Live chat support is one of the best things ever invented. When you type, I can't hear your accent, which removes a huge barrier to communication for most phone support call centre's i've had to deal with. And I can type faster than I can speak (which is slowly for the benefit of the english-is-not-my-first-language person on the other end of the line). And after i've typed the person on the other end can take their time to digest what i've written, and I can look back over what i've written and amend anything I might have missed, and they can cut & pasted into their own internal knowledgebase.
As for the submitter, I have these questions:
. In what stupid world is account verification information not submitted via a web form before the chat session is initiated? Sure, there might be some people who don't have the required information and it has to be done in the chat session itself, but that should be a rare exception.
. As above, why isn't a summary of the problem also provided via web form before the chat session begins? Most chat support web site's i've seen make you enter a description of your problem, and then offer a few possible resolutions based on a keyword search, alongside the "begin chat now" button, which is a huge timesaver for when people haven't checked the FAQ's first.
. If seeing the users screen is a requirement to do your job, then there is _plenty_ of software available to fill that need. Is something like gotomeeting or teamviewer really out of the question? (i'd never let a remote tech that I didn't know into _my_ screen, but that's not the point:)
is to remove "men's" and "women's" and just have events.
I can see your point. Training is one factor in an athlete's ability to perform, but so is genetics. You might have a gene that allows you to build muscle mass faster, or make more efficient use of oxygen, yet someone without those genes still have to compete at the same level as you. Yet if you don't have a Y chromosome you get to compete on a different level without having to compete with people with that particular genetic advantage.
Obviously a Y chromosome isn't the only deciding factor though. I have one, but i wouldn't stand a chance against any decent athlete who doesn't have one, but at the top level you'll find that in most events involving strength the athletes with a Y chromosome outcompete those without.
I vote we keep men's and women's events as is and like the rest of us who lucked out in the high performance genetic lottery, people with indeterminate sex will just have to miss out too (or put up with the category they are assigned to for competition).
Checking the chromosome might work until you find someone with a missing piece
AIS throws that out the window... genetically a male but somewhat or completely (depending on the degree) insensitive to the androgen that would give them the male characteristics leaving them in the default female form.
TFA talks about "Entangled Particles" breaking the law of thermodynamics, seemingly getting something out of nothing
I am not good at all on particle physics, but I believe that particles in their ordinary state do not come "entangled", right?
So, in order to get particles that are already in the "entangled" state, something must have happened to ordinary particles, first, right?
If so, what's the cost (in term of energy) to get originally un-entangled particles to be "entangled"?
I also wonder how the "demon" knows which particle on one side corresponds to the entangled particle on the other side. It's not like they have labels on them or anything.
I'm sorry to be such a grammar freak but you misspelled billion in your comment.
If God created it then being the deceitful God that he is, he could have done it 6000 years ago to make it look like it was done billions of years ago. He could have also done it yesterday and created the universe as-is complete with memories and fossil evidence of days gone by.
Once you bring God into the argument, all counter arguments are pointless because the argument cannot be defeated by evidence (logic yes, evidence no).
From your perspective, it's like if you had a signed litograph, stored it in a bank, and they decided to replace it with another one from the same series. It may look the same to the uneducated eye, but it isn't the same.
Even worse... what if your child has the 'radio edit' of a song and Amazon swaps it for the album version with all the naughty words left in?? Won't somebody _please_ think of the children???
For example, create a file that's 3:14 seconds or whatever the song I want is, name the file "I was born this way", and my file of shit turns into a the song - courtesy of Amazon's service.
You just just upload a tiny file with the right tags and marked as '1bps' and see what happens:)
Another experiment would be to record yourself singing a song and see what Amazon replaces it with.
So, can I upload my music, have it upgraded and tagged by Amazon, then download the improved MP3s and quit the service?
Yes, you can do that if you want, but since they make you prepay for the entire year -- the joke will be on you if you quit their service after just 24 hours.
I'm not sure what laws Amazon operate under, but a contract that says "and after you sign up we can vary the contract however we want and you will like it" is probably not enforceable, so if you already had an account you should be able to do this then get a refund.
