I guess it is nice for you that (for whatever reason) you saw your way clear to work hard and go to college. Your ideas about poverty are a little simplistic. Only the "children, accident victims, and elderly" are unable to care for themselves? You'd probably tell someone with clinical depression to just "cheer up," too, because there is no evident reason for their unhappiness.
Unfortunately it isn't just you. I don't claim that your objections/warnings aren't valid (mostly). But it seems that every time a story like this comes up, someone gets modded +5 insightful for pointing out problems that were probably discussed in the first meeting held by whoever is or might be working on this system. It is truly ridiculous to imagine that they'd get this thing all worked up, pass a law to require it in every car, and only then consider that a system with the power to stop people's cars may potentially be abused.
Anyway, potential solutions:
- (The first and second objections are basically the same, use by unauthorized people). A lot of people have keyless entry remotes for their car, and I've never heard of one of those being "hacked" to unlock someone's door. It wouldn't be tough to make cars only respond to commands sent along with the proper key. Of course, you then have to have maintained a database of these keys, or perhaps some program to hash information about the car (like the license plate number, or a key transmitted by the car itself) to match key to car, and you encounter security issues there. But I'm told that if you lose the remotes for your car, the dealer can replace them, so somewhere this system already exists and is evidentally considered to be secure enough. If you can't tell, I don't know much about this, and I'm mostly just blabbing. Just saying it is not beyond the realm of imagination that this system could be made secure enough.
- And nothing stops policemen from randomly shooting people, either, so they shouldn't be allowed to carry guns. Oh yeah, except that when they do shoot people, there is a huge inquiry into whether or not it was justified. Some policemen do abuse their power, and maybe giving them new toys will give them even more power to abuse, but this isnt a very convincing argument. Policemen can already stop 99.9% of the people they want to stop just because 99.9% of people will stop when they turn their lights on. I really suspect a system like this would not be used for routine traffic stops (and consequently couldn't be used for malicious activity disguised as a routine traffic stop).
- People will carry more weapons? Come on. Even supposing that people would respond to this danger by arming themselves, which I am not convinced of, you are assuming from the outset that there is a danger to respond to. In other words, common criminals like rapists and thieves will so rountinely be able to stop cars that people will feel the need to carry weapons with them to protect themselves. If it were really that easy, wouldn't they disable the system and go back to the old way of stopping cars before we got to that point? There is just a little too much "conspriracy theory" to this and too little reality for me to be convinced, because you must assume that the government has a far greater interest in being able to control people's cars than it has in protecting people. In any case, who cares if more people do start carrying weapons? Concealed carry laws in the states that have 'em have really done nothing but good.
- See the bit above about remote keyless entry. I think the bigger danger would be people jamming the signal used to stop the car, the result being no car stopped at all. But the system doesn't have to work perfectly. Just frequently enough to be worth the investment. If the police try to stop the car and can't, they shrug and resort to the tactics currently in use, like spike strips, ramming, and so on.
I am religious (and also not the parent). But that doesn't mean that I am automatically wrong. The Da Vinci code may be fine as fiction. (I suspect it is tripe. Good fiction rarely becomes popular, and popular fiction is rarely good.) But it is important for people to understand that that's all it really is: Fiction. New Testament scholars (who in most cases are themselves not friends of traditional Christianity by any stretch), art scholars, and etc, don't take his ideas seriously because even though they are charming, they are almost certainly wrong. The only hearing Brown's ideas will ever get is in this novel. Unfortunately, since the only reading that most people will ever do on the subject will be The Da Vinci Code, he will convince many people that his ideas have merit.
I'm not. Like I said in the post, I got out of it pretty early on in the major. I just liked computers and programming, and did not want to be a "computer scientist."
Like I said in another post, my intention was not to malign those professions. I just wanted to point out that there is considerable romanticism associated with programming on slashdot, and I don't think there necessarily ought to be.
