I would guess that: * the US doesn't want to share all the details of shuttle technology. * In engineering there is no substitute for doing, you may think you know how something works, but until you build and fly it... * The shuttle design is antiquated, there are new materials, IT and functional developments that mean it makes sense to start again. * This ship has different requirements to the shuttle it is not trying to be a cargo ship, a space lab, a spy plane, no need for massive cross range, etc * By the logic of the shuttle works, why build a new design to do a similar thing; the 80386 processor works, why build an ARM processor? * Not invented here: on every level people would rather re-invent the wheel themselves because it is fun, cool, and theirs.
What 20-something (or under) can afford an extensive book collection? That doesn't mean they don't like books. I was in my late twenties before I started getting an extensive collection outside what I had been given in my teens as gifts. Why? Because I had more essential things to spend books on. (and to ask people to buy me as gifts). You know you're getting old when you start saying "Kids there days have no respect/education/values". My parents said the same about my generation as we are saying about the next generation. Nothing changes. We bemoan "kids these days" for not taking an interest in "real books" when I would bet that with really cheap e-books and access to constant information by the internet they read more and understand more than we did at their age. You can be sure these kids with their e-books will be bemoaning their children's generation for not being interested in proper reading by just having the whole works of tolken injected into their brain overnight. Yes they may be more read, (they'll argue)but it's not a real interest. How can we call ourselves geeks if we don't welcome the changes to society that new technology brings? This is what the classic sci-fi got wrong (like Azimov) failing to take into account how technology changes society, that's why it reads as dated now because of how technology changed society, and here we are complaining that more cheap access to literature isn't being appreciated by the kids and isn't right because they don't digest it and collect it in the same way we did as kids. Also I think you're comparing the average kid these days to yourself forgetting that you too were an exception. Very few of my peers at school read extensively. Most of my peers from University did read extensively.
I know how you think I have got it back to fron,t but i don't think i have. Consider you have a caveman type situation with an alpha male, all are pretty much equally suited to survive, but one can charm the women/outwit the alpha male to spend time with women/make the women feel more sexual pleasure. This would be a situation where evolution selects those who are more intellegent without any superiour survival skills like tool use, that then can come later once they have the brainpower to use/develop them. Yes if they lost survival skills to develop the brain then evolution may select against them as it would teeth that got too large or whatever...
Really? Why is this so strange? This reasoning is an idea I've been playing with for a while that man's large brain evolved not to use tools, but to attract the opposite sex. Larger brains meant you could please the opposite sex better in bed and flirting as part of courtship and seduction were all things that were encouraged by a group of beach/river apes that liked to live in caves where tight communities would have been inevitable. Prowess at sex would surely be a great evolutionary driver once you have basic survival down pat. Looking at how a gorilla or other ape society works yes there are alpha males but the females all show attraction to the other males who have time for them, a brain that means that there are other ways to have conflict and triumph over other is kind of seen in those ape societies.
Athough that does mean that humans are only the geeks of the animal kingdom by chance; which i think is a shame really, I kind of liked that idea i got from here: http://abstrusegoose.com/283 That it is being geeks that makes us human.
Here are some of my worst nightmares: Infecting other people with a terminal disease. Dying slowly watching yourself drag down those around you watching them get more and more miserable as you gradually decline and there's nothing you can do about it. Losing my mind slowly, waking up occasionally seeing how far I have fallen that brief moment of clarity of the state I have degraded to before knowing any second i will lose it again. Living daily in agony unable to move unable to speak tormented by pain and disease.
Which is why Dignitas is a not for profit company. Doctors can be said to make a living from helping people die, i have a friend who spent 3 years looking after the dying and could have been said to be making his living from the dying. he would not describe it as a pleasant situation and got out of there as soon as his medical career allowed. From watching the reactions on the film I believe it was not pleasant or done for profit by the (very small - I believe there was only one cameraman at the time) film crew & pTerry. I don't know how you could raise this very important subject in a more thoughtful, careful or more enlightening way.This is a discussion society needs to have occasionally and it needs to be an informed decision as a society and I can't think of a better way of doing it than this.
The documentary mentioned that the carter also allows the individual self determination and that the founder of dignitas had founded it and fought in the courts because he believed that the right to self determination guaranteed by the human rights charted included the right to determine for yourself to cease that life.
