I had actually heard of it. Never left the channel sitting on it for long enough to get past the first few bars of the theme music though, before going and doing something useful, like pulling the fluff out of my belly button.
Look it up if you need to. Sort of tongue in cheek, since one of the main character's surnames was "Bing".
You have increased my knowledge content re: "Friends" by around 25%. I'm not sure whether to thank you, or... something.
there are plenty of other reasons to dislike the pharmaceutical companies, such as how they disproportionately fund high-profit, low-urgency treatments
The reason that they fund high-profit, low-urgency treatments is hidden (not very deeply) in your description of them as "pharmaceutical companies". They're not charities, not-for-profit organisations, or anything else. They're profit-making companies, and they describe themselves as such. Do you also dislike oil companies because they drill holes in the ground and produce toxic, polluting, high-chemical energy hydrophobic chemicals, then go on to sell them to people at the highest price that they can get for them?
the teacher gave this helpful advice: "If you just don't like vaccines, then tell them it's against your religion. You don't have to say anything else or name what your religion is, but they won't give your child a shot." The arrogance, ignorance and irrationality of the anti-vaccine movement is just astounding.
Well, since the teacher in question seems to be promoting religion as a valid reason for doing something more significant than rubbing woad into one's belly button (widdershins of course, not turnwise. Heavens forfend!)... then arrogance, ignorance and irrationality would seem to be the order of the day.
There always seem to be new psychics and snake-oil salesmen coming along, but very few equally charismatic skeptics.
Being a profitable psychik (note : obligatory New Age speeling), snake-oil salesman etc is probably rather easier than being a profitable skeptic. One group of people are telling people they want to hear ("Granny may be dead, but she's not really" ; "you have a long and happy life before you" ; "your bum doesn't look big in that") ; the other is telling them the truth.
It takes a rare act of willpower to pay for the truth instead of paying to hear what you want to hear. Confirmation fallacy and all that psycho-chatter.
"Microsoft" I understand (didn't they buy a Quick'n'Dirty work-alike for CP/M a few years ago and do some fancy marketing on it?), and "vomit inducing amount of money" I understand, but what is this thing called "Friends" (is the capitalisation significant)?
The "WTF" is that it's not a bunch of scientists, it's just entertainment television and nothing more. There's some math and science involved, but the actual purpose of the show is just to have something fun and interesting to watch.
It's frustrating though because they don't really emphasize that they are cutting corners on their "research" and they are usually very definitive when stating their conclusions. Also, the show is on the Discovery Channel, which gives it an air of legitimacy to the average individual.
The average individual believes in astrology and the Gambler's Fallacy.
In a world of popular TV designed to attract "the average" Darwin Award candidate, that makes the (flawed, incomplete, unrigorous) application of the scientific method which the MythBusters present a breath of fresh air. They're not perfect exemplars for science education, but they are a damned sight better than the overwhelming majority of the dreck out there. One of these days I'll have to watch more than 30 seconds of an episode of one of the CSI-family programmes so I can have a justified shouting-at-the-TV fit.
But not as lucky as the headlines make out (not that this is terribly surprising - the Torygraph is published approaching a thousand kilometres away, and this was in their "politics" section, not their "mountaineering" section ; they may even not have a mountaineering section!). While it's a relatively steep hill, with lots of lumpy bits, it's by no means the vertical drop that the "gosh wow!" tone of the story implies.
To get 1000ft (305m) vertically down from this summit, he'd have to have covered around 1500ft (500m) horizontally. Which makes for a pretty lumpy bum slide, to judge from his injuries, but puts things into perspective a little bit.
More importantly, what was he doing on the hill at this time of year when he appears incompetent at performing an ice-axe brake? My mountaineering instructors would (quite rightly) have ripped as much skin off me as he appears to have lost for such a display of incompetence. (And not having an ice axe is not an acceptable excuse either at this time of the year in that area.)
I'll load the gun and hold the advertising shill's head still ; you put a cap between his (or her) eyes and we can retire in the knowledge of leaving the world a better place.
Pretty much any shill, for any business. A few advertising skeletons distributed in gibbets would be a good... advert...
OK, I'll go sharpen the edge of a keyboard and commit seppuku with it.
If the books I want to read for free, and the included a small ad at the beginning of every chapter, I wouldn't mind.
