I like reading physics books. Many, if not most, are predictable to one degree or another but once in a while someone actually tries to resolve some of the most common and egregious physics problems. Frank Close and Lee Smolin come to mind.
I drive a highly reliable vehicle for less than average numbers of miles each year. In my state we are not allowed to pump our own gas, so I tend to be much less involved in my vehicle than the average. I get my oil changed by the best shop in town. I like the people there, get a free coffee and some sweet, read from their extensive and free-loanable library, while I savor being associated with good people. When the change is done I get a report that is detailed, itemized, never a surprise but often includes a warning of something I'll need to something about in a year or two. My oil change experience is like what going to the barber shop used to be -- priceless.
Half a dozen of us, all kids, watching TV. Time passes. All is well. Suddenly we see a bright blue flash. The youngest kid, possibly with the help of another young one, had plugged an amputated electrical cord into the wall socket, then randomly touched the heat register. This was the house of neighbors -- they had 7 children, most adopted. So, don't leave your heat registers lying around.
Agree, agree, agree...except for sp of Darmok. ST:TNG before s3 is indeed very tough to watch. Troi in her cheerleader outfit, but even the lighting on the set looks more like Match Game or something. Luckily BBC America still has plenty of re-runs.
The curves (& equations) I pointed to relate to the efficiency of am EM drive.
Bottom line: highest efficiency when ion speed = vehicle speed. Efficiency drops off (per the graph) when vehicle speed is > ion speed, or when vehicle speed is < ion speed. So as your vehicle speed gets faster and faster, your efficiency gets lower and lower. That is the limit I refer to.
Everybody and their dog knows that the limiting thing for ion drives is mass of propellant. However, my point is that as your vehicle speed gets >> ion speed, this makes problem number one a fatal one. In other words, a hard limit.
So, ion drives are as effectively speed limited as any other type of drive. And for the same reason of "limit on the amount of 'fuel' you can carry".
By the way, you contradict your opening statement throughout your own post:
...you don't have any idea what you're talking about... ...
Your arguments with regard to "the law of conservation of momentum" are basically correct ...
The rest of your post I *mostly* agree with ...
I approve of the refusal to state that something is "impossible"
So maybe you should have skipped the opening hyperbowl.
Just for starters, there is no down mod on user comments. And by the way, Amazon removed the down mod on user comments just a few months back. Think about the effect that has...it isn't good.
Also, if you say something highly praiseworthy, Yelp is likely to move your comment to the bottom so no one ever sees it. Of course, you can no doubt BUY a better positioning on Yelp...
Only because they run out of Xenon. If people built them with exponentially larger xenon tanks, they could reach linearly higher speeds.
It's amazing, you seem to assume this will work but you don't even know why it would be useful or the physics of the existing systems well enough to make an informed judgement.
Your reading fails are getting tiresome. At no point have I said that I "assume this will work". I am merely allowing that as a possibility, whereas you are not. You:atheist=me:agnostic. Get it?
And for someone so completely skeptical, it escapes me why you would use a phrase like "If people built them with exponentially larger xenon tanks". So you're not talking about a geometrically larger tank, no. You want one that grows exponentially. Like a million, billion times bigger than current tanks? Maybe using every Xenon atom on Earth? Fine but I would say the exponential growth stops once you use every Xenon atom in the universe. Again, for someone so skeptical and stuck-in-the-mud, you're flying in pretty rarefied air here.
By the way, on this "Chemical Rockets" page, check out
this graph. See how it tails off to the right? Turns out the efficiency is highest when ion escape velocity is about equal to vehicle veloocity. And drops off as the vehicle speed increases. That's whatchacall a limit...
Or, if you prefer wiki, you can see the same graph and some cool equations here
Ion thrusters, the propulsion of choice for science fiction writers have become the propulsion of choice for scientists and engineers at NASA. The ion propulsion system's efficient use of fuel and electrical power enable modern spacecraft to travel farther, faster and cheaper than any other propulsion technology currently available. Chemical rockets have demonstrated fuel efficiencies up to 35 percent, but ion thrusters have demonstrated fuel efficiencies over 90 percent. Currently, ion thrusters are used to keep communication satellites in the proper position relative to Earth and for the main propulsion on deep space probes. Several thrusters can be used on a spacecraft, but they are often used just one at a time. Spacecraft powered by [ion] thrusters can reach speeds up to 90,000 meters per second (over 200,000 mph). - Source (NASA)
Compare this 90,000 m/sec speed to the 300,000,000 m/sec speed of light. It is, as I said, a high but quite limited and limiting speed.
