Sometimes I get a feeling that people like to anthropomorphize evolution, replacing a deity that designs with specific reasons and goals with a system that does the same thing.
Yup. In grad school I had a professor that would make me scratch my head. If you just took whatever he waid and substituted "mother nature" or "evolution" with the word "God" he'd basically be a creationist.
Evolution doesn't like being treated like a deity. It will do bad things to your kids if you continue in such sin.
Besides, most realistic women aren't really impressed by this kind of stupidity as well... or if they are attracted to it they also behave in a reckless manner.
So? The idiots doing this stuff don't really care if the girl who sleeps with them as a result is "realistic" or "reckless."
Actually it'll be much easier for you to bring your suit in that case - you simply look up the records of the previous suit and copy/paste into your own. Make sure you bring up that the company was ruled against in the previous, near-identical case, and the court time will be pretty low - courts base most of their decisions on previous court cases, so you're about 99% likely to win.
Your likelihood of winning might be high, but your chances of getting off with little court time isn't. The OP talks about getting a check for $1000. Your lawyer will probably ask for a retainer of $5000 before he'll file so much as a page. I wouldn't expect that to be sufficient to make it through the entire litigation. The company has every incentive to drag things out much as they can to deter future suits. If the company only wanted to minimize its own legal bills they would have opted for class action in the first place (litigating each case costs far more in legal bills if every case actually gets filed - it only works because 99% of the cases never get filed at all).
The only way small suits like this are possible against large companies is via class action.
You're forgetting the centripetal acceleration being applied to keep it going in a roughly circular path, which will be huge if you want to keep the size of the device limited. Something the size of LHC would still be over 100 g.
The acceleration forces from the initial "kick" should absolutely dwarf the force of the air resistance. 60,000 G!
Not necessarily. The article talks of steadily winding it up in a vacuum. The acceleration could be very gradual. Once it hits the air, that's another story.
You'd almost certainly want to have a pointed nose cone for all the obvious reasons, plus to stabilize it so that it doesn't end up spinning at some insane rate. Good luck dealing with spin once you're in orbit...
The limit on a ballistic trajectory is that you can go EXACTLY halfway around the world. (Well, maybe a bit more with wind resistance? Or is it less?) For the most part if you shoot farther than that the shell just flies around the earth and lands where it started (well, for a non-rotating earth - in the rotating case it just hits somewhat near to where it was fired).
Actually, if you're patient I guess you can even shoot further if you shoot at a very steep angle - just fire slightly west with enough velocity that it takes longer than 12 hours to land and the earth will have rotated more than halfway under the shell.
In reality you'd just aim in the opposite direction - you never have to shoot more than halfway around the world to hit something. You do have to compensate for the earth's rotation, and of course for the fact that rotation is faster at the equator than at the poles (the poles don't move at all when rotating). However, all that stuff already applies to ICBMs, and even to large artillery to a lesser extent (ICBMs do have the advantage of terminal corrections - most artillery shells do not but some do now). Rotation is tricky because the target moves during travel time based on its latitude, and the launcher imparts an initial eastward velocity to the round based on its latitude (which is why Cape Canaveral is in Florida).
The acceleration would liquefy it into a long stream, and the deceleration would vaporize it within meters of the bore.
While it accelerates it would undergo incredible centripetal force along one axis, which would tend to force the material along the other axes (pumpkin pancake). In the air pumpkin juice would be decelerated along one of the long axes, causing it to pancake up again in a different direction briefly before it was completely reduced to plasma due to interaction with the air.
Certainly a constraint, but one key difference. It gets less resistive as you go, the opposite of coming in. At 6 kilometers/sec, you're out of the really dense atmosphere pretty quickly.
That is true, but in general you'd need a much larger heat shield for this than you'd ever need for re-entry of an equivalent payload. With re-entry the highest speed is at the lowest air density. With a mass driver the highest speed is at the highest air density.
Sure, you'll get through it quickly, but that just means that the amount of power being dissipated as heat is astronomical.
I'd think the G forces from atmospheric drag would be incredible as well for the first few seconds.
The mechanics are a solved problem. Large artillery pieces already need to correct for the rotation of the earth, and all artillery needs to correct for atmospheric conditions that vary with altitude. This device would just need to correct for a lot more of it.
This is just a really big howitzer, and behaves exactly the same as one from a ballistics perspective.
