So, if you are at a bowling alley, and on your backswing you let go of a bowling ball and hit someone with it, should you sue the bowling ball manufacturer? If you pitch a baseball, and let go of the ball early and break a window, should you sue the baseball manufacturer? No, you shouldn't, because in normal sports there is an expectation that you hold on to the ball until the proper time. Is it unreasonable to expect someone to hold on to a Wii controller?
Having actually played WiiSports, it states in the directions that extreme motions aren't necessary. You do not need to swing the remote anywhere near what some people are doing, as it offers zero benefit in the game; The controller saturates at a much lower speed. It's like breaking off the analog stick on a gamepad because you were "trying to go faster".
Funny you should mention that. I happen to know somebody who lost much of their PhD dissertation document after writing it in MS Word. It got corrupted in some subtle way, and then ended up making large portions of text unusable and unrecoverable. Most of the large MS Word documents you saw probably used master documents, as the GP mentioned. Of course, he is a "fanboy", and cannot be trusted, right? Your arguments, by contrast, are only based on "facts" (or a lack of medication).
Of course, for large documents I don't know if I would trust OO.org either; I did my PhD thesis in LaTeX.
You always have the source text, which is why you can trust LaTeX not to eat your document. Whether it generates a correct looking output document is a separate issue.
Well, then they should have an article citing examples from the EULA. The FSF tends to beat around the bush far too much; People will take your evidence more willingly if you don't make them read a 10-page manifesto without facts before you get to the meat. I like what the FSF has done, but often their evangelizing is often terrible. Linux sugar has caught more new users than FSF vinegar.
If you want more of your clients to change to OO, just run "strings" on their.doc files and email them the parts that came from other documents. That should be enough to get them to change their minds about it.
(For the uninitiated, As you edit a document in MS Word, it picks up bits of other documents you have open at the time or even previously opened. This is because it doesn't clear memory before using it, and the fast-save file format is really more a memory dump. This may have been fixed in the latest version of MS Word; I certainly hope so...)
I don't have particularly large limits (I think), but it always bothered me that every copy of xemacs would have 10 MB of resident memory. It bothered me a lot more when my computer only had 32 MB of memory (Linux drove me to upgrade to 64 MB pretty quickly after switching from Windows). Now, of course, 10 MB is practically nothing compared to what the Mozilla applications or Open Office use...
1) As far as I can tell, Player/Stage/Gazebo is limited to flat earth. (MSRS is not, arbitrary terrain)
Yes it does. First two hits when you google "gazebo terrain".
2) Part of the.NET framework there is a wealth of functionality: mathematics functions, quaternions, etc.
2b) Loss of portability to other operating systems. This is not something to be overlooked, given the prevalence of Linux for headless embedded devices (i.e. robots). If you like object-oriented development, Player has bindings for C++, Java, Ruby, and Python.
Especially when you are simulating discrete objects. The ability to have TableObject *table and Robot *robot, instead of a bunch of c-calls, is a blessing and speeds up your development time.
Well, if you want to argue the simulator sucks, then I won't necessarily disagree with you. That's not the interface a robot *user* would be dealing with however, only the creator of a custom robot. A C++ interface for the robot "driver" would be nice, but I can understand the portability reasons for choosing plain C. In my graduate-level course on physical simulation, I did use C++ for my simulator. I don't think it was a huge advantage however, since everything was implemented as a large system of ODEs anyway, and the object oriented view was just translating to and from that (following the Baraff/Witkin approach).
This is also why a lot of people choose DirectX over OpenGL.
It seems to me that the only people who prefer DirectX are game programmers. Scientific/visualization/engineering apps are still largely OpenGL. This is partly due to inertia, of course, but I'm sure they appreciate the portability too, since important scientific and engineering apps tend to work on more than one OS.
MS Robotics Studio was created after Player/Stage became successful. Go look up the features of Player/Stage and then tell me how Robotics Studio is a huge step forward.
