OK, I should have responded here instead of to the "Headlines" post.
NASA anticipated the problem - see the paragraph about lens heaters in the mission update referenced in the story.
Not quite windshield wipers, granted, but the agency did anticipate the problem from ealier experience, and built in a solution that had worked before and which worked this time, too.
Actually, even better. For "We fixed it", read "We thought of this in advance and our solution worked".
(From the mission update referenced in the story, the camera had built-in heaters to warm up the lenses in anticipation of this very problem, since warming the instruments had worked on previous missions. So the comment that suggested windscreen wipers wasn't totally off-beam....)
Interesting approach, though I wonder what market is being addressed. The biggest casual users of text messaging these days are young people and for them a few mispellings will be understood from the context, plus as another commenter has noted more recent phones have built-in dictionaries to speed up message composition (though I've found these more a hindrance than a help - my language style perhaps).
If you're interested in using a mobile messagingto to actually do significant work, where a mistake can cost time, money, inconvenience, hurt feelings, etc, then I suspect you'd prefer to use something PDA-sized which either has room for a real keyboard or allows you to use a stylus & touchscreen to tap out a message.
FWIW, here in Switzerland you can ask for your phone directory entry (dead tree and online versions) to be flagged with an asterisk, which means "no advertising, thanks". Do this, and the lists that the directory company sells for telemarketing don't contain your number, and - mostly - if someone calls you despite this they're sensible enough to back off immediately when you point out that your number is flagged in this way. There is no charge for this flagging, btw.
"No advertising" stickers on your physical mailbox are - mostly - also respected here.
I'm not absolutely sure, but I believe that both of these mechanisms are merely advisory with no legal sanctions behind them. Companies operating in Switzerland seem to have worked out that if people signal that they don't want junk mail and junk faxes and junk phone calls then it's a bad idea to irritate them by ignoring these signals. Of course, in Switzerland the citizenry gets to vote directly on issues at all levels of government from local community up to national, and if telemarketeers and their like really pissed off the general public they might find that the federal government would be instructed by voters to Do Something About It.
The Vasa - that's the Swedish warship that sank at the start of its maiden voyage - was raised from the seabed in the 1961 and is now on display in a museum in Stockholm. I saw it in the late 1970s when the fragile timber was still being sprayed with a solution of polyethelenglycol to give it enough strength to bear its own weight as it was gradually dried out.
It's now a massive visitor attraction. However, that's not without its own unfortunate side effects: I heard a report a few week back on the BBC that the wood is now rotting again in places due to the humidy in the air from the visitors' breath, perspiration, damp outer clothes on rainy days, etc.
Yep,IIRC the original 'soaps' were sponsored drama series: "Milly-Molly-Mandy's Adventures is sponsored by ACME Washing Powder, the powder that keeps your whites white and your colours fresh..."
The coffee ads were in the commercial breaks, but had their own little storylines in each "episode" and the episodes had an overall storyline behind them. Whether they sold any more instant coffee is a good question, as others have commented.
...that is blatently obvious, but it seems to me that if your audience is taking steps to actively avoid advertisements - whether by using technology so advanced that TV execs cannot distinguish it from magic;-) or simply by taking a natural break when the ads come on - then the ads can't be doing a very good job of attracting attention to the products or services they are promoting.
Possibly, just possibly, it might be worth trying to commission ads that don't insult the intelligence of a dead sheep? I seem to recall a campaign in the UK a few years ago that ran a whole mini soap-opera to promote a brand of instant coffee, and people's attention was caught because the ads were (a) well made, and (b) the audience wanted to see what happened at the next stage in the story.
(Of course, this does take a bit more effort and genuine creativity than you need to produce the usual dreck.)
There have been a couple of comments in the Risks Digest recently about BMW and VW driving too far too fast down the high-tech route. They're together, in Vol22 Issue 3.
Looks like my next car is going to have to be a second-hand one.
According to the article, the objective is to reduce the incidence of books "walking off the booksellers' shelves" without being paid for, and to provide a way of tracing those that do.
For this, a simple tag that says "this book is part of the stock of such-and-such a bookseller, and has not been paid for" is sufficient. Buy the book, the tag gets cancelled. If you want to, use the tag to record "this belongs to me, if lost, please return". That's fine. Your choice.
Nothing more is needed to achieve the stated objectives. Anything more is there for the benefit of third parties, and needs to be examined very carefully for potential misuse before being accepted.
