Uh, you have that backwards. Daylight savings time was developed during wartime to conserve on energy by moving the daylight back towards the end of the day (people liked getting up late and staying up past dark back then too). So you might be thinking to yourself, that sounds great, why don't we do that all year long? The answer is the kids. We turn daylight savings time off in the winter because otherwise the kids have to go to school in the dark when the days grow short.
Think about it, most kids go to school pretty early in the morning, but get off in the mid afternoon. Shifting the daylight back certainly doesn't help them go to school in any more light, and there was never a problem on the other end unless you live very far North (in which case you're SOL anyway).
That would be some seriously deep sea tuna. I'd think most of these heavy metals would tend to stay on the bottom of the ocean simply because they're considerably denser than the surrounding water. That said, there is some life down there (not much), and there is a chance we'd kill it with nuclear waste down there. Actually, there isn't a lot of life outside of the geologically active areas, but even a little life is worth saving.
The problem is that the ISP from "use nuclear reactions to heat up some other fuel" tends to be too low to be useful. It's a lot easier/safer/cheaper/lighter to just use a reactant that expands on its own (conventional rocket fuel). That's why I specified ground-to-orbit in my post. Once you're in space there are a lot of uses for nuclear propulsion that actually make sense (Nuclear powered Ion drives for instance), but for getting out of the atmosphere you're options are a lot more limited.
Those "Firefighter Union Charities" and "Police Brotherhood Funds" that call you are basically a scam. They give the police/firefighters a lump sum and then call in their name and keep everything they collect. The overhead can be on the order of 95% when all is said and done. If you are suckered into contributing to one of those you'd better be ready to listen to your phone ring, a lot. They will promptly use your name in the other similar charity-scams that they've set up. I used to have a picture of two pledge kits from two "different" organizations (I even asked them when they called back and they denied all knowledge of each other. The two organizations were: The Brotherhood of the Police Chiefs and the Police Chiefs Brotherhood. Their logos were similar, but not quite identical, and the information packets on the inside were nearly identical. Interestingly enough, the former had pledges in the $35-$55 range, while the latter had them in the $45-$75 range.
From what I can tell, if you "pledge" but then never send in the money, eventually they'll put your name on a deadbeats list and stop bothering you. At least the volume of calls I get from "unrelated" organizations diminished a fair bit after I sat on 5 different pledge kits for a few months.
Do people think setting up a Paypal account involves walking down to your local brick and mortar Paypal branch and showing them proper ID and bringing your papers? Have you ever set on up yourself? In case you havn't, here's how it works: you go on their website and click the "create a new account button", that asks you some questions (upgrade to merchant? use the money market? etc...), then it asks for a payment method (usually a credit card at this point) and that's it. Afterward, you have an account that you can attach existing bank accounts and whatnot to your Paypal account. At no point are you talking to a real person or is there really any room for screwup other than the kinds you make yourself.
Theoretically Paypal could set it up such that you have to call them and fax over documentation on your bank accounts and whatnot, but that would greatly increase the amount of staff they need and would almost certainly raise their fees quite a bit. It would also defeat the purpose somewhat of having an easy to use online payment system.
Your story is typical when I ask around at conventions/with friends. It seems to me that a lot of the "Paypal sucks" stories come from people who were scamming or trying to launder money through the service (or doing activities that looked a lot like that) and discovering that Paypal actually pays attention to what's going on with their accounts. It doesn't help when the "Paypal Sucks!" type sites offer suggestions for alternative online payment systems that are known to be scams.
I think you're being wildly optimistic that OEMs won't try to litter the desktop of new machines with software nobody in their right mind would ever use just because Microsoft says "they suck". Now, MS could leverage something through it's OEM agreements to force them to take them off, but you can bet you would have AOL and the like crying bloody murder (and monopoly).
Besides, why is Vista so special? From what I can tell it should be more resistant to OEM software bugs than 95/98/ME, and no less resistant than 2000 and XP. On the other hand, 95/98/ME do have a reputation for crashing that's not entirely deserved (but also not entirely undeserved either), but I think 2000 and XP have shown that bad software doesn't bring the OS reputation down.
