Furthermore where was your activism, where was your concern, where was your humanity back in 1988 or so, when he did kill all those kurds.
I, personally, was kinda busy being 8 years old.
But now, in 2003, your REALLY concerned about how he treats his people, your REALLY concerned about how evil he is. Please give it a rest.
Oh, like european countries don't have any black marks on their histories. Wouldn't the most sensible thing for everyone to do is to try and do the best the could, today, to improve the current world situation, even if mistakes were made in the past? As young as I was, I though we were stupid to leave Saddam in power after the Gulf War. Should we never fix our mistakes?
You're missing my point. Yeah things like this have been made to work under controlled conditions, but that doesn't mean they're anywhere close to ready for the prime time.
Sure you can write software that tries to follow a line, but will it be safe?
The point is this safety technology is not safe. I never claimed they didn't do what they said, I'm just trying to bring some sense to this discussion. This tech, as developed, should not be used in the real world. I think it would be great to have something like this that beeps, but allowing it to hit the brakes is crazy. The safety margin is not there, and I think the concept itself is flawed.
As for driving on the snow, the last thing you want is for something to unexpectedly slam on the brakes, period. ABS and traction control might help, but having your vehicle do sudden, unexpected things if definately bad. Consider you're driving on ice:
You're going around a corner, on the edge of loosing traction (maybe you didn't see the ice), suddenly this system kicks in, your wheels start skid and you're in the ditch, even with abs. ABS and traction control can be helpful, but they also behave in very predictible ways, they make sense. I know they exist, and I think they're decent ideas. Did you really think I've never heard of ABS?
Not every idea is a good one. Some are obviously bad, and some have to be examined more closely. Think about this one more.
As smart as you think you are, please consider the likelyhood that the people designing these things might understand the issues better than you.
Dumbass. Yeah, I must be stupid for actually understanding the limits of today's technology. You clearly don't. I'm only sitting in an office with 3 other engineers at a company whose business is sensors and radar. It's not pessimism, it's realism. Would you believe me if it told you I could build a warp drive? To someone who actually understands the issue, they realize that any system like this being used on a real road is a long ways away.
If you are driving in conditions that light braking will send your car out of control, and the car is unable to detect and respond to this through other mechanisms (steering control, skid control, ABS, whatever), you are already fucked.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand how to drive in the snow.
The radar profile of a bird (size, speed, likelyhood of collision) is probably significantly different than a large obstacle or a car. I wouldn't be surprised if a bird was ignored entirely. Even if it wasn't, there would be a tiny fraction of a second where the computer would like to see you slow down a bit. That might not be enough time for it to actually act on that. *shrug*
Way to not have any idea what you're talking about. Do you really think this car has a radar capable of determining positions in 3-d? Or even 2-d? The only info this system would have, would be the range, and amplitude of the reflection. That's it.
As I posted in another message:
Simply put, the computer does not have enough information to make reasonable decisions, even if the software was smart enough to. Try to put yourself in the computers shoes:
All of a sudden you're in the driver's seat of a car. It's a dark and rainy night. Your headlights don't work, so you don't know anything but where other cars are. You can't hear anything. All your windows are painted black. You have 6" tube that you use to see forwards. Every car's brake lights and turn signals don't work, so you have to wait until you can see the cars slowing down or heading towards you, before you know that they are. All the lights on the cars are the same color, so you have a really tough time telling the front from the back.
Honda engineers discover that an oncoming car in a right curve that appears out of "nowhere" (from around the side of the mountain" causes the device to activate unnecissarily. Solution? There are lots of possible solutions. Is the vehicle approaching you at greater than your own speed? If so, it's oncoming traffic, and automatic braking is an inappropriate response (though a warning light/buzzer -may- be.)
Still would workn't. The problem is much more diffcult than you think. What if that oncoming traffic is actually in the wrong lane, head right for you?
Simply put, the computer does not have enough information to make reasonable decisions, even if the software was smart enough to. Try to put yourself in the computers shoes:
All of a sudden you're in the driver's seat of a car. It's a dark and rainy night. Your headlights don't work, so you don't know anything but where other cars are. You can't hear anything. All your windows are painted black. You have 6" tube that you use to see forwards. Every car's brake lights and turn signals don't work, so you have to wait until you can see the cars slowing down or heading towards you, before you know that they are. All the lights on the cars are the same color, so you have a really tough time telling the front from the back.
The System just does not have enough information to make good decisions. Can you see just how pooly informed a computer would be of the state of the world around you now?
The system should beep loud if it thinks there's trouble. That's it. It's nowhere near good enough to make inportant decisions like applying the brakes.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't expect stringent and rigorous development and testing of such systems, but I find it a bit disingenuous to question the ability of such a system to work successfully because one can imagine scenarios where it wouldn't work.
What? That's exactly why one should question the ability of any system to work. There are reasons cars don't decide when to turn, go and stop on their own: Those decisions are really hard.
You airbag example just doesn't even compare. An airbag system is really simple: "Is the car deccelerating faster than it ever could on it's own (or being crushed), if so set off the air bag." Heck, if you wanted to be really ghetto, you could just put a switch on the bumper and wire it right to the airbag. No computer necessary.
>>I just don't think that we're far enough along to have the car make judgements
>Couldn't we say this about ANY technology?
