Is there no better use for research funding than to study the self-evident and report the obvious?
There might be some use in this if it led to an accurate predictive formula for preemptive intervention, but I see nothing about that in TFA or the summary.
Or would simply applying CDC vectoring tools to the data be too obvious too?
We will never have an idiocracy until we run out of clever oligarchs to manipulate the idiots. The prevailing nomenklatura wins out over the prols every time.
You're likely to see a rush of returns and exchanges, for an anything-but-this-thing alternative. Which, of course, will not against total Win8 sales/installs for marketing fodder. Such is the Windows Experience.
Hopefully without provoking the usual anti-SOE trollfest, I would be thrilled to see EQ2 run natively on a Linux box, without the necessity of VM lag/overhead.
As an EE who designs and implements industrial controls for a living, I'm quite aware of the role software plays in physical implementations.
My point is that practical engineers need a larger helping of physics in their lunchboxes on a daily basis than pure programmers, hence the usual course of study in E-schools.
Controls design requires a sound background in both, though. This is why none of my factories have burned down and my robots have yet to kill or maim their operators.
Apparently you've never worked in a large American manufacturing plant. Lives and limbs are on the line every minute, and the engineers are usually unlicensed. We do manage to muddle through, though, thanks to a rigorous education.
Please don't pretend to understand the nuances of what ME's and the other practical engineering disciplines do and why we need to know what we're taught to do it.
Your lines of code are physically exactly like every other line of code. They do not have things like mass, heat, flow, friction, stress, wear, corrosion, and a dozen other things that gears and hinges have.
With rare exceptions (usually in aerospace research), when a CS or software guru makes a mistake, things don't blow up and hurt people. Hard-science engineers are educated for a reason. Diligence is not optional.
The thread is about CS vs SE. Practical engineers work in a different environment entirely, and are not applicable to the current thread.
Organizations that use SCADA and/or distributed controls, typically the manufacturing and raw materials sectors but also public utilities, very seldom maintain complete on-site in-house support for said systems or their industrial sub-components (proprietary machine programs, frequently written in Step 7 or ControlLogix but locked down by the machine vendor). Neither are most maintenance budgets able to afford frequent on-site vendor visits.
That means off-site tech support, and therefore internet access.
Air walls only work when you have an unlimited budget, a perfect system, or adequate full-time on-site support. I think I saw one of those in a movie once.
In other words, "Software businesses should continue to pay people like me princely salaries year after year to litigate absurd claims, instead of being able to invest that money in research."
It's not just the patent system that's broken. Software patent law is nothing more than binary ambulance chasing.
Indeed, the only way classical conservatives in the GOP (e.g. the sainted WFB) will be able to focus on the message of sound fiscal management and individual responsibility is for them to swallow the medicine and distance themselves from the bible-thumping Tea Party types.
Instead of pandering to the trailer-park faction and forcing principled conservatives to go along out of necessity, it should be the other way around.
The alternative is for more and more defection to the Libertarian Party and formation of a religious fundamentalist rump of a GOP.
I'm as big a Tesla fan as anyone, but I'm also a practical electrical engineer.
Someone above already raised the end-point billing issue the utilco's will have, so we needn't bother with the bean-counter side of things. MBA's, rest easy. Your obscene profits are safe.
However, going from a theoretical ability to blast x amount of joules across an air gap to capturing a useful fraction of x without frying the adjacent wildlife and neighbors is quite another thing. As TFA points out, they seem impressed with a 10% capture rate, which to an engineer means a 90% loss of efficiency.
There is also this unpleasant fact of biophysics: sufficiently strong electro-magnetic fields, regardless of frequency, are inevitably fatal. The required grounding, shielding, etc. would be so outrageously expensive that the cost of copper wires pales.
Some science fiction does eventually become science fact. However, Thermodynamics, biochemistry, and basic engineering discipline relegate most of it to forever remaining fiction. Sorry, no Nobel Prizes here.
The character in Henry VI, not what you first thought (you insensitive clod!), was spot-on. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
As long as 99% of all American politicians are lawyers, and lawyers can make money from patent law, there will never be meaningful patent reform. Until enough of a voting block decides that attorneys make poor statesmen as a class and throws the lot of them out of office in favor of truly populist, honest representatives, we're stuck with what we've got.
