My "relentless" comment was meant to be applied generally in the world of computer GUIs, not just Outlook specifically. I would argue that even with Outlook, there were mostly unnecessary changes from 2007->2010 and especially >2013 that were focused on graphic design rather than any kind of usability.
Microsoft specifically I think deserves dings for their obsessive hiding of features and how-things-work across many products, whether it's making file extensions increasingly hard to display, finding the network interfaces to actually change network settings (thankfully you can still use ncpa.cpl from the run menu).
The only two significant features I can think that have been added really didn't require much in terms of UI changes -- multiple Exchange accounts (along with improved RPC-HTTPS support) and larger.PST files.
If 2013 Outlook is any indication of the direction it's going, it's going to be awful. Even though the basic Outlook application has really only undergone cosmetic changes, 2013 seems to try harder to gloss over and obfuscate parts of the user interface, which I'm sure will result in a usage metrics which show that nobody uses those features they can't find, so let's eliminate them.
I've made my person peace with Outlook, though, and despite all the things that are awful about it, I find it oddly useful. I dread what I expect will be a masturbatory exercise in visual design which will reduce Outlook to a cell-phone level of feature devolution and touch-friendliness which eliminates its quirky usefulness.
I also really hate the relentless level of user interface churn for the sake of style and visual design in almost everything. I think a measure of incremental user interface improvement can be made, especially as display sizes and technologies change, but too often UIs change because some new trend hits the world of graphic design. It's completely frustrating as a user and most often doesn't really improve usability in any salient way.
My sense is that the absolute odds of a US first strike nuclear attack outweigh the odds of a US ground invasion.
I can't even begin to imagine a scenario where the US would even consider a conventional ground war against North Korea. Despite the many weaknesses, DPRK has a huge conventional military force and they are well stocked with the kinds of conventional weapons that can draw real blood, an air force that would have to be paid attention to at least for a few days, and probably a pretty decent air defense network that would take some work to be completely neutralized. In a addition to all the usual Soviet/Chinese military goodies, the North Koreans are probably dug in ways that would make even the Viet Cong jealous.
I don't doubt for a second the US could best the DPRK in a ground war, but it would be a real slugfest at first and require a substantial application of US forces, probably on a scale larger than Gulf War I. There's just no possible reason for the US to ever consider a ground war against the DPRK outside of the equally unlikely event of the North invading the South.
So this basically eliminates any practical defensive value -- maybe THEY think it protects them, but really possessing what amounts to zillions of every conventional weapon made by the Reds since 1950 is their real defense against invasion, along with absolutely nothing of value to be worth invading for.
As for not being pushed around, the DPRK really is immune to being pushed around now, so long as being pushed around means influencing domestic policy or what little foreign policy they have.
The bottom line problem for them with nukes is there is no way they could ever mount a credible threat to actually USE nukes outside their own border. For DPRK (or Iran), nukes become like a suicide weapon. Any actual use is a one-time thing which will result in a counter-strike. Even seriously threatening use against a valued target (ie, Japan, the US) might actually result in a pre-emptive strike. For these small countries lacking US/Soviet/French/British-style triads (sub launch, air launch, ICBM) nukes really are weapons which present an existential risk to their continued existence as they would get glassed over after a single use.
The "rogue states" are decades away from being any kind of a threat as they can barely make a functioning A-bomb let alone a bunch of H-bombs AND delivery system worth a damn.
Even if they got remotely close to being able to deliver a reliable nuke reliably, they HAVE to know that the use or serious threat of use is pretty much a good way to finalize the history on their civilization as they know it.
A strike on the US would pretty much be a guarantee of a nuclear response and I'd wager China and Russia would say nothing, with the idea that getting involved might get them on the hit parade as co-conspirators.
It only starts to get iffy when you get into what-ifs involving low-yield bombs in shipping containers and terrorism subterfuge, but I'm skeptical of those situations because they involve power-mad dictators letting their best toy out of their hands.
I'm curious about the Jpaanese car thing. The Japanese proved their ability to create a pretty decent *airplane* in the 1940s -- the Zero. This means they had something going for them in terms of design and engineering all the way back to the 1940s.
The Japanese cars I remember from the 1970s seem to have been pretty well engineered, if rust prone (as were American cars). Their biggest issue in terms of the American market seemed to be a question of size, not quality, and the size thing seemed to be as much a product of the home market's biases (physically smaller Japanese, high population density, expensive fuel) as anything else.
Yet Japanese cars achieved a high level of acceptance *and* a reputation for quality even in the 1970s, which means that they must have been close to American levels of engineering earlier, which is pretty remarkable considering the fact they got nuked into submission in 1945.