Of all of the possible uses of Nuclear power, using it to power a rocket out of the atmosphere is perhaps the last one I'd want to see actually implemented. It is hard to think of a better way of spreading radioactive particles all over a huge landscape, not to mention what happens when you crash.
Look back about a day in Slashdot's archive to the article about the Macworld 2007 Keynote. Read through the page and all of your questions will be answered.
Did you see the keynote. It's not just a phone + iPod, it's a smartphone (with all of the features you expect when you hear "smartphone") + iPod with an interface that doesn't suck. A smartphone with an interface that doesn't suck is truly newsworthy, as the industry has been trying to build that for years and failing miserably.
I do think there is a bit of euphoria right now over the product launch that is likely to subside a bit as June rolls around and people remember that $700 is a hell of a lot of money for a phone, smart or no.
I'm starting to wonder if anybody at the OLPC project (or even on Slashdot) has actually watched kids in real life? Even when a kid has a sense of ownership, that doesn't mean they won't leave the thing sitting on the floor of the living room for someone to step on, or next to a window that will get direct sun in 12 hours. Kids don't work like that.
It's weird though, the roaming doesn't seem to work. My phone sees the Cingular signal if I switch it to "manual network selection" but it won't use it for anything but E911 service.
Well, that's not entirely true. At the Government Center there is Cingular coverage (the antenna is on the roof) but the T-Mobile signal is drown out. One time I was able to roam on Cingular (it's the only time I've ever seen that funny triangle icon), but every other time my phone is just SOL.
I'm with you on T-Mobile's service plans (especially the data plan), but frankly Cingular just has better coverage. I have T-Mobile on my phone and my wife has Cingular and she pretty consistently has better coverage (my phone is out of range while she still has several bars), especially once you get outside of the city. I actually considered switching to Cingular but they rape you on data.
That also helps them get the porn industry in their pocket. Perhaps they should start building players with Smartmedia slots so we can get BDSM releases?
I find it odd that people are talking about Caps with a "3 year" life and trotting out 1000 or 3000 hour estimates. Your 32,000 hour estimate is much closer to a year than any of those.
I have to echo many other Slashdotters in saying that unless it was one of the badly bungled caps from 3-4 years ago, I rarely have them fail enough to cause problems on my machines. I still have Pentium 133s running here doing menial tasks 24/7 for the past 7 years, and they were used when I got them. It's rare for me to have to throw out a computer part because it stops working, typically I have to throw them out because they're obsolete or some new piece of hardware replaced it (like buying a new motherboard with built-in ethernet, allowing me to squirrel away my ISA ethernet card). I do try to make sure my case doesn't run too hot however, high heat is so bad for so many components (Power supply, Hard Drives, caps), that improperly cooling your case is a sure road to replacement hardware.
If that's the case, then isn't the PIN alone rather useless to a crooked merchant? From what I understand, the chip on the card is supposed to be difficult or impossible to duplicate (especially in a tiny form factor card reader device). So even if you have the PIN, it's of no use to you unless you either mug the person for their card or hope they've used it elsewhere.
I don't use Gentoo's package system, but at this point I think it would take me more than a month to recompile every application I have installed. Admittedly that includes some porkers like Openoffice (which takes 10GB of hard drive space and literally all day to compile).
That's a similar to what happened when I tried to cancel my Gym membership. I had to call their office, then send them a fax with the request, then call back again to insure they got it. A month later I see that they're still charging me and I call them back. They claim they never got the fax, so I send them a copy of my fax receipt (transmission log) and send the request again. Then I have to call them again and make sure that they got the second fax. Did I mention that their office always puts you on hold for 15 minutes when you call? It was ridiculous. Their hold music was just a looping ad for their gym and how you'll be in the best shape of your life blah blah blah.
