of evidence are intellectually productive, provided that they eventually abandon ideas that don't pan out. Should we say those people are *a little bit* delusional? I don't think so. They have a healthy ability to lend provisional belief to an idea that is not yet supported. The distinction between a provisional idea and a delusion is very clear at the extremes, but they shade together and the exact line between them probably depends on context.
The upshot, I think, is that this whole notion is too vague to be debated meaningfully. There is necessarily be a link between delusion and genius, because there's a link between delusion and normal mental functioning.
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Marry the girlfriend. Have a child with her.
Interesting. I was thinking more along the lines of gamma-hydroxybutyrate.
Also if it's war...where is the Congress declaration authorizing this?
Obama needs to be impeached.
What, for cyberattacks that affect non-target systems, or drone attacks that kill non-combatants?
In any case, declaration of war? What century are you living in? The last US declaration of war was on December 11, 1941 against Germany. Last time I checked there have been six wars that were undeclared but "authorized" by US legislation. Seven or eight were undertaken under UN security council resolutions and funded, but not expressly authorized by Congress. One was undertaken without any congressional approval or funding (Ronald Reagan's invasion of Grenada). There have been countless *acts* of war undertaken without the permission of Congress and sometimes without Congress being informed.
I suspect just about every act of war we've been involved with since WW2, under Democratic or Republican presidents, is unconstitutional, but everyone looks the other way.
Federal law trumps state law. The auto manufactures could encrypt the computers and any attempt to crack it would be grounds for violating the DMCA (anti-circumvention portion).
Saying the have to *reveal* their diagnostic codes is entirely consistent with rules against circumvention. In fact, THAT'S THE POINT: allow users to repair their property without circumventing anything.
So there is no issue of Federal preemption here. It preempts private companies from doing certain things which would entice their customers to break Federal law.
Actually, it's more like the Pathetic Fallacy in which an inanimate or abstract thing is ascribed human thoughts and emotions:
fearing change is contrary to the genuine intent of capitalism.
"Capitalism" can have no intent, genuine or otherwise. It's just a category that describes economic systems that have evolved from people pursuing goals under certain conditions. The *people* in those have intent, but their intent isn't necessarily logically consistent with the things we admire about capitalism. For example, one of the good things about capitalism is the competition it forces, but companies spend a lot of time trying to avoid competition because it shaves their profit margins. Sometimes their approach is innovative (creating new products that do things nobody else has thought of). Other times their approach is anti-innovative (attempting to corner the market or erect barriers to entry in their markets).
David Brin, in his critique of Ayn Rand's writing makes the point that one of the oldest repeating patterns in human history are the barbarians who've grown lean and hungry on the outside overwhelming some decadent oligarchy grown fat and complacent through the safety entrenched power brings. Rand rightly admires the barbarians, but Brin thinks she ignores the next step in the pattern: the barbarians digging in and becoming exactly the kind of fat, complacent, change-killing aristocracy they displaced.
The only thing that's more foolish than ignoring the past is expecting the past to repeat itself. Circumstances matter. Differences in capabilities matter. Timing matters. Why did Apple succeed with tablets where Microsoft failed? All three.
You can find instances to support either end of this stick: companies who failed to get out of an eroding business in time, and those that neglected what they were good at and got lost in markets they weren't equipped to enter.
Armchair strategists like to spin scenarios from very superficial knowledge of the facts, and so manage to produce "strategies" that are at once fanciful, yet unimaginative, like futurists of the late 19th C who thought in a hundred years people would commute to their jobs in the city by airship. Real strategy requires brain-cracking gymnastics where you sweat the details while tying to keep hold of the big picture.
It seems to me that Samsung's strategic position is flexible. They're differentiating themselves on a software platform that is open. Their relationship to Google may sour after the Motorola deal, but they have the option of forking Android if need be. Meanwhile they're working on using software to differentiate their offerings from other hardware vendors, which positions them well to differentiate an Android fork or entirely new OS if that is in the cards. It won't be totally untested waters for them, they'll have valuable experience and maybe even customer loyalty if their offerings are good enough. But they don't *have* to burn their bridges yet (including customer access to Google's App marketplace).Dipping their toe into software gives them a stronger bargaining position with Google without forcing anyone's hand.
So it seems to me they've taken a reasonable position in a very competitive market. Where they should go from here, I don't know and can't know. It is possible even Samsung is not entirely sure if we're talking two or three years out -- they'd need a crystal ball to tell them what their competitors and current allies are going to do. It would probably be prudent for them to be doing contingency planning and some preparation for the Google relationship going sour, but to do so quietly.
Put us down for the Royal Dalton "Richard Burton" pattern, the Damascus steel steak knives, and the Mr. Felafel Shawarma rotisserie...
What do you mean, it's not *that* kind of registry?
