The touble is that Dr Who was a serial. Finding one lost episode doesn't really help much if the other half dozen that surrounds it are also missing.
Of course if there was a serial with just one missing show - then this should be grounds for much rejoicing and the stamping of large quantities of overpriced DVD's. But with all those early episodes being missing, the odds are not good.
My mother tells me that I used to have to watch Dr Who from the safety of a large cardboard box T.A.R.D.I.S down behind the sofa so I could hide when the scarey bits came on. (That would have been the Hartnell episodes - not the later stuff - which was much more tongue in cheek)
This (and several other) articles have said:
Of 34 unmanned American, Soviet and Russian missions to Mars since 1960, two-thirds have ended in failure. Beagle 2 would be only the fourth successful Mars landing if all goes well.
Am I just being dense?
If two-thirds of 34 missions ended in failure, wouldn't that mean there were 11 successful missions? How come Beagle 2 would only be the fourth successful one?
It must be that the first statistic is talking about all kinds of missions (including simple orbiters with no landing component) whilst the second is talking only about landers.
That being the case, only three out of the eleven successful missions included landers in the first place. I don't believe that as many as nine or ten landers have ever been sent to Mars. This suggests that the failure rate of the landers is not noticably different than the failure rate of relatively simple orbiters.
What that says to me that the problem is not so much the rigours of descent as of the difficulty of getting electronics and batteries to last throughout launch and the long trip to Mars. I'm betting that these failed landers were dead before they even hit the atmosphere.
Man - where do you start with such a bogus thing as this?
Take a large number of vaguely defined terms - with no units or ranges associated with them - and which are "measured" by the scientific method of asking some guy to rate them.
Then multiply each by a suspiciously exact number - accurate to one part in a hundred - and just add them up! What are the odds that none of these terms need to be squared or something?
Even if you ignore the actual equation - and take this as some kind of list of the things you should think about when buying a game - it doesn't make sense.
Just look at the first term:
"Age range"
The importance of the age range of the game depends crucially on the range of ages of the people playing. If everyone is aged 12 years - then a game that's rated "Ages 12 to 14" is likely to be more fun than something rated "Ages 2 to adult" because it's targetted at the precise ages of the people playing it. Then, if the people playing include a 2 year old and an adult - then a wide age range is indeed important. But if this equation is to be believed, then a game with a 12 to 14 year age range is doomed compared to a game that's simple enough for a 2 year old to play. That's ridiculous.
But in any case, this is a circular argument - age ranges are set such that the people within that range will have fun playing the game - so using that number to calculate how much fun the game is to play is just silly.
Argh!
This is the kind of thing that dramatically reduces the public's perception of the value of the scientific method.
I'm not impressed.
on
News at a Glance
·
· Score: 3, Informative
So, here are the first half-dozen things I tried:
1) A picture of a donut in the Science/Technology section. Links to a story about the record breaking sales of the Finding Nemo DVD??!? So, wrong image *and* wrong category.
2) In the Business section, a photo of some diamonds with a link to a story about Ukrainian diamonds! Hooray! Unfortunately, the next four (unrelated) photo's in the business section point to the exact same article.
3) Even when I selected the "US" edition, the top three entries in "Top Stories" were links to articles in German.
4) The next photo in the Science/Technology section linked to an advert for some video game or other. Not what I'd describe as news.
5) Local News (remember I have 'US' selected). The first three items are in Spanish. If these were stories about the US or maybe Mexico - for Mexicans - maybe I could understand that - but these appeared to be about Spain and were obviously 'Local' stories only if you happen to live in Spain!
6) Clicked on the first photo in the Health section - got a broken link.
Hmmm - I'm seeing "Windows - The Matrix Edition"......We'll have all the information presented to the users in vertically scrolling columns of blurry letters - and let them reply using only a querty keyboard.
Several people here said we should bring the HST back to earth in the shuttle - and lots of other people have explained why it's impossible - I beg to differ.
The shuttle can haul 63,500lbs of payload up to orbit - but it can only carry 43,500lbs on return to earth. However, the Hubble only weighs 23,500lbs - it's BIG - but it's mostly empty space. So it's NOT impossible.
However, consider things like retracting those big solar panels - I doubt they were designed to retract under power - there are probably all sorts of other reasons you can't bring it back - but shuttle cargo capacity isn't one of them.
