This "Variable Speed" transmission is A JOKE!!!
It is an overly complex but mechanically identical version of the Prius hybrid synergy drive planet and sun gear arrangement where an electric motor (AKA the generator) and the gas engine combine to produce a clutchless, constant mesh transmission that is infinitely variable and reversible.
A real CVT would require ONE gas engine, no second electric motor/generator and use a simple effortless position lever that determines the direction and gear ratio of the transmission. That is NOT what Steve has built. He's made a Rube Goldberg contraption to fool the mechanically unsophisticated into thinking there is an invention here...
Real CVT's exist in tractors, Honda has one in a motor cycle (see the wikipedia article on CVT's) and some diesel trucks have CVT's on their alternators. All of these use variable angle swash plates and hydraulic pistons or for low torque applications like the truck alternator, a ratcheting gear assembly.
It annoys me when people get taken in. If you want a real mechanical puzzel to ponder, look up the Torsen Differential. That is a masterpiece of brilliant invention and engineering and is used on very large trucks).
Simbuddha
I have to agree with QuestionsNotAnswers as most smart sociopaths are excellent actors. But when the obvious choice is X and yet they choose Y, over and over, it becomes clear that either they are bought and owned by special interests (read a corrupt international corporation, yes there are many good ones too) and have no allegiance our nation, or they are sociopaths and the two might just be shades of grey.
It is their track record that exposes them. Trouble is the american public just accepts this and has no clear way to unify and express outrage and demand that people acting against our collective and the nations best interest, but in their own interest or the interest of their master (a corporation), should be ejected from public service and government influence. Ultimately our system (governance and capitalism) needs to produce an immune system to sociopathic behaviour. I find it amazing that people watch Fox and trust many other rediculous information sources which are there to ensure the american public are misinformed and brainwashed and accept living like a bunch of corn feed cattle in tight pens, being manipulated and programmed to think and feel in ways they would not normally.
Big Brother is alive and well and if "they" achieve their goal of "a new world order" of sociopathic design, we all ought to realize we will be looking forward to an extended century of suffering and chaos. From my perspective, the anti-christ isn't one person, it is a broad collective of people at various levels of government and in corporations who act in ways that destroy and undermine our rights, our nation and our future. The manipulation is that we are led to believe it (the anti-christ) is one person, external to ourselves, when in fact it is up to us whether we are part of "it" or not...
I'd agree if I thought the sociopaths actually knew how to fix the problems
or could direct others to do so. But being a sociopath does not imbue the
person with great problem solving skills or technical knowledge.
The article referenced makes many lame points and is clearly biased, but
it does bring up some points worth considering.
For example: if we let them create too many UNRECOVERABLE events, we may
not survive and go the way of the dinosaur. I think one crazy idea is
high pressure corbon dioxide gas sequestration underground of massive amounts
of CO2. Nice legacy to leave our children... Imagine if an earthquake could
release a giant (hundreds of square miles) kill zone of Carbon Dioxide gas
from this "underground tank". Worse imagine we lose double digits of square miles
of the amazon daily, and allow the desertification of the south american
continent. Even worse, we poison and change the ecosystem of the oceans
and kill the ocean biosphere. Both of these are already well proven to
be underway. Imagine we reduce our plant bio-diversity (Monsanto crop
seed patents and genetic engineering control) and there is a major
disease that kills off our farming production of say corn and wheat.
Plant diseases and pests like monoculture crops and adapt to pesticides
and herbacides (that poison us, our sea life and the water supply too).
So what if all of these combine and that leads to a rapid fall off in
natures O2 production over just a few years. We could be living on a
planet like plant "Space Ball" (of the movie Spaceballs), where the leader
cracks open a can of fresh air...
Some problems combined might be too big, so do we just let a confluence of
bad policy and profitability decisions that have global and survival risks
go forward without government intervention? Where is government of the
people, by the people, for the people represented in this?
This is more like "of the corporation run by sociopaths, for corporations
run by sociopaths, by political puppets controlled by sociopaths.
Hmm, sounds like Bush and Cheney?
How can Obama resist the sociopath power elite and serve "the people" ?
It took me a long time to figure out why things are going to hell. Then I read
http://www.youmeworks.com/sociopaths.html
and it all made sense. Sociopaths seek power and winning without conscience
and this is why banking and wall street leaders are where they are, because
they've changed the system of laws to favor themselves. Like terminators,
they don't feel remorse or care if their actions hurt other people. These
people are now a large proportion of our international corporate leadership.
Until our system collapses, they will stay in power, even though they are
the reason for our suffering and downfall as a nation. Not sure what there
is to do about the situation except have people come to recognize sociopaths
for what they are, broken people who should never be allowed to hold power.
From the web site the 12 clues to recognizing a sociopath
HOW TO KNOW
The big question is, of course, how can you know whether someone is a sociopath or not? It is a difficult question and even experts on the subject can be fooled. If you suspect that someone close to you is a sociopath, I suggest you read both of the books I mentioned and think hard about it. Compare that person to the other people in your life. Ask yourself these questions:
1. Do you often feel used by the person?
2. Have you often felt that he (or she) doesn't care about you?
3. Does he lie and deceive you?
4. Does he tend to make contradictory statements?
5. Does he tend to take from you and not give back much?
6. Does he often appeal to pity? Does he seem to try to make you feel sorry for him?
7. Does he try to make you feel guilty?
8. Do you sometimes feel he is taking advantage of your good nature?
9. Does he seem easily bored and need constant stimulation?
10. Does he use a lot of flattery? Does he interact with you in a way that makes you feel flattered even if he says nothing overtly complimentary?
11. Does he make you feel worried? Does he do it obviously or more cleverly and sneakily?
12. Does he give you the impression you owe him?
13. Does he chronically fail to take responsibility for harming others? Does he blame everyone and everything but himself?
Tags: evil, Hitler, anti-christ, sociopath,
I agree that parents and teachers are responsible for holding students accountable and encouraging them to learn and accomplish, but I question public education (and private schools) goals for their students learning. It seems to me that public school curriculum is designed to bore the crap out of young people and make their heads hurt so that they drop out, stay dumbed down, ready to take on faith, answers they should determine themselves. This results in a large population of "worker bees" that are manipulable due to their disinterest in actual knowing, and lacking of critical analysis skills to problem solve in the real world.
