When is your government actually going to get around to proper electronic tax filing?
Witness the Australian Tax Office and their (imaginatively named) "E-Tax". For the 2001 fiscal year, over 520,000 people used it. To put it in perspective, that's a quarter of the Australian working population that has a computer is using etax. My refund was electronically deposited into my account in 6 working days, and it was just me and the Tax office, with no other pain-in-the-ass company in the middle.
I know, it probably won't help those with complex finances, but it sure as hell would put a bullet into companies like these.
$200 million to launch 10 tons of hazardous waste to LEO, where if things don't go right in the launch or the next transfer stage, it might end up de-orbited in teeny-little hazardous pieces over some continent. Maybe even *your* continent!
$10 million to buy an abandoned salt mine and dump 10,000t of waste in it for someone else to deal with later (much later - hopefully after you're long gone from the scene with the remainder of the cash you saved from not launching crap into the sun.)
Which one would you pick if you were a corporation that needed to show a profit to worried investors?
Because he hasn't figured out how to get *back* yet. Otherwise it'd be:
Astronaut : "Ok, Mission Control, all mission objectives have been completed, we are ready for the Neptunian / Earth transfer orbital calculations. (Peep!)"
Mission Control : "Er, hang on a tic, I haven't done the numbers yet. Er, lessee here... 2 tons of nuclear fuel remaining... 1g acceleration....er... (Peep!)"
Mission Control : "hmm,no,that's not it...(Peep!)"
Mission Control : "maybe if we...(Peep!)"
Mission Control : "Ahah - hey, did I ever tell you guys about the time I decided to drive down to Texas and ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere? (Peep!)"
GSM has a hard limit of 35km (22 miles) - after that, you can't compensate enough for the round-trip signal delay from speed of light and data processing.
The delay is quantiled as a 6 bit number in the GSM data stream. 6 bits => 64 steps (0-63); each step advances the timing by one bit duration ie 3.7 microseconds.64 steps allows compensation over a maximum propagation time of 31.5 bit periods ie 113.3 microseconds ( => a maximum distance of ~ 35 km).
As this has been mentioned a little bit in other peoples posts, I'll ask the question too:
Why should I (an australian) have to rely on the "Department of Homeland Security" of another country for information regarding a sendmail patch? What if someone found a root exploit affecting 75% of say, iraq's servers and reported it to the "Department of Homeland Security"? I wonder how long it would take for them to issue a release about that one? As far as I'm concerned , the body that looks after this sort of thing should be international and not have any majority government control, as otherwise they start acting in their own interests, and not the greater interests of the other technically competent people on the planet.
(And "Department of Homeland Security" always has a weird , 1984-ish sound to me, hence the quotes)
I was going to go into a long-winded rebuttal of your arguments, but then just did a quick search and copied and pasted the results here. (And I would have thought that a "CHERNOBYL in space!" would have been the best place to have one, seeing as there's nobody there.)
Seeya!
"The ceramic-form plutonium fuel is heat resistant, thus making it more difficult to be vaporized in case of fire or reentry environmental exposure. The fuel is also very insoluble. It has a low chemical reactivity and breaks in large pieces, not small parts that can be inhaled or ingested. Unlike in nuclear accidents, RTGs cannot explode because no fusion or fission processes are occurring. Hence, the acute radiation sickness associated with nuclear explosions wont be witnessed in an RTG accident."
Slashdot's been having "discussions" about "items" for a long time (items being anything ranging from the latest Apple fanfare to the Xbox). Yeah, but how many of these items were being sold by Slashdot?
Er, if you pay to have the banner ads removed, then they're selling information.
You guys don't have CD-singles? Small 8cm CD's with a few tracks only on them? There's normally a wall full of the latest pop singles at my local music store somewhere.
Pity they cost about 2USD to buy - still a little pricey. Yes, and the songs are crap too... but the principle is still there.
But eventually Supply and Demand will kick in - someone will want to tape "Friends, 2009", so presto! the means will appear. Soon enough you'll be able to buy the equivalent HDTV VCR from China for $120 that "mistakenly" ignores the broadcast flag, a-la DVD zoning.
