If the company lives, the code stays on the shelf and eventually the media suffers literal bit rot.
If the company dies, it is marked as being a valuable asset by the creditors, which then hoard it because the poor people that collect the remaining 1% of their investment don't understand the true value of code. They just want their money back.
They'll overvalue the code as if the code is minimally worth the wages it took to produce it, if not much, much more. Really the code is worthless without people who can build it, fix it, use it, sell it, service it, or answer questions about it. Since most would-be purchasers of the code clearly understand that it's worthless without such a support system, they'll want to buy it at a much lower price.
Often the sellers won't be one person, and that makes it even more difficult to sell. Often there are no buyers; if people cared enough about the code to spend more money/effort, it likely would not be mothballed.
I've got a house with aluminium wiring, so I've done tons of reading and research in determining if rewiring is really worth the cost.
The real problem with aluminium wiring is that when it went into place, they used the same gauge wire as the copper it replaced. Aluminium is softer, and will oxidise more readily than copper, but it is actually better suited for wiring provided that you upgrade the gauge appropriately.
Thermal expansion was a culprit only because the screw cap connectors were used in binding to copper wire, and twist around the screw terminals were commonly re-purposed for aluminium. Neither are really appropriate, the best aluminium connections are made with compression screws that secure straight wires in a metal block (clamps), not wrap-around screw posts.
Naturally the history of aluminium screw ups in housing make it nearly impossible to consider wiring a house with anything that's not copper. The fears are so great that I don't think it will ever be legal to use anything other than copper for a long, long time.
Explain that to a Washington D.C. cop who sees a phone in use in the car. They are very polite to tourists, but if you don't comply immediately you're getting a ticket. At least they are often courteous enough to warn people who are convincingly ignorant.
Rules that are enforced are not subject to public acceptance, they are backed by the force of law. Most people speed, it is true; however, we never sped when driving to my grandmother's house. The cops in that small Texas town would pull you over and ticket you for doing a single mile per hour over thirty. In fact, we often drove a few miles per hour slower because it was well known that they didn't care what your speedometer said. Their radar gun was the final judge of your speed.
If the world really ran on acceptable level of risk, then things would be much worse. Few layman estimate risk appropriately; most live under the delusion that common bad things won't affect them for whatever reason. They also live under the delusion that rare but sensational bad things are far more prevalent than they really are.
So people are terrified of airline crashes, but will gleefully drive down the road reading newspapers, putting on make up, talking on cell phones, twiddling with their laptop, changing clothes, eating, etc.
Even if people really understood the risks, freedom to communicate by cell phone while driving does not trump the right to secure other's rights to live, to not be handicapped, or to not be financially disrupted.
Yes but the problems of politics aren't the problems of discrete mathematics. Political problems are less well defined, more sticky, and rarely have any real solution.
For example, take the current political problem of defending our country against a terror attack. Clean cut solutions tend to be in violation of civil liberties, theatre security solutions tend to cost a lot and deliver little, and technological solutions are weak at defending against primitive technology attacks.
What about inadequate health care? Yes, it happens here in the USA. I'm not talking about expensive health care, I'm talking about treating the homeless so they don't pose a risk as walking disease carriers. Pay for it with tax dollars and that's not solving the problem of taxation. Let them go untreated doesn't solve human health issues. Treat them and you're providing incentives to be homeless (yes, some people are stupid enough to believe this argument wholeheartedly). Treat some of them or limit treatment to certain diseases, and you run the risk of failure too.
What if the "nerd" solution to voting comes back out of the symbolic logic quagmire with a proof that you cannot have anonymous, secure, reliable, error free, auditable voting? Computer Science has already proven that some problems cannot be solved by any Turing machine, after pissing off the whole world by stating that they can't do as good of a job as we can, then are you going to be the one to tell them it is not a solvable problem?
Yeah, but we haven't been as lucky to have the Red Scare with the corruption of Tammany Hall all rolled into one!
Think of it, graft and scaremongering, it's like peanut butter and chocolate -> peanut butter cups. Why didn't politicians exploit them both so boldly in combination before?
I would deny them the joy and experience of looking at good code sometimes, because the tendency to bicycle shed.
