This doesn't account for 900% but accounts for some of it maybe.
You might be surprised. When you have a limited pool of something that can't expand, and more demand than supply, prices can go up almost exponentially.
If you drive on a congested highway to work you might notice on a school holiday or delay that the time to commute changes dramatically. And yet, the change might have only taken 10% of the cars off the road. Basically a road can handle so many cars per minute and once you start hitting that level the queuing becomes massive.
Look at home prices - when an area runs out of land for new homes the existing home values start going up dramatically. Gas prices are similar - when those hedge funds collapsed and stopped trading oil futures prices crashed - it isn't like people stopped driving their cars much or anything.
In the case of a university consumers have very little flexibility - if they want an accredited education then there are only so many places to go and new options open up infrequently. Demand exceeds supply, and so prices can rise almost freely. Really the only constraint are limits on student borrowing. If next year the US government announced that students could borrow up to $1M/year in student loans you'd see tuitions skyrocket.
If you want to be a doctor and have good reason to think you'll make a good doctor it makes far more sense to borrow the $150k or whatever and get through school, and then pay it back when you are making $200k/yr. The alternative is working 20 years or whatever for minimum wage before starting on your schooling.
This isn't like a business borrowing money to buy a robot that will save them $10k/day in labor - it just makes more sense to borrow it than to save up for it.
On the other hand, borrowing any amount of money, or even saving up any amount of money, for an education that won't actually impact your future income isn't a good financial decision. Now, if you want to take a night class in medieval literature for fun knock yourself out if you can afford it, but that is a decision that should be weighed on the same merits as going out to the movies or whatever.
Kids go to college because that is what everybody does, which is why they buy expensive jeans and shoes, smoke, and all the rest of it... I'd probably compare it most closely to smoking since both college loans and smoking are activities that seem a lot less expensive while you're doing them than they will ultimately turn out to be...
Again, no harm in college for those who are truly likely to profit from it. However, with rising tuition and sinking everything else fewer and fewer careers are going to make sense.
The problem is the educational establishment, and parents.
What parent wants to be the only one at their sewing circle or whatever who didn't pay to send their kids to college? That is worse than sending your kids to school dressed in last year's fashions!
Teachers and guidance counselors sell kids on college. They give great advice for getting a job 30 years ago back when they were looking for jobs. When college cost a few thousand dollars and wages in today's money were actually higher it made plenty of sense. I know lots of people whose kids are going to $25k/yr colleges who are medicore to above average students at best, and SOMEBODY is going to shell out a lot of money to pay for those degrees. Their kids openly talk about taking 5-6 years to go to college and not really knowing what they want to do with their lives. But, apparently college is the best route to any career so let's sign them up!
The kids themselves don't know any better. For them college is just four more years of high school. They understand schedules and social events and parties and hanging out with friends and generally spending all day with a bunch of people their own age. The job market or other career options are complete mysteries and often involve spending most of your time with adults. So, kids just follow the path of least resistance. Our schools are good at teaching them to do that.
At least in their case they actually get to pay for their own mistakes when the debts come due, unlike the 95% of the public debt they are saddled with from birth that was spent by their parents.
Must be nice to have it all figured out. Are you from the future because your intelligence is blowing my mind right now.
Thanks for the ad hominum. Anything productive to share with the viewers of this site?
Way to miss the point in it's entirety. The point is about exponential growth, why it has to stop and why it IS going to stop no matter what gheyness you force people into.
Well, duh - everything is ultimately finite and nothing will grow forever. However, if people find ways to let things grow more people will accept them. Once upon a time a society where less than 50% of the population were farmers was completely unsustainable. Today such a concept is completely alien. You can suggest rolling back the clock all you want but good luck getting anybody to go along with you.
By the way, I don't ever want to share my car with strangers. My car is as personal as a toothbrush. It feels like an extension of my body and brings me feelings of freedom and joy on a daily basis. I don't want nasty car interiors with other people's bogeys and fecal matter and the scent of harsh industrial cleaners and disinfectants.
Hey, I never said you can't have your own car. However, most people would probably consider not doing this, since the cost would be higher. Consider - if you want to fly somewhere once a year do you own a private jet and retain a pilot for each trip, or do you just fly on an airline? Cars aren't as practical to share so personal ownership makes more sense, but if you change the system so that you can push a button and a car rolls up to your front door in 30 seconds then the incentive to own the vehicle goes WAY down.
