So what if the GP pops Adderall in order to be a better coder? So what if the businessman blows a line with his coffee in the morning?
When you take the drugs away from their distribution networks -- financing organized crime in the case of cocaine -- I don't really get what the big deal is. If you have an otherwise healthy, well-balanced life and some stimulants let you get your job done, fine. I'd rather have some guy doing his job while enjoying some Better Living Through Chemistry than the same guy out of work and on the dole because he couldn't take his job. Or even in a less-valuable job, doing lower-value work. (Unless you're going to sit there with a straight face and tell me that all work is equally valuable, in which case I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.)
If doing drugs makes a person more productive and allows them to do a job and maintain a lifestyle that they otherwise couldn't have, and this lifestyle makes them happier as a result, then maybe they're not always this hugely evil thing that our War on Drugs culture has made them out to be?
Obviously I'm exaggerating a bit in the case of cocaine: it's not really a good example because the increasing quantities required to maintain the effect are ascymptotic, so you can't stay on it for very long. But there are occupations -- office work not one of them -- where a very occasional but strong short-term boost in mental ability (and I don't know if cocaine actually boosts mental ability or just makes you think it does) could be useful. Perhaps, as a species, we would be more productive at the end of the day and on average if our attitude to such things wasn't so Puritanical.
Drugs are not bad because they are drugs. There is nothing inherently bad or wrong with any particular chemical, and I think it's time that we have a frank and honest discussion about the benefits, risks and hazards associated with each, that's divorced from preconcieved notions about "OMG drugz are teh evil" and the industry we've created on both sides: the military-government-industrial complex on one side that "fights" illicit drugs, and the pharmaceutical companies on the other that profit from the legal distribution of same.
Just becuase it's *technically* correct, doesn't mean they can't be held responsible.
I think that being correct is pretty much a binary state. Either what it says on the package is right, or it isn't. If it says "doesn't contain sugar" and we've legally defined 'sugar alcohols' to not be "sugar," then they're in the clear. Nothing they've said is incorrect.
If as a society we don't like their warnings as currently written, then we should change the law so that 'sugar alcohols' count as "sugar" and therefore have to be included when they're claiming to be "sugar free" or not. That burden shouldn't be on the manufacturer, it should be on us as we make the laws. The manufacturers should follow the laws, but that's the end of their responsibility. We have no basis to force them to go any further, unless we want to extend or change the laws.
Once a manufacturer does their part by putting their ingredients on the label and sticking to them, the onus is then on the consumer to check the ingredients for anything they're allergic to, if for some reason they have a rare condition that makes them sensitive to things that most people can consume without problems. Now if the ingredients list doesn't contain something that's in the product, then the manufacturer should be responsible (for failure to warn).
Your complaint should be directed to your local government representative, not at the food producers: they're doing their part. If you don't like the laws that they're following, talk to the people that write the laws.
Wouldn't surprise me at all if there was an NDA. Not that long ago I heard about some people that did a high-res scan of Michaelangelo's David and were only allowed to release the 3-D model with DRM applied. Here's an article, although I don't think it was the original one I read. Apparently the Italians are afraid that the market for Davids is going to be flooded with thousands of "simulated marble replicas" based on the "pirated" scans.
Right. Or more likely, they're afraid that it might somehow cause people to not want and fly to Italy to see the original.
Whatever: be careful not to allow anyone to take or distribute photos, either; you never know when they might stop caring about the original once they get their grubby little paws on a postcard. Hell, what value will the original be once everybody can get one?
Does anyone know if there are any plans/projects out there to build an actual free HDL synthesizer? Something that can go from the Verilog or VHDL to a netlist? It seems that's kind of key to all of the "open source hardware" projects; without one it's like the FSF in 1986, before gcc. You can write all the code you want but doing anything with it requires finding someone with the right commercial software.
The concept of 'hacking hardware' is an attractive one, but it's hampered by the very high cost of entry. Having a Free simulator is certainly a big step, but I think a lot of people are turned off by the fact that they can't produce a netlist of their design for use on an FPGA without very, very expensive tools. (Although I've seen references to some old [c. 1983] tools published by Berkley on tape for VAX that might still be around.) Unless I'm just confused and you can program an FPGA directly from an HDL program without synthesizing to a netlist first...?
