Something like that, but not exactly. There are actually two Chandrasekhar limits, each setting limits on the mass of bodies not engaged in fusion. The lower, about 1.4 solar masses, is the point at which such a body will collapse into a neutron star. The greater, about 8 solar masses, is the point at which degeneracy pressure will fail and the object will collapse into a black hole. These are what Chandrasekhar worked out on the long boat ride from India to England. His work was soundly criticized by the reigning giants of the time, even ones who believed General Relativity to be true (such as Eddington). In the end, of course, he would be proven right, but the experience left him bitter just the same, and is largely why he jumped to another specialty once he'd written his master work. This became his habit throughout life -- study a field, contribute a seminal work, and move on to another.
As for the event horizon, it's also referred to as the Schwarzschild radius, although bodies that are NOT black holes have a Schwarzschild radius as well (it's just smaller than the object, and has no real-world effects). The Schwarzschild radius of Earth is (IIRC) about a mile and a half. All the mass of the planet would have to be condensed into a sphere about three miles wide to make it dense enough to have an escape velocity equal to that of light. However, if you were to drill that deep, you would not notice anything strange going on, because the mass of Earth is NOT within that relatively tiny sphere.
I think this is in great part because someone already paved the way, and with great success: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who solved the Schwarzschild equations while on the long boat trip from India to England. When he met stiff resistance in a field of study, he did the sanest thing I've ever heard -- he'd publish his work in a volume that would go on to become required reading for future generations, and move on to something else. I'm sure you've heard the saying "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke", but his way was more like "fuck 'em if they can't handle the truth".
Mal-2
How about handing out voluntary rescue beacons?
on
Privacy in the Woods?
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· Score: 1
Hand out unique rescue beacons to those who choose to take them. Require a deposit of course so people don't steal them (some people will take anything that's not nailed down), and make sure they know the device will do NOTHING unless they specifically activate it. Then, if they get lost, they turn the thing on. By transmitting in short bursts, it could transmit a fairly good distance without draining the batteries in minutes. Ideally, it would self-adjust the time between bursts by its internal battery level.
There's nothing wrong with a device that lets people say "I'm lost, come get me" if it does nothing the rest of the time. Also, if the deposit actually exceeds the value of the item, the natural attrition due to breakage will make the system self-supporting.:) I'm sure a fair number will get dropped, lost, stepped on, fallen on, or otherwise chewed up. This isn't so bad if you're not alone, your buddy will still have a beacon. Those that fail due to normal wear and tear should be covered by breakage fees collected from other units, provided you know about how long these devices can be expected to live.
If hikers want to provide their own, let them. Frequent users probably would, just to avoid waiting in line to borrow one.
Beyond that, think of it this way -- the 'Net is a dangerous place. Imagine if every time you stopped at a red light in your car, little gnomes could sneak up underneath and cut your brake lines, fuel lines, transmission cooler lines, whatever. And you may or may not know about it, but you sure can't fix it from inside the car. Do you just keep driving, knowing you may not be able to stop, or do you pull over and have the car towed to a shop to fix it so you don't kill someone?
My mother has asked me to set up her machine so that she can use dial-up service, and I refused to do this on W98. I said I'd have to take the machine for a couple weeks while she's on vacation and do it then. I also said I'd put on a fully-patched W2K, but I realize that it's not going to STAY fully patched very long, no matter what I do, because dial-up is so ungodly slow. So I'm highly considering talking her into a Linux setup I won't have to worry about, even if it's less friendly to the user. After all, what good is a luxury car with no brakes?
It is true that reviewer copies get out very quickly, but it is also true that this would be a thousand times worse if there were a thousand times as many copies floating around. Maybe YOU don't rewatch a movie in a theater, but what about all those people who went and saw "Titanic" 29 times? If they bought the DVD after the first time, the theater would have lost 28 ticket sales. This is certainly the exception and not the rule, but you can bet these are exactly the numbers that would be used to oppose your argument. If one $20 DVD sale causes the loss of slightly more than two $9 ticket sales, it's not good sense for them to do it.
As it stands currently, most copies of movies floating around are camrips taken in a theater. They suck (except that you get to enjoy the crowd reaction), and the MPAA would like them to remain sucky, if they're going to exist at all.
