The cashier should have checked the signature on the paper, against the signature on the card. It's to prevent card theft purchases.
Something the contactless payment system completely bypasses, unless you are unlucky enough to get asked for a pin on your contactless purchase. However as there is a limit (£30 UK) you might get a free lunch, some beers and a couple of movies before the card is cancelled, but not much more.
At least chip and pin is something you have (the card) and something you know (the pin), which is fairly reasonable. Since introduction, card fraud has dropped massively in countries using it. I don't know what contactless has done for these figures however.
First warning sign - can't discriminate between immigrants and refugees.
Second warning sign - totally incorrect about immigrant benefits to societies, because immigrants provide a net benefit to their host economies.
Obviously the license change is not enforceable, as it's totally racist, but I do hope that all researchers stop using this software.
I would also hope that this guy is done for hate speech in the near future, after reading the article. He's a bona-fide nutjob that would appear to be on the verge of a terrorist act against those his discriminates against.
You'll have traded in the car for a newer Tesla by then.
And the sap that buys the second hand Tesla from Tesla will likely get the same guarantee.
The supercharger network is a classic sunk cost once installed (and Tesla are installing their own solar farms too IIRC to reduce or negate their electric bills) that has low ongoing costs, so free electricity isn't a massive burden for Tesla to have.
If flying is too expensive, I guess a Tesla is going to be too expensive too...
But yeah, if you are one of the few people that do this, then maybe a Tesla isn't the right car right now.
This is also another reason why I think that Tesla really should concentrate on the UK and Europe more, as it's very rare that people do such long journeys (apart from the EU-wide festival goers that drive from England to Slovenia for obscure heavy metal festivals).
Except you're likely paying for the car monthly, not up front. The most you can do is invest that ~$200 (not working out the real amount) a month saving, whilst enjoying the lovely air quality your car generates at the point of use.
Get fired. Sue. Make yourself unemployable except in non-for-profit organisations. Earn 1/5th of previous earnings. Never own a house. Always live in squalor. Wife leaves you for being an asshat originally. Get drink problem. Die early.
The engineers who coded the software for the engine computer? Why would they know what this does? The software is enabling a signal, hell the signal might even have a vague name, when a condition is met. The condition's name might not very clear.
Yes, a spec saying "when the car is undergoing a test then enabled the cheat mode to get past the test" would clearly implicate the developers.
But most likely it was: "when sig_x and sig_y and indicator_a are set, then set sig_Z to 1 in pattern P for n nanoseconds blah blah blah"
Someone knew what they were doing, and it probably went like this:
Engineer: We can't make this engine pass NOx tests. Message goes up the chain to a certain decision making level, possibly the board. Marketing chimes in: We can't have this, we're already sending out teasers about our new urea-less engine technology, etc, etc. Eventually a message comes down to fix it, in vague terms, entirely forgetting the original message that it's unfixable. Engineers: struggle for ages. In pub: Well, we could enable a special testing mode to pass the tests? In work: Shall we do this -> up the chain. Original context is half forgotten. Approved. Changes made. Software specs made. Timebomb implemented.
Luckily we're talking about a major piece of software here - the engine computer.
This is well planned, has teams of developers, code review, QA, and the feature list is well known. For a safety critical feature, test coverage is going to be good. So much so, that I bet there is a test called "engineEnablesUreaInjectionWhenDiagnosticModeEnabled", that was signed off by a QA against a checklist.
If not - then tbh the entire software of the engine computer should be written off.
The software devs aren't engine engineers. They don't know what the urea injection does, or what it is for. It's a signal that they have to deal with, and they coded it to the specifications given to them, probably from the engine engineering division who realised that their Urea-less engine had terrible NOx emissions and they needed a quick resolution. In fact if the software teams are strung up for this, then we will know directly that there is a cover up and the wrong people are getting the blame for this.
Yeah, Apple are missing an opportunity here with their interest free loan and market rate prices!
Rent to Own shops have always been a ripoff however, but they do spread the cost, albeit at a high price. Useful for washing machines (launderettes are very expensive, and you need to wash clothes today, not in six months), etc. But people just can't resist the shiny and they buy things they don't need. But they're young and make poor decisions because they haven't the experience of life to actually understand what is important or not.