No. I'm perfectly happy to let a computer decide how long to microwave popcorn for. Yeah, it may mess up, but at least I won't get killed.
Letting a car automatically apply the brakes is a stupid idea. Computers are nowhere near developed enough to drive a car. Period.
There are probably hundred of things wrong with this idea:
What about snow, mud, gravel (insert low traction condition here)?
What if you're being tailgated?
What if you're across from someone in a left turn lane?
What if you're speeding up to try an avoid an accident?
What if the system malfunctions?
What if a bird flys in front of your car?
What if you're making a sharp turn, and any braking will cause you to loose control?
This tecnology should be developed, but it should be up to the user to properly operate operate the car. Technology like this should be limited to making a lound "crash alert" noise. The driver of the vehicle should decide what to do. Computers today do not have the level of situational awareness necessary to operate a vehicle in a high traffic environment.
There are lots of people making analogies to ABS, power steeering, etc. To all those analogies, I say bullshit. ABS, power steering, power assited brakes all are under user control. The last thing someone needs to worry about in a crash avoidance situation is the car doing this they didn't specfically ask it to do. In those situations, you need to predict where you and everyone else around you is headed and when. Any sudden changes will completely trash your "survival plan".
I would love to see a car that really could drive itself, but let's be realistic about the current state of AI. Oh, and when I say drive itself i mean: aviod deer about to run out into the road, derbis in the road, not driving off a boat ramp, avioding accidents, and a bunch of other things that current self-driving cars just can't do.
Oh, and BTW, I work at radar/senors company. Without some kind of phased-array antenna hi-frequency radar setup (which would cost as much as the car itself) this thing is simply not going to be able to get an accurate picture of what's in front of you.
Picture this:
You're driving down the road. There's a sharp turn ahead. You are very close to it but have not yet started to turn. There is a big metal sign in front of you. You're just starting to turn you wheels when all of a sudden this system applies your brakes. The combined force of the turn and the braking is too much for your tires and you loose control of the vehicle (it spins out). You end up and the other lane in a head-on with a semi that was coming around the corner.
You're argument might hold up if we were comparing finding 15,000 gallons of Anthrax with finding 15,000 gallons of Saddam.
Actually, I wouldn't be suprised if wherever Saddam is hiding right now occupies at least 15,000 gallons worth of physical space. So his argument is pretty valid. I honestly believe that Iraq did have WMD. Why? We helped Saddam get them. You know, back in the days when he got they key to Detroit(I think).
Regardless of your stance on the war, it's silly to pretend that Iraq never had any WMD. They've used chemical weapons before, that's an undisputable fact.
I don't agree with the way the Bush administartion has handled things, but I don't really care if we find WMD. Do we really have to find a nuke for people to concede that he was actively trying to build them? Only then should we act, once he has nuclear capability? Or should we wait until he actually uses one? Or should we wait until he takes over a few neigboring countries?
Saddam being in power was bad. Do we really need to find WMD to prove that?
Hydrogen is not a "Boondoggle", it's the most likely future energy storage mechanism we have.
Yes, it requires energy to produce. Here's my plan (hopefully they make it work for me:):
Make fusion a viable energy source
Make fuek cells work
Use fusion plant to break water into H2 and O2
Use this H2 to power cars
So far progess is moving along slowly, but all this looks possible. Fusion's around the break-even point right now, and we're making progress with fuel-cells as well. If I had my way, I'd love to see a "Manhattan Project" for alternative energy. Get a whole bunch of smart people together, and give them whatever they need to get this going ASAP.
Now OT: Drill ANWR? You dumbass! Do you have something against caribou? That's the only thing drilling ANWR would do is piss them off. The amount of oil that would be produced is insignificant compared to US annual usage. Even if you don't give a #@$% about the environment, you should be able to recognize that.
Of course, solar hurts the environment too. Yep, you heard me.
That's silly. A car with an emissions system still hurts the environment, but it's a heck of a lot better than one without. You're making a nonsense argument.
The Big 3 Auto Companies paid how much to get this propaganda started?
I don't think this is really a troll.
Who paid for this study? It's a legitmate question, and you're a moron if you don't ask it.
That said, the claims are ridiculous. Claiming 10 to 20% of the hydrogen is going to leak? Yeah right! Economics alone will dictate that this does not happen. Would you buy a car with a gas tank with no cap, so a significant portion of your fuel evaporated? Of course not, that fuel costs money. They even admit this in the study. They are deliberately extaggerating.
If this was a sensible study, they would be comparing the ozone damage currently caused by cars, to that which would be cause if they were run by hydrogen, and they would be using reasonable number for leakage.
Finally, what about oxygen leakage? They have to consider that too. The way I see things 100 years from now is:
water-> H2 + 2O2 ->Fusion reactor->Energy->Use getting much more H2 and 02.->use in cars
If X% of the hydrogen is going to leak, how much oxygen is? Will this mitigate the hydrogen leakage? Seems like it would, since they're going to be produced in perfect proportion to recombine into water.
Re:Where is my last generation Broadband?
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150 Mbit/s DSL.
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"Secondly, the government isn't stimulating this issue (and neither are the states), because the country has serious economic problems."
Yeah, like having decent infrastructure is somehow bad for the economy. [/sarcasm]
The gov't is acting in the best interests of local monopolies/campaign contributors, not the people.
that can only apply if you have READ the license in the first place. So it's dodgy.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If somene hands me a paper contract and I sign it, but don't read it, am I not bound by it? I doubt it.
