You know, thats what puzzles me the most about telemarketers. They get someone to answer, and that person calls them a cockbiting fucktard and hangs up, and then, instead of blacklisting that number (because obviously, your not selling them ANYTHING) they call back every day for two years, wasting their own time on calling a number that is guaranteed to not profit.
My greatest achievement in telemarketer trolling goes as follows:
I'd been getting a lot of marketer calls, so I knew the ones calling me where going strait to a real operator, so I made a plan, and when I got the next call from them, I put on my most official sounding voice, and say:
"Thank you for calling the FBI self incarceration hotline. To surrender in English, press 1. Para español presione dos."
There is this pause, then the guy goes "Hello?"
"Thank you for calling the FBI self incarceration hotline. To surrender in English, press 1. Para español presione dos."
longer pause "Hello?"
"Thank you for calling the FBI self incarceration hotline. To surrender in English, press 1. Para español presione dos."
another pause, and then, to my eternal glee, *beeeep* as the guy presses 1.
At this point, i'm trying so hard not to laugh that I break down and shout "Your are an absolute idiot!" and hang up on the guy.
I've refined my plan for this, and have several more sub-menus of script in my head for future callers.
I spent a bit of time a while back thinking about the whole subject at hand, organizing my thoughts and opinions, and deciding how to describe my feelings on the subject of "offensive' and "Political Correctness" and the like. It all boiled down to this:
I believe that it is the greatest privilege in the world to be offended by something.
Now let me explain why. Offensive things are the crucible and fire that refines and tempers our personalities. When something offends you, you learn more about yourself in that moment than you might learn in decades of introspection and study. You find out, right then, right there, where the edges of your personality are. Where the line is for you. You learn what your limits are, and how to push them.
There is an old saying, that gets passed around once and a while, that goes something like this:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference. - Reinhold Niebuhr.
I really like that quote, as it embodies a part of my feelings on being offended. As such, I have reached a point in my life where very little offends me, in the 'modern' sense of the word (where I must rant and rave and rail against it) but rather, I find things that I find disturbing, or disgusting, and find myself realizing my edges, but not the need to alter the things that give me those feelings.
I think possibly that some of the reason for the rise of 'triggering' and 'SJW' (ugh, that phrase) and the like, is we have failed somehow to teach people how to deal with their emotions. "Being Offended" has become a catch all term with "I don't understand/like the feelings this makes me have."
I consider myself fortunate that it has only taken me this long in life to understand all this. There is a great deal about the world I disagree with to some degree or another, but I recognize that most of it will not be changed by my shouting, and the rest can be changed by gentle actions. Additionally, I have slowly learned to seek out viewpoints dissenting and polar from my own, and test own against them, discard what I find lacking, and adopt what is superior.
What worries me is that this habit is one that may be impossible to teach to people, but must be found on ones own. I hope that this worry is unfounded, and it can be taught, if only we remember how.
I know a little about mold making, and making a new mold from existing parts is *possible* but probably not cost effective for them at this time. When making new masters from existing parts, there is a LOT of weird things you have to deal with. For example, if a part has to be bent to a 45 degree angle around a 1inch curve, your master mold is going to have to have special tolerances built in to compensate for the spring and stretch in the material you are making the part out of. (basically, you have to bend it some amount past its final position, and once the clamping force is released, it springs back to its final state) So you cant just take a finished part and make a negative of it and use that negative as a mold, the new parts made would not quite match the originals. Mold making for stamp formed parts is quite the art and science.
Doubtful, I've accidentally done a bit of research on the DeLorian a few late nights on the internet, and from all accounts, the molds for making the body panels and interior were dumped into the ocean back when DMC shut down, to 'protect trade secrets', which is why they use the warehoused parts, and why they cost so damn much.
Not really, i'm just looking back farther than you are. I'm not talking about 17th century chemistry, with actual scientific method, Robert Boyle, and the like, I'm talking about 420ish B.C. when the idea that everything was made up of some combination of the four elements earth, fire, air and water was considered serious 'science'
we've come a damn long way, but to discount the people who came before, and gave everything names, isolated elements for the first time, and found out that this weird yellow substance burns blue, and seems to keep that fungus from growing on our grape vines when we dust them with it. (sulfur) Many of those people, despite our best efforts to deify them, where fumble fucking around, and learned valuable things, and lived long enough to write them down.