But, owning a self-driving car doesn't harm anybody, so do what you will.
I would be happy to personally expire thousands of people by my own hands and avoid the future you describe there.
I'm sure the local Nazi party could use some help with their propaganda...
Good luck affording auto insurance in a world where the human driver is assumed at fault by default in any collision, and where chances are that the only people who would still drive manually would be the sorts of people who would be at more risk of a collision in the first place.
I don't think autonomous vehicles can achieve most of their benefits in a mixed state. No doubt such a state would have to exist during a transition period. However, when you look at the savings you could get from automated vehicles I suspect that it would be cheaper to just have the government give every citizen a free automated car than to try to come up with some kind of hybrid system.
Oh, I forgot to say - the reason for the focus on a telescope is to correct for warping of the structure of the telescope, not really to move the focal plane per se.
And there is something comical about having a mirror the size of the earth's orbit focusing its light in on a central point floating only 56 meters above the surface of the meter at the center. I imagine that all kinds of crazy effects come into play in such a situation. Sunlight reflecting off of a comet in the ort cloud would probably burn a hole in a steel plate for starters...
Hmm, the CMB has a flux of 3uW/m^2. The mirror has an area of 5*10^23 m^2. So, that means that your eyepiece has 1.6 exawatts of power focused on it just from the big bang. You'd certainly have no trouble making out the structure of the early universe.
Actually, I'm not certain about the last calculation - the mirror has that much radiation falling on it, but I'm not sure if all of that would be focused on the eyepiece. Plus, that assumes that your mirror reflects all wavelengths of EM since most of that energy is way down into the RF range.
I think you're going to need a bigger mirror for that...:)
Focal planes only exist at less than the hyperfocal distance, given by H=f^2/NC.
The hubble has a focal length of 58m - let's consider that a good figure to shoot for. Let's say the pixel size is 10uM. Suppose we want a hyperfocal distance of 2000 light years.
Plugging it all into google we get that we need an aperature of f-1.8x10^-10. That's a bit faster than the typical DSLR lens. F-number is just f/d, so given that f is 56m we can plug that back into google and get that you need a mirror about 2.8 au in diameter. Have fun with that...:)
Before Galileo was decided, US did not give the ability to use the full precision of the GPS to non military US units. It also has the capacity to unilateraly switch off GPS on a zone. Galileo will be a civilian system, for anyone to use. Presumably always on.
Oh, you can bet they'll have a way to switch off civilian use. I can't think of any scenario where the US would want to flip off their switch but the EU would not, or vice-versa. This keeps coming up but other than people with strange notions of the US and EU being mortal enemies I don't think anybody sees this actually having any practical value. More likely than not even the Russians would play ball - there would be some back room deal worked out where the various parties all agree when the switches do and don't get thrown and everybody will play along.
Not all of EU is in NATO. And it wouldn't be impossible for some of the EU states to shoot down the GPS satellites either.
The parent used the words "bizarro world" well - the fact is that the US/EU have far more in common than separate despite all the usual politicking - neither is going to get in a shooting war with the other.
If either the US or the EU had a really serious need to engage selective availability you can bet that some deal would quietly get worked out in the back rooms and both navigation systems would quickly be disabled in the region of concern. Sure, lots of politicians would be screaming about those nasty people on the other side of the Atlantic, but nobody would actually do anything about it since the posturing is for the cameras.
A major shooting war between powers like the US, EU, China, Russia, etc would do little but wipe out the first world economy, and the people running those countries are all very well served by those economies and have no incentive to roll the dice. What is the point in owning a corporate jet if you can't fly it to your vacation home without the risk of being shot down?
People drive because it is cheaper than paying an extra $100k for a more convenient living location.
Think about it - why do you download all those youtube videos from some server halfway across the internet? Wouldn't it make more sense to cut down on traffic and limit yourself to sites that are hosted within 100 miles, or just move your home to be closer to your favorite internet sites?
The only difference between packets and cars is the magnitude of cost. Automated driving reduces that cost, and so it is going to take off once people wise up to the fact that the current system is one of the leading causes of death in the developed world.
