So Japanese people have a seaweed digesting bacterium in their guts. So sushi restaurants could offer visiting westerners a small culture of this bacterium, and they would be set up to digest the seaweed. Before you go "Ewww, bacteria!", this is just what is being offered commercially as "pro-biotic yogurt". You would probably need a top-up on every visit to Japan, because the bacterium would probably die out without a regular supply of seaweed.
Because estimates of the density of galaxies in the universe have been based on the volume that is closer to us and therefore relatively more visible, and did not suffer from the problem described. The assumption had been that the universe far away is, in a general manner, similar to the universe nearby, on the usual principle that there is nothing special about the place that we are. When the density of remote (and very early) galaxies fell off, it was assumed to be more likely to be an observational artefact than a genuine falling off. Which is what the article says has now been proved to be the case. Estimates of the number of galaxies were based on the bits we can see easily, not the bits we can hardly see.
Programming is not a monolithic field. It depends what you do. Obviously, if you work with large datasets, then there are some statistical things you have to do. On the other hand, in my field, embedded software, you don't usually get much further than simple multiply/divide loading estimates. If there is a complex algorithm, it comes from the field specialists. That said, I had to dig into the maths a bit to implement Raid6 - but it was still a matter of understanding someone else's work.
Most planes have satellite communications, so curve of the earth doesn't matter. Particularly used for short digital bursts - such as the GPS transponder. They already use it for engines to "call home" completely independent of what happens on the flight deck.
Of course you need transponders: that is the whole point - replacing expensive radars with cheap transponders. Planes on over-the-ocean routes do not, I think, communicate with each other at the moment; it is still done through ATC. But if ATC know more exactly where they are, they/can/ give closer spacing. At the moment, the spacing has to allow for the "creep" over a three hour out-of-sight segment. If you cut it to a one hour out-of-sight, then you have an hour if someone "disappears" to get other people out of the way.
They have been testing the GPS systems trans-Pacific for five years, at least, Presumably they have managed to avoid or work around the glitches.
Why would GPS go down due to weather storm? GPS satellites are in earth orbit. The GPS receivers they have had 20 years experience ruggedising; they are very simple, all solid state machines, and the plane will probably carry about six of them. There is already no radar other than weather radar in the plane; the radars they would be replacing would be on the ground. And they wouldn't be replacing the approach radars, only the long haul ones.
The fact that transponder, like several existing transponders, has no off switch connected to the flight deck. It is somewhere down in the bowels of the plane, accessible only when the aircraft is on the ground. And it probably has batteries of its own, and access to the ram-air emergency power supply which cuts in when all engines fail.
I think this is not about GA planes like Piper Cubs. This is for the long-haul, air-corridor based traffic which most GA does not get involved with. And I imagine it will only apply over (perhaps) 10,000 ft. There will, of course, always be radar in terminal areas.
I don't think they will be on the flight deck, or have any switch that can be accessed in the air. They will be at some anonymous point deep in the wiring, accessed perhaps via the wheel wells etc.
No change, so far as the planes are concerned: they are already depending on ground based radar. They have INS that tells them where they are - more or less - but not where everybody else is.
I think the GPS transponder will be in sealed units not accessible from inside the aircraft, with no off switch. They want to be very, very automatic.
Radar is big and expensive, and there is no radar coverage over open ocean, so they have to use very wide separations in case planes start catching up with others.
They are talking about replacing the ground radar which generates the "blips" on ATC screens with "secondary" radar that just interrogates the plane's on-board GPS. They already interrogate the plane for ID, bearing and speed - this just adds the position and altitude from the plane. Obviously the GPS receiver and the transponder must be extremely reliable.
This is as much about increasing airway capacity as increasing safety, over ocean there is no radar coverage so that aircraft have to be kept very well spaced, which is becoming a bottleneck on busy routes e.g. US North East to Northern Europe. With GPS you can increase density without decreasing safety. And it will probably save money in the long term - the GPS based systems are inherently cheaper, but you have to put up money in front to run both systems in parallel, and you don't get the payback until you can begin switching off radars. So it needs short term funding to cover the spending hump.
