And the freeway system follows the same model as unlimited DSL and Cable, where you are one of many 'burst' customers on a segment, where the throttling is a fact of the oversubscription of the backbone pipe from the CO to the neighborhood exchange, much in how freeway flow reduces when more cars attempt to use a given stretch of highway than the road can handle.
I know what guaranteed bandwidth costs, it's very expensive and so long as I can get enough bandwidth to do what I need to do even if it's not the theoretical max I'm pragmatic and am not going to worry too much. This isn't what these ISPs are doing though, they're saying that once my odometer crosses a certain threshold I cannot continue to drive on that highway anymore. I know why they're doing it; links between the NX and the CO and between COs and the next-tier ISP are expensive to upgrade, but if they don't upgrade eventually competitors will come into the market and out-compete them. They can try regulatory pressure to attempt to enforce monopoly or duopoly, but in the end other options have come into many markets, and hopefully these companies will be highly damaged by their bad short-term behavior.
Why do they have this kind of stuff where it can be reached from the internet? I don't see why that's necessary. If it's convenient for the designers then it's too damn convenient for your enemies.
From the headline:
Chinese and Russian spies have attempted to hack into the top secret details of Australia's future submarines (paywalled)
Sounds to me like they didn't want to pay for them either...
*grin*
In all seriousness, it is not practical to air-gap computer networks anymore. Operating systems need too much connectivity for updates, and commercial software wants to do authenticity checks to make sure that the corporations using it have actually paid for it. On top of that with the world basically standardized on TCP/IP it's not practical to even use alternate protocols to complicate access.
That's before you even get to the nature of corporate networks. It's very expensive to build networks that are singular in nature, building parallel networks doubles it. Then you have to account for communication between team members and all sorts of other productivity applications. It's just not practical to not put it on the network.
If a truck is Class 3 or below (commonly referred to as a one-ton, 350, or 3500 truck) it's not a true commercial chassis.
That said, I agree with you; the nature of what the vehicle is used for, rather than its capability, starts to become important in vehicles that do not require any special class of license to operate. Vehicles 26,001 lb GCWR and above (if I am remembering correctly, I have not had a practical need to know this stuff) are generally required to have a commercial license of some kind to operate, and even when some states will tolerate private ownership and operation above 26,000 lb, to drive inter-state one must usually get a license as other states will not tolerate it. Class 2 and 3 trucks (three-quarter ton and one-ton) are far too often used as commuter/daily driver vehicles and those overpollute relative to the work that they do in-practice.
A big part of the SUV craze of the last fifteen years has been that automakers were able to use these chassis as means to avoid fuel economy standards and to thus provide gobs of power to the buying public, when more recent developments have proven that the passenger cars and Class 1 trucks can meet these fuel economy and emissions standards when the automakers choose to work to develop them. I haven't kept-up on it, but I think that there's increasing pressure to get automakers to have more fuel-efficient vehicles in these classes- the "lifestyle truck" has become much more of a Class 1 (half-ton) phenomenon, while the plush varieties of the Class 2 and 3 trucks have gotten so ridiculously expensive that they are not suited to being driven casually by too many owners compared to in the past.
So, what happens to the money in-escrow? Do the original contributors get it back? Does the entity that solicited the funding get some to help pay is obligations that it would not have sought had it not thought it would have the funding to cover them?
The whole point of investing is that the investor takes a risk in exchange for what could be a greater reward. Smart small-time investors do not invest money that they cannot afford to lose. Smart big-time investors spend a lot of time calculating risk and attempt to balance the risk with the reward, knowing that some investments will fail entirely regardless.
I've worked for small companies whose investment dollars were trickled-in. Those companies folded when investors got cold-feet. That's part why companies usually try to get funding in lumps, because they can budget the use of the funding better when they know how much they have and for how long. Yes, it means that the investor has to make sure that the company isn't going to use the capital to purchase thousand-dollar chairs and to hold lavish parties, but at the same time, the investor still knows that there are risks when giving others money.
It stinks that commercial vehicles don't have to have pollution controls. A couple of months every year we have smog days and the damage caused by pollutants to our health is just shameful.
I hope I'm alive to see the end of burning in order to create energy and power.
Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis?
Commercial vehicles have emissions rules and pollution controls. They don't happen to be the same as your passenger car, because first, there are many less commercial vehicles than there are passenger vehicles so as a whole they're already polluting less than in-total for passenger vehicles, and second, the rules for commercial vehicles are based around what the vehicle is expected to move. This applies to both passenger commercial vehicles (ie, buses) and to vehicles that move cargo or raw materials. A Class-4 tow truck or short school bus chassis will have its emissions capped at a much lower amount than a Class-6 flatbed delivery truck, which will be lower than a Class-8 over-the-road tractor trailer, or full-sized school bus, or sixteen wheel heavy dump truck.
One could extrapolate that the amount of emissions allowed per unit of work is probably comparable to your passenger car, but these commercial vehicles are doing a lot more total work.
Sounds like, if one wants a fairly nice car as far as its interior and amenities are concerned, but doesn't care about performance, it might not be a bad time to pick up someone's VW diesel for a song.
I was referring to within the borders of the United States predominately. Internationally, nations, even friends, have spied on each other since the concept of the nation first formed.
This is like claiming you are trespassing on my land, because some windblown dirt landed on the highway and you drove across it.
Why do you need an analogy?
If you put something onto the Internet then you published it. A hyperlink to what you published is the other party citing you as a source. Not only historically has it not been bad to cite sources, it has been considered good to cite sources and has been considered good to inform others of work that the informer feels should be read.
That anyone anywhere could get into trouble for hyperlinking to something on the Internet is absurd. If the creator of the work doesn't want others to read or reference it then they need to either not publish it for all to read, or they need to use mechanisms like authentication to prevent access to the content. Hell, they could even look at the referrer and if it's not one of their authorized domains, redirect to an entry-point page. Basically there are already ways of avoiding being linked-to if the publisher wants to avoid being linked-to.
The foreigners use the same technologies as the citizens, and are thus vulnerable to the same sort of exploits.
I guess I feel much the same way as GlobalEcho does. I actually do not have a problem, in of itself, with the concept of attempting to discover the real criminal plots that are used to attack people. What I have a problem with is when the number of persons being subject to scrutiny is far too many generations removed from the original subject, when the scrutiny is applied to things that aren't criminal acts or should otherwise be protected-speech (ie, counter-political groups, peaceful civil rights groups, and other such organizations that did not advocate violence or even equip themselves with the tools for violence), and when the checks and balances to ensure that overzealous application of the surveillance is curtailed are ignored or violated (ie, warrantless).
My problem with the idea is that there currently is no line between surveillance target and everyone else. If surveillance target == enemy, then that means everyone == enemy, or at least potential enemy. It leads to an us-versus-them mentality that is now prevalent in law enforcement at all levels of government. It works to destabilize the nature of our government being by us, for us, and starts resembling something out of 1984 or out of East Germany during its Stasi period. That is not healthy.
There need to be real rules covering investigation of people. There needs to be justification. There needs to be oversight. There needs to be the occasional criminal prosecution of a law enforcement official when they blatantly overstep their authority, and dismissal of charges from time to time through fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree legal concept, to remind law enforcement that if they ignore the law, those they attempt to prosecute can also ignore the law, and the only way to prosecute is to remain within its bounds.
It's not too far yet, but we need to continue to push for it to be corrected.
Don't know where you live, but here they change lanes around, close lanes, and reroute traffic on a nearly daily basis. Its been non-stop doing that for over 10 years straight. If auto driving cars depend on GPS that means I can't use it to just go to work even, not to mention going somewhere else.
What happens when they close part of the city for a parade and a lot of streets are closed? Your car just stops and waits the 4 hours for it to pass before continuing? Sure you could take over, but if your drunk and you do that you committed a DUI, the reason you bought a self driving car to start.
I expect that in addition to cars being able to self-determine routes and find barriers there will need to be intelligent barriers that the cars can detect and follow the instructions of. These kinds of barriers would be used by construction crews, emergency responders, and perhaps even as a function of the four-way hazards when a car is stopped on the side of the road. Call it a more precise means for the autonomous car to determine what it should do or what the expectation is in a complex situation.
