Microsoft entering hardware business will lead to bad blood between HP Acer Asus Dell Samsung and the like and Microsoft. No matter how much it assures the partners, things will sour. The culture in Microsoft, the incentives it sets up, the way it administers incentives etc leads all the Microsoft employees to game the system and get any advantage they can get from other divisions to win over the competition. That tiny division will have some VP who would do things to get an edge over the rivals, and it would snowball. Microsoft does not know how to play nice.
Realized it after posting it. Still, commies, nazis the principle is the same. They are propagandists, and they would usurp very good phrases and symbols. If we eschew them for ever, they win.
Look, cars are very complex and most people do not understand how the internal combustion engine works. Most of them can not recognize a epicyclic gear system if it is served on a silver platter with watercress around it. It is high time we educate everyone in America about thermodynamics, the enthalpy-entropy diagram, the Carnot cycle, theory of spark-advancement mechanism and the issues with the intercooler in the turbo super charger.
I mean we want to make the best generation better drivers, don't we? Then why aren't we doing it?
If you replicate on the road exactly the same driving profile that you use in the test bench, are you getting the same emissions? If so, there is no scandal here. All it calls for is improved testing standards to mimic real life driving conditions.
VW is a scandal because it detected the car being not on the test bench and relaxed to emission control.
I did not know Nazi's were using this phrase. I give rats tail to Nazis.
I have seen "Great Leap Forward" being used in this context,
to the unknown combination of traits that changed our species from
anatomically modern H sapiens to behaviorly modern H sapiens.
It is not something I coined. I'm not going to abandon it and cede
permanent ownership to the Nazis.
But I did know the Nazis were using the Swastika symbol. So what?
I will proudly and happily use the Swastika for what it is, a Hindu
symbol and a decorative motif from ancient India.
I recently ran into a group Indians and their priest in the Starbucks
(@ State College PA) The women were wearing white saris with ornate
decorative borders. The motifs in their border? The Swastika and
the Star of David alternating in a series!
3 = 4 for large values of 3. It is a 3K display not 4K. They forever messed up the hard disk capacity by conflating k = 1000 in SI units with K=1024 in computer parlance. Same thing is going to happen to displays too.
In the evolution of humans, genetics show a bottleneck about 75000 years ago. Some catastrophic global event, probably a volcanic eruption, nearly wiped out all the hominids that were ancestors of Homo sapiens, in Africa. The best evidence suggests the only bands that survived the event clung to life in the east African coast near the southern end of the continent. They seem to have subsisted on shell fish and other crustaceans collected during the low tide. There are some telltale marks of intelligence about that band. Scratches on stone tools that could be decorations or ownership marks, shells with holes punched through them to make garlands of shells, using fire to sharpen and temper their stone tools etc.
In hardly 30,000 years they expanded all across Africa, broke out of Africa, set up nascent populations all across Arabia, Persia, India, Andaman Nicobar Islands (this is important), Malaysia, Java, Sumatra, Papua New Guinea and reached Australia.
Andaman islands is important because the first clade in the cladogram of world languages is Andamanese and Non-Andamanese. It is very clear to me, as a layman, not a strict scientist, the Great Leap Forward that happened 75000 years ago in our history was the development of abstract language and the ability to exploit coastal resources.
So yeah, tide prediction changed our history. But not 75 years ago in Europe, but 75000 years ago in South Eastern Africa.
Sending the email is better than adding comments to the code. The slick boss would later deny giving the instructions. With an email trail it would be more difficult to dodge responsibility. But the these slick bosses don't like being cornered like that. They would retaliate by tough reviews and vindictive job assignments. The company that promotes slick willies as bosses is not a viable long term employer. Leave as much paper trail as possible and dust off the resumes.
May be the top honchos don't know much about the source control procedures. The software engineers can reconstruct the entire change history of how the device was created and implemented. The check-in comments, code comments, pull requests, merge authorizations are all there for ever indelible. The software engineers who are left holding the bag can turn around and finger everyone in their chain of command who knew it, who authorized it, who took care not to leave meeting notes etc.
