No, I wouldn't expect us to be terraforming Mars for centuries, if ever. It'd probably start our with domed or more likely underground habitats, probably with several nuclear power plants to generate the light and heat the colonists would need to grow plants that could recycle their wastes into clean food, water, and oxygen.
The challenge is in getting it all built, ready, and the first crops on their way before the first colonists arrive. You mitigate the risks to your colonists significantly by doing this. Send up robots and machinery to build out the habitats, do the initial planting, and get an oxygen-rich environment throughout the dome. Once the first set of crops is nearly ready for harvest, you send the colonists up to harvest it and maintain the farm and all of the equipment from that point forward. You build a few dozen self-sufficient habitats relatively close to each other this way, preferably with staggered harvest seasons, then if one habitat has a severe failure the others can pitch in to help or absorb the population from the failed habitat until repairs can be made.
The most important input is energy. Solar on Mars ain't gonna cut it - the Sun is too weak to grow crops in any significant volume, though of course if you can manage to build a semi-transparent dome you can use it as a supplement. But your heat losses out of the transparent dome will be massive, so it's probably not worth it. You're pretty much stuck with nuclear based on our current technology.
We'll learn our lessons on Mars (or better yet learn our initial lessons on the moon, where we can actually shuttle emergency supplies in a pinch, and even possibly evacuate colonists if things get terrible) before sending colony ships out further. Once we get good at building self-sufficient colonies, they'll just need a supply of nuclear fuel and shielding from cosmic radiation, so basically anything larger than a small asteroid would make a decent colony. Especially if we can find or manufacture a good supply of water from somewhere without having to drag it out of Earth's gravity well.
The technology isn't that far away. The problems are focus and funding. Humanity as a whole has an interest in doing this in order to ensure our survival as a species, but very few groups within humanity have the resources to accomplish it, and they are all competing with each other over shorter-term goals.
I'm from the US so obviously my math is really poor. So let me take my socks off so I can do some basic math. $2,000 is $83 a month. Are you saying you get an $83 a month discount for having an unlocked phone? That's fucking awesome! Where are you where they are so cool? I don't even pay anywhere near that per line to start with, so let's see. Time for some advanced math, let me take my underwear off so I can carry the one.
$120/month buys me a "family plan" with three telephones and AT&T provided all three phones for a penny a pop. So, if I understand your math correctly, each of those phones will cost me an additional $1,999.99 over the life of the two-year plan, totaling $5999.97 which is about $250 a month over 24 months. I'm paying about $120 a month, so if I had only bought unlocked phones AT&T would be paying me $130 a month, right? God, I'm such a fucking stupid American who is so bad at math I missed an opportunity for AT&T to pay me $130 a month to have their service!
Since most major carriers in the US give ZERO discount for buying an unlocked phone, we'd be paying the money anyway, might as well get a damned phone for it. Even the is a relatively progressive companies offer about a $30/month discount for unlocked phones. Over the two years that generally means a contract, that's $720. Now, don't get me wrong, you can get a pretty awesome phone for $720, but my American math is so stupid I can't figure out how I can save the other $1280 you say my phone would otherwise cost me over the two years. Not to mention the fact that there's no signal anywhere near where I live for any of the companies that offer a discount, so I could save the $720 to have a phone with zero bars and is incapable of making telephone calls. But I've saved $720, how fucking awesome is that, huh?
My wife has an unlocked phone, but only because it allows her to have a smart phone with WiFi and we don't have to buy a data plan. If she wanted a data plan, there'd be no point in an unlocked phone at all, since the data plan is $15-30 a month whether she uses an AT&T provided phone or we bought one. But she's OK with only having data while at home, so the $250 we spent on the phone will actually save us somewhere around a couple hundred bucks over the life of the contract. So we come out ahead $50. Over two years. Woo-freaking-hoo.
Unless it's changed very recently, Verizon doesn't use SIMs. You have to call or go in and activate it. And they can tell the model of phone from the serial number of the phone.
But, yeah, AT&T can also detect the model once you put your SIM in and many models get you an instant, forced "courtesy upgrade" to a data plan, though that may have changed recently with their data plan restructuring. Fortunately, they don't recognize my wife's Nokia 9800 ExpresMusic as a "smart" phone, so we can just use WiFi on it.
There's a very fine line, though, when you're talking about private organizations and their willfully-employed workforce.
Does my freedom of speech extend to, say, lying about something between myself and my employer in public? Selling or giving away their corporate databases? Detailing how cool our security system is including placement and models of cameras and door locking systems? Announcing that I had a really bad day and detailing the personal problems that someone else had that led to my bad day, including their name and phone number? Calling out customers who had late payments by name and including their phone numbers? I'd argue "no".
I'd say if you were experiencing unacceptable working conditions, the employer should not have the right to fire you for saying so in public if you can prove what you are saying. You'll get better traction reporting it to OSHA or someone who can do something about it, but whatever. Telling the truth should never have legal ramifications.
Similarly, just saying you had a bad day because you had a bad day doesn't really reflect negatively on your workplace, unless you make a habit of saying "[employer] sucks!" or something. It's work. You'll have bad days. We all do. Most of us refrain from saying it because, well, no one wants to read constant whining anyway, and we generally don't blame our employers and don't want to associate negativity with the companies that treat us well overall, but those who do should be able to freely as long as they don't make up stuff about their employer in the process or constantly bash their employer without any justification.
If what you say is completely unrelated to work, then there should be no work ramifications unless your personal reputation is somehow critical to the company (CEO, important sales reps or public-facing representatives, etc). "Man, did I get drunk last night, how many hookers did I bang again, and man that blow was good...?" might be enough to get you a serious write-up if you call in sick the next day and claim it was a cold, but abusing a single sick day is rarely a "termination" offense unless it's at the end of a long pattern of same. You might also be subject to a drug test, and you might lose your job if you fail it, but that's being terminated due to a violation of a clear policy, not because you yakked about it on MyFaceTweet. You offered up evidence of a violation of a policy, they followed up on the evidence you gave them. Don't like that idea? Then don't violate your company's policies, pick a company to work for that has policies you can live with, or at least shut the hell up about it in public.
