I didn't ask can we get to the speed of light, I asked "does space travel become possible?" We would just need to go at some % speed of light. I thought this was impossible at the moment due to accelerating == throwing stuff over the side, and I had assumed even with EmDrive physics defying abilities it would still take "too bloody long". But perhaps not is the point.
The fact that time slows for you as you go faster; doesn't this imply that if you could travel at the speed of light, then you could reach anywhere in the universe in 0 relative (to you) time? I mean the thing you were aiming for might be gone by the time you got there, but still. If that EmDrive thing is a real thing, doesn't long distance space travel become a real possability?
Astrology and Homoeopathy are both extremely effective, especially for difficult conditions such as mental health issues. Now sure, this is only due to the placebo effect, but doctors are pretty rubbish at exploiting the placebo and the placebo is extremely powerful! Something seems to prevent them from telling a patient nonsense that will make them believe they will get better and thus actually help them get better. Astrologists and Homoeopaths have no such issues, so this politician is completely correct that utilising astrologists and homoeopaths could help take the load of the NHS.
A millisecond is something like 4million instructions, so "a few milliseconds" can be a lot of work. A heap allocation that took a few milliseconds would be a significant concern. Also i think there is some confusion about "hard real time". Hard realtime simply means that a particular action must occur within a certain maximum time or the system is deemed to have failed. It's not about speed so much, such systems are generally running slower, it's about determinism. However it is correct to assume such systems are allocating memory less frequently. I'm getting the impression that you seem convinced that a GC has no drawbacks, only foolish critics. My own experience does not bear that out. One can work around the issues by using pooling and other techniques to prevent collections; but fundamentally a GC has a different mode of operation that means it works poorly for large numbers of objects tied to a medium term lifespan, suh as that crossing an I/O operation.
C++11 provides a new threading library which, don't get me wrong, I'm very happy about. I can finally write cross-platform thread related code without having to reach for boost or similar. However as with all languages (of which I am aware), that use threads, I can't simply look at a piece of code in isolation and determine if it is thread safe or not. There is no linkage between threads and data ownership. I still haven't had a chance to play with Rust, but what they claim is that all data is thread owned, so if you tried to write code that accessed the same variable from multiple threads it would not compile. The compiler catches the race conditions for you. Which sounds pretty good. Now in practise, you end up building fairly complicated abstractions on top of threads to avoid these kinds of issues (think tasks and contexts), so it'd need to be tried in anger to see if it made any real difference. Still it is very interesting and uniquely different.
Depends what you mean by resolve. Rust does static checking that data is only owned by one thread at once. If you need shared state then you are back to manual memory management again, as far as I know (Rust is a rapidly moving target so anything I say today might be out of date tomorrow).
Just as an addendum: This is the feature that is missing from all current programming languages that I am familiar with, and the principle reason why threads suck as a general concept. I can't look at any data object and know it's thread ownership. I have to infer that by understanding the rest of the program. This is why we end up with elaborate task based libraries, wrapping threads in "contexts" and being careful not to cross boundaries. What Rust is doing here sounds awesome, but I'd need to try it on some real project to see if it's actually useful. Still I greatly appreciate your critique.
That may as well be an eternity in any hard real-time application, or various finance systems as an example. The point isn't that you can't use Java/.NET in many many applications, it's just that there is a reason why C++ is still necessary for certain situations. This Rust thing looks like a potentially better systems level language (or it want's to be); addressing a number of issues that no language in this same space currently does.
Yeah, maybe you should re-read what I wrote before making assumptions. This is not a problem unique to C++, but something Rust appears to try and address.
I've never used Rust or even heard of it prior to this article, but your post here makes me hope that it gains mainstream acceptance. Modern Garbage Collectors are fine and work well in a large majority of uses cases but they fall down badly when the majority of your allocations are transitory objects of intermediate lifespan. Objects that last the length of the application run - fine, objects that are created and destroyed quickly - fine, objects that exist for the duration of an async I/O operation? Not fine. The GC becomes a scaleability bottleneck; the parallel processing eventually being throttled by that GC that can only run as a single thread (more or less). So systems that need high performance, large scalability and distributed networking etc are invariably written in C++. But in these C++ systems, ownership design is one of the most vexing issues and must be very carefully considered at all points, without any compiler support. The whole concept of threads and data ownership has exactly zero level built in conceptual support, and that sucks. It sounds as though Rust has been designed to resolve these issues for systems programmers. Which is a great idea.