I think it is great that you are proud of the work you do. I am proud of the work I do, too. But I don't call it art or carry on (as a previous book review did) about how reading someone's code is like reading poetry (or in my case, reviewing someone's pressure drop calculations or something). They are just instructions to a machine. The best code does what it is supposed to do in an efficient manner, while balancing the expense of writing it, readability later on, and some other stuff I'm sure I'm leaving out b/c I'm not a programmer.
I can appreciate the work of someone who is good at that, and I can appreciate the code that they've written, but it just doesn't seem like art to me.
Your home is a work of art that was worked on by plumbers, carpenters, etc, but I really doubt that the building codes in your area (or if there isn't any, the standard practices in those disciplines) allows for much artistic license. I'm not trying to say that the work that anyone does is worthless or un-needed. It's great that we have plumbers, carpenters, and programmers. I just view programming as something quite a lot different than painting, music, sculpting, etc. There is, in a sense, no such thing as a good or bad painting. It's entirely subjective. But the best program is the one that does what it is supposed to with the fewest resources. Because it is a complex task, and it is very difficult to know out of all the possible ways to go about it the most efficient one, there will be variation between the code of different people. But there is, in reality, a small set of best ways, and other ways are objectively not as good.
I didn't mean to bash people with that certification. I do think they are mis-named, though. Real engineers have
1) A degree from an accredited university
2) A passing grade on the EIT/FE exam
3) 4-5 years of carefully documented work experience, depending on the state (if in the US)
4) A passing ground on the PE exam.
Calling yourself an engineer before you have done those things can get you and the people you work for in hot water in a lot of places. It's a mystery to me why this MCSE stuff has been allowed to persist. It ought to be Microsoft Certified System Technician or something.
I've been itching to say this for months, but just *knew* that I'd be modded down for trolling. I had a CS prof in college (before I dropped that major) who said something like, "A lot of people think programming is art or something like it. The question is, should they?" His view is the programming is like plumbing or carpentry. The skill-set to do it is something you can pick up in trade school. The difference between a computer scientist and a programmer is the difference between a draftsman and an engineer, to put it a different way. And I mean a real engineer, not one of those people with an MCSE certificate.
When I was in school, I worked on atmospheric dispersions and one of the proposals we thought about was using (in the distant future) several stationary or mobile sensors to measure concentrations of NBC agents. The sensors would talk to one another along with some met stations, and try to come up with an idea of where agents were released from. The advantage to mobile sensors is that they could fly "upwind" straight to the source. That's simplified because in cities air currents interact with trees, buildings, etc, but it is interesting just the same.
Re:How will H usage affect this?
on
Global Dimming
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Of course our failure to immediately shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy has nothing at all to do with pesky things like economics, thermodynamics, technological feasibility, and about a dozen other factors. The entire reason we continue to use the same fuels we have used for over a century isn't because we know a lot about it, have existing infrastructure, etc, etc. It's entirely because one guy who used to be heavily involved in the oil business happens to be the current President of the US.
Riiight.....
Yes, and probably even had the audacity to be proud of it. Martial virtues have all but died in these "enlightened" times (our heros, for example, are not the people who accomplish great military feats, but are the people who got captured), but it was not always so.
The entire tenor of this thread is that war is somehow always a great moral evil. Hell, the grandparent referred to the Wrights' intentions as "dark." But there were times in the past when people had the balls and strength of will to understand that sometimes war is necessary and even good in some cases, and you might as well have the best weapons when such an occasion arises.
I hear(read) this this argument made pretty often. The underlying assumption is that you (the person making it this time) are somehow a great deal more clever/less misled than the average person, and are able to pierce the veil to see what the real motives of the Bush Administration are. The rest of us, like sheep or cattle, whatever your preferred metaphor, are so grossly ignorant as to believe that the capture of Saddam Hussein heralds an end to terrorism.
Sorry to burst your bubble, but no one I know personally (and I live in a small Texas town, which in most people's minds means that my friends and neighbors are about as ignorant as you can get) believes any of that, regardless of their political affiliation or who they voted for.
Any radio signals we pick up will have been broadcasted many, many, many years ago.
Besides, we study all sorts of non-human "backwaters critters" on Earth, the most intelligent of which have at best a rudimentary grasp of language.