You should have the freedom to speak your mind as long as you make it clear it's your opinion, and you should have the freedom to tell the truth all the time, but you don't have the right to violate any valid restrictions your employer might place in order to protect their reputation from damage (unless said damage is deserved), and their data from unauthorized distribution (ever), nor should any confessions you might make in public about your own wrongdoing be considered off-limits to your employer, as long as the wrongdoing directly affects your employment (admitting to getting drunk on a Friday night is not a work-related problem as long as you show up to work sober on Monday, admitting to getting drunk during a major sales meeting and losing a major contract as a result is most certainly one).
No, won't work. I clearly remember from a documentary I watched once that land sharks are unstoppable. I can't recall the title, but it aired on Saturday nights and it kept repeating the theme about land sharks being very dangerous and pretty much invincible.
Do people really train their guard dogs to attack strangers?
No. But, in general, dogs don't need to be trained to bark at people they don't know, and dogs are unwanted noise. Your average thief is just looking for a nice, quiet house they can get into without anyone noticing and spend some quality time picking out the choicest bits. If you have a dog barking his head off in the front yard, it increases the chances that someone is going to pay attention (yes, there's a 90% chance the dog will be ignored and you'll go unnoticed, but that's a 10% better chance of being notified than the neighbors across the street who don't have a dog).
My least favorite sound when I knock on a door to a friend's house it the loud barking of dogs.
All things come at a cost. If a dog barks when someone other than Master or Mistress (or someone that Master or Mistress is obviously comfortable with) is around, then they are doing their job. The same discomfort you feel is what will keep the thief away. You can also, as you say, train them not to bark at the doorbell (good luck with that!) or have their vocal cords snipped so they aren't so loud.
what good is a guard dog that doesn't bark?
Some, but not as much as a guard dog that does. The presence of a dog means an extra layer of hassle a thief has to deal with. Thieves don't generally want hassle. If it's a choice between your house with vague signs a dog lives there, and your neighbor's house with no signs of a dog at all, you're relatively safe - all other things being equal the thief will go for the neighbors. If if's a choice between your house with vague signs a dog lives there and your neighbor's house with a loud dog out in the yard, then you're the better-looking target if all other factors are equal.
Honestly, you don't need a dog if none of your neighbors have one. All you need is a doghouse, a leash tied somewhere on the front porch, and maybe a few scratches on the front door. Make your house look a little more dog-infested than your neighbors, and you decrease your desirability as a target.
But there are other factors, of course. Are your entrances and windows free of obstructions and visible to your neighbors, or protected by naturally defensive foliage? A thief doesn't mind jimmying a window under the concealment of a dark corner with a line of bushes, but he'll hesitate if that bush is a hawthorne or rosebush with long thorns and is right up against the house. You might think that having a private mud room with the outer door unlocked is a great idea when it's rainy, but it gives your would-be thief a quiet protected place to work on your main door locks.
Sometimes, a "PROTECTED BY SECURITY SYSTEM" sign as every bit as effective as a full-on security system. And nothing beats having a person home most of the time.
The most important thing in a home security system, to me, is notification that my house has been entered. Forget protecting my stuff. I'm not Chuck Norris, and my shit can be replaced. I don't own anything worth dying for. Not a single thing. The important data on my computer is encrypted and backed up offsite, the papers I care about are in a well-concealed safe, and I can buy replacements for anything else that's important.
I primarily lock my doors so the insurance company can't gripe about my lack of precautions if they see signs of forced entry. The webcams are there to serve the same purpose - if I got robbed, I could show time-indexed footage of someone who is not me driving down my driveway, breaking into the door, and taking things. If I can catch useful imagery of the thief, that's a bonus, for sure. But as far as the insurance company is concerned, I only need to show that it wasn't me stealing from my own house.
But the number one most important part is knowing that I want to be very careful when re-entering my house because the thief could still be there. And for that I want an active system like a motion detector or a few $100 motion-sensing webcams, not a passive system that requires action on my part.
This ROV camera is really cool. But it's not a security item, it's a really cool geek toy.
According to the article, once the toy dog is tricked out it'll set you back a little under $1000. For that kind of money, you can put at least nine of these little suckers (or any one of a number of similar models) into your house:
There are also models with higher resolution and/or automatic night vision, which of course comes at a price. But you can still afford two or three really, really good cameras for $1000.
With one robot, the crook's gonna hear it coming a mile away and one swift kick means no surveillance. When you check in a few minutes later, you'll probably just assume the batteries ran out. It's passive surveillance, meaning your chances of catching footage of someone in the act is slim to none.
A solid handful of well-concealed AC-connected cameras means you'll have redundant coverage throughout the house, with no batteries to worry about recharging. Battery backups are pretty easy if you're worried about a power outage (assuming your Internet connection is similarly backed up, but you'd need that for RoverCam too). Cover the windows, hallways, and doors. No one can get in the house at all without at least one camera catching motion.
Best of all, it's an active surveillance system - the cameras can be set to only capture and forward imagery if they see motion, so instead of checking at random on the off chance you were robbed or becoming overwhelmed with hundreds of hours of footage of a still room, the system can notify you and send the important imagery to an email address somewhere so you have a copy securely offsite. You can easily place cameras so they are hard to see and your would-be thief needs to walk through their field of vision to get to them (far corners of rooms are ideal).
Your local cops might be vaguely interested only in that it proves the person on the camera is not you, and they'll be more willing to sign the forms so your insurance company can reimburse you (technically it'll be a loan with interest because your insurance rates will go up).
About the only practical use would be if you feared coming home to a house with the criminal still in it, leading to a physical confrontation. You could scan the house on your smartphone from your car, I suppose. The problem is, if you fail to get a response back from one ROV, you might logically assume that the batteries went dead. Compare that to one of the independent cameras in the active system having already told you hours ago that they detected motion (and you have a secure copy of the imagery).
The criminal might be able to deactivate them, but it'd be almost impossible for them to take out all nine without at least one of them sensing motion and notifying you before it went dark.
