Buy a handheld aviation GPS. $1000 for a nice one that will happily tell you exactly where to point the plane and let you know if you're off course to teh left or right.
Given that one of the pilots appeared to be a student at Embry-Riddle, he's be familiar with the devices.
Hell, for $2600 get a damn G4 TiBook. Nicest laptop on the market today, runs Unix (OSX/Linux), and you don't even need the PCMCIA slot since you've already got every connector built in. (Including a real modem.)
If "read at -1" is such a difficult concept, perhaps computers are not for you.
You don't get it, do you?
If I read/. at -1, I see endless crap posted by morons.
If I read USENET with my nicely tuned set of filters, I don't see crap. No Portman/hot grits. No first posts. No Archimedes Plutonium posts, even if the moderators haven't gotten around to modding him into oblivion. Nor do I see the effect of moderators with axes to grind: the only axe is my own.
/. is a truly pitiful discussion board: slow, few options, often busy patting itself on the back with endless "Copyright is evil: Open Source rules" posts that instantly are modded to +5. Its only saving grace is that the rest of the web boards are worse.
/. folks wonder why people use MS products when Unices were better ten years ago than W2K is today in many ways. I wonder the same thing about/.: why is anyone here when USENET with a modern newsreader gives speed, power and options that/. readers only dream about.
because web-based forums such as slashdot offer much better functionality than newsgroups.
You've got to be joking. Either that or you've never used a real newsreader.
With Usenet I get *real* killfiles, regexp based. I decide what scores high and what doesn't. I can highlight intelligent people and kill the trolls without ever waiting for a moderator. Nor do I have to worry about moderator bias: I can see what I want.
Since all the articles are local, I get blazing speed: hold down the space bar and 100 articles will flash by in a second. Reading/. is painful in comparision: half the time I sit and wait while some link is down.
No real editor for posting: I used to use something fast with full text editing support: not a HTML textarea.
/. and other web discussion boards just remind me of how far back we've regressed. USENET was 10x better than any web discussion board back when I started using it in the late 80's, and the newsreaders have only gotten better.
The college I work at is a all-MS/Dell shop. Exchange for mail, IIS for web, etc. I've got the only two Unix boxes on campus: my test OSX laptop and an old PII running some Apache/CGI stuff I wrote at my last job. A few profs and students have Apples. I suppose you can count our Cisco routers as Unix if you really want.
Other than that, we have a few hundred PCs (running NT and W2K) on professor's desks and in computer labs and probably another 600 or so more loosely connected student machines, most running Win9x.
There are places much larger than this that are all MS, but ~1000 machines isn't chicken feed.
where do hydrocarbons, sulfates, and nitrates come from when running my car?"
Hydrocarbons are from the fuel: gasoline is a hydrocarbon
The nitrogen in the NOx comes from the air. Gasoline burning produces very little nitrate if any (nitrate = NO3-
The only real contaminant is the sulfur. Car exhaust contains very little sulfur since the oil it was made from doesn't have much. Coal burning is another story.
Eric
P.S. Hey Rob: why not allow < sup > and < sub > in posts?
What I've noticed from the Clios we have here at work: great form factor, slow, poor screen, slow, tiny (but somewhat useable) keyboard and slow.
Did I mention that they were slow? One of the professors here tried using them in class to pull up images on web pages: they were too slow rendering the pictures to be of use. Simple web pages take a long time, complex ones take longer.
My iPaq is faster, and has a better (if smaller) screen. Now if only someone would come out with a better machine in that form factor: the case design is just awesome.
Whenever I see this argument, I always wonder where you draw the line...
Media player?
Web browser?
GUI? There were lots of alternative GUIs for Windows before Win95. Unices don't need one.
Network stack? WfW killed Trumpet Winsock: where's the outrage? (Hell, back when I was a VMS sysadmin we paid a small fortune for a TCP/IP stack)
Virtual memory? Connectix made a good living with RamDoubler for a while, especially on Macs.
