"But man, I love me the convenience of credit cards." But then there's always the convenience of cash to love. By the time you've put in your card, entered the pin and it's thought about it for a while, then waited for the receipt to print it's quicker to have just counted out the money and be done with it. Now if they could make the contactless stuff a bit more secure then I might be interested but I'll often use cash when I'm in a hurry...
"So... what does a bank office do" They charge you money to look after your money for you and handle the transfer of that money to others. In other words they charge you £10 a month for (I exaggerate here but) a very simple script someone wrote many years ago and a small amount of database space. In return they also get the inconvenience of having your money in their hands.
In this free market I wonder if I could start my own bank?
What would you have me do? Write to my MP to complain. Done! Refuse to buy from that station, also do, but once every station does it (which they now do) then you're stuck. Aside from cycle more and use the none existent public transport (which also have cameras on them) then I'm not sure wht else I can do.
The colour of the camera also matters, I believe the colour code goes: blue traffic master (congestion reporting), green, law enforcement CCTV and yellow speed cameras
If it's about the wording then you can bet if it was an issue of wording in their favour he would be beaten over the head and made to stick to the letter of the law. I don't understand why a company isn't held to the same rules. If the contract said "and the customer will pay $20 every payment interval" without specifying the interval you can bet they would argue the right to change the interval to their favour and they would be within their rights to do that. Now you could argue that would be an unfair contract and as such not legally valid, but that is not what they're saying here.
"On my space airline, corporate passengers will be prohibited." two questions: Why? How will you stop them? You'll prohibit anyone flying who has a job? How do you stop someone booking themselves then claiming off expenses?
Also this may go without saying but "space airline" is a misnomer. Chances are you will use one mode of transport to LEO, one to MEO or HEO or some other transfer orbit. Then another craft from the transfer orbit to mars orbit, then another to LMO, then another to the surface of mars. The idea that one company would do all these things implies either a lack of competition or one huge corporation running a monopoly - the very thing you seem to be against. This is going off topic but this is assuming you're colonising Mars at all, I'm personally convinced that once we have the technology/economy/infrastructure to get large number of people into orbit then the last thing we'll want to do is head right back down a gravity well again. Kind of like breaking your back building a house only to burn it to the ground after you've slept in it for one night. Once you have the technology to survive in space for the multi month long journey then you have the technology to live there. Once you can do that, why go down to a planet at all except possibly to mine it? Even then, the asteroids and moons are probably a better source of raw material. Certainly for the first few generations of space fairers anyway...
"no miracle technology" Apart from all the nano-tech And the biotech that did the colonisation for them or the space elevator Or the fact that the temperature warmed faster (it is brought up to earth temperatures in less than 100 years) faster than the energy input from the sun would allow Or my personal favourite, using windmills to power electric heaters to warm the planet.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the books, but no some things were IMO unrealistically optimistic and some like the windmills were just plain wrong.
Yes Slightly pleased that for my novel I did suppose that LEDs would be greater than 100% efficient ( http://www.doubleudoubleudoubleu.co.uk/2011/06/sfap-chapter-55.html ) . Okay it was not meant to be taken seriously when I wrote it, but it looks like I wasn't that far off!
Efficient means the wastage of resources, not the raw availability of them. If we assume the average person shares their photo with around 10 people (I think you're more likely to talk about 100, but let's work in your favour here) then we're instantly talking about an order of magnitude more data needed. Again, possible, but not efficient, not making good use of available resources. I'm not just thinking of the children, if you think adults aren't bullied or intimidated then you're very wrong. If you think people don't stalk their exs or spread lies about co-workers then you need to wake up. I agree the police need to get involved, but for that you need evidence, and for that you need the ability for law enforcement to access the materials from all sides - i.e. sysadmins need access.
sysadmins are not able to see passwords because it is possible to encrypt them before they are sent to the central server. passwords are never actually decrypted in order to authenticate them. photos that have to be shared would have to be decrypted at some stage. If the 3rd party you are sharing with could see them then so could the sysadmin. Now unless you wanted to encrypt every photo independently with every person you share it with's public key, but that would be very inefficient. Also in that case who would you police things like bullying? now you may argue that it is not the place of a website to do that, but (for example) I would expect a pub landlord to monitor his premises for illegal activity, so why not a website/forum?