Basically, this is an unsurprising bit of good housekeeping - as shown by the vote. It was a change that would have to be made sometime, and the only real question was exactly when: costs will almost certainly fall if you delay, but that puts off the arrival of benefits as well.
And your point is? While you are absolutely correct, society has agreed to tolerate Joe Public driving a car dangerously - and also seems to tolerate him driving a computer dangerously. We could make the roads a lot safer by keeping 90% of current drivers off them, and we could make the Net a lot safer by keeping 90% of computer users off them. But those 90% of incompetents are voters, and vote themselves on.
That just restricts the number of people who can use computers unnecessarily. Computers exist to serve people, not people to serve computers. We need to design computers so that people whose job is doing something else can still use computers. Forcing all users to become geeks just limits the availability of computers.
In the early 1900s some pundit in Britain said that road congestion could never become a problem because there were a maximum of a million people in the country who could be trained to become chauffeurs. That might have been reasonable, for a model that said that cars are so complicated that it needs a trained specialist (or enthusiastic amateur) to run them. But cars became so easy that any Joe Public could drive them - and society changed accordingly, few drivers now are competent mechanics - and we shouldn't make the same demands of computer users.
Two problems. Firstly, define, and prove, "difficult-to-spoof" for all time. People have already shown the ability to spoof fingerprints. And all you have to do is to clone the identity of one card onto the biometrics of another, and you have a card that describes the criminal but accesses the victims data.
Secondly, much access to the data is not with the card but without. If people have access to one part of the data it is all to easy to access other parts. So the clerk who can legitimately check, say, that I have paid my property taxes may all to easily be able to access my medical appointments - including the one with a specialist in embarrassing diseases.
It isn't the Queen, it is the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England, on behalf of the Governor and Company. Do you have any idea who they are, and whether you can trust them?
Don't most people round here do incremental development? Isn't it normal to send release 0.1 for test and then start work on release 0.2? It is sensible to put a minimal set of features into a Mk 1 card, then add more to a Mk 2 card later.
The problem is not with enhancing the card, it is with the non-optional nature of it. In technology we are used to early adopters paying a high price, and later users getting something that is both cheaper and probably better. Everybody makes a choice to be an early adopter, or not, and lives with the consequence. But the UK ID card, while claimed to be voluntary, is not. If you want to get/renew a passport from 2011 on, you will have to get an ID card. Which forces people into the early adopter group whether they want it or not. They do not have the option of waiting until the system has settled down. I would definitely play cautious about this ID card scheme, and luckily my passport needs renewing in 2010, so I can - until they find some other way to coerce me. I'll get one when I see real evidence of an advantage to me, and that the security threats have not materialized.
So its not fair that people who buy Ford's basic model get something better than a Model T? It's not fair that when I buy a plane ticket I travel in greater comfort and safety than my father did? It;s not fair that my GBP400 PC today performs better than my first GBP1200 PC (386 8Mhz, 8Mb ram, 10Gb disc)?
Progress happens. Your view is positively Luddite.
The problem with any such card is that as it does more and more things, more and more people can access data used by it. The fact that it can do more things makes it a juicy target for criminals, while the larger the number of people who have access to its data the more there are to be criminals or to be suborned by criminals. This means that there is in inverse square law of security against power of such a card. Nobody is going to attack my library card: all they could do is take out books in my name, and the only people who have access to the database are a handful of librarians. But single index to my entire life gives access to my bank, my medical records, my employment records, my tax records... and is vulnerable to attack by all those with legitimate access to any of those people.
Beware of revenge effects. Every technology has them - this ID card seems to me to have bigger ones than most.
The reliability and selectivity of a weapons are a separate matter from whether its collateral damage is sufficiently small. There is no real difference in morality between a drone and a sniper bullet - if someone is a legitimate target, then either is legitimate. The difference is the collateral damage. By and large, the sniper bullet either kills the target or does not - and that is it. Whether the drone kills its target or not, it is likely to kill a large number, innocent or guilty, in the vicinity of the target.