You know, that may not be an entirely bad thing. Having juries that expect the prosecutor to have some evidence beyond a couple of sketchy eyewitnesses would clear up a lot of the false imprisonments in this country. Eyewitness testimony is so unreliable that there is a strong argument for disallowing it.
Of course there is a problem with people taking it to extremes and wanting perfect photographic evidence, but overall I think Juries have been too lenient on what evidence they'll convict on.
Blockbuster's checkout people are already exceedingly slow. I can't imagine adding a 20 minute burn process to the checkout. Frankly, I don't want to hang around in a Blockbuster for an additional 20 minutes every time I check something out--In fact, I don't want to hang around in them at all, that's why I have Netflix.
Where I could see this coming in handy is an in-store kiosk that has an enormous catalog of the movies that aren't already available for rent in the store. Something where you select what you want, hit "go", and then check out 20 minutes later when your disk is done. Since Blockbuster tends to have an absolutely crap selection of older titles, this could really be a boon for them.
Really, the important point here is that those people operate best in the dark, away from public scrutiny and oversight. They change the science textbooks and most parents won't notice because they don't read the science textbook. They influence the decisions of one school board in a large state (like Texas or California) and they indirectly influence hundreds of other school boards that tend to adopt the same curriculum and text that the "big state" school boards adopt. It is an insidious attack because it flies below most people's radar until it is way too late. Once the school board has approved the purchase of the textbooks and the first copies start arriving with the children of alert parents it is already too late--the budget is spent and county is stuck with those textbooks until the next purchase cycle ten years down the road.
Dude, he's from the EFF, they say that every year. I appreciate what the EFF does, but they are always predicting doom and gloom just around the corner.
Does anybody else remember when Indiana Jones's hat was deposited in some Hollywood museum (under glass) and they made a press conference about how there would never be another one? Apparently Lucas doesn't. Presumably he was holding out for the script that allowed him to shoot the entire movie in CG except for Harrison Ford.
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Uh, you have that backwards. Daylight savings time was developed during wartime to conserve on energy by moving the daylight back towards the end of the day (people liked getting up late and staying up past dark back then too). So you might be thinking to yourself, that sounds great, why don't we do that all year long? The answer is the kids. We turn daylight savings time off in the winter because otherwise the kids have to go to school in the dark when the days grow short.
Think about it, most kids go to school pretty early in the morning, but get off in the mid afternoon. Shifting the daylight back certainly doesn't help them go to school in any more light, and there was never a problem on the other end unless you live very far North (in which case you're SOL anyway).
That would be some seriously deep sea tuna. I'd think most of these heavy metals would tend to stay on the bottom of the ocean simply because they're considerably denser than the surrounding water. That said, there is some life down there (not much), and there is a chance we'd kill it with nuclear waste down there. Actually, there isn't a lot of life outside of the geologically active areas, but even a little life is worth saving.
The problem is that the ISP from "use nuclear reactions to heat up some other fuel" tends to be too low to be useful. It's a lot easier/safer/cheaper/lighter to just use a reactant that expands on its own (conventional rocket fuel). That's why I specified ground-to-orbit in my post. Once you're in space there are a lot of uses for nuclear propulsion that actually make sense (Nuclear powered Ion drives for instance), but for getting out of the atmosphere you're options are a lot more limited.
Those "Firefighter Union Charities" and "Police Brotherhood Funds" that call you are basically a scam. They give the police/firefighters a lump sum and then call in their name and keep everything they collect. The overhead can be on the order of 95% when all is said and done. If you are suckered into contributing to one of those you'd better be ready to listen to your phone ring, a lot. They will promptly use your name in the other similar charity-scams that they've set up. I used to have a picture of two pledge kits from two "different" organizations (I even asked them when they called back and they denied all knowledge of each other. The two organizations were: The Brotherhood of the Police Chiefs and the Police Chiefs Brotherhood. Their logos were similar, but not quite identical, and the information packets on the inside were nearly identical. Interestingly enough, the former had pledges in the $35-$55 range, while the latter had them in the $45-$75 range.