As for your "Underworld" scenario, I'd fully expect this to happen. Why would they change a business model that works? They won't even change models that don't work... and they're not going to start one with as much risk as selling DVDs at the theater. They might take more kindly to notions such as selling "Kill Bill Vol. 1" at the theater which is showing "Kill Bill Vol. 2", because they're not in direct competition and obviously will attract the same demographic.
This won't happen for the following reasons (and probably more):
1. There's no guarantee you won't show this newly acquired DVD to someone who HASN'T seen the movie in a theater.
2. If you have the DVD, you probably won't go back and watch that movie in a theater again. The biggest movies attract a lot of repeat traffic, they're not about to jeopardize that.
3. What's to stop you from ripping that DVD and posting it immediately? Capcode? Are you going to submit ID when you buy the DVD and sign for it, with serial number noted, so they can track what you do with it?
4. You could easily send that DVD overseas where the movie hasn't even been released yet. Oh the humanity! And all those people have evil, society-destroying Region-free players!
This isn't going to happen simply because it isn't good for movie theaters and, although I don't have the numbers to crunch, probably wouldn't be good for MPAA member studios either.
If you're inclined to do phone sex in plaintext, why not just hop onto IRC and do it with someone who is also inclined to do it in plaintext, rather than dealing with an intermediary? It's not like it's the least bit difficult to find someone to "hot chat", though they may be far from what they represent themselves to be. However, this is just as true of phone sex workers, who generally have only one common attribute (they're of the specified gender), and fake everything else as necessary. If you're already using a website to make the call, just launch a Java IRC client instead.
As for anonymity, that went out the window for normal telephone service a long time ago. Sure you can block your Caller ID, but most people won't even take your call, assuming (reasonably) that it's a marketer or survey drone out to interrupt their dinner. Why can't the operator announce the IP address and the reverse lookup results at the beginning of the call, and let the recipient decide whether or not to handle that call? If scammers start using anonymizing proxies, they will quickly become as shunned as people with Caller ID blocked, and for the same reasons. If they don't, then just the fact that they are "calling" internationally will raise all sorts of alarm bells.
In return, when you tire of your used CDs, donate them to the library that has given so much to you. (I mean the pressed, silver-on-both-sides kind, of course.) A lot of the music in the library comes from the librarians, or was selected by them. Getting friendly with them and letting them know what you like is a good idea, as they will most likely be pleased to let you know when something "your style" comes in. They may even flag things you'd never heard of.
Why does it seem to me that many of the Compression Crusaders, who insist that lossy compression is inherently intolerable, are the same people who listen to Ween on $8000 stereos? I will certainly agree there is a point where compression becomes noticeable, and another where it becomes intolerable, but these differ greatly from one person to the next. My girlfriend can listen to 128kbps MP3s without being bothered by artifacts that have me begging her to turn it off. Also, if I hear something that MIGHT be an artifact, it's annoying to spend the mental CPU cycles trying to figure it out. If I'm listening off a CD, at least I know I didn't put that sound there inadvertently.
My personal pain point seems to be at about 160kbps. I can sometimes pick up artifacts there, but they don't overwhelm the music. At 128, they often do. 192 is good enough for stuff lacking a huge dynamic range. It's NOT good enough for classical or chamber jazz, those get ripped with vbr LAME averaging about 192 but sounding like 224. But on the other extreme, is Ween's "Mourning Glory" diminished significantly by being encoded at 96kbps? Puh-leaze.
Meteor shower raves are something you should partake of, if you have any interest in attending a rave at all. They can be very cold, being outdoors and all, but you will be guaranteed something to do aside from dancing, drugs, loud music, and ill-fated attempts to hook up. If you DO decide to partake of some or all of the above mentioned activities, the meteor shower can still be quite an enhancement -- think Van Gogh's "Starry Night".
There have been critics of Einstein ever since he released his theories. You don't hear much about them as they are all heaped into one group and astrocized.
Would that be to blast the offender into space to exile him, or to make him wear artificial turf?