SCO knowingly distributed their proprietary code with GPL'ed code there are three possibilities:
It can be argued that SCO did not accept the GPL, and was only comitting copyright infringement. If this was accepted, their code wouldn't immediately be GPL'ed, but the settlement could very well do so. Besides, it's pretty obvious that SCO knew the terms of the GPL, so I'm not sure that a judge is going to accept "We didn't really accept the contract that it looks like we did becuase we were actually just distributing the code illegally." It's obvious that the copies of the Linux kernel they distribute(d) were under the GPL, if you look at the copyright notices that they included. I don't think they can retract those notices.
It can be argued that SCO knowingly did this, and therefore accepted the terms of the GPL. Hey, the only copyright notice there is the GPL one. If you want to release your code under different terms, it would make sense to include those terms right?
It is decided that they are both infringing on copyright and violating the GPL. I see this as a pretty good possibility. If I had a paper contract with you, guaranteeing me certain penalties if you infringed on my copyright, I could reasonably expect both those penalties and those I could get suing you for copyright infringement.
Think of it this way:
I rent you a house.
The lease provides specific penalties for either party breaking it's terms
I later decide that I want to keep part of this house for myself.
I decide to say "Just kidding about the lease. I didn't really accept it, even though did everythign necessary to give the impression that I did. All you can do is sue me for fraud."
At this point you can sue me fraud, and for the penalties provided in the lease. I think you could win both lawsuits.
tar and gzip are seperate programs. You can always run them in the opposite order if you want. Or use bzip2 instead of gzip, or zip.
Grandparent said:
That may be the unix way, but it's not the efficient way.
"The UNIX way" is to have lots of small programs that do one job well. This way you have tons of flexibility. You can have the files compressed before concatenating them, or after, or never, your choice. You can provide a md5sum/GPGsig for the whole archive, for each file,or not at all.
Usually it doesn't matter, so I just use foo.tar.gz. As another poster has pointed out, it's actually more efficient, since you typically want ALL the files in the archive, and compressing them as one file, allows better compression with groups of many similar files.
I don't know where you went to school, but most of my chem classes were equations, and we never did get to try the "crushing head with bowling ball" in physics. Head-crushing was kind of frowned upon, both during and outside of school.
Man you lost out. My chem prof used to blow something up ever friday. It was great! Somehow he managed to make it relevant to the lesson every week too.
It kept attendence up too.
I had a Psion 5MX (uses a version of the Symbian OS) for about 5 years. It went about 3 years without crashing and I used it every day. Other people have reported similar or better experiences with the version of the Symbian OS built into phones.
Seems to me that this is cause to suggest that Symbian phone is likely to be more stable than an MS based phone.
What idiot modded this as a troll. As an ex Psion Revo+ owner, I have to say that the EPOC OS (now known as Symbian) is the most stable, polished OS I have ever used. I can't remember having to reboot my Psion, EVER.
Saying that MS phones crash and Symbian phones crash is like saying "Windows 98 crashes and Solaris crashes". Yeah the statement may be true, but it's deliberately misleading. In reality, the two products aren't even in the same league as far as stability goes.
Example of people discussing Symbian's reliability:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=42924&threshol d=-1&commentsort=0&tid=100&mode=thread&pid=4501603
Why do people assume it's either one or the other? This is not theory XOR practicality here, folks. What they're doing is combining the two, teaching the theory but placing it in a practical framework so students understand what they're learning AND why. How can this possibly be a bad thing? The way it's done now is like teaching CS without having students write programs, or teaching chemistry without doing lab experiments... it's ridiculous!
I completely agree, and having graduated as an EE less than a month ago I can back up everything he's saying. While there were some labs, many seemed an afterthought. There just wasn't as much though put into them as went into the rest of the course.
While an understanding of design for manufacturability is required for good design engineers, laboratory skills is not.
Yes they are. Ever hear the word "prototype" before?
After all almost nothing is visible unless you use an instrument.
Right, so students need to know how to use these instruments. This falls under "laboratory skills".
Approaching design with a technician mindset is in my opinion the wrong way.
Just because someone knows which end of a soldering iron to hold, doesn't mean they don't know anything else. Besides you said: "understanding of design for manufacturability is required for good design engineers".
Well, this sounds great and all for the production of folks with "practical" knowledge, but I would worry that the theory is taking a back seat. I mean this kinda sounds like the high school electronics courses I took where we would build electronic circuit boards without really knowing the theory.
As a recent (less than 1 month ago) EE grad from a top school, I have to say that I think this desperately needed.
Right now it is possible to get a degree in EE without ever having picked up a soldering iron. Theory is important, but we're not talking about some shitty school here. Of course MIT is going to teach their students the theory.
Let me give you some examples here:
My last semester I was taking EE488: RF Circuits. Our final project was to build a DDS. Out of the four students in my group, I was the only one with any clue how to use a spectrum analyzer. Out of that entire lab section, our group was the only one to use the spectrum analyzer, despite a project requirement that you couldn't proove you met, unless you did (or perhaps did something really creative).
I was also finishing up a project for a VLSI course. Our chips had come back from the foundry, and it was now time to test them. The prof. brought some logic analyzers in to the lab, and we had some Altera eval. boards we could use to produce whatever signals we needed. Better than 90% of the students had no idea how to use a logic analyzer, and no instruction was provided.
