There are a bunch of sites offering to sell payphones and related hardware to would-be COCOT operators. But nowhere can I find out how much it costs to actually get a dial tone. The site you link to has a fancy table citing "revenue", but nothing about expenses.
Since Controlio has neglected to mention how much his present setup costs before he accounts for revenue (Ask Slashdots are painfully sparse on details these days!), we don't know whether he's paying too much for his pay phones, or just not getting any revenue. I suspect he's hoping that magic technology can provide him with phone service for a nominal cost. Which is silly. A business phone line costs $60/mo or so. I doubt if you can get any kind of fixed-point connectivity, be it POTS or IP or whatever, for any less. And in most cases, probably a lot more.
You can definitely feel the ionic wind underneath the thing.
Jeez, you mean we've been listening to these stupid UFO stories for 50 years now, and it's all because all these crackpots didn't notice a slight breeze????
I've often wondered where the UFO mythology came from. Academics talk about cold war paranoia and the semiotics of the space age. Being of a more prosaic turn of mind, I've always assumed that stories about the AvroCar grew in the telling. But now it just turns out that a bunch of nitwits can't distinguish ozone from antigravity. Yep, the truth's out there all right, but I'm too tired to look for it!
The "realism" of The Sims is much overrated. Their stock of behaviors is limited, and even simple interactions can get stuck in various kinds of deadlock. If you micromanage their lives you can get them mates and fancy jobs, but that gets old quickly. I suspect most players just use a well-known cheat to award themselves lots of money and then spend all their time building fancy dream mansions. Which is sort of fun, but...
Magic is not new to The Sims. The very first expansionsion pack (now part of the basic product) includes a Genie that grants wishs that have nasty side effects, and a potions set that with various silly, but basically pointless, effects.
Well, if you believe a con artist squatting on an abandoned radar platform is a "country", then I guess the absence of a Sealand Army or Navy to defend your server from terrorists or process servers won't bother you.
Oh, and are you planning to go live there yourself? Otherwise your own body is subject to laws where it physically exists. You can park your data on Pluto, it doesn't make your physical self immune from U.S. laws.
OK, that threw me. I thought photons had no mass, and every reference I can find says they don't. And jeez, mass would be a drag (no pun intended) if you spent all your time travelling about at the speed of light... Oh yeah, and mass is usually defined as resistance to acceleration. Photons hardly ever accelerate. Either that or Einstein was all wrong about that aether drift thing.
So I finally figured out that some physicists want a new def of "mass" that would give photons a rest mast even though they never rest. I guess I can live with that. But it sounds like one of the quantum definitions ("spin" comes to mind) that starts out in the macroscopic world and retains its old label in the quantum world, even though it's refined until it's a completely different concept. But I could be wrong!
Photons, mesons, all those stupid "carrier" particles. They don't make any sense! They come out of nowhere whenever you need to transfer energy, then they disappear again. That's silly. Can't we forget all this stuff and just go back to regarding energy as an abstraction?
... of which 7 or so are offtopic. And the rest tell you stuff you could have found out with "apropos". I cannot believe some of the stuff Cliff picks up.
...Northern Mexico had a widespread power outage that was attributed to a failed substation here locally. Somehow, with the summer load and some brakes that failed, it took down most of Northern Mexico and, from what I understand, parts of some border states in the U.S.
That's nothing. In 1965, the failure of a single power line left 30 million people in the U.S. and Canada in the dark.
Why is "left-endian" less confusing than "big-endian"? The ambiguous part is "endian". I keep thinking that "big-endian" should mean, "the big part is at the end (the high address)". In fact it means "the big end of the value (the MSB) comes first".
BTW, "Endian" actually has nothing to do with computers. In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift satirized ideological/religious war by mentioning a conflict between two groups who differed on the correct way to crack an egg: the big end, or the little end? The Jargon File credits Danny Cohen with introducing this metaphor to the net, in an attempt to calm down an ongoing flame war over address schemes. In any case, almost nobody who uses these terms seems to have heard of Swift or Cohen!
Good rule, and applicable to other aspects of language as well. When you get flamed by a grammar fascist, they're usually citing a language convention that only makes sense in very formal contexts. And I find nothing wrong with crude language per se, but simple consideration for other people's feeling should make you consider the context before using it.
