If you make the benefits of keeping jobs local less attractive (collective bargaining, a sharp increase in costs, threats of strike, etc), then you upset the balance, and in many cases force the decision to offshore the work.
That's why I stipulated industries where line jobs can't be moved overseas, at least as a starting point. Where line jobs can't be moved overseas, support jobs still can. It is then in the selfish interest of the support workers to unionize.
You make a number of good points.
My point is that its not so clearcut as a saying an IT union will automatically cause all the jobs to dry up and blow away, or that an IT union will automatically be able to keep jobs here. It depends on the industry, management, competition, and of course the union itself. Unions do do stupid things, just like management. The more stupid things that get done by the various parties, the more any kind of clever risk/benefit calculation is likely to go astray.
Of course what you say about IT work being mostly doable remotely is dependent upon what you mean. Support desk stuff, sure. But I see a bit of a danger in divesting yourself of your farm team. If I had my druthers, support workers would work right in the offices of their clients, and work their way up into more senior positions from there. It won't make much difference to things like installing Windows patches (although it might be less disruptive), but I think everybody in IT should do some support at some point in their careers, especially if they spend that career in one industry. Otherwise the work being done by the people you serve is an abstraction.
There is also some evidence that disease agents may confer a kind of symbiotic advantage on their hosts.
Hantavirus, for example, is relatively harmless rodent populations that harbor it. However it can be deadly to immunologically naive populations that might move in and displace them. So it is possible that infectious agents may help their hosts guard their ecological niche. We can see something of the opposite effect in the introduction of European diseases to North American populations living in what were more hygienic conditions.
The idea that alterations in insect populations and the geographic range of diseases may have played a role in a mass extinction event is a sobering one. Ecological disruption tends to cause geographically isolated infectious agents to spill out, especially in a world connected by global commerce. And we are in the middle of the mother of all ecological disruptions: global climate change.
Take Malaria, a constant presence in the tropics for as long as can be remembered. Malaria is special among vector transmitted diseases in that it does not have a significant animal reservoir: malaria pathogens specialize in one closely related group of species, say monkeys but not apes. So human malaria species specialize in humans, which potentially makes them eradicable.
This is important, because with climate change, the boundaries of Malaria carrying mosquitoes is shifting, not only away from the tropics, but to higher altitudes. Mexico city is in a malarial latitude; it is altitude of nearly 13,000 feet that keeps the Anopheles mosquito genus in check. Perturb the climate slightly, and the third largest metropolitan area in the world will provide over twenty million new hosts for Malaria protozoan. As a capital city, it has air links world wide.
I will give another example of how ecological disruption is tied to diseases. A friend of mine married into a family that lived on an island. Everyone in that family had contracted Lyme disease at some point in their life. The problem was the ecosystem needed a top-level predator, but humans had wiped out wolves over a century earlier. This disturbed the ecosystem, because without a top level predator, the only thing keeping the rodent population in check was how much food there was available, and disease. That disease spilled over into the human population.
Now a few decades ago, a small population of Western Coyotes swam out the island and established itself. They took down most of the deer herd, then turned to the rats, voles and other small mammals. Ticks have gone from being a plague of almost unimaginable proportions to being relatively rare. Imagine the amount of biomass in even a small coyote. Now imagine the ecosystem is using that biomass to generate ticks.
Of course, there aren't as many deer, and they make a hell of a racket at night, but on the plus side Lyme disease seems to have become much more rare. Attempts to eradicate the coyotes failed, because while they fill the wolf niche in the environment, they're much, much more adapted to living alongside humans. So overall, the coyotes have restored the disrupted ecology humans had "improved" by eliminating the wolves.
Well, if you think about what Norton antivirus is supposed to do, its pretty intrusive. Having never tried to do anything like that, I can't say whether it is good or bad, but surely a lot of the problem is trying to get the cow back in the barn rather than locking the barn door.
I've found ClamAV meets my needs completely, but I only ever had malware problems two or three times in years and years, with no protection at all. Other people seem to get infected every other week. I don't know how they do it.
Well, in most states, you don't need a union to deal with that. You need a state AG who doesn't have his head up his ass when it comes to enforcing work laws.
Of course you might live in a "right to work" state, a term that has darkly ironic undertones.
So we shouldn't unionize to prevent a trend that is already happening?
Set aside everything for a moment except naked self-interests (our employers do this all the time after all). Companies don't outsource overnight, the dip their toe in it. They also rely upon (and indeed demand) the cooperation of their employees in moving their jobs overseas. If you think you might want to say no to this, you'd better have a union.
The issue is not whether a union would increase the cost of IT -- well duh. It's about making the man give up a bit more after all. The question is whether the you hurt the man enough that he loses business to a man who has his team in Bangalore. The answer probably depends on the business your employer is in. Businesses like health care, or for that matter government, can only offshore line activities to a limited degree. Therefore if IT (a support activity) in these enterprises is unionized, it probably works against offshoring. If you work in the auto industry, it might be a different story.
Personally, if I had the time to justify an expense like this, I'd get SCUBA certified and buy one of those underwater scooter things. I'd have money left over to take some pretty awesome diving trips too.
Come to think of it, it's probably good for divers that these things are and will remain rare.
