'The fledgling space industry is reminiscent of the early days of the personal computer,' notes one technology reporter, 'when a number of established vendors and startups reversed-engineered Microsoft's DOS and manufactured PCs using the Intel 8080 chip set.
What, exactly, is it about the space industry today that is supposed to be reminiscent of those false memories of the early days of the personal computer? All the startups reverse engineering Space-Shuttle-compatible launch vehicles in their garages and undercutting the United Space Alliance on price?
Its hard to figure out which is worse, the analogy proposed or the recollection of history that it is in part based on.
So someone voting on a school board bond election who can correctly answer questions about the stated usage of that bond, or the school district's financial bond rating, or who attends a school board meeting discussing the bond, could get 2 votes for the price of one.
This would a) allow "passionate" (albeit informed) voters to have more of a say than someone who is indifferent, and b) encourage people to do research and get involved in politics.
Giving everyone one vote already does that, without the ability to game-in discriminatory effects through poll tests (the ability to game-in discriminatory effects comes when you give people the right to write the questions and determine what the "correct" answers are, which is essential to having such quizzes); the more passionate are more likely to participate in politics (whether by voting or otherwise), and the more informed are more likely to realize their goals through whatever action they take, so both passion and information are already rewarded.
In a way, it's anti-democratic, but if you are going to insert any sort of elitism into the system, it might as well be a meritocracy.
"Merit" is subjective; all elitisms view are justified (esp. by the chosen "elite") as some kind of meritocracy.
Recession means "lack" of spending behavior, not "lack" of money.
No, actually, it doesn't mean either. It means an overall decline in economic activity across many dimensions taken together, the nearest thing to a single-dimensional rough definition is a decline in production rather than spending. A decline in spending usually occurs during a recession, but its not the same thing as a recession.
I see how this is inconvenient for you, but you seem to be making this whole thing more confusing than it needs to be. You're shipping a proprietary application. Therefore you can't use GPL code in it, and must rely on proprietary code.
Wrong. While its true you can't use GPL code in a non-GPL application, whether proprietary or not, you can use software licensed under the LGPL, Apache License 2.0, Artistic License 2.0, 2- or 3-clause BSD license, or any of variety other F/OSS licenses, or software dedicated expressly to the public domain like SQLite, in proprietary software; it is not the case that you "must rely on proprietary code".
I've never quite understood why the best browser has the lowest market share...
"Best" is largely subjective, but Opera has some pretty clear disadvantages.
IE has the advantage of being bundled with most desktop and laptop computers. Safari has the advantage of being bundled with Apple hardware. Firefox is included with many Linux distros, and is libre, which is a big deal with a certain segment of the market (which, while not a large segment, is a big part of the group that care enough to use anything other than the platform default browser in the first place.) Opera is neither bundled with anything popular, nor libre.
Is it possible to design the helmets in such a way that prevents this?
We don't really know for sure if it can be done without too much compromise somewhere else. TFA identifies the problems with two recent standard designs (the current standard and the preceding one) and the mechanisms by which they contribute to injury, which is a first step to trying to figure out whether we can do better and how.
Sure, it can. TFA discusses, in detail, the mechanisms by which this occurs.
Wearing a helmet mitigates the effects of the explosion. A military helmet is not maximally effective in mitigating the effects.
This is where reading TFA comes in: in fact, TFA identifies mechanisms by which both the previous-standard design (the PASGT helmet) and the newer standard US military helmet design increase the loads on the skull that lead to brain injury (the former focussing shockwaves that underwash the helmet, the latter by tightly coupling movement and deformation of the helmet to the skull.)
So, it is not the case that wearing a helmet mitigates the brain-injury effects of a blast and military helmets just fall short of being "maximally effective"; rather, it is the case that the current and previous standard military helmets magnify the injury-causing effects of blasts.
When I wore the Army helmets in basic training, I noticed this design flaw. Basically, there's no padding or shock absorbing foam in the helmet.
