Upkeep costs would be negligable, and since they were not given I estimated them as zero.
This was a news article, not a cost assesment. Maintenance costs not being provided could simply mean the general public isn't interested in maintenance costs (who is, except policy makers?). Assuming zero or negligible upkeep costs is simply wrong. Your estimates of lifeguard pay is obviously wrong. Where did this "20% more effective" number come from? It sounds like you just made it up, since I can't find reference to it anywhere. You can always justify a cost if you over-estimate how much money it's going to save.
Who pays a lifeguard 20,000 pounds a year? That's about 40,000 US dollars. Either lifeguards are paid WAY more in the UK, or there's something very wrong with that number.
Knowing nothing about the system, I wouldn't be confident that it'll last 20 years. Computers have a way of becoming obsolete, or just breaking down after 5-10 years. How much does maintenance of the system cost?
I still have a basic disagreement over the metric you're using. What does making a lifeguard 20% more effective mean? Does that mean you can have 20% less lifeguards on duty? That works great if you have 5 lifeguards and can go down to 4. It works terribly if you have 1 lifeguard, since.8 lifeguards would mean no lifeguard on duty 20% of the time (making the whole system useless).
This shows that some things, no matter the price tag, can be justified to save a life or the education system.
If your goal is really life saving, is it possible there's a better place that 65,000 pounds could go that would save more lives? The other question that I brought up in another post is if public pools even have anything like 65,000 pounds to spend on a system such as this.
I think people get too caught up in all the emotionalism of the immediate and visible life saving that this system offers. Something more boring like increased immunizations just isn't as exciting, though it might be a lot more effective per dollar.
65,000 pounds isn't a lot of money.. if you have the 65,000 pounds to spend in the first place. I think the point of it being a lot of money is that it's not terribly affordable for most public or private pools.
Have you worked with computerized vision detection systems before? Maybe you're just trying to be curious about how the system works the way it does and why, but it sounds like you're being critical of something you don't know anything about.
I know little to nothing about computerized vision detection systems and wonder the same thing. I have to believe that the decisions made in its design were made for good reasons though to solve problems I would have no idea are even their.
"What is your opinion of this and what do you propose to help correct this?"
If you can get away with blocking out large IP spaces of an entire country, do it. If you can't, don't. I don't receive any legitimate mail from chinese IP addresses and never will. I don't block anything at the moment, but if it solved much of the scanning and spam I see I'd probbably consider it. Unless you have a global market, why not do it if it solves more problems than it creates?
I think when a US company starts targeting large ISPs in the US, or are an ISP yourself you're going to run into trouble though. I know an ISP that discards all mail coming from roadrunner addresses as spam. That's a terrible practice for the ISPs customers who aren't getting legitimate email.
You didn't look very hard, and you don't understand all natural disasters aren't equal. Tornadoes are rare, and effect only small areas of land when they do occur. You also get advanced warning of them. As for Blizzards, unless you're a dumbass and go driving in the middle of nowhere during one they're harmless, but annoying. Sweltering summers aren't fun, but there's this new invention called air conditioning which eliminates any danger (again, unless you're a dumbass and work yourself to death outside). I don't know what danger you're talking about with Nor-easters, beyond the obvious idiocy of going outside in one.
That leaves Flooding, Volcanos, Earthquakes, and Wildfires. All those things are associated with relatively small areas of the country which you can just avoid.
No City or company in there right mind will build roads, or phone systems to handle maximum similtanous usage.
Actually there are roads built larger than they need to be for evacuation purposes. I know that's one of the big reasons for building some freeways in Florida since hurricanes are fairly common. They don't make 50 lanes of course, but evacuating the populace of a large area in a few days is one of the design constraints.
I do agree with the grandparent post though, the underlying assumption of this article is idiotic. People expecting to contact friends to tell them they're allright in an emergency is ridiculous. But I can easily see the need for an emergency communication system for emergency workers/vehicles and 911 calls. That may mean a priority cell phone service with a smaller backup capacity (only emergency workers phones, or 911 calls would be functional until capacity is restored). Whatever the solution, It does sound like a problem worth solving. We had on time in one of our smaller cities - Lethbridge during Canadian Idol, you couldn't place a phone call cause everyone was trying to phone in and vote for there local boy.(he ended up winning).
Sounds like a problem with the phone system, not of capacity. Any call in show like that should have a phone number with a special prefix so the phone system isn't overwhelmed by people calling the same number. Choke all calls to that number off at each central office and I'd bet you can solve that problem. I know radio stations do that kind of thing all the time. I don't know why a similar nationwide solution to that problem couldn't happen as well.
