My original question was making the connection to distracted driving: what difference is there in a conversation over a phone vs. in person?
Whenever you're trying to understand somebody over a cellphone, a huge portion of your brain has to be dedicated to signal processing to reconstruct the meaning of sounds that had been compressed down to a couple of kilobits per second. The dynamic range, signal to noise ratio, and freqency spectrum have all been hugely limited, and you get zero spacial information after the sound has been piped through a single tiny 1/4-inch microphone. The random short dropouts of sound common on wireless calls make the situation even worse. In contrast, you get multiple megabits per second of uncompressed audio information from a person sitting next to you, which is far easier for your brain to parse.
Sometimes I have to concentrate pretty hard to make out what someone on a cellphone is saying even if I'm sitting in a quiet room. It should be obvious that talking on the phone is much more distracting and consuming than talking in person. That's why a lot of people spend 2 days and thousands of dollars flying across the country to attend a 2 hour business meeting rather than just making a conference call.
...but we need to do more. I used to flip burgers at McDonald's 30 years ago, but I'm still alive, and I haven't seen one thin dime from them since 1979. This is an outrage. We need to expand the rights to get compensated for work over a lifetime to *everyone*. Fairness will only be achieved when the financial well being of my grandchildren is ensured through 2073 by their receipt of residuals for my work at McDonald's.
Why exactly is the return trip "technically infeasible"?
The rocket that sent the Cassini probe to Saturn was 200 feet tall and filled with hundreds of tons of oxidizer and fuel. Even so, it took almost 10 years of bouncing around the solar system to leech additional energy from Venus, Earth and Jupiter to get a couple of tons of spacecraft in orbit around Saturn.
The return trip would require just as much effort. Going towards the sun is no easier than away from it; that's why the Mercury probe is taking almost a decade to reach its destination.
Even if you could get a huge rocket to Saturn to launch back to earth, unlike earth there's no oxidizer readily available. So you'd have to send hundreds of tons of that from earth, thereby increasing the size of the effort by 30X or more. The rocket you'd have to send from earth to carry all that oxidizer would make the Apollo mission launcher look like a bottle rocket and would need a supertanker's worth of fuel to make the trip. All of this to obtain less than 1 truckload of gasoline from Titan.
You probably are thinking "then we'll just use a more advanced propulsion system to send back the fuel". But if we had that mastery of energy technology, then why in the hell would we need to get piddly fuel oil from outer space in the first place?
The hardest part about sending something heavy to another planet is getting it out of our atmosphere.
That's not hard at all. Thousands of V2 rockets had gotten "out of our atmosphere" by 1945. Maybe you should look into getting an MBA, because you sure ain't making it as a rocket scientist.
The Cassini-Huygens mission cost more than $3 billion to land a 350 kg probe on titan. If the probe were made out of 100% gasoline, that would cost $30,000,000 per gallon, and that's not even factoring in the cost of a (currently technically infeasible) a return trip.
So you've got at least 7 orders of magnitude of cost reductions to work through before you're competitive with terrestrial fossil fuels.
Chemical Energy Bonanza: Remote sensors indicate that inner planet "Earth" has hundreds of times more oxygen gas than all known reserves here on Titan.
You need to provide links to back up your assertions because your numbers don't add up as far as I can tell. The CIA Factbook gives Japan 4 more years of life expectency than the USA. With the USA's 6 per 100,000 homicide rate and assuming on average a murder victim is 25 years old, that shaves 3 months off US life expectancy relative to Japan, even assuming zero murder rate in Japan. Similar math on car accidents shaves about 6 months, even assuming that nobody in Japan drives. Since I highly doubt that people in the USA are much clumsier than the rest of the world, you have yet to explain an additional 2.5 years of difference compared to my overly conservative estimates. Then you have to explain why we're paying so much more than these other countries; we ought to be living to 120 years old on average at these prices.
The fact that there may be public healthcare for the poor is irrelevant to most people, who aren't poor enough (or don't have the requisite children) to get in the plan, but don't have a pristine health history that allows them to buy individual insurance.
Face it, the thousands of privately managed risk pools, middlemen, ever-changing contracts, murky and confusing billing procedures, etc. make our healthcare system an insane, broken expensive nightmare unless you work at a large corporation. (Which is probably by design, as it creates a feudal-like system to keep corporate employees loyal at the risk of losing coverage for their families.)
