On the other hand, there have been Unixlikes which don't sync before shutting down, which is why on SCO Xenix it used to be the habit to sync twice before issuing the 'haltsys' command. That way, the time you sent typing sync the second time would let the first sync finish
On the really early unix boxes (like the one I had in the mid-80s). the ritual was "sync;sync;sync;halt".
First sync dumps most of the stuff. But various hair including adding the "sync" to the log of superuser activity immediately made things out-of-date again. Second sync pushes that out, too. But its logging just grows the file a little more. Third sync ditto but it's just there to make sure the second sync is fully done before the halt gets launched.
What part of "... the Roman general going postal[k] on them." don't you get? I'd think it was clear even with the typo.
1. Lay siege to Carthage - intending to do the usual thing of annexing them and ending up with them as a new province, religious freedom and all. 2. The Carthaginians' priests declare that the people have angered their god and a sacrifice is needed to make the Romans go away. 3. The people are convinced and a sacrifice is made. Their god happens to be Molloch, so they round up all the babies and toss them in the idol's fire. 4. The smog from this blows over to the Roman positions. The general, who knows how their religion works, gets a whiff. 5. The general goes ballistic. No baby-burning fanatics are going to be merged into the Roman Empire on HIS watch. 6. The Romans level the city, kill every adult they can get their hands on (or a sword or spear into), tear up the surrounding countryside, and sew salt on it so that Carthage will never rise again. 7. No profit for Carthage, from then on.
In about 2000 years archaeological robots will be digging through the ruins of a federal prison and they'll uncover Donald TRUMP's bones!
Yeah, yeah, Cato the Callow. And Carthage Must be Destroyed, too. Oh, wait: It WAS. By Rome, even.
No matter what your professors told you, it wasn't Cato the Elder's incessant injection of flamage of Carthage into discussions of unrelated subjects in his (the original) forum that did them in. It was their behavior the next time Rome and Carthage were having a military-grade spat, which made the Roman general go postalk on them.
But please DO keep being even more annoying than your historical model. It makes both you, and everyone on your side, look deranged, and hurts your cause. B-)
... you would have each been better off performing the transaction through a market.
I assume you're being sarcastic. If the transaction was satisfactory to both of them, there's no difference between this and another other market transaction - except for lower transaction costs and receiving some extra intangible value.
They're better off with this trade than if they'd spent time researching competing providers, splitting the deal into two pieces with money, paying the government a cut, and spending the extra time to handle the accounting for taxes. Then there's the intangible benefits of friendship reenforcement and satisfaction with mutual sufficiency.
(By the way: They DID perform the transaction through a market. They just happened to find their corresponding market player next door, with a satisfactory.)
The fact that exchange in kind hampers productivity has been known for centuries now.
The way that money beats barter is that it is usually easier to arrange turning a piece of your productivity into needed goods or services provided by someone else if you do it in two steps than trying to find someone who happens to need your stuff and can provide what you need. When the opportunity for a good barter falls in your lap, you win by eliminating the frictions of the middle steps.
Copy them to a USB stick, and then yank the stick right when the light stops blinking.
Two functionalities are key: Sync and unmount.
- Sync forces the filesystem to complete all in-RAM updates to blocks, write the blocks to the driver, and forces the driver to flush all pending writes to the backing store. Issuing a "sync" kicks off activity that insures the data for the current state is all on the backing store when the activity is completed. (And manually issuing two of them insures the first one is completed before the second command returns.)
- Unmount also tells the filesystem to get all files closed, go to such a state (including updating a flag saying it isn't mounted, if that is part of the filesystem) and write this all to the store.
Unixes and linux are usually configured to issue syncs periodically. So if you write new stuff to your filesystem, and your filesystem/driver combination isn't one that tries to always force the data to the store right away, you'll see the activitly light go out when there's still important stuff in a last few buffers which AREN'T written yet. (For a new file, on some filesystems, that will include the metadata about the file, which got finalized when it got closed and thus is the last thing changed.) Pull the store now and important stuff about these new files is incomplete or missing, even if they've been closed (so the last buffer of data is complete and queued to be written).
When this happens, if you wait around a short time, and the periodic sync will force it out to the store. But it might be so few blocks that you don't see the activity light blink. Pull the store after that and it will have the file data and metadata for the new, and closed, files. But the filesystem image will still be in a "mounted" state, so remounting it will require at least some filesystem scan (very short for journaling filesystems) and may generate a gripe from the OS.
Unmount (then sync;sync, though unmount seems to do that for you these days) and you guarantee that the backing store is clean and ready to go. Eject does that for you (or gripes if it can't because there are sill things in use by live apps) before it actually ejects the storage medium or tells you you can safely remove it.
I understand that finding, testing and indeed certifying new drugs is costly. I have worked in the certification world for 15 years.
[people have to chose between paying the exorbitant prices gouged by drug companies to pay for developing new drugs, or dying.]
In my opinion, it is fucking disgusting that this is allowed to happen.
