Love it. I have one phone number, and it rings all of my phones based on a schedule I set up. When I'm at work, I get no cell signal at my desk, so I answer my work phone. When I'm on the road, my cell is the only one I'm near, so I answer that. When I'm at home, I answer my Gizmo line so I don't use cell minutes.
The beauty is, if you want to reach me, you don't have to know where I am. You don't have to keep track of three or more numbers to reach me. You just dial my Google Voice number and, if I'm reachable, I answer. And if I'm not, you leave me a voicemail. I get an SMS on my phone with a transcription of that voicemail, and a copy of the transcription is sent to my Gmail account. Plus I can always call Google from any of my phones and listen to your voicemail directly, or listen to it over the Web.
And if you are a telemarketer who calls me a lot, you get my "go away" message and I never have to be aware of your existence again.:)
I'm confused as to what exactly AT&T would lose on the deal.
OK, SMS charges maybe. But I sincerely doubt that. And whatever SMS messages are lost to the Google Voice capability, plenty of other people are going to use SMS messages to get new voicemail notifications and/or simply forward the SMS to their phone, because it's FAR more convenient.
I make MORE of my calls on my AT&T cell phone since I got the Google Voice application on my Blackberry. It's the only phone I can actually dial out of directly and have the caller ID show up as my Google Voice number. My Gizmo line at home and my work line both require that I log into the web application for Google Voice (which is fine and all, but it's not nearly as convenient as just typing a number into the Google Voice app and it automatically calling a GV access number). I'm still using AT&T airtime, and arguably I use it MORE often. My life is more AT&T-centric with Google Voice than it would be without it.
Of course, I could just up and leave AT&T and my Google Voice number would just follow me where I went, but with LNP that's true of my cell phone number anyway.
I honestly believe Apple are the ones who have an issue with this, if it's between Apple and AT&T. AT&T has little to lose, from what I can see.
Last I checked, the Hammerhead doesn't have any sand. Poor Stiggie would get in trouble fast. Not to mention that his insistence on music would have cost a great deal of energy that would have rendered Spirit useless as a science platform. That and the 500BHP engine he'd have insisted on.
Still, we certainly would have covered more of the planet. I doubt we would have gathered much in the way of science, though. Would the Stig ever have stopped long enough for any science to have been carried out?
Yeah, a real waste of a billion dollars. We could have spent that on, what, a month in Iraq? Bailing out three more failed institutions to ensure their CEOs got huge bonuses?
What a shame, wasting our money expanding the horizons of Humanity.
Starting immediately, eyesores in thousands of front yards across the country will get a designation change from "rusty old car" to "emergency shelter and temporary storage facility".
It's possible, but probably unlikely. What's more likely is that, once NASA has redesignated it a stationary platform, they'll start doing long-term observation using it. The sorts of things you can't do when your platform is likely to move around a lot (seismic observations, soil temperature tracking over an entire season, that sort of thing). Someone else on the thread mentioned a few things NASA has been putting off because the platforms were mobile.
Once they start those experiments, I doubt the scientists involved would want to move it even if they could. I suspect a small minority of scientists on the project had big smiles on their faces when the word came down that it is now stuck, since they can start the observations they care about in earnest now.
Plus, they've looked at all the interesting areas in the vicinity. Honestly, there isn't a lot more to be gained from mobility as far as I've read. Better to conserve that energy to run more scientific equipment more often, and maybe live through an extra winter or two.
Now that it's not moving around, I can see Spirit lasting another decade as a stationary platform, albeit probably with the occasional instrument going dark.
Given the relative distances, the additional complexity, the long transit times, and all the other factors, this project WAS done on a shoestring budget. Recall that the Rover project was part of NASA's newish directive to get the most useful information for the least possible money.
So what, pray tell, would have been the advantage of sending a human (other than shakier photos of the same rocks)? It would have cost an order of magnitude more money to haul a few people and all the supplies needed to keep them alive for a year-long mission, and most of that mission would have been spent with the astronauts in the ship on the way there and back. Time onsite would have been, at best, a month or so. Probably less.
By making this a one-way trip and sending collection instruments that don't need to consume, breathe, and excrete on the way there, we actually got two useful instrument packages there and got 6 years of good science (and counting). We gathered good information about a couple of interesting spots on the surface of Mars, what it consists of, and what resources may be available to support an eventual manned mission.
