fyi, I have personally analyzed WER crash dumps and used them to get the root causes fixed in the next update/release in multiple Microsoft products.
(Dynamics AX and Visual Studio, if you're curious)
We (Microsoft) not only look at WER data, we act on it.
You are correct that it is often really hard to figure out what crazy thing happened, but we try anyway, and sometimes, we're able to figure it out and create fixes.
As was mentioned elsewhere, WER data also tells us WHO is hitting a problem and how often it is being reported. That gives us valuable information about prioritizing WER responses.
If you don't want to pay the perf/bandwidth penalty for collecting/uploading reports, that's understandable. But as mentioned elsewhere, you're abstaining from "voting" to have your issues looked at sooner/more thoroughly.
Then, if you care about such things, there's the "social responsibility" aspect of it. I'd much rather we shipped perfect software, but we don't. WER is one of the best ways we can see issues that customers are hitting and get a sense of how painful they are for customers. If the goal is for MS to be less awful, WER is a key feedback mechanism to help us help you.
It would be a shame if your environment produced just the right heap dump that let us understand an issue that was impacting millions of people... and it was locked on your machine. Not only would your abstention cost YOU, but it would cost everyone else as well.
Is it your fault we ship bugs? Of course not. Would it help you, us, and millions of other people if you turned on WER? Probably.
At home, I want my technology to serve me, and not take up any of my limited time.
I don't screw with it unless I have a particular itch that I want scratched.
That said, my work environments and home environments couldn't be more different.
At work, I work on Visual Studio. So I have windows machines with more hyper-V guests in them, running nightly builds of CLR and VS. Plus other ones for IIS/SQL to host test apps on.
At home, I run
- 1 windows workstation (turned off until I run a network drop over to it. We just moved), - 1 surface RT my wife and I share - 1 mac mini in the living room, when we want a bigger screen and keyboard - an Ubuntu media/utility server in my rack - a PC Engines Alix running openbsd as my edge device.
We use our smart phones at home a lot to watch email and facebook.
I just retired my ~6 year old windows media center machine for a WDTVLive. We also use an Xbox 360 for video games and DVDs.
I did a big batch of fiddling recently, as we moved house to a rural property with multiple buildings. I learned about Ubiquity hardware and have retired my previous consumre grade wireless gear in favor of UniFi APs, and I also have a Nanostation link between my house and shop building (with UniFi APs in both spots). Getting that setup was fun and easy, and unlike the consumer grade APs I was used to, I haven't had to power cycle the Ubiquity gear yet since owning it. Solid reliability and astounding speeds.
Also, after I got the WDTVlive and decided I liked it, and packed up my HTPC machine.. only then did I realize that the WD box wouldn't play any of my Hi10P anime. So I spent some time the other evening learning about ffmpeg and x264 build-from-source. My Ubuntu machine isn't fast enough to on-the-fly transcode hi10p to 8bit, and the binary distributions of ffmpeg and x264 on my old Ubuntu release didn't deal with 10bit either.
So, I need to spend some more time here, but honestly, it might just be easier to use handbrake on windows..
A long time ago (like, 1994), on the linuxnet irc network, there was this guy named _Joe_ that claimed he was going to build boards around the Dec Alpha chip that would be dedicated Linux workstations.
We were all salivating.
So far as I know, it never happened, (sadly).
But I always wondered about it -- in the early days of Linux, most of the people working on it were used to using proprietary unix hardware with proprietary unixes. We were clearly willing to use non-windows compatible hardware if it made sense.
It's somewhat surprising to me that "designed for Linux" workstations aren't more popular. On the low end, you have things like the Pi, but that's not necessarily setup to be a general purpose workstation. On the high end, you have the older Silicon Graphics big iron that was designed for Linux. Not really "normal workstation" material, and not by any means open hardware/software.
I guess what I am curious about is that given the level of talent in the F/OSS community, why there doesn't seem to be a clear market participant that builds "Linux compliant" workstations and servers, including preferring chipsets that have open hardware and open firmware. And why isn't there an industry around designing those open cores and writing firmware for them?
Being a fabless hardware company is easier than ever; where's the open source hardware platform that I _know_ doesn't have strange reliability issues (like the random MSI board I bought a few years back), doesn't leak RF/audio all over the place (like the Packard Bell my friend grew up with), and has 100% of its hardware well supported by in-box kernel drivers?
The last few motherboards I've purchased from Newegg have all had subtle defects with them. I'd rather pay a bit more for a board where I knew that the people behind it weren't looking to cut costs but were instead looking to make a product they'd be happy to depend on day-in and day-out, and that part of that guarantee was that the board was widely used by the community and was made of open components that didn't have obsolescence designed in.
That organization or those products may exist already, but its hard to tell who is selling a Rolls Royce vs. who is selling a lemon. If you go by reviews from places like Newegg, there isn't necessarily a correlation between brand and quality or price and quality.
Does anyone have suggestions?
(As an aside, I'm happy with the Raspberry Pi I bought. But it's clearly not a workstation replacement. Similarly, I'm happy with the Alix PCEngine I bought years ago to run my openBSD edge device. That custom hardware has worked very, very well. But it's not a general purpose workstation either)
I guess my contention is that while I cannot afford SGI prices, I can (and will) pay more for something that I have a reasonable assurance of getting strong community support for. Who wants my money?:)
I have news for you. The idea that the instrumental performers with "the most talent" will no longer get paid big bucks in the future isn't something you have to wait for.
It has been going on for at least my entire life.
After I had been playing guitar for about 2 years in high school, I could play nearly any guitar part of any popular song (I came of age in the 90s, the grunge time frame. So, admittedly, a low bar.)
Most of it just wasn't very complicated. If what mattered was being able to play things note for note, capturing all of the "feeling" and what not, for most popular music that just isn't a tall order.
I'm not being a braggart; I was nothing special. My point is that youtube is filled with kids who are _astounding_ guitarists.. and who will never make any money off of their guitar work. Technical proficiency isn't what gets you paid.
I still love all of my Shrapnel Records artists that I dutifully bought albums from growing up. I am thrilled beyond belief that monumental talents like Tony MacAlpine are still able to record and perform after decades of being unknown outside of the guitar-nerd community. And I am escstatic that new younger talents are emerging and doing cool stuff (Seree Lee -- youtube him).
But Katy Pery or whoever the next anonymous pretty face is will make more money off of one single than someone like a Tony Mac or Vic Wooten or Seree Lee or (take your pick) will make in their multi-decade careers. And that's not new, and digital music isn't going to fundamentally change that.
I totally get what you're saying. And I had also thought of wiring a mechanical backup in parallel. But that sort of changes the value prop of the Nest device away from a "install it in 10 minutes and then play" to something somewhat more involved.
The effective reliability of a non-redundant system is limited to the reliability of its least reliable component.
In many years of home ownership with all different types of heating systems and thermostats, grid-tied electrical service has been by far lowest-reliability ingredient in the system.
However, those outages tend to be a few hours per year in the places I've lived, and the system comes back from failure without intervention.