A modern OS bundles hundreds of things that used to be extra cost add-ons. MS does it. Apple does it. So does every Unix workstation maker. Do we strip every add-on out of W2K and leave something like a bare kernel?
Perhaps patent protection is too lengthy in this case.
Not even close: it's vastly too short. Drug companies recently got an extension on the length of patents for drugs.
Why? Because it takes 10+ years from patent to first sold dose. Drug R&D is very, very slow- you can't just make the compound and sell it. Animal tests run years. Then the healthy human tests, then the sick human ones. Better wait 3-5 years after each to check for long-term side effects, although you can at least run them staggered. Even that won't find a lot of the problems, as Bayer recently found out with Baycol.
AIDS treatment advocates have been pushing the FDA to speed up this process, with some results. (And justification- after all, if you're going to die anyway, who cares if there are bad side effects?) But for a "normal" drug like a statin, well over half the patent period is wasted- drug patents used to be for effectively ~7 years, although the extension (24 years IIRC) has pushed it into the double digits.
Why doesn't the national RTL organization
launch a campaign against this? Maybe they
have but it just doesn't get media play?
Actually, pro-life forces are often very quiet about where their views lead, since then they'd have to deal with some unpleasant issues.
For example, how about a gang-raped 13-year-old? Too bad kid: you have to carry the baby to term. Morning after pills are out: the egg is often fertilized by this point. Ditto with incest, or medical complications that don't lead directly to death of the mother. Just because the start of the pregnancy is unpleasant doesn't mean that the life created is any less human.
Next, we have to ban many forms of birth control- most all of them save barrier methods. The IUD certainly has to go. Birth control pills should as well: they don't always stop fertilization, and instead cause chemical abortions.
And, of course as you pointed out, fertility clinics have to be shut down.
The serious pro-life forces voice these views, but very quietly. I at least respect them for the courage of their convictions. The mainstream forces hide behind a wall of hypocrisy, claiming they'll allow abortions in cases of rape and incest and not mentioning birth control. Come on folks: act the way you claim to believe.
Eric
(As a side note, I'm speaking as a person who just adopted a beautiful (if cranky) baby boy. It took a long time (~3 years) simply because abortion is legal. I know lots of other people who would still love to adopt, but can't because the kids[1] just aren't there. I know personally one of the sad side effects of legal abortion, but I'm still willing to say I'm pro-choice.)
[1] Actually, there are. Too bad most people aren't willing to adopt them because they're too old and/or too black. The only reason we have Adam is that we were one of the few couples willing to take a biracial child.
This doesn't mean that the religion they claimed to represent had anything to say about the world being flat/round/square.
Yet we see the Religious Right frothing at the mouth when something like evolution or cosmology is taught in schools that contradicts their literal reading of a bunch of stories written 3000 years ago. (And the Bible does claim the world is flat or close to it: otherwise Jesus could not have seen all the kingdoms of the Earth when he went to the mountaintop.)
Religion (and religious leaders) quite often chime in on matters of fact, drawing their beliefs from their readings of religious texts rather than looking at the world around them. St. Aquinas realized a 1000 years ago that this was a losing battle, but churches continue to ignore him.
Methinks you're confusing religious leaders with religion.
There's often no difference.
For example, who should we blame for the persecution of Galileo? The Pope or the Catholic Church? How about the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Salem witch trials?
How about the current political attempts to ram (Christian) religion down our throats at every step despite the 1st Amendment? Or perhaps the Islamic fundamentalism of Iran or the Taliban? Is that the fault of a few religious leaders, or the "I'm right and you're wrong" beliefs of most religions?
Remember, if WWII taught us anything is was that the "I was just following orders" excuse doesn't wash.
but science also was sure that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the world was flat and if you got to the edge, you would fall off.
Methinks you're confusing science with religion. Science knew thousands of years ago the world was round, and scholars quickly accepted the copernican solar system. It was religion that tortured people for believing the truth.
