My problem with both theories is that they seem to be band-aids applied to current physics to tweak the result to something that matches our observations. For example, we assume that general relativity works the same for superclusters of galaxies as it does here in our solar system. Problem is the results it gives don't match our observations. So is this evidence that the theory breaks down over very large scales? Nope, it just means the universe is mostly made of invisible energy with negative pressure that only interacts through gravitation.
The whole situation reminds me of the aether theories of early physics. The problem then was that Newton's explanation of light provided a very good explanation for reflection, but not refraction or diffraction. The assumption was that since the theory worked well on one set of problems, it must work equally well on another similar set. It didn't, but no matter. By assuming light travels through a medium, the aether, you could tweak the equations to give results close to the observations.
Over the next 200 years this aether gained more and more 'magical' properties to tweak the results of other theories. It had to be a fluid, but also millions of times more rigid than steel. It had to be massless, completely transparent, incompressible and a whole host of other things all at the same time. Everyone was aware of the obvious problems here, but because so many physical theories (theories that gave pretty accurate predictions) were based on it it was just assumed to exist.
In the end aether theory was made obsolete when Einstein re-wrote the incomplete physics that relied on it to deliver accurate predictions. Physics was stuck in a rut for 200 years because it assumed aether must exist, and everyone's efforts were aimed at incorporating aether into physical theories. I just hope this isn't happening again with Dark Matter/Energy.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist or cosmologist, I just have a passing interest in this stuff, so take what I've said as nothing more than an opinion.
I had a similar situation with 1&1 in Germany. I paid for a 16 Mbit connection (which they assured me was available in my area) but the lines were so poor that I'd never see more than 6 Mbit. On top of that the modem would lose sync at least once per hour after 5pm which made VOIP a real pain in the ass. Talking to someone on the phone? Oops, not anymore.
Incidentally the sync losses always started after the street lights turned on, I guess the lines weren't insulated properly. The customer service at 1&1 is worse than terrible, and after the 3rd time of being on the phone with them for half an hour (at 25 cents per minute no less) and getting nothing resolved I simply gave up.
After moving to a new place I ordered a cable connection from Kabel Deutschland instead, 20 Mbit with VOIP for 30 EUR a month. I'm getting 19 Mbit with every speed test I can find and the connection is rock solid. At only 10 EUR/month more than the 1&1 DSL connection it's well worth it.
So I'm happy with the connection I have now, but don't get me started on all the underhanded tricks they use to obscure what you'll really be paying every month. I'm honestly amazed at what they can get away with in that department.
Cell phone companies in Canada are required to have what's called a "materially adverse" clause in their contracts. This basically gives you the right to cancel your contract if they make any changes to it which are "materially adverse", usually things like adding fees or increasing the price of a service you're receiving. But you have to be fast, most of the time you have only 14 days to cancel after the change was made (which means if you don't notice the change until the next bill comes in you're hooped).
If you notice it in time and want out just call their customer service line, ask them if the changes affect you and, if so, read them the materially adverse clause and tell them you want out. When the front line CSR tells you you'll have to pay a fee just escalate the call to his supervisor.
'Course the grass isn't always greener on the other side, especially in the telecom industry.
And this problem is only going to get worse with time, as more and more stupid laws are added to the books. Passing a dumb law is relatively easy, all you need is one extraordinary event ('preferably' involving a child) to make it into the mainstream media and you can pass a law against some aspect involved in that event. Getting useless or stupid laws repealed afterward is much harder.
Personally I think every new law should come under review every 5 years to a) judge its effectiveness in reducing whatever it is it was meant to reduce, b) re-assess its applicability in light of new developments (whether that be technological, court rulings, false positives etc) and c) gauge public opinion about whether this law is still necessary. It's a lot to ask for sure, but then again passing a new law is a big deal, or at least it should be.
Without some kind of review process like this the law books will just get thicker and thicker, until it becomes impossible to live a normal life without breaking some law every day. I'd argue we've already reached that point.
The player can't, but it could be listed in the manual if those headphones come with the phone, since that can be tested in the factory. At least this would give some basis for comparison if you replace the headphones with 3rd party ones.
Even the amplification scale you mentioned would be a step up from Volume: 1-10.
I have no idea what the volume levels on my cell phone mean. I can group the 1-10 scale into quiet, loud, louder and loudest, but where is 89 dB in that 1-10 scale? I have no idea. It would be helpful if the manual listed the dB levels that the factory supplied headphones are capable of generating at each volume level. As it stands the manual for my Ericsson doesn't even mention the headphones.
