as much as I don't like seeing slashvertisements in general, this one is actually fairly on topic. I do hope they do well. It's in our best interest that efforts like this succeed in a big way, and send a strong message to the movie and media cartels.
That, and getting a front page draw on a Sunday on slashdot ought to guarantee they shatter their fundraising goal over the course of the afternoon. Their servers are doing remarkably well considering what's hitting them. Would have been quite the epic fail had they been offering direct downloads instead of torrents.
But on the downside, I bet their monthly traffic allotment just busted through the ceiling and into the gruesome "pay per additional bandwidth this month" point.
Looking out for the customer's best interest in terms of the services that the business offers is in the best interest of the business.
In the long term, definitely. But n the short term, rarely.
Unfortunately, as far as the cell phone industry is concerned, we're still in the "short term". Short term goals are not customer loyalty, they are do anything you can to grow the business as rapidly as possible and achieve market dominance. Customer service can be "money wasted" later when you are in a position of power and have money to burn.
It's probably very shortsighted of them to behave this way, but they're still going to do it. The ones making the decisions to rob the customers blind are securing their retirement packages. They'll be off in the Bahamas by the time customer service backlash comes around. That's part of why we see big businesses spring up around new markets, only to see them fall by the wayside when the market matures.
I'm not debating against you on the idea that the long term winning strategy is good CS, I'm just saying that's not the game they're playing right now. And for the goals they are presently trying to achieve, they're making the correct decisions.
All snarking aside - this is a case of CSRs forgetting who they work for. They work for Verizon - NOT the customer. They have to keep "what is best for Verizon" in mind when dealing with customers.
100% agree. Anyone working in any "customer service" department of a business is not there to look out for the customer's best interest, they're there to look out for the business's best interest. In a mature business / market, customer service is important, and to some degree the CSRs have to start actually helping the customers "beat the system" to at least a small degree in the interest of good customer relations.
However, I believe the point of this article is that Verizon considers screwing the customer in a major way to be in their "best interest". Public backlash and bad press is the fix for that.
But going by Verizon's track record, I rather doubt they care. Right now, they have more to lose by making their business practices more ethical than they do in confirming the public's suspicions of just how badly they are willing to screw you. Summary: we already knew verizon was evil, nothing new to see here.
I'm just rather amazed that considering the options people have, that people voting with their dollar hasn't had a bigger impact on the cell carriers. I guess there's just too much profit to be had right now that the market hasn't settled down yet and good customer service just hasn't had enough time to become an important factor. Until it does, they'll keep shafting the public, we'll keep hearing about it, and we'll keep taking it.
There's been malware out for mac for well over a year. The big one I run into is a self-decoding shell script that installs a root cronjob to redirect your dns servers. The machines get brought into me because their web browsing has gotten slower, due to the malware dns server the machine is now using being a lot slower than their ISP's.
I've actually ran into ONE example of a mac that was back-door'd, but thought it was an isolated targeted attack. (the victim was "high profile") But maybe it was just an early version of what's discussed in this thread.
BUT, tossing my hat into the ring as to whether or not Apple should be "hiding" the fix... check out the latest security update from Apple. HUGE list of security patches. (over 40?) All with accreditation to the people that brought the issues to Apple. It's not like they don't have issues, and it's not like they systematically hide them. They just tend to fix them very quickly, and have very few (relatively speaking) to fix in the first place. Apple is well-known to include security updates and fixes in their OS updates, they don't all land in security updates. That's all this one was. It's very likely there were a dozen other security-related fixes made in the 10.6.4 update. This one they just happened to notice. Apple just doesn't usually put a security-fix accreditation readme in with their OS updates. Is that the real issue here I wonder?
Now, you can argue that people have a right to be exploited, but don't pretend there isn't a human cost to this. You're basically arguing that we shouldn't do anything to prevent grifters from grifting.
Put yourself in their shoes. If your doctor told you that you had 6 months to live, and there was nothing in the world anyone could do to save you, and then you found someone claiming a chance at successful treatment, and your research found them to be at least somewhat plausible, and as you were about to give it a try you had some superhero in a cape leap in front of you and stop you and shout "No! I won't allow it! He may be a FRAUD! I'll save you!" Now how would you like that?
I'll take even high-odds-at-fraud over certain-death anyday. Now get out of my way.
Someone with an otherwise certainly terminal illness took a chance on experimental treatment, that ended up killing them.
