Would it be worthwhile for Nasa to put a few communications satellites capable of relaying around some of the more distant planets? Obviously the number and which ones would depend on where the planets were relative to earth and the objects you wanted to relay from.
They could be used for deep space probe communications or even for SETI-like stuff.
I hate to ask for more laws, but I'd like to see a law passed that requires any company providing a recurring-charge based service to:
(a) have a cancellations department (b) make that department's contact information readily and easily available through all means which the company can be contacted (eg, no "online-only" phone list) (c) the cancellations department's sole job is to cancel accounts. They may only ask once for a reason for cancellation and then process the cancellation. No offers, no lying, no bullshit, immediate cancellation.
Making you jump through sales hoops to cancel your account is dishonest, there's no two ways about it.
With the urban sprawl and wide open spaces and all, there's an awful lot of people not within the required distance.
My understanding is not that its a required distance problem, but the way that many of the suburban developments were cabled from the 80s on. It was copper from the house to some kind of development aggregation point, from there it was some digital technology back to the CO. This is awesome if you're the phone company -- you're serving thousands without pulling dozens of 200 pair cables, and you can build even fewer COs.
It's a disaster for DSL, because you can't mux it up like you can voice, and DSLAMs like a climate controlled environment like a CO. My understanding was that DSLAM vendors were now selling DSLAMs that are environmentally hardended and could be used for locations outside of the DSL distance limit or meshed with development level mux locations in places that you can't usually put sensitive electronics -- on poles or concrete slabs.
Re:its not what google finds but more what it does
on
Googling For Dates?
·
· Score: 2
I extensively googled the 20 women I dated seriously from college until I was married, and I managed to find information about exactly two of them, a PR page for the law firm that one of them works for now and a footnote in a white paper that another contributed to. The others turned up exactly zero hits. All the people I dated were college educated, and a few were involved in science/technology.
One might connect it to women changing their name when they marry -- if Jane Johnson becomes Jane Anderson, how will you ever find her unless she's some ubergeek who continues to go by her original name or alias(es)?
I've done this with other people I've known but not seen for a while, including people that were heavily involved in computers pre-internet and I can't seem to track them down either. I'd mostly assume though that the people you can turn up are primarily active, current users of public forums or have had a lot of public news exposure and have easily identifiable names or aliases.
Based upon my highly unrandom sampling, I'd say that's very, very few people outside of today's current internet "insiders."
There's no reason that an elite Presidential Protection group in "Homeland Security" could be formed. They could at least have better coordination and intelligence with the other homeland security branches.
Each of the internal and external security branches could have a special group designed for investigating the other when needed.
Local loop is the portion of a T1 carried between the carrier and your building, traditionally handled by the local phone company. Often referred to as last mile.
Its usually billed seperately to differentiate the cost of what you're actually buying and what it takes to get it to you. I think it matters in some accounting, and its kind of like saying "2.99 plus shipping and handling." You sometimes get quoted a price without the local loop, which can create a low price perception.
The Secret Service, we naively presumed, was employed to protect high-ranking elected officials.
This is the big problem with Federal law enforcement -- there's so many different law enforcement arms, and few of them like to cooperate with the others. I heard on NPR that they want to form yet another to combat terrorism! Why not have:
(1) FBI -- Enforce federal criminal statutes, including counterfeiting and narcotics, as well as felon apprehension. This gets rid of the DEA, the non-protective Secret Service roles and the Marshalls Service. Essentially focuses on criminal acts comitted in the United States.
(2) Homeland security. Immigration, border security, customs, counter-terrorism, counter-espionage and government protection, including Presidential Security. Eliminates border patrol, customs service, and the rest of the Secret Service function. Essentially focuses on crimes involving extra-national activities and government security.
The constitutional standards for (1), which would mostly involve US citizens, could then be kept higher without a risk to national security.
I keep asking myself that. Here's my biggest problem -- you have to *hold* most console controllers in addition to actually using them. A joystick can just sit on my desk/lap/arm of my chair and I can work it without having to hold it as well.
Not only that, but what other controller for any other machine in the history of mechanization has such a dinky physical range of motion? Gearshifts, flight sticks, yokes, pedals, levers, even elevator buttons, mice and keyboards all have real, physical travel and motion. A PS2 controller's buttons are squishy and the movement stick has less travel than my keyboard.