Just as an example, in long-term highway construction projects it's not uncommon to take a two-lane-single-direction stretch of Interstate and to route both directions on it, one going the natural way, the other driving what would normally be opposed, while the other two-lane stretch is being worked on. In cases like this there needs to be a way for the construction barriers themselves to notify the vehicles both that something has overridden the expected behavior, and that this particular path is the override. The car will in-turn have to account for this deviation in the path and to know that it's not actually trying to go the wrong-way even though its default programming would say that it is, and it would have to understand that while one lane is now no longer the wrong, way, the other lane still is the wrong way and to not try to use it.
Other construction-related examples include the ability to follow a pilot car and the ability to pay attention to flag-men. The flag-men method is a variation of the one-lane bridge in many cases with the addition of a very spontaneous control (ie, the switch from slow to stop and stop to slow comes without warning from the flag-man himself, so the vehicle must pay attention to the flow of traffic in addition to somehow figuring out the sign or receiving a signal from the sign), and the nature of pilot cars means that there has to be some means for cars to be subordinate to other vehicles, which leads into the next example...
...emergency responders. Cars will need to respect things like fire trucks blocking the road, or police cars blocking the road, or tow-trucks blocking the road, or any other sort of obstruction that will be present for awhile and indicates that it isn't safe to be within a certain area. Cars may also have to react to barriers placed by these responders, and it may make sense for those barriers to have some kind of component that lets them more intelligently broadcast so that the cars don't have to figure out what they are visually. Obviously if the police are attempting to close a stretch of road due to an accident investigation they want to keep cars out of that area so that the evidence is not disturbed. If firefighters are working on a structure fire they need to keep cars out of the immediate staging area and from driving down the road that the firemen may be crossing regularly without notice. They also need to keep a wide berth when a tow truck driver is working with a disabled vehicle, wherever that vehicle is disabled and whatever is wrong (ie, difference between an overturned vehicle on the highway, a stalled vehicle on the highway, and a stalled vehicle on the median or shoulder). These are all complex situations that happen all of the time, and cars need to be able to handle them.
I think the first application for autonomous cars will be open-highway dr
It's not a lot different than apprentices and journeymen working for masters in a given trade, educational component not withstanding. Someone can come out of an engineering school with the highest grades and the most respect from their teachers and peers, but they still need a lot of professional development that they won't get from textbooks and academic examples.
That approach doesn't work here. The questions are all written in advance in the committee-based interview process, and anyone could potentially ask any kind of question. The twenty-two year old secretary could ask the interviewee to describe how to troubleshoot a spanning-tree failure that has taken down a building, even if she has no idea what she even said, let alone what the possible solutions are.
Yep. We wouldn't let self-proclaimed civil engineers build bridges.
Why do we let self-proclaimed programmers write important software?
We do let non-PE civil engineers work for PEs and design buildings and bridges that the PEs sign-off on. We basically require it, in order for non-PEs to learn so that they too can become PEs.
Outside of the civil engineering discipline the use of the term requires a lot less formal qualification. My wife is an ME by education and holds a CQE certificate. The firm she works for has some employees with the title of Engineer that do not even have college degrees, they worked their way up through the testing and manufacturing sides to where they do engineering work on key parts of products that they have expert knowledge of. Should they be called engineers? The employer thinks so even if some of the college-trained engineers don't like it.
There are potable-water applications for ABS pipe. I expect that means it's possible to have food-grade ABS plastic at least if certain conditions are met. On top of that ABS is often used in the housings of plastic kitchen appliances, so it still has to be safe for incidental exposure.
I wonder if the process that is used to injection-mold or to extrude ABS gives it different properties than the 3d-print method that may not subject the material to the same pressures.
Apparently you've never seen how computers in the field are treated, or had to account for the volume use of computers.
Their software issues (ie, fraud) aside, Diebold makes voting machines in much the same way as they make ATMs. These computers as public kiosks have to take whatever abuse is foisted on them by an indifferent or even hostile public. These machines need to just work when they're pulled from mothballs and plugged in to house power by the barely-trained pensioners that usually crew the polling locations, without needing much in the way of maintenance before they ever leave storage.
