The problem with polls is that it is all about the way the questions are phrased: e.g. a survey on Captial Punishment may ask:
"Do you agree that it is OK to mistakenly execute an innocent person?" alternatively they could ask:
"Should serial killers remain a burden on the tax payer for the entirity of their natural lives?"
People also habitually exagerate and lie when responding to surveys, and I know professional pollsters should be able to weed this out but they have often failed. A survey on food habits asked people to keep a record of all ingredients used over a period of many weeks. To make the lives of the participants easier, if a ready prepared meal was eaten then they could just keep the packaging. The survey found that the consumption of ready meals was much higher than any one ever thought...
Have you heard of inflation? Generally safe investments (bank accounts etc) at best track inflation, so whilst you may think it's not hard, factor in real inflation (not what the goverment says it is - look at recent fuel price increases) and you will find you need quite a lost of chas spread across a broad range of higher risk investments (which go down as well as up) to beat it.
By maintaining the applications on a central server, for free or nearly free
There is a world of difference between "free" and "nearly free". On my desktop I get to use what ever app I want, and many of them are free (as in beer). Google and the like may be free now but when they have sufficient market share they will start to charge, or introduce advertising.
Now if I always upgrade to the latest version of MS Office, then a small charge for an online app would seem reasonable, no need to find several hundred quid every few years, but we don't, do we? We use free apps (from one soruce or another) and we don't always upgrade.
Of course they want us to move to subcription model, they get to drain your bank account directly, once signed up it becomes an effort to move, cancel the payments etc, and you hardly notice the money going out. Having to find large lumps every few years is a whole different ball-game.
Like a lot of posters in this topic so far, you seem to be assuming that UAVs need someone to fly them. They are uninhabited AUTOMINOUS vehicles. Mostly they are designed to be given a mission, which they execute themselves - e.g. a set of coordinates to fly around whilst carrying a camera. They are generally designed to fly the mission without any input from the ground because them may well be out of radio contact for some or most of the mission (e.g. herti )
As for the air traffic control issue there is no reason that ATC cannot control a UAV in the way that they contol other aircraft in civilian airspace - but instead of talking to it on the radio, send it a message to change course/altitude. There are already standard systems for controlling piloted aricraft (automated landings etc.) No reason why similar systems cannot be used on UAVs.
I think is about stealth, hanging things off pylons gives a lot more surfaces for radar reflections and would mean making the missiles/bombs out of appropriate materials. Put them in a bomb bay and these problems are much reduced.
Really good idea, perhaps we could... errm... how about... oh I don't know... use metallic cables to distribute the energy.
so energy generation and delivery will move from central to distributed sources So we have lots of little, local power sources - which are harder to regulate (both in terms out power output and in terms of ensuring that emissions are clean up etc.), less efficient in terms of materials consumption, and need yet more batteries to store energy at times when the generator is not working. I know, let's cover the world in lead, acid, lithium and cadmium - that will solve lots of problems.
Don't put the pilot on the ground put them in a well protected high flighing plane. Now you won't kill him wiht G-Force, the plane can now accelerate at 20-30g and potentially out accelerate a missile. F35, Typhoon and the like may well be the last manned fast fighter jets. As for bandwith, UAVs fligh themselves, they are just tasked for a mission. Under heavy fire a human may be able to pull off more creative avoidance manouvres, but that does not take much bandwith.
Of course there is a cost to emitting Carbon, and it is a very real one that we all pay each day. Emit no carbon and you pay no fuel bills. Irrespective of the global warming debate, using less fuel means more profitable companies, and it's only the fact that energy has been very cheap compared to the cost of doing anything about reducing usage that has stopped us from looking at this issue.
We have seen fuel costs rise steadily and they will continue to do so, which will drive up the benefits of being fuel efficient. I personally believe that global warming will add to the rate of increase of fuel costs (e.g. damaged refineries, civil unrest in oil producing countries, etc) and so we will see the necessary feedback, Carbon Trading merely seeks to control the market so that the number of people who die due to Global Warming related issues (wars over water, land, etc) is minimized.