I'd be curious to see someone who's gotten involved in hardware, particularly FPGA, programming give a breakdown of the minimum costs required to experiment and actually fabricate (not just simulate) some circuits. Maybe the perception of high cost on my part is false, in which case I'd be happy to be corrected.
As a US-based user, I think that attitude is sometimes the correct one. It may preclude them from getting corporate funding here, but it won't stop a lot of users from running it.
I've thought for a while that it would be nice if somebody based in a nice, free jurisdiction (Sealand or similar) put together a "Functional Linux" disto. Something that ignored all the artificial, non-technical barriers that make Linux a bit of a PITA to install. Built in MPEG encode and decode. Built in eBook decryption. Built in video codecs for every possible format. Strong encryption. Etc.
Sure, it wouldn't be legal anywhere, but people would use it anyway. I wouldn't want it to become a mainstream distro because of the PR damage it might to do Linux, but it would be nice to show people how many of the perceived limitations of Linux are actually legal or philosophical, and not technical, in origin.
That reminds me of the new japanese watches with cellphone capabilities. Now imagine a future with watches transmitting the kids' pulse to their parents to make sure they're fine and not in danger (and NOT having sex! Teenagers will of course HATE this one:P )
Now that would be fun to put on the neighbor's dog...just hope he doesn't take off after the mailman.
Actually I've always wanted to drop something like this into a FedEx package, and watch its progress in real-time across the country. I tried doing it once with a GPS receiver, but it almost never had signal and didn't get any fixes the whole trip, when I retrieved it. But cellphone signals are a little stronger, one of the triangulation-based systems might work.
I have no idea why I think that would be so cool... I just do.
Because of this system you know that he is there and not in the front yard of some keg party somewhere... so you let him hang out a little longer. What is so bad about this?
Because of this system, you believe that his phone is at his friend's house. You have no idea that the system is accurately reporting his position, or that the phone is actually in his possession. While you can probably safely assume that the position of the phone will be reported accurately, the latter is probably a bad assumption.
If you're going to not trust him as to his whereabouts in the first place (which is why you'd use the system), then there's no reason to assume he hasn't stashed the phone somewhere and is just forwarding calls through it. I could think of lots of ways to defeat this, and I'm sure I would have come up with at least a few of them when I was 12 or 13. Even if the system notifies you if a call is being forwarded, there are always ways around it (am I the only person who remembers acoustic couplers?).
What is so bad about this is the false sense of security that it gives you as a parent. Maybe not you personally -- I don't know you and therefore won't judge -- but I can think of a lot of people that would use something like this as an alternative to checking in on their kids. The end result, since it would be easily bypassed, is less supervision and not more, plus less parent/child interaction.
The last thing anyone heard out of them was back in September of last year, they had some crazy scheme that involved selling a platform for running web services on handhelds. It was nothing new or particularly creative, the crazy part was that they had a psuedo-pyramid scheme (I guess the proper term is "multi-level marketing") to sell it, where you'd get money for selling signups to the service and more money for recruiting other people to sell it. Honestly, I just had to sit down and wonder what the hell they were smoking/drinking/injecting.
In the other Slashdot thread about SCO and ELF, people were throwing 1991 around as the introduction of the format, but I'm not sure if anyone has shown convincingly when it was developed or who by.
Be interested to hear the full story, if anyone knows it.
His point, I think, was that capacitors aren't like bearings: they don't fail from overuse. Rather they fail because of environmental conditions. Generally, electrolytics fail when they dry out. Therefore, their MTBF is temperature dependent rather than cycle-dependent. You can wear them out just by sitting them on a shelf in a hot, dry room as easily as you can by having them working in a hot, dry place. (For example, inside a computer, as the Dell people found out.)
I've got another way: everyone is concentrating on measuring the power input, as electricity. The alternative is to measure the power on the output end, as its dissapated as heat. Submerge the motherboard in a dielectric coolant (which is well-insulated from the outside) and watch as its temperature changes over time. You can't get a good instantaneous power measurement, but you can get a pretty good average over time. You'd calibrate the setup by watching the temperature change as a known amount of power is dissapated into it (e.g. through a resistor).
