Yes, I go to the mall because there are 2 mitigating factors.
1 - the threat was made by, for all I know, a bunch of script kiddies. From an isolated country that is unlikely to have sympathizers anywhere where people can escape the regime. 2 - how often do terrorists announce their exact target ahead of time and successfully pull off an attack? I'm guessing not often.
But the vast majority of improvisation situations can be eliminated before they ever happen with better communication.
You're putting in new infrastructure if you do it like that. That defeats the appeal of these cars, which was that they can be perfect drop in replacements for fully independent human drivers.
I think the fact that the road has to be highly mapped out beforehand is a pretty big eye-opener for me. Apparently the ability to interpret the structure of the environment in real time is still pretty far off. I would have thought that would be the easy part, and understanding what to do in response to the environment would be the hard part. Is identifying the existence of a traffic light without help really that hard?
Do you mind elaborating? If you honestly found software enjoyable (and presumably you had a decent lifestyle and good hours, or could have found it) why did you leave it for medicine?
Do you regret it? Have you been able to use any skills from your previous life in your new career?
I think your argument is valid for Israel but when you are talking about the US the dynamics change. There's really only three places you can launch cheap rockets at the US from: Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. These countries are in our back yard and sphere of influence and we would definitely stop attackers before they launched (see: cuban missile crisis). That means the only remaining place to hit us from is across the ocean. You CANNOT build something cheaply that will be able to cross the Atlantic or Pacific and still be aimed at a target when it gets here. Plus the intercepting missiles won't have to fly as far so they might actually be cheaper. We also have systems to detect ICBM launches since hurling a nuke halfway across the planet takes a LOT of launch energy and is easily detectable from space. Cruise missiles are harder to detect in the launch phase but no one would argue that they will ever be cheaper than interceptors. Cruising 3,000 miles without being shot down is way more expensive than shooting down what is basically a fast aircraft.
It doesn't amaze you that you can pay over 60 times as much but it STILL is cheaper to operate? And what's the cost of 100 million of those bulbs going 24/7 in terms of military spending to secure energy supply or carbon pollution?
Exactly. Email is NOT secure. You don't know how many servers your email passes through or what they do with it, and you can't guarantee the receiver is protecting the information. Encrypted email is far harder to implement in your network of contacts than a fax machine. Even then, if public key vendors can be hacked/spoofed/compromised, then how can you say encrypted email on a private small business server won't be? Doctors pretty much are obligated to use fax or they will almost certainly end up violating HIPAA.
The IT industry has not been able to provide a superior or even equal solution to fax yet.
Because you still have to figure out during what hours your colleagues on the other side of the world are asleep and at work. You'd probably have to look up the conversion to local solar time anyway to figure this out.
Care to start naming names? My friend's phone would experience extreme UI lag then crash every few days to the point where she had to remove the battery to fix it (simple power cycle didn't remove the lag). Went away after I uninstalled Advanced Task Killer.
I think the point is more that it's not that social networking sites aren't viable... it's that the web changes fast.
I think you are applying the lessons of the past a bit too liberally. For the last 15 years or so, "the web changes fast" has been quite good advice. But now it is maturing. The web has found a lot of roles that it fills quite well and, more importantly, has developed its own institutions. Amazon, Google, EBay, Slashdot (whatever their corporate overlords are called, I forget) - these companies have all been around for a while and they all have reason to keep innovating to stay on top.
Like it or not, parts of the web have become so ingrained into our lives that they have become more like utilities than luxury brands. Facebook is here to stay. It has critical mass and it offers really good features- and is working hard on offering features you don't even know you want yet. You see, that's the key. The internet's modern institutions are making money, and they certainly have the motivation and resources to create (or buy) the next best thing. Gone are the days when some guy in his garage could topple the current leader overnight.
The critical difference between Facebook and AOL? It's the same as the difference between Facebook and MySpace. Both thought they were content companies, but then competing content came out and they were made obselete (ie, AOL->Yahoo and the rest of the internet, MySpace->YouTube and then Facebook). Both missed the real opportunities in their niche- for AOL it was offering (broadband) internet access and for MySpace it was social networking.
The beauty of Facebook is that they don't pretend to be a content company. Rather, they are a utility, one that will integrate and improve the presentation and accessibility of any future content type. I'm not saying Facebook is invincible, because its income looks a bit small for the number of eyeballs it has and there's always the risk of mass user revolt over privacy concerns, but I'd give it a better than even chance.
