This reminds me of when GUI's were new in the mid 80's, all the elitist jerks who fancied themselves to be high-caliber nerds loudly proclaiming that it was all a gay bullshit fad, etc., ad nauseum. Lemme ask you guys, any chance we'll get a humble redaction if it turns out you are completely and utterly wrong about this?
Hmm. *Looks at the 6 terminal windows open to all the various departmental servers*.
Every tool has its use. GUI may be king for the dekstop, but CLI is king for much server administration.
Mature people argue about the best tool for a job or function. Childish people declare a particular tool "the best." Most platform argument-wars can be described in this way.
Probably would have been roughly as effective to publish an article in a major mag or popular blog saying "Hey, we need more coverage in wikipedia, please contribute."
Why is this worse? Because the small wikis don't have the infrastructure. Financial, technical, and human resources- the volunteers who have spent years figuring out the best available way to do stuff, Etc. etc.
On the plus side, something relatively obscure gets shuffled off into its own wiki. I only wish the same could be said of all the extensive articles on various fictional universes...
I wasn't sure what that was supposed to mean. Does the battery discharge in 8 hours if you don't use the energy?
That is extremely unlikely- that's a LOT of heat.
A Watt is a power unit. A Watt-hour is a energy unit. They most likely meant it is a 32 Megawatt-hour battery.
On an unrelated note, nobody seems to have pictures of the finished thing, or how it was constructed, etc- just one picture of a concrete shell, clearly early in the process. Anyone find more pictures?
Gambling isn't even remotely victimless- why do you think there are recovery groups for gambling addiction?
Casinos are specifically and carefully designed to exploit people's natural instincts (for example, no windows so you have no sense of time) and mental illnesses; the layout of the floor is done purposefully, as are the style of the games. There's a wealth of information out there for anyone with access to Google Scholar, for example, like this:
The pattern of convictions for various categories of crime in the population of the United Kingdom was compared with the corresponding pattern in a sample of addictive gamblers drawn from Gamblers Anonymous in the U.K. A distinctive pattern of income-generating crime was found to be statistically associated with pathological gambling. This pattern was compared with other distinctive patterns associated with the intake of alcohol and with various other drugs and it was found to resemble most closely that of addiction to narcotic drugs.
The possible role of gambling as a contributory cause of crime is discussed in the light of what is known of the issues surrounding other addictions as causes of their distinctive patterns of crime.
I don't care if my neighbor plays poker. I do care if I have to pay money because my neighbor plays poker.
You have to pay when your neighbor robs the local convenience store to pay the rent/mortgage/grocer (or their gambling debts, or just to gamble more), loses the house/apartment anyway, and their spouse and child are now homeless and on welfare. Or the person becomes homeless, with no health insurance, and ends up in the hospital. Or goes mentally insane and stabs you on the street corner for the $10 in your wallet.
Take a look at the police spending in any community pre-and-post casino. It always skyrockets after the casinos move in, because casinos attract the desperate, mentally ill, and criminal.
Currently we've got something like 1100 nuclear weapons- many of those are multiple-warhead weapons. Seems to me we only need, at most, a few dozen, mostly for geographic coverage.
Well, if the Chicago police are saying "we tried it and it doesn't work", I'd listen to them rather than the company.
Police aren't unbiased either. If a tool (or effective policing) pushes crime out of an area, you don't need as many police officers in that area, do you? And if it works in one part of the city, it'll probably work in others. That means layoffs. Let me know when you hit that stage of your life where you realize that the police have little incentive to effectively enforce the law.
Sorta similar to firefighters. Fire calls have dropped in the last 20-30 years to 1/4 of what they used to be; more sprinkler systems, better building and electrical codes, etc. We just don't need nearly as many firefighters these days. So rather than lay off firefighters (or reassign them to work in small rescue crews, or in ambulances as rescue techs) the city of Boston now sends out in many cases TWO fire trucks to any medical or vehicle crash call, putting unnecessary miles on expensive heavy equipment and running up fuel bills.
I regularly see news stories in Boston where the police get a shotspotter alert, show up, find a guy bleeding out on the sidewalk, and sometimes they find him fast enough to call EMS and get him to a hospital and save his life.
