Oh no, you address that directly to the Dean of Admissions. Via snail mail. With a little online searching, you can probably CC to his/her home address just to be sure. Many counties in the U.S. have land records searchable online -- as long as said Dean owns real estate, he/she would be easy to find.
US colleges may be businesses, but they detest negative goodwill. I almost assure you she'd get a reply, heck, maybe even some assurance of someone addressing the problems.
She should send a detailed letter telling them why their admissions process is fucked up, giving the colon WTF as an example. Finish off saying that since they obviously prefer less read candidates, she won't miss them. Oh, and add "PS: a bit of usability testing goes a long way".
By "over the top" I mean that it should cost way more than it does for the level of service they provide. Shipping a $25k gold bar via registered priority mail from west coast to east coast costs less than $60, or 0.2% of the value. That's ridiculously cheap.
To put it bluntly: next time you have to ship 10lb of gold somewhere I'll gladly do it for you for the price of shipping 10lb of rock to the same destination. Good luck finding me afterwards!
The price has to factor in insurance costs. An insurer will insure such shipments for absurd fees (1% will seem minor) unless they can audit (and re-audit periodically) your security measures. The latter have to be implemented, and that costs real money. Such shipments are high risk even if you pretend they are not.
Of course you can get the reimbursement from your corporate umbrella insurance -- without depending on the carrier's insurance. Your insurer will promptly raise the rates by a factor of magnitude as soon as they learn what a sloppy job you pulled of in choosing your carrier.
Perhaps that's part of the problem with USPS: a vastly over-the-top type of service -- it can hardly be cheap. I do understand that such service is good to have, but it should come at a hefty price. I presume that plenty of private companies would be glad to ship $100K bars around for 1% of their value. USPS can't profitably offer that service for anything less, yet they do precisely that. All that government-backed-security costs lots of money. It's not free just because it's law, enforcement costs real dollars.
Re 2: Phones don't really have a physical on-off switch that disconnects the battery from the electronics. The main CPU is always working, although when the phone is OFF, it's in a sleep mode, and a keypress awakens it from it via an interrupt. It'd be quite trivial to have almost any phone, even a non-smartphone, have a mode that can be enabled when the phone is on the network, that will make it only pretend that it's off. It'd then keep the baseband chip running and transmit what the microphone picks up, even though the display is OFF and it looks like the phone is dead.
Of course in many cases it'd be trivial to detect: not only the phone could get noticeably warm, but you could overhear the transmitter with most household electronics that have an amplifier and a speaker. They are good RF envelope demodulators.
Theoretically you're right, but in practice it's solid bullshit when you think of voice-bandwidth tranmissions. Periodic GPS updates can sneak by undetected without a receiver and protocol analyzer, but voice transmission is easy to detect with very low tech.
It's simple to check whether the phone is really transmitting with enough bandwidth to handle voice data. GSM protocol is very, very quiet -- a dormant phone is supposed to check in with the base station only periodically. Put it next to an amplified speaker or somesuch where you'll hear the buzzing (RF envelope) when the transmitter is on. See, or rather, hear, for yourself.
I use Sony Noise Canceling headphones at work, and they are great for listening to my Tracfone's transmitted signal envelope. I hear a short bzzt every couple of minutes. Were this phone transmitting anything other that periodic GPS updates, I'd know about it, instantly. Heck, if someone calls me, I know about it before the phone even rings.
I presume other digital cell systems behave similarly. They won't be transmitting all the time or else the battery will die a quick death. When they do transmit, you can easily know about.
There's no money in such destructive viruses/malware, and it's really marginal. The malware you're most likely to experience is stuff that either extorts money, or steals credentials / personal info. There is a big market for such malware, and lots of money to be made running it.
How on Earth could that be insightful? The chipset needs all the hardware for a 3G connection. They won't be putting any of that in an avionics package. As for Ethernet: I'd presume avionics uses TTEthernet or somesuch -- this requires, AFAIK, custom hardware to access the wire; a bog-standard MII exposed by Sandy Bridge won't cut it IIRC.
I personally would like to see NSF's budget being slowly increased to $100B over, say, the next 10 years. The DoD budget can be slashed to compensate, without any serious loss.
Every worthwhile industrial communication bus standard has the master implementation that's patent encumbered. In terms of TCP/IP, think of having to have a license to operate an ssh, telnet, http or ftp server. Only the clients would be free.
