I have to add my experience with TimeWarner idiocy here.
About a year ago I called their technical support line on behalf of my aunt in NYC, who had just gotten their HD upgrade or something I don't recall, and the picture was missing the red portion of the signal. (note that your reading that last sentence, there wasn't much room for misunderstanding, was there? You can understand the situation I'm describing, right?)
The conversation began badly, and went downhill from there:
Me: "Hi, we seem to be having a problem with our HD cable signal -- the picture is missing the red channel, so everything looks a little bit blue. I've tested this by swapping out the cables from the RGB (whatever it was), reversing them, so I think it's definitely a problem with your cable box, not our cables or our TV. Can you help me with that?"
Her: "sorry sir, looking in your channel lineup, I don't see any Red Channel."
Me: @#$!%#@
Me: regathering politeness, and for the next 20 minutes: "Sorry, I must not have explained that well -- you know how the tv signal has red/green/blue parts? Well, it seems to be missing the red part, so that the color is off."
Her: "no sir, I don't understand, and please, don't fiddle with the cables, please follow my instruction to turn the unit off and reset it."
after 20 minutes:
Me: "Maam, you don't seem to have the technical knowledge to even understand the problem I'm having -- could you please transfer me to someone who does."
10 more minutes of me getting angry that she won't transfer me. Followed by my filing a complaint with a request to be called back. I get called back, the guy on the line understands the problem immediately, and sends someone out the next day.
I cannot stand incompetence that doesn't recognize itself. And that a customer service assistance unit would staff its helpline with someone of such stupidity.
The other thing I learned -- don't get frustrated with stupidity, just leave. Politely hang up (there's no sense in angering yourself, or offending the moron) and call back until you get someone who knows what they're talking about. And I'm not just talking about with cable companies, I've discovered that this applies about life in general....
can someone explain what the pot is doing? Is it acting as a focusing/collimating device? Because if that were the case, I would expect the signal to be focused in the up direction, which I doubt is where the average wireless signal is coming from. Or is it somehow providing a larger surface area for signal collection in all directions, and focusing it internally to the modem? But I don't understand how that would work. Would love to hear a cogent explanation.
on a side topic, does anyone remember the concept that a Taiwanese engineer showed a few months ago on video, where a neat trick solves the problem of station stops? What was that called?
The train decelerates a little bit coming into a station, and on a parallel track or overhead, a small module containing the new passengers gets up to speed with the train and attaches. Then the passengers can transfer in and out without the train having to slow down much. (And of course, the train dumps the similar module as it enters the station, for disembarking pax).
I lived in the UK for 2 years, and let me tell you, despite a lot of things that are annoying over there, being able to transfer money easily is one thing they do well.
All you have to do is give someone your bank account and routing numbers, and they can send you money, for free. Your landlord, friend, etc. And yes, it's free. Why do we have to let Paypal make millions off of this lack of capability in the US?
For all the people in the US who worry about account security, isn't it funny, they don't seem to have problems with this system where you give your account number to someone else. Did you ever realize anyway, that every time you write someone a check, you're giving out your account numbers already? And the fact that we rely on paper checks that take days to be processed opens up way more fraud opportunities than electronic means.
The best thing was that it must have been mandated some time ago that every UK bank offer this, so every bank has to have free transfers in this way. I think it should have been required for the US banks in their bailouts -- as long as we're helping them out, they have to get rid of a system that does nothing but cost consumers fees. Think about it, if you could choose anew, would you have people transfer funds by writing pieces of paper (which by the way, cost like $0.20 cents each if you've looked at the cost of ordering checks) that you have to go the bank to deposit, take several days to clear, and might bounce? Why are we tolerating this middleman system? Why do we tolerate $35-a-pop overdraft fees as a surprise, when clearly they have the means to tell you right away if your balance is insufficient? Boo hoo, the banks will lose some profit from the decline in overdraft fees. Well, they shouldn't even be making huge profits off of those shady fees in the first place.