Most of that cost is getting the drug through regulatory red tape before it can be sold. Ask Google about time and you get a link to a (2014) article saying that the whole process takes 10 to 15 years (average 12) of which 2 1/2 is the bureaucrats final-processing the 100,000 pages of paper. Ask about cost and you get an NYT article deconstructing a Tfuts Center (industry funded) claim of 2.5 BILLION dollars - of which about half is opportunity costs from not being able to sell it sooner. Even after the deconstruction, you're still talking high hundreds of millions to a billion and change.
When the FDA law was first passed, enabling a federal gateway to drug sales, the congresscritters declared that if it held up a new drug for six months it would be unacceptably counter-productive. Years later, the Wall Street Journal headlined that just ONE drug-holdup (approving the use of beta blockers to ward off secondary heart attacks - because research done in Europe couldn't be used and it had to be re-done in the US) had caused 100,000 deaths. Read the text and it looks like the headline was conservative and the number was more like 400,000.
The problem is that the bureaucrats' incentive structure is to hold up approval and cause invisible suffering and death, and high prices, rather than grant it and risk a very visible scandal like the Thalidomide (plus cigarettes, it turns out) flipper-babies.
Want to end this? Change the law.
Start by demoting FDA approval to advisory, rather than necessary for prescribing or sale of a compound for medical use. (Ptients will be able to deal with insurance company formularies in the free market. Some will require it, like UL approval before it became part of electrical codes. Others will pay for iffy stuff - which saves them costs in two ways: Curing some patients more cheaply, or killing them off before the costs add up.)
You'll also have to end the drug war and give people the right to chose what they put in their bodies. This should also help: The drug war has blocked medical uses, and research on them, of drugs with PLESANT side-effects for a half-century. It has also led to under-medication for pain, which, in addition to torturing the terminally ill, seems to be THE cause of PTSD.
I would argue that anyone who thinks it is reasonable that drug companies should be able to charge whatever they like for literally life saving drugs, then you sir, are a complete and total sack of shit and the reason why we cannot have nice things. So, go fuck yourself.
Yeah, shut off debate by a preemptive ad hominem, flaming anyone who disagrees with you as evil and subhuman. We've seen a lot of that lately. It leads to polarization and increased conflict, not solutions.
If I wanted to retaliate in kind, I'd point out that YOUR JOB, no doubt highly paid (or you need to work on that), is part of the very system that causes the problem of which you complain, and wouldn't exist without it. Then I'd call you a vile profiteer on the suffering of those millions of victims, yadda, yadda...
Except recently it's been rising and is accelerating.
That graph looks scary until you look at the scales, and translate milimeters to inches.
It shows the sea level rising by 2 inches in the last century. It also looks very slightly bent up near the end.
Now how you get a error bands of less than +- 1/6 inch when measuring sea level beats me. But let's assume their methodology works. And lets be generous and assume that bend is an exponential. It's a pretty small bend, so let's be REALLY generous and say that the extrapolated next two inches happen in 50 years rather than 100.
So a 2 inch sea level rise in 50 years will flood out the Internet in 10? It only takes (substantially less than) 2/5 of an inch of sea level rise to do it?
I think we need a MUCH scarier graph to support this panic.
They had to tear those EV1s out of their owner's hands. GM at no point wanted to make an EV. They still don't. Customers absolutely wanted them and probably would have paid a higher price to get them. GM fights tooth and nail at every point to not do it and they are one of the auto makers that's better with EVs.
Before the government takeover there was the issue that making such cars was different enough from making gas cars that you had to build some new assembly lines (for components, even if you can manage to hack an existing final line to assemble the new thing), rather than make tweaks to the ones that you already have (and paid for long ago). That makes things much more pricey - especially when the company is already cash-strapped to the point of needing a government bailout.
After the government takeover you're dealing with a C-suite controlled by government bureaucrats, with their eyes on the politics, rather than corporate bureaucrats, with their eyes on the almighty dollar.
2 min and a shaved second between cars. That's running flat out 24/7. No coffee breaks, no shift change, no stop-the-line-for-an-oopsie. (Easy to see why he needed more than one line.)
A target of 5,000 cars a WEEK this early in the company's history? And they HIT it? I'm FLOORED!
How many vehicles can other auto manufacturers produce in one week?
How many production lines do they have?
How many years of investment and plowing-revenue-into-building-or-buying-production-capaity did they spend to get to that point?
5000 cars/month is about 8 2/3 minutes per car. That's if you run your lines three shifts, 7 days a week, and they NEVER STOP. With 5-day weeks it's about 6 minutes between cars (and thus per-station on a line), with two shifts it's 4, with one shift it's 2, with coffee breaks, lunch, etc. it's less.
And that's not even TOUCHING the big killer - adding slop time at each station for fixing any oopsie within the time slot, and stopping the WHOLE LINE when the step doesn't get done right and isn't something you can mark the tag after the car's off the line.
A production line is a giant AND gate, with a forest of inputs, that has to output 1 to make cars.
A target of 5,000 cars a month this early in the company's history? And they HIT it? Amazing!
