I think it's more like the non-optional "gratuity" fee I've encountered in so many US restaurants. If someone or something made my experience better or easier I'll definitely pay extra but it's at my discretion.
Some restaurants include an automatic gratuity if your party is above a certain number; some places it's 6 people--perhaps this is what you meant by "non-optional" because tipping is technically optional.
In Canada and probably the US wait staff are often paid less than minimum wage, the idea being that if they're any good then the tips will make up the difference.
I don't think this theory holds anymore though, since I'm told tips are now pooled and divided evenly to all wait staff and cooks by hours worked. This completely undermines the incentive-driven service model.
You confused that little feature with Android. Apple has never remotely removed an app from your phone or your downloaded apps folder, even after it's been removed from the app store itself.
If there's one thing I don't like about Apple's mobile products it's their unwavering desire to shrink the enclosure thickness by bare millimeters with each new generation, without really compensating for reduced ability to dissipate heat.
I mean, would it have killed them to at least add vents to the sides of their notebooks? A single vent area can't suck in cool air and expel hot air well; if nothing else some of the hot air gets sucked right back in. And the vent's already half-blocked by the screen hinge!
Heat dissipation through the keyboard and palmrest also sucks--my palms have broken into heat-induced hives a few times, and the "don't put on lap" edict can't be adapted--what am I supposed to do, not use the keyboard and trackpad when I'm on the road!?
Isn't there something like 5-8 seconds of delay on "live" TV these days anyway, to prevent wardrobe malfunctions, f-bombs and other public shenanigans from being broadcast to the viewing public?
As someone who has played with software based labs, it doesn't compare to the real thing. It's one thing to click on two test tubes and have a thrid change color, but it entirely different to see the color change in real life as you add the reagents.
Bingo. The same thing happens in astronomy, too. This summer I saw Saturn and its rings for the first time with my own eyes (well, through a telescope). It was a small white ball with thin bulges on the side, and yet that filled me with far more profound awe than all the high-res, full-colour pictures from the Voyager probes I've seen before.
The failure modes may not be exactly the same, but the risk of failure is much reduced on the Space Shuttle because the SRB's have far fewer components that can fail.
The chances of failure may be lower with the US shuttle launch system, but the cost of any such failure is far greater because there's no way to recover from it while the SRBs are still strapped on, as Challenger showed.
If the Space Shuttle had Liquid fuel rockets instead of solid rockets, and one of those boosters shut down, before the crew had a chance to react, the entire vehicle stack would be in an uncontrollable situation and you would have a Loss of Vehicle and crew. (just think asymmetric thrust). Buran dealt with that by having 4 strap on booster rockets rather than just one, and each booster had 4 motors, not one.
Liquid fuel engines have been computer controlled for decades--no need for human intervention except to acknowledge the shutdown. If a side booster shut down suddenly, the computers should automatically shut down the other one too, to prevent asymmetric thrust. At that point the side boosters would be discarded to reduce the stack's mass, then they'd follow a variation of either Return to Launch Site (RTLS) or Transoceanic Abort Landing (TAL) intact abort modes. If it can't make a landing site it still gives the orbiter and crew more time to ditch, and at lower altitudes and speed too.
And no, the Buran stack could not have been throttled back at any time. During the lift off, when the vehicle has the most mass, the vehicle could not be throttled back because then there wouldn't be enough thrust to keep the vehicle through its ascent path. Even the Space Shuttle didn't do that. It comes off the pad pretty much at full thrust, then throttles back the main engines as the velocity increases (after breaking the speed of sound IIRC), and later on throttles back up.
"Anytime" would be an exaggeration, but I wasn't even thinking about a launchpad abort right at liftoff; unless there's a capsule eject system the human crew is still screwed.
I was referring to an abort mode sometime before booster separation, but after the stack has enough speed and altitude (T+30 would probably do it) that if all engines and boosters were shut down and the stack went ballistic, that there'd be enough time for the crew to ditch, or the orbiter attempts to separate from the stack first.
With the US shuttle launch system, there's absolutely no escape for the 2 minutes the SRBs are strapped on.
Actually failure modes are basically the same. A result of having a vehicle attached to the side of the booster that you can't easily eject at lower speeds and altitudes and expect it to glide anywhere.