Re:What happens when the engine loses oxygen?
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Dolphin Inspired Mini-sub
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· Score: 4, Informative
My guess, reading between the lines and looking at the picture, is that the entire vessel is buoyant, and only stays submerged by moving forward and using its control surfaces to counteract its buoyancy. That would make this thing a "submarine" in the same way that a snorkeler is a "marine mammal": perhaps technically defensibly so, but not really what people mean. In any case, if that is true, then when the engine stalls, the vessel will simply float to the surface.
That's how I'd design something like this.
Making a "real" submarine takes a lot of engineering expertise. You can cheat any number of ways to make something sort of like a submarine. You can make a "wet" submarine, and avoid having to deal with a pressure hull. Unfortunately, that experience lacks something of the Captain Nemo drawing room atmosphere (namely the "atmospheric" part). Making a bouyant submarine that stays submerged using its control surfaces means you don't worry about ballast systems, and have a system that is intrinsically safer than one that requires pumping air and water around. But it means you can't go to deep, and you can't stop and admire the scenery.
I'm old enough to remember this kind of argument about assembler vs. compiled languages. Hand coded assembler will always be smaller, and for any given algorithm it will very likely be faster. When viewed as assembler it will always be more elegant.
From time to time one comes across an assembly language application (although it's a lot rarer these days) that is a tour de force, doing the essential tasks of its compiled competitors in a fraction of the space and often noticeably more snappily. But they aren't notable for the breadth of features they offer.
And that's what bloat is about. Bloat isn't about using resources; it's about devoting resources to ideas that seemed like a good idea at the time but which you don't have the time or ability to undo. Sometimes the feature doesn't exist yet, or abandoned, but still leaves its mark. The reason that large assembler programs tend to be lean isn't so much that humans produce tighter code than compilers, although they can. It's because people who code in assembler think very, very had about any feature before adding it. You'd get much the same results if people coded in a language like Brainfuck.
Any application benefits from skepticism about features, whatever it is coded in.
Now, if you think about what Google is trying to do with Chrome, launching a separate process for each tab makes sense; it is a legitimate use of resources. Each tab is, presumably, hosting a different application. You don't want them running in the same address space, anymore than you want traditional applications running in unprotected memory by cooperative multitasking. Yes, it takes more resources to do this, but I've heard much the same complaint about virtual memory and process preemption.
You don't want some random site's malware to get to close to the online banking application running in a different tab, so you've got to take steps. If you're coding was perfect, those steps probably would work pretty well, but running the online apps in different processes is a legitimate use of resources. You can try to protect pages from each other, manage resources such as processor time between them, but eventually you're coming very close to making the browser an operating system in itself.
In fact, for the purposes of Chrome, the browser is an operating system, or at least a layer in the whole operating system that hosts applications. By taking advantage of the underlying operating system's facilities, the browser doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it comes at a cost.
There isn't a universally right or wrong answer to how to architect something like this. When considered as a hypertext viewer, this kind of architecture is wasteful and bloated. When considered as facility to participate in multiple distributed processing applications, this kind of architecture isn't bloated. It consumes more resources, but to achieve an important goal.
I was thinking the same thing: epoxy isn't conductive enough. However, I wonder if it might no be possible to use a thin epoxy like coating and some kind of liquid coolant that could carry heat away from hot spots -- I'm thinking out loud here.
Of course, my experience is that in a properly cooled PC board, the least reliable components are connectors.
Well, I'm guessing they're just wanting to see what people will do. For that purpose, an already widely "pirated" film would be ideal.
The model of distributing the film on a USB key that serves as a DRM dongle is very curious. From a consumer point of view, this looks a lot like the way DVDs are supposed to work: the material is tied to the delivery vehicle. But -- you can also copy the movie to your hard disk, although it is still tied to the key. So, it's kind of an answer to iTunes, where you have a master key to your entire collection.
The USB format allows you to do kinds of cryptographic protections you couldn't do in a DVD. If the system requires Vista style DRM protections in the OS, then cracking the protection would be considerably harder as long as you can't just copy the file onto a hard disk. Allowing the user to copy the file to disk makes this a very interesting test. Clearly, this means that crackers will be able to put the entire DRM protocol under a microscope.
Maybe this is even what is intended.
There are a number of possible outcomes, all of which are interesting to a company that is evaluating a technology:
(1) The play from USB option is proven insecure.
(2) The play from disk option is proven insecure.
(3) One of [1,2], but not both.
(4) Both of [1,2], but sufficiently inconvenient to deter casual infringers.
In optics, you get to the point where further "perfection" doesn't give you any pratical benefit. That is being "diffraction limited". Diffraction limited optics are for practical purposes as "perfect" as you can get.
For a telescope operating through the Earth's atmosphere, you run out of marginal advantage before you reach diffraction limitation. Therefore for such a system, unless special techniques such as adaptive optics are used, practical "perfection" is considerably lower.
I don't know much about the LSST, except that it is a fast (short focal length relative to aperture) optical system. Such systems are much more difficult to get right. Long focal lengths are much more forgiving. Therefore to reach practical perfection in such an aggressive design is quite an achievement. Of course, we aren't there yet. There's three absolutely huge surfaces to grind to very price specifications. But simply casting a blank this size is a huge technical challenge. The amount of heat energy in twenty six tons of molten glass is mind-boggling. Getting it cast into a shape that can be ground and polished into an optical mirror is an engineering tour de force in itself.