Personally, I'd vote to build a replacement - get it up to orbit - then either bring Hubble down on the same shuttle - or get rid of it in a controlled crash.
> If the GPL *is* invalid, as SCO claim, then the code reverts > back to being the copyright of the individual contributers...
I don't know whether that's true or not - but assuming it is...where would that leave the dozen or so MILLION people who have (and use) copies of that code?
The license they thought they had to use it would vaporize - and the chances of finding every single author of every single itty bitty part and getting them to sign up to some 'son-of-GPL' license - are pretty slim.
We'd be in a state of utter chaos for years afterwards.
If the GPL were simply to evaporate as if it had never existed - then SCO would be the very least of our problems.
I think it's more likely that if we lost the battle - then the GPL would have been shown to not provide the protections to the authors rights that he/she thought it would...which would allow people who have the software to distribute it in ways the original owner did not want because the license would have been found not to effectively prevent that abuse.
That's not actually a total disaster. Although it wouldn't please an awful lot of people - we'd still have Linux for free everywhere.
However, even that is not what's really going on here. SCO are not merely asserting their supposed right to redistribute the software in ways contrary to the GPL's spirit - they have actually CHANGED the terms of the license. Whether the GPL would provide the protections we'd hoped for or not - SCO can only change the license completely if they own the copyright to it.
So - we must conclude that SCO are asserting that THEY own the copyright to the code...presumably on some bogus theory about we having stolen sources from them for which they DO own the copyright.
What's special about music? Software, novels, poetry, textbooks, movies, TV shows...and music - are all just bits. Why does one set of bits need to be promoted and distributed one way - and others another? It makes no sense.
You could maybe make the case that movies are special because they are HUGE files and eat bandwidth - but it seems crazy that the others are all treated so differently.
The entire mechanism of production, distribution, marketting and copyrighting of bits needs a complete rework...nothing we are doing these days makes any sense.
It is ESSENTIAL to any fair voting system that the voter be given no means to prove how he/she voted...eg by a reciept.
If you can take away proof of how you voted - then unscrupulous people with piles of cash can subvert elections by bribing voters to vote they way they want. They simply do a deal where the voter brings along their paper reciept in order to claim their bribe money. (eg A supermarket might offer: "20% off groceries if you show us your vote for candidate X!" - the local Mob Boss might offer to break the kneecaps of anyone who can't prove that they voted for candidate Y.)
The whole point of secret voting is to ensure that no matter how much money the voter is paid (or by whom), they can still secretly cast their vote any way they want.
I also have an 02-build/03-model-year MINI - and I don't have the problem.
So long as you don't get the ECU software upgraded to the 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 or 3.5 ECU software - you should be fine. The 3.6 version is supposed to have the fix - and versions prior to 3.2 don't seem to exhibit the problem.
Without reformulated gas, I doubt you'd ever see the problem - and even if you happened to visit a place that has it and bought just one tankful, I don't think that's enough to throw the ECU's algorithms off enough to show the problem.
The diagnostic interface to all cars that are sold in the USA *is* standardized. Look under the dash somewhere close to the steering wheel and you should see a socket (probably covered with a snap-shut cover). This must conform to the 'OBDII' standard.
You can buy the interface pack to hang a laptop or PDA onto the car:
eg: http://www.elmelectronics.com/
There are also circuit diagrams out there to let you build your own if you want to (they interface into the serial port). The codes for the 'typical' problem reports are standardized - and lots of the non-standard ones are well documented out on the web.
The software to read out those codes - and to reset them once you've fixed the car yourself must be out there - and if it isn't, it can't be more than a page of code if you don't want some kind of fancy GUI.
I agree - and it's not just electrical noise (which is a big problem with all of those sparks going off at a few tens of kilohertz - and the starter motor) - but there are also thermal issues (it gets pretty hot under the hood) and vibration too.
It's not going to be easy to physically manufacture a workable/reliable ECU.
Then you can bet there are going to be liability issues in car wrecks.
It really doesn't bear thinking about - yet it's something I think NEEDS to be thought about. OpenSource software under the hood of my car would be a very good thing.
