I work directly with commercial and military pilots. Drones scare the shit out of them. Most of these guys have advanced degrees in an assortment of engineering areas.
Perhaps your pilot friends are geniuses, but there are plenty of not-so-genius pilots around:
- AF447 - co-pilot pulled up from level flight at 35k ft into a deep stall and kept pulling up until they hit the water.
- Transasia 235 - shut down good engine after failure of other engine during climb out. Stalled during ditching.
- AirAsia 8501 - just made up procedure to reboot part of flight control system while at cruise.
- Asiana 214 - in perfect flying conditions with a perfectly functioning 777, smacked into a seawall at the start of the runway.
- Southwest 345 - swapped pilot flying during landing flare.
- TK727 - meant to be a visual approach, but let the plane fly to runway threshold on GPS in mountainous terrain. Unfortunately programmed GPS coordinates out by a few metres.
Pilots are generally just regular people who are trained to fly planes. If anything the best ones I have met are the ones that are scared shitless of any new threat, regardless of how small that threat might actually be. It is this sort of pedantic attention to detail that makes them better pilots. Asking these types of pilots if drones are a big threat is like asking CEOs if they deserve more money.
I think VR offers something that is incredibly valuable in today's modern world - escapism. That is why we read novels, go to movies, drink alcohol, and travel the world - to escape from our normal existence. Most of the people I have talked to who are skeptical about VR have interesting jobs, good social lives, and enough money to entertain themselves with gadgets or travel on demand. But the reality is that the masses don't have these things. They mostly work in boring repetitive jobs, and can't afford to do much more than watch TV. VR offers them a taste of the things wealthy people can do at a potentially very cheap price (in the future anyway). I don't think you should ignore the push and pull of this. Being able to go live inside a big house, or travel to the other side of the world, or race in the Gumbal rally, or hook up with AI models. I think as capitalism continues to fail the middle class, VR will become a huge outlet for people who have enough money to keep their bodies fed and warm, but get nothing else from life.
It's kind off sad in a way, but the future being a sort of social dystopia doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.
I agree. There is lots of 'carification' of cyclists, where it is assumed they are little cars. They aren't. In my fitter days I would regularly do 4min kms while out jogging, which meant moving along the pavement at 15kph. On a sprint I would push 3 min which is 20kph. A typical commuter cyclist does about that range, and a bike only adds 8-10kgs of weight. Unless you are scared of fit human runners, bikes are just not that dangerous.
My main problem with the attitudes of cyclists towards drivers and drivers towards cyclist, is that you can see yet another example of this modern militant partisanship that seems so prevalent now. People can't compromise or just accept that others might do things differently. When they see difference it seems to produce this emotive absolutist reaction. Yet the reality is that every day millions of cycle/car journeys take place without any problems and people on the whole are sharing the roads well without the fabric of society falling apart.
This inability to be objective is what really scares me. If sections of the public get so worked up about this issue, how are we ever going to deal with problems like the demographic time bomb, broken economy that is starting to deflate, and our continuing destruction of the natural environment? It should come as no surprise that peacemaking and compromise are hard, but they are things we need to learn to work on. Many times you find that if you break down something that annoys you, it is more the fear of change that you are scared of, not the thing itself. Sadly, many now (Trump) use this obfuscation to drive division for their own selfish ends.
I hope we can fix this problem. If we don't then any good lawyer will tell you that the outcome of two opposing parties that won't compromise is almost certainly a bit fight which quickly loses all proportionality to the original dispute.
- Cost of designing something - rapidly falling due to better CAD technology, improved manufacturing techniques.
- Cost of making something - rapidly falling due to improved manufacturing and robotics.
- Cost of determining whether your rounded rectangle is sufficiently different from someone else's - the sky is the limit.
We created an industrial base that reduced real scarcity to amazingly low levels, and now we are taking the things with no natural resource limit (ideas) and are busy creating as much scarcity out of them as possible. My only hope is that when we tell our grandchildren's generation how this works, they will not believe anyone could be that stupid.
The current situation with the BBC illustrates the stupidity of accountant driven businesses. Contrary to all the doom and gloom stories you might have heard, the BBC is actually very profitable in terms of making programs with the revenue received from TV licenses. The problem is that it has a massive pension liability that is not ring-fenced from it's normal operations (WTF?). If the pension fund's investments lose value in a year, this loss is booked against their operating profit, making them look like they are losing ridiculous sums of money. What a crazy scheme.
