Just to modify my own post, I don't think the Volt issue is common, or that safety issues inherent to lithium batteries are limited to the Volt. But the notion that one can simply replace the batteries as an easy solution is silly because they're expensive.
This story is a perfect example. This is clearly a very minor issue with a simple solution: if the vehicle gets into a collision, change the fucking batteries
Really? Change the $10,000 battery when you get into a 5mph fender bender? Who the hell wants that car?
Maybe this shouldn't be surprising. America often has been a backward "conservative" nation for much of its history. Aside from a few generations at the very beginning of America's modern history, the tolerance for risk has been decreasing rapidly. Without real risk you can't have real gain.
So what pointless risks are you taking in order to further our society, Mr. Internet Tough Guy?
But America as a culture will overlook this, and will overlook the immense economic and environmental benefits that these vehicles would bring, because they are TOO FUCKING SCARED to take what's a very minor risk.
Actually, it's a very serious risk, and if you believe otherwise you simply don't have any idea what you're talking about. A car exploding is major, in my opinion.
And whoever modded this up should have their head examined.
What about when you're in a bad mood? What about when you've just experienced a life-changing event and everything about you seems different? What about if you get food poisoning, get hit by a bus, get burned in a fire, get a brain tumor, or are just having a bad friggin' day?
That's how pattern classification works. You get a wide array of training data that contains variance across a ton of variables. Then, you use algorithms that can isolate the variable (or frequency band, or whatever) you care about from the other incidental variables.
Interesting for sure, but here the motivation is simple. The company doesn't want him to have so many shares. The only way for him to not have so many shares is to either give them back, or incur clauses that allow the company to take them. The only clause that lets them take them back is if he doesn't work there. Therefore, he must be made to not work there.
Well I dunno about down there in the US, but up here in Canada, an employer is required by law to let you go and cast your ballot during working hours if necessary. As well the polls stay open till 7pm to ensure that most people can get off work and go cast their votes.
True here too, but if you live a 45 min drive from your job - and you vote where you live, not where you work - then you're looking at at least 2, maybe 3 hours missed during the day given the lines. Kind of makes it impractical.
Of course the people who tend not to vote the most are the same poor and unemployed people who most right wing/.ers are complaining about here.
I don't think that's remotely true. Activist groups seem to do a good job of herding them to the polls. The problem is families who have to get the kids to school, get to work, get home, feed the kids, and put the kids to bed from the time the polls open until they close. Unless you can pay a babysitter to watch your kids while you go vote, at best mom *or* dad gets to vote. I've been in that situation (I voted, wife stayed home), and it shouldn't be that way.
Most states have laws that require employers to allow you to leave work to vote.
Which is useless if you don't live near where you work.
Beyond that, polling stations are also typically open before and after work hours.
For a very limited amount of time. During which everyone else is also trying to vote, and which also overlaps with trying to get the kids fed, and all that.
If you can't manage either of those options, then perhaps absentee voting is for you.
If you can remember to request one, AND if it's allowed without an excuse. I don't believe that's universal
If you still can't manage to vote, then you're probably too lazy to get your ass out of bed to vote on saturday anyhow.
Easy throwaway line, but bullshit. Generally the sort of thing that people without kids say. Point is, for people with 9-5 jobs, the current system makes voting *hard*. That shouldn't be the case.
People who actually have jobs and a life will be under represented as the people who have nothing better to do besides sit around and watch TV would be over represented.
Yup. I've always been in favor of moving elections from Tuesdays to all weekend. Think a few election returns would be different if the playing field weren't blatantly slanted against the employed?*
*For the pedantic, yes, I know some people work at other times, but the majority of working people work during working hours.
So the issue becomes one of a cost/benefit analysis. I don't understand why it's not obvious what he has to do. Make an estimate of the cost of *not* going RH, in terms of outside contractors needed, employee hours burned, or the opportunity cost of downtime. Be liberal here, because you need to cover the costs of the unexpected as well ("unknown unknowns" in the Rumsfeldian space). Compare that estimate to the cost of the service. Go with whichever minimizes cost.
This is one of those skills that engineers need in order to communicate with management - give them what they need. This isn't really a technical issue, it's a budget issue. So give the CIO a budget.
The problem here is that the costs continue to skyrocket. Any solution that doesn't address that is simply a band-aid.
Why do costs continue to skyrocket? Because the colleges know that effectively any student anywhere can get loans to pay for the cost of college. From the school's standpoint, they can just about charge whatever they want. There's no brake on the price increase.
This is of course compounded by cuts from government support to the colleges. But the bubble has been inflating since long before the current economic trouble. It is certainly making it worse right now, but it's not the root cause of the problem.