Actually, there is in the current design (perhaps you used the previous PASGT in Basic Training), which why TFA notes that it almsot completely eliminates the problem resulting from the "underwash" effect that TFS is referring to. Unfortunately, TFA finds that the padded-suspension design the newer helmet design uses still increases brain injury in blasts, by tightly coupling movement and deformation of the helmet to the skull.
Can we expect helmets to protect against everything? Let's say that helmets did protect well against the shockwaves of blasts, then the article author would be complaining that helmets do not protect soldiers from a chance encounter with another planet or some other random scenario.
I think that "being in the vincinity of an explosion" and "a chance encounter with another planet" are not comparable classes of events when discussing helmet design for ground troops today.
Obviously there are still improvements to be made, but to make a silly comment that helmets cause brain damage is misleading.
Its not misleading at all. TFA lays out the specific mechanisms by which brain damage occurs in blasts, and the specific mechanisms by which two different helmet designs exacerbate (not just "do not prevent") the loads which produce injuries, causing more injuries in blasts than would occur without the helmets.
[The Previous Helmet] Was a simple metal hat with a (fiberglass?) liner. The current helmet provides far more protection than the previous model. Keep that in mind in the context of this criticism.
TFA discusses mechanisms by which the previous (PASGT helmet, which was a Kevlar helmet with a web suspension, not a metal helmet with a fiberglass liner) and current (ACH/MICH helmet, which uses a more advanced version of Kevlar, and foam-pad suspension.) Metal helmets for general use were phased out in the 1980s.
Also, as a minor quibble point, the airborne modification of the helmet has additional padding on the interior which may affect the dynamic of the air gap between outer shell and liner.
TFA attributes the air-gap effect to the PASGT helmet, the ACH it notes largely avoids that effect but instead exacerbates injury-causing mechanical loads on the skull in blasts by more tightly coupling movement and deformation of the helmet to the skull. Having more pads than normal would seem likely to exacerbate the coupling effect rather than reducing it.
I supposed that depends on how you define "flaw"...
What the article describes is simple
True, which it makes it more surprising that you get it wrong.
injuries that would normally kill people are now survivable due to superior helmets.
That is not, in fact, what TFA describes.TFA describes mechanisms by traumatic brain injury occurs in blast situations, and the specific ways that both the former-standard PASGT helmet design and the newer ACH design increase the effects of these mechanisms.
Maybe it should have been "explosions cause brain damage and the helmet is not very efficient against those" or "don't wear a military helmet and use TNT"
Either of those would have been less on point, since TFA summarizes research which finds specific mechanisms by which two different military helmet designs (both the one currently in use and its immediate predecessor) directly contribute to brain injuries.
Helmets which "have helped modern soldiers survive bullets and blasts that would have killed them in past wars" are being accused of causing brain damage.
Yes. Because they do. The net effect on survivability may be positive, but they still appear to cause specific kinds of brain injuries.
Observing that this is the case and understanding it is the first step to designing helmets that have the same beneficial features as current helemts without while eliminating or mitigating the injury-causing features, thus further improving the net benefit.
I guess boxing gloves cause brain damage, too?
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but that's irrelevant to the issue here.
Now, if they can make better helmets that reduce the risk of brain damage even further, props to them. That doesn't mean the current generation of helmets are "causing" brain damage.
No, what means that the current generation of helmets is causing brain damage is the specific evidence which shows that, in fact, designs like those currently used cause injuries that would not occur without the helmet. From TFS (emphasis added): "Although the blast itself may not accelerate the brain inside a soldier's head enough to cause injury, shockwaves that make it through the space between a helmet and a soldier's head can cause the skull to flex, leading to ripples in the skull that can create damaging pressures in the brain."
TFA itself specifically notes how both the web-style suspension of the old PASGT helmets and the foam suspension of the newer ACH helmets contribute to brain injury by different mechanisms (PASGT by allowing the blast wave to "underwash" the helmet--which seems to be what TFS is referring--ACH, while avoiding that, by tightly coupling deformations of the helmet to the head.)
I guess if you're OK trading off spelling and penmanship for early development of skills that they'll learn soon enough anyway, then sure.
Spelling is a matter of expectations, not medium.