If the equity markets crashed, we might even end up with a situation where the BBC ceases to exist as a broadcaster, and all your license fee just goes towards paying historic BBC worker's pensions.
Anyway that is my rant about them. I actually think they produce some excellent programming.
Cruz isn't going to win. He is almost a compulsive liar, of the type that keeps trying to bend the truth into worse and worse contortions to support the pre-existing thread of lies. I have dealt with these sorts of people before, and I can see Trump dealing with them in the standard way - keep calling them out until they get so tangled up in their web that their lying becomes comically obvious. These people are common in business, so don't underestimate Trump's ability to deal with it (as much as I hate the guy).
Some might say that Trump is also a liar, but actually I think this mis-reads him. Trump believes what he says, he just changes his beliefs based on his present situation. This is very different from Cruz who has more rigid beliefs but hides them to suit his present situation. One comes across as more genuine, while the other as dishonest. Both of them are ultimately just an expression of narcissistic self interest.
Not quite right. The way money laundering through property works is that you setup a holding company in the caymen islands and get whoever is paying you bribes/drug money/embezzelments to deposit it into that company's bank account. Caymen Islands doesn't give a stuff as to why the company is getting payments from dodgy characters, and their secrecy laws prevent UK law enforcement from finding out. You then use the UK's extremely relaxed laws around foreign property ownership to have your caymen island corporation buy a nice house and other toys in the UK, which you then rent off the company (you can even use this expense as a way to reduce your income tax from legal investments/work in the UK). Basically you then own a whole bunch of stuff in the UK that you got using illegally obtained funds, but the UK law enforcement has no way of connecting you to any of it.
The key thing is the layer of secrecy, and the fact that as a British Overseas Territory, you can be reasonably certain that a bunch of rebels aren't going to storm the govt and steal all your money.
If you are a small time criminal then you just set up a chicken shop and add a whole bunch of fake orders to the till each week, but the sort of money that the real criminals deal with would not work in such a scheme. Imagine how much chicken you would need to sell to buy Gaddafi's kid's home in West London. It would look pretty suspicious.
Eliminating cash will have little effect on the big time criminals, but will be quite problematic for the small ones, not to mention the disastrous effect it could have on the UK chicken shop industry.
I don't think there is any conspiracy going on. It is just that the central banks cannot do anything other than manipulate interest rates to attempt to stimulate the economy. So if there is another crash with interest rates already at zero, what do they do? Perhaps they will sit by and let the whole thing collapse, hoping that the bottom is reached before people turn up in the streets with pitchforks. However, ask yourself this - who is most likely to want to turn the system on its head: a bunch of people with zero asset, and now no job, house, hopes, or ability to feed their families? Or a bunch of middle class savers who are pissed off that their savings are being raided by the central bank? The reality is that savers have skin in the game, so will complain bitterly but get on with it. Those who have nothing might just decide the game needs changing by any means necessary if nothing is done for them.
Personally I don't think there are any simple ways out of our present mess. A lot of stuff has been proposed: UBI, people's QE, central bank infrastructure funding. However all of them have potential problems either from a practical point of view, or politically. In the end it may be that just continuing to beat the economy with interest rates is all that central banks can do until we can see how things like UBI experiments and the AI jobs armageddon work out. I mean, the reality is that if you were paying 10% on cash trapped in your account, you would more than likely just go out each week and spend all your money, even if you don't really want anything you are buying. The stimulatory effects of this occurring in aggregate should not be underestimated. Of course the massive asset bubble and the destruction of the planet from rampant zombie consumerism will likely catch up with us eventually, but I guess Yellen and Carney figure they will be long retired by then.
I thought that, but I suspect that the biggest bulwark against telcos charging differently for content (which is something they all really want to do) is that most people just think of their ISP as a utility provider who shouldn't concern itself with what they are using the pipe for. This erodes the basis for that perception. Slippery slope and all that.
Okay so this sounds great, but if everyone cheers them on for doing it, what is to stop them turning around in 6 months time and saying you have to pay extra to access youtube on your phone?
