Aircraft safety is getting close to the point where pilots cause more problems than they resolve. If you made aircraft completely autonomous I'm not convinced that it would decrease the safety of flying at all. It would probably change the liability picture, however.
It is only a matter of time before cars are in the same position.
Oh, and it is ridiculous that the cockpit voice recorder only lasts two hours. They should make it illegal to access except by the NTSB/etc, and make it last the full flight duration. The only reason it is shorter is privacy concerns, which are legitimate, but those can be solved in better ways.
Besides disabling it on-ground, the concern is that anything on the main bus needs to be able to be powered off in case of an electrical problem. If that transmitter develops a short it could take out the entire bus, start a fire, etc. That's the concept at least - certainly there are workarounds.
To those who claim that glassholes are doing nothing wrong, try this little experiment: Go to your local Wal-Mart, when the parking lot is busy with people walking in and out, take out your digital camera, and walk through a busy part of the parking lot. Squat down behind each car, and take a close-up photo of the license plate. Make sure it is very clear what you are doing.
But that's the whole thing that gets me about people who are annoyed at Glass - this sort of thing happens all the time. People in the vehicle repossession industry routinely drive through parking lots logging EVERY SINGLE car's plates in the lot, along with GPS and timestamp. They then trade that data with others in the industry. They just aren't obvious about it.
Anybody can wear a camera that is fairly inconspicuous and capture everything going on.
People are just bothered by Glass because it is new, and it is actually noticeable. However, in reality it really isn't anything new. It will most likely fail because in the end it won't do anything useful because Google is afraid of being sued if it does.
In a few years facial recognition and geotagging will become more ubiquitous and all this info will become public. Then something like Glass will take off, since recordings of everything you do will already be plastered all over the internet already, and people won't perceive Glass as being harmful.
Society just hasn't adjusted to the total absence of privacy yet. They will - there is little choice in the matter.
Nothing. They just do it without the physical motions that would otherwise provide the visual cues to indicate what they're doing.
Yikes, chill out!
Anybody who wants to record everything you're doing is going to use a concealed camera, not one that is mounted on their face. It isn't even practical to do heavy recording on a Glass since the battery life won't handle it.
Besides - you're already being recorded day in and out by everybody and their uncle. It is only a matter of time before that stuff gets posted on the internet regularly...
Curious: If you were to point a bunch of satellites at any part of the open ocean and have dozens or hundreds of analysts pore over those images would they find exactly the type of "possible objects" that we are seeing in this situation?
Quite possible - I'm sure there is other junk on the water. The other issue is that there aren't exactly tons of satellites flying around, and when they're zoomed in sufficiently to actually see debris they can't image a very large area. Basically you can capture a long stripe of data which is only so wide but as long as you want it to be. If the image is only a half-mile wide, and the search area is 100 miles in every direction, then you need 200 passes to image it. Of course, nothing prevents debris from floating from an area you didn't check into an area you checked already, so you're basically just hoping to get lucky.
I'm not aware of any production military drones that have that kind of endurance/range. There are things like solar-powered prop drones that can stay aloft for a very long time, but they are slow, and I imagine that they go where the wind blows (winds aloft can be 50mph+, so a slow aircraft can't really maintain position).
Google suggests that the range of a predator is only 1100 miles. That wouldn't even be a round-trip to the search area.
Global hawk could do the job. However, I don't know how many of those are in the inventory and how busy they are elsewhere, or for that matter how operational they even are.
But yes, this would be the perfect mission for drones if you had enough of them. At least, they'd be useful for looking on the surface. If you want to use any kind of sonar then you'd need ships/subs.
A PLB would be handy if you actually got out of the plane though, which is really the only time you as a still-living individual will care about being located anyway.
By breakaway I mean an externally-located device designed to detach if the plane sinks and float on the surface.
There are other options as well - like a device that detects deceleration, rapid descent, or other abnormal conditions and transmits the plane's location. With satellite monitoring you don't really need that to even survive long - if a single ping makes it to a satellite that is enough to alert rescuers. For commercial aircraft the odd false alarm wouldn't cause any problems - those monitoring the device would check in with the appropriate ATC who would make contact with the aircraft if they aren't already in contact and see if all is well.
