This article is a classic example of how bright people often fail to understand how the average person thinks. "You people aren't behaving the way I want you to behave! You need to do better!" Berners-Lee is wasting his breath, and really ought to know better himself.
You want to create a "civilized" version of Twitter, Berners-Lee? Great, go ahead and create a Twitter that forces people into your desired mode of behavior. Of course, don't be surprised if no one wants to use it after you create it. Twitter is pure anarchy, and that's why it appeals to people. No one I know who uses Twitter expects it to be anything else.
Exactly what kind of living hell are we talking about ? This is the part I don't understand... it's a civil suit, so all they can do is win a judgment worth $X, which he likely does not have, so he would go bankrupt. End of story.
If bankruptcy could shield you from civil judgments, every loser in a civil case would immediately go bankrupt and walk away, thumbing his nose at the plaintiff. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
Only certain classes of debts and obligations are discharged by bankruptcy. In general, civil penalties due to negligence or malicious intent on your part are not, although certain types of assets (e.g. your home) may be exempt from being attached as payment.
Geohot could very well have faced a multi-million dollar penalty, with a large chunk of every paycheck attached for the rest of his life.
You can't argue these points, because the facts are immutable. Geohot could have continued to write software for his own PS3, never told a soul nor released exploits, and been happy as a clam forever. Ego motivated him to crow, fear motivated him to limit how much. Not fear that what he was doing was intrinsically wrong or unethical, but fear that he would be punished for reasons nobody fully understands. This has now happened, and the status quo is unchanged. People donating to hopefully to have somebody else fight for them really should have picked a better champion.
Oh, I'm not arguing your points. Geohot made a mistake that many people his age make, i.e. "don't let your mouth write a check that your ass can't cash".
Ego, immaturity, and false bravado got him into this mess. A hard dose of reality showed him the way out, and he wisely took it.
No offense - but wasn't it Hotz himself that went into this with a battle cry and asked for donations for his defense and so forth and so on? If he hadn't done that - if he had "wisely decided" to immediately go for a settlement, people might have still called him a pussy (as that's what some people do) - but at least they wouldn't have much reason for calling him out on his behavior.
Sure, when Mr. Hotz got that first cease-and-desist letter, I'm sure he thought: "I gonna beat these assholes! My fellow hackers will rally to help me!" Maybe he reads Slashdot - no doubt he could have picked up lots of bogus bravado from this crowd.
And then he had one of those "growing up" epiphanies that most 20- and 21-year-olds go through, where you realize that empty words of support mean nothing, and that while many will cheer you on as you march into the lion's den, damn few will stand by you against the lions.
As for the donations, I doubt that Geohot collected enough money to pay for a week of a good lawyer's time, much less enough to fight a real court battle. If his attorney worked pro bono, maybe he'll have something left to give to the EFF - but frankly, I wouldn't count on it.
Geohot learned a hard lesson about the real world, and wisely opted not to ruin his own life just to make a lot of strangers happy. I don't fault him one bit.
What, so people are disappointed that Geohot didn't wreck his life to fulfill their armchair fantasies? "I gave you $20, and you won't ruin your life to make me happy? You SUCK, Geohot!"
Get real. I've had some dealings in civil cases, and let me say that there are few things in this world as life-destroying and gut-wrenching as being a defendant in a civil case against a plaintiff with lots of money and a willingness to do whatever it takes to crush you.
It is very easy for people with l33t nicknames to criticize Geohot behind the safety of an anonymous computer account. It is another to sit in a room with a group of highly paid lawyers who explain to you in excruciating detail how your life will be made a living hell if you don't cooperate.
Geohot got in over his head, and wisely decided to settle and get on with his life. If Geohot's critics want to fight the good fight instead, all they have to do is repost his techniques on a web page of their own, and wait for Sony to come calling. Somehow I don't think that's gonna happen.
All humor aside, it is worth noting that the description of the "aliens" coincides perfectly with the image of "little green men" common in movies, books, and comics of the era. After "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" became a hit, the imagery of popular culture changed, and the descriptions of aliens shifted accordingly.
As you read the alien encounter stories from the 50's and 60's, it becomes quite obvious how the stories of extraterrestrial visitation are basically rehashed images from popular culture of the time, with the aliens possessing none of the day-to-day technology that is so commonplace today - because it didn't exist in movies and TV shows.
I have no doubt that 40 or 50 years from now, our grandchildren will find today's stories of close encounters equally amusing, because they all lack some "obvious" technological development that the aliens did not possess.
I will never understand why wikiepdia is so frenzied about deletions. If an article is relevant and of good quality, it should stay. It is not like they are going to run out of bytes, I just don't get it.
It's the Wikipedia "split personality" syndrome.
On one hand, Wikipedia wants to be taken seriously as an information resource, so the editors delete huge swathes of articles because they aren't "notable", i.e. "a real encyclopedia wouldn't publish an article like this, so get rid of it".
On the other hand, Wikipedia wants to preserve its culture of "any idiot with a keyboard and an agenda has just as much right to edit an article as an expert in the subject".
