Given that call centers running these operations can have more than one outgoing line, your math is irrelevant.
As I outlined in another comment in this thread/story/whatever, I don’t ever answer my phone (in fact, it has spent about 95% of its life on silent/no-vibrate/do-not-disturb,) and I have a really long outgoing message. In order to get in touch with me by phone, you’d have to dial my number, let it ring and wait for it to go to voicemail, and then wait through all of the...about 22 second-long outgoing message, before you can even begin to leave me a message, which my outgoing message makes clear you must do if you want me to get back to you.
People who call and don’t really need to talk to me, and most robocalls too, simply don’t have the patience or aren’t programmed to last long enough to be able to leave me a message.
Just by having that long OGM, I am tying up any robocaller who DOES call’s harassment resources for FAR longer than they planned.
I think as many people as possible should do this. If they did, instead of a robocaller spending 20 seconds or so, (THEIR message duration, let’s say,) they’ll have to spend closer to double that, maybe more, just to deposit a message and while doing so, the resources in question will be unavailable to harass someone else while their tied up with mine. If everyone did this, I suspect it would become unnecessary for any of us to do it, ironically, as the robocaller will go away when all of us together, or at least most of us, join forces to make robocalling so resource-intensive as to be unworthy of the miscreant’s time and resources to pester us with their stupid shit.
Failing meaningful legal reforms to end the ongoing spam nightmare, it falls to us as The People, as a community, to fix this damned problem, since our government is obviously far too crippled by corruption to do their actual jobs.
For your mobile, use Call Blocker by Vlad Lee. For your landline use nomorobo.com.
I have no association with either beyond being a happy user.
Here’s how I’ve almost completely eliminated this BS from my life: (PS, scroll to the bottom for a PRO TIP!)
Step 1: set a ringtone for all contacts, or multiple if you want to differentiate between some callers or groups and others. Step 2: set the default ringtone for unknown, caller-ID blocking or restricted numbers to “none” and vibration off, or if your phone does not allow that, to a ringtone that is a fraction of a second long, and silent. (I had to create my own one of these. Annoying but worth it!) Step 3: create a lengthy outgoing voicemail message. If you like, start by saying “hello?” and pausing for a breath, then say “you’ve reached” and your full phone number including area code. (Just your number, NOT YOUR NAME. Whoever dialed u already KNOWS your number. No need to give a spammer or robocaller or a telemarketer, etc., either your name or confirmation of your number allowing confirmation of what name goes with what number.) State that you are not available to take the call, but if they will leave a message including their name and organization, their return contact number or address, and a brief message detailing what the call regards, so that when you’re at liberty to do so, you will be able to return their call. Step 4: End your outgoing message with something to the effect of “if you do not leave a message with the required information, I will not be able to call you back. Thank you.”
The longer your outgoing message, the more of the robocalls’ BS you will chew up. Hopefully, you can exhaust the entire thing, and anyone who doesn’t truly need to get in touch with you will hang TF up without leaving a message. I periodically see someone has called, (“Missed Call!”) and I look at it; if the number is unknown, and a message wasn’t left, I generally just delete the notification. If it happens more than once with the same number, I block the number. This rarely happens.
Peace and tranquility RESTORED.
This technique has cut down wrong number calls, fraudulent calls, unsolicitated offers for goods and/or services and the like for me by about 99%.
Also, if your VM system has a feature that lets you skip outgoing messages, disable it if possible. If it doesn’t, or you have a landline instead of a smartphone, turn the ringer off entirely or use a conventional answering machine or service with the above outlined technique.
Good luck!
PRO TIP: Get a phone number that is NOWHERE NEAR anywhere you have ever lived, and where you don’t know anyone and anyone from there is unlikely ever to have a legitimate reason to call you. Some spam/robocall assholes try to exploit the fact that a call recipient is more likely to pick up if the call is local, i.e., in the same area code, so they actually make calls from there or spoof the caller ID. SO when you see a call coming FROM that area code, (your own,) you can be confident that the call is either a wrong number or fraud, and safely ignore it.
This approach’s biggest drawback is that by making it a long distance call, you are making it way more expensive for even a next door neighbor to call you, however, as far as I know, this is an obsolete concern as everyone these days with a phone gets free unlimited long distance anyway, so the distance of the call is irrelevant. I discovered this accidentally one day when I lived somewhere briefly but HAD changed my phone number to be local, (which in retrospect was completely f’ing pointless,) and after I moved away, since I didn’t get to know anyone there, I realized all the calls coming in were either wrong-numbers, or junkcalls.
I have now had the same mobile phone number going on 7 years, despite having lived in about 4 different places since I got this number, and I am now on my 4th phone carrier. True story.
I have no plans ever to change my phone number again.
At some point everyone agreed, let’s not militarize space. Let’s have ONE place, at least, just ONE place where we won’t practice violence upon each other. To this place we all agreed we wouldn’t even bring the TOOLS with which to DO violence... we’d leave them all behind, on the surface. It is an environment too difficult and expensive to reach and too fraught with danger, besides being a place where we could learn so much, to pollute and befoul with such horrible things as weapons.
Now we’re shooting down satellites.
This fucking species. H. “Sapiens” (hahaha) is a disease bedeviling the biosphere, and now we’re both infesting and infecting space around the world, and other nearby bodies.
As a child, I dreamt with great anticipation the discovery of some means to explore space, faster-than-light travel... hyperspace, warp drive, etc. Now I only hope we never realize it, so as to prevent humanity from metastasizing to the broader universe.
Summon the meteors, already, for our reign has gone on long enough. Let us be done with it.
The size of the suit was NOT the issue; that is all just a cover for the real reason.
The real reason is that as anyone who knows anything about women knows, they are INCAPABLE of going out anywhere together once they see that they are wearing the same outfits.
