Get their name, then ask them the name of their boss (or secretary) and the office they work out of (ie - in which city their FBI office is).
Ask them to wait. You look up the number of that office in Google, not using the number on the card they give you.
You call their home office and ask to speak to his boss or his secretary. Tell them "There's a John Smith at my door claiming to be an FBI agent, and that he works for/with you. Can you describe him for me?"
This works for any official who comes knocking - police, meter readers... anyone.
First of all, everything previous posted about doing what you love is true. Figure out what you love first.
And the way to do that is to put yourself in a situation where you can't do anything for long periods. Take a 2-week vacation somewhere w/o internet access and little interaction with others - camping, for instance. It takes a couple of days for your mind to finish processing your daily routine and calm down, but once that's over your mind will naturally start to think about things you enjoy.
(Note: This is hard. You have to force yourself to not go off to get mental stimulation somewhere.)
Some specific suggesitons:
1) I strongly believe that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the subject of AI.
2) If you live near mountains, find an isolated ecological niche and catalog the species there. For instance, find a tall vertical rock cliff with niches which have captured trees and plants fallen from the top. Being essentially isolated from the larger ecology, speciation occurs at these places. Catalog the new species.
3) Go into the woods and find some sort of overhanging rock shelter - of the sort that a hunter-gatherer society might take refuge in during a thunderstorm. Do an archaeological excavation at that spot: Divide it up into rectangles using string, dig down an inch at a time and put the dirt through a sieve and see what you can find. Get any fireplace remains carbon dated.
All of the imagery linked to Wilhem von Gloeden in wikimedia is pornographic. In fact, it's kiddie porn, erotic, and intended to be that way.
At the same time, it's art and has substantial historical value.
It was done at a different time, when different laws applied, and outside the US.
I'm a father and a grandfather, but I also like to think of myself as progressive and liberal about these issues. There is no victim here, even if the images were modern there would be no victim. No victim means no crime, right?
Personally, I'm conflicted about these images. What do others think?
I'm in the process of measuring exactly this effect.
Noontime clear-sky sun measures 9500, blue light through office window with indirect daylight is 250, a desk lamp measures 45, and an LCD TV up close measures 7 uW/cm^2 in the frequency range of the retinal ganglia (480 nm) which is thought to be the part of the eye that senses daily cycles. (Mammalian Eye on Wikipedia.)
So far as I can tell laptops and related devices don't generate an appreciable amount of energy in this range, it's more the artificial indoor lighting.
As an experiment, I've started wearing red-tinted wrap-around sun glasses 2 hours before bedtime. I can still work, read, watch TV and all that, but the glasses mask off the blue frequencies, telling the brain that the sun has gone down.
It had an almost immediate effect. I'm a long-time sufferer of insomnia who has tried everything, but wearing the glasses fixed the problem in the first week.
I'm also a lot more "peppy" during the day, and I wonder if long term exposure to late-night artificial lighting (and low level during the day) is a cause of depression. Depression meds take about 6 weeks to have an effect, so I'm guessing that it would take about 6 weeks for the glasses to have an anti-depressive effect as well. I'm on week 3 with the glasses.
You can get good wrap-around red tinted glasses at a motorcycle shop for $12. WalMart sells an "old grandpa" set for $25 which will go over your existing glasses.
It has to be wrap around so that no light gets in over the edges. You don't want polarized lenses because they will interfere with LCD viewing. You want red tinted and "blue blocker". Oh, and make sure they're comfortable.
If you have to take them off for any reason (such as scratching your nose), you have to remember to close your eyes. It takes a couple of hours of dark before the pineal starts producing melatonin, and I strongly suspect that a short burst of light will reset that internal timer.
If you try this and it has any effect, positive or negative, I'd like to hear about it. Contact me through my homepage (above), I'll collect and post all the anecdotal stories so we can see if there really is an effect. Negative data is important, so if you try it and find no effect, I'd like to hear that as well.
The purpose of the bank is not to make the maximum money, the purpose is to get the most customers.
The bank makes money in two ways: 1) Differential interest between Fed and Savings, and 2) Lending
Lending is done very conservatively.
We cater to the geek crowd:
1) Online access only (but administrative offices with real employees) 2) Good web presence and features 3) Comprehensive accounting and audit trail 4) Excellent security 5) Open API for access 6) No charge for electronic transfers/access 7) Electronic statements 8) Nominal/at cost charge for reading in physical checks 9) Nominal/at cost charge for cutting a check and sending it by USPS 10) Nominal/at cost charge for printed statement 11) Legally compliant in all ways 12) FDIC insured
We would need a couple of people with serious cash, and a couple of people with the wherewithal to implement (or manage the implementation) of each of the items above....and we would need a metric buttload of people who pledge to invest in such a bank,...and another buttload of people who pledge to become a customer of the bank when it's up and running.