My ideal controller would look something like a joystick -- large shaft with 4 buttons accessable by the thumb, and a trigger accessable by the index finger. It'd have a curved handle with twist action on the sides (for leftie/rightie) with 8 buttons (2 rows of 4) that could be used with the other hand. That gives you 3 axis with the main stick, a fourth with the handle, and 13 distinct buttons.
Bandwidth costs are getting so cheap these days, its a miracle anyone's in business. "Good" IP T1s are under $400/mo without local loop, and even that's getting inexpensive. I've been quoted well under a grand per month for 3Mbps with local loop.
In fact, some of the vendors I've talked to say that they've been converting a lot of "business DSL" customers to full T1s, simply because of reliability and cost competitiveness.
Hundreds per month for 1.5/1.5 is pretty much about right for that bandwidth, and it may still technically be a bargain if it includes local loop. T1s may be a better bargain if all prices are pretty much equal, due to higher reliability.
I remember my first and last console, the Atari 2600 and its great (well, compared to the Apple ][ potentiameter joysticks) joystick.
The consoles I've played (PS2, mainly) suffer from what I'd call awful controllers. They're hard to control from a reaction standpoint. Their size and awkwardness is compounded by the games' reliance on a lot of other, small buttons that are hard to press while still controlling motion *and* actually holding the controller.
A true joystick can provide 3 axis of movement and allow you to hold onto the controller, freeing a hand to operate other buttons without conflicting with basic movement or controller handling.
Obviously based on sales alone, this isn't a major stumbling block for other people, but I know I'd like a PS2 a whole lot more if there was a controller I could wrap my hands around.
The problem is the Top100 reviewers program. It's yet another idiotic and worthless online badge of honor that because you can get it some people will try.
If they eliminated the program and there was no way to be a Top100 reviewer, these people would go find something else to do.
Just imagine if Slashdot had a "Top100 posters" category...
think that a heavier amplifier is worse becaue it's harder to move around for cleaning.
What's wrong with this criticism? If the only concern you have is with the quality of the reproduction, then you'd be willing to accept an amp with the size and efficiency of a chest freezer.
Normal people care as much about how it fits into their home from design, space and usage perspectives as they do about what it sounds like. They're willing to trade off sound quality if they can achieve their other goals.
The state-run lottery ALWAYS pays off its winners, and thanks to the fairly transparent nature of its government management, I know that people actually win. I won't play that.
An ad banner telling me I can win if I click is assumed at its most honest to have the odds of a $100M lottery and the payout of the trinket crane at the arcade. At worst, nobody wins anything and the "contest" is just an excuse to harvest marketing info for spammers and to generate leads for fraudulent telemarketing.
TANSTAAFL. I know it and so does everybody else. Offering contests is a great way to cheapen a brand, not enhance it.
How about ipods in *different colors*?? [...]That sounds more like Apple to me...
It all sounds like Apple to me -- much of their innovation has been centered around what are really superficial visual design changes.
Some wags may argue that some of the design changes made the machine easier to work on (some aspects of the B&W G3 case design) or easier to use (the new iMac's screen adjustability) or made them more productive because they made them feel better looking at a "good" design.
I think overall that the design changes were designed more around grabbing people's attention than material improvements in the basic function of the device.
I think Apple rather lays bare the superficiality of some of their design motivations and cheapens the actual design ground they laid by doing this with the iPod. But I bought a Tivo instead of an iPod with my mad money, so what do I know..
A friend told me about a data transfer service that uses a very expensive device that plays vinyl with a laser. Supposed to eliminate almost all the hiss and pop associated with physical contact.
It's not very hard to imagine something that can do this and play in real time also being able to do it at 2x or faster and output PCM digital audio files.
Whether the docor was providing "hope" or sound medicine, I don't doubt that covering his ass was a major factor in his decision.
The biggest problem is that medicine generally is much more of a zero-sum financial game than people realize, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on very old people with very complex health problems *and* terminal illnesses actually denies care to a lot of people.
It raises insurance premiums, which eliminates insurance has an option for many employers and classes of employees. It forces insurers to limit the access and types of care available. This latter issue is a big problem, because in many cases inferior medical care of the young leads to expensive complicated care for them whtn they're not so young, which only aggrevates the cost component.
