Should be given as college scholarships for the kids of Seal Team 6 as well as a nice cunk of tax free cash to each of the members. IT's the right thing to do.
No, it's insulting. Those of us who served didn't so for the money. We're sailors and soldiers and airmen - not mercenaries.
Those coins are only worth what someone will pay for them -- maybe some products online you could buy with them.
Thank you, Captain Obvious. That's pretty much the definition of money.
Well, no. Money is only valuable in terms of the goods and services people are willing to exchange for it. Bitcoins are (currently) valuable only in the terms of money people are willing to exchange to for them. The difference is roughly as subtle as hitting a brick wall at 50MPH.
Or to put it another way; Bitcoins currently resemble comic books or stock certificates more than they do money - they're carriers of value (within the system) rather than having value (within the system) in and of themselves. (Note: I did not say inherent value, that's a different theoretical kettle of fish.) You can't exchange them directly for goods and services, but must exchange them for conventional money first.
Genesis 1:28 doesn't say "have piles of babies", except to the most simple minded. Something that abounds on Slashdot.
In fact, birthrates primarily vary with two simple factors - education and women's rights. You might want to get yourself some of the former.
Both are vigorously and often brutally suppressed by various Christian denominations, Roman Catholicism in particular, and in stricter interpretations of Islam, such as the Taliban. You might want to get yourself some of the former, neh?
Let's see, you're mostly wrong about the various Christian denominations, hilariously wrong about Roman Catholicism, and um.. Ok, you're right about the Taliban/Islam. One out of three isn't bad. Here's a free clue for you: The number of religious doctrines that preach what you think they do is vanishingly small - both in number of doctrines and number of adherents. As you are quite visibly a typical close minded Slashdot bigot I can see how you can believe they're the source of the problem - but they aren't.
Thus, the time it takes to replace the entire length is EXACTLY the same as the time it takes to replace one segment.
In some oddball universe where 10 seconds and 10 hours are equivalent.... sure. Or in some universe where there is thousands of sets of spare tracklaying equipment laying about.
We inhabit neither universe.
Why can't you run container trains on high-speed rail?
It's called the laws of physics. Something that tall with that low a center of gravity is going to tip going around a curve at high speed.
The Europeans do. Hell, British Rail (which is one of the worst networks in Europe) runs goods trains FASTER than most passenger trains.
[[Citation needed]]
Not to mention that anyone familiar with the history of railroading is quite aware that the British rail system is laid and maintained to a higher standard than that of US. Something quite easy to do in a country as highly regulated as the UK (in the 1800's when all this started) and with a tiny fraction as much track.
It hasn't "been tried", at least not in the US, because the US has never had anything that could be remotely worthy of being considered a real rail network.
Do pay attention. The "never been tried" part referred to cars on trains. It has been tried in the US and didn't work. And a rail network that at it's peak reached virtually every town of noticeable size and carried 90% of the nations freight isn't a "real" network?
When it started, it was a bunch of isolated companies that had no real reach, and now it's one single network with no real reach AND an absurd speed limit AND 19th century infrastructure.
You can go from coast to coast and border to border on rail... and it has no real reach? You live in a universe that bears no relation to the real world.
The Eurostar carries trucks and cars routinely between Britain and France and it is a highly successful project
It's a link with a thousand times the cargo capacity of any competitor, ten times as fast, and only three times the price. No shit it's successful. It's also utterly irrelevant to the US.
Look at what has worked and why, look at what hasn't worked and why, but don't look at what hasn't worked and assume that this is a universal constant.
Before you accuse me of that, you need to learn what you're talking about - because you have no more clue than the average comatose sea slug.
Another solution to the global food crisis is to stop having massive freakin steaming piles of babies. (*Gives various religious doctrines a condemning glare*)..
The problem of course, is that most religious doctrines don't say "go out and have piles of babies". In fact, off hand, I can't think of a single one.
Further developing the pwned world would probably go a long way too.. If everyone can afford an xbox, they'll be too busy getting killed playing Halo to go reproduce.
That birthrates in the developed world started dropping long before the introduction of electronic entertainment suggests a flaw in your argument.
In fact, birthrates primarily vary with two simple factors - education and women's rights. You might want to get yourself some of the former.
Unemployment is high enough that you could replace the entire rail system of the US with the kind of tracks needed for high-speed rail within weeks, if not days, of the necessary track being produced because it's absurdly parallel.