Your consumer-grade PC is not going to make for a good voting platform. The lowest-end computer that might be up to the task would be a ruggedized laptop like a Panasonic Toughbook, something that meets one of the MIL or specs or IP specs greater than 43. It has to be able to handle being kicked, knocked over, dropped down a short flight of stairs, being moved outside in the rain, being accidentally sprayed by irrigation sprinklers, being used or handled or stored in dusty or sandy environments, etc.
To your point about a cell-phone readable ballot, that does not because no one will review their ballots. You're looking at Florida all over again. Besides, if you use a paper ballot you can still have an election even if the power is out, even if people are filling in ballots in the dark by flashlight or candle.
Voting is too important to hand-over to machines entirely.
We had pencils and punch cards once, when democracy was hanging by a chad.
That kind of voting was not based on marking a piece of paper with a writing implement. That kind of voting was based on pushing a mechanical button that had to make a physical change in the paper medium over which it was placed. That system was unsound because it required maintenance of equipment and was subject to the abuse that the average person could put on a mechanical device.
I do not have a problem with electronic-tabulated voting so long as the medium on which the voter casts the vote is human-readable and human-markable. That pretty much means optical scan, a technology that has been used for a couple of decades now. Optical scan means that the results can be tabulated as the voting occurs and be known as polls close, but in contests where there is a need to recount it's still possible for humans auditing the individual ballots to read the ballots with their eyes, without any special equipment at all.
Either way, human-tabulated from the outset or computer-tabulated and capable of being human-tabulated or human-audited, the process needs to allow for tabulation without any special equipment whatsoever.
Security Theater is nothing more than the Wizard of Oz. The problem is, nobody learned that lesson, in spite of nearly universal knowledge of that movie's pivotal scene.
The problem is, the security theater only makes it more difficult, and now we're finding out it actually doesn't make it all much more difficult.
IMHO the chances of hijacking a plane became much less likely to be successful after 9/11, because they broke the cardinal rule of hijacking, and turned the plane into a weapon. People on planes already know they are dead if a hijacker takes over, and will respond accordingly.
Zardoz as a film is often panned, but the point that Zed realized the nature of Zardoz and started taking action to learn the real truth behind the floating head seems to be where we're at now with the TSA.
Or its mpg for that matter, simply because the lab tests whether EU, US or elsewhere don't match real world conditions. Whether VW is refering to its lab results - in which case well duh - or real world driving - TFA doesn't say - it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Personally I'd be looking VERY closely at the figures for hybrids because the real world driving test mpg & CO2 is frequently so far removed from the lab results that it might as well be for an entirely different vehicle.
Funny you say that... My wife gets 30 mpg with her '01 Integra, which is better than the 21 city, 23 combined, 28 highway EPA rating, on a mostly-highway commute. I average between 17 and 18 mpg with my '95 Impala on a commute that's half city, half highway, and I drive it like I stole it. EPA says it should get 15 city, 18 mixed, 23 highway.
We are both getting expected or better than expected results. I don't think that the EPA numbers are out of line.
Probably doesn't hurt that the characteristics of a diesel engine that make it popular for over-the-road trucking (ie, long-term, long-operating durability) also are a good fit with endurance racing.
I can assure you, the number of people actually coming to such a judgement is very small. You only notice them because the majority of the population simply doesn't speak on the matter.
hmmm. Low UID, and "volkerdi" would be a good way to represent a username on a system that might have had an eight-character username limitation at some point. Is this Patrick Volkerding of Slackware?
To the point though, even if MINIX is obsolete, obsolesecence could simply be that the features needed are not implemented. Granted, the entire framework could be poor to the point that adding on components does not help, but if the framework is solid then even something obsolete might be able to develop past its obsolescence.
I mention this because a lot of people are upset by some development in the Linux world with Lennart Poettering's contributions. These people might be as ripe to pick-off from Linux as they were to pick-off from BSD back when Linux was young.
If the group in question hadn't ever used violence then I might agree with you, but this group has used violence and does not believe against the use of violence.
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And the freeway system follows the same model as unlimited DSL and Cable, where you are one of many 'burst' customers on a segment, where the throttling is a fact of the oversubscription of the backbone pipe from the CO to the neighborhood exchange, much in how freeway flow reduces when more cars attempt to use a given stretch of highway than the road can handle.