I don't think they should have cameras, but the technology is sound- and it certainly is better use of tax money than where most money is going (all sorts of anti-terrorism crap.) The question: why is such a simple technology so hideously expensive? There should be little patentable in the field, given how old and obvious sonic triangulation is. The equipment is super simple- an embedded computer in an outdoor enclosure with a microphone...
The equivalent of a distribution channel where tens of thousands get movies for free, but then a randomly selected group has to pay a hundred times the cost of the movie in litigation fees. At least they're innovating...
Not really; sounds exactly like "speed enforcement." Most everyone drives over the limit, because they're so ridiculously artificially low (they were designed for cars with 1950's-era radial tires, drum brakes, etc), but the police 'randomly' pull people over and ticket them, supposedly because it'll discourage the population as a whole and "make the roads safer".
Then, the people caught speeding pay much higher insurance rates for the rest of their lives (like in Massachusetts, for example), which pays for all the idiots crashing their cars into things because they were yakking on their cell phone while balancing a cup of coffee on their lap.
Someone I know has one in his car because he often goes sailing at the beach where reception is very weak, but he wanted to be able to call people either for "I'm on my way home" or "I need help." The unit has a nearly identical cradle. Hiding behind that foam back is an antenna which couples any phone to the amplifier (this is why nobody makes phones with RF connectors any more.) A fairly large (foot or so high) antenna on the roof of the SUV further helps both reception and transmission compared to the phone- bigger antenna, ground plane from the roof, higher up, and outside the shielding of the car, interior bits, and your head.
The general rule I found was that if you had *any* signal with the phone out of the cradle, you were guaranteed a full signal strength display and perfect calls (ie no dropped chunks of the conversation or degraded voice quality.) In some places it'd pull enough signal to make a call where no service existed before.
Read as "safer from industrial espionage and nationalization"
Read as "we think it will save us money", but the story is supposedly bogus (or Dell wasn't ready to admit it yet, or leaked it to scare their Chinese vendors, etc.)
According to the study, wine experts have estimated that up to 5% of fine wines sold today are not all they are cracked up to be on the label or in the price tag
The carbon dating didn't find 5% of wines are frauds. A bunch of "wine experts" they talked to said it.
Also, it's not based off the age of the carbon in the wine; it's based off the percentage of radioactive carbon from nuclear tests. Unless they have a precise idea of exactly how much radioactive carbon ended up where after each test, the whole thing is a load of crap.
You friend is stupid, too- overpaying by almost 4x the market rate, and with an interest rate that high, it's going to be years before she pays it off.
Last year I got a loan at 4.9%...
Dennis Chamberland: "So, the key problem is carbon dioxide scrubbing"
Interviewer: "And you've solved it?"
Dennis Chamberland: "Yep!"
Interviewer: "So, what is it?"
Dennis Chamberland: "I'd lose my patent if I told you."
So, basically, he wants us all to live underwater, paying patent royalties to him. You'll be paying for two gas bills- one to heat your underwater habitat, the other to breathe.
I'd really like to know how someone working on this for NASA managed to get a patent. That patent should be public property.
. Using these systems we can level the load and allow the greenest power sources (nuclear, followed by hydro) to produce the vast majority of power we need (because they can run at near 100% 24/7).
I was going to moderate you down, but decided to respond instead.
Nuclear power requires relatively constant output levels- it's a pain in the ass to change power levels.
Hydro has no such issues. They can't take out more water than is being put in over the long run, but that's about it. In fact, if they can take out less, that means they can use more later. They should come up with a name for that! Maybe...supply leveling!
A couple of follow-up comments:
If you find yourself in a car of any brand where the engine is accelerating without command, put the car in neutral (your engine will be fine, as the engine computer has several "rev limiters" built-in) and apply the brakes STRONGLY. Don't "ride" the brakes or use them to "control" the speed. Get over to the side of the road and STOP IMMEDIATELY. On virtually every production car made on the planet, the brakes have vastly more torque than the engine. 60-0MPH is something most cars can do in 100-150 feet. There are VERY few cars which can do 0-60 in 100 feet (and they are race cars, and have really, really big brakes.)
