You seem to be thinking that the sensors have some human level intelligence associated with them. The sensors merely indicated that there was an abnormal condition experienced by the equipment... an error condition as it were. That certainly you could say under certain conditions when comparing other senors and automotive conditions like vehicle speed and charge level history could be something of a concern, I would dare say this was an unusual enough situation that it is likely the conditions seen by this vehicle was even anticipated by the engineers designing the Model S.
That perhaps after the engineers are able to retrieve some of the vehicle data from these accidents and review what actually happened could put those sensor states into their warning system and put up a more urgent warning, I really think this is armchair quarterbacking and unrealistic in terms of expectations of Tesla Motors.
I've seen gas tanks on some pickup trucks that were mounted in the truck bed itself (especially for farm trucks which have some particularly large tanks), and I've owned a 4-door sedan that had the gasoline tank in the trunk part of the car (with only a piece of carpet between the tank and the cargo part of the trunk).
None the less, I agree with your general sentiment that most gasoline tanks are mounted on the bottom of the vehicle. They are usually squeezed into whatever space can be found to put them into, and sometimes can be quite irregularly shaped as well. More importantly, their location is usually not determined by safety considerations so much as simply finding a place which isn't needed for creature comforts (like legroom or cargo space). That implies the rear seat in most cars is literally resting upon the gasoline tank or has that tank immediately behind those seats.
The distinction of interstate highway speeds is a matter of the quality of the roadbed, surface material, average traffic density (which shows up in rural vs. urban highways), and some other well established industry standards to determine the freeways speeds. Most urban highways are usually at 65 mph because of the overall traffic density and the fact that access ramps occur more frequently (hence more things that a driver needs to watch for when traveling at higher speeds).
The Autobahn in Germany is built to a higher standard of roadbed and surface material, which is partly why you can drive at higher speeds in Germany than you can on comparable highways in America (where roadbeds are thinner in part to make highway construction cheaper). It also doesn't hurt that drivers in Germany are better trained than drivers in America (literally.... the licensing requirements alone to drive in Germany are much tougher than a comparable American driver's license exam and training program).
The 65 mph speed limit standard was something that used to be in federal code, but enough states rebelled (especially western states like Wyoming and Montana) that speed limits are now strictly a state highway department issue alone. There are federal standards based upon engineering tests and federal highway standards... including 50-state compacts that get around constitutional issues too so it gets to be a sort of mess on the legal side, but the federal level U.S. Department of Transportation no longer sets absolute speed limits like was done in the 1970's and 1980's.
I'm making a Zelda style 2d MMORPG called "Throne and Crown". Many of the art pieces I will be able to use in my game eventually. I sort of wish Congress would say there's a 10 year copyright law. That way, after 10 years, we could use the art assets, and 3d models of other games. Also it'd be pretty radical for the Internet to be a giant library. It'd be an awesome boost to education.
I'd be more than happy if copyright terms were simply returned to the 17 year + 17 year (for copyright renewal from those that bother) that was in the Copyright Act of 1790. 10 years of copyright is likely all that is needed, but you might make an argument that a few people might be more encouraged (hence the incentive) to make more stuff if they can continue earning money from it 17 years later.
I don't know anybody who is encouraged to publish stuff if their kids and grandkids might be making money off of their stuff 76 years after you are dead... yet current copyright treaties want to even further extend and expand copyright terms. The Steamboat Willie complex is alive and well.
I think you are getting hung up on the "living on the property" issue. While you may personally not need to live there, somebody does and that somebody needs to answer to the property owner in some way which is mutually agreeable (either as an employee or getting some benefit by living there and defending that property).
I have known some people who've tried to manage properties from afar without actually being physically present, and those properties usually turn out to be an utter disaster.... both in terms of literally falling apart from vandalism and tenants who don't give a damn about that property to having it confiscated due to a failure to pay taxes or even having neighbors encroach upon that property by doing subtle things like moving fences or simply "taking over" that property. Absentee landlords who don't live at their properties and also fail to have an on-site manager are practically the definition of tenement slum-lords. Some of those properties in some cities have even been flat out condemned and confiscated by the government as a part of a "redevelopment effort".
Ditto that for commercial properties. While there may not be a huge need for somebody to have a physical residence at the property in commercial and industrial areas, you pretty much need to have somebody at those properties who is responsible for their maintenance and upkeep on almost a daily basis (with perhaps a day or two off each week) that is monitoring what is going on. They need to be physically present or have an agent or manager to deal with those places. If you want to see a place become a ruin in a hurry, remove that daily maintenance and just watch what happens including homeless folks who enter into those businesses and turn it into their home... getting back to that squatter issue mentioned above. I can count hundreds of examples like this I've personally witnessed, including one commercial property that was abandoned for about ten years that when the new owner wanted to inspect the commercial property they needed a police escort simply for protection against the nearly 200 homeless people living in the building. I worked with that new owner and tried to help repair some of the damage done to that property.
I really think your example of rental properties is severely flawed. I agree that it is possible to loan (aka rent) some property to somebody else with a formal agreement, and it is also further true that a good tenant might even maintain a property with a minimal amount of effort on the part of the actual landlord.... but I dare you to show me an example of a property that is not physically occupied and in current use which also does not suffer from significant problems of loss of property rights in some fashion or another... especially squatters or even other individuals laying claim upon that property and confiscating it.
The enforcement of the Outer Space Treaty is simply the non-recognition of any extraterrestrial sovereignty claims. In other words, if China starts to build a mine on the Moon, Russia, the UK, or even the USA can assert the right to plunk a spacecraft down in the middle of that mine (after billions of Yuan have been dumped on clearing away lunar regolith to get down to bedrock for something useful) and put down their own mining equipment.
Perhaps China won't mind having a bunch of American wandering around their facilities.... but maybe they will care about that kind of thing too. There is precedence in that kind of thing in American diplomacy in the past like the Gulf of Tonkin incident as well as a similar incident in the Gulf of Sidra, where sovereignty claims by Vietnam and Libya respectively were flagrantly ignored even to the point of engaging in acts of war when they weren't "internationally recognized". I can definitely see something like that happening on the Moon simply to push that lack of recognition.
