Folder containers is not a new idea but it is not used enough.
Back about 15 years ago, I worked in a TDK plant where they made VHS cassettes, among other things. Everyday, several dozen tractor trailers would unload container loads of bulk videotape shipped in from Japan. The US plant would take that and make individual cassettes for several different brands.
The tape had to be shipped in these special blue crates to keep it from getting contaminated or loose or damaged. Each crate had special fittings and holders for giant reels of tape. Once each crate was unloaded, it was folded up and about four or five of those folded crates could fit into the space of one fully-assembled crate. The crates were designed to disassemble, interlock and fit without any extra parts needed. Meanwhile all the reel holders and things were tucked inside. It was kind of a transformer box.
The combined stacks of five took up exactly as much space as a single full crate. As one unit, that stack of five was then sent back to Japan to be reloaded with more blank tape. This saved a lot on the container space going back and meant they significantly reduced costs.
I've never again seen anything quite like those TDK crates. Sure, there are folding crates and the like, but this was something else beyond any of that. It was clearly designed to do that from the start and you don't often see that kind of integration in a process. Walmart comes close with the way they reuse cardboard boxes.
Much of the talk about Windows 8 has described how fast this OS boots on modern hardware. Under 10 seconds seems to be a common claim.
And the articles profess this to be a good thing, which it may be.
But. How often does anyone actually cold-boot these days?
My aging Mac goes about a month between boots -it goes to sleep the rest of the time and wakes up from that in like two seconds. My Windows 7 PC goes at least three weeks between boots and probably longer. Both the Mac and the Windows 7 box take a while to cold boot -but this is not something that happens every day or even every week. Maybe once a month. I can live with it taking a while, once in a while.
I probably waste more time in my life trying to decide what flavor of toothpaste to buy.
So I am just not excited about Windows 8 claiming to be really good at doing something that essentially almost never happens anyway.
This is like saying you have found a really fast way to make yourself your very own birthday cake, which is a skill you get to use one time a year. Yay. Wow.
Please. Nobody really needs to see Encouter at Farpoint agaiin, not even in HD. It won't help fix any of the problems with that episode or really any of the other problems in season 1 and most of season 2. HD will not fix some of the writing or acting. Time and additional seasons fixed that already.
In later seasons, HD will still be icing on the cake but I can't actually think of any ST:TNG episode where HD will either hurt or improve it. The show didn't run on its visuals most of the time, and that would be exactly where HD would be best utilized.
Incorrect. Motorola was split into two different companies early in 2011.
Motorola Solutions -effectively the old Motorola- makes the public safety and business radio equipment and some other things. They are the ones who make the P25 and TETRA and other radio gear.
Motorola Mobility -effectively some non-core businesses which we basically spun off or shed, if you like- which makes the cellphones and cable boxes and some other things is the part Google has offered to buy. While they share the Motorola name, they have nothing to do with P25 or any of the public safety or business radio products.
Still prefer the "Sneakers" solution to a locked, secured room sporting a very hard to crack keypad combination lock on the door.
It was not only one of the best scenes in the movie but should cause anyone faced with an impossible problem to stop for a moment and think outside the box. If your problem is in the box, then move the box. You will eventually find a way to crush it.
For those who have not seen the film or won't bother, the secret solution to the ultra secure keypad lock is to.... kick the door in.
A lock is only as good as the door it locks. And the door only as good as the door frame. And the frame only as good as the wall. When faced with a very good lock tumbler mounted in a very good lock on a very good door in a very good frame, the solution is not to spend time picking the lock when you could just make a big, quick hole in the cheap low bidder drywall next to the door and instantly make a whole new door with no lock. You get in. You get out.
Subtle, not really. But if you want to get in, expand your horizons. Put your problem in the box and then move the whole box.
Almost nobody thinks like this in my experience. They are all too busy contemplating how to pick the super good lock tumbler. Meanwhile I am out choosing which boot to use on the door, or which fire axe to use on that drywall.
