Initial descent incline 3.2 degrees. Not too impressive;) I'd rather see the tunnel curving - first descending steeply from the station then straightening out at some 2km.
Still, tectonics are going to be a nightmare. I've been to a mine. I saw what they can do.
So, what exactly should I, in your opinion, do to earn this title?
'cause the 'engineer' is a fully recognized graduate degree in my country. Four years of studies ending with defending a final project, earning you the title of engineer.
At my school, the final project was usually building some embedded device. Industrial control, signal processing, extension card for a PC, and such. And writing firmware for the device you've designed and built.
My project involved a DC motor driven through an amplifier, feedback from two rotary encoders, an 8051 family microcontroller to provide readouts of the encoders and control of the motors, plus the whole mechanical backend and frontend, the electronic backend (the '51 wasn't fast enough for polling the encoders so to achieve/4 resolution I needed an extra board with discrete logic for generating interrupts and doing some preprocessing), analog amplifier to drive the motor (again, PWM wouldn't be smooth enough, I used DAC instead), and software in '51 assembly to make it running. Additionally over a month in Matlab to develop algorithm for optimizing the control parameters, another week to rewrite it into C (increasing program speed 300x, allowing the calculations to be finished in one day as opposed to one year they would take in Matlab), a user control application on PC, and then documenting it all (about 170 pages).
So, what exactly is YOUR idea of what earns one the title of an engineer?
What percentage of Americans consider flying with commercial airlines to be the mark of poverty?
Hyperloop isn't a replacement for buses or city cars. It's a replacement for airplanes. Supersonic travel with high initial but low unit cost - airplanes are very wasteful because they need to use a lot of energy just to prevent falling. Hyperloop train, once running, keeps running with only minimal friction losses and can recuperate most of energy used on acceleration during braking.
It actually drives a lot of funds towards science/education. But yeah, the initial investment is huge. I mean, something like, 6% the amount any of the wars USA started!
Imagine a section of tube going splitting away from the main network. It has an airlock shortly after the split, then gently curves up a tunnel through a mountain, and exits at a rather steep angle upwards. Then there's a quick-acting airlock at the opening.
A special train is loaded - a rocket adapted to travel through these tubes. It speeds up to the regular Mach 1 in the "civilian" section of the tunnel, then goes down the branch and gains another 2-3 Mach. The airlock at the end opens right before the rocket reaches it, then the hyperloop propulsion module drops on a parachute while the rocket ignites its engines. We've just shaved off first 1.5km/s out of the required 9 or so needed to reach orbit - and with the tyranny of rocket equation, that's quite a bit of savings!
I believe this is an extremely roundabout and misguided way of describing the pod maintaining a constant pressure so there's no "ear popping" and other silly effects connected with changes of altitude.
I have an engineering degree and a diploma to confirm that. I have a job that required that document; I wouldn't be legally permitted to perform it without it, so it certainly acts as a license. Is there something else I'm missing?
I do. Graduation diploma with the "Engineer of control and management" title.
2/3 of the studies was theory, how to understand, analyze, control and manage systems. The remaining 1/3 was how to implement that control in software, using off-the-shelf hardware for control applications.
I can definitely go to jail for releasing buggy code. Human lives depend on it working correctly (or failing gracefully), and if someone dies because of an error I made, I'm definitely facing a sentence. Also, knowing how to code is a lesser part of my occupation. Understanding the problem the code is to solve, along with all the ways it can go wrong, coming up with the project and finally implementing it in software is what I do.
The difference between a software engineer and a developer is the same as between a structural engineer and a drafter. To an outsider it seems they do the same thing.
You can also usually set a bounty on a question with existing answers if they are not to your satisfaction. It's costly in terms of karma, but it can un-bury an ancient question and attract new, better answers.
Implement a "public forum" where all applications are published and input from the broad public can be gathered - if someone knows prior art, or is able to point out triviality of the patent (e.g. "[doing an extremely common thing] over the Internet" ) they can post it and the USPTO clerk will just reject the application without further ado.
- ask the question one more time. - link previous "duplicates" - tell exactly how they don't answer it - tell what you expect from the answer, that the accepted answer doesn't have.