It should turn out to be a lesson for all top management who think they can throw the nerds under the bus. It should also turn out to be a good lesson for all software engineers to create a complete record of change history. Even if you get a oral order to implement something and the boss refuses to leave *any* paper record, and you are not really in any position to defy the boss, leave it in the source. Leave comments and pull-req messages saying "Adolf and Erwin asked me to make this change".
The software engineers created and implemented a strong change management and tracking system where every line every bit of code change done by every engineer can be tracked years after the fact, with absolute certainity.
The upper management has always created documents that are secret, which are lawyered to provide sufficient deniability to people who sign them, if they ever let it get to the level of signature. The whole culture built on "how can I grab as much money as possible" "how can do as little as possible" "how can create escape hatches and set up fall guys to take the blame if this thing blows up" "how can I position myself to take full advantage if the engineering actually delivers what it promised".
Is it any surprise they blame the software engineers?
Let us see, if the software engineers will fall on the sword or they dig up all the check-in comments, pull-requests and approvals and bring down the entire chain of command that authorized it. Couple of rogue software engineers? If that is true, VW has a much larger problem. We can't trust anything in the VW engine control module. It is the job of the upper management drawing humongous salaries to make sure couple of rogue engineers can't pull off anything this big.
I know someone who works in retail. When they close the store, the two employees very very low in the corporate ladder had to attest that one deposited the cash counted by the other. And VW, an ISO-9600 company or whatever had such lax procedures? Would anyone believe this?
The island that was later named Peterssen Island is a tiny spec in the vast Pacific Ocean. Barely five feet off the sea level it is nearly invisible even to ships barely three miles away. It had neither bird colonies nor coconut palms. It was very fortunately situated, the atmospheric air currents and ocean currents were such that it would rain regularly like a clockwork every evening at sunset. There was no source of fresh water in two hundred mile radius around that island.
It had a very small band of humans living there, and their Chief Ullumongo had a vision that there are other human beings in the ocean. They came from them, and the other humans are descendants of their ancestors who are searching for them. He ordered that every day at sun rise the islanders should build a bonfire with thick column of smoke that could be seen for several dozens of miles. He was sure if they let them know they are there, they will come.
It took them several decades, Chief Ullumongo was old, frail and infirm, his grandson Amonomongo was the reigning chief when the ship captained by Eric Peterssen saw the column of smoke. The only safe anchorage and fresh water withing 200 miles... The island was too important to be left to the natives. They were soon wiped out, the story of Chief Ullumongo is buried in some captain's log in some naval museum of Amsterdam.
Even the hobbyist drones carry GPS receiver and most of them fly a pre programmed flight path. We can make sure the app does not accept any flight path that violates FAA restrictions. They know their GPS coordinates, most of them feed a HD video stream to their controller. They have enough power to transmit their location to ATC in bursts, like a flash in a older camera, they can accumulate charge in a capacitor and discharge them in a burst that can be picked up by ATC radar.
Of course someone would hack the app and circumvent the safeguards. And when they get caught they can be sent to jail. Given a legal and reasonable way to do something, most of the people will follow the law.
Well, the poor choice of words is my mistake, not Diamond's. The pathogens get more and more virulent, but the arms race makes the defenses stronger and stronger. For the populations that have never been exposed to all the mutated strains of the pathogen they get more and more lethal.
It is not FAA's job to reassess the property rights and easement rights. Its job and charter is simple, to promote safety and to promote air travel.
There is nothing to stop Congress from enacting a law and asking FAA to re-evaluate the existing airspace for all users competing for it. Heck, FCC does it all the time in spectrum allocation. It allows free use of the spectrum, with power limits and range limits. Same way, FAA can be mandated to review the airspace allocation policies and come up with a legal way for the drone operators to use it legitimately.
