This reminds me of a joke that I think was in the movie "Colors" - A young bull and an old bull crest the top of a hill and see a valley of cows grazing below them. The young bull says to the other, "let's run down there and fuck one of them cows!" The old bull replies, "no... let's walk down there and fuck them all."
This very simple concept to me perfectly illustrates the situation: At the most basic level, males bond nearly without emotion and certainly without empathy for the females. Females group together for protection in the wild, sensitive to one another's needs. Males have no intention for friendship or relationships with the females and desire only to spread their seed. They are distinctly separate social groups with polar opposite perceptions of the world.
We (humanity) are not programmed for signals, responsiveness, reciprocation or charm. Take it all the way back to cave dwellers - it's survival of the fittest: males impregnate as often and widely as possible, and females do their best to attract the most capable male to them.
I don't think it's any more women's fault that they don't communicate clearly than it is men's fault that they don't understand: men and women weren't designed to be friends; it's society's fault for brain washing us all into thinking that is the case. Now men want to train women to think like them, and women want to train men conversely. It will never work. Ever. The battle of the sexes is doomed to eternal conflict.
As an aside, if you ever find yourself wondering why the younger generations seem to be a directionless, lazy mob - maybe it's because we have confused the crap out them trying to reprogram their basic instincts into being more appreciative, sensitive, caring, emotive, respectful, and yadda, yadda - new-fangled, confusing ideas that conflict with, if not "instinct", their basic behavioral programming.
Curious, if anyone here knows, is "air" the only possible/practical working fluid for something like this? Could it be immersed in some sort of liquid solution to produce a similar "flow" effect without the need for a pump to use liquid cooling, or stray Ozone?
@3 - Negative; that gets the class name, not the instance of the parent object itself.
@1 - Okay; there is a solution to pull upload progress into PHP, but it's written in C to extend PHP's access. I've done the same thing with Perl - and Perl doesn't need extensions to do the job. The point was that Perl has better overall lower level system access than PHP even though both are third layer high level scripting languages. Being able to do what you need without installing custom extensions, restarting Apache, etc. has a much higher chance of successful deployment in, for example, shared hosting environments.
Not that I'm walking away from PHP - I have so much reusable code in PHP that is in good working order that I put nearly everything I can in PHP to leverage those existing assets.
I don't disagree with your statements, but... I get the sense that PHP is popular in the Internet start-up world because it's fast to prototype in and easier on the brain than other options. Most start-ups, from what I have seen, are interested in one thing: fast time to market, damn the consequences of not planning for scalability, porting, etc. I think they figure those are bridges they can cross IF they ever come to them.
I have built applications in Java, XSL/T, PHP, Perl, C, and countless other languages for numerous start-up companies and, no matter what my word of caution in terms of future planning, 9 times out of 10, the boss is insistent on a minimally functional proof-of-concept that gets migrated to the production environment without any further consideration. They don't care because it doesn't translate to revenue right now which is crucial for a business operating on angel funding.
As someone who has spent about 10 hours a day for the last 4 years coding predominantly MySQL-backed PHP-based content management systems, I concur: most things PHP works just fine for. That includes shell scripting automation processes, communication middle-ware, commerce, front ends, data conversions, image and video generation and manipulation, and some pretty good mathematical computations. There are a couple things that I have found it lacking in however:
1) Some of the magical pre-processing that occurs prior to PHP script execution prevents you from doing certain things such as doing the work for uploading files through a browser to the server; with PHP alone, you cannot intercept a file upload without PHP first spooling the file off to disk. I use Perl for this instead which allows me to abort uploads in progress as well as provide an upload progress measurement system.
2) Fatal errors cannot be redirected through a graceful handler and shutdown process. This, to me, is retarded, and has recently bitten me on an application that tests and loads third party modules which may have fatal errors even though they pass syntax checking.
3) OOP is still pretty weak. There have been improvements, but it's still incomplete. I don't like, for example, not being able to navigate a pointer tree through parent identifiers which is something that can be done in just about any other high level language. I can fake it in my own app by deriving all my objects from a base class that gets a pointer to its parent in the constructor, but it's not a capability that's intrinsic to the language.