Excuse me, but GNU must be capitalized to emphasize its importance over all other open source projects -- as well as the fact that it is a recursive acronym.
The current situation is that NVidia cards work fine with the binary driver, but the open driver is terrible (due to lack of docs). The ATI binary driver, for whatever reason, doesn't support some cards for many months after they are released. OTOH, the open ATI driver is at least usable for X, although the GL acceleration isn't very good. I don't like binary drivers, but there are some reasons that the companies keep them closed. ATI needs to pick a side though, and decide if it is supporting Linux or not.
So forcing a user to click twice to get a map or, alternatively, type the URL into the address bar is an excercise in simplicity.
Time is what matters, not the number of clicks. If a page is so cluttered that I have to use "find text" just to find the right search box, I've already lost the time it would take to search and then click on the first link.
I have to say, I didn't agree with the article 100%, but the attempts to refute it here on Slashdot have been hilariously bad.
Wow, bad comments on Slashdot, who would have thought they existed? I find your counter-arguments equally weak though, so maybe both of you ought to work a little more persuasiveness into the comments. Or, you could alternatively just relax, and realize this is a discussion site, not a debate world championship.
The only point of the jackass that posted 5 (or whatever) excerpts from the article was that Spolskys definition of simple isn't what the "Vast Majority" of people consider the definition of simple to be.
Ah, so you know that he's a jackass based on one comment on Slashdot? Or are you just jealous that an "undeserving" comment got modded up over your incredible prose? Why turn it into a personal attack if your evidence is so strong?
"Simplicity Is Highly Overrated" merely states that complexity sells. I wouldn't argue with that one. However, it doesn't mean anything for how people feel about using a product, or a free service which they don't have to buy. Personally, I'm aghast this one got into CACM, with an author who didn't even clean up his grammar (such as messing up less versus fewer, on multiple occasions). "The truth about Google's so-called simplicity" is basically a rant against hierarchy, saying that things should be flat rather than nested, but then calling Google to task for the complicated flat options page. The author misses the fact that most of those options can be accessed via search queries, where the vast majority "do the right thing" when you hit the first link returned. Experts can keep the complex options page if they want it, but most users won't need it. Joel finally adds that complexity sells (again), and that a simple interface may sell, but that doesn't mean simplistic devices will. I don't think anyone ever claimed that a simple backend with few features is best, unless you are trying to limit the number of faults or bugs. Simplicity devotees are mainly talking about the complexity foisted upon the user in order to use the product. This is where Google and Apple do well. The summary is wrong to compare this with K.I.S.S., which is about limiting design faults, bugs, and failure modes. Oh, and Joel, a lot of people DO hate their phones now, and would rather buy a cheaper one without the extra features (which you have to pay extra to use anyway). As one of my friends put it, it was nicer with his old phone, which "didn't take 35 seconds to boot with a dancing clown animation".
Obviously you didn't even read the articles you linked. That's pretty hilarious. Yep, F15s don't win when they are outnumbered 3-1, aren't using the latest missiles, forbidden to engage beyond visual range, and forbidden to use electronics countermeasures (i.e. jamming). Russian fighters have always been great at dogfighting - unfortunately dogfighting hasn't happened much since the Korean war.
While its true the US does not enjoy the advantages it once had, in the current era it's unlikely there will ever be a war between major powers which relies on airpower. It will instead end in 30 minutes in a cloud of radioactive smoke.
MS's format is technically superior, and produces smaller file sizes because of the compression algorithms.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? In my experience I have found OpenDoc text files to regularly be shorter than MS Word documents. In addition, MS Word documents continue to get bigger as you edit them, even if the document itself isn't getting longer. A lot of garbage is left in (which is also a privacy problem). That doesn't sound technically superior to me.
