Why, because the funny Verizon actor on the TV set said it was so?
No, because I looked at coverage maps.
You do realize that all the GSM providers in the US share a good chunk of their towers?
So it's GSM coverage in general (in the U.S., not a comment on the technology in general) that sucks. Ok, fine. I've noticed that I got signal out in the boonies when I had both Verizon and Sprint (indeed, might have been roaming since CDMA providers also share, you know) where folks with AT&T were dark.
In the U.S., CDMA still rules the roost if you venture outside of major urban areas.
We've got plenty data on the athmosphere, climate, radiation levels and most everything else you'd need an explorer for
I wish. We only recently confirmed that there's ice under the dust. We still don't even know if their are native lifeforms.
We may find it easier to substitute robot explorers for human ones before human colonists; but the amount of data we have right now is nothing compared to what would be gathered by a human team in a one month stay.
Which means that we are the ones saying the citizens don't have a right to determine the laws of their land.
Yes. People do not have a right to violate the basic human rights of others, even if it's a million to one.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. While a democratic element is necessary, it is not sufficient to protect human rights, especially when the electorate is woefully ignorant. (Applying this concept to various contemporary Western governments is left as an exercise for the reader.)
I wonder who the totalitarians are in this case.
Totalitarianism and democracy are not mutually exclusive. Remember that Hitler came to power with popular support and through the democratic mechanisms of Weimar Germany.
First, yeah, why do you guys do that? What is it about Americans that they want their towns to be so mindbogglingly inconvenient?
It's a combination of "white flight", cheap gas, public policy favoring public road with private vehicles over public transit, and a general American trend towards thinking that "bigger is better!"
In the 1950s, everyone wanted to live in the suburbs, with their own little plot of land and no dark skinned people around. Gas and cars were cheap enough to allow it. We planned our communities around that, then let public transit rot. As public transit rotted, everyone bought cars; as everyone bought cars, suburban living made more sense and cities decayed...lather, rinse, repeat.
NYC to Philly (or the other way) by car is about 2 hours. If you are traveling ALONE in the car, it will cost you about $20 in gas, $15 in tolls. Throw in $30 for parking.
Rail options are about $60 for Amtrak, $100 for the Express...Time is about the same when you consider that your final destination is very unlikely to be Penn Center or 30th St. Station.
Ah, but it's wasted car time, versus usable (reading, sleeping, working on a laptop) time on the train. And you're more likely to make it close to your scheduled time instead of being stuck on the interstate in a backup.
Plus, you don't have to drive in Manhattan traffic. Big win!
But yes, the Chinatown bus FTW - provided that your schedule has leeway to allow for those backups.
As mentioned in one of the above posts, the key is flight time + airport time + 20% > train time between 2 cities.
Actually it's flight time + security line time + cab/rail time from the airport in the exurbs to your downtown destination, versus train time.
I travel from Baltimore to Manhattan by train a few times a year. Even though I live twenty minutes from BWI, and it's only about an hour and a half flight from there to LaGuardia, I'd have to get to BWI early and dick around with security, wait around at LaGuardia to get my bags, and then face a ride in from Queens. It makes a lot more sense for me to drive downtown to Baltimore's Penn Station and take a two and half hour Amtrak ride and end up walking distance (or maybe a quick subway or cab ride) from my destination. Trains can bring you right into the center of town, usually not workable with airports.
500kmh eh? wouldn't that be more useful in places with HUGE distances to trek, like, canada or usa, or the russian frontier?
Building a rail system - even one that runs on tracks - is expensive. It only makes sense to build one where it will get used.
A line between Tokyo and Nagoya, the largest and the third largest cities in Japan, will see lots of passengers. The shinkansen line between them gets plenty of use by business travelers just going for the day. A train across the Russian wastelands, not so much.
Except for the simple fact that the mongols are a racketteering group. So, if you affiliate with them, you are, in fact, affiliating yourself with people KNOWN for illegal acts.