And having great penmanship isn't exactly critical for success in the modern world; I got an early start on tech skills and have always had fairly poor penmanship. I wouldn't trade even the tiniest bit of the comfort and proficiency with technology for better penmanship.
Given that air forces seem to be moving to unmanned drone fighters, it seems silly to build a new flight sim for traditional *pilot* training at this stage.
Why? Air forces may "seem to be moving toward unmanned drone fighters", but even in the most optimistic assessment of how fast that transition might occur they won't be dominated for several decades, and most unmanned drones used now operate mostly as RPVs, which require in the operators an understanding of flight dynamics and skill set that overlaps very heavily with in-the-cockpit piloting. So money spent training pilots is still important.
We're burning up a lot of the petroleum resources. Which means it goes away. Gone, not available in the future.
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is being preserved in that form.
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is no more "available" or "preserved" as petroleum than is the portion we are turning into carbon dioxide and water by burning it; conversely, the latter is no more "gone" than the former.
A century from now people might be saying 'thank goodness they saved SOME of the petroleum in the form of all that plastic in the landfills and floating in that big mass on the ocean.'
Insofar as that "petroleum" remains usable at all (e.g., as potentially recyclable plastic), it would be much better preserved simply by recycling it as plastic, rather than mixing it with garbage and putting it in landfills or dumping it into the ocean.
Not saying this is a completely thought out notion
Good.
Tear into it if it conflicts with your religion.
You know, it kinds of sends mixed messages when you first admit that you haven't thought through the issue very much, and then go on and preemptively characterize any criticism as being based on your critics' "religion".
'du', disk use, obviously should describe the actual used space on the drive, as that is the name of the program. I, however, would rather any other form of file management to note the physical size of the data in the file. Checking file sizes against, say, a website you just uploaded is a quick and easy way to ensure it all transferred for example.
Isn't the physical size what it takes up on the physical media it is stored on (i.e., the same as "disk use"); I think what you mean is the logical size.
If you work on an agile dev team, this post uses every day language. (yeah, velocity is not an unusual word when referring to backlog burndown rate:D)
Isn't "velocity" in that context (and, for that matter, the particular sense of "backlog" and "burndown" you are using), Scrum-specific jargon rather than general Agile jargon?
Wasn't that sort of the notion of trust networks that Cory Doctorow talks about?
Actually, its more like the notion of government in the real world (though experience has shown that they can get by tolerating a certain level of pacifism, so the rules that many of them have that compel their members to engage in direct violence often have exceptions for "pacifists" within certain bounds.)
You seem to be saying that "ScrumMasters" should be all of the following: 1) Not managers, 2) People with a project management background, 3) People whose primary skill is organizing people, 4) People with sufficient authority within an organization to get through barriers posed by people in management.
In my opinion, Agile is a great tool for managers, not developers.
Development methodologies, in general, are largely about how to manage projects so that the the right thing gets built for the customer. This is true of agile, sure, but its true about most methodologies.
Instead, let's recognise the truth: development is hard, and the best programmers are orders of magnitude better than the worst.
Only with a good process (some of which can be generalized, and some of which has to be specific to the task). With a bad enough development methodology, the best programmers can be just as bad as the worst at producing value.
Everyone does it wrong. Every single place that I've worked has done it differently and failed similarly. Agile + Scrum + Ruby seems to be an epic combination of fail.
I think its more that Agile, Scrum, and Ruby are all things that a few people were incredibly successful with, and that a bunch of other people decided to use them as magical talismans without bothering to learn anything about them, producing epic fails.
Agile, in particular, I've seen frequently used as a buzzword and claim and excuse by firms that are, in fact, doing nothing that even vaguely resembles any Agile methodology.
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What, exactly, is it about the space industry today that is supposed to be reminiscent of those false memories of the early days of the personal computer? All the startups reverse engineering Space-Shuttle-compatible launch vehicles in their garages and undercutting the United Space Alliance on price?
Its hard to figure out which is worse, the analogy proposed or the recollection of history that it is in part based on.