Of course, it would make just as much sense to have an always-on beacon. If they're really worried about electrical faults just give it a decent battery and isolate it, and put the access panel to replace the battery someplace convenient like right next to a door (on the outside of the plane).
Crafting is supposed to be a fun mechanic. The problem is that modern games are too much loot-based, rendering crafting and player creativity useless.
That, and in most games there is nothing creative about crafting. Grind materials, put into formula, get predicted output, sell on market. It is just another form of grinding.
Now, something like Second Life (disclaimer - I've never played it) where you can actually model your own objects and write code that governs their behavior - that is creative. The problem is that it is hard to do something like that for a casual gamer. Something like Minecraft is going in that direction, and of course it is popular as a result.
Yup - that's basically the point though. If you want to carve out a niche, you need to actually make it a niche. Doing what everybody else is trying to do isn't finding a niche.
yes, with the state of the art in 2014, entire commercial jets can disappear without a trace and might never be found
Well, the ocean is a big place, and generally devoid of radar. The airliner almost certainly had ADS-B and that can be tracked by satellite (though I have no idea if there is coverage over the southern Indian Ocean). The problem is that when the crew deliberately turns it off or it fails, what are you going to do?
A breakaway ELT would make a lot of sense. Heck, you can buy them for personal use these days - not that it would do the passengers much good if the pilot were determined to commit suicide.
The ones and zeros that comprise your binaries were copied into "your" object files NOT from your source code but rather from Mr. Stallman's compiler and linker. Your binary files can, therefore, be viewed as very complex derivatives of HIS code, or at the very least as having been linked with thousands (millions?) of fragments of his GPL'd compiler and linker programs.
Sure, but if you build the AMD video drivers nothing but the symbol names and parameter types impact what ends up in the compiled binary. It need not even be built on a system running linux - the only thing the compiler needs access to is the kernel header files. That's just a big list of function prototypes, defines, data types, etc. It is entirely about interoperability as well - an area where courts have overridden copyright in the past (it is actually legal to stick a "NintendoTM" logo in a game made for the game boy using a copy of Nintendo's own code to do it, simply because they put code that checks for it in the loader and a judge felt that in doing so they surrendered their copyright and trademark rights).
So, if code only uses the linux headers, how is that different from using the POSIX signal constants or whatever?
I do agree that in the end it comes down to a what a court rules. I'm pro-GPL in general, but I really don't want to see court rulings that basically say that sticking symbol names in your binary creates a derivative work. Going down that route basically allows OS vendors to require a license just to write software for the OS. Frankly the game console vendors already go way to far in that area, though they generally accomplish it by technical means rather than legal means (mainly because courts have tended to rule against them).
And remember, this is comparing against a previous generation, lower end than needs be Intel chip.
Looking on Newegg I don't see much else at the arbitrary $120 price-point.
Of course, if I were actually buying an Intel chip I doubt I'd buy one at that price. That was basically my point - the Intel chips are much better when you get up there in price, but at the lower end the AMD chips are fairly competitive. In the current generation Intel has more of an edge - 10 years ago AMD was much better in this space.
Somebody else argued that with the right optimization AMD does much better than the benchmarks suggest. I don't have any data to support that one way or the other, but my main amd64 box is running linux with everything built -march=amdfam10, so if that is the case then I'm better off for it...
The FX-6300 is actually faster in multi-threaded cases, which isn't surprising since it has 6 cores vs 2. The single-threaded performance of the Intel processor is clearly better. So, I'd call that one a bit of a toss-up depending on needs.
The Intel chip definitely uses less power though - that is one thing I definitely don't care for in my Phenom II systems - heat management is a real problem.
The X community has said specifically that this sort of end-run around the GPL is strictly forbidden.
Ultimately, only a court can say what is or isn't forbidden. I don't buy the whole can't-link-to-GPL-code argument. If AMD isn't distributing the kernel, then the kernel's license is irrelevant. The fact that AMD's code references kernel symbols doesn't make it a derivative work, unless you buy into the SCO argument that things like #defines are copyrightable. I could see the argument that after the linker resolves the symbols you end up with a derivative work in RAM (maybe), but that image isn't distributed anywhere (certainly not by AMD).