Private funds and grants from private groups should be used in this case
This is exactly what both sides don't want. Without federal oversight, you're going to see experiments that simply ignore ethical boundaries- see the various privately funded groups that are currently trying to sell human clones. (It was on NPR last night: $200,000 a shot. The mere fact that they probably can't do it doesn't seem to bother them.)
That doesn't do either side in this debate any good: it tarnishes the real value of the research while at the same time making a mockery of life.
What I'd like to see is a constant connection between the PC and the PDA. In my experience, "Hotsync" type operations involve a temporary link to the palm, and then that link is terminated. With a wee bit of tweaking, the PDA's touchable screen could be useful as a secondary monitor. I know I've heard discussion of a secondary LCD screen being used for input and the like recently; why not use an already widespread device?
The iPaq isn't too far off that. ActiveSync is always running. (And sucking CPU, which seems a bit much.) The device shows up like any other volume in the Explorer: you can control the filesystem of the iPaq from the desktop, albeit not the other way around. You can also mirror the iPaq screen to the desktop, but I'm not aware of any way to do the reverse.
I suspect it wouldn't be too staggeringly hard to send taps on the screen to the desktop, but I'm talking from exactly no experience programming WinCE devices. I'm not so sure this is all that useful though: the screen is very small and it's hard to be precise, and the iPaq displays the "Today" screen by default when sitting in the cradle which is actually a rather nice feature.
Yeah but its pretty easy to program in a few more "sky lanes" for rush hour
Trust me, it's not. Airspace noise restrictions are a major problem today: if you get hundreds of low-flying planes every day over your house you watch property values tank. People will fight any such action tooth and nail: I've seen it for small airports that want to allow a few more corporate jets/week in, much less this level of traffic.
Add to that the complication of existing routes around major cities. Anywhere you'd want to avoid traffic is probably class B, or at least class C airspace. There are control towers that move all traffic around these areas for a 30-mile radius at the minimum. It's just not going to be as easy as people seem to think.
I don't know what WinCE devices you've been using, but my iPaq is amazingly quick.
I've got Quake, a fully 3-d racing game and a flight simulator on it. It takes no time at all to load up the pocket New York Times, whereas on my (older) Pilot it can take 10-20 seconds to load a long page. Response to any button click is instantaneous. Don't get caught in the "It's MS so it's slow, buggy and insecure. Of course I haven't used or even seen it, but I'm quite sure that I'm right" trap.
I had a choice between the iPaq and a m505 at my new job: I took the iPaq despite having used and liked Palm machines for years. Laugh at MS at your peril: WinCE3 is quite useable. Unless Palm gets off their asses and ships something far, far better than the m505 the high end market is going to desert them in droves.
3) Get plenty of sleep...This should be common sense folks
Yep. I've also got a four-day old infant at home right now. He won't sleep unheld for more than an hour. Care to let me know how I'm supposed to get enough sleep? My wife tried to let me sleep from about 1:30 to 6 this morning so I could drive to work, but I still wake up every time he cries, so I probably got about 2 hours of real sleep and 3-4 of half-doze in 30 minute stretches.
As I said in a previous post, both machines ALWAYS works, so I'm not surprised.
They do? Have you been watching the same show I have?
The shows have devices ranging from the functional but pathetic (Bowser's rugby ball crossbow, 2 sail land yacht) to the almost pathologically broken (Both the blimp and the plane on the radio-controlled bomber episode) to the so-bad-it's-embarrassing-to-watch (the Navy's amphib, which couldn't steer, float or move across water or land without the humans pushing/paddling.)
Except most private pilots now-a-days buy a hand held GPS and never use an E6B except during checkrides.
Their loss. I'll put money that I can outrun them on a standard E6B for working time/speed/distance. Just dial in your ground speed and read off the time between checkpoint after checkpoint.
Then again, I was annoyed when my examiner made me turn off the VOR receiver for all of my cross country. Hey- he's the one that gave me a route between two VORs. Everyone has the equipment they get used to...