Those are just a few samples, but I'm sure I could come up with more if pressed. If it weren't for the widespread availability of PHP-capable programmers and open source code development in PHP today and I were tempted to choose an alternative, I'd probably fall back to Perl - an oldie, but goody that never let me down.
You're describing a net loss in the system. You're correct, I understand that, but I see it as their idea of "the cost of clean air", rather than that "they just don't get it".
There's some criticism as to the notion that hydrogen could be created right on board a moving vehicle represents perpetual motion. It doesn't. Those critics are just jumping to conclusions. The implication is that the coating supposedly improves electrolysis efficiency to such a degree that hydrogen could be created with a small enough on-board system on-demand. With today's elecrolyzers, to make enough hydrogen on-demand to run a vehicle, the hydrogen generation gear would be bigger than the vehicle, so efficiency improvement translates to size reduction which makes this approach plausible. The PEM fuel cell went through similar size reduction before it was ready for passenger vehicle use. Anyway, it means you would have to have a power supply such as a rechargeable battery to run the electrolyzer on. I did not take from the story that they were claiming a system where: 1) water + power in, 2)hydrogen out, 3) hydrogen in, 4) power out, repeat for a water-fueled system. It needs power.
Now, why would you want to do this instead of simply use the battery for electric drive? Well, one could make the argument that converting standard hyrdocarbon fuels from the pump to hydrogen ON the vehicle eliminates the need for fueling infrastructure change which is a MAJOR barrier to the widespread adoption of a "hydrogen economy". With hydrogen on the vehicle it could be used to power a fuel cell for electric drive or some other combustion engine such as BMW's multi-fuel hydrogen car. "Just add power" (solar? plug-in? other?) and if it's all done just right, what you get is more efficient fuel combustion with lower emissions than you would have gotten from burning the gasoline straight. That model I think could be viewed as a "stepping stone" towards conversion much like today's hybrid cars are regarded as a stepping stone towards all electric.
I never got onto the whole AOL thing when it first came out because it had a lot of proprietary crap that broke from established standards, so I don't have any direct experience with their original interface. But I seem to remember something about a child safe online environment being one of their schticks originally, was it not? If so, does that still hold true today?
In the big picture, dying is consequential - it can cause you to lose the game.
I hear you - In the grand scheme, someone who loses the game could become frustrated, arm himself, and go Columbine on his school mates. At first glance that looks a lot like there really are significant consequences attached to losing the game. But if you tear down cause and effect in this example, losing the game is not a direct cause for the effect of dead school mates. Rather it is an intermediate catalyst for a pre-existing cause, that being mental instability. The cause of mental instability results in the effect of dead school mates.
I assert that if to "lose the game" directly bears no tangible effect and is limited only to emotional responses that there are no direct consequences for dying in a game.
it seems to me that the psyche knows the difference between phases of a video game and actually facing mortality. I find it hard to believe that "video game death" can in any way be related to real world psychological patterns surrounding death - for one, there are actually no consequences in the video game world, thus no real fear nor moral struggle.
Kids that age need to know their phone number for their own safety/security anyway, so having to remember it to use the computer is just one more incentive...
Robotics should be focused on super-human activity. If it's interaction they're looking for, posting your typical minimum wage earner next to your directory is still more effective than a robot. Example inspired by true events:
"Are you lost?"
"no."
"I'm sorry, did you say YES, or NO?"
"NO!"
"My mistake - are you LOST?"
"@#*!&@#"
"I'm sorry, did you say YES, or NO?"
Robots that answer the phone tick me off and I'll say anything I can to confuse them and reach a human (to whom I have to invariably repeat all the information anyway). Robots that care for the elderly are twisted sign of social decay. Robots that ask you if you are lost are just, plain... wrong. How long is it before such robots are watching your body language to determine if you have intentions to commit a crime?
Thanks for that - I've seen a number of articles in recent months about various genetically modified "glowing" creatures, and some mention of U.V. light, but I got the impression that they were being "charged up" with a UV light and that they continued to glow without illumination. As an emissive source, I would not expect the thing glowing to cast shadows on itself. So it's good to understand that they flouresce, but don't continue to emit without the light source - unlike night time golf balls that you charge up with a similar light and which continue to glow for several minutes after the illumination is removed.