Shopping catalogues were the same in the 80s and 90s (and possibly still today). Overpriced goods on a repayment plan targeting the less wealthy.
Unless you like to own a phone for three years, there's little difference to this 'rental plan' and the typical "own and put into a drawer" plan. Except you get a new phone every year, in a similar manner to a car lease plan that people appear to be happy paying hundreds each month for.
The AppleCare should take care of damage, so you don't need the old phone as an emergency backup. The only thing missing is hand-me-down capability.
If you typically avoid AppleCare, or are happy with your provider, then using their subsidy-based package is still an option. You still get to decide.
Spread the cost - because otherwise you might buy that $300/$400 Huwaii/Xaomi/Nexus android phone instead as it's more affordable up front.
Actually it's a different mechanism to generating non-overlapping rooms than other algorithms that either place rooms, or divide up areas. Overkill - probably. Does it matter? No, not on today's hardware. Also this algorithm isn't portable to very old computers, not that most people care.
There is always a desire to create 'realistic' dungeons. The truth is, most real dungeons are small and compact, so the entire concept of 'realistic dungeon' is rather silly.
This is a more advanced algorithm than what would have been used back then! Placement was an integral part of the algorithm (rather than being done by a physics engine to 2D areas within a 2D space).
One example is the "mining" algorithm. Start off with a room, then from one of its walls, dig a corridor or another room. Repeat n times. Dungeon generated.
Obviously you could then do things for object placement. The article's algorithm can make use of the minimum spanning tree endpoints to place items at the end of long paths in the dungeon, for maximum playability. You could alternatively use some form of graph colouring. Back on the VIC-20, placement would probably have been random.
There's loads of dungeon generating algorithms on RogueBasin if you're interested.
The main purpose of dedicated hardware video decoders (and encoders) is to save power. Not because it can't be done on the CPU in adequate time. In addition, it saves money from not needing a powerful CPU to drive the process. They are a highly specialised form of hardware.
GPUs do both - they save overall power (compared to a massive clusters of CPUs that could do the same calculations at the same rate), and also they allow the graphics to occur in real time (which a single CPU can't) at a cost similar to a single CPU. GPUs are specialised, but still quite generic so they can be used for compute tasks as well. Video decoders (and encoders) can be implemented on the GPU too, but the power savings from having a dedicated hardware unit are still worthwhile.
HEVC is designed to put most of the work into the encoding stage, hence why it can be decoded in software on a 50W+ CPU.
So it's really like a vertical Gantt chart of space related technological developments, where a delay* high up the chart could cascade down the chart tenfold (at least that seems to be what happens in reality).
* That delay is usually caused by cost cutting. The eventual price paid of the cost cutting is often 10x the savings from the cost cutting.
But you could make an online version of this chart, where you can change the completion dates to fit your own beliefs, and see how far into the future we can push things.
Where are you getting this 1000 year 10m higher sea level thing from anyway? Given that we have evidence of Roman and post-Roman settlements a few metres above current sea levels, I suspect this is complete bullshit.
Not that it is important now, we've build our cities to cope with high tides that we were getting in the very recent past. We have an accelerating sea level rise: 8cm in 20 years is in the past, the next 8 cm will occur in 15 years, the 8cm beyond that in 10 years.
Regardless, a 1 metre level in sea directly affects high tide levels too, so it's massive volumes of water overspilling sea defenses and backfilling very large areas of low level land beyond. Some cities build around tidal rivers will be fine - barriers will be built. Cities on the coast will find $$$ flooding events increasing from once a century to once a decade. And then once or twice a year at seasonal high tides.
And sea walls won't save any city built on porous materials. Miami, for example...
Hah, as if you could get a signal from a Virgin Media router more than 10 metres away!
This is what happens when you don't own the router yourself. Virgin will use it, and their connection that they also rent to you, to make money on other services.
Hopefully 0.5Mbps will not saturate the shared cable connection! Performance is bad enough already, and I'm meant to get 60mbps.