It really will be about the money ultimately though. Yes, not directly in the value that has been extracted already, but when resources and labor have been expended and claims have been made there is going to be a desire for people to protect their infrastructure. It also becomes a big deal for companies who want to make investments into infrastructure and other long term project to know that their efforts won't be in vain.
Heat dissipation isn't the only issue to worry about. Lithium batteries (of multiple chemistries) certainly don't last the same length of time that the batteries built for the Baker Electric automobiles were able to get away with. Heck, even after a century of usage those old Baker batteries can still be used with only a minor refurbishing of the connectors and making sure you fill up each cell with water before you decide to charge it up. I dare any Lithium battery manufacturer to make that claim.
I anticipate that this next generation of batteries might have 5x the charge density as the Lithium batteries, but will only have a lifetime of six months before they need to be replaced and have potentially other significant performance issues. Perhaps that is long enough for most people?
The old *nix "xv" image viewer still works if it's a static binary from 20 years ago. An ex-IBM guy I know mentioned some even older MSDOS game called "Alley Cat" that works on 32bit win7 (not sure about Win8).
MS-DOS games are run under a virtual environment that tries to mimic DOS and is what I call putting the computer into an historic mode of some sort. It is a "walled garden" where that software is not really running on the native hardware, and MS-DOS API calls as well as "standard" (as much as existed at the time) practices for I/O are intercepted and routed through the Windows drivers instead in a software sleight of hand. Yes, it works, but that software does not run natively within Windows 7. That virtual environment of course has limitations.
Furthermore, you can simply use VMware or something similar to create a virtual environment for most computers. I've seen Atari 2600 games (the original console made by Atari in the 1970's) run in Windows and even USB versions of the original game controllers if you want to go for authenticity.... and it even slows down the CPU cycles so the games play at "normal speed" of 1 MhZ CPU clock rate that they were designed for. I've also seen a VAX and PDP-11 emulator running on a PC, not that software written for those computers would even remotely be considered targeted for modern CPUs.
I stand by what I wrote above. Source code written for computers of 20 years ago will not work with the current generation of compilers without some significant tweaking and updating of the code. It won't be impossible and the core algorithms might even be worth hanging onto, but there still will be some major differences (likely with the I/O if anything). It will also look incredibly dated even if you get it to run.
That is a terrible example. Besides, if you want to do that in something like Visual BASIC it would be more like:
MsgBox("Hello, World!")
or something similar. Like I said, it would need to be seriously updated if you are going to be using current compilers. Indeed most versions of BASIC that I've seen that aren't historic compilers, hence have also been optimized to be running on the current generation of computers, don't even use the PRINT command.
As I said, it would need some substantial tweaking if you are using the current generation of compilers. If you are using compilers written that targeted the machines of 30 years ago, yes that might still work (again putting the computer into a historic backward compatible mode too). Then again, the argument in the GP post would also be rendered invalid because the compiler would be targeting that same kind of CPU architecture that he was criticizing the hand generated assembly was targeting.
As I said elsewhere in this general thread about MenuetOS, compilers and assemblers which targeted the 4004 CPU still work at the opcode level with the current generation of Intel (and compatible) chips as well as several other offshoots. That is hardly optimized for the current generation of CPUs though.
Great. US style capitalism screws up pretty much everything it touches these days, and now one of those who've benefited from that wants to use public resources to give him private property.
Typical.
What other kind of economic environment do you want to live in? One where I simply take everything from you at gunpoint and then dribble back barely enough for you to live from day to day as my slave?
Your proposal here is simply unworkable in terms of resource extraction. When you have a mining claim, you don't want to have some other stupid idiot jumping into your mine and working the same mining claim. That implies some sort of real estate property right that must be enforced as the mine will occupy a specific area of the land for occupation and extraction.
In terms of fishing, you don't need those strict kind of property rights as you can have multiple fishermen working the same general area and simply maintain a good working distance to avoid fouling the nets. Then again, there are regions of the world like George's Bank which have been the subject of major wars (in this case the war of 1812 between the USA and the UK was in part over this part of the ocean along with the related Grand Banks) and others are frequently the point of territorial disputes. In that sense even the maritime laws and precedence sort of throw that whole notion out the window that you can "peacefully" resolve disputes in extra-national areas without a sovereign government stepping in to negotiate issues involved.
Robert Bigelow has already plastered advertisements on the outside of his Genesis spacecraft that are orbiting the Earth. They are even technically visible from the ground with an unaided eye.... and has this AC ever bothered trying to look at those advertisements?
I don't think so. The sense of scale is definitely missing here, just as you've pointed out.
Some of the problem is dealing with situations like a mining operation that would require a claim to a sizable chunk of the Moon. You can treat things like a habitat or research station like you would a space station or spaceship (hence treating it like maritime laws and treaties), but dealing with disputed mining claims is entirely the realm of either a bunch of guns (hence the warlords like you are mentioning) or some sort of property title recording agency that has the backing of a sovereign entity.
Luckily, the Moon is about the same size as the entire continent of North America, so there is plenty of room there for multiple nations to co-exist peacefully if that is something you want to deal with. The area of Mars (which is really the next huge issue to deal with) is the same size as the land area of the whole of the Earth. Add in asteroids and other moons of other planets and you see there is room to expand out and have plenty of space to tell brats to stay off your front porch.
The real question in my mind is if these sovereign entities that will hold claim over stuff on the Moon and elsewhere in the Solar System should be indigenous to those areas being claimed (aka the government is established by and subject only to those who actually make the effort to go into space and live in those places) or if they should be treated as colonies of Earth-based governments. You (multimediavt) are seemingly against the idea of a colonial system of dependent governments sponsored by major governments here in the Earth. I also think that turning this over to the United Nations is a bad idea, so far as making the UN into a sovereign entity in its own right. That is just substituting one bad tyrant with one that could be much worse.
