I wonder if Victorian man worried about being replaced by tractors when menial labour was removed from having to plough the field. What about when the combine harvester was invented and suddenly millions were out of work in the harvesting industry? Would the world be a better place without those inventions?
Well do computer programmers have a union? WRT the size of the pool, if banking is so good, why not become one? Go get an MBA from Harvard and if you get a good result you will get a job in banking. Then work hard and with a little luck you will perform well you will get promoted and become one of the ruling elite. I know why I don't do it, because I couldn't, I would be really bad at the social climbing I'd have to do, I couldn't stand the stress and I'm probably not clever enough anyway. But in that case i can't envy them getting well paid for a job that I cannot/choose not to do. So if they have it so good why not go and become one? Or do you believe that the system is not merit based? I know there is likely a lot of nepotism, but I do believe that if someone was good enough they would rise as fast as anyone else.
There have been significant advances in composite materials since the 90s, it's fairly cutting edge stuff. One would think that it would be worth another try with these new materials - it should be comparatively cheap to test just the fuel tank to see if this were true.
Well since this seems to be the Ares V but slightly less ambitious, which is sold as a lego like rehash of space shuttle and saturn technology it's really not worth getting too excited about as a piece of news. Sorry I'm supposed to be a space geek - Go Mediocre rehash of 40+ year old designs!!!
Don't get me wrong I like small incremental steps, I believe it's essential to getting into space reliably and cheaply, but I just wish they would stop changing the specification and just build them. IME The thing that makes projects late and expensive is usually specification change, so can we just celebrate instead when they don't announce news of a change to the heavy lift plans?
See as a kid I hated that turtle, for a start off only the kids the teacher liked got to play with the turtle, for a second what was the point in moving a turtle around? Now when I got my hand on Basic and could write my own text adventures - then that was useful. If only they'd have had a decent graphics library in those days...
Boring seems to equal they want to see instant results - that sounds like most of the population with their social gaming - part of the thing that drives most gaming is making sure that action = result. Think of your favourite activities and usually that's because they all have instant gratification in some form.
I think for second graders the challenge will be coming up with a simple problem they can understand and relate to. how to program a door lock perhaps as a very simple start, how the software in their mp3 player might work would be a great example: sketch out how you would code parts of the gui "well when you press this button it runs this code here." Then say how that would achieve things "What this code says is get the file and then play it" Stress most of the time you don't need to worry about how those things work. Then break down that level of complexity "While I'm not going to talk about how we decode a file what happens when we ask to read a file, well we ask this bit of software to get us the file it looks it up in a table and then knows how to find it and starts to send it to us a bit at a time" or something better phrased.
again it might go over the head of most of them, but if it makes them realise that it's not magic done by PHDs but by real people who just concentrated on a problem who knows what you might start.
I've got to say if there's one thing my limited experience with children has taught me it's that they're a lot brighter than most adults give them credit for. If you think they won't be interested in it then you're talking to the wrong kids, even if it is over the heads of 80% of the class that 20% that is inspired, or at least has hope for an interesting/challenging/useful job should make it worthwhile. No it's not something that you see on spongebob,, but you can do it, you too can write software, now get out there and start writing some perl!
I have to be very careful what I say here because one of the 4-5 guys doing this sits about 10 yards away from me in the office. So I have to be careful everything I say is in the public domain. The aims of the project are publicly stated as to get students into programming on a cheap simple bit of hardware. Get the total hardware cost as cheap as possible. While it would be nice to have access to the GPU that will never be a simple thing to do. Also bear in mind that this is a charitable organisation trying to get students into programming not a charity trying to provide a fully open ecosystem. So closed GPU code is fully compatible with the goals of the project. Now knowing the guys in question I am sure they would love to open that code up but it's a question of priorities, even if they could (I don't know if they can either legally or technically) open everything up, would doing that be the best use of their limited time? Or would it further the project's goals more by leaving that alone and concentrating on the core parts of the system? As you say he works for Broadcom, so this is done in his spare time, so what do you do in his position?
Working backwards: There's a (famous) tale where a literary scholar was talking about what a story/poem meant and the Author of the work heard about it and said "That's not what it's about at all!" To which the scholar was insistent that the Author was wrong and that it was up to those skilled at analysis to determine what the work was about. Whose side you take on that doesn't matter, the point is that a poem/any work of art is supposed to stimulate the reader/observer; there is no absolute answer to what it is supposed to achieve, a story about someone getting lost in the woods could quite correctly be a story about repressed homosexuality or growing up depending on the audience. To say that there is a correct interpretation of a literary work is to me very wrong regardless of who is saying that be it the author or the scholar or the audience. Call it Quantum Interpretation;-) So I would say there is no thing the bible was meant to convey, some bits of the old testament are about "Fear the lord your god", some are "Love the Lord even though he is a bastard", the new testament goes schizophrenic again with the "Love the all forgiving god or burn for eternity". If you claim there was any message there in the bible other than white noise and "obey without question" then I'm reading a different book to you.