Automated driving also works much better with things like ride-sharing, car rental, park-and-ride, and on long journeys it could mesh well with public transit (car pulls onto train and rolls off later, or convoy of cars travels in formation to cut down wind resistance - perhaps deploying canopies/etc to make the formation more aerodynamic). So, basically you make the last mile problem more efficient and actually have the possibility to get everybody where they want to be with LESS cars on the road (or certainly less compared to number of passenger-miles traveled. Automated driving makes sharing a car much more practical, as well as paying by the ride - you get free limo service out of the deal. You also don't need huge parking lots everywhere - just stick a few automated parking garages in each town and have the cars park themselves.
Automated driving is very likely to reduce the environmental impact of people. The only way to reduce it further is to limit population so that it doesn't just rise accordingly.
There are similar potential benefits to networked cars in regular traffic. For instance, you could optimize light timing in real-time so that a bunch of cars get through without having to stop at multiple lights.
Think bigger - you don't need lights - the car already knows where it needs to go. Make new intersections traffic circles, and for legacy ones just allocate time slices to routes or perhaps treat them as circles anyway (if the intersection is large enough you could just pretend there is a concrete barrier in the middle). You could also make roads one way and use all the lanes, and dynamically adjust that allocation - turning entire blocks into traffic circles essentially.
Cars of course would be spaced properly before they even hit the merges since they're not all tailgating. Then on long stretches where no crossings need to happen they would bunch up a meter apart or whatever to save gas.
You could probably take half the knowledge of modern network routing protocols and apply it to this problem, albeit with the limitation that you can't just allow for packet collisions.:)
Is the "spin" of an atomic particle actually conserved with conventional angular momentum?
If I put a bunch of protons in a magnet to create an excess of spins in one direction, and then hit them with photons to flip them, does the container they are stored in experience torque?
My understanding is that we use terms like "spin" and "angular momentum" with particles because the math is similar, but that these are just physical properties of the particle and not the same as conventional angular momentum. In the same way, a "green" quark doesn't interact with visible light of the appropriate wavelength differently...
Well, the issue was that in the past security by obscurity actually worked (or maybe we should call it privacy by obscurity). Your photo in a yearbook didn't make identifying you in a photo array on the other side of the country any easier, and your fingerprint on a card in Memphis didn't make you a suspect for a crime in Seattle.
Today databases are becoming so ubiquitous that it is getting to the point that if anybody knows anything, then anybody else who is determined can find it out unless it is kept very carefully controlled.
I think that privacy ultimately will just have to go away. It isn't unlike what has happened with weapons - once upon a time unless you were Zorro your chances of slashing up a whole crowd of people with your sword before being incapacitated were remote, but today anybody can buy a gun or improvise explosives. Perhaps some day somebody will invent the Star Trek replicator and anybody can make their own nuclear bombs. Technology marches on and all we can do is cope...
Canonical benefits from RedHat paying kernel developers, and RedHat can benefit if they adopt anything that Canonical writes. To some extent it all goes around.
My observation is that desktop environment designers are VERY picky. They're focused on vertical integration and everything is my-way-or-the-highway. It is getting to the point that you won't be able to run a particular DE unless you also run a particular SysVInit implementation, or X11 implementation.
To me this is breaking away from the unix way, which emphasizes modular components. Sure, being able to schedule cron jobs from within the DE is nice, but not if it means that it will only work with one cron implementation. Why not define a standard interface and use it - just as we do with IMAP/POP3/etc?
The point of it is property ownership rights. If I want to give something I own to someone else, I'm not sure why you have an ownership claim to tell me what I get to do with my own property, assuming you believe in the concept of private property rights.
And when somebody comes along and kills you to occupy your property, you would probably like the taxpayers to do something about it. When people become envious of your inherited fortune you'd probably like the police to keep rioters from lynching you as well. And you would be right to expect both, as this is a legitimate role of government. However, if you want the majority of society to protect your property, then they have a say in what you do with it.
I've had some dealings with this lately, unfortunately, and there is no tax up to some modest $ value (roughly the peak bubble cost of a single median California house) and then after that the tax is absolutely punishing, like 50%. Bye bye family farm, etc.
Cry me a river - you did nothing to earn the family farm except be born to somebody who owned a farm. If you get a dollar it is a dollar more than you have personally earned. While the amounts are debatable I'd probably exempt the first $100k from taxes and then start taxing at 50%, with a 90% tax at $1M, 99% at $2M, 99.9% at $3M and so on.
Making the simple and obvious way harder, merely makes parasites on civilization richer as they work around the problem. Not sure thats ethically and morally a sound position.