The question should therefore not be about drones directly, but how the forces calculate the acceptable level of collateral damage incurred in attacking a particular target, and how they estimate the actual level incurred by particular attacks. There should be, at some level, a statement on the lines of "To kill an enemy commander of level X, we are prepared to accept Y civilian deaths" and another statement that "The proposed attack on commander A with weapon B will cause C civilian deaths". The attack can then proceed if C is less than or equal to Y. Of course, the terminology will be different, and no doubt highly obfuscated in military technology. And, of course, the numbers are very uncertain, so the precautionary principle says that the attack should not go ahead unless C us significantly less than Y.
If they don't have these rules, then they are essentially out of control - they are firing of lethal weaponry whose effects they cannot evaluate at targets whose worth they do not know - and should stop until they have such rules. If they do have such rules, there seems no reason why they should not publish the principles behind the rules. The don't have to publish the actual numeric estimates for particular weapons and targets, but they should publish the the way they reach those estimates. And if they are worried about the public backlash - they shouldn't be doing it.
Indeed. The word "liberal" has very different meanings on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. The traditional UK sense of Liberal was closer to (but not equal to) the US Libertarian. True UK liberals would legalise drugs and, probably, guns.
Back in the day when I first got into programming, it was not uncommon for compiles to run for 10 hours or more.
Back in the day? It takes the hardware engineers round here 22 hours to compile their device. If you find a bug in the hardware, come back tomorrow. If the compiler doesn't crash running on a machine with a mere 12Gb of memory,
It is not so much telling the compiler what I know, it is telling the source code, in a checked manner, what I know today that the maintainer (who may be myself) does not know tomorrow. It is a big fallacy that source is needed only for man to communicate with machine; just as important is man communicating with man. And if I can get that communication machine checked, should I not do so? Just like assert(), @override, private: and other annotations which add nothing to functionality but reduce finger trouble.
Slashdot Mirror
So Japanese people have a seaweed digesting bacterium in their guts. So sushi restaurants could offer visiting westerners a small culture of this bacterium, and they would be set up to digest the seaweed. Before you go "Ewww, bacteria!", this is just what is being offered commercially as "pro-biotic yogurt". You would probably need a top-up on every visit to Japan, because the bacterium would probably die out without a regular supply of seaweed.
Actually, they called it the Overwhelmingly Large Telescope http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overwhelmingly_Large_Telescope. Unfortunately, it seems to have shrunk recently.
Because estimates of the density of galaxies in the universe have been based on the volume that is closer to us and therefore relatively more visible, and did not suffer from the problem described. The assumption had been that the universe far away is, in a general manner, similar to the universe nearby, on the usual principle that there is nothing special about the place that we are. When the density of remote (and very early) galaxies fell off, it was assumed to be more likely to be an observational artefact than a genuine falling off. Which is what the article says has now been proved to be the case. Estimates of the number of galaxies were based on the bits we can see easily, not the bits we can hardly see.
Programming is not a monolithic field. It depends what you do. Obviously, if you work with large datasets, then there are some statistical things you have to do. On the other hand, in my field, embedded software, you don't usually get much further than simple multiply/divide loading estimates. If there is a complex algorithm, it comes from the field specialists. That said, I had to dig into the maths a bit to implement Raid6 - but it was still a matter of understanding someone else's work.
And multiply redundant systems.
Most planes have satellite communications, so curve of the earth doesn't matter. Particularly used for short digital bursts - such as the GPS transponder. They already use it for engines to "call home" completely independent of what happens on the flight deck.
Of course you need transponders: that is the whole point - replacing expensive radars with cheap transponders. Planes on over-the-ocean routes do not, I think, communicate with each other at the moment; it is still done through ATC. But if ATC know more exactly where they are, they /can/ give closer spacing. At the moment, the spacing has to allow for the "creep" over a three hour out-of-sight segment. If you cut it to a one hour out-of-sight, then you have an hour if someone "disappears" to get other people out of the way.
They have been testing the GPS systems trans-Pacific for five years, at least, Presumably they have managed to avoid or work around the glitches.
