We've come up with many working designs for flying machines, some of which use the same principles that allow birds to fly, but none of them works like an actual bird.
You've quite obviously never worked in embedded systems
Your crystal ball is quite obviously broken, as half of my work involves embedded system (the other half, the one that comes before the whole embedded thing, involves Matlab).
You can't "optimize" a bubble sort into a quick sort.
When you're deciding on a sorting algorithm, you're already optimizing. The unoptimized version just needs to run correctly, i.e. deliver the expected result. You pick a search algorithm that's easy to understand for that (so, bubble sort rather than quick sort). Chosing one that is best suited to the target hardware and implementing it optimally on the target hardware is part of the optimization process.
I'd blame the managers for suddenly springing a new platform on them after the game was done.
This is normal manager behavior. An experienced programmer plans for it, or makes sure he's not the one who has to adapt the old code to the new platform.
I expect that when they started, they had no intention of porting to other platforms.
Oh, yeah... that is the other mistake. "No one's ever gonna look at this code again, so it's okay if it's an incomprehensible, unmaintainable mess. Ship it!".
The optimisations are the program, there is no unoptimised state to work from.
And that is the mistake. You first need something that actually runs correctly, and then optimize it to work with the hardware that is at your disposal.
Have you ever worked with soft real-time code?
Part of my work involved hard real-time code, down to twiddling with sub-microsecond timings and of course counting CPU cycles. Still, I usually start with code that runs correctly (i.e. it would fulfill the specifications if run on an infinite-horsepower CPU) and then optimize it to work with the hardware.
... of making the software run correctly first, and only then doing optimizations (down to the assembly level)?
Sorry, but *yawn*.
Had they followed the practice, they would have a version of the source code that runs correctly (but slowly) that they could optimize for different target platforms.
... then we're starting with a premise that turns the rest of our argument into pure nonsense.
Who says that an AI can do in one CPU cycle what the human brain can do in one second? Once CPU cycle to an AI is possibly less than one neuron firing in the human brain.
Also, if you compare communication latency to the human/AI potential lifetime, then the AI suddenly has all the time in the world.
"Collision unavoidable. Vehicle on left is driven by Apple patent lawyer, vehicle on right is occupied by Justin Bieber fans.
Attempting to target both vehicles"
Hope the vehicles software comes with a good physics package for these kinds of trick shots...
If you could stop a runaway train from going over a ravene, by pulling a lever, thus saving 300 people, but the lever sent the train down a different track on which 3 children were playing, what do you do?
The answer depends on whether I'm on the train and on whether any of those kids are mine.
Other than fresh water, oxygen, shelter, and sustenance, anyway.
Violence (and any means increasing the potential violence an actor has at his disposal) has intrinsic value.
In fact, in any system with potentially malicious actors, a currency must be backed by some degree of violence. Otherwise, the malicious actor can just take the currency by force (if he considers it valuable).
No, but what happens is that the architect comes along and tells you that the foreman picked the wrong side of the plot markers when telling you where to dig the ditch, so it's exactly a ditch-breadth off from where it should be.
Yeah. Or a case of the dreaded undocumented ninja-spec that pops out of nowhere two weeks before the release.
... because gratification is delayed and not necessarily guaranteed.
Compare this to digging a ditch, which is hard labor, but provides almost instant gratification (you can always look at how much of the ditch you've already dug), and you're not likely to fail completely (unless you're trying to dig in solid rock).
For the majority of the time humans have existed, it was defined as anything edible you can get your hands on. Evolution hasn't yet had enough time to change this.
Meat, of course, keeps you lean, but only if you spend most of your time chasing it down and killing it.
That's it. Humans with exactly this strategy were most likely to survive the periods of hunger that were very much normal until a few decades ago.
Of course, this strategy fails completely if food is always available and hunger periods never occur. Constant availability of food is a relatively new phenomenon, too new for humans to have adapted to it.
The depends on where you are. Wind power is the best option if you're in an area that doesn't have plenty of hydro or geothermal resources and is too far north/south of the nearest tropic to make solar the best option.
It's unreliable
Wind power generation is easy to predict, and unlike solar, its output becomes more steady if the generation is spread out over a larger area. The larger the are, the lower the probability of wind power output ever dropping to low single digits of total installed capacity.
Also, the changes in output are much slower than for solar, which makes smoothing them a smaller technical challenge.
It has to be backed up by something else (usually natural gas.)
You'll have to back up _any_ power plant, or you'll be in the dark as soon as your primary plant goes down for maintenance or due to technical problems.
we'd have to have these things pretty much EVERYWHERE on our planet
Not really. You'd se almost none of them in areas with hydro/geothermal/solar resources.