I'm well aware of cryptography and encryption. However I'm fairly certain that it doesn't apply here. Please correct me if I'm wrong but the reason we can have things like secure passwords is that once encrypted, they are never decrypted. When i supply my password to a secure system it is encrypted at the time of creation and the hash stored. This then is checked against the re-encrypted version supplied every time a person check it. To perform a private/public key check on photos you want to share with a select group of people would mean effectively sharing that public key with that select group. Fine, totally possible, but what happens when it goes wrong, when the page doesn't render correctly for that photo, then you need to call in the sysadmin who can see it as you see it, much as root can su to my user account to check things from my perspective. root always has access to all your data unless you deny them access to the private key, which is possible but I doubt we would see that on any day to day system because it would mean inputting the private key every time you wanted to view it. I just don't know how you could have a real world sharing website that was also secure against the admins.
That's quite naive though because that would mean their sys-admins could not see it if they needed to, also law enforcement(in which jurisdiction?); I'm not sure how you could legally or functionally achieve either of these.
"This suggests either a longer life for Symbian — or maybe Symbian was just an easier platform to make a show-stopping device that may turn out to be more of a concept phone" Or perhaps the phone has been in development for some time, maybe it takes longer than Marketing announcement cycles to design and deliver new technology.
All the examples I used were from things that have happened in the UK recently. I'd move somewhere else, but I can't think of anywhere that's any better Australia is about the only one but then you trade a government trying to control you for wildlife that's trying to kill you. I'll take the oppression over their wildlife anyday;-)
You say that though I was re-watching the film recently and it was the scene at the end where the mob marches on the armed police and the police use their own judgement and decide not to fire. Maybe I've been spending too much time on/. but I can't believe that in the current climate in that situation in the real world the police wouldn't fire and then chase them down. After seeing what happened at the recent protests with police attacking protesters with disproportionate force, the kettling, the staying away from areas where riots were actually taking place I can't believe that with today's police force would do what happened to V's supporters. I honestly found the resolution to be unbelievable because they have shown they're willing to attack huge crowds of protesters for political gain.
install solar at time of construction and now your 'deaths' are largely absorbed by the already on the roof workers.
Transportation of materials deaths? really? You do realize that absolutely *every* activity has these costs right?
Absolutely, but you can't ignore them; when assessing costs you have to assess all costs not just the ones that are convenient to your argument. Just as when calculating the costs of coal you have to count in the costs both human and material of the fuel you have to do the same for all installations and technologies. Why is a death of a truck driver who is transporting a solar panel (what would not be needed to be transported if it wasn't needed) not a death that you should count, and a death of someone building a nuke power plant one that should be counted. I see no difference.
A nuclear disaster doesn't 'have' to happen. That's what 'potential' deaths are. What are the 'potential' deaths should solar panels 'fail'? A wind mill? Don't be within a 1/4 mile when it falls down
Statistics says otherwise. Whatever the cause of the accident we have enough data from past experience to say x activity carries this risk so we can assume that it will have similar in future. Why does it matter that the accident was "Fred forgot to clip his safety line on then slipped on some oil Bob had spilt" rather than "First we got the requirements wrong, then we designed a system that needed active cooling, then we designed multiple systems to do that, then didn't realise that what would happen if our initial assumptions were wrong would be the failure of the next but 2 line of defence" . If the person died in service of providing x MW of power, then they're still dead. I'm not sure why it matters if they're potential deaths from driving to the work site, or potential deaths from a reactor accident.