There would be the problem of whether the electrical characiteristics of your dielectric fluid would influence the chip's performance adversely, but I think with some research you could probably pick a good coolant for this purpose (e.g. Fluorinert, etc.). Or use air in a sealed, insulated chamber as your working fluid, instead of a liquid coolant.
All the power that's going into the chip has to go out somewhere, so if measuring the electrical current draw is too hard, measure the heat instead. It's not as though calorimetry is exactly a new field of study: chemists have been doing it for years.
There might even be some better ways to estimate the power output that I'm not thinking of. If you were to attach the chip to a large mass of metal in such a way that almost all of the heat produced by the chip was being radiated into the metal (verify using an IR camera or other device) then you could measure the change in temperature of the mass of metal and determine the power going into it. That eliminates the practical messiness of the coolant bath.
I think in reality, the problem that chipmakers have is not a measurement issue, but a test-methodology issue. I'm sure they're capable of measuring the power flowing into and out of the chip at any given time, I think they're just aware of how much it fluctuates, and the difficulty in producing a number for public consumption that is representative of different usage patterns. Really, it sounds like a plea for standardization. Maybe what needs to happen is we need to define a processor power consumption metric, as the number of milliwatt-hours consumed during some particular battery of benchmarks.
The profit comes when some enterprising youngster figures out he can charge money to carry around his deviant friends' cellphones for the evening, maybe even send a text message every once in a while to complete the scenario.
Or better yet, have a bunch of prepaid cell phones, which you loan out to people to use while you're carrying around their parentally-supplied one. After all, nobody wants to be without a phone: it's uncool.
I look forward to watching the segment on CBS where they interview some kid who's doing this and everyone acts surprised that kids can actually think for themselves.
No, the solution is to change OS'es every 20 years or so.
Seriously: there's no reason why there ever has to be a "one true OS." In fact, I think that sort of thinking is harmful, because it could prevent a newcomer from gaining a foothold. Even Linux makes some basic assumptions about how a computer operates that could be challenged down the road.
This is why I'm a fan of openness in data storage formats even more than I am in source code or operating systems: as long as people have the ability to move from one platform/OS/software-package to another, we're in good shape. It's the vendor lock-in that's the problem, and honestly I think once the dominance of Windows is broken (don't ask me how long that will take, but it will happen eventually) I doubt that such a situation as we have today will ever repeat itself.
If you have openness in data storage, people can change OSes every decade or so without penalty aside from repurchase and retraining. While significant, they're not enough to outweigh a significant benefit in design or technology. However, access to years of stored data would be.
I don't see how this is any different from a normal industrial accident with something like a sheet metal press.
Because it involved a grinder? Grinder accidents are hands-down cooler than press accidents. They're trumped only by giant-vat-of-liquid-metal accidents, and mutations.
Actually more than that, it seems as though he actually made a decision to disregard the safety procedures and the fact that the machine was still operating.
This guy should have gotten a Darwin award: the only "flaw" in the robot's safety system was that it significantly over-estimated the desire of its human operators not to be torn to shreds.
Actually it's been my experience that the more expertise that someone has in an area of study, the less able they are to give a pat answer to a large question regarding it.
That's like wondering "what is art?" and going to an artists' colony and asking around. No doubt you'll get a lot of interesting and varied answers, but they're all likely to be heavily colored by the personal experience of the artist. And the answer you get in the end as the sum of the various artists' answers will probably bear little relation to the actual use of the word in wide use (by non-artists).
Someone in the robotics department who designs the innards of magnetic-tape drives might suggest that the mechanism that sticks one tape out of a cartridge of six is a "robot," however an average person would probably think that's a stretch or misuse.
Sometimes experts aren't who you want to go for, when you want to get a very basic definition that's useful when communicating with many average people. You would frankly be better served interviewing 1,000 people without any connection to the field of robotics, in order to get a useful definition.
I've worked on CNC machine tools and any definition of "robot" that includes them is a fairly useless definition, and not one that's in line with what most people would assume is being discussed. Anything that's purely programmed and has no capability of responding to inputs (so it records and plays back movements / actions), or is purely remote-controlled, should be separated from 'robots' that have some decisionmaking and logic capacity.