The first half. The early half. I know actual "Chemists" don't "mix random shit together" but I'm talking about back when they where called "Alchemists", and the periodic table was a half dozen or so centuries away from being invented.
Yeah, and you might stumble on to some neat new applications in the process. People forget, that probably half of what we know about chemistry was discovered by crazy people fumble-dicking around trying to turn lead into gold by mixing random shit together, and happening upon fantastic new chemical reactions, which they managed to write down.
Planets have this nice feature called "A Mostly self sustaining breathable environment at 1g" which is what Humans work best in. Less day to day maintenance, and i've never had anyone I know die to explosive decompression into the void. Also, many of us like wide open spaces.
Ok, so here's the plan:
We strip mine the entire asteroid belt, Oort cloud, and half the outer gas giants for materials, we use those materials to bulk up the smallish inner planets closer to earth size and mass, thus adjusting the gravity nearer to earth-normal. While we're doing that, we're gonna need to burrow down into Mars and re-melt its core and spin it up to restart its magnetic field. Then we actually MOVE Mercury, Venus and Mars into orbits closer to Earths, so they are better positioned in the goldilocks zone, and terraform them all. We keep the other half of the outer gas giants to serve their purpose, to sweep up debris from the solar system and reduce impacts to the inner solar system. Any remaining raw materials we have left after that, we build *sections* of Dyson sphere near our new habitable Mercury Venus and Mars, as well as Earth, and use them to scoop up as much power from the sun as we can, but without the hassle of egshelling the actual sun, which physics says you cant do because orbital mechanics don't work that way, and there is no material strong enough to do it. So the net result is we get 4 habitable planets orbiting the sun, with giant solar collectors parked ahead and aft of each of them, with general solar system defense still provided by your favorite gas giants.
After that, we find a HARD project.
Agreed, the dollar coin that is the same size as the quarter is a huge mistake. I'm also not a fan of all the 'state' 'park' and 'presidential' re-designs of the coins, simply because I have to stop and look at the darn thing to make sure its actual US currency, and not a theme park token or some other nationality's coins. There is a lot to be said for consistency of design in metal currency.
I spent about a week in Canada a few years back, and was really taken with their use of 1 and 2$ coins. I especially appreciated them as the perfect vending machine coin. As I was camping, I became quite familiar with pay showers that used 1 and 2$ coins, as well as snack machines that accepted them. Not having to try and iron the wrinkles out of a crumpled dollar bill to get the soda machine to take them is fantastic, and taking paper money into a pay shower seems like a disaster in progress. The larger size, as well as the two metal format of the 2$ coin makes it instantly obvious what it is, and it pretty much never wears out.
That'll be a lot harder in the US, simply because of the tom-fuckery that is our sales tax system. Shelf says 5.39$, but try and calculate that 8.9% sales tax that will get added on at the register in your head, an after you get about 19 items in your basket, you find yourself totally screwed sideways on the math. So a comprehensive re-write of our tax law would probably have to accompany the elimination of the 1 cent coin here.
Of course, I'm still FOR eliminating the penny(1 cent coin, whatever, lets not have this argument again.) as well as the 1$ paper bill. Eliminate both, and bring back the 1$ coin to wide circulation. This is because our (stupidly, paper) bills have to be replaced, on average, every 5.2 years because they wear out, at an estimated cost of approximately 146 million dollars to the US mint annually.
