Wireless bandwidth prices are just going to increase. They are like IPv4 - limited and almost completely used. Reallocating TV space and other frequencies to wireless just postpones the inevitable a few years....
Quite the opposite, actually. I would expect them to decrease over time like everything else in technology. As economies of scale kick in, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to build a cellular site. Therefore, the "we don't have enough cell sites to handle the bandwidth" argument doesn't really fly. And ultimately, bandwidth is only constrained if you don't have enough towers. You could put picocells in every business in a downtown area, for example, and you would never have a bandwidth problem because instead of all those phones shouting, they would be whispering at minimum gain. In the same vein, cellular providers could provide more seamless handoff functionality between towers and Wi-Fi and it would have the same effect.
I don't hear any significant mass outcry against this, except from Geeks.
And there's a reason for that. Geeks understand the technology and know where these limits will inevitably lead. Most average people don't have the slightest clue yet. You can bet that when the companies start shaking down their users with a thousand dollar bandwidth bill because they showed a handful of YouTube videos at their holiday party, those average users will throw a fit, but by then it will be too late to fight it because the policies will be entrenched, and after all, nobody complained for the first two years, so the system must be okay. That's why it is our responsibility as geeks to pitch a fit at the top of our lungs and scream until Congress listens.
Now, that your phone is sending 50Mb (fifty f***ing MB!) of data every day - that's shocking.
If you were on an EDGE connection, that's anywhere from one to eight percent of saturating the pipe (depending on local configuration), and that's just this background traffic. Yeah, that's pretty bad.
Automated testing rarely finds new defects, but is great at making sure old defects don't pop pack up.
Depends on what sort of testing you are doing and on how complex the inputs/outputs of your functional units are. I recently put together a test suite for HeaderDoc (a documentation generation tool). The test suite treats the entire parser core as a single functional unit for testing purposes. At the moment, there are just shy of 300 parser and/or C preprocessor tests, all of which consist of a blob of input and the expected output from the parser core. Whenever anything changes in the parser, if it changes the output for any of the tests, I find out about it. This has only found an old defect popping back up once (and that was while I was deliberately reworking a poorly thought out fix to do it the right way). It finds new defects with regularity. Sometimes the changes are expected, so I approve them. Most of the time, they're errors, though, so I go back and figure out why the behavior changed unexpectedly.
Now obviously this design does not have test coverage for every line of code---there are probably edge cases somewhere that aren't hit by any of the parser tests despite my best effort---but it has been immensely successful at preventing the introduction of new bugs into the code. I've caught literally dozens of bugs before committing that would otherwise have made it into the code. Given that many of the programming languages supported are rarely exercised, those bugs would probably not have been caught otherwise.
More importantly, such a test suite can only determine whether something changed. That means that it cannot discover existing bugs, only new bugs. Similarly, it cannot say definitively whether the change is correct, incorrect, or unimportant. Those are things that only human-driven QA testing can achieve.
Similarly, when it comes to UI testing, automated tests are unlikely to show new bugs unless they involve pixel-by-pixel comparison of entire screens (in which case the false positive rate could be astoundingly high, depending on the app). So for UI testing, QA testers are absolutely essential.
That's true for someone who wants a serious relationship or a sexual relationship and will accept nothing else. It leaves little or no room though for deep, satisfying, rewarding friendships that you might have with someone who isn't attractive to you but has a big heart, a strong spirit, or a perspective on life that you truly appreciate.
Well, there's certainly room for sites to make new friends---maybe even for the same site to provide for that functionality and date searching---but at that point, you're clearly looking for a rather different function than a dating site was intended to provide.
I admit that this is true, but is it ultimately a good thing? It would be "a godsend" in the short term. In the long term, wouldn't it also provide a means to run away from confronting one's own fears, overcoming them through persistent effort, and becoming a stronger person? Don't we do enough of that already?
You're confronting those fears asking someone out no matter what. The point was that some people have a tendency to recede into themselves, and if they get turned down too many times, they don't ever really recover. This could allow those sorts of people to get back on the horse again, knowing that although there's a risk, at least the decked isn't stacked 10:1 against them.