ONE or both will have to change clothes, and they do not have additional spacesuits up there to cover this eventuality.
Thatâ(TM)s not what happens today. FUD is doing a good job of helping those destructive to society get in power and stay in power. In the meantime a well researched stance is screamed at for being elitist, left wing, supporting already defeated candidates and non-patriotic
Donâ(TM)t underestimate the power of the misinformed populist vote. It has hurt the US, the UK and other countries.
Your opinion and votes matter more than ever. We should not need to resort to demeaning opponents (dead or alive) to try to make our arguments. Taking time to understand what scares a person will likely help make a better argument for trying to win them over.
The changes our societies need are (or certainly seem) greater than can be effected by change within the current system. New laws need to be enacted to end corruption but never will be BECAUSE they would need to be drafted and passed by the very same people whose interests those new laws would be contrary to.
Put simply: 1. Complacent or stupid or lazy people install, or suffer to be installed by others, elected officials carelessly. 2. Poorly chosen elected officials are bought off by people and/or corporations with lots of money. 3. In exchange for that money, corrupt politicians write, rewrite, massage, amend, or repeal or otherwise strike down laws to the benefit of their wealthy paymasters. 4. Corrupt governmental bodies (full now of mostly corrupt, morally bankrupt, criminal, conniving, or just downright stupid and/or unqualified, or any one or more of the foregoing up to and including possibly all of the above or worse,) continue to facilitate the hoarding of the wealth of the society in a few at the expense of all. 5. Tendrils of corruption reach out into all subdivisions and branches; partisan, bought-and-paid-for politicians ignore reality and install judges likely to be sympathetic to their cause and either permissive of, or outright supporting, aiding, and abetting the furtherance of corruption. This includes the “Supreme Court”. If you need proof, how’s about “Citizens United”... for one?
Government formed with the words, “WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES DESTRUCTIVE OF THESE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR TO ABOLISH IT” ends up, ironically, becoming destructive to these ends, but the disparity between the power of the oppressed and their oppressor, when these words were written and took their place in history, is today about a million times greater.
American patriots who vastly outnumbered what the armies of their oppressor could bring to bear against them won as much by luck as anything else. Given the separation by an ocean and all that THAT entails, and the fact that the fastest means of communication between their government and their army and navy took months to convey information or instructions, (each way,) not to mention that they had other things on their mind, (like not being taken over by the French... again,) the odds, steep as they were, were immensely better than those of the citizens of the US being able to repair their broken government by force. Even during the American Civil War, with nearly half the country in open revolt, and things like airplanes, the telephone, radio communications, satellite communications and surveillance, rampant local surveillance, etc., still far-off, mostly undreamt, and definitely not yet available, they were unable to resist “Union” forces. Those forces they could not overcome, if combined and were to try to fight against the US government of today, would be crushed in seconds. What chance does the individual have today.
I’m not even ending that question with a question mark because really there IS no question.
So back to the U.K. , since this discussion is ostensibly about Brexit...
The U.K. has very nearly, in the modern day, the same problems as her erstwhile daughter, the US, partially enumerated above. But at least they
Pretty sure some people need to go to jail over this. This appears to be several hundred counts of, at a minimum, negligent homicide... and that's being charitable.
Once a mere cluster of human brain cells from mild-mannered Richard A. Torrence cultured in a lab, when mated to the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system of a mouse and grown into a complete organism, he can now successfully navigate incredibly complex, labyrinthine mazes to find a bit of cheese or peanut butter! Able to run on a hamster wheel for several seconds on end before becoming bored and losing interest, able to leap from one artificial plastic rock to another nearby while caged, in a single bound, Richard A. Torrence has become... Mouse Man!
However, he is too lazy to bother finding the cheese until he is nearly starving to death, and he spends most of his time watching the TV mounted to the ceiling of the office adjacent to the lab.
Squandering taxpayer money on manned missions to uninhabitable waste planets is kinda pointless. You can't terraform MERCURY, VENUS, OR MARS; on account of fundamental, unchangeable things about their natures. Mercury and Venus are too close to the sun AND too hot, Mars is too far away and insufficiently massive and too small to have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere of the kind that would be necessary for us to be able to BREATHE. Without it, we'd die. If you're going to fly away from Earth and build a colony of humans who have to live cooped up inside and only let out only once in a while in spacesuits, there's no real need to go so far as Mars. The MOON would be close enough. Anyway, just a thought.
This means it will likely happen in the next 18 months.
Actually, I think what this means is they've broken it and have been able to read messages "protected" or spoof messages "authenticated" in this way for a while. BUT they want people to keep using it, and not switch to something even more secure, that they CAN'T read. What makes me think this? Um, because it's obvious? That's the reason to make a giant fuss over encryption being too strong, so people think you haven't broken it. Did the Allies tell the Axis powers, "oh, hey, just to be fair and gentlemanly, we have to tell you we've totally broken your Enigma machine cypher system and can completely read any message you send with it within hours of intercepting it." Of course not. The fact that they'd broken it was likely an EXTREMELY closely guarded secret.
Similarly, the NSA or MI...5 or 6 or whatever, I forget, having broken all the various forms of commercially available encryption is probably something they'll keep really quiet about if they ever do it, and pretend they haven't, hence... they've probably already done it.
The closest thing to secure messaging is a one-time-pad cypher system, which is only really secure if BOTH ends hold the only keys and are secure and not compromised, if the code is TRULY random, and if any pad is only used EXACTLY ONCE. Naturally, key-distribution and security, (especially if there are multiple recipients,) is a giant problem and it's why, I suspect, it's probably not very widely used. Not compared with SSL or TLS or whatever, I imagine. Admittedly, I am not a cryptographic expert.
