Maybe they do need to upgrade their systems. And actually, Delta is making a profit right now. Maybe they have the money, maybe not. I don't know.
Final disclaimer: I don't know the details of what caused Delta's meltdown. But I'll share my own, much smaller-scaled personal experience to let you know why I shall at least hesitate before pointing fingers at the airline.
I work for the best company in US radio broadcasting. (Personal opinion, but there you go.) (Heh.) We are willing to spend the money on new equipment and systems to keep our radio stations on air. We have a backup generator at our studios and UPS units on all critical systems. They're tested and serviced frequently.
We've had severe storms in our region (I'm in Birmingham, Delta is in Atlanta) lately. We have had power failures where the AC will flicker on, off, on, off, rapidly, for several seconds, then finally die. Speaking from experience, this can cause all sorts of problems. (Don't believe me? Plug your favorite UPS into an outlet strip and toggle the AC on and off, on and off, while it's under load. Don't be surprised if it finally barfs.)
At any rate: our generator controller got confused and refused to crank the genset and a couple of critical UPS units shut off. I won't bore you with the details, but by any definition, it was a low probability event. We fixed it, we got back on air, and I designed a mod for our 10-year old Kohler generator controller. In fact, I'm ordering the parts now.
Here's the point: it's always something. If you lock the doors, the bad guys come through the window. If you bar the windows, they'll chop a hole in the ceiling. It's a never-ending battle. You examine the failure, do a post-mortem, then figure out a way to prevent it from happening again... and THEN, wait for the next Big Bite(tm).:)
So... maybe Delta mighta-shoulda spent some money to prevent their failure from happening. I'm not going to say that they've invested the money to ensure that what happened shouldn't have happened. But I'm also prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt.:)
Didn't have time to look up the others, but Singapore Air is supported by the government of Singapore. They own over 40% of the airline, according to Wikipedia.
Not taking away from them, I know they're good and have a great reputation. But you're not exactly comparing apples to apples if you try to compare Singapore with, say, Delta or United.
The real reason for the cell companies to "offload" data is to ease the load on their networks. OK, I understand that... and I realize that it could save me money. If I'm in a hotspot, why not use that instead of eating my limited data plan?
But honestly, Verizon has almost gotten ridiculous with it. Little beg screens ("are you SURE you don't want to connect to wireless?" -- it was a happy day when I figured out how to kill that one), refusing to open Web pages if I'm just beyond the range of a known hotspot, and worse.
Verizon is VERY aggressive about offloading.
Given how much it costs to build a new tower site nowadays, I can understand, but don't be fooled: the benefit of offloading is primarily for the cell carrier, and NOT for you.:)
I think, as usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle (as the ORNL study points out). A few things to keep in mind:
1. Even a small nuclear weapon can cause a significant EMP. Larger weapons cause a more widespread affect, but even a relatively small 2KT weapon, targeted over a key facility, could knock out power to a large area.
2. The weapon needs to be detonated above dense atmosphere.
As far as electromagnetic pulses in general, shielding is effective... and those who say it isn't don't understand that there are right and wrong ways to shield and ground. In my work (radio engineer), I have to do some odd-looking things to protect against lightning. A single loop in a feedline to an AM tower, for example, attenuates the lightning that comes back into my facility. Thus, I have big honkin' ball gaps at the tower base, but can get by with a smaller "horn gap" at the entry to my equipment.
Our grid could be protected with reasonable expenditures. We couldn't prevent all damage, but we could limit it. Solid-state electronics have to be protected two ways: overall shielding, and limiting/protection at the I/O points. For example, an old desktop computer in a heavy metal case, with a good ground, probably wouldn't notice the EMP... *except* for induced voltages coming in on the video, mouse and printer cables. Those would probably send the motherboard screaming into the shrubbery.:)
From that article: "No agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution."
And,
"The concept that the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections against arbitrary government are inoperative when they become inconvenient or when expediency dictates otherwise is a very dangerous doctrine and if allowed to flourish would destroy the benefit of a written Constitution and undermine the basis of our government."