I'm not looking at it as a history text, I'm saying that if others are trying to treat it as a history text then there are rules that it has to follow. Part of those being that if someone tries to treat it as a source then they have to apply consistent non-relative interpretation to it. My point in the original post was that I suspect that they were being told via dogma not reason what parts of the white noise they should follow.
I'd ask a higher question: "What else are we going to do? What else is humanity for?" The answer could be nothing at all, but in that case we need to pick a purpose for ourselves. The answer we pick could be to breed and spread ourselves as much as possible, but then the beetles have us beat there so we need another one how about the purpose we chose for humanity is "to produce art and understand the universe." Okay I picked my answer myself there, but if not to breed as much as possible, then what answer to the point of life that you can come up with does not require the better understanding of the workings of the universe? Previous generations have us the Mona-Lisa and Calculus and The Bohr model. Why shouldn't we pass on the results of the LHC?
I disagree, Quantum mechanics is not illogical, it is merely not like the world we experience. It is a model of the world that is not like the model that our brains have made for us. I'm sure a Cow sees eating meat as illogical, I'm certain a dolphin can't conceive of the concept of fire. That a queen can't understand that if there is no bread why you just can't eat some cake. Sure the sub atomic world is outside our experience but that doesn't mean that it is wrong, in fact i would argue that is far more right than the world you and I perceive.
I'd take another point of view. I swear there were a few days when the maths of quantum mechanics made sense to me, for a short while I stopped trying to build a mental physical picture of how it worked and just followed the maths and it was wonderfully simple. You could see these equations describing the behaviour from which would emerge the world we see, it was quite amazing. Then I passed that exam and promptly forgot it all. The point being that from my experience there is no point trying to marry the macro world with the micro world, just like above the ocean is a totally different world from below it. It may all play be the same rules and there be no duality but to expect the model of the world that the human mind constructs for itself to work on all levels is like expecting my model car to work just like the real thing. I just wish people would stop expecting the subatomic world to behave like they expect, it kind of reminds me of a fish denying the existence of fire.
2 points: Is that what they were teaching(which is what i asked)? I have yet to find a preacher or religous studies teacher admitting the flaws in their source material that rely upon you the reader exercising your own judgement. Where they will admit flaws they usually* say that you should then follow their interpretation and only their interpretation. Now all that said I have come across religous scholars who would admit the flaws and preach interpretation as you and I seem to, but these were either Atheists themselves or they subscribed to a different religion. But that's my experience I'm interested if others have a different experience of religous believers, not of those of us who try and understand them.
"those patents are considered essential patents and thus Motorola is forced to license them at reasonable terms" What is this concept of essential patents? The information i can find only applies to those made available to standards bodies, not sure how deactivating the touch sensor when next to a person's ear or data compression or any of the others mentioned in the article apply. Please can you provide more information.
I understand that. I doubt it is being taught as such though. If they were teaching it as "This is the documentation we have of the time. There are some good moral systems in here and some really bad ones too. The facts may be wrong, they may be right, we need to think about this and interpret it carefully using other sources as well." then I would have no problems. Teaching it as "These bits (we'll tell you what they are) are fictional/plain wrong. Please ignore them/use them as a higher lesson. These bits are scripture (we'll tell you what they are), follow their orders in the way we tell you or you go to hell (a concept not actually in the book itself)" Then I have several issues. In some ways I respect the fundamentalists more than those who do the relativism we see a lot because at least the fundamentalists are consistent in their own way. Even if they're trying to be consistent with an inconsistent set of instructions.
You think that's weird an incident in my life from a few months ago: I have some good friends who are geneticists but very active Christians. Some other friends who are almost evangelical in their beliefs but are an engineer and chemist. They were friends with my ex-girlfriend who after going out with me went from atheist to born again Christian (long story) We were all together at a dinner party and were discussing this ex and they were disparaging of her for being a bit nuts for believing this rubbish, they were laughing at her for believing the Earth was created in 7 days, yet I know from previous conversations they themselves believe in the resurrection of Jesus and the Loaves miracle etc. I pointed out to them at the time that "how can some miracles be plausible and some laughable, what's the difference between the loaves and fishes miracle and making the Earth in 7 days?" but all I got from that was a sharp look from my fiancée and the realisation that even people with PHDs believe whatever the hell they want to believe even if it doesn't make sense with the other things they believe. Of course at the same time they thought that creating the world in 7 days was stupid. Of course miracles can and do happen, just not a miracle that big. I just wish i had learned that life lesson sooner that people believe some things that to me seem downright crazy, all you can do is try and occasionally point it out to them and move on.
I'm intrigued, how did they suggest you choose which should be taken as metaphors and as fact/instructions? Or did they indicate that all of the bible should be taken as a metaphor?
Well put yourself in our shoes. You've got to remember an ATI chipset is not a standard, OpenGl is the standard, why shouldn't I be able to develop my own pipeline as long as it complies with the standard? SDRAM is a standard, ARM's implementation of their controller might be targeted for their processor but not for the 3D pipeline you're building, so by building your own you can do better. Trust me an arm processor and 3D pipeline need very different things from an SDRAM controller. Why shouldn't I be able to make a better controller as long as it fits the memory standard and I provide drivers to allow the OS to use it. Granted on things like the HDMI interface I'm never going to be able to open the driver source code to you because there are secrets in there I'm legally not allowed to give people (HDCP keys spring to mind). Should I not be able to do those things? Is it really a better world where there is the one true architecture and no others are allowed? Maybe it is, maybe Linux cannot cope with the things I want to do. Fine I know I'll branch the code, that's the great thing about OSS I can branch if I need to and do my own thing. But that's how the arm code started and then they tried to pull it back into the main stream. And the cycle starts again...