This is really an 'OS' in the loosest sense. The processors it targets (mostly ARM Cortex M) do not have a memory manager, so all these things really do is provide a basic multi-threading system, which is actually pretty trivial to implement on a micro-controller if you can be bothered. I mean, a decent embedded unicode handling library or buddy allocator is a more complicated endeavour, but not as media worthy as saying your wrote a whole 'OS'.
For what it's worth, FreeRTOS has been providing a lightweight and portable kernel that basically does what this does for about a decade now. Like windriver, they also try to leverage the exposure they get from the free code to sell their commercial version.
The interesting thing though is that embedded processing power is really jumping along at an incredible pace now. To be honest, I think in another five year anything that requires connectivity or has a screen will just be using a Linux derivative (or QNX). Memory and processors are becoming ridiculously cheap, and in many cases the few dollars saved by using a resourced constrained chip are not worth the effort of having to port a graphics library, driver etc etc.
because how else could the attackers have been in so many places at once. Magic? Jet Packs?!?!? Why it's the Car's that they drove to those locations that enabled them to murderate all those people. If we would just get rid of all cars in Paris this would never happen again.
You're right. Better add ubiquitous car tracking to the list as well.
The security failure is a bit worrying but I doubt this is really that big a threat. If it was so radioactive that it could kill lots of people from acute radiation sickness, then it will be very hard to smuggle anywhere without being detected. Certainly much harder than just a big cache of conventional weapons/explosives. On the other hand, a radiation weapon where ISIS then announces that those exposed may have a 50% increased chance of dying from cancer in the next 30 years seems rather preferable to a bunch of nutters unloading assault rifles into a crowd.
This is really just a continuation of the 'OMG freak out about nuclear thing' that has been with us since the 60s. Nuclear can be bad, but there is also radiation all around us, and we do know how to detect and manage radiation risks. People still live next to Chernobyl and Fukushima did actually melt down, yet Japan was still there when I visited last year.
And flying up and digging in a bunch of nukes isn't ever going to happen for a host of reasons...
Well, sure, the modified orbiter needed to be more robust, and some retro-thrusters on the Armadillos would have prevented them being blown into space, but overall it worked out fine, and Bruce would have even made it back if not for a bit of bad luck with the auto-detonator.
I find this trend quite strange as well. In the late 90s everyone was going on about how technology would allow us to work from anywhere so we could spread out around the country. Things like cramming into an urban area, and flying to conferences were going to become unnecessary.
Instead what I've observed is that the rise of 'thinking' jobs, which only require a desk, have made it more and more viable for people to live in concentrated urban centres. Contrast this with industrial jobs where you needed large amounts of land for a factory which naturally led to suburban developments. Similarly the rise of cheap air travel has raised the expectation that you'll just turn up at a conference, so I find I have to attend more now.
I think this trend will continue until driverless cars are ubiquitous. These will open up huge amounts of land around urban centres (it will be like adding tube lines everywhere), and will probably cause a significant decline in central city density as people are freed from existing rent/transport monopolies.
I get your point, but I think UBI needs to be able to become something much more than a subsistence payment. Just break it down to a materials utilisation perspective - a humanoid robot might use 100kg of steel, copper and silicon. It could lasts for maybe 50+ years, work in -10-50C temperatures 24 hours a day, uses a couple square meters of solar panels for power, and medical care is a few spare parts from a 3D printer. A human needs a house, land to grow crops, entertainment space, heat and lighting, expensive medical procedures and might have a useful working life of 40 years while taking 20 years to build a new one. Robots will also get faster and more accurate, while humans are probably pretty much topped out at this point.
Humans won't be able to compete with that. We need a system that will allow a considerable number of displaced people to participate in the economy when their labour has no value and it will be tragic if they are housed in subsistence level conditions while we have robots idling due to lack of demand. To be honest, we are not far off having such a situation right now.
People currently living beyond their means will continue to live beyond their elevated means.
What does this even mean when you have a global economy with surplus capacity? Machines/People are sitting around not making stuff because those living within their means just want to save, and those living beyond their means are being told not to borrow the money those living within their means are desperate trying to shove into their bank accounts through the finance industry. An entire economy can't save for next year's harvest by hoarding piles of green paper.
People capable of affording their current lifestyle will invest the additional income.
By desperately trying to find someone to borrow the money off them, even though negative real interest rates would suggest you ain't going to find any takers.