And you can definitely see where the money is spent on the campuses. I work with college researchers and had the opportunity to visit a couple of state schools recently. And compared to when I went to college just 15 years ago, these places are absolutely gorgeous. Until there is some means of implementing cost control at the schools - without affecting the ability of students to go to college - this won't change.
There has been a lot of work for recognizing images in video. Here, if you're smart you should be able to do the recognition given a single still, which means it's just ordinary image processing after extraction from the video.
Make it easier on yourself by making the numbers something like bright yellow on blue with a white border (for instance). Then just look for segments of each image with high response for yellow and blue. Then extract the video and pass it through an OCR tool.
Also, put the camera somewhere like the apex of a turn where they have to slow down and you'll be perpendicular to the side of the car (with enough distance that your camera rig doesn't get creamed).
The number of morons waving their lasers indiscriminately at planes is much higher.
Really? We're talking about thousands of reports here. And if one did the math on the cross-sectional area of the airplane's windshield as observed from the ground...I mean, you'd have to have an army of trained, laser-wielding morons out there.
My question is, what other phenomena might be confused for lasers as seen by a pilot?
That “Defense Integrated Military Human Resource System” was a Northrop Grumman [wikipedia.org] project. If the name Northrop Grumman doesn't mean anything to you, you don't know jackshit about federal politics, or how things REALLY work. Northrop Grumman owns Congress.Tthey have facilities in virtually every state.
Eh.....not really. Or at least not them specifically. More like they are a partner with Lockheed, General Dynamics, Boeing, SAIC and Raytheon who can all say the same. And each of whom have similar failures on their resumes. And Congresscritters in their pockets.
That's why when people start talking about the Dems killing defense spending... Sure, they may say that in the whitehouse. But when it trickles down to the House level in particular, guess where all those high-tech defense jobs are? A whole lot of them in fairly blue areas including the Bay area, LA, Boston, and the DC area, among others.
I think this speaks more to how pathetic the leadership of a lot of US companies have become more than it does on Jobs.
Blame the large institutional shareholders who demand quarter-to-quarter accountability, as well as the litigious society that suffers preposterous shareholder lawsuits for having the audacity to manage with an eye beyond this quarter.
You forgot the part where the definition of someone in "poverty" now would enjoy a standard of living higher than probably 95% of the population from 100 years ago, when many of the machines didn't exist.
Besides, shouldn't you be busy smashing looms or something?
Kind of like when you get your ass kicked in a bar fight, when you tell the story the guy was definitely a heavyweight boxer. Couldn't be you just got your ass whupped by a girl.
No. Let's go after the half-starving clerks and retail workers, many of whom cannot even afford to go to a doctor, in the richest country on the history of the planet. Yeah. those are the real 'thieves'. arent they?
Are you suggesting they should get a free pass for theft? Seems a little ridiculous that one should augment one's income by stealing from patrons and then attempt to justify it.
The problem with many of the fat cats is, what they did is in many cases not illegal. Make it illegal first.
Yeah, I got about two paragraphs in and, expecting to read a description of the actual project, all I found was a bunch of 'look at me!!!'. Then, I realized that *was* the actual project. Distributed Narcissism. Yay.
Not to defend the asshole in this example, but the opposite extreme (espoused by you) won't be any better. Here's a question for you: under your model, who pays for pharmaceutical research and expensive FDA trials if the resulting drug can be manufactured by anyone for pennies on the dollar compared to the upfront investment?
It makes me a little sad to see a slashdot where so few people got that reference. And props to whoever greenlighted that - not in good taste, but funny as hell.
I will now go smear some hot grits on Natalie Portman.
So a company with the bargaining power of Amazon makes a new product, and can't get the price down $10 more?
I don't mean to be rude - but don't you think they were doing that already? That sounds like the Homer Simpson School of Management - "Could you make that cheaper?" Uh, OK...
Whether the estimates are accurate, I couldn't say.
Some have, some are too new. The 'talking about digital lock circumvention' part is a mixed bag - if they can make a case that you've done so in an actual contributory manner, then they have a case. But that sort of thing is case-by-case, to my knowledge. I'm not aware of conviction without courts. Also, there have been victories in terms of fair use vs. DRM.
The process tends to be slow and piecemeal, but bear in mind the DMCA isn't that old on the scale of the legal system. I think the track record of challenges to the DMCA in the courts has been pretty fair, I think.
Slashdot Mirror
Just to modify my own post, I don't think the Volt issue is common, or that safety issues inherent to lithium batteries are limited to the Volt. But the notion that one can simply replace the batteries as an easy solution is silly because they're expensive.
