"Yes, not everyone gets the cool binocular headsets, but that's a matter of the Army being too cheap-ass to properly equip troops, not a technical problem. It's the same reason the Army doesn't bother giving troops body armor, armoring vehicles, or providing adequate medical care."
Do you think the military budget is bottomless? The 80/20 rule applies to soldiers as much as it does to anything else; if very marginal increases in real utility double the cost of something it is frequently foolish to waste finite resources on obtaining that marginal benefit versus other possible expenditures. The military is very good at this calculus, and a soldier is a very expensive piece of capital equipment that they will go to great lengths to protect on that rather dismal basis alone. I think many people do not appreciate just how high the dollar value of a US soldier is; if spending an extra thousand or two would save a bunch of soldier lives the military would do it if at all possible because the payoff would be obvious.
In any case, for many combat roles the monocular rig is functionally superior to a binocular rig, so it would be a foolish expenditure regardless and makes your mini-rant an ignorant platitude.
AIM-9 is a broad family of missiles, but the technology in them has changed a lot. In early versions, they were literally missiles that homed in on the infrared heat signature of another aircraft.
However, a couple decades ago they started transitioning to broad-spectrum imaging terminal guidance. These do not follow a heat source, they actually know what the target looks like (in the sense a human would) and chase it, hence why they are largely impervious to spoofing and counter-measures. It is hard for a MiG-27 to not look like a MiG-27. These imaging systems still work in the infrared spectrum due to its advantages, but they are not seeking hot targets per se and haven't for some time. The latest AIM-9 versions have vectored thrust now too, so it is virtually impossible to out-maneuver them with clever and carefully timed acrobatics.
The guidance package on THAAD is capable of homing on extremely agile targets, as it is a variant of the same intelligent imaging based homing software that is used in a myriad of other weapon systems e.g. the AIM-9X Sidewinder used for air-to-air combat. Unlike many other targets this family of guidance package has a close to perfect intercept probability on, a long-range ballistic missile is not particularly agile. If the rocket motor can deliver, the guidance package certainly can.
A "random trajectory" ballistic missile is no defense against something like THAAD, both because of limitations on a ballistic missile and the capabilities of the terminal guidance package on THAAD. Despite the fact that it uses kinetic intercept, it is a guided missile with a very competent seeker technology that homes in the target all the way to the end just like a "heat-seeking" (not that we've made heat-seeking missiles in ages) missile; the way people talk about these things, you would think it was flying some kind of precomputed ballistic intercept trajectory.
Whether AMD or Intel is producing the fastest, cheapest, most scalable, or most efficient processor at the moment is not terribly important.
What *is* important is that when you have two companies in genuine fierce competition at the bleeding edge of technology and performance, they extract an impressive amount of productivity and effort out of their engineering and science assets. Free markets are at their best when all the major players have a healthy fear of the capabilities of their competitors.
Having yet another nitrogen explosives detector is not very interesting. It does not solve the problem of peroxide and oxyhalide based explosives, the former having already proven to be popular with terrorists, and both types having seen limited military application in the 20th century.
A truly effective explosives detection technology will need to target a broader range of high explosive chemistries, and preferably not the same ones over and over. When the corner store is out of C4, people bent on blowing things up will find something else.
Among the many reasons the high-quality geothermal resevoirs of the western US have not been exploited more than they have is that they attract opposition from environmental groups. Since the land is largerly Federal in many of the locales they are talking about, they use their clout in Washington DC to hinder local geothermal development since there is little overlap between their supporters in Congress and the constituencies that are affected, so it is a low-cost political bone. Instead they build space efficient natural gas and coal plants, which produce much more power with much less land use.
Geothermal power plants of any scale cover large areas of land with a sparse network of pipes. It is usually not the case that you drill one well and put a turbine on top of it, instead you drill a large number of wells, about one well per 20-40 acres and aggregate the output at a central set of turbines. It is not as though you are paving the region, just putting in a small well-head and a pipe to transport/aggregate the output. Note that you also have to have pipes to pump the condensed water back into the ground in separate wells; they do not dump it into the atmosphere. Unfortunately this covers the land with a very sparse spiderweb of pipes that are deemed "ugly", offending the aesthetic sensibilities of the occasional jackrabbit or some such.
The western US has enormous geothermal potential, but people will have to get used to the idea that there will be vast sections of high desert they never visit that will covered in pipe networks for heat transport. Perhaps they would like a coal plant built next door instead.
How about only allowing people to patent inventions that have cost money (resources) to bring into the world (i.e. prototypes, experiments, ect), and not inventions that anyone can "discover" simply by sitting down and thinking hard. (algorithems, formulas, ect)?
What you call "thinking hard" only costs nothing if your time is free. There are many algorithms that were only developed after very significant amounts of technical man-months were invested in research that ultimately led to their creation. And most such algorithms are fully verified and implemented as prototypes, which also costs money.