There are many things in this universe that appear to defy light speed. Unfortunately, not one of them is capable of transmitting useful information faster than light. Considering that this holds true at all levels of physics, one would almost conclude that the universe is out to "get" us.:-)
Maybe it's the other way around -- a hard speed-of-light barrier essentially makes interstellar war on any scale impractical. This could be why we're still here and not a Borg colony. It won't stop us from colonizing this system, and in the long run won't prevent colonizing with generation ships, but unless aliens have a much longer life- (and attention-) span than us humans, they're not going to bother attacking us.
I took the advice of using a provider-independent e-mail address a long time ago, and I have certainly not regretted it. If you were able to buy totally transparent telephone forwarding service so that your number was one degree removed from your provider, number portability would never have become an issue. Of course we really can't afford to go handing out twice as many numbers since there is a limit to the number available before splitting and/or overlaying area codes. (Or maybe we could, if the forwarding numbers got their own area codes.)
In any case, if anyone I know changes their e-mail address due to a change of provider, I advise then to get a forwarding address now while it's still relatively painless and save themselves a lot of trouble down the road.
At 250kph, all you need after a crash is a shovel. Motorcyclists who crack up at this speed usually end up scattered across several counties, so I don't see that a skier is going to be much safer (save that there are somewhat fewer obstacles).
With Everest, the problem everyone faces is that there's precious little air to breathe up there, so unless you're Andean or a Sherpa, you can only survive for a limited time without supplemental oxygen. No amount of monitoring will change this, although it may be able to identify afflicted individuals in time to save them (mostly from doing something stupid while impaired) and keep them from pushing any further. Any technology truly sufficient to overcome this would be seen as "cheating" in some sense, as is claimed by purists about O2-assisted climbs of any sort.
There is an effective way to overclock the entire nervous system -- it's called "methamphetamine". Unfortunately, system stability cannot be guaranteed, and what does get accomplished (fast) will generally be quite useless. There are lots of other ways to think faster as well, provided you're not particularly concerned with the accuracy of the results. Just like silicon overclocking, it also has a detrimental effect on the lifespan of the parts being tweaked if overdone.
Even with range limitations they're hardly useless. Both rovers landed in relatively fertile areas for exploration, and Opportunity would have still been a big success even if it proved unable to leave the crater it landed in. The main thing that comes to my mind is to find the edges of the ancient ocean and explore there -- partly because tidepools on Earth are teeming with life, and partly because shallow water means fossils (if present) won't be buried very deep. I noticed very early on that the rocks Opportunity was looking at looked an awful lot like tidepool rocks, at least ones from the eastern Pacific shore (the only ones I've seen firsthand). I knew there was good reason for NASA to be REALLY damn sure before announcing there was a lot of water on Mars at one time, but I pretty well was convinced as soon as I saw those distinctive wormholed rocks.
However, it looks like their lifespan will be determined by a few factors, some of which are within human control and some which are not:
1. Dust storms. Seems to me one good one would pretty well take a rover out of service from dust buildup on the panels alone.
2. Equipment failure, particularly the "always on and draining power" type. One has already made Opportunity a little bit gimpy, but I doubt a single such failure would be fatal. Cumulatively, several would just be too much to bear.
3. Shorter and/or darker Martian days as the seasons and distance from the sun change. This won't take out a rover outright of course, but they could compound the prior two problems. At least these events are predictable.
4. The Martian Defense System finally tracks the rovers down and explodes them. Turns out the reason they didn't shoot the first time is they thought it was just another shipment of punching balloons for their nitrous oxide-fueled nightlife. Once they realize we sent ROVERS and not RAVERS, they're going to be mighty pissed off.
It seems to me they'd sell more of these things if they just released them under the name of whatever Chinese company they have contracted them out to. At this point, the Iomega name is a net negative, and brand recognition has turned to brand revulsion. Perhaps they could take a page from touring bands of the 1930's and 40's -- fire everyone, make up a new name, and quietly re-hire the people they like.
Additionally, as demand goes down, price goes up. Supercomputer X is going to be a lot cheaper if there is a global market for 10,000 of them than it will be if the demand is 10. Clusters, of course, do not suffer from this effect because they will use whatever hardware they can afford (that works) and will optimize away bottlenecks as best they can with remaining funds.
Every time she called, you needed to explicitly say "this call is being recorded, if you do not consent then please disconnect now." If you did this, either she would have gone away a lot faster, or you would have had your consent. Either way, you win.
