How do you do a double blind when the "patient" is a plant? And why? To eliminate the placebo effect? I think this is muddy thinking, the evaluation could be blinded by taking photos and measurements of the various plants, not showing the cage or lack thereof, and letting whatever scientists are appropriate look at the data rather than the plants in situ.
In the late 1980's a program was developed to encode binary data in text format, called uuencode. It was followed by a shell script to take a filename, create an email message (or newsgroup posting) using uuencode, and package it as part of a shell script which could be fed back into a unix shell and would recreate the original binary file. I wrote a higher performance version in C called shar2 around 1990, which did some detection of file type, and optional preservation of modification. That program automated breaking the output into many parts of a given maximum size for transmission through limited message size channels. So using a bunch of SMS messages is hardly new.
Historical note
That appeared in comp.source.unix and was widely used. I maintained for several years, and stopped due to a lack of bugs and to avoid "creeping featurism" adding of bells and whistles. At a later date, someone else took my source, did some changes (perhaps 20% of the code changed), called it shar3, and released it, with my name pretty well removed and their name as author. Then they submitted it as "gnu shar" where it appears still, with only an obscure mention that I also had a shar program, the last time I looked.
Decades ago Intel changed from the separate integer and floating point processors (8086 and 8087, etc) to an integrated unit, because it was cheaper, faster, and more reliable. And because everyone wanted floating point, so there was no reason to separate them, and because Moore's Law said they could.
Now the GPU is being integrated, at least in the desktop chips. It's not so clear that everyone wants the fancy effects, 3D rendering, wobbly windows, and all the rest of the things vendors tout which are mostly aimed at game players. I think the percentage of users who need, want, or even tolerate those effects is smaller than the percentage who wanted floating point, but if it reduces the size, power, and cost of a computer with video, the average user will be happy, even if the bulk of the features are unused.
Note that Intel has added graphics in their i5-661 (and other) chips, although they seem to be more targeted to users who use only light duty graphics, and don't benefit from vast rendering capability. The market will decide the value of these changes, and the price will fall in line.
Actually what make ethernet work is not the error recovery but the error detection. The hard part of making a more robust CPU and memory model is not recovering from errors, but detecting them at all. This adds complexity to the whole stochastic design, and I think at some level the error detection needs to be error free, so that the success of the error recovery can be evaluated. Like a Hamming code which can correct all one bit errors and detect all two bit errors, as you add robustness to the detection, through more complex schemes like Fire codes, the resources in the error detection are greater than the error detection. And balancing by making the entire system more error prone is clearly not a solution.
27 data points is not enough to draw a strong conclusion.
So why then should the court of public opinion concluded that it's Toyota's fault?
Because it doesn't happen with other brands of cars? Because Steve Wozniak says he can duplicate it at will with his Prius?
I would really like to see a distribution based on years of driving a manual shift car. These days that means older drivers and gear heads. And not many gear heads drive a Prius!
I worked on ECMs at GM (Delco Electronics) for 10 years at the start of their use (1980 to 1990). So if a cosmic ray came along and flipped a bit, it would have to be a specific bit. If it was a msb type bit in the accelerator position, then yes, acceleration. except that the bit would unflip right away because of pedal position update. Or if it was some engine feedback msb, again, yes, temporary acceleration, but again, only for a short time. Updates happen constantly.
My thought on this is related to the cruise control. Many of these incidents have happened on highways where having the CC on would be typical, and if it decided that the target speed was very high full acceleration would occur. The non-effect of the brakes isn't clear, I would love to ask a survivor if the brakes vibrated as if the anti-lock was operating. That could make the brakes less effective as the ABS pumped the brakes to avoid phantom lock up. That sounds unlikely, but the recent car stopped by a police car in front of it offers two additional data item, (1) the police said they could smell the hot brakes as they chased, and (2) when the driver applied the (manual) emergency brake the car slowed down. Hard to argue that the brakes would stop the car if used, when clearly they were used, and that shows that the throttle didn't return to idle when the brakes were applied, another Toyota claim. Based on a trained observer outside the car.
