I wonder if instead of doing that again, they'll just decide that something less susceptible to jamming, that's easier to deploy than a satellite constellation, might be better for positioning. Say, some self-calibrating optical system using image recognition, a high-res camera sensor, and maths, that looks at the position of the stars and combines that with an onboard clock to determine latitude and longitude. An auto-sextant, if you will, far more precise than one operated with eye and hand.
Isn't that system easily jammed by smoke screens, clouds, and daylight?
if I paid for a connecting flight, the airline is getting the same revenue from me whether I get on it or not, but they are saving a little money in fuel and other costs when I don't get on.
Yes, but the airlines hate that they don't know you're getting of and are then unable to resell your empty seat.
Solution - give passengers some incentive to cancel the last leg of the flight instead of suing them. Doesn't have to be cash, give them some frequent flyer mile bonus or a drink coupon for their next flight.
All you have to do to make it gambling is sell your ticket.
1. You buy a $400 ticket and $30 insurance. 2. you sell your ticket for $400 3. player you bet on not to play doesn't play you get refunded $400 4. minus the $30 insurance you pocket $370.
But, just like with gambling, the house always wins. They priced the product so they'll make a profit, the only way you can earn a profit is through luck or insider knowledge about a player's injury that will sideline him)
The skipping out part is the issue. Airlines will let you out mid leg of a trip due to an emergency.
When people play connect the leg's on the same airline without telling them they are not on the same plane outbound, the airline starts to worry about it because A) your luggage B) where did we lose this person C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct. D) is there a security risk to the plane.
I think few people that skip out on a leg let their luggage go on to the final destination. But whether I'm stuck in the toilet getting rid of a bad meal or I miss the flight on purpose, the airline has the same issue.
Except for unaccompanied minors I don't think the airlines worry about whether or not they lost someone.
And as far as I know, they don't pull bags for passengers that miss a connecting flight. I've missed a connecting flight before due to a late aircraft and a long walk + train ride to the gate and still had my bags go on without me.
This is actually how airports set up their runway schedules. There's a set number of departure and arrival slots and if an airline starts missing the slot they risk loosing it - so to preserve those slots they'll straight up run empty flights. It's similar to back when they had limited international phone lines - big companies would pay people to read books over a connection so they could hold the line so they wouldn't have to wait for it to become available again when they needed to make an urgent call.
The other reason they run empty or near empty planes is because if that plane doesn't make it to the destination, then it's not going to be able to make its next scheduled flight.
But none of this is the passenger's concern - if I paid for a connecting flight, the airline is getting the same revenue from me whether I get on it or not, but they are saving a little money in fuel and other costs when I don't get on.
It's not always done by airlines for shits and giggles. A lot of airports have frequency requirements for landing slots, so instead of flying completely empty planes on routes to preserve slot allocation (which does happen), they may offer reduced fares to those cities. The airlines may be giving up a revenue premium to generate demand in the other city to help offset the loss that would otherwise occur.
So the airline shouldn't care whether anyone is actually in their seat -- they already got the revenue from that passenger (even if it's "reduced revenue"), but now they don't have the overhead of actually flying that customer.
When I book flights for A -> B -> C, forcing me to fly on to C when I really wanted to get out in B isn't going to affect demand in C at all. It's not like I'm going to start going to city C just because I once had to go there and find a ride home to my home city.
I never figured on terraforming anything, we can't even figure out how to stop un-terraforming earth, I don't know that we'll ever be able to terraform another planet.
But building an underground habitat on Mars seems at least as easy as building a perpetually floating habitat on Venus
How are you going to power the robots? Solar probably won't cut it for a TBM. What are you going to do for water on Mars? How, exactly, do we deal with the fact that Mars is toxic to most known life? We're not going to be able to track dust into a habitable place. We're not going to be able to drink water from Mars without really expensive filtration. Everything is going to need to be hermetically sealed, and there's going to need to be extensive decontamination of anything coming into a habitable area.