Everyone wants to put some input into the project to prove that they are involved, working, and generally providing some value for the money they are paid. In less than perfect code, this often means they come up with lots of issues that need to be fixed because the code is flawed.
With very pristine code, this often means that they come up with lots of issues that shouldn't be fixed because the code isn't flawed. This can be mitigated by having a better review process, but it's hard to overcome human nature.
A real world example not in code comes to mind.
My brother bought a day care centre, and with every change of hands, such businesses must be inspected (a good practice). Problem was that this centre had been in operation for over thirty years, and had recently passed inspection in a prior sale less that two years ago. So the health inspector stated that the hot water in the public facing bathroom (for parents, children, and employees in the waiting area, not the centre itself) wasn't hot enough. Never mind that it was one hundred and five feet from the water heater and would be plenty hot in three or four seconds of running, it had to be hot instantly. So he installed an assist water heater right behind the wall of the sink.
You might think that the health inspector has a valid point, but if he did, then why did the centre manage to operating unsafely for thirty years? More likely than not, he had to find something wrong to prove to his supervisor that he was really working. Day care centres are inspected far too often for any issue to go unnoticed; to have an outstanding issue, you need a negligent inspector.
He sold it a year later, I wonder what new miracle "flaw" was discovered?
Very good practices in code review could lessen the risk of bike shedding, but it would be very hard to eliminate it. For quite a few of us, it's human nature to add in your own two cents; right or wrong.
You didn't provide proof to back up your examples, so you ask us to accept that explaining cout << "output" << endl;
is incredibly easier to explain than System.out.println("output");
In truth, the explanations for both are very similar, with the first you indicate that the << operator puts something into the left hand side which happens to be the output to the screen.
In the Java version you indicate that the System has an output device called out and you ask that out device to print on a line the string "output".
Why the Java version is superior is because in the C++ version you immediately run into a major issue: How does the string get a endl put into it? To explain that you then need to explain that << is an operator which is implemented on the cout device, which then returns another invisible reference to the cout device that will also accept the endl when the << operator is called on that.
Certainly neither is above the ability for an undergraduate to grasp, but saying that the Java version is harder to explain just shows a bias for all things familiar. I too miss the << syntax from C++ when programming in Java, but it's insane to say that the cleaner syntax results in more easily explainable programs.
As far as garbage collection, that's easier to explain in Java too. Since Java implements only one means of garbage collection, its explanation only takes a couple of hours. C++ has two means of objects consuming memory, one that is rigid enough to explain in an hour and another that is a "figure it out for yourself" solution. Best practices must then immediately be taught, which reduces the number of ways malloc / free can be used "safely".
I've see precious few programs which were competitive on the grounds of their improved garbage collection / freeing mechanism alone.
Perhaps you should read that Dykstra paper carefully, as you seem to have fallen into a trap or two he describes. That said, I wholeheartedly agree with you that the current educational process has a lot be desired for Computer Science, but sometimes I wonder at the utility of a College that does not offer some job training in this age.
Employers look to college graduates expecting them to be trained and have created a huge demand for graduates as a result. Due to the "everything for nothing" culture in the USA, those same employers make it clear that they want pre-trained employees. Colleges react in kind by expanding their enrolment and providing skills that make them competitive in the eyes of their prospective students for the purpose of obtaining a desirable job. Thus the system becomes more a job training centre each day, which is inconsistent with the loftier goals of a College.
Lofty goals are called lofty goals because they are hard to achieve. Colleges of lesser moral fibre will play lip service to such goals and mostly do what industry wants. Colleges of stronger moral fibre will uphold such goals and risk losing credibility with the future hiring base and likewise their future student body. Only a few truly exceptional Colleges will ever be able to disregard the collective employer pressure; like the Computer Science program Dykstra was enjoying. For the masses, environment shapes the subject to a greater degree than we might like.
Line item veto is unconstitutional, but it's a fix for even worse ailments.
The Jumbo Bill, which starts off as a vechile to achieve a specific goal, but quickly becomes the bandwagon for everything under the sun should be unconstitutional, but it's not. Line item veto is a bad patch to fix it, a better one would be a no non-related riders law.
Until voting can be tailored to match each line item; yes for this line item, no for that line item: odds are most of the things a president wants to cut never really had the backing of the congress. They're attached to get undesirable items through riding the coattails of more desirable items. But we don't vote that way, and even if we could it wouldn't be better than just making it illegal to attach non-related riders to a bill.
