> The US doesn't have "extremely high taxes." Compared to the first world it's in the lower end.
Be careful. When talking about economics, if you start comparing the US to Europe, somebody might bring up per capita GDP, and then where will your argument be?
Yeah, but the thing is, a job making alarm clocks would never pay the kind of wages the American worker demands. It would probably pay *less* than asking people if they want fries with that. Similar arguments apply to MOST of the other products mentioned in your rant: coffee pots, electric razors, dress shirts, designer jeans, tennis shoes, electric skillets, calculators, watches, radios, televisions, and sandals are all heavily commoditized products, and the main reason the US automobile industry is sinking is because the (heavily unionized) workers have demanded more compensation than you can get out of what people are willing to pay for a new car.
Working in a gas refinery doesn't pay well either, unless you're upper management or something, and as for the crude petroleum, in the first place it's got to come out of the ground wherever it's found, and furthermore the US is one of the leading producers anyway. (Third place after Saudi Arabia and Russia. We produce more than Iraq and Iran and the UK combined. The reason we're a net importer is because we're also the leading consumer of the stuff.)
You want to know why the US economy is so down right now? There are a lot of reasons, but the big one is simple: no economy can only increase all the time. Basic socioeconomics: when any economic system increases for too many years in a row, people start to think it will always increase every year forever. When that happens, people start to have unrealistic expectations and overvalue stuff. This causes values to become significantly inflated, a non-sustainable condition we call a "bubble". Sooner or later somebody notices that the emperor has no clothes, and the bubble pops, an event that economists call a "correction", because the market is correcting for the artificial value inflation. Sometimes in extreme cases there's an overcorrection.
Why is the economy down right now? It's down now because it was growing so well in the eighties, people started to believe it could climb steeply forever; this mindset directly contributed to several bubbles more or less back-to-back, the most famous ones being the dotcom bubble in the nineties and the housing bubble shortly thereafter, which was accompanied by a credit bubble. There were a couple of others in between. The bubbles have now popped, and we're living in the real world again. And yeah, I think we've even had a bit of an overcorrection.
It also doesn't help that the current Presidential administration is more interested in flamboyant gestures than anything realistic. Not that the previous administration was very effective in dealing with the situation either. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama don't appear to have understood that a large federal government budget deficit significantly undermines confidence, which is a much bigger deal for the economy than most people realize. The Congress bears a large share of guilt here too. But while these things have aggravated the magnitude and the duration of the big recession, we were *going* to have a big recession no matter *what* the government did. Things were just too good for too long in the eighties and nineties, and the piper had to be paid.
And if you think it's bad where you live, you should try things out here where I live (Crawford County, Ohio). We've got 15% unemployment last I heard.
Sure. If you store twenty-five Libraries of Congress, with optimal lossless compression, on the minimum possible number of CD-ROMs, stack the discs, then lay the stack on the surface of an oblate toroid along the largest circle on the toroid's surface, then shrink the toroid until the two ends of the stack exactly touch, an object that's the size of two PC keyboards back to back would just about fit in the "donut hole" area that's either inside or outside the toroid depending on how you define "inside" and "outside"; whereas, a football field would have nearly a hundred times the surface area of the toroid. HTH.HAND.
> Of course, you are conflating proof in a mathematical sense with scientific proof.
As someone who majored in math, I find the phrase "scientific proof" inherently weird. Science really doesn't have anything that a mathematician would call proof. The closest science ever gets to proof is somewhere in the neighborhood of "well, it's worked every time we tried it so far", which is what math people call a "conjecture".
I am not convinced that string theory *can* be proven or disproven at our current level of technological development and scientific knowledge. Either proving or disproving it could potentially be a useful result, because either outcome might give us information we currently can only guess at. But it may have to wait for other developments (if it ever even materializes at all; more than one physicist has suggested that string theory may be inherently non-falsifiable due to its intrinsic vagueness).
Indeed, from onoma (third declension, mat-stem noun meaning "name") and poieo (epsilon-contract thematic verb meaning "make"): onomatopoeia, a word that makes the sound of its own name.
