I think Heinlein has dibs. This sounds more like the Mobile Infantry than it does Iron Man. Though I don't think they'll be deploying troops from orbit in suits like this anytime soon.
Do you remember grade school civics? Its the same reason that Judges are not elected. The FCC Chairman serves at the pleasure of President Bush. He doesn't have to worry about politics, therefore he is less susceptible to influence than our elected officials. Elected officials have to worry about people funding their competitors or throwing money at smear campaigns in retribution for unfavorable actions.
His finances may be under less scrutiny, but that sort of corruption would be criminal for both parties. These companies own the law makers fair and square without breaking any laws.
Not quite. Obviously the FCC is stepping on quite a few toes with the Comcast traffic forgery fiasco. I wonder how much it costs to use Congress to "turn up the heat" on something. The FCC Chairman is not an elected official so its a lot harder to purchase the rulings you want out of him. It only make sense that Comcast found it easier to buy some Congressmen.
I bet if you examine how these politicians' next campaigns are financed you'll find the money trail back to Comcast.
The ndiswrapper source is GPL, however it loads binary blobs which were independently developed. ndiswrapper should have access to the symbols, but it should have a mechanism for indicating the kernel is tainted after loading a binary blob.
Logically it follows that ndiswrapper is a derived work, BUT the binary blobs its loads are not. I don't see how this is at all productive and it IS quibbling over pedantics. Whether or not its their right to be pedantic and counter-productive does not negate the fact that they just hurt linux IMHO.
It was a hack to make things work from what I understand, and I could be wrong. I agree it should register as a tainted kernel. However whoever 'fixed' the Linux kernel and broke ndiswrapper should have provided a mechanism which will continue to allow ndiswrapper to work, and show that the kernel is tainted. Breaking things and starting fights between development teams is the wrong way to go about it. Maybe that exists and the ndiswrapper team isn't using it, if that's the case then the ndiswrapper developers should change the wrapper to identify itself properly.
My sentiments exactly. You can break ndiswrapper AFTER Linux fully supports every wireless chipset that Windows has drivers for. Until then, please learn to live in the real world. Or create a new symbol other than _GPLONLY that ndiswrapper can use instead. Breaking things that work for pedantic reasons is childish and punitive.
From Wikipedia (emphasis mine): "Electric power transmission is about 95 percent efficient and the infrastructure is already in place (though SUBSTANTIAL GRID EXPANSION WOULD BE NEEDED if a sizeable fleet of plug-in hybrids were to be deployed.)"
There's no point in beating a dead horse, but grid expansion is a non-trivial problem. I'm not going to post further on this topic since anything contrary to Slashdot groupthink kills my Karma. They won't even down-mod me fairly, they just use Overrated to avoid the Meta-Moderators.
Its a fact, my Dad is an engineer that has been working with Coal power generation at utilities and related companies for the last 30 years. It is well known within his circles that the power infrastructure is about as sound as our country's bridges. The East Coast grid in particular can barely keep up with new construction, let alone the additional demand that plugin vehicles will create. Much of that infrastructure is older than he is. If you know ANYONE that works as an engineer at your power company, ask them what problems the East Coast is going to face over the next decade.
How will you enforce a charge during off peak policy? That is a fantasy creating some very unrealistic numbers, the numbers for charging during peak times are much much smaller, particularly in the summertime when air conditioning is popular. People are going to plug in their cars (or fuel cell chargers) in their garage whenever they damn well please. We can't even get people to turn down their air conditioners when they aren't home and that caused rolling blackouts in California.
If there was a way to force people do what's best for everyone rather than just what's best for themselves it could work with the existing infrastructure. I just wouldn't want to be the person working the customer support line.
Just remember that Head Hunters have all the ethics of a used car salesman and traffic Humans. They'll place a loser with you if they think they can get away with it. I've used them several times to find jobs but if you're looking for permanent employees and have time to try before you buy, tell some recruiters you're looking to bring someone on Contract to Hire.
