True. If you build that into every LED cluster going forward, it'll fit right into the existing light-bulb-replacing assembly. The retrofit is the problem. And I'll bet someone is already looking to make money off a similarly retrofittable thing that gets its power from an easily-added disc between the "bulb" and the socket (we have an automatic light sensor that works that way). Yes, the labor of going up to re-adjust all those lights they thought wouldn't have to be touched for five years or more is an issue; OTOH there are a lot of mechanics from closed car dealerships (and other people with some practical experience) looking for work this year. Stop giving stimulus money to banks and use it to give people a practical job that needs doing.
Imagine being able to connect to one's partner on that intimate a level at the same time.
Oh, wait - it HAS been imagined, in just about every book and movie and TV show that involves telepathy. But telepathy involves mystical spooky action at a distance, while this is an almost-believable sensitive physical connection.. oh, wait, just like "jacking in" in Samuel R Delany's "Nova" (1968!) and other books/movies/TV with neural links
It's not that all the ideas are original; it's that they've never been able to be SHOWN like this.
... if she HAD discarded or hidden the game system?
By the time I was 14, I was bigger than my mom; by the time my son was, he was bigger than his mom. As others have noted, the time to instill a balance between independence and control/discipline/whatever is when kids are smaller. Also as noted, I just hope all the readers who don't have kids yet realize that (a) maybe their parents had a point, and (b) all the things you swore you'd never do with your kids look a lot different from the other side.
Male,Rensselaer 1976. There were girls whose fathers were engineers (or other technical types) and were happy their daughters took after them; there were also both girls and guys whose fathers were engineers and thought their kids were nuts for going into the field. And I do remember one girl whose parents had cut her off financially precisely because her father figured it was stupid for a girl to get an education at all; at least her mother hoped it was a good environment to meet "someone promising". (Architects, of course, were a whole different story; that's halfway between engineer and artist.)
I'm shocked that you're still describing this as late as the 90s.
all her notes, all her photos, years of work, gone . . .
Things get lost, things get stolen, things get broken. Accidents happen. Even hunting-type accidents.:-)
How much sympathy would/.ers have if this post was "My laptop broke and I lost all my stuff"?
I don't suppose you've ever posted a letter? The physical kind?:-) I've done minor things like auto registration online, but for legal things that have retention periods (like tax returns) I'd like to have something to retain, and be certain that it's the same as what got sent in to the government. For government and legal matters, precedent rules, and they still only believe in physical copies. I would not wish on anyone the wondrous experience of trying to prove past payments to a humorless government official after you've cleaned up a few boxes of "old" records.
Not an idiot, just inexperienced. In the real world that grownups live in, there are some things that actually need to be submitted on paper (like government forms); or signed and witnessed and sealed on paper (like wills and contracts); or saved in a way that will be readable over time (lots of things).
I don't care if it's warming abnormally or rebounding from cold. I don't care if it's human-caused or natural. All I care about is will my son and my potential grandchildren - and everyone else's - be able to grow enough food to eat and have a place to live (considering a large percentage of human population is near coastlines and another chunk is in places where deserts are spreading)?
And as other posts point out, while we may not have specific instrumental readings, we have lots of anecdotal records of historical changes. They may only provide relative information, not absolute, but it's still information.
Why should Microsoft implementing Sparklines in Excel have anything to do with other spreadsheets having sparklines? If they had invented the concept, there *might* be some claim; as it is, why should this be different from implementing "addition" and "subtraction" in a spreadsheet?
An explanation may be long if it is explaining something complex that the code is doing.
...if it really does require that complicated of an explanation, you might need to re-factor your code and make it less arcane.
Sometimes the whole point is to do something arcane because of efficiency, or hardware issues, or really weird special case in the requirements. Or worse, sometimes attempted changes ran afoul of similar hardware issues, and you want to remember *not* to try changing it again without considering the non-obvious issues. It's like surgery; the cut might be simple, but knowing WHAT to cut and what NOT to cut took years of schooling.