The problem is that the patents on these systems make it less likely and more expensive for a single comprehensive service to offer both. It is one potential example of how the patent system actually retards progress.
Patents retard progress inherently. There is no such thing as a good software patent, and this one is no exception. It likely means that the sorts of dating sites I want to see won't happen until I'm too old to care about them. The very definition of hell is corporate ownership of ideas.
And no one goes out looking for someone with deformities or obesity and VERY few people can seriously "look past" them.
That's actually not true. Multiple scientificstudies show that most people tend to have a preference for other people of comparable levels of attractiveness and weight. People who are a little overweight tend to shoot for people a little overweight on average. People who are morbidly obese tend to shoot for people who are morbidly obese.
Eharmony is for people who want to be serious and have a good LIFE.
This mess is for people who want to remain as shallow as rain puddles.
Not at all. Let's face it, looks might not be everything, but they are important. It's only shallow if that's your only criterion.
If a dating site has a prefilter that somehow magically figures out what you find physically attractive and only shows you those matches, that's tens of thousands of profiles you wouldn't have considered anyway that you no longer have to look through.
Also, it could be set up in such a way that you only see each other if you both are likely to find the other attractive. That would be a huge win because it would save an awful lot of awkwardness when one person likes the other but not vice-versa. For people who are intimidated by such social interaction, that would be a godsend.
Combine that with something like eHarmony's matching scheme, and you could rapidly narrow down the choices to the dozen or so people that might actually work out, instead of having to manually weed out the million that wouldn't.
That's why the statement, "No scientific study has demonstrated homeopathic preparations to have an effect greater than a placebo," cannot be factual if it's been studied 20 times.
Actually, it could. You are assuming that the homeopathic treatment is no different than the placebo, whereas in reality it could be more harmful than the placebo.
For example, consider a shotgun as a cancer cure. No matter how many times you study it, shooting someone will almost certainly not result in an improvement.
Meanwhile, fucking *sports drinks*, which are meant to hydrate you, have sodium in them.
Highly active people drink a lot during periods of heavy exercise. Sports drinks contain sodium because if you drink too much pure water, you would be at risk of water intoxication, a potentially fatal condition.
That said, they contain only small amounts of sodium. Too much sodium would dehydrate you.
The idea that drinking water is a miracle cure for lethargy, headaches, etc, let alone asthma and respiratory ailments, is bunk, unsupported by evidence.
Come again? Most headaches are caused by sinus congestion, much of which is caused by allergies. Do you know how your body fights allergies? It produces mucus. Guess what your body has to have enough of to produce mucus that's thin enough to clean out your sinuses? Yup. You guessed it. Water.
Asthma? It's also basically an allergic reaction. Guess how your body fights it? Right again. It produces mucus.
That's not saying that adding extra water will necessarily cure those problems, but not getting enough water definitely exacerbates them, and anybody who says otherwise is kidding him/herself.
But the claim that "most people are dehydrated" is pure, unadulterated bullshit, unsupported by any credible evidence.
Actually, there's good reason to believe that the older we get, the more we become chronically dehydrated. Our blood thickens to the point that by the time you're in your 90s, it can be difficult to take blood because it clots in the needle/container. This is one of the reasons why older people have significantly increased risk of DVTs, strokes, heart attacks, etc.
Now whether this is caused by a lack of thirst sensation (in which case, drinking more water each day will improve things) or by a physiological change (in which case, it won't) is a different question; I have no idea about that.
Would you sit on your ass for, say, 600 bucks a month?
If I fully owned my own home and the ground under it (no rent, no HOA dues, etc.), subtract $150 per month for utilities, and that's still enough to eat out for two meals almost every day. So although I wouldn't sit on my backside, I probably wouldn't work, either. Instead, I'd spend my time doing something more meaningful than working to make a profit for someone else---creating art or music, teaching, social programs for the poor, etc.
On the flip side, if I were renting, $600 per month wouldn't cover the base rent for a mobile home site or a tiny studio apartment. At minimum wage, I would still have to work at least twenty hours per week on top of that $600 per month just to cover base rent, utilities, and bulk food from Target or Costco. At $600 per month, I'd either be homeless or sharing a studio apartment with twelve other people.