Also, what is the magic compression algorithm that MS uses which is so superior? OpenDoc is in XML, which is an inefficient format, but the whole document is compressed with gzip/zlib, which offers fairly decent compression for a non-proprietary algorithm. That also means that I can use gzip and a text editor to view OpenDoc content, if there was ever a need to recover information due to breakage. That's a real advantage. I don't think anyone who's used MS Word for 10 years can claim they haven't lost at least one document to corruption.
The big downside (for slashdotters) is that Open XML is a MS product and not "owned" by the Open Source community. People on this site hate it, not because it's bad or worse than ODF, but because it's MS's creation.
No, the big downside is that you might get in a lawsuit for using an MS "Standard". They can decide to charge money for it if they want (RAND), lock out open source with non-sublicensable licenses, and offer no guarantees that they will even follow the standard in the next version of office. If you follow that with your free implementation, you open yourself up to a lawsuit. Contrast that to OpenDoc, which is a free standard which is compatible with both proprietary and open source programs. Why limit yourself when you don't have to? If you were choosing between two cars, one which might cost a small amount of money and only works six days of the week, and another which is free and works all week, which would you choose?
For you anti-ms people i have a question, a hypnotical really. If you had cancer and were on your death bed and "Satan" creates a cure for cancer, do you take it?
Hypothetically, it sounds like you would sell your soul for a lollipop.
I'm sure they once called these "booby traps". What's the obsession with acronyms?
When's the last time you referred to memory as Double Data Rate Random Access Memory rather than DDR RAM? If you work with something every day, you tend to shorten things. You also define terms more specifically than general usage (RAM vs memory).
An IED is a booby trap consisting of a rigged Device containing a large amount of Explosives in a fairly jury-rigged fashion (i.e. Improvised). It's not uncommon to find multiple anti-tank mines stacked together or even unexploded bombs. When talking about risks and countermeasures, it pays to be specific. Just like you wouldn't refer to large artillery as a "gun" when describing it to someone else, because it is too imprecise without qualification. A "gun" could be anything from a pistol to a 155mm howitzer. This is the same reason Lawyers define a bunch of "useless" jargon and acronyms; They can put a precise meaning on it for their purposes. Now, the military does have a huge number of acronyms, and maybe more than are needed, but it is just as specialized an occupation as practicing law.
Now, IANAL and I did not RTFA or GP, but AFAICT, we are now a nation of acronyms, especially TLAs. If you don't like it you can STFU while I LMAO <JK>.
Re:We have a bigger problem...
on
Saving U.S. Science
·
· Score: 5, Insightful
No kidding. What happened to good old American scientists like we used to have... You know, the ones with names like Einstein, Von Braun, and Tesla.
At $50 a square foot (the current cost of a 25%-efficient cell), a 265-mile square of solar panels would cost $98 trillion dollars. That's quite a bit more than fighting even an expensive war. We will still need a few more breakthroughs for solar to be practical. With a 5x reduction in price, for example, you'd probably start to see it on a lot of buildings.
So how about it? What's a good way for us to make the leap into Linux without dropping a load of cash?
Definitely start with the apps, which will make the underlying OS less of an issue. Switch from MS Office to OpenOffice (should get biggest money savings here), from IE for Firefox, and so on. Once all the apps are cross-platform, changing the platform will be a lot easier. Wait for an major upgrade cycle to switch the OS, where both options would require retraining anyway. Stick with XP for now, but when it comes time, decide between Linux and Vista.
In the mean time, have the IT staff try to learn more about Linux. Switching to a Linux server backend can save some money, and is easier than a complete desktop rollout. Cross-platform apps will play nice with a Linux server in the backend (Samba can usually play fine with MS apps too if needed). After working with that for a while, the staff should be a lot more comfortable with Linux.
If there is a worry about losing practical MS Office (MSO) skills for students, give them a semester course in MSO in their senior year of high school. You'll only need one lab of Windows/MSO machines for that. It shouldn't be difficult for most students to transfer most knowledge from OpenOffice to MSO. Also, teaching MSO any earlier isn't worth it since the interface changes every few years anyway.
