The fault of this argument: 80% of all drivers think they are good drivers (e.g. above average). At least 30% of them are in error. Just because you don't notice the faults you made (and which caused other drivers to brake or swerve do avoid a collision), doesn't mean they weren't there.
The main problem is that a phone number from a technical point of view doesn't indicate a specified station (the name Caller ID is somewhat missleading). It's a route. It gives the network the information how to route a call. Incoming and outgoing route don't have to be the same for the caller ID to be legitimate. As I install phone switches for a living, I know the setup of several companies, and many of them bought PSTN connectivity from several providers, which means that they have several trunk numbers, that are all routed to the same phone switch. Outgoing calls always get the caller ID of the primary trunk, independent of the trunk the call is actually leaving the company. The outgoing trunks are chosen by rate: The trunk that currently offers the best rate for the called number gets used, and if that trunk is full, the next cheapest is used. In the same way, the primary trunk is used for incoming calls, but if it's full, the other trunks are overflow destinations. This setup also provides for redundancy. If one trunk fails, another can be used, and the called party still sees the same caller ID, independent of the route the call actually takes.
With this setup, there is almost a guarantee, that an outgoing call and an incoming call will have different routes, even if the stations at the end of both connections will be the same.
It gets even more confusing in other coutries. In Austria for instance, any entity can get a number starting with 5 (four to six digits long), which acts like a separate area code reserved for this company. Calls to a 5xxx number are always considered local calls, and the difference to the rate of the actual call has to be paid by the owner of the 5xxx number. On the other hand, an owner of a trunk can have extensions of arbitrary length, it's not necessary to buy DIDs or similar, as long as the total E.164 number is not longer than 15 digits. One of my customers for instance has the extensions -5 and -6 for the call centers, but three digits extension for fixed stations and five digits extensions for internal mobile (DECT) phones. The caller IDs the customer sends to the PSTN thus have lengths between 8 and 12 digits (something totally impossible in the U.S. and Canada, where a phone number always has to have 10 digits, with 3 digits for the area code and either three digits for the local code and four digits for the extension, or seven digits for the subscriber number).
Phone providers in Austria offer online tools to their customers where they can define the routes for their trunks, define overflow destinations or caller ID rewrites, so incoming calls to their locations are routed to the right trunks. Especially if you have a 5xxx number, you can finely tune the actual trunks used for calls to your central 5xxx, depending for instance on the origin of the call, or on patterns in the extension numbers or both.
And the owner of the 5xxx number can have several independent local phone switches in the respective locations, and all of them will use the same 5xxx caller ID (plus extension), and in each case this is legitimate. But your scheme would still fail, as the phone switch at location L, where the call went out, is independent for instance of the phone switch at location C, where the call center is located, and where all incoming calls are routed to. Any "call back" feature you imagine would be answered by the switch C which has no information about the call from switch L -- and still the caller ID switch L is providing is totally legitimate.
But different than the 1, which exists in many algebraic objects (e.g. in all Abelian groups), i can only exist in mathematical objects without (partial) order. The problem with i is, that any order you define is not antisymmetric, e.g. from a = b and b = a, you can't conclude a=b, if there is i involved.
They exist only in the sense that a "two" exists. They are numbers. Not things. Even real numbers aren't real in the thinginess sense.
And they exist in the mathematical sense only if you don't need any order on the number field. If you want an order that is consistent with algebraic operations, you can't have imaginary numbers. Algebraic completeness (e.g. the square root of -1) and order completeness (each finite set of numbers has a minimal element) are ruling out each other.
Yes, you can calculate with imaginary numbers. That doesn't make them real things. It makes them useful objects for calculations, if the calculations don't need order completeness.
Imaginary numbers are just the numbers that are real multiples of i. They are a subset of complex numbers, which are sums of real and imaginary numbers.
And the naming of mathematical objects has nothing to do with the meaning of their names in other contexts. For instance, in English, sets with two algebraic operations on it which are abelian and conform to the associative and the distributive laws are called "number fields", associating a two dimensional shape. But in other languages, they are called for instance "number corpus" (Zahlkoerper in German), pointing to a three dimensional shape. But number fields don't have to have dimensions at all (though you can define dimensions in some of them). Shall we call "field" or "corpus" outdated?