They certainly seemed better made than all but the highest end European cars -- better than European models like Fiat or Renault or anything the British made on their own (i.e., not stuff made by Ford or GM European divisions with parts or designs inherited from their American parents).
I'm curious if in terms of Japanese engineering and innovation, the car narrative is one of a lot of copying or whether it wasn't just a question of recovery of the Japanese economy and American market acceptance.
Probably because a good chunk of "critical infrastructure" runs on bog-standard Wintel systems that have reached the point where they almost don't work without a continuous Internet connection for licensing, updates, and non-stop marketing data.
I agree that not airgapping is d-u-m-b, but I also think the people who do it basically run up against all the usual obstacles of time, skill and resources in building out systems that work in an expected manner without Internet access and somebody, somewhere decides that a deadline must be met, a budget must be met, etc and it just becomes easier to bridge that gap than explain to a bunch of nontechnical executives who have already spent expected bonuses why their deadline was unrealistic when a whole bunch of extra work had to be done to operate the products in a manner contrary to the manufacturers built-in expectations of connectivity.
I think they're both to blame, but I kind of blame the software vendors more because they are the ones who make it so inordinately more complex and cumbersome to use their products without a continuous Internet connection. And most of the time the benefit isn't really to the product owner, but to the manufacturer who wants to data to further their own goals.
It kind of works short term, but I find that (somewhat paradoxically) that the tape itself crumbles, dries out and degrades but the adhesive mess stays behind.
3M makes a vinyl "duck" tape that seems to be stronger than the kind of plastic-covered cloth, but I haven't used enough of it to know if it has the same longer term problems as traditional duck tape. Adhesive wise maybe, but the single layer of vinyl may not crap out like duck tape.
Probably one problem with "duck" tape is that it's so widespread that most people's experience with it is with shitty, generic knockoffs which have the worst qualities.
For ducts, I've always used aluminum tape. Seals well and doesn't dry out and degrade.
I'd kind of like a vinyl tape with a silicone adhesive that would vulcanize quickly. Cured silicone is pretty easy to remove from smooth surfaces. I've been using 100% silicone caulk with misc. fabrics (mostly cut pieces of tarp) as a means of patching and reinforcing tarps and outdoor coverings. It makes for a strong patch and the silicone seems totally weatherproof, even when exposed to all-day UV and Minnesota winters.
This Orwellian newspeak is really what's killing us on every front.
It's why a borderline lunatic like Trump gets so much support -- he's like the one guy not spewing newspeak.
It's to the point that people don't take ANYTHING at face value anymore (unless, of course, they can get mileage out of being offended) because they know it's 99% lies, half-truths and outright deception.
And the signal pollution is made worse by all the entities that decided that 802.11 was a WAN protocol meant for broad urban coverage. So in my single family home neighborhood, my wireless has to compete with the city's municipal wifi network and probably a bunch of the Comcast modems with built-in wireless radios that Comcast turns on for their own benefit.
Re-chilling the air is trivial, it's re-chilling the mass of objects inside the fridge that's energy intensive, or at least that's how it seems to me.
It'd be interesting to take two identical fridges with identical items inside and keep one completely closed and open the door for 30 seconds on the other once every half hour and see how much extra energy (minus the lightbulb, maybe) is consumed by the fridge with the door opened.
The first thing these rogue ships do is turn off AIS, so while the technology exists, there's zero ability to enforce the use of AIS.
So now you have a bunch of ships running around and you have no idea where they are. Maybe the military has some kind of magic satellite technology capable of tracking every surface vessel on the ocean, but I doubt they do and if they did, they're unlikely interested in using their space technology for fishing enforcement.
Even if you can track them via AIS, it still doesn't do much good.
The ships fly flags of convenience -- Liberia, Marshall Islands and Panama account for 40% of the world's fleet by deadweight tonnage, even though almost never are there actually companies based in those countries. The ships are owned by someone else in some other country and often leased out to shipping companies who may in turn lease them out again. And we still haven't gotten to the question of who's actually on board running the damn things, a motley crew of foreign nationals unrelated to the flag the ship flies, its owner or necessarily even its operator.
So its entirely possible the *crew* may be up to no good, unbeknownst to the owner, operator or lessee of the ship and certainly unknown to the country the ship is registered to.
By the time you get done doing the forensics, the damn thing is being broken for scrap off the coast of India or just scuttled outright.
Is there something about IPv6 that precludes the implementation of NAT?