Wifi is inherently unregulated. It will have interference and lots of traffic from all the users and devices using the same ISM band. Everything from phones to toys to microwave ovens running in the green room of the booth next door which has a set dressing budget larger than your annual revenue.
You are all unlicensed users and get to accept whatever QoS or lack thereof that you get. There's nobody to whine to, or whine about. It is what it is. On the other hand, there are scary licensed users on that band who have actual priority over the unlicensed users and can use tremendously bigger output power which could obliterate the signal for everybody else. They aren't supposed to do that but they can. And if they do, good luck to you. Your typical wifi router will be useless.
The real question you need to ask is why you are apparently running mission-critical or at least very important business stuff on an inherently congested and unregulated radio band that has no QoS and no promises? What the hell are you thinking? To do what you are doing is naive at best and stupid at worst and makes me wonder why I should trust whatever it is you sell to perform when such poor planning went into the tools you use to sell whatever it is to make.
It's the same when a company selling high-end items chooses to print their marketing collateral on the cheapest paper they can find and use morons to do the production thus ensuring that every book has an upside down cover, or the company name spelled wrong. Gee what a great impression.
You know what impresses? When the people working a tradeshow booth know their stuff, and the demos work, and they have their act together and do not whine about how everybody's iPhone or iPad is using up all the bandwidth.
Now, please excuse me as I use the microwave in my booth to reheat last night's pizza. It will only take a minute or so but your wifi will crumble during this time. Meh. No need to apologize. My dinner has as much right to the ISM band as your apps do.
Well, of course. I am sure -though I have no knowledge of it- that back in the day people probably argued that man would never travel faster than 100mph because horses and buggies could not go that fast.
So now we learn light apparently cannot travel faster than light, and it would be pretty difficult if not impossible to build a ship that could travel even significant fraction of that speed. Lots of energy required, blah blah blah.
However, this says nothing about other ways yet to be discovered or invented. All it tells us is that our horse and buggy or rocketships can't travel at or beyond the speed of light. No kidding. It does not mean it cannot be done. It only means we don't know how.
Suppose for a moment that it can be done. Suppose for a moment that we not only hit the speed of light but exceed it rather handily. What then? Where would you go? When would you go? If you can travel anywhere or anywhen, would you really find anything on the Earth even marginally interesting compared to other places you could go?
The real reason Netflix did this was because many of not all of their license deals were cost-based on how many subs Netflix had.
By pissing off significant numbers of subs, and gaining metric tons of easy to find bad press, Netflix can now go back to the license companies and plead poor house and how they have lost all these subs and can't pay the higher prices the licensors want. Oh woe is Netflix! Have you SEEN the Facebook hate? How could even Sony want more money from poor old Netflix in their time of sorrow?
And for the subs, if they actually stick around and pay the higher price, then Netflix wins that way too.
So anyway, Netflix does the license dance and plays poor mouth and gets a good deal. Then they turn around and invite back all the "lost" customers with some sort of sweetheart deal.
By the time the license deals are up for renewal, then mailing DVDs will actually be dead and off the table, which frees up Netflix to spend money on streaming.
Netflix hits two goals on this: one, instead of paying out the rear for licenses, they could get a better deal, and two, they push along the eventual end of DVDs by mail.
It was also going to be a launch location for military shuttles, which never actually happened. The movie assumed it would and added it to the story. It's nice that they did that. Those who know why probably appreciate it, and those who don't know pay it no attention.
Operator: Sir we have a launch indication! Supervisor: Where is it? Operator: US Operator: California Operator: VAN-DEN-BERG! Supervisor: OH !@#$ hit the red alert thingy! Operator: I need to call my mom before I die for no reason. She worries. James Bond: you are already dead. James Bond: This grave is too small. I will make sure you fit in. James Bond: Tomorrow shall not suffer the likes of you, for today, you die.
This almost but not quite entirely unlike an actual scene from the movie Moonraker. The way they say the word "VAN-DEN-BERG!" in that scene is priceless, and partly because Americans have NO idea what the hell they are talking about. Vandenberg what? Huh?
It's only non-Americans who actually know there was once a plan for an entire space port at that base. Oh well.