People who tend to make bad decisions will quit their jobs and pursue fame by some manner. Any success in this group will be seen as a strong argument for the UBI even if it proves to be statistically consistent with other people who drop their lives to pursue fame.
As opposed to doing a job we could easily automate but won't because those of us who still have utility value ensure (through housing benefits, tax credits) that subsistence level humans can out compete robots for all the rubbish jobs.
I'm not a fan of lazy people. But I don't think it makes sense to have them do jobs that robots could do under the threat of starvation, simply so that I can feel better about some kind of puritan work ethic that was beaten into me as a child.
I meant that the iPhone/iPad were the sorts of fun projects that most engineers would love to have worked on when they were first designed, but now it is just 'make it thinner' and 'remove a connector' incremental engineering. Nothing against Apple - it just illustrates that even the most NBT companies still end up with lots of jobs that are very boring.
Wow this is such a different take from me. I'm also an electrical engineer. I got tired of the hamster wheel, but not because of the financial serf-dom side of things (I never found the pay an issue), but because it was just incredibly boring. Even working for great companies on cool projects generally boils down to doing a whole lot of mundane form filling, process following and politicking. The days of being able to do neat engineering work just got less and less, and as you get older you quickly realise that nobody generally wants to create the 'next big thing'. They just want to do a bunch of small marketing driven improvements to maintain profits for as long as possible and sweat capital (just look at the iPhone/iPad). NBT is too risky and disruptive and few companies will do it unless forced to.
The reality though is that if the boredom didn't get to you, you could (and still can in many places) have a great middle class life as an EE.
For me I ended up starting a business. It was extremely exciting, but the downside is it was like peeling away the nice facade that is the middle class and realising that most of the people who run the show are somewhere between an immature 2 year old who keeps throwing their toys out of the cot, and an ice cold sociopath who will hunt you down and destroy your life in a completely non-sensical way if you happen to stubble into the path of whatever it is they think they were born to do in life.
Now I just find it hard to take anything seriously, including the whole notion of 'financial security'. There is no such thing unless you are Kim Jong Un and own your own country (even then...). The true escape from this life is to realise it is all a crazy game that most people take too seriously, and that we will all die in a pretty short amount of time.
Look, I'm sure VR/AR will create some big companies that will provide real products and services for many people, but the problem with all this is that GS and its ilk are just so massive that they can basically make any industry 'the next big thing' regardless of any sort of fundamentals. I mean, they basically set the whole concept of 'fundamentals'. It just makes it trivially easy for these guys to create huge profits for themselves by inflating bubbles in entire sectors. All they need is some basic level of opportunity to wrap their tentacles around.
The situation has to stop. The banking sector is meant to be highly competitive so that scarce capital (savings) is efficiently allocated to the businesses that will produce the best real returns on it. But with zero interest rates and the massive global scale of the banks, they basically just map out which areas are going to have lots of liquidity piped into them, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't think it is even a big conspiracy. It's just stupidity all around by people who think having lots of fiat currency is the same thing as happiness, and people who spent so much energy getting into power, they have no idea what to do when there.
Personally I think the best solution now is probably to implement a UBI, but with the amount set by an independent central bank. The central bank could then give up on pretending to control the supply of money through interest rates and directly control inflation using the UBI payment. The basket of goods included in the inflation measurement would effectively become a set of essentials that the central bank targets price stability on, and then the rest of the economy can play whatever games it wants. This would prevent populist government from increasing the UBI to a point that was unsustainable. The downside is that there would be no guarantee that the UBI would cover all essential needs, but I think those sorts of rich/poor transfers will always need to be dealt wiht through the existing political process. If you tried to bake a solution into the UBI then one side would just spend all their energy undermining the whole UBI concept.
I love London, but it surprises me that anyone would come here to study Electronics. Why would you when, on graduation from a course much more difficult than all the people churning through law and finance, you can look forward to never earning more than a tube driver, and watching the continuing decline of British industry and your future employment prospects, all from the comfort of your overpriced hovel in Surrey.
If you come here you go jump on whatever fancy bandwagon is the latest trend (seems to be JavaScript), learn a whole bunch of buzzwords so you can out-bluff the guy who will be bluffing you about his knowledge in the interview, and then ride the contracting gravy train, churning out the same Angular implementations over and over again.
