yet again you fail to account for the fact that when we look at distant stars we're only just now starting to be able to tell if there are planets around them, how do you expect us to be able to tell if another civilization is zooming around in space ships?.
The only way to know would be if they stopped by in (or near) our own solar system, and as you say, space is rather large, there's no reason to think they'd choose us as a destination.
also once again, to think that we'd be first may be arrogant, but to think that we're guaranteed to be a long time behind the first may be rather pessimistic too.
Even if that were the case (and I still doubt we would see them unless they've had it for quite some time)
But even if another civilization were to get FTL before we did, that doesn't mean they have to have had it for any length of time now, we could simply be a very long way away from getting it.
But none of this speculation precludes FTL travel. a lack of observation of some phenomenon happening elsewhere in the universe does not make that phenomenon impossible.
You say we should see it before we're capable of it. Ignoring for a moment that the universe is rather large, and that we often can't even tell if a star has planets around it, let along see a starship zooming around. And assuming that we would in fact see it before we're capable of it, this still doesn't prove it's impossible, just that the first species to achieve it hasn't done so yet (or at least they haven't passed close enough to us for the light from them doing so to have reached us yet).
Nothing about that particular situation proves impossibility.
Now this particular article seems to show that one particular method of faster than light travel is unlikely with our current understanding, that doesn't mean it's completely impossible, just that we don't yet have any idea how to do it.
While the joke is a fake, it is still quite amusing...
Your knowledge about lighthouses though isn't much more accurate.
Many lighthouses have been automated, however I have personally visited 3 manned Canadian light houses quite recently, they do exist, mainly in higher risk areas where their ability to assist people in need adds to the function of simply operating the light (which has been modernized to the point where it requires very little maintenance (automated lamp changing, automatic fog-horn etc (though the automatic fog horn is apparently hit and miss, and manual activation is often required))
All 3 of these lighthouses do in fact monitor the radio, this is the primary means of getting a hold of them as they don't have telephones (well these days they probably do have satellite phones (1 of them had satellite internet), but that's more for personal use, radio is the primary contact method)
They also monitor the radio for any emergencies happening nearby so that they can pass it on to the appropriate emergency response department.
Now it is true that they have no "radio communications function" and due to the fact that these lighthouses are manned by a single family, they don't maintain a proper 24/7 radio watch, but the radio is always on, and if you call them, there are pretty good odds they'll hear and answer.
It's weird, at home running firefox on ubuntu it's fast, responsive, and can stay open for weeks without issues, I frequently have MANY tabs open (30+ is not uncommon) and never run in to the whole "bloat" issue people talk about.
However, when I run firefox on my work laptop (windows XP) firefox takes forever to load, is sluggish, and over time (about 2 hours) becomes so slow as to be completely unusable, and shortly afterwards hangs the whole machine forcing me to do a cold-reboot, and this is with no more than 4 tabs ever used.
The add-ons in use on the windows one are all in use on my linux machine, and in fact it has additional ones loaded as well.
I don't know if it's something specific with that windows machine, or if it's just the windows version of firefox, but since I installed it on that windows laptop I finally can see what people mean when they complain about firefox "bloat"
and it doesn't insist on wearing out the screen while charging.
I doubt very much that the screen will die early enough to matter from that issue, but if you are really worried, simply tell it not to keep the screen on when charging, it's a simple option in the settings.
and how is this different from the minutes used on the phone? there is also a non-zero risk that the customer won't be able to pay his bill there, and yet they still allow you to make phone calls.
This part would simply be a matter of deciding what level of risk the phone company is willing to take on you and putting in an appropriate credit limit. if you are on a pre-pay phone plan, you can pre-pay your account as well.