And WHAT is wrong with this?
It's bad enough when people want to be my mom when I prefer to volunteer on unnecessary risks, but in cases like this leave them alone. sheesh. Like you'd prefer to force them to sit at home and die. What's it to you, and what gives you the right?
Comedy Central's censoring of South Park (twice!) because they were afraid of offending Muslims.
Anyone airing South Park is clearly not afraid of simply offending someone. That show's basic premise is offending people.
They're afraid of what that particular group of people would do in retaliation. Poke fun at Jesus and you're going to get at worst what, a circle of picketers in your parking lot. Offend a group of radical muslims and it's entirely possible they'll drive a truckbomb into your HQ next week.
Totally different risk management is necessary when dealing with groups that have more nuts than a fruitcake.
I met Iranian Moslems in college who were thoroughly westernized
It's not so much a matter of the religion, as it is of the culture. But most religions have their majority in a specific culture, which creates stereotypes within the religion. That's why we tend to expect buddhists to be chanting in incense and expect muslims to drive truckbombs.
But then when you're manning a roadblock and that muslim's not stopping for your warning shot, adopting a stereotype can be a survival trait. Stereotypes are not universally bad, as many of the purists would have you believe.
noise canceling headphones work because their cancelers are in a fixed position relative to your ears. So you'd need to be wearing headphones of some sort. But in this application, not to block the noise, but to provide a stable fixed location to receive and attempt to cancel the sound as it approached your eardrums.
You can't just drop a "noise canceling box" next to your chair, or give someone else a somehow matched horn. Even once you got it set right, turning your head would ruin the effect.
but, at least we could hear some sounds from the game. like when player hits the ball, judge whistle
I'd venture a guess that's why the refs use flags (or hand signals) in stadium sports like soccer, american football, and baseball.
They realize nobody's going to be able to hear them.
Tennis and golf are two sports that take the opposite approach. For golf it's just the incredible concentration aspect, but for tennis it's actually quite important to hear how hard your opponent hit the ball. (which is abused frequently nowadays by players making strategic loud grunts/screams/moans almost every time they hit the ball nowadays... which I think is cheap)
Those two, if you make much noise in the crowd you WILL be removed.
batch that are 180 degrees out of phase with the ones currently being used
considering the number of them going off at once (hundred thousand or so?) and the fact that they're all fairly close to the same frequency already, statistically there's already another one going off that's 180 deg of phase of any one you look at.
None of that matters though. For one, the location of the observer is important for phase cancellation. These flakes are everywhere in the crowd. Echoes also get around the effect.
anyway, there are so many reasons that won't work I'm somewhat at a loss for where to start, but that's best effort off the cuff in simple terms.
If you want to try a really freaky experiment though with cancellation, find two people that can whistle well, that have a fine degree of control over their whistle. Have one strike a very stable tone. Have the other try to match it. When they get to within less than a cycle of each other, it produces a very interesting moving zero-beat. At that point it becomes a challenge to hold, because BOTH whistlers will start periodically losing the ability to hear their own whistle, and that loss of self-feedback tends to make them drift. ("I'm blowing, but I don't HEAR anything") A third person observing will not hear two whistlers, but instead hears the source of the whistle appear to float back and forth between the two whistlers, sometimes very slowly, even to the point of outright stopping between the two, even if at a distance of several feet.
after listening to the "before" and "after" application of the notch filter, I quickly noticed that when you removed the vuvu's, you ended up with a slightly quieter, equally annoying general sound of the crowd.
The announcer really wasn't any easier to understand when the vuvus were removed. The audio's average level was just a little lower. (which did make it slightly easier on the ears)
Not much of an improvement. I can't imagine them banning vuvus would have much of an impact on the game -- for example, the crowd noise itself would be almost equally effective at preventing the players from communicating. So unless you're going to surround the pitch with a Cone of Silence, you're just going to have to deal with noise, whether you're on the pitch or behind the big screen.
And Apple Macs don't keep their NICs active when the computer is turned off, making WOL mostly useless
I believe what you are thinking of is Lights Out Management, developed by Intel. It lets you do a lot more than just wake the machine up, and works when the machine is OFF, not just ASLEEP. With LOM you can actually turn on (boot up) a computer remotely from complete shutdown.
Anyway, as many have probably already pointed out, WOMP has been available on all macs for a very long time. But LOM is only available on the mac pros and xserves iirc.
