The Airbus approach is fundamentally flawed. Pilots adapt to how the plane usually works. If the plane usually works in a manner that the pilots can't make mistakes, then the pilots get used to never making mistakes.
When the automatic system quits, the pilots don't have the ability to instinctively react and fly the plane. The result is Air France Flight 447. The pilots flew a perfectly good plan into a stall, and never corrected. Had the copilots been used to flying in full manual, then they would have had the experience and instincts to react to the stall.
People make mistakes. You have to let them make mistakes and let people learn from them. Safety systems that let people repeatedly make mistakes are dangerous. Because, sooner or later, a person will make a mistake in a corner case that the automated system does not catch. When this happens, tragedy often occurs.
The reason the vacuum systems went out of favor was the massive associated fire risk. At first, it doesn't seem obvious why a vacuum system would have a fire risk, as in theory the vacuum should extinguish the fire. However, this doesn't work in practice.
What actually happens is the fire starts outside the vacuum system, where it has access to air. The fire then causes this air to expand. The logical place to expand is straight into the nearest low or negative pressure environment around, which is the vacuum system. In no time at all, the vacuum transportation system spreads the fire between floors - and disaster ensues.
Vacuum transportation systems used to be popular in multilevel buildings of large companies. Then one by one they caught fire. Eventually, the fire codes understood the significance of plenums and air return systems in spreading fires. Now any kind of vacuum, plenum, or return air space that stretches between floors has special safety devices inside it. They are extremely dangerous spaces if fires occur.
Additionally, vacuum systems were never used to transport people, because if air integrity on the capsule fails, then everyone suffocates.
Many of the designs don't monitor line-to-neutral voltages properly. They assume the neutral voltage is 1/2 of the line voltage. This makes them vulnerable to mismeasurement due to problems with the neutral conductor. Normally, this won't be in the customers favour, and allows the utility to rip of the customer.
If deployed units have the same weaknesses as the sensor manufacturers recommended designs, class actions suits could result.
A professor at my local university periodically gets undergraduate and starting graduate students to try reproducing the work of interesting research papers.
One engineering professor at my local institution figures about one-third of the papers can be reproduced to demonstrate the effect in question.
At most schools, graduate students are required to published paper on a "new" idea in an academic journal in order to receive their degree.
As such, journals must exist to collect all the ideas students generate, and this is the driver behind the modern academic journal system.
Huge pressure is put upon the students to describe "new" ideas, and as such, the paper must sell itself as being "new".
Complicating this effort, it the reality that most students are working on student projects.
These projects don't have the necessary resources (time and money) to be developed into fully effective and reproducible ideas.
As such, the results from these projects are fundamentally suspect.
Also, the students working on the project, may not fully understand all the relevant effects on their research (because they are students).
In particular, many students do not understand statistics.
As such, students deliberately or inadvertently conduct biased experiments to show the desired effect in question, because the academic requirement is a "new" idea and not a "new and reproducible" idea.
The result is a collection of papers that all describe themselves as having "new" and "brilliant" ideas on topics that cannot be easily reproduced. When the ideas are reproduced, practicing engineers quickly discover they are reproducing a marginal student project. It is actually really tough to find reproducible, inventive and commercializable research ideas in academic journals, because of all the noise.
The short-term trading reduces the average profitability of long-term trades. It is like purchasing goods direct from the manufacturer, versus purchasing goods via a variety of middle-men. The middle-men must extract a markup to pay for their time.
The big stock market traders have found a new variation on the centuries old system of middle-men. They speculatively execute trades designed to intercept profitable movements on the stock market. In short, they purchase from the seller before the long-term trader gets a chance too. This does have the advantage of improving market liquidity, however in cases of model or computer error, this isn't always a good thing.
The bigger problem for long-term traders is that the short-term trading steals some of the profit. In the absence of short-term trading, the long-term trader would have even odds of receiving a fair trading price. If the short-term traders are capable speculatively intercepting a profitable set (and only a profitable set) of trades, then that necessarily means that the long-term trader is less likely to get an equitable price distribution.
The number of interrupts per second that a modern processor can handle has stayed relatively fixed for a large number of years, and network response time is a strong function of interrupt performance.