These aren't trivial problems. I'm not saying a floating habitat on Venus is easy - I'm saying that humans living on Mars is a hell of a lot harder than most everyone seems to think it is.
Mars is really best left to the robots.
I said "landing a reactor on Mars (for power)" -- if dropped by robots and dug into the ground, it doesn't need to launch with as much heavy shielding as an earth-bound reactor.
All of those problems of water, poisonous environment, etc are problems on Venus too, with the added disadvantage that you can't easily mine raw materials from the surface since surviving 800F temperatures with an acidic atmosphere is challenging even for robots. Curiosity found water in the soil, and it's in the atmosphere too, but it's so thin that condensing it from the air may be difficult.
Any habitat for Venus is likely going to have to be built here (or maybe around the moon) and shipped to Venus, while a Mars colony could be built from locally mined materials.
Though either Mars or Venus will require technology well advanced from current tech to make it a reality - no one can make a fully robot operated mining operation here on earth, let alone on another planet so it's not a near-term goal.
The atmosphere of Venus is a bit more like the ocean than the sky on earth. We know how to build zeppelins, submarines, cruise ships, and aircraft carriers. Something in between all of those doesn't seem that much more difficult than digging out tunnels on Mars to live in. At bare minimum moderately easy access to water on Venus would simplify a ton of major roadblocks for living on Mars.
The atmosphere is ~60 times more dense than Earth's, but it's still only about 6.5% the density of water -- I'm still skeptical that building a floating habitat on an alien planet that needs to be 15X more buoyant than an Earth boat is going to be easier than landing a reactor on Mars (for power), and letting robots dig out a tunnel system for humans to live in.
I agree that Mars isn't best place to spread too. Personally, I think we should focus our efforts on Venus. But staying planet bound is a death sentence for our civilization, if not our species, at some point.
Why Venus? Surface temperature of 800 degrees, acidic atmosphere. People have speculated building floating outposts, but is that really easier than colonizing Mars?
Who could have predicted that flinging a container full of boiling water in the air right next to them would be dangerous!? Next you're going to tell me that it's dangerous to drink boiling water or pour it on someone.
They should put a warning on it if it's that dangerous.
And FedEx claimed, seemingly out of nowhere, last week that Amazon is not their largest competitor, claiming just 1.3% of the company's 2018 revenue.
Sounds like he's saying that they are not their largest *customer*, which I can believe since I rarely get Fedex packages from Amazon, but doesn't say anything about them as a competitor. (and since I haven't seen any non-Amazon packages being delivered by Amazon, I'd guess that they are not a competitor at all.... yet, but could become one quickly)
Sensitive data should never be on personal devices, period.
Well, wrong. As usual on slashdot. Good rule of thumb in a company hiring idiots, of course. Not all do that.
Nothing wrong in hiring people using their own tools - if they are competent to set them up right. Which some people are.
If you hire consultants from some consulting company, they may very well come with their own computers for development+documentation. Hiring a person is very much like hiring a consultant from a one-man company. Might come with his own computer. Ok if he is a computer security expert.
Everything is wrong with letting people set up their own tools if they are going to be storing your data -- even if the people know what they are doing, people are not infallible, so eventually someone's going to slip up and install malware or configure something insecurely. The only way to be sure is to enforce policies with policy enforcement and automatic monitoring.
Ok if he is a computer security expert
If he is, then he'll tell you why he shouldn't have free reign to configure his computer and why the company shoud be enforcing policies and monitoring compliance.
It's not an either/or proposition, smart watches can use a phone *and* be useful standalone.
My Garmin smartwatch works well with and without a phone -- without a phone, I can get all of the fitness tracking I want, and it can even do map based navigation, but that seems less useful, I've never had a case where I wanted to use my watch for navigation.
When it's paired with my phone, I can configure the notifications that appear on my watch, so if I get an SMS or call while biking home, I can see if it's something I want to pull over and take a look at.