The problem isn't lack of warm bodies or spare track laying about. The problem is one of lacking spare *skilled* bodies, and lacking the specialized equipment tracklaying requires. That's assuming that the existing railbed is capable of supporting high speed rail (it isn't) and the existing track alignments are also so capable (they aren't) and the existing control network is up to handling the traffic (it isn't)....
Nor, in many places, is it 'absurdly parallel'. The LA basin is connected to the rest of the US on just one pair of tracks. Most of the West is connected to the rest of the US on just a handful of tracks and there isn't sufficient North-South capacity to significantly route around them.
On top of which, where is the displaced slow cargo traffic going to go once you start running high speed passenger trains on those rails? (Sorry, you aren't running a million pound container train at high speeds - at the first curve it's going to come off of the rails and scatter itself across the landscape.)
tl;dr version: There's a reason why everyone building high speed rails builds new tracks for them. You haven't the foggiest version as to what the difficulties are.
Rail too limited to get everywhere? Hmmm, seems to me there's plenty of trains that can carry cars. If you can travel between point A and point B faster than the cars could on their own, then drive the much shorter distances either end, everyone wins. You get total freedom AND get to sit back for most of the journey.
Someone familiar with the railroad industry and it's history will tell you... this has been tried. Multiple times. It doesn't work.
Actually these realistic driving games are good for in some ways for parents. Because it is cheaper to buy these games and find out whether your kid has a chance than to actually fork out many kilobux or more for a "conventional racing career start" (karting, training, racing, equipment, crashes, etc).
Sure. In the same way that buying your kid a microwave pizza and having him reheat it is a cheap and useful way to see if he has a chance at culinary school.
In other words - no, it's not useful at all. The differences are simply too great.
Also, there are physical limits - racing drivers have to be extremely fit, both for weight reasons, and to handle the forces involved in controlling a race car through corners. Simulators expose none of that.
Indeed. When I was in the Navy, I worked on/trained in a variety of high- and low- fidelity simulators. A video screen doesn't even come close.
""If your parents tell you that playing video games will never get you anywhere, point them in the direction of Lucas Ordoñez."
Basic math: You can't draw a curve through a single point.
Not to mention that if you don't have the far-side-of-the-bell-curve combination of high eye/hand coordination, fine motors skills, and cognitive abilities (each pretty far over on their own bell curves too), it doesn't matter how many video games you play.
Its remarkable how quickly the PATRIOT Act was "created" after 911. Most likely was waiting in a desk drawer waiting for something to polarize the public...
Or more likely you underestimate the capabilities of a couple of hundred Congressmen, a thousand or more high level aides/advisers, and who knows how many lower level drones when focused on a task.
There was LOTS that US Airways could have done. First, they could have flown the planes if they wanted too. They planes had already been scheduled, so there were no questions of maintenance or fuel, or flight plans.
If it were a static problem, you'd have a point. But it's a dynamic problem involving dozens of airports, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of passengers and their luggage. Not to mention that flight plans are filed immediately before departure... so, no system, no flight plan. Not to mention that fuel calculations are performed shortly before departure, again - no system, no fuel calculations, unsafe as hell to fly. Not to mention that maintenance occurs constantly, so... well, hopefully by now you get the point.
Then, of course, as said, there is simply no excuse for the IT to be down for that long, if at all. They had no (working) backup systems, either computers, paper, or people. That is the very definition of incompetent.
Proof positive that you can work in IT and still be an idiot.
Back in the 60's when airlines started computerizing, air traffic volume was a fraction of what it is today. You'd have to be nearly fifty to have even been alive at a time when computers weren't starting to make our lives easier in a variety of ways. ("Computers" !=" PC's".)
I remember trying to make airline reservations back before the web. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to those days. (Unless you could also give me my twenty year old body as well.)
Maybe that big thing outside the window that a whole bunch of people recently walked off of just happens to be the plane everyone at the gate is waiting to board?
Yeah, just loading it up and taking off would make a huge mess of the paperwork, but don't tell me they can't find the plane.
Assuming the plane is at the gate - what about an hour before when it's still a couple of hundred miles away? What happens if it's delayed, or never even takes off? How do they route the luggage since it doesn't have the tags that they can't print because the system is down?
As I said before, not only do you not understand the problem, you can't be bothered to even try.
I know Slashdotters don't always have the best manners, but this isn't Kuro5hin. We still have standards.