To be fair to Qantas all they said in this press release is that they're looking into the possibility as part of the investigation. Nowhere in TFA did they say wireless interference was responsible.
Thanks again to the slashdot editors for the excellent headline and summary... where's my:rolleyes: emoticon?
Second Life is like the Pong of virtual worlds. It's the first step toward what was described in Snow Crash, driven by profit instead of an open source, open world approach.
I would love to see a 3D sandbox where freelance programmers could just be given the tools to create whatever they want and share it in a virtual world. Anyone could download a client application and navigate this virtual world like Google Earth.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson portrayed a world like this. Destinations could be anything from lavish corporate offices where company execs conduct virtual meetings, to virtual clubs (which would really be nothing more than spiffy looking chat rooms), to games, to virtual concerts with pixel shader driven light shows. Everyone could create their own avatar, or download templates, to represent themselves in this virtual world.
The problem is 'policing' the content introduced to the system. In an open ended world like this it'd be trivial for someone to upload some malicious code. There'd have to be some sort of submission system where all code is reviewed before it's introduced to the system, but even that wouldn't be fool proof and it'd probably be pretty expensive.
The situation is similar in Germany with just about all internet banking. No money can be transferred online without inputting a 6 digit number called a TAN code. Whenever you run out you request another list of TAN codes from the bank which get sent to you by registered mail. When you transfer money through a bank's website it'll ask you for a random TAN code number (like "Enter TAN number 93"), once a TAN code is used it can't be used again. Each time I log into my bank's website it shows me the last TAN number used and the last time I was logged on.
I've found banking security in general is better here than in North America. Sometimes at the expense of convenience. You can't make a deposit at a bank ATM here for example, all deposits have to go through a clerk.
Stan Marsh: "And so what have we learned through this ordeal? The internet went away, it came back, but for how long we do not know. We cannot take the internet for granted any longer. We as a country must stop over logging...on. We must use the internet only when we need it. It's easy for to think we can just use up all the internet we want, but if we don't treat the internet with the RESPECT!!! it deserves, it could one day be gone forever.
So let us learn to live with the internet, not for it. No more browsing for no apparent reason, no more mindlessly surfing on our laptops while watching television. And finally, we must learn to only use the internet for porn twice a day... max."
First we had dark energy, then dark matter, now dark flow. All to try and explain an unexpected effect of something we don't understand. Lets figure out what exactly gravity is and how it really works over large scales, then we can revisit all this "dark" stuff.
It's called the Pants Urination Screening SYstem (PUSSY). Although I haven't finished the test on volunteers yet, I'm confident that I can acheive at least a 90% pants urination detection rate in those told to piss their pants. This, combined with a study I've done which found terrorists may piss their pants before an attack, would be an effective tool in combatting terrorism. One interesting result of my study so far; a surprisingly large number of people who get really, really drunk seem to be terrorists. This can be seen as evidence that the device does in fact work.
Yes I know all about the EFF, they do great work. So why aren't there more of them? Why isn't there an organization to properly represent people being sued by the RIAA? Why isn't there one challenging scientology's tax exempt status? There's lots of issues today that make you ask "Well why doesn't somebody take this to court?", the answer is usually lack of money. An EFF like organization seems like the perfect solution, unless you expect the EFF to do everything. Challenging the tax exempt status of a cult isn't exactly the electronic frontier.
So start an organization that will fight on behalf of a group of people, funded by contributions from those people. The financial burden is too much for one person, so split it among thousands of people.
I'm still surprised this isn't happening more often. The internet is the perfect tool to organize something like this, spread the word and secure donations. So short of a few big organizations like the ACLU, why isn't it happening?
I use a modified HOSTS file. Before I'd frequently get websites that would refuse to load for 10 seconds or more, because some ad server was taking its sweet time. Now any calls to ad servers are blocked and pages generally load up in less than a second. 90% of the time ads are blocked by the HOSTS file, the other 10% of the time I use the content blocker in Opera.
I wasn't aware a few megabytes/hour constituted being a 'power user'. Why do online games always get mentioned in the same sentence as people who download 4 gigabyte movies every day?
The worst part about this is the bill can be voted down over and over, and they'll just reintroduce it, over and over. It only has to pass once, and that's the depressing part.
Slashdot Mirror
I think Stephen Colbert did a great job of summarizing the propaganda machine behind the Iraq war. You can watch the bit I'm talking about here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=diEdNgnzR3g
My problem with both theories is that they seem to be band-aids applied to current physics to tweak the result to something that matches our observations. For example, we assume that general relativity works the same for superclusters of galaxies as it does here in our solar system. Problem is the results it gives don't match our observations. So is this evidence that the theory breaks down over very large scales? Nope, it just means the universe is mostly made of invisible energy with negative pressure that only interacts through gravitation.