If neutral won't work- you can also turn off the ignition, but don't turn the key completely off, or you'll engage the steering lock(ie, go to the 'accessory' position.) You will not "lose steering"; at any speed over about 2-3MPH, steering assist becomes less and less necessary, particularly if you don't have very wide tires.)
If you "ride" the brakes, the pad and rotor will heat up and "cook"; consumer, mass-market pads are designed to have good "cold" (ie instant) grab, be easily modulated, quiet, not cause excessive wear on the rotor, and not generate brake dust that is impossible to remove from the wheels. Racing pads are designed for higher temperatures (where among other things, you get much more heat transfer from the rotor to the air blowing past/through it), but they have very lousy "cold" bite. Also, heat up the calipers enough, and you will cause the moisture in the brake fluid to boil (your brake fluid should be changed at a MINIMUM every 2 years, because it is hygroscopic), and that boiling will result in "vapor lock"- no brakes. The brakes MUST be bled after such an incident.
Audi successfully defended itself from several lawsuits and even won a countersuit in a case where a mother crushed her boy against their garage wall (after going through the garage door!). Interviewed by an officer afterwards, she repeatedly said she'd hit the wrong pedal. They sued a few months later claiming the car had "gone out of control". As someone who knows Audis well, particularly the mid-80's 5000 turbo series- the idle stabilization valve (the only way the car computer can increase engine speed) simply cannot allow enough air to bypass the throttle enough to cause the car to lay down burnt rubber, crash through a garage door, and embed itself in a house wall.
The problems with the Volvo "R" models have been reported in a number of other european cars; you'll also see the words "ice mode" thrown around occasionally. Many ABS controllers since 1990 or so have an accelerometer to detect when all the wheels stop simultaneously but there is no corresponding negative acceleration. "Ice mode" is supposedly some sort of variant of this, and there has been great debate as to whether this "mode" is internet folklore, but you'll find many, many posts on all sorts of varying car enthusiast forums.
When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong. The human motor system is not perfect, and it doesn't always do what it is told.'
This was true with Audi in the 80's, when 60 Minutes did a report where, among other things, they faked a car accelerating out of control (the car was modified extensively.) And yes, a large number of drivers, particularly the elderly, hit the wrong pedal all the time.
I've experienced it three times in the 6 months or so that I've owned my car. Each time, I was headed up a hill towards a stop sign, put my foot on the brake, and there was nothing there- I had to push so hard I was pulling against the steering wheel for leverage. This is a car with big, high-performance brakes that can stop on a dime.
Volvo claims there's no problem, despite numerous reports on the V70R.com and Swedespeed forums. No other models demonstrate the behavior.
You absolutely can. It's very easy: discipline people and if they keep doing it, fire them.
It'll probably only take one person before everyone else starts paying more attention. In this economy, it's easy to find replacements (especially if the people in your company are really this stupid.) Lots of folks out there looking for something better than Walmart or flippin' burgers.
If nothing else I predict a large percentage of the umpteen million dollar final cost somehow going to Connecticut, but I'm probably just incredibly jaded.
What's a few million? Connecticut is one of the top haulers, thanks to Electric Boat, where many nuclear subs (and a number of other ships) are made.
Every time the Pentagon tries to cut its budget, congrescritters get all up in arms about "jobs", so the Pentagon has all these useless projects (congress forces the programs it wants.) It's the primary reason US military spending has risen so sharply over the years.
"It's kind of a myth to think that if we would only cut the price, everyone could show up and join in.
It's not a matter of how many people. It's a matter of who. Hence the term ELITIST.
We have an event that is sold out a year in advance, and we can't make it much bigger than the 1,500 who come now (plus 400 in Palm Springs) because it would get too impersonal.
They already limit the number of tickets sold, so this is hogwash. They could easily do a lottery.
Instead, a $6000 entry bar means that only the rich get into TED. Sure, they let a dozen or two "fellows" in the door for free, but that's out of 1500.
I'm sure the $9M in ticket sales also has nothing to do with it. Folks: it doesn't cost $9M to put up a website and hold a conference or two a year.
