You are right about the advantages of trains, but your point about them being "inherently poor terrorist targets" is wrong. A high concenttration of people in a public place that is used every day by millions is an excellent target. Given the scale and distributed nature of train and metro systems, security will never be as good as in airports.
But don't take my word for it. The recent major attacks on cities outside the US or middle east have been on trains: Bombay, Madrid, London (tube).
If you're a US taxpayer, you spent the price of a few cups of milky coffee. I absolutely got value for my money. The pictures and stories are awesome. Perhaps there will be some valuable science coming out of this too; time will tell.
There are also many intangible benefits. This is the kind of stuff that makes kids want to be engineers, reminds scientists why they do research instead of working for a bank, and makes bright people from around the world want to take their skills to the US where they could maybe make robots that go to Mars!
Unfortunately that last one has been made a little tricky when NASA is forced by the government to stop hiring foreigners after 9/11. It's tough on JPL managers when they can't hire a brilliant Australian or Japanese engineer because some Saudis declare war on the US.
In summary: way to go, NASA. Some things you get right, and the robot Mars missions are incredible. But since it's my latte money you're spending, I could use a little less Space Shuttle and I'd prefer you were able to hire the best engineers in the world, no matter where they come from.
That pretty much covers it. Tear it apart, see how it works. That's been the way to "hack" for at least 50 years.
Don't we want a little more from a hacker than this definition demands? Some crafty reverse-engineering, a nifty bit of design or code, or a surprising re-use of some existing object? Opening up a coffee pot is interesting, and credit to the authors for writing up the page, but it's not what I would want to call a hack.
Here's the definition of "hack" in the Jargon File, A.K.A. The Hacker's Dictionary.
Academia has a long and established tradition of collaboration and pooling common resources, from telescopes to particle accelerators.
On the other hand, academia has another great tradition of finding it much easier to obtain captital equipment money than operating money, so many, many clusters get bought and built, but get little use. Many sit idle for months or years. Of course, no one ever switches them off, so they sit there eating power. Next time someone needs a cluster, the old one looks too slow, so another one gets built. Rinse and repeat. I've seen way too many hot, noisy, unused machine rooms.
I estimate that if it takes one unit of work to obtain one capital equipment dollar, then operating dollars (read: student, postdoc or engineer support) take around 5 units of work. Given that brains and labour are the key research resources, this seems bizarrely lopsided. Sigh.
It's the same laboratory, and mostly the same people that built the SlugBot, and EcoBot 1, at the University of West England. The SlugBot never really worked: though several components were demonstrated, they couldn't generate enough juice from digesting slugs to power the arm mechanism, let alone driving the whole vehicle on soft ground.
The EcoBot worked fine. It used a microbial fuel cell powered by suger solution to drive a very light robot base towards a light source. Simple, but a perfectly good tech demonstration.
UWE also has experience with very low-mass autonomous blimp robots. Heavier-than-air flight is a different ballgame, so it looks like they've teamed with aero engineers at Bath to look into this.
UWE has probably the most interesting robotics group in the UK.
(I'm a robotics researcher, not affiliated with UWE.)
A non-coder must either (i) wait for someone else to write the software the non-coder wants, then either buy it from them or take it for free, depending on the wishes of the coder; (ii) contract someone to write the software they want, either for money or some other exchange; or (iii) learn to be a coder. Meanwhile the non-coder, like every other user, should submit detailed bug reports. It's dull, but it's essential.
Does that sound fair? I think it does.
Let's say you commute to work. Every day you step outside your house to see a nice bike on the street with a sign saying 'Free - help yourself', along with a manual on bike repair and the address of a local store that will provide free spare parts. Someone who loves bikes has built it and left it there in case you find it useful. Once in a while the bike has a flat tire. Would you be fed up? You might, if you'd come to rely on that bike being there. But the mistake is yours in taking it for granted. Hey - you had a free bike all this time! Ideally, the thing to do would be either to fix the bike for the next commuter. If you don't know how to do it (despite the manual and free spares), then maybe you'd better think about another route to work. Or you could complain in public about how the guy who built the bike should pay a little more attention to detail. That doesn't sound so cool.