Space X will get there. Probably a lot later than the recent article suggested of course. And I don't know why they want to do the single-shot to Mars rather than the two-shot LEO, then Mars method. Oh well...
NASA will only get there if the Chinese start a project to get there first, and that would require their economy to turn around:-) - but NASA might get a budget in that case.
The blog isn't a scientific article about living on mars. It's an article about how one proven achiever of a man is putting everything in place to make getting to Mars achievable in his lifetime. The examples are simplistic, because the reality would be tedious.
Compared to the joke that is the Mars One project, it seems achievable!
Clearly the author needed scientific review of his work, and then he could have gone through and fixed up the amounts to make things work (e.g., he would have 80 litres of liquid O2 up front instead of 50).
Hopefully the movie has fixed things - probably by removing the attempts at being scientific to make it palatable to the audience.
So maybe we can assume the solar panels aren't 10% efficient, but 40%. And that there is another power source besides solar (the article alludes to this). And maybe that growing food in regolith would be a primary experiment for martian travellers, so they would have suitable lighting with them. Doesn't fix the book, but it might fix the accuracy of the movie.
But generally I watch movies for entertainment, and I can suspend disbelief to that end. Otherwise I would not have made it to the end of 2012.
The food was cooked to order on behalf of the customer. There is an implied transfer of ownership and all rights from the restaurant (or chef) to the customer, hence the customer is allowed to destroy the chef's work without being sued.
If the chef wanted to retain artistic copyright of his work, then he should have got the customer to sign a contract.
Slashdot Mirror
We still get the magstripe on cards in the UK. Presumably so we can still use them when we travel to America.
Chip and signature sounds really odd though - how does the card match the signatures?
The cashier should have checked the signature on the paper, against the signature on the card. It's to prevent card theft purchases.
Something the contactless payment system completely bypasses, unless you are unlucky enough to get asked for a pin on your contactless purchase. However as there is a limit (£30 UK) you might get a free lunch, some beers and a couple of movies before the card is cancelled, but not much more.
At least chip and pin is something you have (the card) and something you know (the pin), which is fairly reasonable. Since introduction, card fraud has dropped massively in countries using it. I don't know what contactless has done for these figures however.
It's amazing that the rest of the world did this transition up to a decade ago, without any issues.
It's excuses for the sake of it. Or using poor software systems instead of proven systems as used elsewhere in the world.
So he is a raving racist lunatic?
First warning sign - can't discriminate between immigrants and refugees.
Second warning sign - totally incorrect about immigrant benefits to societies, because immigrants provide a net benefit to their host economies.
Obviously the license change is not enforceable, as it's totally racist, but I do hope that all researchers stop using this software.
I would also hope that this guy is done for hate speech in the near future, after reading the article. He's a bona-fide nutjob that would appear to be on the verge of a terrorist act against those his discriminates against.
You'll have traded in the car for a newer Tesla by then.
And the sap that buys the second hand Tesla from Tesla will likely get the same guarantee.
The supercharger network is a classic sunk cost once installed (and Tesla are installing their own solar farms too IIRC to reduce or negate their electric bills) that has low ongoing costs, so free electricity isn't a massive burden for Tesla to have.
If flying is too expensive, I guess a Tesla is going to be too expensive too...
But yeah, if you are one of the few people that do this, then maybe a Tesla isn't the right car right now.
This is also another reason why I think that Tesla really should concentrate on the UK and Europe more, as it's very rare that people do such long journeys (apart from the EU-wide festival goers that drive from England to Slovenia for obscure heavy metal festivals).
Except you're likely paying for the car monthly, not up front. The most you can do is invest that ~$200 (not working out the real amount) a month saving, whilst enjoying the lovely air quality your car generates at the point of use.
Get fired. Sue. Make yourself unemployable except in non-for-profit organisations. Earn 1/5th of previous earnings. Never own a house. Always live in squalor. Wife leaves you for being an asshat originally. Get drink problem. Die early.
Or: "sure, btw about my pay review..."
The engineers who designed the engine - yes.
