And if 23&Me does work, then it is in their own best interest for the FDA to enforce these requirements. Otherwise they will be driven out of the market by somebody who makes similar claims at a lower cost, by providing a shoddy and unreliable product. This isn't an area where consumers are able to judge quality for themselves.
I agree that doing behavior research on traditional cultures confers an unwarranted aura of respect. They could conduct the same study on a gang in LA, or a church congregation in the midwest, and the results would be just as valid. There seems to be some assumption that they are a fountain of truth because they are primitive and without guile, whereas we are so cultured that our instincts rarely manifest themselves.
No, not really. Selfish gene theory explains why somebody would do something even if it actually does have a negative expected value for the individual - because it has a positive expected value for (some of) the individual's genes, which are also in the benefitting individuals. (The boxes we draw around ourselves as "individual" are significant, but i still ultimately a philosophical construct, and to some degree arbitrary.)
All the angst over the website is just getting silly. Yes, the website launch sucked. So what? Nobody died. The site didn't even exist before. You can still go to the individual insurers' sites if you want, like before. In a few months the new site will be working, and the whole thing will be quickly forgotten.
This problem is far broader than arithmetic. Any distributed system based on elements out of your control is bound to be somewhat unstable. For example, an app that uses google maps, or a utility to check your bank account. The tradeoff for having more capability than you could manage yourself, is that you don't get to manage it yourself.
I think we need to see rules that curtail how much an automation system does to just automate the drudgery (smooth level flight at cruising altitude) unless it is certified to do it ALL.
Flying in the US in the last decade is safer than it has ever been before, anywhere. Automation is part of the reason for that. What you propose is tantamount to disabling antilock brakes so people maintain their brake-pumping skills, just in case the ABS ever fails. It is likely to be a poor tradeoff.
Why are so many of the people in Disney cartoons drawn as animals? They have human minds and emotions, and move as humans, but with animal bodies. Clearly this is appealing or disarming for some reason, but I can't quite think of why.
All our really big supercomputers today are adding a bunch of individual not-even-Krypto-the-wonderdog CPUs together, and then calling it a supercomputer. Have we reached the limits in that scaling? No.
This is wrong on both counts. First, the CPUs built into supercomputers today are as good as anybody knows how to make one. True, they're not exotic, in that you can also buy one yourself for $700 on newegg. But they represent billions of dollars in design and are produced only on multi-billion dollar fabs. There is no respect in which they are not lightyears more advanced than any custom silicon cray ever put out.
Second, you are wrong that we are not reaching the limits of scaling these types of machines. Performance does not scale infinitely on realistic workloads. And budgets and power supply certainly do not scale infinitely.
A year ago I spent a bunch of money and time trying to move all my data onto SDXC so I could easily move between computers. I bought a Lexar Professional 128 GB 400x SDXC and also the equivalent 128 GB from SanDisk. It was a complete failure. The access time was unacceptable (even in internal readers, not USB readers). But the worse problem was that I had intermittent compatibility errors and transfer errors causing corruption. SD cards are find for what they are made for - intermediate-sized files like images and videos. But for a VMWare image or a TrueCrypt volume, or lots of small files, they are no good.
This is exactly how and why Microsoft makes billions of dollars every year - providing some measure of progress combined with decade-long stability requires, literally, an army of thousands of people to pull off.
But I don't understand your attitude about it. What they're trying to do is difficult, could potentially benefit everybody, and they are paying for it. If that is "hubris" then hubris is not always bad.
Sure, but this article isn't even about anti-drone warfare. The researcher states: "A lot of these UAVs (unmanned aerial vehicles) were not really designed with security in mind apart from some that may be destined for law enforcement use or military use."
This research is not invalid, but it's akin to showing how you can listen in on some walkie-talkies from radio shack. There certainly are analogous concerns in designing military command & control systems, but they are about 70 years past this level of "hey, you could blast some RF noise at it to drown out the signal!"
Granted, allowing un-hardened systems to be adopted inappropriately for use in threatening environments could always be a problem. But if you bring a knife to a gunfight, hey, good luck.
Why do you say that? According to this guy, passmark scores 44MB/s read / 157 MB/s write on the iPhone 5s, which is very impressive. I am skeptical of the strange imbalance though, but
according to the actual passmark website, the 5s earns 19,288 DiskMarks. I don't know what a "DiskMark" is, but for comparison the iPhone 3G scored 586 diskmarks, so the "disk" in the 5s is 33x faster. For sure it's not just a soldered-on MicroSD.
It wasn't a 3 ton drone. It was most likely a BQM-74, which weighs 600 lb empty. They've been flying them since 1965. It doesn't really have a lot to do with Predators, Reapers, etc.
You could say the same of somebody who uses less electricity for any reason - they live in a modestly-sized house, or have a gas water heater and clothes dryer, or just aren't home much - they're cheating the electric company by having a low bill! After all the fixed costs of connecting each house is the same.
And by the same rationale, are they going to give a discount to heavy users, like people who own electric cars, or swimming pools, or grow marijuana, since the fixed costs are low relative to their high usage fees?
I think a lot of the decision between the XBox One and PS4 will come down to whether you value the Kinect. If you do, then you are getting something for the $100. My family does get a fair amount of use out of the Kinect. (For one thing, we don't limit the Kids' play time on Kinect, since they are at least standing up and some, like Kinect Adventures, are a pretty good workout).