IPv4 never "had" NAT, either, AFAIK. It was a kludge tacked onto routers and firewalls as world+dog got Internet access and ISPs only handed out/24s and ultimately/30s.
I worked at a site that had a direct/22 assignment dating to the very early 90s and we never bothered with it until the local network outstripped the useful life of the/22 and then we tacked on RFC1918 blocks for new segments, but kept using the/22 space for servers and a segment of the LAN that used a particularly shitty (HP3000) 3rd party application that dated to the original direct assignment and had a shitload of hard-coded references to the application server because neither the vendor nor the clueless admin ever bothered with DNS configuration (which, IIRC, was mildly brain damaged on the Hp3000 anyway).
We also had a sister company that had TWO/16 assignments -- they would NAT between/16 blocks, which I found to be kind of amazing, like a car you drove to a parking lot...to pick up your other car.
Aren't most passenger diesels turbocharged these days? They still seem to get crazy good MPG figures, and the marketing and car reviews seem to praise their torque for real-world acceleration (what's the old saw -- you buy HP, but drive torque?)
I thought that antigel additives got added at the refinery for winter states like Minnesota so adding additives wasn't really necessary. My dad owned a truck parts business and they used to hawk an additive, but I don't know we ever sold much if any of it. I also remember him saying something about OTR trucks using some kind of heater/recirculation system in their tanks to prevent gelling.
As for the urea tank, isn't it relatively large on passenger cars that use it? Like at least a 30 day supply if not larger, and probably with a significant idiot light that reminds you to fill it. Sure, you could get stuck by not filling it, but you could also trash the engine by not changing the oil, too.
And realize nobody gives a shit and its essentially unenforced and borderline unenforceable.
The only thing the Ascension sanctuary has in its favor is being out in the middle of blue water ocean with little or no shelf around it to support the kind of marine life variety you get around continental shelves.
This means that the commercial fishing might not be that great and its far enough out that the shit boats used by the rogue guys may not be interested in that kind of open ocean adventure for the fuel and maintenance risks involved.
It's totally obvious that the failings of most US urban school districts really have little to do with bad teachers or administrators, but instead with the totally broken social environments kids come from.
But instead of really acknowledging this for the problem it is, we instead try to morph the school district into a comprehensive social welfare delivery system. We then destroy the curriculum by adopting every gimmick that can be dredged up in the name of closing the "achievement gap", assuming that the materials and teachers MUST be at fault when poor, mostly black, kids continually score at the bottom of the relentless standardized testing.
The more recent and more disturbing trend is the decision by some districts to stop suspending highly disruptive kids under the guise that because the minority kids -- those same ones from broken social environments -- get suspended more often because of the dubious specter of racism. St. Paul, MN did this and they may face a teacher strike over it after a high school student beat the shit out of a teacher and put him in the hospital.
I don't doubt that some kind of social welfare intervention is needed, the problem with using the school system to do it is that it's not designed or funded to be a social welfare agency. Its funding base is usually limited to local property taxes, which, (surprise!) is often highly constrained in urban areas with a crummy tax base. It also warps the educational mission of the school through curriculum changes, dubious discipline decisions and excessive focus on the social welfare mission, leaving behind the idea that they're supposed to be teaching kids how to read and write.
The incident that caused us to worry about these (and enable passwords for everything) was an in-app subscription to Pandora. It was a PITA to figure out how to cancel it and trying to get a refund turned out to be a complicated process. I got it, but the time I spent sorting it out was definitely a money loser.
I think the $90 was spread over a half-dozen different apps and several in-app purchases, I can only imagine it would have been hours worth of work to try to get refunds for all of it.
It's just like every other systemic ripoff in life, "they" rig it for maximum complexity and frustration just to keep people from obtaining refunds. Me wasting 3-4 hours trying to get refunds for my $90 really wouldn't change the system at all.
I think what actually might would be a kind of a subterfuge campaign of deliberate multi-thousand dollar iTunes bills made public as part of a publicity campaign to demonstrate how close to a scam in-app purchases really are, especially games and especially games oriented towards kids.
Know what your kid is doing on the computer/tablet/etc. It's not a trained babysitter.
Yet as a parent, I get it. We're fairly conservative, we limit screen time but it's a HUGE magnet for kids and it's easy for non-technical parents to not realize their kids can spend real money or how to block it, and kids aren't stupid, they can guess passwords. Our son figured out my wife's password (observing her typing) and ran up $90 on iTunes before we caught it. Kids are impulsive.
That being said, we paid it and made him pay us back through extra chores accounted on a big sign on the fridge and a loss of access to the iPad. We didn't ask for a refund because we owned the problem and of course getting the refund would be a time consuming headache in and of itself.