(And maybe some alpha and beta testers)
If this comes together in an appreciably believable way, I could be one of the cash founders. As in - getting the seed money is not as difficult as you might think.
Reviewing the responses above, many people profess knowledge of how to implement one or more of the specifics.
Put up or shut up. Does anyone actually want to *make* the geek friendly bank?
According to the almighty internet, we would need (depending on the state) about $5mil starting capital. About 10-20% of that comes directly from the founders, the rest can come from shareholders.
We would need some founders who have cash, some who have the knowledge and ability to implement the system, some who have the ability to *run* the system, some with the ability to negotiate the legal and procedural, and some with the ability to deal with personal interaction.
If a reasonable project plan were available, I could be one of the cash founders of the bank.
The Fontanelles is a group which does HIV research professionally and so has some specialized information in this area. We're disqualifying our entry, but have put it in just for fun as a target. We may be back if someone beats it.
So despite the appearance of the professional entry, this looks like an interesting contest that anyone might enter.
The basic problem with this and many similar measures is not that people disagree with the *intent* of the changes, they disagree that there is a connection between the intent and the action.
Having IDs which are harder to fake is probably a good thing. Fake IDs are the source of much fraud, and fraud is a big problem. Let's do something about it.
Now ask yourself the following question: Would you support this measure if it cost money and made IDs easier to fake?
[The National ID card system] won't work. It won't make us more secure.
In fact, everything I've learned about security over the last 20 years tells me that once it is put in place, a national ID card program will actually make us less secure.
Whenever anything like this comes up we keep asking the wrong questions. "We should ban liquids to make us safer", "we need to take naked pictures of all airline passengers to make us safe", "we should let border guards rifle through everyone's PCs to make us safe".
Everyone wants to be safe, there's absolutely no doubt about that, we should be in favor of all these measures.
But do you support expensive naked-photo camera systems if they make us *less* safe? Again, thoughtful commentary from people who have to actually make a living at this sort of thing is instructive.
Stop distracting us with the intent and convince us of the effectiveness.
I'm predicting that in the future we will be able to generate an infinite supply of music in the style of any particular genre or author, and I'm wondering if that will diminish the beauty of the original.
Maybe instead of beauty I should say "special", with connotations of rarity. A quartz crystal can be just as beautiful as a diamond, but is much less commonplace.
Michelangelo's "David" is beautiful. How less notable would it be if there were similar statues of the same quality in every town square?
I'm not objecting to anything. I don't think we should stop the research or the progress that comes from it.
Is there's a potential problem here, and should we think things through? We tell kids not to try drugs because it may lead to addiction, maybe we should recommend that they allow some things to remain special.
I've actually listened to some of Professor Cope's synthetic music.
Each piece replicates pretty well the style and feel of a particular author or genre of music. Probably not all possible genres and authors, but certainly the ones I've listened to.
What happens when we have the ability to generate as much music of a particular style as we want? Mozart had a particular style - how many hours of listening to Mozart-ish music do you need before it becomes commonplace and boring?
One of the nice things about $FamousComposer is that his works *are* famous... and finite. I don't think I want to burn out my appreciation for someone by listening to his style for hours on end.
So I'm wondering if this will become a problem for kids of the future. Loading up their ipods with hours and hours of a particular style, then getting bored with it. I like having an appreciation for particular authors.
IANAL, the lawyers reading this can correct me as needed.
If the burglar gets hurt due to a trap you have set, it's a crime not a tort. The burglar is not suing you, the police are arresting you on evidence of setting a trap. The crime is "Reckless Endangerment" if no one is hurt, various others if someone *is* hurt.
Traps are illegal because lots of people can be in your home without your consent: firefighters, police chasing a suspect, gas line repairmen,and the super. You must keep your house reasonably safe for that reason. It's a bit of a grey area if the burglar trips over a rug and breaks his leg, depending on the circumstances.
The burglar can sue for damages because we have the presumption of innocence. At the time of the break-in, he had not been convicted of the crime. The "deadly force" argument may or may not be valid, since the trap may very well be non-lethal, like restraining the burglar with a net.
I believe that this last bit varies from state-to-state, so check your local laws.
For those posters who talk about putting up signs, note that the trespasser could be a small child who hasn't yet learned to read, or am adult who only reads a different language.
As an ex-landlord, I view the situation with a measure of caution.
In my experience as a landlord, most problems occur as a direct result of actions taken by the tenants. In this case, spilling water and not immediately cleaning it up will cause mold. This happens because the tenants don't "own" the property they are living in. Cleaning up requires effort, and there's no incentive on the part of the tenants to do this.
To be fair, it may have been caused by the previous tenants, and so it's not the current tenants' fault. Also, many tenants are unaware of the problems which are caused by, for example, not cleaning up the water left over from snowy boots in the entranceway.
