Mr. Toyoda himself testified in front of Congress that Toyota sacrificed safety in the name of corporate growth. Can't get more authoritative than that.
The problem described with the Mercedes seats has nothing to do with the CAN bus on a car. CAN is considered a safety critical bus and is designed as such. Seat buttons are directly wired analog controls or are on some serial data line, not CAN. Its not possible to send a command over the bus and have it do something in the wrong place.
I take it you've never seen code generated by Matlab and Simulink. I certainly believe the number is possible. Modeling a poorly designed control system and machine generating code to operate it can result in HUGE programs.
A public defender is an attorney provided by the court at no cost to the defendant. Try reading the SCOTUS decision in Miranda v. Arizona:
A person "has the right to consult with an attorney and to have that attorney present during questioning, and that, if he or she is indigent, an attorney will be provided at no cost to represent her or him."
That attorney that is provided is both free and court-appointed. This holds throughout the US. Your statements are completely made up.
Brits, send your bad kids to Kansas. We can deal with them.
In my city of about 100,000, a man's house was broken into in the middle of the night by a pair of teens. They stole his TV and several other valuable items before the man awoke and chased them out of his house with a rifle.
The kids decided there was too much good stuff in this guy's house to pass up, so they went back the next night. The first one went in through the window, to find the homeowner was waiting for him, and the kid took two high power rifle rounds to the chest. His friend, in an alpha male sort of way, decided to pull out his pistol and before he even got to aim, the homeowner had shot him several times. The first of the two survived and later told police that they had gone back to steal a Playstation.
Years passed before anyone tried this again.
Last year, there were a string of home invasions. Most of the time, the burglars found the homeowner in bed, and threatened them with a weapon to give them valuables. This worked well until the burglars broke into the trailer of an Iraq war vet, who shot the two burglars 13 times. Both burglars survived, live in great pain, and will stand trial.
There have been no home invasions since.
Come on UK, give your citizens back the right to defend themselves.
Tethering on an Android device really only requires knowing some basic routing, setting the wifi adapter to master mode, and some iptables. How is it that a website full of linux geeks is paying for applications to do this and being amazed with them?
" None of the other devices (WinMo, Symbian,...) even have standard browsers with support for Flash OR HTML5 so web developing is also out of the picture."
BZZZTT.
Windows Mobile has had Flash on ARM for a while. I would watch Homestar Runner in Pocket IE running on Windows Mobile 5 without any trouble. Also, Windows Mobile devices built for the better part of the last decade will play MP4 or divx avis without any trouble. Example: HTC Apache.
"I don't think you understand how standards bodies work, at all - or even what the point of standards are. Standards are something that ANYONE CAN USE."
I don't think you've ever actually made anything compliant with an industry standard. You don't just magically have all the specifications of the standard available to you. Very commonly, you pay for it, and its often not cheap. I was just talking with another engineer today who needed a copy of a standard, and it was going to be a couple hundred dollars. The standards body also wanted the stipulation that only that one guy would have access to the document. Yeah, standards can be used by anyone, if you have the money or have something of interest worth trading.
"If your Mercedes didn't have a catalyst it was spewing crap in the air for no good reason at all. "
No, they are very high compression naturally aspirated engines. They have compression ratios often higher than many modern engines. These engines can burn very cleanly.
Modern management systems are constantly adjusting a plethora of control subsystems including spark timing, valve timing, turbo wastegate, throttle opening, etc. There are engines out there with comparable displacements without all these computer controlled subsystems that get by just fine and don't necessarily pollute any more.
Stick to code? That's not my forte. I can however disassemble Continental O-200, Lycoming O-360, O-540, Volvo B52x4, B23xF, and Mercedes 117 and 617 engines in my head.
I have a 1973 Mercedes with a 4.5L V8. It has electronic fuel injection, and no emissions controls. However, it passed emissions testing with flying colors until it was exempted (not that long ago). Most engines are "managed" because the engineers who designed them were idiots who couldn't build a good engine in the first place.
The only reason the G1 is on Android 1.6 and not 2.0 is because HTC isn't bothering to write drivers for the camera and microphone compatible with 2.0, and bluetooth is mostly broken. Other than that, 2.0 runs fine on a G1...
"The fact of the matter is we do have backups in place right now. Commercial businesses are already launching satellites, let alone other nations. So if we need a satellite launched, we have options."