That being said, in-app purchases are bullshit. They degrade the quality of all apps by masking their true cost and lack of basic quality. Apple's controls are really weak, especially for parents, and there should be a way to set spending limits that protect the parent and the kids.
The $6k refunded by Apple is bullshit compared to the thousands of parents who have paid the $90 like us, and I'm sure Apple just knows a lot of people eat $$$ in unwanted in-app purchases and it's part of the model. They don't *want* more controls.
I'd like to see Apple eliminate in-app purchases completely. Developers should price their apps up front, release multiple versions if they want multiple price points. Shitty apps and especially games that do nothing without a ton of in-app purchases should die. I don't even bother with games at all anymore because they're all rigged to be mostly unplayable without upgrades, and I tend to avoid apps of any kind that flog upgrades via in-app purchases. It's a crappy racket.
Pay phones were pretty impressive engineering overall when you think about how much abuse they were subject to.
The locks used on them, especially the coin box versions, were probably one of the most impressive parts of them. They might rank as one of the most secure mass-produced locking mechanisms ever made. I think the coin box had 1.5 million key variations and were extremely pick resistant.
This link outlines the lock system used and mentions the almost legendary status of them. I seem to remember the urban legend mentioned in the article about one guy who figured out a system for picking the coin box lock. The article doesn't go in to details, but I vaguely remember there was supposedly one guy (maybe an insider who had access to the internals or keying system or something) who got away with it for a while.
Back in the 1970s or even earlier, there would have been a huge motivation for a successful and simple method of opening pay phone coin boxes. Pay phones were everywhere and if you could gain easy access to opening the coin box you could have probably made a living just going from phone to phone emptying the coin boxes.
If the Wikipedia article on Freedom of Movement under US law is to believed, we have broad rights to go where we please. Then how did driving get turned into a privilege? Was riding a horse someplace considered a privilege? Why does flying require so much identification? If you travel on a private plane, does somebody check your ID (and I'm thinking let's say I know some rich guy with a plane, not some NetJets flunky making sure I'm not trying to glom a free ride)?
I guess you can always walk where you want to go, although it has certain limits on its practicality.
When I heard someone give a talk about this, one of the "risks" given was superstupidity *combined* with AI to give you a factory that won't stop churning out paper clips.
Another risk I think the same speaker mentioned was kind of the HAL 9000 bias -- we have an idea of what we THINK super AI is supposed to look at, and we scoff at runaway AI because obviously nothing comes close to HAL 9000 now.
But why does a dangerous AI have to have this human-like appearance in order to be a dangerous AI?
Take, for example, the banking and securities sector. They rely on all kinds of advanced trading algorithms and analytics, basically an AI (if crude). Since a good chunk of who-holds-what securities info is public information, you basically have an information interchange for separate financial company AIs. How do we know that all these individual financial sector agents aren't already some kind of emergent super AI?
Will we even be able to recognize an advanced AI if we're relying on "I'm sorry, Dave.." as our guide?
Everything is potentially better than the cardboard, but the point is, the cardboard works now and is pretty cool for what it is.
And I'm not saying it should be the focus of anything in terms of development, but it's an example of how crude and simple actually working (with wide hardware support) beats "orders of magnitude better" with limited hardware support and much higher costs.
And this will happen, not for your snarky reasons, but because Apple will figure out where the intersection is between functionality, cost and ease of use and people will buy it because it just works.
Occulus and everyone else will be so busy making it perfect, with insane system requirements and high costs, that they will miss the everyman kind of user. I'm sure their system will tick off more technical achievements, but as we've seen time and again, that kind of accounting doesn't work.
I always assumed VR needed the absolute best hardware and software technology could make -- and I suppose it does, if re-creating insane framerate high end games is the goal.
But when I got a free cardboard viewer with my NY Times I was blown away with how good even the most ghetto VR setup could be. The NY Times' video content was meh, but the quickie Google Cardboard app museum tours were immersive and I can't tell you how much time I wasted on the streetview cardboard view.
I'm starting to think they could be doing decent if flawed VR *now*, and building up content, even if it is fairly tame still imagery. As a potential consumer, I could give a shit about gaming but I could easily see spending hours as a virtual tourist.
I worry basically that they're making the perfect the enemy of the good, which means it arrives late, with high cost and a ton of flaws because they've baked too much into it.
Slashdot Mirror
My "relentless" comment was meant to be applied generally in the world of computer GUIs, not just Outlook specifically. I would argue that even with Outlook, there were mostly unnecessary changes from 2007->2010 and especially >2013 that were focused on graphic design rather than any kind of usability.
