Wow, that sucks. Hopefully they kept the $5 plan, and just don't publicize it.
I see that their other option is $0.20 for a single text, and $0.30 for a single photo/video message.
I think we can assume that AT&T does not lose money on any of these services. So since a text message is about 1000x smaller than a photo/video message, that means it should really cost less than $0.0003 per text...33 texts for a penny...3300 texts for a dollar.
*uck AT&T & Verizon's 20 bucks a month for texting, that's all I'm saying
I dunno about Verizon, but AT&T charges me $5 a month for 200 SMS or MMS messages.
If someone uses their unlimited service for short text messages, then yes, that person needs to wake up and realize that they can "text" practically for free using other apps.
But if you use the $5 service to send mostly video & photo messages, it makes more sense. Super convenient too.
Or...buy yourself a vibrating bluetooth wristband.
Or...get good enough at your job that a) there is rarely any reason to call you, and b) they can't afford your rates except in a world-exploding emergency, or c) you can simply refuse to be on-call at night in any situation whatsoever.
I remember a middle-school science experiment many many years ago.
We heated an empty 1-gallon steel fuel can over a bunsen burner, then screwed on the cap, and turned off the heat.
As the can cooled, the internal pressure of the heated air inside dropped, and atmospheric pressure started to crush the can. By the end of the class period, it was a crumpled mess.
Rule of thumb: If an NFL linebacker can crush a container by standing on it, then the atmosphere alone will crush that container when it is "full" of vacuum.
And the steel can that we used in that experiment was ~100 times stronger than a foil-wrapped aero-lattice.
Plus, that is the energy consumption for the entire country, including industry, government, military, etc. If you look at consumer/domestic energy usage, electrical becomes a much much smaller.
I don't have the detailed numbers for France, but if you Google "global per capita energy consumption" you will see that it is more than half that of the US, so I'll use the US as a close-enough example.
The average US household consumes roughly 10,000 kWh of electrical energy per year.
1L of petrol, jet fuel, diesel, or heating oil equals approximately 10 kWh of energy.
The average US household operates at least 2 vehicles, which each consume about 500 gallons (1900 liters) of petrol per year. 1900L * 2 vehicles * 10 kWh/L = 38,000 kWh of energy. In other words, roughly 4x the electrical usage for that household.
And that's just the beginning.
Flying for business or pleasure? A roundtrip from LAX-JFK (5000 miles) burns 250L of fuel per passenger = 2500 kWh. Flying LAX-SYD? 7500 kWh per passenger. Yes...the energy consumption from ONE passenger's US-Australia trip, approaches the electrical usage of a US household for an entire YEAR.
Heat a home with oil or gas? Roughly 10% of US households (mostly in the Northeast) burn an average 750 gallons of heating oil each, every year. That's another 28,500 kWh, about 3 times the electrical usage.
Also more than half of US households run their most energy-intensive appliances -- water heater, furnace, range, oven, dryer -- on natural gas, not electricity.
If you want to save energy: fly less, drive less, carpool, turn down your thermostat, dress appropriately for hot or cold temperatures, and insulate your house. For most folks, electrical consumption is the last thing to consider.
France gets about 80% of its power from nuclear energy and is a major exporter of nuclear technology.
No. France generates almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Not its overall power.
I'm sick of this consistently sloppy reporting about energy usage in the mass media. And sick of the idiots who think that electricity consumption is the big issue (oh noes! we need solar to make teh watts, and CFLs to save teh watts!). Dumbshits.
France's planes, ships, trucks, cars, and more still run on OIL. Not nuclear. Do the math. Electricity is relatively small component of power usage.
Since you asked, OK, I believe that life is for a) enjoying, b) helping others, and c) advancing the overall condition and knowledge of humanity.
Any one of those three goals is a worthy pursuit, but if you can combine all three...that is the absolute best possible use of your time & money.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to take any moral high ground. I've also spent many $10K's on "horribly wasteful", but awesome, hobbies: motorcycles, helicopters, games, music, lasers, etc.