And thank you to the AC kiddies for the mindless reflections of manhood and intelligence - it's most enlightening.
I raise the BS flag on this image. The right-most animal clearly shows a shadow on its snout from its right ear. This is only possible if the subject it is being illuminated from above, not if the subject itself is the source of illumination. The whole scene appears to be either illuminated with a green light source, or a normal photo doctored with a green tint. AM I wrong?
Taking the photo and reproducing it is copyright infringement. The other things you described are called derivative works. Corporations that make a big deal about intellectual property rights should be held to their own standards. It's not so much that the blog owner has been violated, it's the principle of the double standard that justifies the exposure.
Very cool - I've been dying to experiment with laser projection for years. I'm glad someone has the resources to actually pull it off. This technology makes the following scenario possible due to the lens-less infinite focus of the "ray casting":
1) mount laser projector to top helmet projecting forward image covering complete FOV
2) wear helmet on head
3) insert self into small, unlit dome with white interior projection surface
4) use head motion tracking to determine point of view then adjust projected 3D world to match
5) locate BFG9000 and engage target
6)...?
7) Profit!
Indeed - they would be better off selling them at the eBay pricing in their stores because then they wouldn't have the eBay fees on top of the CC processing fees for the ones sold in store. I think though that the entire gaming industry has been geared towards throw-away hardware for high-profit software. Speculation: perhaps the console-makers are unconcerned with retailers profiting on the consoles when the intent is to make the money on the games...
Working with the likes of XP/XPE on a device like this provides a path of migration into mobile computing for companies with well established product lines who want to enter the mobile computing market or want to leverage small footprint computing, but can't re-engineer the application to do it. If you're not a programmer, you have to imagine a scenario where a company has millions to tens of millions of development effort invested into a software application and couldn't possibly hope for a "do-over" to switch platforms. Yes, XP/XPE does very much make sense commercially for mobile computing.
The above responses, I think, are over-complicating the assessment. The calculation should be as simple as work performed/energy consumed. There's probably an official reference somewhere, but I quickly found this page mentioning 125,000,000 joules in a gallon of fuel.
This page on the Powertrain & Energy tab says that the 10e (electric model) uses a 10Kwh battery pack.
1 joule is 1 watt/second. So we take 10,000 watt-hours, multiply by 3600 (# seconds per hour) to get 36,000,000 joules total energy put in. So.... if a gallon of fuel is 125,000,000 joules, then we charged up with the equivalent energy of 0.288 gallons of fuel.
With a total range of 120 miles on 0.288 gallons of fuel it comes out to 428MPG. This is inexact obviously; I don't see what they're claiming for MPG on the electric model (though I'm sure it's less), but any difference could be accounted for in losses and/or margins of error such as actual versus listed capacity of the storage pack. If, for example, the battery pack actually holds 11Kwh instead of 10Kwh, the number drops to 378MPG. The point is that this CAN be calculated in terms of equivalency to gasoline based on the amount of potential energy in a gallon of gas.
That's the best I can come up with imperically off the top of my head. I'm without a doubt though that using the price of fuel versus the price of electricity to make this determination is not the way to go.
Why don't they allocate the space to a certain communication technology with established rules for non-interference and then open it up any company to compete? (think wifi) Why should one company have a monopoly on a wavelength? (think broadcast TV/radio) With sophisticated and (relatively) inexpensive packetization and multiplexing available, is there any real need for single-operator wavelength allocation any more? This seems so... early 20th century.
Other equally important tools we need to cut at the source include air, water, food and reading & writing. We freedom-loving nations of the world must unite to prevent the weaponization of all these things before it's too late.
Yes, unfortunately some of us learn many lessons the hard, painful way. With neither sufficient parental guidance nor any useful input from a public school education, one has little opportunity for avoiding costly mistakes. The particulars of the relationship however are not the point and thus were omitted.