Installing a Nest would have changed that paradigm completely. The failure mode is that the nest freezes and you have no indication at all that anything is wrong. And it never comes back until other symptoms are bad enough that you think to wonder why its so damn cold -- if you are home at all. There is some kind of human reset procedure that must be performed.
If the Nest had any kind of failsafe mechanism in it, it would address my concern. The fact that it doesn't, combined with the numerous reports of them freezing during updates, and that Nest refuses to let you manage updates yourself, suggests that they simply don't have their heads on straight regarding the mission-critical nature of thermostats.
Honeywell is someone I trust to make an arbitrarily complicated thermostat. They have been doing control engineering for decades.
I spent a few evenings recently learning about the Nest products. But the more I looked, the more I found stories of devices that failed to boot after software updates, or had other flakiness issues.
I live in a part of the world where a thermostat failure would be a problem. The ambient temps were -20F last week. If the thermostat updated while we were out of the house and failed to boot properly, the entire house would freeze in short order. The pipes would burst and I'd be out many tens of thousands of dollars trying to repair the place.
I can't risk that.
The Nest clearly seems to be targeted at silicon valley types who want a gadget and are used to the gadget early-adopter flakiness. If your thermostat flakes out in SVC its no big deal. Very different context than rural North Dakota.
It would be a simple matter to integrate a _backup_ mechanical failsafe that activated the heating circuits if the temperature fell below say, 50F.
The Nest apparently does not have this feature.
I've had programmable thermostats in the past, but programming them (not to mention setting the clocks to track DST changes) has always been enough of a hassle that I've always reverted to "one temperature, all the time". So the Nest is interesting in terms of the problem it tries to solve. The data collection, and correlating furnace activity with outside temperature -- is all interesting. As I was researching the Nest, I realized that they were attempting to create a new product category -- home hvac efficiency enthusiast.
I might be willing to pay $250 to solve a problem I don't actually have. But not if it greatly increases the likelihood of causing a $30,000 problem because it was designed by people who apparently have no experience with controls.
However, one difference between how I work now vs. how I worked 20 years ago, is that now I am invariably working on somebody else's machine.
Once upon a time, I used to spend lots of time changing my settings, making customizations to the environment, installing all kinds of tools that made my life easier.
However, a large portion of my time is spent investigating situations that aren't on my own workstations. Either lab machines or other people's environments.
I don't want to be paralyzed when I need to work out of my environment. And so I tend not to invest in or assume the presence of tools that aren't strictly necessary to do a particular task.
This is especially true when there are workable tools included in the default software distribution. So, in the case of isolating bad services, using sc.exe is perfectly sufficient. I know it's going to be there and it's going to work.
About the only basic productivity tools I frequently install any more on a windows machine are gvim and fiddler, and if the IE F12 tools were just a little bit better, I might be able to stop depending on Fiddler....
(the space between "type=" and "own" is important)
this tells the service manager to put windows update service (WUAUserv) into its own hosting process, e.g. a new/separate instance of svchost.exe
Another service that can be implicated in updates is the "BITS" service. You can use the same command to isolate it also.
Anytime I see a svchost.exe instance misbehaving I start isolating the services inside it and then seeing which individual service is being problematic.
This is training minds to think like programmers. It is about understanding a problem, decomposing it, and asking them to express solutions to each sub-problem.
They are required to figure out what went wrong when their code has bugs. They have to keep iterating until it does the right thing.
This is the _fundamental_ activity of thinking like a programmer. All of the bullshit about bad languages, bad tools, bad APIs, etc is all stripped away. We're left with the distilled essence of the programming mindset.
Schools teach computer literacy already. At the highschool I teach CS at, there is a full slate of classes around using Photoshop, office apps, web design, etc. _Those_ are application-specific computer literacy. Everyone has email. Everyone has a network share that is theirs. Everyone knows about loading and saving files. These kids are computer literate.
Hour of Code is not about computer literacy. It is about the quickest, least frivolous way to get kids minds in programming gear.
Some will not get it. Some will get it. Some will _love_ it.
I remember when I was a kid, I went to a workshop about computer programming. They had us yell out the instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich. The presenter did only exactly what the kids said, so when they left out steps or assumed things, the sandwhich got made wrong.
I do the same thing with kids now, except with physical comedy, and by interpreting what they said in the least-correct way that would be permissible under the rules of the English language.
The kids love it; it gets them engaged, it gets them thinking. It makes them think about order of operations. It makes them use precise language. It makes them really think about all of the things they assume or take for granted.
Asking a person to give an imbecile instructions on how to do an everyday thing is MUCH more relevant to computer programming than putting someone infront of a text editor and having them copy/paste lines from a book to make hello world. That requires no thinking at all.
The people behind Hour of Code know what they're doing. Hour of Code isn't the end of CS. But we hope that for a huge pile of kids, It's the beginning.
Disclaimer: I helped with an Hour of Code session in a public highschool this morning. And I've been teaching "block based programming" all semester in this same highschool as part of the "Teals" program (http://www.tealsk12.org)
The Blockly stuff is _Exactly_ how I figured I would teach my own kids about programming years ago. I had planned to make something like blockly at some point, and I was thrilled when I saw that someone else had done so.
Go through the hour of code blockly sample. It is simple enough that my 6 year old got through all 20 exercizes. He needed a little help on a few of them.
But ask yourself - what is the hardest part of programming? It is typing in the code?
I contend that it isn't.
IMO, the interesting stuff is decomposing the problem, and then finding out ways to solve each step of the problem. If you want to be elegant, you figure out which sub-problems are similar to other sub-problems, and you can make your code more efficient; you can increase re-use, etc.
Making kids figure out the instructions to solve a maze is EXACTLY how I'd teach young people about CS. A maze is a problem every child understands. What they may not understand is how to write precise instructions to implement what they already know.
The language and the tooling are irrelevant. Some programming paradigms are more mind-bending than others for a given problem, but fundamentally, if you know how to break down problems, and you know the context/paradigms of a particular language or tool set, you can do whatever you need to do.
We've been teaching highschoolers using "BYOB". Sure, they aren't about where to put the asterisk on a function decl. But all of these kids have been successful at implementing a variety of simple sprite based games -- galaga, hangman, a scrolling Mario, etc.
Don't you dare say its not programming just because they're not typing the code.
I've seen some real ingenuity out of our highschoolers. The tools allow them to be productive quickly; they do a better job of holding their interest than a text editor.
Before the Snowden revelation, it wasn't widely accepted that the government was reading everything anybody ever wrote. For _one_ of these companies to come forward to complain was like the prisoners dilemma. There was no guarantee that other players would follow suit, so for GOOG to come out and say "The NSA is spying on you and we can't stop them" puts GOOG at a competitive disadvantage. Furthermore, all of this stuff was secret; not to be disclosed publicly, etc. Companies weren't sure how much teeth there were in those rules, so were further hesitant to talk much about it.
Post Snowden, its all different. Now its an open secret that this happens, and it happens to everyone. Now there's no posturing or competitive advantage to be exploited; everyone is in the same boat. This is a populist issue and once one company made noise about sticking it to the NSA, the rest were going to have to follow.