Personally though I'm not so interested in ANOTHER way to pay for things, what I want most is for all the various stores to AGREE on a way. My wallet ends up with dozens of different "loyalty cards" and "membership cards" etc all because every store you go to insists you have theirs or they charge you a lot extra for every purchase (technically you get a discount for having the card, not pay extra for not having it, but it works out the same, prices are only competitive if you have their card) And you just end up with a ridiculous amount of plastic in your wallet, and most of it not really useful for anything except one store (or if you're lucky, one family of stores)
currently I carry: - 1 Visa - 1 Mastercard - 1 debit card (stopped carrying my second debit card ages ago) - 1 department store credit card (cancelled my 2nd one when they started charging an annual fee) - 2 supermarket "loyalty" cards - 2 video rental store "membership" cards - 1 outdoor equipment co-op "membership" card - 1 gas station "loyalty" card - 1 auto-club "membership" card
I predict that this system, if ever implemented would turn out like any of the "single sign on" things on the web, where you end up needing 20 different "all in one" logins (or in this case cards or cell phones) instead of the convergence that it touts.
Except for the oven, fridge, and flashing lights - CFLs are appropriate for most applications.
There's only one application that I still can't find a CFL for, and that's dimmers
I have a fair number of bulbs in my house that are on dimmers, and I like being able to dim them.
I tried what home depot was selling as "dimmable" CFL and they had 2 major problems 1) they were WAY too big to fit in any light fixture I've ever seen 2) they dimmed from 100% all the way down to about 80%, hardly worth bothering with the dimmer knob on the wall.
there's a strong negative societal pressure against a "eat all you want" product transitioning into a "taxiometered" one.
people used to buy cars outright, now a large percentage lease them instead, no huge outcry happened. Home phones in North America are monthly "unlimited", people are willingly migrating to cell phone plans where they pay by the minute, and there's no outrage over that. There are other examples as well.
It's all in the marketing, the big print will say "Office, only $1.50*" the microscopic print you can barely read will have buried in the middle of it somewhere "$1.50 is the hourly rate, actual usage fees will vary with use" or some such gibberish, or maybe they'll sell it as a price much closer to what you're used to paying, or looking slightly cheaper, and the fine print will say "based on an average monthly use of 20 hours" or some such.
You'd be amazed what people will accept, and even rush to purchase if you just tell them it's cheaper (actually BEING cheaper is irrelevant)
2 weeks ago I had a car part "overnighted" friday night from nanaimo bc to ottawa ontario (both places in Canada) they "guaranteed" noon on monday, tuesday they told me it was "on time" for delivery that day (a day late) wednesday they said they "might" have lots the package, but that it would take 8 days to check... Thursday, desperate for the part as I was stranded at the other end of the country until it arrived I had a replacement sent, this time guaranteed by 10:30am friday (but UPS insisted I had to pay again) both parts arrived on friday at 10:28am.
UPS charged full price both times and refuses to reimburse even the shipping cost on either part (let alone my hotel bills and other expenses) because both arrived, even if it took 7 days for their "next day early morning" service.
while I know that this comment was meant to be humorous, it should be noted that the lack of air conditioning actually REDUCES the amount of heat produced in the outside world by the data centre.
one thing I haven't seen mention is preventing the servers from getting too cold... at -40 degrees your servers sitting closest to the air intakes might develop some pretty high failure rates as most equipment isn't designed to take that.
Turn your cooling problem in to a heating problem for part of the year... (I remember last year in mid winter in southern Alberta we had people running around putting heaters in some of our outdoor cabinets as our equipment was shutting down due to cold!)
I can't speak for Verizon specifically, however most phone companies have as a general policy to not believe people when they claim not to have dialled a 1-900 number. Because let's face it, who actually ADMITS to that sort of behaviour? even if the person calling in to make the complaint didn't make the calls, their husband, boyfriend, teenage son, uncle, or someone else in the house probably did, and isn't likely to admit it to their wife/girlfriend/mother/niece.
I work as a phone tech (not for Verizon) , and I have been out to quite a few calls where people claim someone else is using their line... in all this time I've only ever found one that had any likelihood of being true (and a padlock on the phone panel solved that one) the rest were either raw paranoia ("I thought I heard a click!!") or someone else in the house, including a few 1-900 complaints, you can usually tell when you meet the family which person it was, it's the one looking really guilty and trying to hide...