If you increase tax rates you increase the benefit of tax evasion, and thus more people will do it all else being equal. I don't see that as an argument for not raising taxes. If you just raise penalties for tax evasion to make the practical consequences more comparable to what happens to some less fortunate guy who robs a convenience store gets I imagine the rate will remain manageable. You could simply make it a crime to hold money or property that cannot be accounted for in declared income and start doing audits on anybody who owns a home worth $500k or more/etc. I'm all for simplifying the tax code in any case.
I'm fine with letting people who earn a lot of money have more money than everybody else (though I support progressive taxation). On the other end I'm fine with supporting people who aren't able to earn a decent income. What I don't like is concentration of wealth, and inheritance is a big part of that problem.
Or just get rid of it entirely. I never really got the point of allowing inheritance (at least not without heavy taxation). If somebody accomplishes a great deal by all means reward them for it. On the other hand, their kids should make their own accomplishments and have their own rewards.
For those who for whatever reason cannot support themselves then there is social welfare - and your access to that shouldn't depend on who your parents are.
Think about what would happen if everybody actually did that.
Can EVERYBODY just work for 15 years, kick back, and then live off of interest? Who would be working to actually sell stuff to them?
I think that one of the problems with the economy is just the whole retirement system - tons of money that needs to make huge returns to try to keep people alive and not working for 30 years or whatever. That money gets invested by other people, who treat it as you'd expect for somebody investing other people's money...
Unless you believe that map-making started with GPS in 1994, then obviously not.
Most map making is done with aerial photographs mixed with good-old-fashioned triangulation-based surveying, which is then reconciled with GPS.
Yes, but what anchors the whole system together on a global level. I can survey a football field, then survey a football field next to it and glue the maps together, and then keep repeating. I might be within a millimeter on all of my measurements, but over time that error propagates, because I have no way to do triangulation on a point 100 miles away due to the curvature of the Earth.
The error ratios in GPS are well understood, as the system has been used to check against other methods in this way almost continuously since it came online. If GPS positioning was throwing up 18 meter errors left and right it would have been noticed many many times.
Sure, but what if it was off by 1 mm / 50 miles or something to the left consistently, or something like that - perhaps the earth is slightly less spherical overall and we're missing it somehow. 18 meters isn't much when you're talking about the entire Earth.
Perhaps the coordinates are completely right, however I wouldn't just take for granted that GPS has an absolute accuracy of so many meters just because it pinpoints your position on a map to that precision no matter where you are. That only guarantees accuracy relative to the things around you.
Systematic error can creep into a measurement like this very easily, as there aren't many truly independent ways of performing such a measurement.
60 ns translates into 18 meters at the speed of light. If the error was that large any car GPS device would be showing you as driving on some other street.
Not if the map is also off by 18 meters. How do they put the roads on the map in the first place? Most likely, by GPS, or whatever GPS was calibrated against when it was implemented.
I'm not qualified to judge if the paper is right, but it is very easy to get into circular reasoning when it comes to standards - deriving true standards to that level of precision is hard so lots of stuff gets derived and if anywhere on the chain something goes wrong you can get lots of results that agree and yet are all wrong. Systematic error, and all that.
Frankly, I'm still amazed that no unix-like OS that I'm aware of has come up with a networked filesystem that is both actually secure and which supports all the unix-y permissions/attributes/etc. It seems like the closest options I can find are:
1. Samba - which is about as unix-y as vfat. 2. OpenAFS - which is crufty and VERY painful to set up. 3. 9P, which is obscure and not well-implemented on unix, or anything else but Plan9.
They'll have a hard time getting back in the server room. Canceling your server line sounds like defaulting on a mortgage - good luck getting a bank to give you another loan.
IT pays extra for workstations just for the guarantee that the vendor will make the same identical model with the same components for n years, and not just drop it in six months because it is obsolete. For servers the need for long-term support is that much greater - who wants to spend $10M getting some system up and running only to find out that two years later you can't buy replacement hardware? In the PC world the hardware is one of the cheapest components of the whole system, and in the Apple world it is potentially one of the riskiest.
Slashdot Mirror
This doesn't account for 900% but accounts for some of it maybe.
You might be surprised. When you have a limited pool of something that can't expand, and more demand than supply, prices can go up almost exponentially.
If you drive on a congested highway to work you might notice on a school holiday or delay that the time to commute changes dramatically. And yet, the change might have only taken 10% of the cars off the road. Basically a road can handle so many cars per minute and once you start hitting that level the queuing becomes massive.