When public school "gets back to basics" by teaching each subject in a sterile and unrelated way to the world at large, it is boring. Young people are naturally interested in how math, english and science are interwoven, not how they exist in isolation. I also am very sad that programming is not something every young person has some mastery at by the time they graduate high school. I blame programming langauge designers for completely failing to provide an adequate programming ecosystem for introductory youth programming. The languages that are avaialble are toys, such as Logo and Squeak. The last great "real" interactive programming languages were BASIC on machines like the Apple II and APL (Ken Iverson) on mainframes and PC's. Unfortunately, modern implementations of these languages are uber complex professional tools that are innappropriate for introductory programming.
But I wandered off topic. What I rant about is how children barely understand the modern world they exist in. They may know how to do basic math and write a formulaic essay, but they have no idea how dozens of natural, man made and life critical systems we all depend on work. Kids get to play photo realistic games of war that require no knowledge or real skill, yet have no way to explore the life cycle of ponds, streams, rivers and oceans as a living simulation that they can nurture or pollute. To young people today, the world is a black box they barely have any interest in understanding, because school is about paper and pencil math drill books, and boring science and history textbooks that are dead, 3rd hand knowledge. If we let kids also learn experientially, through educational simulations that let them experience the systems and interact with them, young people will emerge from school with a broad experiential knowledge of biological and mechanical systems, electronics and power systems, farming, water supply, housing, transportation, political processes, family system and interpersonal dynamics, business operation and management, etc. I wish that all young people graduating from high school would have basic insight into the systemic processes of our world. They would make our population informed voters. What we have instead are people who are in blind allegiance to political parties that don't really know or care about the issues either, and just want to be in control.
I lead the development of two IBM classroom math education products many years ago that gave me a glimpse of where thing might have gone.
As a programmer and parent of three kids and step parent to two others, I recommend a few things that I have exposed kids to with positive effect.
The Torque Game Builder is a fun system. Scratch is also very cool. Of course the Lego system is great fun and a good starting point for programming and robotics. Blitz Basic is also a fun system to learn on.
The problem with todays state of technology is that kids see massively complex video games made by huge teams at great cost and their efforts seem trivial and boring, so working the robotic real world angle helps differentiate their efforts.
The real trick to getting a young person to become a competent programmer is persistence of ongoing projects. Like speaking a foreign language, progreamming is something you use or loose...
Long ago I setup a two mile link between my work (a six story building) and my home using two 14db yagi antennas that look like two foot long by 3 inch PVC pipes with mounting brackets. These were connected to Lucent Orinoco Silver 802.11b cards setup in bridge mode through PCs. It worked GREAT.
These days, there are a lot of solutions out there. One he could try is to setup a router at his friends house and aim a Wifi radio through a yagi at his house from his friends roof. At home he needs a PCI card with external antenna jack that can be placed not too far from a roof top mounted yagi pointed at his friends house. Even expensive coax will eat up the antenna db gains in cable losses so the radios really must be close to the antennas. His best option might be to buy commercial outdoor ethernet to WiFi bridges designed with hi power amps and which come with Yagis or flat Phase Array antennas that place the radio right next to the antenna.
But for any of these options to work there must be line of sight between the two antennas with minimal foliage or buildings between them. If there are even a few large trees in the way or a large building, this will not work. If he doesn't have reasonable line of sight he could try 900mhz or 430mhz wireless radio links that better tolerate trees and buildings. Alternatively, he could use custom firmware on a few WRT54g's and have them form a mesh network where one of the routers is mid way between the two homes and all legs of the link have line of sight.
There are many providers of antennas and equipment for long range WiFi as well as 900mhz and 430mhz radio links. Google around.
Actually Astrology is based on ancient chinese astronomy and dates back many thousands of years. It is all about tracking planetary positions and mapping them into a symbolic langauge of positions. It was used to determine crop planting and harvesting and as a way to measure time and location. So in fact it has very scientific roots. Over the ages, wise elders studied the stars and their positions and found correlation to other living systems which are cyclical and began to identify trends and aspects of things that appeared to be correlated in people. What emerged was a type of psychological langauge framework that describes how certain planetary positions influence living systems including people and animals, possibly through DNA influences at the quantum level. One precept of astrology is that there is free will and ones DNA and astrological influences do not determine your fate. The other is that time twins (people who share the same location and time of birth to within a few minutes), will have the same predispositions in many areas as compared to other people with very different charts.
Astrology is a language describing planetary time and position in relation to star clusters first and foremost.
What I find most interesting personally, being a computer scientist and computer language designer (a person who designs symbolic information representation systems), is how quickly people who have not done even the slightest bit of research into "real" astrology are willing to cast their "flawed" opinions about a most worthy area of study from my perspective.
A wonderful web site that you might want to use as a point of beginning inquiry is:
I have had only one reading done in my life which was very interesting and informative. I had it done by the famous author and friend of Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, Mr. Antero Alli (who is also an excellent independent film director).
If you want to judge a subject, better spend at least a few hours reading about it from well respected and expert practitioners before denigrating it in ignorance.
Shame on all you lazy and prejudiced slashdotters, ready to form an inquisition. Ignoramouses....
SimBuddha
As a language designer, I appreciate this paper
on
State of the Onion 11
·
· Score: 0
I've been designing and implementing a general purpose programming language for many years (in my limited free time) and enjoy studying numerous languages and their good and not so good ideas and fitness for creating a broad range of applications. There are many challenging issues to consider when engaged in programming language implementation. While I am not a Perl/Ruby/Python programmer, I have studied these languages and have used many languages mentioned in the paper professionally. I found the paper to be very insightful, but it really is speaking to other language developers... It might be more useful for the paper to discuss Perl issues from the point of view of various programmers using the language for different applications. Most folks in the audience are more interested in solving problems quickly, reliably, with high performance, scalably and maintably and are less interested in the internal drama that goes on in the heads of language implementors.
From my perspective, I want my language to be approachable by first time programmers age 12+, but capable of building complex professional applications that require assembler and 'C' level performance. My deepest programming language foundations are several assembler languages, 'C', C++, APL, SQL, BASIC, LISP, Prolog, Pascal, Lua, Torque, and JavaScript as well as others. My useage for these has been in constructing spreadsheet recalculation engines, virtualization and dynamic translating processors, educational game simulations, custom business vertical database/financial apps and a host of graphics and system level stuff and some hardware. So I have a bit of a bottom up perspective with some healthy vertical app top down moderation. I love games like "The Incredible Machine" series and engines like The Torque Engine and PhysX. Have you seen the new Crysis game.... unbelieveable.
