Slashdot Mirror


User: Doc+Ruby

Doc+Ruby's activity in the archive.

Stories
0
Comments
21,318
First seen
Last seen
Profile
(view on slashdot.org)

Comments · 21,318

  1. Re:Rail Sail on NASA to Launch Solar Sail · · Score: 1

    Because it doesn't weigh very much, and doesn't go that far, so the fairly small energy that impulsed it in that parabola converts most of its reaction momentum into velocity.

    That conveyor belt reaches 80Km high, so it would have to be moving quite fast, and is "fired" over 2000 Km, and is made of material that stretches that whole way, has loadbearing strength requiring quite a bit of matter stretching across and along as a belt, and runs continuously. The energy to keep it up would be like launching over a thousand rockets every few days, if that long. Why not just convert that energy into rocket fuel and blast it off?

  2. Re:Rail Sail on NASA to Launch Solar Sail · · Score: 1

    Vertically. What keeps it hanging up there 80Km above the ground?

  3. Re:Mobile Monopolies on OMG Did U C What U R Paying 4 Texting? · · Score: 1

    Well, the technical fragmentation I referred to was among different countries, which are now all states in the unified EU, so that fragmentation is probably dying off through attrition, anyway.

    What you described is the kind of government-spurred competition that made the Internet take off with so few limits in the US. We're still running on the vapors of that openness today, as we close more of it off all the time.

  4. Re:Mobile Monopolies on OMG Did U C What U R Paying 4 Texting? · · Score: 1

    Landline voice minutes cost as little as $0.01, because the telco monopolies were finally broken up. GTE couldn't have challenged and broken that monopoly in the 1980s if millions of Americans hadn't whined long enough. Even cable would be a lot more expensive if millions of Americans whining for choice weren't even a little effective.

    Just because people whining for choice hasn't been as effective as the corporate deck stacked against it has been, that doesn't mean it wouldn't be much worse without the whining. But in fact there are consumer orgs that do fight these vendor abuses. They're just not as easy or economical for people to join as are the industry orgs that work against us. But with the Internet, that is in fact changing. The playing field only has to level somewhat more, not even to completely level, for the overwhelming numbers of the public to win much more often.

    That's all supposed to be what the House of Representatives is for. But we're only just starting to organize individuals to influence the House, to deliver feedback between and surrounding elections at all as powerful as corporations have had for centuries. It's beginning to change in our favor, but it takes a long time for any real political changes, especially structural, to come through. OTOH, giving up the fight has immediate, devastating and more or less permanent consequences.

  5. Re:Mobile Monopolies on OMG Did U C What U R Paying 4 Texting? · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Whine harder. Don't send money. Vote for and donate to those people who do the right thing, or will when elected. Expose the bribetakers and liars publicly.

    Politics is a differential equation. Making it harder and more expensive to do the wrong thing is the only way to get the right thing. If it's important, we do it. If we don't, we're as much to blame as the people working for the wrong side.

    Nobody said democracy would be easy, or even very democratic. But it's all we've got. Unless we surrender, and then we've got nothing but an iron boot stomping on a human face forever.

  6. Re:Energy is Rounder than Matter on Roundest Object In the World Created · · Score: 1

    UC San Diego was building a "SET" device that could count individual photons. I wonder what happened to it: the most sensitive sensor ever made, reaching that discrete sampling precision with accuracy, would be fundamentally valuable to all science. Not to mention a great game controller :).

  7. Re:Incoming republicans on FBI Illegally Tapped Phone Phreaks In 1969 · · Score: 1

    That philosophy works only because hundreds of millions are willing to accept it. Those "ogres" include over 60M people who voted for Bush twice, and of course the many millions more who didn't vote at all (especially those tacitly accepting him in 2004). And those people aren't going away by November 2008.

    It takes a nation of millions to hold us back.

  8. Re:Energy is Rounder than Matter on Roundest Object In the World Created · · Score: 1

    All the definitions are "circular": they're self consistent references among the spacetime/matter-energy equivalence. Calibration starts at some arbitrary point that's different because we can consistently measure it. At these fine scales, matter is inconsistent, however we measure it. Energy is more consistent, though we need better engineering for our measurements to be more consistent. That Watt Balance approach, or another with that attitude, is the way to go.

  9. Re:Striking Back at Traffic Threats on Text-Messaging Behind the Wheel · · Score: 1

    Once I drive away, that's their problem. Hopefully they crash into something inanimate. More likely, they'll pull over, or just drive very cautiously.

