I tried to write some scripts for AutoCAD and in the first day I found about a dozen bugs in AutoLisp. I contacted AutoDesk to report the problems, and they told me they knew about the bugs, had no plans to fix them, and recommended that I use the JavaScript API instead.
So I decided not to use AutoCAD. I did some research and found FreeCAD. Free software with a very nice Python API for scripting.
Lying badly and getting caught has a social cost, everywhere.
Not really. China is a low trust society. Chinese people don't trust each other, they expect others to try to cheat them, and if they think they can get away with cheating others, they are often willing to try.
But this also means that dishonesty is so widespread that they have no choice but to tolerate it. If an employee is fired every time they are caught lying/cheating/stealing, the company will soon have no workers and be out of business. So instead, they use one of two solutions: 1) Hire only your own family. This is common in China, and is a reason why they have many many tiny companies, a few gigantic SOEs, and almost nothing in between. 2) Have excessive cross checks and controls. In many Chinese department stores, a checker totals up your items and bags them, then gives you a receipt, and then you go to a separate cashier desk to actually pay. This way the owner has to trust or monitor only the one cashier, and not the six checkers.
We don't expect it to be perfect, but Uber was unnecessarily reckless. They intentionally disabled safety checks. It is hard to imagine Waymo doing that. Waymo has WAY more road-miles than Uber, and has had no fatalities, or even injuries. Tesla has killed a few people, but they have WAY WAY more road-miles, and their fatalities were honest errors, not intentionally crippled software.
I understand why Uber is cutting corners. They are losing money and under pressure from investors, with no obvious path to profitability. They can't raise rates without losing customers to Lyft. They can't cut driver pay, since they are already having trouble recruiting drivers. So self-driving-cars are their only hope, so they needed to show progress before the VCs pulled the plug.
Fake science is everywhere, false claims are made everywhere*
Yes, fake science occurs everywhere, but not at the same levels. I have lived in China, and I am married to a Chinese woman, and I can tell you that lying and deception is far more tolerated in their culture than it is in America.
Poor example. This was a Japanese researcher who's fraud was exposed by Japan's own scientific community. Their internal system fixed the problem.
That happens less frequently in China, where fraud is often only exposed when the claims are big enough to draw international scrutiny. And even then, China will make a show of punishing the one offender, often harshly, rather than reforming the system.
Yes, after rapid then blitz and if still even then Armageddon - white gets a slight time advantage, black only has to draw to win.
Magnus excels at speed chess, the faster the better. So it was widely presumed that he would have a bigger and bigger advantage as the games moved to faster and faster formats... and that is what happened.
It is believed that he offered a draw in game 12, despite having a stronger position, because he figured a single blunder could cost him the championship if the game continued, and going to a 4 game rapid tie breaker would give him better odds.
Airborne invasions indeed have some poor records, but Crete still succeeded.
Crete barely succeeded, and the Germans never again did a large scale airborne operation. The allies drew the opposite lesson, and expanded their airborne capabilities, but this was largely because they didn't realize the level of casualties the Germans had absorbed, or how close they came to being defeated.
Crete was lightly defended, and the British and Greeks were caught totally off guard. They had lost much of their heavy equipment the previous month during the fighting on the Greek mainland. There were also some big communications blunders, when defending units were inadvertently ordered to disengage at critical moments. Despite all these problems, they almost defeated the attackers.
China would have no element of surprise, would be facing an armored adversary, and would be faced with weapons that did not exist in 1941, such as DPICM artillery, that are devastating to exposed infantry.
Unless they get there hands on some plans, like the Khan network's
In the 1980s, Taiwan cooperated with Israel and South Africa on nukes. They agreed to discontinue their program when it was infiltrated and exposed by the CIA.
Actually, they haven't. This is another thing that "everybody knows", but is not true.
Working class incomes, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated since the 1980s. Stagnation means they stayed the same, not that they declined.
Is it a problem that working class incomes have stagnated, especially when people higher up the income ladder have prospered? Sure, most people would agree that is a problem. But by using hyperbolic words like "devastated", you aren't contributing to the solution.
CRISPR the females to get even better protein from some food source other than blood.
Again, that is totally unrealistic. Any available protein source is going to already be exploited by other species that are far better adapted to it than your gene patched mosquitoes.
I would rather a CRISPR-produced variety of mosquito that does not suck blood.