Macs have the option to Wake on Demand [apple.com] which requires the use of an Airport base station but seems to follow the same basic concept.
Macs actually implement the Wake On LAN standard feature. (sometimes referred to as WOMP, or Wake On Magic Packet) This relies on the computer's ethernet hardware remaining awake while the computer sleeps, and any computer on the LAN can send a special UDP packet containing its ethernet MAC (Machine Address Code, unrelated to MACintosh) to trigger the computer to wake up. The only Apple-specific part of this feature is that Apple extended it to wireless use, keeping wifi hardware also active and listening for the magic packet so computers could be woke up wirelessly. Come to think of it thought, WOMP over wireless does require an Airport base station and Mac ethernet adapters - Apple extended the WOMP specs (in an open way) but I think are the only ones presently implementing it?
Looks like Microsoft yet again attempts to take credit for "inventing" something that we've all been using for years. This time it wasn't even ripped off from Apple, it's been in use on all manner of PCs for some time now. This is just MS's first specific support in their OS?
I see a comment immediately below, "it'd be silly to set up a 2nd machine running 24/7 so that I could turn mine off a few hours a day"..... Actually, that's exactly how you wake up machines on different networks such as waking up a work machine from home. Unless your server is asleep too I don't see this being an issue? Remote into it, use it to WOMP your workstation, and then connect to it? Even if you don't have a server, surely keeping one machine awake to provide access to many other machines (easily tens to hundreds) is hardly a hardship.
really? no, they're looking to make him go away, by any means necessary and possible.
When an entire government wants your "cooperation" because you're doing something they really don't like, it can't be called "seeking your cooperation". They are, quite simply said, out to get you, and your "cooperation" will be under extreme duress. Hope he has a good hiding place. And simply being out out of country isn't going to cut it, they're not going to mind in the slightest tossing a hooded unconscious body into a black SUV at 2am in Switzerland.
And no surprise that the soldier got caught, after bragging about it. That has to be one of the stupidest moves a whistleblower can make, bragging to anybody. Real whisteblowers don't need to brag or get credit, they're satisfied that the whistle got blown and will remain where they are, quietly gathering more dirt. In that respect, it's a shame this guy ran his mouth. He could have shed sunlight on more dark corners if he'd have held his cover.
The school is hoping to be able to save money by not having to provide computer labs.
A school district near where I live is doing exactly that, but the school is providing the macbooks, one to every student. And the teachers are also ditching the imacs from their desktops and getting macbook pros. Doing this allows the school to reclaim 7 entire labs into new classrooms to make smaller class sizes without building a new wing, so it's actually a cost-saving measure.
They crunched the numbers, and talked with other nearby school districts that had done the same thing, to see if theft/loss/damage of the laptops was an issue, and surprisingly, it was not. (four damaged laptops in the entire year in one district they asked)
But this is a fairly wealthy school district, they had the money to pull it off, and I think it's great.
I suppose the next ideal evolution will be getting the textbooks onto the computers. That would be an entirely new level of awesome.
have to contend with drag, so with each photon that hits the sail helps the spacecraft gather speed."
Only a very novice astrophysicist would ignore the fact that such a large sail is going to plow through dust too. And how many photons do you think it will take to counter the effects of even a small grain of dust, when the dust is stationary and you're clipping along at hundreds of km/sec? (or vice-versa for that matter - you could quite conceivably get hit by a spec of dust traveling at some fraction of c)
Space is a rough environment. Long-haul long-term propulsion that these sails target is going to end up like a butterfly went through a tornado too.
Slim odds you say? At least one probe we've gone planet-hopping with has been hit by a small asteroid, enough to knock its orientation off for a bit before it (thankfully) managed to correct itself. It's a big place, but when you're traveling for a number of years, at an ever growing rate of speed, the odds start catching up with you.
Slashdot Mirror
as much as I don't like seeing slashvertisements in general, this one is actually fairly on topic. I do hope they do well. It's in our best interest that efforts like this succeed in a big way, and send a strong message to the movie and media cartels.
That, and getting a front page draw on a Sunday on slashdot ought to guarantee they shatter their fundraising goal over the course of the afternoon. Their servers are doing remarkably well considering what's hitting them. Would have been quite the epic fail had they been offering direct downloads instead of torrents.
But on the downside, I bet their monthly traffic allotment just busted through the ceiling and into the gruesome "pay per additional bandwidth this month" point.