The problem is that those two viewpoints are in complete opposition to each other. Wikipedia cannot have its cake and eat it too. Frankly I thought it was a much better online reference when it allowed all those obscure articles, and didn't take itself so seriously.
Sure, I could contribute some detailed articles in my area of expertise - and then I would have to fight a never-ending battle to keep my contributions from being mangled by someone who thinks he understands the subject, but really is barely more than an addled sociopath with an agenda. Been there, done that - never again.
While Wikipedia is a great reference for pop culture, it is not the place for a serious academic articles - not unless some major changes are made to the way articles are edited and administered. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
I was with a group that was suppose to support the medical R&D with statistics and the like for their publications. It was hard working getting them to do anything more than plug a few numbers into a website for a t-test. One guy came with a data set and asked us to show the difference in some measured parameter between the control and experimental group. We could show that there was no statistical difference. The guy said, and i really am quoting him here, "That's why people don't bring you their data!", and stormed out of the meeting room.
Unfortunately, you see a -lot- of that sort of fuzzy thinking in medical and biomedical research. I was asked to be part of a medical survey group after I went through a routine medical procedure last year. The written survey they sent me was almost laughable. I was asked more than a hundred specific questions about my dietary and exercise habits going back over the past three years. Assuming I could even answer those questions from memory, knowing what the "right" answers are supposed to be would have made it incredibly easy for me to tell the researchers what they wanted to hear.
Unfortunately, that is how much of medical research works. You rely on the patients providing you with data, rather than taking it yourself. You rely on the patients being accurate and truthful about their behavior and habits. And then, if the data you get back doesn't show any statistically significant trend from all that garbage input, you throw out data points until it does!
Frankly, I'm astonished that medical science has progressed as much as it has, given the horrible experimental methodology. What passes for "data" in medicine would barely qualify as noise in most engineering disciplines.
And another thing.. Moto only bet the barn on Android on the back of some shockingly bad management decisions. For years they just kept recycling the RAZR.. about two dozen times.. until almost all their customer base had vanished.
Motorola self-destructed when it hopped onto the "six sigma" bandwagon back in the 80's. Even today, most of the energy of Motorola management is still expended on "improving" internal processes while ignoring the external market and neglecting innovation while entire product lines collapse.
It is self-destructive navel-gazing, and after so many years it has become so ingrained into the Motorola culture that nothing short of acquisition or bankruptcy will ever change it.
In short - this new initiative by Motorola will do nothing to save them. They have marginalized themselves in the wireless and smartphone markets, and nothing is going to change that.
I'd be willing to bet that the use of the telephone (one of the greatest social inventions of all time) is linked to just about 100% of all divorces, as well.
What is it with everyone trying to blame Facebook and Craigslist for all the ills of the world? They are tools, and nothing more. But they are new, and so I guess that makes them suspicious, doesn't it?
Is a publication worth it to an undergraduate, even if it's only published in the conference proceedings? Absolutely, for several reasons:
(1) You have the experience of writing and formatting a technical article. (2) You have the experience of presenting your technical work in front of an audience. (3) You get to meet new people in a completely different venue, and can potentially network with future employers and faculty from different universities. (4) You can have a lot of fun sightseeing or touring the town after hours.
Keep in mind that if you are thinking about going to graduate school, you'll want to submit your work to an archival journal after the conference, as conference proceedings don't count for much in the hard-line academic world. For someone at your level, however, it's still a good experience even if you take a job immediately after graduation.
However, having said all of that - you should not be paying your own expenses. If your professor is pushing you to attend, then he or she should be willing to pay for it. Some schools also set aside money for students in your situation; check with the Dean's office and see if you can apply for a travel stipend.
Nowadays, conference registration fees plus travel plus hotel room plus meals can easily hit a couple of thousand dollars. That's a lot of money for a student to pay out of pocket. Yes, going to a conference is worthwhile, but (in my opinion) not that worthwhile. If your work is really that good, you can get most of the benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost by submitting it directly to a journal.
Irconically it may be that in Egypt they won't need it after all. US envoy has told Mubarak they recommend him not to run again, not to participate in transition.
There's no way the Egyptians will accept half measures from Mubarak at this point, and I doubt Mubarak is foolish enough to think they will.
Mubarak is trying to buy time while he empties out his bank accounts and hides his loot. He'll be headed to Saudi Arabia before the week is out.
I see what you're saying, but the actual logic goes like this:
35,000 accidents, with (say) 32,000 causes versus 10000 accidents with one cause.
Whilst you and I would say "yeah, but we can concentrate on the one cause, and fix it, and besides, we've had a net-gain", the world says "I want no part of that one thing". No one said it was logical, but it's how things will go.
But I don't think it will be "one cause". Autonomous auto design will not be a monoculture, any more than current auto design is. Specific models made in specific model years may have specific types of failures, e.g. the recent Toyota Prius situation, but those failures will be addressed as in years past, i.e. recalls, government regulations, and legal action.
Granted, if everyone was forced to use some sort of centralized control, that would be begging for trouble. But the current trend in autonomous design is for each vehicle to act and react independently.