The other thing that has changed is that Snowden and Lavabit have both gone public. The public has spoken. We now have proof of what kind of stuff the Feds will do and how far they'll go to keep it quiet. The people who leaked this stuff survived.
The government might be able to sue Yahoo or Lavabit or any of them individually, but it cannot sue the entire tech industry.. not right now.
I hesitated to respond to you because we live in entirely different worlds, and I don't think any number of Slashdot posts is going to fix that.
However, to be clear, I wasn't implying that Reagan or Thatcher had a problem with violence.
On the contrary; they had a problem with South Africa becoming a communist satellite. When the communist agitators resort to violence, that just makes it easier to convince the domestic public that the communists are bad. Obviously when it is bin Laden fighting the Soviets, violence is just fine. We both understand how it works.
Regarding your last point: South Africa of today is one of the most dangerous and violent places on earth; Mandela did next to nothing to address black on white or even black-on-black violence. There was a huge white-flight out of SA during the 90s.
Perhaps you think this is a positive outcome. I don't.
No racial reconciliation is perfect, of course. I would say that the US probably didn't do enough to help re-enfranchise blacks, and that South Africa may have done a bit too much.
The bottom line is this: I very much enjoyed living in the Reagan years America. I very much would NOT have liked living in the Mandela years SA.
I think Reagan and Thatcher were both great, as far as people who have actually held office go, and I am disappointed that the Reagan we got was nowhere close to the Reagan that campaigned. I was all for abolishing the Depts of Ed, Energy, and the ATF. Very disappointed with Reagan on that score...
The other transgressions in his career (military adventurism) bother me, but I don't think they actually bother Reagan detractors that much. The people who bitterly hate Reagan tend to hate him for reasons that his supporters like him. Similarly, if you accuse Thatcher of being a union buster or for cleaning up free loaders on the dole, people like me will say "bravo Thatcher".
The bottom line is that you and I probably agree that Reagan/Thatcher supported a bunch of wars and terrorists that they shouldn't have. But you shouldn't pretend like that is the basis for your displeasure with them. Especially not when every other US and UK leader since (some of which you've certainly hated LESS, if not mildly supported) has done the same exact shit...
Not that you're interested, but for the benefit of people who come across your posts, I offer this clarification:
Read the Wikipedia article on Mandela. All of it.
ANC/Mandela supported economic nationalism. He was honored by the Soviet Union for his pro-communist affiliations. In 61-62 he participated in a _bombing campaign_ to put pressure on the apartheid government.
Mandela was anti-capitalist. Not as in, "bmajik says so", but as in, Mandela says so.
Reagan and Thatcher were hesitant to cut off South Africa not because they gave a shit about Mandela or because they loved sticking it to black people; they saw SA as a pawn in the cold war. They didn't want a bunch of African Nationalist Parties starting communist and Russia-aligned states all over the untapped African continent.
To Manela's credit, while he advocated for nationalizing of banks, gold production, other mining, and the abolition of private property, he didn't enact these policies when he eventually took control of the government. He was smart enough to understand that SA badly needed foreign investment, and nationalizing industry and destroying property doesn't get you investors.
Mandela is a mixed bag. As terrorists go, he was a pretty pleasant one -- MK (the militant wing he was part of) only attacked infrastructure at night, hoping to minimize civilian losses.
But, he was willing to resort to violence to bring about a communist revolution in Africa.
You think Reagan and Thatcher were against that? You're right.
Again -- read the WP article. I just summarized it here.
You're actually missing an important aspect of sea-steading.
One implementation of seasteading calls for smaller groups (nuclear or extended families, lets say) to have their own independently float-able barge/ship/unit/whatever.
One of the key problems with soil-based governments is that your neighbors (and hence, their bad politics) are "sticky" -- its hard for you to control who your neighbors are, and since they always manage to impose their will upon you, this is the practical limit to freedom for land-based societies.
But this isn't necessarily true in a cluster of sea-steaders.
Imagine 100 families that have tied their rafts/boats together (like something out of Snowcrash). You liked your new neighbors for a while, but over time, they became more and more a hinderance to your lifestyle.
If we're talking about a land-based community, you have to sell your house and find a new place to live -- which is going to have the same problem.
But if we're talking about sea-steading, you just untie the ropes and sail off. Maybe a few likeminded people follow you.
The interesting possibility with sea-steading is that people groups can constantly form and split and reform and split and reform at a very granular level. Nobody needs to fight over who stays and who leaves; nobody needs to suffer a neighbor they don't like.
I understand that this is the twitter generation, and it has left me in the dust, but when one criticizes you based on an obvious failure to read the entirety of what you've written, well, it almost comes off as the oft-misapplied "irony" when we're having a conversation about people who may not be bright enough to vote.
You are very upset with the arguments I haven't made, but you say very little about the ones I have made.
That's a difficult discussion, but it's not one you're really making. You're just stating the nebulous, "people stupider than me shouldn't vote".
Actually, no. What I think is that _nobody_ should vote. I would expect this be abundantly clear where right up front, I say that I am an anarchist, and later on when I say I've become disillusioned with the entire notion of government.
Based on your reading comprehension, you might be one of those people who has no business helping me run my life.
But irrespective of if someone has the mental capacity to manage my life better than I do (and I imagine such people exist), I am not convinced that any individual or group has the ethical or moral right to do so.
Rather, I am convinced that they do not.
It's worth pointing out that the fastest growing socio-cultural group is socially conservative Islam.
It's really not worth point out. I mean, I guess it's helpful for letting us know that you're a racist/religious asshat on top of your other flavors of crazy, but it really wasn't part of the discussion.
My contention -- and its certainly a debatable one -- is that there is currently an impending culture clash, and the two main actors are the socially progressive democracies, vs. the religious fundamentalists.
It turns out that amongst the religious fundamentalists, Islam is the dominant group from a growth perspective. It also turns out that rightly or wrongly, that group seems to get a lot of negative attention for practices we might say are barbaric, like FGM, preventing girls from learning to read, murdering people for blasphemy, etc.
Now then. "Our" progressive social democracy isn't reproducing at the replacement rate. Our survival relies indoctrinating others.
Correspondingly, the forces of acid-face burning and honor killings are reproducing rapidly.
Why do I mention this conflict here?
Some of the best and brightest of our social democracy (affluent technocratic geeks) are giving up on our social democracy. Call this mutiny near the top of the stack.
And our social democracies are being overwhelmed by religious fundamentalists at the bottom of the stack. It's not clear how much of this is refugeeism from oppressive places vs how much of this is attempts to assimilate social democracies and make them more oppressive.
The point I was making is that social democracy is undergoing a squeeze at the top and the bottom. If you like social democracy, you should be concerned.
The summary is right about one thing: democracy appears undesirable, or at least sub-optimal, to many intelligent successful geeks.
The actual support for wanting to "turn back the clock" or to have gender roles or whatever is fragmented, and may range from "this is probably worked better than what we're doing today" to "yeah, I'd enforce this via the sword", with relatively few people advocating the latter.
In the last 15 years I've given up on the GOP, given up on libertarianism, and now consider myself squarely an anarchist.