I know what guaranteed bandwidth costs, it's very expensive and so long as I can get enough bandwidth to do what I need to do even if it's not the theoretical max I'm pragmatic and am not going to worry too much. This isn't what these ISPs are doing though, they're saying that once my odometer crosses a certain threshold I cannot continue to drive on that highway anymore. I know why they're doing it; links between the NX and the CO and between COs and the next-tier ISP are expensive to upgrade, but if they don't upgrade eventually competitors will come into the market and out-compete them. They can try regulatory pressure to attempt to enforce monopoly or duopoly, but in the end other options have come into many markets, and hopefully these companies will be highly damaged by their bad short-term behavior.
Why do they have this kind of stuff where it can be reached from the internet? I don't see why that's necessary. If it's convenient for the designers then it's too damn convenient for your enemies.
From the headline:
Chinese and Russian spies have attempted to hack into the top secret details of Australia's future submarines (paywalled)
Sounds to me like they didn't want to pay for them either...
*grin* In all seriousness, it is not practical to air-gap computer networks anymore. Operating systems need too much connectivity for updates, and commercial software wants to do authenticity checks to make sure that the corporations using it have actually paid for it. On top of that with the world basically standardized on TCP/IP it's not practical to even use alternate protocols to complicate access.
That's before you even get to the nature of corporate networks. It's very expensive to build networks that are singular in nature, building parallel networks doubles it. Then you have to account for communication between team members and all sorts of other productivity applications. It's just not practical to not put it on the network.
If a truck is Class 3 or below (commonly referred to as a one-ton, 350, or 3500 truck) it's not a true commercial chassis.
That said, I agree with you; the nature of what the vehicle is used for, rather than its capability, starts to become important in vehicles that do not require any special class of license to operate. Vehicles 26,001 lb GCWR and above (if I am remembering correctly, I have not had a practical need to know this stuff) are generally required to have a commercial license of some kind to operate, and even when some states will tolerate private ownership and operation above 26,000 lb, to drive inter-state one must usually get a license as other states will not tolerate it. Class 2 and 3 trucks (three-quarter ton and one-ton) are far too often used as commuter/daily driver vehicles and those overpollute relative to the work that they do in-practice.
A big part of the SUV craze of the last fifteen years has been that automakers were able to use these chassis as means to avoid fuel economy standards and to thus provide gobs of power to the buying public, when more recent developments have proven that the passenger cars and Class 1 trucks can meet these fuel economy and emissions standards when the automakers choose to work to develop them. I haven't kept-up on it, but I think that there's increasing pressure to get automakers to have more fuel-efficient vehicles in these classes- the "lifestyle truck" has become much more of a Class 1 (half-ton) phenomenon, while the plush varieties of the Class 2 and 3 trucks have gotten so ridiculously expensive that they are not suited to being driven casually by too many owners compared to in the past.
So, what happens to the money in-escrow? Do the original contributors get it back? Does the entity that solicited the funding get some to help pay is obligations that it would not have sought had it not thought it would have the funding to cover them?
The whole point of investing is that the investor takes a risk in exchange for what could be a greater reward. Smart small-time investors do not invest money that they cannot afford to lose. Smart big-time investors spend a lot of time calculating risk and attempt to balance the risk with the reward, knowing that some investments will fail entirely regardless.
I've worked for small companies whose investment dollars were trickled-in. Those companies folded when investors got cold-feet. That's part why companies usually try to get funding in lumps, because they can budget the use of the funding better when they know how much they have and for how long. Yes, it means that the investor has to make sure that the company isn't going to use the capital to purchase thousand-dollar chairs and to hold lavish parties, but at the same time, the investor still knows that there are risks when giving others money.
It stinks that commercial vehicles don't have to have pollution controls. A couple of months every year we have smog days and the damage caused by pollutants to our health is just shameful.
I hope I'm alive to see the end of burning in order to create energy and power.
Whatchu talkin' 'bout Willis?