Giving everyone one vote already does that, without the ability to game-in discriminatory effects through poll tests (the ability to game-in discriminatory effects comes when you give people the right to write the questions and determine what the "correct" answers are, which is essential to having such quizzes); the more passionate are more likely to participate in politics (whether by voting or otherwise), and the more informed are more likely to realize their goals through whatever action they take, so both passion and information are already rewarded.
"Merit" is subjective; all elitisms view are justified (esp. by the chosen "elite") as some kind of meritocracy.
Perhaps, but I'm pretty sure Apple + Sony will make a bigger dent than Apple alone.
Its not like Apple is going to stop shipping Safari and start bundling IE when Sony starts bundling Chrome.
No, actually, it doesn't mean either. It means an overall decline in economic activity across many dimensions taken together, the nearest thing to a single-dimensional rough definition is a decline in production rather than spending. A decline in spending usually occurs during a recession, but its not the same thing as a recession.
Wrong. While its true you can't use GPL code in a non-GPL application, whether proprietary or not, you can use software licensed under the LGPL, Apache License 2.0, Artistic License 2.0, 2- or 3-clause BSD license, or any of variety other F/OSS licenses, or software dedicated expressly to the public domain like SQLite, in proprietary software; it is not the case that you "must rely on proprietary code".
They aren't deciding which software you use, they are deciding which software they provide you.
You can use whatever software you want, and people who care more than a tiny bit will often use very different software than the OEM bundles.
"Best" is largely subjective, but Opera has some pretty clear disadvantages.
IE has the advantage of being bundled with most desktop and laptop computers.
Safari has the advantage of being bundled with Apple hardware.
Firefox is included with many Linux distros, and is libre, which is a big deal with a certain segment of the market (which, while not a large segment, is a big part of the group that care enough to use anything other than the platform default browser in the first place.)
Opera is neither bundled with anything popular, nor libre.
We don't really know for sure if it can be done without too much compromise somewhere else. TFA identifies the problems with two recent standard designs (the current standard and the preceding one) and the mechanisms by which they contribute to injury, which is a first step to trying to figure out whether we can do better and how.
RTFA.
Sure, it can. TFA discusses, in detail, the mechanisms by which this occurs.
This is where reading TFA comes in: in fact, TFA identifies mechanisms by which both the previous-standard design (the PASGT helmet) and the newer standard US military helmet design increase the loads on the skull that lead to brain injury (the former focussing shockwaves that underwash the helmet, the latter by tightly coupling movement and deformation of the helmet to the skull.)
So, it is not the case that wearing a helmet mitigates the brain-injury effects of a blast and military helmets just fall short of being "maximally effective"; rather, it is the case that the current and previous standard military helmets magnify the injury-causing effects of blasts.
Actually, there is in the current design (perhaps you used the previous PASGT in Basic Training), which why TFA notes that it almsot completely eliminates the problem resulting from the "underwash" effect that TFS is referring to. Unfortunately, TFA finds that the padded-suspension design the newer helmet design uses still increases brain injury in blasts, by tightly coupling movement and deformation of the helmet to the skull.
I think that "being in the vincinity of an explosion" and "a chance encounter with another planet" are not comparable classes of events when discussing helmet design for ground troops today.
Its not misleading at all. TFA lays out the specific mechanisms by which brain damage occurs in blasts, and the specific mechanisms by which two different helmet designs exacerbate (not just "do not prevent") the loads which produce injuries, causing more injuries in blasts than would occur without the helmets.
TFA discusses mechanisms by which the previous (PASGT helmet, which was a Kevlar helmet with a web suspension, not a metal helmet with a fiberglass liner) and current (ACH/MICH helmet, which uses a more advanced version of Kevlar, and foam-pad suspension.) Metal helmets for general use were phased out in the 1980s.
TFA attributes the air-gap effect to the PASGT helmet, the ACH it notes largely avoids that effect but instead exacerbates injury-causing mechanical loads on the skull in blasts by more tightly coupling movement and deformation of the helmet to the skull. Having more pads than normal would seem likely to exacerbate the coupling effect rather than reducing it.
I supposed that depends on how you define "flaw"...
True, which it makes it more surprising that you get it wrong.