I guess to some this all leads down the road to mercy killings and care denied based on diagnoses or age limits or something else out of a bad future movie, but at some point we really do have to ask ourselves about the costs and the benefits in medecine, as well as adjusting our attitude towards life and dying.
As long as "another day at any cost" remains a valid an acceptable mindset, we're in trouble.
It's so damned expensive treating cancer, let's just stop all treatment and spend all the cash we save on preventative research...
Can you see the flaw?
Actually, no I can't see the flaw. My mother was terminal with breast cancer that had spread to her bones and internal organs. 12 months after the terminal diagnosis, she spent three weeks in the hospital with after kidney failure due to ureaters being pinched off by tumor growth. After this episode we had a long conversation with her oncologist (dad, mom, me and my sister) about the value of further chemotherapy. "Yes, it's still of some value. Remission could happen."
MRI and bonescans indicated massive, agressive spread. After more chemo, she died about 4 months later.
So yes, I don't see the point of treating some cancers or stages of cancer unless maybe I'm getting rich off the insurance payments, like the greedy oncologist. We're all familiar with the People magazine stories of people who pulled the plug and climbed halfway into the coffin only to return to normal, cancer free life.
Only we're not familiar with the other 99% who suck chemo juice for maybe two years and end up dying horrible, painful, stretched-out deaths, so doped up they're hardly aware of themselves and those around them. (Mom was on a tasty cocktail of 5mg of atavan and 150 mg of morphine per day -- for comparison, I weigh 2.5 times what she weighed her last months and I got 30mg of morphine after surgery and could hardly stand, 2 mg of atavan makes me a drooling idiot).
There has to be a better way that both directs more benefits to the living (like affordable insurance premimums to cover survivable "problems" like childbirth), more dignity to the very sick (no chasing false hope!), and resources to find meaningful cures. Dumping $150k into 70 year olds with terminal cancer is cruel to them, their families and people who don't get to see a doctor for a sore throat because insurance needs to pay for terminal cases ineffective treatment.
What always got to me were the people that seem to think that it's my job to fix their computer from now on after the first visit.
I always hated fixing employees home PCs. If there were no kids, they were antique Packard-Bells that were fortunate to still work. If there *were* kids they were new Packard-Bells with every piece of BS on them they could install.
I solved this problem by starting to tell anyone that it was $100/hr, 2 hour minimum and I wouldn't even touch the computer without all the original installation disks in case something needed fixing. This scared everyone and let me off the hook.
lemme tell you about the winter of 1993, -50C in Ottawa, Canada with the windchill, and my faithful little Chevette still started on the first shot
Heh, your car doesn't feel the windchill! It was probably only -20F air temp, but that's not bad for getting a car to start first time. My friend in high school had a chevette that started always in the cold, but his '78 Satellite didn't.
Bullshit. Try this and convince all the people who posted info about their 2-cycles snowblowers that since it doesn't make any engineering sense, their 2-cycle machines don't exist. We owned two 2-cycles ourselves when I was younger.
His cars probably get better mileage then most SUVs on the road, and the check engine light does not come on every 2 weeks needing another trip to the dealer (coworkers volvo wagon).
The slant 6 motor (which I wanna guess is in the two Mopar cars) was reliable and likely more fuel efficient than today's ultramonster SUVs, but it can't hold a candle to comparable sedans today. The Dodge Ram D-350 truck can't be as fuel efficient as comperable-sized trucks with 6s. Unless you want to keep making unfair comparisons, you can't argue that cars of 30 years ago are comparable to today's cars.
It's a foam ball that's "safe" to play with in the house. You can chuck it around in the living room and nothing gets broken.
Christmas day, after your presents are open your little brother tosses it randomly around the room. It lands on one of mom's candles she thought was safely burning high above where the kids or pets could get to it. The flaming ooze gets on the bookshelf, ignites the garland, which starts the house on fire.
You write your letter to Nerf complaining about their products from the parking lot of the homeless shelter that you can't get into because its full.
Slashdot Mirror
Would it be worthwhile for Nasa to put a few communications satellites capable of relaying around some of the more distant planets? Obviously the number and which ones would depend on where the planets were relative to earth and the objects you wanted to relay from.
They could be used for deep space probe communications or even for SETI-like stuff.