I had to upgrade a server from three 9 GB SCSI drives to whatever the boss could afford (which turned out to be a 160 GB IDE and a DVD±RW), and this case had five 80 MM fans inside, one of them inside a standard ATX power supply, which fit neatly into the case. Everything but the PCI card riser is stock off the shelf parts. When I reduced the clutter (rounded cables, two fewer drives), I was able to remove the two fans behind the drive cage and significantly reduce the noise of the machine without any sort of heat problem. That office has wonky air conditioning, but even on bad days it won't get above 85 degrees or so.
The machine itself is kinda sad by today's standards, just a dual P3-500 and 512 MB of RAM, and there's no particular reason for it to be in a 2U server case at all, except that the mini-fridge sits on top of it quite neatly. The only compromises forced by the case are:
1. Oddly placed power supply. In this one it's near the front, on the right side, and therefore blows its warm air directly across the motherboard. This also creates some rather odd cable clutter problems, but nothing too terrible.
2. PCI card riser required. The board has six PCI slots and in this case you can only use two, and those two have to be "bent" 90 degrees to accommodate the low profile case. If you're using low-rise PCI cards and can find an inventive way to secure them, you may be able to do without the riser, but the case probably isn't designed that way. I believe this server case came with the PCI riser, it certainly looks like it would have to be.
3. Limited choice in video cards. Basically you HAVE to go low-profile here, since there is no way to squeeze both an AGP and PCI riser into the same case (unless the AGP riser goes the other direction, again something the case is not designed for). But there are low-end DirectX 9 compliant parts that do meet this size requirement. Again you're going to have to be inventive with the mounting.
4. A single 5.25" optical drive bay, and generally a single 3.5" floppy bay (though you may well use it another way). This is hardly insurmountable, since you can put various different types of drives in each of the stacked computers.
Also note that rackmount cases are generally THICK, and that means HEAVY. Don't expect getting a full-size rack full of computers up and down a flight of stairs to be easy. It may well end up weighing more than a fridge, and those are bad enough to move around. Of course the rack would be somewhat more maneuverable, but that doesn't reduce the sheer grunt work needed to get the damn thing up the stairs. Once you get it up there, you may well move it around the house with ease (they usually have casters), but you won't be taking it LANning any time soon.
All of the above are valid worries. Worrying about small, noisy fans isn't really one of them though. There are LOTS of 80 mm fan choices (some would say too many), and lots of places to mount them in the case.
Usually on things expected to take impact (like headphone jacks), the actual contacts are dwarfed by electrically non-functional, purely structural solder points. Usually these are tabs attached to the shield for the jack. If those don't move, the actual contact solder joints aren't going to either.
I've had audio gear fail because of problems like this, and even one monitor. You probably believe permanently integrated cables are a bad thing, but I've never had the socket's solder joints break on a monitor which has none. If you're in the habit of smashing your monitor directly up against a wall, integrated cables are a GOOD thing.
I was able to salvage that monitor by taking it apart and re-soldering all 18 points (15 for the socket itself and three for the shell), and I still have it. I don't use it normally, since there are already two 17" CRTs on the desk, but it does work and is great for hauling out when someone brings me broken or diseased gear.
Now that iPod Mini may well be too small to spare the board space necessary for such anchoring, in which case they should have designed around it. Maybe put something else that doesn't get impact on the daughterboard, and leave the headphone jack on the main board. Maybe find a way to spare the space for a couple of screws to bridge the two boards. Whatever works, but I'm sure they'll implement some sort of change in the next revision. If there's one principle Apple is sure to understand, it's that their reputation is worth a lot more than a few cents saved on gadgets that destroy that name.
Let's just hope they do the right thing with the existing, breakable ones.
Look, how about I set you up with that penguin gal - I know she's not as pretty, but I promise you'll really get to like her as time goes on, and most importantly she won't leave you high and dry when you need her the most. She'll stick with you thru thick and thin.
