Once you get the rocket safely out past Earth's orbit, most of us hippies aren't too worried about it.
The problem is getting it there - what percentage of space launches fail? Way more than zero, and we don't want plutonium-powered reactors on an exploding rocket, even if ETGs really are about as safe as you can get for nuclear power generation.
Mostly Manhattan, with a few in the outer boroughs? Mostly not in poor neighborhoods, where they may not have been as widespread, and they got taken out earliest because of the War On Politically Incorrect Drugs?
Candidate Obama gave great, inspiring speeches, but wasn't that good at real-time conversation. (President Obama not so much.) Dubya Bush always looked like a deer in the headlights, amazed that he was getting away with what he said and hoping nobody would ask questions about it.
But the guy who was really good? Bill Clinton. He was always on, always quick thinking, always had a good comeback for anything, lots of fun to listen to. Sure, he was lying through his teeth half the time, but he knew which half it was, and he did it with a smile that said that he knew that you knew he was lying, and that he'd make the game worth playing, and he usually did.
If he's 50, he was born in 1964, so he might have gone to college before Apple II's became widespread. But when I was in high school from 1972-1974, we had time-sharing access to a PDP-11 at the nearby state university (with one teletype shared for the entire school), so by 8 years later it's likely he had something a lot fancier. My wife's high school didn't have that - they used punch cards, which got batch-processed weekly.
I first encountered PLATO in college, and it had Notesfiles (which contributed significantly to the evolution of Usenet, as well as Lotus Notes), and the coolest-ever Star Trek game.
In the US, the Pi was $25 for the A (now $20 for A+), and $35 for the B (which is what I actually bought, but this discussion is mainly about the A/A+.) The Beaglebone currently runs $52-55 online, and has 4GB memory instead of 2GB (it was getting hard for them to find 2GB parts), and the processor's been updated a bit since last fall when I looked at it (it's also a newer ARM core than the Pi uses.) The catch is that if you want to do 1920x1280 video, you only get 24Hz, vs. 60 for the Pi, which affects using it as a media platform. (But if you don't care about that, yeah, it's a great deal, especially now that it has more RAM.)
The Model A boards have 256MB, the Model B have 512MB. They could have put 512MB in the Model A, but it would have cost them a bit more and they were trying to make it cheaper. (I still wish they'd done it.)
But one reason the board is so cheap is that it's using a System On A Chip that's designed for other applications, not custom for them, so making it faster, or using a newer ARM instruction set, or (apparently) putting more than 512MB on the board would be hard, requiring a major redesign and increasing costs. For instance, the BeagleBone Black costs about twice as much, and while it uses a faster CPU with a newer instruction set, the video processing part is slower, so it's not a total win.
It sounds like you're saying that the free software world suddenly decided to invent Firefox as a competition for IE. Firefox was Netscape freeing the source code for the Netscape browser so the open source community could improve it, and people continuing to improve it over the years. IE was Microsoft's attempt to kill Netscape and particularly to kill browser standardization, because the increasing move to HTML as a universal user interface for applications was threatening to make the operating system irrelevant. Imagine AOL shipping a CD with Linux, Netscape, and AOL, letting you use your slightly older PC, and letting you use AOL for your mail instead of some Microsoft product.
Twitter shows you comments in most-recent-first mode, which is sometimes confusing when news breaks. A few weeks back my twitter feed was filling up with things like "[dog emoji] [knife emoji] [knide] [knife] !!!" and it took a while to get down to the comments about "there's a new vulnerability called 'Poodle' out today."
Maybe Obama did something about this quietly, but I'd think one of the first things he should have done was worked to increase medical school capacities for training doctors and nurses, along with making it easier for immigrant doctors and nurses to get licensed here. Sure, it's a long-term activity that wouldn't significantly improve health care costs or availability during his two terms, and maybe the next batch of Republicans would take credit for it, but it's still critically important.
A lot of us baby boomers are going to be retiring, or even if we can't afford to retire we'll still be getting old and decrepit. And a lot of doctors are boomers, partly because everybody recognized that as a good job when we were growing up (both financial and social good), and it was before the tech booms turned everybody into software entrepreneurs, and also we had fewer kids than our parents' generation (the Millennials are catching up demographically, but with the economy and student loan problems, fewer of them can afford med school, and med school capacities are still limited.)