...Buddhist writings are approaching that same worldwide kind of influence, being that they haven't been around as long?
Religion nit. Buddhism predates Christianity by centuries, although some of the earliest stuff in the Bible is about the same age. Many of the sects Westerners are familiar with like Zen[1] are quite recent, but the religion itself is very old.
The Qu'ran has a better chance of "outinfluencing" the Bible over the long haul: Islam is growing much faster than Buddhism.
[1] Although Zen, Nichiren, Tibetan and other well known sects are so far removed from Theravada tradition that calling them "Buddhism" is stretching it.
Not as much as you might think. We reviewers aren't paid for the reviews: it's regarded as part of our professional responsibility. (The same happens with grant reviews: the vast majority is done by other scientists.)
Many journals charge money to print articles, others charge literally thousands of dollars/year for a subscription. This is a huge bone of contention on many campuses: Professor A and B want the Journal of Obscure Latvian Chemistry at $2000/year, but C and D would rather have Acta Trivia at $2500/year. Academic budgets aren't much- what do you do?
Science and Nature are special cases: there's significant editorial comment in each, and so the costs of printing them are much higher. (The first 3rd of each is quite understandable by any interested layman.)
So why not go electronic? Simple: electronic reserves have a miserable record of longevity. I can and have looked up articles from 1920, and that's hardly the limit. We can't read electronic Pioneer data from the 1960s.
Keeping old journal articles in a format that's always readable is going to cost, and cost big. You'll need multiple servers so that a single crash doesn't kill you, and sysadmins to care for the machines, bandwidth costs, plus format conversion.
And of course, you'll still need to pay for the staff to handle sending articles around for peer review.
Stanford has a program that's looking into solving some of these problems with a distributed system, but it's going to be a long, long time before we abandon paper.
Would R&D stop without patents? I doubt it very much... there will always be a competitive advantage to being the first to market with innovative products,
Not even close. I used to work for one of those huge, evil drug companies.
Could you give me even one reason why a drug company should spend the ~$250 million over 8-10 years it takes to get a drug approved, only to see a generic maker clone the drug the day it comes out at half the price?
That's only one example. There are tons of others. Without patent, you'll see huge sectors of R&D collapse overnight
The only thing AI can do better than humans is to show us what we shouldn't be wasting our time on! It would force the point home better than anything previously in existence.
And in Banks' Culture, that's everything. Learn things? You can't learn a millionth of what a Mind knows. Build things? A Mind can make anything vastly better than you ever could. Discover things? Forget it. Write poetry? Paint pictures? Play games? Fight wars? Minds are better than a human.
The only "real" work available to humans in the Culture is to act as ambassadors/emissaries to civilizations that can't handle robot drones.
No want, no hunger, but no real work either. Banks claims the Culture is as close to Utopia as he can imagine. I'm not so sure, and I think he's not either.
How realistic and well written are the Banks novels? By 'well written' I mean qualities like suspense, emotional intensity, scientific plausibility, consistency, etc...
Disclaimer: I'm a big Banks fan.
They're quite well written as a whole, albeit a bit on the depressing side. (They rarely have happy endings.) The characters generally make sense and act as you would expect given their backgrounds. The plots are also nice, although he tends to ramble in some of them.
As far as "plausibility", forget it. They're self-consistant, but they're set so far in the future that they've they're at the "Clark limit", where the technology might as well be magic. Any material thing you want you can have.
IMHO, the best science part of the novels is a view of just what super-intelligent AIs would be like. No Star Trek crap: the Minds basically keep humans as pets, fulfilling our every need because they find us amusing to keep around. They think millions of times faster than humans: space combat is over in milliseconds and they can predict out the future in great detail.
Of course, this causes problems for humans: when every single thing you can do can be better done by a machine, what do you do?
I doubt the ones in tanks or helicopters are whisper-quite
At least compared to piston engined tanks like the M60. It's a steady, high pitched whine compared to some *really* loud chugga-chugga-roar.