The EM drive might violate our current understanding(s) of physics. Calling what we've put together "laws" is arrogant. You can never prove that a theory is correct so everything we think we know is in the category of theory, not law.
Stating that the EM drive violates conservation of momentum is more foolishness. It might cause something, in-our-tiny-world-of-things-we-think-we-understand, to be not quite that way but another way. In short, it most likely has nothing to do with "violating conservation of momentum". Nothing at all.
Energy in gives a constant force.
That gives a constant rate of change of momentum.
But energy goes up as speed squared. Eventually your energy gain is faster then the energy in. The only way that can work is if the thrust is so small that the lines never cross below c, which is how the photon drive works.
All it takes for the lines to never cross is for the input energy to be some finite magnitude. Eventually that input energy is not enough to accelerate anything. This how the Xenon drive works. It fires particles fast, but at a finite speed. That defines what the maximum speed you will ever be able to accelerate to is.
As to a "photon drive", wiki brought up nothing. Wiki did mention a theoretical Photon Rocket, and also a Nuclear Photonic Rocket. Is that what you meant?
So basically they've proposed a perpetual motion machine and you're criticising me for not finding it credible.
Reading fail. What does need to be considered is where/how is the energy being imparted? In what form? You come across as very closed off on all this. I just don't see the advantage of being that way. I have questions and as this work progresses I will eventually get answers. And I think ultimately it will be found that energy is coming from somewhere, and being transmitted/transferred somewhere else in some way. Or it isn't. In other words, this is a two-part thing: (1) does it do something we don't currently understand? and (2) if it does in fact do something we don't currently understand then how does it do it?
What does it cost us to follow along with at least something of an open mind? Scientific history is littered with examples of people saying something was impossible. Do you want to be the next person?
A hundred years ago, Auguste Compte, a great philosopher,
said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that
we will never know what stars are made out of, that that's
the one thing that science will never ever understand,
because they're so far away. And then, just a few years
later, scientists took starlight, ran it through a prism,
looked at the rainbow coming from the starlight, and said:
"Hydrogen!"
- Michio Kaku
I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years. Ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.
- Wilbur Wright, in a speech to the Aero Club of France, November 5, 1908
Every single response has been a black and white one. Your's is as well. Here was my "shades of gray" one.
The employer/video choices are not the two black and white choices you list. They are/can include: (1) do whatever you want, (2) do it some of the time (20% if you work at Google), (3) do all you can at lunch time, (4) do none at work but here is some equipment to do it at home, (5) do any of it at work and we own your video, (6) anything you do at work, we share the profits on 50:50, (7) heh, you are so talented we want to open up a video division of the company, etc.
There are an infinite number of ways of doing this. Most don't involve your employer encouraging you one minute and treating you like you are nothing the next.
To put this in the terms most commenters apparently need to understand it: This is a bad idea for YouTube/Google.
The concept no one is using is win:win. Everyone is all outraged -- "we ordered all the kids playing at our house to do things our way and they don't like it and want to leave". Well, try not ordering them.
The Google pattern is becoming embarrassing -- do something one way for a long time, then stick your hand in the spokes.
Google, you should Google "kaizen".
By the way, AmiMoJo, you don't seem to even understand the "pay" (i.e. purpose) of protesting. You seem to think protesters were getting paid, then were not getting paid. The pay of protesting -- and it ain't much, believe me -- is to hamper regular business while trying to get the word out to the buying public. Forcing protesters into designated protest areas, often ridiculously far away from anything, deleted both of these benefits, and is a tactic more suited to a police state. Which makes it an interesting counter-example indeed...
If this is bad, then what is the alternative you propose?
How about giving advertisers choice about where they advertise? Give them a slider, all the way left and you only advertise on My Little Pony videos. All the way right equals you advertise anywhere.
Alternatively you could allow people to categorize their own videos -- "RAW: I don't care if I lose some advertisers" at one extreme, "The Gee Est of Gee: Grandma could watch without ever having to avert her gaze" at the other.
One size does not fit all. Stop being dictatorial.