The new BMW MINI Cooper has an ECU built by Siemens and programmed by yet a third company. BMW claim that they don't even have a copy of the source code for their own car! The same ECU is used in a variety of engines. So in order to have the code optimised for a particular car, the software "learns" - over several tankfuls of gas - how best to drive the car. Since cars change over time, it continually re-learns. If you add a new air-filter for example - the effects of doing it only gradually appear - over about three tankfuls - as the ECU learns to adjust the fuel/air mixture again.
This has consequences. Firstly, when you buy a new MINI Cooper, you get really poor gas milage for the first few tanks of gas - but gradually (as the ECU learns), it gets better.
So far, so good.
But the MINI has a problem (known as the 'stumble' amongst owners) - it's a software bug that appeared in 2003 model-year cars - older cars don't have it unless they upgrade to the 3.3.x version of the ECU software for some reason.
Under the special combinations of high air temperatures (and perhaps only in low humidity) in the summer in the southern USA - and with 'Reformulated Gasoline' that we get here in Texas and in Florida - the car sometimes stalls out at dangerous times. (eg You pull out into traffic - and the car stalls halfway across the road).
The stumble was VERY hard to diagnose - both because BMW couldn't reproduce the problem - it took a lot of MINI enthusiasts across the US to finally figure it out.
We (within the owner's community) decided that this couldn't possibly be temperature related - because the car would still stumble in the cool of early morning. We decided it couldn't be reformulated gas because we could drive to Oklahoma - buy a tankful of "the good stuff" - and still experience the stumble. During a heatwave in Washington (who also have reformulated gas) - there were no reports of 'stumbles'.
These were cases where diagnosis was made almost impossible because the ECU had *learned* to stumble - and needed either cool temps or better gas for THREE TANKFULS in order to recover from it. People who experienced a short heatwave - or who bought only one or two tankfuls of reformulated gas didn't see the problem.
In consequence, it's taken over a year to convince BMW that there really is a problem and to find out what it is. However, BMW themselves can't fix it. They have to work through Siemens to get to the third company who programed the ECU so it could be fixed - and those guys didn't want to just fix it "the easy way" because it would have the potential to screw up performance in other kinds of car that use the same ECU software.
We are promised a fix for the stumbles - sometime in December.
This is all VERY yukky and unsatisfactory.
The thought of trying to write OpenSource ECU software came to mind - and there are some projects out there to do just that. This ECU has reloadable software - using a serial port connection that appears just under the steering wheel (used for emissions control stuff too). You can buy a cable to adapt the car's serial port to that of your laptop or PDA - and there is even software to let you read out and reset the engine management error codes in the comfort of your own driveway.
Armed with a laptop, your car dealership can upload new software into your car in about 20 minutes.
However, attempts to do this ourselves resulted in a fascinating inside into what the world of Palladium/DRM. When you tell the MINI "Please accept a new software load" - it sends you back a 16 bit random number. You are supposed to execute some predefined math operations on that number and send back the result as another 16 bit number. If you get the answer wrong, the car completely shuts down for 3 HOURS! You can't even start it under those circumstances - let alone try again with the software download. Obviously, the math operations you have to evaluate to solve this challenge/response scheme are secret.
So - welcome to the world of the future. For some of us it's already here!
As a Brit working in the US, I have this debate over colour vs color all the time.
There is a resolution to it. The 'recognised' standard for American English is Websters - and it allows both flavor and flavour (and color and colour). The recognised standard for British English is the Oxford English dictionary - and it recognises ONLY flavour and colour.
Hence, the most compatible choice is Flavour and Colour since those should be recognisable on both sides of the atlantic where Flavor and Color are most definitely mis-spellings of British English.
This guys 'solution' to Zeno's paradox is silly - and unnecessary.
You can produce a version of the paradox that doesn't rely on time at all - and hence any special properties of time can't be used to resolve it.
Draw two straight lines on a piece of paper. One of them (drawn with a red pencil) starts in the bottom-left corner of the page and slopes from left to right such that it is 1cm further to the right for every 1cm it heads up the page. The other line (drawn in blue) starts off 10cm to the right of the red line and slopes from left to right much more gently such that it is only 1mm further to the right for every 1cm it heads up the page.
Now, you know that if the paper is long enough and more than about 12cm wide, the red line will reach the right hand edge of the page a shorter distance up the paper than the blue line does.
However, Zeno should argue that 10cm up from the bottom of the page, the red line is 10cm further to the right - but the blue line has moved 1cm to the right so it's at 11cm from the lefthand edge. When (at 11cm up the page), the red line is 11cm from the lefthand edge, the blue line is 11.1cm from the edge...and so on.