Some people have asked how this could happen... lack of supervision, I work unsupervised and all over town all day every day, my performance metrics prove that I'm actually working during that time, however in a unionized company even those whose performance is abysmal still keep their job.
The real question in this whole mess is not how they missed it, but rather how they ended up catching him, and how they linked all the calls back to him.
Regulators don't flow air until there is (slight) negative pressure...
normally, yes, however they have a purge button on them that overrides this and forces air to flow, quite useful for clearing them out, or using the regulator to inflate other things, or in case of a malfunction of some form.
During training to become SCUBA certified you remove the regulator from your mouth, hold the purge button, and breathe the air as it passes your mouth. This is a required skill as it will allow you to breathe even if there is some form of equipment failure.
I am no expert in this, but my take on it is this:
if the magazine bills itself as showing girls who are of age ("legal") and shows girls who look too young, but ARE of age, than it "appears" legal.
however if the magazine uses those same girls, who ARE of age, but CLAIMS them to be too young, then they "appear" illegal.
basically, as long as you don't claim anywhere that the people portrayed are too young, and there is nothing in the picture to imply it, and you DO claim visibly that they ARE old enough (and they in fact are) then all appearances are satisfied.
I think that is more what the law is addressing. it allows them to prosecute where there is no way to determine the age of the person in question, but where it is obvious that things are not intended to be legal.
Back on the main topic though, my concern with such things isn't the blocking of child porn (personally I think that would be a very good thing), it's the possibility of "collateral damage" to innocent sites, and worse yet, "feature creep" where they decide that once they have child porn they'll block pirating, then normal porn, then anyone having a cigarette in a photo, then anyone who disagrees with them on any grounds, etc... (classic slippery slope) and once you get to that point you can't fight any of it without being labelled as a lover of child pornography.
>> Satellite internet service has latency issues that will NEVER go away.
That's what they used to say about the latency on satellite phones... but the latency DID go away, they didn't change the laws of physics, they just moved the satellites closer, now they're LEO instead of geostationary.
Data currently tends to go through geostationary satellites, but there's no reason that in time it won't be migrated to LEO satellites, at which point the latency will be quite acceptable to anyone but a hardcore gamer.
Switzerland also has a higher gun ownership rate than the US but a much lower rate of gun-related violence. I think it's save to say that things that work in Switzerland don't necessarily work in the US
I would think that it demonstrates exactly the opposite, it would seem to me that the Swiss have it figured out and the US could learn a lot from them!
I should have a vote, and be able to give that vote to anyone that I feel is able to represent my views and interests best.
While I agree with you on principal, how do you prevent votes from being bought and sold as commodities? It's a noble thought, however I fear too many people would rather a few dollars than freedom, and in time you could find special interest groups owning a large number of votes, so many in fact that they can do anything they want...
Re:Get Over Yourselves People!
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
>> And the bit about how airlines could make more mone with larger >> planes? They can't because they'll lose customers to the other >> airlines.
The point was that if they used fewer larger planes they could offer a lower price than the competition, and still make more money. (this would likely make up for the fact that they only fly to the other city 2-4 times a day instead of 10-12
The cost per traveller per km decreases significantly when you have more people on an aircraft.
Re:Get Over Yourselves People!
on
Terminal Chaos
·
· Score: 1
>> But as long as people make their travel decisions based primarily on >>price
I have to disagree here, if it was entirely price air travel would IMPROVE... the problem right now is that they are trying to be everything to everyone.
Between major cities there are flights every hour from each airline, as a result the planes are smaller models and often half empty.
If the airlines wanted to save money they could easily cut this back, put larger planes on, and run them less often, this is far more efficient for them and would allow them larger profits at a lower price point.
Unfortunately though, business travellers have become too used to being able to pick exactly whatever time they want...
Slashdot Mirror
yet again you fail to account for the fact that when we look at distant stars we're only just now starting to be able to tell if there are planets around them, how do you expect us to be able to tell if another civilization is zooming around in space ships?.
The only way to know would be if they stopped by in (or near) our own solar system, and as you say, space is rather large, there's no reason to think they'd choose us as a destination.
also once again, to think that we'd be first may be arrogant, but to think that we're guaranteed to be a long time behind the first may be rather pessimistic too.
