We don't currently possess the technology to extract that much energy from tectonics. By the time we do have the ability, if we live that long, we should have easier ways to make energy.
So we should be OK. Well, not US. But 20 or 30 generations from now.
eBay slipped on this one because they detected the compromised account as merely a misuse of employee web privileges, a minor sort of issue perhaps to be mentioned by said employee's manager at their next review. Nobody noticed the scope of the issue until much later.
Anyway, remote employees are the rule everywhere these days. They're either the boss working from home or minions unworthy to have a company desk, or all the jobs that have been outsourced.
The plenty of projects going on these days where not a single person involved is actually in a physical office owned or operated by the actual companies involved.
I recently worked on a large IT project with one the huge IT companies you've heard of. While their main project manager was based domestically where the work was taking place, the ENTIRE remaining participation from huge IT was offshored. Most of the other third-party contractors (and there were a LOT of them on this, all touching extremely sensitive data) were also offshore. The contractor I worked for, ironically, is a foreign-owned company but all of our people on this one were domestic.
Robots almost universally expect and assume they will operate in a static universe where fixed obstacles don't move and random things don't happen.
Robot cars attempt to convert driving into a static arena by rapidly scanning, by having good maps, by knowing what is coming.
The problem for robots is that the universe likes to drop things into the middle of roads, that people like to step out between cars, that potholes will suddenly exist where they didn't before, that some doofus pushing a bicycle up a hill in the middle of a lane will happen.
And sometimes suddenly. And all at once. So what IS a robot car to do when the choice is hit two pedestrians or take the car off road over a cliff? Forget Asimov. His laws of robotics are irrelevant and always have been. This car has a choice: hurt two or hurt one? What will it do?
The answer is, hit the pedestrians. The car will do its best to cope with a sudden situation but it can't do any better here than a human driver. People drivers, I often see, are MUCH happier about crossing into opposing lanes of traffic thus risking a head-on collision than they are staying in their lane and coping with a pothole or even just a bump. The FIRST thing they do is violate that double yellow line rather than be even slightly inconvenienced by a jolt.
Crossing that line has no immediate consequence, as the car they are about to hit is several meters away. While the bump they knew was coming is avoided. Success! No bump. Now about that 4,000LB vehicle approaching at 45MPh. We takes our chances.
Even orbit is no big deal, really. If you lived in a house with a fenced in yard, orbit is like running around just inside the fence* all the way around the house. So you are at no point more than a few meters away from the house. Orbit is the same, just scaled up.
What we need to be doing is running down to the corner or across the street or through the woods to grandmother's house. Running around inside a fence is what dogs do, mindlessly making a path in the grass.
*why inside the fence and not outside? Because orbit means you are still in the grasp of gravity, you are just falling as fast as it's pulling. So things in orbit will eventually decay and fall down, just as the kid or dog running in the yard will eventually have to come inside. Things outside the fence could be equated to escape velocity and well, if it got that far, it's not coming back. Your kid has left for college and his/her own family. In Montana.
But in my mind, it's still not space or deep space as it is sometimes called. These terms should have been reserved for some place that is not still basically here, closer than the next biggest city on the ground.
"Space" should be at least further away than the moon, and "deep space" should be out beyond the orbit of Mars. You know, actually far away from here.
Arbitrary? No worse than Karman. And it's going to look damn ridiculous when we start claiming deep space is low Earth orbit when we all know from scifi deep space is really way way out there, where nobody can hear you scream. Deep Space Transport Craft Nixon of course will go no such place. It will taxi to the moon and back. Some kinda deep space. It's just going to sound silly.
Has GM seen a modern mobile device? Oh they are magical things indeed! Maps, GPS, instant messaging, email, music streaming, podcasts, MP3s, even streaming live TV and video, almost anywhere.
And with bluetooth, all of that can be streamed right into the car audio system. Or you can use an aux cable, truly the tail of the magic fairy.
The best part, all of that is included with my phone plan. As much as a I want. Oh sure there's a cap, but exceeding it by a huge margin still wouldn't hit this $150 a month rate, and that cost there would be for something only usable in the car. My magic mobile? Goes with me where I go, and if you will excuse me, I am going to go now, if you get my meaning. But I'll be online the whole time.