It is interesting to read through some 50 comments so far and see how the vast majority appear to be quite happy with this move, with most saying it is not censorship because you can still upload, just not get paid.
That is like "You can still protest, only you have to do it way over there where it doesn't disrupt business and no one will ever see you protest."
It is routine in this day and age to control the 99% with monetary means. For example, food. Only the richest can afford to buy non-GMO, certified organic food. The rest suffer in inverse relation to their bank account size.
Same with employment. Have an opinion, lose your job. Or don't get that choice job in the first place. Control through finance.
Anyway, just fascinating how so few on/. get this.
What about writers, famous and very successful, who don't use a computer to write with? Do they dictate everything? No. Some use a mechanical typewriter, some write with pen on paper.
The point is that they want to focus on what they are doing. When I'm driving, I don't want gadget distractions. Many years back I bought a navigation device, used or tried to use it twice. Threw it out. Google maps works way better for me.
Techies are going to be the last group to see what a fad smartphones have become. Curved displays? This is more like the ultra-faddish 3D display than a useful display. 256GB SDHC chip when you buy a phone? Who will ever use that before their phone breaks? I have somewhere around 50 SDHC chips or thumb drives, with just a single one close to that capacity, and most 8 to 16 times smaller.
I can see gullible consumers rushing off and buying a bunch of 256GB chips because that is what they have already. Monkey see, monkey do. Monster cables, meet 256GB chip.
One other thing that smartphones do that contributes greatly to their uselessness? They run down their battery in a day. My MP3 player does one thing well, is indestructible, easy to plug into my desktop to get more MP3s added to it, and the battery lasts weeks (of my usage, yes). And when the battery is low, I throw it out and pop another one in. Zero charging, the device is always ready. My slide cell phone battery charge lasts weeks, because I keep the phone off and the battery removed until I need it.
I hate multidriver screwdrivers, where the handle breaks because it is hollow, the device is overly heavy, the bits are always the wrong length, and the one I need is not part of that product.
Do one thing well is the unix mantra. How did we get so far from that with our cell phones?
This billionaire has no use for a cell phone (never mind a smartphone). There are other examples in that annoying one-page-per-person story. The point is that many high-power, high-profile, high-success people don't have one because they don't want one. SJP chose email over a phone, for example.
As techies "of course" we want a smartphone. Except, with any technology, there are diminishing returns. For example, with monitors. One person just wants a big one. Many want two monitors. Then are those who have three, or six. I think it is safe to say that unless you are a security/network monitoring place, six simply does not make sense. For example, you could go with virtual desktops instead.
It is like cpu power. For years we all wanted more. With my first (8088) computer I tweaked the RAM refresh rate to gain a few percentage points! Today I run with 3 1/2 cores idle on average. Times change.
In my case, not that it matters, I have an old slide phone. Because when I am out and about I might need to make an emergency phone call. No, I won't be shopping by smart phone -- Costco is very hard to beat. I won't be getting directions with a smart phone either -- I know my way around the city. Occassionally -- maybe once ever two weeks on average -- I need directions. So, shock of shocks, I write them down. I don't even print them off the computer (though I could). I need two or three key details, why waste the paper printing it? By the way, when you write it down by hand...you burn it into your memory better...so you aren't as distracted while you are driving.
It is ironic that we have to design something in specific ways for it to feel random.
What got me noticing it first was an MP3 CD player I got about 15 years ago. When started, it would play, always, Track 1, then 2, then 4, then 8, etc. When this number grew larger than the number of MP3s in your playlist, it would wrap. I never tested it to see if, with a power of 2 number of tracks, it would wrap to the same song infinitely.
That first song, by the way, was 54-40's "Nice To Love You", and I can't listen to it any more.
FWIW, this problem also happens with random image screen savers...
Maybe things have changed but ever since Napster/MP3 came along, I've never seen a true shuffle. If you have 100 songs, they will not be played equally. Random is not.
Is VLC random/shuffle truly random?
Only way I can see it happening, for sure, is what I call forced random. Use existing randomness algorithm, and then save the result(s). So if song 17 is the first one played, make a note of that in a file or wherever. Then, for the next song you are looking for rand(1...100) | !17 -- and that code is designed to not work in any language.
Eventually you have a file with 99 entries, and it is only missing, say, 65. You play 65 and then wipe the file to start again.