Undoubtedly, the most important "non-medical" factor is the fact that close to 1/4 of the population doesn't have proper access to the medical system in the first place, thereby exacerbating any medical problems that they have until it's too late. You can't just sweep that under the rug.
Since the US government *currently* pays for most old people's healthcare costs, your argument that our system is better because it handles old people differently doesn't make any sense.
However, we do know that if you take our current healthcare problems, and try to bandaid on a fix like national healthcare, we will end up with some beast of a system that costs more and provides less.
Funny how you think that you "know" that, given that we're essentially the only developed country that doesn't provide some form of national health care, we pay almost twice as much for healthcare as the next most expensive country, and even with all that money we're spending, we're nowhere near the top of the list of healthiest or longest living populations.
Because "Yahoo!" and "Google" aren't stupid; they're clever marketing as opposed to some dork's hamster's name or favorite line from an RPG session
On the contrary: I think that a backronym (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) based on a literary reference to a fantasy novel, and a name based on a technical term for a huge number coined by some mathematician's kid, are both pretty damned dorky. You probably just think otherwise because you got used to them.
Got a car? Take any form of motorized transportation? Chances are that you have personally used over 4000 liters of fuel in just the past couple of years. Maybe you ought to invest in a tank of hydrogen.
We're stuck in the dark ages of sub-sonic flight because a vocal minority - mostly housewives with more time on their hands than brains - don't want their miserable little lives occasionally disrupted.
On a day with the right weather conditions, I can see the remnants of dozens of contrails in the sky at any given time. I certainly don't want to be subjected to a dish-rattling sonic boom for each one of those.
Basically, you'd be annoying hundreds of thousands of people each time a few dozen passengers shave a couple of hours off of a flight (but still spend 4 hours in traffic jams, terminal waiting areas, baggage areas and security lines at the endpoints). Those "housewives" are 100% correct on this one.
there used to be a whole slew of mom 'n' pop ISP operations.
Yeah, and they were on dialup. That doesn't count because nobody cares about dialup anymore. Broadband is a monopoly or duopoly due to the huge capital costs tied up in phone or cable lines, and 3rd parties ISPs have to outsource to the same telcos they compete with, which is a conflict of interest that doesn't make business sense. It has nothing to do with consumers choosing one feature or another.
Secondly, the reason ISPs charge more for fixed IP addresses is just because it makes some of their network administration more complicated.
Maybe a tiny bit. But the main reason they charge more is because the people who care about fixed addresses are almost certainly running some kind of server, and the ISP figures that they can extract more money from people who run servers. With IPv6, it wouldn't be nearly so easy to sort out who's running a server and who's not.
Finally, your complaint where it isn't uninformed seems to boil down to the complaint that people in the business of selling Internet access want to charge as much as possible for doing so.
You need to work on your reading comprehension. Where did I say that I was complaining? I was just explaining why you shouldn't be surprised that you'll probably be on IPv4 for a long time to come. Personally, I'd be happy not having to learn this whole new pile of alien IPv6 concepts.
ISPs see the limited IPv4 address space as a revenue stream. Many of them charge almost double for the privilege of getting a fixed public IP address. They don't have to spend money on a lot of scarce IP addresses themselves since they can always stick their customers in NAT ghettos.
They're not going to be very eager to give up their position as a gatekeeper of a limited resource just so their customers can frolick in a vast address space for free. Since most of them operate in a monopoly or duopoly situation, the proverbial "free market" won't force them to move off IPv4 either.
these days everyone is comparing spending to iraq,when its very rarely a good comparison.
That's right, since Iraq is costing us orders of magnitude more than almost anything else. We really should be using more reasonable units like milliIraqs.
Ok, but that has nothing at all to do with democracy and/or its alleged evilness. A system where fixed religious laws trump civil laws is even farther from a pure democracy than the US system.
This is exactly why democracy is evil and why we need to realize we have a constitutional republic, and that is what we need to spread.
... except that Afghanistan is not a pure democracy either; it is a constitutional republic with elected representatives just like the USA. So what's your point?
Not really. When I looked this up a while back, as far as I could tell TiVo had several relatively narrow patents on DVR technology that they invented. (The most prominent of these had to do with tricks to get enough performance out of 1990s era hard drive to simultaneously record and view video. That's no longer an issue.) Probably most of their patents can be worked around.