Hmmm, PTerry (one of the biggest individual sellers in the English language market for the last couple of decades) would be most unpopular. Most (not all, but most) of his books more-or-less completely eschew the "chapter" paradigm.
Hell, it could be an ad holder page that gets update with adds every 6 months.
Now, just what makes you think that an e-book reader would have a wireless connection, or be within several hundred kilometres of one? Ah, sorry, I'm forgetting : it's marketing to the masses, not marketing to people for whom an ebook reader might be useful.
Oh well, continue trying to make the sale. But you're doing no better than the last dozen salesmen.
There's a lot of applications where you have plenty of time - such as locating areas where bomb building activities may be in progress,
Like... pretty-much anywhere within a couple of days travel time of an airport (not necessarily the closest airport.
You could also (possibly) tell when a bag run through security contained explosives
Sorry, didn't you take class Terrorism 1.0.1 when you first got a mobile phone? It was obvious then (mid-1990s) that these devices gave remote (as in "distance from detonator") energisation (approx. equivalent to "detonate") capabilities. So, from that time, being within physical reach of your bomb has been unnecessary.
That's most of a generation now. Didn't your daddy tell you?
Just to make it plain (as if you hadn't thought this through for yourself ; obviously if you had thought it through, you'd already be sweating in a torture camp in the USA state in Cuba) : Being able to detect a bomb when it goes onto a plane is only one tiny part of securing against un-planned explosions at airports.
Hell, what is this thing about airports? Before Monday it was utterly obvious that any place where a significant gathering of people happens is a target. Oh, sorry, Spanish commuter-train bombs of 2006, or thereabouts.
This is history, not news. Queen Anne's dead, don'tcha know?
I'm curious; so what solution is available for Israeli-Palestinian problem?
Build a wall (to low orbit) around the area and man it with disinterested guards (Hindus, Buddhists, meso-American Indian animists, atheists, whoever as long as they're not followers of any of the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim monotheist sects) with orders to shoot anyone coming out AND anyone looking in.
Let them sort it out amongst themselves for a half-dozen generations (on the outside).
Demolish the wall and greet the inhabitants as "Wallites" and start to learn their language.
If we'd started on this in 1950, we'd be half-way through the cure by now.
A goverment company in a third world country with 350+ employees and a lazy IT department
Sounds about normal then. I did some work last year for a South Korean government department and every single memory stick that they tried to pass data to me with had some sort of virus on it. Don't know (or care) if it was Conficker or something else. It would seem that every one of their laptops was infected too - copy the data off a memory stick, clean and re-format it, re-load the data. 2 hours later, the stick is infected again. After a while, you stop wasting your breath.
You sound as if that article contains something that is news to you? How so?
Or... did you actually believe the bullshit that the advertising drones feed to the outside world?
Some of the most unpleasant months of my life I've spent working in Abu Dhabi and having to socialise with the dross that lives there as ex-pats. They're not all arseholes. But a majority are, and the minority seem to want to go along with it.
When Sun is between the Moon and the Earth, you know, the lunar eclipse which happens once a month. Still, I think Sun's gravity will bend the laser, so you could shoot around it...
Err, sorry only in some months.
The planes of the Earth's orbit around the Sun and of the Moon's orbit around the Earth are not the same, so it is only possible to achieve co-linearity of all three planets at two periods each year around the time that the two planes cross. Then, since the Moon does not orbit the Earth an integral number of times each year, you can't automatically assume that each time the Moon passes through the Earth-Sun plane, that it's going to be lined up to undergo an eclipse. That's going to make eclipses less common.
Working in the opposite direction, towards more common eclipses, is that Sun, Earth and Moon are not point objects, so strictly speaking you need to be looking at cones of shadow and taking into account that the Moon oscillates up and down with respect to the Earth-Sun plane.
Welcome to the wonderful world of celestial mechanics.
...I kinda wish we could just "fork" Oracle (in the a**) and move on. If you know what I mean;)
Amazing how much of a bad rap they managed to get themselves over the years.
Why are you assuming that Oracle (corporately, or it's employees individually) don't like taking it up the arse? Enough men and women like "a bit of the brown" that surely some of them work at Oracle.
Are you aware that their day-to-day officers do not have right of entry to search for a TV.