Spelling is so much easier when you know the etymology.
> A single attack on a civilian nuclear facility... could fuel opponents > of nuclear power and set the nuclear energy industry... years back.
Now, that's an interesting point. I was looking at nuclear sites as being poor targets for terrorism, because their security is disproportionately high for the amount of terror an attack would create (compared to, say, a high-school football stadium, which is thousands of times easier to attack, and hitting a couple dozen of them would create almost as much terror as hitting a nuclear facility). But if the terrorist group's agenda were to harm the nuclear energy industry, rather than just cause random terror in the populace at large, that changes the considerations somewhat.
Nuclear sites are still difficult targets, but they are nonetheless potentially strategic.
Of course, I don't happen to *know* of any terrorist groups whose main agenda is against the nuclear power industry. What would that be, a weird splinter faction off of Greenpeace, or something?
It was called Byzantium when the project launched, but then it was changed to Constantinople when the CEO split the project in two and left half of it in charge of each of his two veeps. (The other half of the project was the Rome chip, but that's another story.) It didn't get renamed to Istanbul until after the hostile takeover.
Feel free to continue trying to use it to browse the web. Heck, you can try to use IE4 if you want, what do I care?
But as a web developer I quit testing in IE6 a year or so ago, and at this point I no longer test in IE7 either, since IE8 is on Automatic Updates, so any Windows system connected to the internet *should* have it, unless somebody has gone out of their way to avoid it, which is Their Problem(TM) as far as I'm concerned.
I haven't gone out of my way to *break* IE6 and 7, and in fact I haven't done any significant sweeping changes to the website at work since IE8 came out, so for now it almost certainly still works fine in IE7, and well enough in IE6 to be usable if you can ignore things like the lack of proper transparency support. The old legacy IE6 stylesheet that I developed for IE6 several years ago is still there and probably still has things covered pretty well. For now.
But, next time my boss comes to me and says, "I think we should change the website up again", IE6 and 7 will probably break. I don't test in them any more. How would I? All of the computers have been upgraded to IE8.
Web developers can't make users upgrade their browsers. But neither do we keep supporting ancient browsers forever and ever. You can upgrade or not, your choice. But don't come whining to me if the site doesn't look right in NCSA Mosaic. I try to support a wide variety of browsers, but I've got limits, and anything that came out more than three years ago is generally beyond the limits, unless it's still the *current* default browser for one of the major platforms (as was the case with IE6 well beyond three years until IE7 finally hit Automatic Updates, for instance). More than three years old and *used* to be the default browser? Sorry, I've gotta draw the line somewhere. Feel free to send me a screenshot showing the problem, but I make no promises.
> I guess I'm just strange, enjoying hearing from friends.
If you don't "hear from" these people a great deal more frequently than once a year, calling them your "friends" is worse than strange. It's really really sad. It makes me think you don't have any *actual* friends at all.
Well, I suppose, technically, in order to get a legal copy of Notepad, you have to get a legal copy of Windows, which has for most (all?) of its history always retailed, officially, for at least that much, at least in the US.
But personally, I can't imagine trying to edit XML in Notepad. In a text editor, yes, but not Notepad. It's too feature-impoverished. Notepad doesn't do indentation, doesn't match up grouping symbols or quotes, doesn't provide validation or other doctype-related features, doesn't provide for the insertion of elements in a structured manner, doesn't have syntax-aware (re)wrapping (neither automatic nor manual), doesn't even do syntax highlighting,...
> Of course German is going to sound guttural and violent if all you listen to is people > doing Hitler impressions. Real-life German is about as romantic-sounding as a language gets.
I don't know. Pennsylvania Deutch is derived from German, and it sounds pretty rough compared to, say, Brasilian Portuguese. Even English (which is only loosely related to modern German, really) is a bit rough around the edges.
On the other hand, there are languages with a much rougher sound. Klingon is the most extreme example I'm aware of, and it was constructed that way artificially, but Yiddish is pretty far over toward that end of the scale as well, and it got that way naturally. Speaking of which, isn't Yiddish related to German?