There is no other space vehicle with the carrying capacity of the shuttle. There are satellites in orbit that couldn't have been placed there by any other spacecraft currently in existence, or under development.
"Really, they've killed a bunch of astronauts and they do so at a huge, HUGE, cost to the public."
The shuttle is considered a military aircraft. With 130 missions, less than a 2% failure rate is pretty good, not even counting the insane complexity of the vehicle systems.
Ranger, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Voyager, Mariner, SOHO, Spirit, Opportunity, Mars Global Surveyor, Cassini, Huygens...do I really need to go on? Where is private industry on landing stuff on the Moon, Venus, or Mars, or orbiting Saturn and Titan? Or even in sending a craft out of the solar system? What rock have you lived under your whole life?
Most people won't know that you're referring to two neighboring cities in Illinois.:)
I was one of those New Trier punks south of the Lake County line. We were very similar though. The school itself stopped sponsoring the computer society because they didn't see the connection to what students were studying. The township (not the school mind you) then took over sponsoring the computer society. This allowed students to learn about a wide variety of subjects. We had a Gateway Pentium-90 box that we set up FreeBSD on that was the club server. We ran a website from there, used it as our mail server, and fooled around in shells. The staff sponsors would teach us about their equipment too. The township had just bought a Sun E450 to run all the websites and handle mail for every teacher in the township and every student at the high school. They also got a Sun Ultra Enterprise 1, but I don't remember what it was for. So here you had a bunch of high school kids learning about enterprise grade Solaris installations. To help us learn better, a Sparcstation IPC was scrounged up so we could learn about Solaris in a separate environment. We learned how to configure and compile the linux kernel for another retired P-90. We even got our hands on some dual Pentium Pro 200 machines that we made into a linux cluster. We all learned what *not* to do also, such as how quickly "rm -rf/" can ruin your day, and what happens when you ping flood someone on 28.8kbps dialup when you have a full T1. The excitement and creativity knowing that there was *so much* out there and that we really could tackle any of it was amazing and an experience that helped guide me to become an engineer.
Hard to believe that was more than a decade ago. After my class graduated, things weren't the same. The students became more focused on gaming and being 1337, and the school stepped in and decided to take the society back from the township. I used to go back periodically to talk about the work I did in academic, military, and commercial environments involving linux and unix, from tiny embedded systems in UAVs, GPS devices, and cell phones, all the way up to gargantuan clusters and huge old systems. The interest seemed to fade though. Last time I went was five years ago, right after I had given a talk on NASA TV about linux powered flight control systems for UAVs. Nobody seemed to make the connection that what they were doing then could lead to doing things like that. Maybe it would be good to go back though, who knows, maybe the mindset has changed again.
At the very least, thank you for the trip down memory lane though.
I've taught CATIA classes for a major aerospace company and worked closely with the company formerly known as UGS. I've been impressed what will run complex CAD programs. Here's a good example:
Runs CATIA V5 effortlessly (but takes about 45 seconds to start), and as long as you aren't working with huge assemblies it works fine. There are no problems making parts, and rendering is fluid. Runs NX4 just fine as well.
Here's a machine that can be a big laggy sometimes:
This machine runs NX5 *ok* but nothing spectacular. For simple parts there isn't much difference between it and the P3. And yes, I did use the SMP extensions for the Parasolids engine.
The performance comes mainly from the graphics card.
Stock, many turbocharged cars sold in the US will run with 20-30% ethanol no problem. My 2002 Volvo will happily run on E30 fuel, but it takes a bit of a mileage hit.
Spoiled by low gas prices, yeah, while we are forced oversized, underpowered, inefficient engines, and screwed over by having diesel powered cars basically legislated away. If most of my fellow Americans knew that the best American cars *aren't sold in America* maybe things would change.
Example: Ford Fusion Hybrid: overpriced, overcomplicated, in global comparisons not very efficient. Give me a Ford Mondeo TDCI instead, it gets 50-60% better economy out of a simpler design and has every feature the Fusion has. Oh wait, I CAN'T HAVE ONE IN THE US.
"Complex mechanical mechanisms inevitably get pushed aside for solid state. "
I know that's all the rage these days, but sometimes it is foolish to replace trusted, well understood mechanical systems with computerized versions. Just ask Toyota what a bright idea it was to leap into that.
"Unexploded ordinance is just nasty stuff that may or may not still be viable - the only effective way to make it safe is to let all the boom out of it."