"We regret that owing to circumstances outside our control, 1984 has been somewhat delayed."
Blunket (current UK Home Secretary, ie the government minister responsible for amongst other things the criminal justice system and the police) is not the primary problem. I wouldn't even say that the problem lies primarily in his department, the government's Home Office, despite its prediliction for using any and all pretexts to restrict civil liberties and reduce the accountability of itself and its agents. The basic underlying problem is that the UK's unwritten constitution is based (simplifying very considerably) on the concept that authority derives from the monarch, and that ministers of the crown are exercising this royal prerogative under the oversight of the crown's subjects - not citizens - through their representatives elected to Parliament.
Unfortunately, Parliament is now typically dominated by the party of government and has long ceased to be a check on the executive, which in the current Blair administrations is effectively equivalent to the Prime Minister and a small number of senior ministers and other cronies who have the PM's ear, for one reason or another. And as for Mr Blair: he's so utterly convinced in the rightness of what he's doing and that it's for the good of everyone that he's effectively uncontrollable. He's the government, and he's here to help you. Shudder and run.
You might want to consider just moving to the European mainland. There's a reasonable choice of states which aren't organised as elected dictatorships, and there's even one (Switzerland) where the citizens have direct authority to make decisions at the ballot box. As a Brit, of cource, you won't get to vote, just pay the taxes:-(
Arthur C Clarke wrote a short piece about conditions on Earth as deduced from observations by astronomers of the long-extinct Martian civilisation (obtained by archeological investigations undertaken by early scientific expeditions from Earth in the early 21st century, IIRC - one of his early pieces). The Martian scientific consensus was that intelligent life could not possibly evolve on Earth, because 20% of its atmosphere was made up of the dangerously reactive element oxygen. Any life that did exist would have to be heavily armoured and shielded from exposure to such a corosive substance, and even then, there was evidence of sporadic large-scale chemical reactions on the surface of the planet, a terrifying natural phenomenon for which the scientists had invented the technical term "fire". Clearly, no life at all could possibly survive such events....
ACC was quietly ignoring the question of what was maintaining the level of such a reactive substance in the atmosphere in the first place, but he was also making a good point: most people do underestimate how reactive oxygen can be outside the everyday circumstances that we're familiar with. Wood burns, but we can make stoves out of iron, so iron doesn't burn easily, right? Wrong. Stuff an iron pipe with iron rods, blow pure oxygen down it and heat the open end for a while with an oxy-acetylene torch and you get one of the more powerful cheap cutting flames around. The cannon-balls had apparently had lots of fine channels corroded into them by years of exposure to sea-water so there was a large surface area unprotected by a covering of rust: in the cases where the iron combusted sufficient area of unprotected iron became exposed as or after the water evaporated which was enough to get the reaction started.
And Primo Levy commented in one of his books (Periodic Table, perhaps? I don't have it to hand to check) about how treacherously ready sawdust could be to spontaniously combust. A more obviously flammable example than iron, but a similar situation: with more surface area and less nearby mass to absorb heat from any reaction that does start, sawdust is that much more liable to behave dangerously that timber in bulk.
I need to resort my bookshelves by author or subject (or, indeed, any scheme at all)...
As I recall, from a short story collection titled "A Hole in Space", examining the effects on society if teleportation became a reliable and economic mode of transport. But it may have been published elsewhere and elsewhen under another title. You're right about the Known Space aspect, though, the stories were set in a recognisably moderate-future setting where Earth had colonised the Solar System and was exploring beyond but had not yet made contact with the Known Space species.
I must admit I like Niven's work: he's an entertaining storyteller and there's enough thought put into the implications of the worlds he imagined. Unfortunately he seems to have ceased writing and his work has dropped off the SF/Fantasy shelves without trace.
I would dearly love to possess a working "Dali", even if the cleaning bills were exorbitant.
Now please excuse me, I have to sort my library....
So, it seems that MS spent a little small change cooking up some documentation that raised the possibility that Samba might infringe on some of MS's intellectual property. Samba Team was then obliged to spend (proportionally considerably more) time and resources analysing this suggestion so they can issue a plausible refutation. In the meantime, all the 'careful' line management types whose reason for existence is never to be seen to be responsible for a mistake will have taken the point that deploying Samba is 'risky', and will now have to be persuaded all over again that this particular risk is an acceptable one, and that in this case there was smoke without fire.