> Or you can just stick the disc in the player, go make popcorn and when > it's ready the movie has reached menu. What's so difficult about it?
Well, for one thing, then you're at the menu, which isn't where you want to be. From there it takes, depending on the DVD, anywhere between two and eleven button presses, each one in most cases followed by an annoying and gratuitous unskippable animation sequence, before you can actually get to the movie. And then if at any time during the movie a dust particle gets between the disc and the lense, you have to go back and repeat all that again.
I hate DVDs. VHS was better in such a wide variety of ways.
> The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected.
The majority of users don't have a clue what copyright law does or does not allow, either, and if they are unaffected by DRM it's because they haven't tried to do anything that it effectively prevents.
(Note that violating copyright law is not at all synonymous with doing something DRM effectively prevents. Making multiple copies of a DVD and passing them out to your friends violates copyright, but you wouldn't even *notice* the DRM. On the other hand, *watching* a DVD that you purchased is, at least theoretically, not a violation of copyright law, but in practice DRM can get in the way pretty badly, especially if you're trying to watch it on a PC.)
One supposes this study is looking at what effect DRM has on the people who *do* notice it.
With that said, the article summary reads like "we set out to prove this predetermined conclusion, and here's our study that does so". If that is indeed what's going in, the study is meaningless. You can construct a study to support any conclusion you want, if you decide the conclusion ahead of time and don't bother with proper controls or blinding. The conclusion may actually be correct, but a study conducted to support a foregone conclusion doesn't really constitute meaningful evidence of that.
> They may still be audible, but ultrasound will appear to go through them as if they were water.
Yeah, theoretically.
Thing is, "invisible to sonar" is not the same thing as "undetectable and untrackable". Ships would just have to start using more than traditional sonar. Given how *long* sonar has been in use essentially unchanged, I'm not sure this is really a big deal. An upgrade to the sonar room was probably overdue anyway.
Being invisible to traditional bounce-back-to-the-source sonar is one thing, but what happens if there are several sound emitters pinging at you from different angles and several listeners analyzing how each of those sound sources is deflected? Military ships don't usually travel alone these days, so networked multi-source multi-listener sonar grids ought to be very practical, if the sonar room equipment were designed to support it.
Also, besides sound, shouldn't they also be monitoring EM radiation (radio and infrared and such) at the very least?
Yeah, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Something like that, wouldn't you just instinctively escalate it to your boss? I mean, duh, that's what the boss is *for*.
> You are assuming it was in the public interest to find the person before they died. > This is a guy who didn't pay his phone bill. Sounds like a loser to me.
If everyone who HAS a cellphone keeled over in the next five minutes, the rest of us would probably be better off;-)
> And if the company is, say, 50% owned by public shareholders, you'll just screw the public by taking their money?
What kind of a sick, twisted individual would hold stock in Verizon? Not only is it ethically unconscionable, it's also patently inadvisable from a fiscal perspective. Buying stock in Verizon makes about as much sense as deploying a giant James-Bond-villain weapon in space.
> Exactly, what they should do is just give out the information to anybody claiming to be a cop
The "claiming to be a cop" part is relatively easy to fix (if anyone involved has the presence of mind to think about the problem clearly for two seconds): "Okay, look up the sheriff's department in your phone directory, which I assume you have a copy of since you are the phone company, and call me back."
Yes, this is *theoretically* abusable, but either the attacker would need inside access to phone company routing equipment (in which case, he presumably wouldn't need to call for the info; he could just get it directly) or else the attacker would need control of the phone lines at the sheriff's office (in which case, we've got a bigger problem than what information he could get from phone company). In all seriousness, if the phone company calls up the sheriff's office and asks to speak to the sheriff, I would say it's reasonable for them to assume the person they get on the other end is a law enforcement official.
> regardless of whether or they have a warrant...