For one of my projects, I was involved in unmanned aircraft activities at Fort Riley, KS, using an old weapons test range. Downrange was a tree line that we were warned to stay away from, and there were "UXO" signs around them. Apparently, trees had grown *around* unexploded ordnance, and that those trees were known to spontaneously explode. It was too dangerous to go out there, and they couldn't just bomb the land on base, so the Army just left that bunch of trees alone.
Not everyone subscribes to the idea that they MUST purchase the latest and greatest OS for their hardware. I don't believe that thinking "I'm not going to blow $100 on an upgrade I DON'T NEED or I CAN'T USE" is an esoteric reason at all. Step out of your reality distortion field.
I'm an engineer who finds himself on the road a lot. I have a netbook (MSI Wind U120, 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB HD) and a real laptop (Dell Latitude D630, 2.2GHz C2D, 8GB RAM, 120GB 7200rpm HD, Quadro graphics) for the hardcore work. Both go with me everywhere, and I'll use the netbook unless I absolutely need more power, but that's not too often unless I need to build software or something. I can do anything I'd normally do at my desk on my big workstations on the road.
I've done aerospace engineering for one of the premier aerospace design houses in the US, and anything going to production was done in Unigraphics/NX. At Cessna, everything was done in CATIA. Either of those programs are what you need. As easy to use and handy as SolidWorks is, I think it is better suited for widgets and small assemblies, not something as complex as an aircraft or space vehicle. You're likely to blow yourselves up with anything less than UG or CATIA. If you care about pretty pictures, both UG and CATIA have rendering packages.
Use the right tool for the job, even though in this case the right tool is going to be about $100,000 for a single perpetual floating license.
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Mr. Toyoda himself testified in front of Congress that Toyota sacrificed safety in the name of corporate growth. Can't get more authoritative than that.
"I'm guessing that Flight Data Recorders are mandated by law for commercial aircraft."
I believe what you are looking for is 14 CFR FAR 91.609.
The problem described with the Mercedes seats has nothing to do with the CAN bus on a car. CAN is considered a safety critical bus and is designed as such. Seat buttons are directly wired analog controls or are on some serial data line, not CAN. Its not possible to send a command over the bus and have it do something in the wrong place.
I take it you've never seen code generated by Matlab and Simulink. I certainly believe the number is possible. Modeling a poorly designed control system and machine generating code to operate it can result in HUGE programs.
"How could you possible get a defense lawyer on your side if you had hard evidence lined up against you?"
YOU don't have to get him on your side, its his JOB to be on your side, regardless of the evidence against you. Research "zealous representation."
A public defender is an attorney provided by the court at no cost to the defendant. Try reading the SCOTUS decision in Miranda v. Arizona:
A person "has the right to consult with an attorney and to have that attorney present during questioning, and that, if he or she is indigent, an attorney will be provided at no cost to represent her or him."
That attorney that is provided is both free and court-appointed. This holds throughout the US. Your statements are completely made up.
Brits, send your bad kids to Kansas. We can deal with them.
In my city of about 100,000, a man's house was broken into in the middle of the night by a pair of teens. They stole his TV and several other valuable items before the man awoke and chased them out of his house with a rifle.
The kids decided there was too much good stuff in this guy's house to pass up, so they went back the next night. The first one went in through the window, to find the homeowner was waiting for him, and the kid took two high power rifle rounds to the chest. His friend, in an alpha male sort of way, decided to pull out his pistol and before he even got to aim, the homeowner had shot him several times. The first of the two survived and later told police that they had gone back to steal a Playstation.
Years passed before anyone tried this again.
Last year, there were a string of home invasions. Most of the time, the burglars found the homeowner in bed, and threatened them with a weapon to give them valuables. This worked well until the burglars broke into the trailer of an Iraq war vet, who shot the two burglars 13 times. Both burglars survived, live in great pain, and will stand trial.
There have been no home invasions since.
Come on UK, give your citizens back the right to defend themselves.
Tethering on an Android device really only requires knowing some basic routing, setting the wifi adapter to master mode, and some iptables. How is it that a website full of linux geeks is paying for applications to do this and being amazed with them?
" None of the other devices (WinMo, Symbian, ...) even have standard browsers with support for Flash OR HTML5 so web developing is also out of the picture."
BZZZTT.