Ditto. I got a razr after reading about all of the cool features, and then discovered that *none* of them worked on a Verizon razr without extra fees - and some features available on the European GSM model wouldn't ever work here. At least it still fits in my pocket and makes phone calls.:-)
This is Slashdot. Independence and libertarianism rule. The existence of "Some agency to complain to" would require having a government, and expecting it to work for the individual.
Agreed. The statement is just like a retail store manager saying "I wish people wouldn't shoplift so much". The analogy also holds in that the vendor is trying to protect, and get people to pay for, something that used to be free. Back in the day, there were decent water fountains in every public place, often in the same area as vending machines; then the soda bottlers realized they could bottle plain water and get people to pay the same price as for water plus flavoring, and water fountains started disappearing. It wouldn't excuse shoplifting the bottled water; and the cable execs feel that you shouldn't be pirating secured materials even if you were used to watching it over-the-air for free.
I don't like it either.
...my pet theory concerning time travel: any attempt to do it will change the past, which changes the conditions of the travel slightly, which changes the past, and so on, until the travel never occurs and the past stops changing. In other words, a spacetime where time travel happens is unstable and decays into one where it won't.
Prior art. See Larry Niven, "Theory and Practice of Time Travel", 1971 (I think)
This idea isn't new. "Serious" science fiction since the 1950s has considered the more complex vulnerabilities of more complex systems, specifically including false takeover of control (Colossus and WarGames), malicious Trojan horses (Battlestar), and false triggering of safety/self-destruct signals (Keith Laumer's Bolo stories) (and yes, I know some of those examples aren't the highest quality, but they're well known). The only disappointment in this article is the apparent surprise expressed.
I agree completely, if you're talking about the original topic of scraping social network sites. This branch has digressed into specifically credit information (or similar) that is *not* posted publicly. Credit reporting bureaus buy information from banks about your personal transactions, and from other companies about your personal payments. That's the kind of thing one used to hire a private detective to find out on the sly; now companies are selling it as a matter of course. I forget which state was selling information that they were requiring on the driver's license application; you have to PAY to get a license and entrust the government with your information, and they turn around and sell it to advertisers. (I wouldn't mind if the government were charging advertisers a fee to add something to the envelope they're going to mail me anyway; I *do* mind if they're handing information *out*.)
So my follow-on question is, Why does everyone think it's OK for private companies answerable to no one (or the highest bidder) to be collecting this information in the first place? Well, yes, I suppose most people in this thread don't think so, but all of the normal people out there seem to be perfectly happy with the idea.
Mod parent up. I'd say *most* people don't know what good sound should sound like. At some point FM radio became the quality target instead of live performance; perhaps because people became so used to hearing music with other noise in the background (car, exercise equipment, talkative restaurant).
Totally. Why do the Shuttle crews need to get woken up over the radio? Don't they have a clock? maybe a watch? There are self-winding mechanical ones with alarms, no batteries to wear out. It seemed childish in the Apollo age when I was a kid with my own alarm clock for school; it's downright stupid now.
Current process relies almost completely on human control. The equipment is bookkeeping and display. Considering when it was designed, in an era when the job was done by people with basic radar and no IFF ids, it was a tremendous aid in support of the people - but *just* a support. [When deck control told Apollo "No automated systems on Galactica, captain's orders", it resonated both ways through the timeline.:-) ]
I graduated in 1976, when dinosaurs still roamed and mainframes were all-powerful. I have also played Freespace over *audio modem* with sizeable battles tracking ships and missiles, and I've worked in embedded systems for most of the time. The laptop I'm working on right now has more horsepower than the mainframes the ATC was built on. We can distribute the problems like trajectory planning and collision probability, even duplicating work from the perspective of each plane to ensure correctness with redundancy, in ways we could never have afforded.
I wouldn't take the humans out of control: the goal is to give them a more intelligent system to oversee so they are less stressed and in top form to make decisions. I think of it like giving a shepherd highly trained sheepdogs vs. untrained mutts.
that's the other $22M in "what kind of project costs $32M".