So in my mind, my language has to be capable of being used to create these types of reliable, networked applications with performance equal to 'C' and assembler, but with the brevity of APL, structure of 'C', Lua or TorqueScript, the platform of TGE and the analytical and transactional power of SQL DBMS. And that is what my language is attempting to fuse together in a sensible manner. Then to provide a "Scratch" or "Lego Mindstorms" application constructor GUI for newbies to use to get started. (ya I know, a huge goal)
I think the biggest challenge facing communities using their favorite language is how to provide useful general direction to the future of the language; like how to simplify it while expanding its overall applicability for an ever wider scope of real world products and a broader programmer/user audience. And as a language implementor, the challenge is how to interpret the needs of programmers and navigate an optimal evolution for the language.
The 8K Floating Point BASIC on my first machine had functions. My second machine with NorthStar Basic was useful for writing complex business applications. Visual Basic has been enhanced and is a core language for MicroSoft platforms today and is quite efficient and fully capable... LOGO is still? So your point is what?
My point is that LOGO is more toy than programming language, and while some people have had a positive experience using it, I question its value, even as a first language. I question why an educator would start a student out on a language they cannot continue to use long term, and that is highly abstract in some ways so the true nature of the machine hardware underneath is obscured and not understood while using it. To me it is a bit like teaching kids about bugs and higher biological life forms without a foundational knowledge of cells.
Why not teach them how a line is drawn, instead of ideas like, turn right 45 degrees, draw X distance. How many kids even know what angles are and sin/cosine, etc.
Considering that I have been involved as engineering management with several educational application suites for classroom K-4, and have raised 3 children, so I have a perspective based on my experience. I see that a lot of what is passed off as learning about computers is about becomming a good data entry person, and not about foundational knowledge and skills at applying a tool to a problem.
Simbuddha
LOGO - not a viable adult language
on
Forty Years of LOGO
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
My concern with teaching and using LOGO in education is that LOGO fails to provide people with a fully capable language that they can use life long. How many teens or adults program in LOGO? What type of "real" programs can be written in LOGO. Is it efficient enough for practical programs.
My first programming language was BASIC, (then 6502/Z80 assembly) then Pascal, C and APL (APL is my favorite teaching langauge - see Kxdb+ from KX Systems to see where APL is now). While LOGO is cute, in my mind it fails the long term relevance test, and also is not close to CPU's in operational methodology.
I have been an MS supporter and developer since before Win 3.1 but Vista has me very frustrated.
I bought a great new machine, an Acer E700 quad core with Vista. I try to use it for various purposes and it just doesn't work or has some subtle compatibility bug that I cannot work around. So I try to install a new $300 XP Pro on the machine... Kaboom, I cannot get around the blue screen even using SCSI disks and other PCI cards. SOOOOO I put Ubuntu on it and VMWare Server with XP in a VM and the machine is now usable.
If I had been given an option to buy the machine with XP, I would have taken it 100% and what really bugs me is that we are being forced to use Vista when there is no significant end user benefit to upgrading to the new OS. Simbuddha
It could be made into a public licensed radio band for public use with a specific grid networking transmission standard providing a grid (mesh netowrk) at high speed, but restrict all users to a fractional maximum legal capped bit rate for all users of say 1 megabits sec. While the radio equipment would provide grid mesh wireless at high data rates, the nature of the usage would be a cooperative bandwidth sharing system providing fractional bandwidth.
Of course a public (free RF band area) cooperative grid bandwidth as a public use scheme probably will not find corporate support nor government support (privatize - ie private organizations are to own all public commons)...
If Google really wants equanimity and not just a powerful empire of its own, it would champion a public system of equanimity (ie a legally imposed QOS limited public mesh network)
I've been programming using parallel techniques for more than 25 years using APL. I was so imnpressed with APL that I implemented an APL like derivative language called Simmunity which is a hybrid compiler for an APL like syntax. Simmunity can be targeted at a parallel processor implemented in FPGA's that provides multiple simultaneously executing vector/matrix operations in parallel... (stay tuned for more info)
Ken Iverson invented APL and then the J language which anyone interested in really discussing parallel programming should look at closely. The Connection Machine LISP had many of the APL operators/functions and certainly Map/Reduce that it added to provide a convienent parallel expression langauge
Most programmers think in terms of sequential code execution with threads and processes. APL incourages the programmer to conceive of programming using vector and matrix operations to process strings and numbers and manipulate data like a spreadsheet. An application that people might be familiar with is Lotus Improv which provided naturally parallel expressions based on a subset of APL operations.
For most people, getting the job done is the point of connecting to a network, buying computers and running software.
For most vendors, accomplishing the task in a reliable way is already a challenge.
To expect application vendors to make their applications secure, when the computer and the operating system are not designed to be secure is laughable.
The issue is it is not a priority and possibly not financially beneficial for Intel, AMD, MicroSoft and others to actually make their systems secure and reliable.
Computers and software have designed in obsolescence meaning that they are design to slowly deteriorate such that customers are foreced to buy or upgrade. Software decrepitude is provided by leaving the system exposed to malicious code and by using lousy algorithms which slow down when loaded with data (the Windows Registry for example).
When we all decide that having a sustainable software infrastructure which is good enough for our long term needs is more important than stupid, useless new features, then the infrastructure on which software is built will necessarily need to be reliable and therefore inpenetrable to attack. The software I use today is really almost identical to the software I used ten years ago and stagnation has long set in. Software gets bigger and more bloated to consume the vast resources that modern machines provide, yet the user experience gets slower and slower...
Just some thoughts from an engineer who wrote a vertical whole business automation application that runs 7/24 23 years ago that is still runnning with no data loss and no down time ever... The biggest problem is that the last time I made any money from that application was 16 years ago when I modified it for multi-user and made it Y2k compliant. Software that is too good needs no maintenance and produces no ongoing revenue for the developers.
Government seems to exist now to create and enforce laws of big business self interests, by big business lobbyists, for big business ever greater appetite for exploiting and plundering shared resources and rights.
Our democracy is lost, we no longer live in a democratic political system. Just the illusion is promoted through propoganda.
Bravo Republicans, Democrats and corporate leaders. You have won at all cost and now all is lost.