By Zeno's argument, the red line can never cross the blue line.
All I've done is replace the temporal dimension with a spatial one...every other argument still applies.
Personally, I've never seen Zeno's paradox as a paradox. With modern mathematics, it's simple to sum the infinite series of tiny time steps that the story subjects us to in order to arrive at the time at which Achilles reaches the Tortoise - then you can apply the paradox in reverse to show that Achilles can comfortably make it to the finish line first.
Not that I recommend doing such a thing - but just to highlight why this is a silly idea...
1) Go to the razor blade stand - pick up a pack of blades - get
photo taken.
2) Hand pack of blades to your wife as she's buying cornflakes in
the next aisle. Say "Honey - please pay for these - I have to go
to the store next door."
3) Leave store.
4) When they stop you leaving the store and accuse you of not paying for
the blades you picked up - tell them that you left the blades in the
Cornflakes aisle. Let them strip-search you - you don't have
the blades. Make a terrible fuss.
5) They let you go with profuse apologies.
6) Your wife then leaves the store - with pack of blades in her pocket
'forgetting' to pay for them. Nobody bats an eyelid because her photo
didn't get taken at the razor blade shelf.
So why don't they simply correlate the RFID tags that they detect going through the exit of the store with an RFID tag on the till reciept and directly check that every tag that they detect as marked as being in the store's inventory is also in the database as having been sold against that reciept?
Nobody's privacy is invaded - it's all perfectly anonymous.
I don't see the need for all the photography and consequent invasion of privacy.
Suppose I want to set up a peer-to-peer system for trading legitimate material - maybe not music at all - photo's of people's dogs or something. How should I protect myself from legal action given that I have no real control of the files that others are trading using the system I set up?
I was one of the people that somehow got onto the mailing list for Dijkstra's notes. It was always a joy to see a photocopy of one of his hand-written (mostly) notes appear in my In-Tray at work.
Unless you've read a good number of his writings, it's hard to appreciate the way this guy thought.
He also had the neatest handwriting in the known universe. I recall getting one of his notes that seemed as immaculately neat as all the others - with a note at the end apologising for the quality of the handwriting as he'd written it with his other hand "because it could use some practice". He resented having to use a typewriter because he liked to invent new symbols. He always wrote code fragments in a programming language of his own invention for which no known compiler exists.
It may be that you could describe this as a 'blog' - it was disseminated by mail to people who he'd somehow run into or been associated with. I have no idea how many copies were sent out - but it must have been hundreds. The earliest ones were long before the advent of the Internet.
Whether it makes a suitable Salon story - I can't say.
What's different about our society looking to develop super-luminal travel compared to people in the 1600's thinking about heavier-than-air flight is that whilst there were no known scientific laws that would enable a heavier-than-air craft to stay aloft, there were no laws to prohibit it either. They had birds, insects and bats flying around all over the place - all demonstrably heavier than air. They knew this was an achievable goal.
With faster-than-light travel, we have a very different situation. He have actual scientific laws courtesy of that Einstein guy that show that you cannot accellerate an object up to the speed of light without consuming infinite energy . Those laws also indicate extreme difficulties with even the concept of something travelling FASTER than light (if you ever got going faster than light, it would take infinite energy to avoid travelling infinitely fast - and getting to a nearby star at infinite speed is MUCH harder than doing it at subluminal speeds.
Then, we also have no examples of super-luminal objects to point at and say "Ha! Those laws must be wrong".
That's an entirely different (and much more depressing) situation than the situation in the 1600's. They could look to a simple child's kite and imagine a hang-glider with a motor replacing the force provided by the kite-string. They could see birds doing that exact thing - taunting us with the ease of it all.
We have no similar thing to look towards - and one of the greatest minds of the last century showed us clear mathematical proof that this isn't going to be an easy matter.
Slashdot Mirror
The touble is that Dr Who was a serial. Finding one lost episode doesn't really help much if the other half dozen that surrounds it are also missing.
Of course if there was a serial with just one missing show - then this should be grounds for much rejoicing and the stamping of large quantities of overpriced DVD's. But with all those early episodes being missing, the odds are not good.