And how about maintenance for hundreds of thousands of wind turbines?
Other types of power plants need maintenance, too, and keeping relatively simple mechanical devices running is hardly rocket science.. And with smaller generating units, you can do maintenance on 50MW of your generating capacity at a time while the remaining 950MW are still available.
Multiply the failure potential (and harm potential) of wind power by the huge number of new generators.
That's just a matter of proper occupational safety, and of course insurance. In fact, the more turbines there are, the easier the business for the insurance company becomes, since they'll get very good statistics on frequency and cost of accidents. Compare this to nuclear, where you won't find any insurance company in the world that will sell you coverage for an INES-7 type accident, or even an INES-6 one.
Solar is nicer idea
It's ridiculously expensive (even compared to wind power) once you're north/south of the 45th parallel. Also, it cycles much more rapidly than wind, and produces power anticyclical to seasonal power demand in these areas (peak power demand is during winter, where solar produces almost nothing).
Of course, if you're closer to a tropic than to a polar circle, it's hard to beat solar. It only has small seasonal variations there, and (due to the prevalence of air conditioning) produces the most power when demand is at its peak.
It's all a matter of looking at the local geographical and geological resources, and making optimal use of them.
If terrorists really want to kill a lot of people all they have to do is steal a strategic nuclear warhead.
Actually, it might be easier to look for one of the many lost warheads. Even easier would be combing the worlds scrapyards for lost radiation sources, which can provide enough material for a dirty bomb.
Also, even the most powerful strategic bombs don't come close to the contamination caused by a reactor belching its contents into the environment. The largest nuclear bomb weighted 27 tons, the fuel load alone of a normal reactor is over 100 tons (plus there might be pools full of spent fuel rods nearby for additional contamination).
If security really were the issue with nuclear, it would be easily solved.
It's one of the many issues. Security, safety, disposal, transport, etc.
Also, they should compete favorably against non-GM mosquitos for mating purposes.
That's going to be hard, take one blood source away and still be competitive.
Instead, they could make GM mosquitoes that are unsuitable as carriers for the Dengue virus. You'd still get stung by them, but at least you're less likely to catch crippling diseases.
Yes, I know, "totally infeasible due to launch costs". However, this uses the premise of current launch system and that the waste actually has to be in solid/liquid form.
Has anyone considered building an ion accelerator and shoot the waste into space as a stream of ions? The energy necessary for the waste to disappear into space would be a couple of magnitude below scientific particle accelerators. The only large obstacle is earths atmosphere.
Slashdot Mirror
We've come up with many working designs for flying machines, some of which use the same principles that allow birds to fly, but none of them works like an actual bird.
They design their engines for the most common fuel in the US - regular gasoline.
Europeans get more than that out of 4.5L V8's.
In Europe, most cars run on premium/super gasoline, which makes it easier to get more power out of the same displacement.
Actually, you have to use words like "liability", "class-action lawsuit", "company stock price drops like a rock", etc.
At least when you're dealing with real managers, and not pretend ones that used to be engineers at some point.
Your crystal ball is quite obviously broken, as half of my work involves embedded system (the other half, the one that comes before the whole embedded thing, involves Matlab).
When you're deciding on a sorting algorithm, you're already optimizing. The unoptimized version just needs to run correctly, i.e. deliver the expected result. You pick a search algorithm that's easy to understand for that (so, bubble sort rather than quick sort). Chosing one that is best suited to the target hardware and implementing it optimally on the target hardware is part of the optimization process.
This is normal manager behavior. An experienced programmer plans for it, or makes sure he's not the one who has to adapt the old code to the new platform.
Oh, yeah ... that is the other mistake. "No one's ever gonna look at this code again, so it's okay if it's an incomprehensible, unmaintainable mess. Ship it!".
And that is the mistake. You first need something that actually runs correctly, and then optimize it to work with the hardware that is at your disposal.
Have you ever worked with soft real-time code?
Part of my work involved hard real-time code, down to twiddling with sub-microsecond timings and of course counting CPU cycles. Still, I usually start with code that runs correctly (i.e. it would fulfill the specifications if run on an infinite-horsepower CPU) and then optimize it to work with the hardware.
Sorry, but *yawn*.
Had they followed the practice, they would have a version of the source code that runs correctly (but slowly) that they could optimize for different target platforms.
Who says that an AI can do in one CPU cycle what the human brain can do in one second? Once CPU cycle to an AI is possibly less than one neuron firing in the human brain.
Also, if you compare communication latency to the human/AI potential lifetime, then the AI suddenly has all the time in the world.