Your argument here seems to imply that Rust is this great replacement for Java, and then argue why that make no sense. But it seems to me that Rust is really a great replacement for C++, and the kinds of systems that cannot suffer the burden of a GC.
[citation needed] As I have said previously on slashdot. Australia uses only cane sugar and obesity levels are similar. I think the issue is simply swapping fat for sugar.
Commercial drivers license: If you have a full drivers license and a GPS, what more actually functional skill do you need? What is the point of an additional drivers license?
Appropriate inspected vehicle: This is NSW so that is done every year. Frankly, the most poorly maintained vehicles seem to be Taxi's from my experience, so I don't think a special law is required here.
Insurance: Well that's a given, and from what I understand Uber provide their own insurance, so nothing more to do here
Now I do think that there should be additional regulation. Drivers should be required to pass a police check, not be a registered sex offender, and have a certain standard for their driving record. This would be fair and reasonable. Everything else is government wielding power for the sake of it or trying to protect entrenched interests ($500 000 license? All this extra red tape? For what? Taxis that cannot be found at 2 in the morning?). I fully support disruptive change to this industry, and I believe that it is completely moral for Uber to ignore an outdated legal framework to achieve this.
Wrong. The license fee is $500 000 odd. If they got rid of this and then said "but you must get a special drivers license and pass a police check" this would be appropriate. The point is that the laws need to change and Uber is trying to force that change. Which I agree with.
This is exactly the point. Uber is operating outside of the law because the law in this case is retrograde and needs to be updated to allow for the disruptive effects of technology change. Taxi licenses need to be unlimited and much cheaper and available to anyone without them having to join the existing cartels. So yes, Uber is acting outside the existing legal framework to try and force change that will benefit everyone. (There still needs to be regulation here, but it needs to be based on modern realities). Now I've seen this kind of thing before; Napster comes to mind, and they didn't fair so well. But you can't erase a good idea from peoples minds, so change is inevitable, it's just a matter of how long. Uber might just have deep enough pockets to bring that change more quickly.
As a side note; I see nothing wrong with companies violating laws that are clearly wrong, in order to bring about change. The old US of A didn't seem to have a problem with this in their very early days either.
No their not. There is an extremely loose reference to Mirror Neurons, and that's all the science you are going to get. The rest is anecdote and persuasive reasoning. Frankly it's crap. But why are we surprised? Anything like the development of the most complex structure we know of in the universe (the human brain), is not going to be an easy (do X + Y == Best Outcome For All Developing Brains). People have their ideas and then move on to pushing an idealogical agenda with all confidence. Maybe their right, maybe their wrong, but to call this "parenting based on science" is just flat out nonsense.
At the end is a bit of a reference to some ways of teaching kids based on some psychotherapy concepts. It looks pretty good to me. I try everything and keep what works.
There are times when I do things that I think are pretty smart, and then I see something like this and am humbled. It staggers the imagination to envisage how this Albert fellow was able to design this incredible machine. It's marvellous to watch, and beautiful in its operation. This is how Fourier analysis should be taught! Nothing has brought it more alive for me than watching this documentary. I desperately want one; I don't think I've ever seen a machine more beautiful.
Not true. I live in the UK and do not pay the TV license as I don't watch broadcast television. Without the license you can still play this game (and listen to the radio, and watch programs on the BBC site that are not live).
The US comparison is a bit of a sidetrack, and really only used to suggest how broken the UK's public health care system is. They main thrust here was to compare with the Australian system that is a mix between public and private. Private is incentivised by increased tax on higher income unless you have private health cover. Medicare (public health cover) will cover a portion of all private sessions even if you have no insurance, which further incentivises people to go private as it is more affordable. There are no silly rules about which doctor you can see. And doctors have no incentive (and more explicitly are not prevented) from referring you to specialists. In addition, as there is this good mix of public and private, the public system is not so separated as it is in the UK. This means that public GPs know what services might be available if you go private and even suggest it.
So in Australia you get: Cheap affordable health care, particularly if something serious has gone wrong (it will be free).
You get competition. I can't stress enough what a difference this makes. Yes the train system here in the UK is completely busted, but that's because they privatised a monopoly. That doesn't work. Allowing GP's to charge a little more for better service makes an enormous difference. I always paid a bit for each GP visit in Aus, but the value was completely worth it. And I only had to pay the gap between the base rate (covered by medicare) and the private provider. Here in the UK I have to pay the whole lot. In addition, as medical is at a state level, you actually get competition between the states that drives better outcomes by states learning from each other. You also get the ability to fairly easily go private when you need to. And it will be covered to some extent even without insurance. I never realised how effective this system was until I learning the "joy" of an underfunded universal health system.