If the development of new basic algorithms was so easy and inexpensive, why are they discovered so infrequently?
"When your country was founded, the literacy rate was in all probability in the single digits. It certainly was every else in the world"
Actually, no. The literacy rates in New England were roughly similar to what they are now, and the literacy rates out in the deep frontier were around 50-60%. In the populated parts of the US, literacy was almost universal even back then. It was not perfect, but it was surprisingly effective and was driven by the fact that in the early Americas there was a social obsession with making everyone literate for cultural and historical reasons that are mostly forgotten now. If you studied the history instead of assuming it, the reason we have public schools today has nothing to do with the quality or universality of private education at the time. The extreme literacy of the early US population was noted by de Tocqueville and others, and the USians were by far the most voracious consumers of written material in the world at the time.
Furthermore, in a couple States private and public education ran in parallel for a couple decades giving people a choice. When the government of Massachusetts finally forced public education in 1851, it was NOT because people wanted public education. In fact, at the time the public education system was broadly criticized for being deplorable such that even the poorest refused to use it, opting for private education (which for most poor people was free or almost free). It was some last minute clever legislative maneuvering that effectively created the modern public school system at a time when most people and politicians wanted to abolish it as a waste of money and being of embarrassingly low quality. During the couple decades when people had a choice, they overwhelmingly chose private schools, and the public school system "won" by legal maneuvering that effectively disbanded most private schools and thereby eliminating the competition.
As a more interesting point, there are people alive today that went to school before the advent of universal public education. The history of education in the US is very different than what many people assume it was. If you think the literacy rates at the founding were generally single digits, it means that you did not even do rudimentary research on the subject.
In US States with competent electronic voting standards such as Nevada, a third party audits a random sample of all machines (usually 1-3% in practice, which is adequate), comparing the paper results with the electronic results. Any discrepancy found in the samples between the electronic results and the paper results triggers a full recount from paper, which is presumed to be correct since the voter verified it. This buys you the speed and accuracy of electronic ballots in theory, with the fault tolerance and robustness of third-party audits and independently derivable paper results. The best part is that it is extremely resistant to software/hardware attacks since the voter verified paper is statistically sampled to detect such attacks. Trust but verify, no?
As a general comment, the arguably stupid part of the fixation on SUVs is that if everyone stopped driving them tomorrow and drove a Prius instead, it would have a negligible impact on oil consumption in the US. That fixation is fundamentally misplaced.
The only way you'll make a difference is if people stop driving generally. Which means more telecommuting and smaller suburbs, something I am okay with on both accounts. Whining about SUVs is pissing in the ocean because it ignores the major causes of fuel consumption.
As something of a tangent, the reason that gas taxes are a non-solution is that the demand is inelastic because the basic infrastructure of the country forces the existing level of consumption. In most parts of the US, driving your own vehicle is actually economical, and there is no alternative in any case. You cannot automagically build a public transport infrastructure in cities with millions of people that were never designed for ubiquitous public transport. That is the real chicken-and-egg problem; for the most part it is not possible to live in the US without burning a lot of fuel even if you wanted to, and it would cost trillions of dollars to make that not the case. In that cost-benefit analysis, slow and gradual migration is a good thing.
The "slow processing" is caused by more than taking a lot of space. XML is basically a document markup but is frequently and regular used as a wire protocol, which has very different design requirements if you want a good standard. And in fact we already have a good standard for this kind of thing called "ASN.1", which was actually engineered to be extremely efficient as a wire protocol standard. (There is also an ITU standard for encoding XML as ASN.1 called XER, which solves many of the performance problems.)
Arguably the single biggest problem with XML that causes slow processing is that software can predict almost nothing about an XML stream and therefore has to allow for anything. The opening bracket tells you very little about what to expect, and creates few implicit failure or non-conformance tests that allows one to terminate processing because there is no definition of "unreasonable". If I want to embed a terabyte of data between XML tags, there is no built-in basic mechanism to inform the software of how much data I should expect to see before a closing tag and no basic mechanism to cue the software as to the type of data to expect. (Yes, you can sort of do it with lots of other layers strapped on, but it isn't core and strapping it on adds complexity.) This is the primary reason it gives miserable performance as a wire protocol format -- the software cannot make decisions about the data without slurping most or all of it, with no way to predict what "most" or "all" actually is. In well engineered standards such as ASN.1, they use the good old tag-length-value (TLV) format. The "tag" tells you what to expect, the length tells you how many bytes to expect, and the value is the actual data. In short, the encoding tells the software exactly what it is about to do before it does it in enough detail that the software can make smart and performant handling decisions.
The only real advantage XML has is that it is (sort of) human readable. Raw TLV formatted documents are a bit opaque, but they can be trivially converted into an XML-like format with no loss (and back) without giving software parsers headaches. There is buckets of irony that the deficiencies of XML are being fixed by essentially converting it to ASN.1 style formats so that machines can parse them with maximum efficiency. Yet another case of computer science history repeating itself. XML is not useful for much more than a presentation layer, and the fact that it is often treated as far more is ridiculous.