Mold is (apparently) completely blown out of proportion by companies that want to be paid to remove it. Yes, toxic mold does occasionally happen and it should be dealt with... but it's extremely rare. Not at all the level of fear an panic that we currently see. The vast majority of mold cases are not worth the effort.
I make software that goes on an aircraft for a living.
All such software is required to be certified by the FAA, which has elaborate requirements for development, documentation, and testing (the applicable document is DO-178B).
I'm told that the reason for certification is not safety, but culpability. If your software satisfies the requirements and passes review by the FAA, then your company will not be held liable if it causes problems.
In essence, certification represents "best effort" engineering practices and tries very hard to eliminate bugs in the final product.
By the time a software package gets on a plane, many people have combed over it looking for problems, and the testers have spent a massive amount of time running it. There is a safety/failure hazard analysis which asks all the "what if" questions, and the flight crew has written procedures in case it fails.
If a bug is found after deployment (this happens occasionally) and it is discovered that there was a flaw in the certification process, all hell would break loose. It would open up the FAA and the company to all sorts of lawsuits from injured parties. The people who signed off on the certification would essentially be screwed.
The FAA is generally a bunch of bureaucrats. The one thing they do well is look out for their own interests.
Oh, and I worked for the company that got Microsoft Windows certified to run in the cockpit as a map display. It's Posix compliant, dontcha' know!
The first thing to note is that the company has put some effort into making the decision. If they don't get the purchase, that effort will be wasted....which means you can make a counteroffer for 10% more and they will probably take it.
(The same thing is true with job offers. The company doesn't want to go back to the interview process, so once they've made an offer to hire you, ask to "think about it" for a day. On the next day, come in and ask for 10% more.)
Next, you should decide what your goals are, and whether it's more important to "feel good" or "be successful".
If your goals are to make tons of money, and you think your project has a good shot at that, then don't take the offer (politely) and keep working.
Otherwise, decide whether it's more important to "feel good" or "be successful".
As an example, people who show up at traffic court wearing jeans and a T-shirt with long unkempt hair usually get short shrift. If asked, they would complain something like "it shouldn't matter how I dress - they should see me for who I really am".
Those people have unclear goals.
If it's important to not get the ticket, then you should do everything you can to make it more likely that the ticket goes away, even if it means getting dressed up in a costume and acting as if you are someone you aren't (read: suit and tie). Dressing to your personal philosophy makes you feel good, but it doesn't accomplish your goals.
So for your situation, you must ask the question: "what are our goals"?
If you are well and truly into "not following rules" and other things, then that's your answer right there.
But remember it's easy, even trivial to start another project and get excited about it, and you can even have your existing dev group together to do it.
If your goals are to have fun and go your own way, selling out now could be a stepping stone to that end.
When the situation is framed clearly, as the traffic court example, most people realize that the fleeting "feel goodness" really isn't all that important to them, compared to the value of achieving their goals.
Have a group meeting, decide what your goals are as a group, and write that down. Your decision will flow naturally from there.
I've been considering doing a home GE experiment for some time now. Can I ask you a couple of questions about the difficulty level & maybe pick your brain on a couple of issues? 10 minutes tops.
Drop me a line:
GE (dot) 9 (dot) OkianWarrior (at) SpamGourmet (dot) com
As it happens, I'm working on a package which does exactly this.
It's a complete system with the top 68 culturally significant books and a "word flash reader" with a simple selection scheme to choose a book and save your place, &c.
There are word flash readers on the net already. The important part of my project is that it is a complete system with the books already loaded. A user can download one (rather large) file and begin reading immediately, instead of having to do all the geek stuff required to install a reader and then go off and grab/format the books.
The purpose is to increase literacy. Someone with poor comprehension could use this to increase their reading speed and comprehension (start slow, build up over time), as well as introduce them to pleasant reading by presenting well-known popular works.
I'm doing this as a hobby and as time permits (read: extremely slowly). If anyone thinks this is interesting or would like to work on this together, feel free to get in touch.
Literacy (dot) 9 (dot) OkianWarrior (at) SpamGourmet (dot) com
Download the top 80 or so classic masterpieces from Project Gutenberg. Things like Treasure Island, Heidi, Sherlock Holmes, and so on. Books you have not read, and are culturally important.
Set up the display with fine control over the scrolling speed, so that you can increase or decrease the speed in small increments (say, plus or minus 1% of current speed).
At night, before bedtime, "read" a novel by scroll sign, while slowly incrementing the speed until you are reading at your mental pace (about 450 WPM) instead of your normal reading pace (about 150 WPM for most people).
Do this consistently for an hour each night. You will need more than one day to finish any novel.
After a year, you will have read the top 80 culturally significant written works. Your intelligence (specifically: reading comprehension) will have greatly increased. When you hear a political review that, for example, obliquely references something in Sherlock Holmes, it will make sense. You can speak in terms relating to situations described in these works ("He's taking a Pollyanna view"), and you will have a larger vocabulary.