Disregarding your incorrect assertion that Darwin's theory says "meaningful information emerges from randomness", have you stopped to think about the timescales involved? We are talkng about BILLIONS of years vs 50 years of computer programming. Invent a computer that can last for a billion years, switch it on and let cosmic rays change its memory state occaisionally, build in some "selection" mechanism that retains viable bit patterns and sit back...
Err... who used the phrase first, Car Manufacturers? Computer Manufacturers? no it was Darwin by a centurary or two. So I think, just may be, the other uses of the term evolution came from Darwin
He would build the brain with some capacity to detect His presence under certain circumstances
Why only under certain circumstances? If God were building, or designing brains why not make us all certain of his existance all the time? Why would he give some people faith and not others? Why keep us all guessing?
I suppose the normal explanation for God's obtuseness in this area is that it is some kind of test, we ae requried to find God ourselves. But look at the vast majority of people (made in God's image) - they normally want others to know that they exist. Getting attention is something in-built into new born babies and something that is with us for the rest of our lives.
Well said, and even if it didn't yeild false positives, spraying half of the population of Palestine or Iraq yellow will obviously help us along the road to peace.
Read the article, it addresses most of your concerns. Clearly there is no point in having an office full of robots, it only has meaning where one or two team members are separated from the rest. I work in an open-plan office, which is common in the UK and it has benefits and problems. One of the benefits is that I can see who in the team is at their desk, who is on the phone, who is getting a coffee, etc. So if I need to ask someone a question I can wait until they are at their desk and then go over and ask. The issue with telecommuting is that If I phone up the person may be away from their desk, which then disturbs someone else, who has to take a message, etc. The robot solves this problem, it also allows the telecommuter to decide whether to make sensible and less intrusive decisions, Jane is tlaking to John, I'll wait until they have finished before talking to Jane...
Re:I had an interview with Google a few weeks ago
on
Want To Work At Google?
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
Stop being so literal and read the article. The point of the questions is not necessarily to get the correct answer, they are interested in your though processes.
Over the years I have had more than my fair share of jobs and many of them I got even though I failed to answer the technical questions. What I did was explain my thinking, even on multiple choice tests, I write my thinking along side. You are never ever going to have to solve the marble problem, but they want to know if you have heard of things like a binary search and more importantly how do you respond in situations that are "out of the box".
It aims to demonstrate problem solving, communication, breadth of knowledge. They do not want you to sit in silence for 5 minutes and then given them the right answer, they want you to explain ALL the ideas you have about how to solve the problem, and then the criteria you may use for selecting a solution from the available ideas. Arguing the toss about the number of marbles, the mass of the marbles, etc. is not going to get you anywhere.
Not forgetting that one armed student STARTED THIS.
Consider this scenario, you walk into class and a nut with a gun is standing there with bodies around him, you shoot the nut. At that point I walk in, I see you stood there with a gun and bodies around you, I shoot you...
"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind2 - Ghandi
May be I don't know what a "tech" product is but this list seems utterly trival. I assume "tech" is short for technology and a good definition of that (apart from "things that don't work yet") is "The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives"
Is this really the "ALL TIME" list? - about the microchip, the Wright Flyer, the transistor, antibiotics, water chlorination, the X-ray machine, paper, the printing press, steel, the steam engine...
Some people's "ALL TIME" seems a bit limtied...
A lot of companies cannot stay ahead by buying off the shelf products - they NEED to be ahead of the game, and they recognise that a so called "off the shelf" product at the level of ERP, CRM, etc. is really just a bag of components that the vendor will integrate into a product for you - they will charge you to do the analysis for your industry sector, and then they will take the knowledge they have gained and sell it on to others in the same sector - you paid them to shape the product for your sector... and they sold it to your competitors.
On the legacy side, it's fine to buy a big integrated suite if you are a new start-up, but I have never worked anywhere that could contemplate stripping out all their apps and starting from scratch, it's an endless round of upgrade payroll, replace ERP, bring in CRM. And someone has to makle all these work together.
There are also those systems that no one writes - Engineering, Financial (as in city trading - I'm sure someone does do these as packages but in my experince there is a lot of in house software development going on in this area), process monitoring and control...