The US shuttle has one failure mode between T=0 and booster separation: you're screwed. The SRBs can't be shut down, and you can't separate either the shuttle or booster from the stack until SRB burn-out; catastrophic stresses would tear it apart if you tried.
The Buran stack, being entirely liquid-fueled, could be shut down or throttled back at any time, allowing the Russian shuttle to separate safely (in theory; even on the US shuttle, post-launch aborts have always been abort-to-orbit). It might not have enough altitude or speed to make a safe landing after an early abort, but it gives the crew a chance to eject or ditch.
Kinda the point. I doubt they asked Google (or the power company in the case of powerlines) for permission to shoot at their equipment. Article mentions one team having to cross country 3 days to fix it, or using helicopters. Damn expensive in equipment and manhours, so for damn sure Google didn't give it even if they were asked.
Not to tar the responsible hunters, but these were selfish inconsiderate yahoos that shouldn't be allowed to handle guns.
If you work for telcos that have thousands of miles of fibre traversing farmland, you'll quickly come to appreciate (especially in the hunting season) that shotgun damage is a fact of life.
And no, the hunters are not shooting at the fibre or insulators, but at the pheasant, grouse and other flying game creatures that routinely alight on the overhead cables (usually power lines) that carry the fibre.
Inconsiderate morons. I wonder how they'd feel if I tried taking out birds perched on their rooftops or even their fences. Even if I was a perfect shot I'm pretty damn sure they'd still scream bloody murder and come after me for violating their property, despite the fact they're doing the exact same thing to public property.
Toronto's CN Tower has a glass floor, about a 1/4 mile above street level and there are many, many people who can't muster the nerve to walk out on it.
Then again, there are others who won't hesitate to make a point of jumping on it. Sometimes in a small group at the same time. I've said for a while now, they should loosen the top layer (the "scuff plate") of one of the panels on April Fool's so there's some give when people jump on it.
The funny part is, "WE" will likely begin limiting our own population anyway. You may notice that the more prosperous a country becomes, the lower the birthrates. At least half of the countries in Europe have birthrates lower than self-replacement right now... China is already facing a looming population drop as it is - a one-child policy, an over-abundance of males, and an aging demographic. These three factors will pretty much chop the numbers down pretty harshly by 2100. Even India is showing a (albeit slowly) declining birthrate.
Any surprise that religious extremists seem hell-bent on keeping their followers, especially women, uneducated and poor?
I was going to expand on this to consider the implications of developed countries being too dependent on immigration to counter negative domestic population growth, but I was rather shaken at the realization it was leading to a far-right conservative perspective.
The problem is that carriers do not want you to have a general-purpose computer on their networks.
If that were the case, carriers (in Canada anyway) wouldn't be handing out 3G internet sticks like free candy (for a multi-year contract of course).
With that, I really don't understand the data restrictions on phones anymore. The internet stick (or via tethered phone for that matter) doesn't limit your computer's quality of Youtube videos, or prevent video chats, or becoming a wifi hotspot, so why impose such restrictions on a phone anymore?
Perhaps it's different outside of North America, but here (US and Canada) carriers were notorious for taking a phone with all the latest whiz-bang features (Bluetooth, wifi, tethering, etc) and loading them with custom firmware that crippled them. You had to either pay an ridiculous monthly fee to re-enable them, if they even allowed you.
Another neat trick was making a physical button on "dumb" phones launch the web browser to the company's website. This button would be right near the Call or End-Call button so you could easily hit it accidentally--bang, instant $5 extra for "web access without a plan" for the month, because few were dumb enough to actually include a web access plan on such crap phones. And you couldn't de-program the button either. The aforementioned crapware you couldn't uninstall or hide.
You would also likely never see a carrier-specific firmware update to fix any of the problems with the phone.
Apple was the first phone manufacturer in NA market to remove the carrier's claws from the user experience of post-paid plans. No carrier logo when starting the phone. No carrier-disabled features, tethering aside on AT&T. No 3rd party crapware you couldn't get rid of. Free firmware updates--the second-generation model (iPhone 3G) has seen two major OS updates and several minor ones.