That is not a realistic goal. The female (only females suck blood) use the protein from the blood to make eggs. Non-blood-suckers would be at a reproductive disadvantage, and the modified gene would die out instead of spreading through the population.
A better goal is CRISPR-produced mosquitoes that don't transmit diseases. This would be no disadvantage to the mosquito, so would not die out.
And once we have proven this technique with mosquitoes, we can try it on humans.
Blood sucking human females are not a problem everywhere. Some countries don't have alimony.
The PRC might try to finish off the ROC before we can get a carrier there
Taiwan already has WAY more airpower than a single American carrier, and islands don't sink.
The main purpose of the carrier would be to act as a tripwire, ensuring American involvement if it is attacked.
A sea or airborne invasion of Taiwan is far beyond the current capability of the PLA. It would have to be bigger than D-Day. In June 1944, 90% of the German Army was in Russia. Of their soldiers in France, most were focused on Calais. For the PLA, there would be no "second front" nor any deception about landing points. They don't have even 1% of the amphibious capability that the USA+UK+Canada possessed in 1944.
Airborne invasions have a very poor track record. Crete was a pyrrhic victory, the Normandy jumps were successful only because they linked up with troops advancing from the beaches. Arnheim was a failure. So was Dien Bien Phu.
China could go nuclear, but that would likely bring American retaliation. If Taiwan ever feels like they can't count on America, they could build their own nukes in, maybe, a month. Remember, every country that has ever made a serious attempt to build a nuke has succeeded on the first try. As one of the most technologically advanced countr^H^H^H^H^Hregions in the world, Taiwan would have no problem.
2. Having deployed said working solution, does this give early adopter benefits? 2a. Skills and knowledge should allow entrepreneurship to provide economical benefits. 2b. This can be exported to other places that did wait for prices to come down.
Global market share for German-made solar panels: 0%.
While other countries were investing in R&D, Germany was spending a fortune to pay roofers to install expensive crap in one of the world's cloudiest locations.
In hindsight that was not a good strategy. At the time it seemed pretty stupid as well.
"Wiping it out" implies globally, not just in California.
A bacteria borne disease is not going to "wipe out" Aedes aegypti. It is very robust and adaptable species. They can breed in an overturned bottle cap.
But if we knock the population back, it gives us breathing room to target the diseases. If there are a million cases of mosquito borne disease every year, very few resources can be devoted to each outbreak. But if we eliminate 90% of the mosquitoes, the result is a 99% reduction in the spread of the disease. That means we can devote much more personnel and resources to pounce on each outbreak.
This is what happened with smallpox. Once we got it 99% gone, we had fast-reaction teams of dozens of people, that would fly in to each outbreak, and then fan out to vaccinate everyone in the vicinity, and quarantine those likely to have been exposed. The last case in the wild was in Somalia in 1973.
No, not at all. The targeted species, Aedes aegypti, is African, and IS NOT NATIVE TO CALIFORNIA. So there should be no negative repercussions from wiping it out. There are plenty of native species of mosquitoes (which are not disease vectors) that will be happy to fill the vacated niche.
Although the targeted A. aegypti will develop resistance, in the meantime, the temporary drop in their population may be enough to disrupt the spread of diseases. The spread of vector-borne diseases goes down as the reciprocal of the square of the vector population. For many of these diseases, R0 is already less than one, so this may be a way to lick'em for good.
Hawaii and mongoose is a very easy obvious one...
Before the arrival of Europeans, Hawaii had zero mosquitoes. All the mosquitoes there should be wiped out. Then we can start working on the mongooses.
if your chip designs are that sensitive for national security you better have your own Fab.
ROC is a solid America ally, so there isn't much "national security" risk. American defense contractors can't afford their own fabs.
Now the part that can be fixed with trade negotiations is to be sure that the company doesn't go ahead and make a spinoff product based off your IP.
ROC does not require any IP sharing or joint ventures (ROC != PRC). If they are fabbing your chip, you give them your masks, not your VHDL/Verilog source. With the mask, they could make direct copies, but not "spin-offs".
Of course, if they are caught ripping off their customers, their $190B market cap would quickly go to near zero. So they have a pretty big incentive to behave.
Good thing they're delaying the nuclear plant closures
They are not delaying them. They are reaching the end of their service life, and are being closed on schedule.
What has changed is that they will not be replaced with new nukes.