If you're totally paranoid about someone being in your house, you could also have a pretty simple machine running BigBrother and notifying you every hour that "all is well" if all your cameras are pingable, or notifying you immediately when a camera goes offline. That way, if the thief goes around disabling cameras and manages to do so without triggering the camera through motion, at least you'll get multiple warnings that "Camera A is out", "Camera B is out", and you'll pretty much know that someone is walking around the house breaking cameras.
But, agreed, an ROV-mounted camera is cool concept. I'd still love to have one, but solely for the geek factor, not for surveillance.
Because then you'd be up all night wondering when you're going to hear [Knock! Knock!] "Candygram!" on the bedroom door, knowing it'll be the last thing you ever hear other than your own screaming.
You know, I can understand not reading the article. I mean, it's clicking on a link, and that's hard. But maybe the summary can enlighten a bit:
They found that even with a lap pad under the computer, the men's scrotums overheated quickly.
The problem is not the heat generated by the laptop. It's the additional insulation provided by putting the laptop on your lap. In the 80s, it was tight pants, in the 90s, it was briefs, in the early 00s, it was laptops. Who knows what we'll be warned about in 2010? Oh, wait...
Also, I wonder if the temperature raises more from the laptop itself or just from the fact you are holding your legs together around your junk (in order to balance the lappy.)
Yes, that's exactly what the article says is happening.
The actual heat generated by the laptop is irrelevant. The problem is insulation, not generated heat. Your own body temperature is WAY above the temperature where the man-factory can operate, hence why this equipment is hanging down in its own air-cooled bag, which is an otherwise insanely stupid arrangement).
Of course, they used to cite the same issues with briefs and/or tight jeans when I was in high school in the 80s.
Absolutely. That, and cost. And it's not that no one has thought of it before, it's that everyone who has brought one to market has failed miserably, and for damned good reason. Modular laptops have existed before. They've been expensive, heavy, and really no more upgradeable than desktops (which don't get upgraded outside the geek crowd really all that much).
Really, what percentage of machines would be upgraded if the user had the easy capability of upgrading them without anything more complex than a screwdriver?
To answer that question, look no further than desktops, the VAST majority of which are designed to be upgraded easily, and the VAST majority of which are thrown away with the exact same components they were purchased with. The last two Dells I've salvaged had cases designed to be opened without even a screwdriver, and yet I found them in the dumpster with the factory seal intact. The owners had simply purchased new machines, and thrown the old ones in the scrap bin. I've dumpster-dived and set at least a half dozen machines up for reuse, and all but one had their original components firmly intact when I compared them to the original specs on the model. One, just ONE, had an upgraded hard drive and optical drive, and an extra couple of chips of memory added (all of which can be replaced in any commodity laptop today, by the way).
Speaking of which, you really need look no further than the current bits of a laptop that are already designed to be replaced/upgraded easily (battery, memory, wireless card, hard drive, etc) today on most laptops. I'd bet that easily 80% of those never get upgraded, and that's a component that is easy to do and makes sense to make them upgradeable/replaceable.
Now imagine making the motherboard, keyboard, screen, trackpad, speakers, etc modular. Change the motherboard and you need to change the memory and CPU, so there's the cost of a new laptop right there. Think of the number of connectors you'll need for everything. Think of the complexity you'll need to design in - your new motherboard has to work with your old video card and your old wireless card and your old hard drive and have exactly the same connectors in exactly the same places (want HDMI? Sorry! New connector = new chassis!), or you'll end up replacing so many components it'll cost more than a new machine. You can't upgrade to a bigger screen or it won't fit in the chassis at all.
If you design laptops to be as modular and upgrade-ready as desktops (as in "only a screwdriver required"), you'll have to replace all of the current soldered connections with plastic-and-metal connectors which would then be soldered at each end. A lot of the case attachments would have to be upgraded to screws, and the screw sockets would have to be changed from plastic one-time-use to metal or some more solid material. You'll be stuck with stagnated motherboard layouts to fit a chassis that lacks new style connector holes, or you'll have to make snap-out holes in the case in the hopes that you'll have about the right shape for a connector which will be invented 6 years from now.
This adds cost, weight, materials consumed during construction, reduce efficiency (material resistance), and it will increase the chances of a failure of a connection (because instead of one clean solder you'll have two solders and a non-hardened connection that is more subject to bumps and/or wear). So you'll have a heavier machine that's bigger and cost more to produce and whose production had more environmental impact, in order to accommodate a capacity that almost none of your customer base is going to want to do.
Is building laptops with completely modular "green"? I'd say "no". At a certain point, building unnecessary function into devices makes them more wasteful. If 95% of your customer base is not going to use a function and that function adds 10% to the materials or energy consumed making your device, then you are making a poor environmental deci
Really? Where are you that you get a 3G service you could possibly use to stream movies without incurring hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in overage charges?
AT&T's monthly cap is now 2GB, which means about 66 Megabytes per day. Coincidentally, that is the size Comcast is claiming for a standard-resolution movie. So I might, if I used my bandwidth for nothing else that whole month, be able to watch one standard-definition (not HD) movie on that cap. Overage is, last time I checked, about $10 per gigabyte, meaning that in addition to my NetFlix fees each movie in standard definition would cost me $20 after I used up my $60 account cap for the first movie. For $20, I'll drive to Wally World and buy the DVD, and I can probably buy a pack of microwave popcorn with some of the remainder, and I can watch it as many times as I want. Or I'll rent it from my local video store (we still have one left in town, and they get $3 for a new release, so there's an option that's $17 cheaper per movie than NetFlix over AT&T, for $17 I can hire a college kid to deliver it for me and add to the local economy).
T-Mobile's cap recently dropped to 3GB from 5GB. Hey, a little better, but that's still less than two movies a month, tops, assuming you do nothing else on your connection and the movies are TV resolution and heavily compressed. I don't know what their overage charges are. I can't imagine they are pretty.
I think Verizon is the only holdout with a 5GB plan. So there's 2 movies a month if you watch them in TV quality, and a whole 33 Megabytes a day left for everything else you could possibly want to do. Yippee! Someone pinch me, I must be dreaming! Again, no idea what the overages are.
Meanwhile, Comcast, much as I detest caps at all, at least gives me 250GB a month, and even my "you used all your speed for 15 minutes, you're capped at 50%!" throttled speeds much higher than what 3G is capable of, all for the same $60 a month a standalone wireless data account costs.
TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch), compliments of Heinlein.
To be fair, I am not sure the original design anticipated the amount of bandwidth that HD Video and the like use.
The original design didn't have anything to do with the amount of bandwidth that anything was going to use. The original implementation would have been overloaded with JPEG-compressed images, at least the BITNET node I was on in 1987 would have been, and "Instant" messaging was more like 30 seconds per message if you chatted with someone overseas, and a minimum of 10 seconds if you were in the same state.
We've upgraded things since then, thank goodness, and we can handle a lot more now. The problem is that we have entrenched government-enforced monopolies (because a monopoly model is the only real alternative to government-owned infrastructure) who have been taking money and not doing the upgrades our tax dollars have been paying for. There's no real competition for companies to actually innovate and come up with ways of increasing bandwidth, and the government mandates (which is our only way to introduce improvements) are met with "hey, you only send us money, you don't get to tell us what to do!"
Deregulation should mean something really, really simple. "Hey, you know that government-enforced right of way we gave you and all the tax dollars to help build out your infrastructure? Well, we want that all back. You can rent space on the right-of-way and so can everyone else, or you can turn the wires over to us and rent space back on them and so can everyone else."
We have a "mark the circle and scan" system here, and while it might be possible to add new ones, it would be impossible for them to invalidate or remove ones they don't like.
As I enter the polling place, there's a greeter with a count-clicker (one of those little devices that you push a button and a number increments). They count the number of people entering the building.
A poll person checks my ID and checks me off a list (while being watched by a second person to make sure the name was not previously checked, and that the name on the ID matches the name just checked off), then the second person gives me my ballot pack and also keeps a count with their own count-clicker.
I take my paper ballots to a voting station and vote, then I have to put each of them face down in a separate scanning machine, where Person 1 verifies that I've put the white ballot in the white ballot scanner, Person 2 verifies that I've put the pink ballot in the pink ballot scanner, and Person 3 verifies that I've put the blue ballot in the blue ballot scanner. All three ballot scanners have a digital counter that increments as the ballots are inserted, and all three people have a count-clicker, but cannot see the digital readout of the ballot scanners.
The human verifiers are physically separated from the scanners and are not at any time allowed to touch my ballot or see my vote. There is a separate person walking around between the three scanner machines verifying that each ballot is scanned properly. They are allowed to touch ballots, but they are not keeping a count and they are watched by the three scanner verifiers and another two people standing on either side of the scanner area looking for ballot swaps. They also give you a replacement ballot if you mess yours up, but the invalidated ballot is put in a separate locked box.
Once your ballot is scanned, it's in a locked ballot box integrated into the scanner. As you leave through the one door you are allowed to use to exit, there's someone handing out "I voted" stickers and counting you with another count-clicker.
I presume the counters are there so, at the end of the day, each election worker has to hand theirs in and the numbers are all added up. It's a pretty simple formula - to within a reasonable margin of human error, the following numbers must match:
- The total number of people entering the building.
- The total number of people who have been "checked off" the list.
- The total number of people receiving a "ballot pack"
- The total number of people putting a ballot into the white ballot scanner as counted by the machine.
- The total number of people putting a ballot into the white ballot scanner as counted by the human verifier.
- The total number of physical white ballots in the white ballot scanner.
(repeat the same three numbers above with Blue and Pink ballots)
- The total number of people leaving the building.
- The total number of ballots used (minus the ones that are in the bad ballot lockbox).
So, yeah, you're right. There's a lot of people involved, but I was in and out of there in under 5 minutes, but even if each and every person in that room was corrupt, at least 7 of them would have to be in collusion to introduce more than a small handful of votes. You could have someone come through the building multiple times, I suppose, but they'd have to have multiple valid-looking IDs of people they know have registered but have not voted, or they'd have to pre-arrange it with both people doing the
We have instant official results (at the end of the day election officials download the results from the scanner), and a paper backup in case a recount becomes necessary.
It's more expensive than an electronic ballot system, except of course that the ballot scanners have been paid for for years, and most of the poll workers are volunteers.
Our major expense is printing out the paper ballots each year, and election results are available at 8:05PM (the polls close at 8:00PM).
Well, I'm not referring to doing 25 down the Interstate of course. But if the road looks a little slippery, I'm going to keep to a few miles an hour below the speed limit.
I agree with you on the "stick behind a semi" option on the highway. It also makes it hard for semis to pass you, which if the blindness won't get you the wind from their passing just might.
It'll be ever so slightly more meaningful when you approach your congresscritter, representative, or other elected official and say "Guess what? I voted, and I intend to keep doing so. Last election, I did (or did not) vote for you. If you want to keep (or earn) my vote next time, here's what I want."
You'll get a whole lot more attention than "I don't vote because I don't like you." If they try and satisfy you, there's little chance of reward, and if they ignore you there's little chance of punishment.
A butterfly flapping his wings rarely starts a storm, but one who sits on the log looking at the sky has no chance at all.:)
Because by not voting, the greater of two evils might get in.
But why vote for one of two evils? If you're planning on sitting it out, then widen out your scope and vote for the least of all of the evils on the ballot, and you might even find someone you actually like.
Your chosen candidate won't win, of course, but he or she might at least show up on the radar and their party might get to keep their slot on the ballot next election. Or write in a candidate from a fringe party that you agree with a little more than the Republicrats and the Demublicans, and see if you can help win them a slot on the ballot in the next election.
Hence why a lot of people end up sitting out the election. They can't choose between A or B and end up frustrated, and their sitting out supports C by default.
So, if you're going to sit out the election because you can't find a candidate you like who could possibly win, go and vote for the candidate you like regardless of whether they could win. It's an ineffective something, but it's better than nothing.
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No, I wouldn't expect us to be terraforming Mars for centuries, if ever. It'd probably start our with domed or more likely underground habitats, probably with several nuclear power plants to generate the light and heat the colonists would need to grow plants that could recycle their wastes into clean food, water, and oxygen.
