Once again, the free market fails where regulation would succeed - the former can only correct for the future AFTER everyone's dead and un-buried.
Why do you say that? What makes YOU the authority on the "correct" answer? Maybe people are perfectly comfortable with the status quo - after all, it's not like this box would save anyone, it would just help to find their corpses a little sooner. Considering only a few hundred people a year die in commercial plane crashes (vs around 100 million total deaths per year), and the vast majority of those are found very quickly, it's not really that big of a deal. There are probably better ways to spend $100K per plane to improve the flying experience (safer, more comfortable, less TSA, whatever), yet you've suddenly decided that the best thing to do would have been to bump this box (which you never even heard of until today) to the top of the list!
If you are talking about a major aircraft like a commercial B777 passenger craft, the installation and upkeep is relatively small. These massive aircraft are expensive to buy and maintain. The amortized cost per passenger over a year's flights is going to be a fraction of a cent.
Come on, let's do some math instead of just guessing at the answer: if a plane seats 200 people, flies 4 segments/day, 300 days/year, and the device has a useful life of 10 years, that's $100K / 10 / 300 / 4 / 200 = about 4 cents per passenger segment. An order of magnitude more than "a fraction of a cent", but still pretty close to negligible.
Not sure iOS is any less broken - they don't ask you about some things, they just share them anyway. As soon as I got an iPhone and installed the LinkedIn app, linked in started asking me if I wanted to connect to people/organizations that I haven't had anything to do with in years - but they happened to be in my contact list on the phone. Hmmmm.....
I find it interesting that the guy figures out a good way to meet compatible women, and the most noteworthy part to slashdotters is what computer language he used to do it. No wonder the slashdot crowd still has nothing better to do than surf the web!
Fuck....now you tell me. This date has lasted 8 years, 3 cars, 2 houses, and 3 kids. She just won't take a hint....but I don't want to be rude.
Resurrect your old OKCupid profile and start going on dates. Make it a point to come home with lipstick kisses, or smelling of perfume, or with your shirt misbuttoned. She'll take the hint.
Improving detection by 68% != Reducing fraud by 68%
Imagine that previous methods caught 10% of the fraudulent accounts. New tech improves that to 16.8%. It's a 68% improvement in the fraud detection rate, but only a 6.8% "slashing" of the fraudulent accounts.
Just like digital improves the quality of everything.
Except music, if you're an audiophile who prefers vinyl.
I don't care one way or the other about the audio, but I'm a true hipster videophile, and I insist on watching everything on VHS. It's hard to describe, but VHS gives a warmer, softer, smoother picture without all those annoying dots distracting you from the filmmaker's true vision.
Have each company rated by everyone who goes to the show.
Seriously? Most people won't even bother to fill out your surveys, and the few that do will probably "grade on the curve(s)" and give the hottest women the benefit of the doubt, at the expense of the those who are "plainly" more knowledgeable. You'd probably get lots of technical people voted out and even more bimbos voted in.
Clearly you are well intentioned but out of touch with the reality of today's government spending issues.
Let's use the HealthCare.gov website as an example. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Any, and I mean any, space related government project, let alone a permanent base somewhere, is going to cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.
I've been meaning to start drinking heavily, and this is the perfect time: with any luck at all, I'll already be dead when the volcano blows! Take that, fate - I refuse to play by your rules!
One can manipulate math to to describe or answer pretty much anything you want. Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.
Who cares? As long as the equations match what's happening (and what's going to happen), does it matter what's "really" going on? We've been doing quantum mechanics for almost a century now, and still no one actually knows what it all means - but we're perfectly happy to take advantage of QM in our technology.
We're still talking about two events that are outside of each others light cones. In order for an observer to observe both events at all, let alone ascribe them an order in time, he'd have to be travelling faster than the speed of light.
No, the observer just needs to be situated so that both events are in his past light cone. That's completely independent of whether they're in each other's past or future light cones.
It will affect us eventually, when both light cones get large enough to intersect. That is, unless they are far enough away that the expansion of the universe outpaces the growth of the light cone
Sure, but that's not the point - relativity talks about "events" which are particular points in space and in time. You're treating "us" as a point in space but a line in time.