Yeah, that's trickier. The warrant procedure is designed to protect the citizen, so obviously if the man's life is in danger and you're using the information to save him, that's in keeping with the spirit of the law (though perhaps not the letter; IANAL). But how does the phone company rep know that the man's life is actually in danger? Are they supposed to always trust law enforcement's word on that? Part of me would like for that to be possible, but another part of me knows that we *have* warrant procedure for a reason.
> It's no accident that it's practically impossible to talk to anyone > who has the least shred of authority to go off policy at many companies. > The people who answer the phones either do not know who that would be > or are trained to claim that. That too is part of the policy and procedures.
At a large company, this is really the only way it's possible to operate; otherwise the people with the authority to make or bend policy would be inundated with infinite numbers of phone calls. (And you do NOT want to see what would happen if the regular people answering the phone were empowered to change policy every time they hear a sob story.) However, it *ought* to be possible to follow the chain of escalation upward and eventually reach someone with authority.
> That's why phone numbers that ring the executive offices are so popular > on sites like the consumerist and why shortly after those numbers leak, > they get re-directed to customer "service".
No, that's just because of the scale issue I was talking about: if every customer with a grievance could reach the executive offices directly, they all *would*, and the executives would have to spend thousands of hours per week handling petty grievances. You can't run a large company (or any large organization) that way. There are a *lot* more people answering the phones than there are executives, for a reason.
It is arguable that the top execs should each spend a little time each week on the phones, so that they can hear a sample of the kinds of things customers are calling about. But it would just be a sample. There's no way they have time to handle every call.
> There's usually not very much to be gained by handing out the death penalty > illegitimately to innocent individuals, but if you don't see how threatening > large corporations with a corporate death penalty on spurious charges could > be profitable for corrupt politicians, you clearly don't have much imagination.
Come to think of it, accused individuals are tried before a jury. I suppose doing the same thing to companies *might* be a workable system, if it were implemented well. I wouldn't want to be on the committee to design that setup, though.
> If government is trusted to hand out the actual death penalty to living human beings > defended by draftee lawyers, why not to large corporations that are surely better represented?
There's usually not very much to be gained by handing out the death penalty illegitimately to innocent individuals, but if you don't see how threatening large corporations with a corporate death penalty on spurious charges could be profitable for corrupt politicians, you clearly don't have much imagination.
I would like to see Verizon disbanded, though. My own dealings with them were completely unsatisfactory, and you'll notice that I mention dealing with them in the past tense exclusively. (Actually, I never signed up to deal with them in the first place; they bought out a more-or-less reasonable company with which I had been doing business...)
> So now I have NO CELL PHONE at all. I sure showed them!! Now I feel like I'm Amish
I'm very pleased to say that I have never had a cell phone. It's bad enough I live in a house with a land line. Fortunately I can't hear the ring from my bedroom, or I think I'd lose my mind. That blasted thing rings all the time. I mean, you never get an hour's peace. You can't watch a movie all in one go, because you're going to have to stop for one or more phone calls at some point in the middle. You can't even curl up with a book and expect to get through *one chapter* without an interruption. You can't have a normal conversation with the other people in the house without being interrupted in the middle by someone who's not even present. It's terrible.
One of my life goals is to someday live in a house with *no* phone. If somebody needs to talk to me, and it's not urgent enough for them to get off their sorry backside and knock on my front door, then it can just wait, and they can catch me the next time they see me.
But since we're having this conversation on a discussion forum on the internet, I'm pretty sure neither of us is Amish. I know some Amish groups have gone liberal and started to allow buttons and (limited) colors on their clothing, and possibly even farm tractors, and I think some of the *really* liberal Amish groups will even allow a member to have a computer as long as it's for business (rather than for home use), but I'm pretty sure the internet is still considered worldly.
> Just say no to cellular phone companies.
Meh. To say "no", I'd have to be talking to them in the first place.
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> The US doesn't have "extremely high taxes." Compared to the first world it's in the lower end.
Be careful. When talking about economics, if you start comparing the US to Europe, somebody might bring up per capita GDP, and then where will your argument be?