Coders benefit from polite, constructive criticism. Detailed bug reports are your gift to the coder, who just wanted to write sweet, correct code in the first place. But saying you're fed up because the gift they gave you isn't good enough is just rude
I'm fed up of finding bugs in Open Source software and being told 'what do you expect, it's free'
You're missing the point. You're being offered the opportunity to use the software for free. You also have the opportunity to fix the bugs you find, because you have the sourcecode. It is no one's responsibility to fix the bugs for you, but people pitching in tend to get a lot of them fixed. Pitch in.
If you're fed up, and don't want to pitch in, you could try buying some commercial software. Then let us know how much luck you have getting the bugs fixed.
The RMP has been around for a while - in fact you slashdotted USC's robotics lab about 18 months ago when they posted their Player drivers for RMP.
Anyway, Here are some movies of the RMP running the Player Robot Server (GPL, naturally). If you want to try programming a Segway RMP, but haven't got one sitting around, you can use the Gazebo robot simulator with Player - your code won't know the difference.
(Please, please somebody mirror these movies before we brown-out Southern California. Sorry Andrew...)
I'm a CS professor and I don't allow submission in MS formats. This is for two reasons: (i) because I don't think it's fair to require students to buy expensive software just to complete their assignments; and (ii) because I want them to understand that it's possible to do use free, open formats to exchange data. If the students don't discover this in college, they sure aren't going to see it at company X after graduation.
I would say on average I need to reboot about once a month when Seti@home decides to get flakey or something.
One basic purpose of an OS is to protect processes on a machine from one another, including the OS itself. If you have one flakey process, it should only be able to hurt itself and certainly shouldn't require you to restart the OS. Any other behavior is a serious security problem, quite apart from being annoying from a reliability point of view.
I think robots are cool, so I checked these links out with interest, to find... WTF? What a horrible juxtaposition of real engineering with total mubo-jumbo bullshit. I hope the HAL-3 designers never find out they've been linked next to this stuff.
The author of the linking article admits he doesn't understand the 10 law stuff, but isn't quite confident enough to call it out as crap. It's crap. Sub-scientology nonsense that isn't even internally comprehensible.
That made me laugh out loud. Darwin, Newton and Einstein dismissed as poster children! The argument is that they are very important non-American scientists. That's not really refuted by calling them poster children.
(google) define: poster child
(one hit:) a child afflicted by some disease or deformity whose picture is used on posters to raise money for charitable purposes.
While they treat each other with respect they treat the rest of us as if we're somehow less worthy of life just because we weren't given the opportunity for a PhD.
Now that's an important point. I was slating the original anonymous poster for being disrespectful of his/her fellow students. People often come out of grad school very arrogant. I don't think that scientists are worse than MDs, lawyers or MBAs, but it ain't good. I think many PhDs are grateful for the breaks they had, but plenty of 'em are ambitious, aggressive, arrogant loonies. It's a tough business.
It's awful that you were forced to abandon grad school for financial reasons. I wish everyone could choose school or work based on their aptitude and personal goals, and compete fair and square with others for the slots. But there has to be competition for the slots, just like there's competition for the music academy and the football team. You want people who can play. Grad school isn't a human right; it's an opportunity society offers a few people. It's up to us to make sure we spread the opportunities out as fairly as possible.
Keep the salaries low for beginners and make the rewards GREATER for those who prove their dedication and hard work
That's pretty much how it works. In the US, CS postdocs make 45-60K, depending on location. You can live on that. Associate Profs make double that. Do the senior profs you know look hard up? Now, it's hard to get from one to the other, and there's - what, maybe an 6-1 ratio of people that make it from postdoc to tenure? So those that make it have competed mostly fair and square (subject to various socioeconomic dis/advantages along the way). And the life of a tenured prof doesn't look too bad. Hard work, but you spend your time with smart young people, probably travel the world and spend time thinking hard about the stuff that tickles you. The work is mostly terrific and the money is OK. Hard to find a better deal apart from rock star. The rock star has the edge because there's no committee service requirement.