Similar with algebraic rings. Only the finite ones are somehow ring-shaped. Shall we thus abandon the ring term?
Imaginary numbers are the numbers that are real multiples of i, where i is short for "imaginary unit". Shall we replace it with c?
The square root of -1 does not exist, at least not as a real number.
Having complex numbers might help us to achieve algebraic completeness for the number field, but you lose completeness in regard to order theory. While each finite set of real numbers has a minimal element, you can't define a minimal element of a finite set of complex numbers (at least not one that is consistent with the algebraic properties of complex numbers).
The square root of -1 only exists, if you don't need completeness in regard to order theory.
But 0.05 is as arbitrary as any value. A p-value of 0.05 means, that out of 20 studies, that consider themselves significant because of their p-value, one is a pure statistical fluke. So why not 0.1? Or 0.01? Or even 0.000,001?
You can recharge the buses during off-peak hours, e.g. during the night. A standard bus has an average speed of about 20-25 mph, thus during an 8 hrs shift, it travels about 160 to 200 miles. Battery packs with 250 miles capacity thus are mostly sufficient for a city bus.
It's even less for buses that are only running during peak hours, which normally go from 6 am to 10 am and again between 3 pm to 7 pm. Those buses can drive for 4 hrs, being recharged during noon and be back in service in the afternoon. With some intelligent schedule, you can recharge each bus twice a day without interupting normal operation.
Even with coal plants, the total energy efficiency of electric cars is better than for diesel cars, as the coal plant doesn't experience that many partial-load situations as a diesel car (it's different with trains, as they travel longer distances without stop and don't experience that many traffic-jams with stop-and-go). And with each clean-up of electricity generation, all electric cars automatically get that clean-up too without any additional work on the cars themself, while each progress in clean-up for diesel cars is postponed until the cars are replaced or retrofitted. Also, technology to carbon sequestration or similar can easily be built into coal plants, but not in diesel cars. Thus it directly helps electric cars, but not diesel cars.
Trolleybusses a) need a temporary shutdown of the roads until the wires are put up, c) need complicated wiring at crossings, and especially at central bus stops, level crossings with streetcars and electric trains and c) are not very flexible when it comes to rerouting compared with diesel busses.
Purely battery operated busses have the same freedom of motion than diesel busses, and can act as 1:1 replacement, which makes the barrier of entry extremely low.
I trust chinese equipment equally to U.S. made equipment, e.g. not at all. I'll use Cisco and Huawei in layers, so every data packet from a Cisco device has to cross at least an Huawei device, and each Huawei origin data packet has to cross at least one Cisco device.
Before that, the network was in the hand of the NSA. Apparently, the U.S. is fearing to lose access to some very important intelligence, if Huawei equipment is interspersed with Cisco and Nortel/Avaya.
That's why VoIP between providers gets more and more popular, and why numbering schemes like ENUM are used. It just takes time until all the phone switches and exchanges are upgraded or moved to VoIP. I've seen switches running since 30 years, which also have the capabilities of 30 years ago.
No. You still have no idea, how phones actually work.
Lets for a moment ignore all flat billing plans or similar constructs.
Then you get billed for using a line for a specified amount of time. Each line has a base rate associated to it, and a billing clock, that ticks while you are using that line. You get then billed for the number of ticks during the call. If you are calling long distance or international, you have to use several lines connected together and get billed for the ticks of each of those lines (which then often have different rates). Between the providers, there are interconnects (mostly running the CCSS7 protocol) which also exchange the billing information. But as you can't know beforehand on which lines your call actually gets routed and what the actual total rate for your call will be, your provider offers you a plan with fixed rates for each type of call, hiding the actual pricing the company has with other companies. If you want to see the real cost incurred by your call, you would have to operate your own CCSS7 switch at home and have an CCSS7 link to your provider instead of a PSTN.
As a fusion reactor is by no means a perpetual motion engine, I would wager that laughing at perpetual motion cranks gets people to actually look into energy, mass, quantum field theory and physics in general and not to chase pipe dreams.
This is exactly the type of thinking that the article mentions as faulty.