I have several friends who were keeping their old jobs for the insurance, and Obamacare has let them leave their jobs to do other things. One's a writer who was able to go full-time writing, and the usual software/computer consultants who are now on their own or starting startups. The lawyer who started a small partnership with a couple of friends could have done that anyway, but since she's got kids, the difference in insurance costs was significant.
Those aren't the heavily-subsidized plans - they're just the "you can buy an individual plan at similar rates to what a large company gets" plans, plus the "not denying your coverage for pre-existing conditions" effects.
Friend of mine was working for a company that dropped their health insurance plan, then a few months later laid off their employees. Since COBRA only covers whatever plan you had, that mean they couldn't get it.
My car radio has Bluetooth. Works really well for phone calls, and has a good microphone built into the car ceiling near the driver. Unfortunately, it doesn't get along with the navigation applications in my phone; they're not phone calls, so it doesn't play them. (Maybe it would if I set the radio for MP3 mode or something, instead of radio? But then it wouldn't be playing the radio, whereas my Garmin doesn't care about the radio and just talks, and I pick the snarky British GPS voice because it usually doesn't sound like anybody on the radio except some BBC programs.)
The difference between a sacrificial altar and a butcher shop / BBQ joint is the words people say when they're there, and the article says that culture didn't have writing. If the person in charge asks the customers what favors they want from the gods, it's a temple; if they ask whether you want regular or extra crispy, it's a BBQ joint, and in some cultures they're going to thank the gods for the life of the animal even if it's a BBQ joint. In a temple, it's more likely that some parts of the animal will get burned instead of eaten, and in a BBQ joint, it's more likely that there'll be spices on the meat, and maybe priests get paid a bigger share than a butcher and cook, but none of those are universal across known cultures.
Also, the article says it was a two-story building; just because it's underground millennia later doesn't mean it was underground at the time.
My Garmin Nuvi GPS no longer gets traffic data, and can't use a few other 2-way features like Google Search, because the 2G wireless network it used will be going away early next year, and the carrier's no longer renewing contracts for them. So it's back to being a dumb GPS, with maps and built-in data points, but no live search.
Carriers really want to reallocate their 2G spectrum to 4G or at least 3G, because it lets them get more calls and a lot more data in the same amount of bandwidth, and because the movement of users to newer standards means that their remaining 2G bands are very underused.
No, constructing something impossible, like a perpetual motion machine, is impossible. Science quite often says "definitely" or "definitely not".
Constructing something highly unlikely but not provably impossible, like cold fusion, is highly unlikely, especially if you're doing stuff by accident instead of actually understanding theory, but what science says about cold fusion is "everybody assumed it wasn't possible, but somebody did it, and then we showed that what they did was bogus but interesting, so we're back to assuming it's probably not possible so you'd better do a really good job of explaining what you're doing if you want us to spend our time looking at it again."
This was the negotiations that led up to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; Santa Ana really didn't want to be stuck with the not-really-conquered tribes if he was going to lose the good land north of them.
Oh, right, I never owned a 90s car:-) My wife's 1985 car lasted until 2001, my 1987 van lasted until 2012 (with one engine replacement), and I never played with the digital busses on either my 2012 car or my wife's 2001 car (which IIRC only had the dumber version of OBD, not the current CAN bus.) I suppose I should try that some time. Both of those cars have the electronic speedometer with analog readout you refer to.
Many of the remote management applications I used to do with X are being replaced by HTTP interfaces, optionally with AJAX, or sometimes REST APIs, but there are still a number that aren't.
- Remote logins to run Unix shell - xterm really rocks for this (these days usually with X over SSH), as long as I'm using a Linux desktop, and it's a bit lame but workable from a Windows desktop (usually using Xming.)
- Windows Remote Desktop Protocol remote logins to Windows servers - RDP mostly works, though running any sort of video over it is painful, and audio's worse, even over Ethernets. VNC would be similar, if I were talking to a Unix machine.
- VMware console access to Unix or sometimes Windows VMs - the biggest problem here is that too many different applications are carving away chunks of the screen, so there's only 800x600 or maybe 1024x768 left; and I'm usually accessing the VMware server from a web browser on a Windows machine accessed by RDP through a firewall, so there's no real way to compare video speeds or get audio.
We definitely have to dumb down protocols to run on mobile phones with 1024x768 screens and only 1 GHz CPUs and 1GB RAM, because they can't possibly run anywhere near as fast as they did on 1152x900 screens with 10 MHz CPUs and 4 MB RAM running X10, or 640x480 screens with 25-33 MHz 386 CPUs and (I forget how much, but not enough) RAM and X11 with Motif.