From the front, you hear the clanking treads before you hear the turbine on an M1.
The exhaust is also clear, which is sorta an advantage over an M60, but the heat put out by the turbine makes these things look like the sun on a thermal scope.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that one of the pilots appeared to be a student at Embry-Riddle, he's be familiar with the devices.
Eric
Eric
If "read at -1" is such a difficult concept, perhaps computers are not for you.
You don't get it, do you?
If I read /. at -1, I see endless crap posted by morons.
If I read USENET with my nicely tuned set of filters, I don't see crap. No Portman/hot grits. No first posts. No Archimedes Plutonium posts, even if the moderators haven't gotten around to modding him into oblivion. Nor do I see the effect of moderators with axes to grind: the only axe is my own.
/. is a truly pitiful discussion board: slow, few options, often busy patting itself on the back with endless "Copyright is evil: Open Source rules" posts that instantly are modded to +5. Its only saving grace is that the rest of the web boards are worse.
/. folks wonder why people use MS products when Unices were better ten years ago than W2K is today in many ways. I wonder the same thing about /.: why is anyone here when USENET with a modern newsreader gives speed, power and options that /. readers only dream about.
because web-based forums such as slashdot offer much better functionality than newsgroups.
You've got to be joking. Either that or you've never used a real newsreader.
With Usenet I get *real* killfiles, regexp based. I decide what scores high and what doesn't. I can highlight intelligent people and kill the trolls without ever waiting for a moderator. Nor do I have to worry about moderator bias: I can see what I want.
Since all the articles are local, I get blazing speed: hold down the space bar and 100 articles will flash by in a second. Reading /. is painful in comparision: half the time I sit and wait while some link is down.
No real editor for posting: I used to use something fast with full text editing support: not a HTML textarea.
/. and other web discussion boards just remind me of how far back we've regressed. USENET was 10x better than any web discussion board back when I started using it in the late 80's, and the newsreaders have only gotten better.
Eric
The college I work at is a all-MS/Dell shop. Exchange for mail, IIS for web, etc. I've got the only two Unix boxes on campus: my test OSX laptop and an old PII running some Apache/CGI stuff I wrote at my last job. A few profs and students have Apples. I suppose you can count our Cisco routers as Unix if you really want.
Other than that, we have a few hundred PCs (running NT and W2K) on professor's desks and in computer labs and probably another 600 or so more loosely connected student machines, most running Win9x.
There are places much larger than this that are all MS, but ~1000 machines isn't chicken feed.
Eric
You would need a stepper capable of moving an atom at a time.
We've got them: how do you think they move a STM tip? They're piezoelectric.
There's other problems with this though: the chances of cutting a clean, macroscopic edge are basically nil.
Eric
where do hydrocarbons, sulfates, and nitrates come from when running my car?"
Hydrocarbons are from the fuel: gasoline is a hydrocarbon
The nitrogen in the NOx comes from the air. Gasoline burning produces very little nitrate if any (nitrate = NO3-
The only real contaminant is the sulfur. Car exhaust contains very little sulfur since the oil it was made from doesn't have much. Coal burning is another story.
Eric
P.S. Hey Rob: why not allow < sup > and < sub > in posts?
Did I mention that they were slow? One of the professors here tried using them in class to pull up images on web pages: they were too slow rendering the pictures to be of use. Simple web pages take a long time, complex ones take longer.
My iPaq is faster, and has a better (if smaller) screen. Now if only someone would come out with a better machine in that form factor: the case design is just awesome.
Eric
Whenever I see this argument, I always wonder where you draw the line...
A modern OS bundles hundreds of things that used to be extra cost add-ons. MS does it. Apple does it. So does every Unix workstation maker. Do we strip every add-on out of W2K and leave something like a bare kernel?
Eric
Perhaps patent protection is too lengthy in this case.
Not even close: it's vastly too short. Drug companies recently got an extension on the length of patents for drugs.