I don't think I'd be willing to pay the battery (and maybe size) penalty it would take to make my watch into a standalone phone, as it is now, my watch lasts about a week on battery.
So you still don't see why oversight is needed to verify that, eh? Gee. Maybe it will just happen all by itself like the invisible jackoff hand of the free market?
Oh my god, I would hope that it doesn't take congress to oversee standard security practice that every large business follows - if any oversight is needed at all, then use it to put competent IT staff in place.
I don't see why some congressional oversight is needed -- just block VPN apps on government owned laptops. If employees are using the apps on their personal devices, they should not have sensitive government data on those devices.
Somewhere in the deep bowels of the Alphabet headquarters a fscking BEAN COUNTER has a spredasheet that show exactly how much digging down ever additional inch would cost along with another one that shows the cost of "sealant" vs the cost of trenching and the expextant
That's the part I don't understand, once you've trenched through the asphalt, digging a few more inches isn't that hard, they probably could have buried it 8" down with little additional cost.
And the assertion that this is "bad" has some very interesting implications for those advocating free healthcare, free college, and enhanced welfare programs. Medicare, for example, increases the cost of non-medicare treatment. This is even true when paid for by a third party. For example, increased availability and size of student loans also increases tuition for all. If you're going to declare something as bad, you should at least attempt to be consistent about it, instead of arguing both for and against it, depending on what your party's platform tells you to embrace or reject.
Medicare is bad because it's not universal -- the USA should have single-payer healthcare, so everyone pays the same, we shouldn't end up in a situation where some people overpay because others underpay. Just let it all be paid by a single entity. Healthcare is not a good analogy since that market is so skewed by insurance companies. It's like having:
1. One class of cell phone users getting government paid call phones (well, they've paid for it all their life though paycheck deductions) They get only basic phones/services, but it's all free or low-cost to them. 2. Another class of cell phone users that have negotiated monthly plans (mostly paid by their employers) - they can pay a copay to get a premium phone/features, but in general, they get unlimited usage at relatively low cost. 3. One final class of cell phone user that only needs a phone occasionally, but when they do need one, it's a life-and-death situation and since they don't have a negotiated rate, they get reamed by the cell phone companies and are charged 10X even 100X more than the negotiated rates. And since it's such an emergency, these users usually can't shop around, and even if they could, it's nearly impossible to compare prices/services because you generally can't find out the price until you've already bought the phone.
Is this the kind of cell phone market you're striving for?
It seems like common sense -- carriers are selling bandwidth at wholesale rates to large companies that provide "free" service, so they jack up the retail rates paid by consumers to compensate.
The Pai FCC's 2017 decision would have limited the $25 subsidy to "facilities-based" carriers -- those that build their own networks -- making it impossible for tribal residents to use the $25 subsidy to buy telecom service from resellers....The move would have dramatically limited tribal residents' options for purchasing subsidized service, but the FCC claimed it was necessary in order to encourage carriers to build their own networks.
I don't understand this reasoning -- the resellers must be ultimately buying from the "facilities-based" carriers, and if these carriers are charging the resellers less than it costs to provide service, that's their own fault.
But it wasn't a public position. It was an informal motto that they used to trick gullible people into thinking they were something they weren't. Google has always put money ahead of ethics. That anyone believed otherwise is silly.
They included it in their S-1 filing prior to their IPO.
How about you stop being naive instead of falling for an informal motto that was not legally-binding in any way.
There's nothing wrong with expecting companies to abide by their publicly stated position, if a company is going to publicly say they are going to do something, they should follow through. Though they've already removed "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct, so it's moot anyway.
Slashdot Mirror
I wonder if instead of doing that again, they'll just decide that something less susceptible to jamming, that's easier to deploy than a satellite constellation, might be better for positioning. Say, some self-calibrating optical system using image recognition, a high-res camera sensor, and maths, that looks at the position of the stars and combines that with an onboard clock to determine latitude and longitude. An auto-sextant, if you will, far more precise than one operated with eye and hand.