I read that there's one bank which lets you take a iPhone photo of checks someone gives you, and send in that image as the deposit. Or other banks that let you scan checks in at home and send them in via their website. At that point, why are we even having the checks? cmon people, let's not put up with this bullshit any more. Give us free transfer capability, honest information on our accounts, and no more idiots writing checks in supermarket lines. What, did you drive up in your horse and buggy?
sorry, this topic makes me grouchy about how behind the US is, and apologists who think it's fine and want to cut productivity-sucking banks any slack over it.
the editor completely misunderstands the point (or misuses his/her GPS). The potential clutter of the user interface/map/traffic aside, GPS is the most dramatic simplification in driving to emerge in years -- provided you just listen to the voice prompts.
When used correctly, this one amazing device outsources your mental burden of navigation, and presents it to you with a clear voice that lets you devote your effort to (hopefully) driving better, although obviously this has turned many people's attention elsewhere.
If you've ever found yourself in an unfamiliar city in fast moving, dense traffic, trying to find an address, you will be grateful that you can offload your navigational workload to the GPS, which tells you clearly and plainly when to get ready to turn, in how far a distance, potentially even making it safer as you no longer swerve across 3 lanes of traffic at the last minute while looking at a paper map.
Of course, people who use it to navigate down isolated country roads they're familiar with will never see the point, but for someone who's task-overloaded in a busy situation, listening to the GPS voice is an amazing improvement in life.
By the way, just a tip for everyone -- I've found that ironically the bus is actually where a GPS makes the biggest improvement in knowing how to get around.
If you're in an unfamiliar city, buses (in contrast to trains) often have a frustratingly indescribable and unpredictable route/stop pattern, and when the driver/announcement system is of no help, a GPS system in your hand will help you figure out exactly how close you are to your destination, and when to get off the bus.
I no longer dread dealing with buses because of this capability, although the lurching stop/start of buses in general still drives me crazy. Try it sometime -- the small Nuvi-style units are just about as inconspicuous as an ipod, and are great for helping you get around.
my question is, given that you cannot roll out additional wireless capacity in such a short time, for a reasonable amount of investment, and users getting upset over the unreliability (many people say that as soon as it expires they'll leave AT&T), why do they not put in a traffic prioritization scheme? I.e. prioritize:
1. voice (lots of dissatisfaction if lag, dropped calls)
2. text messages (dissatisfaction if text does not even get sent)
3. then email (low bandwidth use)
4. html (sometimes need to find important information)
5. finally streaming media (this is a luxury)
They say "unlimited" but surely we all acknowledge there is some limit -- whether it's going to be set by AT&T in terms of raw usage, prioritized, or finally, by the user's frustration and willingness to wait...
I would just think it's natural to do this given people's rising complaints.
One thing that hasn't been emphasized so far as I've read, is not so much even the loss of dark sky (which is a shame for people who would have their eyes opened), but rather the waste of energy and light going up into the sky.
As in, if lights were properly aimed/covered/baffled, you could probably spend 10-20% less energy on lighting. Is that not a waste to be doing the old way then?
As they have done in some municipalities, have legislation that only well-baffled outdoor lamps be sold or used. Who would this hurt, lamp manufacturers? Even? Would it be such an encroachment on the right to choose a wasteful lamp housing?
You know the lamp posts with bulbs+lenses that shine light everywhere -- the kind with 360deg housings. Why? The birds don't care about the light -- it's people underneath. Unless you run an airport, guiding planes into land, cover that shit up!
As in many things today, we don't have to be virtuous or self-righteous about lofty issues before it's ripe to do so -- just ask people to begin by stopping the waste of precious resources. I think everyone (aside from asshole investment bankers) can understand that.
when I saw the headline, I was thinking not so much the fragmentation issues, but the repeated re-writing of logs and other small frequently accessed files that SSDs are susceptible to (maximum # of rated read-write cycles). Have there been any developments in that area?
according to an article (referenced below, very entertaining article which I suggest you read when you have the time), laying undersea cable a bit safer than overland, because "anyone with a bulldozer" can be a fool and do damage to your line.
Newspapers face the difficult situation of being the best medium for sustained, in-depth examination of some issues, while suffering from the curse of people being unwilling to pay for content that can be cut-and-pasted with one click these days.