What we can not have is for the drone makers to violated existing regulations because they don't like it. You can think of thousand new and and exciting product offering if you can trample all over the spectra and broadcasting with gay abandon. But that is not legal, that is not conducive to developing services and attracting investments.
Marijuana makes you feel as though you had just completed a marathon. So they say, "whatever. pass the toke. I'm vegging out". And they get the munchies too.
Half the population survived and got immunity to it. These pathogens traveled along the trade routes by land to three large population centers, India, China and Europe, Arabia and the Silk route forming land trading routes. They will leave behind an immunized population but sustain themselves by hitting these population centers and rebounding some 20 years later to find fresh unimmunized populations. And several such iterations strengthened the immunity of all the inhabitants of the old World. In each iteration these pathogens got more and more lethal. When the sea routes opened these pathogens "seeded" multiple locations simultaneously in Europe creating very virulent outbreaks.
When Europeans arrived to colonize the New World, their small population should have been wiped out by the diseases unfamiliar to them in the New World. But they were not. Instead the much larger (than the colonists) New World population got devastated by the Old World diseases.
This explanation came out as a 12 page (The arrow of disease) article by Jared Diamond in 1992 in the Discover magazine. Later it was expanded into a Pulitzer winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel
One of the tenets in FAA rule making is: "If a rule is violated repeatedly and frequently, there is something wrong with the rule. Must find the root cause and fix it."
The way police "fight" drunk driving is by creating very heavy punishment, but enforce it lackadaisically. The probability of getting caught is low, but if you do get caught the punishment is severe. The ExpectedCost = Sum over the driving population (probability of getting caught * severity of punishment). This leads to widespread rule violation, gaming the system, using apps to minimize getting caught etc. Add to it the conflict of interest due to the fines being used as revenue source for the municipality.
FAA approach would be: Something along the lines of "all drivers who drove drunk must file an incident report voluntarily". You will be surprised how much FAA relies on voluntary disclosure from all the parties, airlines, pilots, ATC, maintenance logs etc. It would collect the reported incident data and try to get to the root of the problem. It would not set up a single blood alcohol limit for all roads and all locations. It would eventually classify roads as Class A, Class B etc with different blood alcohol levels. Will encourage a combination of public transport or shared transportation of drunk passengers through Class A and Class B thoroughfares to park-and-ride lots accessible by Class C and Class D thoroughfares. The drunks would be allowed to reach their homes on their own. They really don't want to kill you or damage their cars or die in accidents. They just want to go home. It is as much in their interest to avoid an accident as it is yours. Will allow drunk drivers to install "I'm driving drunk" warning lights on their cars to alert others and voluntarily install speed limiting devices.
Of course FAA will not get any financial incentive in punishing the drunk drivers. It would beg for handouts from the government for its operating budget. The free market fanatics would attack it continuously and hamper it in every possible way.
SkyPan operated the 43 flights in the New York Class B airspace without receiving an air traffic control clearance to access it, the FAA alleges. Additionally, the agency alleges the aircraft was not equipped with a two-way radio, transponder, and altitude-reporting equipment.
The FAA further alleges that on all 65 flights, the aircraft lacked an airworthiness certificate and effective registration, and SkyPan did not have a Certificate of Waiver or Authorization for the operations.
SkyPan operated the aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger lives or property, the FAA alleges.
If you have flown to New York and Chicago between March 21, 2012, and Dec. 15, 2014 you might have been endangered by this company. It operated drones which were not airworthy, it operated drones without the transponder to alert the ATC about its altitude, location and speed. These machines are too small to show up in radar. Without a transponder they are nearly invisible to radar.
New York is where both engines of USAir flight were hit by soft bodied geese weighing less than 20 pounds each and forced the plane to crash land in the Hudson river. The drones have hard metal parts and hard plastic. They would do far more damage to the plane.
Air safety is achieved by rigorous enforcement of rules. One can not show the lack of adverse consequences for a violated rule as defense for violating the rule. At the time the rule violation happened, the violator did not know it would have no adverse consequences.