There's a strain of people, lets call them "technocrats", who are probably very smart, and believe that if only they were in charge, they could make things better.
These people want to believe in democracy, but they see the very real impediment it presents to them getting anything done. It's ridiculous to them that they must put up with climate deniers and intelligent design blowhards (and critically, those that these groups elect to office) when there is critical work to be done.
They may be right, but invariably the powerful institutions they build will be co-opted by people who are either less capable or less moral, or often, both. You build a state science department, and invariably, Pat Robertson is going to end up running it somehow.
Then you have people like me, who have become so disillusioned with government that I contend the whole affair should be done away with.
I was fed a steady diet of government school growing up, and I've found out how much of that was pro-state mythology. And so one naturally questions other parts of the mythology. Is our government good? Is it effective? Does it have the right goals? What about the "right" to vote? Who really ought to have it? Why?
I, for instance, take the unpopular view that voter suppression is probably a good idea - as long as it is done for the right reasons. Voting in this country is by no means an "absolute right". Felons don't get the right to vote; neither do children or the mentally handicapped (beyond some level). So let's dispense with that claim entirely. Society has always had (and will continue to have) rules on who may vote.
Some percentage of the voting public is clearly dumber than I am, and clearly unable to manage their own affairs and well-being appropriately.
So a rude question emerges: Should people who cannot manage their own lives get any role in managing mine? (e.g., a "vote")?
I'm persuaded that the answer is, "no".
The difference between an anarchist and a technocrat, on this issue, is that an anarchist ALSO doesn't recognize the right of a successful man to govern an unsuccessful one.
The tech crunch article listed Herman Hoppe as one of the members of this club. I'm a fan of Hoppe, and he in no way is an advocate of Monarchy. He is a critic of the state, and specifically a critic of democracy. He has an excellent bit of writing that explains immigration policy from the POV of a monarch vs. an elected official, and in his conclusion, the self-interested monarch has a much better set of incentives for a positive immigration policy than does the elected official who panders for votes. Pointing out situations where a monarch behaves preferably to a democratic body does make one an advocate of Monarchy, any more than saying "the trains ran on time!" make one an advocate of Mussolini.
What you're seeing here is a group made up of successful, intelligent people, who grew up with the internet in its wild-west days -- there was no authority to crush dissent and no censorship.
They're questioning the mythology of society. Either our society is on firm enough footing that it stands, or it isn't, and these ideas spread.
It's worth pointing out that the fastest growing socio-cultural group is socially conservative Islam. Proponents of progressive social democracy had better have some pretty damn good answers (and more kids), because there's a storm coming. Not helping the impending clash is the reality of this article: Some of the best and brightest that our progressive society has produced are having second thoughts about the society that birthed them.
Your post here is a bit naive. I'm not sure how much of Ron Paul you've really listened to, or how many of his legions of followers you've talked to.
Ron Paul is an interesting guy because he attracted a strange brew of fans. He's one of the only people that manages to get gun rednecks, business owners, vegan crystal energy hippies, and the rabid anti-war people in the same room. The fact that they are all there supporting the same guy is just astounding.
The core philosophy of Ron Paul is not "States rights"; it is voluntarism. He rejects the idea that anybody has the right to force you to do what you don't want to do if you haven't first harmed someone else.
How though, do you project this idea into our current system? Paul has admitted that he doesn't think the US constitution is the best possible thing there is, instead, he has explained that it is supposed to be the law of the land and that people understand it, respect it, and gives you currency when you speak in terms of it.
His goals are to reduce the concentration of power and the authority of government over people who have done no wrong.
One mechanism he talks about for doing that is _states rights_ --- limiting what is done at the federal level. This is as the constitution allegedly proscribes, and is what folks like Jefferson recommended on numerous occasions.
It's not that he wants states to be oppressive. His goal is the decentralization of power and the weakening of government.
The architects of the constitution were Hamilton and Madison. They were strong nationalists; Hamilton admitted that the powers he crafted into the constitution could result in a national government with unlimited power, and that this was necessary for reasons of self defense and to "compete" with the empires of Europe on the world stage.
Jefferson and the other anti-federalists succeeded in putting liberty-preserving amendments into the constitution; the Federalists thought they were unnecessary and might even put onerous burdens on the new national government.
Jefferson's writings and behavior are self contradictory when you compare any two points in his career, but he was probably the most politically successful anarchist in US history. Paul is much more Jeffersonian than he is Madisonian, and it was the work of Jefferson, not Madison and Hamilton, that has bought and kept our most cherished individual liberties. It was the work of Jefferson that has done the most to lessen oppression in the US...
Talking about states rights is a bit of pragmatism. Any decision you push closer to the edge of the population impacts fewer people and reduces the total number of people who are pissed off about it. Jefferson's desire was that the state would be superior to the national government in regards of impact and importance in the lives of the citizens, and that each state would be its own experiment in self governance.
Sadly for Americans, Switzerland is a much better example of states-rights than the US ever was.
But there is ONE THING that makes autonomous cars safer than planes: Cutting of the engine is a safe failure mode.
Yes. Fully autonomous flying is fine as long as nothing brakes.
Part of what made the AF crash such a high-stakes affair is that jetliners (AF included) fly up in "coffin corner".
Basically, if you draw a graph where the x-axis is airspeed, and the y-axis is altitude, and plot where the safe alt+airspeed boundaries are, you get a triangle. The far right of the triangle is basically a vertical line -- the maximum allowable velocity of the airframe is basically constant. The triangle starts "near" the origin. And the hypotenuse goes from near the origin to the point of "max speed, max altitude".
It is this point of "max speed, max altitude" that is the coffin corner. The closer you get to that point, the smaller your safe region is. This is because the higher you fly, the faster you HAVE to go in order to maintain sufficient lift in thin air.
It's called "coffin corner" because too fast means an airframe overspeed, and too slow means a stall. Both of these kill you. The coffin gets tighter the closer to maxalt/maxspeed you get.
Of course, the engines get more fuel efficient the further into coffin corner you go. Fuel efficiency is how you make money in this business. So guess where you're going to fly the plane for 10 straight hours.
So, you're flying along at 36,000 feet. Your permissible airspeed range is plus or minus 10kts. Seriously. Then the computers suddenly don't know how fast you're going any more. Whatever they were doing to control your airspeed, attitude, and altitude... they are no longer doing.
You are in coffin corner, you're completely blind, and you have no margin for error.
In the case of the Airbus glass cockpit, the controls have gone into full authority mode (computer isn't smart enough to limit you to a safe flight program), and the electronic haptic feedback in them is now offline.
Slashdot Mirror
fyi, I have personally analyzed WER crash dumps and used them to get the root causes fixed in the next update/release in multiple Microsoft products.
(Dynamics AX and Visual Studio, if you're curious)
We (Microsoft) not only look at WER data, we act on it.
You are correct that it is often really hard to figure out what crazy thing happened, but we try anyway, and sometimes, we're able to figure it out and create fixes.
As was mentioned elsewhere, WER data also tells us WHO is hitting a problem and how often it is being reported. That gives us valuable information about prioritizing WER responses.
