Yup. Impressive. But still "just" a rich person's toy.
As was the car, the television, the mobile phone, and a bunch of other stuff that we now take for granted. If people with money to spare didn't go out and keep the market ticking over when nobody else could afford them, the market would have developed a lot more slowly.
Having said that, I think there is more novelty than utility in a trip to outer space.
Amen. Fly by wire can never be perfectly safe - no matter how well a system is designed it can still fail. As long as its safer than the mechanical systems we're still ahead though.
I think even the most coldhearted persons must admit that your genetic makeup is something you cannot influence and which a caring society should insure you from.
I agree with that. Knowing that you might carry a defective gene, you can make a decision about if you are going to have kids or not though. I don't have an answer for this, but if you are aware that there is an x% chance of passing on some serious defect to your children, where x is above some magic threshold, should you expect a caring society to insure your family anyway? Taking it another step further, if mandatory genetic scanning[1] of your unborn child shows that has some serious defect, what should happen if you choose to proceed with the pregnancy?
These are all things we need to have a think about because the technology to do it will be around sooner or later and it's a fairly safe bet that the insurance companies will try and push legislation in their favour.
[1] yes I know this doesn't exist yet, and without some magic answer to the questions above it probably shouldn't, but it raises an uncomfortable issue.
Alternatively, build the cities underground and reduce the surface atmosphere to 0-3psi and run the trains on the surface. The surface will be uninhabitable in another 100 years anyway so we might as well make it useful for something.
You could always create one out of your own stem cells. Technically she'd be your twin sister, but God made Eve out of Adam's rib so you can at least cite precedent.
I got an SSL cert for a web site through Thawte. It was fine for a year but then the renewal didn't work. All my emails asking for support were met with silence. I finally got in touch with them and sorted it out. Next renewal, same thing. Third time I meant to go somewhere else but left it too late and so tried the renewal again (yes, that's right, shame on me). Much the same thing - something went wrong, lots of emails asking for support, no response.
This time though they sent me a customer satisfaction survey. I gave them a big smackdown on any point remotely related to the quality of their after sales support. A few days later I got a phone call from them and chatted with someone. She apologized for the lack of response and recommended that I don't use the published 'support' email addresses on the web site and she gave me another address I could use. I know she was doing her best to be helpful, but seriously???
The other frequently asked question will be "what the hell was that?". Like the face on mars, there will be a heap of random rock outcrops and shadows that look really interesting from a certain angle, and unfortunately you can't easily go round for a second look. For that reason alone I think we should do it - a new conspiracy theory could be born every second!
That would work great until the freeway entrance ramps became littered with corpses. There aren't a whole lot of other options for getting up to 70 mph in as little as 100 yards or so.
The 'dead spot' wouldn't be blind. You'd have to apply significant pressure to the accelerator pedal to activate it. My car has a point right at the end of the accelerator travel where you have to press extra hard to move it further, and it gives you some extra power (as well as fast gear changes). Something similar would work for disengaging it completely.
I would have thought that too, but in a situation where the acceleration is caused by a crashed computer (as opposed to pressing on the wrong pedal), why would you think that the gear shift still works? My gear shift is completely "fly-by-wire" and the gear changes are completely under computer control (it's a robotic manual transmission). I'm sure plenty of other cars have a similar setup.
I think that they brakes are direct hydraulic though, and I'm very sure that they would be capable of stopping the car very quick, even under hard acceleration where the vacuum power brake assistance drops to zero.
If I happen to need acceleration, I want to floor the accelerator and not think about it.
And that is exactly the problem. People put their foot on the pedal and don't think about it. Very occasionally they put their foot on the wrong pedal, and not thinking about it causes all sorts of problems.
Besides, this only solves the "hit the wrong pedal" problem, which isn't what we're talking about there.
Apart from a very small number of cases, I suspect that it is the problem.
We already have a solution - Cut the power when the break is pushed.
(copied from my previous post) An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling, and it wouldn't accelerate again until the pedal was fully released. There would be an initial surge of acceleration if they did the accelerator-instead-of-brake trick, but as the driver panicked and pressed harder, they'd just go back to idle instead. To take the idea a bit further you might make the car brake instead of idle, but while it would be funny to watch, I suspect that that would cause more accidents than it would avoid.
That's what i'd be putting my money on for 99% of the cases of short unexplained bursts of acceleration. The longer ones (eg where the driver has enough time to call the police) might actually be faults with the car, but incidents of that are so rare compared to other deaths on the road that it's hardly worth spending time on.
I've done the opposite before - I put my foot on what I thought was the accelerator but was actually the brake. The car didn't go faster so I pressed harder and nearly planted my face on the steering wheel! I can easily understand how the more unfortunate case would happen for a few seconds (which is plenty enough time to have disasterous results).