They vary wildly between 'unreasonably high' and 'ludicrously amusing', but yes, Slashdot has standards. (And very occasionally, the have some relevance to the real world.)
Asteroid takes out a data center? Well, then you've probably got bigger issues, but co-locating across the country is Standard Practice for most instustries.
If 'most' industries had a system even half as complex - you'd have a point. But 'most' industries don't dynamically track dozens of airports, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of passengers (and their luggage) in real time. Worse yet, not only in this information dynamic, its also tightly interrelated. (That plane I'm meeting in Dallas after taking of from Sea-Tac this evening is the same plane that flew from LA to Chicago this morning, and then flew Chicago to Dallas.)
This isn't just a simple matter of backing up data and providing redundant communications links... It's also a matter of keeping the hot spare updated and parallel to the active string at about the triple nine level. This is both very expensive and very hard. (And requires something much more than the standard PC and server mentality the average Slashdotter deals with.)
This simply isn't about the problem. It's about whether the solution has been implemented. Nothing more.
As with the poster to whom I replied, you don't even understand the problem. This results in facile and inappropriate 'solutions' that don't even begin to address the issues.
One of the reasons they went to computers in the first place is because paper systems could no longer handle the workload... And that was back in the 60's when air traffic volumes were a fraction of what they are today. I.E. having to maintain a duplicate paper system would actually slow things down likely without actually providing sufficient backup.
Can't they just read what the tickets say such as flight and seat number?
That isn't much help with getting the luggage on the appropriate aircraft. Nor does it help to inform what flights (that you're expecting passengers from) are on time or nearly so and will or will not effect the flight in question. (Let alone routing the luggage involved.) Not to mention the number of passengers and the weight of the luggage - something the pilot needs to know to operate the aircraft safely.
They know where the flights are going as most are routine.
There's a lot more information flowing through the system than just "plane A goes to destination B" and "butt X goes into seat Y". With the system down they don't even know when/where plane 'A' is in order to get butt 'X' onto it.
It seems they should have been able to get *some* flights in the air.
No offense, but that's because you don't even remotely understand the problem. (And seemingly can't even be bothered to try by asking questions rather than making statements.)
Ah yes - the usual response of those unable to actually form and defend a logical position, exaggeration and hyperbole indicating the trajectory of the point whooshing over their heads.
The fact that the drug lords are deploying these means they're desperate: smuggling operations fail, so the only way for them to make money is to try and bust through the border.
You say desperate, but I'd argue that they have actually demonstrated a high level of creativity. It's not like the traditional routes of drug smuggling are going to stop - the US market is just as well supplied now as it has always been. The submarines, the armoured vehicles etc., are just attempts at finding a better smuggling method.
Which begs the question of *why* they are trying to find a 'better' route - better than *what*?
If 'normal' routes are working, then there is little to no incentive to get creative and use unusual and expensive routes. If normal routes are working, you don't need to sneak around them ("submarines") or punch through them (armored fighting vehicles/'"tanks"). If normal routes are working, you punch up the volume on those routes.
The existence of these vehicles tells me that for whatever reason, these normal routes aren't working - though the existence of two different types may be answers to different problems... The 'submarine' (actually a semi-submersible) is likely an attempt to perform an end around the guarded and increasingly risky land border. The AFV/'tank' is however likely in response to a different problem - being able to overcome other cartels who are guarding the same stretch of border to protect their own profits.
The data might be there, but you just sent thousands of scientists off on a theoretical goose hunt and cast doubt on every large scale experiment currently running.
No I didn't. I started with one guy, or a couple guys that get a flash of inspiration over a beer, or a handful at a weekend BBQ or a conference. You're correct in assuming there is unlikely to be a large scale assault - you're incorrect in assuming that's the only possible route.
Slashdot Mirror
No, it's insulting. Those of us who served didn't so for the money. We're sailors and soldiers and airmen - not mercenaries.
It's pretty much been that way since the invention of the telephone, the printing press/mass media, etc... etc...
Well, no. Money is only valuable in terms of the goods and services people are willing to exchange for it. Bitcoins are (currently) valuable only in the terms of money people are willing to exchange to for them. The difference is roughly as subtle as hitting a brick wall at 50MPH.