Yep, because after growing up with Commodores and Apples in school, I found it completely impossible to work on anything else. It's a good thing companies still use WFW 3.11, because how would I ever transfer that knowledge to later versions of Windows with their radical innovations? On a similar token, we should stop teaching foreign languages, since it is a waste of time to speak those less useful languages. It's not like broadening your educational horizon helps in picking up other things, right?
They are looking in the wrong places. They didn't need to change anything to catch these sings, they just needed to pay attention to the security briefings that were provided to them. Competence stops terrorists, not privacy intrusions.
To some extent that's kind of saying "The needle was right there, poking out of the side of the haystack; Why didn't you see it?". The closest thing to a smoking gun was the untranslated NSA phone intercept (which they translated a few days too late). How much do you want to bet that it came from an illegal wiretap?
Well ending foreign policies that act to dehumanize people in Muslim countries would also help.
Improving our international relations with Muslim countries would certainly help (mainly through better choice of actions on our part). That's a long-term solution though, so it requires patience I'm not sure the public or our government have. That is quite a shame. Also, even if the Mideast finds a solution for peace someday, terrorism will continue in the future anyway, with new groups causing it. It seems to be the modern way to wage war -- using the media to magnify a militarily minor action to affect an entire nation's populace.
Pattern recognition on computers is approximately equal for the two, but human performance is quite different. Vision is easy for humans because 1/4 of our brain is devoted to the task. When you look at an arbitrary classification tasks, it is an entirely different matter (evaluating a game board, for example). This is why we beat computers at vision tasks, and they beat us at board games. For a data-mining effort, you don't usually have "rich" features like an image, but simple ones such as "the number of days a person bought the ticket in advance". The human will not have insight into the task without a lot of effort, and will have to work against personal biases which could be wrong.
Sometimes you can use human help to boost the system. If there is a really good expert at a task, you can hire them to help guide the design by working with machine learning experts. You can't afford to train and hire such a domain expert to work 24/7 at every US airport however. That's the idea of a so-called "Expert system", although unfortunately that term got watered down by bad research when it became a research fad. The original idea is still quite sound.
The other, more technical reason for the vision-vs-classification performance is that vision involves a much larger, more distorted space. A 320x240 color image has 230 thousand dimensions -- which can bleed into one another (under translation and rotation), and can scale arbitrarily (due to light source changes). Something like a security classifier is dealing with "only" 10-30 dimensions, and the variables are more independent. For example, the "ticket bought with cash" variable won't bleed into the "meal selection" variable.
Which is not to say this system will work all that well anyway. By definition, there won't be much training data for "real terrorists", so the model will not learn as well as it could with a larger positive example set. Thus if you want a decent rate of catching the bad guys, there will be many false positives. But that's how they're treating the system anyway; It's not that you get thrown in jail if a computer thinks you are a risk, but rather it means an already existing security agent will consider your case. Think of it as the computer equivalent of a metal detector.
Is it worth the cost and decreased privacy? Probably not. However, as long as we have unrealistic expectations of our security system, projects like this will flourish.
Slashdot Mirror
I, for one, refuse to ignore your post.
So, if you are at a bowling alley, and on your backswing you let go of a bowling ball and hit someone with it, should you sue the bowling ball manufacturer? If you pitch a baseball, and let go of the ball early and break a window, should you sue the baseball manufacturer? No, you shouldn't, because in normal sports there is an expectation that you hold on to the ball until the proper time. Is it unreasonable to expect someone to hold on to a Wii controller?
Having actually played WiiSports, it states in the directions that extreme motions aren't necessary. You do not need to swing the remote anywhere near what some people are doing, as it offers zero benefit in the game; The controller saturates at a much lower speed. It's like breaking off the analog stick on a gamepad because you were "trying to go faster".
