It's not the same as steering by wire, but my car has power steering. (99 grand am) One day I was rounding a corner and I swear to christ my car was nearly impossible to turn; I went to move the steering wheel with its normal ease, and it would move, but it was incredibly difficult to get it to move. It felt like i was pushing/pulling against a gigantic weight that was holding the steering wheel in place.
I was able to turn the car, but barely, and i had to slam on the brakes. I actually drifted into the oncoming traffic lane of the road i was turning onto. If there was a car there, I surely would have crashed into it.
Turns out the reason was just that my power steering fluid was low. I put some in, and all better, never had the problem again.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there are systems in cars today, which if they fail, could also kill you, and they aren't by wire systems.
My friend made his "family" after the iraqi dictator. Sims2 does a remarkable job of letting you create likelesses that really do look like their RL counterparts to some extent.
As for me, I spent a day playing the game the way it was meant to be played, then got bored and started the mass slaughter of my entire neighborhood, playing some sort of sims2 offshoot game where your success was measured by the number of graves.
This post is true, but the other huge problem with the comparative statistic is that the 95% number comes from "All IE users over all IE versions" while the 57% number comes from just IE6 users.
i hate people who use statistics improperly to bend it to say what they want. compare apples to apples for christ sakes. for instance, according to w3schools, IE has a total share of 77%. the submitter could have been honest and used the real statistic, but instead chose the more improper one to highlight a point. i find that to be dishonest and points out the zealotry pretty well.
i really am not sure about that, and wish i knew enough to really say otherwise.
gravity is a pretty weak force that pervades through everything. I would think that one could consider an entire solar system as a single gravitational source, being that each individual entity adds to the mass of the solar system.. why not?
also, i don't think saying that each is individual would be right. each planet affects the others through their gravity, no matter how far away (even if very weakly). that pretty much says that they don't work individually, but are interlinked through their gravitational fields.
i use the old 3d representation (instead of the 4d gravity would be) to imagine how it works.. if you have 1 giant marble on a blanket, and put another smaller marble on it, the smaller marble will roll toward the dip made by the large one..
if one were to somehow put a second marble in orbit, wouldn't it create a larger depression overall?
im probably looking at things way too simply, but still.
im not scientist, and surely these articles are written for the layman, but all of the articles i've read say "something more than the sun's gravity is pulling at the probes"
wouldn't the planets, especially jupiter, and saturn, and ALL of the misc tiny asteroids in the various belts, exert a pull on the probes as well? some sort of combined solar system gravitational force since the probes are well beyond the last planet?
doesn't seem that complicated to me, but im definately coming at it from a relatively uneducated perspective then who's saying something's wrong in the first place.
on a semi-related note, i recently bought a shuttle motherboard. it had the most amazing smell. it was almost a perfume.. they should bottle whatever they cleaned that thing off in. aside from the skin burns that would no doubt result, it would probably do well on market!..
What's it matter what the internet was designed to do? It's the duty of corporations to bend laws and technological infrastructure to suit their own needs, right? ZD is only doing what any good corporation looking out for their shareholder's interests would do./sarcasm
First off, I really like your post, but I disagree on this point.
I can understand the argument that spectrum should be handled like land (purchased and owned) but since radio spectrum is inherently public it cannot simply be run under land management laws. There would be no ability for small consumers to buy spectrum, and without efficient management you may end up with a few big chunks, and then millions of tiny inefficent chunks - consider hard disk fragmenting.
-Radio spectrum is not "inheirently public", that's only a perception you have. The same ideas can be applied to land, or any scarce resource. In order for something to be a public commodity, it has to have the ability to transmutate.. Like water and air is free flowing and moves, it is a public commodity. radio spectrum is very static and therefore saleable as if it were land.
-the spectrum would not become fragmented, because the economics would not allow it to become fragmented. it's far too valuable for that to even happen
-"Parcels" of spectrum would be defined by some sort of governing body; probably a reformed FCC. These parcels would be defined by land contours affecting said radio spectrum, and then sold to the "highest bidder". they would not be allowed to shrink, they would cover a certain area at a certain band, and thats it.
