In many ways, Google seems to have fallen victim to the same pattern of innovative ideas leading to half-baked products that cursed Apple back in the '90s.
They're always throwing random new products out there, and you get the idea that they don't really believe in them from Day 1, and have little confidence in their ability to succeed. More often than not, the products are quietly dropped and early adopters are told essentially: "Thanks for giving it a shot!"
Google Wave was interesting, except that Google didn't know how to tell people what it was, how it would benefit them or how to use it. An 80 minute instructional video is as useful as no video. It betrayed a lack of understanding of the market.
GoogleTV was a kinda neat idea that appeared dead on arrival as an actual product.
Apple's biggest achievement has been shedding the complex of being the company that develops cool stuff that goes nowhere because it wasn't packaged and presented properly. It's the reason it still exists today, while other members of that category like Atari and Commodore are no longer with us in any real sense. Nobody gives a damn if you've created something awesome that exists on a workbench, or in some niche of a niche.
Fanboys will whine that "Company X developed that years ago!" I know this, because I was one of them. I fought for Amigas and later, Macs. But fanboyism is just an excuse for mismanagement on the part of the companies being defended.
Who first developed a feature doesn't really matter. What matters is who developed that feature into a product and got the market interested.
It's the difference between the gamers who want to be the "idea guys" and tell you about that totally cool, awesome, fun game they want to develop, and the ones who sit down and turn those ideas into a cohesive, functional and enjoyable experience.
you failed to read the article. the tape drives they are talking about are plug and play. no special drivers.
Did I mention drivers?
The tapes still have to go into something. To introduce tapes beyond specific, narrowly-focused role (such as the one Voyager529 mentioned above) demands that everyone along the chain own that something. That something costs a good deal of money.
Nobody I work with in media production really wants tape to stick around as a day-to-day medium. Even medium-term archival use is a pain.
The issue is that hard drives are a self-contained solution. If you give someone a hard drive, they have all of the data and physical infrastructure needed to access and use the data contained within. The most elusive component is often a spare cable.
If you give someone an HDCam tape, they have to go find an HDCam deck. While a hard drive demands a Firewire or USB port that exists in every edit bay and on every desk in every production company, office and network everywhere, an HDCam tape needs about $80,000 to $100,000 in equipment just to get to what's on that tape. For the final output, you need that $100K deck again.
And it's not even a matter of the outlay for the tape hardware. It's the time it adds to the whole process of working on a project.
While you can go and rent time, it adds a layer of obfuscation and complexity in the process. Instead of rendering-out a project and dumping it onto a hard drive, you've got to actually go somewhere and pay someone to do it for you.
Even if you have a deck, and can use it for free, it's still an extra step on both ends. And you have to stop and think "Will they be able to work with this file? Will I?" A new tape formal will likely present all of these issues. While it's a great idea on paper and in the lab, I don't see it being workable in a functioning production environment aside from long-term archival storage. (i.e: everything more than a few years back)
And what about all the nerds that actually did it?
They'll inevitably get hefty prison sentences, while Murdoch goes free with a "please don't do any more bad things until the next time you do bad things" warning.
But do any tablets offer network-based administrative control?
This comes as no surprise, but RIM offers enterprise tools for managing BlackBerry Playbook tablet computers and other brand handsets with BlackBerry Mobile Fusion.
The Playbook has a track record of very, very secure email. So secure in fact, that it didn't exist for the better part of a year.
A company that can't get email working on its flagship tablet for that long after it ships is completely dead in the water. Apple can do some nutty things, but not being able to figure out how to implement email in your own product is just straight-up insane.
The last several times I sent something through UPS they verified the contents. They do this now because of all the people mailing packages of drugs.
Wouldn't they rather claim something similar to the telecoms' "common carrier" status? In other words, is there really zero chance that the one cleverly-concealed package of drugs that slips by wouldn't get them in trouble for drug trafficking?