This way if they pass the initial screening you can see the programmer in their natural environment before deciding if they're a good fit for your team. Which head hunters you use would be specific to the type of programmer you want to hire. You wouldn't take a bicycle to a foreign automobile mechanic, so don't try to hire embedded programmers from head hunters who deal with mostly with web application developers.
All you need to do is build a rainwater collecting solar powered hydrogen fuel cell charging unit for your garage and you're good to go, no more trips to the gas station.
In all seriousness though, how is this any different than an electric car? Hydrogen is just the intermediary form of the Energy which needs to be transported to the consumer at some point. So charging our fuel cells in the garage is as unfeasible as charging electric cars in the garage on national scale. The power grid just can't handle the load of an electric car in every garage.
On the bright side we don't need the Middle East to sell us coal.
It may be possible for some individuals to get away from the oil infrastructure. However, the electric grid would be unable to cope with the load of 20% of drivers using electric cars, let alone 100%. I'm not just referring to electric power generation, but power transmission and maximum load as well.
I suppose those issues aren't covered in "Who Killed the Electric Car."
That's a bunch of crap. You decide what your reaction is to events, you can control how events effect your mental state. Everyone has the choice between wallowing in their own crapulence and deciding to do something about it.
I was just rewatching the Sopranos the other night and the Russian woman that Tony has an affair with tells him "Only in America do people expect to be happy, everywhere else in the world people expect bad things to happen to them." I probably butchered the quote, but survival in the modern world is very different than survival in a less civilized one. We as a species are hard wired to overcome adversity, take away the adversity and people lose their sense of purpose.
I live in Seattle, arguably the depression capital of the lower 48 states. The lack of sunlight during the winter months causes everyone to get a bit loopy. That still leaves you with a choice, are you going to be short and irritable when dealing with people, or are you going to acknowledge that the lack of light has made the entire city, including yourself, seasonally bi-polar and make the extra effort to compensate.
When recognizing the physical symptoms of this physical disease, you can do plenty of stuff to mitigate or eliminate the symptoms:
Go to bed early - lack of sleep can cause or exacerbate depression.
Get more exercise - physically tiring your body will help regulate your sleeping and in turn the chemicals in your head.
Talk to a therapist or friend - I would recommend you go to a therapist because really most friends don't want to hear you go on about what's making you depressed, but talking out your issues will also help overcome depression.
Drugs may have some therapeutic value, but should be used as a crutch, not a cure. Crutches are discarded when you get well. If their only use is mental, as a placebo, then I am not surprised. Whatever makes you happpy, right? It is my understanding that anti-depressants work similar to the drug ecstacy as they are either SSRI's or MAIO's(?). Drug Companies want to create drug addicts.^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean Pharmaceutical Companies just want to treat disease to make the world a better place.
Personally I'm waiting for the Class Action lawsuits after a whistle blower leaks some internal documents. There was once a time when smoking was not thought to be bad for your health. The big difference is the Drug makers have a product which doesn't slowly kill you after you become addicted to it.
I'm not telling people to throw away their medications, that would be irresponsible and reckless. Just tell your doctor you want to work towards a life where you are happy and not on prescription medication.
You may dismiss my points as coming from someone who doesn't grok depression, well screw you, I'm not about to post any of my medical history on a public internet forum.
I made the disclaimer in my post I had no idea what the licensing was for HyperTransport. However, I think it would be bad PR for Intel to adopt now what AMD has been doing for years, even if it is the right thing to do technologically. I also qualified PR to mean Public Relations with the unenlightened masses, those who know nothing of Open Source Software or Open Standards.
Intel has always been about the marketing, first it was clock speed, now its cores. Bear in mind marketing usually has very little to do with reality, yet will often drive engineering decisions. Brands are important, it's easy for us techies to forget that.
QuickPath: because Intel doesn't adopt standards... it rewrites them.
Why should Intel pay AMD to license HyperTransport? The specs may be open to developers, but that does not mean they are unencumbered by patents. Even if they could, why Would they?