I also did an independent study last semester. I was designing a new development board for the microcontrollers class. It's a very simple board. The professor and I had originally batted around the idea of having the students build it themselves. No go. It would be a nightmare. I spent time that semester asking other students if they though they or their fellow students could handle it and every single one said no. Even if we taught everyone how to solder, there would still be an issue with them fixing any mistakes them made. It all comes down to this: most students don't have much experience prototyping their designs.
IMHO, to be a real engineer, you need to understand both the theory, AND how to use it.
There is a huge gap between paper and reality. There are all kinds of important details that need to be worked out when you're actually building something. Grads should have experience working out those details. Without it, they can be well suited to be researchers and academics, but not designers of things that someone is going to produce 100,000 of.
There is a reason that the US higher ed system is commonly accepted as one of the best in the world and that is that many schools concentrate on theory allowing the students to innovate after they graduate.
If they don't know how to apply this theory, all they're going to be able to do is create innovative new theory. A well-educated engineer should have an ample knowledge of the theory, AND how to use it is real-world applications.
Capitalism work great for some things, but is terrible for others.
Capitalism is terrible in monoply situations. If you bothered to learn some economics, you would learn about the concept of "monopoly price".
These companies own sole rights to run the fiber. How many set of telephone poles go by your house? Exactly. Capitalism (in the sense that you're talking about) is a terrible thing is this situation, because even if someone else is willing to do it better, cheaper, they can't.
Cconsider this situation:
Telco A owns all the rights to run fiber throughout a city. They decide to run fiber to 15% of the city, as this maximizes their profits. They charge the monopoly price. No one else can run fiber, since they own all the rights.
Now what if they had to lease their fiber?
Several things happen:
They can no longer charge the monopoly price. This is bad for them and good for consumers.
They are allowed to charge for the use of their fiber. This allows them to make a reasonable profit, and maintains the incentive to run fiber.
They have an incentive to run fiber to places others are willing to provide service to, but they aren't.
Under this situation, the only time fiber isn't run is when no one is willing to lease enough of it to pay the cost of its maintenence. Under your idea of glorious capitalism, fiber isn't run anywhere the market will not support the cost or real fiber maintence plus service at a monopoly price.
Thus more fiber gets run more places.
Q: Why doesn't the telco just lease the fiber, even if they aren't forced to?
A: Because it destroys their ability to charge the monopoly price. If they lease it at a competitive price, their monopoly price will be undercut. If they lease it at a price which will not allow anyone to undercut their monopoly, not one will lease it from them, since they wouldn't be able to make money doing so.
Re:The Zaurus software is so-so? No, it's rubbish.
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YOPY Arrives
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Psion/Epoc based machines (Series 5, Revo) are *faster*, have all of the above functionality with a significantly lower hardware profile (8Mb RAM, 18MHz cpu).
You're really almost comparing apples to oranges here. I used to own a Psion Revo+, and now I have a Zaurus 5500, so I know exactly what I'm talking about. The EPOC OS is probably the most polished, stable OS I've ever used. The pim apps were great. That said, the Psions you're taling about never had anything close to the functionality of the Z.
The Z can handle real Word and Excel files, the Psions can not. They must be converted.
The Psions simply do not have the CPU power to play MP3s, let alone DIVX movies.
There is a ROM update for the Z which fixes some of the things you're talking about (like the documents tab). You are clearly using the older ROM version.
On top of all this... I have to back it up to MMC card twice per day because it's not reliable. This is probably the double reset bug. Install the safeboot ipk. Now that I've done so, I have yet to expecience data loss and it's been months.
The Z can simply do more, but its OS is nowhere near as polished.
To be USB v1.1 compliant, a host controller must be able to source 5V 500mA minmum. If your device doesn't do that, it may still work with some things, but it won't meet the spec. so you can even print USB on the box.
I think there is a new USB mobile standard coming out that deals with this.
On a side note, the grandparent poster seems to be unaware that a CF slot is just a miniturized PCMCIA slot. You can get a CF->PCMCIA adapter, and then use a PCMCIA IDE controller card if you want. (Or a PCMCIA hard drive.) Even so, what the hell is the point? It would completely destroy the portability of the device. A 1GB CF card is only around $250 now anyways.
I wonder which of these thing they violated. It's possible that they didn't break any, and that someone rooted their firewall, and then the server itself, but it's much more likely to have been poor design.
No one reasonable is asking for the cops to stop chasing terrorists to do this, but we as a society prosecute any crime (even stupid ones, to even stupider lengths) as a principle.
Except that this is now defined as "cyberterrorism". Reasonable people no longer run things, and the penalties levied against whatever 15 year old did this could very well run his life.
If the punishment does not fit the crime, should it be carried out anyways?
You had to disarm a bomb within a time limit using a variety of tools corresponding to a certain type of wire.Holy damn.
I am so sick of the "Cut the red wire....no the blue!" shit. As if there were some sort of international terrorist wire color code. It would be one thing if the bombs were military, where they might have seen schematics, but it's always a home-made bomb. There's no way for them to have any idea what to do based on wire color alone.
I'm not ripping on you, but that shit really pisses me off. It's just lame. I would love to see a scene in a movie where the terrorist used the same color wire for everything.
