seeing as how the telephone has been in offices for generations now and it hasn't stopped business yet with that yakking
At least for telephones you only hear one side of the conversation, that would make it half as quiet right? There are the companies that give each of their employees VoIP phones and disable the speaker phone functionality just for being in a cube.
Between having a dozen computer saying the same things over and over with the same tone* would be bad enough, but as people would realize that the computers actually respond to what is spoken you'll have to listen to a bunch of choice words mixed in with the commands.
* Okay, so three different female voices, and a robotic one or two. Still that's not a lot of variety.
If we are lucky said capacitor and the much hyped cheap plastic/polymer/solar cells will become available at the same time. That way you can have a set of capacitors in the home that the new plastic solar cells on your roof charges all day
and in turn charges your car when you get home at night. If the solar cells don't
materialize I would just have to ask what politician would stand in the way of
building a few more power plants to support the new cars. Just say the magic words,
stop terrorism by not buying their oil. Then again the middle east is used to
getting our money, how does anyone expect to be more stable if we suddenly stop
buying oil?
Actually, they do. It's just that they drive by in a specially equipped truck to read the meters.
It is a mesh network, so at the worst, they would just need to park at the edge and wait for all the data to come to them. But if they have a city connected, I assume they would have an access point someplace so that wouldn't even be required. From my notes when they were installed,
cellnet is contracted to install and maintain them
The battery only has to be replaced every 8-10 years. (Could I get a battery like that for my laptop?)
InfiNet, UtilNet
secure web based host system
Our interfaces use industry standard file formats
secure IP networks
spread-spectrum radio
unlicensed 902-928MHz (they say it is secure, why not give out the frequency?)
It can't be vaporware, my gas meter already has a radio on it. It was installed earlier this year along with I assume every other one in the neighborhood. It is some kind of mesh network and they no longer have to send someone out to read the gas meters.
Broadband? Um, probably not. These three celled batteries are rated for years and I don't think you could get many bits over that little bit of electricity.
Maybe they make it into a USB device, include it with their game and require you to have it plugged in to play. That way everyone who bought the game has it and who doesn't, well, doesn't play. It could happen if the AI chip was cheap enough to produce. So you have a half dozen titles, plug them all in and have them load share.
The internet access could be down half the day and I might not notice it. I probably use it more than I think, it just depends on the day, nothing mission critical to me (most of the time).
Now, if the local network was down (that is the one I use), I'd be SOL in a minute. That tends to happen when/home is mounted remotely.
They say that USB is hot pluggable, but I've stopped hotplugging keyboards at work after two beeped and powered off in exactly the same way when I hot plugged a USB keyboard in. These aren't cheap computers either, they are rackmountable cases with high end motherboards and cpus.
The other huge boon to this is for the state. Imagine if you could see traffic trends by the minute covering trends over months. You could quickly identify dangerous traffic areas, distractions, traffic quirks, and all sorts of oddities that could be engineered around to reduce injuries, fatalities, and expenses.
Funny, I thought that is what accident reports were for. It is law to fill them out (for more than X dollars of damages). An accident report includes details. Just having data saying that there was a backup doesn't give any information on what happened.
These days a cell phone is a microprocessor with an attached two way radio. When is someone going to hack it so that they can communicate cell phone to cell phone? That is with a range greater than blue tooth and without a cell tower? Do that an you can have your own mesh network running as a Beauwolf cluster without having to pay the telephone companies.
Give them a call. I bet they'll say something like we own and control all the equipment (no you can't get the password for the unit on your desk), we disabled all the peering so you either get calls from other POT lines or as we mentioned earlier the equipment we control so no anonymous from the internet SIP calls.
I even had an [discussion] with a salesman with Charter a couple months back. He was trying to tell me that the telephone service they sell isn't VoIP. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, or in this case plugs into an Internet Protocol based network and splits up the audio into UDP or TCP packets it's a Voice over Internet Protocol device. I guess they train their sales force to think it is secure because it doesn't go over internet and it has to go over internet to to be called VoIP.
And they say that road rage incidents increase with just having a loaded gun in the car with you. That's even if they never use them. What are they going to come up with if they are toting a mini nuke?
I could just see the bumper sticker now,
Back off! I've got a short fuse and one hand on the drop bomb switch.
I heard someplace that there was an idiot that was obsessed with washing machines. He even disabled the switch to turn it off when the lid was open so he could just watch it. One day he was standing on it looking down into the open door and slipped, yes into the machine.
If they can make killer washing machines I forsee just about any robot capable of the same.
It's not too hard to engineer around putting tape on one of the buttons to hold it down. Just replace them with fingerprint readers. That even gives you a bonus of two modes of operation. If you have a fingerprint you can use the machine, or if you have a finger print of someone authorized (and trained) to use the machine you can. I suppose you could have a third, one finger print must come from each hand of the same person. Without the last one you would allow double teaming the machine.