> the only reason no virus got around that is that no one bothered working around a blocker no one uses
At the time, we actually had thousands of users of the ARF Antivirus, and we received more than one report that there were indeed efforts to hack it.:)
What you say is true *technically.* And you should change your username to "Deja Vu," because I (and my friends with similar approaches, like Zvi Netiv with Invircible) had to repeat this over and over. I finally got tired of it, and given that out of those thousands of downloads only ONE person ever bother to register/pay, it wasn't worth it. Fuggedaboutit, just use your virus scanner and we'll still be friends.
Never forget this: it's theoretically possible to do many things. But it is not always PRACTICAL. In the instant case, using your example, a virus that tried to emulate actual DOS calls, essentially duplicating the code internally, would be very large. Remember, this was back in the day of dial up modems and bulletin boards. And a virus that emulated processor opcodes would be even larger.
(And *cough*... we also kept encrypted copies of critical system areas, and compared what we'd stored with what we found -- both on disk AND in memory -- from time to time. That made it much more difficult for the "stealth OS" hack that you describe.) (Heh.)
But I'm not going to waste time rehashing this argument. What I WILL warn against is what I saw your attitude produce, too many times to count: "since we can't guarantee 100% that a system can't be hacked, why bother?" I'm not saying that's what you believe, but I ran across that attitude too many times to count.
It is possible to achieve high levels of security through integrity checking and behavior(al) control. It just costs a bit in performance and memory. And if you write something in very tight C, it's not going to be large.
I may have mentioned this here before; if so, I apologize. But a million years ago, back when MS DOS 5 came out, a friend and I developed something called the ARF Utilities. (To my endless amusement, you can still find it in a Google.) Our approach was integrity and behavior blocking.
One reason why DOS was so vulnerable at the time was because Microsoft kept rebuilding and reusing the same code. The entry point to the DOS kernel (the old INT21h interface) didn't change from DOS 5 through 6.22. Our integrity blocker did a simple search to find that in memory, then *patched* DOS to send all calls through the behavior blocker, which was resident in memory. We also hooked and examined a bunch of other stuff inside the kernel (including the INT 21h interface and the SHARE hooks -- the latter was a terrible security vulnerability and only the appearance of Windows 95, and the rapid demise of DOS, kept it from being exploiting widely and wildly.) The blocker was written in assembler and could fit in about 2K of memory, as I recall.
It also checked itself, and the integrity of an executed program's file, at startup, and each time a program was terminated. By "check," I mean it literally scanned its own code in memory, compared random CRCs taken of different blocks to generated values stored earlier and would instantly warn if DOS, the terminating program or itself had been tampered with. (You don't just do one "checksum" of a fixed length; you do different blocks, chosen at random, generated on the fly at system startup.)
We couldn't find a virus that could get around it. The worst we ever experienced was a hang that required a hard reboot. But the system wasn't altered. And yet, the Official Anti-Virus Community (which, at the time, was BIG business) rejected our approach, called us interlopers and marginalized us. Everyone back then wanted scanners, scanners, scanners. All of the tests were on scanners.
In sum: I have no idea if this particular company's code is snake oil or the Real Deal(tm). But don't just dismiss them. If you think outside the box, it is possible to find better ways to do something.
Just my opinion and worth every penny of what you paid for it.:)
> That's not analog strictly speaking. That is a digital device imitating an analog display.
Technically true, but I think you're missing the point. In fact, the arguments here about whether this meter is "true analog" or that one is "digital" miss what the original poster was trying to say.
Whether I play my guitar and record it directly, or use a digitized sample or even a modeled guitar sound, the end result sounds like a guitar. Likewise, it's entirely possible to emulate an analog meter with digital techniques. While I might prefer the real thing when recording (and I do), my eyes truly couldn't care less whether the meter that I'm looking at uses a magnetic moving vane, or is just a clever simulation done digitally. (The operative term is "clever;" if it's a bad simulation, that's different.)
On most of my transmitters, even the all-solid-state ones, the power meters are moving vane analog types. I actually prefer them. Nautel (the manufacturer) now does all-digital displays on its latest boxen, but you can also have analog-style bargraphs.