The fact that the emergency brake was effective suggests that the regular brakes weren't working properly. May be an ABS problem or not, but clearly the normal brakes were being used and were not stopping the car.
Since the biggest Toyota runaway story has turned out to be a problem exists between seat and pedals situation... is this all hype with no science behind it?
And this happen only with Toyota? This would imply one of three things:
-People who buy Toyotas are worse drivers than other makes.
-Toyota has human engineering flaws which make them hard to control.
-There is really a flaw and behavior of expert drivers testing doesn't trigger it.
Hint:Steve Wozniack, co-founder of Apple,
says it's software and he can demonstrate the flaw with his Prius on demand.
You can certainly dump 10MB through the serial port, should only take a few hours (as noted by others). But if you dump a raw image copy of the entire hard drive, there's a high probability that you can run the whole machine as a virtual machine under Linux (or whatever). I had probably the first UNIX based BBS in the country, back when the "UNIX-PC" (aka at&t 7300) came out with SysVR3. I ran both Citadel and my own MBS on it, with a modem on each serial port. Good fun!
Given the power of current hardware, you could probably put it back up in a VM and let people use it.
And I'm pretty sure most antilock brake systems actually increase the effectiveness of the brakes (the actuation results in more friction between the vehicle and the road surface).
I won't be surprised if a flaw is eventually uncovered. I also won't be surprised if more and more cases are revealed to be pedal error.
An antilock braking system is intended to preserve steering by "pumping" the brakes so the tires don't lock. However, this reduces the ability of the brakes to stop the wheel, and gives a longer but more controlled stop. If the antilock decided that it should pump the brakes it would reduce the driver's ability to slow the wheels. The fact that the car stopped by police only slowed when the emergency (mechanical) brake was applied suggests this. I'd love to interview the driver and see if he noticed the brakes throbbing.
So apparently being an idiot is also a likely factor in the failing to cope with the incident before it becomes lethal.
But they key observation is that the higher number of fatalities among older drivers doesn't really point to the source of the problem being driver error (rather, the driver error is in failing to deal with the situation once it arises).
You certainly don't have to be an idiot to fail to handle a stuck throttle, most people will never have the experience, and if it becomes a problem starting at highway speeds, many drivers may feel the need for both hands on the wheel. I would want to know in advance that I could turn the engine off without engaging the steering wheel lock. And that it kills both the electric and gas power in a Prius. Shifting to neutral is likely to to be the last resort, but most effective.
There could well be an issue with the anti-lock brakes as well, if the braking power is being limited, they may well not have the stopping power needed to overcome the engine, the recent police assisted stop was made made after slowing with the emergency brake which probably is mechanical and will actually lock the wheels. That would explain the claims that the brakes were full on but the car didn't slow down, and the odd signs of only partial brake application noted in some cases. Apply full engine power and limit brake effectiveness, if that bug could be proved it would explain many things.
Also, if Boeing built a car, it would have a flight data recorder which investigators could examine and say for example "Looks like both(*) potentiometers on the accelerator went hard over at the same time, so we go look on the branches of the fault tree where there's a common-mode failure in the potentiometers or the pedal is down due to mechanical or pilot error".
(*) If I remember correctly from my obsessive pre-purchase research on Priuses, there are two separate sensors for accelerator position.
There are black boxes, and several stories circulating about them. The first says there is only one laptop in the entire USA which can read the black box codes. And the other claims that the black boxes are now not recording brake and throttle settings, or so Toyota claims. Call me paranoid, but if that data showed something which proved the throttles didn't stick or the brakes weren't used, I bet Toyota would give the NTSB a hundred of the laptops. Of course I would promptly crash a Toyota with brake and throttle on and see what the readings were, "I am not a trusting person."
The link I gave to the Associated Press story notes both accusations, and a number of other steps Toyota has taken to hide the black box data. As Nixon found, the damage from being caught in a coverup is worse than the crime.