"Cut the black wire"
"They're all black"
"Oh shit!"
[explosion]
The Martix Reloaded had the first realist portrayal of hacking in a very long time. Maybe we'll see an end to all this wire color silliness, but I doubt it.
[/rant]
"Afghanistan is now a mess, sliding backwards towards feudalism worse than before the Taliban"
Do you honestly expect me to believe that people in Afghanistan were better off under the Taliban than they are now?
"not to mention the privacy and civil rights degrading laws which have been passed in the US.
True, the have been some really lousy laws passed in the US lately, but guess what? If the people in Iraq ended up living under all current US laws (even the shitty ones), they would still be about one metric fuckload better off than they were two years ago.
Neither Iraq, nor Afghanistan is going to become a Utopia overnight, no matter what anyone does. These things take time. And I'm not saying this to justify some of the shitty things the US has done. I'm just saying you have to use rational metrics when you're comparing things. The US isn't perfect, but there sure are a lot of people who want to move here.
Oh, BTW, I not only know what "sovereignty" means, but can spell it. Just saying sovereignty argues nothing, it's like saying diplomacy. The real issue is how far can/should each go. Go talk it over with your poly sci friend.
souvereignity
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Furthermore where was your activism, where was your concern, where was your humanity back in 1988 or so, when he did kill all those kurds.
I, personally, was kinda busy being 8 years old.
But now, in 2003, your REALLY concerned about how he treats his people, your REALLY concerned about how evil he is. Please give it a rest.
Oh, like european countries don't have any black marks on their histories. Wouldn't the most sensible thing for everyone to do is to try and do the best the could, today, to improve the current world situation, even if mistakes were made in the past? As young as I was, I though we were stupid to leave Saddam in power after the Gulf War. Should we never fix our mistakes?
You're missing my point. Yeah things like this have been made to work under controlled conditions, but that doesn't mean they're anywhere close to ready for the prime time.
Sure you can write software that tries to follow a line, but will it be safe?
The point is this safety technology is not safe. I never claimed they didn't do what they said, I'm just trying to bring some sense to this discussion. This tech, as developed, should not be used in the real world. I think it would be great to have something like this that beeps, but allowing it to hit the brakes is crazy. The safety margin is not there, and I think the concept itself is flawed.
As for driving on the snow, the last thing you want is for something to unexpectedly slam on the brakes, period. ABS and traction control might help, but having your vehicle do sudden, unexpected things if definately bad. Consider you're driving on ice:
You're going around a corner, on the edge of loosing traction (maybe you didn't see the ice), suddenly this system kicks in, your wheels start skid and you're in the ditch, even with abs. ABS and traction control can be helpful, but they also behave in very predictible ways, they make sense. I know they exist, and I think they're decent ideas. Did you really think I've never heard of ABS?
Not every idea is a good one. Some are obviously bad, and some have to be examined more closely. Think about this one more.
As smart as you think you are, please consider the likelyhood that the people designing these things might understand the issues better than you.
Dumbass. Yeah, I must be stupid for actually understanding the limits of today's technology. You clearly don't. I'm only sitting in an office with 3 other engineers at a company whose business is sensors and radar. It's not pessimism, it's realism. Would you believe me if it told you I could build a warp drive? To someone who actually understands the issue, they realize that any system like this being used on a real road is a long ways away.
If you are driving in conditions that light braking will send your car out of control, and the car is unable to detect and respond to this through other mechanisms (steering control, skid control, ABS, whatever), you are already fucked.
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand how to drive in the snow.
The radar profile of a bird (size, speed, likelyhood of collision) is probably significantly different than a large obstacle or a car. I wouldn't be surprised if a bird was ignored entirely. Even if it wasn't, there would be a tiny fraction of a second where the computer would like to see you slow down a bit. That might not be enough time for it to actually act on that. *shrug*
Way to not have any idea what you're talking about. Do you really think this car has a radar capable of determining positions in 3-d? Or even 2-d? The only info this system would have, would be the range, and amplitude of the reflection. That's it.
As I posted in another message:
Simply put, the computer does not have enough information to make reasonable decisions, even if the software was smart enough to. Try to put yourself in the computers shoes:
All of a sudden you're in the driver's seat of a car. It's a dark and rainy night. Your headlights don't work, so you don't know anything but where other cars are. You can't hear anything. All your windows are painted black. You have 6" tube that you use to see forwards. Every car's brake lights and turn signals don't work, so you have to wait until you can see the cars slowing down or heading towards you, before you know that they are. All the lights on the cars are the same color, so you have a really tough time telling the front from the back.
Honda engineers discover that an oncoming car in a right curve that appears out of "nowhere" (from around the side of the mountain" causes the device to activate unnecissarily. Solution? There are lots of possible solutions. Is the vehicle approaching you at greater than your own speed? If so, it's oncoming traffic, and automatic braking is an inappropriate response (though a warning light/buzzer -may- be.)
Still would workn't. The problem is much more diffcult than you think. What if that oncoming traffic is actually in the wrong lane, head right for you?
