essentially have perfectly flat torque over their entire RPM range. They can keep spinning and making torque at really, really high RPMs so they dont need to be geared down as road speed increases.
ICE (internal combustion engines) really only produce torque in a VERY narrow range of revolutions, and are limited to a fairly low maximum rev count by mechanical issues..
an electric motor, comparatively, will spin as fast as you want it to, and make the same torque at any rpm (within reason)
as someone else pointed out, electric cars always out-accelerate ICE cars in these "electric sports car" tests for two reasons
1) instantaneous peak torque, held all the way up to V_max
2) car is a prototype with no basis in reality for production use.
The average ICE car engine is only usable from 1000 to 6000 rpm. Diesel truck engines are more like 500 to 2200 rpm. The enormous diesel ship engine everyone was sending the link to a few months back runs at _90_ rpm.
It is not uncommon for an electric motor to spin at 20,000 or more rpm. The only practical displacement motors going this fast are the Formula 1 3L V10s, which spin up to 19k rpm but need to be rebuilt after 1 weekend.
a semi is following your Mini Cooper at an approved computer controlled distance (i.e., very close, since you sold this concept to the public based on the computer perfectino of reaction time and understanding of vehicle stopping times / capabilities)
A child jumps in front of your car.
Please describe an algorithm that does the right thing.
Disclaimer: I have taken several high speed advanced driving courses and am working towards being an instructor for same
The vehicle electronic aids of today do not out-perform a highly skilled human operator.
Consider ABS for instance. ABS is a compromise that says most drivers are better off most of the time if their wheels do not lock up.
There are plenty of times when you do not want any current implementation of ABS from involving itself with you. Consider snow or deep gravel - when you have near zero grip anyway, most ABS implementations will simply NOT apply the brakes, as it would cause a wheel lock. Yet if you were to lock the wheels, you develop a leading edge of snow/gravel (or other loose material) infront of the tires that DOES act to slow the car down. The difference can be used to the advantage of a skilled operator.
Another consideration - 2 wheels on ice, 2 wheels on pavement. If you hit the brakes in this situation, the ice wheels will lock, ABS will release them, and your car will yaw because youhave solid braking power on one side of the car. ABS doesn't want your car to get all screwy and out of whack, so it reduces braking torque to the wheels that DO have traction.
If you're a skilled driver, you can get on the brakes, let the left side lock, and use steering to correct the car's yaw from getting stopping power on only one side of the car.
I have an old AWD Audi where the ABS can be disabled via a dashboard button. Once winter hits here in north dakota, i turn it on and off several times during the course of a drive, depending on the road conditions i see ahead, as sometimes it does a good job and sometimes i do a better job of generating effective decelleration.
Finally, no computerized vehicle system currently envisioned can possibly make all of the considerations that a human occupant can make. Will an automatic car start braking _early_ because it sees a hill crest coming ? Braking power is reduced after cresting a hill because the ground falls away from the car and available grip decreases until the car resettles. People that are used to driving at speed on uneven surfaces know to lift prior to crests to settle the cars steering and braking. Will these automagical cars be smart enough to drive around puddles ? Potholes ? Will the car know that certain bends are off camber, and prone to freezing because of pavement type ?
Will the self driving car recognize that a truck 5s infront of you in your lane is carrying an unsecured load ? Will it know that the safe thing to do is change lanes and briskly accelerate to get out of the path of destruction should the trucks load fall away from it ?
What about the white-out conditions we have when you are in the rear/side vortex of a semi-truck in winter conditions? Any optical systems would be completely blinded at this point, and safe passage is only possible by accelerating through the white out with your headlights off while watching the side signal markers of the truck. Could a self driving car know this ? What would happen if the car was attempting a maneuver and was abruptly put into white-out conditions ?
I know a bunch about working on cars, a little bit about performance and safe driving, and a lot about how hard it is to write software.
I am not looking forward to a day when my car drives for me, because I don't think i could write the software to do it as well as i can do it myself.
If convicted murderers or rapists are still a concern after they've been released back into public, then they shouldn't be released back into public, dont' you think ?
I mean, either they've repayed their debt to society, and have been reformed for the positive, or they haven't. How is tagging them going to help?
The plan of record for my wife and I is that if/when we have children of our own, they will be homeschooled.
The only thing that happened in my highschool that was beyond the intellectual capacity of the average adult was the 3 semesters of calculus i took for college credit. That program has since been dismantled. Between my own BS in mathematics and my father being (at the time) the youngest person ever to become a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, i figure there is enough mathematical talent in the family that we'll manage to set the direction for any mathematically inclined children up until they're of the age appropriate for advanced self study.
In other words, barring a special needs child, i think homeschooling parents can cover it. With the benefits of flexible hours, fewer behavioral problems, and less liklihood of getting shot by classmates and insulted by administration.
I'm also wondering why it would be nessisary to CC the police on who didn't show up in the morning
Because the public school system in the United States is a holding pen and work/release program for those not yet legally required to work and pay taxes.
The police need to know when prisoners have escaped, don't they?
I remember moving to slackware from TAMU shortly after i found out about slackware, like _10_ years ago.
Through an odd and circuitous route, i find myself in Fargo, ND, where Patrick, who is for many, the "founder" of using linux at home, is currently residing.
Ironially enough, i moved to fargo by way of Microsoft employment (Microsoft Great Plains), and find that one of the biggest names in linux is here in town:)
I just asked a co-worker about it and naturally the computer people in town all kind of know each other; he said a friend of his sisters was patricks' roommate for a while. If you search on the name Voldkering with the word Fargo, you get the business address of some dentists, and at first i was like "thats not right" until i read that his parents were dentists:)
the notion that our electronic systems are less accurate, more failure prone, and less trustworthy than 6 senior citizens sitting in a school basement is _hillarious_.
