What happens when there are a decreasing amount of POTS subscribers and an increasing number of cellular subscribers? The total revenue going towards the cost of maintenance of the POTS equipment and the employees starts shrinking. Eventually it gets to a point where there is risk associated with the "subscription fees" not being able to cover the total cost.
Except that the "maintenance" issue is bollocks. I'd like to know where my 19 GBP per month standing charge really goes. What BT need to maintain, and its capital cost, is lightweight stuff compared with my electrical power provider, and their standing charge is half that.
People subscribe to it because most internet in the UK is via ADSL or variants which is delivered through the POTS system.
That is right. Cell phone coverage is not good everywhere (almost unusable where I live) and land lines are much faster for data. I am suprised the situation is not even worse in the USA, being much larger and with more remote area.
Also, doesn't POTS still work when the power goes out?
Yes they do, provided the exchange still has power...
In the UK all exchanges have battery back-up AFAIK.
Thing is almost all modern phones you can buy require power.... However if you can find a basic POTS phone... or even better - just a speaker and a pen knife, you can strip the wires and dial by touching the wires together for pulses...., I don't know if POTS still actually support decadic dialling.
No, pulse dialling no longer works. As I am not one to throw things away, I still have an old (but tone dialling) phone I can plug in if I have a power cut. It is also good for fault finding around the house system.
There's something dodgy with pricing going on though. AAISP offer an ADSL only copper pair for 10GBP/month. The only difference between this and a full telephone service is that there's no dial tone and no telephone number. It's still exactly the same wires as when you go to BT and have the full telephone service. I'm pretty sure they're actually reselling a BT offering.
Look at their small print and I expect that you will find that they are reselling BT bandwidth. I am with UNO for my ISP and they buy bandwidth from BT, yet even with (presumably) a profit they are still cheaper than BT . BT are just capitalising on their "established" position.
"How is that any better than an independent single body that could be more easily changed?"
What makes you think that a single, centralized gatekeeper could be "more easily changed"?
Anything would be more easily changed than the CEO or board membership of a company like Google or Facebook - at least for reasons related to anything ethical. Such people can only be changed by a boardroom "palace" rebellion or shareholders' vote, and neither of those would ever happen over an issue (trivial to them) like fake news. Such rebellions only ever happen if not enough money is being made, and are rare even then.
How would that system work and who would get to make the changes?
Something like a body appointed by the W3C. Complaints could be made to it, they'd look into the incident, and at the very least they could name and shame. They could also initiate court proceedings against offenders if actual damage was considered to have been done.
The only solution to fake news is for readers not to be gullible.
I agree but it means that there is really no solution. Some individual readers may not be gullible, but not the majority.
A philospher said, long time ago, that if you had a billion monkeys bashing at typewriters, one of them would eventually perchance reproduce the works of Shakespeare. However, the internet has shown that this does not happen.
OTOH, if some monkeys did produce some gems of literature, another monkey could perchance produce an index pointing where to find them among the dross. However there would be billions of times as many false indexes too. It's hopeless.
We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem,
Notice the plural (emphasis mine)
- Tim wants the companies (plural) spreading informations/news to do a little bit of work to help assess the reliability of facts in the links that people pass around. - Tim does not want a single central entity becoming the official authority on all truth (he doesn't want a central "Ministry of Truth").
Having plural gatekeepers does not solve the problem. "Plural" in practice means jerks like Zuckerberg, Gates, Cook, Nadella and Pichai being in control of gatekeeping. These are people who, as senior company officers, only their boards or shareholdes could remove : such actions in companies are very rare and even more rare over anything ethical, or their influence is not removable at all if they hold a massive share of the company (as in Gates' case). How is that any better than an independent single body that could be more easily changed?
Have they successfully built / connected any curved sections yet? I would imagine that's an important proof of concept at the technical level.
Don't worry. At the speeds they want there cannot be anything like you would recognise as a curve or the passengers' eyeballs would start popping out. Even on modern conventional railways they avoid curves less than 1-2 km radius. "Curves" on the hyperloop could probable be made just by slight shimming of the joints between tube sections.