My mother tells me that I used to have to watch Dr Who from the safety of a large cardboard box T.A.R.D.I.S down behind the sofa so I could hide when the scarey bits came on. (That would have been the Hartnell episodes - not the later stuff - which was much more tongue in cheek)
Am I just being dense?
If two-thirds of 34 missions ended in failure, wouldn't that mean there were 11 successful missions? How come Beagle 2 would only be the fourth successful one?
It must be that the first statistic is talking about all kinds of missions (including simple orbiters with no landing component) whilst the second is talking only about landers.
That being the case, only three out of the eleven successful missions included landers in the first place. I don't believe that as many as nine or ten landers have ever been sent to Mars. This suggests that the failure rate of the landers is not noticably different than the failure rate of relatively simple orbiters.
What that says to me that the problem is not so much the rigours of descent as of the difficulty of getting electronics and batteries to last throughout launch and the long trip to Mars. I'm betting that these failed landers were dead before they even hit the atmosphere.
How much does a motherboard vendor pay for each BIOS chip (or license to burn a BIOS chip)?
Man - where do you start with such a bogus thing as this?
Take a large number of vaguely defined terms - with no units or ranges associated with them - and which are "measured" by the scientific method of asking some guy to rate them.
Then multiply each by a suspiciously exact number - accurate to one part in a hundred - and just add them up! What are the odds that none of these terms need to be squared or something?
Even if you ignore the actual equation - and take this as some kind of list of the things you should think about when buying a game - it doesn't make sense.
Just look at the first term:
"Age range"
The importance of the age range of the game depends crucially on the range of ages of the people playing. If everyone is aged 12 years - then a game that's rated "Ages 12 to 14" is likely to be more fun than something rated "Ages 2 to adult" because it's targetted at the precise ages of the people playing it. Then, if the people playing include a 2 year old and an adult - then a wide age range is indeed important. But if this equation is to be believed, then a game with a 12 to 14 year age range is doomed compared to a game that's simple enough for a 2 year old to play. That's ridiculous.
But in any case, this is a circular argument - age ranges are set such that the people within that range will have fun playing the game - so using that number to calculate how much fun the game is to play is just silly.
Argh!
This is the kind of thing that dramatically reduces the public's perception of the value of the scientific method.
So, here are the first half-dozen things I tried:
1) A picture of a donut in the Science/Technology section. Links to a story about the record breaking sales of the Finding Nemo DVD??!? So, wrong image *and* wrong category.
2) In the Business section, a photo of some diamonds with a link to a story about Ukrainian diamonds! Hooray! Unfortunately, the next four (unrelated) photo's in the business section point to the exact same article.
3) Even when I selected the "US" edition, the top three entries in "Top Stories" were links to articles in German.
4) The next photo in the Science/Technology section linked to an advert for some video game or other. Not what I'd describe as news.
5) Local News (remember I have 'US' selected). The first three items are in Spanish. If these were stories about the US or maybe Mexico - for Mexicans - maybe I could understand that - but these appeared to be about Spain and were obviously 'Local' stories only if you happen to live in Spain!
6) Clicked on the first photo in the Health section - got a broken link.
Deeply unimpressive.
Hmmm - I'm seeing "Windows - The Matrix Edition"... ...We'll have all the information presented to the users in vertically scrolling columns of blurry letters - and let them reply using only a querty keyboard.
Several people here said we should bring the HST back to earth in the shuttle - and lots of other people have explained why it's impossible - I beg to differ.
The shuttle can haul 63,500lbs of payload up to orbit - but it can only carry 43,500lbs on return to earth. However, the Hubble only weighs 23,500lbs - it's BIG - but it's mostly empty space. So it's NOT impossible.
However, consider things like retracting those big solar panels - I doubt they were designed to retract under power - there are probably all sorts of other reasons you can't bring it back - but shuttle cargo capacity isn't one of them.
Personally, I'd vote to build a replacement - get it up to orbit - then either bring Hubble down on the same shuttle - or get rid of it in a controlled crash.
Windows, .NET *and* COBOL? Looks like Dante missed a circle.
He didn't say they don't work - only that they are a last resort.
> If the GPL *is* invalid, as SCO claim, then the code reverts
> back to being the copyright of the individual contributers...
I don't know whether that's true or not - but assuming it is...where would that leave the dozen or so MILLION people who have (and use) copies of that code?
