Tell that to the survivors of a flight that crashed in the DC area back in the 60's that affected by a portable recorder and all of the other flights that the FAA/DOT investigated that were caused by portable hardware screwing things up.
I'm fairly sure that radio and electronics technology has advanced enough in the last 50 years to the point where "examples" from the VACUUM TUBE era are of no value whatsoever
Another factor, I don't want to be sitting in first class getting hit in the head by some Joe Sixpacks kid's fucking kindle from the rear of the plane while landing. So shut it down and put the fucking thing away.
Getting hit in the back of the head with Joe Sixpack's hardcover book is somehow perfectly fine though.
it does make me wonder how those recorded 9/11 messages made it through.
Thats easy, those "hijack" calls were all recorded days in advance. (Funny how the plane that hit the pentagon just "happened" to hit the section that was COMPLETELY EMPTY at that exact moment in time, and how the outdoor security footage from the gas station across the highway from the pentagon was seized by the feds later that day, never to be seen again)
The irony of the mythbusters test is that they never actually left the ground, because the FAA wouldn't let them test it for real (even in a private plane, even with a mythbusters-level insurance policy)
When the FAA bans independent research, it makes me suspicious of their motivations
An extreme example, is that about once a year you can find a story about rescue teams being mobilized because they see an emergency radio beacon signal, only to find out it is a malfunctioning TV or other device (well, appears functional to the user, but something is out of spec with the circuit and EMC goes to heck).
No.
It is not the TV that cause this, it is the cable TV system itself. If a coax cable breaks in the right way, all the RF that should be safely contained within the wire starts spewing out (at a fairly high power) and some of those RF signals are on the same frequency as the emergency radio beacons.
The cable companies have teams of people who do nothing except manually walk the lines every day looking for any small leaks before they get big enough. (I worked with a guy that used to do this job. He told me how he was threatened at gunpoint several occasions (and even beat-up once) by people who thought he was a government spy, just because he was walking around with a big antenna array near their house, even though he was wearing a blaze-orange comcast vest)
Laptops are designed from the ground up to be as cool-running, quiet, and energy efficient as possible (usually to the point of being underpowered) in order to have a decent amount of on-battery running time. Desktops don't have this limitation and tend to focus more on raw performance and price, with much less consideration for heat output and energy efficiency.
Go measure a P4 laptop, and you will get a much more reasonable comparison (granted, the macbook pro will still probably beat it by 15-30 watts, but it's a lot better than the 129 watt difference you got before).
Alternately, go test a G4 tower (if you can find one that still works) and compare THAT to the 140 watt P4 desktop
Hopefully this leads to people (re)discovering the PC as a gaming platform, so PC gamers can stop being held back by these stupid console ports that are written for hardware that was commodity level 6 years ago.
Maybe if enough people switch back to the PC for all their gaming needs, we can finally get Valve to release HL2 Episode 3.
First of all, that would more than double the cost of gas, second of all, that would have no effect on debt or deficit, the bill would have to be written specifically so that the money could only be used to pay debt, otherwise it would all get spent on tax cuts or Homeland Security. Also, any increase in gas prices generally leads to an overall increase in product prices, because it costs more to ship everything.
You really want to clean up the environment? Instead of artificially raising the price of gas even more (there is $1-$2 per gallon worth of taxes at the pump already), take all the money we currently spend on the military, and use it instead to build so many solar and wind farms that it forces electricity costs down, hopefully to the point where coal and gasoline look expensive in comparison.
When you want to teach a dog a new trick, dog treats work a lot better than shock collars. The same rule applies when you are trying to teach an entire nation, it's better to give incentives for doing "good" than punishment for doing "bad".
Also, "carbon taxes" and "carbon credits" are a complete joke. It leads to odd situations where power plants and industrial factories are now buying up old refrigerant and incinerating it because, according to the law, destroying a pound of refrigerant earns enough "carbon credits" to offset a pound of carbon pollution, and it's currently cheaper to buy and destroy a pound of refrigerant than it is to actually remove a pound of carbon from the smokestack. The part that makes this really stupid, is that the refrigerant would have likely been reused in another piece of equipment, and would have never ended up in the atmosphere in the first place.
In Chicago, ANY method of transport is faster and cheaper than driving. I knew someone who managed to get stuck in traffic for 4 hours on 294 while trying to get through that area once.