This story is a perfect example. This is clearly a very minor issue with a simple solution: if the vehicle gets into a collision, change the fucking batteries
Really? Change the $10,000 battery when you get into a 5mph fender bender? Who the hell wants that car?
Maybe this shouldn't be surprising. America often has been a backward "conservative" nation for much of its history. Aside from a few generations at the very beginning of America's modern history, the tolerance for risk has been decreasing rapidly. Without real risk you can't have real gain.
So what pointless risks are you taking in order to further our society, Mr. Internet Tough Guy?
But America as a culture will overlook this, and will overlook the immense economic and environmental benefits that these vehicles would bring, because they are TOO FUCKING SCARED to take what's a very minor risk.
Actually, it's a very serious risk, and if you believe otherwise you simply don't have any idea what you're talking about. A car exploding is major, in my opinion.
And whoever modded this up should have their head examined.
What about when you're in a bad mood? What about when you've just experienced a life-changing event and everything about you seems different? What about if you get food poisoning, get hit by a bus, get burned in a fire, get a brain tumor, or are just having a bad friggin' day?
That's how pattern classification works. You get a wide array of training data that contains variance across a ton of variables. Then, you use algorithms that can isolate the variable (or frequency band, or whatever) you care about from the other incidental variables.
Interesting for sure, but here the motivation is simple. The company doesn't want him to have so many shares. The only way for him to not have so many shares is to either give them back, or incur clauses that allow the company to take them. The only clause that lets them take them back is if he doesn't work there. Therefore, he must be made to not work there.
Well I dunno about down there in the US, but up here in Canada, an employer is required by law to let you go and cast your ballot during working hours if necessary. As well the polls stay open till 7pm to ensure that most people can get off work and go cast their votes.
True here too, but if you live a 45 min drive from your job - and you vote where you live, not where you work - then you're looking at at least 2, maybe 3 hours missed during the day given the lines. Kind of makes it impractical.
Of course the people who tend not to vote the most are the same poor and unemployed people who most right wing /.ers are complaining about here.
I don't think that's remotely true. Activist groups seem to do a good job of herding them to the polls. The problem is families who have to get the kids to school, get to work, get home, feed the kids, and put the kids to bed from the time the polls open until they close. Unless you can pay a babysitter to watch your kids while you go vote, at best mom *or* dad gets to vote. I've been in that situation (I voted, wife stayed home), and it shouldn't be that way.
Most states have laws that require employers to allow you to leave work to vote.
Which is useless if you don't live near where you work.
Beyond that, polling stations are also typically open before and after work hours.
For a very limited amount of time. During which everyone else is also trying to vote, and which also overlaps with trying to get the kids fed, and all that.
If you can't manage either of those options, then perhaps absentee voting is for you.
If you can remember to request one, AND if it's allowed without an excuse. I don't believe that's universal
If you still can't manage to vote, then you're probably too lazy to get your ass out of bed to vote on saturday anyhow.
Easy throwaway line, but bullshit. Generally the sort of thing that people without kids say. Point is, for people with 9-5 jobs, the current system makes voting *hard*. That shouldn't be the case.
People who actually have jobs and a life will be under represented as the people who have nothing better to do besides sit around and watch TV would be over represented.
Yup. I've always been in favor of moving elections from Tuesdays to all weekend. Think a few election returns would be different if the playing field weren't blatantly slanted against the employed?*
*For the pedantic, yes, I know some people work at other times, but the majority of working people work during working hours.
So the issue becomes one of a cost/benefit analysis. I don't understand why it's not obvious what he has to do. Make an estimate of the cost of *not* going RH, in terms of outside contractors needed, employee hours burned, or the opportunity cost of downtime. Be liberal here, because you need to cover the costs of the unexpected as well ("unknown unknowns" in the Rumsfeldian space). Compare that estimate to the cost of the service. Go with whichever minimizes cost.
This is one of those skills that engineers need in order to communicate with management - give them what they need. This isn't really a technical issue, it's a budget issue. So give the CIO a budget.
The problem here is that the costs continue to skyrocket. Any solution that doesn't address that is simply a band-aid.
Why do costs continue to skyrocket? Because the colleges know that effectively any student anywhere can get loans to pay for the cost of college. From the school's standpoint, they can just about charge whatever they want. There's no brake on the price increase.
This is of course compounded by cuts from government support to the colleges. But the bubble has been inflating since long before the current economic trouble. It is certainly making it worse right now, but it's not the root cause of the problem.
And you can definitely see where the money is spent on the campuses. I work with college researchers and had the opportunity to visit a couple of state schools recently. And compared to when I went to college just 15 years ago, these places are absolutely gorgeous. Until there is some means of implementing cost control at the schools - without affecting the ability of students to go to college - this won't change.