This makes sense, since nukes are no longer economical. While the cost of renewables has plummeted, the cost of nukes has steadily gone UP. There are, of course, reasons why nuclear power is so expensive, and those reasons might not be valid in an alternative universe, but that doesn't change our reality.
France has one of the best, most realistic and cleanest power generation systems on the planet.
Also a rather expensive one. About 0.15 euro = 0.17 USD per kwh. That is not so high by EU standards, but hurts them globally, leading to trade deficits and chronically high unemployment. France needs to be more competitive.
Solar and wind can generate power for about 0.03 euro per kwh.
There are some very sunny areas in southern France, and plenty of wind in Brittany.
Macron tries to justify himself staying in to power despite deceiving the population.
He ran for office as a moderate reformer, and he has governed as a moderate reformer. So where is the deception?
Being a reformer means going against entrenched interest groups. So of course he has made some enemies. If he deserves any criticism, it is for being too timid. But France is not an easy place to fix.
Those few seconds can really eat into profits when you add it all up.
CSRs are not doing one chat at a time. They are handling a dozen or so simultaneous chats. While you are typing, they are responding to another customer.
They also have automatic pattern matchers to scan your text for strings related to common questions, and then pre-fill the reply. The CSR just needs to give it a quick glance, and click "send". But that was a few years ago, so the state-of-the-art today may be to just auto-send. This may have been the cause of the "instant reply" mentioned in the summary.
It is all very efficient, and there is almost no dead time waiting for the customer to type.
Slashdot Mirror
Sports.
Nerds don't watch sports. It is not "stuff that matters".
I tried to write some scripts for AutoCAD and in the first day I found about a dozen bugs in AutoLisp. I contacted AutoDesk to report the problems, and they told me they knew about the bugs, had no plans to fix them, and recommended that I use the JavaScript API instead.
So I decided not to use AutoCAD. I did some research and found FreeCAD. Free software with a very nice Python API for scripting.
I don't trust my fellow Americans or Germans (dual citizen).
Do you buy products without opening the box first to see if it is full of sawdust?
Do you wear a knapsack on your back in a crowd, rather than shifting it around to your chest so no one slices the bottom with a razor?
Do you share information with your co-workers, even when you are not required to do so?
Do you feed your baby domestically produced baby formula?
If you do any of these things, then you trust your fellow citizens more than Chinese do.
Lying badly and getting caught has a social cost, everywhere.
Not really. China is a low trust society. Chinese people don't trust each other, they expect others to try to cheat them, and if they think they can get away with cheating others, they are often willing to try.
But this also means that dishonesty is so widespread that they have no choice but to tolerate it. If an employee is fired every time they are caught lying/cheating/stealing, the company will soon have no workers and be out of business. So instead, they use one of two solutions: 1) Hire only your own family. This is common in China, and is a reason why they have many many tiny companies, a few gigantic SOEs, and almost nothing in between. 2) Have excessive cross checks and controls. In many Chinese department stores, a checker totals up your items and bags them, then gives you a receipt, and then you go to a separate cashier desk to actually pay. This way the owner has to trust or monitor only the one cashier, and not the six checkers.
You can't expect it to be perfect
We don't expect it to be perfect, but Uber was unnecessarily reckless. They intentionally disabled safety checks. It is hard to imagine Waymo doing that. Waymo has WAY more road-miles than Uber, and has had no fatalities, or even injuries. Tesla has killed a few people, but they have WAY WAY more road-miles, and their fatalities were honest errors, not intentionally crippled software.
I understand why Uber is cutting corners. They are losing money and under pressure from investors, with no obvious path to profitability. They can't raise rates without losing customers to Lyft. They can't cut driver pay, since they are already having trouble recruiting drivers. So self-driving-cars are their only hope, so they needed to show progress before the VCs pulled the plug.
Execs should be in prison for murder.
If we are going to lock people up for incompetence, we will need a lot more prisons.
Fake science is everywhere, false claims are made everywhere*
Yes, fake science occurs everywhere, but not at the same levels. I have lived in China, and I am married to a Chinese woman, and I can tell you that lying and deception is far more tolerated in their culture than it is in America.
(* Favorite: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... )
Poor example. This was a Japanese researcher who's fraud was exposed by Japan's own scientific community. Their internal system fixed the problem.
That happens less frequently in China, where fraud is often only exposed when the claims are big enough to draw international scrutiny. And even then, China will make a show of punishing the one offender, often harshly, rather than reforming the system.