Look at home prices - when an area runs out of land for new homes the existing home values start going up dramatically. Gas prices are similar - when those hedge funds collapsed and stopped trading oil futures prices crashed - it isn't like people stopped driving their cars much or anything.
In the case of a university consumers have very little flexibility - if they want an accredited education then there are only so many places to go and new options open up infrequently. Demand exceeds supply, and so prices can rise almost freely. Really the only constraint are limits on student borrowing. If next year the US government announced that students could borrow up to $1M/year in student loans you'd see tuitions skyrocket.
I think there is a valid balance.
If you want to be a doctor and have good reason to think you'll make a good doctor it makes far more sense to borrow the $150k or whatever and get through school, and then pay it back when you are making $200k/yr. The alternative is working 20 years or whatever for minimum wage before starting on your schooling.
This isn't like a business borrowing money to buy a robot that will save them $10k/day in labor - it just makes more sense to borrow it than to save up for it.
On the other hand, borrowing any amount of money, or even saving up any amount of money, for an education that won't actually impact your future income isn't a good financial decision. Now, if you want to take a night class in medieval literature for fun knock yourself out if you can afford it, but that is a decision that should be weighed on the same merits as going out to the movies or whatever.
Kids go to college because that is what everybody does, which is why they buy expensive jeans and shoes, smoke, and all the rest of it... I'd probably compare it most closely to smoking since both college loans and smoking are activities that seem a lot less expensive while you're doing them than they will ultimately turn out to be...
Again, no harm in college for those who are truly likely to profit from it. However, with rising tuition and sinking everything else fewer and fewer careers are going to make sense.
The problem is the educational establishment, and parents.
What parent wants to be the only one at their sewing circle or whatever who didn't pay to send their kids to college? That is worse than sending your kids to school dressed in last year's fashions!
Teachers and guidance counselors sell kids on college. They give great advice for getting a job 30 years ago back when they were looking for jobs. When college cost a few thousand dollars and wages in today's money were actually higher it made plenty of sense. I know lots of people whose kids are going to $25k/yr colleges who are medicore to above average students at best, and SOMEBODY is going to shell out a lot of money to pay for those degrees. Their kids openly talk about taking 5-6 years to go to college and not really knowing what they want to do with their lives. But, apparently college is the best route to any career so let's sign them up!
The kids themselves don't know any better. For them college is just four more years of high school. They understand schedules and social events and parties and hanging out with friends and generally spending all day with a bunch of people their own age. The job market or other career options are complete mysteries and often involve spending most of your time with adults. So, kids just follow the path of least resistance. Our schools are good at teaching them to do that.
At least in their case they actually get to pay for their own mistakes when the debts come due, unlike the 95% of the public debt they are saddled with from birth that was spent by their parents.
Must be nice to have it all figured out. Are you from the future because your intelligence is blowing my mind right now.
Thanks for the ad hominum. Anything productive to share with the viewers of this site?
Way to miss the point in it's entirety. The point is about exponential growth, why it has to stop and why it IS going to stop no matter what gheyness you force people into.
Well, duh - everything is ultimately finite and nothing will grow forever. However, if people find ways to let things grow more people will accept them. Once upon a time a society where less than 50% of the population were farmers was completely unsustainable. Today such a concept is completely alien. You can suggest rolling back the clock all you want but good luck getting anybody to go along with you.
By the way, I don't ever want to share my car with strangers. My car is as personal as a toothbrush. It feels like an extension of my body and brings me feelings of freedom and joy on a daily basis. I don't want nasty car interiors with other people's bogeys and fecal matter and the scent of harsh industrial cleaners and disinfectants.
Hey, I never said you can't have your own car. However, most people would probably consider not doing this, since the cost would be higher. Consider - if you want to fly somewhere once a year do you own a private jet and retain a pilot for each trip, or do you just fly on an airline? Cars aren't as practical to share so personal ownership makes more sense, but if you change the system so that you can push a button and a car rolls up to your front door in 30 seconds then the incentive to own the vehicle goes WAY down.
But, owning a self-driving car doesn't harm anybody, so do what you will.
I would be happy to personally expire thousands of people by my own hands and avoid the future you describe there.
I'm sure the local Nazi party could use some help with their propaganda...
Good luck affording auto insurance in a world where the human driver is assumed at fault by default in any collision, and where chances are that the only people who would still drive manually would be the sorts of people who would be at more risk of a collision in the first place.