In the documentary pTerry mentioned that when he was a journalist he had come across a number of people who had attempted to commit suicide and got it wrong, he saw just how badly it could be if you tried it yourself and got it wrong. He said he would never be able to do that because of that. One of the other clients of dignitas on the program mentioned how because of his terminal disease he had tried to commit suicide twice and failed both times. He remarked on how surprisingly rugged the human body is at times. he took a months worth of sleeping pills at once and merely slept for 5 days. It is a surprisingly hard thing to do. People have jumped off buildings and survived, they've shot themselves and a bullet through the brain missed all the critical areas. They've tried to hang themselves and failed to snap the neck, they've slit their wrists and not bled out fast enough. They've driven into brick walls or off cliffs at high speed and survived. The list goes on. That's why you need assisted suicide to do it well. In the program they showed how you have to drink two things, one to settle the stomach so that when you drank the second one you didn't vomit it back up. They explained how you must drink it all quickly otherwise you might not take it all in and merely take a part of it into your system. Even with the best technology available it's a tricky thing.
No there's another potential reason. Granny could have a large inheritance and the kids could encourage her to top herself because they want the money. Any law allowing assisted suicide has to cope with the concept of relation coercion. It's not a good society where others can decide that someone has become a drain on society. By making it illegal to help someone commit suicide you are trying to regulate society to not get to the situation where people are encouraged to believe that their time is up. Much as I have thousands of problems with religion the sanctity of life is one of those things that I do agree with them on(mostly).*
The scary thing for this one though that was in the documentary was that the guy who died on film had motor neuron disease he chose to die when he knew his body was just about to go, because he was still in sound frame of mind. However he could wait until the disease had progressed far enough or even progressed too far and he had had enough. pTerry will have to decide to go while he is still sound of body and sound of mind otherwise he won't be allowed to. He will have to go knowing he could have weeks or months of good life yet but have to chose to go while he still can; if he leaves it too long then he is stuck. It's a scary situation. Seriously if you can watch this documentary do, I've never been so disturbed by watching a program or more supportive of assisted suicide than after watching it. *I do believe people have the right to take their own life and I believe that with modern technology there should be good ways available to the individual to do it. That said because of the preciousness of life it should be a hard thing to do. That said part of the sanctity of life is the absence of suffering both physically and mentally particularly with the strain you know/feel you may be putting on your carers.
I'm an ASIC engineer, rather not say the name of the company, however here is a name of companies that employ lots of people who do this: Intel, Marvel*, Qualcomm*, Broadcom*, Imagination Technologies*, Nortel, Synopsys, Cadence, Cisco, Xilinx. Look up the languages of Verilog and VHDL. Take a look at some of the projects on opencores.org. Some good starter stuff on http://www.fpga4fun.com/ too. Any company doing ASIC design will need lots of software engineers who can work with this parallel hardware too. I'd love to say more but I'd be breaking NDAs. Have a look at any of the companies I've marked with a * above and look at some of their chip architectures, many of them have dozens of different processors/hardware blocks all needing to run at the same time - and that's just the control software, the underlying hardware on every company mentioned above is written in wither vhdl or verilog and each chip is millions of lines of code producing parallel operation.
No we weren't talking about "the responsibility of the workers for the carnage" we were talking about how all industry is deadly, how on a wider perspective all human activity is risky and potentially deadly. Policemen and Nurses can kill either accidentally or intentionally as part of their job (A Nurse may administer a drug with the knowledge it has a 2% chance of killing the patient, but that's the risks of the business). Nuclear workers could be described as trying to clear up the mess of coal plants by generating electricity without co2 emissions, or the mess that solar panels make during their construction (lots of toxic chemicals used in silicon processing, if you could get safe enough nuclear then no need for that toxic energy intensive process), or the damage to wildlife that wind power makes. Current Nuclear workers are as responsible for the Fukushima woes as you are for the design of the car you drive. You try do use it as safely as you can and probably have ideas about how it could be improved, but if it suffes an accident caused by parameters well outside the design parameters (equivalent to your car not protecting you in the case of a truck rear ending you at high speed) then you don't jump to blaming the current operators you ask what are the prudent design changes we can make to mitigate that problem in future designs.
I would hope hardly any glue code is written, ideally anyway, but your comment that "We don't have that luxury for most of the code we write." made me think that you were saying that most of what you write is glue code. I guess I just don't get it because I am a hardware engineer and the code I write 99% of the time is inherently parallel because it is hardware, you have to go out of your way to serialise it. To me at the low level almost all algorithms are parallelizeable because thar's my job to implement algorithms in hardware. At a high level most things seem to be parallelizable because why can't you draw your window at the same time as downloading the jpegs at the same time as working out how you will render your table at the same time as playing your background music etc. Now I understand that it is quicker to write serial C code and most languages and frameworks are built around the C methodology so serial is the quick way to write things and that's what you do with the quick bits of glue code but I don't understand why you'd do that as the main part of the software architecture. Or am I wrong in assuming most code is architected before it is implemented?