Commercial vehicles have emissions rules and pollution controls. They don't happen to be the same as your passenger car, because first, there are many less commercial vehicles than there are passenger vehicles so as a whole they're already polluting less than in-total for passenger vehicles, and second, the rules for commercial vehicles are based around what the vehicle is expected to move. This applies to both passenger commercial vehicles (ie, buses) and to vehicles that move cargo or raw materials. A Class-4 tow truck or short school bus chassis will have its emissions capped at a much lower amount than a Class-6 flatbed delivery truck, which will be lower than a Class-8 over-the-road tractor trailer, or full-sized school bus, or sixteen wheel heavy dump truck.
One could extrapolate that the amount of emissions allowed per unit of work is probably comparable to your passenger car, but these commercial vehicles are doing a lot more total work.
Sounds like, if one wants a fairly nice car as far as its interior and amenities are concerned, but doesn't care about performance, it might not be a bad time to pick up someone's VW diesel for a song.
I was referring to within the borders of the United States predominately. Internationally, nations, even friends, have spied on each other since the concept of the nation first formed.
Car analogy? Ok - I'll give it a shot.
This is like claiming you are trespassing on my land, because some windblown dirt landed on the highway and you drove across it.
Why do you need an analogy?
If you put something onto the Internet then you published it. A hyperlink to what you published is the other party citing you as a source. Not only historically has it not been bad to cite sources, it has been considered good to cite sources and has been considered good to inform others of work that the informer feels should be read.
That anyone anywhere could get into trouble for hyperlinking to something on the Internet is absurd. If the creator of the work doesn't want others to read or reference it then they need to either not publish it for all to read, or they need to use mechanisms like authentication to prevent access to the content. Hell, they could even look at the referrer and if it's not one of their authorized domains, redirect to an entry-point page. Basically there are already ways of avoiding being linked-to if the publisher wants to avoid being linked-to.
The foreigners use the same technologies as the citizens, and are thus vulnerable to the same sort of exploits.
I guess I feel much the same way as GlobalEcho does. I actually do not have a problem, in of itself, with the concept of attempting to discover the real criminal plots that are used to attack people. What I have a problem with is when the number of persons being subject to scrutiny is far too many generations removed from the original subject, when the scrutiny is applied to things that aren't criminal acts or should otherwise be protected-speech (ie, counter-political groups, peaceful civil rights groups, and other such organizations that did not advocate violence or even equip themselves with the tools for violence), and when the checks and balances to ensure that overzealous application of the surveillance is curtailed are ignored or violated (ie, warrantless).
My problem with the idea is that there currently is no line between surveillance target and everyone else. If surveillance target == enemy, then that means everyone == enemy, or at least potential enemy. It leads to an us-versus-them mentality that is now prevalent in law enforcement at all levels of government. It works to destabilize the nature of our government being by us, for us, and starts resembling something out of 1984 or out of East Germany during its Stasi period. That is not healthy.
There need to be real rules covering investigation of people. There needs to be justification. There needs to be oversight. There needs to be the occasional criminal prosecution of a law enforcement official when they blatantly overstep their authority, and dismissal of charges from time to time through fruit-of-the-poisonous-tree legal concept, to remind law enforcement that if they ignore the law, those they attempt to prosecute can also ignore the law, and the only way to prosecute is to remain within its bounds.
It's not too far yet, but we need to continue to push for it to be corrected.
Don't know where you live, but here they change lanes around, close lanes, and reroute traffic on a nearly daily basis. Its been non-stop doing that for over 10 years straight. If auto driving cars depend on GPS that means I can't use it to just go to work even, not to mention going somewhere else.
What happens when they close part of the city for a parade and a lot of streets are closed? Your car just stops and waits the 4 hours for it to pass before continuing? Sure you could take over, but if your drunk and you do that you committed a DUI, the reason you bought a self driving car to start.
I expect that in addition to cars being able to self-determine routes and find barriers there will need to be intelligent barriers that the cars can detect and follow the instructions of. These kinds of barriers would be used by construction crews, emergency responders, and perhaps even as a function of the four-way hazards when a car is stopped on the side of the road. Call it a more precise means for the autonomous car to determine what it should do or what the expectation is in a complex situation.