Okay, I am an avionics software engineer, who also understands electronics. Here's some info.
I cannot comment on the Airbus specifically, since I did not work on it directly, but on other aircraft (747, &c) it works like this:
There are 2 air data computers. These take in sensor reading from various parts of the ship and calculate results based on these readings and then distribute the information to other parts of the ship via an internal communications bus.
Sometimes the calculations are performed by the remote device and the ADC just passes them on; for example, the altimeter takes air pressure readings and calculates altitude and airspeed.
I'm glossing over some details for clarity, but you get the overall picture.
That's the theory, now let's look at reality and personal experience.
1) It turns out that a bad solder joint can act like a diode (perhaps someone from the physics department can further explain?), so an AC signal passing through such a joint will generate high frequency interference, much like a light dimmer does. On past aircraft there have been instances where quite a bit of EM interference was generated and such interference has been a problem BUT......those were instances of bad solder joints on devices actually installed in the aircraft, and which were directly coupled to other devices, so it's no big surprise that massive amounts of high frequency interference were getting fed to other systems and causing general mayhem.
The general fear is that your iPod might have such a fault, and that the random frequency it generates is exactly what is needed to spoof a signal needed by system. Some of the older navigation systems are based on "presence of RF signal", and could conceivably be confused by a much closer/much weaker transmitter.
Modern nav signals are modulated in various ways, so that the system can tell the difference between a real signal and noise.
2) Having written software which receives information from both nav computers, one might ask the question: What do you do when the nav computers disagree?
In a modern aircraft, YOU IGNORE IT. We found cases where the nav computers disagreed on the altitude calculation by 600 feet, which is a HUGE differential. If you try to throw up some sort of error message, maintenance will pull your product (not the broken computers) and send it back with a note saying "it keeps showing an error message".
This, of course, is very expensive for everyone involved. The process never ends, and the nav computers never get repaired. So the expedient solution is to ignore problems you discover in other people's devices and keep your mouth shut. So long as it's not your product that knocks the plane out of the sky, you're good.
3) A curious feature of software is that it's repeatable. If you give it the same inputs, it will calculate the same outputs every time.
So the question arises, if you have two identical devices making calculations on identical input data and there's a fault in the software, will redundancy do any good?
What we found is that identical systems will behave identically, and if one side goes haywire the other side will screw up in exactly the same way, and there will generally be no way to detect this. If the input doesn't seem quite right, then check it with the other side. It's saying the same thing? Well, OK. It must be correct... it just seems funny though.
(Note: You generally can't use different algorithms for your calculations, because there really aren't that many ways to multiply rate times time, for instance. All the behaviour is precisely specified and there aren't too many ways to code "if this happens, do that". Also, having multiple algorithms would *double* the amount of certification work you need, since it would result in essentially two different devices. Certification costs 15x the amount of development.)
This is why software systems on aircraft have extremely strict internal consistency requirements - it's mu
I rather enjoyed the poster's comments and read them fully, as I did his previous postings.
His overall tone and conclusion is that the system doesn't work for us common folk, which reflects my own experience with the court system.
It's a simple problem in game theory: people will do the least amount of work for the maximum amount of gain. As applied to judges (or any government employee), that means showing up late, not bothering to read paperwork, and generally opting for the shortest path to going home early.
The expected slashdot comment for this type of post should read something like "Government employee doesn't do their job, film at 11".
I've anecdotally polled several people about the cost benefits of taking someone to small claims court, and the overwhelming opinion is that it's not worth it. Judges are arbitrary, don't know the law, and don't bother to enforce it.
Think about what this means for a moment: the general population (again, my polls are anecdotal) has lost faith in the idea of taking someone to court to have their grievances settled.
You appear to talk with the authority of a lawyer, or maybe you're a judge yourself. Good for you! Tearing down an (obviously) non-lawyer is trivial for someone at your level of learning and experience.
Now explain to me how his conclusions are wrong, that the system works as advertized, and any sense of justice is ever accomplished.
"It's no coincidence then that of the 205 Members who voted in support of the bill today, there are only two -- Reps. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) and Jon Porter (R-Nev.) -- who find themselves in difficult reelection races this fall. The list of the 228 "nays" reads like a virtual target list for the two parties."
Slashdot Mirror
Get their name, then ask them the name of their boss (or secretary) and the office they work out of (ie - in which city their FBI office is).
Ask them to wait. You look up the number of that office in Google, not using the number on the card they give you.
You call their home office and ask to speak to his boss or his secretary. Tell them "There's a John Smith at my door claiming to be an FBI agent, and that he works for/with you. Can you describe him for me?"
This works for any official who comes knocking - police, meter readers... anyone.
It's a rock.
Replying to my own post, if you try any of the above and happen to find anything interesting, I'd love to hear about it.
Contact me through my homepage link, on the title of the post.