No, because then they'd get completely fucked by people sneaking HAZMAT shipments through as regular packages that don't need special TLC and shouldn't be bouncing around with 70lb spools of wire smashing into them on conveyor belts above the heads of their workers.
Instead of drawing on memory, I'll just quote the damn engineers who know a hell of a lot more about this than I do. I don't need someone screaming at me that I misremembered some detail and I'm obviously a shill for the CIA.
Fire-induced thermal expansion of the floor system surrounding Column 79 led to the collapse of Floor 13, which triggered a cascade of floor failures. In this case, the floor beams on the east side of the building expanded enough that they pushed the girder spanning between Columns 79 and 44 to the west on the 13th floor. (See Figure 1–5 for column numbering and the locations of girders and beams.) This movement was enough for the girder to walk off of its support at Column 79.
The unsupported girder and other local fire-induced damage caused Floor 13 to collapse, beginning a cascade of floor failures down to the 5th floor (which, as noted in Section 1.2.3, was much thicker and stronger). Many of these floors had already been at least partially weakened by the fires in the vicinity of Column 79. This left Column 79 with insufficient lateral support, and as a consequence, the column buckled eastward, becoming the initial local failure for collapse initiation.
Due to the buckling of Column 79 between Floors 5 and 14, the upper section of Column 79 began to descend. The downward movement of Column 79 led to the observed kink in the east penthouse, and its subsequent descent. The cascading failures of the lower floors surrounding Column 79 led to increased unsupported length in, falling debris impact on, and loads being re-distributed to adjacent columns; and Column 80 and then Column 81 buckled as well. All the floor connections to these three columns, as well as to the exterior columns, failed, and the floors fell on the east side of the building. The exterior façade on the east quarter of the building was just a hollow shell.
The failure of the interior columns then proceeded toward the west. Truss 2 (Figure 1–6) failed, hit by the debris from the falling floors. This caused Column 77 and Column 78 to fail, followed shortly by Column 76. Each north-south line of three core columns then buckled in succession from east to west, due to loss of lateral support from floor system failures, to the forces exerted by falling debris, which tended to push the columns westward, and to the loads redistributed to them from the buckled columns. Within seconds, the entire building core was buckling.
The global collapse of WTC 7 was underway. The shell of exterior columns buckled between the 7th and 14th floors, as loads were redistributed to these columns due to the downward movement of the building core and the floors. The entire building above the buckled-column region then moved downward as a single unit, completing the global collapse sequence.
A few weeks ago I was passing through the Seattle airport with my family. I found an iPad 2 on the shuttle train between terminals - basically brand new with only the very barest of info on it. We were running behind, so I stuck it in my pack and boarded the plane.
You found some random, attractive piece of hardware just laying about an airport, and brought it on a plane with you? Please tell me you understand why that might have turned out to be a huge safety problem.
Before you dismiss that as crazy paranoia, remember the endlessly-popular "USB stick left in the parking lot" vector.
Yet, here we have a modern building, built to high standards, that completely collapses all at once while NIST says that it's because of the failure of a single member. I never say anything is impossible, but the report didn't give an engineering reason for why this building should behave in this manner when other buildings haven't (except to say it did). Remember, there's no airplane full of Jet-A here, just an uncontrolled office fire (Enron might have been a hot news story, but the Enron case files burn like normal paper). NIST also ruled out seismic damage from the collapse of the North and South towers.
Really, it comes down to spaghetti. Bear with me here.
WTC7 had fireproofing with a 2 hour rating on beams, and 3 hour rating on columns. Keep in mind the building burned for about 7 hours before it fell.
Much like in WTC1 and 2, smaller beams with less mass than the core columns were exposed to fire for long periods of time. Even with intact fire insulation, it was only a matter of time before they began to heat-up. The collapse of the Twins had left the sprinklers and standpipes dry, so there was nothing to be done. And by that point, who was going to give a shit about fighting a fire in an evacuated, battered high rise with no water when 220 floors, thousands of people and hundreds of firefighters had just been lost across the damn street? The fire crews were pulled from the scene and told it was a lost cause. I mean, what would you do?
