What surprises me is that the insurance people involved in these projects don't play hardass more effectively. The structure is going to have some trouble being built and leased/rented/sold if nobody is willing to cover it; and no insurance outfit would want some zesty wrongful death claims showing up because somebody is too cool for fluid mechanics.
In the case of the 'death-ray' building they don't even have that excuse. The one in the UK was put up by the same architect who had already learned (by experience, not with 'math') that "Build a 50ish-story parabolic reflector in Las Vegas" might not be the best plan.
We have flying cars. They care called 'helicopters'. Widely used, widely available, you probably don't own and/or can't afford one.
As with so much of a certain genre of science fiction, the 'flying car' is more a fiction about how 'the future' would exist as though post WWII advances in the American middle class were going to continue following their upward trajectory all the way to personal flying cars 4 hour workdays.
Instead, availability of things (like basically anything based on transistors) that have become radically cheaper is broader than most would have imagined (Dear ENIAC design team, how probable do you think it is that people who lack clean water or adequate food will be using vastly more powerful computers to send text messages to one another in less than a century?); but 'science fiction' that requires simply owning a big enough slice of the pie to implement with today's, or yesterday's, technology? Probably more distant now than it was then.
If something is an end user product, it appears to be sad but inevitable that nobody RTFM anyway, so you are probably better off doing everything you can to make it actually work when prodded by the clueless. Try to make sure that it's all point-and-drool simple(if it is possible to back yourself into a 'mysteriously doesn't work, provides meaningless or nonexistent clues as to why' corner; an elegant way to roll back is nice).
If the idea is that the product will be set up and administered by the customer's IT minions(internal, contract, or purchased 'as a service'), then Please, Please, Please document. IT minions are largely innured to the suffering of merely bad, hostile, and unintuitive software; but they are the most likely to need to know how things fit together, where they may need to bodge some shim together and keep an extra close eye on things, and so on. They won't like it; but they'll like it a whole lot more than an equivalent product where they need to deploy a mixture of reverse-engineering and pure mysticism because the system is a total black box.
So if you were running an ISP, what would you do to bandwidth hogs? QOS, Throttle, or just drop them as a customer? Perhaps a courteous letter or warning?
If it became necessary, throttle them; but without regard for what sort of traffic makes them bandwidth hogs. My problem is not that networks don't have infinite capacity to deal with high demand situations; but that the various throttling measures put into effect seem to be focused against certain types of traffic and/or subscriber types that the operator dislikes, rather than being based on volume.alone. You can't avoid volume based throttling unless you pay enough for a guaranteed non-oversubscribed line; but if there is a crunch doing your throttling based on what sorts of traffic you like least, or what customers you like least, seems like a bad road to go down.
I realize that bittorrent is presumptively the protocol used entirely by piratopedophile terrorists and all; but what kind of bullshit excuse do they offer for treating one data-heavy use differently from another? Is this purely about making those pesky unlimited customers use less data by crippling their service in various ways, or is their network riddled with devices that can't handle the volume of connections a decently active bittorrent transfer tends to create, like some mid-90s router?
I'm definitely in favor of more solidly adequate drives at attractive prices; but a quick look through newegg (without any effort at comparison shopping or grubbing for special offers) shows a fair selection at and under the $0.5/GB mark. The MX100 has a particularly good reputation for that price; but prices in that range haven't been a 'barrier' for some time.
I only switched to carrying sacks of bills across the border in the dead of night because dealing with those assholes at HSBC when I needed money laundered was too much trouble. I'll be seriously upset if enhanced security means I have to re-open my account with them. They wouldn't even upgrade me to Narcoterrorist Platinum Checking unless I provided proof of having ordered at least 50 grisly killings personally, or qualified for MegaMule Rewards by transporting more than a metric ton of high quality cocaine per quarter...
'Terrorists' quickly discover that a few milligrams of clonazepam right before the big martyrdom operation is way less haram than getting shitfaced and at least as effective at masking anxiety. In other news, state security services are stretched thin in their new battle against 'cosmetics', a class of nefarious concealment powders and pigments specifically designed to mask the user's true facial state. On a happier note, authorities report that perps with anxiety disorders are much easier to interrogate than the other kind and credit a 58% increase in the number and detail of mostly-voluntary confessions to a new focus on these low resistance criminals...
Don't talk about your fraud on the record... It's not at all surprising that Comcast would do this, the fact that their alignment is apathetic/evil is well known; but it's pretty surprising how open they are about it.