Aircraft are using computers to LAND WITHOUT HUMAN INTERVENTION. I think we can design a system such that it is possible to reliably ADD NUMBERS.
There are tricky problems to voting, like making sure the warm body standing there is authorized to use this particular voting station, but that's not what the griping is about - here there are basic issues of physical security, data security, data auditing, and so on.
These are computer science problems, and they've been solved in practice and in theory.
If you want to see how to use computers to do math correctly with high confidence, look no further than the military avionics and flight control systems.
Namely, what we need is a specification for what a vote counting machine needs to do.
Then we need 2 separate vendors to build clean-room, different technology implementations of the spec.
Then at each polling location, one machine of each type counts every vote. (i.e. each vote is counted by 2 machines)
If the machines agree - bitchin.
If they disagree - now there's legitimate reason for closer scrutiny.
This has a few nice benefits: - it makes a standard, nationwide voting form. No state can have a pathologically awful ballot - it gives somebody at the federal government something important to do, since they're going to make new offices and blow money on stupid shit anyway - people that know wtf they're doing can be involved in the spec review, so you dont have to rely on the machine builders to come up with the right spec, just a good implementation of a public spec
I don't think paperless voting is a good idea. If you go to a totally paperless approach, it gets MUCH uglier, so i am going to advocate sticking with a paper ballot for now.
I think machine-reading of paper votes is a good idea, and that is what i am suggesting above re: multiple independant readers which must agree before the results are valid.
My personal thinking is that the paper vote needs some sort of bar code representing a guid on it so that a vote can be uniquely identified. This lets you resolve such issues as a vote showing up in one machine and not another.. a vote getting counted twice.. etc. You can also track which paper ballots you issue and see how many actually make it into a machine, etc.
Also, each ballot counting machine needs a way to show that its results are tamper proof; perhaps each machine is given a cryptographic key that it signs the output with. In any case, those are problems/details for the bright people to figure out - all i know is that this is a solvable problem, from an engineering and theory perspective.
I cringe at suggesting the federal government come up with another spec or proposal, or get itself involved in something else, but if there is going to be this much drama surrounding election accuracy, the adults need to step in and apply some actual engineering to the whole problem space.
SGI has been working through this in hardware for over 10 years.
The distributed shared memory concept of the Altix (first seen on Origin 200 / Origin 2000 in the commercial space, and previously based on the Standford DASH/FLASH projects) uses a hardware based memory router.
Each PE has local ram and local CPUs and a "MAGIC" chip that routes cache invalidations, memory block "ownership", etc messages to other PE's as necessary. Unlike SMP designs, cache coherencvy doesn't destroy the whole shebang because its not a shared bus, it's a heirarchial directory system. I.e. PE0 knows it only needs to contact PE3, PE6, and PE13 to invalidate a cache block. Turns out that thats much more efficient than broadcasting a message to PE0-PE63 saying "invalidate this block!"
Now, as far as _all_ processor sharing the full 13TB - i am not sure.
The memory density / system image equation is sort of a tradeoff, as more PE's require more router hops in the topology. More router hops increase latency. SGI has sold 256 and 512p single-image systems, and may have gone up to 1024 or 2048p / system.
To be perfectly honest, the system-system latency is different than the intra-system latency, but nothing like it would be on an x86-with-ethernet shared nothing cluster.
SGI's big installations are cool as they have advantages of both SMP and MPP designs.. each autonomous machine gives you signle-image benefits but with really high proc counts.. . and then you link a bunch of those together to get this outrageously sized machine.
at least you didn't come right out and start mocking me, you saved that for the end;)
re: problems with creation science, ID, etc.
I agree with you. These movements are political in nature, not scientific. The "need" for these arose from people using macro-evolution to push a political/religious (anti-religious) world view in public schools.
If the rhetoric around macro-evolution-disproves-the-bible were toned down somewhat i dont think it would be so upsetting to people.
Regarding being skeptical of scientific findings that are publicizied to be contradictory to christianity - ask yourself what the motivation for doing the study and/or publishing the results as contradictory was.
I can't see anyone actually doing a scientific study on the transubstantiation of juice->blood without the point of the study being to cause a problem with catholics. Christianity has the nice axioms built in that 1) god can do whatever he wants 2) just because your feeble mind doesn't understand how it could work doesn't mean god doesn't 3) people with evil intentions will try attacking your beleifs and what you have been told
So its really easy to suggest, from a catholics point of view, that such a study is irrelevant since it's up to god to figure out how to make that transformation happen (assuming they beleive it happens in a physical way instead of a spiritual or allegorical way) and that furthermore, the motivations for such a study are highly indicative of someone who has heard the truth but refuses to beleive (thus, an enemy)
as far as observable "facts" contradicting religious doctrines - i've NEVER found one of these that i cannot come up with a satisfying remediation for. It usually involves careful examination of the religious text, and discarding an assumption about the text that is not explicitly stated. There is NOTHING in the bible that suggests that the first time you read it, you will fully understand God. Quite the opposite - no man can ever know how God works, and all christians are to be continually praying / re-reading the bible and trying to evolve their understanding of the word.
In your last major paragraph - you are framing the problem wrong. Christians don't necessarily beleive that God was essential for the creation of the universe - just that he made it anyway. It's something like arguing wether or not God was the critical instrument in the design and construction of a truck. Show the truck to someone in the 1400s, and they'd insist that it was made by a deity, because they have no understanding of its construction, and cannot possibly fathom how it might be made by men (or by any other means). Yet humans of today can fully design, understand, and build pickup trucks.
Humans have already been able to design and create new/modified forms of life, and designing new life is one of the things traditionally reserved for the role of "creator".
People that use God to explain things they dont understand today will always be disappointed in the future when more of God's plan (the observable "how") is discovered.