I hate to ask for more laws, but I'd like to see a law passed that requires any company providing a recurring-charge based service to:
(a) have a cancellations department
(b) make that department's contact information readily and easily available through all means which the company can be contacted (eg, no "online-only" phone list)
(c) the cancellations department's sole job is to cancel accounts. They may only ask once for a reason for cancellation and then process the cancellation. No offers, no lying, no bullshit, immediate cancellation.
Making you jump through sales hoops to cancel your account is dishonest, there's no two ways about it.
1) You can't have the widget
2) You WILL PAY FOR THE WIDGET
3) Profit!!!
With the urban sprawl and wide open spaces and all, there's an awful lot of people not within the required distance.
My understanding is not that its a required distance problem, but the way that many of the suburban developments were cabled from the 80s on. It was copper from the house to some kind of development aggregation point, from there it was some digital technology back to the CO. This is awesome if you're the phone company -- you're serving thousands without pulling dozens of 200 pair cables, and you can build even fewer COs.
It's a disaster for DSL, because you can't mux it up like you can voice, and DSLAMs like a climate controlled environment like a CO. My understanding was that DSLAM vendors were now selling DSLAMs that are environmentally hardended and could be used for locations outside of the DSL distance limit or meshed with development level mux locations in places that you can't usually put sensitive electronics -- on poles or concrete slabs.
I extensively googled the 20 women I dated seriously from college until I was married, and I managed to find information about exactly two of them, a PR page for the law firm that one of them works for now and a footnote in a white paper that another contributed to. The others turned up exactly zero hits. All the people I dated were college educated, and a few were involved in science/technology.
One might connect it to women changing their name when they marry -- if Jane Johnson becomes Jane Anderson, how will you ever find her unless she's some ubergeek who continues to go by her original name or alias(es)?
I've done this with other people I've known but not seen for a while, including people that were heavily involved in computers pre-internet and I can't seem to track them down either. I'd mostly assume though that the people you can turn up are primarily active, current users of public forums or have had a lot of public news exposure and have easily identifiable names or aliases.
Based upon my highly unrandom sampling, I'd say that's very, very few people outside of today's current internet "insiders."
There's no reason that an elite Presidential Protection group in "Homeland Security" could be formed. They could at least have better coordination and intelligence with the other homeland security branches.
Each of the internal and external security branches could have a special group designed for investigating the other when needed.
Local loop is the portion of a T1 carried between the carrier and your building, traditionally handled by the local phone company. Often referred to as last mile.
Its usually billed seperately to differentiate the cost of what you're actually buying and what it takes to get it to you. I think it matters in some accounting, and its kind of like saying "2.99 plus shipping and handling." You sometimes get quoted a price without the local loop, which can create a low price perception.
The Secret Service, we naively presumed, was employed to protect high-ranking elected officials.
This is the big problem with Federal law enforcement -- there's so many different law enforcement arms, and few of them like to cooperate with the others. I heard on NPR that they want to form yet another to combat terrorism! Why not have:
(1) FBI -- Enforce federal criminal statutes, including counterfeiting and narcotics, as well as felon apprehension. This gets rid of the DEA, the non-protective Secret Service roles and the Marshalls Service. Essentially focuses on criminal acts comitted in the United States.
(2) Homeland security. Immigration, border security, customs, counter-terrorism, counter-espionage and government protection, including Presidential Security. Eliminates border patrol, customs service, and the rest of the Secret Service function. Essentially focuses on crimes involving extra-national activities and government security.
The constitutional standards for (1), which would mostly involve US citizens, could then be kept higher without a risk to national security.
What the hell's wrong with you...
I keep asking myself that. Here's my biggest problem -- you have to *hold* most console controllers in addition to actually using them. A joystick can just sit on my desk/lap/arm of my chair and I can work it without having to hold it as well.
Not only that, but what other controller for any other machine in the history of mechanization has such a dinky physical range of motion? Gearshifts, flight sticks, yokes, pedals, levers, even elevator buttons, mice and keyboards all have real, physical travel and motion. A PS2 controller's buttons are squishy and the movement stick has less travel than my keyboard.
My ideal controller would look something like a joystick -- large shaft with 4 buttons accessable by the thumb, and a trigger accessable by the index finger. It'd have a curved handle with twist action on the sides (for leftie/rightie) with 8 buttons (2 rows of 4) that could be used with the other hand. That gives you 3 axis with the main stick, a fourth with the handle, and 13 distinct buttons.
