Well, they're already opting to have damaged natural joints like hips and knees replaced. That's a case of upgrading from natural to artificial to gain function. As the performance of artificial limbs increase, it might become an increasingly commonplace treatment for older people, just like knee or hip replacement.
If we project that trend forward for twenty or thirty years I wouldn't be surprised at all to see artificial legs that outperform natural legs for the purposes of walking or even running. But I don't think people with normal abilities will be trading in their limbs just to be able walk a little longer, run a little faster, or carry more weight. That won't happen until the replacement is subjectively indistinguishable from the real thing; until you can feel the grass under your toes.
I'm comfortable predicting locomotion parity in the next fifty years, but I wouldn't care to speculate on when we'll see sensory parity.
I think it will be way more likely that exoskeleton type systems using the same control mechanism will be developed. They could have adaptive algorithms which gradually decrease the power output over time, forcing the patient to develop muscle mass in a safe and 100% controlled manner. It could prevent people with broken or weak bones from making damaging movements, while at the same time allowing rehabilitative movements. It would revolutionize the rehabilitation industry.
The same technology could be used, it has all the advantages of bionic limb replacement, plus you get to keep your limbs.
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the ability to innovate and change it. They aren't always first movers, but they DO bring innovation and of course profits to any segment they enter.
The magic is in saying "NO" to doing things that don't make sense... entering a crowded, unimaginative, razor-thin margin, mature TV market doesn't make sense for Apple. That's why they said no.... No more, no less.
My company declines jobs and new markets all the time. We run some quick numbers and make a decision on whether it makes sense to take on X risk for Y% margin. Nobody calls us "magic".
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the potential to charge $1 for a lime that everyone else is selling for 50 cents.
The real issue should be is evaluating regulations that the Taxi companies have to follow and the rules that Uber drivers do not.
Why? In most places, the rules that Uber isn't following are because they are operating in violation of the law. They themselves have created the uneven playing field by refusing to operate under the law. The only distinction between Uber and a traditional taxi dispatcher dispatching independent cabs is that one uses a piece of software and the other (historically) has used phones.
Orange's Orange garb is not functional in so far as the COLOUR goes. They can't get trade dress on the overalls' style, since that is generic. Nor on the vans an cars. But the colour, they can.
Same here.
Rounded corners (and don't give me BS about "it's not rounded corners". Go to the patent. There's fuck all BUT corners- not even aspect ratios or curve radius appears in the patent - and a picture of someone holding the tablet).
I believe the correct patent number is D670286. This is the first time I have looked at this patent. I encourage everyone to take a brief look at it, it is a very short read and even more ridiculous than I ever could have imagined. I've read my share of BS patents but this one takes the cake.
You're right. Let me rephrase that. I've never met a rich stock analyst who made his money by doing exactly what he told everyone else to do.
I've only ever found 1 who seems to do that. This guy. One of his rules is that he discloses what he is currently investing in. He also revisits his predictions later, identifies how he was wrong , and offers some commentary, as in the last table of this article.
I have not actually subscribed to his services, but have read his (Free!) newsletters for many years.
There has been practically zero progress on handling the demand side. Doing so would require a radical rethink of how Western countries deal with drugs and drug addiction. This is not likely to happen in the next 20 years at least, and it is stupid to condemn other countries to 20 more years of violence by keeping our focus on limiting supply.
In Canada (at least in Sydney, Nova Scotia), addicts get their fix right at the hospital. For free.
It seems stupid at first, but it is extremely effective in reducing all kinds of crime related to drugs and addiction. Nobody there is breaking into houses or summer cabins looking for painkillers or goods to pawn. Nobody is stealing car stereos and pawning them to finance their habit. The number of people mixing dangerous chemicals in their house or garage is reduced. Why bother with all that when you just go to the hospital and get your legal high for free? Product originating from Taliban-controlled areas can't compete with free.
If Marijuana is more your style, they have medical marijuana laws and lax enforcement of recreational use. The end result is that local people grow it in their basements, cutting out any foreign supplier or middlemen. Marijuana isn't free, but I have yet to hear of any case where someone broke the law in order to get money to buy weed.
We had this "better world" 130ish years ago. It was not better, addicts were becoming a huge problem for the society - the actual reason drugs became illegal. And yes, there still was a war in Afghanistan.
Yes, but 130 years ago we were still in an "all hands on deck" global economy. We now have the ability to produce all the things that the world needs or wants with far less than 100% of the population. The global economy no longer needs a significant portion of the population to participate in the economy. How do you solve that? Having a class of people who do nothing but drugs all day long may actually be somewhat helpful in solving the problem of what to do with all the people that society doesn't need.