The Event -we blew an entire season trying to come up with something epic to fit the show name, and in the end, we phoned in the best idea somebody had and then we all went to Taco Bell for lunch and also to look for a new job.
Seriously. The actual 'event' was ludicrous and fucking stupid. It's a good thing nobody was actually watching or they'd feel cheated.
RIM is kind of a matter of national pride in Canada. It's sort of their Apple, a company they are immensely proud of and so on and so forth.
The Canadian government would probably step in to keep the company going and also to block any sale to a foreign buyer, particularly an American buyer. There is no way they will allow an HP or Microsoft to come in and swallow the company and surely terminate a vast number of Canadian workers. A whole ecosystem has been built around RIM, their suppliers and contractors and it feeds into schools and is the foundation for a lot of the high-tech industries in and around Waterloo. RIM is the flagship. The champion team.
Perhaps they could sell out to a non-US buyer like Lenovo or HTC or whatever but those companies don't exactly need anything RIM has. I am not sure anyone "needs" what RIM has -after all, they're all already competing and doing well in many cases. Perhaps a main reason to buy RIM would be to shut it down and gut the IP. There is no way the Canadian government would allow a wholesale gutting.
But the stock price is certainly not assuring at the moment.
I do find it relatively interesting that any story about RIM or Blackberry or the Playbook where user comments are allowed is invariably full of comments that utterly sing the praises of the company. They are usually way out of proportion to any negative comments, and usually any negative comment is directly addressed and challenged post for post. Nothing goes unchallenged. I never, ever see this for anyone else, not for Apple or Microsoft or anyone. My suspicion is that RIM is actively seeking out those sorts of comment forums and perhaps encouraging positive messages. OK I will just say it: I think they are paying people to do this. And they are rather clumsy and obvious at it. No, no proof, of course.
RIM, this is nice and all that you apparently care what people think and want to challenge them, but still does not fix the actual problems. Whether you want to admit they are there or not, astroturfing on forums is not the answer. The stock price is controlled by more than the comments on forums.
While I will agree there has been a lot of waving arms about the room and proclaiming "There is a CRISIS!!!!1111 -but I know how to solve it! But first, I need a stuffed dog toy. WALK WITH ME!" with this Doctor, it sort of works because the guy seems like a flibbertygibbit.
But it seems as if the writers have some sort of mandate to come up with twisty bits every other episode. When a character we have all been watching all season suddenly turns out to not be the real thing, then at some point it means the producers and writers have been giving the finger to the audience. And when stunts like that become the norm, regular mundane plots become neglected.
It seems to me there is a distinct lack of ambition in the US. Many seem to want to hit the lottery or become a super sports figure much more than they want to do much of anything else, especially if the anything else involves working hard.
There is a different attitude in many other countries. Certainly Germany and the other countries have their issues as well but it almost seems as if the image of the US as a powerhouse of everything is a motivator in some ways, even as those of us who live in the US fail to appreciate what we have.
Do you blame America for being cynical? We keep hearing how test scores are going down, how American kids flunk everything, how there are no jobs even if they manage to graduate, how college costs keep going up and up, and how taxes to pay for local schools keep going up and up while the property values that those taxes are based on are going down. We keep hearing how China and India are raising generations of geniuses and how the USA will be mostly Hispanic in 50 years and the future is not only going not be the same as now, it's going to be VERY different.
The message is, no matter how hard you try to teach your kids, the game is already lost. Meanwhile taxes and tuition costs will keep going up to pay for the ever-diminishing results. What are you going to do, argue for reduced spending on schools???
There is damn little optimism for the common man or woman with a kid or two.
Without optimism, it becomes that much harder to look at a box of electronic parts and want to make something. That takes desire and wish to make something. The desire these days is to go to a big box store and buy something made in China, and the wish is for enough money to pay for it.
HD-DVD is not dead! My local Costco is STILL selling HD-DVD players.
