You're abusing something that wasn't meant for your purpose, and you're a weirdo. There is no reason why everybody else should pay any overhead for you.
These messages had better not be spending years getting routed around the phone company network. The phone can infer what year it is.
You don't need a month even. I'm not sure you need a day, and you could probably skip the rest as well. This is a stupid waste of bytes, and thus air-time. It eats away at space that could go to the message or anything else useful.
Suppose we really do want sender-side time. OK, let's use an 8-bit count of minutes. That covers over 4 hours. We take UNIX time (UTC seconds since 1970), divide by 60, and throw away all but the low 8 bits. The receiver assumes this is in the recent past, unless it could fall within the future 5 minutes.
In only a generation or two we could be right back to fuedalism !
No, it's a self-balancing stable system. The more tax breaks and subsidies you give yourself, the smaller your vote. Do remember that the poor will naturally outnumber the rich to a great degree, and that the reverse is impossible. Giving a bit more power to the productive (less stupid) people would lead to political debate being a bit more intellectual.
Our current system is unstable. Welfare slowly increases over time because the poor are able to vote for it. They destroy their own jobs (their global competitiveness) via all sorts of goodies that raise the cost of employing them.
After the first war, Saddam started/continued killing Kurds in the north and Marsh Arabs in the south. We initially responded by creating no-fly zones.
Think about that for a moment. For about a decade, we patrol the sky over Iraq in some lame attempt to reduce genocide. It's continuous military action. It's an on-going cost, it doesn't work very well, and we can't just quit.
That had to end somehow, in a non-genocidal way. The hope had been that we could encourage a coup, but that wasn't successful. So, what would you have us do?
There are lots of places that could serve as battlegrounds for a US/China war. Some of them could involve nukes, either homegrown or supplied by US/China. Lots of these are likely, and many get the "oh fuck!" designation:
Our democratic system contains a serious flaw because budget deficits are allowed, enabling instant gratification for all elected officials with payments beginning only after their term of office. Since tax payers and voters are different electorates, iterative evolution preferred parties exploiting it to the fullest for which is what we had for almost 20 years now in all Western countries. All types of government struggle hard when the budget is strained too far and has to be cut back, but I seriously doubt a Western-style democracy is able to do that, especially as there is no more defined "demos" anywhere that could come to a finite set of consensuses, but a gaggle of minorities clamoring for their share of the loot.
Yep. The fundamental difficulty in fixing this is that redistributing power requires consent of those who currently have the power. This rarely ever happens without major revolution-style violence.
The fix is pretty clear though:
Votes are weighted by contribution to the budget. The taxes you pay, minus fedaral-related (contractors included) salary and/or benefits, are your contribution. If your contribution is positive, that is the weight of your vote.
Politicians collect most of their pay after leaving office, proportional to sustained GDP improvements.
We mostly don't have a command economy, while China mostly does. China is able to have long-term coherent planning that we can only dream of.
Here in the USA, who would buy up the supplies? Maybe a few speculators with no real use for the metals would do that, but they'll sell to the higest bidder whenever they please. They won't work together to control supplies for the good of the nation.
Suppose the government took control of the supplies. OK, how do we use the supplies? We'd auction them off! Even if we did limit the auction participants to US citizens, we wouldn't stop those people from selling to China or even acting as agents for China.
Right, we're pretty well pwned in this case. Even if we ("we" being the nation as a whole) were smart enough to deal with this, it's probably too late.
In theory though, your "and why not?" attitude suggests at least three solutions.
1. One obvious and somewhat suicidal solution is war.
2. Another solution in keistering. Keistering is what you do when you realize that these metals are already so expensive that it's no big deal to pay somebody to hide it up their butt.
3. Another solution is neodymium gold clubs. We can have them made in China you see.:-)
Reduce the turns below the 300m radius and some of us would pay extra. You need full banking, good seats, and smooth track. Anything below 6 G is good.