"I'm very surprised that Google would spend so much money on defensive patents for Android. Android can't be generating that much revenue, can it?" I'm not sure that's the issue. I'd be more willing to bet it is more to do with perceived future control of the platform. Imagine there was no android and that there were no PCs, everything done through tablets, mobile phones, set top boxes games consoles etc. Assume they are all sufficiently well integrated that it would work too. What platform do they run? Their own proprietary OS? Windows? iOS? Either way without android either Apple of Microsoft therefore controls the whole experience. With an open option like Android at least there is room for other to play. Look at it this way in a future where 99% of people don't own a PC because their tablet/phone/set top box does everything from gaming to web browsing then where is there for Linux? Suddenly your phone comes with Microsoft Mail reader bundled, so you don't install the gmail app. So you use your hotmail address instead of your gmail. So you could go to OpenGames.org,to get a game or you could just look at the games that your Microsoft Apps Market offers you. Own the Platform and own the Market.
So as Google you have to defend android to give yourself room to move, the best way to defend it is to buy it. Google already did that, now what? Pour money into it to expand the platform, done that. If they don't defend Android against patents then it could become an impossible platform to develop for because as Samsung and others are discovering developing for Android gets you sued. So you stop targeting android and sign up for the only other game in town Windows. You're now back to the picture I painted earlier of controlling the Platform to get rid of your competitors. Microsoft is very good at this but as has been discussed before it is almost impossible to make a truly open piece of Android hardware because mobile devices are so varied and by their nature have to be. (see/. article earlier today)
Right, because do you want to boot your router from ROM? Or your IP phone from flash attached over what will later be GPIO? or your Mobile phone from SDCARD. Your tablet an embedded SSD, your MP3 player from its flash chip over custom interface*, your set top box from its hard drive? What if you have one processor booting another, what if it needs to do a first stage loader from ROM and then grab the image over ethernet (using your own ethernet implementation of course). What if it's not ethernet but SPI? So you come up with this Frankenstein of a common bios and it takes $2 worth of flash to store it in, well if your entire SOC only costs $2 then what do you do? Cut out the bits of the bios you don't need? Then you're back to square 1 of a custom bios. PCs don't have this problem because they will always** have a keyboard, a mouse, a screen, RS232, a hard drive, a floppy drive, USB etc * And of course you need a custom interface because the standard one the kernel supports bit-bangs the operation for maximum commonality, but that's not quick enough for your customer requirement. So you write a bit of hardware to do that for you. You could put in a compatibility mode but that will cost you 0.1c of silicon per chip an multiplied by the hundreds of thousands you plan to sell of this chip it soon adds up to be worthwhile. ** Yes yes I know, "Keyboard not found press F1 to continue", this is not true for servers and historically there was not always a hard drive never mind USB but you get the idea. An embedded device however has no concept of common requirements of hardware. Also while PC's have always been very cost sensitive very few PC historically sold were targeting a device cost of a few dollars so you have to cut something...
This like Linus is spoken by someone who cannot have done any ASIC/embedded development. There are standard graphics pipelines but you will integrate them onto your SOC with direct access to your SDRAM. This removes any standard bus architecture. You may even write your own 3D pipeline.You will probably write your own SDRAM controller. You will add your own peripherals. Why do this rather than plug in standard components? Well if you just stick off the shelf stuff together then how is your product any different from your competitor? You can just build lego and there's nothing wrog with that, but if you are clever then you can get rid of inefficiencies in the system. that is engineering. No you are in business because (for example) you think you can make a better 3D pipeline than ATI, or perhaps you think you can come up with a better bus infrastructure than the ARM standard. Maybe you want to even customize the ARM processor itself? These are not pointless changes, they may be changes you don't understand but that does not make them pointless. Let me take an example I am allowed to talk about: is it better to do your 3D pipeline with a wide array of low clock speed processors that are shared with your imagining pipeline or to have different processor architectures for each function or pipelines hardcoded to the exact operation of each function? There is no good answer and a full spectrum of solution between each possibility. A low cost design will probably be better with shared general purpose hardware a high performance will be better with many tailored processors.
