It's not inconceivable to build a system that feeds a movie script, perhaps with more detailed stage directions and some background and avitar art work model files, into a video game engine with high quality text to speech and get a movie. Performances might be somewhat different each time it ran, much like live theater. The effective compression would be extremely high. Conceivably such a system could perform any play ever written, with an interface that allowed a user to act as director, maybe creating a cast from an avitar library of the great actors of history and tuning the performance to their liking. The original script plus directorial hints file would still be very small.
Vehicles are not a good analogy. Replacing some older vehicles does not cause the organization that uses them to stop functioning. A better example is industrial land pollution ("brownfields"), where US law requires the polluting company to pay for cleanup no matter how long ago it happened. Microsoft made a huge amount of money selling software it knew had defects into applications it knew would be hard to upgrade. It's not much different from companies who kept their costs down by dumping toxic waste materials onto nearby land. Microsoft should be responsible for cleaning up the mess they made and profited from.
The activities "canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, or packing" are all activities that take place in a food processing plant. The work in such plants is often seasonal, with long hours for a short period when the harvest comes in, and so exempting such work from overtime pay makes some sense. Truckers, on the other hand typically have work year round so there is no obvious reason to exempt them from the general rule of overtime pay just based on what type of cargo they happen to be carrying. If the legislature's intent was to exempt truckers, it would likely have done so more clearly. Reading such an exemption into a law because of ambiguous punctuation would be improper.
Eric's history is interesting and valuable as long as you realize it is based on his stove-piped career. There are glaring omissions. In particular there was this company called IBM that dominated the data processing industry for most of the 20th century. The end of the 36-bit era and the universal use of addressable 8-bit bytes began when IBM introduced the System/360 in 1964, not when DEC finally stopped making PDP-10s in 1983. ASCII did not grow out of anything, it was a fresh creation of a new standard. IBM even pretended to support it, though it used its own 8-bit code, EBCDIC. The short Unix commands were optimized for Teletype machines. Video displays were not cheaper than Teletypes at first, they succeeded because they were much faster and far more user friendly, not because they saved money on consumables. Many early minicomputers supported the native "current loop" interface to the Model 33 Teletype. Tektronix storage tubes deserve a mention. They made graphical computing possible when memory was far too expensive for display buffers. RS232 is still alive and well in the Arduino world; level shifting there means 5 volt to 3 volt. I would mention the 16-bit programming address space that almost all minicomputers had, which forced programs to fit in 64K byte segments. It made it hard to grow software because it forced you to constantly restructure to fit in small overlays. I once had an argument with Gordon Bell of DEC about this when the PDP-11 was introduced; he thought any program larger than 64K *should* be broken up. In general hardware people had a greater influence on computer design in the early years. Early microcomputers adopted the same 16-bit addressing scheme. The Motorola 68000, introduced in 1979, was the first to allow a larger address space (24-bit at first, but architecturally 32-bit). Line printers and multi-part fan-fold paper forms also deserve mention. IBM printers used to be controlled by a loop of paper tape with holes that allowed a fast move to the top of a new page or even a point in the middle, hence form-feed and vertical tab. USB's popularization by Apple deserves mention too, especially since the are now leading the push for USB-C.
The data you link to shows that large scale hydro energy output has declined sharply since 2010, presumably due to the drought, while wind and solar output have increased by about the same amount, making up the difference and leaving thermal output flat over the period, since overall demand was flat. If the drought is temporary, this will correct itself; if the drought is due to long term climate change, continued growth in wind and solar will soon start to reduce thermal generation needs. Either way, it's wind and solar that are working, large scale hydro not so much.
I attended a persentation about ARPANET by BB&N back in 1971 and I asked about encryption. I was told that if encryption was included, the project would have to be classified, which they didn't want. Instead they expected each link would be encrypted for military use, employing NSA black boxes. On the other hand, Ethernet, developed at Xerox PARC a couple of years later, used 48-bit addressing. If ARPANET had done that, the added two bytes would have been insignificant even then, and we'd have 32,768 times as many addresses in IPv4, and we'd be just fine even with IoT.
That's not quite how it works. In zero g, just adding Helium pressure to a tank won't accomplish much. You either have to use some kind of pressurized bladder to force the liquid down (ok for thrusters, too big a weight penalty for the main engine fuel and oxidizer) or supply a small acceleration, say from auxiliary thrusters, to settle the liquid to the bottom of the tank prior to ignition. Then He pressure can push the liquid into the main pumps which, in turn, provide enough pressure to force the liquid into the engine against its internal pressure.
This tax is a very small bone that was thrown to the taxi industry who wanted far more crippling regulation of their competition. The ride sharing companies won big in this law.
... Government subsidizing the development of new technologies has the universal effect of distorting competition and making any such projects fail....