The license they thought they had to use it would vaporize - and the chances of finding every single author of every single itty bitty part and getting them to sign up to some 'son-of-GPL' license - are pretty slim.
We'd be in a state of utter chaos for years afterwards.
If the GPL were simply to evaporate as if it had never existed - then SCO would be the very least of our problems.
I think it's more likely that if we lost the battle - then the GPL would have been shown to not provide the protections to the authors rights that he/she thought it would...which would allow people who have the software to distribute it in ways the original owner did not want because the license would have been found not to effectively prevent that abuse.
That's not actually a total disaster. Although it wouldn't please an awful lot of people - we'd still have Linux for free everywhere.
However, even that is not what's really going on here. SCO are not merely asserting their supposed right to redistribute the software in ways contrary to the GPL's spirit - they have actually CHANGED the terms of the license. Whether the GPL would provide the protections we'd hoped for or not - SCO can only change the license completely if they own the copyright to it.
So - we must conclude that SCO are asserting that THEY own the copyright to the code...presumably on some bogus theory about we having stolen sources from them for which they DO own the copyright.
The whole things just seems crazy.
What's special about music? Software, novels, poetry, textbooks, movies, TV shows...and music - are all just bits. Why does one set of bits need to be promoted and distributed one way - and others another? It makes no sense.
You could maybe make the case that movies are special because they are HUGE files and eat bandwidth - but it seems crazy that the others are all treated so differently.
The entire mechanism of production, distribution, marketting and copyrighting of bits needs a complete rework...nothing we are doing these days makes any sense.
YIKES!!!
It is ESSENTIAL to any fair voting system that the voter be given no means to prove how he/she voted...eg by a reciept.
If you can take away proof of how you voted - then unscrupulous people with piles of cash can subvert elections by bribing voters to vote they way they want. They simply do a deal where the voter brings along their paper reciept in order to claim their bribe money. (eg A supermarket might offer: "20% off groceries if you show us your vote for candidate X!" - the local Mob Boss might offer to break the kneecaps of anyone who can't prove that they voted for candidate Y.)
The whole point of secret voting is to ensure that no matter how much money the voter is paid (or by whom), they can still secretly cast their vote any way they want.
The manifesto for LABRats says they'll wear a distinctive item of clothing...not a military style uniform.
...just the kind of thing a trendy teenager will want to be seen in!
Now - I just *know* we slashdotters can come up with good suggestions;
* Pocket protectors - emblazoned with the LABRat's logo done in simulated whiteboard marker ink.
* White lab coats.
The program doesn't exist yet. But I'd certainly sign up to mentor a local chapter.
I already do this stuff for my kid - how much harder could it be to do it for an entire pack...oh - wait...
I also have an 02-build/03-model-year MINI - and I don't have the problem.
So long as you don't get the ECU software upgraded to the 3.2, 3.3, 3.4 or 3.5 ECU software - you should be fine. The 3.6 version is supposed to have the fix - and versions prior to 3.2 don't seem to exhibit the problem.
Without reformulated gas, I doubt you'd ever see the problem - and even if you happened to visit a place that has it and bought just one tankful, I don't think that's enough to throw the ECU's algorithms off enough to show the problem.
I think you're OK.
If it can happen with something as mundane as printer ink - it can certainly happen to something like a car.
I'm pretty sure you can already do this.
The diagnostic interface to all cars that are sold in the USA *is* standardized. Look under the dash somewhere close to the steering wheel and you should see a socket (probably covered with a snap-shut cover). This must conform to the 'OBDII' standard.
You can buy the interface pack to hang a laptop or PDA onto the car:
eg: http://www.elmelectronics.com/
There are also circuit diagrams out there to let you build your own if you want to (they interface into the serial port). The codes for the 'typical' problem reports are standardized - and lots of the non-standard ones are well documented out on the web.
The software to read out those codes - and to reset them once you've fixed the car yourself must be out there - and if it isn't, it can't be more than a page of code if you don't want some kind of fancy GUI.
I agree - and it's not just electrical noise (which is a big problem with all of those sparks going off at a few tens of kilohertz - and the starter motor) - but there are also thermal issues (it gets pretty hot under the hood) and vibration too.
It's not going to be easy to physically manufacture a workable/reliable ECU.
Then you can bet there are going to be liability issues in car wrecks.