And yes, there were really good reasons for running NeWS instead of X, because some changes in which work you did on which end of the wire could make a huge difference in responsiveness and speed, and using Postscript meant that what you saw was really what you'd get, and it let you deal with problems like mouse tracking latency a lot better.
No, besides disliking competition in general, auto dealers and car makers have two big reasons to try to block Tesla sales
- Tesla sells high-priced cars, competing with the other high-priced high-profit-margin cars that dealers like to sell. They wouldn't be as worried about threats to the low-profit-margin econobox sales.
- They also threaten the whole business model that US car dealers have, affecting who gets what cut of the car buyer's money. This may bother the manufacturers less than the dealer, but it still upsets the whole value chain, especially if those evil Tesla car buyers then resell their old cars on Craigslist or some other Internet site instead of trading it in at the dealer or at least selling it to a used car lot.
I'd expect most of them are sensors for the various battery and motor things, or components to connect the sensors safely to the other electronics (opto-isolators, etc. to keep potentially high random voltages and currents from frying the whole system.) Once you've turned the analog data into bits, even with small-volume production it'd be fairly easy to use an FPGA or programmable microcontrollers to do the rest, rather than building lots of custom discrete parts.
My Garmin Nuvi had some cool features that depended on 2G, like using Google search instead of just built-in, and also checking movies, weather, etc. It also used that to get traffic data, instead of whatever other traffic data services are available. Now the 2G wireless is going away, since the carrier won't renew the contract, so there's no more traffic data:-( But at least it's a separate GPS, so I could replace it if I wanted to. (Instead, I use the AM radio you dislike to listen to Traffic Every 10 Minutes Radio.)
When the satellite XM radio free-with-new-car subscription on my current car ran out, no problem, that just meant there was one button on the dashboard that was no longer useful; the most likely interface to become obsolete is the Bluetooth cellphone support. There'd be a lot more risk of obsolescence if I'd gotten the hopelessly-overpriced navigation/radio/etc. console only that came with the fancy trim package (which also had the bigger engine that I didn't want, and the spare tire I really did need, and pushbutton combination door lock I'd also have liked.) While I like having a remote-control door lock, which is probably already insecure, it's built in to the keys, which means I have to carry a big clunky not-waterproof key system with me instead of a probably-waterproof slightly clunky RFID key like my wife's car has or a simple key like older cars - really annoying when I'm going surfing.
Digital speedometers might be lying; analog speedometers also might be lying, especially if there's a problem with the cable, or you've put on different sized tires.
Slashdot Mirror
Once you get the rocket safely out past Earth's orbit, most of us hippies aren't too worried about it.
The problem is getting it there - what percentage of space launches fail? Way more than zero, and we don't want plutonium-powered reactors on an exploding rocket, even if ETGs really are about as safe as you can get for nuclear power generation.
Mostly Manhattan, with a few in the outer boroughs? Mostly not in poor neighborhoods, where they may not have been as widespread, and they got taken out earliest because of the War On Politically Incorrect Drugs?
Are you kidding? They couldn't even figure out how to get female characters to work.
XKCD 606
Candidate Obama gave great, inspiring speeches, but wasn't that good at real-time conversation. (President Obama not so much.) Dubya Bush always looked like a deer in the headlights, amazed that he was getting away with what he said and hoping nobody would ask questions about it.
But the guy who was really good? Bill Clinton. He was always on, always quick thinking, always had a good comeback for anything, lots of fun to listen to. Sure, he was lying through his teeth half the time, but he knew which half it was, and he did it with a smile that said that he knew that you knew he was lying, and that he'd make the game worth playing, and he usually did.
If he's 50, he was born in 1964, so he might have gone to college before Apple II's became widespread. But when I was in high school from 1972-1974, we had time-sharing access to a PDP-11 at the nearby state university (with one teletype shared for the entire school), so by 8 years later it's likely he had something a lot fancier. My wife's high school didn't have that - they used punch cards, which got batch-processed weekly.
I first encountered PLATO in college, and it had Notesfiles (which contributed significantly to the evolution of Usenet, as well as Lotus Notes), and the coolest-ever Star Trek game.
