this would seem to put handheld HELL-guns within an order of magnitude of the striking power offered by conventional small-arms. A 9mm pistol bullet has about 750 joules muzzle energy: a 5kg portable HELL-ray weapon would put out this much energy in a blast less than a second long.
I can't get the article to load, but that claim sure underwhelms me. So the author thinks it would be useful to put something that emits the equivalent of the muzzle energy of a 9mm (presumably Parabellum) pistol round per second? Even if that meant the beam had the destructive potential of such a round, it would be a ridiculous weapon for a very expensive, very fast fighter plane—they have automatic cannon that fire armor-piercing, tank killing shells, they have electric "gatling guns" that can fire thousands of rounds a second, they have missiles that can kill or destroy at great distances. And we're supposed to think it's a good idea to mount the equivalent of a pistol on such a plane? As for blinding enemies...well sure it might work for that. But why not just obliterate them?
In any case, comparing the kinetic energy of a projectile to the energy of a laser beam is not useful. While energy is pretty much irrelevant in pistol calibers (they are just good for making holes), the kinetic energy of a 5.56 NATO round can cause considerable damage if it tumbles inside you. A tungsten or depleted uranium 2cm cannon projectile has a lot more energy, and does correspondingly more damage. The problem with a laser is that unless you can deliver a lot of energy in a very small amount of time, you will wind up spreading that energy over a large surface area as your beam moves over your target, which is presumably not holding still and offering itself for frying. Then there are other factors that mitigate the effects of lasers as weapons; for example, if you manage to vaporize some metal on your target, the cloud of vapor may diffuse your beam, thus preventing it from doing further damage. A laser is also going to have trouble shooting through clouds, fog, or even rain.
I'm not saying we're never going to get science fictional blasters, but this is a long way from a useful weapon. By the way, does the 5kg include the battery? How many seconds of continuous fire is the battery good for? Dang, wish I could get the article to load.
As it happens, I have devoted my life to philosophical knowledge, I've just done it in a way that fits my quirks, strengths, and weaknesses better than formal study would have.
One can certainly study outside of academia—these days, it's probably easier. I was lucky enough to encounter some good teachers. The most interesting person I know doesn't have a B.A. For me, it was important to go the academic route, because I needed to learn discipline. I doubt whether I would have fit in well, had I ever got that tenure track appointment that I thought was my dream. I think academia has become largely a huge waste of time and resources. Very few people would benefit from studying philosophy in an academic setting. Yet, I also think it's very, very difficult to study it alone. One needs an intellectual community.
I didn't interpret your remarks as condescending, nor was my intention to diminish you—I was trying to tell you that you are touching on questions that have been asked for literally thousands of years. You are saying some of the things I used to say, questions that gripped me so tightly that I spent four years studying something completely impractical (in the sense of "will not put money in my bank account").
The reason I replied to you was that though you were saying stuff many intelligent people without philosophical training say, your phraseology struck me as remarkably like that of one of my favorite philosophers—George Edward Moore. The paper I was thinking of was, indeed, "A Defence of Common Sense". You might be able to find it in a used book somewhere. I think you'd probably agree with Moore. However, if you read some of the commentaries on the paper, you'll find that there are other philosophers who don't think that what Moore said was all that obvious.
I took one Philosophy course as an undergraduate (pre-Socratic philosophy), and swore I'd never touch the stuff again. That was, of course, before I learned that what you get out of a course is proportional to the effort you put into it.
So you let a single academic jerk discourage you? Jeez. Back in my day, we had gumption; we were creative; we lied. Of course it's easy today for a prof to verify what courses you've taken—he probably has access to your academic records. In the good old paleolithic days when I was a student, it was a lot of trouble for a prof to verify what courses you had actually taken...so they didn't usually bother, and believed what I told them. Heh.
Had you taken the course from a competent teacher, the first thing you would have learned is that you didn't really understand Plato as well as you thought. How do I know this? I know it because if you read all of Plato's dialogues in a matter of a few weeks, then you didn't stop when you came across some of the truly strange and outlandish things he wrote, and study those passages. It's easy to misunderstand Plato if you forget that he is not a contemporary; many of his ideas sound superficially familiar, but are actually quite alien to our normal ways of thinking. What, for example, is a "good man", according to Plato?
Of course the hand is really there, even though this is only inferred from seeing the palm. What other kinds of things are real that we can infer with some reliability but can not see directly?
Your mistake is to think these things are simple, or in any way obvious or easy. Leaving aside the question what "really there" might mean, you do realize that inferences can be mistaken, right? So there's room for doubt that you are looking at your own hand. If you find this disturbing, you should take some philosophy classes. You might then attain a state of honest confusion about these issues. If not...well, never mind. Moore also had some remarks about the difference between "seeing directly" and seeing...well...not so directly, I guess. Wrote a dissertation about that remark, I did.
No matter how many eyes you have, or where they are placed, you still see only surfaces.
That's interesting. As I think about it, I wander over to my aquarium and stare pensively. The water looks clean, the guppies seem as happy as guppies get. The seaweed is wafting gently back and forth. But wait, do I really see my aquarium? Or am I only staring at its surface?
Suddenly seized by philosophical doubts, I hold my hand in front of my face. Can I see my hand? —or only my palm?
Your remark is similar to one made by the British philospher G.E. Moore, in a paper published some time in the 1940s (I think). Can't remember the title at the moment...might have been "A Defence of Common Sense".
You can find a picture of a "4-D" Mandlebrot set in a mid/late 80's issue of Scientific American.
I was generating pictures of this on a 286 pc. (with EGA graphics) 15 years ago, and the pictures
in TFA of z^2 look *nothing* like that did.
Hah, I can beat that! I used a Compaq portable with an 8088 processor, 256 K of RAM and 2 floppies! I wrote a C program based on that original Scientific American article, and then had a Basic program read the results and display it. I think the C program took a week to run.
The joke, of course, is that the Compaq didn't have a color screen—it had a small grayscale monitor built in. But I still thought it was really cool.
Stop with the "methodologies" already!
on
Becoming Agile
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· Score: 1
While the this methodology and... The Agile methodologies which are described...In describing these development methodologies...non-religious presentation of multiple Agile methodologies...
The word method may be defined as "a systematic way of accomplishing a task"; near-synonyms include "procedure" or "technique". The word methodology means "a study of methods", or perhaps "a comparison of methods", or "a science of methods".