Simply put, the computer does not have enough information to make reasonable decisions, even if the software was smart enough to. Try to put yourself in the computers shoes:
All of a sudden you're in the driver's seat of a car. It's a dark and rainy night. Your headlights don't work, so you don't know anything but where other cars are. You can't hear anything. All your windows are painted black. You have 6" tube that you use to see forwards. Every car's brake lights and turn signals don't work, so you have to wait until you can see the cars slowing down or heading towards you, before you know that they are. All the lights on the cars are the same color, so you have a really tough time telling the front from the back.
The System just does not have enough information to make good decisions. Can you see just how pooly informed a computer would be of the state of the world around you now?
The system should beep loud if it thinks there's trouble. That's it. It's nowhere near good enough to make inportant decisions like applying the brakes.
I'm not saying that we shouldn't expect stringent and rigorous development and testing of such systems, but I find it a bit disingenuous to question the ability of such a system to work successfully because one can imagine scenarios where it wouldn't work.
What? That's exactly why one should question the ability of any system to work. There are reasons cars don't decide when to turn, go and stop on their own: Those decisions are really hard.
You airbag example just doesn't even compare. An airbag system is really simple: "Is the car deccelerating faster than it ever could on it's own (or being crushed), if so set off the air bag." Heck, if you wanted to be really ghetto, you could just put a switch on the bumper and wire it right to the airbag. No computer necessary.
>Couldn't we say this about ANY technology?
No. I'm perfectly happy to let a computer decide how long to microwave popcorn for. Yeah, it may mess up, but at least I won't get killed.
Letting a car automatically apply the brakes is a stupid idea. Computers are nowhere near developed enough to drive a car. Period.
There are probably hundred of things wrong with this idea:
This tecnology should be developed, but it should be up to the user to properly operate operate the car. Technology like this should be limited to making a lound "crash alert" noise. The driver of the vehicle should decide what to do. Computers today do not have the level of situational awareness necessary to operate a vehicle in a high traffic environment.
There are lots of people making analogies to ABS, power steeering, etc. To all those analogies, I say bullshit. ABS, power steering, power assited brakes all are under user control. The last thing someone needs to worry about in a crash avoidance situation is the car doing this they didn't specfically ask it to do. In those situations, you need to predict where you and everyone else around you is headed and when. Any sudden changes will completely trash your "survival plan".
I would love to see a car that really could drive itself, but let's be realistic about the current state of AI. Oh, and when I say drive itself i mean: aviod deer about to run out into the road, derbis in the road, not driving off a boat ramp, avioding accidents, and a bunch of other things that current self-driving cars just can't do.
Oh, and BTW, I work at radar/senors company. Without some kind of phased-array antenna hi-frequency radar setup (which would cost as much as the car itself) this thing is simply not going to be able to get an accurate picture of what's in front of you.
Picture this:
You're driving down the road. There's a sharp turn ahead. You are very close to it but have not yet started to turn. There is a big metal sign in front of you. You're just starting to turn you wheels when all of a sudden this system applies your brakes. The combined force of the turn and the braking is too much for your tires and you loose control of the vehicle (it spins out). You end up and the other lane in a head-on with a semi that was coming around the corner.
You're argument might hold up if we were comparing finding 15,000 gallons of Anthrax with finding 15,000 gallons of Saddam.
Actually, I wouldn't be suprised if wherever Saddam is hiding right now occupies at least 15,000 gallons worth of physical space. So his argument is pretty valid. I honestly believe that Iraq did have WMD. Why? We helped Saddam get them. You know, back in the days when he got they key to Detroit(I think).
Regardless of your stance on the war, it's silly to pretend that Iraq never had any WMD. They've used chemical weapons before, that's an undisputable fact.
I don't agree with the way the Bush administartion has handled things, but I don't really care if we find WMD. Do we really have to find a nuke for people to concede that he was actively trying to build them? Only then should we act, once he has nuclear capability? Or should we wait until he actually uses one? Or should we wait until he takes over a few neigboring countries?
Saddam being in power was bad. Do we really need to find WMD to prove that?
Yes, it requires energy to produce. Here's my plan (hopefully they make it work for me:):
- Make fusion a viable energy source
- Make fuek cells work
- Use fusion plant to break water into H2 and O2
- Use this H2 to power cars
So far progess is moving along slowly, but all this looks possible. Fusion's around the break-even point right now, and we're making progress with fuel-cells as well. If I had my way, I'd love to see a "Manhattan Project" for alternative energy. Get a whole bunch of smart people together, and give them whatever they need to get this going ASAP.Now OT: Drill ANWR? You dumbass! Do you have something against caribou? That's the only thing drilling ANWR would do is piss them off. The amount of oil that would be produced is insignificant compared to US annual usage. Even if you don't give a #@$% about the environment, you should be able to recognize that.
Of course, solar hurts the environment too. Yep, you heard me.
That's silly. A car with an emissions system still hurts the environment, but it's a heck of a lot better than one without. You're making a nonsense argument.
The Big 3 Auto Companies paid how much to get this propaganda started?
I don't think this is really a troll.
Who paid for this study? It's a legitmate question, and you're a moron if you don't ask it.
That said, the claims are ridiculous. Claiming 10 to 20% of the hydrogen is going to leak? Yeah right! Economics alone will dictate that this does not happen. Would you buy a car with a gas tank with no cap, so a significant portion of your fuel evaporated? Of course not, that fuel costs money. They even admit this in the study. They are deliberately extaggerating.
If this was a sensible study, they would be comparing the ozone damage currently caused by cars, to that which would be cause if they were run by hydrogen, and they would be using reasonable number for leakage.