I do love how the implication here is that it is money alone that will decide this. I think you're right, but it's an interesting commentary on the state of affairs.
yes seriously. Working in construction is one of the most dangerous thing the average Joe can do: http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/ http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf Roofers in particular being the worst. Now there are worse jobs out there, but my understanding is that per kW installed solar and wind kill a relatively large number of people because each install is a relatively small output. Let's say your new nuke plant kills a dozen people over the course of it's life - that's terrible and a disaster, and certainly well above the proven average - but consider that to install solar panels on roofs equal to that plant's capacity would require of the order of a million installs. Plug that into the statistics and you're looking at about 30 people killed (if I have my numbers right). Now that's not factoring in the deaths from the truckers who transport the materials, or the deaths from pollutants during their production or any deaths from servicing the panels during their life or when decommissioning them, that's not allowing for any deaths from construction of the storage facilities that would have to go with such a solar install. The list just goes on.
It's not like they've come up with a new high-thrust ion engine or something.
Even if they did I suspect some people would just say "Yawn, it's just a new higher thrust ion engine, it's not like they've come up with a new drive mechanism" or "Yawn, they're just taking all they've done with chemical engines and running it from a nuclear reactor. NERVA was in the 50s, you think we'd be doing better than that by now." I'm sorry to labour the point but this kind of Hipster view of Engineering just really annoys me.
There you are very wrong. There's a reason the african plains are plains and not forests. The acacia trees would quite hapily take over the plains if it were not for creatures like elephants. The life cycle roughtly goes: 1) open plain with lots of grass that supports roaming animals. 2) a few acacia seeds arrive and you get the odd bush. Most animals can't eat them because they are so thorny. A nimber of species though depend on their adaptations that llow them to eat between the thorns. 3) Bush grows into a tall tree, animals like giraffes come along and eat the top leaves that aren't as thorny. 4) lots of trees now in the area, it's almost a forest. 5) elephants come along, use their strength to push the trees down, literally snapping the trunk so they can eat the leaves at the top. They eat pretty much everything there. 6) forest is now destroyed, wood rots down to be new soil, area reverts to plains as grass moves back in. Cows cannot topple trees, elephants are very special and essential to the wildlife. Now without elephants you might have a new african rainforest or a something else, but you wouldn't have africa like we know it.
Define advancing technology. I hate to use a/. car analogy, so let's use a motorbike one instead: When BMW release a new bike that has >190HP vs the competition's approx 185HP is that advancing the technology? When Honda manage to release a bike that is $100 cheaper than the competition because they've managed to improve their manufacturing through better tools and materials tech is that not advancing technology? It sounds like you'd claim that today's internal combustion engine is no better than the ones being built in 1905, which is not just wrong but comical.
You mean like when he had yet to get Falcon 1 reliable, yet to even build Falcon 9 and he was talking about building Dragon? I scolded him similarly when he first announced dragon for just what you said, but i was wrong. He did deliver on those promises, now he's planning the next phase and talking about it. Would you prefer he kept things secret? As an example in the branch of engineering I work (ASIC design) it can easily take 4 years from "hey this is a cool idea, let's draw it on the whiteboard" to it being in a product I can buy in a shop. SpaceX are doing proper mechanical engineering and safety critical stuff to which takes a lot longer; yet they are delivering in about 6 years from "hey this is a cool idea" to selling it to customers. Personally I'm impressed with how fast they are doing it and so far they have yet to fail to deliver the product, they've been a bit behind schedule sure but they have delivered (but with modern NASA involved, a bit behind is early) .
Slashdot Mirror
"But man, I love me the convenience of credit cards."
But then there's always the convenience of cash to love. By the time you've put in your card, entered the pin and it's thought about it for a while, then waited for the receipt to print it's quicker to have just counted out the money and be done with it.
Now if they could make the contactless stuff a bit more secure then I might be interested but I'll often use cash when I'm in a hurry...