This certainly explains the plummeting birthrates in South Korea. So even if everyone is a gaming geek, they *still* don't get laid. Time for Plan B...
"30 meter CEP on INS alone, 13 meters with GPS. Enough to make a militarily significant difference."
Those were the initial design specifications, not the actual capabilities of the device. It is known that the design significantly exceeded the precision specs both in INS and INS/GPS modes, but the exact numbers are (of course) classified.
"Russian jamming systems are publicly known -- the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets during the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs."
Contrary to the widely propogated ignorance in the media, the US has no GPS guided weapons. None. Therefore it should not be surprising that these weapons are impervious to the jamming of GPS. I almost think the US military has encouraged this gross misconception.
The US *does* use high-precision inertial guidance systems that can accept GPS corrections, but that is a very different thing and you cannot jam inertial guidance packages short of altering physics as we know it. If GPS is tampered with, the guidance system ignores it.
"Except that I don't want to live in HIGH DENSITY URBAN area. I want a yard where my kids can play, unmolested by child preditors, gangs, drug addicts. You know, that thing called "outside"? Take your high density living and force it upon yourself."
Your argument is entirely misplaced. Right now, they are forcing developers to NOT build high density urban construction and so the suburban sprawl is the default. I am not suggesting everyone should live in an urban environment, I am suggesting that people should have the choice. I do not care if you choose to live in the suburbs, my point was that the city planners are FORCING everyone to live in the suburbs whether they want to or not. The point is nominally to reduce average fuel consumption, not to force people to live in some particular type of neighborhood. Allowing people that want to live in an urbanized environment to live there will reduce average emissions for the whole area.
A far more productive activity with respect to reducing fuel usage that would not involve California creating yet another destructive tax would be to allow high density development in places like Silicon Valley. It is the height of stupidity that the same political class that wants everyone off the roads and/or to take public transportation adamantly refuses to allow the high density construction that would make it feasible. Far more fuel use reduction could be obtained by simply letting developers turn the vast suburban sprawl of places like Silicon Valley into an urban environment, but apparently this offends their sense of aesthetics.
If they were serious, they would start with the absurdly contradictory positions of city planners rather than inventing a new tax that will invariably get pissed away with no obvious benefit.
I suppose that if you implement computer software which is sufficiently original, not completely obvious after 5 minutes of thought, and is not representable as a mathematical algorithm, that might deserve the protection of a patent
So was everyone asleep in that part of computational theory where they point out that everything (including hardware) is reducible to a mathematical algorithm?
For one thing, software already has copyright. Why does it also need patents?
Non-software patents are no different and have the same relationship. You can get a copyright on the implementation design and a patent on the abstract design. Chemical process patents for example, which no one seems to care about, are entirely indistinguishable from software patents in this regard. The idea that software is somehow different on the basis of a copyright is a fallacy and obscures the real issue.
Which is not an argument in support of software patents, but an argument against the idea that software patents are a special case because they are not. Any argument that can be made against software patents can be made against other types of patents. Rather than arguing over a strawman, we should be debating the purpose and value of patents generally.
The reason PostgreSQL copies every single row on write is that it enables very high ACID transaction concurrency that would otherwise not be supportable -- it is a feature. It is called Multi-Version Concurrency Control (MVCC) and is used by Oracle and, as of the latest version, SQL Server. A big part of MVCC database engine design is how to manage the row version bloat in a fast and efficient manner. While there are a couple different common strategies, they all have not insignificant drawbacks and put the pain in different places. If you compare mature MVCC implementations, e.g. PostgreSQL and Oracle, you will find the "cost" of MVCC expressed in different database operations that reflect their design strategies. TANSTAAFL.
In recent versions of PostgreSQL, the visible cost of managing the row copies in MVCC has been greatly reduced such that it should be largely invisible for most people most of the time. It is an area of PostgreSQL that is constantly being refined and discussed in development.
The idea that Dems have no coherent agenda is laughable. ..
I would agree that the Democrats have a coherent agenda, at least internally, if you study their platform.
However, I would also agree that the Democrats have not run on a coherent agenda as a national party for quite a few years. Stupid or smart in its content, the Republicans have run on a coherent agenda the last several years, though I would observe that this seems to be decohering quite nicely lately. The Democrats are facing up to the reality that if they want a coherent agenda that they can actual sell to the general population, they will have to cut some delusional parts of their base loose.
I actually fear that both parties are showing a tendency toward embracing the fringe nutball portion of their base, which have pretty unappealing ideas on both sides.