The next paradigm is already begun and will be the reclaiming and exposing of the crimes against the people of the earth and the earth itself, by selfish empire builders running the world. Shamre on you and shame on us for not seeing the fundamental problem of our time.
While Dell is a for profit company (whose equipment I happen to use and like), Avatar Action Center is a non-profit organization that is focussed on sustainability education and empowerment and is hosting special events all Earth Day in Second Life. This is an international effort with group participants providing information about wind and solar energy, short videos about global warming and alternative energy and several live music performances. Visit our sim in Second Life at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Undulosa/219/222/62 and our web site at http://avataraction.org/
Happy Earth Day
SimBuddha
I find it funny how instead of believing that what needs to be done is to create an age appropriate way to educating children to recognize the threat of online predators and feel confident and comfortable talking with parents, teachers, counselors and guardians about interactions that seem questionable. Legislators think that simply blocking access to social networking online will preclude the need to raise the awareness of social predators, leaving children vulnerable. Ignorance of harm does not protect against it....
The same illogic and "easy solution" allows society to avoid creating age appropriate education for children such that they understand how wholesome fondness, affection, intimacy and adult partner commitments of love which lead to appropriate and meaningful sexual expression are missing in lude and emotionally devoid, objectification oriented pornography. Children need to understand that people take pictures and make movies about people who do not really love the person they are depicted to be engaging in sexual experiences with and that seeing this can hurt them and damage their ability to be happy and have good sexual relationships when they get older.
Schools already teach various subjects related to this, so this could be added to that curriculum.
But I beleive the real issue is that if children learn how to form social networks and become collective groups, they form an independent social force that is not controlled by the 3 media companies that control most media and the powers that use that media to manipulate and control society. Imagine millions of children networking and discussing and coming to an independent collective opionion about social, ecological and power structure issues. They might have a voice that is not defined by the unholy cabal (the most powerful and self serving energy, food, drugs, housing, technology, banking, transportation, chemical, defense industry, news media and other organizations that form overwhelming lobbist groups. Groups that force lawmakers to slowly rewrite law, not in the service of the public good or with the intention of improving the global ecosystem or helping to create healthier, happier, more optimally actualized citizens, but to serve their goal of market dominance and profits.
This is a goal to keep american citizens devided and disempowered. It is couched as protections against harm, like war with Iraq is a protection against terrorism. We need to resist grabs for power and laws that seek to disempower and further divide human connections and collectivism.
SimBuddha
The point I am making is that instead of making things more reliable and refactoring out useless complexity and "features", market dominators benefit from complexity which they use as a competitive weapon. They also leverage the profits of one product line/service to take over others. I have worked for 2 different large SW companies for many years that each were market leaders and yet were driven out of a product sector by a larger domination oriented software/system vendor who used this exact technique. I have lived it and witnessed the process. If it were funny, I would be laughing.
If the dominant commercial OS of today could provide half of the guarantees of antique OS's of the past, I would be happier. The reality is we have a poorly designed foundation on top of which software has to sit. The whole thing leads to a system and software that corrupts itself and crashes and is effectively designed to wear out. Imagine software that wears out, a perfect way to ensure future revenue and sales of new software.
If I hadn't written a complex vertical application that is still running all aspects of a complex medium size business without incident for over 20 years, I'd say that software cannot be reliable or just fully serve its purpose like an appliance for years without maintenance or improvement. But I know it can...
I have worked with Linus years ago and respect him and his goal, which I understand as just providing an alternative. Linux is, well basically unix, like BSD... It isn't something new nor is there any agenda to create a complete, yet fully functional "new" environment that has dramatically reduced complexity while offering new levels of power and capability (like Flash for example). Linux is good enough for a lot of people to do useful things with.
What bugs me most is that young people who might consider programming are not provided a welcoming environment that most can succeed in using for school projects. Use of the computer is limited to word processing and graphics. The 100$ Laptop is a multimedia book for 3rd world kids that I wonder about. How about kids in the USA? Lets see, they should use MS Dev Studio? or Logo... Laugh. How about smalltalk or a similar environment.
Software is being made to serve vendors need to sell something they know how to make, not to serve peoples need to understand, model and solve problems most effectively. Vendors make what is easy, not what is worthwhile. Exceptions to this are rare and usually expensive. (like Reason(tm) music synthesis for example)
I've been writing software and hacking hardware for nearly thirty years. It used to be much easier to write software. The machines were less capable and the software environments were less capable, and yet making software was easier.
Why?
Imagine you are one of the current software industry IP exploiter/plunderers: a senior manager at a large computer software/systems company. Your company didn't create computing nor invent most of the foundational technology you now control, leverage and profit from. You have a huge staff of marketers, managers and engineers to keep busy and an array of divisions and product lines. You have other smaller companies and open source initiatives nipping at your products trying to compete and share some fraction of the market. How do dominate the market? you protect your turf... You make the development environment and the software itself as complex as possible and influence the key hardware vendors to do the same. Why? so it takes a huge staff of engineers to do anything useful. That way that the cost of trying to compete exceeds the value of a competitive product, discouraging such competition. In order to take over certain product sectors, you under price products in that area while over pricing products where the competition is now extinct. When the new product sector is dominated after a few years, that becomes a new product area you can over charge for while under charging for some new sector of conquest.
The real problem with this "complexity as a weapon" strategy is that people who are making totally unrelated software, like most of us, have to suffer with insanely complex, poorly designed and not refactored, unreliable, no real time guarantees or QOS, barely interoperable, no security to speak of... systems and development environments that compare very poorly to 30 year old mainframe/mini technology.
Is this a conspiracy? or is this just a habit that happens to serve the very powerful and disempower the rest of us... YMMV
One day the motivation for making products and services will switch from "Winning" to "Serving" and on that day I will CHEER!!!
I have the ultimate PDA, a HP6315. 1 Gig of flash, T Mobile Phone, WiFi, BlueTooth, touch screen, the works. Problem is it just doesn't work and when it does it takes minutes of fiddling with. Then it crashes and forgets everything or the wireless goes haywire and won't connect. One day these things will be great but today my 60 Gig Ipod works fine and my HP PDA sits idle.