Yeah, but the thing is, a job making alarm clocks would never pay the kind of wages the American worker demands. It would probably pay *less* than asking people if they want fries with that. Similar arguments apply to MOST of the other products mentioned in your rant: coffee pots, electric razors, dress shirts, designer jeans, tennis shoes, electric skillets, calculators, watches, radios, televisions, and sandals are all heavily commoditized products, and the main reason the US automobile industry is sinking is because the (heavily unionized) workers have demanded more compensation than you can get out of what people are willing to pay for a new car.
Working in a gas refinery doesn't pay well either, unless you're upper management or something, and as for the crude petroleum, in the first place it's got to come out of the ground wherever it's found, and furthermore the US is one of the leading producers anyway. (Third place after Saudi Arabia and Russia. We produce more than Iraq and Iran and the UK combined. The reason we're a net importer is because we're also the leading consumer of the stuff.)
You want to know why the US economy is so down right now? There are a lot of reasons, but the big one is simple: no economy can only increase all the time. Basic socioeconomics: when any economic system increases for too many years in a row, people start to think it will always increase every year forever. When that happens, people start to have unrealistic expectations and overvalue stuff. This causes values to become significantly inflated, a non-sustainable condition we call a "bubble". Sooner or later somebody notices that the emperor has no clothes, and the bubble pops, an event that economists call a "correction", because the market is correcting for the artificial value inflation. Sometimes in extreme cases there's an overcorrection.
Why is the economy down right now? It's down now because it was growing so well in the eighties, people started to believe it could climb steeply forever; this mindset directly contributed to several bubbles more or less back-to-back, the most famous ones being the dotcom bubble in the nineties and the housing bubble shortly thereafter, which was accompanied by a credit bubble. There were a couple of others in between. The bubbles have now popped, and we're living in the real world again. And yeah, I think we've even had a bit of an overcorrection.
It also doesn't help that the current Presidential administration is more interested in flamboyant gestures than anything realistic. Not that the previous administration was very effective in dealing with the situation either. Both George W. Bush and Barack Obama don't appear to have understood that a large federal government budget deficit significantly undermines confidence, which is a much bigger deal for the economy than most people realize. The Congress bears a large share of guilt here too. But while these things have aggravated the magnitude and the duration of the big recession, we were *going* to have a big recession no matter *what* the government did. Things were just too good for too long in the eighties and nineties, and the piper had to be paid.
And if you think it's bad where you live, you should try things out here where I live (Crawford County, Ohio). We've got 15% unemployment last I heard.
Sure. If you store twenty-five Libraries of Congress, with optimal lossless compression, on the minimum possible number of CD-ROMs, stack the discs, then lay the stack on the surface of an oblate toroid along the largest circle on the toroid's surface, then shrink the toroid until the two ends of the stack exactly touch, an object that's the size of two PC keyboards back to back would just about fit in the "donut hole" area that's either inside or outside the toroid depending on how you define "inside" and "outside"; whereas, a football field would have nearly a hundred times the surface area of the toroid. HTH.HAND.
> evolution does make testable predictions. It usually takes a while to run the tests, though.
In fact, running the tests takes an open-ended indeterminate amount of time, very much analogous to the halting problem in computer science.
> Of course, you are conflating proof in a mathematical sense with scientific proof.
As someone who majored in math, I find the phrase "scientific proof" inherently weird. Science really doesn't have anything that a mathematician would call proof. The closest science ever gets to proof is somewhere in the neighborhood of "well, it's worked every time we tried it so far", which is what math people call a "conjecture".
I am not convinced that string theory *can* be proven or disproven at our current level of technological development and scientific knowledge. Either proving or disproving it could potentially be a useful result, because either outcome might give us information we currently can only guess at. But it may have to wait for other developments (if it ever even materializes at all; more than one physicist has suggested that string theory may be inherently non-falsifiable due to its intrinsic vagueness).
Indeed, from onoma (third declension, mat-stem noun meaning "name") and poieo (epsilon-contract thematic verb meaning "make"): onomatopoeia, a word that makes the sound of its own name.
