I don't understand the hatred towards Snowden for asking an important question regarding surveillance. From the linked article his question:
"So I'd like to ask you, does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals? And do you believe that simply increasing the effectiveness of intelligence or law enforcement investigations can justify placing societies, rather than subjects, under surveillance?"
It is a perfectly valid question which needs to be asked to all world leaders. While Putin's answer can certainly be seen as pure political spin, the question itself is a legitimate and forceful question to be posed. And by asking it, it forced Putin to provide an answer through which he can be measured against. He has basically said in nationwide tv that if they did have a mass surveillance system, the state would be breaking the law. This public statement can now be used to hold him accountable should evidence surface proving him as lying.
I would also argue that the question is a far more direct one regarding surveillance than any that has been posed to Obama. And unlike Putin, Obama insists such a surveillance program is legal and necessary. One cannot reform the system without admitting the problem first. Were Obama to give the same answer as Putin to that question, the repercussions would be enormous, as it places a moral and legal standard on the role of surveillance in our society from the chief executive of the nation itself.
They've gotten themselves into autonomous cars, fiber optic internet, robotics, and Wi-Fi balloons.
That's all great, but if I was shareholder I'd be worried about what their long-term vision for the company is. Sure, their R&D projects are a geek's wet dream, but they are unfocused. They appear to try and cover any and all emerging technologies, from wide variety of disparate sectors. Apple tries to focus on the consumer electronics sector. Google? I'm not quite sure what they are trying to be, and as an investor I'd be wary in investing in a company with such a schizophrenic view of its future.
A while back I was prescribed an anti-depressant. The doctor said he didn't know if it would work for me. He said it wasn't even well understood *how* it worked.
You had a bad and uninformed doctor. A good doctor should have at least a general idea of how the medication works, and he certainly shouldn't be prescribing drugs without knowing if they'd work or how!
That confused me because presumably whatever was in the pill was added for a reason, but clearly there's a lot of trial and error. And clearly there are extremely nasty side effects from many drugs.
So many pharmaceuticals' effectiveness may be overrated, as may be their safety. I'm not sure some medicinal plants are necessarily less effective or less safe.
Presumably chemicals in our drugs are often extracted from nature. why wouldn't the same chemicals in their natural form have the same potential to work? For example, willow bark has salicin (from whence aspirin came), and has been used medicinally since the time of Hippocrates.
There may be side effects from pharmaceutical drugs, but they are well understood as a result of the extensive testing they are required to go through, and a lot of effort is made to minimize those side effects. Medicinal plants have the same range of side effects. The difference is herbal medicine doesn't go through scientific testing, it's side effects are not required to be labeled and are not as well understood. Drugs that are isolated from medicinal herbs will typically try to isolate the active ingredient, reducing the chances of side effects from other plant ingredients that may have unwanted pharmacological properties and refining the dosage to the minimum necessary.
The idea of treating the whole person instead of just the symptom is a growing concern in western medicine. This has always been the defining characteristic of homeopathy's holistic approach.
So many homeopathic treatments are almost certainly bunk, but throwing out all homeopathy may be short sighted, just as throwing out all of western medicine would be.
The defining characteristic of homeopathy is the "like cures like" approach, with medicine prepared from repeated dilution. This has been repeatedly proven to be bunk and without merit. If the core fundamentals of their medical approach is false, having been consistently disproven, why shouldn't the whole field be throw out as discredited and without merit?
I assume the live-streaming solution you're talking about is the one proposed by FLYHT. Their proposed solution, however, would only send essential data at the moment an event is detected, and it wouldn't supersed a standard flight data recorder. It wouldn't carry cockpit voice recording, for example, which was essential in determining what happened in the case of AF447. With the Air France case as an example, the search for the black box would still have to be carried out to close the investigation. And while it may have narrowed the search area, we already had an idea of where it went down based on transponder and ACARS data. And the ACARS transmissions also provided a good idea of what the precipitating event was in that case. It is therefore unclear what the FLYHT system would have added in value to that event.
As to the MH370 case, as I mentioned it is quite likely that whatever took down ACARS and the transponder systems in the aircraft would have also affected live-streaming by any black box recorder. And even with some data streamed, you would still need to find the cockpit voice and flight data recorder to get a complete picture.