This substitution of the word "methodology" for "method" happens so frequently that one could argue this is just one of those shifts in English usage that happen now and then, and it's time to stop obsessing about it. I don't think this is such a case—I think if a writer uses long, pretentious words in place of simpler, more direct ones, then this should serve as a warning to the reader: stilted diction may serve to obscure a lack of substance.
Now, about the word "agile"...as a buzzword it's become quite raddled by excessive use. I'm surprised someone is brave enough to use it in the title of a book.
And why should I care about that looky feely stuff? Here's what I care about: I installed Windows 7 64 bit on a new build the other day (Intel i5), and it was, without qualification, the easiest OS installation I have ever done. I put the DVD in the drive, booted it, waited around a few minutes while the installer was doing whatever, and answered a few simple prompts. Then it started churning.
This is usually the first act of a very painful multi-day drama, and I was tired, so I just walked away from it, figuring I'd deal with it the next day, and went to sleep. When I woke up, I noticed the PC looked like it was shut off. Nope...just asleep. It asked me for an admin login and password...and started right up. The OS was installed, and fully functional. I plugged the ethernet cable into the back, and lo, I had connectivity. First I downloaded Firefox, worked fine. Then I downloaded my current MMORPG, Aion, and cranked it up. Ran much better than before. There are no hardware problems, no missing drivers, sound works, everything works. I am happy. If by "look and feel like a Mac" you mean "works, and does not constantly irritate you", then why I suppose it's exactly like a Mac.
Absolutely true. I got my Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1978. My teachers had warned me that I wouldn't get a tenure-track job, but of course I was young and optimistic. They were right of course. I could have tried to get by with $800 a quarter per course (remember when schools had quarters instead of semesters? Amazingly stupid idea). But I wouldn't have called that "making a living".
There are two tiers of academia: "real" professors who have full-time tenured jobs, and those people eking out a miserable living as part-timers or temporary "adjunct" faculty who hope someday to make it into the first tier. If you're being taught by an adjunct, you aren't necessarily getting bad teaching; many part time instructors do their very best job the can, under the conditions. That often is much better than "real faculty" who have offices, access to support infrastructure, research funds, etc. But after a while, even the most dedicated teacher succumbs to the bitter fact that he must either consign himself and his family to a life of poverty and total disrespect from the institution that employs him, or get out. Lucky me...I was around in a time when you could actually talk your way into a software job without any form of certification that you could do the job.
If a student is taking the teacher's/Professor's time, then you would have to assume that they have a desire to learn. Otherwise, why would they bother?
To get a piece of paper that entitles them to do something they want...like go to med school.
Hint to all you pre-med students out there: do not tell your instructor that you "have to get an A in this class or I won't get into med school". It makes your instructor envision you in a surgical gown, scalpel in hand...need I explain further?
Anyway, the students don't need the book to be read to them. The prof needs to present a different explanation with different examples - to give a different viewpoint. Any prof who uses the slides provided with the book is not doing the job.
Amen. During my short teaching stint(s), I usually told the students not to bother buying the (expensive) textbook ordered by the department. I used to give them short excerpts as handouts, and talked about those. Some of them actually complained I didn't use the book. They didn't seem to grasp that, as an "adjunct instructor", I had no power to pick a book I could actually live with.
I was abruptly thrown into second grade of an American school at age 8 without knowing a word of English. My only language at that time was German. This was roughly 1956. Luckily, some aspects of American culture had already insiduously penetrated the German one—specifically, Walt Disney comic books. Thus, when I found a huge pile of comic books that the kindly American teacher had stashed in a closet in the back room, I realized that I had found my personal Rosetta Stone. I knew the form of this sort of communication; I knew who Donald and Uncle Scrooge and Huey Dewey and Louie were. Thanks to my phonic skills (courtesy of good instruction by real grammar nazis) I was able to decode the words in the speech and thought bubbles, and connect them with words I heard my classmates say.
So I snuck inside during recess (most of which usually consisted of being beat up for being a lousy Kraut who couldn't speak English) and devoured comic books. Within weeks, I could speak English—though my pronunciation was weird, to say the least (why don't those stupid Americans pronounce every vowel in words like, for example, "beautiful"? Why isn't it "beh-ah-oo-ti-ful"?). By the middle of third grade, I'd lost all trace of my Germanic accent, and could "pass" as an American.
So yes, I would be all in favor of buying "graphic novels" or whatever for non-English speakers who wish to adapt in a hurry.
I'd vote for cloud computing, previously known as utility computing. It's a lot more work than expected to offload processing outside your organization.
Not only that, but the idea that large software, hardware, or engineering companies—in short, companies with "intellectual property"—are going to entrust their confidential data to some server that's not under their control and security is nuts. I'm not saying they won't do it...I'm saying the smart ones won't do it.
I think "cloud computing" has a future as a replacement for PCs in the hands of private individuals who haven't a clue—and don't want to get one—about how computers actually work. "Dumb terminals for dumb users"—now there's a marketing slogan that won't ever get out...I'm sure they'll figure out a way to make it sound more complimentary.
The problem is that, if it isn't that, then what is "artificial intelligence", rather than flashy marketing speak for just another bunch of algorithms?
Exactly. "Artificial intelligence" seems to serve various purposes—at best vacuous and at worst deceptive. How many millions of dollars have academicians raked in for various projects that involve research into "artificial intelligence"?
What makes all this silliness sustainable is the philosophical fog that surrounds words such as "intelligence" and "thinking". Such words easily slip their moorings in our common language, and acquire some very strange uses. Yet, because they are recognizably legitimate words that do have perfectly legitimate uses, it is all too easy to fool people into uncritical acceptance of claims that, when analyzed, make little sense.
When someone talks to me about creating "artificial intelligence", I never deny that this is possible. I can't deny a claim that I don't clearly understand. To evaluate a claim, I first need clarification of what is being asserted. In this case, it's as though someone were talking about the discovery of "artificial chenya". To even understand that claim, I have to know what natural chenya might be. So tell me, what is "natural intelligence"? You're going to have to be very clear about that before you can start writing the requirements document for your project.