256 bit integer math is sufficient to address the observable universe with planck length precision. Unless you intent to run your simulation from components you found in a dumpster. Climate research and weather research are individually large enough fields to justify developing a customized CPU but considering that the x86 architecture already has support for 256bit integer operations through the AVX instruction set this seems more to be a problem of languages not supporting it in a good way.
Sure, but in the same time that you can process one 256-bit integer you could SIMD to process several shorter integers in the same time.
If you're running a simulation I suspect that processing more points is probably more important than processing each individual point down to the planck length.
So now we're just arguing over where to draw the line. Oh, and all of this is setting aside all the arguments over order-of-operations and such. If you want a fully deterministic process it probably means far more locking/synchronization/etc. If you can get a perfect model run in 12 hours, and a good-enough one in 2 hours, most would take the latter (and 5 more to go along with it).
Remember, the desired result here is not a set of identical numbers everywhere. It is an accurate simulation.
Well, I'd say a useful simulation, which entails some reasonable level of accuracy, but speed and cost are also important.
It isn't helpful if an algorithm gives you a slightly better simulation of tomorrow's weather if it takes a week to run. If your algorithm is faster or less expensive to run then you can run it more often, or use the saved computer time to run other models. Having an ensemble of models or more frequent updates might be more useful to forecasters than having one model that stays coherent for an extra 30 minutes out. The weather is so chaotic that it gets exponentially more expensive to predict further out.
Huh? This is a phone we are talking about, not a tablet. It's got a perfectly reasonable screen size. Any larger, and I'd have a problem fitting it in my pocket. Screen size is not a good way of judging a mobile phone, especially if you think bigger is better.
And this is why the 10% of the population who thinks this way will still buy iPhones. Well, the ones who don't just buy smaller Android phones at least...
This sounds a lot easier than it is in practice. The problem is with the sheer volume of formatting.
For starters, every single quotation mark in the document will need to be modified (Latex uses `` and '' instead of "). Anyplace there is emphasis/etc will require reformatting. Any place with a footnote will require a fair bit of reformatting.
In something like a paper this will add up very quickly.
The Latex way would be to split up the file into many smaller text files included into a master document, and then use git to manage all the changes. The problem is that it is hard enough to find non-FOSS-types who grok git for software development, let alone for word processing.
Rather than screwing workers out of the best retirement available, how about mandate governments to fund them adequately, and companies award pensioners first before any other creditor, and before any bonuses or raises are awarded to executives.
You misunderstand me. I'm not interesting in banning pensions per-se. However, they need to be employee-owned for all the reasons you basically describe.
You also missed a common form of abuse - numbers games. Pension funds have to be funded so that they have enough money to pay out benefits 30 years from now. The problem is that nobody really knows what the market will be like for the next 30 years. Imagine you're a CEO and your accountant gives you some options:
1. Put $100M into the pension fund this year which is invested in stocks under the assumption that it will earn 10% for life and be enough to meet current obligations.
2. Put $200M into the pension fund this year which is invested in stocks under the assumption that it will only earn 8% for life and be enough to meet current obligations. Explain lower earnings to shareholders.
3. Put $20M into the pension fund this year because Bernie Madoff is a wiz and promises 30% earnings for life which will easily meet current obligations. Pay out $20M in dividends and give $60M to the execs (including self) to celebrate.
How many CEOs do you think will pick #2? On paper all three options are the same for future pensioners. In reality, they are not.
This means you're cool if your company highers some kid fresh out of high school and pays him just as much as you, even if you've had 15 years experience?
Right now a substantial part of my earnings is based on years of service - mainly my pension. They still pay new people just as much as old people at their whim, so the status quo isn't any better than what you're proposing unless you work for a union.
However, here is how you and I can get screwed by the current state. If you have a pension that is a defined-benefit plan (the way most traditional plans work) chances are that you earn most of your benefits in the last 10 years of work. Usually these plans are based on your pay when you leave the company (retirement or otherwise), multiplied by years of service.
Anytime you multiply x * y you get a far bigger answer if you add to both x and y at the same time vs adding more to either one individually. If you start with 5*5=35 and you can add two units you get more from 6*6 than 7*5.
If another company offers you a job for better pay you get screwed if you take it, because your retirement at your current employer stops growing (exponentially), and you start a new plan at a new retirement with a low years-of-service multiplier. So you've basically increased one multiplier and decreased the other and that means that it will dramatically lower your benefits. It only makes sense if the new pay is just dramatically more than you'd have made at the old company over the rest of your employment so that you make it up on the front end.