I don't really know the situation surrounding the technology, but even if Intel could use it for free, they would lose a huge battle in the PR War. I can see it now, "Remember that interconnect AMD has been using for years now? Well our design has finally caught up with theirs enough to use it." Remember that to the masses, the non-slashdot crowd, they have no idea what the techno-jargon spouted by Intel marketing means.
Intel currently has the superior technology, this is because of superior fabrication capabilities, not because of a superior architecture, if I've been following this correctly over the last few years. The general public is oblivious to the fact that internally the AMD architecture is cleaner and more elegant, the only thing they have to go on is marketing. If Intel were to adopt HyperTransport, which IIRC is trademarked by AMD, that would be a huge step backwards for Intel marketing, which is just recovering now that the Core 2 architecture has put them back on top.
We'll need a way to get the oil into orbit. Better get back to work on that space elevator. Inflatable Space Stations which are resistant to micro meteors seem like a really good idea as well. Now might be a good time to buy some Bigelow Aerospace stock, they're going to need a lot of space balloons.
Does anyone have the link for the results of the actual Senate vote? Since I wrote both my Senators about this issue, I would like to see whether or not my voice was actually heard for when I write a follow up letter.
and getting vaster every day. Most security is worthless. Its good enough to prevent a majority of threats from getting through, sometimes. The only thing protecting users is the size of the internet combined with the fact that most of them do not have anything of value stored on their computers. The only thing Joe Sixpack has that Evil Hacker wants is his credit card number, which let's face it, is not enough to retire off of. The only other things that can be taken from Joe Sixpack are his resources; CPU and bandwidth. The net result is you would still have to grind out a living as an Evil Hacker, or get into freelance corporate espionage. So yes, the internet seems safer, mainly because its bigger, not because it is technologically more capable of stopping the bad guys from getting you.
(I apologize for rambling, I'm sick in bed hopped up on meds)
Wow, thats right up there with putting the infected into concentration camps. Your trolling needs work, it has to be believable that you personally hold that opinion to elicit the shrill responses a good troll will get.
My point above was that this is not viable for mass treatment and will only be available to the privileged elite like Magic Johnson. Though you are technically correct about the effectiveness of your method, you've raised a fundamental ethics question: Is saving the species from disease worth it at the cost of our humanity?
This is fundamental to the ethical debate behind many emerging technologies like embrionic stem cell research, where the answer is unclear to many. However, I think its safe to say that compulsory mutilation has a lot less grey area.
It is my understanding anti-retroviral treatment is very expensive. For this to have any effect on the spread of HIV, every infected person in the third world needs treatment.
I wonder how many months in Iraq it would cost to do something like that.
You absolutely right, and absolutely wrong at the same time. Congrats!
Yes, the quality of CS majors varies greatly. Most are not what I would consider software engineers. I was not a CS Major. The computer science program at my university was developed by the college of engineering, which is why my degree says Applied Sciences, rather than Computer Science.
However, you are completely wrong about not needing Software Engineers for engineering projects. Will your retrained Mechanical Engineer be able to calculate your worst-case CPU load to make sure that no matter what, you always meet the critical deadlines? What about profiling for performance enhancements? How about writing code which is maintainable by other engineers? Most EEs write a mess of unreadable spaghetti code and call it a day. Sure, it works, but god forbid you ever have to modify it.
Software Engineers are a critical piece to any engineering company. You may be able to get by for a while without them, but once your code base exceeds a certain size, things like version control, bug tracking, requirements, design, and testing separate the Engineers who moonlight writing software from the Software Engineers.
I would like to have as much confidence in a piece of software as I do in a bridge, but we're not at that point yet.
Modern avionics software has higher reliability than any bridge. The mean time between failures for safety critical avionics exceeds once in 10,000+ years. With thousands of planes in operation running identical instances it *IS* more reliable than a bridge which may last for 100 years of continuous service before collapsing. Of course you don't build 10,000 identical bridges and hold the engineer responsible if 1 out of 10,000 fail.