Without grade separation, a train at 70 MPH hits a schoolbus. Boom, kids die, news at 11. That train is NOT stopping; it's already way way too fast. Trains don't stop like sports cars. Trains take miles to stop.
At 200 MPH? Dead is dead. 200 MPH isn't going to start nuclear fusion.
The only real difference is the position of the sensors that cause the road to be blocked off. If you want fast and slow trains on the same line, you'll want speed-aware sensors to avoid needless delay.
Grade separation is of course safer at all speeds, and it eliminates the problem of the road being stopped from time to time. You'll especially want it if you run trains frequently, no matter if they are fast or slow.
airports already have the infrastructure like rent a cars and public transportation that will have to be duplicated at a new high speed rail station.
The train station also needs a runway so that I can transfer from train to airplane. Hey, wait...
The damn obvious thing is to give the airport some extra gates dedicated to train service. People could walk between train and airplane without passing through security and without messing with checked baggage.
Code sharing is important too. I should be able to book a trip through any airline and get offered routes that involve a train. I should be getting frequent flyer miles when I do that.
Swap is difficult. It's daft to build a rail line on a swamp. It'll sink into the swap.
Urban is difficult. It's full of historical landmarks and buried pipes.
Mountains? Make a hole. Normally the rock in nice and solid. Mostly you can avoid taking ownership of the surface land, and anyway it's probably public already because people prefer to build condos and mcmansions on the most productive farmland.
There's really only one exception to the rule. Mountains are not easy if they already have natural holes, specifically vertical ones filled with liquid magma. Of course no decent engineer would pass up the opportunity to get a front page article in a civil engineering magazine, so mere lava need not be a show-stopper.
Suppose the train goes from city C to metropolis M. We want to also serve D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and L. No problem, we just run 9 trains and ensure that stopped trains aren't sitting on the main track.
The first train of the day serves C, D, M.
The second train of the day serves C, E, M.
The third train of the day serves C, F, M....and so on.
Basically, there must be some third-party publication ("reliable reference", so preferably a professional, a journalist or something) to talk about that subject. Every claim should, theoretically, be supported by a third-party.
Those have been going out of business, in part because of wikipedia.
They are also worthless, because anybody with an ax to grind can set up his own web site to look like a credible source.
Most people who complain about the impossibly high notability are spammers or people who created articles about themselves or their own activities.
True spammers are automated bots and they don't complain.
If somebody writes about the 6-person start-up company in his garage, great! (and no, I have not done anything like that myself)
I agree there are instances when relatively notable articles get deleted, but that happens because the creator of the article doesn't care enough to bring sources.
Unless you have a conflicting source, I don't see a problem with an unsourced article. Marking up articles with sources is not easy.
First of all, it's a whole distinct kind of wiki markup to learn, and thus quite a barrier to newbies. Subject experts are normally wiki newbies; the wiki experts are the editors abusing wiki rules to bludgeon the newcomers.
Second of all, where are you going to find the source you happen to remember from XXX years ago? You clearly remember it, but maybe it was something physical that you neglected to purchase at a yard sale.
Third of all, what are you going to do for stuff that is damn obvious? Is every sentence going to have multiple references? The wiki text becomes an unreadable and bloated mess, all to defend against abusive idiots who will use any excuse to delete stuff.
Well that's pretty much understandable that people like you are afraid that Wikipedia could get destroyed by idiotic editors with an agenda.
It seems you haven't been paying attention, or you aren't an expert on anything.
Take any subject with fanatical supporters. Except for a few high-profile subjects with fanatical opposition (like Adolph Hitler for example) you will see a positive spin. For example, consider any article about a religeon or any article of the form "XXXXXX rights". The supporters come out in force. It could be that 99.99% of the world disagrees with the article, but they don't have the energy to fight 24x7 over an article that they mostly don't give a damn about.