While those Gizmos may be cool and fun, they are no longer your major concern. Now this isn't all that bad, you are more mature and comfortable with yourself, things don't bother you so much, but you also need such distractions as well.
I thought like that for a long time, then one day I realized that I had optimized "fun" almost entirely out of my life. I am a lot happier now that I make sure to budget for "fun" things. Going through life without frivolous, but fun things was negatively affecting my mental condition. The joy of saving a dollar can only take you so far.
Hardly anyone over the age of 25 cares about the eye candy touchscreen and gadgets in the car. They either car about space for kids and/or general crap, fuel economy, performance or looks or a combination of the above. Everything else can be done on a smartphone.
Well, I'm 30 and I drive a lot of rental cars. There is a big difference between an entertainment system done right, and one which has an idiotic interface. I love the Remote touch (a trackball/mouse-like interface) in my Lexus, even though I hate the rest of the entertainment system. It's conveniently located right where my hand would be comfortably resting anyway.
On the other hand, in many Ford models, if I set up the seat to be perfectly comfortable for my legs, then all the controls are about 3" farther away than I can reach without leaning forward. I'm 5'10" tall and don't have stubby arms so that's just poor design.
100,000 miles in a car at 45MPH is equivalent to over a year's worth of 40-hour weeks. I don't know about you, but I am interested in having the most positive experience in my car that I can reasonably afford, because during the lifetime of a car a great deal of time is spent in it. So I pay attention to everything that adds or detracts from a positive experience.
I worked on the PTC a few years ago with Lockheed Martin and Norfolk Southern. The LM folks were very committed to the program, but NS kept reducing funding. I wont make you read between the lines here, the program was a absolute disaster.
Technologically the solution evolved GPS/Radio units in every train and maintenance vehicle that reported back to a bunker, data center, the trains approximate location, direction, and speed. However because of accuracy issues it was really hard to tell EXACTLY which track a train was on, especially in high density rail yards. So train GPS was supplemented by track circuits which in theory tell you if a train is on a section of track. Which is good in theory, but it can't tell you which train, nor distinguish between maintenance vehicles and trains, nor can it tell you how fast or long a train is.
Knowing how long a train is became important for guaranteeing safe spacing between vehicles, as well as knowing safe times to switch track selectors.
And don't get me started on the software, if anything were ever written by a room full of monkeys it was the PTC software. I recall one function in particular that controlled logic for determining which track a train was likely to be on; when printing out was over 30 foot long. To give you a since of how convoluted that code was, that single function had a McCabe complexity of over 1.5 million.
Now I don't care how brilliant you THINK you are as a programmer, but thinking that you could understand that function only proved to me you were an idiot. 1.5 million possible paths through that one function (yes I know that we didn't account for similar condition statements that artificially inflate that number). That one function is absolutely guaranteed to kill your program, and we stressed that until we were released from the program. Just by odds alone, you are likely to add 5-10 defects while trying to fix a bug in it. And for two solid years that is exactly what happened, the defect count literally oscillated like a sin-wave function.
I'm not telling you this as a slight at the programmers, nor the management. I'm telling you this because a project like PTC is HARD, its like the traveling salesman problem but with 50 salesman who can't be at the same place at the same time, but can pass each-other as needed, are likely going in opposite directions, and you have to recompute the whole mess every 30 seconds and resolve conflicts when a previous solution made the train "jump". Let me tell you there is nothing worse than watching a train make it's way through a switch yard then suddenly jump 10 lanes halfway through on the display.
I too was once involved in a Lockheed software project for a (thankfully) brief time. I came away with the impression that Lockheed has a very strong aversion to anything that wasn't developed there. Using Off-the-shelf hardware or software just isn't their thing, and making convoluted code was very common. Its how they run up the man-hour bill and keep support contracts. I would even go as far as to say that writing crappy code and using custom hardware is part of their business model.
Sorry bub. There's no such thing as "equal footing".
It's a nice concept. But that's all it is.
What you're asking for isn't EQUAL treatment. It's SPECIAL treatment.
This is victim mentality and places you at greater disadvantage than the actual oppression did to your ancestors.
And your mindset would have us eternally offering "reparations" because there's no way you can ever be "equal" in your own mindset.
Nowadays, how much of the African American community's problems are from remnants of oppression and how much is of their own making?
The fact is, the deck is stacked against black men from birth. Would you mind being born black in the USA? I wouldn't wish that on anybody. All the skill and bootstraplifting in the world can't make up for the inequalities that some minorities face from K-12. The problem is that we are not trying very hard to equal the K-12 system, we are trying to fix things at the college level with special treatment. At that point, we are stacking the deck against good students to try to make up for not doing so at the elementary school level.
