If it works as advertised, it violates the law of conservation of energy, so its energy efficiency can be infinite. (it produces a force with no reaction mass.
OK, I'm not a physicist and it's been a long time since my physics classes, but I don't see why mass is important at all. Mass and energy are interchangeable by E=mc^2. Electric motors produce motion without losing any mass, so I don't really see why it's impossible for there to be some way of producing thrust in a vacuum using only energy. Just because all our prior methods of producing thrust in space depend on Newton's 3rd law doesn't mean that it has to be that way. While there may be no mass escaping from this device, it absolutely is consuming energy. Where does that go? We already know we can produce thrust with lasers, which are pure energy; we've even talked about making micro-miniature space probes and sending them to Alpha Centauri with a big laser, and the whole principle of solar sails rests on thrust provided by pure energy.
Yes, it's just you. Facebook is hugely popular among people like those you mention. If you're not like that, and you don't want to read their political articles about FEMA death camps and how Hillary is a secret Satanist and how important Safe Spaces and Trigger Warnings are, and you don't like all the news articles Facebook itself presents to you in its feeds, then maybe you shouldn't be using Facebook.
Wow, that sounds pretty sad. I haven't had *that* much luck dating, but I can certainly say I've met plenty of decent women, things just didn't work out for us to date. You might want to look at yourself if you haven't met a single decent member of the opposite sex.
I should hope that if we figure out our biology enough to achieve biological immortality, we'd also figure out how to finally conquer those STDs. Of course, it probably won't be a single holy grail achievement, it'll probably come in stages, with each advance bringing longer lifespan and less age-related degeneration and disease, so maybe we'll have longer lifespans (like 150-200) for a while but still not have figured out the STD problem completely.
I don't think that exists in real life. Interestingly, I've seen several women on dating sites write in their profiles something like "no men in law enforcement; been there, done that". I've never seen women specifically exclude any other professions like that.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to launch some radio relays into space and then use smaller, cheaper ground based dishes to communicate with those relays? This would also eliminate the problem with the Sun being in the way (position one relay far away from the Earth so that you can beam the signal around the Sun).
I'm old enough now that, when feeling particularly sour I said something about not liking the music now, the attitudes now, etc. And in the next sentence, I admitted that my father felt that way about current times when I was in my 20s.
Assuming you're around my age (40s), your father was wrong. The music of the 70s-80s was the best. The music being made now is crap, at least if you're talking about commercialized stuff. (There's a lot of good independent stuff though.)
The world has changed and I don't fit in quite so well anymore.
Oh please. The nice thing about modern times and the internet is that you don't need to "fit in" any more; you can live in your own secluded subculture. There's no shortage of online communities (and offline ones too: see meetup.com) catering to any eclectic interest you might have. You really do need to live in or near a metro area to take advantage of much of this though if you want any in-person interactions with others of your subculture.
Well with an effectively infinite lifespan, and a body that never ages, it shouldn't be that hard to find a companion at some point. You might have to go a decade single, but over a 1000-year lifespan before you tragically get killed by a falling piano, that's not much.
you still have infinity more years. What will you do for the next thousand? the thousand after that?
You don't have "infinity more years". The chances of you living more than a few thousand is not that great, even with biological immortality. At some point, something is going to happen to you: either you're going to have an accident, or someone is going to kill you. Or you could die of a new disease that they don't figure out how to cure in time. Sure, auto accidents will become more rare in coming years thanks to self-driving cars, but people die in accidents all the time, and there's always murders, terrorist attacks, etc. Your chances of dying this way in a 100-year life are not that high, but change it to an unlimited lifetime, with a 30-year-old body (so you don't spend your older years just sitting around the house), and now your chances of dying by accident or murder become 100%.
How so? The other choice is at least as bad, and just perpetuates the problem.
The best choice, IMO, is to vote third-party; if enough people did that, they wouldn't be "third parties" any more. But I can understand someone voting for Trump just to shake things up like a bull in a china shop.