The whole point of ARM is that it is used in the embedded world. The whole point of the embedded world is that it is a (semi-)custom design for that application. Targeting Linux-arm for a router is a very different problem (in hardware terms) from a thermostat, to a games console to an e-reader to a mobile phone. A different problem requires a different solution. In a PC you just need to provide grunt, previous posters have mentioned PCI enumeration, and that's great, but in embedded you can't waste the time nor effort nor power nor hardware on this process because it is not _needed_ it'd be a lot easier to include it but you often have to remove it because of its cost. This is a world where your customer won't let you have even 5% left on the table for overhead, so burning silicon area and power in the name of commonality is a no-no (at least you have to do the trade-off between software effort and hardware cost). Even if you limit the problem to mobile handsets why should I burn 60% more power* by using an off the shelf hardware video encoder in order to make things easy for Linus? Would you rather do a tricky software merge or have a mobile phone that has twice the battery life? Without the ability to tailor the hardware to the problem you will waste area and power and also limit innovation. Let's face it, it would be easier to not have graphics card acceleration, or RAID accelerators or DMA engines or any form of CPU offload, but that's the world we live in. Now I grant you that in the Linux situation making things cheaper by this kind of customisation makes things harder for the kernel developer, but that's the nature of the problem. If they don't want to play in that field then that's fine, the GPL lets you do that, but you have to be able to customize architectures to play in the embedded world it's that simple. * I have pulled these numbers out of the air, I don't want to get into trouble for even trying to do anything near confidential.
I think if you look back I'm not sure we ever had big ideas at any time. Everything is small steps. Give me an example of something that was a genuine big idea that wasn't done without lots of small tiny increments. Man on the moon: ever greater size rockets. Ever greater rockets, small steps of improvements over earlier ones. The original rocket, was built in someone's shed. The first working airplane: built by a pair of bicycle builders in their spare time. Telephone: preceded by speaking tubes, and microphones and speakers as separete developments. The computer: need I spell it out?
They only seem like big massive ideas in retrospect. Look at Bell lab's transistor development, that wasn't a big idea just an interesting discovery that took years to get working reliably and in production. Same with fibre optics, the idea was had in the 60s, it took until the 80s/90s for the glass technology to catch up. To me this sounds like the author of the article can't see the trees in the forest because of all the trees popping up all over the place.
The article states that "when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat". Let me try and turn this into something that might make sense (BTW I believe this is BS, but benefit of the doubt and all that) Heating a material up would normally reduce its density, but localised heating might cause stress lines that would cause areas of local increased density. Also a heated spot would expand to cause other areas around it to be compressed and therefore be at increased density. Let's therefore assume that localised heating can cause some areas to have increased density We all know that plutonium based bombs can operate by rapidly bringing together spheres of plutonium to form a critical mass. A part of this is to have a local density of material sufficient to produce a self sustaining reaction. Therefore all you need is nuclear material sufficiently dense and it will fission. Heating effects are very important in reactor design, the temperature co-efficient of a reactor is an important design consideration. Generally as the reactor gets hotter the cross section of the atoms increases so increasing the probability of neutron absorption so again the laser would help achieving fission in a controlled manner. So yes without doing the maths I can see a mechanism whereby this would work, however given that this person is targeting cars rather than power plants to me implies BS. Either the power establishment has already tried this mechanism and it doesn't work, or the economies don't work (either in terms of dollar cost or energy cost). Anything else implies conspiracy theory, which I just don't buy when there's this much money to be made. If it truly is a new way to get thorium to fission then I would expect him to target both large scale power production and small scale car level power plants. But if he can provide a demonstration then I'll reconsider; extraordinary claims simply require extraordinary evidence. If he's right then I'll be easily proved wrong.
Easy, because this is a complex issue. To over simplify: Most people seem to have no problem with using all the technology at their disposal to catch these rioters. This includes CCTV, face recognition etc. Next time there is a problem they can say "well we used this technology before." Then you get feature creep where they use it for every crime. Then they use it for suspicion of a crime. Next thing it's police principle to pull people over because the face recognition software thought they looked like someone who dropped a piece of litter three months back. You might even argue this is acceptable, but the worry for me is how do I defend against the accusation? I have no evidence for my innocence except the CCTV that I have access to. It might be public CCTV cameras but if only the police have access then you can imagine a corrupt officer could frame trouble makers with relative ease. Or at least select amoungst the guilty to target his favourite pressure group. You might be fine with all of this and say I'm worrying over nothing and I might be, but the only thing that would make me 100% comfortable with this is if the public CCTV cameras' records were publicly available so that we all could defend ourselves. more than that I'd want access to CCTV of the police investigating their case against me. But I don't see any of that happening. So do I have a problem with this at the moment? No. But as the old saying goes, first they came after the Jews, but I wasn't a Jew so did nothing; then they came after the gays, etc.. Then they came after me and there was no-one left. You have to stop these things before they get to the point whereby they come after you. What has worried me about these riots if what happens if we in the UK ever had to violently overthrow a corrupt government? What happens if democracy stops working. If I understand the US, then the second amendment was partially intended to allow the citizens to get rid of a corrupt government; too many of these tools that are only in the hand of the government is a worrying scenario.
Actually one of the main use cases for this would be charging tablet computers. The tablet would have a single connector and negotiate to never supply power above that required for base peripherals. However it would negotiate to accept as much power as the peripheral will give it. This would mean that you could plug your webcam into your tablet and it would power the webcam, but when you had the tablet plugged into your TV in your lounge then it would charge from the TV (whilst the tablet was providing the display for the TV).
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I wonder if Victorian man worried about being replaced by tractors when menial labour was removed from having to plough the field. What about when the combine harvester was invented and suddenly millions were out of work in the harvesting industry? Would the world be a better place without those inventions?