An example that is thankfully more-or-less resolved is "feral cat". A couple years ago, it was pure positive spin on the idea of having people support large colonies of semi-wild cats. The crazy cat ladies were out in force. Since I last looked at the article it appears to have gotten a bit of attention from ecologists.
On the other hand, some rules are still needed to avoid wikipedia being filled with extremely detailed articles written by über-nerds and containing complete commentary on every 5minute slice of every Star-Trek episode.
The chances are pretty slim that I'd ever want Star-Trek trivia, but it's not hurting anybody. That slim chance isn't zero. In case I ever do happen to need such info, where else could I rely on finding it?
Furthermore, somebody clearly thought it was important. If one person thought this, then the chances are pretty decent that at least a few other people would agree.
I am thus deprived of a just barely better wikipedia when you go delete the less important stuff. If I only wanted the important stuff, I could just buy a dead-tree encyclopedia. The unimportant stuff is actually important when you consider the whole.
You're also needlessly pissing off contributers. Maybe that Star-Trek weirdo could also improve an article on something I care more about, but he decides that Wikipedia isn't worth his time because people needlessly destroy the stuff that he most likes to write about. So I miss out on his contributions even if I never would have noticed the Star-Trek stuff.
When I go to Wikipedia, I'm going there because I want some info that **I** happen to care about. I don't give a flying fuck if it meets some notability guideline. Wikipedia isn't printed on physical paper and sold as a 220-pound (100-kg) pile of books. Bits are cheap to store; there is no reason to be destroying people's hard work other than some asshole power trip. I'm pissed when I go to an article page seeing info and find it deleted; this happens often if you go directly to the obvious article name instead of just relying on Google and not questioning why there isn't an article for you to read.
BTW, the other big problem we have is positive spin. Articles about any given subject are guarded by editors who have a vested interest in the subject. You're lucky if they only do 1-sided enforcement of no-original-research and citation-please rules to abuse people who tone down the glorification. It's easy to see and quite frustrating for the subjects where I am an expert and could be an editor. On the subjects where I am only a reader seeing to understand, it's frightening to know that these special-interest editors are warping my learning.
You could pretty much say that the not-notable, no-original-research, and citation-needed excuses are Wikipedia's way to do a (Score:-1, Unpolitical) moderation. Not that people wouldn't delete stuff that makes them uncomfortable anyway, but those excuses sure encourage them by providing righteous justification.
In theory, assuming we saw the danger and had the balls to save ourselves by attacking first:
Start with Africa north of the Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, everything from Turkey to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Obviously nuclear weapons are the most practical tool.
Next, wipe out anybody who is really upset.
Finally, test the remaining 5 billion people by requiring each person to piss on a Koran. Wipe out those who refuse.
Horrible? Oh yeah, but the alternative is sitting on our thumbs until they nuke us. Somebody's going to get nuked, and I'd rather it be the other guy.
Realisticly, I expect it'll be us doing the dying. We're really screwed. Our civilization is generally wimpy, short-sighted, cheap, easily distracted, and dumb.
Sure, but I'm saying it doesn't count. When an animal is on either the giving or receiving end, we shouldn't imagine that any ethical issue exists.
To say otherwise would mean that animals could also be held accountable. We could arrest them, arraign them, prosecute them, convict them, and punish them.
Heck, if animal rights are legitimate, then why not let them own property? Why not let them marry? Why not let them run for president?
Slashdot Mirror
In some ways, seriously, China is doing just that. The USA no longer makes anything; the resulting jobless people fill our jails.
We're only fooling ourselves if we pretend that our own system is 100% good without any downsides.
Yep.
Getting a wrong time stamp on some rare occasion is no big deal.
Throwing away old messages is another option, pretty reasonable too since they are most likely moot. (message "see you in a few minutes" for example)
Of course, a 2-byte value would allow for about 2 months to deliver the message.
You're abusing something that wasn't meant for your purpose, and you're a weirdo. There is no reason why everybody else should pay any overhead for you.
You can send your own date in the message itself.