As the beams got hotter, they lost strength. Structural steel loses about 50% of its strength hundreds of degrees below the melting point. This is not a bit of secret, esoteric news. As others have said, that's the whole idea behind blacksmithing.
So after hours and hours of uncontrolled heating weakened steel beams began to sag, and collapse. Specifically those on floors 8 to 14 (where fires had been observed for some time). The core columns were suddenly dealing with fewer lateral connections across nine whole floors, which meant less lateral stability. To make matters worse, the core columns were getting hotter too.
To understand the physics a bit better, take a piece of dry spaghetti, stand it up straight, and gently pinch it halfway down, then lay a finger on the top. The spaghetti is a vertical column, the hand pinching the spaghetti is a floor beam, and your finger on top is the weight of the building above.
Stop pinching the spaghetti.
Core column 79 had to do its part to hold up the building, and the mechanical penthouse loaded with equipment on one side of the roof. With nine floors of reenforcement gone, it began to bow and give way. The mechanical penthouse developed a visible kink, and eventually column 79 snapped. Just like the spaghetti.
The mechanical penthouse shot down through the roof, and took out floors from the top-down, while the collapsing column pulled the remaining, weakened floor sections down with it. The rest of the structure was irrevocably compromised.
Take a moment to consider what would be necessary to shift that much mass off-center to a degree that would cause it to stray from its footprint.
We're talking a huge amount of lateral force. Also consider your only other point of reference for large buildings coming down is videos of controlled demolitions. Of course it's going to look like something you've seen before, because that's the only other thing you've seen before.
yes. and both 1, 2, and 7 all collapsed NEATLY IN THEIR OWN FOOTPRINTS. Exactly like all those videos of controlled demolition. Them's gamblin' odds if you ask me!
I've seen this cited by people attempting to be serious, and it never fails to make me laugh... a bit sadly.
Physics dictates that a building "wants" to fall straight down. Moving that much mass off-center is really fucking difficult, and why even failed professional demolitions usually end up with incomplete collapse, rather than some old structure tipping over.
You're talking nonsense. It's not even an argument against what I said, it's merely words that have no real connection with reality being written down for the sake of opposing what I said.
And sadly, the facts aren't even an issue for them. They define themselves based on their opposition to what's accepted. It's solely a case of being "special" enough to see the "truth", while the rest of us are "sheep".
That's what it's about. They'll create, and continue to create vast conspiracy theories that don't even match the last theory they said was the absolute truth. Their theories clash with their own theories. It's just about being different, and elevating your own worth above that of other people who are seen as dumber than you and need to be saved from themselves.
9/11 isn't even really the issue, it's merely a symptom of their own malignancy.
I think you're taking conspiracy theory 'debunking' a little too seriously, and doing it in a rather creep and non-sensical fashion............. While many people have some problems with the way the buildings collapsed I have never heard this stuff.
Um... you haven't spent much time on the internet, have you? Or noticed that it was enough to prompt a Popular Mechanics cover story.
Wait... there's already a ""Enterprise false flag"" conspiracy theory?
You're talking about the same type of people who really believe the planes that hit the World Trade Center didn't hit the World Trade Center, or if they hit the World Trade Center they didn't have people on them, or if they had people on them they were controlled by robotic pods. And that this was just to somehow cover the REAL method of destruction which was extensive demolition charges in the buildings that no one ever noticed, because flying a plane into a building somehow wouldn't be enough to destroy it so there needed to be a REAL method of destruction that the planes somehow didn't provide. You're talking about the same people who really believe the people trapped above the impact floors weren't trapped, that the photos of them were falsified and took place on a set because the window sizes don't look right - which had nothing to do with the fact any first year photography or film student could tell you that zooming from 1/4 of a mile away will distort perspective.
It's a pathological desire to undermine anything that is believed by anyone. It's not healthy distrust, it's a creepy, nonsensical obsession with being the one, unique snowflake who sees things how they "really are".
