I have to admit, it's a pretty impressive demonstration.
Note, though, that the suit is tethered to a practically endless supply of power. That is why I think these things will not be practical in combat in most of our lifetimes. Muscle power is limited, but incredibly efficient. A solider can carry enough energy on him to keep him at peak performance for days.
Any practical untethered system would only be usable for a very short time, or it would be designed around the need to carry a massive power source. I can imagine specialized uses for a suit that worked for ten or fifteen minutes though, although higher endurance ROVs could perform many of the same functions.
If the armor is "fully protective", why couldn't that soldier be in a VR simulator that can tilt and rotate and provide force feedback? And the delay created by a thousand kilometers distance is nothing compared to the delay created by the servos responding to his inputs.
I'm just playing devil's advocate here. The kind of armor we're talking about is probably decades in the future. However ROVs are here today, albeit in crude form. I'm betting that ROV technology and strategies for using it will mature far before anything like combat ready power suits become practical.
Well, sure. The robots could be jammed, just like your guys can be killed by a massive fuel air-bomb or a biowarfare agent. It's the same concern, but the costs are different.
The ROV operators can try even harder than the power armored soliders to avoid capture. They can afford to "die".
I'm not suggesting for an instant that ROVs replace live soldiers. I'm saying that the technology to provide practical powered armor to troops could also create highly effective ROVs. It may be that the best choice would be a force with a mix of conventional, power-armored and ROV forces.
On the other hand, it might also be that such a force wouldn't be much if any better than a mix of conventional troops and ROV units. Certainly it would cost more, and at some point that becomes a limiting factor in providing the best equipment.
Sure, but don't higher power weapons translate into more rounds fired or higher kinetic energy per round? That's weight. I'm also suggesting that you probably can't add heavier armor without removing other things the soldier carries, or having the soldier's mobility restricted by the system. If he needs to move faster, he'd need to remove the added protection. If the system failed, even partially, he'd have to choose between mobility and protection.
Not that it wouldn't be cool to have power armored soldiers, of course. I'm just suggesting that maybe complicating the decisions a solider has to make in combat by making him dependent on a technology like this for mobility and protection might not be a good thing.
Either way you're running a robotic arm. There's nothing magical I can see about putting a person in a can attached to that arm, unless you can somehow manage to extend his proprioception into the arm. Doing this means that the arm must envelop the operator's arm, yet retain its approximate dimensions.
It seems to me that it's a lot more practical to use a VR setup; you could even scale the system to allow workers to assemble bridge girders like Legos.
As far as the fork lift is concerned, it doesn't have to be a wheeled vehicle. It can be a four legged walking contraption that would provide a more stable and safer platform from which larger forces could be applied.
That's a good point, but in many ways we're already down that road, IIRC. We rely on communication and coordination as a force multiplier. While breaking the force down into multiple autonomous units is more practical when those units are people, it's probably more strategically costly to have that happen to people who try to fight on at cross purposes than to robots who execute some kind of return to base failsafe.
Suits like this could increase productivity and decrease injuries in any hundred of industries that require workers to lift heavy loads.
Well, that may be the case, but I doubt that a suit would be an optimal design in any case. Why not a forklift with a well designed robotic arm, or some similar design that carries more lifting power for less complicated and energy intensive mobility?
Does the meat inside suddenly lose its decision making capabilities if it is, let us say, a few hundred meters away?
And so far as the human body's flexibility is concerned, that argument goes out the window once you encase that body in what is to all purposes a ROV, except that the operator is tucked into it like spam in a can. If the suit does not protect the wearer, I can only imagine it makes him less mobile and more vulnerable.
Remote control will probably never be quite as good as having a human brain inside guiding it.
Why not though? I'd like to see an airtight argument that practical powered armor is, net, more effective than an ROV. It's not that ROVs can, in the near future, replace soldiers, but in any case where you can imagine a suit like this being practical, surely an ROV would be more practical.
After all, soldier carry a lot of stuff, basically as much as physically possible without being a net impairment. The suit and its battery simply add to this, so surely such a suit would have to multiply the soldier's muscle power considerably. In that case, moving about is accomplished by muscles controlling actuators, and would, I'm guessing, be limited by that. So while I can imagine a scenario where a lightly but appropriately armed soldier outperforms either an ROV or suited soldier, I am doubtful that a suited soldier will outperform a solider running an ROV, especially considering the lower hazard the ROV operator encounters.
Now here's another possiblity. If a practical power suit is possible, why not issue every soldier a robotic mule to carry his stuff, or possibly even him?
Why a suit, instead of an armed, semi-autonomous ROV? Why spend weight (and thus battery) protecting the squishy bits inside, when those bits can back home at an army base working eight hour shifts and going home to their families?
I realize that troops have to carry an ungodly amount of gear, but by the time all the technical challenges of a truly battle-ready suit are met, surely putting a person in it would be a waste.
We appreciate your submission of a bug report for swfdec, and we have submitted it to the maintainers. However we are unable at this point to assign it "high" priority because it appears to be an interaction of a buggy ACPI BIOS with the Intel HDA audio codecs. We refer you to Toshiba for support details.
In the meantime, you may not be aware that the traditional SYSV "inittab" mechanism has been replaced in recent editions of Fedora with the newer "upstart" mechanism. Simply edit the "/etc/event.d/linus" file, specifying that under the appropriate runlevels you should be automatically respawned. This should effectively prevent you from being killed. At least permanently so.
The closest Chinese analog of the katana is the jian, which is usually translated as "long sword". It is by definition a double edged weapon, as distinct from a single edged weapon, which is referred to a a "knife" ("dao") regardless of length.