Wouldn't such an observer be moving faster than the speed of light?
Nope - that's the whole point. Relativity is actually pretty simple (special relativity, anyway), but you have to get past a couple of things, and one of the biggies is that space and time don't work the way you think they do. Your "common sense" has jumped to unwarranted conclusions based on severely limited experience, and until you can let that go you'll struggle to fit relativity into a worldview that it doesn't fit in.
I mean the total universe, not just the observable universe.
The universe is 14b years old; let's assume it continues for another 14b years. Ignore expansion for now, and we can conclude that it must be at least 14b light-years across because we can see almost back to the big bang. In a 2D space-time diagram (1 space dim + 1 time) you'd see a square with an X in it - we're at the center, the absolute past is below us, the absolute future is above us, and the "neither past nor future" (let's call this the "elsewhen") is to the sides. Clearly half of this "universe" is in the elsewhen.
Now make it a 3D space-time diagram (2 space dims + 1 time): the diagram is a cylinder and the light-cones are normal geometric cones. But this means the volume of the absolute past + future is less than half of the cylinder, leaving more than half for the elsewhen. Add in the 3rd space dim, and there's an even smaller proportion inside the "hyper-cones" and thus even more outside.
Now if the universe if really more than 14b LY years across (which it almost certainly is - some estimates are hundreds of billions of LY, some much more), there's even more space-time in the elsewhen.
And because it's expanding, then the "hyper-cylinder" flares out as you move from past to future, resulting in yet still more space-time in the elsewhen.
So ultimately a very tiny fraction of all of space-time is in our absolute past, and a very time fraction is in our absolute future, meaning the vast majority is in the elsewhen.
If that's true, we can only hope that the exponential bloating of software stops as well. Software has been eating the free lunch Moore was providing before it got to the users; the sad reality is that the typical end-user hasn't seen much in the way of performance improvements - in some cases, common tasks are even slower now than 10 years ago.
Oh sure, we defend it by claiming that the software is "good enough" (or will be on tomorrow's computers, anyway), and we justify the bloat by claiming that the software is better in so many other areas like maintainability (it's not), re-usability (it's not), adherence to "design patterns" (regardless of whether they help or hurt), or just "newer software technologies" (I'm looking at you, XAML&WPF), as if the old ones were rusting away.
You're close - but the whole point of relativity is that there is no "absolute time". With one caveat (see below) It's ALL relative to the observer. There are some observers (specifically those roughly motionless with respect to the earth and the two black holes, like us) for whom "then" and "now" are separated by 3.8b years. There are (or could be) other observers (specifically those traveling at something close to the speed of light in along a line between the black holes and us) for whom the two events are separated by far less time. For someone traveling along that line at the speed of light, the two events would be simultaneous.
The only hard and fast rule is that space-time is divided into 3 zones:
* The absolute past - events within (or on the surface of) the light-cone leading up to here-and-now
* The absolute future - events within (or on the surface of) the light-cone starting at here-and-now
* Everything else - events in neither light cone, which means they cannot affect us and we cannot affect them. Depending on an observer's motion relative to us and such an event, someone might see the event as happening at the same time as the here-and-now, or before, or after. It doesn't matter, because such an event is not causally connected to the here-and-now in either direction.
The interesting thing is that the vast majority of the universe is in the "everything else" zone.... contemplate that one for a while...
I've never read any of her books, and I only have the vaguest idea of her ideology! But I must admit, that's the only flaw in your argument - had I ever read a single one of her books, all the rest of your accusations would undoubtedly follow.
It must really suck to have the technology of an adult, the vocabulary of a teenager, and the reasoning capability of a toddler.
Slashdot Mirror
Once again, the free market fails where regulation would succeed - the former can only correct for the future AFTER everyone's dead and un-buried.
Why do you say that? What makes YOU the authority on the "correct" answer? Maybe people are perfectly comfortable with the status quo - after all, it's not like this box would save anyone, it would just help to find their corpses a little sooner. Considering only a few hundred people a year die in commercial plane crashes (vs around 100 million total deaths per year), and the vast majority of those are found very quickly, it's not really that big of a deal. There are probably better ways to spend $100K per plane to improve the flying experience (safer, more comfortable, less TSA, whatever), yet you've suddenly decided that the best thing to do would have been to bump this box (which you never even heard of until today) to the top of the list!