Every little bit of information presented to them is disputed due to "inconsistencies" but their basic theories are routinely rewritten over the course of an argument. Their own truth isn't even stable, because they're not stable. Being in opposition to commonly-held beliefs is the only thing that sustains them, and they define themselves and reality solely based on that stance. Nothing else.
Wow, I had not noticed that. Also the data plans seem to cost more now. That is warranting a serious thought of moving to any other carrier...
Yeah, it was the final thing that pushed AT&T off the table for me.
Sprint is giving me 450 minutes a month, free nights and weekends, unlimited minutes to, and from any mobile phone on any carrier at any time of the day or night, unlimited data and unlimited voice / data roaming and unlimited SMS for $79 a month. Sprint roams on Verizon's network.
If you get a corporate discount through your employer, it comes out to exactly $77.90 after taxes (in California).
Is Sprint the super-fastest network ever? No. Is it bad? No. Is it worth signing the contract? Yes.
Your argument is flawed in that you're applying your own rural area's poor level of service to infrastructure that is not designed for the sticks.
The average car driver commutes alone. The average bus holds 50 to 100 commuters. Rush hour headways in many major American cities are 8 to 15 min, with buses running at full capacity.
This is why they deserve their own lanes, and signal priority. That bus waiting to cross an intersection is likely moving more people than all of the cars waiting at the light combined.
I remember a few years back using a similar app as Siri on my BlackBerry Curve 8330. The accuracy wasn't perfect, but it was the closest thing in comparison with the built voice recognition software. If you've used a BB before, it always started out with "Say a command...**beep**". Anyways, I used it to Google where I would have my next lunch break. Other than that, it wasn't all that useful.
Earlier versions of the iPhone have simple voice commands too. I never knew of anyone who used them. I'd imagine they were invaluable for the disabled though.
That being said, Siri's real strength is the ability to parse a sentence of natural-language speech and proceed with a multi-stage response. The kicker is that it's really just manipulating a few pieces of info that other apps use all of the time. The people you've texted recently, your address book, your current location, etc.
As annoying as Apple can be sometimes, I have to give them credit for taking a piece of advanced technology, and using it to bind together a bunch of things that already existed, and make them work better together as a unified whole.
- "Hey Siri, wake me up at 8:30 tomorrow"
Siri sets an alarm for 8:30am using the alarm tone you last used. You can specify AM or PM, but otherwise she'll assume you want to get up in the morning.
- "Let Lisa know I'll be late."
Siri figures you're probably trying to text the Lisa you message the most. She writes the text "I'll be late." and offers to send it.
If you've never texted any Lisa before, she'll ask which one you're talking about. She might ask the next few more times you try to text Lisa, and eventually stop asking.
- "Remind me to thaw the chicken when I get home."
Siri is aware of everything in your address book, along with your current location. An alert will pop-up when you get home telling you to "Thaw the chicken."
Again, nothing crazy advanced at work, except some really nice noise-cancelation features and better language parsing than we've seen on a phone before. The other ingredients have been in place for years. It's how they've made them function together that matters. Apple is less about selling you a long list of features, rather than a package that does a shorter list of things very smoothly. You're not talking to a phone, you're just talking. Not "Make new calendar entry. Doctor appointment. 10 am January 20th." but "Remind me to go to the doctor at 10 am on the 20th." It's a subtle difference, but an important one.
How people interact with their computers is just as important as what those computers are capable of.
Slashdot Mirror
You can just plug an iPhone, iPad or iPod Touch into a Mac or PC and back up absolutely everything without pressing a button.
In many ways, Google seems to have fallen victim to the same pattern of innovative ideas leading to half-baked products that cursed Apple back in the '90s.
They're always throwing random new products out there, and you get the idea that they don't really believe in them from Day 1, and have little confidence in their ability to succeed. More often than not, the products are quietly dropped and early adopters are told essentially: "Thanks for giving it a shot!"
Google Wave was interesting, except that Google didn't know how to tell people what it was, how it would benefit them or how to use it. An 80 minute instructional video is as useful as no video. It betrayed a lack of understanding of the market.