  10. Mobile Monopolies on OMG Did U C What U R Paying 4 Texting? · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Telcos can charge you 4-10-30-50 cents for a text message that costs them hundredths, thousandths of a cent to carry because they monopolize the network. If your phone could login to any radio network to which it can eletromagnetically connect, depending on which services and prices it provides, then the networks would compete for those connections.

    Instead, you're locked in. If you want to switch in realtime, you have to pay prohibitive "roaming" fees that are arbitrary and extremely high - higher than even the ripoffs from the primary network. Switching your primary network requires "porting" your phone number, days or weeks of bureacratic "processing", and sometimes can't port, and breaks your old primary network's contract at great expense.

    These constraints are all made-up for telcos to retain their old monopoly status with their existing customers. The exact same truths that forced open the wired networks are still true for the wireless networks, but the telcos have lobbied to make that much more expandable market into an "exception".

    Note that this problem is more true in the US than in Europe and elsewhere. Foreign countries don't have as much contractual monopoly, but do have some residual technical fragmentation that is more of a basis for lockin, even though there's somewhat less lockin. But since their formerly more separate states (AKA "countries") had separate telcos that compete with each other, there's still some effort to keep whatever lockin they can, though there's less of it.

    The US Congress should fix the laws to apply "universal access" to the radio networks as well as to the wired networks (including the Internet). Make these lockin contracts illegal, so they become the exception (merely to purchase rates even lower than the open market produces after competition, to pass along to consumers the savings telcos get from lower "churn" rates). We're a loooong way away from that kind of Congressional alliance with consumers instead of telcos. But we can get there, just as we got there with landlines after many years of fighting.

    We just have to start by making the problem of telco monopoly privilege the conventional wisdom. 300M Americans whining about paying too much with no choice usually eventually has an effect.

  11. Orgs Are Not Focused on ID Security on No-Fail Identity Theft – Live and In Person · · Score: 2, Interesting

    The reason: organizations are typically so focused on online ID theft that they've forgotten how easy it is for a criminal to socially engineer his way into a bank branch or office and physically hack it.

    But orgs are not not so focused on online ID theft that they're stopping it. So really they're unfocused on online ID theft, and even more unfocused on in-person ID theft.

    Because they don't pay the costs. Any focus on ID theft is an extra cost that doesn't save them any money, because the theft doesn't cost them as much.

    Make the orgs liable for mishandling the IDs. Make them indemnify all costs, including the victim's labor to recover and even just monitor for exploitation for years later.

    And make them liable for copyright violations when they copy personal data without express permission for that transaction, and they won't be giving it away to risky people anymore, either.

    Then you'll see them "focused" like a laser.

  12. Re:Incoming republicans on FBI Illegally Tapped Phone Phreaks In 1969 · · Score: 1

    Nixon created the China policy and official relationship by sending Bush Sr to actually create and run in, the first US consul there.

    We can't blame any president for Hoover, but we can blame Nixon for replacing Hoover (at death, of course) with a series of FBI directors who were at least as criminal as Hoover (or otherwise ,A HREF="">they quit, but even more an underling. All Nixon's criminal underlings are responsible for their own crimes, but Nixon is responsible for installing, empowering and directing them.

    There's a vast amount of criminal responsibility in the Nixon regime to go around to its various players. And some of them, like Bush Sr, Cheney and Rumsfeld, banked their huge shares, invested them in the Ford, Reagan, and Bush Jr regimes, to inflate the entire criminal responsibility industry, while still keeping the lyin's share.

  13. Energy is Rounder than Matter on Roundest Object In the World Created · · Score: 1

    Why make these standard unit samples out of matter at all? A single sample of matter is going to be irregular, and it's going to change over time. Why not make them all samples of energy, which is much more consistent in its state? E = mc^2 is a simple conversion for the matter equivalents, even if the equivalent matter is nanoscopic or smaller - we can also easily multiple by powers of 10.

    As for "roundness", matter is even worse in that measure. "Round" and "straight" are idealized qualities that matter does not possess. Again, energy is much more consistent, as in its inverse square law that can be measured as "round" to a much higher precision than knobby, crude matter.

    Why do we have a simple, metric and relativistic physics, if we can't refer to it as the basis of that physics?

  14. Re:Incoming republicans on FBI Illegally Tapped Phone Phreaks In 1969 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Just because Bush is worse than Nixon doesn't mean Nixon wasn't really bad. He was.

  15. Powell: Liar on Algorithm Names Powell 'Ideal' Vice President Candidate · · Score: 0, Troll

    No, I'm not just talking about how Colin Powell kicked off his military/political career whitewashing the My Lai massacre in Vietnam. I'm talking about him waving around those fake vials in the UN, lying us into the Iraq War.