Granted there are features Apple doesn't offer that other phones do (wifi station being my occasional gripe), and sometimes AT&T's inadequacies limits iPhone capabilities beyond USA borders (just because AT&T is crap doesn't mean the rest of the world's carriers can't handle video chat and high-quality Youtube over 3G), but to date the carriers have no real say as to what goes on the iPhone, or what features to disable.
With Android, carriers are free to return to their old ways unchecked.
You'd think so. But would these be the same educated, well-off landowners that sit around watching so-called reality TV, or the ones that don't even bother voting in elections anymore because they don't feel their vote will make a difference... or worse, they flat-out don't care who speaks for them in government?
Or the ones watching polarizing issues being "debated" on Fox and CNN? That's not being educated on the issue, that's entertainment appealing to base emotions, the same kind that manipulate the less educated poor, as you put it. Rational discussion is boring so they don't show it.
I'd also suggest that the wealthy, educated "property" owners (RIAA, MPAA, megacorps) are doing a piss-poor job of lobbying^H paying for laws that benefit the nation and not just themselves.
It's been claimed that the leaked documents will harm US and allied troops as well as the named informants (never mind that only a few were apparently left uncensored), which has some clamoring for the US soldier who leaked to be executed for treason.
I put it to you the ultra-right wing fundamentalist pastor who plans to burn the Koran on the anniversary of 9-11 will do a thousand times more actual harm, and destroy everything allied troops have fought and died for in the so-called War on Terror. Protesters have already pelted a US convoy with rocks, and this "church" hasn't even *done* anything yet except state their intentions.
Never mind it's a small, formerly-insignificant group of nobodies--they're white, they're "Christian", they're American. Never mind that every other religious group immediately denounced them on national TV--that won't get any airtime in Muslim countries because it gets in the way of an emotionally-charged issue.
If there's any traitor endangering US and allied troops now, it's this so-called church and its sociopathic leaders.
you could just use the search bar in firefox, or type your queries directly into the url bar in chrome.
really, who goes to the google front page anymore, other than to check on some interesting doodle?
Almost everyone I know who isn't a techie, and/or has set their homepage to Google. This is actually way more people than I know who use the search bar in Firefox or IE7+
The real question is where is the Republican outrage that a US megacorp is dealing with a crazed nuke-happy communist regime?
Right-wing media outlets would be all over any "liberal" organization (US or otherwise) that would dare deal with North Korea, or even the relatively benign Cuba, the rationale being that any business run in a communist country is majority-owned by the government itself so paying them therefore directly aids and abets that government.
Hello? Republicans congresscritters and their supporters? Can I get some outrage here? Just a little bit?
In all, I'm pretty convinced speed isn't the demon the US likes to make it out to be - beyond the fact that any speed is unsafe in the right circumstances.
To add to this, I'm convinced part of the *reason* speed is demonized in the US and Canada is the prevalence of automatic transmission. People started filling in that "free hand" with food, drinks, cell phones, makeup, and other distractions. Add the fact there are far more big vehicles in the US and Canada that handle and stop poorly (they need to "be better protected" in an accident), and it's a recipe for disaster.
Perhaps Microsoft wants to make the appearance of text the same across all platforms.
Apple got soundly roasted when they first released Safari for Windows, and it rendered fonts the Mac way instead of the Windows way. As a Mac user at home but Windows at work, I'm forced to agree it was a bad idea, and the latest versions of WinSafari have a "Windows standard" font smoothing option.
If Microsoft is trying the same thing in reverse (and I realize this is your own speculation), they had better include an option to go with normal Mac font rendering.
If remember the McAfee bug from a few months back, Intel was hit by this bug and shutdown their network. Maybe Intel is forking over the cash to fire whoever screwed up at McAfee and caused this problem.
It would've been at least a couple orders of magnitude cheaper, both short- and long-term, to arrange an under-the-table "understanding" with the right higher-ups.
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I think it's more like the non-optional "gratuity" fee I've encountered in so many US restaurants. If someone or something made my experience better or easier I'll definitely pay extra but it's at my discretion.
Some restaurants include an automatic gratuity if your party is above a certain number; some places it's 6 people--perhaps this is what you meant by "non-optional" because tipping is technically optional.
In Canada and probably the US wait staff are often paid less than minimum wage, the idea being that if they're any good then the tips will make up the difference.