The act of writing a story naturally takes some intellectual talent and prolonged effort, and I would say that newspaper journalists (and even blog writers who actually do a fair bit of their own writing) are more dedicated to unearthing real stories, than most any TV "journalist" is. The TV medium, with its emphasis on good sound and video clips (tending to emphasize short-term catastrophe), with just anyone being able to say something without thought, is so transitory and gossip-like, and without any permanent record, that anyone can break a story on TV and not have to do any real work to follow it up. Look at how many bullshit headlines pass for news on the 24 hour news channels. They're so desperate to fill the day that just about anything is put on the air.
Compare this to one of the reputable newspapers, where you have one chance per day to publish something, so that the contributors make active decisions about what to write on for the next day, and refine their stories, get things right before putting it on paper. How many times have you heard of a TV station making an apology because it was incorrect on some detail (which isn't uncommon), or made a mistake? Newspapers on the other hand, have this kind of responsibility. I'm not saying newspapers are without fault, but compared to TV, they're the people who keep us honest. Their news doesn't evaporate into thin air after it's finished.
I *pay* for a subscription to the WSJ, because I know that it takes money to produce good news reporting, I don't want just regurgitated/duplicated AP feeds. I encourage you to read it for once (the WSJ news is not the same as the WSJ opinion page), and see how refreshing good content is. I'm glad that they (hopefully at least for a little while longer, depending on R. Murdoch) are restricting their services to paid subscribers so a unique product can be maintained, and good journalists encouraged to do this kind of work.
I think people are a little bit deceived by the ads for noise canceling headphones, which show images like a guy leaning back in his seat with the mom+screaming baby walled off behind soundproof glass thanks to the headphones.
That's completely the opposite of what happens. The active noise reduction actually cancels the incoherent noise of the engines, wind, etc. Voices come through just fine, and you're going to be hearing that baby just as clear as before.
Perhaps someone with expertise in antitrust could enlighten me as to a silly question:
About five years ago, satellite radio was unheard of, or nearly so. For a time, there was only one company offering service. No one at that time would complain of this being anti-competitive or a monopoly, that there was only one choice in the market.
But now, after two companies decide to merge, suddenly threatens to become anticompetitive and needs government approval. Why is the first case ok, but the second case not?
Maybe this is a little bit off topic, but I for one am quite grateful to live in a society where air safety is so well looked after and monitored. We really don't skimp (in general) on air safety, and take quite a rational view about how checking and maintaining planes, and training pilots actually contributes to preventing accidents.
This is far from the common attitude in some other places around the world. In some other countries, operating an "airline" is still a very seat-of-the-pants operation -- passengers are unrecorded, cargo is misloaded, pilots are bribed to take things they don't know about, etc. And if a plane were to crash, people would throw up their hands and say, "what can be done, these things just happen", or "it's God's will that accidents occur", or "why talk about it?". But here, we've been accustomed to understanding that there were tangible causes behind every accident, and if we could only see the moments before the crash (since often no one survives to tell us what happened), we might be able to prevent future accidents. This is an admirable thing that I am very grateful for.
The state of the technology and awareness of safety are so advanced that accidents have decreased so much in the US, that the NTSB/airlines, having fewer crashes to investigate, now analyze the data from normal flights, and look for patterns that suggest unsafe conditions -- and they change those unsafe conditions. see this article for example
Finally, just regarding some of the other points made here, I am not an expert, but I think it would be impractical to have a nonstop streaming black box. These recorders not only capture audio, but sub-second sampled data for dozens, if not scores of readings from the aircraft systems -- non stop. Multiply that by the number of planes in the sky, and it quickly becomes overwhelming I think. Most airplane data systems are at the text messaging level of bandwidth.
as a side note, this problem is even more important for people who, unlike me, don't have any other email accounts whose mail is getting forwarded to Gmail to read. For users who use Gmail as their only/primary account, a backup is even more important. Just think of that Lycos user who caused all that trouble over permanently deleted email. Google doesn't tell you how long your account is valid for, does it? A hard copy of your mail in your hands is priceless.
Why? You only have to download all your messages once, then from there on you only download new ones as they come in. Thousands of people, including me, using a POP3 client for their gmail and have local copies of all their emails.
two problems with this:
1. Since I haven't used POP ever with the account, on that first download it is going to try to download about 1GB of messages. And in some tests so far, Gmail is not reliable about how far it gets done. It will stop at some arbitrary message and say it's finished, but it's not.
