Yes, it's a very effective burglar alarm indeed that allows someone to come in to the building, snip the cable in 200 places, and leave, with nobody seeing a thing.
"All I heard was that blasted alarm going for half an hour. Then it stopped, and everyone cheered. I also don't know who the 3-dozen people in the street were, dousing gasoline on the control unit and setting it ablaze."
And sorry, it's not the neighbors' duty to inform the idiot who owns the alarm that it's improperly configured. Likewise, it's not the state's duty to point out that driving a four-wheeled vehicle with only 3 wheels attached is unsafe and contrary to the highway code.
Your best ally in crime prevention are your neighbors. If you can't trust your neighbors, or if your neighbors actively hate you, no amount of mosquitoes and fences is gonna help.
I love books. I have tons of 'em. Many of my trips for business and pleasure involve going to libraries. I'm not afraid of using fancy words like "codicology" if it makes the librarian grant me access to the reserve collection, or "her private binding laboratory", if you catch my drift.
I have no interest in PDAs, smart phones are just expensive pieces of junk with poor interfaces and worse displays that break easily.
But an E-ink reader -- that's interesting. Many haven't grasped by description only just how important "minimal eyestrain" is. It's not just an improvement in comfort -- it changes how the mind processes the information. Staring at a screen, we have a tendency to pick-and-choose the essential details of a text, without fully reading it: a significant part of our brain is dedicated to resolving what that text is, so we lack the concentration necessary to read anything comfortably. Put something in electronic ink, and you bypass this huge hurdle. At the office, we do a lot of reading on screens; but there are some things we do on paper (because we need reflective light, and something more manueverable than a computer screen), and for that we print an enormous amount on paper. Much of this could be handled by transferring the files to a reader using electronic ink. Of course, not at the current generation's prices.
The release caught me by surprise. I know iRex was planning April, then moved down a bit. Then they announced they would be shipping to their bulk-order companies first, and to the general public in September. Now it's for sale: did they lose a huge order?
Sony's coming out with their Librie, and it should be cheaper, but in every category the Sony product is inferior. Plus, you can be sure that Sony's DRM is gonna really blow. At least with these Rex folks, you can hope that it's going to be a "Checkbox" DRM that will satisfy the Big Evil IP Whores that it can't be used for "schoolyard piracy", but that can be defeated by some madman living in a basement listening to L'Internationale.
LANL and LLNL are run by the University of California, but our buddies at Lockheed MArtin have been eyeing their TIAA/CREF funds for a while (corporate spinoff runs the thing, goes bankrupt, raids the pension fund as the US Govt. takes it over).
The real problem isn't Academic Management vs. Scientific Researcher, it's the fact that the labs are funded by the Department of Energy. And the Secretary of Energy is a Cabinet-level appointment. Since about the mid-80s, the Secretary of Energy has been open season for the opposition party. The National Labs are big, and mission-critical to the US.
So the Democrats hit them for environmental issues -- even though, environmentally, the labs are not only excellent (LLNL was a Superfund site because of the paint remover used when it was a Naval Training Base), they're doing some of the most important research on the future of our planet.
Then, when Slick Willy is in power, the Republicans hit them for "security" breaches -- even though, security wise, the place is locked down, and foreign intelligence agencies (as well as the relevant congressional committees) already know that "industry partners" are the weak link.
What destroys agencies like this is politics and over-regulation. Incidentally, that's the same recipe to destroy Microsoft.
Yeah, he's been doing this for a long time. And the tech world is full of enough fanatics that you can't help but piss people off. Write an inflammatory article on Apple, Open Source, Linux, Nintendo, or any number of other technosacredcows, and bang! instant traffic. Much easier than saying something intelligent.
The article implies that ESRB is pretty good, compared to the alternative. The fallacy is that alternative isn't, and by sleight-of-hand, many are led to believe that the alternative is government regulation. The CCA and the Hays (or was it Hayes?) office were both examples of industry self-censorship, and have conclusively proven that self-censorship is worse than censorship by an external body.
To be honest, very few want to insist upon the "judeo-christian" standards (As if such a thing existed) claimed by the Hays office and cited in the article. And if they were to follow the standards that put the Hays Office in place, they'd probably also insist on a "blue-chip" so that games couldn't be played on Sundays.
So what's the best approach? Insist on doing nothing wrong, and let Congress see how far it can go in making laws abridging free speech.
Copilot did the landing. Before approach, the Captain in the cockpit chit-chat managed to establish a serious command gradient by speaking critically (in this case, approvingly) of one of the other co-pilots ("Not even captain could do such a fine landing as that").
