Not only was he holding a long-haired white cat (I don't think it was a real cat by the way) he was wearing a captain's jacket and standing inside of a private jet's passenger compartment.
The article talks about suppliers at drugstores and at Walmart. The conventional drugstores are certainly not discount places, and while Walmart is, they're not exactly scraping the bottom of the barrel like a 99-cent store is.
Let's be fair. The summary is more like a ten year old's bookreport where aforesaid ten year old doesn't consider that the audience has no previous knowledge of what he's going to talk about so important details are omitted.
It jumps straight from checking out the SSID that he found on his phone and seeing his IP address to somehow having a device in his hand that he could manipulate?
It would cost more to regularly supply fossil fuel than to replace batteries every few years. Fuel has to be shipped-in regularly, probably bi-weekly or monthly, while the batteries should be good for closer to a decade.
Eventually Facebook will collapse under all its bells and whistles same as AOL.
Trying to be everything to everyone is never a good plan.
Unfortunately AOL is still not dead, more than thirty years after it debuted and a decade or more after dialup itself was ostensibly dead.
I have noscript on my browser and I see a lot of pages with embedded script from Facebook. I suspect that even if they collapse under their own mass, they're still going to be an Internet Force of Nature for some time.
If you have commercial service there's a fun way to annoy them. They don't call their facility a Network Operations Center or NOC, they call it a TAC or Technical Assistance Center.
I still refer to it as a NOC or as the COX NOC. And the people that work there as COX NOCers.
And for me that sort of thing isn't going to work since I do not feel a need to purchase their other services.
Part of the reason why we don't have pay-TV is that I do not want to pay a fairly large amount of money for something that I don't have interest in watching. I have even less interest in paying for something like this that also serves ads. Doesn't really matter what it is either.
As I see it there are two extremes in television distribution that establish a gradient. First is the free-to-the-viewer model. This is broadcast TV. The viewer has no choice but to receive ads, but the viewer doesn't pay for content outside of watching ads and pays for nothing short purchase of one's own receiving equipment. The advertiser is the entity that pays for the service in effect. The second is the viewer-paid-ad-free model. The viewer's subscription fee pays for the content delivery and the content and there are no ads.
The gradient lies in between these two positions. Inexpensive pay-TV like conventional cable or satellite requires the viewer to pay for the medium and requires the viewer to put up with ads. In turn the networks sell ads and negotiate with the medium (the "cable company") to have the network available to the viewer. More expensive pay-TV like premium cable or satellite requires the viewer to pay for the medium and to pay for individual networks on top of the base rate.
The problem is when networks like ESPN end up negotiating with the cable companies to where all subscribers pay for this premium network (and I call it that based on the per-subscriber fee required of all viewing households) even though a lot of people don't want to watch the network at all. I don't want to pay $5 - $10 per month because my cable TV company has a bad deal with ESPN where they have to pay for ESPN on my behalf whether or not I want to watch it. Throw on top of that the ads ESPN sells and airs and it's frankly insulting.
If Amazon tries to force Prime into an all-or-nothing proposition like the cable and satellite companies have then I have no reason to bother giving them my money. After all, if I want an all-or-nothing scenario where I'm actively paying for content that I don't want I can get that treatment from existing players. The only way I would consider Prime is if I can choose what I subscribe to. Amazon might have arrangements to the networks funded by the wholly-ad-supported-model like current conventional cable, but I don't have to fork over cash for those. If I don't want ESPN I don't want to pay for it anyway.
I suppose it shows how much a house of cards networks like ESPN are, if they don't have the compulsory model for subscription payments from people that have no interest then they probably wouldn't manage to stay in business.
I do not trust the cryonics industry to be actually doing the basic research to make it possible. Every time I've heard about it, they're taking the attitude that in the future, the ability will be developed to repair the damage caused by freezing human tissue, a capability that does not exist now. Then in the future they'll have cures for whatever ails the body. Then they'll have the ability to reanimate to then cure the body.