My job has mutated over the years such that that I am now tasked with doing work on I don't actually know how to do, on custom systems I don't understand. As a result, I suck at it. I have told management this many times but they blink and look at me like I am speaking Martian and basically think I don't WANT to work.
Anyway, I end up with a pile of work I can't do and a few things I can do and it is often a struggle to stay awake. I mean a serious battle between me and gravity pulling my head down to the desk. Snacks doesn't help. Three cups of coffee does not help. Even walks don't help: I am very good at falling asleep in motion.
Yeah it scares me too. Terrifies me.
The combination of boredom, lack of mental stimulation, and lack of ability to do the work leaves me physically devastated.
I am told I am the least productive employee in the whole company so I am waiting around now to see if they will fire me, at which point I will go home and take a nap.
That's it exactly: Google needs fibre so it can say to Comcast and ATT, we won't pay for users on your networks who want Google services. Instead, we''ll service them ourselves with a better product at same/better pricing.
It puts the ball back in Comcast's court to say they'll match the service or pricing and dares them to keep the network open. It would look awful for Comcast to start blocking services. Customers with a choice might just flee.
Eventually Google will need their own wireless coverage. Mobile is where they will make most of their money, if not already, and that means all the carriers will want a cut
Greed about what? What would we, either as a race of creatures, or as a populated biosphere, or even as the raw planet itself, what would we have that an advanced race could not find somewhere else for less hassle?
This assumes advanced races couldn't just do "magic" with materials sciences and simply make whatever they needed. If they still need raw material, why come here?
Water? We know there's a LOT of it out there. Our own Oort cloud could be mined for water for close to forever and we wouldn't know about it or be able to do anything. They won't need our oceans.
Gold? Metals? Asteroids. Free. Nobody with spears guarding them. They don't need your dental fillings.
Food? Oh come on, advanced races surely have sorted out getting rid of biological needs like food and waste processing. So they won't need to eat us.
Reproduction? Laughable. Our reproductive process is ridiculous. And probably not compatible. We don't have horse-humans running around and our DNA is already close to the horse DNA. Alien DNA won't be that similar. It would have to be modified, tested, modified more, tested more, to get to a viable hybrid. Hmmm....
Toys? Now this is really the only reason for them to come here. A set of living toys. If all we are to aliens is a set of toys, then we have no hope. This is worse than if they wanted to come here to eat us and take our water. Being a toy means we're only here until somebody decides they want new toys.
We do have plenty of evidence. Something is definitely going on.
The real truth is that humanity is merely a curiosity at this point. We think very highly indeed of ourselves but we're barely better than zoo animals and we go out of our way to ensure we stay that way.
Those who have come here to see what's up haven't felt any need to establish an open, formal relationship. It brings no benefit to them. We have nothing to offer they can't get now while they continue to operate as they have, and there's nothing we can do about it. Zero. So why bother talking to us?
That's the really sad thing: it's not that we can't find ET or if there is or is not an ET at all; it's that ET is around and just doesn't care about us.
The real problem is the ( and ). It would have been possible to construct that sentence as a whole thought and finish it rather than put the last bit in ( ), It's one thought, one statement; there is no need do it the way it was done. You're not interjecting something. It's all one sentence.
I think in nearly every case, whatever is being said can be structured in a way to eliminate the need to ever use those damn things. If you have to use them, you need to redo whatever you are trying to day, because you should not need them. And yet I know plenty of people find it impossible to write anything without using them.
It just pushes me to find ways to avoid them (the parenthesis, I mean; not the people).
hey, they're Canadians, the only disputes they get in are over the shape on their bacon.
Jokes like that about Canadians not getting into fights are funny but also sad. The country has experienced huge growth recently driven by immigration from all parts of the world. Those people bring with them whatever cultural tendencies that had in their places of origin. And that includes violence, quick tempers, fighting, etc. Things normally not what you'd expect from Canadians.
There are already enclaves of people who moved en masse from home country to Canada where they live just as they did before, complete with their own codes of justice and morality which mean more to them than provincial law.
Some of it is muted by exposure and blending to the overall culture, it is true. But It's also safe to say Canada will continue to slowly be less and less "Canada" and more just a melting pot more like the US. There is no way to stop this short of ceasing the immigration options.