On the approach, the co-pilot reached for the flap lever, and instead threw the lever that put the auto-pilot in Go-Around mode.
Co-pilot realised his mistake, put the lever back, and tried to continue the approach.
At this point, sure, we can say "The pilot should have gone around", and we'd be right to say so. But that is not why the plane crashed. The plane crashed because the autopilot had decided to go around, and the Pilot In Command had not. Per Airbus design, the Pilot in Command was not in command: the Autopilot, having decided the pilot really wanted to go around, was busy trimming out his elevator inputs, until the pilots figured out what was going on: the aircraft neither understood what the pilots were trying to do, nor told the pilots what it was doing, until it was so out of trim that the engines stalled, the airframe stalled, and everybody died.
That's exactly the problem with this approach: either the pilot or the machine is ultimately in control. True, machines in controlled circumstances make fewer mistakes; but machines cannot (yet) be trusted with control in all circumstances: the situations are just too complex. So if you give machines control in only _certain_ circumstances, you create flightdeck confusion over who is ultimately flying the plane. That is a design flaw, and one that merits some serious liablity lawsuits.
Weight-on-Wheels is an excellent example, but more for the difference than the similarity. What you've cited is bad training: the computer is a fail-safe (yes, engineers, I'm probably using this term incorrectly) for a bad operator decision; in no situation should the operator rely on a fail-safe.
This situation is analogous to ATC relying on TCAS to perform collision avoidance. ATC doesn't do their job, so TCAS usually steps in.
What Airbus is proposing is different: in the cases where the failsafe activates, Airbus takes control from the operators. The situation is: If the primary source of guidance information has probably failed, and the secondary source has activated, take control from the pilot, just in case he keeps following the primary."
The is in the terms "probably". The swisscontrol collision was a tragedy, and my heart goes out to the Danish ATC and his family who found himself in an unacceptable situation (only guy managing a sector, other ATC dude out of the building, Collision-Detection software offline, trying to get Ludwigshafen on the phone, fails to notice that the only two aircraft on his scope are on a collision course, then tries to "fix it", only to find out that a whole bunch of school kids died on his watch), and then to be murdered by one of the bereaved. After that incident, though, you can be darn sure that every pilot had drilled in as part of their training never to do the opposite of what the TCAS box says.
That just creates another problem. TCAS does a great job at 33,000 feet, but it gets more sporty closer to the ground, in particular with your traffic around airports. You can imagine, in a crowded environment, if some lazy ass is using his autopilot to snap climb to an assigned altitude, TCAS can see a couple of rates of climb and issue a traffic advisory (90 seconds to go -- no action required, just ), or even an RA (45 sec). So there's a screen (not terribly accurate) to enable the crew to spot traffic visually in those cases. And there's logic so that in certain situations TCAS doesn't trigger.
So now, to our issue. It's about interfaces, and who is in control. If you make the autopilot automatically follow a RA, it will generally work. But it works at a price -- it communicates the message that the plane, not the pilot, handles collision avoidance. And that's not true. In those situations where TCAS doesn't fire, the pilot may ignore signs of impending collision ("That's just a somatographic illusion. If it were gonna hit me, the A/P would be dodging it already"). In situations where it does fire, no autopilot in the world can achieve the situational awareness of a competent pilot (that's why we have them up there), so little things like terrain avoidance may be missed. Then, of course, there's the bugs the override software may have.
To put it a little more verbosely than the other posters.
A system to avoid mid-air collisiosn exists. It's called TCAS, and it works well. But when TCAS issues a Resolution Advisor (aka a loud voice in the cockpit booming "CLIMB CLIMB" or "DIVE DIVE"), it means that Air Traffic Control has already failed to do its job, and, given the refresh rates of ATC radar, ATC isn't likely to be of much help any more. In such a case, you have two pieces of information:
A) ATC has failed. B) You better do what the box says, or you something bad will happen.
In this case, the failsafe triggered, one crew did what the box told them to do (DIVE); the other followed ATC and ignored the box.
When a system fails, and the backup kicks in, you follow the backup.
Yes, there are problems with the Boeing philosophy: pilots make plenty of mistakes. But there are serious concerns with Airbus. Getting code to perform flawlessly isn't cheap, nor does it happen (as an Airbus that came darn close to running out of fuel over The Netherlands proved a few months ago); in addition, every airliner has interface problems, and a great number of accidents in both Boeing and Airbus involve the crew not understanding what the aircraft is saying. Airbus adds in the bonus of the aircraft not understanding what the crew is trying to do (A300 crash in Nagoya was it?), and in the mix, automates enough procedures to cause a real mess when then automation fails/cannot be used (a rainy missed approach over the Baltic Sea, perhaps).
