Using an Ant colony optimization algorithm, it's trivial ( ~200 lines of code) to coordinate n agents, avoid collisions, prioritize distressed planes, optimize approach vectors - all/without/ ground control computers or people. that it takes so long is IMO, incompetence.
Such systems could be implemented by equipment the size, weight and power of your cellphone.
Everytime a manned plane goes down - the potential exists to kill people on the ground, if that were a much smaller uav ie (www.cropcam.com) - the potential damage on the ground is minimal.
I doubt that colliding with a cropcam, is any worse than colliding with a bird.
UAV's are a half-order of magnitude less expensive than manned craft (7,000 for crop cam vs. 70,000), and two orders of magnitude less expensive to operate. (battery charge vs. fuel and maintenence)
Air-based search is often called off due to bad weather, UAV's can/could be sacrificed.
Visual based avoidance doesn't work very well with human pilots.
With very simple GPS, point-to-point radio systems - every thing in the air and more importantly on the ground could participate in active collision avoidance.
UAV can be made small, light and from foam-based materials which would render them less harmful than birds even in the event of a collision,
At some point the benefits outweigh the risks, full-on paranoia is unproductive.
Anything that could be improved an order of magnitude by a teenager in the time it takes to chug a mountain dew is horrible.
I submit that if reduced to a single keystroke - not carpel-inducing-mousing clicks, and enlarged 4 times, one could expose the average user to 10 times the number of pixels in the same time; moreover, the pixels searched would go up 100 times as people would stay with it longer if it we're so tedious.
These pictures are lousy - to really get useable images would require a fly-over. Manned flyovers are expensive, slow, and often dangerous if a person is lost due to inclimate weather; However Unmanned flyovers can be conducted in poor weather, at very low cost, and without pilot fatigue or airspace crowding concerns.
It is ironic that private pilots have been objecting to uav, and now their hero doesn't have the benefit of private UAV flights for search and rescue in his time of need.
Not to gloat, but this would be a fitting time for the private pilots associations to change course on elbowing out UAV's and giving another nascent industry to europe.
Agree on two points, The One-click Mechanical Turk is highly inefficient as it requires loads of clicks and scrolling for each of the impossible small search areas provided.
While something is better than nothing - what's the point of a large community effort if not to advance the technology, and maintain the technology so that in future cases, it can be deployed more effectively.
If this is the best google can do - i'd sell their stock.
Indian Wars, like the Indian Plagues, are examples of re-introducing two divergent cultural/genetic lineages. The Europeans had suffered the costs of both plagues and wars, and had developed war technology, large-scale cooperative behaviors, and disease immunity. The A-Indians were further behind in this development track, and they appear to have paid the price of catching up in one major balloon payment.
Today, we cringe at the loss of an interesting people, society, and maybe some gene trait which would be useful today, but at the moment of re-introduction, the composite characteristics were less developed.
Morality is but a fleeting temporal Nomic intended to aid in the aggregation and maintenance of large cohesive cooperative groups. Appeals to morality in the preset tense, based on wrongs outside the temperal scope of the nomic are generally unpersuasive, and bear a disporportionate cost to benefit ratio for the complaint as they are likely to waste time energy and the opportunity to participate in the current society by trying to tar them with the sins of their forefathers.
So while the outcome of the Pilgrim/Indian conflict is in part regrettable all around, it might be more usefully viewed as a chapter in human evolution - an amoral process by which we all benefit from the early demise of the lesser fit.
Native Americans appear to have preferred the flight instinct while those who preferred to fight remained in europe and develeped technology by competition and the pains of war. It turns out that migration to avoid conflict is a less successful survival strategy in the end game, than is stay and fight. It could have turned out differently, but it didn't and you seem to be expressing angst toward the descendants of "fighters" because they don't fully appreciate the "flighters".