People tend to overlook that in attacking this, one is also saying that women simply do not have as much merit and ability as men. And then people are surprised when they are called sexist for it.. it shows just how deeply ingrained the idea of female inferiority is in their minds... that the natural order, which just happens to disproportionately benefit them, is simply the way nature intended and any attempt to question that is somehow hurting them.
Not necessarily. My personal opinion is that the skills and thought processes needed in some disciplines simply might not be interesting to people who have more estrogen than testosterone in their blood.
It is curious that this kind of movement always seems to be only interested in obtaining safe, high-paying, white-collar jobs for women. If there is any hint that a job might be Difficult, Dangerous, or Dirty, there is no real push to put women in those roles, even when the pay is high. I have never met a single female welder, for example. A good welder is patient, deliberate, and if the directions don't line up with the situation, they need to ask for further directions. If you wanted to pick a gender most suited for that, would you pick a man? I wouldn't. Yet because it is (very mildly) dangerous, often dirty, and sometimes difficult, most women don't seem to be interested.
If you look at this amtrak passenger coach, its height seems to be above 20 feet. When something this tall, riding on narrow rails, takes a high speed turn, it's bound to overturn and derail due to high center of gravity. Why don't they make much shorter coaches to reduce the CoG? That might eliminate most of these crashes.
That's a special parlour car, which seems to be extra high compared to most passenger coaches in the USA. The standard is the Amfleet I and Amfleet II passenger cars, which are all 12ft, 8 inches tall with a CG of 60.4 inches.
I would be surprised if the center of gravity is much more than 6 feet off the ground.
It's probably higher than that since the coach rides high over the chassis. Most cars are way below 6 feet in height and SUVs, which are around 6 feet in height, usually have a high rollover risk, again mainly due to their high CoG compared to regular cars even though they are bottom-heavy, just like train coaches.
Well, prepare to be surprised then. According to this diagram of an Amfleet I car, the CG is at 60.4 inches or a hair more than 5 feet. The wheels and bogies of a train are very heavy. Amfleet II cars are a little different, but not in ways that would significantly affect the CG.
This was the Amtrak line between DC and NYC. There's no diesel fumes on that train, because it uses an electric locomotive.
It may have been a diesel electric unit. Many routes, such as the Northeast Regional travel from DC to NYC. But they also continue on to other places, like Richmond, VA. I can assure you that the trains continuing on to Richmond are diesel-electric since that line is not electrified. Often they will swap locomotives in DC, but not always.
One should be very wary of the distinction between "run without refueling" and "run without regular maintenance". Even assuming that the reactor's fuel would last, the ancillary equipment associated with the reactor's operation (coolant pumps and such) and electricity generation (steam turbines) certainly wouldn't be expected to operate unattended and unmaintained for months, let alone years.
That said, the fifty-year planned lifespan of the Nimitz-class includes, if I'm not mistaken, a mid-life refuelling and complex overhaul (RCOH). To be fair, the reactor's fuel would likely last longer than the planned 20-25 years if the carrier weren't actively steaming--but I wouldn't trust the other parts to last anywhere near so long.
As a steam turbine engineer, I am fairly confident that, given a well maintained system to start with, the first failure would probably be in a stuck steam control valve. Over time, oxides build up on the valve stem, which would cause it to become stuck at some point. This would probably take 3-6 years. When that happened, the instrumentation control loop (need more steam, open valve, need less steam, close valve) would have a hiccup since it would ask for more or less demand and the valve wouldn't move. Valves stuck-open have historically caused many turbine overspeeds and resulting disasters.
Depending on exactly how the system was set up, the stuck steam valve should trigger the control system to automatically close a different valve, shutting down the plant. However, it is possible that it would result in a large kaboom as the turbine entered overspeed and the turbine blades liberated.
As for the last electrical device operating, my money would be on a solar powered yard light. The quality of those devices is generally terrible but the law of averages suggests some of them have to be on the long tail of a MTBF curve.
Personally, I have a Windows tablet and I love it. The only real problem is the small number of apps. If they could make iOS and Android apps run on it, then all the better.
Why do you think a small number of apps is a problem? I have a Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 with Windows 8, and it can run any Windows software ever written that it meets the minimum requirements for. I have never once thought "boy I wish I had an app that did X". In fact, I wish some of the apps that I do have (Skype, for one) were not apps at all but normal Windows programs.
they're probably talking about wanting to run Android/iOS apps on Windows 10 phones.
Are you sure about that? I have only seen Windows phones, and not owned one but as an owner of a Windows 8 tablet, the desktop OS looks a lot like a portable device and vice versa. In fact, it seems they have been planning convergence for some time. Windows 10 might be the OS where the differences between mobile and desktop are only in the relevent aspects of the UI.
