Your phone will not be able to register with the tower if the rount-trip-time is longer than for the maximum intended range of the tower.
Yeah, those radio waves can take a lonnnng time to travel a few miles.:)
But seriously. The problem you had is that your phone could hear the tower but not vice versa. Your phone's signal indicator shows how well the tower signals are received, but says nothing about how well the tower can hear your phone's reply.
The social stigma is somewhat warranted. True, there is nothing wrong with meeting someone online, but many of these people fail to realize that they truely don't know someone if they've only communicated via text or voice. Half of human communication is visual...
The reverse could also be true. Because there isn't any visual communication, people become more honest and more revealing about the rest of themselves.
It could well be that the visual component triggers the 'project the desired image' algorithm in our minds, which can only muddy the water when trying to get to know somebody.
The USA Army uses them in Iraq. This means the US Army battlefield radios are hacked. This is a may as well give up and die for US Troups and explains much of what is going on in Iraq. Another fine case of D. Rumsfeld and his army of one thinking. Single point failure is death to any group. If I need to explain this any further....!
The radios are not hacked. It was the Israeli procedure that was hacked -- or more precisely, it was the sloppiness that was hacked.
Any cryptosystem can be hacked if it is (for example) configured with weak keys or passwords.
But please, don't let this information temper your passion for blaming everything (even the choice of radios?!) on Rumsfeld.
We've also found that there's a category of customers that say, "Give me a brand experience, advertise it to me on television; I want to be part of the digital music revolution, and that solution [PlaysForSure] doesn't work for me."
LOL! WTF are these guys smoking? There must be something in the water up there in marketing.
Still, I expect some sort of hardware failure to occur a few months after release.
Hmmmm... I wonder how long the warranty period is.:)
In my experience with Playstations and similar devices, it's the damn connectors that give out. And since the connectors are usually proprietary, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Sony's MBAs, the device becomes obsolete before its time. For example, were it not for the failed totally-arbitrarily-proprietary video connector, my PS1 would still be cookin'.
And we are all aware of Sony's eternal dream of standardizing a proprietary format... betamax... mini-DV... memory-stick... blu-ray...
My brother is a pedigreed professor of finance who, after eight years of teaching and research, quit in disgust. One of his top two reasons for leaving was the self-loathing he felt for the part he played in churning out MBAs whose jobs will be to dream up stuff like proprietary connectors.
When he and I go around together, we still play a game of detecting the signs of MBAs grazing in the area. A striking example in recent memory is when the Oshkosh fly-in changed its name to the more-trademarkable "EAA Airventure", raised all the camping fees, and implemented tamper-resistant wristbands for admission.
Microsoft is working on this problem -- a way to computerize the release of authentication information but not identification information (and vice versa). See the "Laws of Identity" over at http://www.identityblog.com/.
In particular, they are discussing a way to build an 'identity wallet' into the OS that will allow you to choose what identifying or authenticating bits of information to give to whom. And the wallet will be kept in a hardened UI that only humans can access.
It's about damn time, too. The real world already works like this: for everyone you interact with, you dynamically choose what data to reveal, and you never reveal it all in the manner presently demanded by many websites.
True that, I buy condoms with a big grin on my face. "Yes ma'am, I AM getting some tonight and for the forseeable future. I'll take the economy pack please."
Ah, the 36-count jumbo box... I believe the name for that sized box is "The don't-have-a-Family Pack".
Maybe in 20 years the tech will get there, but it ain't there yet and I think it's absurd that we're basically experimenting with the integrity of the voting system during a time of great political tension.
With the possible exceptions of a few weeks after WWI, WWII, and 09/11, there has never been a time that we weren't in "a time of great political tension".
But that's okay. Political tension is a sign of a healthy democracy, in which people are willing to speak and push for their cause. Compare this to the sullen quiet of a dictatorship.
This also feels like all those agencies that will let you pay a pile of money to name a star after yourself... in the records of that one agency, which aren't actually recognized by anyone ever.
Hey now, no fair bashing the star-naming agencies. From starregistry.com:
Because these star names are copyrighted with their telescopic coordinates in the book, "Your Place in the Cosmos," future generations may identify the star name in the directory and, using a telescope, locate the actual star in the sky.
