The logical thing to do would be to put added value in the DVD release, such as commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and other fun stuff, instead of pissing off one's potential customers.
Then again, I guess we're talking about the entertainment industry here, so never mind.
It's not just a bug - it's an exploit. TV stations and other content distributors can start exploiting this bug to force deletions on people's Tivo boxes (unless Tivo patches their product to prevent false positives).
The wealth of the parent of your post wasn't the guy's point. He was saying that, for people who do get cars with these features, it makes them worse drivers than if they had never used those features at all.
It's like having a calculator in an arithmetic class. The calculator isn't standard equipment by any means, but there are people who use a calculator anyway. Yes, when they're using the calculator, they're a lot better at doing arithmetic, but if you take away the calculator, they're far, far worse.
The same thing applies in what the parent of your post was saying: having features where the car manages aspects of your driving for you makes you less dependent upon your own wits and more dependent upon those managed-safety features. Take those away (say, they break, or maybe you end up renting/borrowing a car that doesn't have them) and you put yourself at risk.
By the way, what 2001 model car do you have that doesn't have power steering?
Part of the point of an RTOS is to be able to control a process in many different ways with different priorities. For example, if you need extremely fine torque control on a motor, you can run the thread that controls motor torque as high-priority, and it will be guaranteed to update at a specified interval (assuming you don't overtax the system with other threads at the same priority), while you can run other threads on the same box that don't need a guaranteed update rate to do things like user interface at a low priority.
You could do this all with special control hardware, if you want - back in the day, this sort of thing was even done analog, which was a lot harder to tune but was as real-time as you could get - but with an RTOS all you really need is a fast x86 box with additional I/O capabilities to do the same thing. It's a cost-saver and/or a space-saver, depending on your application.
However.... When the system has to be failsafe (like enabling safety protocols), I would never trust the task to *any* system that runs the risk of crashing due to Unlikely Event X. People who design systems with safety features always design them such that if something unlikely and very bad happens, the system shuts down as safely as possible. For example, emergency stop buttons are always normally closed, so that if one of the wires going to the button falls off (a very unlikely event), the e-stop trips (and the buttons are designed such that they never short out if the button itself fails). A nuclear reactor should have hardware interlocks which shut the system down in a controlled fashion even if the normal control system fails altogether, with the last result probably being some gravity-driven system. One might use solenoids to hold the control rods in their mounting brackets, for example, so that if the power fails completely, the solenoids disengage, dropping the control rods into the reactor.
The parent of my post was saying, essentially, "You learn one language, you've learned them all," which is what I was refuting.
In case you were being non-rhetorical, by the way, I've TA'd (and guest lectured during) two separate semesters of the programming language theory course you mentioned. But when I was first learning Lisp, ML, Prolog, etc., I was an EE undergraduate student, not a CS graduate student, so I hadn't yet been exposed to the sort of coursework that would teach me about different programming paradigms. In other words, I've seen things from both sides of the fence (wrestling with programming languages whose syntax is only the beginning of their differences, to later understanding why that can be so difficult).
Combine just-in-time publishing with "open-source" textbooks (two concepts which could work today, but for some reason haven't gone anywhere yet), and you've just saved college students and public schools a lot of money.
Hypocrisy is irrelevant when it comes to governmental policy. If (hypothetically) a legislature consisted entirely of convicted murderers, and they all voted to increase the minimum sentence for murder, that's hypocritical too, but that doesn't by itself make it the wrong thing to do.
Have you programmed in ML? Lisp? What about Prolog?
Maybe you haven't programmed in some or any of these languages. If you have, though, you'll probably know what I mean when I say that, compared to C/C++, none of them are exactly a walk in the park. They require you to think differently about not just syntax, but the entire form of your programs.
What if your only programming experience was ten years of (not Visual) Basic, and suddenly you were faced with learning Java? The concepts of object-oriented programming would be completely foreign to a person coming from a language that doesn't even have user-definable data structures.