Wow, this must be a world record for slashdot - the press release only just made it out. Having said that, this was possibly the worst kept announcement in the history of science journalism.
Slashdot Mirror
I work directly with commercial and military pilots. Drones scare the shit out of them. Most of these guys have advanced degrees in an assortment of engineering areas.
Perhaps your pilot friends are geniuses, but there are plenty of not-so-genius pilots around:
Pilots are generally just regular people who are trained to fly planes. If anything the best ones I have met are the ones that are scared shitless of any new threat, regardless of how small that threat might actually be. It is this sort of pedantic attention to detail that makes them better pilots. Asking these types of pilots if drones are a big threat is like asking CEOs if they deserve more money.
I think VR offers something that is incredibly valuable in today's modern world - escapism. That is why we read novels, go to movies, drink alcohol, and travel the world - to escape from our normal existence. Most of the people I have talked to who are skeptical about VR have interesting jobs, good social lives, and enough money to entertain themselves with gadgets or travel on demand. But the reality is that the masses don't have these things. They mostly work in boring repetitive jobs, and can't afford to do much more than watch TV. VR offers them a taste of the things wealthy people can do at a potentially very cheap price (in the future anyway). I don't think you should ignore the push and pull of this. Being able to go live inside a big house, or travel to the other side of the world, or race in the Gumbal rally, or hook up with AI models. I think as capitalism continues to fail the middle class, VR will become a huge outlet for people who have enough money to keep their bodies fed and warm, but get nothing else from life.
It's kind off sad in a way, but the future being a sort of social dystopia doesn't mean it isn't going to happen.
I agree. There is lots of 'carification' of cyclists, where it is assumed they are little cars. They aren't. In my fitter days I would regularly do 4min kms while out jogging, which meant moving along the pavement at 15kph. On a sprint I would push 3 min which is 20kph. A typical commuter cyclist does about that range, and a bike only adds 8-10kgs of weight. Unless you are scared of fit human runners, bikes are just not that dangerous.
My main problem with the attitudes of cyclists towards drivers and drivers towards cyclist, is that you can see yet another example of this modern militant partisanship that seems so prevalent now. People can't compromise or just accept that others might do things differently. When they see difference it seems to produce this emotive absolutist reaction. Yet the reality is that every day millions of cycle/car journeys take place without any problems and people on the whole are sharing the roads well without the fabric of society falling apart.
This inability to be objective is what really scares me. If sections of the public get so worked up about this issue, how are we ever going to deal with problems like the demographic time bomb, broken economy that is starting to deflate, and our continuing destruction of the natural environment? It should come as no surprise that peacemaking and compromise are hard, but they are things we need to learn to work on. Many times you find that if you break down something that annoys you, it is more the fear of change that you are scared of, not the thing itself. Sadly, many now (Trump) use this obfuscation to drive division for their own selfish ends.
I hope we can fix this problem. If we don't then any good lawyer will tell you that the outcome of two opposing parties that won't compromise is almost certainly a bit fight which quickly loses all proportionality to the original dispute.
If only making a few renderings and CG animations was all that was required to make those driverless car things.
This is why China will beat us:
- Cost of designing something - rapidly falling due to better CAD technology, improved manufacturing techniques.
- Cost of making something - rapidly falling due to improved manufacturing and robotics.
- Cost of determining whether your rounded rectangle is sufficiently different from someone else's - the sky is the limit.
We created an industrial base that reduced real scarcity to amazingly low levels, and now we are taking the things with no natural resource limit (ideas) and are busy creating as much scarcity out of them as possible. My only hope is that when we tell our grandchildren's generation how this works, they will not believe anyone could be that stupid.
The current situation with the BBC illustrates the stupidity of accountant driven businesses. Contrary to all the doom and gloom stories you might have heard, the BBC is actually very profitable in terms of making programs with the revenue received from TV licenses. The problem is that it has a massive pension liability that is not ring-fenced from it's normal operations (WTF?). If the pension fund's investments lose value in a year, this loss is booked against their operating profit, making them look like they are losing ridiculous sums of money. What a crazy scheme.
If the equity markets crashed, we might even end up with a situation where the BBC ceases to exist as a broadcaster, and all your license fee just goes towards paying historic BBC worker's pensions.
Anyway that is my rant about them. I actually think they produce some excellent programming.