First of all, everything previous posted about doing what you love is true. Figure out what you love first.
And the way to do that is to put yourself in a situation where you can't do anything for long periods. Take a 2-week vacation somewhere w/o internet access and little interaction with others - camping, for instance. It takes a couple of days for your mind to finish processing your daily routine and calm down, but once that's over your mind will naturally start to think about things you enjoy.
(Note: This is hard. You have to force yourself to not go off to get mental stimulation somewhere.)
Some specific suggesitons:
1) I strongly believe that there is a lot of low-hanging fruit in the subject of AI.
2) If you live near mountains, find an isolated ecological niche and catalog the species there. For instance, find a tall vertical rock cliff with niches which have captured trees and plants fallen from the top. Being essentially isolated from the larger ecology, speciation occurs at these places. Catalog the new species.
3) Go into the woods and find some sort of overhanging rock shelter - of the sort that a hunter-gatherer society might take refuge in during a thunderstorm. Do an archaeological excavation at that spot: Divide it up into rectangles using string, dig down an inch at a time and put the dirt through a sieve and see what you can find. Get any fireplace remains carbon dated.
All of the imagery linked to Wilhem von Gloeden in wikimedia is pornographic. In fact, it's kiddie porn, erotic, and intended to be that way.
At the same time, it's art and has substantial historical value.
It was done at a different time, when different laws applied, and outside the US.
I'm a father and a grandfather, but I also like to think of myself as progressive and liberal about these issues. There is no victim here, even if the images were modern there would be no victim. No victim means no crime, right?
Personally, I'm conflicted about these images. What do others think?
I'm in the process of measuring exactly this effect.
Noontime clear-sky sun measures 9500, blue light through office window with indirect daylight is 250, a desk lamp measures 45, and an LCD TV up close measures 7 uW/cm^2 in the frequency range of the retinal ganglia (480 nm) which is thought to be the part of the eye that senses daily cycles. (Mammalian Eye on Wikipedia.)
So far as I can tell laptops and related devices don't generate an appreciable amount of energy in this range, it's more the artificial indoor lighting.
As an experiment, I've started wearing red-tinted wrap-around sun glasses 2 hours before bedtime. I can still work, read, watch TV and all that, but the glasses mask off the blue frequencies, telling the brain that the sun has gone down.
It had an almost immediate effect. I'm a long-time sufferer of insomnia who has tried everything, but wearing the glasses fixed the problem in the first week.
I'm also a lot more "peppy" during the day, and I wonder if long term exposure to late-night artificial lighting (and low level during the day) is a cause of depression. Depression meds take about 6 weeks to have an effect, so I'm guessing that it would take about 6 weeks for the glasses to have an anti-depressive effect as well. I'm on week 3 with the glasses.
You can get good wrap-around red tinted glasses at a motorcycle shop for $12. WalMart sells an "old grandpa" set for $25 which will go over your existing glasses.
It has to be wrap around so that no light gets in over the edges. You don't want polarized lenses because they will interfere with LCD viewing. You want red tinted and "blue blocker". Oh, and make sure they're comfortable.
If you have to take them off for any reason (such as scratching your nose), you have to remember to close your eyes. It takes a couple of hours of dark before the pineal starts producing melatonin, and I strongly suspect that a short burst of light will reset that internal timer.
If you try this and it has any effect, positive or negative, I'd like to hear about it. Contact me through my homepage (above), I'll collect and post all the anecdotal stories so we can see if there really is an effect. Negative data is important, so if you try it and find no effect, I'd like to hear that as well.
Let me throw this out as an initial proposal.
The purpose of the bank is not to make the maximum money, the purpose is to get the most customers.
The bank makes money in two ways:
1) Differential interest between Fed and Savings, and
2) Lending
Lending is done very conservatively.
We cater to the geek crowd:
1) Online access only (but administrative offices with real employees)
2) Good web presence and features
3) Comprehensive accounting and audit trail
4) Excellent security
5) Open API for access
6) No charge for electronic transfers/access
7) Electronic statements
8) Nominal/at cost charge for reading in physical checks
9) Nominal/at cost charge for cutting a check and sending it by USPS
10) Nominal/at cost charge for printed statement
11) Legally compliant in all ways
12) FDIC insured
We would need a couple of people with serious cash, and a couple of people with the wherewithal to implement (or manage the implementation) of each of the items above. ...and we would need a metric buttload of people who pledge to invest in such a bank, ...and another buttload of people who pledge to become a customer of the bank when it's up and running.
(And maybe some alpha and beta testers)
If this comes together in an appreciably believable way, I could be one of the cash founders. As in - getting the seed money is not as difficult as you might think.
Reviewing the responses above, many people profess knowledge of how to implement one or more of the specifics.
Any takers?
It seems that there is an opportunity here.
Put up or shut up. Does anyone actually want to *make* the geek friendly bank?