If you don't want to pay the perf/bandwidth penalty for collecting/uploading reports, that's understandable. But as mentioned elsewhere, you're abstaining from "voting" to have your issues looked at sooner/more thoroughly.
Then, if you care about such things, there's the "social responsibility" aspect of it. I'd much rather we shipped perfect software, but we don't. WER is one of the best ways we can see issues that customers are hitting and get a sense of how painful they are for customers. If the goal is for MS to be less awful, WER is a key feedback mechanism to help us help you.
It would be a shame if your environment produced just the right heap dump that let us understand an issue that was impacting millions of people... and it was locked on your machine. Not only would your abstention cost YOU, but it would cost everyone else as well.
Is it your fault we ship bugs? Of course not. Would it help you, us, and millions of other people if you turned on WER? Probably.
Thanks,
Matt Evans
Senior SDET, Visual Studio
At home, I want my technology to serve me, and not take up any of my limited time.
I don't screw with it unless I have a particular itch that I want scratched.
That said, my work environments and home environments couldn't be more different.
At work, I work on Visual Studio. So I have windows machines with more hyper-V guests in them, running nightly builds of CLR and VS. Plus other ones for IIS/SQL to host test apps on.
At home, I run
- 1 windows workstation (turned off until I run a network drop over to it. We just moved),
- 1 surface RT my wife and I share
- 1 mac mini in the living room, when we want a bigger screen and keyboard
- an Ubuntu media/utility server in my rack
- a PC Engines Alix running openbsd as my edge device.
We use our smart phones at home a lot to watch email and facebook.
I just retired my ~6 year old windows media center machine for a WDTVLive. We also use an Xbox 360 for video games and DVDs.
I did a big batch of fiddling recently, as we moved house to a rural property with multiple buildings. I learned about Ubiquity hardware and have retired my previous consumre grade wireless gear in favor of UniFi APs, and I also have a Nanostation link between my house and shop building (with UniFi APs in both spots). Getting that setup was fun and easy, and unlike the consumer grade APs I was used to, I haven't had to power cycle the Ubiquity gear yet since owning it. Solid reliability and astounding speeds.
Also, after I got the WDTVlive and decided I liked it, and packed up my HTPC machine.. only then did I realize that the WD box wouldn't play any of my Hi10P anime. So I spent some time the other evening learning about ffmpeg and x264 build-from-source. My Ubuntu machine isn't fast enough to on-the-fly transcode hi10p to 8bit, and the binary distributions of ffmpeg and x264 on my old Ubuntu release didn't deal with 10bit either.
So, I need to spend some more time here, but honestly, it might just be easier to use handbrake on windows..
A long time ago (like, 1994), on the linuxnet irc network, there was this guy named _Joe_ that claimed he was going to build boards around the Dec Alpha chip that would be dedicated Linux workstations.
We were all salivating.
So far as I know, it never happened, (sadly).
But I always wondered about it -- in the early days of Linux, most of the people working on it were used to using proprietary unix hardware with proprietary unixes. We were clearly willing to use non-windows compatible hardware if it made sense.
It's somewhat surprising to me that "designed for Linux" workstations aren't more popular. On the low end, you have things like the Pi, but that's not necessarily setup to be a general purpose workstation. On the high end, you have the older Silicon Graphics big iron that was designed for Linux. Not really "normal workstation" material, and not by any means open hardware/software.
I guess what I am curious about is that given the level of talent in the F/OSS community, why there doesn't seem to be a clear market participant that builds "Linux compliant" workstations and servers, including preferring chipsets that have open hardware and open firmware. And why isn't there an industry around designing those open cores and writing firmware for them?
Being a fabless hardware company is easier than ever; where's the open source hardware platform that I _know_ doesn't have strange reliability issues (like the random MSI board I bought a few years back), doesn't leak RF/audio all over the place (like the Packard Bell my friend grew up with), and has 100% of its hardware well supported by in-box kernel drivers?
The last few motherboards I've purchased from Newegg have all had subtle defects with them. I'd rather pay a bit more for a board where I knew that the people behind it weren't looking to cut costs but were instead looking to make a product they'd be happy to depend on day-in and day-out, and that part of that guarantee was that the board was widely used by the community and was made of open components that didn't have obsolescence designed in.
That organization or those products may exist already, but its hard to tell who is selling a Rolls Royce vs. who is selling a lemon. If you go by reviews from places like Newegg, there isn't necessarily a correlation between brand and quality or price and quality.
Does anyone have suggestions?
(As an aside, I'm happy with the Raspberry Pi I bought. But it's clearly not a workstation replacement. Similarly, I'm happy with the Alix PCEngine I bought years ago to run my openBSD edge device. That custom hardware has worked very, very well. But it's not a general purpose workstation either)
I guess my contention is that while I cannot afford SGI prices, I can (and will) pay more for something that I have a reasonable assurance of getting strong community support for. Who wants my money? :)
Hi. Former guitar shredder here.
I have news for you. The idea that the instrumental performers with "the most talent" will no longer get paid big bucks in the future isn't something you have to wait for.
It has been going on for at least my entire life.
After I had been playing guitar for about 2 years in high school, I could play nearly any guitar part of any popular song (I came of age in the 90s, the grunge time frame. So, admittedly, a low bar.)
Most of it just wasn't very complicated. If what mattered was being able to play things note for note, capturing all of the "feeling" and what not, for most popular music that just isn't a tall order.
I'm not being a braggart; I was nothing special. My point is that youtube is filled with kids who are _astounding_ guitarists.. and who will never make any money off of their guitar work. Technical proficiency isn't what gets you paid.
I still love all of my Shrapnel Records artists that I dutifully bought albums from growing up. I am thrilled beyond belief that monumental talents like Tony MacAlpine are still able to record and perform after decades of being unknown outside of the guitar-nerd community. And I am escstatic that new younger talents are emerging and doing cool stuff (Seree Lee -- youtube him).
But Katy Pery or whoever the next anonymous pretty face is will make more money off of one single than someone like a Tony Mac or Vic Wooten or Seree Lee or (take your pick) will make in their multi-decade careers. And that's not new, and digital music isn't going to fundamentally change that.
I totally get what you're saying. And I had also thought of wiring a mechanical backup in parallel. But that sort of changes the value prop of the Nest device away from a "install it in 10 minutes and then play" to something somewhat more involved.
The effective reliability of a non-redundant system is limited to the reliability of its least reliable component.
In many years of home ownership with all different types of heating systems and thermostats, grid-tied electrical service has been by far lowest-reliability ingredient in the system.
However, those outages tend to be a few hours per year in the places I've lived, and the system comes back from failure without intervention.
Installing a Nest would have changed that paradigm completely. The failure mode is that the nest freezes and you have no indication at all that anything is wrong. And it never comes back until other symptoms are bad enough that you think to wonder why its so damn cold -- if you are home at all. There is some kind of human reset procedure that must be performed.
If the Nest had any kind of failsafe mechanism in it, it would address my concern. The fact that it doesn't, combined with the numerous reports of them freezing during updates, and that Nest refuses to let you manage updates yourself, suggests that they simply don't have their heads on straight regarding the mission-critical nature of thermostats.