When we rebuilt a 50KW AM directional back in 1999, I installed a then-cutting-edge all-digital antenna monitor to measure current ratios and phases. At first, I was excited... but when I saw how the displays jumped and toggled around, I found myself longing for an older analog-style meter. (Call me a dinosaur.):)
Again: I wouldn't care if it was an excellent simulation done digitally. Something that gives me a smooth, "averaged*" response, is all I care about.
One popular audio meter nowadays is the Dorrough Loudness Monitor (www.dorrough.com). It has the best of both worlds: a little peak LED that flies off to the right, showing the instantaneous peak levels, and an "averaged" LED indication of the perceived loudness. Is that "digital" or "analog?" I don't care. It's blamed useful.:)
(* technically, I guess you'd say "RMS," but that's not really accurate for what we're doing, either.)
For years, I used a small ISP called Hiwaay Information Services here in Alabama. Great people, I was on a first-name basis with tech support and sales. ATT owned the lines, of course, but Hiwaay bought the service wholesale and resold it to individuals like me. It cost me a little more, but if I had a problem, instead of going through ATT's byzantine voice menus and slower-than-molasses "escalations," I called and they'd hound ATT until it was fixed.
Well worth it, in my book. I MUST have high-speed access at home for remote administration of our servers after hours.
Then ATT introduced Uverse. We received monthly offers to switch to Uverse; I ignored them and stayed with Hiwaay. But Hiwaay finally sent me a letter: sorry, ATT is no longer making these products available to us, so we'll have to cancel your DSL. I had no choice but to go with UVerse.
Right now, the price is less, but they could raise it in the future and there is no competition (unless I want to use dialup; forget that). They send me WEEKLY offers to use the UVerse "cable" television service. They can't stop DirecTV from selling to me, so I'm still with that. For now.:)
Now: you decide if the big-hearted folks at Comcast and Time-Warner will do similar or equivalent things. Add to this the service that our company gets from them in some of our other markets, and I'm afraid I'm just not quite as impressed with their protestations as I might otherwise be.
In fact, I can't speak for the latest versions of Windows (because it has been a while since I've programmed), but even as late as Windows XP, a call to "get version" returns something completely different from the marketing version number/name.
For example, under Windows 95, GetVersion() would return "4.0." Under XP, it reports NT 5.1 or NT 5.2.
Those of us who love science fiction are used to this. It's fun to go back and read what some of the authors in the 1950's thought the future would look like. My personal favorite is that no thought it given to miniaturization; everything still uses tubes. Exotic tubes with magical abilities (like the power tubes in the Venus Equilateral series), but still vacuum tubes with filaments.
When it comes to computers, it's just as hit and miss. The way some authors handle artificial intelligence is by insisting that it won't happen. (David Weber, to name one -- in his books, the idea is that any true AI would quickly go insane.)
(But then, poor David has other concerns: in the Honor Harrington series, one key to Manticore's military superiority is the fact that they've harnessed "gravity waves" for faster-than-light communications... and the physicists have long since determined that gravity propagates no faster than the speed of light.):)
Likewise when I see anyone in a story "pressing a button" (even if it's a virtual button). We're already on the brink of direct neural interfaces. You think it, things happen. That's the future. But to be fair to these authors, it's hard to see what's coming in 10 years.
Loser-Pay Legislation would take care of the second one. Been saying it for years.
Eventually, those folks who oppose it simply because it seems too "conservative" for their politics are going to get their minds right.
The United States is the only major Western Democracy that doesn't follow the "british rule," where the winning party in a lawsuit is generally allowed to recover the costs of bringing or defending a suit.
> Other times you can work like an actual adult and solve the problems
I don't know the details in this case, and neither do you. But trust me, it ain't always that simple.
Years ago, back when I was still doing the contract programming gig on the side, I took a job for a major multinational. This was a relatively simple concept: write some software that read the AutoCAD files for the wire numbers, and then print heat-shrink labels to go on the wires. Sounds good, right?
First strike: it was done in Visual C++ 1.5, 16 bit. That compiler had some marvelous bugs (such as getting the segment and offset REVERSED when it loaded the ES and SI registers, HA HA that one was fun to track down).
Second strike: my predecessor had used that silly "frame-document-view" model for this relatively simple program (I can't even remember what they call it now). He decided to put everything in the View, so he had globals everywhere. Of course, they were getting clobbered, and of COURSE, I had to find each of these bugs.