I see that Toyota apologists are in full cry, trying to prove that Toyota unintended acceleration is really due to a bunch of old people who don't know how to drive, young people driving badly, and almost anything other than a real defect in the throttle software. Steve Wozniac (Apple founder and designer) says he can replicate the problem at will, and he claims that Toyota is ignoring him. Wonder why.
Other things to consider:
- The same old and young drivers don't report unintended acceleration for other brands.
- The unintended acceleration in other cars was a real human design defect[1]
- The press (other than Slashdot) has ignored Wozniac as well, for the most part
[1] It seems that if pedals are put in a "stick shift" configuration, throttle on the right, brake in the middle, and (space for) clutch on the left, people don't hit an unintended pedal. Putting the brake and accelerator in the middle space, under the wheel, is more likely to result in error. Since the elderly and young men are somewhat more likely to have driven manual transmission, they are more likely to stomp in the middle of the floor looking for the brake under stress. Call that human error exacerbated by design factors. But those were not situations lasting for minutes.
The issue of sexual preference is not related to morality, but to blackmail. If someone is openly gay, that shouldn't be an issue. If someone is secretly gay, bi, cross dresser, etc, then that employee might be subject to blackmail attempts. Other secrets apply, affairs, fake degrees (or cheating to get a degree), etc.
There is actually a reason for this, people who can be pressured are additional risks. It is an unpleasant part of having clearance, having been through DOD and DOE I have seen the first few rungs of the investigation, I'm sure checking is greater for people who do top secret work, as opposed to IT people who might get a change to see some.
The problem with an effective tarpit is that it ties up one of your sockets as well as the originator's socket. I played with a program to open a socket, and for each incoming packet wait some time and NAK. Too effective, kept the attack socket up for hours.
The problem with certificates is that there are stored somewhere easier to find than inside someone's head. A certificate is a key anyone can use. But, you say, "I can password the certificate!" So the security comes back to a password again.
For really security conscious users there will be a password on the filesystem, one on the account (login), and one on the certificate. They will be non-trivial and different.
My point is that a certificate by itself is less secure than a password, since anyone can use it. Only by combining the certificate to identify the system and the passwords to prevent misuse will you have acceptable security. The hardest part is finding the user who will actually faithfully use all the available security.
Combine this with human factors, like fingerprint readers, and port knocking and you can reach whatever combination of levels matches your requirements.
Of course Microsoft has figured out a way to deal with this, they will charge the legitimate user again. The object of the program is to generate revenue, not to protect the rights of legitimate users. The only question is if the false positives are accidental, or a case of guilty unless proved innocent.
A few days ago we had a study showing that cell phone radiation protects the brain against Alzheimer's in rodents and now other studies suggest that it causes cancer. I suspect that some (or all) of these are cases of "too much number crunching and too little data."
Sounds a little like the Face on Mars or laying on your back and finding images in clouds. Any set of noisy data will show anything you wish when analyzed with the proper algorithm.
No, I think you are confused about sunk costs. To sum it up, that is the idea that if you spend a lot of money on a bad idea, you must spend more because you have an investment (yes, I simplify). And if Ares was unworkable that would certainly be true. But it appears that it's suboptimal instead, other solutions would work better, but finishing now would result in a workable solution, and getting to the Moon and Mars at the lowest incremental cost.
(Ares now + finish) < (new design)
and that's less in both money and time.
To scrap Ares now would mean that a better program would have to start over and spend money and time on the same design process we have already funded with Ares. That might make sense if there was new and better technology available, but in truth we are probably a decade away for "really better," and the way we will get that technology is by going into space with what we have.
Clearly there are new materials, methods, and propulsion systems coming, but they are not available now. To wait may mean that instead of building new systems we will sit on the sidelines and read about the things other countries are doing. There is only so far behind you can get before it becomes too expensive to stay in the chase. Once America has no relevant tech to contribute, why should other countries include us in future missions?
Ares is not a perfect solution, but "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and we would develop a better system in 2030 if we aren't still using 1995 data and 2010 technology.