Slashdot Mirror
I really have to ask: so what?
So what if the GP pops Adderall in order to be a better coder? So what if the businessman blows a line with his coffee in the morning?
When you take the drugs away from their distribution networks -- financing organized crime in the case of cocaine -- I don't really get what the big deal is. If you have an otherwise healthy, well-balanced life and some stimulants let you get your job done, fine. I'd rather have some guy doing his job while enjoying some Better Living Through Chemistry than the same guy out of work and on the dole because he couldn't take his job. Or even in a less-valuable job, doing lower-value work. (Unless you're going to sit there with a straight face and tell me that all work is equally valuable, in which case I have a bridge in Brooklyn to sell you.)
If doing drugs makes a person more productive and allows them to do a job and maintain a lifestyle that they otherwise couldn't have, and this lifestyle makes them happier as a result, then maybe they're not always this hugely evil thing that our War on Drugs culture has made them out to be?
Obviously I'm exaggerating a bit in the case of cocaine: it's not really a good example because the increasing quantities required to maintain the effect are ascymptotic, so you can't stay on it for very long. But there are occupations -- office work not one of them -- where a very occasional but strong short-term boost in mental ability (and I don't know if cocaine actually boosts mental ability or just makes you think it does) could be useful. Perhaps, as a species, we would be more productive at the end of the day and on average if our attitude to such things wasn't so Puritanical.
Drugs are not bad because they are drugs. There is nothing inherently bad or wrong with any particular chemical, and I think it's time that we have a frank and honest discussion about the benefits, risks and hazards associated with each, that's divorced from preconcieved notions about "OMG drugz are teh evil" and the industry we've created on both sides: the military-government-industrial complex on one side that "fights" illicit drugs, and the pharmaceutical companies on the other that profit from the legal distribution of same.
That cos-ine is dangerous business. Once you get going, the ups and downs are awful.
Just becuase it's *technically* correct, doesn't mean they can't be held responsible.
I think that being correct is pretty much a binary state. Either what it says on the package is right, or it isn't. If it says "doesn't contain sugar" and we've legally defined 'sugar alcohols' to not be "sugar," then they're in the clear. Nothing they've said is incorrect.
If as a society we don't like their warnings as currently written, then we should change the law so that 'sugar alcohols' count as "sugar" and therefore have to be included when they're claiming to be "sugar free" or not. That burden shouldn't be on the manufacturer, it should be on us as we make the laws. The manufacturers should follow the laws, but that's the end of their responsibility. We have no basis to force them to go any further, unless we want to extend or change the laws.
Once a manufacturer does their part by putting their ingredients on the label and sticking to them, the onus is then on the consumer to check the ingredients for anything they're allergic to, if for some reason they have a rare condition that makes them sensitive to things that most people can consume without problems. Now if the ingredients list doesn't contain something that's in the product, then the manufacturer should be responsible (for failure to warn).
Your complaint should be directed to your local government representative, not at the food producers: they're doing their part. If you don't like the laws that they're following, talk to the people that write the laws.
Wouldn't surprise me at all if there was an NDA. Not that long ago I heard about some people that did a high-res scan of Michaelangelo's David and were only allowed to release the 3-D model with DRM applied. Here's an article, although I don't think it was the original one I read. Apparently the Italians are afraid that the market for Davids is going to be flooded with thousands of "simulated marble replicas" based on the "pirated" scans.
Right. Or more likely, they're afraid that it might somehow cause people to not want and fly to Italy to see the original.
Whatever: be careful not to allow anyone to take or distribute photos, either; you never know when they might stop caring about the original once they get their grubby little paws on a postcard. Hell, what value will the original be once everybody can get one?
("Who cares if it's tossed together in VB^D^D low-grade bronze? It's not like anyone's ever going to look at it hard.")
I think that their site is actually http://www.opengraphicsproject.org/
Does anyone know if there are any plans/projects out there to build an actual free HDL synthesizer? Something that can go from the Verilog or VHDL to a netlist? It seems that's kind of key to all of the "open source hardware" projects; without one it's like the FSF in 1986, before gcc. You can write all the code you want but doing anything with it requires finding someone with the right commercial software.