"So... what does a bank office do"
They charge you money to look after your money for you and handle the transfer of that money to others.
In other words they charge you £10 a month for (I exaggerate here but) a very simple script someone wrote many years ago and a small amount of database space. In return they also get the inconvenience of having your money in their hands.
In this free market I wonder if I could start my own bank?
What would you have me do?
Write to my MP to complain. Done!
Refuse to buy from that station, also do, but once every station does it (which they now do) then you're stuck.
Aside from cycle more and use the none existent public transport (which also have cameras on them) then I'm not sure wht else I can do.
The colour of the camera also matters, I believe the colour code goes: blue traffic master (congestion reporting), green, law enforcement CCTV and yellow speed cameras
Did you respond to the wrong comment.
Either that or I missed something
If it's about the wording then you can bet if it was an issue of wording in their favour he would be beaten over the head and made to stick to the letter of the law.
I don't understand why a company isn't held to the same rules.
If the contract said "and the customer will pay $20 every payment interval" without specifying the interval you can bet they would argue the right to change the interval to their favour and they would be within their rights to do that. Now you could argue that would be an unfair contract and as such not legally valid, but that is not what they're saying here.
Except time money and the stress and grief put up on others by this sham of a company.
"On my space airline, corporate passengers will be prohibited."
two questions:
Why?
How will you stop them? You'll prohibit anyone flying who has a job? How do you stop someone booking themselves then claiming off expenses?
Also this may go without saying but "space airline" is a misnomer. Chances are you will use one mode of transport to LEO, one to MEO or HEO or some other transfer orbit. Then another craft from the transfer orbit to mars orbit, then another to LMO, then another to the surface of mars. The idea that one company would do all these things implies either a lack of competition or one huge corporation running a monopoly - the very thing you seem to be against.
This is going off topic but this is assuming you're colonising Mars at all, I'm personally convinced that once we have the technology/economy/infrastructure to get large number of people into orbit then the last thing we'll want to do is head right back down a gravity well again. Kind of like breaking your back building a house only to burn it to the ground after you've slept in it for one night.
Once you have the technology to survive in space for the multi month long journey then you have the technology to live there. Once you can do that, why go down to a planet at all except possibly to mine it? Even then, the asteroids and moons are probably a better source of raw material. Certainly for the first few generations of space fairers anyway...
"no miracle technology"
Apart from all the nano-tech
And the biotech that did the colonisation for them
or the space elevator
Or the fact that the temperature warmed faster (it is brought up to earth temperatures in less than 100 years) faster than the energy input from the sun would allow
Or my personal favourite, using windmills to power electric heaters to warm the planet.
Don't get me wrong, I enjoyed the books, but no some things were IMO unrealistically optimistic and some like the windmills were just plain wrong.
Actually this would be really useful in spacecraft designs. No more need to have huge radiators vulnerable on the side of the craft, just fire the refrigeration laser.
http://www.projectrho.com/rocket/basicdesign.php#id--Heat_Radiators
Yes Slightly pleased that for my novel I did suppose that LEDs would be greater than 100% efficient ( http://www.doubleudoubleudoubleu.co.uk/2011/06/sfap-chapter-55.html ) . Okay it was not meant to be taken seriously when I wrote it, but it looks like I wasn't that far off!
Efficient means the wastage of resources, not the raw availability of them.
If we assume the average person shares their photo with around 10 people (I think you're more likely to talk about 100, but let's work in your favour here) then we're instantly talking about an order of magnitude more data needed. Again, possible, but not efficient, not making good use of available resources.
I'm not just thinking of the children, if you think adults aren't bullied or intimidated then you're very wrong. If you think people don't stalk their exs or spread lies about co-workers then you need to wake up.
I agree the police need to get involved, but for that you need evidence, and for that you need the ability for law enforcement to access the materials from all sides - i.e. sysadmins need access.
sysadmins are not able to see passwords because it is possible to encrypt them before they are sent to the central server. passwords are never actually decrypted in order to authenticate them.
photos that have to be shared would have to be decrypted at some stage. If the 3rd party you are sharing with could see them then so could the sysadmin.