Wow. I guess if you only define christians as the fundamentalist/born again type I guess you're right. All other christians aren't "real" christians. Perhaps you should expand beyond your narrow view of christianity and realize that there's a LOT of diversity out their beyond the fundamentalists that currently think they're the ONLY christians.
eDonkey2000 was the first client and the inventor of the protocol. The author slacked quite severly on development for at least a year, and thus eMule was born. eMule accounts for probbably 80% of the clients on the network, so no matter which client is considered "offical" the network is really an eMule network now and has been for years.
Dude, read up on synthetic diamonds. The state of the art has advanced to a point where it is possible to create synthetic diamonds that exceed natural diamonds in purity/and or size
I know all about that. The post however was about hard substances replacing diamonds, not about producing gem quality stones. The recent developments in producing gem quality stones is irrelevant to the post, so I didn't mention it.
If we could make a drill out of this new material, doesn't that mean we would have a surplus of diamond to use?
No. Synthetic diamonds were developed by GE in the 50s. Most (if not all) of the diamond in diamond coated drills are produced through this process. The process developed in the 50s only produces what's called "industrial diamonds" and are nowhere near gem quality.
So any new harder substance would only effect the industrial diamond market, and have no effect on the gem quality diamond market.
Not a bad idea, until someone slams their hand in a car door, hurts themselves while playing racketball, strains their hand while helping someone move, etc and their handshake changes.
You could have a backup identifier at that point, but then your security is only as secure as the backup identifier.
Fingerprints never change, and only are lost if you lose the finger. Most people don't lose fingers during their lifetimes, but people do injure their hands for a day or two.
First, the wording of an individual news post and the slant/position that the post takes does not necessarily reflect my views and opinions (nor that of anyone else associated with the administration of Slashdot).
It may not reflect yours, or the views of slashdot but it does mean that you think this story is at least plausible. Unless they're the Weekly World News, News outlets don't post stories like "Green headed aliens have replaced the president with a robot!" Obviously Macromedia isn't intending to stop the software being used on laptops, but that's what the article summary implies.
The news item here is that Macromedia put out an overly broad EULA that has some awfully weird restrictions in it. That should be the focus of the summary. If you wanted people to focus on that, then write your own summary instead of relying on the obviously wrong and misleading slant of the article submitter. You don't have to plagiarize, but I suppose you could give credit to the article submitter for telling you about it.
Um, am I the only one wondering what the point of sending a CD is? Apart from the "prestiege" for the people on said CD, if any intelligent life picks it up, they're not exactly going to be able to read it are they?
Who said anything about intelligent life finding it? Since the article summary says it may return near earth in 50,000 years it's not leaving the solar system. The only intelligent life that might possibly find it is us in 50,000 years. Though I doubt any information will still be readable after such a long period of time.
The whole point is to get some positive PR for Nasa. Letting people put their name on a CD that's going to Pluto (or really going near Pluto) gives them a small piece of the experience. That's the point.
As someone else has already pointed out there is ice not floating in water on glaciers in Greenland. That's most likely where the iceberg that sank the Titanic came from. Also, you forget that liquid water expands when heated. Increased temperature of the oceans results in higher sea levels because the water takes up more volume.
Power supplies are terribly inefficient. 66% efficiency is typical, this one gets 71% efficiency which is considered "good".
Of course that doesn't mean it's wasting 400 watts just sitting idle. That only means that when the system is drawing the full capacity of 1000 watts you're losing 400 watts to inefficient AC->DC power conversion.
I'm crossing Pensylvania off the list of states where I'd ever live. Felony charges?. Geez, maybe suspend them from school for insubordination, but giving them a criminal record is.. well criminal.
You need to get a grasp of reality: He wasn't playing a game, he was STEALING REAL MONEY FROM REAL PEOPLE
Why do people have to make up fantastical garbage like this? There was no money stolen. The things in the game don't "belong" to you. Thee's no money in the game that can be turned in for actual money. If the server crashed, your virtual thing is gone. If your account is taken away because you broke the rules, the game company doesn't give you back the "stuff", because it never was yours in the first place Riiiiiight, how about I just add you to my list of idiots who's opinions aren't worth the bandwith it's carried on then?
Please go ahead. The less poorly informed and irrational people responding to my posts the better. I heavily encourage you to put me out your foes list. I welcome seeing myself listed in it.
Combining the genetic material of different species, I think we can all agree, is hardly creating life from scratch.