As far as I'm aware no court has ruled on this either way. It would be interesting to see how this goes.
Hell, a 40$ APU from AMD beats anything Intel has to offer for almost twice as much, not to mention that even at that price the AMD has a decent GPU while the Intel has none at all.
This is why I think AMD tends to be represented more in the DIY arena. Companies like Dell don't want to sell you a $150 CPU+motherboard upgrade. They want to sell you a $1200 PC. If you're going to throw away your old case, PSU, video card, RAM, hard drive, DVD drive, etc - then you might as well spend an extra $200 on the CPU.
On the other hand, if you're only upgrading CPU+MB, and maybe RAM, then AMD makes a lot more sense. If my options are to spend $500 every 6 years on an Intel CPU+MB, or $150 every other year on an AMD CPU+MB, then I'll take the latter. I'll actually spend less money, and for most of the time I'll have a better system. Sure, the Intel system will outperform the AMD system in years 1-2, but the AMD system will outperform in years 3-6, and by a huge margin in the last two years. A CPU is a rapidly-depreciating asset, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of money going high-end - you're far better off buying something moderate and replacing it more often. Then Moore's Law will work for you, and not against you.
Lower power consumption in better CPUs. Why choose AMD?
The most recent generation of chips definitely has power issues, but it seems like you get a lot more bang for your buck with AMD. What can you get that is decent from Intel for $120? You can get a fairly decent chip from AMD for that.
Yes, but the point you guys need to come to terms with is that fossil fuels aren't the only source of energy production and transport, and it's becoming apparent that the harm outweighs the minor increases in fiscal cost of many other technologies.
Yup. Germany actually had a pretty sane policy until Fukushima, now they just import lots of gas from Russia. I wonder how that's working for them now?
Personally, I do believe in rehabilitation, but only for minor offenses, where someone goes "astray". As for things like rape, robbery and murder... not so much.
Why?
And the problem is that there are always matters of degree. Walking into a mall and shooting 20 people is a different crime than killing somebody with your hands after they invaded your home and grappled and tried to strangle you. Shoplifting is a different crime than holding somebody up at gunpoint. Grabbing a woman off the street and raping her is a different crime than sleeping with your girlfriend without getting a signed consent form.
I think that rehabilitation MUST be a higher priority because doing anything else endangers the public unless the criminal is locked away for life. What good is sending somebody to prison for 10 years if they rape somebody else after they get out? Better to spend 3 years, or 30 years, rehabilitating them so that when they do get out the public is safe.
Justice isn't a code word for vengence...There's an argument to be made for execution, if someone is deemed beyond redemption, but to invent drugs to extend punishment is horrible.
Couldn't agree more. The problem in the US is that justice is almost entirely about vengeance. We don't care about recidivism - that's just another opportunity to get more vengeance.
It makes no sense at all to me. I actually have a conscience, so I find the way we treat prisoners simply unconscionable. However, for the sake of argument let's pretend that I'm just a purely self-interested sociopath. The way the US prison system is run is EXTREMELY expensive, and the high recidivism rate means that I'm going to pay over and over to lock up criminals.
Really the current state only makes sense if you're a sadist.
I think that people who have committed crimes should be rehabilitated. The conditions they are in when in rehabilitation should be driven by public safety concerns and effectiveness concerns. If somebody won't get themselves to rehab, then they need to be incarcerated. If somebody is likely to stab somebody before they're rehabilitated then they need to be incarcerated. If somebody isn't likely to cause much trouble and will reliably drive themselves to whether they're supposed to be, then just give them a tracking bracelet or something - they might not even need house arrest.
Duration of rehab should be whatever it takes. If after 30 years in prison somebody is still likely to rob a store, then keep them there. If after two years somebody is unlikely to kill somebody again, release them. The "punishment" SHOULDN'T fit the crime - the rehabilitation should fit the criminal. If somebody got drunk and killed somebody, then they're not a risk for walking into a mall and shooting somebody - but they certainly should be banned from bars or buying alcohol until they're rehabilitated. Their crime might be murder, but they shouldn't be treated in the same way as some guy who snapped and shot somebody in a mall. They don't have the same risks of recidivism.