Six, so go shove off. Most of them are kits or attempts to cobble two kits together. The simplest ones can follow lines drawn on paper, some are just bump and turn jobs. One had a microcontroller which was programmable. One use a cassette player to "play back" the program code which wasn't much more than tones on a tape.
This guy does good metal work, but without his machines accepting input, it's about as much of a robot as the lighted casino cowyboy featured in Las Vegas. Perhaps you view your car as a robot, that's fine, just don't bother me about it. I can't do decent metal work so now your world view that a guy in China is somehow better than everyone else is restored.
More to the point, how many robots did you build, or are you just trying to bolster your opinion by calling everyone a boobie?
Well, I'll give it to him, he's done a lot of fiddling. It is a shame, with a little study he might have done a lot more.
It is obvious from his work that this man is skilled in basic metal work, but most of his robots are enlarged versions of their child toy equivalents. For example, the rickshaw "robot" doesn't balance, because it is rigidly welded to the rickshaw, meaning that it is more of a four wheeled vehicle where the front two wheels have been replaced by legs. So during its most unstable moments, there are always three points of contact with the ground. To make it even easier, the batteries (car batteries I'd guess from the size of the torso) are obviously stored next to the motor driving the legs in the "robot's" torso.
With a little bit of knowledge about mechanical linkages, you could build one too. The steering is what you would call "rear wheel" (you can barely see the linkages, so the robot is only used for forward propulsion. I've seen movies of this thing in motion, and I can assure you that the legs are in a fixed stride path which really jars the passengers as they cruise along at slower than walking speed.
Someone else mentioned a lot of BS about how we would do it in the "western" world, which mostly illustrated his bias that westerners will overdesign, are overeducated, and will underproduce. The truth is that this guy would fit in pretty well over here in the west, but we wouldn't call him a robot maker. He's be an artist building automatrons, just like we already have in various places in the U.S. of A. Take a look at the burning man videos, and various "performances" on the west coast and other places. Road side attractions used to highlight people like him, with their tree museums, junk sculpture, and other oddities of interest.
Perhaps someone will want to call them robots anyway. That lowers the bar to where any wind up walking toy enlarged to human size outfitted with an electric motor and battery back is a robot. I prefer robots that at least sense their environment and alter their behaviour based on the environment. You turn on this rickshaw and it will run straight into a brick wall or step straight down an open manhole. Its lack of ability to react to the environment at all makes me view it as a leg equipped human shaped motor. Even attaching a giant leaf spring bumper switch that changed the rickshaw's direction would give this thing tons of robot credibility.
Big companies are not that much smarter than small companies in this respect, because the goal is to keep your class's attention.
Actually getting a training class involved in not zoning out and absorbing 0% of the material is not very difficult, but it is not easy either. Too many years of high school conditioning, I guess. If you have ever had to train a group on a less than facinating subject, it is obvious that at least 30% of the class will never pay attention. That's why teachers have to sell the education at the same time they present the material.
Some do it by indicating there is a test at the end of the class that you must pass. Eventually pressures in the corporation will force higher expectations on the instructor to make their entire class pass the first time. That leads to "this will be on the test" warning announcements, or even putting up the answers while the test is being administered. (There's no budget for re-training the flunkies).
The author of this lesson plan took something boring and made it exciting. Looking up someone's call history to resolve a disputed long distance call == boring. Looking up Anthony Hopkin's call history == exciting!
It doesn't make it right, but why is it less wrong for Joe Nobody than Mr. Celebrity? Eventually people will have to use the live data, so eventually you'll have these issues. At least some monitoring was in place to catch this guy.
Don't worry, they'll be forced to install beeping horns. That way the people crossing runways won't accidentally think it's clear because they failed to look both ways.
I knew there was a car analogy in there somewhere.
Somehow I believe if you could bring one back, bringing another back of the opposite sex within a few years wouldn't be impossibly difficult. Especially when it would likely be the most cost effective means of producing more Mammoths for zoos and others that were willing to pay.
The business of zoos might not always be pretty, but it practically guarantees that more than one will exist if public outrage doesn't overcome public curiosity.