Maybe I'm just old.
Bandwidth costs are getting so cheap these days, its a miracle anyone's in business. "Good" IP T1s are under $400/mo without local loop, and even that's getting inexpensive. I've been quoted well under a grand per month for 3Mbps with local loop.
In fact, some of the vendors I've talked to say that they've been converting a lot of "business DSL" customers to full T1s, simply because of reliability and cost competitiveness.
Hundreds per month for 1.5/1.5 is pretty much about right for that bandwidth, and it may still technically be a bargain if it includes local loop. T1s may be a better bargain if all prices are pretty much equal, due to higher reliability.
I remember my first and last console, the Atari 2600 and its great (well, compared to the Apple ][ potentiameter joysticks) joystick.
The consoles I've played (PS2, mainly) suffer from what I'd call awful controllers. They're hard to control from a reaction standpoint. Their size and awkwardness is compounded by the games' reliance on a lot of other, small buttons that are hard to press while still controlling motion *and* actually holding the controller.
A true joystick can provide 3 axis of movement and allow you to hold onto the controller, freeing a hand to operate other buttons without conflicting with basic movement or controller handling.
Obviously based on sales alone, this isn't a major stumbling block for other people, but I know I'd like a PS2 a whole lot more if there was a controller I could wrap my hands around.
If Linux cared about what went into the rest of the system, he'd be a committer to FreeBSD. :)
The problem is the Top100 reviewers program. It's yet another idiotic and worthless online badge of honor that because you can get it some people will try.
If they eliminated the program and there was no way to be a Top100 reviewer, these people would go find something else to do.
Just imagine if Slashdot had a "Top100 posters" category...
think that a heavier amplifier is worse becaue it's harder to move around for cleaning.
What's wrong with this criticism? If the only concern you have is with the quality of the reproduction, then you'd be willing to accept an amp with the size and efficiency of a chest freezer.
Normal people care as much about how it fits into their home from design, space and usage perspectives as they do about what it sounds like. They're willing to trade off sound quality if they can achieve their other goals.
Offer prizes.
You're joking, right?
The state-run lottery ALWAYS pays off its winners, and thanks to the fairly transparent nature of its government management, I know that people actually win. I won't play that.
An ad banner telling me I can win if I click is assumed at its most honest to have the odds of a $100M lottery and the payout of the trinket crane at the arcade. At worst, nobody wins anything and the "contest" is just an excuse to harvest marketing info for spammers and to generate leads for fraudulent telemarketing.
TANSTAAFL. I know it and so does everybody else. Offering contests is a great way to cheapen a brand, not enhance it.
How about ipods in *different colors*?? [...]That sounds more like Apple to me...
It all sounds like Apple to me -- much of their innovation has been centered around what are really superficial visual design changes.
Some wags may argue that some of the design changes made the machine easier to work on (some aspects of the B&W G3 case design) or easier to use (the new iMac's screen adjustability) or made them more productive because they made them feel better looking at a "good" design.
I think overall that the design changes were designed more around grabbing people's attention than material improvements in the basic function of the device.
I think Apple rather lays bare the superficiality of some of their design motivations and cheapens the actual design ground they laid by doing this with the iPod. But I bought a Tivo instead of an iPod with my mad money, so what do I know..
A friend told me about a data transfer service that uses a very expensive device that plays vinyl with a laser. Supposed to eliminate almost all the hiss and pop associated with physical contact.
It's not very hard to imagine something that can do this and play in real time also being able to do it at 2x or faster and output PCM digital audio files.
Hmm.
1) Hijack access point
2) Fake service payment screens via same intercept tech
3) Profit, illegally
Whether the docor was providing "hope" or sound medicine, I don't doubt that covering his ass was a major factor in his decision.
The biggest problem is that medicine generally is much more of a zero-sum financial game than people realize, and spending hundreds of thousands of dollars on very old people with very complex health problems *and* terminal illnesses actually denies care to a lot of people.
It raises insurance premiums, which eliminates insurance has an option for many employers and classes of employees. It forces insurers to limit the access and types of care available. This latter issue is a big problem, because in many cases inferior medical care of the young leads to expensive complicated care for them whtn they're not so young, which only aggrevates the cost component.