Example. The original question asked "how to deal with the problem". My question was "Why the problem exists; what are its potential consequences?" - I had to state I'm not looking for solution but for a rationale, not "do it because standard says so" but "what rationale lies behind this entry in the standard?" - it was three close-votes down before I got the point across.
Another one, not on SO but on Arquade, one of SE sites. A Minecraft question, which was at first deemed a duplicate... except the original was about the Creative mode, and mine was about Survival, making the (trivial) answers for the original useless in my context. Again, underlying the difference... made all the difference.
So: Just re-ask the non-duplicate, just make sure to show clearly why and how it's non-duplicate.
Nicely ask in the question that if it doesn't belong here, could you (please) be redirected to the right site?:)
"Programmers.SE" is also a good site for questions that can't be answered with a snippet of code. You may get a better track record asking there - especially that it's not so ridden with competition between vicious addicts of the karma that swarm every new question and fill it with loathing if they find they can't gain any karma to be earned from it.
Also, if the situation was regular, it would be a good idea to bring it up in meta.stackoverflow.com, asking for advice.
And if the answer is "there is no site in the SE network that would be a good match for your questions currently", the right course of action might be a visit to area51.stackexchange.com...
Now read your own post in a non-sarcastic way; treat the text of your post as a personal opinion. Then judge whether that opinion is not objectively wrong.
Yeah, I'm sure to master systemd from reading its manpages.
Good documentation is hard to come by. Most of documentation out there seems to be more of a logbook where developers log their achievements and describe what they made in terms only they can understand. It's way too often unreadable for the outsiders.
A good documentation needs a document that describes the structure of the whole thing, how its elements influence each other and how the user can affect them. Provide usage patterns, examples with explanation of what and how is being done, caveats, processes.
Most of documentation, instead, lists available functions in alphabetic order, with perfunctory descriptions of their parameters and vestigal mentions of their purpose. Mapping intended action -> sequence of functions is about impossible for anyone not already trained in the system. Instead of "How to do [task X]" you get "which [mysterious parameter] does knob Y tweak?"
Imagine trying to learn flying an airplane given only a list of names, locations and briefest descriptions of every switch, dial and knob in that airplane.
In the (not so rare) cases where a question was closed as a duplicate even though it was not, the right course of action is to act the question for a third time. This time - underlying differences and focus; linking the existing "duplicates" and telling how they don't answer what you need. It works.
Also, don't treat every single closure as a "punishment".
"Duplicate" closures mean people still get the correct answer (at the original question) but they still provide alternative paths to find it.
"Migration" closures mean there are people better qualified to answer that elsewhere, so you're better off going there.
"Too broad" closures - you really won't obtain a comprehensive answer because it's impossible; it would require a library, not an answer entry. In these cases Either split your question into smaller, bite-sized chunks or explicitly ask for a shallow, broad summary of the topic.
Also, before you ask a question that has numerous possible answers, think how are you going to pick that single "correct" one. If you know some quality that would let you choose, include it. If you don't - you should really rethink your question.
Also, in case "is there any...?" type of questions, don't hesitate to state "this is a yes/no question, I'm not asking to list all, just drop me any single example or 'none' if there is none." Some mods are allergic to list questions and unless you narrow it down sufficiently, it will be closed. Same about short, closed lists - if the list goes on and on with no way to find its tail, the question is too broad. But if the list is like "which out of these five?" then its answer will not exceed five items and it should be perfectly acceptable. And sometimes people forget "none" is a valid answer, it's good to remind that in the question.
Last but not least, each site has its chat. If you have trouble formulating a neat question, you can drop in and ask for help there. Not for answer as such, but help in phrasing your question right.
The way it varies though - mapping out the "dark matter" - suggests interactions with common matter both ways. So it's not like "the underlying fabric varies" - it really behaves like matter, forming clouds, strands, that "hair" - it's not a generic field or a generalized property of space "resulting in galaxies".
MOND suggests some unknown as of yet function mu(a/a0). If that function was to fit the observational data, it would be incredibly complex; nothing as elegant and common as common [something]/r^2 or sqrt(v^2/c^2). It would be more like a function to describe shapes of clouds basing on air flow, temperature and humidity.
We don't know any other physical entity that would behave that way - move, flow, gather - than matter. And while still some predictions are defied and we can't say for sure it's matter, if we compare the effects to known behaviors of various physical entities - waves, fields, energies - this one has strong similarities to matter and very few to others.