Science in 2019, ladies and gentlemen, they LITERALLY produced NIGHT AND DAY
2019?!? Science?!? This is ANCIENT TECH! Humans have been producing night and day for a very long time. The production of day was first, with the discovery of how to produce FIRE, safely, and more or less on-demand with campfires then oil pots and lamps and then, I think, wax candles, and the production of night likely came a little later with the advent of SHUTTERS, and as time passed, eventually, the miracle of blackout curtains! It being 2019 has nothing to do with it!
Of course, I got your point... some people literally don't know what the word literally means!;-b
Hang on tight, I'm working tangential to your comment on AC sound... Funny you mention that, I'm addicted to fans. Living room, bedroom, cubicle; all have fans. Car, fan on high most of the time. I believe I get 20+ hours of fan every day. Unless it's terribly hot I camp without a fan (I camp a lot). Of course a chorus of crickets is quite similar to the drone of a fan. Winter is a test in silence, because: I also have tinnitus (permanent ear ringing - stupid teenager, too many concerts, too little ear protection), fans cover up the ringing. Total silence is something I can't experience any more. I hear a low volume high pitch tone that wavers but never goes away. I now carry ear protection (foam plugs) at all times, realizing I may need to protect my ears at any time.
I get that intermittently once in a great while, it usually goes away after a few seconds. But be of good cheer... hopefully as you age, and the fine hair-like structures in your cochleae stop working, the annoying noise will go away too. Of course, that is all part of getting old, I'm told. Also, I love fans too. Can you believe the nerve of those Dyson guys to charge hundreds of dollars for a "air multiplier" (hahaha) that allegedly is super quiet? That defeats one of the main reasons to HAVE a fan in the first place!:-O
The everpresent hum of central AC is very calming. As long as the outdoor temperature isn't expected to drop below 55, I turn it on in fan mode most nights as a white noise generator. At work it keeps stress low, whenever they turn it off for maintenance the silence throws everyone off.
I'd do that buy mine's too loud. I have a Logitech speaker system (the $35 one) and an old iOS device plugged into it (and to power) and an app called, "Rain Rain" (one of the small number of apps I decided was worth the 2 or 3 bucks they were asking for, whatever it was,) and use a combination of the sounds "Central Air," "Airliner," and "Brown Noise," to mask all the various city and neighbor sounds. Lulls me to sleep pretty well and enables me to stay asleep.:)
In fact, one of the noises I use the app to drown out is the sound of the AC kicking on and off, and to fill up the loud silence (I know... it's ironic) that results from the AC being off after it's been running.
And no, I don't work for them, get paid by them, or get a commission or whatever. I tried several such apps, and this is the one I kept, in part because of a really great library of sounds, a decent interface, sleep timer, the ability to mix and control sound volumes individually, separate from each other and the master sound volume, and more. (OH MY GOD do I wish Apple built an equalizer and sound panel into the iPhone that would let me adjust individual app volumes independently of the master control. It's a real shame it doesn't have this. The Mac doesn't either, obliging me to install an app to give me that control, and that doesn't work perfectly or consistently.) Anyway, the Rain Rain app supports iPhone and iPad both (it's not an iPhone app scaled up, nor an iPad app scaled down,) and supports up to three simultaneous sounds being played on the iPhone, and up to five on the iPad.
Raising the noise-floor does wonders for generally not hearing or being awakened by the periodic noise of screaming motorcycle or sports car engines, and fire, police, and ambulance sirens. I'd be going bonkers without this. I used to have a couple CDs, (yes, I'm old,) of soothing noises, but the sound of the CD player going silent at the end, then spinning back up while the speakers fell silent while it restarted the album would sometimes prevent me falling asleep or wake me up. (Yes, it sometimes takes longer than a CD plays to fall asleep.) The app on the other hand, plays the sound continuously WITHOUT needing to store a giant sound file, (which would also go silent when it repeats... I've tried that approach once,) so... just my two cents on this.
Scientists Have Discovered a Shape That Blocks All Sound
No they haven't. At least, not according to the linked video in the article. It quieted it down quite a bit, but I could still hear it EASILY with the ring in place. It wasn't inaudible, not even CLOSE. Since they didn't put a ring of the same dimensions and material but in the shape of a simple, smooth, right, regular cylinder with a right, regular, cylindrical hole through it, centered and along the same axis as the material cylinder, (just like the "magic" ring but without the magic shape on the end,) while the speaker was generating the same sound at the same volume, to COMPARE it with. At least, that is, not in THAT video.
So this really is a non-story. Even if it quiets it quite a bit, it also occupies a LOT of the space, which RESTRICTS airflow, and likely adds a good bit of weight. (Imagine how big, thick, and therefore HEAVY it would have to be to fit the inner diameter of a big turbofan engine on a jet aircraft!) Then the output would need one too, and I understand the exhaust is pretty warm on one of those things, or at least can be. That may cause additional engineering challenges and cost, either of which could easily end up being insurmountable.
By the way, reflecting sound energy doesn't DESTROY it. It's ENERGY. Even if it DID work and DIDN'T add too much weight, and DIDN'T occlude the flow of air into and out of the engine to an extent that makes the plane unable even to take off under its own power, AND heat from the engine's exhaust wasn't a problem, etc., then the SOUND ENERGY being reflected INTO the engine will cause it to heat up even more. What are you going to do with all that extra heat? It's a LOT of noise, (and therefore, likely, a LOT of HEAT). Oh, and you're going to need a pair of these rings for EACH engine. How much weight will the required additional cooling cost? So you obviously will need much bigger, much more powerful (and noisier) engines. That will necessitate even bigger, thicker, sturdier rings, which will cause additional heat buildup... ETC.