Well do computer programmers have a union?
WRT the size of the pool, if banking is so good, why not become one? Go get an MBA from Harvard and if you get a good result you will get a job in banking. Then work hard and with a little luck you will perform well you will get promoted and become one of the ruling elite.
I know why I don't do it, because I couldn't, I would be really bad at the social climbing I'd have to do, I couldn't stand the stress and I'm probably not clever enough anyway. But in that case i can't envy them getting well paid for a job that I cannot/choose not to do.
So if they have it so good why not go and become one? Or do you believe that the system is not merit based? I know there is likely a lot of nepotism, but I do believe that if someone was good enough they would rise as fast as anyone else.
There have been significant advances in composite materials since the 90s, it's fairly cutting edge stuff. One would think that it would be worth another try with these new materials - it should be comparatively cheap to test just the fuel tank to see if this were true.
Well since this seems to be the Ares V but slightly less ambitious, which is sold as a lego like rehash of space shuttle and saturn technology it's really not worth getting too excited about as a piece of news.
Sorry I'm supposed to be a space geek - Go Mediocre rehash of 40+ year old designs!!!
Don't get me wrong I like small incremental steps, I believe it's essential to getting into space reliably and cheaply, but I just wish they would stop changing the specification and just build them. IME The thing that makes projects late and expensive is usually specification change, so can we just celebrate instead when they don't announce news of a change to the heavy lift plans?
See as a kid I hated that turtle, for a start off only the kids the teacher liked got to play with the turtle, for a second what was the point in moving a turtle around?
Now when I got my hand on Basic and could write my own text adventures - then that was useful. If only they'd have had a decent graphics library in those days...
Boring seems to equal they want to see instant results - that sounds like most of the population with their social gaming - part of the thing that drives most gaming is making sure that action = result. Think of your favourite activities and usually that's because they all have instant gratification in some form.
I think for second graders the challenge will be coming up with a simple problem they can understand and relate to. how to program a door lock perhaps as a very simple start, how the software in their mp3 player might work would be a great example:
sketch out how you would code parts of the gui "well when you press this button it runs this code here."
Then say how that would achieve things "What this code says is get the file and then play it"
Stress most of the time you don't need to worry about how those things work.
Then break down that level of complexity "While I'm not going to talk about how we decode a file what happens when we ask to read a file, well we ask this bit of software to get us the file it looks it up in a table and then knows how to find it and starts to send it to us a bit at a time"
or something better phrased.
again it might go over the head of most of them, but if it makes them realise that it's not magic done by PHDs but by real people who just concentrated on a problem who knows what you might start.
I've got to say if there's one thing my limited experience with children has taught me it's that they're a lot brighter than most adults give them credit for.
If you think they won't be interested in it then you're talking to the wrong kids, even if it is over the heads of 80% of the class that 20% that is inspired, or at least has hope for an interesting/challenging/useful job should make it worthwhile.
No it's not something that you see on spongebob,, but you can do it, you too can write software, now get out there and start writing some perl!
I have to be very careful what I say here because one of the 4-5 guys doing this sits about 10 yards away from me in the office. So I have to be careful everything I say is in the public domain.
The aims of the project are publicly stated as to get students into programming on a cheap simple bit of hardware. Get the total hardware cost as cheap as possible.
While it would be nice to have access to the GPU that will never be a simple thing to do. Also bear in mind that this is a charitable organisation trying to get students into programming not a charity trying to provide a fully open ecosystem.
So closed GPU code is fully compatible with the goals of the project.
Now knowing the guys in question I am sure they would love to open that code up but it's a question of priorities, even if they could (I don't know if they can either legally or technically) open everything up, would doing that be the best use of their limited time? Or would it further the project's goals more by leaving that alone and concentrating on the core parts of the system? As you say he works for Broadcom, so this is done in his spare time, so what do you do in his position?
Working backwards: ;-)
There's a (famous) tale where a literary scholar was talking about what a story/poem meant and the Author of the work heard about it and said "That's not what it's about at all!" To which the scholar was insistent that the Author was wrong and that it was up to those skilled at analysis to determine what the work was about.
Whose side you take on that doesn't matter, the point is that a poem/any work of art is supposed to stimulate the reader/observer; there is no absolute answer to what it is supposed to achieve, a story about someone getting lost in the woods could quite correctly be a story about repressed homosexuality or growing up depending on the audience.
To say that there is a correct interpretation of a literary work is to me very wrong regardless of who is saying that be it the author or the scholar or the audience. Call it Quantum Interpretation
So I would say there is no thing the bible was meant to convey, some bits of the old testament are about "Fear the lord your god", some are "Love the Lord even though he is a bastard", the new testament goes schizophrenic again with the "Love the all forgiving god or burn for eternity". If you claim there was any message there in the bible other than white noise and "obey without question" then I'm reading a different book to you.
I'm not looking at it as a history text, I'm saying that if others are trying to treat it as a history text then there are rules that it has to follow. Part of those being that if someone tries to treat it as a source then they have to apply consistent non-relative interpretation to it. My point in the original post was that I suspect that they were being told via dogma not reason what parts of the white noise they should follow.
