Of course now you're going to say "what if there's no wind or sun for a whole month?"
Like a _decade_ ago I read a report from an engineer in the UK about renewable energy vs "standard" energy. He was just a guy doing his own research (I don't believe he was astroturfing or Funded by Big Whatever).
This was a decade ago before the BatteryWall. But he was looking at solar (50% utilization because: night), wind, hydro, coal, gas, etc. One of the surprising things HE came up with was that like you said, wind stops sometimes. Guessing here, I think that in the UK / Europe every decade or so wind stops for up to two weeks, so needs some kind of a backup. Also, the cost of having a coal/oil/NatGas plant in stand-by mode was nearly the normal operating costs of the plant.
Not hating here, but: the sun goes down / wind stops occasionally / dry spells happen / oil rigs run dry / nuke rods expend / etc. How DO you always keep the base load powered -- no excuses -- never mind handling peaks or growth? And remember: "I didn't think a solar eclipse could last for a month" isn't an excuse.:-)
Other power storage systems are: pumping water uphill, moving heavy trains uphill, compressing gas, speeding up a spinning flywheel. Notice that all of those end up power a generator, Tesla is at least bypassing that. But how expensive it is to replace the batteries and controlling assembly once exhausted, never mind the resources used in creating new ones? (That same question can be asked of ALL of them, not just the PowerWall. Tesla's the new kid on the block, so he's got some long term 'splainin to do besides New! Shiny! Pretty!)
And I started out thinking it was a safety measure to prevent cars from hitting animals by cutting the animals in half before the cars come near. I was expecting lasers or Army NewGen sonic weapons or something. Instead: "small devices... mounted on a pole on the side of the road."
Well, I guess with an amp cranked up to 11 they might could still manage it.
that [Comcast internal servers] traffic doesn't cross the public internet,
But THAT's the trick. Think of your normal (techie) home. You've got servers and storage. You've got infrastructure: cabling, routers, WiFi hubs, and a link to "outside."
You've got clients, wired and wireless. You might have peak BANDWIDTH problems which you ignore, or continual problems you fix fix by upgrading equipment: speed, wifi, storage.
But that's your HOME. It's a single one-charge per item with slight depreciation. (And power charges and lightning strikes.) This is also Comcast, with lots and LOTS of cabling. But they've got a network with clients, servers *1, and infrastructure and it's all paid for *2 and can charge you for access to all of it and profit. As. Long. As. You. Stay. Inside.
Once you hit that outward going edge router, two absolutely horrible things happen: you're using their bandwidth to access the internet at large and not paying them for it. *3 And, you're not looking at and subsidizing *their* servers.
So let's watch a movie. Comcast: Client hits home router, the city hub, a larger hub, is sent to a large city containing one of their replicated servers. Bandwidth usage occurs, and 11GB of data is sent across their wires to your home. TA-DAA! The End, roll credits.
Outside NetFlix/YouTube/PornHub: Same exact thing, but instead of a server, data hits their network edge and leaves their network going into the cloud. *4 It merges with all of the other raindrops, eventually ending up at your far-away remote site, where 11GB of data is sent from the internet thru their edge router and that 11GB is sent through their infrastructure to you. The ONLY DIFFERENCE is the relative destination: internal server vs edge router. Oh, and did I mention that their server is free while the edge has a continuing cost per bandwidth?
NOW let's bring in the bandwidth cap. What actually is it? It's just a cap of data on the edge router. If it actually affected their own system they wouldn't have excluded it from usage. So that cap is also a way to prompt you to look at their own "free data" services, or risk going over on NetFlix and paying +$10/each 50G or whatever the charge is. "See? NetFlix isn't as cheap as you THOUGHT it was! Buy us and always have a known fixed monthly charge." *5
Verizon is the same. Metered bandwidth, but OH! You can view our servers as much as you want. (They included ESPN on that.) So I did. I watched the entire SuperBowl game, previews, game, and afterwards on my phone. I'd go to bed, fire it up and mute it. I'd get up and go to the bathroom later and reset/restart it. During the day I'd fire it up as well. For a month. I *FORGET* my usage, it was well over my normal (old, actually unlimited) account usage. Cell tower wireless bandwidth usage isn't (normally) the limiting problem with them either, it's that nasty old "outside" internet.