Ouya has loads of competition now from ARM "sticks" and media adapters like the Fire, Roku or Cu Box. And each year brings more capable hardware while Ouja stays the same. The new raspberry pi 2 or Amazon Fire are arguably superior in all ways. Certainly both those alternatives make excellent XBMC/Kodi boxes.
And competition has also come from tablets in terms of casual gaming. Tablets benefit from huge economies of scale and large online market ecosystems. Ouja was always going to be a niche market appealing to techies and gamers.
I have a Fire TV (the fat one, not the stick) with Kodi on it, and it is not that "excellent". If you don't exit Kodi properly (by just pushing the "home" button on the remote, for example), then Amazon videos won't play. Various other minor, but irritating bugs make me wonder if I should have just gotten a cheap Chinese android stick or android box instead. I got a Maige TV HD3 recently, which is OUTSTANDING albeit not perfectly legal, so I will probably be dumping Kodi and all my home server content in the near future anyway. Curating my own content just takes up too much of my time, at a time when the amount of free time I have is shrinking.
But what really frosted me was the "Oh the advertised rates are for NEW customers only!" line. Come on Verizon, I've been your customer for 6 years, never a late bill payment, no changes in my service, not even a technician visit to my home to fix something. You are going to give the guy up the street you don't know is really going to pay you a better deal then me? You people are NUTS..
The only reason that works is because of limited competition. Which, sadly, is the system that almost everyone in the USA lives under.
Interesting how in some places in the world, we call it bribery and corruption. In other places, it's just "how stuff gets done."
It's still graft either way. Think of all the problems caused by money buying influence in government. Now imagine how terrible it would be if businesses did it to each other too. The US government might be bought and paid for, but at least we have quite low levels of business-to-business bribery and corruption. My company can bid on projects and stand a very good chance of being evaluated on the quality of our bid and our reputation. That isn't true in a lot of places.
I can't imagine how ridiculous things must be in China, where bribery is rampant and government and business are hard to distinguish from each other.
Now let's say the university alters their courses to be more attractive to women. But the jobs that engineers will not change. You may want to change them, but if they want them to actually achieve something useful, they really can't change. It's like asking painters to be more like actors, so actors can also enter the field of painters; this will not create more painters, since the skill of painting, remains the skill of painting.
"more societally meaningful" ?! And I don't get it either. My job does not get more societally meaningful; if I don't do my job (Software Engineer, Industrial Automation), you don't get any power to your home, don't drive a car, don't get air condition in the mall and many more things. Sure I am only a small cog in that bigger scheme of things, but without engineers modern society would not exist.
I would like more women in engineering; many of the colleagues I like to work with are women. And talking with them, the content of their work is not what is holding them back. In some cases it may be social or cultural and in other cases just "math is hard".
On that note, I demand more male nurses!
When a man doesn't want to be a nurse, that's OK because most men would prefer not be nurses.
When a woman doesn't want to be an engineer, that's because the male dominated field is holding them back, and remedies must be made!
Ain't nobody going to install pentabular screws in my body.
It's hard to find a good picture of the thing but my Ponto hearing aid looks like a rounded Torx variant. And I'm OK with having only the doctor have the screwdriver for it.
Something I will be curious to see over the next few decades is how propaganda is affected by advertising saturation. Something that has been worrying marketers is that young consumers (ones more accustomed to multitasking and who grew up with heavy advertizing) filter out a larger amount of marketing than other groups. Even as their knowledge and skills improve (ah, the dark uses of all those psych majors), advertising is becoming more difficult and consumers more jaded and less uniform.
Since propaganda can be seen as a specialized form of marketing, I wonder how that type of manipulation is going to adjust. It used to be that one coherent message would affect most of the population the same way, but increasingly the same techniques and narratives will have differing effects on different populations. So what we tend to see more and more of is propaganda generating smaller more fanatical groups along with others forming backlash against tem.. it kinda works if you examine only the successful parts of the application, but is no longer all that useful for changing general public perception, just creating partisans.
Having traveled to North Korea and seen what propaganda looks like, you are wrong. Good propaganda is something that people want to believe, or could easily believe, even if it isn't true. Good propaganda has no opposing viewpoint that is credible. Good propaganda speaks to the choir, where the choir intentionally designed to be the largest possible audience. And anyone who isn't in the choir is a bad person.
Consider as just one example the propaganda that in North Korea, everyone must choose from 28 official state haircuts. It's something that the average American could easily be convinced to believe. Perhaps you read the story and believed it too. It sounds plausible enough for most westerners to believe.
Unfortunately, it was complete bunk. But just about everyone I talked to bought it. And they thought I was the odd one for believing otherwise.
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Well, they're already opting to have damaged natural joints like hips and knees replaced. That's a case of upgrading from natural to artificial to gain function. As the performance of artificial limbs increase, it might become an increasingly commonplace treatment for older people, just like knee or hip replacement.