See? See?! The star names are in a copyrighted book! Future generations may even look it up some day!
P.S. What I do not understand, is how anyone can work for companies like that and manage to not hate themselves.
This would appear to be a MUCH safer way to play god whilst still keeping it technologically advanced enough to appeal to the scientists. I have a feeling the "public" would be much more relaxed about growing crops in this manner.
Those 'natural' methods are slow. Meanwhile, people all around the world are sick, malnourished, and dying. We Westerners are sufficiently safe and comfortable so as to be snooty about such things, but it would be a different story if it was our stomachs that were empty.
Whatever theoretical hazards there are in GM, must be weighed against the very real very human cost of delaying the worldwide adaptation of superior crop strains.
Why drive out into the hostile empty vacuum of space? Home is much better. Especially once home has really good VR. Then you can jack in, fly around, have three-week-long orgasms, whatever.
Seriously. Once real VR is invented, we're not going anywhere.
This may have already happened. We may have even forgotten that we are in VR. It would certainly explain the odd computational features of our reality, such as the Law of Conservation of Information.
Anyway, if aliens did visit the Earth, they certainly wouldn't have sent person-sized ships. Microscopic ships piloted by AI or virtual-people are vastly more efficient for crossing interstellar distances.
This argument is ridiculous. Why bother making paper? Just take the trees themselves, bury them in such a manner that they will not decay, and allow new trees to grow where the old ones stood. Sounds pretty stupid, doesn't it?
That depends on how desperate you are to remove carbon from the air.
Right now, we aren't. Therefore, paper and lumber is the most profitable -- if indirect -- route for taking atmospheric carbon and re-burying it.
Also, you are asserting without proof that trees can only grow where previous trees once stood, a premise easily refuted by the existence of a fine apple tree in my front lawn, planted last year, which takes the place of no previous tree.
How am I asserting that? I just said that paper recycling reduces demand for new carbon that began life as a CO2-eating tree. Your apple tree is a carbon sink too, but not on the scale that paper- and lumber-production are.
I'm talking "put up with little Johnny's abusive / antisocial behavior because he has a hard homelife - his parents both work and make $350K/yr. We should relish in Johnny's unique gifts."
Show us even ONE example of a tolerance curriculum embracing a child's abusive or antisocial behavior.
You are laboring under a caricature of the tolerance movement. And while I am sure that the occasional tolerance advocate goes off into the weeds, and begins teaching guff like that, it is obvious that they are an unimportant deviation from the core principle.
The core principle is "different is not automatically bad". Teaching this requires undoing a 100,000-year-old meme that once protected the tribe from predatory outsiders, which in turn requires the shifting of a great weight of social ballast. It will take a long time to get it right, and there will be many missteps along the way. But don't let that obscure your view of the goal's value.
IMHO, public schools have gotten a LOT worse since I went. Much more PC "tollerance" crap [...]
Please don't include 'tolerance' in your package-deal of What Is Wrong With Public Schools. Tolerance is one part of the broader overcome-your-Tribalism effort, and this is a Good Thing. Tribalism squanders vast amounts of resources, as we waste effort on hate and fear and persecution.
Not to mention the fact that children are usually innocent of whatever it is that they are being persecuted for. Were it not for the tolerance movement you so brazenly deride, my own sons would have been hurt and made miserable for having two moms. But now, kids are becoming sophisticated enough to see that there is more than one codepath to happiness.
I suppose it is easy to harp about tolerance when you are solidly in the middle of the tribe. The majority, after all, is always sane.
Agreed...but,seeing that parental behavior cannot be legislated, lets at least try something!
Take care about making these assumptions:
the current system is broken
significant improvement is possible
...especially the first one. While we hear from all sides that schools are horrible and not working, it's not clear to me that this is true. Not all students are going to be teachable. And students may need to have failures around them in order to learn various metalessons about mankind.
I'm not saying I know the answers here. I am just questioning the conventional wisdom that public schools are failing to efficiently prepare students for independence.
I almost think we do need to somehow make US schools private run entities...or at least make the schools truely competitive, where people lose jobs and funding for lack of performance.