The NHS is really broken, people in the UK are just generally unfamiliar with alternatives (as was I before living here). Care can be good when you get it, but the beast is a big inefficient bureaucratic monster.
See there would be logic to this if things like Autism killed you. They could encourage a high fat diet for example, or anything else that would take you out young and quickly (free base jumping lessons for the unemployed?). But Autism is often (look at the stats) a drain on the public purse for the lifetime of the Autistic. Common sense alone would suggest invest a little now to reduce the overall burden (no need to consider ethical issues for the moment). But there is no common sense here. The NHS has demonstrated to me the absolute categorical failure of large centralised planning (the same thing that undoes communism). The US may have a messed up health system; but it looks like if you have insurance you actually get timely effective treatment! Give me your broken capitalist model over this broken socialist model any day of the week.
Just to add to the "moronically inefficient" bit. Now that my son has finally been recognised as Autistic (by going privately) we gain access to various services, one of which is a special nursery school. The staff of which are complaining they don't have enough students and spend most afternoons with no students at all! The absolute insanity of this makes me unbelievably angry. Between the ages of 2-5 is the only time you have to intervene in an Autistics life to really improve outcomes and here they are rarely diagnosed before school, while the intervention services sit by idle.
Rubbish. Living here now in the UK (from Australia) for the past couple of years, I can categorically attest that the NHS is both tragically underfunded and conversely, moronically inefficient. Yes I can see a GP for free, but quotas and waiting lists are ridiculous and it simply means that you don't get referred and you don't get treated unless bits are literally dropping off you. Turns out my son has Autism; pity the UK hasn't grasped the concept of "early intervention". The Australian system of a good mix of public and private and actually looking at preventative healthcare (skin cancer checks, early intervention for Autism), is light years ahead of the hopelessly outdated and underperforming NHS.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't ask can we get to the speed of light, I asked "does space travel become possible?" We would just need to go at some % speed of light. I thought this was impossible at the moment due to accelerating == throwing stuff over the side, and I had assumed even with EmDrive physics defying abilities it would still take "too bloody long". But perhaps not is the point.
The fact that time slows for you as you go faster; doesn't this imply that if you could travel at the speed of light, then you could reach anywhere in the universe in 0 relative (to you) time? I mean the thing you were aiming for might be gone by the time you got there, but still. If that EmDrive thing is a real thing, doesn't long distance space travel become a real possability?
Actually, the placebo effect still works even when you know it's just a placebo. Go on, give it a try. You'll feel better.
Astrology and Homoeopathy are both extremely effective, especially for difficult conditions such as mental health issues. Now sure, this is only due to the placebo effect, but doctors are pretty rubbish at exploiting the placebo and the placebo is extremely powerful! Something seems to prevent them from telling a patient nonsense that will make them believe they will get better and thus actually help them get better. Astrologists and Homoeopaths have no such issues, so this politician is completely correct that utilising astrologists and homoeopaths could help take the load of the NHS.
A millisecond is something like 4million instructions, so "a few milliseconds" can be a lot of work. A heap allocation that took a few milliseconds would be a significant concern. Also i think there is some confusion about "hard real time". Hard realtime simply means that a particular action must occur within a certain maximum time or the system is deemed to have failed. It's not about speed so much, such systems are generally running slower, it's about determinism. However it is correct to assume such systems are allocating memory less frequently. I'm getting the impression that you seem convinced that a GC has no drawbacks, only foolish critics. My own experience does not bear that out. One can work around the issues by using pooling and other techniques to prevent collections; but fundamentally a GC has a different mode of operation that means it works poorly for large numbers of objects tied to a medium term lifespan, suh as that crossing an I/O operation.
C++11 provides a new threading library which, don't get me wrong, I'm very happy about. I can finally write cross-platform thread related code without having to reach for boost or similar. However as with all languages (of which I am aware), that use threads, I can't simply look at a piece of code in isolation and determine if it is thread safe or not. There is no linkage between threads and data ownership. I still haven't had a chance to play with Rust, but what they claim is that all data is thread owned, so if you tried to write code that accessed the same variable from multiple threads it would not compile. The compiler catches the race conditions for you. Which sounds pretty good. Now in practise, you end up building fairly complicated abstractions on top of threads to avoid these kinds of issues (think tasks and contexts), so it'd need to be tried in anger to see if it made any real difference. Still it is very interesting and uniquely different.