160,000 people searched under the new anti-terrorist behaviour screening, 0 terrorists found. 1,200 arrests made for completely non-terrorist activity.
This doesn't indicate a ~1% success rate, it indicates a 100% failure rate; no terrorists were found.
Perhaps there are no terrorists to find, perhaps there are; but in either case, this method has found to be a complete failure over a sample size of 160,000 individuals.
Glad to see that link get a bit more use, even though I hope to never need the information at the other end of it.
The best part is when it boils down to you telling the truth and the police interviewing someone who is mistaken. Normally it would be a 1:1 ratio of guilt versus innocence, except that the police can then take the stand and testify that you lied to them only using the mistaken person as proof that you lied.
Sure, perhaps a great lawyer will have half a dozen defences ready for such a circumstance, but the world doesn't lack for average and below average lawyers.
I really miss great lectures. They were few and far between at the University, and now that I'm long out of school, there have been none.
Funny part is when the decoy ring slides off under the table as an eligible one approaches.
Women, you're not that sly, we see it. Guys are sticklers for details, rings leave marks, and sleight of hand seldom works. Maybe you're undoing the lie you made that morning; maybe you're creating a lie for the present. It just makes you look untrustworthy either way.
Who hits on an untrustworthy woman? Likely the exact kind of person that the ring was supposed to repel.
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
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Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
And with each decimal place, we are ten fold in number!
Re:Hey, remember when Ender's Game was good?
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Ender in Exile
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· Score: 1
Card's personal politics aside, I bought Ender's Game because it was a known Sci Fi book and "award winning." After reading it, I will never buy anything he writes again.
It was mediocre writing, mixed a few good ideas; perhaps too many good ideas for one story with any depth. Some characters were comically typecast (cue the superhuman assassin sage teacher). Situations were obviously shallow, let's tell him that real combat is only training (even at twelve you'd figure it out sooner than the character). Overall the writing didn't challenge anyone's vocabulary, and seemed targeted to invoke imagination into the 13 to 17 year old mindset.
Now that I see the awards it won were mass popularity based, it all makes sense. I mean, Scott Card is a genius at self promotion. Why else would we be talking about him now? I mean, in my copy of Ender's Game, he writes about how well he knows the craft of telling a story! Promote, promote, promote Scott, but if you push a stupid agenda, it will all be for naught.
1. Download Iceweasel 2. Change a few things. 3. Introduce instability (hey, it's a feature!) 4. Host it for download on the Internet. 5. Buy a few Google ads, advertising Iceweasel, pointing to your download. 6. Hire a PR firm to place ads and new articles mentioning Iceweasel, but directing them to your website. 7. Profit (in knowing if the iceweasel people will really not care about their trademark, registered or otherwise)
Renaming something doesn't fix the freeness of a product unless you lose the ability to associate the name with the product. Until we commonly refer to things by something other than it's name, we're stuck.
Iceweasel sounds free, but find out what happens when someone wants to mess with their product's identity. For open source software trademarks are not an issue, because in open source software they can be removed. The issue comes with people who are too lazy to remove them, too incompetent to remove them, or too sleazy to indicate that they are not who they pretend they are. In all cases, only protecting the assocation of the name to the distributable will fit with the current expectations of society.
Stallman may just be pounding sand again; he may just be quoted out of context; or someone may just be trying to stir the pot for their own gain. I don't know or care, because Stallman's variety of freeness is admirable and well understood. It is a shame that he tends to view freedom as only applicable when using his definitions and rules. I don't worry about it because I haven't given Stallman permission to hijack my dictionary.
The irony of Stallman's freedom is that it requires some of the most stringent constraints to ensure it's free Stallman's way. There's value in Stallman's freedom, but protection too. That protection comes at the cost of true freedom, or anarchy. "Stallman freedom"(tm) of code reserves the right to share, use, and maintain his code in the future, but does not grant you the freedom to truly do whatever you want with it.
In the rare event that he's been quoted spot-on, he also doesn't get permission to crate a world of chaos where names don't identify entities any more. That would just be stupid.
Slashdot Mirror
If the company lives, the code stays on the shelf and eventually the media suffers literal bit rot.
If the company dies, it is marked as being a valuable asset by the creditors, which then hoard it because the poor people that collect the remaining 1% of their investment don't understand the true value of code. They just want their money back.