What we really need is an all-new system that allows multiple parties to exist, enabled by a voting system that supports this (i.e., anything besides first-past-the-post).
Send six women to Mars and see how long before they start trying to kill one another.
This is completely unfair and stereotypical.
If you send female scientists, I really don't think there will be a problem.
However, according to my wife, if you send women who work in law offices, you can absolutely expect murder to happen, or at the very least a lot of fighting and back-stabbing. And from what I've seen, you can probably expect similar results if you send women who work in HR.
If you were talking about a normal, competitive industry like cars, you'd be correct: reliability costs money, and unreliability costs customers. Detroit knows that lesson all too well. Sell someone an unreliable car, and they'll badmouth it and start looking for another car in the same price range with a better reliability reputation. This is why Japanese brands have commanded higher prices than similar American cars for a long time; it takes a lot of time (esp. in the car industry since people keep their cars for years) to fix your reputation. It's even more pronounced in other markets where the products cost less and people don't keep them as long (cars are the second-most expensive items consumers typically purchase, behind houses).
Microsoft does not operate in a competitive industry. If someone thinks Windows 10 is unreliable, what are they going to do? They could buy a Mac, but those are much more expensive than Windows machines; you're not going to get a Mac for $300 or $400. And the Mac won't so easily run their Windows software, unless they run it in a VM (like with Parallels) but then they're still going to have the same unreliability problems since that's really Windows. They could run Linux, but there again you have the software compatibility problem, and on top of that most people don't even know what Linux is. In the enterprise space, it's really worse because even though they have professional IT, those IT pros only know Windows (you'll have to lay off your whole IT department and start from scratch to switch OSes), and they run all kinds of crappy "enterprise" software that only runs on Windows.
So, since the customers aren't going anywhere (except holding out with their older Windows versions as long as possible), what incentive exactly does MS have to invest in reliability? None. It's really a waste of money for them, and hurts their profits. It's better for them to make Windows as shoddy as possible to save money (while not making it completely non-functional because then they can suffer class-action lawsuits, returns, etc.), and keep profitability high while letting the customers suffer with unreliability.
Yeah, I addressed that: Netflix instant-play doesn't carry the stuff Redbox does; Redbox stuff is fairly recent releases, whereas Netflix's instant-play stuff is usually older stuff and TV shows. Netflix disc is certainly cheaper than Redbox if you watch at least 5 or so movies a month, but it's not as convenient if you want to be able to grab something and watch it that night. The other online stuff is what competes with Redbox: newer releases, and you can select it and watch it immediately. But it's a lot more expensive, and you're really paying for that convenience.
It's one of many, many examples where the cost of getting the product to customers is not really related to the price of the product. With online viewing of more current movies (Neflix doesn't usually have Redbox's movies available on instant-play), you're really paying extra for the convenience, and they price it that way. People who can afford high-speed internet can afford to pay more for watching movies online, so that's how they're charged. People who use Redbox are usually in a lower socioeconomic stratus (hence you usually see Redboxes at Walmart), so prices are lower there.
The main customer who will not abandon Windows no matter what are businesses (esp. large ones) and governments. The US government just loves MS (plus HP Enterprise); even if all their individual customers and most businesses left them, they could just jack up their prices to $1M per computer and the US government will happily pay that.
I think you are creating generalities from your specific situation.
No, I specifically said it varies; did you miss that? You even quoted it. I also said that addressing is controlled by local governments, so places with alleyways are obviously going to be handled differently.
AFAYK. But it's not that way in real life. There is no "default". You have to know.
No, you'd don't "have to know". Enter some lat/lon coordinates into Google Maps, and it'll show you a location on the map. It doesn't ask you for your datum. That's because there IS a default.
That's funny, because I can get my location in any number of datums using GPS. Wikipedia isn't always right..
Oh, please. These businesses and governments have been threatening to move to Linux for years and years; they never do. They only say this so they can get a discount from Microsoft when they're negotiating their license costs.
Show me a significant number of companies, or any really large companies, that have actually made a move to Linux. We're all familiar with a small handful of standout examples: City of Munich, Ernie Ball, etc., but these are exceptions, not the norm.