Hate to reply to myself but: I meant to say that the daleks being used like the sonic as a writing tool, only instead of being used to let him through any door, to solve any problem, to magic the badness away being used to up the tension at any moment. No need to have a good idea just add Dalek for instant tension. Sorry, overused, doesn't work, come back when you have a good story.
i think a lot of this comes down to the quality of the writers not the tools at the disposal of the characters. A bad/mediocre writer will wave the magic wand to get past the problem the writer has put the character in. To create tension they'll have the magic wand not work. This is fine and an audience will put up with this provided the rest of the story is enough to keep them interested. A good writer won't need a sonic screwdriver or a deadlock seal, the traps and problems will be those of circumstance, character traits and morals. But like any tool they can be overused too, there's only so many times the lock of the doctor being a pacifist being opened by a companion sacrifice can be used; but we're back to the good vs bad writer stage again... So I've no problems with the Daleks being used a lot, used in every episode even as long as they are used well. That does seem to worry me about the new Dr Who that they're not being used because they have a good story but used like the sonic to up the tension and that just doesn't work long term.
So are we agreed then that it's not the absolute amount of radioactivity that matters it's the concentration of that material? Great we can now dispose of nuclear waste by burying it at sea and letting the water currents disperse the products into harmlessly low concentrations.
But it's not just the radioactive concentration we need to worry about, the elements themselves matter. It's the old idea that you don't need to worry as much about highly radioactive materials because they have short half lives and are soon safe. Likewise you don't have to worry about materials with long half lives because they're not very radioactive.
I realise this post comes across as slightly tongue in cheek, but I'm just trying to say that radioactivity, especially the dangers of being exposed to it are a complex subject and any attempt to simplify it to an either or issue will be flawed and fail in the eyes of the person you're trying to convince of your point of view. I just wish i understood why it seems to be such a polarizing topic that people seem to be either rabidly for or against. Yes burning coal releases a lot of radioactivity into the environment and in fact releases more seiverts than a properly functioning nuclear plant; but does it constitute a greater risk to human health (through its radioactivity). There's a growing body of evidence that exposure to radioactivity isn't a linear harm scale; that is your body appears to be able to repair itself from moderate exposure to radioactivity so in fact the coal plants could be doing zero harm through the radioactivity they release because the human body can repair the low damage.Shutting up now before I preach to the choir...
Right, just like cyanide that hydrochloric acid that are used in many chemical processes are highly dangerous. Like cars are dangerous and working at heights is highly dangerous. Or mining or working as a nurse or policeman is dangerous. Just because something is potentially dangerous does not mean that that something is not possible to tame nor that it is not worthwhile.
I have often wondered why we can't treat CPU cores like we treat memory. Always assume there will be enough* and if there isn't then have things like the time sharing algorithms to make up the slack like we have virtual memory algorithms. As opposed to the moment where the entire mindset is one or at best a few processes. It's as if we're back in the says of a few KB of memory but we've somehow managed to implement GUIs and abstracted many layed software because we've got a really good at running the virtual memory...
*ok I'd be worried at a programmer who assumed there would always be enough memory to solve any problem and implement any algorithm no matter how sloppy, but you get my drift.
"Manufacturing plants are expensive to build. It makes sense for an engineer to spend weeks or even months optimizing the process. We don't have that luxury for most of the code we write." Really, code should be reusable. Code should be modular. Code should be written to be maintained and with the assumption that it will be in use for decades. At least that's good code. I admit that there's always glue code, shall we call it mortar code that may be written quickly and thrown away, but for the guts/bricks of the code why not write it well? What kind of code do you write that you expect it all to be temporary?
"The 10 or 20 kilometers that you can save by using this kind of design is really a small fraction of the distance to cross" Distance isn't the problem for getting to orbit, velocity is. By running as a plane you don't have to burn thrust to support the weight of the craft and fuel, you can accelerate up to Mach 5 (as they plan to) using the atmosphere to support you. That's a truly massive gain, for reference the first stage of the Saturn V got you up to just over mach 6. Now I don't know what percentage of their fuel they burn to get to that speed but to not have to support that weight with thrust for such a long period is a huge gain. Remembering as well that during this phase they are air breathing too which is another massive gain. Fine you say mach 5 is 1/5th of the way to mach 25. so at best they've saved 20%, better but still not amazing. Not quite because you get a weird multiplier effect, because (when you are at say mach 5) you have accelerated the fuel you carry to mach 5 so it effectively has more energy that when it was at rest on the ground. If you run the numbers for a multistage rocker you'll find that they can't reach orbit unless you take this effect into account. Trying to find a good source for this, will hopefully reply to this later with said source...