*1 the licensed media on their servers might have a continuing monthly/annually cost
*2 It's paid for or they wouldn't have it. The LOAN they took out for it for capital expenditures, however, probably is not.
*3 You are paying for it, but not paying them for their servers. How dare you think you could look thru their atmosphere but then look at something ELSE besides their pretty, shiny servers?
*4 Netflix had a policy whereby they would provide and maintain free hardware for ISPs to lower the edge router bandwidth so that all of their usage would be "ISP local". Comcast didn't want it, I wonder why?
*5 I am altering the deal; pray i don't alter it any further. TV only
An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October
People (and companies!) tend to treat companies as cohesive wholes, instead of say ants with a queen or cells and nerves in a human going to the unconscious then conscious brain. There's a lag-time between something sensed and transmitted to "management", and even then it might not be "upper management" if something along the way NAKed the transfer. And even if it makes it, it still might be accidentally corrupted along the way. (Double-takes, anyone?)
There is a joke I cannot find: An engineer look at a product and says, This is the largest pile of BS I've even worked on. His manager reported upwards about the s$*t problem. It went upwards talking about the c&@p. Upwards talking about the smelly excrement, and then the strong fertilizer. It kept going up until finally the CEO gave an announcement: This single project is the best and strongest one we've ever built and will power the company for years to come!
Paraphrasing. This was also back before the internet, so reports were copied and staples together with the current synopsis on top. Anybody have the original joke?
people claiming Russia' meddling have evidence of this happening
I'm sorry, not to downplay this (and I'm in the US), but: we've supposedly occasionally been interfering with other (smaller usually) government elections for decades, and probably attempted for our larger enemies. WHY ON EARTH would we think we'd be completely immune from this to start with?
Now there are different levels of tampering: you directly change the vote count by ballot tampering (changing / adding ballots), losing boxes, changing computer collection results, all that.
Or get people to change their votes: pay them directly, misleading news articles, direct / deflect attention to / from something real OR imagined (how does it go: hide a lie in the midths of a truth), or somehow form a popular movement that does what you want.
So there's hacking the election mechanics proper, where the vote count doesn't match what was truly "done", vs hack the people to vote the way you want. We've been doing it to ourselves for years (vote my way because... KIDS!), why would you think foreign entities would be any different?
Evidence of interference? I'd be shocked if you COULDN'T find any interference. Now like antibodies it needs to be defended against and unless we're going retroactive it needs to be fixed going forward, but... I am shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find that gambling is going on in here!
I have ComCast Business. Nope, you must rent it. Like a different comment says, I think it's for the business SLA -- in addition, they KNOW what's on the other end, how to access and configure it, and already have a warehouse full of 'em. If you've got your own modem, they don't know how to buy it or configure it, and you probably don't know know or have forgotten. But that's bad for their SLA, so I think modem rental is just a cost of doing business.
Curiousitystream for $20 a year is a better value for me.
I've been thinking about that (CS). Check out this. Not 100% sure it includes everything but I kinda think so. That'd be half-price and that even includes OTHER stuff as well.
And I got an email from Hulu -- apparently they're running a New Customer promotion for $1/month for 6 / 9 / 12? months.
This means a study that says standing desks are good for you
You *do* realize that you're greatly offending legless and paralyzed people stuck in wheelchairs. I feel offended, me with my two working legs -- you racist! Off with their heads!
I've also never quite understood why people who can act in movies are somehow qualified to make important contributions with their opinions that suggest preference for candidates and political positions.
(Frowning.) Really?
OK then, let's watch some TV. (Movies are OK but TV have more airtime; movies have more emotional action and excitement.) What's on? Doctor shows, lawyer shows, cops, news, comedies, "Reality" (HA!), and others. Let's take a doctor show. I'd use Doctor Kildare but most of y'all wouldn't know him. Let's take Grey's Anatomy. Confession: I hadn't seen ANY of them. Zero. But I can tell you what some of the shows are about: standard doctor prototypes.
Doctor fights against unknown disease and cures it, or not and learns a lesson. Doctor fights against differing opinions and is finally proven right. Doctor fights hospital / insurance for dying patient and eventually wins. Caring nurses accidentally provide clues to save patents. And on, and on.
Same for cop shows and the rest. Make it interesting, have some personal conflict appear to the main / supporting characters, all that.