Yes, after rapid then blitz and if still even then Armageddon - white gets a slight time advantage, black only has to draw to win.
Magnus excels at speed chess, the faster the better. So it was widely presumed that he would have a bigger and bigger advantage as the games moved to faster and faster formats ... and that is what happened.
It is believed that he offered a draw in game 12, despite having a stronger position, because he figured a single blunder could cost him the championship if the game continued, and going to a 4 game rapid tie breaker would give him better odds.
Also, we should consider the environmental impact of NOT building the tunnels, and everyone continuing to commute with SUVs on the freeway.
NIMBYism is destroying America.
Airborne invasions indeed have some poor records, but Crete still succeeded.
Crete barely succeeded, and the Germans never again did a large scale airborne operation. The allies drew the opposite lesson, and expanded their airborne capabilities, but this was largely because they didn't realize the level of casualties the Germans had absorbed, or how close they came to being defeated.
Crete was lightly defended, and the British and Greeks were caught totally off guard. They had lost much of their heavy equipment the previous month during the fighting on the Greek mainland. There were also some big communications blunders, when defending units were inadvertently ordered to disengage at critical moments. Despite all these problems, they almost defeated the attackers.
China would have no element of surprise, would be facing an armored adversary, and would be faced with weapons that did not exist in 1941, such as DPICM artillery, that are devastating to exposed infantry.
Unless they get there hands on some plans, like the Khan network's
In the 1980s, Taiwan cooperated with Israel and South Africa on nukes. They agreed to discontinue their program when it was infiltrated and exposed by the CIA.
It's our working class that's been devastated.
Actually, they haven't. This is another thing that "everybody knows", but is not true.
Working class incomes, adjusted for inflation, have stagnated since the 1980s. Stagnation means they stayed the same, not that they declined.
Is it a problem that working class incomes have stagnated, especially when people higher up the income ladder have prospered? Sure, most people would agree that is a problem. But by using hyperbolic words like "devastated", you aren't contributing to the solution.
CRISPR the females to get even better protein from some food source other than blood.
Again, that is totally unrealistic. Any available protein source is going to already be exploited by other species that are far better adapted to it than your gene patched mosquitoes.
I would rather a CRISPR-produced variety of mosquito that does not suck blood.
That is not a realistic goal. The female (only females suck blood) use the protein from the blood to make eggs. Non-blood-suckers would be at a reproductive disadvantage, and the modified gene would die out instead of spreading through the population.
A better goal is CRISPR-produced mosquitoes that don't transmit diseases. This would be no disadvantage to the mosquito, so would not die out.
And once we have proven this technique with mosquitoes, we can try it on humans.
Blood sucking human females are not a problem everywhere. Some countries don't have alimony.
The PRC might try to finish off the ROC before we can get a carrier there
Taiwan already has WAY more airpower than a single American carrier, and islands don't sink.
The main purpose of the carrier would be to act as a tripwire, ensuring American involvement if it is attacked.
A sea or airborne invasion of Taiwan is far beyond the current capability of the PLA. It would have to be bigger than D-Day. In June 1944, 90% of the German Army was in Russia. Of their soldiers in France, most were focused on Calais. For the PLA, there would be no "second front" nor any deception about landing points. They don't have even 1% of the amphibious capability that the USA+UK+Canada possessed in 1944.
Airborne invasions have a very poor track record. Crete was a pyrrhic victory, the Normandy jumps were successful only because they linked up with troops advancing from the beaches. Arnheim was a failure. So was Dien Bien Phu.
China could go nuclear, but that would likely bring American retaliation. If Taiwan ever feels like they can't count on America, they could build their own nukes in, maybe, a month. Remember, every country that has ever made a serious attempt to build a nuke has succeeded on the first try. As one of the most technologically advanced countr^H^H^H^H^Hregions in the world, Taiwan would have no problem.
2. Having deployed said working solution, does this give early adopter benefits?
2a. Skills and knowledge should allow entrepreneurship to provide economical benefits.
2b. This can be exported to other places that did wait for prices to come down.
Global market share for German-made solar panels: 0%.
While other countries were investing in R&D, Germany was spending a fortune to pay roofers to install expensive crap in one of the world's cloudiest locations.
In hindsight that was not a good strategy. At the time it seemed pretty stupid as well.
"Wiping it out" implies globally, not just in California.
A bacteria borne disease is not going to "wipe out" Aedes aegypti. It is very robust and adaptable species. They can breed in an overturned bottle cap.