Simply put, no one should give the cryonics industry money to freeze human corpses or near-corpses until that cryonics industry has proven through laboratory experiments that it can freeze and thaw/animate large mammals with high reliability and get a good result for quality-of-life for those mammals, also with high reliability. This capability would demonstrate an ability to freeze without causing undue damage and to reanimate. Then they need to demonstrate the technique on diseased and injured animals, showing that the subject, weakened from the disease or injury, can survive the freezing and thawing/reanimation. Lastly they need to demonstrate that they have the financial endowment to support long-term operations and the costs associated with the reanimation and acclimatization process, and submit themselves to medical regulation.
As it stands now, they are not really regulated as medical businesses. They handle corpses, and since they handle corpses, not patients, they do not have to meet the burden that a medical provider has to meet, and as we've seen with abuses that other entities that handle corpses have been discovered to have committed, they do not have much oversight or regulation. Looking at the Ted Williams case, clearly this is not a mature, honest industry and should not be treated as if it is a realistic solution in any way.
And what about human lives is worth saving? There is no sanctity of life. Very few people actually make enough of a dent on the rest of humanity to legitimately be called important, and even then, many if not most of those people make negative impacts.
If you disappeared off the planet right now, only a few people would really, truly be devastated. Your parents, if they're still alive. Your spouse or significant-other. Your children. Possibly your siblings and possibly their children if you have a close relationship. Devastated as they would be, however, even they would probably move-on with life, and in time would remember you somewhat dispassionately instead of being consumed with mourning. Parents would remember you from time to time. Spouse or significant other would move-on. Children would have to move on as it's normal for their parents to die before them anyway.
We all die. We're all pretty good at handling the death around us, even in cultures where significant effort is made to thwart death. The death of a fourteen year old girl from disease past the ability of medical science to treat is unfotunate, but it's also pretty routine, and to be honest, our ability to suspend the body and preserve it is so poor that she's never going to be reanimated and cured from what ails her now. It's a shame that snake-oil salesmen have convinced some people that it's possible to do this, when all it will do is consume resources without any return.
Front-office medical staff that can't or won't make things work well for me will cause me to change providers for run-of-the-mill treatment or other appointments.
My time is fairly limited. I cannot afford to put up with problems in scheduling appointments or problems and delays with front office staff.
When the end worker is so many middle-managers away from the people who think that they run the company, feedback from the bottom does not reach the top, and directives from the top do not reach the bottom. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame wrote about a quality initiative that was started at Pacific Bell when he worked there, the only noticeable difference that reached down to him as an engineer was that the word Quality appeared preprinted on their internal notepad stationery. The people at the very top of the company can make decisions that can hire or fire a bunch of workers, but the amount of hands-on influence is pretty small, and if their various levels of subordinate staff get their own ideas for what they are willing to do or should be doing then it's hard for upper management to affect change.
Likewise, if the people at the bottom of the org chart have problems that they really need to get addressed, those layers of middle management can obscure real problems and real suggestions from ever reaching up. This is ultimately what builds corporate culture. Lazy, dishonest, or inept middle managers can cause a lot of harm, especially when they're unwilling to do their jobs to deal with disciplinary problems or performance issues. It can take a lot of work to document when an employee needs demerits, and if someone isn't willing to do that then the problem employee can really harm the team.
If these kinds of problems become the norm then customer relations usually goes to hell.
That is not necessarily a sign of being loved. Cox Communications is owned by the Cox family, it's private. It's still a very accurately named company though, based on my dealings with them.
Same thing is happening with new cars also. How many people are installing Holleys and Hookers anymore? Open the hood. Can you even see the engine?
The engine is usually covered up by thin plastic panels that either press-on or have a couple of mounting screws. Take that cover off and you still have an air filter, an intake plenum, a throttle plate, an intake manifold, a cylinder head with valves, a block with pistons, an exhaust manifold, headpipe, cat, exhaust and muffler.