If you're wondering how MUCH heat, well, it's actually pretty easy to work it out. Have you ever stood anywhere near a big turbofan jet engine, operating at, or at least near full power? Now imagine having to reproduce that sound, that same volume of noise, the same intensity... and while producing the same note, with a SPEAKER system. How big of an amplifier, in terms of Watts, would you need to do that? THAT'S how much sound power, (assuming you are somehow reflecting ALL of it,) we're talking about here. That much power is going to get trapped at BOTH ends of this hypothetical muffled engine. Where TF is it going to GO?
I see this tech as largely an interesting oddity, and will most likely come to nothing of any particular significance whatsoever in the world. Now maybe it MIGHT have some terrestrial applications, but don't look for this to be on aircraft anytime soon... that's my prediction.
Some nerds you are. All these posts should be asking the most important question...
Which angle measure system are these using, and why not have two sets, where sine is dsin(argument) or rsin(argument) and the others too, to remove any ambiguity?
Just a thought. It would suck if they implemented this in degree measure for people who prefer radians or vice versa.
Sure... but that's only because Earth's temperature is going to increase exponentially, and soon it'll be too hot to print money anymore. Thank god I'm old and won't be around much fucking longer anyway. I don't envy them. Good luck, kids... that's all I'm saying.
Yes, I get that telling this to a patient is hard. But if you cannot do it in person, then do not be a doctor or do pathology were patients are already dead.
The doctor could have just not told him. The test results don't say, "patient will die in 2-3 days". They say things like, platelet count is 17, white blood cells are 26, serum albumin is 78.3, arterial blood gas panel pending... et cetera. The doctor could just say, if it comes up after the patient drops dead, "it was a judgement call. I didn't tell him he'd be dead in two or three days because I didn't want to cause him to freak out over nothing when he could have lived for months or even years still... I wanted to run another test," (or get a consult with another doc, or 50 other things,) "to confirm before just dropping THAT kind of news on the guy," and covered his AND the hospital's asses, and we'd never even have heard about this. No story, no scandal, no lawsuit... nada.
ALSO... this is SLASHDOT! Why isn't everyone here all, "YAY!!! ROBOTS!!! SO FSCKING KEWL!!! WOOO!!!"
I, for one, WELCOME our new telling-patients-they're-going-to-die-robot overlords!
To me it's simpler than that; a planet is an object of considerable size in direct solar orbit, meaning that most stuff in the solar system could be considered planets, and I'm fine with that. The convention I was speaking of, when I say there are (or were) nine planets is really just something that means there are 9 THAT WE KNOW OF. Odds are there are others that are so distant, dark, etc., that we simply haven't found them yet. It is completely arbitrary, of course; my irritation comes from the arbitrary exclusion of Pluto for no really, particularly good reason. The only things I'd exclude are bits of space rock of negligible size. Even an object like Earth's moon I would consider a planet if it weren't ORBITING a planet, namely ours. (And yes, I already knew the origin of the word planet, the meaning, (wanderer) and also that the moon doesn't really orbit the Earth, but rather it (and the Earth,) both orbit their mutual center of gravitation, which I believe, due to differences in mass, is located fairly close to Earth's geographical center of mass, just as Earth (and the other planets) don't really orbit the sun, they orbit the mutual center of gravitation, as does the sun, (which is one of a couple ways we started to discover exoplanets in the first place, through observing the star's wobble,) but again, due to the sun having somewhere around 95 or 97 or 99 percent of the solar system's total mass, that center, like Earth's, is probably pretty close to ITS geographical (or would that be solographical?) center. In the case of the sun, it's probably generally within a few centimeters of the center, and obviously will move about as the planets move. (The percentage could be much lower than we think, because there could be dozens or hundreds or thousands of large, perhaps up to Jupiter-sized planets (perhaps larger!) orbiting the sun that we don't know about, floating out there in the space between the sun and the next nearest stars, still bound to the sun by gravity. Seems a tad unlikely, but since I think the surface area on a photo decreases progressively ever more rapidly the farther away you get, they get rapidly difficult to see or detect. It's why all these centuries after the invention of the telescope we still keep finding new objects, WAY the hell out in the solar system. You need increasingly large, and more powerful telescopes (more sensitive light gathering cameras, more precise lenses, etc.,) and then you have to start hefting them up into space because beyond a certain point, the atmosphere itself becomes an obstacle, even using a laser to try to mitigate the effect. But enough of that.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. You'll go on calling Pluto a dwarf planet, whatever the hell that means, and Earth a planet as if there's a meaningful technical difference, and I'll keep calling Pluto a planet, and you'll call me a luddite and I'll say you lack imagination.
I'm not an astronomer, and I'm not going to Pluto, so it really actually doesn't matter WTF it is. In truth, it has very little impact on my life. A smidgin of my tax dollars go to pay for a spacecraft to go look at it up close, otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, and just about might as well not exist. Just like the 50 other planets orbiting between what we currently think of as the edge of the solar system, and the point where a planet would end up getting snatched away by another star.
Slashdot Mirror
Given that call centers running these operations can have more than one outgoing line, your math is irrelevant.
As I outlined in another comment in this thread/story/whatever, I don’t ever answer my phone (in fact, it has spent about 95% of its life on silent/no-vibrate/do-not-disturb,) and I have a really long outgoing message. In order to get in touch with me by phone, you’d have to dial my number, let it ring and wait for it to go to voicemail, and then wait through all of the...about 22 second-long outgoing message, before you can even begin to leave me a message, which my outgoing message makes clear you must do if you want me to get back to you.
People who call and don’t really need to talk to me, and most robocalls too, simply don’t have the patience or aren’t programmed to last long enough to be able to leave me a message.
Just by having that long OGM, I am tying up any robocaller who DOES call’s harassment resources for FAR longer than they planned.