A survey by J.D.Powers showed T-Mobil and Verizon pretty much tied in customer satisfaction. TM is cheap, friendly, and competent, VZ has best signal quality. Another survey checked top plans and top signal and had similar results. I fear before you can find the best, you will have to define best for you.
To muddy the waters, it seems that Sprint and Verizon struck a deal to let Sprint customers use the Verizon data network. I'm not sure how that plays for you, clearly people who value call quality now have another way to get it.
What's next, banning the use of televised material, movies, and any presentation using visual aids such as plots? Or does teaching any subject not understandable to someone with a low IQ somehow become prohibited as well?
Making the majority of students use paper books does not make things better for those with limited sight, it just means they spend more per book, have more garbage as the book becomes obsolete, etc. I guess next they will forbid use of any book not available in braille.
I know a group of users who have been using xawtv for several years on Fedora Core 4. Now they want to update the desktop and need a new viewer/DVR which works with their new hardware (Happage USB and dual input PCI cards). The backend stuff for MythTV stopped them, they don't want to take over running a database, having a trained DBA, etc, etc.
Can't find anything any simpler for Linux, I think they're going back to Windows next year, because video is a requirement. Watching normal TV is a bonus, of course. Local cable has NTSC analog and clear QAM digital, internal is S-video. The old setup did the analog and S-video just fine, HDTV is a "nice but not required" at this point. Too many "experts only" software, nothing, even commercial, for end users.
Sure would be nice to see this for US paper currency. Many cash registers are PC based at the motherboard level, and could support an optical mouse just fine. What a great bit of Open Source software it would be to create and release a program people could run in business, etc.
People were mixing "read and test" with recreational content in the early 70s, letting people play tic-tac-toe on a Model 33 Teletype. I have to wonder how this patent is new.
Slashdot Mirror
How do you do a double blind when the "patient" is a plant? And why? To eliminate the placebo effect? I think this is muddy thinking, the evaluation could be blinded by taking photos and measurements of the various plants, not showing the cage or lack thereof, and letting whatever scientists are appropriate look at the data rather than the plants in situ.
In the late 1980's a program was developed to encode binary data in text format, called uuencode. It was followed by a shell script to take a filename, create an email message (or newsgroup posting) using uuencode, and package it as part of a shell script which could be fed back into a unix shell and would recreate the original binary file. I wrote a higher performance version in C called shar2 around 1990, which did some detection of file type, and optional preservation of modification. That program automated breaking the output into many parts of a given maximum size for transmission through limited message size channels. So using a bunch of SMS messages is hardly new.
Historical note
That appeared in comp.source.unix and was widely used. I maintained for several years, and stopped due to a lack of bugs and to avoid "creeping featurism" adding of bells and whistles. At a later date, someone else took my source, did some changes (perhaps 20% of the code changed), called it shar3, and released it, with my name pretty well removed and their name as author. Then they submitted it as "gnu shar" where it appears still, with only an obscure mention that I also had a shar program, the last time I looked.
Decades ago Intel changed from the separate integer and floating point processors (8086 and 8087, etc) to an integrated unit, because it was cheaper, faster, and more reliable. And because everyone wanted floating point, so there was no reason to separate them, and because Moore's Law said they could.
Now the GPU is being integrated, at least in the desktop chips. It's not so clear that everyone wants the fancy effects, 3D rendering, wobbly windows, and all the rest of the things vendors tout which are mostly aimed at game players. I think the percentage of users who need, want, or even tolerate those effects is smaller than the percentage who wanted floating point, but if it reduces the size, power, and cost of a computer with video, the average user will be happy, even if the bulk of the features are unused.
Note that Intel has added graphics in their i5-661 (and other) chips, although they seem to be more targeted to users who use only light duty graphics, and don't benefit from vast rendering capability. The market will decide the value of these changes, and the price will fall in line.
Actually what make ethernet work is not the error recovery but the error detection. The hard part of making a more robust CPU and memory model is not recovering from errors, but detecting them at all. This adds complexity to the whole stochastic design, and I think at some level the error detection needs to be error free, so that the success of the error recovery can be evaluated. Like a Hamming code which can correct all one bit errors and detect all two bit errors, as you add robustness to the detection, through more complex schemes like Fire codes, the resources in the error detection are greater than the error detection. And balancing by making the entire system more error prone is clearly not a solution.