So in other words, this will be TED without the elitism (used to be you had to get "invited", now you can't join at all except to pay $1k to get streaming video), astronomical ticket prices ($6000 to attend the conference!), etc?
Christopher Poole, founder of 4chan, was invited to talk this year at TED.
The vehicle drivetrain network is very often, if not always, separate from the "entertainment" network; Audi, for example, runs two separate CAN busses for them. The original story hypes things a bit; there may be 70-100 microCONTROLLERS, but half or more of them are "body" (ie windows, sunroof, etc) or "entertainment"(audio, navigation) related and thus don't really need to be reviewed.
The vast majority of them do very, very simple things, mostly sending CAN bus messages or responding to CAN bus commands. Ie, you move the wiper stalk. The microcontroller for the steering wheel controls says "the stalk moved" either to the wiper motor interface or a 'body control' computer, which then sends a command to the wipers.
The code review for most of the modules, as a result, is extremely simple- they're just (mostly digital) I/O boxes. Some of them are things like fuel pump modules, which at most have some diagnostic capabilities (like current draw from the pump, pressure sensor, etc.)
The code review will not be very problematic for engine computers, because (gasp!) they're not made by car manufacturers. Bosch, Magnetti Marelli, Hitachi, and a couple of other companies are the primary producers. And guess what? The code is largely the same car-to-car. Parameters are changed- code doesn't, so much. And car companies share "platforms", which further simplifies things.
This is the fundamental reason why we don't dump all of our uneaten food into starving countries. Doing so strongly devalues the local farmer's products and makes it difficult for them to buy seed and fertilizer for the next year.
We do dump food.
In the 80's, Regan re-instituted all the price controls and tariffs on sugar. Poorer countries which relied on the US for sugar sales suddenly found a giant chunk of their exports gone, and farmers switched to growing different crops.
What did we do then? Provided "assistance" food to those countries- the same crops that farmers were growing.
I'm not sure that we still "provide" food "assistance", but I know the sugar tariff remains (which protects around a thousand corporate sugar cane growers), as do hundreds of other tariffs that protect very small farming interests and hurt worldwide access to our markets.
Guess how High Fructose Corn Syrup became the predominant sweetener, by the way? Yep, the price controls from the 80's made it a much cheaper alternative because the government wasn't artificially propping up the price. Our national diet, fucked for the sake of ~1000 sugarcane farmers.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of when GUI's were new in the mid 80's, all the elitist jerks who fancied themselves to be high-caliber nerds loudly proclaiming that it was all a gay bullshit fad, etc., ad nauseum. Lemme ask you guys, any chance we'll get a humble redaction if it turns out you are completely and utterly wrong about this?
Hmm. *Looks at the 6 terminal windows open to all the various departmental servers*.
Every tool has its use. GUI may be king for the dekstop, but CLI is king for much server administration.
Mature people argue about the best tool for a job or function. Childish people declare a particular tool "the best." Most platform argument-wars can be described in this way.
Probably would have been roughly as effective to publish an article in a major mag or popular blog saying "Hey, we need more coverage in wikipedia, please contribute."
Why is this worse? Because the small wikis don't have the infrastructure. Financial, technical, and human resources- the volunteers who have spent years figuring out the best available way to do stuff, Etc. etc.
On the plus side, something relatively obscure gets shuffled off into its own wiki. I only wish the same could be said of all the extensive articles on various fictional universes...
That is extremely unlikely- that's a LOT of heat.
A Watt is a power unit. A Watt-hour is a energy unit. They most likely meant it is a 32 Megawatt-hour battery.
On an unrelated note, nobody seems to have pictures of the finished thing, or how it was constructed, etc- just one picture of a concrete shell, clearly early in the process. Anyone find more pictures?
Casinos are specifically and carefully designed to exploit people's natural instincts (for example, no windows so you have no sense of time) and mental illnesses; the layout of the floor is done purposefully, as are the style of the games. There's a wealth of information out there for anyone with access to Google Scholar, for example, like this:
I don't care if my neighbor plays poker. I do care if I have to pay money because my neighbor plays poker.
