If you want to convince me you're more informed, the way to do it is not to make a comment like that with absolutely no data to back it up. If you look at Damore's comment text, you will see right at the top that he posted it to two internal URLs that are not specific to the anti-discrimination class: the internal document publication URL go/pc-considered-harmful and the internal discussion forum g/pc-harmful-discuss.
This required sufficient internal response that the CEO had to cut short a family vacation in order to handle it. In general, a CEO of that size company does not expect to personally manage damage from an engineering hire unless things are seriously wrong. IMO that alone was sufficient reason for termination.
And entirely separate from discussion of his rights, Damore's a turkey.
Firing people who shout stupid ideas from the rooftop is not racism or discrimination.
There's a difference between hiring discrimination and termination for conduct. Google might have been prohibited from rejecting Damore as a new hire solely because he held stupid beliefs about women, but would have had a right to expect him to keep his beliefs to himself during the work day. He didn't.
At an old company, we had an engineer who would walk into someone's office where music was playing and state "that's devil music!" He had some strange religion. He had a right to his beliefs but it was still misconduct to direct them toward others at work.
Firing people who shout stupid ideas from the rooftop is not racism or discrimination.
Correct. A lot of people don't seem to realize that your free speech rights don't extend to using your workplace as the venue for your free speech. If Damore had posted this on his personal blog, rather than within the company, and was then terminated, he'd have a much better case.
Besides R&D, fixed infrastructure costs are huge. And there are somewhere north of 5000 employees! Block 5 (now also called Falcon 9 2.0, the latest and supposedly final version of Falcon 9) is supposed to refly 10 times. With greater than 20 launches per year in Florida, recovery may reach an economic payoff.
The US gave up the idea of space exploration for the sake of science, and sold it to the highest bidder.
That's not actually how things are going at all. The U.S. has always had contractors build its rockets, now some contractors have chosen to build their own and sell rides to NASA and others. This is an inevitable consequence of the development of rocketry.
If you want to cry about something, go back to the 50 year vacation the U.S. took from space development at the end of the Apollo program.
I am heading to Orlando for Hamcation and hope SpaceX holds things up just long enough for me to be there. That is going to be amazing, whatever happens. I think they'll pull it off, but it's a really risky launch.
Falcon 9 Heavy would be the largest operating launch system by weight carried to orbit. The closest competitor might be Blue Origin's New Glenn, which they haven't really started to build yet and is 4 years away if they work real hard, by which time SpaceX might have a similar large rocket.
National rocket programs and ULA are still in the denial stage. ULA has a theoretical, not built, recovery program called "SMART recovery" which is more efficient in flight but less economically efficient because it throws away most of the rocket, which probably makes it a non-starter given how SpaceX is doing.
SpaceX recovery is not yet proven to be economically feasable - it works and gives them a reserve of first-stages so that they can do launches faster than companies that have to build the first stage, but it doesn't yet save money - but it looks like SpaceX will get there.
Sorry, Bruce, sarcasm is in our DNA here, and that goes for numbered users as well as ACs.
Actually, you are perpetuating the naive assumption that Anonymous Cowards are human beings who have feelings. Not so. Anonymous Cowards are actually alien beings from a planet orbiting the star Beta Anonyma. They emigrated to Middle America and have been posing as real people, having destroyed their own planet through bad political policy. Although they have developed a society nearly as intelligent as ours (not quite as intelligent, they are actually the cause of the Red States Mystery), they do not have feelings, they are thoughtless automations who have been programmed to believe that they are alive and have feelings, which they volubly protest while in fact being entirely without consciousness. Also, no matter how many Anonymous Cowards you meet, they are all one individual.
t Raspberry Pi, while not exactly open source, is pretty close, and it's available now. Feel free to trick that out and use it as your primary workstation.
I do have some issues with documentation. Have they now documented the GPU (or whatever it is) that first has control at boot time, before the main CPU is enabled? I'd also like to use the LVDS for an SDR rather than the camera and display, and that was not documented either the last time I looked. There was also some chat about additional entirely undocumented coprocessors on the die.
