I kind of wonder if Google shows exactly the same news to all users. I sometimes see significant differences between which News links are presented by Google in different browsers on the same computer. Of course, that might be due to changes in ranking in the time between the invocations of Google. OTOH, they could be tailoring what is presented to their assumptions about my tastes and interests. How would I know?
"However, most of these 4th gen are much cheaper and safer...."
Don't know about safer. But recent attempts to build state of the art reactors in the US, EU and Korea have been way late and way over budget. Only a year ago, Toshiba wrote off something like $6B due to losses in its nuclear unit.
Maybe the Chinese or Indians can do better. I hope so. But lets not count our cheap, safe nuclear reactors until they are on line and generating power and revenue.
Of course there's going to be an SEC investigation. It'll probably find that Musk had no malign intent, but that he broke some rules. They'll lay a substantial fine on him more as an example to others than a punishment. He'll pay out of petty cash.
OTOH, you'd think the CEO of a substantial company would have the good sense to check with a lawyer before sending out a post on twitter (for God's sake) that might affect his company's stock price. Anyone who was looking for a reason to bail out of Tesla stock sure has one. The company is apparently being run by a guy who is, to understate the case, not a detail man.
"I did have CFL bulbs go bad, though... all the bloody time."
CFLs do seem to fail more often than is claimed. I think "they" extrapolated the failure rate for long tube "industrial" bulbs to the curly compact form factor. I suspect that compact FLs run warmer and therefore fail more often than the T8/T12 straight bulbs . I've even had one CFL expire with a loud bang. Blew the curly glass tube off the base.
That said, the CFLs do last a lot longer than incandescents.
I had some bad experiences with early LED bulbs. But nowadays, they seem pretty reliable and are more efficient than CFLs, so I'm slowly switching over to LEDs It'll take a long time as the CFLs only get replaced when they fail -- typically after 4 -8 years of use.
Interesting to me -- the spectrum from "daylight" CFLs and LEDs seem to differ from brand to brand, and often has some "holes". FWIW, if you care, you can improvise a diffraction grating of sorts using a CD and see what the emission spectrum looks like.
"Are people really this poor? Can't you afford a Walmart $10 antenna instead of a $5 homebrew one with half the performance? "
How do you know the homebrew has "half the performance?" Some inexpensive commercial stuff works brilliantly. But a lot truly is junk. And the amount of signal one has to work with can vary dramatically over short distances. In practice, a homemade antenna or even a few feet of wire hung off the TV antenna terminal may give one all the signal they need.
The idea that store bought is always better is right up there with newer is better in the world's list of dumbish notions..
Let's see. Virtually all passengers will be making a round trip, so $2 per passenger times 1500 vict ^h^h^h... clients =$3000 per gameday. And I think Dodger Stadium is used for things other than baseball sometimes. Let's say it's used 150 "days" a year. So, revenue = $450,000 a year. Seems a bit low. By a factor of maybe 100. But what the hell do I know?
No, it does not. It purportedly works well on dry roads and OK on wet ones. Quite likely that's true.
It is, and auto makers agree, ineffective on dirt and gravel and makes directional control very difficult without improving braking distance.when trying to stop on snow/ice I've literally never had it kick in except when I didn't want it to as when stopping when descending a hill on a snow covered road.
As for Electronic Traction Control -- I don't know why, but it is notorious for cutting/reducing power to the wrong wheels at exactly the wrong time on slippery roads. At least you can turn it off on many cars and lot of experienced drivers do in snow country in Winter. But on a lot of cars, turning it off has to be done every trip. I don't know all that much about it as I've never driven an ETC/ECS car on a daily basis and I'm willing to believe that some versions may work better than others.
I could do without a lot of them including Antilock Braking and Electronic Traction Control which work dismally in ice and snow. But I think you'll have trouble finding many people who want to replace Engine Control Units with Carburetors..
Patriot is an antiaircraft missile system that was pressed into service as an antimissile system prior to and during the first Gulf War. It seems to be quite a good anti-aircraft system. A lot of claims were made for it as an antimissile system during the Gulf War, but they didn't stand up well to scrutiny when the data was made public. The military and the GWB administration solved that problem after 2001 by not releasing more recent data for public analysis.