You've missed the point, or maybe I have but... Let me take an example I already own rufty.org.uk. This is registered on the main dns server. If a p2p dns was setup tomorrow almost everyone would have that entry in their records. But some joker decides he wants that address, so he changes his dns entry for that to point to his server and instructs his dns server to share that with the rest of the network. Those who trust his dns server go to his address. Those who trust the old records go to mine. Fine, you may decide this is desirable in some situations, but if i visit www.mybank.com how do I know it is my bank? I have to trust verisign, fine then you've just replaced dns with verisign. Fine you'll always have that problem but how do you build the web of trust that you need. In the final implementation it would probably end up that I trust who installed the software on my computer trusts plus any specific additions needed along the way for specific sites (such as wikileaks). Or if I built the computer myself I trust who built the last computer/whoever edited mozilla's web of trust last. Maybe you'd have something like wikipedia (wikitrust?) following a similar notion, but fundamentally that leaves you as a user either building your own map of the internet yourself (in which case why have dns at all) or having a single regulated address space. In which case why go p2p.
While I like the idea in general that you lay out I think it smacks of an "If only everyone followed the rules then the world would be a better place." I think it's biggest flaw is the idea that those people who maintain the 3.3.3.3 in your example will exist. While I believe in the adage that the best way to get something done is to tell an engineer that it can't be done, I believe that in the real world while you might start out with many trustworthy and trusted sources then simple human nature will cause fragmentation amoungst them, partially due to personal interest, partly to malice, but mostly due to laziness, after all "the distributed system works, i don't have time to patch on the latest updates I need to get $other_project working" When the proverbial really does hit the fan the redundancy designed into the system just isn't there because it has been partially engineered out in the interest of cost saving, and partially in the lament of laziness. We've seen this before in intranet infrastructure that there are a few scary bottlenecks in the physical infrastructure and while database contents may not have a direct cost associated with them I fear the complexity of such a distributed system would be beyond human comprehension.(While at least with physical infrastructure it is possible to partition the problem.) If you can make it work then great, but it sounds to me like the arguments for anarchy in any form, they sound great provided most people play by the rules, in real life it often seems that people try and game the system. It seems like some people don't like other people to have anything nice so the fundamental state of the world has to be one of brokenness. Sorry for wandering off topic a bit there but I really don't see how this p2p dns could stand up to abuse. You only have to look at the number of idiots posting goatse links to see that script kiddies could easily flood the system with rubbish. Fine you say, you don't trust those flooded sources, but how is trust built up in the first place on dns? By conforming to the original standard? How are new domains introduced? (If I want to introduce a new domain I may get it out to all the people I trust but I don't know everyone that everyone trusts, so like you have domain squatters and patenet trolls now you could imagine someone who waits to see a new domain being registered and propogates it to several highly trusted dns servers and therefore steals the trust for that address for most of the web from you unless you pay a fee) In any system I can think of you could imagine a boycott of $multinational meaning that they have no recognisable place on the web and while that might be an effective method of protest I don't think it would be fair or desirable.
I'd rather fight this government problem at the law maker level that at the technology level because it doesn't matter what technology you use to protect yourself or the architecture they'll make it illegal and throw you in jail, or force you to follow their rules for use of that technology thus negating the protection you gain from it.
The problem is fundamentally how do you have a a single coherent addressing scheme without a central authority to enforce it? If you have a single authority then that will always be open to attack/enforcement by governments. If you have no authorities then that's as bad as no addressing scheme. Even worse is you have multiple authorities all competing for the smae address space then you have arguments over who claims an address first.
Now one might argue that in the days of google and other effective search engines why bother with dns at all. Which may be a valid question, after all dns is only a convenience not a necessity. (Actually that's not quite true, you want a level of abstraction between an service - e.g. wikipedia - and the server's address.) Maybe the anarchists approach would be to give up on dns as such and just rely on url shortening services...
Isn't that what you need to achieve: angry rants get modded down. Well thought out considered position that the other person disagrees with however should be modded up.
You missed the part where this is done by the national trust. An organisation that exists to give the average person access to national treasures such as stately homes and great countryside that would otherwise be inaccessible to the average joe. It's well within their remit of opening up the countryside to the people to do a project such as this to get people involved in farming. It's not about making money or being successful in any real measurable way as long as people are interested and involved. The money for the NT comes from people having subscriptions (I pay about £70 a year for my partner and myself), tickets to go to the attractions and donations (Often people leave things in their will to the NT, many of the properties the NT runs were left to the NT in wills because they wanted to public to enjoy it and/or there was no family money left to carry on running the property. To my knowledge no government money goes to the NT, and this project will be funded entirely by the subscribers to the project so it's their money to do with as they please. I really don't see the problem
Slashdot Mirror
I would guess that:
* the US doesn't want to share all the details of shuttle technology.
* In engineering there is no substitute for doing, you may think you know how something works, but until you build and fly it...