It's not that some people are better, faster or otherwise superior to others. It's just coincidence that for them, things played out. You can be as good, as fast, as superior to your peers be as you want. If you aren't lucky, this leads to nothing (and even the fact that you are good and fast is mainly luck). But if you believe that somehow, you earned your luck (e.g. you got it because of your merits), you are turning selfish, uncritical against yourself and discriminatory to others.
If everyone with no clue how something works has a say in how people should be punished for things they do, because the outcome is different than expected by the clueless, we all would sit in prison (including you, as you probably also do things in a way that is different than the usual layman would think).
Let me present you a phone switch system I helped building a few years ago. It is the phone switch of an organization with locations in several counties. In each county, you have a local gateway connected to sometimes one, sometimes several S1 lines (depends on the number of calls usually going on there). Each S1 can operate 30 simultaneous calls, and each S1 has its own phone number. In each location, the organization has a local phone number, and you can dial through to individual stations via their 4 digit extension. All local phone switches are interconnected within that organization, thus internal calls never leave the system.
So far, so good.
If an S1 fails for what reason ever or all 30 connections are used, the location would be unreachable. Thus each S1 has at least one overflow destination, meaning another S1 (with another number associated to it). If you call the failed S1, your call will be automatically routed to another S1, completely transparent to you, and you will still reach the 4 digit extension you dialed, as the organization has a flat numbering plan, meaning each 4 digit extension exists only once within that organization, independent of their actual physical location. Thus the phone switch the other S1 is connected to (in whatever county or area code it is located) will automatically route your call to the extension intended by you without you even noticing that the physical call was routed via another county with another area code on a different S1 with another trunk number. You will not see that the original S1 has failed or was completely full. For you, your call has worked the way you intended it to work when you dialed that number.
Still o.k. with you?
And now, you have to simulate the same behavior for outgoing calls. The S1 you call out should assign to you the right area code and the right trunk code of your station, independently of the S1 the call is actually leaving the organization. Thus you have to overwrite the S1 trunk code, insert the right area code and the right trunk code additionally to your extension number, so people you call can get back to you via the number of the location you are actually working from. How do you do that without "misrepresenting caller IDs"?
As usual, people with no clue how phones work think they have a solution.
A T1 trunk has 30 lines. Those lines are not physical numbers, just possible phone connections. Normally, the T1 lines are assigned round robin to the calls (you can also assign them linearly, meaning always use the lowest free line number). So whenever station 43 calls, and the last call was assigned to line 14 on the T1, the call of station 43 will now go out on line 15. And an incoming call to station 198 will then get line 16. It simply makes no sense to associate 30 fixed numbers to it, as there is no 1:1 relation to a physical station. A T1 has a single number. If I have 30 calls going through a T1, which numbers shall I assign to them?
As the phone switch the T1 is hooked up to has maybe 500 stations, how shall I distribute 30 numbers to them? And the phone switch has several T1s connected to it, because the company has several locations, how shall I assign the respective T1 number to them?
It gets even worse if the company has locations in several countries. It makes sense to have a call going to the U.S. leave the switch on a T1 in the U.S., because the call rates might be better, and the callback to that number will be cheaper if the called number gets back to an U.S. number. So I have to assign an U.S. number to a station which might be physically located in Ireland. Or, if you prefer the "real ID", I have to assign an Irish caller ID to a call leaving an U.S. located T1 connection.
The whole "no misrepresented caller ID" comes from the technically wrong idea that a line is fixed to a station, and thus the line somehow represents the station, which never was the case, not even in the times of manually connected calls on large switch boards 100 years ago.
It's not a $TECHNICALITY, it's the very definition of "misrepresented caller ID". When is a caller ID misrepresented?
I'm actually working with phone switches for a living. There are so many legitimate reasons to change the caller ID, that I really doubt you can come up with a working definition for "misrepresentation".
A hint: Just because the line a call goes out has a phone number assigned to it, it does not mean that the number of that line should ever be used in a call. It could be that this line is just the overflow line for the main line, and thus the number of the main line should be used. There is no warranty that a callback on that technical line number even works, as all calls should be directed to the main line's number. And with the somewhat screwed up U.S. phone number plan (each and every number has to have 10 digits, with 3 of them have to be the area code), you often need a lot of magic to even get a working caller ID. There are many local phone switches with more connected lines to it than the number plan for the trunk line allows. So you have to overbook the numbers your provider gave you.