Brontosuars and Siplodocis may not be as excitinfg as T-Rex, but they won't eat you.
How can you be sure? I mean we know they were plant eaters but even a horse will bite you if you piss it off, and these things are substantially bigger than horses.
I distinctly remember that happening in a movie from my youth. It was even based on a book! As I recall it didn't end well for those involved.
A futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques? I think the movie you're thinking of was "Billy and the Clonasaurus".
That would be a nifty idea although it may just be another distraction. A change in attitude might be better... maybe coupled with a big red light on the top of the car. If the light isn't lit then a "oops, sorry, my bad" is implied, and the driver would need to illuminate the light to reflect a "haha I meant to cut you off just then!" intention.
A few years ago I was stopped at a give way sign and someone rear-ended me. It didn't really upset me that much at all... she obviously wasn't paying attention but I didn't feel particularly angry or anything. About a week after that someone entered a roundabout right in front of me causing me to slam on my brakes to avoid a collision... and I saw red, despite the fact that rear ending someone who has been stopped for several seconds implies a far greater lapse in concentration than simply failing to see someone on a roundabout.
I think the main difference between the two was that the girl who rear-ended me apologised immediately (and even before that I could see the look of dismay on her face in the rear view mirror) while the girl who cut me off on the roundabout didn't even glance in my direction. An "oops" button would be all that was required to diffuse a lot of road rage situations, but even so some people are just dicks and will get pissed off for any reason at all.
Heat sensors are the wrong technology to use for this. Radar works much better because it can detect cold objects as well, penetrates fog/smoke, and can use the doppler effect to detect if an object is moving. Radar is what the Google Driverless Car uses, and is what most other autonomous vehicles use as well. It is also what most automatic cruise control systems use.
I've pondered before over how well chaff would work to fool a collision avoidance system. If a car fitted with a radar based collision avoidance system was tailgating then a release of chaff might cause it to slam on its brakes, with ensuing hilarity.
Or young. Although that doesn't always measure up either... none of my young kids have facebook accounts but I still suspect they are planning something.
Also am reminded of an old pulp sc-fi short story that took the form of letters between a Mars bio-dome colonist and the manufacturer of the living bio dome system... they kept adding critters to the dome to try and balance the eco-system, with predictable and silly results.
Sounds like an interesting story... got any more info? Like a title, or something to google? I tried googling a few keywords but just found your post...
Sure. Now it's just regular fish. Next it will be sharks, then sharks with lasers. It will be all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
These are _sharks_ we're talking about here. Not just angry sea bass. These lasers will be big. It will be all fun and games until someone loses a _head_
We're likely to see more data trickle out over the coming days, considering that the group has promised 40GB worth of leaks.
I have a 25GB monthly quota, you insensitive clods!
Don't worry. If it was a raw database extract totally 40GB I bet a lot of it is metadata and the content itself is probably highly compressible. I bet someone can put it in a more useful form and compress it and you'll be able to slide under your quota.
Failing that, I'm sure the slashdot editors could release a summary. They are excellent at making summaries of things - most of the time they don't even need the original data to do so!
Anonymous harms the people who's data they publish, and they are not the good guys. They are criminals doing criminal harm.
However, they are *also* revealing just how vulnerable the system is to crime. If the data were not logged at all, then anonymous would not be able to publish it.
So, the government should protect me from anonymous by making this level of logging illegal, rather than mandatory.
That's not how it works (it's how it _should_ work though!) The government has taken steps to protect you from terrorists, but do you feel any safer for it? You say "the government should protect me from anonymous", but their idea of protecting you from anonymous will be to capture _more_ data to watch you more closely, and increase the punishments for this "terrorist" activity (including looking at the released captured data, and discussing the inadequacies of security).
(disclaimer: i've very recently given up caffeine so i'm extra cynical and extra grumpy)
Note the "revolution" does not have to mean "violence". Voting in a third party into the White House and Congress, and giving them a mandate to shrink the government would do just fine. That is, so long as said third party were willing to do such a thing.
I wasn't equating "revolution" with "violence". I was equating "well armed militia" with "violence".