Well we all know about the astronomy/telescope quote, and it's true up to a limit.
However, a better analogy would be optics to telescope making. Even that is not perfect. I think we may find interesting insights into fundamental physics coming from the study of quantum computing. It's possible that computation might become a model of how we look at theoretical physics. Still, the optics/telescope analogy is serviceable.
Optics is a broad science with many fields of applicability, one of which includes the engineering of optical instruments such as microscopes and telescopes. Every paper published in an optics journal needn't be applicable to telescope making. But designers of telescopes need to have a substantial and current knowledge of optics, unless they wish to confine themselves to reproducing the instruments of the past.
As an industry we need to start differentiating the people who need to know about N=NP? versus the people who are just "code monkeys". You don't need to be an EE to wire a house, an electrician's certificate is sufficient.
Well, I think anybody who is involved in coding should have a rough idea of what P=NP is about, to the degree that they understand that consensus of the vast majority of stupendously intelligent people working in the field of CS believe that P NP. NP problems come up very frequently, especially since the late 90s, where much of the new value created in computer engineering has come from developing new technologies for new business models. Think search engines, for example. Think vehicle routing.
A relative in the seafood industry described to me a system he saw for preparing salmon steaks and fillets. There is a queue of orders in the system, and a conveyor belt with a sequence of fish on it takes them through a laser scanner that creates a 3D model of the fish. High pressure water jets then slice the fish into cuts that fill the orders while attempting to minimize waste. The cuts are then automatically routed and assembled into orders, which are packed in ice and shipped to restaurants all over the region. Any restaurant within a couple of hundred miles can order fifty one pound salmon fillets first thing in the morning and have them show up at the door in time for dinner, and they'll all be almost exactly a pound or a tiny bit over.
Creating a system like this involves finding an approximation solution to a problem to which (it seems likely) we can readily reduce a number of NP-C or NP-hard problems, such as partition or bin packing. Not knowing this means you're probably going to end up way over your head. Even if you succeed in doing a practical approximation, you won't be able to quantify how reliable that approximation is.
Now, some people will say that systems like this aren't all that common, and they're right. But they've got cause and effect screwed up. They think that we don't have many people who understand the P=NP problem because these systems are rare. In fact, there are probably endless economically valuable problems that are as or more algorithmically difficult than this. Solutions to those economic problems are rare because there aren't many people who understand P=NP.
True, code monkeys are basically craft workers. They pretty much construct artifacts that consist of applying known solutions to common problems to a restricted class of problems. The analogy with electricians is apt. 90% of being a qualified electrician is learning to avoid originality. You don't make up your own wire coloring scheme, you don't try to invent a new way to wire a three way switch, you don't waste time figuring out if conduit is really needed if code demands it.
But the point of education is to open up the potential of students, isn't it? High school and college are about fundamental education. "Fundamental" doesn't mean easy or simplistic. It means something upon which the student can build. Trade based technology is almost the exact opposite of fundamental education. It has a distinct sell-by date, usually three or four years away. An education should last a lifetime.
Certification training is only one kind of education, and not particularly important for people who are five to eight years from entering the work force. Of course, computer science is a practical field, but knowing the underlying theory is kind of the point of pre-professional education.
Thinking back over my own history, I think the most important book I ever read was Kernighan and Pike's The Unix Programming Environment. This was a wonderful book, in that it was extremely practical, but at the same time introduced readers gently to things like lexical analysis and parsing. The world would be different if everybody who ever went overboard for XML had read that book. I also recommend K&R's The C Programming Language, even though it is not a theoretical book, simply because it is exceptionally well written and clear. Programming is a fundamental skill, and it's good to learn from clean, well thought out examples.
Perhaps, the shortest advice is anything with Brian Kernighan as an author. Software Tools by K & Plaugher was very influential in my thinking, although the whole "software tools movement" never took off the way its proponents hoped. I don't know what recent editions are like, but these books have practical examples that illustrate important ideas.
Other really good texts, although far to advanced for high school, would be Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, and Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Lieserson, Rivest and Stein.
In the end, I would look for books that have a practical syllabus (if you will) that illustrates important theoretical ideas. If students entered CS knowing how to write a fairly clean C program, if they knew how to write a simple grammar that could be parsed by recursive descent, if they could do a simple object oriented design (perhaps Mr. Bruce Eckels' books, which are available online for free would be good here), if they could write both simple filter programs as well as programs that run in a more nondeterministic style, they'd be ahead of where a lot of people coming out of CS programs are.
I have to say, this is a truly bizarre, possibly even paranoid fantasy. Ever since most people have caught up with the scientific consensus on global climate change, the remaining die hards have been working like hell to paint environmentalists as the boogeyman in every fantasy dystopia like this they spin. So it's not unusual to have "environmentalist" thrown into the litany of villains the way previous generations saw the dire hand of the Trialeralist Commision behind every misfortune, but for just plain weird, this takes the cake.