It really doesn't bear thinking about - yet it's something I think NEEDS to be thought about. OpenSource software under the hood of my car would be a very good thing.
The new BMW MINI Cooper has an ECU built by Siemens and programmed by yet a third company. BMW claim that they don't even have a copy of the source code for their own car! The same ECU is used in a variety of engines. So in order to have the code optimised for a particular car, the software "learns" - over several tankfuls of gas - how best to drive the car. Since cars change over time, it continually re-learns. If you add a new air-filter for example - the effects of doing it only gradually appear - over about three tankfuls - as the ECU learns to adjust the fuel/air mixture again.
This has consequences. Firstly, when you buy a new MINI Cooper, you get really poor gas milage for the first few tanks of gas - but gradually (as the ECU learns), it gets better.
So far, so good.
But the MINI has a problem (known as the 'stumble' amongst owners) - it's a software bug that appeared in 2003 model-year cars - older cars don't have it unless they upgrade to the 3.3.x version of the ECU software for some reason.
Under the special combinations of high air temperatures (and perhaps only in low humidity) in the summer in the southern USA - and with 'Reformulated Gasoline' that we get here in Texas and in Florida - the car sometimes stalls out at dangerous times. (eg You pull out into traffic - and the car stalls halfway across the road).
The stumble was VERY hard to diagnose - both because BMW couldn't reproduce the problem - it took a lot of MINI enthusiasts across the US to finally figure it out.
We (within the owner's community) decided that this couldn't possibly be temperature related - because the car would still stumble in the cool of early morning. We decided it couldn't be reformulated gas because we could drive to Oklahoma - buy a tankful of "the good stuff" - and still experience the stumble.
During a heatwave in Washington (who also have reformulated gas) - there were no reports of 'stumbles'.
These were cases where diagnosis was made almost impossible because the ECU had *learned* to stumble - and needed either cool temps or better gas for THREE TANKFULS in order to recover from it. People who experienced a short heatwave - or who bought only one or two tankfuls of reformulated gas didn't see the problem.
In consequence, it's taken over a year to convince BMW that there really is a problem and to find out what it is. However, BMW themselves can't fix it. They have to work through Siemens to get to the third company who programed the ECU so it could be fixed - and those guys didn't want to just fix it "the easy way" because it would have the potential to screw up performance in other kinds of car that use the same ECU software.
We are promised a fix for the stumbles - sometime in December.
This is all VERY yukky and unsatisfactory.
The thought of trying to write OpenSource ECU software came to mind - and there are some projects out there to do just that. This ECU has reloadable software - using a serial port connection that appears just under the steering wheel (used for emissions control stuff too). You can buy a cable to adapt the car's serial port to that of your laptop or PDA - and there is even software to let you read out and reset the engine management error codes in the comfort of your own driveway.
Armed with a laptop, your car dealership can upload new software into your car in about 20 minutes.
However, attempts to do this ourselves resulted in a fascinating inside into what the world of Palladium/DRM. When you tell the MINI "Please accept a new software load" - it sends you back a 16 bit random number. You are supposed to execute some predefined math operations on that number and send back the result as another 16 bit number. If you get the answer wrong, the car completely shuts down for 3 HOURS! You can't even start it under those circumstances - let alone try again with the software download. Obviously, the math operations you have to evaluate to solve this challenge/response scheme are secret.
So - welcome to the world of the future. For some of us it's already here!
As a Brit working in the US, I have this debate over colour vs color all the time.
There is a resolution to it. The 'recognised' standard for American English is Websters - and it allows both flavor and flavour (and color and colour). The recognised standard for British English is the Oxford English dictionary - and it recognises ONLY flavour and colour.
Hence, the most compatible choice is Flavour and Colour since those should be recognisable on both sides of the atlantic where Flavor and Color are most definitely mis-spellings of British English.
Case solved!
This guys 'solution' to Zeno's paradox is silly - and unnecessary.
You can produce a version of the paradox that doesn't rely on time at all - and hence any special properties of time can't be used to resolve it.
Draw two straight lines on a piece of paper. One of them (drawn with a red pencil) starts in the bottom-left corner of the page and slopes from left to right such that it is 1cm further to the right for every 1cm it heads up the page. The other line (drawn in blue) starts off 10cm to the right of the red line and slopes from left to right much more gently such that it is only 1mm further to the right for every 1cm it heads up the page.