This is rascist nonsense. You say the foreign students are working harder than the Americans. Good for them. Grad school is hard work, and many of these students are working in a second or third language. Quite an achievement. How well would you do in grad school in China? Now it's true that hard work is not equal to good results, but it sure as hell helps a lot more than moaning about the "superfluous" foreigners.
You say "the papers these people crank out are often full of nonsense". Here are some foreigners for you: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, Lorenz, Voltaire. If you'd prefer some modern day foreigners, how about Rodney Brooks or Stephen Hawking? Both work (part of the year in Hawking's case) in US universities. I'm glad that Brooks worked hard as a student thousands of miles from his home.
No doubt you have some less than stellar students around you. But Americans do not have a monopoly on brains as your silly comment demonstrates.
I'm an English-born scientist who did a postdoc in California, where I worked with very bright, very productive people born inside and outside the US. My grad students come from all over the world. I expect them all to work hard and treat each other with respect.
There is such a thing as a world juducial system. Or almost. But the US doesn't want to play ball. It's not the rest of the world that is slowing down this kind of global cooperation.
If he has to buy more RAM, upgrade his CPU or even buy a whole new PC just to run desktop Linux adequately, how are we any better than Microsoft?
Here's a hatful of how:
Price
Source code
Security
Uptime
Not using illegal business practices
Not using DRM
Now, these memory issues are very important. I hate bloat as much as the next C hacker, but let's not overreact. Remember why you got into this Linux thing in the first place? I bet it was not memory footprint.
Like the mainstream movie and animation biz, adult movies moved a few miles NW of Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley many years ago. So _that_ would be your Silicone Valley.
It's a little wierd having lunch at In'N'Out Burger on Ventura Blvd when it hits you that that the tables of inflated, tanned, women made up like Barbie are building up to an afternoon's work.
Unlike the more expensive lunch tables full of inflated, tanned, made-up women you find in Hollywood: those women don't do anything at all. Unless rollerblading can be considered a trade.
Meanwhile, most of the software people are on the west side, Westwood or Santa Monica, where things are a little less nutty.
Nonsense. Weapons like this only make it more likely for people to be injured and killed. This kind of 'assymetric warfare' tool (i.e. we have 'em, the other guys don't) just makes it more likely that we will start and continue wars.
Robots are particularly nasty weapons, because it reduces the risk of injury to one side so much. A commander is more likely to attack a building and kill everyone inside if she is less likely to have any nasty injuries on her team. Can you tell the difference between an Iraqi that means you harm and an innocent civilian on a shakey, wireless TV picture, when one mistake means death for them and/or you? I'd guess no.
Seriously, I believe developing robots for combat purposes is immoral as it is deliberately removing the moral agent from the pointy end of things, even more than the already-illegal poison gas and neutron bombs.
Taking the long view, and supposing that robots become very smart and capable - and my colleagues in robot research are trying very hard to make it so - do we want them armed to the teeth and designed to kill people? I think not. Some will protest that this robot is for reconnaisance and is not armed, and they are right so far. But adding a gun or bomb is a technically trivial next step. It's alreay happened with the Predator drone.
Besides, a toughened remote-control buggy is not a very interesting robot anyway. There are a hundred cool robots at CMU, and MIT, USC, NASA, that are not designed to spot Iraqis so we can kill them, and have more interesting technology. And that's just in the US - there are many CRAZY things going on in Japan. Check them out.
a weapon makes a good intermediate scientific goal - deliver and release large amount of energy to a small remote location.
No - that's an engineering goal. Science isn't about doing stuff, it's a about understanding stuff.