Why would GPS go down due to weather storm? GPS satellites are in earth orbit. The GPS receivers they have had 20 years experience ruggedising; they are very simple, all solid state machines, and the plane will probably carry about six of them. There is already no radar other than weather radar in the plane; the radars they would be replacing would be on the ground. And they wouldn't be replacing the approach radars, only the long haul ones.
The fact that transponder, like several existing transponders, has no off switch connected to the flight deck. It is somewhere down in the bowels of the plane, accessible only when the aircraft is on the ground. And it probably has batteries of its own, and access to the ram-air emergency power supply which cuts in when all engines fail.
I think this is not about GA planes like Piper Cubs. This is for the long-haul, air-corridor based traffic which most GA does not get involved with. And I imagine it will only apply over (perhaps) 10,000 ft. There will, of course, always be radar in terminal areas.
I don't think they will be on the flight deck, or have any switch that can be accessed in the air. They will be at some anonymous point deep in the wiring, accessed perhaps via the wheel wells etc.
No change, so far as the planes are concerned: they are already depending on ground based radar. They have INS that tells them where they are - more or less - but not where everybody else is.
I think the GPS transponder will be in sealed units not accessible from inside the aircraft, with no off switch. They want to be very, very automatic.
Radar is big and expensive, and there is no radar coverage over open ocean, so they have to use very wide separations in case planes start catching up with others.
They are talking about replacing the ground radar which generates the "blips" on ATC screens with "secondary" radar that just interrogates the plane's on-board GPS. They already interrogate the plane for ID, bearing and speed - this just adds the position and altitude from the plane. Obviously the GPS receiver and the transponder must be extremely reliable.
This is as much about increasing airway capacity as increasing safety, over ocean there is no radar coverage so that aircraft have to be kept very well spaced, which is becoming a bottleneck on busy routes e.g. US North East to Northern Europe. With GPS you can increase density without decreasing safety. And it will probably save money in the long term - the GPS based systems are inherently cheaper, but you have to put up money in front to run both systems in parallel, and you don't get the payback until you can begin switching off radars. So it needs short term funding to cover the spending hump.
Basically, this is an unsurprising bit of good housekeeping - as shown by the vote. It was a change that would have to be made sometime, and the only real question was exactly when: costs will almost certainly fall if you delay, but that puts off the arrival of benefits as well.
And your point is? While you are absolutely correct, society has agreed to tolerate Joe Public driving a car dangerously - and also seems to tolerate him driving a computer dangerously. We could make the roads a lot safer by keeping 90% of current drivers off them, and we could make the Net a lot safer by keeping 90% of computer users off them. But those 90% of incompetents are voters, and vote themselves on.
That just restricts the number of people who can use computers unnecessarily. Computers exist to serve people, not people to serve computers. We need to design computers so that people whose job is doing something else can still use computers. Forcing all users to become geeks just limits the availability of computers.
In the early 1900s some pundit in Britain said that road congestion could never become a problem because there were a maximum of a million people in the country who could be trained to become chauffeurs. That might have been reasonable, for a model that said that cars are so complicated that it needs a trained specialist (or enthusiastic amateur) to run them. But cars became so easy that any Joe Public could drive them - and society changed accordingly, few drivers now are competent mechanics - and we shouldn't make the same demands of computer users.
Have you ever flown in a DC3?
Two problems. Firstly, define, and prove, "difficult-to-spoof" for all time. People have already shown the ability to spoof fingerprints. And all you have to do is to clone the identity of one card onto the biometrics of another, and you have a card that describes the criminal but accesses the victims data.
Secondly, much access to the data is not with the card but without. If people have access to one part of the data it is all to easy to access other parts. So the clerk who can legitimately check, say, that I have paid my property taxes may all to easily be able to access my medical appointments - including the one with a specialist in embarrassing diseases.
It isn't the Queen, it is the Chief Cashier of the Bank of England, on behalf of the Governor and Company. Do you have any idea who they are, and whether you can trust them?