Funny you should mention that. I happen to know somebody who lost much of their PhD dissertation document after writing it in MS Word. It got corrupted in some subtle way, and then ended up making large portions of text unusable and unrecoverable. Most of the large MS Word documents you saw probably used master documents, as the GP mentioned. Of course, he is a "fanboy", and cannot be trusted, right? Your arguments, by contrast, are only based on "facts" (or a lack of medication).
Of course, for large documents I don't know if I would trust OO.org either; I did my PhD thesis in LaTeX.
You always have the source text, which is why you can trust LaTeX not to eat your document. Whether it generates a correct looking output document is a separate issue.
Yep, a direct suicide mission to mars would be great for the US space program.
Well, then they should have an article citing examples from the EULA. The FSF tends to beat around the bush far too much; People will take your evidence more willingly if you don't make them read a 10-page manifesto without facts before you get to the meat. I like what the FSF has done, but often their evangelizing is often terrible. Linux sugar has caught more new users than FSF vinegar.
If you want more of your clients to change to OO, just run "strings" on their .doc files and email them the parts that came from other documents. That should be enough to get them to change their minds about it.
(For the uninitiated, As you edit a document in MS Word, it picks up bits of other documents you have open at the time or even previously opened. This is because it doesn't clear memory before using it, and the fast-save file format is really more a memory dump. This may have been fixed in the latest version of MS Word; I certainly hope so...)
I don't have particularly large limits (I think), but it always bothered me that every copy of xemacs would have 10 MB of resident memory. It bothered me a lot more when my computer only had 32 MB of memory (Linux drove me to upgrade to 64 MB pretty quickly after switching from Windows). Now, of course, 10 MB is practically nothing compared to what the Mozilla applications or Open Office use...
1) As far as I can tell, Player/Stage/Gazebo is limited to flat earth. (MSRS is not, arbitrary terrain)
.NET framework there is a wealth of functionality: mathematics functions, quaternions, etc.
Yes it does. First two hits when you google "gazebo terrain".
2) Part of the
2b) Loss of portability to other operating systems.
This is not something to be overlooked, given the prevalence of Linux for headless embedded devices (i.e. robots). If you like object-oriented development, Player has bindings for C++, Java, Ruby, and Python.
Especially when you are simulating discrete objects. The ability to have TableObject *table and Robot *robot, instead of a bunch of c-calls, is a blessing and speeds up your development time.
Well, if you want to argue the simulator sucks, then I won't necessarily disagree with you. That's not the interface a robot *user* would be dealing with however, only the creator of a custom robot. A C++ interface for the robot "driver" would be nice, but I can understand the portability reasons for choosing plain C. In my graduate-level course on physical simulation, I did use C++ for my simulator. I don't think it was a huge advantage however, since everything was implemented as a large system of ODEs anyway, and the object oriented view was just translating to and from that (following the Baraff/Witkin approach).
(I know, this is my day job)
Guess what my day job is?
This is also why a lot of people choose DirectX over OpenGL.
It seems to me that the only people who prefer DirectX are game programmers. Scientific/visualization/engineering apps are still largely OpenGL. This is partly due to inertia, of course, but I'm sure they appreciate the portability too, since important scientific and engineering apps tend to work on more than one OS.
MS Robotics Studio was created after Player/Stage became successful. Go look up the features of Player/Stage and then tell me how Robotics Studio is a huge step forward.
Excuse me, but GNU must be capitalized to emphasize its importance over all other open source projects -- as well as the fact that it is a recursive acronym.
The current situation is that NVidia cards work fine with the binary driver, but the open driver is terrible (due to lack of docs). The ATI binary driver, for whatever reason, doesn't support some cards for many months after they are released. OTOH, the open ATI driver is at least usable for X, although the GL acceleration isn't very good. I don't like binary drivers, but there are some reasons that the companies keep them closed. ATI needs to pick a side though, and decide if it is supporting Linux or not.