But if we knock the population back, it gives us breathing room to target the diseases. If there are a million cases of mosquito borne disease every year, very few resources can be devoted to each outbreak. But if we eliminate 90% of the mosquitoes, the result is a 99% reduction in the spread of the disease. That means we can devote much more personnel and resources to pounce on each outbreak.
This is what happened with smallpox. Once we got it 99% gone, we had fast-reaction teams of dozens of people, that would fly in to each outbreak, and then fan out to vaccinate everyone in the vicinity, and quarantine those likely to have been exposed. The last case in the wild was in Somalia in 1973.
this exactly.
No, not at all. The targeted species, Aedes aegypti, is African, and IS NOT NATIVE TO CALIFORNIA. So there should be no negative repercussions from wiping it out. There are plenty of native species of mosquitoes (which are not disease vectors) that will be happy to fill the vacated niche.
Although the targeted A. aegypti will develop resistance, in the meantime, the temporary drop in their population may be enough to disrupt the spread of diseases. The spread of vector-borne diseases goes down as the reciprocal of the square of the vector population. For many of these diseases, R0 is already less than one, so this may be a way to lick'em for good.
Hawaii and mongoose is a very easy obvious one ...
Before the arrival of Europeans, Hawaii had zero mosquitoes. All the mosquitoes there should be wiped out. Then we can start working on the mongooses.
It's sad. When we lost manufacturing to China ...
Over the last 30 years, manufacturing in America has doubled.
The "deindustrialization of America" is one of those things that "everybody knows", but is actually nonsense.
if your chip designs are that sensitive for national security you better have your own Fab.
ROC is a solid America ally, so there isn't much "national security" risk. American defense contractors can't afford their own fabs.
Now the part that can be fixed with trade negotiations is to be sure that the company doesn't go ahead and make a spinoff product based off your IP.
ROC does not require any IP sharing or joint ventures (ROC != PRC). If they are fabbing your chip, you give them your masks, not your VHDL/Verilog source. With the mask, they could make direct copies, but not "spin-offs".
Of course, if they are caught ripping off their customers, their $190B market cap would quickly go to near zero. So they have a pretty big incentive to behave.
Meanwhile Germany - with the largest uptake for wind and solar - has some of the most expensive electricity in Europe.
This is because Germany made a political decision to adopt wind and solar years ago, way before it was economical to do so.
Here is the way you should do it:
1. Develop tech that works.
2. Deploy it.
Germany did it the other way around.
Quite literally: https://www.npr.org/2018/11/27...
Refusing to cave in to the demands of a mob is not a threat to democracy.
It is more accurate to say the mob is the threat. The protesters should take their demands to the voters, rather than rioting in the streets.
Good thing they're delaying the nuclear plant closures
They are not delaying them. They are reaching the end of their service life, and are being closed on schedule.
What has changed is that they will not be replaced with new nukes.
This makes sense, since nukes are no longer economical. While the cost of renewables has plummeted, the cost of nukes has steadily gone UP. There are, of course, reasons why nuclear power is so expensive, and those reasons might not be valid in an alternative universe, but that doesn't change our reality.
France has one of the best, most realistic and cleanest power generation systems on the planet.
Also a rather expensive one. About 0.15 euro = 0.17 USD per kwh. That is not so high by EU standards, but hurts them globally, leading to trade deficits and chronically high unemployment. France needs to be more competitive.
Solar and wind can generate power for about 0.03 euro per kwh.
There are some very sunny areas in southern France, and plenty of wind in Brittany.
Macron tries to justify himself staying in to power despite deceiving the population.
He ran for office as a moderate reformer, and he has governed as a moderate reformer. So where is the deception?
Being a reformer means going against entrenched interest groups. So of course he has made some enemies. If he deserves any criticism, it is for being too timid. But France is not an easy place to fix.
Those few seconds can really eat into profits when you add it all up.
CSRs are not doing one chat at a time. They are handling a dozen or so simultaneous chats. While you are typing, they are responding to another customer.
They also have automatic pattern matchers to scan your text for strings related to common questions, and then pre-fill the reply. The CSR just needs to give it a quick glance, and click "send". But that was a few years ago, so the state-of-the-art today may be to just auto-send. This may have been the cause of the "instant reply" mentioned in the summary.
It is all very efficient, and there is almost no dead time waiting for the customer to type.