For example, space expansion is uniform; about all of cosmos expands at the same, flat rate that slowly changes over time, but is independent of location. Its source is described as "dark energy" but you can have justified doubts if it's really energy because its interaction with reality seems really unidirectional: it affects space, but the space and its contents don't seem to affect it. In case of dark matter though, the similarities are striking.
And if you think about difficulties of detecting it - it doesn't interact with electromagnetism... What percentage of our observation methods are not based on electromagnetism? All known matter keeps its structure - solid, gas, structure of atoms - due to electromagnetic forces. Bindings between atoms are all about electrons and protons interacting electromagnetically. All of light is EM wave. Most of non-electromagnetic observations like neutrina or collisions of neutrons - boil down to interactions that *eventually* produce some EM influence; be it an emitted photon, a neutron decaying into a proton and an electron, and so on - we observe them indirectly. If Dark Matter doesn't interact electromagnetically, it could sit right in front of our noses and we'd be unable to spot it. A solid chunk of dark matter could directly phase through a solid chunk of steel, because there's a lot of room between electrons and the nuclei and no force (electromagnetic!) that would prevent particles of the dark matter occupying locations in between; it could even phase through the nuclei because who says it needs to follow Pauli's Exclusion Principle? It's enough that it interacts gravitationally, and so your chunk of steel would exhibit 30% higher gravitational pull - but since its original gravitational pull is piconewtons, the change would be undetectable.
Slashdot Mirror
Initial descent incline 3.2 degrees. Not too impressive ;) I'd rather see the tunnel curving - first descending steeply from the station then straightening out at some 2km.
Still, tectonics are going to be a nightmare. I've been to a mine. I saw what they can do.
So, what exactly should I, in your opinion, do to earn this title?
'cause the 'engineer' is a fully recognized graduate degree in my country. Four years of studies ending with defending a final project, earning you the title of engineer.
At my school, the final project was usually building some embedded device. Industrial control, signal processing, extension card for a PC, and such. And writing firmware for the device you've designed and built.
My project involved a DC motor driven through an amplifier, feedback from two rotary encoders, an 8051 family microcontroller to provide readouts of the encoders and control of the motors, plus the whole mechanical backend and frontend, the electronic backend (the '51 wasn't fast enough for polling the encoders so to achieve /4 resolution I needed an extra board with discrete logic for generating interrupts and doing some preprocessing), analog amplifier to drive the motor (again, PWM wouldn't be smooth enough, I used DAC instead), and software in '51 assembly to make it running. Additionally over a month in Matlab to develop algorithm for optimizing the control parameters, another week to rewrite it into C (increasing program speed 300x, allowing the calculations to be finished in one day as opposed to one year they would take in Matlab), a user control application on PC, and then documenting it all (about 170 pages).
So, what exactly is YOUR idea of what earns one the title of an engineer?
Perhaps you should take your meds.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
12km, or 40,000ft and they were unable to keep up due to heat melting the drill.
If you're going to cut into Earth curvature, in a straight line with maximum 10km depth the longest you can go is 714km.
What percentage of Americans consider flying with commercial airlines to be the mark of poverty?
Hyperloop isn't a replacement for buses or city cars. It's a replacement for airplanes. Supersonic travel with high initial but low unit cost - airplanes are very wasteful because they need to use a lot of energy just to prevent falling. Hyperloop train, once running, keeps running with only minimal friction losses and can recuperate most of energy used on acceleration during braking.
It actually drives a lot of funds towards science/education. But yeah, the initial investment is huge. I mean, something like, 6% the amount any of the wars USA started!
Imagine a section of tube going splitting away from the main network. It has an airlock shortly after the split, then gently curves up a tunnel through a mountain, and exits at a rather steep angle upwards. Then there's a quick-acting airlock at the opening.
A special train is loaded - a rocket adapted to travel through these tubes. It speeds up to the regular Mach 1 in the "civilian" section of the tunnel, then goes down the branch and gains another 2-3 Mach. The airlock at the end opens right before the rocket reaches it, then the hyperloop propulsion module drops on a parachute while the rocket ignites its engines. We've just shaved off first 1.5km/s out of the required 9 or so needed to reach orbit - and with the tyranny of rocket equation, that's quite a bit of savings!