Why? Because it takes 10+ years from patent to first sold dose. Drug R&D is very, very slow- you can't just make the compound and sell it. Animal tests run years. Then the healthy human tests, then the sick human ones. Better wait 3-5 years after each to check for long-term side effects, although you can at least run them staggered. Even that won't find a lot of the problems, as Bayer recently found out with Baycol.
AIDS treatment advocates have been pushing the FDA to speed up this process, with some results. (And justification- after all, if you're going to die anyway, who cares if there are bad side effects?) But for a "normal" drug like a statin, well over half the patent period is wasted- drug patents used to be for effectively ~7 years, although the extension (24 years IIRC) has pushed it into the double digits.
Eric
Why doesn't the national RTL organization launch a campaign against this? Maybe they have but it just doesn't get media play?
Actually, pro-life forces are often very quiet about where their views lead, since then they'd have to deal with some unpleasant issues.
For example, how about a gang-raped 13-year-old? Too bad kid: you have to carry the baby to term. Morning after pills are out: the egg is often fertilized by this point. Ditto with incest, or medical complications that don't lead directly to death of the mother. Just because the start of the pregnancy is unpleasant doesn't mean that the life created is any less human.
Next, we have to ban many forms of birth control- most all of them save barrier methods. The IUD certainly has to go. Birth control pills should as well: they don't always stop fertilization, and instead cause chemical abortions.
And, of course as you pointed out, fertility clinics have to be shut down.
The serious pro-life forces voice these views, but very quietly. I at least respect them for the courage of their convictions. The mainstream forces hide behind a wall of hypocrisy, claiming they'll allow abortions in cases of rape and incest and not mentioning birth control. Come on folks: act the way you claim to believe.
Eric
(As a side note, I'm speaking as a person who just adopted a beautiful (if cranky) baby boy. It took a long time (~3 years) simply because abortion is legal. I know lots of other people who would still love to adopt, but can't because the kids[1] just aren't there. I know personally one of the sad side effects of legal abortion, but I'm still willing to say I'm pro-choice.)
[1] Actually, there are. Too bad most people aren't willing to adopt them because they're too old and/or too black. The only reason we have Adam is that we were one of the few couples willing to take a biracial child.
This doesn't mean that the religion they claimed to represent had anything to say about the world being flat/round/square.
Yet we see the Religious Right frothing at the mouth when something like evolution or cosmology is taught in schools that contradicts their literal reading of a bunch of stories written 3000 years ago. (And the Bible does claim the world is flat or close to it: otherwise Jesus could not have seen all the kingdoms of the Earth when he went to the mountaintop.)
Religion (and religious leaders) quite often chime in on matters of fact, drawing their beliefs from their readings of religious texts rather than looking at the world around them. St. Aquinas realized a 1000 years ago that this was a losing battle, but churches continue to ignore him.
Methinks you're confusing religious leaders with religion.
There's often no difference.
For example, who should we blame for the persecution of Galileo? The Pope or the Catholic Church? How about the Crusades, the Inquisition, or the Salem witch trials?
How about the current political attempts to ram (Christian) religion down our throats at every step despite the 1st Amendment? Or perhaps the Islamic fundamentalism of Iran or the Taliban? Is that the fault of a few religious leaders, or the "I'm right and you're wrong" beliefs of most religions?
Remember, if WWII taught us anything is was that the "I was just following orders" excuse doesn't wash.
Eric
but science also was sure that the Earth was the center of the universe and that the world was flat and if you got to the edge, you would fall off.
Methinks you're confusing science with religion. Science knew thousands of years ago the world was round, and scholars quickly accepted the copernican solar system. It was religion that tortured people for believing the truth.
Private funds and grants from private groups should be used in this case
This is exactly what both sides don't want. Without federal oversight, you're going to see experiments that simply ignore ethical boundaries- see the various privately funded groups that are currently trying to sell human clones. (It was on NPR last night: $200,000 a shot. The mere fact that they probably can't do it doesn't seem to bother them.)