Then again, my own political philosophy is one where I think small independent governments with a minimal amount of overhead from anybody "over" those governments tends to make for a better system of living where you can "vote with your feet" when a small government like that gets tyrannical in ways you can't stand. Many of the problems we are facing on the Earth right now are due to large governments with far reaching powers which turn their citizens into slaves.
There is talk about renegotiating the Outer Space Treaty, which is the only real international agreement that stands in the way at the moment. There is an "exit clause" on that treaty where the chief executive of the signing country (in the USA it would be the President) could announce they are leaving the provisions of the treaty in a year and after that year has expired that country is no longer bound to the treaty.
As you say, that would be a diplomatic time bomb which could cause wars and other sorts of fun, so it is in the interests of everybody involved to try and come up with an alternate agreement or at least work out some sort of method for legal property rights recognition elsewhere besides the Earth. It wasn't done earlier because the Soviet government (the only other country besides America that really mattered when the Outer Space treaty was negotiated) didn't want to have any sort of property rights on the Moon or elsewhere, and the U.S. State Department didn't realize what they were negotiating away... or at least didn't care. Since those negotiators are now either retired or dead, it isn't their problem either.
The alternative to dealing with squatters and people who claim property that isn't legally theirs is to have a bunch of big bad ass folks (usually wearing uniforms and on occasion wielding various weapons from a simple rubber club to a nuclear warhead) that decide to enforce your property claims on your behalf.
The statement above is most certainly true, as if you don't defend your property, you lose your property. You can defend your property through proxies, but it most definitely requires constant and active defense to maintain property rights.
In fact, in the state I live in, if you pay property taxes on a piece of real estate for more than five years in a row without contested claims upon that property, it is legally considered your property regardless of any prior claims upon that property. Contested claims have a whole separate set of rules and it is fairly easy to drop a lien or register another legal dispute on any piece of property. Those disputes are also easily dismissed too without a valid claim and subject to barratry counter claims if done for spurious reasons, but the point is that it still takes active effort to maintain property even here on the Earth in most places.
Regardless, on the Moon there are treaties in place that prohibit government agencies from getting involved, hence the massive concern about private property rights, the chaos of squatters showing up that can only get tossed out by killing them, and the general lack of laws which would apply to those who are in space. Heck, as long as you figured out a way to get into space, as long as you don't have any citizenship claims upon you as a person, you are truly an "outlaw", meaning you are completely outside of the law and can neither claim protection under laws nor can any laws be enforced upon you. It would be a violation of these treaties for a government like the U.S. government to even send its military up into space to enforce any sort of law.
I would dare you to take a 20 year old program in any language and have it run successfully on any current computer without having to do some substantial tweaking or putting that computer into some sort of historical mode of operation. In most cases I would dare you to find the source code for that 20 year old software as well, as my experience in such situations is that binaries alone are what survives. Most examples I can think of also run on 20 year old hardware (or at least the basic hardware architecture is 20+ years old too).
Come to think of it, I was developing software in Windows 3.1.1 for Workgroups about 20 years ago. I actually do have some of that software sitting around on some very old CD-ROMs of that software too, and some fragments of the source code that I wrote too. Getting it to run is a real challenge, and the default installer program most certainly doesn't work as I've had to tweak things just to get it to work at all in Windows XP (I won't even try Windows 8).
Yeah, assuming that the compiler doesn't barf out with some of the compiler flags, exceptions, API library calls, or other various problems that would come from trying to recompile that old software, you would most certainly be able to get a modern compiler to be able to target the current generation of CPU architecture and do a better job as opposed to simply running those 20 year old binaries. It may be possible to recompile some of Linus Torvalds' original source code for the first version of Linux too, but just imagine the problems you would face trying to get that to actually run?
No doubt there are some standard libraries of code that are in core operating systems that have stood the test of time and work much better in current generations of compilers, but I dare say you are also comparing apples and oranges here too. In many cases, those libraries were in fact the test cases which the compilers were built around, so of course they would be able to keep compiling some of those older code examples. Regardless, all of those examples, inline assembly inserted into the middle of a C program, and other examples of older code would all have some significant and continued maintenance done over the past couple decades or it would be treated as abandonware and become a major engineering effort just to get it recompiled in the first place.
The other was to use "understandable" words that supposedly non-programmers could at least in theory be able to read. It is debatable if COBOL actually met those goals.
Common Business-Oriented Language
The goal was a program that could be read and audited by corporate accountants and integrated into systems and practices that in some cases dated back centuries.
It was also so non-programmer managers could at least pick up a piece of code and be able to read it with at least something resembling some understanding of what was being written. Having something like:
MULTIPLY SIX BY PI GIVING RESULT
is certainly much easier to read than
MOV 3.14159,C MOV 6,X MUL X,C MOV C,$0ADB
although the C equivalent of:
return 6 * PI
certainly seems even easier.
My point though is the design goals of high level languages has many primary goals, and the issues of compiler efficiency is very much secondary or even tertiary in terms of what it is supposed to be accomplishing. Often those goals are at substantial odds against producing efficient code in the first place, in terms of being executed quickly on the target CPU.
Yeah, outside a few rather narrow cases, modern CPUs have just gotten too complicated to write efficient assembly for.
That says more about lousy CPU architecture design with bloat and incredible inefficiencies than it says about software developers who can write software for those CPUs. Then again, look up the RISC vs. CISC debates about CPU design and you might be surprised about CPU complexity as well.
Otherwise, most of the CPU complexity that currently shows up is due to the fact that the CPU speed far outstrips the memory bus speed, thus all of the concern about "local" memory caches and pipelined instruction ordering. If you could create a much faster memory bus, CPU designs could be simplified considerably from a software developer POV.