Finding ANY extra-terrestrial life, particularly life advanced enough to detect with a radio telescope, would be very significant, even if it turns out that we are a great deal more technologically advanced than they are (although it's hard to imagine how that could be true). It's not hard to imagine that the reverse would be true for some other civilization that discovered us.
"He also suggests we often approach the whole issue of encouraging migration to Linux from Windows entirely wrongly."
Actually, he's right. "Wrongly" is modifying the verb ("approach"), and is used as an adverb. "Wrong" without the -ly would be an adjective. Adjectives modify nouns.
Further refinement of the technique is required before full scale production would be efficient
It seems like a lot of the "science with potentially awesome applications" posts that get made to/. include some sentence like this. I'm sortof patting myself on the back here when I say this, but hats off to the chemical engineers who actually do the work here. Chemical engineers are an important stepping stone between "oh, cool" and full-scale production, but hardly ever get a mention. In fact, most people have no idea what chemical engineers do, even though you probably scarcely have an item around you that doesn't owe its existence in part to chemical engineering.
I doubt anyone will ever see this message buried as it is below 1400 other posts, but there is a pretty good piece of logging software that'll automatically point out the less savory URLs to you in a report that you can receive as frequently as you like. Service costs $7 a month, and can be set up for a number of users, so one kid isn't blaming the other.
"Another boost to my pet theory of the universe: everything is equal to everything else, and we delude ourselves into perceiving imaginary distinctions between things."
E may equal m*c^2, but it is hard to understand how you can make the leap from that to the conclusion that matter and energy can't be distinguished at all.
You're right, I didn't know that. But it doesn't help matters, because even in a methanol powered fuel cell, water is produced. The energy-producing reaction is still between hydrogen and oxygen. The methanol is just the the hydrogen supply. So you'd have both carbon dioxide AND water as exhaust.
There are engineering advantages (I assume you are referring to the problems associated with storing hydrogen), but regardless of the process you use (be it a methanol reformer prior to the fuel cell, or a direct methanol fuel cell) you end up with carbon dioxide. Since one of the big motives for going to fuel cells is a reduction of green house gases (in a lot of people's minds), it isn't surprising that few are excited about using methanol. What's more, even though methanol is renewable, my suspicion is that most of it is currently coming from oil, and not from biomass.
.. science TV is that for it to work, TV will have to be fundamentally different. While it is theoretically possible for people to think about complicated ideas while watching TV (there are taped lectures which are very educational), it isn't at all likely to happen.
Television is designed to be rapid-fire. Most people flip channels when a lull occurs. When people turn on the TV, usually their intention isn't to think, but to do the opposite - vegetate. The evening news flips from story to story with flashing lights and catchy music, and before any genuine critical thought begins to occur, a commerical (lasting 15-30 seconds) comes on, and then another, and another, and another - the brain is rebooted over and over and over again.
Think about it. When you read a book, would you be able to learn anything if every 30 seconds you were required to drop what you were thinking about and think about something new?
In real life, thinking takes time, and thinking about things that really matter should take a lot of time. Are the participants in a discussion about stem-cell research going to just stop every minute or so to allow the audience to ponder what has been said? Are they all going to agree to play nice so that one guy who might not be so "photogenic" will get as honest a hearing as the other who can talk a million miles a minute and who just looks so smart?
It seems like what science TV supporters probably really want is not thoughtful, educational TV, but another outlet through which to indoctrinate and shape people's thinking without their really completely coming to grips with what they've ingested. If their motives are otherwise, I'd like to hear how they are planning on overcoming the limitations which the medium of television will (necessarily?) place on the content they wish to convey.
Actually, the "Thou shalt not" that most people are thinking of is from the KJV, and is "Thou shalt not kill." Even so, I agree that it is more properly translated in modern language as "murder."
Slashdot Mirror
I guess it is nice for you that (for whatever reason) you saw your way clear to work hard and go to college. Your ideas about poverty are a little simplistic. Only the "children, accident victims, and elderly" are unable to care for themselves? You'd probably tell someone with clinical depression to just "cheer up," too, because there is no evident reason for their unhappiness.