* The shuttle design is antiquated, there are new materials, IT and functional developments that mean it makes sense to start again.
* This ship has different requirements to the shuttle it is not trying to be a cargo ship, a space lab, a spy plane, no need for massive cross range, etc
* By the logic of the shuttle works, why build a new design to do a similar thing; the 80386 processor works, why build an ARM processor?
* Not invented here: on every level people would rather re-invent the wheel themselves because it is fun, cool, and theirs.
Should I go on?
What 20-something (or under) can afford an extensive book collection? That doesn't mean they don't like books. I was in my late twenties before I started getting an extensive collection outside what I had been given in my teens as gifts. Why? Because I had more essential things to spend books on. (and to ask people to buy me as gifts).
You know you're getting old when you start saying "Kids there days have no respect/education/values". My parents said the same about my generation as we are saying about the next generation. Nothing changes.
We bemoan "kids these days" for not taking an interest in "real books" when I would bet that with really cheap e-books and access to constant information by the internet they read more and understand more than we did at their age. You can be sure these kids with their e-books will be bemoaning their children's generation for not being interested in proper reading by just having the whole works of tolken injected into their brain overnight. Yes they may be more read, (they'll argue)but it's not a real interest.
How can we call ourselves geeks if we don't welcome the changes to society that new technology brings? This is what the classic sci-fi got wrong (like Azimov) failing to take into account how technology changes society, that's why it reads as dated now because of how technology changed society, and here we are complaining that more cheap access to literature isn't being appreciated by the kids and isn't right because they don't digest it and collect it in the same way we did as kids.
Also I think you're comparing the average kid these days to yourself forgetting that you too were an exception. Very few of my peers at school read extensively. Most of my peers from University did read extensively.
I know how you think I have got it back to fron,t but i don't think i have.
Consider you have a caveman type situation with an alpha male, all are pretty much equally suited to survive, but one can charm the women/outwit the alpha male to spend time with women/make the women feel more sexual pleasure. This would be a situation where evolution selects those who are more intellegent without any superiour survival skills like tool use, that then can come later once they have the brainpower to use/develop them.
Yes if they lost survival skills to develop the brain then evolution may select against them as it would teeth that got too large or whatever...
Really? Why is this so strange? This reasoning is an idea I've been playing with for a while that man's large brain evolved not to use tools, but to attract the opposite sex. Larger brains meant you could please the opposite sex better in bed and flirting as part of courtship and seduction were all things that were encouraged by a group of beach/river apes that liked to live in caves where tight communities would have been inevitable. Prowess at sex would surely be a great evolutionary driver once you have basic survival down pat. Looking at how a gorilla or other ape society works yes there are alpha males but the females all show attraction to the other males who have time for them, a brain that means that there are other ways to have conflict and triumph over other is kind of seen in those ape societies.
Athough that does mean that humans are only the geeks of the animal kingdom by chance; which i think is a shame really, I kind of liked that idea i got from here:
http://abstrusegoose.com/283
That it is being geeks that makes us human.
Here are some of my worst nightmares:
Infecting other people with a terminal disease.
Dying slowly watching yourself drag down those around you watching them get more and more miserable as you gradually decline and there's nothing you can do about it.
Losing my mind slowly, waking up occasionally seeing how far I have fallen that brief moment of clarity of the state I have degraded to before knowing any second i will lose it again.
Living daily in agony unable to move unable to speak tormented by pain and disease.
There are many worse things than a quick death.
Which is why Dignitas is a not for profit company.
Doctors can be said to make a living from helping people die, i have a friend who spent 3 years looking after the dying and could have been said to be making his living from the dying. he would not describe it as a pleasant situation and got out of there as soon as his medical career allowed.
From watching the reactions on the film I believe it was not pleasant or done for profit by the (very small - I believe there was only one cameraman at the time) film crew & pTerry. I don't know how you could raise this very important subject in a more thoughtful, careful or more enlightening way.This is a discussion society needs to have occasionally and it needs to be an informed decision as a society and I can't think of a better way of doing it than this.
The documentary mentioned that the carter also allows the individual self determination and that the founder of dignitas had founded it and fought in the courts because he believed that the right to self determination guaranteed by the human rights charted included the right to determine for yourself to cease that life.
In the documentary pTerry mentioned that when he was a journalist he had come across a number of people who had attempted to commit suicide and got it wrong, he saw just how badly it could be if you tried it yourself and got it wrong. He said he would never be able to do that because of that.
One of the other clients of dignitas on the program mentioned how because of his terminal disease he had tried to commit suicide twice and failed both times. He remarked on how surprisingly rugged the human body is at times. he took a months worth of sleeping pills at once and merely slept for 5 days.