Well, based on what I've been told about vasectomies, its not a "Kids with the wife, not with the mistress" kind of deal, because after you flip the switch, your gonna need to jerk it like 3 times a day for a week to clear out any lingering swimmers in the tubes. So more of a "Book 6 weeks in advance to have the doctor flip the switch on your balls"
I'm not saying don't think about it, I'm saying think about the several thousand milestones we need to hit before we can even start to push out to the stars. Viable cheep reusable *To Orbit* vehicles, solutions to the long term physical degradation living in space causes, (bone mass, muscle mass, vision loss, to name a few). We need to be able to grow food in space, which pretty much means some form of artificial gravity, so we keep talking about a spinning habitat, but we have to carefully isolate the stationary bicycle on the ISS so it does not shake the entire station apart, we are a long way from building something that spins at a simulated 1G. The steps to "sent 2000 people across interstellar space" are legion, and we are maybe on step 3. I'm not against thinking about it, however, I am much more FOR spending that mental effort on the problems that are actually next in the queue. Sure, maybe someone accidents onto FTL tech in a lab somewhere,(probably not) but that still does not get us up the gravity well, into orbit, and surviving in space long term. All the problems have to be solved before we can go, not just the propulsion.
I like how we're talking about sending 2000 people to another star system, when the most people we've ever had in space simultaneously is 13, and the total number of people who've even BEEN to space is 1/4th of the number we're talking about, and that is in all of human history.
Hell, Its fun to think about how to send people across the stars, but when it comes right down to it, we are WAY short of the technology to even start.
Yeah, the video showing it being used is just a guy standing in front of a TV, airsoft controller at his hip, numbly playing Call of Battlefield: Medal of Duty Ops. The usage of this thing does not remotely resemble the controller from DuckHunt, other than being 'gun shaped'
This article should have been titled "debate the political landscape layed out in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red/Blue/Green Mars trillogy" because that is exactly what this is. I think if 1653 pages on the subject cant come to a consise answer, then there is no concise answer.
You missed part of my comment. the Kickstart funds are put in escrow, and a LOAN is issued to the inventor for tooling/production. IF the inventor manages to use that loan to ship product, the money comes out of escrow and pays off the loan, with any excess funds being given to the inventor. if the inventor FAILS to use his loaned funds wisely, and fucks off to ikea and buys an entire house worth of crap instead, he is expected to pay off the loan himself, and the money is returned from the escrow to the investors.
clearly, there would need to be some careful setup to prevent screwing people who come up 5$ short of shipping their product, but its better than what we have.
Thats his point (i think) His ideal Kickstarter is more along the lines of "Hey, i've been tinkering in my garage for the past 5 years with my own money, and have finally proven that my idea is not only cool, but not actually impossible! I have a functioning prototype that does not explode 5 seconds into use, and am now kickstarting to bring it to manufacturing and retail."
At which point, millions of dollars are put into an escrow account by thousands of enthused people, and a loan for some amount less is issued to the inventor to actually produce the product. When units start shipping, the money from the escrow account is used to pay off the loan and any balloon expenses, with any extra going to the inventor.
This would help filter out the people who use kickstarter in the "Hey, I have a neat idea, but i'm going to need about 500K to find out if its even physically possible." but say it in a way that insinuates that the 500K will bring it to your doorstep. Those projects belong on GoFundMe.
Exactly. The most important part of this article (in my mind) is this part.
have the potential to deliver the desired power thanks to a high energy density - a measure of energy stored for a given weight - that could be 10 times that of lithium-ion batteries and approach that of gasoline.
The fact that we've confirmed that this is even possible is incredible. And don't forget, in terms of existing IC engines, gasoline is only about 30% efficient at converting its stored energy into movement. We've built a few that can do 38%, but thats not even in commercially available stuff, just test bench machines. If we can get even to that, we're doing something amazing. If we're approaching the actual energy density of gasoline, not the power to the ground number, that is practically a holy grail of science.
Who gives a shit if its 20, 40, or even 100 years down the road before this battery tech is in every device, the fact that we know its even POSSIBLE is incredibly amazing, incredibly worthwhile to report, and damn exciting, just knowing we're on the right track.
Not really. Earth-ram blocks are a common enough building material, and can be made by hand, or with simple tools. Instead of cement, we can use any number of masonry epoxies as a mortar, which are far easier to ship than a cement factory. Additionally, the fact that Mars has just over 1/3rd the gravitational pull as earth simplifies the building process.
all this is pretty well beside the point, because these are more of a 'long term' option, not a 'first visit'. Not like we're going to Mars any time soon anyways.
Slashdot Mirror
the other 1% punch through the menu tree to get a human operator, and issue verbal abuse and threats.