Honeywell is someone I trust to make an arbitrarily complicated thermostat. They have been doing control engineering for decades.
Quite right.
I spent a few evenings recently learning about the Nest products. But the more I looked, the more I found stories of devices that failed to boot after software updates, or had other flakiness issues.
I live in a part of the world where a thermostat failure would be a problem. The ambient temps were -20F last week. If the thermostat updated while we were out of the house and failed to boot properly, the entire house would freeze in short order. The pipes would burst and I'd be out many tens of thousands of dollars trying to repair the place.
I can't risk that.
The Nest clearly seems to be targeted at silicon valley types who want a gadget and are used to the gadget early-adopter flakiness. If your thermostat flakes out in SVC its no big deal. Very different context than rural North Dakota.
It would be a simple matter to integrate a _backup_ mechanical failsafe that activated the heating circuits if the temperature fell below say, 50F.
The Nest apparently does not have this feature.
I've had programmable thermostats in the past, but programming them (not to mention setting the clocks to track DST changes) has always been enough of a hassle that I've always reverted to "one temperature, all the time". So the Nest is interesting in terms of the problem it tries to solve. The data collection, and correlating furnace activity with outside temperature -- is all interesting. As I was researching the Nest, I realized that they were attempting to create a new product category -- home hvac efficiency enthusiast.
I might be willing to pay $250 to solve a problem I don't actually have. But not if it greatly increases the likelihood of causing a $30,000 problem because it was designed by people who apparently have no experience with controls.
Absolutely.
However, one difference between how I work now vs. how I worked 20 years ago, is that now I am invariably working on somebody else's machine.
Once upon a time, I used to spend lots of time changing my settings, making customizations to the environment, installing all kinds of tools that made my life easier.
However, a large portion of my time is spent investigating situations that aren't on my own workstations. Either lab machines or other people's environments.
I don't want to be paralyzed when I need to work out of my environment. And so I tend not to invest in or assume the presence of tools that aren't strictly necessary to do a particular task.
This is especially true when there are workable tools included in the default software distribution. So, in the case of isolating bad services, using sc.exe is perfectly sufficient. I know it's going to be there and it's going to work.
About the only basic productivity tools I frequently install any more on a windows machine are gvim and fiddler, and if the IE F12 tools were just a little bit better, I might be able to stop depending on Fiddler....
to isolate windows update so you can kill it safely, do
sc config wuauserv type= own
next time service manager starts wuauserv, it will get its own private instance of svchost.exe, which you can kill with impunity :)
one thing you can do to fix this is the following
sc config wuauserv type= own
(the space between "type=" and "own" is important)
this tells the service manager to put windows update service (WUAUserv) into its own hosting process, e.g. a new/separate instance of svchost.exe
Another service that can be implicated in updates is the "BITS" service. You can use the same command to isolate it also.
Anytime I see a svchost.exe instance misbehaving I start isolating the services inside it and then seeing which individual service is being problematic.
This is not computer literacy.
This is training minds to think like programmers. It is about understanding a problem, decomposing it, and asking them to express solutions to each sub-problem.
They are required to figure out what went wrong when their code has bugs. They have to keep iterating until it does the right thing.
This is the _fundamental_ activity of thinking like a programmer. All of the bullshit about bad languages, bad tools, bad APIs, etc is all stripped away. We're left with the distilled essence of the programming mindset.
Schools teach computer literacy already. At the highschool I teach CS at, there is a full slate of classes around using Photoshop, office apps, web design, etc. _Those_ are application-specific computer literacy. Everyone has email. Everyone has a network share that is theirs. Everyone knows about loading and saving files. These kids are computer literate.
Hour of Code is not about computer literacy. It is about the quickest, least frivolous way to get kids minds in programming gear.
Some will not get it.
Some will get it.
Some will _love_ it.
I remember when I was a kid, I went to a workshop about computer programming. They had us yell out the instructions to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwhich. The presenter did only exactly what the kids said, so when they left out steps or assumed things, the sandwhich got made wrong.
I do the same thing with kids now, except with physical comedy, and by interpreting what they said in the least-correct way that would be permissible under the rules of the English language.
The kids love it; it gets them engaged, it gets them thinking. It makes them think about order of operations. It makes them use precise language. It makes them really think about all of the things they assume or take for granted.
Asking a person to give an imbecile instructions on how to do an everyday thing is MUCH more relevant to computer programming than putting someone infront of a text editor and having them copy/paste lines from a book to make hello world. That requires no thinking at all.
The people behind Hour of Code know what they're doing. Hour of Code isn't the end of CS. But we hope that for a huge pile of kids, It's the beginning.
You couldn't be more wrong.
Disclaimer: I helped with an Hour of Code session in a public highschool this morning. And I've been teaching "block based programming" all semester in this same highschool as part of the "Teals" program (http://www.tealsk12.org)
Go here. Do it. Then do it with kids you know.
http://learn.code.org/hoc/1
The Blockly stuff is _Exactly_ how I figured I would teach my own kids about programming years ago. I had planned to make something like blockly at some point, and I was thrilled when I saw that someone else had done so.
Go through the hour of code blockly sample. It is simple enough that my 6 year old got through all 20 exercizes. He needed a little help on a few of them.
But ask yourself - what is the hardest part of programming? It is typing in the code?
I contend that it isn't.
IMO, the interesting stuff is decomposing the problem, and then finding out ways to solve each step of the problem. If you want to be elegant, you figure out which sub-problems are similar to other sub-problems, and you can make your code more efficient; you can increase re-use, etc.
Making kids figure out the instructions to solve a maze is EXACTLY how I'd teach young people about CS. A maze is a problem every child understands. What they may not understand is how to write precise instructions to implement what they already know.
The language and the tooling are irrelevant. Some programming paradigms are more mind-bending than others for a given problem, but fundamentally, if you know how to break down problems, and you know the context/paradigms of a particular language or tool set, you can do whatever you need to do.
We've been teaching highschoolers using "BYOB". Sure, they aren't about where to put the asterisk on a function decl. But all of these kids have been successful at implementing a variety of simple sprite based games -- galaga, hangman, a scrolling Mario, etc.
Don't you dare say its not programming just because they're not typing the code.
I've seen some real ingenuity out of our highschoolers. The tools allow them to be productive quickly; they do a better job of holding their interest than a text editor.
This is such a Slashdot story :)
"A girl invited me to her house on several occasions. Each time, I spent more and more time being impressed with the Commodore 64"
I think Snowden changed the game on this
Before the Snowden revelation, it wasn't widely accepted that the government was reading everything anybody ever wrote. For _one_ of these companies to come forward to complain was like the prisoners dilemma. There was no guarantee that other players would follow suit, so for GOOG to come out and say "The NSA is spying on you and we can't stop them" puts GOOG at a competitive disadvantage. Furthermore, all of this stuff was secret; not to be disclosed publicly, etc. Companies weren't sure how much teeth there were in those rules, so were further hesitant to talk much about it.
Post Snowden, its all different. Now its an open secret that this happens, and it happens to everyone. Now there's no posturing or competitive advantage to be exploited; everyone is in the same boat. This is a populist issue and once one company made noise about sticking it to the NSA, the rest were going to have to follow.