Even if it is much safer, the lawyers will be salivating while they wait for the first death.
I think the fear of lawsuits preventing autonomous vehicles is way overblown.
Historically, the auto industry has had several design flaws that have led to huge lawsuits, e.g. exploding gas tanks on the Ford Pinto. Ford's gas tank design led to numerous deaths and injuries, and corporate memos later showed that the company was even aware of the problem, yet Ford was not sued out of business. Even today, with all the fuss and lawsuits concerning Toyota's computer systems, Toyota is doing just fine. Lawsuits are part of the cost of doing business in the auto industry.
The technology being used in autonomous vehicle research was, by modern standards, painfully primitive 20 or 30 years ago. I could see how people would fear legal liability, because those older systems weren't smart enough to deal with every contingency in a roadway environment. Today's research vehicles are much better, and in ten years they'll be even better still.
The question to ask is this: can autonomous vehicles do better than 35,000+ fatalities, 2 million+ injuries, and $200B+ in liability / medical costs per year? That's what the U.S. alone is paying right now with humans behind the wheel. 20 years ago, engineers knew their vehicles weren't robust enough for the roadway. As Google's own experiments have recently shown, things are much different now.
There's no doubt that autonomous vehicles will fail from time to time, and occasionally someone will be injured. But fatalities from a well-engineered system will be rare, and the roadways will be orders of magnitude safer. The fear of autonomous vehicles is basically a classic example of flawed risk perception by human beings - they are uncomfortable with a few hundred possible auto accidents with a computer in control, yet think nothing of millions of accidents with the current system because they all think "I'm in control of the situation".
Script kiddies aren't smart enough to code their own exploits. They rely on other people to release their code and then use / abuse it.
The feds should take a page from the RIAA playbook and release their own trojan versions of exploit kits, permitting them to track these little snots, or at least wipe their drives. It won't stop the hardcore professionals, but at least this tactic would weed out many of the braindead wannabes.
Stop bolting technology onto a 19th century design. How about designing something from the ground up that solves the issues of our time ? We already have something that allows you to do other things while traveling, it's called a train.
Spoken like a young, healthy individual who doesn't have to carry a large load of groceries or manage a couple of children while walking several blocks in bad weather. Personally, I prefer to walk the 1.5 miles back and forth to work every day. However, I recognize that my preference is not equivalent to a mandate for the rest of society.
No train will take you from your destination to your driveway. As Google's experiments in automated driving have already shown, the autonomous automobile is much closer than we think. By 2020 you'll be able to buy a luxury vehicle with the option of autonomous navigation. By 2030 practically all vehicles will have it. When the day comes that any one of us can hit a button and let the computer take over while we read, nap, eat, deal with the kids, etc., we'll all wonder how we got along without it. Plus, that money pit called "pubic transportation" (e.g. subways and trains) will, in most cities, die a well-deserved death in favor of fleets of autonomous public vehicles that are cheaper, faster, and will deliver you exactly where you want to go.
What constantly surprises me is the visceral knee-jerk reaction so many people have against the concept of autonomous transportation. I suspect that many people equate driving with freedom (a byproduct of their teenage years) and somehow see the coming revolution in autonomous vehicles as taking something away from them. In fact, it will be exactly the opposite: autonomous vehicles will give you back your freedom and your time, rather than force you to deal with the drudgery and boredom that >95% of driving actually is, or the inconvenience and time sink that >95% of public transportation actually is.
Regrettably, I have seen factual reports from a fairly reliable source (The Economist) that exactly what GP said is happening, A lot of flood relief money is sticking to fingers or being routed to the preferted groups rather than the needy groups.
It may or may not be racist, but Pakistan has a pretty corrupt administration.
And I have read the exact same reports, hence my original post. It is not racist to point out the truth of the situation in Pakistan, any more than it is racist to point out that a huge portion of the Haitian earthquake relief money is being diverted / stolen / squandered in exactly the same way.
It is regrettable that the people of Haiti and Pakistan must suffer with the governments they have, but that doesn't change the fact that most of the money that has been donated for those causes hasn't done anything except line the pockets of the criminal elite.
The SES already had to rescue some moron who thought it'd be fun to canoe down the raging torrent that is now the Brisbane River earlier this afternoon.
When Nashville flooded last year, an 18-year-old man decided to go tubing down a creek near his apartment when the flood waters began to rise. He was last seen as his tube slammed into a bridge overpass. They found his body about two weeks later.
You really have to wonder about the long-term prospects of those who see raging floodwaters and think: "Hey, that looks like fun!" It's tempting to let Darwin sort things out instead.
I think a donation to rebuilding flooded areas in Pakistan would achieve more.
A donation to rebuild flooded areas in Pakistan will almost certainly wind up in the pockets of a corrupt government official or anti-Western mullah.
Australia may be a wealthy country in the grand scheme of things, but that doesn't mean that individuals affected by the flooding can't use some additional help. And unlike Pakistan, your donation to Australian flood relief has an infinitely greater chance of actually making to the people affected by the disaster.