This assertion is contrary to all known, demonstrable fact. It is theoretically possible, I guess, that in some unknown future, some unknown force might turn environmentalists against rail. The situations as it stands now are this: the number of bona fide environmentalists who oppose rail improvements is approximately the number who think we ought to drive Hummers converted to run on baby harp seal blood.
There are no major environmental figures I know of that wouldn't be delighted if the US invested in upgrading its passenger and freight rail services. There are no mainline environmental groups that oppose moving more travel and freight to rail. I don't even know of any fringe groups against it.
Any environmental groups that oppose this are probably front organizations, like the anti-recycling groups that have names like "Citizens for a Clean Environment".
I think the reason has to do with using "testing" as a kind of back-door tariff.
The US industry would like to argue that testing has no scientifically demonstrable economic or human benefit. They may in fact, be right, although this is obviously self-serving.
The problem with the idea you are only adding marginal sales is that not only are you putting yourself in a weak position with respect to future trade negotiations with the country in question, other countries might reasonably point to that country and insist on the same treatment. This would give their local beef producers an economic edge since the imported beef would have to be tested, but domestic beef would not.
So, the idea is that the gross exports of beef would suffer because this could be a pretext for what amounts to a protective tariff.
Probably have done. Probably were anticipated by the companies to be going to do.
The thing about credit cards is that they have never been very secure. They just have a business model that can absorb a fairly substantial slice of fraud. True, the companies don't like fraud, and they take steps to reduce it, but they don't spend more than a dollar to save a dollar of fraud.
Having a fraud tolerant business model is way more important than having a fraud tolerant credit card. The only thing is that credit card marketing is based on getting consumers to rely on their cards, to trust the cards and the company behind them.
As far as going places you'd never have gone, meeting and talking to people you'd never have talked to, and seeing your message crash part, you must really be rooting for McCain, since his POW experience wins him that hands down.
McCain evidently thinks so. Y'know, cross in the sand and all.
Whether that experience is relevant to understanding the average American, I leave up to you.
It seems to me you've answered your own question. They might want to do something with user mods. The exclusive right to do something commercial with user mods is one of their assets under copyright law, but it isn't worth much if people are just going ahead and doing it without you. If you've ever been involved selling a company, you get through things that have real value fairly quickly, then you spend ten times the time haggling over things that might have value in some kind of radically different future universe.
It's really hard to make a profit with intellectual property, and that leads to an attitude of paranoia.
And very few software companies ever want to admit that bugs are a serious problem.
Overall, I think that an attitude of paranoia towards game modders is probably not justified in most cases, but even that's a far cry from saying that companies ought to help users tinker with their products.
Governor Palin is obviously accomplished individual, but there's no way you can compare being a point guard on a championship basketball team with being the student that Lawrence Tribe described as the the most impressive he'd seen in decades of teaching at Harvard Law School; or compare being an TV sports reporter to being a neighborhood activist, or being runner up for Miss Alaska to being a professor of fricken Constitutional Law at University of Chicago.
This is not to belittle Governor Palin's personal accomplishments which are certainly "above average".
I watched Obama through the primaries and I was impressed. He consistently figured out what he needed to do and went out and did it, no fuss, no excess. Hillary was a tough opponent. I remember hearing some republican candidates boast about how they were looking forward to debating Hillary, and thinking that's like saying you'd like to climb into the ring and go a few rounds with George Foreman in his prime. And to tell you the truth, I think Hillary won the debates on points. But Obama always did what he had to do. If something didn't work, he figured out why and he fixed it.
Lawrence Tribe was onto something. Obama is probably the most gifted politician I have seen in an adult life of watching politicians. Maybe Reagan might be on par with him. And while I didn't agree with Reagan, I recognized he was an incredible politician, underestimated even by people on his side. And, by the way, Obama has more experience than Reagan did.
Yes, and President Bush is in charge of defending the nation, but nobody expects him to spend his time riding in a humvee on the mean streets of Iraq, whatever they think of the war.
This is the sort of case where a governor might step in, except that the trooper in question was romantically involved with a woman who was involved in a divorce from one of the governor's husband's best friends.
That's where you recuse yourself and let the people you hire do their job. And that's what Governor Palin says she did. And if it's true, then this is all just a pile of baloney. On the other hand, there seem to be a number of people involved in this affair that remember both the governor and her husband taking a direct hand in this affair.
Under the circumstances, that would be extremely improper.
It appears that the trooper in question was disciplined for the taser incident and several other disciplinary problems. In my opinion, the disciplinary action was too light. However, it is certainly not the norm for the governor's husband to get involved in this sort of thing.
We'll see. I frankly don't see the need to gild the lily when it comes to this particular political windfall to the Democrats.
I actually sat out of a lot of political discussions during the Obama-Hillary fight. I thought each candidate had his or her points, but on balance Obama understood the need to frame the issues better, and he ran an impressively disciplined campaign.
This made me Evil to the Hillary supporters. On the other hand I refused to return the favor made me Evil to Obama supporters. So I said, fine, I've cast my primary vote, now I'm just going to check out of this discussion until one or the other concedes.
I think the breaking point came when I called Hillary the "Wicked Witch of Chappaqua", and nobody on either side of the argument acted as if they recognized this was supposed to be ironic.