Spelling is so much easier when you know the etymology.
> A single attack on a civilian nuclear facility ... could fuel opponents ... years back.
> of nuclear power and set the nuclear energy industry
Now, that's an interesting point. I was looking at nuclear sites as being poor targets for terrorism, because their security is disproportionately high for the amount of terror an attack would create (compared to, say, a high-school football stadium, which is thousands of times easier to attack, and hitting a couple dozen of them would create almost as much terror as hitting a nuclear facility). But if the terrorist group's agenda were to harm the nuclear energy industry, rather than just cause random terror in the populace at large, that changes the considerations somewhat.
Nuclear sites are still difficult targets, but they are nonetheless potentially strategic.
Of course, I don't happen to *know* of any terrorist groups whose main agenda is against the nuclear power industry. What would that be, a weird splinter faction off of Greenpeace, or something?
Still, it's interesting to consider.
It was called Byzantium when the project launched, but then it was changed to Constantinople when the CEO split the project in two and left half of it in charge of each of his two veeps. (The other half of the project was the Rome chip, but that's another story.) It didn't get renamed to Istanbul until after the hostile takeover.
Feel free to continue trying to use it to browse the web. Heck, you can try to use IE4 if you want, what do I care?
But as a web developer I quit testing in IE6 a year or so ago, and at this point I no longer test in IE7 either, since IE8 is on Automatic Updates, so any Windows system connected to the internet *should* have it, unless somebody has gone out of their way to avoid it, which is Their Problem(TM) as far as I'm concerned.
I haven't gone out of my way to *break* IE6 and 7, and in fact I haven't done any significant sweeping changes to the website at work since IE8 came out, so for now it almost certainly still works fine in IE7, and well enough in IE6 to be usable if you can ignore things like the lack of proper transparency support. The old legacy IE6 stylesheet that I developed for IE6 several years ago is still there and probably still has things covered pretty well. For now.
But, next time my boss comes to me and says, "I think we should change the website up again", IE6 and 7 will probably break. I don't test in them any more. How would I? All of the computers have been upgraded to IE8.
Web developers can't make users upgrade their browsers. But neither do we keep supporting ancient browsers forever and ever. You can upgrade or not, your choice. But don't come whining to me if the site doesn't look right in NCSA Mosaic. I try to support a wide variety of browsers, but I've got limits, and anything that came out more than three years ago is generally beyond the limits, unless it's still the *current* default browser for one of the major platforms (as was the case with IE6 well beyond three years until IE7 finally hit Automatic Updates, for instance). More than three years old and *used* to be the default browser? Sorry, I've gotta draw the line somewhere. Feel free to send me a screenshot showing the problem, but I make no promises.
> I guess I'm just strange, enjoying hearing from friends.
If you don't "hear from" these people a great deal more frequently than once a year, calling them your "friends" is worse than strange. It's really really sad. It makes me think you don't have any *actual* friends at all.
> ...did notepad start costing $98?
...
Well, I suppose, technically, in order to get a legal copy of Notepad, you have to get a legal copy of Windows, which has for most (all?) of its history always retailed, officially, for at least that much, at least in the US.
But personally, I can't imagine trying to edit XML in Notepad. In a text editor, yes, but not Notepad. It's too feature-impoverished. Notepad doesn't do indentation, doesn't match up grouping symbols or quotes, doesn't provide validation or other doctype-related features, doesn't provide for the insertion of elements in a structured manner, doesn't have syntax-aware (re)wrapping (neither automatic nor manual), doesn't even do syntax highlighting,
> Of course German is going to sound guttural and violent if all you listen to is people
> doing Hitler impressions. Real-life German is about as romantic-sounding as a language gets.
I don't know. Pennsylvania Deutch is derived from German, and it sounds pretty rough compared to, say, Brasilian Portuguese. Even English (which is only loosely related to modern German, really) is a bit rough around the edges.