Cruz isn't going to win. He is almost a compulsive liar, of the type that keeps trying to bend the truth into worse and worse contortions to support the pre-existing thread of lies. I have dealt with these sorts of people before, and I can see Trump dealing with them in the standard way - keep calling them out until they get so tangled up in their web that their lying becomes comically obvious. These people are common in business, so don't underestimate Trump's ability to deal with it (as much as I hate the guy).
Some might say that Trump is also a liar, but actually I think this mis-reads him. Trump believes what he says, he just changes his beliefs based on his present situation. This is very different from Cruz who has more rigid beliefs but hides them to suit his present situation. One comes across as more genuine, while the other as dishonest. Both of them are ultimately just an expression of narcissistic self interest.
They should send him in, so that he can show these lightweights how to play the game!
Oh wait...
Not quite right. The way money laundering through property works is that you setup a holding company in the caymen islands and get whoever is paying you bribes/drug money/embezzelments to deposit it into that company's bank account. Caymen Islands doesn't give a stuff as to why the company is getting payments from dodgy characters, and their secrecy laws prevent UK law enforcement from finding out. You then use the UK's extremely relaxed laws around foreign property ownership to have your caymen island corporation buy a nice house and other toys in the UK, which you then rent off the company (you can even use this expense as a way to reduce your income tax from legal investments/work in the UK). Basically you then own a whole bunch of stuff in the UK that you got using illegally obtained funds, but the UK law enforcement has no way of connecting you to any of it.
The key thing is the layer of secrecy, and the fact that as a British Overseas Territory, you can be reasonably certain that a bunch of rebels aren't going to storm the govt and steal all your money.
If you are a small time criminal then you just set up a chicken shop and add a whole bunch of fake orders to the till each week, but the sort of money that the real criminals deal with would not work in such a scheme. Imagine how much chicken you would need to sell to buy Gaddafi's kid's home in West London. It would look pretty suspicious.
Eliminating cash will have little effect on the big time criminals, but will be quite problematic for the small ones, not to mention the disastrous effect it could have on the UK chicken shop industry.
I don't think there is any conspiracy going on. It is just that the central banks cannot do anything other than manipulate interest rates to attempt to stimulate the economy. So if there is another crash with interest rates already at zero, what do they do? Perhaps they will sit by and let the whole thing collapse, hoping that the bottom is reached before people turn up in the streets with pitchforks. However, ask yourself this - who is most likely to want to turn the system on its head: a bunch of people with zero asset, and now no job, house, hopes, or ability to feed their families? Or a bunch of middle class savers who are pissed off that their savings are being raided by the central bank? The reality is that savers have skin in the game, so will complain bitterly but get on with it. Those who have nothing might just decide the game needs changing by any means necessary if nothing is done for them.
Personally I don't think there are any simple ways out of our present mess. A lot of stuff has been proposed: UBI, people's QE, central bank infrastructure funding. However all of them have potential problems either from a practical point of view, or politically. In the end it may be that just continuing to beat the economy with interest rates is all that central banks can do until we can see how things like UBI experiments and the AI jobs armageddon work out. I mean, the reality is that if you were paying 10% on cash trapped in your account, you would more than likely just go out each week and spend all your money, even if you don't really want anything you are buying. The stimulatory effects of this occurring in aggregate should not be underestimated. Of course the massive asset bubble and the destruction of the planet from rampant zombie consumerism will likely catch up with us eventually, but I guess Yellen and Carney figure they will be long retired by then.
I thought that, but I suspect that the biggest bulwark against telcos charging differently for content (which is something they all really want to do) is that most people just think of their ISP as a utility provider who shouldn't concern itself with what they are using the pipe for. This erodes the basis for that perception. Slippery slope and all that.
Okay so this sounds great, but if everyone cheers them on for doing it, what is to stop them turning around in 6 months time and saying you have to pay extra to access youtube on your phone?
This is really an 'OS' in the loosest sense. The processors it targets (mostly ARM Cortex M) do not have a memory manager, so all these things really do is provide a basic multi-threading system, which is actually pretty trivial to implement on a micro-controller if you can be bothered. I mean, a decent embedded unicode handling library or buddy allocator is a more complicated endeavour, but not as media worthy as saying your wrote a whole 'OS'.