You have to pay when your neighbor robs the local convenience store to pay the rent/mortgage/grocer (or their gambling debts, or just to gamble more), loses the house/apartment anyway, and their spouse and child are now homeless and on welfare. Or the person becomes homeless, with no health insurance, and ends up in the hospital. Or goes mentally insane and stabs you on the street corner for the $10 in your wallet.
Take a look at the police spending in any community pre-and-post casino. It always skyrockets after the casinos move in, because casinos attract the desperate, mentally ill, and criminal.
Currently we've got something like 1100 nuclear weapons- many of those are multiple-warhead weapons. Seems to me we only need, at most, a few dozen, mostly for geographic coverage.
Nobody is listening to my suggestion penalize any player who has memorized every 2 letter english word by 1 tile.
Yep, though you mean "every 2 letter word in the Scrabble Dictionary."
It's basically cheating. If you are a talented scrabble player, you should be better able to use the tiles you have, not memorize crutches.
Well, if the Chicago police are saying "we tried it and it doesn't work", I'd listen to them rather than the company.
Police aren't unbiased either. If a tool (or effective policing) pushes crime out of an area, you don't need as many police officers in that area, do you? And if it works in one part of the city, it'll probably work in others. That means layoffs. Let me know when you hit that stage of your life where you realize that the police have little incentive to effectively enforce the law.
Sorta similar to firefighters. Fire calls have dropped in the last 20-30 years to 1/4 of what they used to be; more sprinkler systems, better building and electrical codes, etc. We just don't need nearly as many firefighters these days. So rather than lay off firefighters (or reassign them to work in small rescue crews, or in ambulances as rescue techs) the city of Boston now sends out in many cases TWO fire trucks to any medical or vehicle crash call, putting unnecessary miles on expensive heavy equipment and running up fuel bills.
But, they get to look busy...
I don't think they should have cameras, but the technology is sound- and it certainly is better use of tax money than where most money is going (all sorts of anti-terrorism crap.) The question: why is such a simple technology so hideously expensive? There should be little patentable in the field, given how old and obvious sonic triangulation is. The equipment is super simple- an embedded computer in an outdoor enclosure with a microphone...
The equivalent of a distribution channel where tens of thousands get movies for free, but then a randomly selected group has to pay a hundred times the cost of the movie in litigation fees. At least they're innovating...
Not really; sounds exactly like "speed enforcement." Most everyone drives over the limit, because they're so ridiculously artificially low (they were designed for cars with 1950's-era radial tires, drum brakes, etc), but the police 'randomly' pull people over and ticket them, supposedly because it'll discourage the population as a whole and "make the roads safer".
Then, the people caught speeding pay much higher insurance rates for the rest of their lives (like in Massachusetts, for example), which pays for all the idiots crashing their cars into things because they were yakking on their cell phone while balancing a cup of coffee on their lap.
Someone I know has one in his car because he often goes sailing at the beach where reception is very weak, but he wanted to be able to call people either for "I'm on my way home" or "I need help." The unit has a nearly identical cradle. Hiding behind that foam back is an antenna which couples any phone to the amplifier (this is why nobody makes phones with RF connectors any more.) A fairly large (foot or so high) antenna on the roof of the SUV further helps both reception and transmission compared to the phone- bigger antenna, ground plane from the roof, higher up, and outside the shielding of the car, interior bits, and your head. The general rule I found was that if you had *any* signal with the phone out of the cradle, you were guaranteed a full signal strength display and perfect calls (ie no dropped chunks of the conversation or degraded voice quality.) In some places it'd pull enough signal to make a call where no service existed before.
Dell spokesperson denied the story this morning
Protip: spokespersons spend 90% of their time "denying" things which 2 weeks later turn out to be true.
It could have been Dell was, or still is- they just don't want to admit it yet.
Read as "safer from industrial espionage and nationalization"
Read as "we think it will save us money", but the story is supposedly bogus (or Dell wasn't ready to admit it yet, or leaked it to scare their Chinese vendors, etc.)
According to the study, wine experts have estimated that up to 5% of fine wines sold today are not all they are cracked up to be on the label or in the price tag
The carbon dating didn't find 5% of wines are frauds. A bunch of "wine experts" they talked to said it.