John Rennie is just pissed that he can't command such nice speaking fees.
I was thinking the same thing after reading the article. Jealous much, Mr. Rennie?
To those who didn't bother to RTFA, John Rennie was the editor-in-chief for Scientific American from 1994 to 2009. You know, the guy who took a formerly great science periodical and ran it into the ground by turning it into a magazine full of puff-piece op-eds masquerading as science articles.
Most of Kurzweil's ventures have been a success. Rennie, on the other hand, ruined Scientific American, and now all he can do is snipe at someone who has been far more successful than he could ever hope to be.
Many jurors go into the courtroom with the idea that their purpose is to convict criminals and make them pay, and that anybody who is a defendant must be a criminal. They think the defendants are not like themselves at all. The do not think they are peers.
That's a pretty sweeping generalization, and in my opinion (having served on two criminal court juries) it is not true. Jurors really do take the "innocent until proven guilty" meme very seriously. There is one thing that a jury will focus on: Does the defendant (or the defendant's attorney) tell a consistent and plausible story? Outright lies and implausible circumstances do not get past a good jury, and jurors tend to be harsher when they feel they've been lied to by the defendant. Judges, on the other hand, are used to hearing people lie in court, and they take it more in stride.
The fact that different juries have socked her with $1M+ penalties tells me that they perceived her story not only as implausible, but as an insultingly obvious pack of lies. She clearly tampered with the evidence (her computer's hard drive) and claimed that she was not the person who used her computer. The jury didn't believe her, and rightly so.
If Ms. Thomas in unhappy with the verdict, she has no one to blame but herself. She should have accepted the judge's $54K verdict and walked away, but instead she rolled the dice and told the same pack of lies that got her the first $1M+ penalty.
And before people start flaming me: I am not commenting on whether the amount of the penalty is fair, but it is the law, and Ms. Thomas made a major mistake when she chose to lie to a jury of her peers.
Why o you think 50% would be lucky? modern power line loss is around 7%.
7% is the power line loss. Then you need AC-to-DC conversion of the power, and a current control regulator that can handle thousands of amperes of current. That's probably another 10% loss. Then (unfortunately), the recharging of the battery itself generates significant amounts of heat within the battery, as does the discharging process. (Ever noticed how hot your lithium laptop battery gets?) Assuming that you had 100 kW of waste heat during that 1 MW fast recharge, you'd cook the battery, the car, and the occupants inside it unless you provide some means of refrigeration of the battery during charging, adding to even more loss.
It all adds up. You can quibble over the exact numbers, but the energy loss will be significant throughout the entire charging / usage cycle.
Refueling average would be closer to 10 days.
Okay, so assuming perfectly lossless recharging and a refueling cycle of 10 days instead of 7, we're still talking about 600 kW delivered on a continuous basis to every refueling station in the U.S. That's 2500 A @ 240 V, and that's a best case calculation. Of course, there's no way you're going to shove that much current through a 240 V power line - the I^2R losses would ruin you. So instead, you'd need a 10 kV high-voltage transmission line to each and every station, to drop the current to 60 A. How practical do you think that would be?
And what would be wrong with building 136 Modern nuclear power plants?
Why wouldn't they build 1.8GW plants instead of 1GW?
And considering Gen IV plants can yield 3 times that with the same amount of material, It's not really a problem.
From my viewpoint, there's absolutely nothing wrong with building that many nuclear power plants. I only wish we had started 20 or 30 years ago. I'm as pro-nuke as you can get, but even I can't see adding that much nuclear capacity over the next 20 years. Too many people will fight it.
But my point remains. We are not going to replace chemical fuels anytime soon. Electric cars will have their place, and I for one would love an affordable plug-in hybrid. But there's simply no way that we will switch over to an all-electric vehicle fleet anytime soon. You cannot argue away the numbers, or the laws of physics.
And the issue of long haul trips and fast charging is also bogus because the same trickle charge that works at home would also be implemented at the station in the form of storage. Assuming recharge stations would need instantaneous demand from the power distribution system is like assuming gasoline stations must rely on an instantaneous supply of tanker trucks to refill cars.
Look at my calculations again. The 1.67 MW value is the trickle value. In other words, if a station does a fast recharge of 200 cars per day, it needs that much power delivered to it 24/7.
You can calculate it another way. Refueling 200 cars a day requires about 2000 gallons of gasoline. A gallon contains 130 MJ of energy, so the total energy is 260 GJ. That much energy is equivalent to a 3 MW power plant running at full capacity 24 hour a day.
Unfortunately, people have no appreciation of just how much energy is contained in chemical fuels. It makes the energy content of lithium batteries look tame by comparison. Large scale electric recharging is simply not feasible unless the recharging station is right next door to an electric power plant.
Why do people struggle with this? To provide the charging current needed to charge in 6 minutes, all you need is a charging station that is topped up by the grid but uses a large battery (of batteries). The peak current to charge the car is taken care off by the batteries and the average daily usage at the station is supplied by the grid.
Maybe the reason why people struggle with it is because they actually do the math.