-Why would we care about small consumers buying spectrum? You would need a company to effectively use a piece of spectrum, I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where this would be actually be needed. The cost of spectrum is going to be so high, that a company with a product is the only thing that could buy spectrum, be it TV or radio or otherwise..
-There would still be public spectrum (just like there is still public land) This spectrum would be set aside and allocated appropriately by whatever would theoretically replace the FCC, for use by the public.
-The FCC has taken up censorship, a duty its wholly unsuited for.
it needs to go, in my opinion. no question about it.
A young boy's father wants the right to use the boy's genetic embryo clone to develop a baby who could donate a portion of his liver to save him. The firm also takes on the case of a boy band that is suing its lead singer for not adhering to his contract to keep up his physical appearance.
It doesn't look like they are going to tbe dealing with technology very much/not at all.
moreover, it looks like the 2 issues they picked for their pilot are both things that don't require much foresight to envision, not to mention that the clone thing should happen alot sooner then 25 yrs..
Sorry man, im not interested in typing grammatically correct on slashdot. i dont want to come to slashdot and type out some doctoral thesis for peer review. it's not a reason to attack me, ass:)
that said, i agree with what you said except your attacks on me, of course.
i left out something important, and that is that the internet makes the understanding of things much more important. availability of information stresses the fundamentals rather than ROTE (thank you for the correction) memorization.
fundamentals being: resourcefulness understanding implicatio n application
and many more related skills that were necessary BEFORE ready access to information, but now have taken on an increased role, while others have taken on a DECREASED role, because inheirent knowledge of information is much less important.
one other skill, which before was nice to have, but now EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, is the ability to decipher bullshit. the internet is a huge source of it, and having the above fundamentals in place, combined with this ability, really does make you a "fricken star" to other people that don't have these skills, like bosses and peers.
I think the major diff between smart people and dumb people is that dumb people don't have to think about everything so analytically. that's not to say there aren't smart people who can think analytically about social situations, but just that is something that takes time to develop. Also not to say all smart people develop the ability to emulate social skills either.
my opinion is that in smart people, social skills is a developed trait, while in most people, they don't have to think about it because they aren't focused enough to let it get above suboncious level.
when you're a kid, there hasn't been time yet. kids aren't really rational about anything, even the smartest ones. myself at the time included, even tho i thought i knew it all.
my best advice would be to sit him down and try to explain in an analytical way how social skills are just another thing for him to dominate his peers in. i think that would've motivated me more, before i had figured out that I had to teach myself how to emulate the social skills that appear relevant in others, yet lacking in smart people.
but who knows honestly;) im not a psychological expert for sure.
I can't begin to state how much having the internet has affected myself, and society as a whole.
Never before have the key values of resourcefulness and problem solving been so apparant in individuals and the work place, where before wrote memorized knowledge was necessary.
Having the internet, and refined resourcefulness trumps anyone who has wrote memorized anything. With the internet as a resource, instead of a 30 book bound volume set of encyclopedias, a resourceful person can find answers and implement them in minutes, where before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.
i love the internet and everything it's done for me. I'm not a super genius, but being extremely efficient and resourceful, and knowing how to use google, has made me look like a fricken star both to peers and my employer.
in my experience, certifications don't mean that much.
What they do mean, is that someone is booksmart enough to sit there and study the material, go in, and take a test. They don't mean the individual can actually fix anything.
In any technical job, be it mechanical or information, the fundamentals of troubleshooting and resourcefulness are far more important than any piece of paper.
i put alot more stock in good references and job experience than certs..
ALL THAT SAID THOUGH: HR and employers are still waking up to the facts mentioned above. so no matter what the reality is with certs, the problem remains; how can you prove yourself a good technician if you can't get hired.
companies are getting better at recognizing intrinsic skill rather than going whats on a resume, but that has a long way left to go.
i didn't get any certs tho, because i refuse to pay money for something i don't need. i can do my job just fine without a piece of paper to help me along, heh.