The point is that, without a true random, there is no point in having a large playlist, as the bigger the playlist, the worse this problem is.
So, anyway, is VLC a truly random player? Or, even better, a forced random player...because it could be truly random while running, then when you close it and open it, it plays the same song again.
Ah yes the anecdote of one person...modded up. The "hasn't happened to me" approach is like a reverse ad hominem -- "You can't attack Apple, because I say there is no problem."
Slashdot Mirror
I like reading physics books. Many, if not most, are predictable to one degree or another but once in a while someone actually tries to resolve some of the most common and egregious physics problems. Frank Close and Lee Smolin come to mind.
I drive a highly reliable vehicle for less than average numbers of miles each year. In my state we are not allowed to pump our own gas, so I tend to be much less involved in my vehicle than the average. I get my oil changed by the best shop in town. I like the people there, get a free coffee and some sweet, read from their extensive and free-loanable library, while I savor being associated with good people. When the change is done I get a report that is detailed, itemized, never a surprise but often includes a warning of something I'll need to something about in a year or two. My oil change experience is like what going to the barber shop used to be -- priceless.
Half a dozen of us, all kids, watching TV. Time passes. All is well. Suddenly we see a bright blue flash. The youngest kid, possibly with the help of another young one, had plugged an amputated electrical cord into the wall socket, then randomly touched the heat register. This was the house of neighbors -- they had 7 children, most adopted. So, don't leave your heat registers lying around.
2 - how can you (or anyone) rent/own for $271/month?
3 - why do you group clothing with misc? Bizarre.
14 - get pay as you go phones from, for example, T-Mobile for as little as $10/year. Also, consider Ting.com
15 - where do you get Internet for $25/month? Is it broadband?
Agree, agree, agree...except for sp of Darmok. ST:TNG before s3 is indeed very tough to watch. Troi in her cheerleader outfit, but even the lighting on the set looks more like Match Game or something. Luckily BBC America still has plenty of re-runs.
Bottom line: highest efficiency when ion speed = vehicle speed. Efficiency drops off (per the graph) when vehicle speed is > ion speed, or when vehicle speed is < ion speed. So as your vehicle speed gets faster and faster, your efficiency gets lower and lower. That is the limit I refer to.
Everybody and their dog knows that the limiting thing for ion drives is mass of propellant. However, my point is that as your vehicle speed gets >> ion speed, this makes problem number one a fatal one. In other words, a hard limit.
So, ion drives are as effectively speed limited as any other type of drive. And for the same reason of "limit on the amount of 'fuel' you can carry".
By the way, you contradict your opening statement throughout your own post:
So maybe you should have skipped the opening hyperbowl.
I came here to say the same thing.
Was there ever a more extortionistic web site?
Just for starters, there is no down mod on user comments. And by the way, Amazon removed the down mod on user comments just a few months back. Think about the effect that has...it isn't good.
Also, if you say something highly praiseworthy, Yelp is likely to move your comment to the bottom so no one ever sees it. Of course, you can no doubt BUY a better positioning on Yelp...
I didn't know about this, so researched and found this page that explains "10-Bit H.264".
I offer it here so that someone can complain that I am karma whoring.
Agreed!
Your reading fails are getting tiresome. At no point have I said that I "assume this will work". I am merely allowing that as a possibility, whereas you are not. You:atheist=me:agnostic. Get it?
And for someone so completely skeptical, it escapes me why you would use a phrase like "If people built them with exponentially larger xenon tanks". So you're not talking about a geometrically larger tank, no. You want one that grows exponentially. Like a million, billion times bigger than current tanks? Maybe using every Xenon atom on Earth? Fine but I would say the exponential growth stops once you use every Xenon atom in the universe. Again, for someone so skeptical and stuck-in-the-mud, you're flying in pretty rarefied air here.
By the way, on this "Chemical Rockets" page, check out this graph. See how it tails off to the right? Turns out the efficiency is highest when ion escape velocity is about equal to vehicle veloocity. And drops off as the vehicle speed increases. That's whatchacall a limit...
Or, if you prefer wiki, you can see the same graph and some cool equations here
Compare this 90,000 m/sec speed to the 300,000,000 m/sec speed of light. It is, as I said, a high but quite limited and limiting speed.