But we need another step: a requirement for a paper audit trail. According to the article, criticism of the Sequoia system first surfaced because some printed output didn't match the electronic totals. Open source is good, but in this case, it's not enough: we must be able to check the reliability of these machines and their operators against a paper record. That doesn't mean that every election has to involve an electronic and a paper count—but the paper will be there if we need it. As the reliability of a given system is proven over time, we'll come to trust it—though I think a cross-check of a statistically significant number of votes would always be a good idea.
You might want to take a look at this. According to Salon, it was a local cop who tipped off the media. In any case, the fact remains that law enforcement informed the media, and some reporter inadvertently compromised the secrecy of the operation. The ATF proceeded even though they knew this, having been informed by one of their own agents inside the Davidians.
As for shooting at government law enforcement officers, you have the right to defend yourself against such officers if they are acting illegally. The Davidians were under the impression that they were about to be attacked. The ATF action of rushing the "compound" confirmed this impression.
Viewed dispassionately, we can say that both sides screwed up, of course. From a comfortable distance, we can see that the smart thing for the Davidians to do would have been to surrender and fight in court...but they didn't think they were going to be given the chance to do that. The blame rests far more heavily on the ATF. Like all of our law enforcement agencies, the ATF have become militarized; they see themselves as Rambos, not as peace officers. Both at the local and Federal levels, police agencies are no longer taught that they have a duty to use minimum force, or to de-escalate tense situations. Their training and their equipment is military, and their first impulse is to apply firepower.
This reminds me of a story I heard about a computer failure that occurred during the Falklands war. This was apparently a bug, and not sabotage...but who knows? According to the story (confession: I've not verified this, but it's such a good story that it just has to be true), the Brits noticed that sometimes their computer-controlled naval antiaircraft guns weren't firing—there were targets—i.e., Argentine planes firing at them, but the guns just froze up. The cause was later determined to be a flaw in the targeting algorithm. The algorithm was supposed to pick the optimal target by weighing criteria such as distance, vector, speed, etc. of the enemy planes. However, there was no code for making a decision if two targets were calculated to have equal priority. The gun just couldn't make up its mind. Sort of a real-life implementation of Buridan's Ass.
The Javascript thing isn't important - that's how the device operates because it's been told to and, in 99% of circumstances it's an internal-only device. My printer offers up a lot worse options. However, exposing that interface to the web is stupid, as are using standardised passwords.
Either I misunderstood what happened, or you did. From what I read, this wasn't a complaint that Javascript is somehow inherently a security hole. I thought that what happened was that the router had its password embedded en clair in its maintenance web page, and concealed only by some Javascript that did something like switch the display style for the class="sekrit" stuff to "none". That's monumentally stupid. All you have to do is open the maintenance web page in a browser, and dump the page's source code, and you have it all. I don't think that having the web page accessible from the WAN is necessarily bad—lots of people do remote maintenance of their routers, and that's the way it's done. BUT if you do that, you had better have bulletproof security...and security that fails because of embedded passwords that are revealed by clicking a browser's "view source code" button is...well...words fail me.
Of course, a real attack on this vulnerability wouldn't consist of a bunch of people in some Chinese internet cafe using Firefox—it would be automated, and potentially devastating, depending on the intentions of the black hat.
So get a gigabit wired router. I'd never trust a router that wasn't my property; I will always have my own router behind any provider-owned router, password protected so only I can maintain it. I refuse to install wi-fi, mostly because I know what it takes to secure a wireless network, and it's just easier to pull cable. Hmmm. You can disable wi-fi on those FIOS routers, right? Heck, if not, I'll rip off the frickin antennas and pack the whole thing in tin foil, if they ever get around to laying FIOS in my neighborhood.
My friends say I'm paranoid. Of course, one of them just got his broadband shut off because the neighborhood kiddies were downloading pr0n courtesy of his poorly secured wireless. Heck, some of them give their real name when a Windows installation asks—and then they're supprised when their name shows up in places like the metadata to every Word document that's composed on their computers.
I think I know how to fix it. We don't need no steenkin' computers! Instead, if you sign up for the game, you get phone calls in the middle of the night from someone who plays the "handler" role, and who asks you to do strange errands, like locate a certain package hidden behind some bushes in an industrial area, then drive across town and deliver the package to someone's mailbox. Next morning, you note a surprising coincidence—the TV news says some guy who works for the Ukrainian embassy as "trade liaison" was tragically killed this morning by a mail bomb...coincidentally in the same neighborhood where you delivered the package.
The best part of the game is that you don't pay to play; instead you get paid—achievements are rewarded with actual cash (unmarked $20s) that arrive in a "drop box" known only to you. Downside: the death penalty is severe.
I have to confess I ripped this idea off from a SF writer...um...Charles Stross? The scary thing is, I'm not sure that it wouldn't work.
I don't agree with the zero sum mentality of the X-killer remarks. Absolute dominance of a market is not necessarily a good thing, nor is a limited number of strong competitors necessarily a bad thing for them.
I used to work for a company who made a specialized line of "supercomputers". We had about half a dozen competitors when I started there. One by one, our rivals went belly-up. Each time that happened, the CEO would throw a party (free beer!) and hold a mock funeral for the deceased firm. This always made me feel uncomfortable, for I wasn't convinced that the death of a competitor was necessarily a good thing. Sure, it could mean that our machines were better, and we would now grab more market share. But what if the death of those competitors really signaled a bad market for this type of machine? In a declining market, the weakest die first, of course. But in the end, the market becomes so unprofitable that nobody survives.
As you may have noticed if you follow my postings, I'm a bit of a pessimist. People tell me I'm "negative", and to "lighten up". For example, just after the conclusion of a project at this company, we were given the customary trophy T-shirts. The motto on these was, "Now anything is possible!". I remarked to some fellow employees that I found the implications of this motto disturbing: "anything" of necessity covers all the bad possibilities, as well as the good. They laughed at me, of course, over their free beer. The next day, the company announced the first of the layoffs that marked the beginning of the Death Spiral.
Getting back to the smartphone market, I'd rather have half a dozen strong competitors than one successful "killer". I think that's a win-win scenario for consumers, because each competitor will try to improve their product to gain on their rivals, and we will have a choice of a variety of good devices, instead of only one. As long as the market remains healthy, all the really good designs should reap a profit, so it's good for the manufacturers too.
Eh, that arguement might work for Iraq but not Afghanistan. We had plenty of reason to invade them and make a regime change.