You know, thats what puzzles me the most about telemarketers. They get someone to answer, and that person calls them a cockbiting fucktard and hangs up, and then, instead of blacklisting that number (because obviously, your not selling them ANYTHING) they call back every day for two years, wasting their own time on calling a number that is guaranteed to not profit.
My greatest achievement in telemarketer trolling goes as follows:
I'd been getting a lot of marketer calls, so I knew the ones calling me where going strait to a real operator, so I made a plan, and when I got the next call from them, I put on my most official sounding voice, and say:
"Thank you for calling the FBI self incarceration hotline. To surrender in English, press 1. Para español presione dos."
There is this pause, then the guy goes "Hello?"
"Thank you for calling the FBI self incarceration hotline. To surrender in English, press 1. Para español presione dos."
longer pause "Hello?"
"Thank you for calling the FBI self incarceration hotline. To surrender in English, press 1. Para español presione dos."
another pause, and then, to my eternal glee, *beeeep* as the guy presses 1.
At this point, i'm trying so hard not to laugh that I break down and shout "Your are an absolute idiot!" and hang up on the guy. I've refined my plan for this, and have several more sub-menus of script in my head for future callers.
I believe that it is the greatest privilege in the world to be offended by something.
Now let me explain why. Offensive things are the crucible and fire that refines and tempers our personalities. When something offends you, you learn more about yourself in that moment than you might learn in decades of introspection and study. You find out, right then, right there, where the edges of your personality are. Where the line is for you. You learn what your limits are, and how to push them.
There is an old saying, that gets passed around once and a while, that goes something like this:
God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, Courage to change the things I can, And wisdom to know the difference. - Reinhold Niebuhr.
I really like that quote, as it embodies a part of my feelings on being offended. As such, I have reached a point in my life where very little offends me, in the 'modern' sense of the word (where I must rant and rave and rail against it) but rather, I find things that I find disturbing, or disgusting, and find myself realizing my edges, but not the need to alter the things that give me those feelings.
I think possibly that some of the reason for the rise of 'triggering' and 'SJW' (ugh, that phrase) and the like, is we have failed somehow to teach people how to deal with their emotions. "Being Offended" has become a catch all term with "I don't understand/like the feelings this makes me have."
I consider myself fortunate that it has only taken me this long in life to understand all this. There is a great deal about the world I disagree with to some degree or another, but I recognize that most of it will not be changed by my shouting, and the rest can be changed by gentle actions. Additionally, I have slowly learned to seek out viewpoints dissenting and polar from my own, and test own against them, discard what I find lacking, and adopt what is superior.
What worries me is that this habit is one that may be impossible to teach to people, but must be found on ones own. I hope that this worry is unfounded, and it can be taught, if only we remember how.
I was all of like, 1.5 years old, so probably naked wandering around the house eating Cheetos straight from the bag, getting the cat all orange.
I know a little about mold making, and making a new mold from existing parts is *possible* but probably not cost effective for them at this time. When making new masters from existing parts, there is a LOT of weird things you have to deal with. For example, if a part has to be bent to a 45 degree angle around a 1inch curve, your master mold is going to have to have special tolerances built in to compensate for the spring and stretch in the material you are making the part out of. (basically, you have to bend it some amount past its final position, and once the clamping force is released, it springs back to its final state) So you cant just take a finished part and make a negative of it and use that negative as a mold, the new parts made would not quite match the originals. Mold making for stamp formed parts is quite the art and science.
Doubtful, I've accidentally done a bit of research on the DeLorian a few late nights on the internet, and from all accounts, the molds for making the body panels and interior were dumped into the ocean back when DMC shut down, to 'protect trade secrets', which is why they use the warehoused parts, and why they cost so damn much.
Not really, i'm just looking back farther than you are. I'm not talking about 17th century chemistry, with actual scientific method, Robert Boyle, and the like, I'm talking about 420ish B.C. when the idea that everything was made up of some combination of the four elements earth, fire, air and water was considered serious 'science'
we've come a damn long way, but to discount the people who came before, and gave everything names, isolated elements for the first time, and found out that this weird yellow substance burns blue, and seems to keep that fungus from growing on our grape vines when we dust them with it. (sulfur) Many of those people, despite our best efforts to deify them, where fumble fucking around, and learned valuable things, and lived long enough to write them down.