GoogleTV was a kinda neat idea that appeared dead on arrival as an actual product.
Apple's biggest achievement has been shedding the complex of being the company that develops cool stuff that goes nowhere because it wasn't packaged and presented properly. It's the reason it still exists today, while other members of that category like Atari and Commodore are no longer with us in any real sense. Nobody gives a damn if you've created something awesome that exists on a workbench, or in some niche of a niche.
Fanboys will whine that "Company X developed that years ago!" I know this, because I was one of them. I fought for Amigas and later, Macs. But fanboyism is just an excuse for mismanagement on the part of the companies being defended.
Who first developed a feature doesn't really matter. What matters is who developed that feature into a product and got the market interested.
It's the difference between the gamers who want to be the "idea guys" and tell you about that totally cool, awesome, fun game they want to develop, and the ones who sit down and turn those ideas into a cohesive, functional and enjoyable experience.
Please?
Thank you.
you failed to read the article. the tape drives they are talking about are plug and play. no special drivers.
Did I mention drivers?
The tapes still have to go into something. To introduce tapes beyond specific, narrowly-focused role (such as the one Voyager529 mentioned above) demands that everyone along the chain own that something. That something costs a good deal of money.
Nobody I work with in media production really wants tape to stick around as a day-to-day medium. Even medium-term archival use is a pain.
The issue is that hard drives are a self-contained solution. If you give someone a hard drive, they have all of the data and physical infrastructure needed to access and use the data contained within. The most elusive component is often a spare cable.
If you give someone an HDCam tape, they have to go find an HDCam deck. While a hard drive demands a Firewire or USB port that exists in every edit bay and on every desk in every production company, office and network everywhere, an HDCam tape needs about $80,000 to $100,000 in equipment just to get to what's on that tape. For the final output, you need that $100K deck again.
And it's not even a matter of the outlay for the tape hardware. It's the time it adds to the whole process of working on a project.
While you can go and rent time, it adds a layer of obfuscation and complexity in the process. Instead of rendering-out a project and dumping it onto a hard drive, you've got to actually go somewhere and pay someone to do it for you.
Even if you have a deck, and can use it for free, it's still an extra step on both ends. And you have to stop and think "Will they be able to work with this file? Will I?" A new tape formal will likely present all of these issues. While it's a great idea on paper and in the lab, I don't see it being workable in a functioning production environment aside from long-term archival storage. (i.e: everything more than a few years back)
And what about all the nerds that actually did it?
They'll inevitably get hefty prison sentences, while Murdoch goes free with a "please don't do any more bad things until the next time you do bad things" warning.
Nothing tastes better. I'm not entirely sure why. But it's never quite as good back on the ground.
If your job requirements are such that an iPad can replace a PC for work, then you're working in a job that doesn't require a damn computer.
Please tell me that you don't work in IT. If you do, I pity the people who are forced to make their business case to you.
But do any tablets offer network-based administrative control?
This comes as no surprise, but RIM offers enterprise tools for managing BlackBerry Playbook tablet computers and other brand handsets with BlackBerry Mobile Fusion.
The Playbook has a track record of very, very secure email. So secure in fact, that it didn't exist for the better part of a year.
A company that can't get email working on its flagship tablet for that long after it ships is completely dead in the water. Apple can do some nutty things, but not being able to figure out how to implement email in your own product is just straight-up insane.
The last several times I sent something through UPS they verified the contents. They do this now because of all the people mailing packages of drugs.
Wouldn't they rather claim something similar to the telecoms' "common carrier" status? In other words, is there really zero chance that the one cleverly-concealed package of drugs that slips by wouldn't get them in trouble for drug trafficking?
No, because then they'd get completely fucked by people sneaking HAZMAT shipments through as regular packages that don't need special TLC and shouldn't be bouncing around with 70lb spools of wire smashing into them on conveyor belts above the heads of their workers.
The terrorists have won.