I'd rather have that then spend ten or twenty times the money, have less science, and have a shaky photograph of a footprint.
I think we need to send people there. But when we do, it should be a one-way trip. We should continue to send robots until we figure out a good spot for an initial landing site, then send a few more robots to build a permanent, self-sustaining base there. THEN we send people.
The Moon would be a good training ground, and having a permanent base there would teach us a lot about doing this with Mars. And beyond.
Maybe, but then you've lost half your capacity to examine interesting bits of Mars. If Spirit and Opportunity had been dropped as a pair instead of on different sections of the Martian surface, we would only have studied one location on Mars instead of the two we got. There's also a good chance Opportunity would simply have mired or been damaged trying to dig Spirit out and we'd have two stationary science platforms right next to each other.
A project like this always maximizes the amount of science per dollar. If you have enough money and payload to build two assets, you want to examine two places.
They have taken this policy change and turned it into an advertisement.
"If you act THIS YEAR, your certification will be good FOR LIFE! Act NOW!"
They can imply that certifications earned this year will have more value than certifications earned after 1 Jan 2011, because the ones earned this year never expire. Neither cert will be worth bupkus a year after it's granted, but one that never expires probably feels more valuable than one that does, even if the actual knowledge really does expire.
Actually, given the quality of music of late, I wonder if I could just download tracks of static. At least that way, I'm not breaking the law, and I know the tracks will remain static.
Until someone copyrights white and pink noise, then I'm screwed.
I live in New England (Maine, specifically), and I personally see little use for a remote starter. But I purchased a car that was meant to be used in this climate (glow plugs for the Diesel engine, heated seats, heated side mirrors, and a small electric coil in the windshield defroster to clear the windows quickly). But a lot of cars simply aren't equipped that way. Volvo, Saab, VW, and maybe a handful of other brands really know what cold weather means, and give you the tools to compensate for it. With a lot of other cars, warmup is as much a safety issue as it is a comfort issue.
Heaven help you if you get salt or something else on the windshield and try to wash it off, only to discover that your windshield is cold enough to frost up your wiper fluid when spread thinly enough. Instant, near-total blindness.
It's unfortunate that more auto manufacturers don't offer cold weather packages, but even when they do they can get expensive (more so than a remote starter). It's probably cheaper to just run the thing for 10 minutes the 20-30 times a year you might need defrost. It's not like it consumes gallons and gallons of fuel.
Having said all that, remote starters can and do get "abused". If you're remote starting your car when it's well above the freezing temperature of your washer fluid, you really need to rethink how much that is costing you (in my opinion). But, hey, it's great living in a free country where people can legally do things I consider stupid.:)
Not if they used the remote start circuitry in the car, which it looks like this author did. The remote start circuit already has all the safety features built into the regular ignition key starter, plus probably a few extras.
You can already. It works similar to that modern thingamabobboe, the Telegraph. What you do is each carry two of these cell phones, and you mutually agree to designate one as "dot" and the other as "dash". Then, when you want to send a message, you do so in morse code.
So, to send an SOS, you dial the other person's "dot" phone three times, then their "dash" phone three times, then their "dot" phone three times. Since the recipient never actually answers the phone, it'll pay for itself as compared to SMS charges the first few times you use it.
Admittedly it's not terribly efficient, but people go to great lengths to avoid actually talking to each other on the phone, or even yelling loud enough to be heard upstairs.
The last new car my wife and I purchased was a Pontiac Vibe. My wife wanted a manual because she and I both prefer them, but we were surprised to discover that the EPA rated mileage on the manual was 1MPG lower than the automatic. However, the purchase price on the manual was about $1600 less, so we figure we saved enough to pay for a couple of percentage point drop in efficiency, not to mention maintenance costs.:)
Plus, we live in an area that gets lots of snow and ice, and we didn't want to drop a lot of dough on expensive traction control gimcrackery. A manual transmission is very handy under less-than-ideal driving conditions. It does, however, demand a little extra attention.
I also find that having a manual makes me more aware of things. I feel more engaged in the driving experience, and am less easily distracted by other things. But that's a psychological improvement in driving, not a technical one, and probably doesn't apply to everyone.
I will say that if I drove a stop-and-go commute every day, I'd switch out for something with an automatic. Manuals aren't for everyone, and they are certainly less than ideal under a lot of circumstances.