And they haven't been all along, oh no. But a stack of Toshiba HD-A3 players suddenly appeared on the shelves in March, stacked on top of some Vizio Blu-Ray players. It's been so long since I've seen an HD-DVD player for sale, I had to stop and think for a moment about what HD-DVD actually was. Wooh is that some kind of media player or streaming format or what? I had to google it on my phone.
Wait. THAT HD-DVD? It was a major WTF moment for me.
Did not buy one, mainly because Costco didn't seem to have a price displayed and I didn't give a crap enough to go ask -honestly even if they were free, it's questionable because I don't already own any HD-DVD discs.
The body of the Aloha flight 243 flight attendant was never found, so the actual cause of death can only be surmised, not proven.
The way you worded it, merely falling out of the plane was fatal.
However without a body, there is no way to know if falling out of the plane was fatal, or the fall from altitude was fatal, or finally the presumed splashdown in the ocean, or whether she might have survived all of that only to drown or be eaten by a shark.
The cause of death cannot be known for sure.
The only thing reasonably sure is that it was not a survivable incident, based for example on historical incidents of skydivers who lose their parachutes and hit the ground. The ocean water is somewhat less hard than solid ground, but the difference is not meaningful at those speeds.
People also fall much shorter heights from bridges into water and fall to survive.
But I still submit that there's no way to know the cause of death on the Aloha 243 case without having the body, which we do not have.
I'm wondering why they can't pump liquid nitrogen in there to cool it down. Didn't they do that at Chernobyl?
Not clear on whether this was done before, however one reason to not do it is that it's not needed. IF you can get water to the problem, water would be good enough to have the needed cooling effect. Keyword being IF. Apparently this is not exactly working out.
LN2 would have a lot more cooling power but in this case it would be more than would be needed, plus there's no logistics solution for supplying LN2 in quantity. It takes tanker trucks or rail cars to transport mass quantities of LN2 and in this case it would take a LOT of them. Roads and rails may or may not be damaged. I'd tend toward wrecked based on pictures.
For sea water, it's as simple as "run some hoses out to the ocean, or tap the existing ocean water lines" which is what was done. All the water you can use, for free.
Perhaps the only saving grace is that the Fukushima #1 plant was built on the ocean so they do have all that water to use. However, water is also what killed them.
The original idea behind DSL was to provide video and other services over the phone line. Think Videotex and Minitel. THAT idea didn't work out but they did figure out how to use it for internet connections. UVerse came along later and is once again all about video and other services over the single connection, with internet tagging along.
Where I live, I have ATT DSL. Way back when, I was their first DSL customer in my area. They used my house as a training exercise for their other techs. This may be why it didn't work right at first.
In any case, they are the DSL provider here. I could also choose others however only ATT offers 6mbit service. Everybody else tops out at 3mbit, even though they'd be using the same central office and the same copper.
The other wired option is Comcast with whatever bandwidth they offer. The more you pay, the more you get. But there's a cap there too and stories about the bad things that happen when you go over the limits. Plus a neighbor has Comcast and the Comcast truck is over there every other week fixing something. The reliability seems low in this neighborhood. The CATV wiring is all pre-Comcast by a couple decades.
For wireless, there is Clearwire Wimax. I have it on my phone and yes the speed is pretty good. But the signal appears to dislike things like windows, much less actual house walls or anything solid. As a result, I rarely get to actually use it on the phone and have absolutely no illusions about it working as a wireless internet connection for the home. Clear also has a lot of people suing it for misrepresentation and throttling.
We do have excelled 3G CDMA coverage here. But it maxes out at 1.5mbit, usually less in normal use. Not acceptable.
I transferred 2 gigs of data last night while I was asleep. I'm definitely going to hit the ATT limits.
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Folder containers is not a new idea but it is not used enough.
Back about 15 years ago, I worked in a TDK plant where they made VHS cassettes, among other things. Everyday, several dozen tractor trailers would unload container loads of bulk videotape shipped in from Japan. The US plant would take that and make individual cassettes for several different brands.