Of course there is no precise cultural parallel, since there has not been any period in Chinese cultural memory where martial authority has implied supreme social status. The jian is the personal weapon of the elite, not because it is an object of cultural veneration, but because it literally cuts both ways. Because of this, it is harder to wield than a dao without risking self-injury.
By contrast, the dao was the Kalashnikov of classical Chinese martial arts. It was an easy to manufacture, user-friendly weapon you could press into the hand of a recruit plucked off the farm, with the command, "go forth and kill." Not that some people can't manage to endanger themselves. A friend of mine witnessed a person who cut a new vent in a suit when he picked up an unfamiliar dao (which happened to be sharp) and did a little showing off.
What makes the jian the weapon of the elite is that its skillful use embodies the Chinese ideal of a superior individual: diligent study, balance, and restraint. Not that one cannot embody these qualities in the use of the dao, as the following legend relates.
Once there was a master of the dao, whose skill was supreme in his province. He never lost a duel, and soon his reputation grew so that none dared challenge him. He was, however, a rough and brutal man, and he enjoyed demonstrating his superiority over lesser swordsmen. So he sought out and killed anybody with any claim to skill with the dao at all.
One day, news came that a Shaolin monk, who was reputedly skilled in many weapons , was traveling in the province. The master sought the monk out and challenged him to a duel with the dao. They met at the appointed place, and each prepared to fight in his own manner. The master warmed up by showing off his amazing skill, a tactic that had never failed to strike fear in his opponents. The monk did not fail to notice that the master's skill with the dao was indeed far greater than his own. Still, he prepared for the fight as he prepared himself each day to do everyday things, spending a few moments disciplining his thoughts, banishing any considerations of pride in victory, shame of defeat, or fear of pain or death from his mind.
As the duel commenced, the master tested the monk's defenses with a flurry of vicious, but basic attacks. These the monk calmly parried and countered each attack as if he were giving a lesson to a student. The monk's equanimity unnerved the master, who suspected this was because the monk had some secret skill the master did not -- which indeed was the case, although not in the way the master suspected. "I must kill this monk quickly, or else he will use his secret on me and defeat me."
So the master launched his most elaborately vicious attack yet. Foremost in his mind was the vision of himself, victorious over the dead monk. Also unbidden in his mind was the vision of himself defeated and shamed. What was not in his mind were the basics of his art. And so the monk, despite his lesser skill, was able to defeat the master with the basics taught to every beginning student of the dao, although he forbore to kill the master. In an act of mercy, he cut off both the master's feet instead, putting an end to the master's dueling career.
This legend as it comes down to us, whatever its basis in historical fact, is uniquely Chinese. It explains why it is that, although the Chinese are fond of swords, and a sword is not an uncommonly wall decoration in a Chinese household, the they seldom venerate the sword as a symbol of status and authority. The sword is a tool of liberation, including liberation from the tyrannies of rashness, thoughtless aggression and ignorance.
That is the biggest heaping pile of crap I have ever read.
Perhaps you should make a habit of reading more then.
I am speaking of "rights" in a legal sense, not a philosophical one. The issue of rights "making" duties on others is a quibble; let's stipulate that rights "correspond to" duties others have.
Rights in a legal sense don't come from a piece of paper, but they can come from an agreement represented by that piece of paper. I don't have the right to walk over your land, but you and I agree that in return for a million dollars I am allowed to take a short cut from my back door across your yard, then that becomes a "right" that I posses, and you have a "duty" to respect. Later on I can sell that right back to you, a process that is called "alienation".
The "inalienable rights" of the Declaration of Independence are so called to distinguish them from rights that can be given away or sold. This distinction is important, because the assertion is that people can't give away their fundamental liberty, and any contract to that effect is void.
Well, sounds like the drive numbering somehow changes between boot and making the RAM file system for the boot. Supposedly specifying partitions by their volume UUID fixes this, since doing things like altering the device boot order in the BIOS renumbers drives.
It would be nice, though, if grub gave you the ability to load the prior version of menu.lst; it would save a lot of time.
The boot problem, of course is bigger than grub, especially when you are dealing with an OS that bend or change the rules, such as Vista.
Vista departs from the boot specfication used by OS's for the last couple of decades, in order to accommodate boot from larger physical partitions. Personally, while I understand the motiviation for this, I think having a separate boot partition is a better way of handling this. But there you have it. So if you take a Vista machine and alter the partition table to make room for Linux or XP, then you risk not being able to boot Vista any longer unless you do it with Vista's disk management tools.
Basically, it's risky to touch any partition tables that include a Vista boot partition with anything but Vista -- even XP can screw up the alignment. I've also heard reports of Vista altering Linux partition IDs, although the conditions under which that happens haven't been made clear to me. So imagine this scenario: you set up a dual boot of Vista and another OS (Linux or XP). This makes Vista unbootable. You try to fix it using some Vista tools and you end up inadvertently changing the Linux partition types; meanwhile your Vista partition remains unbootale. Result: unbootable system.
So, the newbie looks at this situation as follows: he was promised that installing Linux wouldn't mess up his Vista installation, and naturally the first thing he checks is whether he can get at his Vista data. On finding he can't, he takes reasonable steps to fix this, which fail. Then he figures, at least he has a working Linux installation, but he finds that no, he doesn't. Therefore he concludes: the Linux installation screwed everything up. His friendly (note irony) Linux community gives him a bunch of useless advice, until he hits on somebody who knows what's going on, who says, "Blah blah partition alignment blah blah master boot record blah blah blah." This seems to make sense to everybody else but him, so they give him up as a hopeless luser.
There's probably more than one way around this, but the one I settled on was to start from scratch, lay out the partitions I wanted in Vista, install Linux without installing grub, then using NeoGrub, a grub port that can be managed in Vista and works with the Vista boot loader so that you can boot Vista or a more standard OS like XP or Linux. The menu.lst reside in your NTFS partition.