According to the almighty internet, we would need (depending on the state) about $5mil starting capital. About 10-20% of that comes directly from the founders, the rest can come from shareholders.
We would need some founders who have cash, some who have the knowledge and ability to implement the system, some who have the ability to *run* the system, some with the ability to negotiate the legal and procedural, and some with the ability to deal with personal interaction.
If a reasonable project plan were available, I could be one of the cash founders of the bank.
Anyone else?
From the forum page over at Kaggle:
So despite the appearance of the professional entry, this looks like an interesting contest that anyone might enter.
The basic problem with this and many similar measures is not that people disagree with the *intent* of the changes, they disagree that there is a connection between the intent and the action.
Having IDs which are harder to fake is probably a good thing. Fake IDs are the source of much fraud, and fraud is a big problem. Let's do something about it.
Now ask yourself the following question: Would you support this measure if it cost money and made IDs easier to fake?
See Bruce Schneier for a thoughtful analysis.
Here, let me quote from that article:
Whenever anything like this comes up we keep asking the wrong questions. "We should ban liquids to make us safer", "we need to take naked pictures of all airline passengers to make us safe", "we should let border guards rifle through everyone's PCs to make us safe".
Everyone wants to be safe, there's absolutely no doubt about that, we should be in favor of all these measures.
But do you support expensive naked-photo camera systems if they make us *less* safe? Again, thoughtful commentary from people who have to actually make a living at this sort of thing is instructive.
Stop distracting us with the intent and convince us of the effectiveness.
I'm predicting that in the future we will be able to generate an infinite supply of music in the style of any particular genre or author, and I'm wondering if that will diminish the beauty of the original.
Maybe instead of beauty I should say "special", with connotations of rarity. A quartz crystal can be just as beautiful as a diamond, but is much less commonplace.
Michelangelo's "David" is beautiful. How less notable would it be if there were similar statues of the same quality in every town square?
I'm not objecting to anything. I don't think we should stop the research or the progress that comes from it.
Is there's a potential problem here, and should we think things through? We tell kids not to try drugs because it may lead to addiction, maybe we should recommend that they allow some things to remain special.
I've actually listened to some of Professor Cope's synthetic music.
Each piece replicates pretty well the style and feel of a particular author or genre of music. Probably not all possible genres and authors, but certainly the ones I've listened to.
What happens when we have the ability to generate as much music of a particular style as we want? Mozart had a particular style - how many hours of listening to Mozart-ish music do you need before it becomes commonplace and boring?
One of the nice things about $FamousComposer is that his works *are* famous... and finite. I don't think I want to burn out my appreciation for someone by listening to his style for hours on end.
So I'm wondering if this will become a problem for kids of the future. Loading up their ipods with hours and hours of a particular style, then getting bored with it. I like having an appreciation for particular authors.
On the internet, no one knows you're a dog.
http://weblogs.mozillazine.org/gerv/archives/2007/images/internet_dog.jpg
IANAL, the lawyers reading this can correct me as needed.
If the burglar gets hurt due to a trap you have set, it's a crime not a tort. The burglar is not suing you, the police are arresting you on evidence of setting a trap. The crime is "Reckless Endangerment" if no one is hurt, various others if someone *is* hurt.
Traps are illegal because lots of people can be in your home without your consent: firefighters, police chasing a suspect, gas line repairmen,and the super. You must keep your house reasonably safe for that reason. It's a bit of a grey area if the burglar trips over a rug and breaks his leg, depending on the circumstances.
The burglar can sue for damages because we have the presumption of innocence. At the time of the break-in, he had not been convicted of the crime. The "deadly force" argument may or may not be valid, since the trap may very well be non-lethal, like restraining the burglar with a net.
I believe that this last bit varies from state-to-state, so check your local laws.
Interesting link
For those posters who talk about putting up signs, note that the trespasser could be a small child who hasn't yet learned to read, or am adult who only reads a different language.
As an ex-landlord, I view the situation with a measure of caution.
In my experience as a landlord, most problems occur as a direct result of actions taken by the tenants. In this case, spilling water and not immediately cleaning it up will cause mold. This happens because the tenants don't "own" the property they are living in. Cleaning up requires effort, and there's no incentive on the part of the tenants to do this.
To be fair, it may have been caused by the previous tenants, and so it's not the current tenants' fault. Also, many tenants are unaware of the problems which are caused by, for example, not cleaning up the water left over from snowy boots in the entranceway.
Mold is (apparently) completely blown out of proportion by companies that want to be paid to remove it. Yes, toxic mold does occasionally happen and it should be dealt with... but it's extremely rare. Not at all the level of fear an panic that we currently see. The vast majority of mold cases are not worth the effort.
I write software that goes into aircraft for a living.
Aircraft software is not always perfect, but in many cases it is and in the other cases it's pretty close.
During development, we once calculated that there is about 15X as much effort put on the certification process as the software development.