Also, it's not based off the age of the carbon in the wine; it's based off the percentage of radioactive carbon from nuclear tests. Unless they have a precise idea of exactly how much radioactive carbon ended up where after each test, the whole thing is a load of crap.
You friend is stupid, too- overpaying by almost 4x the market rate, and with an interest rate that high, it's going to be years before she pays it off. Last year I got a loan at 4.9%...
Dennis Chamberland: "So, the key problem is carbon dioxide scrubbing"
Interviewer: "And you've solved it?"
Dennis Chamberland: "Yep!"
Interviewer: "So, what is it?"
Dennis Chamberland: "I'd lose my patent if I told you."
So, basically, he wants us all to live underwater, paying patent royalties to him. You'll be paying for two gas bills- one to heat your underwater habitat, the other to breathe.
I'd really like to know how someone working on this for NASA managed to get a patent. That patent should be public property.
. Using these systems we can level the load and allow the greenest power sources (nuclear, followed by hydro) to produce the vast majority of power we need (because they can run at near 100% 24/7).
I was going to moderate you down, but decided to respond instead.
Nuclear power requires relatively constant output levels- it's a pain in the ass to change power levels.
Hydro has no such issues. They can't take out more water than is being put in over the long run, but that's about it. In fact, if they can take out less, that means they can use more later. They should come up with a name for that! Maybe...supply leveling!
If neutral won't work- you can also turn off the ignition, but don't turn the key completely off, or you'll engage the steering lock(ie, go to the 'accessory' position.) You will not "lose steering"; at any speed over about 2-3MPH, steering assist becomes less and less necessary, particularly if you don't have very wide tires.)
If you "ride" the brakes, the pad and rotor will heat up and "cook"; consumer, mass-market pads are designed to have good "cold" (ie instant) grab, be easily modulated, quiet, not cause excessive wear on the rotor, and not generate brake dust that is impossible to remove from the wheels. Racing pads are designed for higher temperatures (where among other things, you get much more heat transfer from the rotor to the air blowing past/through it), but they have very lousy "cold" bite. Also, heat up the calipers enough, and you will cause the moisture in the brake fluid to boil (your brake fluid should be changed at a MINIMUM every 2 years, because it is hygroscopic), and that boiling will result in "vapor lock"- no brakes. The brakes MUST be bled after such an incident.
Audi successfully defended itself from several lawsuits and even won a countersuit in a case where a mother crushed her boy against their garage wall (after going through the garage door!). Interviewed by an officer afterwards, she repeatedly said she'd hit the wrong pedal. They sued a few months later claiming the car had "gone out of control". As someone who knows Audis well, particularly the mid-80's 5000 turbo series- the idle stabilization valve (the only way the car computer can increase engine speed) simply cannot allow enough air to bypass the throttle enough to cause the car to lay down burnt rubber, crash through a garage door, and embed itself in a house wall.
The problems with the Volvo "R" models have been reported in a number of other european cars; you'll also see the words "ice mode" thrown around occasionally. Many ABS controllers since 1990 or so have an accelerometer to detect when all the wheels stop simultaneously but there is no corresponding negative acceleration. "Ice mode" is supposedly some sort of variant of this, and there has been great debate as to whether this "mode" is internet folklore, but you'll find many, many posts on all sorts of varying car enthusiast forums.
When the driver says they have their foot on the brake, they are just plain wrong. The human motor system is not perfect, and it doesn't always do what it is told.'
This was true with Audi in the 80's, when 60 Minutes did a report where, among other things, they faked a car accelerating out of control (the car was modified extensively.) And yes, a large number of drivers, particularly the elderly, hit the wrong pedal all the time.
However, there are cases where driver reports are plenty accurate. A great example of this would be the problems Volvo V70R and S60R owners have with brake failure while going up hills.
I've experienced it three times in the 6 months or so that I've owned my car. Each time, I was headed up a hill towards a stop sign, put my foot on the brake, and there was nothing there- I had to push so hard I was pulling against the steering wheel for leverage. This is a car with big, high-performance brakes that can stop on a dime.