On the other hand, there are languages with a much rougher sound. Klingon is the most extreme example I'm aware of, and it was constructed that way artificially, but Yiddish is pretty far over toward that end of the scale as well, and it got that way naturally. Speaking of which, isn't Yiddish related to German?
> Or you can just stick the disc in the player, go make popcorn and when
> it's ready the movie has reached menu. What's so difficult about it?
Well, for one thing, then you're at the menu, which isn't where you want to be. From there it takes, depending on the DVD, anywhere between two and eleven button presses, each one in most cases followed by an annoying and gratuitous unskippable animation sequence, before you can actually get to the movie. And then if at any time during the movie a dust particle gets between the disc and the lense, you have to go back and repeat all that again.
I hate DVDs. VHS was better in such a wide variety of ways.
> The majority of users probably have no idea what DRM is and are thus unaffected.
The majority of users don't have a clue what copyright law does or does not allow, either, and if they are unaffected by DRM it's because they haven't tried to do anything that it effectively prevents.
(Note that violating copyright law is not at all synonymous with doing something DRM effectively prevents. Making multiple copies of a DVD and passing them out to your friends violates copyright, but you wouldn't even *notice* the DRM. On the other hand, *watching* a DVD that you purchased is, at least theoretically, not a violation of copyright law, but in practice DRM can get in the way pretty badly, especially if you're trying to watch it on a PC.)
One supposes this study is looking at what effect DRM has on the people who *do* notice it.
With that said, the article summary reads like "we set out to prove this predetermined conclusion, and here's our study that does so". If that is indeed what's going in, the study is meaningless. You can construct a study to support any conclusion you want, if you decide the conclusion ahead of time and don't bother with proper controls or blinding. The conclusion may actually be correct, but a study conducted to support a foregone conclusion doesn't really constitute meaningful evidence of that.
> They may still be audible, but ultrasound will appear to go through them as if they were water.
Yeah, theoretically.
Thing is, "invisible to sonar" is not the same thing as "undetectable and untrackable". Ships would just have to start using more than traditional sonar. Given how *long* sonar has been in use essentially unchanged, I'm not sure this is really a big deal. An upgrade to the sonar room was probably overdue anyway.
Being invisible to traditional bounce-back-to-the-source sonar is one thing, but what happens if there are several sound emitters pinging at you from different angles and several listeners analyzing how each of those sound sources is deflected? Military ships don't usually travel alone these days, so networked multi-source multi-listener sonar grids ought to be very practical, if the sonar room equipment were designed to support it.
Also, besides sound, shouldn't they also be monitoring EM radiation (radio and infrared and such) at the very least?
Yeah, that's along the lines of what I was thinking. Something like that, wouldn't you just instinctively escalate it to your boss? I mean, duh, that's what the boss is *for*.
> You are assuming it was in the public interest to find the person before they died.
;-)
> This is a guy who didn't pay his phone bill. Sounds like a loser to me.
If everyone who HAS a cellphone keeled over in the next five minutes, the rest of us would probably be better off
> Why is everybody hating on Verizon so much?
Not everybody. Just the people who have ever done business with them.
> And if the company is, say, 50% owned by public shareholders, you'll just screw the public by taking their money?
What kind of a sick, twisted individual would hold stock in Verizon? Not only is it ethically unconscionable, it's also patently inadvisable from a fiscal perspective. Buying stock in Verizon makes about as much sense as deploying a giant James-Bond-villain weapon in space.
> Exactly, what they should do is just give out the information to anybody claiming to be a cop
The "claiming to be a cop" part is relatively easy to fix (if anyone involved has the presence of mind to think about the problem clearly for two seconds): "Okay, look up the sheriff's department in your phone directory, which I assume you have a copy of since you are the phone company, and call me back."
Yes, this is *theoretically* abusable, but either the attacker would need inside access to phone company routing equipment (in which case, he presumably wouldn't need to call for the info; he could just get it directly) or else the attacker would need control of the phone lines at the sheriff's office (in which case, we've got a bigger problem than what information he could get from phone company). In all seriousness, if the phone company calls up the sheriff's office and asks to speak to the sheriff, I would say it's reasonable for them to assume the person they get on the other end is a law enforcement official.