THE POINT BEING: You now have a relationship with the characters on the screen. You like the nice caring ones who buck the system in order to save the day. If they flub their lines they'll redo the take, so they're always "perfect." Sometimes you disagree with their choices, but be assured there won't be many of those times or they wouldn't be loved. But they'll be SOME conflict.
Now that relationship is *two* sided, both ways. The show keeps coming on and you keep watching it, and watch the characters interact and perhaps grow a little. But not much or you couldn't miss random shows and pick up where you left off. The on-screen characters will never turn YOU off because they can't. It's their JOB to keep you watching and interested; they couldn't turn off your TV if they wanted too. Oh, and those conflicts? Adrenaline to get you excited and aroused. Not like *THAT*, but just a slight hit that you'll want more and come back NEXT WEEK for the adventures of...
So you have your favorite characters you like and who "like you" since they keep on speaking to you, telling you about their lives and so on. And then you see "Doctor John" aka Real Life Actor, and your sub-brain says, "That's a friend, a good guy, trying to do the right thing. I better listen to what they're saying." And you do, and maybe you like it or maybe you don't. But you're going to disassociate the news with the person with all of the OTHER information coming in, and eventually just remember someone said something, and "oh yeah that was a smart guy and maybe there's something to that, and I'm smart too so that's probably right" and quit thinking about it because someone's already done the idea-chewing and processing for you, so all you have to do is remember and occasionally regurgitate it.
If you stop and consider the facts maybe you'll agree or not. But there's initial your starting point, the opposing view(s) now have a larger hill to climb.
THAT is how Famous Media Stars influence people -- not when you're actively paying attention, but when you're NOT.
Psst -- and remember, the actors are just coughing up lines some writer somewhere else wrote. They're not THINKING that at all (well, Method Acting), just hitting marks and cues and talking emotionally when needed.
Lassie! Calm down, what's up? Little Timmy fell down a well? What, again? I know, let's run to the house and both have a nice steak supper and let him think about the choices he's made recently. And then we'll go to bed and if we remember, go pick him up on the way back from the store so he can help carry things. And if he's not alive, well then that's just More For Us!
Believe it or not, there's are times where you WANT to lose your data.
Oh, and speaking of old phrases, does anyone remember: "If anyone says they're from the government and here to help you, run"? Now-days it seems more like a demand rather than a joke.
Really? Let's see: 365 days / year, 18 hours / day (he's got to stop for gas sometime), let's say 45 sites (45 laptops, and I'm ASS-U-ME-ing, and let's say they're all in a circle. (It's been done before.)
Around in the US, I thought a "visit" lasted an hour. Since he's "going" to different store locations, this shouldn't be a problem. And 0 seconds at the store -- he drives up to the front door, the GPS reads his location, and drives off. For convenience sake, it always takes 10 minutes to reach the next store.
It takes 10 * 45 = 450 minutes for a 45 store transit, or 7.5 hours. Say 7, so 3 complete rotations per day. That's 21 hours (a bit over my 18 hours / day, but he hits a lot of green lights. Or pedestrians, your choice.) That's 3x45 = 135 stores per day. In a year that's 49,000 store visits.
So 2.7 Million visits would take 55 years. So a la Mythbusters: CONFIRMED.;-) (Man, that's a cheap life. They oughta give him a free soda or something.)
And so he really thought he could get away with it? A million visits (over multiple accounts, that's what the 45 computers were for. Yeah I know. But how much did THEY cost?) That's like the guys in Germany who were getting paid to produce solar power. It was fine, but they noticed one company producing it at night. Bright moon I guess.
I've also heard of geniuses who go to WalMart (or wherever) buy thousands of dollars or merchandise and hand the clerk a million dollar bill. AND WANT THEIR CHANGE.
It wonâ(TM)t be in my lifetime, but I hope that - some day - we really do have an honest-to-goodness deep space network.
Maybe I'm just a depressing old fogie. With that intro, nope. It's just too hard to get out of the gravity well.
Oh, we can DO it, but just barely. We've had the combustion engine moving things around horizontally for a century. We've had air-flight for "nearly" as long, and "Space Flight" (well, there ain't no air, so it's space!) for half that. We've visited the moon in person, and other planets by proxy. We've even sent two crafts into interplanetary space, outside Sol's gravity well. WHEEE!