It did not matter the Air Traffic Control violated 1 km horizontal separation and 1000 feet vertical separation without a mid air collision. If the rule was violated the incident report must be filed. All rule violations must be filed. Accidents are too infrequent to infer statistically significant conclusions.
Among the federal agencies FAA has a very good track record of amending the rules and regulations to help improve safety. It does not simply issue fines for incident violations. When some rule violation becomes too frequent it analyses the situation and comes up with a solution too.
For example, when the pilots go through the check lists, if it gets interrupted, the rule is to start from the top all over again. Pilots should NOT try to remember what was done and continue from the middle. But this rule was getting violated too often. They analyzed and found that the check lists were getting too long and it was quite tedious to start from the top. They broke the check list into sections, and amended the rule "Start from the top of section. Each section should start in its own page. No section should have more than so many checks". This is how we achieved the safety in air travel. It might hurt the free market fanatics to accept it, but FAA is one federal agency that is doing its job right.
May be a little too slow to respond, and may be it has some conflict of goals in its charter, "to promote safety" as well as "to promote air travel". It is high time we remove the requirement for it to promote air travel and make safety its single goal.
In fact its procedures draw universal acclaim and some medical researchers are arguing for check lists for surgeons for their procedures.
If FAA says this drone operator flew their machines with reckless disregard for safety, they did. They should pay the fine.
I use the "I want five blades" Fusion.. It works even when rinsed with cold water. I have seen a Ford Fusion in Minnesota in dead winter. It is time to stop denying. Cold Fusion works.
Slashdot Mirror
now it shows up. It was not modded up enough to be picked sooner,
Microsoft entering hardware business will lead to bad blood between HP Acer Asus Dell Samsung and the like and Microsoft. No matter how much it assures the partners, things will sour. The culture in Microsoft, the incentives it sets up, the way it administers incentives etc leads all the Microsoft employees to game the system and get any advantage they can get from other divisions to win over the competition. That tiny division will have some VP who would do things to get an edge over the rivals, and it would snowball. Microsoft does not know how to play nice.
Realized it after posting it. Still, commies, nazis the principle is the same. They are propagandists, and they would usurp very good phrases and symbols. If we eschew them for ever, they win.
I mean we want to make the best generation better drivers, don't we? Then why aren't we doing it?
VW is a scandal because it detected the car being not on the test bench and relaxed to emission control.
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/e...
http://schools.yrdsb.ca/markvi...
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pm...
But I did know the Nazis were using the Swastika symbol. So what? I will proudly and happily use the Swastika for what it is, a Hindu symbol and a decorative motif from ancient India. I recently ran into a group Indians and their priest in the Starbucks (@ State College PA) The women were wearing white saris with ornate decorative borders. The motifs in their border? The Swastika and the Star of David alternating in a series!
Not sure how many noticed the irony!
3 = 4 for large values of 3. It is a 3K display not 4K. They forever messed up the hard disk capacity by conflating k = 1000 in SI units with K=1024 in computer parlance. Same thing is going to happen to displays too.
In hardly 30,000 years they expanded all across Africa, broke out of Africa, set up nascent populations all across Arabia, Persia, India, Andaman Nicobar Islands (this is important), Malaysia, Java, Sumatra, Papua New Guinea and reached Australia.
Andaman islands is important because the first clade in the cladogram of world languages is Andamanese and Non-Andamanese. It is very clear to me, as a layman, not a strict scientist, the Great Leap Forward that happened 75000 years ago in our history was the development of abstract language and the ability to exploit coastal resources.
So yeah, tide prediction changed our history. But not 75 years ago in Europe, but 75000 years ago in South Eastern Africa.
His name is Hackenberg. It was his destiny. Even his parents saw it coming.
Sending the email is better than adding comments to the code. The slick boss would later deny giving the instructions. With an email trail it would be more difficult to dodge responsibility. But the these slick bosses don't like being cornered like that. They would retaliate by tough reviews and vindictive job assignments. The company that promotes slick willies as bosses is not a viable long term employer. Leave as much paper trail as possible and dust off the resumes.