This is probably the most important cause of microsoft's gradual downfall over the last 10-12 years. With each of their attempts to build a music player, an ebook reader, or a phone, every time an engineer would show his prototype to a manager, the first thing that manager would say is "thats neat, but how does it relate to windows?"
Microsoft is a company that has poured billions into researching product diversification, while still possessing a complete unwillingness to actually diversify. It's kinda like a fat guy who buys all the Weight Watchers meals every week, but lets it all spoil and go to waste because he would rather eat delivery pizza and chinese takeout instead.
Sure, that's fine. But my point is that parents don't get to choose a religious class over a science class, or a religious alternative during evolution week of biology class.
Sure they do, It's called "sending your kids to the local Catholic school"
Is there any reason why the digital textbooks can't be loaded from a hardwired connection and then used when the tablets are offline?
Because iPads don't have USB ports, ethernet ports, or any sort of removable storage whatsoever.
The only way to get those books onto the tablets would be to pack all of them into a car, drive to someplace far enough away that they CAN use wifi, and manually load the books onto each tablet one at a time.
I have an idea for a great new invention. I call it the Rubber-Stamp Machine.
You insert a filing for a new patent, and it automatically stamps APPROVED on the patent. It can process hundred of patent applications per hour, without any human interaction or oversight needed.
There may already be prior art however, as it seems the USPTO already owns a few of these machines.
You drive one of the rare cars that actually requires high octane gas (turbo'd sportcar or whatever) Your lawnmower works fine with low octane gas. So you drive to the gas station, fill your little one gallon lawnmower gas can with the cheaper low octane gas. See on the bill that you are being charged for high octane gas. "Its company policy that if you have a car requiring high octane gas, we will charge you for high octane gas, no matter what you actually use or want".
I actually had something a bit like this happen when trying to buy tires at a Mill's Fleet Farm My car was an 1987 chrysler lebaron GTS turbo, which is the same car as the chrysler lebaron gts, and the dodge lancer (not to be confused with the mitsu lancer). For some reason, my specific car was listed, in thier book, as needing (more expensive) H rated tires. While they did have my size (stock alloy rims) in S rating, which was listed for the other 2 cars (lebaron gts and lancer), they didn't have them in H rating, and simply refused to sell me any tires.
The max rated speed of S rated tires is (I think) 113 mph, and the max speed for H rated tires is (I think) 130mph, neither speed being legally attainable anywhere in wisconsin (except at the track). They would rather lose a customer (we stopped getting tires there completely) than stray from words of the almighty tire-size bible. (another tire shop in town had no problem putting S rated tires on the car)
I just want to say that the whole "pocket computer with phone add-ons" idea really blew me away with my first android phone (a tmobile g2). It was a special moment for me, realizing that the thing I was holding in my hand had more power, more internet connectivity, and more battery life than my 2 year-old netbook (even had the same screen resolution I think), and also made my first computer (a 386) look like a stone tool in comparison.
As a phone however, it kinda sucks. the screen gets greasy, and half the time the ringer mutes itself in my pocket and I miss calls
Just "walking away" stopped being an option the moment that corporations realized it was more profitable to gouge the existing customers (and underpay the workers) and use the resulting profit to simply buy-out the competition, instead of actually attempting to counter the competition's offerings. (why fight them, when you can just pay them to stop fighting you)
John's hardware store is closer to your house but charges too much for tools, so you shop at Bob's Hardware instead. But today you arrive at Bob's and the sign on the door says "going out of business, early retirement", with a crew on the outside changing the neon sign to "John's hardware" and another crew on the inside re-stickering all the items to a higher price.
If these were just mom' n 'pop places, and Bob was the sole owner, then Bob might have a problem with closing his pride and joy (and his children might have an issue too, if they were expecting to inherent the store). But if "Bob's Hardware" is nothing but a publicly traded company, then the only thing the "owners" (shareholders) care about is converting their "Bob's Hardware" stock into some marginally more valuable "John's Hardware" stock. (Assuming the shareholders even know about the merger, and it's not some investment firm making the decisions for them)
You really want a free market? Get rid of wall street, get rid of stocks, get rid of "wealth management" firms, and get rid of publicly traded companies where the decision makers are kept completely isolated from the consequences of their decisions. How can you tell what is the "right" thing to do with a business, when you have never been within 500 miles of the business? Or even worse, aren't even aware that you own it, because you have a "wealth manager" handling all your stocks.