I won't doubt you're more qualified than me here, but here's my response.
now realize i also wrote the above reply in 5 mins because im at work. im still at work, but ill try to be a little more detailed.
what i mean to say, is that the exacting requirements of a to-0 landing is such that leaving it to just a computer program would be a mistake.
that computer program would have to take into account many variables during the firing of its retros, including but not limited to; sideways movement, deceleration of the craft caused by chutes, air resistance that can be expected EXACTLY, the exact gravity of mars(so it knows how much retro to apply) etc etc
all of these together are not testable on earth, because mars is/different/ you could approximate it, but nothing exactly.
thats the real genius of the bounce technique, is that it takes all these unknowns/semi-unknowns and mitigates their risk by reducing the variables. if you drop it from a known height, you don't have to get the downward velocity to exactly 0 so that the landing G's don't crush the ship. you already know about how hard of G's to design for.
you can approximate all the factors in a simulation, but then you have to program something to react appropriately, and it can become very complicated indeed.
the reason why a human can do the direct surface landing is because a human pilot has the ability to feel a situation and adjust accordingly out of the box. as a programmer, i say good luck designing something that can do all that and do it right.
the reason it was used is because it reduces the variables of an automatic landing. you can test drop something from 150 feet off the ground all day, but you cant test a landing by a computer program using retro rockets.
in a manned mission, the landing would be by parachute with retro rockets to slow acceleration to 0 on the surface, because the trained pilot has that ability.
currently, programs don't have that ability, so they didn't do it.
Slashdot Mirror
It's not the same as steering by wire, but my car has power steering. (99 grand am) One day I was rounding a corner and I swear to christ my car was nearly impossible to turn; I went to move the steering wheel with its normal ease, and it would move, but it was incredibly difficult to get it to move. It felt like i was pushing/pulling against a gigantic weight that was holding the steering wheel in place.
I was able to turn the car, but barely, and i had to slam on the brakes. I actually drifted into the oncoming traffic lane of the road i was turning onto. If there was a car there, I surely would have crashed into it.
Turns out the reason was just that my power steering fluid was low. I put some in, and all better, never had the problem again.
I guess what I'm getting at is that there are systems in cars today, which if they fail, could also kill you, and they aren't by wire systems.
My friend made his "family" after the iraqi dictator. Sims2 does a remarkable job of letting you create likelesses that really do look like their RL counterparts to some extent.
As for me, I spent a day playing the game the way it was meant to be played, then got bored and started the mass slaughter of my entire neighborhood, playing some sort of sims2 offshoot game where your success was measured by the number of graves.
needless to say, it quickly got boring.
That was pretty neat, for the 2 or 3 commercials it lasted for
ill have to bookmark it and come back after the slashdotting has ended.
what does storage capacity of an addressable file system have to do with number of persons living on earth? /me confused
This post is true, but the other huge problem with the comparative statistic is that the 95% number comes from "All IE users over all IE versions" while the 57% number comes from just IE6 users.
i hate people who use statistics improperly to bend it to say what they want. compare apples to apples for christ sakes. for instance, according to w3schools, IE has a total share of 77%. the submitter could have been honest and used the real statistic, but instead chose the more improper one to highlight a point. i find that to be dishonest and points out the zealotry pretty well.
i wonder how much matter in the form of small bodies like asteroids in belts and such would be needed to explain the anomalies?
i really am not sure about that, and wish i knew enough to really say otherwise.
gravity is a pretty weak force that pervades through everything. I would think that one could consider an entire solar system as a single gravitational source, being that each individual entity adds to the mass of the solar system.. why not?
also, i don't think saying that each is individual would be right. each planet affects the others through their gravity, no matter how far away (even if very weakly). that pretty much says that they don't work individually, but are interlinked through their gravitational fields.
i use the old 3d representation (instead of the 4d gravity would be) to imagine how it works.. if you have 1 giant marble on a blanket, and put another smaller marble on it, the smaller marble will roll toward the dip made by the large one..
if one were to somehow put a second marble in orbit, wouldn't it create a larger depression overall?
im probably looking at things way too simply, but still.
im not scientist, and surely these articles are written for the layman, but all of the articles i've read say "something more than the sun's gravity is pulling at the probes"
wouldn't the planets, especially jupiter, and saturn, and ALL of the misc tiny asteroids in the various belts, exert a pull on the probes as well? some sort of combined solar system gravitational force since the probes are well beyond the last planet?
doesn't seem that complicated to me, but im definately coming at it from a relatively uneducated perspective then who's saying something's wrong in the first place.
i had this idea a few months ago, wish i could have done something about it then, oh well.
on a semi-related note, i recently bought a shuttle motherboard. it had the most amazing smell. it was almost a perfume.. they should bottle whatever they cleaned that thing off in. aside from the skin burns that would no doubt result, it would probably do well on market!..