The engineers who coded the software for the engine computer? Why would they know what this does? The software is enabling a signal, hell the signal might even have a vague name, when a condition is met. The condition's name might not very clear.
Yes, a spec saying "when the car is undergoing a test then enabled the cheat mode to get past the test" would clearly implicate the developers.
But most likely it was: "when sig_x and sig_y and indicator_a are set, then set sig_Z to 1 in pattern P for n nanoseconds blah blah blah"
Someone knew what they were doing, and it probably went like this:
Engineer: We can't make this engine pass NOx tests.
Message goes up the chain to a certain decision making level, possibly the board. Marketing chimes in: We can't have this, we're already sending out teasers about our new urea-less engine technology, etc, etc.
Eventually a message comes down to fix it, in vague terms, entirely forgetting the original message that it's unfixable.
Engineers: struggle for ages.
In pub: Well, we could enable a special testing mode to pass the tests?
In work: Shall we do this -> up the chain. Original context is half forgotten. Approved.
Changes made. Software specs made. Timebomb implemented.
Luckily we're talking about a major piece of software here - the engine computer.
This is well planned, has teams of developers, code review, QA, and the feature list is well known. For a safety critical feature, test coverage is going to be good. So much so, that I bet there is a test called "engineEnablesUreaInjectionWhenDiagnosticModeEnabled", that was signed off by a QA against a checklist.
If not - then tbh the entire software of the engine computer should be written off.
The software devs aren't engine engineers. They don't know what the urea injection does, or what it is for. It's a signal that they have to deal with, and they coded it to the specifications given to them, probably from the engine engineering division who realised that their Urea-less engine had terrible NOx emissions and they needed a quick resolution. In fact if the software teams are strung up for this, then we will know directly that there is a cover up and the wrong people are getting the blame for this.
Yeah, Apple are missing an opportunity here with their interest free loan and market rate prices!
Rent to Own shops have always been a ripoff however, but they do spread the cost, albeit at a high price. Useful for washing machines (launderettes are very expensive, and you need to wash clothes today, not in six months), etc. But people just can't resist the shiny and they buy things they don't need. But they're young and make poor decisions because they haven't the experience of life to actually understand what is important or not.
Shopping catalogues were the same in the 80s and 90s (and possibly still today). Overpriced goods on a repayment plan targeting the less wealthy.
Unless you like to own a phone for three years, there's little difference to this 'rental plan' and the typical "own and put into a drawer" plan. Except you get a new phone every year, in a similar manner to a car lease plan that people appear to be happy paying hundreds each month for.
The AppleCare should take care of damage, so you don't need the old phone as an emergency backup. The only thing missing is hand-me-down capability.
If you typically avoid AppleCare, or are happy with your provider, then using their subsidy-based package is still an option. You still get to decide.
Spread the cost - because otherwise you might buy that $300/$400 Huwaii/Xaomi/Nexus android phone instead as it's more affordable up front.
Actually it's a different mechanism to generating non-overlapping rooms than other algorithms that either place rooms, or divide up areas. Overkill - probably. Does it matter? No, not on today's hardware. Also this algorithm isn't portable to very old computers, not that most people care.
There is always a desire to create 'realistic' dungeons. The truth is, most real dungeons are small and compact, so the entire concept of 'realistic dungeon' is rather silly.
This is a more advanced algorithm than what would have been used back then! Placement was an integral part of the algorithm (rather than being done by a physics engine to 2D areas within a 2D space).
One example is the "mining" algorithm. Start off with a room, then from one of its walls, dig a corridor or another room. Repeat n times. Dungeon generated.
Obviously you could then do things for object placement. The article's algorithm can make use of the minimum spanning tree endpoints to place items at the end of long paths in the dungeon, for maximum playability. You could alternatively use some form of graph colouring. Back on the VIC-20, placement would probably have been random.
There's loads of dungeon generating algorithms on RogueBasin if you're interested.
Maybe they could be tattooed on? And maybe the visitors could be kept in camps, to stop them wandering around and breaking the system.
This guy is a fascist, pure and simple, and he's pulling his ideas from historical fascist policy.