The challenge is in getting it all built, ready, and the first crops on their way before the first colonists arrive. You mitigate the risks to your colonists significantly by doing this. Send up robots and machinery to build out the habitats, do the initial planting, and get an oxygen-rich environment throughout the dome. Once the first set of crops is nearly ready for harvest, you send the colonists up to harvest it and maintain the farm and all of the equipment from that point forward. You build a few dozen self-sufficient habitats relatively close to each other this way, preferably with staggered harvest seasons, then if one habitat has a severe failure the others can pitch in to help or absorb the population from the failed habitat until repairs can be made.
The most important input is energy. Solar on Mars ain't gonna cut it - the Sun is too weak to grow crops in any significant volume, though of course if you can manage to build a semi-transparent dome you can use it as a supplement. But your heat losses out of the transparent dome will be massive, so it's probably not worth it. You're pretty much stuck with nuclear based on our current technology.
We'll learn our lessons on Mars (or better yet learn our initial lessons on the moon, where we can actually shuttle emergency supplies in a pinch, and even possibly evacuate colonists if things get terrible) before sending colony ships out further. Once we get good at building self-sufficient colonies, they'll just need a supply of nuclear fuel and shielding from cosmic radiation, so basically anything larger than a small asteroid would make a decent colony. Especially if we can find or manufacture a good supply of water from somewhere without having to drag it out of Earth's gravity well.
The technology isn't that far away. The problems are focus and funding. Humanity as a whole has an interest in doing this in order to ensure our survival as a species, but very few groups within humanity have the resources to accomplish it, and they are all competing with each other over shorter-term goals.
I'm from the US so obviously my math is really poor. So let me take my socks off so I can do some basic math. $2,000 is $83 a month. Are you saying you get an $83 a month discount for having an unlocked phone? That's fucking awesome! Where are you where they are so cool? I don't even pay anywhere near that per line to start with, so let's see. Time for some advanced math, let me take my underwear off so I can carry the one.
$120/month buys me a "family plan" with three telephones and AT&T provided all three phones for a penny a pop. So, if I understand your math correctly, each of those phones will cost me an additional $1,999.99 over the life of the two-year plan, totaling $5999.97 which is about $250 a month over 24 months. I'm paying about $120 a month, so if I had only bought unlocked phones AT&T would be paying me $130 a month, right? God, I'm such a fucking stupid American who is so bad at math I missed an opportunity for AT&T to pay me $130 a month to have their service!
Since most major carriers in the US give ZERO discount for buying an unlocked phone, we'd be paying the money anyway, might as well get a damned phone for it. Even the is a relatively progressive companies offer about a $30/month discount for unlocked phones. Over the two years that generally means a contract, that's $720. Now, don't get me wrong, you can get a pretty awesome phone for $720, but my American math is so stupid I can't figure out how I can save the other $1280 you say my phone would otherwise cost me over the two years. Not to mention the fact that there's no signal anywhere near where I live for any of the companies that offer a discount, so I could save the $720 to have a phone with zero bars and is incapable of making telephone calls. But I've saved $720, how fucking awesome is that, huh?
My wife has an unlocked phone, but only because it allows her to have a smart phone with WiFi and we don't have to buy a data plan. If she wanted a data plan, there'd be no point in an unlocked phone at all, since the data plan is $15-30 a month whether she uses an AT&T provided phone or we bought one. But she's OK with only having data while at home, so the $250 we spent on the phone will actually save us somewhere around a couple hundred bucks over the life of the contract. So we come out ahead $50. Over two years. Woo-freaking-hoo.
Unless it's changed very recently, Verizon doesn't use SIMs. You have to call or go in and activate it. And they can tell the model of phone from the serial number of the phone.
But, yeah, AT&T can also detect the model once you put your SIM in and many models get you an instant, forced "courtesy upgrade" to a data plan, though that may have changed recently with their data plan restructuring. Fortunately, they don't recognize my wife's Nokia 9800 ExpresMusic as a "smart" phone, so we can just use WiFi on it.
There's a very fine line, though, when you're talking about private organizations and their willfully-employed workforce.
Does my freedom of speech extend to, say, lying about something between myself and my employer in public? Selling or giving away their corporate databases? Detailing how cool our security system is including placement and models of cameras and door locking systems? Announcing that I had a really bad day and detailing the personal problems that someone else had that led to my bad day, including their name and phone number? Calling out customers who had late payments by name and including their phone numbers? I'd argue "no".
I'd say if you were experiencing unacceptable working conditions, the employer should not have the right to fire you for saying so in public if you can prove what you are saying. You'll get better traction reporting it to OSHA or someone who can do something about it, but whatever. Telling the truth should never have legal ramifications.
Similarly, just saying you had a bad day because you had a bad day doesn't really reflect negatively on your workplace, unless you make a habit of saying "[employer] sucks!" or something. It's work. You'll have bad days. We all do. Most of us refrain from saying it because, well, no one wants to read constant whining anyway, and we generally don't blame our employers and don't want to associate negativity with the companies that treat us well overall, but those who do should be able to freely as long as they don't make up stuff about their employer in the process or constantly bash their employer without any justification.
If what you say is completely unrelated to work, then there should be no work ramifications unless your personal reputation is somehow critical to the company (CEO, important sales reps or public-facing representatives, etc). "Man, did I get drunk last night, how many hookers did I bang again, and man that blow was good...?" might be enough to get you a serious write-up if you call in sick the next day and claim it was a cold, but abusing a single sick day is rarely a "termination" offense unless it's at the end of a long pattern of same. You might also be subject to a drug test, and you might lose your job if you fail it, but that's being terminated due to a violation of a clear policy, not because you yakked about it on MyFaceTweet. You offered up evidence of a violation of a policy, they followed up on the evidence you gave them. Don't like that idea? Then don't violate your company's policies, pick a company to work for that has policies you can live with, or at least shut the hell up about it in public.
You should have the freedom to speak your mind as long as you make it clear it's your opinion, and you should have the freedom to tell the truth all the time, but you don't have the right to violate any valid restrictions your employer might place in order to protect their reputation from damage (unless said damage is deserved), and their data from unauthorized distribution (ever), nor should any confessions you might make in public about your own wrongdoing be considered off-limits to your employer, as long as the wrongdoing directly affects your employment (admitting to getting drunk on a Friday night is not a work-related problem as long as you show up to work sober on Monday, admitting to getting drunk during a major sales meeting and losing a major contract as a result is most certainly one).