Of course software does not degrade over time like physical materials, so its not quite an apples to apples comparison.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Heinlein has dibs. This sounds more like the Mobile Infantry than it does Iron Man. Though I don't think they'll be deploying troops from orbit in suits like this anytime soon.
I wrote code for the 777, 787, and A380 you insensitive clod.
Do you remember grade school civics? Its the same reason that Judges are not elected. The FCC Chairman serves at the pleasure of President Bush. He doesn't have to worry about politics, therefore he is less susceptible to influence than our elected officials. Elected officials have to worry about people funding their competitors or throwing money at smear campaigns in retribution for unfavorable actions.
His finances may be under less scrutiny, but that sort of corruption would be criminal for both parties. These companies own the law makers fair and square without breaking any laws.
Not quite. Obviously the FCC is stepping on quite a few toes with the Comcast traffic forgery fiasco. I wonder how much it costs to use Congress to "turn up the heat" on something. The FCC Chairman is not an elected official so its a lot harder to purchase the rulings you want out of him. It only make sense that Comcast found it easier to buy some Congressmen.
I bet if you examine how these politicians' next campaigns are financed you'll find the money trail back to Comcast.
The ndiswrapper source is GPL, however it loads binary blobs which were independently developed. ndiswrapper should have access to the symbols, but it should have a mechanism for indicating the kernel is tainted after loading a binary blob.
Logically it follows that ndiswrapper is a derived work, BUT the binary blobs its loads are not. I don't see how this is at all productive and it IS quibbling over pedantics. Whether or not its their right to be pedantic and counter-productive does not negate the fact that they just hurt linux IMHO.
It was a hack to make things work from what I understand, and I could be wrong. I agree it should register as a tainted kernel. However whoever 'fixed' the Linux kernel and broke ndiswrapper should have provided a mechanism which will continue to allow ndiswrapper to work, and show that the kernel is tainted. Breaking things and starting fights between development teams is the wrong way to go about it. Maybe that exists and the ndiswrapper team isn't using it, if that's the case then the ndiswrapper developers should change the wrapper to identify itself properly.
My sentiments exactly. You can break ndiswrapper AFTER Linux fully supports every wireless chipset that Windows has drivers for. Until then, please learn to live in the real world. Or create a new symbol other than _GPLONLY that ndiswrapper can use instead. Breaking things that work for pedantic reasons is childish and punitive.
From Wikipedia (emphasis mine):
"Electric power transmission is about 95 percent efficient and the infrastructure is already in place (though SUBSTANTIAL GRID EXPANSION WOULD BE NEEDED if a sizeable fleet of plug-in hybrids were to be deployed.)"
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hydrogen_vehicle
There's no point in beating a dead horse, but grid expansion is a non-trivial problem. I'm not going to post further on this topic since anything contrary to Slashdot groupthink kills my Karma. They won't even down-mod me fairly, they just use Overrated to avoid the Meta-Moderators.
Its a fact, my Dad is an engineer that has been working with Coal power generation at utilities and related companies for the last 30 years. It is well known within his circles that the power infrastructure is about as sound as our country's bridges. The East Coast grid in particular can barely keep up with new construction, let alone the additional demand that plugin vehicles will create. Much of that infrastructure is older than he is. If you know ANYONE that works as an engineer at your power company, ask them what problems the East Coast is going to face over the next decade.
How will you enforce a charge during off peak policy? That is a fantasy creating some very unrealistic numbers, the numbers for charging during peak times are much much smaller, particularly in the summertime when air conditioning is popular. People are going to plug in their cars (or fuel cell chargers) in their garage whenever they damn well please. We can't even get people to turn down their air conditioners when they aren't home and that caused rolling blackouts in California.
If there was a way to force people do what's best for everyone rather than just what's best for themselves it could work with the existing infrastructure. I just wouldn't want to be the person working the customer support line.