A third party would be awesome... the legacy government wouldn't know what hit it:)
Well... none of that is my job in your country, because it's your country not mine.
It sounds like you are trying to disagree with me to make your point but you kind if missed the point I was making so you are disagreeing with some imaginary third person. It sounds as if you are suggesting that there are a lot of things that can be done before you need to start forming militias and shooting people, which was kind of my point. I can't be bothered looking up who said it, but "if you make non-violent revolution impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable". The mere fact that you can even whisper to your neighbor about overthrowing your government without getting dissapeared means that the non-violent revolution solution is still entirely possible, and easy, by doing all the things you just said. So yeah, make a difference now while you can still do so easily - it could be a lot harder later.
In my country (Australia), we haven't yet run out of acceptable candidates to vote for, and the way our government is set up it means that they are not so far removed from the people that they can't pretend they don't exist, so unlike you guys we can actually influence things simply by voting for the right candidate. For now.
remove a govt that is TOO corrupt and can NOT be fixed
How do you see this removal of government taking place? Sure, you could maybe round up enough of your militia to kill them all, but what then? Decades of education neglect has left you with a nation of morons and I guarantee that whatever you try and replace your government with, it will be worse. There are some drug lords in Mexico who might like to take a stab at leadership, if that helps.
I'm not disagreeing that there is a problem, and it needs to be fixed, and I don't know how you would fix it, but the moment you get out your guns and start shooting you'll have much bigger problems than you have now.
btw, kudo's on not posting anonymously when you are publicly inviting violent revolution. If you don't hear hammers batter down the door (you'd better run!) in the next few hours then you don't have it as bad as some countries.
Slashdot Mirror
Yes, this is sarcasm, in case your detector is broken.
You could always print a new one.
A sarcasm detector? Now that's a _really_ useful invention.
Live chat support is one of the best things ever invented. When you type, I can't hear your accent, which removes a huge barrier to communication for most phone support call centre's i've had to deal with. And I can type faster than I can speak (which is slowly for the benefit of the english-is-not-my-first-language person on the other end of the line). And after i've typed the person on the other end can take their time to digest what i've written, and I can look back over what i've written and amend anything I might have missed, and they can cut & pasted into their own internal knowledgebase.
As for the submitter, I have these questions:
. In what stupid world is account verification information not submitted via a web form before the chat session is initiated? Sure, there might be some people who don't have the required information and it has to be done in the chat session itself, but that should be a rare exception.
. As above, why isn't a summary of the problem also provided via web form before the chat session begins? Most chat support web site's i've seen make you enter a description of your problem, and then offer a few possible resolutions based on a keyword search, alongside the "begin chat now" button, which is a huge timesaver for when people haven't checked the FAQ's first.
. If seeing the users screen is a requirement to do your job, then there is _plenty_ of software available to fill that need. Is something like gotomeeting or teamviewer really out of the question? (i'd never let a remote tech that I didn't know into _my_ screen, but that's not the point :)
is to remove "men's" and "women's" and just have events.
I can see your point. Training is one factor in an athlete's ability to perform, but so is genetics. You might have a gene that allows you to build muscle mass faster, or make more efficient use of oxygen, yet someone without those genes still have to compete at the same level as you. Yet if you don't have a Y chromosome you get to compete on a different level without having to compete with people with that particular genetic advantage.
Obviously a Y chromosome isn't the only deciding factor though. I have one, but i wouldn't stand a chance against any decent athlete who doesn't have one, but at the top level you'll find that in most events involving strength the athletes with a Y chromosome outcompete those without.
I vote we keep men's and women's events as is and like the rest of us who lucked out in the high performance genetic lottery, people with indeterminate sex will just have to miss out too (or put up with the category they are assigned to for competition).
If you have a Y chromosome, you are a male.
Simpler would be to check the birth certificate, or simply ask the person. Not definitive though, but neither is your idea.
Checking the chromosome might work until you find someone with a missing piece
AIS throws that out the window... genetically a male but somewhat or completely (depending on the degree) insensitive to the androgen that would give them the male characteristics leaving them in the default female form.