Mod parent up! I was going to post nearly the EXACT same thing. Censorship is COMPLETELY different than what's going on at the olympics.
Slashdot, News for Nerds, and baseless zealotry.
Well, DUH!! you cant just give away source code and not expect this to happen. This is what you open source people get!! /begin astroturfing
What's it matter what the internet was designed to do? It's the duty of corporations to bend laws and technological infrastructure to suit their own needs, right? ZD is only doing what any good corporation looking out for their shareholder's interests would do. /sarcasm
First off, I really like your post, but I disagree on this point.
I can understand the argument that spectrum should be handled like land (purchased and owned) but since radio spectrum is inherently public it cannot simply be run under land management laws. There would be no ability for small consumers to buy spectrum, and without efficient management you may end up with a few big chunks, and then millions of tiny inefficent chunks - consider hard disk fragmenting.
-Radio spectrum is not "inheirently public", that's only a perception you have. The same ideas can be applied to land, or any scarce resource. In order for something to be a public commodity, it has to have the ability to transmutate.. Like water and air is free flowing and moves, it is a public commodity. radio spectrum is very static and therefore saleable as if it were land.
-the spectrum would not become fragmented, because the economics would not allow it to become fragmented. it's far too valuable for that to even happen
-"Parcels" of spectrum would be defined by some sort of governing body; probably a reformed FCC. These parcels would be defined by land contours affecting said radio spectrum, and then sold to the "highest bidder". they would not be allowed to shrink, they would cover a certain area at a certain band, and thats it.
-Why would we care about small consumers buying spectrum? You would need a company to effectively use a piece of spectrum, I'm having a hard time imagining a situation where this would be actually be needed. The cost of spectrum is going to be so high, that a company with a product is the only thing that could buy spectrum, be it TV or radio or otherwise..
-There would still be public spectrum (just like there is still public land) This spectrum would be set aside and allocated appropriately by whatever would theoretically replace the FCC, for use by the public.
-The FCC has taken up censorship, a duty its wholly unsuited for.
it needs to go, in my opinion. no question about it.
we need one more story mentioning some form of dutch for the trifecta.
how often does that happen.
There are cartridges available for GBA's that are upwards of 256 megs of flash memory, writeable from PC's and such. Pretty neat.
someoen post an example.
here's the pilot info:
A young boy's father wants the right to use the boy's genetic embryo clone to develop a baby who could donate a portion of his liver to save him. The firm also takes on the case of a boy band that is suing its lead singer for not adhering to his contract to keep up his physical appearance.
It doesn't look like they are going to tbe dealing with technology very much/not at all.
moreover, it looks like the 2 issues they picked for their pilot are both things that don't require much foresight to envision, not to mention that the clone thing should happen alot sooner then 25 yrs..
Sorry man, im not interested in typing grammatically correct on slashdot. i dont want to come to slashdot and type out some doctoral thesis for peer review. it's not a reason to attack me, ass :)
o n
that said, i agree with what you said except your attacks on me, of course.
i left out something important, and that is that the internet makes the understanding of things much more important. availability of information stresses the fundamentals rather than ROTE (thank you for the correction) memorization.
fundamentals being:
resourcefulness
understanding
implicati
application
and many more related skills that were necessary BEFORE ready access to information, but now have taken on an increased role, while others have taken on a DECREASED role, because inheirent knowledge of information is much less important.
one other skill, which before was nice to have, but now EXTREMELY IMPORTANT, is the ability to decipher bullshit. the internet is a huge source of it, and having the above fundamentals in place, combined with this ability, really does make you a "fricken star" to other people that don't have these skills, like bosses and peers.
and to type this all without sounding too aloof.