If we project that trend forward for twenty or thirty years I wouldn't be surprised at all to see artificial legs that outperform natural legs for the purposes of walking or even running. But I don't think people with normal abilities will be trading in their limbs just to be able walk a little longer, run a little faster, or carry more weight. That won't happen until the replacement is subjectively indistinguishable from the real thing; until you can feel the grass under your toes.
I'm comfortable predicting locomotion parity in the next fifty years, but I wouldn't care to speculate on when we'll see sensory parity.
I think it will be way more likely that exoskeleton type systems using the same control mechanism will be developed. They could have adaptive algorithms which gradually decrease the power output over time, forcing the patient to develop muscle mass in a safe and 100% controlled manner. It could prevent people with broken or weak bones from making damaging movements, while at the same time allowing rehabilitative movements. It would revolutionize the rehabilitation industry.
The same technology could be used, it has all the advantages of bionic limb replacement, plus you get to keep your limbs.
Because they have half a clue ...
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the ability to innovate and change it. They aren't always first movers, but they DO bring innovation and of course profits to any segment they enter.
The magic is in saying "NO" to doing things that don't make sense... entering a crowded, unimaginative, razor-thin margin, mature TV market doesn't make sense for Apple. That's why they said no.... No more, no less.
My company declines jobs and new markets all the time. We run some quick numbers and make a decision on whether it makes sense to take on X risk for Y% margin. Nobody calls us "magic".
Apple doesn't enter a market unless they see the potential to charge $1 for a lime that everyone else is selling for 50 cents.
The real issue should be is evaluating regulations that the Taxi companies have to follow and the rules that Uber drivers do not.
Why? In most places, the rules that Uber isn't following are because they are operating in violation of the law. They themselves have created the uneven playing field by refusing to operate under the law. The only distinction between Uber and a traditional taxi dispatcher dispatching independent cabs is that one uses a piece of software and the other (historically) has used phones.
You get trade dress on the non-functional part.
Orange's Orange garb is not functional in so far as the COLOUR goes. They can't get trade dress on the overalls' style, since that is generic. Nor on the vans an cars. But the colour, they can.
Same here.
Rounded corners (and don't give me BS about "it's not rounded corners". Go to the patent. There's fuck all BUT corners- not even aspect ratios or curve radius appears in the patent - and a picture of someone holding the tablet).
I believe the correct patent number is D670286. This is the first time I have looked at this patent. I encourage everyone to take a brief look at it, it is a very short read and even more ridiculous than I ever could have imagined. I've read my share of BS patents but this one takes the cake.
You're right. Let me rephrase that. I've never met a rich stock analyst who made his money by doing exactly what he told everyone else to do.
I've only ever found 1 who seems to do that. This guy. One of his rules is that he discloses what he is currently investing in. He also revisits his predictions later, identifies how he was wrong , and offers some commentary, as in the last table of this article.
I have not actually subscribed to his services, but have read his (Free!) newsletters for many years.
There has been practically zero progress on handling the demand side. Doing so would require a radical rethink of how Western countries deal with drugs and drug addiction. This is not likely to happen in the next 20 years at least, and it is stupid to condemn other countries to 20 more years of violence by keeping our focus on limiting supply.
In Canada (at least in Sydney, Nova Scotia), addicts get their fix right at the hospital. For free.
It seems stupid at first, but it is extremely effective in reducing all kinds of crime related to drugs and addiction. Nobody there is breaking into houses or summer cabins looking for painkillers or goods to pawn. Nobody is stealing car stereos and pawning them to finance their habit. The number of people mixing dangerous chemicals in their house or garage is reduced. Why bother with all that when you just go to the hospital and get your legal high for free? Product originating from Taliban-controlled areas can't compete with free.
If Marijuana is more your style, they have medical marijuana laws and lax enforcement of recreational use. The end result is that local people grow it in their basements, cutting out any foreign supplier or middlemen. Marijuana isn't free, but I have yet to hear of any case where someone broke the law in order to get money to buy weed.
We had this "better world" 130ish years ago. It was not better, addicts were becoming a huge problem for the society - the actual reason drugs became illegal. And yes, there still was a war in Afghanistan.
Yes, but 130 years ago we were still in an "all hands on deck" global economy. We now have the ability to produce all the things that the world needs or wants with far less than 100% of the population. The global economy no longer needs a significant portion of the population to participate in the economy. How do you solve that? Having a class of people who do nothing but drugs all day long may actually be somewhat helpful in solving the problem of what to do with all the people that society doesn't need.
While those Gizmos may be cool and fun, they are no longer your major concern. Now this isn't all that bad, you are more mature and comfortable with yourself, things don't bother you so much, but you also need such distractions as well.