Without understanding what went wrong with the plane, we can't know whether the proposed enhanced black box would be effective. There were systems in the aircraft to report its position and status remotely - namely ACARS and its transponders. These failed or were disabled early on. It is quite possible that whatever took those systems out would have also disabled communications from an enhanced black box.
Until we know the cause of the crash, proposing a solution is premature.
All of Bennett Haselton's post suffer from the same flaw: they're long winded, technical solutions for problems that are at their core are a social problem.
Trying to impose a convoluted mathematical solution to a human/social problem is always doomed to fail. It's almost like I hear Sheldon Cooper from "The Big Bang Theory" speaking through him when he posts: a complete lack of understanding of social interaction in the real world, and an obstinate belief that you can fix the real world if only people would use your methodically thought algorithms to plan their lives.
How is this different from winter over expeditions in the South Pole, where you have a small group of people, isolated in a dome from the rest of the globe, and only able to leave their dome through puffy bulky suits.
And in fact. winter time expeditions at South Pole station are a better representation of Mars would be: they are effectively isolated, with the potential of any minor equipment malfunction turning into a life-or-death issue in the harsh Antarctic winter, dependent only on their own supplies. I doubt these NASA volunteers staying in a balmy hawaiian island will have to worry much if a medical problem or equipment malfunction occurs.
This is like asking why a battered wife doesn't defend herself against her abusive husband.
The Russian military is much larger than the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainians knew they didn't stand a chance in any conflict. Additionally, having a tumultuous change of government at the same time which paralyzed decision making didn't help. The Russians, on the other hand, had been preparing for this for weeks, moving additional troops into the Crimea before the opportunity presented itself. It didn't help that Ukrainian military equipment is antiquate soviet holdovers, with very little equipment upgrades in the last 25 years.
On top of it, the majority of the Ukrainian navy was in the Crimea, which enabled the Russians to easily bottle it up. Ukrainian policy allowed servicemen to be based near their hometowns - which would have made the army more pliable to local pressures. Finally, the Ukrainians also have to worry about the Russian-speaking eastern part of the country separating at the moment.
There was very little the Ukrainians could do, and shooting back would have been a pointless loss of lives and only provided an excuse for Putin for even further aggression.
You're asking for a technical solution to a social/political problem. The only feasible solution is to make sure your policy is clearly explained and understood to all who board the limo-bus, and then strictly enforcing it by expelling anyone caught with a camera. Sure, you won't be able to monitor people 100% of the time, but if you're strict with enforcement people won't risk taking snapshots. It will probably be more effective than any technical solution which would be expensive and easily circumvented.
And if the owners of the limo-bus are really that worried about photos onboard, the simplest solution would be for everyone to deposit their electronic devices into a bag, and they can then recover their devices after leaving the limo-bus.
My guess though is that your policy is likely to lose your limo-bus company customers, so the owners better make sure whether enforcing it is worth the cost.
I imagine most just don't know what "Astrology" means off the tops of their head, and they probably think it's some scientific term for astronomy
All pseudo-science tries to utilize scientific sounding jargon in an attempt to sound more credible.
Therefore, if we are to to better educate Americans to prevent them from falling prey to pseudo-science mambo-jumbo, it is equally important to sharpen their vocabulary skills. Those who push astrology deliberate try to capitalize on it's perceived confusion with astronomy. Astrologers would probably look at the fact that the majority of people confuse it with astronomy as a positive. We shouldn't take any consolation that this may be an explanation for the survey findings, and instead look at how to better educate young Americans.
So you're saying that it's not that Americans are prone to believe in pseudo-science, but that they lack basic English comprehension skills? Even if I were to believe that this unscientific internet study with a small sample size somehow trumps the observations of the National Science Foundation's wide ranging academic study, the conclusions derived are equally troubling. It's not that they're scientific illiterate - they're simply illiterate! Either conclusion indicates a serious deficit in US education standards, and rather than trying to justify the survey results away, we should be looking at ways to improving American education standards. If they can't distinguish between astronomy and astrology I'd be worried about their English vocabulary.
I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights.
If it is to be done, it needs to be done in a way that respect's people's civil rights.