If you affiliate yourself with the FBI, you are, in fact, affiliating yourself with people KNOWN for illegal acts.
If you affiliate yourself with Microsoft, Exxon, ADM..., you are, in fact, affiliating yourself with people KNOWN for illegal acts.
Esimates of the number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl range from less than 4,000 to 500,000. It's hard to know; the USSR was not known for being open with data. The IAEA number of 4,000 is almost certainly BS (the International Atomic Energy Agency has an obvious bias); same with the 500,000 figure (Greenpeace has a well-known anti-nuclear bias).
Since most of the fuel remains, and the "sarcophagus" is deteriorating, it's quite possible that another large release of radioactive material may occur.
For comparison, the Bhopal catastrophe resulted the immediate deaths of 3,000, with 8,000 dying in the first two weeks and another 8,000 deaths over the long term attributed to the disaster.
The rest of the world is because it is safe and clean.
Safe? So-so. The risk of a Chernobyl-style catastrophic failure may be low, but the consequences are enormous. Clean? No. The waste disposal problem remains unsolved, and uranium mining remains a tremendously dirty business.
There's also the issue of nuclear security. We cannot sensibly assert that fission is the answer to the world's power needs, while at the same time we threaten nations like Iran who proceed with building fission plants. Furthermore, the only way to make fission a long-term solution is to breed fissile material - in other words, to put plutonium factories all over the place. Which not only make plutonium more available to wackos, but make great targets for terrorist bombings.
Chernobyl, 3 Mile Island, need you name more? Yes, you do.
Rather than building more uranium and plutonium fission plants, we'd be better off putting those resources into developing accelerator-driven systems using thorium systems, and fusion.
For example, in my opinion one of the most striking things about the original video game "Asteroids" that set it apart was the brightness of the phaser torpedoes, due to its use of vector screen scanning instead of raster scanning. I put a note about this on wikipedia, but the "citation police" kept deleting it. This despite the fact that most of the existing article was not cited either.
When a statement begins "in my opinion", it's a good guide that it doesn't belong in the wik. And looking at the Talk page for the article, I agree that if this observation belongs anywhere, it belongs in a general discussion of vector game displays, not in this one game.
(Also, not to start a geek war, but "phaser torpedoes"? Star Trek had "phasers", which were beam weapons, and "photon torpedoes". Star Wars has "proton torpedoes". I don't know of any fictional universe with "phaser torpedoes".)
First of all, if you are under the jurisdiction of a country that will enforce the laws of another state, then you will find that locating the server into another state will not save you from prosecution.
I'm presuming that the owners of these servers are corporations chartered in friendly nations, so that who has jurisdiction over the owners is not an issue. AbsolutePoker, for example, is owned by a company located in the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, in Quebec. I doubt the Kahnawake government is disposed to act on behalf of the Kentucky courts. And the last time the Canadian government tried to get tough with the Mohawk Nations, it didn't go well, with an armed resistance movement facing off against Canadian troops. I wouldn't look to Canada to enforce a Kentucky court ruling there.
Yes, if I, my own personal self, were going to put content on the web locally deemed "illegal", it doesn't help to put the content on a server in Sealand when my corpus is available here for the local constabulary to point guns at.
But in a case like this, it's all about the servers.
Now, others in this thread have pointed out that the "servers" have to include the root DNS servers, which are owned by a California corporation So long as everyone is reliant on those servers, that's a point of leverage.
Second, if you are doing business within another state, it is your obligation to conform to the laws not the state's obligation to stop you from doing business.
What in the world do you mean by "obligation"? Who is creating and enforcing this "obligation"? The state is, by force - they are exactly "stopping you from doing business".
So no, the state of KY does not have to attempt to block access to anything. All it has to do is assume that when your offering goods and services in their state, that you are acting in a lawful way according to state laws and if your not, they will take any actions at their disposal to resolve the issue.