So enjoy making jokes while you can. Assuredly somewhere in Canada somebody will soon enough cut off their child's head for something on religious grounds, and others will obtain guns under hunting laws and instead use them on people.
Noting: I am USAmerican. But I work for Canadian company, which has nearly all immigrant employees in our Toronto headquarters. These are people who have nothing to do with Canada in any way, except that they happen to live there now instead of some place you see on the "tragedy today in..." news stories from some country overseas. They do not share any of the laid-back traits Canada is famous for. At all.
I also completely get that modern Canada was created in the first place by immigrants who displaced the "first peoples" much as the Indians were displaced in the US. I get that Canada wouldn't be Canada without ships full of people moving in. However, in the old days, you moved to a new country and eventually blended in for the good of all and because you had no choice. Your shared DNA made all strong. Nowadays you can move in and watch the same TV you had at home, and never integrate into anything new. Instead of making all stronger, this makes pockets of infection increasingly at odds with the body.
This same thing is happening in the US, of course. We're just used to it here. We happily kill each other and think nothing of it. I fear for Canada. This hasn't been their norm, but it will be.
There's nothing to joke about here. I used to work next to the local Postal Police offices. Yes, they have their own cops. Yes, they have their own guns, and lots of undercover cars. They also have one of those fully-loaded mobile command centers that show up at major incidents. This vehicle is exactly the same as what any other government agency would have.
It's so loaded with gear and antennas, Google's map photos block out the whole vehicle to prevent anyone from seeing the equipment.
So go on making jokes. The Postal cops are just like any other police and their bullets will kill you dead just like any other.
I used to be a real fan of WRT54GL and happily ran Tomato on it for a long time, until I realized I needed gigabit ethernet (yes, I do need it) and Wireless N (yes I use it). The new router had to actually work, without crashing, and handle constant data load, and not need hand-holding.
Linksys had the E3000 which worked fine except the CPU was wimpy and the 5GHz never worked for me. Throughput was awful. So I went to closed-source hardware, specifically an Asus router, and it works just great. No problems. Lots of bells and whistles and enough horsepower to cope with actually doing what the buzzwords on the box say it can do, without crapping out. This thing is a beast. Never needs nursing. It just works.
The E3000 is now relegated to a glorified WAP and gigabit backhaul at the other end of the house. Tomato is still useful as I never have to maintain that box at all, not that it's being asked to do a lot.
Open source is great when it's compatible with what I need to do. But bottom line is, I need to do X task. If closed-source can do it, OK. But I am not holding my breath or suffering with some problem waiting for an open fix.
This is a classic example of governments and problems. When some sort of problem is identified, and "the people" want action to happen, the government has two choices to deal with the problem.
One, they can take appropriate action, if they can do that and know what to do and how to do it. Even better if doing so is relatively cheap. In this case, you do the cheap thing to make it go away.
Two, they can do everything in their power to suppress knowledge of the problem. A problem nobody knows about is one that doesn't need to be solved. This is especially important if the problem is big or serious, or affects a lot of people in a negative way, and to which the government has no solution. The only thing worse than a big problem is having "the people" aware of it and that their government is unable to act. So is is essential that the government take this route when they cannot solve the problem or don't know how, or can't afford the solution. Or there's some other reason they don't want to solve it but they can't admit that either.
So type one problems, you dump the reservoir. It's cheap to clean it out and, well, water is cheap anyway.
A good example of type two problems are the side effects from the chemical disposal mishandling at Groom Lake. To admit the problem exists would invite a huge liability mess. So by denying it, they avoid the problem. Because they can.
It has been speculated one reason the governments generally dodge the UFO issue is that if they were ever identified as a real force(s) of some kind, then the people would demand that something be done about stopping it. It's not clear anyone would have the ability to DO anything about it and when your government can't protect you, what good is the government? So a problem like this would have to be denied.
Thankfully there are no UFOs. So this is not a problem.
American tax code is sometimes called "The Lawyers and Accountants Retirement Act" because the complexity ensures lots of work to do for those professions until they retire to small private islands.
Paradoxically, there is a saying in Washington that any law with the word "act" in the name manages to do exactly the opposite of whatever is says it does. But since there is no actual act named this, it does not counter itself and thus they get to keep the work.
My taxes are deliberately setup to withhold extra, because I stink at saving money and I know it. So this way it just happens, and I get a refund every year. One year I had to pay a few hundred bucks I didn't have so this also makes sure I have plenty of cushion in case something goes wacky and I owe.