The first half. The early half. I know actual "Chemists" don't "mix random shit together" but I'm talking about back when they where called "Alchemists", and the periodic table was a half dozen or so centuries away from being invented.
Yeah, and you might stumble on to some neat new applications in the process. People forget, that probably half of what we know about chemistry was discovered by crazy people fumble-dicking around trying to turn lead into gold by mixing random shit together, and happening upon fantastic new chemical reactions, which they managed to write down.
Strangely enough, the population of the US is suddenly only 4000 people!
Planets have this nice feature called "A Mostly self sustaining breathable environment at 1g" which is what Humans work best in. Less day to day maintenance, and i've never had anyone I know die to explosive decompression into the void. Also, many of us like wide open spaces.
If we develop the tech to move a planet to a new orbit on purpose and accurately, clearly we can adjust and stabilize from time to time.
Ok, so here's the plan:
We strip mine the entire asteroid belt, Oort cloud, and half the outer gas giants for materials, we use those materials to bulk up the smallish inner planets closer to earth size and mass, thus adjusting the gravity nearer to earth-normal. While we're doing that, we're gonna need to burrow down into Mars and re-melt its core and spin it up to restart its magnetic field. Then we actually MOVE Mercury, Venus and Mars into orbits closer to Earths, so they are better positioned in the goldilocks zone, and terraform them all. We keep the other half of the outer gas giants to serve their purpose, to sweep up debris from the solar system and reduce impacts to the inner solar system. Any remaining raw materials we have left after that, we build *sections* of Dyson sphere near our new habitable Mercury Venus and Mars, as well as Earth, and use them to scoop up as much power from the sun as we can, but without the hassle of egshelling the actual sun, which physics says you cant do because orbital mechanics don't work that way, and there is no material strong enough to do it. So the net result is we get 4 habitable planets orbiting the sun, with giant solar collectors parked ahead and aft of each of them, with general solar system defense still provided by your favorite gas giants.
After that, we find a HARD project.
Agreed, the dollar coin that is the same size as the quarter is a huge mistake. I'm also not a fan of all the 'state' 'park' and 'presidential' re-designs of the coins, simply because I have to stop and look at the darn thing to make sure its actual US currency, and not a theme park token or some other nationality's coins. There is a lot to be said for consistency of design in metal currency.
I spent about a week in Canada a few years back, and was really taken with their use of 1 and 2$ coins. I especially appreciated them as the perfect vending machine coin. As I was camping, I became quite familiar with pay showers that used 1 and 2$ coins, as well as snack machines that accepted them. Not having to try and iron the wrinkles out of a crumpled dollar bill to get the soda machine to take them is fantastic, and taking paper money into a pay shower seems like a disaster in progress. The larger size, as well as the two metal format of the 2$ coin makes it instantly obvious what it is, and it pretty much never wears out.
That'll be a lot harder in the US, simply because of the tom-fuckery that is our sales tax system. Shelf says 5.39$, but try and calculate that 8.9% sales tax that will get added on at the register in your head, an after you get about 19 items in your basket, you find yourself totally screwed sideways on the math. So a comprehensive re-write of our tax law would probably have to accompany the elimination of the 1 cent coin here.
Of course, I'm still FOR eliminating the penny(1 cent coin, whatever, lets not have this argument again.) as well as the 1$ paper bill. Eliminate both, and bring back the 1$ coin to wide circulation. This is because our (stupidly, paper) bills have to be replaced, on average, every 5.2 years because they wear out, at an estimated cost of approximately 146 million dollars to the US mint annually.