It has been a while since I benchmarked interrupt response on a variety of processors with the same block of code. However, when I last did it, a 32 MHz 8-bit PIC18 series microcontroller (MCU) was capable of processing a real-time interrupt at 10,000 times per second. A much faster 3 GHz x86 CPU could manage 70,000 interrupts per second under Real-Time Linux. This wasn't much of an improvement, considering the x86 CPU is theoretically 100 times faster, was capable of executing multiple instructions per clock, and the little 8-bit PIC MCU has a hard limit of around 8 MIPs.
Why does this happen?
For a variety of factors including:
1. The amount of data a modern CPU must flush on an interrupt is huge. Most of the cache needs to be flushed and replaced, and this means a great deal of memory bus bandwidth.
2. Main memory latency in the modern PC is huge. Modern compiler designers assume it to be on the order of 100's of clocks.
3. Modern operating systems have to reload the page tables for every user/kernel mode transition. This takes time, and possibly more interrupts.
4. The I/O response time of the PCI bus is terrible relative to the cycle time of the processor. This means that most of the network traffic is transferred via DMA. However, this optimization only helps in terms of bandwidth, not latency.
5. Multiple cores don't really help. Synchronization overhead is a killer. Tricks like software transactional memory can help, however typical I/O devices lack the ability to support software transactional memory. Even simple techniques, like giving each core its own I/O and thus eliminating synchronization overhead, are often not implemented. Linux is still trying to eliminate the "Big Kernel Lock".
In short, the interrupt response latency in modern processors has really not improved much. This was a big discussion in some of the Ethernet working groups, because some of the simulations pointed out that 10Gb Ethernet performance might be limited by interrupt response time on the processors.
From an electrical point of view, many medical devices are simply to sensitive to be made immune to induced interference. The noise will have to affect them some how. It is just a matter of how big the noise source is (magnitude), the frequency of the noise source (Hz), and what geometry it sits relative to the medical device (coupling.)
Obviously, the TSA has found a big enough noise source.
In particular, the difficulty with mm-wave interference is that it can induce noise directly onto the geometries of integrated circuits and thin-film devices. The only way to guard against the problem would be to heavily shield the chips in question. Maybe it is time for medical devices to start using radiation-hardened integrated circuits. Radiation hardened circuits are designed to withstand short and intense blasts of EMI, including high-frequency EMI sources.
Submarines patents are when a patent is deliberately kept hidden until the competitors develop competing products. They are particularly effective when they allow a company to patent an industry standard, as in the Rambus lawsuit against DDR-RAM.
This proposal would allow lawyers to easily create submarine patents. Because of the secrecy, it could even happen that more than one company has submarine patents on the same industry standard technology.
Submarine patents block industry standards and free software.
The Model 100 had a number of features that modern computers lack. If you need a simple computer to make notes, its battery life was in the 20 hours region. It was many many long years before the modern PC laptop was "portable" and had a battery life greater than 3 hours. (I'm thinking of some of the old transportables, which weighed 35 lbs and had no batteries.)
At long last, with the advent of the OLPC, the Eee PC, the smartphone, and a few of the smaller laptops, battery life has reached the 6 to 12 hours. However, for taking a piece of equipment to strange places with no power, being able to use AA batteries to power your computer is a really helpful feature.
Really wish the modern laptop could run from batteries longer. It's sad that a 30 year old PC is still competitive with regards to battery life.
I was on ice. Ice also jammed the accelerator cable (which is what locked the engine at full throttle.)
Personally, I suspect three problems:
1. On ice, the ABS system may actually prevent applying full power to the brakes.
2. It was a pickup truck, and it had a ton of torque. As an engineer, I have my doubts that brakes could stop the engine. However, at least historically, brakes on most cars are not rated to full engine output. As a GM mechanic explained it to me: brakes on GM vehicles were rated to 70 mph, because that is (was) the legal requirement. Never mind the fact that most vehicles can go much faster than 70 mph.
3. If I had ice on the road, and ice on my accelerator cable, then it is possible that ice was present on the brakes themselves. However, I would think the pads would heat, and boil off the ice. Alternatively, the pads may possibly have heated and glazed, in which case there stopping power would be limited.
I religiously maintain my brakes. Lack of maintenance was not a factor in the failure.