I don't think this theory holds anymore though, since I'm told tips are now pooled and divided evenly to all wait staff and cooks by hours worked. This completely undermines the incentive-driven service model.
4-that they can remotely remove it.
You confused that little feature with Android. Apple has never remotely removed an app from your phone or your downloaded apps folder, even after it's been removed from the app store itself.
That restriction's been lifted. Skype happily works over 3G now.
If there's one thing I don't like about Apple's mobile products it's their unwavering desire to shrink the enclosure thickness by bare millimeters with each new generation, without really compensating for reduced ability to dissipate heat.
I mean, would it have killed them to at least add vents to the sides of their notebooks? A single vent area can't suck in cool air and expel hot air well; if nothing else some of the hot air gets sucked right back in. And the vent's already half-blocked by the screen hinge!
Heat dissipation through the keyboard and palmrest also sucks--my palms have broken into heat-induced hives a few times, and the "don't put on lap" edict can't be adapted--what am I supposed to do, not use the keyboard and trackpad when I'm on the road!?
Have you played any game apps recently?
Thanks to leaderboards and finding nearby gamers to ally with, a lot of simple game apps can legitimately request GPS and internet.
Contacts less so; I've not yet seen a game app that asked to email game invitations to all your friends.
Isn't there something like 5-8 seconds of delay on "live" TV these days anyway, to prevent wardrobe malfunctions, f-bombs and other public shenanigans from being broadcast to the viewing public?
As someone who has played with software based labs, it doesn't compare to the real thing. It's one thing to click on two test tubes and have a thrid change color, but it entirely different to see the color change in real life as you add the reagents.
Bingo. The same thing happens in astronomy, too. This summer I saw Saturn and its rings for the first time with my own eyes (well, through a telescope). It was a small white ball with thin bulges on the side, and yet that filled me with far more profound awe than all the high-res, full-colour pictures from the Voyager probes I've seen before.
The failure modes may not be exactly the same, but the risk of failure is much reduced on the Space Shuttle because the SRB's have far fewer components that can fail.
The chances of failure may be lower with the US shuttle launch system, but the cost of any such failure is far greater because there's no way to recover from it while the SRBs are still strapped on, as Challenger showed.
If the Space Shuttle had Liquid fuel rockets instead of solid rockets, and one of those boosters shut down, before the crew had a chance to react, the entire vehicle stack would be in an uncontrollable situation and you would have a Loss of Vehicle and crew. (just think asymmetric thrust). Buran dealt with that by having 4 strap on booster rockets rather than just one, and each booster had 4 motors, not one.
Liquid fuel engines have been computer controlled for decades--no need for human intervention except to acknowledge the shutdown. If a side booster shut down suddenly, the computers should automatically shut down the other one too, to prevent asymmetric thrust. At that point the side boosters would be discarded to reduce the stack's mass, then they'd follow a variation of either Return to Launch Site (RTLS) or Transoceanic Abort Landing (TAL) intact abort modes. If it can't make a landing site it still gives the orbiter and crew more time to ditch, and at lower altitudes and speed too.
And no, the Buran stack could not have been throttled back at any time. During the lift off, when the vehicle has the most mass, the vehicle could not be throttled back because then there wouldn't be enough thrust to keep the vehicle through its ascent path. Even the Space Shuttle didn't do that. It comes off the pad pretty much at full thrust, then throttles back the main engines as the velocity increases (after breaking the speed of sound IIRC), and later on throttles back up.
"Anytime" would be an exaggeration, but I wasn't even thinking about a launchpad abort right at liftoff; unless there's a capsule eject system the human crew is still screwed.
I was referring to an abort mode sometime before booster separation, but after the stack has enough speed and altitude (T+30 would probably do it) that if all engines and boosters were shut down and the stack went ballistic, that there'd be enough time for the crew to ditch, or the orbiter attempts to separate from the stack first.
With the US shuttle launch system, there's absolutely no escape for the 2 minutes the SRBs are strapped on.
Actually failure modes are basically the same. A result of having a vehicle attached to the side of the booster that you can't easily eject at lower speeds and altitudes and expect it to glide anywhere.