Until we start banning FCC employees from EVER working for telcom companies or telecom lobbies (after their term in office is over), we will never have an objective FCC that actually follows it's mission statement.
how you described it is exactly how its SUPPOSED to work, but not with some carriers (at&t and verizon for sure). if you don't buy a data plan and try to use data, your download works just fine, but they bill you per kb, as if it were ALL overage. You have to specifically tell then to disable data on the account if you want no data access at all. I found this out the hard way when my first at&t bill was $75 higher than it should have been (and the first bill was prorated for a mid-month signup which only covered 10 days of the billing period). In at&t's defense, they did cancel the $75 in fees for me, once I signed up for a data plan
This isn't what happened with the OPs story though, in the OP's case, they "detected" he was using an iphone, and decided that all iphones MUST have a data plan and that they could add one without even asking, regardless of whether or not the OP had ever used any data before.
Between at&t and verizon, they have managed to reassemble all the parts of the old at&t (by "acquiring" all the various baby bells), and managed to go right back to being the same old telecom monopoly. The only difference between today and the Ma Bell days is that now they are skirting anti-trust laws by being a two-company cartel instead of a one-company monopoly.
that only works until the company that you fled TO (t-mobile) gets bought out by the company you were fleeing FROM (at&t), and you are back where you started, as an at&t customer whether you wanted to be one or not.
You should go to a t-mobile store and ask about the "new" unlimited plan that they started offering about 6 months ago. It's $30 a month (same as 5gb plan) and it's ACTUALLY UNLIMITED, it's the same 4-8megabit speed (t-mobile g2) whether you have downloaded 1GB or 100GB (technically there is a limit, but it's 9765.62GB)
The only downside is that the "new" unlimited plan doesn't include tethering, but you can get around that by using privoxy to change your browser user agent
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You are saying that a cell phone will still try to connect a tower, even when the cell radio is TURNED OFF (airplane mode)?
Tell that to the survivors of a flight that crashed in the DC area back in the 60's that affected by a portable recorder and all of the other flights that the FAA/DOT investigated that were caused by portable hardware screwing things up.
I'm fairly sure that radio and electronics technology has advanced enough in the last 50 years to the point where "examples" from the VACUUM TUBE era are of no value whatsoever
Another factor, I don't want to be sitting in first class getting hit in the head by some Joe Sixpacks kid's fucking kindle from the rear of the plane while landing. So shut it down and put the fucking thing away.
Getting hit in the back of the head with Joe Sixpack's hardcover book is somehow perfectly fine though.
it does make me wonder how those recorded 9/11 messages made it through.
Thats easy, those "hijack" calls were all recorded days in advance. (Funny how the plane that hit the pentagon just "happened" to hit the section that was COMPLETELY EMPTY at that exact moment in time, and how the outdoor security footage from the gas station across the highway from the pentagon was seized by the feds later that day, never to be seen again)
The irony of the mythbusters test is that they never actually left the ground, because the FAA wouldn't let them test it for real (even in a private plane, even with a mythbusters-level insurance policy)
When the FAA bans independent research, it makes me suspicious of their motivations
I was wondering this too, he says " I have first-hand proof" then fails to mention even a single detail
An extreme example, is that about once a year you can find a story about rescue teams being mobilized because they see an emergency radio beacon signal, only to find out it is a malfunctioning TV or other device (well, appears functional to the user, but something is out of spec with the circuit and EMC goes to heck).
No.
It is not the TV that cause this, it is the cable TV system itself. If a coax cable breaks in the right way, all the RF that should be safely contained within the wire starts spewing out (at a fairly high power) and some of those RF signals are on the same frequency as the emergency radio beacons.
The cable companies have teams of people who do nothing except manually walk the lines every day looking for any small leaks before they get big enough.
(I worked with a guy that used to do this job. He told me how he was threatened at gunpoint several occasions (and even beat-up once) by people who thought he was a government spy, just because he was walking around with a big antenna array near their house, even though he was wearing a blaze-orange comcast vest)
You can't compare a laptop to a desktop.
Laptops are designed from the ground up to be as cool-running, quiet, and energy efficient as possible (usually to the point of being underpowered) in order to have a decent amount of on-battery running time. Desktops don't have this limitation and tend to focus more on raw performance and price, with much less consideration for heat output and energy efficiency.