I think as many people as possible should do this. If they did, instead of a robocaller spending 20 seconds or so, (THEIR message duration, let’s say,) they’ll have to spend closer to double that, maybe more, just to deposit a message and while doing so, the resources in question will be unavailable to harass someone else while their tied up with mine. If everyone did this, I suspect it would become unnecessary for any of us to do it, ironically, as the robocaller will go away when all of us together, or at least most of us, join forces to make robocalling so resource-intensive as to be unworthy of the miscreant’s time and resources to pester us with their stupid shit.
Failing meaningful legal reforms to end the ongoing spam nightmare, it falls to us as The People, as a community, to fix this damned problem, since our government is obviously far too crippled by corruption to do their actual jobs.
For your mobile, use Call Blocker by Vlad Lee. For your landline use nomorobo.com .
I have no association with either beyond being a happy user.
Here’s how I’ve almost completely eliminated this BS from my life:
(PS, scroll to the bottom for a PRO TIP!)
Step 1: set a ringtone for all contacts, or multiple if you want to differentiate between some callers or groups and others.
Step 2: set the default ringtone for unknown, caller-ID blocking or restricted numbers to “none” and vibration off, or if your phone does not allow that, to a ringtone that is a fraction of a second long, and silent. (I had to create my own one of these. Annoying but worth it!)
Step 3: create a lengthy outgoing voicemail message. If you like, start by saying “hello?” and pausing for a breath, then say “you’ve reached” and your full phone number including area code. (Just your number, NOT YOUR NAME. Whoever dialed u already KNOWS your number. No need to give a spammer or robocaller or a telemarketer, etc., either your name or confirmation of your number allowing confirmation of what name goes with what number.) State that you are not available to take the call, but if they will leave a message including their name and organization, their return contact number or address, and a brief message detailing what the call regards, so that when you’re at liberty to do so, you will be able to return their call.
Step 4: End your outgoing message with something to the effect of “if you do not leave a message with the required information, I will not be able to call you back. Thank you.”
The longer your outgoing message, the more of the robocalls’ BS you will chew up. Hopefully, you can exhaust the entire thing, and anyone who doesn’t truly need to get in touch with you will hang TF up without leaving a message. I periodically see someone has called, (“Missed Call!”) and I look at it; if the number is unknown, and a message wasn’t left, I generally just delete the notification. If it happens more than once with the same number, I block the number. This rarely happens.
Peace and tranquility RESTORED.
This technique has cut down wrong number calls, fraudulent calls, unsolicitated offers for goods and/or services and the like for me by about 99%.
Also, if your VM system has a feature that lets you skip outgoing messages, disable it if possible. If it doesn’t, or you have a landline instead of a smartphone, turn the ringer off entirely or use a conventional answering machine or service with the above outlined technique.
Good luck!
PRO TIP: Get a phone number that is NOWHERE NEAR anywhere you have ever lived, and where you don’t know anyone and anyone from there is unlikely ever to have a legitimate reason to call you. Some spam/robocall assholes try to exploit the fact that a call recipient is more likely to pick up if the call is local, i.e., in the same area code, so they actually make calls from there or spoof the caller ID. SO when you see a call coming FROM that area code, (your own,) you can be confident that the call is either a wrong number or fraud, and safely ignore it.
This approach’s biggest drawback is that by making it a long distance call, you are making it way more expensive for even a next door neighbor to call you, however, as far as I know, this is an obsolete concern as everyone these days with a phone gets free unlimited long distance anyway, so the distance of the call is irrelevant. I discovered this accidentally one day when I lived somewhere briefly but HAD changed my phone number to be local, (which in retrospect was completely f’ing pointless,) and after I moved away, since I didn’t get to know anyone there, I realized all the calls coming in were either wrong-numbers, or junkcalls.
I have now had the same mobile phone number going on 7 years, despite having lived in about 4 different places since I got this number, and I am now on my 4th phone carrier. True story.
I have no plans ever to change my phone number again.
We are why we can’t have nice things.
At some point everyone agreed, let’s not militarize space. Let’s have ONE place, at least, just ONE place where we won’t practice violence upon each other. To this place we all agreed we wouldn’t even bring the TOOLS with which to DO violence... we’d leave them all behind, on the surface. It is an environment too difficult and expensive to reach and too fraught with danger, besides being a place where we could learn so much, to pollute and befoul with such horrible things as weapons.
Now we’re shooting down satellites.
This fucking species. H. “Sapiens” (hahaha) is a disease bedeviling the biosphere, and now we’re both infesting and infecting space around the world, and other nearby bodies.
As a child, I dreamt with great anticipation the discovery of some means to explore space, faster-than-light travel... hyperspace, warp drive, etc. Now I only hope we never realize it, so as to prevent humanity from metastasizing to the broader universe.
Summon the meteors, already, for our reign has gone on long enough. Let us be done with it.
The size of the suit was NOT the issue; that is all just a cover for the real reason.
The real reason is that as anyone who knows anything about women knows, they are INCAPABLE of going out anywhere together once they see that they are wearing the same outfits.
ONE or both will have to change clothes, and they do not have additional spacesuits up there to cover this eventuality.
...it's the new vinyl!
It Took 10 Seconds For Instagram To Push Me Into An Anti-Vaxx Rabbit Hole
Being against pregnancy tests and good luck charms I can understand, but rabbits are against vaccines now? Feh... dumb bunnies.
If the batteries were standardized and replaceable, then Apple would be deprived of an ongoing revenue stream.
Yes, and that would be tragic for them. They’re hurting badly as it is... they haven’t even made their first trillion dollars yet!
Oops. Oh, wait... never mind.
Remember those pictures of George W. Bush captioned, “Miss me yet?”
Someone needs to remake that but with a photo of the bottom of an iPhone with a headphone jack.