That is not, in fact, what TFA describes.TFA describes mechanisms by traumatic brain injury occurs in blast situations, and the specific ways that both the former-standard PASGT helmet design and the newer ACH design increase the effects of these mechanisms.
Either of those would have been less on point, since TFA summarizes research which finds specific mechanisms by which two different military helmet designs (both the one currently in use and its immediate predecessor) directly contribute to brain injuries.
Yes. Because they do. The net effect on survivability may be positive, but they still appear to cause specific kinds of brain injuries.
Observing that this is the case and understanding it is the first step to designing helmets that have the same beneficial features as current helemts without while eliminating or mitigating the injury-causing features, thus further improving the net benefit.
Maybe they do, maybe they don't, but that's irrelevant to the issue here.
No, what means that the current generation of helmets is causing brain damage is the specific evidence which shows that, in fact, designs like those currently used cause injuries that would not occur without the helmet. From TFS (emphasis added): "Although the blast itself may not accelerate the brain inside a soldier's head enough to cause injury, shockwaves that make it through the space between a helmet and a soldier's head can cause the skull to flex, leading to ripples in the skull that can create damaging pressures in the brain."
TFA itself specifically notes how both the web-style suspension of the old PASGT helmets and the foam suspension of the newer ACH helmets contribute to brain injury by different mechanisms (PASGT by allowing the blast wave to "underwash" the helmet--which seems to be what TFS is referring--ACH, while avoiding that, by tightly coupling deformations of the helmet to the head.)
Spelling is a matter of expectations, not medium.
And having great penmanship isn't exactly critical for success in the modern world; I got an early start on tech skills and have always had fairly poor penmanship. I wouldn't trade even the tiniest bit of the comfort and proficiency with technology for better penmanship.
Why? Air forces may "seem to be moving toward unmanned drone fighters", but even in the most optimistic assessment of how fast that transition might occur they won't be dominated for several decades, and most unmanned drones used now operate mostly as RPVs, which require in the operators an understanding of flight dynamics and skill set that overlaps very heavily with in-the-cockpit piloting. So money spent training pilots is still important.
The portion of the petroleum that we're turning into plastic is no more "available" or "preserved" as petroleum than is the portion we are turning into carbon dioxide and water by burning it; conversely, the latter is no more "gone" than the former.
Insofar as that "petroleum" remains usable at all (e.g., as potentially recyclable plastic), it would be much better preserved simply by recycling it as plastic, rather than mixing it with garbage and putting it in landfills or dumping it into the ocean.
Good.
You know, it kinds of sends mixed messages when you first admit that you haven't thought through the issue very much, and then go on and preemptively characterize any criticism as being based on your critics' "religion".
Isn't the physical size what it takes up on the physical media it is stored on (i.e., the same as "disk use"); I think what you mean is the logical size.
Isn't "velocity" in that context (and, for that matter, the particular sense of "backlog" and "burndown" you are using), Scrum-specific jargon rather than general Agile jargon?
Actually, its more like the notion of government in the real world (though experience has shown that they can get by tolerating a certain level of pacifism, so the rules that many of them have that compel their members to engage in direct violence often have exceptions for "pacifists" within certain bounds.)
You seem to be saying that "ScrumMasters" should be all of the following:
1) Not managers,
2) People with a project management background,
3) People whose primary skill is organizing people,
4) People with sufficient authority within an organization to get through barriers posed by people in management.
This seems somewhat incoherent.
Development methodologies, in general, are largely about how to manage projects so that the the right thing gets built for the customer. This is true of agile, sure, but its true about most methodologies.
Only with a good process (some of which can be generalized, and some of which has to be specific to the task). With a bad enough development methodology, the best programmers can be just as bad as the worst at producing value.
I think its more that Agile, Scrum, and Ruby are all things that a few people were incredibly successful with, and that a bunch of other people decided to use them as magical talismans without bothering to learn anything about them, producing epic fails.
Agile, in particular, I've seen frequently used as a buzzword and claim and excuse by firms that are, in fact, doing nothing that even vaguely resembles any Agile methodology.