Like the railroads, airplanes, nuclear power, computers, the Internet, GPS, biotech, all of which had heavy US government subsidy in the beginning.
or other high level government officials, including past Secretaries of State, have ever had years of their email scrutinized by the FBI for possibly classified information? And anyone who watches Fox News knows that there has been a steady stream of leaks from the FBI on their investigation of Mrs. Clinton. Has anyone in the FBI been disciplined for the leaks? And was the NSA aware of Clinton's private e-mail server? Did they complain to her or her boss about it? If not why not?
The right hand rules in electromagnetism isn't a fundamental property of the universe, but just a result of sign convention. If we had a signed positive charge to electrons and flipped the definition of current, you would end up with a left hand rule. If we had picked the opposite definition of what the positive direction of the magnetic field means , we would have left hand rules. You can make the vector cross product left handed instead of right handed, and physics is fundamentally the same with some sign flips in definitions that are arbitrary human notation.
Correct. But non-conservation of parity in the weak interaction does produce chirality. However it is not clear how this property of sub-atomic particles could bias chemical reactions to favor one handedness over the other. More likely chirality in biology reflects a "first mover advantage" in early evolution. Descendants of a self-replicating molecule that happened to form in one chirality may simply have come to dominate life. Another explanation is that life did not evolve on Earth and was seeded by a single chiral bacteria.
In past exploits, attackers have scattered a few shiny USB thumb drives in parking lots in the hope that some employee will plug one into a work computer, infecting it with the malware payload the drive contains. Soon USB-C headphones will be the vector of choice. Who is going to do a security audit on a headphone?
I worked a NASA MSC in 1966 and 67 and computers were available to all engineers and widely used for calculations. We even had a virtual reality simulator using an early polygon processor developed by GE that filled several relay racks in Building 16. Computers were used to manage the Apollo project as well, using PERT.
Right but settling balances could be a problem for Hawala if there is a large imbalanced flow in one direction. The multi-billion dollar drug business likely creates such an imbalance. Terrorists trying to get money into first world countries are moving money in the other direction, hence reducing that imbalance, so their transfers should be easy to execute and might even get a discount.
Our "war on drugs" creates a perfect method for terrorists to get money into the U.S. The retail drug trade generates lots of cash, but some of it has to go out of the country to pay suppliers in third world countries. All the the terrorists have to do is make deals with those third world suppliers (if they aren't one and the same). The terrorists give the suppliers cash from their backers and the drug dealers give cash to the terrorists designees in the U.S, settling accounts. It's simple. Why bother with bitcoin or cash smuggling?
The generator hardware could be used as a motor to spin up the wheels to match ground speed prior to landing. This would greatly reduce wear on the tires and might allow lighter landing gear due to reduced peak load on landing. The savings might compensate for some of the added weight.
Writing your own encryption software isn't illegal yet (at not least in the U.S.) and getting kids to learn how is not a bad idea. Also it's time people on Slashdot gave Apple some respect for providing high grade security and encryption to its customers. After all, Apple is the company that the FBI and supporters of mass surveillance in Congress are most angry at.
The big problem is security. There are too many places for exploitable bugs, deliberate back doors, key loggers, side channels and other forms of pwnware to hide in modern processors. Do you know where all the components in your PC were fabricated?
The Space Shuttle Main Engines, which push the envelope far more than SpaceX's Merlin, were reused up to 19 times. According to the Wikipedia article: "After each flight the engines would be removed from the orbiter and transferred to the Space Shuttle Main Engine Processing Facility (SSMEPF), where they would be inspected and refurbished in preparation for reuse on a subsequent flight. A total of 46 reusable RS-25 engines, each costing around US$40 million, were flown during the Space Shuttle program, with each new or overhauled engine entering the flight inventory requiring flight qualification on one of the test stands at Stennis Space Center prior to flight." There is also a chart of which engines were used on which flight.
Musk and his team seem to have a clear engineering vision. This first landing of an orbital booster is just the beginning, but the potential for cutting cost to orbit through reusability is enormous.
While the idea of machines that could flexibly manipulate objects in 3-D had been around for a while in science fiction, Joe Engelberger actually made robot arms that worked. And he did it not just in a lab, but in production in the demanding environment of automotive factories. And this was back in 1961, when computers typically filled up a large air-conditioned room. He built a successful company, Unimation, around his inventions, put several generations of robots into production and mentored other pioneers in the field. He unquestionably deserves the title of "Father of Robotics."
Slashdot Mirror
It's not inconceivable to build a system that feeds a movie script, perhaps with more detailed stage directions and some background and avitar art work model files, into a video game engine with high quality text to speech and get a movie. Performances might be somewhat different each time it ran, much like live theater. The effective compression would be extremely high. Conceivably such a system could perform any play ever written, with an interface that allowed a user to act as director, maybe creating a cast from an avitar library of the great actors of history and tuning the performance to their liking. The original script plus directorial hints file would still be very small.