Even if that were the case (and I still doubt we would see them unless they've had it for quite some time)
But even if another civilization were to get FTL before we did, that doesn't mean they have to have had it for any length of time now, we could simply be a very long way away from getting it.
But none of this speculation precludes FTL travel. a lack of observation of some phenomenon happening elsewhere in the universe does not make that phenomenon impossible.
You say we should see it before we're capable of it. Ignoring for a moment that the universe is rather large, and that we often can't even tell if a star has planets around it, let along see a starship zooming around. And assuming that we would in fact see it before we're capable of it, this still doesn't prove it's impossible, just that the first species to achieve it hasn't done so yet (or at least they haven't passed close enough to us for the light from them doing so to have reached us yet).
Nothing about that particular situation proves impossibility.
Now this particular article seems to show that one particular method of faster than light travel is unlikely with our current understanding, that doesn't mean it's completely impossible, just that we don't yet have any idea how to do it.
While the joke is a fake, it is still quite amusing...
Your knowledge about lighthouses though isn't much more accurate.
Many lighthouses have been automated, however I have personally visited 3 manned Canadian light houses quite recently, they do exist, mainly in higher risk areas where their ability to assist people in need adds to the function of simply operating the light (which has been modernized to the point where it requires very little maintenance (automated lamp changing, automatic fog-horn etc (though the automatic fog horn is apparently hit and miss, and manual activation is often required))
All 3 of these lighthouses do in fact monitor the radio, this is the primary means of getting a hold of them as they don't have telephones (well these days they probably do have satellite phones (1 of them had satellite internet), but that's more for personal use, radio is the primary contact method)
They also monitor the radio for any emergencies happening nearby so that they can pass it on to the appropriate emergency response department.
Now it is true that they have no "radio communications function" and due to the fact that these lighthouses are manned by a single family, they don't maintain a proper 24/7 radio watch, but the radio is always on, and if you call them, there are pretty good odds they'll hear and answer.
It's weird, at home running firefox on ubuntu it's fast, responsive, and can stay open for weeks without issues, I frequently have MANY tabs open (30+ is not uncommon) and never run in to the whole "bloat" issue people talk about.
However, when I run firefox on my work laptop (windows XP) firefox takes forever to load, is sluggish, and over time (about 2 hours) becomes so slow as to be completely unusable, and shortly afterwards hangs the whole machine forcing me to do a cold-reboot, and this is with no more than 4 tabs ever used.
The add-ons in use on the windows one are all in use on my linux machine, and in fact it has additional ones loaded as well.
I don't know if it's something specific with that windows machine, or if it's just the windows version of firefox, but since I installed it on that windows laptop I finally can see what people mean when they complain about firefox "bloat"
and it doesn't insist on wearing out the screen while charging.
I doubt very much that the screen will die early enough to matter from that issue, but if you are really worried, simply tell it not to keep the screen on when charging, it's a simple option in the settings.
and how is this different from the minutes used on the phone? there is also a non-zero risk that the customer won't be able to pay his bill there, and yet they still allow you to make phone calls.
This part would simply be a matter of deciding what level of risk the phone company is willing to take on you and putting in an appropriate credit limit. if you are on a pre-pay phone plan, you can pre-pay your account as well.
Personally though I'm not so interested in ANOTHER way to pay for things, what I want most is for all the various stores to AGREE on a way. My wallet ends up with dozens of different "loyalty cards" and "membership cards" etc all because every store you go to insists you have theirs or they charge you a lot extra for every purchase (technically you get a discount for having the card, not pay extra for not having it, but it works out the same, prices are only competitive if you have their card) And you just end up with a ridiculous amount of plastic in your wallet, and most of it not really useful for anything except one store (or if you're lucky, one family of stores)
currently I carry:
- 1 Visa
- 1 Mastercard
- 1 debit card (stopped carrying my second debit card ages ago)
- 1 department store credit card (cancelled my 2nd one when they started charging an annual fee)
- 2 supermarket "loyalty" cards
- 2 video rental store "membership" cards
- 1 outdoor equipment co-op "membership" card
- 1 gas station "loyalty" card
- 1 auto-club "membership" card
I predict that this system, if ever implemented would turn out like any of the "single sign on" things on the web, where you end up needing 20 different "all in one" logins (or in this case cards or cell phones) instead of the convergence that it touts.