Well, plenty of that old 24fps stuff looked good too -- even black and white.
I wouldn't assume that any 48fps movie necessarily looks better than any 24fps movie, or even that a given movie will necessarily look better in 48 than 24. I'm guessing that it will depend on whether the people lighting and shooting the 48fps know what they're doing. Yes there are bound to be use cases where 48fps is necessarily better, but overall I wouldn't underestimate the ability of incompetent people to shoot themselves in the foot with it.
I purchased the MP3 of the original cast recording of the Broadway musical "Hair", and was blown away by how good it sounds, and it was recorded in 1968. I don't think that's because of any vacuum tube pixie dust, I think it's because it was skillfully recorded and mixed by people who knew how to get the most out of the equipment they had. Singers came across particularly well, because the dynamic range of the recording gave them room to be expressive. CDs have a much wider dynamic range than vinyl, but that does not good if the engineers don't *use* it.
Bubonic plague has been endemic (sustaining itself permanently, in this case in the animal population) in the western part of the US for years, although it is news to public health officials when a human contracts it. There was a case two years ago, also in Oregon.
The reason it doesn't sweep the nation the way it swept Europe is advances in hygiene, public health and medical treatment. Rats and fleas in the house aren't unheard of these days, but they're no longer universal. If people are getting bit by fleas they'll call the exterminator or the board of health; they won't just accept it as a fact of life. If they contract plague they'll go to the doctor who will cure it relatively easily.
Why is it that Microsoft can't seem to do anything until some one else does it and it's usually Apple?
Corporate culture. Microsoft is famously a competitive environment, but from what I've read it's not companies like Apple that's the enemy, it's other projects at Microsoft that might siphon resources from yours. When an outside vendor introduces a successful product, nobody can say, "it'll never sell." When the product is *wildly* successful, like the iPad, it can even overcome "we tried that before and it doesn't work."
Maybe, maybe not.
The idea of a $100 master's degree is subversive, especially considering that a master's is the basic qualification to hold a professorship at a modern university. It attacks the one of the main roles that academic degrees have assumed in our society: being a certification of social class. If there's any doubt of that consider this: recent studies have shown that the average amount of time college students spend studying has dropped from 24 hours/week to 15. Some have put the current figure as low as 10-13 hours/week spent outside of class. Even engineering students spend a mere nineteen hours per week outside of class; today's *nerds* spend five fewer hours per week studying than the average student in their grandparent's generation.
This lack of rigor is reflected in how degrees are used after graduation. Most jobs that require a nonspecific bachelor's degree (i.e. not in an area like engineering) could be done by an intelligent and well-read high school graduate. Many jobs that require master's degrees could be done by a bachelor's degree holder in that field. It is difficult (although obviously not impossible) for someone who has to work to put bread on the table to obtain those kinds of credentials. So a bachelor's degree reflects having middle class parents more than it does intelligence, knowledge, or intellectual sophistication.
Now if you can get the actual education for $100, then there'd be no justification to withhold accreditation from a program like this. That would mean that *anybody* could get degrees to use as a credential provided they can do the work. That would completely undermine the higher education system in the country as it now stands. It might spell the end of widespread college education.
Well, magnetic core was pretty new back then. Choosing to go with mercury delay lines is the kind of choice you'd make as a designer because you were familiar with the technology and were confident it would do the job. Cambridge (UK) University's EDSAC was very similar to this Australian beast and successful computer that operated between 1949 and 1958; it's successor EDSAC 2 operated until the mid 60s. Despite being archaic in certain details (memory storage, logic circuitry) these were very architecturally sophisticated computers for their time.
I suspect planning for this computer went back several years before the actual construction, too. It may be that by the time they started building this thing they might have preferred core memory, but redesigning the memory system would have delayed the project for no particular benefit. They'd probably have to revisit the design of the whole system to make the change worthwhile.
Unrelated aside here. A sci-fi writer friend of mine asked for advice on how a steampunk automaton might store its program and data. I suggested the program be loaded by jacquard-style punchcards into a maze of tiny mercury delay tubes coupled with tuning forks and clockwork. I think mercury, being shiny and toxic, has a certain steampunk vibe.
the main system comprised nine steel cabinets containing 2000 valves that weighed over 7000kg
By my math that's about 14000 metric tons in valves alone. That's 80% of the displacement of the HMS Dreadnought, the first modern battleship.
As for still having access, I wouldn't know. That would require testing for it.
I've never been fired, but I have left jobs where I had access to sensitive information. What I did was write an distribute memo which listed everything I could think of that I needed to be locked out of, then sat down on my last day with the person who was supposed to do it and made sure it happened.
Protection is a two-way street. Not only does it protect my former employer from me, if anything happens after I leave it makes it less likely suspicion will fall on me. Besides that revenge is a juvenile act. It feels better to do the right thing and move on than to gloat over the power you wield over the people you left behind.