Invoice fraud is a totally classic con; but it depends in part on knowing when not to push it. The target catches on and is angy; do you want to cause a scene and risk discovery or just offer an insincere apology, drop the issue, and move on to the next target? Especially given Comcast's current less-than-winning PR situation (you know it's bad when your cancellation procedure has an AOL guy driven to despair...) there is no way this call would be worth the risk, even if they'd made all the charges stick. Shut up, appease the noisy guy, and cram some befuddled old people or something.
I suspect that the odds of actually being charged are basically zero; but billing 'errors' made in very, very, questionable good faith start to look a lot like mail fraud if they aren't quite isolated incidents(especially given how added charges always seem to be more common than accidentally omitted charges).
I thought that the kinect, while nicer than the average cheapie camera in terms of optics and sensor, also used a fairly normal camera(well, one higher resolution visual band one for image and one IR one for depth) and that the real secret sauce was the IR laser device that projected the dot pattern on the environment for the camera to pick up and interpret. Am I remembering incorrectly?
Indium/gallium mixtures are the expensive, classy, mostly-nontoxic-ish low temperature alloy. The cheap seats skip the indium and add zesty cadmium instead. A great deal cheaper; but not for internal use.
Oral Rehydration Therapy. The preferred version is slightly more complex; but it's pretty much a sugar/salt solution in water, designed to replenish lost fluids without causing electrolyte issues if consumed in large quantities. Cheap and easy to do without much equipment or medical expertise.
You crazy end-times nutjobs... Everyone knows that Verichip(tm) brand subdermal RFID solutions are supposed to be implanted in the arm, not the hand or forehead!
It's pretty tricky to avoid the 'carry something around' requirement; but people seem to be good enough at that when they need to be.
I suppose the major mess would be all the phones and tablets that either don't have card readers or USB, or have USB but will never receive driver support outside of third party hacks. Smartcards and their USB attached analogs can handle the job but having accounts that you can't access from almost any mobile device will probably play poorly.
It does have that (though using a stylus still tends to involve enough contact with your hand to make cleaning relevant); but it is also a touchscreen device so depending on the don't touch it school of cleanliness is a bit of a waste.
I'm not sure that the incentives line up in this case: Alzeimer's tends to be expensive because of the amount of care and nursing people require as their cognitive state declines; but the pharmaceutical options are sparse. People would beat down your door for the chance to pay for pills what they now pay for nursing if you had something(even if it has to be taken twice daily forever) that was suitably effective. Anyone who could would likely pay more because the disease itself is so nasty. Seems like a very lucrative position for anyone except those currently doing the nursing.
On the plus side, if you are truly tacticool, the sheer mass of black-anodized widgets rail mounted to your gun will offer substantial stability improvements during fire..
It's not as nice as a sanitation system good enough to prevent the problem; but ORT is pretty good at keeping you from dying of it and a great deal cheaper.
There's also the fact that a fancy scope system designed to improve accuracy against relatively distant targets likely isn't worth the weight, much less the cost, for use indoors at very close range.
It's possible that there are some would-be snipers out there, currently restrained only by incompetence; but barring those this system isn't of obvious interest for most spree killing purposes.
Sheesh. I never did get that. Dandelion is actually useful. It's edible for cryin' out loud. Clover fixed nitrogen. Turf grass? I'm hard pressed to think of a use.
It makes a lot more sense if you think of ornamental landscaping (and much of fashion in general) in terms of competitive display rather than pursuit of some specific aesthetic ideal. It is precisely because something is pointless and relatively resource intensive that it is a good competitive display. If it were purely utilitarian, or if it were trivial, everyone would have one. Lawns are also good for this because deficiencies in maintenance become publicly visible, in the form of various 'weeds' and irregularities of color or height, fairly quickly.
Unless the OR is pain waiting to happen for users with ordinary vision I'd imagine that the optics are designed to provide a comfortable apparent distance from the screen for viewers with ordinary eyesight. This would mean that a nearsighted user would still be attempting to focus on something that appears further away than close-in vision is suitable for.
Somebody comfortable at closer distances would likely require slightly less correction from the internal optics, since their comfortable apparent distance is shorter; but if the optics aren't designed that way that doesn't help them very much.
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What surprises me is that the insurance people involved in these projects don't play hardass more effectively. The structure is going to have some trouble being built and leased/rented/sold if nobody is willing to cover it; and no insurance outfit would want some zesty wrongful death claims showing up because somebody is too cool for fluid mechanics.