I'm just explaining why the FAA guys might have been unimpressed. They surely knew that there was absolutely nothing new or interesting about this launch. Just another hobbyist to keep from interfering with the airways.
Like I already said, our global weather services send more than 500,000 instrument packages (with radio telemetry) to similar altitudes every year. And the German rocket hobbyists who inspired the V2 program (which inspired the ICBM, which inspired the Russian & American space programs and all that followed) had more advanced rockets than this "Qu8k", almost 70 years ago.
The only reason this launch got so much attention is that hobby rockets have been out-of-vogue for about 30 years. Oh and some association with a popular video game developer.
I predict a surge in Estes sales based on this launch. If Derek was smart, he's actually sponsored by Estes.:)
Well...if you knew that we put up more than half a MILLION fully instrumented weather balloons to similar altitudes every year (800 balloons every 12 hours, 1600 every day, 365 days a year), for just a couple hundred bucks each...I think you would be far less impressed with this $10K+ hobby exercise.
Probably the only reason the FAA guys were there, was to make sure that this toy rocket did not go careening south towards RNO (Reno-Tahoe International Airport).
In any case, it is the most awesome toy rocket ever. A horrible waste of time and money, but awesome. That's what hobbies are all about.
1) Put FEMA, plus the search & rescue part of the Coast Guard, under the Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS). Put the policing part of the Coast Guard under the DoD and/or Commerce.
2) Disband the TSA, and require private parties to control their own security. Let each airline specify their own security checks, to a regulated baseline. If you the consumer don't like the level of security, you can choose a different airline that makes you take off your shoes, or that asks you intelligent questions instead of stupidly frisking you, etc. Let the market decide.
3) Split the Secret Service into its separate functions under the Treasury (counterfeiting etc), President/VP (protection), and State (protection).
4) Put Customs under the Dept of Commerce.
5) Put Immigration under the Dept of State.
6) Send the higher bureaucracy of DHS to an isolated island in the south pacific, where it will implode within a matter of days under its own weight and paranoia.
Unless of course you have a good alternative to using fog for a walk-through volumetric projection, in which case, you should speak the fuck up instead of wasting everyone's time with idiotic comments.
Regulation is never bad when the regulators have more information than the market participants they're trying to regulate.
Except when the regulators are the market participants, just swapping roles through the revolving door between Wall St and SEC, FINRA, Fed, etc.
This is exactly the situation with the US "financial system".
The SEC is similar to the FDIC in broad stroke: A sham, a "government" front, that provides the masses with the illusion of policing and protection, when in fact they are aiding and abetting the financial rapists.
I can understand if you didn't see this 10 years ago, or maybe even 5 years ago, but it has been clearly proven in the last 3 years.
I HAVE the US Army Survival Guide app and it's the best.
LOL. "Army" and "Survival" are generally contradictory terms.
The British SAS survival guide is pretty damn good. So good, in fact, that the US Navy SEALs cribbed it. And you can probably find a copy in your local library.:)
Siri doesn't send your voice to Apple's servers. It parses it & sends queries based on it's parsing.
Where do you get these wacky ideas? Are you genuinely misinformed, or are you an Apple marketing 'bot trying to spread misinformation?
Again: No. Siri sends raw voice data over the network. Even worse, it sends the data at a radically higher bitrate (~100 kbits/s) than the cell network uses for your voice calls (~12 kbits/s).
Google has no idea when I call or text someone, set an appointment with someone, etc. Apple should not have this information either. The ~only~ company who should know when I call or text someone, is my cell service provider.
Others have already corrected your misconceptions about Maps "navigation", including, ironically, the author of the article that you linked above. LOL.
I'll say again with bold instead of italics this time: Siri is not an in-phone implementation of voice commands.
Siri on the 4S sends your voice to Apple's servers. This means it is sloooow (assuming you even have a data connection)...plus it runs down your (expensive) data plan...plus Apple can log and index everything you ask.