There goes the patent, clearly prior art.
27 data points is not enough to draw a strong conclusion.
So why then should the court of public opinion concluded that it's Toyota's fault?
Because it doesn't happen with other brands of cars? Because Steve Wozniak says he can duplicate it at will with his Prius?
I would really like to see a distribution based on years of driving a manual shift car. These days that means older drivers and gear heads. And not many gear heads drive a Prius!
I worked on ECMs at GM (Delco Electronics) for 10 years at the start of their use (1980 to 1990). So if a cosmic ray came along and flipped a bit, it would have to be a specific bit. If it was a msb type bit in the accelerator position, then yes, acceleration. except that the bit would unflip right away because of pedal position update. Or if it was some engine feedback msb, again, yes, temporary acceleration, but again, only for a short time. Updates happen constantly.
My thought on this is related to the cruise control. Many of these incidents have happened on highways where having the CC on would be typical, and if it decided that the target speed was very high full acceleration would occur. The non-effect of the brakes isn't clear, I would love to ask a survivor if the brakes vibrated as if the anti-lock was operating. That could make the brakes less effective as the ABS pumped the brakes to avoid phantom lock up. That sounds unlikely, but the recent car stopped by a police car in front of it offers two additional data item, (1) the police said they could smell the hot brakes as they chased, and (2) when the driver applied the (manual) emergency brake the car slowed down. Hard to argue that the brakes would stop the car if used, when clearly they were used, and that shows that the throttle didn't return to idle when the brakes were applied, another Toyota claim. Based on a trained observer outside the car.
The fact that the emergency brake was effective suggests that the regular brakes weren't working properly. May be an ABS problem or not, but clearly the normal brakes were being used and were not stopping the car.
Since the biggest Toyota runaway story has turned out to be a problem exists between seat and pedals situation... is this all hype with no science behind it?
And this happen only with Toyota? This would imply one of three things:
-People who buy Toyotas are worse drivers than other makes.
-Toyota has human engineering flaws which make them hard to control.
-There is really a flaw and behavior of expert drivers testing doesn't trigger it.
Hint:Steve Wozniack, co-founder of Apple, says it's software and he can demonstrate the flaw with his Prius on demand.
You can certainly dump 10MB through the serial port, should only take a few hours (as noted by others). But if you dump a raw image copy of the entire hard drive, there's a high probability that you can run the whole machine as a virtual machine under Linux (or whatever). I had probably the first UNIX based BBS in the country, back when the "UNIX-PC" (aka at&t 7300) came out with SysVR3. I ran both Citadel and my own MBS on it, with a modem on each serial port. Good fun!
Given the power of current hardware, you could probably put it back up in a VM and let people use it.
And I'm pretty sure most antilock brake systems actually increase the effectiveness of the brakes (the actuation results in more friction between the vehicle and the road surface).
I won't be surprised if a flaw is eventually uncovered. I also won't be surprised if more and more cases are revealed to be pedal error.
An antilock braking system is intended to preserve steering by "pumping" the brakes so the tires don't lock. However, this reduces the ability of the brakes to stop the wheel, and gives a longer but more controlled stop. If the antilock decided that it should pump the brakes it would reduce the driver's ability to slow the wheels. The fact that the car stopped by police only slowed when the emergency (mechanical) brake was applied suggests this. I'd love to interview the driver and see if he noticed the brakes throbbing.
To me it suggests that older drivers are having more difficulty coping with the situation once it arises.
Forbes says that the guy who got himself plastered all over cable last week was 'afraid' to put the vehicle into neutral, or to turn off the engine:
http://www.forbes.com/2010/03/12/toyota-autos-hoax-media-opinions-contributors-michael-fumento.html?boxes=financechannelforbes
(They link the 911 recording:
http://www.thetruthaboutcars.com/the-jim-sikes-911-call-23-minutes-of-unintended-acceleration/
)
So apparently being an idiot is also a likely factor in the failing to cope with the incident before it becomes lethal.