Microsoft specifically I think deserves dings for their obsessive hiding of features and how-things-work across many products, whether it's making file extensions increasingly hard to display, finding the network interfaces to actually change network settings (thankfully you can still use ncpa.cpl from the run menu).
The only two significant features I can think that have been added really didn't require much in terms of UI changes -- multiple Exchange accounts (along with improved RPC-HTTPS support) and larger .PST files.
If 2013 Outlook is any indication of the direction it's going, it's going to be awful. Even though the basic Outlook application has really only undergone cosmetic changes, 2013 seems to try harder to gloss over and obfuscate parts of the user interface, which I'm sure will result in a usage metrics which show that nobody uses those features they can't find, so let's eliminate them.
I've made my person peace with Outlook, though, and despite all the things that are awful about it, I find it oddly useful. I dread what I expect will be a masturbatory exercise in visual design which will reduce Outlook to a cell-phone level of feature devolution and touch-friendliness which eliminates its quirky usefulness.
I also really hate the relentless level of user interface churn for the sake of style and visual design in almost everything. I think a measure of incremental user interface improvement can be made, especially as display sizes and technologies change, but too often UIs change because some new trend hits the world of graphic design. It's completely frustrating as a user and most often doesn't really improve usability in any salient way.
My sense is that the absolute odds of a US first strike nuclear attack outweigh the odds of a US ground invasion.
I can't even begin to imagine a scenario where the US would even consider a conventional ground war against North Korea. Despite the many weaknesses, DPRK has a huge conventional military force and they are well stocked with the kinds of conventional weapons that can draw real blood, an air force that would have to be paid attention to at least for a few days, and probably a pretty decent air defense network that would take some work to be completely neutralized. In a addition to all the usual Soviet/Chinese military goodies, the North Koreans are probably dug in ways that would make even the Viet Cong jealous.
I don't doubt for a second the US could best the DPRK in a ground war, but it would be a real slugfest at first and require a substantial application of US forces, probably on a scale larger than Gulf War I. There's just no possible reason for the US to ever consider a ground war against the DPRK outside of the equally unlikely event of the North invading the South.
So this basically eliminates any practical defensive value -- maybe THEY think it protects them, but really possessing what amounts to zillions of every conventional weapon made by the Reds since 1950 is their real defense against invasion, along with absolutely nothing of value to be worth invading for.
As for not being pushed around, the DPRK really is immune to being pushed around now, so long as being pushed around means influencing domestic policy or what little foreign policy they have.
The bottom line problem for them with nukes is there is no way they could ever mount a credible threat to actually USE nukes outside their own border. For DPRK (or Iran), nukes become like a suicide weapon. Any actual use is a one-time thing which will result in a counter-strike. Even seriously threatening use against a valued target (ie, Japan, the US) might actually result in a pre-emptive strike. For these small countries lacking US/Soviet/French/British-style triads (sub launch, air launch, ICBM) nukes really are weapons which present an existential risk to their continued existence as they would get glassed over after a single use.
The "rogue states" are decades away from being any kind of a threat as they can barely make a functioning A-bomb let alone a bunch of H-bombs AND delivery system worth a damn.
Even if they got remotely close to being able to deliver a reliable nuke reliably, they HAVE to know that the use or serious threat of use is pretty much a good way to finalize the history on their civilization as they know it.
A strike on the US would pretty much be a guarantee of a nuclear response and I'd wager China and Russia would say nothing, with the idea that getting involved might get them on the hit parade as co-conspirators.
It only starts to get iffy when you get into what-ifs involving low-yield bombs in shipping containers and terrorism subterfuge, but I'm skeptical of those situations because they involve power-mad dictators letting their best toy out of their hands.
I'm curious about the Jpaanese car thing. The Japanese proved their ability to create a pretty decent *airplane* in the 1940s -- the Zero. This means they had something going for them in terms of design and engineering all the way back to the 1940s.
The Japanese cars I remember from the 1970s seem to have been pretty well engineered, if rust prone (as were American cars). Their biggest issue in terms of the American market seemed to be a question of size, not quality, and the size thing seemed to be as much a product of the home market's biases (physically smaller Japanese, high population density, expensive fuel) as anything else.
Yet Japanese cars achieved a high level of acceptance *and* a reputation for quality even in the 1970s, which means that they must have been close to American levels of engineering earlier, which is pretty remarkable considering the fact they got nuked into submission in 1945.