Windows Mobile has had Flash on ARM for a while. I would watch Homestar Runner in Pocket IE running on Windows Mobile 5 without any trouble. Also, Windows Mobile devices built for the better part of the last decade will play MP4 or divx avis without any trouble. Example: HTC Apache.
"I don't think you understand how standards bodies work, at all - or even what the point of standards are. Standards are something that ANYONE CAN USE."
I don't think you've ever actually made anything compliant with an industry standard. You don't just magically have all the specifications of the standard available to you. Very commonly, you pay for it, and its often not cheap. I was just talking with another engineer today who needed a copy of a standard, and it was going to be a couple hundred dollars. The standards body also wanted the stipulation that only that one guy would have access to the document. Yeah, standards can be used by anyone, if you have the money or have something of interest worth trading.
"If your Mercedes didn't have a catalyst it was spewing crap in the air for no good reason at all. "
No, they are very high compression naturally aspirated engines. They have compression ratios often higher than many modern engines. These engines can burn very cleanly.
Modern management systems are constantly adjusting a plethora of control subsystems including spark timing, valve timing, turbo wastegate, throttle opening, etc. There are engines out there with comparable displacements without all these computer controlled subsystems that get by just fine and don't necessarily pollute any more.
Stick to code? That's not my forte. I can however disassemble Continental O-200, Lycoming O-360, O-540, Volvo B52x4, B23xF, and Mercedes 117 and 617 engines in my head.
I have a 1973 Mercedes with a 4.5L V8. It has electronic fuel injection, and no emissions controls. However, it passed emissions testing with flying colors until it was exempted (not that long ago). Most engines are "managed" because the engineers who designed them were idiots who couldn't build a good engine in the first place.
The only reason the G1 is on Android 1.6 and not 2.0 is because HTC isn't bothering to write drivers for the camera and microphone compatible with 2.0, and bluetooth is mostly broken. Other than that, 2.0 runs fine on a G1...
"a third party team blew up a data center"
So a sysadmin and John McClane traded jobs for a day is what you're saying.
"The fact of the matter is we do have backups in place right now. Commercial businesses are already launching satellites, let alone other nations. So if we need a satellite launched, we have options."
There is no other space vehicle with the carrying capacity of the shuttle. There are satellites in orbit that couldn't have been placed there by any other spacecraft currently in existence, or under development.
"Really, they've killed a bunch of astronauts and they do so at a huge, HUGE, cost to the public."
The shuttle is considered a military aircraft. With 130 missions, less than a 2% failure rate is pretty good, not even counting the insane complexity of the vehicle systems.
"...they really haven't done anything private enterprise isn't doing already. "
Ranger, Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Voyager, Mariner, SOHO, Spirit, Opportunity, Mars Global Surveyor, Cassini, Huygens...do I really need to go on? Where is private industry on landing stuff on the Moon, Venus, or Mars, or orbiting Saturn and Titan? Or even in sending a craft out of the solar system? What rock have you lived under your whole life?
Most people won't know that you're referring to two neighboring cities in Illinois. :)
I was one of those New Trier punks south of the Lake County line. We were very similar though. The school itself stopped sponsoring the computer society because they didn't see the connection to what students were studying. The township (not the school mind you) then took over sponsoring the computer society. This allowed students to learn about a wide variety of subjects. We had a Gateway Pentium-90 box that we set up FreeBSD on that was the club server. We ran a website from there, used it as our mail server, and fooled around in shells. The staff sponsors would teach us about their equipment too. The township had just bought a Sun E450 to run all the websites and handle mail for every teacher in the township and every student at the high school. They also got a Sun Ultra Enterprise 1, but I don't remember what it was for. So here you had a bunch of high school kids learning about enterprise grade Solaris installations. To help us learn better, a Sparcstation IPC was scrounged up so we could learn about Solaris in a separate environment. We learned how to configure and compile the linux kernel for another retired P-90. We even got our hands on some dual Pentium Pro 200 machines that we made into a linux cluster. We all learned what *not* to do also, such as how quickly "rm -rf /" can ruin your day, and what happens when you ping flood someone on 28.8kbps dialup when you have a full T1. The excitement and creativity knowing that there was *so much* out there and that we really could tackle any of it was amazing and an experience that helped guide me to become an engineer.