Vehicles are not a good analogy. Replacing some older vehicles does not cause the organization that uses them to stop functioning. A better example is industrial land pollution ("brownfields"), where US law requires the polluting company to pay for cleanup no matter how long ago it happened. Microsoft made a huge amount of money selling software it knew had defects into applications it knew would be hard to upgrade. It's not much different from companies who kept their costs down by dumping toxic waste materials onto nearby land. Microsoft should be responsible for cleaning up the mess they made and profited from.
The activities "canning, processing, preserving, freezing, drying, marketing, storing, or packing" are all activities that take place in a food processing plant. The work in such plants is often seasonal, with long hours for a short period when the harvest comes in, and so exempting such work from overtime pay makes some sense. Truckers, on the other hand typically have work year round so there is no obvious reason to exempt them from the general rule of overtime pay just based on what type of cargo they happen to be carrying. If the legislature's intent was to exempt truckers, it would likely have done so more clearly. Reading such an exemption into a law because of ambiguous punctuation would be improper.
Eric's history is interesting and valuable as long as you realize it is based on his stove-piped career. There are glaring omissions. In particular there was this company called IBM that dominated the data processing industry for most of the 20th century. The end of the 36-bit era and the universal use of addressable 8-bit bytes began when IBM introduced the System/360 in 1964, not when DEC finally stopped making PDP-10s in 1983. ASCII did not grow out of anything, it was a fresh creation of a new standard. IBM even pretended to support it, though it used its own 8-bit code, EBCDIC. The short Unix commands were optimized for Teletype machines. Video displays were not cheaper than Teletypes at first, they succeeded because they were much faster and far more user friendly, not because they saved money on consumables. Many early minicomputers supported the native "current loop" interface to the Model 33 Teletype. Tektronix storage tubes deserve a mention. They made graphical computing possible when memory was far too expensive for display buffers. RS232 is still alive and well in the Arduino world; level shifting there means 5 volt to 3 volt. I would mention the 16-bit programming address space that almost all minicomputers had, which forced programs to fit in 64K byte segments. It made it hard to grow software because it forced you to constantly restructure to fit in small overlays. I once had an argument with Gordon Bell of DEC about this when the PDP-11 was introduced; he thought any program larger than 64K *should* be broken up. In general hardware people had a greater influence on computer design in the early years. Early microcomputers adopted the same 16-bit addressing scheme. The Motorola 68000, introduced in 1979, was the first to allow a larger address space (24-bit at first, but architecturally 32-bit). Line printers and multi-part fan-fold paper forms also deserve mention. IBM printers used to be controlled by a loop of paper tape with holes that allowed a fast move to the top of a new page or even a point in the middle, hence form-feed and vertical tab. USB's popularization by Apple deserves mention too, especially since the are now leading the push for USB-C.
And of course NULL = 0x00 represents a blank character on paper tape, i.e. no holes except the feed hole.
The data you link to shows that large scale hydro energy output has declined sharply since 2010, presumably due to the drought, while wind and solar output have increased by about the same amount, making up the difference and leaving thermal output flat over the period, since overall demand was flat. If the drought is temporary, this will correct itself; if the drought is due to long term climate change, continued growth in wind and solar will soon start to reduce thermal generation needs. Either way, it's wind and solar that are working, large scale hydro not so much.
Given their massive data breach, requiring users to re-establish any forwarding addresses is not a bad security move.
I attended a persentation about ARPANET by BB&N back in 1971 and I asked about encryption. I was told that if encryption was included, the project would have to be classified, which they didn't want. Instead they expected each link would be encrypted for military use, employing NSA black boxes. On the other hand, Ethernet, developed at Xerox PARC a couple of years later, used 48-bit addressing. If ARPANET had done that, the added two bytes would have been insignificant even then, and we'd have 32,768 times as many addresses in IPv4, and we'd be just fine even with IoT.
That's not quite how it works. In zero g, just adding Helium pressure to a tank won't accomplish much. You either have to use some kind of pressurized bladder to force the liquid down (ok for thrusters, too big a weight penalty for the main engine fuel and oxidizer) or supply a small acceleration, say from auxiliary thrusters, to settle the liquid to the bottom of the tank prior to ignition. Then He pressure can push the liquid into the main pumps which, in turn, provide enough pressure to force the liquid into the engine against its internal pressure.
This tax is a very small bone that was thrown to the taxi industry who wanted far more crippling regulation of their competition. The ride sharing companies won big in this law.