Also, Siri does not do navigation. It only works with the built-in "Maps" app, which does not do navigation. If you use a real navigation app (like Navigon), you would understand the difference. Oh, and your navigation would work even when your phone has no data connection. Which, if you ever leave your desk and city, you will find describes most of the world.
Siri's advantage isn't the speech recognition or ties to Wolfram Alpha, but that it handles natural language
No, it really doesn't.
The Siri team has simply implemented a few thousand special-case questions (e.g. "Do I need an umbrella today?")...and Apple has hyper-marketed those special-case examples...so brain-dead consumers who lack the ability to formulate questions of their own, will still have a bunch of pre-fab demo questions to show off their new toy.
I've tested Siri, and I'm far from impressed.
I'd much rather have in-phone implementation of basic voice commands like: "text contactmessage send text", "navigate to address/business", "add contact name name number number, etc.
However, as much as I love my iphone, I don't expect much innovation from a corporation that took THREE iphone releases to add voice dialing...which my cellphone had way back in 2000...
Ambiguity aside, both of those interpretations might be true.
TFA includes a nifty animated GIF of the asteroid's path...but only in 2 dimensions. Space is 3-dimensional. You would have to see the 3D trajectory to tell whether the asteroid passes closer to the earth, or to the moon.
Previously, search engines were unable to read comments because Facebook, Disqus and Intense Debate used programming that was not easy to read automatically.
The comments appear as human-readable HTML.
If a person can read the comments, a search engine can also easily read & index them.
TFA provides no sources or references to support their claim that this comment-indexing is something new.
Google's servers have been indexing Facebook comments from the beginning of Facebook. Whether those comments played a significant role in the pageranking algorithm is another matter.
Off the top of my head I can think of 3 Chinese brands with any sort of real presence in the western market, Lenovo, Haier, and Huawei
FTFY.
Chinese companies, however, actually make a huge proportion of the dominant consumer products in the western market.
Lenovo is an interesting example, because most consumers had never heard of Lenovo until IBM ditched their ThinkPad business, selling the brand to the actual manufacturer (ok...assembler) of the product.
Foxconn is a better example, because they make the iPhone and iPad which are sold under the "Apple" brand...as well as products that are "branded" by Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, Motorola, Sony Ericsson...and probably a hundred more "companies" that you know.
Perhaps in the next 5-10 years Apple, like IBM, will divest themselves of the hardware business to focus entirely on their media/apps business, and then you will buy "Foxconn" branded phones and tablets at the local "Foxconn" store. Haha.
That is just one example of a Chinese company that dominates the "western market". Admittedly it's a huge one. But if you trace the supply chain on your other electronics, vehicles, appliances, toys, clothing, building materials, etc etc...you will find thousands more.
Slashdot Mirror
Wow, that sucks. Hopefully they kept the $5 plan, and just don't publicize it.
I see that their other option is $0.20 for a single text, and $0.30 for a single photo/video message.
I think we can assume that AT&T does not lose money on any of these services. So since a text message is about 1000x smaller than a photo/video message, that means it should really cost less than $0.0003 per text...33 texts for a penny...3300 texts for a dollar.
But you know, whatever the market will bear...
*uck AT&T & Verizon's 20 bucks a month for texting, that's all I'm saying
I dunno about Verizon, but AT&T charges me $5 a month for 200 SMS or MMS messages.
If someone uses their unlimited service for short text messages, then yes, that person needs to wake up and realize that they can "text" practically for free using other apps.
But if you use the $5 service to send mostly video & photo messages, it makes more sense. Super convenient too.
YMMV.
Give her some nyquil?
Or...buy her a big jar of foam earplugs.
Or...buy yourself a vibrating bluetooth wristband.
Or...get good enough at your job that a) there is rarely any reason to call you, and b) they can't afford your rates except in a world-exploding emergency, or c) you can simply refuse to be on-call at night in any situation whatsoever.