Finally, what about oxygen leakage? They have to consider that too. The way I see things 100 years from now is:
water-> H2 + 2O2 ->Fusion reactor->Energy->Use getting much more H2 and 02.->use in cars
If X% of the hydrogen is going to leak, how much oxygen is? Will this mitigate the hydrogen leakage? Seems like it would, since they're going to be produced in perfect proportion to recombine into water.
"Secondly, the government isn't stimulating this issue (and neither are the states), because the country has serious economic problems."
Yeah, like having decent infrastructure is somehow bad for the economy. [/sarcasm]
The gov't is acting in the best interests of local monopolies/campaign contributors, not the people.
I wouldn't be so sure about that. If somene hands me a paper contract and I sign it, but don't read it, am I not bound by it? I doubt it.
SCO knowingly distributed their proprietary code with GPL'ed code there are three possibilities:
Think of it this way:
I rent you a house.
The lease provides specific penalties for either party breaking it's terms
I later decide that I want to keep part of this house for myself.
I decide to say "Just kidding about the lease. I didn't really accept it, even though did everythign necessary to give the impression that I did. All you can do is sue me for fraud."
At this point you can sue me fraud, and for the penalties provided in the lease. I think you could win both lawsuits.
Yeah, that's what the .gz.tar format is for.
It's not only funny, but true.
tar and gzip are seperate programs. You can always run them in the opposite order if you want. Or use bzip2 instead of gzip, or zip.
Grandparent said:
That may be the unix way, but it's not the efficient way.
"The UNIX way" is to have lots of small programs that do one job well. This way you have tons of flexibility. You can have the files compressed before concatenating them, or after, or never, your choice. You can provide a md5sum/GPGsig for the whole archive, for each file,or not at all.
Usually it doesn't matter, so I just use foo.tar.gz. As another poster has pointed out, it's actually more efficient, since you typically want ALL the files in the archive, and compressing them as one file, allows better compression with groups of many similar files.
I don't know where you went to school, but most of my chem classes were equations, and we never did get to try the "crushing head with bowling ball" in physics. Head-crushing was kind of frowned upon, both during and outside of school.
Man you lost out. My chem prof used to blow something up ever friday. It was great! Somehow he managed to make it relevant to the lesson every week too.
It kept attendence up too.
"I will show you the offending code IN ONE HOUR"
-SCO's new (imaginary) press spokesman
I had a Psion 5MX (uses a version of the Symbian OS) for about 5 years. It went about 3 years without crashing and I used it every day. Other people have reported similar or better experiences with the version of the Symbian OS built into phones. Seems to me that this is cause to suggest that Symbian phone is likely to be more stable than an MS based phone.
l d=-1&commentsort=0&tid=100&mode=thread&pid=4501603
What idiot modded this as a troll. As an ex Psion Revo+ owner, I have to say that the EPOC OS (now known as Symbian) is the most stable, polished OS I have ever used. I can't remember having to reboot my Psion, EVER.
Saying that MS phones crash and Symbian phones crash is like saying "Windows 98 crashes and Solaris crashes". Yeah the statement may be true, but it's deliberately misleading. In reality, the two products aren't even in the same league as far as stability goes.
Example of people discussing Symbian's reliability:
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=42924&thresho
Why do people assume it's either one or the other? This is not theory XOR practicality here, folks. What they're doing is combining the two, teaching the theory but placing it in a practical framework so students understand what they're learning AND why. How can this possibly be a bad thing? The way it's done now is like teaching CS without having students write programs, or teaching chemistry without doing lab experiments... it's ridiculous!
I completely agree, and having graduated as an EE less than a month ago I can back up everything he's saying. While there were some labs, many seemed an afterthought. There just wasn't as much though put into them as went into the rest of the course.
While an understanding of design for manufacturability is required for good design engineers, laboratory skills is not.
Yes they are. Ever hear the word "prototype" before?
After all almost nothing is visible unless you use an instrument.
Right, so students need to know how to use these instruments. This falls under "laboratory skills".
Approaching design with a technician mindset is in my opinion the wrong way.
Just because someone knows which end of a soldering iron to hold, doesn't mean they don't know anything else. Besides you said: "understanding of design for manufacturability is required for good design engineers".
As a recent (less than 1 month ago) EE grad from a top school, I have to say that I think this desperately needed.
Right now it is possible to get a degree in EE without ever having picked up a soldering iron. Theory is important, but we're not talking about some shitty school here. Of course MIT is going to teach their students the theory.
Let me give you some examples here:
IMHO, to be a real engineer, you need to understand both the theory, AND how to use it.
There is a huge gap between paper and reality. There are all kinds of important details that need to be worked out when you're actually building something. Grads should have experience working out those details. Without it, they can be well suited to be researchers and academics, but not designers of things that someone is going to produce 100,000 of.
There is a reason that the US higher ed system is commonly accepted as one of the best in the world and that is that many schools concentrate on theory allowing the students to innovate after they graduate.
If they don't know how to apply this theory, all they're going to be able to do is create innovative new theory. A well-educated engineer should have an ample knowledge of the theory, AND how to use it is real-world applications.
Uhh_Duh you don't get it.
Capitalism work great for some things, but is terrible for others.