That doesn't do either side in this debate any good: it tarnishes the real value of the research while at the same time making a mockery of life.
Eric
What I'd like to see is a constant connection between the PC and the PDA. In my experience, "Hotsync" type operations involve a temporary link to the palm, and then that link is terminated. With a wee bit of tweaking, the PDA's touchable screen could be useful as a secondary monitor. I know I've heard discussion of a secondary LCD screen being used for input and the like recently; why not use an already widespread device?
The iPaq isn't too far off that. ActiveSync is always running. (And sucking CPU, which seems a bit much.) The device shows up like any other volume in the Explorer: you can control the filesystem of the iPaq from the desktop, albeit not the other way around. You can also mirror the iPaq screen to the desktop, but I'm not aware of any way to do the reverse.
I suspect it wouldn't be too staggeringly hard to send taps on the screen to the desktop, but I'm talking from exactly no experience programming WinCE devices. I'm not so sure this is all that useful though: the screen is very small and it's hard to be precise, and the iPaq displays the "Today" screen by default when sitting in the cradle which is actually a rather nice feature.
Eric
Yeah but its pretty easy to program in a few more "sky lanes" for rush hour
Trust me, it's not. Airspace noise restrictions are a major problem today: if you get hundreds of low-flying planes every day over your house you watch property values tank. People will fight any such action tooth and nail: I've seen it for small airports that want to allow a few more corporate jets/week in, much less this level of traffic.
Add to that the complication of existing routes around major cities. Anywhere you'd want to avoid traffic is probably class B, or at least class C airspace. There are control towers that move all traffic around these areas for a 30-mile radius at the minimum. It's just not going to be as easy as people seem to think.
Eric
I don't know what WinCE devices you've been using, but my iPaq is amazingly quick.
I've got Quake, a fully 3-d racing game and a flight simulator on it. It takes no time at all to load up the pocket New York Times, whereas on my (older) Pilot it can take 10-20 seconds to load a long page. Response to any button click is instantaneous. Don't get caught in the "It's MS so it's slow, buggy and insecure. Of course I haven't used or even seen it, but I'm quite sure that I'm right" trap.
I had a choice between the iPaq and a m505 at my new job: I took the iPaq despite having used and liked Palm machines for years. Laugh at MS at your peril: WinCE3 is quite useable. Unless Palm gets off their asses and ships something far, far better than the m505 the high end market is going to desert them in droves.
Eric
3) Get plenty of sleep...This should be common sense folks
Yep. I've also got a four-day old infant at home right now. He won't sleep unheld for more than an hour. Care to let me know how I'm supposed to get enough sleep? My wife tried to let me sleep from about 1:30 to 6 this morning so I could drive to work, but I still wake up every time he cries, so I probably got about 2 hours of real sleep and 3-4 of half-doze in 30 minute stretches.
Sometimes sleep-debt can't be avoided.
Eric
As I said in a previous post, both machines ALWAYS works, so I'm not surprised.
They do? Have you been watching the same show I have?
The shows have devices ranging from the functional but pathetic (Bowser's rugby ball crossbow, 2 sail land yacht) to the almost pathologically broken (Both the blimp and the plane on the radio-controlled bomber episode) to the so-bad-it's-embarrassing-to-watch (the Navy's amphib, which couldn't steer, float or move across water or land without the humans pushing/paddling.)
Eric
Except most private pilots now-a-days buy a hand held GPS and never use an E6B except during checkrides.
Their loss. I'll put money that I can outrun them on a standard E6B for working time/speed/distance. Just dial in your ground speed and read off the time between checkpoint after checkpoint.
Then again, I was annoyed when my examiner made me turn off the VOR receiver for all of my cross country. Hey- he's the one that gave me a route between two VORs. Everyone has the equipment they get used to...
Eric
Religion nit. Buddhism predates Christianity by centuries, although some of the earliest stuff in the Bible is about the same age. Many of the sects Westerners are familiar with like Zen[1] are quite recent, but the religion itself is very old.