God always and forever is about the question of "why". It seems unlikely that science will ever answer that.
about those that will think "that's the way it panned out because thats how God meant for it to pan out", irrespective of what happened.
There isn't a required scientific discrepancy between modern science and biblical christianity. (It's up to christians to resolve such questions as 'were those 7 24 hr days or 7 god days that it took to make stuff?')
You'll find very few fundamentalist christians get upset about discussions of subatomic particles because discoveries in subatomic theory are never used by anti-christians as the foundation for a "see, you stupid christians were wrong!" argument. Macro-evolution and even micro-evolution are unfortuneately often used exactly for this purpose.
The notion that earth based life forms are related and seem to have differentiated themselves from others in discoverable, explainable ways seems reasonable to me. I mean, if i were a deity and wanted to "make world", i'd use lots of shared libraries:)
"the scientists" are at least as guilty as the hardcore creationists in the antagonism that has lead to the cultural divide in america. "science", where it appears to contradict traditional christian thinking, is the new religion for a sub-society that hates traditional religious thought.
Strictly speaking, science has never been "right" about anything - the scientific process merely produces output ("knowledge") that asymptotically approaches "truth" as our observational techniques become more advanced.
I mean, consider that newton thought his laws of motion adequately described mechanics. This theory broke down in some scenarios, requiring the relativistic theories accounting for time/mass/distance expansion/contraction. Special relativity wasn't sufficient to explain photolovaics and that problem led to the thinking of quantum mechanics.
I sincerely hope that after 3 groundbraking world-view changes on just the basic rules governing how things _move_, in _only_ 400 years, nobody thinkgs that we are now at the end-destination of scientific thought, and that we completely understand mechanics, and there will be no more refinements to our understanding of mechanics.
I thought so.
It is perfectly acceptable to me to accept scientific progress as learning about the incredible universe that was engineered for us by God, the "designer" if you will:)
Infact, it used to be the case that the worlds best scientific minds were strong thelogians as well, and studied under the context of discerning how God's universe operated.
You should be suspicious of scientific "progress" that is touted as being contradictory to Christianity.
Let the Christians figure out how to reconcile what is observed in nature and what they think their biblical understanding is.
Let the scientists concentrate on making the best possible observations and the best possible theories to explain them.
That will leave just the pundits - the real people causing the rift between science and religion.
It didn't take me long in my first house before i realized i would never hire a plumber or electrician again, when both bill at 100/hr or more. I can buy an awful lot of plumbing/electrical tools for the price of one job, and then i learn a new skill myself in the process. I did pay pro electricians to put a new main service head and panel in my last house, but that was strictly required by local code to be done by licensed pros, and i didn't really have the guts to try that task myself:)
The way i see it, this country will continue spiraling out of control such that the only white collar profession left is working in the legal industry... either as a lawyer or for a lawyer.
So, my plan, when it comes to pass, is to become a plumber. I figure plumbers will be in high demand and i can bill whatever i want and choose which jobs to pass up.
Because with that many lawyers running around, the shit is going to be awfully deep.
This car has mechanical power steering and mechanical power brake assist. however, it is incorrect to say that power brakes are just a vacuum booster. Many are, but many are not, especially mid 80s german cars that didn't really draw enough vacuum for a vacuum based brake assist. (Some BMW, Audi, and VW models feature non vacuum assist)
Those vehicles have a hydraulic brake booster which is run as a separate output channel from the power steering pump. The power steering pump cant react fast enough for panic threshhold braking, so such cars have a brake pressure accumulator or "brake bomb" which stores pressurized power steering fluid. This pressurized fluid is what provides brake force assistance. Note that the power steering fluid and brake fluid are separate and do not mix; it's just that the brake power regulator uses stored pressure from the PS system to pressurize the brake system.
I recently replaced the brake pressure accumulator on my BMW.
Now, ancient brake technology dissertation aside - i have _very_ relevant experience regarding loss of steering and braking power.
I was on Brainerd International Raceway in Minnesota with my M5. This racetrack has a 1 mile long front straight, and turn 1 is banked. I was entering turn 1 at about 125mph (its a 4 door sedan, give me some slack) and midway through the turn i felt my steering get a bit "funny". I immediately recognized the loss of power steering. KNowing what i know about the car, i checked the brake pedal and found i had no power braking either.
Turn 2 can also be taken in excess of 100mph in my vehicle, but turn 3 is a 110 deegree turn that can't really be navigated above 50mph in a sedan on street tires. So I had no power steering and no power brakes, and i had to slow down 4000 lbs of vehicle, driver, and passenger from in excess of 100mph to about 40 mph.
This was no problem, honestly. You can do the entire back section of BIR without braking once you get past turn 3 if you're running a cool down lap. I really stood on the mechanical unassisted brakes to get speed down by turn 3, and then i was able to drive the car back into the pits.
The problem? The power steering pump is belt driven, and since the power steering pump also pressurizes the power brake system as described above, when the belt snapped, i lost power steering and power braking. My brake presure accumulator, which normally stores enough pressurized fuild to perform 3-4 full brake applications even in the total loss of engine power and brake assist, was faulty (thats why i replaced it a few weeks later:) so thats why i had no power braking as soon as the belt went.
So, the moral of the story is 1) knowing how your car works is helpful. I got a ride over to NAPA, bought a new belt, and was back on the track for the next session. I remained calm even though i had the most difficult braking maneuver on the track coming up in less than 15 seconds.
2) The key to all driving situations is operator skillset and awareness.
Here's another short story: Once in my 1980 BMW 528i i was cruising along the highway, with cruise control enabled. This was an aftermarket cruise control system, as it did not come on this specific vehicle from the factory. I opted to take an off ramp (which went up hill, as they often do in the midwest) and when i dipped the clutch the engine started bouncing off the rev limiter. Manually cancelling the cruise control had no effect. This took me quite by surprise so i killed the engine and slowed to a stop on manual brakes.