I thought like that for a long time, then one day I realized that I had optimized "fun" almost entirely out of my life. I am a lot happier now that I make sure to budget for "fun" things. Going through life without frivolous, but fun things was negatively affecting my mental condition. The joy of saving a dollar can only take you so far.
Hardly anyone over the age of 25 cares about the eye candy touchscreen and gadgets in the car. They either car about space for kids and/or general crap, fuel economy, performance or looks or a combination of the above. Everything else can be done on a smartphone.
Well, I'm 30 and I drive a lot of rental cars. There is a big difference between an entertainment system done right, and one which has an idiotic interface. I love the Remote touch (a trackball/mouse-like interface) in my Lexus, even though I hate the rest of the entertainment system. It's conveniently located right where my hand would be comfortably resting anyway.
On the other hand, in many Ford models, if I set up the seat to be perfectly comfortable for my legs, then all the controls are about 3" farther away than I can reach without leaning forward. I'm 5'10" tall and don't have stubby arms so that's just poor design.
100,000 miles in a car at 45MPH is equivalent to over a year's worth of 40-hour weeks. I don't know about you, but I am interested in having the most positive experience in my car that I can reasonably afford, because during the lifetime of a car a great deal of time is spent in it. So I pay attention to everything that adds or detracts from a positive experience.
Replying as anonymous for business reasons...
I worked on the PTC a few years ago with Lockheed Martin and Norfolk Southern. The LM folks were very committed to the program, but NS kept reducing funding. I wont make you read between the lines here, the program was a absolute disaster.
Technologically the solution evolved GPS/Radio units in every train and maintenance vehicle that reported back to a bunker, data center, the trains approximate location, direction, and speed. However because of accuracy issues it was really hard to tell EXACTLY which track a train was on, especially in high density rail yards. So train GPS was supplemented by track circuits which in theory tell you if a train is on a section of track. Which is good in theory, but it can't tell you which train, nor distinguish between maintenance vehicles and trains, nor can it tell you how fast or long a train is.
Knowing how long a train is became important for guaranteeing safe spacing between vehicles, as well as knowing safe times to switch track selectors.
And don't get me started on the software, if anything were ever written by a room full of monkeys it was the PTC software. I recall one function in particular that controlled logic for determining which track a train was likely to be on; when printing out was over 30 foot long. To give you a since of how convoluted that code was, that single function had a McCabe complexity of over 1.5 million.
Now I don't care how brilliant you THINK you are as a programmer, but thinking that you could understand that function only proved to me you were an idiot. 1.5 million possible paths through that one function (yes I know that we didn't account for similar condition statements that artificially inflate that number). That one function is absolutely guaranteed to kill your program, and we stressed that until we were released from the program. Just by odds alone, you are likely to add 5-10 defects while trying to fix a bug in it. And for two solid years that is exactly what happened, the defect count literally oscillated like a sin-wave function.
I'm not telling you this as a slight at the programmers, nor the management. I'm telling you this because a project like PTC is HARD, its like the traveling salesman problem but with 50 salesman who can't be at the same place at the same time, but can pass each-other as needed, are likely going in opposite directions, and you have to recompute the whole mess every 30 seconds and resolve conflicts when a previous solution made the train "jump". Let me tell you there is nothing worse than watching a train make it's way through a switch yard then suddenly jump 10 lanes halfway through on the display.
I too was once involved in a Lockheed software project for a (thankfully) brief time. I came away with the impression that Lockheed has a very strong aversion to anything that wasn't developed there. Using Off-the-shelf hardware or software just isn't their thing, and making convoluted code was very common. Its how they run up the man-hour bill and keep support contracts. I would even go as far as to say that writing crappy code and using custom hardware is part of their business model.
Sorry bub. There's no such thing as "equal footing".
It's a nice concept. But that's all it is.
What you're asking for isn't EQUAL treatment. It's SPECIAL treatment.
This is victim mentality and places you at greater disadvantage than the actual oppression did to your ancestors.
And your mindset would have us eternally offering "reparations" because there's no way you can ever be "equal" in your own mindset.
Nowadays, how much of the African American community's problems are from remnants of oppression and how much is of their own making?
The fact is, the deck is stacked against black men from birth. Would you mind being born black in the USA? I wouldn't wish that on anybody. All the skill and bootstraplifting in the world can't make up for the inequalities that some minorities face from K-12. The problem is that we are not trying very hard to equal the K-12 system, we are trying to fix things at the college level with special treatment. At that point, we are stacking the deck against good students to try to make up for not doing so at the elementary school level.