Perhaps you should have tried to comprehend what I wrote then.
Depends what you mean by resolve. Rust does static checking that data is only owned by one thread at once. If you need shared state then you are back to manual memory management again, as far as I know (Rust is a rapidly moving target so anything I say today might be out of date tomorrow).
Just as an addendum: This is the feature that is missing from all current programming languages that I am familiar with, and the principle reason why threads suck as a general concept. I can't look at any data object and know it's thread ownership. I have to infer that by understanding the rest of the program. This is why we end up with elaborate task based libraries, wrapping threads in "contexts" and being careful not to cross boundaries. What Rust is doing here sounds awesome, but I'd need to try it on some real project to see if it's actually useful. Still I greatly appreciate your critique.
need a-few-milliseconds-or-less pause times
That may as well be an eternity in any hard real-time application, or various finance systems as an example. The point isn't that you can't use Java/.NET in many many applications, it's just that there is a reason why C++ is still necessary for certain situations. This Rust thing looks like a potentially better systems level language (or it want's to be); addressing a number of issues that no language in this same space currently does.
Yeah, maybe you should re-read what I wrote before making assumptions. This is not a problem unique to C++, but something Rust appears to try and address.
I've never used Rust or even heard of it prior to this article, but your post here makes me hope that it gains mainstream acceptance. Modern Garbage Collectors are fine and work well in a large majority of uses cases but they fall down badly when the majority of your allocations are transitory objects of intermediate lifespan. Objects that last the length of the application run - fine, objects that are created and destroyed quickly - fine, objects that exist for the duration of an async I/O operation? Not fine. The GC becomes a scaleability bottleneck; the parallel processing eventually being throttled by that GC that can only run as a single thread (more or less). So systems that need high performance, large scalability and distributed networking etc are invariably written in C++. But in these C++ systems, ownership design is one of the most vexing issues and must be very carefully considered at all points, without any compiler support. The whole concept of threads and data ownership has exactly zero level built in conceptual support, and that sucks. It sounds as though Rust has been designed to resolve these issues for systems programmers. Which is a great idea.
Your argument here seems to imply that Rust is this great replacement for Java, and then argue why that make no sense. But it seems to me that Rust is really a great replacement for C++, and the kinds of systems that cannot suffer the burden of a GC.
[citation needed] As I have said previously on slashdot. Australia uses only cane sugar and obesity levels are similar. I think the issue is simply swapping fat for sugar.
There should be appropriate laws.
Commercial drivers license: If you have a full drivers license and a GPS, what more actually functional skill do you need? What is the point of an additional drivers license?
Appropriate inspected vehicle: This is NSW so that is done every year. Frankly, the most poorly maintained vehicles seem to be Taxi's from my experience, so I don't think a special law is required here.
Insurance: Well that's a given, and from what I understand Uber provide their own insurance, so nothing more to do here
Now I do think that there should be additional regulation. Drivers should be required to pass a police check, not be a registered sex offender, and have a certain standard for their driving record. This would be fair and reasonable. Everything else is government wielding power for the sake of it or trying to protect entrenched interests ($500 000 license? All this extra red tape? For what? Taxis that cannot be found at 2 in the morning?). I fully support disruptive change to this industry, and I believe that it is completely moral for Uber to ignore an outdated legal framework to achieve this.
Wrong. The license fee is $500 000 odd. If they got rid of this and then said "but you must get a special drivers license and pass a police check" this would be appropriate. The point is that the laws need to change and Uber is trying to force that change. Which I agree with.
Wrong. Taxi licenses are $500 000 or so in Aus and are rationed. Uber wants that to change and so do I.
This is exactly the point. Uber is operating outside of the law because the law in this case is retrograde and needs to be updated to allow for the disruptive effects of technology change. Taxi licenses need to be unlimited and much cheaper and available to anyone without them having to join the existing cartels. So yes, Uber is acting outside the existing legal framework to try and force change that will benefit everyone. (There still needs to be regulation here, but it needs to be based on modern realities). Now I've seen this kind of thing before; Napster comes to mind, and they didn't fair so well. But you can't erase a good idea from peoples minds, so change is inevitable, it's just a matter of how long. Uber might just have deep enough pockets to bring that change more quickly.
As a side note; I see nothing wrong with companies violating laws that are clearly wrong, in order to bring about change. The old US of A didn't seem to have a problem with this in their very early days either.