I guess we don't all agree, because I don't. What does "from scratch" mean? In cooking it means taking basic ingredients and turning that into a finished product. Isn't DNA the basic ingredient to life? In cooking you can still use machines to do some of the work like a mixer, oven, etc and still have your product created "from scratch". Why isn't the same true in biology when you're using a cell as your machine to do some of the work?
Long time! But that was when we didn't have computers, materials engineers, great theories on lots more things. Look at how quickly planes advanced during WWII. There's another timeline that you could compare against.
And space flight is easily MUCH harder than air flight. A bird can fly in the air, but no animal but man can get into space. Anyway most of this is irrelavent. You can make it safe right now simply by not using the shuttle, and by buying Russian rockets.
Ridiculous. The Russians don't own some magic that makes spaceflight safe, they've just launched fewer manned spacecraft into orbit. If you count all the Soyuz craft, it amounts to about 60. The shuttle has flown a little more than 100 times. The Russians lost one Soyuz crew, the Americans two Shuttle crews.
If you think the Russian spacecraft is any more safe than the Americans, I suggest you take some courses in statistical analysis.
Don't you think that this says something about what they thought the risk was?
Oh I'm sure it does. Nasa has said the risk of the gap filler was minimal. With the new ability to inspect the Shuttle in orbit there's a few more things to look for, and potentially fix.
There is a scathing indictment of your attitude by Feynman.
An attitude you just invented. If you'll recall I was replying to someone claiming that the shuttle falls apart at the slightest failure. It doesn't. That was the point I was trying to make. Remember, context is key.
Yes it can be dangerous, just like airflight is dangerous. Airflight is a lot safer and spaceflight can be made similarly safe as well.
And how long did it take to make airflight safe? The first flight took place in a hot air ballon in 1783. It took until 1903 to even get to a primitive airplane from the Wright brothers. With spaceflight, we're not a hell of a long way past the hot air balloon stage.
Just look at the Russian Soyuz, which hasn't had a fatality since 1971.
And the Soyuz program has had about 60 manned launches compared to a little more than 100 shuttle launches. The shuttle has been lost twice, and Soyuz once. Sounds like about the same safety record to me. (which is completely igoring the fact that Soyuz has been redesigned a couple times during that period, so we have even less data on it).
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Upkeep costs would be negligable, and since they were not given I estimated them as zero.
This was a news article, not a cost assesment. Maintenance costs not being provided could simply mean the general public isn't interested in maintenance costs (who is, except policy makers?). Assuming zero or negligible upkeep costs is simply wrong. Your estimates of lifeguard pay is obviously wrong. Where did this "20% more effective" number come from? It sounds like you just made it up, since I can't find reference to it anywhere. You can always justify a cost if you over-estimate how much money it's going to save.
Who pays a lifeguard 20,000 pounds a year? That's about 40,000 US dollars. Either lifeguards are paid WAY more in the UK, or there's something very wrong with that number.
.8 lifeguards would mean no lifeguard on duty 20% of the time (making the whole system useless).
Knowing nothing about the system, I wouldn't be confident that it'll last 20 years. Computers have a way of becoming obsolete, or just breaking down after 5-10 years. How much does maintenance of the system cost?
I still have a basic disagreement over the metric you're using. What does making a lifeguard 20% more effective mean? Does that mean you can have 20% less lifeguards on duty? That works great if you have 5 lifeguards and can go down to 4. It works terribly if you have 1 lifeguard, since
This shows that some things, no matter the price tag, can be justified to save a life or the education system.
If your goal is really life saving, is it possible there's a better place that 65,000 pounds could go that would save more lives? The other question that I brought up in another post is if public pools even have anything like 65,000 pounds to spend on a system such as this.
I think people get too caught up in all the emotionalism of the immediate and visible life saving that this system offers. Something more boring like increased immunizations just isn't as exciting, though it might be a lot more effective per dollar.
65,000 pounds isn't a lot of money.. if you have the 65,000 pounds to spend in the first place. I think the point of it being a lot of money is that it's not terribly affordable for most public or private pools.
Have you worked with computerized vision detection systems before? Maybe you're just trying to be curious about how the system works the way it does and why, but it sounds like you're being critical of something you don't know anything about.
I know little to nothing about computerized vision detection systems and wonder the same thing. I have to believe that the decisions made in its design were made for good reasons though to solve problems I would have no idea are even their.
"What is your opinion of this and what do you propose to help correct this?"