2. This doesn't cover messages sent *from* the Gmail account, that are not cc:ed/copied to the other accounts. Outgoing mail sent via Gmail will not be POP downloaded because they are not "received mail" to Gmail.
I could bcc: myself on everything. But this is not an available option by default, and sometimes you forget.
This may be a little off topic, but maybe many others here will benefit from discussing this same concern. I love Gmail, but there is a problem I see that's been slowly nagging me:
I use Gmail to read the messages off my work/academic Pine accounts, and it has rapidly become my main way to check email because it has a great feature set, and Gmail doesn't pull some of the stupid tricks that other free email services do. I also use it to send messages (i.e. the "from:" field pretending as if it is one of the other work/school accounts I have), and rapidly I'm accumulating email on my Gmail account that now doesn't exist elsewhere.
However, sometime in the far off future, Gmail may decide not to work one day, or there may be a new technology to replace it. We can't know for sure. So I would like to be able to have a backup of that mail just in case. As much as I trust Gmail and like Google, I need some way to keep my mail on my own, because if it were all lost, it would be awful.
Couldn't they offer a service, for some reasonable amount of $$, where they would burn my entire Gmailbox onto a DVD and send it to me? With the size of my mailbox, POP downloading is becoming impossible, and this would also be a great way to give users some peace of mind.
or has anyone else felt this worry, and come up with an interesting/workable solution??
this ground was covered a few years ago in (what I think was) a correct decision by a federal court where a disabled person brought suit against Southwest Airlines for its web site. The court said, under the law, the world of online does not count as a place of public accomodation. The ADA was written very clearly to cover physical locations. It gives a list of places that fall under this definition, like a barbershop, auditorium, bakery, etc.
Whether or not the online world should fall under the ADA may be a legitimate question, but that is not the same as what the current law is. If new rules are to be issued, let that be changed through the public deliberative process, so that all the details can come out and be thought about first.
Slashdot Mirror
I have to add my experience with TimeWarner idiocy here.
About a year ago I called their technical support line on behalf of my aunt in NYC, who had just gotten their HD upgrade or something I don't recall, and the picture was missing the red portion of the signal. (note that your reading that last sentence, there wasn't much room for misunderstanding, was there? You can understand the situation I'm describing, right?)
The conversation began badly, and went downhill from there:
Me: "Hi, we seem to be having a problem with our HD cable signal -- the picture is missing the red channel, so everything looks a little bit blue. I've tested this by swapping out the cables from the RGB (whatever it was), reversing them, so I think it's definitely a problem with your cable box, not our cables or our TV. Can you help me with that?"
Her: "sorry sir, looking in your channel lineup, I don't see any Red Channel."
Me: @#$!%#@
Me: regathering politeness, and for the next 20 minutes: "Sorry, I must not have explained that well -- you know how the tv signal has red/green/blue parts? Well, it seems to be missing the red part, so that the color is off."
Her: "no sir, I don't understand, and please, don't fiddle with the cables, please follow my instruction to turn the unit off and reset it."
after 20 minutes:
Me: "Maam, you don't seem to have the technical knowledge to even understand the problem I'm having -- could you please transfer me to someone who does."
10 more minutes of me getting angry that she won't transfer me. Followed by my filing a complaint with a request to be called back. I get called back, the guy on the line understands the problem immediately, and sends someone out the next day.
I cannot stand incompetence that doesn't recognize itself. And that a customer service assistance unit would staff its helpline with someone of such stupidity.
The other thing I learned -- don't get frustrated with stupidity, just leave. Politely hang up (there's no sense in angering yourself, or offending the moron) and call back until you get someone who knows what they're talking about. And I'm not just talking about with cable companies, I've discovered that this applies about life in general....
can someone explain what the pot is doing? Is it acting as a focusing/collimating device? Because if that were the case, I would expect the signal to be focused in the up direction, which I doubt is where the average wireless signal is coming from. Or is it somehow providing a larger surface area for signal collection in all directions, and focusing it internally to the modem? But I don't understand how that would work. Would love to hear a cogent explanation.
on a side topic, does anyone remember the concept that a Taiwanese engineer showed a few months ago on video, where a neat trick solves the problem of station stops? What was that called?