And all that comes down to liability. Pilot error settlements may not be cheap, but the manufacturer isn't liable to the same degree as a software design flaw.
Be sarcastic if you must, but their next upgrade is to integrate a chick magnet into the system. Activating 'party mode' by default spawns a Babe-Level Management Routine (BALMER), which controls the Magnet. Preset desired peak and sustained chick levels are set in the Application Data Layer, and MIDAS carefully manages the Chick Magnet to maintain the ambient babeness at the level desired for the activity. When the security cameras, IR sensors, or seismographs determine that levels are exceeded, the Magnet is taken off line or dropped to a lower power level (From "Ferrari" to "Porsche" all the way down to "Ford Fairlane").
It all looks very impressive on paper, but they're having trouble getting enough juice to those magnets, and as yet have been unable to give the BALMER anything but a dry run.
Easy here: apple develops a bunch of simple, casual games that run on ipod/with interface, and sells them for a couple bucks a pop at ITMS. Nothing fancy, and nothing that taxes resources (as so many phone games do).
With the money to be made, the market share to be exploited, and the minimal investment required, I'm surprised they haven't already done this.
actually, most phones have a keyboard lock feature. They usually involve pressing a sequence of keys. Although, the last candybar phone I had (cough siemens) decided that a sequence of keys was too complicated, and made it one key, the # key sitting in the corner. Pure genius. I'd walk into work, and find my boss had been on the phone with me for five minutes.
Thinking more about this topic, the fundamental problem is clear from the article itself. The debate is between Cell phone manufacturers and service providers, not between those two and the consumer. The question that's being asked is "How can the manufacturers make these services more appealing so our consumers will use them more?" What's ignored is that a good deal (but alas, not all) of the interface problems caused by these "next-gen" wonders are due to requirements of service providers.
A phone with bluetooth? Okay, but better put in a way that we can prevent users from downloading pictures directly to their computer. They need to pay by the kilobyte to send it through the mobile phone network.
Internet Access at 1 cent/kilobyte? Great! But let's make sure they use it -- wire that spare button on the keyboard to automatically load the browser; and set the homepage to our 50kb site!
Oh, and ringtones! Yes! Ringtones! Can we get that with double-dawg DRM?
-cheap
-NO CAMERA, no ridiculous frilles. -Crappy battery life (two and a half days if I don't use the phone). Incidentally, this model gets advertised as having an "extreme battery" and long life. -If you enter PIN too fast on startup, fails to logon, reboots (must reenter pin). -When battery is low, emits an annoying beep every minute. This beep bypasses the ringer settings, so if you're in a meeting and have the ringer set to vibrate or silent, it will beep at you anyway. After all, its needs are more important than anything else. -color screen, which largely serves to force these animations of some kid skateboarding or spraying graffitti, implying that only prepubescent kids should have a phone this cheap
-Even with clamshell design, it could be a little bigger. I don't need no handsfree kid, but it would be nice to cradle the thing against my shoulder without pulling my neck out.
So there you have it. You want a cheap, functional phone, they sell you one with a couple of lethal bugs. Then, because you don't want all those fancy toys, they specify a tiny battery, tethering you to frequent recharges, just as if you had been downloading 3G pr0n all the time. Finally, they keep it smaller than it needs to be.
Indeed. If anything, it's an argument for a liberal arts education. A creative mind can apply
Here's my experience as someone who's actually paid to do philosophy (and philology, for that matter), and who likes to tinker with code from time to time: Philosophy is a set of tools that help to describe reality. Large branches of philosophy include epistemology (the study of knowledge, what constitutes a science), noetics (how people cognize things), metaphysics (the underlying nature of reality), ontology (what constitutes being), logic, mathematics, ethics, economics and political science. There are plenty of others too. Clearly, there are branches of philosophy that are no longer under the direct control of the philosophy departments. And there are things that overlap with other disciplines. I've seen neurologists rail against "the philosophers" and their mucking up everything by positing a mind-body problem.
Many fields of philosophy beyond the obvious case of logic provide excellent tools for conceptualizing and expressing what we're trying to do with computers. Philosophy won't provide the explanation for how they work, but it will help to conceive them, express them, and work within them. For example, many programming languages feature a system of class inheritances; some of these systems can be quite bizarre. But they all trace their roots back, one way or another, to Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. So if you arm yourself with Aristotle, you'll be able to explain not only that it's a good idea to have each child express a single axis of change from its parent, but the reason why it is a good idea.
The same cna be said for interface design: if you create an interface based around the meaning of the actions, rather than around what a focus group says, you'll end up with something a lot more intuitive and a lot easier to use.