The whole situation reminds me of the aether theories of early physics. The problem then was that Newton's explanation of light provided a very good explanation for reflection, but not refraction or diffraction. The assumption was that since the theory worked well on one set of problems, it must work equally well on another similar set. It didn't, but no matter. By assuming light travels through a medium, the aether, you could tweak the equations to give results close to the observations.
Over the next 200 years this aether gained more and more 'magical' properties to tweak the results of other theories. It had to be a fluid, but also millions of times more rigid than steel. It had to be massless, completely transparent, incompressible and a whole host of other things all at the same time. Everyone was aware of the obvious problems here, but because so many physical theories (theories that gave pretty accurate predictions) were based on it it was just assumed to exist.
In the end aether theory was made obsolete when Einstein re-wrote the incomplete physics that relied on it to deliver accurate predictions. Physics was stuck in a rut for 200 years because it assumed aether must exist, and everyone's efforts were aimed at incorporating aether into physical theories. I just hope this isn't happening again with Dark Matter/Energy.
Disclaimer: I am not a physicist or cosmologist, I just have a passing interest in this stuff, so take what I've said as nothing more than an opinion.
I had a similar situation with 1&1 in Germany. I paid for a 16 Mbit connection (which they assured me was available in my area) but the lines were so poor that I'd never see more than 6 Mbit. On top of that the modem would lose sync at least once per hour after 5pm which made VOIP a real pain in the ass. Talking to someone on the phone? Oops, not anymore.
Incidentally the sync losses always started after the street lights turned on, I guess the lines weren't insulated properly. The customer service at 1&1 is worse than terrible, and after the 3rd time of being on the phone with them for half an hour (at 25 cents per minute no less) and getting nothing resolved I simply gave up.
After moving to a new place I ordered a cable connection from Kabel Deutschland instead, 20 Mbit with VOIP for 30 EUR a month. I'm getting 19 Mbit with every speed test I can find and the connection is rock solid. At only 10 EUR/month more than the 1&1 DSL connection it's well worth it.
So I'm happy with the connection I have now, but don't get me started on all the underhanded tricks they use to obscure what you'll really be paying every month. I'm honestly amazed at what they can get away with in that department.
Cell phone companies in Canada are required to have what's called a "materially adverse" clause in their contracts. This basically gives you the right to cancel your contract if they make any changes to it which are "materially adverse", usually things like adding fees or increasing the price of a service you're receiving. But you have to be fast, most of the time you have only 14 days to cancel after the change was made (which means if you don't notice the change until the next bill comes in you're hooped).
If you notice it in time and want out just call their customer service line, ask them if the changes affect you and, if so, read them the materially adverse clause and tell them you want out. When the front line CSR tells you you'll have to pay a fee just escalate the call to his supervisor.
'Course the grass isn't always greener on the other side, especially in the telecom industry.
And this problem is only going to get worse with time, as more and more stupid laws are added to the books. Passing a dumb law is relatively easy, all you need is one extraordinary event ('preferably' involving a child) to make it into the mainstream media and you can pass a law against some aspect involved in that event. Getting useless or stupid laws repealed afterward is much harder.
Personally I think every new law should come under review every 5 years to a) judge its effectiveness in reducing whatever it is it was meant to reduce, b) re-assess its applicability in light of new developments (whether that be technological, court rulings, false positives etc) and c) gauge public opinion about whether this law is still necessary. It's a lot to ask for sure, but then again passing a new law is a big deal, or at least it should be.
Without some kind of review process like this the law books will just get thicker and thicker, until it becomes impossible to live a normal life without breaking some law every day. I'd argue we've already reached that point.
The player can't, but it could be listed in the manual if those headphones come with the phone, since that can be tested in the factory. At least this would give some basis for comparison if you replace the headphones with 3rd party ones.
Even the amplification scale you mentioned would be a step up from Volume: 1-10.
I have no idea what the volume levels on my cell phone mean. I can group the 1-10 scale into quiet, loud, louder and loudest, but where is 89 dB in that 1-10 scale? I have no idea. It would be helpful if the manual listed the dB levels that the factory supplied headphones are capable of generating at each volume level. As it stands the manual for my Ericsson doesn't even mention the headphones.
I think the correct term is accountabilibuddy.
Actually, to be even more fair to Qantas, it's the Australian Transport Safety Bureau looking into this issue.
To be fair to Qantas all they said in this press release is that they're looking into the possibility as part of the investigation. Nowhere in TFA did they say wireless interference was responsible.