I'd really love it if businesses and governments all moved to Linux, but after everything I've seen about how these organizations work, I'll believe it can happen when I actually see it, and I expect to see pigs fly first. The morons running these places don't know anything besides MS, so they aren't going to change no matter what. It's entirely to MS's advantage to screw over their customers for more profit, because these customers aren't going anywhere.
I live on a corner. My "address" is on one street, but if I walk out the side door I'm on the wrong street from what my address says.
This is resolved with standards. A building can only have one address, so in the case of a building on a corner, you have to pick one. This probably varies by country or state, but I think in many places in the US, residential houses' addresses are determined by which road the driveway enters from. I lived in a house like that years ago: the front door faced street A, but the driveway was on street B, so that was the house's address. I don't really see the problem here; it's not like the two are very far apart.
If you're coming out of a larger buildings with faces on two non-contiguous streets, and want a roboUber to pick you up, you should be able to just give it your GPS coordinates. (Also, I wouldn't be surprised if in large cities, buildings like that don't frequently have multiple street addresses that are resolvable by GPS, but I don't really know. Again, this probably varies a lot from place to place, since addressing is controlled by local government.)
How do you fix the "coordinate" problem of having ten different coordinate systems in use just in one place?
Um, the default? Almost everything is WGS-84 AFAIK. My car GPS lets me enter GPS coordinates, and it doesn't ask me for a datum. According to the Wikipedia article for WGS-84, it is the datum used by the GPS system itself, so logically that's the one you should use. Again according to the article, it's consistent worldwide to an accuracy of +- 1m. For building addresses, that's far more than sufficient resolution, esp. if you're just worried about where some robocar is going to pick you up. If you can't walk an extra 6 feet to deal with an inaccurate address, you're not going to be taking a roboUber anywhere.
(Here's one I really love. I order something online and the vendor tells me that my address doesn't exist. I've lived here for 20 years, I get mail and packages here all the time. Unfortunately, the shipping program he's using has "fixed" my address and it doesn't appear in his database, so my address doesn't exist.)
Does your address exist according to the USPS? That's the real authority there. I've seen that before, where people claim their address is such-and-such, but the USPS does not recognize that as an address and so will not deliver to it. Just because Google Maps thinks it's a real place doesn't mean the USPS does. To check, you need to go to usps.com and use their address verification tool there. If it doesn't come up there (along with a 9-digit ZIP code), then you need to contact your local postmaster and have the issue fixed. However you say you get mail there all the time (I'm assuming USPS when you say "mail"), so likely it is in there, and the vendor is using some other 3rd-party address database which is incomplete. I'm not sure what the real problem here is without more information but it sounds like your vendor has some shitty 3rd-party software. My recommendation is to go here: https://tools.usps.com/go/ZipL... and check your address. It'll correct your address if you're entering it weirdly, and will put it into the USPS's preferred standardized format (no punctuation, correct city name, etc.). Use that for your orders always. If the vendor has a problem with that, then it's the vendor's fault. Point them to the USPS's verifier if they disagree. How many vendors have a problem with this anyway? One or a lot?
Why is it that every time I make a comment about Seattle, referencing posts like yours here (I haven't actually been to Seattle, much less lived there and tried to sign up for ISP service), some Seattle person chimes in telling me that it's all lies and they have no trouble getting high-speed internet service there?
Slashdot Mirror
If it works as advertised, it violates the law of conservation of energy, so its energy efficiency can be infinite.
(it produces a force with no reaction mass.
OK, I'm not a physicist and it's been a long time since my physics classes, but I don't see why mass is important at all. Mass and energy are interchangeable by E=mc^2. Electric motors produce motion without losing any mass, so I don't really see why it's impossible for there to be some way of producing thrust in a vacuum using only energy. Just because all our prior methods of producing thrust in space depend on Newton's 3rd law doesn't mean that it has to be that way. While there may be no mass escaping from this device, it absolutely is consuming energy. Where does that go? We already know we can produce thrust with lasers, which are pure energy; we've even talked about making micro-miniature space probes and sending them to Alpha Centauri with a big laser, and the whole principle of solar sails rests on thrust provided by pure energy.