It so happens tax refund season also falls right on the time when I need annual work done on my car, which I would not otherwise have the money to cover. So that's what I do with my little refund every stinking year. Car repairs.
Anyway, the moment my W2 is available for download from my payroll company, I ask HR if that's final. Because sometimes they revise it. And THAT sucks if you have already filed. Once I get a final W2, I run it through one of the online tax software things mainly to see where the numbers fall. They'll let you get all the way to the end before you have to pay. Normally I do this through two competing products to see if they have the same results. So far, they always have.
If I am due a refund, I file that part of it immediately. Typically a Federal refund posts in a week. This year, I filed on Jan 31 and had a refund on February 6.
Normally I owe a little to my state. $23 this year. If I owe, I mail it around April 14. No need to pay them early.
Now I have a very simple income. One job, plain W2. I used to own stocks outright and that messed things up badly for me. Have to do all this depreciation and interest basis whatsit junk. HUH? All I wanted to do was own a few shares in companies I admire or use or liked or whatever, totally a whopping $30 or something. Wasn't trying to make money and didn't. But those few symbolic shares did cause a paperwork nightmare as 1099s started coming in after I've already sent in my tax form and spent my little refund and forgotten all about it. What do you mean I get a 1099 for ONE share of something that lost money? wtf do I do now? I already filed.
I never could figure out what to do with all that stuff but since the shares were worth approximately 10 bucks and had lost value, I ignored it and presumed the IRS would not bother to audit something so small. They never said a word. The one company I really liked went private, from which I got jack. The sale price per share was practically nil. And that ended my desire to have anything to do with stocks. So yeah don't do it. Let your 401(k) do it.
I call BS. Pro phone thieves and their buyers know to pull the battery as soon as they steal a phone. Without power, no tracking.
This is trivial on Android/Windows Phone/BB (not that anyone wants to steal the latter two) and even on iPhones, it's not very hard to pull the cover off and remove the battery (was two screws on an iPhone 4, plus a screw for the battery cable, well under 30 seconds to do it), or pop it into a faraday bag for later handling.
Nobody stealing phones with half a brain would ever allow themselves to be caught with one that has GPS actively reporting their position. Only low-level idiots would do that.
So? Congrats, you have found the enemy ship with the really powerful gun they just fired at yo- yeah it sort of stops being a thought about then.
There hasn't been ship-to-ship gun battles in decades so nobody knows what it would even be like if opfor went at it with these weapons. But I bet they'd have a pretty good idea where the enemy was even before they fired this thing, and once they did fire it, they'd know for sure they were about to get a headache.
The real question is, what the heck do they DO about it once they know they're being fired upon by this thing? You do, of course, what you'd do versus a conventional round, which all depends on the tactics being used for that particular battle. Sometimes you take hits for the team, too. So you let the supergun take out some non-critical assets while something more useful or valuable does other work.
Scrapheap Challenge was perhaps the very first of the modern reality shows, and always mostly honest about needing something that was competitive AND looked good on TV. Cathy Rogers and Robert Llewellyn have both said they had a show to make, afterall. Something entertaining needed to come out, even if it was a disaster. (The later US-produced seasons completely rejected these aspects in favor of JUST making stupid TV Hollywood style. Was very happy when that version was cancelled. Just garbage TV there at the end.)
I found their approach of sundown mostly OK compared to the other shows where there is some sort of arbitrary clock running and a mad rush to meet it, although there is no particular reason for any of the panic. For example, the home renovation shows that have "five days!!!!" to do some project. Reality is, they could take as long as they want to make it work, barring budget. The mad rush is just to add urgency.
And if I recall, there was at least one Scrapheap episode where one of the machines failed immediately. They showed that and also showed the opposing team step in to help get it going. The early-seasons attitude on THAT show was at least competitive with comradery.
Slashdot Mirror
We don't currently possess the technology to extract that much energy from tectonics. By the time we do have the ability, if we live that long, we should have easier ways to make energy.
So we should be OK. Well, not US. But 20 or 30 generations from now.
Nice handle btw.
eBay slipped on this one because they detected the compromised account as merely a misuse of employee web privileges, a minor sort of issue perhaps to be mentioned by said employee's manager at their next review. Nobody noticed the scope of the issue until much later.