Don't most people round here do incremental development? Isn't it normal to send release 0.1 for test and then start work on release 0.2? It is sensible to put a minimal set of features into a Mk 1 card, then add more to a Mk 2 card later.
The problem is not with enhancing the card, it is with the non-optional nature of it. In technology we are used to early adopters paying a high price, and later users getting something that is both cheaper and probably better. Everybody makes a choice to be an early adopter, or not, and lives with the consequence. But the UK ID card, while claimed to be voluntary, is not. If you want to get/renew a passport from 2011 on, you will have to get an ID card. Which forces people into the early adopter group whether they want it or not. They do not have the option of waiting until the system has settled down. I would definitely play cautious about this ID card scheme, and luckily my passport needs renewing in 2010, so I can - until they find some other way to coerce me. I'll get one when I see real evidence of an advantage to me, and that the security threats have not materialized.
So its not fair that people who buy Ford's basic model get something better than a Model T? It's not fair that when I buy a plane ticket I travel in greater comfort and safety than my father did? It;s not fair that my GBP400 PC today performs better than my first GBP1200 PC (386 8Mhz, 8Mb ram, 10Gb disc)?
Progress happens. Your view is positively Luddite.
The problem with any such card is that as it does more and more things, more and more people can access data used by it. The fact that it can do more things makes it a juicy target for criminals, while the larger the number of people who have access to its data the more there are to be criminals or to be suborned by criminals. This means that there is in inverse square law of security against power of such a card. Nobody is going to attack my library card: all they could do is take out books in my name, and the only people who have access to the database are a handful of librarians. But single index to my entire life gives access to my bank, my medical records, my employment records, my tax records... and is vulnerable to attack by all those with legitimate access to any of those people.
Beware of revenge effects. Every technology has them - this ID card seems to me to have bigger ones than most.
The reliability and selectivity of a weapons are a separate matter from whether its collateral damage is sufficiently small. There is no real difference in morality between a drone and a sniper bullet - if someone is a legitimate target, then either is legitimate. The difference is the collateral damage. By and large, the sniper bullet either kills the target or does not - and that is it. Whether the drone kills its target or not, it is likely to kill a large number, innocent or guilty, in the vicinity of the target.
The question should therefore not be about drones directly, but how the forces calculate the acceptable level of collateral damage incurred in attacking a particular target, and how they estimate the actual level incurred by particular attacks. There should be, at some level, a statement on the lines of "To kill an enemy commander of level X, we are prepared to accept Y civilian deaths" and another statement that "The proposed attack on commander A with weapon B will cause C civilian deaths". The attack can then proceed if C is less than or equal to Y. Of course, the terminology will be different, and no doubt highly obfuscated in military technology. And, of course, the numbers are very uncertain, so the precautionary principle says that the attack should not go ahead unless C us significantly less than Y.
If they don't have these rules, then they are essentially out of control - they are firing of lethal weaponry whose effects they cannot evaluate at targets whose worth they do not know - and should stop until they have such rules. If they do have such rules, there seems no reason why they should not publish the principles behind the rules. The don't have to publish the actual numeric estimates for particular weapons and targets, but they should publish the the way they reach those estimates. And if they are worried about the public backlash - they shouldn't be doing it.
Indeed. The word "liberal" has very different meanings on the opposite sides of the Atlantic. The traditional UK sense of Liberal was closer to (but not equal to) the US Libertarian. True UK liberals would legalise drugs and, probably, guns.
Back in the day when I first got into programming, it was not uncommon for compiles to run for 10 hours or more.
Back in the day? It takes the hardware engineers round here 22 hours to compile their device. If you find a bug in the hardware, come back tomorrow. If the compiler doesn't crash running on a machine with a mere 12Gb of memory,
It is not so much telling the compiler what I know, it is telling the source code, in a checked manner, what I know today that the maintainer (who may be myself) does not know tomorrow. It is a big fallacy that source is needed only for man to communicate with machine; just as important is man communicating with man. And if I can get that communication machine checked, should I not do so? Just like assert(), @override, private: and other annotations which add nothing to functionality but reduce finger trouble.