Patent law, civil torts, and personal injury are all areas where the Rule of Law has been perverted into the Rule of Lawyers.
Nothing short of an electoral or economic revolution can rectify the problem.
Any odds-making experts care to venture an estimate on that happening?
Is./ different from the free-wheeling "I had a beer with Linus yesterday" days? Of course. Slashdot has evolved. Everything evolves.
Whatever your subjective view of what/. is now, there is no harm in recalling, and appreciating the creators of, the "good old days".
As several of the authors in TFA said,./ is what the users make it. It's up to us to add the energy and flavor we want, not the editors. Don't like the article selections? Submit some.
Personally, I'm a lot more interested in pure geekspeak than business, law, or politics, but that's just me. It is, after all, a community.
Those of us who were around as scientists, engineers, and programmers back in the 1980's and '90's committed a collective epic fail of foresight when we didn't insist on "privacy by design" standards from the outset. In our headlong rush to connectivity and interoperability, we built systems that were ripe for commercial, governmental, and criminal data mining, and did not effectively campaign for legal safeguards or adequately forewarn the general public. We were, in our heady world of fast-paced progress and self-congratulation, irresponsible. Yes, we had our heroes trying to sound a warning, but they were too few and went unheeded. The rest of us just let it happen.
The cow has long been out of the proverbial barn. The best we can hope for is to corral the cow to some extent, and warn people about wild cows.
We as professionals owe a duty to the public to scream from the hilltops at every opportunity that There is no privacy on the internet! of any real sort, and make it clear that it is both naive and utopian to expect any. The power of money and government, and the avarice of criminals, have made it so and there can be no going back.
The analogy I use is that of walking out one's front door. You are in clear sight. Do not open your wallet if you want no one to see what's in it. Do not speak publicly if you desire confidentiality. You are in public every time you access the internet as much as every time you step out to the pub. Act accordingly.
New laws are indeed too late. There is no legal time machine to roll back what has already been done.
No, the taxes cover the government services that one requires to make use of their property. Things like roads and storm sewers. Police and fire protection. Not to mention the costs associated with ensuring that nobody steals your land from you.
Contrary to popular belief all that isn't free, somebody has to pay for it, and attaching it to the land as a property tax is the fairest way I can think of to handle it.
Malarkey. Even unimproved remote rural property that benefits from none of these so-called services is taxed.
Roads, sewers, and other public works are generally financed via other taxes, levies and districts, often by user fees fees, which are much fairer. Property taxes are usually paid into "general fund" or public schools accounts, where they are squandered as government sees fit.
The point here is that you either pay or lose the land. Rent by any other name.
Quite right. The ability of almost any government agency to attach private property, often without fair-value compensation, is one of the better reasons to rent one's domicile rather than "buy". The unscrupulous use of "eminent domain" by local government to attach property for commercial re-use by anyone from utility companies to land developers is an on-going story.
Even if one does acquire a deed, it often excludes certain so-called "rights" to everything from water to mineral deposits.
Private property is a worse than a myth, it's a sham. Rather than argue and litigate about it, it's simpler to just accept the fact and not get involved in real estate at all.
Property "owners" are merely renting their parcels from the government, with taxes being the rent.
The EU could fire just one of their fat bloated bureaucrats and save the BTU equivalent in hot air of all the video cards ever produced or ever will be.
Slashdot Mirror
Is there no better use for research funding than to study the self-evident and report the obvious?
There might be some use in this if it led to an accurate predictive formula for preemptive intervention, but I see nothing about that in TFA or the summary.
Or would simply applying CDC vectoring tools to the data be too obvious too?
We will never have an idiocracy until we run out of clever oligarchs to manipulate the idiots. The prevailing nomenklatura wins out over the prols every time.
Read the last line of the OP.
And their legal (read: environmental) difficulties.
Launch from somewhere accessible to the market via other modes, but with sane local regulations.
Problem solved.