I can't tell if you're pro-establishment, anti-establishment, or antidisestablishmentarian. Wow!
Could be counterantidisestablishmentarianesqueishy.
Thatâ(TM)s not what happens today. FUD is doing a good job of helping those destructive to society get in power and stay in power. In the meantime a well researched stance is screamed at for being elitist, left wing, supporting already defeated candidates and non-patriotic
Donâ(TM)t underestimate the power of the misinformed populist vote. It has hurt the US, the UK and other countries.
Your opinion and votes matter more than ever. We should not need to resort to demeaning opponents (dead or alive) to try to make our arguments. Taking time to understand what scares a person will likely help make a better argument for trying to win them over.
The changes our societies need are (or certainly seem) greater than can be effected by change within the current system. New laws need to be enacted to end corruption but never will be BECAUSE they would need to be drafted and passed by the very same people whose interests those new laws would be contrary to.
Put simply:
1. Complacent or stupid or lazy people install, or suffer to be installed by others, elected officials carelessly.
2. Poorly chosen elected officials are bought off by people and/or corporations with lots of money.
3. In exchange for that money, corrupt politicians write, rewrite, massage, amend, or repeal or otherwise strike down laws to the benefit of their wealthy paymasters.
4. Corrupt governmental bodies (full now of mostly corrupt, morally bankrupt, criminal, conniving, or just downright stupid and/or unqualified, or any one or more of the foregoing up to and including possibly all of the above or worse,) continue to facilitate the hoarding of the wealth of the society in a few at the expense of all.
5. Tendrils of corruption reach out into all subdivisions and branches; partisan, bought-and-paid-for politicians ignore reality and install judges likely to be sympathetic to their cause and either permissive of, or outright supporting, aiding, and abetting the furtherance of corruption. This includes the “Supreme Court”. If you need proof, how’s about “Citizens United”... for one?
Government formed with the words, “WHENEVER ANY FORM OF GOVERNMENT BECOMES DESTRUCTIVE OF THESE ENDS, IT IS THE RIGHT OF THE PEOPLE TO ALTER OR TO ABOLISH IT” ends up, ironically, becoming destructive to these ends, but the disparity between the power of the oppressed and their oppressor, when these words were written and took their place in history, is today about a million times greater.
American patriots who vastly outnumbered what the armies of their oppressor could bring to bear against them won as much by luck as anything else. Given the separation by an ocean and all that THAT entails, and the fact that the fastest means of communication between their government and their army and navy took months to convey information or instructions, (each way,) not to mention that they had other things on their mind, (like not being taken over by the French... again,) the odds, steep as they were, were immensely better than those of the citizens of the US being able to repair their broken government by force. Even during the American Civil War, with nearly half the country in open revolt, and things like airplanes, the telephone, radio communications, satellite communications and surveillance, rampant local surveillance, etc., still far-off, mostly undreamt, and definitely not yet available, they were unable to resist “Union” forces. Those forces they could not overcome, if combined and were to try to fight against the US government of today, would be crushed in seconds. What chance does the individual have today.
I’m not even ending that question with a question mark because really there IS no question.
So back to the U.K. , since this discussion is ostensibly about Brexit...
The U.K. has very nearly, in the modern day, the same problems as her erstwhile daughter, the US, partially enumerated above. But at least they
Pretty sure some people need to go to jail over this. This appears to be several hundred counts of, at a minimum, negligent homicide... and that's being charitable.
#BoycottBoeing
Once a mere cluster of human brain cells from mild-mannered Richard A. Torrence cultured in a lab, when mated to the spinal cord and peripheral nervous system of a mouse and grown into a complete organism, he can now successfully navigate incredibly complex, labyrinthine mazes to find a bit of cheese or peanut butter! Able to run on a hamster wheel for several seconds on end before becoming bored and losing interest, able to leap from one artificial plastic rock to another nearby while caged, in a single bound, Richard A. Torrence has become... Mouse Man!
However, he is too lazy to bother finding the cheese until he is nearly starving to death, and he spends most of his time watching the TV mounted to the ceiling of the office adjacent to the lab.
Squandering taxpayer money on manned missions to uninhabitable waste planets is kinda pointless. You can't terraform MERCURY, VENUS, OR MARS ; on account of fundamental, unchangeable things about their natures. Mercury and Venus are too close to the sun AND too hot, Mars is too far away and insufficiently massive and too small to have enough gravity to hold an atmosphere of the kind that would be necessary for us to be able to BREATHE. Without it, we'd die. If you're going to fly away from Earth and build a colony of humans who have to live cooped up inside and only let out only once in a while in spacesuits, there's no real need to go so far as Mars. The MOON would be close enough. Anyway, just a thought.
The "experts" say "not possible for 10 years".
This means it will likely happen in the next 18 months.
Actually, I think what this means is they've broken it and have been able to read messages "protected" or spoof messages "authenticated" in this way for a while. BUT they want people to keep using it, and not switch to something even more secure, that they CAN'T read. What makes me think this? Um, because it's obvious? That's the reason to make a giant fuss over encryption being too strong, so people think you haven't broken it. Did the Allies tell the Axis powers, "oh, hey, just to be fair and gentlemanly, we have to tell you we've totally broken your Enigma machine cypher system and can completely read any message you send with it within hours of intercepting it." Of course not. The fact that they'd broken it was likely an EXTREMELY closely guarded secret.
Similarly, the NSA or MI...5 or 6 or whatever, I forget, having broken all the various forms of commercially available encryption is probably something they'll keep really quiet about if they ever do it, and pretend they haven't, hence... they've probably already done it.
