Or get used oil from your car and go spill it next to their machinery and then tip off the EPA.
Are you sure that's in the original book and not one of the later (digital) versions? Because in 1971, the EPA wouldn't have cared. The absolute paranoia about the tiniest spill of anything was over a decade away.
OTOH, given the other stupid idea you list (popping the tires of heavy construction machinery... which are designed to survive the rough environment of construction sites) the suggestion about the oil may just be one more example the (original) authors overactive imagination.
The letter from congressman George Mahon (D-TX) is disheartening.
Seriously? You expect someone as busy as a congressman to read everything with regards to a minor issue that comes across his desk and the lacking the requisite background knowledge form a reasonable opinion about it? That's ridiculous.
I see a congressman doing what I hope mine does - delegating and asking the experts.
I tried to explain to the wife how amazing it is. She isn't technology illiterate, in fact I'd say she's well above average, but she just didn't see what was so impressive about it.
It's the CSI effect - your wife, like many others have seen this stuff so often on TV, or simulated in games, or in books, they don't understand the gap between media/fiction and the real world.
Sadly, the effect isn't just limited to technology nor does it occur only among those not literate in unrelated fields.
When you can afford quality products, you don't have to buy stuff so often.
Yeah. It would never occur to poor people to save up and buy quality goods. They're all lemming and stereotype like and buy the cheapest stuff possible.
The only state that's NOT having budget problems is North Dakota. Ellen Brown says North Dakota is sitting pretty because they own the Bank of North Dakota.
And who is Ellen Brown and why should we believe her? (And I note you link not to her - but to an article that lays North Dakota's solvency on an entirely different cause.)
All the other states are slaves to their financiers on Wall Street. For example, the City of Phoenix (Arizona) borrowed a billion dollars over the past 5 years to build out the water system. Now the water department wants to raise an extra $24million a year by raising water fees... 'Cause the usury always gets paid first.
What does raising more money have to do with having borrowed money? (I.E. correlation is not causation.) That could be just as easily explained by unexpected costs (as is the case with my local water department, heavier than normal winter storms caused damage), or by poor planning (as I've also seen with my local water department).
I calculate that the interest charge on a billion dollars a year (at 5%) is $50million. If Arizona owned a bank like North Dakota, the Bank of Arizona would have financed the Phoenix water expansion (at, say, 3%). Most of the $50million the city is now bleeding out to Wall Street would instead be flowing into the state's treasury.
Maybe they could have, maybe they couldn't have - interest rates are a function of the cost of the money the bank loans to the water dept, not a function of numbers you've pulled out of your ass.
The financial crisis is easily fixable, with the right solutions. Money and the Crisis of Civilization, and... Richard Clark's A Bailout for the People are also on my recommended reading list.
The only interesting thing there is that you didn't link to a gold bug site as well.
Have you ever noticed that these days, the first thing people do when they get into an elevator is reach for their phone to look at something... anything other than making eye contact or talking with people in the elevator?
Since people in elevators have been avoiding eye contact or talking with the others in the elevator since roughly forever... your point would be, what exactly?
They are cool and all. But 200 bucks a month cool?
My wife and I decided to ditch the laptop we carried while traveling, figuring the cost of the smartphone was more-or-less equivalent to replacing the laptop or it's battery every year or so. It's been more than a fair trade. The laptop stayed in our hotel room or RV and pretty much only got used for email/LJ/etc... (And only one of us could use it at a time.)
The smartphones are on our hips and get used for all that, *plus* looking for places for lunch, checking business hours of shops and museums, etc... etc... We have an hour or two to kill, we open the geocache app and go caching. In fact, when we balance the only thing we miss (the ability to review pictures from my DSLR on a reasonably sized screen) with all the functionality we've gained - we're way ahead with smartphones vs a laptop for traveling. (And that's not even mentioning the uses we've found for it here at home where we wouldn't ever have even carried the laptop.)