Isn't that system easily jammed by smoke screens, clouds, and daylight?
They couldn't just go to a 16 bit number they had to save 3 freaking bits ? and for what to have an odd length numeric ?
When you're sending data at 50 bits/second over an unreliable transport that makes retransmissions likely, every bit counts.
But in the updated CNAV block, they increased the week number to 13 bits, which will extend the next time to zero to 2037
if I paid for a connecting flight, the airline is getting the same revenue from me whether I get on it or not, but they are saving a little money in fuel and other costs when I don't get on.
Yes, but the airlines hate that they don't know you're getting of and are then unable to resell your empty seat.
Solution - give passengers some incentive to cancel the last leg of the flight instead of suing them. Doesn't have to be cash, give them some frequent flyer mile bonus or a drink coupon for their next flight.
All you have to do to make it gambling is sell your ticket.
1. You buy a $400 ticket and $30 insurance.
2. you sell your ticket for $400
3. player you bet on not to play doesn't play you get refunded $400
4. minus the $30 insurance you pocket $370.
But, just like with gambling, the house always wins. They priced the product so they'll make a profit, the only way you can earn a profit is through luck or insider knowledge about a player's injury that will sideline him)
The skipping out part is the issue. Airlines will let you out mid leg of a trip due to an emergency.
When people play connect the leg's on the same airline without telling them they are not on the same plane outbound, the airline starts to worry about it because A) your luggage B) where did we lose this person C) we now have to delay the flight to make sure our count is correct. D) is there a security risk to the plane.
I think few people that skip out on a leg let their luggage go on to the final destination. But whether I'm stuck in the toilet getting rid of a bad meal or I miss the flight on purpose, the airline has the same issue.
Except for unaccompanied minors I don't think the airlines worry about whether or not they lost someone.
And as far as I know, they don't pull bags for passengers that miss a connecting flight. I've missed a connecting flight before due to a late aircraft and a long walk + train ride to the gate and still had my bags go on without me.
This is actually how airports set up their runway schedules. There's a set number of departure and arrival slots and if an airline starts missing the slot they risk loosing it - so to preserve those slots they'll straight up run empty flights. It's similar to back when they had limited international phone lines - big companies would pay people to read books over a connection so they could hold the line so they wouldn't have to wait for it to become available again when they needed to make an urgent call.
The other reason they run empty or near empty planes is because if that plane doesn't make it to the destination, then it's not going to be able to make its next scheduled flight.
But none of this is the passenger's concern - if I paid for a connecting flight, the airline is getting the same revenue from me whether I get on it or not, but they are saving a little money in fuel and other costs when I don't get on.
It's not always done by airlines for shits and giggles. A lot of airports have frequency requirements for landing slots, so instead of flying completely empty planes on routes to preserve slot allocation (which does happen), they may offer reduced fares to those cities. The airlines may be giving up a revenue premium to generate demand in the other city to help offset the loss that would otherwise occur.
So the airline shouldn't care whether anyone is actually in their seat -- they already got the revenue from that passenger (even if it's "reduced revenue"), but now they don't have the overhead of actually flying that customer.
When I book flights for A -> B -> C, forcing me to fly on to C when I really wanted to get out in B isn't going to affect demand in C at all. It's not like I'm going to start going to city C just because I once had to go there and find a ride home to my home city.
Apple can benefit from huge economies of scale by selling the same accessories for many generation.
I think they meant "Apple can boost their profit by selling proprietary Lightning accessories"
I never figured on terraforming anything, we can't even figure out how to stop un-terraforming earth, I don't know that we'll ever be able to terraform another planet.
But building an underground habitat on Mars seems at least as easy as building a perpetually floating habitat on Venus
How are you going to power the robots? Solar probably won't cut it for a TBM. What are you going to do for water on Mars? How, exactly, do we deal with the fact that Mars is toxic to most known life? We're not going to be able to track dust into a habitable place. We're not going to be able to drink water from Mars without really expensive filtration. Everything is going to need to be hermetically sealed, and there's going to need to be extensive decontamination of anything coming into a habitable area.