No, won't work. I clearly remember from a documentary I watched once that land sharks are unstoppable. I can't recall the title, but it aired on Saturday nights and it kept repeating the theme about land sharks being very dangerous and pretty much invincible.
Do people really train their guard dogs to attack strangers?
No. But, in general, dogs don't need to be trained to bark at people they don't know, and dogs are unwanted noise. Your average thief is just looking for a nice, quiet house they can get into without anyone noticing and spend some quality time picking out the choicest bits. If you have a dog barking his head off in the front yard, it increases the chances that someone is going to pay attention (yes, there's a 90% chance the dog will be ignored and you'll go unnoticed, but that's a 10% better chance of being notified than the neighbors across the street who don't have a dog).
My least favorite sound when I knock on a door to a friend's house it the loud barking of dogs.
All things come at a cost. If a dog barks when someone other than Master or Mistress (or someone that Master or Mistress is obviously comfortable with) is around, then they are doing their job. The same discomfort you feel is what will keep the thief away. You can also, as you say, train them not to bark at the doorbell (good luck with that!) or have their vocal cords snipped so they aren't so loud.
what good is a guard dog that doesn't bark?
Some, but not as much as a guard dog that does. The presence of a dog means an extra layer of hassle a thief has to deal with. Thieves don't generally want hassle. If it's a choice between your house with vague signs a dog lives there, and your neighbor's house with no signs of a dog at all, you're relatively safe - all other things being equal the thief will go for the neighbors. If if's a choice between your house with vague signs a dog lives there and your neighbor's house with a loud dog out in the yard, then you're the better-looking target if all other factors are equal.
Honestly, you don't need a dog if none of your neighbors have one. All you need is a doghouse, a leash tied somewhere on the front porch, and maybe a few scratches on the front door. Make your house look a little more dog-infested than your neighbors, and you decrease your desirability as a target.
But there are other factors, of course. Are your entrances and windows free of obstructions and visible to your neighbors, or protected by naturally defensive foliage? A thief doesn't mind jimmying a window under the concealment of a dark corner with a line of bushes, but he'll hesitate if that bush is a hawthorne or rosebush with long thorns and is right up against the house. You might think that having a private mud room with the outer door unlocked is a great idea when it's rainy, but it gives your would-be thief a quiet protected place to work on your main door locks.
Sometimes, a "PROTECTED BY SECURITY SYSTEM" sign as every bit as effective as a full-on security system. And nothing beats having a person home most of the time.
The most important thing in a home security system, to me, is notification that my house has been entered. Forget protecting my stuff. I'm not Chuck Norris, and my shit can be replaced. I don't own anything worth dying for. Not a single thing. The important data on my computer is encrypted and backed up offsite, the papers I care about are in a well-concealed safe, and I can buy replacements for anything else that's important.
I primarily lock my doors so the insurance company can't gripe about my lack of precautions if they see signs of forced entry. The webcams are there to serve the same purpose - if I got robbed, I could show time-indexed footage of someone who is not me driving down my driveway, breaking into the door, and taking things. If I can catch useful imagery of the thief, that's a bonus, for sure. But as far as the insurance company is concerned, I only need to show that it wasn't me stealing from my own house.
But the number one most important part is knowing that I want to be very careful when re-entering my house because the thief could still be there. And for that I want an active system like a motion detector or a few $100 motion-sensing webcams, not a passive system that requires action on my part.
This ROV camera is really cool. But it's not a security item, it's a really cool geek toy.
According to the article, once the toy dog is tricked out it'll set you back a little under $1000. For that kind of money, you can put at least nine of these little suckers (or any one of a number of similar models) into your house:
http://www.amazon.com/Cisco-Linksys-Wireless-N-Internet-Monitoring-Camera/dp/B002OHDFOA/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1289334401&sr=8-2
There are also models with higher resolution and/or automatic night vision, which of course comes at a price. But you can still afford two or three really, really good cameras for $1000.
With one robot, the crook's gonna hear it coming a mile away and one swift kick means no surveillance. When you check in a few minutes later, you'll probably just assume the batteries ran out. It's passive surveillance, meaning your chances of catching footage of someone in the act is slim to none.
A solid handful of well-concealed AC-connected cameras means you'll have redundant coverage throughout the house, with no batteries to worry about recharging. Battery backups are pretty easy if you're worried about a power outage (assuming your Internet connection is similarly backed up, but you'd need that for RoverCam too). Cover the windows, hallways, and doors. No one can get in the house at all without at least one camera catching motion.
Best of all, it's an active surveillance system - the cameras can be set to only capture and forward imagery if they see motion, so instead of checking at random on the off chance you were robbed or becoming overwhelmed with hundreds of hours of footage of a still room, the system can notify you and send the important imagery to an email address somewhere so you have a copy securely offsite. You can easily place cameras so they are hard to see and your would-be thief needs to walk through their field of vision to get to them (far corners of rooms are ideal).
Your local cops might be vaguely interested only in that it proves the person on the camera is not you, and they'll be more willing to sign the forms so your insurance company can reimburse you (technically it'll be a loan with interest because your insurance rates will go up).
About the only practical use would be if you feared coming home to a house with the criminal still in it, leading to a physical confrontation. You could scan the house on your smartphone from your car, I suppose. The problem is, if you fail to get a response back from one ROV, you might logically assume that the batteries went dead. Compare that to one of the independent cameras in the active system having already told you hours ago that they detected motion (and you have a secure copy of the imagery).
The criminal might be able to deactivate them, but it'd be almost impossible for them to take out all nine without at least one of them sensing motion and notifying you before it went dark.
If you're totally paranoid about someone being in your house, you could also have a pretty simple machine running BigBrother and notifying you every hour that "all is well" if all your cameras are pingable, or notifying you immediately when a camera goes offline. That way, if the thief goes around disabling cameras and manages to do so without triggering the camera through motion, at least you'll get multiple warnings that "Camera A is out", "Camera B is out", and you'll pretty much know that someone is walking around the house breaking cameras.