Looking out for the customer's best interest in terms of the services that the business offers is in the best interest of the business.
In the long term, definitely. But n the short term, rarely.
Unfortunately, as far as the cell phone industry is concerned, we're still in the "short term". Short term goals are not customer loyalty, they are do anything you can to grow the business as rapidly as possible and achieve market dominance. Customer service can be "money wasted" later when you are in a position of power and have money to burn.
It's probably very shortsighted of them to behave this way, but they're still going to do it. The ones making the decisions to rob the customers blind are securing their retirement packages. They'll be off in the Bahamas by the time customer service backlash comes around. That's part of why we see big businesses spring up around new markets, only to see them fall by the wayside when the market matures.
I'm not debating against you on the idea that the long term winning strategy is good CS, I'm just saying that's not the game they're playing right now. And for the goals they are presently trying to achieve, they're making the correct decisions.
All snarking aside - this is a case of CSRs forgetting who they work for. They work for Verizon - NOT the customer. They have to keep "what is best for Verizon" in mind when dealing with customers.
100% agree. Anyone working in any "customer service" department of a business is not there to look out for the customer's best interest, they're there to look out for the business's best interest. In a mature business / market, customer service is important, and to some degree the CSRs have to start actually helping the customers "beat the system" to at least a small degree in the interest of good customer relations.
However, I believe the point of this article is that Verizon considers screwing the customer in a major way to be in their "best interest". Public backlash and bad press is the fix for that.
But going by Verizon's track record, I rather doubt they care. Right now, they have more to lose by making their business practices more ethical than they do in confirming the public's suspicions of just how badly they are willing to screw you. Summary: we already knew verizon was evil, nothing new to see here.
I'm just rather amazed that considering the options people have, that people voting with their dollar hasn't had a bigger impact on the cell carriers. I guess there's just too much profit to be had right now that the market hasn't settled down yet and good customer service just hasn't had enough time to become an important factor. Until it does, they'll keep shafting the public, we'll keep hearing about it, and we'll keep taking it.
btw, what good is "legal recourse" when you're DEAD?
How would you like that?
"Owell, was worth a shot. At least I'm glad I won't be sitting in a hospice suffering for the last six months of my life."
yeah if you don't mind google knowing every hostname you ever resolve...
If I had a tinfoil hat I think given the choice of Qwest knowing my browsing habits vs Google knowing them, I'd pick Google every single time.
And a lot out there can do worse. "comcast" comes immediately to mind, with their unresolvable dns lookup hijacking.
Use Google Public DNS. Easy to remember too. 8.8.8.8 and 8.8.4.4
There's been malware out for mac for well over a year. The big one I run into is a self-decoding shell script that installs a root cronjob to redirect your dns servers. The machines get brought into me because their web browsing has gotten slower, due to the malware dns server the machine is now using being a lot slower than their ISP's.
I've actually ran into ONE example of a mac that was back-door'd, but thought it was an isolated targeted attack. (the victim was "high profile") But maybe it was just an early version of what's discussed in this thread.
BUT, tossing my hat into the ring as to whether or not Apple should be "hiding" the fix... check out the latest security update from Apple. HUGE list of security patches. (over 40?) All with accreditation to the people that brought the issues to Apple. It's not like they don't have issues, and it's not like they systematically hide them. They just tend to fix them very quickly, and have very few (relatively speaking) to fix in the first place. Apple is well-known to include security updates and fixes in their OS updates, they don't all land in security updates. That's all this one was. It's very likely there were a dozen other security-related fixes made in the 10.6.4 update. This one they just happened to notice. Apple just doesn't usually put a security-fix accreditation readme in with their OS updates. Is that the real issue here I wonder?
Now, you can argue that people have a right to be exploited, but don't pretend there isn't a human cost to this. You're basically arguing that we shouldn't do anything to prevent grifters from grifting.
Put yourself in their shoes. If your doctor told you that you had 6 months to live, and there was nothing in the world anyone could do to save you, and then you found someone claiming a chance at successful treatment, and your research found them to be at least somewhat plausible, and as you were about to give it a try you had some superhero in a cape leap in front of you and stop you and shout "No! I won't allow it! He may be a FRAUD! I'll save you!" Now how would you like that?
I'll take even high-odds-at-fraud over certain-death anyday. Now get out of my way.
What it tells me is, that religion is man's way of trying to justify irrational behavior.