And get rid of criminal records entirely following rehabilitation. If somebody isn't safe to let out on the streets, then don't let him out on the streets. If somebody is safe to be on their own, then why brand them for life so that they can never re-integrate into society.
Did Fluke actually request this? Or did Customs do this of their own volition?
If it's the latter, Fluke should step up and allow them to make a one time exception for this shipment. It would generate considerably goodwill for the company and show that they're not bullies keeping the little guy down.
Given my limited knowledge of US Customs, it seems almost certain to be their own rules, and I'd be surprised if a conference call with the CEO of Fluke and President Obama would get that shipment through the border.
The US has fairly complex customs compared to most nations, but this kind of nonsense is by no means limited to the US. In most countries the silly rules are protectionist. In the US the crazy rules are more like what you run into trying to edit an article on Wikipedia.
I can't tell you how many times I've run into the term "or destroy the shipment" in coming to understand the rules in this space. I've heard of Fortune 500 companies begging with inspectors to try to find ways around crazy rules and destroying shipments much more valuable than $30k. I can only imagine what it is like for a small company that doesn't have 30 people doing nothing but dealing with customs full-time.
It isn't so much corruption as bureaucracy here. Rule says export or destroy, so that's what we're going to do.
I've been introduced to this topic recently and the way customs agencies work is a real eye-opener. I know of VERY expensive shipments being destroyed over paperwork disputes/errors/etc. Somebody does a clerical error which overstates the value of something, customs won't let it be fixed and demands some monster duty or the destruction of the shipment, so the shipment gets destroyed. It was a big company this happened to, so chances are you paid a bit for it in the price of something you bought.
I can't tell you how many situations I've encountered in this space where a very attractive way to solve a problem involves destroying something that is brand new. Bring something in for value-add and re-export, decide you don't need all of it, destroy the rest because you can't store it under that customs program (oh, and you have to ask customs if they want to watch you destroy it too), etc.
The whole thing is an incredible mess. The rules are probably the result of somebody gaming the system, so they figure if you have to destroy your "mistakes" you won't be as inclined to make mistakes.
Oh, the fun thing is when you forget to stamp the outside of the box with some disclaimer and instead of just fixing it on arrival or sending somebody to the warehouse to apply stickers you have to have them shipped back to the originator so that stickers can be applied and have it sent back again. That gets really fun if the shipment is perishable.
There is a whole industry devoted to getting packages to where they're supposed to go. Don't even get started on how you figure out whether a given product with 300 parts from all over the globe qualifies as Made in Foo for the purpose of some kind of duty discount.
So, I write business requirements for a living, and I can say that they're almost impossible to get completely right on the first shot, especially when moving into a space where a company has little experience.
Now, companies certainly can do things that make the whole experience better or worse.
What you can't do is just ask the customer to sign off on requirements on day 1, deliver those requirements and a bill for $1M on day 180, and have a system anybody wants to use.
That's the whole reason that techniques like Agile/etc have sprung up. They help a business to gradually discover requirements while still having some kind of framework to ensure steady progress towards some kind of final goal.
While it is true that most projects fail due to poorly defined requirements, what isn't true is that getting the requirements right is something you can count on. The most you can do is manage risks so that your requirements aren't totally off-base, and be prepared to clean up the inevitable mistakes.
So, where would these forests be? All around us? Can you grow enough food to sustain a family for a year in a typical suburban back yard? The whole reason farming was created thousands of years ago is that it is far more productive in terms of yield/productivity/etc per acre of land consumed. Prior to automation a full 50% of the population was employed on farms, and I suspect that it would have taken almost 100% of the population to pick food off of random bushes/etc.
Almost all of civilization sprang up after the invention of agriculture. Most anthropologists I've heard suggest that this was the transformation that actually gave people time to do something other than survive.
It is a pretty hard-sell to suggest that this is workable.
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Aircraft safety is getting close to the point where pilots cause more problems than they resolve. If you made aircraft completely autonomous I'm not convinced that it would decrease the safety of flying at all. It would probably change the liability picture, however.