BTW, I love these Hyperloop stories. They reveal such a load of public misconceptions (I mean generally, I'm not referring to the parent).
The idea of a vacuum being used is not new. Go google 'Brunel's Atmospheric Railway'..... The Hyperloop is a very diffferent concept.
Then why bring it up? Brunel's railway used a vacuum tube between the rails for propulsion. The Hyperloop uses a vacuum tube around the whole train and track for air resisance reduction. Nothing whatever to do with each other.
Like most things, it's bullshit until it works. Then it's genius.
Yes, the key words being "until it works", which in this case will never happen.
It will happen. There will be a hyperloop between a couple of places, as a sheik's toy in Dubai, or even LA to Las Vegas as a tourist attraction, but that will be it. It will be far too expensive for wider use, and for safety reasons run at far lower speeds than Musk talks about, even if there are occasional faster publicity runs by technicians.
In space the pressure is an outward force, in atmosphere it's an inward force.
For steel, the compressive and tensile strengths are similar, so it doesn't really matter.
Yes it does matter, it is not as simple as the failure stress.
Under compression, as the vacuum tube will be, the structure can buckle. What starts off as a small variation from the round shape (even the minutest manufacturing departure from a pure circle) causes a further small distortion which escalates by positive feedback, even though the material is at first still well within its failure limit (and even within its elastic limit). Then, as the distortion gets more and more, the material eventually reaches its failure stress (starting "plastic" distortion in the case of steel). That is called buckling. This would not happen under internal pressure, which would keep a tube circular.
A steel tube would stand a much greater pressure difference if the greater pressure were inside rather than outside.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Carl Sagan
Help me here, which one(s) are/are not the genius?
Daylight savings time has been opposed by a grassroots group of Montana farmers and ranchers, who have to sync their work schedule to the sun rather than the time on the clock
So why TF does it matter to a farmer what the clock says? They of all people can entirely ignore what the clock says, including DST, and just get up when the cock crows or use whatever other criterion they want to. DST only matters if you have an employer to report to.
I know DST is incredibly unpopular on Slashdot and I can certainly understand why changing clocks is inconvenient and seems antiquated to the/. crowd....
Don't know why this is modded Troll, seems some fair points. DST is unpopular on/. because we have a high proportion of those who do not do much out of doors.
What benefit is there to DST? Name one single benefit.
More light time in the evening after work (during the months of DST time) to do outdoor jobs at home or do anything else outdoors. Sorry, that was two reasons; I'll stop there.
I'd change the last part of that sentence from "that all governments should be wary of" to "that all people/businesses should be wary of"... I'd bet all of this "telemetry" crap is *not* just desired by MS but was requested by the government.
What exactly is the problem with shipping batteries via boat?
It just is not trendy enough for some people here.
This is supposed to be a techies' forum, yet people are worrying themselves sick over a simple delivery. It would not take anywhere near 100 days to ship (yes, ship, by ship) stuff from USA to Australia. The bigger challenge, as someone else has said, is the infrasructure and the connection details. A large inverter is going to be needed and a very hefty connection at a suitable point to the existing grid. Then you wonder if 100MWh is going to be enough anyway to solve the problem as Musk claims.
Slashdot Mirror
What happens when there are a decreasing amount of POTS subscribers and an increasing number of cellular subscribers? The total revenue going towards the cost of maintenance of the POTS equipment and the employees starts shrinking. Eventually it gets to a point where there is risk associated with the "subscription fees" not being able to cover the total cost.
Except that the "maintenance" issue is bollocks. I'd like to know where my 19 GBP per month standing charge really goes. What BT need to maintain, and its capital cost, is lightweight stuff compared with my electrical power provider, and their standing charge is half that.
People subscribe to it because most internet in the UK is via ADSL or variants which is delivered through the POTS system.
That is right. Cell phone coverage is not good everywhere (almost unusable where I live) and land lines are much faster for data. I am suprised the situation is not even worse in the USA, being much larger and with more remote area.
Also, doesn't POTS still work when the power goes out?