It is a Hard Problem to measure the performance of a school, or even a teacher.
You allude to vouchers, as a stopgap measure, but that doesn't entirely solve the problem. A voucher is basically a way for individual parents to judge the school based on observations of their child. While this is more precise than a standardized test, it is not necessarily accurate, nor is it reliable on a schoolwide basis. In any event, it functions only in the presence of attentive, devoted parents.
Now where problems might arise... how many times could a sheet be used? How much more expensive will it be than normal paper? Will that price be worth the usability of this in place of just more plain paper?
You also need to factor in the greatest expense of all: person-hours. How many sheets of paper would a human need to gather up, stack, straighten, and then reload, in order to offset the cost of the paper?
Person-hours get more expensive by the day, because they are a function of society's total productive output which is climbing continuously. I expect that this issue is like the issue with pens and paper plates: it's wasteful to take steps to avoid wasting them.
The recycling of paper is bad for the environment. Paper represents carbon that a tree took from the air by converting CO2 to O2. If you bury that paper, the carbon remains sequestered, and then a new tree can take new carbon from the air to make new paper.
Recycling reduces the demand for this cycle, and therefore reduces the rate of atmospheric carbon removal rate.
Killing trees, turning them into paper and lumber, and then wasting the aforementioned paper and lumber, is the only way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
A tree pulls carbon out of the air (i.e. photosynthesizes CO2 into O2 by removing C) insofar as it is growing. A matured tree removes no additional (net) carbon from the air because its leaves rot and give the carbon back up to their air via decay, ants, and termites. And when it falls over and rots away, all of its lifetime accumulation of carbon is re-released.
The only way to keep the tree's carbon from getting back into the air, is to bury it deeply, as occurs when it has been logged, turned to paper, and then wasted and sent to a landfill.
If forests or rainforests really removed net carbon from the air all by themselves, then they would quickly develop coalbeds of carbon underneath themselves. Guess what? They don't. The Lorax is a big fat liar. Well, a small fat liar, anyway.
Useless objection. We all understand that Turing-completeness requires infinite memory. So, when we say that a machine is Turing-complete, we are understood to mean "This machine is Turing-complete qua available memory".
Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't realize that you were disrupting the conversation just to show off your alleged mental prowess.
Slashdot Mirror
Yeah, those radio waves can take a lonnnng time to travel a few miles. :)
But seriously. The problem you had is that your phone could hear the tower but not vice versa. Your phone's signal indicator shows how well the tower signals are received, but says nothing about how well the tower can hear your phone's reply.
The reverse could also be true. Because there isn't any visual communication, people become more honest and more revealing about the rest of themselves.
It could well be that the visual component triggers the 'project the desired image' algorithm in our minds, which can only muddy the water when trying to get to know somebody.
The radios are not hacked. It was the Israeli procedure that was hacked -- or more precisely, it was the sloppiness that was hacked.
Any cryptosystem can be hacked if it is (for example) configured with weak keys or passwords.
But please, don't let this information temper your passion for blaming everything (even the choice of radios?!) on Rumsfeld.
LOL! WTF are these guys smoking? There must be something in the water up there in marketing.
Hmmmm... I wonder how long the warranty period is. :)
In my experience with Playstations and similar devices, it's the damn connectors that give out. And since the connectors are usually proprietary, thanks to the thoughtfulness of Sony's MBAs, the device becomes obsolete before its time. For example, were it not for the failed totally-arbitrarily-proprietary video connector, my PS1 would still be cookin'.
And we are all aware of Sony's eternal dream of standardizing a proprietary format... betamax... mini-DV... memory-stick... blu-ray...
My brother is a pedigreed professor of finance who, after eight years of teaching and research, quit in disgust. One of his top two reasons for leaving was the self-loathing he felt for the part he played in churning out MBAs whose jobs will be to dream up stuff like proprietary connectors.
When he and I go around together, we still play a game of detecting the signs of MBAs grazing in the area. A striking example in recent memory is when the Oshkosh fly-in changed its name to the more-trademarkable "EAA Airventure", raised all the camping fees, and implemented tamper-resistant wristbands for admission.