These aren't trivial problems. I'm not saying a floating habitat on Venus is easy - I'm saying that humans living on Mars is a hell of a lot harder than most everyone seems to think it is.
Mars is really best left to the robots.
I said "landing a reactor on Mars (for power)" -- if dropped by robots and dug into the ground, it doesn't need to launch with as much heavy shielding as an earth-bound reactor.
All of those problems of water, poisonous environment, etc are problems on Venus too, with the added disadvantage that you can't easily mine raw materials from the surface since surviving 800F temperatures with an acidic atmosphere is challenging even for robots. Curiosity found water in the soil, and it's in the atmosphere too, but it's so thin that condensing it from the air may be difficult.
Any habitat for Venus is likely going to have to be built here (or maybe around the moon) and shipped to Venus, while a Mars colony could be built from locally mined materials.
Though either Mars or Venus will require technology well advanced from current tech to make it a reality - no one can make a fully robot operated mining operation here on earth, let alone on another planet so it's not a near-term goal.
The atmosphere of Venus is a bit more like the ocean than the sky on earth. We know how to build zeppelins, submarines, cruise ships, and aircraft carriers. Something in between all of those doesn't seem that much more difficult than digging out tunnels on Mars to live in. At bare minimum moderately easy access to water on Venus would simplify a ton of major roadblocks for living on Mars.
The atmosphere is ~60 times more dense than Earth's, but it's still only about 6.5% the density of water -- I'm still skeptical that building a floating habitat on an alien planet that needs to be 15X more buoyant than an Earth boat is going to be easier than landing a reactor on Mars (for power), and letting robots dig out a tunnel system for humans to live in.
I agree that Mars isn't best place to spread too. Personally, I think we should focus our efforts on Venus. But staying planet bound is a death sentence for our civilization, if not our species, at some point.
Why Venus? Surface temperature of 800 degrees, acidic atmosphere. People have speculated building floating outposts, but is that really easier than colonizing Mars?
Who could have predicted that flinging a container full of boiling water in the air right next to them would be dangerous!? Next you're going to tell me that it's dangerous to drink boiling water or pour it on someone.
They should put a warning on it if it's that dangerous.
Is this a misquote:
And FedEx claimed, seemingly out of nowhere, last week that Amazon is not their largest competitor, claiming just 1.3% of the company's 2018 revenue.
Sounds like he's saying that they are not their largest *customer*, which I can believe since I rarely get Fedex packages from Amazon, but doesn't say anything about them as a competitor. (and since I haven't seen any non-Amazon packages being delivered by Amazon, I'd guess that they are not a competitor at all.... yet, but could become one quickly)
Sensitive data should never be on personal devices, period.
Well, wrong. As usual on slashdot. Good rule of thumb in a company hiring idiots, of course. Not all do that.
Nothing wrong in hiring people using their own tools - if they are competent to set them up right. Which some people are.
If you hire consultants from some consulting company, they may very well come with their own computers for development+documentation. Hiring a person is very much like hiring a consultant from a one-man company. Might come with his own computer. Ok if he is a computer security expert.
Everything is wrong with letting people set up their own tools if they are going to be storing your data -- even if the people know what they are doing, people are not infallible, so eventually someone's going to slip up and install malware or configure something insecurely. The only way to be sure is to enforce policies with policy enforcement and automatic monitoring.
Ok if he is a computer security expert
If he is, then he'll tell you why he shouldn't have free reign to configure his computer and why the company shoud be enforcing policies and monitoring compliance.
...on a phone to be useful are a dead end.
It's not an either/or proposition, smart watches can use a phone *and* be useful standalone.
My Garmin smartwatch works well with and without a phone -- without a phone, I can get all of the fitness tracking I want, and it can even do map based navigation, but that seems less useful, I've never had a case where I wanted to use my watch for navigation.