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That's why I stipulated industries where line jobs can't be moved overseas, at least as a starting point. Where line jobs can't be moved overseas, support jobs still can. It is then in the selfish interest of the support workers to unionize.
You make a number of good points.
My point is that its not so clearcut as a saying an IT union will automatically cause all the jobs to dry up and blow away, or that an IT union will automatically be able to keep jobs here. It depends on the industry, management, competition, and of course the union itself. Unions do do stupid things, just like management. The more stupid things that get done by the various parties, the more any kind of clever risk/benefit calculation is likely to go astray.
Of course what you say about IT work being mostly doable remotely is dependent upon what you mean. Support desk stuff, sure. But I see a bit of a danger in divesting yourself of your farm team. If I had my druthers, support workers would work right in the offices of their clients, and work their way up into more senior positions from there. It won't make much difference to things like installing Windows patches (although it might be less disruptive), but I think everybody in IT should do some support at some point in their careers, especially if they spend that career in one industry. Otherwise the work being done by the people you serve is an abstraction.
My bad.
There is also some evidence that disease agents may confer a kind of symbiotic advantage on their hosts.
Hantavirus, for example, is relatively harmless rodent populations that harbor it. However it can be deadly to immunologically naive populations that might move in and displace them. So it is possible that infectious agents may help their hosts guard their ecological niche. We can see something of the opposite effect in the introduction of European diseases to North American populations living in what were more hygienic conditions.
The idea that alterations in insect populations and the geographic range of diseases may have played a role in a mass extinction event is a sobering one. Ecological disruption tends to cause geographically isolated infectious agents to spill out, especially in a world connected by global commerce. And we are in the middle of the mother of all ecological disruptions: global climate change.
Take Malaria, a constant presence in the tropics for as long as can be remembered. Malaria is special among vector transmitted diseases in that it does not have a significant animal reservoir: malaria pathogens specialize in one closely related group of species, say monkeys but not apes. So human malaria species specialize in humans, which potentially makes them eradicable.
This is important, because with climate change, the boundaries of Malaria carrying mosquitoes is shifting, not only away from the tropics, but to higher altitudes. Mexico city is in a malarial latitude; it is altitude of nearly 13,000 feet that keeps the Anopheles mosquito genus in check. Perturb the climate slightly, and the third largest metropolitan area in the world will provide over twenty million new hosts for Malaria protozoan. As a capital city, it has air links world wide.
I will give another example of how ecological disruption is tied to diseases. A friend of mine married into a family that lived on an island. Everyone in that family had contracted Lyme disease at some point in their life. The problem was the ecosystem needed a top-level predator, but humans had wiped out wolves over a century earlier. This disturbed the ecosystem, because without a top level predator, the only thing keeping the rodent population in check was how much food there was available, and disease. That disease spilled over into the human population.
Now a few decades ago, a small population of Western Coyotes swam out the island and established itself. They took down most of the deer herd, then turned to the rats, voles and other small mammals. Ticks have gone from being a plague of almost unimaginable proportions to being relatively rare. Imagine the amount of biomass in even a small coyote. Now imagine the ecosystem is using that biomass to generate ticks.
Of course, there aren't as many deer, and they make a hell of a racket at night, but on the plus side Lyme disease seems to have become much more rare. Attempts to eradicate the coyotes failed, because while they fill the wolf niche in the environment, they're much, much more adapted to living alongside humans. So overall, the coyotes have restored the disrupted ecology humans had "improved" by eliminating the wolves.
Well, if you think about what Norton antivirus is supposed to do, its pretty intrusive. Having never tried to do anything like that, I can't say whether it is good or bad, but surely a lot of the problem is trying to get the cow back in the barn rather than locking the barn door.
I've found ClamAV meets my needs completely, but I only ever had malware problems two or three times in years and years, with no protection at all. Other people seem to get infected every other week. I don't know how they do it.
Well, in most states, you don't need a union to deal with that. You need a state AG who doesn't have his head up his ass when it comes to enforcing work laws.
Of course you might live in a "right to work" state, a term that has darkly ironic undertones.
So we shouldn't unionize to prevent a trend that is already happening?
Set aside everything for a moment except naked self-interests (our employers do this all the time after all). Companies don't outsource overnight, the dip their toe in it. They also rely upon (and indeed demand) the cooperation of their employees in moving their jobs overseas. If you think you might want to say no to this, you'd better have a union.
The issue is not whether a union would increase the cost of IT -- well duh. It's about making the man give up a bit more after all. The question is whether the you hurt the man enough that he loses business to a man who has his team in Bangalore. The answer probably depends on the business your employer is in. Businesses like health care, or for that matter government, can only offshore line activities to a limited degree. Therefore if IT (a support activity) in these enterprises is unionized, it probably works against offshoring. If you work in the auto industry, it might be a different story.
Personally, if I had the time to justify an expense like this, I'd get SCUBA certified and buy one of those underwater scooter things. I'd have money left over to take some pretty awesome diving trips too.
Come to think of it, it's probably good for divers that these things are and will remain rare.