Slashdot Mirror
This "Variable Speed" transmission is A JOKE!!! It is an overly complex but mechanically identical version of the Prius hybrid synergy drive planet and sun gear arrangement where an electric motor (AKA the generator) and the gas engine combine to produce a clutchless, constant mesh transmission that is infinitely variable and reversible. A real CVT would require ONE gas engine, no second electric motor/generator and use a simple effortless position lever that determines the direction and gear ratio of the transmission. That is NOT what Steve has built. He's made a Rube Goldberg contraption to fool the mechanically unsophisticated into thinking there is an invention here... Real CVT's exist in tractors, Honda has one in a motor cycle (see the wikipedia article on CVT's) and some diesel trucks have CVT's on their alternators. All of these use variable angle swash plates and hydraulic pistons or for low torque applications like the truck alternator, a ratcheting gear assembly. It annoys me when people get taken in. If you want a real mechanical puzzel to ponder, look up the Torsen Differential. That is a masterpiece of brilliant invention and engineering and is used on very large trucks). Simbuddha
I have to agree with QuestionsNotAnswers as most smart sociopaths are excellent actors. But when the obvious choice is X and yet they choose Y, over and over, it becomes clear that either they are bought and owned by special interests (read a corrupt international corporation, yes there are many good ones too) and have no allegiance our nation, or they are sociopaths and the two might just be shades of grey.
It is their track record that exposes them. Trouble is the american public just accepts this and has no clear way to unify and express outrage and demand that people acting against our collective and the nations best interest, but in their own interest or the interest of their master (a corporation), should be ejected from public service and government influence. Ultimately our system (governance and capitalism) needs to produce an immune system to sociopathic behaviour. I find it amazing that people watch Fox and trust many other rediculous information sources which are there to ensure the american public are misinformed and brainwashed and accept living like a bunch of corn feed cattle in tight pens, being manipulated and programmed to think and feel in ways they would not normally.
Big Brother is alive and well and if "they" achieve their goal of "a new world order" of sociopathic design, we all ought to realize we will be looking forward to an extended century of suffering and chaos. From my perspective, the anti-christ isn't one person, it is a broad collective of people at various levels of government and in corporations who act in ways that destroy and undermine our rights, our nation and our future. The manipulation is that we are led to believe it (the anti-christ) is one person, external to ourselves, when in fact it is up to us whether we are part of "it" or not...
I'd agree if I thought the sociopaths actually knew how to fix the problems or could direct others to do so. But being a sociopath does not imbue the person with great problem solving skills or technical knowledge.
The article referenced makes many lame points and is clearly biased, but it does bring up some points worth considering.
For example: if we let them create too many UNRECOVERABLE events, we may not survive and go the way of the dinosaur. I think one crazy idea is high pressure corbon dioxide gas sequestration underground of massive amounts of CO2. Nice legacy to leave our children... Imagine if an earthquake could release a giant (hundreds of square miles) kill zone of Carbon Dioxide gas from this "underground tank". Worse imagine we lose double digits of square miles of the amazon daily, and allow the desertification of the south american continent. Even worse, we poison and change the ecosystem of the oceans and kill the ocean biosphere. Both of these are already well proven to be underway. Imagine we reduce our plant bio-diversity (Monsanto crop seed patents and genetic engineering control) and there is a major disease that kills off our farming production of say corn and wheat. Plant diseases and pests like monoculture crops and adapt to pesticides and herbacides (that poison us, our sea life and the water supply too).
So what if all of these combine and that leads to a rapid fall off in natures O2 production over just a few years. We could be living on a planet like plant "Space Ball" (of the movie Spaceballs), where the leader cracks open a can of fresh air...
Some problems combined might be too big, so do we just let a confluence of bad policy and profitability decisions that have global and survival risks go forward without government intervention? Where is government of the people, by the people, for the people represented in this?
This is more like "of the corporation run by sociopaths, for corporations run by sociopaths, by political puppets controlled by sociopaths.
Hmm, sounds like Bush and Cheney?
How can Obama resist the sociopath power elite and serve "the people" ?
So I worry from time to time, what to do?
It took me a long time to figure out why things are going to hell. Then I read http://www.youmeworks.com/sociopaths.html and it all made sense. Sociopaths seek power and winning without conscience and this is why banking and wall street leaders are where they are, because they've changed the system of laws to favor themselves. Like terminators, they don't feel remorse or care if their actions hurt other people. These people are now a large proportion of our international corporate leadership. Until our system collapses, they will stay in power, even though they are the reason for our suffering and downfall as a nation. Not sure what there is to do about the situation except have people come to recognize sociopaths for what they are, broken people who should never be allowed to hold power. From the web site the 12 clues to recognizing a sociopath HOW TO KNOW The big question is, of course, how can you know whether someone is a sociopath or not? It is a difficult question and even experts on the subject can be fooled. If you suspect that someone close to you is a sociopath, I suggest you read both of the books I mentioned and think hard about it. Compare that person to the other people in your life. Ask yourself these questions: 1. Do you often feel used by the person? 2. Have you often felt that he (or she) doesn't care about you? 3. Does he lie and deceive you? 4. Does he tend to make contradictory statements? 5. Does he tend to take from you and not give back much? 6. Does he often appeal to pity? Does he seem to try to make you feel sorry for him? 7. Does he try to make you feel guilty? 8. Do you sometimes feel he is taking advantage of your good nature? 9. Does he seem easily bored and need constant stimulation? 10. Does he use a lot of flattery? Does he interact with you in a way that makes you feel flattered even if he says nothing overtly complimentary? 11. Does he make you feel worried? Does he do it obviously or more cleverly and sneakily? 12. Does he give you the impression you owe him? 13. Does he chronically fail to take responsibility for harming others? Does he blame everyone and everything but himself? Tags: evil, Hitler, anti-christ, sociopath,
I agree that parents and teachers are responsible for holding students accountable and encouraging them to learn and accomplish, but I question public education (and private schools) goals for their students learning. It seems to me that public school curriculum is designed to bore the crap out of young people and make their heads hurt so that they drop out, stay dumbed down, ready to take on faith, answers they should determine themselves. This results in a large population of "worker bees" that are manipulable due to their disinterest in actual knowing, and lacking of critical analysis skills to problem solve in the real world.
When public school "gets back to basics" by teaching each subject in a sterile and unrelated way to the world at large, it is boring. Young people are naturally interested in how math, english and science are interwoven, not how they exist in isolation. I also am very sad that programming is not something every young person has some mastery at by the time they graduate high school. I blame programming langauge designers for completely failing to provide an adequate programming ecosystem for introductory youth programming. The languages that are avaialble are toys, such as Logo and Squeak. The last great "real" interactive programming languages were BASIC on machines like the Apple II and APL (Ken Iverson) on mainframes and PC's. Unfortunately, modern implementations of these languages are uber complex professional tools that are innappropriate for introductory programming.