When it's paired with my phone, I can configure the notifications that appear on my watch, so if I get an SMS or call while biking home, I can see if it's something I want to pull over and take a look at.
I don't think I'd be willing to pay the battery (and maybe size) penalty it would take to make my watch into a standalone phone, as it is now, my watch lasts about a week on battery.
So you still don't see why oversight is needed to verify that, eh? Gee. Maybe it will just happen all by itself like the invisible jackoff hand of the free market?
Oh my god, I would hope that it doesn't take congress to oversee standard security practice that every large business follows - if any oversight is needed at all, then use it to put competent IT staff in place.
I don't see why some congressional oversight is needed -- just block VPN apps on government owned laptops. If employees are using the apps on their personal devices, they should not have sensitive government data on those devices.
Somewhere in the deep bowels of the Alphabet headquarters a fscking BEAN COUNTER has a spredasheet that show exactly how much digging down ever additional inch would cost along with another one that shows the cost of "sealant" vs the cost of trenching and the expextant
That's the part I don't understand, once you've trenched through the asphalt, digging a few more inches isn't that hard, they probably could have buried it 8" down with little additional cost.
And the assertion that this is "bad" has some very interesting implications for those advocating free healthcare, free college, and enhanced welfare programs. Medicare, for example, increases the cost of non-medicare treatment. This is even true when paid for by a third party. For example, increased availability and size of student loans also increases tuition for all. If you're going to declare something as bad, you should at least attempt to be consistent about it, instead of arguing both for and against it, depending on what your party's platform tells you to embrace or reject.
Medicare is bad because it's not universal -- the USA should have single-payer healthcare, so everyone pays the same, we shouldn't end up in a situation where some people overpay because others underpay. Just let it all be paid by a single entity. Healthcare is not a good analogy since that market is so skewed by insurance companies. It's like having:
1. One class of cell phone users getting government paid call phones (well, they've paid for it all their life though paycheck deductions) They get only basic phones/services, but it's all free or low-cost to them.
2. Another class of cell phone users that have negotiated monthly plans (mostly paid by their employers) - they can pay a copay to get a premium phone/features, but in general, they get unlimited usage at relatively low cost.
3. One final class of cell phone user that only needs a phone occasionally, but when they do need one, it's a life-and-death situation and since they don't have a negotiated rate, they get reamed by the cell phone companies and are charged 10X even 100X more than the negotiated rates. And since it's such an emergency, these users usually can't shop around, and even if they could, it's nearly impossible to compare prices/services because you generally can't find out the price until you've already bought the phone.
Is this the kind of cell phone market you're striving for?
It seems like common sense -- carriers are selling bandwidth at wholesale rates to large companies that provide "free" service, so they jack up the retail rates paid by consumers to compensate.
The Pai FCC's 2017 decision would have limited the $25 subsidy to "facilities-based" carriers -- those that build their own networks -- making it impossible for tribal residents to use the $25 subsidy to buy telecom service from resellers....The move would have dramatically limited tribal residents' options for purchasing subsidized service, but the FCC claimed it was necessary in order to encourage carriers to build their own networks.
I don't understand this reasoning -- the resellers must be ultimately buying from the "facilities-based" carriers, and if these carriers are charging the resellers less than it costs to provide service, that's their own fault.
But it wasn't a public position. It was an informal motto that they used to trick gullible people into thinking they were something they weren't. Google has always put money ahead of ethics. That anyone believed otherwise is silly.
They included it in their S-1 filing prior to their IPO.
I wish Google still "Don't be evil."
How about you stop being naive instead of falling for an informal motto that was not legally-binding in any way.
There's nothing wrong with expecting companies to abide by their publicly stated position, if a company is going to publicly say they are going to do something, they should follow through. Though they've already removed "Don't be evil" from their code of conduct, so it's moot anyway.
Anyway nowadays it's hard to Root and get SuperUser and I don't understand why.
Seems pretty straightforward:
https://www.xda-developers.com...
It's not trivial and should not be since only those that know what they are doing should root their phone.