No can do. Lava too shallow.
10-15km deep will hardly make a difference and we can't really go much deeper without ridiculous amount of work on thermal isolation.
Plus tectonics will really rain all over the parade unless it's built as a flexible maglev in a way oversized tunnel.
I believe this is an extremely roundabout and misguided way of describing the pod maintaining a constant pressure so there's no "ear popping" and other silly effects connected with changes of altitude.
Excuse me, what is your problem?
I have an engineering degree and a diploma to confirm that. I have a job that required that document; I wouldn't be legally permitted to perform it without it, so it certainly acts as a license. Is there something else I'm missing?
The community could actually vastly reduce the workload - especially removing a lot of burden of searching for the prior art.
A nice theory. But this is how it works really.
I do. Graduation diploma with the "Engineer of control and management" title.
2/3 of the studies was theory, how to understand, analyze, control and manage systems. The remaining 1/3 was how to implement that control in software, using off-the-shelf hardware for control applications.
Your point?
I can definitely go to jail for releasing buggy code. Human lives depend on it working correctly (or failing gracefully), and if someone dies because of an error I made, I'm definitely facing a sentence. Also, knowing how to code is a lesser part of my occupation. Understanding the problem the code is to solve, along with all the ways it can go wrong, coming up with the project and finally implementing it in software is what I do.
The difference between a software engineer and a developer is the same as between a structural engineer and a drafter. To an outsider it seems they do the same thing.
ESR may not be important, but the warning he issued is. It directly affects maybe a couple dozen people, but indirectly millions.
If, following entrapment, top open source contributors are forced to resign, this will affect the whole world.
And before you dismiss it as baseless FUD, recall (or look up) Assange's rape allegations, the Shirtstorm and #notyourshield.
Well, I could do without my couple "Tumbleweed"s.
You can also usually set a bounty on a question with existing answers if they are not to your satisfaction. It's costly in terms of karma, but it can un-bury an ancient question and attract new, better answers.
Employ? Who says anything about employment?
Implement a "public forum" where all applications are published and input from the broad public can be gathered - if someone knows prior art, or is able to point out triviality of the patent (e.g. "[doing an extremely common thing] over the Internet" ) they can post it and the USPTO clerk will just reject the application without further ado.
Unfortunately that merely counts as a modified three pronged handheld tool. A three-pronged fork with an extra prong.
The solution is:
- ask the question one more time.
- link previous "duplicates"
- tell exactly how they don't answer it
- tell what you expect from the answer, that the accepted answer doesn't have.
Example. The original question asked "how to deal with the problem". My question was "Why the problem exists; what are its potential consequences?" - I had to state I'm not looking for solution but for a rationale, not "do it because standard says so" but "what rationale lies behind this entry in the standard?" - it was three close-votes down before I got the point across.
Another one, not on SO but on Arquade, one of SE sites. A Minecraft question, which was at first deemed a duplicate... except the original was about the Creative mode, and mine was about Survival, making the (trivial) answers for the original useless in my context. Again, underlying the difference... made all the difference.
So: Just re-ask the non-duplicate, just make sure to show clearly why and how it's non-duplicate.
Nicely ask in the question that if it doesn't belong here, could you (please) be redirected to the right site? :)
"Programmers.SE" is also a good site for questions that can't be answered with a snippet of code. You may get a better track record asking there - especially that it's not so ridden with competition between vicious addicts of the karma that swarm every new question and fill it with loathing if they find they can't gain any karma to be earned from it.
Also, if the situation was regular, it would be a good idea to bring it up in meta.stackoverflow.com, asking for advice.
And if the answer is "there is no site in the SE network that would be a good match for your questions currently", the right course of action might be a visit to area51.stackexchange.com ...
Now read your own post in a non-sarcastic way; treat the text of your post as a personal opinion. Then judge whether that opinion is not objectively wrong.
Yeah, I'm sure to master systemd from reading its manpages.
Good documentation is hard to come by. Most of documentation out there seems to be more of a logbook where developers log their achievements and describe what they made in terms only they can understand. It's way too often unreadable for the outsiders.
A good documentation needs a document that describes the structure of the whole thing, how its elements influence each other and how the user can affect them. Provide usage patterns, examples with explanation of what and how is being done, caveats, processes.