Third: the people with this company had no idea what they wanted it to actually do. They said, "the stuff for the heater wiring starts with 'H," the motor wiring with 'M', and so on... except for when it doesn't." (That's not a joke.) In other words, the files that I was reading (with a horrible third-party bolt-on DLL, by the way) weren't even guaranteed to be standardized!
I left this project and moved on to more pleasant things. That cured me. I went back into radio engineering, even though (with no false modesty) I was actually a very good programmer.
OH, and did I mention that this was using Visual C++ 1.5? Make sure you don't miss that.:)
> that could directly impact the contractor's future work prospects, if they cite how bad a job the contractor has done
They're going to do that anyway, whether he stays to completion/collapse, or quits now.
I say quit now, find something else right away and let it blow over. It may not seem like it right now, but it WILL eventually blow over. Get another successful project or two under your belt and the one bad project won't glare too badly on the resume.
The brain is intimately involved with how we perceive things. A bunch of experiments have been done, for example (recounted in the link above), one guy wore glasses that inverted everything -- he saw everything "upside down." After a few days, his brain flipped everything the right way!
I can imagine that years with low or no gravity would do far more than just affect the physiology. This isn't just a mechanical phenomenon. It's not just a matter of distorted eyeballs or inner ears. The whole time, your brain is trying to reinterpret what you're sensing to fit what it understands.
> Posts like this are why scientists like Lawrence Krauss have no time for philosophers.
Heh. Thanks for the laugh with my morning coffee. You are dead on the money.
> Karl Popper's rules do not claim to be science itself
And Popper himself was responsible for the Philosophy of Science. His rules are generally used because they work.
A good example for the layman (not scientific by any means, but illustrative) would be, you're sitting in your den, watching TV. "Where's the cat?" you wonder. One of his play toys mysteriously rolls from under the sofa, and you say, "ah." Is that proof that there's a cat under there? Of course not. But based on previous observations, experience, and the knowledge that your feline is a loveable knothead who can get into anything and at any time, it's a darn safe guess.:)
> Creationists, by the by, have an agenda; that is, 'prove' what they already take to be a priori assumptions. They aren't interested in knowledge, they're interested in influence.
Many are. But don't make blanket assumptions.
Me? I'm more of a libertarian, plotting endlessly to take over the world so that I can leave you completely alone.:)
I spent a good bit of time trying to explain this to laycreatures at my own Website. Karl Popper pretty well summed up the rules for scientific theories:
1. It must adequately explain that which is known about the thing being observed. 2. It must be falsifiable. In other words, it must make concrete predictions that can be tested empirically. If not, it is NOT a scientific theory. 3. This is the key: the SIMPLEST (i.e., the most "economical") theory that adequately explains the observations is preferred.
This is extremely important: just because you come up with a theory that seems to work does NOT mean that you're right. It simply means that you've found a mathematical model that works as far as you are able to understand and test it.
These guys seem to believe that inflation compels a belief in multiverses. They are certainly not alone in that. But in the interest of equal time, there are PLENTY of other cosmological-types who insist that there are alternate explanations. The "math" does NOT lead only and exclusively to that conclusion. In fact, while researching this for my Website, I found a flooding TON of physicists who went all the way back to Andre Linde (who was one of the first to popularize this) and beyond, and poked all sorts of holes in these arguments.
Disclaimer, I'm not a physicist and don't claim to be. But I'm about as up to speed on it as a layman can get and still remain sane.:)
Slashdot Mirror
> I would bet that this affects a lot more than 25 people
My wife is one of them. She runs Fedora on her Dell laptop and the browser just would not work with Apple's support Website.
Maybe they do need to upgrade their systems. And actually, Delta is making a profit right now. Maybe they have the money, maybe not. I don't know.
Final disclaimer: I don't know the details of what caused Delta's meltdown. But I'll share my own, much smaller-scaled personal experience to let you know why I shall at least hesitate before pointing fingers at the airline.
I work for the best company in US radio broadcasting. (Personal opinion, but there you go.) (Heh.) We are willing to spend the money on new equipment and systems to keep our radio stations on air. We have a backup generator at our studios and UPS units on all critical systems. They're tested and serviced frequently.