Yes they do, provided the exchange still has power...
In the UK all exchanges have battery back-up AFAIK.
Thing is almost all modern phones you can buy require power.... However if you can find a basic POTS phone ... or even better - just a speaker and a pen knife, you can strip the wires and dial by touching the wires together for pulses ...., I don't know if POTS still actually support decadic dialling.
No, pulse dialling no longer works. As I am not one to throw things away, I still have an old (but tone dialling) phone I can plug in if I have a power cut. It is also good for fault finding around the house system.
There's something dodgy with pricing going on though. AAISP offer an ADSL only copper pair for 10GBP/month. The only difference between this and a full telephone service is that there's no dial tone and no telephone number. It's still exactly the same wires as when you go to BT and have the full telephone service. I'm pretty sure they're actually reselling a BT offering.
Look at their small print and I expect that you will find that they are reselling BT bandwidth. I am with UNO for my ISP and they buy bandwidth from BT, yet even with (presumably) a profit they are still cheaper than BT . BT are just capitalising on their "established" position.
Then there is the cost of running the AC for a long time when you get home to cool down the house and it's contents that have been warming up all day.
You don't know the UK. It is rare for private houses to have AC, or to need it for more than a few days per year.
The classic definition of the English summer is "three days of heatwave followed by a thunderstorm".
"How is that any better than an independent single body that could be more easily changed?"
What makes you think that a single, centralized gatekeeper could be "more easily changed"?
Anything would be more easily changed than the CEO or board membership of a company like Google or Facebook - at least for reasons related to anything ethical. Such people can only be changed by a boardroom "palace" rebellion or shareholders' vote, and neither of those would ever happen over an issue (trivial to them) like fake news. Such rebellions only ever happen if not enough money is being made, and are rare even then.
How would that system work and who would get to make the changes?
Something like a body appointed by the W3C. Complaints could be made to it, they'd look into the incident, and at the very least they could name and shame. They could also initiate court proceedings against offenders if actual damage was considered to have been done.
The only solution to fake news is for readers not to be gullible.
I agree but it means that there is really no solution. Some individual readers may not be gullible, but not the majority.
A philospher said, long time ago, that if you had a billion monkeys bashing at typewriters, one of them would eventually perchance reproduce the works of Shakespeare. However, the internet has shown that this does not happen.
OTOH, if some monkeys did produce some gems of literature, another monkey could perchance produce an index pointing where to find them among the dross. However there would be billions of times as many false indexes too. It's hopeless.
We must push back against misinformation by encouraging gatekeepers such as Google and Facebook to continue their efforts to combat the problem,
Notice the plural (emphasis mine)
- Tim wants the companies (plural) spreading informations/news to do a little bit of work to help assess the reliability of facts in the links that people pass around.
- Tim does not want a single central entity becoming the official authority on all truth (he doesn't want a central "Ministry of Truth").
Having plural gatekeepers does not solve the problem. "Plural" in practice means jerks like Zuckerberg, Gates, Cook, Nadella and Pichai being in control of gatekeeping. These are people who, as senior company officers, only their boards or shareholdes could remove : such actions in companies are very rare and even more rare over anything ethical, or their influence is not removable at all if they hold a massive share of the company (as in Gates' case). How is that any better than an independent single body that could be more easily changed?
Have they successfully built / connected any curved sections yet? I would imagine that's an important proof of concept at the technical level.
Don't worry. At the speeds they want there cannot be anything like you would recognise as a curve or the passengers' eyeballs would start popping out. Even on modern conventional railways they avoid curves less than 1-2 km radius. "Curves" on the hyperloop could probable be made just by slight shimming of the joints between tube sections.
BTW, I love these Hyperloop stories. They reveal such a load of public misconceptions (I mean generally, I'm not referring to the parent).
The idea of a vacuum being used is not new. Go google 'Brunel's Atmospheric Railway'. .... The Hyperloop is a very diffferent concept.
Then why bring it up? Brunel's railway used a vacuum tube between the rails for propulsion. The Hyperloop uses a vacuum tube around the whole train and track for air resisance reduction. Nothing whatever to do with each other.