When I learned PHP (no, I'm no master), I was able to draw on my knowledge of C/C++, which is syntactically practically identical but more importantly the same paradigm. Learning how to tinker around in it was a snap. On the other hand, learning a language like Lisp, coming from C/C++, was much more of a challenge - yes, the syntax was different, but I had the whole ample use of parentheses thing down quickly. It was the fact that Lisp flows as a functional language but stutters as an imperative one that gave me fits. You'll never be a good Lisp programmer until you resign yourself to the fact that when you try to fit Lisp in to the C++ mold, you get crappy Lisp programs.
You're probably thinking, why the hell do I want to learn how to program in Lisp? I'll probably never use it. True, in a production environment, Lisp isn't anywhere near the most commonly used language. But college is about teaching you how to think more so than what to think. By learning Lisp while you're in college (or another language that doesn't fit into the C/C++/Java/PHP/etc. motif), you give yourself another way to think about how to do things. When you finish your degree and go into job training wherever you end up, that will help you just as much as the program design courses that give you the depth you need to get a leg up in the job market.
One question is what Franklin meant by "essential liberty". Is the freedom to walk down the streets of London without being videotaped an essential liberty?* What about the freedom to use the phone unmonitored?
Another question is why Franklin would believe that the willingness to give up some of one's own essential liberty merits a loss of safety. Did he really mean that people who would feel safer with a constant overbearing police presence should instead be thrown to the wolves (rather, to the criminal elements they want the police to protect them from)? Isn't safety itself an essential liberty?
My point is that just because Franklin said something doesn't make it the gospel truth. The moment I saw the original post on the Slashdot front page, I knew somebody would whip out the old Franklin quote. This time around, though, I hope people really think about the implications rather than just use it as a bludgeoning instrument for proving their point.
(*Never mind that Brits might not be apt to take advice from an icon of the American Revolution.)
That said (and getting a bit more on-topic), I think a real issue here is that liberty is being sacrificed to gain no appreciable increase in safety. The mere illusion of safety is not enough to justify some of the intrusions that governments like the UK and US are foisting on their citizens.
But wait. Murdoch is an arch conservative who plows millions if not billions of dollars into media companies worldwide to advance his right wing zealotry into politics. He also finances right wing politicians. He owns multitute of newspapers, television stations, internet holdings etc.
That doesn't mean that everything that happens underneath the News Corp umbrella is a shill for right-wing politics. A great deal of their business is politically neutral, and some of it actually carries a liberal message from time to time.
You can use ctrl-alt-tab to switch between units. Sometimes this is necessary because if you start a "program" but don't actually place it anywhere, there'll be no unit to click on in order to terminate it (you can only run a few programs at a time). Yeah, you might get carpal tunnel doing this, but it works.
Mouse gestures are kind of annoying, yes. I didn't much care for it with Black and White, either, mainly because it was too easy to call up the wrong thing or just have it not recognize your gesture at all.
Is it worth 20 pounds UK or 30 dollars American? Probably not. But even with its flaws, it's a fun little game.
News Corp is more than just Fox News Channel and the NY Post, people. They bought out 20th Century Fox (the film studio) in 1984 and started the Fox TV network the next year. FNC wasn't started for another 11 years. As for actual "news" holdings, most of that is in Australia.
I realize that finding ways to channel the spirit of Michael Moore onto Slashdot is an easy shot at karma, but really, by buying IGN, News Corp is just making a move toward a greater presence in Internet entertainment. There's not some vast right-wing conspiracy behind it.
"Noble Citizens, I tell you that the disgusting inhabitants of the evil blue planet will not find us easy prey. We will never surrender. We will never give up. We will fight them on the dunes. We will fight them on the plains. We will fight them in the cities. We will fight them in the canals. We will fight them to the edge of the empire, but we will never, never, Never, Never, NEVER SURRENDER!"
Yeah, they say that now. But it won't be long before they, for one, welcome their new hyoo-mon overlords.
Slashdot Mirror
It does if they get a kickback from Fox.
The logical thing to do would be to put added value in the DVD release, such as commentary tracks, deleted scenes, and other fun stuff, instead of pissing off one's potential customers.
Then again, I guess we're talking about the entertainment industry here, so never mind.
It's not just a bug - it's an exploit. TV stations and other content distributors can start exploiting this bug to force deletions on people's Tivo boxes (unless Tivo patches their product to prevent false positives).