My guess, reading between the lines and looking at the picture, is that the entire vessel is buoyant, and only stays submerged by moving forward and using its control surfaces to counteract its buoyancy. That would make this thing a "submarine" in the same way that a snorkeler is a "marine mammal": perhaps technically defensibly so, but not really what people mean. In any case, if that is true, then when the engine stalls, the vessel will simply float to the surface.
That's how I'd design something like this.
Making a "real" submarine takes a lot of engineering expertise. You can cheat any number of ways to make something sort of like a submarine. You can make a "wet" submarine, and avoid having to deal with a pressure hull. Unfortunately, that experience lacks something of the Captain Nemo drawing room atmosphere (namely the "atmospheric" part). Making a bouyant submarine that stays submerged using its control surfaces means you don't worry about ballast systems, and have a system that is intrinsically safer than one that requires pumping air and water around. But it means you can't go to deep, and you can't stop and admire the scenery.
are there to be used.
I'm old enough to remember this kind of argument about assembler vs. compiled languages. Hand coded assembler will always be smaller, and for any given algorithm it will very likely be faster. When viewed as assembler it will always be more elegant.
From time to time one comes across an assembly language application (although it's a lot rarer these days) that is a tour de force, doing the essential tasks of its compiled competitors in a fraction of the space and often noticeably more snappily. But they aren't notable for the breadth of features they offer.
And that's what bloat is about. Bloat isn't about using resources; it's about devoting resources to ideas that seemed like a good idea at the time but which you don't have the time or ability to undo. Sometimes the feature doesn't exist yet, or abandoned, but still leaves its mark. The reason that large assembler programs tend to be lean isn't so much that humans produce tighter code than compilers, although they can. It's because people who code in assembler think very, very had about any feature before adding it. You'd get much the same results if people coded in a language like Brainfuck.
Any application benefits from skepticism about features, whatever it is coded in.
Now, if you think about what Google is trying to do with Chrome, launching a separate process for each tab makes sense; it is a legitimate use of resources. Each tab is, presumably, hosting a different application. You don't want them running in the same address space, anymore than you want traditional applications running in unprotected memory by cooperative multitasking. Yes, it takes more resources to do this, but I've heard much the same complaint about virtual memory and process preemption.
You don't want some random site's malware to get to close to the online banking application running in a different tab, so you've got to take steps. If you're coding was perfect, those steps probably would work pretty well, but running the online apps in different processes is a legitimate use of resources. You can try to protect pages from each other, manage resources such as processor time between them, but eventually you're coming very close to making the browser an operating system in itself.
In fact, for the purposes of Chrome, the browser is an operating system, or at least a layer in the whole operating system that hosts applications. By taking advantage of the underlying operating system's facilities, the browser doesn't reinvent the wheel, but it comes at a cost.
There isn't a universally right or wrong answer to how to architect something like this. When considered as a hypertext viewer, this kind of architecture is wasteful and bloated. When considered as facility to participate in multiple distributed processing applications, this kind of architecture isn't bloated. It consumes more resources, but to achieve an important goal.
I was thinking the same thing: epoxy isn't conductive enough. However, I wonder if it might no be possible to use a thin epoxy like coating and some kind of liquid coolant that could carry heat away from hot spots -- I'm thinking out loud here.
Of course, my experience is that in a properly cooled PC board, the least reliable components are connectors.
Well, I'm guessing they're just wanting to see what people will do. For that purpose, an already widely "pirated" film would be ideal.
The model of distributing the film on a USB key that serves as a DRM dongle is very curious. From a consumer point of view, this looks a lot like the way DVDs are supposed to work: the material is tied to the delivery vehicle. But -- you can also copy the movie to your hard disk, although it is still tied to the key. So, it's kind of an answer to iTunes, where you have a master key to your entire collection.
The USB format allows you to do kinds of cryptographic protections you couldn't do in a DVD. If the system requires Vista style DRM protections in the OS, then cracking the protection would be considerably harder as long as you can't just copy the file onto a hard disk. Allowing the user to copy the file to disk makes this a very interesting test. Clearly, this means that crackers will be able to put the entire DRM protocol under a microscope.
Maybe this is even what is intended.
There are a number of possible outcomes, all of which are interesting to a company that is evaluating a technology:
(1) The play from USB option is proven insecure.
(2) The play from disk option is proven insecure.
(3) One of [1,2], but not both.
(4) Both of [1,2], but sufficiently inconvenient to deter casual infringers.
etc.
In optics, you get to the point where further "perfection" doesn't give you any pratical benefit. That is being "diffraction limited". Diffraction limited optics are for practical purposes as "perfect" as you can get.
For a telescope operating through the Earth's atmosphere, you run out of marginal advantage before you reach diffraction limitation. Therefore for such a system, unless special techniques such as adaptive optics are used, practical "perfection" is considerably lower.
I don't know much about the LSST, except that it is a fast (short focal length relative to aperture) optical system. Such systems are much more difficult to get right. Long focal lengths are much more forgiving. Therefore to reach practical perfection in such an aggressive design is quite an achievement. Of course, we aren't there yet. There's three absolutely huge surfaces to grind to very price specifications. But simply casting a blank this size is a huge technical challenge. The amount of heat energy in twenty six tons of molten glass is mind-boggling. Getting it cast into a shape that can be ground and polished into an optical mirror is an engineering tour de force in itself.