The US shuttle has one failure mode between T=0 and booster separation: you're screwed. The SRBs can't be shut down, and you can't separate either the shuttle or booster from the stack until SRB burn-out; catastrophic stresses would tear it apart if you tried.
The Buran stack, being entirely liquid-fueled, could be shut down or throttled back at any time, allowing the Russian shuttle to separate safely (in theory; even on the US shuttle, post-launch aborts have always been abort-to-orbit). It might not have enough altitude or speed to make a safe landing after an early abort, but it gives the crew a chance to eject or ditch.
posting to remove an incorrect mod caused by slip of the finger. Damn why can't /. have a time-limited "undo mod"!?
So'long as yah ask fust. Prob'ly all'ite.
Kinda the point. I doubt they asked Google (or the power company in the case of powerlines) for permission to shoot at their equipment. Article mentions one team having to cross country 3 days to fix it, or using helicopters. Damn expensive in equipment and manhours, so for damn sure Google didn't give it even if they were asked.
Not to tar the responsible hunters, but these were selfish inconsiderate yahoos that shouldn't be allowed to handle guns.
If you work for telcos that have thousands of miles of fibre traversing farmland, you'll quickly come to appreciate (especially in the hunting season) that shotgun damage is a fact of life.
And no, the hunters are not shooting at the fibre or insulators, but at the pheasant, grouse and other flying game creatures that routinely alight on the overhead cables (usually power lines) that carry the fibre.
Inconsiderate morons. I wonder how they'd feel if I tried taking out birds perched on their rooftops or even their fences. Even if I was a perfect shot I'm pretty damn sure they'd still scream bloody murder and come after me for violating their property, despite the fact they're doing the exact same thing to public property.
Toronto's CN Tower has a glass floor, about a 1/4 mile above street level and there are many, many people who can't muster the nerve to walk out on it.
Then again, there are others who won't hesitate to make a point of jumping on it. Sometimes in a small group at the same time. I've said for a while now, they should loosen the top layer (the "scuff plate") of one of the panels on April Fool's so there's some give when people jump on it.
The funny part is, "WE" will likely begin limiting our own population anyway. You may notice that the more prosperous a country becomes, the lower the birthrates. At least half of the countries in Europe have birthrates lower than self-replacement right now... China is already facing a looming population drop as it is - a one-child policy, an over-abundance of males, and an aging demographic. These three factors will pretty much chop the numbers down pretty harshly by 2100. Even India is showing a (albeit slowly) declining birthrate.
Any surprise that religious extremists seem hell-bent on keeping their followers, especially women, uneducated and poor?
I was going to expand on this to consider the implications of developed countries being too dependent on immigration to counter negative domestic population growth, but I was rather shaken at the realization it was leading to a far-right conservative perspective.
Too bad no one tells them the 72 virgins are, well, other engineers who preceeded them to the afterlife hoping for the same thing.
The problem is that carriers do not want you to have a general-purpose computer on their networks.
If that were the case, carriers (in Canada anyway) wouldn't be handing out 3G internet sticks like free candy (for a multi-year contract of course).
With that, I really don't understand the data restrictions on phones anymore. The internet stick (or via tethered phone for that matter) doesn't limit your computer's quality of Youtube videos, or prevent video chats, or becoming a wifi hotspot, so why impose such restrictions on a phone anymore?
Perhaps it's different outside of North America, but here (US and Canada) carriers were notorious for taking a phone with all the latest whiz-bang features (Bluetooth, wifi, tethering, etc) and loading them with custom firmware that crippled them. You had to either pay an ridiculous monthly fee to re-enable them, if they even allowed you.
Another neat trick was making a physical button on "dumb" phones launch the web browser to the company's website. This button would be right near the Call or End-Call button so you could easily hit it accidentally--bang, instant $5 extra for "web access without a plan" for the month, because few were dumb enough to actually include a web access plan on such crap phones. And you couldn't de-program the button either. The aforementioned crapware you couldn't uninstall or hide.
You would also likely never see a carrier-specific firmware update to fix any of the problems with the phone.
Apple was the first phone manufacturer in NA market to remove the carrier's claws from the user experience of post-paid plans. No carrier logo when starting the phone. No carrier-disabled features, tethering aside on AT&T. No 3rd party crapware you couldn't get rid of. Free firmware updates--the second-generation model (iPhone 3G) has seen two major OS updates and several minor ones.