They'll overvalue the code as if the code is minimally worth the wages it took to produce it, if not much, much more. Really the code is worthless without people who can build it, fix it, use it, sell it, service it, or answer questions about it. Since most would-be purchasers of the code clearly understand that it's worthless without such a support system, they'll want to buy it at a much lower price.
Often the sellers won't be one person, and that makes it even more difficult to sell. Often there are no buyers; if people cared enough about the code to spend more money/effort, it likely would not be mothballed.
You seem to think that doing things in parallel guarantees delay of the product that hits the majority of the masses.
I've got a house with aluminium wiring, so I've done tons of reading and research in determining if rewiring is really worth the cost.
The real problem with aluminium wiring is that when it went into place, they used the same gauge wire as the copper it replaced. Aluminium is softer, and will oxidise more readily than copper, but it is actually better suited for wiring provided that you upgrade the gauge appropriately.
Thermal expansion was a culprit only because the screw cap connectors were used in binding to copper wire, and twist around the screw terminals were commonly re-purposed for aluminium. Neither are really appropriate, the best aluminium connections are made with compression screws that secure straight wires in a metal block (clamps), not wrap-around screw posts.
Naturally the history of aluminium screw ups in housing make it nearly impossible to consider wiring a house with anything that's not copper. The fears are so great that I don't think it will ever be legal to use anything other than copper for a long, long time.
Explain that to a Washington D.C. cop who sees a phone in use in the car. They are very polite to tourists, but if you don't comply immediately you're getting a ticket. At least they are often courteous enough to warn people who are convincingly ignorant.
Rules that are enforced are not subject to public acceptance, they are backed by the force of law. Most people speed, it is true; however, we never sped when driving to my grandmother's house. The cops in that small Texas town would pull you over and ticket you for doing a single mile per hour over thirty. In fact, we often drove a few miles per hour slower because it was well known that they didn't care what your speedometer said. Their radar gun was the final judge of your speed.
If the world really ran on acceptable level of risk, then things would be much worse. Few layman estimate risk appropriately; most live under the delusion that common bad things won't affect them for whatever reason. They also live under the delusion that rare but sensational bad things are far more prevalent than they really are.
So people are terrified of airline crashes, but will gleefully drive down the road reading newspapers, putting on make up, talking on cell phones, twiddling with their laptop, changing clothes, eating, etc.
Even if people really understood the risks, freedom to communicate by cell phone while driving does not trump the right to secure other's rights to live, to not be handicapped, or to not be financially disrupted.
Yes but the problems of politics aren't the problems of discrete mathematics. Political problems are less well defined, more sticky, and rarely have any real solution.
For example, take the current political problem of defending our country against a terror attack. Clean cut solutions tend to be in violation of civil liberties, theatre security solutions tend to cost a lot and deliver little, and technological solutions are weak at defending against primitive technology attacks.
What about inadequate health care? Yes, it happens here in the USA. I'm not talking about expensive health care, I'm talking about treating the homeless so they don't pose a risk as walking disease carriers. Pay for it with tax dollars and that's not solving the problem of taxation. Let them go untreated doesn't solve human health issues. Treat them and you're providing incentives to be homeless (yes, some people are stupid enough to believe this argument wholeheartedly). Treat some of them or limit treatment to certain diseases, and you run the risk of failure too.
What if the "nerd" solution to voting comes back out of the symbolic logic quagmire with a proof that you cannot have anonymous, secure, reliable, error free, auditable voting? Computer Science has already proven that some problems cannot be solved by any Turing machine, after pissing off the whole world by stating that they can't do as good of a job as we can, then are you going to be the one to tell them it is not a solvable problem?
Yeah, but we haven't been as lucky to have the Red Scare with the corruption of Tammany Hall all rolled into one!
Think of it, graft and scaremongering, it's like peanut butter and chocolate -> peanut butter cups. Why didn't politicians exploit them both so boldly in combination before?
You're for loop was kicked back, -1 flamebait!
Next time don't use the index variable Adolph, and stop incrementing by the constant SIEG_HAIL.
I would deny them the joy and experience of looking at good code sometimes, because the tendency to bicycle shed.