The cruise control cable had stuck. OPening the hood, wiggling the cable returned the throttle to the closed position.
Note that at BMW Club track events, a specific part of the technical inspection is the condition and function of the throttle return spring. Driving at speed requires nuance in the use of the throttle, a stock throttle can be a real problem.
is bullshit. Audi owners know it well - 60 minutes did a big thing on it and it basically crushed Audi NA's brand image and sales. They renamed their entire model range twice.
The real cause ?
On the type 44 cars (Audi 4000 and 5000) the gas and brake pedal are close together to make performance driving easier.
Dumb shit americans would hit the gas pedal going for the brakes and rear end people at stops.
CBS fabricated the "expose" on the "problem" completely. Lawsuits were filed and eventually resolved with Audi showing no negligence or fault, but they still changed their pedals in later cars anyway.
i was looking at cray.com and there's no mention of the Tera MTA. The Tera MTA was the innovative idea they had to have 128 logical threads on a single CPU.. think of hyperthreading but with 128 logical threads instead of.. 2.. and also it was working at least 8 years ago.
If you look at cray.com today its pretty sad. 3 product lines - the TD1 opteron+magic, the X1, which is traditional cray vector (smp vector nodes, and MPP's of those nodes), and their 3rd product line is the NEC SX-6... they're reselling it in the states for NEC.
the nec SX architecture uses these ridiculously huge custom vector processors to get performance (similar to the Cray 1, 2, XMP, YMP, etc design)
this Cray is more like building MPPs off of scalar units (opterons) and doing some real innovation around the MPP interconnect. It's sort of off the shelf, yet not at the same time.
The big thing here that kicks ass is the 6 FPGAs per chassis. If you can write a highly tuned software algorithm, there's a chance you can write a highly tuned peice of hardware, deploy that to the FPGA, and you've got an application specific hardware accelerator. 6 per chassis, infact. That's pretty cool, and its in some ways a HUGE innovation over having a dedicated vector unit (as was the cray1 design).
the really interesting thing here is that these are essentially opterons running linux, with custom interconnect goo. The interconnect bypasses the PCI bus - its closer to the PE's than that.. their claim is that it attaches to the AMD hypertransport bus (the Proc -> Proc -> Mem bus for SMP AMD machines)
I'm going to ignore the whole hacker vs cracker thing and assume we're talking about crackers - people with ethical lapses in their past w.r.t. technology.
Someone that is an accomplished cracker in the wild is good at...cracking.
Does your company have a need for someone to try and crack stuff ? If so, hiring a cracker for the sole purpose of attempting to break whatever it is you make that you dont want broken is probably a good idea. However, you may as well contract that work out unless you make enough stuff that having a full time cracker seems like a justified expense.
Now, the unwritten implicatino here is that people that are good at cracking are good defending against other crackers. I don't think this is self evident.
For instance, Michael Schumacher is perhaps the best car driver in the history of motorsports. He arguably knows more about driving a car quickly than anyone else ever has.
He is not designing the cars he drives. he is driving them. He provides _feedback_ on the cars he sits in, based on his personal preferences and experience as a car driver.
I think the analogy holds for employing crackers - if your job is to make something that crackers will "use" (i.e. try and attack), get some of them looking at it, get their comments, their feedback. But thinking that they are going to magically design you a crack proof or crack resistant scheme is folly.
The "cracker as consultant or exteral advisor" approach also has the benefit that you don't necessarily need to let them into your corporate network.
If the question is "should you hire someone that was a cracker in the past for an unrelated CS/IT job", then that just depends on the nature of their offense, the threats / risks of the new project in question, and your personal beleifs on giving people a second chance, personal judgement, etc.
we're in fargo. so we have to get the fargo local stations, (which were just enabled in summer of 04), which generally do not carry the games.
the regional fox sports net channel doesn't show up until you upgrade packages.
its frankly not my problem why direcTV cant give us a reliable feed of twins games. For a while, everyone was upset with Victory Sports Network (which bought the tv rights to most twins games and wouldn't deal with anybody except on their terms).. i can tell you that we got less than 5 the whole season.. heck we WENT to more games than we saw on TV:/
ReplayTV offers something like home media, iirc.
Re: HD content - no, i'm not blaming dtv for lack of HD content. Lack of HD content is a pervasive issue, but the ltitle shred thats out there is an additional premium package from DTV... once upon a time it was like 3 HD channels for like $15 extra a month, in addition to buying a new receiver that was also quite expensive.
It's gotten better, and will continue to get better, but that still doesn't really fix the content issue i mentioned earlier, and i still feel like anyone doing HD is an early adopter at this stage..
finally, no matter how many HD channels they add, uninteresting time-sucking crap is still uninteresting time-sucking crap, even at high resolution with 5.1 audio.
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essentially have perfectly flat torque over their entire RPM range. They can keep spinning and making torque at really, really high RPMs so they dont need to be geared down as road speed increases.
ICE (internal combustion engines) really only produce torque in a VERY narrow range of revolutions, and are limited to a fairly low maximum rev count by mechanical issues..
an electric motor, comparatively, will spin as fast as you want it to, and make the same torque at any rpm (within reason)
as someone else pointed out, electric cars always out-accelerate ICE cars in these "electric sports car" tests for two reasons
1) instantaneous peak torque, held all the way up to V_max
2) car is a prototype with no basis in reality for production use.
The average ICE car engine is only usable from 1000 to 6000 rpm. Diesel truck engines are more like 500 to 2200 rpm. The enormous diesel ship engine everyone was sending the link to a few months back runs at _90_ rpm.