So, you stick around with your employer for 10 years turning down slightly better offers, and you plan to work 20 more. Suddenly your employer changes their retirement plan so that the future benefit is much lower. They credit you 10 years * your CURRENT salary to be "fair." However, you didn't work those 10 years because you wanted to retire on 10 years at your current salary. You worked those 10 years because you expected to be credited those 10 years at your FINAL salary and you'll never see that and since nobody knows what that is today no court will award it to you.
This happens to people all the time and courts have ruled that it is legal.
The whole problem is that people are donating their years of service today for the promise of something later. The company can find legal tricks to avoid paying it later, or maybe they'll just be unable to pay it later.
Airplanes have another last ditch fail safe system (granted it only works in the day and when it's reasonably clear). It's called looking out the windows.
Airplanes don't only fly when it is reasonably clear. All that rigor goes into the design so that a plane can fly safely on instruments from takeoff until the wheels hit the ground again (in the case of CatIII ILS).
Or calling the tower and asking where the hell they are (doesn't work everyplace).
I included that in my post, but as I said when everybody switches to ADS-B the only indication the tower will have about your position will be what your GPS unit is telling them. There have actually been accidents in the past when pilots used radar reports of altitude to validate that their own altimeters were correct even when they had reason to believe they were not. They didn't realize that the "radar" report of altitude is just parroting the aircraft's own altimeter report via the transponder and is not independent at all. I'm not sure how current ATC handles an aircraft whose ADS-B transmissions don't match up with their radar position - that would be a telltale sign of spoofing or equipment failure while we still are operating both systems.
Civil aviation radar in general is pretty limited and dependent on the aircraft themselves. Only the military uses radar that can operate without cooperation from the planes they track (for obvious reasons).
That said, they would still be vulnerable to replay attacks if the main signal could be jammed and the receiver did not have a sufficiently accurate clock to spot replays (it would have to be VERY accurate over fairly long periods of time).
Wouldn't it only have to be accurate since the last valid frame?
Nope. If you update your clock against each valid frame then I can introduce drift over time until you're substantially far away from the real signal (at which point you actually reject any real signals you get). The more lag I can introduce, the more flexibility I get to mix and match replayed frames from various satellites to change your position. If you have a GPS running yesterday's clock and I have a record of every frame transmitted for the last 24 hours I can send you an authentic set of GPS signals for any point on the globe that matches your clock.
The only way to defeat replay attacks is to have a stable timesource that you trust and don't update from GPS, and that means an atomic clock basically.
Disclaimer, I'm not an engineer who works on such things, but that is how I see it. Certainly interested in expert opinion.
In the case of airliners, it is usually full inertial navigation. Usually three independent inertial systems which continual comparison. The navigation system uses all the inertial systems as inputs, usually 1-2 GPS systems as input, and also radio navigation beacons (not very precise, but good enough for anything but landing). The GPS mainly provides long-term stability to the inertial systems, which are the direct reference.
Any area navigation system used in an aircraft for navigation in non-visual conditions has to meet a number of standards, which include the ability to measure its own performance/inaccuracy. I'm not sure if the spoofing in this article would defeat that - it isn't enough to give a false position - you need to give a false position which looks very accurate, and which drifts from the real position slowly enough that if the aircraft has inertial navigation it will consider the change plausible.
Even then, you'll also have to jam all the local radio navigation beacons which is going to be noticed most likely. If the aircraft tunes a radio beacon and gets inconsistent values from every station it tunes (automatically) it will probably report a navigation failure to the crew who will take it into account (and you'd be surprised how well a plane can do with nothing but the magnetic compass, good wind reports, and dead reckoning).
If you did manage to confuse the plane it really would only be a problem low to the ground in fairly mountainous terrain, unless you can keep it up for hours to get it way off course (and the crew will notice when they can't tune stations that are supposed to be in range and ATC will surely notice until they go entirely to ADS-B - and in the case of international flight the air defense identification zones surrounding many countries including the US will have active radar for obvious reasons). Most actual landings use ILS, which is completely independent of GPS - the aircraft won't really descend enough to hit buildings until it is on the ILS glideslope which is guaranteed to be clear. Only an actual GPS-based runway approach would get the plane low enough to hit something unless there are mountains nearby.
So, an attack would be hard to pull off against an airliner. Small planes do not have so much redundancy, but their GPS units still try to evaluate position accuracy and generate warnings (which pilots are trained to heed) when they believe they are having problems.
All that aside, GPS signals really need to have authentication embedded. That said, they would still be vulnerable to replay attacks if the main signal could be jammed and the receiver did not have a sufficiently accurate clock to spot replays (it would have to be VERY accurate over fairly long periods of time).