From what I can tell, if you "pledge" but then never send in the money, eventually they'll put your name on a deadbeats list and stop bothering you. At least the volume of calls I get from "unrelated" organizations diminished a fair bit after I sat on 5 different pledge kits for a few months.
Do people think setting up a Paypal account involves walking down to your local brick and mortar Paypal branch and showing them proper ID and bringing your papers? Have you ever set on up yourself? In case you havn't, here's how it works: you go on their website and click the "create a new account button", that asks you some questions (upgrade to merchant? use the money market? etc...), then it asks for a payment method (usually a credit card at this point) and that's it. Afterward, you have an account that you can attach existing bank accounts and whatnot to your Paypal account. At no point are you talking to a real person or is there really any room for screwup other than the kinds you make yourself.
Theoretically Paypal could set it up such that you have to call them and fax over documentation on your bank accounts and whatnot, but that would greatly increase the amount of staff they need and would almost certainly raise their fees quite a bit. It would also defeat the purpose somewhat of having an easy to use online payment system.
Your story is typical when I ask around at conventions/with friends. It seems to me that a lot of the "Paypal sucks" stories come from people who were scamming or trying to launder money through the service (or doing activities that looked a lot like that) and discovering that Paypal actually pays attention to what's going on with their accounts. It doesn't help when the "Paypal Sucks!" type sites offer suggestions for alternative online payment systems that are known to be scams.
I think you're being wildly optimistic that OEMs won't try to litter the desktop of new machines with software nobody in their right mind would ever use just because Microsoft says "they suck". Now, MS could leverage something through it's OEM agreements to force them to take them off, but you can bet you would have AOL and the like crying bloody murder (and monopoly).
Besides, why is Vista so special? From what I can tell it should be more resistant to OEM software bugs than 95/98/ME, and no less resistant than 2000 and XP. On the other hand, 95/98/ME do have a reputation for crashing that's not entirely deserved (but also not entirely undeserved either), but I think 2000 and XP have shown that bad software doesn't bring the OS reputation down.
Of all of the possible uses of Nuclear power, using it to power a rocket out of the atmosphere is perhaps the last one I'd want to see actually implemented. It is hard to think of a better way of spreading radioactive particles all over a huge landscape, not to mention what happens when you crash.
Look back about a day in Slashdot's archive to the article about the Macworld 2007 Keynote. Read through the page and all of your questions will be answered.
Did you see the keynote. It's not just a phone + iPod, it's a smartphone (with all of the features you expect when you hear "smartphone") + iPod with an interface that doesn't suck. A smartphone with an interface that doesn't suck is truly newsworthy, as the industry has been trying to build that for years and failing miserably.
I do think there is a bit of euphoria right now over the product launch that is likely to subside a bit as June rolls around and people remember that $700 is a hell of a lot of money for a phone, smart or no.
I'm starting to wonder if anybody at the OLPC project (or even on Slashdot) has actually watched kids in real life? Even when a kid has a sense of ownership, that doesn't mean they won't leave the thing sitting on the floor of the living room for someone to step on, or next to a window that will get direct sun in 12 hours. Kids don't work like that.
Isn't it called Microsoft Flight Simulator? That's what Jack Thompson told me.
It's weird though, the roaming doesn't seem to work. My phone sees the Cingular signal if I switch it to "manual network selection" but it won't use it for anything but E911 service.
Well, that's not entirely true. At the Government Center there is Cingular coverage (the antenna is on the roof) but the T-Mobile signal is drown out. One time I was able to roam on Cingular (it's the only time I've ever seen that funny triangle icon), but every other time my phone is just SOL.
I'm with you on T-Mobile's service plans (especially the data plan), but frankly Cingular just has better coverage. I have T-Mobile on my phone and my wife has Cingular and she pretty consistently has better coverage (my phone is out of range while she still has several bars), especially once you get outside of the city. I actually considered switching to Cingular but they rape you on data.