Slashdot Mirror
Something like that, but not exactly. There are actually two Chandrasekhar limits, each setting limits on the mass of bodies not engaged in fusion. The lower, about 1.4 solar masses, is the point at which such a body will collapse into a neutron star. The greater, about 8 solar masses, is the point at which degeneracy pressure will fail and the object will collapse into a black hole. These are what Chandrasekhar worked out on the long boat ride from India to England. His work was soundly criticized by the reigning giants of the time, even ones who believed General Relativity to be true (such as Eddington). In the end, of course, he would be proven right, but the experience left him bitter just the same, and is largely why he jumped to another specialty once he'd written his master work. This became his habit throughout life -- study a field, contribute a seminal work, and move on to another.
As for the event horizon, it's also referred to as the Schwarzschild radius, although bodies that are NOT black holes have a Schwarzschild radius as well (it's just smaller than the object, and has no real-world effects). The Schwarzschild radius of Earth is (IIRC) about a mile and a half. All the mass of the planet would have to be condensed into a sphere about three miles wide to make it dense enough to have an escape velocity equal to that of light. However, if you were to drill that deep, you would not notice anything strange going on, because the mass of Earth is NOT within that relatively tiny sphere.
Mal-2
It is my firm belief that it is a mistake to hold firm beliefs.
Mal-2
I think this is in great part because someone already paved the way, and with great success: Subramanyan Chandrasekhar, who solved the Schwarzschild equations while on the long boat trip from India to England. When he met stiff resistance in a field of study, he did the sanest thing I've ever heard -- he'd publish his work in a volume that would go on to become required reading for future generations, and move on to something else. I'm sure you've heard the saying "fuck 'em if they can't take a joke", but his way was more like "fuck 'em if they can't handle the truth".
Mal-2
Hand out unique rescue beacons to those who choose to take them. Require a deposit of course so people don't steal them (some people will take anything that's not nailed down), and make sure they know the device will do NOTHING unless they specifically activate it. Then, if they get lost, they turn the thing on. By transmitting in short bursts, it could transmit a fairly good distance without draining the batteries in minutes. Ideally, it would self-adjust the time between bursts by its internal battery level.
:) I'm sure a fair number will get dropped, lost, stepped on, fallen on, or otherwise chewed up. This isn't so bad if you're not alone, your buddy will still have a beacon. Those that fail due to normal wear and tear should be covered by breakage fees collected from other units, provided you know about how long these devices can be expected to live.
There's nothing wrong with a device that lets people say "I'm lost, come get me" if it does nothing the rest of the time. Also, if the deposit actually exceeds the value of the item, the natural attrition due to breakage will make the system self-supporting.
If hikers want to provide their own, let them. Frequent users probably would, just to avoid waiting in line to borrow one.
Mal-2
Beyond that, think of it this way -- the 'Net is a dangerous place. Imagine if every time you stopped at a red light in your car, little gnomes could sneak up underneath and cut your brake lines, fuel lines, transmission cooler lines, whatever. And you may or may not know about it, but you sure can't fix it from inside the car. Do you just keep driving, knowing you may not be able to stop, or do you pull over and have the car towed to a shop to fix it so you don't kill someone?
My mother has asked me to set up her machine so that she can use dial-up service, and I refused to do this on W98. I said I'd have to take the machine for a couple weeks while she's on vacation and do it then. I also said I'd put on a fully-patched W2K, but I realize that it's not going to STAY fully patched very long, no matter what I do, because dial-up is so ungodly slow. So I'm highly considering talking her into a Linux setup I won't have to worry about, even if it's less friendly to the user. After all, what good is a luxury car with no brakes?
Mal-2
Unfortunately, SCO's got a 7-2 offsuit and IBM's got A-K suited.
Mal-2
It is true that reviewer copies get out very quickly, but it is also true that this would be a thousand times worse if there were a thousand times as many copies floating around. Maybe YOU don't rewatch a movie in a theater, but what about all those people who went and saw "Titanic" 29 times? If they bought the DVD after the first time, the theater would have lost 28 ticket sales. This is certainly the exception and not the rule, but you can bet these are exactly the numbers that would be used to oppose your argument. If one $20 DVD sale causes the loss of slightly more than two $9 ticket sales, it's not good sense for them to do it.
As it stands currently, most copies of movies floating around are camrips taken in a theater. They suck (except that you get to enjoy the crowd reaction), and the MPAA would like them to remain sucky, if they're going to exist at all.