Slashdot Mirror
This reminds me of a joke that I think was in the movie "Colors" - A young bull and an old bull crest the top of a hill and see a valley of cows grazing below them. The young bull says to the other, "let's run down there and fuck one of them cows!" The old bull replies, "no... let's walk down there and fuck them all."
This very simple concept to me perfectly illustrates the situation: At the most basic level, males bond nearly without emotion and certainly without empathy for the females. Females group together for protection in the wild, sensitive to one another's needs. Males have no intention for friendship or relationships with the females and desire only to spread their seed. They are distinctly separate social groups with polar opposite perceptions of the world.
We (humanity) are not programmed for signals, responsiveness, reciprocation or charm. Take it all the way back to cave dwellers - it's survival of the fittest: males impregnate as often and widely as possible, and females do their best to attract the most capable male to them.
I don't think it's any more women's fault that they don't communicate clearly than it is men's fault that they don't understand: men and women weren't designed to be friends; it's society's fault for brain washing us all into thinking that is the case. Now men want to train women to think like them, and women want to train men conversely. It will never work. Ever. The battle of the sexes is doomed to eternal conflict.
As an aside, if you ever find yourself wondering why the younger generations seem to be a directionless, lazy mob - maybe it's because we have confused the crap out them trying to reprogram their basic instincts into being more appreciative, sensitive, caring, emotive, respectful, and yadda, yadda - new-fangled, confusing ideas that conflict with, if not "instinct", their basic behavioral programming.
This is worthy of a /. hall of fame - we need a new moderation option :)
Curious, if anyone here knows, is "air" the only possible/practical working fluid for something like this? Could it be immersed in some sort of liquid solution to produce a similar "flow" effect without the need for a pump to use liquid cooling, or stray Ozone?
@3 - Negative; that gets the class name, not the instance of the parent object itself.
@1 - Okay; there is a solution to pull upload progress into PHP, but it's written in C to extend PHP's access. I've done the same thing with Perl - and Perl doesn't need extensions to do the job. The point was that Perl has better overall lower level system access than PHP even though both are third layer high level scripting languages. Being able to do what you need without installing custom extensions, restarting Apache, etc. has a much higher chance of successful deployment in, for example, shared hosting environments.
Not that I'm walking away from PHP - I have so much reusable code in PHP that is in good working order that I put nearly everything I can in PHP to leverage those existing assets.
I don't disagree with your statements, but... I get the sense that PHP is popular in the Internet start-up world because it's fast to prototype in and easier on the brain than other options. Most start-ups, from what I have seen, are interested in one thing: fast time to market, damn the consequences of not planning for scalability, porting, etc. I think they figure those are bridges they can cross IF they ever come to them.
I have built applications in Java, XSL/T, PHP, Perl, C, and countless other languages for numerous start-up companies and, no matter what my word of caution in terms of future planning, 9 times out of 10, the boss is insistent on a minimally functional proof-of-concept that gets migrated to the production environment without any further consideration. They don't care because it doesn't translate to revenue right now which is crucial for a business operating on angel funding.
As someone who has spent about 10 hours a day for the last 4 years coding predominantly MySQL-backed PHP-based content management systems, I concur: most things PHP works just fine for. That includes shell scripting automation processes, communication middle-ware, commerce, front ends, data conversions, image and video generation and manipulation, and some pretty good mathematical computations. There are a couple things that I have found it lacking in however:
1) Some of the magical pre-processing that occurs prior to PHP script execution prevents you from doing certain things such as doing the work for uploading files through a browser to the server; with PHP alone, you cannot intercept a file upload without PHP first spooling the file off to disk. I use Perl for this instead which allows me to abort uploads in progress as well as provide an upload progress measurement system.
2) Fatal errors cannot be redirected through a graceful handler and shutdown process. This, to me, is retarded, and has recently bitten me on an application that tests and loads third party modules which may have fatal errors even though they pass syntax checking.
3) OOP is still pretty weak. There have been improvements, but it's still incomplete. I don't like, for example, not being able to navigate a pointer tree through parent identifiers which is something that can be done in just about any other high level language. I can fake it in my own app by deriving all my objects from a base class that gets a pointer to its parent in the constructor, but it's not a capability that's intrinsic to the language.