If you look at crossing the chasm model, they've yet to, actually cross.
Which is good for the company, because if you look at companies where someone in the C-suite starts enthusing about "Crossing the Chasm" the book, you see a consistent pattern:
1. They fire the early-hires and screw them out of the bulk of their stock option gains (as recommended near the end of one of the later chapters).
2. But they do it too soon - when they are still what's making the company run and innovate, when the key "invisible IP" is still in their heads and skills, rather than institutionalized, documented, and trained into a redundant collection of other skilled people.
3. So then the company keeps running for a while. But it doesn't keep innovating (or goes on a wild chasing-the-vexing-opportunities spree), the core proceses start to randomly flake out when something breaks and has to be redesigned from the ground up rather than just tweaked, the company stops growing (and/or flakes out visibly on customers). Shortly it falls into, rather than crossing, the chasm.
4. No profit.
Further back, I remember getting a 64K memory card for my Imsai 8080
Tell me about it.
I had to automate the energy management system for an auto plant using 8080A based machine with two ROM sockets, 8KB each, for the whole program memory. But I needed to fit the works in just one of 'em, to leave the other for the plant engineers to use for the per-machine configuration.
So, standing on the backs of giants (Dijkstra, Riddle, Saal, and Weiser), I ported and optimized (the HELL out of) a little OS. Got prioritized preempting multitasking (including boot initialization and minimal supporting task set) in about 535 bytes of assembler. (Communicating Semaphores are SWEET. They do EVERYTHING for you, if you know the right use patterns.) It all fit with room to spare: Drivers, debugger, soft real-time clock, ladder logic interpreter, protocol stack, schedule interpreter.
Much of what bloats current 'ware is system support for fast programming, including boundary enforcement and crossing, error checking, and the like. With cheap resources to throw at it you can get enormously more done in a given amount of designer time. And that snowballs - which also snowballs the bloat.
This tiny system had no protection whatsoever. The pieces all had to work and carefully not stomp on their neighbors. But with the Communicating Semaphore approach the multitasking boundaries drove the software design toward tiny, encapsulated, components interacting via message-passing, anticipating Object Oriented Programming. With such small, unbloated, pieces it was possible to actually get one's head loaded with each entire piece and debug it to that level of reliability.
IoT brought back machines comparable to those minis - for under a buck and fuel-sipping enough to run on a coin cell for years. A couple years back there was a window where such software approaches might have been apropos again. (You can shoehorn an AMAZING amount of functionality into a tiny computer if you substitute skill and use-patterns for tool-driven bloat. Alternatively, the tools could be upgraded to do much of the protection and usage-pattern checking offline during build, rather than on the live system.) Moore's law has grown IoT machines to the point where they are starting to have enough memory to support code bloat. But the power requirements still push down on cycles-per-task, so the window probably isn't closed.
What bugs me is that the federal law preempts civil suits against the likes of phone spammers, those who ignore the do-not-call list, etc.
My family has our land lines on the do-not-call list and yet is running a higher ratio of junk to real calls than junk to real snail mail, and the robocallers are starting to show up on our cellphones (which is supposedly strictly a no-no).
If we could civil-sue the offenders (say, in small-claims court) for damages in the form of the cost of our time and resources in receiving those calls, we could recover at least some of our losses, while the offenders might think twice about re-offending. But we can't, because the federal government preempted such suits, and then doesn't take effective action against the offenders, so the level of offence, and resulting damage, explodes.
It seems to me that such preemption might constitute a "taking" under the Fifth Amendment (for the alleged "public purpose" of avoiding crippling legitimate businesses with bogus suits from disgruntled customers when they make a legitimate phone contact).
If so, the Fed owes us all a lot of money.
Anyone up for running a class-action to recover that? B-)
We already know that plants use piezoelectricity to increase cell growth on the concave side of a loaded branch in order to grow upward or outward.
Can you point me to a reference somewhere?
Wish I could. I saw that in a civil-service-level electrical engineering trade journal some time in the 1950s or early '60s (that I found in a pile of discarded magazines, when I was a kid with a serious electronics hobby.)
The article was about engineering around possible problems with a high voltage cross-country DC power transmission line. The concern was that trees under the line would grow to "seek" one of the wires, then short the line.
(Solution was to swap the + and - lines from time to time, so the distortion would average out and the trees would grow straight until they could be cut. I notice, though, that they mostly ran it through the desert east of the Sierras (and somewhat west of Hawthorne NV) - on REALLY high poles. B-) )
(Another worry was that, if the went into the "one wire's down so use grounds at both ends to complete the circuit until it's fixed" mode, they'd foul up the small voltage between the rails that detects trains for the signal systems.)
Animal bones do that, too. Put a pair of electrodes across a bone and give them a small voltage. The bone will grow a big hemispheric lump around the + wire without (any mentioned) erosion around the - (if I recall the polarity correctly). This makes sense: If the bone is bending enough to activate the mechanism it should be both straighter and stronger. Article had a nice piece of artwork of that. (Sorry: Also decades old and pre-Internet, so good luck.)