But I wandered off topic. What I rant about is how children barely understand the modern world they exist in. They may know how to do basic math and write a formulaic essay, but they have no idea how dozens of natural, man made and life critical systems we all depend on work. Kids get to play photo realistic games of war that require no knowledge or real skill, yet have no way to explore the life cycle of ponds, streams, rivers and oceans as a living simulation that they can nurture or pollute. To young people today, the world is a black box they barely have any interest in understanding, because school is about paper and pencil math drill books, and boring science and history textbooks that are dead, 3rd hand knowledge. If we let kids also learn experientially, through educational simulations that let them experience the systems and interact with them, young people will emerge from school with a broad experiential knowledge of biological and mechanical systems, electronics and power systems, farming, water supply, housing, transportation, political processes, family system and interpersonal dynamics, business operation and management, etc. I wish that all young people graduating from high school would have basic insight into the systemic processes of our world. They would make our population informed voters. What we have instead are people who are in blind allegiance to political parties that don't really know or care about the issues either, and just want to be in control.
I lead the development of two IBM classroom math education products many years ago that gave me a glimpse of where thing might have gone.
I still have a dream,
SimBuddha
As a programmer and parent of three kids and step parent to two others, I recommend a few things that I have exposed kids to with positive effect.
The Torque Game Builder is a fun system.
Scratch is also very cool.
Of course the Lego system is great fun and a good starting point for programming and robotics.
Blitz Basic is also a fun system to learn on.
The problem with todays state of technology is that kids see massively complex video games made by huge teams at great cost and their efforts seem trivial and boring, so working the robotic real world angle helps differentiate their efforts.
The real trick to getting a young person to become a competent programmer is persistence of ongoing projects. Like speaking a foreign language, progreamming is something you use or loose...
Long ago I setup a two mile link between my work (a six story building) and my home using two 14db yagi antennas that look like two foot long by 3 inch PVC pipes with mounting brackets. These were connected to Lucent Orinoco Silver 802.11b cards setup in bridge mode through PCs. It worked GREAT.
These days, there are a lot of solutions out there. One he could try is to setup a router at his friends house and aim a Wifi radio through a yagi at his house from his friends roof. At home he needs a PCI card with external antenna jack that can be placed not too far from a roof top mounted yagi pointed at his friends house. Even expensive coax will eat up the antenna db gains in cable losses so the radios really must be close to the antennas. His best option might be to buy commercial outdoor ethernet to WiFi bridges designed with hi power amps and which come with Yagis or flat Phase Array antennas that place the radio right next to the antenna.
But for any of these options to work there must be line of sight between the two antennas with minimal foliage or buildings between them. If there are even a few large trees in the way or a large building, this will not work. If he doesn't have reasonable line of sight he could try 900mhz or 430mhz wireless radio links that better tolerate trees and buildings. Alternatively, he could use custom firmware on a few WRT54g's and have them form a mesh network where one of the routers is mid way between the two homes and all legs of the link have line of sight.
There are many providers of antennas and equipment for long range WiFi as well as 900mhz and 430mhz radio links. Google around.
Cheers,
SimBuddha
Actually Astrology is based on ancient chinese astronomy and dates back many thousands of years. It is all about tracking planetary positions and mapping them into a symbolic langauge of positions. It was used to determine crop planting and harvesting and as a way to measure time and location. So in fact it has very scientific roots. Over the ages, wise elders studied the stars and their positions and found correlation to other living systems which are cyclical and began to identify trends and aspects of things that appeared to be correlated in people. What emerged was a type of psychological langauge framework that describes how certain planetary positions influence living systems including people and animals, possibly through DNA influences at the quantum level. One precept of astrology is that there is free will and ones DNA and astrological influences do not determine your fate. The other is that time twins (people who share the same location and time of birth to within a few minutes), will have the same predispositions in many areas as compared to other people with very different charts.
Astrology is a language describing planetary time and position in relation to star clusters first and foremost.
What I find most interesting personally, being a computer scientist and computer language designer (a person who designs symbolic information representation systems), is how quickly people who have not done even the slightest bit of research into "real" astrology are willing to cast their "flawed" opinions about a most worthy area of study from my perspective.
A wonderful web site that you might want to use as a point of beginning inquiry is:
http://www.nightlightnews.com/
I have had only one reading done in my life which was very interesting and informative. I had it done by the famous author and friend of Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson, Mr. Antero Alli (who is also an excellent independent film director).
If you want to judge a subject, better spend at least a few hours reading about it from well respected and expert practitioners before denigrating it in ignorance.
Shame on all you lazy and prejudiced slashdotters, ready to form an inquisition. Ignoramouses....
SimBuddha
I've been designing and implementing a general purpose programming language for many years (in my limited free time) and enjoy studying numerous languages and their good and not so good ideas and fitness for creating a broad range of applications. There are many challenging issues to consider when engaged in programming language implementation. While I am not a Perl/Ruby/Python programmer, I have studied these languages and have used many languages mentioned in the paper professionally. I found the paper to be very insightful, but it really is speaking to other language developers... It might be more useful for the paper to discuss Perl issues from the point of view of various programmers using the language for different applications. Most folks in the audience are more interested in solving problems quickly, reliably, with high performance, scalably and maintably and are less interested in the internal drama that goes on in the heads of language implementors.
From my perspective, I want my language to be approachable by first time programmers age 12+, but capable of building complex professional applications that require assembler and 'C' level performance. My deepest programming language foundations are several assembler languages, 'C', C++, APL, SQL, BASIC, LISP, Prolog, Pascal, Lua, Torque, and JavaScript as well as others. My useage for these has been in constructing spreadsheet recalculation engines, virtualization and dynamic translating processors, educational game simulations, custom business vertical database/financial apps and a host of graphics and system level stuff and some hardware. So I have a bit of a bottom up perspective with some healthy vertical app top down moderation. I love games like "The Incredible Machine" series and engines like The Torque Engine and PhysX. Have you seen the new Crysis game.... unbelieveable.