Microsoft is working on this problem -- a way to computerize the release of authentication information but not identification information (and vice versa). See the "Laws of Identity" over at http://www.identityblog.com/.
In particular, they are discussing a way to build an 'identity wallet' into the OS that will allow you to choose what identifying or authenticating bits of information to give to whom. And the wallet will be kept in a hardened UI that only humans can access.
It's about damn time, too. The real world already works like this: for everyone you interact with, you dynamically choose what data to reveal, and you never reveal it all in the manner presently demanded by many websites.
Ah, the 36-count jumbo box... I believe the name for that sized box is "The don't-have-a-Family Pack".
Not this again.
Would someone please create a metalist? You can title it "The Top 100 Top n Games Of All Time Of All Time".
k'thanks.
With the possible exceptions of a few weeks after WWI, WWII, and 09/11, there has never been a time that we weren't in "a time of great political tension".
But that's okay. Political tension is a sign of a healthy democracy, in which people are willing to speak and push for their cause. Compare this to the sullen quiet of a dictatorship.
There should be a fee for producing any carbon-free device.
Atmospheric carbon is our one and only defense against the next ice age, which we know is coming and which we know will wipe us out.
Not to mention the fact that warming the planet will yield more useful land in northern climes than will be abandoned in equatorial climes.
Hey now, no fair bashing the star-naming agencies. From starregistry.com:
See? See?! The star names are in a copyrighted book! Future generations may even look it up some day!
P.S. What I do not understand, is how anyone can work for companies like that and manage to not hate themselves.
Those 'natural' methods are slow. Meanwhile, people all around the world are sick, malnourished, and dying. We Westerners are sufficiently safe and comfortable so as to be snooty about such things, but it would be a different story if it was our stomachs that were empty.
Whatever theoretical hazards there are in GM, must be weighed against the very real very human cost of delaying the worldwide adaptation of superior crop strains.
They collect patents for self-defense against the many new IP predators lurking out there.
There are companies amassing thousands of patents, with which to bludgeon an ill-gotten profit out of established product lines.
Microsoft et. al. hold whatever patents they can in order to have ammunition for the day the sharks come knocking.
Just when we start to worry that we've hit a wall in our attempts to grow, somebody goes and cuts a completely unexpected doorway in it.
Same thing happened with telecommunications vis-a-vis wireless.
I'm looking forward to something similar happening with domestic power generation and distribution.
Um, staying home?
Why drive out into the hostile empty vacuum of space? Home is much better. Especially once home has really good VR. Then you can jack in, fly around, have three-week-long orgasms, whatever.
Seriously. Once real VR is invented, we're not going anywhere.
This may have already happened. We may have even forgotten that we are in VR. It would certainly explain the odd computational features of our reality, such as the Law of Conservation of Information.
Anyway, if aliens did visit the Earth, they certainly wouldn't have sent person-sized ships. Microscopic ships piloted by AI or virtual-people are vastly more efficient for crossing interstellar distances.
That depends on how desperate you are to remove carbon from the air.
Right now, we aren't. Therefore, paper and lumber is the most profitable -- if indirect -- route for taking atmospheric carbon and re-burying it.
How am I asserting that? I just said that paper recycling reduces demand for new carbon that began life as a CO2-eating tree. Your apple tree is a carbon sink too, but not on the scale that paper- and lumber-production are.
Show us even ONE example of a tolerance curriculum embracing a child's abusive or antisocial behavior.
You are laboring under a caricature of the tolerance movement. And while I am sure that the occasional tolerance advocate goes off into the weeds, and begins teaching guff like that, it is obvious that they are an unimportant deviation from the core principle.
The core principle is "different is not automatically bad". Teaching this requires undoing a 100,000-year-old meme that once protected the tribe from predatory outsiders, which in turn requires the shifting of a great weight of social ballast. It will take a long time to get it right, and there will be many missteps along the way. But don't let that obscure your view of the goal's value.
Please don't include 'tolerance' in your package-deal of What Is Wrong With Public Schools. Tolerance is one part of the broader overcome-your-Tribalism effort, and this is a Good Thing. Tribalism squanders vast amounts of resources, as we waste effort on hate and fear and persecution.