Granted there are features Apple doesn't offer that other phones do (wifi station being my occasional gripe), and sometimes AT&T's inadequacies limits iPhone capabilities beyond USA borders (just because AT&T is crap doesn't mean the rest of the world's carriers can't handle video chat and high-quality Youtube over 3G), but to date the carriers have no real say as to what goes on the iPhone, or what features to disable.
With Android, carriers are free to return to their old ways unchecked.
You'd think so. But would these be the same educated, well-off landowners that sit around watching so-called reality TV, or the ones that don't even bother voting in elections anymore because they don't feel their vote will make a difference... or worse, they flat-out don't care who speaks for them in government?
Or the ones watching polarizing issues being "debated" on Fox and CNN? That's not being educated on the issue, that's entertainment appealing to base emotions, the same kind that manipulate the less educated poor, as you put it. Rational discussion is boring so they don't show it.
I'd also suggest that the wealthy, educated "property" owners (RIAA, MPAA, megacorps) are doing a piss-poor job of lobbying^H paying for laws that benefit the nation and not just themselves.
It's been claimed that the leaked documents will harm US and allied troops as well as the named informants (never mind that only a few were apparently left uncensored), which has some clamoring for the US soldier who leaked to be executed for treason.
I put it to you the ultra-right wing fundamentalist pastor who plans to burn the Koran on the anniversary of 9-11 will do a thousand times more actual harm, and destroy everything allied troops have fought and died for in the so-called War on Terror. Protesters have already pelted a US convoy with rocks, and this "church" hasn't even *done* anything yet except state their intentions.
Never mind it's a small, formerly-insignificant group of nobodies--they're white, they're "Christian", they're American. Never mind that every other religious group immediately denounced them on national TV--that won't get any airtime in Muslim countries because it gets in the way of an emotionally-charged issue.
If there's any traitor endangering US and allied troops now, it's this so-called church and its sociopathic leaders.
you could just use the search bar in firefox, or type your queries directly into the url bar in chrome.
really, who goes to the google front page anymore, other than to check on some interesting doodle?
Almost everyone I know who isn't a techie, and/or has set their homepage to Google. This is actually way more people than I know who use the search bar in Firefox or IE7+
The real question is where is the Republican outrage that a US megacorp is dealing with a crazed nuke-happy communist regime?
Right-wing media outlets would be all over any "liberal" organization (US or otherwise) that would dare deal with North Korea, or even the relatively benign Cuba, the rationale being that any business run in a communist country is majority-owned by the government itself so paying them therefore directly aids and abets that government.
Hello? Republicans congresscritters and their supporters? Can I get some outrage here? Just a little bit?
In all, I'm pretty convinced speed isn't the demon the US likes to make it out to be - beyond the fact that any speed is unsafe in the right circumstances.
To add to this, I'm convinced part of the *reason* speed is demonized in the US and Canada is the prevalence of automatic transmission. People started filling in that "free hand" with food, drinks, cell phones, makeup, and other distractions. Add the fact there are far more big vehicles in the US and Canada that handle and stop poorly (they need to "be better protected" in an accident), and it's a recipe for disaster.
But I wholeheartedly disagree with the government giving 'special' rights in exchange for money.
Street parking? Licenses to drive, hunt, fish, concealed carry, etc?
I'd say they're carrying on the fine tradition of doing just that.
Perhaps Microsoft wants to make the appearance of text the same across all platforms.
Apple got soundly roasted when they first released Safari for Windows, and it rendered fonts the Mac way instead of the Windows way. As a Mac user at home but Windows at work, I'm forced to agree it was a bad idea, and the latest versions of WinSafari have a "Windows standard" font smoothing option.
If Microsoft is trying the same thing in reverse (and I realize this is your own speculation), they had better include an option to go with normal Mac font rendering.
If remember the McAfee bug from a few months back, Intel was hit by this bug and shutdown their network. Maybe Intel is forking over the cash to fire whoever screwed up at McAfee and caused this problem.
It would've been at least a couple orders of magnitude cheaper, both short- and long-term, to arrange an under-the-table "understanding" with the right higher-ups.