This is unreasonable because neither you nor he are personally responsible for the long string of experimental choices which prcedes each of us. Yeah, the past is unjust, but justice is a fleeting whimsical fantasy defined by the victors of war for the purpose of aggregating cooperation. The process of natural selection on the other hand doesn't moralize conflict or its outcome, and we must all admit that we benefit from the resolution of these competitive conflicts, - without which we would be grunting monosyllables while pounding nuts with stones, or worse.
Maybe consider dropping te chip on your shoulder, and ask yourself, what have you done lately for the cause of tolerance and diversity? So often minority groups march for diversity while the actions suggest they really just crave the advancement of their own.
You're describing a fairly complex system for allocating limited resources.
I doubt that software engineering effort is a unique good that somehow transcends the general field of economics.
The central command and control of economies has proven devastating - but I admit, it has its charm.
I have lived in communists countries, and there are some benefits, but the costs outweigh the benefits by orders of magnitude.
I would like to hear more precisely why you feel software development would fare differently than the production of other goods, IP or otherwise under a centrally controlled economy.
I would suggest, that during our lifetime at least, the example of the soviet experiment will effectively serve as a cautionary tale to those placing too much stock in the Marxist principal that central control will reduce worker effort be reducing redundancy. Redundancy of effort is quite probably the greatest good of a competitive society - and not a flaw as Marx would argue.
That said, I do believe there is a role for government to play in reducing certain costs. The cost of removing garbage for example is much less when properly organized. Some would argue that health-care could be made more efficient.
I think we need to look at the possibility of commonwealth solutions, and I am open to a strong argument for shared cost software - particularly when the government is paying for development, and I think they could perhaps do much more to open-source more of the tools they use, but there are profound risks associated with central command and control, and most schemes to coordinate engineering can be reduced to a centralized economy.
"making copies of software" - presuming one is collecting payment for same - is extremely valuable, as it allows for the obscene cost of software to be distributed in some fair fashion among the pool of users.
This is hardly unethical.
Free software receives free marketing in a voluntary exchange. so long as there are people who value the advertising higher than the marginal value of their technical efforts - free software will persist. But then so will direct payment software. The two markets are vastly different and cannot easily be compared. but discounting either seems somewhat puerile.
Might be safe to say, that Sun is betting they will be able to improve the design better and faster than brand X (lenevo?), but that brand x's can help establish a broad and diverse culture of software, support, and education - in which Sun can expect to retain the highest margin business, in exchange for some, or most of the low-margin fare.
The gamble loses if sun cannot produce a better chip next year than brand x.
Bush has everything to do with appointing Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court. This decision would mean nothing if it weren't that the Highest Court is composed of Bush-appointed sycophants and enemies of democracy (yeah stopping a vote count in progress has consequences). Clearly the ACLU will appeal, and the Court will go on record opposing the rights of the people to the protections of their Constitution.
"Silver-halide" prints are superior, only in certain terms. All ink jet prints use more colors than the three found in "Silver-halide" paper, and so have a larger color gamut. They can print much more deeply saturated colors. violets, yellows, and reds, in particular.
True, ink jet print tend to be more easily damaged.
I prefer Silver Halide for increasingly subjective reasons. For example, the fact that the colors are buried in the emulsions makes it harder for the Brain to have that "ah-ha" moment where it figures out its being tricked by a flat representations and raises the "Its just a piece of paper stupid" alert. Halide prints preserve the "suspension of reality" a bit better than ink jet, but Ink jet can print more colors, so It's a trade off best informed by purpose.
Even with multi-threaded apps, I find older single core (but fast) processors to be ~3x faster than my dual core AMD.
I am writing n-threaded app now, the trade off appears to be stability - particularly the stability of 3rd-party libraries (.net).
But the question is with image loading and processing. Some functions can be split, but the slowest functions are spatial filters(ie Gaussian blur), and these have overlapping datasets (though only in read mode). So it seems that the applications will become multithreaded when the libraries are smart enough to break down long functions into sub threads.
The other solution - which is to divide threads at the higher level would seem to quickly hit the serialization horizon.