Yes, it's just you. Facebook is hugely popular among people like those you mention. If you're not like that, and you don't want to read their political articles about FEMA death camps and how Hillary is a secret Satanist and how important Safe Spaces and Trigger Warnings are, and you don't like all the news articles Facebook itself presents to you in its feeds, then maybe you shouldn't be using Facebook.
Wow, that sounds pretty sad. I haven't had *that* much luck dating, but I can certainly say I've met plenty of decent women, things just didn't work out for us to date. You might want to look at yourself if you haven't met a single decent member of the opposite sex.
I should hope that if we figure out our biology enough to achieve biological immortality, we'd also figure out how to finally conquer those STDs. Of course, it probably won't be a single holy grail achievement, it'll probably come in stages, with each advance bringing longer lifespan and less age-related degeneration and disease, so maybe we'll have longer lifespans (like 150-200) for a while but still not have figured out the STD problem completely.
Well if it'll never happen under this system, then I'd rather see the system collapse entirely so we can get to that state.
How many female used-car salespeople are there in the US? Why isn't there a big push to increase this number?
How many female landscapers are there in the US? Why isn't there a big push to increase this number?
And now you see how if you go too far left-wing, it wraps around and now you're in right-wing territory.
A male nerd who is good at talking to girls?
Iron Man was pretty good at this one.
A cop who is happily married?
I don't think that exists in real life. Interestingly, I've seen several women on dating sites write in their profiles something like "no men in law enforcement; been there, done that". I've never seen women specifically exclude any other professions like that.
Wouldn't it make more sense for them to launch some radio relays into space and then use smaller, cheaper ground based dishes to communicate with those relays? This would also eliminate the problem with the Sun being in the way (position one relay far away from the Earth so that you can beam the signal around the Sun).
I'm old enough now that, when feeling particularly sour I said something about not liking the music now, the attitudes now, etc. And in the next sentence, I admitted that my father felt that way about current times when I was in my 20s.
Assuming you're around my age (40s), your father was wrong. The music of the 70s-80s was the best. The music being made now is crap, at least if you're talking about commercialized stuff. (There's a lot of good independent stuff though.)
The world has changed and I don't fit in quite so well anymore.
Oh please. The nice thing about modern times and the internet is that you don't need to "fit in" any more; you can live in your own secluded subculture. There's no shortage of online communities (and offline ones too: see meetup.com) catering to any eclectic interest you might have. You really do need to live in or near a metro area to take advantage of much of this though if you want any in-person interactions with others of your subculture.
Well with an effectively infinite lifespan, and a body that never ages, it shouldn't be that hard to find a companion at some point. You might have to go a decade single, but over a 1000-year lifespan before you tragically get killed by a falling piano, that's not much.
you still have infinity more years. What will you do for the next thousand? the thousand after that?
You don't have "infinity more years". The chances of you living more than a few thousand is not that great, even with biological immortality. At some point, something is going to happen to you: either you're going to have an accident, or someone is going to kill you. Or you could die of a new disease that they don't figure out how to cure in time. Sure, auto accidents will become more rare in coming years thanks to self-driving cars, but people die in accidents all the time, and there's always murders, terrorist attacks, etc. Your chances of dying this way in a 100-year life are not that high, but change it to an unlimited lifetime, with a 30-year-old body (so you don't spend your older years just sitting around the house), and now your chances of dying by accident or murder become 100%.
How so? The other choice is at least as bad, and just perpetuates the problem.
The best choice, IMO, is to vote third-party; if enough people did that, they wouldn't be "third parties" any more. But I can understand someone voting for Trump just to shake things up like a bull in a china shop.
What we really need is an all-new system that allows multiple parties to exist, enabled by a voting system that supports this (i.e., anything besides first-past-the-post).