Actually, if you look at this device, you'll see that gate-arrays aren't in the same class with your father's Oldsmobile any longer. We need them to be denser than the ones at that link, but the potential is there.
I doubt that open source hardware would prevent hardware bugs, but it would provide a way of avoiding backdoors that are intentionally placed. You're absolutely right in that respect.
Use of gate-arrays would make the bugs reprogrammable. And now that we have mobile gate-arrays, performance is actually getting pretty good.
Unfortunately, as you well know, this approach means goodbye to virtually very computing-type device most of us have become accustomed-to.
Maybe you haven't been following gate-array development. There are mobile ones now. They use FLASH to store the program bits. And the rest is CMOS which we know how to power-manage. The gate-arrays of yore were more power-thirsty because nobody cared back then.
I have a paper on Open Cars, written with Lother Determann (a Boalt Hall [Berkeley Law] professor). One of the issues I go over is just how fast the hardware in your car goes obsolete, compared to your phone. Manufacturers want embedded net features because they can have a continuing income after you have purchased the car, from wireless fees (the cellular company kicks back fees to the auto manufacturer) and from advertising and content. But you will end up plugging in a phone less than 2 years old instead of the built-in device.
The problem is worse with self-driving computers. Who wants one more than 2 years old? Not even the state authorities who will license them.
Auto manufacturers would like to solve this by having everyone lease their car. An alternative is for the car to have plugs for self-driving and network features, allowing the user more control. The paper has more detail on the social and legal issues.
I have a 2007 Prius, a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, and a Trailmanor travel trailer. Obviously I commute in the Prius and save the big SUV for tasks that need it. When I bought the Jeep, I rejected the connected version and went for a model with a dumber radio. I doubt I'm alone in making that choice.
Thank you for this vast work of erudition, anonymous moron.
Someday, perhaps, when you are a pre-adolescent, you may aquire somewhat more knowledge of computers, though probably not enough to make you top-heavy. At that time, you may hear of a miraculous device called a gate-array which makes it possible to craft a running CPU similarly to the way that programmers write software. With this device, someone of greater skill than you will put together a computer that might not be as fast as you like, and might not have as many transistors as you like, and might use more power than you like, but will be capable of running an Open Source CPU with a known-bitstream so that the chance of there being nasties that we're not told about that spy on us built into the CPU die is reduced from today's horrible state (gate-arrays can still have them, but the people who make these nasties don't know in advance where we put the CPU implementation).
The instruction set and currently-fixed hardware features like the MMU and the translation look-aside buffer (a feature implicated today) will be repairable by changing the bitstream.
This will never be as efficient as a fully-custom chip, but it can be good enough. Many of us will be happier using it. And for those of us who require algorithm acceleration (hopefully for better reasons than mining cryptocoins, but that is one example) it will be possible to code it into the system and get the advantages of a hardware implementation without it being so hard.
If you really want an Open Source, after-market bug fixes, and security, the best way to do that is to use not a CPU at all but a programmable gate-array. This also gives you the ability to have evolution in purchased hardware, for example improvement of the instruction set. The problem is finding a gate-array that is fast enough, dense enough, and power-conserving enough.
It would be cool to code your own special-purpose algorithm accelerators in VHDL or Verilog, etc.
This is sort of on the edge of practical, if you have the money to spend. Not as fast, not as powerful, uses more electricity, infinitely flexible. Certainly there would be some good research papers, etc., in building one.
Californians in general and the nearby community of Lompoc aren't great fans of the base. It very likely is a candidate for base closure. Development of the base real-estate would likely lead to greater economic benefit to California and communities close to the base.
I'd rather question your religion. The main problem here is a view of the world based on the best method we know of understanding it, vs. a faith-based view of the world that denies any aspect of reality that is inconvenient to its beliefs.
I apologize for not participating in this discussion, but it is obvious legal hygiene not to discuss the suit until it's all over. There are some things I can discuss: Here is the Court Order, and I would like to introduce you to my Wonderful Legal Team. Valerie, Stanley, and I are having a good time over the winter break and wish you all happy holidays. Don't worry about me, and I'll explain what costs I have, if any, when this is over.