Most of documentation, instead, lists available functions in alphabetic order, with perfunctory descriptions of their parameters and vestigal mentions of their purpose. Mapping intended action -> sequence of functions is about impossible for anyone not already trained in the system. Instead of "How to do [task X]" you get "which [mysterious parameter] does knob Y tweak?"
Imagine trying to learn flying an airplane given only a list of names, locations and briefest descriptions of every switch, dial and knob in that airplane.
In the (not so rare) cases where a question was closed as a duplicate even though it was not, the right course of action is to act the question for a third time. This time - underlying differences and focus; linking the existing "duplicates" and telling how they don't answer what you need. It works.
Also, don't treat every single closure as a "punishment".
"Duplicate" closures mean people still get the correct answer (at the original question) but they still provide alternative paths to find it.
"Migration" closures mean there are people better qualified to answer that elsewhere, so you're better off going there.
"Too broad" closures - you really won't obtain a comprehensive answer because it's impossible; it would require a library, not an answer entry. In these cases Either split your question into smaller, bite-sized chunks or explicitly ask for a shallow, broad summary of the topic.
Also, before you ask a question that has numerous possible answers, think how are you going to pick that single "correct" one. If you know some quality that would let you choose, include it. If you don't - you should really rethink your question.
Also, in case "is there any...?" type of questions, don't hesitate to state "this is a yes/no question, I'm not asking to list all, just drop me any single example or 'none' if there is none." Some mods are allergic to list questions and unless you narrow it down sufficiently, it will be closed. Same about short, closed lists - if the list goes on and on with no way to find its tail, the question is too broad. But if the list is like "which out of these five?" then its answer will not exceed five items and it should be perfectly acceptable. And sometimes people forget "none" is a valid answer, it's good to remind that in the question.
Last but not least, each site has its chat. If you have trouble formulating a neat question, you can drop in and ask for help there. Not for answer as such, but help in phrasing your question right.
The way it varies though - mapping out the "dark matter" - suggests interactions with common matter both ways. So it's not like "the underlying fabric varies" - it really behaves like matter, forming clouds, strands, that "hair" - it's not a generic field or a generalized property of space "resulting in galaxies".
MOND suggests some unknown as of yet function mu(a/a0). If that function was to fit the observational data, it would be incredibly complex; nothing as elegant and common as common [something]/r^2 or sqrt(v^2/c^2). It would be more like a function to describe shapes of clouds basing on air flow, temperature and humidity.
We don't know any other physical entity that would behave that way - move, flow, gather - than matter. And while still some predictions are defied and we can't say for sure it's matter, if we compare the effects to known behaviors of various physical entities - waves, fields, energies - this one has strong similarities to matter and very few to others.
For example, space expansion is uniform; about all of cosmos expands at the same, flat rate that slowly changes over time, but is independent of location. Its source is described as "dark energy" but you can have justified doubts if it's really energy because its interaction with reality seems really unidirectional: it affects space, but the space and its contents don't seem to affect it. In case of dark matter though, the similarities are striking.
And if you think about difficulties of detecting it - it doesn't interact with electromagnetism... What percentage of our observation methods are not based on electromagnetism? All known matter keeps its structure - solid, gas, structure of atoms - due to electromagnetic forces. Bindings between atoms are all about electrons and protons interacting electromagnetically. All of light is EM wave. Most of non-electromagnetic observations like neutrina or collisions of neutrons - boil down to interactions that *eventually* produce some EM influence; be it an emitted photon, a neutron decaying into a proton and an electron, and so on - we observe them indirectly. If Dark Matter doesn't interact electromagnetically, it could sit right in front of our noses and we'd be unable to spot it. A solid chunk of dark matter could directly phase through a solid chunk of steel, because there's a lot of room between electrons and the nuclei and no force (electromagnetic!) that would prevent particles of the dark matter occupying locations in between; it could even phase through the nuclei because who says it needs to follow Pauli's Exclusion Principle? It's enough that it interacts gravitationally, and so your chunk of steel would exhibit 30% higher gravitational pull - but since its original gravitational pull is piconewtons, the change would be undetectable.
"which "original" Aether theory are you formally referencing?"
The one Michelsonâ"Morley experiment failed to detect.