Fuel is delivered via fuel injection. Could be multiport fuel injection into the intake runners for each cylinder, or could be direct injection right into the cylinder similarly to how most diesels work. The sensors on the intake plenum, intake manifold, exhust headpipe, and exhaust post-catalytic converter provide feedback to the computer so that it may deliver fuel and spark to most efficiently and powerfully operate the engine. Some engines use variable valve timing to further refine the airflow through the engine.
There is no need to bolt a Holley on. There might be some advantage in a better designed exhaust manifold or header, and that is still possible, but modern design and manufacturing techniques are producing exhaust manifolds and intake components that are pretty damn good, it would cost quite a bit to actually produce ones that are better. Even most aftermarket exhausts these days, headpipe-down or cat-back, are for sound, not for performance.
The 2.4L "Tigershark" inline four cylinder in my wife's Renegade has more horsepower than the 360 cubic inch (5.9L) 2bbl 360 that was in my '78 Chrysler when it was built. It has almost as much torque. Granted, these do not come at the same low RPM as the Chrysler, but it can accelerate quicker and gets more than double the fuel economy with a more comfortable interior. The Chrysler 3.6L V6 puts out around 300 horsepower, around 40 more than the 5.7L LT1 engine in my '95 Impala. The Chrysler V8s are well over 400 horsepower.
Back in the day, relatively inexpensive bolt-ons like carburetors, intake manifolds, headers, even cams would make a difference. Today automakers have a lot more compliance to meet, so they've had to take the tricks that were used back in the day and apply them with both fuel economy and emissions in-mind to squeeze as much as they can for the money out of reciprocating piston engines. One can still mod engines for more power, but it's neither cheap nor easy to do so now.
Slashdot Mirror
It's been done before.
Changing capacitors is not that difficult to do...
As much as I want one I already have that space set aside for the Bridgeport mill...
Not only was he holding a long-haired white cat (I don't think it was a real cat by the way) he was wearing a captain's jacket and standing inside of a private jet's passenger compartment.
The article talks about suppliers at drugstores and at Walmart. The conventional drugstores are certainly not discount places, and while Walmart is, they're not exactly scraping the bottom of the barrel like a 99-cent store is.
Let's be fair. The summary is more like a ten year old's bookreport where aforesaid ten year old doesn't consider that the audience has no previous knowledge of what he's going to talk about so important details are omitted.
...from the summary...
It jumps straight from checking out the SSID that he found on his phone and seeing his IP address to somehow having a device in his hand that he could manipulate?
How exactly are we supposed to be careful, as the summary suggests, if we cannot trust the ingredients list on the packaging to be accurate?
It would cost more to regularly supply fossil fuel than to replace batteries every few years. Fuel has to be shipped-in regularly, probably bi-weekly or monthly, while the batteries should be good for closer to a decade.
A couple of containers full of batteries every decade or so is a lot cheaper than shipping-in large quantities of fossil fuels.
Now all he needs is a monocle.
Eventually Facebook will collapse under all its bells and whistles same as AOL.
Trying to be everything to everyone is never a good plan.
Unfortunately AOL is still not dead, more than thirty years after it debuted and a decade or more after dialup itself was ostensibly dead.
I have noscript on my browser and I see a lot of pages with embedded script from Facebook. I suspect that even if they collapse under their own mass, they're still going to be an Internet Force of Nature for some time.
It's not communism if it's used as an incentive to get you in the door to use their paid services.
What does Hagrid's dog have to do with this?
If you have commercial service there's a fun way to annoy them. They don't call their facility a Network Operations Center or NOC, they call it a TAC or Technical Assistance Center.
I still refer to it as a NOC or as the COX NOC. And the people that work there as COX NOCers.
So you want your content delivered by UPS instead of Prime?
And for me that sort of thing isn't going to work since I do not feel a need to purchase their other services.
Part of the reason why we don't have pay-TV is that I do not want to pay a fairly large amount of money for something that I don't have interest in watching. I have even less interest in paying for something like this that also serves ads. Doesn't really matter what it is either.