It is only a matter of time before cars are in the same position.
Oh, and it is ridiculous that the cockpit voice recorder only lasts two hours. They should make it illegal to access except by the NTSB/etc, and make it last the full flight duration. The only reason it is shorter is privacy concerns, which are legitimate, but those can be solved in better ways.
Besides disabling it on-ground, the concern is that anything on the main bus needs to be able to be powered off in case of an electrical problem. If that transmitter develops a short it could take out the entire bus, start a fire, etc. That's the concept at least - certainly there are workarounds.
To those who claim that glassholes are doing nothing wrong, try this little experiment: Go to your local Wal-Mart, when the parking lot is busy with people walking in and out, take out your digital camera, and walk through a busy part of the parking lot. Squat down behind each car, and take a close-up photo of the license plate. Make sure it is very clear what you are doing.
But that's the whole thing that gets me about people who are annoyed at Glass - this sort of thing happens all the time. People in the vehicle repossession industry routinely drive through parking lots logging EVERY SINGLE car's plates in the lot, along with GPS and timestamp. They then trade that data with others in the industry. They just aren't obvious about it.
Anybody can wear a camera that is fairly inconspicuous and capture everything going on.
People are just bothered by Glass because it is new, and it is actually noticeable. However, in reality it really isn't anything new. It will most likely fail because in the end it won't do anything useful because Google is afraid of being sued if it does.
In a few years facial recognition and geotagging will become more ubiquitous and all this info will become public. Then something like Glass will take off, since recordings of everything you do will already be plastered all over the internet already, and people won't perceive Glass as being harmful.
Society just hasn't adjusted to the total absence of privacy yet. They will - there is little choice in the matter.
Nothing. They just do it without the physical motions that would otherwise provide the visual cues to indicate what they're doing.
Yikes, chill out!
Anybody who wants to record everything you're doing is going to use a concealed camera, not one that is mounted on their face. It isn't even practical to do heavy recording on a Glass since the battery life won't handle it.
Besides - you're already being recorded day in and out by everybody and their uncle. It is only a matter of time before that stuff gets posted on the internet regularly...
Curious: If you were to point a bunch of satellites at any part of the open ocean and have dozens or hundreds of analysts pore over those images would they find exactly the type of "possible objects" that we are seeing in this situation?
Quite possible - I'm sure there is other junk on the water. The other issue is that there aren't exactly tons of satellites flying around, and when they're zoomed in sufficiently to actually see debris they can't image a very large area. Basically you can capture a long stripe of data which is only so wide but as long as you want it to be. If the image is only a half-mile wide, and the search area is 100 miles in every direction, then you need 200 passes to image it. Of course, nothing prevents debris from floating from an area you didn't check into an area you checked already, so you're basically just hoping to get lucky.
I'm not aware of any production military drones that have that kind of endurance/range. There are things like solar-powered prop drones that can stay aloft for a very long time, but they are slow, and I imagine that they go where the wind blows (winds aloft can be 50mph+, so a slow aircraft can't really maintain position).
Google suggests that the range of a predator is only 1100 miles. That wouldn't even be a round-trip to the search area.
Global hawk could do the job. However, I don't know how many of those are in the inventory and how busy they are elsewhere, or for that matter how operational they even are.
But yes, this would be the perfect mission for drones if you had enough of them. At least, they'd be useful for looking on the surface. If you want to use any kind of sonar then you'd need ships/subs.
A PLB would be handy if you actually got out of the plane though, which is really the only time you as a still-living individual will care about being located anyway.
By breakaway I mean an externally-located device designed to detach if the plane sinks and float on the surface.
There are other options as well - like a device that detects deceleration, rapid descent, or other abnormal conditions and transmits the plane's location. With satellite monitoring you don't really need that to even survive long - if a single ping makes it to a satellite that is enough to alert rescuers. For commercial aircraft the odd false alarm wouldn't cause any problems - those monitoring the device would check in with the appropriate ATC who would make contact with the aircraft if they aren't already in contact and see if all is well.
Of course, it would make just as much sense to have an always-on beacon. If they're really worried about electrical faults just give it a decent battery and isolate it, and put the access panel to replace the battery someplace convenient like right next to a door (on the outside of the plane).