Oh great, the old "education is much better in the 3rd world" argument. Please. If their education systems were better than ours, they would have better economies.
Here's the reality. In third world countries they sit around memorizing things all day. So when it comes time to take a math or history or english test, they blow it out of the water. But when it comes time to solve a problem, take risks, or do something new, they're... at a complete loss because they don't know what "creativity" is.
The American system is actually pretty damn good. Maybe not in terms of the worst students, but certainly in terms of the best students.
If you haven't already realized, Slashdot is a terrible place to ask this kind of question. People here have a strong individualistic, anti-government slant.
Anyway, I think the best thing you can do is install some red lights, then post police officers in motorcycles around these lights. Every time they see someone break the red light rule, flag them down and give them a ticket. At first the officers will be constantly busy and will be raking in a lot of revenue. Word will spread fast, and eventually you will see people obeying the rules, at least in the intersections where police are known to be. Videotape the intersection with an HD camera for documentation. Later you can buy radar guns for the traffic officers.
You have to make sure the money from tickets goes to the general fund, NOT the police department. Otherwise this will cause all sort of problems.
Beyond that, you should hire a company (or start your own) that can work with you and the city council to implement technological solutions like red light cameras and speeding cameras. The best solution however, is policing because it is proven and the simplest to implement off the bat.
One idea would be to spray large amounts of even smaller debris- fine dust- into these orbits. Perhaps from the moon. It would increase drag for everything, and anything that didn't have active boosting capability (ie, anything that wasn't an active satellite) would eventually fall back to earth, including all debris. The downside would be that satellites would have to carry more propellant to maintain their orbits, increasing the needed booster size and thus overall cost. Not pretty but feasible, effective and fairly benign. If enough debris accumulates up there in the next century we just may have to do this by virtue of not having any other choice.
Another option might be to require that all satellite components be made of or be alloyed with iron so that future satellites and spacecraft could generate magnetic fields to deflect the debris.
Good point. No, it is not newsworthy. This headline is the equivalent of "CS student learns how to use buffer overflow" or "biochemistry student learns how to replicate DNA."
But it makes perfect sense when you realize who is behind what is currently the biggest Super Mileage competition in North America: Shell. And last year the Shell Eco-Marathon was not 5 miles from Cal Poly Pomona. I believe 1st place is $10,000.
As you might expect Shell makes sure that media outlets hear about this kind of stuff. They actually send the teams registering for the competition questionnaires essentially asking them to say something interesting for a potential story.
Gullibility of the media aside, it's still a great project for students and hey, at least Shell *seems* to care about fuel efficiency.
This isn't research. It's just an engineering competition for engineering students. You know, getting out of the classroom and doing hands-on work and all that good stuff.
He did become famous. Just now. When was the last time something you did personally was reported on by the world media? I'm not saying that your criticism is misplaced, just that you're using the wrong argument. More significant than becoming rich or famous is whether you have done anything worthwhile and the answer in this case is no.
The fact of the matter is the US doesn't build roads to the same quality (27inch depth) of the Autobahn
We have an area several times larger than the entire country of Germany to pave, of course we can't build roads with 3 feet of cement, we'd go bankrupt and then some: we'd have to suck up the entire world output of cement for a decade or more to do it.
There are two ways in which electric heat can be said to be "inefficient." First, there are two ways to generate heat from electricity. You can use resistive dissipative heating, which you are thinking of, or you can operate a heat pump. Heat pumps are more common in cold climates and can reach something like 130% efficiency by taking heat from outside and moving it into the cold house- plus the 100% heat dissipation from electric losses in the pump itself. Compare this to a maximum efficiency of 100% for resistive heating alone. The downside of course is that a heat pump is far more expensive than a resistive heater.
However, electric heating is painfully inefficient when you look at the best solution- directly burning the energy source in the home. Think about it: to get that electricity to run your electric heater, the power company has to burn fuel in a power plant. The power plant efficiency is maybe 40%, meaning the remaining 60% of the heat released during combustion gets dumped into the environment. Then, the electricity must be transmitted over the grid which is only maybe 70% efficient. That means resistance heating, though 100% efficient starting at the wall socket, is less than 30% efficient overall when considering the original energy content of the fuel. Burning the fuel to directly obtain its heat is much better than converting it to electricity to transmit it first.