The train decelerates a little bit coming into a station, and on a parallel track or overhead, a small module containing the new passengers gets up to speed with the train and attaches. Then the passengers can transfer in and out without the train having to slow down much. (And of course, the train dumps the similar module as it enters the station, for disembarking pax).
Does this mean that the iPhone will not be coming to Verizon?
I lived in the UK for 2 years, and let me tell you, despite a lot of things that are annoying over there, being able to transfer money easily is one thing they do well.
All you have to do is give someone your bank account and routing numbers, and they can send you money, for free. Your landlord, friend, etc. And yes, it's free. Why do we have to let Paypal make millions off of this lack of capability in the US?
For all the people in the US who worry about account security, isn't it funny, they don't seem to have problems with this system where you give your account number to someone else. Did you ever realize anyway, that every time you write someone a check, you're giving out your account numbers already? And the fact that we rely on paper checks that take days to be processed opens up way more fraud opportunities than electronic means.
The best thing was that it must have been mandated some time ago that every UK bank offer this, so every bank has to have free transfers in this way. I think it should have been required for the US banks in their bailouts -- as long as we're helping them out, they have to get rid of a system that does nothing but cost consumers fees. Think about it, if you could choose anew, would you have people transfer funds by writing pieces of paper (which by the way, cost like $0.20 cents each if you've looked at the cost of ordering checks) that you have to go the bank to deposit, take several days to clear, and might bounce? Why are we tolerating this middleman system? Why do we tolerate $35-a-pop overdraft fees as a surprise, when clearly they have the means to tell you right away if your balance is insufficient? Boo hoo, the banks will lose some profit from the decline in overdraft fees. Well, they shouldn't even be making huge profits off of those shady fees in the first place.
I read that there's one bank which lets you take a iPhone photo of checks someone gives you, and send in that image as the deposit. Or other banks that let you scan checks in at home and send them in via their website. At that point, why are we even having the checks? cmon people, let's not put up with this bullshit any more. Give us free transfer capability, honest information on our accounts, and no more idiots writing checks in supermarket lines. What, did you drive up in your horse and buggy?
sorry, this topic makes me grouchy about how behind the US is, and apologists who think it's fine and want to cut productivity-sucking banks any slack over it.
the editor completely misunderstands the point (or misuses his/her GPS). The potential clutter of the user interface/map/traffic aside, GPS is the most dramatic simplification in driving to emerge in years -- provided you just listen to the voice prompts.
When used correctly, this one amazing device outsources your mental burden of navigation, and presents it to you with a clear voice that lets you devote your effort to (hopefully) driving better, although obviously this has turned many people's attention elsewhere.
If you've ever found yourself in an unfamiliar city in fast moving, dense traffic, trying to find an address, you will be grateful that you can offload your navigational workload to the GPS, which tells you clearly and plainly when to get ready to turn, in how far a distance, potentially even making it safer as you no longer swerve across 3 lanes of traffic at the last minute while looking at a paper map.
Of course, people who use it to navigate down isolated country roads they're familiar with will never see the point, but for someone who's task-overloaded in a busy situation, listening to the GPS voice is an amazing improvement in life.
By the way, just a tip for everyone -- I've found that ironically the bus is actually where a GPS makes the biggest improvement in knowing how to get around.
If you're in an unfamiliar city, buses (in contrast to trains) often have a frustratingly indescribable and unpredictable route/stop pattern, and when the driver/announcement system is of no help, a GPS system in your hand will help you figure out exactly how close you are to your destination, and when to get off the bus.
I no longer dread dealing with buses because of this capability, although the lurching stop/start of buses in general still drives me crazy. Try it sometime -- the small Nuvi-style units are just about as inconspicuous as an ipod, and are great for helping you get around.
my question is, given that you cannot roll out additional wireless capacity in such a short time, for a reasonable amount of investment, and users getting upset over the unreliability (many people say that as soon as it expires they'll leave AT&T), why do they not put in a traffic prioritization scheme? I.e. prioritize:
1. voice (lots of dissatisfaction if lag, dropped calls)
2. text messages (dissatisfaction if text does not even get sent)
3. then email (low bandwidth use)
4. html (sometimes need to find important information)
5. finally streaming media (this is a luxury)
They say "unlimited" but surely we all acknowledge there is some limit -- whether it's going to be set by AT&T in terms of raw usage, prioritized, or finally, by the user's frustration and willingness to wait...