Pity it means that some other country's tech industry gets the "3) Profit!".
Side note: Sure won't be worrying about how illegal it is in my country (Australia) for a long while yet. Is "the switch" happening in 2008? And have we sorted whether we're going for SDTV or HDTV? Anyone with a set-top DTV box in.au care to comment on the current digital transmissions? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
I had trouble getting a DoC recognised on my webplayer too, with the same kind of symptoms. Eventually I found that adding a delay in the DoC code fixed it - see patch.
--- linux/drivers/mtd/doc2000.c Tue May 1 08:19:14 2001 +++ linux/drivers/mtd/doc2000.c Tue May 1 08:21:25 2001 @@ -71,7 +71,8 @@ volatile char dummy; int i;
- for (i = 0; i < cycles; i++) { +/* Virgin-Linux patch for WebPlayer DoC timing, multiply cycles by 4 */ + for (i = 0; i < cycles*4; i++) { if (DoC_is_Millennium(doc)) dummy = ReadDOC(doc->virtadr, NOP); else
R11, for example boiled at about 20 degrees C, but you can't get that anymore, due to nasty ozone-depletion. However, one of the other commonly-available R's (R123 perhaps?) boils at around 30 degrees. Sounds like what's needed here, as long as room temp doesn't get above 30 so you can condense it again without too much hassle.
Volume of water going through (arbitrary example) 20cm dia steam-powered jet engine at 10m/s: 3.14*.10*.10*10 = 314 litres/second, raised approx 3 degrees.
Volume of water in 1 square kilometre of 20m deep ocean at 20 degrees: 20 thousand million litres.
Time to traverse 1km in boat at 10m/s = 100 seconds = 31,400 litres of 4 degree warmer water.
Mix 31,400 litres of 4 degree warmer water with remaining 19999968600 litres.
So, if 1000 boats all simultaneously traversed the same 1km square section of water, the water temperature would be temporarily raised 0.0628 degrees.
Well, better discard this invention and go back to conventional petroleum powered motors, for surely they are the safest, most environmentally friendly way to proper water craft.
(This dose of reality brought to you today by the concept of common sense. Please try some.)
Unless you visit some other , non-US version of project gutenburg , such as the Australianone, which I peruse through every now and then.
From the.au front page:
Works in the 'public domain' in Australia
Under Australian copyright law, literary, dramatic, & musical work published, performed, communicated, or recorded and offered for sale in an author's lifetime are protected for the life of the author plus fifty years from the end of the year of the author's death. After this time they enter into the public domain. EBooks on this page may be still copyright in the US and are therefore not available from the US site.
So , at present Australians can get up to the beginning of 1953. Seems a hell of a lot easier to follow than the mess of dates the parent posted.
I have a setup for my users at work (using IMAP mailboxes) - I have "Junk-Mail","Missed-Junk" and "Wrongly-Sorted" folders. Bogofilter and procmail sort spams as they arrrive into the "Junk-Mail" folder, depending on each users word list.
If a spam makes it to the inbox proper, all they have to do is move it to a "missed-junk" folder. That folder gets processed every hour by bogofilter, marked as spam and messages moved to the "junk-mail" folder.
If a real email gets wrongly classified, all they have to do is move it to "wrongly-sorted" and it gets noted and the email moved back to the inbox when done.
He said that he waded through the FAA phone system, talked to a lot of clueless people and eventually planned to put out a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) about the ballon in the area. He also specifically put a radar reflector on the balloon , and complied with the various FAA requirements on weather balloons.
Air traffic control (if any) would have spotted the radar reflector on it and manouevered traffic around it if necessary.
And the odds of one cubic meter object (balloon) intersecting with another cubic meter object (engine intake) are pretty low, considering the large volume of airspace - a 1x1x1km cube is a thousand million cubic meters, and he was pushing upwards of 20km high.
Privacy? WTF are you on? It's a satellite with a Ku-Band link. Unless you're transmitting pretty much directly at the satellite, chances of it intercepting any of your private comms is *very* slim. And you could transmit 1.21 Jiggawatts of wireless data at it for gods sake, and it still wouldn't receive it due to different frequencies.