The brakes are not more powerful than the engine. Firstly, I work in automotive. The design specification on most modern braking systems is below what is required for a worst case stop. Secondly, in an emergency situation, full power assist may not be present. You would have to be superman to apply full brakes without power assist. Parking brakes do not help either. On most cars, it is trivial to demonstrate driving out of the driveway with the parking brake on.
Lastly, I have been in a car with a runaway engine. THE BRAKES WERE NOT CAPABLE OF STOPPING THE ENGINE. Putting the car in neutral, and turning off the engine both worked. Getting caught in a snow bank helps too.:-)
It used to be that police would investigate intelligently, and lay charges appropriately. Now, it appears that everything must reach a judge before common sense is applied. We are living in the days where losing a cell phone will cause a plane to be grounded. We need to get people to use their brains again, and not make major incidents out of false alarms.
Soon, every aspiring American entrepreneur running a server farm can get busted for growing pot, and every Canadian's with hot tubs and pools can get charged massive fees.
The GP post is essentially correct. I did a bunch of the math behind it in my undergraduate thesis / research project in the context of high-speed PWMs for motor drives.
Essentially, if you reconstruct the sampled information with a non-ideal DAC converter, it phase shifts the output based on the time varying magnitudes of the input signals. When analyzed mathematically, the effect is very similar to phase modulation (PM) or frequency modulation (FM). Normally, phase and frequency modulation is used in the context of radio receivers, which use complex filters prevent distortion. The audio amplifier has none of these filters, and the result is that the phase modulation shows up as audible distortion inside the normal frequency band. The effects of this distortion are significant. I noted them in the context of a motor drive.
Modern DAC manufacturers are well aware of the fact that their products are non-ideal. As such, almost all of the new audo DACs feature circuits to reduce the distortion. However, this distortion ellimination isn't perfect, especially for a 16-bit/44.1 kHz signal. Nevertheless, numerous papers have been published on how to create a DAC converter that behaves more closely to the ideal DAC converter modelled in Nyquist sampling theory.
Realistically, the bigger problem with the 16 bit/44.1 kHz format is the loudnesswars.
The loudness wars cause clipping. No amount DAC converter trickery can fix clipping. The result is that people say old LPs now sound better than new CDs. They are correct. The old LPs were mastered with more dynamic range and less clipping than modern recordings.
Power failures can last several days. Parts of the north eastern U.S. and Ontario have been blacked out for several days at a time. Montreal was hit by an ice-storm that caused them to lose power for several days too.
It doesn't happen often, but the problem with big disasters is that they are big. Emergency equipment still has to run.
US needs to take $5bn out from any federal budget, even war funds would suffice and use it for NASA.
Unfortunately, the US Deficit is $1.56 trillion dollars on revenues of $2.314 trillion and with expenditures of $3.36 trillion. Huge budget changes need to happen to correct the imbalance. Compared to this, NASA is small potatoes, and will probably get severely cut as it is "low hanging fruit."
No other federal government in the world could run the deficits that the U.S. is currently running. It is amazing we get away with it.
Space X has some ideas on how to land a rocket on Mars, and is already testing some design principles, like the SuperDrago rockets for landing its Dragon capsules.
If I were the Europeans, I would be contacting them. The cheapest and best original thinking in the space race is currently at Space/X.
Where's the payoff for the avalanche of poor patents?
IBM will be sued the moment the PTO grants a similar patent application to another company, so they file first.
As long as it passes the "will the PTO grant this?" threshold, IBM files it. They have to file it, because five years later someone else will attempt to patent the same feature. The PTO will issue the patent in due course, and sometime later a patent troll company will buy the patent and source code (like SCO). Presto IBM will be sued for billions of dollars for violating patents and copyright, for something that happened many years ago. To prevent this from happening, IBM files patents, such that the technology shows up in the PTO database of patents.
The interesting thing is that this technology was probably present in email systems running from the 1970s. Nevertheless, IBM still felt the need to patent it.
What? What is this "Magnetics" and how does that protect against gamma rays?
Most of a robot is built with some fairly old-school stuff, like steel and copper, and this is unaffected by gamma rays (in the short term). The robot moves through the use of magnetics ie: Electric Motors. It turns out that most electric motors, along with the steel and rubber used in most robots is short-term invulnerable to low intensity (and even fairly high intensity) radiation. The issue is that certain types of radiation generate electric (and magnetic) fields which play havoc with some of the fancy sensors used in the newer brushless DC motor designs. The solution is to redesign the magnetics of the robot such that they use old-school technologies which operate happily in extreme environments.