Consider: if the Manhattan Project engineers could have built a city-flattening device without all the difficult, time-consuming and high-risk nuclear-physics stuff, would they have bothered doing all that new science? Nope.
Slashdot Mirror
But don't take my word for it. The recent major attacks on cities outside the US or middle east have been on trains: Bombay, Madrid, London (tube).
Looks like it is indeed based on Urchin's work. Here's part of the script you have to insert in your page markup:
If you're a US taxpayer, you spent the price of a few cups of milky coffee. I absolutely got value for my money. The pictures and stories are awesome. Perhaps there will be some valuable science coming out of this too; time will tell.
There are also many intangible benefits. This is the kind of stuff that makes kids want to be engineers, reminds scientists why they do research instead of working for a bank, and makes bright people from around the world want to take their skills to the US where they could maybe make robots that go to Mars!
Unfortunately that last one has been made a little tricky when NASA is forced by the government to stop hiring foreigners after 9/11. It's tough on JPL managers when they can't hire a brilliant Australian or Japanese engineer because some Saudis declare war on the US.
In summary: way to go, NASA. Some things you get right, and the robot Mars missions are incredible. But since it's my latte money you're spending, I could use a little less Space Shuttle and I'd prefer you were able to hire the best engineers in the world, no matter where they come from.
Don't we want a little more from a hacker than this definition demands? Some crafty reverse-engineering, a nifty bit of design or code, or a surprising re-use of some existing object? Opening up a coffee pot is interesting, and credit to the authors for writing up the page, but it's not what I would want to call a hack. Here's the definition of "hack" in the Jargon File, A.K.A. The Hacker's Dictionary.
Bell is a great lab, but credit where it's due: the laser was demonstrated by Theodore Maiman at Hughes Aircraft..
Hoopy: really together guy
Frood: really amazingly together guy
Example usage: "Hey, you sass that hoopy Ford Prefect? There's a frood who really knows where his towel is."
On the other hand, academia has another great tradition of finding it much easier to obtain captital equipment money than operating money, so many, many clusters get bought and built, but get little use. Many sit idle for months or years. Of course, no one ever switches them off, so they sit there eating power. Next time someone needs a cluster, the old one looks too slow, so another one gets built. Rinse and repeat. I've seen way too many hot, noisy, unused machine rooms.
I estimate that if it takes one unit of work to obtain one capital equipment dollar, then operating dollars (read: student, postdoc or engineer support) take around 5 units of work. Given that brains and labour are the key research resources, this seems bizarrely lopsided. Sigh.
The EcoBot worked fine. It used a microbial fuel cell powered by suger solution to drive a very light robot base towards a light source. Simple, but a perfectly good tech demonstration.
UWE also has experience with very low-mass autonomous blimp robots. Heavier-than-air flight is a different ballgame, so it looks like they've teamed with aero engineers at Bath to look into this.
UWE has probably the most interesting robotics group in the UK.
(I'm a robotics researcher, not affiliated with UWE.)
A non-coder must either (i) wait for someone else to write the software the non-coder wants, then either buy it from them or take it for free, depending on the wishes of the coder; (ii) contract someone to write the software they want, either for money or some other exchange; or (iii) learn to be a coder. Meanwhile the non-coder, like every other user, should submit detailed bug reports. It's dull, but it's essential.
Does that sound fair? I think it does.
Let's say you commute to work. Every day you step outside your house to see a nice bike on the street with a sign saying 'Free - help yourself', along with a manual on bike repair and the address of a local store that will provide free spare parts. Someone who loves bikes has built it and left it there in case you find it useful. Once in a while the bike has a flat tire. Would you be fed up? You might, if you'd come to rely on that bike being there. But the mistake is yours in taking it for granted. Hey - you had a free bike all this time! Ideally, the thing to do would be either to fix the bike for the next commuter. If you don't know how to do it (despite the manual and free spares), then maybe you'd better think about another route to work. Or you could complain in public about how the guy who built the bike should pay a little more attention to detail. That doesn't sound so cool.