The other thing that has changed is that Snowden and Lavabit have both gone public. The public has spoken. We now have proof of what kind of stuff the Feds will do and how far they'll go to keep it quiet. The people who leaked this stuff survived.
The government might be able to sue Yahoo or Lavabit or any of them individually, but it cannot sue the entire tech industry.. not right now.
I hesitated to respond to you because we live in entirely different worlds, and I don't think any number of Slashdot posts is going to fix that.
However, to be clear, I wasn't implying that Reagan or Thatcher had a problem with violence.
On the contrary; they had a problem with South Africa becoming a communist satellite. When the communist agitators resort to violence, that just makes it easier to convince the domestic public that the communists are bad. Obviously when it is bin Laden fighting the Soviets, violence is just fine. We both understand how it works.
Regarding your last point: South Africa of today is one of the most dangerous and violent places on earth; Mandela did next to nothing to address black on white or even black-on-black violence. There was a huge white-flight out of SA during the 90s.
Perhaps you think this is a positive outcome. I don't.
No racial reconciliation is perfect, of course. I would say that the US probably didn't do enough to help re-enfranchise blacks, and that South Africa may have done a bit too much.
The bottom line is this: I very much enjoyed living in the Reagan years America. I very much would NOT have liked living in the Mandela years SA.
I think Reagan and Thatcher were both great, as far as people who have actually held office go, and I am disappointed that the Reagan we got was nowhere close to the Reagan that campaigned. I was all for abolishing the Depts of Ed, Energy, and the ATF. Very disappointed with Reagan on that score...
The other transgressions in his career (military adventurism) bother me, but I don't think they actually bother Reagan detractors that much. The people who bitterly hate Reagan tend to hate him for reasons that his supporters like him. Similarly, if you accuse Thatcher of being a union buster or for cleaning up free loaders on the dole, people like me will say "bravo Thatcher".
The bottom line is that you and I probably agree that Reagan/Thatcher supported a bunch of wars and terrorists that they shouldn't have. But you shouldn't pretend like that is the basis for your displeasure with them. Especially not when every other US and UK leader since (some of which you've certainly hated LESS, if not mildly supported) has done the same exact shit...
Not that you're interested, but for the benefit of people who come across your posts, I offer this clarification:
Read the Wikipedia article on Mandela. All of it.
ANC/Mandela supported economic nationalism. He was honored by the Soviet Union for his pro-communist affiliations. In 61-62 he participated in a _bombing campaign_ to put pressure on the apartheid government.
Mandela was anti-capitalist. Not as in, "bmajik says so", but as in, Mandela says so.
Reagan and Thatcher were hesitant to cut off South Africa not because they gave a shit about Mandela or because they loved sticking it to black people; they saw SA as a pawn in the cold war. They didn't want a bunch of African Nationalist Parties starting communist and Russia-aligned states all over the untapped African continent.
To Manela's credit, while he advocated for nationalizing of banks, gold production, other mining, and the abolition of private property, he didn't enact these policies when he eventually took control of the government. He was smart enough to understand that SA badly needed foreign investment, and nationalizing industry and destroying property doesn't get you investors.
Mandela is a mixed bag. As terrorists go, he was a pretty pleasant one -- MK (the militant wing he was part of) only attacked infrastructure at night, hoping to minimize civilian losses.
But, he was willing to resort to violence to bring about a communist revolution in Africa.
You think Reagan and Thatcher were against that? You're right.
Again -- read the WP article. I just summarized it here.
You're actually missing an important aspect of sea-steading.
One implementation of seasteading calls for smaller groups (nuclear or extended families, lets say) to have their own independently float-able barge/ship/unit/whatever.
One of the key problems with soil-based governments is that your neighbors (and hence, their bad politics) are "sticky" -- its hard for you to control who your neighbors are, and since they always manage to impose their will upon you, this is the practical limit to freedom for land-based societies.
But this isn't necessarily true in a cluster of sea-steaders.
Imagine 100 families that have tied their rafts/boats together (like something out of Snowcrash). You liked your new neighbors for a while, but over time, they became more and more a hinderance to your lifestyle.
If we're talking about a land-based community, you have to sell your house and find a new place to live -- which is going to have the same problem.
But if we're talking about sea-steading, you just untie the ropes and sail off. Maybe a few likeminded people follow you.
The interesting possibility with sea-steading is that people groups can constantly form and split and reform and split and reform at a very granular level. Nobody needs to fight over who stays and who leaves; nobody needs to suffer a neighbor they don't like.
No kidding.
I understand that this is the twitter generation, and it has left me in the dust, but when one criticizes you based on an obvious failure to read the entirety of what you've written, well, it almost comes off as the oft-misapplied "irony" when we're having a conversation about people who may not be bright enough to vote.
You are very upset with the arguments I haven't made, but you say very little about the ones I have made.
Actually, no. What I think is that _nobody_ should vote. I would expect this be abundantly clear where right up front, I say that I am an anarchist, and later on when I say I've become disillusioned with the entire notion of government.
Based on your reading comprehension, you might be one of those people who has no business helping me run my life.
But irrespective of if someone has the mental capacity to manage my life better than I do (and I imagine such people exist), I am not convinced that any individual or group has the ethical or moral right to do so.
Rather, I am convinced that they do not.
My contention -- and its certainly a debatable one -- is that there is currently an impending culture clash, and the two main actors are the socially progressive democracies, vs. the religious fundamentalists.
It turns out that amongst the religious fundamentalists, Islam is the dominant group from a growth perspective. It also turns out that rightly or wrongly, that group seems to get a lot of negative attention for practices we might say are barbaric, like FGM, preventing girls from learning to read, murdering people for blasphemy, etc.
Now then. "Our" progressive social democracy isn't reproducing at the replacement rate. Our survival relies indoctrinating others.
Correspondingly, the forces of acid-face burning and honor killings are reproducing rapidly.
Why do I mention this conflict here?
Some of the best and brightest of our social democracy (affluent technocratic geeks) are giving up on our social democracy. Call this mutiny near the top of the stack.
And our social democracies are being overwhelmed by religious fundamentalists at the bottom of the stack. It's not clear how much of this is refugeeism from oppressive places vs how much of this is attempts to assimilate social democracies and make them more oppressive.
The point I was making is that social democracy is undergoing a squeeze at the top and the bottom. If you like social democracy, you should be concerned.
I apologize for not making this clearer for you.
The summary is right about one thing: democracy appears undesirable, or at least sub-optimal, to many intelligent successful geeks.
The actual support for wanting to "turn back the clock" or to have gender roles or whatever is fragmented, and may range from "this is probably worked better than what we're doing today" to "yeah, I'd enforce this via the sword", with relatively few people advocating the latter.
In the last 15 years I've given up on the GOP, given up on libertarianism, and now consider myself squarely an anarchist.
There's a strain of people, lets call them "technocrats", who are probably very smart, and believe that if only they were in charge, they could make things better.