Everyone here is making the same mistake. They are generalising
LOL
I remember a middle-school science experiment many many years ago.
We heated an empty 1-gallon steel fuel can over a bunsen burner, then screwed on the cap, and turned off the heat.
As the can cooled, the internal pressure of the heated air inside dropped, and atmospheric pressure started to crush the can. By the end of the class period, it was a crumpled mess.
Rule of thumb: If an NFL linebacker can crush a container by standing on it, then the atmosphere alone will crush that container when it is "full" of vacuum.
And the steel can that we used in that experiment was ~100 times stronger than a foil-wrapped aero-lattice.
Thanks for the linked data.
50% is relatively small compared to 100%.
Plus, that is the energy consumption for the entire country, including industry, government, military, etc. If you look at consumer/domestic energy usage, electrical becomes a much much smaller.
I don't have the detailed numbers for France, but if you Google "global per capita energy consumption"
you will see that it is more than half that of the US, so I'll use the US as a close-enough example.
The average US household consumes roughly 10,000 kWh of electrical energy per year.
1L of petrol, jet fuel, diesel, or heating oil equals approximately 10 kWh of energy.
The average US household operates at least 2 vehicles, which each consume about 500 gallons (1900 liters) of petrol per year. 1900L * 2 vehicles * 10 kWh/L = 38,000 kWh of energy. In other words, roughly 4x the electrical usage for that household.
And that's just the beginning.
Flying for business or pleasure? A roundtrip from LAX-JFK (5000 miles) burns 250L of fuel per passenger = 2500 kWh. Flying LAX-SYD? 7500 kWh per passenger. Yes...the energy consumption from ONE passenger's US-Australia trip, approaches the electrical usage of a US household for an entire YEAR.
Heat a home with oil or gas? Roughly 10% of US households (mostly in the Northeast) burn an average 750 gallons of heating oil each, every year. That's another 28,500 kWh, about 3 times the electrical usage.
Also more than half of US households run their most energy-intensive appliances -- water heater, furnace, range, oven, dryer -- on natural gas, not electricity.
If you want to save energy: fly less, drive less, carpool, turn down your thermostat, dress appropriately for hot or cold temperatures, and insulate your house. For most folks, electrical consumption is the last thing to consider.
From the summary:
France gets about 80% of its power from nuclear energy and is a major exporter of nuclear technology.
No. France generates almost 80% of its electricity from nuclear energy. Not its overall power.
I'm sick of this consistently sloppy reporting about energy usage in the mass media. And sick of the idiots who think that electricity consumption is the big issue (oh noes! we need solar to make teh watts, and CFLs to save teh watts!). Dumbshits.
France's planes, ships, trucks, cars, and more still run on OIL. Not nuclear. Do the math. Electricity is relatively small component of power usage.
What is life for, if not to do what we love?
Since you asked, OK, I believe that life is for a) enjoying, b) helping others, and c) advancing the overall condition and knowledge of humanity.
Any one of those three goals is a worthy pursuit, but if you can combine all three...that is the absolute best possible use of your time & money.
Don't get me wrong. I'm not trying to take any moral high ground. I've also spent many $10K's on "horribly wasteful", but awesome, hobbies: motorcycles, helicopters, games, music, lasers, etc.
I'm just explaining why the FAA guys might have been unimpressed. They surely knew that there was absolutely nothing new or interesting about this launch. Just another hobbyist to keep from interfering with the airways.
Like I already said, our global weather services send more than 500,000 instrument packages (with radio telemetry) to similar altitudes every year. And the German rocket hobbyists who inspired the V2 program (which inspired the ICBM, which inspired the Russian & American space programs and all that followed) had more advanced rockets than this "Qu8k", almost 70 years ago.
The only reason this launch got so much attention is that hobby rockets have been out-of-vogue for about 30 years. Oh and some association with a popular video game developer.