Supporters of the NSA spying program have been rephrasing the concerns with it as a privacy rights issue. The concerns with it go deeper than that: fundamentally it is a violation of the constitutional and civil rights afforded by law. Reframing it a privacy issue is a dishonest way of downplaying the serious constitutional violations that the NSA is infringing upon.
Typically these leaks are very small and are no danger to the public, which is why they are allowed to persist.
It's not about the danger of explosion from these leaks; it's about the large volume of methane escaping from these small leaks around the country. Given that methane is a potent greenhouse gas (20x more than CO2), the volume of leaks so far detected would make natural gas a dirtier fuel than even coal! The implications to national energy policy should be of concern to the public.
It's not about the danger of gas explosions ; larger gas leaks that pose safety concerns are usually addressed if they are detected. It's about the thousands of small leaks, that the gas industry often ignores as being too small to pose any risk. In this the second link is very informative: not only are these small leaks killing trees and vegetation in the vicinity of where they occur, but collectively they are leaking a large amount of methane into the atmosphere that contributes to global warming. And given that methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas, it means if the estimates of the leaks were to be correct, natural gas would actually be worse for global warming than coal. This would have powerful implications for US energy policy, given that natural gas is being sold as a cleaner burning fossil fuel, when the leaks completely undermine it's "clean" premise.
Democracy is more than just holding elections. An effective democracy needs a free press, freedom of speech and an independent judiciary, amongst others. The most important part about creating a democracy is having those effective institutions in place. Holding elections is only the last step on the road towards democracy.
This is why technological solutions won't work - any voting system won't work if they're being implemented by a corrupt and unaccountable executive who can manipulate public opinion by cracking down on dissent. Most dictators attempt to legitimize their rule at some point by holding elections - and when you can control public opinion by limiting dissent and controlling the media, rigging the election isn't even necessary to guarantee an election victory. Elections are meaningless without democratic institutions in place
Great! So I don't have to worry about the NSA wiretapping my communications. I only have to worry about neighbours snitching on me and resentful co-workers calling up the police based on spurious accusations. I feel so much safer!
Mr Aigon has since schooled himself in all the procedures for take off and landing and says he is able to fly his 'plane' just like a real-life pilot.
No. he's proven he's able to fly his simulator, not the real aircraft. An actual training flight simulator goes through an exhaustive validation to ensure it is accurately reproducing the aircraft within the envelope of interest. While he may have been able to get real cockpit parts to get the look of the real cockpit, there's no guarantee that his simulator reproduces the real flight envelope of the aircraft accurately, or that the system components were assembled in a way as to properly reproduce the aircraft system response. And training in an inaccurate simulator can be worse than training in no simulator at all.
Still, kudos for the DYI simulator. It's a cool grown-up toy, but it's not a training device.
I know people will try to make this an issue about gun regulation, but ultimately this just boils downs to market economics.
People who are in favour of gun regulation, and who would be for this type of device, by and large simply don't buy guns.
People who do buy guns - sportsmen, hunters, and other gun enthusiasts - tend to be against greater regulation, especially if it will additional costs in the purchase of their firearm.
The type of person who would buy these "smart guns" - a gun enthusiast who's willing to pay more to have more control on their firearms - is going to be very small at best. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that these guns weren't going to sell...
Aren't all artifacts left by the Apollo missions still considered US property and therefore still protected by federal law? As far as I know, the US government never relinquished ownership, and therefore no additional protection is needed.
All this does is add unnecessary bureaucracy and administrative costs. Once this "park" is set up, the artifacts will have to be catalogued, regulations drafted, lawyers proficient in space law consulted -all this will be non-trivial expenses for little benefit.
Full autonomy is not the immediate goal for most car companies. The more tangible near-term goal is to implement piecemeal aspects of technology as various "driver-assist" or safety devices. New cars on the market are already being offered with automatic parking, lane departure warning systems, autonomous cruise control amongst others. The goal is not to eliminate the driver but to reduce driver workload and eliminate the risk of accidents through various collision avoidance devices. Eventually, as automation in driver's seat increase the public may be more willing to accept a fully autonomous vehicle, but that was never the near term goal.