When I moved into my apartment, I sent them precisely one letter stating that I was not going to buy a TV license because I did not have, and did not intend to get, any TV-reception equipment. Over the next 12 years, while I did not have either a license or a TV, I'd get regular (quarterly-ish) threatening letters telling me that I was a thief because "according to our records, you don't have a TV license". These I returned suggesting that they consult their records to find out why I didn't have a TV. Every couple of years I'd get a couple of miserable wet faces appear on the doorstep to try to back up their threats with bullshit and bluster. After having been told that they should consult their records for the detailed reasons I gave X years ago, they'd try the "well could we get in out of the rain for a few minutes to sort out the paperwork" trick, which would be greeted with "you and other employees of your organisation are only getting into my property accompanied by a valid warrant, your lawyer, my lawyer and a police officer to ensure that things are done civilly. Now turn your faces into the horizontal sleet and get your bodies off my property."
Never had them come back or even follow up with a threat of a warrant. Just the usual bullshit. I read that as meaning that they know they've no right to enter or search, and they don't want the general populace to become aware of it by being publicly challenged.
Later, the wife insisted that I get a TV when we got married. So I started getting a license. But their underhanded behaviour still rankles. The way they sent their officers out on miserable wet December evenings may have been coincidence, but since I don't recall having seen the same faces dripping twice, I think that they had a rapid turn-over of staff. Or they died of pneumonia, or something.
"the whistleblower website [in 2006] to publish classified material."
The site was set up to publish confidential and/ or suppressed material. Most people equate "classified" with "government or military secret". While I'm sure there was an expectation that such material would become available, the target was (and is) much broader than just governments and military.
Remember the first big news concerning Wikileaks? The attempt by a Swiss bank to bring it down for publicising the bank's illegal and/ or immoral activities.
I bet the US government is pissed off with that Swiss bank (Julius Baer, or something similar) for disproving their claims that WikiLeaks is picking on the USGovt by continuing to highlight WikiLeaks other activities.
Can I absolutely 100% guarantee that two separate air bottles with two separate regulators will guarantee me an air supply while I'm scuba diving? No. The probability is in the 99.5%-plus range, but it is definitely not 100%.
Actually, these days I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that a hotel didn't bother hooking up an outside line to the room. Everyone has a mobile, right, and (South Korea excepted) it's going to work. So why bother with enabling outside lines? A line to reception (and more profitably, room service) I can understand, but why bother with an outside line?
I paid some attention to it (yEnc) back when I was on dial-up with a 2-hour connection limit. While I was by no means convinced that the solution they proposed was the BEST solution, I was willing to have a listen to them. It seems like a (note : "a", not "the") solution to a perceived problem for some (note : "some", not "all") users. OK, so the proponents were unwilling to work through the standards process, but that's just youthful exuberance, probably.
What put me off making some effort to produce yEnc support for the mail system that I used at that time, was the way that the users of yEnc and the makers of yEnc tools refused to abide by their own community's recommended standards. Remember the fairly strong (and utterly free) recommendation that messages posted in yEnc encoding should use the string "yEnc" in the subject line. So that I could filter the yEnc messages the way I wanted to. But OH NOES, THOUGHTCRIME CENSORSHIP! would have been one of the more restrained comments.
yEnc's stupid cunt user communities drove away potential support. When they so-polluted some newsgroups that I couldn't follow the news for the traffic of useless un-labelled yEnc shit... well it was one of the reasons that I gradually gave up using USENET. PAR2 files in particular, tripling the wasted bandwidth when the original solution was IIRC going to lead to a 13% decrease in bandwidth for the same traffic. Yeah, right.
So, anyway, I gather from what you say that yEnc isn't dead yet, but is probably near enough to dead. If I cared enough, I'd go get the worlds smallest violin and try to train a mouse to play a requiem. Meanwhile, it's a salutary lesson for other people who are utterly committed to the idea that their solution is the One True Way.
If a cell phone posed even minimal danger to air traffic then you'd be required to put them in with the hold luggage or surrender them to the airline staff for the duration of the flight. There is no danger.
The most frequent of the flying machines I use (Aerospatiale (Super) Pumas, in various generations and configurations) have experienced problems in some combinations of (IIRC) weather radar and telephone becoming activated in someone's pocket.
So, as you say, phones are required to be switched off (battery removed) and put in your baggage (there is no cabin baggage). At the search (everone get fingertip-searched before every flight), you'll also lose any MP3 players, even if they're switched-off and in your pocket as a memory stick. Because you're required to listen to the pre-flight briefing and all on board announcements.