Everyone wants to put some input into the project to prove that they are involved, working, and generally providing some value for the money they are paid. In less than perfect code, this often means they come up with lots of issues that need to be fixed because the code is flawed.
With very pristine code, this often means that they come up with lots of issues that shouldn't be fixed because the code isn't flawed. This can be mitigated by having a better review process, but it's hard to overcome human nature.
A real world example not in code comes to mind.
My brother bought a day care centre, and with every change of hands, such businesses must be inspected (a good practice). Problem was that this centre had been in operation for over thirty years, and had recently passed inspection in a prior sale less that two years ago. So the health inspector stated that the hot water in the public facing bathroom (for parents, children, and employees in the waiting area, not the centre itself) wasn't hot enough. Never mind that it was one hundred and five feet from the water heater and would be plenty hot in three or four seconds of running, it had to be hot instantly. So he installed an assist water heater right behind the wall of the sink.
You might think that the health inspector has a valid point, but if he did, then why did the centre manage to operating unsafely for thirty years? More likely than not, he had to find something wrong to prove to his supervisor that he was really working. Day care centres are inspected far too often for any issue to go unnoticed; to have an outstanding issue, you need a negligent inspector.
He sold it a year later, I wonder what new miracle "flaw" was discovered?
Very good practices in code review could lessen the risk of bike shedding, but it would be very hard to eliminate it. For quite a few of us, it's human nature to add in your own two cents; right or wrong.
Hence the reason for this post, oh the irony! :)
You didn't provide proof to back up your examples, so you ask us to accept that explaining
cout << "output" << endl;
is incredibly easier to explain than
System.out.println("output");
In truth, the explanations for both are very similar, with the first you indicate that the << operator puts something into the left hand side which happens to be the output to the screen.
In the Java version you indicate that the System has an output device called out and you ask that out device to print on a line the string "output".
Why the Java version is superior is because in the C++ version you immediately run into a major issue: How does the string get a endl put into it? To explain that you then need to explain that << is an operator which is implemented on the cout device, which then returns another invisible reference to the cout device that will also accept the endl when the << operator is called on that.
Certainly neither is above the ability for an undergraduate to grasp, but saying that the Java version is harder to explain just shows a bias for all things familiar. I too miss the << syntax from C++ when programming in Java, but it's insane to say that the cleaner syntax results in more easily explainable programs.
As far as garbage collection, that's easier to explain in Java too. Since Java implements only one means of garbage collection, its explanation only takes a couple of hours. C++ has two means of objects consuming memory, one that is rigid enough to explain in an hour and another that is a "figure it out for yourself" solution. Best practices must then immediately be taught, which reduces the number of ways malloc / free can be used "safely".
I've see precious few programs which were competitive on the grounds of their improved garbage collection / freeing mechanism alone.
Perhaps you should read that Dykstra paper carefully, as you seem to have fallen into a trap or two he describes. That said, I wholeheartedly agree with you that the current educational process has a lot be desired for Computer Science, but sometimes I wonder at the utility of a College that does not offer some job training in this age.
Employers look to college graduates expecting them to be trained and have created a huge demand for graduates as a result. Due to the "everything for nothing" culture in the USA, those same employers make it clear that they want pre-trained employees. Colleges react in kind by expanding their enrolment and providing skills that make them competitive in the eyes of their prospective students for the purpose of obtaining a desirable job. Thus the system becomes more a job training centre each day, which is inconsistent with the loftier goals of a College.
Lofty goals are called lofty goals because they are hard to achieve. Colleges of lesser moral fibre will play lip service to such goals and mostly do what industry wants. Colleges of stronger moral fibre will uphold such goals and risk losing credibility with the future hiring base and likewise their future student body. Only a few truly exceptional Colleges will ever be able to disregard the collective employer pressure; like the Computer Science program Dykstra was enjoying. For the masses, environment shapes the subject to a greater degree than we might like.
Line item veto is unconstitutional, but it's a fix for even worse ailments.
The Jumbo Bill, which starts off as a vechile to achieve a specific goal, but quickly becomes the bandwagon for everything under the sun should be unconstitutional, but it's not. Line item veto is a bad patch to fix it, a better one would be a no non-related riders law.