Only the communication was not ok. What the citizens voted on was the Electoral College, whose members then elect the President of the U.S..
Each state of the U.S. gets represented by two electors for the two senators (as in the Senate) and by as many members as it sends to the House. And how those members are elected locally, is determined by the states as they see fit. Most states use a winner-takes-it-all approach.
That by the special arithmetics of the current distribution of votes only two parties sent electors to the Electoral College at all, and that those numbers aren't proportional ot the absolute number of votes across all states, so be it. There is even a mathematical proof that no election system exists that in all cases elects the "right" candidate.
Voting is just one element of a democracy, albeit a very visual one. More important is the following question: How much blood has to be shed to get rid of an unwanted government? For the U.S., the answer is 'none'. Just wait for the next election day and then elect differently.
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The fault of this argument: 80% of all drivers think they are good drivers (e.g. above average). At least 30% of them are in error. Just because you don't notice the faults you made (and which caused other drivers to brake or swerve do avoid a collision), doesn't mean they weren't there.
With this setup, there is almost a guarantee, that an outgoing call and an incoming call will have different routes, even if the stations at the end of both connections will be the same.
It gets even more confusing in other coutries. In Austria for instance, any entity can get a number starting with 5 (four to six digits long), which acts like a separate area code reserved for this company. Calls to a 5xxx number are always considered local calls, and the difference to the rate of the actual call has to be paid by the owner of the 5xxx number. On the other hand, an owner of a trunk can have extensions of arbitrary length, it's not necessary to buy DIDs or similar, as long as the total E.164 number is not longer than 15 digits. One of my customers for instance has the extensions -5 and -6 for the call centers, but three digits extension for fixed stations and five digits extensions for internal mobile (DECT) phones. The caller IDs the customer sends to the PSTN thus have lengths between 8 and 12 digits (something totally impossible in the U.S. and Canada, where a phone number always has to have 10 digits, with 3 digits for the area code and either three digits for the local code and four digits for the extension, or seven digits for the subscriber number).
Phone providers in Austria offer online tools to their customers where they can define the routes for their trunks, define overflow destinations or caller ID rewrites, so incoming calls to their locations are routed to the right trunks. Especially if you have a 5xxx number, you can finely tune the actual trunks used for calls to your central 5xxx, depending for instance on the origin of the call, or on patterns in the extension numbers or both.
And the owner of the 5xxx number can have several independent local phone switches in the respective locations, and all of them will use the same 5xxx caller ID (plus extension), and in each case this is legitimate. But your scheme would still fail, as the phone switch at location L, where the call went out, is independent for instance of the phone switch at location C, where the call center is located, and where all incoming calls are routed to. Any "call back" feature you imagine would be answered by the switch C which has no information about the call from switch L -- and still the caller ID switch L is providing is totally legitimate.
Oh... slashcode. From a <= b and b <= a, you can't conclude a = b.
But different than the 1, which exists in many algebraic objects (e.g. in all Abelian groups), i can only exist in mathematical objects without (partial) order. The problem with i is, that any order you define is not antisymmetric, e.g. from a = b and b = a, you can't conclude a=b, if there is i involved.
And they exist in the mathematical sense only if you don't need any order on the number field. If you want an order that is consistent with algebraic operations, you can't have imaginary numbers. Algebraic completeness (e.g. the square root of -1) and order completeness (each finite set of numbers has a minimal element) are ruling out each other.
Yes, you can calculate with imaginary numbers. That doesn't make them real things. It makes them useful objects for calculations, if the calculations don't need order completeness.
Imaginary numbers are just the numbers that are real multiples of i. They are a subset of complex numbers, which are sums of real and imaginary numbers.
And the naming of mathematical objects has nothing to do with the meaning of their names in other contexts. For instance, in English, sets with two algebraic operations on it which are abelian and conform to the associative and the distributive laws are called "number fields", associating a two dimensional shape. But in other languages, they are called for instance "number corpus" (Zahlkoerper in German), pointing to a three dimensional shape. But number fields don't have to have dimensions at all (though you can define dimensions in some of them). Shall we call "field" or "corpus" outdated?