In a post-apocalypse society gold would probably revert to being the preferred metal for tooth fillings. It's soft and inert. In an industrial society there are lots of things done with gold every day. One is wiring integrated circuit dies to the package leads, another is plating connections (because it's conductive and does not corrode).
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My sinister viral GPL cabal has been successful! Baw ha ha ha ha :-)
If you want to convince me you're more informed, the way to do it is not to make a comment like that with absolutely no data to back it up. If you look at Damore's comment text, you will see right at the top that he posted it to two internal URLs that are not specific to the anti-discrimination class: the internal document publication URL go/pc-considered-harmful and the internal discussion forum g/pc-harmful-discuss.
This required sufficient internal response that the CEO had to cut short a family vacation in order to handle it. In general, a CEO of that size company does not expect to personally manage damage from an engineering hire unless things are seriously wrong. IMO that alone was sufficient reason for termination.
And entirely separate from discussion of his rights, Damore's a turkey.
There's a difference between hiring discrimination and termination for conduct. Google might have been prohibited from rejecting Damore as a new hire solely because he held stupid beliefs about women, but would have had a right to expect him to keep his beliefs to himself during the work day. He didn't.
At an old company, we had an engineer who would walk into someone's office where music was playing and state "that's devil music!" He had some strange religion. He had a right to his beliefs but it was still misconduct to direct them toward others at work.
Correct. A lot of people don't seem to realize that your free speech rights don't extend to using your workplace as the venue for your free speech. If Damore had posted this on his personal blog, rather than within the company, and was then terminated, he'd have a much better case.
Ha ha ha ha ha he he haw! More proof of my thesis on anonymous cowards.
Besides R&D, fixed infrastructure costs are huge. And there are somewhere north of 5000 employees! Block 5 (now also called Falcon 9 2.0, the latest and supposedly final version of Falcon 9) is supposed to refly 10 times. With greater than 20 launches per year in Florida, recovery may reach an economic payoff.
That's not actually how things are going at all. The U.S. has always had contractors build its rockets, now some contractors have chosen to build their own and sell rides to NASA and others. This is an inevitable consequence of the development of rocketry.
If you want to cry about something, go back to the 50 year vacation the U.S. took from space development at the end of the Apollo program.
I am heading to Orlando for Hamcation and hope SpaceX holds things up just long enough for me to be there. That is going to be amazing, whatever happens. I think they'll pull it off, but it's a really risky launch.
Falcon 9 Heavy would be the largest operating launch system by weight carried to orbit. The closest competitor might be Blue Origin's New Glenn, which they haven't really started to build yet and is 4 years away if they work real hard, by which time SpaceX might have a similar large rocket.
National rocket programs and ULA are still in the denial stage. ULA has a theoretical, not built, recovery program called "SMART recovery" which is more efficient in flight but less economically efficient because it throws away most of the rocket, which probably makes it a non-starter given how SpaceX is doing.
SpaceX recovery is not yet proven to be economically feasable - it works and gives them a reserve of first-stages so that they can do launches faster than companies that have to build the first stage, but it doesn't yet save money - but it looks like SpaceX will get there.
Good point. I have championed the creation of a fully open gate array, and will continue to do so.
Actually, you are perpetuating the naive assumption that Anonymous Cowards are human beings who have feelings. Not so. Anonymous Cowards are actually alien beings from a planet orbiting the star Beta Anonyma. They emigrated to Middle America and have been posing as real people, having destroyed their own planet through bad political policy. Although they have developed a society nearly as intelligent as ours (not quite as intelligent, they are actually the cause of the Red States Mystery), they do not have feelings, they are thoughtless automations who have been programmed to believe that they are alive and have feelings, which they volubly protest while in fact being entirely without consciousness. Also, no matter how many Anonymous Cowards you meet, they are all one individual.
I do have some issues with documentation. Have they now documented the GPU (or whatever it is) that first has control at boot time, before the main CPU is enabled? I'd also like to use the LVDS for an SDR rather than the camera and display, and that was not documented either the last time I looked. There was also some chat about additional entirely undocumented coprocessors on the die.