Neat work, MS.
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. You can't choose just two out of the three, they come co-mingled.
Here, we can send SMS from any carrier to any other carrier, even from GSM network to CDMA ones.
This is generally the case now for carriers in the same country (though in some cases it took pressure from the regulators before the carriers agreed to do this). Sending messages to a destination in another country, though, is still something of a crap-shoot. It will work more often than not, but some carriers are selectively blocking messages from other carriers, and the blocking lists are seldom made public (they change without notice, too). The background to all this is apparently that the SMS service was never expected to be the success it has become (expecially its use by young people): the carriers were thinking more in terms of a follow-on to paging services with the added facility to call back to the home base. As a result, mechanisms for charging other carriers for forwarding their messages were never included in the specifications. So where traffic flows between two carriers are highly unbalanced the carrier on the predominantly receiving side will sometimes put a block in place until a contract can be negotiated for compensatory payments.
Some of my work is in this area, and these black holes in the messaging coverage are not only an irritation ("Why didn't the message I sent get through?"), but are hampering rollout of some useful commercial information services.
One that can be removed without bringing the rest of the OS and its applications crashing down around it, so that it is technically and - please, dear God - legally and economically possible for me to buy equipment without it integrated if I have no need for it!
ie, hard-disk drive, aka HDD: the terms only came into general use after 'floppy disks' became a familiar storage medium for 'microcomputors', as they were once called. Pre-floppy, we just called them 'disk drives'.
Yes, it's a slow day at the office, how could you tell?
The author (Douglas Hoffstadter) named this entity "Aunt Hillary". (Think about it for a second....)
He also had the colony undergo a major rearrangement from some sort of physical damage (can't remember the cause) which led to a major change in its "personality".
Slashdot Mirror
NASA anticipated the problem - see the paragraph about lens heaters in the mission update referenced in the story.
Not quite windshield wipers, granted, but the agency did anticipate the problem from ealier experience, and built in a solution that had worked before and which worked this time, too.
(From the mission update referenced in the story, the camera had built-in heaters to warm up the lenses in anticipation of this very problem, since warming the instruments had worked on previous missions. So the comment that suggested windscreen wipers wasn't totally off-beam....)
If you're interested in using a mobile messagingto to actually do significant work, where a mistake can cost time, money, inconvenience, hurt feelings, etc, then I suspect you'd prefer to use something PDA-sized which either has room for a real keyboard or allows you to use a stylus & touchscreen to tap out a message.
"No advertising" stickers on your physical mailbox are - mostly - also respected here.
I'm not absolutely sure, but I believe that both of these mechanisms are merely advisory with no legal sanctions behind them. Companies operating in Switzerland seem to have worked out that if people signal that they don't want junk mail and junk faxes and junk phone calls then it's a bad idea to irritate them by ignoring these signals. Of course, in Switzerland the citizenry gets to vote directly on issues at all levels of government from local community up to national, and if telemarketeers and their like really pissed off the general public they might find that the federal government would be instructed by voters to Do Something About It.
It's now a massive visitor attraction. However, that's not without its own unfortunate side effects: I heard a report a few week back on the BBC that the wood is now rotting again in places due to the humidy in the air from the visitors' breath, perspiration, damp outer clothes on rainy days, etc.
More information at the Vasa Museum .
Wonder if they're going to get named? Astronomers must be running out of references to Zeus' amorous adventures by now....
Plus a few hundred thousand who are there in spirit.
The coffee ads were in the commercial breaks, but had their own little storylines in each "episode" and the episodes had an overall storyline behind them. Whether they sold any more instant coffee is a good question, as others have commented.
Possibly, just possibly, it might be worth trying to commission ads that don't insult the intelligence of a dead sheep? I seem to recall a campaign in the UK a few years ago that ran a whole mini soap-opera to promote a brand of instant coffee, and people's attention was caught because the ads were (a) well made, and (b) the audience wanted to see what happened at the next stage in the story.
(Of course, this does take a bit more effort and genuine creativity than you need to produce the usual dreck.)
Looks like my next car is going to have to be a second-hand one.
And leptons. Don't forget the leptons.
(Insert reference to Spanish Inquisition sketch here.)
Strangelets in the night....
</Sinatra>
It's OK, I was just leaving anyway.