Speaking of reactors, Exactly where are the Enterprise reactors? Still on the ship in Newport News? (Why Newport News? How did it get there?) Maybe sitting in a parking lot at the Puget Sound Naval Base? Maybe at Hanford? (Permanent storage? At Hanford? What then was Yucca Mountain for?) Has the Navy lost track of them?
It's not that hard to hit. But you don't want to hit it. What looks to be hard is keeping your lander and rovers "landed" on a small rock with virtually no gravity and still having them do anything useful.
Returning a sample probably isn't so hard, but how does one extract a sample without having the sample and sampling device drift off in opposite directions?
Probably not. It's not too hard to figure out that stuff in orbit is extremely vulnerable and will be shot to pieces in the first 12 hours of any serious conflict. ICBMs and cruise missiles are more reliable, less vulnerable, and orders of magnitude cheaper. That's probably beyond the comprehension of Trump, Pence, the press and most of the bozos in Congress. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff will understand it.
"If you are talking about hand-counting ballots by people, it's just not true."
Cross-check. Recounts are often made in very close elections. My impression is that it is uncommon for the recount to exactly match the initial count. Conclusion: Indeed, people are not, in fact, 100% accurate counters.
Note. Some places use OCR to tally paper ballots. I've never seen data on how repeatable those counts are. But I imagine the data exists.
Taking Tesla private also means that you don't have to worry about filing those pesky quarterly and annual SEC reports with 20 pages of risk factor discussions tacked on the end at the insistence of the auditors http://ir.tesla.com/node/18946...
If Musk takes the company private, I expect it'll have a more substantial basis than ire at short sellers. Could be a genuine concern about the difficulty of arranging financing against a background of stock market tribulation. (I thought Tesla was gonna be profitable any day now. Why would financing be a concern?)
Anyway, this is beyond my pay grade, but I would point out taking the company private is something one might consider if they expected serious bad news in the near to medium term future.
"Shorting the company is betting against my livelihood."
Not at all. Short selling an overpriced stock just says that it's overpriced, nothing more, nothing less. If you'd sold Microsoft short at its 1999 peak, you'd have done OK when the price dropped by 50% during the dotcom crash. Doesn't mean Microsoft had no future. And short selling it today at 108 wouldn't mean that it has no future either.
You javascript guys remind me of the loyal Americans that firmly believed in the 1970s and 1980s that America was building the finest cars in the world. The cars themselves had barely changed since 1949. Huge, gas guzzling monstrosities, with the handling characteristics of a buckboard and a typical showroom to scrapyard lifetime of six years. On top of which, the build quality was, if anything, worse than it was two or three decades earlier. When consumers finally realized that the product was awful, they fled en masse to products from overseas. It took government intervention and the 1984 Ford Taurus/Sable sedan to sort of save the US automotive industry for a couple of decades..
The issue is not my understanding of javascript mate. It's the crummy products you folks are producing.
Even if javascript wasn't beyond the capabilities of its practicioners, I think it's likely doomed in the long run because it seems impossible to prevent malicious any_sort_of_script from compromising users computers and there seems to be no way to keep nasty scripts out of the web ecosystem other than to refuse to run scripts.
Don't get me wrong. I loath Javascript. And apparently it is quite difficult to write and test because it seems often to work very badly.
On the bright side, I think web scripting is probably doomed because its always going to be a security problem. Eventually --- maybe in 5 or 10 years -- folks will work that out.
BUT, there are capabilities that are needed for handling interactive maps, message editing, etc that presumably will need to be built into browsers and/or OSes before downloadable scripts can be consigned to the dustbin of history.
"But that's no longer the case once the 'web fartists' got through with it. Perhaps people should worry far less about visual appearance and far more about functionality."
The wretched hive of scum and infamy that is the modern Internet seems slowly to be evolving toward near total unusability. I have to confess that some of what is going on seems almost inexplicable. For example, Amazon.com, which used to be relentlessly consumer oriented has a web site that is becoming so slow and unresponsive in every browser I try as to be virtually unusable. Google maps has gone to enormous effort to put together a terrific GIS database -- at least for the US -- but for some reason they insist on presenting map data in a low contrast format that often makes their maps pretty much unusable. You often can't even see secondary roads if you turn terrain display on. And Google itself is so busy spying on its users that many of the services it has gone to great effort to build are compromised. For example, Google News no longer works with the simple text browsers (links, lynx, etc) used by the visually impaired.