It would also mean a greater likelihood that Spokeo would take the case to court, and cause a lot more work and headaches for the investigators.
So? Investigating is what they get paid to do. They don't have to *enjoy* it.
The problem started again though. I was able to figure out that power management/suspend in linux was disabling the nic
Linux ACPI is pretty good in my experience. The kind of problem you're describing is often caused by glitchy ACPI data supplied by the manufacturer -- especially with crappy consumer-grade systems.
There's a structure in the firmware called a "Differentiated System Description Table", or DSDT. Why is it "differentiated"? Because it can return different information to different operating systems -- utter crap from an architectural standpoint, but there you go. This kind of problem happens when the manufacture pays careful attention to the data returned to Windows family operating systems, but leaves their non-windows entries incomplete or in an inconsistent state. This shouldn't be possible, but the Microsoft compiler for ASL (ACPI Source Language) lets you get away with it. Intel's compiler (I am told) makes you fix it.
The upshot is that even when a host operating system other than Windows implements ACPI *perfectly*, users may experience many ACPI related glitches. Your glitch is *classic*. I had similar problems with sound on Toshiba laptops, which went away entirely when I booted with ACPI off. Some ACPI related glitches don't appear to users to be power related (e.g., system reports the wrong number and type of hardware ports provided by the motherboard's sound card).
The solution varies. Sometimes you can use Linux boot parameters to spoof the hardware by claiming to be Windows instead of Linux. Other times you have to extract the DSDT, de-compile it, fix it, re-compile it, and have the Linux kernel load your fixed version -- although you'll have to repeat this every time you upgrade your kernel.
The simplest problem might be to get a different NIC other than the one provided by the manufacturer -- possibly a USB adapter.
Now as to who's fault this is, it's definitely the manufacturer. Unfortunately returning the computer isn't going to help because every computer of that model is going to have the same problem.
1/5 the price of CP/M 86.
And you don't think that access to sales channels and the ability to amortize development costs across more customers has anything to do with that?
No one was FORCED to buy Windows,
That's right. The CHOSE to buy windows, rather than pay for alternatives whose costs and inconvenience were artificially inflated by Microsoft's abuse of its monopoly powers.
This summary reads like a corporate soap opera.
This is very true. But it's true of conventional warfare too. The sixteen unarmed Afghani civilians killed by a an army solider (or soldiers) in March didn't do us much good either. But in the end that was not really any more preventable than the innocent people killed by drones either by mistake or as "collateral damage". Every army in history has had sick people in it, and we've made our soldiers so lethal that one bad (or sick) apple do untold damage.
That a drone attack antagonizes the populace doesn't distinguish it from conventional warfare or counter-insurgency, which also antagonize the populace. The unique aspect of drone strikes may ironically be the terror they inspire; that an attack can come at any time or any place and that there is nowhere safe.
The question of whether to rely on drones versus troops is not a morally simple one, or one that can be answered out of context. A drone campaign is worse for the terror it strikes in the innocent, but if ends a conflict quicker that may justify it (if a conflict isn't winnable it's immoral to keep fighting it). Other context specific factors are culture and politics. You can't argue about the relative morality of drone attacks vs. counter-insurgency without taking into account the probable results of each approach.
There are only two sure things you can conclude from recent US wars: it's a bad idea to get into a war where winning the hearts and minds of the enemy populace is a condition of success and if you do find yourself in such a war, get out of it as quickly as possible.
Well, I just gave up and got an external keyboard and folding laptop stand. This is not only more ergonomic, it has the advantage of extending the lifetime of my laptops. I write so much the keys fall off. My palms even wear through the finish of the palm rests. Who knew that the plastic under the black Thinkpad finish was blue-green?
Some people are sickened by the thousands of hours of perfectly good broadcast time that are wasted on the hyenas in question each week.
To quote Harry Shearer, whose Le Show followed Car Talk at the time, "Memo to the Car Talk guys: Stop Laughing."
I recently went over some Burns and Allen Show scripts, and discovered something very interesting: most of the jokes aren't that funny on the page, even though the shows are hilarious when you watch them. The strongest material is at the start and end of the routine, the stuff in the middle is usually just mildly amusing at best. It's all about timing. Not only could they do mediocre material in a way that made it funnier than it really was, but they made shrewd use of it, using it to keep the ball rolling once they'd got you laughing. If you flipped past the sketch and caught one or two gags in the middle, you'd wonder what all the fuss was about.
In any case there are different kinds of humor, and "Car Talk" just doesn't happen to be Shearer's kind of humor; it's not *comedy*, nor is it *satire*. It's a couple of guys having a good time poking fun at themselves. Shearer is a funny guy, but I suspect the idea of not taking yourself seriously might hit a little close to home for him.