I'm just wondering if this technology can be scaled up to something human-sized.
It might be interesting to use it, not as primary lift, but as trim lift, on a dirigible.
With essentially neutral bouyancy it doesn't take a lot to make the difference between climbing, hovering, and dropping. Meanwhile, the craft has an enormous area to acquire force from the charge's interaction with the atmosphere's ambient field, while the shape is just about ideal for avoiding corona losses.
You'd want to go zero charge for tethering or landing, to avoid a big spark discharge followed immediately by (if not a fire) a change in lift. (Though an isolated and zero-charged region around the mooring attachment might do the trick.)
This could be much less of a hassle than dynamic lift (which requires motion relative to the air for the elevators to bite into), ballast/gas volume adjustment, or gasbag temperature adjustment.
A number of plants have windborne seeds surrounded or mounted beneath a thready structure. (Dandelions, cottonwood, and milkweed come to mind immediately.) Other structures could also get some assistance from electriec lift. Charge would be a good thing to look for.
We already know that plants use piezoelectricity to increase cell growth on the concave side of a loaded branch in order to grow upward or outward. Why not another electrical hack?
Why should spiders - or the animal kingdom in general - have all the fun?
The problem is when there is no human oversight to correct the inevitable mistakes that bots make either before or after the fact.
Web plublication (some of it automated) occurs at computer speed and there's a lot of it. _Live Science_ estimated total internet traffic at a zettabyte per year, and that
As of September 2014, there were 1 billion websites on the Internet, a number that fluctuates by the minute as sites go defunct and others are born.
Are there even enough humans to check the automated classification done by Google's server farms? (If so, how would Google pay the necessary number of them?)
In 1969, the United States Supreme Court ruled... that people could view whatever they wished in the privacy of their own homes. In response, the United States Congress funded the President's Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, set up by President Lyndon B. Johnson to study pornography.... On balance the report found that obscenity and pornography were not important social problems, that there was no evidence that exposure to such material was harmful to individuals, and that current legal and policy initiatives were more likely to create problems than solve them.
The report was resoundingly rejected and denounced by congress.
In response to that, along with continued attempts to, nevertheless, enforce existing, and impose new, anti-pornography laws (and otherwise harass publishers of erotic images), Earl Kemp published an illustrated version of the report, consisting of the report's text but "replete with the sort of photographs the commission examined.".
For distributing this book he was sentenced to a year in prison, and served the federal minimum of three months and one day. (This brings up the question of how one is supposed to have a right to view something it's a crime to provide.)
Nearly half a century later the same sort of attacks on free speech continue on the new Intenet medium. And a handful of copies of the... Illustrated Report... are available on Amazon (with the asking price of an unused copy of over half a grand.)
in your world apparently there are no competitors and thus no need to compete
yes, that really is how you think! we see it, the words are right there, you don't even think about competing
You're confusing my description of what goes on in a C-suite with my own thinking.
In THEIR world, the pointy-haired bosses see no need to compete - at least until some competitor is starting to come up behind them and cut into their market share. THEN they MAY think about adding features (often cloned) to head them off.
Often, even if they DO think of it, it's too little too late, or they roll out the wrong thing. Occasionally the upstart manages to take them on in court and win. These are some of the ways that a former big-name market leader becomes a "remember that company back in the old days?"
You'll notice that the ones that have STAYED big-names (such as Google) keep rolling out innovations - and occasionally manage to dis-improve their mainline product.
(By the way: I DID consider adding something about that to the original post. But I decided it would was unnecessary detail that would obscure the base message. Judging from your post, that was a wrong call, at least in your case.)
A service website typically gets revenue (directly or typically indirectly) from use. Once it's working, popular, and supporting most potetial customers, the bux roll in. Why change what's working and risk breaking that? Essentially only bug fixing and reach-expanding could pay for itself.
An application typically gets its revenue from sales. Once it's sold, the user has it. No more money from him. Given time you saturate the market and your revenue peters out - while your support load continues.
This can be fixed partly by making the app run on other platforms and expanding the target market. But for ongoing revenue you need previous customers to buy again. They won't do this unless you provide a later-and-greater version with enough extra functionality to be worth it. Then they're in the business of adding bells and whistles until the old customers become repeat customers.
Everything that's called "AI" today is just advanced pattern recognition. I hope that the/. editors quit using the term "AI" so frequently....
For decades "AI was a failure". But that was because intelligence seems to involve a number of different components, and every time AI researchers got one of the components working and useful, somebody gave it a name, stopped calling it AI, and the field of "AI" shrunk to exclude it, leaving only the problems not yet solved.
It's nice to finally see some of the pieces retain the "AI" label once they're up and running well enough to be impressive..
Sure it's not the whole of "intelligence". But it's obviously a part of it - or (if not the SAME thing that our brains do), at least a part of something that, once more pieces are added, would be recognized as "intelligence" in a Turing test.
Slashdot Mirror
... adopt formal methods, write good software like your life depends on it.
And while you're at it: Discard "rapid prototyping" methods, no matter how formal they look.