People tend to overlook that in attacking this, one is also saying that women simply do not have as much merit and ability as men. And then people are surprised when they are called sexist for it.. it shows just how deeply ingrained the idea of female inferiority is in their minds... that the natural order, which just happens to disproportionately benefit them, is simply the way nature intended and any attempt to question that is somehow hurting them.
Not necessarily. My personal opinion is that the skills and thought processes needed in some disciplines simply might not be interesting to people who have more estrogen than testosterone in their blood.
It is curious that this kind of movement always seems to be only interested in obtaining safe, high-paying, white-collar jobs for women. If there is any hint that a job might be Difficult, Dangerous, or Dirty, there is no real push to put women in those roles, even when the pay is high. I have never met a single female welder, for example. A good welder is patient, deliberate, and if the directions don't line up with the situation, they need to ask for further directions. If you wanted to pick a gender most suited for that, would you pick a man? I wouldn't. Yet because it is (very mildly) dangerous, often dirty, and sometimes difficult, most women don't seem to be interested.
If you look at this amtrak passenger coach, its height seems to be above 20 feet. When something this tall, riding on narrow rails, takes a high speed turn, it's bound to overturn and derail due to high center of gravity. Why don't they make much shorter coaches to reduce the CoG? That might eliminate most of these crashes.
That's a special parlour car, which seems to be extra high compared to most passenger coaches in the USA. The standard is the Amfleet I and Amfleet II passenger cars, which are all 12ft, 8 inches tall with a CG of 60.4 inches.
It's probably higher than that since the coach rides high over the chassis. Most cars are way below 6 feet in height and SUVs, which are around 6 feet in height, usually have a high rollover risk, again mainly due to their high CoG compared to regular cars even though they are bottom-heavy, just like train coaches.
Well, prepare to be surprised then. According to this diagram of an Amfleet I car, the CG is at 60.4 inches or a hair more than 5 feet. The wheels and bogies of a train are very heavy. Amfleet II cars are a little different, but not in ways that would significantly affect the CG.
This was the Amtrak line between DC and NYC. There's no diesel fumes on that train, because it uses an electric locomotive.
It may have been a diesel electric unit. Many routes, such as the Northeast Regional travel from DC to NYC. But they also continue on to other places, like Richmond, VA. I can assure you that the trains continuing on to Richmond are diesel-electric since that line is not electrified. Often they will swap locomotives in DC, but not always.
One should be very wary of the distinction between "run without refueling" and "run without regular maintenance". Even assuming that the reactor's fuel would last, the ancillary equipment associated with the reactor's operation (coolant pumps and such) and electricity generation (steam turbines) certainly wouldn't be expected to operate unattended and unmaintained for months, let alone years.
That said, the fifty-year planned lifespan of the Nimitz-class includes, if I'm not mistaken, a mid-life refuelling and complex overhaul (RCOH). To be fair, the reactor's fuel would likely last longer than the planned 20-25 years if the carrier weren't actively steaming--but I wouldn't trust the other parts to last anywhere near so long.
As a steam turbine engineer, I am fairly confident that, given a well maintained system to start with, the first failure would probably be in a stuck steam control valve. Over time, oxides build up on the valve stem, which would cause it to become stuck at some point. This would probably take 3-6 years. When that happened, the instrumentation control loop (need more steam, open valve, need less steam, close valve) would have a hiccup since it would ask for more or less demand and the valve wouldn't move. Valves stuck-open have historically caused many turbine overspeeds and resulting disasters.
Depending on exactly how the system was set up, the stuck steam valve should trigger the control system to automatically close a different valve, shutting down the plant. However, it is possible that it would result in a large kaboom as the turbine entered overspeed and the turbine blades liberated.
As for the last electrical device operating, my money would be on a solar powered yard light. The quality of those devices is generally terrible but the law of averages suggests some of them have to be on the long tail of a MTBF curve.
Personally, I have a Windows tablet and I love it. The only real problem is the small number of apps. If they could make iOS and Android apps run on it, then all the better.
Why do you think a small number of apps is a problem? I have a Lenovo Yoga Tablet 2 with Windows 8, and it can run any Windows software ever written that it meets the minimum requirements for. I have never once thought "boy I wish I had an app that did X". In fact, I wish some of the apps that I do have (Skype, for one) were not apps at all but normal Windows programs.
they're probably talking about wanting to run Android/iOS apps on Windows 10 phones.
Are you sure about that? I have only seen Windows phones, and not owned one but as an owner of a Windows 8 tablet, the desktop OS looks a lot like a portable device and vice versa. In fact, it seems they have been planning convergence for some time. Windows 10 might be the OS where the differences between mobile and desktop are only in the relevent aspects of the UI.