I would just think it's natural to do this given people's rising complaints.
How about the judge offers him a deal -- 1 year off of his sentence for every $1B he reveals and pays back.
One thing that hasn't been emphasized so far as I've read, is not so much even the loss of dark sky (which is a shame for people who would have their eyes opened), but rather the waste of energy and light going up into the sky.
As in, if lights were properly aimed/covered/baffled, you could probably spend 10-20% less energy on lighting. Is that not a waste to be doing the old way then?
As they have done in some municipalities, have legislation that only well-baffled outdoor lamps be sold or used. Who would this hurt, lamp manufacturers? Even? Would it be such an encroachment on the right to choose a wasteful lamp housing?
You know the lamp posts with bulbs+lenses that shine light everywhere -- the kind with 360deg housings. Why? The birds don't care about the light -- it's people underneath. Unless you run an airport, guiding planes into land, cover that shit up!
As in many things today, we don't have to be virtuous or self-righteous about lofty issues before it's ripe to do so -- just ask people to begin by stopping the waste of precious resources. I think everyone (aside from asshole investment bankers) can understand that.
when I saw the headline, I was thinking not so much the fragmentation issues, but the repeated re-writing of logs and other small frequently accessed files that SSDs are susceptible to (maximum # of rated read-write cycles). Have there been any developments in that area?
according to an article (referenced below, very entertaining article which I suggest you read when you have the time), laying undersea cable a bit safer than overland, because "anyone with a bulldozer" can be a fool and do damage to your line.
see here (again, one of the best articles I've ever read):
http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/4.12/ffglass.html
or here
http://www.j-bradford-delong.net/OpEd/virtual/stephenson.html
Newspapers face the difficult situation of being the best medium for sustained, in-depth examination of some issues, while suffering from the curse of people being unwilling to pay for content that can be cut-and-pasted with one click these days.
The act of writing a story naturally takes some intellectual talent and prolonged effort, and I would say that newspaper journalists (and even blog writers who actually do a fair bit of their own writing) are more dedicated to unearthing real stories, than most any TV "journalist" is. The TV medium, with its emphasis on good sound and video clips (tending to emphasize short-term catastrophe), with just anyone being able to say something without thought, is so transitory and gossip-like, and without any permanent record, that anyone can break a story on TV and not have to do any real work to follow it up. Look at how many bullshit headlines pass for news on the 24 hour news channels. They're so desperate to fill the day that just about anything is put on the air.
Compare this to one of the reputable newspapers, where you have one chance per day to publish something, so that the contributors make active decisions about what to write on for the next day, and refine their stories, get things right before putting it on paper. How many times have you heard of a TV station making an apology because it was incorrect on some detail (which isn't uncommon), or made a mistake? Newspapers on the other hand, have this kind of responsibility. I'm not saying newspapers are without fault, but compared to TV, they're the people who keep us honest. Their news doesn't evaporate into thin air after it's finished.
I *pay* for a subscription to the WSJ, because I know that it takes money to produce good news reporting, I don't want just regurgitated/duplicated AP feeds. I encourage you to read it for once (the WSJ news is not the same as the WSJ opinion page), and see how refreshing good content is. I'm glad that they (hopefully at least for a little while longer, depending on R. Murdoch) are restricting their services to paid subscribers so a unique product can be maintained, and good journalists encouraged to do this kind of work.
I think people are a little bit deceived by the ads for noise canceling headphones, which show images like a guy leaning back in his seat with the mom+screaming baby walled off behind soundproof glass thanks to the headphones.
That's completely the opposite of what happens. The active noise reduction actually cancels the incoherent noise of the engines, wind, etc. Voices come through just fine, and you're going to be hearing that baby just as clear as before.
Perhaps someone with expertise in antitrust could enlighten me as to a silly question:
About five years ago, satellite radio was unheard of, or nearly so. For a time, there was only one company offering service. No one at that time would complain of this being anti-competitive or a monopoly, that there was only one choice in the market.
But now, after two companies decide to merge, suddenly threatens to become anticompetitive and needs government approval. Why is the first case ok, but the second case not?