An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling, and it wouldn't accelerate again until the pedal was fully released. There would be an initial surge of acceleration if they did the accelerator-instead-of-brake trick, but as the driver panicked and pressed harder, they'd just go back to idle instead. To take the idea a bit further you might make the car brake instead of idle, but while it would be funny to watch, I suspect that that would cause more accidents than it would avoid.
I don't think he was in a particular rush. The car had long since left the scene and probably wasn't local. I think maybe he was just bored. Some people read Slashdot while doing there job, others talk to people.
If you talk to the police without consul, during an investigation you have waived your rights and demonstrated to the police that you are an idiot, not honest or friendly.
Bullshit. You just make it harder for them to do their job. Sure there are cops who are crooks, or just jerks, but if you presume that they all are then you are no better than your make-believe stereotypical policeman. Have a think about which dark corner of society would benefit if everyone starts being hostile towards the police.
We had a policeman knock on our door a while back. There was a grassfire a few km down the road and a car vaguely fitting the description of our car parked in our driveway was seen leaving the scene. By the time he knocked on our door I assumed he had already put his hand on the bonnet etc to see if had been driven recently, and he even told us that our car didn't really match the description after all. We chatted for a while and he left. If i'd had behaved like a prick like you suggest what would it have gained me?
I can only begin to guess at what a horrible job it must be most of the time. You'd see the worst of people every day. You'd have to knock on doors at 3am and tell parents that they have one less living child. Every time you pull someone over you know that there is a slim chance that someone's going to pull a shotgun on you. And if you make it hard for them to do their job then the only people left doing the job are the ones who don't take your sort of shit lightly.
Hopefully if you ever need the assistance of the police, you won't run into one that you've pissed off along the way.
Our current understanding is that John Titor, (who was actually journeying from late 2011, not 2036 as he previously claimed[1]) re-materialised into the LHC when returning from his journey to 2000/2001. This simultaneously started the black hole that ultimately destroys the world, and bounced him back to Mayan times where he was able to warn them before dying from the high exposure to radiation.
You cant use security as argument, if you assume the app is so vulnerable, why not assume the DBMS is as vulnerable?
Sure I can. It's a perfectly valid reason to use stored procedures. It's the difference between safe, audited access, and unlimited access, and helps to reduce the 'attack surface'.
Code reuse is a thing to be left to developers to decide what is to be reused and what is not, you have to design specifically for it and SQL is not as helpful as an object-oriented imperative language when doing it. And different environments require different logic, your mobile app will not have the same data requirements as your enterprise app.
Sure, it depends on the app, but 'create a new order' or 'add a new user' are potentially complicated operations and there are a lot of situations where it makes a lot of sense to keep the complexity in one place.
Stored procedures don't have to be written in SQL either. I think Oracle supports Java stored procs, and MSSQL supports external DLL's.
Creating a separate 'Business Logic' layer in the language of your choosing with a published API between the database and the presentation layer also solves this problem (and most other problems) to some extent.
And as I said first up, it depends on the app and it depends on the requirements, not some universal law of "stored procedures are always good" or "stored procedures are always bad", and making generalizations like you did with your "No, the logic belongs to the app. The database is there to store data" comment is just going to get you into trouble.
I like the spam problem as a measuring stick. First go and solve the spam problem without reducing the usefulness of the internet to anyone (except the spammers of course). If you can do that, then we'll talk about some other policing that might be a good idea...
If they could stop all the child porn and stop all illegal downloads then i'd be all for it, but only if they can stop _only_ child porn, and _only_ illegal downloads, without any 'collatoral damage' of legal material. And they can't - all recent attempts to do so are proof of that. So in the mean time, keep a better eye on your kids and make it easier for people to buy your stuff than download it.
Your reasoning is kind of dumb... If I decided to go on a shooting rampage, targeting those drinking alcohol, and I managed to shot 10000 people, would it be a 'non-story' because more than 10000 people die annually of alcohol related causes? I bet if I only managed to shoot 10 people before I was caught it would be a front page story for a week.
But how can you have one with out the other? Crashing is an important part of flying, equally important to any other aspect of a simulator. Or at least it is when I play.
Slashdot Mirror
Yup. Impressive. But still "just" a rich person's toy.
As was the car, the television, the mobile phone, and a bunch of other stuff that we now take for granted. If people with money to spare didn't go out and keep the market ticking over when nobody else could afford them, the market would have developed a lot more slowly.
Having said that, I think there is more novelty than utility in a trip to outer space.
When I was a kid, I threw a rock so high it didn't come down. I'm pretty sure it landed on the moon.
Do you not, for one, welcome your new ass-blasting overlords?