Of course we are still living with the effects of the 4004 design architecture that lives on with the laptop I'm using right now (and is opcode compatible with the 4004 instruction set still capable of being used as a strict sub-set of the opcodes used by my laptop's CPU). That is another reason for much of the added complexity in CPU architecture design, as few if any CPU designers want to abandon the software developed for earlier generations of CPUs as a way to promote their new design. Instead, they tinker on the edges and keep piling new instructions onto the existing heap of instructions and keep making the CPU more and more complex as a new generation of designers is in charge.
If a compiler can't produce better assembly than any one programmer, it's time to get a new compiler.
I mean, that's pretty much the point of upper level languages to begin with.
Hardly.
The point of high level languages is to improve the productivity of software developers with the full knowledge and recognition that compilers will always do an inferior job... trading off efficiency and memory space for increased throughput of the developer.
That some compiler developers using some languages (notably C) can usually produce software that is within a few single digit percentages of the efficiency of a hand crafted assembly code written by competent and knowledgeable programmers well versed in those respective languages (an important distinction.... you need to compare expert C programmers with expert assembly programmers) for a few benchmark algorithms is besides the point.
Grace Hopper, one of the developers of COBOL, created the programming language for some very different goals than what you mention. Portability (the ability to move from one CPU architecture/operating system to another) was a key component and rationale. The other was to use "understandable" words that supposedly non-programmers could at least in theory be able to read. It is debatable if COBOL actually met those goals. Another very significant goal is to increase the volume of software produced by the individual software developer (mentioned above), and perhaps finally the point of a high level language is to reduce the learning curve for somebody new to computers and software development to be able to become the expert that is needed to get software developed.
I would agree that some compilers need to be tossed out the window in terms of their code efficiency, but you might be surprised at which compilers really can make the cut or not as well.
As a driver you are liable for anything that falls off your vehicle or becomes detached in any way.
At least in the U.S., the case law disagrees with you.
I would be curious about what law it is that says that? If your rear bumper falls off your car, you mean to tell me that you are not liable for any damage that bumper causes to my car that is falling behind?
A good example is how freight haulers of bulk materials like gravel used in construction are liable for any chipped windows caused by even small rocks that fall out of that truck. That often they "get away" with having stuff fall out of those kind of trucks, but if you can document when and where you were at when that rock hit your windshield, most construction companies will simply pay for the new window with almost no other questions asked. If you file a small claims action, most judges will put the presumption of guilt on the construction company where they will be required to show that they had no trucks on the road at the time and place being claimed in the lawsuit.
I highly doubt you can find either statutory nor case common law that would suggest a lack of liability on the part of the operator of that vehicle and indeed plenty of both that would claim otherwise. Of course it varies a bit from state to state, but most states do require you to perform routine safety checks of your vehicle before you start to operate that vehicle, and to additional maintain all loads and items within the vehicle.
The one really useful "new" language that I've seen this past decade has been Scratch, something that I think could be turned into a production language (as opposed to the tutorial language that MIT uses it for). There have been some attempts to do just that by some other 3rd party developers, but it certainly isn't widespread and they largely take clues from what MIT is doing with the base language.
The GUI development environment is definitely useful, and I like how Scratch does multi-threaded applications like breathing air... it really is built into the language in a very basic and fundamental way. That in particular is something which should be leveraged more.
Beyond that, I would agree that most of the new languages I've looked at seem to be a rehash of C in some fashion with a few variations that either try to remove semicolons or do some other interesting things but still are just variants on the same general syntax philosophy. I'm an old Delphi programmer that has been sort of left behind as that programming community has shrunk to just a few diehard fans and I haven't really found anything to replace that kind of programming environment of hand-crafted gems that could do just about anything you wanted including rewriting base classes in the compiler (assuming that was something you felt necessary for that particular project).
So, obviously, in your car you bungee-cord the floor of the trunk to the lid on the off chance that the floor would decide to give way and drop out of the car? Did you even fucking read what you comment on?!
If the car is a falling apart rust-bucket where there might be a concern? You had better believe that you need to use a bungee cord, twine, or weld the damn thing shut. As a driver you are liable for anything that falls off your vehicle or becomes detached in any way. It doesn't matter if you are a private citizen or a commercial driver, although commercial drivers tend to get nailed more often for stuff like that.
Ideally you should do a "walk around" before you start to drive just to make sure you vehicle is safe for operation. Just don't get caught for automotive manslaughter if you are really being a prick.
Are you sure it is a hitch receiver? I keep seeing all kinds of crap like that in various blogs and on the tesla forum, and likely it was a hitch receiver, but I really don't know. You are talking out of your ass here as much as you claim other are doing, and the only published accounts I'm seeing claim it was a hitch itself, so who am I to question what that might be instead?
I was just saying that a huge hunk of irregularly shaped metal (it wasn't a clean bar or a sphere) would sure do some damage. What the hell does it matter what that piece of metal really was? It was a big ass thing that this car hit at freeway speeds that ripped a huge hunk of stuff out of the bottom of the car. It sure would do some damage like say yank out the drive line (I've had my drive line fall out on me before when I was driving and it ain't pretty) or something else equally bad.
Where is the emergency in dialing 911 for road debris? I suppose I could dial directory assistance and call the business line for the local police agency (assuming I even know what jurisdiction I am in) and try to resolve the issue that way, and I guess that would be the logical thing to do.
Then again, if there is a huge hunk of metal sitting on a highway that urgently needs to be removed, like say this particular 30 lb. or 50 lb. tow hitch mentioned in the OP or saying "dispatch, I just dropped my car's jack on the highway", that indeed would be an emergency to get a police officer to turn on his lights, throw up some orange cones, and spend the freaking 2-5 minutes that might just save somebody's life. Are you really sure that isn't considered an urgent emergency on a freeway? I'm sure most police officers wouldn't mind a little bit of prevention rather than spending the next couple of hours responding to somebody's severe injury or death.