The cost vs. capability calculation is going to be different for everyone - but it's not just about the 'cool'. Smartphones are useful tools too.
That sound you just heard is my point whooshing over your head, carrying your reading comprehension with it. (Tip: Read TFA and note that cell phones aren't the only alternative.)
Then engage your brain and consider the audience that uses Gmail - you don't think that virtually all of them have cell phones?
But either way, my point remains the same - that edge cases exist in which this method is not useful doesn't mean those edge cases are anything but a microscopic minority.
Encryption seems a bit more foolproof. It's also a bit more believable that one might "forget" a lengthy passphrase, while physical destruction looks a bit suspicious.
It's more believable in the sense that believing in pink elephants is more believable than believing in polka-dotted ones.
I.E. it's not at all believable that company who routinely encrypts their data (and thus must routinely decrypt it to compile statements, etc...) conveniently 'forgets' how to decrypt it when the cops show up.
Ahhh the old "if you are innocent, then you shouldn't have a right to privacy" argument.
The problem of course, it's that's a strawman of your own creation. Nobody claims that but you.
The claim is "if they're innocent, why are they going to such extremes to destroy the evidence that would prove them innocent?". The reasonable answer of course is that nobody innocent has any reason to destroy the evidence that proves them innocent. Innocent people normally want to go out of their way to introduce the evidence that proves them so and to prevent the prosecution from hiding it or blocking it's usage in court.
Kids have a way of living up to people's expectations. She expects these kids to act like animals, and they're fulfilling her expectations.
My mother works as a substitute teacher. She takes troubled kids that every else badmouths, treats them with respect, and gets them to open up, stop being disruptive, and actually start learning.
That's a nice pretty story - it would make a wonderful movie. But, as Paul Harvey said there's the rest of the story - and you rarely hear it.
A friend of mine is a full time teacher. She does her damnedest to do exactly what your mother does. Some students do respond - but many do not. Many remain animals and disruptive no matter how you treat them.
As for the "first to sight" rule which was being addressed, that really stems from entry of aircraft carriers. Meaning, the first to be sighted was frequently the first to be sunk. I never heard of it being applied outside of that context.
I've heard a variant ("first to be heard") applied to ASW, but yeah - never to battlewagons.
If you ever get to study USN gunnery manuals of the period, you'll be amazed at how deeply they thought about the problems. (I saw same of the same issues in the SLBM related manuals I worked with in the 80's.) Their tools and analytical methods may have been crude and primitive by today's standards - but they weren't stupid.
The guy is STATING THE OBVIOUS because the app has been sensationalized, hello!/. is better than this!
I don't think it's that obvious, and I bet there's not a programmer on Slashdot who didn't immediately start thinking of counterexamples.
But they didn't do it because they are programmers They did it because of the geek hubris that they know better than anyone else, even when they know nothing about the problem domain.
Your farcial 'counterexamples' show just how deep your misunderstanding is. The first line of 'code' in every example is "is there direct personal contact via the app between penitents and their confessor". The answer in every example is "no". The result of every counterexample is "test fails". The statement "it is impossible to confess via the app" is a true one under all circumstances.
But you fail to understand this because you've failed to understand the problem domain. Worse yet, you didn't even try. Still worse, you don't even realize your ignorance even exists.
"Under no circumstances"? This guy doesn't write unit tests for a living.
And you're neither a priest nor even remotely familiar with Catholic doctrine.
I've used accelerometers in vehicle / equipment monitoring applications and unless the mechanical bonding is solid and/or known the results are practically useless. Especially with a phone where having it in your pocket while you adjust sitting position and any other number of things will possibly have a similar acceleration profile to hitting a pot hole.
All that changes when you're getting input data from a variety of vehicles over a span of time. With that kind of data, you can analyze it statistically to sort out the noise from the signal.
Take a 1.5 hour plane flight...where I need to be at the airport 2 hours early, and get dropped off about an hour or so from Seattle city center in traffic, thus making the whole trip take about ~5 hours...