In the case of the 'death-ray' building they don't even have that excuse. The one in the UK was put up by the same architect who had already learned (by experience, not with 'math') that "Build a 50ish-story parabolic reflector in Las Vegas" might not be the best plan.
We have flying cars. They care called 'helicopters'. Widely used, widely available, you probably don't own and/or can't afford one.
As with so much of a certain genre of science fiction, the 'flying car' is more a fiction about how 'the future' would exist as though post WWII advances in the American middle class were going to continue following their upward trajectory all the way to personal flying cars 4 hour workdays.
Instead, availability of things (like basically anything based on transistors) that have become radically cheaper is broader than most would have imagined (Dear ENIAC design team, how probable do you think it is that people who lack clean water or adequate food will be using vastly more powerful computers to send text messages to one another in less than a century?); but 'science fiction' that requires simply owning a big enough slice of the pie to implement with today's, or yesterday's, technology? Probably more distant now than it was then.
If something is an end user product, it appears to be sad but inevitable that nobody RTFM anyway, so you are probably better off doing everything you can to make it actually work when prodded by the clueless. Try to make sure that it's all point-and-drool simple(if it is possible to back yourself into a 'mysteriously doesn't work, provides meaningless or nonexistent clues as to why' corner; an elegant way to roll back is nice).
If the idea is that the product will be set up and administered by the customer's IT minions(internal, contract, or purchased 'as a service'), then Please, Please, Please document. IT minions are largely innured to the suffering of merely bad, hostile, and unintuitive software; but they are the most likely to need to know how things fit together, where they may need to bodge some shim together and keep an extra close eye on things, and so on. They won't like it; but they'll like it a whole lot more than an equivalent product where they need to deploy a mixture of reverse-engineering and pure mysticism because the system is a total black box.
So if you were running an ISP, what would you do to bandwidth hogs? QOS, Throttle, or just drop them as a customer? Perhaps a courteous letter or warning?
If it became necessary, throttle them; but without regard for what sort of traffic makes them bandwidth hogs. My problem is not that networks don't have infinite capacity to deal with high demand situations; but that the various throttling measures put into effect seem to be focused against certain types of traffic and/or subscriber types that the operator dislikes, rather than being based on volume.alone. You can't avoid volume based throttling unless you pay enough for a guaranteed non-oversubscribed line; but if there is a crunch doing your throttling based on what sorts of traffic you like least, or what customers you like least, seems like a bad road to go down.
I realize that bittorrent is presumptively the protocol used entirely by piratopedophile terrorists and all; but what kind of bullshit excuse do they offer for treating one data-heavy use differently from another? Is this purely about making those pesky unlimited customers use less data by crippling their service in various ways, or is their network riddled with devices that can't handle the volume of connections a decently active bittorrent transfer tends to create, like some mid-90s router?
I have a kinetically fragile head, so I'd prefer to buy a protective helmet without particular regard for price.
I'm definitely in favor of more solidly adequate drives at attractive prices; but a quick look through newegg (without any effort at comparison shopping or grubbing for special offers) shows a fair selection at and under the $0.5/GB mark. The MX100 has a particularly good reputation for that price; but prices in that range haven't been a 'barrier' for some time.
I only switched to carrying sacks of bills across the border in the dead of night because dealing with those assholes at HSBC when I needed money laundered was too much trouble. I'll be seriously upset if enhanced security means I have to re-open my account with them. They wouldn't even upgrade me to Narcoterrorist Platinum Checking unless I provided proof of having ordered at least 50 grisly killings personally, or qualified for MegaMule Rewards by transporting more than a metric ton of high quality cocaine per quarter...
'Terrorists' quickly discover that a few milligrams of clonazepam right before the big martyrdom operation is way less haram than getting shitfaced and at least as effective at masking anxiety. In other news, state security services are stretched thin in their new battle against 'cosmetics', a class of nefarious concealment powders and pigments specifically designed to mask the user's true facial state. On a happier note, authorities report that perps with anxiety disorders are much easier to interrogate than the other kind and credit a 58% increase in the number and detail of mostly-voluntary confessions to a new focus on these low resistance criminals...
It could be better formatted; but our wiki overlords have you covered.
Don't talk about your fraud on the record... It's not at all surprising that Comcast would do this, the fact that their alignment is apathetic/evil is well known; but it's pretty surprising how open they are about it.