Honestly, I'd be a big fan of banning pensions entirely, at least in the form they're in now. There have been countless messes over the past few decades when companies fail to meet pension obligations, usually as the result of bankruptcy. It messes up the lives of any employee involved and is fundamentally unfair to them (essentially they are denied compensation for work already done). The public sector problems are relatively new, but this happens all the time in the private sector. With claw-backs there are even cases of people who have gotten lump sums who have had to return them.
I think that any kind of employment compensation needs to be paid in full every payday. If a company goes belly-up employees should never have more than one paycheck at risk. That doesn't mean that you can't have retirement benefits - but they have to be paid into employee-owned accounts where the employee gets a statement/etc, and which are not considered company assets to be borrowed from, borrowed against, or considered as obligations in bankruptcy.
Oh, I'd also prohibit any kind of compensation system in which years of service is given any consideration at all, unless it is for the odd anniversary gift of token value. Those kinds of systems encourage workers to essentially accept lower pay in the hopes of getting in on larger benefits later which might never appear (again, delayed compensation). I'm not even keen on compensation in investments with a vesting period. If you want to encourage long-term performance then I'm fine with grants of investments which cannot be sold until a certain date, but they should be fully owned on day one. If an employer needs to hire an employee that they can count on for some long-term duration then just sign a contract with them guaranteeing a certain level of compensation (ie both sides are bound and cannot end the relationship without mutual consent without involving some kind of penalty or transition process - just like any sports contract).
The nature of an employment agreement should be that an employee does work, and the employer pays them for that work. That is not a relationship that should require either party to essentially be forced to make a loan to the other (retirement is a loan in which an employee puts up labor today in the promise of a payment in the future).
Good points. There is still quite a bit of variety on Wintel though - ACPI seems like a mess, and there are lots of other support chips that need variations of behavior on motherboards.
But you're right, in the end the boot loaders all have the same defined interface, with the CPU in a relatively similar state, and the same basic architecture across the board. Until EFI came along the modern PC would probably boot DOS 2.1 just fine.
Really, the way that people spend $400-$500 on a device and think that they are entitled to lifetime support for bugfixes AND updates amazes me.
Microsoft of all companies set the expectation here. Your $500 laptop from 2000 running XP STILL gets security updates every patch Tuesday. And certainly Android can't hold a candle to Wintel when it comes to fragmentation.
Traditionally phased array was done by feeding the raw signals to a central point and then the "processing" is analog (circuits, not algorithms). The output is a single signal that contains the desired "image" which then goes into an A/D. At any time you only can look at the data in one way, since the raw data is not captured (raw being the data from each individual antenna).
That works great for a radar on a ship where the antennas are all next to each other and where you can just rapidly steer back and forth, or where you are only tracking a single point and just don't want to use servos to do it. When the antennas are spread across a large area then you can't just run antenna feeds directly into a central box due to signal loss (even with amplification). It also doesn't work if you want to capture wideband data and look at all directions simultaneously after the fact. For that you need to digitize every antenna feed, and you also need an absolute time reference (which means lots of atomic clocks unless the sites are close enough to share a reference).
Maybe I'm the only one who thinks that, but after 5 minutes of playing with a Windows 8 tablet, I was hooked. I can do tablet stuff AND desktop stuff? Sold.
Sure, if you're running on a tablet then a tablet UI makes tons of sense. However, the problem is that it is clumsy when you're running on a desktop.
I don't get the case for merging the UIs. I can see where you might try to move in a convergent direction where possible for consistency, but the desktop UI is HIGHLY optimized already after decades of evolution. To think that a revolutionary change is going to be an improvement is pretty audacious.
The Windows desktop is extremely popular, and you think becoming more of a Windows clone is the problem?
Keep in mind that 99.999% of those running Gnome are running it on a PC that could be running Windows, and the reason they're not using windows isn't because they don't want to fork out the $0 to buy a license for their PC and the 0min of time it takes to get it installed.
Gnome users already jumped through a lot of hoops because they think it offers something that Windows doesn't offer, so moving back towards Windows is not a given.
Hey, if there is a good idea in Windows go ahead and borrow it, but you have to keep in mind that your user base is not aunt tilly, but a bunch of geeks who don't mind installing Linux and going through all kinds of pain to configure modelines and printers. (Yes, I realize that both of those are much easier today, but much of the Linux userbase are people who didn't mind doing that work in the past.)