No, no, no, it was me... I teach an Adult Education course on creating websites, the course costs less than £100 and after 10 weeks most of the students can create and maintain their own site.
In a gold rush, the way to make money is to sell shovels!
Concrete with re-bar is reinforced concrete. Re-bar is not only put in to resist tensile forces due to bending. Re-bar is put in to prevent the concrete cracking. That said there are systems (developed for spayed concrete in tunnels) that incorporate steel of syntheic fibres which have a similar effect to re-bar but are just mixed into the concrete.
Given other comments in this discussion is is probably worth noting that brick walls have no tensile strength, unreinforced concrete is better. As long as this approach is only used for vertical walls there is no need to reinforce (except to rpevent cracking as mentioned above).
Why is everyone having a dig at the Indians over telemarketing and Call Centres? The Indians are only providing the service that is paid for by Western companies, in other words we only have ourselves to blame.
People were patronising and cynical about Japanese attempts to industrialise and develop technologies in the 1950's and 60's, say no more...
It might be a recruiting tool but setting unrealistic expectations is just daft. Army recruiting in the UK is all about doing exciting stuff and seeing the world, not about being shot at and enduring weeks of boardom punctuated by fighting for your life.
People then wonder why moral is low and troops and their parents are complaining about the support and conditions. If I tried to sell you something by misrepresenting it, I would be liable to prosecution, and you would get you money back.
Of course the USA had perfected society, democracy, health care, and all other ills and was sitting around twiddling its thumbs so it thought - "We've done everything here, lets go to the moon". Come on, 1960's America, segregation, poverty, hundreds of billions going into defence spending and Russia puts up Sputnik - America just has to beat that.
There is just no way that spening the space budget on poverty or infrastructure would make any long term difference. India is out to become a major player on the world stage, from that will come (hopefully) the other things.
Is it true that NASA spent millions developing a zero-g pen, and when they got up to Sky Lab they found that the Russians were using pencils? May be this isn't going to cost as much as a NASA style programme.
I did Home Support for a while and several conversations went like "I need to reinstall Windows"
"will I get all my stuff back?"
"have you got the original disks?"
"what disks?"
I saw machines that were so old that drivers and the like were no longer available - no use reinstalling if you can't get the hardware going.
I would never use my own disks for an installation, if they didn't have disks, and the machine could stand a later version, and the customer had disks for their software, then I would buy a copy for them and install it.
Now, I'm sure some one out there is thinking that it would be a good chance to spread the Linux message and replace windows with Linux - Don't. I know of someone who nearly ended up in court being sued because he provided linux when the customer was expecting windows.
Slashdot Mirror
The problem with polls is that it is all about the way the questions are phrased: e.g. a survey on Captial Punishment may ask:
"Do you agree that it is OK to mistakenly execute an innocent person?"
alternatively they could ask:
"Should serial killers remain a burden on the tax payer for the entirity of their natural lives?"
People also habitually exagerate and lie when responding to surveys, and I know professional pollsters should be able to weed this out but they have often failed. A survey on food habits asked people to keep a record of all ingredients used over a period of many weeks. To make the lives of the participants easier, if a ready prepared meal was eaten then they could just keep the packaging. The survey found that the consumption of ready meals was much higher than any one ever thought...
Have you heard of inflation? Generally safe investments (bank accounts etc) at best track inflation, so whilst you may think it's not hard, factor in real inflation (not what the goverment says it is - look at recent fuel price increases) and you will find you need quite a lost of chas spread across a broad range of higher risk investments (which go down as well as up) to beat it.
There is a world of difference between "free" and "nearly free". On my desktop I get to use what ever app I want, and many of them are free (as in beer). Google and the like may be free now but when they have sufficient market share they will start to charge, or introduce advertising.
Now if I always upgrade to the latest version of MS Office, then a small charge for an online app would seem reasonable, no need to find several hundred quid every few years, but we don't, do we? We use free apps (from one soruce or another) and we don't always upgrade.
Of course they want us to move to subcription model, they get to drain your bank account directly, once signed up it becomes an effort to move, cancel the payments etc, and you hardly notice the money going out. Having to find large lumps every few years is a whole different ball-game.