Just remember that Head Hunters have all the ethics of a used car salesman and traffic Humans. They'll place a loser with you if they think they can get away with it. I've used them several times to find jobs but if you're looking for permanent employees and have time to try before you buy, tell some recruiters you're looking to bring someone on Contract to Hire.
This way if they pass the initial screening you can see the programmer in their natural environment before deciding if they're a good fit for your team. Which head hunters you use would be specific to the type of programmer you want to hire. You wouldn't take a bicycle to a foreign automobile mechanic, so don't try to hire embedded programmers from head hunters who deal with mostly with web application developers.
All you need to do is build a rainwater collecting solar powered hydrogen fuel cell charging unit for your garage and you're good to go, no more trips to the gas station.
In all seriousness though, how is this any different than an electric car? Hydrogen is just the intermediary form of the Energy which needs to be transported to the consumer at some point. So charging our fuel cells in the garage is as unfeasible as charging electric cars in the garage on national scale. The power grid just can't handle the load of an electric car in every garage.
On the bright side we don't need the Middle East to sell us coal.
It may be possible for some individuals to get away from the oil infrastructure. However, the electric grid would be unable to cope with the load of 20% of drivers using electric cars, let alone 100%. I'm not just referring to electric power generation, but power transmission and maximum load as well.
I suppose those issues aren't covered in "Who Killed the Electric Car."
That's a bunch of crap. You decide what your reaction is to events, you can control how events effect your mental state. Everyone has the choice between wallowing in their own crapulence and deciding to do something about it. I was just rewatching the Sopranos the other night and the Russian woman that Tony has an affair with tells him "Only in America do people expect to be happy, everywhere else in the world people expect bad things to happen to them." I probably butchered the quote, but survival in the modern world is very different than survival in a less civilized one. We as a species are hard wired to overcome adversity, take away the adversity and people lose their sense of purpose. I live in Seattle, arguably the depression capital of the lower 48 states. The lack of sunlight during the winter months causes everyone to get a bit loopy. That still leaves you with a choice, are you going to be short and irritable when dealing with people, or are you going to acknowledge that the lack of light has made the entire city, including yourself, seasonally bi-polar and make the extra effort to compensate. When recognizing the physical symptoms of this physical disease, you can do plenty of stuff to mitigate or eliminate the symptoms: Go to bed early - lack of sleep can cause or exacerbate depression. Get more exercise - physically tiring your body will help regulate your sleeping and in turn the chemicals in your head. Talk to a therapist or friend - I would recommend you go to a therapist because really most friends don't want to hear you go on about what's making you depressed, but talking out your issues will also help overcome depression. Drugs may have some therapeutic value, but should be used as a crutch, not a cure. Crutches are discarded when you get well. If their only use is mental, as a placebo, then I am not surprised. Whatever makes you happpy, right? It is my understanding that anti-depressants work similar to the drug ecstacy as they are either SSRI's or MAIO's(?). Drug Companies want to create drug addicts.^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H I mean Pharmaceutical Companies just want to treat disease to make the world a better place. Personally I'm waiting for the Class Action lawsuits after a whistle blower leaks some internal documents. There was once a time when smoking was not thought to be bad for your health. The big difference is the Drug makers have a product which doesn't slowly kill you after you become addicted to it. I'm not telling people to throw away their medications, that would be irresponsible and reckless. Just tell your doctor you want to work towards a life where you are happy and not on prescription medication. You may dismiss my points as coming from someone who doesn't grok depression, well screw you, I'm not about to post any of my medical history on a public internet forum.
I made the disclaimer in my post I had no idea what the licensing was for HyperTransport. However, I think it would be bad PR for Intel to adopt now what AMD has been doing for years, even if it is the right thing to do technologically. I also qualified PR to mean Public Relations with the unenlightened masses, those who know nothing of Open Source Software or Open Standards.