Those are just a few samples, but I'm sure I could come up with more if pressed. If it weren't for the widespread availability of PHP-capable programmers and open source code development in PHP today and I were tempted to choose an alternative, I'd probably fall back to Perl - an oldie, but goody that never let me down.
You're describing a net loss in the system. You're correct, I understand that, but I see it as their idea of "the cost of clean air", rather than that "they just don't get it".
There's some criticism as to the notion that hydrogen could be created right on board a moving vehicle represents perpetual motion. It doesn't. Those critics are just jumping to conclusions. The implication is that the coating supposedly improves electrolysis efficiency to such a degree that hydrogen could be created with a small enough on-board system on-demand. With today's elecrolyzers, to make enough hydrogen on-demand to run a vehicle, the hydrogen generation gear would be bigger than the vehicle, so efficiency improvement translates to size reduction which makes this approach plausible. The PEM fuel cell went through similar size reduction before it was ready for passenger vehicle use. Anyway, it means you would have to have a power supply such as a rechargeable battery to run the electrolyzer on. I did not take from the story that they were claiming a system where: 1) water + power in, 2)hydrogen out, 3) hydrogen in, 4) power out, repeat for a water-fueled system. It needs power.
Now, why would you want to do this instead of simply use the battery for electric drive? Well, one could make the argument that converting standard hyrdocarbon fuels from the pump to hydrogen ON the vehicle eliminates the need for fueling infrastructure change which is a MAJOR barrier to the widespread adoption of a "hydrogen economy". With hydrogen on the vehicle it could be used to power a fuel cell for electric drive or some other combustion engine such as BMW's multi-fuel hydrogen car. "Just add power" (solar? plug-in? other?) and if it's all done just right, what you get is more efficient fuel combustion with lower emissions than you would have gotten from burning the gasoline straight. That model I think could be viewed as a "stepping stone" towards conversion much like today's hybrid cars are regarded as a stepping stone towards all electric.
I never got onto the whole AOL thing when it first came out because it had a lot of proprietary crap that broke from established standards, so I don't have any direct experience with their original interface. But I seem to remember something about a child safe online environment being one of their schticks originally, was it not? If so, does that still hold true today?
In the big picture, dying is consequential - it can cause you to lose the game.
I hear you - In the grand scheme, someone who loses the game could become frustrated, arm himself, and go Columbine on his school mates. At first glance that looks a lot like there really are significant consequences attached to losing the game. But if you tear down cause and effect in this example, losing the game is not a direct cause for the effect of dead school mates. Rather it is an intermediate catalyst for a pre-existing cause, that being mental instability. The cause of mental instability results in the effect of dead school mates.
I assert that if to "lose the game" directly bears no tangible effect and is limited only to emotional responses that there are no direct consequences for dying in a game.
it seems to me that the psyche knows the difference between phases of a video game and actually facing mortality. I find it hard to believe that "video game death" can in any way be related to real world psychological patterns surrounding death - for one, there are actually no consequences in the video game world, thus no real fear nor moral struggle.
Kids that age need to know their phone number for their own safety/security anyway, so having to remember it to use the computer is just one more incentive...
Robotics should be focused on super-human activity. If it's interaction they're looking for, posting your typical minimum wage earner next to your directory is still more effective than a robot. Example inspired by true events:
"Are you lost?"
"no." "I'm sorry, did you say YES, or NO?"
"NO!"
"My mistake - are you LOST?"
"@#*!&@#"
"I'm sorry, did you say YES, or NO?"
Robots that answer the phone tick me off and I'll say anything I can to confuse them and reach a human (to whom I have to invariably repeat all the information anyway). Robots that care for the elderly are twisted sign of social decay. Robots that ask you if you are lost are just, plain... wrong. How long is it before such robots are watching your body language to determine if you have intentions to commit a crime?
Five foot robots are so last year. Now, five assed robots...