As for the air traffic control issue there is no reason that ATC cannot control a UAV in the way that they contol other aircraft in civilian airspace - but instead of talking to it on the radio, send it a message to change course/altitude. There are already standard systems for controlling piloted aricraft (automated landings etc.) No reason why similar systems cannot be used on UAVs.
I think is about stealth, hanging things off pylons gives a lot more surfaces for radar reflections and would mean making the missiles/bombs out of appropriate materials. Put them in a bomb bay and these problems are much reduced.
In Brownian Britain, the flying cars are watching you!
Don't put the pilot on the ground put them in a well protected high flighing plane. Now you won't kill him wiht G-Force, the plane can now accelerate at 20-30g and potentially out accelerate a missile. F35, Typhoon and the like may well be the last manned fast fighter jets. As for bandwith, UAVs fligh themselves, they are just tasked for a mission. Under heavy fire a human may be able to pull off more creative avoidance manouvres, but that does not take much bandwith.
Of course there is a cost to emitting Carbon, and it is a very real one that we all pay each day. Emit no carbon and you pay no fuel bills. Irrespective of the global warming debate, using less fuel means more profitable companies, and it's only the fact that energy has been very cheap compared to the cost of doing anything about reducing usage that has stopped us from looking at this issue.
We have seen fuel costs rise steadily and they will continue to do so, which will drive up the benefits of being fuel efficient. I personally believe that global warming will add to the rate of increase of fuel costs (e.g. damaged refineries, civil unrest in oil producing countries, etc) and so we will see the necessary feedback, Carbon Trading merely seeks to control the market so that the number of people who die due to Global Warming related issues (wars over water, land, etc) is minimized.
Disregarding your incorrect assertion that Darwin's theory says "meaningful information emerges from randomness", have you stopped to think about the timescales involved? We are talkng about BILLIONS of years vs 50 years of computer programming. Invent a computer that can last for a billion years, switch it on and let cosmic rays change its memory state occaisionally, build in some "selection" mechanism that retains viable bit patterns and sit back...
Err... who used the phrase first, Car Manufacturers? Computer Manufacturers? no it was Darwin by a centurary or two. So I think, just may be, the other uses of the term evolution came from Darwin
I suppose the normal explanation for God's obtuseness in this area is that it is some kind of test, we ae requried to find God ourselves. But look at the vast majority of people (made in God's image) - they normally want others to know that they exist. Getting attention is something in-built into new born babies and something that is with us for the rest of our lives.
Well said, and even if it didn't yeild false positives, spraying half of the population of Palestine or Iraq yellow will obviously help us along the road to peace.
Read the article, it addresses most of your concerns. Clearly there is no point in having an office full of robots, it only has meaning where one or two team members are separated from the rest. I work in an open-plan office, which is common in the UK and it has benefits and problems. One of the benefits is that I can see who in the team is at their desk, who is on the phone, who is getting a coffee, etc. So if I need to ask someone a question I can wait until they are at their desk and then go over and ask. The issue with telecommuting is that If I phone up the person may be away from their desk, which then disturbs someone else, who has to take a message, etc. The robot solves this problem, it also allows the telecommuter to decide whether to make sensible and less intrusive decisions, Jane is tlaking to John, I'll wait until they have finished before talking to Jane ...
Stop being so literal and read the article. The point of the questions is not necessarily to get the correct answer, they are interested in your though processes.
Over the years I have had more than my fair share of jobs and many of them I got even though I failed to answer the technical questions. What I did was explain my thinking, even on multiple choice tests, I write my thinking along side. You are never ever going to have to solve the marble problem, but they want to know if you have heard of things like a binary search and more importantly how do you respond in situations that are "out of the box".
It aims to demonstrate problem solving, communication, breadth of knowledge. They do not want you to sit in silence for 5 minutes and then given them the right answer, they want you to explain ALL the ideas you have about how to solve the problem, and then the criteria you may use for selecting a solution from the available ideas. Arguing the toss about the number of marbles, the mass of the marbles, etc. is not going to get you anywhere.
Not forgetting that one armed student STARTED THIS.
Consider this scenario, you walk into class and a nut with a gun is standing there with bodies around him, you shoot the nut. At that point I walk in, I see you stood there with a gun and bodies around you, I shoot you...