And then there is security. I (probably) loaded all the comments in this thread -- a capability that has worked only erratically this weekend presumably thanks to Slashdot's flaky site scripting. Only two comments mention security. Come on folks. Does anyone seriously believe that users can keep confidential information confidential and still load and execute random code from random web sites? Really? You folks believe that?
I don't know how, when or where all this ends. But I'm guessing that it doesn't end very well.
FWIW, about 40 years ago the US Navy wrote a "mathematically specified" launch system for one of their weapons systems. It was implemented reasonably competently in FORTRAN. Guess what: It worked REALLY badly. It turns out that most any fool can write equations that look OK in isolation, but making hundreds of "equations" consistent over the full range of legitimate inputs is a lot harder than it looks. (And then there's the minor matter of describing and actually dealing with state transitions...)
Don't get me wrong. If you're solving a problem like tracking missiles, writing the equations of motion you plan to use down and implementing what is written is a terrific idea. But I think the concept is likely to have limited utility in other contexts.
"To wit, they will not use pre-existing code, because it couldn't POSSIBLY compare with their own brilliant code."
Right road, but wrong driveway I think. It's often easier to solve a complex problem yourself than to understand how to use someone else's solution even when their solution is perfectly valid. Throw in the number of times when their solution is flawed or is the solution to some other similar, but not identical problem (now you have two problems) and there is often some justification for being leary of at least some pre-existing code.
What's wrong with that? The trick would be HOW to dumb down computer programming without ending up with an intractable shambles like the last 50000 attempts to do so.
Interesting thought -- seriously. Back around 1980 or so, I decided that if I was going to be doing computer stuff for most of my career, I should learn the basics, so I read Hamming, and Knuth and Tannenbaum and Dijkstra and... All the important books and papers available at the time I think
I came away with the feeling that there were solid pieces of foundation here and there. But no body of knowledge that constituted a "science". My feeling is that things haven't really changed all that much. But what the hell do I know?
Slashdot Mirror
I kind of wonder if Google shows exactly the same news to all users. I sometimes see significant differences between which News links are presented by Google in different browsers on the same computer. Of course, that might be due to changes in ranking in the time between the invocations of Google. OTOH, they could be tailoring what is presented to their assumptions about my tastes and interests. How would I know?
Well ... OK ... But who's going to shinny up and plug our remote control iinterface into the Walker USB port?
"However, most of these 4th gen are much cheaper and safer. ..."
Don't know about safer. But recent attempts to build state of the art reactors in the US, EU and Korea have been way late and way over budget. Only a year ago, Toshiba wrote off something like $6B due to losses in its nuclear unit.
Maybe the Chinese or Indians can do better. I hope so. But lets not count our cheap, safe nuclear reactors until they are on line and generating power and revenue.
"There should be an SEC investigation"
Of course there's going to be an SEC investigation. It'll probably find that Musk had no malign intent, but that he broke some rules. They'll lay a substantial fine on him more as an example to others than a punishment. He'll pay out of petty cash.
OTOH, you'd think the CEO of a substantial company would have the good sense to check with a lawyer before sending out a post on twitter (for God's sake) that might affect his company's stock price. Anyone who was looking for a reason to bail out of Tesla stock sure has one. The company is apparently being run by a guy who is, to understate the case, not a detail man.
"I did have CFL bulbs go bad, though... all the bloody time."
CFLs do seem to fail more often than is claimed. I think "they" extrapolated the failure rate for long tube "industrial" bulbs to the curly compact form factor. I suspect that compact FLs run warmer and therefore fail more often than the T8/T12 straight bulbs . I've even had one CFL expire with a loud bang. Blew the curly glass tube off the base.
That said, the CFLs do last a lot longer than incandescents.
I had some bad experiences with early LED bulbs. But nowadays, they seem pretty reliable and are more efficient than CFLs, so I'm slowly switching over to LEDs It'll take a long time as the CFLs only get replaced when they fail -- typically after 4 -8 years of use.
Interesting to me -- the spectrum from "daylight" CFLs and LEDs seem to differ from brand to brand, and often has some "holes". FWIW, if you care, you can improvise a diffraction grating of sorts using a CD and see what the emission spectrum looks like.
"I can't believe all the rich people posting in this thread, openly bragging about how often they have access to potatoes"
I hope that you don't seriously believe that Pringles are made out of potatoes.