Like I said, you wouldn't go pick up a USB stick you find in your company's parking lot, and plug it into a work computer, would you?
Oh yeah, about that.
The beams were all weakened by fire, right? If column 79 is going down, why wouldn't its weakened beam attachments fail?
That's exactly what happened.
Instead of drawing on memory, I'll just quote the damn engineers who know a hell of a lot more about this than I do. I don't need someone screaming at me that I misremembered some detail and I'm obviously a shill for the CIA.
Fire-induced thermal expansion of the floor system surrounding Column 79 led to the collapse of Floor 13, which triggered a cascade of floor failures. In this case, the floor beams on the east side of the building expanded enough that they pushed the girder spanning between Columns 79 and 44 to the west on the 13th floor. (See Figure 1–5 for column numbering and the locations of girders and beams.) This movement was enough for the girder to walk off of its support at Column 79.
The unsupported girder and other local fire-induced damage caused Floor 13 to collapse, beginning a cascade of floor failures down to the 5th floor (which, as noted in Section 1.2.3, was much thicker and stronger). Many of these floors had already been at least partially weakened by the fires in the vicinity of Column 79. This left Column 79 with insufficient lateral support, and as a consequence, the column buckled eastward, becoming the initial local failure for collapse initiation.
Due to the buckling of Column 79 between Floors 5 and 14, the upper section of Column 79 began to descend. The downward movement of Column 79 led to the observed kink in the east penthouse, and its subsequent descent. The cascading failures of the lower floors surrounding Column 79 led to increased unsupported length in, falling debris impact on, and loads being re-distributed to adjacent columns; and Column 80 and then Column 81 buckled as well. All the floor connections to these three columns, as well as to the exterior columns, failed, and the floors fell on the east side of the building. The exterior façade on the east quarter of the building was just a hollow shell.
The failure of the interior columns then proceeded toward the west. Truss 2 (Figure 1–6) failed, hit by the debris from the falling floors. This caused Column 77 and Column 78 to fail, followed shortly by Column 76. Each north-south line of three core columns then buckled in succession from east to west, due to loss of lateral support from floor system failures, to the forces exerted by falling debris, which tended to push the columns westward, and to the loads redistributed to them from the buckled columns. Within seconds, the entire building core was buckling.
The global collapse of WTC 7 was underway. The shell of exterior columns buckled between the 7th and 14th floors, as loads were redistributed to these columns due to the downward movement of the building core and the floors. The entire building above the buckled-column region then moved downward as a single unit, completing the global collapse sequence.
A few weeks ago I was passing through the Seattle airport with my family. I found an iPad 2 on the shuttle train between terminals - basically brand new with only the very barest of info on it. We were running behind, so I stuck it in my pack and boarded the plane.
You found some random, attractive piece of hardware just laying about an airport, and brought it on a plane with you? Please tell me you understand why that might have turned out to be a huge safety problem.
Before you dismiss that as crazy paranoia, remember the endlessly-popular "USB stick left in the parking lot" vector.
Yet, here we have a modern building, built to high standards, that completely collapses all at once while NIST says that it's because of the failure of a single member. I never say anything is impossible, but the report didn't give an engineering reason for why this building should behave in this manner when other buildings haven't (except to say it did). Remember, there's no airplane full of Jet-A here, just an uncontrolled office fire (Enron might have been a hot news story, but the Enron case files burn like normal paper). NIST also ruled out seismic damage from the collapse of the North and South towers.
Really, it comes down to spaghetti. Bear with me here.
WTC7 had fireproofing with a 2 hour rating on beams, and 3 hour rating on columns. Keep in mind the building burned for about 7 hours before it fell.
Much like in WTC1 and 2, smaller beams with less mass than the core columns were exposed to fire for long periods of time. Even with intact fire insulation, it was only a matter of time before they began to heat-up. The collapse of the Twins had left the sprinklers and standpipes dry, so there was nothing to be done. And by that point, who was going to give a shit about fighting a fire in an evacuated, battered high rise with no water when 220 floors, thousands of people and hundreds of firefighters had just been lost across the damn street? The fire crews were pulled from the scene and told it was a lost cause. I mean, what would you do?