These messages had better not be spending years getting routed around the phone company network. The phone can infer what year it is.
You don't need a month even. I'm not sure you need a day, and you could probably skip the rest as well. This is a stupid waste of bytes, and thus air-time. It eats away at space that could go to the message or anything else useful.
Suppose we really do want sender-side time. OK, let's use an 8-bit count of minutes. That covers over 4 hours. We take UNIX time (UTC seconds since 1970), divide by 60, and throw away all but the low 8 bits. The receiver assumes this is in the recent past, unless it could fall within the future 5 minutes.
In only a generation or two we could be right back to fuedalism !
No, it's a self-balancing stable system. The more tax breaks and subsidies you give yourself, the smaller your vote. Do remember that the poor will naturally outnumber the rich to a great degree, and that the reverse is impossible. Giving a bit more power to the productive (less stupid) people would lead to political debate being a bit more intellectual.
Our current system is unstable. Welfare slowly increases over time because the poor are able to vote for it. They destroy their own jobs (their global competitiveness) via all sorts of goodies that raise the cost of employing them.
After the first war, Saddam started/continued killing Kurds in the north and Marsh Arabs in the south. We initially responded by creating no-fly zones.
Think about that for a moment. For about a decade, we patrol the sky over Iraq in some lame attempt to reduce genocide. It's continuous military action. It's an on-going cost, it doesn't work very well, and we can't just quit.
That had to end somehow, in a non-genocidal way. The hope had been that we could encourage a coup, but that wasn't successful. So, what would you have us do?
There are lots of places that could serve as battlegrounds for a US/China war. Some of them could involve nukes, either homegrown or supplied by US/China. Lots of these are likely, and many get the "oh fuck!" designation:
South Korea / North Korea
Japan / unified Korea
Taiwan / itself
Colombia / Venuzuela
Cuba / itself
Iran / itself
Israel / Saudi Arabia
Chile / Bolivia
anywhere in Africa
Our democratic system contains a serious flaw because budget deficits are allowed, enabling instant gratification for all elected officials with payments beginning only after their term of office. Since tax payers and voters are different electorates, iterative evolution preferred parties exploiting it to the fullest for which is what we had for almost 20 years now in all Western countries. All types of government struggle hard when the budget is strained too far and has to be cut back, but I seriously doubt a Western-style democracy is able to do that, especially as there is no more defined "demos" anywhere that could come to a finite set of consensuses, but a gaggle of minorities clamoring for their share of the loot.
Yep. The fundamental difficulty in fixing this is that redistributing power requires consent of those who currently have the power. This rarely ever happens without major revolution-style violence.
The fix is pretty clear though:
Votes are weighted by contribution to the budget. The taxes you pay, minus fedaral-related (contractors included) salary and/or benefits, are your contribution. If your contribution is positive, that is the weight of your vote.
Politicians collect most of their pay after leaving office, proportional to sustained GDP improvements.
We mostly don't have a command economy, while China mostly does. China is able to have long-term coherent planning that we can only dream of.
Here in the USA, who would buy up the supplies? Maybe a few speculators with no real use for the metals would do that, but they'll sell to the higest bidder whenever they please. They won't work together to control supplies for the good of the nation.
Suppose the government took control of the supplies. OK, how do we use the supplies? We'd auction them off! Even if we did limit the auction participants to US citizens, we wouldn't stop those people from selling to China or even acting as agents for China.
Right, we're pretty well pwned in this case. Even if we ("we" being the nation as a whole) were smart enough to deal with this, it's probably too late.
In theory though, your "and why not?" attitude suggests at least three solutions.
1. One obvious and somewhat suicidal solution is war.
2. Another solution in keistering. Keistering is what you do when you realize that these metals are already so expensive that it's no big deal to pay somebody to hide it up their butt.
3. Another solution is neodymium gold clubs. We can have them made in China you see. :-)
no, GPS is mid-level
Without a magnetic field to stop the solar wind, satellites tend to die.