Does it overlook Lindon? If so, can you throw some rocks at SCO for us?
So forcing a user to click twice to get a map or, alternatively, type the URL into the address bar is an excercise in simplicity.
Time is what matters, not the number of clicks. If a page is so cluttered that I have to use "find text" just to find the right search box, I've already lost the time it would take to search and then click on the first link.
I have to say, I didn't agree with the article 100%, but the attempts to refute it here on Slashdot have been hilariously bad.
Wow, bad comments on Slashdot, who would have thought they existed? I find your counter-arguments equally weak though, so maybe both of you ought to work a little more persuasiveness into the comments. Or, you could alternatively just relax, and realize this is a discussion site, not a debate world championship.
The only point of the jackass that posted 5 (or whatever) excerpts from the article was that Spolskys definition of simple isn't what the "Vast Majority" of people consider the definition of simple to be.
Ah, so you know that he's a jackass based on one comment on Slashdot? Or are you just jealous that an "undeserving" comment got modded up over your incredible prose? Why turn it into a personal attack if your evidence is so strong?
"Simplicity Is Highly Overrated" merely states that complexity sells. I wouldn't argue with that one. However, it doesn't mean anything for how people feel about using a product, or a free service which they don't have to buy. Personally, I'm aghast this one got into CACM, with an author who didn't even clean up his grammar (such as messing up less versus fewer, on multiple occasions). "The truth about Google's so-called simplicity" is basically a rant against hierarchy, saying that things should be flat rather than nested, but then calling Google to task for the complicated flat options page. The author misses the fact that most of those options can be accessed via search queries, where the vast majority "do the right thing" when you hit the first link returned. Experts can keep the complex options page if they want it, but most users won't need it. Joel finally adds that complexity sells (again), and that a simple interface may sell, but that doesn't mean simplistic devices will. I don't think anyone ever claimed that a simple backend with few features is best, unless you are trying to limit the number of faults or bugs. Simplicity devotees are mainly talking about the complexity foisted upon the user in order to use the product. This is where Google and Apple do well. The summary is wrong to compare this with K.I.S.S., which is about limiting design faults, bugs, and failure modes. Oh, and Joel, a lot of people DO hate their phones now, and would rather buy a cheaper one without the extra features (which you have to pay extra to use anyway). As one of my friends put it, it was nicer with his old phone, which "didn't take 35 seconds to boot with a dancing clown animation".
Yahoo! even has an excellent personalization page, so you can choose what you wish to see on that first page.
Wow, amazing! Google has that too. In fact, you can make it look quite a bit like yahoo.
Want a map? You have to click once to be offered the choice, then a second additional time to get to the map page.
Nope, typing the address into the regular search bar works just fine, offering it as the first result.
Want to use Google Scholar to check references? Um, well, is that "Advanced Search" or "more."
Actually, you just type the name of the paper into the search bar, and it will pop up in the results. Noticing a trend here?
Why is Google maps separate from Google Earth?
Why is Yahoo shopping separate from paypal? That's about as relevant.
(Oh, those were purchased from different companies. Yes, but why should I, the user, care about the
history of Google's acquisitions?)
You don't, and if you just type in the address in the default search bar, the "problem" never even comes up.
All of these things require you to click on "more"...
Which couldn't be more wrong. It's pretty clear this guy hasn't actually used Google for any length of time.
So, I guess that cherrypicking isn't helping you much either, now is it?
Obviously you didn't even read the articles you linked. That's pretty hilarious. Yep, F15s don't win when they are outnumbered 3-1, aren't using the latest missiles, forbidden to engage beyond visual range, and forbidden to use electronics countermeasures (i.e. jamming). Russian fighters have always been great at dogfighting - unfortunately dogfighting hasn't happened much since the Korean war.