;) im not a psychological expert for sure.
I think the major diff between smart people and dumb people is that dumb people don't have to think about everything so analytically. that's not to say there aren't smart people who can think analytically about social situations, but just that is something that takes time to develop. Also not to say all smart people develop the ability to emulate social skills either.
my opinion is that in smart people, social skills is a developed trait, while in most people, they don't have to think about it because they aren't focused enough to let it get above suboncious level.
when you're a kid, there hasn't been time yet. kids aren't really rational about anything, even the smartest ones. myself at the time included, even tho i thought i knew it all.
my best advice would be to sit him down and try to explain in an analytical way how social skills are just another thing for him to dominate his peers in. i think that would've motivated me more, before i had figured out that I had to teach myself how to emulate the social skills that appear relevant in others, yet lacking in smart people.
but who knows honestly
I can't begin to state how much having the internet has affected myself, and society as a whole.
Never before have the key values of resourcefulness and problem solving been so apparant in individuals and the work place, where before wrote memorized knowledge was necessary.
Having the internet, and refined resourcefulness trumps anyone who has wrote memorized anything. With the internet as a resource, instead of a 30 book bound volume set of encyclopedias, a resourceful person can find answers and implement them in minutes, where before it could take an hour to find information, and then more than a few hours to then find that information was OUT OF DATE.
i love the internet and everything it's done for me. I'm not a super genius, but being extremely efficient and resourceful, and knowing how to use google, has made me look like a fricken star both to peers and my employer.
-Jeff
i think the real interpretation of the compound word "near miss" is that it was near, yet still a miss.
being critical of the term "near miss" being mutually exclusive is infact a mis-understanding of the term.
in my experience, certifications don't mean that much.
What they do mean, is that someone is booksmart enough to sit there and study the material, go in, and take a test. They don't mean the individual can actually fix anything.
In any technical job, be it mechanical or information, the fundamentals of troubleshooting and resourcefulness are far more important than any piece of paper.
i put alot more stock in good references and job experience than certs..
ALL THAT SAID THOUGH:
HR and employers are still waking up to the facts mentioned above. so no matter what the reality is with certs, the problem remains; how can you prove yourself a good technician if you can't get hired.
companies are getting better at recognizing intrinsic skill rather than going whats on a resume, but that has a long way left to go.
i didn't get any certs tho, because i refuse to pay money for something i don't need. i can do my job just fine without a piece of paper to help me along, heh.
you're obviously missing the last part of that sentance that says "to the surface"
the mars rovers are not landing on the surface without a cushioning technique as a manned mission would
I won't doubt you're more qualified than me here, but here's my response.
/different/ you could approximate it, but nothing exactly.
now realize i also wrote the above reply in 5 mins because im at work. im still at work, but ill try to be a little more detailed.
what i mean to say, is that the exacting requirements of a to-0 landing is such that leaving it to just a computer program would be a mistake.
that computer program would have to take into account many variables during the firing of its retros, including but not limited to; sideways movement, deceleration of the craft caused by chutes, air resistance that can be expected EXACTLY, the exact gravity of mars(so it knows how much retro to apply) etc etc
all of these together are not testable on earth, because mars is
thats the real genius of the bounce technique, is that it takes all these unknowns/semi-unknowns and mitigates their risk by reducing the variables. if you drop it from a known height, you don't have to get the downward velocity to exactly 0 so that the landing G's don't crush the ship. you already know about how hard of G's to design for.
you can approximate all the factors in a simulation, but then you have to program something to react appropriately, and it can become very complicated indeed.
the reason why a human can do the direct surface landing is because a human pilot has the ability to feel a situation and adjust accordingly out of the box. as a programmer, i say good luck designing something that can do all that and do it right.
that delivery method would not be used of course.
the reason it was used is because it reduces the variables of an automatic landing. you can test drop something from 150 feet off the ground all day, but you cant test a landing by a computer program using retro rockets.
in a manned mission, the landing would be by parachute with retro rockets to slow acceleration to 0 on the surface, because the trained pilot has that ability.
currently, programs don't have that ability, so they didn't do it.
-jeff