We've had severe storms in our region (I'm in Birmingham, Delta is in Atlanta) lately. We have had power failures where the AC will flicker on, off, on, off, rapidly, for several seconds, then finally die. Speaking from experience, this can cause all sorts of problems. (Don't believe me? Plug your favorite UPS into an outlet strip and toggle the AC on and off, on and off, while it's under load. Don't be surprised if it finally barfs.)
At any rate: our generator controller got confused and refused to crank the genset and a couple of critical UPS units shut off. I won't bore you with the details, but by any definition, it was a low probability event. We fixed it, we got back on air, and I designed a mod for our 10-year old Kohler generator controller. In fact, I'm ordering the parts now.
Here's the point: it's always something. If you lock the doors, the bad guys come through the window. If you bar the windows, they'll chop a hole in the ceiling. It's a never-ending battle. You examine the failure, do a post-mortem, then figure out a way to prevent it from happening again ... and THEN, wait for the next Big Bite(tm). :)
So ... maybe Delta mighta-shoulda spent some money to prevent their failure from happening. I'm not going to say that they've invested the money to ensure that what happened shouldn't have happened. But I'm also prepared to give them the benefit of the doubt. :)
The issue isn't simple number crunching and database retrieval, it's the fact that it's global.
Didn't have time to look up the others, but Singapore Air is supported by the government of Singapore. They own over 40% of the airline, according to Wikipedia.
Not taking away from them, I know they're good and have a great reputation. But you're not exactly comparing apples to apples if you try to compare Singapore with, say, Delta or United.
The real reason for the cell companies to "offload" data is to ease the load on their networks. OK, I understand that ... and I realize that it could save me money. If I'm in a hotspot, why not use that instead of eating my limited data plan?
But honestly, Verizon has almost gotten ridiculous with it. Little beg screens ("are you SURE you don't want to connect to wireless?" -- it was a happy day when I figured out how to kill that one), refusing to open Web pages if I'm just beyond the range of a known hotspot, and worse.
Verizon is VERY aggressive about offloading.
Given how much it costs to build a new tower site nowadays, I can understand, but don't be fooled: the benefit of offloading is primarily for the cell carrier, and NOT for you. :)
Whoosh.
Really interesting reading, found the link at the Wiki article on NEMP.
http://www.ornl.gov/sci/ees/et...
I think, as usual, the truth lies somewhere in the middle (as the ORNL study points out). A few things to keep in mind:
1. Even a small nuclear weapon can cause a significant EMP. Larger weapons cause a more widespread affect, but even a relatively small 2KT weapon, targeted over a key facility, could knock out power to a large area.
2. The weapon needs to be detonated above dense atmosphere.
As far as electromagnetic pulses in general, shielding is effective ... and those who say it isn't don't understand that there are right and wrong ways to shield and ground. In my work (radio engineer), I have to do some odd-looking things to protect against lightning. A single loop in a feedline to an AM tower, for example, attenuates the lightning that comes back into my facility. Thus, I have big honkin' ball gaps at the tower base, but can get by with a smaller "horn gap" at the entry to my equipment.
Our grid could be protected with reasonable expenditures. We couldn't prevent all damage, but we could limit it. Solid-state electronics have to be protected two ways: overall shielding, and limiting/protection at the I/O points. For example, an old desktop computer in a heavy metal case, with a good ground, probably wouldn't notice the EMP ... *except* for induced voltages coming in on the video, mouse and printer cables. Those would probably send the motherboard screaming into the shrubbery. :)
> treaties override the US constitution as per precedent ...
No. Only in certain very limited cases.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/R...
From that article: "No agreement with a foreign nation can confer power on the Congress, or on any other branch of Government, which is free from the restraints of the Constitution."
And,
"The concept that the Bill of Rights and other constitutional protections against arbitrary government are inoperative when they become inconvenient or when expediency dictates otherwise is a very dangerous doctrine and if allowed to flourish would destroy the benefit of a written Constitution and undermine the basis of our government."