They certainly seemed better made than all but the highest end European cars -- better than European models like Fiat or Renault or anything the British made on their own (i.e., not stuff made by Ford or GM European divisions with parts or designs inherited from their American parents).
I'm curious if in terms of Japanese engineering and innovation, the car narrative is one of a lot of copying or whether it wasn't just a question of recovery of the Japanese economy and American market acceptance.
Probably because a good chunk of "critical infrastructure" runs on bog-standard Wintel systems that have reached the point where they almost don't work without a continuous Internet connection for licensing, updates, and non-stop marketing data.
I agree that not airgapping is d-u-m-b, but I also think the people who do it basically run up against all the usual obstacles of time, skill and resources in building out systems that work in an expected manner without Internet access and somebody, somewhere decides that a deadline must be met, a budget must be met, etc and it just becomes easier to bridge that gap than explain to a bunch of nontechnical executives who have already spent expected bonuses why their deadline was unrealistic when a whole bunch of extra work had to be done to operate the products in a manner contrary to the manufacturers built-in expectations of connectivity.
I think they're both to blame, but I kind of blame the software vendors more because they are the ones who make it so inordinately more complex and cumbersome to use their products without a continuous Internet connection. And most of the time the benefit isn't really to the product owner, but to the manufacturer who wants to data to further their own goals.
It kind of works short term, but I find that (somewhat paradoxically) that the tape itself crumbles, dries out and degrades but the adhesive mess stays behind.
3M makes a vinyl "duck" tape that seems to be stronger than the kind of plastic-covered cloth, but I haven't used enough of it to know if it has the same longer term problems as traditional duck tape. Adhesive wise maybe, but the single layer of vinyl may not crap out like duck tape.
Probably one problem with "duck" tape is that it's so widespread that most people's experience with it is with shitty, generic knockoffs which have the worst qualities.
For ducts, I've always used aluminum tape. Seals well and doesn't dry out and degrade.
I'd kind of like a vinyl tape with a silicone adhesive that would vulcanize quickly. Cured silicone is pretty easy to remove from smooth surfaces. I've been using 100% silicone caulk with misc. fabrics (mostly cut pieces of tarp) as a means of patching and reinforcing tarps and outdoor coverings. It makes for a strong patch and the silicone seems totally weatherproof, even when exposed to all-day UV and Minnesota winters.
This Orwellian newspeak is really what's killing us on every front.
It's why a borderline lunatic like Trump gets so much support -- he's like the one guy not spewing newspeak.
It's to the point that people don't take ANYTHING at face value anymore (unless, of course, they can get mileage out of being offended) because they know it's 99% lies, half-truths and outright deception.
And the signal pollution is made worse by all the entities that decided that 802.11 was a WAN protocol meant for broad urban coverage. So in my single family home neighborhood, my wireless has to compete with the city's municipal wifi network and probably a bunch of the Comcast modems with built-in wireless radios that Comcast turns on for their own benefit.
In dense urban areas its borderline unusable.
Re-chilling the air is trivial, it's re-chilling the mass of objects inside the fridge that's energy intensive, or at least that's how it seems to me.
It'd be interesting to take two identical fridges with identical items inside and keep one completely closed and open the door for 30 seconds on the other once every half hour and see how much extra energy (minus the lightbulb, maybe) is consumed by the fridge with the door opened.
The first thing these rogue ships do is turn off AIS, so while the technology exists, there's zero ability to enforce the use of AIS.
So now you have a bunch of ships running around and you have no idea where they are. Maybe the military has some kind of magic satellite technology capable of tracking every surface vessel on the ocean, but I doubt they do and if they did, they're unlikely interested in using their space technology for fishing enforcement.
Even if you can track them via AIS, it still doesn't do much good.
The ships fly flags of convenience -- Liberia, Marshall Islands and Panama account for 40% of the world's fleet by deadweight tonnage, even though almost never are there actually companies based in those countries. The ships are owned by someone else in some other country and often leased out to shipping companies who may in turn lease them out again. And we still haven't gotten to the question of who's actually on board running the damn things, a motley crew of foreign nationals unrelated to the flag the ship flies, its owner or necessarily even its operator.
So its entirely possible the *crew* may be up to no good, unbeknownst to the owner, operator or lessee of the ship and certainly unknown to the country the ship is registered to.
By the time you get done doing the forensics, the damn thing is being broken for scrap off the coast of India or just scuttled outright.
Yeah, but don't Fiats also still use 6V, positive-ground electrical systems and spring brakes?
Is there something about IPv6 that precludes the implementation of NAT?