Or to put it another way; Bitcoins currently resemble comic books or stock certificates more than they do money - they're carriers of value (within the system) rather than having value (within the system) in and of themselves. (Note: I did not say inherent value, that's a different theoretical kettle of fish.) You can't exchange them directly for goods and services, but must exchange them for conventional money first.
Genesis 1:28 doesn't say "have piles of babies", except to the most simple minded. Something that abounds on Slashdot.
Let's see, you're mostly wrong about the various Christian denominations, hilariously wrong about Roman Catholicism, and um.. Ok, you're right about the Taliban/Islam. One out of three isn't bad. Here's a free clue for you: The number of religious doctrines that preach what you think they do is vanishingly small - both in number of doctrines and number of adherents. As you are quite visibly a typical close minded Slashdot bigot I can see how you can believe they're the source of the problem - but they aren't.
In some oddball universe where 10 seconds and 10 hours are equivalent.... sure. Or in some universe where there is thousands of sets of spare tracklaying equipment laying about.
We inhabit neither universe.
It's called the laws of physics. Something that tall with that low a center of gravity is going to tip going around a curve at high speed.
[[Citation needed]]
Not to mention that anyone familiar with the history of railroading is quite aware that the British rail system is laid and maintained to a higher standard than that of US. Something quite easy to do in a country as highly regulated as the UK (in the 1800's when all this started) and with a tiny fraction as much track.
Do pay attention. The "never been tried" part referred to cars on trains. It has been tried in the US and didn't work. And a rail network that at it's peak reached virtually every town of noticeable size and carried 90% of the nations freight isn't a "real" network?
You can go from coast to coast and border to border on rail... and it has no real reach? You live in a universe that bears no relation to the real world.
It's a link with a thousand times the cargo capacity of any competitor, ten times as fast, and only three times the price. No shit it's successful. It's also utterly irrelevant to the US.
Before you accuse me of that, you need to learn what you're talking about - because you have no more clue than the average comatose sea slug.
The problem of course, is that most religious doctrines don't say "go out and have piles of babies". In fact, off hand, I can't think of a single one.
That birthrates in the developed world started dropping long before the introduction of electronic entertainment suggests a flaw in your argument.
In fact, birthrates primarily vary with two simple factors - education and women's rights. You might want to get yourself some of the former.
The problem isn't lack of warm bodies or spare track laying about. The problem is one of lacking spare *skilled* bodies, and lacking the specialized equipment tracklaying requires. That's assuming that the existing railbed is capable of supporting high speed rail (it isn't) and the existing track alignments are also so capable (they aren't) and the existing control network is up to handling the traffic (it isn't)....
Nor, in many places, is it 'absurdly parallel'. The LA basin is connected to the rest of the US on just one pair of tracks. Most of the West is connected to the rest of the US on just a handful of tracks and there isn't sufficient North-South capacity to significantly route around them.
On top of which, where is the displaced slow cargo traffic going to go once you start running high speed passenger trains on those rails? (Sorry, you aren't running a million pound container train at high speeds - at the first curve it's going to come off of the rails and scatter itself across the landscape.)
tl;dr version: There's a reason why everyone building high speed rails builds new tracks for them. You haven't the foggiest version as to what the difficulties are.
Someone familiar with the railroad industry and it's history will tell you... this has been tried. Multiple times. It doesn't work.
Sure. In the same way that buying your kid a microwave pizza and having him reheat it is a cheap and useful way to see if he has a chance at culinary school.
In other words - no, it's not useful at all. The differences are simply too great.
Indeed. When I was in the Navy, I worked on/trained in a variety of high- and low- fidelity simulators. A video screen doesn't even come close.
""If your parents tell you that playing video games will never get you anywhere, point them in the direction of Lucas Ordoñez."
Basic math: You can't draw a curve through a single point.
Not to mention that if you don't have the far-side-of-the-bell-curve combination of high eye/hand coordination, fine motors skills, and cognitive abilities (each pretty far over on their own bell curves too), it doesn't matter how many video games you play.
Or more likely you underestimate the capabilities of a couple of hundred Congressmen, a thousand or more high level aides/advisers, and who knows how many lower level drones when focused on a task.
I followed the link and could trivially read the contents. Maybe you need to upgrade your browser to something post 1996.
(Hint: 'readable' means 'can be read', not 'cant be cut and pasted', not 'can be linked', etc...)