Amen. Fly by wire can never be perfectly safe - no matter how well a system is designed it can still fail. As long as its safer than the mechanical systems we're still ahead though.
I think even the most coldhearted persons must admit that your genetic makeup is something you cannot influence and which a caring society should insure you from.
I agree with that. Knowing that you might carry a defective gene, you can make a decision about if you are going to have kids or not though. I don't have an answer for this, but if you are aware that there is an x% chance of passing on some serious defect to your children, where x is above some magic threshold, should you expect a caring society to insure your family anyway? Taking it another step further, if mandatory genetic scanning[1] of your unborn child shows that has some serious defect, what should happen if you choose to proceed with the pregnancy?
These are all things we need to have a think about because the technology to do it will be around sooner or later and it's a fairly safe bet that the insurance companies will try and push legislation in their favour.
[1] yes I know this doesn't exist yet, and without some magic answer to the questions above it probably shouldn't, but it raises an uncomfortable issue.
Alternatively, build the cities underground and reduce the surface atmosphere to 0-3psi and run the trains on the surface. The surface will be uninhabitable in another 100 years anyway so we might as well make it useful for something.
partially oxidizing it
So... they burn it a bit outside the combustion chamber?
once I get a girlfriend, I mean.
You could always create one out of your own stem cells. Technically she'd be your twin sister, but God made Eve out of Adam's rib so you can at least cite precedent.
I got an SSL cert for a web site through Thawte. It was fine for a year but then the renewal didn't work. All my emails asking for support were met with silence. I finally got in touch with them and sorted it out. Next renewal, same thing. Third time I meant to go somewhere else but left it too late and so tried the renewal again (yes, that's right, shame on me). Much the same thing - something went wrong, lots of emails asking for support, no response.
This time though they sent me a customer satisfaction survey. I gave them a big smackdown on any point remotely related to the quality of their after sales support. A few days later I got a phone call from them and chatted with someone. She apologized for the lack of response and recommended that I don't use the published 'support' email addresses on the web site and she gave me another address I could use. I know she was doing her best to be helpful, but seriously???
This entire planet is mad, you know.
Yes, save for me and thee.
The other frequently asked question will be "what the hell was that?". Like the face on mars, there will be a heap of random rock outcrops and shadows that look really interesting from a certain angle, and unfortunately you can't easily go round for a second look. For that reason alone I think we should do it - a new conspiracy theory could be born every second!
Wouldn't it be grand if the guys who hacked Ubisoft's latest game [slashdot.org] took on this challenge instead?
It would be nice, but it's impossible. They'd have to be some sort of elite uber-hacker to even attempt such a challenge.
Absolutely impossible.
Not a hope in hell.
Can't be done.
when you put 4096 bit encryption into the hands of an average person, they really do type 12345 one hundred and sixty times.
I'm obviously above average then - i'd use cut & paste to do the job in seconds!
That would work great until the freeway entrance ramps became littered with corpses. There aren't a whole lot of other options for getting up to 70 mph in as little as 100 yards or so.
The 'dead spot' wouldn't be blind. You'd have to apply significant pressure to the accelerator pedal to activate it. My car has a point right at the end of the accelerator travel where you have to press extra hard to move it further, and it gives you some extra power (as well as fast gear changes). Something similar would work for disengaging it completely.
I would have thought that too, but in a situation where the acceleration is caused by a crashed computer (as opposed to pressing on the wrong pedal), why would you think that the gear shift still works? My gear shift is completely "fly-by-wire" and the gear changes are completely under computer control (it's a robotic manual transmission). I'm sure plenty of other cars have a similar setup.
I think that they brakes are direct hydraulic though, and I'm very sure that they would be capable of stopping the car very quick, even under hard acceleration where the vacuum power brake assistance drops to zero.
If I happen to need acceleration, I want to floor the accelerator and not think about it.
And that is exactly the problem. People put their foot on the pedal and don't think about it. Very occasionally they put their foot on the wrong pedal, and not thinking about it causes all sorts of problems.
Besides, this only solves the "hit the wrong pedal" problem, which isn't what we're talking about there.
Apart from a very small number of cases, I suspect that it is the problem.
We already have a solution - Cut the power when the break is pushed.
(copied from my previous post) An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling, and it wouldn't accelerate again until the pedal was fully released. There would be an initial surge of acceleration if they did the accelerator-instead-of-brake trick, but as the driver panicked and pressed harder, they'd just go back to idle instead. To take the idea a bit further you might make the car brake instead of idle, but while it would be funny to watch, I suspect that that would cause more accidents than it would avoid.
That's what i'd be putting my money on for 99% of the cases of short unexplained bursts of acceleration. The longer ones (eg where the driver has enough time to call the police) might actually be faults with the car, but incidents of that are so rare compared to other deaths on the road that it's hardly worth spending time on.