"An eye for an eye will make the whole world blind2 - Ghandi
Took me a while to get back on this, but ALL TIME is, by definition, not anything after 1970
May be I don't know what a "tech" product is but this list seems utterly trival. I assume "tech" is short for technology and a good definition of that (apart from "things that don't work yet") is "The application of science, especially to industrial or commercial objectives" Is this really the "ALL TIME" list? - about the microchip, the Wright Flyer, the transistor, antibiotics, water chlorination, the X-ray machine, paper, the printing press, steel, the steam engine ...
Some people's "ALL TIME" seems a bit limtied...
But there are still plenty of development jobs.
... and they sold it to your competitors.
...
A lot of companies cannot stay ahead by buying off the shelf products - they NEED to be ahead of the game, and they recognise that a so called "off the shelf" product at the level of ERP, CRM, etc. is really just a bag of components that the vendor will integrate into a product for you - they will charge you to do the analysis for your industry sector, and then they will take the knowledge they have gained and sell it on to others in the same sector - you paid them to shape the product for your sector
On the legacy side, it's fine to buy a big integrated suite if you are a new start-up, but I have never worked anywhere that could contemplate stripping out all their apps and starting from scratch, it's an endless round of upgrade payroll, replace ERP, bring in CRM. And someone has to makle all these work together.
There are also those systems that no one writes - Engineering, Financial (as in city trading - I'm sure someone does do these as packages but in my experince there is a lot of in house software development going on in this area), process monitoring and control
No, no, no, it was me ... I teach an Adult Education course on creating websites, the course costs less than £100 and after 10 weeks most of the students can create and maintain their own site.
In a gold rush, the way to make money is to sell shovels!
Concrete with re-bar is reinforced concrete. Re-bar is not only put in to resist tensile forces due to bending. Re-bar is put in to prevent the concrete cracking. That said there are systems (developed for spayed concrete in tunnels) that incorporate steel of syntheic fibres which have a similar effect to re-bar but are just mixed into the concrete.
Given other comments in this discussion is is probably worth noting that brick walls have no tensile strength, unreinforced concrete is better. As long as this approach is only used for vertical walls there is no need to reinforce (except to rpevent cracking as mentioned above).
Why is everyone having a dig at the Indians over telemarketing and Call Centres? The Indians are only providing the service that is paid for by Western companies, in other words we only have ourselves to blame.
...
People were patronising and cynical about Japanese attempts to industrialise and develop technologies in the 1950's and 60's, say no more
It might be a recruiting tool but setting unrealistic expectations is just daft. Army recruiting in the UK is all about doing exciting stuff and seeing the world, not about being shot at and enduring weeks of boardom punctuated by fighting for your life.
People then wonder why moral is low and troops and their parents are complaining about the support and conditions. If I tried to sell you something by misrepresenting it, I would be liable to prosecution, and you would get you money back.
Of course the USA had perfected society, democracy, health care, and all other ills and was sitting around twiddling its thumbs so it thought - "We've done everything here, lets go to the moon". Come on, 1960's America, segregation, poverty, hundreds of billions going into defence spending and Russia puts up Sputnik - America just has to beat that.
There is just no way that spening the space budget on poverty or infrastructure would make any long term difference. India is out to become a major player on the world stage, from that will come (hopefully) the other things.
Is it true that NASA spent millions developing a zero-g pen, and when they got up to Sky Lab they found that the Russians were using pencils? May be this isn't going to cost as much as a NASA style programme.
I did Home Support for a while and several conversations went like
"I need to reinstall Windows"
"will I get all my stuff back?"
"have you got the original disks?"
"what disks?"
I saw machines that were so old that drivers and the like were no longer available - no use reinstalling if you can't get the hardware going.
I would never use my own disks for an installation, if they didn't have disks, and the machine could stand a later version, and the customer had disks for their software, then I would buy a copy for them and install it.
Now, I'm sure some one out there is thinking that it would be a good chance to spread the Linux message and replace windows with Linux - Don't. I know of someone who nearly ended up in court being sued because he provided linux when the customer was expecting windows.
Chris