The reason for optimism in the face of leaky abstractions and overly complex systems is that ultimately, human beings, being a large collection of leaky abstractions themselves, are very good at dealing with the failures that can occur, and moving forward anyway.
The problem comes from the fact that some folks expect perfect technological utopia, and build systems that don't allow for any messiness in the design. The issue isn't usually the frequency of the failures in a system, but what happens when the system fails, and how easy it is to recover from a failure.
The whole air traffic system is a classic example; even if the air traffic control radar system and the autopilot control system in the jet being vectored by said radar system fail simultaneously, human pilots and controllers will still be able to get the airplane on the ground safely and successfully, as long as you give them sufficient low-tech backups (basic radios, little airplane markers on maps, manual-reversion flight controls, etc).
The air conditioning packs on most airliners completely change the entire volume of air in the cabin every 10 minutes or so, sometimes more often than that. While the pilots do have control over the cabin altitude setting, which indirectly controls the overall partial pressure of oxygen in the cabin, they're (a) usually not allowed to mess with it, per company regulations (ie. they leave it on automatic), and (b) they have to keep the cabin altitude at or below 8000 feet, per government regulations.
No danger of running out of oxygen, unless the cabin loses pressure entirely, at which point your laptop fuel cell is going to be the least of your worries, as the "rubber jungle" is deployed (drop-down oxygen masks), and the airplane is pushed over into a screaming dive to get down to a safe altitude (but man, it's fun to do in the simulator:-)).
The chip has an on-board hardware emulator for X86 instructions; it translates them to native instructions and pumps them into the execution pipeline. PA-RISC instructions are emulated in software, either on the fly or by pretranslating the binaries (HP has a lot of experience with doing software emulation, having done it before when moving from its proprietary HP3000 architecture to PA-RISC back in the late 80's; it's a lot faster than you might think).
You miss the fundamental question: WHY are Americans eating more? Well, obviously, because we're more hungry, of course; most people don't eat to entertain themselves. Why are we more hungry? Because we're eating crap that doesn't provide meaningful, long-lasting nutrition, which causes our blood-sugar levels to zoom up and down wildly, and we're hungry an hour after lunch because the blob of simple carbohydrates we consumed (burger, french fries and a Coke) has already been burned through, and the fat is being stored rather than burned (hey, why burn fat when there's probably more carbs on the way?)
The point of ditching simple carbs, and eating more (yes, more) fat and protein is that you don't have to eat nearly as much to be full, and after you've eaten, you won't be hungry until the next meal-time. Overall, you may even be consuming the same amount of calories, but your body is not only going to burn the fat you eat, it may even burn a little stored fat too. If you eat simple carbs all the time, your metabolism is never going to get around to switching into fat-burning mode, which doesn't happen until you've burned through all available carbohydrate calories.
Re:Impact on the environment (and the ground)
on
Going Up?
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· Score: 1
The proposed ribbon would be only a few millimeters thick, and about a meter wide. Such a cable would tend to either burn up due to air friction, or decelerate dramatically due to atmospheric drag. Besides, even if air resistance didn't appreciably decelerate the cable, you can't treat the impact solely on the basis of kinetic energy of the total mass. It's the energy density generated by the impact that matters the most. An asteroid generates an enormous amount of energy in a confined space because a huge mass hits all at one place. A falling space elevator cable might take days to fall, depending on where it broke, and the impact energy would be spread over hundreds or thousands of miles, so the total impact on any one place is not out of reason (although I still wouldn't necessarily want to get hit by it).
The scene in T2 was real, not an effect, a very nice piece of helicopter flying. I think the film was speeded up, though, the helicopter was not moving that fast. The funny part of that scene, if you look very closely, is that at one point the pilot has three hands, because they apparently CGI'ed the actor in over the real pilot.
600 ft. is actually a perfectly legal height for a helicopter to fly at, at least in the U.S., even over a city, as long as it's far enough away from buildings and obstructions. Police patrol helicopters routinely fly around at 300-400 ft. Fixed wing aircraft have to stay at least 1000 ft. above the surface, and 2000 ft. horizontally from the nearest obstacle.
AC-3 is a sophisticated multi-channel surround audio scheme invented by Dolby. It is most often used in professional broadcast equipment, like video servers, and it's not something that is simple or obvious, so Dolby has every right to patent it. We support AC-3 on the video servers that the company I work for builds, and we licensed the technology from Dolby to do so.