I'll take journaling filesystems for $200, Alex.
feb 2006 - the onStar system gains awareness.
GM, in a panic tries to pull the plug, in turn the onStar system tries to defend it self.
Apparently, it'll be OnStar versus Cisco in an all-out brawl in a giant muuuuuud pit!
The wealth of the parent of your post wasn't the guy's point. He was saying that, for people who do get cars with these features, it makes them worse drivers than if they had never used those features at all.
It's like having a calculator in an arithmetic class. The calculator isn't standard equipment by any means, but there are people who use a calculator anyway. Yes, when they're using the calculator, they're a lot better at doing arithmetic, but if you take away the calculator, they're far, far worse.
The same thing applies in what the parent of your post was saying: having features where the car manages aspects of your driving for you makes you less dependent upon your own wits and more dependent upon those managed-safety features. Take those away (say, they break, or maybe you end up renting/borrowing a car that doesn't have them) and you put yourself at risk.
By the way, what 2001 model car do you have that doesn't have power steering?
Part of the point of an RTOS is to be able to control a process in many different ways with different priorities. For example, if you need extremely fine torque control on a motor, you can run the thread that controls motor torque as high-priority, and it will be guaranteed to update at a specified interval (assuming you don't overtax the system with other threads at the same priority), while you can run other threads on the same box that don't need a guaranteed update rate to do things like user interface at a low priority.
You could do this all with special control hardware, if you want - back in the day, this sort of thing was even done analog, which was a lot harder to tune but was as real-time as you could get - but with an RTOS all you really need is a fast x86 box with additional I/O capabilities to do the same thing. It's a cost-saver and/or a space-saver, depending on your application.
However.... When the system has to be failsafe (like enabling safety protocols), I would never trust the task to *any* system that runs the risk of crashing due to Unlikely Event X. People who design systems with safety features always design them such that if something unlikely and very bad happens, the system shuts down as safely as possible. For example, emergency stop buttons are always normally closed, so that if one of the wires going to the button falls off (a very unlikely event), the e-stop trips (and the buttons are designed such that they never short out if the button itself fails). A nuclear reactor should have hardware interlocks which shut the system down in a controlled fashion even if the normal control system fails altogether, with the last result probably being some gravity-driven system. One might use solenoids to hold the control rods in their mounting brackets, for example, so that if the power fails completely, the solenoids disengage, dropping the control rods into the reactor.
http://wordnet.princeton.edu/perl/webwn?s=niggardl y
The parent of my post was saying, essentially, "You learn one language, you've learned them all," which is what I was refuting.
In case you were being non-rhetorical, by the way, I've TA'd (and guest lectured during) two separate semesters of the programming language theory course you mentioned. But when I was first learning Lisp, ML, Prolog, etc., I was an EE undergraduate student, not a CS graduate student, so I hadn't yet been exposed to the sort of coursework that would teach me about different programming paradigms. In other words, I've seen things from both sides of the fence (wrestling with programming languages whose syntax is only the beginning of their differences, to later understanding why that can be so difficult).
Combine just-in-time publishing with "open-source" textbooks (two concepts which could work today, but for some reason haven't gone anywhere yet), and you've just saved college students and public schools a lot of money.
Hypocrisy is irrelevant when it comes to governmental policy. If (hypothetically) a legislature consisted entirely of convicted murderers, and they all voted to increase the minimum sentence for murder, that's hypocritical too, but that doesn't by itself make it the wrong thing to do.
See also ad hominem to quoque.
Have you programmed in ML? Lisp? What about Prolog?
Maybe you haven't programmed in some or any of these languages. If you have, though, you'll probably know what I mean when I say that, compared to C/C++, none of them are exactly a walk in the park. They require you to think differently about not just syntax, but the entire form of your programs.
What if your only programming experience was ten years of (not Visual) Basic, and suddenly you were faced with learning Java? The concepts of object-oriented programming would be completely foreign to a person coming from a language that doesn't even have user-definable data structures.