Radiation sources like gamma rays will eventually effect some of the key non-electronic systems of robots. In particular, they can break down insulation. Also, they can render the entire robot radioactive, and not safe to be around people. Prolonged exposure to high-energy sources may also damage bearing surfaces, preventing robot motion. However, long before any of this happens, the electronics will act up.
The GP poster was trying to suggest: is (a) take a regular robot, (b) install radiation protected electronics, (c) use a bunch of old-school servo-motor technologies (like DC motors and resolvers), and (d) you will have a short-term survivable rad-hardened robot.
Monsanto makes money regardless of whether the seed works. Monsanto's contracts specify that once you purchase Genetically Modified seed from them, you must keep purchasing seed from them.
If the Genetically modified seed quits working, the farmers have to pay Monsanto for seed anyway.
It is
fully consistent with socioeconomic status of the
home environment being a primary determinant
for success of children in school.
The dominant factor in the study appears to be the ability of the school system and parents to teach math (aka the "culture").
I don't think the metrics ever come close to evaluating the true mathematical potential of the children. Otherwise, they would be confronted with the unpleasant result that my Calculus prof and I noted: 20 years ago, the university math tests were harder. Simply put, the math education system (at least in Ontario, Canada) is being watered down. This can easily be seen with proposals where Integration is to be eliminated from the High School math curriculum.
If the education system is not teaching students to the peaks of their abilities, then all the effects will be cultural or systemic.
The problem is that most games are insufficiently multi-threaded to take advantage of a dual processor architecture. A hard core group of gamers exists that would purchase dual processor and quad processor Opteron and Xeon motherboards if it resulted in increased game performance. Unfortunately, best game performance is often obtained from single processor desktop chips.
Bottom line: Games often struggle at keeping more than 2 to 3 cores busy. As a result, better performance for the dollar is obtained by purchasing better video cards.
Slashdot Mirror
The Airbus approach is fundamentally flawed. Pilots adapt to how the plane usually works. If the plane usually works in a manner that the pilots can't make mistakes, then the pilots get used to never making mistakes.
When the automatic system quits, the pilots don't have the ability to instinctively react and fly the plane. The result is Air France Flight 447. The pilots flew a perfectly good plan into a stall, and never corrected. Had the copilots been used to flying in full manual, then they would have had the experience and instincts to react to the stall.
People make mistakes. You have to let them make mistakes and let people learn from them. Safety systems that let people repeatedly make mistakes are dangerous. Because, sooner or later, a person will make a mistake in a corner case that the automated system does not catch. When this happens, tragedy often occurs.
The reason the vacuum systems went out of favor was the massive associated fire risk. At first, it doesn't seem obvious why a vacuum system would have a fire risk, as in theory the vacuum should extinguish the fire. However, this doesn't work in practice.
What actually happens is the fire starts outside the vacuum system, where it has access to air. The fire then causes this air to expand. The logical place to expand is straight into the nearest low or negative pressure environment around, which is the vacuum system. In no time at all, the vacuum transportation system spreads the fire between floors - and disaster ensues.
Vacuum transportation systems used to be popular in multilevel buildings of large companies. Then one by one they caught fire. Eventually, the fire codes understood the significance of plenums and air return systems in spreading fires. Now any kind of vacuum, plenum, or return air space that stretches between floors has special safety devices inside it. They are extremely dangerous spaces if fires occur.
Additionally, vacuum systems were never used to transport people, because if air integrity on the capsule fails, then everyone suffocates.
The rip-offs go both ways.
Many of the designs don't monitor line-to-neutral voltages properly. They assume the neutral voltage is 1/2 of the line voltage. This makes them vulnerable to mismeasurement due to problems with the neutral conductor. Normally, this won't be in the customers favour, and allows the utility to rip of the customer.
If deployed units have the same weaknesses as the sensor manufacturers recommended designs, class actions suits could result.
A professor at my local university periodically gets undergraduate and starting graduate students to try reproducing the work of interesting research papers.
One engineering professor at my local institution figures about one-third of the papers can be reproduced to demonstrate the effect in question.