Like most things, it's bullshit until it works. Then it's genius.
Yes, the key words being "until it works", which in this case will never happen.
It will happen. There will be a hyperloop between a couple of places, as a sheik's toy in Dubai, or even LA to Las Vegas as a tourist attraction, but that will be it. It will be far too expensive for wider use, and for safety reasons run at far lower speeds than Musk talks about, even if there are occasional faster publicity runs by technicians.
In space the pressure is an outward force, in atmosphere it's an inward force.
For steel, the compressive and tensile strengths are similar, so it doesn't really matter.
Yes it does matter, it is not as simple as the failure stress.
Under compression, as the vacuum tube will be, the structure can buckle. What starts off as a small variation from the round shape (even the minutest manufacturing departure from a pure circle) causes a further small distortion which escalates by positive feedback, even though the material is at first still well within its failure limit (and even within its elastic limit). Then, as the distortion gets more and more, the material eventually reaches its failure stress (starting "plastic" distortion in the case of steel). That is called buckling. This would not happen under internal pressure, which would keep a tube circular.
A steel tube would stand a much greater pressure difference if the greater pressure were inside rather than outside.
"But the fact that some geniuses were laughed at does not imply that all who are laughed at are geniuses. They laughed at Columbus, they laughed at Fulton, they laughed at the Wright Brothers. But they also laughed at Bozo the Clown." Carl Sagan
Help me here, which one(s) are/are not the genius?
I never cease to be amazed how many people think vacuum exerts a massive amount of pressure
I think his point was that there is a tube to escape out of, irrespective of how "massive" or otherwise the pressure is.
Did you know that daylight savings time single handedly kills more people from cardiac problems than terrorism per year.
No I didn't. Is that what they put on the death certificate - "Killed by DST" ?
FTFA
Daylight savings time has been opposed by a grassroots group of Montana farmers and ranchers, who have to sync their work schedule to the sun rather than the time on the clock
So why TF does it matter to a farmer what the clock says? They of all people can entirely ignore what the clock says, including DST, and just get up when the cock crows or use whatever other criterion they want to. DST only matters if you have an employer to report to.
I know DST is incredibly unpopular on Slashdot and I can certainly understand why changing clocks is inconvenient and seems antiquated to the /. crowd....
Don't know why this is modded Troll, seems some fair points. DST is unpopular on /. because we have a high proportion of those who do not do much out of doors.
What benefit is there to DST? Name one single benefit.
More light time in the evening after work (during the months of DST time) to do outdoor jobs at home or do anything else outdoors. Sorry, that was two reasons; I'll stop there.
This is Gates? Of Microsoft fame? How about a special tax on H1Bs replacing American workers - like he lobbies for.
I'd change the last part of that sentence from "that all governments should be wary of" to "that all people/businesses should be wary of"... I'd bet all of this
"telemetry" crap is *not* just desired by MS but was requested by the government.
Not necessarily by the Munich government.
Windows 10 users should hope to be pushed a botched update that just disables the ability to take pushed updates.
They have this thing called 'insurance' so if something happens to the boat the person shipping the items will be reimbursed.
I don't think Musk needs insurance. He could just pay for the ship.
And why are people worrying so much about the battery blowing up? Presumably it will be transported uncharged.
What exactly is the problem with shipping batteries via boat?
It just is not trendy enough for some people here.
This is supposed to be a techies' forum, yet people are worrying themselves sick over a simple delivery. It would not take anywhere near 100 days to ship (yes, ship, by ship) stuff from USA to Australia. The bigger challenge, as someone else has said, is the infrasructure and the connection details. A large inverter is going to be needed and a very hefty connection at a suitable point to the existing grid. Then you wonder if 100MWh is going to be enough anyway to solve the problem as Musk claims.
Prepare the land, build the slabs, put all the supporting infrastructure in place.
Sure, but all of that can be done while the batteries are in transit.
I think that was his point.
It made history as India's first unmanned lunar spacecraft.
Was there an earlier manned one from India then?