While its true the US does not enjoy the advantages it once had, in the current era it's unlikely there will ever be a war between major powers which relies on airpower. It will instead end in 30 minutes in a cloud of radioactive smoke.
MS's format is technically superior, and produces smaller file sizes because of the compression algorithms.
Do you have any evidence to back this up? In my experience I have found OpenDoc text files to regularly be shorter than MS Word documents. In addition, MS Word documents continue to get bigger as you edit them, even if the document itself isn't getting longer. A lot of garbage is left in (which is also a privacy problem). That doesn't sound technically superior to me.
Also, what is the magic compression algorithm that MS uses which is so superior? OpenDoc is in XML, which is an inefficient format, but the whole document is compressed with gzip/zlib, which offers fairly decent compression for a non-proprietary algorithm. That also means that I can use gzip and a text editor to view OpenDoc content, if there was ever a need to recover information due to breakage. That's a real advantage. I don't think anyone who's used MS Word for 10 years can claim they haven't lost at least one document to corruption.
The big downside (for slashdotters) is that Open XML is a MS product and not "owned" by the Open Source community. People on this site hate it, not because it's bad or worse than ODF, but because it's MS's creation.
No, the big downside is that you might get in a lawsuit for using an MS "Standard". They can decide to charge money for it if they want (RAND), lock out open source with non-sublicensable licenses, and offer no guarantees that they will even follow the standard in the next version of office. If you follow that with your free implementation, you open yourself up to a lawsuit. Contrast that to OpenDoc, which is a free standard which is compatible with both proprietary and open source programs. Why limit yourself when you don't have to? If you were choosing between two cars, one which might cost a small amount of money and only works six days of the week, and another which is free and works all week, which would you choose?
For you anti-ms people i have a question, a hypnotical really. If you had cancer and were on your death bed and "Satan" creates a cure for cancer, do you take it?
Hypothetically, it sounds like you would sell your soul for a lollipop.
I'm sure they once called these "booby traps". What's the obsession with acronyms?
When's the last time you referred to memory as Double Data Rate Random Access Memory rather than DDR RAM? If you work with something every day, you tend to shorten things. You also define terms more specifically than general usage (RAM vs memory).
An IED is a booby trap consisting of a rigged Device containing a large amount of Explosives in a fairly jury-rigged fashion (i.e. Improvised). It's not uncommon to find multiple anti-tank mines stacked together or even unexploded bombs. When talking about risks and countermeasures, it pays to be specific. Just like you wouldn't refer to large artillery as a "gun" when describing it to someone else, because it is too imprecise without qualification. A "gun" could be anything from a pistol to a 155mm howitzer. This is the same reason Lawyers define a bunch of "useless" jargon and acronyms; They can put a precise meaning on it for their purposes. Now, the military does have a huge number of acronyms, and maybe more than are needed, but it is just as specialized an occupation as practicing law.
Now, IANAL and I did not RTFA or GP, but AFAICT, we are now a nation of acronyms, especially TLAs. If you don't like it you can STFU while I LMAO <JK>.
No kidding. What happened to good old American scientists like we used to have... You know, the ones with names like Einstein, Von Braun, and Tesla.
Oh wait...
Yep. Solar has certainly found some good niche markets already, and I didn't intend to take anything away from that.
At $50 a square foot (the current cost of a 25%-efficient cell), a 265-mile square of solar panels would cost $98 trillion dollars. That's quite a bit more than fighting even an expensive war. We will still need a few more breakthroughs for solar to be practical. With a 5x reduction in price, for example, you'd probably start to see it on a lot of buildings.
NO WAR FOR SILICON!
So how about it? What's a good way for us to make the leap into Linux without dropping a load of cash?
Definitely start with the apps, which will make the underlying OS less of an issue. Switch from MS Office to OpenOffice (should get biggest money savings here), from IE for Firefox, and so on. Once all the apps are cross-platform, changing the platform will be a lot easier. Wait for an major upgrade cycle to switch the OS, where both options would require retraining anyway. Stick with XP for now, but when it comes time, decide between Linux and Vista.