Capitalism is terrible in monoply situations. If you bothered to learn some economics, you would learn about the concept of "monopoly price".
These companies own sole rights to run the fiber. How many set of telephone poles go by your house? Exactly. Capitalism (in the sense that you're talking about) is a terrible thing is this situation, because even if someone else is willing to do it better, cheaper, they can't.
Cconsider this situation:
Telco A owns all the rights to run fiber throughout a city. They decide to run fiber to 15% of the city, as this maximizes their profits. They charge the monopoly price. No one else can run fiber, since they own all the rights.
Now what if they had to lease their fiber?
Several things happen:
-
They can no longer charge the monopoly price. This is bad for them and good for consumers.
-
They are allowed to charge for the use of their fiber. This allows them to make a reasonable profit, and maintains the incentive to run fiber.
-
They have an incentive to run fiber to places others are willing to provide service to, but they aren't.
Under this situation, the only time fiber isn't run is when no one is willing to lease enough of it to pay the cost of its maintenence. Under your idea of glorious capitalism, fiber isn't run anywhere the market will not support the cost or real fiber maintence plus service at a monopoly price.Thus more fiber gets run more places.
Q: Why doesn't the telco just lease the fiber, even if they aren't forced to?
A: Because it destroys their ability to charge the monopoly price. If they lease it at a competitive price, their monopoly price will be undercut. If they lease it at a price which will not allow anyone to undercut their monopoly, not one will lease it from them, since they wouldn't be able to make money doing so.
You're really almost comparing apples to oranges here. I used to own a Psion Revo+, and now I have a Zaurus 5500, so I know exactly what I'm talking about. The EPOC OS is probably the most polished, stable OS I've ever used. The pim apps were great. That said, the Psions you're taling about never had anything close to the functionality of the Z.
- The Z can handle real Word and Excel files, the Psions can not. They must be converted.
- The Psions simply do not have the CPU power to play MP3s, let alone DIVX movies.
- There is a ROM update for the Z which fixes some of the things you're talking about (like the documents tab). You are clearly using the older ROM version.
- On top of all this... I have to back it up to MMC card twice per day because it's not reliable.
The Z can simply do more, but its OS is nowhere near as polished.This is probably the double reset bug. Install the safeboot ipk. Now that I've done so, I have yet to expecience data loss and it's been months.
To be USB v1.1 compliant, a host controller must be able to source 5V 500mA minmum. If your device doesn't do that, it may still work with some things, but it won't meet the spec. so you can even print USB on the box.
I think there is a new USB mobile standard coming out that deals with this.
On a side note, the grandparent poster seems to be unaware that a CF slot is just a miniturized PCMCIA slot. You can get a CF->PCMCIA adapter, and then use a PCMCIA IDE controller card if you want. (Or a PCMCIA hard drive.) Even so, what the hell is the point? It would completely destroy the portability of the device. A 1GB CF card is only around $250 now anyways.
Exactly.
I wonder which of these thing they violated. It's possible that they didn't break any, and that someone rooted their firewall, and then the server itself, but it's much more likely to have been poor design.
No one reasonable is asking for the cops to stop chasing terrorists to do this, but we as a society prosecute any crime (even stupid ones, to even stupider lengths) as a principle.
Except that this is now defined as "cyberterrorism". Reasonable people no longer run things, and the penalties levied against whatever 15 year old did this could very well run his life.
If the punishment does not fit the crime, should it be carried out anyways?
You had to disarm a bomb within a time limit using a variety of tools corresponding to a certain type of wire.Holy damn.
I am so sick of the "Cut the red wire....no the blue!" shit. As if there were some sort of international terrorist wire color code. It would be one thing if the bombs were military, where they might have seen schematics, but it's always a home-made bomb. There's no way for them to have any idea what to do based on wire color alone.
I'm not ripping on you, but that shit really pisses me off. It's just lame. I would love to see a scene in a movie where the terrorist used the same color wire for everything.
"Cut the black wire"
"They're all black"
"Oh shit!"
[explosion]
The Martix Reloaded had the first realist portrayal of hacking in a very long time. Maybe we'll see an end to all this wire color silliness, but I doubt it. [/rant]
You need a dose of perspective.
"Afghanistan is now a mess, sliding backwards towards feudalism worse than before the Taliban"
Do you honestly expect me to believe that people in Afghanistan were better off under the Taliban than they are now?
"not to mention the privacy and civil rights degrading laws which have been passed in the US.
True, the have been some really lousy laws passed in the US lately, but guess what? If the people in Iraq ended up living under all current US laws (even the shitty ones), they would still be about one metric fuckload better off than they were two years ago.
Neither Iraq, nor Afghanistan is going to become a Utopia overnight, no matter what anyone does. These things take time. And I'm not saying this to justify some of the shitty things the US has done. I'm just saying you have to use rational metrics when you're comparing things. The US isn't perfect, but there sure are a lot of people who want to move here.
Oh, BTW, I not only know what "sovereignty" means, but can spell it. Just saying sovereignty argues nothing, it's like saying diplomacy. The real issue is how far can/should each go. Go talk it over with your poly sci friend. souvereignity
Tell me, idiot:....
When? Give me a goddamn answer, boy.
Wow, what maturity. It really proves whatever your point is.
Maybe you just resort to all the verbal abuse because you don't have any valid points to make. Huh boy?
You're just making yourself look bad.