It is not uncommon for an electric motor to spin at 20,000 or more rpm. The only practical displacement motors going this fast are the Formula 1 3L V10s, which spin up to 19k rpm but need to be rebuilt after 1 weekend.
Maybe you weren't paying attention during "i, robot" (or ANY peice of fiction on a world with humans and robots interacting in daily life)
How can a robot make the right decision in traffic without understanding philosophy ?
Robotic cars can outperform average drivers in a very narrow scope of circumstance.
If driving were confined to a narrow set of circumstance, we could just make people better drivers. We can't.
As i said elsewhere, please write the algorithm to determine the cars behavior in this situation:
You are riding in a computer controlled Mini. Behind you there is a computer controlled semi.
A child jumps out infront of your car.
Please describe the appropriate reaction, and how the car decides to take it.
a semi is following your Mini Cooper at an approved computer controlled distance (i.e., very close, since you sold this concept to the public based on the computer perfectino of reaction time and understanding of vehicle stopping times / capabilities)
A child jumps in front of your car.
Please describe an algorithm that does the right thing.
Disclaimer: I have taken several high speed advanced driving courses and am working towards being an instructor for same
The vehicle electronic aids of today do not out-perform a highly skilled human operator.
Consider ABS for instance. ABS is a compromise that says most drivers are better off most of the time if their wheels do not lock up.
There are plenty of times when you do not want any current implementation of ABS from involving itself with you. Consider snow or deep gravel - when you have near zero grip anyway, most ABS implementations will simply NOT apply the brakes, as it would cause a wheel lock. Yet if you were to lock the wheels, you develop a leading edge of snow/gravel (or other loose material) infront of the tires that DOES act to slow the car down. The difference can be used to the advantage of a skilled operator.
Another consideration - 2 wheels on ice, 2 wheels on pavement. If you hit the brakes in this situation, the ice wheels will lock, ABS will release them, and your car will yaw because youhave solid braking power on one side of the car. ABS doesn't want your car to get all screwy and out of whack, so it reduces braking torque to the wheels that DO have traction.
If you're a skilled driver, you can get on the brakes, let the left side lock, and use steering to correct the car's yaw from getting stopping power on only one side of the car.
I have an old AWD Audi where the ABS can be disabled via a dashboard button. Once winter hits here in north dakota, i turn it on and off several times during the course of a drive, depending on the road conditions i see ahead, as sometimes it does a good job and sometimes i do a better job of generating effective decelleration.
Finally, no computerized vehicle system currently envisioned can possibly make all of the considerations that a human occupant can make. Will an automatic car start braking _early_ because it sees a hill crest coming ? Braking power is reduced after cresting a hill because the ground falls away from the car and available grip decreases until the car resettles. People that are used to driving at speed on uneven surfaces know to lift prior to crests to settle the cars steering and braking. Will these automagical cars be smart enough to drive around puddles ? Potholes ? Will the car know that certain bends are off camber, and prone to freezing because of pavement type ?
Will the self driving car recognize that a truck 5s infront of you in your lane is carrying an unsecured load ? Will it know that the safe thing to do is change lanes and briskly accelerate to get out of the path of destruction should the trucks load fall away from it ?
What about the white-out conditions we have when you are in the rear/side vortex of a semi-truck in winter conditions? Any optical systems would be completely blinded at this point, and safe passage is only possible by accelerating through the white out with your headlights off while watching the side signal markers of the truck. Could a self driving car know this ? What would happen if the car was attempting a maneuver and was abruptly put into white-out conditions ?
I know a bunch about working on cars, a little bit about performance and safe driving, and a lot about how hard it is to write software.
I am not looking forward to a day when my car drives for me, because I don't think i could write the software to do it as well as i can do it myself.
because you assume you'll never get tagged.
You're wrong.
If convicted murderers or rapists are still a concern after they've been released back into public, then they shouldn't be released back into public, dont' you think ?
I mean, either they've repayed their debt to society, and have been reformed for the positive, or they haven't. How is tagging them going to help?
The plan of record for my wife and I is that if/when we have children of our own, they will be homeschooled.
The only thing that happened in my highschool that was beyond the intellectual capacity of the average adult was the 3 semesters of calculus i took for college credit. That program has since been dismantled. Between my own BS in mathematics and my father being (at the time) the youngest person ever to become a Fellow of the Society of Actuaries, i figure there is enough mathematical talent in the family that we'll manage to set the direction for any mathematically inclined children up until they're of the age appropriate for advanced self study.
In other words, barring a special needs child, i think homeschooling parents can cover it. With the benefits of flexible hours, fewer behavioral problems, and less liklihood of getting shot by classmates and insulted by administration.
If someone tells you they are going to implant something in your body that is a unique tracking device, you do NOT agree to it.
Instead, you buy/steal/find a shotgun, and a bunch of shells, and you stay in a church.
Ask the pastor about the last book of the new testament. He'll be glad you brought the shotgun.
I'm also wondering why it would be nessisary to CC the police on who didn't show up in the morning
Because the public school system in the United States is a holding pen and work/release program for those not yet legally required to work and pay taxes.
The police need to know when prisoners have escaped, don't they?
I remember moving to slackware from TAMU shortly after i found out about slackware, like _10_ years ago.
:)
:)
Through an odd and circuitous route, i find myself in Fargo, ND, where Patrick, who is for many, the "founder" of using linux at home, is currently residing.
Ironially enough, i moved to fargo by way of Microsoft employment (Microsoft Great Plains), and find that one of the biggest names in linux is here in town
I just asked a co-worker about it and naturally the computer people in town all kind of know each other; he said a friend of his sisters was patricks' roommate for a while. If you search on the name Voldkering with the word Fargo, you get the business address of some dentists, and at first i was like "thats not right" until i read that his parents were dentists
It's a small world.
the notion that our electronic systems are less accurate, more failure prone, and less trustworthy than 6 senior citizens sitting in a school basement is _hillarious_.