Someone with an otherwise certainly terminal illness took a chance on experimental treatment, that ended up killing them.
And WHAT is wrong with this?
It's bad enough when people want to be my mom when I prefer to volunteer on unnecessary risks, but in cases like this leave them alone. sheesh. Like you'd prefer to force them to sit at home and die. What's it to you, and what gives you the right?
Comedy Central's censoring of South Park (twice!) because they were afraid of offending Muslims.
Anyone airing South Park is clearly not afraid of simply offending someone. That show's basic premise is offending people.
They're afraid of what that particular group of people would do in retaliation. Poke fun at Jesus and you're going to get at worst what, a circle of picketers in your parking lot. Offend a group of radical muslims and it's entirely possible they'll drive a truckbomb into your HQ next week.
Totally different risk management is necessary when dealing with groups that have more nuts than a fruitcake.
I met Iranian Moslems in college who were thoroughly westernized
It's not so much a matter of the religion, as it is of the culture. But most religions have their majority in a specific culture, which creates stereotypes within the religion. That's why we tend to expect buddhists to be chanting in incense and expect muslims to drive truckbombs.
But then when you're manning a roadblock and that muslim's not stopping for your warning shot, adopting a stereotype can be a survival trait. Stereotypes are not universally bad, as many of the purists would have you believe.
Islam - a religion of peace. Are you serious?
Absolutely.
After all, their goal is world peace. All they need to do is kill everyone else and then the world will have everlasting peace!
("War is Peace", as the good book says)
Or...perhaps there is some trick thanks to which such setup could at least work a bit?
Since the whole goal of noise canceling is to time sound to work against the other sound, knowing everything's exact position is essential.
noise canceling headphones work because their cancelers are in a fixed position relative to your ears. So you'd need to be wearing headphones of some sort. But in this application, not to block the noise, but to provide a stable fixed location to receive and attempt to cancel the sound as it approached your eardrums.
You can't just drop a "noise canceling box" next to your chair, or give someone else a somehow matched horn. Even once you got it set right, turning your head would ruin the effect.
but, at least we could hear some sounds from the game. like when player hits the ball, judge whistle
I'd venture a guess that's why the refs use flags (or hand signals) in stadium sports like soccer, american football, and baseball.
They realize nobody's going to be able to hear them.
Tennis and golf are two sports that take the opposite approach. For golf it's just the incredible concentration aspect, but for tennis it's actually quite important to hear how hard your opponent hit the ball. (which is abused frequently nowadays by players making strategic loud grunts/screams/moans almost every time they hit the ball nowadays... which I think is cheap)
Those two, if you make much noise in the crowd you WILL be removed.
batch that are 180 degrees out of phase with the ones currently being used
considering the number of them going off at once (hundred thousand or so?) and the fact that they're all fairly close to the same frequency already, statistically there's already another one going off that's 180 deg of phase of any one you look at.
None of that matters though. For one, the location of the observer is important for phase cancellation. These flakes are everywhere in the crowd. Echoes also get around the effect.
anyway, there are so many reasons that won't work I'm somewhat at a loss for where to start, but that's best effort off the cuff in simple terms.
If you want to try a really freaky experiment though with cancellation, find two people that can whistle well, that have a fine degree of control over their whistle. Have one strike a very stable tone. Have the other try to match it. When they get to within less than a cycle of each other, it produces a very interesting moving zero-beat. At that point it becomes a challenge to hold, because BOTH whistlers will start periodically losing the ability to hear their own whistle, and that loss of self-feedback tends to make them drift. ("I'm blowing, but I don't HEAR anything") A third person observing will not hear two whistlers, but instead hears the source of the whistle appear to float back and forth between the two whistlers, sometimes very slowly, even to the point of outright stopping between the two, even if at a distance of several feet.
after listening to the "before" and "after" application of the notch filter, I quickly noticed that when you removed the vuvu's, you ended up with a slightly quieter, equally annoying general sound of the crowd.
The announcer really wasn't any easier to understand when the vuvus were removed. The audio's average level was just a little lower. (which did make it slightly easier on the ears)
Not much of an improvement. I can't imagine them banning vuvus would have much of an impact on the game -- for example, the crowd noise itself would be almost equally effective at preventing the players from communicating. So unless you're going to surround the pitch with a Cone of Silence, you're just going to have to deal with noise, whether you're on the pitch or behind the big screen.