Stating that the EM drive violates conservation of momentum is more foolishness. It might cause something, in-our-tiny-world-of-things-we-think-we-understand, to be not quite that way but another way. In short, it most likely has nothing to do with "violating conservation of momentum". Nothing at all.
All it takes for the lines to never cross is for the input energy to be some finite magnitude. Eventually that input energy is not enough to accelerate anything. This how the Xenon drive works. It fires particles fast, but at a finite speed. That defines what the maximum speed you will ever be able to accelerate to is.
As to a "photon drive", wiki brought up nothing. Wiki did mention a theoretical Photon Rocket, and also a Nuclear Photonic Rocket. Is that what you meant?
Reading fail. What does need to be considered is where/how is the energy being imparted? In what form? You come across as very closed off on all this. I just don't see the advantage of being that way. I have questions and as this work progresses I will eventually get answers. And I think ultimately it will be found that energy is coming from somewhere, and being transmitted/transferred somewhere else in some way. Or it isn't. In other words, this is a two-part thing: (1) does it do something we don't currently understand? and (2) if it does in fact do something we don't currently understand then how does it do it?
What does it cost us to follow along with at least something of an open mind? Scientific history is littered with examples of people saying something was impossible. Do you want to be the next person?
A hundred years ago, Auguste Compte, a great philosopher, said that humans will never be able to visit the stars, that we will never know what stars are made out of, that that's the one thing that science will never ever understand, because they're so far away. And then, just a few years later, scientists took starlight, ran it through a prism, looked at the rainbow coming from the starlight, and said: "Hydrogen!"
- Michio Kaku
I confess that in 1901, I said to my brother Orville that man would not fly for fifty years.
Ever since, I have distrusted myself and avoided all predictions.
- Wilbur Wright, in a speech to the Aero Club of France, November 5, 1908
Every single response has been a black and white one. Your's is as well. Here was my "shades of gray" one.
The employer/video choices are not the two black and white choices you list. They are/can include: (1) do whatever you want, (2) do it some of the time (20% if you work at Google), (3) do all you can at lunch time, (4) do none at work but here is some equipment to do it at home, (5) do any of it at work and we own your video, (6) anything you do at work, we share the profits on 50:50, (7) heh, you are so talented we want to open up a video division of the company, etc.
There are an infinite number of ways of doing this. Most don't involve your employer encouraging you one minute and treating you like you are nothing the next.
To put this in the terms most commenters apparently need to understand it: This is a bad idea for YouTube/Google.
The concept no one is using is win:win. Everyone is all outraged -- "we ordered all the kids playing at our house to do things our way and they don't like it and want to leave". Well, try not ordering them.
The Google pattern is becoming embarrassing -- do something one way for a long time, then stick your hand in the spokes.
Google, you should Google "kaizen".
By the way, AmiMoJo, you don't seem to even understand the "pay" (i.e. purpose) of protesting. You seem to think protesters were getting paid, then were not getting paid. The pay of protesting -- and it ain't much, believe me -- is to hamper regular business while trying to get the word out to the buying public. Forcing protesters into designated protest areas, often ridiculously far away from anything, deleted both of these benefits, and is a tactic more suited to a police state. Which makes it an interesting counter-example indeed...
As to your fifth point/new paragraph:
How about giving advertisers choice about where they advertise? Give them a slider, all the way left and you only advertise on My Little Pony videos. All the way right equals you advertise anywhere.
Alternatively you could allow people to categorize their own videos -- "RAW: I don't care if I lose some advertisers" at one extreme, "The Gee Est of Gee: Grandma could watch without ever having to avert her gaze" at the other.
One size does not fit all. Stop being dictatorial.
It is interesting to read through some 50 comments so far and see how the vast majority appear to be quite happy with this move, with most saying it is not censorship because you can still upload, just not get paid.
That is like "You can still protest, only you have to do it way over there where it doesn't disrupt business and no one will ever see you protest."
It is routine in this day and age to control the 99% with monetary means. For example, food. Only the richest can afford to buy non-GMO, certified organic food. The rest suffer in inverse relation to their bank account size.
Same with employment. Have an opinion, lose your job. Or don't get that choice job in the first place. Control through finance.
Anyway, just fascinating how so few on /. get this.
What about writers, famous and very successful, who don't use a computer to write with? Do they dictate everything? No. Some use a mechanical typewriter, some write with pen on paper.