I'm envisioning distributing the hardware among the radar centers proportional to traffic within the radar range area, to maintain locality of information. The important concepts that have received much more research and practical exploration over the years include search spaces and interconnection spaces - what are the possible trajectories, who needs to know and how urgently do they need to know, and at what point should the responsibility be handed off. Between the approaches used in massively multiplayer flight/space simulations, cell phone organization, etc., I'm convinced that a robust yet cost-scalable approach can be done at the quality level required for such a life-critical application. The project started in the 1980s was still based on strongly centralized control because the distributed model had not yet been demonstrated successfully. Just as RAID proved itself, I believe distributed processing is ready for ATC.
When the last ATC project failed disastrously, people were already playing online games over phone modems. Now we have massively multiplayer games, with gigahertz hardware dedicated to each user (your PC, that is), and ATC is still being done on single mainframes. Quick scan suggests six thousand planes in the air at a time over the US; let's call it ten thousand. Dedicate a CPU to each plus some hierarchy of busy areas and regional control; allow $1000 per CPU/system (and its share of comm bandwidth); call it $10 million. Sounds like an interesting project.:-)
Well, sort of. That's what makes it "science fiction" or, as used in the very old days, "scientific fiction". That's why it's not "fantasy". OTOH it doesn't necessarily have to be about immediately plausible technology; it just has to be seriously scientific and rational and plausible about whatever technology it presents.
Really, though, it's about people interacting with technology, and how the technology affects people and society.
Two good essays by Larry Niven (award-winning SF author) on the Theory and Practice of Time Travel and Teleportation are instructive. He doesn't believe either will work; but ASSUMING THAT THEY DO, what happens? With teleportation, for example, how does it affect society? What happens with different constraints on the cost? Do you still have transportation hubs if long-distance is more complex than short-distance? Do heavy people have to pay more than light people, leading to discrimination? It's supposed to make you *think*.
Slashdot Mirror
True. If you build that into every LED cluster going forward, it'll fit right into the existing light-bulb-replacing assembly. The retrofit is the problem. And I'll bet someone is already looking to make money off a similarly retrofittable thing that gets its power from an easily-added disc between the "bulb" and the socket (we have an automatic light sensor that works that way). Yes, the labor of going up to re-adjust all those lights they thought wouldn't have to be touched for five years or more is an issue; OTOH there are a lot of mechanics from closed car dealerships (and other people with some practical experience) looking for work this year. Stop giving stimulus money to banks and use it to give people a practical job that needs doing.
Imagine being able to connect to one's partner on that intimate a level at the same time. Oh, wait - it HAS been imagined, in just about every book and movie and TV show that involves telepathy. But telepathy involves mystical spooky action at a distance, while this is an almost-believable sensitive physical connection .. oh, wait, just like "jacking in" in Samuel R Delany's "Nova" (1968!) and other books/movies/TV with neural links
It's not that all the ideas are original; it's that they've never been able to be SHOWN like this.
... if she HAD discarded or hidden the game system? By the time I was 14, I was bigger than my mom; by the time my son was, he was bigger than his mom. As others have noted, the time to instill a balance between independence and control/discipline/whatever is when kids are smaller. Also as noted, I just hope all the readers who don't have kids yet realize that (a) maybe their parents had a point, and (b) all the things you swore you'd never do with your kids look a lot different from the other side.
Male,Rensselaer 1976. There were girls whose fathers were engineers (or other technical types) and were happy their daughters took after them; there were also both girls and guys whose fathers were engineers and thought their kids were nuts for going into the field. And I do remember one girl whose parents had cut her off financially precisely because her father figured it was stupid for a girl to get an education at all; at least her mother hoped it was a good environment to meet "someone promising". (Architects, of course, were a whole different story; that's halfway between engineer and artist.) I'm shocked that you're still describing this as late as the 90s.
all her notes, all her photos, years of work, gone . . . Things get lost, things get stolen, things get broken. Accidents happen. Even hunting-type accidents. :-)
How much sympathy would /.ers have if this post was "My laptop broke and I lost all my stuff"?