The closest thing to secure messaging is a one-time-pad cypher system, which is only really secure if BOTH ends hold the only keys and are secure and not compromised, if the code is TRULY random, and if any pad is only used EXACTLY ONCE. Naturally, key-distribution and security, (especially if there are multiple recipients,) is a giant problem and it's why, I suspect, it's probably not very widely used. Not compared with SSL or TLS or whatever, I imagine. Admittedly, I am not a cryptographic expert.
literally night and day
Science in 2019, ladies and gentlemen, they LITERALLY produced NIGHT AND DAY
2019?!? Science?!? This is ANCIENT TECH! Humans have been producing night and day for a very long time. The production of day was first, with the discovery of how to produce FIRE, safely, and more or less on-demand with campfires then oil pots and lamps and then, I think, wax candles, and the production of night likely came a little later with the advent of SHUTTERS, and as time passed, eventually, the miracle of blackout curtains! It being 2019 has nothing to do with it!
Of course, I got your point... some people literally don't know what the word literally means! ;-b
Hang on tight, I'm working tangential to your comment on AC sound... Funny you mention that, I'm addicted to fans. Living room, bedroom, cubicle; all have fans. Car, fan on high most of the time. I believe I get 20+ hours of fan every day. Unless it's terribly hot I camp without a fan (I camp a lot). Of course a chorus of crickets is quite similar to the drone of a fan. Winter is a test in silence, because: I also have tinnitus (permanent ear ringing - stupid teenager, too many concerts, too little ear protection), fans cover up the ringing. Total silence is something I can't experience any more. I hear a low volume high pitch tone that wavers but never goes away. I now carry ear protection (foam plugs) at all times, realizing I may need to protect my ears at any time.
I get that intermittently once in a great while, it usually goes away after a few seconds. But be of good cheer... hopefully as you age, and the fine hair-like structures in your cochleae stop working, the annoying noise will go away too. Of course, that is all part of getting old, I'm told. Also, I love fans too. Can you believe the nerve of those Dyson guys to charge hundreds of dollars for a "air multiplier" (hahaha) that allegedly is super quiet? That defeats one of the main reasons to HAVE a fan in the first place! :-O
The everpresent hum of central AC is very calming. As long as the outdoor temperature isn't expected to drop below 55, I turn it on in fan mode most nights as a white noise generator. At work it keeps stress low, whenever they turn it off for maintenance the silence throws everyone off.
I'd do that buy mine's too loud. I have a Logitech speaker system (the $35 one) and an old iOS device plugged into it (and to power) and an app called, "Rain Rain" (one of the small number of apps I decided was worth the 2 or 3 bucks they were asking for, whatever it was,) and use a combination of the sounds "Central Air," "Airliner," and "Brown Noise," to mask all the various city and neighbor sounds. Lulls me to sleep pretty well and enables me to stay asleep. :)
In fact, one of the noises I use the app to drown out is the sound of the AC kicking on and off, and to fill up the loud silence (I know... it's ironic) that results from the AC being off after it's been running.
And no, I don't work for them, get paid by them, or get a commission or whatever. I tried several such apps, and this is the one I kept, in part because of a really great library of sounds, a decent interface, sleep timer, the ability to mix and control sound volumes individually, separate from each other and the master sound volume, and more. (OH MY GOD do I wish Apple built an equalizer and sound panel into the iPhone that would let me adjust individual app volumes independently of the master control. It's a real shame it doesn't have this. The Mac doesn't either, obliging me to install an app to give me that control, and that doesn't work perfectly or consistently.) Anyway, the Rain Rain app supports iPhone and iPad both (it's not an iPhone app scaled up, nor an iPad app scaled down,) and supports up to three simultaneous sounds being played on the iPhone, and up to five on the iPad.
Raising the noise-floor does wonders for generally not hearing or being awakened by the periodic noise of screaming motorcycle or sports car engines, and fire, police, and ambulance sirens. I'd be going bonkers without this. I used to have a couple CDs, (yes, I'm old,) of soothing noises, but the sound of the CD player going silent at the end, then spinning back up while the speakers fell silent while it restarted the album would sometimes prevent me falling asleep or wake me up. (Yes, it sometimes takes longer than a CD plays to fall asleep.) The app on the other hand, plays the sound continuously WITHOUT needing to store a giant sound file, (which would also go silent when it repeats... I've tried that approach once,) so... just my two cents on this.
That was the exact same point I stopped using Evernote. Time to find an alternative cloud storage.
Ditto.
"The more you tighten your grip, Dropbox, the more customers will slip through your fingers."
~ Former Dropbox user ORGANAL6689
Only for extremely small values of "All".
Scientists Have Discovered a Shape That Blocks All Sound
No they haven't. At least, not according to the linked video in the article. It quieted it down quite a bit, but I could still hear it EASILY with the ring in place. It wasn't inaudible, not even CLOSE. Since they didn't put a ring of the same dimensions and material but in the shape of a simple, smooth, right, regular cylinder with a right, regular, cylindrical hole through it, centered and along the same axis as the material cylinder, (just like the "magic" ring but without the magic shape on the end,) while the speaker was generating the same sound at the same volume, to COMPARE it with. At least, that is, not in THAT video.
So this really is a non-story. Even if it quiets it quite a bit, it also occupies a LOT of the space, which RESTRICTS airflow, and likely adds a good bit of weight. (Imagine how big, thick, and therefore HEAVY it would have to be to fit the inner diameter of a big turbofan engine on a jet aircraft!) Then the output would need one too, and I understand the exhaust is pretty warm on one of those things, or at least can be. That may cause additional engineering challenges and cost, either of which could easily end up being insurmountable.