In my experience, not many philosophers are directly interested in what computers can do, but there are more than you'd think. If you're a CS major, taking philosophy courses is probably the way to go: after all the "computer expertise" is what you're bringing to the table. In general, I would suggest looking at history of philosophy courses, since that will probably give a beginner the most tools.
First off, dictionaries base their definitions on usage; in the case of plagiarism, it's been used largely in academic contexts, and that's where the "definition" comes from. That doesn't make it infallible, and it certainly doesn't exclude it from acquiring new usages, or modified ones. Or, in this case, it doesn't exclude the possibility that Mr. Dictionary-Entry-Writer missed the specific difference:
Plagiarism is a breach of ethics caused by taking authorial credit for someone else's work.
"Breatch of ethics" is what distinguishes it from Copyright Infringement, which is a legal issue. "taking authorial credit" is much better than saying "not citing", since it is clear what's going on. In this case, your "technology trends"-style blog may cite sources, but the blog itself pretends to authority: its mere existence as a weblog is tied to a claim to authority. If all it does is echo other crap, it's zero. In the academic or publishing world, such cases of plagiarism rarely exist because their ethical shortcomings are immediately apparent. On the web, with search engines and aggregators making the call, it's not always the case: on slashdot, they've been wondering what to do with these self-promoters for a while.
Well, yeah, it is. In this case, while the citation may be there, enough of the text is taken that there's no point in consulting the original article (so it's not like aggregators such as slashdot, which point to the article). The blogger adds no additional content, and effectively profits (whether in "community kudos" or adsense) from unauthorized reproduction of someone else's content.
That's plagiarism, whether cited it or not.
Think of some of the "techno trends" blog links that make it to slashdot sometimes. Slashdot links to the blog; the blog contains pretty much the whole news item, and you're done.
Aye, it looks like the hardware is going to sabotage DRM, willy nilly. Sony's argument will be along the lines of, "well, there are a lot of non-HDMI HD monitors up there; we'll make HDMI mandatory in the next generation of DRM, when players are cheap. Get the foothold, then start locking it down."
The problem is that by that time, HDCP will be thoroughly defeated as well.
The graphs show the PS3 is not the most expensive console in history by adjusted prices, sure. And the 3DO and neo-geo were huge flops. And yes, back in 1982 dollars, people paid more for the Atari 2600 and the intellivision.
But there are two elements missing here.
A) Total Sales at Price. How many Atari 2600s sold at a price point above the PS3's adjusted value? If the PS3 sold like that, would it be a success? B) Relative price to PCs. There's a reason the last "successful" console priced (in adjusted value) above the PS3 was back in 1979. Computers were even more expensive: The Apple ][ was the game machine to beat (I know, I know, I had a Pet, thank you) in 1979, and in 82 it was the (much cheaper) Commodore 64. For a console to be successful, it has to be cheap enough to be below the threshhold that people start looking at PCs. I know you guys are gonna argue that Console markets are different, and the PS3's über-cell architecture will run circles around a 3-gig dual core with a decent video card, but that's not how it's going to be viewed by consumers (or reality for that matter).
A Finnish computer expert working with Black Box Voting, a nonprofit organization critical of electronic voting, found the security hole in March after Emery County, Utah, was forced by state officials to accept Diebold touch screens, and a local elections official let the expert examine the machines.
Many tech workers don't need a union, because they're part of management -- an imaginative coder, or one who keep your old mainframe afloat, is an asset that can call down whatever price s/he wants.
But there's a whole bunch who are treated as labor: whether here, or India, or wherever; and in some industries (*cough* video games), that labor is being ruthlessly exploited. I'm sorry, but when some management moron thinks that "permanent crunch time" of 80 hours/week is more efficient than 40 for intellectual labor -- contrary to just about every workplace study ever done --, then the people on the screwed end need protection, for their own sanity, and for the good of the company.
The fact of the matter is, you will find in the business managers who build their careers on employee burnout; and you will find managers who are idiots and torture those under them, thinking their getting some productivity benefit; and you will also find outright idiots.
In an ideal world, unions don't exist. In the real world, they do, and they never come about because people want to sit around and be lazy all day.
2) is easier than you think. Swinging, and other motions are simply movements between extremes. Anything beyond an extreme (Such as against a contraopposing sword, or bey0ond the range of motion), you can either filter out or use to shift the relative range of motion -- or some combination thereof.