It seems to that the various privacy laws in place across Europe targeting Google Maps have little effect on Google, which has enough resources that they can easily apply technical fixes to tackle each states differing privacy requirement. The net effect though, is to provide a high barrier of entry for competitors. A young startup wishing to start a competing street level mapping service will not have army of lawyers to sort through each states differing laws. Nor may they have the technical expertise to accurately implement blurring algorithms to the satisfaction of the courts. In short, while these laws are intended to target Google, they end up benefiting it, by making it more difficult for competitors to enter the field.
Letting fans take control of tv shows is a bad idea, and will make tv scripts be written like so much bad fan fiction. The key issue for me is that the crowdsourcing of fans tends to favour the familiar and desirable. This discourages creativity, as you can't introduce new characters and situations without removing the familiar first, and fans will always agitate to maintain the familiar. What you get in the end is a melow saccharinne version of the show, with no unexpected twists that might shake the diehard fan's loyalty, but that ends up alienating those very same fans
I think you missed the point. The article is not arguing in favour of coal, oil or any other non-renewable energy source. He is pointing out that the "renewable" energy sources have their own sets of environmental issues that need to be addressed and shouldn't be ignored. The need for water in solar-thermal installations is a valid concern, when most solar plant installations are being planned in arid desert areas, for example. These concerns shouldn't be swept aside by environmentalists for the greater good of green energy, because if they are, the oil and coal industry would be just as happy to point them out, and the debate will be defined by oilmen instead.
TV and movie productions have become more technically elaborate over the years, evolving from what were essentially filmed theatrical productions, to elaborate and technically demanding productions that require a large industry of people to support it. In your view, how has technology changed the role and experience of acting since you started?
How will they actually test the viability of 'intelligent traffic systems' with no traffic?
In fact, most of those mentioned systems are about the interaction of that technology WITH PEOPLE in an urban environment. Just an empty urban environment doesn't get you much?
The point of this is that it is a controlled environment, where systems can be tested under lab-like conditions before being released into the urban "wild". Test subjects could be easily recruited to drive around in an instructed manner to replicate any given traffic pattern. This would make it much easier to debug a system before it is tested under real-life urban conditions. And given that this is a lab environment, you can also test the effect of a catastrophic system failures without any safety concerns.
Slashdot Mirror
I don't understand the hatred towards Snowden for asking an important question regarding surveillance. From the linked article his question:
"So I'd like to ask you, does Russia intercept, store or analyze in any way the communications of millions of individuals? And do you believe that simply increasing the effectiveness of intelligence or law enforcement investigations can justify placing societies, rather than subjects, under surveillance?"
It is a perfectly valid question which needs to be asked to all world leaders. While Putin's answer can certainly be seen as pure political spin, the question itself is a legitimate and forceful question to be posed. And by asking it, it forced Putin to provide an answer through which he can be measured against. He has basically said in nationwide tv that if they did have a mass surveillance system, the state would be breaking the law. This public statement can now be used to hold him accountable should evidence surface proving him as lying.
I would also argue that the question is a far more direct one regarding surveillance than any that has been posed to Obama. And unlike Putin, Obama insists such a surveillance program is legal and necessary. One cannot reform the system without admitting the problem first. Were Obama to give the same answer as Putin to that question, the repercussions would be enormous, as it places a moral and legal standard on the role of surveillance in our society from the chief executive of the nation itself.
They've gotten themselves into autonomous cars, fiber optic internet, robotics, and Wi-Fi balloons.
That's all great, but if I was shareholder I'd be worried about what their long-term vision for the company is. Sure, their R&D projects are a geek's wet dream, but they are unfocused. They appear to try and cover any and all emerging technologies, from wide variety of disparate sectors. Apple tries to focus on the consumer electronics sector. Google? I'm not quite sure what they are trying to be, and as an investor I'd be wary in investing in a company with such a schizophrenic view of its future.
A while back I was prescribed an anti-depressant. The doctor said he didn't know if it would work for me. He said it wasn't even well understood *how* it worked.
You had a bad and uninformed doctor. A good doctor should have at least a general idea of how the medication works, and he certainly shouldn't be prescribing drugs without knowing if they'd work or how!
That confused me because presumably whatever was in the pill was added for a reason, but clearly there's a lot of trial and error. And clearly there are extremely nasty side effects from many drugs.
So many pharmaceuticals' effectiveness may be overrated, as may be their safety. I'm not sure some medicinal plants are necessarily less effective or less safe.