Well, based on what I've been told about vasectomies, its not a "Kids with the wife, not with the mistress" kind of deal, because after you flip the switch, your gonna need to jerk it like 3 times a day for a week to clear out any lingering swimmers in the tubes. So more of a "Book 6 weeks in advance to have the doctor flip the switch on your balls"
I'm not saying don't think about it, I'm saying think about the several thousand milestones we need to hit before we can even start to push out to the stars. Viable cheep reusable *To Orbit* vehicles, solutions to the long term physical degradation living in space causes, (bone mass, muscle mass, vision loss, to name a few). We need to be able to grow food in space, which pretty much means some form of artificial gravity, so we keep talking about a spinning habitat, but we have to carefully isolate the stationary bicycle on the ISS so it does not shake the entire station apart, we are a long way from building something that spins at a simulated 1G. The steps to "sent 2000 people across interstellar space" are legion, and we are maybe on step 3. I'm not against thinking about it, however, I am much more FOR spending that mental effort on the problems that are actually next in the queue. Sure, maybe someone accidents onto FTL tech in a lab somewhere,(probably not) but that still does not get us up the gravity well, into orbit, and surviving in space long term. All the problems have to be solved before we can go, not just the propulsion.
I like how we're talking about sending 2000 people to another star system, when the most people we've ever had in space simultaneously is 13, and the total number of people who've even BEEN to space is 1/4th of the number we're talking about, and that is in all of human history.
Hell, Its fun to think about how to send people across the stars, but when it comes right down to it, we are WAY short of the technology to even start.
Yeah, the video showing it being used is just a guy standing in front of a TV, airsoft controller at his hip, numbly playing Call of Battlefield: Medal of Duty Ops. The usage of this thing does not remotely resemble the controller from DuckHunt, other than being 'gun shaped'
This article should have been titled "debate the political landscape layed out in Kim Stanley Robinson's "Red/Blue/Green Mars trillogy" because that is exactly what this is. I think if 1653 pages on the subject cant come to a consise answer, then there is no concise answer.
You missed part of my comment. the Kickstart funds are put in escrow, and a LOAN is issued to the inventor for tooling/production. IF the inventor manages to use that loan to ship product, the money comes out of escrow and pays off the loan, with any excess funds being given to the inventor. if the inventor FAILS to use his loaned funds wisely, and fucks off to ikea and buys an entire house worth of crap instead, he is expected to pay off the loan himself, and the money is returned from the escrow to the investors. clearly, there would need to be some careful setup to prevent screwing people who come up 5$ short of shipping their product, but its better than what we have.
Thats his point (i think) His ideal Kickstarter is more along the lines of "Hey, i've been tinkering in my garage for the past 5 years with my own money, and have finally proven that my idea is not only cool, but not actually impossible! I have a functioning prototype that does not explode 5 seconds into use, and am now kickstarting to bring it to manufacturing and retail."
At which point, millions of dollars are put into an escrow account by thousands of enthused people, and a loan for some amount less is issued to the inventor to actually produce the product. When units start shipping, the money from the escrow account is used to pay off the loan and any balloon expenses, with any extra going to the inventor.
This would help filter out the people who use kickstarter in the "Hey, I have a neat idea, but i'm going to need about 500K to find out if its even physically possible." but say it in a way that insinuates that the 500K will bring it to your doorstep. Those projects belong on GoFundMe.
have the potential to deliver the desired power thanks to a high energy density - a measure of energy stored for a given weight - that could be 10 times that of lithium-ion batteries and approach that of gasoline.
The fact that we've confirmed that this is even possible is incredible. And don't forget, in terms of existing IC engines, gasoline is only about 30% efficient at converting its stored energy into movement. We've built a few that can do 38%, but thats not even in commercially available stuff, just test bench machines. If we can get even to that, we're doing something amazing. If we're approaching the actual energy density of gasoline, not the power to the ground number, that is practically a holy grail of science.
Who gives a shit if its 20, 40, or even 100 years down the road before this battery tech is in every device, the fact that we know its even POSSIBLE is incredibly amazing, incredibly worthwhile to report, and damn exciting, just knowing we're on the right track.
Not really. Earth-ram blocks are a common enough building material, and can be made by hand, or with simple tools. Instead of cement, we can use any number of masonry epoxies as a mortar, which are far easier to ship than a cement factory. Additionally, the fact that Mars has just over 1/3rd the gravitational pull as earth simplifies the building process.
all this is pretty well beside the point, because these are more of a 'long term' option, not a 'first visit'. Not like we're going to Mars any time soon anyways.