The concept of 'hacking hardware' is an attractive one, but it's hampered by the very high cost of entry. Having a Free simulator is certainly a big step, but I think a lot of people are turned off by the fact that they can't produce a netlist of their design for use on an FPGA without very, very expensive tools. (Although I've seen references to some old [c. 1983] tools published by Berkley on tape for VAX that might still be around.) Unless I'm just confused and you can program an FPGA directly from an HDL program without synthesizing to a netlist first...?
I'd be curious to see someone who's gotten involved in hardware, particularly FPGA, programming give a breakdown of the minimum costs required to experiment and actually fabricate (not just simulate) some circuits. Maybe the perception of high cost on my part is false, in which case I'd be happy to be corrected.
As a US-based user, I think that attitude is sometimes the correct one. It may preclude them from getting corporate funding here, but it won't stop a lot of users from running it.
I've thought for a while that it would be nice if somebody based in a nice, free jurisdiction (Sealand or similar) put together a "Functional Linux" disto. Something that ignored all the artificial, non-technical barriers that make Linux a bit of a PITA to install. Built in MPEG encode and decode. Built in eBook decryption. Built in video codecs for every possible format. Strong encryption. Etc.
Sure, it wouldn't be legal anywhere, but people would use it anyway. I wouldn't want it to become a mainstream distro because of the PR damage it might to do Linux, but it would be nice to show people how many of the perceived limitations of Linux are actually legal or philosophical, and not technical, in origin.
Actually I've always wanted to drop something like this into a FedEx package, and watch its progress in real-time across the country. I tried doing it once with a GPS receiver, but it almost never had signal and didn't get any fixes the whole trip, when I retrieved it. But cellphone signals are a little stronger, one of the triangulation-based systems might work.
... I just do.
I have no idea why I think that would be so cool
If you're going to not trust him as to his whereabouts in the first place (which is why you'd use the system), then there's no reason to assume he hasn't stashed the phone somewhere and is just forwarding calls through it. I could think of lots of ways to defeat this, and I'm sure I would have come up with at least a few of them when I was 12 or 13. Even if the system notifies you if a call is being forwarded, there are always ways around it (am I the only person who remembers acoustic couplers?).
What is so bad about this is the false sense of security that it gives you as a parent. Maybe not you personally -- I don't know you and therefore won't judge -- but I can think of a lot of people that would use something like this as an alternative to checking in on their kids. The end result, since it would be easily bypassed, is less supervision and not more, plus less parent/child interaction.
The last thing anyone heard out of them was back in September of last year, they had some crazy scheme that involved selling a platform for running web services on handhelds. It was nothing new or particularly creative, the crazy part was that they had a psuedo-pyramid scheme (I guess the proper term is "multi-level marketing") to sell it, where you'd get money for selling signups to the service and more money for recruiting other people to sell it. Honestly, I just had to sit down and wonder what the hell they were smoking/drinking/injecting.
In addition to the above Slashdot article, there's also the comparatively dry InformationWeek announcement.
In the other Slashdot thread about SCO and ELF, people were throwing 1991 around as the introduction of the format, but I'm not sure if anyone has shown convincingly when it was developed or who by.
Be interested to hear the full story, if anyone knows it.
His point, I think, was that capacitors aren't like bearings: they don't fail from overuse. Rather they fail because of environmental conditions. Generally, electrolytics fail when they dry out. Therefore, their MTBF is temperature dependent rather than cycle-dependent. You can wear them out just by sitting them on a shelf in a hot, dry room as easily as you can by having them working in a hot, dry place. (For example, inside a computer, as the Dell people found out.)
I've got another way: everyone is concentrating on measuring the power input, as electricity. The alternative is to measure the power on the output end, as its dissapated as heat. Submerge the motherboard in a dielectric coolant (which is well-insulated from the outside) and watch as its temperature changes over time. You can't get a good instantaneous power measurement, but you can get a pretty good average over time. You'd calibrate the setup by watching the temperature change as a known amount of power is dissapated into it (e.g. through a resistor).
There would be the problem of whether the electrical characiteristics of your dielectric fluid would influence the chip's performance adversely, but I think with some research you could probably pick a good coolant for this purpose (e.g. Fluorinert, etc.). Or use air in a sealed, insulated chamber as your working fluid, instead of a liquid coolant.