Slashdot Mirror
The reason for optimism in the face of leaky abstractions and overly complex systems is that ultimately, human beings, being a large collection of leaky abstractions themselves, are very good at dealing with the failures that can occur, and moving forward anyway.
The problem comes from the fact that some folks expect perfect technological utopia, and build systems that don't allow for any messiness in the design. The issue isn't usually the frequency of the failures in a system, but what happens when the system fails, and how easy it is to recover from a failure.
The whole air traffic system is a classic example; even if the air traffic control radar system and the autopilot control system in the jet being vectored by said radar system fail simultaneously, human pilots and controllers will still be able to get the airplane on the ground safely and successfully, as long as you give them sufficient low-tech backups (basic radios, little airplane markers on maps, manual-reversion flight controls, etc).
But Bozo the Clown _was_ a genius!
The air conditioning packs on most airliners completely change the entire volume of air in the cabin every 10 minutes or so, sometimes more often than that. While the pilots do have control over the cabin altitude setting, which indirectly controls the overall partial pressure of oxygen in the cabin, they're (a) usually not allowed to mess with it, per company regulations (ie. they leave it on automatic), and (b) they have to keep the cabin altitude at or below 8000 feet, per government regulations.
:-)).
No danger of running out of oxygen, unless the cabin loses pressure entirely, at which point your laptop fuel cell is going to be the least of your worries, as the "rubber jungle" is deployed (drop-down oxygen masks), and the airplane is pushed over into a screaming dive to get down to a safe altitude (but man, it's fun to do in the simulator
The chip has an on-board hardware emulator for X86 instructions; it translates them to native instructions and pumps them into the execution pipeline. PA-RISC instructions are emulated in software, either on the fly or by pretranslating the binaries (HP has a lot of experience with doing software emulation, having done it before when moving from its proprietary HP3000 architecture to PA-RISC back in the late 80's; it's a lot faster than you might think).
You miss the fundamental question: WHY are Americans eating more? Well, obviously, because we're more hungry, of course; most people don't eat to entertain themselves. Why are we more hungry? Because we're eating crap that doesn't provide meaningful, long-lasting nutrition, which causes our blood-sugar levels to zoom up and down wildly, and we're hungry an hour after lunch because the blob of simple carbohydrates we consumed (burger, french fries and a Coke) has already been burned through, and the fat is being stored rather than burned (hey, why burn fat when there's probably more carbs on the way?)
The point of ditching simple carbs, and eating more (yes, more) fat and protein is that you don't have to eat nearly as much to be full, and after you've eaten, you won't be hungry until the next meal-time. Overall, you may even be consuming the same amount of calories, but your body is not only going to burn the fat you eat, it may even burn a little stored fat too. If you eat simple carbs all the time, your metabolism is never going to get around to switching into fat-burning mode, which doesn't happen until you've burned through all available carbohydrate calories.
The proposed ribbon would be only a few millimeters thick, and about a meter wide. Such a cable would tend to either burn up due to air friction, or decelerate dramatically due to atmospheric drag. Besides, even if air resistance didn't appreciably decelerate the cable, you can't treat the impact solely on the basis of kinetic energy of the total mass. It's the energy density generated by the impact that matters the most. An asteroid generates an enormous amount of energy in a confined space because a huge mass hits all at one place. A falling space elevator cable might take days to fall, depending on where it broke, and the impact energy would be spread over hundreds or thousands of miles, so the total impact on any one place is not out of reason (although I still wouldn't necessarily want to get hit by it).
The scene in T2 was real, not an effect, a very nice piece of helicopter flying. I think the film was speeded up, though, the helicopter was not moving that fast. The funny part of that scene, if you look very closely, is that at one point the pilot has three hands, because they apparently CGI'ed the actor in over the real pilot.
600 ft. is actually a perfectly legal height for a helicopter to fly at, at least in the U.S., even over a city, as long as it's far enough away from buildings and obstructions. Police patrol helicopters routinely fly around at 300-400 ft. Fixed wing aircraft have to stay at least 1000 ft. above the surface, and 2000 ft. horizontally from the nearest obstacle.
Flygeek (commercial fixed-wing pilot)
AC-3 is a sophisticated multi-channel surround audio scheme invented by Dolby. It is most often used in professional broadcast equipment, like video servers, and it's not something that is simple or obvious, so Dolby has every right to patent it. We support AC-3 on the video servers that the company I work for builds, and we licensed the technology from Dolby to do so.