Until voting can be tailored to match each line item; yes for this line item, no for that line item: odds are most of the things a president wants to cut never really had the backing of the congress. They're attached to get undesirable items through riding the coattails of more desirable items. But we don't vote that way, and even if we could it wouldn't be better than just making it illegal to attach non-related riders to a bill.
Six, so go shove off. Most of them are kits or attempts to cobble two kits together. The simplest ones can follow lines drawn on paper, some are just bump and turn jobs. One had a microcontroller which was programmable. One use a cassette player to "play back" the program code which wasn't much more than tones on a tape.
This guy does good metal work, but without his machines accepting input, it's about as much of a robot as the lighted casino cowyboy featured in Las Vegas. Perhaps you view your car as a robot, that's fine, just don't bother me about it. I can't do decent metal work so now your world view that a guy in China is somehow better than everyone else is restored.
More to the point, how many robots did you build, or are you just trying to bolster your opinion by calling everyone a boobie?
Well, I'll give it to him, he's done a lot of fiddling. It is a shame, with a little study he might have done a lot more.
It is obvious from his work that this man is skilled in basic metal work, but most of his robots are enlarged versions of their child toy equivalents. For example, the rickshaw "robot" doesn't balance, because it is rigidly welded to the rickshaw, meaning that it is more of a four wheeled vehicle where the front two wheels have been replaced by legs. So during its most unstable moments, there are always three points of contact with the ground. To make it even easier, the batteries (car batteries I'd guess from the size of the torso) are obviously stored next to the motor driving the legs in the "robot's" torso.
With a little bit of knowledge about mechanical linkages, you could build one too. The steering is what you would call "rear wheel" (you can barely see the linkages, so the robot is only used for forward propulsion. I've seen movies of this thing in motion, and I can assure you that the legs are in a fixed stride path which really jars the passengers as they cruise along at slower than walking speed.
Someone else mentioned a lot of BS about how we would do it in the "western" world, which mostly illustrated his bias that westerners will overdesign, are overeducated, and will underproduce. The truth is that this guy would fit in pretty well over here in the west, but we wouldn't call him a robot maker. He's be an artist building automatrons, just like we already have in various places in the U.S. of A. Take a look at the burning man videos, and various "performances" on the west coast and other places. Road side attractions used to highlight people like him, with their tree museums, junk sculpture, and other oddities of interest.
Perhaps someone will want to call them robots anyway. That lowers the bar to where any wind up walking toy enlarged to human size outfitted with an electric motor and battery back is a robot. I prefer robots that at least sense their environment and alter their behaviour based on the environment. You turn on this rickshaw and it will run straight into a brick wall or step straight down an open manhole. Its lack of ability to react to the environment at all makes me view it as a leg equipped human shaped motor. Even attaching a giant leaf spring bumper switch that changed the rickshaw's direction would give this thing tons of robot credibility.
Big companies are not that much smarter than small companies in this respect, because the goal is to keep your class's attention.
Actually getting a training class involved in not zoning out and absorbing 0% of the material is not very difficult, but it is not easy either. Too many years of high school conditioning, I guess. If you have ever had to train a group on a less than facinating subject, it is obvious that at least 30% of the class will never pay attention. That's why teachers have to sell the education at the same time they present the material.
Some do it by indicating there is a test at the end of the class that you must pass. Eventually pressures in the corporation will force higher expectations on the instructor to make their entire class pass the first time. That leads to "this will be on the test" warning announcements, or even putting up the answers while the test is being administered. (There's no budget for re-training the flunkies).
The author of this lesson plan took something boring and made it exciting. Looking up someone's call history to resolve a disputed long distance call == boring. Looking up Anthony Hopkin's call history == exciting!
It doesn't make it right, but why is it less wrong for Joe Nobody than Mr. Celebrity? Eventually people will have to use the live data, so eventually you'll have these issues. At least some monitoring was in place to catch this guy.
Don't worry, they'll be forced to install beeping horns. That way the people crossing runways won't accidentally think it's clear because they failed to look both ways.
I knew there was a car analogy in there somewhere.
Forty acres and a mammoth?
Somehow I believe if you could bring one back, bringing another back of the opposite sex within a few years wouldn't be impossibly difficult. Especially when it would likely be the most cost effective means of producing more Mammoths for zoos and others that were willing to pay.