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Sometimes I get a feeling that people like to anthropomorphize evolution, replacing a deity that designs with specific reasons and goals with a system that does the same thing.
Yup. In grad school I had a professor that would make me scratch my head. If you just took whatever he waid and substituted "mother nature" or "evolution" with the word "God" he'd basically be a creationist.
Evolution doesn't like being treated like a deity. It will do bad things to your kids if you continue in such sin.
Besides, most realistic women aren't really impressed by this kind of stupidity as well... or if they are attracted to it they also behave in a reckless manner.
So? The idiots doing this stuff don't really care if the girl who sleeps with them as a result is "realistic" or "reckless."
Actually it'll be much easier for you to bring your suit in that case - you simply look up the records of the previous suit and copy/paste into your own. Make sure you bring up that the company was ruled against in the previous, near-identical case, and the court time will be pretty low - courts base most of their decisions on previous court cases, so you're about 99% likely to win.
Your likelihood of winning might be high, but your chances of getting off with little court time isn't. The OP talks about getting a check for $1000. Your lawyer will probably ask for a retainer of $5000 before he'll file so much as a page. I wouldn't expect that to be sufficient to make it through the entire litigation. The company has every incentive to drag things out much as they can to deter future suits. If the company only wanted to minimize its own legal bills they would have opted for class action in the first place (litigating each case costs far more in legal bills if every case actually gets filed - it only works because 99% of the cases never get filed at all).
The only way small suits like this are possible against large companies is via class action.
You're forgetting the centripetal acceleration being applied to keep it going in a roughly circular path, which will be huge if you want to keep the size of the device limited. Something the size of LHC would still be over 100 g.
Good point.
The acceleration forces from the initial "kick" should absolutely dwarf the force of the air resistance. 60,000 G!
Not necessarily. The article talks of steadily winding it up in a vacuum. The acceleration could be very gradual. Once it hits the air, that's another story.
That is an excellent point!
You'd almost certainly want to have a pointed nose cone for all the obvious reasons, plus to stabilize it so that it doesn't end up spinning at some insane rate. Good luck dealing with spin once you're in orbit...
The limit on a ballistic trajectory is that you can go EXACTLY halfway around the world. (Well, maybe a bit more with wind resistance? Or is it less?) For the most part if you shoot farther than that the shell just flies around the earth and lands where it started (well, for a non-rotating earth - in the rotating case it just hits somewhat near to where it was fired).
Actually, if you're patient I guess you can even shoot further if you shoot at a very steep angle - just fire slightly west with enough velocity that it takes longer than 12 hours to land and the earth will have rotated more than halfway under the shell.
In reality you'd just aim in the opposite direction - you never have to shoot more than halfway around the world to hit something. You do have to compensate for the earth's rotation, and of course for the fact that rotation is faster at the equator than at the poles (the poles don't move at all when rotating). However, all that stuff already applies to ICBMs, and even to large artillery to a lesser extent (ICBMs do have the advantage of terminal corrections - most artillery shells do not but some do now). Rotation is tricky because the target moves during travel time based on its latitude, and the launcher imparts an initial eastward velocity to the round based on its latitude (which is why Cape Canaveral is in Florida).
The acceleration would liquefy it into a long stream, and the deceleration would vaporize it within meters of the bore.
While it accelerates it would undergo incredible centripetal force along one axis, which would tend to force the material along the other axes (pumpkin pancake). In the air pumpkin juice would be decelerated along one of the long axes, causing it to pancake up again in a different direction briefly before it was completely reduced to plasma due to interaction with the air.
Certainly a constraint, but one key difference. It gets less resistive as you go, the opposite of coming in. At 6 kilometers/sec, you're out of the really dense atmosphere pretty quickly.
That is true, but in general you'd need a much larger heat shield for this than you'd ever need for re-entry of an equivalent payload. With re-entry the highest speed is at the lowest air density. With a mass driver the highest speed is at the highest air density.
Sure, you'll get through it quickly, but that just means that the amount of power being dissipated as heat is astronomical.
I'd think the G forces from atmospheric drag would be incredible as well for the first few seconds.
The mechanics are a solved problem. Large artillery pieces already need to correct for the rotation of the earth, and all artillery needs to correct for atmospheric conditions that vary with altitude. This device would just need to correct for a lot more of it.
This is just a really big howitzer, and behaves exactly the same as one from a ballistics perspective.
256 bit integer math is sufficient to address the observable universe with planck length precision.
Unless you intent to run your simulation from components you found in a dumpster.