The best way to find out what really works is to hook someone up and play.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, it's a very effective burglar alarm indeed that allows someone to come in to the building, snip the cable in 200 places, and leave, with nobody seeing a thing. "All I heard was that blasted alarm going for half an hour. Then it stopped, and everyone cheered. I also don't know who the 3-dozen people in the street were, dousing gasoline on the control unit and setting it ablaze." And sorry, it's not the neighbors' duty to inform the idiot who owns the alarm that it's improperly configured. Likewise, it's not the state's duty to point out that driving a four-wheeled vehicle with only 3 wheels attached is unsafe and contrary to the highway code. Your best ally in crime prevention are your neighbors. If you can't trust your neighbors, or if your neighbors actively hate you, no amount of mosquitoes and fences is gonna help.
I love books. I have tons of 'em. Many of my trips for business and pleasure involve going to libraries. I'm not afraid of using fancy words like "codicology" if it makes the librarian grant me access to the reserve collection, or "her private binding laboratory", if you catch my drift.
I have no interest in PDAs, smart phones are just expensive pieces of junk with poor interfaces and worse displays that break easily.
But an E-ink reader -- that's interesting. Many haven't grasped by description only just how important "minimal eyestrain" is. It's not just an improvement in comfort -- it changes how the mind processes the information. Staring at a screen, we have a tendency to pick-and-choose the essential details of a text, without fully reading it: a significant part of our brain is dedicated to resolving what that text is, so we lack the concentration necessary to read anything comfortably.
Put something in electronic ink, and you bypass this huge hurdle.
At the office, we do a lot of reading on screens; but there are some things we do on paper (because we need reflective light, and something more manueverable than a computer screen), and for that we print an enormous amount on paper. Much of this could be handled by transferring the files to a reader using electronic ink. Of course, not at the current generation's prices.
The release caught me by surprise. I know iRex was planning April, then moved down a bit. Then they announced they would be shipping to their bulk-order companies first, and to the general public in September. Now it's for sale: did they lose a huge order?
Sony's coming out with their Librie, and it should be cheaper, but in every category the Sony product is inferior. Plus, you can be sure that Sony's DRM is gonna really blow. At least with these Rex folks, you can hope that it's going to be a "Checkbox" DRM that will satisfy the Big Evil IP Whores that it can't be used for "schoolyard piracy", but that can be defeated by some madman living in a basement listening to L'Internationale.
Well, not quite.
LANL and LLNL are run by the University of California, but our buddies at Lockheed MArtin have been eyeing their TIAA/CREF funds for a while (corporate spinoff runs the thing, goes bankrupt, raids the pension fund as the US Govt. takes it over).
The real problem isn't Academic Management vs. Scientific Researcher, it's the fact that the labs are funded by the Department of Energy. And the Secretary of Energy is a Cabinet-level appointment. Since about the mid-80s, the Secretary of Energy has been open season for the opposition party. The National Labs are big, and mission-critical to the US.
So the Democrats hit them for environmental issues -- even though, environmentally, the labs are not only excellent (LLNL was a Superfund site because of the paint remover used when it was a Naval Training Base), they're doing some of the most important research on the future of our planet.
Then, when Slick Willy is in power, the Republicans hit them for "security" breaches -- even though, security wise, the place is locked down, and foreign intelligence agencies (as well as the relevant congressional committees) already know that "industry partners" are the weak link.
What destroys agencies like this is politics and over-regulation. Incidentally, that's the same recipe to destroy Microsoft.
... but some people have hit on a way to make money doing it.
Yeah, he's been doing this for a long time. And the tech world is full of enough fanatics that you can't help but piss people off. Write an inflammatory article on Apple, Open Source, Linux, Nintendo, or any number of other technosacredcows, and bang! instant traffic. Much easier than saying something intelligent.
It's worse than that.
The article implies that ESRB is pretty good, compared to the alternative. The fallacy is that alternative isn't, and by sleight-of-hand, many are led to believe that the alternative is government regulation. The CCA and the Hays (or was it Hayes?) office were both examples of industry self-censorship, and have conclusively proven that self-censorship is worse than censorship by an external body.
To be honest, very few want to insist upon the "judeo-christian" standards (As if such a thing existed) claimed by the Hays office and cited in the article. And if they were to follow the standards that put the Hays Office in place, they'd probably also insist on a "blue-chip" so that games couldn't be played on Sundays.
So what's the best approach? Insist on doing nothing wrong, and let Congress see how far it can go in making laws abridging free speech.
To be precise:
Copilot did the landing. Before approach, the Captain in the cockpit chit-chat managed to establish a serious command gradient by speaking critically (in this case, approvingly) of one of the other co-pilots ("Not even captain could do such a fine landing as that").
On the approach, the co-pilot reached for the flap lever, and instead threw the lever that put the auto-pilot in Go-Around mode.
Co-pilot realised his mistake, put the lever back, and tried to continue the approach.