I absolutely agree that there was a casus belli against Afghanistan. Given that the Taliban-run government of Afghanistan was sheltering perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks, and had refused to give them up, then we had every right under the norms of "civilized" warfare to launch a war against Afghanistan. Moreover, the European nations would have seen it that way also. Do you remember the outpouring of sympathy from Europe immediately after the attack? One of the most astonishing anti-achievements of all time is how George Bush managed to turn this sympathy into antipathy in a matter of months by launching a war against a country that had not attacked us (Iraq).
Immediately after the attack, I wanted military action against Afghanistan. I wanted the U.S. government to lay out its proof of Afghan involvement in the 9-11 crime for all the world to see, and then take action. I was—and am—disgusted that this action took so long to prepare and was so ineffectual and unfocused. The primary goal should have been to capture Bin Laden & co, as well as Sheikh Omar and his top henchpersons (for being accessories after the fact, if nothing else), and bring them to the U.S. for trial. We should have done this with American troops—not Afghan hirelings with U.S. air support and a few special forces; we should have pursued this goal with as much military force as was necessary. And most importantly, we should have been quick about it. If 2 or 3 months wasn't enough time to do the job, then it just wasn't going to get done.
A secondary goal would have been to teach a clear lesson: any government that shelters mass murderers does not survive. This is not some sort of endorsement for carpet-bombing Kabul, but for direct action to arrest if possible and kill if necessary all high level officials of such a government, and to drive that government out of power. This should serve as a deterrent to future incidents of this kind.
That would have made sense to me. What did we get instead? We got a slowly festering sore that will cost far more lives—American and Afghan—than a short sharp strike would have done, and that will, in the end, leave us weaker than before. We are waging a pointless war for illusory goals. That is a tragedy, and it is morally wrong.
To establish some kind of relevance to the original topic of this thread, I think that the "Predator Porn" attitude is emblematic of how our military thinks about war. They want excuses to buy new gadgets; they want to wage wars that are "safe"—for them—and the best way to do that is to turn it into a video game. What they don't want is to create an Army that can actually meet today's threats. That's because such solutions would center on acquiring and training the right people, and people just aren't that important to the generals who make their careers on shepherding some "sophisticated weapons system" through the purchasing process.
All I said was that we play by the rules and our enemies do not. That's why our enemies are unlawful combatants. Not because they are our enemies. It's because they refuse to obey the laws of war.
This is a downright silly view; the fact that many seem to share it does not diminish its idiocy. Haven't you read any history?
The "laws of war" evolved among warring European states between the mid-seventeenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries. This was a time when state armies clashed in relatively limited wars that had as their objective not the annihilation of the enemy, but the gaining of some relatively minor advantage, or perhaps a "regime change" among the ruling aristocracy that would make no difference to their subjects. These rules held up pretty well even during the Napoleonic wars, but became strained during the First World War, and partially failed during the Second World War, where both sides practiced indiscriminate killing of civilians. (Yet, prisoners were still taken more often than not, at least on the Western Front in Europe, and many of those prisoners lived to be repatriated.)
But what has any of this to do with the people on which we now make war? They do not share our cultural heritage, and they certainly never signed any agreements in Geneva or the Hague. By what standard of judgment are they "unlawful combatants"? Because they don't have the proper European-style uniforms? Because they're not part of a state army? What twaddle!
The people we're fighting are civilians because there's no army for them to join (except those we set up and pay to fight for us, of course). But that doesn't make them unlawful. Nor does using I.E.D.s and other "unfair" tactics make them so; if they could afford stealth bombers, I'm sure they'd be happy to use them instead of those junky explosive-stuffed cars. And may I remind you where we are fighting? Are the Afghans on our turf, or theirs? Is it "lawful" to go pick fights with countries 10,000 miles away for no sensible reason?
Not even close. At Waco, the ATF attempted to execute a search warrant on the Branh Dividian compound. The Branch Dividians opened fire from a huge stockpile of automatic weapons killing 4 ATF agents.
After these murders, the FBI came in and *then* you started seeing millitary-like hardware.
Seeing as you don't seem to remember the incident very well, I'll remind you. The ATF attempted to stage a massive raid on the "compound". They lost the element of surprise because the ATF invited in the media to get lots of footage of their brave storming of this menacing redoubt. No action occurred that could be remotely called "an attempt to serve a warrant". What occurred was an unprovoked attack by a large force of ATF agents armed with automatic weapons, which was repelled and driven into ignominious flight by legally armed citizens firing in self defense from their dwelling.
Subsequent to this, the scene was taken over by a paramilitary FBI force which did its best over a period of weeks to work the situation up into a fever pitch that culminated in the mass murder of citizens guilty of no crime—including dozens of children.
In the future, such things will be taken care of quickly and quietly by drone jockeys in Nevada.
...The current cynicism that any improvement in infrastructure is
a) only for the money
b) going to ruin the planet
c) a target for terrorists
d) too late
is getting really old.
The proposal allows for better distribution of power generation across the continent. Even if it was a target for terrorism so what....
How about this criticism: poorly described technology from a dubious source.
First of all, I don't think this interconnect is intended to prevent one of the three major grids going down...if that were to happen, you'd want to disconnect the other two pronto so they don't go down with it. This is being sold as a way to efficiently move cheap electricity to places that need it and are willing to buy it. The article refers to it as a "renewable energy market hub". That's fine, in principle (and who dares oppose anything with the word "renewable" in it?).
But how does it work? There's generalities about how electrical transmissions and interconnects between the major power grids work, but nothing really about the superconducting cable, and why it's better than regular cable. That's not too surprising, if you consider that this is "financial news" aimed at getting people to buy stock in this exciting new venture. What's more disturbing is that when you follow the link to the company that's supposed to be doing this wonderful thing—American Superconductor—you don't get any better answers to these questions.
You do realize that we're not talking about room temperature superconductors here, right? "High temperature superconductors" is a relative term. Unless they have indeed invented something totally new and kept it totally secret, what we're talking about is a pipeline carrying liquid nitrogen with some superconducting tape wrapped around it. (See, for example, this more informative article from another company selling the same thing. (PDF!)
One major issue right off the bat is how much of the efficiency gained by using the superconductor is consumed by the coolant system. The article doesn't say exactly how long these superconducting conduits will be, and it seems you still need AC/DC/AC conversion, so what's the real gain over using regular cables, especially if we're only talking a mile or so?