One obvious (to me) problem would be the amount of time that passes between pulling the trigger and the round firing. For the purposes of accuracy, you want this time to be as small as possible. For normal mechanical lock mechanisms, shaving a millisecond off the "lock time" is a big deal. This RF authenticator has to be very fast AND have a constant time authentication, otherwise it would significantly reduce the practical accuracy of the firearm. Any decent implementation needs to have a sub-millisecond authentication cycle if they want it to be transparent, and I wonder how difficult it would be to actually achieve those latencies in an inexpensive and reliable system.
I don't really want to call you a liar here, but I just don't believe it. The teachers I know can't afford to live without a roommate for several years.
I wish it were true, but my younger sister (age: 25) already traded up to a better house after a couple years of owning the first one. She lives in the large city of Fresno, CA. If she were working in the private sector and doing as well as she does now, I would be happy for her. But the reality is that she is overpaid on the taxpayer's dime. Other states may be different -- all my family members who teach are in California -- but every last one of them in many different parts of California is doing quite well, and a couple of them only have a couple years of experience under their belts.
The most telling statistic for me is the fact that the public sector pays 30% more than the private sector for equivalent experience, per the US DoE. Last I checked, no one is suggesting that private school educations are inferior to public school educations. The US used to have an enviable education system that in constant dollars cost a pittance. Today we pay vastly more in constant dollars but are hard-pressed to find the improvement in quality. Even if teachers were low-paid, one could make a very sound economic argument that this fact has no bearing on educational efficiency. Somehow, western Europe manages to do well with education spending far less money per student, much like the US used to. The job of teacher does not exist to give someone a cozy paycheck.
Point: Don't ever compare road maintenance and building costs in temperate climates to those that aren't. You have no idea.
I have lived way up north among many other places, so I am not unfamiliar with what these climates do to the road. Nevada has an interesting mix of climate, being extreme desert in the south (120-130F in the summer) and alpine in the northern part of the State (the low spots are at least 1500m above sea level) with plenty of ice and snow in winter. Both those climates trash the roads. Nevada is the most mountainous state in the US, and it requires a hell of a lot to keep the year around passes open (>3000m elevation). California has a better climate and a lighter typical road load (Nevada is nothing but trucking corridor), and still manages to spend 12x as much per mile as Nevada, which is next door. Nevada does something that I have never seen anywhere else, in that they proactively rebuild and resurface roads before they get to a badly decayed state (which is allowed to happen far too often in the upper midwest -- lived there too). Good roads, very low cost, and proactive well managed maintenance.
Nevada is actually atypically efficient and effective, so in some ways it is a loaded example, but with the number of road miles it actually has it makes a fair example of how efficient it could be. Honestly, I had a much lower opinion of what was possible in terms of efficiency until I was exposed to Nevada's DoT. Hell, because they have no set budget and are conservative with their spending, when it gets toward the end of the fiscal year you can call them up and ask them to do things with the excess budget (e.g. pave a gravel road out in ranch land) and they will actually act on the suggestion, which frankly is thrilling from a government bureaucracy. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that gas is slightly cheaper than in California, even though the gas tax pays for the roads in Nevada.
Ultimately, the argument is this: there is no way California can justify spending 12x as much per mile per year with vastly inferior results to its climate challenged next door neighbor. I have no problem with the Finns and Swedes taxing the bejeezus out of their fuel if they wish to, but let's not pretend it is strictly necessary for effective road maintenance and construction. Most DoT outfits suffer from very heavy union influence and deep, well-established bureaucracy, which is reflected in the value they generate.
It would be an interesting experiment to see what happened if teachers didn't have to be destitute their first several years on the job.
Destitute? Not in reality. I have several people in my extended family who are teachers, including some of my siblings, and frankly they make better money than they should for their skill level and experience. Being able to buy a house in California in your early to mid 20s -- which all of my teacher relatives have -- is not "destitute". Some of them border on overpaid.
According to the US Department of Education, public school teachers make an average of 30% more than their private school counterparts. The poverty of public school teachers is a myth perpetrated by their unions and has no basis in reality. The average teacher makes above average wages in the community they reside in. The cost of education has exploded in the US, but none of the promised improvements in education have materialzed, so I'd like to see some results before throwing any more money down that rat hole.
Thought, you are quite right about the fact that having and driving a car in both Sweden and Finland is very expensive, but that's because the car taxes double the cars price and gasolines price, which btw. is just right, because personal driving is expensive to goverment (roads) and to enviroment (polution) and thus taxes should be taken to compensate those costs.
You should find it interestingly then that in some States in the US the roads and transportation infrastructure is paid for entirely by gas and use tax revenues as a matter of law. No tax money is allocated by the government to pay for transportation infrastructure. Why do the Swedes and Finns require an order of magnitude more gas tax money to build roads and bridges, and run the Department of Transportation and DMV (or its equivalent), when some States in the US manage to do it pretty well on far less money (e.g. US$0.15/liter tax). The "expense of driving" argument may be what they tell you, but I find it highly improbable that Finnish and Swedish roads cost that much more to build and maintain.