I predict a surge in Estes sales based on this launch. If Derek was smart, he's actually sponsored by Estes. :)
Well...if you knew that we put up more than half a MILLION fully instrumented weather balloons to similar altitudes every year (800 balloons every 12 hours, 1600 every day, 365 days a year), for just a couple hundred bucks each...I think you would be far less impressed with this $10K+ hobby exercise.
Probably the only reason the FAA guys were there, was to make sure that this toy rocket did not go careening south towards RNO (Reno-Tahoe International Airport).
In any case, it is the most awesome toy rocket ever. A horrible waste of time and money, but awesome. That's what hobbies are all about.
Top-level orgchart for DHS:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Homeland-security-orgchart-2008-07-17.png
Suggestions:
1) Put FEMA, plus the search & rescue part of the Coast Guard, under the Dept of Health and Human Services (HHS). Put the policing part of the Coast Guard under the DoD and/or Commerce.
2) Disband the TSA, and require private parties to control their own security. Let each airline specify their own security checks, to a regulated baseline. If you the consumer don't like the level of security, you can choose a different airline that makes you take off your shoes, or that asks you intelligent questions instead of stupidly frisking you, etc. Let the market decide.
3) Split the Secret Service into its separate functions under the Treasury (counterfeiting etc), President/VP (protection), and State (protection).
4) Put Customs under the Dept of Commerce.
5) Put Immigration under the Dept of State.
6) Send the higher bureaucracy of DHS to an isolated island in the south pacific, where it will implode within a matter of days under its own weight and paranoia.
7) Nothing is left to rename. Move along.
From your snark.
Unless of course you have a good alternative to using fog for a walk-through volumetric projection, in which case, you should speak the fuck up instead of wasting everyone's time with idiotic comments.
Thank you Mr. Fog Machine...but of course that would eliminate slashdot...and then where would you be?
Just sayin.
Needs ... some way to maintain uniform fog distribution in a room.
Or a way to measure the fog distribution in real time and adjust accordingly.
Or a way to redundantly re-state the quoted post.
Regulation is never bad when the regulators have more information than the market participants they're trying to regulate.
Except when the regulators are the market participants, just swapping roles through the revolving door between Wall St and SEC, FINRA, Fed, etc.
This is exactly the situation with the US "financial system".
The SEC is similar to the FDIC in broad stroke: A sham, a "government" front, that provides the masses with the illusion of policing and protection, when in fact they are aiding and abetting the financial rapists.
I can understand if you didn't see this 10 years ago, or maybe even 5 years ago, but it has been clearly proven in the last 3 years.
I HAVE the US Army Survival Guide app and it's the best.
LOL. "Army" and "Survival" are generally contradictory terms.
The British SAS survival guide is pretty damn good. So good, in fact, that the US Navy SEALs cribbed it. And you can probably find a copy in your local library. :)
Siri doesn't send your voice to Apple's servers. It parses it & sends queries based on it's parsing.
Where do you get these wacky ideas? Are you genuinely misinformed, or are you an Apple marketing 'bot trying to spread misinformation?
Again: No. Siri sends raw voice data over the network. Even worse, it sends the data at a radically higher bitrate (~100 kbits/s) than the cell network uses for your voice calls (~12 kbits/s).
If you don't believe me, go read the arstechnica test results here:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars
Apple indexes queries, just like Google does.
Google has no idea when I call or text someone, set an appointment with someone, etc. Apple should not have this information either. The ~only~ company who should know when I call or text someone, is my cell service provider.
Others have already corrected your misconceptions about Maps "navigation", including, ironically, the author of the article that you linked above. LOL.
I'll say again with bold instead of italics this time: Siri is not an in-phone implementation of voice commands.
Siri on the 4S sends your voice to Apple's servers. This means it is sloooow (assuming you even have a data connection)...plus it runs down your (expensive) data plan...plus Apple can log and index everything you ask.
Also, Siri does not do navigation. It only works with the built-in "Maps" app, which does not do navigation. If you use a real navigation app (like Navigon), you would understand the difference. Oh, and your navigation would work even when your phone has no data connection. Which, if you ever leave your desk and city, you will find describes most of the world.