No their not. There is an extremely loose reference to Mirror Neurons, and that's all the science you are going to get. The rest is anecdote and persuasive reasoning. Frankly it's crap. But why are we surprised? Anything like the development of the most complex structure we know of in the universe (the human brain), is not going to be an easy (do X + Y == Best Outcome For All Developing Brains). People have their ideas and then move on to pushing an idealogical agenda with all confidence. Maybe their right, maybe their wrong, but to call this "parenting based on science" is just flat out nonsense.
At the end is a bit of a reference to some ways of teaching kids based on some psychotherapy concepts. It looks pretty good to me. I try everything and keep what works.
There are times when I do things that I think are pretty smart, and then I see something like this and am humbled. It staggers the imagination to envisage how this Albert fellow was able to design this incredible machine. It's marvellous to watch, and beautiful in its operation. This is how Fourier analysis should be taught! Nothing has brought it more alive for me than watching this documentary. I desperately want one; I don't think I've ever seen a machine more beautiful.
Your signature contains more than a trace irony. If only stupidity hurt.
Unfortunately, RTGs don't come in multiple sizes, so you can't get a 1/10th scale RTG that weighs 6kg and is 15 liters in volume.
What do you mean RTGs don't come in multiple sizes? How'd they fit them into pacemakers then?
Not true. I live in the UK and do not pay the TV license as I don't watch broadcast television. Without the license you can still play this game (and listen to the radio, and watch programs on the BBC site that are not live).
the US comparison is bogus
The US comparison is a bit of a sidetrack, and really only used to suggest how broken the UK's public health care system is. They main thrust here was to compare with the Australian system that is a mix between public and private. Private is incentivised by increased tax on higher income unless you have private health cover. Medicare (public health cover) will cover a portion of all private sessions even if you have no insurance, which further incentivises people to go private as it is more affordable. There are no silly rules about which doctor you can see. And doctors have no incentive (and more explicitly are not prevented) from referring you to specialists. In addition, as there is this good mix of public and private, the public system is not so separated as it is in the UK. This means that public GPs know what services might be available if you go private and even suggest it.
So in Australia you get: Cheap affordable health care, particularly if something serious has gone wrong (it will be free). You get competition. I can't stress enough what a difference this makes. Yes the train system here in the UK is completely busted, but that's because they privatised a monopoly. That doesn't work. Allowing GP's to charge a little more for better service makes an enormous difference. I always paid a bit for each GP visit in Aus, but the value was completely worth it. And I only had to pay the gap between the base rate (covered by medicare) and the private provider. Here in the UK I have to pay the whole lot. In addition, as medical is at a state level, you actually get competition between the states that drives better outcomes by states learning from each other. You also get the ability to fairly easily go private when you need to. And it will be covered to some extent even without insurance. I never realised how effective this system was until I learning the "joy" of an underfunded universal health system.
The NHS is really broken, people in the UK are just generally unfamiliar with alternatives (as was I before living here). Care can be good when you get it, but the beast is a big inefficient bureaucratic monster.
See there would be logic to this if things like Autism killed you. They could encourage a high fat diet for example, or anything else that would take you out young and quickly (free base jumping lessons for the unemployed?). But Autism is often (look at the stats) a drain on the public purse for the lifetime of the Autistic. Common sense alone would suggest invest a little now to reduce the overall burden (no need to consider ethical issues for the moment). But there is no common sense here. The NHS has demonstrated to me the absolute categorical failure of large centralised planning (the same thing that undoes communism). The US may have a messed up health system; but it looks like if you have insurance you actually get timely effective treatment! Give me your broken capitalist model over this broken socialist model any day of the week.
Just to add to the "moronically inefficient" bit. Now that my son has finally been recognised as Autistic (by going privately) we gain access to various services, one of which is a special nursery school. The staff of which are complaining they don't have enough students and spend most afternoons with no students at all! The absolute insanity of this makes me unbelievably angry. Between the ages of 2-5 is the only time you have to intervene in an Autistics life to really improve outcomes and here they are rarely diagnosed before school, while the intervention services sit by idle.
I just receive the care that I need.
Rubbish. Living here now in the UK (from Australia) for the past couple of years, I can categorically attest that the NHS is both tragically underfunded and conversely, moronically inefficient. Yes I can see a GP for free, but quotas and waiting lists are ridiculous and it simply means that you don't get referred and you don't get treated unless bits are literally dropping off you. Turns out my son has Autism; pity the UK hasn't grasped the concept of "early intervention". The Australian system of a good mix of public and private and actually looking at preventative healthcare (skin cancer checks, early intervention for Autism), is light years ahead of the hopelessly outdated and underperforming NHS.