As the beams got hotter, they lost strength. Structural steel loses about 50% of its strength hundreds of degrees below the melting point. This is not a bit of secret, esoteric news. As others have said, that's the whole idea behind blacksmithing.
So after hours and hours of uncontrolled heating weakened steel beams began to sag, and collapse. Specifically those on floors 8 to 14 (where fires had been observed for some time). The core columns were suddenly dealing with fewer lateral connections across nine whole floors, which meant less lateral stability. To make matters worse, the core columns were getting hotter too.
To understand the physics a bit better, take a piece of dry spaghetti, stand it up straight, and gently pinch it halfway down, then lay a finger on the top. The spaghetti is a vertical column, the hand pinching the spaghetti is a floor beam, and your finger on top is the weight of the building above.
Stop pinching the spaghetti.
Core column 79 had to do its part to hold up the building, and the mechanical penthouse loaded with equipment on one side of the roof. With nine floors of reenforcement gone, it began to bow and give way. The mechanical penthouse developed a visible kink, and eventually column 79 snapped. Just like the spaghetti.
The mechanical penthouse shot down through the roof, and took out floors from the top-down, while the collapsing column pulled the remaining, weakened floor sections down with it. The rest of the structure was irrevocably compromised.
And then there was no WTC7 anymore.
Take a moment to consider what would be necessary to shift that much mass off-center to a degree that would cause it to stray from its footprint.
We're talking a huge amount of lateral force. Also consider your only other point of reference for large buildings coming down is videos of controlled demolitions. Of course it's going to look like something you've seen before, because that's the only other thing you've seen before.
yes. and both 1, 2, and 7 all collapsed NEATLY IN THEIR OWN FOOTPRINTS. Exactly like all those videos of controlled demolition. Them's gamblin' odds if you ask me!
I've seen this cited by people attempting to be serious, and it never fails to make me laugh... a bit sadly.
Physics dictates that a building "wants" to fall straight down. Moving that much mass off-center is really fucking difficult, and why even failed professional demolitions usually end up with incomplete collapse, rather than some old structure tipping over.
"Nano-thermites"?
"Little passenger plane"?
You're talking nonsense. It's not even an argument against what I said, it's merely words that have no real connection with reality being written down for the sake of opposing what I said.
Which is at the core of the 9/11 Truther M.O.
And sadly, the facts aren't even an issue for them. They define themselves based on their opposition to what's accepted. It's solely a case of being "special" enough to see the "truth", while the rest of us are "sheep".
That's what it's about. They'll create, and continue to create vast conspiracy theories that don't even match the last theory they said was the absolute truth. Their theories clash with their own theories. It's just about being different, and elevating your own worth above that of other people who are seen as dumber than you and need to be saved from themselves.
9/11 isn't even really the issue, it's merely a symptom of their own malignancy.
I think you're taking conspiracy theory 'debunking' a little too seriously, and doing it in a rather creep and non-sensical fashion............. While many people have some problems with the way the buildings collapsed I have never heard this stuff.
Um... you haven't spent much time on the internet, have you? Or noticed that it was enough to prompt a Popular Mechanics cover story.
Wait... there's already a ""Enterprise false flag"" conspiracy theory?
You're talking about the same type of people who really believe the planes that hit the World Trade Center didn't hit the World Trade Center, or if they hit the World Trade Center they didn't have people on them, or if they had people on them they were controlled by robotic pods. And that this was just to somehow cover the REAL method of destruction which was extensive demolition charges in the buildings that no one ever noticed, because flying a plane into a building somehow wouldn't be enough to destroy it so there needed to be a REAL method of destruction that the planes somehow didn't provide. You're talking about the same people who really believe the people trapped above the impact floors weren't trapped, that the photos of them were falsified and took place on a set because the window sizes don't look right - which had nothing to do with the fact any first year photography or film student could tell you that zooming from 1/4 of a mile away will distort perspective.