Apple, the company behind the "PC" ads, ads which denigrate their competitor be using a generic, but well-understood, reference to "Microsoft" - is complaining that someone else is using a generic, but obvious, reference to their own product?
I would point out that unlike software companies (ie Microsoft - which is regularly panned by name) Lawyers generally do business under their legal name - rather than under a company facade. There are lawyers - such as John Edwards - whose business is largely chasing ambulances. Criticising what they do, and the effects on society is important, and names are a critical part of lawyering.
I know people who take off their shoes every time they get on an airplane - even though no plane has ever come down due to inappropriate footwear. We live in an obsessive era when bizarre risks take center stage at the expense of real mortality schedules.
Pop Quiz - what are the top three causes of death in the civilized world?
The assertion that a laptop can cause a house-fire affects more than just the ex-homeowner. It affects everyone, and it demand a PR response, and a rationale warning to consumers. Do not leave Dell laptops running unsupervised - comes to mind.
I think the author is trying to raise public awareness about a devastating loss which could potentially affect each of us.
Bear in mind - the probability of that risk is irrelevant. The probability of a terrorist death in your family is much smaller than the risk of a fatal car accident, but the President has made his a single-issue presidency by selling the fear uncertainty and doubt caused by (certain) dark-skinned people to white Anglo-Saxon protestants (which never weary of that sort of thing).
This author is selling us a much more rationale risk with Dell as the responsible party. Dell will have to deal with this, and their failure to provide a PR person to the caller, means they now owe all of us an explanation.
"At-Will" may still have its limitations, if memory serves, employers cannot terminate an employee in order to hire someone else at a lower salary under Federal law, in addition, any manner of discrimination is grounds for chaos. And then there is unemployment which can be fairly costly to the employer.
The question of two-weeks, as you say, is merely conventional, not obligatory, moreover, I think there is a requirement for major layoff's to be pre-announced so that workers are encouraged to ease into new employment over a period of time. To some extent, this requirement can serve as the flip-side of the two-week notice.
The full and real costs of fossil or nuclear fuel were to be charged at the meter, then solar energy might prove to be cost competitive.
Because Solar energy falls on everyone's house in nearly equal amounts, solar energy does not foster and foment regional dependencies, inequities, and competition for scarce resources (as does oil). As there are no known military uses for solar energy, adopting Solar energy is not wholly coincidental with the adoption of a weapon of mass destruction (as nuclear energy is - hint: name one country with nuclear electricity which does not also have the bomb)
When you add up the blood and treasure required to burn oil for energy, and then compare that with the blood and treasure required for solar power, Solar power is quite cheap - particularly on the blood side of the equation.
Bush's reasons for going to war are pretty much the only reasons that count. And yes, oil seems to be playing into his reasoning. I agree with you, its a big swimming pool, and it matters little who gets the oil.
In addition to depending on bad information, there is substantial evidence that Bush actively dismissed good information when they contradicted his pet (non-)facts. Scooter Libby is in court today because of the effort by the Admin to discredit the Plame report. (technical legal reasons notwithstanding).
I think undeclared wars are Unconstitutional. I think the words "Congress shall have the power to declare war" means that congress has to get up and pass a resolution to "declare war" in those words, or at least by citing the war-powers provisions. Just like on your third-grade school yard, you've got to say the words: whether its mother-may-i, "I do", or "for the foregoing reasons, We hereby declare war on the country of x" Anything else is "not Cricket".
Slashdot Mirror
Using an Ant colony optimization algorithm, it's trivial ( ~200 lines of code) to coordinate n agents, avoid collisions, prioritize distressed planes, optimize approach vectors - all /without/ ground control computers or people. that it takes so long is IMO, incompetence.
Such systems could be implemented by equipment the size, weight and power of your cellphone.
(yes I built and tested one myself)
AIK
Everytime a manned plane goes down - the potential exists to kill people on the ground, if that were a much smaller uav ie (www.cropcam.com) - the potential damage on the ground is minimal.
I doubt that colliding with a cropcam, is any worse than colliding with a bird.