You're likely to see a rush of returns and exchanges, for an anything-but-this-thing alternative. Which, of course, will not against total Win8 sales/installs for marketing fodder. Such is the Windows Experience.
the whole bloody lot.
These funny green thingies poking out of the ground seem to accumulate moisture from thin air every morning.
More evidence of visitation by technologically superior extraterrestrials?
Hopefully without provoking the usual anti-SOE trollfest, I would be thrilled to see EQ2 run natively on a Linux box, without the necessity of VM lag/overhead.
Not because I love Sony. I just love EQ2.
As an EE who designs and implements industrial controls for a living, I'm quite aware of the role software plays in physical implementations.
My point is that practical engineers need a larger helping of physics in their lunchboxes on a daily basis than pure programmers, hence the usual course of study in E-schools.
Controls design requires a sound background in both, though. This is why none of my factories have burned down and my robots have yet to kill or maim their operators.
Apparently you've never worked in a large American manufacturing plant. Lives and limbs are on the line every minute, and the engineers are usually unlicensed. We do manage to muddle through, though, thanks to a rigorous education.
Please don't pretend to understand the nuances of what ME's and the other practical engineering disciplines do and why we need to know what we're taught to do it.
Your lines of code are physically exactly like every other line of code. They do not have things like mass, heat, flow, friction, stress, wear, corrosion, and a dozen other things that gears and hinges have.
With rare exceptions (usually in aerospace research), when a CS or software guru makes a mistake, things don't blow up and hurt people. Hard-science engineers are educated for a reason. Diligence is not optional.
The thread is about CS vs SE. Practical engineers work in a different environment entirely, and are not applicable to the current thread.
Thank you.
/. might as well run more articles along the lines of "Astronomical research finds evidence of stars."
Since when is redundant research into the very obvious news?
Hell, Carl Jung had this pretty much worked out decades ago.
Maybe some brilliant new detailed insights into the chemical workings of thought centers might be newsworthy, but this?
Come on, /.
Organizations that use SCADA and/or distributed controls, typically the manufacturing and raw materials sectors but also public utilities, very seldom maintain complete on-site in-house support for said systems or their industrial sub-components (proprietary machine programs, frequently written in Step 7 or ControlLogix but locked down by the machine vendor). Neither are most maintenance budgets able to afford frequent on-site vendor visits.
That means off-site tech support, and therefore internet access.
Air walls only work when you have an unlimited budget, a perfect system, or adequate full-time on-site support. I think I saw one of those in a movie once.
Just don't buy them. Recommend/review against them. Refuse to support them.
Then let's see what their copyright is worth.
In other words, "Software businesses should continue to pay people like me princely salaries year after year to litigate absurd claims, instead of being able to invest that money in research."
It's not just the patent system that's broken. Software patent law is nothing more than binary ambulance chasing.
Mod up.
"If it can be accessed, it is vulnerable." -Geezer's First Law of System Security.
We'll never have the materials to clinically test this theory on us 60's came-of-agers. We took them all.
Indeed, the only way classical conservatives in the GOP (e.g. the sainted WFB) will be able to focus on the message of sound fiscal management and individual responsibility is for them to swallow the medicine and distance themselves from the bible-thumping Tea Party types.
Instead of pandering to the trailer-park faction and forcing principled conservatives to go along out of necessity, it should be the other way around.
The alternative is for more and more defection to the Libertarian Party and formation of a religious fundamentalist rump of a GOP.
I'm as big a Tesla fan as anyone, but I'm also a practical electrical engineer.
Someone above already raised the end-point billing issue the utilco's will have, so we needn't bother with the bean-counter side of things. MBA's, rest easy. Your obscene profits are safe.
However, going from a theoretical ability to blast x amount of joules across an air gap to capturing a useful fraction of x without frying the adjacent wildlife and neighbors is quite another thing. As TFA points out, they seem impressed with a 10% capture rate, which to an engineer means a 90% loss of efficiency.
There is also this unpleasant fact of biophysics: sufficiently strong electro-magnetic fields, regardless of frequency, are inevitably fatal. The required grounding, shielding, etc. would be so outrageously expensive that the cost of copper wires pales.