The line, "He's an asshole!" in Back to the Future III always makes me squirm. I'm not offended by the anatomical reference -- I use it myself -- but it seems out of place in a movie you might go to see with your grandparents.
One problem you see in a lot of technical documentation is imprecise use of jargon. But that doesn't mean using some "correct" definition of a word. It just means using the word in a way your expected audience is likely to understand.
Which is half the problem. You can't avoid jargon completely, but techies seem to use it compulsively. Like "automagically".
My own particular disfavorites are "big-endian" and "little-endian", mainly because I can never remember which is which. Now, you can't really talk about byte and bit orders without using jargon, but at least you can use descriptive jargon. The really sad thing is that most people who use these terms seem to be unaware that they started out as a joke!
It is bad for IE to ignore mime types. But that's not the problem here. The problem seems to be that IE is trying to validate the markup against its DTD. Which would be a silly thing to do even if it didn't make the page undisplayable.
The GTP site naturally links to the Open Books Project site. Here things get sort of depressing. The HTML includes a reference to the XHTML DTD at w3.org. If you try to open this page with Internet Explorer, it tries to download and parse the DTD, with unfortunate results:
Parameter entity must be defined before it is used. Error processing resource 'http://www.w3.org/TR/xhtml11/DTD/xhtml11.dtd'. Line 85, Position 2
IE behaves correctly if you give it an out-of-band indication that this is HTML (such as copying the text to a file with an.html extension). Netscape seems to ignore the DTD reference, even if you feed it the code in a file with an XML extension.
This is frustrating. I'm beginning to be a fan of XHTML and CSS. The specification are much better thought out than they use to be. There's even support for using XHTML for hard copy! But what's the point of creating content in these formats if it's inaccessible to 90% of web users?
Well, if you can reduce an ordinary story into "epistemological allegory" then all bets are off. I think any story can be expounded in terms of some obscure literary-philosophical theory, difficult to understand, impossible to refute. Such theories are of extreme disinterest to most people -- hence your post being labeled as Flamebait.
If you want solemn deconstruction, Slashdot is the wrong place to look for it.
It should have occurred to me that somebody would drag out the old parallel timeline story. Which is not exactly new, and I even enjoy some of them. (I particularly like S.M. Stirling's work, even though -- or maybe because -- I totally disagree with half his social and political assumptions.) But I also find a lot of it to be incredibly stupid. Being allowed to make up any assumptions you want -- 'cause it's in a parallel universe where the Roman Empire never fell or humans have tails or Pi = 3.0 -- can allow some really bad writers to get away with a lot.
All of which is neither here nor there. I'm not talking about SF with an innovative premise. I'm talking about stuff which just ignores reality, and gets away with it because it's aimed at an ignorant audience. Maybe instead of Caesar meets Boone, a better example would be that SNL Skit "What if Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?"
Your observation is all the more insightful because Brits are really paranoid about rabies. Until a couple years ago, a dog or cat couldn't travel to the U.K. without spending six months in quarantine. The rules have been loosened for people travelling from the rest of the EU -- provided they start the process six months in advance.
Terry Nation once did an after-the-virus show for the BBC called Survivors. Aside from destroying civilization, the virus also allows rabid dogs to escape from quarantine. In one episode, people are attacked by these dogs, and themselves go mad, wanting only to spread the infection. Oddly enough, this never seems to happen in North America, even though rabies is endemic here.
Hey, a movie about two guys who party themselves into amnesia is targeted at a key 18-25 substance-abusing demographic! Who's gonna believe that a famous chef (Julius Caesar invented Caesar Salad, right?) is an action hero?
Slashdot Mirror
...don't worry about pager rotations because our bosses don't like overtime, you insensitive clod!
Since Controlio has neglected to mention how much his present setup costs before he accounts for revenue (Ask Slashdots are painfully sparse on details these days!), we don't know whether he's paying too much for his pay phones, or just not getting any revenue. I suspect he's hoping that magic technology can provide him with phone service for a nominal cost. Which is silly. A business phone line costs $60/mo or so. I doubt if you can get any kind of fixed-point connectivity, be it POTS or IP or whatever, for any less. And in most cases, probably a lot more.