You might never run into the dual boot issues that less lucky people have, and there are probably other ways of doing it, but this worked for me.
No search or seizure is reasonable unless determined by a court to derive from probable cause for the search or seizure.
That's not true at all. If the police are engaging in hot pursuit, they don't have to wait for a warrant to follow you (or anybody else) onto your property.
The health inspector or fire marshal doesn't need a warrant to inspect private property for code violations.
If there is active combat, say in a civil war, the army can enter your house without permission for combat purposes, either to seek combatants or to use it as a vantage point. This is one reason why Americans ought to be very concerned about blurring the definition of "combat" and "combatant".
The Fourth Amendment says that searches need only be "reasonable". It's presumptively unreasonable to search or seize in circumstances where a warrant is customarily required. However, if you can show that under the circumstances delaying to seek a warrant would be unreasonable, you don't need one, although you have to prove this, and may face challenges to evidence you introduce into criminal trials.
The flip side is that having a warrant issued on probable cause makes a search presumptively reasonable, but there are exceptions. If the warrant is not sufficiently narrowly tailored to the evidence supporting probable cause, or you exceed its specific limitations, then your search or seizure is unreasonable, warrant notwithstanding.
So, the Fourth Amendment is both stronger and weaker than people think it is. It is certainly not reasonable to play linguistic games to make a search appear "reasonable". Calling a person a "combatant" isn't enough to convert an unconstitutional search into a constitutional one, because it is the substance of the circumstances that matter. If you're shooting at people out of your window, it is the necessity of protecting people that makes entering your home, searching it, and detaining you reasonable, not the label the police apply to you.
Nope. Because campaign finance laws don't change the laws of economics, they just make money hard to get. Money is a commodity like any other; when it is scarce it's value becomes higher with respect to other commodities (say a Congressman's time). We just have a special name for money scarcity, we call it "deflation".
So, the net effect of campaign finance laws is to make buying Congressmen cheap, although the complexity of delivering that money legally presents a separate cost barrier to ordinary citizens. It's expensive to set up a lobbying firm, but the marginal cost of buying legislative influence is actually shamefully low, once you have the mechanisms in place to do it legally.
Anything they propose will not be binding and will not have the force of law.
Well,never forget that under the law, two plus two can equal five, for sufficiently large values of two or sufficiently small values of five.
Suppose you are an ISP that advertises its adherence to the P2P Bill of Rights. You entice customers to sign up under a TOS that includes the standard statement saying you can change TOS at any time. Then you decide to take away some of the rights listed in the P2P Bill of Rights, pointing to your TOS statement as proof you are entitled.
I'm not sure that works. A "right" after all is just the flip side of a duty. A right held by an individual consists of a set of duties borne by certain others with respect to him. You can't just unilaterally declare one of your duties towards somebody void. You can't change the TOS in a way that absolves you of the duty of providing service, but does not absolve the customer of the duty of paying you. That's unconscionable.
So, you'd have to say in your TOS that you have the right to declare the specific rights in the Bill of Rights to be void. Or you'd have to say in the Bill of Right that "rights" doesn't mean something the service providers are obligated to abide by. Otherwise, you've just enticed customers to sign on with you by deception.
I am not a lawyer, but surely this is at least one of those things lawyers are always telling you not to do, because even if you are certain to win if it ever comes to court you could not possibly hope to gain enough benefit to pay for the costs of fighting and winning.
I agree, theoretically the appeal of a device like this is that you can flip it open any time you need it, and riggity-jig-and-away-you-go.
On the other hand, how many people are buying this as a full time alternative to a full sized laptop?
I think we're still in the early adopter stage -- where most of the people who are buying it are just curious. Therefore it may be more important to meet certain psychological pricing benchmarks (e.g. it's closer to 300 Euros than 400) than it is to put a bigger battery in it. Then the people who find it seriously useful will buy a second battery, or a larger aftermarket battery.
Admit it; you've bought things on impulse for X dollars, then on impulse bought a Y dollar ugprade for those things, even though you probably wouldn't consider paying X + Y for the entire rig and it was just wishful thinking you didn't need the upgrade. That normal economic behavior for early adopters.
When the thing gets to the point where pragmatists are buying them, you can bet they'll sport much longer battery lives. Just the volumes they'll be buying parts in will bring the price down to stay "cheap".
Well, as a hiring manager I think you're philosophy of screening out candidates with degrees from liberal arts institutions is stupid, although stupidity is common enough that accommodating it is a vocational consideration.
I've supervised people with masters and even PhDs from engineering schools, and they don't really have practical experience unless they got it outside of school. At least nothing that was as useful as three or four years of actual work in the field. You've got the beat the precious habits of schoolboy programming out of somebody before they're fit for work. The "practical" experience you get in schools isn't worth spit in the real world, IMHO. It's just a start.
Ultimately, it is a solid grasp of theory I want graduates to have. An attitude that theory is just something they make you learn and what really matters it that you use Java in your courses because that's what is used in the real world -- well, that attitude is common enough, but it is a huge intellectual handicap. You might as well put "mediocrity" as one of your hiring criteria.
It's doubtful whether computer science is an engineering field. But if it is, it is a field in which imagination is unusually critical.
Once I had a tropical medicine researcher in my office, showing me this elaborate risk evaluation model he had constructed in the Stella -- a poplar modeling system with an easy to use GUI. He wanted to know if there were a way to package the model so it could be used for public health decision support.
"We need a freely redistributable system in which it's easy to do what this model does" he said.
I flipped through the pages of his model diagram for a minute, then said, "Easy. All this model accomplishes is to count true instances of these half dozen or so boolean parameters."