UAV's are a half-order of magnitude less expensive than manned craft (7,000 for crop cam vs. 70,000), and two orders of magnitude less expensive to operate. (battery charge vs. fuel and maintenence)
Air-based search is often called off due to bad weather, UAV's can/could be sacrificed.
AIK
Visual based avoidance doesn't work very well with human pilots.
With very simple GPS, point-to-point radio systems - every thing in the air and more importantly on the ground could participate in active collision avoidance.
UAV can be made small, light and from foam-based materials which would render them less harmful than birds even in the event of a collision,
At some point the benefits outweigh the risks, full-on paranoia is unproductive.
AIK
Anything that could be improved an order of magnitude by a teenager in the time it takes to chug a mountain dew is horrible.
I submit that if reduced to a single keystroke - not carpel-inducing-mousing clicks, and enlarged 4 times,
one could expose the average user to 10 times the number of pixels in the same time; moreover, the pixels searched would go up 100 times as people would stay with it longer if it we're so tedious.
as is - it is embarrassingly horrid.
Ben
These pictures are lousy - to really get useable images would require a fly-over.
Manned flyovers are expensive, slow, and often dangerous if a person is lost due to inclimate weather;
However Unmanned flyovers can be conducted in poor weather, at very low cost, and without pilot fatigue or airspace crowding concerns.
It is ironic that private pilots have been objecting to uav, and now their hero doesn't have the benefit of private UAV flights for search and rescue in his time of need.
Not to gloat, but this would be a fitting time for the private pilots associations to change course on elbowing out UAV's and giving another nascent industry to europe.
AIK
Agree on two points,
The One-click Mechanical Turk is highly inefficient as it requires loads of clicks and scrolling for each of the impossible small search areas provided.
While something is better than nothing - what's the point of a large community effort if not to advance the technology, and maintain the technology so that in future cases, it can be deployed more effectively.
If this is the best google can do - i'd sell their stock.
AIK
Indian Wars, like the Indian Plagues, are examples of re-introducing two divergent cultural/genetic lineages.
The Europeans had suffered the costs of both plagues and wars, and had developed war technology, large-scale cooperative behaviors, and disease immunity. The A-Indians were further behind in this development track, and they appear to have paid the price of catching up in one major balloon payment.
Today, we cringe at the loss of an interesting people, society, and maybe some gene trait which would be useful today, but at the moment of re-introduction, the composite characteristics were less developed.
Morality is but a fleeting temporal Nomic intended to aid in the aggregation and maintenance of large cohesive cooperative groups. Appeals to morality in the preset tense, based on wrongs outside the temperal scope of the nomic are generally unpersuasive, and bear a disporportionate cost to benefit ratio for the complaint as they are likely to waste time energy and the opportunity to participate in the current society by trying to tar them with the sins of their forefathers.
So while the outcome of the Pilgrim/Indian conflict is in part regrettable all around, it might be more usefully viewed as a chapter in human evolution - an amoral process by which we all benefit from the early demise of the lesser fit.
AIK
ok maybe ease up a bit.
Native Americans appear to have preferred the flight instinct while those who preferred to fight remained in europe and develeped technology by competition and the pains of war. It turns out that migration to avoid conflict is a less successful survival strategy in the end game, than is stay and fight. It could have turned out differently, but it didn't and you seem to be expressing angst toward the descendants of "fighters" because they don't fully appreciate the "flighters".
This is unreasonable because neither you nor he are personally responsible for the long string of experimental choices which prcedes each of us. Yeah, the past is unjust, but justice is a fleeting whimsical fantasy defined by the victors of war for the purpose of aggregating cooperation. The process of natural selection on the other hand doesn't moralize conflict or its outcome, and we must all admit that we benefit from the resolution of these competitive conflicts, - without which we would be grunting monosyllables while pounding nuts with stones, or worse.
Maybe consider dropping te chip on your shoulder, and ask yourself, what have you done lately for the cause of tolerance and diversity? So often minority groups march for diversity while the actions suggest they really just crave the advancement of their own.