Going vertically is just much harder than horizontally, both equipment-wise, energy-wise, and intelligence-wise. (Any idiot can drive a car now-a-days, but back at the beginning, you had to know how to start it and crank it by hand, how to light the lights (candles!), and the correct fuel to add.) I'd be curious to see how many square feet -- meters, if you're drinking tea -- in livable space we've sent to the moon, and then just around Earth orbit. The moon/Mars isn't going to be a tourist destination anytime in the next 200 years without an energy breakthrough. Yeah, we can ship a few people someplace far away AKA Captain Cook (or was that Captain Bligh?) but for having people living in Tombstone, Arizona, Mars is unbelievable, never mind having a McD, WalM, or Micky there to visit when you're bored.
We can maybe go get Asteroids (I loved that game when it first came out) for minerals and metal, but we're still trading energy for it. Until we can solve the energy problem (remember in the '50s when All Electric Medallion Homes were the rage? Power was going to be "Too cheap to meter" -- a prediction for a fission utopia. It'll be here Any Day Now.)
Back in the 70s I was ready to go, excited about the moon landings and wanted us to go further. But further is a LOOONG way away, and that's just the nearest planets. We're better off Mars-forming our children's bodies instead of trying to Terraform Mars.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to see us try. I'd love all of the accidental scientific and technology fallouts that occur while producing all of that. I'd like my tax money to go TOWARDS that. But unless you're a large handful of specialists, you're not going to make it out of the atmosphere, never mind our local well. Who knows, though, maybe Andy Griffith can save us.
Oh, I'm sure we'll eventually have "an honest-to-goodness deep space network" but it'll always be machines on the far end.
Sorry for being so negative. Maybe the younger kids, standing on the shoulders of giants, can see better. Link Or, maybe not.
a team of scientists... reached a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius for 10 seconds.
Great! So soon I can get my Chinese takeout much faster, right?
So serious question: how many oceans will that boil? It's one thing to have the moon that hot, it's another to have the head of a pin that hot. Or are the just going after temperature quantity rather than size/mass? (which is not a bad thing.)
If I remember my fusion stuff correctly, they were trying to have high temps via lasers at a single point, and drop some deuterium at that same point/instant and get it to fuse. They got it working, but not enough to be self-sufficient.
Even better: give it access to your A/e account and have it ship the flowers FOR you. It could write and sign the card for you, too.
Want a romantic supper? It could set up a delivery of takeout for two -- to two seperate addresses. And then she could automate her responses and gifts, and pretty soon we've got internet connected remote control fleshlights and dildos for NetFlix movie night, once again at two seperate addresses. Cameras for visuals? NAAA, that'd break the romance if you know what they looked like. Or actually said.
*This* could be eHarmony's new sales pitch: Have Trouble Meeting Women? Then Don't!
You might only work for 2-3 companies your entire life.
*I* worked for three companies without ever quitting my job. *I* stayed in the same place, every 8 years the company would change around me.
They finally mostly closed down our region and laid everyone off. Out of over a thousand, I was one of the last 20 to go. I'm not sure if that was good or NOT, everyone else had already settled down again before I even got out the door.
Slashdot Mirror
Of course now you're going to say "what if there's no wind or sun for a whole month?"
Like a _decade_ ago I read a report from an engineer in the UK about renewable energy vs "standard" energy. He was just a guy doing his own research (I don't believe he was astroturfing or Funded by Big Whatever).
:-)
This was a decade ago before the BatteryWall. But he was looking at solar (50% utilization because: night), wind, hydro, coal, gas, etc. One of the surprising things HE came up with was that like you said, wind stops sometimes. Guessing here, I think that in the UK / Europe every decade or so wind stops for up to two weeks, so needs some kind of a backup. Also, the cost of having a coal/oil/NatGas plant in stand-by mode was nearly the normal operating costs of the plant.
Not hating here, but: the sun goes down / wind stops occasionally / dry spells happen / oil rigs run dry / nuke rods expend / etc. How DO you always keep the base load powered -- no excuses -- never mind handling peaks or growth? And remember: "I didn't think a solar eclipse could last for a month" isn't an excuse.