The only real solution is find a way to work with the foreign countries to make it enforceable.
Until they do that, companies in the US will continue to call Canada, and companies in Canada will continue to call the US.
the time per person is the same as these are automated phone calls, they use an (illegal in Canada) robo-call system.
The real expense difference is that phone lines cost more than email addresses.
Except for the oven, fridge, and flashing lights - CFLs are appropriate for most applications.
There's only one application that I still can't find a CFL for, and that's dimmers
I have a fair number of bulbs in my house that are on dimmers, and I like being able to dim them.
I tried what home depot was selling as "dimmable" CFL and they had 2 major problems
1) they were WAY too big to fit in any light fixture I've ever seen
2) they dimmed from 100% all the way down to about 80%, hardly worth bothering with the dimmer knob on the wall.
there's a strong negative societal pressure against a "eat all you want" product transitioning into a "taxiometered" one.
people used to buy cars outright, now a large percentage lease them instead, no huge outcry happened.
Home phones in North America are monthly "unlimited", people are willingly migrating to cell phone plans where they pay by the minute, and there's no outrage over that.
There are other examples as well.
It's all in the marketing, the big print will say "Office, only $1.50*" the microscopic print you can barely read will have buried in the middle of it somewhere "$1.50 is the hourly rate, actual usage fees will vary with use" or some such gibberish, or maybe they'll sell it as a price much closer to what you're used to paying, or looking slightly cheaper, and the fine print will say "based on an average monthly use of 20 hours" or some such.
You'd be amazed what people will accept, and even rush to purchase if you just tell them it's cheaper (actually BEING cheaper is irrelevant)
2 weeks ago I had a car part "overnighted" friday night from nanaimo bc to ottawa ontario (both places in Canada) they "guaranteed" noon on monday, tuesday they told me it was "on time" for delivery that day (a day late) wednesday they said they "might" have lots the package, but that it would take 8 days to check...
Thursday, desperate for the part as I was stranded at the other end of the country until it arrived I had a replacement sent, this time guaranteed by 10:30am friday (but UPS insisted I had to pay again) both parts arrived on friday at 10:28am.
UPS charged full price both times and refuses to reimburse even the shipping cost on either part (let alone my hotel bills and other expenses) because both arrived, even if it took 7 days for their "next day early morning" service.
Their guarantee is essentially meaningless.
of course if you pick express overnight guaranteed by 10:30am the next day, it might arrive 2 weeks later... or it might not arrive at all...
Despite airlines knack for loosing luggage, their record is still much better for me than UPS (or DHL for that matter)
while I know that this comment was meant to be humorous, it should be noted that the lack of air conditioning actually REDUCES the amount of heat produced in the outside world by the data centre.
one thing I haven't seen mention is preventing the servers from getting too cold... at -40 degrees your servers sitting closest to the air intakes might develop some pretty high failure rates as most equipment isn't designed to take that.
Turn your cooling problem in to a heating problem for part of the year... (I remember last year in mid winter in southern Alberta we had people running around putting heaters in some of our outdoor cabinets as our equipment was shutting down due to cold!)
I can't speak for Verizon specifically, however most phone companies have as a general policy to not believe people when they claim not to have dialled a 1-900 number. Because let's face it, who actually ADMITS to that sort of behaviour? even if the person calling in to make the complaint didn't make the calls, their husband, boyfriend, teenage son, uncle, or someone else in the house probably did, and isn't likely to admit it to their wife/girlfriend/mother/niece.
I work as a phone tech (not for Verizon) , and I have been out to quite a few calls where people claim someone else is using their line... in all this time I've only ever found one that had any likelihood of being true (and a padlock on the phone panel solved that one) the rest were either raw paranoia ("I thought I heard a click!!") or someone else in the house, including a few 1-900 complaints, you can usually tell when you meet the family which person it was, it's the one looking really guilty and trying to hide...