AIK
ShieldWolf,
You're describing a fairly complex system for allocating limited resources.
I doubt that software engineering effort is a unique good that somehow transcends the general field of economics.
The central command and control of economies has proven devastating - but I admit, it has its charm.
I have lived in communists countries, and there are some benefits, but the costs outweigh the benefits by orders of magnitude.
I would like to hear more precisely why you feel software development would fare differently than the production of other goods, IP or otherwise under a centrally controlled economy.
I would suggest, that during our lifetime at least, the example of the soviet experiment will effectively serve as a cautionary tale to those placing too much stock in the Marxist principal that central control will reduce worker effort be reducing redundancy. Redundancy of effort is quite probably the greatest good of a competitive society - and not a flaw as Marx would argue.
That said, I do believe there is a role for government to play in reducing certain costs. The cost of removing garbage for example is much less when properly organized. Some would argue that health-care could be made more efficient.
I think we need to look at the possibility of commonwealth solutions, and I am open to a strong argument for shared cost software - particularly when the government is paying for development, and I think they could perhaps do much more to open-source more of the tools they use, but there are profound risks associated with central command and control, and most schemes to coordinate engineering can be reduced to a centralized economy.
AIK
beg to differ.
"making copies of software" - presuming one is collecting payment for same - is extremely valuable, as it allows for the obscene cost of software to be distributed in some fair fashion among the pool of users.
This is hardly unethical.
Free software receives free marketing in a voluntary exchange. so long as there are people who value the advertising higher than the marginal value of their technical efforts - free software will persist. But then so will direct payment software. The two markets are vastly different and cannot easily be compared. but discounting either seems somewhat puerile.
AIK
Might be safe to say, that Sun is betting they will be able to improve the design better and faster than brand X (lenevo?), but that brand x's can help establish a broad and diverse culture of software, support, and education - in which Sun can expect to retain the highest margin business, in exchange for some, or most of the low-margin fare.
The gamble loses if sun cannot produce a better chip next year than brand x.
I like sun's odds.
AIK
Au contraire,
Bush has everything to do with appointing Roberts and Alito to the Supreme Court. This decision would mean nothing if it weren't that the Highest Court is composed of Bush-appointed sycophants and enemies of democracy (yeah stopping a vote count in progress has consequences). Clearly the ACLU will appeal, and the Court will go on record opposing the rights of the people to the protections of their Constitution.
AIK
"Wow, so NASA regularly conducts shuttle missions to change the film in the Hubble Space Telescope? I didn't know that!"
how silly, they don't go for the film, just to replenish the blix.
AIK
"Silver-halide" prints are superior, only in certain terms. All ink jet prints use more colors than the three found in "Silver-halide" paper, and so have a larger color gamut. They can print much more deeply saturated colors. violets, yellows, and reds, in particular.
True, ink jet print tend to be more easily damaged.
I prefer Silver Halide for increasingly subjective reasons. For example, the fact that the colors are buried in the emulsions makes it harder for the Brain to have that "ah-ha" moment where it figures out its being tricked by a flat representations and raises the "Its just a piece of paper stupid" alert. Halide prints preserve the "suspension of reality" a bit better than ink jet, but Ink jet can print more colors, so It's a trade off best informed by purpose.
AIK
Even with multi-threaded apps, I find older single core (but fast) processors to be ~3x faster than my dual core AMD.
I am writing n-threaded app now, the trade off appears to be stability - particularly the stability of 3rd-party libraries (.net).
But the question is with image loading and processing. Some functions can be split, but the slowest functions are spatial filters(ie Gaussian blur), and these have overlapping datasets (though only in read mode). So it seems that the applications will become multithreaded when the libraries are smart enough to break down long functions into sub threads.
The other solution - which is to divide threads at the higher level would seem to quickly hit the serialization horizon.
AIK
Apple, the company behind the "PC" ads, ads which denigrate their competitor be using a generic, but well-understood, reference to "Microsoft" - is complaining that someone else is using a generic, but obvious, reference to their own product?