Send six women to Mars and see how long before they start trying to kill one another.
This is completely unfair and stereotypical.
If you send female scientists, I really don't think there will be a problem.
However, according to my wife, if you send women who work in law offices, you can absolutely expect murder to happen, or at the very least a lot of fighting and back-stabbing. And from what I've seen, you can probably expect similar results if you send women who work in HR.
You're completely wrong here.
If you were talking about a normal, competitive industry like cars, you'd be correct: reliability costs money, and unreliability costs customers. Detroit knows that lesson all too well. Sell someone an unreliable car, and they'll badmouth it and start looking for another car in the same price range with a better reliability reputation. This is why Japanese brands have commanded higher prices than similar American cars for a long time; it takes a lot of time (esp. in the car industry since people keep their cars for years) to fix your reputation. It's even more pronounced in other markets where the products cost less and people don't keep them as long (cars are the second-most expensive items consumers typically purchase, behind houses).
Microsoft does not operate in a competitive industry. If someone thinks Windows 10 is unreliable, what are they going to do? They could buy a Mac, but those are much more expensive than Windows machines; you're not going to get a Mac for $300 or $400. And the Mac won't so easily run their Windows software, unless they run it in a VM (like with Parallels) but then they're still going to have the same unreliability problems since that's really Windows. They could run Linux, but there again you have the software compatibility problem, and on top of that most people don't even know what Linux is. In the enterprise space, it's really worse because even though they have professional IT, those IT pros only know Windows (you'll have to lay off your whole IT department and start from scratch to switch OSes), and they run all kinds of crappy "enterprise" software that only runs on Windows.
So, since the customers aren't going anywhere (except holding out with their older Windows versions as long as possible), what incentive exactly does MS have to invest in reliability? None. It's really a waste of money for them, and hurts their profits. It's better for them to make Windows as shoddy as possible to save money (while not making it completely non-functional because then they can suffer class-action lawsuits, returns, etc.), and keep profitability high while letting the customers suffer with unreliability.
So, since the
Yeah, I addressed that: Netflix instant-play doesn't carry the stuff Redbox does; Redbox stuff is fairly recent releases, whereas Netflix's instant-play stuff is usually older stuff and TV shows. Netflix disc is certainly cheaper than Redbox if you watch at least 5 or so movies a month, but it's not as convenient if you want to be able to grab something and watch it that night. The other online stuff is what competes with Redbox: newer releases, and you can select it and watch it immediately. But it's a lot more expensive, and you're really paying for that convenience.
I don't know about you, but I have better things to do with my time than go on interviews for jobs I have no intention of taking.
Even if you change your mind and decide you'd like to procreate, good luck finding a decent female to do so with in this society.
It's one of many, many examples where the cost of getting the product to customers is not really related to the price of the product. With online viewing of more current movies (Neflix doesn't usually have Redbox's movies available on instant-play), you're really paying extra for the convenience, and they price it that way. People who can afford high-speed internet can afford to pay more for watching movies online, so that's how they're charged. People who use Redbox are usually in a lower socioeconomic stratus (hence you usually see Redboxes at Walmart), so prices are lower there.
The main customer who will not abandon Windows no matter what are businesses (esp. large ones) and governments. The US government just loves MS (plus HP Enterprise); even if all their individual customers and most businesses left them, they could just jack up their prices to $1M per computer and the US government will happily pay that.
I think you are creating generalities from your specific situation.
No, I specifically said it varies; did you miss that? You even quoted it. I also said that addressing is controlled by local governments, so places with alleyways are obviously going to be handled differently.
AFAYK. But it's not that way in real life. There is no "default". You have to know.
No, you'd don't "have to know". Enter some lat/lon coordinates into Google Maps, and it'll show you a location on the map. It doesn't ask you for your datum. That's because there IS a default.
That's funny, because I can get my location in any number of datums using GPS. Wikipedia isn't always right..
And I'm supposed to believe you over a cited article? If you think it's wrong, then go correct it. From a little bit of Googling, what I've read supports Wikipedia:
http://www.gpsinformation.org/...
http://gis.stackexchange.com/q...