The tape had to be shipped in these special blue crates to keep it from getting contaminated or loose or damaged. Each crate had special fittings and holders for giant reels of tape. Once each crate was unloaded, it was folded up and about four or five of those folded crates could fit into the space of one fully-assembled crate. The crates were designed to disassemble, interlock and fit without any extra parts needed. Meanwhile all the reel holders and things were tucked inside. It was kind of a transformer box.
The combined stacks of five took up exactly as much space as a single full crate. As one unit, that stack of five was then sent back to Japan to be reloaded with more blank tape. This saved a lot on the container space going back and meant they significantly reduced costs.
I've never again seen anything quite like those TDK crates. Sure, there are folding crates and the like, but this was something else beyond any of that. It was clearly designed to do that from the start and you don't often see that kind of integration in a process. Walmart comes close with the way they reuse cardboard boxes.
As long as we have these pesky bandwidth caps, there is no need or point for gigabit to the net.
Much of the talk about Windows 8 has described how fast this OS boots on modern hardware. Under 10 seconds seems to be a common claim.
And the articles profess this to be a good thing, which it may be.
But. How often does anyone actually cold-boot these days?
My aging Mac goes about a month between boots -it goes to sleep the rest of the time and wakes up from that in like two seconds. My Windows 7 PC goes at least three weeks between boots and probably longer. Both the Mac and the Windows 7 box take a while to cold boot -but this is not something that happens every day or even every week. Maybe once a month. I can live with it taking a while, once in a while.
I probably waste more time in my life trying to decide what flavor of toothpaste to buy.
So I am just not excited about Windows 8 claiming to be really good at doing something that essentially almost never happens anyway.
This is like saying you have found a really fast way to make yourself your very own birthday cake, which is a skill you get to use one time a year. Yay. Wow.
Please. Nobody really needs to see Encouter at Farpoint agaiin, not even in HD. It won't help fix any of the problems with that episode or really any of the other problems in season 1 and most of season 2. HD will not fix some of the writing or acting. Time and additional seasons fixed that already.
In later seasons, HD will still be icing on the cake but I can't actually think of any ST:TNG episode where HD will either hurt or improve it. The show didn't run on its visuals most of the time, and that would be exactly where HD would be best utilized.
Incorrect. Motorola was split into two different companies early in 2011.
Motorola Solutions -effectively the old Motorola- makes the public safety and business radio equipment and some other things. They are the ones who make the P25 and TETRA and other radio gear.
Motorola Mobility -effectively some non-core businesses which we basically spun off or shed, if you like- which makes the cellphones and cable boxes and some other things is the part Google has offered to buy. While they share the Motorola name, they have nothing to do with P25 or any of the public safety or business radio products.
And finds out the warranty won't cover that kind of damage.
We just had a big resignation story yesterday. The editors have clearly let through yet another dupe.
j/k
Godspeed Rob. Thank you and Jeff for coming up with a focal point for so many geeks and nerds and info junkies.
--
Still prefer the "Sneakers" solution to a locked, secured room sporting a very hard to crack keypad combination lock on the door.
It was not only one of the best scenes in the movie but should cause anyone faced with an impossible problem to stop for a moment and think outside the box. If your problem is in the box, then move the box. You will eventually find a way to crush it.
For those who have not seen the film or won't bother, the secret solution to the ultra secure keypad lock is to.... kick the door in.
A lock is only as good as the door it locks. And the door only as good as the door frame. And the frame only as good as the wall. When faced with a very good lock tumbler mounted in a very good lock on a very good door in a very good frame, the solution is not to spend time picking the lock when you could just make a big, quick hole in the cheap low bidder drywall next to the door and instantly make a whole new door with no lock. You get in. You get out.
Subtle, not really. But if you want to get in, expand your horizons. Put your problem in the box and then move the whole box.
Almost nobody thinks like this in my experience. They are all too busy contemplating how to pick the super good lock tumbler. Meanwhile I am out choosing which boot to use on the door, or which fire axe to use on that drywall.
Wifi is inherently unregulated. It will have interference and lots of traffic from all the users and devices using the same ISM band. Everything from phones to toys to microwave ovens running in the green room of the booth next door which has a set dressing budget larger than your annual revenue.