Slashdot Mirror
You seem to be thinking that the sensors have some human level intelligence associated with them. The sensors merely indicated that there was an abnormal condition experienced by the equipment... an error condition as it were. That certainly you could say under certain conditions when comparing other senors and automotive conditions like vehicle speed and charge level history could be something of a concern, I would dare say this was an unusual enough situation that it is likely the conditions seen by this vehicle was even anticipated by the engineers designing the Model S.
That perhaps after the engineers are able to retrieve some of the vehicle data from these accidents and review what actually happened could put those sensor states into their warning system and put up a more urgent warning, I really think this is armchair quarterbacking and unrealistic in terms of expectations of Tesla Motors.
I've seen gas tanks on some pickup trucks that were mounted in the truck bed itself (especially for farm trucks which have some particularly large tanks), and I've owned a 4-door sedan that had the gasoline tank in the trunk part of the car (with only a piece of carpet between the tank and the cargo part of the trunk).
None the less, I agree with your general sentiment that most gasoline tanks are mounted on the bottom of the vehicle. They are usually squeezed into whatever space can be found to put them into, and sometimes can be quite irregularly shaped as well. More importantly, their location is usually not determined by safety considerations so much as simply finding a place which isn't needed for creature comforts (like legroom or cargo space). That implies the rear seat in most cars is literally resting upon the gasoline tank or has that tank immediately behind those seats.
The distinction of interstate highway speeds is a matter of the quality of the roadbed, surface material, average traffic density (which shows up in rural vs. urban highways), and some other well established industry standards to determine the freeways speeds. Most urban highways are usually at 65 mph because of the overall traffic density and the fact that access ramps occur more frequently (hence more things that a driver needs to watch for when traveling at higher speeds).
The Autobahn in Germany is built to a higher standard of roadbed and surface material, which is partly why you can drive at higher speeds in Germany than you can on comparable highways in America (where roadbeds are thinner in part to make highway construction cheaper). It also doesn't hurt that drivers in Germany are better trained than drivers in America (literally.... the licensing requirements alone to drive in Germany are much tougher than a comparable American driver's license exam and training program).
The 65 mph speed limit standard was something that used to be in federal code, but enough states rebelled (especially western states like Wyoming and Montana) that speed limits are now strictly a state highway department issue alone. There are federal standards based upon engineering tests and federal highway standards... including 50-state compacts that get around constitutional issues too so it gets to be a sort of mess on the legal side, but the federal level U.S. Department of Transportation no longer sets absolute speed limits like was done in the 1970's and 1980's.
I'm making a Zelda style 2d MMORPG called "Throne and Crown". Many of the art pieces I will be able to use in my game eventually. I sort of wish Congress would say there's a 10 year copyright law. That way, after 10 years, we could use the art assets, and 3d models of other games. Also it'd be pretty radical for the Internet to be a giant library. It'd be an awesome boost to education.
I'd be more than happy if copyright terms were simply returned to the 17 year + 17 year (for copyright renewal from those that bother) that was in the Copyright Act of 1790. 10 years of copyright is likely all that is needed, but you might make an argument that a few people might be more encouraged (hence the incentive) to make more stuff if they can continue earning money from it 17 years later.
I don't know anybody who is encouraged to publish stuff if their kids and grandkids might be making money off of their stuff 76 years after you are dead... yet current copyright treaties want to even further extend and expand copyright terms. The Steamboat Willie complex is alive and well.
I think you are getting hung up on the "living on the property" issue. While you may personally not need to live there, somebody does and that somebody needs to answer to the property owner in some way which is mutually agreeable (either as an employee or getting some benefit by living there and defending that property).
I have known some people who've tried to manage properties from afar without actually being physically present, and those properties usually turn out to be an utter disaster.... both in terms of literally falling apart from vandalism and tenants who don't give a damn about that property to having it confiscated due to a failure to pay taxes or even having neighbors encroach upon that property by doing subtle things like moving fences or simply "taking over" that property. Absentee landlords who don't live at their properties and also fail to have an on-site manager are practically the definition of tenement slum-lords. Some of those properties in some cities have even been flat out condemned and confiscated by the government as a part of a "redevelopment effort".
Ditto that for commercial properties. While there may not be a huge need for somebody to have a physical residence at the property in commercial and industrial areas, you pretty much need to have somebody at those properties who is responsible for their maintenance and upkeep on almost a daily basis (with perhaps a day or two off each week) that is monitoring what is going on. They need to be physically present or have an agent or manager to deal with those places. If you want to see a place become a ruin in a hurry, remove that daily maintenance and just watch what happens including homeless folks who enter into those businesses and turn it into their home... getting back to that squatter issue mentioned above. I can count hundreds of examples like this I've personally witnessed, including one commercial property that was abandoned for about ten years that when the new owner wanted to inspect the commercial property they needed a police escort simply for protection against the nearly 200 homeless people living in the building. I worked with that new owner and tried to help repair some of the damage done to that property.
I really think your example of rental properties is severely flawed. I agree that it is possible to loan (aka rent) some property to somebody else with a formal agreement, and it is also further true that a good tenant might even maintain a property with a minimal amount of effort on the part of the actual landlord.... but I dare you to show me an example of a property that is not physically occupied and in current use which also does not suffer from significant problems of loss of property rights in some fashion or another... especially squatters or even other individuals laying claim upon that property and confiscating it.
I read it as an assertion that this was an example of that kind of behavior.
You have a very warped view of America to think everybody in America or where American armies are at are just a bunch of enslaved peasants.
The enforcement of the Outer Space Treaty is simply the non-recognition of any extraterrestrial sovereignty claims. In other words, if China starts to build a mine on the Moon, Russia, the UK, or even the USA can assert the right to plunk a spacecraft down in the middle of that mine (after billions of Yuan have been dumped on clearing away lunar regolith to get down to bedrock for something useful) and put down their own mining equipment.