Go measure a P4 laptop, and you will get a much more reasonable comparison (granted, the macbook pro will still probably beat it by 15-30 watts, but it's a lot better than the 129 watt difference you got before).
Alternately, go test a G4 tower (if you can find one that still works) and compare THAT to the 140 watt P4 desktop
Hopefully this leads to people (re)discovering the PC as a gaming platform, so PC gamers can stop being held back by these stupid console ports that are written for hardware that was commodity level 6 years ago.
Maybe if enough people switch back to the PC for all their gaming needs, we can finally get Valve to release HL2 Episode 3.
First of all, that would more than double the cost of gas, second of all, that would have no effect on debt or deficit, the bill would have to be written specifically so that the money could only be used to pay debt, otherwise it would all get spent on tax cuts or Homeland Security. Also, any increase in gas prices generally leads to an overall increase in product prices, because it costs more to ship everything.
You really want to clean up the environment? Instead of artificially raising the price of gas even more (there is $1-$2 per gallon worth of taxes at the pump already), take all the money we currently spend on the military, and use it instead to build so many solar and wind farms that it forces electricity costs down, hopefully to the point where coal and gasoline look expensive in comparison.
When you want to teach a dog a new trick, dog treats work a lot better than shock collars. The same rule applies when you are trying to teach an entire nation, it's better to give incentives for doing "good" than punishment for doing "bad".
Also, "carbon taxes" and "carbon credits" are a complete joke. It leads to odd situations where power plants and industrial factories are now buying up old refrigerant and incinerating it because, according to the law, destroying a pound of refrigerant earns enough "carbon credits" to offset a pound of carbon pollution, and it's currently cheaper to buy and destroy a pound of refrigerant than it is to actually remove a pound of carbon from the smokestack. The part that makes this really stupid, is that the refrigerant would have likely been reused in another piece of equipment, and would have never ended up in the atmosphere in the first place.
In Chicago, ANY method of transport is faster and cheaper than driving.
I knew someone who managed to get stuck in traffic for 4 hours on 294 while trying to get through that area once.
It's Windows. Everything had to be windows.
This is probably the most important cause of microsoft's gradual downfall over the last 10-12 years. With each of their attempts to build a music player, an ebook reader, or a phone, every time an engineer would show his prototype to a manager, the first thing that manager would say is "thats neat, but how does it relate to windows?"
Microsoft is a company that has poured billions into researching product diversification, while still possessing a complete unwillingness to actually diversify. It's kinda like a fat guy who buys all the Weight Watchers meals every week, but lets it all spoil and go to waste because he would rather eat delivery pizza and chinese takeout instead.
I believe in the scientific method (hypothesis>experiment>theory>experiment>law)
Evolution just happens to be the answer you arrive at, when you use the scientific method.
I would rather have faith in the method that provided the answer, than faith in the answer alone.
Sure, that's fine. But my point is that parents don't get to choose a religious class over a science class, or a religious alternative during evolution week of biology class.
Sure they do, It's called "sending your kids to the local Catholic school"
Is there any reason why the digital textbooks can't be loaded from a hardwired connection and then used when the tablets are offline?
Because iPads don't have USB ports, ethernet ports, or any sort of removable storage whatsoever.
The only way to get those books onto the tablets would be to pack all of them into a car, drive to someplace far enough away that they CAN use wifi, and manually load the books onto each tablet one at a time.
I have an idea for a great new invention. I call it the Rubber-Stamp Machine.
You insert a filing for a new patent, and it automatically stamps APPROVED on the patent. It can process hundred of patent applications per hour, without any human interaction or oversight needed.
There may already be prior art however, as it seems the USPTO already owns a few of these machines.
You drive one of the rare cars that actually requires high octane gas (turbo'd sportcar or whatever)
Your lawnmower works fine with low octane gas.
So you drive to the gas station, fill your little one gallon lawnmower gas can with the cheaper low octane gas. See on the bill that you are being charged for high octane gas. "Its company policy that if you have a car requiring high octane gas, we will charge you for high octane gas, no matter what you actually use or want".
I actually had something a bit like this happen when trying to buy tires at a Mill's Fleet Farm
My car was an 1987 chrysler lebaron GTS turbo, which is the same car as the chrysler lebaron gts, and the dodge lancer (not to be confused with the mitsu lancer). For some reason, my specific car was listed, in thier book, as needing (more expensive) H rated tires. While they did have my size (stock alloy rims) in S rating, which was listed for the other 2 cars (lebaron gts and lancer), they didn't have them in H rating, and simply refused to sell me any tires.