The point is that they want to focus on what they are doing. When I'm driving, I don't want gadget distractions. Many years back I bought a navigation device, used or tried to use it twice. Threw it out. Google maps works way better for me.
Techies are going to be the last group to see what a fad smartphones have become. Curved displays? This is more like the ultra-faddish 3D display than a useful display. 256GB SDHC chip when you buy a phone? Who will ever use that before their phone breaks? I have somewhere around 50 SDHC chips or thumb drives, with just a single one close to that capacity, and most 8 to 16 times smaller.
I can see gullible consumers rushing off and buying a bunch of 256GB chips because that is what they have already. Monkey see, monkey do. Monster cables, meet 256GB chip.
One other thing that smartphones do that contributes greatly to their uselessness? They run down their battery in a day. My MP3 player does one thing well, is indestructible, easy to plug into my desktop to get more MP3s added to it, and the battery lasts weeks (of my usage, yes). And when the battery is low, I throw it out and pop another one in. Zero charging, the device is always ready. My slide cell phone battery charge lasts weeks, because I keep the phone off and the battery removed until I need it.
I hate multidriver screwdrivers, where the handle breaks because it is hollow, the device is overly heavy, the bits are always the wrong length, and the one I need is not part of that product.
Do one thing well is the unix mantra. How did we get so far from that with our cell phones?
This billionaire has no use for a cell phone (never mind a smartphone). There are other examples in that annoying one-page-per-person story. The point is that many high-power, high-profile, high-success people don't have one because they don't want one. SJP chose email over a phone, for example.
As techies "of course" we want a smartphone. Except, with any technology, there are diminishing returns. For example, with monitors. One person just wants a big one. Many want two monitors. Then are those who have three, or six. I think it is safe to say that unless you are a security/network monitoring place, six simply does not make sense. For example, you could go with virtual desktops instead.
It is like cpu power. For years we all wanted more. With my first (8088) computer I tweaked the RAM refresh rate to gain a few percentage points! Today I run with 3 1/2 cores idle on average. Times change.
In my case, not that it matters, I have an old slide phone. Because when I am out and about I might need to make an emergency phone call. No, I won't be shopping by smart phone -- Costco is very hard to beat. I won't be getting directions with a smart phone either -- I know my way around the city. Occassionally -- maybe once ever two weeks on average -- I need directions. So, shock of shocks, I write them down. I don't even print them off the computer (though I could). I need two or three key details, why waste the paper printing it? By the way, when you write it down by hand...you burn it into your memory better...so you aren't as distracted while you are driving.
What was the % gain for those who never bought into the smartphone fad in the first place?
It is ironic that we have to design something in specific ways for it to feel random.
What got me noticing it first was an MP3 CD player I got about 15 years ago. When started, it would play, always, Track 1, then 2, then 4, then 8, etc. When this number grew larger than the number of MP3s in your playlist, it would wrap. I never tested it to see if, with a power of 2 number of tracks, it would wrap to the same song infinitely.
That first song, by the way, was 54-40's "Nice To Love You", and I can't listen to it any more.
FWIW, this problem also happens with random image screen savers...
Another late submission/question:
True random/shuffle play.
Maybe things have changed but ever since Napster/MP3 came along, I've never seen a true shuffle. If you have 100 songs, they will not be played equally. Random is not.
Is VLC random/shuffle truly random?
Only way I can see it happening, for sure, is what I call forced random. Use existing randomness algorithm, and then save the result(s). So if song 17 is the first one played, make a note of that in a file or wherever. Then, for the next song you are looking for rand(1...100) | !17 -- and that code is designed to not work in any language.
Eventually you have a file with 99 entries, and it is only missing, say, 65. You play 65 and then wipe the file to start again.
The point is that, without a true random, there is no point in having a large playlist, as the bigger the playlist, the worse this problem is.
So, anyway, is VLC a truly random player? Or, even better, a forced random player...because it could be truly random while running, then when you close it and open it, it plays the same song again.
Ah yes the anecdote of one person...modded up. The "hasn't happened to me" approach is like a reverse ad hominem -- "You can't attack Apple, because I say there is no problem."
This page, that Google returned as the first link, is rather extensive.
Clearly this is a massive problem, both in how many are affected, and the cost to rectify things.
A person with this much subtlety has no place on Slashdot.
About the same number as people who smoke.