I don't think autonomous vehicles can achieve most of their benefits in a mixed state. No doubt such a state would have to exist during a transition period. However, when you look at the savings you could get from automated vehicles I suspect that it would be cheaper to just have the government give every citizen a free automated car than to try to come up with some kind of hybrid system.
I'm all for PRT. Cars just have the advantage of not needing new infrastructure. Self-driving cars are really just another way to implement PRT.
Oh, I forgot to say - the reason for the focus on a telescope is to correct for warping of the structure of the telescope, not really to move the focal plane per se.
And there is something comical about having a mirror the size of the earth's orbit focusing its light in on a central point floating only 56 meters above the surface of the meter at the center. I imagine that all kinds of crazy effects come into play in such a situation. Sunlight reflecting off of a comet in the ort cloud would probably burn a hole in a steel plate for starters...
Hmm, the CMB has a flux of 3uW/m^2. The mirror has an area of 5*10^23 m^2. So, that means that your eyepiece has 1.6 exawatts of power focused on it just from the big bang. You'd certainly have no trouble making out the structure of the early universe.
Actually, I'm not certain about the last calculation - the mirror has that much radiation falling on it, but I'm not sure if all of that would be focused on the eyepiece. Plus, that assumes that your mirror reflects all wavelengths of EM since most of that energy is way down into the RF range.
I think you're going to need a bigger mirror for that... :)
Focal planes only exist at less than the hyperfocal distance, given by H=f^2/NC.
The hubble has a focal length of 58m - let's consider that a good figure to shoot for. Let's say the pixel size is 10uM. Suppose we want a hyperfocal distance of 2000 light years.
Plugging it all into google we get that we need an aperature of f-1.8x10^-10. That's a bit faster than the typical DSLR lens. F-number is just f/d, so given that f is 56m we can plug that back into google and get that you need a mirror about 2.8 au in diameter. Have fun with that... :)
Before Galileo was decided, US did not give the ability to use the full precision of the GPS to non military US units. It also has the capacity to unilateraly switch off GPS on a zone. Galileo will be a civilian system, for anyone to use. Presumably always on.
Oh, you can bet they'll have a way to switch off civilian use. I can't think of any scenario where the US would want to flip off their switch but the EU would not, or vice-versa. This keeps coming up but other than people with strange notions of the US and EU being mortal enemies I don't think anybody sees this actually having any practical value. More likely than not even the Russians would play ball - there would be some back room deal worked out where the various parties all agree when the switches do and don't get thrown and everybody will play along.
Not all of EU is in NATO. And it wouldn't be impossible for some of the EU states to shoot down the GPS satellites either.
The parent used the words "bizarro world" well - the fact is that the US/EU have far more in common than separate despite all the usual politicking - neither is going to get in a shooting war with the other.
If either the US or the EU had a really serious need to engage selective availability you can bet that some deal would quietly get worked out in the back rooms and both navigation systems would quickly be disabled in the region of concern. Sure, lots of politicians would be screaming about those nasty people on the other side of the Atlantic, but nobody would actually do anything about it since the posturing is for the cameras.
A major shooting war between powers like the US, EU, China, Russia, etc would do little but wipe out the first world economy, and the people running those countries are all very well served by those economies and have no incentive to roll the dice. What is the point in owning a corporate jet if you can't fly it to your vacation home without the risk of being shot down?
People drive because it is cheaper than paying an extra $100k for a more convenient living location.
Think about it - why do you download all those youtube videos from some server halfway across the internet? Wouldn't it make more sense to cut down on traffic and limit yourself to sites that are hosted within 100 miles, or just move your home to be closer to your favorite internet sites?
The only difference between packets and cars is the magnitude of cost. Automated driving reduces that cost, and so it is going to take off once people wise up to the fact that the current system is one of the leading causes of death in the developed world.
Automated driving also works much better with things like ride-sharing, car rental, park-and-ride, and on long journeys it could mesh well with public transit (car pulls onto train and rolls off later, or convoy of cars travels in formation to cut down wind resistance - perhaps deploying canopies/etc to make the formation more aerodynamic). So, basically you make the last mile problem more efficient and actually have the possibility to get everybody where they want to be with LESS cars on the road (or certainly less compared to number of passenger-miles traveled. Automated driving makes sharing a car much more practical, as well as paying by the ride - you get free limo service out of the deal. You also don't need huge parking lots everywhere - just stick a few automated parking garages in each town and have the cars park themselves.