I'd ask a higher question: "What else are we going to do? What else is humanity for?"
The answer could be nothing at all, but in that case we need to pick a purpose for ourselves. The answer we pick could be to breed and spread ourselves as much as possible, but then the beetles have us beat there so we need another one how about the purpose we chose for humanity is "to produce art and understand the universe."
Okay I picked my answer myself there, but if not to breed as much as possible, then what answer to the point of life that you can come up with does not require the better understanding of the workings of the universe?
Previous generations have us the Mona-Lisa and Calculus and The Bohr model. Why shouldn't we pass on the results of the LHC?
I disagree, Quantum mechanics is not illogical, it is merely not like the world we experience. It is a model of the world that is not like the model that our brains have made for us.
I'm sure a Cow sees eating meat as illogical, I'm certain a dolphin can't conceive of the concept of fire. That a queen can't understand that if there is no bread why you just can't eat some cake.
Sure the sub atomic world is outside our experience but that doesn't mean that it is wrong, in fact i would argue that is far more right than the world you and I perceive.
I'd take another point of view.
I swear there were a few days when the maths of quantum mechanics made sense to me, for a short while I stopped trying to build a mental physical picture of how it worked and just followed the maths and it was wonderfully simple. You could see these equations describing the behaviour from which would emerge the world we see, it was quite amazing.
Then I passed that exam and promptly forgot it all.
The point being that from my experience there is no point trying to marry the macro world with the micro world, just like above the ocean is a totally different world from below it. It may all play be the same rules and there be no duality but to expect the model of the world that the human mind constructs for itself to work on all levels is like expecting my model car to work just like the real thing.
I just wish people would stop expecting the subatomic world to behave like they expect, it kind of reminds me of a fish denying the existence of fire.
2 points:
Is that what they were teaching(which is what i asked)? I have yet to find a preacher or religous studies teacher admitting the flaws in their source material that rely upon you the reader exercising your own judgement.
Where they will admit flaws they usually* say that you should then follow their interpretation and only their interpretation.
Now all that said I have come across religous scholars who would admit the flaws and preach interpretation as you and I seem to, but these were either Atheists themselves or they subscribed to a different religion.
But that's my experience I'm interested if others have a different experience of religous believers, not of those of us who try and understand them.
*actually always IME
"those patents are considered essential patents and thus Motorola is forced to license them at reasonable terms"
What is this concept of essential patents? The information i can find only applies to those made available to standards bodies, not sure how deactivating the touch sensor when next to a person's ear or data compression or any of the others mentioned in the article apply.
Please can you provide more information.
I understand that.
I doubt it is being taught as such though. If they were teaching it as "This is the documentation we have of the time. There are some good moral systems in here and some really bad ones too. The facts may be wrong, they may be right, we need to think about this and interpret it carefully using other sources as well." then I would have no problems.
Teaching it as "These bits (we'll tell you what they are) are fictional/plain wrong. Please ignore them/use them as a higher lesson. These bits are scripture (we'll tell you what they are), follow their orders in the way we tell you or you go to hell (a concept not actually in the book itself)" Then I have several issues. In some ways I respect the fundamentalists more than those who do the relativism we see a lot because at least the fundamentalists are consistent in their own way. Even if they're trying to be consistent with an inconsistent set of instructions.
You think that's weird an incident in my life from a few months ago: I have some good friends who are geneticists but very active Christians.
Some other friends who are almost evangelical in their beliefs but are an engineer and chemist. They were friends with my ex-girlfriend who after going out with me went from atheist to born again Christian (long story)
We were all together at a dinner party and were discussing this ex and they were disparaging of her for being a bit nuts for believing this rubbish, they were laughing at her for believing the Earth was created in 7 days, yet I know from previous conversations they themselves believe in the resurrection of Jesus and the Loaves miracle etc.
I pointed out to them at the time that "how can some miracles be plausible and some laughable, what's the difference between the loaves and fishes miracle and making the Earth in 7 days?" but all I got from that was a sharp look from my fiancée and the realisation that even people with PHDs believe whatever the hell they want to believe even if it doesn't make sense with the other things they believe. Of course at the same time they thought that creating the world in 7 days was stupid. Of course miracles can and do happen, just not a miracle that big.
I just wish i had learned that life lesson sooner that people believe some things that to me seem downright crazy, all you can do is try and occasionally point it out to them and move on.
I'm intrigued, how did they suggest you choose which should be taken as metaphors and as fact/instructions? Or did they indicate that all of the bible should be taken as a metaphor?
Well put yourself in our shoes.
You've got to remember an ATI chipset is not a standard, OpenGl is the standard, why shouldn't I be able to develop my own pipeline as long as it complies with the standard?
SDRAM is a standard, ARM's implementation of their controller might be targeted for their processor but not for the 3D pipeline you're building, so by building your own you can do better. Trust me an arm processor and 3D pipeline need very different things from an SDRAM controller. Why shouldn't I be able to make a better controller as long as it fits the memory standard and I provide drivers to allow the OS to use it.