Thanks for that - I've seen a number of articles in recent months about various genetically modified "glowing" creatures, and some mention of U.V. light, but I got the impression that they were being "charged up" with a UV light and that they continued to glow without illumination. As an emissive source, I would not expect the thing glowing to cast shadows on itself. So it's good to understand that they flouresce, but don't continue to emit without the light source - unlike night time golf balls that you charge up with a similar light and which continue to glow for several minutes after the illumination is removed. And thank you to the AC kiddies for the mindless reflections of manhood and intelligence - it's most enlightening.
I raise the BS flag on this image. The right-most animal clearly shows a shadow on its snout from its right ear. This is only possible if the subject it is being illuminated from above, not if the subject itself is the source of illumination. The whole scene appears to be either illuminated with a green light source, or a normal photo doctored with a green tint. AM I wrong?
Taking the photo and reproducing it is copyright infringement. The other things you described are called derivative works. Corporations that make a big deal about intellectual property rights should be held to their own standards. It's not so much that the blog owner has been violated, it's the principle of the double standard that justifies the exposure.
Very cool - I've been dying to experiment with laser projection for years. I'm glad someone has the resources to actually pull it off. This technology makes the following scenario possible due to the lens-less infinite focus of the "ray casting": 1) mount laser projector to top helmet projecting forward image covering complete FOV 2) wear helmet on head 3) insert self into small, unlit dome with white interior projection surface 4) use head motion tracking to determine point of view then adjust projected 3D world to match 5) locate BFG9000 and engage target 6) ...?
7) Profit!
In the S.F. Bay Area here, this would be referred to as "domestic rice".
Indeed - they would be better off selling them at the eBay pricing in their stores because then they wouldn't have the eBay fees on top of the CC processing fees for the ones sold in store. I think though that the entire gaming industry has been geared towards throw-away hardware for high-profit software. Speculation: perhaps the console-makers are unconcerned with retailers profiting on the consoles when the intent is to make the money on the games...
Working with the likes of XP/XPE on a device like this provides a path of migration into mobile computing for companies with well established product lines who want to enter the mobile computing market or want to leverage small footprint computing, but can't re-engineer the application to do it. If you're not a programmer, you have to imagine a scenario where a company has millions to tens of millions of development effort invested into a software application and couldn't possibly hope for a "do-over" to switch platforms. Yes, XP/XPE does very much make sense commercially for mobile computing.
The above responses, I think, are over-complicating the assessment. The calculation should be as simple as work performed/energy consumed. There's probably an official reference somewhere, but I quickly found this page mentioning 125,000,000 joules in a gallon of fuel.
This page on the Powertrain & Energy tab says that the 10e (electric model) uses a 10Kwh battery pack.
1 joule is 1 watt/second. So we take 10,000 watt-hours, multiply by 3600 (# seconds per hour) to get 36,000,000 joules total energy put in. So.... if a gallon of fuel is 125,000,000 joules, then we charged up with the equivalent energy of 0.288 gallons of fuel.
With a total range of 120 miles on 0.288 gallons of fuel it comes out to 428MPG. This is inexact obviously; I don't see what they're claiming for MPG on the electric model (though I'm sure it's less), but any difference could be accounted for in losses and/or margins of error such as actual versus listed capacity of the storage pack. If, for example, the battery pack actually holds 11Kwh instead of 10Kwh, the number drops to 378MPG. The point is that this CAN be calculated in terms of equivalency to gasoline based on the amount of potential energy in a gallon of gas.
That's the best I can come up with imperically off the top of my head. I'm without a doubt though that using the price of fuel versus the price of electricity to make this determination is not the way to go.
Why don't they allocate the space to a certain communication technology with established rules for non-interference and then open it up any company to compete? (think wifi) Why should one company have a monopoly on a wavelength? (think broadcast TV/radio) With sophisticated and (relatively) inexpensive packetization and multiplexing available, is there any real need for single-operator wavelength allocation any more? This seems so... early 20th century.
Other equally important tools we need to cut at the source include air, water, food and reading & writing. We freedom-loving nations of the world must unite to prevent the weaponization of all these things before it's too late.
Yes, unfortunately some of us learn many lessons the hard, painful way. With neither sufficient parental guidance nor any useful input from a public school education, one has little opportunity for avoiding costly mistakes. The particulars of the relationship however are not the point and thus were omitted.