The rules (400' ceiling) are well known by people who care about the rules.
I've seen more than one Cessna flying well below 500'AGL far from airports, often with friends whooping and hollering from the ground... it will happen regardless of the rules and how well they are known.
Birds also fly in the same airspace as planes carrying people, they are small and hard to see, many of them weigh more than 3lbs, and they often fly in large flocks.
I agree with you we _should_ be building new plants, especially when the old plants are being stretched past their original design lifetimes. Furthermore, we _really_ should be shutting down coal-fired generation stations and not replacing them with new coal-fired anything.
On the other hand, even at the ripe old age of 22, I could recognize a socio-political trend, and from the perspective of 1990, construction of new nuke plants was not looking very likely in the next 2 decades, at least.
Resident inspectors have a real fun life, they aren't allowed to stay in any one town for more than 2 years before moving on to the next inspection post.
In 1990 the NRC wanted to hire me, straight out of school, to be an onsite inspector. I had one serious question for them: post 3 mile island, are we really going to be building new nuke plants? They assured me that many new plants would be starting construction "very soon."
Your present NRC inspectors were presumably kids straight out of school when they started, who believed that kind of assurance.
I would hope after 1000 years that we would a) find an alternative fuel, and b) be sufficiently "off this rock" that we can get what we need.
Of course, significant "off this rock" activities are liable to accelerate energy consumption by orders of magnitude, so that's a dangerous bit of progress to hope for.
>they want employees ideas without paying them for those ideas or giving them any credit
Do you live and work in the Western world?
Are you independently wealthy?
If your answers are Yes and No respectively, you should not have any expectation of pay beyond salary or credit beyond "attaboy!" If this bothers you, please seek asylum in your preferred alternate society.
I always cringed when checking into "fancy" hotels back in the day for conferences and such. $12 charges to connect the room phone for a local call....
Until you've programmed ASM for a micro controller, you really don't know what's going on under the hood, and you're almost certainly doomed to create bloated, slow-as-mud compared to what it *could* be, code.
There was a time I agreed with this, and I believe that technology has advanced sufficiently that I no longer do.
For trivial. or very specific problems, you may still be able to out-perform an optimizing compiler - but for things that take more than a week to accomplish in a high level language, it will _usually_ take an impractical amount of effort to out-optimize modern optimizers. If you live and breathe code optimization, you might know just where the current optimizer technology is lacking and be able to make surgical strikes with your hand assembly code, but for the vast majority of applications, there is little to no ROI in doing this.
I first came to this conclusion when analyzing code generated by the Cosmic C package for 6811 CPUs circa 1998, and have had it reinforced periodically by looking "under the hood" at what gcc produces for desktop PCs.
Still, knowing a thing or two about how it works "under the hood" can save a programmer from doing something inherently slow in a higher level language - but the days of being able to beat the (mainstream) optimizers probably ended 15 years ago. Of course, if you're working with some under-developed tool-chain, then you can be effectively "working 20 years in the past" and then the old rules still apply.
I can't blame him, though I do feel burned for having bought one of the "ripoff authored" titles with a big "TOM CLANCY" on the cover whilst stuck in an airport layover.
Word to the publishing industry: that happens to have been the last paperback I ever bought... not saying the false author advertising is the whole reason I gave up reading ink smeared on dead trees, but it didn't help.
Another way of looking at it is: be careful what you wish for.
If you were to wish for things to be different than they were and actually get your wish, then things would indeed be different - less cometary bombardment might be "good" for some forms of life, but almost definitely not homo sapiens.
If life plateaued as a particularly tenacious single celled slime - would that be a bad thing?
Slime is efficient at doing what it does, and can be highly anti-competitive to new forms of life that might be more complex but less efficient, at least during their first evolutionary steps away from slime.
Well, I'm not a God, but I play one in evolutionary simulations sometimes.
Without catastrophic or otherwise challenging events, life seems to become complacent - evolution often plateaus.
Run two simulations for an equal amount of time, keep one in "Goldilocks" conditions the whole time, and whack the other with a 90% to 99% extinction cataclysmic event and/or climatic shift every time that life builds up to a nice robust stage. With billions of species out there, periodically challenging the top dogs allows more diverse species to have a chance.
It's the same basic reason the U.S. has anti-trust legislation.
Slashdot Mirror
>Right off the bat you can imagine autonomous driving easily topping your average intoxicated drivers' ability behind the wheel.
Didn't anybody pay attention to the DARPA Grand Challenge?
And Spock had better voicing in it too...
You realize the political cost of not spending that $19,000 would exceed your annual salary many times over?
It wouldn't be NSA style if you realized it was going on....
No, I'd rather say "my current network OS is Linux, so what's next?"
Seems like this story is about a drone pilot who got identified and had some consequences...