Granted on things like the HDMI interface I'm never going to be able to open the driver source code to you because there are secrets in there I'm legally not allowed to give people (HDCP keys spring to mind).
Should I not be able to do those things? Is it really a better world where there is the one true architecture and no others are allowed?
Maybe it is, maybe Linux cannot cope with the things I want to do. Fine I know I'll branch the code, that's the great thing about OSS I can branch if I need to and do my own thing. But that's how the arm code started and then they tried to pull it back into the main stream. And the cycle starts again...
"I'm very surprised that Google would spend so much money on defensive patents for Android. Android can't be generating that much revenue, can it?"
I'm not sure that's the issue. I'd be more willing to bet it is more to do with perceived future control of the platform.
Imagine there was no android and that there were no PCs, everything done through tablets, mobile phones, set top boxes games consoles etc. Assume they are all sufficiently well integrated that it would work too. What platform do they run? Their own proprietary OS? Windows? iOS? Either way without android either Apple of Microsoft therefore controls the whole experience. With an open option like Android at least there is room for other to play.
Look at it this way in a future where 99% of people don't own a PC because their tablet/phone/set top box does everything from gaming to web browsing then where is there for Linux? Suddenly your phone comes with Microsoft Mail reader bundled, so you don't install the gmail app. So you use your hotmail address instead of your gmail. So you could go to OpenGames.org,to get a game or you could just look at the games that your Microsoft Apps Market offers you.
Own the Platform and own the Market.
So as Google you have to defend android to give yourself room to move, the best way to defend it is to buy it. /. article earlier today)
Google already did that, now what? Pour money into it to expand the platform, done that.
If they don't defend Android against patents then it could become an impossible platform to develop for because as Samsung and others are discovering developing for Android gets you sued. So you stop targeting android and sign up for the only other game in town Windows. You're now back to the picture I painted earlier of controlling the Platform to get rid of your competitors. Microsoft is very good at this but as has been discussed before it is almost impossible to make a truly open piece of Android hardware because mobile devices are so varied and by their nature have to be. (see
Right, because do you want to boot your router from ROM? Or your IP phone from flash attached over what will later be GPIO? or your Mobile phone from SDCARD. Your tablet an embedded SSD, your MP3 player from its flash chip over custom interface*, your set top box from its hard drive? What if you have one processor booting another, what if it needs to do a first stage loader from ROM and then grab the image over ethernet (using your own ethernet implementation of course). What if it's not ethernet but SPI?
So you come up with this Frankenstein of a common bios and it takes $2 worth of flash to store it in, well if your entire SOC only costs $2 then what do you do? Cut out the bits of the bios you don't need? Then you're back to square 1 of a custom bios.
PCs don't have this problem because they will always** have a keyboard, a mouse, a screen, RS232, a hard drive, a floppy drive, USB etc
* And of course you need a custom interface because the standard one the kernel supports bit-bangs the operation for maximum commonality, but that's not quick enough for your customer requirement. So you write a bit of hardware to do that for you. You could put in a compatibility mode but that will cost you 0.1c of silicon per chip an multiplied by the hundreds of thousands you plan to sell of this chip it soon adds up to be worthwhile.
** Yes yes I know, "Keyboard not found press F1 to continue", this is not true for servers and historically there was not always a hard drive never mind USB but you get the idea. An embedded device however has no concept of common requirements of hardware. Also while PC's have always been very cost sensitive very few PC historically sold were targeting a device cost of a few dollars so you have to cut something...
This like Linus is spoken by someone who cannot have done any ASIC/embedded development.
There are standard graphics pipelines but you will integrate them onto your SOC with direct access to your SDRAM. This removes any standard bus architecture. You may even write your own 3D pipeline.You will probably write your own SDRAM controller. You will add your own peripherals. Why do this rather than plug in standard components? Well if you just stick off the shelf stuff together then how is your product any different from your competitor? You can just build lego and there's nothing wrog with that, but if you are clever then you can get rid of inefficiencies in the system. that is engineering. No you are in business because (for example) you think you can make a better 3D pipeline than ATI, or perhaps you think you can come up with a better bus infrastructure than the ARM standard. Maybe you want to even customize the ARM processor itself? These are not pointless changes, they may be changes you don't understand but that does not make them pointless. Let me take an example I am allowed to talk about: is it better to do your 3D pipeline with a wide array of low clock speed processors that are shared with your imagining pipeline or to have different processor architectures for each function or pipelines hardcoded to the exact operation of each function? There is no good answer and a full spectrum of solution between each possibility. A low cost design will probably be better with shared general purpose hardware a high performance will be better with many tailored processors.
The whole point of ARM is that it is used in the embedded world. The whole point of the embedded world is that it is a (semi-)custom design for that application. Targeting Linux-arm for a router is a very different problem (in hardware terms) from a thermostat, to a games console to an e-reader to a mobile phone. A different problem requires a different solution. In a PC you just need to provide grunt, previous posters have mentioned PCI enumeration, and that's great, but in embedded you can't waste the time nor effort nor power nor hardware on this process because it is not _needed_ it'd be a lot easier to include it but you often have to remove it because of its cost. This is a world where your customer won't let you have even 5% left on the table for overhead, so burning silicon area and power in the name of commonality is a no-no (at least you have to do the trade-off between software effort and hardware cost).