After all, if you never get near the equipment you can never have an accident, right?
It depends, do you have stairs going to the worker hangout next to the equipment they no longer operate? Even a well place floor can be enough for people to slip and fall on. Even if you turn off the machines it only keeps people from getting hurt operating them. People will still find ways to get hurt.
I'm a fan of safe failure modes. But I'm also a fan of letting lusers make the Darwin Awards each year.
Unfortunately loosing one's finger tips or fingers may increase those people's changes of propagation as some people will feel sorry for them. It's probably easier to win the Darwin Award's outright by dying that just loosing the ability to pass down their jeans.
Programmers write code. It is also important to go and cut out dead or badly written code. Maybe we need some politicians to go through and start removing some bad laws, something big, complex, and ugly, something like... DMCA ?
Slashdot Mirror
At least for telephones you only hear one side of the conversation, that would make it half as quiet right? There are the companies that give each of their employees VoIP phones and disable the speaker phone functionality just for being in a cube.
Between having a dozen computer saying the same things over and over with the same tone* would be bad enough, but as people would realize that the computers actually respond to what is spoken you'll have to listen to a bunch of choice words mixed in with the commands.
* Okay, so three different female voices, and a robotic one or two. Still that's not a lot of variety.
$ gcc zero.c -o zero
$
inf
Darn them, is the Middle East the ones behind the recent price drops at the pump? I want my electric car (and full house photo cell shingles).
If we are lucky said capacitor and the much hyped cheap plastic/polymer/solar cells will become available at the same time. That way you can have a set of capacitors in the home that the new plastic solar cells on your roof charges all day and in turn charges your car when you get home at night. If the solar cells don't materialize I would just have to ask what politician would stand in the way of building a few more power plants to support the new cars. Just say the magic words, stop terrorism by not buying their oil. Then again the middle east is used to getting our money, how does anyone expect to be more stable if we suddenly stop buying oil?
Do you think 4909 amps at 220V would be enough? And parents put plastic covers over the little 15 amp power plugs in their homes.
It is a mesh network, so at the worst, they would just need to park at the edge and wait for all the data to come to them. But if they have a city connected, I assume they would have an access point someplace so that wouldn't even be required. From my notes when they were installed,
It even runs on Linux. Linux-Alpha 32bit Intel that is.
Broadband? Um, probably not. These three celled batteries are rated for years and I don't think you could get many bits over that little bit of electricity.
What's it matter if the antenna was throwing off sparks in the gas line? Where's it going to get some oxygen to burn (or explode)?
Maybe they make it into a USB device, include it with their game and require you to have it plugged in to play. That way everyone who bought the game has it and who doesn't, well, doesn't play. It could happen if the AI chip was cheap enough to produce. So you have a half dozen titles, plug them all in and have them load share.
Now, if the local network was down (that is the one I use), I'd be SOL in a minute. That tends to happen when /home is mounted remotely.
They say that USB is hot pluggable, but I've stopped hotplugging keyboards at work after two beeped and powered off in exactly the same way when I hot plugged a USB keyboard in. These aren't cheap computers either, they are rackmountable cases with high end motherboards and cpus.
But of course it has many more holes to let light through
Funny, I thought that is what accident reports were for. It is law to fill them out (for more than X dollars of damages). An accident report includes details. Just having data saying that there was a backup doesn't give any information on what happened.
How bad would the Digital Millennium Copyright Act become if the media companies knew it was mandated to be upgraded every few years?
These days a cell phone is a microprocessor with an attached two way radio. When is someone going to hack it so that they can communicate cell phone to cell phone? That is with a range greater than blue tooth and without a cell tower? Do that an you can have your own mesh network running as a Beauwolf cluster without having to pay the telephone companies.
I even had an [discussion] with a salesman with Charter a couple months back. He was trying to tell me that the telephone service they sell isn't VoIP. If it walks like a duck and talks like a duck, or in this case plugs into an Internet Protocol based network and splits up the audio into UDP or TCP packets it's a Voice over Internet Protocol device. I guess they train their sales force to think it is secure because it doesn't go over internet and it has to go over internet to to be called VoIP.
I could just see the bumper sticker now,
Back off! I've got a short fuse and one hand on the drop bomb switch.
But will the outlaws be able to? That's the question I'm interested in.
If they can make killer washing machines I forsee just about any robot capable of the same.
It's not too hard to engineer around putting tape on one of the buttons to hold it down. Just replace them with fingerprint readers. That even gives you a bonus of two modes of operation. If you have a fingerprint you can use the machine, or if you have a finger print of someone authorized (and trained) to use the machine you can. I suppose you could have a third, one finger print must come from each hand of the same person. Without the last one you would allow double teaming the machine.
It depends, do you have stairs going to the worker hangout next to the equipment they no longer operate? Even a well place floor can be enough for people to slip and fall on. Even if you turn off the machines it only keeps people from getting hurt operating them. People will still find ways to get hurt.