Phones, and other electronics, do not pose a problem in-flight. The people who insisted on using them (zero, I think) were individually fired long ago.
Your analysis of the economics of district heating isn't utterly wrong, but it is deeply flawed. You neglect that most of the towns in question have been built solely to provide accommodation for the workers at the respective mines, oil fields, etc. Secondary occupation (teachers, shop keepers, etc) is a relatively minor and recent thing. And no-one but no-one goes there for any reason other than being paid (seriously, no-one. When I got permission to visit my Fiancée in one such town, a condition was registering with the police within one day of getting there, surrendering passport, Izveschenyie, visa etc ; when we got to the police station to hand over the documents, after an hour of hunting around the police told us to go away and stop confusing them, because no-one in the county knew what paperwork was necessary or what to do. "So just go away!" That was 14 years after glasnost.)
So, the entire population already live clustered around the railway station, power station, and already live in pre-fabricated blocks. There is literally nothing else. (OK, this is slowly changing. Very slowly. There were several privately-owned buildings built in the Fiancée's town by the time she left ; maybe a half-dozen in a city of around 100,000 people. And most of them were shops, not dwellings.)
As for summer heat load : don't forget that you're not only providing heating water, you're also providing hot water and cold water (at -50degC, clod water is hot) to all the town. That's a more-or-less constant load for the heating system. In summer, such as it is, the maintenance on the redundant life-support systems for the various accommodation blocks is carried out, while it's possible to turn off the heating (or water) to blocks without causing hundreds of deaths.
CHP (Combined Heat and Power) schemes are a lot more broadly-applicable a solution than you choose to make out. I'll agree that it's less useful in low-latitude and low-altitude areas but even there low-grade heat is useful. It is, after all, energy.
Roughly half of Russia's land mass lies north of Canada's northern border,
Is that claim as well researched as the rest of your post? Nice foot-shot! Do you want a wheelchair, or is depending on someone to push you perhaps a little too mutualist for your liking?
ALL the "mom and pop" stores around here put the SN (where available) of each component they sell on the invoice/receipt to prevent someone from buying a part to replace a defective one and return the defective.
Which gets you as far as "Someone giving an invoice address of 1600 Downing Street (I forgot the American equivalent) paid cash for this on date X". So now you're down to working from Mom'n'Pop's video surveillence records. Which may or may not work. It's not beyond the state of "trade craft" to break, erase, steal or otherwise circumvent such mechanisms. It's not even particularly high-tech. A little theatrical skill and Bob is not just your uncle, but your... no hang on, that metaphor doesn't really work. But it's not rocket surgery or brain science.
A really secure encryption is what the US used with the Navajo language.
Just as one point on that, I suspect that's more akin to an encoding than an encryption. But I'm not really enough of a math person to put that as stronger than a gut feeling.
Get a group of people who know an undocumented language
Hmmm, interesting. With something well over half of the spoken languages in the world functionally extinct, or going to become extinct shortly... that's going to be such a trivial problem. For the documented languages, a large part of that language diversity is in Papua new Guinea.
I'm sure that's going to help your nations communications needs.
For my nation's communication needs, then there's a tiny problem that the gap between the native speakers of the country's three languages and the total population is approximately zero. It's possible that there are the thousands of unregistered people in your country who could service your country's needs... but wouldn't they be, almost by definition, those filthy terrorist scumballs who don't register their children with the authorities.
Has your country been successful at preventing all native Navajo speaker from exiting the country, or teaching filthy foreign scumballs the language?
Yeah. Scales well. High security. Can't speak too highly for it. You should be on the... ummm... Presidential Security Advisory Commission, or something like that.
Slashdot Mirror
I had actually heard of it. Never left the channel sitting on it for long enough to get past the first few bars of the theme music though, before going and doing something useful, like pulling the fluff out of my belly button.
You have increased my knowledge content re: "Friends" by around 25%. I'm not sure whether to thank you, or ... something.
The reason that they fund high-profit, low-urgency treatments is hidden (not very deeply) in your description of them as "pharmaceutical companies". They're not charities, not-for-profit organisations, or anything else. They're profit-making companies, and they describe themselves as such. Do you also dislike oil companies because they drill holes in the ground and produce toxic, polluting, high-chemical energy hydrophobic chemicals, then go on to sell them to people at the highest price that they can get for them?