When I demonstrated this, he was flabbergasted. "How did you do that?" he asked.
"I don't know," I shrugged. "It's just what software engineers do."
When you get into the advanced portion of a CS program, it's really about understanding the deep ideas of CS, the ideas that even an extraordinarily brilliant engineer is unlikely to come up with on his own. Connecting practical problems to these ideas is one of the things that a first rate software engineer does. If he can do that, he can bang out acceptable Java programs, but the converse isn't necessarily true.
If you can get into a prestigious program it will make a big difference in your first couple of jobs, and it will probably continue to open doors for you over the rest of your career. On the other hand, after you've had a couple of jobs, your accomplishments should be opening doors for you.
You will probably learn more CS, just by osmosis, if you go to a top flight CS program. However, if you are really suited for a career that a CS degree prepares you for, it probably does not matter because you'll learn anyway. There may be educational opportunities at more balanced institutions that you come to appreciate later.
There are two, really important questions you have to ask, especially if you are choosing a school based on a CS program. First, are you absolutely certain that CS is what you want to pursue? It may not be what you expect. Choose an institution that will give you options for a second choice. Second, will you finish a degree in the institution you have chosen, whether or not it is a CS degree?
In the end, if you are planning a career that requires a CS degree, it's more important that you have a degree than a CS degree; it's more important that you have a CS degree at all than you have one from a prestigious program.
The vocational value of a CS degree from a prestigious program marginal, especially if you know how to write a good application letter and give a good interview. The educational value of a prestigious degree is marginal, if you have a talent and interest for the field. It's not that these things aren't useful, it's that they're mainly useful if you don't have personal qualities that would even the playing field if you went to a less prestigious place. The irony is that in the words of the song, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. And you will. And sometimes you can't make it there for reasons that have nothing to do with your talent.
In the end, the most important thing is that you get the degree. If you come from a family that doesn't have a lot of money or has some other kind of instability that means you don't have bottomless support for your education, it's probably a bad idea to go to an expensive program famous for its pressure cooker atmosphere.
Anybody can have a bad quarter (which is a bad year if the quarter is the last half of an academic quarter and the first half of the next). It could be an existential crisis, or it could be a physical health issue, or it can be an unexpected financial problem. If you don't have a family support cushion, and you don't have any financial slack, you can be screwed. Don't forget that sometimes institutions are more generous with freshman financial aid packages to attract the students they want.
I'm not discouraging your from applying or going to a prestigious program. I just want you to consider that the value of prestige has its limits, and that practical matters like cost can leave you in debt without any offsetting prestige. In the end the best advice is to choose a school you think you will be most happy at, and you'll get the most out of it. Don't sacrifice anything for prestige. Ultimately the only prestige that is worthwhile is the prestige you earn through your own distinctive accomplishments.
Well, the pragmatic solution is to keep people making the decision honest.
How?
Simple. If they turn out to be wrong, everybody involved in approving the waterboarding gets waterboarded. If it's an honest mistake, call it serving your country. If you aren't certain enough to risk it yourself, you aren't certain enough to risk it for somebody else.
Re:Skill and not language used?
on
The Return of Ada
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· Score: 4, Insightful
Not necessarily.
C is a good language if you (a) need a portable language but don't have another portable language to implement it with and (b) you need the language to be well designed enough for a team of competent programmers to tackle nearly any problem.
You can give a language more features that makes it easier to tackle certain problems, but it tends to undermine the portability goal. C is something like a portable assembler, only with the most critical abstractions for day to day programming provided. Once you get into more, you start to run into assumptions. Static or dynamic typing? It depends on your software engineering methodologies, particularly testing.
What C is emphatically not is idiot proof. Even worse, it is spectacularly not clever person proof. I dunno. I've never worked in Ada myself, but I suspect this might be some of its, er, attraction. It looks like a language in which it is not fun to be cleverer than you need to be.
I see nothing in the least wrong in language evolving. "Fear" at the time of the King James Bible meant "respect." "Contact" was once a pretentious affectation when used to mean "communicate with".
However, sloppy thinking and sloppy habits of writing often cover for each other; when you are accustomed to one you can easily fail to perceive the other. It's not that habits of reflexive and unthinking amplification ("literally", "obviously"), or dressing up arguments of distraction in the terms of logic ("ad hominem!") debase the language. It's that they confuse both the speaker and the listener.
Here the original poster seems to be using the term "beg the question" correctly. He was saying that the question of a technology's potential could not be addressed until the question of its implementation cost had been answered. Except this doesn't really make any sense. Naturally, the first question you want to ask is does this work at all? After that you can ask, can we afford to transition the current infrastructure over? I suppose it is not utterly illogical to ask the second question first, it's just pointless.
That's the obscuring power of habitual sloppy writing for you. It's perfectly valid to point out that just because the physics of something works doesn't mean it can work economically. However, the habit of speaking and thinking in pseudo-logic gets confusing, and somehow squeezing that valid point through a randomly chosen logical template transmutes a sound piece of economic reasoning into an unthinking prejudice against new ideas.
Re:Skill and not language used?
on
The Return of Ada
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· Score: 2, Interesting
I think there is something to be said for this idea. Not too much, mind you, but something.
Let's imagine a language so obscure and difficult, that 90% of working programmers cannot gain sufficient mastery of it to understand what it is saying at first glance. This sounds terrible, until you realize that every programmer at some time in his life has written code in "friendly" languages that 0% of programmers (including his future self) can understand. And maybe selecting a language that only the top 1% of programmers is capable of using might be a good thing for some projects.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can mandate thinking via language restrictions.