Huh? I routinely make the trip from SeaTac to downtown Seattle in under twenty minutes. Hell, I routinely drive from my home on the Kitsap Peninsula to the downtown Seattle in an hour or so.
Wouldn't it be awesome if there were a c) Take a train that takes maybe 8-10 hours, costs as much as the airplane ride, but is comfy and relaxing?
The problem is that this is essentially a fantasy - there isn't sufficient passenger traffic on that line to pay the for the tens of billions of dollars in construction costs while holding passenger ticker prices comparable to those of the airlines. Now in theory, you could combine all the traffic in the corridor into a single line - but now instead of an 8-10 hour trip you're talking 12-16 hours because of all the additional stops. (And you still don't have enough passenger traffic to pay off the debt load.)
There's a reason why, historically speaking, long distance passenger rail has always been a spectacular money sink.
Except the TFA makes one huge error - Terrestar has filed under Chapter 11 (reorganization), not Chapter 7 (dissolution). As TerreStar-1 is it's primary operational asset, the odds of it coming up for sale are somewhere between slim and none.
And that's the *least* of the problems with the whole scheme... TerreStar-1 in in GEO, which means it will take weeks to months to relocate to cover a crisis area (making the dubious assumption that a parking slot is available). On top of that, the plan also assumes the people it's meant to help already have (or can be shipped) the necessary ground networking equipment and mobile equipment.
Well, no, he's stating the truth - the role of these women has been known among real historians for years. Erickson is an idiot for making the assumption that since she had never heard of it, nobody else had either.
Your statements about their treatment post war, while factually correct, are irrelevant to that.
Oh, I have no doubt that your mother was glad to go back to being domestic - many women today are perfectly happy being domestic. But it's a grave error to believe that was or is a universal characteristic.
I've known several women over the years that were extremely bitter than when the war ended they lost their 'good' jobs and were forced to go back to being shop girls, or receptionists, or housewives, or farm wives.
And, believe me, many of those gun plot and gunnery crews were dead on target, all the time. Never missed.
No, I don't believe you. (But then I've studied Big Gun fire control.) There's considerable slop in the system, and that's why they had methods of correcting their fire, like ladder fire. That's why, as late as the redeployment of the Iowa's in the 1980's they were doing things like adding radars (to track the speed of a fired shell and feed that back as a correction) and experimenting with laser rangefinders (to supplement the optical and radar ones.)
Many engagements were decided by who saw whom first, because there was no opportunity for a second salvo.
The only instance I can recall offhand that was even close to that was Bismark vs. Hood at the Battle of Denmark Straight - and that was Bismark's fifth salvo. (And today it's thought that was more luck, a Golden Bullet, more than anything else.)
Oh, matter of fact, we shot 99% all the time.
That's a gunner score vs.a target - which tells you pretty much nothing about how a given salvo would effect an actual target. I've seen the CEP plots from several of New Jersey's exercises - and they aren't pretty. One or two rounds that might have been on target, alone with multiple over's, under's, and shots scattered to the left and right of the target bearing. (That's the main reason that BB design emphasized speed of firing and ammunition capacity for the main guns.)
Slashdot Mirror
Are you sure that's in the original book and not one of the later (digital) versions? Because in 1971, the EPA wouldn't have cared. The absolute paranoia about the tiniest spill of anything was over a decade away.
OTOH, given the other stupid idea you list (popping the tires of heavy construction machinery... which are designed to survive the rough environment of construction sites) the suggestion about the oil may just be one more example the (original) authors overactive imagination.
Seriously? You expect someone as busy as a congressman to read everything with regards to a minor issue that comes across his desk and the lacking the requisite background knowledge form a reasonable opinion about it? That's ridiculous.
I see a congressman doing what I hope mine does - delegating and asking the experts.
It's the CSI effect - your wife, like many others have seen this stuff so often on TV, or simulated in games, or in books, they don't understand the gap between media/fiction and the real world.