And you'd have to park the car there during the day. Most drivers use their vehicle during the day and leave it parked at night.
Hope the vehicles software comes with a good physics package for these kinds of trick shots ...
The answer depends on whether I'm on the train and on whether any of those kids are mine.
Never before has it been so easy to actually earn money with indie game development.
And things might be getting even better.
The blue code of silence.
Almost unlimited sympathy from prosecutors and judges.
Violence (and any means increasing the potential violence an actor has at his disposal) has intrinsic value.
In fact, in any system with potentially malicious actors, a currency must be backed by some degree of violence. Otherwise, the malicious actor can just take the currency by force (if he considers it valuable).
They only add buckets of _mud_ where you work? Do they have any open positions?
Yeah. Or a case of the dreaded undocumented ninja-spec that pops out of nowhere two weeks before the release.
Compare this to digging a ditch, which is hard labor, but provides almost instant gratification (you can always look at how much of the ditch you've already dug), and you're not likely to fail completely (unless you're trying to dig in solid rock).
For the majority of the time humans have existed, it was defined as anything edible you can get your hands on. Evolution hasn't yet had enough time to change this.
Meat, of course, keeps you lean, but only if you spend most of your time chasing it down and killing it.
That's it. Humans with exactly this strategy were most likely to survive the periods of hunger that were very much normal until a few decades ago.
Of course, this strategy fails completely if food is always available and hunger periods never occur. Constant availability of food is a relatively new phenomenon, too new for humans to have adapted to it.
The depends on where you are. Wind power is the best option if you're in an area that doesn't have plenty of hydro or geothermal resources and is too far north/south of the nearest tropic to make solar the best option.
It's unreliable
Wind power generation is easy to predict, and unlike solar, its output becomes more steady if the generation is spread out over a larger area. The larger the are, the lower the probability of wind power output ever dropping to low single digits of total installed capacity.
Also, the changes in output are much slower than for solar, which makes smoothing them a smaller technical challenge.
It has to be backed up by something else (usually natural gas.)
You'll have to back up _any_ power plant, or you'll be in the dark as soon as your primary plant goes down for maintenance or due to technical problems.
we'd have to have these things pretty much EVERYWHERE on our planet
Not really. You'd se almost none of them in areas with hydro/geothermal/solar resources.
And how about maintenance for hundreds of thousands of wind turbines?
Other types of power plants need maintenance, too, and keeping relatively simple mechanical devices running is hardly rocket science.. And with smaller generating units, you can do maintenance on 50MW of your generating capacity at a time while the remaining 950MW are still available.
Multiply the failure potential (and harm potential) of wind power by the huge number of new generators.
That's just a matter of proper occupational safety, and of course insurance. In fact, the more turbines there are, the easier the business for the insurance company becomes, since they'll get very good statistics on frequency and cost of accidents. Compare this to nuclear, where you won't find any insurance company in the world that will sell you coverage for an INES-7 type accident, or even an INES-6 one.
Solar is nicer idea
It's ridiculously expensive (even compared to wind power) once you're north/south of the 45th parallel. Also, it cycles much more rapidly than wind, and produces power anticyclical to seasonal power demand in these areas (peak power demand is during winter, where solar produces almost nothing).
Of course, if you're closer to a tropic than to a polar circle, it's hard to beat solar. It only has small seasonal variations there, and (due to the prevalence of air conditioning) produces the most power when demand is at its peak.
It's all a matter of looking at the local geographical and geological resources, and making optimal use of them.
Actually, it might be easier to look for one of the many lost warheads. Even easier would be combing the worlds scrapyards for lost radiation sources, which can provide enough material for a dirty bomb.
Also, even the most powerful strategic bombs don't come close to the contamination caused by a reactor belching its contents into the environment. The largest nuclear bomb weighted 27 tons, the fuel load alone of a normal reactor is over 100 tons (plus there might be pools full of spent fuel rods nearby for additional contamination).
If security really were the issue with nuclear, it would be easily solved.
It's one of the many issues. Security, safety, disposal, transport, etc.
That's going to be hard, take one blood source away and still be competitive.
Instead, they could make GM mosquitoes that are unsuitable as carriers for the Dengue virus. You'd still get stung by them, but at least you're less likely to catch crippling diseases.
Yes, I know, "totally infeasible due to launch costs". However, this uses the premise of current launch system and that the waste actually has to be in solid/liquid form.
Has anyone considered building an ion accelerator and shoot the waste into space as a stream of ions? The energy necessary for the waste to disappear into space would be a couple of magnitude below scientific particle accelerators. The only large obstacle is earths atmosphere.