...emergency responders. Cars will need to respect things like fire trucks blocking the road, or police cars blocking the road, or tow-trucks blocking the road, or any other sort of obstruction that will be present for awhile and indicates that it isn't safe to be within a certain area. Cars may also have to react to barriers placed by these responders, and it may make sense for those barriers to have some kind of component that lets them more intelligently broadcast so that the cars don't have to figure out what they are visually. Obviously if the police are attempting to close a stretch of road due to an accident investigation they want to keep cars out of that area so that the evidence is not disturbed. If firefighters are working on a structure fire they need to keep cars out of the immediate staging area and from driving down the road that the firemen may be crossing regularly without notice. They also need to keep a wide berth when a tow truck driver is working with a disabled vehicle, wherever that vehicle is disabled and whatever is wrong (ie, difference between an overturned vehicle on the highway, a stalled vehicle on the highway, and a stalled vehicle on the median or shoulder). These are all complex situations that happen all of the time, and cars need to be able to handle them.
Just as an example, in long-term highway construction projects it's not uncommon to take a two-lane-single-direction stretch of Interstate and to route both directions on it, one going the natural way, the other driving what would normally be opposed, while the other two-lane stretch is being worked on. In cases like this there needs to be a way for the construction barriers themselves to notify the vehicles both that something has overridden the expected behavior, and that this particular path is the override. The car will in-turn have to account for this deviation in the path and to know that it's not actually trying to go the wrong-way even though its default programming would say that it is, and it would have to understand that while one lane is now no longer the wrong, way, the other lane still is the wrong way and to not try to use it.
Other construction-related examples include the ability to follow a pilot car and the ability to pay attention to flag-men. The flag-men method is a variation of the one-lane bridge in many cases with the addition of a very spontaneous control (ie, the switch from slow to stop and stop to slow comes without warning from the flag-man himself, so the vehicle must pay attention to the flow of traffic in addition to somehow figuring out the sign or receiving a signal from the sign), and the nature of pilot cars means that there has to be some means for cars to be subordinate to other vehicles, which leads into the next example...
I think the first application for autonomous cars will be open-highway dr
I also don't like to play grabby-squeezy in a taxi, that's disgusting on multiple levels.
At least with an autonomous car you'll have no one there to disgust...
It's not a lot different than apprentices and journeymen working for masters in a given trade, educational component not withstanding. Someone can come out of an engineering school with the highest grades and the most respect from their teachers and peers, but they still need a lot of professional development that they won't get from textbooks and academic examples.
That approach doesn't work here. The questions are all written in advance in the committee-based interview process, and anyone could potentially ask any kind of question. The twenty-two year old secretary could ask the interviewee to describe how to troubleshoot a spanning-tree failure that has taken down a building, even if she has no idea what she even said, let alone what the possible solutions are.
Yep. We wouldn't let self-proclaimed civil engineers build bridges.
Why do we let self-proclaimed programmers write important software?
We do let non-PE civil engineers work for PEs and design buildings and bridges that the PEs sign-off on. We basically require it, in order for non-PEs to learn so that they too can become PEs.
Outside of the civil engineering discipline the use of the term requires a lot less formal qualification. My wife is an ME by education and holds a CQE certificate. The firm she works for has some employees with the title of Engineer that do not even have college degrees, they worked their way up through the testing and manufacturing sides to where they do engineering work on key parts of products that they have expert knowledge of. Should they be called engineers? The employer thinks so even if some of the college-trained engineers don't like it.
There are potable-water applications for ABS pipe. I expect that means it's possible to have food-grade ABS plastic at least if certain conditions are met. On top of that ABS is often used in the housings of plastic kitchen appliances, so it still has to be safe for incidental exposure.
I wonder if the process that is used to injection-mold or to extrude ABS gives it different properties than the 3d-print method that may not subject the material to the same pressures.
Apparently you've never seen how computers in the field are treated, or had to account for the volume use of computers.
Their software issues (ie, fraud) aside, Diebold makes voting machines in much the same way as they make ATMs. These computers as public kiosks have to take whatever abuse is foisted on them by an indifferent or even hostile public. These machines need to just work when they're pulled from mothballs and plugged in to house power by the barely-trained pensioners that usually crew the polling locations, without needing much in the way of maintenance before they ever leave storage.