Crafting is supposed to be a fun mechanic.
The problem is that modern games are too much loot-based, rendering crafting and player creativity useless.
That, and in most games there is nothing creative about crafting. Grind materials, put into formula, get predicted output, sell on market. It is just another form of grinding.
Now, something like Second Life (disclaimer - I've never played it) where you can actually model your own objects and write code that governs their behavior - that is creative. The problem is that it is hard to do something like that for a casual gamer. Something like Minecraft is going in that direction, and of course it is popular as a result.
Yup - that's basically the point though. If you want to carve out a niche, you need to actually make it a niche. Doing what everybody else is trying to do isn't finding a niche.
Final Fantasy jumped the sharks ages ago for me.
yes, with the state of the art in 2014, entire commercial jets can disappear without a trace and might never be found
Well, the ocean is a big place, and generally devoid of radar. The airliner almost certainly had ADS-B and that can be tracked by satellite (though I have no idea if there is coverage over the southern Indian Ocean). The problem is that when the crew deliberately turns it off or it fails, what are you going to do?
A breakaway ELT would make a lot of sense. Heck, you can buy them for personal use these days - not that it would do the passengers much good if the pilot were determined to commit suicide.
The ones and zeros that comprise your binaries were copied into "your" object files NOT from your source code but rather from Mr. Stallman's compiler and linker. Your binary files can, therefore, be viewed as very complex derivatives of HIS code, or at the very least as having been linked with thousands (millions?) of fragments of his GPL'd compiler and linker programs.
Sure, but if you build the AMD video drivers nothing but the symbol names and parameter types impact what ends up in the compiled binary. It need not even be built on a system running linux - the only thing the compiler needs access to is the kernel header files. That's just a big list of function prototypes, defines, data types, etc. It is entirely about interoperability as well - an area where courts have overridden copyright in the past (it is actually legal to stick a "NintendoTM" logo in a game made for the game boy using a copy of Nintendo's own code to do it, simply because they put code that checks for it in the loader and a judge felt that in doing so they surrendered their copyright and trademark rights).
So, if code only uses the linux headers, how is that different from using the POSIX signal constants or whatever?
I do agree that in the end it comes down to a what a court rules. I'm pro-GPL in general, but I really don't want to see court rulings that basically say that sticking symbol names in your binary creates a derivative work. Going down that route basically allows OS vendors to require a license just to write software for the OS. Frankly the game console vendors already go way to far in that area, though they generally accomplish it by technical means rather than legal means (mainly because courts have tended to rule against them).
And remember, this is comparing against a previous generation, lower end than needs be Intel chip.
Looking on Newegg I don't see much else at the arbitrary $120 price-point.
Of course, if I were actually buying an Intel chip I doubt I'd buy one at that price. That was basically my point - the Intel chips are much better when you get up there in price, but at the lower end the AMD chips are fairly competitive. In the current generation Intel has more of an edge - 10 years ago AMD was much better in this space.
Somebody else argued that with the right optimization AMD does much better than the benchmarks suggest. I don't have any data to support that one way or the other, but my main amd64 box is running linux with everything built -march=amdfam10, so if that is the case then I'm better off for it...
The FX-6300 is actually faster in multi-threaded cases, which isn't surprising since it has 6 cores vs 2. The single-threaded performance of the Intel processor is clearly better. So, I'd call that one a bit of a toss-up depending on needs.
The Intel chip definitely uses less power though - that is one thing I definitely don't care for in my Phenom II systems - heat management is a real problem.
The X community has said specifically that this sort of end-run around the GPL is strictly forbidden.
Ultimately, only a court can say what is or isn't forbidden. I don't buy the whole can't-link-to-GPL-code argument. If AMD isn't distributing the kernel, then the kernel's license is irrelevant. The fact that AMD's code references kernel symbols doesn't make it a derivative work, unless you buy into the SCO argument that things like #defines are copyrightable. I could see the argument that after the linker resolves the symbols you end up with a derivative work in RAM (maybe), but that image isn't distributed anywhere (certainly not by AMD).
As far as I'm aware no court has ruled on this either way. It would be interesting to see how this goes.