And Apple Macs don't keep their NICs active when the computer is turned off, making WOL mostly useless
I believe what you are thinking of is Lights Out Management, developed by Intel. It lets you do a lot more than just wake the machine up, and works when the machine is OFF, not just ASLEEP. With LOM you can actually turn on (boot up) a computer remotely from complete shutdown.
Anyway, as many have probably already pointed out, WOMP has been available on all macs for a very long time. But LOM is only available on the mac pros and xserves iirc.
Macs have the option to Wake on Demand [apple.com] which requires the use of an Airport base station but seems to follow the same basic concept.
Macs actually implement the Wake On LAN standard feature. (sometimes referred to as WOMP, or Wake On Magic Packet) This relies on the computer's ethernet hardware remaining awake while the computer sleeps, and any computer on the LAN can send a special UDP packet containing its ethernet MAC (Machine Address Code, unrelated to MACintosh) to trigger the computer to wake up. The only Apple-specific part of this feature is that Apple extended it to wireless use, keeping wifi hardware also active and listening for the magic packet so computers could be woke up wirelessly. Come to think of it thought, WOMP over wireless does require an Airport base station and Mac ethernet adapters - Apple extended the WOMP specs (in an open way) but I think are the only ones presently implementing it?
Looks like Microsoft yet again attempts to take credit for "inventing" something that we've all been using for years. This time it wasn't even ripped off from Apple, it's been in use on all manner of PCs for some time now. This is just MS's first specific support in their OS?
I see a comment immediately below, "it'd be silly to set up a 2nd machine running 24/7 so that I could turn mine off a few hours a day"..... Actually, that's exactly how you wake up machines on different networks such as waking up a work machine from home. Unless your server is asleep too I don't see this being an issue? Remote into it, use it to WOMP your workstation, and then connect to it? Even if you don't have a server, surely keeping one machine awake to provide access to many other machines (easily tens to hundreds) is hardly a hardship.
really? no, they're looking to make him go away , by any means necessary and possible.
When an entire government wants your "cooperation" because you're doing something they really don't like, it can't be called "seeking your cooperation". They are, quite simply said, out to get you, and your "cooperation" will be under extreme duress. Hope he has a good hiding place. And simply being out out of country isn't going to cut it, they're not going to mind in the slightest tossing a hooded unconscious body into a black SUV at 2am in Switzerland.
And no surprise that the soldier got caught, after bragging about it. That has to be one of the stupidest moves a whistleblower can make, bragging to anybody. Real whisteblowers don't need to brag or get credit, they're satisfied that the whistle got blown and will remain where they are, quietly gathering more dirt. In that respect, it's a shame this guy ran his mouth. He could have shed sunlight on more dark corners if he'd have held his cover.
The school is hoping to be able to save money by not having to provide computer labs.
A school district near where I live is doing exactly that, but the school is providing the macbooks, one to every student. And the teachers are also ditching the imacs from their desktops and getting macbook pros. Doing this allows the school to reclaim 7 entire labs into new classrooms to make smaller class sizes without building a new wing, so it's actually a cost-saving measure.
They crunched the numbers, and talked with other nearby school districts that had done the same thing, to see if theft/loss/damage of the laptops was an issue, and surprisingly, it was not. (four damaged laptops in the entire year in one district they asked)
But this is a fairly wealthy school district, they had the money to pull it off, and I think it's great.
I suppose the next ideal evolution will be getting the textbooks onto the computers. That would be an entirely new level of awesome.
have to contend with drag, so with each photon that hits the sail helps the spacecraft gather speed."
Only a very novice astrophysicist would ignore the fact that such a large sail is going to plow through dust too. And how many photons do you think it will take to counter the effects of even a small grain of dust, when the dust is stationary and you're clipping along at hundreds of km/sec? (or vice-versa for that matter - you could quite conceivably get hit by a spec of dust traveling at some fraction of c)
Space is a rough environment. Long-haul long-term propulsion that these sails target is going to end up like a butterfly went through a tornado too.
Slim odds you say? At least one probe we've gone planet-hopping with has been hit by a small asteroid, enough to knock its orientation off for a bit before it (thankfully) managed to correct itself. It's a big place, but when you're traveling for a number of years, at an ever growing rate of speed, the odds start catching up with you.
So, if you hold an iPhone at the typical 12 inches
My vision's not GOOD, but it's not that bad that I use my ipod at a foot from my face.
Actually, 18" is about where I use mine, maybe a tad less.