1 BTU = 1.055 kilojoule (KJ)
... Government subsidizing the development of new technologies has the universal effect of distorting competition and making any such projects fail. ...
Like the railroads, airplanes, nuclear power, computers, the Internet, GPS, biotech, all of which had heavy US government subsidy in the beginning.
They had years to plan for the transition and they can always leave a few isolated XP boxes up to support laser engravers and the like.
or other high level government officials, including past Secretaries of State, have ever had years of their email scrutinized by the FBI for possibly classified information? And anyone who watches Fox News knows that there has been a steady stream of leaks from the FBI on their investigation of Mrs. Clinton. Has anyone in the FBI been disciplined for the leaks? And was the NSA aware of Clinton's private e-mail server? Did they complain to her or her boss about it? If not why not?
The right hand rules in electromagnetism isn't a fundamental property of the universe, but just a result of sign convention. If we had a signed positive charge to electrons and flipped the definition of current, you would end up with a left hand rule. If we had picked the opposite definition of what the positive direction of the magnetic field means , we would have left hand rules. You can make the vector cross product left handed instead of right handed, and physics is fundamentally the same with some sign flips in definitions that are arbitrary human notation.
Correct. But non-conservation of parity in the weak interaction does produce chirality. However it is not clear how this property of sub-atomic particles could bias chemical reactions to favor one handedness over the other. More likely chirality in biology reflects a "first mover advantage" in early evolution. Descendants of a self-replicating molecule that happened to form in one chirality may simply have come to dominate life. Another explanation is that life did not evolve on Earth and was seeded by a single chiral bacteria.
In past exploits, attackers have scattered a few shiny USB thumb drives in parking lots in the hope that some employee will plug one into a work computer, infecting it with the malware payload the drive contains. Soon USB-C headphones will be the vector of choice. Who is going to do a security audit on a headphone?
I worked a NASA MSC in 1966 and 67 and computers were available to all engineers and widely used for calculations. We even had a virtual reality simulator using an early polygon processor developed by GE that filled several relay racks in Building 16. Computers were used to manage the Apollo project as well, using PERT.
Scroll down two stories to read the usual Slashdot sneering about Apple products.
Right but settling balances could be a problem for Hawala if there is a large imbalanced flow in one direction. The multi-billion dollar drug business likely creates such an imbalance. Terrorists trying to get money into first world countries are moving money in the other direction, hence reducing that imbalance, so their transfers should be easy to execute and might even get a discount.
Our "war on drugs" creates a perfect method for terrorists to get money into the U.S. The retail drug trade generates lots of cash, but some of it has to go out of the country to pay suppliers in third world countries. All the the terrorists have to do is make deals with those third world suppliers (if they aren't one and the same). The terrorists give the suppliers cash from their backers and the drug dealers give cash to the terrorists designees in the U.S, settling accounts. It's simple. Why bother with bitcoin or cash smuggling?
The generator hardware could be used as a motor to spin up the wheels to match ground speed prior to landing. This would greatly reduce wear on the tires and might allow lighter landing gear due to reduced peak load on landing. The savings might compensate for some of the added weight.
Writing your own encryption software isn't illegal yet (at not least in the U.S.) and getting kids to learn how is not a bad idea. Also it's time people on Slashdot gave Apple some respect for providing high grade security and encryption to its customers. After all, Apple is the company that the FBI and supporters of mass surveillance in Congress are most angry at.
The big problem is security. There are too many places for exploitable bugs, deliberate back doors, key loggers, side channels and other forms of pwnware to hide in modern processors. Do you know where all the components in your PC were fabricated?
The Space Shuttle Main Engines, which push the envelope far more than SpaceX's Merlin, were reused up to 19 times. According to the Wikipedia article: "After each flight the engines would be removed from the orbiter and transferred to the Space Shuttle Main Engine Processing Facility (SSMEPF), where they would be inspected and refurbished in preparation for reuse on a subsequent flight. A total of 46 reusable RS-25 engines, each costing around US$40 million, were flown during the Space Shuttle program, with each new or overhauled engine entering the flight inventory requiring flight qualification on one of the test stands at Stennis Space Center prior to flight." There is also a chart of which engines were used on which flight. Musk and his team seem to have a clear engineering vision. This first landing of an orbital booster is just the beginning, but the potential for cutting cost to orbit through reusability is enormous.
While the idea of machines that could flexibly manipulate objects in 3-D had been around for a while in science fiction, Joe Engelberger actually made robot arms that worked. And he did it not just in a lab, but in production in the demanding environment of automotive factories. And this was back in 1961, when computers typically filled up a large air-conditioned room. He built a successful company, Unimation, around his inventions, put several generations of robots into production and mentored other pioneers in the field. He unquestionably deserves the title of "Father of Robotics."