Perhaps China won't mind having a bunch of American wandering around their facilities.... but maybe they will care about that kind of thing too. There is precedence in that kind of thing in American diplomacy in the past like the Gulf of Tonkin incident as well as a similar incident in the Gulf of Sidra, where sovereignty claims by Vietnam and Libya respectively were flagrantly ignored even to the point of engaging in acts of war when they weren't "internationally recognized". I can definitely see something like that happening on the Moon simply to push that lack of recognition.
It really will be about the money ultimately though. Yes, not directly in the value that has been extracted already, but when resources and labor have been expended and claims have been made there is going to be a desire for people to protect their infrastructure. It also becomes a big deal for companies who want to make investments into infrastructure and other long term project to know that their efforts won't be in vain.
Heat dissipation isn't the only issue to worry about. Lithium batteries (of multiple chemistries) certainly don't last the same length of time that the batteries built for the Baker Electric automobiles were able to get away with. Heck, even after a century of usage those old Baker batteries can still be used with only a minor refurbishing of the connectors and making sure you fill up each cell with water before you decide to charge it up. I dare any Lithium battery manufacturer to make that claim.
I anticipate that this next generation of batteries might have 5x the charge density as the Lithium batteries, but will only have a lifetime of six months before they need to be replaced and have potentially other significant performance issues. Perhaps that is long enough for most people?
The old *nix "xv" image viewer still works if it's a static binary from 20 years ago. An ex-IBM guy I know mentioned some even older MSDOS game called "Alley Cat" that works on 32bit win7 (not sure about Win8).
MS-DOS games are run under a virtual environment that tries to mimic DOS and is what I call putting the computer into an historic mode of some sort. It is a "walled garden" where that software is not really running on the native hardware, and MS-DOS API calls as well as "standard" (as much as existed at the time) practices for I/O are intercepted and routed through the Windows drivers instead in a software sleight of hand. Yes, it works, but that software does not run natively within Windows 7. That virtual environment of course has limitations.
Furthermore, you can simply use VMware or something similar to create a virtual environment for most computers. I've seen Atari 2600 games (the original console made by Atari in the 1970's) run in Windows and even USB versions of the original game controllers if you want to go for authenticity.... and it even slows down the CPU cycles so the games play at "normal speed" of 1 MhZ CPU clock rate that they were designed for. I've also seen a VAX and PDP-11 emulator running on a PC, not that software written for those computers would even remotely be considered targeted for modern CPUs.
I stand by what I wrote above. Source code written for computers of 20 years ago will not work with the current generation of compilers without some significant tweaking and updating of the code. It won't be impossible and the core algorithms might even be worth hanging onto, but there still will be some major differences (likely with the I/O if anything). It will also look incredibly dated even if you get it to run.
That is a terrible example. Besides, if you want to do that in something like Visual BASIC it would be more like:
MsgBox("Hello, World!")
or something similar. Like I said, it would need to be seriously updated if you are going to be using current compilers. Indeed most versions of BASIC that I've seen that aren't historic compilers, hence have also been optimized to be running on the current generation of computers, don't even use the PRINT command.
As I said, it would need some substantial tweaking if you are using the current generation of compilers. If you are using compilers written that targeted the machines of 30 years ago, yes that might still work (again putting the computer into a historic backward compatible mode too). Then again, the argument in the GP post would also be rendered invalid because the compiler would be targeting that same kind of CPU architecture that he was criticizing the hand generated assembly was targeting.
As I said elsewhere in this general thread about MenuetOS, compilers and assemblers which targeted the 4004 CPU still work at the opcode level with the current generation of Intel (and compatible) chips as well as several other offshoots. That is hardly optimized for the current generation of CPUs though.
Great. US style capitalism screws up pretty much everything it touches these days, and now one of those who've benefited from that wants to use public resources to give him private property.
Typical.
What other kind of economic environment do you want to live in? One where I simply take everything from you at gunpoint and then dribble back barely enough for you to live from day to day as my slave?
Your proposal here is simply unworkable in terms of resource extraction. When you have a mining claim, you don't want to have some other stupid idiot jumping into your mine and working the same mining claim. That implies some sort of real estate property right that must be enforced as the mine will occupy a specific area of the land for occupation and extraction.
In terms of fishing, you don't need those strict kind of property rights as you can have multiple fishermen working the same general area and simply maintain a good working distance to avoid fouling the nets. Then again, there are regions of the world like George's Bank which have been the subject of major wars (in this case the war of 1812 between the USA and the UK was in part over this part of the ocean along with the related Grand Banks) and others are frequently the point of territorial disputes. In that sense even the maritime laws and precedence sort of throw that whole notion out the window that you can "peacefully" resolve disputes in extra-national areas without a sovereign government stepping in to negotiate issues involved.
Robert Bigelow has already plastered advertisements on the outside of his Genesis spacecraft that are orbiting the Earth. They are even technically visible from the ground with an unaided eye.... and has this AC ever bothered trying to look at those advertisements?
I don't think so. The sense of scale is definitely missing here, just as you've pointed out.
Some of the problem is dealing with situations like a mining operation that would require a claim to a sizable chunk of the Moon. You can treat things like a habitat or research station like you would a space station or spaceship (hence treating it like maritime laws and treaties), but dealing with disputed mining claims is entirely the realm of either a bunch of guns (hence the warlords like you are mentioning) or some sort of property title recording agency that has the backing of a sovereign entity.
Luckily, the Moon is about the same size as the entire continent of North America, so there is plenty of room there for multiple nations to co-exist peacefully if that is something you want to deal with. The area of Mars (which is really the next huge issue to deal with) is the same size as the land area of the whole of the Earth. Add in asteroids and other moons of other planets and you see there is room to expand out and have plenty of space to tell brats to stay off your front porch.
The real question in my mind is if these sovereign entities that will hold claim over stuff on the Moon and elsewhere in the Solar System should be indigenous to those areas being claimed (aka the government is established by and subject only to those who actually make the effort to go into space and live in those places) or if they should be treated as colonies of Earth-based governments. You (multimediavt) are seemingly against the idea of a colonial system of dependent governments sponsored by major governments here in the Earth. I also think that turning this over to the United Nations is a bad idea, so far as making the UN into a sovereign entity in its own right. That is just substituting one bad tyrant with one that could be much worse.