So in my mind, my language has to be capable of being used to create these types of reliable, networked applications with performance equal to 'C' and assembler, but with the brevity of APL, structure of 'C', Lua or TorqueScript, the platform of TGE and the analytical and transactional power of SQL DBMS. And that is what my language is attempting to fuse together in a sensible manner. Then to provide a "Scratch" or "Lego Mindstorms" application constructor GUI for newbies to use to get started. (ya I know, a huge goal)
I think the biggest challenge facing communities using their favorite language is how to provide useful general direction to the future of the language; like how to simplify it while expanding its overall applicability for an ever wider scope of real world products and a broader programmer/user audience. And as a language implementor, the challenge is how to interpret the needs of programmers and navigate an optimal evolution for the language.
No more playing games or watching TV for hours without EARNING IT >;-) SimBuddha PS I WANT ONE...
The 8K Floating Point BASIC on my first machine had functions. My second machine with NorthStar Basic was useful for writing complex business applications. Visual Basic has been enhanced and is a core language for MicroSoft platforms today and is quite efficient and fully capable... LOGO is still? So your point is what?
My point is that LOGO is more toy than programming language, and while some people have had a positive experience using it, I question its value, even as a first language. I question why an educator would start a student out on a language they cannot continue to use long term, and that is highly abstract in some ways so the true nature of the machine hardware underneath is obscured and not understood while using it. To me it is a bit like teaching kids about bugs and higher biological life forms without a foundational knowledge of cells.
Why not teach them how a line is drawn, instead of ideas like, turn right 45 degrees, draw X distance. How many kids even know what angles are and sin/cosine, etc.
Considering that I have been involved as engineering management with several educational application suites for classroom K-4, and have raised 3 children, so I have a perspective based on my experience. I see that a lot of what is passed off as learning about computers is about becomming a good data entry person, and not about foundational knowledge and skills at applying a tool to a problem.
Simbuddha
My concern with teaching and using LOGO in education is that LOGO fails to provide people with a fully capable language that they can use life long. How many teens or adults program in LOGO? What type of "real" programs can be written in LOGO. Is it efficient enough for practical programs.
My first programming language was BASIC, (then 6502/Z80 assembly) then Pascal, C and APL (APL is my favorite teaching langauge - see Kxdb+ from KX Systems to see where APL is now). While LOGO is cute, in my mind it fails the long term relevance test, and also is not close to CPU's in operational methodology.
Just my 2 cents
Simbuddha
I have been an MS supporter and developer since before Win 3.1 but Vista has me very frustrated.
I bought a great new machine, an Acer E700 quad core with Vista. I try to use it for various purposes and it just doesn't work or has some subtle compatibility bug that I cannot work around. So I try to install a new $300 XP Pro on the machine... Kaboom, I cannot get around the blue screen even using SCSI disks and other PCI cards. SOOOOO I put Ubuntu on it and VMWare Server with XP in a VM and the machine is now usable.
If I had been given an option to buy the machine with XP, I would have taken it 100% and what really bugs me is that we are being forced to use Vista when there is no significant end user benefit to upgrading to the new OS. Simbuddha
It could be made into a public licensed radio band for public use with a specific grid networking transmission standard providing a grid (mesh netowrk) at high speed, but restrict all users to a fractional maximum legal capped bit rate for all users of say 1 megabits sec. While the radio equipment would provide grid mesh wireless at high data rates, the nature of the usage would be a cooperative bandwidth sharing system providing fractional bandwidth.
Of course a public (free RF band area) cooperative grid bandwidth as a public use scheme probably will not find corporate support nor government support (privatize - ie private organizations are to own all public commons)...
If Google really wants equanimity and not just a powerful empire of its own, it would champion a public system of equanimity (ie a legally imposed QOS limited public mesh network)
SimBuddha
I've been programming using parallel techniques for more than 25 years using APL.
I was so imnpressed with APL that I implemented an APL like derivative language
called Simmunity which is a hybrid compiler for an APL like syntax. Simmunity
can be targeted at a parallel processor implemented in FPGA's that provides
multiple simultaneously executing vector/matrix operations in parallel...
(stay tuned for more info)
The quintessential parallel database programming language available is clearly
KxSystems Q and KDB+
See the faq at http://kx.com/faq/ and tutorial at http://kx.com/q/d/primer.htm
Ken Iverson invented APL and then the J language which anyone interested in
really discussing parallel programming should look at closely. The Connection
Machine LISP had many of the APL operators/functions and certainly Map/Reduce
that it added to provide a convienent parallel expression langauge
Most programmers think in terms of sequential code execution with threads and
processes. APL incourages the programmer to conceive of programming using
vector and matrix operations to process strings and numbers and manipulate
data like a spreadsheet. An application that people might be familiar with
is Lotus Improv which provided naturally parallel expressions based on a subset
of APL operations.
Cheers, Simbuddha
Where to begin...
For most people, getting the job done is the point of connecting to a network, buying computers and running software.
For most vendors, accomplishing the task in a reliable way is already a challenge.
To expect application vendors to make their applications secure, when the computer and the operating system are not designed to be secure is laughable.
The issue is it is not a priority and possibly not financially beneficial for Intel, AMD, MicroSoft and others to actually make their systems secure and reliable.
Computers and software have designed in obsolescence meaning that they are design to slowly deteriorate such that customers are foreced to buy or upgrade. Software decrepitude is provided by leaving the system exposed to malicious code and by using lousy algorithms which slow down when loaded with data (the Windows Registry for example).
When we all decide that having a sustainable software infrastructure which is good enough for our long term needs is more important than stupid, useless new features, then the infrastructure on which software is built will necessarily need to be reliable and therefore inpenetrable to attack. The software I use today is really almost identical to the software I used ten years ago and stagnation has long set in. Software gets bigger and more bloated to consume the vast resources that modern machines provide, yet the user experience gets slower and slower...
Just some thoughts from an engineer who wrote a vertical whole business automation application that runs 7/24 23 years ago that is still runnning with no data loss and no down time ever... The biggest problem is that the last time I made any money from that application was 16 years ago when I modified it for multi-user and made it Y2k compliant. Software that is too good needs no maintenance and produces no ongoing revenue for the developers.
SimBuddha
Government seems to exist now to create and enforce laws of big business self interests, by big business lobbyists, for big business ever greater appetite for exploiting and plundering shared resources and rights.
Our democracy is lost, we no longer live in a democratic political system. Just the illusion is promoted through propoganda.