Start by putting a stake in the heart of Agile.
On the other hand, there have been Unixlikes which don't sync before shutting down, which is why on SCO Xenix it used to be the habit to sync twice before issuing the 'haltsys' command. That way, the time you sent typing sync the second time would let the first sync finish
On the really early unix boxes (like the one I had in the mid-80s). the ritual was "sync;sync;sync;halt".
First sync dumps most of the stuff. But various hair including adding the "sync" to the log of superuser activity immediately made things out-of-date again. Second sync pushes that out, too. But its logging just grows the file a little more. Third sync ditto but it's just there to make sure the second sync is fully done before the halt gets launched.
The battle of Carthage was a massacre.
Sure was.
What part of "... the Roman general going postal[k] on them." don't you get? I'd think it was clear even with the typo.
1. Lay siege to Carthage - intending to do the usual thing of annexing them and ending up with them as a new province, religious freedom and all.
2. The Carthaginians' priests declare that the people have angered their god and a sacrifice is needed to make the Romans go away.
3. The people are convinced and a sacrifice is made. Their god happens to be Molloch, so they round up all the babies and toss them in the idol's fire.
4. The smog from this blows over to the Roman positions. The general, who knows how their religion works, gets a whiff.
5. The general goes ballistic. No baby-burning fanatics are going to be merged into the Roman Empire on HIS watch.
6. The Romans level the city, kill every adult they can get their hands on (or a sword or spear into), tear up the surrounding countryside, and sew salt on it so that Carthage will never rise again.
7. No profit for Carthage, from then on.
I'd bet that in Rome you cannot dig anywhere without stumbling on some archaeological finding.
What was garbage, obsolete rubble, or misplaced trinkets millenia ago is now valuable information about lost or corrupted history.
In about 2000 years archaeological robots will be digging through the ruins of a federal prison and they'll uncover Donald TRUMP's bones!
Yeah, yeah, Cato the Callow. And Carthage Must be Destroyed, too. Oh, wait: It WAS. By Rome, even.
No matter what your professors told you, it wasn't Cato the Elder's incessant injection of flamage of Carthage into discussions of unrelated subjects in his (the original) forum that did them in. It was their behavior the next time Rome and Carthage were having a military-grade spat, which made the Roman general go postalk on them.
But please DO keep being even more annoying than your historical model. It makes both you, and everyone on your side, look deranged, and hurts your cause. B-)
... you would have each been better off performing the transaction through a market.
I assume you're being sarcastic. If the transaction was satisfactory to both of them, there's no difference between this and another other market transaction - except for lower transaction costs and receiving some extra intangible value.
They're better off with this trade than if they'd spent time researching competing providers, splitting the deal into two pieces with money, paying the government a cut, and spending the extra time to handle the accounting for taxes. Then there's the intangible benefits of friendship reenforcement and satisfaction with mutual sufficiency.
(By the way: They DID perform the transaction through a market. They just happened to find their corresponding market player next door, with a satisfactory .)
The fact that exchange in kind hampers productivity has been known for centuries now.
The way that money beats barter is that it is usually easier to arrange turning a piece of your productivity into needed goods or services provided by someone else if you do it in two steps than trying to find someone who happens to need your stuff and can provide what you need. When the opportunity for a good barter falls in your lap, you win by eliminating the frictions of the middle steps.
Copy them to a USB stick, and then yank the stick right when the light stops blinking.
Two functionalities are key: Sync and unmount.
- Sync forces the filesystem to complete all in-RAM updates to blocks, write the blocks to the driver, and forces the driver to flush all pending writes to the backing store. Issuing a "sync" kicks off activity that insures the data for the current state is all on the backing store when the activity is completed. (And manually issuing two of them insures the first one is completed before the second command returns.)
- Unmount also tells the filesystem to get all files closed, go to such a state (including updating a flag saying it isn't mounted, if that is part of the filesystem) and write this all to the store.
Unixes and linux are usually configured to issue syncs periodically. So if you write new stuff to your filesystem, and your filesystem/driver combination isn't one that tries to always force the data to the store right away, you'll see the activitly light go out when there's still important stuff in a last few buffers which AREN'T written yet. (For a new file, on some filesystems, that will include the metadata about the file, which got finalized when it got closed and thus is the last thing changed.) Pull the store now and important stuff about these new files is incomplete or missing, even if they've been closed (so the last buffer of data is complete and queued to be written).
When this happens, if you wait around a short time, and the periodic sync will force it out to the store. But it might be so few blocks that you don't see the activity light blink. Pull the store after that and it will have the file data and metadata for the new, and closed, files. But the filesystem image will still be in a "mounted" state, so remounting it will require at least some filesystem scan (very short for journaling filesystems) and may generate a gripe from the OS.
Unmount (then sync;sync, though unmount seems to do that for you these days) and you guarantee that the backing store is clean and ready to go. Eject does that for you (or gripes if it can't because there are sill things in use by live apps) before it actually ejects the storage medium or tells you you can safely remove it.