Granted, GPS is military and not LEO, so it might be built a bit better than most.
Reduce the turns below the 300m radius and some of us would pay extra. You need full banking, good seats, and smooth track. Anything below 6 G is good.
Without grade separation, a train at 70 MPH hits a schoolbus. Boom, kids die, news at 11. That train is NOT stopping; it's already way way too fast. Trains don't stop like sports cars. Trains take miles to stop.
At 200 MPH? Dead is dead. 200 MPH isn't going to start nuclear fusion.
The only real difference is the position of the sensors that cause the road to be blocked off. If you want fast and slow trains on the same line, you'll want speed-aware sensors to avoid needless delay.
Grade separation is of course safer at all speeds, and it eliminates the problem of the road being stopped from time to time. You'll especially want it if you run trains frequently, no matter if they are fast or slow.
airports already have the infrastructure like rent a cars and public transportation that will have to be duplicated at a new high speed rail station.
The train station also needs a runway so that I can transfer from train to airplane. Hey, wait...
The damn obvious thing is to give the airport some extra gates dedicated to train service. People could walk between train and airplane without passing through security and without messing with checked baggage.
Code sharing is important too. I should be able to book a trip through any airline and get offered routes that involve a train. I should be getting frequent flyer miles when I do that.
Very easy, as long as it is not in my back yard!
We routed it through your front yard. At that point it's elevated 9 feet, leaving a 6-foot gap underneath so you can get your car into the garage.
Swap is difficult. It's daft to build a rail line on a swamp. It'll sink into the swap.
Urban is difficult. It's full of historical landmarks and buried pipes.
Mountains? Make a hole. Normally the rock in nice and solid. Mostly you can avoid taking ownership of the surface land, and anyway it's probably public already because people prefer to build condos and mcmansions on the most productive farmland.
There's really only one exception to the rule. Mountains are not easy if they already have natural holes, specifically vertical ones filled with liquid magma. Of course no decent engineer would pass up the opportunity to get a front page article in a civil engineering magazine, so mere lava need not be a show-stopper.
Suppose the train goes from city C to metropolis M. We want to also serve D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K, and L. No problem, we just run 9 trains and ensure that stopped trains aren't sitting on the main track.
The first train of the day serves C, D, M.
The second train of the day serves C, E, M.
The third train of the day serves C, F, M. ...and so on.
They have an office in Staines. Really.
It's in Germany. In their language, it's called something like Douche Republic.
You can't make this shit up!
Basically, there must be some third-party publication ("reliable reference", so preferably a professional, a journalist or something) to talk about that subject. Every claim should, theoretically, be supported by a third-party.
Those have been going out of business, in part because of wikipedia.
They are also worthless, because anybody with an ax to grind can set up his own web site to look like a credible source.
Most people who complain about the impossibly high notability are spammers or people who created articles about themselves or their own activities.
True spammers are automated bots and they don't complain.
If somebody writes about the 6-person start-up company in his garage, great! (and no, I have not done anything like that myself)
I agree there are instances when relatively notable articles get deleted, but that happens because the creator of the article doesn't care enough to bring sources.
Unless you have a conflicting source, I don't see a problem with an unsourced article. Marking up articles with sources is not easy.
First of all, it's a whole distinct kind of wiki markup to learn, and thus quite a barrier to newbies. Subject experts are normally wiki newbies; the wiki experts are the editors abusing wiki rules to bludgeon the newcomers.
Second of all, where are you going to find the source you happen to remember from XXX years ago? You clearly remember it, but maybe it was something physical that you neglected to purchase at a yard sale.
Third of all, what are you going to do for stuff that is damn obvious? Is every sentence going to have multiple references? The wiki text becomes an unreadable and bloated mess, all to defend against abusive idiots who will use any excuse to delete stuff.
Well that's pretty much understandable that people like you are afraid that Wikipedia could get destroyed by idiotic editors with an agenda.
It seems you haven't been paying attention, or you aren't an expert on anything.