Other power storage systems are: pumping water uphill, moving heavy trains uphill, compressing gas, speeding up a spinning flywheel. Notice that all of those end up power a generator, Tesla is at least bypassing that. But how expensive it is to replace the batteries and controlling assembly once exhausted, never mind the resources used in creating new ones? (That same question can be asked of ALL of them, not just the PowerWall. Tesla's the new kid on the block, so he's got some long term 'splainin to do besides New! Shiny! Pretty!)
Are there any /. readers out there that don't understand 4E84?
Sorry, we didn't learn that geeky hexadecimal stuff in physics class.That's NaN.
4x10^84 takes up WAS more space and thus is WAY more precise!
Australian Fence of Sound Halves Roadkill
And I started out thinking it was a safety measure to prevent cars from hitting animals by cutting the animals in half before the cars come near. I was expecting lasers or Army NewGen sonic weapons or something. Instead: "small devices ... mounted on a pole on the side of the road."
Well, I guess with an amp cranked up to 11 they might could still manage it.
that [Comcast internal servers] traffic doesn't cross the public internet,
But THAT's the trick. Think of your normal (techie) home. You've got servers and storage. You've got infrastructure: cabling, routers, WiFi hubs, and a link to "outside." You've got clients, wired and wireless. You might have peak BANDWIDTH problems which you ignore, or continual problems you fix fix by upgrading equipment: speed, wifi, storage.
But that's your HOME. It's a single one-charge per item with slight depreciation. (And power charges and lightning strikes.) This is also Comcast, with lots and LOTS of cabling. But they've got a network with clients, servers *1, and infrastructure and it's all paid for *2 and can charge you for access to all of it and profit. As. Long. As. You. Stay. Inside.
Once you hit that outward going edge router, two absolutely horrible things happen: you're using their bandwidth to access the internet at large and not paying them for it. *3 And, you're not looking at and subsidizing *their* servers.
So let's watch a movie. Comcast: Client hits home router, the city hub, a larger hub, is sent to a large city containing one of their replicated servers. Bandwidth usage occurs, and 11GB of data is sent across their wires to your home. TA-DAA! The End, roll credits.
Outside NetFlix/YouTube/PornHub: Same exact thing, but instead of a server, data hits their network edge and leaves their network going into the cloud. *4 It merges with all of the other raindrops, eventually ending up at your far-away remote site, where 11GB of data is sent from the internet thru their edge router and that 11GB is sent through their infrastructure to you. The ONLY DIFFERENCE is the relative destination: internal server vs edge router. Oh, and did I mention that their server is free while the edge has a continuing cost per bandwidth?
NOW let's bring in the bandwidth cap. What actually is it? It's just a cap of data on the edge router. If it actually affected their own system they wouldn't have excluded it from usage. So that cap is also a way to prompt you to look at their own "free data" services, or risk going over on NetFlix and paying +$10/each 50G or whatever the charge is. "See? NetFlix isn't as cheap as you THOUGHT it was! Buy us and always have a known fixed monthly charge." *5
Verizon is the same. Metered bandwidth, but OH! You can view our servers as much as you want. (They included ESPN on that.) So I did. I watched the entire SuperBowl game, previews, game, and afterwards on my phone. I'd go to bed, fire it up and mute it. I'd get up and go to the bathroom later and reset/restart it. During the day I'd fire it up as well. For a month. I *FORGET* my usage, it was well over my normal (old, actually unlimited) account usage. Cell tower wireless bandwidth usage isn't (normally) the limiting problem with them either, it's that nasty old "outside" internet.
*1 the licensed media on their servers might have a continuing monthly/annually cost
*2 It's paid for or they wouldn't have it. The LOAN they took out for it for capital expenditures, however, probably is not.
*3 You are paying for it, but not paying them for their servers. How dare you think you could look thru their atmosphere but then look at something ELSE besides their pretty, shiny servers?
*4 Netflix had a policy whereby they would provide and maintain free hardware for ISPs to lower the edge router bandwidth so that all of their usage would be "ISP local". Comcast didn't want it, I wonder why?
*5 I am altering the deal; pray i don't alter it any further. TV only
Interesting Old Links:
I
An engineer at Facebook notified the company in October
People (and companies!) tend to treat companies as cohesive wholes, instead of say ants with a queen or cells and nerves in a human going to the unconscious then conscious brain. There's a lag-time between something sensed and transmitted to "management", and even then it might not be "upper management" if something along the way NAKed the transfer. And even if it makes it, it still might be accidentally corrupted along the way. (Double-takes, anyone?)