And just what actions do you think they're going to take against someone located outside their jurisdiction? If they can't send their own agents there, and if there are no arrangements in place to have the agents of that government act as their proxy, then the only "actions at their disposal to resolve the issue" are to act on against the customers or their service providers who are located within their jurisdiction.
Apparently the law of the state of Kentucky is applicable to any server on the internet, regardless of country of origin.
The law of the state of Kentucky, like the laws of any nation or locality, is applicable only where the authorities of that nation or locality can send people with guns, or convince the locals to point guns on their behalf.
So the trick is to host your servers and register your domain in a country where a court order from Kentucky is going to be recycled as toilet paper.
Of course, Kentucky may then try to firewall that nation to keep its citizens from accessing your site. But if China can't do it very effectively, I doubt Kentucky can either.
It's not the wholesale grab of domain names some people want you to believe.
The issue is not whether it's a "wholesale grab" or not. The issue is that if Kentucky has authority to seize a domain name used for gambling, any state has authority to seize a domain name used for anything in state law, and the net is quickly reduced to the lowest common denominator.
(Indeed, seems to me - though IANAL - that if this nutcase theory of jurisdiction holds, any country hostile to free speech can seize domain names left and right. Germany can seize "HolocaustDeniers.org", Russian can seize "PutinSucks.com".)
The Air Force doesn't let Jim from the trailer park fly their planes.
The Air Force only lets people gullible enough to believe in the moral authority of the United States government fly their planes. Anyone who attains a position of trust or authority in any armed force has shown high suggestibility.
Well, I applied Occam's Razor to what happened. I had two possible explanations:
Why only two?
Perhaps the fact that this happened to your mother shortly before it happened to you is merely coincidence. Perhaps you inherited a neurological trait from her, once that has nothing to do with the power of suggestion. Perhaps what happened to you was not the same phenomenon at all, and you merely had a "hysterical" belief about such events based on what happened to her. Perhaps this same thing had happened to you before but you just ignored it, forgot about it, but this time paid more attention to it because of her report.
Nothing personal, but we outside observers also have the possibility that you're lying or delusional - or your mother was lying or delusional.
Perhaps you were not actually visited by aliens, but just targeted by their telepathic rays from Sirius. Or maybe just telepathic emanations from your neighbor. Perhaps it was neither aliens nor demons, but simply voodoo. Or government mind control experiments.
As a practical matter, if Almighty Goddess herself came down with a sealed envelope holding The Truth of The Matter and invited me to bet on what it said, yeah, I'd put my money on sleep paralysis influenced by the "power of suggestion". But to say there were only two possible explanations is to overly simplify.
Always remember that through any finite set of data points, an infinite number of curves can be drawn.
Why publicize it was just a "weather balloon", yet go to all the apparent trouble to guard it from public view, quickly whisking it away under military guard?
Because it wasn't just a "weather balloon". It was a balloon sent up to monitor Russian nuclear tests. In the late 40's, that's super-duper top-secret stuff - heck, I can almost imagine that they deliberately covered that program up with stories of a flying saucer crash!
The "Witness to Rosell" book published in 2007 lists over 600 people who claim, in some fashion, that it was really some type of UFO that was collected. That's a significant number of people.....
You can find millions of Americans who claim, in some fashion, that a big bearded guy in the sky created the whole universe just a few thousand years ago, including a garden where he put a man made out of clay who is the ancestor of all of humanity. That's a significant number of people. But numbers don't make a belief sensible.
Just read the history of UFO abductions over the past 50 years, and notice how the stories and descriptions constantly evolve to match the technology and culture of the day. For example, the "abduction" of Betty and Barney Hill reads like a bad 50's sci-fi movie nowadays - which is almost certainly what inspired it.
When I was a kid in the 70s, I was a bit of a UFO buff. I read accounts of all sort of aliens being sighted - tall ones, short ones, green ones, grey ones, ones clothed in shiny silver, naked ones...