You are all unlicensed users and get to accept whatever QoS or lack thereof that you get. There's nobody to whine to, or whine about. It is what it is. On the other hand, there are scary licensed users on that band who have actual priority over the unlicensed users and can use tremendously bigger output power which could obliterate the signal for everybody else. They aren't supposed to do that but they can. And if they do, good luck to you. Your typical wifi router will be useless.
The real question you need to ask is why you are apparently running mission-critical or at least very important business stuff on an inherently congested and unregulated radio band that has no QoS and no promises? What the hell are you thinking? To do what you are doing is naive at best and stupid at worst and makes me wonder why I should trust whatever it is you sell to perform when such poor planning went into the tools you use to sell whatever it is to make.
It's the same when a company selling high-end items chooses to print their marketing collateral on the cheapest paper they can find and use morons to do the production thus ensuring that every book has an upside down cover, or the company name spelled wrong. Gee what a great impression.
You know what impresses? When the people working a tradeshow booth know their stuff, and the demos work, and they have their act together and do not whine about how everybody's iPhone or iPad is using up all the bandwidth.
Now, please excuse me as I use the microwave in my booth to reheat last night's pizza. It will only take a minute or so but your wifi will crumble during this time. Meh. No need to apologize. My dinner has as much right to the ISM band as your apps do.
Well, of course. I am sure -though I have no knowledge of it- that back in the day people probably argued that man would never travel faster than 100mph because horses and buggies could not go that fast.
So now we learn light apparently cannot travel faster than light, and it would be pretty difficult if not impossible to build a ship that could travel even significant fraction of that speed. Lots of energy required, blah blah blah.
However, this says nothing about other ways yet to be discovered or invented. All it tells us is that our horse and buggy or rocketships can't travel at or beyond the speed of light. No kidding. It does not mean it cannot be done. It only means we don't know how.
Suppose for a moment that it can be done. Suppose for a moment that we not only hit the speed of light but exceed it rather handily. What then? Where would you go? When would you go? If you can travel anywhere or anywhen, would you really find anything on the Earth even marginally interesting compared to other places you could go?
The real reason Netflix did this was because many of not all of their license deals were cost-based on how many subs Netflix had.
By pissing off significant numbers of subs, and gaining metric tons of easy to find bad press, Netflix can now go back to the license companies and plead poor house and how they have lost all these subs and can't pay the higher prices the licensors want. Oh woe is Netflix! Have you SEEN the Facebook hate? How could even Sony want more money from poor old Netflix in their time of sorrow?
And for the subs, if they actually stick around and pay the higher price, then Netflix wins that way too.
So anyway, Netflix does the license dance and plays poor mouth and gets a good deal. Then they turn around and invite back all the "lost" customers with some sort of sweetheart deal.
By the time the license deals are up for renewal, then mailing DVDs will actually be dead and off the table, which frees up Netflix to spend money on streaming.
Netflix hits two goals on this: one, instead of paying out the rear for licenses, they could get a better deal, and two, they push along the eventual end of DVDs by mail.
It was also going to be a launch location for military shuttles, which never actually happened. The movie assumed it would and added it to the story. It's nice that they did that. Those who know why probably appreciate it, and those who don't know pay it no attention.
Not that anyone looks at that movie much.
Operator: Sir we have a launch indication!
Supervisor: Where is it?
Operator: US
Operator: California
Operator: VAN-DEN-BERG!
Supervisor: OH !@#$ hit the red alert thingy!
Operator: I need to call my mom before I die for no reason. She worries.
James Bond: you are already dead.
James Bond: This grave is too small. I will make sure you fit in.
James Bond: Tomorrow shall not suffer the likes of you, for today, you die.
This almost but not quite entirely unlike an actual scene from the movie Moonraker. The way they say the word "VAN-DEN-BERG!" in that scene is priceless, and partly because Americans have NO idea what the hell they are talking about. Vandenberg what? Huh?
It's only non-Americans who actually know there was once a plan for an entire space port at that base. Oh well.