Anyway, remote employees are the rule everywhere these days. They're either the boss working from home or minions unworthy to have a company desk, or all the jobs that have been outsourced.
The plenty of projects going on these days where not a single person involved is actually in a physical office owned or operated by the actual companies involved.
I recently worked on a large IT project with one the huge IT companies you've heard of. While their main project manager was based domestically where the work was taking place, the ENTIRE remaining participation from huge IT was offshored. Most of the other third-party contractors (and there were a LOT of them on this, all touching extremely sensitive data) were also offshore. The contractor I worked for, ironically, is a foreign-owned company but all of our people on this one were domestic.
TANSTAASU
Robots almost universally expect and assume they will operate in a static universe where fixed obstacles don't move and random things don't happen.
Robot cars attempt to convert driving into a static arena by rapidly scanning, by having good maps, by knowing what is coming.
The problem for robots is that the universe likes to drop things into the middle of roads, that people like to step out between cars, that potholes will suddenly exist where they didn't before, that some doofus pushing a bicycle up a hill in the middle of a lane will happen.
And sometimes suddenly. And all at once. So what IS a robot car to do when the choice is hit two pedestrians or take the car off road over a cliff? Forget Asimov. His laws of robotics are irrelevant and always have been. This car has a choice: hurt two or hurt one? What will it do?
The answer is, hit the pedestrians. The car will do its best to cope with a sudden situation but it can't do any better here than a human driver. People drivers, I often see, are MUCH happier about crossing into opposing lanes of traffic thus risking a head-on collision than they are staying in their lane and coping with a pothole or even just a bump. The FIRST thing they do is violate that double yellow line rather than be even slightly inconvenienced by a jolt.
Crossing that line has no immediate consequence, as the car they are about to hit is several meters away. While the bump they knew was coming is avoided. Success! No bump. Now about that 4,000LB vehicle approaching at 45MPh. We takes our chances.
Even orbit is no big deal, really. If you lived in a house with a fenced in yard, orbit is like running around just inside the fence* all the way around the house. So you are at no point more than a few meters away from the house. Orbit is the same, just scaled up.
What we need to be doing is running down to the corner or across the street or through the woods to grandmother's house. Running around inside a fence is what dogs do, mindlessly making a path in the grass.
*why inside the fence and not outside? Because orbit means you are still in the grasp of gravity, you are just falling as fast as it's pulling. So things in orbit will eventually decay and fall down, just as the kid or dog running in the yard will eventually have to come inside. Things outside the fence could be equated to escape velocity and well, if it got that far, it's not coming back. Your kid has left for college and his/her own family. In Montana.
But in my mind, it's still not space or deep space as it is sometimes called. These terms should have been reserved for some place that is not still basically here, closer than the next biggest city on the ground.
"Space" should be at least further away than the moon, and "deep space" should be out beyond the orbit of Mars. You know, actually far away from here.
Arbitrary? No worse than Karman. And it's going to look damn ridiculous when we start claiming deep space is low Earth orbit when we all know from scifi deep space is really way way out there, where nobody can hear you scream. Deep Space Transport Craft Nixon of course will go no such place. It will taxi to the moon and back. Some kinda deep space. It's just going to sound silly.
Are you at ALL familiar with the Hilux they're speaking about? There is a very good reason to want THAT specific pickup over any other. It's immortal.
See for yourself: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v...
Parts 2 and 3 also available.
Don't forget the Hilux options for "Able to float out to sea and still run afterward" and "building demolition device"
GM would charge a LOT for those features and they wouldn't actually work.
Has GM seen a modern mobile device? Oh they are magical things indeed! Maps, GPS, instant messaging, email, music streaming, podcasts, MP3s, even streaming live TV and video, almost anywhere.
And with bluetooth, all of that can be streamed right into the car audio system. Or you can use an aux cable, truly the tail of the magic fairy.
The best part, all of that is included with my phone plan. As much as a I want. Oh sure there's a cap, but exceeding it by a huge margin still wouldn't hit this $150 a month rate, and that cost there would be for something only usable in the car. My magic mobile? Goes with me where I go, and if you will excuse me, I am going to go now, if you get my meaning. But I'll be online the whole time.