> regardless of whether or they have a warrant...
Yeah, that's trickier. The warrant procedure is designed to protect the citizen, so obviously if the man's life is in danger and you're using the information to save him, that's in keeping with the spirit of the law (though perhaps not the letter; IANAL). But how does the phone company rep know that the man's life is actually in danger? Are they supposed to always trust law enforcement's word on that? Part of me would like for that to be possible, but another part of me knows that we *have* warrant procedure for a reason.
> It's no accident that it's practically impossible to talk to anyone
> who has the least shred of authority to go off policy at many companies.
> The people who answer the phones either do not know who that would be
> or are trained to claim that. That too is part of the policy and procedures.
At a large company, this is really the only way it's possible to operate; otherwise the people with the authority to make or bend policy would be inundated with infinite numbers of phone calls. (And you do NOT want to see what would happen if the regular people answering the phone were empowered to change policy every time they hear a sob story.) However, it *ought* to be possible to follow the chain of escalation upward and eventually reach someone with authority.
> That's why phone numbers that ring the executive offices are so popular
> on sites like the consumerist and why shortly after those numbers leak,
> they get re-directed to customer "service".
No, that's just because of the scale issue I was talking about: if every customer with a grievance could reach the executive offices directly, they all *would*, and the executives would have to spend thousands of hours per week handling petty grievances. You can't run a large company (or any large organization) that way. There are a *lot* more people answering the phones than there are executives, for a reason.
It is arguable that the top execs should each spend a little time each week on the phones, so that they can hear a sample of the kinds of things customers are calling about. But it would just be a sample. There's no way they have time to handle every call.
> There's usually not very much to be gained by handing out the death penalty
> illegitimately to innocent individuals, but if you don't see how threatening
> large corporations with a corporate death penalty on spurious charges could
> be profitable for corrupt politicians, you clearly don't have much imagination.
Come to think of it, accused individuals are tried before a jury. I suppose doing the same thing to companies *might* be a workable system, if it were implemented well. I wouldn't want to be on the committee to design that setup, though.
> If government is trusted to hand out the actual death penalty to living human beings
> defended by draftee lawyers, why not to large corporations that are surely better represented?
There's usually not very much to be gained by handing out the death penalty illegitimately to innocent individuals, but if you don't see how threatening large corporations with a corporate death penalty on spurious charges could be profitable for corrupt politicians, you clearly don't have much imagination.
I would like to see Verizon disbanded, though. My own dealings with them were completely unsatisfactory, and you'll notice that I mention dealing with them in the past tense exclusively. (Actually, I never signed up to deal with them in the first place; they bought out a more-or-less reasonable company with which I had been doing business...)
> So now I have NO CELL PHONE at all. I sure showed them!! Now I feel like I'm Amish
I'm very pleased to say that I have never had a cell phone. It's bad enough I live in a house with a land line. Fortunately I can't hear the ring from my bedroom, or I think I'd lose my mind. That blasted thing rings all the time. I mean, you never get an hour's peace. You can't watch a movie all in one go, because you're going to have to stop for one or more phone calls at some point in the middle. You can't even curl up with a book and expect to get through *one chapter* without an interruption. You can't have a normal conversation with the other people in the house without being interrupted in the middle by someone who's not even present. It's terrible.
One of my life goals is to someday live in a house with *no* phone. If somebody needs to talk to me, and it's not urgent enough for them to get off their sorry backside and knock on my front door, then it can just wait, and they can catch me the next time they see me.
But since we're having this conversation on a discussion forum on the internet, I'm pretty sure neither of us is Amish. I know some Amish groups have gone liberal and started to allow buttons and (limited) colors on their clothing, and possibly even farm tractors, and I think some of the *really* liberal Amish groups will even allow a member to have a computer as long as it's for business (rather than for home use), but I'm pretty sure the internet is still considered worldly.
> Just say no to cellular phone companies.
Meh. To say "no", I'd have to be talking to them in the first place.