The Event -we blew an entire season trying to come up with something epic to fit the show name, and in the end, we phoned in the best idea somebody had and then we all went to Taco Bell for lunch and also to look for a new job.
Seriously. The actual 'event' was ludicrous and fucking stupid. It's a good thing nobody was actually watching or they'd feel cheated.
RIM is kind of a matter of national pride in Canada. It's sort of their Apple, a company they are immensely proud of and so on and so forth.
The Canadian government would probably step in to keep the company going and also to block any sale to a foreign buyer, particularly an American buyer. There is no way they will allow an HP or Microsoft to come in and swallow the company and surely terminate a vast number of Canadian workers. A whole ecosystem has been built around RIM, their suppliers and contractors and it feeds into schools and is the foundation for a lot of the high-tech industries in and around Waterloo. RIM is the flagship. The champion team.
Perhaps they could sell out to a non-US buyer like Lenovo or HTC or whatever but those companies don't exactly need anything RIM has. I am not sure anyone "needs" what RIM has -after all, they're all already competing and doing well in many cases. Perhaps a main reason to buy RIM would be to shut it down and gut the IP. There is no way the Canadian government would allow a wholesale gutting.
But the stock price is certainly not assuring at the moment.
I do find it relatively interesting that any story about RIM or Blackberry or the Playbook where user comments are allowed is invariably full of comments that utterly sing the praises of the company. They are usually way out of proportion to any negative comments, and usually any negative comment is directly addressed and challenged post for post. Nothing goes unchallenged. I never, ever see this for anyone else, not for Apple or Microsoft or anyone. My suspicion is that RIM is actively seeking out those sorts of comment forums and perhaps encouraging positive messages. OK I will just say it: I think they are paying people to do this. And they are rather clumsy and obvious at it. No, no proof, of course.
RIM, this is nice and all that you apparently care what people think and want to challenge them, but still does not fix the actual problems. Whether you want to admit they are there or not, astroturfing on forums is not the answer. The stock price is controlled by more than the comments on forums.
While I will agree there has been a lot of waving arms about the room and proclaiming "There is a CRISIS!!!!1111 -but I know how to solve it! But first, I need a stuffed dog toy. WALK WITH ME!" with this Doctor, it sort of works because the guy seems like a flibbertygibbit.
But it seems as if the writers have some sort of mandate to come up with twisty bits every other episode. When a character we have all been watching all season suddenly turns out to not be the real thing, then at some point it means the producers and writers have been giving the finger to the audience. And when stunts like that become the norm, regular mundane plots become neglected.
Well, it's more than the beer and the cars.
It seems to me there is a distinct lack of ambition in the US. Many seem to want to hit the lottery or become a super sports figure much more than they want to do much of anything else, especially if the anything else involves working hard.
There is a different attitude in many other countries. Certainly Germany and the other countries have their issues as well but it almost seems as if the image of the US as a powerhouse of everything is a motivator in some ways, even as those of us who live in the US fail to appreciate what we have.
Do you blame America for being cynical? We keep hearing how test scores are going down, how American kids flunk everything, how there are no jobs even if they manage to graduate, how college costs keep going up and up, and how taxes to pay for local schools keep going up and up while the property values that those taxes are based on are going down. We keep hearing how China and India are raising generations of geniuses and how the USA will be mostly Hispanic in 50 years and the future is not only going not be the same as now, it's going to be VERY different.
The message is, no matter how hard you try to teach your kids, the game is already lost. Meanwhile taxes and tuition costs will keep going up to pay for the ever-diminishing results. What are you going to do, argue for reduced spending on schools???
There is damn little optimism for the common man or woman with a kid or two.
Without optimism, it becomes that much harder to look at a box of electronic parts and want to make something. That takes desire and wish to make something. The desire these days is to go to a big box store and buy something made in China, and the wish is for enough money to pay for it.
HD-DVD is not dead! My local Costco is STILL selling HD-DVD players.
And they haven't been all along, oh no. But a stack of Toshiba HD-A3 players suddenly appeared on the shelves in March, stacked on top of some Vizio Blu-Ray players. It's been so long since I've seen an HD-DVD player for sale, I had to stop and think for a moment about what HD-DVD actually was. Wooh is that some kind of media player or streaming format or what? I had to google it on my phone.