In the US, the Pi was $25 for the A (now $20 for A+), and $35 for the B (which is what I actually bought, but this discussion is mainly about the A/A+.) The Beaglebone currently runs $52-55 online, and has 4GB memory instead of 2GB (it was getting hard for them to find 2GB parts), and the processor's been updated a bit since last fall when I looked at it (it's also a newer ARM core than the Pi uses.) The catch is that if you want to do 1920x1280 video, you only get 24Hz, vs. 60 for the Pi, which affects using it as a media platform. (But if you don't care about that, yeah, it's a great deal, especially now that it has more RAM.)
The Model A boards have 256MB, the Model B have 512MB. They could have put 512MB in the Model A, but it would have cost them a bit more and they were trying to make it cheaper. (I still wish they'd done it.)
But one reason the board is so cheap is that it's using a System On A Chip that's designed for other applications, not custom for them, so making it faster, or using a newer ARM instruction set, or (apparently) putting more than 512MB on the board would be hard, requiring a major redesign and increasing costs. For instance, the BeagleBone Black costs about twice as much, and while it uses a faster CPU with a newer instruction set, the video processing part is slower, so it's not a total win.
It sounds like you're saying that the free software world suddenly decided to invent Firefox as a competition for IE. Firefox was Netscape freeing the source code for the Netscape browser so the open source community could improve it, and people continuing to improve it over the years. IE was Microsoft's attempt to kill Netscape and particularly to kill browser standardization, because the increasing move to HTML as a universal user interface for applications was threatening to make the operating system irrelevant. Imagine AOL shipping a CD with Linux, Netscape, and AOL, letting you use your slightly older PC, and letting you use AOL for your mail instead of some Microsoft product.
Twitter shows you comments in most-recent-first mode, which is sometimes confusing when news breaks. A few weeks back my twitter feed was filling up with things like
"[dog emoji] [knife emoji] [knide] [knife] !!!"
and it took a while to get down to the comments about "there's a new vulnerability called 'Poodle' out today."
Maybe Obama did something about this quietly, but I'd think one of the first things he should have done was worked to increase medical school capacities for training doctors and nurses, along with making it easier for immigrant doctors and nurses to get licensed here. Sure, it's a long-term activity that wouldn't significantly improve health care costs or availability during his two terms, and maybe the next batch of Republicans would take credit for it, but it's still critically important.
A lot of us baby boomers are going to be retiring, or even if we can't afford to retire we'll still be getting old and decrepit. And a lot of doctors are boomers, partly because everybody recognized that as a good job when we were growing up (both financial and social good), and it was before the tech booms turned everybody into software entrepreneurs, and also we had fewer kids than our parents' generation (the Millennials are catching up demographically, but with the economy and student loan problems, fewer of them can afford med school, and med school capacities are still limited.)
I have several friends who were keeping their old jobs for the insurance, and Obamacare has let them leave their jobs to do other things. One's a writer who was able to go full-time writing, and the usual software/computer consultants who are now on their own or starting startups. The lawyer who started a small partnership with a couple of friends could have done that anyway, but since she's got kids, the difference in insurance costs was significant.
Those aren't the heavily-subsidized plans - they're just the "you can buy an individual plan at similar rates to what a large company gets" plans, plus the "not denying your coverage for pre-existing conditions" effects.
Friend of mine was working for a company that dropped their health insurance plan, then a few months later laid off their employees. Since COBRA only covers whatever plan you had, that mean they couldn't get it.
If I buy a car that turns out to suck, I don't get a tax writeoff for it.
The whole professional sports business is a racket - things like the NFL being a non-profit, etc.
My car radio has Bluetooth. Works really well for phone calls, and has a good microphone built into the car ceiling near the driver. Unfortunately, it doesn't get along with the navigation applications in my phone; they're not phone calls, so it doesn't play them. (Maybe it would if I set the radio for MP3 mode or something, instead of radio? But then it wouldn't be playing the radio, whereas my Garmin doesn't care about the radio and just talks, and I pick the snarky British GPS voice because it usually doesn't sound like anybody on the radio except some BBC programs.)
The difference between a sacrificial altar and a butcher shop / BBQ joint is the words people say when they're there, and the article says that culture didn't have writing. If the person in charge asks the customers what favors they want from the gods, it's a temple; if they ask whether you want regular or extra crispy, it's a BBQ joint, and in some cultures they're going to thank the gods for the life of the animal even if it's a BBQ joint. In a temple, it's more likely that some parts of the animal will get burned instead of eaten, and in a BBQ joint, it's more likely that there'll be spices on the meat, and maybe priests get paid a bigger share than a butcher and cook, but none of those are universal across known cultures.