If you really, really wanted to improve the quality of thought in code, wouldn't mandate languages, you'd mandate editors that don't support cut and paste. Then instead of taking a piece of code that works more or less for one purpose, then hammering into the approximate shape you'd need for something else, sooner or later you'd be forced to abstract what was useful about it rather than banging it out over and over again.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to admit, it's a pretty impressive demonstration.
Note, though, that the suit is tethered to a practically endless supply of power. That is why I think these things will not be practical in combat in most of our lifetimes. Muscle power is limited, but incredibly efficient. A solider can carry enough energy on him to keep him at peak performance for days.
Any practical untethered system would only be usable for a very short time, or it would be designed around the need to carry a massive power source. I can imagine specialized uses for a suit that worked for ten or fifteen minutes though, although higher endurance ROVs could perform many of the same functions.
Why?
If the armor is "fully protective", why couldn't that soldier be in a VR simulator that can tilt and rotate and provide force feedback? And the delay created by a thousand kilometers distance is nothing compared to the delay created by the servos responding to his inputs.
I'm just playing devil's advocate here. The kind of armor we're talking about is probably decades in the future. However ROVs are here today, albeit in crude form. I'm betting that ROV technology and strategies for using it will mature far before anything like combat ready power suits become practical.
Well, sure. The robots could be jammed, just like your guys can be killed by a massive fuel air-bomb or a biowarfare agent. It's the same concern, but the costs are different.
The ROV operators can try even harder than the power armored soliders to avoid capture. They can afford to "die".
I'm not suggesting for an instant that ROVs replace live soldiers. I'm saying that the technology to provide practical powered armor to troops could also create highly effective ROVs. It may be that the best choice would be a force with a mix of conventional, power-armored and ROV forces.
On the other hand, it might also be that such a force wouldn't be much if any better than a mix of conventional troops and ROV units. Certainly it would cost more, and at some point that becomes a limiting factor in providing the best equipment.
Sure, but don't higher power weapons translate into more rounds fired or higher kinetic energy per round? That's weight. I'm also suggesting that you probably can't add heavier armor without removing other things the soldier carries, or having the soldier's mobility restricted by the system. If he needs to move faster, he'd need to remove the added protection. If the system failed, even partially, he'd have to choose between mobility and protection.
Not that it wouldn't be cool to have power armored soldiers, of course. I'm just suggesting that maybe complicating the decisions a solider has to make in combat by making him dependent on a technology like this for mobility and protection might not be a good thing.
Either way you're running a robotic arm. There's nothing magical I can see about putting a person in a can attached to that arm, unless you can somehow manage to extend his proprioception into the arm. Doing this means that the arm must envelop the operator's arm, yet retain its approximate dimensions.
It seems to me that it's a lot more practical to use a VR setup; you could even scale the system to allow workers to assemble bridge girders like Legos.
As far as the fork lift is concerned, it doesn't have to be a wheeled vehicle. It can be a four legged walking contraption that would provide a more stable and safer platform from which larger forces could be applied.
That's a good point, but in many ways we're already down that road, IIRC. We rely on communication and coordination as a force multiplier. While breaking the force down into multiple autonomous units is more practical when those units are people, it's probably more strategically costly to have that happen to people who try to fight on at cross purposes than to robots who execute some kind of return to base failsafe.
Well, that may be the case, but I doubt that a suit would be an optimal design in any case. Why not a forklift with a well designed robotic arm, or some similar design that carries more lifting power for less complicated and energy intensive mobility?
Does the meat inside suddenly lose its decision making capabilities if it is, let us say, a few hundred meters away?
And so far as the human body's flexibility is concerned, that argument goes out the window once you encase that body in what is to all purposes a ROV, except that the operator is tucked into it like spam in a can. If the suit does not protect the wearer, I can only imagine it makes him less mobile and more vulnerable.
Why not though? I'd like to see an airtight argument that practical powered armor is, net, more effective than an ROV. It's not that ROVs can, in the near future, replace soldiers, but in any case where you can imagine a suit like this being practical, surely an ROV would be more practical.
After all, soldier carry a lot of stuff, basically as much as physically possible without being a net impairment. The suit and its battery simply add to this, so surely such a suit would have to multiply the soldier's muscle power considerably. In that case, moving about is accomplished by muscles controlling actuators, and would, I'm guessing, be limited by that. So while I can imagine a scenario where a lightly but appropriately armed soldier outperforms either an ROV or suited soldier, I am doubtful that a suited soldier will outperform a solider running an ROV, especially considering the lower hazard the ROV operator encounters.
Now here's another possiblity. If a practical power suit is possible, why not issue every soldier a robotic mule to carry his stuff, or possibly even him?
Why a suit, instead of an armed, semi-autonomous ROV? Why spend weight (and thus battery) protecting the squishy bits inside, when those bits can back home at an army base working eight hour shifts and going home to their families?
I realize that troops have to carry an ungodly amount of gear, but by the time all the technical challenges of a truly battle-ready suit are met, surely putting a person in it would be a waste.
Dear Mr. Torvalds
We appreciate your submission of a bug report for swfdec, and we have submitted it to the maintainers. However we are unable at this point to assign it "high" priority because it appears to be an interaction of a buggy ACPI BIOS with the Intel HDA audio codecs. We refer you to Toshiba for support details.
In the meantime, you may not be aware that the traditional SYSV "inittab" mechanism has been replaced in recent editions of Fedora with the newer "upstart" mechanism. Simply edit the "/etc/event.d/linus" file, specifying that under the appropriate runlevels you should be automatically respawned. This should effectively prevent you from being killed. At least permanently so.
-The Fedora Support Team
The closest Chinese analog of the katana is the jian, which is usually translated as "long sword". It is by definition a double edged weapon, as distinct from a single edged weapon, which is referred to a a "knife" ("dao") regardless of length.