As I see it there are two extremes in television distribution that establish a gradient. First is the free-to-the-viewer model. This is broadcast TV. The viewer has no choice but to receive ads, but the viewer doesn't pay for content outside of watching ads and pays for nothing short purchase of one's own receiving equipment. The advertiser is the entity that pays for the service in effect. The second is the viewer-paid-ad-free model. The viewer's subscription fee pays for the content delivery and the content and there are no ads.
The gradient lies in between these two positions. Inexpensive pay-TV like conventional cable or satellite requires the viewer to pay for the medium and requires the viewer to put up with ads. In turn the networks sell ads and negotiate with the medium (the "cable company") to have the network available to the viewer. More expensive pay-TV like premium cable or satellite requires the viewer to pay for the medium and to pay for individual networks on top of the base rate.
The problem is when networks like ESPN end up negotiating with the cable companies to where all subscribers pay for this premium network (and I call it that based on the per-subscriber fee required of all viewing households) even though a lot of people don't want to watch the network at all. I don't want to pay $5 - $10 per month because my cable TV company has a bad deal with ESPN where they have to pay for ESPN on my behalf whether or not I want to watch it. Throw on top of that the ads ESPN sells and airs and it's frankly insulting.
If Amazon tries to force Prime into an all-or-nothing proposition like the cable and satellite companies have then I have no reason to bother giving them my money. After all, if I want an all-or-nothing scenario where I'm actively paying for content that I don't want I can get that treatment from existing players. The only way I would consider Prime is if I can choose what I subscribe to. Amazon might have arrangements to the networks funded by the wholly-ad-supported-model like current conventional cable, but I don't have to fork over cash for those. If I don't want ESPN I don't want to pay for it anyway.
I suppose it shows how much a house of cards networks like ESPN are, if they don't have the compulsory model for subscription payments from people that have no interest then they probably wouldn't manage to stay in business.
I do not trust the cryonics industry to be actually doing the basic research to make it possible. Every time I've heard about it, they're taking the attitude that in the future, the ability will be developed to repair the damage caused by freezing human tissue, a capability that does not exist now. Then in the future they'll have cures for whatever ails the body. Then they'll have the ability to reanimate to then cure the body.
Simply put, no one should give the cryonics industry money to freeze human corpses or near-corpses until that cryonics industry has proven through laboratory experiments that it can freeze and thaw/animate large mammals with high reliability and get a good result for quality-of-life for those mammals, also with high reliability. This capability would demonstrate an ability to freeze without causing undue damage and to reanimate. Then they need to demonstrate the technique on diseased and injured animals, showing that the subject, weakened from the disease or injury, can survive the freezing and thawing/reanimation. Lastly they need to demonstrate that they have the financial endowment to support long-term operations and the costs associated with the reanimation and acclimatization process, and submit themselves to medical regulation.
As it stands now, they are not really regulated as medical businesses. They handle corpses, and since they handle corpses, not patients, they do not have to meet the burden that a medical provider has to meet, and as we've seen with abuses that other entities that handle corpses have been discovered to have committed, they do not have much oversight or regulation. Looking at the Ted Williams case, clearly this is not a mature, honest industry and should not be treated as if it is a realistic solution in any way.
And what about human lives is worth saving? There is no sanctity of life. Very few people actually make enough of a dent on the rest of humanity to legitimately be called important, and even then, many if not most of those people make negative impacts.
If you disappeared off the planet right now, only a few people would really, truly be devastated. Your parents, if they're still alive. Your spouse or significant-other. Your children. Possibly your siblings and possibly their children if you have a close relationship. Devastated as they would be, however, even they would probably move-on with life, and in time would remember you somewhat dispassionately instead of being consumed with mourning. Parents would remember you from time to time. Spouse or significant other would move-on. Children would have to move on as it's normal for their parents to die before them anyway.
We all die. We're all pretty good at handling the death around us, even in cultures where significant effort is made to thwart death. The death of a fourteen year old girl from disease past the ability of medical science to treat is unfotunate, but it's also pretty routine, and to be honest, our ability to suspend the body and preserve it is so poor that she's never going to be reanimated and cured from what ails her now. It's a shame that snake-oil salesmen have convinced some people that it's possible to do this, when all it will do is consume resources without any return.