Anyway, which country with the available tech respects privacy? China? Britain? France? The Conglomerate of Former Soviet States? The (Ha!) US? Not too many nations respect privacy - ever heard of "spies"? 'Nuff said.
(And Australia still has fairly good privacy laws. I can attest to that, having recently tried to extract info out of an ISP about another harassing internet user. Pretty big penalties if they get caught giving private info out to the public)
With the cameras, either make them very invisible or have them very much in plain view.
Just make sure that if the cameras are not easily visible first off to put little stickers around saying "off-site video recording", or a dummy VCR with a tape in an obvious place. Otherwise the thought patterns of thieves go like:
(thief ransacking premises.. spots a camera)
"Crap, a camera!... must be a VCR here somewhere taping us!"
(Search of premises ensues)
"Where *is* it?!?!... hmmm, better torch the place to be on the safe side."
Reminds me of one of the B.O.F.H articles at The Register, where they think up a new T-shirt slogan for the I.T. department. My favorite was "Slipping I.T. to you from behind".
Reading the letter, it appears that the commas have something to do with the denominations of currency used - in this case it appears to be 74 (somethings) and 10 (something elses).
Although the valuation of their currency on the international market is a little disconcerting. In Indonesia, there is presently about 10,000 rupiah to the US dollar. So when you're reading the paper and they're casually dropping trillion-rupiah figures it causes a bit of confusion;-)
Slashdot Mirror
When is your government actually going to get around to proper electronic tax filing?
Witness the Australian Tax Office and their (imaginatively named) "E-Tax". For the 2001 fiscal year, over 520,000 people used it. To put it in perspective, that's a quarter of the Australian working population that has a computer is using etax. My refund was electronically deposited into my account in 6 working days, and it was just me and the Tax office, with no other pain-in-the-ass company in the middle.
I know, it probably won't help those with complex finances, but it sure as hell would put a bullet into companies like these.
Let's see:
$200 million to launch 10 tons of hazardous waste to LEO, where if things don't go right in the launch or the next transfer stage, it might end up de-orbited in teeny-little hazardous pieces over some continent. Maybe even *your* continent!
$10 million to buy an abandoned salt mine and dump 10,000t of waste in it for someone else to deal with later (much later - hopefully after you're long gone from the scene with the remainder of the cash you saved from not launching crap into the sun.)
Which one would you pick if you were a corporation that needed to show a profit to worried investors?
Because he hasn't figured out how to get *back* yet. Otherwise it'd be :
Astronaut : "Ok, Mission Control, all mission objectives have been completed, we are ready for the Neptunian / Earth transfer orbital calculations. (Peep!)"
Mission Control : "Er, hang on a tic, I haven't done the numbers yet. Er, lessee here... 2 tons of nuclear fuel remaining... 1g acceleration....er... (Peep!)"
Mission Control : "hmm,no,that's not it...(Peep!)"
Mission Control : "maybe if we...(Peep!)"
Mission Control : "Ahah - hey, did I ever tell you guys about the time I decided to drive down to Texas and ran out of gas in the middle of nowhere? (Peep!)"
"The U.S. is planning to sit around and watch. "
Hmm, I thought the US was going to send Iraq to the moon Real Soon Now. Or large portions of Iraq, anyway.
GSM has a hard limit of 35km (22 miles) - after that, you can't compensate enough for the round-trip signal delay from speed of light and data processing.
The delay is quantiled as a 6 bit number in the GSM data stream. 6 bits => 64 steps (0-63); each step advances the timing by one bit duration ie 3.7 microseconds.64 steps allows compensation over a maximum propagation time of 31.5 bit periods ie 113.3 microseconds ( => a maximum distance of ~ 35 km).
As this has been mentioned a little bit in other peoples posts, I'll ask the question too :
Why should I (an australian) have to rely on the "Department of Homeland Security" of another country for information regarding a sendmail patch?
What if someone found a root exploit affecting 75% of say, iraq's servers and reported it to the "Department of Homeland Security"?
I wonder how long it would take for them to issue a release about that one? As far as I'm concerned , the body that looks after this sort of thing should be international and not have any majority government control, as otherwise they start acting in their own interests, and not the greater interests of the other technically competent people on the planet.