At most schools, graduate students are required to published paper on a "new" idea in an academic journal in order to receive their degree. As such, journals must exist to collect all the ideas students generate, and this is the driver behind the modern academic journal system. Huge pressure is put upon the students to describe "new" ideas, and as such, the paper must sell itself as being "new".
Complicating this effort, it the reality that most students are working on student projects. These projects don't have the necessary resources (time and money) to be developed into fully effective and reproducible ideas. As such, the results from these projects are fundamentally suspect. Also, the students working on the project, may not fully understand all the relevant effects on their research (because they are students). In particular, many students do not understand statistics. As such, students deliberately or inadvertently conduct biased experiments to show the desired effect in question, because the academic requirement is a "new" idea and not a "new and reproducible" idea.
The result is a collection of papers that all describe themselves as having "new" and "brilliant" ideas on topics that cannot be easily reproduced. When the ideas are reproduced, practicing engineers quickly discover they are reproducing a marginal student project. It is actually really tough to find reproducible, inventive and commercializable research ideas in academic journals, because of all the noise.
This involves the Mossad, CIA, and national security. You can ask, but you might not survive the attempt.
Gerald Bull and the drone attacks come to mind. Of course, this assumes that they even listen, and don't simply claim National Security!
A little brick of styrofoam would never harm a space shuttle ...
The short-term trading reduces the average profitability of long-term trades. It is like purchasing goods direct from the manufacturer, versus purchasing goods via a variety of middle-men. The middle-men must extract a markup to pay for their time.
The big stock market traders have found a new variation on the centuries old system of middle-men. They speculatively execute trades designed to intercept profitable movements on the stock market. In short, they purchase from the seller before the long-term trader gets a chance too. This does have the advantage of improving market liquidity, however in cases of model or computer error, this isn't always a good thing.
The bigger problem for long-term traders is that the short-term trading steals some of the profit. In the absence of short-term trading, the long-term trader would have even odds of receiving a fair trading price. If the short-term traders are capable speculatively intercepting a profitable set (and only a profitable set) of trades, then that necessarily means that the long-term trader is less likely to get an equitable price distribution.
The number of interrupts per second that a modern processor can handle has stayed relatively fixed for a large number of years, and network response time is a strong function of interrupt performance.
It has been a while since I benchmarked interrupt response on a variety of processors with the same block of code. However, when I last did it, a 32 MHz 8-bit PIC18 series microcontroller (MCU) was capable of processing a real-time interrupt at 10,000 times per second. A much faster 3 GHz x86 CPU could manage 70,000 interrupts per second under Real-Time Linux. This wasn't much of an improvement, considering the x86 CPU is theoretically 100 times faster, was capable of executing multiple instructions per clock, and the little 8-bit PIC MCU has a hard limit of around 8 MIPs.
Why does this happen?
For a variety of factors including:
1. The amount of data a modern CPU must flush on an interrupt is huge. Most of the cache needs to be flushed and replaced, and this means a great deal of memory bus bandwidth.
2. Main memory latency in the modern PC is huge. Modern compiler designers assume it to be on the order of 100's of clocks.
3. Modern operating systems have to reload the page tables for every user/kernel mode transition. This takes time, and possibly more interrupts.
4. The I/O response time of the PCI bus is terrible relative to the cycle time of the processor. This means that most of the network traffic is transferred via DMA. However, this optimization only helps in terms of bandwidth, not latency.
5. Multiple cores don't really help. Synchronization overhead is a killer. Tricks like software transactional memory can help, however typical I/O devices lack the ability to support software transactional memory. Even simple techniques, like giving each core its own I/O and thus eliminating synchronization overhead, are often not implemented. Linux is still trying to eliminate the "Big Kernel Lock".
In short, the interrupt response latency in modern processors has really not improved much. This was a big discussion in some of the Ethernet working groups, because some of the simulations pointed out that 10Gb Ethernet performance might be limited by interrupt response time on the processors.
As far as the food industry is concerned, labelling is equivalent to banning genetically modified food.
As far as I am concerned, if they can't sell it for what it is, then they shouldn't be selling it.
From an electrical point of view, many medical devices are simply to sensitive to be made immune to induced interference. The noise will have to affect them some how. It is just a matter of how big the noise source is (magnitude), the frequency of the noise source (Hz), and what geometry it sits relative to the medical device (coupling.)