Similar with algebraic rings. Only the finite ones are somehow ring-shaped. Shall we thus abandon the ring term?
Imaginary numbers are the numbers that are real multiples of i, where i is short for "imaginary unit". Shall we replace it with c?
Having complex numbers might help us to achieve algebraic completeness for the number field, but you lose completeness in regard to order theory. While each finite set of real numbers has a minimal element, you can't define a minimal element of a finite set of complex numbers (at least not one that is consistent with the algebraic properties of complex numbers).
The square root of -1 only exists, if you don't need completeness in regard to order theory.
But 0.05 is as arbitrary as any value. A p-value of 0.05 means, that out of 20 studies, that consider themselves significant because of their p-value, one is a pure statistical fluke. So why not 0.1? Or 0.01? Or even 0.000,001?
It's even less for buses that are only running during peak hours, which normally go from 6 am to 10 am and again between 3 pm to 7 pm. Those buses can drive for 4 hrs, being recharged during noon and be back in service in the afternoon. With some intelligent schedule, you can recharge each bus twice a day without interupting normal operation.
Even with coal plants, the total energy efficiency of electric cars is better than for diesel cars, as the coal plant doesn't experience that many partial-load situations as a diesel car (it's different with trains, as they travel longer distances without stop and don't experience that many traffic-jams with stop-and-go). And with each clean-up of electricity generation, all electric cars automatically get that clean-up too without any additional work on the cars themself, while each progress in clean-up for diesel cars is postponed until the cars are replaced or retrofitted. Also, technology to carbon sequestration or similar can easily be built into coal plants, but not in diesel cars. Thus it directly helps electric cars, but not diesel cars.
Purely battery operated busses have the same freedom of motion than diesel busses, and can act as 1:1 replacement, which makes the barrier of entry extremely low.
I wonder what happens next. Singularity?
Before that, the network was in the hand of the NSA. Apparently, the U.S. is fearing to lose access to some very important intelligence, if Huawei equipment is interspersed with Cisco and Nortel/Avaya.
It didn't hit Russia. It hit the Bering Sea. So it did hit Alaska in the same sense than it hit Russia.
That's why VoIP between providers gets more and more popular, and why numbering schemes like ENUM are used. It just takes time until all the phone switches and exchanges are upgraded or moved to VoIP. I've seen switches running since 30 years, which also have the capabilities of 30 years ago.
Lets for a moment ignore all flat billing plans or similar constructs.
Then you get billed for using a line for a specified amount of time. Each line has a base rate associated to it, and a billing clock, that ticks while you are using that line. You get then billed for the number of ticks during the call. If you are calling long distance or international, you have to use several lines connected together and get billed for the ticks of each of those lines (which then often have different rates). Between the providers, there are interconnects (mostly running the CCSS7 protocol) which also exchange the billing information. But as you can't know beforehand on which lines your call actually gets routed and what the actual total rate for your call will be, your provider offers you a plan with fixed rates for each type of call, hiding the actual pricing the company has with other companies. If you want to see the real cost incurred by your call, you would have to operate your own CCSS7 switch at home and have an CCSS7 link to your provider instead of a PSTN.
As a fusion reactor is by no means a perpetual motion engine, I would wager that laughing at perpetual motion cranks gets people to actually look into energy, mass, quantum field theory and physics in general and not to chase pipe dreams.
It's not that some people are better, faster or otherwise superior to others. It's just coincidence that for them, things played out. You can be as good, as fast, as superior to your peers be as you want. If you aren't lucky, this leads to nothing (and even the fact that you are good and fast is mainly luck). But if you believe that somehow, you earned your luck (e.g. you got it because of your merits), you are turning selfish, uncritical against yourself and discriminatory to others.
Let me present you a phone switch system I helped building a few years ago. It is the phone switch of an organization with locations in several counties. In each county, you have a local gateway connected to sometimes one, sometimes several S1 lines (depends on the number of calls usually going on there). Each S1 can operate 30 simultaneous calls, and each S1 has its own phone number. In each location, the organization has a local phone number, and you can dial through to individual stations via their 4 digit extension. All local phone switches are interconnected within that organization, thus internal calls never leave the system.
So far, so good.