Some States do pay for road transportation infrastructure out of general tax revenues (e.g. California), but other States allocate no budget for transportation and force those agencies to extract it from drivers. Nevada is an example of a State that relies on nothing but gas taxes and vehicle fees. The fact that some States fund all the roads within their borders this way surprises a lot of people. As an interesting tangent, studies of transportation funding between the different States in the US generally show that gas/use tax based systems both produces better road quality and very substantially reduces costs and overhead compared to roads funded from general tax budgets. The substantially reduced expense makes sense when you consider that those departments cannot predict how much money they will have to spend in the near future, since they have no guaranteed budget.
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"Yes, not everyone gets the cool binocular headsets, but that's a matter of the Army being too cheap-ass to properly equip troops, not a technical problem. It's the same reason the Army doesn't bother giving troops body armor, armoring vehicles, or providing adequate medical care."
Do you think the military budget is bottomless? The 80/20 rule applies to soldiers as much as it does to anything else; if very marginal increases in real utility double the cost of something it is frequently foolish to waste finite resources on obtaining that marginal benefit versus other possible expenditures. The military is very good at this calculus, and a soldier is a very expensive piece of capital equipment that they will go to great lengths to protect on that rather dismal basis alone. I think many people do not appreciate just how high the dollar value of a US soldier is; if spending an extra thousand or two would save a bunch of soldier lives the military would do it if at all possible because the payoff would be obvious.
In any case, for many combat roles the monocular rig is functionally superior to a binocular rig, so it would be a foolish expenditure regardless and makes your mini-rant an ignorant platitude.
AIM-9 is a broad family of missiles, but the technology in them has changed a lot. In early versions, they were literally missiles that homed in on the infrared heat signature of another aircraft.
However, a couple decades ago they started transitioning to broad-spectrum imaging terminal guidance. These do not follow a heat source, they actually know what the target looks like (in the sense a human would) and chase it, hence why they are largely impervious to spoofing and counter-measures. It is hard for a MiG-27 to not look like a MiG-27. These imaging systems still work in the infrared spectrum due to its advantages, but they are not seeking hot targets per se and haven't for some time. The latest AIM-9 versions have vectored thrust now too, so it is virtually impossible to out-maneuver them with clever and carefully timed acrobatics.
The guidance package on THAAD is capable of homing on extremely agile targets, as it is a variant of the same intelligent imaging based homing software that is used in a myriad of other weapon systems e.g. the AIM-9X Sidewinder used for air-to-air combat. Unlike many other targets this family of guidance package has a close to perfect intercept probability on, a long-range ballistic missile is not particularly agile. If the rocket motor can deliver, the guidance package certainly can.
A "random trajectory" ballistic missile is no defense against something like THAAD, both because of limitations on a ballistic missile and the capabilities of the terminal guidance package on THAAD. Despite the fact that it uses kinetic intercept, it is a guided missile with a very competent seeker technology that homes in the target all the way to the end just like a "heat-seeking" (not that we've made heat-seeking missiles in ages) missile; the way people talk about these things, you would think it was flying some kind of precomputed ballistic intercept trajectory.
Whether AMD or Intel is producing the fastest, cheapest, most scalable, or most efficient processor at the moment is not terribly important.
What *is* important is that when you have two companies in genuine fierce competition at the bleeding edge of technology and performance, they extract an impressive amount of productivity and effort out of their engineering and science assets. Free markets are at their best when all the major players have a healthy fear of the capabilities of their competitors.
Having yet another nitrogen explosives detector is not very interesting. It does not solve the problem of peroxide and oxyhalide based explosives, the former having already proven to be popular with terrorists, and both types having seen limited military application in the 20th century.
A truly effective explosives detection technology will need to target a broader range of high explosive chemistries, and preferably not the same ones over and over. When the corner store is out of C4, people bent on blowing things up will find something else.
Among the many reasons the high-quality geothermal resevoirs of the western US have not been exploited more than they have is that they attract opposition from environmental groups. Since the land is largerly Federal in many of the locales they are talking about, they use their clout in Washington DC to hinder local geothermal development since there is little overlap between their supporters in Congress and the constituencies that are affected, so it is a low-cost political bone. Instead they build space efficient natural gas and coal plants, which produce much more power with much less land use.
Geothermal power plants of any scale cover large areas of land with a sparse network of pipes. It is usually not the case that you drill one well and put a turbine on top of it, instead you drill a large number of wells, about one well per 20-40 acres and aggregate the output at a central set of turbines. It is not as though you are paving the region, just putting in a small well-head and a pipe to transport/aggregate the output. Note that you also have to have pipes to pump the condensed water back into the ground in separate wells; they do not dump it into the atmosphere. Unfortunately this covers the land with a very sparse spiderweb of pipes that are deemed "ugly", offending the aesthetic sensibilities of the occasional jackrabbit or some such.