Don't you have anything else on the TV where you live?
Nope. They had a second TV station in our state for a little while, but it was too liberal, so nobody watched it. I think it was called PBS or something.
Wait, did you just say FOX News lied? I'm shocked! Shocked, I say! Shocked that suck a distinguished and reputable news source would be so disingenuous.
Next thing you know, you'll tell me that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy aren't real, or that there hasn't been a truly fiscally conservative Republican since pre-Reagan.
No, I'm quite certain that you're just misunderstanding the meaning of the word "live". It was live when it was recorded.
That said, if you would prefer "insane but without requiring the sun's total output for 3 billion years", build a giant tether that extends from Mars to Venus. Let their orbital velocities cancel each other out and they should drift together on their own. The energy needed to build such a thing is probably infeasible, but at least the net energy required for the orbit change itself would be zero.:-D
Unless the previous person blew high enough that there's residual alcohol inside the machine.
As far as I'm concerned, probable cause means probable cause. If they want to stop everybody at random checkpoints like the gestapo, fine, but don't make people who seem sober take any stupid breath tests or blood tests. If there's no probable cause to believe that the person has been drinking, such tests just plain don't pass constitutional muster.
Oh, and you can bet a blood test on the side of the road won't meet HIPAA requirements for electronic medical records.
Hope those states have good lawyers. They're going to need them.
Venus is a dead end. Sure, you can make floating cities, but HOW would you do this? Venus has no satellites to mine and conditions on the surface are waay too extreme.
No, but given enough propellant, it could still be very useful. Crash it into Mars. That would add enough mass to Mars to give it the necessary gravity for human life (about 1.2 G, I think), and it would also provide a much-needed atmosphere that Mars basically lacks. The higher CO2 levels would make up for the added distance from the sun, and you'd have a habitable world once all the volcanic eruptions died down.
TLS proves the tower is owned by the telco, but it doesn't prove that the tower isn't compromised. Further, since a sizable portion of towers are owned by local telcos and are merely used by the major telcos, you'd need most of that PK infrastructure to handle such a trust model anyway, so why not do the extra 10% to get it right?
A proper security scheme really should be end-to-end encrypted, not end-to-nearest-trusted-node encrypted. I realize that this scares the bajeezus out of the powers that be because it makes government eavesdropping difficult as well, but as soon as you leave a back door, it can be exploited.
Until phones use proper PK crypto with a proper certificate authority, key revocation, etc. under the user's control, you can safely assume your phone calls are trivially snooped over the air. That's just a great big "duh". Not at all surprising that it can be done cheaply. What's surprising is that it took so long.
Slashdot Mirror
Quite the opposite, actually. I would expect them to decrease over time like everything else in technology. As economies of scale kick in, it becomes cheaper and cheaper to build a cellular site. Therefore, the "we don't have enough cell sites to handle the bandwidth" argument doesn't really fly. And ultimately, bandwidth is only constrained if you don't have enough towers. You could put picocells in every business in a downtown area, for example, and you would never have a bandwidth problem because instead of all those phones shouting, they would be whispering at minimum gain. In the same vein, cellular providers could provide more seamless handoff functionality between towers and Wi-Fi and it would have the same effect.
And there's a reason for that. Geeks understand the technology and know where these limits will inevitably lead. Most average people don't have the slightest clue yet. You can bet that when the companies start shaking down their users with a thousand dollar bandwidth bill because they showed a handful of YouTube videos at their holiday party, those average users will throw a fit, but by then it will be too late to fight it because the policies will be entrenched, and after all, nobody complained for the first two years, so the system must be okay. That's why it is our responsibility as geeks to pitch a fit at the top of our lungs and scream until Congress listens.
If you were on an EDGE connection, that's anywhere from one to eight percent of saturating the pipe (depending on local configuration), and that's just this background traffic. Yeah, that's pretty bad.