Take any subject with fanatical supporters. Except for a few high-profile subjects with fanatical opposition (like Adolph Hitler for example) you will see a positive spin. For example, consider any article about a religeon or any article of the form "XXXXXX rights". The supporters come out in force. It could be that 99.99% of the world disagrees with the article, but they don't have the energy to fight 24x7 over an article that they mostly don't give a damn about.
An example that is thankfully more-or-less resolved is "feral cat". A couple years ago, it was pure positive spin on the idea of having people support large colonies of semi-wild cats. The crazy cat ladies were out in force. Since I last looked at the article it appears to have gotten a bit of attention from ecologists.
On the other hand, some rules are still needed to avoid wikipedia being filled with extremely detailed articles written by über-nerds and containing complete commentary on every 5minute slice of every Star-Trek episode.
The chances are pretty slim that I'd ever want Star-Trek trivia, but it's not hurting anybody. That slim chance isn't zero. In case I ever do happen to need such info, where else could I rely on finding it?
Furthermore, somebody clearly thought it was important. If one person thought this, then the chances are pretty decent that at least a few other people would agree.
I am thus deprived of a just barely better wikipedia when you go delete the less important stuff. If I only wanted the important stuff, I could just buy a dead-tree encyclopedia. The unimportant stuff is actually important when you consider the whole.
You're also needlessly pissing off contributers. Maybe that Star-Trek weirdo could also improve an article on something I care more about, but he decides that Wikipedia isn't worth his time because people needlessly destroy the stuff that he most likes to write about. So I miss out on his contributions even if I never would have noticed the Star-Trek stuff.
When I go to Wikipedia, I'm going there because I want some info that **I** happen to care about. I don't give a flying fuck if it meets some notability guideline. Wikipedia isn't printed on physical paper and sold as a 220-pound (100-kg) pile of books. Bits are cheap to store; there is no reason to be destroying people's hard work other than some asshole power trip. I'm pissed when I go to an article page seeing info and find it deleted; this happens often if you go directly to the obvious article name instead of just relying on Google and not questioning why there isn't an article for you to read.
BTW, the other big problem we have is positive spin. Articles about any given subject are guarded by editors who have a vested interest in the subject. You're lucky if they only do 1-sided enforcement of no-original-research and citation-please rules to abuse people who tone down the glorification. It's easy to see and quite frustrating for the subjects where I am an expert and could be an editor. On the subjects where I am only a reader seeing to understand, it's frightening to know that these special-interest editors are warping my learning.
You could pretty much say that the not-notable, no-original-research, and citation-needed excuses are Wikipedia's way to do a (Score:-1, Unpolitical) moderation. Not that people wouldn't delete stuff that makes them uncomfortable anyway, but those excuses sure encourage them by providing righteous justification.
Wipe who out? Where do we go to wipe them out?
In theory, assuming we saw the danger and had the balls to save ourselves by attacking first:
Start with Africa north of the Sahara, the Arabian Peninsula, everything from Turkey to Pakistan, Bangladesh, Malaysia, and Indonesia. Obviously nuclear weapons are the most practical tool.
Next, wipe out anybody who is really upset.
Finally, test the remaining 5 billion people by requiring each person to piss on a Koran. Wipe out those who refuse.
Horrible? Oh yeah, but the alternative is sitting on our thumbs until they nuke us. Somebody's going to get nuked, and I'd rather it be the other guy.
Realisticly, I expect it'll be us doing the dying. We're really screwed. Our civilization is generally wimpy, short-sighted, cheap, easily distracted, and dumb.
Sure, but I'm saying it doesn't count. When an animal is on either the giving or receiving end, we shouldn't imagine that any ethical issue exists.
To say otherwise would mean that animals could also be held accountable. We could arrest them, arraign them, prosecute them, convict them, and punish them.
Heck, if animal rights are legitimate, then why not let them own property? Why not let them marry? Why not let them run for president?