"Are people really this poor? Can't you afford a Walmart $10 antenna instead of a $5 homebrew one with half the performance? "
How do you know the homebrew has "half the performance?" Some inexpensive commercial stuff works brilliantly. But a lot truly is junk. And the amount of signal one has to work with can vary dramatically over short distances. In practice, a homemade antenna or even a few feet of wire hung off the TV antenna terminal may give one all the signal they need.
The idea that store bought is always better is right up there with newer is better in the world's list of dumbish notions..
Let's see. Virtually all passengers will be making a round trip, so $2 per passenger times 1500 vict ^h^h^h ... clients =$3000 per gameday. And I think Dodger Stadium is used for things other than baseball sometimes. Let's say it's used 150 "days" a year. So, revenue = $450,000 a year. Seems a bit low. By a factor of maybe 100. But what the hell do I know?
"ABS works amazingly well."
No, it does not. It purportedly works well on dry roads and OK on wet ones. Quite likely that's true.
It is, and auto makers agree, ineffective on dirt and gravel and makes directional control very difficult without improving braking distance.when trying to stop on snow/ice I've literally never had it kick in except when I didn't want it to as when stopping when descending a hill on a snow covered road.
As for Electronic Traction Control -- I don't know why, but it is notorious for cutting/reducing power to the wrong wheels at exactly the wrong time on slippery roads. At least you can turn it off on many cars and lot of experienced drivers do in snow country in Winter. But on a lot of cars, turning it off has to be done every trip. I don't know all that much about it as I've never driven an ETC/ECS car on a daily basis and I'm willing to believe that some versions may work better than others.
I could do without a lot of them including Antilock Braking and Electronic Traction Control which work dismally in ice and snow. But I think you'll have trouble finding many people who want to replace Engine Control Units with Carburetors..
Patriot is an antiaircraft missile system that was pressed into service as an antimissile system prior to and during the first Gulf War. It seems to be quite a good anti-aircraft system. A lot of claims were made for it as an antimissile system during the Gulf War, but they didn't stand up well to scrutiny when the data was made public. The military and the GWB administration solved that problem after 2001 by not releasing more recent data for public analysis.
Speaking of reactors, Exactly where are the Enterprise reactors? Still on the ship in Newport News? (Why Newport News? How did it get there?) Maybe sitting in a parking lot at the Puget Sound Naval Base? Maybe at Hanford? (Permanent storage? At Hanford? What then was Yucca Mountain for?) Has the Navy lost track of them?
It's not that hard to hit. But you don't want to hit it. What looks to be hard is keeping your lander and rovers "landed" on a small rock with virtually no gravity and still having them do anything useful.
Returning a sample probably isn't so hard, but how does one extract a sample without having the sample and sampling device drift off in opposite directions?
Probably not. It's not too hard to figure out that stuff in orbit is extremely vulnerable and will be shot to pieces in the first 12 hours of any serious conflict. ICBMs and cruise missiles are more reliable, less vulnerable, and orders of magnitude cheaper. That's probably beyond the comprehension of Trump, Pence, the press and most of the bozos in Congress. But the Joint Chiefs of Staff will understand it.
"If you are talking about hand-counting ballots by people, it's just not true."
Cross-check. Recounts are often made in very close elections. My impression is that it is uncommon for the recount to exactly match the initial count. Conclusion: Indeed, people are not, in fact, 100% accurate counters.
Note. Some places use OCR to tally paper ballots. I've never seen data on how repeatable those counts are. But I imagine the data exists.
Of course. But at least giving out a receipt will likely detect stuck keys/levers and many other mechanical issues.
OTOH, maybe elections are something that really should not be automated.
Taking Tesla private also means that you don't have to worry about filing those pesky quarterly and annual SEC reports with 20 pages of risk factor discussions tacked on the end at the insistence of the auditors http://ir.tesla.com/node/18946...
If Musk takes the company private, I expect it'll have a more substantial basis than ire at short sellers. Could be a genuine concern about the difficulty of arranging financing against a background of stock market tribulation. (I thought Tesla was gonna be profitable any day now. Why would financing be a concern?)
Anyway, this is beyond my pay grade, but I would point out taking the company private is something one might consider if they expected serious bad news in the near to medium term future.
"Shorting the company is betting against my livelihood."