Siri's advantage isn't the speech recognition or ties to Wolfram Alpha, but that it handles natural language
No, it really doesn't.
The Siri team has simply implemented a few thousand special-case questions (e.g. "Do I need an umbrella today?")...and Apple has hyper-marketed those special-case examples...so brain-dead consumers who lack the ability to formulate questions of their own, will still have a bunch of pre-fab demo questions to show off their new toy.
I've tested Siri, and I'm far from impressed.
I'd much rather have in-phone implementation of basic voice commands like: "text contact message send text", "navigate to address/business", "add contact name name number number, etc.
However, as much as I love my iphone, I don't expect much innovation from a corporation that took THREE iphone releases to add voice dialing...which my cellphone had way back in 2000...
Siri is a marketing stunt, plain and simple.
Ambiguity aside, both of those interpretations might be true.
TFA includes a nifty animated GIF of the asteroid's path...but only in 2 dimensions. Space is 3-dimensional. You would have to see the 3D trajectory to tell whether the asteroid passes closer to the earth, or to the moon.
It's a shame that NASA posts a lame size comparison to a warship, instead of educating people with the much larger scale of this event. To wit:
1) Earth is a basketball
2) Luna is a baseball, orbiting about 30 feet (9m) away from the basketball
3) Asteroid 2005YU55 is a red blood cell (about 1/10 the diameter of a human hair), passing about 25 feet away from the basketball
The truly amazing thing is that we can see surface details on that red blood cell from 25 feet away.
The "cloud" hides those pesky & boring details of where your data is stored, and how it is backed up, and who has access. Super convenient!
Oh, and your identity is just a bit more data whose location(s), access, and use are all hidden from you. Super convenient!
Love the cloud.
No, this has never been a problem.
Even if intensedebate or whomever are smart enough to use AJAX to load comments...the comments are still ultimately displayed as human-readable HTML.
And the comment server has no way of knowing whether a human, or a search engine, is reading this content.
Google's indexing servers are perfectly capable of emulating a web browser "driven" by a human. They can just do it much much faster than a human.
Nutshell...TFA is total BS.
From TFA:
Previously, search engines were unable to read comments because Facebook, Disqus and Intense Debate used programming that was not easy to read automatically.
The comments appear as human-readable HTML.
If a person can read the comments, a search engine can also easily read & index them.
TFA provides no sources or references to support their claim that this comment-indexing is something new.
Google's servers have been indexing Facebook comments from the beginning of Facebook. Whether those comments played a significant role in the pageranking algorithm is another matter.
Off the top of my head I can think of 3 Chinese brands with any sort of real presence in the western market, Lenovo, Haier, and Huawei
FTFY.
Chinese companies, however, actually make a huge proportion of the dominant consumer products in the western market.
Lenovo is an interesting example, because most consumers had never heard of Lenovo until IBM ditched their ThinkPad business, selling the brand to the actual manufacturer (ok...assembler) of the product.
Foxconn is a better example, because they make the iPhone and iPad which are sold under the "Apple" brand...as well as products that are "branded" by Amazon, Intel, Cisco, Hewlett-Packard, Dell, Nintendo, Nokia, Microsoft, Motorola, Sony Ericsson...and probably a hundred more "companies" that you know.
Perhaps in the next 5-10 years Apple, like IBM, will divest themselves of the hardware business to focus entirely on their media/apps business, and then you will buy "Foxconn" branded phones and tablets at the local "Foxconn" store. Haha.
That is just one example of a Chinese company that dominates the "western market". Admittedly it's a huge one. But if you trace the supply chain on your other electronics, vehicles, appliances, toys, clothing, building materials, etc etc...you will find thousands more.
Hmmm.
Did the crabs leave their old shells behind?
Or, did your wife kill some animals by pick up living shells...which were taken by the birds for an easy night-time snack?