Then, after Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out, everybody started seeing Greys. No one sees tall green aliens in shiny suits anymore.
(It's kind of sad, really...poor guys kicked to the curb by Spielberg's FX.)
The 20-30 times I've flown in the past several years, my ID has never been checked with my boarding pass. I'm sure of this because as soon as I'm through the xray machines...
Is there no check before the machines? That's where I recall the alert TSA rent-a-cops looking at my boarding pass and ID when I go through BWI.
Not in the U.S. - the clamshell-style Zs were only sold in Japan. (The clamshell form factor is very common for electronic dictionaries in Japan.) A few companies imported the later Zaurus models, and did an English conversion.
I have a SL-C3000, which is simply fantastic. I do a lot of writing on it; it's pocket-sized and has a long battery life.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because I looked at coverage maps.
So it's GSM coverage in general (in the U.S., not a comment on the technology in general) that sucks. Ok, fine. I've noticed that I got signal out in the boonies when I had both Verizon and Sprint (indeed, might have been roaming since CDMA providers also share, you know) where folks with AT&T were dark.
In the U.S., CDMA still rules the roost if you venture outside of major urban areas.
I don't care how good the phone is. T-Mobile's coverage is too sparse to make it attractive.
I wish. We only recently confirmed that there's ice under the dust. We still don't even know if their are native lifeforms.
We may find it easier to substitute robot explorers for human ones before human colonists; but the amount of data we have right now is nothing compared to what would be gathered by a human team in a one month stay.
Yes. People do not have a right to violate the basic human rights of others, even if it's a million to one.
Democracy is two wolves and a sheep voting on what's for dinner. While a democratic element is necessary, it is not sufficient to protect human rights, especially when the electorate is woefully ignorant. (Applying this concept to various contemporary Western governments is left as an exercise for the reader.)
Totalitarianism and democracy are not mutually exclusive. Remember that Hitler came to power with popular support and through the democratic mechanisms of Weimar Germany.
xkcd FTW: "Remember, if you pirate something, it's yours for life. You can take it anywhere and it will always work. But if you buy DRM-locked media, and you ever switch operating systems or new technology comes along, your collection could be lost. And if you try to keep it, you'll be a criminal."
It's a combination of "white flight", cheap gas, public policy favoring public road with private vehicles over public transit, and a general American trend towards thinking that "bigger is better!"
In the 1950s, everyone wanted to live in the suburbs, with their own little plot of land and no dark skinned people around. Gas and cars were cheap enough to allow it. We planned our communities around that, then let public transit rot. As public transit rotted, everyone bought cars; as everyone bought cars, suburban living made more sense and cities decayed...lather, rinse, repeat.
Ah, but it's wasted car time, versus usable (reading, sleeping, working on a laptop) time on the train. And you're more likely to make it close to your scheduled time instead of being stuck on the interstate in a backup.
Plus, you don't have to drive in Manhattan traffic. Big win!
But yes, the Chinatown bus FTW - provided that your schedule has leeway to allow for those backups.
Actually it's flight time + security line time + cab/rail time from the airport in the exurbs to your downtown destination, versus train time.
I travel from Baltimore to Manhattan by train a few times a year. Even though I live twenty minutes from BWI, and it's only about an hour and a half flight from there to LaGuardia, I'd have to get to BWI early and dick around with security, wait around at LaGuardia to get my bags, and then face a ride in from Queens. It makes a lot more sense for me to drive downtown to Baltimore's Penn Station and take a two and half hour Amtrak ride and end up walking distance (or maybe a quick subway or cab ride) from my destination. Trains can bring you right into the center of town, usually not workable with airports.
Building a rail system - even one that runs on tracks - is expensive. It only makes sense to build one where it will get used.
A line between Tokyo and Nagoya, the largest and the third largest cities in Japan, will see lots of passengers. The shinkansen line between them gets plenty of use by business travelers just going for the day. A train across the Russian wastelands, not so much.