Not at all. Short selling an overpriced stock just says that it's overpriced, nothing more, nothing less. If you'd sold Microsoft short at its 1999 peak, you'd have done OK when the price dropped by 50% during the dotcom crash. Doesn't mean Microsoft had no future. And short selling it today at 108 wouldn't mean that it has no future either.
You javascript guys remind me of the loyal Americans that firmly believed in the 1970s and 1980s that America was building the finest cars in the world. The cars themselves had barely changed since 1949. Huge, gas guzzling monstrosities, with the handling characteristics of a buckboard and a typical showroom to scrapyard lifetime of six years. On top of which, the build quality was, if anything, worse than it was two or three decades earlier. When consumers finally realized that the product was awful, they fled en masse to products from overseas. It took government intervention and the 1984 Ford Taurus/Sable sedan to sort of save the US automotive industry for a couple of decades..
The issue is not my understanding of javascript mate. It's the crummy products you folks are producing.
Even if javascript wasn't beyond the capabilities of its practicioners, I think it's likely doomed in the long run because it seems impossible to prevent malicious any_sort_of_script from compromising users computers and there seems to be no way to keep nasty scripts out of the web ecosystem other than to refuse to run scripts.
Don't get me wrong. I loath Javascript. And apparently it is quite difficult to write and test because it seems often to work very badly.
On the bright side, I think web scripting is probably doomed because its always going to be a security problem. Eventually --- maybe in 5 or 10 years -- folks will work that out.
BUT, there are capabilities that are needed for handling interactive maps, message editing, etc that presumably will need to be built into browsers and/or OSes before downloadable scripts can be consigned to the dustbin of history.
"But that's no longer the case once the 'web fartists' got through with it. Perhaps people should worry far less about visual appearance and far more about functionality."
The wretched hive of scum and infamy that is the modern Internet seems slowly to be evolving toward near total unusability. I have to confess that some of what is going on seems almost inexplicable. For example, Amazon.com, which used to be relentlessly consumer oriented has a web site that is becoming so slow and unresponsive in every browser I try as to be virtually unusable. Google maps has gone to enormous effort to put together a terrific GIS database -- at least for the US -- but for some reason they insist on presenting map data in a low contrast format that often makes their maps pretty much unusable. You often can't even see secondary roads if you turn terrain display on. And Google itself is so busy spying on its users that many of the services it has gone to great effort to build are compromised. For example, Google News no longer works with the simple text browsers (links, lynx, etc) used by the visually impaired.
And then there is security. I (probably) loaded all the comments in this thread -- a capability that has worked only erratically this weekend presumably thanks to Slashdot's flaky site scripting. Only two comments mention security. Come on folks. Does anyone seriously believe that users can keep confidential information confidential and still load and execute random code from random web sites? Really? You folks believe that?
I don't know how, when or where all this ends. But I'm guessing that it doesn't end very well.
FWIW, about 40 years ago the US Navy wrote a "mathematically specified" launch system for one of their weapons systems. It was implemented reasonably competently in FORTRAN. Guess what: It worked REALLY badly. It turns out that most any fool can write equations that look OK in isolation, but making hundreds of "equations" consistent over the full range of legitimate inputs is a lot harder than it looks. (And then there's the minor matter of describing and actually dealing with state transitions ...)
Don't get me wrong. If you're solving a problem like tracking missiles, writing the equations of motion you plan to use down and implementing what is written is a terrific idea. But I think the concept is likely to have limited utility in other contexts.
"To wit, they will not use pre-existing code, because it couldn't POSSIBLY compare with their own brilliant code."
Right road, but wrong driveway I think. It's often easier to solve a complex problem yourself than to understand how to use someone else's solution even when their solution is perfectly valid. Throw in the number of times when their solution is flawed or is the solution to some other similar, but not identical problem (now you have two problems) and there is often some justification for being leary of at least some pre-existing code.
"'let's dumb down computer programming".
What's wrong with that? The trick would be HOW to dumb down computer programming without ending up with an intractable shambles like the last 50000 attempts to do so.
Interesting thought -- seriously. Back around 1980 or so, I decided that if I was going to be doing computer stuff for most of my career, I should learn the basics, so I read Hamming, and Knuth and Tannenbaum and Dijkstra and ...
All the important books and papers available at the time I think
I came away with the feeling that there were solid pieces of foundation here and there. But no body of knowledge that constituted a "science". My feeling is that things haven't really changed all that much. But what the hell do I know?