Invoice fraud is a totally classic con; but it depends in part on knowing when not to push it. The target catches on and is angy; do you want to cause a scene and risk discovery or just offer an insincere apology, drop the issue, and move on to the next target? Especially given Comcast's current less-than-winning PR situation (you know it's bad when your cancellation procedure has an AOL guy driven to despair...) there is no way this call would be worth the risk, even if they'd made all the charges stick. Shut up, appease the noisy guy, and cram some befuddled old people or something.
I suspect that the odds of actually being charged are basically zero; but billing 'errors' made in very, very, questionable good faith start to look a lot like mail fraud if they aren't quite isolated incidents(especially given how added charges always seem to be more common than accidentally omitted charges).
I thought that the kinect, while nicer than the average cheapie camera in terms of optics and sensor, also used a fairly normal camera(well, one higher resolution visual band one for image and one IR one for depth) and that the real secret sauce was the IR laser device that projected the dot pattern on the environment for the camera to pick up and interpret. Am I remembering incorrectly?
Indium/gallium mixtures are the expensive, classy, mostly-nontoxic-ish low temperature alloy. The cheap seats skip the indium and add zesty cadmium instead. A great deal cheaper; but not for internal use.
Oral Rehydration Therapy. The preferred version is slightly more complex; but it's pretty much a sugar/salt solution in water, designed to replenish lost fluids without causing electrolyte issues if consumed in large quantities. Cheap and easy to do without much equipment or medical expertise.
You crazy end-times nutjobs... Everyone knows that Verichip(tm) brand subdermal RFID solutions are supposed to be implanted in the arm, not the hand or forehead!
It's pretty tricky to avoid the 'carry something around' requirement; but people seem to be good enough at that when they need to be.
I suppose the major mess would be all the phones and tablets that either don't have card readers or USB, or have USB but will never receive driver support outside of third party hacks. Smartcards and their USB attached analogs can handle the job but having accounts that you can't access from almost any mobile device will probably play poorly.
It does have that (though using a stylus still tends to involve enough contact with your hand to make cleaning relevant); but it is also a touchscreen device so depending on the don't touch it school of cleanliness is a bit of a waste.
Do they have matte screens that can handle having disgusting human finger grease smeared on them?
The glossy ones collect it; but at least can be wiped off. Getting fingerprints off matte screens tends to be more obnoxious.
I'm not sure that the incentives line up in this case: Alzeimer's tends to be expensive because of the amount of care and nursing people require as their cognitive state declines; but the pharmaceutical options are sparse. People would beat down your door for the chance to pay for pills what they now pay for nursing if you had something(even if it has to be taken twice daily forever) that was suitably effective. Anyone who could would likely pay more because the disease itself is so nasty. Seems like a very lucrative position for anyone except those currently doing the nursing.
On the plus side, if you are truly tacticool, the sheer mass of black-anodized widgets rail mounted to your gun will offer substantial stability improvements during fire..
It's not as nice as a sanitation system good enough to prevent the problem; but ORT is pretty good at keeping you from dying of it and a great deal cheaper.
There's also the fact that a fancy scope system designed to improve accuracy against relatively distant targets likely isn't worth the weight, much less the cost, for use indoors at very close range.
It's possible that there are some would-be snipers out there, currently restrained only by incompetence; but barring those this system isn't of obvious interest for most spree killing purposes.
Sheesh. I never did get that. Dandelion is actually useful. It's edible for cryin' out loud. Clover fixed nitrogen. Turf grass? I'm hard pressed to think of a use.
It makes a lot more sense if you think of ornamental landscaping (and much of fashion in general) in terms of competitive display rather than pursuit of some specific aesthetic ideal. It is precisely because something is pointless and relatively resource intensive that it is a good competitive display. If it were purely utilitarian, or if it were trivial, everyone would have one. Lawns are also good for this because deficiencies in maintenance become publicly visible, in the form of various 'weeds' and irregularities of color or height, fairly quickly.
Unless the OR is pain waiting to happen for users with ordinary vision I'd imagine that the optics are designed to provide a comfortable apparent distance from the screen for viewers with ordinary eyesight. This would mean that a nearsighted user would still be attempting to focus on something that appears further away than close-in vision is suitable for.
Somebody comfortable at closer distances would likely require slightly less correction from the internal optics, since their comfortable apparent distance is shorter; but if the optics aren't designed that way that doesn't help them very much.