For this, a simple tag that says "this book is part of the stock of such-and-such a bookseller, and has not been paid for" is sufficient. Buy the book, the tag gets cancelled. If you want to, use the tag to record "this belongs to me, if lost, please return". That's fine. Your choice.
Nothing more is needed to achieve the stated objectives. Anything more is there for the benefit of third parties, and needs to be examined very carefully for potential misuse before being accepted.
"We regret that owing to circumstances outside our control, 1984 has been somewhat delayed."
Blunket (current UK Home Secretary, ie the government minister responsible for amongst other things the criminal justice system and the police) is not the primary problem. I wouldn't even say that the problem lies primarily in his department, the government's Home Office, despite its prediliction for using any and all pretexts to restrict civil liberties and reduce the accountability of itself and its agents. The basic underlying problem is that the UK's unwritten constitution is based (simplifying very considerably) on the concept that authority derives from the monarch, and that ministers of the crown are exercising this royal prerogative under the oversight of the crown's subjects - not citizens - through their representatives elected to Parliament.
Unfortunately, Parliament is now typically dominated by the party of government and has long ceased to be a check on the executive, which in the current Blair administrations is effectively equivalent to the Prime Minister and a small number of senior ministers and other cronies who have the PM's ear, for one reason or another. And as for Mr Blair: he's so utterly convinced in the rightness of what he's doing and that it's for the good of everyone that he's effectively uncontrollable. He's the government, and he's here to help you. Shudder and run.
You might want to consider just moving to the European mainland. There's a reasonable choice of states which aren't organised as elected dictatorships, and there's even one (Switzerland) where the citizens have direct authority to make decisions at the ballot box. As a Brit, of cource, you won't get to vote, just pay the taxes :-(
ACC was quietly ignoring the question of what was maintaining the level of such a reactive substance in the atmosphere in the first place, but he was also making a good point: most people do underestimate how reactive oxygen can be outside the everyday circumstances that we're familiar with. Wood burns, but we can make stoves out of iron, so iron doesn't burn easily, right? Wrong. Stuff an iron pipe with iron rods, blow pure oxygen down it and heat the open end for a while with an oxy-acetylene torch and you get one of the more powerful cheap cutting flames around. The cannon-balls had apparently had lots of fine channels corroded into them by years of exposure to sea-water so there was a large surface area unprotected by a covering of rust: in the cases where the iron combusted sufficient area of unprotected iron became exposed as or after the water evaporated which was enough to get the reaction started.
And Primo Levy commented in one of his books (Periodic Table, perhaps? I don't have it to hand to check) about how treacherously ready sawdust could be to spontaniously combust. A more obviously flammable example than iron, but a similar situation: with more surface area and less nearby mass to absorb heat from any reaction that does start, sawdust is that much more liable to behave dangerously that timber in bulk.
As I recall, from a short story collection titled "A Hole in Space", examining the effects on society if teleportation became a reliable and economic mode of transport. But it may have been published elsewhere and elsewhen under another title. You're right about the Known Space aspect, though, the stories were set in a recognisably moderate-future setting where Earth had colonised the Solar System and was exploring beyond but had not yet made contact with the Known Space species.
I must admit I like Niven's work: he's an entertaining storyteller and there's enough thought put into the implications of the worlds he imagined. Unfortunately he seems to have ceased writing and his work has dropped off the SF/Fantasy shelves without trace.
I would dearly love to possess a working "Dali", even if the cleaning bills were exorbitant.
Now please excuse me, I have to sort my library....
Acknowledgements to Larry Niven for coming up with this idea ("It's a Bulova Dali") in one of his tales of Known Space.
Neat work, MS.
Fear, Uncertainty, Doubt. You can't choose just two out of the three, they come co-mingled.
Some of my work is in this area, and these black holes in the messaging coverage are not only an irritation ("Why didn't the message I sent get through?"), but are hampering rollout of some useful commercial information services.
One that can be removed without bringing the rest of the OS and its applications crashing down around it, so that it is technically and - please, dear God - legally and economically possible for me to buy equipment without it integrated if I have no need for it!
Yes, it's a slow day at the office, how could you tell?
We now get /. effect * 4 as people try each alternative in turn, and they're all at the same location....
He also had the colony undergo a major rearrangement from some sort of physical damage (can't remember the cause) which led to a major change in its "personality".
Droll idea, thoroughly recommended book.