Magic times these are!
30Km/s? That's 67,000 miles an hour. Good luck with that if you're not using some anti-friction/anti-inertia techniques.
My job has mutated over the years such that that I am now tasked with doing work on I don't actually know how to do, on custom systems I don't understand. As a result, I suck at it. I have told management this many times but they blink and look at me like I am speaking Martian and basically think I don't WANT to work.
Anyway, I end up with a pile of work I can't do and a few things I can do and it is often a struggle to stay awake. I mean a serious battle between me and gravity pulling my head down to the desk. Snacks doesn't help. Three cups of coffee does not help. Even walks don't help: I am very good at falling asleep in motion.
Yeah it scares me too. Terrifies me.
The combination of boredom, lack of mental stimulation, and lack of ability to do the work leaves me physically devastated.
I am told I am the least productive employee in the whole company so I am waiting around now to see if they will fire me, at which point I will go home and take a nap.
That's it exactly: Google needs fibre so it can say to Comcast and ATT, we won't pay for users on your networks who want Google services. Instead, we''ll service them ourselves with a better product at same/better pricing.
It puts the ball back in Comcast's court to say they'll match the service or pricing and dares them to keep the network open. It would look awful for Comcast to start blocking services. Customers with a choice might just flee.
Eventually Google will need their own wireless coverage. Mobile is where they will make most of their money, if not already, and that means all the carriers will want a cut
Greed about what? What would we, either as a race of creatures, or as a populated biosphere, or even as the raw planet itself, what would we have that an advanced race could not find somewhere else for less hassle?
This assumes advanced races couldn't just do "magic" with materials sciences and simply make whatever they needed. If they still need raw material, why come here?
Water? We know there's a LOT of it out there. Our own Oort cloud could be mined for water for close to forever and we wouldn't know about it or be able to do anything. They won't need our oceans.
Gold? Metals? Asteroids. Free. Nobody with spears guarding them. They don't need your dental fillings.
Food? Oh come on, advanced races surely have sorted out getting rid of biological needs like food and waste processing. So they won't need to eat us.
Reproduction? Laughable. Our reproductive process is ridiculous. And probably not compatible. We don't have horse-humans running around and our DNA is already close to the horse DNA. Alien DNA won't be that similar. It would have to be modified, tested, modified more, tested more, to get to a viable hybrid. Hmmm....
Toys? Now this is really the only reason for them to come here. A set of living toys. If all we are to aliens is a set of toys, then we have no hope. This is worse than if they wanted to come here to eat us and take our water. Being a toy means we're only here until somebody decides they want new toys.
We do have plenty of evidence. Something is definitely going on.
The real truth is that humanity is merely a curiosity at this point. We think very highly indeed of ourselves but we're barely better than zoo animals and we go out of our way to ensure we stay that way.
Those who have come here to see what's up haven't felt any need to establish an open, formal relationship. It brings no benefit to them. We have nothing to offer they can't get now while they continue to operate as they have, and there's nothing we can do about it. Zero. So why bother talking to us?
That's the really sad thing: it's not that we can't find ET or if there is or is not an ET at all; it's that ET is around and just doesn't care about us.
The real problem is the ( and ). It would have been possible to construct that sentence as a whole thought and finish it rather than put the last bit in ( ), It's one thought, one statement; there is no need do it the way it was done. You're not interjecting something. It's all one sentence.
I think in nearly every case, whatever is being said can be structured in a way to eliminate the need to ever use those damn things. If you have to use them, you need to redo whatever you are trying to day, because you should not need them. And yet I know plenty of people find it impossible to write anything without using them.
It just pushes me to find ways to avoid them (the parenthesis, I mean; not the people).
hey, they're Canadians, the only disputes they get in are over the shape on their bacon.
Jokes like that about Canadians not getting into fights are funny but also sad. The country has experienced huge growth recently driven by immigration from all parts of the world. Those people bring with them whatever cultural tendencies that had in their places of origin. And that includes violence, quick tempers, fighting, etc. Things normally not what you'd expect from Canadians.
There are already enclaves of people who moved en masse from home country to Canada where they live just as they did before, complete with their own codes of justice and morality which mean more to them than provincial law.
Some of it is muted by exposure and blending to the overall culture, it is true. But It's also safe to say Canada will continue to slowly be less and less "Canada" and more just a melting pot more like the US. There is no way to stop this short of ceasing the immigration options.