For what it's worth, FreeRTOS has been providing a lightweight and portable kernel that basically does what this does for about a decade now. Like windriver, they also try to leverage the exposure they get from the free code to sell their commercial version.
The interesting thing though is that embedded processing power is really jumping along at an incredible pace now. To be honest, I think in another five year anything that requires connectivity or has a screen will just be using a Linux derivative (or QNX). Memory and processors are becoming ridiculously cheap, and in many cases the few dollars saved by using a resourced constrained chip are not worth the effort of having to port a graphics library, driver etc etc.
because how else could the attackers have been in so many places at once. Magic? Jet Packs?!?!? Why it's the Car's that they drove to those locations that enabled them to murderate all those people. If we would just get rid of all cars in Paris this would never happen again.
You're right. Better add ubiquitous car tracking to the list as well.
The security failure is a bit worrying but I doubt this is really that big a threat. If it was so radioactive that it could kill lots of people from acute radiation sickness, then it will be very hard to smuggle anywhere without being detected. Certainly much harder than just a big cache of conventional weapons/explosives. On the other hand, a radiation weapon where ISIS then announces that those exposed may have a 50% increased chance of dying from cancer in the next 30 years seems rather preferable to a bunch of nutters unloading assault rifles into a crowd.
This is really just a continuation of the 'OMG freak out about nuclear thing' that has been with us since the 60s. Nuclear can be bad, but there is also radiation all around us, and we do know how to detect and manage radiation risks. People still live next to Chernobyl and Fukushima did actually melt down, yet Japan was still there when I visited last year.
Yeah good luck taking on the Chinese market. Look what Alibaba did to Ebay. China supports its own companies, and Uber is not a Chinese company, yet.
And flying up and digging in a bunch of nukes isn't ever going to happen for a host of reasons...
Well, sure, the modified orbiter needed to be more robust, and some retro-thrusters on the Armadillos would have prevented them being blown into space, but overall it worked out fine, and Bruce would have even made it back if not for a bit of bad luck with the auto-detonator.
I find this trend quite strange as well. In the late 90s everyone was going on about how technology would allow us to work from anywhere so we could spread out around the country. Things like cramming into an urban area, and flying to conferences were going to become unnecessary.
Instead what I've observed is that the rise of 'thinking' jobs, which only require a desk, have made it more and more viable for people to live in concentrated urban centres. Contrast this with industrial jobs where you needed large amounts of land for a factory which naturally led to suburban developments. Similarly the rise of cheap air travel has raised the expectation that you'll just turn up at a conference, so I find I have to attend more now.
I think this trend will continue until driverless cars are ubiquitous. These will open up huge amounts of land around urban centres (it will be like adding tube lines everywhere), and will probably cause a significant decline in central city density as people are freed from existing rent/transport monopolies.
I get your point, but I think UBI needs to be able to become something much more than a subsistence payment. Just break it down to a materials utilisation perspective - a humanoid robot might use 100kg of steel, copper and silicon. It could lasts for maybe 50+ years, work in -10-50C temperatures 24 hours a day, uses a couple square meters of solar panels for power, and medical care is a few spare parts from a 3D printer. A human needs a house, land to grow crops, entertainment space, heat and lighting, expensive medical procedures and might have a useful working life of 40 years while taking 20 years to build a new one. Robots will also get faster and more accurate, while humans are probably pretty much topped out at this point.
Humans won't be able to compete with that. We need a system that will allow a considerable number of displaced people to participate in the economy when their labour has no value and it will be tragic if they are housed in subsistence level conditions while we have robots idling due to lack of demand. To be honest, we are not far off having such a situation right now.
It's a temporary study, so here's my prediction:
People currently living beyond their means will continue to live beyond their elevated means.
What does this even mean when you have a global economy with surplus capacity? Machines/People are sitting around not making stuff because those living within their means just want to save, and those living beyond their means are being told not to borrow the money those living within their means are desperate trying to shove into their bank accounts through the finance industry. An entire economy can't save for next year's harvest by hoarding piles of green paper.
People capable of affording their current lifestyle will invest the additional income.
By desperately trying to find someone to borrow the money off them, even though negative real interest rates would suggest you ain't going to find any takers.
People who tend to make bad decisions will quit their jobs and pursue fame by some manner. Any success in this group will be seen as a strong argument for the UBI even if it proves to be statistically consistent with other people who drop their lives to pursue fame.