These people want to believe in democracy, but they see the very real impediment it presents to them getting anything done. It's ridiculous to them that they must put up with climate deniers and intelligent design blowhards (and critically, those that these groups elect to office) when there is critical work to be done.
They may be right, but invariably the powerful institutions they build will be co-opted by people who are either less capable or less moral, or often, both. You build a state science department, and invariably, Pat Robertson is going to end up running it somehow.
Then you have people like me, who have become so disillusioned with government that I contend the whole affair should be done away with.
I was fed a steady diet of government school growing up, and I've found out how much of that was pro-state mythology. And so one naturally questions other parts of the mythology. Is our government good? Is it effective? Does it have the right goals? What about the "right" to vote? Who really ought to have it? Why?
I, for instance, take the unpopular view that voter suppression is probably a good idea - as long as it is done for the right reasons. Voting in this country is by no means an "absolute right". Felons don't get the right to vote; neither do children or the mentally handicapped (beyond some level). So let's dispense with that claim entirely. Society has always had (and will continue to have) rules on who may vote.
Some percentage of the voting public is clearly dumber than I am, and clearly unable to manage their own affairs and well-being appropriately.
So a rude question emerges: Should people who cannot manage their own lives get any role in managing mine? (e.g., a "vote")?
I'm persuaded that the answer is, "no".
The difference between an anarchist and a technocrat, on this issue, is that an anarchist ALSO doesn't recognize the right of a successful man to govern an unsuccessful one.
The tech crunch article listed Herman Hoppe as one of the members of this club. I'm a fan of Hoppe, and he in no way is an advocate of Monarchy. He is a critic of the state, and specifically a critic of democracy. He has an excellent bit of writing that explains immigration policy from the POV of a monarch vs. an elected official, and in his conclusion, the self-interested monarch has a much better set of incentives for a positive immigration policy than does the elected official who panders for votes. Pointing out situations where a monarch behaves preferably to a democratic body does make one an advocate of Monarchy, any more than saying "the trains ran on time!" make one an advocate of Mussolini.
What you're seeing here is a group made up of successful, intelligent people, who grew up with the internet in its wild-west days -- there was no authority to crush dissent and no censorship.
They're questioning the mythology of society. Either our society is on firm enough footing that it stands, or it isn't, and these ideas spread.
It's worth pointing out that the fastest growing socio-cultural group is socially conservative Islam. Proponents of progressive social democracy had better have some pretty damn good answers (and more kids), because there's a storm coming. Not helping the impending clash is the reality of this article: Some of the best and brightest that our progressive society has produced are having second thoughts about the society that birthed them.
Your post here is a bit naive. I'm not sure how much of Ron Paul you've really listened to, or how many of his legions of followers you've talked to.
Ron Paul is an interesting guy because he attracted a strange brew of fans. He's one of the only people that manages to get gun rednecks, business owners, vegan crystal energy hippies, and the rabid anti-war people in the same room. The fact that they are all there supporting the same guy is just astounding.
The core philosophy of Ron Paul is not "States rights"; it is voluntarism. He rejects the idea that anybody has the right to force you to do what you don't want to do if you haven't first harmed someone else.
How though, do you project this idea into our current system? Paul has admitted that he doesn't think the US constitution is the best possible thing there is, instead, he has explained that it is supposed to be the law of the land and that people understand it, respect it, and gives you currency when you speak in terms of it.
His goals are to reduce the concentration of power and the authority of government over people who have done no wrong.
One mechanism he talks about for doing that is _states rights_ --- limiting what is done at the federal level. This is as the constitution allegedly proscribes, and is what folks like Jefferson recommended on numerous occasions.
It's not that he wants states to be oppressive. His goal is the decentralization of power and the weakening of government.
The architects of the constitution were Hamilton and Madison. They were strong nationalists; Hamilton admitted that the powers he crafted into the constitution could result in a national government with unlimited power, and that this was necessary for reasons of self defense and to "compete" with the empires of Europe on the world stage.
Jefferson and the other anti-federalists succeeded in putting liberty-preserving amendments into the constitution; the Federalists thought they were unnecessary and might even put onerous burdens on the new national government.
Jefferson's writings and behavior are self contradictory when you compare any two points in his career, but he was probably the most politically successful anarchist in US history. Paul is much more Jeffersonian than he is Madisonian, and it was the work of Jefferson, not Madison and Hamilton, that has bought and kept our most cherished individual liberties. It was the work of Jefferson that has done the most to lessen oppression in the US...
Talking about states rights is a bit of pragmatism. Any decision you push closer to the edge of the population impacts fewer people and reduces the total number of people who are pissed off about it. Jefferson's desire was that the state would be superior to the national government in regards of impact and importance in the lives of the citizens, and that each state would be its own experiment in self governance.
Sadly for Americans, Switzerland is a much better example of states-rights than the US ever was.
Ok, but the reason it is a "corner" is because there is an upperbound on the airspeed also.
Yes, the airframe will not breakup when you go 5kts above that airspeed, but there's a maximum airspeed for a reason.
Control surface response can also diminish with increased speeds, and nastiness like Mach tuck can happen
(http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mach_tuck)
For the A330, the "cruise speed" and maximum cruise speed are only 16mph apart...
http://blogs.msdn.com/b/vcblog/
Visual Studio is a huge organization, and only a subset of people work on the C compiler.
The people behind VS C89 work and Node.js are entirely different people, with different funding and business justifications.
I work on VS LightSwitch. I never talk to the C compiler team about anything.
Yes. Fully autonomous flying is fine as long as nothing brakes.
Part of what made the AF crash such a high-stakes affair is that jetliners (AF included) fly up in "coffin corner".
Basically, if you draw a graph where the x-axis is airspeed, and the y-axis is altitude, and plot where the safe alt+airspeed boundaries are, you get a triangle. The far right of the triangle is basically a vertical line -- the maximum allowable velocity of the airframe is basically constant. The triangle starts "near" the origin. And the hypotenuse goes from near the origin to the point of "max speed, max altitude".
It is this point of "max speed, max altitude" that is the coffin corner. The closer you get to that point, the smaller your safe region is. This is because the higher you fly, the faster you HAVE to go in order to maintain sufficient lift in thin air.
It's called "coffin corner" because too fast means an airframe overspeed, and too slow means a stall. Both of these kill you. The coffin gets tighter the closer to maxalt/maxspeed you get.
Of course, the engines get more fuel efficient the further into coffin corner you go. Fuel efficiency is how you make money in this business. So guess where you're going to fly the plane for 10 straight hours.
So, you're flying along at 36,000 feet. Your permissible airspeed range is plus or minus 10kts. Seriously. Then the computers suddenly don't know how fast you're going any more. Whatever they were doing to control your airspeed, attitude, and altitude... they are no longer doing.
You are in coffin corner, you're completely blind, and you have no margin for error.
In the case of the Airbus glass cockpit, the controls have gone into full authority mode (computer isn't smart enough to limit you to a safe flight program), and the electronic haptic feedback in them is now offline.
You're completely fucked.
(As the AF crew discovered)
Thanks! Glad you like it.
Feel free to email me if you're willing to share your experiences with the product, and what sorts of problems you're trying to solve with it.