Volvo claims there's no problem, despite numerous reports on the V70R.com and Swedespeed forums. No other models demonstrate the behavior.
Would it affect a JDAM bomb in flight, for example?
This is just a guess, but- yes? By 8cm?
ultimately you can't fix stupid.
You absolutely can. It's very easy: discipline people and if they keep doing it, fire them.
It'll probably only take one person before everyone else starts paying more attention. In this economy, it's easy to find replacements (especially if the people in your company are really this stupid.) Lots of folks out there looking for something better than Walmart or flippin' burgers.
If nothing else I predict a large percentage of the umpteen million dollar final cost somehow going to Connecticut, but I'm probably just incredibly jaded.
What's a few million? Connecticut is one of the top haulers, thanks to Electric Boat, where many nuclear subs (and a number of other ships) are made.
Every time the Pentagon tries to cut its budget, congrescritters get all up in arms about "jobs", so the Pentagon has all these useless projects (congress forces the programs it wants.) It's the primary reason US military spending has risen so sharply over the years.
"It's kind of a myth to think that if we would only cut the price, everyone could show up and join in.
It's not a matter of how many people. It's a matter of who. Hence the term ELITIST.
We have an event that is sold out a year in advance, and we can't make it much bigger than the 1,500 who come now (plus 400 in Palm Springs) because it would get too impersonal.
They already limit the number of tickets sold, so this is hogwash. They could easily do a lottery.
Instead, a $6000 entry bar means that only the rich get into TED. Sure, they let a dozen or two "fellows" in the door for free, but that's out of 1500.
I'm sure the $9M in ticket sales also has nothing to do with it. Folks: it doesn't cost $9M to put up a website and hold a conference or two a year.
So in other words, this will be TED without the elitism (used to be you had to get "invited", now you can't join at all except to pay $1k to get streaming video), astronomical ticket prices ($6000 to attend the conference!), etc?
Christopher Poole, founder of 4chan, was invited to talk this year at TED.
"Eyyyyy!" *splash*
Here comes DO-178B for cars.
The vehicle drivetrain network is very often, if not always, separate from the "entertainment" network; Audi, for example, runs two separate CAN busses for them. The original story hypes things a bit; there may be 70-100 microCONTROLLERS, but half or more of them are "body" (ie windows, sunroof, etc) or "entertainment"(audio, navigation) related and thus don't really need to be reviewed.
The vast majority of them do very, very simple things, mostly sending CAN bus messages or responding to CAN bus commands. Ie, you move the wiper stalk. The microcontroller for the steering wheel controls says "the stalk moved" either to the wiper motor interface or a 'body control' computer, which then sends a command to the wipers.
The code review for most of the modules, as a result, is extremely simple- they're just (mostly digital) I/O boxes. Some of them are things like fuel pump modules, which at most have some diagnostic capabilities (like current draw from the pump, pressure sensor, etc.)
The code review will not be very problematic for engine computers, because (gasp!) they're not made by car manufacturers. Bosch, Magnetti Marelli, Hitachi, and a couple of other companies are the primary producers. And guess what? The code is largely the same car-to-car. Parameters are changed- code doesn't, so much. And car companies share "platforms", which further simplifies things.
It's not nearly as scary as it sounds.
This is the fundamental reason why we don't dump all of our uneaten food into starving countries. Doing so strongly devalues the local farmer's products and makes it difficult for them to buy seed and fertilizer for the next year.
We do dump food.
In the 80's, Regan re-instituted all the price controls and tariffs on sugar. Poorer countries which relied on the US for sugar sales suddenly found a giant chunk of their exports gone, and farmers switched to growing different crops.
What did we do then? Provided "assistance" food to those countries- the same crops that farmers were growing.
I'm not sure that we still "provide" food "assistance", but I know the sugar tariff remains (which protects around a thousand corporate sugar cane growers), as do hundreds of other tariffs that protect very small farming interests and hurt worldwide access to our markets.
Guess how High Fructose Corn Syrup became the predominant sweetener, by the way? Yep, the price controls from the 80's made it a much cheaper alternative because the government wasn't artificially propping up the price. Our national diet, fucked for the sake of ~1000 sugarcane farmers.