It's also not clear just who is paying for this project. Is it the State of Oklahoma? The US Government (in "stimulation" mode)? Is it a private venture? Is it really a done and financed deal? This is a most unsatisfactory article, and I think some cynicism is warranted.
Disclaimer: The fact that I am a Texan and intend to give up my megawatts only if you pry them from my cold, dead fingers has not in the least influenced my position on this matter.
Slashdot Mirror
I can't get the article to load, but that claim sure underwhelms me. So the author thinks it would be useful to put something that emits the equivalent of the muzzle energy of a 9mm (presumably Parabellum) pistol round per second? Even if that meant the beam had the destructive potential of such a round, it would be a ridiculous weapon for a very expensive, very fast fighter plane—they have automatic cannon that fire armor-piercing, tank killing shells, they have electric "gatling guns" that can fire thousands of rounds a second, they have missiles that can kill or destroy at great distances. And we're supposed to think it's a good idea to mount the equivalent of a pistol on such a plane? As for blinding enemies...well sure it might work for that. But why not just obliterate them?
In any case, comparing the kinetic energy of a projectile to the energy of a laser beam is not useful. While energy is pretty much irrelevant in pistol calibers (they are just good for making holes), the kinetic energy of a 5.56 NATO round can cause considerable damage if it tumbles inside you. A tungsten or depleted uranium 2cm cannon projectile has a lot more energy, and does correspondingly more damage. The problem with a laser is that unless you can deliver a lot of energy in a very small amount of time, you will wind up spreading that energy over a large surface area as your beam moves over your target, which is presumably not holding still and offering itself for frying. Then there are other factors that mitigate the effects of lasers as weapons; for example, if you manage to vaporize some metal on your target, the cloud of vapor may diffuse your beam, thus preventing it from doing further damage. A laser is also going to have trouble shooting through clouds, fog, or even rain.
I'm not saying we're never going to get science fictional blasters, but this is a long way from a useful weapon. By the way, does the 5kg include the battery? How many seconds of continuous fire is the battery good for? Dang, wish I could get the article to load.
One can certainly study outside of academia—these days, it's probably easier. I was lucky enough to encounter some good teachers. The most interesting person I know doesn't have a B.A. For me, it was important to go the academic route, because I needed to learn discipline. I doubt whether I would have fit in well, had I ever got that tenure track appointment that I thought was my dream. I think academia has become largely a huge waste of time and resources. Very few people would benefit from studying philosophy in an academic setting. Yet, I also think it's very, very difficult to study it alone. One needs an intellectual community.
I didn't interpret your remarks as condescending, nor was my intention to diminish you—I was trying to tell you that you are touching on questions that have been asked for literally thousands of years. You are saying some of the things I used to say, questions that gripped me so tightly that I spent four years studying something completely impractical (in the sense of "will not put money in my bank account").
The reason I replied to you was that though you were saying stuff many intelligent people without philosophical training say, your phraseology struck me as remarkably like that of one of my favorite philosophers—George Edward Moore. The paper I was thinking of was, indeed, "A Defence of Common Sense". You might be able to find it in a used book somewhere. I think you'd probably agree with Moore. However, if you read some of the commentaries on the paper, you'll find that there are other philosophers who don't think that what Moore said was all that obvious.
I took one Philosophy course as an undergraduate (pre-Socratic philosophy), and swore I'd never touch the stuff again. That was, of course, before I learned that what you get out of a course is proportional to the effort you put into it.
So you let a single academic jerk discourage you? Jeez. Back in my day, we had gumption; we were creative; we lied. Of course it's easy today for a prof to verify what courses you've taken—he probably has access to your academic records. In the good old paleolithic days when I was a student, it was a lot of trouble for a prof to verify what courses you had actually taken...so they didn't usually bother, and believed what I told them. Heh.
Had you taken the course from a competent teacher, the first thing you would have learned is that you didn't really understand Plato as well as you thought. How do I know this? I know it because if you read all of Plato's dialogues in a matter of a few weeks, then you didn't stop when you came across some of the truly strange and outlandish things he wrote, and study those passages. It's easy to misunderstand Plato if you forget that he is not a contemporary; many of his ideas sound superficially familiar, but are actually quite alien to our normal ways of thinking. What, for example, is a "good man", according to Plato?
Of course the hand is really there, even though this is only inferred from seeing the palm. What other kinds of things are real that we can infer with some reliability but can not see directly?
Your mistake is to think these things are simple, or in any way obvious or easy. Leaving aside the question what "really there" might mean, you do realize that inferences can be mistaken, right? So there's room for doubt that you are looking at your own hand. If you find this disturbing, you should take some philosophy classes. You might then attain a state of honest confusion about these issues. If not...well, never mind. Moore also had some remarks about the difference between "seeing directly" and seeing...well...not so directly, I guess. Wrote a dissertation about that remark, I did.
No matter how many eyes you have, or where they are placed, you still see only surfaces.
That's interesting. As I think about it, I wander over to my aquarium and stare pensively. The water looks clean, the guppies seem as happy as guppies get. The seaweed is wafting gently back and forth. But wait, do I really see my aquarium? Or am I only staring at its surface?
Suddenly seized by philosophical doubts, I hold my hand in front of my face. Can I see my hand? —or only my palm?
Your remark is similar to one made by the British philospher G.E. Moore, in a paper published some time in the 1940s (I think). Can't remember the title at the moment...might have been "A Defence of Common Sense".
You can find a picture of a "4-D" Mandlebrot set in a mid/late 80's issue of Scientific American. I was generating pictures of this on a 286 pc. (with EGA graphics) 15 years ago, and the pictures in TFA of z^2 look *nothing* like that did.
Hah, I can beat that! I used a Compaq portable with an 8088 processor, 256 K of RAM and 2 floppies! I wrote a C program based on that original Scientific American article, and then had a Basic program read the results and display it. I think the C program took a week to run.
The joke, of course, is that the Compaq didn't have a color screen—it had a small grayscale monitor built in. But I still thought it was really cool.
The word method may be defined as "a systematic way of accomplishing a task"; near-synonyms include "procedure" or "technique". The word methodology means "a study of methods", or perhaps "a comparison of methods", or "a science of methods".
This substitution of the word "methodology" for "method" happens so frequently that one could argue this is just one of those shifts in English usage that happen now and then, and it's time to stop obsessing about it. I don't think this is such a case—I think if a writer uses long, pretentious words in place of simpler, more direct ones, then this should serve as a warning to the reader: stilted diction may serve to obscure a lack of substance.