Maybe this is a little bit off topic, but I for one am quite grateful to live in a society where air safety is so well looked after and monitored. We really don't skimp (in general) on air safety, and take quite a rational view about how checking and maintaining planes, and training pilots actually contributes to preventing accidents.
This is far from the common attitude in some other places around the world. In some other countries, operating an "airline" is still a very seat-of-the-pants operation -- passengers are unrecorded, cargo is misloaded, pilots are bribed to take things they don't know about, etc. And if a plane were to crash, people would throw up their hands and say, "what can be done, these things just happen", or "it's God's will that accidents occur", or "why talk about it?". But here, we've been accustomed to understanding that there were tangible causes behind every accident, and if we could only see the moments before the crash (since often no one survives to tell us what happened), we might be able to prevent future accidents. This is an admirable thing that I am very grateful for.
The state of the technology and awareness of safety are so advanced that accidents have decreased so much in the US, that the NTSB/airlines, having fewer crashes to investigate, now analyze the data from normal flights, and look for patterns that suggest unsafe conditions -- and they change those unsafe conditions. see this article for example
Finally, just regarding some of the other points made here, I am not an expert, but I think it would be impractical to have a nonstop streaming black box. These recorders not only capture audio, but sub-second sampled data for dozens, if not scores of readings from the aircraft systems -- non stop. Multiply that by the number of planes in the sky, and it quickly becomes overwhelming I think. Most airplane data systems are at the text messaging level of bandwidth.
maybe the students could save more energy by spending that time on optimizing their code....
I've told you before, you need to see your doctor about that.
Yeah, that would be nice. Until everyone else wants to do it, and then how do you get a train to pick up every one of you?
just an update, I've changed the entry in Wikipedia so that it's now expected to grow at 150% in the next six months!
if it's not on this new list, it's closed:
this list
as a side note, this problem is even more important for people who, unlike me, don't have any other email accounts whose mail is getting forwarded to Gmail to read. For users who use Gmail as their only/primary account, a backup is even more important. Just think of that Lycos user who caused all that trouble over permanently deleted email. Google doesn't tell you how long your account is valid for, does it? A hard copy of your mail in your hands is priceless.
two problems with this:
1. Since I haven't used POP ever with the account, on that first download it is going to try to download about 1GB of messages. And in some tests so far, Gmail is not reliable about how far it gets done. It will stop at some arbitrary message and say it's finished, but it's not.
2. This doesn't cover messages sent *from* the Gmail account, that are not cc:ed/copied to the other accounts. Outgoing mail sent via Gmail will not be POP downloaded because they are not "received mail" to Gmail.
I could bcc: myself on everything. But this is not an available option by default, and sometimes you forget.
This may be a little off topic, but maybe many others here will benefit from discussing this same concern. I love Gmail, but there is a problem I see that's been slowly nagging me:
I use Gmail to read the messages off my work/academic Pine accounts, and it has rapidly become my main way to check email because it has a great feature set, and Gmail doesn't pull some of the stupid tricks that other free email services do. I also use it to send messages (i.e. the "from:" field pretending as if it is one of the other work/school accounts I have), and rapidly I'm accumulating email on my Gmail account that now doesn't exist elsewhere.
However, sometime in the far off future, Gmail may decide not to work one day, or there may be a new technology to replace it. We can't know for sure. So I would like to be able to have a backup of that mail just in case. As much as I trust Gmail and like Google, I need some way to keep my mail on my own, because if it were all lost, it would be awful.
Couldn't they offer a service, for some reasonable amount of $$, where they would burn my entire Gmailbox onto a DVD and send it to me? With the size of my mailbox, POP downloading is becoming impossible, and this would also be a great way to give users some peace of mind.
or has anyone else felt this worry, and come up with an interesting/workable solution??
this ground was covered a few years ago in (what I think was) a correct decision by a federal court where a disabled person brought suit against Southwest Airlines for its web site. The court said, under the law, the world of online does not count as a place of public accomodation. The ADA was written very clearly to cover physical locations. It gives a list of places that fall under this definition, like a barbershop, auditorium, bakery, etc.
Whether or not the online world should fall under the ADA may be a legitimate question, but that is not the same as what the current law is. If new rules are to be issued, let that be changed through the public deliberative process, so that all the details can come out and be thought about first.
the related story: here in this article