Obviously, the TSA has found a big enough noise source.
In particular, the difficulty with mm-wave interference is that it can induce noise directly onto the geometries of integrated circuits and thin-film devices. The only way to guard against the problem would be to heavily shield the chips in question. Maybe it is time for medical devices to start using radiation-hardened integrated circuits. Radiation hardened circuits are designed to withstand short and intense blasts of EMI, including high-frequency EMI sources.
Submarines patents are when a patent is deliberately kept hidden until the competitors develop competing products. They are particularly effective when they allow a company to patent an industry standard, as in the Rambus lawsuit against DDR-RAM.
This proposal would allow lawyers to easily create submarine patents. Because of the secrecy, it could even happen that more than one company has submarine patents on the same industry standard technology.
Submarine patents block industry standards and free software.
The Model 100 had a number of features that modern computers lack. If you need a simple computer to make notes, its battery life was in the 20 hours region. It was many many long years before the modern PC laptop was "portable" and had a battery life greater than 3 hours. (I'm thinking of some of the old transportables, which weighed 35 lbs and had no batteries.)
At long last, with the advent of the OLPC, the Eee PC, the smartphone, and a few of the smaller laptops, battery life has reached the 6 to 12 hours. However, for taking a piece of equipment to strange places with no power, being able to use AA batteries to power your computer is a really helpful feature.
Really wish the modern laptop could run from batteries longer. It's sad that a 30 year old PC is still competitive with regards to battery life.
I was on ice. Ice also jammed the accelerator cable (which is what locked the engine at full throttle.)
Personally, I suspect three problems:
1. On ice, the ABS system may actually prevent applying full power to the brakes.
2. It was a pickup truck, and it had a ton of torque. As an engineer, I have my doubts that brakes could stop the engine. However, at least historically, brakes on most cars are not rated to full engine output. As a GM mechanic explained it to me: brakes on GM vehicles were rated to 70 mph, because that is (was) the legal requirement. Never mind the fact that most vehicles can go much faster than 70 mph.
3. If I had ice on the road, and ice on my accelerator cable, then it is possible that ice was present on the brakes themselves. However, I would think the pads would heat, and boil off the ice. Alternatively, the pads may possibly have heated and glazed, in which case there stopping power would be limited.
I religiously maintain my brakes. Lack of maintenance was not a factor in the failure.
The brakes are not more powerful than the engine. Firstly, I work in automotive. The design specification on most modern braking systems is below what is required for a worst case stop. Secondly, in an emergency situation, full power assist may not be present. You would have to be superman to apply full brakes without power assist. Parking brakes do not help either. On most cars, it is trivial to demonstrate driving out of the driveway with the parking brake on.
Lastly, I have been in a car with a runaway engine. THE BRAKES WERE NOT CAPABLE OF STOPPING THE ENGINE. Putting the car in neutral, and turning off the engine both worked. Getting caught in a snow bank helps too. :-)
It used to be that police would investigate intelligently, and lay charges appropriately. Now, it appears that everything must reach a judge before common sense is applied. We are living in the days where losing a cell phone will cause a plane to be grounded. We need to get people to use their brains again, and not make major incidents out of false alarms.
Soon, every aspiring American entrepreneur running a server farm can get busted for growing pot, and every Canadian's with hot tubs and pools can get charged massive fees.
The GP post is essentially correct. I did a bunch of the math behind it in my undergraduate thesis / research project in the context of high-speed PWMs for motor drives.
Essentially, if you reconstruct the sampled information with a non-ideal DAC converter, it phase shifts the output based on the time varying magnitudes of the input signals. When analyzed mathematically, the effect is very similar to phase modulation (PM) or frequency modulation (FM). Normally, phase and frequency modulation is used in the context of radio receivers, which use complex filters prevent distortion. The audio amplifier has none of these filters, and the result is that the phase modulation shows up as audible distortion inside the normal frequency band. The effects of this distortion are significant. I noted them in the context of a motor drive.
Modern DAC manufacturers are well aware of the fact that their products are non-ideal. As such, almost all of the new audo DACs feature circuits to reduce the distortion. However, this distortion ellimination isn't perfect, especially for a 16-bit/44.1 kHz signal. Nevertheless, numerous papers have been published on how to create a DAC converter that behaves more closely to the ideal DAC converter modelled in Nyquist sampling theory.