Now, about the word "agile"...as a buzzword it's become quite raddled by excessive use. I'm surprised someone is brave enough to use it in the title of a book.
And why should I care about that looky feely stuff? Here's what I care about: I installed Windows 7 64 bit on a new build the other day (Intel i5), and it was, without qualification, the easiest OS installation I have ever done. I put the DVD in the drive, booted it, waited around a few minutes while the installer was doing whatever, and answered a few simple prompts. Then it started churning.
This is usually the first act of a very painful multi-day drama, and I was tired, so I just walked away from it, figuring I'd deal with it the next day, and went to sleep. When I woke up, I noticed the PC looked like it was shut off. Nope...just asleep. It asked me for an admin login and password...and started right up. The OS was installed, and fully functional. I plugged the ethernet cable into the back, and lo, I had connectivity. First I downloaded Firefox, worked fine. Then I downloaded my current MMORPG, Aion, and cranked it up. Ran much better than before. There are no hardware problems, no missing drivers, sound works, everything works. I am happy. If by "look and feel like a Mac" you mean "works, and does not constantly irritate you", then why I suppose it's exactly like a Mac.
Absolutely true. I got my Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1978. My teachers had warned me that I wouldn't get a tenure-track job, but of course I was young and optimistic. They were right of course. I could have tried to get by with $800 a quarter per course (remember when schools had quarters instead of semesters? Amazingly stupid idea). But I wouldn't have called that "making a living".
There are two tiers of academia: "real" professors who have full-time tenured jobs, and those people eking out a miserable living as part-timers or temporary "adjunct" faculty who hope someday to make it into the first tier. If you're being taught by an adjunct, you aren't necessarily getting bad teaching; many part time instructors do their very best job the can, under the conditions. That often is much better than "real faculty" who have offices, access to support infrastructure, research funds, etc. But after a while, even the most dedicated teacher succumbs to the bitter fact that he must either consign himself and his family to a life of poverty and total disrespect from the institution that employs him, or get out. Lucky me...I was around in a time when you could actually talk your way into a software job without any form of certification that you could do the job.
If a student is taking the teacher's/Professor's time, then you would have to assume that they have a desire to learn. Otherwise, why would they bother?
To get a piece of paper that entitles them to do something they want...like go to med school.
Hint to all you pre-med students out there: do not tell your instructor that you "have to get an A in this class or I won't get into med school". It makes your instructor envision you in a surgical gown, scalpel in hand...need I explain further?
Amen. During my short teaching stint(s), I usually told the students not to bother buying the (expensive) textbook ordered by the department. I used to give them short excerpts as handouts, and talked about those. Some of them actually complained I didn't use the book. They didn't seem to grasp that, as an "adjunct instructor", I had no power to pick a book I could actually live with.
I was abruptly thrown into second grade of an American school at age 8 without knowing a word of English. My only language at that time was German. This was roughly 1956. Luckily, some aspects of American culture had already insiduously penetrated the German one—specifically, Walt Disney comic books. Thus, when I found a huge pile of comic books that the kindly American teacher had stashed in a closet in the back room, I realized that I had found my personal Rosetta Stone. I knew the form of this sort of communication; I knew who Donald and Uncle Scrooge and Huey Dewey and Louie were. Thanks to my phonic skills (courtesy of good instruction by real grammar nazis) I was able to decode the words in the speech and thought bubbles, and connect them with words I heard my classmates say.
So I snuck inside during recess (most of which usually consisted of being beat up for being a lousy Kraut who couldn't speak English) and devoured comic books. Within weeks, I could speak English—though my pronunciation was weird, to say the least (why don't those stupid Americans pronounce every vowel in words like, for example, "beautiful"? Why isn't it "beh-ah-oo-ti-ful"?). By the middle of third grade, I'd lost all trace of my Germanic accent, and could "pass" as an American.
So yes, I would be all in favor of buying "graphic novels" or whatever for non-English speakers who wish to adapt in a hurry.
I'd vote for cloud computing, previously known as utility computing. It's a lot more work than expected to offload processing outside your organization.
Not only that, but the idea that large software, hardware, or engineering companies—in short, companies with "intellectual property"—are going to entrust their confidential data to some server that's not under their control and security is nuts. I'm not saying they won't do it...I'm saying the smart ones won't do it.
I think "cloud computing" has a future as a replacement for PCs in the hands of private individuals who haven't a clue—and don't want to get one—about how computers actually work. "Dumb terminals for dumb users"—now there's a marketing slogan that won't ever get out...I'm sure they'll figure out a way to make it sound more complimentary.
The problem is that, if it isn't that, then what is "artificial intelligence", rather than flashy marketing speak for just another bunch of algorithms?
Exactly. "Artificial intelligence" seems to serve various purposes—at best vacuous and at worst deceptive. How many millions of dollars have academicians raked in for various projects that involve research into "artificial intelligence"?
What makes all this silliness sustainable is the philosophical fog that surrounds words such as "intelligence" and "thinking". Such words easily slip their moorings in our common language, and acquire some very strange uses. Yet, because they are recognizably legitimate words that do have perfectly legitimate uses, it is all too easy to fool people into uncritical acceptance of claims that, when analyzed, make little sense.
When someone talks to me about creating "artificial intelligence", I never deny that this is possible. I can't deny a claim that I don't clearly understand. To evaluate a claim, I first need clarification of what is being asserted. In this case, it's as though someone were talking about the discovery of "artificial chenya". To even understand that claim, I have to know what natural chenya might be. So tell me, what is "natural intelligence"? You're going to have to be very clear about that before you can start writing the requirements document for your project.
But we need another step: a requirement for a paper audit trail. According to the article, criticism of the Sequoia system first surfaced because some printed output didn't match the electronic totals. Open source is good, but in this case, it's not enough: we must be able to check the reliability of these machines and their operators against a paper record. That doesn't mean that every election has to involve an electronic and a paper count—but the paper will be there if we need it. As the reliability of a given system is proven over time, we'll come to trust it—though I think a cross-check of a statistically significant number of votes would always be a good idea.
You might want to take a look at this. According to Salon, it was a local cop who tipped off the media. In any case, the fact remains that law enforcement informed the media, and some reporter inadvertently compromised the secrecy of the operation. The ATF proceeded even though they knew this, having been informed by one of their own agents inside the Davidians.