Aircraft are using computers to LAND WITHOUT HUMAN INTERVENTION. I think we can design a system such that it is possible to reliably ADD NUMBERS.
There are tricky problems to voting, like making sure the warm body standing there is authorized to use this particular voting station, but that's not what the griping is about - here there are basic issues of physical security, data security, data auditing, and so on.
These are computer science problems, and they've been solved in practice and in theory.
If you want to see how to use computers to do math correctly with high confidence, look no further than the military avionics and flight control systems.
Namely, what we need is a specification for what a vote counting machine needs to do.
Then we need 2 separate vendors to build clean-room, different technology implementations of the spec.
Then at each polling location, one machine of each type counts every vote. (i.e. each vote is counted by 2 machines)
If the machines agree - bitchin.
If they disagree - now there's legitimate reason for closer scrutiny.
This has a few nice benefits:
- it makes a standard, nationwide voting form. No state can have a pathologically awful ballot
- it gives somebody at the federal government something important to do, since they're going to make new offices and blow money on stupid shit anyway
- people that know wtf they're doing can be involved in the spec review, so you dont have to rely on the machine builders to come up with the right spec, just a good implementation of a public spec
I don't think paperless voting is a good idea.
If you go to a totally paperless approach, it gets MUCH uglier, so i am going to advocate sticking with a paper ballot for now.
I think machine-reading of paper votes is a good idea, and that is what i am suggesting above re: multiple independant readers which must agree before the results are valid.
My personal thinking is that the paper vote needs some sort of bar code representing a guid on it so that a vote can be uniquely identified. This lets you resolve such issues as a vote showing up in one machine and not another.. a vote getting counted twice.. etc. You can also track which paper ballots you issue and see how many actually make it into a machine, etc.
Also, each ballot counting machine needs a way to show that its results are tamper proof; perhaps each machine is given a cryptographic key that it signs the output with. In any case, those are problems/details for the bright people to figure out - all i know is that this is a solvable problem, from an engineering and theory perspective.
I cringe at suggesting the federal government come up with another spec or proposal, or get itself involved in something else, but if there is going to be this much drama surrounding election accuracy, the adults need to step in and apply some actual engineering to the whole problem space.
SGI has been working through this in hardware for over 10 years.
The distributed shared memory concept of the Altix (first seen on Origin 200 / Origin 2000 in the commercial space, and previously based on the Standford DASH/FLASH projects) uses a hardware based memory router.
Each PE has local ram and local CPUs and a "MAGIC" chip that routes cache invalidations, memory block "ownership", etc messages to other PE's as necessary. Unlike SMP designs, cache coherencvy doesn't destroy the whole shebang because its not a shared bus, it's a heirarchial directory system. I.e. PE0 knows it only needs to contact PE3, PE6, and PE13 to invalidate a cache block. Turns out that thats much more efficient than broadcasting a message to PE0-PE63 saying "invalidate this block!"
Now, as far as _all_ processor sharing the full 13TB - i am not sure.
The memory density / system image equation is sort of a tradeoff, as more PE's require more router hops in the topology. More router hops increase latency. SGI has sold 256 and 512p single-image systems, and may have gone up to 1024 or 2048p / system.
To be perfectly honest, the system-system latency is different than the intra-system latency, but nothing like it would be on an x86-with-ethernet shared nothing cluster.
SGI's big installations are cool as they have advantages of both SMP and MPP designs.. each autonomous machine gives you signle-image benefits but with really high proc counts.. . and then you link a bunch of those together to get this outrageously sized machine.
its a good thing i said "very few" instead of "none" :)
at least you didn't come right out and start mocking me, you saved that for the end ;)
re: problems with creation science, ID, etc.
I agree with you. These movements are political in nature, not scientific. The "need" for these arose from people using macro-evolution to push a political/religious (anti-religious) world view in public schools.
If the rhetoric around macro-evolution-disproves-the-bible were toned down somewhat i dont think it would be so upsetting to people.
Regarding being skeptical of scientific findings that are publicizied to be contradictory to christianity - ask yourself what the motivation for doing the study and/or publishing the results as contradictory was.
I can't see anyone actually doing a scientific study on the transubstantiation of juice->blood without the point of the study being to cause a problem with catholics. Christianity has the nice axioms built in that 1) god can do whatever he wants 2) just because your feeble mind doesn't understand how it could work doesn't mean god doesn't 3) people with evil intentions will try attacking your beleifs and what you have been told
So its really easy to suggest, from a catholics point of view, that such a study is irrelevant since it's up to god to figure out how to make that transformation happen (assuming they beleive it happens in a physical way instead of a spiritual or allegorical way) and that furthermore, the motivations for such a study are highly indicative of someone who has heard the truth but refuses to beleive (thus, an enemy)
as far as observable "facts" contradicting religious doctrines - i've NEVER found one of these that i cannot come up with a satisfying remediation for. It usually involves careful examination of the religious text, and discarding an assumption about the text that is not explicitly stated. There is NOTHING in the bible that suggests that the first time you read it, you will fully understand God. Quite the opposite - no man can ever know how God works, and all christians are to be continually praying / re-reading the bible and trying to evolve their understanding of the word.
In your last major paragraph - you are framing the problem wrong. Christians don't necessarily beleive that God was essential for the creation of the universe - just that he made it anyway. It's something like arguing wether or not God was the critical instrument in the design and construction of a truck. Show the truck to someone in the 1400s, and they'd insist that it was made by a deity, because they have no understanding of its construction, and cannot possibly fathom how it might be made by men (or by any other means). Yet humans of today can fully design, understand, and build pickup trucks.