Hell, a 40$ APU from AMD beats anything Intel has to offer for almost twice as much, not to mention that even at that price the AMD has a decent GPU while the Intel has none at all.
This is why I think AMD tends to be represented more in the DIY arena. Companies like Dell don't want to sell you a $150 CPU+motherboard upgrade. They want to sell you a $1200 PC. If you're going to throw away your old case, PSU, video card, RAM, hard drive, DVD drive, etc - then you might as well spend an extra $200 on the CPU.
On the other hand, if you're only upgrading CPU+MB, and maybe RAM, then AMD makes a lot more sense. If my options are to spend $500 every 6 years on an Intel CPU+MB, or $150 every other year on an AMD CPU+MB, then I'll take the latter. I'll actually spend less money, and for most of the time I'll have a better system. Sure, the Intel system will outperform the AMD system in years 1-2, but the AMD system will outperform in years 3-6, and by a huge margin in the last two years. A CPU is a rapidly-depreciating asset, so it doesn't make a lot of sense to spend a lot of money going high-end - you're far better off buying something moderate and replacing it more often. Then Moore's Law will work for you, and not against you.
Lower power consumption in better CPUs. Why choose AMD?
The most recent generation of chips definitely has power issues, but it seems like you get a lot more bang for your buck with AMD. What can you get that is decent from Intel for $120? You can get a fairly decent chip from AMD for that.
Heck, some ISPs probably still distribute wireless APs that only support WEP.
Yes, but the point you guys need to come to terms with is that fossil fuels aren't the only source of energy production and transport, and it's becoming apparent that the harm outweighs the minor increases in fiscal cost of many other technologies.
Yup. Germany actually had a pretty sane policy until Fukushima, now they just import lots of gas from Russia. I wonder how that's working for them now?
Personally, I do believe in rehabilitation, but only for minor offenses, where someone goes "astray". As for things like rape, robbery and murder ... not so much.
Why?
And the problem is that there are always matters of degree. Walking into a mall and shooting 20 people is a different crime than killing somebody with your hands after they invaded your home and grappled and tried to strangle you. Shoplifting is a different crime than holding somebody up at gunpoint. Grabbing a woman off the street and raping her is a different crime than sleeping with your girlfriend without getting a signed consent form.
I think that rehabilitation MUST be a higher priority because doing anything else endangers the public unless the criminal is locked away for life. What good is sending somebody to prison for 10 years if they rape somebody else after they get out? Better to spend 3 years, or 30 years, rehabilitating them so that when they do get out the public is safe.
Justice isn't a code word for vengence...There's an argument to be made for execution, if someone is deemed beyond redemption, but to invent drugs to extend punishment is horrible.
Couldn't agree more. The problem in the US is that justice is almost entirely about vengeance. We don't care about recidivism - that's just another opportunity to get more vengeance.
It makes no sense at all to me. I actually have a conscience, so I find the way we treat prisoners simply unconscionable. However, for the sake of argument let's pretend that I'm just a purely self-interested sociopath. The way the US prison system is run is EXTREMELY expensive, and the high recidivism rate means that I'm going to pay over and over to lock up criminals.
Really the current state only makes sense if you're a sadist.
I think that people who have committed crimes should be rehabilitated. The conditions they are in when in rehabilitation should be driven by public safety concerns and effectiveness concerns. If somebody won't get themselves to rehab, then they need to be incarcerated. If somebody is likely to stab somebody before they're rehabilitated then they need to be incarcerated. If somebody isn't likely to cause much trouble and will reliably drive themselves to whether they're supposed to be, then just give them a tracking bracelet or something - they might not even need house arrest.
Duration of rehab should be whatever it takes. If after 30 years in prison somebody is still likely to rob a store, then keep them there. If after two years somebody is unlikely to kill somebody again, release them. The "punishment" SHOULDN'T fit the crime - the rehabilitation should fit the criminal. If somebody got drunk and killed somebody, then they're not a risk for walking into a mall and shooting somebody - but they certainly should be banned from bars or buying alcohol until they're rehabilitated. Their crime might be murder, but they shouldn't be treated in the same way as some guy who snapped and shot somebody in a mall. They don't have the same risks of recidivism.