Let's assume the local gas station just around the corner fuels around 200 cars a day over a 16 hour period. It decides to switch over to an all-electric recharging system. Furthermore, let's assume the customers all drive fast charging electric cars that require 1 MW for 6 minutes. Just to make it interesting, let's also assume the charging is completely lossless.
So, that former gas station would need to supply 1E6 * 6 * 60 * 200 joules every day to recharge those vehicles. Over a 24 hour period, it would be pulling 833 kW from the mains to trickle charge the battery array at the station, or 3472 A @ 240 V. A modern nuclear power plant can supply 1.1 GW on a continuous basis, so that means the entire output of that nuclear power plant, if devoted to charging electric vehicles, would be sufficient to supply 1,320 converted gas stations.
Now assuming that the average driver refuels his vehicle once a week, that means that those 1,320 refueling stations are sufficient to service 1.85M electric vehicles. There are estimated to be 251M passenger vehicles in the U.S. alone, so we only need to build 136 modern 1.1 GW nuclear power plants just to keep those vehicles running.
But of course, I assumed lossless energy transport, storage, and charging. Realistically, the entire process may be 50% efficient if we are lucky. So actually we need to build 272 brand new nuclear power plants, and that local converted gas station will be pulling an average of 1.67 MW from the grid.
Now frankly, the total added generation capacity is not that outrageous. The U.S. electric generation capacity is about 750 GW, so adding an extra 300 GW is expensive, but doable. On the other hand, efficiently supplying a continuous average of 1.67 MW of electric power to every gas station in the U.S., including those in remote areas and on remote roads, is a complete pipe dream unless someone comes up with room temperature superconductors.
Electric vehicles will work fine if they are trickle-charged nightly from home mains, and used for short commutes each day. But for long-haul trips, or fast refueling of large numbers of vehicles, nothing is going to replace chemical fuels anytime soon.
Slashdot Mirror
This article is a classic example of how bright people often fail to understand how the average person thinks. "You people aren't behaving the way I want you to behave! You need to do better!" Berners-Lee is wasting his breath, and really ought to know better himself.
You want to create a "civilized" version of Twitter, Berners-Lee? Great, go ahead and create a Twitter that forces people into your desired mode of behavior. Of course, don't be surprised if no one wants to use it after you create it. Twitter is pure anarchy, and that's why it appeals to people. No one I know who uses Twitter expects it to be anything else.
I think that an older Slashdot posting about Twitter is still appropriate: http://apple.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1223191&cid=27841127
If bankruptcy could shield you from civil judgments, every loser in a civil case would immediately go bankrupt and walk away, thumbing his nose at the plaintiff. Sorry, it doesn't work that way.
Only certain classes of debts and obligations are discharged by bankruptcy. In general, civil penalties due to negligence or malicious intent on your part are not, although certain types of assets (e.g. your home) may be exempt from being attached as payment.
Geohot could very well have faced a multi-million dollar penalty, with a large chunk of every paycheck attached for the rest of his life.
Oh, I'm not arguing your points. Geohot made a mistake that many people his age make, i.e. "don't let your mouth write a check that your ass can't cash".
Ego, immaturity, and false bravado got him into this mess. A hard dose of reality showed him the way out, and he wisely took it.
Sure, when Mr. Hotz got that first cease-and-desist letter, I'm sure he thought: "I gonna beat these assholes! My fellow hackers will rally to help me!" Maybe he reads Slashdot - no doubt he could have picked up lots of bogus bravado from this crowd.
And then he had one of those "growing up" epiphanies that most 20- and 21-year-olds go through, where you realize that empty words of support mean nothing, and that while many will cheer you on as you march into the lion's den, damn few will stand by you against the lions.
As for the donations, I doubt that Geohot collected enough money to pay for a week of a good lawyer's time, much less enough to fight a real court battle. If his attorney worked pro bono, maybe he'll have something left to give to the EFF - but frankly, I wouldn't count on it.
Geohot learned a hard lesson about the real world, and wisely opted not to ruin his own life just to make a lot of strangers happy. I don't fault him one bit.
What, so people are disappointed that Geohot didn't wreck his life to fulfill their armchair fantasies? "I gave you $20, and you won't ruin your life to make me happy? You SUCK, Geohot!"
Get real. I've had some dealings in civil cases, and let me say that there are few things in this world as life-destroying and gut-wrenching as being a defendant in a civil case against a plaintiff with lots of money and a willingness to do whatever it takes to crush you.
It is very easy for people with l33t nicknames to criticize Geohot behind the safety of an anonymous computer account. It is another to sit in a room with a group of highly paid lawyers who explain to you in excruciating detail how your life will be made a living hell if you don't cooperate.
Geohot got in over his head, and wisely decided to settle and get on with his life. If Geohot's critics want to fight the good fight instead, all they have to do is repost his techniques on a web page of their own, and wait for Sony to come calling. Somehow I don't think that's gonna happen.