That means to say, if the software alone takes 3 man-months to develop, there is an additional 45 man-months spent on documentation and testing.
This is an average for critical systems. Non critical systems have easier requirements, so the cost goes down *slightly* in that case.
I make software that goes on an aircraft for a living.
All such software is required to be certified by the FAA, which has elaborate requirements for development, documentation, and testing (the applicable document is DO-178B).
I'm told that the reason for certification is not safety, but culpability. If your software satisfies the requirements and passes review by the FAA, then your company will not be held liable if it causes problems.
In essence, certification represents "best effort" engineering practices and tries very hard to eliminate bugs in the final product.
By the time a software package gets on a plane, many people have combed over it looking for problems, and the testers have spent a massive amount of time running it. There is a safety/failure hazard analysis which asks all the "what if" questions, and the flight crew has written procedures in case it fails.
If a bug is found after deployment (this happens occasionally) and it is discovered that there was a flaw in the certification process, all hell would break loose. It would open up the FAA and the company to all sorts of lawsuits from injured parties. The people who signed off on the certification would essentially be screwed.
The FAA is generally a bunch of bureaucrats. The one thing they do well is look out for their own interests.
Oh, and I worked for the company that got Microsoft Windows certified to run in the cockpit as a map display. It's Posix compliant, dontcha' know!
The first thing to note is that the company has put some effort into making the decision. If they don't get the purchase, that effort will be wasted. ...which means you can make a counteroffer for 10% more and they will probably take it.
(The same thing is true with job offers. The company doesn't want to go back to the interview process, so once they've made an offer to hire you, ask to "think about it" for a day. On the next day, come in and ask for 10% more.)
Next, you should decide what your goals are, and whether it's more important to "feel good" or "be successful".
If your goals are to make tons of money, and you think your project has a good shot at that, then don't take the offer (politely) and keep working.
Otherwise, decide whether it's more important to "feel good" or "be successful".
As an example, people who show up at traffic court wearing jeans and a T-shirt with long unkempt hair usually get short shrift. If asked, they would complain something like "it shouldn't matter how I dress - they should see me for who I really am".
Those people have unclear goals.
If it's important to not get the ticket, then you should do everything you can to make it more likely that the ticket goes away, even if it means getting dressed up in a costume and acting as if you are someone you aren't (read: suit and tie). Dressing to your personal philosophy makes you feel good, but it doesn't accomplish your goals.
So for your situation, you must ask the question: "what are our goals"?
If you are well and truly into "not following rules" and other things, then that's your answer right there.
But remember it's easy, even trivial to start another project and get excited about it, and you can even have your existing dev group together to do it.
If your goals are to have fun and go your own way, selling out now could be a stepping stone to that end.
When the situation is framed clearly, as the traffic court example, most people realize that the fleeting "feel goodness" really isn't all that important to them, compared to the value of achieving their goals.
Have a group meeting, decide what your goals are as a group, and write that down. Your decision will flow naturally from there.
Right, except that all the extra cost from the burden will still be passed on to customers.
Which is exactly how it should be. Customers will then switch to the more secure service providers because they are cheaper.
This is even true if the "customers" are other corporations, such as banks.
Making the responsible party bear the cost of their mistakes is an incentive to make fewer mistakes.
Ryan:
I've been considering doing a home GE experiment for some time now. Can I ask you a couple of questions about the difficulty level & maybe pick your brain on a couple of issues? 10 minutes tops.
Drop me a line:
GE (dot) 9 (dot) OkianWarrior (at) SpamGourmet (dot) com
As it happens, I'm working on a package which does exactly this.
It's a complete system with the top 68 culturally significant books and a "word flash reader" with a simple selection scheme to choose a book and save your place, &c.
There are word flash readers on the net already. The important part of my project is that it is a complete system with the books already loaded. A user can download one (rather large) file and begin reading immediately, instead of having to do all the geek stuff required to install a reader and then go off and grab/format the books.
The purpose is to increase literacy. Someone with poor comprehension could use this to increase their reading speed and comprehension (start slow, build up over time), as well as introduce them to pleasant reading by presenting well-known popular works.
I'm doing this as a hobby and as time permits (read: extremely slowly). If anyone thinks this is interesting or would like to work on this together, feel free to get in touch.
Literacy (dot) 9 (dot) OkianWarrior (at) SpamGourmet (dot) com
Download the top 80 or so classic masterpieces from Project Gutenberg. Things like Treasure Island, Heidi, Sherlock Holmes, and so on. Books you have not read, and are culturally important.
Set up the display with fine control over the scrolling speed, so that you can increase or decrease the speed in small increments (say, plus or minus 1% of current speed).
At night, before bedtime, "read" a novel by scroll sign, while slowly incrementing the speed until you are reading at your mental pace (about 450 WPM) instead of your normal reading pace (about 150 WPM for most people).