Now unless you wanted to encrypt every photo independently with every person you share it with's public key, but that would be very inefficient.
Also in that case who would you police things like bullying? now you may argue that it is not the place of a website to do that, but (for example) I would expect a pub landlord to monitor his premises for illegal activity, so why not a website/forum?
I'm well aware of cryptography and encryption.
However I'm fairly certain that it doesn't apply here. Please correct me if I'm wrong but the reason we can have things like secure passwords is that once encrypted, they are never decrypted. When i supply my password to a secure system it is encrypted at the time of creation and the hash stored. This then is checked against the re-encrypted version supplied every time a person check it.
To perform a private/public key check on photos you want to share with a select group of people would mean effectively sharing that public key with that select group. Fine, totally possible, but what happens when it goes wrong, when the page doesn't render correctly for that photo, then you need to call in the sysadmin who can see it as you see it, much as root can su to my user account to check things from my perspective.
root always has access to all your data unless you deny them access to the private key, which is possible but I doubt we would see that on any day to day system because it would mean inputting the private key every time you wanted to view it.
I just don't know how you could have a real world sharing website that was also secure against the admins.
That's quite naive though because that would mean their sys-admins could not see it if they needed to, also law enforcement(in which jurisdiction?); I'm not sure how you could legally or functionally achieve either of these.
"This suggests either a longer life for Symbian — or maybe Symbian was just an easier platform to make a show-stopping device that may turn out to be more of a concept phone"
Or perhaps the phone has been in development for some time, maybe it takes longer than Marketing announcement cycles to design and deliver new technology.
All the examples I used were from things that have happened in the UK recently. ;-)
I'd move somewhere else, but I can't think of anywhere that's any better Australia is about the only one but then you trade a government trying to control you for wildlife that's trying to kill you.
I'll take the oppression over their wildlife anyday
You say that though /. but I can't believe that in the current climate in that situation in the real world the police wouldn't fire and then chase them down.
I was re-watching the film recently and it was the scene at the end where the mob marches on the armed police and the police use their own judgement and decide not to fire. Maybe I've been spending too much time on
After seeing what happened at the recent protests with police attacking protesters with disproportionate force, the kettling, the staying away from areas where riots were actually taking place I can't believe that with today's police force would do what happened to V's supporters. I honestly found the resolution to be unbelievable because they have shown they're willing to attack huge crowds of protesters for political gain.
install solar at time of construction and now your 'deaths' are largely absorbed by the already on the roof workers.
Transportation of materials deaths? really? You do realize that absolutely *every* activity has these costs right?
Absolutely, but you can't ignore them; when assessing costs you have to assess all costs not just the ones that are convenient to your argument.
Just as when calculating the costs of coal you have to count in the costs both human and material of the fuel you have to do the same for all installations and technologies. Why is a death of a truck driver who is transporting a solar panel (what would not be needed to be transported if it wasn't needed) not a death that you should count, and a death of someone building a nuke power plant one that should be counted. I see no difference.
A nuclear disaster doesn't 'have' to happen. That's what 'potential' deaths are. What are the 'potential' deaths should solar panels 'fail'? A wind mill? Don't be within a 1/4 mile when it falls down
Statistics says otherwise. Whatever the cause of the accident we have enough data from past experience to say x activity carries this risk so we can assume that it will have similar in future. Why does it matter that the accident was "Fred forgot to clip his safety line on then slipped on some oil Bob had spilt" rather than "First we got the requirements wrong, then we designed a system that needed active cooling, then we designed multiple systems to do that, then didn't realise that what would happen if our initial assumptions were wrong would be the failure of the next but 2 line of defence" . If the person died in service of providing x MW of power, then they're still dead.