Depends on what sort of testing you are doing and on how complex the inputs/outputs of your functional units are. I recently put together a test suite for HeaderDoc (a documentation generation tool). The test suite treats the entire parser core as a single functional unit for testing purposes. At the moment, there are just shy of 300 parser and/or C preprocessor tests, all of which consist of a blob of input and the expected output from the parser core. Whenever anything changes in the parser, if it changes the output for any of the tests, I find out about it. This has only found an old defect popping back up once (and that was while I was deliberately reworking a poorly thought out fix to do it the right way). It finds new defects with regularity. Sometimes the changes are expected, so I approve them. Most of the time, they're errors, though, so I go back and figure out why the behavior changed unexpectedly.
Now obviously this design does not have test coverage for every line of code---there are probably edge cases somewhere that aren't hit by any of the parser tests despite my best effort---but it has been immensely successful at preventing the introduction of new bugs into the code. I've caught literally dozens of bugs before committing that would otherwise have made it into the code. Given that many of the programming languages supported are rarely exercised, those bugs would probably not have been caught otherwise.
More importantly, such a test suite can only determine whether something changed. That means that it cannot discover existing bugs, only new bugs. Similarly, it cannot say definitively whether the change is correct, incorrect, or unimportant. Those are things that only human-driven QA testing can achieve.
Similarly, when it comes to UI testing, automated tests are unlikely to show new bugs unless they involve pixel-by-pixel comparison of entire screens (in which case the false positive rate could be astoundingly high, depending on the app). So for UI testing, QA testers are absolutely essential.
Well, there's certainly room for sites to make new friends---maybe even for the same site to provide for that functionality and date searching---but at that point, you're clearly looking for a rather different function than a dating site was intended to provide.
You're confronting those fears asking someone out no matter what. The point was that some people have a tendency to recede into themselves, and if they get turned down too many times, they don't ever really recover. This could allow those sorts of people to get back on the horse again, knowing that although there's a risk, at least the decked isn't stacked 10:1 against them.
Patents retard progress inherently. There is no such thing as a good software patent, and this one is no exception. It likely means that the sorts of dating sites I want to see won't happen until I'm too old to care about them. The very definition of hell is corporate ownership of ideas.
That's actually not true. Multiple scientific studies show that most people tend to have a preference for other people of comparable levels of attractiveness and weight. People who are a little overweight tend to shoot for people a little overweight on average. People who are morbidly obese tend to shoot for people who are morbidly obese.
Not at all. Let's face it, looks might not be everything, but they are important. It's only shallow if that's your only criterion.
If a dating site has a prefilter that somehow magically figures out what you find physically attractive and only shows you those matches, that's tens of thousands of profiles you wouldn't have considered anyway that you no longer have to look through.
Also, it could be set up in such a way that you only see each other if you both are likely to find the other attractive. That would be a huge win because it would save an awful lot of awkwardness when one person likes the other but not vice-versa. For people who are intimidated by such social interaction, that would be a godsend.
Combine that with something like eHarmony's matching scheme, and you could rapidly narrow down the choices to the dozen or so people that might actually work out, instead of having to manually weed out the million that wouldn't.
Actually, it could. You are assuming that the homeopathic treatment is no different than the placebo, whereas in reality it could be more harmful than the placebo.
For example, consider a shotgun as a cancer cure. No matter how many times you study it, shooting someone will almost certainly not result in an improvement.
Highly active people drink a lot during periods of heavy exercise. Sports drinks contain sodium because if you drink too much pure water, you would be at risk of water intoxication, a potentially fatal condition.
That said, they contain only small amounts of sodium. Too much sodium would dehydrate you.
Come again? Most headaches are caused by sinus congestion, much of which is caused by allergies. Do you know how your body fights allergies? It produces mucus. Guess what your body has to have enough of to produce mucus that's thin enough to clean out your sinuses? Yup. You guessed it. Water.
Asthma? It's also basically an allergic reaction. Guess how your body fights it? Right again. It produces mucus.
That's not saying that adding extra water will necessarily cure those problems, but not getting enough water definitely exacerbates them, and anybody who says otherwise is kidding him/herself.