All humor aside, it is worth noting that the description of the "aliens" coincides perfectly with the image of "little green men" common in movies, books, and comics of the era. After "Close Encounters of the Third Kind" became a hit, the imagery of popular culture changed, and the descriptions of aliens shifted accordingly.
As you read the alien encounter stories from the 50's and 60's, it becomes quite obvious how the stories of extraterrestrial visitation are basically rehashed images from popular culture of the time, with the aliens possessing none of the day-to-day technology that is so commonplace today - because it didn't exist in movies and TV shows.
I have no doubt that 40 or 50 years from now, our grandchildren will find today's stories of close encounters equally amusing, because they all lack some "obvious" technological development that the aliens did not possess.
It's the Wikipedia "split personality" syndrome.
On one hand, Wikipedia wants to be taken seriously as an information resource, so the editors delete huge swathes of articles because they aren't "notable", i.e. "a real encyclopedia wouldn't publish an article like this, so get rid of it".
On the other hand, Wikipedia wants to preserve its culture of "any idiot with a keyboard and an agenda has just as much right to edit an article as an expert in the subject".
The problem is that those two viewpoints are in complete opposition to each other. Wikipedia cannot have its cake and eat it too. Frankly I thought it was a much better online reference when it allowed all those obscure articles, and didn't take itself so seriously.
Sure, I could contribute some detailed articles in my area of expertise - and then I would have to fight a never-ending battle to keep my contributions from being mangled by someone who thinks he understands the subject, but really is barely more than an addled sociopath with an agenda. Been there, done that - never again.
While Wikipedia is a great reference for pop culture, it is not the place for a serious academic articles - not unless some major changes are made to the way articles are edited and administered. I don't see that happening anytime soon.
Unfortunately, you see a -lot- of that sort of fuzzy thinking in medical and biomedical research. I was asked to be part of a medical survey group after I went through a routine medical procedure last year. The written survey they sent me was almost laughable. I was asked more than a hundred specific questions about my dietary and exercise habits going back over the past three years. Assuming I could even answer those questions from memory, knowing what the "right" answers are supposed to be would have made it incredibly easy for me to tell the researchers what they wanted to hear.
Unfortunately, that is how much of medical research works. You rely on the patients providing you with data, rather than taking it yourself. You rely on the patients being accurate and truthful about their behavior and habits. And then, if the data you get back doesn't show any statistically significant trend from all that garbage input, you throw out data points until it does!
Frankly, I'm astonished that medical science has progressed as much as it has, given the horrible experimental methodology. What passes for "data" in medicine would barely qualify as noise in most engineering disciplines.
Motorola self-destructed when it hopped onto the "six sigma" bandwagon back in the 80's. Even today, most of the energy of Motorola management is still expended on "improving" internal processes while ignoring the external market and neglecting innovation while entire product lines collapse.
It is self-destructive navel-gazing, and after so many years it has become so ingrained into the Motorola culture that nothing short of acquisition or bankruptcy will ever change it.
In short - this new initiative by Motorola will do nothing to save them. They have marginalized themselves in the wireless and smartphone markets, and nothing is going to change that.
I'd be willing to bet that the use of the telephone (one of the greatest social inventions of all time) is linked to just about 100% of all divorces, as well.
What is it with everyone trying to blame Facebook and Craigslist for all the ills of the world? They are tools, and nothing more. But they are new, and so I guess that makes them suspicious, doesn't it?
Is a publication worth it to an undergraduate, even if it's only published in the conference proceedings? Absolutely, for several reasons:
(1) You have the experience of writing and formatting a technical article.
(2) You have the experience of presenting your technical work in front of an audience.
(3) You get to meet new people in a completely different venue, and can potentially network with future employers and faculty from different universities.
(4) You can have a lot of fun sightseeing or touring the town after hours.
Keep in mind that if you are thinking about going to graduate school, you'll want to submit your work to an archival journal after the conference, as conference proceedings don't count for much in the hard-line academic world. For someone at your level, however, it's still a good experience even if you take a job immediately after graduation.
However, having said all of that - you should not be paying your own expenses. If your professor is pushing you to attend, then he or she should be willing to pay for it. Some schools also set aside money for students in your situation; check with the Dean's office and see if you can apply for a travel stipend.
Nowadays, conference registration fees plus travel plus hotel room plus meals can easily hit a couple of thousand dollars. That's a lot of money for a student to pay out of pocket. Yes, going to a conference is worthwhile, but (in my opinion) not that worthwhile. If your work is really that good, you can get most of the benefit at a tiny fraction of the cost by submitting it directly to a journal.
There's no way the Egyptians will accept half measures from Mubarak at this point, and I doubt Mubarak is foolish enough to think they will.
Mubarak is trying to buy time while he empties out his bank accounts and hides his loot. He'll be headed to Saudi Arabia before the week is out.
But I don't think it will be "one cause". Autonomous auto design will not be a monoculture, any more than current auto design is. Specific models made in specific model years may have specific types of failures, e.g. the recent Toyota Prius situation, but those failures will be addressed as in years past, i.e. recalls, government regulations, and legal action.