It is a surprisingly hard thing to do. People have jumped off buildings and survived, they've shot themselves and a bullet through the brain missed all the critical areas. They've tried to hang themselves and failed to snap the neck, they've slit their wrists and not bled out fast enough. They've driven into brick walls or off cliffs at high speed and survived. The list goes on. That's why you need assisted suicide to do it well.
In the program they showed how you have to drink two things, one to settle the stomach so that when you drank the second one you didn't vomit it back up. They explained how you must drink it all quickly otherwise you might not take it all in and merely take a part of it into your system. Even with the best technology available it's a tricky thing.
No there's another potential reason.
Granny could have a large inheritance and the kids could encourage her to top herself because they want the money. Any law allowing assisted suicide has to cope with the concept of relation coercion. It's not a good society where others can decide that someone has become a drain on society. By making it illegal to help someone commit suicide you are trying to regulate society to not get to the situation where people are encouraged to believe that their time is up. Much as I have thousands of problems with religion the sanctity of life is one of those things that I do agree with them on(mostly).*
The scary thing for this one though that was in the documentary was that the guy who died on film had motor neuron disease he chose to die when he knew his body was just about to go, because he was still in sound frame of mind. However he could wait until the disease had progressed far enough or even progressed too far and he had had enough. pTerry will have to decide to go while he is still sound of body and sound of mind otherwise he won't be allowed to. He will have to go knowing he could have weeks or months of good life yet but have to chose to go while he still can; if he leaves it too long then he is stuck.
It's a scary situation. Seriously if you can watch this documentary do, I've never been so disturbed by watching a program or more supportive of assisted suicide than after watching it.
*I do believe people have the right to take their own life and I believe that with modern technology there should be good ways available to the individual to do it. That said because of the preciousness of life it should be a hard thing to do. That said part of the sanctity of life is the absence of suffering both physically and mentally particularly with the strain you know/feel you may be putting on your carers.
I'm an ASIC engineer, rather not say the name of the company, however here is a name of companies that employ lots of people who do this:
Intel, Marvel*, Qualcomm*, Broadcom*, Imagination Technologies*, Nortel, Synopsys, Cadence, Cisco, Xilinx. Look up the languages of Verilog and VHDL. Take a look at some of the projects on opencores.org. Some good starter stuff on http://www.fpga4fun.com/ too.
Any company doing ASIC design will need lots of software engineers who can work with this parallel hardware too. I'd love to say more but I'd be breaking NDAs. Have a look at any of the companies I've marked with a * above and look at some of their chip architectures, many of them have dozens of different processors/hardware blocks all needing to run at the same time - and that's just the control software, the underlying hardware on every company mentioned above is written in wither vhdl or verilog and each chip is millions of lines of code producing parallel operation.
No we weren't talking about "the responsibility of the workers for the carnage" we were talking about how all industry is deadly, how on a wider perspective all human activity is risky and potentially deadly. Policemen and Nurses can kill either accidentally or intentionally as part of their job (A Nurse may administer a drug with the knowledge it has a 2% chance of killing the patient, but that's the risks of the business).
Nuclear workers could be described as trying to clear up the mess of coal plants by generating electricity without co2 emissions, or the mess that solar panels make during their construction (lots of toxic chemicals used in silicon processing, if you could get safe enough nuclear then no need for that toxic energy intensive process), or the damage to wildlife that wind power makes.
Current Nuclear workers are as responsible for the Fukushima woes as you are for the design of the car you drive. You try do use it as safely as you can and probably have ideas about how it could be improved, but if it suffes an accident caused by parameters well outside the design parameters (equivalent to your car not protecting you in the case of a truck rear ending you at high speed) then you don't jump to blaming the current operators you ask what are the prudent design changes we can make to mitigate that problem in future designs.
I would hope hardly any glue code is written, ideally anyway, but your comment that "We don't have that luxury for most of the code we write." made me think that you were saying that most of what you write is glue code.
I guess I just don't get it because I am a hardware engineer and the code I write 99% of the time is inherently parallel because it is hardware, you have to go out of your way to serialise it. To me at the low level almost all algorithms are parallelizeable because thar's my job to implement algorithms in hardware. At a high level most things seem to be parallelizable because why can't you draw your window at the same time as downloading the jpegs at the same time as working out how you will render your table at the same time as playing your background music etc.
Now I understand that it is quicker to write serial C code and most languages and frameworks are built around the C methodology so serial is the quick way to write things and that's what you do with the quick bits of glue code but I don't understand why you'd do that as the main part of the software architecture. Or am I wrong in assuming most code is architected before it is implemented?