But they key observation is that the higher number of fatalities among older drivers doesn't really point to the source of the problem being driver error (rather, the driver error is in failing to deal with the situation once it arises).
You certainly don't have to be an idiot to fail to handle a stuck throttle, most people will never have the experience, and if it becomes a problem starting at highway speeds, many drivers may feel the need for both hands on the wheel. I would want to know in advance that I could turn the engine off without engaging the steering wheel lock. And that it kills both the electric and gas power in a Prius. Shifting to neutral is likely to to be the last resort, but most effective.
There could well be an issue with the anti-lock brakes as well, if the braking power is being limited, they may well not have the stopping power needed to overcome the engine, the recent police assisted stop was made made after slowing with the emergency brake which probably is mechanical and will actually lock the wheels. That would explain the claims that the brakes were full on but the car didn't slow down, and the odd signs of only partial brake application noted in some cases. Apply full engine power and limit brake effectiveness, if that bug could be proved it would explain many things.
It would also probably exonerate the man who is in prison after unintended acceleration.
Also, if Boeing built a car, it would have a flight data recorder which investigators could examine and say for example "Looks like both(*) potentiometers on the accelerator went hard over at the same time, so we go look on the branches of the fault tree where there's a common-mode failure in the potentiometers or the pedal is down due to mechanical or pilot error".
(*) If I remember correctly from my obsessive pre-purchase research on Priuses, there are two separate sensors for accelerator position.
There are black boxes, and several stories circulating about them. The first says there is only one laptop in the entire USA which can read the black box codes. And the other claims that the black boxes are now not recording brake and throttle settings, or so Toyota claims. Call me paranoid, but if that data showed something which proved the throttles didn't stick or the brakes weren't used, I bet Toyota would give the NTSB a hundred of the laptops. Of course I would promptly crash a Toyota with brake and throttle on and see what the readings were, "I am not a trusting person."
The link I gave to the Associated Press story notes both accusations, and a number of other steps Toyota has taken to hide the black box data. As Nixon found, the damage from being caught in a coverup is worse than the crime.
I see that Toyota apologists are in full cry, trying to prove that Toyota unintended acceleration is really due to a bunch of old people who don't know how to drive, young people driving badly, and almost anything other than a real defect in the throttle software. Steve Wozniac (Apple founder and designer) says he can replicate the problem at will, and he claims that Toyota is ignoring him. Wonder why.
Other things to consider:
- The same old and young drivers don't report unintended acceleration for other brands.
- The unintended acceleration in other cars was a real human design defect[1]
- The press (other than Slashdot) has ignored Wozniac as well, for the most part
[1] It seems that if pedals are put in a "stick shift" configuration, throttle on the right, brake in the middle, and (space for) clutch on the left, people don't hit an unintended pedal. Putting the brake and accelerator in the middle space, under the wheel, is more likely to result in error. Since the elderly and young men are somewhat more likely to have driven manual transmission, they are more likely to stomp in the middle of the floor looking for the brake under stress. Call that human error exacerbated by design factors. But those were not situations lasting for minutes.
The issue of sexual preference is not related to morality, but to blackmail. If someone is openly gay, that shouldn't be an issue. If someone is secretly gay, bi, cross dresser, etc, then that employee might be subject to blackmail attempts. Other secrets apply, affairs, fake degrees (or cheating to get a degree), etc.
There is actually a reason for this, people who can be pressured are additional risks. It is an unpleasant part of having clearance, having been through DOD and DOE I have seen the first few rungs of the investigation, I'm sure checking is greater for people who do top secret work, as opposed to IT people who might get a change to see some.
The problem with an effective tarpit is that it ties up one of your sockets as well as the originator's socket. I played with a program to open a socket, and for each incoming packet wait some time and NAK. Too effective, kept the attack socket up for hours.
What are the odds of a legitimate using the same source IP?