Granted, if everyone was forced to use some sort of centralized control, that would be begging for trouble. But the current trend in autonomous design is for each vehicle to act and react independently.
I think the fear of lawsuits preventing autonomous vehicles is way overblown.
Historically, the auto industry has had several design flaws that have led to huge lawsuits, e.g. exploding gas tanks on the Ford Pinto. Ford's gas tank design led to numerous deaths and injuries, and corporate memos later showed that the company was even aware of the problem, yet Ford was not sued out of business. Even today, with all the fuss and lawsuits concerning Toyota's computer systems, Toyota is doing just fine. Lawsuits are part of the cost of doing business in the auto industry.
The technology being used in autonomous vehicle research was, by modern standards, painfully primitive 20 or 30 years ago. I could see how people would fear legal liability, because those older systems weren't smart enough to deal with every contingency in a roadway environment. Today's research vehicles are much better, and in ten years they'll be even better still.
The question to ask is this: can autonomous vehicles do better than 35,000+ fatalities, 2 million+ injuries, and $200B+ in liability / medical costs per year? That's what the U.S. alone is paying right now with humans behind the wheel. 20 years ago, engineers knew their vehicles weren't robust enough for the roadway. As Google's own experiments have recently shown, things are much different now.
There's no doubt that autonomous vehicles will fail from time to time, and occasionally someone will be injured. But fatalities from a well-engineered system will be rare, and the roadways will be orders of magnitude safer. The fear of autonomous vehicles is basically a classic example of flawed risk perception by human beings - they are uncomfortable with a few hundred possible auto accidents with a computer in control, yet think nothing of millions of accidents with the current system because they all think "I'm in control of the situation".
The feds should take a page from the RIAA playbook and release their own trojan versions of exploit kits, permitting them to track these little snots, or at least wipe their drives. It won't stop the hardcore professionals, but at least this tactic would weed out many of the braindead wannabes.
Spoken like a young, healthy individual who doesn't have to carry a large load of groceries or manage a couple of children while walking several blocks in bad weather. Personally, I prefer to walk the 1.5 miles back and forth to work every day. However, I recognize that my preference is not equivalent to a mandate for the rest of society.
No train will take you from your destination to your driveway. As Google's experiments in automated driving have already shown, the autonomous automobile is much closer than we think. By 2020 you'll be able to buy a luxury vehicle with the option of autonomous navigation. By 2030 practically all vehicles will have it. When the day comes that any one of us can hit a button and let the computer take over while we read, nap, eat, deal with the kids, etc., we'll all wonder how we got along without it. Plus, that money pit called "pubic transportation" (e.g. subways and trains) will, in most cities, die a well-deserved death in favor of fleets of autonomous public vehicles that are cheaper, faster, and will deliver you exactly where you want to go.
What constantly surprises me is the visceral knee-jerk reaction so many people have against the concept of autonomous transportation. I suspect that many people equate driving with freedom (a byproduct of their teenage years) and somehow see the coming revolution in autonomous vehicles as taking something away from them. In fact, it will be exactly the opposite: autonomous vehicles will give you back your freedom and your time, rather than force you to deal with the drudgery and boredom that >95% of driving actually is, or the inconvenience and time sink that >95% of public transportation actually is.
And I have read the exact same reports, hence my original post. It is not racist to point out the truth of the situation in Pakistan, any more than it is racist to point out that a huge portion of the Haitian earthquake relief money is being diverted / stolen / squandered in exactly the same way.
It is regrettable that the people of Haiti and Pakistan must suffer with the governments they have, but that doesn't change the fact that most of the money that has been donated for those causes hasn't done anything except line the pockets of the criminal elite.
When Nashville flooded last year, an 18-year-old man decided to go tubing down a creek near his apartment when the flood waters began to rise. He was last seen as his tube slammed into a bridge overpass. They found his body about two weeks later.
You really have to wonder about the long-term prospects of those who see raging floodwaters and think: "Hey, that looks like fun!" It's tempting to let Darwin sort things out instead.
A donation to rebuild flooded areas in Pakistan will almost certainly wind up in the pockets of a corrupt government official or anti-Western mullah.
Australia may be a wealthy country in the grand scheme of things, but that doesn't mean that individuals affected by the flooding can't use some additional help. And unlike Pakistan, your donation to Australian flood relief has an infinitely greater chance of actually making to the people affected by the disaster.
I was thinking the same thing after reading the article. Jealous much, Mr. Rennie?
To those who didn't bother to RTFA, John Rennie was the editor-in-chief for Scientific American from 1994 to 2009. You know, the guy who took a formerly great science periodical and ran it into the ground by turning it into a magazine full of puff-piece op-eds masquerading as science articles.
Most of Kurzweil's ventures have been a success. Rennie, on the other hand, ruined Scientific American, and now all he can do is snipe at someone who has been far more successful than he could ever hope to be.
That's a pretty sweeping generalization, and in my opinion (having served on two criminal court juries) it is not true. Jurors really do take the "innocent until proven guilty" meme very seriously. There is one thing that a jury will focus on: Does the defendant (or the defendant's attorney) tell a consistent and plausible story? Outright lies and implausible circumstances do not get past a good jury, and jurors tend to be harsher when they feel they've been lied to by the defendant. Judges, on the other hand, are used to hearing people lie in court, and they take it more in stride.