TFA talks about "Entangled Particles" breaking the law of thermodynamics, seemingly getting something out of nothing
I am not good at all on particle physics, but I believe that particles in their ordinary state do not come "entangled", right?
So, in order to get particles that are already in the "entangled" state, something must have happened to ordinary particles, first, right?
If so, what's the cost (in term of energy) to get originally un-entangled particles to be "entangled"?
I also wonder how the "demon" knows which particle on one side corresponds to the entangled particle on the other side. It's not like they have labels on them or anything.
This whole thing smells more of violating presumptive accounting categories than real physics. But then I'm an even stupider arm-chair physicist.
So the Enron guys became physicists and think they can fudge the books of nature?
I'm sorry to be such a grammar freak but you misspelled billion in your comment.
If God created it then being the deceitful God that he is, he could have done it 6000 years ago to make it look like it was done billions of years ago. He could have also done it yesterday and created the universe as-is complete with memories and fossil evidence of days gone by.
Once you bring God into the argument, all counter arguments are pointless because the argument cannot be defeated by evidence (logic yes, evidence no).
From your perspective, it's like if you had a signed litograph, stored it in a bank, and they decided to replace it with another one from the same series. It may look the same to the uneducated eye, but it isn't the same.
Even worse... what if your child has the 'radio edit' of a song and Amazon swaps it for the album version with all the naughty words left in?? Won't somebody _please_ think of the children???
For example, create a file that's 3:14 seconds or whatever the song I want is, name the file "I was born this way", and my file of shit turns into a the song - courtesy of Amazon's service.
You just just upload a tiny file with the right tags and marked as '1bps' and see what happens :)
Another experiment would be to record yourself singing a song and see what Amazon replaces it with.
So, can I upload my music, have it upgraded and tagged by Amazon, then download the improved MP3s and quit the service?
Yes, you can do that if you want, but since they make you prepay for the entire year -- the joke will be on you if you quit their service after just 24 hours.
I'm not sure what laws Amazon operate under, but a contract that says "and after you sign up we can vary the contract however we want and you will like it" is probably not enforceable, so if you already had an account you should be able to do this then get a refund.
Brontosuars and Siplodocis may not be as excitinfg as T-Rex, but they won't eat you.
How can you be sure? I mean we know they were plant eaters but even a horse will bite you if you piss it off, and these things are substantially bigger than horses.
I distinctly remember that happening in a movie from my youth. It was even based on a book! As I recall it didn't end well for those involved.
A futuristic amusement park where dinosaurs are brought to life through advanced cloning techniques? I think the movie you're thinking of was "Billy and the Clonasaurus".
Even if it is authentic, it wouldn't be worth $150,000 being most likely the final retail binary.
If someone pays $150,000 for it, then it was worth $150,000. I guess we'll just have to wait and see...
Generalizations have no place in legit conversation.
What? Never??
That would be a nifty idea although it may just be another distraction. A change in attitude might be better... maybe coupled with a big red light on the top of the car. If the light isn't lit then a "oops, sorry, my bad" is implied, and the driver would need to illuminate the light to reflect a "haha I meant to cut you off just then!" intention.
A few years ago I was stopped at a give way sign and someone rear-ended me. It didn't really upset me that much at all... she obviously wasn't paying attention but I didn't feel particularly angry or anything. About a week after that someone entered a roundabout right in front of me causing me to slam on my brakes to avoid a collision... and I saw red, despite the fact that rear ending someone who has been stopped for several seconds implies a far greater lapse in concentration than simply failing to see someone on a roundabout.
I think the main difference between the two was that the girl who rear-ended me apologised immediately (and even before that I could see the look of dismay on her face in the rear view mirror) while the girl who cut me off on the roundabout didn't even glance in my direction. An "oops" button would be all that was required to diffuse a lot of road rage situations, but even so some people are just dicks and will get pissed off for any reason at all.
Why not use heat sensors?
Heat sensors are the wrong technology to use for this. Radar works much better because it can detect cold objects as well, penetrates fog/smoke, and can use the doppler effect to detect if an object is moving. Radar is what the Google Driverless Car uses, and is what most other autonomous vehicles use as well. It is also what most automatic cruise control systems use.