How do you get to Shell Beach?
So, Tesla and Solar City join to form Tesla City.
Then in a bizarre twist, Tesla City merges with the relatively unknown Spatula Designs, to form Spatula City!
Front-office medical staff that can't or won't make things work well for me will cause me to change providers for run-of-the-mill treatment or other appointments.
My time is fairly limited. I cannot afford to put up with problems in scheduling appointments or problems and delays with front office staff.
That I won't disagree.
What's sad is that we're even having to make these comparisons, that these companies are so bad that we're talking lesser-of-evils.
I don't think it's even that complicated.
When the end worker is so many middle-managers away from the people who think that they run the company, feedback from the bottom does not reach the top, and directives from the top do not reach the bottom. Scott Adams of Dilbert fame wrote about a quality initiative that was started at Pacific Bell when he worked there, the only noticeable difference that reached down to him as an engineer was that the word Quality appeared preprinted on their internal notepad stationery. The people at the very top of the company can make decisions that can hire or fire a bunch of workers, but the amount of hands-on influence is pretty small, and if their various levels of subordinate staff get their own ideas for what they are willing to do or should be doing then it's hard for upper management to affect change.
Likewise, if the people at the bottom of the org chart have problems that they really need to get addressed, those layers of middle management can obscure real problems and real suggestions from ever reaching up. This is ultimately what builds corporate culture. Lazy, dishonest, or inept middle managers can cause a lot of harm, especially when they're unwilling to do their jobs to deal with disciplinary problems or performance issues. It can take a lot of work to document when an employee needs demerits, and if someone isn't willing to do that then the problem employee can really harm the team.
If these kinds of problems become the norm then customer relations usually goes to hell.
That is not necessarily a sign of being loved. Cox Communications is owned by the Cox family, it's private. It's still a very accurately named company though, based on my dealings with them.
Same thing is happening with new cars also. How many people are installing Holleys and Hookers anymore? Open the hood. Can you even see the engine?
The engine is usually covered up by thin plastic panels that either press-on or have a couple of mounting screws. Take that cover off and you still have an air filter, an intake plenum, a throttle plate, an intake manifold, a cylinder head with valves, a block with pistons, an exhaust manifold, headpipe, cat, exhaust and muffler.
Fuel is delivered via fuel injection. Could be multiport fuel injection into the intake runners for each cylinder, or could be direct injection right into the cylinder similarly to how most diesels work. The sensors on the intake plenum, intake manifold, exhust headpipe, and exhaust post-catalytic converter provide feedback to the computer so that it may deliver fuel and spark to most efficiently and powerfully operate the engine. Some engines use variable valve timing to further refine the airflow through the engine.
There is no need to bolt a Holley on. There might be some advantage in a better designed exhaust manifold or header, and that is still possible, but modern design and manufacturing techniques are producing exhaust manifolds and intake components that are pretty damn good, it would cost quite a bit to actually produce ones that are better. Even most aftermarket exhausts these days, headpipe-down or cat-back, are for sound, not for performance.
The 2.4L "Tigershark" inline four cylinder in my wife's Renegade has more horsepower than the 360 cubic inch (5.9L) 2bbl 360 that was in my '78 Chrysler when it was built. It has almost as much torque. Granted, these do not come at the same low RPM as the Chrysler, but it can accelerate quicker and gets more than double the fuel economy with a more comfortable interior. The Chrysler 3.6L V6 puts out around 300 horsepower, around 40 more than the 5.7L LT1 engine in my '95 Impala. The Chrysler V8s are well over 400 horsepower.
Back in the day, relatively inexpensive bolt-ons like carburetors, intake manifolds, headers, even cams would make a difference. Today automakers have a lot more compliance to meet, so they've had to take the tricks that were used back in the day and apply them with both fuel economy and emissions in-mind to squeeze as much as they can for the money out of reciprocating piston engines. One can still mod engines for more power, but it's neither cheap nor easy to do so now.