This guy has it right. Deadlines go both ways.
I once had a client where the project manager handling our contract often sat on deliveries for a month or more before looking at them -- and here I am with a three man development team dedicated to this project. Finally we fly down install the production software and train the users. A week later the project manager is fired and nobody looks at the system for over two years until a new manager starts to procure a system and realizes that his predecessor already paid for one. Word gets to the board of directors, and then we get letter threatening.to sue us for not delivering the system.We have no way of proving to them that we flew a team down there and actually did the installation and training, because everybody we trained had subsequently left the organization. But we had the bills we submitted that were paid by the client, which is at least prima facie evidence we did the work.
Now we had the source in our source code control system, but so much time had gone by that just getting all the stuff together needed to build and package the system would have been a pain (this is why you should be using maven, folks, which we weren't at the time). And there is no doubt the system was probably so riddled with bugs that getting it working would have taken much, much more work, but the client made it impossible for us to deliver a quality product. The project manager accepted deliveries with only cursory examination, and so late that it forced us to work on this product intermittently, dropping it and picking it up weeks later.
The lesson is build client responsibilities and support limitations into the contract.
Standing behind your work doesn't mean delivering unlimited support. It means delivering more than you promised. That starts by setting clear limits and conditions on what you are promising.
Well, what do you expect?
Most of the time the first steps in learning anything practical aren't particularly interesting. If you were forced to take a sailing class that was limited to learning how to tie a couple of knots and name the parts of a sailboat, you probably wouldn't look back on your "sailing education" as the high point of your school years.
Now take high school chemistry lab, which is typically the dullest lab experience most students will ever have. But gaining the advanced chemistry lab skills to synthesize interesting stuff or do useful analyses would be an entirely different kind of experience..
Making rockets is one of those things that sounds like it's the answer, but in truth schools *do* a lot of that stuff these days, particularly elementary schools. What they don't do is take activities like that to the point they become intellectually and creatively challenging.
When they do really important and secret things, you can guarantee that we never even know it happened at all.
I dunno about that reasoning. If it went up for a single *day*, you'd be able to rule out some things, but since it was up there for a full year, it could have been up to *anything* that could be accomplished in that time window. For all we know it might have been put up there for an entire year just for one day's work, the nature of which would have been more effectively hidden this way than if they'd attempted a secret launch.
Personally, I buy that it is a technology demonstrator, but this kind of long mission is one that has lots of military applications, some of which would be highly unpopular with people outside the US. The US military already uses drones, and they understand the value of loitering time. The technical boundary between the atmosphere and space is where the transition from travel dominated by aerodynamic forces to travel dominated by momentum. 100km is roughly where the speed needed to maintain altitude by lift exceeds orbital velocity. In other words a spaceplane has nearly unlimited loiter time because it just stays up there without requiring a continuous expenditure of energy.
They could re-enter something like this anywhere on the Earth within a day or so. If you had a dozen of spaceplanes like this loitering in low Earth orbit, you could put a drone anywhere you wanted in a matter of hours. I wonder whether there is anything a spaceplane could do better than something simpler and cheaper that doesn't involve that capability.
Looking at TFA, it looks to me like it makes some dubious extrapolations. I think it's highly questionable to conflate intelligence with creativity, or creativity with mental fecundity, although these phenomena clearly must be related. For example:
Studies on word associations that ask participants to list all the words that come to mind in relation to a stimulus word like "tulip" found that bipolar patients experiencing mild mania can generate three times as many word associations in the same amount of time as the general population.
This result may be true, but you can't measure creativity this way. Creativity is generating novel and *appropriate* responses to challenges. You can't look at mere mental fecundity because creativity also involves discrimination between novel and better approaches from novel and worse.
On the other hand, I think your response has the same problems. You seem to presuppose that mania or the processes involved with schizophrenia are an entirely adulterants to normal mental functioning, and that you can extrapolate the way you can with, say, water in your brake fluid: a lot is bad, therefore a little can't be helpful. It's quite possible that many forms of mental illness are simply distortions or imbalances of normal mental function, in which case some situations would be more like water in a cake batter: too much is bad, too little is bad also.
Delusions are wrong beliefs that are refractory, but without a crystal ball they're not so easy to distinguish in the moment from original ideas which currently contradict the preponderance of evidence. People who pursue unlikely ideas to the point where they alter the preponderance of evidence are intellectually productive, provided that they eventually abandon ideas that don't pan out. Should we say those people are *a little bit* delusional? I don't think so. They have a healthy ability to lend provisional belief to an idea that is not yet supported. The distinction between a provisional idea and a delusion is very clear at the extremes, but they shade together and the exact line between them probably depends on context.
The upshot, I think, is that this whole notion is too vague to be debated meaningfully. There is necessarily be a link between delusion and genius, because there's a link between delusion and normal mental functioning.