Of course there is no precise cultural parallel, since there has not been any period in Chinese cultural memory where martial authority has implied supreme social status. The jian is the personal weapon of the elite, not because it is an object of cultural veneration, but because it literally cuts both ways. Because of this, it is harder to wield than a dao without risking self-injury.
By contrast, the dao was the Kalashnikov of classical Chinese martial arts. It was an easy to manufacture, user-friendly weapon you could press into the hand of a recruit plucked off the farm, with the command, "go forth and kill." Not that some people can't manage to endanger themselves. A friend of mine witnessed a person who cut a new vent in a suit when he picked up an unfamiliar dao (which happened to be sharp) and did a little showing off.
What makes the jian the weapon of the elite is that its skillful use embodies the Chinese ideal of a superior individual: diligent study, balance, and restraint. Not that one cannot embody these qualities in the use of the dao, as the following legend relates.
Once there was a master of the dao, whose skill was supreme in his province. He never lost a duel, and soon his reputation grew so that none dared challenge him. He was, however, a rough and brutal man, and he enjoyed demonstrating his superiority over lesser swordsmen. So he sought out and killed anybody with any claim to skill with the dao at all.
One day, news came that a Shaolin monk, who was reputedly skilled in many weapons , was traveling in the province. The master sought the monk out and challenged him to a duel with the dao. They met at the appointed place, and each prepared to fight in his own manner. The master warmed up by showing off his amazing skill, a tactic that had never failed to strike fear in his opponents. The monk did not fail to notice that the master's skill with the dao was indeed far greater than his own. Still, he prepared for the fight as he prepared himself each day to do everyday things, spending a few moments disciplining his thoughts, banishing any considerations of pride in victory, shame of defeat, or fear of pain or death from his mind.
As the duel commenced, the master tested the monk's defenses with a flurry of vicious, but basic attacks. These the monk calmly parried and countered each attack as if he were giving a lesson to a student. The monk's equanimity unnerved the master, who suspected this was because the monk had some secret skill the master did not -- which indeed was the case, although not in the way the master suspected. "I must kill this monk quickly, or else he will use his secret on me and defeat me."
So the master launched his most elaborately vicious attack yet. Foremost in his mind was the vision of himself, victorious over the dead monk. Also unbidden in his mind was the vision of himself defeated and shamed. What was not in his mind were the basics of his art. And so the monk, despite his lesser skill, was able to defeat the master with the basics taught to every beginning student of the dao, although he forbore to kill the master. In an act of mercy, he cut off both the master's feet instead, putting an end to the master's dueling career.
This legend as it comes down to us, whatever its basis in historical fact, is uniquely Chinese. It explains why it is that, although the Chinese are fond of swords, and a sword is not an uncommonly wall decoration in a Chinese household, the they seldom venerate the sword as a symbol of status and authority. The sword is a tool of liberation, including liberation from the tyrannies of rashness, thoughtless aggression and ignorance.
Perhaps you should make a habit of reading more then.
I am speaking of "rights" in a legal sense, not a philosophical one. The issue of rights "making" duties on others is a quibble; let's stipulate that rights "correspond to" duties others have.
Rights in a legal sense don't come from a piece of paper, but they can come from an agreement represented by that piece of paper. I don't have the right to walk over your land, but you and I agree that in return for a million dollars I am allowed to take a short cut from my back door across your yard, then that becomes a "right" that I posses, and you have a "duty" to respect. Later on I can sell that right back to you, a process that is called "alienation".
The "inalienable rights" of the Declaration of Independence are so called to distinguish them from rights that can be given away or sold. This distinction is important, because the assertion is that people can't give away their fundamental liberty, and any contract to that effect is void.
Well, sounds like the drive numbering somehow changes between boot and making the RAM file system for the boot. Supposedly specifying partitions by their volume UUID fixes this, since doing things like altering the device boot order in the BIOS renumbers drives.
It would be nice, though, if grub gave you the ability to load the prior version of menu.lst; it would save a lot of time.
The boot problem, of course is bigger than grub, especially when you are dealing with an OS that bend or change the rules, such as Vista.
Vista departs from the boot specfication used by OS's for the last couple of decades, in order to accommodate boot from larger physical partitions. Personally, while I understand the motiviation for this, I think having a separate boot partition is a better way of handling this. But there you have it. So if you take a Vista machine and alter the partition table to make room for Linux or XP, then you risk not being able to boot Vista any longer unless you do it with Vista's disk management tools.
Basically, it's risky to touch any partition tables that include a Vista boot partition with anything but Vista -- even XP can screw up the alignment. I've also heard reports of Vista altering Linux partition IDs, although the conditions under which that happens haven't been made clear to me. So imagine this scenario: you set up a dual boot of Vista and another OS (Linux or XP). This makes Vista unbootable. You try to fix it using some Vista tools and you end up inadvertently changing the Linux partition types; meanwhile your Vista partition remains unbootale. Result: unbootable system.
So, the newbie looks at this situation as follows: he was promised that installing Linux wouldn't mess up his Vista installation, and naturally the first thing he checks is whether he can get at his Vista data. On finding he can't, he takes reasonable steps to fix this, which fail. Then he figures, at least he has a working Linux installation, but he finds that no, he doesn't. Therefore he concludes: the Linux installation screwed everything up. His friendly (note irony) Linux community gives him a bunch of useless advice, until he hits on somebody who knows what's going on, who says, "Blah blah partition alignment blah blah master boot record blah blah blah." This seems to make sense to everybody else but him, so they give him up as a hopeless luser.
There's probably more than one way around this, but the one I settled on was to start from scratch, lay out the partitions I wanted in Vista, install Linux without installing grub, then using NeoGrub, a grub port that can be managed in Vista and works with the Vista boot loader so that you can boot Vista or a more standard OS like XP or Linux. The menu.lst reside in your NTFS partition.