Did anyone else initially read the headline as being about a political campaign using iPhone malware to research their target voters?
I understand that finding, testing and indeed certifying new drugs is costly. I have worked in the certification world for 15 years.
[people have to chose between paying the exorbitant prices gouged by drug companies to pay for developing new drugs, or dying.]
In my opinion, it is fucking disgusting that this is allowed to happen.
Most of that cost is getting the drug through regulatory red tape before it can be sold. Ask Google about time and you get a link to a (2014) article saying that the whole process takes 10 to 15 years (average 12) of which 2 1/2 is the bureaucrats final-processing the 100,000 pages of paper. Ask about cost and you get an NYT article deconstructing a Tfuts Center (industry funded) claim of 2.5 BILLION dollars - of which about half is opportunity costs from not being able to sell it sooner. Even after the deconstruction, you're still talking high hundreds of millions to a billion and change.
When the FDA law was first passed, enabling a federal gateway to drug sales, the congresscritters declared that if it held up a new drug for six months it would be unacceptably counter-productive. Years later, the Wall Street Journal headlined that just ONE drug-holdup (approving the use of beta blockers to ward off secondary heart attacks - because research done in Europe couldn't be used and it had to be re-done in the US) had caused 100,000 deaths. Read the text and it looks like the headline was conservative and the number was more like 400,000.
The problem is that the bureaucrats' incentive structure is to hold up approval and cause invisible suffering and death, and high prices, rather than grant it and risk a very visible scandal like the Thalidomide (plus cigarettes, it turns out) flipper-babies.
Want to end this? Change the law.
Start by demoting FDA approval to advisory, rather than necessary for prescribing or sale of a compound for medical use. (Ptients will be able to deal with insurance company formularies in the free market. Some will require it, like UL approval before it became part of electrical codes. Others will pay for iffy stuff - which saves them costs in two ways: Curing some patients more cheaply, or killing them off before the costs add up.)
You'll also have to end the drug war and give people the right to chose what they put in their bodies. This should also help: The drug war has blocked medical uses, and research on them, of drugs with PLESANT side-effects for a half-century. It has also led to under-medication for pain, which, in addition to torturing the terminally ill, seems to be THE cause of PTSD.
I would argue that anyone who thinks it is reasonable that drug companies should be able to charge whatever they like for literally life saving drugs, then you sir, are a complete and total sack of shit and the reason why we cannot have nice things. So, go fuck yourself.
Yeah, shut off debate by a preemptive ad hominem, flaming anyone who disagrees with you as evil and subhuman. We've seen a lot of that lately. It leads to polarization and increased conflict, not solutions.
If I wanted to retaliate in kind, I'd point out that YOUR JOB, no doubt highly paid (or you need to work on that), is part of the very system that causes the problem of which you complain, and wouldn't exist without it. Then I'd call you a vile profiteer on the suffering of those millions of victims, yadda, yadda...
Except recently it's been rising and is accelerating.
That graph looks scary until you look at the scales, and translate milimeters to inches.
It shows the sea level rising by 2 inches in the last century. It also looks very slightly bent up near the end.
Now how you get a error bands of less than +- 1/6 inch when measuring sea level beats me. But let's assume their methodology works. And lets be generous and assume that bend is an exponential. It's a pretty small bend, so let's be REALLY generous and say that the extrapolated next two inches happen in 50 years rather than 100.
So a 2 inch sea level rise in 50 years will flood out the Internet in 10? It only takes (substantially less than) 2/5 of an inch of sea level rise to do it?
I think we need a MUCH scarier graph to support this panic.
They had to tear those EV1s out of their owner's hands. GM at no point wanted to make an EV. They still don't. Customers absolutely wanted them and probably would have paid a higher price to get them. GM fights tooth and nail at every point to not do it and they are one of the auto makers that's better with EVs.
Before the government takeover there was the issue that making such cars was different enough from making gas cars that you had to build some new assembly lines (for components, even if you can manage to hack an existing final line to assemble the new thing), rather than make tweaks to the ones that you already have (and paid for long ago). That makes things much more pricey - especially when the company is already cash-strapped to the point of needing a government bailout.
After the government takeover you're dealing with a C-suite controlled by government bureaucrats, with their eyes on the politics, rather than corporate bureaucrats, with their eyes on the almighty dollar.
5,000 a WEEK, not a MONTH. Let's try that again:
2 min and a shaved second between cars. That's running flat out 24/7. No coffee breaks, no shift change, no stop-the-line-for-an-oopsie. (Easy to see why he needed more than one line.)
A target of 5,000 cars a WEEK this early in the company's history? And they HIT it? I'm FLOORED!
How many vehicles can other auto manufacturers produce in one week?
How many production lines do they have?
How many years of investment and plowing-revenue-into-building-or-buying-production-capaity did they spend to get to that point?
5000 cars/month is about 8 2/3 minutes per car. That's if you run your lines three shifts, 7 days a week, and they NEVER STOP. With 5-day weeks it's about 6 minutes between cars (and thus per-station on a line), with two shifts it's 4, with one shift it's 2, with coffee breaks, lunch, etc. it's less.