So enjoy making jokes while you can. Assuredly somewhere in Canada somebody will soon enough cut off their child's head for something on religious grounds, and others will obtain guns under hunting laws and instead use them on people.
Noting: I am USAmerican. But I work for Canadian company, which has nearly all immigrant employees in our Toronto headquarters. These are people who have nothing to do with Canada in any way, except that they happen to live there now instead of some place you see on the "tragedy today in..." news stories from some country overseas. They do not share any of the laid-back traits Canada is famous for. At all.
I also completely get that modern Canada was created in the first place by immigrants who displaced the "first peoples" much as the Indians were displaced in the US. I get that Canada wouldn't be Canada without ships full of people moving in. However, in the old days, you moved to a new country and eventually blended in for the good of all and because you had no choice. Your shared DNA made all strong. Nowadays you can move in and watch the same TV you had at home, and never integrate into anything new. Instead of making all stronger, this makes pockets of infection increasingly at odds with the body.
This same thing is happening in the US, of course. We're just used to it here. We happily kill each other and think nothing of it. I fear for Canada. This hasn't been their norm, but it will be.
Agreed. The AG-1980 was excellent. The AG-6500 is also a good choice for SP only.
There's nothing to joke about here. I used to work next to the local Postal Police offices. Yes, they have their own cops. Yes, they have their own guns, and lots of undercover cars. They also have one of those fully-loaded mobile command centers that show up at major incidents. This vehicle is exactly the same as what any other government agency would have.
It's so loaded with gear and antennas, Google's map photos block out the whole vehicle to prevent anyone from seeing the equipment.
So go on making jokes. The Postal cops are just like any other police and their bullets will kill you dead just like any other.
I used to be a real fan of WRT54GL and happily ran Tomato on it for a long time, until I realized I needed gigabit ethernet (yes, I do need it) and Wireless N (yes I use it). The new router had to actually work, without crashing, and handle constant data load, and not need hand-holding.
Linksys had the E3000 which worked fine except the CPU was wimpy and the 5GHz never worked for me. Throughput was awful. So I went to closed-source hardware, specifically an Asus router, and it works just great. No problems. Lots of bells and whistles and enough horsepower to cope with actually doing what the buzzwords on the box say it can do, without crapping out. This thing is a beast. Never needs nursing. It just works.
The E3000 is now relegated to a glorified WAP and gigabit backhaul at the other end of the house. Tomato is still useful as I never have to maintain that box at all, not that it's being asked to do a lot.
Open source is great when it's compatible with what I need to do. But bottom line is, I need to do X task. If closed-source can do it, OK. But I am not holding my breath or suffering with some problem waiting for an open fix.
This is a classic example of governments and problems. When some sort of problem is identified, and "the people" want action to happen, the government has two choices to deal with the problem.
One, they can take appropriate action, if they can do that and know what to do and how to do it. Even better if doing so is relatively cheap. In this case, you do the cheap thing to make it go away.
Two, they can do everything in their power to suppress knowledge of the problem. A problem nobody knows about is one that doesn't need to be solved. This is especially important if the problem is big or serious, or affects a lot of people in a negative way, and to which the government has no solution. The only thing worse than a big problem is having "the people" aware of it and that their government is unable to act. So is is essential that the government take this route when they cannot solve the problem or don't know how, or can't afford the solution. Or there's some other reason they don't want to solve it but they can't admit that either.
So type one problems, you dump the reservoir. It's cheap to clean it out and, well, water is cheap anyway.
A good example of type two problems are the side effects from the chemical disposal mishandling at Groom Lake. To admit the problem exists would invite a huge liability mess. So by denying it, they avoid the problem. Because they can.
It has been speculated one reason the governments generally dodge the UFO issue is that if they were ever identified as a real force(s) of some kind, then the people would demand that something be done about stopping it. It's not clear anyone would have the ability to DO anything about it and when your government can't protect you, what good is the government? So a problem like this would have to be denied.
Thankfully there are no UFOs. So this is not a problem.
American tax code is sometimes called "The Lawyers and Accountants Retirement Act" because the complexity ensures lots of work to do for those professions until they retire to small private islands.