The business of zoos might not always be pretty, but it practically guarantees that more than one will exist if public outrage doesn't overcome public curiosity.
Right, the true numbers should be:
160,000 people searched under the new anti-terrorist behaviour screening, 0 terrorists found. 1,200 arrests made for completely non-terrorist activity.
This doesn't indicate a ~1% success rate, it indicates a 100% failure rate; no terrorists were found.
Perhaps there are no terrorists to find, perhaps there are; but in either case, this method has found to be a complete failure over a sample size of 160,000 individuals.
Glad to see that link get a bit more use, even though I hope to never need the information at the other end of it.
The best part is when it boils down to you telling the truth and the police interviewing someone who is mistaken. Normally it would be a 1:1 ratio of guilt versus innocence, except that the police can then take the stand and testify that you lied to them only using the mistaken person as proof that you lied.
Sure, perhaps a great lawyer will have half a dozen defences ready for such a circumstance, but the world doesn't lack for average and below average lawyers.
I really miss great lectures. They were few and far between at the University, and now that I'm long out of school, there have been none.
Funny part is when the decoy ring slides off under the table as an eligible one approaches.
Women, you're not that sly, we see it. Guys are sticklers for details, rings leave marks, and sleight of hand seldom works. Maybe you're undoing the lie you made that morning; maybe you're creating a lie for the present. It just makes you look untrustworthy either way.
Who hits on an untrustworthy woman? Likely the exact kind of person that the ring was supposed to repel.
Survival of the fittest Biology.
And with each decimal place, we are ten fold in number!
Card's personal politics aside, I bought Ender's Game because it was a known Sci Fi book and "award winning." After reading it, I will never buy anything he writes again.
It was mediocre writing, mixed a few good ideas; perhaps too many good ideas for one story with any depth. Some characters were comically typecast (cue the superhuman assassin sage teacher). Situations were obviously shallow, let's tell him that real combat is only training (even at twelve you'd figure it out sooner than the character). Overall the writing didn't challenge anyone's vocabulary, and seemed targeted to invoke imagination into the 13 to 17 year old mindset.
Now that I see the awards it won were mass popularity based, it all makes sense. I mean, Scott Card is a genius at self promotion. Why else would we be talking about him now? I mean, in my copy of Ender's Game, he writes about how well he knows the craft of telling a story! Promote, promote, promote Scott, but if you push a stupid agenda, it will all be for naught.
1. Download Iceweasel
2. Change a few things.
3. Introduce instability (hey, it's a feature!)
4. Host it for download on the Internet.
5. Buy a few Google ads, advertising Iceweasel, pointing to your download.
6. Hire a PR firm to place ads and new articles mentioning Iceweasel, but directing them to your website.
7. Profit (in knowing if the iceweasel people will really not care about their trademark, registered or otherwise)
Renaming something doesn't fix the freeness of a product unless you lose the ability to associate the name with the product. Until we commonly refer to things by something other than it's name, we're stuck.
Iceweasel sounds free, but find out what happens when someone wants to mess with their product's identity. For open source software trademarks are not an issue, because in open source software they can be removed. The issue comes with people who are too lazy to remove them, too incompetent to remove them, or too sleazy to indicate that they are not who they pretend they are. In all cases, only protecting the assocation of the name to the distributable will fit with the current expectations of society.
Stallman may just be pounding sand again; he may just be quoted out of context; or someone may just be trying to stir the pot for their own gain. I don't know or care, because Stallman's variety of freeness is admirable and well understood. It is a shame that he tends to view freedom as only applicable when using his definitions and rules. I don't worry about it because I haven't given Stallman permission to hijack my dictionary.
The irony of Stallman's freedom is that it requires some of the most stringent constraints to ensure it's free Stallman's way. There's value in Stallman's freedom, but protection too. That protection comes at the cost of true freedom, or anarchy. "Stallman freedom"(tm) of code reserves the right to share, use, and maintain his code in the future, but does not grant you the freedom to truly do whatever you want with it.
In the rare event that he's been quoted spot-on, he also doesn't get permission to crate a world of chaos where names don't identify entities any more. That would just be stupid.
Or the handle of an old Heiland camera flash, either one works just as well.
with respect to subjective / objective:
strike that, reverse it.