Ouya has loads of competition now from ARM "sticks" and media adapters like the Fire, Roku or Cu Box. And each year brings more capable hardware while Ouja stays the same. The new raspberry pi 2 or Amazon Fire are arguably superior in all ways. Certainly both those alternatives make excellent XBMC/Kodi boxes.
And competition has also come from tablets in terms of casual gaming. Tablets benefit from huge economies of scale and large online market ecosystems. Ouja was always going to be a niche market appealing to techies and gamers.
I have a Fire TV (the fat one, not the stick) with Kodi on it, and it is not that "excellent". If you don't exit Kodi properly (by just pushing the "home" button on the remote, for example), then Amazon videos won't play. Various other minor, but irritating bugs make me wonder if I should have just gotten a cheap Chinese android stick or android box instead. I got a Maige TV HD3 recently, which is OUTSTANDING albeit not perfectly legal, so I will probably be dumping Kodi and all my home server content in the near future anyway. Curating my own content just takes up too much of my time, at a time when the amount of free time I have is shrinking.
But what really frosted me was the "Oh the advertised rates are for NEW customers only!" line. Come on Verizon, I've been your customer for 6 years, never a late bill payment, no changes in my service, not even a technician visit to my home to fix something. You are going to give the guy up the street you don't know is really going to pay you a better deal then me? You people are NUTS..
The only reason that works is because of limited competition. Which, sadly, is the system that almost everyone in the USA lives under.
Interesting how in some places in the world, we call it bribery and corruption. In other places, it's just "how stuff gets done."
It's still graft either way. Think of all the problems caused by money buying influence in government. Now imagine how terrible it would be if businesses did it to each other too. The US government might be bought and paid for, but at least we have quite low levels of business-to-business bribery and corruption. My company can bid on projects and stand a very good chance of being evaluated on the quality of our bid and our reputation. That isn't true in a lot of places.
I can't imagine how ridiculous things must be in China, where bribery is rampant and government and business are hard to distinguish from each other.
Ok, fine, I will bite.
Now let's say the university alters their courses to be more attractive to women. But the jobs that engineers will not change. You may want to change them, but if they want them to actually achieve something useful, they really can't change. It's like asking painters to be more like actors, so actors can also enter the field of painters; this will not create more painters, since the skill of painting, remains the skill of painting.
"more societally meaningful" ?! And I don't get it either. My job does not get more societally meaningful; if I don't do my job (Software Engineer, Industrial Automation), you don't get any power to your home, don't drive a car, don't get air condition in the mall and many more things. Sure I am only a small cog in that bigger scheme of things, but without engineers modern society would not exist.
I would like more women in engineering; many of the colleagues I like to work with are women. And talking with them, the content of their work is not what is holding them back. In some cases it may be social or cultural and in other cases just "math is hard".
On that note, I demand more male nurses!
When a man doesn't want to be a nurse, that's OK because most men would prefer not be nurses.
When a woman doesn't want to be an engineer, that's because the male dominated field is holding them back, and remedies must be made!
Show me a product from 10 years ago that is still around, and popular, in essentially the same form.
... My ISP still offers Usenet access...
I don't believe that for a second.
Ain't nobody going to install pentabular screws in my body.
It's hard to find a good picture of the thing but my Ponto hearing aid looks like a rounded Torx variant. And I'm OK with having only the doctor have the screwdriver for it.
Something I will be curious to see over the next few decades is how propaganda is affected by advertising saturation. Something that has been worrying marketers is that young consumers (ones more accustomed to multitasking and who grew up with heavy advertizing) filter out a larger amount of marketing than other groups. Even as their knowledge and skills improve (ah, the dark uses of all those psych majors), advertising is becoming more difficult and consumers more jaded and less uniform. Since propaganda can be seen as a specialized form of marketing, I wonder how that type of manipulation is going to adjust. It used to be that one coherent message would affect most of the population the same way, but increasingly the same techniques and narratives will have differing effects on different populations. So what we tend to see more and more of is propaganda generating smaller more fanatical groups along with others forming backlash against tem.. it kinda works if you examine only the successful parts of the application, but is no longer all that useful for changing general public perception, just creating partisans.
Having traveled to North Korea and seen what propaganda looks like, you are wrong. Good propaganda is something that people want to believe, or could easily believe, even if it isn't true. Good propaganda has no opposing viewpoint that is credible. Good propaganda speaks to the choir, where the choir intentionally designed to be the largest possible audience. And anyone who isn't in the choir is a bad person.
Consider as just one example the propaganda that in North Korea, everyone must choose from 28 official state haircuts. It's something that the average American could easily be convinced to believe. Perhaps you read the story and believed it too. It sounds plausible enough for most westerners to believe.
Unfortunately, it was complete bunk. But just about everyone I talked to bought it. And they thought I was the odd one for believing otherwise.