The Qu'ran has a better chance of "outinfluencing" the Bible over the long haul: Islam is growing much faster than Buddhism.
[1] Although Zen, Nichiren, Tibetan and other well known sects are so far removed from Theravada tradition that calling them "Buddhism" is stretching it.
Eric
The peer review costs money.
Not as much as you might think. We reviewers aren't paid for the reviews: it's regarded as part of our professional responsibility. (The same happens with grant reviews: the vast majority is done by other scientists.)
Many journals charge money to print articles, others charge literally thousands of dollars/year for a subscription. This is a huge bone of contention on many campuses: Professor A and B want the Journal of Obscure Latvian Chemistry at $2000/year, but C and D would rather have Acta Trivia at $2500/year. Academic budgets aren't much- what do you do?
Science and Nature are special cases: there's significant editorial comment in each, and so the costs of printing them are much higher. (The first 3rd of each is quite understandable by any interested layman.)
So why not go electronic? Simple: electronic reserves have a miserable record of longevity. I can and have looked up articles from 1920, and that's hardly the limit. We can't read electronic Pioneer data from the 1960s.
Keeping old journal articles in a format that's always readable is going to cost, and cost big. You'll need multiple servers so that a single crash doesn't kill you, and sysadmins to care for the machines, bandwidth costs, plus format conversion.
And of course, you'll still need to pay for the staff to handle sending articles around for peer review.
Stanford has a program that's looking into solving some of these problems with a distributed system, but it's going to be a long, long time before we abandon paper.
Eric
Would R&D stop without patents? I doubt it very much... there will always be a competitive advantage to being the first to market with innovative products,
Not even close. I used to work for one of those huge, evil drug companies.
Could you give me even one reason why a drug company should spend the ~$250 million over 8-10 years it takes to get a drug approved, only to see a generic maker clone the drug the day it comes out at half the price?
That's only one example. There are tons of others. Without patent, you'll see huge sectors of R&D collapse overnight
Eric
The only thing AI can do better than humans is to show us what we shouldn't be wasting our time on! It would force the point home better than anything previously in existence.
And in Banks' Culture, that's everything. Learn things? You can't learn a millionth of what a Mind knows. Build things? A Mind can make anything vastly better than you ever could. Discover things? Forget it. Write poetry? Paint pictures? Play games? Fight wars? Minds are better than a human.
The only "real" work available to humans in the Culture is to act as ambassadors/emissaries to civilizations that can't handle robot drones.
No want, no hunger, but no real work either. Banks claims the Culture is as close to Utopia as he can imagine. I'm not so sure, and I think he's not either.
Eric
How realistic and well written are the Banks novels? By 'well written' I mean qualities like suspense, emotional intensity, scientific plausibility, consistency, etc...
Disclaimer: I'm a big Banks fan.
They're quite well written as a whole, albeit a bit on the depressing side. (They rarely have happy endings.) The characters generally make sense and act as you would expect given their backgrounds. The plots are also nice, although he tends to ramble in some of them.
As far as "plausibility", forget it. They're self-consistant, but they're set so far in the future that they've they're at the "Clark limit", where the technology might as well be magic. Any material thing you want you can have.
IMHO, the best science part of the novels is a view of just what super-intelligent AIs would be like. No Star Trek crap: the Minds basically keep humans as pets, fulfilling our every need because they find us amusing to keep around. They think millions of times faster than humans: space combat is over in milliseconds and they can predict out the future in great detail.
Of course, this causes problems for humans: when every single thing you can do can be better done by a machine, what do you do?
Eric
I doubt the ones in tanks or helicopters are whisper-quite
At least compared to piston engined tanks like the M60. It's a steady, high pitched whine compared to some *really* loud chugga-chugga-roar.
From the front, you hear the clanking treads before you hear the turbine on an M1.
The exhaust is also clear, which is sorta an advantage over an M60, but the heat put out by the turbine makes these things look like the sun on a thermal scope.
Eric