Actually, if you look at this device, you'll see that gate-arrays aren't in the same class with your father's Oldsmobile any longer. We need them to be denser than the ones at that link, but the potential is there.
Use of gate-arrays would make the bugs reprogrammable. And now that we have mobile gate-arrays, performance is actually getting pretty good.
Maybe you haven't been following gate-array development. There are mobile ones now. They use FLASH to store the program bits. And the rest is CMOS which we know how to power-manage. The gate-arrays of yore were more power-thirsty because nobody cared back then.
The problem is worse with self-driving computers. Who wants one more than 2 years old? Not even the state authorities who will license them.
Auto manufacturers would like to solve this by having everyone lease their car. An alternative is for the car to have plugs for self-driving and network features, allowing the user more control. The paper has more detail on the social and legal issues.
I have a 2007 Prius, a 2015 Jeep Grand Cherokee, and a Trailmanor travel trailer. Obviously I commute in the Prius and save the big SUV for tasks that need it. When I bought the Jeep, I rejected the connected version and went for a model with a dumber radio. I doubt I'm alone in making that choice.
Thank you for this vast work of erudition, anonymous moron.
Someday, perhaps, when you are a pre-adolescent, you may aquire somewhat more knowledge of computers, though probably not enough to make you top-heavy. At that time, you may hear of a miraculous device called a gate-array which makes it possible to craft a running CPU similarly to the way that programmers write software. With this device, someone of greater skill than you will put together a computer that might not be as fast as you like, and might not have as many transistors as you like, and might use more power than you like, but will be capable of running an Open Source CPU with a known-bitstream so that the chance of there being nasties that we're not told about that spy on us built into the CPU die is reduced from today's horrible state (gate-arrays can still have them, but the people who make these nasties don't know in advance where we put the CPU implementation).
The instruction set and currently-fixed hardware features like the MMU and the translation look-aside buffer (a feature implicated today) will be repairable by changing the bitstream.
This will never be as efficient as a fully-custom chip, but it can be good enough. Many of us will be happier using it. And for those of us who require algorithm acceleration (hopefully for better reasons than mining cryptocoins, but that is one example) it will be possible to code it into the system and get the advantages of a hardware implementation without it being so hard.
If you really want an Open Source, after-market bug fixes, and security, the best way to do that is to use not a CPU at all but a programmable gate-array. This also gives you the ability to have evolution in purchased hardware, for example improvement of the instruction set. The problem is finding a gate-array that is fast enough, dense enough, and power-conserving enough.
It would be cool to code your own special-purpose algorithm accelerators in VHDL or Verilog, etc.
This is sort of on the edge of practical, if you have the money to spend. Not as fast, not as powerful, uses more electricity, infinitely flexible. Certainly there would be some good research papers, etc., in building one.
Californians in general and the nearby community of Lompoc aren't great fans of the base. It very likely is a candidate for base closure. Development of the base real-estate would likely lead to greater economic benefit to California and communities close to the base.
I'd rather question your religion. The main problem here is a view of the world based on the best method we know of understanding it, vs. a faith-based view of the world that denies any aspect of reality that is inconvenient to its beliefs.
Try explaining this photo. :-)
I apologize for not participating in this discussion, but it is obvious legal hygiene not to discuss the suit until it's all over. There are some things I can discuss: Here is the Court Order, and I would like to introduce you to my Wonderful Legal Team. Valerie, Stanley, and I are having a good time over the winter break and wish you all happy holidays. Don't worry about me, and I'll explain what costs I have, if any, when this is over.
A creditor is required to take dollars for debts, but nobody is required to take dollars for goods and services.
Nah, I'll tell people now, so I can point at that when it's at the bottom and say I told them then.
In a post-apocalypse society gold would probably revert to being the preferred metal for tooth fillings. It's soft and inert. In an industrial society there are lots of things done with gold every day. One is wiring integrated circuit dies to the package leads, another is plating connections (because it's conductive and does not corrode).