IPv4 never "had" NAT, either, AFAIK. It was a kludge tacked onto routers and firewalls as world+dog got Internet access and ISPs only handed out /24s and ultimately /30s.
I worked at a site that had a direct /22 assignment dating to the very early 90s and we never bothered with it until the local network outstripped the useful life of the /22 and then we tacked on RFC1918 blocks for new segments, but kept using the /22 space for servers and a segment of the LAN that used a particularly shitty (HP3000) 3rd party application that dated to the original direct assignment and had a shitload of hard-coded references to the application server because neither the vendor nor the clueless admin ever bothered with DNS configuration (which, IIRC, was mildly brain damaged on the Hp3000 anyway).
We also had a sister company that had TWO /16 assignments -- they would NAT between /16 blocks, which I found to be kind of amazing, like a car you drove to a parking lot...to pick up your other car.
Aren't most passenger diesels turbocharged these days? They still seem to get crazy good MPG figures, and the marketing and car reviews seem to praise their torque for real-world acceleration (what's the old saw -- you buy HP, but drive torque?)
I thought that antigel additives got added at the refinery for winter states like Minnesota so adding additives wasn't really necessary. My dad owned a truck parts business and they used to hawk an additive, but I don't know we ever sold much if any of it. I also remember him saying something about OTR trucks using some kind of heater/recirculation system in their tanks to prevent gelling.
As for the urea tank, isn't it relatively large on passenger cars that use it? Like at least a 30 day supply if not larger, and probably with a significant idiot light that reminds you to fill it. Sure, you could get stuck by not filling it, but you could also trash the engine by not changing the oil, too.
Read this:
http://www.nytimes.com/interac...
And realize nobody gives a shit and its essentially unenforced and borderline unenforceable.
The only thing the Ascension sanctuary has in its favor is being out in the middle of blue water ocean with little or no shelf around it to support the kind of marine life variety you get around continental shelves.
This means that the commercial fishing might not be that great and its far enough out that the shit boats used by the rogue guys may not be interested in that kind of open ocean adventure for the fuel and maintenance risks involved.
It's totally obvious that the failings of most US urban school districts really have little to do with bad teachers or administrators, but instead with the totally broken social environments kids come from.
But instead of really acknowledging this for the problem it is, we instead try to morph the school district into a comprehensive social welfare delivery system. We then destroy the curriculum by adopting every gimmick that can be dredged up in the name of closing the "achievement gap", assuming that the materials and teachers MUST be at fault when poor, mostly black, kids continually score at the bottom of the relentless standardized testing.
The more recent and more disturbing trend is the decision by some districts to stop suspending highly disruptive kids under the guise that because the minority kids -- those same ones from broken social environments -- get suspended more often because of the dubious specter of racism. St. Paul, MN did this and they may face a teacher strike over it after a high school student beat the shit out of a teacher and put him in the hospital.
I don't doubt that some kind of social welfare intervention is needed, the problem with using the school system to do it is that it's not designed or funded to be a social welfare agency. Its funding base is usually limited to local property taxes, which, (surprise!) is often highly constrained in urban areas with a crummy tax base. It also warps the educational mission of the school through curriculum changes, dubious discipline decisions and excessive focus on the social welfare mission, leaving behind the idea that they're supposed to be teaching kids how to read and write.
The incident that caused us to worry about these (and enable passwords for everything) was an in-app subscription to Pandora. It was a PITA to figure out how to cancel it and trying to get a refund turned out to be a complicated process. I got it, but the time I spent sorting it out was definitely a money loser.
I think the $90 was spread over a half-dozen different apps and several in-app purchases, I can only imagine it would have been hours worth of work to try to get refunds for all of it.
It's just like every other systemic ripoff in life, "they" rig it for maximum complexity and frustration just to keep people from obtaining refunds. Me wasting 3-4 hours trying to get refunds for my $90 really wouldn't change the system at all.
I think what actually might would be a kind of a subterfuge campaign of deliberate multi-thousand dollar iTunes bills made public as part of a publicity campaign to demonstrate how close to a scam in-app purchases really are, especially games and especially games oriented towards kids.
Know what your kid is doing on the computer/tablet/etc. It's not a trained babysitter.
Yet as a parent, I get it. We're fairly conservative, we limit screen time but it's a HUGE magnet for kids and it's easy for non-technical parents to not realize their kids can spend real money or how to block it, and kids aren't stupid, they can guess passwords. Our son figured out my wife's password (observing her typing) and ran up $90 on iTunes before we caught it. Kids are impulsive.