Well, since the teacher in question seems to be promoting religion as a valid reason for doing something more significant than rubbing woad into one's belly button (widdershins of course, not turnwise. Heavens forfend!) ... then arrogance, ignorance and irrationality would seem to be the order of the day.
Depressing certainly, but not surprising.
Welcome to a reality that is not designed in any way, shape or form for your comfort or convenience.
That's life. Live with it. Or die. Your choice which.
Being a profitable psychik (note : obligatory New Age speeling), snake-oil salesman etc is probably rather easier than being a profitable skeptic. One group of people are telling people they want to hear ("Granny may be dead, but she's not really" ; "you have a long and happy life before you" ; "your bum doesn't look big in that") ; the other is telling them the truth.
It takes a rare act of willpower to pay for the truth instead of paying to hear what you want to hear. Confirmation fallacy and all that psycho-chatter.
"Microsoft" I understand (didn't they buy a Quick'n'Dirty work-alike for CP/M a few years ago and do some fancy marketing on it?), and "vomit inducing amount of money" I understand, but what is this thing called "Friends" (is the capitalisation significant)?
The average individual believes in astrology and the Gambler's Fallacy.
In a world of popular TV designed to attract "the average" Darwin Award candidate, that makes the (flawed, incomplete, unrigorous) application of the scientific method which the MythBusters present a breath of fresh air. They're not perfect exemplars for science education, but they are a damned sight better than the overwhelming majority of the dreck out there. One of these days I'll have to watch more than 30 seconds of an episode of one of the CSI-family programmes so I can have a justified shouting-at-the-TV fit.
To get 1000ft (305m) vertically down from this summit, he'd have to have covered around 1500ft (500m) horizontally. Which makes for a pretty lumpy bum slide, to judge from his injuries, but puts things into perspective a little bit.
More importantly, what was he doing on the hill at this time of year when he appears incompetent at performing an ice-axe brake? My mountaineering instructors would (quite rightly) have ripped as much skin off me as he appears to have lost for such a display of incompetence. (And not having an ice axe is not an acceptable excuse either at this time of the year in that area.)
Pretty much any shill, for any business. A few advertising skeletons distributed in gibbets would be a good ... advert ...
OK, I'll go sharpen the edge of a keyboard and commit seppuku with it.
Hmmm, PTerry (one of the biggest individual sellers in the English language market for the last couple of decades) would be most unpopular. Most (not all, but most) of his books more-or-less completely eschew the "chapter" paradigm.
Now, just what makes you think that an e-book reader would have a wireless connection, or be within several hundred kilometres of one? Ah, sorry, I'm forgetting : it's marketing to the masses, not marketing to people for whom an ebook reader might be useful.
Oh well, continue trying to make the sale. But you're doing no better than the last dozen salesmen.
Like ... pretty-much anywhere within a couple of days travel time of an airport (not necessarily the closest airport.
Sorry, didn't you take class Terrorism 1.0.1 when you first got a mobile phone? It was obvious then (mid-1990s) that these devices gave remote (as in "distance from detonator") energisation (approx. equivalent to "detonate") capabilities. So, from that time, being within physical reach of your bomb has been unnecessary.
That's most of a generation now. Didn't your daddy tell you?
Just to make it plain (as if you hadn't thought this through for yourself ; obviously if you had thought it through, you'd already be sweating in a torture camp in the USA state in Cuba) : Being able to detect a bomb when it goes onto a plane is only one tiny part of securing against un-planned explosions at airports.
Hell, what is this thing about airports? Before Monday it was utterly obvious that any place where a significant gathering of people happens is a target. Oh, sorry, Spanish commuter-train bombs of 2006, or thereabouts.
This is history, not news. Queen Anne's dead, don'tcha know?
Build a wall (to low orbit) around the area and man it with disinterested guards (Hindus, Buddhists, meso-American Indian animists, atheists, whoever as long as they're not followers of any of the Judaeo-Christian-Muslim monotheist sects) with orders to shoot anyone coming out AND anyone looking in.
Let them sort it out amongst themselves for a half-dozen generations (on the outside).
Demolish the wall and greet the inhabitants as "Wallites" and start to learn their language.