It should turn out to be a lesson for all top management who think they can throw the nerds under the bus. It should also turn out to be a good lesson for all software engineers to create a complete record of change history. Even if you get a oral order to implement something and the boss refuses to leave *any* paper record, and you are not really in any position to defy the boss, leave it in the source. Leave comments and pull-req messages saying "Adolf and Erwin asked me to make this change".
The upper management has always created documents that are secret, which are lawyered to provide sufficient deniability to people who sign them, if they ever let it get to the level of signature. The whole culture built on "how can I grab as much money as possible" "how can do as little as possible" "how can create escape hatches and set up fall guys to take the blame if this thing blows up" "how can I position myself to take full advantage if the engineering actually delivers what it promised".
Is it any surprise they blame the software engineers?
Let us see, if the software engineers will fall on the sword or they dig up all the check-in comments, pull-requests and approvals and bring down the entire chain of command that authorized it. Couple of rogue software engineers? If that is true, VW has a much larger problem. We can't trust anything in the VW engine control module. It is the job of the upper management drawing humongous salaries to make sure couple of rogue engineers can't pull off anything this big.
I know someone who works in retail. When they close the store, the two employees very very low in the corporate ladder had to attest that one deposited the cash counted by the other. And VW, an ISO-9600 company or whatever had such lax procedures? Would anyone believe this?
You can't trust these European car makers. The fine print will say "contract valid only when driven on test tracks instrumented by Volvo a priori"
Sorry for pulling a Senator Jon Kyl on you.
It had a very small band of humans living there, and their Chief Ullumongo had a vision that there are other human beings in the ocean. They came from them, and the other humans are descendants of their ancestors who are searching for them. He ordered that every day at sun rise the islanders should build a bonfire with thick column of smoke that could be seen for several dozens of miles. He was sure if they let them know they are there, they will come.
It took them several decades, Chief Ullumongo was old, frail and infirm, his grandson Amonomongo was the reigning chief when the ship captained by Eric Peterssen saw the column of smoke. The only safe anchorage and fresh water withing 200 miles ... The island was too important to be left to the natives. They were soon wiped out, the story of Chief Ullumongo is buried in some captain's log in some naval museum of Amsterdam.
Is it really wise to let "them" know we are here?
Of course someone would hack the app and circumvent the safeguards. And when they get caught they can be sent to jail. Given a legal and reasonable way to do something, most of the people will follow the law.
Well, the poor choice of words is my mistake, not Diamond's. The pathogens get more and more virulent, but the arms race makes the defenses stronger and stronger. For the populations that have never been exposed to all the mutated strains of the pathogen they get more and more lethal.
There is nothing to stop Congress from enacting a law and asking FAA to re-evaluate the existing airspace for all users competing for it. Heck, FCC does it all the time in spectrum allocation. It allows free use of the spectrum, with power limits and range limits. Same way, FAA can be mandated to review the airspace allocation policies and come up with a legal way for the drone operators to use it legitimately.
What we can not have is for the drone makers to violated existing regulations because they don't like it. You can think of thousand new and and exciting product offering if you can trample all over the spectra and broadcasting with gay abandon. But that is not legal, that is not conducive to developing services and attracting investments.
Marijuana makes you feel as though you had just completed a marathon. So they say, "whatever. pass the toke. I'm vegging out". And they get the munchies too.
When Europeans arrived to colonize the New World, their small population should have been wiped out by the diseases unfamiliar to them in the New World. But they were not. Instead the much larger (than the colonists) New World population got devastated by the Old World diseases.