Some science fiction does eventually become science fact. However, Thermodynamics, biochemistry, and basic engineering discipline relegate most of it to forever remaining fiction. Sorry, no Nobel Prizes here.
Aside from demonstrating a profound inability to construct a coherent sentence, you have also made the false presumption that I even have a god.
Put down the pipe before you type.
The character in Henry VI, not what you first thought (you insensitive clod!), was spot-on. "The first thing we do, let's kill all the lawyers."
As long as 99% of all American politicians are lawyers, and lawyers can make money from patent law, there will never be meaningful patent reform. Until enough of a voting block decides that attorneys make poor statesmen as a class and throws the lot of them out of office in favor of truly populist, honest representatives, we're stuck with what we've got.
Patent law, civil torts, and personal injury are all areas where the Rule of Law has been perverted into the Rule of Lawyers.
Nothing short of an electoral or economic revolution can rectify the problem.
Any odds-making experts care to venture an estimate on that happening?
Is ./ different from the free-wheeling "I had a beer with Linus yesterday" days? Of course. Slashdot has evolved. Everything evolves.
Whatever your subjective view of what /. is now, there is no harm in recalling, and appreciating the creators of, the "good old days".
As several of the authors in TFA said, ./ is what the users make it. It's up to us to add the energy and flavor we want, not the editors. Don't like the article selections? Submit some.
Personally, I'm a lot more interested in pure geekspeak than business, law, or politics, but that's just me. It is, after all, a community.
Hail Slashdot!
Those of us who were around as scientists, engineers, and programmers back in the 1980's and '90's committed a collective epic fail of foresight when we didn't insist on "privacy by design" standards from the outset. In our headlong rush to connectivity and interoperability, we built systems that were ripe for commercial, governmental, and criminal data mining, and did not effectively campaign for legal safeguards or adequately forewarn the general public. We were, in our heady world of fast-paced progress and self-congratulation, irresponsible. Yes, we had our heroes trying to sound a warning, but they were too few and went unheeded. The rest of us just let it happen.
The cow has long been out of the proverbial barn. The best we can hope for is to corral the cow to some extent, and warn people about wild cows.
We as professionals owe a duty to the public to scream from the hilltops at every opportunity that There is no privacy on the internet! of any real sort, and make it clear that it is both naive and utopian to expect any. The power of money and government, and the avarice of criminals, have made it so and there can be no going back.
The analogy I use is that of walking out one's front door. You are in clear sight. Do not open your wallet if you want no one to see what's in it. Do not speak publicly if you desire confidentiality. You are in public every time you access the internet as much as every time you step out to the pub. Act accordingly.
New laws are indeed too late. There is no legal time machine to roll back what has already been done.
No, the taxes cover the government services that one requires to make use of their property. Things like roads and storm sewers. Police and fire protection. Not to mention the costs associated with ensuring that nobody steals your land from you.
Contrary to popular belief all that isn't free, somebody has to pay for it, and attaching it to the land as a property tax is the fairest way I can think of to handle it.
Malarkey. Even unimproved remote rural property that benefits from none of these so-called services is taxed.
Roads, sewers, and other public works are generally financed via other taxes, levies and districts, often by user fees fees, which are much fairer. Property taxes are usually paid into "general fund" or public schools accounts, where they are squandered as government sees fit.
The point here is that you either pay or lose the land. Rent by any other name.
Quite right. The ability of almost any government agency to attach private property, often without fair-value compensation, is one of the better reasons to rent one's domicile rather than "buy". The unscrupulous use of "eminent domain" by local government to attach property for commercial re-use by anyone from utility companies to land developers is an on-going story.
Even if one does acquire a deed, it often excludes certain so-called "rights" to everything from water to mineral deposits.
Private property is a worse than a myth, it's a sham. Rather than argue and litigate about it, it's simpler to just accept the fact and not get involved in real estate at all.
Property "owners" are merely renting their parcels from the government, with taxes being the rent.
The EU could fire just one of their fat bloated bureaucrats and save the BTU equivalent in hot air of all the video cards ever produced or ever will be.