Paradoxically, there is a saying in Washington that any law with the word "act" in the name manages to do exactly the opposite of whatever is says it does. But since there is no actual act named this, it does not counter itself and thus they get to keep the work.
My taxes are deliberately setup to withhold extra, because I stink at saving money and I know it. So this way it just happens, and I get a refund every year. One year I had to pay a few hundred bucks I didn't have so this also makes sure I have plenty of cushion in case something goes wacky and I owe.
It so happens tax refund season also falls right on the time when I need annual work done on my car, which I would not otherwise have the money to cover. So that's what I do with my little refund every stinking year. Car repairs.
Anyway, the moment my W2 is available for download from my payroll company, I ask HR if that's final. Because sometimes they revise it. And THAT sucks if you have already filed. Once I get a final W2, I run it through one of the online tax software things mainly to see where the numbers fall. They'll let you get all the way to the end before you have to pay. Normally I do this through two competing products to see if they have the same results. So far, they always have.
If I am due a refund, I file that part of it immediately. Typically a Federal refund posts in a week. This year, I filed on Jan 31 and had a refund on February 6.
Normally I owe a little to my state. $23 this year. If I owe, I mail it around April 14. No need to pay them early.
Now I have a very simple income. One job, plain W2. I used to own stocks outright and that messed things up badly for me. Have to do all this depreciation and interest basis whatsit junk. HUH? All I wanted to do was own a few shares in companies I admire or use or liked or whatever, totally a whopping $30 or something. Wasn't trying to make money and didn't. But those few symbolic shares did cause a paperwork nightmare as 1099s started coming in after I've already sent in my tax form and spent my little refund and forgotten all about it. What do you mean I get a 1099 for ONE share of something that lost money? wtf do I do now? I already filed.
I never could figure out what to do with all that stuff but since the shares were worth approximately 10 bucks and had lost value, I ignored it and presumed the IRS would not bother to audit something so small. They never said a word. The one company I really liked went private, from which I got jack. The sale price per share was practically nil. And that ended my desire to have anything to do with stocks. So yeah don't do it. Let your 401(k) do it.
I call BS. Pro phone thieves and their buyers know to pull the battery as soon as they steal a phone. Without power, no tracking.
This is trivial on Android/Windows Phone/BB (not that anyone wants to steal the latter two) and even on iPhones, it's not very hard to pull the cover off and remove the battery (was two screws on an iPhone 4, plus a screw for the battery cable, well under 30 seconds to do it), or pop it into a faraday bag for later handling.
Nobody stealing phones with half a brain would ever allow themselves to be caught with one that has GPS actively reporting their position. Only low-level idiots would do that.
So? Congrats, you have found the enemy ship with the really powerful gun they just fired at yo- yeah it sort of stops being a thought about then.
There hasn't been ship-to-ship gun battles in decades so nobody knows what it would even be like if opfor went at it with these weapons. But I bet they'd have a pretty good idea where the enemy was even before they fired this thing, and once they did fire it, they'd know for sure they were about to get a headache.
The real question is, what the heck do they DO about it once they know they're being fired upon by this thing? You do, of course, what you'd do versus a conventional round, which all depends on the tactics being used for that particular battle. Sometimes you take hits for the team, too. So you let the supergun take out some non-critical assets while something more useful or valuable does other work.
Scrapheap Challenge was perhaps the very first of the modern reality shows, and always mostly honest about needing something that was competitive AND looked good on TV. Cathy Rogers and Robert Llewellyn have both said they had a show to make, afterall. Something entertaining needed to come out, even if it was a disaster. (The later US-produced seasons completely rejected these aspects in favor of JUST making stupid TV Hollywood style. Was very happy when that version was cancelled. Just garbage TV there at the end.)
I found their approach of sundown mostly OK compared to the other shows where there is some sort of arbitrary clock running and a mad rush to meet it, although there is no particular reason for any of the panic. For example, the home renovation shows that have "five days!!!!" to do some project. Reality is, they could take as long as they want to make it work, barring budget. The mad rush is just to add urgency.
And if I recall, there was at least one Scrapheap episode where one of the machines failed immediately. They showed that and also showed the opposing team step in to help get it going. The early-seasons attitude on THAT show was at least competitive with comradery.
Finding the recorders had been shut off will provide immense support for the idea a deliberate act was taking place.