Climate research and weather research are individually large enough fields to justify developing a customized CPU but considering that the x86 architecture already has support for 256bit integer operations through the AVX instruction set this seems more to be a problem of languages not supporting it in a good way.
Sure, but in the same time that you can process one 256-bit integer you could SIMD to process several shorter integers in the same time.
If you're running a simulation I suspect that processing more points is probably more important than processing each individual point down to the planck length.
So now we're just arguing over where to draw the line. Oh, and all of this is setting aside all the arguments over order-of-operations and such. If you want a fully deterministic process it probably means far more locking/synchronization/etc. If you can get a perfect model run in 12 hours, and a good-enough one in 2 hours, most would take the latter (and 5 more to go along with it).
Remember, the desired result here is not a set of identical numbers everywhere. It is an accurate simulation.
Well, I'd say a useful simulation, which entails some reasonable level of accuracy, but speed and cost are also important.
It isn't helpful if an algorithm gives you a slightly better simulation of tomorrow's weather if it takes a week to run. If your algorithm is faster or less expensive to run then you can run it more often, or use the saved computer time to run other models. Having an ensemble of models or more frequent updates might be more useful to forecasters than having one model that stays coherent for an extra 30 minutes out. The weather is so chaotic that it gets exponentially more expensive to predict further out.
Huh? This is a phone we are talking about, not a tablet. It's got a perfectly reasonable screen size. Any larger, and I'd have a problem fitting it in my pocket. Screen size is not a good way of judging a mobile phone, especially if you think bigger is better.
And this is why the 10% of the population who thinks this way will still buy iPhones. Well, the ones who don't just buy smaller Android phones at least...
This sounds a lot easier than it is in practice. The problem is with the sheer volume of formatting.
For starters, every single quotation mark in the document will need to be modified (Latex uses `` and '' instead of "). Anyplace there is emphasis/etc will require reformatting. Any place with a footnote will require a fair bit of reformatting.
In something like a paper this will add up very quickly.
The Latex way would be to split up the file into many smaller text files included into a master document, and then use git to manage all the changes. The problem is that it is hard enough to find non-FOSS-types who grok git for software development, let alone for word processing.
Rather than screwing workers out of the best retirement available, how about mandate governments to fund them adequately, and companies award pensioners first before any other creditor, and before any bonuses or raises are awarded to executives.
You misunderstand me. I'm not interesting in banning pensions per-se. However, they need to be employee-owned for all the reasons you basically describe.
You also missed a common form of abuse - numbers games. Pension funds have to be funded so that they have enough money to pay out benefits 30 years from now. The problem is that nobody really knows what the market will be like for the next 30 years. Imagine you're a CEO and your accountant gives you some options:
1. Put $100M into the pension fund this year which is invested in stocks under the assumption that it will earn 10% for life and be enough to meet current obligations.
2. Put $200M into the pension fund this year which is invested in stocks under the assumption that it will only earn 8% for life and be enough to meet current obligations. Explain lower earnings to shareholders.
3. Put $20M into the pension fund this year because Bernie Madoff is a wiz and promises 30% earnings for life which will easily meet current obligations. Pay out $20M in dividends and give $60M to the execs (including self) to celebrate.
How many CEOs do you think will pick #2? On paper all three options are the same for future pensioners. In reality, they are not.
This means you're cool if your company highers some kid fresh out of high school and pays him just as much as you, even if you've had 15 years experience?
Right now a substantial part of my earnings is based on years of service - mainly my pension. They still pay new people just as much as old people at their whim, so the status quo isn't any better than what you're proposing unless you work for a union.
However, here is how you and I can get screwed by the current state. If you have a pension that is a defined-benefit plan (the way most traditional plans work) chances are that you earn most of your benefits in the last 10 years of work. Usually these plans are based on your pay when you leave the company (retirement or otherwise), multiplied by years of service.
Anytime you multiply x * y you get a far bigger answer if you add to both x and y at the same time vs adding more to either one individually. If you start with 5*5=35 and you can add two units you get more from 6*6 than 7*5.
If another company offers you a job for better pay you get screwed if you take it, because your retirement at your current employer stops growing (exponentially), and you start a new plan at a new retirement with a low years-of-service multiplier. So you've basically increased one multiplier and decreased the other and that means that it will dramatically lower your benefits. It only makes sense if the new pay is just dramatically more than you'd have made at the old company over the rest of your employment so that you make it up on the front end.