At this point, sure, we can say "The pilot should have gone around", and we'd be right to say so.
But that is not why the plane crashed.
The plane crashed because the autopilot had decided to go around, and the Pilot In Command had not. Per Airbus design, the Pilot in Command was not in command: the Autopilot, having decided the pilot really wanted to go around, was busy trimming out his elevator inputs, until the pilots figured out what was going on: the aircraft neither understood what the pilots were trying to do, nor told the pilots what it was doing, until it was so out of trim that the engines stalled, the airframe stalled, and everybody died.
That's exactly the problem with this approach: either the pilot or the machine is ultimately in control. True, machines in controlled circumstances make fewer mistakes; but machines cannot (yet) be trusted with control in all circumstances: the situations are just too complex. So if you give machines control in only _certain_ circumstances, you create flightdeck confusion over who is ultimately flying the plane. That is a design flaw, and one that merits some serious liablity lawsuits.
Because they use Windows/IE and not Linux/Firefox
...sorry, someone was gonna say it.
Weight-on-Wheels is an excellent example, but more for the difference than the similarity. What you've cited is bad training: the computer is a fail-safe (yes, engineers, I'm probably using this term incorrectly) for a bad operator decision; in no situation should the operator rely on a fail-safe.
This situation is analogous to ATC relying on TCAS to perform collision avoidance. ATC doesn't do their job, so TCAS usually steps in.
What Airbus is proposing is different: in the cases where the failsafe activates, Airbus takes control from the operators. The situation is: If the primary source of guidance information has probably failed, and the secondary source has activated, take control from the pilot, just in case he keeps following the primary."
The is in the terms "probably". The swisscontrol collision was a tragedy, and my heart goes out to the Danish ATC and his family who found himself in an unacceptable situation (only guy managing a sector, other ATC dude out of the building, Collision-Detection software offline, trying to get Ludwigshafen on the phone, fails to notice that the only two aircraft on his scope are on a collision course, then tries to "fix it", only to find out that a whole bunch of school kids died on his watch), and then to be murdered by one of the bereaved. After that incident, though, you can be darn sure that every pilot had drilled in as part of their training never to do the opposite of what the TCAS box says.
That just creates another problem. TCAS does a great job at 33,000 feet, but it gets more sporty closer to the ground, in particular with your traffic around airports. You can imagine, in a crowded environment, if some lazy ass is using his autopilot to snap climb to an assigned altitude, TCAS can see a couple of rates of climb and issue a traffic advisory (90 seconds to go -- no action required, just ), or even an RA (45 sec). So there's a screen (not terribly accurate) to enable the crew to spot traffic visually in those cases. And there's logic so that in certain situations TCAS doesn't trigger.
So now, to our issue. It's about interfaces, and who is in control. If you make the autopilot automatically follow a RA, it will generally work. But it works at a price -- it communicates the message that the plane, not the pilot, handles collision avoidance. And that's not true. In those situations where TCAS doesn't fire, the pilot may ignore signs of impending collision ("That's just a somatographic illusion. If it were gonna hit me, the A/P would be dodging it already"). In situations where it does fire, no autopilot in the world can achieve the situational awareness of a competent pilot (that's why we have them up there), so little things like terrain avoidance may be missed. Then, of course, there's the bugs the override software may have.
To put it a little more verbosely than the other posters.
A system to avoid mid-air collisiosn exists. It's called TCAS, and it works well. But when TCAS issues a Resolution Advisor (aka a loud voice in the cockpit booming "CLIMB CLIMB" or "DIVE DIVE"), it means that Air Traffic Control has already failed to do its job, and, given the refresh rates of ATC radar, ATC isn't likely to be of much help any more. In such a case, you have two pieces of information:
A) ATC has failed.
B) You better do what the box says, or you something bad will happen.
In this case, the failsafe triggered, one crew did what the box told them to do (DIVE); the other followed ATC and ignored the box.
When a system fails, and the backup kicks in, you follow the backup.
Yes, there are problems with the Boeing philosophy: pilots make plenty of mistakes. But there are serious concerns with Airbus. Getting code to perform flawlessly isn't cheap, nor does it happen (as an Airbus that came darn close to running out of fuel over The Netherlands proved a few months ago); in addition, every airliner has interface problems, and a great number of accidents in both Boeing and Airbus involve the crew not understanding what the aircraft is saying. Airbus adds in the bonus of the aircraft not understanding what the crew is trying to do (A300 crash in Nagoya was it?), and in the mix, automates enough procedures to cause a real mess when then automation fails/cannot be used (a rainy missed approach over the Baltic Sea, perhaps).