The rules (400' ceiling) are well known by people who care about the rules.
I've seen more than one Cessna flying well below 500'AGL far from airports, often with friends whooping and hollering from the ground... it will happen regardless of the rules and how well they are known.
Birds also fly in the same airspace as planes carrying people, they are small and hard to see, many of them weigh more than 3lbs, and they often fly in large flocks.
That expense is mostly due to the hostile political climate surrounding them. Before TMI, they had an acceptable ROI horizon.
I agree with you we _should_ be building new plants, especially when the old plants are being stretched past their original design lifetimes. Furthermore, we _really_ should be shutting down coal-fired generation stations and not replacing them with new coal-fired anything.
On the other hand, even at the ripe old age of 22, I could recognize a socio-political trend, and from the perspective of 1990, construction of new nuke plants was not looking very likely in the next 2 decades, at least.
Resident inspectors have a real fun life, they aren't allowed to stay in any one town for more than 2 years before moving on to the next inspection post.
In 1990 the NRC wanted to hire me, straight out of school, to be an onsite inspector. I had one serious question for them: post 3 mile island, are we really going to be building new nuke plants? They assured me that many new plants would be starting construction "very soon."
Your present NRC inspectors were presumably kids straight out of school when they started, who believed that kind of assurance.
I would hope after 1000 years that we would a) find an alternative fuel, and b) be sufficiently "off this rock" that we can get what we need.
Of course, significant "off this rock" activities are liable to accelerate energy consumption by orders of magnitude, so that's a dangerous bit of progress to hope for.
And hooray for Helium generation!
Oh, aren't Helium nuclei also called Alpha particles?
>What's the point in having these high tech giants in our midst when there is little or no advantage to the communities that surround them?
What a completely communist statement! Next you'll want them to start paying their fair share of taxes.
>they want employees ideas without paying them for those ideas or giving them any credit
Do you live and work in the Western world?
Are you independently wealthy?
If your answers are Yes and No respectively, you should not have any expectation of pay beyond salary or credit beyond "attaboy!" If this bothers you, please seek asylum in your preferred alternate society.
I always cringed when checking into "fancy" hotels back in the day for conferences and such. $12 charges to connect the room phone for a local call....
Until you've programmed ASM for a micro controller, you really don't know what's going on under the hood, and you're almost certainly doomed to create bloated, slow-as-mud compared to what it *could* be, code.
There was a time I agreed with this, and I believe that technology has advanced sufficiently that I no longer do.
For trivial. or very specific problems, you may still be able to out-perform an optimizing compiler - but for things that take more than a week to accomplish in a high level language, it will _usually_ take an impractical amount of effort to out-optimize modern optimizers. If you live and breathe code optimization, you might know just where the current optimizer technology is lacking and be able to make surgical strikes with your hand assembly code, but for the vast majority of applications, there is little to no ROI in doing this.
I first came to this conclusion when analyzing code generated by the Cosmic C package for 6811 CPUs circa 1998, and have had it reinforced periodically by looking "under the hood" at what gcc produces for desktop PCs.
Still, knowing a thing or two about how it works "under the hood" can save a programmer from doing something inherently slow in a higher level language - but the days of being able to beat the (mainstream) optimizers probably ended 15 years ago. Of course, if you're working with some under-developed tool-chain, then you can be effectively "working 20 years in the past" and then the old rules still apply.
The power plug.
I can't blame him, though I do feel burned for having bought one of the "ripoff authored" titles with a big "TOM CLANCY" on the cover whilst stuck in an airport layover.
Word to the publishing industry: that happens to have been the last paperback I ever bought... not saying the false author advertising is the whole reason I gave up reading ink smeared on dead trees, but it didn't help.
Another way of looking at it is: be careful what you wish for.
If you were to wish for things to be different than they were and actually get your wish, then things would indeed be different - less cometary bombardment might be "good" for some forms of life, but almost definitely not homo sapiens.
http://gradspeeches.com/2008/2008/carl-icahn
Carl Icahn put out a nicely worded take on why CEOs only promote people who are less intelligent than themselves...
If life plateaued as a particularly tenacious single celled slime - would that be a bad thing?
Slime is efficient at doing what it does, and can be highly anti-competitive to new forms of life that might be more complex but less efficient, at least during their first evolutionary steps away from slime.
Well, I'm not a God, but I play one in evolutionary simulations sometimes.
Without catastrophic or otherwise challenging events, life seems to become complacent - evolution often plateaus.
Run two simulations for an equal amount of time, keep one in "Goldilocks" conditions the whole time, and whack the other with a 90% to 99% extinction cataclysmic event and/or climatic shift every time that life builds up to a nice robust stage. With billions of species out there, periodically challenging the top dogs allows more diverse species to have a chance.
It's the same basic reason the U.S. has anti-trust legislation.