Sadly, the effect isn't just limited to technology nor does it occur only among those not literate in unrelated fields.
No. It's pretty much lame sophomoric 'philosophical' twaddle where it isn't crappy sophomoric 'philosophical' twaddle.
LOL :) My wife an I are forty something, well outside the 'hipster' demographic.... Though we have carried hipster PDA's in the past.
Yeah. It would never occur to poor people to save up and buy quality goods. They're all lemming and stereotype like and buy the cheapest stuff possible.
And who is Ellen Brown and why should we believe her? (And I note you link not to her - but to an article that lays North Dakota's solvency on an entirely different cause.)
What does raising more money have to do with having borrowed money? (I.E. correlation is not causation.) That could be just as easily explained by unexpected costs (as is the case with my local water department, heavier than normal winter storms caused damage), or by poor planning (as I've also seen with my local water department).
Maybe they could have, maybe they couldn't have - interest rates are a function of the cost of the money the bank loans to the water dept, not a function of numbers you've pulled out of your ass.
The only interesting thing there is that you didn't link to a gold bug site as well.
Since people in elevators have been avoiding eye contact or talking with the others in the elevator since roughly forever... your point would be, what exactly?
My wife and I decided to ditch the laptop we carried while traveling, figuring the cost of the smartphone was more-or-less equivalent to replacing the laptop or it's battery every year or so. It's been more than a fair trade. The laptop stayed in our hotel room or RV and pretty much only got used for email/LJ/etc... (And only one of us could use it at a time.)
The smartphones are on our hips and get used for all that, *plus* looking for places for lunch, checking business hours of shops and museums, etc... etc... We have an hour or two to kill, we open the geocache app and go caching. In fact, when we balance the only thing we miss (the ability to review pictures from my DSLR on a reasonably sized screen) with all the functionality we've gained - we're way ahead with smartphones vs a laptop for traveling. (And that's not even mentioning the uses we've found for it here at home where we wouldn't ever have even carried the laptop.)
The cost vs. capability calculation is going to be different for everyone - but it's not just about the 'cool'. Smartphones are useful tools too.
That sound you just heard is my point whooshing over your head, carrying your reading comprehension with it. (Tip: Read TFA and note that cell phones aren't the only alternative.)
Then engage your brain and consider the audience that uses Gmail - you don't think that virtually all of them have cell phones?
But either way, my point remains the same - that edge cases exist in which this method is not useful doesn't mean those edge cases are anything but a microscopic minority.
It's more believable in the sense that believing in pink elephants is more believable than believing in polka-dotted ones.
I.E. it's not at all believable that company who routinely encrypts their data (and thus must routinely decrypt it to compile statements, etc...) conveniently 'forgets' how to decrypt it when the cops show up.
The problem of course, it's that's a strawman of your own creation. Nobody claims that but you.
The claim is "if they're innocent, why are they going to such extremes to destroy the evidence that would prove them innocent?". The reasonable answer of course is that nobody innocent has any reason to destroy the evidence that proves them innocent. Innocent people normally want to go out of their way to introduce the evidence that proves them so and to prevent the prosecution from hiding it or blocking it's usage in court.
That's a nice pretty story - it would make a wonderful movie. But, as Paul Harvey said there's the rest of the story - and you rarely hear it.
A friend of mine is a full time teacher. She does her damnedest to do exactly what your mother does. Some students do respond - but many do not. Many remain animals and disruptive no matter how you treat them.
Yeah, the system only works 99.99% of the time for 99.99% of the users - so it must be useless.
I've heard a variant ("first to be heard") applied to ASW, but yeah - never to battlewagons.
If you ever get to study USN gunnery manuals of the period, you'll be amazed at how deeply they thought about the problems. (I saw same of the same issues in the SLBM related manuals I worked with in the 80's.) Their tools and analytical methods may have been crude and primitive by today's standards - but they weren't stupid.