Your consumer-grade PC is not going to make for a good voting platform. The lowest-end computer that might be up to the task would be a ruggedized laptop like a Panasonic Toughbook, something that meets one of the MIL or specs or IP specs greater than 43. It has to be able to handle being kicked, knocked over, dropped down a short flight of stairs, being moved outside in the rain, being accidentally sprayed by irrigation sprinklers, being used or handled or stored in dusty or sandy environments, etc.
To your point about a cell-phone readable ballot, that does not because no one will review their ballots. You're looking at Florida all over again. Besides, if you use a paper ballot you can still have an election even if the power is out, even if people are filling in ballots in the dark by flashlight or candle.
Voting is too important to hand-over to machines entirely.
I prefer this example, with JFK, Stalin, and the strippers...
We had pencils and punch cards once, when democracy was hanging by a chad.
That kind of voting was not based on marking a piece of paper with a writing implement. That kind of voting was based on pushing a mechanical button that had to make a physical change in the paper medium over which it was placed. That system was unsound because it required maintenance of equipment and was subject to the abuse that the average person could put on a mechanical device.
I do not have a problem with electronic-tabulated voting so long as the medium on which the voter casts the vote is human-readable and human-markable. That pretty much means optical scan, a technology that has been used for a couple of decades now. Optical scan means that the results can be tabulated as the voting occurs and be known as polls close, but in contests where there is a need to recount it's still possible for humans auditing the individual ballots to read the ballots with their eyes, without any special equipment at all.
Either way, human-tabulated from the outset or computer-tabulated and capable of being human-tabulated or human-audited, the process needs to allow for tabulation without any special equipment whatsoever.
Security Theater is nothing more than the Wizard of Oz. The problem is, nobody learned that lesson, in spite of nearly universal knowledge of that movie's pivotal scene.
The problem is, the security theater only makes it more difficult, and now we're finding out it actually doesn't make it all much more difficult.
IMHO the chances of hijacking a plane became much less likely to be successful after 9/11, because they broke the cardinal rule of hijacking, and turned the plane into a weapon. People on planes already know they are dead if a hijacker takes over, and will respond accordingly.
Zardoz as a film is often panned, but the point that Zed realized the nature of Zardoz and started taking action to learn the real truth behind the floating head seems to be where we're at now with the TSA.
Or its mpg for that matter, simply because the lab tests whether EU, US or elsewhere don't match real world conditions. Whether VW is refering to its lab results - in which case well duh - or real world driving - TFA doesn't say - it really shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone. Personally I'd be looking VERY closely at the figures for hybrids because the real world driving test mpg & CO2 is frequently so far removed from the lab results that it might as well be for an entirely different vehicle.
Funny you say that... My wife gets 30 mpg with her '01 Integra, which is better than the 21 city, 23 combined, 28 highway EPA rating, on a mostly-highway commute. I average between 17 and 18 mpg with my '95 Impala on a commute that's half city, half highway, and I drive it like I stole it. EPA says it should get 15 city, 18 mixed, 23 highway.
We are both getting expected or better than expected results. I don't think that the EPA numbers are out of line.
With the software cheat, sure.
How are the Porsche owners with these engines going to feel when their SUVs now perform no better than a Dodge Durango or Ford Explorer?
Probably doesn't hurt that the characteristics of a diesel engine that make it popular for over-the-road trucking (ie, long-term, long-operating durability) also are a good fit with endurance racing.
I can assure you, the number of people actually coming to such a judgement is very small. You only notice them because the majority of the population simply doesn't speak on the matter.
hmmm. Low UID, and "volkerdi" would be a good way to represent a username on a system that might have had an eight-character username limitation at some point. Is this Patrick Volkerding of Slackware?
To the point though, even if MINIX is obsolete, obsolesecence could simply be that the features needed are not implemented. Granted, the entire framework could be poor to the point that adding on components does not help, but if the framework is solid then even something obsolete might be able to develop past its obsolescence.
I mention this because a lot of people are upset by some development in the Linux world with Lennart Poettering's contributions. These people might be as ripe to pick-off from Linux as they were to pick-off from BSD back when Linux was young.
If the group in question hadn't ever used violence then I might agree with you, but this group has used violence and does not believe against the use of violence.