I generally fire up the car, turn defrost on medium, and let it idle while I scrape the windows off. Depending on how much I have to scrape and wipe off, the car will usually be safe to drive about the time I finish (if I have to wipe 10 inches of snow off it, it can take a couple of minutes - grin).
I've never felt the need for an engine block heater for my Diesel car. Of course, it has glow plugs that run off the internal battery, so it starts just fine even in the cold (assuming you remember to wait for the glow plugs). It also has a small electric heater for the defroster, heat for both side-view mirrors, and heated seats. Most of this is to make up for the simple fact that a Diesel is too efficient to warm up quickly when it's very cold out. Generally it takes about 10 minutes of driving for the temp gauge to nudge off minimum when it's below about 0F.
The coldest I've ever started my car is about -20F (~-29C), and it started up pretty easily, though I did have to wait about a minute for the glow plugs to do their warming thing. I expect I'd have trouble at much below that, but if the temps get much below -20F, I'd expect to have trouble with some of the other systems in the car, not just the fuel delivery and burn.
"It's not the size of the network, it's how you... handle it."
Seriously, I use LinkedIn and it's helped me make a few contacts I otherwise wouldn't, and get back in touch with some old coworkers I had lost touch with. Every now and again, I help someone out with a problem, or get help with a problem. It reinforces that contact so should I lose my job my name is still fresher in the minds of some of my contacts here and there.
But I work on a less-popular language, so my network is a valuable tool to me. If you're a programmer in a more popular language, there will be both more opportunities and more competition, so maybe a business network isn't as important.
Sorry, further study has been suspended. Turns out the slime mold mutated during the process, is now a unique new subspecies, and is protected under the Endangered Species act. The entire research facility has been declared an ecologically sensitive area, and the biologists are under strict orders not to interfere with its natural habitat.
Yes, and that's how they are going to fund the new, cheaper train network. Selling Virgin Mary cheese sandwiches, Nun buns, and Jesus-burgers (Jeezburgers).
Slashdot Mirror
You make an excellent point, sir. :)
Love it. I have one phone number, and it rings all of my phones based on a schedule I set up. When I'm at work, I get no cell signal at my desk, so I answer my work phone. When I'm on the road, my cell is the only one I'm near, so I answer that. When I'm at home, I answer my Gizmo line so I don't use cell minutes.
The beauty is, if you want to reach me, you don't have to know where I am. You don't have to keep track of three or more numbers to reach me. You just dial my Google Voice number and, if I'm reachable, I answer. And if I'm not, you leave me a voicemail. I get an SMS on my phone with a transcription of that voicemail, and a copy of the transcription is sent to my Gmail account. Plus I can always call Google from any of my phones and listen to your voicemail directly, or listen to it over the Web.
And if you are a telemarketer who calls me a lot, you get my "go away" message and I never have to be aware of your existence again. :)
I'm confused as to what exactly AT&T would lose on the deal.
OK, SMS charges maybe. But I sincerely doubt that. And whatever SMS messages are lost to the Google Voice capability, plenty of other people are going to use SMS messages to get new voicemail notifications and/or simply forward the SMS to their phone, because it's FAR more convenient.
I make MORE of my calls on my AT&T cell phone since I got the Google Voice application on my Blackberry. It's the only phone I can actually dial out of directly and have the caller ID show up as my Google Voice number. My Gizmo line at home and my work line both require that I log into the web application for Google Voice (which is fine and all, but it's not nearly as convenient as just typing a number into the Google Voice app and it automatically calling a GV access number). I'm still using AT&T airtime, and arguably I use it MORE often. My life is more AT&T-centric with Google Voice than it would be without it.
Of course, I could just up and leave AT&T and my Google Voice number would just follow me where I went, but with LNP that's true of my cell phone number anyway.
I honestly believe Apple are the ones who have an issue with this, if it's between Apple and AT&T. AT&T has little to lose, from what I can see.
Last I checked, the Hammerhead doesn't have any sand. Poor Stiggie would get in trouble fast. Not to mention that his insistence on music would have cost a great deal of energy that would have rendered Spirit useless as a science platform. That and the 500BHP engine he'd have insisted on.
Still, we certainly would have covered more of the planet. I doubt we would have gathered much in the way of science, though. Would the Stig ever have stopped long enough for any science to have been carried out?