I guess to some this all leads down the road to mercy killings and care denied based on diagnoses or age limits or something else out of a bad future movie, but at some point we really do have to ask ourselves about the costs and the benefits in medecine, as well as adjusting our attitude towards life and dying.
As long as "another day at any cost" remains a valid an acceptable mindset, we're in trouble.
It's so damned expensive treating cancer, let's just stop all treatment and spend all the cash we save on preventative research...
Can you see the flaw?
Actually, no I can't see the flaw. My mother was terminal with breast cancer that had spread to her bones and internal organs. 12 months after the terminal diagnosis, she spent three weeks in the hospital with after kidney failure due to ureaters being pinched off by tumor growth. After this episode we had a long conversation with her oncologist (dad, mom, me and my sister) about the value of further chemotherapy. "Yes, it's still of some value. Remission could happen." MRI and bonescans indicated massive, agressive spread. After more chemo, she died about 4 months later.
So yes, I don't see the point of treating some cancers or stages of cancer unless maybe I'm getting rich off the insurance payments, like the greedy oncologist. We're all familiar with the People magazine stories of people who pulled the plug and climbed halfway into the coffin only to return to normal, cancer free life.
Only we're not familiar with the other 99% who suck chemo juice for maybe two years and end up dying horrible, painful, stretched-out deaths, so doped up they're hardly aware of themselves and those around them. (Mom was on a tasty cocktail of 5mg of atavan and 150 mg of morphine per day -- for comparison, I weigh 2.5 times what she weighed her last months and I got 30mg of morphine after surgery and could hardly stand, 2 mg of atavan makes me a drooling idiot).
There has to be a better way that both directs more benefits to the living (like affordable insurance premimums to cover survivable "problems" like childbirth), more dignity to the very sick (no chasing false hope!), and resources to find meaningful cures. Dumping $150k into 70 year olds with terminal cancer is cruel to them, their families and people who don't get to see a doctor for a sore throat because insurance needs to pay for terminal cases ineffective treatment.
What always got to me were the people that seem to think that it's my job to fix their computer from now on after the first visit.
I always hated fixing employees home PCs. If there were no kids, they were antique Packard-Bells that were fortunate to still work. If there *were* kids they were new Packard-Bells with every piece of BS on them they could install.
I solved this problem by starting to tell anyone that it was $100/hr, 2 hour minimum and I wouldn't even touch the computer without all the original installation disks in case something needed fixing. This scared everyone and let me off the hook.
lemme tell you about the winter of 1993, -50C in Ottawa, Canada with the windchill, and my faithful little Chevette still started on the first shot
Heh, your car doesn't feel the windchill! It was probably only -20F air temp, but that's not bad for getting a car to start first time. My friend in high school had a chevette that started always in the cold, but his '78 Satellite didn't.
Maybe management didn't want you mixing your side business with your day job.
Generally speaking, most places dislike their employees generating business from their customers or doing business on their time.
There were never any 2-cycle snowblowers.
Bullshit. Try this and convince all the people who posted info about their 2-cycles snowblowers that since it doesn't make any engineering sense, their 2-cycle machines don't exist. We owned two 2-cycles ourselves when I was younger.
His cars probably get better mileage then most SUVs on the road, and the check engine light does not come on every 2 weeks needing another trip to the dealer (coworkers volvo wagon).
The slant 6 motor (which I wanna guess is in the two Mopar cars) was reliable and likely more fuel efficient than today's ultramonster SUVs, but it can't hold a candle to comparable sedans today. The Dodge Ram D-350 truck can't be as fuel efficient as comperable-sized trucks with 6s. Unless you want to keep making unfair comparisons, you can't argue that cars of 30 years ago are comparable to today's cars.
It's a foam ball that's "safe" to play with in the house. You can chuck it around in the living room and nothing gets broken.
Christmas day, after your presents are open your little brother tosses it randomly around the room. It lands on one of mom's candles she thought was safely burning high above where the kids or pets could get to it. The flaming ooze gets on the bookshelf, ignites the garland, which starts the house on fire.
You write your letter to Nerf complaining about their products from the parking lot of the homeless shelter that you can't get into because its full.
Merry Christmas, and thanks for the Nerf toys.