If an S1 fails for what reason ever or all 30 connections are used, the location would be unreachable. Thus each S1 has at least one overflow destination, meaning another S1 (with another number associated to it). If you call the failed S1, your call will be automatically routed to another S1, completely transparent to you, and you will still reach the 4 digit extension you dialed, as the organization has a flat numbering plan, meaning each 4 digit extension exists only once within that organization, independent of their actual physical location. Thus the phone switch the other S1 is connected to (in whatever county or area code it is located) will automatically route your call to the extension intended by you without you even noticing that the physical call was routed via another county with another area code on a different S1 with another trunk number. You will not see that the original S1 has failed or was completely full. For you, your call has worked the way you intended it to work when you dialed that number.
Still o.k. with you?
And now, you have to simulate the same behavior for outgoing calls. The S1 you call out should assign to you the right area code and the right trunk code of your station, independently of the S1 the call is actually leaving the organization. Thus you have to overwrite the S1 trunk code, insert the right area code and the right trunk code additionally to your extension number, so people you call can get back to you via the number of the location you are actually working from. How do you do that without "misrepresenting caller IDs"?
A T1 trunk has 30 lines. Those lines are not physical numbers, just possible phone connections. Normally, the T1 lines are assigned round robin to the calls (you can also assign them linearly, meaning always use the lowest free line number). So whenever station 43 calls, and the last call was assigned to line 14 on the T1, the call of station 43 will now go out on line 15. And an incoming call to station 198 will then get line 16. It simply makes no sense to associate 30 fixed numbers to it, as there is no 1:1 relation to a physical station. A T1 has a single number. If I have 30 calls going through a T1, which numbers shall I assign to them?
As the phone switch the T1 is hooked up to has maybe 500 stations, how shall I distribute 30 numbers to them? And the phone switch has several T1s connected to it, because the company has several locations, how shall I assign the respective T1 number to them?
It gets even worse if the company has locations in several countries. It makes sense to have a call going to the U.S. leave the switch on a T1 in the U.S., because the call rates might be better, and the callback to that number will be cheaper if the called number gets back to an U.S. number. So I have to assign an U.S. number to a station which might be physically located in Ireland. Or, if you prefer the "real ID", I have to assign an Irish caller ID to a call leaving an U.S. located T1 connection.
The whole "no misrepresented caller ID" comes from the technically wrong idea that a line is fixed to a station, and thus the line somehow represents the station, which never was the case, not even in the times of manually connected calls on large switch boards 100 years ago.
I'm actually working with phone switches for a living. There are so many legitimate reasons to change the caller ID, that I really doubt you can come up with a working definition for "misrepresentation".
A hint: Just because the line a call goes out has a phone number assigned to it, it does not mean that the number of that line should ever be used in a call. It could be that this line is just the overflow line for the main line, and thus the number of the main line should be used. There is no warranty that a callback on that technical line number even works, as all calls should be directed to the main line's number. And with the somewhat screwed up U.S. phone number plan (each and every number has to have 10 digits, with 3 of them have to be the area code), you often need a lot of magic to even get a working caller ID. There are many local phone switches with more connected lines to it than the number plan for the trunk line allows. So you have to overbook the numbers your provider gave you.
It's somewhere in East Africa. It must be Muslim, otherwise the own world view would be wrong.
Only the communication was not ok. What the citizens voted on was the Electoral College, whose members then elect the President of the U.S.. Each state of the U.S. gets represented by two electors for the two senators (as in the Senate) and by as many members as it sends to the House. And how those members are elected locally, is determined by the states as they see fit. Most states use a winner-takes-it-all approach.
That by the special arithmetics of the current distribution of votes only two parties sent electors to the Electoral College at all, and that those numbers aren't proportional ot the absolute number of votes across all states, so be it. There is even a mathematical proof that no election system exists that in all cases elects the "right" candidate.
Voting is just one element of a democracy, albeit a very visual one. More important is the following question: How much blood has to be shed to get rid of an unwanted government? For the U.S., the answer is 'none'. Just wait for the next election day and then elect differently.
Victims of white suprematists in the U.S. by far outnumber the victims of Allah worshipping mideasterners. So why not have a movie about them?
Apparently, most people think differently and think you are somewhat off the tracks. Otherwise the box office numbers wouldn't be as good.