The western US has enormous geothermal potential, but people will have to get used to the idea that there will be vast sections of high desert they never visit that will covered in pipe networks for heat transport. Perhaps they would like a coal plant built next door instead.
What you call "thinking hard" only costs nothing if your time is free. There are many algorithms that were only developed after very significant amounts of technical man-months were invested in research that ultimately led to their creation. And most such algorithms are fully verified and implemented as prototypes, which also costs money.
If the development of new basic algorithms was so easy and inexpensive, why are they discovered so infrequently?
"When your country was founded, the literacy rate was in all probability in the single digits. It certainly was every else in the world"
Actually, no. The literacy rates in New England were roughly similar to what they are now, and the literacy rates out in the deep frontier were around 50-60%. In the populated parts of the US, literacy was almost universal even back then. It was not perfect, but it was surprisingly effective and was driven by the fact that in the early Americas there was a social obsession with making everyone literate for cultural and historical reasons that are mostly forgotten now. If you studied the history instead of assuming it, the reason we have public schools today has nothing to do with the quality or universality of private education at the time. The extreme literacy of the early US population was noted by de Tocqueville and others, and the USians were by far the most voracious consumers of written material in the world at the time.
Furthermore, in a couple States private and public education ran in parallel for a couple decades giving people a choice. When the government of Massachusetts finally forced public education in 1851, it was NOT because people wanted public education. In fact, at the time the public education system was broadly criticized for being deplorable such that even the poorest refused to use it, opting for private education (which for most poor people was free or almost free). It was some last minute clever legislative maneuvering that effectively created the modern public school system at a time when most people and politicians wanted to abolish it as a waste of money and being of embarrassingly low quality. During the couple decades when people had a choice, they overwhelmingly chose private schools, and the public school system "won" by legal maneuvering that effectively disbanded most private schools and thereby eliminating the competition.
As a more interesting point, there are people alive today that went to school before the advent of universal public education. The history of education in the US is very different than what many people assume it was. If you think the literacy rates at the founding were generally single digits, it means that you did not even do rudimentary research on the subject.
You sort of missed the point of paper trails.
In US States with competent electronic voting standards such as Nevada, a third party audits a random sample of all machines (usually 1-3% in practice, which is adequate), comparing the paper results with the electronic results. Any discrepancy found in the samples between the electronic results and the paper results triggers a full recount from paper, which is presumed to be correct since the voter verified it. This buys you the speed and accuracy of electronic ballots in theory, with the fault tolerance and robustness of third-party audits and independently derivable paper results. The best part is that it is extremely resistant to software/hardware attacks since the voter verified paper is statistically sampled to detect such attacks. Trust but verify, no?
As a general comment, the arguably stupid part of the fixation on SUVs is that if everyone stopped driving them tomorrow and drove a Prius instead, it would have a negligible impact on oil consumption in the US. That fixation is fundamentally misplaced.
The only way you'll make a difference is if people stop driving generally. Which means more telecommuting and smaller suburbs, something I am okay with on both accounts. Whining about SUVs is pissing in the ocean because it ignores the major causes of fuel consumption.
As something of a tangent, the reason that gas taxes are a non-solution is that the demand is inelastic because the basic infrastructure of the country forces the existing level of consumption. In most parts of the US, driving your own vehicle is actually economical, and there is no alternative in any case. You cannot automagically build a public transport infrastructure in cities with millions of people that were never designed for ubiquitous public transport. That is the real chicken-and-egg problem; for the most part it is not possible to live in the US without burning a lot of fuel even if you wanted to, and it would cost trillions of dollars to make that not the case. In that cost-benefit analysis, slow and gradual migration is a good thing.
The "slow processing" is caused by more than taking a lot of space. XML is basically a document markup but is frequently and regular used as a wire protocol, which has very different design requirements if you want a good standard. And in fact we already have a good standard for this kind of thing called "ASN.1", which was actually engineered to be extremely efficient as a wire protocol standard. (There is also an ITU standard for encoding XML as ASN.1 called XER, which solves many of the performance problems.)
Arguably the single biggest problem with XML that causes slow processing is that software can predict almost nothing about an XML stream and therefore has to allow for anything. The opening bracket tells you very little about what to expect, and creates few implicit failure or non-conformance tests that allows one to terminate processing because there is no definition of "unreasonable". If I want to embed a terabyte of data between XML tags, there is no built-in basic mechanism to inform the software of how much data I should expect to see before a closing tag and no basic mechanism to cue the software as to the type of data to expect. (Yes, you can sort of do it with lots of other layers strapped on, but it isn't core and strapping it on adds complexity.) This is the primary reason it gives miserable performance as a wire protocol format -- the software cannot make decisions about the data without slurping most or all of it, with no way to predict what "most" or "all" actually is. In well engineered standards such as ASN.1, they use the good old tag-length-value (TLV) format. The "tag" tells you what to expect, the length tells you how many bytes to expect, and the value is the actual data. In short, the encoding tells the software exactly what it is about to do before it does it in enough detail that the software can make smart and performant handling decisions.