(And "Department of Homeland Security" always has a weird , 1984-ish sound to me, hence the quotes)
Anyone care to explain how an ISP makes money because their users download a lot ??
When they charge 15 cents per megabyte for people who download more than their (300MB/1GB/3GB - choose your poison) cap.\
And then have the gall to define a megabyte as 1,000,000 bytes , a-la hard disk manufacturers.
Ka-Ching!!
Hello , troll :-)
I was going to go into a long-winded rebuttal of your arguments, but then just did a quick search and copied and pasted the results here.
(And I would have thought that a "CHERNOBYL in space!" would have been the best place to have one, seeing as there's nobody there.)
Seeya!
"The ceramic-form plutonium fuel is heat resistant, thus making it more difficult to be vaporized in case of fire or reentry environmental exposure. The fuel is also very insoluble. It has a low chemical reactivity and breaks in large pieces, not small parts that can be inhaled or ingested. Unlike in nuclear accidents, RTGs cannot explode because no fusion or fission processes are occurring. Hence, the acute radiation sickness associated with nuclear explosions wont be witnessed in an RTG accident."
Slashdot's been having "discussions" about "items" for a long time (items being anything ranging from the latest Apple fanfare to the Xbox). Yeah, but how many of these items were being sold by Slashdot?
Er, if you pay to have the banner ads removed, then they're selling information.
You guys don't have CD-singles? Small 8cm CD's with a few tracks only on them? There's normally a wall full of the latest pop singles at my local music store somewhere.
Pity they cost about 2USD to buy - still a little pricey. Yes, and the songs are crap too... but the principle is still there.
Maybe it *will* be illegal in your country.
.au care to comment on the current digital transmissions?
But eventually Supply and Demand will kick in - someone will want to tape "Friends, 2009", so presto! the means will appear. Soon enough you'll be able to buy the equivalent HDTV VCR from China for $120 that "mistakenly" ignores the broadcast flag, a-la DVD zoning.
Pity it means that some other country's tech industry gets the "3) Profit!".
Side note:
Sure won't be worrying about how illegal it is in my country (Australia) for a long while yet.
Is "the switch" happening in 2008? And have we sorted whether we're going for SDTV or HDTV?
Anyone with a set-top DTV box in
Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?
I had trouble getting a DoC recognised on my webplayer too, with the same kind of symptoms.
/* Virgin-Linux patch for WebPlayer DoC timing, multiply cycles by 4 */
Eventually I found that adding a delay in the DoC code fixed it - see patch.
--- linux/drivers/mtd/doc2000.c Tue May 1 08:19:14 2001
+++ linux/drivers/mtd/doc2000.c Tue May 1 08:21:25 2001
@@ -71,7 +71,8 @@
volatile char dummy;
int i;
- for (i = 0; i < cycles; i++) {
+
+ for (i = 0; i < cycles*4; i++) {
if (DoC_is_Millennium(doc))
dummy = ReadDOC(doc->virtadr, NOP);
else
Could always try a *real* refrigerant.
R11, for example boiled at about 20 degrees C, but you can't get that anymore, due to nasty ozone-depletion. However, one of the other commonly-available R's (R123 perhaps?) boils at around 30 degrees. Sounds like what's needed here, as long as room temp doesn't get above 30 so you can condense it again without too much hassle.
Pedantic bastard ;-)
Yes, by "beginning of 1953", I meant the end of 1952. Of course, you only realise these ambiguities *after* you post.
Won't somebody PLEASE THINK of the ENVIRONMENT?!?
/second, raised approx 3 degrees.
Sigh. Let's look at some numbers, shall we?
Volume of water going through (arbitrary example) 20cm dia steam-powered jet engine at 10m/s: 3.14*.10*.10*10 = 314 litres
Volume of water in 1 square kilometre of 20m deep ocean at 20 degrees: 20 thousand million litres.
Time to traverse 1km in boat at 10m/s = 100 seconds = 31,400 litres of 4 degree warmer water.
Mix 31,400 litres of 4 degree warmer water with remaining 19999968600 litres.