> the only reason no virus got around that is that no one bothered working around a blocker no one uses
At the time, we actually had thousands of users of the ARF Antivirus, and we received more than one report that there were indeed efforts to hack it. :)
What you say is true *technically.* And you should change your username to "Deja Vu," because I (and my friends with similar approaches, like Zvi Netiv with Invircible) had to repeat this over and over. I finally got tired of it, and given that out of those thousands of downloads only ONE person ever bother to register/pay, it wasn't worth it. Fuggedaboutit, just use your virus scanner and we'll still be friends.
Never forget this: it's theoretically possible to do many things. But it is not always PRACTICAL. In the instant case, using your example, a virus that tried to emulate actual DOS calls, essentially duplicating the code internally, would be very large. Remember, this was back in the day of dial up modems and bulletin boards. And a virus that emulated processor opcodes would be even larger.
(And *cough* ... we also kept encrypted copies of critical system areas, and compared what we'd stored with what we found -- both on disk AND in memory -- from time to time. That made it much more difficult for the "stealth OS" hack that you describe.) (Heh.)
But I'm not going to waste time rehashing this argument. What I WILL warn against is what I saw your attitude produce, too many times to count: "since we can't guarantee 100% that a system can't be hacked, why bother?" I'm not saying that's what you believe, but I ran across that attitude too many times to count.
> it sounds like AppArmor
Or SE Linux, as others have noted.
It is possible to achieve high levels of security through integrity checking and behavior(al) control. It just costs a bit in performance and memory. And if you write something in very tight C, it's not going to be large.
I may have mentioned this here before; if so, I apologize. But a million years ago, back when MS DOS 5 came out, a friend and I developed something called the ARF Utilities. (To my endless amusement, you can still find it in a Google.) Our approach was integrity and behavior blocking.
One reason why DOS was so vulnerable at the time was because Microsoft kept rebuilding and reusing the same code. The entry point to the DOS kernel (the old INT21h interface) didn't change from DOS 5 through 6.22. Our integrity blocker did a simple search to find that in memory, then *patched* DOS to send all calls through the behavior blocker, which was resident in memory. We also hooked and examined a bunch of other stuff inside the kernel (including the INT 21h interface and the SHARE hooks -- the latter was a terrible security vulnerability and only the appearance of Windows 95, and the rapid demise of DOS, kept it from being exploiting widely and wildly.) The blocker was written in assembler and could fit in about 2K of memory, as I recall.
It also checked itself, and the integrity of an executed program's file, at startup, and each time a program was terminated. By "check," I mean it literally scanned its own code in memory, compared random CRCs taken of different blocks to generated values stored earlier and would instantly warn if DOS, the terminating program or itself had been tampered with. (You don't just do one "checksum" of a fixed length; you do different blocks, chosen at random, generated on the fly at system startup.)
We couldn't find a virus that could get around it. The worst we ever experienced was a hang that required a hard reboot. But the system wasn't altered. And yet, the Official Anti-Virus Community (which, at the time, was BIG business) rejected our approach, called us interlopers and marginalized us. Everyone back then wanted scanners, scanners, scanners. All of the tests were on scanners.
In sum: I have no idea if this particular company's code is snake oil or the Real Deal(tm). But don't just dismiss them. If you think outside the box, it is possible to find better ways to do something.
Just my opinion and worth every penny of what you paid for it. :)
> That's not analog strictly speaking. That is a digital device imitating an analog display.
Technically true, but I think you're missing the point. In fact, the arguments here about whether this meter is "true analog" or that one is "digital" miss what the original poster was trying to say.
Whether I play my guitar and record it directly, or use a digitized sample or even a modeled guitar sound, the end result sounds like a guitar. Likewise, it's entirely possible to emulate an analog meter with digital techniques. While I might prefer the real thing when recording (and I do), my eyes truly couldn't care less whether the meter that I'm looking at uses a magnetic moving vane, or is just a clever simulation done digitally. (The operative term is "clever;" if it's a bad simulation, that's different.)
On most of my transmitters, even the all-solid-state ones, the power meters are moving vane analog types. I actually prefer them. Nautel (the manufacturer) now does all-digital displays on its latest boxen, but you can also have analog-style bargraphs.