Unfortunately it isn't just you. I don't claim that your objections/warnings aren't valid (mostly). But it seems that every time a story like this comes up, someone gets modded +5 insightful for pointing out problems that were probably discussed in the first meeting held by whoever is or might be working on this system. It is truly ridiculous to imagine that they'd get this thing all worked up, pass a law to require it in every car, and only then consider that a system with the power to stop people's cars may potentially be abused.
Anyway, potential solutions:
- (The first and second objections are basically the same, use by unauthorized people). A lot of people have keyless entry remotes for their car, and I've never heard of one of those being "hacked" to unlock someone's door. It wouldn't be tough to make cars only respond to commands sent along with the proper key. Of course, you then have to have maintained a database of these keys, or perhaps some program to hash information about the car (like the license plate number, or a key transmitted by the car itself) to match key to car, and you encounter security issues there. But I'm told that if you lose the remotes for your car, the dealer can replace them, so somewhere this system already exists and is evidentally considered to be secure enough. If you can't tell, I don't know much about this, and I'm mostly just blabbing. Just saying it is not beyond the realm of imagination that this system could be made secure enough.
- And nothing stops policemen from randomly shooting people, either, so they shouldn't be allowed to carry guns. Oh yeah, except that when they do shoot people, there is a huge inquiry into whether or not it was justified. Some policemen do abuse their power, and maybe giving them new toys will give them even more power to abuse, but this isnt a very convincing argument. Policemen can already stop 99.9% of the people they want to stop just because 99.9% of people will stop when they turn their lights on. I really suspect a system like this would not be used for routine traffic stops (and consequently couldn't be used for malicious activity disguised as a routine traffic stop).
- People will carry more weapons? Come on. Even supposing that people would respond to this danger by arming themselves, which I am not convinced of, you are assuming from the outset that there is a danger to respond to. In other words, common criminals like rapists and thieves will so rountinely be able to stop cars that people will feel the need to carry weapons with them to protect themselves. If it were really that easy, wouldn't they disable the system and go back to the old way of stopping cars before we got to that point? There is just a little too much "conspriracy theory" to this and too little reality for me to be convinced, because you must assume that the government has a far greater interest in being able to control people's cars than it has in protecting people. In any case, who cares if more people do start carrying weapons? Concealed carry laws in the states that have 'em have really done nothing but good.
- See the bit above about remote keyless entry. I think the bigger danger would be people jamming the signal used to stop the car, the result being no car stopped at all. But the system doesn't have to work perfectly. Just frequently enough to be worth the investment. If the police try to stop the car and can't, they shrug and resort to the tactics currently in use, like spike strips, ramming, and so on.
I am religious (and also not the parent). But that doesn't mean that I am automatically wrong. The Da Vinci code may be fine as fiction. (I suspect it is tripe. Good fiction rarely becomes popular, and popular fiction is rarely good.) But it is important for people to understand that that's all it really is: Fiction. New Testament scholars (who in most cases are themselves not friends of traditional Christianity by any stretch), art scholars, and etc, don't take his ideas seriously because even though they are charming, they are almost certainly wrong. The only hearing Brown's ideas will ever get is in this novel. Unfortunately, since the only reading that most people will ever do on the subject will be The Da Vinci Code, he will convince many people that his ideas have merit.
I'm not. Like I said in the post, I got out of it pretty early on in the major. I just liked computers and programming, and did not want to be a "computer scientist."
Like I said in another post, my intention was not to malign those professions. I just wanted to point out that there is considerable romanticism associated with programming on slashdot, and I don't think there necessarily ought to be.
I think it is great that you are proud of the work you do. I am proud of the work I do, too. But I don't call it art or carry on (as a previous book review did) about how reading someone's code is like reading poetry (or in my case, reviewing someone's pressure drop calculations or something). They are just instructions to a machine. The best code does what it is supposed to do in an efficient manner, while balancing the expense of writing it, readability later on, and some other stuff I'm sure I'm leaving out b/c I'm not a programmer.