If we'd started on this in 1950, we'd be half-way through the cure by now.
Sounds about normal then. I did some work last year for a South Korean government department and every single memory stick that they tried to pass data to me with had some sort of virus on it. Don't know (or care) if it was Conficker or something else. It would seem that every one of their laptops was infected too - copy the data off a memory stick, clean and re-format it, re-load the data. 2 hours later, the stick is infected again. After a while, you stop wasting your breath.
Tanzania was much more advanced than South Korea.
You sound as if that article contains something that is news to you? How so?
Or ... did you actually believe the bullshit that the advertising drones feed to the outside world?
Some of the most unpleasant months of my life I've spent working in Abu Dhabi and having to socialise with the dross that lives there as ex-pats. They're not all arseholes. But a majority are, and the minority seem to want to go along with it.
Welcome to the UAE, Shit-hole of the Universe.
Err, sorry only in some months.
The planes of the Earth's orbit around the Sun and of the Moon's orbit around the Earth are not the same, so it is only possible to achieve co-linearity of all three planets at two periods each year around the time that the two planes cross. Then, since the Moon does not orbit the Earth an integral number of times each year, you can't automatically assume that each time the Moon passes through the Earth-Sun plane, that it's going to be lined up to undergo an eclipse. That's going to make eclipses less common.
Working in the opposite direction, towards more common eclipses, is that Sun, Earth and Moon are not point objects, so strictly speaking you need to be looking at cones of shadow and taking into account that the Moon oscillates up and down with respect to the Earth-Sun plane.
Welcome to the wonderful world of celestial mechanics.
Why are you assuming that Oracle (corporately, or it's employees individually) don't like taking it up the arse? Enough men and women like "a bit of the brown" that surely some of them work at Oracle.
Sounds to me like you need to play some CowClicker. No, seriously! This is not (quite) a joke.
When I moved into my apartment, I sent them precisely one letter stating that I was not going to buy a TV license because I did not have, and did not intend to get, any TV-reception equipment. Over the next 12 years, while I did not have either a license or a TV, I'd get regular (quarterly-ish) threatening letters telling me that I was a thief because "according to our records, you don't have a TV license". These I returned suggesting that they consult their records to find out why I didn't have a TV. Every couple of years I'd get a couple of miserable wet faces appear on the doorstep to try to back up their threats with bullshit and bluster. After having been told that they should consult their records for the detailed reasons I gave X years ago, they'd try the "well could we get in out of the rain for a few minutes to sort out the paperwork" trick, which would be greeted with "you and other employees of your organisation are only getting into my property accompanied by a valid warrant, your lawyer, my lawyer and a police officer to ensure that things are done civilly. Now turn your faces into the horizontal sleet and get your bodies off my property."
Never had them come back or even follow up with a threat of a warrant. Just the usual bullshit. I read that as meaning that they know they've no right to enter or search, and they don't want the general populace to become aware of it by being publicly challenged.
Later, the wife insisted that I get a TV when we got married. So I started getting a license. But their underhanded behaviour still rankles. The way they sent their officers out on miserable wet December evenings may have been coincidence, but since I don't recall having seen the same faces dripping twice, I think that they had a rapid turn-over of staff. Or they died of pneumonia, or something.
The site was set up to publish confidential and/ or suppressed material. Most people equate "classified" with "government or military secret". While I'm sure there was an expectation that such material would become available, the target was (and is) much broader than just governments and military.
Remember the first big news concerning Wikileaks? The attempt by a Swiss bank to bring it down for publicising the bank's illegal and/ or immoral activities.
I bet the US government is pissed off with that Swiss bank (Julius Baer, or something similar) for disproving their claims that WikiLeaks is picking on the USGovt by continuing to highlight WikiLeaks other activities.
Hmmm, seems to be a bit of a mismatch there.
Can I absolutely 100% guarantee that two separate air bottles with two separate regulators will guarantee me an air supply while I'm scuba diving? No. The probability is in the 99.5%-plus range, but it is definitely not 100%.
Actually, these days I wouldn't be terribly surprised to find that a hotel didn't bother hooking up an outside line to the room. Everyone has a mobile, right, and (South Korea excepted) it's going to work. So why bother with enabling outside lines? A line to reception (and more profitably, room service) I can understand, but why bother with an outside line?