Presumably chemicals in our drugs are often extracted from nature. why wouldn't the same chemicals in their natural form have the same potential to work? For example, willow bark has salicin (from whence aspirin came), and has been used medicinally since the time of Hippocrates.
There may be side effects from pharmaceutical drugs, but they are well understood as a result of the extensive testing they are required to go through, and a lot of effort is made to minimize those side effects. Medicinal plants have the same range of side effects. The difference is herbal medicine doesn't go through scientific testing, it's side effects are not required to be labeled and are not as well understood. Drugs that are isolated from medicinal herbs will typically try to isolate the active ingredient, reducing the chances of side effects from other plant ingredients that may have unwanted pharmacological properties and refining the dosage to the minimum necessary.
The idea of treating the whole person instead of just the symptom is a growing concern in western medicine. This has always been the defining characteristic of homeopathy's holistic approach.
So many homeopathic treatments are almost certainly bunk, but throwing out all homeopathy may be short sighted, just as throwing out all of western medicine would be.
The defining characteristic of homeopathy is the "like cures like" approach, with medicine prepared from repeated dilution. This has been repeatedly proven to be bunk and without merit. If the core fundamentals of their medical approach is false, having been consistently disproven, why shouldn't the whole field be throw out as discredited and without merit?
I assume the live-streaming solution you're talking about is the one proposed by FLYHT. Their proposed solution, however, would only send essential data at the moment an event is detected, and it wouldn't supersed a standard flight data recorder. It wouldn't carry cockpit voice recording, for example, which was essential in determining what happened in the case of AF447. With the Air France case as an example, the search for the black box would still have to be carried out to close the investigation. And while it may have narrowed the search area, we already had an idea of where it went down based on transponder and ACARS data. And the ACARS transmissions also provided a good idea of what the precipitating event was in that case. It is therefore unclear what the FLYHT system would have added in value to that event.
As to the MH370 case, as I mentioned it is quite likely that whatever took down ACARS and the transponder systems in the aircraft would have also affected live-streaming by any black box recorder. And even with some data streamed, you would still need to find the cockpit voice and flight data recorder to get a complete picture.
Without understanding what went wrong with the plane, we can't know whether the proposed enhanced black box would be effective. There were systems in the aircraft to report its position and status remotely - namely ACARS and its transponders. These failed or were disabled early on. It is quite possible that whatever took those systems out would have also disabled communications from an enhanced black box.
Until we know the cause of the crash, proposing a solution is premature.
All of Bennett Haselton's post suffer from the same flaw: they're long winded, technical solutions for problems that are at their core are a social problem. Trying to impose a convoluted mathematical solution to a human/social problem is always doomed to fail. It's almost like I hear Sheldon Cooper from "The Big Bang Theory" speaking through him when he posts: a complete lack of understanding of social interaction in the real world, and an obstinate belief that you can fix the real world if only people would use your methodically thought algorithms to plan their lives.
How is this different from winter over expeditions in the South Pole, where you have a small group of people, isolated in a dome from the rest of the globe, and only able to leave their dome through puffy bulky suits.
And in fact. winter time expeditions at South Pole station are a better representation of Mars would be: they are effectively isolated, with the potential of any minor equipment malfunction turning into a life-or-death issue in the harsh Antarctic winter, dependent only on their own supplies. I doubt these NASA volunteers staying in a balmy hawaiian island will have to worry much if a medical problem or equipment malfunction occurs.
This is like asking why a battered wife doesn't defend herself against her abusive husband.
The Russian military is much larger than the Ukrainian military, and the Ukrainians knew they didn't stand a chance in any conflict. Additionally, having a tumultuous change of government at the same time which paralyzed decision making didn't help. The Russians, on the other hand, had been preparing for this for weeks, moving additional troops into the Crimea before the opportunity presented itself. It didn't help that Ukrainian military equipment is antiquate soviet holdovers, with very little equipment upgrades in the last 25 years.
On top of it, the majority of the Ukrainian navy was in the Crimea, which enabled the Russians to easily bottle it up. Ukrainian policy allowed servicemen to be based near their hometowns - which would have made the army more pliable to local pressures. Finally, the Ukrainians also have to worry about the Russian-speaking eastern part of the country separating at the moment.