Never mind that actually implementing almost any popular industrial bus requires purchasing about $2000 worth of standards, and getting your brain to hurt while trying to understand the abstract descriptions offered. The most convoluted RFC is a breeze to understand compared to say IEC 61158.
My definition of the great unwashed includes, say, welfare moms. They are the payees, not the payers. I'd say that anyone who actually pays income taxes is outside the "great unwashed" set. I specifically exclude social security/medicare/medicaid payments from this discussion, I'm only talking about what's your net tax on IRS form 1040.
Nope. A probe of a given mass will shed a fixed energy as it exits the solar system. It won't ever shed more energy than that. Sure, the velocity will be decreasing, but the decrease decays, and eventually it's zero -- you've paid the exit ticket and you're free.
Any sane porn search engine or posting site out there won't include underage images/movies when you use the teen keyword. It will include -- you guess -- pics of 18 and 19 year olds. Like it should. Stop being so dramatic.
And the next thing is that not only is it denied by the government, but the one of the dozen you mention is suddenly out of a job, without security clearance, and pretty much a persona non grata.
Yup. A "beam" is basically a bunch of multipliers and accumulators on a chip. It's still hardware to be sure, but nothing moving besides electrons:)
And I should have said that the beam is large enough -- due to finite antenna size on the satellite -- that it'd easily cover everyone in your camp in a remote area. Even if you had lookouts posted miles away, or a roving party.
Genus, the TerreStar's phone, is a hybrid phone, thankyouverymuch. Of course it has only sat coverage where their bird can point its beams (mostly North America), but it's hardly "big and clunky".
At orbital speeds, banging into anything pretty much implies destruction. Besides, the orbit is so relatively empty anyway, that you don't need to assume you'd ever bang into anything. As for launcher complexity: how the heck can you make them any simpler than SpaceX's launchers? You can't. They are as simple as they get. All that complexity is simply so that it can lift off and reach orbit, no more no less.
What's more, TerreStar's Genus does use a terrestrial network when it's available. It only switches to satellite when there are no cell towers in range.
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Oh no, you address that directly to the Dean of Admissions. Via snail mail. With a little online searching, you can probably CC to his/her home address just to be sure. Many counties in the U.S. have land records searchable online -- as long as said Dean owns real estate, he/she would be easy to find.
US colleges may be businesses, but they detest negative goodwill. I almost assure you she'd get a reply, heck, maybe even some assurance of someone addressing the problems.
She should send a detailed letter telling them why their admissions process is fucked up, giving the colon WTF as an example. Finish off saying that since they obviously prefer less read candidates, she won't miss them. Oh, and add "PS: a bit of usability testing goes a long way".
By "over the top" I mean that it should cost way more than it does for the level of service they provide. Shipping a $25k gold bar via registered priority mail from west coast to east coast costs less than $60, or 0.2% of the value. That's ridiculously cheap.
To put it bluntly: next time you have to ship 10lb of gold somewhere I'll gladly do it for you for the price of shipping 10lb of rock to the same destination. Good luck finding me afterwards!
The price has to factor in insurance costs. An insurer will insure such shipments for absurd fees (1% will seem minor) unless they can audit (and re-audit periodically) your security measures. The latter have to be implemented, and that costs real money. Such shipments are high risk even if you pretend they are not.
Of course you can get the reimbursement from your corporate umbrella insurance -- without depending on the carrier's insurance. Your insurer will promptly raise the rates by a factor of magnitude as soon as they learn what a sloppy job you pulled of in choosing your carrier.
+1 informative. The document linked by the parent is very interesting.
Perhaps that's part of the problem with USPS: a vastly over-the-top type of service -- it can hardly be cheap. I do understand that such service is good to have, but it should come at a hefty price. I presume that plenty of private companies would be glad to ship $100K bars around for 1% of their value. USPS can't profitably offer that service for anything less, yet they do precisely that. All that government-backed-security costs lots of money. It's not free just because it's law, enforcement costs real dollars.
Very true.
:)
Re 2: Phones don't really have a physical on-off switch that disconnects the battery from the electronics. The main CPU is always working, although when the phone is OFF, it's in a sleep mode, and a keypress awakens it from it via an interrupt. It'd be quite trivial to have almost any phone, even a non-smartphone, have a mode that can be enabled when the phone is on the network, that will make it only pretend that it's off. It'd then keep the baseband chip running and transmit what the microphone picks up, even though the display is OFF and it looks like the phone is dead.