What put me off making some effort to produce yEnc support for the mail system that I used at that time, was the way that the users of yEnc and the makers of yEnc tools refused to abide by their own community's recommended standards. Remember the fairly strong (and utterly free) recommendation that messages posted in yEnc encoding should use the string "yEnc" in the subject line. So that I could filter the yEnc messages the way I wanted to. But OH NOES, THOUGHTCRIME CENSORSHIP! would have been one of the more restrained comments.
yEnc's stupid cunt user communities drove away potential support. When they so-polluted some newsgroups that I couldn't follow the news for the traffic of useless un-labelled yEnc shit ... well it was one of the reasons that I gradually gave up using USENET. PAR2 files in particular, tripling the wasted bandwidth when the original solution was IIRC going to lead to a 13% decrease in bandwidth for the same traffic. Yeah, right.
So, anyway, I gather from what you say that yEnc isn't dead yet, but is probably near enough to dead. If I cared enough, I'd go get the worlds smallest violin and try to train a mouse to play a requiem. Meanwhile, it's a salutary lesson for other people who are utterly committed to the idea that their solution is the One True Way.
The most frequent of the flying machines I use (Aerospatiale (Super) Pumas, in various generations and configurations) have experienced problems in some combinations of (IIRC) weather radar and telephone becoming activated in someone's pocket.
So, as you say, phones are required to be switched off (battery removed) and put in your baggage (there is no cabin baggage). At the search (everone get fingertip-searched before every flight), you'll also lose any MP3 players, even if they're switched-off and in your pocket as a memory stick. Because you're required to listen to the pre-flight briefing and all on board announcements.
Phones, and other electronics, do not pose a problem in-flight. The people who insisted on using them (zero, I think) were individually fired long ago.
So, the entire population already live clustered around the railway station, power station, and already live in pre-fabricated blocks. There is literally nothing else. (OK, this is slowly changing. Very slowly. There were several privately-owned buildings built in the Fiancée's town by the time she left ; maybe a half-dozen in a city of around 100,000 people. And most of them were shops, not dwellings.)
As for summer heat load : don't forget that you're not only providing heating water, you're also providing hot water and cold water (at -50degC, clod water is hot) to all the town. That's a more-or-less constant load for the heating system. In summer, such as it is, the maintenance on the redundant life-support systems for the various accommodation blocks is carried out, while it's possible to turn off the heating (or water) to blocks without causing hundreds of deaths.
CHP (Combined Heat and Power) schemes are a lot more broadly-applicable a solution than you choose to make out. I'll agree that it's less useful in low-latitude and low-altitude areas but even there low-grade heat is useful. It is, after all, energy.
Is that claim as well researched as the rest of your post? Nice foot-shot! Do you want a wheelchair, or is depending on someone to push you perhaps a little too mutualist for your liking?
Which gets you as far as "Someone giving an invoice address of 1600 Downing Street (I forgot the American equivalent) paid cash for this on date X". So now you're down to working from Mom'n'Pop's video surveillence records. Which may or may not work. It's not beyond the state of "trade craft" to break, erase, steal or otherwise circumvent such mechanisms. It's not even particularly high-tech. A little theatrical skill and Bob is not just your uncle, but your ... no hang on, that metaphor doesn't really work. But it's not rocket surgery or brain science.
Just as one point on that, I suspect that's more akin to an encoding than an encryption. But I'm not really enough of a math person to put that as stronger than a gut feeling.
Hmmm, interesting. With something well over half of the spoken languages in the world functionally extinct, or going to become extinct shortly ... that's going to be such a trivial problem. For the documented languages, a large part of that language diversity is in Papua new Guinea.
I'm sure that's going to help your nations communications needs.
For my nation's communication needs, then there's a tiny problem that the gap between the native speakers of the country's three languages and the total population is approximately zero. It's possible that there are the thousands of unregistered people in your country who could service your country's needs ... but wouldn't they be, almost by definition, those filthy terrorist scumballs who don't register their children with the authorities.
Has your country been successful at preventing all native Navajo speaker from exiting the country, or teaching filthy foreign scumballs the language? Yeah. Scales well. High security. Can't speak too highly for it. You should be on the ... ummm ... Presidential Security Advisory Commission, or something like that.
- Idiocracy
(OK, it's probably not true ; but Idiocracy is so much more depressingly plausible in it's overall theme.)