Not to mention the fact that children are usually innocent of whatever it is that they are being persecuted for. Were it not for the tolerance movement you so brazenly deride, my own sons would have been hurt and made miserable for having two moms. But now, kids are becoming sophisticated enough to see that there is more than one codepath to happiness.
I suppose it is easy to harp about tolerance when you are solidly in the middle of the tribe. The majority, after all, is always sane.
Take care about making these assumptions:
...especially the first one. While we hear from all sides that schools are horrible and not working, it's not clear to me that this is true. Not all students are going to be teachable. And students may need to have failures around them in order to learn various metalessons about mankind.
I'm not saying I know the answers here. I am just questioning the conventional wisdom that public schools are failing to efficiently prepare students for independence.
It is a Hard Problem to measure the performance of a school, or even a teacher.
You allude to vouchers, as a stopgap measure, but that doesn't entirely solve the problem. A voucher is basically a way for individual parents to judge the school based on observations of their child. While this is more precise than a standardized test, it is not necessarily accurate, nor is it reliable on a schoolwide basis. In any event, it functions only in the presence of attentive, devoted parents.
You also need to factor in the greatest expense of all: person-hours. How many sheets of paper would a human need to gather up, stack, straighten, and then reload, in order to offset the cost of the paper?
Person-hours get more expensive by the day, because they are a function of society's total productive output which is climbing continuously. I expect that this issue is like the issue with pens and paper plates: it's wasteful to take steps to avoid wasting them.
The recycling of paper is bad for the environment. Paper represents carbon that a tree took from the air by converting CO2 to O2. If you bury that paper, the carbon remains sequestered, and then a new tree can take new carbon from the air to make new paper.
Recycling reduces the demand for this cycle, and therefore reduces the rate of atmospheric carbon removal rate.
Ditto for lumber.
Killing trees, turning them into paper and lumber, and then wasting the aforementioned paper and lumber, is the only way to reduce atmospheric carbon dioxide levels.
A tree pulls carbon out of the air (i.e. photosynthesizes CO2 into O2 by removing C) insofar as it is growing. A matured tree removes no additional (net) carbon from the air because its leaves rot and give the carbon back up to their air via decay, ants, and termites. And when it falls over and rots away, all of its lifetime accumulation of carbon is re-released.
The only way to keep the tree's carbon from getting back into the air, is to bury it deeply, as occurs when it has been logged, turned to paper, and then wasted and sent to a landfill.
If forests or rainforests really removed net carbon from the air all by themselves, then they would quickly develop coalbeds of carbon underneath themselves. Guess what? They don't. The Lorax is a big fat liar. Well, a small fat liar, anyway.
> L
You are sitting in an airplane seat, in the coach section of an airliner. The airliner is descending.
> I
You are carrying:
>READ TICKET
I don't see any ticket here.
>READ TICKET STUB
The ticket stub is for an intercontinental flight from Great Britain to Mexico, with a stopover in Dallas.
>DALLAS?
I don't know how to dallas.
>DOES THIS PLANE HAVE A STOPOVER IN DALLAS?
I don't see any plane here.
>LEAVE PLANE
Your seatbelt holds you in the seat, preventing you from standing up.
>OPEN SEATBELT
You cannot open that.
>UNFASTEN SEATBELT
Unfastened.
>LEAVE PLANE
You need to stand up first.
>STAND UP
You are now standing. The passenger sitting next to you looks agitated.
>LEAVE PLANE
The exit doors are locked, as the plane is still in flight.
>FUCK
I don't know how to fuck.
The plane is about to land in Dallas. You are likely to be arrested by a grue.
>ARE THEY GOING TO ARREST ME?
I don't see any they here.
>EXIT
You cannot exit now.
Your sword is glowing faintly.
>QUIT
You cannot quit now.
Your sword is glowing faintly.
Useless objection. We all understand that Turing-completeness requires infinite memory. So, when we say that a machine is Turing-complete, we are understood to mean "This machine is Turing-complete qua available memory".
Oh. I'm sorry. I didn't realize that you were disrupting the conversation just to show off your alleged mental prowess.