Are you saying every ad you have ever seen contains a product? What about ads from companies like Boeing and Lockheed? Nonspecific ads from companies like Nike and Adidas? Hell, the Visa ads narrated by Morgan Freeman that ran during the olympics? None of them tell you to buy anything specific. Instead, they all convey an image and associate the brand with that image.
I thought Slashdot users were capable of looking at things objectively. I guess I was wrong.
The answer is hydrogen generation. It is a medium term technology (10-30 years) but once the efficiency of electrolysis gets up, it will be one of the best solutions.
Cheap fuel cells for cars may be impractical for a while, but it isn't too early to start thinking about super efficient (and super-expensive) cells that could operate economically on the power grid level. You'd have one electrolyzer and one fuel cell per power plant or per region. During periods of high renewable energy generation (bright/windy days) the excess power would be routed to a hydrogen generation plant. During periods of high demand it would be converted via the fuel cell back into electricity. Or, the hydrogen could be directly sold for use in cars.
If there are issues with sending the power through the grid, the electrolysis station could be moved closer to the windfarms, and the windfarms would export only hydrogen either through pipelines or through tankers rolling out to local gasoline/hydrogen stations, pretty much exactly like is done with gasoline/oil today.
This is why the combination of renewable energy with a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle fleet is such a perfect idea. Instantaneous production rate doesn't matter when you won't be shipping anything out till the end of the day anyway.
It's like a self-replicating virus that arose from the result of a random mutation.
"Ever since the first computers, there have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code that have grouped together to form unexpected protocols."
Could you forward your emails to a personal account on one of the big three webmail providers? IANAL but it seems like that might limit the company's liability while allowing you to automatically archive your emails in a fully searchable format.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, I go to the mall because there are 2 mitigating factors.
1 - the threat was made by, for all I know, a bunch of script kiddies. From an isolated country that is unlikely to have sympathizers anywhere where people can escape the regime.
2 - how often do terrorists announce their exact target ahead of time and successfully pull off an attack? I'm guessing not often.
But the vast majority of improvisation situations can be eliminated before they ever happen with better communication.
You're putting in new infrastructure if you do it like that. That defeats the appeal of these cars, which was that they can be perfect drop in replacements for fully independent human drivers.
I think the fact that the road has to be highly mapped out beforehand is a pretty big eye-opener for me. Apparently the ability to interpret the structure of the environment in real time is still pretty far off. I would have thought that would be the easy part, and understanding what to do in response to the environment would be the hard part. Is identifying the existence of a traffic light without help really that hard?
Do you mind elaborating? If you honestly found software enjoyable (and presumably you had a decent lifestyle and good hours, or could have found it) why did you leave it for medicine?
Do you regret it? Have you been able to use any skills from your previous life in your new career?
I'm facing a similar choice. Thanks.
I think your argument is valid for Israel but when you are talking about the US the dynamics change. There's really only three places you can launch cheap rockets at the US from: Canada, Mexico, and the Caribbean. These countries are in our back yard and sphere of influence and we would definitely stop attackers before they launched (see: cuban missile crisis). That means the only remaining place to hit us from is across the ocean. You CANNOT build something cheaply that will be able to cross the Atlantic or Pacific and still be aimed at a target when it gets here. Plus the intercepting missiles won't have to fly as far so they might actually be cheaper. We also have systems to detect ICBM launches since hurling a nuke halfway across the planet takes a LOT of launch energy and is easily detectable from space. Cruise missiles are harder to detect in the launch phase but no one would argue that they will ever be cheaper than interceptors. Cruising 3,000 miles without being shot down is way more expensive than shooting down what is basically a fast aircraft.
It doesn't amaze you that you can pay over 60 times as much but it STILL is cheaper to operate? And what's the cost of 100 million of those bulbs going 24/7 in terms of military spending to secure energy supply or carbon pollution?
The difference is that one you have to physically break into, the other you can break into over the internet through Tor or a botnet or a virus.
The old fax machine in the corner where everyone's faxes go and anyone can look through them isn't terribly secure either.
Everyone who works in a medical office is required to be educated about and sign a HIPAA compliance form. Every employee is liable.
If someone is willing to go through enough trouble to intercept a company's email, they'll happily do the same for their fax line.
Phone lines are more difficult to break into than a protocol that is passed over the public internet. At least for now.