Well we all know about the astronomy/telescope quote, and it's true up to a limit.
However, a better analogy would be optics to telescope making. Even that is not perfect. I think we may find interesting insights into fundamental physics coming from the study of quantum computing. It's possible that computation might become a model of how we look at theoretical physics. Still, the optics/telescope analogy is serviceable.
Optics is a broad science with many fields of applicability, one of which includes the engineering of optical instruments such as microscopes and telescopes. Every paper published in an optics journal needn't be applicable to telescope making. But designers of telescopes need to have a substantial and current knowledge of optics, unless they wish to confine themselves to reproducing the instruments of the past.
Well, I think anybody who is involved in coding should have a rough idea of what P=NP is about, to the degree that they understand that consensus of the vast majority of stupendously intelligent people working in the field of CS believe that P NP. NP problems come up very frequently, especially since the late 90s, where much of the new value created in computer engineering has come from developing new technologies for new business models. Think search engines, for example. Think vehicle routing.
A relative in the seafood industry described to me a system he saw for preparing salmon steaks and fillets. There is a queue of orders in the system, and a conveyor belt with a sequence of fish on it takes them through a laser scanner that creates a 3D model of the fish. High pressure water jets then slice the fish into cuts that fill the orders while attempting to minimize waste. The cuts are then automatically routed and assembled into orders, which are packed in ice and shipped to restaurants all over the region. Any restaurant within a couple of hundred miles can order fifty one pound salmon fillets first thing in the morning and have them show up at the door in time for dinner, and they'll all be almost exactly a pound or a tiny bit over.
Creating a system like this involves finding an approximation solution to a problem to which (it seems likely) we can readily reduce a number of NP-C or NP-hard problems, such as partition or bin packing. Not knowing this means you're probably going to end up way over your head. Even if you succeed in doing a practical approximation, you won't be able to quantify how reliable that approximation is.
Now, some people will say that systems like this aren't all that common, and they're right. But they've got cause and effect screwed up. They think that we don't have many people who understand the P=NP problem because these systems are rare. In fact, there are probably endless economically valuable problems that are as or more algorithmically difficult than this. Solutions to those economic problems are rare because there aren't many people who understand P=NP.
True, code monkeys are basically craft workers. They pretty much construct artifacts that consist of applying known solutions to common problems to a restricted class of problems. The analogy with electricians is apt. 90% of being a qualified electrician is learning to avoid originality. You don't make up your own wire coloring scheme, you don't try to invent a new way to wire a three way switch, you don't waste time figuring out if conduit is really needed if code demands it.
But the point of education is to open up the potential of students, isn't it? High school and college are about fundamental education. "Fundamental" doesn't mean easy or simplistic. It means something upon which the student can build. Trade based technology is almost the exact opposite of fundamental education. It has a distinct sell-by date, usually three or four years away. An education should last a lifetime.
goals.
Certification training is only one kind of education, and not particularly important for people who are five to eight years from entering the work force. Of course, computer science is a practical field, but knowing the underlying theory is kind of the point of pre-professional education.
Thinking back over my own history, I think the most important book I ever read was Kernighan and Pike's The Unix Programming Environment. This was a wonderful book, in that it was extremely practical, but at the same time introduced readers gently to things like lexical analysis and parsing. The world would be different if everybody who ever went overboard for XML had read that book. I also recommend K&R's The C Programming Language, even though it is not a theoretical book, simply because it is exceptionally well written and clear. Programming is a fundamental skill, and it's good to learn from clean, well thought out examples.
Perhaps, the shortest advice is anything with Brian Kernighan as an author. Software Tools by K & Plaugher was very influential in my thinking, although the whole "software tools movement" never took off the way its proponents hoped. I don't know what recent editions are like, but these books have practical examples that illustrate important ideas.
Other really good texts, although far to advanced for high school, would be Applied Cryptography by Bruce Schneier, and Introduction to Algorithms by Cormen, Lieserson, Rivest and Stein.
In the end, I would look for books that have a practical syllabus (if you will) that illustrates important theoretical ideas. If students entered CS knowing how to write a fairly clean C program, if they knew how to write a simple grammar that could be parsed by recursive descent, if they could do a simple object oriented design (perhaps Mr. Bruce Eckels' books, which are available online for free would be good here), if they could write both simple filter programs as well as programs that run in a more nondeterministic style, they'd be ahead of where a lot of people coming out of CS programs are.
Environmentalists blocking rail improvements? +5 insightful?
I have to say, this is a truly bizarre, possibly even paranoid fantasy. Ever since most people have caught up with the scientific consensus on global climate change, the remaining die hards have been working like hell to paint environmentalists as the boogeyman in every fantasy dystopia like this they spin. So it's not unusual to have "environmentalist" thrown into the litany of villains the way previous generations saw the dire hand of the Trialeralist Commision behind every misfortune, but for just plain weird, this takes the cake.
This assertion is contrary to all known, demonstrable fact. It is theoretically possible, I guess, that in some unknown future, some unknown force might turn environmentalists against rail. The situations as it stands now are this: the number of bona fide environmentalists who oppose rail improvements is approximately the number who think we ought to drive Hummers converted to run on baby harp seal blood.