But, agreed, an ROV-mounted camera is cool concept. I'd still love to have one, but solely for the geek factor, not for surveillance.
Because then you'd be up all night wondering when you're going to hear [Knock! Knock!] "Candygram!" on the bedroom door, knowing it'll be the last thing you ever hear other than your own screaming.
Land sharks can never be trusted.
I lack mod points, so I'll put it this way instead...
Please get out of my head. You're obviously stealing my thoughts and claiming them for yourself. Bastard. :)
You know, I can understand not reading the article. I mean, it's clicking on a link, and that's hard. But maybe the summary can enlighten a bit:
They found that even with a lap pad under the computer, the men's scrotums overheated quickly.
The problem is not the heat generated by the laptop. It's the additional insulation provided by putting the laptop on your lap. In the 80s, it was tight pants, in the 90s, it was briefs, in the early 00s, it was laptops. Who knows what we'll be warned about in 2010? Oh, wait...
Also, I wonder if the temperature raises more from the laptop itself or just from the fact you are holding your legs together around your junk (in order to balance the lappy.)
Yes, that's exactly what the article says is happening.
The actual heat generated by the laptop is irrelevant. The problem is insulation, not generated heat. Your own body temperature is WAY above the temperature where the man-factory can operate, hence why this equipment is hanging down in its own air-cooled bag, which is an otherwise insanely stupid arrangement).
Of course, they used to cite the same issues with briefs and/or tight jeans when I was in high school in the 80s.
heave more sex.
If heaving is involved, that might be part of your problem. You're probably doing it wrong. :)
Overclock that laptop. Now.
Size matters?
Absolutely. That, and cost. And it's not that no one has thought of it before, it's that everyone who has brought one to market has failed miserably, and for damned good reason. Modular laptops have existed before. They've been expensive, heavy, and really no more upgradeable than desktops (which don't get upgraded outside the geek crowd really all that much).
Really, what percentage of machines would be upgraded if the user had the easy capability of upgrading them without anything more complex than a screwdriver?
To answer that question, look no further than desktops, the VAST majority of which are designed to be upgraded easily, and the VAST majority of which are thrown away with the exact same components they were purchased with. The last two Dells I've salvaged had cases designed to be opened without even a screwdriver, and yet I found them in the dumpster with the factory seal intact. The owners had simply purchased new machines, and thrown the old ones in the scrap bin. I've dumpster-dived and set at least a half dozen machines up for reuse, and all but one had their original components firmly intact when I compared them to the original specs on the model. One, just ONE, had an upgraded hard drive and optical drive, and an extra couple of chips of memory added (all of which can be replaced in any commodity laptop today, by the way).
Speaking of which, you really need look no further than the current bits of a laptop that are already designed to be replaced/upgraded easily (battery, memory, wireless card, hard drive, etc) today on most laptops. I'd bet that easily 80% of those never get upgraded, and that's a component that is easy to do and makes sense to make them upgradeable/replaceable.
Now imagine making the motherboard, keyboard, screen, trackpad, speakers, etc modular. Change the motherboard and you need to change the memory and CPU, so there's the cost of a new laptop right there. Think of the number of connectors you'll need for everything. Think of the complexity you'll need to design in - your new motherboard has to work with your old video card and your old wireless card and your old hard drive and have exactly the same connectors in exactly the same places (want HDMI? Sorry! New connector = new chassis!), or you'll end up replacing so many components it'll cost more than a new machine. You can't upgrade to a bigger screen or it won't fit in the chassis at all.
If you design laptops to be as modular and upgrade-ready as desktops (as in "only a screwdriver required"), you'll have to replace all of the current soldered connections with plastic-and-metal connectors which would then be soldered at each end. A lot of the case attachments would have to be upgraded to screws, and the screw sockets would have to be changed from plastic one-time-use to metal or some more solid material. You'll be stuck with stagnated motherboard layouts to fit a chassis that lacks new style connector holes, or you'll have to make snap-out holes in the case in the hopes that you'll have about the right shape for a connector which will be invented 6 years from now.
This adds cost, weight, materials consumed during construction, reduce efficiency (material resistance), and it will increase the chances of a failure of a connection (because instead of one clean solder you'll have two solders and a non-hardened connection that is more subject to bumps and/or wear). So you'll have a heavier machine that's bigger and cost more to produce and whose production had more environmental impact, in order to accommodate a capacity that almost none of your customer base is going to want to do.
Is building laptops with completely modular "green"? I'd say "no". At a certain point, building unnecessary function into devices makes them more wasteful. If 95% of your customer base is not going to use a function and that function adds 10% to the materials or energy consumed making your device, then you are making a poor environmental deci
Really? Where are you that you get a 3G service you could possibly use to stream movies without incurring hundreds or thousands of dollars a month in overage charges?
AT&T's monthly cap is now 2GB, which means about 66 Megabytes per day. Coincidentally, that is the size Comcast is claiming for a standard-resolution movie. So I might, if I used my bandwidth for nothing else that whole month, be able to watch one standard-definition (not HD) movie on that cap. Overage is, last time I checked, about $10 per gigabyte, meaning that in addition to my NetFlix fees each movie in standard definition would cost me $20 after I used up my $60 account cap for the first movie. For $20, I'll drive to Wally World and buy the DVD, and I can probably buy a pack of microwave popcorn with some of the remainder, and I can watch it as many times as I want. Or I'll rent it from my local video store (we still have one left in town, and they get $3 for a new release, so there's an option that's $17 cheaper per movie than NetFlix over AT&T, for $17 I can hire a college kid to deliver it for me and add to the local economy).
T-Mobile's cap recently dropped to 3GB from 5GB. Hey, a little better, but that's still less than two movies a month, tops, assuming you do nothing else on your connection and the movies are TV resolution and heavily compressed. I don't know what their overage charges are. I can't imagine they are pretty.
I think Verizon is the only holdout with a 5GB plan. So there's 2 movies a month if you watch them in TV quality, and a whole 33 Megabytes a day left for everything else you could possibly want to do. Yippee! Someone pinch me, I must be dreaming! Again, no idea what the overages are.