Yeah, a real waste of a billion dollars. We could have spent that on, what, a month in Iraq? Bailing out three more failed institutions to ensure their CEOs got huge bonuses?
What a shame, wasting our money expanding the horizons of Humanity.
Starting immediately, eyesores in thousands of front yards across the country will get a designation change from "rusty old car" to "emergency shelter and temporary storage facility".
It's possible, but probably unlikely. What's more likely is that, once NASA has redesignated it a stationary platform, they'll start doing long-term observation using it. The sorts of things you can't do when your platform is likely to move around a lot (seismic observations, soil temperature tracking over an entire season, that sort of thing). Someone else on the thread mentioned a few things NASA has been putting off because the platforms were mobile.
Once they start those experiments, I doubt the scientists involved would want to move it even if they could. I suspect a small minority of scientists on the project had big smiles on their faces when the word came down that it is now stuck, since they can start the observations they care about in earnest now.
Plus, they've looked at all the interesting areas in the vicinity. Honestly, there isn't a lot more to be gained from mobility as far as I've read. Better to conserve that energy to run more scientific equipment more often, and maybe live through an extra winter or two.
Now that it's not moving around, I can see Spirit lasting another decade as a stationary platform, albeit probably with the occasional instrument going dark.
Given the relative distances, the additional complexity, the long transit times, and all the other factors, this project WAS done on a shoestring budget. Recall that the Rover project was part of NASA's newish directive to get the most useful information for the least possible money.
So what, pray tell, would have been the advantage of sending a human (other than shakier photos of the same rocks)? It would have cost an order of magnitude more money to haul a few people and all the supplies needed to keep them alive for a year-long mission, and most of that mission would have been spent with the astronauts in the ship on the way there and back. Time onsite would have been, at best, a month or so. Probably less.
By making this a one-way trip and sending collection instruments that don't need to consume, breathe, and excrete on the way there, we actually got two useful instrument packages there and got 6 years of good science (and counting). We gathered good information about a couple of interesting spots on the surface of Mars, what it consists of, and what resources may be available to support an eventual manned mission.
I'd rather have that then spend ten or twenty times the money, have less science, and have a shaky photograph of a footprint.
I think we need to send people there. But when we do, it should be a one-way trip. We should continue to send robots until we figure out a good spot for an initial landing site, then send a few more robots to build a permanent, self-sustaining base there. THEN we send people.
The Moon would be a good training ground, and having a permanent base there would teach us a lot about doing this with Mars. And beyond.
Maybe, but then you've lost half your capacity to examine interesting bits of Mars. If Spirit and Opportunity had been dropped as a pair instead of on different sections of the Martian surface, we would only have studied one location on Mars instead of the two we got. There's also a good chance Opportunity would simply have mired or been damaged trying to dig Spirit out and we'd have two stationary science platforms right next to each other.
A project like this always maximizes the amount of science per dollar. If you have enough money and payload to build two assets, you want to examine two places.
They have taken this policy change and turned it into an advertisement.
"If you act THIS YEAR, your certification will be good FOR LIFE! Act NOW!"
They can imply that certifications earned this year will have more value than certifications earned after 1 Jan 2011, because the ones earned this year never expire. Neither cert will be worth bupkus a year after it's granted, but one that never expires probably feels more valuable than one that does, even if the actual knowledge really does expire.
I assume that would be to turn on the defroster and other functions, but yeah, remote start has far less utility in an electric. :)
Actually, given the quality of music of late, I wonder if I could just download tracks of static. At least that way, I'm not breaking the law, and I know the tracks will remain static.
Until someone copyrights white and pink noise, then I'm screwed.
The Volt comes with an iPhone app that allows you to start it remotely over the mobile phone network.
I live in New England (Maine, specifically), and I personally see little use for a remote starter. But I purchased a car that was meant to be used in this climate (glow plugs for the Diesel engine, heated seats, heated side mirrors, and a small electric coil in the windshield defroster to clear the windows quickly). But a lot of cars simply aren't equipped that way. Volvo, Saab, VW, and maybe a handful of other brands really know what cold weather means, and give you the tools to compensate for it. With a lot of other cars, warmup is as much a safety issue as it is a comfort issue.
Heaven help you if you get salt or something else on the windshield and try to wash it off, only to discover that your windshield is cold enough to frost up your wiper fluid when spread thinly enough. Instant, near-total blindness.