As for your "Underworld" scenario, I'd fully expect this to happen. Why would they change a business model that works? They won't even change models that don't work... and they're not going to start one with as much risk as selling DVDs at the theater. They might take more kindly to notions such as selling "Kill Bill Vol. 1" at the theater which is showing "Kill Bill Vol. 2", because they're not in direct competition and obviously will attract the same demographic.
Mal-2
This won't happen for the following reasons (and probably more):
1. There's no guarantee you won't show this newly acquired DVD to someone who HASN'T seen the movie in a theater.
2. If you have the DVD, you probably won't go back and watch that movie in a theater again. The biggest movies attract a lot of repeat traffic, they're not about to jeopardize that.
3. What's to stop you from ripping that DVD and posting it immediately? Capcode? Are you going to submit ID when you buy the DVD and sign for it, with serial number noted, so they can track what you do with it?
4. You could easily send that DVD overseas where the movie hasn't even been released yet. Oh the humanity! And all those people have evil, society-destroying Region-free players!
This isn't going to happen simply because it isn't good for movie theaters and, although I don't have the numbers to crunch, probably wouldn't be good for MPAA member studios either.
Mal-2
And that stops someone else in the house from answering the phone HOW?
Mal-2
If you're inclined to do phone sex in plaintext, why not just hop onto IRC and do it with someone who is also inclined to do it in plaintext, rather than dealing with an intermediary? It's not like it's the least bit difficult to find someone to "hot chat", though they may be far from what they represent themselves to be. However, this is just as true of phone sex workers, who generally have only one common attribute (they're of the specified gender), and fake everything else as necessary. If you're already using a website to make the call, just launch a Java IRC client instead.
As for anonymity, that went out the window for normal telephone service a long time ago. Sure you can block your Caller ID, but most people won't even take your call, assuming (reasonably) that it's a marketer or survey drone out to interrupt their dinner. Why can't the operator announce the IP address and the reverse lookup results at the beginning of the call, and let the recipient decide whether or not to handle that call? If scammers start using anonymizing proxies, they will quickly become as shunned as people with Caller ID blocked, and for the same reasons. If they don't, then just the fact that they are "calling" internationally will raise all sorts of alarm bells.
Mal-2
In return, when you tire of your used CDs, donate them to the library that has given so much to you. (I mean the pressed, silver-on-both-sides kind, of course.) A lot of the music in the library comes from the librarians, or was selected by them. Getting friendly with them and letting them know what you like is a good idea, as they will most likely be pleased to let you know when something "your style" comes in. They may even flag things you'd never heard of.
Mal-2
Why does it seem to me that many of the Compression Crusaders, who insist that lossy compression is inherently intolerable, are the same people who listen to Ween on $8000 stereos? I will certainly agree there is a point where compression becomes noticeable, and another where it becomes intolerable, but these differ greatly from one person to the next. My girlfriend can listen to 128kbps MP3s without being bothered by artifacts that have me begging her to turn it off. Also, if I hear something that MIGHT be an artifact, it's annoying to spend the mental CPU cycles trying to figure it out. If I'm listening off a CD, at least I know I didn't put that sound there inadvertently.
My personal pain point seems to be at about 160kbps. I can sometimes pick up artifacts there, but they don't overwhelm the music. At 128, they often do. 192 is good enough for stuff lacking a huge dynamic range. It's NOT good enough for classical or chamber jazz, those get ripped with vbr LAME averaging about 192 but sounding like 224. But on the other extreme, is Ween's "Mourning Glory" diminished significantly by being encoded at 96kbps? Puh-leaze.
Mal-2
Meteor shower raves are something you should partake of, if you have any interest in attending a rave at all. They can be very cold, being outdoors and all, but you will be guaranteed something to do aside from dancing, drugs, loud music, and ill-fated attempts to hook up. If you DO decide to partake of some or all of the above mentioned activities, the meteor shower can still be quite an enhancement -- think Van Gogh's "Starry Night".
Mal-2
There have been critics of Einstein ever since he released his theories. You don't hear much about them as they are all heaped into one group and astrocized.
Would that be to blast the offender into space to exile him, or to make him wear artificial turf?