As for shooting at government law enforcement officers, you have the right to defend yourself against such officers if they are acting illegally. The Davidians were under the impression that they were about to be attacked. The ATF action of rushing the "compound" confirmed this impression.
Viewed dispassionately, we can say that both sides screwed up, of course. From a comfortable distance, we can see that the smart thing for the Davidians to do would have been to surrender and fight in court...but they didn't think they were going to be given the chance to do that. The blame rests far more heavily on the ATF. Like all of our law enforcement agencies, the ATF have become militarized; they see themselves as Rambos, not as peace officers. Both at the local and Federal levels, police agencies are no longer taught that they have a duty to use minimum force, or to de-escalate tense situations. Their training and their equipment is military, and their first impulse is to apply firepower.
This reminds me of a story I heard about a computer failure that occurred during the Falklands war. This was apparently a bug, and not sabotage...but who knows? According to the story (confession: I've not verified this, but it's such a good story that it just has to be true), the Brits noticed that sometimes their computer-controlled naval antiaircraft guns weren't firing—there were targets—i.e., Argentine planes firing at them, but the guns just froze up. The cause was later determined to be a flaw in the targeting algorithm. The algorithm was supposed to pick the optimal target by weighing criteria such as distance, vector, speed, etc. of the enemy planes. However, there was no code for making a decision if two targets were calculated to have equal priority. The gun just couldn't make up its mind. Sort of a real-life implementation of Buridan's Ass.
The Javascript thing isn't important - that's how the device operates because it's been told to and, in 99% of circumstances it's an internal-only device. My printer offers up a lot worse options. However, exposing that interface to the web is stupid, as are using standardised passwords.
Either I misunderstood what happened, or you did. From what I read, this wasn't a complaint that Javascript is somehow inherently a security hole. I thought that what happened was that the router had its password embedded en clair in its maintenance web page, and concealed only by some Javascript that did something like switch the display style for the class="sekrit" stuff to "none". That's monumentally stupid. All you have to do is open the maintenance web page in a browser, and dump the page's source code, and you have it all. I don't think that having the web page accessible from the WAN is necessarily bad—lots of people do remote maintenance of their routers, and that's the way it's done. BUT if you do that, you had better have bulletproof security...and security that fails because of embedded passwords that are revealed by clicking a browser's "view source code" button is...well...words fail me.
Of course, a real attack on this vulnerability wouldn't consist of a bunch of people in some Chinese internet cafe using Firefox—it would be automated, and potentially devastating, depending on the intentions of the black hat.
So get a gigabit wired router. I'd never trust a router that wasn't my property; I will always have my own router behind any provider-owned router, password protected so only I can maintain it. I refuse to install wi-fi, mostly because I know what it takes to secure a wireless network, and it's just easier to pull cable. Hmmm. You can disable wi-fi on those FIOS routers, right? Heck, if not, I'll rip off the frickin antennas and pack the whole thing in tin foil, if they ever get around to laying FIOS in my neighborhood.
My friends say I'm paranoid. Of course, one of them just got his broadband shut off because the neighborhood kiddies were downloading pr0n courtesy of his poorly secured wireless. Heck, some of them give their real name when a Windows installation asks—and then they're supprised when their name shows up in places like the metadata to every Word document that's composed on their computers.
Anyone who isn't paranoid these days is a sucker.
I think I know how to fix it. We don't need no steenkin' computers! Instead, if you sign up for the game, you get phone calls in the middle of the night from someone who plays the "handler" role, and who asks you to do strange errands, like locate a certain package hidden behind some bushes in an industrial area, then drive across town and deliver the package to someone's mailbox. Next morning, you note a surprising coincidence—the TV news says some guy who works for the Ukrainian embassy as "trade liaison" was tragically killed this morning by a mail bomb...coincidentally in the same neighborhood where you delivered the package.
The best part of the game is that you don't pay to play; instead you get paid—achievements are rewarded with actual cash (unmarked $20s) that arrive in a "drop box" known only to you. Downside: the death penalty is severe.
I have to confess I ripped this idea off from a SF writer...um...Charles Stross? The scary thing is, I'm not sure that it wouldn't work.
I don't agree with the zero sum mentality of the X-killer remarks. Absolute dominance of a market is not necessarily a good thing, nor is a limited number of strong competitors necessarily a bad thing for them.
I used to work for a company who made a specialized line of "supercomputers". We had about half a dozen competitors when I started there. One by one, our rivals went belly-up. Each time that happened, the CEO would throw a party (free beer!) and hold a mock funeral for the deceased firm. This always made me feel uncomfortable, for I wasn't convinced that the death of a competitor was necessarily a good thing. Sure, it could mean that our machines were better, and we would now grab more market share. But what if the death of those competitors really signaled a bad market for this type of machine? In a declining market, the weakest die first, of course. But in the end, the market becomes so unprofitable that nobody survives.
As you may have noticed if you follow my postings, I'm a bit of a pessimist. People tell me I'm "negative", and to "lighten up". For example, just after the conclusion of a project at this company, we were given the customary trophy T-shirts. The motto on these was, "Now anything is possible!". I remarked to some fellow employees that I found the implications of this motto disturbing: "anything" of necessity covers all the bad possibilities, as well as the good. They laughed at me, of course, over their free beer. The next day, the company announced the first of the layoffs that marked the beginning of the Death Spiral.
Getting back to the smartphone market, I'd rather have half a dozen strong competitors than one successful "killer". I think that's a win-win scenario for consumers, because each competitor will try to improve their product to gain on their rivals, and we will have a choice of a variety of good devices, instead of only one. As long as the market remains healthy, all the really good designs should reap a profit, so it's good for the manufacturers too.
Eh, that arguement might work for Iraq but not Afghanistan. We had plenty of reason to invade them and make a regime change.
I absolutely agree that there was a casus belli against Afghanistan. Given that the Taliban-run government of Afghanistan was sheltering perpetrators of the 9-11 attacks, and had refused to give them up, then we had every right under the norms of "civilized" warfare to launch a war against Afghanistan. Moreover, the European nations would have seen it that way also. Do you remember the outpouring of sympathy from Europe immediately after the attack? One of the most astonishing anti-achievements of all time is how George Bush managed to turn this sympathy into antipathy in a matter of months by launching a war against a country that had not attacked us (Iraq).