The fact that different juries have socked her with $1M+ penalties tells me that they perceived her story not only as implausible, but as an insultingly obvious pack of lies. She clearly tampered with the evidence (her computer's hard drive) and claimed that she was not the person who used her computer. The jury didn't believe her, and rightly so.
If Ms. Thomas in unhappy with the verdict, she has no one to blame but herself. She should have accepted the judge's $54K verdict and walked away, but instead she rolled the dice and told the same pack of lies that got her the first $1M+ penalty.
And before people start flaming me: I am not commenting on whether the amount of the penalty is fair, but it is the law, and Ms. Thomas made a major mistake when she chose to lie to a jury of her peers.
7% is the power line loss. Then you need AC-to-DC conversion of the power, and a current control regulator that can handle thousands of amperes of current. That's probably another 10% loss. Then (unfortunately), the recharging of the battery itself generates significant amounts of heat within the battery, as does the discharging process. (Ever noticed how hot your lithium laptop battery gets?) Assuming that you had 100 kW of waste heat during that 1 MW fast recharge, you'd cook the battery, the car, and the occupants inside it unless you provide some means of refrigeration of the battery during charging, adding to even more loss.
It all adds up. You can quibble over the exact numbers, but the energy loss will be significant throughout the entire charging / usage cycle.
Okay, so assuming perfectly lossless recharging and a refueling cycle of 10 days instead of 7, we're still talking about 600 kW delivered on a continuous basis to every refueling station in the U.S. That's 2500 A @ 240 V, and that's a best case calculation. Of course, there's no way you're going to shove that much current through a 240 V power line - the I^2R losses would ruin you. So instead, you'd need a 10 kV high-voltage transmission line to each and every station, to drop the current to 60 A. How practical do you think that would be?
From my viewpoint, there's absolutely nothing wrong with building that many nuclear power plants. I only wish we had started 20 or 30 years ago. I'm as pro-nuke as you can get, but even I can't see adding that much nuclear capacity over the next 20 years. Too many people will fight it.
But my point remains. We are not going to replace chemical fuels anytime soon. Electric cars will have their place, and I for one would love an affordable plug-in hybrid. But there's simply no way that we will switch over to an all-electric vehicle fleet anytime soon. You cannot argue away the numbers, or the laws of physics.
Look at my calculations again. The 1.67 MW value is the trickle value. In other words, if a station does a fast recharge of 200 cars per day, it needs that much power delivered to it 24/7.
You can calculate it another way. Refueling 200 cars a day requires about 2000 gallons of gasoline. A gallon contains 130 MJ of energy, so the total energy is 260 GJ. That much energy is equivalent to a 3 MW power plant running at full capacity 24 hour a day.
Unfortunately, people have no appreciation of just how much energy is contained in chemical fuels. It makes the energy content of lithium batteries look tame by comparison. Large scale electric recharging is simply not feasible unless the recharging station is right next door to an electric power plant.
Maybe the reason why people struggle with it is because they actually do the math.
Let's assume the local gas station just around the corner fuels around 200 cars a day over a 16 hour period. It decides to switch over to an all-electric recharging system. Furthermore, let's assume the customers all drive fast charging electric cars that require 1 MW for 6 minutes. Just to make it interesting, let's also assume the charging is completely lossless.
So, that former gas station would need to supply 1E6 * 6 * 60 * 200 joules every day to recharge those vehicles. Over a 24 hour period, it would be pulling 833 kW from the mains to trickle charge the battery array at the station, or 3472 A @ 240 V. A modern nuclear power plant can supply 1.1 GW on a continuous basis, so that means the entire output of that nuclear power plant, if devoted to charging electric vehicles, would be sufficient to supply 1,320 converted gas stations.
Now assuming that the average driver refuels his vehicle once a week, that means that those 1,320 refueling stations are sufficient to service 1.85M electric vehicles. There are estimated to be 251M passenger vehicles in the U.S. alone, so we only need to build 136 modern 1.1 GW nuclear power plants just to keep those vehicles running.
But of course, I assumed lossless energy transport, storage, and charging. Realistically, the entire process may be 50% efficient if we are lucky. So actually we need to build 272 brand new nuclear power plants, and that local converted gas station will be pulling an average of 1.67 MW from the grid.
Now frankly, the total added generation capacity is not that outrageous. The U.S. electric generation capacity is about 750 GW, so adding an extra 300 GW is expensive, but doable. On the other hand, efficiently supplying a continuous average of 1.67 MW of electric power to every gas station in the U.S., including those in remote areas and on remote roads, is a complete pipe dream unless someone comes up with room temperature superconductors.
Electric vehicles will work fine if they are trickle-charged nightly from home mains, and used for short commutes each day. But for long-haul trips, or fast refueling of large numbers of vehicles, nothing is going to replace chemical fuels anytime soon.