There was very little the Ukrainians could do, and shooting back would have been a pointless loss of lives and only provided an excuse for Putin for even further aggression.
You're asking for a technical solution to a social/political problem. The only feasible solution is to make sure your policy is clearly explained and understood to all who board the limo-bus, and then strictly enforcing it by expelling anyone caught with a camera. Sure, you won't be able to monitor people 100% of the time, but if you're strict with enforcement people won't risk taking snapshots. It will probably be more effective than any technical solution which would be expensive and easily circumvented.
And if the owners of the limo-bus are really that worried about photos onboard, the simplest solution would be for everyone to deposit their electronic devices into a bag, and they can then recover their devices after leaving the limo-bus.
My guess though is that your policy is likely to lose your limo-bus company customers, so the owners better make sure whether enforcing it is worth the cost.
I imagine most just don't know what "Astrology" means off the tops of their head, and they probably think it's some scientific term for astronomy
All pseudo-science tries to utilize scientific sounding jargon in an attempt to sound more credible.
Therefore, if we are to to better educate Americans to prevent them from falling prey to pseudo-science mambo-jumbo, it is equally important to sharpen their vocabulary skills. Those who push astrology deliberate try to capitalize on it's perceived confusion with astronomy. Astrologers would probably look at the fact that the majority of people confuse it with astronomy as a positive. We shouldn't take any consolation that this may be an explanation for the survey findings, and instead look at how to better educate young Americans.
So you're saying that it's not that Americans are prone to believe in pseudo-science, but that they lack basic English comprehension skills? Even if I were to believe that this unscientific internet study with a small sample size somehow trumps the observations of the National Science Foundation's wide ranging academic study, the conclusions derived are equally troubling. It's not that they're scientific illiterate - they're simply illiterate! Either conclusion indicates a serious deficit in US education standards, and rather than trying to justify the survey results away, we should be looking at ways to improving American education standards. If they can't distinguish between astronomy and astrology I'd be worried about their English vocabulary.
I think we need to do it in a way that respects people's privacy rights.
If it is to be done, it needs to be done in a way that respect's people's civil rights.
Supporters of the NSA spying program have been rephrasing the concerns with it as a privacy rights issue. The concerns with it go deeper than that: fundamentally it is a violation of the constitutional and civil rights afforded by law. Reframing it a privacy issue is a dishonest way of downplaying the serious constitutional violations that the NSA is infringing upon.
Typically these leaks are very small and are no danger to the public, which is why they are allowed to persist.
It's not about the danger of explosion from these leaks; it's about the large volume of methane escaping from these small leaks around the country. Given that methane is a potent greenhouse gas (20x more than CO2), the volume of leaks so far detected would make natural gas a dirtier fuel than even coal! The implications to national energy policy should be of concern to the public.
It's not about the danger of gas explosions ; larger gas leaks that pose safety concerns are usually addressed if they are detected. It's about the thousands of small leaks, that the gas industry often ignores as being too small to pose any risk. In this the second link is very informative: not only are these small leaks killing trees and vegetation in the vicinity of where they occur, but collectively they are leaking a large amount of methane into the atmosphere that contributes to global warming. And given that methane is 20 times more potent as a greenhouse gas, it means if the estimates of the leaks were to be correct, natural gas would actually be worse for global warming than coal. This would have powerful implications for US energy policy, given that natural gas is being sold as a cleaner burning fossil fuel, when the leaks completely undermine it's "clean" premise.
Democracy is more than just holding elections. An effective democracy needs a free press, freedom of speech and an independent judiciary, amongst others. The most important part about creating a democracy is having those effective institutions in place. Holding elections is only the last step on the road towards democracy.
This is why technological solutions won't work - any voting system won't work if they're being implemented by a corrupt and unaccountable executive who can manipulate public opinion by cracking down on dissent. Most dictators attempt to legitimize their rule at some point by holding elections - and when you can control public opinion by limiting dissent and controlling the media, rigging the election isn't even necessary to guarantee an election victory. Elections are meaningless without democratic institutions in place
Great! So I don't have to worry about the NSA wiretapping my communications. I only have to worry about neighbours snitching on me and resentful co-workers calling up the police based on spurious accusations. I feel so much safer!