It's unfortunate that more auto manufacturers don't offer cold weather packages, but even when they do they can get expensive (more so than a remote starter). It's probably cheaper to just run the thing for 10 minutes the 20-30 times a year you might need defrost. It's not like it consumes gallons and gallons of fuel.
Having said all that, remote starters can and do get "abused". If you're remote starting your car when it's well above the freezing temperature of your washer fluid, you really need to rethink how much that is costing you (in my opinion). But, hey, it's great living in a free country where people can legally do things I consider stupid. :)
Not if they used the remote start circuitry in the car, which it looks like this author did. The remote start circuit already has all the safety features built into the regular ignition key starter, plus probably a few extras.
You can already. It works similar to that modern thingamabobboe, the Telegraph. What you do is each carry two of these cell phones, and you mutually agree to designate one as "dot" and the other as "dash". Then, when you want to send a message, you do so in morse code.
So, to send an SOS, you dial the other person's "dot" phone three times, then their "dash" phone three times, then their "dot" phone three times. Since the recipient never actually answers the phone, it'll pay for itself as compared to SMS charges the first few times you use it.
Admittedly it's not terribly efficient, but people go to great lengths to avoid actually talking to each other on the phone, or even yelling loud enough to be heard upstairs.
The last new car my wife and I purchased was a Pontiac Vibe. My wife wanted a manual because she and I both prefer them, but we were surprised to discover that the EPA rated mileage on the manual was 1MPG lower than the automatic. However, the purchase price on the manual was about $1600 less, so we figure we saved enough to pay for a couple of percentage point drop in efficiency, not to mention maintenance costs. :)
Plus, we live in an area that gets lots of snow and ice, and we didn't want to drop a lot of dough on expensive traction control gimcrackery. A manual transmission is very handy under less-than-ideal driving conditions. It does, however, demand a little extra attention.
I also find that having a manual makes me more aware of things. I feel more engaged in the driving experience, and am less easily distracted by other things. But that's a psychological improvement in driving, not a technical one, and probably doesn't apply to everyone.
I will say that if I drove a stop-and-go commute every day, I'd switch out for something with an automatic. Manuals aren't for everyone, and they are certainly less than ideal under a lot of circumstances.
I generally fire up the car, turn defrost on medium, and let it idle while I scrape the windows off. Depending on how much I have to scrape and wipe off, the car will usually be safe to drive about the time I finish (if I have to wipe 10 inches of snow off it, it can take a couple of minutes - grin).
I've never felt the need for an engine block heater for my Diesel car. Of course, it has glow plugs that run off the internal battery, so it starts just fine even in the cold (assuming you remember to wait for the glow plugs). It also has a small electric heater for the defroster, heat for both side-view mirrors, and heated seats. Most of this is to make up for the simple fact that a Diesel is too efficient to warm up quickly when it's very cold out. Generally it takes about 10 minutes of driving for the temp gauge to nudge off minimum when it's below about 0F.
The coldest I've ever started my car is about -20F (~-29C), and it started up pretty easily, though I did have to wait about a minute for the glow plugs to do their warming thing. I expect I'd have trouble at much below that, but if the temps get much below -20F, I'd expect to have trouble with some of the other systems in the car, not just the fuel delivery and burn.
In the venerable words of one F. Leghorn, "It's a joke, son." :)
"It's not the size of the network, it's how you... handle it."
Seriously, I use LinkedIn and it's helped me make a few contacts I otherwise wouldn't, and get back in touch with some old coworkers I had lost touch with. Every now and again, I help someone out with a problem, or get help with a problem. It reinforces that contact so should I lose my job my name is still fresher in the minds of some of my contacts here and there.
But I work on a less-popular language, so my network is a valuable tool to me. If you're a programmer in a more popular language, there will be both more opportunities and more competition, so maybe a business network isn't as important.
Using slime mold to study two other kinds of slime seems either redundant or self-evident. I can't decide which.
Use the phone?
Sorry, further study has been suspended. Turns out the slime mold mutated during the process, is now a unique new subspecies, and is protected under the Endangered Species act. The entire research facility has been declared an ecologically sensitive area, and the biologists are under strict orders not to interfere with its natural habitat.
Yes, and that's how they are going to fund the new, cheaper train network. Selling Virgin Mary cheese sandwiches, Nun buns, and Jesus-burgers (Jeezburgers).