If it were a static problem, you'd have a point. But it's a dynamic problem involving dozens of airports, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of passengers and their luggage. Not to mention that flight plans are filed immediately before departure... so, no system, no flight plan. Not to mention that fuel calculations are performed shortly before departure, again - no system, no fuel calculations, unsafe as hell to fly. Not to mention that maintenance occurs constantly, so... well, hopefully by now you get the point.
Proof positive that you can work in IT and still be an idiot.
Back in the 60's when airlines started computerizing, air traffic volume was a fraction of what it is today. You'd have to be nearly fifty to have even been alive at a time when computers weren't starting to make our lives easier in a variety of ways. ("Computers" !=" PC's".)
I remember trying to make airline reservations back before the web. You couldn't pay me enough to go back to those days. (Unless you could also give me my twenty year old body as well.)
Assuming the plane is at the gate - what about an hour before when it's still a couple of hundred miles away? What happens if it's delayed, or never even takes off? How do they route the luggage since it doesn't have the tags that they can't print because the system is down?
As I said before, not only do you not understand the problem, you can't be bothered to even try.
They vary wildly between 'unreasonably high' and 'ludicrously amusing', but yes, Slashdot has standards. (And very occasionally, the have some relevance to the real world.)
If 'most' industries had a system even half as complex - you'd have a point. But 'most' industries don't dynamically track dozens of airports, hundreds of aircraft, and tens of thousands of passengers (and their luggage) in real time. Worse yet, not only in this information dynamic, its also tightly interrelated. (That plane I'm meeting in Dallas after taking of from Sea-Tac this evening is the same plane that flew from LA to Chicago this morning, and then flew Chicago to Dallas.)
This isn't just a simple matter of backing up data and providing redundant communications links... It's also a matter of keeping the hot spare updated and parallel to the active string at about the triple nine level. This is both very expensive and very hard. (And requires something much more than the standard PC and server mentality the average Slashdotter deals with.)
As with the poster to whom I replied, you don't even understand the problem. This results in facile and inappropriate 'solutions' that don't even begin to address the issues.
One of the reasons they went to computers in the first place is because paper systems could no longer handle the workload... And that was back in the 60's when air traffic volumes were a fraction of what they are today. I.E. having to maintain a duplicate paper system would actually slow things down likely without actually providing sufficient backup.
That isn't much help with getting the luggage on the appropriate aircraft. Nor does it help to inform what flights (that you're expecting passengers from) are on time or nearly so and will or will not effect the flight in question. (Let alone routing the luggage involved.) Not to mention the number of passengers and the weight of the luggage - something the pilot needs to know to operate the aircraft safely.
There's a lot more information flowing through the system than just "plane A goes to destination B" and "butt X goes into seat Y". With the system down they don't even know when/where plane 'A' is in order to get butt 'X' onto it.
No offense, but that's because you don't even remotely understand the problem. (And seemingly can't even be bothered to try by asking questions rather than making statements.)
Ah yes - the usual response of those unable to actually form and defend a logical position, exaggeration and hyperbole indicating the trajectory of the point whooshing over their heads.
If it doesn't stand scrutiny, then why is your only response to it insults rather than a demonstration of how it fails to withstand scrutiny?
And you know that how exactly?
I wish I had mod points today... All the folks saying "just legalize it already" really have no clue what they're proposing to unleash on the public.
Which begs the question of *why* they are trying to find a 'better' route - better than *what*?
If 'normal' routes are working, then there is little to no incentive to get creative and use unusual and expensive routes. If normal routes are working, you don't need to sneak around them ("submarines") or punch through them (armored fighting vehicles/'"tanks"). If normal routes are working, you punch up the volume on those routes.
The existence of these vehicles tells me that for whatever reason, these normal routes aren't working - though the existence of two different types may be answers to different problems... The 'submarine' (actually a semi-submersible) is likely an attempt to perform an end around the guarded and increasingly risky land border. The AFV/'tank' is however likely in response to a different problem - being able to overcome other cartels who are guarding the same stretch of border to protect their own profits.
If that's "some of the best", I'd hate to hear any of the worst. Most of the songs were virtually unrecognizable..
No I didn't. I started with one guy, or a couple guys that get a flash of inspiration over a beer, or a handful at a weekend BBQ or a conference. You're correct in assuming there is unlikely to be a large scale assault - you're incorrect in assuming that's the only possible route.
That Famous People (or more likely their media relations people) are as susceptible to social engineering as the rest of us is news... how?