Then again, my own political philosophy is one where I think small independent governments with a minimal amount of overhead from anybody "over" those governments tends to make for a better system of living where you can "vote with your feet" when a small government like that gets tyrannical in ways you can't stand. Many of the problems we are facing on the Earth right now are due to large governments with far reaching powers which turn their citizens into slaves.
There is talk about renegotiating the Outer Space Treaty, which is the only real international agreement that stands in the way at the moment. There is an "exit clause" on that treaty where the chief executive of the signing country (in the USA it would be the President) could announce they are leaving the provisions of the treaty in a year and after that year has expired that country is no longer bound to the treaty.
As you say, that would be a diplomatic time bomb which could cause wars and other sorts of fun, so it is in the interests of everybody involved to try and come up with an alternate agreement or at least work out some sort of method for legal property rights recognition elsewhere besides the Earth. It wasn't done earlier because the Soviet government (the only other country besides America that really mattered when the Outer Space treaty was negotiated) didn't want to have any sort of property rights on the Moon or elsewhere, and the U.S. State Department didn't realize what they were negotiating away... or at least didn't care. Since those negotiators are now either retired or dead, it isn't their problem either.
The alternative to dealing with squatters and people who claim property that isn't legally theirs is to have a bunch of big bad ass folks (usually wearing uniforms and on occasion wielding various weapons from a simple rubber club to a nuclear warhead) that decide to enforce your property claims on your behalf.
The statement above is most certainly true, as if you don't defend your property, you lose your property. You can defend your property through proxies, but it most definitely requires constant and active defense to maintain property rights.
In fact, in the state I live in, if you pay property taxes on a piece of real estate for more than five years in a row without contested claims upon that property, it is legally considered your property regardless of any prior claims upon that property. Contested claims have a whole separate set of rules and it is fairly easy to drop a lien or register another legal dispute on any piece of property. Those disputes are also easily dismissed too without a valid claim and subject to barratry counter claims if done for spurious reasons, but the point is that it still takes active effort to maintain property even here on the Earth in most places.
Regardless, on the Moon there are treaties in place that prohibit government agencies from getting involved, hence the massive concern about private property rights, the chaos of squatters showing up that can only get tossed out by killing them, and the general lack of laws which would apply to those who are in space. Heck, as long as you figured out a way to get into space, as long as you don't have any citizenship claims upon you as a person, you are truly an "outlaw", meaning you are completely outside of the law and can neither claim protection under laws nor can any laws be enforced upon you. It would be a violation of these treaties for a government like the U.S. government to even send its military up into space to enforce any sort of law.
It really is a silly situation at the moment.
I would dare you to take a 20 year old program in any language and have it run successfully on any current computer without having to do some substantial tweaking or putting that computer into some sort of historical mode of operation. In most cases I would dare you to find the source code for that 20 year old software as well, as my experience in such situations is that binaries alone are what survives. Most examples I can think of also run on 20 year old hardware (or at least the basic hardware architecture is 20+ years old too).
Come to think of it, I was developing software in Windows 3.1.1 for Workgroups about 20 years ago. I actually do have some of that software sitting around on some very old CD-ROMs of that software too, and some fragments of the source code that I wrote too. Getting it to run is a real challenge, and the default installer program most certainly doesn't work as I've had to tweak things just to get it to work at all in Windows XP (I won't even try Windows 8).
Yeah, assuming that the compiler doesn't barf out with some of the compiler flags, exceptions, API library calls, or other various problems that would come from trying to recompile that old software, you would most certainly be able to get a modern compiler to be able to target the current generation of CPU architecture and do a better job as opposed to simply running those 20 year old binaries. It may be possible to recompile some of Linus Torvalds' original source code for the first version of Linux too, but just imagine the problems you would face trying to get that to actually run?
No doubt there are some standard libraries of code that are in core operating systems that have stood the test of time and work much better in current generations of compilers, but I dare say you are also comparing apples and oranges here too. In many cases, those libraries were in fact the test cases which the compilers were built around, so of course they would be able to keep compiling some of those older code examples. Regardless, all of those examples, inline assembly inserted into the middle of a C program, and other examples of older code would all have some significant and continued maintenance done over the past couple decades or it would be treated as abandonware and become a major engineering effort just to get it recompiled in the first place.
The other was to use "understandable" words that supposedly non-programmers could at least in theory be able to read. It is debatable if COBOL actually met those goals.
Common Business-Oriented Language
The goal was a program that could be read and audited by corporate accountants and integrated into systems and practices that in some cases dated back centuries.
It was also so non-programmer managers could at least pick up a piece of code and be able to read it with at least something resembling some understanding of what was being written. Having something like:
MULTIPLY SIX BY PI GIVING RESULT
is certainly much easier to read than
MOV 3.14159,C
MOV 6,X
MUL X,C
MOV C,$0ADB
although the C equivalent of:
return 6 * PI
certainly seems even easier.
My point though is the design goals of high level languages has many primary goals, and the issues of compiler efficiency is very much secondary or even tertiary in terms of what it is supposed to be accomplishing. Often those goals are at substantial odds against producing efficient code in the first place, in terms of being executed quickly on the target CPU.
Yeah, outside a few rather narrow cases, modern CPUs have just gotten too complicated to write efficient assembly for.
That says more about lousy CPU architecture design with bloat and incredible inefficiencies than it says about software developers who can write software for those CPUs. Then again, look up the RISC vs. CISC debates about CPU design and you might be surprised about CPU complexity as well.
Otherwise, most of the CPU complexity that currently shows up is due to the fact that the CPU speed far outstrips the memory bus speed, thus all of the concern about "local" memory caches and pipelined instruction ordering. If you could create a much faster memory bus, CPU designs could be simplified considerably from a software developer POV.