The problem with certificates is that there are stored somewhere easier to find than inside someone's head. A certificate is a key anyone can use. But, you say, "I can password the certificate!" So the security comes back to a password again.
For really security conscious users there will be a password on the filesystem, one on the account (login), and one on the certificate. They will be non-trivial and different.
My point is that a certificate by itself is less secure than a password, since anyone can use it. Only by combining the certificate to identify the system and the passwords to prevent misuse will you have acceptable security. The hardest part is finding the user who will actually faithfully use all the available security.
Combine this with human factors, like fingerprint readers, and port knocking and you can reach whatever combination of levels matches your requirements.
Of course Microsoft has figured out a way to deal with this, they will charge the legitimate user again. The object of the program is to generate revenue, not to protect the rights of legitimate users. The only question is if the false positives are accidental, or a case of guilty unless proved innocent.
A few days ago we had a study showing that cell phone radiation protects the brain against Alzheimer's in rodents and now other studies suggest that it causes cancer. I suspect that some (or all) of these are cases of "too much number crunching and too little data."
Sounds a little like the Face on Mars or laying on your back and finding images in clouds. Any set of noisy data will show anything you wish when analyzed with the proper algorithm.
No, I think you are confused about sunk costs. To sum it up, that is the idea that if you spend a lot of money on a bad idea, you must spend more because you have an investment (yes, I simplify). And if Ares was unworkable that would certainly be true. But it appears that it's suboptimal instead, other solutions would work better, but finishing now would result in a workable solution, and getting to the Moon and Mars at the lowest incremental cost.
(Ares now + finish) < (new design)
and that's less in both money and time.
To scrap Ares now would mean that a better program would have to start over and spend money and time on the same design process we have already funded with Ares. That might make sense if there was new and better technology available, but in truth we are probably a decade away for "really better," and the way we will get that technology is by going into space with what we have.
Clearly there are new materials, methods, and propulsion systems coming, but they are not available now. To wait may mean that instead of building new systems we will sit on the sidelines and read about the things other countries are doing. There is only so far behind you can get before it becomes too expensive to stay in the chase. Once America has no relevant tech to contribute, why should other countries include us in future missions?
Ares is not a perfect solution, but "perfect is the enemy of good enough" and we would develop a better system in 2030 if we aren't still using 1995 data and 2010 technology.
A survey by J.D.Powers showed T-Mobil and Verizon pretty much tied in customer satisfaction. TM is cheap, friendly, and competent, VZ has best signal quality. Another survey checked top plans and top signal and had similar results. I fear before you can find the best, you will have to define best for you.
To muddy the waters, it seems that Sprint and Verizon struck a deal to let Sprint customers use the Verizon data network. I'm not sure how that plays for you, clearly people who value call quality now have another way to get it.
What's next, banning the use of televised material, movies, and any presentation using visual aids such as plots? Or does teaching any subject not understandable to someone with a low IQ somehow become prohibited as well?
Making the majority of students use paper books does not make things better for those with limited sight, it just means they spend more per book, have more garbage as the book becomes obsolete, etc. I guess next they will forbid use of any book not available in braille.
I know a group of users who have been using xawtv for several years on Fedora Core 4. Now they want to update the desktop and need a new viewer/DVR which works with their new hardware (Happage USB and dual input PCI cards). The backend stuff for MythTV stopped them, they don't want to take over running a database, having a trained DBA, etc, etc.
Can't find anything any simpler for Linux, I think they're going back to Windows next year, because video is a requirement. Watching normal TV is a bonus, of course. Local cable has NTSC analog and clear QAM digital, internal is S-video. The old setup did the analog and S-video just fine, HDTV is a "nice but not required" at this point. Too many "experts only" software, nothing, even commercial, for end users.
Sure would be nice to see this for US paper currency. Many cash registers are PC based at the motherboard level, and could support an optical mouse just fine. What a great bit of Open Source software it would be to create and release a program people could run in business, etc.
People were mixing "read and test" with recreational content in the early 70s, letting people play tic-tac-toe on a Model 33 Teletype. I have to wonder how this patent is new.