Hate to reply to myself but:
I meant to say that the daleks being used like the sonic as a writing tool, only instead of being used to let him through any door, to solve any problem, to magic the badness away being used to up the tension at any moment. No need to have a good idea just add Dalek for instant tension. Sorry, overused, doesn't work, come back when you have a good story.
i think a lot of this comes down to the quality of the writers not the tools at the disposal of the characters. A bad/mediocre writer will wave the magic wand to get past the problem the writer has put the character in. To create tension they'll have the magic wand not work. This is fine and an audience will put up with this provided the rest of the story is enough to keep them interested.
A good writer won't need a sonic screwdriver or a deadlock seal, the traps and problems will be those of circumstance, character traits and morals. But like any tool they can be overused too, there's only so many times the lock of the doctor being a pacifist being opened by a companion sacrifice can be used; but we're back to the good vs bad writer stage again...
So I've no problems with the Daleks being used a lot, used in every episode even as long as they are used well. That does seem to worry me about the new Dr Who that they're not being used because they have a good story but used like the sonic to up the tension and that just doesn't work long term.
So are we agreed then that it's not the absolute amount of radioactivity that matters it's the concentration of that material?
Great we can now dispose of nuclear waste by burying it at sea and letting the water currents disperse the products into harmlessly low concentrations.
But it's not just the radioactive concentration we need to worry about, the elements themselves matter. It's the old idea that you don't need to worry as much about highly radioactive materials because they have short half lives and are soon safe. Likewise you don't have to worry about materials with long half lives because they're not very radioactive.
I realise this post comes across as slightly tongue in cheek, but I'm just trying to say that radioactivity, especially the dangers of being exposed to it are a complex subject and any attempt to simplify it to an either or issue will be flawed and fail in the eyes of the person you're trying to convince of your point of view.
I just wish i understood why it seems to be such a polarizing topic that people seem to be either rabidly for or against.
Yes burning coal releases a lot of radioactivity into the environment and in fact releases more seiverts than a properly functioning nuclear plant; but does it constitute a greater risk to human health (through its radioactivity). There's a growing body of evidence that exposure to radioactivity isn't a linear harm scale; that is your body appears to be able to repair itself from moderate exposure to radioactivity so in fact the coal plants could be doing zero harm through the radioactivity they release because the human body can repair the low damage.Shutting up now before I preach to the choir...
Right, just like cyanide that hydrochloric acid that are used in many chemical processes are highly dangerous. Like cars are dangerous and working at heights is highly dangerous. Or mining or working as a nurse or policeman is dangerous.
Just because something is potentially dangerous does not mean that that something is not possible to tame nor that it is not worthwhile.
I have often wondered why we can't treat CPU cores like we treat memory. Always assume there will be enough* and if there isn't then have things like the time sharing algorithms to make up the slack like we have virtual memory algorithms. As opposed to the moment where the entire mindset is one or at best a few processes. It's as if we're back in the says of a few KB of memory but we've somehow managed to implement GUIs and abstracted many layed software because we've got a really good at running the virtual memory...
*ok I'd be worried at a programmer who assumed there would always be enough memory to solve any problem and implement any algorithm no matter how sloppy, but you get my drift.
"Manufacturing plants are expensive to build. It makes sense for an engineer to spend weeks or even months optimizing the process. We don't have that luxury for most of the code we write."
Really, code should be reusable. Code should be modular. Code should be written to be maintained and with the assumption that it will be in use for decades. At least that's good code.
I admit that there's always glue code, shall we call it mortar code that may be written quickly and thrown away, but for the guts/bricks of the code why not write it well?
What kind of code do you write that you expect it all to be temporary?
Nope i appear to be wrong about that last point or at least can't find any sources.
Sorry.
"The 10 or 20 kilometers that you can save by using this kind of design is really a small fraction of the distance to cross"
Distance isn't the problem for getting to orbit, velocity is.
By running as a plane you don't have to burn thrust to support the weight of the craft and fuel, you can accelerate up to Mach 5 (as they plan to) using the atmosphere to support you. That's a truly massive gain, for reference the first stage of the Saturn V got you up to just over mach 6. Now I don't know what percentage of their fuel they burn to get to that speed but to not have to support that weight with thrust for such a long period is a huge gain. Remembering as well that during this phase they are air breathing too which is another massive gain.
Fine you say mach 5 is 1/5th of the way to mach 25. so at best they've saved 20%, better but still not amazing.
Not quite because you get a weird multiplier effect, because (when you are at say mach 5) you have accelerated the fuel you carry to mach 5 so it effectively has more energy that when it was at rest on the ground. If you run the numbers for a multistage rocker you'll find that they can't reach orbit unless you take this effect into account. Trying to find a good source for this, will hopefully reply to this later with said source...
You've missed the point, or maybe I have but...