This explanation came out as a 12 page (The arrow of disease) article by Jared Diamond in 1992 in the Discover magazine. Later it was expanded into a Pulitzer winning book, Guns, Germs and Steel
The way police "fight" drunk driving is by creating very heavy punishment, but enforce it lackadaisically. The probability of getting caught is low, but if you do get caught the punishment is severe. The ExpectedCost = Sum over the driving population (probability of getting caught * severity of punishment). This leads to widespread rule violation, gaming the system, using apps to minimize getting caught etc. Add to it the conflict of interest due to the fines being used as revenue source for the municipality.
FAA approach would be: Something along the lines of "all drivers who drove drunk must file an incident report voluntarily". You will be surprised how much FAA relies on voluntary disclosure from all the parties, airlines, pilots, ATC, maintenance logs etc. It would collect the reported incident data and try to get to the root of the problem. It would not set up a single blood alcohol limit for all roads and all locations. It would eventually classify roads as Class A, Class B etc with different blood alcohol levels. Will encourage a combination of public transport or shared transportation of drunk passengers through Class A and Class B thoroughfares to park-and-ride lots accessible by Class C and Class D thoroughfares. The drunks would be allowed to reach their homes on their own. They really don't want to kill you or damage their cars or die in accidents. They just want to go home. It is as much in their interest to avoid an accident as it is yours. Will allow drunk drivers to install "I'm driving drunk" warning lights on their cars to alert others and voluntarily install speed limiting devices.
Of course FAA will not get any financial incentive in punishing the drunk drivers. It would beg for handouts from the government for its operating budget. The free market fanatics would attack it continuously and hamper it in every possible way.
SkyPan operated the 43 flights in the New York Class B airspace without receiving an air traffic control clearance to access it, the FAA alleges. Additionally, the agency alleges the aircraft was not equipped with a two-way radio, transponder, and altitude-reporting equipment. The FAA further alleges that on all 65 flights, the aircraft lacked an airworthiness certificate and effective registration, and SkyPan did not have a Certificate of Waiver or Authorization for the operations. SkyPan operated the aircraft in a careless or reckless manner so as to endanger lives or property, the FAA alleges.
If you have flown to New York and Chicago between March 21, 2012, and Dec. 15, 2014 you might have been endangered by this company. It operated drones which were not airworthy, it operated drones without the transponder to alert the ATC about its altitude, location and speed. These machines are too small to show up in radar. Without a transponder they are nearly invisible to radar.
New York is where both engines of USAir flight were hit by soft bodied geese weighing less than 20 pounds each and forced the plane to crash land in the Hudson river. The drones have hard metal parts and hard plastic. They would do far more damage to the plane.
It did not matter the Air Traffic Control violated 1 km horizontal separation and 1000 feet vertical separation without a mid air collision. If the rule was violated the incident report must be filed. All rule violations must be filed. Accidents are too infrequent to infer statistically significant conclusions.
Among the federal agencies FAA has a very good track record of amending the rules and regulations to help improve safety. It does not simply issue fines for incident violations. When some rule violation becomes too frequent it analyses the situation and comes up with a solution too.
For example, when the pilots go through the check lists, if it gets interrupted, the rule is to start from the top all over again. Pilots should NOT try to remember what was done and continue from the middle. But this rule was getting violated too often. They analyzed and found that the check lists were getting too long and it was quite tedious to start from the top. They broke the check list into sections, and amended the rule "Start from the top of section. Each section should start in its own page. No section should have more than so many checks". This is how we achieved the safety in air travel. It might hurt the free market fanatics to accept it, but FAA is one federal agency that is doing its job right.
May be a little too slow to respond, and may be it has some conflict of goals in its charter, "to promote safety" as well as "to promote air travel". It is high time we remove the requirement for it to promote air travel and make safety its single goal.
In fact its procedures draw universal acclaim and some medical researchers are arguing for check lists for surgeons for their procedures.
If FAA says this drone operator flew their machines with reckless disregard for safety, they did. They should pay the fine.
That is a good fantasy to have.
I use the "I want five blades" Fusion.. It works even when rinsed with cold water. I have seen a Ford Fusion in Minnesota in dead winter. It is time to stop denying. Cold Fusion works.