Mal-2
There are many things in this universe that appear to defy light speed. Unfortunately, not one of them is capable of transmitting useful information faster than light. Considering that this holds true at all levels of physics, one would almost conclude that the universe is out to "get" us. :-)
Maybe it's the other way around -- a hard speed-of-light barrier essentially makes interstellar war on any scale impractical. This could be why we're still here and not a Borg colony. It won't stop us from colonizing this system, and in the long run won't prevent colonizing with generation ships, but unless aliens have a much longer life- (and attention-) span than us humans, they're not going to bother attacking us.
Mal-2
I took the advice of using a provider-independent e-mail address a long time ago, and I have certainly not regretted it. If you were able to buy totally transparent telephone forwarding service so that your number was one degree removed from your provider, number portability would never have become an issue. Of course we really can't afford to go handing out twice as many numbers since there is a limit to the number available before splitting and/or overlaying area codes. (Or maybe we could, if the forwarding numbers got their own area codes.)
In any case, if anyone I know changes their e-mail address due to a change of provider, I advise then to get a forwarding address now while it's still relatively painless and save themselves a lot of trouble down the road.
Mal-2
At 250kph, all you need after a crash is a shovel. Motorcyclists who crack up at this speed usually end up scattered across several counties, so I don't see that a skier is going to be much safer (save that there are somewhat fewer obstacles).
With Everest, the problem everyone faces is that there's precious little air to breathe up there, so unless you're Andean or a Sherpa, you can only survive for a limited time without supplemental oxygen. No amount of monitoring will change this, although it may be able to identify afflicted individuals in time to save them (mostly from doing something stupid while impaired) and keep them from pushing any further. Any technology truly sufficient to overcome this would be seen as "cheating" in some sense, as is claimed by purists about O2-assisted climbs of any sort.
Mal-2
There is an effective way to overclock the entire nervous system -- it's called "methamphetamine". Unfortunately, system stability cannot be guaranteed, and what does get accomplished (fast) will generally be quite useless. There are lots of other ways to think faster as well, provided you're not particularly concerned with the accuracy of the results. Just like silicon overclocking, it also has a detrimental effect on the lifespan of the parts being tweaked if overdone.
Mal-2
Even with range limitations they're hardly useless. Both rovers landed in relatively fertile areas for exploration, and Opportunity would have still been a big success even if it proved unable to leave the crater it landed in. The main thing that comes to my mind is to find the edges of the ancient ocean and explore there -- partly because tidepools on Earth are teeming with life, and partly because shallow water means fossils (if present) won't be buried very deep. I noticed very early on that the rocks Opportunity was looking at looked an awful lot like tidepool rocks, at least ones from the eastern Pacific shore (the only ones I've seen firsthand). I knew there was good reason for NASA to be REALLY damn sure before announcing there was a lot of water on Mars at one time, but I pretty well was convinced as soon as I saw those distinctive wormholed rocks.
However, it looks like their lifespan will be determined by a few factors, some of which are within human control and some which are not:
1. Dust storms. Seems to me one good one would pretty well take a rover out of service from dust buildup on the panels alone.
2. Equipment failure, particularly the "always on and draining power" type. One has already made Opportunity a little bit gimpy, but I doubt a single such failure would be fatal. Cumulatively, several would just be too much to bear.
3. Shorter and/or darker Martian days as the seasons and distance from the sun change. This won't take out a rover outright of course, but they could compound the prior two problems. At least these events are predictable.
4. The Martian Defense System finally tracks the rovers down and explodes them. Turns out the reason they didn't shoot the first time is they thought it was just another shipment of punching balloons for their nitrous oxide-fueled nightlife. Once they realize we sent ROVERS and not RAVERS, they're going to be mighty pissed off.
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It seems to me they'd sell more of these things if they just released them under the name of whatever Chinese company they have contracted them out to. At this point, the Iomega name is a net negative, and brand recognition has turned to brand revulsion. Perhaps they could take a page from touring bands of the 1930's and 40's -- fire everyone, make up a new name, and quietly re-hire the people they like.
Mal-2
Additionally, as demand goes down, price goes up. Supercomputer X is going to be a lot cheaper if there is a global market for 10,000 of them than it will be if the demand is 10. Clusters, of course, do not suffer from this effect because they will use whatever hardware they can afford (that works) and will optimize away bottlenecks as best they can with remaining funds.