Don't hypocrisy suck?
AIK
I would point out that unlike software companies (ie Microsoft - which is regularly panned by name) Lawyers generally do business under their legal name - rather than under a company facade. There are lawyers - such as John Edwards - whose business is largely chasing ambulances. Criticising what they do, and the effects on society is important, and names are a critical part of lawyering.
AIK
Agreed,
We need less gangs, and frankl, when cops use their power to perpetuate their own power by tactics of fear - they become the same as gangs.
I was arrested for picking up litter (including the kind politicians use for advertising) So tis sort of ting is familiar...
AIK
-- I don't know about the second or third, but according to the news, the first one must be terrorism.
There you go jumping to conclusions. Now it's sleeping with rich old men. god save us from such a fate.
AIK
I know people who take off their shoes every time they get on an airplane - even though no plane has ever come down due to inappropriate footwear. We live in an obsessive era when bizarre risks take center stage at the expense of real mortality schedules.
Pop Quiz - what are the top three causes of death in the civilized world?
AIK
The assertion that a laptop can cause a house-fire affects more than just the ex-homeowner. It affects everyone, and it demand a PR response, and a rationale warning to consumers. Do not leave Dell laptops running unsupervised - comes to mind.
I think the author is trying to raise public awareness about a devastating loss which could potentially affect each of us.
Bear in mind - the probability of that risk is irrelevant. The probability of a terrorist death in your family is much smaller than the risk of a fatal car accident, but the President has made his a single-issue presidency by selling the fear uncertainty and doubt caused by (certain) dark-skinned people to white Anglo-Saxon protestants (which never weary of that sort of thing).
This author is selling us a much more rationale risk with Dell as the responsible party. Dell will have to deal with this, and their failure to provide a PR person to the caller, means they now owe all of us an explanation.
AIK
I suggest that you've over-simplified a bit.
"At-Will" may still have its limitations, if memory serves, employers cannot terminate an employee in order to hire someone else at a lower salary under Federal law, in addition, any manner of discrimination is grounds for chaos. And then there is unemployment which can be fairly costly to the employer.
The question of two-weeks, as you say, is merely conventional, not obligatory, moreover, I think there is a requirement for major layoff's to be pre-announced so that workers are encouraged to ease into new employment over a period of time. To some extent, this requirement can serve as the flip-side of the two-week notice.
AIK (NAFL)
Quite possibly, if ...
The full and real costs of fossil or nuclear fuel were to be charged at the meter, then solar energy might prove to be cost competitive.
Because Solar energy falls on everyone's house in nearly equal amounts, solar energy does not foster and foment regional dependencies, inequities, and competition for scarce resources (as does oil). As there are no known military uses for solar energy, adopting Solar energy is not wholly coincidental with the adoption of a weapon of mass destruction (as nuclear energy is - hint: name one country with nuclear electricity which does not also have the bomb)
When you add up the blood and treasure required to burn oil for energy, and then compare that with the blood and treasure required for solar power, Solar power is quite cheap - particularly on the blood side of the equation.
AIK
Which would be bad why?
AIK
Trying to answer the question ...
Bush's reasons for going to war are pretty much the only reasons that count. And yes, oil seems to be playing into his reasoning. I agree with you, its a big swimming pool, and it matters little who gets the oil.
In addition to depending on bad information, there is substantial evidence that Bush actively dismissed good information when they contradicted his pet (non-)facts. Scooter Libby is in court today because of the effort by the Admin to discredit the Plame report. (technical legal reasons notwithstanding).
I think undeclared wars are Unconstitutional. I think the words "Congress shall have the power to declare war" means that congress has to get up and pass a resolution to "declare war" in those words, or at least by citing the war-powers provisions. Just like on your third-grade school yard, you've got to say the words: whether its mother-may-i, "I do", or "for the foregoing reasons, We hereby declare war on the country of x" Anything else is "not Cricket".
AIK