It's a pathological desire to undermine anything that is believed by anyone. It's not healthy distrust, it's a creepy, nonsensical obsession with being the one, unique snowflake who sees things how they "really are".
Every little bit of information presented to them is disputed due to "inconsistencies" but their basic theories are routinely rewritten over the course of an argument. Their own truth isn't even stable, because they're not stable. Being in opposition to commonly-held beliefs is the only thing that sustains them, and they define themselves and reality solely based on that stance. Nothing else.
Duh
Wow, I had not noticed that. Also the data plans seem to cost more now. That is warranting a serious thought of moving to any other carrier...
Yeah, it was the final thing that pushed AT&T off the table for me.
Sprint is giving me 450 minutes a month, free nights and weekends, unlimited minutes to, and from any mobile phone on any carrier at any time of the day or night, unlimited data and unlimited voice / data roaming and unlimited SMS for $79 a month. Sprint roams on Verizon's network.
If you get a corporate discount through your employer, it comes out to exactly $77.90 after taxes (in California).
Is Sprint the super-fastest network ever? No. Is it bad? No. Is it worth signing the contract? Yes.
Your argument is flawed in that you're applying your own rural area's poor level of service to infrastructure that is not designed for the sticks.
The average car driver commutes alone. The average bus holds 50 to 100 commuters. Rush hour headways in many major American cities are 8 to 15 min, with buses running at full capacity.
This is why they deserve their own lanes, and signal priority. That bus waiting to cross an intersection is likely moving more people than all of the cars waiting at the light combined.
This post in picture form: http://consumerist.com/2010/06/how-much-street-space-car-vs-bus-vs-bicycle.html
I remember a few years back using a similar app as Siri on my BlackBerry Curve 8330. The accuracy wasn't perfect, but it was the closest thing in comparison with the built voice recognition software. If you've used a BB before, it always started out with "Say a command ...**beep**". Anyways, I used it to Google where I would have my next lunch break. Other than that, it wasn't all that useful.
Earlier versions of the iPhone have simple voice commands too. I never knew of anyone who used them. I'd imagine they were invaluable for the disabled though.
That being said, Siri's real strength is the ability to parse a sentence of natural-language speech and proceed with a multi-stage response. The kicker is that it's really just manipulating a few pieces of info that other apps use all of the time. The people you've texted recently, your address book, your current location, etc.
As annoying as Apple can be sometimes, I have to give them credit for taking a piece of advanced technology, and using it to bind together a bunch of things that already existed, and make them work better together as a unified whole.
- "Hey Siri, wake me up at 8:30 tomorrow"
Siri sets an alarm for 8:30am using the alarm tone you last used. You can specify AM or PM, but otherwise she'll assume you want to get up in the morning.
- "Let Lisa know I'll be late."
Siri figures you're probably trying to text the Lisa you message the most. She writes the text "I'll be late." and offers to send it.
If you've never texted any Lisa before, she'll ask which one you're talking about. She might ask the next few more times you try to text Lisa, and eventually stop asking.
- "Remind me to thaw the chicken when I get home."
Siri is aware of everything in your address book, along with your current location. An alert will pop-up when you get home telling you to "Thaw the chicken."
Again, nothing crazy advanced at work, except some really nice noise-cancelation features and better language parsing than we've seen on a phone before. The other ingredients have been in place for years. It's how they've made them function together that matters. Apple is less about selling you a long list of features, rather than a package that does a shorter list of things very smoothly. You're not talking to a phone, you're just talking. Not "Make new calendar entry. Doctor appointment. 10 am January 20th." but "Remind me to go to the doctor at 10 am on the 20th." It's a subtle difference, but an important one.
How people interact with their computers is just as important as what those computers are capable of.
That argument doesn't really hold water though. For iphone 4 they could just only enable Siri when the proximity sensor was active.
That's not an elegant solution and a shoddy level of product consistency. It would never be implemented.