Now, you know that if the paper is long enough and more than about 12cm wide, the red line will reach the right hand edge of the page a shorter distance up the paper than the blue line does.
However, Zeno should argue that 10cm up from the bottom of the page, the red line is 10cm further to the right - but the blue line has moved 1cm to the right so it's at 11cm from the lefthand edge. When (at 11cm up the page), the red line is 11cm from the lefthand edge, the blue line is 11.1cm from the edge...and so on.
By Zeno's argument, the red line can never cross the blue line.
All I've done is replace the temporal dimension with a spatial one...every other argument still applies.
Personally, I've never seen Zeno's paradox as a paradox. With modern mathematics, it's simple to sum the infinite series of tiny time steps that the story subjects us to in order to arrive at the time at which Achilles reaches the Tortoise - then you can apply the paradox in reverse to show that Achilles can comfortably make it to the finish line first.
Not that I recommend doing such a thing - but just to highlight
why this is a silly idea...
1) Go to the razor blade stand - pick up a pack of blades - get
photo taken.
2) Hand pack of blades to your wife as she's buying cornflakes in
the next aisle. Say "Honey - please pay for these - I have to go
to the store next door."
3) Leave store.
4) When they stop you leaving the store and accuse you of not paying for
the blades you picked up - tell them that you left the blades in the
Cornflakes aisle. Let them strip-search you - you don't have
the blades. Make a terrible fuss.
5) They let you go with profuse apologies.
6) Your wife then leaves the store - with pack of blades in her pocket
'forgetting' to pay for them. Nobody bats an eyelid because her photo
didn't get taken at the razor blade shelf.
So why don't they simply correlate the RFID tags that they detect going
through the exit of the store with an RFID tag on the till reciept and
directly check that every tag that they detect as marked as being in the
store's inventory is also in the database as having been sold against
that reciept?
Nobody's privacy is invaded - it's all perfectly anonymous.
I don't see the need for all the photography and consequent invasion of
privacy.
Suppose I want to set up a peer-to-peer system for trading legitimate material - maybe not music at all - photo's of people's dogs or something. How should I protect myself from legal action given that I have no real control of the files that others are trading using the system I set up?
I was one of the people that somehow got onto the mailing list for Dijkstra's notes. It was always a joy to see a photocopy of one of his hand-written (mostly) notes appear in my In-Tray at work.
Unless you've read a good number of his writings, it's hard to appreciate the way this guy thought.
He also had the neatest handwriting in the known universe. I recall getting one of his notes that seemed as immaculately neat as all the others - with a note at the end apologising for the quality of the handwriting as he'd written it with his other hand "because it could use some practice". He resented having to use a typewriter because he liked to invent new symbols. He always wrote code fragments in a programming language of his own invention for which no known compiler exists.
It may be that you could describe this as a 'blog' - it was disseminated by mail to people who he'd somehow run into or been associated with. I have no idea how many copies were sent out - but it must have been hundreds. The earliest ones were long before the advent of the Internet.
Whether it makes a suitable Salon story - I can't say.
What's different about our society looking to develop super-luminal travel compared to people in the 1600's thinking about heavier-than-air flight is that whilst there were no known scientific laws that would enable a heavier-than-air craft to stay aloft, there were no laws to prohibit it either. They had birds, insects and bats flying around all over the place - all demonstrably heavier than air. They knew this was an achievable goal.
With faster-than-light travel, we have a very different situation. He have actual scientific laws courtesy of that Einstein guy that show that you cannot accellerate an object up to the speed of light without consuming infinite energy . Those laws also indicate extreme difficulties with even the concept of something travelling FASTER than light (if you ever got going faster than light, it would take infinite energy to avoid travelling infinitely fast - and getting to a nearby star at infinite speed is MUCH harder than doing it at subluminal speeds.
Then, we also have no examples of super-luminal objects to point at and say "Ha! Those laws must be wrong".
That's an entirely different (and much more depressing) situation than the situation in the 1600's. They could look to a simple child's kite and imagine a hang-glider with a motor replacing the force provided by the kite-string. They could see birds doing that exact thing - taunting us with the ease of it all.
We have no similar thing to look towards - and one of the greatest minds of the last century showed us clear mathematical proof that this isn't going to be an easy matter.