Also, the article says it was a two-story building; just because it's underground millennia later doesn't mean it was underground at the time.
My Garmin Nuvi GPS no longer gets traffic data, and can't use a few other 2-way features like Google Search, because the 2G wireless network it used will be going away early next year, and the carrier's no longer renewing contracts for them. So it's back to being a dumb GPS, with maps and built-in data points, but no live search.
Carriers really want to reallocate their 2G spectrum to 4G or at least 3G, because it lets them get more calls and a lot more data in the same amount of bandwidth, and because the movement of users to newer standards means that their remaining 2G bands are very underused.
No, constructing something impossible, like a perpetual motion machine, is impossible. Science quite often says "definitely" or "definitely not".
Constructing something highly unlikely but not provably impossible, like cold fusion, is highly unlikely, especially if you're doing stuff by accident instead of actually understanding theory, but what science says about cold fusion is "everybody assumed it wasn't possible, but somebody did it, and then we showed that what they did was bogus but interesting, so we're back to assuming it's probably not possible so you'd better do a really good job of explaining what you're doing if you want us to spend our time looking at it again."
This was the negotiations that led up to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; Santa Ana really didn't want to be stuck with the not-really-conquered tribes if he was going to lose the good land north of them.
Oh, right, I never owned a 90s car :-) My wife's 1985 car lasted until 2001, my 1987 van lasted until 2012 (with one engine replacement), and I never played with the digital busses on either my 2012 car or my wife's 2001 car (which IIRC only had the dumber version of OBD, not the current CAN bus.) I suppose I should try that some time. Both of those cars have the electronic speedometer with analog readout you refer to.
Many of the remote management applications I used to do with X are being replaced by HTTP interfaces, optionally with AJAX, or sometimes REST APIs, but there are still a number that aren't.
We definitely have to dumb down protocols to run on mobile phones with 1024x768 screens and only 1 GHz CPUs and 1GB RAM, because they can't possibly run anywhere near as fast as they did on 1152x900 screens with 10 MHz CPUs and 4 MB RAM running X10, or 640x480 screens with 25-33 MHz 386 CPUs and (I forget how much, but not enough) RAM and X11 with Motif.
And yes, there were really good reasons for running NeWS instead of X, because some changes in which work you did on which end of the wire could make a huge difference in responsiveness and speed, and using Postscript meant that what you saw was really what you'd get, and it let you deal with problems like mouse tracking latency a lot better.
No, besides disliking competition in general, auto dealers and car makers have two big reasons to try to block Tesla sales
I'd expect most of them are sensors for the various battery and motor things, or components to connect the sensors safely to the other electronics (opto-isolators, etc. to keep potentially high random voltages and currents from frying the whole system.) Once you've turned the analog data into bits, even with small-volume production it'd be fairly easy to use an FPGA or programmable microcontrollers to do the rest, rather than building lots of custom discrete parts.
My Garmin Nuvi had some cool features that depended on 2G, like using Google search instead of just built-in, and also checking movies, weather, etc. It also used that to get traffic data, instead of whatever other traffic data services are available. Now the 2G wireless is going away, since the carrier won't renew the contract, so there's no more traffic data :-( But at least it's a separate GPS, so I could replace it if I wanted to. (Instead, I use the AM radio you dislike to listen to Traffic Every 10 Minutes Radio.)
When the satellite XM radio free-with-new-car subscription on my current car ran out, no problem, that just meant there was one button on the dashboard that was no longer useful; the most likely interface to become obsolete is the Bluetooth cellphone support. There'd be a lot more risk of obsolescence if I'd gotten the hopelessly-overpriced navigation/radio/etc. console only that came with the fancy trim package (which also had the bigger engine that I didn't want, and the spare tire I really did need, and pushbutton combination door lock I'd also have liked.) While I like having a remote-control door lock, which is probably already insecure, it's built in to the keys, which means I have to carry a big clunky not-waterproof key system with me instead of a probably-waterproof slightly clunky RFID key like my wife's car has or a simple key like older cars - really annoying when I'm going surfing.
Digital speedometers might be lying; analog speedometers also might be lying, especially if there's a problem with the cable, or you've put on different sized tires.