Actually, there's good reason to believe that the older we get, the more we become chronically dehydrated. Our blood thickens to the point that by the time you're in your 90s, it can be difficult to take blood because it clots in the needle/container. This is one of the reasons why older people have significantly increased risk of DVTs, strokes, heart attacks, etc.
Now whether this is caused by a lack of thirst sensation (in which case, drinking more water each day will improve things) or by a physiological change (in which case, it won't) is a different question; I have no idea about that.
If I fully owned my own home and the ground under it (no rent, no HOA dues, etc.), subtract $150 per month for utilities, and that's still enough to eat out for two meals almost every day. So although I wouldn't sit on my backside, I probably wouldn't work, either. Instead, I'd spend my time doing something more meaningful than working to make a profit for someone else---creating art or music, teaching, social programs for the poor, etc.
On the flip side, if I were renting, $600 per month wouldn't cover the base rent for a mobile home site or a tiny studio apartment. At minimum wage, I would still have to work at least twenty hours per week on top of that $600 per month just to cover base rent, utilities, and bulk food from Target or Costco. At $600 per month, I'd either be homeless or sharing a studio apartment with twelve other people.
Dude, that's your UPS. My UPS wakes me up every power failure, too. Bloody annoying.
Nope. They had a second TV station in our state for a little while, but it was too liberal, so nobody watched it. I think it was called PBS or something.
Wait, did you just say FOX News lied? I'm shocked! Shocked, I say! Shocked that suck a distinguished and reputable news source would be so disingenuous.
Next thing you know, you'll tell me that Santa Claus, the Easter Bunny, and the Tooth Fairy aren't real, or that there hasn't been a truly fiscally conservative Republican since pre-Reagan.
No, I'm quite certain that you're just misunderstanding the meaning of the word "live". It was live when it was recorded.
Momentum. A browser in operation tends to stay in operation unless acted upon by an outside IT consultant.
Of course, there's still the problem of what happens when they're on opposite sides of the sun. You know what, scratch that idea.
That's freedom pancakes, comrade. Back to the reeducation camp for you.
I didn't say it was practical. :-)
That said, if you would prefer "insane but without requiring the sun's total output for 3 billion years", build a giant tether that extends from Mars to Venus. Let their orbital velocities cancel each other out and they should drift together on their own. The energy needed to build such a thing is probably infeasible, but at least the net energy required for the orbit change itself would be zero. :-D
Unless the previous person blew high enough that there's residual alcohol inside the machine.
As far as I'm concerned, probable cause means probable cause. If they want to stop everybody at random checkpoints like the gestapo, fine, but don't make people who seem sober take any stupid breath tests or blood tests. If there's no probable cause to believe that the person has been drinking, such tests just plain don't pass constitutional muster.
Oh, and you can bet a blood test on the side of the road won't meet HIPAA requirements for electronic medical records.
Hope those states have good lawyers. They're going to need them.
No, I'm pretty sure the TSA is not involved in any way.
No, but given enough propellant, it could still be very useful. Crash it into Mars. That would add enough mass to Mars to give it the necessary gravity for human life (about 1.2 G, I think), and it would also provide a much-needed atmosphere that Mars basically lacks. The higher CO2 levels would make up for the added distance from the sun, and you'd have a habitable world once all the volcanic eruptions died down.
No, you've got it all wrong. It's the AT&T Stellar Sphere, the Ford Galaxy, and Planet Hollywood.
TLS proves the tower is owned by the telco, but it doesn't prove that the tower isn't compromised. Further, since a sizable portion of towers are owned by local telcos and are merely used by the major telcos, you'd need most of that PK infrastructure to handle such a trust model anyway, so why not do the extra 10% to get it right?
A proper security scheme really should be end-to-end encrypted, not end-to-nearest-trusted-node encrypted. I realize that this scares the bajeezus out of the powers that be because it makes government eavesdropping difficult as well, but as soon as you leave a back door, it can be exploited.
Until phones use proper PK crypto with a proper certificate authority, key revocation, etc. under the user's control, you can safely assume your phone calls are trivially snooped over the air. That's just a great big "duh". Not at all surprising that it can be done cheaply. What's surprising is that it took so long.