Intel has always been about the marketing, first it was clock speed, now its cores. Bear in mind marketing usually has very little to do with reality, yet will often drive engineering decisions. Brands are important, it's easy for us techies to forget that.
I don't really know the situation surrounding the technology, but even if Intel could use it for free, they would lose a huge battle in the PR War. I can see it now, "Remember that interconnect AMD has been using for years now? Well our design has finally caught up with theirs enough to use it." Remember that to the masses, the non-slashdot crowd, they have no idea what the techno-jargon spouted by Intel marketing means.
Intel currently has the superior technology, this is because of superior fabrication capabilities, not because of a superior architecture, if I've been following this correctly over the last few years. The general public is oblivious to the fact that internally the AMD architecture is cleaner and more elegant, the only thing they have to go on is marketing. If Intel were to adopt HyperTransport, which IIRC is trademarked by AMD, that would be a huge step backwards for Intel marketing, which is just recovering now that the Core 2 architecture has put them back on top.
We'll need a way to get the oil into orbit. Better get back to work on that space elevator. Inflatable Space Stations which are resistant to micro meteors seem like a really good idea as well. Now might be a good time to buy some Bigelow Aerospace stock, they're going to need a lot of space balloons.
Found it. http://www.senate.gov/legislative/LIS/roll_call_lists/vote_menu_110_2.htm
I guess someone posted it higher in the thread too. This link is to the index of all the recent votes.
Does anyone have the link for the results of the actual Senate vote? Since I wrote both my Senators about this issue, I would like to see whether or not my voice was actually heard for when I write a follow up letter.
and getting vaster every day. Most security is worthless. Its good enough to prevent a majority of threats from getting through, sometimes. The only thing protecting users is the size of the internet combined with the fact that most of them do not have anything of value stored on their computers. The only thing Joe Sixpack has that Evil Hacker wants is his credit card number, which let's face it, is not enough to retire off of. The only other things that can be taken from Joe Sixpack are his resources; CPU and bandwidth. The net result is you would still have to grind out a living as an Evil Hacker, or get into freelance corporate espionage. So yes, the internet seems safer, mainly because its bigger, not because it is technologically more capable of stopping the bad guys from getting you.
(I apologize for rambling, I'm sick in bed hopped up on meds)
Wow, thats right up there with putting the infected into concentration camps. Your trolling needs work, it has to be believable that you personally hold that opinion to elicit the shrill responses a good troll will get.
My point above was that this is not viable for mass treatment and will only be available to the privileged elite like Magic Johnson. Though you are technically correct about the effectiveness of your method, you've raised a fundamental ethics question: Is saving the species from disease worth it at the cost of our humanity?
This is fundamental to the ethical debate behind many emerging technologies like embrionic stem cell research, where the answer is unclear to many. However, I think its safe to say that compulsory mutilation has a lot less grey area.
It is my understanding anti-retroviral treatment is very expensive. For this to have any effect on the spread of HIV, every infected person in the third world needs treatment.
I wonder how many months in Iraq it would cost to do something like that.
You absolutely right, and absolutely wrong at the same time. Congrats!
Yes, the quality of CS majors varies greatly. Most are not what I would consider software engineers. I was not a CS Major. The computer science program at my university was developed by the college of engineering, which is why my degree says Applied Sciences, rather than Computer Science.
However, you are completely wrong about not needing Software Engineers for engineering projects. Will your retrained Mechanical Engineer be able to calculate your worst-case CPU load to make sure that no matter what, you always meet the critical deadlines? What about profiling for performance enhancements? How about writing code which is maintainable by other engineers? Most EEs write a mess of unreadable spaghetti code and call it a day. Sure, it works, but god forbid you ever have to modify it.
Software Engineers are a critical piece to any engineering company. You may be able to get by for a while without them, but once your code base exceeds a certain size, things like version control, bug tracking, requirements, design, and testing separate the Engineers who moonlight writing software from the Software Engineers.
Of course software does not degrade over time like physical materials, so its not quite an apples to apples comparison.