I'm not sure why it matters if they're potential deaths from driving to the work site, or potential deaths from a reactor accident.
I do love how the implication here is that it is money alone that will decide this.
I think you're right, but it's an interesting commentary on the state of affairs.
Solar? potential deaths? seriously?
yes seriously.
Working in construction is one of the most dangerous thing the average Joe can do:
http://money.cnn.com/2005/08/26/pf/jobs_jeopardy/
http://www.bls.gov/iif/oshwc/cfar0020.pdf
Roofers in particular being the worst.
Now there are worse jobs out there, but my understanding is that per kW installed solar and wind kill a relatively large number of people because each install is a relatively small output.
Let's say your new nuke plant kills a dozen people over the course of it's life - that's terrible and a disaster, and certainly well above the proven average - but consider that to install solar panels on roofs equal to that plant's capacity would require of the order of a million installs. Plug that into the statistics and you're looking at about 30 people killed (if I have my numbers right).
Now that's not factoring in the deaths from the truckers who transport the materials, or the deaths from pollutants during their production or any deaths from servicing the panels during their life or when decommissioning them, that's not allowing for any deaths from construction of the storage facilities that would have to go with such a solar install. The list just goes on.
http://www.google.co.uk/search?q=quartz+die
quartz is used as spacers in chip packaging.
It's not like they've come up with a new high-thrust ion engine or something.
Even if they did I suspect some people would just say "Yawn, it's just a new higher thrust ion engine, it's not like they've come up with a new drive mechanism"
or "Yawn, they're just taking all they've done with chemical engines and running it from a nuclear reactor. NERVA was in the 50s, you think we'd be doing better than that by now."
I'm sorry to labour the point but this kind of Hipster view of Engineering just really annoys me.
There you are very wrong.
There's a reason the african plains are plains and not forests. The acacia trees would quite hapily take over the plains if it were not for creatures like elephants. The life cycle roughtly goes:
1) open plain with lots of grass that supports roaming animals.
2) a few acacia seeds arrive and you get the odd bush. Most animals can't eat them because they are so thorny. A nimber of species though depend on their adaptations that llow them to eat between the thorns.
3) Bush grows into a tall tree, animals like giraffes come along and eat the top leaves that aren't as thorny.
4) lots of trees now in the area, it's almost a forest.
5) elephants come along, use their strength to push the trees down, literally snapping the trunk so they can eat the leaves at the top. They eat pretty much everything there.
6) forest is now destroyed, wood rots down to be new soil, area reverts to plains as grass moves back in.
Cows cannot topple trees, elephants are very special and essential to the wildlife.
Now without elephants you might have a new african rainforest or a something else, but you wouldn't have africa like we know it.
Define advancing technology. /. car analogy, so let's use a motorbike one instead: When BMW release a new bike that has >190HP vs the competition's approx 185HP is that advancing the technology? When Honda manage to release a bike that is $100 cheaper than the competition because they've managed to improve their manufacturing through better tools and materials tech is that not advancing technology?
I hate to use a
It sounds like you'd claim that today's internal combustion engine is no better than the ones being built in 1905, which is not just wrong but comical.
You mean like when he had yet to get Falcon 1 reliable, yet to even build Falcon 9 and he was talking about building Dragon? I scolded him similarly when he first announced dragon for just what you said, but i was wrong.
He did deliver on those promises, now he's planning the next phase and talking about it. Would you prefer he kept things secret?
As an example in the branch of engineering I work (ASIC design) it can easily take 4 years from "hey this is a cool idea, let's draw it on the whiteboard" to it being in a product I can buy in a shop. SpaceX are doing proper mechanical engineering and safety critical stuff to which takes a lot longer; yet they are delivering in about 6 years from "hey this is a cool idea" to selling it to customers. Personally I'm impressed with how fast they are doing it and so far they have yet to fail to deliver the product, they've been a bit behind schedule sure but they have delivered (but with modern NASA involved, a bit behind is early) .