Hard to believe that was more than a decade ago. After my class graduated, things weren't the same. The students became more focused on gaming and being 1337, and the school stepped in and decided to take the society back from the township. I used to go back periodically to talk about the work I did in academic, military, and commercial environments involving linux and unix, from tiny embedded systems in UAVs, GPS devices, and cell phones, all the way up to gargantuan clusters and huge old systems. The interest seemed to fade though. Last time I went was five years ago, right after I had given a talk on NASA TV about linux powered flight control systems for UAVs. Nobody seemed to make the connection that what they were doing then could lead to doing things like that. Maybe it would be good to go back though, who knows, maybe the mindset has changed again.
At the very least, thank you for the trip down memory lane though.
I've taught CATIA classes for a major aerospace company and worked closely with the company formerly known as UGS. I've been impressed what will run complex CAD programs. Here's a good example:
My cheap CAD box:
CPU: P3-550
RAM: 640MB
OS: WinXP
GPU: nVidia QuadroFX 1000
Runs CATIA V5 effortlessly (but takes about 45 seconds to start), and as long as you aren't working with huge assemblies it works fine. There are no problems making parts, and rendering is fluid. Runs NX4 just fine as well.
Here's a machine that can be a big laggy sometimes:
Dell Precision 530
CPU: 2x Xeon 2.8GHz
RAM: 2GB RAMBUS
GPU: nVidia Quadro4 700XGL
This machine runs NX5 *ok* but nothing spectacular. For simple parts there isn't much difference between it and the P3. And yes, I did use the SMP extensions for the Parasolids engine.
The performance comes mainly from the graphics card.
Stock, many turbocharged cars sold in the US will run with 20-30% ethanol no problem. My 2002 Volvo will happily run on E30 fuel, but it takes a bit of a mileage hit.
Spoiled by low gas prices, yeah, while we are forced oversized, underpowered, inefficient engines, and screwed over by having diesel powered cars basically legislated away. If most of my fellow Americans knew that the best American cars *aren't sold in America* maybe things would change.
Example: Ford Fusion Hybrid: overpriced, overcomplicated, in global comparisons not very efficient. Give me a Ford Mondeo TDCI instead, it gets 50-60% better economy out of a simpler design and has every feature the Fusion has. Oh wait, I CAN'T HAVE ONE IN THE US.
"Complex mechanical mechanisms inevitably get pushed aside for solid state. "
I know that's all the rage these days, but sometimes it is foolish to replace trusted, well understood mechanical systems with computerized versions. Just ask Toyota what a bright idea it was to leap into that.
"Unexploded ordinance is just nasty stuff that may or may not still be viable - the only effective way to make it safe is to let all the boom out of it."
For one of my projects, I was involved in unmanned aircraft activities at Fort Riley, KS, using an old weapons test range. Downrange was a tree line that we were warned to stay away from, and there were "UXO" signs around them. Apparently, trees had grown *around* unexploded ordnance, and that those trees were known to spontaneously explode. It was too dangerous to go out there, and they couldn't just bomb the land on base, so the Army just left that bunch of trees alone.
Not everyone subscribes to the idea that they MUST purchase the latest and greatest OS for their hardware. I don't believe that thinking "I'm not going to blow $100 on an upgrade I DON'T NEED or I CAN'T USE" is an esoteric reason at all. Step out of your reality distortion field.
The courts have spoken several times now. What part of "no" don't you understand?
I'm an engineer who finds himself on the road a lot. I have a netbook (MSI Wind U120, 1.6GHz Atom, 1GB RAM, 160GB HD) and a real laptop (Dell Latitude D630, 2.2GHz C2D, 8GB RAM, 120GB 7200rpm HD, Quadro graphics) for the hardcore work. Both go with me everywhere, and I'll use the netbook unless I absolutely need more power, but that's not too often unless I need to build software or something. I can do anything I'd normally do at my desk on my big workstations on the road.
I've done aerospace engineering for one of the premier aerospace design houses in the US, and anything going to production was done in Unigraphics/NX. At Cessna, everything was done in CATIA. Either of those programs are what you need. As easy to use and handy as SolidWorks is, I think it is better suited for widgets and small assemblies, not something as complex as an aircraft or space vehicle. You're likely to blow yourselves up with anything less than UG or CATIA. If you care about pretty pictures, both UG and CATIA have rendering packages.
Use the right tool for the job, even though in this case the right tool is going to be about $100,000 for a single perpetual floating license.