If you can get away with blocking out large IP spaces of an entire country, do it. If you can't, don't. I don't receive any legitimate mail from chinese IP addresses and never will. I don't block anything at the moment, but if it solved much of the scanning and spam I see I'd probbably consider it. Unless you have a global market, why not do it if it solves more problems than it creates?
I think when a US company starts targeting large ISPs in the US, or are an ISP yourself you're going to run into trouble though. I know an ISP that discards all mail coming from roadrunner addresses as spam. That's a terrible practice for the ISPs customers who aren't getting legitimate email.
You didn't look very hard, and you don't understand all natural disasters aren't equal. Tornadoes are rare, and effect only small areas of land when they do occur. You also get advanced warning of them. As for Blizzards, unless you're a dumbass and go driving in the middle of nowhere during one they're harmless, but annoying. Sweltering summers aren't fun, but there's this new invention called air conditioning which eliminates any danger (again, unless you're a dumbass and work yourself to death outside). I don't know what danger you're talking about with Nor-easters, beyond the obvious idiocy of going outside in one.
That leaves Flooding, Volcanos, Earthquakes, and Wildfires. All those things are associated with relatively small areas of the country which you can just avoid.
No City or company in there right mind will build roads, or phone systems to handle maximum similtanous usage.
Actually there are roads built larger than they need to be for evacuation purposes. I know that's one of the big reasons for building some freeways in Florida since hurricanes are fairly common. They don't make 50 lanes of course, but evacuating the populace of a large area in a few days is one of the design constraints.
I do agree with the grandparent post though, the underlying assumption of this article is idiotic. People expecting to contact friends to tell them they're allright in an emergency is ridiculous. But I can easily see the need for an emergency communication system for emergency workers/vehicles and 911 calls. That may mean a priority cell phone service with a smaller backup capacity (only emergency workers phones, or 911 calls would be functional until capacity is restored). Whatever the solution, It does sound like a problem worth solving.
We had on time in one of our smaller cities - Lethbridge during Canadian Idol, you couldn't place a phone call cause everyone was trying to phone in and vote for there local boy.(he ended up winning).
Sounds like a problem with the phone system, not of capacity. Any call in show like that should have a phone number with a special prefix so the phone system isn't overwhelmed by people calling the same number. Choke all calls to that number off at each central office and I'd bet you can solve that problem. I know radio stations do that kind of thing all the time. I don't know why a similar nationwide solution to that problem couldn't happen as well.
Wow. I guess if you only define christians as the fundamentalist/born again type I guess you're right. All other christians aren't "real" christians. Perhaps you should expand beyond your narrow view of christianity and realize that there's a LOT of diversity out their beyond the fundamentalists that currently think they're the ONLY christians.
eDonkey2000 is the official eDonkey client.
eDonkey2000 was the first client and the inventor of the protocol. The author slacked quite severly on development for at least a year, and thus eMule was born. eMule accounts for probbably 80% of the clients on the network, so no matter which client is considered "offical" the network is really an eMule network now and has been for years.
Dude, read up on synthetic diamonds. The state of the art has advanced to a point where it is possible to create synthetic diamonds that exceed natural diamonds in purity/and or size
I know all about that. The post however was about hard substances replacing diamonds, not about producing gem quality stones. The recent developments in producing gem quality stones is irrelevant to the post, so I didn't mention it.
If we could make a drill out of this new material, doesn't that mean we would have a surplus of diamond to use?
No. Synthetic diamonds were developed by GE in the 50s. Most (if not all) of the diamond in diamond coated drills are produced through this process. The process developed in the 50s only produces what's called "industrial diamonds" and are nowhere near gem quality.
So any new harder substance would only effect the industrial diamond market, and have no effect on the gem quality diamond market.
Not a bad idea, until someone slams their hand in a car door, hurts themselves while playing racketball, strains their hand while helping someone move, etc and their handshake changes.
You could have a backup identifier at that point, but then your security is only as secure as the backup identifier.
Fingerprints never change, and only are lost if you lose the finger. Most people don't lose fingers during their lifetimes, but people do injure their hands for a day or two.
First, the wording of an individual news post and the slant/position that the post takes does not necessarily reflect my views and opinions (nor that of anyone else associated with the administration of Slashdot).
It may not reflect yours, or the views of slashdot but it does mean that you think this story is at least plausible. Unless they're the Weekly World News, News outlets don't post stories like "Green headed aliens have replaced the president with a robot!" Obviously Macromedia isn't intending to stop the software being used on laptops, but that's what the article summary implies.