:rolleyes: emoticon?
Thanks again to the slashdot editors for the excellent headline and summary... where's my
Second Life is like the Pong of virtual worlds. It's the first step toward what was described in Snow Crash, driven by profit instead of an open source, open world approach.
I would love to see a 3D sandbox where freelance programmers could just be given the tools to create whatever they want and share it in a virtual world. Anyone could download a client application and navigate this virtual world like Google Earth.
Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson portrayed a world like this. Destinations could be anything from lavish corporate offices where company execs conduct virtual meetings, to virtual clubs (which would really be nothing more than spiffy looking chat rooms), to games, to virtual concerts with pixel shader driven light shows. Everyone could create their own avatar, or download templates, to represent themselves in this virtual world.
The problem is 'policing' the content introduced to the system. In an open ended world like this it'd be trivial for someone to upload some malicious code. There'd have to be some sort of submission system where all code is reviewed before it's introduced to the system, but even that wouldn't be fool proof and it'd probably be pretty expensive.
That aside, the possibilities would be endless.
The situation is similar in Germany with just about all internet banking. No money can be transferred online without inputting a 6 digit number called a TAN code. Whenever you run out you request another list of TAN codes from the bank which get sent to you by registered mail. When you transfer money through a bank's website it'll ask you for a random TAN code number (like "Enter TAN number 93"), once a TAN code is used it can't be used again. Each time I log into my bank's website it shows me the last TAN number used and the last time I was logged on.
I've found banking security in general is better here than in North America. Sometimes at the expense of convenience. You can't make a deposit at a bank ATM here for example, all deposits have to go through a clerk.
Crysis was known for excellent gameplay? When did that happen?
Stan Marsh: "And so what have we learned through this ordeal? The internet went away, it came back, but for how long we do not know. We cannot take the internet for granted any longer. We as a country must stop over logging...on. We must use the internet only when we need it. It's easy for to think we can just use up all the internet we want, but if we don't treat the internet with the RESPECT!!! it deserves, it could one day be gone forever.
So let us learn to live with the internet, not for it. No more browsing for no apparent reason, no more mindlessly surfing on our laptops while watching television. And finally, we must learn to only use the internet for porn twice a day... max."
First we had dark energy, then dark matter, now dark flow. All to try and explain an unexpected effect of something we don't understand. Lets figure out what exactly gravity is and how it really works over large scales, then we can revisit all this "dark" stuff.
It's called the Pants Urination Screening SYstem (PUSSY). Although I haven't finished the test on volunteers yet, I'm confident that I can acheive at least a 90% pants urination detection rate in those told to piss their pants. This, combined with a study I've done which found terrorists may piss their pants before an attack, would be an effective tool in combatting terrorism. One interesting result of my study so far; a surprisingly large number of people who get really, really drunk seem to be terrorists. This can be seen as evidence that the device does in fact work.
Funding please...
who is selling the Eva Longoria PC and how much does it cost? Actually, nevermind the cost, just tell me where I can buy one.
This will only be a suddenoutbreakofcommonsense if the bill actually gets passed and enacted into law. I'm not holding my breath.
Yes I know all about the EFF, they do great work. So why aren't there more of them? Why isn't there an organization to properly represent people being sued by the RIAA? Why isn't there one challenging scientology's tax exempt status? There's lots of issues today that make you ask "Well why doesn't somebody take this to court?", the answer is usually lack of money. An EFF like organization seems like the perfect solution, unless you expect the EFF to do everything. Challenging the tax exempt status of a cult isn't exactly the electronic frontier.
So start an organization that will fight on behalf of a group of people, funded by contributions from those people. The financial burden is too much for one person, so split it among thousands of people.
I'm still surprised this isn't happening more often. The internet is the perfect tool to organize something like this, spread the word and secure donations. So short of a few big organizations like the ACLU, why isn't it happening?
I use a modified HOSTS file. Before I'd frequently get websites that would refuse to load for 10 seconds or more, because some ad server was taking its sweet time. Now any calls to ad servers are blocked and pages generally load up in less than a second. 90% of the time ads are blocked by the HOSTS file, the other 10% of the time I use the content blocker in Opera.
I wasn't aware a few megabytes/hour constituted being a 'power user'. Why do online games always get mentioned in the same sentence as people who download 4 gigabyte movies every day?
It's called critical thinking. You know, the opposite of accepting everything that's dished out by some guy with a degree.
The worst part about this is the bill can be voted down over and over, and they'll just reintroduce it, over and over. It only has to pass once, and that's the depressing part.
But at least for now, Mr. Stephen Harper; we're setting you adrift, idiot.