Coders benefit from polite, constructive criticism. Detailed bug reports are your gift to the coder, who just wanted to write sweet, correct code in the first place. But saying you're fed up because the gift they gave you isn't good enough is just rude
You're missing the point. You're being offered the opportunity to use the software for free. You also have the opportunity to fix the bugs you find, because you have the sourcecode. It is no one's responsibility to fix the bugs for you, but people pitching in tend to get a lot of them fixed. Pitch in.
If you're fed up, and don't want to pitch in, you could try buying some commercial software. Then let us know how much luck you have getting the bugs fixed.
In fact, most of us are not American. I know. It's amazing.
Anyway, Here are some movies of the RMP running the Player Robot Server (GPL, naturally). If you want to try programming a Segway RMP, but haven't got one sitting around, you can use the Gazebo robot simulator with Player - your code won't know the difference.
(Please, please somebody mirror these movies before we brown-out Southern California. Sorry Andrew...)
Your professors are being unreasonable.
I'm a CS professor and I don't allow submission in MS formats. This is for two reasons: (i) because I don't think it's fair to require students to buy expensive software just to complete their assignments; and (ii) because I want them to understand that it's possible to do use free, open formats to exchange data. If the students don't discover this in college, they sure aren't going to see it at company X after graduation.
Imagine there's no countries. It isn't hard to do. Nothing to kill or die for. And no religion too.
I would say on average I need to reboot about once a month when Seti@home decides to get flakey or something.
One basic purpose of an OS is to protect processes on a machine from one another, including the OS itself. If you have one flakey process, it should only be able to hurt itself and certainly shouldn't require you to restart the OS. Any other behavior is a serious security problem, quite apart from being annoying from a reliability point of view.
I think robots are cool, so I checked these links out with interest, to find... WTF? What a horrible juxtaposition of real engineering with total mubo-jumbo bullshit. I hope the HAL-3 designers never find out they've been linked next to this stuff.
The author of the linking article admits he doesn't understand the 10 law stuff, but isn't quite confident enough to call it out as crap. It's crap. Sub-scientology nonsense that isn't even internally comprehensible.
That made me laugh out loud. Darwin, Newton and Einstein dismissed as poster children! The argument is that they are very important non-American scientists. That's not really refuted by calling them poster children.
(google) define: poster child
(one hit:) a child afflicted by some disease or deformity whose picture is used on posters to raise money for charitable purposes.
While they treat each other with respect they treat the rest of us as if we're somehow less worthy of life just because we weren't given the opportunity for a PhD.
Now that's an important point. I was slating the original anonymous poster for being disrespectful of his/her fellow students. People often come out of grad school very arrogant. I don't think that scientists are worse than MDs, lawyers or MBAs, but it ain't good. I think many PhDs are grateful for the breaks they had, but plenty of 'em are ambitious, aggressive, arrogant loonies. It's a tough business.
It's awful that you were forced to abandon grad school for financial reasons. I wish everyone could choose school or work based on their aptitude and personal goals, and compete fair and square with others for the slots. But there has to be competition for the slots, just like there's competition for the music academy and the football team. You want people who can play. Grad school isn't a human right; it's an opportunity society offers a few people. It's up to us to make sure we spread the opportunities out as fairly as possible.
That's pretty much how it works. In the US, CS postdocs make 45-60K, depending on location. You can live on that. Associate Profs make double that. Do the senior profs you know look hard up? Now, it's hard to get from one to the other, and there's - what, maybe an 6-1 ratio of people that make it from postdoc to tenure? So those that make it have competed mostly fair and square (subject to various socioeconomic dis/advantages along the way). And the life of a tenured prof doesn't look too bad. Hard work, but you spend your time with smart young people, probably travel the world and spend time thinking hard about the stuff that tickles you. The work is mostly terrific and the money is OK. Hard to find a better deal apart from rock star. The rock star has the edge because there's no committee service requirement.