Damnit, I just read through the whole manual and there was nothing about satellites. You have disappointed me sir.
Exactly. Email is NOT secure. You don't know how many servers your email passes through or what they do with it, and you can't guarantee the receiver is protecting the information. Encrypted email is far harder to implement in your network of contacts than a fax machine. Even then, if public key vendors can be hacked/spoofed/compromised, then how can you say encrypted email on a private small business server won't be? Doctors pretty much are obligated to use fax or they will almost certainly end up violating HIPAA.
The IT industry has not been able to provide a superior or even equal solution to fax yet.
Because you still have to figure out during what hours your colleagues on the other side of the world are asleep and at work. You'd probably have to look up the conversion to local solar time anyway to figure this out.
Care to start naming names? My friend's phone would experience extreme UI lag then crash every few days to the point where she had to remove the battery to fix it (simple power cycle didn't remove the lag). Went away after I uninstalled Advanced Task Killer.
I think the point is more that it's not that social networking sites aren't viable... it's that the web changes fast.
I think you are applying the lessons of the past a bit too liberally. For the last 15 years or so, "the web changes fast" has been quite good advice. But now it is maturing. The web has found a lot of roles that it fills quite well and, more importantly, has developed its own institutions. Amazon, Google, EBay, Slashdot (whatever their corporate overlords are called, I forget) - these companies have all been around for a while and they all have reason to keep innovating to stay on top.
Like it or not, parts of the web have become so ingrained into our lives that they have become more like utilities than luxury brands. Facebook is here to stay. It has critical mass and it offers really good features- and is working hard on offering features you don't even know you want yet. You see, that's the key. The internet's modern institutions are making money, and they certainly have the motivation and resources to create (or buy) the next best thing. Gone are the days when some guy in his garage could topple the current leader overnight.
The critical difference between Facebook and AOL? It's the same as the difference between Facebook and MySpace. Both thought they were content companies, but then competing content came out and they were made obselete (ie, AOL->Yahoo and the rest of the internet, MySpace->YouTube and then Facebook). Both missed the real opportunities in their niche- for AOL it was offering (broadband) internet access and for MySpace it was social networking.
The beauty of Facebook is that they don't pretend to be a content company. Rather, they are a utility, one that will integrate and improve the presentation and accessibility of any future content type. I'm not saying Facebook is invincible, because its income looks a bit small for the number of eyeballs it has and there's always the risk of mass user revolt over privacy concerns, but I'd give it a better than even chance.
Oh great, the old "education is much better in the 3rd world" argument. Please. If their education systems were better than ours, they would have better economies.
Here's the reality. In third world countries they sit around memorizing things all day. So when it comes time to take a math or history or english test, they blow it out of the water. But when it comes time to solve a problem, take risks, or do something new, they're... at a complete loss because they don't know what "creativity" is.
The American system is actually pretty damn good. Maybe not in terms of the worst students, but certainly in terms of the best students.
If you haven't already realized, Slashdot is a terrible place to ask this kind of question. People here have a strong individualistic, anti-government slant.
Anyway, I think the best thing you can do is install some red lights, then post police officers in motorcycles around these lights. Every time they see someone break the red light rule, flag them down and give them a ticket. At first the officers will be constantly busy and will be raking in a lot of revenue. Word will spread fast, and eventually you will see people obeying the rules, at least in the intersections where police are known to be. Videotape the intersection with an HD camera for documentation. Later you can buy radar guns for the traffic officers.
You have to make sure the money from tickets goes to the general fund, NOT the police department. Otherwise this will cause all sort of problems.
Beyond that, you should hire a company (or start your own) that can work with you and the city council to implement technological solutions like red light cameras and speeding cameras. The best solution however, is policing because it is proven and the simplest to implement off the bat.
Not nearly as hard as some of the other proposals such as shooting it down with lasers or sending up robotic ships to collect the debris.
One idea would be to spray large amounts of even smaller debris- fine dust- into these orbits. Perhaps from the moon. It would increase drag for everything, and anything that didn't have active boosting capability (ie, anything that wasn't an active satellite) would eventually fall back to earth, including all debris. The downside would be that satellites would have to carry more propellant to maintain their orbits, increasing the needed booster size and thus overall cost. Not pretty but feasible, effective and fairly benign. If enough debris accumulates up there in the next century we just may have to do this by virtue of not having any other choice.