That being said, we paid it and made him pay us back through extra chores accounted on a big sign on the fridge and a loss of access to the iPad. We didn't ask for a refund because we owned the problem and of course getting the refund would be a time consuming headache in and of itself.
That being said, in-app purchases are bullshit. They degrade the quality of all apps by masking their true cost and lack of basic quality. Apple's controls are really weak, especially for parents, and there should be a way to set spending limits that protect the parent and the kids.
The $6k refunded by Apple is bullshit compared to the thousands of parents who have paid the $90 like us, and I'm sure Apple just knows a lot of people eat $$$ in unwanted in-app purchases and it's part of the model. They don't *want* more controls.
I'd like to see Apple eliminate in-app purchases completely. Developers should price their apps up front, release multiple versions if they want multiple price points. Shitty apps and especially games that do nothing without a ton of in-app purchases should die. I don't even bother with games at all anymore because they're all rigged to be mostly unplayable without upgrades, and I tend to avoid apps of any kind that flog upgrades via in-app purchases. It's a crappy racket.
Pay phones were pretty impressive engineering overall when you think about how much abuse they were subject to.
The locks used on them, especially the coin box versions, were probably one of the most impressive parts of them. They might rank as one of the most secure mass-produced locking mechanisms ever made. I think the coin box had 1.5 million key variations and were extremely pick resistant.
This link outlines the lock system used and mentions the almost legendary status of them. I seem to remember the urban legend mentioned in the article about one guy who figured out a system for picking the coin box lock. The article doesn't go in to details, but I vaguely remember there was supposedly one guy (maybe an insider who had access to the internals or keying system or something) who got away with it for a while.
Back in the 1970s or even earlier, there would have been a huge motivation for a successful and simple method of opening pay phone coin boxes. Pay phones were everywhere and if you could gain easy access to opening the coin box you could have probably made a living just going from phone to phone emptying the coin boxes.
http://www.crypto.com/photos/m...
If the Wikipedia article on Freedom of Movement under US law is to believed, we have broad rights to go where we please. Then how did driving get turned into a privilege? Was riding a horse someplace considered a privilege? Why does flying require so much identification? If you travel on a private plane, does somebody check your ID (and I'm thinking let's say I know some rich guy with a plane, not some NetJets flunky making sure I'm not trying to glom a free ride)?
I guess you can always walk where you want to go, although it has certain limits on its practicality.
I think that pretty much most people who get married start out with an idea of being committed to the institution, but their experience sours after.
When I heard someone give a talk about this, one of the "risks" given was superstupidity *combined* with AI to give you a factory that won't stop churning out paper clips.
Another risk I think the same speaker mentioned was kind of the HAL 9000 bias -- we have an idea of what we THINK super AI is supposed to look at, and we scoff at runaway AI because obviously nothing comes close to HAL 9000 now.
But why does a dangerous AI have to have this human-like appearance in order to be a dangerous AI?
Take, for example, the banking and securities sector. They rely on all kinds of advanced trading algorithms and analytics, basically an AI (if crude). Since a good chunk of who-holds-what securities info is public information, you basically have an information interchange for separate financial company AIs. How do we know that all these individual financial sector agents aren't already some kind of emergent super AI?
Will we even be able to recognize an advanced AI if we're relying on "I'm sorry, Dave.." as our guide?
Everything is potentially better than the cardboard, but the point is, the cardboard works now and is pretty cool for what it is.
And I'm not saying it should be the focus of anything in terms of development, but it's an example of how crude and simple actually working (with wide hardware support) beats "orders of magnitude better" with limited hardware support and much higher costs.
And this will happen, not for your snarky reasons, but because Apple will figure out where the intersection is between functionality, cost and ease of use and people will buy it because it just works.
Occulus and everyone else will be so busy making it perfect, with insane system requirements and high costs, that they will miss the everyman kind of user. I'm sure their system will tick off more technical achievements, but as we've seen time and again, that kind of accounting doesn't work.
I always assumed VR needed the absolute best hardware and software technology could make -- and I suppose it does, if re-creating insane framerate high end games is the goal.
But when I got a free cardboard viewer with my NY Times I was blown away with how good even the most ghetto VR setup could be. The NY Times' video content was meh, but the quickie Google Cardboard app museum tours were immersive and I can't tell you how much time I wasted on the streetview cardboard view.
I'm starting to think they could be doing decent if flawed VR *now*, and building up content, even if it is fairly tame still imagery. As a potential consumer, I could give a shit about gaming but I could easily see spending hours as a virtual tourist.
I worry basically that they're making the perfect the enemy of the good, which means it arrives late, with high cost and a ton of flaws because they've baked too much into it.