When we rebuilt a 50KW AM directional back in 1999, I installed a then-cutting-edge all-digital antenna monitor to measure current ratios and phases. At first, I was excited ... but when I saw how the displays jumped and toggled around, I found myself longing for an older analog-style meter. (Call me a dinosaur.) :)
Again: I wouldn't care if it was an excellent simulation done digitally. Something that gives me a smooth, "averaged*" response, is all I care about.
One popular audio meter nowadays is the Dorrough Loudness Monitor (www.dorrough.com). It has the best of both worlds: a little peak LED that flies off to the right, showing the instantaneous peak levels, and an "averaged" LED indication of the perceived loudness. Is that "digital" or "analog?" I don't care. It's blamed useful. :)
(* technically, I guess you'd say "RMS," but that's not really accurate for what we're doing, either.)
For years, I used a small ISP called Hiwaay Information Services here in Alabama. Great people, I was on a first-name basis with tech support and sales. ATT owned the lines, of course, but Hiwaay bought the service wholesale and resold it to individuals like me. It cost me a little more, but if I had a problem, instead of going through ATT's byzantine voice menus and slower-than-molasses "escalations," I called and they'd hound ATT until it was fixed.
Well worth it, in my book. I MUST have high-speed access at home for remote administration of our servers after hours.
Then ATT introduced Uverse. We received monthly offers to switch to Uverse; I ignored them and stayed with Hiwaay. But Hiwaay finally sent me a letter: sorry, ATT is no longer making these products available to us, so we'll have to cancel your DSL. I had no choice but to go with UVerse.
Right now, the price is less, but they could raise it in the future and there is no competition (unless I want to use dialup; forget that). They send me WEEKLY offers to use the UVerse "cable" television service. They can't stop DirecTV from selling to me, so I'm still with that. For now. :)
Now: you decide if the big-hearted folks at Comcast and Time-Warner will do similar or equivalent things. Add to this the service that our company gets from them in some of our other markets, and I'm afraid I'm just not quite as impressed with their protestations as I might otherwise be.
In fact, I can't speak for the latest versions of Windows (because it has been a while since I've programmed), but even as late as Windows XP, a call to "get version" returns something completely different from the marketing version number/name.
For example, under Windows 95, GetVersion() would return "4.0." Under XP, it reports NT 5.1 or NT 5.2.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L...
> I'm in the southern hemisphere
So? Just bore a hole through the Earth and line up on Polaris like the rest of us do.
Sheesh.
Those of us who love science fiction are used to this. It's fun to go back and read what some of the authors in the 1950's thought the future would look like. My personal favorite is that no thought it given to miniaturization; everything still uses tubes. Exotic tubes with magical abilities (like the power tubes in the Venus Equilateral series), but still vacuum tubes with filaments.
When it comes to computers, it's just as hit and miss. The way some authors handle artificial intelligence is by insisting that it won't happen. (David Weber, to name one -- in his books, the idea is that any true AI would quickly go insane.)
(But then, poor David has other concerns: in the Honor Harrington series, one key to Manticore's military superiority is the fact that they've harnessed "gravity waves" for faster-than-light communications ... and the physicists have long since determined that gravity propagates no faster than the speed of light.) :)
Likewise when I see anyone in a story "pressing a button" (even if it's a virtual button). We're already on the brink of direct neural interfaces. You think it, things happen. That's the future. But to be fair to these authors, it's hard to see what's coming in 10 years.
Loser-Pay Legislation would take care of the second one. Been saying it for years.
Eventually, those folks who oppose it simply because it seems too "conservative" for their politics are going to get their minds right.
The United States is the only major Western Democracy that doesn't follow the "british rule," where the winning party in a lawsuit is generally allowed to recover the costs of bringing or defending a suit.
I think everyone here learned from the Snowpocalypse last week. Most people stayed off the roads.
> Other times you can work like an actual adult and solve the problems
I don't know the details in this case, and neither do you. But trust me, it ain't always that simple.
Years ago, back when I was still doing the contract programming gig on the side, I took a job for a major multinational. This was a relatively simple concept: write some software that read the AutoCAD files for the wire numbers, and then print heat-shrink labels to go on the wires. Sounds good, right?
First strike: it was done in Visual C++ 1.5, 16 bit. That compiler had some marvelous bugs (such as getting the segment and offset REVERSED when it loaded the ES and SI registers, HA HA that one was fun to track down).