So, you stick around with your employer for 10 years turning down slightly better offers, and you plan to work 20 more. Suddenly your employer changes their retirement plan so that the future benefit is much lower. They credit you 10 years * your CURRENT salary to be "fair." However, you didn't work those 10 years because you wanted to retire on 10 years at your current salary. You worked those 10 years because you expected to be credited those 10 years at your FINAL salary and you'll never see that and since nobody knows what that is today no court will award it to you.
This happens to people all the time and courts have ruled that it is legal.
The whole problem is that people are donating their years of service today for the promise of something later. The company can find legal tricks to avoid paying it later, or maybe they'll just be unable to pay it later.
If you moved to a system where all
Airplanes have another last ditch fail safe system (granted it only works in the day and when it's reasonably clear). It's called looking out the windows.
Airplanes don't only fly when it is reasonably clear. All that rigor goes into the design so that a plane can fly safely on instruments from takeoff until the wheels hit the ground again (in the case of CatIII ILS).
Or calling the tower and asking where the hell they are (doesn't work everyplace).
I included that in my post, but as I said when everybody switches to ADS-B the only indication the tower will have about your position will be what your GPS unit is telling them. There have actually been accidents in the past when pilots used radar reports of altitude to validate that their own altimeters were correct even when they had reason to believe they were not. They didn't realize that the "radar" report of altitude is just parroting the aircraft's own altimeter report via the transponder and is not independent at all. I'm not sure how current ATC handles an aircraft whose ADS-B transmissions don't match up with their radar position - that would be a telltale sign of spoofing or equipment failure while we still are operating both systems.
Civil aviation radar in general is pretty limited and dependent on the aircraft themselves. Only the military uses radar that can operate without cooperation from the planes they track (for obvious reasons).
That said, they would still be vulnerable to replay attacks if the main signal could be jammed and the receiver did not have a sufficiently accurate clock to spot replays (it would have to be VERY accurate over fairly long periods of time).
Wouldn't it only have to be accurate since the last valid frame?
Nope. If you update your clock against each valid frame then I can introduce drift over time until you're substantially far away from the real signal (at which point you actually reject any real signals you get). The more lag I can introduce, the more flexibility I get to mix and match replayed frames from various satellites to change your position. If you have a GPS running yesterday's clock and I have a record of every frame transmitted for the last 24 hours I can send you an authentic set of GPS signals for any point on the globe that matches your clock.
The only way to defeat replay attacks is to have a stable timesource that you trust and don't update from GPS, and that means an atomic clock basically.
Disclaimer, I'm not an engineer who works on such things, but that is how I see it. Certainly interested in expert opinion.
In the case of airliners, it is usually full inertial navigation. Usually three independent inertial systems which continual comparison. The navigation system uses all the inertial systems as inputs, usually 1-2 GPS systems as input, and also radio navigation beacons (not very precise, but good enough for anything but landing). The GPS mainly provides long-term stability to the inertial systems, which are the direct reference.
Any area navigation system used in an aircraft for navigation in non-visual conditions has to meet a number of standards, which include the ability to measure its own performance/inaccuracy. I'm not sure if the spoofing in this article would defeat that - it isn't enough to give a false position - you need to give a false position which looks very accurate, and which drifts from the real position slowly enough that if the aircraft has inertial navigation it will consider the change plausible.
Even then, you'll also have to jam all the local radio navigation beacons which is going to be noticed most likely. If the aircraft tunes a radio beacon and gets inconsistent values from every station it tunes (automatically) it will probably report a navigation failure to the crew who will take it into account (and you'd be surprised how well a plane can do with nothing but the magnetic compass, good wind reports, and dead reckoning).
If you did manage to confuse the plane it really would only be a problem low to the ground in fairly mountainous terrain, unless you can keep it up for hours to get it way off course (and the crew will notice when they can't tune stations that are supposed to be in range and ATC will surely notice until they go entirely to ADS-B - and in the case of international flight the air defense identification zones surrounding many countries including the US will have active radar for obvious reasons). Most actual landings use ILS, which is completely independent of GPS - the aircraft won't really descend enough to hit buildings until it is on the ILS glideslope which is guaranteed to be clear. Only an actual GPS-based runway approach would get the plane low enough to hit something unless there are mountains nearby.
So, an attack would be hard to pull off against an airliner. Small planes do not have so much redundancy, but their GPS units still try to evaluate position accuracy and generate warnings (which pilots are trained to heed) when they believe they are having problems.
All that aside, GPS signals really need to have authentication embedded. That said, they would still be vulnerable to replay attacks if the main signal could be jammed and the receiver did not have a sufficiently accurate clock to spot replays (it would have to be VERY accurate over fairly long periods of time).