And that's not even TOUCHING the big killer - adding slop time at each station for fixing any oopsie within the time slot, and stopping the WHOLE LINE when the step doesn't get done right and isn't something you can mark the tag after the car's off the line.
A production line is a giant AND gate, with a forest of inputs, that has to output 1 to make cars.
A target of 5,000 cars a month this early in the company's history? And they HIT it? Amazing!
If you look at crossing the chasm model, they've yet to, actually cross.
Which is good for the company, because if you look at companies where someone in the C-suite starts enthusing about "Crossing the Chasm" the book, you see a consistent pattern:
1. They fire the early-hires and screw them out of the bulk of their stock option gains (as recommended near the end of one of the later chapters).
2. But they do it too soon - when they are still what's making the company run and innovate, when the key "invisible IP" is still in their heads and skills, rather than institutionalized, documented, and trained into a redundant collection of other skilled people.
3. So then the company keeps running for a while. But it doesn't keep innovating (or goes on a wild chasing-the-vexing-opportunities spree), the core proceses start to randomly flake out when something breaks and has to be redesigned from the ground up rather than just tweaked, the company stops growing (and/or flakes out visibly on customers). Shortly it falls into, rather than crossing, the chasm.
4. No profit.
Further back, I remember getting a 64K memory card for my Imsai 8080
Tell me about it.
I had to automate the energy management system for an auto plant using 8080A based machine with two ROM sockets, 8KB each, for the whole program memory. But I needed to fit the works in just one of 'em, to leave the other for the plant engineers to use for the per-machine configuration.
So, standing on the backs of giants (Dijkstra, Riddle, Saal, and Weiser), I ported and optimized (the HELL out of) a little OS. Got prioritized preempting multitasking (including boot initialization and minimal supporting task set) in about 535 bytes of assembler. (Communicating Semaphores are SWEET. They do EVERYTHING for you, if you know the right use patterns.) It all fit with room to spare: Drivers, debugger, soft real-time clock, ladder logic interpreter, protocol stack, schedule interpreter.
Much of what bloats current 'ware is system support for fast programming, including boundary enforcement and crossing, error checking, and the like. With cheap resources to throw at it you can get enormously more done in a given amount of designer time. And that snowballs - which also snowballs the bloat.
This tiny system had no protection whatsoever. The pieces all had to work and carefully not stomp on their neighbors. But with the Communicating Semaphore approach the multitasking boundaries drove the software design toward tiny, encapsulated, components interacting via message-passing, anticipating Object Oriented Programming. With such small, unbloated, pieces it was possible to actually get one's head loaded with each entire piece and debug it to that level of reliability.
IoT brought back machines comparable to those minis - for under a buck and fuel-sipping enough to run on a coin cell for years. A couple years back there was a window where such software approaches might have been apropos again. (You can shoehorn an AMAZING amount of functionality into a tiny computer if you substitute skill and use-patterns for tool-driven bloat. Alternatively, the tools could be upgraded to do much of the protection and usage-pattern checking offline during build, rather than on the live system.) Moore's law has grown IoT machines to the point where they are starting to have enough memory to support code bloat. But the power requirements still push down on cycles-per-task, so the window probably isn't closed.
What bugs me is that the federal law preempts civil suits against the likes of phone spammers, those who ignore the do-not-call list, etc.
My family has our land lines on the do-not-call list and yet is running a higher ratio of junk to real calls than junk to real snail mail, and the robocallers are starting to show up on our cellphones (which is supposedly strictly a no-no).
If we could civil-sue the offenders (say, in small-claims court) for damages in the form of the cost of our time and resources in receiving those calls, we could recover at least some of our losses, while the offenders might think twice about re-offending. But we can't, because the federal government preempted such suits, and then doesn't take effective action against the offenders, so the level of offence, and resulting damage, explodes.
It seems to me that such preemption might constitute a "taking" under the Fifth Amendment (for the alleged "public purpose" of avoiding crippling legitimate businesses with bogus suits from disgruntled customers when they make a legitimate phone contact).
If so, the Fed owes us all a lot of money.
Anyone up for running a class-action to recover that? B-)
Wish I could. I saw that in a civil-service-level electrical engineering trade journal some time in the 1950s or early '60s (that I found in a pile of discarded magazines, when I was a kid with a serious electronics hobby.)
The article was about engineering around possible problems with a high voltage cross-country DC power transmission line. The concern was that trees under the line would grow to "seek" one of the wires, then short the line.
(Solution was to swap the + and - lines from time to time, so the distortion would average out and the trees would grow straight until they could be cut. I notice, though, that they mostly ran it through the desert east of the Sierras (and somewhat west of Hawthorne NV) - on REALLY high poles. B-) )
(Another worry was that, if the went into the "one wire's down so use grounds at both ends to complete the circuit until it's fixed" mode, they'd foul up the small voltage between the rails that detects trains for the signal systems.)