If you are talking about a major aircraft like a commercial B777 passenger craft, the installation and upkeep is relatively small. These massive aircraft are expensive to buy and maintain. The amortized cost per passenger over a year's flights is going to be a fraction of a cent.
Come on, let's do some math instead of just guessing at the answer: if a plane seats 200 people, flies 4 segments/day, 300 days/year, and the device has a useful life of 10 years, that's $100K / 10 / 300 / 4 / 200 = about 4 cents per passenger segment. An order of magnitude more than "a fraction of a cent", but still pretty close to negligible.
They didn't used to
Not sure iOS is any less broken - they don't ask you about some things, they just share them anyway. As soon as I got an iPhone and installed the LinkedIn app, linked in started asking me if I wanted to connect to people/organizations that I haven't had anything to do with in years - but they happened to be in my contact list on the phone. Hmmmm.....
Are YOU fucking stupid? Or is your sarcasm detector just frozen today?
I find it interesting that the guy figures out a good way to meet compatible women, and the most noteworthy part to slashdotters is what computer language he used to do it. No wonder the slashdot crowd still has nothing better to do than surf the web!
Fuck....now you tell me. This date has lasted 8 years, 3 cars, 2 houses, and 3 kids. She just won't take a hint....but I don't want to be rude.
Resurrect your old OKCupid profile and start going on dates. Make it a point to come home with lipstick kisses, or smelling of perfume, or with your shirt misbuttoned. She'll take the hint.
Improving detection by 68% != Reducing fraud by 68%
Imagine that previous methods caught 10% of the fraudulent accounts. New tech improves that to 16.8%. It's a 68% improvement in the fraud detection rate, but only a 6.8% "slashing" of the fraudulent accounts.
(And 5% false positives is pretty horrific)
Just like digital improves the quality of everything.
Except music, if you're an audiophile who prefers vinyl.
I don't care one way or the other about the audio, but I'm a true hipster videophile, and I insist on watching everything on VHS. It's hard to describe, but VHS gives a warmer, softer, smoother picture without all those annoying dots distracting you from the filmmaker's true vision.
I'm no sucker. I only buy coins named after celebrities.
Like 50 Cent?
And Nickelback?
A day without analogies would be like.... ummm...
Down side: the Chinese that are looking to crack them just to use the camera to spy on all the hot American girl gamers.
Boy are they in for some disappointment...
Have each company rated by everyone who goes to the show.
Seriously? Most people won't even bother to fill out your surveys, and the few that do will probably "grade on the curve(s)" and give the hottest women the benefit of the doubt, at the expense of the those who are "plainly" more knowledgeable. You'd probably get lots of technical people voted out and even more bimbos voted in.
After all, it's an analogy, not a model.
Analogies are like glass: if you push them too far, they break.
Clearly you are well intentioned but out of touch with the reality of today's government spending issues.
Let's use the HealthCare.gov website as an example. It cost hundreds of millions of dollars. Any, and I mean any, space related government project, let alone a permanent base somewhere, is going to cost hundreds of trillions of dollars.
Worse yet, it's going to need a web site of its own: http://www.lunarcolony.gov/
I'm no vulcanologist either, but I can still "live long and prosper."
Not if the volcano blows any time soon!
I've been meaning to start drinking heavily, and this is the perfect time: with any luck at all, I'll already be dead when the volcano blows! Take that, fate - I refuse to play by your rules!
One can manipulate math to to describe or answer pretty much anything you want. Just because the equations match what's happening does not mean they describe what's going on.
Who cares? As long as the equations match what's happening (and what's going to happen), does it matter what's "really" going on? We've been doing quantum mechanics for almost a century now, and still no one actually knows what it all means - but we're perfectly happy to take advantage of QM in our technology.
We're still talking about two events that are outside of each others light cones. In order for an observer to observe both events at all, let alone ascribe them an order in time, he'd have to be travelling faster than the speed of light.