Bravo Republicans, Democrats and corporate leaders. You have won at all cost and now all is lost.
The next paradigm is already begun and will be the reclaiming and exposing of the crimes against the people of the earth and the earth itself, by selfish empire builders running the world. Shamre on you and shame on us for not seeing the fundamental problem of our time.
SimBuddha.
While Dell is a for profit company (whose equipment I happen to use and like), Avatar Action Center is a non-profit organization that is focussed on sustainability education and empowerment and is hosting special events all Earth Day in Second Life. This is an international effort with group participants providing information about wind and solar energy, short videos about global warming and alternative energy and several live music performances. Visit our sim in Second Life at http://slurl.com/secondlife/Undulosa/219/222/62 and our web site at http://avataraction.org/ Happy Earth Day SimBuddha
I find it funny how instead of believing that what needs to be done is to create an age appropriate way to educating children to recognize the threat of online predators and feel confident and comfortable talking with parents, teachers, counselors and guardians about interactions that seem questionable. Legislators think that simply blocking access to social networking online will preclude the need to raise the awareness of social predators, leaving children vulnerable. Ignorance of harm does not protect against it.... The same illogic and "easy solution" allows society to avoid creating age appropriate education for children such that they understand how wholesome fondness, affection, intimacy and adult partner commitments of love which lead to appropriate and meaningful sexual expression are missing in lude and emotionally devoid, objectification oriented pornography. Children need to understand that people take pictures and make movies about people who do not really love the person they are depicted to be engaging in sexual experiences with and that seeing this can hurt them and damage their ability to be happy and have good sexual relationships when they get older. Schools already teach various subjects related to this, so this could be added to that curriculum. But I beleive the real issue is that if children learn how to form social networks and become collective groups, they form an independent social force that is not controlled by the 3 media companies that control most media and the powers that use that media to manipulate and control society. Imagine millions of children networking and discussing and coming to an independent collective opionion about social, ecological and power structure issues. They might have a voice that is not defined by the unholy cabal (the most powerful and self serving energy, food, drugs, housing, technology, banking, transportation, chemical, defense industry, news media and other organizations that form overwhelming lobbist groups. Groups that force lawmakers to slowly rewrite law, not in the service of the public good or with the intention of improving the global ecosystem or helping to create healthier, happier, more optimally actualized citizens, but to serve their goal of market dominance and profits. This is a goal to keep american citizens devided and disempowered. It is couched as protections against harm, like war with Iraq is a protection against terrorism. We need to resist grabs for power and laws that seek to disempower and further divide human connections and collectivism. SimBuddha
The point I am making is that instead of making things more reliable and refactoring out useless complexity and "features", market dominators benefit from complexity which they use as a competitive weapon. They also leverage the profits of one product line/service to take over others. I have worked for 2 different large SW companies for many years that each were market leaders and yet were driven out of a product sector by a larger domination oriented software/system vendor who used this exact technique. I have lived it and witnessed the process. If it were funny, I would be laughing.
If the dominant commercial OS of today could provide half of the guarantees of antique OS's of the past, I would be happier. The reality is we have a poorly designed foundation on top of which software has to sit. The whole thing leads to a system and software that corrupts itself and crashes and is effectively designed to wear out. Imagine software that wears out, a perfect way to ensure future revenue and sales of new software.
If I hadn't written a complex vertical application that is still running all aspects of a complex medium size business without incident for over 20 years, I'd say that software cannot be reliable or just fully serve its purpose like an appliance for years without maintenance or improvement. But I know it can...
I have worked with Linus years ago and respect him and his goal, which I understand as just providing an alternative. Linux is, well basically unix, like BSD... It isn't something new nor is there any agenda to create a complete, yet fully functional "new" environment that has dramatically reduced complexity while offering new levels of power and capability (like Flash for example). Linux is good enough for a lot of people to do useful things with.
What bugs me most is that young people who might consider programming are not provided a welcoming environment that most can succeed in using for school projects. Use of the computer is limited to word processing and graphics. The 100$ Laptop is a multimedia book for 3rd world kids that I wonder about. How about kids in the USA? Lets see, they should use MS Dev Studio? or Logo... Laugh. How about smalltalk or a similar environment.
Software is being made to serve vendors need to sell something they know how to make, not to serve peoples need to understand, model and solve problems most effectively. Vendors make what is easy, not what is worthwhile. Exceptions to this are rare and usually expensive. (like Reason(tm) music synthesis for example)
Thanks for listening to my perspective. YMMV
SimBuddha
I've been writing software and hacking hardware for nearly thirty years. It used to be much easier to write software. The machines were less capable and the software environments were less capable, and yet making software was easier.
Why?
Imagine you are one of the current software industry IP exploiter/plunderers: a senior manager at a large computer software/systems company. Your company didn't create computing nor invent most of the foundational technology you now control, leverage and profit from. You have a huge staff of marketers, managers and engineers to keep busy and an array of divisions and product lines. You have other smaller companies and open source initiatives nipping at your products trying to compete and share some fraction of the market. How do dominate the market? you protect your turf... You make the development environment and the software itself as complex as possible and influence the key hardware vendors to do the same. Why? so it takes a huge staff of engineers to do anything useful. That way that the cost of trying to compete exceeds the value of a competitive product, discouraging such competition. In order to take over certain product sectors, you under price products in that area while over pricing products where the competition is now extinct. When the new product sector is dominated after a few years, that becomes a new product area you can over charge for while under charging for some new sector of conquest.
The real problem with this "complexity as a weapon" strategy is that people who are making totally unrelated software, like most of us, have to suffer with insanely complex, poorly designed and not refactored, unreliable, no real time guarantees or QOS, barely interoperable, no security to speak of... systems and development environments that compare very poorly to 30 year old mainframe/mini technology.
Is this a conspiracy? or is this just a habit that happens to serve the very powerful and disempower the rest of us... YMMV
One day the motivation for making products and services will switch from "Winning" to "Serving" and on that day I will CHEER!!!
SimBuddha
I have the ultimate PDA, a HP6315. 1 Gig of flash, T Mobile Phone, WiFi, BlueTooth, touch screen, the works. Problem is it just doesn't work and when it does it takes minutes of fiddling with. Then it crashes and forgets everything or the wireless goes haywire and won't connect. One day these things will be great but today my 60 Gig Ipod works fine and my HP PDA sits idle.