Animal bones do that, too. Put a pair of electrodes across a bone and give them a small voltage. The bone will grow a big hemispheric lump around the + wire without (any mentioned) erosion around the - (if I recall the polarity correctly). This makes sense: If the bone is bending enough to activate the mechanism it should be both straighter and stronger. Article had a nice piece of artwork of that. (Sorry: Also decades old and pre-Internet, so good luck.)
I'm just wondering if this technology can be scaled up to something human-sized.
It might be interesting to use it, not as primary lift, but as trim lift, on a dirigible.
With essentially neutral bouyancy it doesn't take a lot to make the difference between climbing, hovering, and dropping. Meanwhile, the craft has an enormous area to acquire force from the charge's interaction with the atmosphere's ambient field, while the shape is just about ideal for avoiding corona losses.
You'd want to go zero charge for tethering or landing, to avoid a big spark discharge followed immediately by (if not a fire) a change in lift. (Though an isolated and zero-charged region around the mooring attachment might do the trick.)
This could be much less of a hassle than dynamic lift (which requires motion relative to the air for the elevators to bite into), ballast/gas volume adjustment, or gasbag temperature adjustment.
I wonder if plants do it, too.
A number of plants have windborne seeds surrounded or mounted beneath a thready structure. (Dandelions, cottonwood, and milkweed come to mind immediately.) Other structures could also get some assistance from electriec lift. Charge would be a good thing to look for.
We already know that plants use piezoelectricity to increase cell growth on the concave side of a loaded branch in order to grow upward or outward. Why not another electrical hack?
Why should spiders - or the animal kingdom in general - have all the fun?
The problem is when there is no human oversight to correct the inevitable mistakes that bots make either before or after the fact.
Web plublication (some of it automated) occurs at computer speed and there's a lot of it. _Live Science_ estimated total internet traffic at a zettabyte per year, and that
This reminds me of The Illustrated Presidential Report of the Commission on Obscenity and Pornography, back in 1970.
As Wikipedia says:
The report was resoundingly rejected and denounced by congress.
In response to that, along with continued attempts to, nevertheless, enforce existing, and impose new, anti-pornography laws (and otherwise harass publishers of erotic images), Earl Kemp published an illustrated version of the report, consisting of the report's text but "replete with the sort of photographs the commission examined.".
For distributing this book he was sentenced to a year in prison, and served the federal minimum of three months and one day. (This brings up the question of how one is supposed to have a right to view something it's a crime to provide.)
Nearly half a century later the same sort of attacks on free speech continue on the new Intenet medium. And a handful of copies of the ... Illustrated Report ... are available on Amazon (with the asking price of an unused copy of over half a grand.)
in your world apparently there are no competitors and thus no need to compete
yes, that really is how you think! we see it, the words are right there, you don't even think about competing
You're confusing my description of what goes on in a C-suite with my own thinking.
In THEIR world, the pointy-haired bosses see no need to compete - at least until some competitor is starting to come up behind them and cut into their market share. THEN they MAY think about adding features (often cloned) to head them off.
Often, even if they DO think of it, it's too little too late, or they roll out the wrong thing. Occasionally the upstart manages to take them on in court and win. These are some of the ways that a former big-name market leader becomes a "remember that company back in the old days?"
You'll notice that the ones that have STAYED big-names (such as Google) keep rolling out innovations - and occasionally manage to dis-improve their mainline product.
(By the way: I DID consider adding something about that to the original post. But I decided it would was unnecessary detail that would obscure the base message. Judging from your post, that was a wrong call, at least in your case.)
It's the business model.
A service website typically gets revenue (directly or typically indirectly) from use. Once it's working, popular, and supporting most potetial customers, the bux roll in. Why change what's working and risk breaking that? Essentially only bug fixing and reach-expanding could pay for itself.
An application typically gets its revenue from sales. Once it's sold, the user has it. No more money from him. Given time you saturate the market and your revenue peters out - while your support load continues.
This can be fixed partly by making the app run on other platforms and expanding the target market. But for ongoing revenue you need previous customers to buy again. They won't do this unless you provide a later-and-greater version with enough extra functionality to be worth it. Then they're in the business of adding bells and whistles until the old customers become repeat customers.
What they actually did was destroy evidence of their criminal wiretapping enterprise.
I do believe you hit the nail on the head. The jig is up and they're trying to CYA.
I'd mod you up myself but I'm out of mod points just now,
Everything that's called "AI" today is just advanced pattern recognition. I hope that the /. editors quit using the term "AI" so frequently. ...
For decades "AI was a failure". But that was because intelligence seems to involve a number of different components, and every time AI researchers got one of the components working and useful, somebody gave it a name, stopped calling it AI, and the field of "AI" shrunk to exclude it, leaving only the problems not yet solved.
It's nice to finally see some of the pieces retain the "AI" label once they're up and running well enough to be impressive..
Sure it's not the whole of "intelligence". But it's obviously a part of it - or (if not the SAME thing that our brains do), at least a part of something that, once more pieces are added, would be recognized as "intelligence" in a Turing test.