I've done the opposite before - I put my foot on what I thought was the accelerator but was actually the brake. The car didn't go faster so I pressed harder and nearly planted my face on the steering wheel! I can easily understand how the more unfortunate case would happen for a few seconds (which is plenty enough time to have disasterous results).
An easy fix would be to have a 'dead' spot on the accelerator right at the end of the travel, so that the 'foot to the floor' situation would just result in the car idling, and it wouldn't accelerate again until the pedal was fully released. There would be an initial surge of acceleration if they did the accelerator-instead-of-brake trick, but as the driver panicked and pressed harder, they'd just go back to idle instead. To take the idea a bit further you might make the car brake instead of idle, but while it would be funny to watch, I suspect that that would cause more accidents than it would avoid.
I don't think he was in a particular rush. The car had long since left the scene and probably wasn't local. I think maybe he was just bored. Some people read Slashdot while doing there job, others talk to people.
Exercising your rights does *not* make one a prick.
True, but being a prick does make you a prick, even if it is within your rights to do so.
If you talk to the police without consul, during an investigation you have waived your rights and demonstrated to the police that you are an idiot, not honest or friendly.
Bullshit. You just make it harder for them to do their job. Sure there are cops who are crooks, or just jerks, but if you presume that they all are then you are no better than your make-believe stereotypical policeman. Have a think about which dark corner of society would benefit if everyone starts being hostile towards the police.
We had a policeman knock on our door a while back. There was a grassfire a few km down the road and a car vaguely fitting the description of our car parked in our driveway was seen leaving the scene. By the time he knocked on our door I assumed he had already put his hand on the bonnet etc to see if had been driven recently, and he even told us that our car didn't really match the description after all. We chatted for a while and he left. If i'd had behaved like a prick like you suggest what would it have gained me?
I can only begin to guess at what a horrible job it must be most of the time. You'd see the worst of people every day. You'd have to knock on doors at 3am and tell parents that they have one less living child. Every time you pull someone over you know that there is a slim chance that someone's going to pull a shotgun on you. And if you make it hard for them to do their job then the only people left doing the job are the ones who don't take your sort of shit lightly.
Hopefully if you ever need the assistance of the police, you won't run into one that you've pissed off along the way.
How did the mayans know this was going to happen?
Our current understanding is that John Titor, (who was actually journeying from late 2011, not 2036 as he previously claimed[1]) re-materialised into the LHC when returning from his journey to 2000/2001. This simultaneously started the black hole that ultimately destroys the world, and bounced him back to Mayan times where he was able to warn them before dying from the high exposure to radiation.
You cant use security as argument, if you assume the app is so vulnerable, why not assume the DBMS is as vulnerable?
Sure I can. It's a perfectly valid reason to use stored procedures. It's the difference between safe, audited access, and unlimited access, and helps to reduce the 'attack surface'.
Code reuse is a thing to be left to developers to decide what is to be reused and what is not, you have to design specifically for it and SQL is not as helpful as an object-oriented imperative language when doing it.
And different environments require different logic, your mobile app will not have the same data requirements as your enterprise app.
Sure, it depends on the app, but 'create a new order' or 'add a new user' are potentially complicated operations and there are a lot of situations where it makes a lot of sense to keep the complexity in one place.
Stored procedures don't have to be written in SQL either. I think Oracle supports Java stored procs, and MSSQL supports external DLL's.
Creating a separate 'Business Logic' layer in the language of your choosing with a published API between the database and the presentation layer also solves this problem (and most other problems) to some extent.
And as I said first up, it depends on the app and it depends on the requirements, not some universal law of "stored procedures are always good" or "stored procedures are always bad", and making generalizations like you did with your "No, the logic belongs to the app. The database is there to store data" comment is just going to get you into trouble.
I like the spam problem as a measuring stick. First go and solve the spam problem without reducing the usefulness of the internet to anyone (except the spammers of course). If you can do that, then we'll talk about some other policing that might be a good idea...
If they could stop all the child porn and stop all illegal downloads then i'd be all for it, but only if they can stop _only_ child porn, and _only_ illegal downloads, without any 'collatoral damage' of legal material. And they can't - all recent attempts to do so are proof of that. So in the mean time, keep a better eye on your kids and make it easier for people to buy your stuff than download it.
Your reasoning is kind of dumb... If I decided to go on a shooting rampage, targeting those drinking alcohol, and I managed to shot 10000 people, would it be a 'non-story' because more than 10000 people die annually of alcohol related causes? I bet if I only managed to shoot 10 people before I was caught it would be a front page story for a week.
It's a flight simulator, not a crash simulator.
But how can you have one with out the other? Crashing is an important part of flying, equally important to any other aspect of a simulator. Or at least it is when I play.