That also helps them get the porn industry in their pocket. Perhaps they should start building players with Smartmedia slots so we can get BDSM releases?
That's one fancy 386 you got there Mr. Moneybags.
I find it odd that people are talking about Caps with a "3 year" life and trotting out 1000 or 3000 hour estimates. Your 32,000 hour estimate is much closer to a year than any of those.
I have to echo many other Slashdotters in saying that unless it was one of the badly bungled caps from 3-4 years ago, I rarely have them fail enough to cause problems on my machines. I still have Pentium 133s running here doing menial tasks 24/7 for the past 7 years, and they were used when I got them. It's rare for me to have to throw out a computer part because it stops working, typically I have to throw them out because they're obsolete or some new piece of hardware replaced it (like buying a new motherboard with built-in ethernet, allowing me to squirrel away my ISA ethernet card). I do try to make sure my case doesn't run too hot however, high heat is so bad for so many components (Power supply, Hard Drives, caps), that improperly cooling your case is a sure road to replacement hardware.
If that's the case, then isn't the PIN alone rather useless to a crooked merchant? From what I understand, the chip on the card is supposed to be difficult or impossible to duplicate (especially in a tiny form factor card reader device). So even if you have the PIN, it's of no use to you unless you either mug the person for their card or hope they've used it elsewhere.
I don't use Gentoo's package system, but at this point I think it would take me more than a month to recompile every application I have installed. Admittedly that includes some porkers like Openoffice (which takes 10GB of hard drive space and literally all day to compile).
That's a similar to what happened when I tried to cancel my Gym membership. I had to call their office, then send them a fax with the request, then call back again to insure they got it. A month later I see that they're still charging me and I call them back. They claim they never got the fax, so I send them a copy of my fax receipt (transmission log) and send the request again. Then I have to call them again and make sure that they got the second fax. Did I mention that their office always puts you on hold for 15 minutes when you call? It was ridiculous. Their hold music was just a looping ad for their gym and how you'll be in the best shape of your life blah blah blah.
You know, that may not be an entirely bad thing. Having juries that expect the prosecutor to have some evidence beyond a couple of sketchy eyewitnesses would clear up a lot of the false imprisonments in this country. Eyewitness testimony is so unreliable that there is a strong argument for disallowing it.
Of course there is a problem with people taking it to extremes and wanting perfect photographic evidence, but overall I think Juries have been too lenient on what evidence they'll convict on.
Blockbuster's checkout people are already exceedingly slow. I can't imagine adding a 20 minute burn process to the checkout. Frankly, I don't want to hang around in a Blockbuster for an additional 20 minutes every time I check something out--In fact, I don't want to hang around in them at all, that's why I have Netflix.
Where I could see this coming in handy is an in-store kiosk that has an enormous catalog of the movies that aren't already available for rent in the store. Something where you select what you want, hit "go", and then check out 20 minutes later when your disk is done. Since Blockbuster tends to have an absolutely crap selection of older titles, this could really be a boon for them.
Really, the important point here is that those people operate best in the dark, away from public scrutiny and oversight. They change the science textbooks and most parents won't notice because they don't read the science textbook. They influence the decisions of one school board in a large state (like Texas or California) and they indirectly influence hundreds of other school boards that tend to adopt the same curriculum and text that the "big state" school boards adopt. It is an insidious attack because it flies below most people's radar until it is way too late. Once the school board has approved the purchase of the textbooks and the first copies start arriving with the children of alert parents it is already too late--the budget is spent and county is stuck with those textbooks until the next purchase cycle ten years down the road.
Dude, he's from the EFF, they say that every year. I appreciate what the EFF does, but they are always predicting doom and gloom just around the corner.
Does anybody else remember when Indiana Jones's hat was deposited in some Hollywood museum (under glass) and they made a press conference about how there would never be another one? Apparently Lucas doesn't. Presumably he was holding out for the script that allowed him to shoot the entire movie in CG except for Harrison Ford.