No. he's proven he's able to fly his simulator, not the real aircraft. An actual training flight simulator goes through an exhaustive validation to ensure it is accurately reproducing the aircraft within the envelope of interest. While he may have been able to get real cockpit parts to get the look of the real cockpit, there's no guarantee that his simulator reproduces the real flight envelope of the aircraft accurately, or that the system components were assembled in a way as to properly reproduce the aircraft system response. And training in an inaccurate simulator can be worse than training in no simulator at all.
Still, kudos for the DYI simulator. It's a cool grown-up toy, but it's not a training device.
I know people will try to make this an issue about gun regulation, but ultimately this just boils downs to market economics.
People who are in favour of gun regulation, and who would be for this type of device, by and large simply don't buy guns.
People who do buy guns - sportsmen, hunters, and other gun enthusiasts - tend to be against greater regulation, especially if it will additional costs in the purchase of their firearm.
The type of person who would buy these "smart guns" - a gun enthusiast who's willing to pay more to have more control on their firearms - is going to be very small at best. It shouldn't have come as a surprise to anyone that these guns weren't going to sell...
Aren't all artifacts left by the Apollo missions still considered US property and therefore still protected by federal law? As far as I know, the US government never relinquished ownership, and therefore no additional protection is needed.
All this does is add unnecessary bureaucracy and administrative costs. Once this "park" is set up, the artifacts will have to be catalogued, regulations drafted, lawyers proficient in space law consulted -all this will be non-trivial expenses for little benefit.
Full autonomy is not the immediate goal for most car companies. The more tangible near-term goal is to implement piecemeal aspects of technology as various "driver-assist" or safety devices. New cars on the market are already being offered with automatic parking, lane departure warning systems, autonomous cruise control amongst others. The goal is not to eliminate the driver but to reduce driver workload and eliminate the risk of accidents through various collision avoidance devices. Eventually, as automation in driver's seat increase the public may be more willing to accept a fully autonomous vehicle, but that was never the near term goal.
It seems to that the various privacy laws in place across Europe targeting Google Maps have little effect on Google, which has enough resources that they can easily apply technical fixes to tackle each states differing privacy requirement. The net effect though, is to provide a high barrier of entry for competitors. A young startup wishing to start a competing street level mapping service will not have army of lawyers to sort through each states differing laws. Nor may they have the technical expertise to accurately implement blurring algorithms to the satisfaction of the courts. In short, while these laws are intended to target Google, they end up benefiting it, by making it more difficult for competitors to enter the field.
Letting fans take control of tv shows is a bad idea, and will make tv scripts be written like so much bad fan fiction. The key issue for me is that the crowdsourcing of fans tends to favour the familiar and desirable. This discourages creativity, as you can't introduce new characters and situations without removing the familiar first, and fans will always agitate to maintain the familiar. What you get in the end is a melow saccharinne version of the show, with no unexpected twists that might shake the diehard fan's loyalty, but that ends up alienating those very same fans
I think you missed the point. The article is not arguing in favour of coal, oil or any other non-renewable energy source. He is pointing out that the "renewable" energy sources have their own sets of environmental issues that need to be addressed and shouldn't be ignored. The need for water in solar-thermal installations is a valid concern, when most solar plant installations are being planned in arid desert areas, for example. These concerns shouldn't be swept aside by environmentalists for the greater good of green energy, because if they are, the oil and coal industry would be just as happy to point them out, and the debate will be defined by oilmen instead.
TV and movie productions have become more technically elaborate over the years, evolving from what were essentially filmed theatrical productions, to elaborate and technically demanding productions that require a large industry of people to support it. In your view, how has technology changed the role and experience of acting since you started?
How will they actually test the viability of 'intelligent traffic systems' with no traffic?
In fact, most of those mentioned systems are about the interaction of that technology WITH PEOPLE in an urban environment. Just an empty urban environment doesn't get you much?
The point of this is that it is a controlled environment, where systems can be tested under lab-like conditions before being released into the urban "wild". Test subjects could be easily recruited to drive around in an instructed manner to replicate any given traffic pattern. This would make it much easier to debug a system before it is tested under real-life urban conditions. And given that this is a lab environment, you can also test the effect of a catastrophic system failures without any safety concerns.