A few years ago, however, TiVo bought the rights from a 3rd party to an older and incredibly broad patent that covers absolutely any DVR implementation, or indeed any simultaneous reading and writing of any digital video stream. (From the claims it looked like the commands mencoder/dev/video -o foo.mpg &; mplayer foo.mpg would inringe.) That kind of makes them a patent troll, since that dubious "invention" (which in a sane world would have been rejected as obvious by the patent office) predates TiVo altogether. The good news is that this particular patent is expiring really soon now.
This whole story mainly reminds me of the classic depair.com poster:
It could be that the purpose of your life is only to serve as a warning to others.
Slashdot Mirror
Whenever you're trying to understand somebody over a cellphone, a huge portion of your brain has to be dedicated to signal processing to reconstruct the meaning of sounds that had been compressed down to a couple of kilobits per second. The dynamic range, signal to noise ratio, and freqency spectrum have all been hugely limited, and you get zero spacial information after the sound has been piped through a single tiny 1/4-inch microphone. The random short dropouts of sound common on wireless calls make the situation even worse. In contrast, you get multiple megabits per second of uncompressed audio information from a person sitting next to you, which is far easier for your brain to parse.
Sometimes I have to concentrate pretty hard to make out what someone on a cellphone is saying even if I'm sitting in a quiet room. It should be obvious that talking on the phone is much more distracting and consuming than talking in person. That's why a lot of people spend 2 days and thousands of dollars flying across the country to attend a 2 hour business meeting rather than just making a conference call.
...but we need to do more. I used to flip burgers at McDonald's 30 years ago, but I'm still alive, and I haven't seen one thin dime from them since 1979. This is an outrage. We need to expand the rights to get compensated for work over a lifetime to *everyone*. Fairness will only be achieved when the financial well being of my grandchildren is ensured through 2073 by their receipt of residuals for my work at McDonald's.
The rocket that sent the Cassini probe to Saturn was 200 feet tall and filled with hundreds of tons of oxidizer and fuel. Even so, it took almost 10 years of bouncing around the solar system to leech additional energy from Venus, Earth and Jupiter to get a couple of tons of spacecraft in orbit around Saturn.
The return trip would require just as much effort. Going towards the sun is no easier than away from it; that's why the Mercury probe is taking almost a decade to reach its destination.
Even if you could get a huge rocket to Saturn to launch back to earth, unlike earth there's no oxidizer readily available. So you'd have to send hundreds of tons of that from earth, thereby increasing the size of the effort by 30X or more. The rocket you'd have to send from earth to carry all that oxidizer would make the Apollo mission launcher look like a bottle rocket and would need a supertanker's worth of fuel to make the trip. All of this to obtain less than 1 truckload of gasoline from Titan.
You probably are thinking "then we'll just use a more advanced propulsion system to send back the fuel". But if we had that mastery of energy technology, then why in the hell would we need to get piddly fuel oil from outer space in the first place?
The hardest part about sending something heavy to another planet is getting it out of our atmosphere.That's not hard at all. Thousands of V2 rockets had gotten "out of our atmosphere" by 1945. Maybe you should look into getting an MBA, because you sure ain't making it as a rocket scientist.
The Cassini-Huygens mission cost more than $3 billion to land a 350 kg probe on titan. If the probe were made out of 100% gasoline, that would cost $30,000,000 per gallon, and that's not even factoring in the cost of a (currently technically infeasible) a return trip.
So you've got at least 7 orders of magnitude of cost reductions to work through before you're competitive with terrestrial fossil fuels.
Chemical Energy Bonanza: Remote sensors indicate that inner planet "Earth" has hundreds of times more oxygen gas than all known reserves here on Titan.
The fact that there may be public healthcare for the poor is irrelevant to most people, who aren't poor enough (or don't have the requisite children) to get in the plan, but don't have a pristine health history that allows them to buy individual insurance.
Face it, the thousands of privately managed risk pools, middlemen, ever-changing contracts, murky and confusing billing procedures, etc. make our healthcare system an insane, broken expensive nightmare unless you work at a large corporation. (Which is probably by design, as it creates a feudal-like system to keep corporate employees loyal at the risk of losing coverage for their families.)
Undoubtedly, the most important "non-medical" factor is the fact that close to 1/4 of the population doesn't have proper access to the medical system in the first place, thereby exacerbating any medical problems that they have until it's too late. You can't just sweep that under the rug.