This is rascist nonsense. You say the foreign students are working harder than the Americans. Good for them. Grad school is hard work, and many of these students are working in a second or third language. Quite an achievement. How well would you do in grad school in China? Now it's true that hard work is not equal to good results, but it sure as hell helps a lot more than moaning about the "superfluous" foreigners.
You say "the papers these people crank out are often full of nonsense". Here are some foreigners for you: Newton, Darwin, Einstein, Bohr, Lorenz, Voltaire. If you'd prefer some modern day foreigners, how about Rodney Brooks or Stephen Hawking? Both work (part of the year in Hawking's case) in US universities. I'm glad that Brooks worked hard as a student thousands of miles from his home.
No doubt you have some less than stellar students around you. But Americans do not have a monopoly on brains as your silly comment demonstrates.
I'm an English-born scientist who did a postdoc in California, where I worked with very bright, very productive people born inside and outside the US. My grad students come from all over the world. I expect them all to work hard and treat each other with respect.
There is such a thing as a world juducial system. Or almost. But the US doesn't want to play ball. It's not the rest of the world that is slowing down this kind of global cooperation.
If he has to buy more RAM, upgrade his CPU or even buy a whole new PC just to run desktop Linux adequately, how are we any better than Microsoft?
Here's a hatful of how:
- Price
- Source code
- Security
- Uptime
- Not using illegal business practices
- Not using DRM
Now, these memory issues are very important. I hate bloat as much as the next C hacker, but let's not overreact. Remember why you got into this Linux thing in the first place? I bet it was not memory footprint.From a recent escapee from Los Angeles:
Like the mainstream movie and animation biz, adult movies moved a few miles NW of Hollywood to the San Fernando Valley many years ago. So _that_ would be your Silicone Valley.
It's a little wierd having lunch at In'N'Out Burger on Ventura Blvd when it hits you that that the tables of inflated, tanned, women made up like Barbie are building up to an afternoon's work. Unlike the more expensive lunch tables full of inflated, tanned, made-up women you find in Hollywood: those women don't do anything at all. Unless rollerblading can be considered a trade.
Meanwhile, most of the software people are on the west side, Westwood or Santa Monica, where things are a little less nutty.
Oh, but the US is working on it...
Nonsense. Weapons like this only make it more likely for people to be injured and killed. This kind of 'assymetric warfare' tool (i.e. we have 'em, the other guys don't) just makes it more likely that we will start and continue wars.
Robots are particularly nasty weapons, because it reduces the risk of injury to one side so much. A commander is more likely to attack a building and kill everyone inside if she is less likely to have any nasty injuries on her team. Can you tell the difference between an Iraqi that means you harm and an innocent civilian on a shakey, wireless TV picture, when one mistake means death for them and/or you? I'd guess no.
Seriously, I believe developing robots for combat purposes is immoral as it is deliberately removing the moral agent from the pointy end of things, even more than the already-illegal poison gas and neutron bombs.
Taking the long view, and supposing that robots become very smart and capable - and my colleagues in robot research are trying very hard to make it so - do we want them armed to the teeth and designed to kill people? I think not. Some will protest that this robot is for reconnaisance and is not armed, and they are right so far. But adding a gun or bomb is a technically trivial next step. It's alreay happened with the Predator drone.
I have 'No Evil Robots' web page that makes this point, and reminds me to keep my robots peaceful.
Besides, a toughened remote-control buggy is not a very interesting robot anyway. There are a hundred cool robots at CMU, and MIT, USC, NASA, that are not designed to spot Iraqis so we can kill them, and have more interesting technology. And that's just in the US - there are many CRAZY things going on in Japan. Check them out.
No - that's an engineering goal. Science isn't about doing stuff, it's a about understanding stuff.
Consider: if the Manhattan Project engineers could have built a city-flattening device without all the difficult, time-consuming and high-risk nuclear-physics stuff, would they have bothered doing all that new science? Nope.