But the growing dependence of the XBox on paying a recurring subscription fee really does bother me. I don't enjoy online gaming because you waste too much time in matchmaking, too many people are too good, and a lot of people are jerks online. It would help if they would at least agree not to raise the price of the subscription during the life of the device.
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And if 23&Me does work, then it is in their own best interest for the FDA to enforce these requirements. Otherwise they will be driven out of the market by somebody who makes similar claims at a lower cost, by providing a shoddy and unreliable product. This isn't an area where consumers are able to judge quality for themselves.
I agree that doing behavior research on traditional cultures confers an unwarranted aura of respect. They could conduct the same study on a gang in LA, or a church congregation in the midwest, and the results would be just as valid. There seems to be some assumption that they are a fountain of truth because they are primitive and without guile, whereas we are so cultured that our instincts rarely manifest themselves.
No, not really. Selfish gene theory explains why somebody would do something even if it actually does have a negative expected value for the individual - because it has a positive expected value for (some of) the individual's genes, which are also in the benefitting individuals. (The boxes we draw around ourselves as "individual" are significant, but i still ultimately a philosophical construct, and to some degree arbitrary.)
All the angst over the website is just getting silly. Yes, the website launch sucked. So what? Nobody died. The site didn't even exist before. You can still go to the individual insurers' sites if you want, like before. In a few months the new site will be working, and the whole thing will be quickly forgotten.
CPU: X
GPU: XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX
This problem is far broader than arithmetic. Any distributed system based on elements out of your control is bound to be somewhat unstable. For example, an app that uses google maps, or a utility to check your bank account. The tradeoff for having more capability than you could manage yourself, is that you don't get to manage it yourself.
I would LOVE to have wireless charging on my Garmin GPS watch. The problem is the contacts get gummed up by sweaty grit, until it won't charge, reliably or at all. It's a persistent problem for many people with this type of device.
Flying in the US in the last decade is safer than it has ever been before, anywhere. Automation is part of the reason for that. What you propose is tantamount to disabling antilock brakes so people maintain their brake-pumping skills, just in case the ABS ever fails. It is likely to be a poor tradeoff.
The XEON Phi has vastly greater SIMD capability than any Cray or SPARC architecture. In stock now.
What is missing?
Why are so many of the people in Disney cartoons drawn as animals? They have human minds and emotions, and move as humans, but with animal bodies. Clearly this is appealing or disarming for some reason, but I can't quite think of why.
This is wrong on both counts. First, the CPUs built into supercomputers today are as good as anybody knows how to make one. True, they're not exotic, in that you can also buy one yourself for $700 on newegg. But they represent billions of dollars in design and are produced only on multi-billion dollar fabs. There is no respect in which they are not lightyears more advanced than any custom silicon cray ever put out.
Second, you are wrong that we are not reaching the limits of scaling these types of machines. Performance does not scale infinitely on realistic workloads. And budgets and power supply certainly do not scale infinitely.
A year ago I spent a bunch of money and time trying to move all my data onto SDXC so I could easily move between computers. I bought a Lexar Professional 128 GB 400x SDXC and also the equivalent 128 GB from SanDisk. It was a complete failure. The access time was unacceptable (even in internal readers, not USB readers). But the worse problem was that I had intermittent compatibility errors and transfer errors causing corruption. SD cards are find for what they are made for - intermediate-sized files like images and videos. But for a VMWare image or a TrueCrypt volume, or lots of small files, they are no good.
How do you figure? It's open source.
But I don't understand your attitude about it. What they're trying to do is difficult, could potentially benefit everybody, and they are paying for it. If that is "hubris" then hubris is not always bad.
This research is not invalid, but it's akin to showing how you can listen in on some walkie-talkies from radio shack. There certainly are analogous concerns in designing military command & control systems, but they are about 70 years past this level of "hey, you could blast some RF noise at it to drown out the signal!"
Granted, allowing un-hardened systems to be adopted inappropriately for use in threatening environments could always be a problem. But if you bring a knife to a gunfight, hey, good luck.
Why do you say that? According to this guy, passmark scores 44MB/s read / 157 MB/s write on the iPhone 5s, which is very impressive. I am skeptical of the strange imbalance though, but according to the actual passmark website, the 5s earns 19,288 DiskMarks. I don't know what a "DiskMark" is, but for comparison the iPhone 3G scored 586 diskmarks, so the "disk" in the 5s is 33x faster. For sure it's not just a soldered-on MicroSD.
Exactly. But can't this sort of thing be overridden by the end-user? I would hope so, but probably not.
The summary, and the few paragraphs constituting the "article" itself, are almost pure interpretation with virtually no specific facts.
It wasn't a 3 ton drone. It was most likely a BQM-74, which weighs 600 lb empty. They've been flying them since 1965. It doesn't really have a lot to do with Predators, Reapers, etc.
I demand backwards compatibility with ipfwadm!
Actually the electricity bill already includes a fixed fee for having service (called the Service Charge) which is on top of usage fees. So, now what is the rationale?
And by the same rationale, are they going to give a discount to heavy users, like people who own electric cars, or swimming pools, or grow marijuana, since the fixed costs are low relative to their high usage fees?
If a price hike is out of the question, then Microsoft could easily quell any concerns by agreeing up front not to do it.
But the growing dependence of the XBox on paying a recurring subscription fee really does bother me. I don't enjoy online gaming because you waste too much time in matchmaking, too many people are too good, and a lot of people are jerks online. It would help if they would at least agree not to raise the price of the subscription during the life of the device.