And all that comes down to liability. Pilot error settlements may not be cheap, but the manufacturer isn't liable to the same degree as a software design flaw.
Be sarcastic if you must, but their next upgrade is to integrate a chick magnet into the system. Activating 'party mode' by default spawns a Babe-Level Management Routine (BALMER), which controls the Magnet. Preset desired peak and sustained chick levels are set in the Application Data Layer, and MIDAS carefully manages the Chick Magnet to maintain the ambient babeness at the level desired for the activity. When the security cameras, IR sensors, or seismographs determine that levels are exceeded, the Magnet is taken off line or dropped to a lower power level (From "Ferrari" to "Porsche" all the way down to "Ford Fairlane").
It all looks very impressive on paper, but they're having trouble getting enough juice to those magnets, and as yet have been unable to give the BALMER anything but a dry run.
Easy here: apple develops a bunch of simple, casual games that run on ipod/with interface, and sells them for a couple bucks a pop at ITMS. Nothing fancy, and nothing that taxes resources (as so many phone games do).
With the money to be made, the market share to be exploited, and the minimal investment required, I'm surprised they haven't already done this.
actually, most phones have a keyboard lock feature. They usually involve pressing a sequence of keys. Although, the last candybar phone I had (cough siemens) decided that a sequence of keys was too complicated, and made it one key, the # key sitting in the corner. Pure genius. I'd walk into work, and find my boss had been on the phone with me for five minutes.
Thinking more about this topic, the fundamental problem is clear from the article itself. The debate is between Cell phone manufacturers and service providers, not between those two and the consumer. The question that's being asked is "How can the manufacturers make these services more appealing so our consumers will use them more?" What's ignored is that a good deal (but alas, not all) of the interface problems caused by these "next-gen" wonders are due to requirements of service providers.
A phone with bluetooth? Okay, but better put in a way that we can prevent users from downloading pictures directly to their computer. They need to pay by the kilobyte to send it through the mobile phone network.
Internet Access at 1 cent/kilobyte? Great! But let's make sure they use it -- wire that spare button on the keyboard to automatically load the browser; and set the homepage to our 50kb site!
Oh, and ringtones! Yes! Ringtones! Can we get that with double-dawg DRM?
Yes, yes it is too much to ask. Convergence is a myth, get over it.
What you want is a tablet PC with a GSM card and a bluetooth headset.
My v.171, even cheaper than yours:
-cheap
-NO CAMERA, no ridiculous frilles.
-Crappy battery life (two and a half days if I don't use the phone). Incidentally, this model gets advertised as having an "extreme battery" and long life.
-If you enter PIN too fast on startup, fails to logon, reboots (must reenter pin).
-When battery is low, emits an annoying beep every minute. This beep bypasses the ringer settings, so if you're in a meeting and have the ringer set to vibrate or silent, it will beep at you anyway. After all, its needs are more important than anything else.
-color screen, which largely serves to force these animations of some kid skateboarding or spraying graffitti, implying that only prepubescent kids should have a phone this cheap
-Even with clamshell design, it could be a little bigger. I don't need no handsfree kid, but it would be nice to cradle the thing against my shoulder without pulling my neck out.
So there you have it. You want a cheap, functional phone, they sell you one with a couple of lethal bugs. Then, because you don't want all those fancy toys, they specify a tiny battery, tethering you to frequent recharges, just as if you had been downloading 3G pr0n all the time. Finally, they keep it smaller than it needs to be.
Indeed. If anything, it's an argument for a liberal arts education. A creative mind can apply
Here's my experience as someone who's actually paid to do philosophy (and philology, for that matter), and who likes to tinker with code from time to time:
Philosophy is a set of tools that help to describe reality. Large branches of philosophy include epistemology (the study of knowledge, what constitutes a science), noetics (how people cognize things), metaphysics (the underlying nature of reality), ontology (what constitutes being), logic, mathematics, ethics, economics and political science. There are plenty of others too.
Clearly, there are branches of philosophy that are no longer under the direct control of the philosophy departments. And there are things that overlap with other disciplines. I've seen neurologists rail against "the philosophers" and their mucking up everything by positing a mind-body problem.
Many fields of philosophy beyond the obvious case of logic provide excellent tools for conceptualizing and expressing what we're trying to do with computers. Philosophy won't provide the explanation for how they work, but it will help to conceive them, express them, and work within them. For example, many programming languages feature a system of class inheritances; some of these systems can be quite bizarre. But they all trace their roots back, one way or another, to Aristotelian logic and metaphysics. So if you arm yourself with Aristotle, you'll be able to explain not only that it's a good idea to have each child express a single axis of change from its parent, but the reason why it is a good idea.