Humans have already been able to design and create new/modified forms of life, and designing new life is one of the things traditionally reserved for the role of "creator".
People that use God to explain things they dont understand today will always be disappointed in the future when more of God's plan (the observable "how") is discovered.
God always and forever is about the question of "why". It seems unlikely that science will ever answer that.
about those that will think "that's the way it panned out because thats how God meant for it to pan out", irrespective of what happened.
:)
:)
There isn't a required scientific discrepancy between modern science and biblical christianity. (It's up to christians to resolve such questions as 'were those 7 24 hr days or 7 god days that it took to make stuff?')
You'll find very few fundamentalist christians get upset about discussions of subatomic particles because discoveries in subatomic theory are never used by anti-christians as the foundation for a "see, you stupid christians were wrong!" argument. Macro-evolution and even micro-evolution are unfortuneately often used exactly for this purpose.
The notion that earth based life forms are related and seem to have differentiated themselves from others in discoverable, explainable ways seems reasonable to me. I mean, if i were a deity and wanted to "make world", i'd use lots of shared libraries
"the scientists" are at least as guilty as the hardcore creationists in the antagonism that has lead to the cultural divide in america. "science", where it appears to contradict traditional christian thinking, is the new religion for a sub-society that hates traditional religious thought.
Strictly speaking, science has never been "right" about anything - the scientific process merely produces output ("knowledge") that asymptotically approaches "truth" as our observational techniques become more advanced.
I mean, consider that newton thought his laws of motion adequately described mechanics. This theory broke down in some scenarios, requiring the relativistic theories accounting for time/mass/distance expansion/contraction. Special relativity wasn't sufficient to explain photolovaics and that problem led to the thinking of quantum mechanics.
I sincerely hope that after 3 groundbraking world-view changes on just the basic rules governing how things _move_, in _only_ 400 years, nobody thinkgs that we are now at the end-destination of scientific thought, and that we completely understand mechanics, and there will be no more refinements to our understanding of mechanics.
I thought so.
It is perfectly acceptable to me to accept scientific progress as learning about the incredible universe that was engineered for us by God, the "designer" if you will
Infact, it used to be the case that the worlds best scientific minds were strong thelogians as well, and studied under the context of discerning how God's universe operated.
You should be suspicious of scientific "progress" that is touted as being contradictory to Christianity.
Let the Christians figure out how to reconcile what is observed in nature and what they think their biblical understanding is.
Let the scientists concentrate on making the best possible observations and the best possible theories to explain them.
That will leave just the pundits - the real people causing the rift between science and religion.
Or hadn't you heard ?
See, in canada it is ILLEGAL for anyone to say anything in public that can be construed as hate speech against _any_ group.
So for instance, a religious organization cannot express the sentiment that they beleive homosexuality is immoral and sinful.
Because, IIRC, that was the one that they were only building one of, and when the govt cancelled the order, thats when Cray Research went under.
also, diy-efi.org
It didn't take me long in my first house before i realized i would never hire a plumber or electrician again, when both bill at 100/hr or more. I can buy an awful lot of plumbing/electrical tools for the price of one job, and then i learn a new skill myself in the process. I did pay pro electricians to put a new main service head and panel in my last house, but that was strictly required by local code to be done by licensed pros, and i didn't really have the guts to try that task myself :)
The way i see it, this country will continue spiraling out of control such that the only white collar profession left is working in the legal industry... either as a lawyer or for a lawyer.
So, my plan, when it comes to pass, is to become a plumber. I figure plumbers will be in high demand and i can bill whatever i want and choose which jobs to pass up.
Because with that many lawyers running around, the shit is going to be awfully deep.
I drive, amonst other things, a 1988 BMW M5.
:) so thats why i had no power braking as soon as the belt went.
This car has mechanical power steering and mechanical power brake assist. however, it is incorrect to say that power brakes are just a vacuum booster. Many are, but many are not, especially mid 80s german cars that didn't really draw enough vacuum for a vacuum based brake assist. (Some BMW, Audi, and VW models feature non vacuum assist)
Those vehicles have a hydraulic brake booster which is run as a separate output channel from the power steering pump. The power steering pump cant react fast enough for panic threshhold braking, so such cars have a brake pressure accumulator or "brake bomb" which stores pressurized power steering fluid. This pressurized fluid is what provides brake force assistance. Note that the power steering fluid and brake fluid are separate and do not mix; it's just that the brake power regulator uses stored pressure from the PS system to pressurize the brake system.
I recently replaced the brake pressure accumulator on my BMW.
Now, ancient brake technology dissertation aside - i have _very_ relevant experience regarding loss of steering and braking power.
I was on Brainerd International Raceway in Minnesota with my M5. This racetrack has a 1 mile long front straight, and turn 1 is banked. I was entering turn 1 at about 125mph (its a 4 door sedan, give me some slack) and midway through the turn i felt my steering get a bit "funny". I immediately recognized the loss of power steering. KNowing what i know about the car, i checked the brake pedal and found i had no power braking either.
Turn 2 can also be taken in excess of 100mph in my vehicle, but turn 3 is a 110 deegree turn that can't really be navigated above 50mph in a sedan on street tires. So I had no power steering and no power brakes, and i had to slow down 4000 lbs of vehicle, driver, and passenger from in excess of 100mph to about 40 mph.
This was no problem, honestly. You can do the entire back section of BIR without braking once you get past turn 3 if you're running a cool down lap. I really stood on the mechanical unassisted brakes to get speed down by turn 3, and then i was able to drive the car back into the pits.