If you affiliate yourself with the FBI, you are, in fact, affiliating yourself with people KNOWN for illegal acts.
If you affiliate yourself with Microsoft, Exxon, ADM..., you are, in fact, affiliating yourself with people KNOWN for illegal acts.
If the risk of a Chernobyl-style catastrophic failure was "virtually nonexistent", we would not have had one already.
France's waste is still in "interim storage", awaiting a long-term solution. Meanwhile, it's leaking into groundwater.
Japan's waste also still has no long-term home; they plan to start building a facility in the 2030s.
Esimates of the number of deaths attributable to Chernobyl range from less than 4,000 to 500,000. It's hard to know; the USSR was not known for being open with data. The IAEA number of 4,000 is almost certainly BS (the International Atomic Energy Agency has an obvious bias); same with the 500,000 figure (Greenpeace has a well-known anti-nuclear bias).
Since most of the fuel remains, and the "sarcophagus" is deteriorating, it's quite possible that another large release of radioactive material may occur.
For comparison, the Bhopal catastrophe resulted the immediate deaths of 3,000, with 8,000 dying in the first two weeks and another 8,000 deaths over the long term attributed to the disaster.
Safe? So-so. The risk of a Chernobyl-style catastrophic failure may be low, but the consequences are enormous. Clean? No. The waste disposal problem remains unsolved, and uranium mining remains a tremendously dirty business.
There's also the issue of nuclear security. We cannot sensibly assert that fission is the answer to the world's power needs, while at the same time we threaten nations like Iran who proceed with building fission plants. Furthermore, the only way to make fission a long-term solution is to breed fissile material - in other words, to put plutonium factories all over the place. Which not only make plutonium more available to wackos, but make great targets for terrorist bombings.
Well then, here and here you go.
Rather than building more uranium and plutonium fission plants, we'd be better off putting those resources into developing accelerator-driven systems using thorium systems, and fusion.
When a statement begins "in my opinion", it's a good guide that it doesn't belong in the wik. And looking at the Talk page for the article, I agree that if this observation belongs anywhere, it belongs in a general discussion of vector game displays, not in this one game.
(Also, not to start a geek war, but "phaser torpedoes"? Star Trek had "phasers", which were beam weapons, and "photon torpedoes". Star Wars has "proton torpedoes". I don't know of any fictional universe with "phaser torpedoes".)
I'm presuming that the owners of these servers are corporations chartered in friendly nations, so that who has jurisdiction over the owners is not an issue. AbsolutePoker, for example, is owned by a company located in the Kahnawake Mohawk Territory, in Quebec. I doubt the Kahnawake government is disposed to act on behalf of the Kentucky courts. And the last time the Canadian government tried to get tough with the Mohawk Nations, it didn't go well, with an armed resistance movement facing off against Canadian troops. I wouldn't look to Canada to enforce a Kentucky court ruling there.
Yes, if I, my own personal self, were going to put content on the web locally deemed "illegal", it doesn't help to put the content on a server in Sealand when my corpus is available here for the local constabulary to point guns at.
But in a case like this, it's all about the servers.
Now, others in this thread have pointed out that the "servers" have to include the root DNS servers, which are owned by a California corporation So long as everyone is reliant on those servers, that's a point of leverage.
What in the world do you mean by "obligation"? Who is creating and enforcing this "obligation"? The state is, by force - they are exactly "stopping you from doing business".
And just what actions do you think they're going to take against someone located outside their jurisdiction? If they can't send their own agents there, and if there are no arrangements in place to have the agents of that government act as their proxy, then the only "actions at their disposal to resolve the issue" are to act on against the customers or their service providers who are located within their jurisdiction.
The law of the state of Kentucky, like the laws of any nation or locality, is applicable only where the authorities of that nation or locality can send people with guns, or convince the locals to point guns on their behalf.
So the trick is to host your servers and register your domain in a country where a court order from Kentucky is going to be recycled as toilet paper.