The news item here is that Macromedia put out an overly broad EULA that has some awfully weird restrictions in it. That should be the focus of the summary. If you wanted people to focus on that, then write your own summary instead of relying on the obviously wrong and misleading slant of the article submitter. You don't have to plagiarize, but I suppose you could give credit to the article submitter for telling you about it.
Um, am I the only one wondering what the point of sending a CD is? Apart from the "prestiege" for the people on said CD, if any intelligent life picks it up, they're not exactly going to be able to read it are they?
Who said anything about intelligent life finding it? Since the article summary says it may return near earth in 50,000 years it's not leaving the solar system. The only intelligent life that might possibly find it is us in 50,000 years. Though I doubt any information will still be readable after such a long period of time.
The whole point is to get some positive PR for Nasa. Letting people put their name on a CD that's going to Pluto (or really going near Pluto) gives them a small piece of the experience. That's the point.
As someone else has already pointed out there is ice not floating in water on glaciers in Greenland. That's most likely where the iceberg that sank the Titanic came from. Also, you forget that liquid water expands when heated. Increased temperature of the oceans results in higher sea levels because the water takes up more volume.
Power supplies are terribly inefficient. 66% efficiency is typical, this one gets 71% efficiency which is considered "good".
Of course that doesn't mean it's wasting 400 watts just sitting idle. That only means that when the system is drawing the full capacity of 1000 watts you're losing 400 watts to inefficient AC->DC power conversion.
I'm crossing Pensylvania off the list of states where I'd ever live. Felony charges?. Geez, maybe suspend them from school for insubordination, but giving them a criminal record is.. well criminal.
You need to get a grasp of reality: He wasn't playing a game, he was STEALING REAL MONEY FROM REAL PEOPLE
Why do people have to make up fantastical garbage like this? There was no money stolen. The things in the game don't "belong" to you. Thee's no money in the game that can be turned in for actual money. If the server crashed, your virtual thing is gone. If your account is taken away because you broke the rules, the game company doesn't give you back the "stuff", because it never was yours in the first place
Riiiiiight, how about I just add you to my list of idiots who's opinions aren't worth the bandwith it's carried on then?
Please go ahead. The less poorly informed and irrational people responding to my posts the better. I heavily encourage you to put me out your foes list. I welcome seeing myself listed in it.
Combining the genetic material of different species, I think we can all agree, is hardly creating life from scratch.
I guess we don't all agree, because I don't. What does "from scratch" mean? In cooking it means taking basic ingredients and turning that into a finished product. Isn't DNA the basic ingredient to life? In cooking you can still use machines to do some of the work like a mixer, oven, etc and still have your product created "from scratch". Why isn't the same true in biology when you're using a cell as your machine to do some of the work?
Long time! But that was when we didn't have computers, materials engineers, great theories on lots more things.
Look at how quickly planes advanced during WWII. There's another timeline that you could compare against.
And space flight is easily MUCH harder than air flight. A bird can fly in the air, but no animal but man can get into space.
Anyway most of this is irrelavent. You can make it safe right now simply by not using the shuttle, and by buying Russian rockets.
Ridiculous. The Russians don't own some magic that makes spaceflight safe, they've just launched fewer manned spacecraft into orbit. If you count all the Soyuz craft, it amounts to about 60. The shuttle has flown a little more than 100 times. The Russians lost one Soyuz crew, the Americans two Shuttle crews.
If you think the Russian spacecraft is any more safe than the Americans, I suggest you take some courses in statistical analysis.
Don't you think that this says something about what they thought the risk was?
Oh I'm sure it does. Nasa has said the risk of the gap filler was minimal. With the new ability to inspect the Shuttle in orbit there's a few more things to look for, and potentially fix.
There is a scathing indictment of your attitude by Feynman.
An attitude you just invented. If you'll recall I was replying to someone claiming that the shuttle falls apart at the slightest failure. It doesn't. That was the point I was trying to make. Remember, context is key.
Yes it can be dangerous, just like airflight is dangerous. Airflight is a lot safer and spaceflight can be made similarly safe as well.
And how long did it take to make airflight safe? The first flight took place in a hot air ballon in 1783. It took until 1903 to even get to a primitive airplane from the Wright brothers. With spaceflight, we're not a hell of a long way past the hot air balloon stage.
Just look at the Russian Soyuz, which hasn't had a fatality since 1971.
And the Soyuz program has had about 60 manned launches compared to a little more than 100 shuttle launches. The shuttle has been lost twice, and Soyuz once. Sounds like about the same safety record to me. (which is completely igoring the fact that Soyuz has been redesigned a couple times during that period, so we have even less data on it).