The only real advantage XML has is that it is (sort of) human readable. Raw TLV formatted documents are a bit opaque, but they can be trivially converted into an XML-like format with no loss (and back) without giving software parsers headaches. There is buckets of irony that the deficiencies of XML are being fixed by essentially converting it to ASN.1 style formats so that machines can parse them with maximum efficiency. Yet another case of computer science history repeating itself. XML is not useful for much more than a presentation layer, and the fact that it is often treated as far more is ridiculous.
This certainly explains the plummeting birthrates in South Korea. So even if everyone is a gaming geek, they *still* don't get laid. Time for Plan B...
"30 meter CEP on INS alone, 13 meters with GPS. Enough to make a militarily significant difference."
Those were the initial design specifications, not the actual capabilities of the device. It is known that the design significantly exceeded the precision specs both in INS and INS/GPS modes, but the exact numbers are (of course) classified.
"Russian jamming systems are publicly known -- the Air Force destroyed such a system deployed to Iraq to keep American GPS guided bombs from finding their targets during the 2003. The site was destroyed by GPS guided bombs."
Contrary to the widely propogated ignorance in the media, the US has no GPS guided weapons. None. Therefore it should not be surprising that these weapons are impervious to the jamming of GPS. I almost think the US military has encouraged this gross misconception.
The US *does* use high-precision inertial guidance systems that can accept GPS corrections, but that is a very different thing and you cannot jam inertial guidance packages short of altering physics as we know it. If GPS is tampered with, the guidance system ignores it.
"Except that I don't want to live in HIGH DENSITY URBAN area. I want a yard where my kids can play, unmolested by child preditors, gangs, drug addicts. You know, that thing called "outside"? Take your high density living and force it upon yourself."
Your argument is entirely misplaced. Right now, they are forcing developers to NOT build high density urban construction and so the suburban sprawl is the default. I am not suggesting everyone should live in an urban environment, I am suggesting that people should have the choice. I do not care if you choose to live in the suburbs, my point was that the city planners are FORCING everyone to live in the suburbs whether they want to or not. The point is nominally to reduce average fuel consumption, not to force people to live in some particular type of neighborhood. Allowing people that want to live in an urbanized environment to live there will reduce average emissions for the whole area.
A far more productive activity with respect to reducing fuel usage that would not involve California creating yet another destructive tax would be to allow high density development in places like Silicon Valley. It is the height of stupidity that the same political class that wants everyone off the roads and/or to take public transportation adamantly refuses to allow the high density construction that would make it feasible. Far more fuel use reduction could be obtained by simply letting developers turn the vast suburban sprawl of places like Silicon Valley into an urban environment, but apparently this offends their sense of aesthetics.
If they were serious, they would start with the absurdly contradictory positions of city planners rather than inventing a new tax that will invariably get pissed away with no obvious benefit.
I suppose that if you implement computer software which is sufficiently original, not completely obvious after 5 minutes of thought, and is not representable as a mathematical algorithm, that might deserve the protection of a patent
So was everyone asleep in that part of computational theory where they point out that everything (including hardware) is reducible to a mathematical algorithm?
For one thing, software already has copyright. Why does it also need patents?
Non-software patents are no different and have the same relationship. You can get a copyright on the implementation design and a patent on the abstract design. Chemical process patents for example, which no one seems to care about, are entirely indistinguishable from software patents in this regard. The idea that software is somehow different on the basis of a copyright is a fallacy and obscures the real issue.
Which is not an argument in support of software patents, but an argument against the idea that software patents are a special case because they are not. Any argument that can be made against software patents can be made against other types of patents. Rather than arguing over a strawman, we should be debating the purpose and value of patents generally.
In recent versions of PostgreSQL, the visible cost of managing the row copies in MVCC has been greatly reduced such that it should be largely invisible for most people most of the time. It is an area of PostgreSQL that is constantly being refined and discussed in development.
I would agree that the Democrats have a coherent agenda, at least internally, if you study their platform.
However, I would also agree that the Democrats have not run on a coherent agenda as a national party for quite a few years. Stupid or smart in its content, the Republicans have run on a coherent agenda the last several years, though I would observe that this seems to be decohering quite nicely lately. The Democrats are facing up to the reality that if they want a coherent agenda that they can actual sell to the general population, they will have to cut some delusional parts of their base loose.
I actually fear that both parties are showing a tendency toward embracing the fringe nutball portion of their base, which have pretty unappealing ideas on both sides.