By the way, reflecting sound energy doesn't DESTROY it. It's ENERGY. Even if it DID work and DIDN'T add too much weight, and DIDN'T occlude the flow of air into and out of the engine to an extent that makes the plane unable even to take off under its own power, AND heat from the engine's exhaust wasn't a problem, etc., then the SOUND ENERGY being reflected INTO the engine will cause it to heat up even more. What are you going to do with all that extra heat? It's a LOT of noise, (and therefore, likely, a LOT of HEAT). Oh, and you're going to need a pair of these rings for EACH engine. How much weight will the required additional cooling cost? So you obviously will need much bigger, much more powerful (and noisier) engines. That will necessitate even bigger, thicker, sturdier rings, which will cause additional heat buildup... ETC.
If you're wondering how MUCH heat, well, it's actually pretty easy to work it out. Have you ever stood anywhere near a big turbofan jet engine, operating at, or at least near full power? Now imagine having to reproduce that sound, that same volume of noise, the same intensity... and while producing the same note, with a SPEAKER system. How big of an amplifier, in terms of Watts, would you need to do that? THAT'S how much sound power, (assuming you are somehow reflecting ALL of it,) we're talking about here. That much power is going to get trapped at BOTH ends of this hypothetical muffled engine. Where TF is it going to GO?
I see this tech as largely an interesting oddity, and will most likely come to nothing of any particular significance whatsoever in the world. Now maybe it MIGHT have some terrestrial applications, but don't look for this to be on aircraft anytime soon... that's my prediction.
Some nerds you are. All these posts should be asking the most important question...
Which angle measure system are these using, and why not have two sets, where sine is dsin(argument) or rsin(argument) and the others too, to remove any ambiguity?
Just a thought. It would suck if they implemented this in degree measure for people who prefer radians or vice versa.
Sure... but that's only because Earth's temperature is going to increase exponentially, and soon it'll be too hot to print money anymore. Thank god I'm old and won't be around much fucking longer anyway. I don't envy them. Good luck, kids... that's all I'm saying.
Yes, I get that telling this to a patient is hard. But if you cannot do it in person, then do not be a doctor or do pathology were patients are already dead.
The doctor could have just not told him. The test results don't say, "patient will die in 2-3 days". They say things like, platelet count is 17, white blood cells are 26, serum albumin is 78.3, arterial blood gas panel pending... et cetera. The doctor could just say, if it comes up after the patient drops dead, "it was a judgement call. I didn't tell him he'd be dead in two or three days because I didn't want to cause him to freak out over nothing when he could have lived for months or even years still... I wanted to run another test," (or get a consult with another doc, or 50 other things,) "to confirm before just dropping THAT kind of news on the guy," and covered his AND the hospital's asses, and we'd never even have heard about this. No story, no scandal, no lawsuit... nada.
ALSO... this is SLASHDOT! Why isn't everyone here all, "YAY!!! ROBOTS!!! SO FSCKING KEWL!!! WOOO!!!"
I, for one, WELCOME our new telling-patients-they're-going-to-die-robot overlords!
Old DIP (dual-inline-package) chips can be used to brush your or your pet's hair!
Also, floppy drives and peripherals can make music! (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3m9OgVkAbE8)
I am to impose a 112 dollar spending limit on anything Volvo sells.
To me it's simpler than that; a planet is an object of considerable size in direct solar orbit, meaning that most stuff in the solar system could be considered planets, and I'm fine with that. The convention I was speaking of, when I say there are (or were) nine planets is really just something that means there are 9 THAT WE KNOW OF. Odds are there are others that are so distant, dark, etc., that we simply haven't found them yet. It is completely arbitrary, of course; my irritation comes from the arbitrary exclusion of Pluto for no really, particularly good reason. The only things I'd exclude are bits of space rock of negligible size. Even an object like Earth's moon I would consider a planet if it weren't ORBITING a planet, namely ours. (And yes, I already knew the origin of the word planet, the meaning, (wanderer) and also that the moon doesn't really orbit the Earth, but rather it (and the Earth,) both orbit their mutual center of gravitation, which I believe, due to differences in mass, is located fairly close to Earth's geographical center of mass, just as Earth (and the other planets) don't really orbit the sun, they orbit the mutual center of gravitation, as does the sun, (which is one of a couple ways we started to discover exoplanets in the first place, through observing the star's wobble,) but again, due to the sun having somewhere around 95 or 97 or 99 percent of the solar system's total mass, that center, like Earth's, is probably pretty close to ITS geographical (or would that be solographical?) center. In the case of the sun, it's probably generally within a few centimeters of the center, and obviously will move about as the planets move. (The percentage could be much lower than we think, because there could be dozens or hundreds or thousands of large, perhaps up to Jupiter-sized planets (perhaps larger!) orbiting the sun that we don't know about, floating out there in the space between the sun and the next nearest stars, still bound to the sun by gravity. Seems a tad unlikely, but since I think the surface area on a photo decreases progressively ever more rapidly the farther away you get, they get rapidly difficult to see or detect. It's why all these centuries after the invention of the telescope we still keep finding new objects, WAY the hell out in the solar system. You need increasingly large, and more powerful telescopes (more sensitive light gathering cameras, more precise lenses, etc.,) and then you have to start hefting them up into space because beyond a certain point, the atmosphere itself becomes an obstacle, even using a laser to try to mitigate the effect. But enough of that.
We'll just have to agree to disagree. You'll go on calling Pluto a dwarf planet, whatever the hell that means, and Earth a planet as if there's a meaningful technical difference, and I'll keep calling Pluto a planet, and you'll call me a luddite and I'll say you lack imagination.
I'm not an astronomer, and I'm not going to Pluto, so it really actually doesn't matter WTF it is. In truth, it has very little impact on my life. A smidgin of my tax dollars go to pay for a spacecraft to go look at it up close, otherwise, as far as I'm concerned, and just about might as well not exist. Just like the 50 other planets orbiting between what we currently think of as the edge of the solar system, and the point where a planet would end up getting snatched away by another star.