OH DEAR GOD, NO! IT'S 0.00000628 DEGREES WARMER!WE'RE ALL GONNA DIE!!!!
So, if 1000 boats all simultaneously traversed the same 1km square section of water, the water temperature would be temporarily raised 0.0628 degrees.
Well, better discard this invention and go back to conventional petroleum powered motors, for surely they are the safest, most environmentally friendly way to proper water craft.
(This dose of reality brought to you today by the concept of common sense. Please try some.)
Percentage Accuracy : 100%
Percentage Inaccuracy : 0.8333333333333334%
Maybe they should also add:
Probability of getting Accuracy+Inaccuracy to total 100% correctly : Low
From the
So , at present Australians can get up to the beginning of 1953. Seems a hell of a lot easier to follow than the mess of dates the parent posted.
I have a setup for my users at work (using IMAP mailboxes) - I have "Junk-Mail","Missed-Junk" and "Wrongly-Sorted" folders. Bogofilter and procmail sort spams as they arrrive into the "Junk-Mail" folder, depending on each users word list.
If a spam makes it to the inbox proper, all they have to do is move it to a "missed-junk" folder. That folder gets processed every hour by bogofilter, marked as spam and messages moved to the "junk-mail" folder.
If a real email gets wrongly classified, all they have to do is move it to "wrongly-sorted" and it gets noted and the email moved back to the inbox when done.
Handy, and easy for the end user to figure out.
Didja read the article?
He said that he waded through the FAA phone system, talked to a lot of clueless people and eventually planned to put out a NOTAM (Notice to Airmen) about the ballon in the area. He also specifically put a radar reflector on the balloon , and complied with the various FAA requirements on weather balloons.
Air traffic control (if any) would have spotted the radar reflector on it and manouevered traffic around it if necessary.
And the odds of one cubic meter object (balloon) intersecting with another cubic meter object (engine intake) are pretty low, considering the large volume of airspace - a 1x1x1km cube is a thousand million cubic meters, and he was pushing upwards of 20km high.
Seems like he did enough to me.
With this statement :
:
Google's complex, automated methods make human tampering with our results extremely difficult.
and this
(i.e., no one can buy a higher PageRank).
They appear have a lot of integrity - the human tampering is external to google, google is attempting to reduce this tampering as much as possible.
Since when is (c - an infinitesimally small number) smaller than c?
Perhaps your infinitesimally small number is negative.
(ducks and runs for cover)
(feeding a rather confused troll)
Privacy? WTF are you on? It's a satellite with a Ku-Band link. Unless you're transmitting pretty much directly at the satellite, chances of it intercepting any of your private comms is *very* slim. And you could transmit 1.21 Jiggawatts of wireless data at it for gods sake, and it still wouldn't receive it due to different frequencies.
Anyway, which country with the available tech respects privacy? China? Britain? France? The Conglomerate of Former Soviet States? The (Ha!) US? Not too many nations respect privacy - ever heard of "spies"? 'Nuff said.
(And Australia still has fairly good privacy laws. I can attest to that, having recently tried to extract info out of an ISP about another harassing internet user. Pretty big penalties if they get caught giving private info out to the public)
With the cameras, either make them very invisible or have them very much in plain view.
:
Just make sure that if the cameras are not easily visible first off to put little stickers around saying "off-site video recording", or a dummy VCR with a tape in an obvious place.
Otherwise the thought patterns of thieves go like
(thief ransacking premises.. spots a camera)
"Crap, a camera!... must be a VCR here somewhere taping us!"
(Search of premises ensues)
"Where *is* it?!?!... hmmm, better torch the place to be on the safe side."
Reminds me of one of the B.O.F.H articles at The Register, where they think up a new T-shirt slogan for the I.T. department. My favorite was "Slipping I.T. to you from behind".
Reading the letter, it appears that the commas have something to do with the denominations of currency used - in this case it appears to be 74 (somethings) and 10 (something elses).
;-)
Although the valuation of their currency on the international market is a little disconcerting. In Indonesia, there is presently about 10,000 rupiah to the US dollar. So when you're reading the paper and they're casually dropping trillion-rupiah figures it causes a bit of confusion