Meanwhile, Comcast, much as I detest caps at all, at least gives me 250GB a month, and even my "you used all your speed for 15 minutes, you're capped at 50%!" throttled speeds much higher than what 3G is capable of, all for the same $60 a month a standalone wireless data account costs.
TANSTASFL
TANSTAAFL (There Ain't No Such Thing As A Free Lunch), compliments of Heinlein.
To be fair, I am not sure the original design anticipated the amount of bandwidth that HD Video and the like use.
The original design didn't have anything to do with the amount of bandwidth that anything was going to use. The original implementation would have been overloaded with JPEG-compressed images, at least the BITNET node I was on in 1987 would have been, and "Instant" messaging was more like 30 seconds per message if you chatted with someone overseas, and a minimum of 10 seconds if you were in the same state.
We've upgraded things since then, thank goodness, and we can handle a lot more now. The problem is that we have entrenched government-enforced monopolies (because a monopoly model is the only real alternative to government-owned infrastructure) who have been taking money and not doing the upgrades our tax dollars have been paying for. There's no real competition for companies to actually innovate and come up with ways of increasing bandwidth, and the government mandates (which is our only way to introduce improvements) are met with "hey, you only send us money, you don't get to tell us what to do!"
Deregulation should mean something really, really simple. "Hey, you know that government-enforced right of way we gave you and all the tax dollars to help build out your infrastructure? Well, we want that all back. You can rent space on the right-of-way and so can everyone else, or you can turn the wires over to us and rent space back on them and so can everyone else."
That's one more than most of us have.
I'm thinking we dress him up in a red-and-white striped shirt and put him in a few populated areas. "Where's Leo"?
We have a "mark the circle and scan" system here, and while it might be possible to add new ones, it would be impossible for them to invalidate or remove ones they don't like.
As I enter the polling place, there's a greeter with a count-clicker (one of those little devices that you push a button and a number increments). They count the number of people entering the building.
A poll person checks my ID and checks me off a list (while being watched by a second person to make sure the name was not previously checked, and that the name on the ID matches the name just checked off), then the second person gives me my ballot pack and also keeps a count with their own count-clicker.
I take my paper ballots to a voting station and vote, then I have to put each of them face down in a separate scanning machine, where Person 1 verifies that I've put the white ballot in the white ballot scanner, Person 2 verifies that I've put the pink ballot in the pink ballot scanner, and Person 3 verifies that I've put the blue ballot in the blue ballot scanner. All three ballot scanners have a digital counter that increments as the ballots are inserted, and all three people have a count-clicker, but cannot see the digital readout of the ballot scanners.
The human verifiers are physically separated from the scanners and are not at any time allowed to touch my ballot or see my vote. There is a separate person walking around between the three scanner machines verifying that each ballot is scanned properly. They are allowed to touch ballots, but they are not keeping a count and they are watched by the three scanner verifiers and another two people standing on either side of the scanner area looking for ballot swaps. They also give you a replacement ballot if you mess yours up, but the invalidated ballot is put in a separate locked box.
Once your ballot is scanned, it's in a locked ballot box integrated into the scanner. As you leave through the one door you are allowed to use to exit, there's someone handing out "I voted" stickers and counting you with another count-clicker.
I presume the counters are there so, at the end of the day, each election worker has to hand theirs in and the numbers are all added up. It's a pretty simple formula - to within a reasonable margin of human error, the following numbers must match:
- The total number of people entering the building.
- The total number of people who have been "checked off" the list.
- The total number of people receiving a "ballot pack"
- The total number of people putting a ballot into the white ballot scanner as counted by the machine.
- The total number of people putting a ballot into the white ballot scanner as counted by the human verifier.
- The total number of physical white ballots in the white ballot scanner.
(repeat the same three numbers above with Blue and Pink ballots)
- The total number of people leaving the building.
- The total number of ballots used (minus the ones that are in the bad ballot lockbox).
So, yeah, you're right. There's a lot of people involved, but I was in and out of there in under 5 minutes, but even if each and every person in that room was corrupt, at least 7 of them would have to be in collusion to introduce more than a small handful of votes. You could have someone come through the building multiple times, I suppose, but they'd have to have multiple valid-looking IDs of people they know have registered but have not voted, or they'd have to pre-arrange it with both people doing the
We have instant official results (at the end of the day election officials download the results from the scanner), and a paper backup in case a recount becomes necessary.
It's more expensive than an electronic ballot system, except of course that the ballot scanners have been paid for for years, and most of the poll workers are volunteers.
Our major expense is printing out the paper ballots each year, and election results are available at 8:05PM (the polls close at 8:00PM).
Well, I'm not referring to doing 25 down the Interstate of course. But if the road looks a little slippery, I'm going to keep to a few miles an hour below the speed limit.
I agree with you on the "stick behind a semi" option on the highway. It also makes it hard for semis to pass you, which if the blindness won't get you the wind from their passing just might.
It'll be ever so slightly more meaningful when you approach your congresscritter, representative, or other elected official and say "Guess what? I voted, and I intend to keep doing so. Last election, I did (or did not) vote for you. If you want to keep (or earn) my vote next time, here's what I want."
You'll get a whole lot more attention than "I don't vote because I don't like you." If they try and satisfy you, there's little chance of reward, and if they ignore you there's little chance of punishment.
A butterfly flapping his wings rarely starts a storm, but one who sits on the log looking at the sky has no chance at all. :)
Then write someone in. At least you've made your voice heard. Not terribly effective, but if everyone did it...
Because by not voting, the greater of two evils might get in.
But why vote for one of two evils? If you're planning on sitting it out, then widen out your scope and vote for the least of all of the evils on the ballot, and you might even find someone you actually like.
Your chosen candidate won't win, of course, but he or she might at least show up on the radar and their party might get to keep their slot on the ballot next election. Or write in a candidate from a fringe party that you agree with a little more than the Republicrats and the Demublicans, and see if you can help win them a slot on the ballot in the next election.
Hence why a lot of people end up sitting out the election. They can't choose between A or B and end up frustrated, and their sitting out supports C by default.
So, if you're going to sit out the election because you can't find a candidate you like who could possibly win, go and vote for the candidate you like regardless of whether they could win. It's an ineffective something, but it's better than nothing.