Of course we are still living with the effects of the 4004 design architecture that lives on with the laptop I'm using right now (and is opcode compatible with the 4004 instruction set still capable of being used as a strict sub-set of the opcodes used by my laptop's CPU). That is another reason for much of the added complexity in CPU architecture design, as few if any CPU designers want to abandon the software developed for earlier generations of CPUs as a way to promote their new design. Instead, they tinker on the edges and keep piling new instructions onto the existing heap of instructions and keep making the CPU more and more complex as a new generation of designers is in charge.
If a compiler can't produce better assembly than any one programmer, it's time to get a new compiler.
I mean, that's pretty much the point of upper level languages to begin with.
Hardly.
The point of high level languages is to improve the productivity of software developers with the full knowledge and recognition that compilers will always do an inferior job... trading off efficiency and memory space for increased throughput of the developer.
That some compiler developers using some languages (notably C) can usually produce software that is within a few single digit percentages of the efficiency of a hand crafted assembly code written by competent and knowledgeable programmers well versed in those respective languages (an important distinction.... you need to compare expert C programmers with expert assembly programmers) for a few benchmark algorithms is besides the point.
Grace Hopper, one of the developers of COBOL, created the programming language for some very different goals than what you mention. Portability (the ability to move from one CPU architecture/operating system to another) was a key component and rationale. The other was to use "understandable" words that supposedly non-programmers could at least in theory be able to read. It is debatable if COBOL actually met those goals. Another very significant goal is to increase the volume of software produced by the individual software developer (mentioned above), and perhaps finally the point of a high level language is to reduce the learning curve for somebody new to computers and software development to be able to become the expert that is needed to get software developed.
I would agree that some compilers need to be tossed out the window in terms of their code efficiency, but you might be surprised at which compilers really can make the cut or not as well.
As a driver you are liable for anything that falls off your vehicle or becomes detached in any way.
At least in the U.S., the case law disagrees with you.
I would be curious about what law it is that says that? If your rear bumper falls off your car, you mean to tell me that you are not liable for any damage that bumper causes to my car that is falling behind?
A good example is how freight haulers of bulk materials like gravel used in construction are liable for any chipped windows caused by even small rocks that fall out of that truck. That often they "get away" with having stuff fall out of those kind of trucks, but if you can document when and where you were at when that rock hit your windshield, most construction companies will simply pay for the new window with almost no other questions asked. If you file a small claims action, most judges will put the presumption of guilt on the construction company where they will be required to show that they had no trucks on the road at the time and place being claimed in the lawsuit.
I highly doubt you can find either statutory nor case common law that would suggest a lack of liability on the part of the operator of that vehicle and indeed plenty of both that would claim otherwise. Of course it varies a bit from state to state, but most states do require you to perform routine safety checks of your vehicle before you start to operate that vehicle, and to additional maintain all loads and items within the vehicle.
The one really useful "new" language that I've seen this past decade has been Scratch, something that I think could be turned into a production language (as opposed to the tutorial language that MIT uses it for). There have been some attempts to do just that by some other 3rd party developers, but it certainly isn't widespread and they largely take clues from what MIT is doing with the base language.
The GUI development environment is definitely useful, and I like how Scratch does multi-threaded applications like breathing air... it really is built into the language in a very basic and fundamental way. That in particular is something which should be leveraged more.
Beyond that, I would agree that most of the new languages I've looked at seem to be a rehash of C in some fashion with a few variations that either try to remove semicolons or do some other interesting things but still are just variants on the same general syntax philosophy. I'm an old Delphi programmer that has been sort of left behind as that programming community has shrunk to just a few diehard fans and I haven't really found anything to replace that kind of programming environment of hand-crafted gems that could do just about anything you wanted including rewriting base classes in the compiler (assuming that was something you felt necessary for that particular project).
So, obviously, in your car you bungee-cord the floor of the trunk to the lid on the off chance that the floor would decide to give way and drop out of the car? Did you even fucking read what you comment on?!
If the car is a falling apart rust-bucket where there might be a concern? You had better believe that you need to use a bungee cord, twine, or weld the damn thing shut. As a driver you are liable for anything that falls off your vehicle or becomes detached in any way. It doesn't matter if you are a private citizen or a commercial driver, although commercial drivers tend to get nailed more often for stuff like that.
Ideally you should do a "walk around" before you start to drive just to make sure you vehicle is safe for operation. Just don't get caught for automotive manslaughter if you are really being a prick.
Are you sure it is a hitch receiver? I keep seeing all kinds of crap like that in various blogs and on the tesla forum, and likely it was a hitch receiver, but I really don't know. You are talking out of your ass here as much as you claim other are doing, and the only published accounts I'm seeing claim it was a hitch itself, so who am I to question what that might be instead?
I was just saying that a huge hunk of irregularly shaped metal (it wasn't a clean bar or a sphere) would sure do some damage. What the hell does it matter what that piece of metal really was? It was a big ass thing that this car hit at freeway speeds that ripped a huge hunk of stuff out of the bottom of the car. It sure would do some damage like say yank out the drive line (I've had my drive line fall out on me before when I was driving and it ain't pretty) or something else equally bad.
Where is the emergency in dialing 911 for road debris? I suppose I could dial directory assistance and call the business line for the local police agency (assuming I even know what jurisdiction I am in) and try to resolve the issue that way, and I guess that would be the logical thing to do.
Then again, if there is a huge hunk of metal sitting on a highway that urgently needs to be removed, like say this particular 30 lb. or 50 lb. tow hitch mentioned in the OP or saying "dispatch, I just dropped my car's jack on the highway", that indeed would be an emergency to get a police officer to turn on his lights, throw up some orange cones, and spend the freaking 2-5 minutes that might just save somebody's life. Are you really sure that isn't considered an urgent emergency on a freeway? I'm sure most police officers wouldn't mind a little bit of prevention rather than spending the next couple of hours responding to somebody's severe injury or death.
Geez, what do you think?