I can appreciate the work of someone who is good at that, and I can appreciate the code that they've written, but it just doesn't seem like art to me.
Your home is a work of art that was worked on by plumbers, carpenters, etc, but I really doubt that the building codes in your area (or if there isn't any, the standard practices in those disciplines) allows for much artistic license. I'm not trying to say that the work that anyone does is worthless or un-needed. It's great that we have plumbers, carpenters, and programmers. I just view programming as something quite a lot different than painting, music, sculpting, etc. There is, in a sense, no such thing as a good or bad painting. It's entirely subjective. But the best program is the one that does what it is supposed to with the fewest resources. Because it is a complex task, and it is very difficult to know out of all the possible ways to go about it the most efficient one, there will be variation between the code of different people. But there is, in reality, a small set of best ways, and other ways are objectively not as good.
:)
Hopefully that makes sense.
I didn't mean to bash people with that certification. I do think they are mis-named, though. Real engineers have 1) A degree from an accredited university 2) A passing grade on the EIT/FE exam 3) 4-5 years of carefully documented work experience, depending on the state (if in the US) 4) A passing ground on the PE exam. Calling yourself an engineer before you have done those things can get you and the people you work for in hot water in a lot of places. It's a mystery to me why this MCSE stuff has been allowed to persist. It ought to be Microsoft Certified System Technician or something.
I've been itching to say this for months, but just *knew* that I'd be modded down for trolling. I had a CS prof in college (before I dropped that major) who said something like, "A lot of people think programming is art or something like it. The question is, should they?" His view is the programming is like plumbing or carpentry. The skill-set to do it is something you can pick up in trade school. The difference between a computer scientist and a programmer is the difference between a draftsman and an engineer, to put it a different way. And I mean a real engineer, not one of those people with an MCSE certificate.
When I was in school, I worked on atmospheric dispersions and one of the proposals we thought about was using (in the distant future) several stationary or mobile sensors to measure concentrations of NBC agents. The sensors would talk to one another along with some met stations, and try to come up with an idea of where agents were released from. The advantage to mobile sensors is that they could fly "upwind" straight to the source. That's simplified because in cities air currents interact with trees, buildings, etc, but it is interesting just the same.
Of course our failure to immediately shift away from fossil fuels to renewable energy has nothing at all to do with pesky things like economics, thermodynamics, technological feasibility, and about a dozen other factors. The entire reason we continue to use the same fuels we have used for over a century isn't because we know a lot about it, have existing infrastructure, etc, etc. It's entirely because one guy who used to be heavily involved in the oil business happens to be the current President of the US. Riiight.....
Yes, and probably even had the audacity to be proud of it. Martial virtues have all but died in these "enlightened" times (our heros, for example, are not the people who accomplish great military feats, but are the people who got captured), but it was not always so. The entire tenor of this thread is that war is somehow always a great moral evil. Hell, the grandparent referred to the Wrights' intentions as "dark." But there were times in the past when people had the balls and strength of will to understand that sometimes war is necessary and even good in some cases, and you might as well have the best weapons when such an occasion arises.
I hear(read) this this argument made pretty often. The underlying assumption is that you (the person making it this time) are somehow a great deal more clever/less misled than the average person, and are able to pierce the veil to see what the real motives of the Bush Administration are. The rest of us, like sheep or cattle, whatever your preferred metaphor, are so grossly ignorant as to believe that the capture of Saddam Hussein heralds an end to terrorism. Sorry to burst your bubble, but no one I know personally (and I live in a small Texas town, which in most people's minds means that my friends and neighbors are about as ignorant as you can get) believes any of that, regardless of their political affiliation or who they voted for.
Any radio signals we pick up will have been broadcasted many, many, many years ago. Besides, we study all sorts of non-human "backwaters critters" on Earth, the most intelligent of which have at best a rudimentary grasp of language. Finding ANY extra-terrestrial life, particularly life advanced enough to detect with a radio telescope, would be very significant, even if it turns out that we are a great deal more technologically advanced than they are (although it's hard to imagine how that could be true). It's not hard to imagine that the reverse would be true for some other civilization that discovered us.