There is a joke I cannot find: An engineer look at a product and says, This is the largest pile of BS I've even worked on. His manager reported upwards about the s$*t problem. It went upwards talking about the c&@p. Upwards talking about the smelly excrement, and then the strong fertilizer. It kept going up until finally the CEO gave an announcement: This single project is the best and strongest one we've ever built and will power the company for years to come!
Paraphrasing. This was also back before the internet, so reports were copied and staples together with the current synopsis on top. Anybody have the original joke?
people claiming Russia' meddling have evidence of this happening
I'm sorry, not to downplay this (and I'm in the US), but: we've supposedly occasionally been interfering with other (smaller usually) government elections for decades, and probably attempted for our larger enemies. WHY ON EARTH would we think we'd be completely immune from this to start with?
... KIDS!), why would you think foreign entities would be any different?
... I am shocked -- SHOCKED -- to find that gambling is going on in here!
Now there are different levels of tampering: you directly change the vote count by ballot tampering (changing / adding ballots), losing boxes, changing computer collection results, all that.
Or get people to change their votes: pay them directly, misleading news articles, direct / deflect attention to / from something real OR imagined (how does it go: hide a lie in the midths of a truth), or somehow form a popular movement that does what you want.
So there's hacking the election mechanics proper, where the vote count doesn't match what was truly "done", vs hack the people to vote the way you want. We've been doing it to ourselves for years (vote my way because
Evidence of interference? I'd be shocked if you COULDN'T find any interference. Now like antibodies it needs to be defended against and unless we're going retroactive it needs to be fixed going forward, but
I think you can buy your own cable modem as well.
I have ComCast Business. Nope, you must rent it. Like a different comment says, I think it's for the business SLA -- in addition, they KNOW what's on the other end, how to access and configure it, and already have a warehouse full of 'em. If you've got your own modem, they don't know how to buy it or configure it, and you probably don't know know or have forgotten. But that's bad for their SLA, so I think modem rental is just a cost of doing business.
Curiousitystream for $20 a year is a better value for me.
I've been thinking about that (CS). Check out this. Not 100% sure it includes everything but I kinda think so. That'd be half-price and that even includes OTHER stuff as well.
And I got an email from Hulu -- apparently they're running a New Customer promotion for $1/month for 6 / 9 / 12? months.
expose every crime and underhanded tactic the company has ever engaged in and fine them until it bankrupts the company.
So just what common place would you expect this information to all end up where people could easily see it -- Facebook?
Can we put them in something now to have them multiply?
Forget that -- can we put them in something now to STOP them from multiplying?
Let's worry about the ON switch after we've found the OFF (or at least STOP) switch.
itâ(TM)s good to see that the city of DC, at least, has upgraded to git.
I wish DC would tell *all* of the legislators there to GIT and stay git.
This means a study that says standing desks are good for you
You *do* realize that you're greatly offending legless and paralyzed people stuck in wheelchairs. I feel offended, me with my two working legs -- you racist! Off with their heads!
Considering the fact ... shouldn't I get some stock/compensation?
You got screwed. What else do you want?
The cells reportedly lost 25% of their capacity in just 50 cycles.
So? That's Planned Obsolescence already built-in! That just raised the potential stock value by 1/3rd.
I simply think he doesn't worry, tomorrow's problems can be fixed tomorrow.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ummm, you realize you've got your answer in your own tagline, right?
I've also never quite understood why people who can act in movies are somehow qualified to make important contributions with their opinions that suggest preference for candidates and political positions.
(Frowning.) Really? OK then, let's watch some TV. (Movies are OK but TV have more airtime; movies have more emotional action and excitement.) What's on? Doctor shows, lawyer shows, cops, news, comedies, "Reality" (HA!), and others. Let's take a doctor show. I'd use Doctor Kildare but most of y'all wouldn't know him. Let's take Grey's Anatomy. Confession: I hadn't seen ANY of them. Zero. But I can tell you what some of the shows are about: standard doctor prototypes.
...