The problem? The power steering pump is belt driven, and since the power steering pump also pressurizes the power brake system as described above, when the belt snapped, i lost power steering and power braking. My brake presure accumulator, which normally stores enough pressurized fuild to perform 3-4 full brake applications even in the total loss of engine power and brake assist, was faulty (thats why i replaced it a few weeks later
So, the moral of the story is
1) knowing how your car works is helpful. I got a ride over to NAPA, bought a new belt, and was back on the track for the next session. I remained calm even though i had the most difficult braking maneuver on the track coming up in less than 15 seconds.
2) The key to all driving situations is operator skillset and awareness.
Here's another short story:
Once in my 1980 BMW 528i i was cruising along the highway, with cruise control enabled. This was an aftermarket cruise control system, as it did not come on this specific vehicle from the factory. I opted to take an off ramp (which went up hill, as they often do in the midwest) and when i dipped the clutch the engine started bouncing off the rev limiter. Manually cancelling the cruise control had no effect. This took me quite by surprise so i killed the engine and slowed to a stop on manual brakes.
The cruise control cable had stuck. OPening the hood, wiggling the cable returned the throttle to the closed position.
Note that at BMW Club track events, a specific part of the technical inspection is the condition and function of the throttle return spring. Driving at speed requires nuance in the use of the throttle, a stock throttle can be a real problem.
is bullshit. Audi owners know it well - 60 minutes did a big thing on it and it basically crushed Audi NA's brand image and sales. They renamed their entire model range twice.
The real cause ?
On the type 44 cars (Audi 4000 and 5000) the gas and brake pedal are close together to make performance driving easier.
Dumb shit americans would hit the gas pedal going for the brakes and rear end people at stops.
CBS fabricated the "expose" on the "problem" completely. Lawsuits were filed and eventually resolved with Audi showing no negligence or fault, but they still changed their pedals in later cars anyway.
i was looking at cray.com and there's no mention of the Tera MTA. The Tera MTA was the innovative idea they had to have 128 logical threads on a single CPU.. think of hyperthreading but with 128 logical threads instead of.. 2.. and also it was working at least 8 years ago.
:/
If you look at cray.com today its pretty sad. 3 product lines - the TD1 opteron+magic, the X1, which is traditional cray vector (smp vector nodes, and MPP's of those nodes), and their 3rd product line is the NEC SX-6... they're reselling it in the states for NEC.
If you hit tera.com, you get a 404
the nec SX architecture uses these ridiculously huge custom vector processors to get performance (similar to the Cray 1, 2, XMP, YMP, etc design)
this Cray is more like building MPPs off of scalar units (opterons) and doing some real innovation around the MPP interconnect. It's sort of off the shelf, yet not at the same time.
The big thing here that kicks ass is the 6 FPGAs per chassis. If you can write a highly tuned software algorithm, there's a chance you can write a highly tuned peice of hardware, deploy that to the FPGA, and you've got an application specific hardware accelerator. 6 per chassis, infact. That's pretty cool, and its in some ways a HUGE innovation over having a dedicated vector unit (as was the cray1 design).
the really interesting thing here is that these are essentially opterons running linux, with custom interconnect goo. The interconnect bypasses the PCI bus - its closer to the PE's than that.. their claim is that it attaches to the AMD hypertransport bus (the Proc -> Proc -> Mem bus for SMP AMD machines)
an article about taking apart new cool hardware (in a nondestructive manner, no less) and the submitter harps on "voiding the warranty"?
its a personal computer. If you cant take it apart, what's the point?
I'm going to ignore the whole hacker vs cracker thing and assume we're talking about crackers - people with ethical lapses in their past w.r.t. technology.
.cracking.
Someone that is an accomplished cracker in the wild is good at..
Does your company have a need for someone to try and crack stuff ? If so, hiring a cracker for the sole purpose of attempting to break whatever it is you make that you dont want broken is probably a good idea. However, you may as well contract that work out unless you make enough stuff that having a full time cracker seems like a justified expense.
Now, the unwritten implicatino here is that people that are good at cracking are good defending against other crackers. I don't think this is self evident.
For instance, Michael Schumacher is perhaps the best car driver in the history of motorsports. He arguably knows more about driving a car quickly than anyone else ever has.
He is not designing the cars he drives. he is driving them. He provides _feedback_ on the cars he sits in, based on his personal preferences and experience as a car driver.
I think the analogy holds for employing crackers - if your job is to make something that crackers will "use" (i.e. try and attack), get some of them looking at it, get their comments, their feedback. But thinking that they are going to magically design you a crack proof or crack resistant scheme is folly.
The "cracker as consultant or exteral advisor" approach also has the benefit that you don't necessarily need to let them into your corporate network.
If the question is "should you hire someone that was a cracker in the past for an unrelated CS/IT job", then that just depends on the nature of their offense, the threats / risks of the new project in question, and your personal beleifs on giving people a second chance, personal judgement, etc.
we're in fargo. so we have to get the fargo local stations, (which were just enabled in summer of 04), which generally do not carry the games.
:/
the regional fox sports net channel doesn't show up until you upgrade packages.
its frankly not my problem why direcTV cant give us a reliable feed of twins games. For a while, everyone was upset with Victory Sports Network (which bought the tv rights to most twins games and wouldn't deal with anybody except on their terms).. i can tell you that we got less than 5 the whole season.. heck we WENT to more games than we saw on TV
ReplayTV offers something like home media, iirc.
Re: HD content - no, i'm not blaming dtv for lack of HD content. Lack of HD content is a pervasive issue, but the ltitle shred thats out there is an additional premium package from DTV... once upon a time it was like 3 HD channels for like $15 extra a month, in addition to buying a new receiver that was also quite expensive.
It's gotten better, and will continue to get better, but that still doesn't really fix the content issue i mentioned earlier, and i still feel like anyone doing HD is an early adopter at this stage..
finally, no matter how many HD channels they add, uninteresting time-sucking crap is still uninteresting time-sucking crap, even at high resolution with 5.1 audio.