"He also suggests we often approach the whole issue of encouraging migration to Linux from Windows entirely wrongly."
Actually, he's right. "Wrongly" is modifying the verb ("approach"), and is used as an adverb. "Wrong" without the -ly would be an adjective. Adjectives modify nouns.
Further refinement of the technique is required before full scale production would be efficient
/. include some sentence like this. I'm sortof patting myself on the back here when I say this, but hats off to the chemical engineers who actually do the work here. Chemical engineers are an important stepping stone between "oh, cool" and full-scale production, but hardly ever get a mention. In fact, most people have no idea what chemical engineers do, even though you probably scarcely have an item around you that doesn't owe its existence in part to chemical engineering.
It seems like a lot of the "science with potentially awesome applications" posts that get made to
I doubt anyone will ever see this message buried as it is below 1400 other posts, but there is a pretty good piece of logging software that'll automatically point out the less savory URLs to you in a report that you can receive as frequently as you like. Service costs $7 a month, and can be set up for a number of users, so one kid isn't blaming the other.
Covenant Eyes is the name of the software.
"Another boost to my pet theory of the universe: everything is equal to everything else, and we delude ourselves into perceiving imaginary distinctions between things." E may equal m*c^2, but it is hard to understand how you can make the leap from that to the conclusion that matter and energy can't be distinguished at all.
That's a great question, but I don't know why you're asking ./. Don't you know how much charitable giving you do?
I think I learned more about how this actually works by reading the parent's criticisms than I did by RTFA.
And once again, the subtle art of sarcasm is lost not only on the parent, but on everyone who modded him as insightful..
How long do we HAVE?
You're right, I didn't know that. But it doesn't help matters, because even in a methanol powered fuel cell, water is produced. The energy-producing reaction is still between hydrogen and oxygen. The methanol is just the the hydrogen supply. So you'd have both carbon dioxide AND water as exhaust.
There are engineering advantages (I assume you are referring to the problems associated with storing hydrogen), but regardless of the process you use (be it a methanol reformer prior to the fuel cell, or a direct methanol fuel cell) you end up with carbon dioxide. Since one of the big motives for going to fuel cells is a reduction of green house gases (in a lot of people's minds), it isn't surprising that few are excited about using methanol. What's more, even though methanol is renewable, my suspicion is that most of it is currently coming from oil, and not from biomass.
There is such a word, he just used it incorrectly.
.. science TV is that for it to work, TV will have to be fundamentally different. While it is theoretically possible for people to think about complicated ideas while watching TV (there are taped lectures which are very educational), it isn't at all likely to happen.
Television is designed to be rapid-fire. Most people flip channels when a lull occurs. When people turn on the TV, usually their intention isn't to think, but to do the opposite - vegetate. The evening news flips from story to story with flashing lights and catchy music, and before any genuine critical thought begins to occur, a commerical (lasting 15-30 seconds) comes on, and then another, and another, and another - the brain is rebooted over and over and over again.
Think about it. When you read a book, would you be able to learn anything if every 30 seconds you were required to drop what you were thinking about and think about something new?
In real life, thinking takes time, and thinking about things that really matter should take a lot of time. Are the participants in a discussion about stem-cell research going to just stop every minute or so to allow the audience to ponder what has been said? Are they all going to agree to play nice so that one guy who might not be so "photogenic" will get as honest a hearing as the other who can talk a million miles a minute and who just looks so smart?
It seems like what science TV supporters probably really want is not thoughtful, educational TV, but another outlet through which to indoctrinate and shape people's thinking without their really completely coming to grips with what they've ingested. If their motives are otherwise, I'd like to hear how they are planning on overcoming the limitations which the medium of television will (necessarily?) place on the content they wish to convey.
Actually, the "Thou shalt not" that most people are thinking of is from the KJV, and is "Thou shalt not kill." Even so, I agree that it is more properly translated in modern language as "murder."