I've pondered before over how well chaff would work to fool a collision avoidance system. If a car fitted with a radar based collision avoidance system was tailgating then a release of chaff might cause it to slam on its brakes, with ensuing hilarity.
Or young. Although that doesn't always measure up either... none of my young kids have facebook accounts but I still suspect they are planning something.
Also am reminded of an old pulp sc-fi short story that took the form of letters between a Mars bio-dome colonist and the manufacturer of the living bio dome system... they kept adding critters to the dome to try and balance the eco-system, with predictable and silly results.
Sounds like an interesting story... got any more info? Like a title, or something to google? I tried googling a few keywords but just found your post...
Sure. Now it's just regular fish. Next it will be sharks, then sharks with lasers. It will be all fun and games until someone loses an eye.
These are _sharks_ we're talking about here. Not just angry sea bass. These lasers will be big. It will be all fun and games until someone loses a _head_
I have a 25GB monthly quota, you insensitive clods!
Don't worry. If it was a raw database extract totally 40GB I bet a lot of it is metadata and the content itself is probably highly compressible. I bet someone can put it in a more useful form and compress it and you'll be able to slide under your quota.
Failing that, I'm sure the slashdot editors could release a summary. They are excellent at making summaries of things - most of the time they don't even need the original data to do so!
Anonymous harms the people who's data they publish, and they are not the good guys. They are criminals doing criminal harm.
However, they are *also* revealing just how vulnerable the system is to crime. If the data were not logged at all, then anonymous would not be able to publish it.
So, the government should protect me from anonymous by making this level of logging illegal, rather than mandatory.
That's not how it works (it's how it _should_ work though!) The government has taken steps to protect you from terrorists, but do you feel any safer for it? You say "the government should protect me from anonymous", but their idea of protecting you from anonymous will be to capture _more_ data to watch you more closely, and increase the punishments for this "terrorist" activity (including looking at the released captured data, and discussing the inadequacies of security).
(disclaimer: i've very recently given up caffeine so i'm extra cynical and extra grumpy)
Note the "revolution" does not have to mean "violence". Voting in a third party into the White House and Congress, and giving them a mandate to shrink the government would do just fine. That is, so long as said third party were willing to do such a thing.
I wasn't equating "revolution" with "violence". I was equating "well armed militia" with "violence".
A third party would be awesome... the legacy government wouldn't know what hit it :)
Well... none of that is my job in your country, because it's your country not mine.
It sounds like you are trying to disagree with me to make your point but you kind if missed the point I was making so you are disagreeing with some imaginary third person. It sounds as if you are suggesting that there are a lot of things that can be done before you need to start forming militias and shooting people, which was kind of my point. I can't be bothered looking up who said it, but "if you make non-violent revolution impossible, you make violent revolution inevitable". The mere fact that you can even whisper to your neighbor about overthrowing your government without getting dissapeared means that the non-violent revolution solution is still entirely possible, and easy, by doing all the things you just said. So yeah, make a difference now while you can still do so easily - it could be a lot harder later.
In my country (Australia), we haven't yet run out of acceptable candidates to vote for, and the way our government is set up it means that they are not so far removed from the people that they can't pretend they don't exist, so unlike you guys we can actually influence things simply by voting for the right candidate. For now.
remove a govt that is TOO corrupt and can NOT be fixed
How do you see this removal of government taking place? Sure, you could maybe round up enough of your militia to kill them all, but what then? Decades of education neglect has left you with a nation of morons and I guarantee that whatever you try and replace your government with, it will be worse. There are some drug lords in Mexico who might like to take a stab at leadership, if that helps.
I'm not disagreeing that there is a problem, and it needs to be fixed, and I don't know how you would fix it, but the moment you get out your guns and start shooting you'll have much bigger problems than you have now.
btw, kudo's on not posting anonymously when you are publicly inviting violent revolution. If you don't hear hammers batter down the door (you'd better run!) in the next few hours then you don't have it as bad as some countries.