The main purpose of dedicated hardware video decoders (and encoders) is to save power. Not because it can't be done on the CPU in adequate time. In addition, it saves money from not needing a powerful CPU to drive the process. They are a highly specialised form of hardware.
GPUs do both - they save overall power (compared to a massive clusters of CPUs that could do the same calculations at the same rate), and also they allow the graphics to occur in real time (which a single CPU can't) at a cost similar to a single CPU. GPUs are specialised, but still quite generic so they can be used for compute tasks as well. Video decoders (and encoders) can be implemented on the GPU too, but the power savings from having a dedicated hardware unit are still worthwhile.
HEVC is designed to put most of the work into the encoding stage, hence why it can be decoded in software on a 50W+ CPU.
So it's really like a vertical Gantt chart of space related technological developments, where a delay* high up the chart could cascade down the chart tenfold (at least that seems to be what happens in reality).
* That delay is usually caused by cost cutting. The eventual price paid of the cost cutting is often 10x the savings from the cost cutting.
But you could make an online version of this chart, where you can change the completion dates to fit your own beliefs, and see how far into the future we can push things.
I think this bug was reported originally in 1998. Seriously.
Hmm, from a few pixels on the last graph.
Yet other data sources simply don't support this.
http://1.bp.blogspot.com/_nB6y... http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea... http://www.giss.nasa.gov/resea...
https://upload.wikimedia.org/w... http://www.forbes.com/sites/er...
Where are you getting this 1000 year 10m higher sea level thing from anyway? Given that we have evidence of Roman and post-Roman settlements a few metres above current sea levels, I suspect this is complete bullshit.
Not that it is important now, we've build our cities to cope with high tides that we were getting in the very recent past. We have an accelerating sea level rise: 8cm in 20 years is in the past, the next 8 cm will occur in 15 years, the 8cm beyond that in 10 years.
Regardless, a 1 metre level in sea directly affects high tide levels too, so it's massive volumes of water overspilling sea defenses and backfilling very large areas of low level land beyond. Some cities build around tidal rivers will be fine - barriers will be built. Cities on the coast will find $$$ flooding events increasing from once a century to once a decade. And then once or twice a year at seasonal high tides.
And sea walls won't save any city built on porous materials. Miami, for example...
Hah, as if you could get a signal from a Virgin Media router more than 10 metres away!
This is what happens when you don't own the router yourself. Virgin will use it, and their connection that they also rent to you, to make money on other services.
Hopefully 0.5Mbps will not saturate the shared cable connection! Performance is bad enough already, and I'm meant to get 60mbps.
Yeah, that's what is truly unbelievable!
Space X will get there. Probably a lot later than the recent article suggested of course. And I don't know why they want to do the single-shot to Mars rather than the two-shot LEO, then Mars method. Oh well...
NASA will only get there if the Chinese start a project to get there first, and that would require their economy to turn around :-) - but NASA might get a budget in that case.
The blog isn't a scientific article about living on mars. It's an article about how one proven achiever of a man is putting everything in place to make getting to Mars achievable in his lifetime. The examples are simplistic, because the reality would be tedious.
Compared to the joke that is the Mars One project, it seems achievable!
Clearly the author needed scientific review of his work, and then he could have gone through and fixed up the amounts to make things work (e.g., he would have 80 litres of liquid O2 up front instead of 50).
Hopefully the movie has fixed things - probably by removing the attempts at being scientific to make it palatable to the audience.
So maybe we can assume the solar panels aren't 10% efficient, but 40%. And that there is another power source besides solar (the article alludes to this). And maybe that growing food in regolith would be a primary experiment for martian travellers, so they would have suitable lighting with them. Doesn't fix the book, but it might fix the accuracy of the movie.
But generally I watch movies for entertainment, and I can suspend disbelief to that end. Otherwise I would not have made it to the end of 2012.
The food was cooked to order on behalf of the customer. There is an implied transfer of ownership and all rights from the restaurant (or chef) to the customer, hence the customer is allowed to destroy the chef's work without being sued.
If the chef wanted to retain artistic copyright of his work, then he should have got the customer to sign a contract.