When I learned PHP (no, I'm no master), I was able to draw on my knowledge of C/C++, which is syntactically practically identical but more importantly the same paradigm. Learning how to tinker around in it was a snap. On the other hand, learning a language like Lisp, coming from C/C++, was much more of a challenge - yes, the syntax was different, but I had the whole ample use of parentheses thing down quickly. It was the fact that Lisp flows as a functional language but stutters as an imperative one that gave me fits. You'll never be a good Lisp programmer until you resign yourself to the fact that when you try to fit Lisp in to the C++ mold, you get crappy Lisp programs.
You're probably thinking, why the hell do I want to learn how to program in Lisp? I'll probably never use it. True, in a production environment, Lisp isn't anywhere near the most commonly used language. But college is about teaching you how to think more so than what to think. By learning Lisp while you're in college (or another language that doesn't fit into the C/C++/Java/PHP/etc. motif), you give yourself another way to think about how to do things. When you finish your degree and go into job training wherever you end up, that will help you just as much as the program design courses that give you the depth you need to get a leg up in the job market.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pebble_bed_reactor
One question is what Franklin meant by "essential liberty". Is the freedom to walk down the streets of London without being videotaped an essential liberty?* What about the freedom to use the phone unmonitored?
Another question is why Franklin would believe that the willingness to give up some of one's own essential liberty merits a loss of safety. Did he really mean that people who would feel safer with a constant overbearing police presence should instead be thrown to the wolves (rather, to the criminal elements they want the police to protect them from)? Isn't safety itself an essential liberty?
My point is that just because Franklin said something doesn't make it the gospel truth. The moment I saw the original post on the Slashdot front page, I knew somebody would whip out the old Franklin quote. This time around, though, I hope people really think about the implications rather than just use it as a bludgeoning instrument for proving their point.
(*Never mind that Brits might not be apt to take advice from an icon of the American Revolution.)
That said (and getting a bit more on-topic), I think a real issue here is that liberty is being sacrificed to gain no appreciable increase in safety. The mere illusion of safety is not enough to justify some of the intrusions that governments like the UK and US are foisting on their citizens.
Actually, "Fox Kids" changed its name to "Jetix" everywhere (not just in Europe) because it was sold to Disney some time ago.
But wait. Murdoch is an arch conservative who plows millions if not billions of dollars into media companies worldwide to advance his right wing zealotry into politics. He also finances right wing politicians. He owns multitute of newspapers, television stations, internet holdings etc.
That doesn't mean that everything that happens underneath the News Corp umbrella is a shill for right-wing politics. A great deal of their business is politically neutral, and some of it actually carries a liberal message from time to time.
You can use ctrl-alt-tab to switch between units. Sometimes this is necessary because if you start a "program" but don't actually place it anywhere, there'll be no unit to click on in order to terminate it (you can only run a few programs at a time). Yeah, you might get carpal tunnel doing this, but it works.
Mouse gestures are kind of annoying, yes. I didn't much care for it with Black and White, either, mainly because it was too easy to call up the wrong thing or just have it not recognize your gesture at all.
Is it worth 20 pounds UK or 30 dollars American? Probably not. But even with its flaws, it's a fun little game.
News Corp is more than just Fox News Channel and the NY Post, people. They bought out 20th Century Fox (the film studio) in 1984 and started the Fox TV network the next year. FNC wasn't started for another 11 years. As for actual "news" holdings, most of that is in Australia.
I realize that finding ways to channel the spirit of Michael Moore onto Slashdot is an easy shot at karma, but really, by buying IGN, News Corp is just making a move toward a greater presence in Internet entertainment. There's not some vast right-wing conspiracy behind it.
Just donate through Amazon.com.
something tells me the mail might not get through to New Orleans addresses for a while...
Something like this, perhaps.
"Noble Citizens, I tell you that the disgusting inhabitants of the evil blue planet will not find us easy prey. We will never surrender. We will never give up. We will fight them on the dunes. We will fight them on the plains. We will fight them in the cities. We will fight them in the canals. We will fight them to the edge of the empire, but we will never, never, Never, Never, NEVER SURRENDER!"
Yeah, they say that now. But it won't be long before they, for one, welcome their new hyoo-mon overlords.
That's a misread statistic, considering we're talking about hydrogen fuel cells here and not gasoline.
I've been using POP to fetch my e-mail from the same address for 11 years.
The folks at Redmond must have special paper that lets you print video and audio.