Second strike: my predecessor had used that silly "frame-document-view" model for this relatively simple program (I can't even remember what they call it now). He decided to put everything in the View, so he had globals everywhere. Of course, they were getting clobbered, and of COURSE, I had to find each of these bugs.
Third: the people with this company had no idea what they wanted it to actually do. They said, "the stuff for the heater wiring starts with 'H," the motor wiring with 'M', and so on ... except for when it doesn't." (That's not a joke.) In other words, the files that I was reading (with a horrible third-party bolt-on DLL, by the way) weren't even guaranteed to be standardized!
I left this project and moved on to more pleasant things. That cured me. I went back into radio engineering, even though (with no false modesty) I was actually a very good programmer.
OH, and did I mention that this was using Visual C++ 1.5? Make sure you don't miss that. :)
> that could directly impact the contractor's future work prospects, if they cite how bad a job the contractor has done
They're going to do that anyway, whether he stays to completion/collapse, or quits now.
I say quit now, find something else right away and let it blow over. It may not seem like it right now, but it WILL eventually blow over. Get another successful project or two under your belt and the one bad project won't glare too badly on the resume.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/P...
The brain is intimately involved with how we perceive things. A bunch of experiments have been done, for example (recounted in the link above), one guy wore glasses that inverted everything -- he saw everything "upside down." After a few days, his brain flipped everything the right way!
I can imagine that years with low or no gravity would do far more than just affect the physiology. This isn't just a mechanical phenomenon. It's not just a matter of distorted eyeballs or inner ears. The whole time, your brain is trying to reinterpret what you're sensing to fit what it understands.
> Posts like this are why scientists like Lawrence Krauss have no time for philosophers.
Heh. Thanks for the laugh with my morning coffee. You are dead on the money.
> Karl Popper's rules do not claim to be science itself
And Popper himself was responsible for the Philosophy of Science. His rules are generally used because they work.
A good example for the layman (not scientific by any means, but illustrative) would be, you're sitting in your den, watching TV. "Where's the cat?" you wonder. One of his play toys mysteriously rolls from under the sofa, and you say, "ah." Is that proof that there's a cat under there? Of course not. But based on previous observations, experience, and the knowledge that your feline is a loveable knothead who can get into anything and at any time, it's a darn safe guess. :)
> Creationists, by the by, have an agenda; that is, 'prove' what they already take to be a priori assumptions. They aren't interested in knowledge, they're interested in influence.
Many are. But don't make blanket assumptions.
Me? I'm more of a libertarian, plotting endlessly to take over the world so that I can leave you completely alone. :)
> Is this testable?
I spent a good bit of time trying to explain this to laycreatures at my own Website. Karl Popper pretty well summed up the rules for scientific theories:
1. It must adequately explain that which is known about the thing being observed.
2. It must be falsifiable. In other words, it must make concrete predictions that can be tested empirically. If not, it is NOT a scientific theory.
3. This is the key: the SIMPLEST (i.e., the most "economical") theory that adequately explains the observations is preferred.
This is extremely important: just because you come up with a theory that seems to work does NOT mean that you're right. It simply means that you've found a mathematical model that works as far as you are able to understand and test it.
These guys seem to believe that inflation compels a belief in multiverses. They are certainly not alone in that. But in the interest of equal time, there are PLENTY of other cosmological-types who insist that there are alternate explanations. The "math" does NOT lead only and exclusively to that conclusion. In fact, while researching this for my Website, I found a flooding TON of physicists who went all the way back to Andre Linde (who was one of the first to popularize this) and beyond, and poked all sorts of holes in these arguments.
Disclaimer, I'm not a physicist and don't claim to be. But I'm about as up to speed on it as a layman can get and still remain sane. :)
> You imply the Big Bang is generaly accepted nowadays because Koch brothers managed to make money of it?
Indeed. I had to put my helmet on just to consider that one.
My head still might explode.
> dick move ... dick move ... classic RH ...
Larry Ellison, is that you?
"Red Hat Lutherans ... Ubuntu baptists ... Android is like the Mormons ..."
OK. ... so whom are the snake handlers?
[Stephen pops a bag of corn and sits happily back to watch the debate ...]