Doctor fights against unknown disease and cures it, or not and learns a lesson. Doctor fights against differing opinions and is finally proven right. Doctor fights hospital / insurance for dying patient and eventually wins. Caring nurses accidentally provide clues to save patents. And on, and on. Same for cop shows and the rest. Make it interesting, have some personal conflict appear to the main / supporting characters, all that.
THE POINT BEING: You now have a relationship with the characters on the screen. You like the nice caring ones who buck the system in order to save the day. If they flub their lines they'll redo the take, so they're always "perfect." Sometimes you disagree with their choices, but be assured there won't be many of those times or they wouldn't be loved. But they'll be SOME conflict.
Now that relationship is *two* sided, both ways. The show keeps coming on and you keep watching it, and watch the characters interact and perhaps grow a little. But not much or you couldn't miss random shows and pick up where you left off. The on-screen characters will never turn YOU off because they can't. It's their JOB to keep you watching and interested; they couldn't turn off your TV if they wanted too. Oh, and those conflicts? Adrenaline to get you excited and aroused. Not like *THAT*, but just a slight hit that you'll want more and come back NEXT WEEK for the adventures of
So you have your favorite characters you like and who "like you" since they keep on speaking to you, telling you about their lives and so on. And then you see "Doctor John" aka Real Life Actor, and your sub-brain says, "That's a friend, a good guy, trying to do the right thing. I better listen to what they're saying." And you do, and maybe you like it or maybe you don't. But you're going to disassociate the news with the person with all of the OTHER information coming in, and eventually just remember someone said something, and "oh yeah that was a smart guy and maybe there's something to that, and I'm smart too so that's probably right" and quit thinking about it because someone's already done the idea-chewing and processing for you, so all you have to do is remember and occasionally regurgitate it.
If you stop and consider the facts maybe you'll agree or not. But there's initial your starting point, the opposing view(s) now have a larger hill to climb. THAT is how Famous Media Stars influence people -- not when you're actively paying attention, but when you're NOT.
Psst -- and remember, the actors are just coughing up lines some writer somewhere else wrote. They're not THINKING that at all (well, Method Acting), just hitting marks and cues and talking emotionally when needed.
Lassie! Calm down, what's up? Little Timmy fell down a well? What, again? I know, let's run to the house and both have a nice steak supper and let him think about the choices he's made recently. And then we'll go to bed and if we remember, go pick him up on the way back from the store so he can help carry things. And if he's not alive, well then that's just More For Us!
It's a Ramjet for fish -- if you do it right.
See? Science Fiction dreams DO come true! (Well, it's a start.)
no backups Wow
Just one phrase: Bookie Flash Paper.
"The days of guys writing bets on flash paper so they could burn everything when the cops busted in are long gone," But I guess that was before most of y'alls time.
Believe it or not, there's are times where you WANT to lose your data.
Oh, and speaking of old phrases, does anyone remember: "If anyone says they're from the government and here to help you, run"? Now-days it seems more like a demand rather than a joke.
"Hey, that Stan Lee thing seems interesting." :-("
"Oh, not available.
"I wonder if there is a torrent...."
Obligatory Link: I tried to watch Game of Thrones and this is what happened.
I don't know of an XKCD link, sorry about that.
to fake 2.7 million visits to shops
Really? Let's see: 365 days / year, 18 hours / day (he's got to stop for gas sometime), let's say 45 sites (45 laptops, and I'm ASS-U-ME-ing, and let's say they're all in a circle. (It's been done before.)
;-) (Man, that's a cheap life. They oughta give him a free soda or something.)
Around in the US, I thought a "visit" lasted an hour. Since he's "going" to different store locations, this shouldn't be a problem. And 0 seconds at the store -- he drives up to the front door, the GPS reads his location, and drives off.
For convenience sake, it always takes 10 minutes to reach the next store.
It takes 10 * 45 = 450 minutes for a 45 store transit, or 7.5 hours. Say 7, so 3 complete rotations per day. That's 21 hours (a bit over my 18 hours / day, but he hits a lot of green lights. Or pedestrians, your choice.) That's 3x45 = 135 stores per day. In a year that's 49,000 store visits.
So 2.7 Million visits would take 55 years. So a la Mythbusters: CONFIRMED.
And so he really thought he could get away with it? A million visits (over multiple accounts, that's what the 45 computers were for. Yeah I know. But how much did THEY cost?) That's like the guys in Germany who were getting paid to produce solar power. It was fine, but they noticed one company producing it at night. Bright moon I guess.