There has been a lot of work for recognizing images in video. Here, if you're smart you should be able to do the recognition given a single still, which means it's just ordinary image processing after extraction from the video.
Make it easier on yourself by making the numbers something like bright yellow on blue with a white border (for instance). Then just look for segments of each image with high response for yellow and blue. Then extract the video and pass it through an OCR tool.
Also, put the camera somewhere like the apex of a turn where they have to slow down and you'll be perpendicular to the side of the car (with enough distance that your camera rig doesn't get creamed).
Why? I'm not seeing the huge market for bundling there. Especially at the Laserjet level.
The number of morons waving their lasers indiscriminately at planes is much higher.
Really? We're talking about thousands of reports here. And if one did the math on the cross-sectional area of the airplane's windshield as observed from the ground...I mean, you'd have to have an army of trained, laser-wielding morons out there.
My question is, what other phenomena might be confused for lasers as seen by a pilot?
That “Defense Integrated Military Human Resource System” was a Northrop Grumman [wikipedia.org] project. If the name Northrop Grumman doesn't mean anything to you, you don't know jackshit about federal politics, or how things REALLY work. Northrop Grumman owns Congress.Tthey have facilities in virtually every state.
Eh.....not really. Or at least not them specifically. More like they are a partner with Lockheed, General Dynamics, Boeing, SAIC and Raytheon who can all say the same. And each of whom have similar failures on their resumes. And Congresscritters in their pockets.
That's why when people start talking about the Dems killing defense spending... Sure, they may say that in the whitehouse. But when it trickles down to the House level in particular, guess where all those high-tech defense jobs are? A whole lot of them in fairly blue areas including the Bay area, LA, Boston, and the DC area, among others.
I think this speaks more to how pathetic the leadership of a lot of US companies have become more than it does on Jobs.
Blame the large institutional shareholders who demand quarter-to-quarter accountability, as well as the litigious society that suffers preposterous shareholder lawsuits for having the audacity to manage with an eye beyond this quarter.
You forgot the part where the definition of someone in "poverty" now would enjoy a standard of living higher than probably 95% of the population from 100 years ago, when many of the machines didn't exist.
Besides, shouldn't you be busy smashing looms or something?
Anyone know who to update the submission?
Just re-submit the corrected story. That way when the dupe is inevitably posted by the (on) crack editorial staff, it'll all work out.
The youth of today are a bunch of whiny crybabies.
As opposed to their whiny hippie (grand)parents from 40-50 years ago?
We have a winner!!!!
Kind of like when you get your ass kicked in a bar fight, when you tell the story the guy was definitely a heavyweight boxer. Couldn't be you just got your ass whupped by a girl.
If a liberal like Jerry Brown won't support basic civil liberties, who the hell will?
No. Let's go after the half-starving clerks and retail workers, many of whom cannot even afford to go to a doctor, in the richest country on the history of the planet. Yeah. those are the real 'thieves'. arent they?
Are you suggesting they should get a free pass for theft? Seems a little ridiculous that one should augment one's income by stealing from patrons and then attempt to justify it.
The problem with many of the fat cats is, what they did is in many cases not illegal. Make it illegal first.
Yeah, I got about two paragraphs in and, expecting to read a description of the actual project, all I found was a bunch of 'look at me!!!'. Then, I realized that *was* the actual project. Distributed Narcissism. Yay.
Not to defend the asshole in this example, but the opposite extreme (espoused by you) won't be any better. Here's a question for you: under your model, who pays for pharmaceutical research and expensive FDA trials if the resulting drug can be manufactured by anyone for pennies on the dollar compared to the upfront investment?
It makes me a little sad to see a slashdot where so few people got that reference. And props to whoever greenlighted that - not in good taste, but funny as hell.
I will now go smear some hot grits on Natalie Portman.
So a company with the bargaining power of Amazon makes a new product, and can't get the price down $10 more?
I don't mean to be rude - but don't you think they were doing that already? That sounds like the Homer Simpson School of Management - "Could you make that cheaper?" Uh, OK...
Whether the estimates are accurate, I couldn't say.
Some have, some are too new. The 'talking about digital lock circumvention' part is a mixed bag - if they can make a case that you've done so in an actual contributory manner, then they have a case. But that sort of thing is case-by-case, to my knowledge. I'm not aware of conviction without courts. Also, there have been victories in terms of fair use vs. DRM.
The process tends to be slow and piecemeal, but bear in mind the DMCA isn't that old on the scale of the legal system. I think the track record of challenges to the DMCA in the courts has been pretty fair, I think.