Of course, Kentucky may then try to firewall that nation to keep its citizens from accessing your site. But if China can't do it very effectively, I doubt Kentucky can either.
The issue is not whether it's a "wholesale grab" or not. The issue is that if Kentucky has authority to seize a domain name used for gambling, any state has authority to seize a domain name used for anything in state law, and the net is quickly reduced to the lowest common denominator.
(Indeed, seems to me - though IANAL - that if this nutcase theory of jurisdiction holds, any country hostile to free speech can seize domain names left and right. Germany can seize "HolocaustDeniers.org", Russian can seize "PutinSucks.com".)
The Air Force only lets people gullible enough to believe in the moral authority of the United States government fly their planes. Anyone who attains a position of trust or authority in any armed force has shown high suggestibility.
And let's remember that just last year, the U.S. Air Force loaded live nukes on a B-52 flying across the country. Association with the USAF is not a guarantee of competence.
Why only two?
Perhaps the fact that this happened to your mother shortly before it happened to you is merely coincidence. Perhaps you inherited a neurological trait from her, once that has nothing to do with the power of suggestion. Perhaps what happened to you was not the same phenomenon at all, and you merely had a "hysterical" belief about such events based on what happened to her. Perhaps this same thing had happened to you before but you just ignored it, forgot about it, but this time paid more attention to it because of her report.
Nothing personal, but we outside observers also have the possibility that you're lying or delusional - or your mother was lying or delusional.
Perhaps you were not actually visited by aliens, but just targeted by their telepathic rays from Sirius. Or maybe just telepathic emanations from your neighbor. Perhaps it was neither aliens nor demons, but simply voodoo. Or government mind control experiments.
As a practical matter, if Almighty Goddess herself came down with a sealed envelope holding The Truth of The Matter and invited me to bet on what it said, yeah, I'd put my money on sleep paralysis influenced by the "power of suggestion". But to say there were only two possible explanations is to overly simplify.
Always remember that through any finite set of data points, an infinite number of curves can be drawn.
OMFG. I hadn't thought of that voice-over in years. "This is the wheel he said he saw."
And I did not know that was a song reference. Hurray for the wik.
Because it wasn't just a "weather balloon". It was a balloon sent up to monitor Russian nuclear tests. In the late 40's, that's super-duper top-secret stuff - heck, I can almost imagine that they deliberately covered that program up with stories of a flying saucer crash!
And there wasn't a whole lot of trouble taken to guard it from public view. A farmer found a bunch of shiny junk, it got picked up, the local paper ran a story about it, some joker at the Roswell Army Air Field conflated it with recent stories about "flying discs" and issued a press release. Thirty years later, reports of "rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather tough paper and sticks" somehow became wreckage of an alien spacecraft.
You can find millions of Americans who claim, in some fashion, that a big bearded guy in the sky created the whole universe just a few thousand years ago, including a garden where he put a man made out of clay who is the ancestor of all of humanity. That's a significant number of people. But numbers don't make a belief sensible.
When I was a kid in the 70s, I was a bit of a UFO buff. I read accounts of all sort of aliens being sighted - tall ones, short ones, green ones, grey ones, ones clothed in shiny silver, naked ones...
Then, after Close Encounters of the Third Kind came out, everybody started seeing Greys. No one sees tall green aliens in shiny suits anymore.
(It's kind of sad, really...poor guys kicked to the curb by Spielberg's FX.)
Is there no check before the machines? That's where I recall the alert TSA rent-a-cops looking at my boarding pass and ID when I go through BWI.
It has a mini-USB port, but I guess it'd need USB OTG to be useful as you're contemplating.
Not in the U.S. - the clamshell-style Zs were only sold in Japan. (The clamshell form factor is very common for electronic dictionaries in Japan.) A few companies imported the later Zaurus models, and did an English conversion.
I have a SL-C3000, which is simply fantastic. I do a lot of writing on it; it's pocket-sized and has a long battery life.