There are no major environmental figures I know of that wouldn't be delighted if the US invested in upgrading its passenger and freight rail services. There are no mainline environmental groups that oppose moving more travel and freight to rail. I don't even know of any fringe groups against it.
Any environmental groups that oppose this are probably front organizations, like the anti-recycling groups that have names like "Citizens for a Clean Environment".
I think the reason has to do with using "testing" as a kind of back-door tariff.
The US industry would like to argue that testing has no scientifically demonstrable economic or human benefit. They may in fact, be right, although this is obviously self-serving.
The problem with the idea you are only adding marginal sales is that not only are you putting yourself in a weak position with respect to future trade negotiations with the country in question, other countries might reasonably point to that country and insist on the same treatment. This would give their local beef producers an economic edge since the imported beef would have to be tested, but domestic beef would not.
So, the idea is that the gross exports of beef would suffer because this could be a pretext for what amounts to a protective tariff.
Probably have done. Probably were anticipated by the companies to be going to do.
The thing about credit cards is that they have never been very secure. They just have a business model that can absorb a fairly substantial slice of fraud. True, the companies don't like fraud, and they take steps to reduce it, but they don't spend more than a dollar to save a dollar of fraud.
Having a fraud tolerant business model is way more important than having a fraud tolerant credit card. The only thing is that credit card marketing is based on getting consumers to rely on their cards, to trust the cards and the company behind them.
Extrapolate forward the possible effects of medical science drastically extending human lifespan...
McCain evidently thinks so. Y'know, cross in the sand and all.
Whether that experience is relevant to understanding the average American, I leave up to you.
I honestly don't know how anyone could think he's realistically innocent.
You must be new around here. Earth, I mean.
It seems to me you've answered your own question. They might want to do something with user mods. The exclusive right to do something commercial with user mods is one of their assets under copyright law, but it isn't worth much if people are just going ahead and doing it without you. If you've ever been involved selling a company, you get through things that have real value fairly quickly, then you spend ten times the time haggling over things that might have value in some kind of radically different future universe.
It's really hard to make a profit with intellectual property, and that leads to an attitude of paranoia.
And very few software companies ever want to admit that bugs are a serious problem.
Overall, I think that an attitude of paranoia towards game modders is probably not justified in most cases, but even that's a far cry from saying that companies ought to help users tinker with their products.
Oh, no, they absolutely can and are doing it.
Governor Palin is obviously accomplished individual, but there's no way you can compare being a point guard on a championship basketball team with being the student that Lawrence Tribe described as the the most impressive he'd seen in decades of teaching at Harvard Law School; or compare being an TV sports reporter to being a neighborhood activist, or being runner up for Miss Alaska to being a professor of fricken Constitutional Law at University of Chicago.
This is not to belittle Governor Palin's personal accomplishments which are certainly "above average".
I watched Obama through the primaries and I was impressed. He consistently figured out what he needed to do and went out and did it, no fuss, no excess. Hillary was a tough opponent. I remember hearing some republican candidates boast about how they were looking forward to debating Hillary, and thinking that's like saying you'd like to climb into the ring and go a few rounds with George Foreman in his prime. And to tell you the truth, I think Hillary won the debates on points. But Obama always did what he had to do. If something didn't work, he figured out why and he fixed it.
Lawrence Tribe was onto something. Obama is probably the most gifted politician I have seen in an adult life of watching politicians. Maybe Reagan might be on par with him. And while I didn't agree with Reagan, I recognized he was an incredible politician, underestimated even by people on his side. And, by the way, Obama has more experience than Reagan did.
She is also against contraception!! Not just abortion, but F*'n contraception!
Ummm. What other sort of contraception does anybody need?
Yes, and President Bush is in charge of defending the nation, but nobody expects him to spend his time riding in a humvee on the mean streets of Iraq, whatever they think of the war.
This is the sort of case where a governor might step in, except that the trooper in question was romantically involved with a woman who was involved in a divorce from one of the governor's husband's best friends.
That's where you recuse yourself and let the people you hire do their job. And that's what Governor Palin says she did. And if it's true, then this is all just a pile of baloney. On the other hand, there seem to be a number of people involved in this affair that remember both the governor and her husband taking a direct hand in this affair.
Under the circumstances, that would be extremely improper.
It appears that the trooper in question was disciplined for the taser incident and several other disciplinary problems. In my opinion, the disciplinary action was too light. However, it is certainly not the norm for the governor's husband to get involved in this sort of thing.
We'll see. I frankly don't see the need to gild the lily when it comes to this particular political windfall to the Democrats.
I actually sat out of a lot of political discussions during the Obama-Hillary fight. I thought each candidate had his or her points, but on balance Obama understood the need to frame the issues better, and he ran an impressively disciplined campaign.
This made me Evil to the Hillary supporters. On the other hand I refused to return the favor made me Evil to Obama supporters. So I said, fine, I've cast my primary vote, now I'm just going to check out of this discussion until one or the other concedes.
I think the breaking point came when I called Hillary the "Wicked Witch of Chappaqua", and nobody on either side of the argument acted as if they recognized this was supposed to be ironic.