The only reason anyone uses other datums is because they have old maps that are based on them, not because they're better in any way (they're not).
Oh, please. These businesses and governments have been threatening to move to Linux for years and years; they never do. They only say this so they can get a discount from Microsoft when they're negotiating their license costs.
Show me a significant number of companies, or any really large companies, that have actually made a move to Linux. We're all familiar with a small handful of standout examples: City of Munich, Ernie Ball, etc., but these are exceptions, not the norm.
I'd really love it if businesses and governments all moved to Linux, but after everything I've seen about how these organizations work, I'll believe it can happen when I actually see it, and I expect to see pigs fly first. The morons running these places don't know anything besides MS, so they aren't going to change no matter what. It's entirely to MS's advantage to screw over their customers for more profit, because these customers aren't going anywhere.
I dread to think what that update will break.
I don't; I look forward to it with glee. I'm having a lot of fun watching Microsoft users being tormented by Windows 10.
I live on a corner. My "address" is on one street, but if I walk out the side door I'm on the wrong street from what my address says.
This is resolved with standards. A building can only have one address, so in the case of a building on a corner, you have to pick one. This probably varies by country or state, but I think in many places in the US, residential houses' addresses are determined by which road the driveway enters from. I lived in a house like that years ago: the front door faced street A, but the driveway was on street B, so that was the house's address. I don't really see the problem here; it's not like the two are very far apart.
If you're coming out of a larger buildings with faces on two non-contiguous streets, and want a roboUber to pick you up, you should be able to just give it your GPS coordinates. (Also, I wouldn't be surprised if in large cities, buildings like that don't frequently have multiple street addresses that are resolvable by GPS, but I don't really know. Again, this probably varies a lot from place to place, since addressing is controlled by local government.)
How do you fix the "coordinate" problem of having ten different coordinate systems in use just in one place?
Um, the default? Almost everything is WGS-84 AFAIK. My car GPS lets me enter GPS coordinates, and it doesn't ask me for a datum. According to the Wikipedia article for WGS-84, it is the datum used by the GPS system itself, so logically that's the one you should use. Again according to the article, it's consistent worldwide to an accuracy of +- 1m. For building addresses, that's far more than sufficient resolution, esp. if you're just worried about where some robocar is going to pick you up. If you can't walk an extra 6 feet to deal with an inaccurate address, you're not going to be taking a roboUber anywhere.
(Here's one I really love. I order something online and the vendor tells me that my address doesn't exist. I've lived here for 20 years, I get mail and packages here all the time. Unfortunately, the shipping program he's using has "fixed" my address and it doesn't appear in his database, so my address doesn't exist.)
Does your address exist according to the USPS? That's the real authority there. I've seen that before, where people claim their address is such-and-such, but the USPS does not recognize that as an address and so will not deliver to it. Just because Google Maps thinks it's a real place doesn't mean the USPS does. To check, you need to go to usps.com and use their address verification tool there. If it doesn't come up there (along with a 9-digit ZIP code), then you need to contact your local postmaster and have the issue fixed. However you say you get mail there all the time (I'm assuming USPS when you say "mail"), so likely it is in there, and the vendor is using some other 3rd-party address database which is incomplete. I'm not sure what the real problem here is without more information but it sounds like your vendor has some shitty 3rd-party software. My recommendation is to go here:
https://tools.usps.com/go/ZipL...
and check your address. It'll correct your address if you're entering it weirdly, and will put it into the USPS's preferred standardized format (no punctuation, correct city name, etc.). Use that for your orders always. If the vendor has a problem with that, then it's the vendor's fault. Point them to the USPS's verifier if they disagree. How many vendors have a problem with this anyway? One or a lot?
Why is it that every time I make a comment about Seattle, referencing posts like yours here (I haven't actually been to Seattle, much less lived there and tried to sign up for ISP service), some Seattle person chimes in telling me that it's all lies and they have no trouble getting high-speed internet service there?