Of course in many cases it'd be trivial to detect: not only the phone could get noticeably warm, but you could overhear the transmitter with most household electronics that have an amplifier and a speaker. They are good RF envelope demodulators.
Theoretically you're right, but in practice it's solid bullshit when you think of voice-bandwidth tranmissions. Periodic GPS updates can sneak by undetected without a receiver and protocol analyzer, but voice transmission is easy to detect with very low tech.
It's simple to check whether the phone is really transmitting with enough bandwidth to handle voice data. GSM protocol is very, very quiet -- a dormant phone is supposed to check in with the base station only periodically. Put it next to an amplified speaker or somesuch where you'll hear the buzzing (RF envelope) when the transmitter is on. See, or rather, hear, for yourself.
I use Sony Noise Canceling headphones at work, and they are great for listening to my Tracfone's transmitted signal envelope. I hear a short bzzt every couple of minutes. Were this phone transmitting anything other that periodic GPS updates, I'd know about it, instantly. Heck, if someone calls me, I know about it before the phone even rings.
I presume other digital cell systems behave similarly. They won't be transmitting all the time or else the battery will die a quick death. When they do transmit, you can easily know about.
There's no money in such destructive viruses/malware, and it's really marginal. The malware you're most likely to experience is stuff that either extorts money, or steals credentials / personal info. There is a big market for such malware, and lots of money to be made running it.
How on Earth could that be insightful? The chipset needs all the hardware for a 3G connection. They won't be putting any of that in an avionics package. As for Ethernet: I'd presume avionics uses TTEthernet or somesuch -- this requires, AFAIK, custom hardware to access the wire; a bog-standard MII exposed by Sandy Bridge won't cut it IIRC.
They most likely have a volume site license, and they didn't have to do anything special -- just installed it and that's it. 100% legal.
I personally would like to see NSF's budget being slowly increased to $100B over, say, the next 10 years. The DoD budget can be slashed to compensate, without any serious loss.
Heck, more to the point: if it was your typical industry focus group, it'd likely be not only patented to the brim, but they'd chase off people who want to make their standard more popular by making, say, an open source implementation.
Every worthwhile industrial communication bus standard has the master implementation that's patent encumbered. In terms of TCP/IP, think of having to have a license to operate an ssh, telnet, http or ftp server. Only the clients would be free.
Never mind that actually implementing almost any popular industrial bus requires purchasing about $2000 worth of standards, and getting your brain to hurt while trying to understand the abstract descriptions offered. The most convoluted RFC is a breeze to understand compared to say IEC 61158.
My definition of the great unwashed includes, say, welfare moms. They are the payees, not the payers. I'd say that anyone who actually pays income taxes is outside the "great unwashed" set. I specifically exclude social security/medicare/medicaid payments from this discussion, I'm only talking about what's your net tax on IRS form 1040.
Nope. A probe of a given mass will shed a fixed energy as it exits the solar system. It won't ever shed more energy than that. Sure, the velocity will be decreasing, but the decrease decays, and eventually it's zero -- you've paid the exit ticket and you're free.
Any sane porn search engine or posting site out there won't include underage images/movies when you use the teen keyword. It will include -- you guess -- pics of 18 and 19 year olds. Like it should. Stop being so dramatic.
Since the fashion models are clothed, there's no sex.
I beg to disagree (NSFW).
And the next thing is that not only is it denied by the government, but the one of the dozen you mention is suddenly out of a job, without security clearance, and pretty much a persona non grata.
Yup. A "beam" is basically a bunch of multipliers and accumulators on a chip. It's still hardware to be sure, but nothing moving besides electrons :)
And I should have said that the beam is large enough -- due to finite antenna size on the satellite -- that it'd easily cover everyone in your camp in a remote area. Even if you had lookouts posted miles away, or a roving party.
Genus, the TerreStar's phone, is a hybrid phone, thankyouverymuch. Of course it has only sat coverage where their bird can point its beams (mostly North America), but it's hardly "big and clunky".
Not so fast: TerreStar's bird has no coverage outside of North America, for all practical purposes. South Pole: forget it.
At orbital speeds, banging into anything pretty much implies destruction. Besides, the orbit is so relatively empty anyway, that you don't need to assume you'd ever bang into anything. As for launcher complexity: how the heck can you make them any simpler than SpaceX's launchers? You can't. They are as simple as they get. All that complexity is simply so that it can lift off and reach orbit, no more no less.
What's more, TerreStar's Genus does use a terrestrial network when it's available. It only switches to satellite when there are no cell towers in range.