I don't suppose you've ever posted a letter? The physical kind? :-) I've done minor things like auto registration online, but for legal things that have retention periods (like tax returns) I'd like to have something to retain, and be certain that it's the same as what got sent in to the government. For government and legal matters, precedent rules, and they still only believe in physical copies. I would not wish on anyone the wondrous experience of trying to prove past payments to a humorless government official after you've cleaned up a few boxes of "old" records.
Not an idiot, just inexperienced. In the real world that grownups live in, there are some things that actually need to be submitted on paper (like government forms); or signed and witnessed and sealed on paper (like wills and contracts); or saved in a way that will be readable over time (lots of things).
I don't care if it's warming abnormally or rebounding from cold. I don't care if it's human-caused or natural. All I care about is will my son and my potential grandchildren - and everyone else's - be able to grow enough food to eat and have a place to live (considering a large percentage of human population is near coastlines and another chunk is in places where deserts are spreading)?
And as other posts point out, while we may not have specific instrumental readings, we have lots of anecdotal records of historical changes. They may only provide relative information, not absolute, but it's still information.
Why should Microsoft implementing Sparklines in Excel have anything to do with other spreadsheets having sparklines? If they had invented the concept, there *might* be some claim; as it is, why should this be different from implementing "addition" and "subtraction" in a spreadsheet?
...if it really does require that complicated of an explanation, you might need to re-factor your code and make it less arcane.
Sometimes the whole point is to do something arcane because of efficiency, or hardware issues, or really weird special case in the requirements. Or worse, sometimes attempted changes ran afoul of similar hardware issues, and you want to remember *not* to try changing it again without considering the non-obvious issues. It's like surgery; the cut might be simple, but knowing WHAT to cut and what NOT to cut took years of schooling.
Ditto. I got a razr after reading about all of the cool features, and then discovered that *none* of them worked on a Verizon razr without extra fees - and some features available on the European GSM model wouldn't ever work here. At least it still fits in my pocket and makes phone calls. :-)
This is Slashdot. Independence and libertarianism rule. The existence of "Some agency to complain to" would require having a government, and expecting it to work for the individual.
Agreed. The statement is just like a retail store manager saying "I wish people wouldn't shoplift so much". The analogy also holds in that the vendor is trying to protect, and get people to pay for, something that used to be free. Back in the day, there were decent water fountains in every public place, often in the same area as vending machines; then the soda bottlers realized they could bottle plain water and get people to pay the same price as for water plus flavoring, and water fountains started disappearing. It wouldn't excuse shoplifting the bottled water; and the cable execs feel that you shouldn't be pirating secured materials even if you were used to watching it over-the-air for free. I don't like it either.
...my pet theory concerning time travel: any attempt to do it will change the past, which changes the conditions of the travel slightly, which changes the past, and so on, until the travel never occurs and the past stops changing. In other words, a spacetime where time travel happens is unstable and decays into one where it won't.
Prior art. See Larry Niven, "Theory and Practice of Time Travel", 1971 (I think)
This idea isn't new. "Serious" science fiction since the 1950s has considered the more complex vulnerabilities of more complex systems, specifically including false takeover of control (Colossus and WarGames), malicious Trojan horses (Battlestar), and false triggering of safety/self-destruct signals (Keith Laumer's Bolo stories) (and yes, I know some of those examples aren't the highest quality, but they're well known). The only disappointment in this article is the apparent surprise expressed.
I agree completely, if you're talking about the original topic of scraping social network sites. This branch has digressed into specifically credit information (or similar) that is *not* posted publicly. Credit reporting bureaus buy information from banks about your personal transactions, and from other companies about your personal payments. That's the kind of thing one used to hire a private detective to find out on the sly; now companies are selling it as a matter of course. I forget which state was selling information that they were requiring on the driver's license application; you have to PAY to get a license and entrust the government with your information, and they turn around and sell it to advertisers. (I wouldn't mind if the government were charging advertisers a fee to add something to the envelope they're going to mail me anyway; I *do* mind if they're handing information *out*.)