You might never run into the dual boot issues that less lucky people have, and there are probably other ways of doing it, but this worked for me.
A "solder" is a "soldier" missing an "i".
A double solder is probably a military robot with failures in both of its redundant vision systems.
That's not true at all. If the police are engaging in hot pursuit, they don't have to wait for a warrant to follow you (or anybody else) onto your property.
The health inspector or fire marshal doesn't need a warrant to inspect private property for code violations.
If there is active combat, say in a civil war, the army can enter your house without permission for combat purposes, either to seek combatants or to use it as a vantage point. This is one reason why Americans ought to be very concerned about blurring the definition of "combat" and "combatant".
The Fourth Amendment says that searches need only be "reasonable". It's presumptively unreasonable to search or seize in circumstances where a warrant is customarily required. However, if you can show that under the circumstances delaying to seek a warrant would be unreasonable, you don't need one, although you have to prove this, and may face challenges to evidence you introduce into criminal trials.
The flip side is that having a warrant issued on probable cause makes a search presumptively reasonable, but there are exceptions. If the warrant is not sufficiently narrowly tailored to the evidence supporting probable cause, or you exceed its specific limitations, then your search or seizure is unreasonable, warrant notwithstanding.
So, the Fourth Amendment is both stronger and weaker than people think it is. It is certainly not reasonable to play linguistic games to make a search appear "reasonable". Calling a person a "combatant" isn't enough to convert an unconstitutional search into a constitutional one, because it is the substance of the circumstances that matter. If you're shooting at people out of your window, it is the necessity of protecting people that makes entering your home, searching it, and detaining you reasonable, not the label the police apply to you.
Nope. Because campaign finance laws don't change the laws of economics, they just make money hard to get. Money is a commodity like any other; when it is scarce it's value becomes higher with respect to other commodities (say a Congressman's time). We just have a special name for money scarcity, we call it "deflation".
So, the net effect of campaign finance laws is to make buying Congressmen cheap, although the complexity of delivering that money legally presents a separate cost barrier to ordinary citizens. It's expensive to set up a lobbying firm, but the marginal cost of buying legislative influence is actually shamefully low, once you have the mechanisms in place to do it legally.
Well,never forget that under the law, two plus two can equal five, for sufficiently large values of two or sufficiently small values of five.
Suppose you are an ISP that advertises its adherence to the P2P Bill of Rights. You entice customers to sign up under a TOS that includes the standard statement saying you can change TOS at any time. Then you decide to take away some of the rights listed in the P2P Bill of Rights, pointing to your TOS statement as proof you are entitled.
I'm not sure that works. A "right" after all is just the flip side of a duty. A right held by an individual consists of a set of duties borne by certain others with respect to him. You can't just unilaterally declare one of your duties towards somebody void. You can't change the TOS in a way that absolves you of the duty of providing service, but does not absolve the customer of the duty of paying you. That's unconscionable.
So, you'd have to say in your TOS that you have the right to declare the specific rights in the Bill of Rights to be void. Or you'd have to say in the Bill of Right that "rights" doesn't mean something the service providers are obligated to abide by. Otherwise, you've just enticed customers to sign on with you by deception.
I am not a lawyer, but surely this is at least one of those things lawyers are always telling you not to do, because even if you are certain to win if it ever comes to court you could not possibly hope to gain enough benefit to pay for the costs of fighting and winning.
I agree, theoretically the appeal of a device like this is that you can flip it open any time you need it, and riggity-jig-and-away-you-go.
On the other hand, how many people are buying this as a full time alternative to a full sized laptop?
I think we're still in the early adopter stage -- where most of the people who are buying it are just curious. Therefore it may be more important to meet certain psychological pricing benchmarks (e.g. it's closer to 300 Euros than 400) than it is to put a bigger battery in it. Then the people who find it seriously useful will buy a second battery, or a larger aftermarket battery.
Admit it; you've bought things on impulse for X dollars, then on impulse bought a Y dollar ugprade for those things, even though you probably wouldn't consider paying X + Y for the entire rig and it was just wishful thinking you didn't need the upgrade. That normal economic behavior for early adopters.
When the thing gets to the point where pragmatists are buying them, you can bet they'll sport much longer battery lives. Just the volumes they'll be buying parts in will bring the price down to stay "cheap".
Well, as a hiring manager I think you're philosophy of screening out candidates with degrees from liberal arts institutions is stupid, although stupidity is common enough that accommodating it is a vocational consideration.
I've supervised people with masters and even PhDs from engineering schools, and they don't really have practical experience unless they got it outside of school. At least nothing that was as useful as three or four years of actual work in the field. You've got the beat the precious habits of schoolboy programming out of somebody before they're fit for work. The "practical" experience you get in schools isn't worth spit in the real world, IMHO. It's just a start.
Ultimately, it is a solid grasp of theory I want graduates to have. An attitude that theory is just something they make you learn and what really matters it that you use Java in your courses because that's what is used in the real world -- well, that attitude is common enough, but it is a huge intellectual handicap. You might as well put "mediocrity" as one of your hiring criteria.
It's doubtful whether computer science is an engineering field. But if it is, it is a field in which imagination is unusually critical.
Once I had a tropical medicine researcher in my office, showing me this elaborate risk evaluation model he had constructed in the Stella -- a poplar modeling system with an easy to use GUI. He wanted to know if there were a way to package the model so it could be used for public health decision support.
"We need a freely redistributable system in which it's easy to do what this model does" he said.
I flipped through the pages of his model diagram for a minute, then said, "Easy. All this model accomplishes is to count true instances of these half dozen or so boolean parameters."