Honestly, I'd be a big fan of banning pensions entirely, at least in the form they're in now. There have been countless messes over the past few decades when companies fail to meet pension obligations, usually as the result of bankruptcy. It messes up the lives of any employee involved and is fundamentally unfair to them (essentially they are denied compensation for work already done). The public sector problems are relatively new, but this happens all the time in the private sector. With claw-backs there are even cases of people who have gotten lump sums who have had to return them.
I think that any kind of employment compensation needs to be paid in full every payday. If a company goes belly-up employees should never have more than one paycheck at risk. That doesn't mean that you can't have retirement benefits - but they have to be paid into employee-owned accounts where the employee gets a statement/etc, and which are not considered company assets to be borrowed from, borrowed against, or considered as obligations in bankruptcy.
Oh, I'd also prohibit any kind of compensation system in which years of service is given any consideration at all, unless it is for the odd anniversary gift of token value. Those kinds of systems encourage workers to essentially accept lower pay in the hopes of getting in on larger benefits later which might never appear (again, delayed compensation). I'm not even keen on compensation in investments with a vesting period. If you want to encourage long-term performance then I'm fine with grants of investments which cannot be sold until a certain date, but they should be fully owned on day one. If an employer needs to hire an employee that they can count on for some long-term duration then just sign a contract with them guaranteeing a certain level of compensation (ie both sides are bound and cannot end the relationship without mutual consent without involving some kind of penalty or transition process - just like any sports contract).
The nature of an employment agreement should be that an employee does work, and the employer pays them for that work. That is not a relationship that should require either party to essentially be forced to make a loan to the other (retirement is a loan in which an employee puts up labor today in the promise of a payment in the future).
Good points. There is still quite a bit of variety on Wintel though - ACPI seems like a mess, and there are lots of other support chips that need variations of behavior on motherboards.
But you're right, in the end the boot loaders all have the same defined interface, with the CPU in a relatively similar state, and the same basic architecture across the board. Until EFI came along the modern PC would probably boot DOS 2.1 just fine.
Really, the way that people spend $400-$500 on a device and think that they are entitled to lifetime support for bugfixes AND updates amazes me.
Microsoft of all companies set the expectation here. Your $500 laptop from 2000 running XP STILL gets security updates every patch Tuesday. And certainly Android can't hold a candle to Wintel when it comes to fragmentation.
Traditionally phased array was done by feeding the raw signals to a central point and then the "processing" is analog (circuits, not algorithms). The output is a single signal that contains the desired "image" which then goes into an A/D. At any time you only can look at the data in one way, since the raw data is not captured (raw being the data from each individual antenna).
That works great for a radar on a ship where the antennas are all next to each other and where you can just rapidly steer back and forth, or where you are only tracking a single point and just don't want to use servos to do it. When the antennas are spread across a large area then you can't just run antenna feeds directly into a central box due to signal loss (even with amplification). It also doesn't work if you want to capture wideband data and look at all directions simultaneously after the fact. For that you need to digitize every antenna feed, and you also need an absolute time reference (which means lots of atomic clocks unless the sites are close enough to share a reference).
Maybe I'm the only one who thinks that, but after 5 minutes of playing with a Windows 8 tablet, I was hooked. I can do tablet stuff AND desktop stuff? Sold.
Sure, if you're running on a tablet then a tablet UI makes tons of sense. However, the problem is that it is clumsy when you're running on a desktop.
I don't get the case for merging the UIs. I can see where you might try to move in a convergent direction where possible for consistency, but the desktop UI is HIGHLY optimized already after decades of evolution. To think that a revolutionary change is going to be an improvement is pretty audacious.
The Windows desktop is extremely popular, and you think becoming more of a Windows clone is the problem?
Keep in mind that 99.999% of those running Gnome are running it on a PC that could be running Windows, and the reason they're not using windows isn't because they don't want to fork out the $0 to buy a license for their PC and the 0min of time it takes to get it installed.
Gnome users already jumped through a lot of hoops because they think it offers something that Windows doesn't offer, so moving back towards Windows is not a given.
Hey, if there is a good idea in Windows go ahead and borrow it, but you have to keep in mind that your user base is not aunt tilly, but a bunch of geeks who don't mind installing Linux and going through all kinds of pain to configure modelines and printers. (Yes, I realize that both of those are much easier today, but much of the Linux userbase are people who didn't mind doing that work in the past.)