Let me take an example I already own rufty.org.uk. This is registered on the main dns server. If a p2p dns was setup tomorrow almost everyone would have that entry in their records.
But some joker decides he wants that address, so he changes his dns entry for that to point to his server and instructs his dns server to share that with the rest of the network. Those who trust his dns server go to his address. Those who trust the old records go to mine.
Fine, you may decide this is desirable in some situations, but if i visit www.mybank.com how do I know it is my bank? I have to trust verisign, fine then you've just replaced dns with verisign. Fine you'll always have that problem but how do you build the web of trust that you need. In the final implementation it would probably end up that I trust who installed the software on my computer trusts plus any specific additions needed along the way for specific sites (such as wikileaks). Or if I built the computer myself I trust who built the last computer/whoever edited mozilla's web of trust last.
Maybe you'd have something like wikipedia (wikitrust?) following a similar notion, but fundamentally that leaves you as a user either building your own map of the internet yourself (in which case why have dns at all) or having a single regulated address space. In which case why go p2p.
While I like the idea in general that you lay out I think it smacks of an "If only everyone followed the rules then the world would be a better place."
I think it's biggest flaw is the idea that those people who maintain the 3.3.3.3 in your example will exist. While I believe in the adage that the best way to get something done is to tell an engineer that it can't be done, I believe that in the real world while you might start out with many trustworthy and trusted sources then simple human nature will cause fragmentation amoungst them, partially due to personal interest, partly to malice, but mostly due to laziness, after all "the distributed system works, i don't have time to patch on the latest updates I need to get $other_project working" When the proverbial really does hit the fan the redundancy designed into the system just isn't there because it has been partially engineered out in the interest of cost saving, and partially in the lament of laziness.
We've seen this before in intranet infrastructure that there are a few scary bottlenecks in the physical infrastructure and while database contents may not have a direct cost associated with them I fear the complexity of such a distributed system would be beyond human comprehension.(While at least with physical infrastructure it is possible to partition the problem.)
If you can make it work then great, but it sounds to me like the arguments for anarchy in any form, they sound great provided most people play by the rules, in real life it often seems that people try and game the system. It seems like some people don't like other people to have anything nice so the fundamental state of the world has to be one of brokenness.
Sorry for wandering off topic a bit there but I really don't see how this p2p dns could stand up to abuse. You only have to look at the number of idiots posting goatse links to see that script kiddies could easily flood the system with rubbish. Fine you say, you don't trust those flooded sources, but how is trust built up in the first place on dns? By conforming to the original standard? How are new domains introduced? (If I want to introduce a new domain I may get it out to all the people I trust but I don't know everyone that everyone trusts, so like you have domain squatters and patenet trolls now you could imagine someone who waits to see a new domain being registered and propogates it to several highly trusted dns servers and therefore steals the trust for that address for most of the web from you unless you pay a fee)
In any system I can think of you could imagine a boycott of $multinational meaning that they have no recognisable place on the web and while that might be an effective method of protest I don't think it would be fair or desirable.
I'd rather fight this government problem at the law maker level that at the technology level because it doesn't matter what technology you use to protect yourself or the architecture they'll make it illegal and throw you in jail, or force you to follow their rules for use of that technology thus negating the protection you gain from it.
The problem is fundamentally how do you have a a single coherent addressing scheme without a central authority to enforce it?
If you have a single authority then that will always be open to attack/enforcement by governments. If you have no authorities then that's as bad as no addressing scheme. Even worse is you have multiple authorities all competing for the smae address space then you have arguments over who claims an address first.
Now one might argue that in the days of google and other effective search engines why bother with dns at all. Which may be a valid question, after all dns is only a convenience not a necessity. (Actually that's not quite true, you want a level of abstraction between an service - e.g. wikipedia - and the server's address.) Maybe the anarchists approach would be to give up on dns as such and just rely on url shortening services...
Isn't that what you need to achieve: angry rants get modded down.
Well thought out considered position that the other person disagrees with however should be modded up.
You missed the part where this is done by the national trust. An organisation that exists to give the average person access to national treasures such as stately homes and great countryside that would otherwise be inaccessible to the average joe. It's well within their remit of opening up the countryside to the people to do a project such as this to get people involved in farming. It's not about making money or being successful in any real measurable way as long as people are interested and involved.
The money for the NT comes from people having subscriptions (I pay about £70 a year for my partner and myself), tickets to go to the attractions and donations (Often people leave things in their will to the NT, many of the properties the NT runs were left to the NT in wills because they wanted to public to enjoy it and/or there was no family money left to carry on running the property. To my knowledge no government money goes to the NT, and this project will be funded entirely by the subscribers to the project so it's their money to do with as they please. I really don't see the problem