So my follow-on question is, Why does everyone think it's OK for private companies answerable to no one (or the highest bidder) to be collecting this information in the first place? Well, yes, I suppose most people in this thread don't think so, but all of the normal people out there seem to be perfectly happy with the idea.
Mod parent up. I'd say *most* people don't know what good sound should sound like. At some point FM radio became the quality target instead of live performance; perhaps because people became so used to hearing music with other noise in the background (car, exercise equipment, talkative restaurant).
Totally. Why do the Shuttle crews need to get woken up over the radio? Don't they have a clock? maybe a watch? There are self-winding mechanical ones with alarms, no batteries to wear out. It seemed childish in the Apollo age when I was a kid with my own alarm clock for school; it's downright stupid now.
Yes, and that's the whole point - when the planet is blocked, the Lagrange points would be visible to use for a relay.
Look up 1940's science fiction about the Venus Equilateral Relay Station by George O. Smith http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Venus_Equilateral
Current process relies almost completely on human control. The equipment is bookkeeping and display. Considering when it was designed, in an era when the job was done by people with basic radar and no IFF ids, it was a tremendous aid in support of the people - but *just* a support. [When deck control told Apollo "No automated systems on Galactica, captain's orders", it resonated both ways through the timeline. :-) ]
I graduated in 1976, when dinosaurs still roamed and mainframes were all-powerful. I have also played Freespace over *audio modem* with sizeable battles tracking ships and missiles, and I've worked in embedded systems for most of the time. The laptop I'm working on right now has more horsepower than the mainframes the ATC was built on. We can distribute the problems like trajectory planning and collision probability, even duplicating work from the perspective of each plane to ensure correctness with redundancy, in ways we could never have afforded.
I wouldn't take the humans out of control: the goal is to give them a more intelligent system to oversee so they are less stressed and in top form to make decisions. I think of it like giving a shepherd highly trained sheepdogs vs. untrained mutts.
that's the other $22M in "what kind of project costs $32M".
I'm envisioning distributing the hardware among the radar centers proportional to traffic within the radar range area, to maintain locality of information. The important concepts that have received much more research and practical exploration over the years include search spaces and interconnection spaces - what are the possible trajectories, who needs to know and how urgently do they need to know, and at what point should the responsibility be handed off. Between the approaches used in massively multiplayer flight/space simulations, cell phone organization, etc., I'm convinced that a robust yet cost-scalable approach can be done at the quality level required for such a life-critical application. The project started in the 1980s was still based on strongly centralized control because the distributed model had not yet been demonstrated successfully. Just as RAID proved itself, I believe distributed processing is ready for ATC.
When the last ATC project failed disastrously, people were already playing online games over phone modems. Now we have massively multiplayer games, with gigahertz hardware dedicated to each user (your PC, that is), and ATC is still being done on single mainframes. Quick scan suggests six thousand planes in the air at a time over the US; let's call it ten thousand. Dedicate a CPU to each plus some hierarchy of busy areas and regional control; allow $1000 per CPU/system (and its share of comm bandwidth); call it $10 million. Sounds like an interesting project. :-)
... I think you've got the relationship between Star Wars and Tolkein backward. :-)
Well, sort of. That's what makes it "science fiction" or, as used in the very old days, "scientific fiction". That's why it's not "fantasy". OTOH it doesn't necessarily have to be about immediately plausible technology; it just has to be seriously scientific and rational and plausible about whatever technology it presents.
Really, though, it's about people interacting with technology, and how the technology affects people and society.
Two good essays by Larry Niven (award-winning SF author) on the Theory and Practice of Time Travel and Teleportation are instructive. He doesn't believe either will work; but ASSUMING THAT THEY DO, what happens? With teleportation, for example, how does it affect society? What happens with different constraints on the cost? Do you still have transportation hubs if long-distance is more complex than short-distance? Do heavy people have to pay more than light people, leading to discrimination? It's supposed to make you *think*.