One obvious (to me) problem would be the amount of time that passes between pulling the trigger and the round firing. For the purposes of accuracy, you want this time to be as small as possible. For normal mechanical lock mechanisms, shaving a millisecond off the "lock time" is a big deal. This RF authenticator has to be very fast AND have a constant time authentication, otherwise it would significantly reduce the practical accuracy of the firearm. Any decent implementation needs to have a sub-millisecond authentication cycle if they want it to be transparent, and I wonder how difficult it would be to actually achieve those latencies in an inexpensive and reliable system.
I wish it were true, but my younger sister (age: 25) already traded up to a better house after a couple years of owning the first one. She lives in the large city of Fresno, CA. If she were working in the private sector and doing as well as she does now, I would be happy for her. But the reality is that she is overpaid on the taxpayer's dime. Other states may be different -- all my family members who teach are in California -- but every last one of them in many different parts of California is doing quite well, and a couple of them only have a couple years of experience under their belts.
The most telling statistic for me is the fact that the public sector pays 30% more than the private sector for equivalent experience, per the US DoE. Last I checked, no one is suggesting that private school educations are inferior to public school educations. The US used to have an enviable education system that in constant dollars cost a pittance. Today we pay vastly more in constant dollars but are hard-pressed to find the improvement in quality. Even if teachers were low-paid, one could make a very sound economic argument that this fact has no bearing on educational efficiency. Somehow, western Europe manages to do well with education spending far less money per student, much like the US used to. The job of teacher does not exist to give someone a cozy paycheck.
I have lived way up north among many other places, so I am not unfamiliar with what these climates do to the road. Nevada has an interesting mix of climate, being extreme desert in the south (120-130F in the summer) and alpine in the northern part of the State (the low spots are at least 1500m above sea level) with plenty of ice and snow in winter. Both those climates trash the roads. Nevada is the most mountainous state in the US, and it requires a hell of a lot to keep the year around passes open (>3000m elevation). California has a better climate and a lighter typical road load (Nevada is nothing but trucking corridor), and still manages to spend 12x as much per mile as Nevada, which is next door. Nevada does something that I have never seen anywhere else, in that they proactively rebuild and resurface roads before they get to a badly decayed state (which is allowed to happen far too often in the upper midwest -- lived there too). Good roads, very low cost, and proactive well managed maintenance.
Nevada is actually atypically efficient and effective, so in some ways it is a loaded example, but with the number of road miles it actually has it makes a fair example of how efficient it could be. Honestly, I had a much lower opinion of what was possible in terms of efficiency until I was exposed to Nevada's DoT. Hell, because they have no set budget and are conservative with their spending, when it gets toward the end of the fiscal year you can call them up and ask them to do things with the excess budget (e.g. pave a gravel road out in ranch land) and they will actually act on the suggestion, which frankly is thrilling from a government bureaucracy. Perhaps the ultimate irony is that gas is slightly cheaper than in California, even though the gas tax pays for the roads in Nevada.
Ultimately, the argument is this: there is no way California can justify spending 12x as much per mile per year with vastly inferior results to its climate challenged next door neighbor. I have no problem with the Finns and Swedes taxing the bejeezus out of their fuel if they wish to, but let's not pretend it is strictly necessary for effective road maintenance and construction. Most DoT outfits suffer from very heavy union influence and deep, well-established bureaucracy, which is reflected in the value they generate.
Destitute? Not in reality. I have several people in my extended family who are teachers, including some of my siblings, and frankly they make better money than they should for their skill level and experience. Being able to buy a house in California in your early to mid 20s -- which all of my teacher relatives have -- is not "destitute". Some of them border on overpaid.
According to the US Department of Education, public school teachers make an average of 30% more than their private school counterparts. The poverty of public school teachers is a myth perpetrated by their unions and has no basis in reality. The average teacher makes above average wages in the community they reside in. The cost of education has exploded in the US, but none of the promised improvements in education have materialzed, so I'd like to see some results before throwing any more money down that rat hole.
You should find it interestingly then that in some States in the US the roads and transportation infrastructure is paid for entirely by gas and use tax revenues as a matter of law. No tax money is allocated by the government to pay for transportation infrastructure. Why do the Swedes and Finns require an order of magnitude more gas tax money to build roads and bridges, and run the Department of Transportation and DMV (or its equivalent), when some States in the US manage to do it pretty well on far less money (e.g. US$0.15/liter tax). The "expense of driving" argument may be what they tell you, but I find it highly improbable that Finnish and Swedish roads cost that much more to build and maintain.
Some States do pay for road transportation infrastructure out of general tax revenues (e.g. California), but other States allocate no budget for transportation and force those agencies to extract it from drivers. Nevada is an example of a State that relies on nothing but gas taxes and vehicle fees. The fact that some States fund all the roads within their borders this way surprises a lot of people. As an interesting tangent, studies of transportation funding between the different States in the US generally show that gas/use tax based systems both produces better road quality and very substantially reduces costs and overhead compared to roads funded from general tax budgets. The substantially reduced expense makes sense when you consider that those departments cannot predict how much money they will have to spend in the near future, since they have no guaranteed budget.