But yeah, the 99% claim is hogwash.
It's not a vital part - under Church doctrine, it's required.
But they didn't do it because they are programmers They did it because of the geek hubris that they know better than anyone else, even when they know nothing about the problem domain.
Your farcial 'counterexamples' show just how deep your misunderstanding is. The first line of 'code' in every example is "is there direct personal contact via the app between penitents and their confessor". The answer in every example is "no". The result of every counterexample is "test fails". The statement "it is impossible to confess via the app" is a true one under all circumstances.
But you fail to understand this because you've failed to understand the problem domain. Worse yet, you didn't even try. Still worse, you don't even realize your ignorance even exists.
And you're neither a priest nor even remotely familiar with Catholic doctrine.
All that changes when you're getting input data from a variety of vehicles over a span of time. With that kind of data, you can analyze it statistically to sort out the noise from the signal.
Huh? I routinely make the trip from SeaTac to downtown Seattle in under twenty minutes. Hell, I routinely drive from my home on the Kitsap Peninsula to the downtown Seattle in an hour or so.
The problem is that this is essentially a fantasy - there isn't sufficient passenger traffic on that line to pay the for the tens of billions of dollars in construction costs while holding passenger ticker prices comparable to those of the airlines. Now in theory, you could combine all the traffic in the corridor into a single line - but now instead of an 8-10 hour trip you're talking 12-16 hours because of all the additional stops. (And you still don't have enough passenger traffic to pay off the debt load.)
There's a reason why, historically speaking, long distance passenger rail has always been a spectacular money sink.
Except the TFA makes one huge error - Terrestar has filed under Chapter 11 (reorganization), not Chapter 7 (dissolution). As TerreStar-1 is it's primary operational asset, the odds of it coming up for sale are somewhere between slim and none.
And that's the *least* of the problems with the whole scheme... TerreStar-1 in in GEO, which means it will take weeks to months to relocate to cover a crisis area (making the dubious assumption that a parking slot is available). On top of that, the plan also assumes the people it's meant to help already have (or can be shipped) the necessary ground networking equipment and mobile equipment.
Which is true, but utterly irrelevant to the OP's point - which is the extreme difficulty of doing so.
Well, no, he's stating the truth - the role of these women has been known among real historians for years. Erickson is an idiot for making the assumption that since she had never heard of it, nobody else had either.
Your statements about their treatment post war, while factually correct, are irrelevant to that.
Oh, I have no doubt that your mother was glad to go back to being domestic - many women today are perfectly happy being domestic. But it's a grave error to believe that was or is a universal characteristic.
I've known several women over the years that were extremely bitter than when the war ended they lost their 'good' jobs and were forced to go back to being shop girls, or receptionists, or housewives, or farm wives.
Well, absent your rant, I was going to say pretty much the same thing - the work of these 'computers' in WWII is pretty well known among historians.
Erickson's mistake (and an all too common one, even here on Slashdot) was to believe that since she had never heard of it then nobody else had either.
No, I don't believe you. (But then I've studied Big Gun fire control.) There's considerable slop in the system, and that's why they had methods of correcting their fire, like ladder fire. That's why, as late as the redeployment of the Iowa's in the 1980's they were doing things like adding radars (to track the speed of a fired shell and feed that back as a correction) and experimenting with laser rangefinders (to supplement the optical and radar ones.)
The only instance I can recall offhand that was even close to that was Bismark vs. Hood at the Battle of Denmark Straight - and that was Bismark's fifth salvo. (And today it's thought that was more luck, a Golden Bullet, more than anything else.)
That's a gunner score vs.a target - which tells you pretty much nothing about how a given salvo would effect an actual target. I've seen the CEP plots from several of New Jersey's exercises - and they aren't pretty. One or two rounds that might have been on target, alone with multiple over's, under's, and shots scattered to the left and right of the target bearing. (That's the main reason that BB design emphasized speed of firing and ammunition capacity for the main guns.)