As opposed to doing a job we could easily automate but won't because those of us who still have utility value ensure (through housing benefits, tax credits) that subsistence level humans can out compete robots for all the rubbish jobs.
I'm not a fan of lazy people. But I don't think it makes sense to have them do jobs that robots could do under the threat of starvation, simply so that I can feel better about some kind of puritan work ethic that was beaten into me as a child.
I meant that the iPhone/iPad were the sorts of fun projects that most engineers would love to have worked on when they were first designed, but now it is just 'make it thinner' and 'remove a connector' incremental engineering. Nothing against Apple - it just illustrates that even the most NBT companies still end up with lots of jobs that are very boring.
Wow this is such a different take from me. I'm also an electrical engineer. I got tired of the hamster wheel, but not because of the financial serf-dom side of things (I never found the pay an issue), but because it was just incredibly boring. Even working for great companies on cool projects generally boils down to doing a whole lot of mundane form filling, process following and politicking. The days of being able to do neat engineering work just got less and less, and as you get older you quickly realise that nobody generally wants to create the 'next big thing'. They just want to do a bunch of small marketing driven improvements to maintain profits for as long as possible and sweat capital (just look at the iPhone/iPad). NBT is too risky and disruptive and few companies will do it unless forced to.
The reality though is that if the boredom didn't get to you, you could (and still can in many places) have a great middle class life as an EE.
For me I ended up starting a business. It was extremely exciting, but the downside is it was like peeling away the nice facade that is the middle class and realising that most of the people who run the show are somewhere between an immature 2 year old who keeps throwing their toys out of the cot, and an ice cold sociopath who will hunt you down and destroy your life in a completely non-sensical way if you happen to stubble into the path of whatever it is they think they were born to do in life.
Now I just find it hard to take anything seriously, including the whole notion of 'financial security'. There is no such thing unless you are Kim Jong Un and own your own country (even then...). The true escape from this life is to realise it is all a crazy game that most people take too seriously, and that we will all die in a pretty short amount of time.
Look, I'm sure VR/AR will create some big companies that will provide real products and services for many people, but the problem with all this is that GS and its ilk are just so massive that they can basically make any industry 'the next big thing' regardless of any sort of fundamentals. I mean, they basically set the whole concept of 'fundamentals'. It just makes it trivially easy for these guys to create huge profits for themselves by inflating bubbles in entire sectors. All they need is some basic level of opportunity to wrap their tentacles around.
The situation has to stop. The banking sector is meant to be highly competitive so that scarce capital (savings) is efficiently allocated to the businesses that will produce the best real returns on it. But with zero interest rates and the massive global scale of the banks, they basically just map out which areas are going to have lots of liquidity piped into them, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. I don't think it is even a big conspiracy. It's just stupidity all around by people who think having lots of fiat currency is the same thing as happiness, and people who spent so much energy getting into power, they have no idea what to do when there.
Personally I think the best solution now is probably to implement a UBI, but with the amount set by an independent central bank. The central bank could then give up on pretending to control the supply of money through interest rates and directly control inflation using the UBI payment. The basket of goods included in the inflation measurement would effectively become a set of essentials that the central bank targets price stability on, and then the rest of the economy can play whatever games it wants. This would prevent populist government from increasing the UBI to a point that was unsustainable. The downside is that there would be no guarantee that the UBI would cover all essential needs, but I think those sorts of rich/poor transfers will always need to be dealt wiht through the existing political process. If you tried to bake a solution into the UBI then one side would just spend all their energy undermining the whole UBI concept.
I love London, but it surprises me that anyone would come here to study Electronics. Why would you when, on graduation from a course much more difficult than all the people churning through law and finance, you can look forward to never earning more than a tube driver, and watching the continuing decline of British industry and your future employment prospects, all from the comfort of your overpriced hovel in Surrey.
If you come here you go jump on whatever fancy bandwagon is the latest trend (seems to be JavaScript), learn a whole bunch of buzzwords so you can out-bluff the guy who will be bluffing you about his knowledge in the interview, and then ride the contracting gravy train, churning out the same Angular implementations over and over again.
Wow, this must be a world record for slashdot - the press release only just made it out. Having said that, this was possibly the worst kept announcement in the history of science journalism.