Do this consistently for an hour each night. You will need more than one day to finish any novel.
After a year, you will have read the top 80 culturally significant written works. Your intelligence (specifically: reading comprehension) will have greatly increased. When you hear a political review that, for example, obliquely references something in Sherlock Holmes, it will make sense. You can speak in terms relating to situations described in these works ("He's taking a Pollyanna view"), and you will have a larger vocabulary.
Enjoy your new found status and higher pay rate.
Okay, I am an avionics software engineer, who also understands electronics. Here's some info.
I cannot comment on the Airbus specifically, since I did not work on it directly, but on other aircraft (747, &c) it works like this:
There are 2 air data computers. These take in sensor reading from various parts of the ship and calculate results based on these readings and then distribute the information to other parts of the ship via an internal communications bus.
Sometimes the calculations are performed by the remote device and the ADC just passes them on; for example, the altimeter takes air pressure readings and calculates altitude and airspeed.
I'm glossing over some details for clarity, but you get the overall picture.
That's the theory, now let's look at reality and personal experience.
1) It turns out that a bad solder joint can act like a diode (perhaps someone from the physics department can further explain?), so an AC signal passing through such a joint will generate high frequency interference, much like a light dimmer does. On past aircraft there have been instances where quite a bit of EM interference was generated and such interference has been a problem BUT... ...those were instances of bad solder joints on devices actually installed in the aircraft, and which were directly coupled to other devices, so it's no big surprise that massive amounts of high frequency interference were getting fed to other systems and causing general mayhem.
The general fear is that your iPod might have such a fault, and that the random frequency it generates is exactly what is needed to spoof a signal needed by system. Some of the older navigation systems are based on "presence of RF signal", and could conceivably be confused by a much closer/much weaker transmitter.
Modern nav signals are modulated in various ways, so that the system can tell the difference between a real signal and noise.
2) Having written software which receives information from both nav computers, one might ask the question: What do you do when the nav computers disagree?
In a modern aircraft, YOU IGNORE IT. We found cases where the nav computers disagreed on the altitude calculation by 600 feet, which is a HUGE differential. If you try to throw up some sort of error message, maintenance will pull your product (not the broken computers) and send it back with a note saying "it keeps showing an error message".
This, of course, is very expensive for everyone involved. The process never ends, and the nav computers never get repaired. So the expedient solution is to ignore problems you discover in other people's devices and keep your mouth shut. So long as it's not your product that knocks the plane out of the sky, you're good.
3) A curious feature of software is that it's repeatable. If you give it the same inputs, it will calculate the same outputs every time.
So the question arises, if you have two identical devices making calculations on identical input data and there's a fault in the software, will redundancy do any good?
What we found is that identical systems will behave identically, and if one side goes haywire the other side will screw up in exactly the same way, and there will generally be no way to detect this. If the input doesn't seem quite right, then check it with the other side. It's saying the same thing? Well, OK. It must be correct... it just seems funny though.
(Note: You generally can't use different algorithms for your calculations, because there really aren't that many ways to multiply rate times time, for instance. All the behaviour is precisely specified and there aren't too many ways to code "if this happens, do that". Also, having multiple algorithms would *double* the amount of certification work you need, since it would result in essentially two different devices. Certification costs 15x the amount of development.)
This is why software systems on aircraft have extremely strict internal consistency requirements - it's mu
I rather enjoyed the poster's comments and read them fully, as I did his previous postings.
His overall tone and conclusion is that the system doesn't work for us common folk, which reflects my own experience with the court system.
It's a simple problem in game theory: people will do the least amount of work for the maximum amount of gain. As applied to judges (or any government employee), that means showing up late, not bothering to read paperwork, and generally opting for the shortest path to going home early.
The expected slashdot comment for this type of post should read something like "Government employee doesn't do their job, film at 11".
I've anecdotally polled several people about the cost benefits of taking someone to small claims court, and the overwhelming opinion is that it's not worth it. Judges are arbitrary, don't know the law, and don't bother to enforce it.
Think about what this means for a moment: the general population (again, my polls are anecdotal) has lost faith in the idea of taking someone to court to have their grievances settled.
You appear to talk with the authority of a lawyer, or maybe you're a judge yourself. Good for you! Tearing down an (obviously) non-lawyer is trivial for someone at your level of learning and experience.
Now explain to me how his conclusions are wrong, that the system works as advertized, and any sense of justice is ever accomplished.
Here's the Washington Post take on the vote:
"It's no coincidence then that of the 205 Members who voted in support of the bill today, there are only two -- Reps. Chris Shays (R-Conn.) and Jon Porter (R-Nev.) -- who find themselves in difficult reelection races this fall. The list of the 228 "nays" reads like a virtual target list for the two parties."
Source: http://voices.washingtonpost.com/thefix/2008/09/the_failure_of_the_financial.html?nav=rss_blog