I've also heard of geniuses who go to WalMart (or wherever) buy thousands of dollars or merchandise and hand the clerk a million dollar bill. AND WANT THEIR CHANGE.
It wonâ(TM)t be in my lifetime, but I hope that - some day - we really do have an honest-to-goodness deep space network.
Maybe I'm just a depressing old fogie. With that intro, nope. It's just too hard to get out of the gravity well.
Oh, we can DO it, but just barely. We've had the combustion engine moving things around horizontally for a century. We've had air-flight for "nearly" as long, and "Space Flight" (well, there ain't no air, so it's space!) for half that. We've visited the moon in person, and other planets by proxy. We've even sent two crafts into interplanetary space, outside Sol's gravity well. WHEEE!
Going vertically is just much harder than horizontally, both equipment-wise, energy-wise, and intelligence-wise. (Any idiot can drive a car now-a-days, but back at the beginning, you had to know how to start it and crank it by hand, how to light the lights (candles!), and the correct fuel to add.) I'd be curious to see how many square feet -- meters, if you're drinking tea -- in livable space we've sent to the moon, and then just around Earth orbit. The moon/Mars isn't going to be a tourist destination anytime in the next 200 years without an energy breakthrough. Yeah, we can ship a few people someplace far away AKA Captain Cook (or was that Captain Bligh?) but for having people living in Tombstone, Arizona, Mars is unbelievable, never mind having a McD, WalM, or Micky there to visit when you're bored.
We can maybe go get Asteroids (I loved that game when it first came out) for minerals and metal, but we're still trading energy for it. Until we can solve the energy problem (remember in the '50s when All Electric Medallion Homes were the rage? Power was going to be "Too cheap to meter" -- a prediction for a fission utopia. It'll be here Any Day Now.)
Back in the 70s I was ready to go, excited about the moon landings and wanted us to go further. But further is a LOOONG way away, and that's just the nearest planets. We're better off Mars-forming our children's bodies instead of trying to Terraform Mars.
Don't get me wrong -- I'd love to see us try. I'd love all of the accidental scientific and technology fallouts that occur while producing all of that. I'd like my tax money to go TOWARDS that. But unless you're a large handful of specialists, you're not going to make it out of the atmosphere, never mind our local well. Who knows, though, maybe Andy Griffith can save us.
Oh, I'm sure we'll eventually have "an honest-to-goodness deep space network" but it'll always be machines on the far end.
Sorry for being so negative. Maybe the younger kids, standing on the shoulders of giants, can see better. Link Or, maybe not.
I wonder if I can use Shodan to find F-35s?
You COULD, but they're not there if you look, only if you ping. And if it's flying greater than Mach 1 even that'll be in the wrong place. ;-)
a team of scientists ... reached a whopping 100 million degrees Celsius for 10 seconds.
Great! So soon I can get my Chinese takeout much faster, right?
So serious question: how many oceans will that boil? It's one thing to have the moon that hot, it's another to have the head of a pin that hot. Or are the just going after temperature quantity rather than size/mass? (which is not a bad thing.)
If I remember my fusion stuff correctly, they were trying to have high temps via lasers at a single point, and drop some deuterium at that same point/instant and get it to fuse. They got it working, but not enough to be self-sufficient.
Even better: give it access to your A/e account and have it ship the flowers FOR you. It could write and sign the card for you, too.
Want a romantic supper? It could set up a delivery of takeout for two -- to two seperate addresses. And then she could automate her responses and gifts, and pretty soon we've got internet connected remote control fleshlights and dildos for NetFlix movie night, once again at two seperate addresses. Cameras for visuals? NAAA, that'd break the romance if you know what they looked like. Or actually said.
*This* could be eHarmony's new sales pitch: Have Trouble Meeting Women? Then Don't!
You might only work for 2-3 companies your entire life.
*I* worked for three companies without ever quitting my job. *I* stayed in the same place, every 8 years the company would change around me.
They finally mostly closed down our region and laid everyone off. Out of over a thousand, I was one of the last 20 to go. I'm not sure if that was good or NOT, everyone else had already settled down again before I even got out the door.
If it's Kizuna AI, I don't care, I'm watching it.