Some people have asked how this could happen... lack of supervision, I work unsupervised and all over town all day every day, my performance metrics prove that I'm actually working during that time, however in a unionized company even those whose performance is abysmal still keep their job.
The real question in this whole mess is not how they missed it, but rather how they ended up catching him, and how they linked all the calls back to him.
wow... 8 days of uptime... impressive.
Regulators don't flow air until there is (slight) negative pressure...
normally, yes, however they have a purge button on them that overrides this and forces air to flow, quite useful for clearing them out, or using the regulator to inflate other things, or in case of a malfunction of some form.
During training to become SCUBA certified you remove the regulator from your mouth, hold the purge button, and breathe the air as it passes your mouth. This is a required skill as it will allow you to breathe even if there is some form of equipment failure.
>> Honestly, I think 68k for a change of that nature is quite cheap if you look at all of the things involved
If you know the change will cost $68,000... don't you think you could live with brown leather instead of blue?
I am no expert in this, but my take on it is this:
if the magazine bills itself as showing girls who are of age ("legal") and shows girls who look too young, but ARE of age, than it "appears" legal.
however if the magazine uses those same girls, who ARE of age, but CLAIMS them to be too young, then they "appear" illegal.
basically, as long as you don't claim anywhere that the people portrayed are too young, and there is nothing in the picture to imply it, and you DO claim visibly that they ARE old enough (and they in fact are) then all appearances are satisfied.
I think that is more what the law is addressing. it allows them to prosecute where there is no way to determine the age of the person in question, but where it is obvious that things are not intended to be legal.
Back on the main topic though, my concern with such things isn't the blocking of child porn (personally I think that would be a very good thing), it's the possibility of "collateral damage" to innocent sites, and worse yet, "feature creep" where they decide that once they have child porn they'll block pirating, then normal porn, then anyone having a cigarette in a photo, then anyone who disagrees with them on any grounds, etc... (classic slippery slope) and once you get to that point you can't fight any of it without being labelled as a lover of child pornography.
>> Satellite internet service has latency issues that will NEVER go away.
That's what they used to say about the latency on satellite phones... but the latency DID go away, they didn't change the laws of physics, they just moved the satellites closer, now they're LEO instead of geostationary.
Data currently tends to go through geostationary satellites, but there's no reason that in time it won't be migrated to LEO satellites, at which point the latency will be quite acceptable to anyone but a hardcore gamer.
Switzerland also has a higher gun ownership rate than the US but a much lower rate of gun-related violence. I think it's save to say that things that work in Switzerland don't necessarily work in the US
I would think that it demonstrates exactly the opposite, it would seem to me that the Swiss have it figured out and the US could learn a lot from them!
I should have a vote, and be able to give that vote to anyone that I feel is able to represent my views and interests best.
While I agree with you on principal, how do you prevent votes from being bought and sold as commodities?
It's a noble thought, however I fear too many people would rather a few dollars than freedom, and in time you could find special interest groups owning a large number of votes, so many in fact that they can do anything they want...
>> And the bit about how airlines could make more mone with larger
>> planes? They can't because they'll lose customers to the other
>> airlines.
The point was that if they used fewer larger planes they could offer a lower price than the competition, and still make more money. (this would likely make up for the fact that they only fly to the other city 2-4 times a day instead of 10-12
The cost per traveller per km decreases significantly when you have more people on an aircraft.
>> But as long as people make their travel decisions based primarily on
>>price
I have to disagree here, if it was entirely price air travel would IMPROVE... the problem right now is that they are trying to be everything to everyone.
Between major cities there are flights every hour from each airline, as a result the planes are smaller models and often half empty.
If the airlines wanted to save money they could easily cut this back, put larger planes on, and run them less often, this is far more efficient for them and would allow them larger profits at a lower price point.
Unfortunately though, business travellers have become too used to being able to pick exactly whatever time they want...