The same cna be said for interface design: if you create an interface based around the meaning of the actions, rather than around what a focus group says, you'll end up with something a lot more intuitive and a lot easier to use.
In my experience, not many philosophers are directly interested in what computers can do, but there are more than you'd think. If you're a CS major, taking philosophy courses is probably the way to go: after all the "computer expertise" is what you're bringing to the table. In general, I would suggest looking at history of philosophy courses, since that will probably give a beginner the most tools.
no. It's that Europe lists prices including VAT. US prices don't include sales tax.
First off, dictionaries base their definitions on usage; in the case of plagiarism, it's been used largely in academic contexts, and that's where the "definition" comes from. That doesn't make it infallible, and it certainly doesn't exclude it from acquiring new usages, or modified ones. Or, in this case, it doesn't exclude the possibility that Mr. Dictionary-Entry-Writer missed the specific difference:
Plagiarism is a breach of ethics caused by taking authorial credit for someone else's work.
"Breatch of ethics" is what distinguishes it from Copyright Infringement, which is a legal issue.
"taking authorial credit" is much better than saying "not citing", since it is clear what's going on. In this case, your "technology trends"-style blog may cite sources, but the blog itself pretends to authority: its mere existence as a weblog is tied to a claim to authority. If all it does is echo other crap, it's zero. In the academic or publishing world, such cases of plagiarism rarely exist because their ethical shortcomings are immediately apparent. On the web, with search engines and aggregators making the call, it's not always the case: on slashdot, they've been wondering what to do with these self-promoters for a while.
Well, yeah, it is. In this case, while the citation may be there, enough of the text is taken that there's no point in consulting the original article (so it's not like aggregators such as slashdot, which point to the article). The blogger adds no additional content, and effectively profits (whether in "community kudos" or adsense) from unauthorized reproduction of someone else's content.
That's plagiarism, whether cited it or not.
Think of some of the "techno trends" blog links that make it to slashdot sometimes. Slashdot links to the blog; the blog contains pretty much the whole news item, and you're done.
Aye, it looks like the hardware is going to sabotage DRM, willy nilly. Sony's argument will be along the lines of, "well, there are a lot of non-HDMI HD monitors up there; we'll make HDMI mandatory in the next generation of DRM, when players are cheap. Get the foothold, then start locking it down."
The problem is that by that time, HDCP will be thoroughly defeated as well.
The graphs show the PS3 is not the most expensive console in history by adjusted prices, sure. And the 3DO and neo-geo were huge flops. And yes, back in 1982 dollars, people paid more for the Atari 2600 and the intellivision.
But there are two elements missing here.
A) Total Sales at Price. How many Atari 2600s sold at a price point above the PS3's adjusted value? If the PS3 sold like that, would it be a success?
B) Relative price to PCs. There's a reason the last "successful" console priced (in adjusted value) above the PS3 was back in 1979. Computers were even more expensive: The Apple ][ was the game machine to beat (I know, I know, I had a Pet, thank you) in 1979, and in 82 it was the (much cheaper) Commodore 64.
For a console to be successful, it has to be cheap enough to be below the threshhold that people start looking at PCs. I know you guys are gonna argue that Console markets are different, and the PS3's über-cell architecture will run circles around a 3-gig dual core with a decent video card, but that's not how it's going to be viewed by consumers (or reality for that matter).
That's right. We've seen this before.
Turns out Diebold has a strong interest in keeping their security systems proprietary.
Well, crap...
Many tech workers don't need a union, because they're part of management -- an imaginative coder, or one who keep your old mainframe afloat, is an asset that can call down whatever price s/he wants.
But there's a whole bunch who are treated as labor: whether here, or India, or wherever; and in some industries (*cough* video games), that labor is being ruthlessly exploited. I'm sorry, but when some management moron thinks that "permanent crunch time" of 80 hours/week is more efficient than 40 for intellectual labor -- contrary to just about every workplace study ever done --, then the people on the screwed end need protection, for their own sanity, and for the good of the company.
The fact of the matter is, you will find in the business managers who build their careers on employee burnout; and you will find managers who are idiots and torture those under them, thinking their getting some productivity benefit; and you will also find outright idiots.
In an ideal world, unions don't exist. In the real world, they do, and they never come about because people want to sit around and be lazy all day.
Aye, 1) is the rumblestick.
2) is easier than you think. Swinging, and other motions are simply movements between extremes. Anything beyond an extreme (Such as against a contraopposing sword, or bey0ond the range of motion), you can either filter out or use to shift the relative range of motion -- or some combination thereof.
The best way to find out what really works is to hook someone up and play.