Automated driving is very likely to reduce the environmental impact of people. The only way to reduce it further is to limit population so that it doesn't just rise accordingly.
There are similar potential benefits to networked cars in regular traffic. For instance, you could optimize light timing in real-time so that a bunch of cars get through without having to stop at multiple lights.
Think bigger - you don't need lights - the car already knows where it needs to go. Make new intersections traffic circles, and for legacy ones just allocate time slices to routes or perhaps treat them as circles anyway (if the intersection is large enough you could just pretend there is a concrete barrier in the middle). You could also make roads one way and use all the lanes, and dynamically adjust that allocation - turning entire blocks into traffic circles essentially.
Cars of course would be spaced properly before they even hit the merges since they're not all tailgating. Then on long stretches where no crossings need to happen they would bunch up a meter apart or whatever to save gas.
You could probably take half the knowledge of modern network routing protocols and apply it to this problem, albeit with the limitation that you can't just allow for packet collisions. :)
Yup - I work on FOSS projects and I'd lock a bug if it turned into an open forum - I don't need more bugspam for something that isn't a bug.
If you're going to ask for a new feature at least be nice enough to offer a patch along with it...
Is the "spin" of an atomic particle actually conserved with conventional angular momentum?
If I put a bunch of protons in a magnet to create an excess of spins in one direction, and then hit them with photons to flip them, does the container they are stored in experience torque?
My understanding is that we use terms like "spin" and "angular momentum" with particles because the math is similar, but that these are just physical properties of the particle and not the same as conventional angular momentum. In the same way, a "green" quark doesn't interact with visible light of the appropriate wavelength differently...
Ubuntu uses the linux kernel, so if RedHat employs a bunch of kernel developers they upstream their changes and everybody benefits.
That is the whole point of FOSS. Sure, everybody has their areas of differentiation, but the idea is that a rising tide lifts all boats.
Well, the issue was that in the past security by obscurity actually worked (or maybe we should call it privacy by obscurity). Your photo in a yearbook didn't make identifying you in a photo array on the other side of the country any easier, and your fingerprint on a card in Memphis didn't make you a suspect for a crime in Seattle.
Today databases are becoming so ubiquitous that it is getting to the point that if anybody knows anything, then anybody else who is determined can find it out unless it is kept very carefully controlled.
I think that privacy ultimately will just have to go away. It isn't unlike what has happened with weapons - once upon a time unless you were Zorro your chances of slashing up a whole crowd of people with your sword before being incapacitated were remote, but today anybody can buy a gun or improvise explosives. Perhaps some day somebody will invent the Star Trek replicator and anybody can make their own nuclear bombs. Technology marches on and all we can do is cope...
Canonical benefits from RedHat paying kernel developers, and RedHat can benefit if they adopt anything that Canonical writes. To some extent it all goes around.
My observation is that desktop environment designers are VERY picky. They're focused on vertical integration and everything is my-way-or-the-highway. It is getting to the point that you won't be able to run a particular DE unless you also run a particular SysVInit implementation, or X11 implementation.
To me this is breaking away from the unix way, which emphasizes modular components. Sure, being able to schedule cron jobs from within the DE is nice, but not if it means that it will only work with one cron implementation. Why not define a standard interface and use it - just as we do with IMAP/POP3/etc?
The point of it is property ownership rights. If I want to give something I own to someone else, I'm not sure why you have an ownership claim to tell me what I get to do with my own property, assuming you believe in the concept of private property rights.
And when somebody comes along and kills you to occupy your property, you would probably like the taxpayers to do something about it. When people become envious of your inherited fortune you'd probably like the police to keep rioters from lynching you as well. And you would be right to expect both, as this is a legitimate role of government. However, if you want the majority of society to protect your property, then they have a say in what you do with it.
I've had some dealings with this lately, unfortunately, and there is no tax up to some modest $ value (roughly the peak bubble cost of a single median California house) and then after that the tax is absolutely punishing, like 50%. Bye bye family farm, etc.
Cry me a river - you did nothing to earn the family farm except be born to somebody who owned a farm. If you get a dollar it is a dollar more than you have personally earned. While the amounts are debatable I'd probably exempt the first $100k from taxes and then start taxing at 50%, with a 90% tax at $1M, 99% at $2M, 99.9% at $3M and so on.