So, I can legally rob liquor stores by hiring on with a company that's incorporated in another country that sanctions such activity? Cool!
...to bring back virtual flogging!
I've often wondered where the UFO mythology came from. Academics talk about cold war paranoia and the semiotics of the space age. Being of a more prosaic turn of mind, I've always assumed that stories about the AvroCar grew in the telling. But now it just turns out that a bunch of nitwits can't distinguish ozone from antigravity. Yep, the truth's out there all right, but I'm too tired to look for it!
Magic is not new to The Sims. The very first expansionsion pack (now part of the basic product) includes a Genie that grants wishs that have nasty side effects, and a potions set that with various silly, but basically pointless, effects.
And there's no shortage of jobs to choose from!
Oh, and are you planning to go live there yourself? Otherwise your own body is subject to laws where it physically exists. You can park your data on Pluto, it doesn't make your physical self immune from U.S. laws.
However! A consular passport will give you diplomatic immunity! For a very small fee, I can arrange for your accredidation by the The Kingdom of Araucania and Patagonia. Or you can apply for annexation by The Kingdom of Talossa. Too late to emigrate to The Republic of Minerva, though.
So I finally figured out that some physicists want a new def of "mass" that would give photons a rest mast even though they never rest. I guess I can live with that. But it sounds like one of the quantum definitions ("spin" comes to mind) that starts out in the macroscopic world and retains its old label in the quantum world, even though it's refined until it's a completely different concept. But I could be wrong!
Photons, mesons, all those stupid "carrier" particles. They don't make any sense! They come out of nowhere whenever you need to transfer energy, then they disappear again. That's silly. Can't we forget all this stuff and just go back to regarding energy as an abstraction?
You never have to develop for any platform that you don't like! You lucky dog! But some of us live in the real world.
... of which 7 or so are offtopic. And the rest tell you stuff you could have found out with "apropos". I cannot believe some of the stuff Cliff picks up.
BTW, "Endian" actually has nothing to do with computers. In Gulliver's Travels (1726), Jonathan Swift satirized ideological/religious war by mentioning a conflict between two groups who differed on the correct way to crack an egg: the big end, or the little end? The Jargon File credits Danny Cohen with introducing this metaphor to the net, in an attempt to calm down an ongoing flame war over address schemes. In any case, almost nobody who uses these terms seems to have heard of Swift or Cohen!
The line, "He's an asshole!" in Back to the Future III always makes me squirm. I'm not offended by the anatomical reference -- I use it myself -- but it seems out of place in a movie you might go to see with your grandparents.
One problem you see in a lot of technical documentation is imprecise use of jargon. But that doesn't mean using some "correct" definition of a word. It just means using the word in a way your expected audience is likely to understand.
My own particular disfavorites are "big-endian" and "little-endian", mainly because I can never remember which is which. Now, you can't really talk about byte and bit orders without using jargon, but at least you can use descriptive jargon. The really sad thing is that most people who use these terms seem to be unaware that they started out as a joke!
It is bad for IE to ignore mime types. But that's not the problem here. The problem seems to be that IE is trying to validate the markup against its DTD. Which would be a silly thing to do even if it didn't make the page undisplayable.
If you want solemn deconstruction, Slashdot is the wrong place to look for it.
Jackie Chan isn't an action hero, he's a comedian!
All of which is neither here nor there. I'm not talking about SF with an innovative premise. I'm talking about stuff which just ignores reality, and gets away with it because it's aimed at an ignorant audience. Maybe instead of Caesar meets Boone, a better example would be that SNL Skit "What if Eleanor Roosevelt Could Fly?"
Steven Seagall would never play a chef. CPO Ryback was a cook. What kind of commiefaghippie are you, you don't know the difference?
Terry Nation once did an after-the-virus show for the BBC called Survivors. Aside from destroying civilization, the virus also allows rabid dogs to escape from quarantine. In one episode, people are attacked by these dogs, and themselves go mad, wanting only to spread the infection. Oddly enough, this never seems to happen in North America, even though rabies is endemic here.
Hey, a movie about two guys who party themselves into amnesia is targeted at a key 18-25 substance-abusing demographic! Who's gonna believe that a famous chef (Julius Caesar invented Caesar Salad, right?) is an action hero?
If you can get financial backing, I'm in!