Wait. THAT HD-DVD? It was a major WTF moment for me.
Did not buy one, mainly because Costco didn't seem to have a price displayed and I didn't give a crap enough to go ask -honestly even if they were free, it's questionable because I don't already own any HD-DVD discs.
The body of the Aloha flight 243 flight attendant was never found, so the actual cause of death can only be surmised, not proven.
The way you worded it, merely falling out of the plane was fatal.
However without a body, there is no way to know if falling out of the plane was fatal, or the fall from altitude was fatal, or finally the presumed splashdown in the ocean, or whether she might have survived all of that only to drown or be eaten by a shark.
The cause of death cannot be known for sure.
The only thing reasonably sure is that it was not a survivable incident, based for example on historical incidents of skydivers who lose their parachutes and hit the ground. The ocean water is somewhat less hard than solid ground, but the difference is not meaningful at those speeds.
People also fall much shorter heights from bridges into water and fall to survive.
But I still submit that there's no way to know the cause of death on the Aloha 243 case without having the body, which we do not have.
I'm wondering why they can't pump liquid nitrogen in there to cool it down. Didn't they do that at Chernobyl?
Not clear on whether this was done before, however one reason to not do it is that it's not needed. IF you can get water to the problem, water would be good enough to have the needed cooling effect. Keyword being IF. Apparently this is not exactly working out.
LN2 would have a lot more cooling power but in this case it would be more than would be needed, plus there's no logistics solution for supplying LN2 in quantity. It takes tanker trucks or rail cars to transport mass quantities of LN2 and in this case it would take a LOT of them. Roads and rails may or may not be damaged. I'd tend toward wrecked based on pictures.
For sea water, it's as simple as "run some hoses out to the ocean, or tap the existing ocean water lines" which is what was done. All the water you can use, for free.
Perhaps the only saving grace is that the Fukushima #1 plant was built on the ocean so they do have all that water to use. However, water is also what killed them.
The original idea behind DSL was to provide video and other services over the phone line. Think Videotex and Minitel. THAT idea didn't work out but they did figure out how to use it for internet connections. UVerse came along later and is once again all about video and other services over the single connection, with internet tagging along.
Where I live, I have ATT DSL. Way back when, I was their first DSL customer in my area. They used my house as a training exercise for their other techs. This may be why it didn't work right at first.
In any case, they are the DSL provider here. I could also choose others however only ATT offers 6mbit service. Everybody else tops out at 3mbit, even though they'd be using the same central office and the same copper.
The other wired option is Comcast with whatever bandwidth they offer. The more you pay, the more you get. But there's a cap there too and stories about the bad things that happen when you go over the limits. Plus a neighbor has Comcast and the Comcast truck is over there every other week fixing something. The reliability seems low in this neighborhood. The CATV wiring is all pre-Comcast by a couple decades.
For wireless, there is Clearwire Wimax. I have it on my phone and yes the speed is pretty good. But the signal appears to dislike things like windows, much less actual house walls or anything solid. As a result, I rarely get to actually use it on the phone and have absolutely no illusions about it working as a wireless internet connection for the home. Clear also has a lot of people suing it for misrepresentation and throttling.
We do have excelled 3G CDMA coverage here. But it maxes out at 1.5mbit, usually less in normal use. Not acceptable.
I transferred 2 gigs of data last night while I was asleep. I'm definitely going to hit the ATT limits.
If Bob lives two miles from Lisa, and Fred moves in one mile away, Fred is not twice as close as Lisa.
He's 1/2th the distance. 50% the distance. Whatever.
But he is not twice as close.
You can't even define close. What value does close have? So you can't say Fred is twice something that can't be defined anyway.
Lasers will work great until the pirates get good laser-proof sunglasses.
The ships will totally have to upgrade to pew-pew lasers, and then the pirates upgrade to mirrored sunglasses. Or just mirrors.
It'll be a lightwave arms race.