Making the simple and obvious way harder, merely makes parasites on civilization richer as they work around the problem. Not sure thats ethically and morally a sound position.
If you increase tax rates you increase the benefit of tax evasion, and thus more people will do it all else being equal. I don't see that as an argument for not raising taxes. If you just raise penalties for tax evasion to make the practical consequences more comparable to what happens to some less fortunate guy who robs a convenience store gets I imagine the rate will remain manageable. You could simply make it a crime to hold money or property that cannot be accounted for in declared income and start doing audits on anybody who owns a home worth $500k or more/etc. I'm all for simplifying the tax code in any case.
I'm fine with letting people who earn a lot of money have more money than everybody else (though I support progressive taxation). On the other end I'm fine with supporting people who aren't able to earn a decent income. What I don't like is concentration of wealth, and inheritance is a big part of that problem.
Or just get rid of it entirely. I never really got the point of allowing inheritance (at least not without heavy taxation). If somebody accomplishes a great deal by all means reward them for it. On the other hand, their kids should make their own accomplishments and have their own rewards.
For those who for whatever reason cannot support themselves then there is social welfare - and your access to that shouldn't depend on who your parents are.
Inheritance just creates classes.
Think about what would happen if everybody actually did that.
Can EVERYBODY just work for 15 years, kick back, and then live off of interest? Who would be working to actually sell stuff to them?
I think that one of the problems with the economy is just the whole retirement system - tons of money that needs to make huge returns to try to keep people alive and not working for 30 years or whatever. That money gets invested by other people, who treat it as you'd expect for somebody investing other people's money...
Unless you believe that map-making started with GPS in 1994, then obviously not.
Most map making is done with aerial photographs mixed with good-old-fashioned triangulation-based surveying, which is then reconciled with GPS.
Yes, but what anchors the whole system together on a global level. I can survey a football field, then survey a football field next to it and glue the maps together, and then keep repeating. I might be within a millimeter on all of my measurements, but over time that error propagates, because I have no way to do triangulation on a point 100 miles away due to the curvature of the Earth.
The error ratios in GPS are well understood, as the system has been used to check against other methods in this way almost continuously since it came online. If GPS positioning was throwing up 18 meter errors left and right it would have been noticed many many times.
Sure, but what if it was off by 1 mm / 50 miles or something to the left consistently, or something like that - perhaps the earth is slightly less spherical overall and we're missing it somehow. 18 meters isn't much when you're talking about the entire Earth.
Perhaps the coordinates are completely right, however I wouldn't just take for granted that GPS has an absolute accuracy of so many meters just because it pinpoints your position on a map to that precision no matter where you are. That only guarantees accuracy relative to the things around you.
Systematic error can creep into a measurement like this very easily, as there aren't many truly independent ways of performing such a measurement.
60 ns translates into 18 meters at the speed of light. If the error was that large any car GPS device would be showing you as driving on some other street.
Not if the map is also off by 18 meters. How do they put the roads on the map in the first place? Most likely, by GPS, or whatever GPS was calibrated against when it was implemented.
I'm not qualified to judge if the paper is right, but it is very easy to get into circular reasoning when it comes to standards - deriving true standards to that level of precision is hard so lots of stuff gets derived and if anywhere on the chain something goes wrong you can get lots of results that agree and yet are all wrong. Systematic error, and all that.
Frankly, I'm still amazed that no unix-like OS that I'm aware of has come up with a networked filesystem that is both actually secure and which supports all the unix-y permissions/attributes/etc. It seems like the closest options I can find are:
1. Samba - which is about as unix-y as vfat.
2. OpenAFS - which is crufty and VERY painful to set up.
3. 9P, which is obscure and not well-implemented on unix, or anything else but Plan9.
This shouldn't be so difficult to do...
Even so, what good does the law do?
The state STILL doesn't know about the situation, and now nobody who could possibly do something to help does either.
They'll have a hard time getting back in the server room. Canceling your server line sounds like defaulting on a mortgage - good luck getting a bank to give you another loan.
IT pays extra for workstations just for the guarantee that the vendor will make the same identical model with the same components for n years, and not just drop it in six months because it is obsolete. For servers the need for long-term support is that much greater - who wants to spend $10M getting some system up and running only to find out that two years later you can't buy replacement hardware? In the PC world the hardware is one of the cheapest components of the whole system, and in the Apple world it is potentially one of the riskiest.