Even if you limit the problem to mobile handsets why should I burn 60% more power* by using an off the shelf hardware video encoder in order to make things easy for Linus? Would you rather do a tricky software merge or have a mobile phone that has twice the battery life? Without the ability to tailor the hardware to the problem you will waste area and power and also limit innovation.
Let's face it, it would be easier to not have graphics card acceleration, or RAID accelerators or DMA engines or any form of CPU offload, but that's the world we live in.
Now I grant you that in the Linux situation making things cheaper by this kind of customisation makes things harder for the kernel developer, but that's the nature of the problem. If they don't want to play in that field then that's fine, the GPL lets you do that, but you have to be able to customize architectures to play in the embedded world it's that simple.
* I have pulled these numbers out of the air, I don't want to get into trouble for even trying to do anything near confidential.
I think if you look back I'm not sure we ever had big ideas at any time. Everything is small steps. Give me an example of something that was a genuine big idea that wasn't done without lots of small tiny increments.
Man on the moon: ever greater size rockets. Ever greater rockets, small steps of improvements over earlier ones. The original rocket, was built in someone's shed.
The first working airplane: built by a pair of bicycle builders in their spare time.
Telephone: preceded by speaking tubes, and microphones and speakers as separete developments.
The computer: need I spell it out?
They only seem like big massive ideas in retrospect. Look at Bell lab's transistor development, that wasn't a big idea just an interesting discovery that took years to get working reliably and in production. Same with fibre optics, the idea was had in the 60s, it took until the 80s/90s for the glass technology to catch up.
To me this sounds like the author of the article can't see the trees in the forest because of all the trees popping up all over the place.
The article states that "when silvery metal thorium is heated by an external source, it becomes so dense its molecules give off considerable heat".
Let me try and turn this into something that might make sense (BTW I believe this is BS, but benefit of the doubt and all that)
Heating a material up would normally reduce its density, but localised heating might cause stress lines that would cause areas of local increased density. Also a heated spot would expand to cause other areas around it to be compressed and therefore be at increased density. Let's therefore assume that localised heating can cause some areas to have increased density
We all know that plutonium based bombs can operate by rapidly bringing together spheres of plutonium to form a critical mass. A part of this is to have a local density of material sufficient to produce a self sustaining reaction. Therefore all you need is nuclear material sufficiently dense and it will fission.
Heating effects are very important in reactor design, the temperature co-efficient of a reactor is an important design consideration. Generally as the reactor gets hotter the cross section of the atoms increases so increasing the probability of neutron absorption so again the laser would help achieving fission in a controlled manner.
So yes without doing the maths I can see a mechanism whereby this would work, however given that this person is targeting cars rather than power plants to me implies BS. Either the power establishment has already tried this mechanism and it doesn't work, or the economies don't work (either in terms of dollar cost or energy cost). Anything else implies conspiracy theory, which I just don't buy when there's this much money to be made. If it truly is a new way to get thorium to fission then I would expect him to target both large scale power production and small scale car level power plants.
But if he can provide a demonstration then I'll reconsider; extraordinary claims simply require extraordinary evidence. If he's right then I'll be easily proved wrong.
Easy, because this is a complex issue. To over simplify:
Most people seem to have no problem with using all the technology at their disposal to catch these rioters. This includes CCTV, face recognition etc.
Next time there is a problem they can say "well we used this technology before." Then you get feature creep where they use it for every crime. Then they use it for suspicion of a crime. Next thing it's police principle to pull people over because the face recognition software thought they looked like someone who dropped a piece of litter three months back.
You might even argue this is acceptable, but the worry for me is how do I defend against the accusation? I have no evidence for my innocence except the CCTV that I have access to. It might be public CCTV cameras but if only the police have access then you can imagine a corrupt officer could frame trouble makers with relative ease. Or at least select amoungst the guilty to target his favourite pressure group.
You might be fine with all of this and say I'm worrying over nothing and I might be, but the only thing that would make me 100% comfortable with this is if the public CCTV cameras' records were publicly available so that we all could defend ourselves. more than that I'd want access to CCTV of the police investigating their case against me.
But I don't see any of that happening.
So do I have a problem with this at the moment? No. But as the old saying goes, first they came after the Jews, but I wasn't a Jew so did nothing; then they came after the gays, etc.. Then they came after me and there was no-one left. You have to stop these things before they get to the point whereby they come after you.
What has worried me about these riots if what happens if we in the UK ever had to violently overthrow a corrupt government? What happens if democracy stops working. If I understand the US, then the second amendment was partially intended to allow the citizens to get rid of a corrupt government; too many of these tools that are only in the hand of the government is a worrying scenario.
Actually one of the main use cases for this would be charging tablet computers. The tablet would have a single connector and negotiate to never supply power above that required for base peripherals. However it would negotiate to accept as much power as the peripheral will give it.
This would mean that you could plug your webcam into your tablet and it would power the webcam, but when you had the tablet plugged into your TV in your lounge then it would charge from the TV (whilst the tablet was providing the display for the TV).