All the power that's going into the chip has to go out somewhere, so if measuring the electrical current draw is too hard, measure the heat instead. It's not as though calorimetry is exactly a new field of study: chemists have been doing it for years.
There might even be some better ways to estimate the power output that I'm not thinking of. If you were to attach the chip to a large mass of metal in such a way that almost all of the heat produced by the chip was being radiated into the metal (verify using an IR camera or other device) then you could measure the change in temperature of the mass of metal and determine the power going into it. That eliminates the practical messiness of the coolant bath.
I think in reality, the problem that chipmakers have is not a measurement issue, but a test-methodology issue. I'm sure they're capable of measuring the power flowing into and out of the chip at any given time, I think they're just aware of how much it fluctuates, and the difficulty in producing a number for public consumption that is representative of different usage patterns. Really, it sounds like a plea for standardization. Maybe what needs to happen is we need to define a processor power consumption metric, as the number of milliwatt-hours consumed during some particular battery of benchmarks.
The profit comes when some enterprising youngster figures out he can charge money to carry around his deviant friends' cellphones for the evening, maybe even send a text message every once in a while to complete the scenario.
Or better yet, have a bunch of prepaid cell phones, which you loan out to people to use while you're carrying around their parentally-supplied one. After all, nobody wants to be without a phone: it's uncool.
I look forward to watching the segment on CBS where they interview some kid who's doing this and everyone acts surprised that kids can actually think for themselves.
I don't think Mr. Goatse is a standard, by anyone's definition.
Or at least if he's the standard somewhere, I hope to God I never go there.
So ... how does dual-booting figure in to your metaphor?
What if I only run from a LiveCD once in a while, after I've had a few drinks?
No, the solution is to change OS'es every 20 years or so.
Seriously: there's no reason why there ever has to be a "one true OS." In fact, I think that sort of thinking is harmful, because it could prevent a newcomer from gaining a foothold. Even Linux makes some basic assumptions about how a computer operates that could be challenged down the road.
This is why I'm a fan of openness in data storage formats even more than I am in source code or operating systems: as long as people have the ability to move from one platform/OS/software-package to another, we're in good shape. It's the vendor lock-in that's the problem, and honestly I think once the dominance of Windows is broken (don't ask me how long that will take, but it will happen eventually) I doubt that such a situation as we have today will ever repeat itself.
If you have openness in data storage, people can change OSes every decade or so without penalty aside from repurchase and retraining. While significant, they're not enough to outweigh a significant benefit in design or technology. However, access to years of stored data would be.
Does anyone know who it's actually run by? It reminds me a lot of Adequacy.org from a few years back. More political, though.
It's been a while since we've had a good source of high-quality trolls; I applaud their efforts.
Yes, yes, I'm going to Hell.
Actually more than that, it seems as though he actually made a decision to disregard the safety procedures and the fact that the machine was still operating.
This guy should have gotten a Darwin award: the only "flaw" in the robot's safety system was that it significantly over-estimated the desire of its human operators not to be torn to shreds.
Actually it's been my experience that the more expertise that someone has in an area of study, the less able they are to give a pat answer to a large question regarding it.
That's like wondering "what is art?" and going to an artists' colony and asking around. No doubt you'll get a lot of interesting and varied answers, but they're all likely to be heavily colored by the personal experience of the artist. And the answer you get in the end as the sum of the various artists' answers will probably bear little relation to the actual use of the word in wide use (by non-artists).
Someone in the robotics department who designs the innards of magnetic-tape drives might suggest that the mechanism that sticks one tape out of a cartridge of six is a "robot," however an average person would probably think that's a stretch or misuse.
Sometimes experts aren't who you want to go for, when you want to get a very basic definition that's useful when communicating with many average people. You would frankly be better served interviewing 1,000 people without any connection to the field of robotics, in order to get a useful definition.
I think that's an excellent working definition.
I've worked on CNC machine tools and any definition of "robot" that includes them is a fairly useless definition, and not one that's in line with what most people would assume is being discussed. Anything that's purely programmed and has no capability of responding to inputs (so it records and plays back movements / actions), or is purely remote-controlled, should be separated from 'robots' that have some decisionmaking and logic capacity.