When I demonstrated this, he was flabbergasted. "How did you do that?" he asked.
"I don't know," I shrugged. "It's just what software engineers do."
When you get into the advanced portion of a CS program, it's really about understanding the deep ideas of CS, the ideas that even an extraordinarily brilliant engineer is unlikely to come up with on his own. Connecting practical problems to these ideas is one of the things that a first rate software engineer does. If he can do that, he can bang out acceptable Java programs, but the converse isn't necessarily true.
If you can get into a prestigious program it will make a big difference in your first couple of jobs, and it will probably continue to open doors for you over the rest of your career. On the other hand, after you've had a couple of jobs, your accomplishments should be opening doors for you.
You will probably learn more CS, just by osmosis, if you go to a top flight CS program. However, if you are really suited for a career that a CS degree prepares you for, it probably does not matter because you'll learn anyway. There may be educational opportunities at more balanced institutions that you come to appreciate later.
There are two, really important questions you have to ask, especially if you are choosing a school based on a CS program. First, are you absolutely certain that CS is what you want to pursue? It may not be what you expect. Choose an institution that will give you options for a second choice. Second, will you finish a degree in the institution you have chosen, whether or not it is a CS degree?
In the end, if you are planning a career that requires a CS degree, it's more important that you have a degree than a CS degree; it's more important that you have a CS degree at all than you have one from a prestigious program.
The vocational value of a CS degree from a prestigious program marginal, especially if you know how to write a good application letter and give a good interview. The educational value of a prestigious degree is marginal, if you have a talent and interest for the field. It's not that these things aren't useful, it's that they're mainly useful if you don't have personal qualities that would even the playing field if you went to a less prestigious place. The irony is that in the words of the song, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. And you will. And sometimes you can't make it there for reasons that have nothing to do with your talent.
In the end, the most important thing is that you get the degree. If you come from a family that doesn't have a lot of money or has some other kind of instability that means you don't have bottomless support for your education, it's probably a bad idea to go to an expensive program famous for its pressure cooker atmosphere.
Anybody can have a bad quarter (which is a bad year if the quarter is the last half of an academic quarter and the first half of the next). It could be an existential crisis, or it could be a physical health issue, or it can be an unexpected financial problem. If you don't have a family support cushion, and you don't have any financial slack, you can be screwed. Don't forget that sometimes institutions are more generous with freshman financial aid packages to attract the students they want.
I'm not discouraging your from applying or going to a prestigious program. I just want you to consider that the value of prestige has its limits, and that practical matters like cost can leave you in debt without any offsetting prestige. In the end the best advice is to choose a school you think you will be most happy at, and you'll get the most out of it. Don't sacrifice anything for prestige. Ultimately the only prestige that is worthwhile is the prestige you earn through your own distinctive accomplishments.
Well, the pragmatic solution is to keep people making the decision honest.
How?
Simple. If they turn out to be wrong, everybody involved in approving the waterboarding gets waterboarded. If it's an honest mistake, call it serving your country. If you aren't certain enough to risk it yourself, you aren't certain enough to risk it for somebody else.
Not necessarily.
C is a good language if you (a) need a portable language but don't have another portable language to implement it with and (b) you need the language to be well designed enough for a team of competent programmers to tackle nearly any problem.
You can give a language more features that makes it easier to tackle certain problems, but it tends to undermine the portability goal. C is something like a portable assembler, only with the most critical abstractions for day to day programming provided. Once you get into more, you start to run into assumptions. Static or dynamic typing? It depends on your software engineering methodologies, particularly testing.
What C is emphatically not is idiot proof. Even worse, it is spectacularly not clever person proof. I dunno. I've never worked in Ada myself, but I suspect this might be some of its, er, attraction. It looks like a language in which it is not fun to be cleverer than you need to be.
I see nothing in the least wrong in language evolving. "Fear" at the time of the King James Bible meant "respect." "Contact" was once a pretentious affectation when used to mean "communicate with".
However, sloppy thinking and sloppy habits of writing often cover for each other; when you are accustomed to one you can easily fail to perceive the other. It's not that habits of reflexive and unthinking amplification ("literally", "obviously"), or dressing up arguments of distraction in the terms of logic ("ad hominem!") debase the language. It's that they confuse both the speaker and the listener.
Here the original poster seems to be using the term "beg the question" correctly. He was saying that the question of a technology's potential could not be addressed until the question of its implementation cost had been answered. Except this doesn't really make any sense. Naturally, the first question you want to ask is does this work at all? After that you can ask, can we afford to transition the current infrastructure over? I suppose it is not utterly illogical to ask the second question first, it's just pointless.
That's the obscuring power of habitual sloppy writing for you. It's perfectly valid to point out that just because the physics of something works doesn't mean it can work economically. However, the habit of speaking and thinking in pseudo-logic gets confusing, and somehow squeezing that valid point through a randomly chosen logical template transmutes a sound piece of economic reasoning into an unthinking prejudice against new ideas.
I think there is something to be said for this idea. Not too much, mind you, but something.
Let's imagine a language so obscure and difficult, that 90% of working programmers cannot gain sufficient mastery of it to understand what it is saying at first glance. This sounds terrible, until you realize that every programmer at some time in his life has written code in "friendly" languages that 0% of programmers (including his future self) can understand. And maybe selecting a language that only the top 1% of programmers is capable of using might be a good thing for some projects.
Unfortunately, I don't think you can mandate thinking via language restrictions.
If you really, really wanted to improve the quality of thought in code, wouldn't mandate languages, you'd mandate editors that don't support cut and paste. Then instead of taking a piece of code that works more or less for one purpose, then hammering into the approximate shape you'd need for something else, sooner or later you'd be forced to abstract what was useful about it rather than banging it out over and over again.