In the mean time, have the IT staff try to learn more about Linux. Switching to a Linux server backend can save some money, and is easier than a complete desktop rollout. Cross-platform apps will play nice with a Linux server in the backend (Samba can usually play fine with MS apps too if needed). After working with that for a while, the staff should be a lot more comfortable with Linux.
If there is a worry about losing practical MS Office (MSO) skills for students, give them a semester course in MSO in their senior year of high school. You'll only need one lab of Windows/MSO machines for that. It shouldn't be difficult for most students to transfer most knowledge from OpenOffice to MSO. Also, teaching MSO any earlier isn't worth it since the interface changes every few years anyway.
Just my $0.02, take it with plentiful salt...
Yep, because after growing up with Commodores and Apples in school, I found it completely impossible to work on anything else. It's a good thing companies still use WFW 3.11, because how would I ever transfer that knowledge to later versions of Windows with their radical innovations? On a similar token, we should stop teaching foreign languages, since it is a waste of time to speak those less useful languages. It's not like broadening your educational horizon helps in picking up other things, right?
P.S. It's literate, not litterate.
They are looking in the wrong places. They didn't need to change anything to catch these sings, they just needed to pay attention to the security briefings that were provided to them. Competence stops terrorists, not privacy intrusions.
To some extent that's kind of saying "The needle was right there, poking out of the side of the haystack; Why didn't you see it?". The closest thing to a smoking gun was the untranslated NSA phone intercept (which they translated a few days too late). How much do you want to bet that it came from an illegal wiretap?
Well ending foreign policies that act to dehumanize people in Muslim countries would also help.
Improving our international relations with Muslim countries would certainly help (mainly through better choice of actions on our part). That's a long-term solution though, so it requires patience I'm not sure the public or our government have. That is quite a shame. Also, even if the Mideast finds a solution for peace someday, terrorism will continue in the future anyway, with new groups causing it. It seems to be the modern way to wage war -- using the media to magnify a militarily minor action to affect an entire nation's populace.
Pattern recognition on computers is approximately equal for the two, but human performance is quite different. Vision is easy for humans because 1/4 of our brain is devoted to the task. When you look at an arbitrary classification tasks, it is an entirely different matter (evaluating a game board, for example). This is why we beat computers at vision tasks, and they beat us at board games. For a data-mining effort, you don't usually have "rich" features like an image, but simple ones such as "the number of days a person bought the ticket in advance". The human will not have insight into the task without a lot of effort, and will have to work against personal biases which could be wrong.
Sometimes you can use human help to boost the system. If there is a really good expert at a task, you can hire them to help guide the design by working with machine learning experts. You can't afford to train and hire such a domain expert to work 24/7 at every US airport however. That's the idea of a so-called "Expert system", although unfortunately that term got watered down by bad research when it became a research fad. The original idea is still quite sound.
The other, more technical reason for the vision-vs-classification performance is that vision involves a much larger, more distorted space. A 320x240 color image has 230 thousand dimensions -- which can bleed into one another (under translation and rotation), and can scale arbitrarily (due to light source changes). Something like a security classifier is dealing with "only" 10-30 dimensions, and the variables are more independent. For example, the "ticket bought with cash" variable won't bleed into the "meal selection" variable.
Which is not to say this system will work all that well anyway. By definition, there won't be much training data for "real terrorists", so the model will not learn as well as it could with a larger positive example set. Thus if you want a decent rate of catching the bad guys, there will be many false positives. But that's how they're treating the system anyway; It's not that you get thrown in jail if a computer thinks you are a risk, but rather it means an already existing security agent will consider your case. Think of it as the computer equivalent of a metal detector.
Is it worth the cost and decreased privacy? Probably not. However, as long as we have unrealistic expectations of our security system, projects like this will flourish.