Immediately after the attack, I wanted military action against Afghanistan. I wanted the U.S. government to lay out its proof of Afghan involvement in the 9-11 crime for all the world to see, and then take action. I was—and am—disgusted that this action took so long to prepare and was so ineffectual and unfocused. The primary goal should have been to capture Bin Laden & co, as well as Sheikh Omar and his top henchpersons (for being accessories after the fact, if nothing else), and bring them to the U.S. for trial. We should have done this with American troops—not Afghan hirelings with U.S. air support and a few special forces; we should have pursued this goal with as much military force as was necessary. And most importantly, we should have been quick about it. If 2 or 3 months wasn't enough time to do the job, then it just wasn't going to get done.
A secondary goal would have been to teach a clear lesson: any government that shelters mass murderers does not survive. This is not some sort of endorsement for carpet-bombing Kabul, but for direct action to arrest if possible and kill if necessary all high level officials of such a government, and to drive that government out of power. This should serve as a deterrent to future incidents of this kind.
That would have made sense to me. What did we get instead? We got a slowly festering sore that will cost far more lives—American and Afghan—than a short sharp strike would have done, and that will, in the end, leave us weaker than before. We are waging a pointless war for illusory goals. That is a tragedy, and it is morally wrong.
To establish some kind of relevance to the original topic of this thread, I think that the "Predator Porn" attitude is emblematic of how our military thinks about war. They want excuses to buy new gadgets; they want to wage wars that are "safe"—for them—and the best way to do that is to turn it into a video game. What they don't want is to create an Army that can actually meet today's threats. That's because such solutions would center on acquiring and training the right people, and people just aren't that important to the generals who make their careers on shepherding some "sophisticated weapons system" through the purchasing process.
All I said was that we play by the rules and our enemies do not. That's why our enemies are unlawful combatants. Not because they are our enemies. It's because they refuse to obey the laws of war.
This is a downright silly view; the fact that many seem to share it does not diminish its idiocy. Haven't you read any history?
The "laws of war" evolved among warring European states between the mid-seventeenth and the end of the nineteenth centuries. This was a time when state armies clashed in relatively limited wars that had as their objective not the annihilation of the enemy, but the gaining of some relatively minor advantage, or perhaps a "regime change" among the ruling aristocracy that would make no difference to their subjects. These rules held up pretty well even during the Napoleonic wars, but became strained during the First World War, and partially failed during the Second World War, where both sides practiced indiscriminate killing of civilians. (Yet, prisoners were still taken more often than not, at least on the Western Front in Europe, and many of those prisoners lived to be repatriated.)
But what has any of this to do with the people on which we now make war? They do not share our cultural heritage, and they certainly never signed any agreements in Geneva or the Hague. By what standard of judgment are they "unlawful combatants"? Because they don't have the proper European-style uniforms? Because they're not part of a state army? What twaddle!
The people we're fighting are civilians because there's no army for them to join (except those we set up and pay to fight for us, of course). But that doesn't make them unlawful. Nor does using I.E.D.s and other "unfair" tactics make them so; if they could afford stealth bombers, I'm sure they'd be happy to use them instead of those junky explosive-stuffed cars. And may I remind you where we are fighting? Are the Afghans on our turf, or theirs? Is it "lawful" to go pick fights with countries 10,000 miles away for no sensible reason?
Not even close. At Waco, the ATF attempted to execute a search warrant on the Branh Dividian compound. The Branch Dividians opened fire from a huge stockpile of automatic weapons killing 4 ATF agents.
After these murders, the FBI came in and *then* you started seeing millitary-like hardware.
Seeing as you don't seem to remember the incident very well, I'll remind you. The ATF attempted to stage a massive raid on the "compound". They lost the element of surprise because the ATF invited in the media to get lots of footage of their brave storming of this menacing redoubt. No action occurred that could be remotely called "an attempt to serve a warrant". What occurred was an unprovoked attack by a large force of ATF agents armed with automatic weapons, which was repelled and driven into ignominious flight by legally armed citizens firing in self defense from their dwelling.
Subsequent to this, the scene was taken over by a paramilitary FBI force which did its best over a period of weeks to work the situation up into a fever pitch that culminated in the mass murder of citizens guilty of no crime—including dozens of children.
In the future, such things will be taken care of quickly and quietly by drone jockeys in Nevada.
...The current cynicism that any improvement in infrastructure is a) only for the money b) going to ruin the planet c) a target for terrorists d) too late
is getting really old.
The proposal allows for better distribution of power generation across the continent. Even if it was a target for terrorism so what. ...
How about this criticism: poorly described technology from a dubious source.
First of all, I don't think this interconnect is intended to prevent one of the three major grids going down...if that were to happen, you'd want to disconnect the other two pronto so they don't go down with it. This is being sold as a way to efficiently move cheap electricity to places that need it and are willing to buy it. The article refers to it as a "renewable energy market hub". That's fine, in principle (and who dares oppose anything with the word "renewable" in it?).
But how does it work? There's generalities about how electrical transmissions and interconnects between the major power grids work, but nothing really about the superconducting cable, and why it's better than regular cable. That's not too surprising, if you consider that this is "financial news" aimed at getting people to buy stock in this exciting new venture. What's more disturbing is that when you follow the link to the company that's supposed to be doing this wonderful thing—American Superconductor—you don't get any better answers to these questions.
You do realize that we're not talking about room temperature superconductors here, right? "High temperature superconductors" is a relative term. Unless they have indeed invented something totally new and kept it totally secret, what we're talking about is a pipeline carrying liquid nitrogen with some superconducting tape wrapped around it. (See, for example, this more informative article from another company selling the same thing. (PDF!)
One major issue right off the bat is how much of the efficiency gained by using the superconductor is consumed by the coolant system. The article doesn't say exactly how long these superconducting conduits will be, and it seems you still need AC/DC/AC conversion, so what's the real gain over using regular cables, especially if we're only talking a mile or so?
It's also not clear just who is paying for this project. Is it the State of Oklahoma? The US Government (in "stimulation" mode)? Is it a private venture? Is it really a done and financed deal? This is a most unsatisfactory article, and I think some cynicism is warranted.
Disclaimer: The fact that I am a Texan and intend to give up my megawatts only if you pry them from my cold, dead fingers has not in the least influenced my position on this matter.