The max rated speed of S rated tires is (I think) 113 mph, and the max speed for H rated tires is (I think) 130mph, neither speed being legally attainable anywhere in wisconsin (except at the track). They would rather lose a customer (we stopped getting tires there completely) than stray from words of the almighty tire-size bible. (another tire shop in town had no problem putting S rated tires on the car)
I just want to say that the whole "pocket computer with phone add-ons" idea really blew me away with my first android phone (a tmobile g2). It was a special moment for me, realizing that the thing I was holding in my hand had more power, more internet connectivity, and more battery life than my 2 year-old netbook (even had the same screen resolution I think), and also made my first computer (a 386) look like a stone tool in comparison.
As a phone however, it kinda sucks. the screen gets greasy, and half the time the ringer mutes itself in my pocket and I miss calls
I wonder when they introduced that rule?
When homeland security started freaking out about terrorists using untraceable burner phones as remote-controlled explosive detonators
Just "walking away" stopped being an option the moment that corporations realized it was more profitable to gouge the existing customers (and underpay the workers) and use the resulting profit to simply buy-out the competition, instead of actually attempting to counter the competition's offerings. (why fight them, when you can just pay them to stop fighting you)
John's hardware store is closer to your house but charges too much for tools, so you shop at Bob's Hardware instead. But today you arrive at Bob's and the sign on the door says "going out of business, early retirement", with a crew on the outside changing the neon sign to "John's hardware" and another crew on the inside re-stickering all the items to a higher price.
If these were just mom' n 'pop places, and Bob was the sole owner, then Bob might have a problem with closing his pride and joy (and his children might have an issue too, if they were expecting to inherent the store). But if "Bob's Hardware" is nothing but a publicly traded company, then the only thing the "owners" (shareholders) care about is converting their "Bob's Hardware" stock into some marginally more valuable "John's Hardware" stock. (Assuming the shareholders even know about the merger, and it's not some investment firm making the decisions for them)
You really want a free market? Get rid of wall street, get rid of stocks, get rid of "wealth management" firms, and get rid of publicly traded companies where the decision makers are kept completely isolated from the consequences of their decisions. How can you tell what is the "right" thing to do with a business, when you have never been within 500 miles of the business? Or even worse, aren't even aware that you own it, because you have a "wealth manager" handling all your stocks.
Until we start banning FCC employees from EVER working for telcom companies or telecom lobbies (after their term in office is over), we will never have an objective FCC that actually follows it's mission statement.
Wow, off-topic AND extremely sexist
Maybe you meant to post to 4chan and got the browser tabs mixed up?
how you described it is exactly how its SUPPOSED to work, but not with some carriers (at&t and verizon for sure). if you don't buy a data plan and try to use data, your download works just fine, but they bill you per kb, as if it were ALL overage. You have to specifically tell then to disable data on the account if you want no data access at all. I found this out the hard way when my first at&t bill was $75 higher than it should have been (and the first bill was prorated for a mid-month signup which only covered 10 days of the billing period). In at&t's defense, they did cancel the $75 in fees for me, once I signed up for a data plan
This isn't what happened with the OPs story though, in the OP's case, they "detected" he was using an iphone, and decided that all iphones MUST have a data plan and that they could add one without even asking, regardless of whether or not the OP had ever used any data before.
Between at&t and verizon, they have managed to reassemble all the parts of the old at&t (by "acquiring" all the various baby bells), and managed to go right back to being the same old telecom monopoly. The only difference between today and the Ma Bell days is that now they are skirting anti-trust laws by being a two-company cartel instead of a one-company monopoly.
that only works until the company that you fled TO (t-mobile) gets bought out by the company you were fleeing FROM (at&t), and you are back where you started, as an at&t customer whether you wanted to be one or not.
You should go to a t-mobile store and ask about the "new" unlimited plan that they started offering about 6 months ago. It's $30 a month (same as 5gb plan) and it's ACTUALLY UNLIMITED, it's the same 4-8megabit speed (t-mobile g2) whether you have downloaded 1GB or 100GB (technically there is a limit, but it's 9765.62GB)
The only downside is that the "new" unlimited plan doesn't include tethering, but you can get around that by using privoxy to change your browser user agent