    How can anyone possibly consider giving that bloody old liar the keys to the Cheney Bunker?

  16. Re:Emanating? on Cell Phones Tracking Nightlife Activity · · Score: 1

    Most of the universe is cold dark matter. Some tiny, inscrutable fraction is really cloaked.

  17. Re:Why Not for Linux? on Fresh Air For Windows? · · Score: 1

    No, it's more like

    "It takes me almost a minute to start writing an email, or to get a web page, or to search my whole computer for wherever I last saw that thing I need to know"
    "I'm already done."
    "Can I use your computer?"
    "I'll show you how to edit your registry"
    "My what?"
    "Here, use this CD and yours will work like mine."
    "Wait, I can click this link and it will convert me."

    See how that could catch on? See how the worse OS fails, and gets replaced? For great reality, slow that conversation down over a few months of repeated failures of the old OS, but wait a while for the new OS to "disappear" behind "just working".

  18. Re:They Break Too Easy on IRobot Looj Gutter Cleaning Robot Review · · Score: 1

    Moderation -1
        100% Flamebait

    What kind of anonymous fool takes an honest, proportioned review to be "Flamebait"? Are you some kind of Roomba moderating 'bot?

  19. Re:Mission Accomplished on Al-Qaeda's Growing Online Offensive · · Score: 1, Flamebait

    Moderation 0
        50% Troll
        30% Funny
        20% Insightful

    Is this the fate of Republicans? Now in the minority, their legacy of catastrophe making their insane, cowardly bleatings nothing but the butt of jokes or cautionary tales, they merely anonymously snipe at the truth about their Reign of Error.

  20. Re:Why Not for Linux? on Fresh Air For Windows? · · Score: 3, Insightful

    No, most people just want apps that do what they need to do. They don't care whether it's "Linux" or "Windows" or "both" or "neither". They don't even want an app, just to do what they need to do. Something that just runs Windows apps, because those do what people think they need to do, and does it without the crap that is Windows, but rather a simpler new paradigm, would be welcomed. Some of the extra Linux apps would probably be welcomed too, especially if they could be used side by side their familiar Windows apps. And they won't care whether it's running on top of "Linux", or "Winedows" or whatever, so long as it runs. Since Linux is a good basis to roll out a new PC OS on top of, especially with its existing developer and other community, which keeps any Linux-based OS compatible with most HW, it's a good means to that end. At an adequate degree of complexity, Wine doesn't "change", it just remains stable and the apps "just work". Which is a long way away still, but we're talking about a way to give people the "next generation" of PC environments. Without waiting for "Windows 8", or probably "Windows 9", or probably "Windows Never".

    That's the point of new PC paradigms. Not to "do Windows" better, or to "do Linux" at all, but to make people's computers "do my job" better.

  21. Why Not for Linux? on Fresh Air For Windows? · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Why bother pretending that Microsoft will do anything with Windows that's interesting at all, when it's clearly spending its time and money making "more of the same", and its design constraints are clearly defined by its corporate interests.

    How about just making a version of Linux like that? If more work also makes Wine work a lot more reliably for most Windows apps, the whole thing could do a lot better than Microsoft at making "Windows" users happier.

  22. Emanating? on Cell Phones Tracking Nightlife Activity · · Score: 1

    How do just I stop my cellphone from "emanating" this data? I don't want a bunch of losers tracking down the hot nightlife I find and create, just because they subscribe to some website. TimeOutNY has already ruined too many places with a load of bridge & tunnel dweebs.

    Maybe the cool places should all jam these "emanation".

  23. Re:Failed to Jump to Linux on What Happened To Palm? · · Score: 1

    AFAICT, the 2004 LinuxWorld demo just showed Linux booting on a Treo. Which some independent hackers managed to do on their own, and have continued to tweak since then. I really thought that the Treo 700W HW would be fairly easy to port Linux to, since it ran Mobile Windows, but I think the developers just lost interest as the Palm line faded with the 21st Century racing past it.

  24. Re:Rail Sail on NASA to Launch Solar Sail · · Score: 1

    A lasso has a lot of energy put into it with every turn the tail end is pulled. Enough to push the whole lasso up. The lasso stays in place because of the gyroscopic motion around a center of gravity. That rail hump shows neither of those dynamics.

  25. Super Race of Granulocyte+ Smokers on Cancer Resistance Technique Moves To Human Trials · · Score: 4, Funny

    How do I get tested for whether I've got the granulocyte cancer immunity? I've always wanted to take up smoking. If I could sell my granulocytes, I'd afford to buy a carton of cigarettes.