Another option might be to require that all satellite components be made of or be alloyed with iron so that future satellites and spacecraft could generate magnetic fields to deflect the debris.
Good point. No, it is not newsworthy. This headline is the equivalent of "CS student learns how to use buffer overflow" or "biochemistry student learns how to replicate DNA."
But it makes perfect sense when you realize who is behind what is currently the biggest Super Mileage competition in North America: Shell. And last year the Shell Eco-Marathon was not 5 miles from Cal Poly Pomona. I believe 1st place is $10,000.
As you might expect Shell makes sure that media outlets hear about this kind of stuff. They actually send the teams registering for the competition questionnaires essentially asking them to say something interesting for a potential story.
Gullibility of the media aside, it's still a great project for students and hey, at least Shell *seems* to care about fuel efficiency.
This isn't research. It's just an engineering competition for engineering students. You know, getting out of the classroom and doing hands-on work and all that good stuff.
He did become famous. Just now. When was the last time something you did personally was reported on by the world media? I'm not saying that your criticism is misplaced, just that you're using the wrong argument. More significant than becoming rich or famous is whether you have done anything worthwhile and the answer in this case is no.
The fact of the matter is the US doesn't build roads to the same quality (27inch depth) of the Autobahn
We have an area several times larger than the entire country of Germany to pave, of course we can't build roads with 3 feet of cement, we'd go bankrupt and then some: we'd have to suck up the entire world output of cement for a decade or more to do it.
There are two ways in which electric heat can be said to be "inefficient." First, there are two ways to generate heat from electricity. You can use resistive dissipative heating, which you are thinking of, or you can operate a heat pump. Heat pumps are more common in cold climates and can reach something like 130% efficiency by taking heat from outside and moving it into the cold house- plus the 100% heat dissipation from electric losses in the pump itself. Compare this to a maximum efficiency of 100% for resistive heating alone. The downside of course is that a heat pump is far more expensive than a resistive heater.
However, electric heating is painfully inefficient when you look at the best solution- directly burning the energy source in the home. Think about it: to get that electricity to run your electric heater, the power company has to burn fuel in a power plant. The power plant efficiency is maybe 40%, meaning the remaining 60% of the heat released during combustion gets dumped into the environment. Then, the electricity must be transmitted over the grid which is only maybe 70% efficient. That means resistance heating, though 100% efficient starting at the wall socket, is less than 30% efficient overall when considering the original energy content of the fuel. Burning the fuel to directly obtain its heat is much better than converting it to electricity to transmit it first.
Are you saying every ad you have ever seen contains a product? What about ads from companies like Boeing and Lockheed? Nonspecific ads from companies like Nike and Adidas? Hell, the Visa ads narrated by Morgan Freeman that ran during the olympics? None of them tell you to buy anything specific. Instead, they all convey an image and associate the brand with that image.
I thought Slashdot users were capable of looking at things objectively. I guess I was wrong.
The answer is hydrogen generation. It is a medium term technology (10-30 years) but once the efficiency of electrolysis gets up, it will be one of the best solutions.
Cheap fuel cells for cars may be impractical for a while, but it isn't too early to start thinking about super efficient (and super-expensive) cells that could operate economically on the power grid level. You'd have one electrolyzer and one fuel cell per power plant or per region. During periods of high renewable energy generation (bright/windy days) the excess power would be routed to a hydrogen generation plant. During periods of high demand it would be converted via the fuel cell back into electricity. Or, the hydrogen could be directly sold for use in cars.
If there are issues with sending the power through the grid, the electrolysis station could be moved closer to the windfarms, and the windfarms would export only hydrogen either through pipelines or through tankers rolling out to local gasoline/hydrogen stations, pretty much exactly like is done with gasoline/oil today.
This is why the combination of renewable energy with a hydrogen fuel cell vehicle fleet is such a perfect idea. Instantaneous production rate doesn't matter when you won't be shipping anything out till the end of the day anyway.
It's like a self-replicating virus that arose from the result of a random mutation.
"Ever since the first computers,
there have always been
ghosts in the machine.
Random segments of code that
have grouped together to
form unexpected protocols."
Could you forward your emails to a personal account on one of the big three webmail providers? IANAL but it seems like that might limit the company's liability while allowing you to automatically archive your emails in a fully searchable format.