Realistically, the bigger problem with the 16 bit/44.1 kHz format is the loudness wars. The loudness wars cause clipping. No amount DAC converter trickery can fix clipping. The result is that people say old LPs now sound better than new CDs. They are correct. The old LPs were mastered with more dynamic range and less clipping than modern recordings.
Power failures can last several days. Parts of the north eastern U.S. and Ontario have been blacked out for several days at a time. Montreal was hit by an ice-storm that caused them to lose power for several days too.
It doesn't happen often, but the problem with big disasters is that they are big. Emergency equipment still has to run.
Copper phone line work well as a backup.
US needs to take $5bn out from any federal budget, even war funds would suffice and use it for NASA.
Unfortunately, the US Deficit is $1.56 trillion dollars on revenues of $2.314 trillion and with expenditures of $3.36 trillion. Huge budget changes need to happen to correct the imbalance. Compared to this, NASA is small potatoes, and will probably get severely cut as it is "low hanging fruit."
No other federal government in the world could run the deficits that the U.S. is currently running. It is amazing we get away with it.
Space X has some ideas on how to land a rocket on Mars, and is already testing some design principles, like the SuperDrago rockets for landing its Dragon capsules.
If I were the Europeans, I would be contacting them. The cheapest and best original thinking in the space race is currently at Space/X.
Where's the payoff for the avalanche of poor patents?
IBM will be sued the moment the PTO grants a similar patent application to another company, so they file first.
As long as it passes the "will the PTO grant this?" threshold, IBM files it. They have to file it, because five years later someone else will attempt to patent the same feature. The PTO will issue the patent in due course, and sometime later a patent troll company will buy the patent and source code (like SCO). Presto IBM will be sued for billions of dollars for violating patents and copyright, for something that happened many years ago. To prevent this from happening, IBM files patents, such that the technology shows up in the PTO database of patents.
The interesting thing is that this technology was probably present in email systems running from the 1970s. Nevertheless, IBM still felt the need to patent it.
Most of a robot is built with some fairly old-school stuff, like steel and copper, and this is unaffected by gamma rays (in the short term). The robot moves through the use of magnetics ie: Electric Motors. It turns out that most electric motors, along with the steel and rubber used in most robots is short-term invulnerable to low intensity (and even fairly high intensity) radiation. The issue is that certain types of radiation generate electric (and magnetic) fields which play havoc with some of the fancy sensors used in the newer brushless DC motor designs. The solution is to redesign the magnetics of the robot such that they use old-school technologies which operate happily in extreme environments.
Radiation sources like gamma rays will eventually effect some of the key non-electronic systems of robots. In particular, they can break down insulation. Also, they can render the entire robot radioactive, and not safe to be around people. Prolonged exposure to high-energy sources may also damage bearing surfaces, preventing robot motion. However, long before any of this happens, the electronics will act up.
The GP poster was trying to suggest: is (a) take a regular robot, (b) install radiation protected electronics, (c) use a bunch of old-school servo-motor technologies (like DC motors and resolvers), and (d) you will have a short-term survivable rad-hardened robot.
If the Genetically modified seed quits working, the farmers have to pay Monsanto for seed anyway.
The dominant factor in the study appears to be the ability of the school system and parents to teach math (aka the "culture").
I don't think the metrics ever come close to evaluating the true mathematical potential of the children. Otherwise, they would be confronted with the unpleasant result that my Calculus prof and I noted: 20 years ago, the university math tests were harder. Simply put, the math education system (at least in Ontario, Canada) is being watered down. This can easily be seen with proposals where Integration is to be eliminated from the High School math curriculum.
If the education system is not teaching students to the peaks of their abilities, then all the effects will be cultural or systemic.
AMD tried this once before with their AMD QuadFX 4x4 concept. It didn't go anywhere.
The problem is that most games are insufficiently multi-threaded to take advantage of a dual processor architecture. A hard core group of gamers exists that would purchase dual processor and quad processor Opteron and Xeon motherboards if it resulted in increased game performance. Unfortunately, best game performance is often obtained from single processor desktop chips.
Bottom line: Games often struggle at keeping more than 2 to 3 cores busy. As a result, better performance for the dollar is obtained by purchasing better video cards.