No, the observer just needs to be situated so that both events are in his past light cone. That's completely independent of whether they're in each other's past or future light cones.
See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Relativity_of_simultaneity
It will affect us eventually, when both light cones get large enough to intersect. That is, unless they are far enough away that the expansion of the universe outpaces the growth of the light cone
Sure, but that's not the point - relativity talks about "events" which are particular points in space and in time. You're treating "us" as a point in space but a line in time.
Wouldn't such an observer be moving faster than the speed of light?
Nope - that's the whole point. Relativity is actually pretty simple (special relativity, anyway), but you have to get past a couple of things, and one of the biggies is that space and time don't work the way you think they do. Your "common sense" has jumped to unwarranted conclusions based on severely limited experience, and until you can let that go you'll struggle to fit relativity into a worldview that it doesn't fit in.
I mean the total universe, not just the observable universe.
The universe is 14b years old; let's assume it continues for another 14b years. Ignore expansion for now, and we can conclude that it must be at least 14b light-years across because we can see almost back to the big bang. In a 2D space-time diagram (1 space dim + 1 time) you'd see a square with an X in it - we're at the center, the absolute past is below us, the absolute future is above us, and the "neither past nor future" (let's call this the "elsewhen") is to the sides. Clearly half of this "universe" is in the elsewhen.
Now make it a 3D space-time diagram (2 space dims + 1 time): the diagram is a cylinder and the light-cones are normal geometric cones. But this means the volume of the absolute past + future is less than half of the cylinder, leaving more than half for the elsewhen. Add in the 3rd space dim, and there's an even smaller proportion inside the "hyper-cones" and thus even more outside.
Now if the universe if really more than 14b LY years across (which it almost certainly is - some estimates are hundreds of billions of LY, some much more), there's even more space-time in the elsewhen.
And because it's expanding, then the "hyper-cylinder" flares out as you move from past to future, resulting in yet still more space-time in the elsewhen.
So ultimately a very tiny fraction of all of space-time is in our absolute past, and a very time fraction is in our absolute future, meaning the vast majority is in the elsewhen.
If that's true, we can only hope that the exponential bloating of software stops as well. Software has been eating the free lunch Moore was providing before it got to the users; the sad reality is that the typical end-user hasn't seen much in the way of performance improvements - in some cases, common tasks are even slower now than 10 years ago.
Oh sure, we defend it by claiming that the software is "good enough" (or will be on tomorrow's computers, anyway), and we justify the bloat by claiming that the software is better in so many other areas like maintainability (it's not), re-usability (it's not), adherence to "design patterns" (regardless of whether they help or hurt), or just "newer software technologies" (I'm looking at you, XAML&WPF), as if the old ones were rusting away.
I stuck my finger in an electric outlet once, and my will to persevere in sticking my finger in there was reduced, not boosted.
You're close - but the whole point of relativity is that there is no "absolute time". With one caveat (see below) It's ALL relative to the observer. There are some observers (specifically those roughly motionless with respect to the earth and the two black holes, like us) for whom "then" and "now" are separated by 3.8b years. There are (or could be) other observers (specifically those traveling at something close to the speed of light in along a line between the black holes and us) for whom the two events are separated by far less time. For someone traveling along that line at the speed of light, the two events would be simultaneous.
The only hard and fast rule is that space-time is divided into 3 zones:
* The absolute past - events within (or on the surface of) the light-cone leading up to here-and-now
* The absolute future - events within (or on the surface of) the light-cone starting at here-and-now
* Everything else - events in neither light cone, which means they cannot affect us and we cannot affect them. Depending on an observer's motion relative to us and such an event, someone might see the event as happening at the same time as the here-and-now, or before, or after. It doesn't matter, because such an event is not causally connected to the here-and-now in either direction.
The interesting thing is that the vast majority of the universe is in the "everything else" zone.... contemplate that one for a while...
I've never read any of her books, and I only have the vaguest idea of her ideology! But I must admit, that's the only flaw in your argument - had I ever read a single one of her books, all the rest of your accusations would undoubtedly follow.
It must really suck to have the technology of an adult, the vocabulary of a teenager, and the reasoning capability of a toddler.