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Every time she called, you needed to explicitly say "this call is being recorded, if you do not consent then please disconnect now." If you did this, either she would have gone away a lot faster, or you would have had your consent. Either way, you win.
Mal-2
I had to upgrade a server from three 9 GB SCSI drives to whatever the boss could afford (which turned out to be a 160 GB IDE and a DVD±RW), and this case had five 80 MM fans inside, one of them inside a standard ATX power supply, which fit neatly into the case. Everything but the PCI card riser is stock off the shelf parts. When I reduced the clutter (rounded cables, two fewer drives), I was able to remove the two fans behind the drive cage and significantly reduce the noise of the machine without any sort of heat problem. That office has wonky air conditioning, but even on bad days it won't get above 85 degrees or so.
The machine itself is kinda sad by today's standards, just a dual P3-500 and 512 MB of RAM, and there's no particular reason for it to be in a 2U server case at all, except that the mini-fridge sits on top of it quite neatly. The only compromises forced by the case are:
1. Oddly placed power supply. In this one it's near the front, on the right side, and therefore blows its warm air directly across the motherboard. This also creates some rather odd cable clutter problems, but nothing too terrible.
2. PCI card riser required. The board has six PCI slots and in this case you can only use two, and those two have to be "bent" 90 degrees to accommodate the low profile case. If you're using low-rise PCI cards and can find an inventive way to secure them, you may be able to do without the riser, but the case probably isn't designed that way. I believe this server case came with the PCI riser, it certainly looks like it would have to be.
3. Limited choice in video cards. Basically you HAVE to go low-profile here, since there is no way to squeeze both an AGP and PCI riser into the same case (unless the AGP riser goes the other direction, again something the case is not designed for). But there are low-end DirectX 9 compliant parts that do meet this size requirement. Again you're going to have to be inventive with the mounting.
4. A single 5.25" optical drive bay, and generally a single 3.5" floppy bay (though you may well use it another way). This is hardly insurmountable, since you can put various different types of drives in each of the stacked computers.
Also note that rackmount cases are generally THICK, and that means HEAVY. Don't expect getting a full-size rack full of computers up and down a flight of stairs to be easy. It may well end up weighing more than a fridge, and those are bad enough to move around. Of course the rack would be somewhat more maneuverable, but that doesn't reduce the sheer grunt work needed to get the damn thing up the stairs. Once you get it up there, you may well move it around the house with ease (they usually have casters), but you won't be taking it LANning any time soon.
All of the above are valid worries. Worrying about small, noisy fans isn't really one of them though. There are LOTS of 80 mm fan choices (some would say too many), and lots of places to mount them in the case.
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Usually on things expected to take impact (like headphone jacks), the actual contacts are dwarfed by electrically non-functional, purely structural solder points. Usually these are tabs attached to the shield for the jack. If those don't move, the actual contact solder joints aren't going to either.
I've had audio gear fail because of problems like this, and even one monitor. You probably believe permanently integrated cables are a bad thing, but I've never had the socket's solder joints break on a monitor which has none. If you're in the habit of smashing your monitor directly up against a wall, integrated cables are a GOOD thing.
I was able to salvage that monitor by taking it apart and re-soldering all 18 points (15 for the socket itself and three for the shell), and I still have it. I don't use it normally, since there are already two 17" CRTs on the desk, but it does work and is great for hauling out when someone brings me broken or diseased gear.
Now that iPod Mini may well be too small to spare the board space necessary for such anchoring, in which case they should have designed around it. Maybe put something else that doesn't get impact on the daughterboard, and leave the headphone jack on the main board. Maybe find a way to spare the space for a couple of screws to bridge the two boards. Whatever works, but I'm sure they'll implement some sort of change in the next revision. If there's one principle Apple is sure to understand, it's that their reputation is worth a lot more than a few cents saved on gadgets that destroy that name.
Let's just hope they do the right thing with the existing, breakable ones.
Mal-2
Look, how about I set you up with that penguin gal - I know she's not as pretty, but I promise you'll really get to like her as time goes on, and most importantly she won't leave you high and dry when you need her the most. She'll stick with you thru thick and thin.
Ah, but nuns don't put out.
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