And get rid of criminal records entirely following rehabilitation. If somebody isn't safe to let out on the streets, then don't let him out on the streets. If somebody is safe to be on their own, then why brand them for life so that they can never re-integrate into society.
Did Fluke actually request this? Or did Customs do this of their own volition?
If it's the latter, Fluke should step up and allow them to make a one time exception for this shipment. It would generate considerably goodwill for the company and show that they're not bullies keeping the little guy down.
Given my limited knowledge of US Customs, it seems almost certain to be their own rules, and I'd be surprised if a conference call with the CEO of Fluke and President Obama would get that shipment through the border.
The US has fairly complex customs compared to most nations, but this kind of nonsense is by no means limited to the US. In most countries the silly rules are protectionist. In the US the crazy rules are more like what you run into trying to edit an article on Wikipedia.
I can't tell you how many times I've run into the term "or destroy the shipment" in coming to understand the rules in this space. I've heard of Fortune 500 companies begging with inspectors to try to find ways around crazy rules and destroying shipments much more valuable than $30k. I can only imagine what it is like for a small company that doesn't have 30 people doing nothing but dealing with customs full-time.
It isn't so much corruption as bureaucracy here. Rule says export or destroy, so that's what we're going to do.
I've been introduced to this topic recently and the way customs agencies work is a real eye-opener. I know of VERY expensive shipments being destroyed over paperwork disputes/errors/etc. Somebody does a clerical error which overstates the value of something, customs won't let it be fixed and demands some monster duty or the destruction of the shipment, so the shipment gets destroyed. It was a big company this happened to, so chances are you paid a bit for it in the price of something you bought.
I can't tell you how many situations I've encountered in this space where a very attractive way to solve a problem involves destroying something that is brand new. Bring something in for value-add and re-export, decide you don't need all of it, destroy the rest because you can't store it under that customs program (oh, and you have to ask customs if they want to watch you destroy it too), etc.
The whole thing is an incredible mess. The rules are probably the result of somebody gaming the system, so they figure if you have to destroy your "mistakes" you won't be as inclined to make mistakes.
Oh, the fun thing is when you forget to stamp the outside of the box with some disclaimer and instead of just fixing it on arrival or sending somebody to the warehouse to apply stickers you have to have them shipped back to the originator so that stickers can be applied and have it sent back again. That gets really fun if the shipment is perishable.
There is a whole industry devoted to getting packages to where they're supposed to go. Don't even get started on how you figure out whether a given product with 300 parts from all over the globe qualifies as Made in Foo for the purpose of some kind of duty discount.
Problem number three - the customer sometimes doesn't know what they want.
Rule one - the customer NEVER knows what they want. I don't work on government contracts, but it is certainly true in private industry.
They wouldn't call it requirements "elicitation" if it were just a matter of writing them down...
So, I write business requirements for a living, and I can say that they're almost impossible to get completely right on the first shot, especially when moving into a space where a company has little experience.
Now, companies certainly can do things that make the whole experience better or worse.
What you can't do is just ask the customer to sign off on requirements on day 1, deliver those requirements and a bill for $1M on day 180, and have a system anybody wants to use.
That's the whole reason that techniques like Agile/etc have sprung up. They help a business to gradually discover requirements while still having some kind of framework to ensure steady progress towards some kind of final goal.
While it is true that most projects fail due to poorly defined requirements, what isn't true is that getting the requirements right is something you can count on. The most you can do is manage risks so that your requirements aren't totally off-base, and be prepared to clean up the inevitable mistakes.
So, where would these forests be? All around us? Can you grow enough food to sustain a family for a year in a typical suburban back yard? The whole reason farming was created thousands of years ago is that it is far more productive in terms of yield/productivity/etc per acre of land consumed. Prior to automation a full 50% of the population was employed on farms, and I suspect that it would have taken almost 100% of the population to pick food off of random bushes/etc.
Almost all of civilization sprang up after the invention of agriculture. Most anthropologists I've heard suggest that this was the transformation that actually gave people time to do something other than survive.
It is a pretty hard-sell to suggest that this is workable.