Since the US government *currently* pays for most old people's healthcare costs, your argument that our system is better because it handles old people differently doesn't make any sense.
Funny how you think that you "know" that, given that we're essentially the only developed country that doesn't provide some form of national health care, we pay almost twice as much for healthcare as the next most expensive country, and even with all that money we're spending, we're nowhere near the top of the list of healthiest or longest living populations.
On the contrary: I think that a backronym (Yet Another Hierarchical Officious Oracle) based on a literary reference to a fantasy novel, and a name based on a technical term for a huge number coined by some mathematician's kid, are both pretty damned dorky. You probably just think otherwise because you got used to them.
If stupid names are such a user turn-off, then why is Microsoft willing to spend $44B to buy "Yahoo!" so that it can compete with "Google"?
Got a car? Take any form of motorized transportation? Chances are that you have personally used over 4000 liters of fuel in just the past couple of years. Maybe you ought to invest in a tank of hydrogen.
On a day with the right weather conditions, I can see the remnants of dozens of contrails in the sky at any given time. I certainly don't want to be subjected to a dish-rattling sonic boom for each one of those.
Basically, you'd be annoying hundreds of thousands of people each time a few dozen passengers shave a couple of hours off of a flight (but still spend 4 hours in traffic jams, terminal waiting areas, baggage areas and security lines at the endpoints). Those "housewives" are 100% correct on this one.
You need to buy them in bulk. For example, Intel will sell you about 500 million FETs for only $200.
Yeah, and they were on dialup. That doesn't count because nobody cares about dialup anymore. Broadband is a monopoly or duopoly due to the huge capital costs tied up in phone or cable lines, and 3rd parties ISPs have to outsource to the same telcos they compete with, which is a conflict of interest that doesn't make business sense. It has nothing to do with consumers choosing one feature or another.
Secondly, the reason ISPs charge more for fixed IP addresses is just because it makes some of their network administration more complicated.Maybe a tiny bit. But the main reason they charge more is because the people who care about fixed addresses are almost certainly running some kind of server, and the ISP figures that they can extract more money from people who run servers. With IPv6, it wouldn't be nearly so easy to sort out who's running a server and who's not.
Finally, your complaint where it isn't uninformed seems to boil down to the complaint that people in the business of selling Internet access want to charge as much as possible for doing so.You need to work on your reading comprehension. Where did I say that I was complaining? I was just explaining why you shouldn't be surprised that you'll probably be on IPv4 for a long time to come. Personally, I'd be happy not having to learn this whole new pile of alien IPv6 concepts.
How could you tell? I was never able to find lighting conditions good enough to let me decipher what was on that non-backlit, 1.01:1 contrast display.
They're not going to be very eager to give up their position as a gatekeeper of a limited resource just so their customers can frolick in a vast address space for free. Since most of them operate in a monopoly or duopoly situation, the proverbial "free market" won't force them to move off IPv4 either.
That's right, since Iraq is costing us orders of magnitude more than almost anything else. We really should be using more reasonable units like milliIraqs.
Ok, but that has nothing at all to do with democracy and/or its alleged evilness. A system where fixed religious laws trump civil laws is even farther from a pure democracy than the US system.
Not really. When I looked this up a while back, as far as I could tell TiVo had several relatively narrow patents on DVR technology that they invented. (The most prominent of these had to do with tricks to get enough performance out of 1990s era hard drive to simultaneously record and view video. That's no longer an issue.) Probably most of their patents can be worked around.
A few years ago, however, TiVo bought the rights from a 3rd party to an older and incredibly broad patent that covers absolutely any DVR implementation, or indeed any simultaneous reading and writing of any digital video stream. (From the claims it looked like the commands mencoder /dev/video -o foo.mpg &; mplayer foo.mpg would inringe.) That kind of makes them a patent troll, since that dubious "invention" (which in a sane world would have been rejected as obvious by the patent office) predates TiVo altogether. The good news is that this particular patent is expiring really soon now.
Scientists using the latest computing tools and measuring equipment master the same ballistics computation abilities as an apricot-sized tiger brain.
Probably because they can see first hand how their company is run, and it's usually not pretty.
...why? Because you could put in the BASIC programming cartridge and enter 1Kb of your own code on the built-in numeric keypad!